I Don't Believe in Culture, I Believe in Right and Wrong

When I taught English in Taiwan (in about 1999), I met some jerky guy from Oklahoma state one day while eating at KFC. This dude eventually got himself a job as an English language editor at a major Taiwan newspaper in Taipei. At first, I was impressed.

Until... that is, he told me how he'd gotten the job in the first place. He said he had simply "followed the culture" and FALSIFIED HIS RESUME!!! It's a long story, but suffice it to say that he soon got himself into a whole lot of hot water in his new job, because he actually had no experience whatsoever in any kind of journalism or graphic design, and he obviously did not deserve to land that position.

Nor was he able to handle it once he got the job. But given that so many Chinese (Taiwanese) had told him that that's how "everybody" gets a job, I guess we could say that he was gullible (or just plain dumb?) enough to buy into all that BS.

So I say, to hell with "culture." Because CULTure cannot supersede morality. Because right is right and wrong is wrong. And "race" or "culture" should never automatically give anybody a pass. Not anybody.

Another Day, Another North Korean Missile Launch

Just this morning, I had a friend on Facebook private message me to ask about the latest North Korean nuclear test. Honestly, this is the first I've heard of about this latest North Korean missile test. As usual, over here in South Korea, everyone is acting like absolutely nothing is happening. Nothing except the usual SH*T and SHENANIGANS that people are constantly getting up to in most places in East Asia, that is.

You know, all the usual pushing, shoving, bad manners, littering (because there aren't any public waste baskets), shout talking, and really bad driving habits. People walking or standing in the streets, obstructing traffic, cars parked illegally in places that routinely force drivers on major thoroughfares to go out of their way to drive around, an illegally parked car near our apartment complex, with an extremely LOUD car alarm that just keeps going off at all hours of the day and night - and yet, no one ever comes to attend to it. That kind of thing.

Oh, and on the weekends, there are these stupid trucks with loud speakers attached to them that drive around the neighborhood really slowly, blaring sales messages for a local appliance store at an insanely LOUD volume. And cops in Asia are almost non-existent. When you do see them, they are driving around really slowly with their lights flashing. No siren. They're apparently just playing with their fancy PO-lice lights! And the cruiser is often totally full, with two cops in the front and two in the back. You look in at them, and they just seem to be joyriding, chatting up a storm and mostly eyeing each other.

In Taiwan I was told that cops joyriding around and playing with their lights like that were meant to be a major deterrent. "Those crim'nal, if they stealing, they see cop car, they drop what they doing!" Well, sorry, kids, but... NO THEY ABSOLUTELY DO NOT. Beyond the fact that they look like total JOKES most of the time, cops in Asia really don't do much in most cases. In Taiwan, in fact, I used to marvel at the sight of how four cops packed in a police cruiser like that would drive slowly by jaywalkers.

And in South Korea, most roads are double wide, with two lanes on each side of the middle yellow line. HOWEVER, the outer lanes on both sides are almost always packed, bumper to bumper, with illegally parked cars. And NOBODY ever gets ticketed or towed. Never seen it even once in eight years here. The only time you'll see a vehicle get towed, is if there's been an accident, and the smashed up mess can no longer be driven away by the habitually reckless driver.

've even seen cops in Asia quickly look the other way as somebody was running a red light. Oops! Didn't see that! I was busy looking the other way! QUITE LITERALLY. Yeah, sure you didn't, you corrupt, ineffectual moron. In fact, one day in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, while waiting at a crosswalk, I stood right beside a Chinese cop, who quickly turned his head as a driver went straight through a red light! And if you were born and raised in a law abiding country, like I was, you really don't forget things like that. Unfortunately.

So yeah. It's Asia. No real change. Ever. Violent crime? There's not much to speak of over here (that actually gets reported, that is), but every single day that you go out, you'll see mindbogglingly stupid shenanigans of all sorts, that are clearly in violation of the law (their law, our law, everybody's freaking law!), but they all just keep getting away with it.

Because, quite literally, absolutely no one seems to be minding the store. So it's constant CHAOS in South Korea. It's pure pandemonium in most cases. And even when the locals do use the crosswalks, they walk on the wrong side, totally ignoring the painted arrows that clearly show which side they need to keep to. So just crossing the street in Asia (not just Korea) is often an exercise in pure stress and frustration. So why then, should anyone expect anyone (in Asia, anyway) to do absolutely anything whatsoever about Kim Jong-Un's latest stunt up in North Korea?

Old Chinese Superstitions

When teaching in Taiwan and China, I was given four markers with which to write on the white board during classes: black, blue, red and green. Being from an art background myself, I tend to draw on the board a lot, as a teaching tool. Plus, to stimulate young, hopefully impressionable minds, I always made it a point to change marker colors when writing the kid's names on the board. However... there is an old Chinese superstition that says that if a person's name is written in red, they will soon die! So, among a whole list of other "offenses," I was told never to write someone's name on the board in red. And that right there is "modern" Chinese CULTure.... Psst! None of the kids whose names I wrote in red ever died. Not even a single one.

Patience

Today, right before my first class (the one that only has two students in it) a South Korean boy and a girl, both first graders, were happily engaged in getting me to chase them around the school -- which is something they both love, of course. It was almost time for class, however, so I had to figure out how to gently herd them back to their classroom, so we could actually study something.

But, wouldn't ya know it, as often goes "the best laid plans of mice and men," little Bonnie bumped into and knocked off onto the floor, two trays full of upper and lowercase alphabet letters! Letters that have to be put back into forty-eight different cups, all in precise alphabetical order....

Oops!

So, quite unlike the way it would have been if my own father had been in the room when I was that age, I just smiled. And then Bonnie, John and I all sat down on the floor, and made an impromptu, and surprisingly fun game, out of putting each and every single one of those hundreds of plastic letters back into each of their respective cups.

'Cause that's just the way it ought to be for every kid, and every stressed out adult. And that's the way I really, really wish it could always be for everyone in the world. Though sadly, it just ain't.

North Korean FearMongering

Just in case any of my friends in the West are curious, over here in South Korea, I hear almost nothing at all about North Korean missile tests or nuclear brinkmanship. My wife doesn't talk about it at all, and when I do decide to tell her the current news (that I have to go to the various foreign English language news sources to get), she usually hasn't heard even a single word of any of it.

In fact, the prevailing opinion in South Korea, about the current crisis, is that nothing (beyond the usual North Korean bully boy posturing and fear mongering) is going to happen. And if you ask most Koreans why they think that way, they will tell you that all of their lives, there has been one false alarm coming from the North after the next. In fact, the vicious rhetoric and constant threats coming from North Korea has all become so routine over the past 65+ years, that most Koreans simply no longer take any of it seriously at all.

As a result, here in South Korea, when I do hear something about North Korea, it's usually coming from the little students of our school, who sometimes make fun of how fat and dumb looking they think North Korean despot Kim Jong-Un is!

Also, just to clarify, I do NOT currently live in China. My wife is South Korean, NOT Chinese, Japanese, etc. Of course, I have been to Japan a couple of times, and I lived long term in both Shanghai, China and Taiwan previously (and I've visited almost every other Chinese speaking nation or city state, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao and Malaysia), but to be quite honest, the 6 years (cumulative) that I spent teaching English in Chinese speaking countries totally and thoroughly turned me off and disillusioned me about Chinese CULTure in general.

Yes, I did meet and even befriend plenty of nice, sensible, and often generous and kind people in Taiwan over the course of 5 1/2 years. After all, as they say, "people are people," regardless of race, sex, national origin, etc, but overall, I found that, due to the long ailing nature of Chinese civilization (that has been in trouble for quite literally hundreds of years now), I simply could not trust most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis in one way or another.

Primarily because of really old, but horrifically corrupt customs like "lying to save face," which has unfortunately become so deeply ingrained in the various societies of this part of the world, that it affects absolutely everything in the lives of the people who, sadly, get indoctrinated into clearly unhealthy customs such as these. And sorry, all you well meaning folks out there, but there really isn't any way to just wishfully think any of the more negative aspects of any corrupt society away.

No matter how "open minded," non-"racist," or "liberal" one may truly hope to be. Because whether we like it or not, some aspects of human culture are positive and beneficial, while others, such as cultures that propagate vicious and/or self destructive ideologies, such as Nazism and Communism, simply prove, time and time again, to be terribly negative and detrimental to human society as a whole.

So, whether it was an adult student in Taipei, Taiwan, coming in to one of my classes one day, all excited because she'd just, the day before, eaten whale ("Shhhh!"), a well known endangered species that is now mostly only (and quite illegally) hunted by the Japanese, to all the Taiwanese who, when I told them how I'd nearly been run over by yet another recklessly driving motorist on the way to work, who simply scolded me, and told me to "be more careful," I'm afraid I came away from all that with a very, very, very bad taste in my very, very, very American mouth.

'Cause see, I too was raised to have a bit of culture, you know. And as a result, I just plain know better. So I know when someone is full of crap -- regardless of their "race," sex, nationality, politics, religion, etc, etc, etc.

On the Nature of "Stoicism," or Perhaps Deep-Seated Angst

Because, after a while, that big, toothy grin really begins to not look so very much like a genuine smile anymore. And that's  because quite often, it really isn't. It's a mask. It's virtually the only socially acceptable ("politically correct") way to mask almost every one of the other dark, or even downright ugly, emotions that all created equal human beings everywhere experience - but are not necessarily forced by their draconian society to conceal with quite so much... passive-aggressive zeal.

The Enduring Legacy of Communist Aggression in East Asia

We all went down together. Even the ones who burned their draft cards, or just looked on scornfully from the sidelines, because they didn't really understand what was going on. Or maybe they just didn't understand what was, historically speaking, at stake. Or because they, quite understandably, simply didn't care to have their fathers, brothers and sons die in, or come home mangled from, a foreign land, for a cause that, in the end, most people (in the West) didn't really care about anyway.

Especially the often vicious Western media propaganda machine, that was unwittingly instrumental in making the failed Tet Offensive of 1968 look like the massive North Vietnamese victory that it simply never was. Although, yes, most historians can now safely argue that the Tet Offensive was, if nothing else, a very big victory for the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese communist allies, the Vietcong, at least in terms of propaganda. And this internecine, Western media fueled fifth column has, curiously enough, always been a real boon for rival foreign governments (such as the former Soviet Union and the Taliban in Afghanistan, just for starters).

So yes, we all went down together. Even and especially the Vietnamese communists and their former Chinese allies, who, just a few years after the Vietnam War ended, proceeded to seize territory from the newly united Vietnam, and then, under Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, savagely attack them in the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. And the worst part of all, while everyone outside of Asia was mostly ignoring what was going on after the US and our allies (chiefly South Korea, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand) had finally pulled out of Vietnam, communist China, like the Imperial Japanese Empire before them, was just getting started in their quest to dominate and bully the entire region.

Fast forward to the recent building of artificial islands in the South China Sea, and... THAT is the enduring legacy of just how far we've all gone down together since the Vietnam War. And, whether anyone really likes it or not, just like the stalemate of the Korean War of 1950-53 (that really only came about because of communist Chinese intervention), it's not even over yet. Not even close. The "sleeping giants," the US, Russia and China, are stirring, even now. And if you don't believe it, just look at the latest headlines about the showdown between the US, South Korea, and China and North Korea.

Because when this all finally does come to a head, it most likely won't just be the US versus smaller proxy states being propped up by the Russians and Chinese. It will be the Russians and/or the Chinese themselves. And unless we can UNIFY and stop the advance of totalitarianism TOGETHER, the whole damn free world is going to be going down even further with US. And it's going to be a helluva lot worse than what we unfortunately endured during the Pacific War with the Japanese, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.