Well, it's the New Year. Everyone on booktube is talking about their reading goals. I've noticed most of my fellow booktubers are setting goals for themselves in terms of the number of books they want to read in 2024. But measuring reading by the number of books never made a lot of sense to me, because books vary widely in length.
[Perhaps this disparity is because of my reading habits. Maybe I like to mix up epic classics and children's books more than most booktubers. Maybe your average booktuber just reads a lot of novels that are all solidly 300-400 pages long.]
But anyway, I prefer to do it by page count.
Now, I know, even page counts are not accurate across books. Because the number of words per page also varies widely per book. Some books have very large font, some books have very small font. But, at a certain point you just have to throw your hands up and accept the limitations of your chosen measurement. I mean, word count would be the most accurate means of measuring my reading progress. But I'm not going to count the words of everything I read, so page count it is.
Many years ago (back when I still lived in Cambodia), I decided my daily goal for reading was 20 pages a day. This was about the amount of pages I could read in an 40-60 minutes. It was also just about the amount of pages I could comfortably read before I started to get antsy and lose focus. After about 20 pages, I felt like I needed to take a break from my book and do something else for a while.
So, a good reading week for me, then, is 140 pages (20 pages times 7 days).
But I've decided to round that number up to 200 to try to push myself just a little bit more.
200 is a stretch for me, to be honest, but then the whole point of making New Year's goals is to try to push yourself.
The other reason for choosing 200 is I was watching Steve Donoghue's interview with Jared Henderson, and at one point Jared said that since having the baby he was so busy now that he only had time for one book a week. And I thought "I'm also crazy busy since having kids. But if he can manage a book a week, then maybe I could push myself to 200 pages a week." I mean, it's not quite a book, but 200 pages is close to a book.
So that's my goal. We'll see how I do.
In 2021, I averaged 164 pages a week. In 2022, I averaged 99 pages a week. In 2023, I did 168 pages per week. Maybe I can get that closer to 200 in 2024?
Of course, the problem with New Year's goals is that they all have to be balanced against each other. I've also committed myself to finishing Vietnamese on Duolingo in 2024. And for this first week of 2024, I spent loads of time on Duolingo, but not so much time on my reading. So I'm going to have to figure out if I can keep both my Duolingo goals and my reading goals in 2024. But I'm going to try.
While researching information on Voltairine de Cleyre (for the previous post), I came across a 4 part publication detailing the history of anarchism in Grand Rapids. See here.
I looked in vain for the author's names, but couldn't find it. Apparently whoever wrote it wanted to be anonymous. But I've got a strong suspicion I know who it is--one of my former comrades from the Media Mouse days.
Should one wish to go a bit further back, Emma Goldman once visited Grand Rapids and actually loved it. She gave a speech at which she was very well received. She writes about her trip briefly in her autobiography, and at the time she gave a brief write in mother earth magazine http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/ME/mev6n1.html#17
The author, though, was way ahead of me on this one, and responded:
@Joel:
Way to go with knowing my two favorite bits of Grand Rapids anarchist history! There was actually a hilarious article in one of the newspapers of the time when Emma Goldman was in town that basically expressed surprise that she wasnt an actual monster, it was pretty ridiculous.
There was also a very active IWW branch in the early 1900s.
So I said:
Ah, so I see I'm not the only one who knows this little tidbit then. I actually learned about it a few years ago, in Japan of all places, when reading through Emma Goldman's autobiography. Id be curious to know where you first heard about this. Is it common knowledge in West Michigan progressive circles, or did you have to dig around a bit?
I've not seen the newspaper articles though. Were these from the Grand Rapids Press or its equivalent of the time? And again, how did you stumble upon them? Are they publically available?
In her autobiography Emma Goldman also talks about William Buwalda, a US soldier from Hudsonville Michigan, who was court martialled and imprisoned for the crime of shaking hands with Emma Goldman.
And the author responded with:
I came across the bit about Volteraine de Cleyre while reading her biography.
As for the Emma Goldman bit, I actually searched around a bit in the Grand Rapids Public Librarys local history room to find the articles. They were in whatever the Grand Rapids Press equivalent was back then, although there were actually multiple newspapers. I cant remember what one they were in. To find the dates I believe I cross referenced with a tour itinerary from another source.
I dont have access to the notebook with the references right off hand, but Ill try to find it. Maybe Ill see about scanning or retyping the articles sometime, just for curiositys sake.
Someday Id like to do a piece looking at radical history in Grand Rapids, so this would certainly fit.
So, I suspect that he's the same author of this extensive 4 volume history of anarchism in Grand Rapids.
I was an active member of the group Media Mouse--whose history is briefly covered in volume 4 starting on page 30.
Since I like to wax nostalgic on this blog, I'll jot down a few reminiscences here from my Media Mouse days. This can be read as a supplement to the history of Media Mouse that you'll find Volume 4 of the History of Anarchism in Grand Rapids.
I wasn't one of the founding members of Media Mouse, but I started hearing about them through the Calvin College Social Justice Coalition (which I was actively involved in at the time). With several members of Calvin's SJC, we attended the April 17, 2000 Breaking the Bank Protest (which is mentioned in on page 31 of the history). The Media Mouse video of which can be viewed here.
By the summer of that year, I started attending Media Mouse meetings regularly.
There were a lot of people in Grand Rapids who were vaguely interested in Media Mouse, but there were only about 5 of us who attended the regular meetings with any consistency. And I was one of those 5. I didn't have any valuable skills to lend to the group--I wasn't particularly smart, or creative, and I usually just went along with what the other members suggested. But I was dedicated--I never missed a meeting.
In total, my days at Media Mouse lasted for slightly over a year, and then I left for Japan in August 2001, and that was the end of my activism days.
(Much to my regret--it all seemed like a big adventure at the time, and I was sorry to give it up. But it was impossible to stay involved in grass roots politics in America and live in the Japanese countryside at the same time. So I had to choose one of the two adventures, and I chose travelling. But I've always wondered about the road not taken.)
My own personal recollection is that Media Mouse itself, as an organization, was non-doctrinal. (I don't remember anyone referring to it as an anarchist group at the time). But I think all of us regular members self-identified as anarchists, so in that sense it was an anarchist organization.
On page 31, the history mentions Media Mouse's coverage and participation in the 2001 Quebec anti-FTAA protests. For my own memory of that event, see excerpts from my journal here here. For the Media Mouse documentary of the event, see here. (The documentary contains some footage that I shot, and also contains me as part of a Media Mouse panel discussion).
One of the people tangentially associated with Media Mouse published her own Zine called "Get Up!" This is also mentioned briefly in the history on page 31.
Anarchist ideas began to manifest themselves in other venues as well. A short lived zine called Get Up! featured anarchist symbols and described itself as “an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, pro-feminist, radically-oriented publication.”
When I came back to Grand Rapids in 2006, I tried to get back into activism.
I followed the pattern I had set before--I attended all the meetings regularly, and I showed up - at - the -protests, but I didn't provide any leadership or have any special skills. And that was my history with the Grand Rapids chapter of the IWW (also mentioned in volume 4 of the history, page 31). I attended their meetings regularly for a period during 2006, but that's as much as I can claim.
I don't usually do a lot of fashion and beauty tips on this blog, but I had the opportunity of conducting some research this afternoon, and I figured it would be a pity to let my newfound knowledge go to waste.
After all, somebody out there in Internetland may one day find themselves in the same predicament, and may find this information useful.
To answer the obvious question--how did I get blue tack in my hair in the first place?--I'm not really sure. There's always tons of blue-tack around the teachers' office. I remember absent-mindedly fiddling around with it in the morning. Perhaps I touched my hair with it still on my fingers. Or maybe it was on the headphones on the communal work computers.
At any rate, somewhere in the course of the day I noticed there was a lump of something in my hair. I initially thought it was a seed or a burr or something, and tried to just pull it out, but only succeeded in mashing it into my hair farther. (I'm overdue for a haircut at the moment, so I'm in one of my long-hair stages).
At this point, it became impossible to pull it out without taking a good chunk of my hair with it. So I thought I would just leave it alone until I got home and could try to shampoo it out.
Which meant the whole rest of the day, people were commenting "Did you know you have this big clump of blue tack in your hair?" (Fortunately I wasn't teaching that day. I was just in the office prepping).
Lots of people began offering their advice to me, and it turned out that this was not the first time this had happened at my school. Which makes a certain degree of statistical sense, I suppose. Hundreds of teachers, all of them handling blue-tack all day long-- it's like the million monkeys on the typewriters. Sooner or later, the blue tack is going to get in people's hair.
One manager had a story of a teacher who was attacked by a kid, and had blue-tack thrown into her hair. Her advice was not to shower or get the blue tack warm at all, but to freeze it with ice, and then peel it off. (Apparently this is what they had done in that case.)
I, on the other hand, picked up advice on the Internet about using peanut butter or vegetable oil to get gum out of hair.
Long story short, I picked up some olive oil on the way home. And it worked like magic.
Like it was the easiest thing in the world--I just put the olive oil onto the blue tack, and the blue tack just magically dissolved. I didn't have to pull it out. I didn't have to carefully comb it out. It just dissolved into a blue liquid, and that was the job done.
It was so magically quick and painless, that I figured I post the advice on the Internet, so that the next teacher who gets into this predicament knows exactly what to do.
After Tom Hayden died, I re-watched an interesting documentary on the 1968 Chicago convention. This documentary is worth re-watching now, because I think it perfectly explains what happened this election year as well. See video here.
Now, I know we didn't have riots outside the convention center in 2016, but a lot of this should feel familiar. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party wants an anti-establishment candidate, and gets silenced. Then they try to get a discussion going about the Vietnam War on the Convention floor, and the discussion gets silenced.
"You're not getting your candidate or acknowledgement of any of your issues," the Democratic Party tells the Liberals. "Go fuck off. And then come back and vote for us in November."
And then the unthinkable happens. Nixon, who everyone thought was unelectable, ended up winning.
On the night Tim Kaine spoke to the convention, many Sanders delegates like me wanted to express respectful opposition to President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement by holding signs. But, our signs were confiscated, and, when we made some homemade versions on the back of the officially-sanctioned Kaine signs, we were told to cease and desist or our credentials would be revoked. So much for democracy.More important, that gagging of pretty mild protest was symbolic. The party is not an open place, beyond rhetoric, to a whole swath of activists and voters who want deep, systemic change.
Not only did we progressives not get our candidate, but the Democratic Party just refused to talk about any of our issues.
Bernie Sanders didn't get enough delegates to become the nominee. Fair enough. But he had gotten so much support that Hillary should have at least realized people wanted reform and taken on some of his issues.
Bernie Sanders actually stood for stuff. And he promised a lot of stuff. So did Trump. Hillary didn't appear to promise anything at all.
In fact, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what Hillary stood for in this campaign. As I wrote on October 17, 2016 .
What does Hillary actually stand for? I mean, take away all the "At least she's not as bad as..." out of the equation, and someone remind me why anyone should vote for her. What has she promised us? What issues is she campaigning on?
And so we were stuck with Hillary--someone who was an insider at a time when the country definitely wanted an outsider, someone who was a Hawk at a time when the liberals were worried about the expansion of drone strikes, and someone who was so clearly in the pockets of Wall Street that she refused to release her transcript of the speeches.
The selection of the Vice-President was a moment where Hillary Clinton could have reached out to the liberal wing. And there was a lot of hope at the time that Elizabeth Warren would be selected. But then when the choice came, we progressives got absolutely nothing out of the Vice-President.
It was reported in several news agencies that Wall Street had actually forbidden the selection of Elizabeth Warren--Hillary was told she would lose her funding if she selected Elizabeth Warren, and so Hillary folded to Wall Street.
And then came the Wikileaks, and we found out that Democratic Party Leadership had indeed conspired with Hillary to deny Bernie the nomination. During the primaries, Donna Brazile secretly fed Hillary questions in advance. The chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had hated Bernie all along, and had scheduled the primaries to intentionally benefit Hillary. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign after she was booed off stage at her own convention. (And apparently after a call from Barack Obama (W) ). But instead of condemning this behavior, Hillary gave Debbie Wasserman Schultz a new position on her campaign. It was blatant, blatant cronyism. It was clearly sending the message "As long as your corrupt for me, I'll take care of you." And it was done by a woman who was already viewed with suspicion by the majority of the country as being a crooked politician.
And it was all done under the assumption that the Democratic Party didn't need to worry about it's liberal wing.
The message was clear. "Go fuck off. And then come back and vote for us in November."
Henry Kissinger once said of the Iran-Iraq War: "It's a pity they can't both lose." Lately, I've been feeling this way about the election. As I wrote before, I had been pessimistic about a Bernie Sanders victory all along, and that made it easy for me to bypass the outrage stage and go right to a cynical acceptance of Hillary's victory. But I thought the DNC would at least try to make some show of appeasing the party's left wing with the Vice Presidential pick. (I really had my heart set on Elizabeth Warren). That, plus the news about the leaked DNC e-mails, is making it really hard to work up the energy to support Hillary.
For a brief moment earlier this week, I caught myself hoping Hillary might actually lose, just because she deserves to lose. But then I remembered how awful Donald Trump is, and I came back to sanity. Still...it's really a pity that they can't both lose.
Prompted by Whisky, I continued my rant in the comments:
I tell you what, this past week has really burned me up. And I was all set to hold my nose and support Hillary. I'd even resigned myself to that since last November. But the way Hillary just refuses to give the Left Wing anything is astounding. And then the DNC gets angry at the Bernie supporters, and calls them childish. They don't act like they have to earn the support of the Left, they are acting like they are entitled to the support of the Left. And if the Left doesn't just automatically give them their support, then they pour vitriol on the left and call them childish and unreasonable. You NEVER see this kind of thing over on the Republican side. They act like they actually have to EARN the support of their base over on the Republicans.
Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ’08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They’re not going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do something to give them a reason to support her — and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.
It's not that Bernie Sanders voters didn't fall in line and support Hillary. They did. But they weren't passionate about her, they didn't volunteer for her, and they didn't convince their friends to vote for Hillary.
And that ended up costing her the election.
And Hillary and the Democratic Party just made absolutely no effort to get them back. "Go Fuck off, and then come back and vote for us in November."
It's a brilliant article. Go and read the whole thing.
Liberals like to think that Republicans have tricked working class people into voting against their own self-interest, Taibbi says, but the truth is that the Democratic Party hasn't represented working class people for a long time now. What's hurting the working class? NAFTA and the TPP. And who is pushing NAFTA and the TPP. The Clintons.
Was there any effort to reach out to rural working class voters by the Clinton campaign? If there was, I certainly missed it.
What I did catch was that Clinton refused to even let the public see the speeches she had made to Wall Street. And when Wikileaks released the transcripts, we found Clinton secretly praising the TPP to Wall Street.
And then when confronted with this, the Clinton campaign acted like they do every time they get caught doing something--they acted like the issue was that it was the fault of Wikileaks for revealing it, and not her fault for having done it. There was no effort to ameliorate this. The voter was just supposed to suck up everything, and still love her. "Go Fuck off, and then come back and vote for me in November."
The closest I ever got to wanting to vote for Trump was listening to this Dan Carlin show on the secrecy of the negotiations around the TPP. As Dan Carlin points out, it's not being kept secret from foreign governments--the foreign government already know all about it. It's being kept secret from the American public, and it's being kept a secret precisely because the American public would not approve of it if they knew about it.
And Hillary is a big part of this. She is giving secret speeches to Wall Street in which she is praising the TPP, and then refusing to even let the public see what was in those speeches. "It's none of your business what I said to Wall Street. Now go Fuck off and vote for me in November."
That was her attitude!
Well, I tell you, this kind of thing makes a person want to vote for Trump. It almost made me want to vote for Trump.
Second reason why I'm wary about Hillary: she's just too much red meat for the right wing to go after. They love to hate her, and they're good at it. They've been hating her for years even before she had any sort of elected position or political power. If it weren't for Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh would probably have run out of material and been out of a job years ago. And they've just been drooling waiting for her to run. They wanted her to run back in 2000. They were sure she would run in 2004. If you go back and read the right wing editorials from those periods they couldn't wait to slam her and she wasn't even a candidate. If Hillary wins the Democratic primary, we can expect months and months of gleeful conservatives drudging up all their accumulated 16 years of dirt on her. Obama, on the other hand, they've got nothing on, so they have to resort to cheap tricks (examples here) which I think will backfire on the Republicans and help Obama more than they hurt him. As a friend of mine once put it, "The Right wing is absolutely drooling at the idea of Hillary winning. They're shitting themselves at the prospect of an Obama victory." (Of course none of this is Hillary's fault. It's not her fault that Rush Limbaugh is such an asshole. But then politics has never been fair. If politics were fair, ugly people or people who were terrible public speakers could be candidates.)
To re-emphasize: I'm not saying it is fair that Republicans have an irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton. But what I am saying is that it was entirely predictable. And if we're concerned with things like winning elections and keeping fascists out of power, then we have to admit to ourselves that she was the wrong choice as nominee.
Had anyone else been the Democratic Nominee, I think we would have seen defections from the Republican Party in droves. We knew a lot of establishment Republicans were unhappy with Trump. But they've just couldn't make the jump for Hillary Clinton--they had been hating her for too long.
And if Clinton had trouble making inroads with Republicans, she also had trouble making progress with the Black Lives Matter group, who never forgave her for her comments about young black men as super predators with no conscience.
Okay, so I've already admitted I was wrong about everything. (See the previous 3 posts). But I might as well detail what the logic of the time was, so that we can go back later and examine why none of these reasons ended up mattering.
* Conventional wisdom has always been that each party has a base of supporters, but that to win elections you need to reach outside of your base by appealing to the moderates. And the conventional wisdom always was that you appealed to the moderates by being moderate. Donald Trump was being so extreme, we were all certain he'd scare all the moderates away, and then he'd just be left with his party's base. And you can't win an election with just the party's base.
* Not only that, but Donald Trump didn't even appear to have the party's base locked down. His populist talk and anti-free trade rhetoric alienated the business wing of the Republican Party. His blatantly un-Christian behavior should have alienated the Evangelical wing of the Republican Party. (In the end, as we know now, it didn't. But it should have.)
And his blatant irresponsibility had alienated any serious thinking establishment Republican. I mean, here we had several prominent life-long Republicans saying "This man can not be allowed to have the nuclear codes. I'm voting for Hillary."
* Latinos are the fastest growing demographic, and Donald Trump was doing everything he could to alienate them.
* Donald Trump was doing everything he could to alienate Muslims.
* Donald Trump was alienating black people. (I don't think he himself ever went after black people quite the way he went after Mexicans and Muslims, but he was attracting supporters who were, and in the racial charged atmosphere of Black Lives Matter, Black people were feeling threatened.)
* Donald Trump was alienating women. Not only was his behavior very sexist, but surely most women would vote to support the first woman president. And women are like half the population. That's game, set and match right there.
* Continuing on from the above point: as I wrote before, although Donald Trump is not the first candidate to be accused of sexual assault, at the very least with Bill Clinton there was reasonable doubt. In Trump's case, 12 women accuse him of sexual assault plushe's caught on audio tape bragging about how much he liked to sexually assault women. I mean, that's got to cost him all the women's votes, and all the Christian votes right there, right?
* Forget the fact that his plan to build a wall was racist and xenophobic. More importantly, it was just a physical impossibility. A wall that big covering a boarder that large? It was just pure fantasy. It was apparent in the Republican primaries that a certain percentage of the Republican voters lived in a fantasy world of irrationality, but the majority of the country? Surely not.
* We Leftists had always been taught that American democracy was controlled by the businessmen. Whoever got the most contributions from big business always won every election, we'd been told. You could count on it every time, we'd been told. And business was scared of Donald Trump, and embracing Hillary. So it was a sure thing.
* It was painfully obvious to anyone watching the debates that there was really only one adult choice in the room. Everyone could see that, couldn't they? How could anyone vote for Donald Trump after seeing how he handled himself in the debates?
* Related to the above point: We've been told all our lives that to be President of America, you have to be squeaky clean. You can't have any skeletons in your closet. You can never say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing. The slightest little gaffe could end your career.
And here was a man who had a very sordid past (he appeared in pornography, bragged about his sex life and had regularly made coarse comments about women on the Howard Stern show), married multiple times, had tons of skeletons in his closet.
(I'm not going to bother listing everything here, you've been watching the news the past year just like I have, you can name these scandals in your sleep.)
* The polls. The polls all showed Hillary ahead. Of course, with 20/20 hindsight, it's obvious those polls were wrong. But at the time, it seemed only crazy people were dismissing the polls.
* And lastly, we Americans had always been taught that there was a certain amount of dignity that went with being the President of the United States. It was unimaginable that such a man could ever hold such an office.
Alright, I made a number of predictions this year that turned out to be dead wrong.
Before I get too much into the self flagellation, let me say that the whole game of making predictions on this blog was always just a bit of a lark--the whole point of the game is that no one ever predicts anything 100% right, but it's interesting sometimes to take a stab at it, and then look back and see everything you got right and everything you got wrong.
But that said, I would totally be cheating at this game if I didn't take my lumps when they came due.
The one thing I did get right, however, was: "There's no way that the Democratic Party Establishment is ever going to let Bernie Sanders get the nomination, and so Hillary's nomination is inevitable."
(Not only did Hillary go on to get the nomination, but of course once the Wikileaks were released, it turned out the Democratic Party Establishment was indeed actively conspiring to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination. So two-for-two in that sentence, at least.)
My other prediction, however, about Hillary winning the election, is looking safer than ever....And I know people are saying that we can't under-estimate Trump. And people are saying that, yes, a Trump victory could happen, and so we should be scared. And people are saying that Brexit proves that voters can do incredibly stupid things some times. But I'm going to go ahead and put my reputation on the line on this one. There is no way Donald Trump will ever win in the general election. He's going to get creamed in November. He surprised us all in the primaries, I know, but that's because he was appealing directly to the racists and the crazies in the Republican Party. There's no way he's going to duplicate that success when he has to try to appeal to moderate voters
Um, yeah, that one turned out to be dead wrong.
And as if being wrong on this blog wasn't enough, I also went on record in personal conversation. Talking at the office, or out at bars, I repeatedly assured friends and co-workers that Donald Trump wasn't going to win.
"I don't know," someone would say, "Look at what happened with Brexit."
Or "I don't know," someone would say, "He won the primary, and no one thought he would do that. Shouldn't we be concerned?"
And I was adamant each time. "No. No no no no no. Listen to me. I'm going to go ahead and put my credibility on the line for this one. There is absolutely no way Donald Trump will ever win in a general election. And if he does win, you never have to listen to anything I say ever again."
And that was basically verbatim what I said. On several occasions. And I actually repeatedly used the expressions: "put my credibility on the line" and "you never have to listen to anything I say ever again if he wins."
As time went on, and some people in my work place were getting more nervous about the election, I increased my insistence. "No. Listen to me. Listen to me. I will eat my hat if Donald Trump gets elected. This hat, right here. I will literally eat it if Donald Trump wins the election. I mean it. I will literally eat this hat." *1
I made this claim loudly enough and repeatedly enough that everyone in the office knew about it.
Of course, wiser liberals were taking a more cautious approach. There were plenty of Cassandras out there, trying to warn us not to be complacent.
Even some of my co-workers tried to warn me. "Don't say that!" someone told me in the office just last week. "He could win. What good does it do to say things like that? We need to be worried."
Indeed, what good does it do to say things like that? Why did I go around telling everyone that Trump couldn't possibly win, instead of taking a more pre-cautionary approach.
I've done some self-reflection, and I've come up with three reasons why I said what I said.
1): Pure intellectual smugness. I was sure Trump would lose, so I wanted to be sure I got all the credit for predicting it ahead of time.
2): As a way to try to deflect the smugness of the non-American expats.
As anyone who's been an expat this past year will tell you, it's been an embarrassing year to be an American. Many a time, a Brit, or New Zealander, or Australian, or Canadian, or Irish, etc, would say smugly something like "What is wrong with your country?"
And in order to try to undercut their smugness, I would say something like, "Don't worry. Trump is going to get absolutely creamed in November. Or I'll eat my hat. Whereas you guys, on the other hand, still voted for Brexit."
3): To the extent that there was an ideological reason for this (and not just me being a smug jackass), it was that I felt that to acknowledge the threat of Trump's candidacy would be to legitimize it. *2
And then Trump won, and my jaw hit the floor.
I'm currently getting a lot of flack in the office about the hat eating issue. And I did seriously contemplate eating it.
I posted on Facebook to try to get some free medical advice about the dangers of hat eating.
I need some advice about a situation:in an effort to show faith in the goodness of humanity, in the weeks and months preceding the election I assured everyone that Trump would not win, and I told everyone that I was so sure of this that I would eat my hat if he won. (literally, not metaphorically).I'm contemplating how I can fulfill this promise without doing any serious damage to my health. The hat is 75% cotton, and 25% polyester. It's a rather large hat, but I was thinking of cutting it into small pieces, using some kind of barbecue sauce, and washing it down with lots of beer. I was wondering if anyone had any insight into adverse health effects I should expect from this.
Many people have commented on the post, and several more people sent me private messages. The advice is all over the map, but I've gotten several serious warnings that eating the hat could have devastating physical consequences.
So it looks like I'll be weaseling out of eating the hat.
Footnote 1:
Years in Southeast Asia have caused me to develop the same phobia of the sun that all the local Vietnamese have. I never go outside without a huge hat on. The hat I'm currently wearing is a fishing hat with a wide brim--somewhat similar to the one pictured below.
Footnote 2
I have long thought that we liberals often give legitimacy to fringe groups by over-reacting to them. For example, the common phenomenon of when the Klu-Klux-Klan holds a rally in some city, and 12 mentally unstable hill-billies will show up to represent the Klan, and then thousands and thousands of liberals will go out of their minds protesting them. I've always thought this behavior was counter-productive--that it was giving these 12 mentally unstable hill-billies exactly the kind of attention and legitimacy they craved, and that it would be better to ignore them.
Or take Ann Coulter. Here is a woman who should have faded into obscurity years ago, except that she knows exactly how to play liberals. She'll make some sort of over-the-top ridiculous statement that no one in their right mind would take seriously, but then liberals will get so angry at her that she'll stay in the news for months.
In the same way, I thought that to worry too much about Trump's candidacy would be to give it an importance it did not deserve. I thought it should be recognized for what it was: a manifestation of the fact that the Republican primary process had long ago been taken over by the right-wing nuts, and not as a serious representation of the American voter. To treat it as a serious representation of the American voter, I thought, would to legitimatize Trump's discourse.
I was wrong.
Quite possibly I've been wrong on this issue across the board. Maybe we liberals should go crazy and protest when those 12 mentally unstable hill-billies show up for the Klu-Klux-Klan rally.
Ah, yes, I'd temporarily forgotten about Rob Ford. I remember thinking at the time, "What is wrong with Toronto?" But I guess I can't feel so smug about it now. Of course, Rob Ford never held any national office. It was just a subset of the Canadian Population. Same with Trump. Or so I hope. He may be very popular with the extreme fringe of the Republican Party, but once the primaries are over and he has to go into the general election, I'm still hopeful that he's going to get creamed.
Actually, let me quote myself, because it still holds true.
Before I start this story, there's an oddity about the ex-patriot community here I should explain. Namely there are no conservatives here. None. There are none in Oita, none in Gifu, none in Sapporo. In my 3 years plus here in Japan, I've only meet one conservative I can think of. Some of you may be thinking, "That's just Joel's liberal bias", or "He's just hanging out with the wrong people". But I assure you it is not I alone who have made this observation. Several other American expatriates have observed to me, "There's so many Bush supporters back home, how come we never run into any of them here in Japan?" Even Japanese friends have occasionally commented, "The news reports say Bush is very popular, but how come every American I meet hates him so much?" Now as to why this is I can't really say. The expatriate community, or at least the English teaching expatriate community, is almost entirely composed of people in their 20s, and as an age demographic that is obviously pre-dominantly liberal. Also in order to get into many of the English teacher programs a university degree is required, and statistically people with higher education degrees tend to be proportionately more liberal than the population as a whole. But of course there are plenty of college educated young conservatives, and indeed I knew many of them at Calvin College. Why do none of them seem to end up in Japan? It is a question we Americans here in Japan have often pondered among ourselves. The usually answer is that conservatives are very small minded and so don't tend to want to travel outside of their own country. Or, as a corollary, any one who does a lot of travelling can not help but become more liberal as they are exposed to different view points outside of the American media. I imagine this is an answer which would infuriate many of my conservative friends back home, but in the absence of any conservatives to refute it over here, it has become a sort of conventional wisdom.
At the time, one of my old Calvin friends Chris Baker, who was living in Hong Kong at the time, chimed in on the comments section to say something to the effect of "This is so true!" Chris Baker offered an additional explanation that I hadn't considered--namely that the Americans make up a very small percentage of the expatriate community. The rest of the expats are Canadian, English, Scottish, Irish, Australian, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, various Europeans, et cetera. And by and large, the American Republican Party has very little support outside of America's boarders, so all these other nationalities tend to look on the Republican ideology with a lot of scorn and derision. So Chris Baker theorized that this was causing conservative Christian Americans to just be quiet and outwardly conform.
...He may be on to something. Although I've yet to meet any closeted Christian conservatives. In my experience all the American expats are genuine liberals. But anyway...
Back in 2004 I was writing about my experiences in Japan. But it's also held true in the other countries I've lived in since. It was true in Cambodia (as I noted here), and it is true in Vietnam.
It is also, by the way, a phenomenon which the locals pick up on, and which confuses them.
When I lived in Japan during the Bush years, Japanese friends would say something like, "It's funny. I haven't met a single American person who likes Bush. And yet he keeps getting elected. Why is that?"
I've been getting the same question this year from confused Vietnamese friends, who have the same question regarding Trump. "None of my American friends like Trump," they will tell me. "So how can he be getting so popular in America?"
All of this is to say: I have grown completely out of touch with conservative Christians.
When I wrote that original post back in 2004, I had only been abroad for 3 years, and it was still a novelty to live in a place that wasn't dominated by conservative Christian rhetoric. Now I've been living abroad for almost 15 years, and I tend to forget that this conservative Christian ideology exists at all.
...Until I see something posted on Facebook by a former high school classmate, and then I think, "Oh yeah, there are people out there who still believe this." And I spend some time contemplating how deep the gulf is between their thinking, and my thinking, and how we both started out in the same place, but ended up so different.
During this past election season, some of my former high school classmates became Trump supporters. They posted stuff on Facebook and on their blogs. Some of them were even intelligent people--one of them had been our valedictorian back at Ada Christian middle school. And I looked at it, and I thought they had lost their minds. And I began trying to contemplate how smart people could have come to this point, and I started forming theories about human rationality and irrationality, and all that stuff.
And then the election came, and it turned out that these former high school classmates of mine hadn't lost their minds after all--it turned out that they were now representing the mainstream of American political opinion, and I had just become so out of touch with things that I thought they were crazy.
I just completed renewing my passport...which made me realize that another ten years has come and gone.
...that's right, it's going to be yet another post where I bemoan the fact that I'm getting older...
I first got my passport in November 1996 when I was 18. I noticed that it was good for 10 years, and that I wouldn't have to renew it until 2006, when I was 28.
At the time, 28 seemed so old I couldn't even fathom it. Intellectually, of course, I knew I would inevitably age just like every one else does. But psychologically, I couldn't believe I would ever really become 28.
And then 2006 came, and I had to renew my passport for another 10 years. "Huh, I guess I got to 28 after all," I remember thinking to myself. "But I can't ever imagine being 38!"
And now I'm 38, and it was time to renew the passport again. Sigh. Where does time go?
At the very least, I got good use out of this last passport. This last passport was the first passport I filled up completely (and then had to apply for extra pages at the US Consulate).*
And now I have the stamps for memories. But just in case I ever lose the passport, I'll duplicate the itinerary here.
When I first got the renewed passport in November 2006, I was living in the United States.
* And then in January 2007, I went back to Japan.
* September 2008, I went back to the United States for 2 weeks for my sister's wedding, and then back to Japan.
* January 2010 I left Japan to return home to the United States
* February 2010 I went to Australia.
* February 2011 I left Australia to return to the United States
* April 2011 I left the United States to go to Cambodia
* June 2011 I visited Vietnam for one week, and then back to Cambodia
* December 2011 I visited Malaysia for 3 weeks, and then back to Cambodia (pictures here)
* June 2012 I visited Thailand for 1 week, and then back to Cambodia
* March 2013: Attempted to visit Vietnam for a short trip on the Mekong Delta Tour, but was turned away at the boarder because my passport was full (or full by their standards--they wanted 4 completely blank pages)
* May 2013: Mekong Delta Tour second try--this time with extra pages in the pasport. Visited Vietnam for 3 days, and then back to Cambodia
* December 2014 I went home to the United States for one month, and then back to Cambodia
* April 2015 I moved from Cambodia to Vietnam
* August 2015 I went back to Cambodia for 5 days (to visit friends and pick up some luggage) and then back to Vietnam.
Total: lived in 5 countries (America, Japan, Australia, Cambodia, Vietnam), plus visited two more (Malaysia, Thailand). Not a bad 10 years I suppose.
Footnote *Although part of the reason that this passport filled up so quickly was less to do with my frequent travels and more to do with the fact that both Cambodia and Vietnam issue huge visa stickers that cover up one whole page of the passport. And then every time your visa is renewed, you get another huge sticker. Simply by renewing my visa several times in Cambodia and Vietnam, I filled up half of the passport.
So, if you've been following the news, you of course know that Obama is in Vietnam right now.
What I didn't know was that he would be on my block this morning.
I was walking home after I finished my morning class (I'm lucky enough that I live close enough to my school that I can walk back and forth from home). I could see that there was a heavy police presence on the street (as there had been all week) but I assumed that closed roads only applied to motorized traffic.
But, to my surprise, they suddenly started yelling at me, and informed me that I couldn't continue walking down the street.
I've been living here over a year now, and my Vietnamese is still terrible. But I pulled out my apartment key (which has the street address printed on it), pointed to the street address, pointed to myself, and pointed in the direction of my apartment. (I was only about a block away from my apartment at this point.) "Sorry sir," was all the policeman kept repeating.
Fuming at how unfair it was to keep a man blocked out from his own domicile, I tried to go around the long way. I went over one block, and saw several people waiting behind police barricades for Obama to drive by.
I briefly contemplated what the advantages of seeing Obama's motorcade would be, and ended up deciding that it would bring no measurable material improvement to my life. And so I opted to just get back to my apartment rather than wait out in the hot sun.
And yet...and yet, I still do think it's kind of cool that Obama was speaking one the same block I live on.
And to think, I ate my lunch just half a block away from the President of the United States. (Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention it, but by going all the way around, I did eventually get into my apartment that afternoon).
Anyway, for anyone who's interested:
This is video of the Presidential motorcade at the Gem Center (which is on my block).
Here is video of people waiting for Obama to drive by: This is just one block away from my apartment.
I didn't attend the actual event, but by all the media accounts, the highlight of this conference was an interaction between Obama and a young Vietnamese rapper.
P.S.--I don't think I blogged about it at the time, but I had some similar experiences in Cambodia--i.e. I once ate my dinner within half a block of where Hillary Clinton spoke, and I was once inconvenienced by the traffic jams when Obama came to Phnom Penh. So if I ever get hit by a truck or something, someone make sure to mention all this at my funeral--I won't have people saying I never had anything exciting happen to me.
Today marks 10 years since I started regularly reviewing books on this blog. (It's taken me a few years to figure out exactly what this blog is best suited for, so I didn't start regular book reviews until I was a few years into my blogging.)
So, I thought I'd write down a few notes on this project as well. Starting, with a list of all the books I've reviewed:
And Some Random Thoughts * The actual number, 277, is misleading, and makes me look way more literary than I actually am. In reality, within this 277 are several graded readers, two graphic - novels, several short novellas, lots of children's books (including 7 Books in the "World -Leaders: Past - and -Present" Series --a series of picture books about world leaders intended for children) and lots and lots of audio books.
* Given how little I actually read, I sometimes feel guilty about maintaining a blog dedicated to book reviews. "Who do I think I'm kidding?" I sometimes ask myself. "I'm trying to appear cultured and literary by maintaining a book review blog, but I barely get through a book a month!" (Although most likely I'm the only one who's losing any sleep over this issue.)
On the other hand, if I was the kind of person who knocked off a book every few days (like some of my friends are) then I would never have time to write detailed book reviews on each one. So in that sense, this type of blog is only possible for someone with my reading habits.
* I discovered audio books in my early 20s, and I've had a number of positive experiences with them (both before and after starting this book review project). A number of books I've done only by audio book, and yet I feel like I've absorbed them every bit as well as if I had read the actual pages. In some cases, I think I might even get more out of the book if it's an audio. (My eyes can tend to glaze over sometimes when reading the printed page, but a skilled voice actor can bring the words to life. And also something about the spoken word tends to stick in my mind more than the written word.)
However, over the years my opinion on audio books has evolved, and I've decided that they're not ideal for every situation.
There are external factors that can detract from audio books of course (how noisy it is outside, how distracted I am).
But there are also just some books that can't be absorbed as easily orally--books where the author's prose isn't so straightforward and simple, for example. Also books with lots of characters to keep track of.
There are a few books on this list that I did on audio book that I now have to admit I got very little out of.
The one I feel most guilty about is Anna Karenina . I did it as an audio book back in 2006, and today I can remember just about zero of it, and I feel really guilty having it on my list of books that I've read. I haven't really absorbed it, so I shouldn't really be claiming that I've read it. At some point, I need to go back and re-visit that book. Until that point, I'm living a lie by having that book on my list.
As time went on, I started to get more anal retentive about my audio books. Instead of just listening once and writing a review, I would try to listen to them 3 or 4 times before I truly counted them as "read". But even in this case it should be noted that there are certain authors I still have trouble absorbing audibly, even after 3 or 4 listens.
I've also decided to try to be more forthright about which books I did as audio books, and to make this explicit in the review now. (Something that was absent from the first few years of this project.)
* In my 10 years of blogging retrospective post, I mentioned how embarrassed I am by all the bad writing on this blog over the years.
This is true with my book review project as well.
As I type the words onto the screen, I think everything I write is absolutely brilliant.
When I re-read old posts after a few years have gone by, I'm appalled by how clunky the writing style is. I often have difficulty following my own train of thought, because the sentences are so mangled, and the transitions between ideas are unclear.
And all the typos! So many typos!
There's also the problem of a intelligent commentary--or lack thereof.
When I first started this book review project, I didn't have a lot of intelligent things to say about the books I was reading. For example, my review of The Postman Always Rings Twice is so vague and aimless as to be pretty much just a waste of cyberspace. (I can't imagine anyone getting anything out of that review.)
In more recent years, I think I've gone to the opposite extreme, and started writing way too much about the books I've read. There are several examples of this, but I guess the most infamous one is my review of The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, which totals 46,375 words. That's an exceptional example, but there are plenty of others. This review on The Age of Reasonwas pretty dense. This one on At War With Asia went on forever. And many more examples.
* I like having all the books listed in order of date read (as opposed to alphabetically) because they form a bit of a biography over the last 10 years. As my interests and ambitions changed, so did my reading list. When I thought I was going to go to graduate school in Japanese studies, my reading list was all books about Japan. When I thought maybe I would go to school for modern European studies, my reading list was all books from this period.
As with most people who like history, I like pretty much all of it, and I do kind of skip around from period to period. But the area that I thought I wanted to specialize in was early modern European history. At my Alma Mater, the early modern period was defined from the start of the French Revolution to the First World War, and I've kept those dates (1789-1918) as a rough guide for my history reading. Also, since literature and history or always very inter-related, I tried to tackle a lot of literature from the same period.
Now that I've decided my career is in English Teaching, I've been trying to read lots of books related to the English Teaching Profession.
When I first started this book review project, however, I still had literary ambitions--I wanted to be a writer. And I was under the influence of Stephen King's book On Writing (A).
I never reviewed it on this blog (I read it a few months before I started the book review project), but it influenced my reading choices for the first few years of book reviewing.
In his book, Stephen King wrote at length about the importance of reading for anyone with ambitions to be a writer. All writing comes out of reading, and if you're not constantly devouring books, King said, you'll never make it as a writer.
What to read, then? Anything and everything, King said. All written works can help you develop your literary technique. A good book shows you what to do. A badly written book, however, is equally as valuable, because you can get a very clear sense of what not to do.
In other words, there is no such thing as a book that's a waste of time.
"If you're looking for permission to read all those trashy books that you've always wanted to read, but that you thought were a waste of time, then I'm giving you that permission," King said. (Or something like that. I'm paraphrasing because I'm quoting from memory.)
Eventually, I dropped my literary ambitions. Much like my flirtations with going into graduate school for history, or for Japanese studies, it was just not a realistic career path.
(And much like graduate school for history, or Japanese studies, it took me far too long to realize this. Boy, is it embarrassing to realize how long it took me to grow up!)
So, for the most part, the pulpy sci-fi/fantasy books that dominated the early part of this book review project are over now. Although, (once a geek, always a geek), I still relapse back into them once and a while. (Just last year I reviewed Anno Dracula, and Hothousefor example.) And I'm still enough of a geek to enjoy the sheer imagination that comes from the better writers in this genre.
The one thing that I am really and truly over, however, is superhero comic books.
10 years ago when I started this book review project I still had a fondness for the comic books of my youth. I had long ago stopped reading them because they seemed like a huge waste of time. But, based on Stephen King's advice that this was no longer a waste of time, I dove back in to comic books in the form of tie-in novels based on the DC Universe (52: The Novel, Infinite Crisis: The Novel, Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Novel, DC Universe: Inheritance, Justice League of America: Superman--The Never-Ending Battle, Justice League of America: Exterminators, Kingdom Come: The Novel, Challengers of the Unknown.)
Sure, I knew they were terrible, but I loved the pulp cheesiness of the superhero world.
Now, however, I'm tired of it all.
It's a bit hard to pinpoint exactly where my disillusionment with comic book superheros began. And, as with all ex-lovers, once the spark has gone out of the relationship, it's hard to identify what went wrong, because the question changes from "Why did I stop loving her?" to "What did I ever see in her to begin with?" And it's almost impossible to get back into that old frame of mind to remember what the original attraction had been.
It's possible that after an extended adolescence, I just finally grew up. (I usually think of myself as fully cognitively mature at 27, but maybe tastes can still change between 27 and 37).
It's possible that with all the superhero overload in the media the past few years, I just got sick of the whole thing.
It's possible that with all the resets and reboots in the comic book publishing world, the thing that attracted me to comic books in the first place was no longer valid. (I used to be fascinated by the idea of one long continuous story going all the way back to the 1940s. But in the past 10 years alone DC comics has reset it's continuity several times. It's now clear that any advancements or developments that happen in any issue is just temporary until the next reset a few years later, and that takes all the investment out of the story.)
But whatever the case, I'm over it. Comic book superheroes seem stupid and juvenile to me now. And to be quite honest, I'm embarrassed to have these book reviews in my blog archives.
(I'm doing the worst books first because it's very easy to identify the books I hated. Because this book review list is mostly elective pleasure reading, I don't read a lot of books I don't like.
The books I really enjoyed, on the other hand, are so numerous that it's going to be difficult to pick favorites, but I'll give it a try.)
