About This Blog and a Potential Podcast

This blog, begun in April of 2007, now has more than 5,540 posts and I'm not even remotely considering ending it...for me it's been a successful disciplined exercise and outlet for my writing.  Although I have intentionally striven to avoid excessively personal and dramatic articles, at times my passions regarding a particular subject can come out on the page...that's good since this never was to be a dry, technical manual.  This is a personal journal, designed to have one foot objectively planted in the world around me and the other in my own inner world over which subjectivity reigns supreme. It's the intersection of these two worlds that defines reality for me.  Personal opinions and sometimes emotional reactions to what I experience, either in my daily walk or from being exposed to media news sources, are things that I naturally expect to often differ from those of other people.  The problem I see nowadays is that the expected bedrock of factual information, where that first foot is supposed to securely stand, also differs vastly from one individual to another. People have deliberately chosen to believe alternate realities and, with the choices that they have with their information sources, can now completely surround themselves with only that which affirms their prejudices and biases and either condemns or ignores differing and possibly challenging conclusions that could be drawn from a more realistic presentation of the news.  So, this is the world I live in in the year 2023, and I don't see things improving on this front anytime in the near future.  As for my personal expression, I am thinking of establishing my own brief podcast, in the same vein as this blog to serve as a consistent periodic disciplined exercise, not in writing though, but rather in speaking.  Since my speaking ability has always lagged far behind that of my writing, this should pose a bit of a challenge to my fear of rejection.  As a precursor to me starting out on this venture, I have decided to "schedule" my daily solo drives to work and back as "carcasts" in which I verbally speak out on a predetermined topic (with myself as the entire audience), much in the same way I write.  I figure if I do this enough times to place myself in a kind of habitual speaking "groove", then some of the awkwardness involved in improvised speaking specifically for effective podcasting can be exercised away and I can grow into this new activity.  I also need to find a suitable outlet for podcasts...since Google has served me nicely with this blog, I think I'll start there. Do you have a podcast or blog, and have you ever considered doing one?   

Just Finished Reading American Idolatry by Andrew L. Whitehead

The full title of the book I just read, by Andrew L. Whitehead, is American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church.  It just came out this year and expressed some concerns about conservative evangelical Christianity in this country that I have been feeling for some time.  The author also went a little too far is pushing his conclusions, in my opinion.  Whitehead is a professing Christian from his youth, attending the very types of churches he discusses in this book.  The American flag is prominently displayed in their sanctuaries, and much is made of the United States always having been a Christian nation, established on Christian principles.  He disapproves of the flag being there and disagrees with America's Christian heritage.  In fact, he seems repelled by both the word "heritage" and its common companion "traditional", since they usually imply that the social values of the "good old days" were better and more noble than our society in the present time.  But slavery lasted until 1865 and then afterward legalized discrimination against the former enslaved blacks was practiced until the US Supreme Court struck it down just two years before I was born.  Still, the struggle has continued for African Americans to get a fair shake in our country.  As for Native Americans, the push for much of our history had been to eliminate either them or their culture, with a strong push toward Christianizing the population, especially children.  I'm totally in agreement with Whitehead's grim assessment of these facets of our history...they should be taught in all the schools without any attempt to cover anything up.  Where I do have a problem with his book is that he tends to repeatedly emphasize something that, while true up to a point, has some sinister connotations: the notion of privilege, which he applies to whites whether they subscribe to Christian nationalism or not.  Historically, different groups of people have been collectively scapegoated for society's problems by essentially being accused of being unfairly privileged: this has long been a recurring theme with anti-Semites when railing against Jewish people.  Careful: attacking or criticizing people for being born a certain way crosses an important line and can place you in the company of those who are prejudiced...well, by its very nature it is prejudice.  Also, I don't like whole groups of people lumped together and judged by a few in their midst who espouse objectionable views: I think I know of quite a few Christian nationalists in churches I've attended...and quite a few much more tolerant and open-minded folks...should I automatically judge Muslims because some among them have radical notions?  This book is nevertheless an appropriate response to the type of Christian nationalism pushed by, of all people, a thoroughly secular reprobate who once as President had federal troops tear-gas peaceful demonstrators so that he could walk from the White House to a church he never attended and...in front of it and numerous cameras...hold up a Bible he never read, much to the adoring approval of Christian nationalist Franklin Graham.  The sad thing about it all is that the very people who need to change their attitudes the most are thoroughly (and happily) brainwashed and will only double down on their convictions.  Still, I thought the book was a worthwhile effort despite some of my disagreements.  Whitehead made a very good point of contrasting Jesus' walk on Earth and his ministry and sayings with the political, bellicose attitudes of many today who liberally invoke his name while violating his principles.  There's a fork in the road for Christianity, for sure: which way will it go?

Just Finished Reading Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Our Missing Hearts, the 2022 novel by Celeste Ng, is the third book I've read of hers since Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You...click on the titles to read my previous reviews on this blog. In this latest work of hers, it is sometime in the near future in an America painfully recovering from an abrupt economic downtown as Chinese people are unfairly targeted as scapegoats for the crisis. And a new set of repressive laws, P.A.C.T., has been enacted that justify discrimination and censorship against Asian-Americans, even to the point of the government taking away their children as punishment for dissent.  It's a dreary, heartbreaking world as young Bird, a little boy whose mother Margaret, a Chinese-American dissident poet, has protected him from being taken away by leaving him and his father.  But Bird wants to find her, and she leaves a clue that he follows with the aid of his local librarian, a sympathizer to the resistance.  It became quickly clear to me not far into the book that this story is a combined reaction by Ng to (1) the way after 9/11 that Muslims and Middle Eastern people in America were often stigmatized following that traumatic event, and (2) the tendency for China...and by irrational inference, Chinese people in general...to be blamed for the Covid-19 pandemic that broke out in 2020.  The big difference as I see it between the two is that the American president at the time of 9/11, George W. Bush, took great pains to prevent any kind of bigoted reactions while during Covid, then-president Donald Trump made a repeated point of scapegoating China and the Chinese.  It's very clear that Celeste Ng, of Chinese ancestry but born and raised here in the United States, had a message to convey regarding what is ultimately not just an American problem with prejudice and scapegoating but a human problem of which history over the ages has provided extensive examples.  Yes, it's a depressing tale, this book, and I'm afraid that just about every society on Earth has elements within it that will gladly trample on someone else's rights because of their own fears and willful ignorance.  I didn't enjoy reading Our Missing Hearts, but I don't think that was the author's intention anyway...

Just Finished Reading Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You is Celeste Ng's first novel, and it won all kinds of acclaim after it came out in 2014.  I had already read her 2017 book Little Fires Everywhere...read my article about it by clicking HERE.  With this first effort of Ng's, the focus is on an American family living in the Midwest in 1977: the mother Marilyn, the father James, and their three children Nathan, Lydia and Hannah.  Ng clearly delineates the often diametrically opposed perspectives of each of these members, their love for one another and the inevitable conflicts, sometimes very intense.  And...I'm not giving away the story since it happens at the beginning...Lydia's drowning death in the nearby lake is the trigger setting off not only the story's subsequent events and how the surviving family members resolve their grief and conflicts, but also many interspersed flashbacks, including those from Lydia herself.  There is an ongoing mystery as well: how and why did she die, and what about the teenage rebel neighbor Jack, whom Nathan loathes and suspects of foul play regarding his sister?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out.  As for my own reactions, I will say that there is a lot of scrutiny about the marriage between white Marilyn and Chinese-descended James and the real (and imagined) hostility and prejudice that they and their children unfairly receive for this.  And Marilyn is loaded with resentment for how she had wanted to become a physician but was held back by resistance from her own family and society as a whole because she is a woman.  So, I get it, this story...compelling as it was...I believed still derived much of its critical success from appealing to victimized identity groups, not that I am diminishing the fact that discrimination and prejudice affect us.  What appealed most to me personally was how Ng reveals the often-wide chasm of communication differences between parents and their children, especially with regard to how mother and father often transfer their own past, frustrated dreams to their sons and daughters, expecting them to accomplish what they themselves could not.  That I also totally get, and the author nailed it perfectly.  Everything I Never Told You is very well written, but it's also pretty sad and might well cause anyone reading it to reflect on their own family histories and relationships...

Yoko Ono: the Woman in the Room

As I continue to watch the Peter Jackson recompilation of the Beatles' Let It Be sessions from January 1969...which he renamed Get Back and is showing on the Disney+ channel...I am puzzled by the so-called controversy and division that Yoko Ono, then John Lennon's girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, was causing: she was supposedly breaking up the band if you believe the numerous accounts and analyses.  Yet I just see her quietly sitting next to John, being supportive of him as well as respectful of the other Beatles.  She's not making any kind of waves or acting like the kind of diva you would expect to see on any of these nauseating reality series that nowadays plague the TV dial.  Often she's just reading a book or magazine. I did see her pat John's back and smile at him, and being pleasant and encouraging toward his bandmates....OH MY GOD SHE'S BREAKING UP THE BEATLES! And even though the other Beatles have had their own girlfriends in the studio before, Yoko's presence there at John's behest has been regarded as violating some kind of sacred "men only" arbitrary protocol in the recording studio that the Beatles maintained (when it was convenient for them, that is).  I see nothing in any of this but extreme male chauvinism, and without going into details in order to protect another individual, I am personally keenly aware of the nasty, irrational and patronizing behavior that men can exhibit when their expected all-male group finds itself graced with the presence of just one woman...regardless of her demeanor or behavior. And, sadly, scapegoating her as being divisive instead of them taking responsibility for their own sorry-ass behavior toward each other is one of the results.  Yoko, you're not the only woman who has had to go through this, and I'm afraid it's just going to continue...

Political Narratives Becoming Dangerously Homogenous

I was sitting as unobtrusively as possible in the back row of an assembly recently and observed an individual...around my age in his sixties...engaged in friendly conversation with another he had seen sitting in a row ahead of me.  It went a little nervously at first but then I noticed this man suddenly getting very loud as he laughingly proclaimed a very partisan, political statement meant to demean anyone with a different opinion...let me tell you, it was completely inappropriate for that solemn setting.  I'm afraid that this kind of behavior is only becoming more and more prevalent in our society, and depending on where you happen to live or be at any given moment in time, you could change the party labels of those involved and get the same kind of result.  It's all about people stuck in a particular narrative...and there are several narratives in a state of dominance right now...who are operating under the mass delusion that their adopted narrative contains all the truth and that those who disagree with it are themselves deluded, stupid, ignorant, or the enemy.  As an example just look at TV on competing channels and see Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson push their respective conflicting narratives.  This type of thing has been going on throughout our history, but its advent over the past few years...first of multiple specialized cable/satellite television channels, conservative talk radio, and finally, the Internet, political blogging and social media that have made narratives much less individualized and more homogenized within the different camps.  And I fear it's beginning to instill a new form of prejudice...

Usually when you use the word "prejudice" it means "pre-judgment" based on someone's ethnicity, gender, age, or faith.  Now since the mega-narratives of today tend to bundle together a number of different opinions on things, it's tempting to ascribe attributes to people based on little ways they behave.  So a dude walking in Publix without a mask MUST be a Trump-supporting fascist who denies he lost the last election and wants to keep minorities from voting, right?  Or somebody wearing a BLM tee-shirt MUST be "woke" and believe in taking away your guns and suppressing your right to speak your conservative thoughts on social media, right?  In other words, expressing a "piece" of a narrative is increasingly being interpreted as subscribing to that narrative in its entirety, and although our "brave new world" seems to be headed in that direction, I still think that as individuals we're more complex than that, each of us while often latching onto some to the narratives provided us still reserving the right to differ on some of their specifics.  But we are nevertheless going in the wrong direction.  As an exercise I suggest this: examine your own political beliefs and (temporarily) try to see things from the other guy's point of view...or at least try to find something genuinely complimentary to say about those with whom you fundamentally disagree.  You can always spring right back to your own positions, but I think if more folks did this they'd be more civil and respectful to their counterparts while preserving and strengthening their own crucial individual right to disagree on different details of the narratives foisted onto them by others... 

China, Russia, and the USA: It's Complicated

Although I was a history major in college, I make no claim to be an expert in that area...or in the highly complicated field of international relations.  But it should be clear to anyone that for the United States, China and Russia represent serious challenges.  Both are vast autocratic nations with great military power and highly developed intelligence services, designed both to steal business and government secrets as well as unduly manipulating American public opinion through false plants in social media.  Both nations have demonstrated aggression in their foreign policy...one might claim that we in America have as well...and to an extent the argument can be made that as great nations they are asserting themselves within their respective spheres of influence.  But as I see it, both Russia and China are much, much more sensitive to American and Western criticism of their treatment of their own people than of their foreign policy.  I think the reason is clear: neither nation sees much of a military threat from others, but their respective regimes depend on suppressing any dissent within their borders from catching on and growing into a movement that challenges their hold on power. Trump never called Russia on its internal human rights abuses, but after Biden became president relations between the two countries have cooled considerably...our President, as Head of State, should have been more reserved with his comment about Russian president Putin.  China brokers no criticism whatsoever of their reported policies toward Hong Kong, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and their role in the COVID-19 outbreak, often invoking charges of racism in regard to their critics.  Since last year the United States have seen a sharp increase in assaults and intimidation of Americans of Asian descent, the main reason seeming to be that they are somehow to blame for the coronavirus pandemic as scapegoats.  Equating the actions of a foreign country or organization with its primary ethnic composition and acting in a hostile, racist way isn't new: following 9/11 nearly twenty years ago, Americans appearing to be Middle Eastern...even Sikhs...were exposed to attack and harassment, as if any of them had anything remotely to do with the events in the news.  President Trump kept calling COVID-19 the "China Virus", but his sloppy criticism was always directed at the communist Chinese state and what he saw as its mishandling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan along with suppressed and misleading reporting henceforth.  And here's an interesting problem: if people criticize the Russian government and policies, nobody says they are racist or are inciting people to attack Americans of Russian ancestry...after all, most of them are white and blend into the background population.  But critics of China's policies often find themselves wrongly accused of prejudice against Chinese people, an idea which that government itself promotes.  Russia and China clearly have adversarial relationships with America, but we also have productive, positive relationships in different areas.  In space exploration, Russia and the USA have cooperated throughout the bumpy roads the two countries have gone through over the years, and with China we do an incredible amount of business (like both Trump and Biden, I think some of the ground rules need reform, though).  And that's the way it should be, if great, rival nations like these three are to live together in peace with each other.  Should I ever find myself privileged to visit Russia or China, it will not be my role while there to criticize their political systems or leaders but rather to comply within the parameters of what it means to be a guest in a different culture while under its authority during the course of my stay.  Do I wish they had more democratic political systems and greater individual liberties? Sure, but I also know that this is my country and they have theirs.  As an American I reserve my right to give my opinion about any government and its leaders...especially my own.  But that commentary does not necessarily imply condemnation...on the contrary, I like both Russia and China and their people, to the extent where I have extensively studied both the Russian and Chinese languages: they are great societies with absorbing histories and much to offer the rest of the world...