Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 18 June 2008 · 8:41 pm

Chinese Prisoners in Nagasaki, September 1945

From First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller (1907-2002), ed. by Anthony Weller (Three Rivers, 2006), pp. 56-57 (reviewed at length in Japan Focus and more briefly at HNN):

Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945, 0100 hours
Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu

American and Chinese prisoner coal miners emerging from underground darkness in central Kyushu are discovering for the first time that their prison camps are adjacent.

For nearly one month since the surrender the Chinese have been going foodless because their Japanese guards have departed from the camp. Their serious medical condition was discovered today by two parties headed by American doctor Captain Thomas Hewlett, of New Albany, Indiana, and Crystal River, Florida, who was captured on Corregidor, and Australian Captain Ian Duncan, of Sydney, captured in Singapore.

B-29s today dropped the Chinese their first food supplies since the surrender.

Hewlett reported that the nearest Chinese camp commander is a remnant of a party under American-trained Airman Lieutenant Colonel Chiu, which left North China two years ago, then numbering 1,236. Three hundred men died on reaching Japan. The Japanese never provided a camp physician and the Chinese have none. Thus in the Chinese camp every man regardless of condition has been considered by the Japanese fit for underground work. Fifty are seriously ill, about half of these with deficiency disease.

This Chinese camp counted 70 men killed by Japanese guards in two years, plus 120 dead of disease, with 546 still living.

The other coal miners’ camp of Chinese consists of what remains of 1,365 who left China eighteen months ago; 54 have been executed or otherwise beaten to death by the Japanese, and 60 died of mining injuries.

Many of the surviving Chinese are ”as thin as skeletons,” with bandages made of rags or newspapers. The camp has one Chinese doctor who possesses neither a scalpel, forceps, thermometer nor stethoscope.

Both those Mitsui mines worked by Americans and those worked by Chinese are defective, “stripped” mines, dangerous to operate because their tunnels’ underpinnings have been removed to obtain the last vestiges of coal.

Another Chinese camp is known to exist somewhere in Kyushu and is being sought by a party headed by Medical Warrant Officer Houston Sanders, of Hartwell, Georgia.

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by Joel | 15 June 2008 · 10:24 pm

A Whirlwind Visit in the Wisconsin Dells

Car & cabin at Cedar Crest Lodge The Far Outliers spent last weekend in the stormy Wisconsin Dells, celebrating my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday with a small family reunion in a cabin at Cedar Crest Lodge on the Wisconsin River, just off Sauk County Highway A, barely half a mile from where Lake Delton cut a new path (or widened an old path) across the highway into the river. When we tried to drive out down Highway A last Monday, we were turned back by policemen at the floodpath who told us to head back uphill to Bunker Drive, which we had heard was partially washed out the previous night when part of the family drove back to Madison.

The Wisconsin River near Lake Delton We got away at 6 a.m., stopped in tiny DeForest, WI (home of the Pink Elephant), to refill our rented Camry’s near-empty gas tank for $57.50 (@ $3.96/gal., the cheapest we found) and to have a good, meaty breakfast at DeForest Family Restaurant, and managed to return the car to O’Hare by 10:30 a.m., in ample time for our flight out. That one full tank took us from O’Hare to the Dells and back, and from the Dells to Dane County Regional Airport and back to pick up our daughter on Saturday, the day when all hell broke loose.

Tree felled by storm winds Soon after Miss Outlier and I returned, the sky darkened, the wind kicked up, the power went out, and the manager came around to announce a tornado warning and advise us to seek shelter in the exercise lodge, which had windowless concrete block walls in two long, narrow restrooms on the ground floor. That warning period lasted about an hour. Not long after it ended, we heard sirens again, and spent another half hour watching tree branches fall to the ground and getting to know our few neighbors a bit better. Fortunately, the wind and rain let up a little and the power came back on by the time the last of our party arrived from Madison for dinner, which featured brats, burgers, grilled veggies, salad, and a birthday cake with 80 candles (unfrosted except for some residue of candlewax on top).

Aloha Beach Resort, Lake Delton Friday had been clear enough for us to drive down through Baraboo to Devil’s Lake and hike halfway up a rock face to a balanced rock. And Sunday was clear enough for me to walk a mile or so up Highway A to take a picture of the now rather beachless Aloha Beach Resort & Suites. The highway was crisscrossed with trails for Wisconsin Ducks, vehicles that have aided rescue efforts in many flood conditions, including yeoman work in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For much of our time around the cabin, the Ducks would pass us going up Hillside Drive, but we saw one or two rush back downhill just after the tornado warnings.

UPDATE: On the way to and from Aloha Beach Resort, I passed some interesting gateways and an historical marker, which I’ll reproduce here.

Dawn Manor historical plaque

Here on the Wisconsin River the lost village of Newport was begun in 1853, planned for a city of 10,000. Assuming that the Milwaukee & Lacrosse Railroad would cross the river here, over 2,000 settlers quickly came to Newport, causing a lively land boom. When the bridge and dam were ultimately located a mile upstream after an alleged secret moonlight survey, Newport was almost completely deserted in favor of Kilbourn City (today Wisconsin Dells). Only Dawn Manor, with its servant quarters, remains. Dawn Manor was completed in 1855 by Capt. Abraham Vanderpoel, friend of Lincoln and a signer of the Wisconsin Constitution. The home is built of Potsdam sandstone, white mahogany, and white pine, put together with brass screws and wooden pegs. Dawn Manor houses the art collection of George Raab, one of Wisconsin’s famous artists.

More on Dawn Manor and the aftermath of the flooding and drainage of Lake Delton can be found at random blonde thoughts.

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by Joel | 14 June 2008 · 4:33 pm

Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire

From Frank McLynn’s review of The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Yale University Press, 2008) in Literary Review:

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Comanches were a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in New Mexico. Once they acquired the use of horses, in three generations they evolved into the ‘Spartans of the plains’ and provided the fiercest of all Native American resistance to the Anglo-Hispanic conquest of the American West. For a hundred years from 1750, the Comanches dominated New Mexico, Texas and even parts of Louisiana and northern Mexico. As Amerindians, the Comanches were even more impressive than the Aztecs or the Iroquois, for until the American Civil War they largely forced Europeans to bend the knee, and did so moreover when the European imperialist impulse was at its height. Although the word ’empire’ may be author’s hyperbole, the Comanches ruled an extensive domain that worked on a melange of kinship ties, trade, diplomacy, extortion and violence….

So why were the Comanches so exceptional among American Indians? Pekka Hämäläinen, a Finnish scholar of the American West, currently at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that, like the Iroquois, the Comanches were fortunate geographically, since their heartland was at once central and peripheral, and at the intersection of Spanish and Anglo spheres of influence. They were inventive and flexible, using a nuanced division of labour in everyday life and operating a dual economy of hunting and pastoralism; they had a unique ability to make use of the horse; and their culture enabled them to incorporate change better than other Indians. They depended on two animals, the horse and the bison, which in the early days were present on the Great Plains in vast numbers. They had 120,000 horses in their herds and access to another two million wild ones.

Hämäläinen’s most detailed scholarly labours concern the eighteenth century: he claims that by 1730 the Comanches had all their people on horses and had reached what he calls ‘the critical threshold of mounted nomadism’. The narrative, firmly based on admirable scholarship, shifts from warfare to diplomacy and back in the Comanche’s dealings both with the colonial Spanish (for in those days the white-occupied American West was wholly Hispanic) and with the other Indian tribes of the Great Plains – principally the Utes, Navajos, Apaches, Osages, Pawnees and Wichitas. With the exception of the Lakota (Sioux) and the Blackfeet, every western Indian tribe was linked to the Comanches’ informal ’empire’. Far from being bit players in the drama of the Spanish colonial empire, the Comanches, especially after obtaining guns from French traders in the 1740s, had the edge in the continuing conflict with ‘New Spain’. One single statistic is eloquent on the Comanches’ rise to dominance in the American Southwest. Their population, 15,000 in 1750, had ascended to 45,000 by 1780 because of their superior diet and plentiful food supply. Their heartland was the so-called Comancheria – an area covering the valleys of the Arkansas, Cimarron, Canadian and Red Rivers, plus all the plains of northern Texas, especially the Llano Estacado in the Panhandle….

Hämäläinen’s great achievement is to force a rethink about Mexican history from its independence from Spain in 1821 to its defeat by the United States in 1846-8. Every September the Comanches sent a major raiding force into northern Mexico, and some of these bands of plains Indians ended up exploring tropical jungles and snow-covered mountains. Their penetration of northern Mexico was astonishing, since they raided as far south as Guadalajara and Queretaro, just 135 miles north of Mexico City and one thousand miles away from the centre of Comancheria….

By some indices the Comanches reached the apex of their power at just the moment, in the 1840s, when they began to collide with the US expansion westwards. Actually, smallpox and other diseases had already brought the Comanche population down to 20,000. And a whole host of factors seriously weakened them even before they inevitably came to blows with white settlers and the US government. Essentially the Comanches were overstretching their resources and habitat. They were killing more than 280,000 bison a year – the maximum loss the herds could sustain without imploding – and at the very time the great drought of 1845-50 was exacerbating the situation. Even worse, bison and horses were in competition for the same pasture and water, and if the bison moved farther west to new grasslands, they found these occupied by the sheep and shepherds of New Mexico. On the other hand, if the Comanches cut their horse numbers, they also cut down their military capacity. As everyone except a handful of Native American fundamentalists now accepts, the bison herds were in terminal decline even before the arrival of white hunters. There had originally been seven million ‘buffalo’ on the southern plains but by the 1860s, before the frenzy of the white bison hunters, half of these had already been killed by the Indians. Put simply, by the end of the 1840s there were too many Comanches raising too many horses and hunting too many bison on too small a land base. The writing was on the wall in other ways, too. While Comanche numbers had declined to 10,000 by 1850, the population of white Texas rose from 140,000 in 1847 to 600,000 by 1860s. Meanwhile, Arapahos and Cheyennes, pushed west by the expanding power of the Lakota, began encroaching on the Comanche heartland.

The end came suddenly. Faced with a shortage of bison, having lost access to firearms, maize and garden produce, and been forced to relinquish control of the long-distance trade routes into Mexico and across the Great Plains, the Comanches began literally to starve to death and in their weakened state to become prey to cholera, smallpox and other deadly diseases. In this terminal crisis, at the end of the 1850s they were engaged in warfare on three fronts, against the Fox Indians, the Texas Rangers and the Spanish buffalo hunters of new Mexico. Driven out of Texas by 1859, the Comanches were abruptly handed a lifeline when the American Civil War erupted. By 1865, with Texas on the losing side, the end of the drought on the Great Plains and a short-lived increase in bison numbers, the Comanches were able to enjoy a (literal) Indian summer. A new era of raiding in Texas partially restored the Comanche position there; in two years of devastation Texas lost 4,000 horses, 30,000 cattle and hundreds of human lives. But in 1871 the United States finally unleashed its military might on the Comanches. The US Cavalry wore down the enemy by dogging them so that they had no time to pasture and tend horses, hunt buffalo, dry meats or prepare hides. The coup de grace came when white buffalo hunters poured onto the plains. In just two years they slaughtered 3.3 million bison. The once proud Comanches ended up on tacky Indian reservations.

Sounds a bit more impressive than the Yapese Empire, though probably shorter-lived.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by Joel | 13 June 2008 · 8:34 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hack, Buckboard, … Democrat

From Plain Buggies: Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren Horse-Drawn Transportation (Intercourse, Penn.: Good Books, 1998), by Stephen Scott, pp. 46-47:

The open spring wagon, the utility vehicle with one seat and a hauling space in back, has a wide variety of local names. In Holmes County, Ohio, it is a “Hack”; in Arthur, Illinois, a “Buckboard”; in Dover, Delaware, a “Durban”; in Adams County, Indiana, a “Johnny wagon”; in Daviess County, Indiana, a “Long John”; and in Aylmer, Ontario, a “Democrat.”

A recent style of spring wagon, featuring an open bed or long storage compartment in back and an enclosed driver’s seat will be referred to as a “cab wagon” in this book. In Pennsylvania a carriage-like vehicle with heavier suspension on the rear axle is called a “market wagon” or “peddle wagon.”

A number of vehicles used by the plain people are somewhat out of the scope of this book. These include heavy farm wagons and other agricultural vehicles. The special wagons designed to transport benches from one Amish meeting place to the next are found in each Amish church district. In Lancaster County the Old Order Amish and Mennonites make use of specially designed hearses. In Holmes County vehicles resembling a cab wagon transport the coffins.

Sleighs, cutters, and bobsleds are rarely used in most communities and are not of any special style. Few new snow vehicles are produced. Enough antique vehicles are around to serve the limited demand.

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by Joel | 15 May 2008 · 9:29 pm

Evading Jim Crow in Caroline County, Virginia

New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples has some interesting background on how people of mixed race (as legally defined) evaded the Jim Crow laws in Caroline County, Virginia. It’s entitled Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of Race:

Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on learning that 40 states once had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. [Note: There were only 11 states in the Confederacy.—J.] The Supreme Court struck down the last of these statutes in the 1967 case of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested and banished from Virginia for the crime of being married….

Like many rural areas in the Jim Crow South, Caroline County was governed by two competing racial ideologies. The impulse toward segregation was of course etched in law. But Central Point, which had been a visibly mixed-race community since the 19th century, was home to a secret but paradoxically open interracialism. The community’s story goes a long way toward explaining how the Lovings thought about race and why they behaved as they did.

Virginia slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, were notorious for fathering children with their slaves. The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut could easily have been speaking of Caroline County planters when she wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.”

Many of the mixed-race men and women in Caroline County settled in and around Central Point. They were already thriving by the early 20th century. Their church, St. Stephen’s Baptist, was, as one historian noted, “the largest and most costly house of worship in Caroline, white or colored.” People in the congregation and community were “as a whole, very nearly white,” the historian wrote, “and, out of their community, could not be recognized or distinguished as colored people.”

Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied. But when they ventured beyond Caroline County — where no one knew them — many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to “pass” as white. They visited white-only movie houses and restaurants. They also served in all-white units of the segregated Army during World War II.

The community developed a system for protecting the racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families. When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.

The state officials who enforced segregation were clearly aware of what Central Point’s residents were up to and tried to stop it. They circulated lists of families described as descendants of black people. For a time, the state “corrected” birth certificates to note the “real” race of the bearer. It didn’t change things much in Central Point.

By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships.

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by Joel | 22 April 2008 · 7:02 am

Kite Runner: Crossing a Cultural Minefield

From The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead Books, 2003), pp. 145-147:

“Be careful, Amir,” he said as I began to walk. “Of what, Baba?”

“I am not an ahmaq, so don’t play stupid with me.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Remember this,” Baba said, pointing at me, “The man is a Pashtun to the root. He has nang and namoos.” Nang. Namoos. Honor and pride. The tenets of Pashtun men. Especially when it came to the chastity of a wife. Or a daughter.

“I’m only going to get us drinks.”

“Just don’t embarrass me, that’s all I ask.” “I won’t. God, Baba.”

Baba lit a cigarette and started fanning himself again.

I walked toward the concession booth initially, then turned left at the T-shirt stand-where, for $5, you could have the face of Jesus, Elvis, Jim Morrison, or all three, pressed on a white nylon T-shirt. Mariachi music played overhead, and I smelled pickles and grilled meat.

I spotted the Taheris’ gray van two rows from ours, next to a kiosk selling mango-on-a-stick. She was alone, readirig. White ankle-length summer dress today. Open-toed sandals. Hair pulled back and crowned with a tulip-shaped bun. I meant to simply walk by again and I thought I had, except suddenly I was standing at the edge of the Taheris’ white tablecloth, staring at Soraya across curling irons and old neckties. She looked up.

“Salaam,” I said. “I’m sorry to be mozahem, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Salaam.”

“Is General Sahib here today?” I said. My ears were burning. I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye.

“He went that way,” she said. Pointed to her right. The bracelet slipped down to her elbow, silver against olive.

“Will you tell him I stopped by to pay my respects?” I said. “I will.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, and my name is Amir. In case you need to know. So you can tell him. That I stopped by. To … pay my respects.”

“Yes.”

I shifted on my feet, cleared my throat. “I’ll go now. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Nay, you didn’t,” she said.

“Oh. Good.” I tipped my hed and gave her a half smile. “I’ll go now.” Hadn’t I already said that? “Khoda hafez.”

“Khoda hafez.”

I began to walk. Stopped and turned. I said it before I had a chance to lose my nerve. “Can I ask what you’re reading?”

She blinked. I held my breath. Suddenly, I felt the collective eyes of the flea market Afghans shift to us. I imagined a hush falling. Lips stopping in midsentence. Heads turning. Eyes narrowing with keen interest.

What was this? Up to that point, our encounter could have been interpreted as a respectful inquiry, one man asking for the whereabouts of another man. But I’d asked her a question and if she answered, we’d be … well, we’d be chatting. Me a mojarad, a single young man, and she an unwed young woman. One with a history, no less. This was teetering dangerously on the verge of gossip material, and the best kind of it. Poison tongues would flap. And she would bear the brunt of that poison, not me—I was fully aware of the Afghan double standard that favored my gender. Not Did you see him chatting with her? but Wooooy! Did you see how she wouldn’t let him go? What a lochak!

By Afghan standards, my question had been bold. With it, I had bared myself, and left little doubt as to my interest in her. But I was a man, and all I had risked was a bruised ego. Bruises healed. Reputations did not. Would she take my dare?

She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. “Have you read it?” she said.

I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. “It’s a sad story.”

“Sad stories make good books,” she said.

“They do.”

“I heard you write.”

How did she know? I wondered if her father had told her, maybe she had asked him. I immediately dismissed both scenarios as absurd. Fathers and sons could talk freely about women. But no Afghan girl—no decent and mohtaram Afghan girl, at least, queried her father about a young man. And no father, especially a Pashtun with nang and namoos, would discuss a mojarad with his daughter, not unless the fellow in question was a khastegar, a suitor, who had done the honorable thing and sent his father to knock on the door.

Incredibly, I heard myself say, “Would you like to read one of my stories?”

“I would like that,” she said. I sensed an unease in her now, saw it in the way her eyes began to flick side to side. Maybe checking for the general. I wondered what he would say if he found me speaking for such an inappropriate length of time with his daughter.

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by Joel | 21 April 2008 · 7:42 am

Materialist Rationality vs. Postmaterialist Morality

From: Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 184, 185, 187:

In What’s the Matter with Kansas? Tom Frank correctly identifies the resentment of gays, intellectuals, and liberals as compensatory efforts by the insecure to feel better about themselves. But telling working-class Americans that they are fools is not the path to victory. About the worst thing you can tell the economically insecure and the status anxious is that they are victims.

Kansas was received as a critique of moralizing but is itself the ultimate morality tale. Frank fancies himself a populist but it’s plain that he can’t stand the masses of people he grew up with. Frank writes as though contempt flows only one way, from the backlashers to the liberal elite, but the feeling is quite mutual. Frank wields pity like a weapon, to club fools who forsake materialist rationality for postmaterialist morality.

Whereas moral-values crusaders tell their followers that they are spiritually rich and morally superior, materialist liberals tell their followers that they are materially poor and intellectually inferior….

Frank characterizes right-wing nostalgia for a halcyon Leave It to Beaver past as little more than an irrational yearning for the protective womb of childhood. It is thus more than a little ironic that he fills his book with nostalgic visions of a progressive Kansas of the populist era of the 1890s and the New Deal era of the 1930s — times when, Frank believes, the people of Kansas rationally acted upon their material self-interests. Frank ends his book with a eulogy for the Kansas of FDR’s New Deal and President Johnson’s Great Society….

In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That’s because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.

As liberals and environmentalists lost political power, they abandoned a politics of the strong, aspiring, and fulfilled for a politics of the weak, aggrieved, and resentful. The unique circumstances of the Great Depression — a dramatic, collective, and public fall from prosperity — are not being repeated today, nor are they likely to be repeated anytime soon. Today’s reality of insecure affluence is a very different burden.

It is time for us to draw a new fault line through American political life, one that divides those dedicated to a politics of resentment, limits, and victimization from those dedicated to a politics of gratitude, possibility, and overcoming. The challenge for American liberals and environmentalists isn’t to convince the American people that they are poor, insecure, and low status but rather the opposite: to speak to their wealth, security, and high status. It is this posture that motivates our higher aspirations for fulfillment. The way to get insecure Americans to embrace an expansive, generous, and progressive politics is not to tell them they are weak but rather to point out all the ways in which they are strong.

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by Joel | 20 April 2008 · 1:21 pm

Jenkins in Jakarta

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick (U. California Press, 2008), pp. 163-165:

Once we touched down in Jakarta, my wife was there on the tarmac along with throngs of media…. The bus ride into the city took two hours. I had never seen such a bad traffic jam in my life. In Pyongyang there was rarely any traffic at all, even in the center of the city, but here the streets were jammed with cars. I did not wait long before getting down to business with my wife. I had already been waiting so long, I didn’t see any reason to delay the discussion any further. The bus was full of the Japanese delegation, so I still had to be a little discreet. We sat side by side, not looking at each other while we talked. “Why didn’t you want to have this meeting in China?” I asked. “If we met in China,” she said, “I may have been sent back to North Korea.” So I asked, “You don’t want to go back to North Korea?” “No,” she said quietly but firmly. “But I thought you did,” I said. “The [Korean Workers Party] Organization told me that you have been trying and wanting to come back this whole time.” “Gae-so-ri,” she said. (That is dog talk.) “Well,” I thought, “that’s it, then. The decision has been made. We are not going back.”

They put us up in a hotel downtown that was the nicest place I think I have ever stayed. We were in a suite on the fourteenth floor. It was larger than any house I had ever lived in. Brinda and Mika were in a state of shock. The television just blew them away. Actually, it blew me away, too. All those channels. The size of it. The brightness of all the colors. Some of the stuff that was shown, and the fact that it was on twenty-four hours a day. I think that was their very first whiff that there might be a lot more to the outside world than the North Koreans had ever told them. It didn’t take them long to sense that the rest of the world was much more free than North Korea had been. At the same time, there was only so much freedom for us: There was a guard on our door (officers from the Niigata police force, to be specific) twenty-four hours a day. Right across the hall from us was the Japanese delegation, including Saiki and Nakayama.

The next morning, my wife and I continued the discussion we had been having on the bus. To test her resolve on the matter, I said to her, “If you are not going back, then there is no point to me being here. The girls and I will go to China for a little while and then return to North Korea to pick up our new house. I don’t see what the problem is for you to come to North Korea. The Organization says you can go and come as you please. You can take the ferry back and forth. You can visit anytime you want.” She responded, “You know one big reason why I am not going back? It is not just because of me. It is because of you. Because of your family in the United States. If you go back to North Korea, you will never see your mother and sisters again.” “But I am not going to see them anyway, since I am going to go to jail for life!” I yelled. “You are not going to go to jail!” she yelled back. “How can you say that? ” I asked. “You can’t say that for sure.” I had realized by then that she and Koizumi were doing everything they could to appeal to the Americans for understanding and leniency in my case, but I also knew that my wife was in no position to offer me assurances about how the U.S. Army was going to choose to punish me. Whenever it was I had to face my accusers, I knew at least on that count, I would be doing it alone.

It was around that time I also realized that the power between my wife and me had changed. In North Korea, I was primarily responsible for protecting her and providing for her, and she would do what I thought was best for us almost without exception. She needed me. Now, however, the equation had changed. I would have to listen to her; she would be my guide. I now needed her more than she needed me. This change in our relationship has been one of the most noteworthy parts of our lives together since 2002, and, to be honest, sometimes one of the hardest for me to adjust to.

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by Joel | 20 April 2008 · 1:20 pm

Jenkins by Other Names

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick (U. California Press, 2008), p. 173:

[My defense attorney] introduced himself, and we made a little small talk. He asked me what he should call me. I told him something we used to say ages ago in the army: “You can call me anything you want, as long as you call me three times a day for chow and once a month to get paid.” So with that, he started calling me Charlie. I had never been called Charlie before in my life. Growing up, I was always Robert. When I was a teenager, I was Super. In the army, I was Jenkins. In North Korea, the three other Americans took to calling me C. R., while the Koreans sometimes called me Min Hyung-chan. (They gave me this name when I started acting—they needed something to put on the credits—but in person, I refused to answer to it.) So, although I have gone by many names in my life, Charlie was a new one. But now, thanks to Capt. Culp, a lot of people, especially everyone I now know in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, refer to me as “Charlie.”

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by Joel | 7 April 2008 · 9:26 pm

Narratives of the Rise vs. Narratives of the Fall

From: Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 150-151:

There is a very different story [than that in Jared Diamond’s Collapse] that can be told about human history, one that embraces our agency, and that is the story of constant human overcoming. Whereas the tragic story imagines that humans have fallen, the narrative of overcoming imagines that we have risen.

Consider how much our ancestors – human and nonhuman – overcame for us to become what we are today. For beginners, they were prey. Given how quickly and efficiently humans are driving the extinction of nonhuman animal species, the notion that our ancestors were food seems preposterous. And yet, understanding that we evolved from being prey goes a long way toward understanding some of the feelings and motivations that drive us into suicidal wars and equally suicidal ecological collapses.

Against the happy accounts of harmonious premodern human societies at one with Nature, there is the reality that life was exceedingly short and difficult. Of course, life could also be wonderful and joyous. But it was hunger not obesity, oppression not depression, and violence not loneliness that were primary concerns.

Just as the past offers plenty of stories of humankind’s failure, it also offers plenty of stories of human overcoming. Indeed, we can only speak of past collapses because we have survived them. There are billions more people on earth than there were when the tiny societies of the Anasazi in the American Southwest and the Norse in Greenland collapsed in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. That there are nearly seven billion of us alive today is a sign of our success, not failure.

Perhaps the most powerful indictment of environmentalism is that environmentalists so often consider our long life spans and large numbers terrible tragedies rather than extraordinary achievements. The narrative of overpopulation voiced almost entirely by some of the richest humans ever to roam the earth is utterly lacking in gratitude for the astonishing labors of our ancestors.

Of course, none of this is to say that human civilizations won’t collapse again in the future. They almost certainly will. Indeed, some already are collapsing. But to focus on these collapses is to miss the larger picture of rising prosperity and longer life spans. Not only have we survived, we’ve thrived. Today more and more of us are “free at last” – free to say what we want to say, love whom we want to love, and live within a far larger universe of possibilities than any other generation of humans on earth.

At the very moment that we humans are close to overcoming hunger and ancient diseases like polio and malaria, we face ecological crises of our own making, ones that could trigger drought, hunger, and the resurgence of ancient diseases.

The narrative of overcoming helps us to imagine and thus create a brighter future. Human societies will continue to stumble. Many will fall. But we have overcome starvation, disease, deprivation, oppression, and war. We can overcome ecological crises.