Far East Cynic

Well tomorrow is the first of August. Over on the right side of the international date line it already is.

I’ve struggled to put my thoughts into words having now been back in the land of the  fat women free and the home of the brave for almost 3 months.

To sum it up in one sentence-its ok, but I’d kill to be in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Singapore right now. By myself. With money and a charged up EZ-Link card. Climbing up the steps in Central or Somerset.  To turn the corner and walk up to Lan Kwai Fung or Orchard Road; seeing the girls, smelling the smells, hearing the noise.

In hindsight, it may have been divinely ordained that  I return home for a while-if for only the reason to see, my  mother, see my daughter, and set some personal issues in order. That may in fact be true-but it still does not overcome the repetitive sameness of life here in Shopping Mall USA. Sleep, eat, go to work, come home-repeat.  Not a beautiful Japanese girl in sight, not a train in sight, no view like this one from the Tokaido line:

In Japan, even the simple things were exotic and exciting. Here they are…..just simple.

Job? It is a job. It has its ups and downs-the people are OK, the complexity of the organization I work for is hard to understand sometimes. Learned a lot-still feel very inadequate at it-always grateful to be able to pay my bills. Happy to have it and yet I wish like crazy it was on the other side of the IDL.

Probably if the position involved international travel vice domestic, I’d be better acclimated by now. It does not though-although I cling to hope that I can work hard and earn a spot in that arena in a while. I do miss my high flying days of yesteryear.

The S.O. she has taken to it pretty well. She’s come to love garage sales, she keeps our place incredibly neat and has not become too corrupted by American customs-yet. She looks at houses longingly and has already decided the house we are buying is not big enough. I keep reminding here that goal number 1 is money in the bank and we’ll do much better with a smaller house payment. The house is a necessary evil-but truth be told I’m quite happy with this little apartment. It would be just fine for me, myself, and I. Especially if I was 25 again. No yard to mow.

American impoliteness frustrates her, tips in restaurants drive her nuts,  and she has yet to grasp the fact that she’s going to have to spend a little money once in a while.  She wants to go exploring-but hates the fact it takes a couple of hours and a good amount of gas to go somewhere different. She stays at home way too much even though she has a car. Hints about her getting a J-O-B? Politely ignored. She’ll do nothing about that until she has Stately Skippy Manor exactly the way she wants it.

Our life is quiet. Too quiet for my taste. I rise early, so I am tired at night early.  I’ve only played golf 3 times this summer. I do work out more here. Actually started a progam of sorts.  The only time I’ve been to a bar is on a business trips. Even then,  its often just too much hassle. A couple of times I’ve just bought snacks, beer, and fallen asleep watching TV in a strange hotel in a strange town. That is depressing.

I’m struggling to  mantain my Japanese proficiency. I talk with S.O. but even she is lapsing into English more than she used to. (Except when she gets mad…).

Even the sex has become feast or famine……is there something in the water over here? Did not used to be that way in Nihon.

However I am working hard to save money. I am paying down my other bills.  I buy powerball tickets and hope to win enough to buy out my ex wife-so I can stop working and paying her extortion money.

I never win,  so I keep working.

Probably the most interesting thing about all of it is I have no passion either for, or against, my new found state. Where once I was passionate about things-now I am just sort of mindly numb about it all. If it were not for the war, and politics, I would not have been truly angry in weeks. Watching In Memoriam on Sundays still gets my blood boiling though. The surge- a- holics maybe happy-but I am still fairly convinced my assessment of the situation in Iraq is correct. Getting better in many ways-still  not worth the effort, or the lives of any Americans.

Life in Shopping mall is what it is. Useful, peaceful, productive-and boring as hell.

1.5 years tops. Then I’ll have to get on a plane-or go crazy. Till then, I just hope to enjoy what I can.

It is what it is.

Will be seeing a Chinese athlete make it to the finals of the 400, then in the finals ( with Hu Jintao watching) fall on his ass with 50 meters to go. As he looks up he will see an American, a Brit, a Japanese and a Korean cross the finish line ahead of him. That will be a great Olympic moment. ( The American will win the Gold Medal of course).

Because you can dress a commie up but you can’t take him anywhere.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will launch an inquiry into internet censorship in China after accusations that Beijing was failing to live up to its promises guaranteeing unrestricted online access.

Furious reporters are finding that their internet access is inadequate. Attempts to use the network to access the website of Amnesty International, which has just released a damning report on human rights in China, proved fruitless yesterday.

Wage slavery and other things have kept me busy. So tonight I treated myself to a movie and went to see the Dark Knight at the fancy movie theater-where you can buy beer and take it in with your popcorn.  Nothing like a pint of Sam Adams while you munch your popcorn!

I don’t know which was more depressing, seeing the scenes from Hong Kong-the scene where Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox are talking on the Mid-Levels escalator was sad for me to see, since I won’t be riding the escalator into Soho anytime soon-or the really dark and twisted character Heath Ledger created.

Come to think of it-I arrived in HK on one of my sojourns the day after they filmed the C-130 scene. And now that I think about, I saw a couple of guys that looked like the Joker while drinking beer in Fenwicks…………….

Never write angry.

Never write angry.

Never, ever, write angry…..

Otherwise the world ends up just like that one described by this guy.

This post is dedicated to to all the learning impaired folks who just love to run opposing views into the ground.

This no longer American beer is for you!

The horribleness of commenters isn’t really a mystery: Internet anonymity is disinhibiting, and people are basically mean anyway. Nor is it a mystery why the people who run websites put up with commenters: the economic model for Internet content is based on advertising, which means it’s based on traffic volume, and comments mean traffic. They’re part of the things that make online publishing work. TIME.com enables comments on its blogs, including mine.) It’s just hard to tell whether they’re ruining the Web faster than they can save it.

Commenters tend to respond with surprise–they’re shocked, shocked!–when people call them on being not nice. In their social universe, this kind of rhetorical slap-fighting is just how you do business, and anybody who feels otherwise is thin-skinned and humorless. As lame and self-serving as this excuse is, we can learn something from taking it at face value. Maybe commenters are just on one side of a cultural disconnect between two incompatible ideas of what the social conventions of the Internet should be. One is based on the standards of real-world, off-line politeness. The other is a kind of communal game in which whoever is cleverest and pushes the most buttons wins.

Or so John McCain and his legions would have you believe.

In a nutshell, the sycophants and the other McCain true believers would have you believe that just because things might actually be looking up in Iraq, that it somehow excuses every one of the blunders that were made getting to where we are today.

They also want you to believe that Obama is just one generation short of the anti-Christ because he has pointed out that successful surge or not, it was never in our long term interests to invade and /or remain in Iraq.

John McCain wants you to believe that he was the lone maverick-baying in the wilderness-against the Bush adminstration and was in that role since 2003. Sounds good, and makes a great campaign line, “Lose a campaign, not a war.”

Too bad its not true. John McCain was perfoming politico fellatio on the President for what appears by my count, at least three years. Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

That’s an important point McCain does not want you to remember:

What McCain omits is that if he himself had been right all the times before 2007 that he said things were going fine, no surge would have been needed. He’s like a weatherman who forecasts clear skies every day and, when the rain finally lets up after a week, expects a standing ovation for his accuracy.

The troop escalation has not been the complete failure Obama suggested it would be, but it has fallen far short of the triumph claimed by Republicans. The level of violence, though down from the very worst months of the war, remains at levels comparable with 2005, which were considered awful at the time.

Iraqi civilians died at a higher rate in the first four months of this year than in the same period of 2005. The number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces is about the same. Here is McCain’s definition of success: returning to a pace of bloodshed that was once regarded as intolerable.

Even the progress made in the last 18 months is only partly attributable to the additional American forces. Equally important was the decision of Sunni militias to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

What is true is that McCain recognized a lot earlier than his President, that there was no hope of anything good happening in Iraq, as long as Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense. He was out in front of his party by pointing out in mid 2005, that Rumsfeld was very guilty of the cardinal sin of a SECDEF-not doing what it takes to resource the armed forces to get the conflict over with as quickly as possible. It took another 18 months for Rumsfeld to be thrown under the bus as he richly deserved to be.

So has the surge worked and victory is around the corner?

I believe the answer is yes and no. No amount of troops would have made a difference without a different focus by the military ( which has been pointed out by GI Korea). Having extra troops did make a difference and I submit to you that Obama will live to regret the fact that they has so beholden to the lunatic fringe of the Democratic party not to acknowledge that fact-in fact embrace it and use it as proof that he is correct-American troops can be withdrawn over a defined period of time and the world will not end.

McCain however does the military a real disservice by also not acknowledging that the success of the surge is not just due to the efforts of the teflon general-Saint Petreaus. There was a lot of solid military effort that went on long before he returned to the Iraqi scene. I think one of the great travesties of when the history of the Iraq war is written will be that the hard work and sacrifice by the US military in the almost 4 years leading up to the surge, will get short shrift because the story will get intermixed with the personal narrative of how Petreaus single handly saved Iraq. It was actually a combination of factors-not the least of which was a de-facto apartheid imposed by events , on the city of Baghdad:

The sectarian cleansing of Baghdad has been — albeit tragic — one of the key elements to the drop in sectarian violence in the capital. […] It’s a very simple concept: Baghdad has been divided; segregated into Sunni and Shia enclaves. The days of mixed neighborhoods are gone. […] If anyone is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are lying to you.’

Of course, Gen. Petraeus took courageous and effective steps to try to stop bombings in markets and so forth. But I am skeptical that most of these techniques had macro effects. Big population movements because of militia ethnic cleansing are more likely to account for big changes in social statistics.

The way in which the escalation troops did help establish Awakening Councils is that when they got wise to the Shiite ethnic cleansing program, the US began supporting these Sunni militias, thus forestalling further expulsions.

The Shiitization of Baghdad was thus a significant cause of falling casualty rates. But it is another war waiting to happen, when the Sunnis come back to find Shiite militiamen in their living rooms……..

The troop escalation in and of itself was probably not that consequential. That the troops were used in new ways by Gen. Petraeus was more important. But their main effect was ironic. They calmed Baghdad down by accidentally turning it into a Shiite city, as Shiite as Isfahan or Tehran, and thus a terrain on which the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement could not hope to fight effectively.

Both candidates are searching for the road to the exits, it will depend on who wins to determine whose version of “Peace with honor” is executed.

That’s the dirty little secret John McCain dances around. He’ll withdraw just as assuredly as Obama will.

Only his timetable will not be a “timtable”. And in what I consider the most positive development-if it lasts-it will be against the stated desire of the elected Iraqi government. How he’s going to dance around that little fact-is going to be interesting indeed.

Randy Pausch died this weekend. I felt sad because I had the privilege of sitting down to read his book in Stanley Bay in Hong Kong only a short two and a half months ago.

If there is one good thing about this that can be said-he has left a legacy that suspect will grow and grow and grow.

God grant you rest and peace.

We were gone down south today driving down well past the lake and the towns below it. Just got back a little while ago.

And when I sat down and surfed I discovered that the Wakayama station master cat-Tama-chan-got a raise of sorts. From Japan Probe:

The Wakayama Electric Railway has given a special summer bonus to Tama, a cat that serves as stationmaster of Kishi Station on the Kishigawa Line. The bonus consists of a cooling pad and a custom-made mesh hat to replace the heaver stationmaster hat Tama usually wears.

He is something of a tourist attraction as this previous post on Japan Probe notes.

Reason 433 why I miss Japan.

Of George Bush?

Matthew Yglsieas has a great find:

There’s an excellent piece by Elisabeth Bumiller in The New York Times which makes the point that one area in which Bush and McCain now differ is foreign policy. Specifically, Bush has — without explicitly admitting any errors — moved away from his earlier, disastrous policies on a number of fronts.

McCain, by contrast, has stayed much closer to the true faith. Bumiller explains that “as the administration has taken a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy, the decision of Mr. McCain to adhere to his more hawkish positions illustrates the continuing influence of neoconservatives on his thinking even as they are losing clout within the administration.” Of course it’s relevant here to recall that McCain reached these positions first running as the neocon candidate in 1999-2000 while Bush tried to straddle the neocon-pragmatist divide. Now the two men have returned to form, with McCain promising a return to the sort of policymaking we saw from Bush in 2002-2005.

“But the surge worked!”

Ok-but the surge is also irrelevant.

You will hear this theme again.

When I was a boy, my father was lead electrical engineer at the Alcoa Headquarters in Alcoa.  That meant he was involved in everything related to bringing power from various places to the South, East and West ALCOA plants that were in the city of Alcoa. I’m told Alcoa has shrunk their presence from those days-but they still smelt and fabricate aluminum there. Alcoa has since bought Reynolds Aluminum-but during the day-Reynolds “crap” was not allowed in the door of our house.

So periodically Dad would take us up into the mountains. Sometimes he had work to do at Cheoah, or Santeetlah. Other times it was just for time away from our house, which did not have air conditioning and thus was pretty hot in the summer. Being an employee of Alcoa, he had rights to use Tapoco lodge.

Thus, when the S.O. and I went back home from Franklin, I planned the trip so that we could stop and have lunch at Tapoco. Like the places noted in the other post, this was a trip back in time for me-especially since I had not darkened the doorstep of this lodge in over 35 years.

Tapoco Lodge, just a short walk from Cheoah Dam, is located in a community that reached a peak population in excess of 2,000 during construction of the Cheoah and Santeetlah dams. The Lodge was not built until 1930 and when a road reached the area a year later it was opened to the public. It has 10 guest rooms in the lodge, and five cabins with 15 rooms as well as a dining room that seats 90. In recent years it has been sold by ALCOA but remains open to the public.  The whole history can be found here and here.

The S.O. has no sense of direction-and as I discovered that also extends to not being able to read a map. So only by the grace of the fact that at least one of my remaining neurons, not yet expunged by beer-I remembered the turn onto 129 and after a detour around road construction at Santeetlah -we arrived only slightly late at the lodge:

Lets go inside shall we?

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Step 1 of updating links is complete-I have gone through and house cleaned my links and deleted dead ones. Step two will be to add new ones. You will also notice I added a couple of widgets.

Construction continues.

Political commentary will resume this weekend. There is too much stupidity going on, on both sides of the aisle, that I just cannot let it pass. I also want to tell you my mother’s story-it deserves to be told-but that should wait until my thoughts on the matter can coalesce some more.

However tonight, I want to post some pictures from the trip up to Dad’s and back again. For more than a couple of reasons it was a trip back in time for me, and funerals make you think hard about the path that has brought you to that point where you stand above a green patch of earth holding the remains of someone you dearly loved.

I consider myself a Yankee-but I was actually born in the South. In Tennessee to be precise. For the first 10 years of my life I lived in a house in Alcoa, Tennessee. When the S.O. and I drove up to N.C. we took some time on the way to stop at some places that are of significance to me. It has been over 30 years since the last time I was at any of them.

Like the house I was a little boy in:

On that vacant lot, a house once stood. It had been built in 1913 by the Aluminum Company of America, (ALCOA) for whom both my father and grandfather worked for. My Dad was able to get a deal on it when he moved to Alcoa after the World War and it was in that town that all of us, spent our childhood years. The trees in the back of the yard where not so much in evidence when I was a boy. You cannot see it, but there was a sloping vacant lot behind where all of those trees where, and it was heaven for a 7 year old boy-especially when the snow fell.

There’s more to see. Follow me!

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The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. -Psalm 34 Verse 18.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid
and deeds left undone. -Harriet Beecher Stowe, Author

For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. 

( A word about the dog-he is the “mascot” of sorts to the men who work at the cemetery. They were apologetic about the dog coming over while we lingered, to grasp one last, apologetic look at the family grave site. Far from being offended, we all found “Hank’s” presence comforting. Same too with the roosters who crowed not a bit during the service-but immediately afterward, and could be heard off in the distance. I found a bit of symmetry in these things, although I am not sure why.)

Greetings from a small town in rural North Carolina.

Today, started with a conversation in the dark, ” Don’t you have anything to say to me?”

Uh, oh.

“Ummm. No. Unless you want me to say that I think you are being unreasonable, and I know full well that this has nothing to do with my daughter. Its about our nice little life coming face to face with my previous life and all of the not so perfect things it says about me.”

Known as a slam return-it usually puts one on the ceiling, but it got the point across. Especially when it is followed by this, ” You do not have to like her, you do not have to be her friend, you are not her mother-but you don’t want me in a place where I have to be making choices about her or you. That’s a losing proposition, for you and me. All you have to do is be polite-be helpful and then go home. And I’ll never ask you to accompany me again.”

Which surprisingly, after some stammering on her part-finally sunk in. Back to sleep for a while and then the rest of the day went pretty well all things considered. Especially when you consider that we all spent 5 hours in a car together on the way down here.

One thing we all got to do though, was ask questions about my father’s history here. He showed us both the apartment he lived in with his folks and the house they later moved to. We got to see where the store was that he worked Saturdays in, during the summer-while at the same time he was working on a line crew during the week stringing power lines from Cheoa power station to the city.

And the fact that my father had a 1940 Harley Davidson-which he rode back to NC State. And pegged the speedometer one time at a 100 miles per hour.

Things I never knew before.

Pictures to follow. Just shows that everyone’s life is full of unique experiences and my father has a great deal to share with us.

No post tomorrow.

I retract everything I wrote in the previous post.

No fireworks happened when S.O. met offspring of yours truly. True you could cut the tension with a knife-but no rudeness ensued. Polite remarks all around.

So why am I blogging when I have to drive 6 hours tomorrow to a small town in rural N.C.? No waiting till we get back to Shopping Mall USA for the emotional punching bag routine-let the games begin now.

Every time I think I have her figured out-I get kicked in the head.

“Lets just start hating each other now, skip the preliminaries, and avoid the Christmas rush.”

Know its all about ownership issues and resentments of other worlds, dogs and cats, Mars and Venus, fire and gasoline. O yea baby, tell me again Oriental women are submissive.

I’ve got property in the Everglades to sell you………………..

” But can’t we just all get along till Thursday?”

Welcome to the Jungle!

Lots to talk about in the world these days-including the Obama Iraq tour 2008. However those things will have to wait for another time.

I had some fun with the S.O. in my previous post. I’m banking that she does not read the blog-but since I passed all of the condolences that were left on the blog to my family, all bets are off on that score. She will have a fit if she sees it-as was noted. Oh well.

I would like to offer another side though, which has driven home to me why I am very glad she came along. We had talked about her staying behind and me flying, today I’m glad we came up the way we did.

As I may have noted before, one of the S.O.’s great gifts is that she has the ability to speak to anyone about anything and everything. It just comes naturally to her-and while her English versions can be somewhat choppy and confusing for someone who does not know her well to follow, she convey’s her ideas with a kind of bright, fresh, inquisitive manner that is infectious to other people. During this time in my parent’s house she has been a facilitator of sorts. She has kept all involved here occupied in one way or another and enable each of us to navigate our way conversationally around the 800 pound gorilla in the room. She has been particularly amazing to watch talking to my father. She is able to engage him, draw him out, and even has gotten to see a wistful smile and a small laugh on a couple of occassions. The rest of us cannot do that-our conversations bear the weight of 50 + years of baggage-but she can because she is something of an outsider, an observer of sorts if you will.

Last night we sat and talked with my father for over 3 hours- a miracle of sorts-with the S.O. asking questions of all  kinds. They in turn forced conversation from the rest  of us, either in the form of explanations or in the recounting of various parts of the history. She also asked my father rather innocuous questions an almost perfectly timed intervals, such that the allowed the tenor of the conversation to rise and fall. Later as we laid in the bed in the room-I thanked her for that.

Then this morning, unannounced and unrequested, after she had gotten my father a real breakfast and did the dishes, she launched into cleaning my father’s house from top to bottom. She did not touch anything of value, but out came vacuum cleaners, dust rags, and she scrubbed cabinets all around. When she was finished (I was pressed into service too-so don’t think there was any rest for the wicked). She kept my father engaged by having him point out various locations of various appliances and what he wanted done with things around them. In the mean time, my sister was able to be on the phone with the florist, the minister, and other things all out of earshot of my father. It seemed almost like it was deliberately planned that way, if I did not know better. She simply cannot abide a dwelling that is not pristine and neat,  no matter who the owner is. She is now in the shower cleaning off the accumulated sweat and dirt. With all the back and forth to the hospital no one had had time to attend to anything but basic necessities. Amazing to me-when she could have just left well enough alone. Yet, she somehow knew that this thing would be useful at this particular juncture in time.

She is stressing about meeting my daughter I know. This will be the first time she has met either of my children, although she has talked to my son on the phone. My sense is that its a territorial thing of sorts-she does not want my “old” life intruding into what she regards as “her” life. Sigh, the dynamics of this little drama will be interesting to watch unfold. Truth be told I am stressing about it too. Both she and I know that all will be reported back to my ex-wife and her family. I sure as heck do not need any more rocks to throw at me-deposited in the arsenal.

However knowing her, she will be all of charm and graciousness. Then when we get back to Shopping  Mall USA-I will become an emotional punching bag.

Everything has it’s price, and this is one I will bear gladly if we can all just get through this week smoothly.