Boring Political Post

Joe Biden did exactly the right thing re: Afghanistan.  And come November 2024 he'll be remembered as the guy who got us out of a terrible, wasteful Forever War.  If the economy is in good shape (especially regarding higher wages) and COVID is under control, in that people who want their free vaccine shots have gotten and will continue to get them, he'll win a second term pretty easily.  You have to be an enormously terrible incumbent not to win a second term in America, for starters.

I'm willing to bet anyone five bucks at least.

America was led into a two-decade occupation under the most false pretenses imaginable -- that a functioning government, let alone a democracy, can be imposed from the outside rather than grown organically from within.  No wonder that the very same "serious" people, and the institutions that pay them handsomely in the military and the media, are now headed for the fainting couch now that the spigot of blood and treasure is being turned off for good.

"This is not California. . ."

"Before he could answer, the door from one of the other adjoining rehearsal rooms swung open.  A plump man came in dragging a small child and a cello, one in each hand.  'Now here's Dr. Munte,' said the fat man to his son.  'Ask him how long you need every day.'  He turned to us and said, 'Getting the little devil to practice would try the patience of a saint.  All he thinks about is American jazz.  Talk to him, Dr. Munte.  Tell him he's got to practice.  Tell him he must play real music, German music.'

'If the interest, is lacking, the child will never love music, Herr Spengler.  Perhaps you should let him do what he wants.'

'Yes, that's the modern way, isn't it,' said the fat man, not bothering to hide his annoyance at Munte's lack of support.  'Well, I don't believe in the modern way.  This is not California. . . .'  He studied my appearance and seemed to guess that I was not an East Berliner.  But, having decided that I was not a foreigner, he continued: 'We are Germans, aren't we?  This is not California -- yet.  And may the Lord protect us from the sort of things that go on over there in the West.  If I say my son is going to practice the cello, he'll do it.  Do you hear that, Lothar?  You'll practice every night for an hour before you go out to play football with your friends."

'Yes, Vaterchen,' said the boy with affection.  He held his father's hand tightly until the man unclasped it in order to get his keys from his pocket.  The boy seemed reassured by his father's dictum.

That fat man put the cello into a locker and closed the door.  Then he locked it with a padlock.  'You're not strong enough for football,' he said loudly as they went out.  The little boy grabbed his father's hand again.

'We Germans find reassurance in tyranny,' said Munte sadly.  'That's always been our downfall."

-- Len Deighton, Berlin Game

Afghanistan

The only way to win a Forever War is to not start one in the first place.

"Yeah, Throw Me Down The Keys"

The Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knockin" live 2013

Charlie Watts has died.  For my money he was the most interesting personality in the band, if only because he always shied away from the attention Jagger and Richards were willing to bask in.

Let's Do This

I have my first job interview in 11 years tomorrow.

I think I feel O.K. about it, just planning on getting a good sleep, set out some decent clothes and a necktie.

I'd like to think the hard part -- updating my resume and putting together a cover letter -- was the most difficult part.

Deming Eagle Park

 

Bellingham, Washington.

"infinite like the sky"

"In the Pawnees' opinion the whites were headed for the big trading post that was being built on the Arkansas -- so that was where Greasy Lake decided to go.  There was always the likelihood of finding interesting goods around a new trading post.  The whites were always inventing useful things.  Though Greasy Lake had no money he could sometimes get the whites to exchange goods for prophecies.  Usually he just made simple prophecies, informing them of the location of a nice buffalo herd he had happened to pass.  This kind of information might even earn him a new gun, if the whites were in a generous mood.

The sight of the lost balloonist, drinking muddy water from a puddle when there was a fine spring in plain sight, reminded Greasy Lake that there was really no predicting the eccentricities of whites, and no exaggerating their ineptitude.  For one thing they kept producing watches and clocks, instruments that were supposed to measure time and break it into units, when common sense should have told them that the notion that time could be cut up, like a buffalo shank or a fish, was simply absurd.  Time lay all one, open and eternal, infinite like the sky.  Of course, there were seasons, the moon waxed and waned, the geese flew south or north, and yet all the while time remained unaffected and unchanged."

-- Larry McMurtry, By Sorrow's River

"finding somebody living in your area who shared your very peculiar hobby was not an easy task"

Last year I finally finished Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, a history of roleplaying games as they grew out of a surprisingly long and rich history of tabletop war games.  I thought it was longer than it needed to be, but as a well-sourced academic work it's hard to criticize.  This interesting article by Giaime Alonge gets into some of the cultural context surrounding the rise of modern war board games in the 1960's simultaneously with the anti-Vietnam war movement:

"Should we assume that there was a morbid fascination with Nazism among wargamers? I would say 'yes', at least in part. One of the most important sections of the aforementioned magazine The General was the 'Opponents Wanted' page. In the pre-Internet era, finding somebody living in your area who shared your very peculiar hobby was not an easy task. Wargamers used ads to find playing mates. Several of these ads clearly state a preference for playing the Germans – or even the Japanese – in games on World War Two. Some ads go even further, like one from a 1971 issue, which reads: 'The Fuehrer desires a good Joe to crush in Stalingrad.'[17] Actually, some of the interest in playing the Nazis has strictly technical reasons. Besides games specifically devoted to the last phase of the conflict, in World War Two games the German player is usually the one on the offensive, at least in the first part of the game, and one could argue that wargamers normally prefer to attack. In some ads, authors say that they prefer playing the Germans in games where the Axis has the initiative, but want to play the Allies in Anzio (1969), a game about the Italian campaign, where the Germans are on the defensive from the very beginning. Moreover, one of the main pleasures in playing a wargame is achieving a result that is different from the historical outcome. You thus might want to win World War Two with the Axis, as you might want to win the battle of Waterloo with the French. It would then mean that you would have been 'smarter' than Napoleon. Nonetheless, dismissing this whole phenomenon with simply technical reasons would be naïve and misleading. There was a fascination with Nazism. After all, in the 1970s, Nazi paraphernalia were widespread in American and European popular culture. Susan Sontag’s well-known 1975 essay Fascinating Fascism elaborates on this point in detail.[18] Wargames were following the current."

The article also reminds us that Dungeons and Dragons, a game where you roleplay a violent vagabond, kill monsters, and take their stuff, was created in part by Gary Gygax, a lifelong pacifist and Jehovah's Witness. 

Fail

Even after a failed 20 year occupation of Afghanistan, the "mainline" U.S. view, even on liberal stations like MSNBC, is that the presence of the military is a stabilizing force everywhere and anywhere.  It just doesn't always work out, for some darn reason.

Life After Korea

I'm applying for some part time jobs.  I haven't updated (haven't had to update) my resume and materials for over a decade, so I give myself a little credit for taking some serious time to work on these things over the past few weeks.

In lieu of a longer post on how tough it is to find a job after coming back from South Korea, something that so many people droned on about when I lived in Daegu, I just have to say that, well, you get back what you put in.  For starters, yes, not having a network sucks but then again, I'm living in a place where I literally know nobody except my Dad and his immediate neighbors.  A good network probably wouldn't be that much help to me right now due to simple geography.  Next, and this was my feeling back in Korea, you're going to develop as much or as little as a professional as you want to no matter where you live.  Believe me, I'm not a diligent self-starter by any means, but during my 12 years abroad I managed to learn some of the language, co-publish a scholarly article, edited an ESL text by a professor at my college, and let my boss know that I'd be happy to help him edit (or write) things for the school as needed.  I also developed, or created from nothing, a decent set of teaching materials that I might end up using again.

The point being, I'm not sure why teaching English abroad is seen as a professional black hole by so many folks.  It certainly doesn't qualify me for doing brain surgery, but over the years I feel like I did a reasonable job at self-improvement and, more bluntly, getting worthwhile stuff onto my resume.  And it seems like my secondary cultural experiences don't hurt -- if anything, maybe I stand out a bit.

It's a process of course, and we'll see how it goes.  I've applied for both classroom teaching jobs and more education-adjacent positions.  Putting my cover letter together I never felt weakened or at a loss for explaining why a decade in Korea makes me a stronger candidate than I was before I left.

I should have worked harder on my Korean, definitely.  But it was nice to hear from some of my former bosses that they'd be more than happy to give me positive recommendations.  My resume has a larger "narrative" that I can handle teaching ESL or English composition, and that I had a fairly productive last decade.  I'm not sure what more ESL folks are expecting from work history, either in Korea or in some mythical "perfect" job back here in America.

Work is work.

Lonesome Whistle

 

Bellingham, Washington.

"you're just drunk"

"'Then I'll unmarry you, you insolent wench,' Lord B. managed to thunder.  'You can't just fob off the nobility of Europe like that.  I'll seek an annulment -- consider yourself confined to your room.'

'Here's a priest. . . he must know how to arrange annulments,' he added.

Father Geoffrin merely chuckled.

'Oh, not I, Your Lordship,' he said.  'I should think you have to apply to the Holy Father directly in a matter of that significance.'

'The Holy See is unfortunately rather distant from the Missouri River,' he added, unnecessarily Mary thought.'

'Wouldn't work anyway -- not only am I married, I'm with child,' Tasmin said.  'Pregnant, to put it bluntly.'

'What?  You harlot, I'm ruined!' said Lord Berrybender.  'Where is the fellow?  I'll kill him!'

'You're not ruined at all, you're just drunk,' Tasmin informed him.

Seconds later Lord B. began to sway, then to sway more, and finally to heave.  The remains of his modest dinner, and a great deal of wine besdies, came up in Simon Le Page's lap, to the horror of Mademoiselle Pellenc, who at once took command of the young trader and led him away, meaning to clean him up.'"

-- Larry McMurtry, Sin Killer

A Simple Country Life

I'm updating my resume for the first time since 2009 or so.  That is all.

Also, it's raining for the first time in two months.  I guess that wasn't all.

Perpetual Forehead Slap

Americans are the biggest fucking babies in the world.#scientifictweet #objectivetweet#accuratetweet

— James (@wetcasements) August 5, 2021

"this hard mineral gravitational scene"

"As I am writing this story it will be evident that I survived, and I cannot hope to convey what the experience was like, how long it was, how terrible, how hopeless: a primal experience of a total loss of hope.  Falling, what the child fears, what the man dreads, is itself the image of death, of the defencelessness of the body, of its frailty and mortality, its absolute subjection to alien causes.  Even in a harmless fall in the road there is a little moment of horror when the faller realizes that he cannot help himself; he has been taken over by a relentless mechanism and must continue with it to the end and be subject to the consequences.  'There is nothing more I can do.'  How long, how infinitely expansible, a second is when it contains this thought, which is an effigy of death.  A complete fall into the void, something which I had often imagined on aeroplanes, is of course the most terrible thing of all.  Hands, feet, muscles, all the familiar protective mechanisms of the body are suddenly useless.  The enmity of matter is unleashed against the frail breakable crushable animal form, always perhaps an alien in this hard mineral gravitational scene."

-- Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

Ah, Nature

We've got an owl living above the house now.  I wish I could say I've made friends with it, but I've seen it hunting three separate times now and it's absolutely terrifying.  Chipmunks do not die quietly.