Korean-Americans Can Speak Together in Korean If They Feel Like It

The world is full of ex-pats, short for ex-patriots, meaning people who take up residence in countries other than their native land. I, for example, am an ex-pat. I live in South East Asia, and it's been so long now that babies that were born the year that I left America are now in high school. I have achieved some facility with the language of my adopted country, but you wouldn't call it fluency. In fact, “my Thai, she's a broke.” I talk to natives all the time, and it usually goes okay. Sometimes not great, but usually okay. It takes a native that is willing to grace me with some patience and speak slowly so that I have any hope of keeping up. Luckily, my country of residence is full of such people, and I deeply appreciate their kindness and their hospitality.

America could learn a lot from my adopted country.

When I sit down for coffee at the local Dunkin Donuts with an American friend, we speak English. We are surrounded by natives, and no one seems to care, or even notice. It's not uncommon, after all, for people here to speak to each other in English. This is in Bangkok, so you might think that no one notices because Bangkok is a big, cosmopolitan city. It's true, there are so many foreigners here that hearing other languages is very common. Even in the countryside, though, it's not a problem. More people would notice, but they would notice out of a sense of interest. Just for entertainment, they might come over and ask a simple question in Thai. Not to test us so much as looking for an exciting opportunity to talk to a foreigner. Even in Bangkok, I get this from Taxi drivers all the time. When I explain where I'm going, in Thai and hitting most of the tones correctly, the drivers will often ask me a simple question to check my hearing comprehension. If I answer, they might smile and start a conversation. At the end of these rides, I sometimes wai (the Thai bow) and say, “thank you, teacher.” That gets a laugh. It's all very casual. Diversity is a fact of life here. Thailand has been a crossroads country for three thousand years.

Diversity is a fact of life in America, too, but somehow the message has not sunk in.

I saw a video very recently about someone yelling at two young women in a mall cafeteria because they were not speaking “American.” We've all seen these videos, “this is America! We speak American!” One of the women told the language police in perfect, native English that she was an American, and that she could speak English perfectly well, but she was Korean-American and her cousin was visiting the family from Korea. That's not enough for people anymore. The harangue went on. “We speak American here!” It's gotten so bad that many Americans are hostile to any fellow American who speaks more than one language. Like they must be spies or something.

More recently, my wife and I were having lunch in a small restaurant in our very diverse Bangkok neighborhood. (It's predominantly Thai Buddhist, but there are many mosques and many, many Thai and ex-pat Muslims in my neighborhood. It's been a Muslim neighborhood for over one hundred years.) We speak together in a combination of Thai and English, mostly English, to be fair. We go to this shop all the time, and no one has ever said anything, or seemed to notice. Certainly the owners and the staff don't care, because we always smile and say, “thank you!” and I always put a nice tip in the jar. The other day three men came in after us and they were speaking together in Korean. After glancing at the menu, which was in Thai, one of the men leaned over and very politely asked us about what we were having, because it looked delicious, and he also had a couple of questions about the menu. Koreans speak loudly, so there's no doubt that it's not Thai. Plus, one fellow was speaking to me in English. Still, no one even looks up.

I see videos from time to time that end with, “go back to your own country!” or, “go back where you came from!” I've seen and read about incidents where some “American patriot” will randomly demand to see proof that someone who appears foreign “belongs here.” In fifteen years in Thailand I've never heard anything remotely like that sentiment.

There is an ill will towards foreigners growing in America, and it is nurtured by political groups and religious organizations who wish to drive wedges between Americans who may have slight variations in their backgrounds. This ill will is directed not only towards actual foreigners, aliens with or without visas, but also towards American citizens who may speak more than one language, who may be recent arrivals or the children of recent arrivals, or it may be directed at established groups of American citizens like black Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, or, through some bizarre misapprehension, Indian Americans (not to be confused with American Indians, who are also still persecuted). The guilty political groups want votes, which they will trade for money. The guilty religious groups want money and political power. In the meantime, gullible Americans are making total assholes of themselves, usually while someone is filming them with a cell phone. It's sickening.

America really does have a lot to learn from Thailand on this subject. Thais are a very diverse people who live comfortably under the umbrella of Thai language and culture. The same could be said of America, except for the comfortable part. The coastal states, and the Blue states in general, make a good show of accepting diversity. But the great heartland of America can't even get along with their racial and religious equivalents in the Blue states. Those Red state people, and, to be fair, many people in Blue states, seem to hate everybody!

This is a terrible situation, and there's no quick fix for it. Maybe we should consider electing politicians who will try to make things better, not worse.

Chuck Brown - Run Joe

This Go-Go is downright infectious. 

Butter

Question: how many ingredients are there in butter? Ha! Trick question! There's only one ingredient in butter. No, the only ingredient is not, “butter,” it's milk. (Salted butter has two ingredients, milk and salt.)

There was was a five year period not long ago when I was living the bachelor lifestyle, and I did almost all of my shopping in convenience stores. I ate lunch at school or on the soi. (That's shorthand for any small restaurant in a Thai neighborhood.) There was a Family Mart in my building, and I always stopped in on the way home. I could buy most of what I needed there. My dinners followed a pretty close pattern of sandwiches or eggs, with the occasional pizza delivery in the mix. I bought my butter in the convenience store, and I bought the one brand that they had. It seemed okay; it tasted like butter. The company was Australian, and the butter was “product of Australia,” and it was certainly not expensive at about $3 for 400 grams (a bit less than a pound). I'd cut it into thirds and put two in the freezer and one in a Tupperware. I didn't give it much thought.

One day, unwrapping a new package, I idly looked at the ingredients. There were about ten, several of which looked like industrial products. The first ingredient was, “butter oil.” It all looked very suspicious. I read up on the modern varieties of butter-like products and decided that I'd be better served by finding some real butter.

The mall supermarket had a couple of brands, and checking the ingredients, sure enough, “Milk; Salt.” There was a brand from Denmark called Lurpak that cost about $5 for 200 grams (close to half a pound). There were a couple of other brands, but the Lurpak was fine. I still buy it. Is this a prudent course of action? The Lurpak costs almost three times as much as the ersatz butter. Of course, it's fine, go ahead. It's not a bank-breaker. It's not like I'm baking pies and croissants here. A package lasts me quite a while.

If my father were reading this, he would take it as further proof that I am a reckless spendthrift. He would disinherit me! Oh, wait. He already did that.

This butter is a small matter, but it is illustrative of one of the founding principles of my family life when my first wife and I were raising our boys. We were never rich, not by a long shot, and when my boys were small, we weren't even particularly prosperous. In almost every category of food and drink, we had no chance of indulging in the top-shelf products. In some instances, though, even a very moderate budget can support the day-to-day use of the best special products from around the world. My ex-wife was in complete agreement on the subject.

Like real maple syrup from Canada. We always ate together as much as possible, dinner every evening and at least one special breakfast on the weekend. That could be bacon and eggs, or something like pancakes or waffles or French toast. At first the real maple syrup seems like a wild expense. The sugar-syrup substitute was about a buck, maybe a little more, and the premium maple syrup was about $5. That bottle lasted a long time, though. So as an annual expense, what did it come to? An extra $10 or $15? The four of us loved it, and we enjoyed the hell out of it. We weren't rich, but the maple syrup in our house was as good as that in any house in America, including the White House.

Same with Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. The Kraft imitation is particularly odious once you've tasted the real thing. We always had the real stuff. We cooked a lot of Italian food, eggplant and chicken Parmesan, lasagna, baked ziti, steak pizzaiola. The Kraft was probably under a dollar then, and the jar lasted a while. The Reggiano was available in whatever quantity suited your needs. I usually got a tub, a small, lidded plastic tub, that cost under $4. It was quite a bit of grated cheese to look at it, and it lasted a long time. Here too, on an annualized basis it was a no brainer. Buy it!

My parents were eating dinner at our house one time. We saw them almost every year; either we'd fly to New York or they'd come out to L.A. My father loved Italian food, and he loved the Parmesan cheese, too. So he's looking at the package, smelling the cheese, he held it up and looked at it from the bottom. Then he put it down without taking any. I asked him, “everything okay, dad?” He gave me that look and said, “did you know that that cheese costs almost $20 per pound?” Sure, I said, but that tub only cost four dollars and it'll last us a few months. He just shook his head in disappointment and ate his spaghetti and meat balls, without cheese. He couldn't bring himself to eat cheese that expensive. He thought that I was crazy.

The only luxury item that I indulge in these days is medicine. Luckily, it's all affordable so far. We eat in restaurants frequently, but where we live those are very affordable as well. At the house, well, there's the matter of the Danish butter. That disappears into the annual budget just like the other things did. We have French toast or pancakes sometimes, but my wife found the real maple syrup too sweet for her taste, so we stick with the sugar syrup. “Shake Cheese?” It's a very rare Thai person who will knowingly eat any cheese at all, and my wife is no exception. The European cheeses at the mall are ridiculously expensive, too expensive for me to consider just for myself. You have to draw the line. There's a jar of Kraft in our refrigerator. I'm getting used to it.

FRANK HOWARD - JUDY - EXCELLO

Another Excello hit from the CD "Uptown Down South." This is a Nashville record from 1967. It's amazing to consider just how much music changed in the mid-1960s, and how fast. All of it, across time zones and genres. Not all necessarily good changes, I suppose (see, Jazz). All hell was breaking loose all over the world, but recording studios were using new technology to turn out a steady stream of hits. 

Even David Brooks Thinks The Republicans Are Crazy

I've been seeing columns by David Brooks in mostly the New York Times for what seems like a very long time now. The ones that I actually read have most often seemed to start out leaning in one direction, staying there until the end of the column, at which point they veered suddenly in the direction of the clampdown. It was as though he were trying to be reasonable and polite at first, but then had to blurt out what he really felt at the end. Maybe it was just me; I'm not a political scientist.

He's still in the column writing game, and one of them caught my eye today.

His main point in this one was that the Republican party is really pushing its luck by continuing to resist diversity at every turn. He seems to believe that the policy is stupid and doomed to fail in the end. I tend to agree with him, and he had a few good statistics to back us up. Statistics show that Millennials are very close to fifty percent diverse already and their follow-on group, Generation Z, is even closer. They've all grown up in a very diverse world. Pretty soon the entire country will be less than fifty percent white. That's a wave that's going to kick your ass when push comes to shove.

Republicans don't seem to be seeing all of this. They can still win elections with white people, so they're dancing with the one they brung.

Maybe their psephologists have crunched all of the numbers and decided that almost all of the diversity will remain on the coasts and in some deeply blue states, while plenty of states will remain nearly all white and generate enough senators and Electoral College votes to carry the Republicans into the future. Maybe they figure that they'll be fine with the Senate and the occasional presidency. And the Supreme Court, I guess. Maybe they're right.

The best part, however, came when Mr. Brooks described the three main blocs within the current Republican party, with reference to a recent article by Mr. Matthew Continetti. The three were summed up as follows:

The Jacksonians, described as “pugilistic populists.” Would this be fans of Donald “Man of the People” Trump? Trump doesn't know much about history, but he likes what he's heard about Andrew Jackson, which is probably limited to facts like his dueling record, the story of him getting shot and immediately using his cane to beat the would-be assassin to within an inch of his life, and how popular he was with low-lives who trashed the White House when given the chance. The trouble here is that to be a successful populist, you must give the voters something that they want. Trump has only given the voters promises. I'm not sure that giving the voters permission to be racist assholes will be enough.

Next come the Paleos, who are described as “Tucker Carlson style economic nationalists.” That would be Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, a fabulously wealthy trust-fund baby who has traded in his bow-ties and shit-eating grin look for a more dignified big-boy tie and the expression of a man who has just been hit on the top of the head with a bat. In my experience, men who have only family names strung together, and no names of their own at all, are almost always insufferable. Three family names in a row indicate great wealth. If Tucker is any indication, four in a row just means even more wealth. (You've heard of “Swanson's TV Dinners.” That's only one of the four names.) I'm not sure what “economic nationalism” is, exactly, but from appearances, maybe it means using our economy as a cudgel to beat our adversaries, and our friends for that matter, into submission.

Thirdly, there are the Post Liberals. These seem to be the reactionaries to beat all reactionaries. They are described as “opposing pluralism and seeking to return to pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy.” Are there sufficient exclamation points in the world to highlight the delusional nature of people who would seek to unwind the previous 250 years of European and American history? Bring back the days when men and women were restrained by poverty and deprivation? When women were additionally controlled by witchcraft trials? When all wealth was controlled by the Church, Royalty, and a very small merchant class? Most of the individuals who espouse this policy would lose their privilege entirely and be returned to serfdom. “Opposing pluralism” is the least of their problems, which are obviously psychological and deep seated.

As even David Brooks seems to realize, there is no longer any future in “opposing pluralism.” What, I wonder, are they suggesting when they hint at reinstating the privileges of the white race? We can turn away immigrants at the border, although even that is not certain, and we can try to winnow out all of the illegal immigrants in our midst and kick them out, although that would be an economic disaster in many industries, but what then? What about all of the pluralism that either has all of its citizenship papers properly in order, or was born here fair and square? What about our black Americans? This “opposing pluralism” crowd really got some wind in its sails when Mr. Obama was president. Just like many of our police, many Americans now have the black race in America fully in their sights. Are we to eject all of those individuals for excessive pigmentation? Wrong eye-shape or hair-texture? People say these things without having given them a moment's thought.

When someone says, “we must take our country back,” we know exactly what they mean, and they probably do, too. But what would that look like? Should we let the diverse populations stay, but only as something less than citizens and certainly without voting privileges and denied access to any kind of welfare or government aid? Something more demonstrative? Financial incentives to leave? That is all crazy talk, but returning to something like the America of the 1940s is even crazier. More than half of our population would need to be eliminated somehow, or subjugated. Some people want to go back to Andy Griffith's Maybury, they want Midwestern cities to be prosperous and white again, they want good, clean food from farms that look like Dorothy's place in the Wizard of Oz. The terrible truth is that the people who want these things are tearing the country apart before anyone has even thought any of this through. To accomplish any of those things, while eliminating some or all of the diversity (plurality), not to mention the sexual "deviation," would take a revolution. Our time would be better spent “taking our country back” from the investment class and their corporate stooges who are really the ones who have stolen it from us. Stolen our prosperity and our security to the degree that many people have been rendered unreasonable. It's a bad situation.

Diversity hasn't hurt us one bit, and America has enjoyed great diversity since its Colonial Period. Rather, it is these anti-diversity reactionaries who are right now burning our playhouse down. 

I should wrap this up before I really start to scare people. Imagine asking people straight out: do you want a world in the next twenty or fifty or one hundred years that is a fit place to live in, where your children and grandchildren can enjoy the comfort and many of the privileges that you enjoy now? Everyone would say YES! If you asked them: would you like to help to build a world for your children and grandchildren that is better than the one that exists now, again all of them would say YES! And yet, for forty years, those same interviewees have been digging deep graves for all of those advantages that they wish for their offspring. The graves are being filled in now, and every good thing will soon be but a memory in the minds of some old men and women.

If we are to provide anything that is good and decent to our grandchildren, we'd better get started. Time ran out more than ten years ago, and catch-up is difficult. Some days I feel like St. John the Baptist, bearing a message that people would profit from hearing, but repeatedly being rejected and ignored. I won't live long enough to see the last act, but I am haunted by the images of the lives that we are leaving for our grandchildren. The images stand before us as plain as day. The suffering! The misery! How they will hate us!

FOLI (there is no movement without rhythm) original version by Thomas Ro...

I don't have much to add. This video says it all. You should listen to it all the way through. The music is propulsive and wonderful; the visuals are dramatic and meaningful; the tension builds to a fine crescendo. This is really great. 

13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS - YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME (UPGRADED)

Roky joined the lost today. He must have had a big personality. He stayed in touch with people all over the country. He was a fixture in the Texas rock club scene. A friend of mine in L.A. was in touch with Roky all of his life, and the friend assures me that Roky was a great guy. And you know what? I believe it.