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Thoughts on American World Domination

The USA is currently leading in the medal count at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, with 8, although the Swiss have the most golds, at 3.  My adopted homeland of the Czech Republic has 1 gold and one bronze.  I’m quite proud of that last fact.

The Czech Republic only has a population of 10 million.  That is 1/30^th the size of the U.S.  Yet, in sports, we are competitive.

I’m embarrassed when I hear American fans chanting USA! USA!  If this were done in a friendly, sporting manner it would not be so bad.  But it’s not.  You can hear it in their voices.  I remember, many years ago, when the world soccer championship was in Los Angeles.  A couple of friends and I went out to see the party on the night of the final.  I believe it was Brazil v. Italy.  It was a rare night, the chance to see massive numbers of foreigners out in the streets partying, singing songs and chanting chants in support of their country.  My friend started chanting USA! USA! and looking as if he thought he was being very clever.  What  a dick, I thought.  It’s like a fish chanting “Water!  Water!”  It’s like being invited to a friend’s house and talking about how much bigger yours is.

On an Olympic level, the worst example I think I’ve ever seen of poor sportsmanship was when the American basketball team – the so called Dream Team – was criticized for staying in a 5 star hotel instead of at the Olympic Village.  One of the players said “We’re not here to make friends.  We’re here to win basketball games.”  I felt that that team should have been recalled immediately, with a sharp rebuke.  The whole idea of the Olympic games is to make friends.  It is a celebration of peace.  It is friendly competition as a substitute for war.  That’s the history.  That’s the tradition.

But I think I was the only one who felt that way.  The American public reveled in their victories just as if they weren’t a bunch of NBA all-stars playing against a bunch of amateurs in the easiest games any of them had had since high school.

It’s not just in sports that the U.S. dominates, of course.  I live in Europe, but most of the films I see are American made and the Internet from which I get my news is totally Amerocentric.  That could be changing.  The U.S. is loosing its economic dominance and cultural dominance will probably not be far behind.  I’m looking forward to that day.

Meanwhile, I will continue to watch the Olympics and cheer for my two favorite teams:  the Czech Republic and whoever is competing against the U.S.

Too Much Information

My goodness, one does see a lot of absolute rubbish on the Huffington Post.  I was intrigued by a headline about dark secrets of kiddie lit authors, so I read the story.  My expectations weren’t high.  I was expecting to read a tired re-hash of Lewis Carroll’s attraction to 8 year old girls, J.M. Barrie’s attraction to 8 year old boys, maybe a little bit about Walt Disney’s racism and the fact that A.A. Milne was a lousy father.

None of those even made the list, but I wouldn’t have objected if the author had had some juicy stuff on some other writers, but it was really pretty weak stuff all around.

Dr. Seuss supported the Japanese Internment Camps in WWII (so did FDR, which is why they existed), L. Frank Baum didn’t like Indians, Aesop was accused of embezzlement (the author fails to mention that O. Henry was actually convicted of it, which is why we have the short stories of O. Henry) and Shel Silverstein also wrote things for adults!!

I should be a little bit more sympathetic to the author.  After all, if you have to write something to fill up the space by a certain deadline and you’re short of ideas, you start writing any old thing – rather like this.

That is part of what’s wrong with the world today.  With hundreds of TV channels and literally millions of blogs, it’s hard to find something unique to say.  Even harder is finding something that is both unique and worth a damn.

But the curse is also a blessing.  With so much verbiage at our fingertips, we truly are becoming the infinite number of monkeys who are typing at the infinite number of typewriters and sooner or later we will produce some 21^st century version of the complete works of William Shakespeare.

One thing that I think would speed that process along is a filter.  I wish we had a way to weed out the crap and only read the brilliant, insightful articles, to only see the good movies, to make every conversation an intelligent, idea filled interchange which would improve our lives and move things forward.

I’m hoping that eventually the comments section of this blog will be like that, but I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

The Future is Asian AND Western

I was talking to a friend the other day (both of us are white) about the differences between Asian and Western culture, specifically the work ethic and the attitudes toward the elderly.  He seemed to think that their highly regarded respect for the elderly was a bit over-rated, more of a sense of duty than genuine affection.

We agreed that they can outwork us, though, and that means that, economically at least, they will probably control the future.

Here’s how I see it:  First of all, they outnumber us by quite a bit.  The Chinese are more numerous than any race on Earth.  The Indians are close behind and, while  there are obvious cultural differences between them and the Chinese, there are also cultural differences between them and us.  Humor me for a moment, I am getting to a point.  If you factor in the Africans, the European races are a small minority of people on this planet.

We are all  capable of interbreeding.  Therefore, it is pretty clear that in 3 or 4 generations from now, say 100 years, the vast majority of the people in the world will be dark skinned and dark haired.

No race has a uniform culture.  There are lazy Asians and industrious white people.  I remember once I was hitchhiking in Yugoslavia, way back when it was Yugoslavia, probably Croatia today, and I got picked up by a Swedish guy who drove like an absolute lunatic, way too fast for those mountain roads.  I mentioned to him that I had thought that Swedes were supposed to be calm, non-crazy type people.  I will never forget his response.  “Yes,” he said.  “That’s why I come here on vacation.”

There are some cultural changes with each generation.  Chinese kids who grew up in San Francisco may still honor their parents, in their way, but they are as American as can be.  Their English is unaccented, they like the same foods, buy the same products and laugh at the same jokes as their paler skinned co-generationalists.

Everybody wants to be J.R. Ewing.  I don’t mean that everybody aspires to ruthless asshole-dom, but pretty close to everybody would like to live in a huge mansion, eat every day in fancy restaurants and have many, many relationships with extremely attractive people of whichever sex you might prefer.

So, in short, I think that the future will be dominated by Asians.  But they will be just like us.

Jesus, Shut Up

This morning when I got home from taking my son to school, the cleaning lady was in front of the building.  It was a bit awkward, because she had just finished mopping the floor and my shoes were, as all of the streets and sidewalks of the city, wet and muddy.

She is generally a friendly sort.   She usually smiles and says hello when you meet her which is more than a lot of folks around here.  But, she’s nuts.  Jesus type nuts.

She asked me if I  could wait a bit before I walked in so I said sure, even though that struck me as a bit unreasonable.  I do live here, and the floor is going to get dirty at some point, but I complied.  And was subjected, of course, to a lecture about religion.  Not just religion.  End times religion.  The snow, you see, which fell so softly during the night, which is lying over the city like a blanket of purity, which is gracing the branches of the trees like christmas cotton that doesn’t want to go away, is a sign that the world is about to end because we have offended God (and Jesus, which is more or less the same thing) with our wicked, wicked ways.

Religious people see it as their obligation to persuade everybody else to be religious.  If I did the same, pushing my interests on them, they would be quite disturbed.

I like to watch porn, but wouldn’t do so in front of women.  I am interested in poetry, and go to poetry readings, but they really have to be held in places where the only people present are those who are interested in poetry.  When they try to hold the readings in a pub where people want to drink and talk, it doesn’t work.  As a teenager, I quite liked Frank Zappa (still do) but I knew better than to play his music in front of my mother.

Some religious people do not have that sense of compartmentalization, that shut off switch which allows civilized society to exist without us tearing each other apart.

Eventually, I got up to my flat, opened up Wonkette, and found a link from Sayitwithwookies leading me to an article about Michele Bachmann.  In a recent speech to a group of Republican Jews, she said that America was blessed by God because it supports Israel and would be cursed by God if that support were withdrawn.

Michele Bachmann is just as nutty as my cleaning lady.

There are many kinds of lies in the political world.  There are the whoppers.  Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.  I did not have sex with that woman.  I am not a crook.

There are lies of omission, such as the Republicans bemoaning the current economy even though they know full well it’s their own fault.  I guess the currently popular term for that is “being disingenuous.”

There is lying by tone of voice.  NASA is spending HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars.  (sounds like more than billions, doesn’t it?)

Then there is fakery.  Sarah Palin was not lying when she wrote things on the palm of her hand, but there was something very fake, very theatrical about it.  As stupid as I think she is, I doubt that she really needed to write “tax cuts” and “lift American spirits” on her hand.  She spoke for quite a while, and either had pages of notes or an actual script, or used a teleprompter.  The whole writing on the hand thing was strictly for show.

It worked for her.  Her supporters thought it was folksy and natural.  Her opponents (like me) were drawn to attack it, and not the tangled string of nonsense that was her speech.

I just watched another example of fakery.  I know Blagojevich is a long and unusual name.  It is 4 syllables, which is two or three longer than average.  It is Slavic, which makes it almost automatically comical.  But it’s not really that difficult to pronounce.

The 1^st syllable is blah, like blah blah blah.  The 2^nd syllable is goy, which is a rather racist term that Jews use to mean “not a jew.”  The 3^rd syllable can be pronounced either eh or oh, but it’s short and you get through it before anybody is really paying attention, so that part is pretty easy, too.  The last part is vich, which rhymes with bitch or sandwich, and if you can’t pronounce that you’ve got a serious problem.

So, when Republican Senator Mike Enzi pretended in a speech yesterday that he couldn’t pronounce Blagojevich, he was faking.  Whether he did it for humor or to demean Rod Blagojevich, which would be totally redundant, I don’t know.

Probably, like Sarah Palin, he wanted to convince his constituents that he is just as ignorant as they are.

Republican v. Democrat, Liberal v. Conservative, Big Government v. Small Government are all important divisions within our society.  However, the real war that is coming is between intelligent people and stupid people.

And we are seriously outnumbered.