If everybody had a skateboard...

I went to High School in Campbell County, Virginia not far from Red Hill Plantation. I discovered that the most nerd-friendly sport was Cross-Country, but I enjoyed cheering the jocks who played the sports where teamwork and coordination are more necessary for victory. In the part of China where I now teach English, Basketball is the sport people seem most interested in playing. Basketball is a sport well suited to urban environments like the great cities of China and North America.

A few weeks ago, I tried to get my students to sing the lyrics of the beach boys.

“Be true to your school
Just like you would to your girl or guy
Be true to your school
Let your colors fly.”

Actually, in China I haven't seem the same sort of rah-rah cheerleading which characterizes games in the US. My college students say that their High School preparation mostly involved exams and competing against each other in the High School Sports meeting. Another thing which seems to be missing is the booing of the other team I remember when I attended Red Sox games and heard choruses of “Yankees suck.” Unlike Fenway Park, no one here seems to hate the Yankees, though many people on the street greet me with choruses of “Obama!”

I haven't seen cheerleaders. An Australian friend has commented on the presence of dancing girls in reputable bars where men and women go together. “English-speaking girls would be talking about how it was degrading to women.” Perhaps given the hegemony pictures of pretty white girls have over the worldwide media, Chinese girls are glad that their menfolk are having their desires directed toward women from their own race.

What is missing in China is the sort of anti-cheerleading, the snide remarks about the people wearing basketball or cheerleaders uniforms you sometimes hear in the US. “What makes them think they're so great? Why are they trying to show off, why don't they just keeping passing and let some one else handle the ball for a change.” The desire to ridicule and demean other peoples' desires does not seem to be as prevalent in China in this century. My students write essays celebrating “Our China” but they don't feel a need to razz other countries. Many writers in the West participate in a genre of social criticism which implies that failure is a result of emotional attitude, that problems would be solved if people just “kept some things in mind.” Good emotional attitude can build team spirit, but it's not enough to win games. We criticize actions based on the observations a nerd's parents make, instead of the observations jocks would make. We don't talk about the fact that making mistakes is necessary to acquire skills.

My parents gave me a picture book from the People's Republic of China when I was a kid. One of the things I noticed was that next to the shiny pictures of fruit, pigs, smiling grandparents, steelworks, and barefoot doctors—there were also pictures of bayonetts and grenades. In comparison with other third world countries, there seem to be far fewer men with guns protecting shops. But there is a presence of unarmed men in uniform.

When I went to college in the United States there were controversies a bout whether ROTC should be allowed to be present on campus—or put another way, whether poorer students who needed ROTC to pay for college should be able to attend. Here in China every student has to put on fatigues and undergo training in marching in formation—though they don't carry guns. They may bitch about it a little, but I suspect the average college-educated Chinese citizen feels much greater identification with those wearing the uniform of their nation's armed forces than the average college-educated citizen of the US, or Europe. Especially after their role in cleaning up after the Sichuan earthquake.

High School wasn't all great for me. Like almost everyone there were some fights, some name-calling. Moments when I was defined by some one else, their preconceptions, their stereotypes, even their fists. There were other moments when I got to shine, or make decisions. In the moments of victimhood, my identity was chosen and defined completely by other people. But I realized that taking on an identity of victimhood can be a step away from autonomy, making the coercively imposed identity permanent. But though it's a mistake to define yourself through victimhood, there are stories I wish I could change the ending to.

During the First Gulf War I was trying to figure out my own position. I remember trying to articulate varying positions for and against it. Sometimes I felt I had lost an argument, and tried to repeat the victor's position with the next person I encountered. Sometimes I tried to agree with my classmates, sometimes I tried to be contrarian But I never came up with an independent perspective I could feel comfortable with regardless of the attitude of the person I was talking to. I affirmed positions, but they changed with my surroundings, I had not created a stable and coherent self out of my various feelings. Is War wrong, is it right to defend your allies? Is killing the worst thing you can do to someone? Is death the worst, or is there a fate worse than death?

Last semester I taught history of the English-Speaking world. I ended up being drawn to people like Louis Riel and Ned Kelly, people whose lives were cut short by British soldiers and police in Canada and Australia respectively. Now both have become widely revered folk heroes, Riel is sometimes called the father of Manitoba. Many people, including perhaps the descendants of those who executed them, take their lives and words as inspiration. As with Nathan Hale, the British publicly executed them, but they did not render their lives meaningless. They vanished from life, but they did not disappear from history. Decades later, they may seem more heroic than if they had lived long enough to continue their last battles.

How does one assemble an authentic identity? And what are the threats to that process? What do you do to human life, or human history when the only moments you talk about are moments of victimization? When you talk about the Christ only during the passion, and not the rest of the good news.

There are people who would criticize the Chinese government for things that happened under their watch, just as there are people who might criticize my school principals for things which happened under theirs. But even when you are in what looks like a position of power most of what you accomplish depends on the will and morale of your subordinates and you can only influence that in certain directions. To punish bullies, you have to find some one more powerful than them. Repairing mechanisms of discipline and punishment require looking at things from the point of view of the aggressor, and not merely of the victim. All power derives to a certain extent from coercion and other peoples' sacrifice. But trying to seek decision-making power based purely on victimhood is merely trying to make the power of that suffering flow in a different direction. People like Gandhi and King accomplished that by being a source of Authority independent of Law. They demonstrated that the morale of the people who hearkened to their words was greater than that of the men in uniform.

Every decision-maker confronts a finite array of options. Like armchair quarterbacks, it is tempting to assume we understand those options better than they do. To believe that if we were in Chairman Mao's shoes we could have left a better legacy to subsequent generations of the Chinese people. That, not merely individual decisions, but the overall pattern created by those decisions would have been better. Chairman Mao left a legacy which his successors are content to regard as seventy percent right, which is better than most people in the Communist dictator line. You can argue that he should have acted differently in particular situations, just as you can argue that Pontius Pilate should have spared us one or two of the many crucifixions it was his job as to order as Roman governor. But Communist China has incrementally improved the concrete conditions of life for many of its citizens. Prosperity was not instantly brought into being by the Communist revolution, any more than equality was instantly brought into being by the American one, or Salaam by the Iranian one.

The achievement of human liberty takes place according to a plan and timetable of the government brought into being by the Revolution, not according to the priorities of a non-participant.

All governments rely to a certain extent on coercion. But restraint of that coercion can only happen through coercion by a higher authority. The most reliable limits on the power of princes are the limits imposed by human nature—certain things enable human vitality, others hamstring it. In China during the Cultural Revolution, we already saw the limits of what can be accomplished by shame, ostracism, and verbal castigation and what happens to your economy and society when those voices are the loudest. Now people have many more liberties, there is economic freedom, and it is very easy to buy Hollywood movies. You can see game shows, talk shows, and historical epics on TV—including ones sympathetic to thieves or armed revolutionaries. What you do not see is a concerted effort to snidely question and subvert the State. The citizens of China have no freedom to burn their flag, or to carry signs comparing AWOL-airman George Bush to Adolph Hitler. There is no discourse based on the presumption that people with guns are more malevolent than people who say nasty things. People who advance political ideas in China recognize that there may be a price to questioning the ideas for which Chairman Mao risked his life as a common soldier in the People's Liberation Army. Here in China, people may have to die for ideas. But the converse is that the discourse in the United States is full of ideas which are just people on the sidelines egging each other on. The political dialog in the United States is full of ideas and speculations for which no one has ever been willing to risk their life.

My mother's people were Amish-Mennonites. In Delaware, their religious beliefs required them to set up their own school because they did not want their children to pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. They believed in two kingdoms, one of Caesar in which soldiers wield violence and coercion, and a Christian one in which people are only the victims of violence but avoid being its perpetrators. Their menfolk did not put on the uniform of the military, but they maintained their own discipline and distinction from the world of English civilians: the men in plain coats, the women keeping their heads covered. Like soldiers, they witnessed through their clothing that their was a code of conduct and set of rules of engagment they had sworn to uphold and protect as a group.

Those ancestors felt that they could not bear the sword in defense of that banner. But as time has gone on that witness has become confused with other witnesses, including those who feel entitled to snidely denigrate not merely the military-industrial complex, but look for ways to argue that the sacrifice of the soldiers within it is a complete waste. Who dishonor American servicemen in ways that dishonor not merely the policies of particular princes, but every soldier who ever marched beneath any banner throughout all of human history. Who forget who they have put in the wrong in a search for a right they cannot directly define. People notice that in the Orthodox and Muslim worlds men are sometimes spoken of as responsible for things done by their tribe hundreds of years ago. But in modern America there are those who attempt to hold men responsible for things done by all men regardless of tribe or time, and with no possibility of atonement. People who still haven't decided whether the problem is that cops and soldiers follow orders too well, or not well enough.

What we think are arguments about truth, are often arguments about ways of naming things. Which is what war is about. Was it Manassas or Bull Run? Was Napoleon a hero or a Villain? Whether the names are given by soldiers, or tenured professors, or singers and filmmakers, naming is power. Some shibboleths are enforced by herdsmen, others by schoolmarms. But the modern academic dialect may not be as powerful or widely accepted as its enforcers assume. Naming is power, but the human heart responds differently to different ways of naming. Some ways of naming, like Orwellian Newspeak, play on fears and aversions, negative emotions, training us to behave the way a dog responds to a fickle master. Other ways of naming call on our highest instincts, the way a dog responds to the whistle of a beloved master.

After college, I worked in transportation—hoping to figure out a way to get people to drive less. And I was sometimes shocked at how blasé people seemed about all the ills caused by the automobile civilization: car wrecks, pollution, suburban sprawl. I wanted to change things, and I thought the first step was to get the people around me to adopt my way of naming the problem. I thought what I could contribute was the sense of emotional aversion, wake people up to how wrong this was. Later on, I worked with intersections, studying car wrecks. And what I realized was that, there are limits to what you can accomplish through emotional aversion. If you want to redesign an intersection so it produces fewer car wrecks, you have to get beyond an individual car wreck, or even numbers of car wrecks, to patterns—where and why the are most likely to happen. How do you descibe the problem?

When you become political, you often look at the world, the way I looked at my engineering co-workers. And you acquire an attitude of presumptive hostility toward the image, presented in books or Hollywood movies. If you are into black power you see them as racist, if you are a feminist you see them as sexist, if you are a fundamentalist Protestant you see them as undermining Christian values, if you are a socialist or environmentalist you see it as unfair to activists. This is a learning process, that hostility sometimes leads you to understand the image better, and those types of complaints do result in the worst stereotypes becoming less caricatured. But there are certain aspects of the image you cannot change without changing human nature. There are rules of representation which are very difficult to break. Nerds have a hard time getting the girl in High School. And at some point you have to ask whether the hostility or malevolence exists in the thing you are looking at, or in the thing that is looking. And the best responses focus not on the image as a whole, but on particular aspects of the image. There was an article called “Women in Refrigerators” talking about comic books not overall, but the particular aspect that girlfriend or other significant figures in the hero's life, were so often subject to violent and traumatic suffering as a plot device. This was much easier to talk about, than the fact that comic book artists like drawing women they like to look at.

Many social critics name problems the way a nerd names them, as single isolated events which seem to be under the control of a mastermind, and which that mastermind could make disappear. But really changing society requires thinking the way a jock thinks, seeing the interaction of multiple dynamic processes involving various decision-makers where no single strategy guarantees victory. And also where goals separate from you own, such as those of the other team cannot be thwarted merely by trying to make them feel ashamed. In a ball-game you don't try to ask why, or search for a because for every single action. In a game desire is the root of all meaningful experience, both the suffering of losing and the elation of winning, and the way you learn from what happens in both. It is not clear that the past few decades of presuming that our leaders were wrong have resulted in better decision-making.

Our world is in grave danger right now. And saving it requires looking at both nature and human nature. Are the predatory instincts which created eagles and wolves so pathological we have to hire men in Black Helicopters to hunt them down? Can we have a vibrant economy which does not sometimes manifest the exuberance of a meadow in August, and the tragedy of the Killing Frost? Should we sow our fields only with a monoculture of vacuum-sealed seeds with the right labels, with no space for maize criollo? And should we take note that it is precisely the species which has had its consciousness raised, and precisely the parts of the world where it has been raised, which is the biggest threat to the environment. It is the domesticated animals which are destroying the environment, not wild ones. Ants do not hate their anthill, nor bees their honeycomb. Animal instincts allow them to act adaptively in situations of imperfect information, and they do occasionally bring them into violent interactions. We are not merely abstract philosophical constructs, we are embedded in the types of relationships the Beach Boys sang about.

As I walk through the campus of this university, I see flying above in the place of honor, a banner with stars. And I think of those in the soldiering trade who fought to bring this government into being, and those who defend it now. Here it is a scarlet banner with red stars, but I also think of the stars and stripes of my American Republic and the soldiers sworn to defend that. Both in Afghanistan, where we joined our German-speaking allies to enter an existing conflict with the allies of Ahmed Shah Massoud, asassinated by duplicity. And in Iraq, where the English-speaking world found that the shock and awe of bombs bought from the Military-Industrial complex were not enough to achieve victory in a muslim nation. Machinery can always be manipulated by people other than those who think they are in control of the situation. On September 11, 1973 the airplanes of the Chilean air force were commandeered against a democratically elected socialist president. And on another September 11, American airlines were the ones commandeered. The most important weapons in any Prince's arsenal will always be of woman born.

We have not fully achieved the goals of our Revolution, but we have seen progress toward that goal.

Happy May Day!