Category: blog

[estimated reading time 10 minutes]

let’s talk a little about the army. the american army in particular because that’s the real focus but this applies to most countries, especially in the western world. i am a strong component of demilitarization and pacifism at all costs. but this is not an argument for disarmament in the complete sense of having no military. this is about the point of having an army. armies are extremely expensive both in financial and human terms. they cost vast amounts of money to maintain, train, equip and organize and the cost to society in death, psychological problems, armed and dangerous civilians and a culture of warfare and competition are immeasurable. so what’s the point?

first, a look at history. armies do two things. they allow you to defend yourself and attack, conquer, pacify and control others. yes, that looks like five things but the last four are really all one thing and we can call it conquest. so either you are using an army for defense or conquest. in the past, you were defending yourself against two things, loosely classifiable as barbarians and state actors. in the typical example, the roman army (the imperial roman army, let’s say, in the period after caesar) was responsible for keeping the empire safe from those terrorists just on the edges of its borders (they had shaggy beards and became referred to as barbarians from the latin for beard) and ensuring other states (for example, greek and germanic ones) didn’t take over. that was a huge portion of its reason for being and why it was worth so much effort and money from the roman citizens. the other part was conquest, acquiring more territory and ensuring it was sufficiently peaceful not to escape the imperial clutches. this included places like modern-day france, england and spain. they weren’t originally roman territories but the army made them part of the empire. this was also true of smaller pre-roman states like judea, now israel, as you may remember if you have read the bible, and much of what is now the arab middle-east, which the prophet spoke of in the qur’an. anyway, those are just examples but they’re ones most people are familiar with.

from a modern perspective, then, what’s the purpose of the american army in these two possible roles? realistically nothing. it has none at all. that may seem like an incredibly sweeping statement but please hear me out. i’m not saying military power in the american sense is useless. i can clearly demonstrate its immorality but it’s not useless. but the army is not a functional part of that usefulness in the twenty-first century.

first, defense. if you’re going to use an army for defense, you need to be in contact with the enemy. you’re defending yourself from an invasion, in other words. if you’re not fighting in your own territory, it’s not defense. if i go to your house and fight you, it doesn’t matter who starts it. it’s still your house. so who’s the potential attacker america is frightened of? perhaps an exploration of the nearby geography will give us a clue. well, looking at the map, it must be canada. a massive territory inhabited by another violent culture just to the north. but that can’t be right. america has friendly relations with canada (well, since the war of 1812, at least and i think two hundred years really is enough to kiss and make up, even for two homophobic societies that tend to think of kissing as a prelude to things best left not done by nation-states). perhaps the other direction. mexico? cuba? that doesn’t seem to make much sense, either. a mexican uprising crossing the rio grande isn’t hugely likely and i think the texans on the border are likely going to stop that in its tracks with their antique muskets and blunderbusses before the army needs to deploy. and the cubans are about as threatening as an invasion force as that school of dolphins living outside miami harbor. yes, some cubans and mexicans would like to move to america but we’re not talking about using the army for border control, just invasion-suppression. if there’s no invasion, suppression seems a little unnecessary. while we’re on the idea of unnecessary, try not to forget that the 2021 budget for the american military is a little over six-hundred-billion dollars. billion with a b. that’s two thirds of a trillion. a six with eleven zeros after it. let’s say only a tenth of that is destined for the army (and it’s more than that but nobody really knows the exact number, officially-speaking), that means we can think of it in several ways…

• if every church in america was given just that one-tenth, each would receive about $150 000.
• that’s a bit more than $800 for each child in the country.
• it’s almost a half-million dollars for each elementary and secondary school, college or university.
• if every hospital in the country received an equal share of this one-tenth-of-the-military-budget number, it would mean an extra ten-million dollars every year to help the sick.

of course, that’s not how economics works and the army’s budget couldn’t really be used for any of those things. that’s not the point. the idea is to give you an idea of how absolutely incredible the amount of money we’re talking about is. and that, remember, is only one-tenth of the military budget for one year, a vast underestimate for what the army actually costs but a very safe bet as a savings number if it was eliminated.

i can hear what you’re thinking, though. there are countries out there that hate america. truly hate america. and want to attack it. yes. i am certain this is true. but we’re not talking about defending against an attack. most attacks don’t actually occur in a way an army can fight against them. it’s built to fight against an invasion, not a single attack. the army won’t stop a ballistic inbound from clobbering washington or los angeles. it won’t stop a terrorist attack in seattle or houston. as much as i would like it to be able to do these things – it would be a truly justifiable reason to have an army, practically speaking – nothing can do this. potentially, a missile shield can do the first but none has been successful yet in accomplishing it in any meaningful way. nothing can do the second. perhaps good intelligence and policework. but criminals and terrorists always have the initiative and a free country means there is a certain degree of freedom to cause harm that can’t be eliminated without eliminating that freedom. while i believe that freedom should be vastly diminished in the interest of safety, that’s not the current discussion and not really relevant to the army.

so what countries out there hate america and have the ability to invade? which states are americans so afraid of that they are willing to spend eight-hundred bucks for every child so they can sleep easily knowing there won’t be an invasion? there are, realistically, three – north korea, iran and china. i know. i know. what about russia? well, the soviet union died a long time ago and, with it, any hope of being able to invade the united states. russia might now be a belligerent and painful enemy in a lot of ways. but it’s not looking for an invasion force to land on the beaches of new england – not any time soon, at least, unless the political landscape changes. but those other three? what about them, given how much they hate america in public? ok, admittedly north korea would probably love to conquer america but (not to put too fine a point on it) it’s not going to happen. if you seriously think the north korean army is going to pop up on the california coast and try to march across to washington and sweep up the lower forty-eight, whatever you’ve been smoking is likely to earn you a long stay in a federal prison. yes, north korea has an absolutely massive army. but it’s in north korea and that’s not exactly swimming-distance. they’d have to have a fleet of ships to rival a small country in land-mass. and that’s not something you can hide from a satellite. tell me the navy wouldn’t sink that before it gets anywhere near american shores. the same goes for iran but, unlike north korea, it simply doesn’t have the army to do it, even if it could land that army in america, which is realistically impossible even if it had the ships, which it also doesn’t. china, in theory, has the army capability to conquer and do it successfully but even that vast military powerhouse doesn’t have the marine transport facilities. and that’s assuming it wanted to in the first place, which i’m sure you realize, if you know anything about china, it simply doesn’t. does china need the headache of conquering america? not in the slightest. china wants two things from america – for the united states to leave it alone and buy its products. that’s all. the united states as a colony of china? who needs that nightmare? the cpp is far too smart to wish that on itself and the american public isn’t stupid enough to think it’s a possibility even in the most fevered of dreams.

so there are no countries to defend against an invasion from. but you knew that because the idea of an invasion from canada, mexico, cuba or anywhere in asia is so ludicrous it will make your head spin.

what about the other side, though? every country wants the power to take over its enemies, right? like the song says, everybody wants to rule the world. but does america? it wants to meddle in other people’s business, most certainly. it wants to rule the world economy, which it has been doing a horrendous job of in the last few decades, not that it was doing well before but at least doing well enough most people didn’t notice. but rule the world? conquer it and plant american flags all over asia and europe and africa? i’m not sure even the staunchest conservatives the republican party can field would support such a plan. can you picture the house of representatives with representatives from busan and kyoto? the honorable senators from johannesberg and berlin (not the one in georgia – or the one in nevada, for that matter, which i believe has absolutely no citizens)? i am a proponent of a single world government. but this is, again, not the forum for that discussion and it’s not relevant to the army.

so where would america like to conquer? or where is america likely to conquer despite lack of ambition in the colonial sphere? right. nowhere.

what this means is a complete lack of purpose for an army. the army, while potentially enjoyable for its members in many cases, provides no actual function to the country.

i can, yet again, hear the objection. a country without a military force leaves itself open to attack. yes, this is potentially true. it’s not always the case but it’s definitely a possibility. here’s the issue. we live in the twenty-first century. attacks come from various places. if they are invasions from nearby, an army can repel those invasions. there are really only three countries close enough to stage a functional invasion of the united states – canada, mexico and cuba. none of these three have either the armed forces or the political desire to do it. the army is defending against a potentiality that has no potential at all of happening. if a country like north korea or iran wants to attack america, they have to do it with long-range weapons. missiles or ships or aircraft. if it’s missiles, defense is possible but we’re mostly talking about blind scientific luck on a defense shield coupled to intelligence work. if it’s ships and planes, there are other branches of the military set up to deal with those threats. you’re generally not going to try to sink a ship with an army or shoot down an aircraft from the ground. yes, as a last-ditch effort it’s definitely been done, though rarely successfully since the second-world-war.

the other possibility for a military force is projection of power. and this is probably something that’s come to mind as we’ve been thinking about this topic. but that’s not relevant to the army. the american military projects power with its carrier fleet. sending ships and aircraft near china, for example, to try to bully that country into submission. it’s not really all that effective but it makes americans feel good for some reason. gunboat diplomacy, some people have called it. it worked in japan centuries ago but it’s not so likely to function against a modern nation like china or india that has the ability to fight back and, especially in the case of china, succeed in teaching a very painful lesson in return.

to summarize, then. the army costs the united states at least sixty-billion a year. probably far more than that but it’s a reasonable low-estimate. it works and trains very hard. but it has no purpose. there’s nothing to defend against and nothing to attack. american soldiers are training, fighting and dying but they shouldn’t be. they should be at home. and nobody should be fighting. there’s no war in america. it shouldn’t go looking for one. if america needs defending, it can rely on the navy and air force because nobody is going to get nearly close enough for the army to have to engage them on american soil. the entire army could stand there on the rim of the san francisco bay for the next hundred years and it will provide absolutely no useful protection for the country because nobody’s going to show up to try to invade. and there’s nobody to conquer. america doesn’t want to expand its territory (ok, some americans do but it’s not going to happen and the last thing america needs is new states called alberta and chiapas. trust me. expansionist politics are a thing of the past even if they do fit the traditional rhetoric of hardline conservatives.

so let’s do ourselves a favor and scrap the army. it’s not worth the pain. not worth the cost. and not worth the societal sacrifice. it won’t make the country weak. those are strong people whose minds and bodies could do something far more useful for the country. build things, learn things, help people, save lives at home. let’s give them a chance to do it.

by the way, expanding this perspective to other countries, the same could be said for most western nations. why does the united kingdom need an army? defending itself from france? i know france has attacked england many times in the past but it’s been hundreds of years and perhaps it’s time to stop imagining baguette-wielding bogeymen under the four-poster for a change? france needs to defend itself from spain and italy about as much as i need to defend myself from the ravages of the squirrel i saw this morning in the garden. armies can’t fight against individual terrorists and these countries have no functional large-scale enemies and no territorial ambitions. they need an army like i need a bleeding head-wound. it’s not just useless. it’s incredibly harmful to society to have an army both in financial and sociological terms. there are certainly countries where there is a theoretical risk of invasion. south korea has a legitimate fear of north korea. north korea isn’t going to invade them and that’s something i may someday have to write about. there are many reasons it won’t happen. but at least the fear is legitimate and physically present. israel is legitimately afraid of its neighbors potentially invading (and this one really could happen, though it’s unlikely). there are various central-african countries where invasion is far more possible and an army to defend their citizens might be a reasonable precaution, though there are always better options. but for countries in the developed west and much of the east (china, japan, india, malaysia and indonesia, i’m looking at you), there is no rational justification for a ground fighting force. that’s not to say there never was. just that we live in this modern world and it’s time we started to make decisions like it.

thanks for taking the time to explore this idea with me today. please let me know what areas of thought you’d like me to explore next. i’m always happy to take topic suggestions…

[estimated reading time 16 minutes]

the language frame

east asia is home to myriad languages but three are very dominant — chinese, japanese and korean. today we will look at how these languages communicate in writing and how that compares to english.

the first thing to note about this is that these languages share certain elements but in many ways are extremely different. chinese and japanese have many things about their writing systems that are similar enough to be mutually-comprehensible in a way. but the languages are in no way grammatically linked. this may seem odd but chinese is a language far closer to english and other western languages than either japanese or korean. looking at this other pair, japanese and korean, the first thing that becomes obvious is that these are realistically two divergent paths in the evolution of a single language that eventually broke far enough from each other to be separate. they share common grammar with little variation and a huge overlap of similar vocabulary, though with massive pronunciation differences.

with the background out of the way, we will look at their writing systems in more depth. english uses an arcane, cumbersome writing system developed millennia ago that is neither phonetic nor efficient. chinese has an even more ancient system combining meaning symbols with sounds but it is purely phonetic and extremely efficient. japanese combines a semi-phonetic version of the chinese character system, somewhat simplified and repurposed, with a pure-phonetic system of sound-only characters. korean uses a highly-efficient phonetic writing system that appears to be the best of all possible worlds but, through an odd twist of linguistic history, corrupts the whole enterprise by introducing complex unpronounced final characters that impact meaning and multiple simultaneous notations for the same phoneme.

the conclusion we will eventually arrive at is that an optimal writing system would take the phonetic absolutism of chinese and japanese kana and notate it with the phonetic system from korean, eliminating the meaning symbols of chinese and japanese and simplifying korean’s writing to be exactly what is pronounced without exception, regardless of meaning or tradition. this may be clearly understood to say, too, that, while there are many positive aspects to english as a language, its writing system has nothing to offer and is a disaster that would be better scrapped and forgotten as a historical error with no redeeming features. this is, however, the end of a longer road. to get there, it is beet to look at these written languages in terms of five areas of comparison — character sets, meaning vs sound, visual efficiency, learning complexity and phonetic accuracy. this ignores the spoken forms and grammar and focuses only on how they are written. this also avoids the added complexity of looking at chinese written in pinyin or japanese in romaji as irrelevant to the questions of the moment.

writing with character

to begin, let’s review the basics and look at how each of these languages appears on the page. a simple interactive greeting.

in english… hello. nice to meet you. how are you?

in japanese… こんにちは。 はじめまして。 お元気ですか？

in korean… 안녕하세요. 만나서 반갑습니다. 어떻게 지내세요?

finally, in chinese… 你好。 很高兴认识你。 你好吗？

as a point of comparison, english has 26 characters, each with two basic versions, each representing many possible sounds with a huge degree of overlap. it is a single character set that communicates only sound, doing even that very poorly.

japanese has three character sets. at this point, it’s useful to clarify that we will use roman transliteration for all technical terms here. these three are kanji, hiragana and katakana. kanji are simplified chinese characters borrowed for meaning and given approximately two potential sounds (sometimes more, occasionally only one). hiragana and katakana are generally equivalent and simply function as two options for the same sound characters for different purposes (usually hiragana is grammatical while katakana is foreign and special words but this is a loose characterization at best). kana are phonetic and do not vary in reading but they are not simple phonemes — most are a group, leading to there being far more of them than individual sounds in a sound-poor language would require. for example, the first character in the example we just saw is こ, a combination of sounds /k/ and /o/, rather than using a single symbol for each sound. the first kanji character in this example, 元, denotes three sounds, /g/, /e/ and /n/. while there is no hard count on the number of kanji, an estimate in the ten-thousand range is close enough as only about 3000 are necessary for daily use and the rest are rare enough to be irrelevant. it is useful to note that most basic ideas are represented as kanji (犬, 猫, 魚) while imported concepts are written with katakana (コーヒー, ラジオ, テレビ) and grammatical or non-conceptual information is written with hiragana (さん, ちゃん, くん, examples of honorifics).

korean, while an extremely similar language in structure and content, has a completely different writing system, a brilliant model created in the fifteenth century to replace the chinese symbol characters used at the time — and, shockingly, used well into the twentieth century by many koreans and still understood by many in older generations. hangul, however, is a thoroughly modern approach to writing. it uses 14 consonants and 10 vowels, loosely shaped to indicate their sound, grouped in syllabic blocks. the first block in the example, 안, contains a silent placeholder (ㅇ), a vowel (ㅏ) and a consonant (ㄴ) representing the sounds /a/ and /n/. while this sounds like a perfect system and is likely the closest natural language evolution over time has ever produced, there is a shocking break with this phonetic paradise. when applied to korean, pronunciation of final consonants and their modification for non-sound reasons is frequent and is referred to as batchim, making spelling frighteningly difficult even for many native-speakers. this adds to the spelling difficulty of multiple potential writings for identical or nearly-identical sounds. english has no fixed relationship between its characters and sounds. japanese has a bidirectional relationship — only one way to write each sound and only one way to say each character, with a variety of caveats. hangul, however, has a mostly unidirectional link, one way to pronounce the written form but often two or more ways to write a single sound.

chinese is the other extreme from the english where we began this survey. it has approximately the same number of functional characters as japanese, modern chinese (in particular that of the mainland, usually called simplified as opposed to the traditional version used elsewhere by far fewer) being an evolution of the ancient chinese characters japanese also derived its kanji from. much like japanese, two or three thousand characters are commonly-known and useful for daily reading and writing, the rest being mostly arcane and/or specialized, less useful in a general context. how they function, however, is far simpler than their japanese counterparts. each symbol represents a single syllable and has a single reading. a sentence with ten symbols has ten syllables and can only be read one way (within a single language — reading it in cantonese as opposed to mandarin is certainly an option but this isn’t significant to the discussion). there is no distinction between grammatical elements and meaning.

the sound and the furry

english doesn’t differentiate its writing based on meaning, only sound. the link between pronunciation and writing should therefore be extremely strong but english’ ambiguous connection in both directions between sound and written characters results in ambiguity at best, often complete confusion. there is no way to accurately predict how a new english word will be written or spoken without having encountered it before. there are certainly rules but they are followed only intermittently and the exceptions are myriad and spectacularly nonspecific. an example may help.

• sight
• site
• night
• knight
• nite
• date
• bait
• eight
• ate

in these nine examples, the first two have identical pronunciation but different meanings (vision, location). the next three are pronounced the same but again meanings vary (time, person, time). the final four vary only in their initial consonant sound (/d/, /b/ and the last two being identical with no initial) but again spelling of this is variable.

while many english scholars claim that this is not an issue with the structure of english writing as context makes confusion unlikely, it has two obvious issues. the first is that there is vast scope for the writing to be completely comprehensible but technically incorrect — in other words, communicating perfectly well but judged inferior as it is not using the expected spelling, while accurately representing the sounds, which is the whole point of written language in a non-symbolic context in the first place. the second is slightly more esoteric but a stronger argument against the system’s failures. if, as these scholars claim, perhaps even truthfully, context solves all problems of confusion between multiple alternate possible spellings, their existence is unnecessary and spelling standardization on a single model would be a vast improvement. the only reasonable argument to justify the confused spelling model for english, therefore, actually becomes the strongest justification for its replacement.

korean is the other language in the set where writing communicates sound without meaning. with the exception of the idiosyncratic batchim, the only difficulty here is that there is sound overlap between several characters. for example, ㅐ and ㅔ are realistically the same sound represented by two possible component characters, making it impossible to know which will be used in a word. there are certainly ways to make an educated guess but, as with english, the overlap is a problem. unlike english, however, this problem only occurs in one direction. there is no confusion for pronunciation — 개 and 게 vary by meaning (dog, crab) but there is no ambiguity when speaking them from the written version. yes, some traditional theorists will argue that there is a slight difference between these two (and other pairs and groups of) component characters in hangul but this minimal difference is insignificant to the point — whether a small difference occurs is not an argument against simplification. this being said, as a simple sound-text representation, hangul has english beaten by orders of magnitude.

looking at the relationship between sound and meaning is very different in the other two languages we’ve been focusing on.

chinese is written with a single character set but some pieces of those characters provide meaning while others determine sound. this is not necessarily obvious at first glance. a good example (the majority of characters work in this way to some degree but this one is an obvious simple combination) is 洋 (ocean). this combines the character 水 (water, in slightly-modified form to fit in the space) with 羊 (sheep) with the result that it signifies the meaning of water (shuǐ) with the sound of sheep (yáng). this allows an interesting result — it is in many cases possible to understand the meaning of a chinese sentence without necessarily remembering how to pronounce it. while this can be awkward, it certainly makes it easier to communicate in partial-comprehension situations.

the relationship between written and spoken sound is unidirectional but fixed. there are many ways to write the syllable yáng, for example (洋 and 羊 as we have already seen but 杨, a type of tree, also immediately comes to mind with many others existing). there is, however, only one possible pronunciation for these three characters. there can be no confusion when speaking from written text.

japanese has a different approach to the link between pronunciation and meaning. most kanji have at least two possible readings (generally onyomi and kunyomi are used to describe them, the first being an approximation of the original chinese pronunciation modified to fit japanese phonetic norms, the second being a usually multisyllabic japanese-only reading, though there are many characters that have multiple possibilities and some with only one). this could easily lead to confusion but rarely does except in young children and beginner language-learners as there is a rigid pattern determining when each is used and this pattern has no common exceptions. so while 学 in 学校 (school) is pronounced /gaku/, in 学ぶ (learn) it is /mana/. having mastered the pattern, however, reading kanji for sound is a simple exercise.

kana (both hiragana and katakana) are bidirectional sound pairs. while there are contexts where one or the other is used, assuming a single character set in any situation means writing is no more than direct translation of sound. the phonemic group /ka/ is always written in hiragana as か, /go/ as ご, etc. it may be useful to point out here that there are three extremely common exceptions to this — は, を and へ, when used as particle markers being generally pronounced as /wa/, /o/ and /e/ rather than /ha/, /wo/ and /he/. but, as this is a predictable thing, it likely poses no real issues, unlike english exceptions where they appear mostly random unless the history of a word is already known.

of course, english gets its spelling system from its history, the language being a mashup of old german and old french with various other languages’ spelling systems added. this is not an excuse for, a half-millennium later, however, continuing to use a standardized spelling system that is perhaps the least useful of any modern language. it is, though, an explanation for its existence, compared to kana, created specifically for japanese, or hangul, designed with korean in mind — the alphabet used in english was created more than a thousand years before english was first spoken and it was adopted without any real consideration for its complete unsuitability to the task as english was a vulgar language of the common masses and teaching a new writing system was simply never considered — today it is a valid option but tradition and laziness prevail in english-speaking locations, leading to the continued use of this problematic character set.

the quick without the dead language

turning to efficiency of written communication, there is a comparative statistic that is useful to remember. an average english book contains about 350-450 thousand characters (about 80000 words but “word” is something that has far less meaning outside english, especially in symbolic languages so becomes useless as a comparative tool). looking at a similarly-average book in chinese of approximately similar content length, it contains about 100-140 thousand characters, making it about three times more dense.

this is certainly a very generalized statistic but it is a good place to begin and these are the two extremes of the scale. korean with its slightly longer constructions, while there is no official data on the subject that i’m aware of, is likely close to the chinese number but a little higher. japanese, having extra grammatical information in kana, requires additional characters for the same content, making its writing less efficient again than korean in most cases.

there is another question regarding efficiency, though, which will immediately come to mind for anyone speaking korean or japanese. these are topic-focused languages while english and chinese are subject-focused. it is nearly impossible in modern standard english to eliminate either the subject or the verb. chinese more frequently eliminates state verbs, occasionally others, while rarely dropping subjects. japanese and korean, however, rarely need subjects to be objectively stated. this is not the only difference allowing compressive efficiency in the languages but it is likely the one with the largest impact on overall information density.

there is a comparison to be made between these languages on speaking speed, too, though this is not an issue of writing — japanese and korean are spoken much more quickly than chinese and that faster than english. from an oral communication standpoint, the same information can be communicated just as quickly in korean or japanese as mandarin but english is far slower. while unrelated to the writing, it is a relative important thing to keep in mind as a comparison.

to take the example from earlier, again…

english… hello. nice to meet you. how are you?

japanese… こんにちは。 はじめまして。 お元気ですか？

korean… 안녕하세요. 만나서 반갑습니다. 어떻게 지내세요?

chinese… 你好。 很高兴认识你。 你好吗？

an easy and somewhat representative count can be made.

english 37, japanese 20, korean 29, chinese 14. while this doesn’t take into account many aspects of written language and this is a spectacularly-formalized statement in korean, it is a clear demonstration of what has already been said, that english has an overwhelmingly-inefficient writing system, chinese being vastly more and japanese and korean being in the middle with their agglutinating syntax compared to chinese’ tense-neutral non-conjugating system necessitating greater use of characters for similar meanings. it may be useful to note that these are relatively-formal versions of these three statements in all four languages.

hello world?

english is not the most difficult language to learn. with myriad unnecessary cases and complex structure systems, finnish, dutch and german are vastly more time-consuming for new language learners while arabic and hindi’s (among other languages in the region) clumsy linked-script writing systems are difficult for those who haven’t acquired them as children compared to discrete-block characters in the languages we have discussed today. there are many things about the english writing system, however, that make it perhaps the most difficult writing system for learners seeking spoken fluency and the ability to switch between speaking and writing in both directions.

english uses a multi-version character set. it has a completely meaningless secondary set of characters called capital letters that are a traditional formal affectation adopted centuries ago but with no lasting meaning. there is an expectation of an understanding of their use, despite no change in either meaning or pronunciation and no generalized agreement on many aspects of their standardization. this is compounded by the fact that, unlike the other three languages discussed here, there is a completely separate written form and this is only vaguely-standardized and extremely regionally-variant. it may be useful to note that each of these variant handwritten forms also has at least two version of each character, a small and large version, often several additional decorative versions and variations. this is compounded in difficulty as these various regional forms, while the text is somewhat standardized, are not mutually legible across boundaries, the most notable difficulty being between linked scripts from western europe and north america where native speakers can understand the text but often can’t interpret the writing to quickly form letters for comprehension.

while comparatively complex, chinese characters have only one form within a language. variations exist between simplified and traditional but a single language generally uses only one so the separation is insignificant for learners. whether typed or written by anyone of any age, provided the writing is generally neat, any reader can read any character without difficulty. japanese characters are similar in this way. complex characters are often replaced with phonetic equivalents for young people and learners but this doesn’t require additional knowledge, just an awareness that it happens (犬 becomes いぬ and 魚 becomes さかな in children’s books, for example — dog, fish). in korean, where no symbolic characters need to be learned, a single non-divergent non-variant writing system simplifies the whole writing-speaking-learning process, allowing the 24-component set to be the only thing necessary to learn for reading comprehension — beyond, of course, vocabulary and grammar, which are necessary for spoken comprehension before anything is written or read, anyway.

this can be compared to english non-phonetic writing where leaners are ridiculed for not differentiating “site” and “sight” or “but” and “butt” (identical pronunciation, divergent meanings) and where there is continuous fighting about capitalization (pc, tv and internet just to name three words where capitalization status is debated, of the thousands where this is a constant issue — often one that leads to debates in a work or school context that simply should never have existed).

alpha, bravo and charlie

phonetic accuracy is a somewhat odd point of comparison for all four languages’ writing systems we’re looking at and this is where they don’t quite hold up in the same way.

english has no phonetic accuracy. the reason for this is simple. it has no unified and standardized basis for its spelling system and there is vast overlap between characters’ pronunciation, often independent of context. there is frequently disagreement even between native speakers (adult, progress, thorough, data, etc) of correct pronunciation and spelling has absolutely no solution to these issues, regardless of its dictionary standardization status, which is spurious at best as many common dictionaries disagree on pronunciation and usage of frequently-used words like adult and data. it may be worth noting that this is not an original observation. english has evolved over time without oversight or modernization and, to the extent that anything is intentional in language, the lack of standardization in english is purposeful rather than oversight. this doesn’t make it any less problematic for native speakers or leaners.

korean occupies an interesting place for phonetic accuracy. in most cases, it is pronounced exactly as predicted from the spelling and spelled as expected. with overlapping potential character components for certain sounds, however, and the oddly-arcane batchim rules, however, there are exceptions that make certain components of hangul distinctly phonetically-inaccurate. it is, however, overall an excellent example of how a two-way phonetic transcription and communication system can work. with minor upgrades and modernization, hangul could achieve a perfect score on this front.

japanese is purely phonetically-accurate once the rules have been learned. these rules are not quite as simple as most in korean or chinese but they are without exception so it is simply a matter of memorization. there are no silent characters and, while there is not a one-to-one relationship between characters and sounds in either direction, selecting which character represents each sound and which sound is represented by each character is a logical process that is both completely predictable and relatively straightforward. there is a slight difference in intonation emphasis between certain words but this is somewhat insignificant given pronunciation-to-text links — 雨 (rain) and 飴 (candy) have the same pronunciation with different intonation, for example.

chinese is also phonetically-accurate in the same way as japanese without any of the exceptions. it has a predictable speech structure where each character is a single syllable, leading to rapid text-to-speech processing. its complex symbol library is the only difficulty and the unidirectional transfer is potentially problematic, especially as it doesn’t have a pronunciation key system like japanese (hiragana written above or beside kanji to indicate pronunciation is common, especially for more difficult or less-frequently-used characters). while 雨 and 糖 in mandarin have only one pronunciation (not the same one in this case), yǔ and táng have many potential written forms, leading to this accuracy being extremely useful when reading written chinese but far less helpful when copying speech.

final thoughts

english is a language with many potential upsides. it is evolutionary so it quickly changes with trends to create new words — this may be positive or negative. it is extremely well-adopted worldwide — it is, in fact, difficult to find a location where english is not at least somewhat useful in communication and this really can’t be said for any other modern language, much in the way imperial latin was the standard across europe, west asia and north africa in the classical period and chinese was for most of asia for thousands of years, especially among educated classes. english, mostly as a result of american political and military dominance, has taken that role in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.

it is, however, hamstrung by its arcane, inefficient and cumbersome writing system (among other things but that is a topic for another day). a complete lack of phonetic accuracy, inefficient visual presence and absence of spelling standardization or even pronunciation agreement, compounded by multiple potential character forms and whole competing written character sets by location and generation lead english writing to be accepted but simply not fit for use.

looking at these other writing systems has led to various conclusions. chinese is extremely efficient with its single set of characters combining phonetic accuracy with high-compression meaning. japanese takes that same structure and augments it with phonetic characters, leading to less efficiency but easier learning, especially for children and beginners. korean eliminates the unidirectional transcription problem of many-characters-for-one-sound-group common to all chinese and much japanese writing but adds a problem already present in english, character overlap and, with batchim, slight variations in pronunciation not accounted for by the basic character components.

this is realistically the end of the comparison but it may be useful to make a comment about how this could inform future english modernization. this is no longer an objective view, however, so that must be admitted.

english writing is a useless system that must be replaced. what it can be replaced with could be a symbolic meaning-pronunciation system like that in chinese or a phonetic-transcription system like hangul. it would be ridiculous to adopt the mess of multiple character sets japanese currently uses — it works far better than the english alphabet but it is so plagued with problems it wouldn’t be worth the effort to switch when something far more useful already exists and i suspect japanese wouldn’t be using it today, either, if an option like hangul had existed and its continued use is a result of tradition and cost of change rather than any mistaken thoughts of it being the best possible approach to writing.

what we have seen is a comparison between how a symbolic system (chinese) and a phonetic system (korean) compare. korean is less efficient in its writing but vastly easier to learn. assuming pronunciation vagaries like letter duplication and silent or implied final consonants were eliminated before it (or something like it) was adopted as a new writing system for english, this would mean increased efficiency (though not as much as a purely-symbolic system) and complete context-independence, allowing learners and advanced readers including software-based text-to-speech and future artificial intelligence to accurately read without difficulty, even words not previously encountered.

while there are many things about english that would be better with modernization and simplification, this is a completely feasible potential upgrade that could take place in a single generation with minimal effort — a twenty-character alphabet phonetic system loosely based on hangul would half the length of english books (an exciting environmental improvement to say the least) and make reading and writing a much easier and more intuitive process for children and learners, likely eliminating at least a significant minority, potentially a majority, of text-based learning disabilities coming from stream-written languages like english and non-phonetic transcription systems like the english alphabet.

as a side-note, it may be useful to see what impact such a change would have on other western languages that share the same script (or at least the same idea of script). it is likely french, spanish, german, italian and various less-widely-spoken languages would quickly shift to a phonetic system if english made the upgrade, probably within a few years, a decade at most. languages using other alphabets (russian, hebrew, greek) would likely follow suit, perhaps just as quickly, though likely slightly more slowly, especially in the case of russian, where tradition is a cultural obsession. indigenous languages, especially in the americas, that have been very poorly-served by the english alphabet and this could mean a resurgence in their functional usability, especially in the central and south american areas where languages like guaraní, quechua and nahuatl are frequently difficult to transliterate using vague english spelling and letters.

[estimated reading time 10 minutes]

there has been a significant amount of whining both within the autistic community and outside it. the first is mostly because of oddly-missing information. the second is, i suspect, based in our cultural obsession of late with shaming people and taking any excuse to make noise about things that sound outrageous, despite no real personal connection.

so i thought it would be a good idea to talk about this issue and perhaps make some things a little clearer. i want to make this perfectly plain, though. this is not the beginning of a discussion and if you don’t agree, that’s perfectly fine. i’m not interested. you are entitled to have your own view on anything you like. there’s no point in sharing it with me as i don’t read comments and my feedback is moderated to include only questions and teaching.

with that out of the way, let’s look at the problem people have with “asperger’s” (asperger’s syndrome, it is usually called) as a diagnosis. it’s two things, really. one is that they say it’s not a real diagnosis. the other is that they say the doctor it was named after was a terrible person. i’ll take a look at the second one first.

hans asperger was a doctor in austria in the first half of the twentieth century who studied children with neurological disorders. no big surprise there, i suspect, given that one of them is named after him for being the first one to propose its existence. here’s where the problem comes, though. he wasn’t just a doctor. he was a nazi doctor. and he used his experiments and diagnoses to systematically privilege certain patients, often children of other nazis, while condemning those with similar divergent mental traits to death or torture. by the standards of the holocaust, what he did was unsurprising. by the standards of all modern medicine is supposed to stand for, his actions, like those of all doctors working for the nazis, are nothing short of disgusting.

that seems to jive well with what people are complaining about in terms of the diagnosis, right? well, no. not quite. john langdon down (the one down’s syndrome is named for) spent a significant portion of his career performing questionable and unscientific bleeding treatments on patients in his care. james parkinson (parkinson’s disease) was part of a plot to poison king george iii (admittedly not for nasty reasons as the king was standing in the way of equal rights for citizens but still not exactly the behavior one expects of a doctor). thomas hodgkin (hodgkin’s disease) was an ardent and outspoken supporter of the liberia project, a way to separate black people of african descent from whites and keep them locked in a single place, where they couldn’t mix with or (scandalously) breed with other races.

what’s my point? historical revisionism. we look at the past and think these people lived in a situation where their actions can be judged by modern standards. and we are free to do that, of course. but we must be very careful not to assume that the people we would like to respect from a century or more ago lived lives that we would consider worthy of that respect on closer examination. that is in no way an apology for the actions of asperger (or, for that matter, down, parkinson or hodgkin). i am happy to condemn these people as the hateful examples of humanity that they so obviously were. what i am not prepared to do is accept the hypocrisy that is in place where people discredit certain individuals for their actions while ignoring the terrible things done by others, just because they like the results. adolf hitler was a racist, violent monster who killed untold millions and propagated hatred that still lives generations later. winston churchill, too, was a racist, violent monster who killed untold millions and propagated hatred (a very similar white-supremacist, antisemitic, anti-asian hatred, in fact) that still lives to this day and is in many ways the guiding principle for british culture and society. let’s be highly critical of the horrible actions of people in the past. but let’s be complete about it.

so i would happily see people’s names stripped from medical diagnoses. not just the ones who were horrible, actually. i think it’s a horrible idea to name medical conditions after people. but if we’re going to do that for all the people whose actions were reprehensible and monstrous, let’s do it whole-heartedly and have some less-historically-loaded names across the board in medicine.

the other part that appears to be being propagated of late, though, is a bit more troubling — the notion that asperger’s is an artificial diagnosis. there are a few problems with this. one is that a vast number of people received this as their clinical diagnosis when the name was still being used. the other is that, whatever name we put on it, there is definitely something causing the symptoms and saying the disorder is fictitious denies those people a clear diagnosis, something that gives many people not just comfort but a way to continue their lives, strategies to cope, etc. i was a teen when i was given exactly this diagnosis. while i believe the classification is questionable at best and the name troubling, the fact that there was certainly a problem requiring a name is unmistakable. yes, certainly, it would be better to put another name on it. but much of the rhetoric around this topic has been more to deny people with such a diagnosis in their past the certainty of knowing how to identify themselves, denying them a community of support. i don’t think that’s the intent, at least not from within the community. but for many people this has been the effect.

leaving aside the question of what to call it, though, let’s look at the issue of diagnosis. specifically the diagnosis of autism.

“autism” is a poorly-understood series of neurological abnormalities that can be assumed to be, though not necessarily proved to be, genetic in origin, though almost certainly not hereditary. what does that mean? it means an autistic brain works differently from, though not necessarily either better or worse than, an average brain. while the word is thrown around far too much lately without context and its definition has been bent so far out of shape as to have almost no coherent meaning, an average neurological system can be called “neurotypical”. that’s not to say that there is a specific neurotypical brain or neurology that is possessed by individuals. it’s a range of norms, though, and the vast majority of people fall within a small deviation of that norm in various measures, giving it a reasonably-meaningful clinical definition.

autism is not the only way people can end up with a neurology different from the norm but it is probably the most common. this is important, though, as it is often seen as a binary — either you are autistic or neurotypical. that is absolutely not the case. many people who are not neurotypical are also not autistic. so any diagnostic situation that sets up diagnosis as simply occurring because proof the other is not the case is spurious at best and manipulative in most cases.

this brings us to the real problem, though. while i certainly have issues with “asperger’s” as a diagnosis, i have a much larger problem with people being diagnosed with “autism spectrum disorder”. why? because it’s not a spectrum. i will say that again just to be clear. there is no autism spectrum. it’s a horrible way to look at it. technically speaking, it’s not really a disorder, either. but that’s a difference without any real effect. it’s the fact that people see it as a spectrum that is the real issue. it leads to ideas like “you’re a little autistic” or “you’re more autistic than them”. this is both wrong and harmful.

let’s take a look at an obvious and perhaps silly, though meaningful example. pregnancy is an extremely variable condition. it begins and ends at reasonably predictable points but how it impacts the body while it is ongoing is both unpredictable and vastly divergent from one to another. some gain vast amounts of weight and have visibly-different bodies after a matter of five or six months while others barely show effects at all. some encounter myriad side-effects while others continue to full-term with the child having minimal impact on their daily lives. some have incredible difficulty in the delivery process while for others it is quick and relatively simple. having never been pregnant, i am no expert on how it feels from the inside and this is certainly not a judgment of those who have gone through the process. i imagine birth is extremely painful and much of pregnancy is terribly unpleasant. but my issue is that nobody is “a little pregnant”. if you have more severe effects on the body, people won’t say you’re more pregnant than someone else. and, for that matter, someone who goes through their pregnancy without it impacting their daily lives in a meaningful way from these effects is not described as being “high-functioning-pregnant”. the whole concept would be, as i said, silly.

this is what is done with autism, however. the notion of a spectrum was originally proposed to show that there are various symptoms and that not all autistics exhibit all of them. it went on to describe the idea that even within these symptoms there are vast degrees of variability of severity. the result is that autism presents in many different ways because of the limitless combinations possible of which characteristics and their severity. much like in the case of pregnancy, however, none of these things make a person more or less autistic or turn it into a spectrum.

symptoms of depression are myriad and unpredictably-combined, presenting in limitless patterns that often change daily. yet a diagnosis of “being on the depression spectrum” would be met with completely-justified derision and immediately exposed as meaningless. there are many varieties of cancer, usually denoted by type of growth and, more frequently, location (breast, lung, stomach, pancreas, etc). we do not, however, talk about people as being on the cancer spectrum, despite its variability in presentation and effect. like cancer, actually, autism is not a mammoth, overarching diagnosis. cancer certainly began that way, as a catch-all term for any mutational cellular growth. autism in much the same way began as a diagnosis for all non-neurotypical effects.

we know far more about how neurology works now, though. what was (and sadly still is) called a single thing truly needs to be redefined as a group of loosely-linked diagnoses under the umbrella term of autism.

the most common way, though no longer popular, to do this was by classifying people as high/low-functioning autistic. the problem with this is that it made it sound like those classified in the low category had a more severe problem and those in the high category were better people. we can call this systemic ableism or simply see it as an example of human self-classification in line with selfish and prejudicial motives, which i suspect is more accurate as a description.

there are very clearly several sets of common behavioral effects of autism, however. the variation is not random. it is, to a certain degree, predictable. for example, autistics who lack verbal communication also demonstrate certain traits like physical sensitivity variation, temperature control problems, cognitive processing deficiencies and eye-movement and eye-contact difficulties. some of these are shared with other autistics but they tend to exist predictably when someone is non-verbal. conversely, those whose symptoms appear far closer to what would be thought of as obsessive-compulsive disorder often have high mental processing in both detail and concentration while lacking social cue understanding. these, too, tend to come as a group. this is an extremely simplified version of this division and there are absolutely not only two groups of autistics but i believe it clearly demonstrates the problem with a single name or diagnosis. this is not to say that autism isn’t a thing. it’s just to say that it is several things and it would be useful if instead of there being only a blanket term (which is certainly useful), there were names for the more specific groups, too, allowing those who experience those particular effects to more easily receive treatment and find others whose lives may have been similar — finding those who suffer from a similar problem is extremely difficult within the autistic community unless your symptoms are the most common ones and you respond well to the most common treatments because subdivision is often vague at best and more frequently absent.

i would welcome a diagnostic system that looks much like that used for diabetes, where patients are classified simply with a type number. still definitely diabetic, a clear diagnosis with all that entails both positive and negative. but a specific subcategory leading to more effective grouping, treatment and community. i can see a potential future where we are classified and identify as “type 4 autistic” and that has a specific meaning.

so, yes. we definitely need to stop using the term “asperger’s”, though we need to make sure all people who have received that diagnosis accurately can still be classified as autistic and receive all the benefits both societally and emotionally that a clear and unambiguous diagnosis entails. more importantly, we need to stop using the phrase “autism spectrum” or the classification of “autism spectrum disorder” to denote non-neurotypicals. “autism” or “autistic” are perfectly fine with me and probably the best option. it might be useful to remember that this word itself has a somewhat troubled history, though. it symbolizes that autistics are self-only, outside society or culture (from auto, self, as in automatic, autoimmune, etc) and that’s a rather troubling stereotype that really only applies to a certain subsection of the autistic community.

all that being said, the purpose of this is mostly to share information and encourage people to be a little less exasperated (ok, not exasperated at all), performatively-shocked, mock-outraged and such about the use of “asperger’s” as a term. yes, it’s outdated. yes, it’s horrible. yes, he was a degenerate. but let’s put it in perspective and if we’re going to use these things as judgments of medical diagnoses that have vast impacts on people’s lives, let’s think it through and be coherent, complete and caring as we do it. if you’ve lived a huge portion of your life identifying in a particular way and someone tells you you’re identifying with a diagnosis that doesn’t exist, this could send you into a horrendous spiral of failing mental health. i wouldn’t want to be responsible for that, especially not by the casual sharing and reposting of things that sound great and are trending on social media.

let’s try to be a little better about our own histories and treat these subjects carefully. i don’t expect you (or anyone) to take what i have said and believe or accept it wholeheartedly. i’m not looking to engage in a discussion with you or anyone else on it. this is publication, not community-outreach. i am a writer coming from a place of my own experience, emotions and knowledge. what i would encourage is that before you speak or write about this, especially in public but even to your family and friends, make sure you familiarize yourself with the history of the topic, read some papers and studies, talk to people who have personally experienced diagnoses (or have had difficulty getting them, for that matter, which is all too frequently the case). in other words, i encourage you to speak about this. but please make sure your words come from a place not just of best intentions but awareness, not just awareness of what people are saying in the global megaphone of social media but actual scientific and medical professionals, not just one of them, many. engage with the subtlety and nuance and ongoing debate. if you’re going to wade into this topic, know that what you say could hurt many people around you, perhaps your friend, in many cases those who are autistic and either haven’t yet been diagnosed or simply don’t share their diagnosis.

as in all things, it’s better to be quiet until you can be kind and gentle. i’m not the one who will be hurt by potentially-careless words because i won’t be the one hearing them. but those you would like to protect may suffer from them. and i think we’d all like to avoid that.

thanks for reading.

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

the king ain’t dead. and by king i mean president. trump survived his dubious encounter with the novel coronavirus and that’s probably the worst possible thing that could have happened to america. no, i don’t mean because it would be good if he died. that’s a whole other issue. but surviving the virus poses a mess of problems. and i really do mean a mess.

let’s take a brief look at the effect of surviving a potentially fatal pandemic on another uberconservative country and speculate on a future pathway for america. i say this not so much for it to be avoided, as it won’t be. more for those who might be interested in a modern equivalent of duck-and-cover. shelter in place without the need for an earthquake, you might say.

the first problem is confirmation bias. you know what that is even if you don’t know the technical term. it when you believe something and all the evidence supports your belief. think the earth’s flat? walking in a straight line without falling over is a pretty good confirmation. it doesn’t really confirm your suspicions but it certainly seems to. if you think you’ve got covid-19, every time you cough because you got too close to someone smoking (yes, it really should have been made illegal decades ago) or drank your coffee too fast and started to choke on it, you feel like that’s a confirmation of your suspicions and head off to the doctor to get tested (in whose waiting room you will be far more likely to actually contract the virus, unfunny ironies abounding in western medicine).

what does that have to do with this? there are two types of people in america in this crisis (not just in america but that’s the focus at the moment). the first type takes the virus seriously, aware that it’s dangerous in the same way a severe case of pneumonia is dangerous (and quite similar, if not in its method of infection, definitely in its symptoms and method of death, to an extent). this group of people wears masks, avoids any unnecessary social contact (no, distant contact isn’t going to save you — stay the fuck home, already), washes more frequently (which is a good lesson for a summarily dirty culture to start with — and this isn’t a racial thing — it’s a cultural norm that focusing on being thoroughly clean all the time is something better reserved for east asian cultures and is somehow unamerican but i suspect there’s something far more insidious at work there). these people are likely going to become complacent over time and switch to the other side but, for the moment, i suspect most are at least somewhat being careful.

the other side of that coin, however, is generally young and middle-aged conservatives. and no, that doesn’t mean it’s specifically rednecks, hicks or uneducated manual laborers. nor does that imply that anyone who works with their hands is uneducated or unintelligent. or conservative, for that matter. but there is a tendency for those who are uneducated to be more conservative. and a trend for those who are conservative to be more focused on freedom than safety, personal choice than common good.

what’s a mask for? that depends on the mask but face coverings in general are useful for one obvious positive effect and one far less obvious positive effect. they don’t really have any negative effects. it’s like wearing underwear. you’ve got nothing to lose. the positive effect? that if you are carrying a disease (no, not if you’re infected, specifically, just if it’s in your body, regardless), there is a good chance you won’t spread it to someone nearby. i would call that a fantastic positive effect worth wearing a mask for in public. it’s nice not to hurt people. but as that’s not particularly important to most people in western society (as evidenced by the almost complete lack of protective measure people take when those measures are to keep others safe), there’s a far more personal positive that everyone has apparently not noticed. the healthcare system was already overwhelmed before the pandemic arrived. it’s even more overwhelmed now. it’s slammed. borked. screwed. there’s very little healthcare to go around. and there’s a fairly significant chance you’ll catch something significant in the next year, whether it’s covid-19 or not. if you do find yourself with the novel coronavirus, however, you will likely need medical attention. and that’s in very, very short supply. you’re sharing it with all the people nearby. the people you haven’t necessarily been taking care to protect. so let’s put this in language a conservative can understand — they’re using up your healthcare opportunities cause you didn’t wear a fucking mask.

mocking people is an american sport. it’s something i’ve never understood. it’s also common in other western conservative countries like the united kingdom, canada, spain, france and germany. but it’s a horrible trend and becoming more and more prevalent. in particular it is the default reaction to any stimulus employed by the current president of the united states. do anything that appears “weak” like taking precautions that might save children’s lives? making sure you are careful so your elderly parents don’t die from a preventable disease? definitely weak, inhuman behavior as far as the government is concerned and worth of mockery, even during a nationally-televised debate. i’m not sure why it is such a cultural obsession, being physically strong. there’s no particular upside to it. strong people don’t live longer or experience more happiness. they don’t generally make more money or have more vacation time. actually, it’s quite the opposite. think of the people from your high school class who were bullied because they were “weak” in some way. what are they doing now? more successful than the ones who were overtly strong? i suspect so.

so what does all this have to do with the aftereffects of trump’s brush with covid-19? his supporters will take it as proof that the virus isn’t particularly dangerous. that prevention isn’t necessary. that social change isn’t needed and that they should force anyone who is demonstrating “weakness” to comply with the capitalist agenda — profit over safety, freedom over protection. trump, with the best imaginable medical care and early-diagnosis, excellent health before infection and no delays at all getting treatment, things that can be said for realistically almost nobody else in the country, has survived a disease that most people do eventually survive, anyway. many people also survived the spanish flu, malaria and the pneumonic plague (which is, realistically, a pretty accurate description of covid-19 but they don’t want to call it “plague” because that is frightening, as if people shouldn’t be frightened of something that’s both deadly and prevalent).

let me ask you a question. you’ve probably survived chicken pox. almost nobody dies from that disease. it’s far less deadly than covid-19 or even pneumonia. if someone else had it and you were at risk from getting it, would you take precautions? wash more frequently, for example? what about if your children could get it. or your parents? your grandparents? to prevent them getting an easily-avoidable disease? i suspect you would. yet you’re on the streets protesting against precautions for something that could kill you and them. or at least make your lives pretty terrible for a while. i’m not asking for an explanation. i know what kind of social programming goes into those decisions and i don’t care.

but from the perspective of someone whose life has been put on hold, stuck in a country where infection is rampant because people don’t take it seriously, unable to return to a place where things are far safer because simply going to an airport is impossible in an immunocompromised state, i implore you to do just one thing. think.

the up-sides of taking precautions are myriad. you could save yourself, save those you care about and, when it comes down to it, save the economy. a long, dragged-out infection process like what we’re currently seeing is what’s tearing the economy apart. while i don’t care in the slightest about finance and am a die-hard communist and pure egalitarian, you probably do. if everyone took the maximum precautions all the time, the virus would be removed from our society far more quickly and money-making could resume in earnest. what’s the down-side of precautions? perhaps you’ll be mocked for appearing “weak” to the ultraconservatives. i figure if you’re getting attacked from the right, you’re probably making the correct decision anyway. but that seems a small price to pay to keep your family as safe as possible. think it’s not a major risk? neither is the risk of getting killed in a car crash but i bet you make your children wear their seatbelts and you bought a car with airbags, right?

perhaps it’s time to stop fighting and just do what’s right not cause it’s profitable, not cause it increases your freedom but because it’s, you know, just good for everyone.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

today, i’m old. ok, now that i think more clearly on the subject, i’m not suddenly old. i’ve been old for a long time. i’m not sure where old starts and people will generally say no, it’s not a real issue and it’s all about how you feel. and i feel like a teenager. i’m sure i always will. but that mostly comes from the fact that i care about social equality, peace, tranquility and harmony. i care about people being safe and never allowing emotion to influence their decisions and actions. i am, in a word, an idealist. i’m anti-democratic, anti-profit, anti-corporate, anti-national and anti-tradition. so yes, if you’re looking for a word to describe people beginning college, it’s usually “anti”-something. and i fit.

but i’m not beginning college except for another year as an instructor (which, of course, this isn’t really as there’s a global pandemic and i’m stuck in limbo between teaching positions in a place where the national pastime is hatred and the culture is slightly more vulgar than incest pornography involving barnyard companions). and i haven’t been a teenager in nearly twenty years but it’s the thought that counts. except that my joints are closer to arthritic spasm than 420 and “party” is a word that conjures thoughts of rigged votes and floor speeches rather than dancing on the tables. having fallen off my share of tables at a point barely remembered in the past, i mourn the loss of happiness but i’m pretty sure i never noticed it when i was there.

that being said, it is customary once a year to reflect on the past, which leads to an interesting realization. culture is mostly about shame.

when i was a child, birthdays were a time of reckless and stupid celebration. i don’t mean teenagers getting loud. i mean ten year olds covering each other in shaving cream and beating the celebrating child in the back of the schoolbus. it was a nightmare and i was terrified of these things. i took to avoiding birthday parties because they were frightening — being autistic, at that time undiagnosed, i found the movement, the energy, the noise, the unpredictability overwhelming. i hated them like a fox hates barbed wire. that was ok, though. being alone at home was something my parents were always a little afraid of letting happen but i desperately wanted. school was hell because it was a combination of idiocy (and by this i generally mean the teachers far more than the students, who weren’t so much idiots at this point as uneducated — they’d turn into idiots later as a result) and rigid rote exercise. it didn’t matter what you knew, just that you did what was instructed, even when it was neither helpful nor correct. being taught things has never been a good place for me. being taught things that were obviously wrong has been a place where i tend to get into trouble with those in authority. i don’t do authority. i believe that’s something that people should never have over others. but that’s a thought for another day.

i wasn’t bullied as a child. which was great. i remember a few incidents where i was on the receiving end of unpleasantness but it was incredibly rare. most people who showed early signs of intelligence in a western culture were subjected to the most brutal physical and emotional abuse. it is societally accepted, expected and ritualized. you can think of it as the anti-nerd cultural dynamic. if you’re an idiot, you’re safe. if you’re smarter than that, you’d better take out some insurance for the first time you’re given a wedgie and shoved into a locker. why this is the case is the subject of many books studying western culture. none of them are satisfactory. as in many things, the east may not have the right answer but i can guarantee the west has the wrong one.

here’s where the shame part comes in, though. and that shame is so strong, it’s hard to admit and i’m not sure what the purpose of putting it in writing is except potentially to help someone else overcome such a thing by proxy. in a society where attention, good or bad, is something you are taught to crave, when my birthday came, i was terrified i would be ostracized, embarrassed and turned into a laughing stock in public. it didn’t happen. i was relieved. thankful. at peace for a whole other year. then i wondered why it didn’t happen. was i not good enough to even warrant their attention? my parents told me i was special but i’m sure everyone else’s did, too. i didn’t realize at that point that being able to do things faster, better and more efficiently, especially learning, was something that didn’t just make me “different” in the individualization sense but wholly atypical in the neurological one.

so for a brief flicker in the dark (which wasn’t dark since then, as now, i sleep in a well-lit room) of night, i desperately wanted to be treated like the other children. followed by hours, days and, as i now realize, years of shame for wishing to endure pain. for a second i understood the desire for inclusion that makes people endure painful hazing rituals and frosh tasks at college. then i felt ashamed for having wished to be included. and i still do.

of course, i long ago stopped wanting to be hurt and embarrassed. by the time i was a teenager for real, i was absolutely certain not only shouldn’t i be treated that way, society had it completely wrong and these things should be trained away from everyday life and children shouldn’t be given such ideas — i blame for this, as i do for pretty much everything else in society that is hateful, western parenting and children’s literature, the first of which needs to be overhauled in its entirety, the second requiring abolition. children’s literature is written using horrendous grammar, outdated and vulgar ideas to pander to the desire of parents to uneducate their children and confine them to the ultimate goal of western society — average mediocrity and conservative xenophobia.

so where do you go once you realize your desires are shameful? like all other humans, i didn’t talk about it. and i dreaded birthdays not simply as they would be disappointing and terrifying but they’d be shameful. i would feel guilty.

i also felt guilty for not wanting to be given things. people get pleasure from providing something they have bought or, preferably, made for you. i, as a neuroatypical, abhor change. even the slightest change. holidays frighten me. “special occasions” are things i dread and try to pretend don’t exist. getting presents changes my life. i avoid change. sure, we all need new things. but i try to minimize turnover. i am the epitome of the “buy once, cry once” mantra not just because things are expensive, which is where it comes from (mostly in woodworking and metalcrafts) but that acquiring new things often does, literally, make me cry from the change and the presence of more “stuff”.

i’m a hardcore minimalist. empty rooms make me smile. i like comfortable cushions and clean still air. i like blank walls and time filled with scheduled, imposed activity. i don’t like free time and full rooms.

anyway, i am old now. i’ve been putting off the shame of aging for many years, pretending i’m still as young in body as i am in idea. i guess i shall have to content myself with the fact that i will never devolve into the western disease of desperately seeking partners and family and forgetting what is truly important about life — improving the peace and harmony and tranquility and equality of all life, human and otherwise.

i still feel endless shame for many things, mostly thoughts rather than actions. but i look forward to a future when shame mountain becomes a peak in the distance rather than the scrap pile i deposit new material on every day.

someday, at least.

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

What did they say that stuck?

There are a few phrases that have stuck with me throughout my entire life — some of which I have already spoken of in recent articles.

• When in doubt, throw it out.
• They all take a shit the same way you do.
• You shall not kill.
• It’s better to be good because you have to be than to be bad because you can be.
• The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
  

Many more come to mind, of course, yet all of these have some things in common. They’re all fundamental precepts that I live every day. They’re all practical advice. And they’re all things that were repeatedly said to my by family members, whether that be my mother, my uncle, my grandfather, my grandmothers. They have certainly served me well. It’s the last one that I think might be mostly on my mind this morning, though.

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. In other words, being noticed is dangerous. Being invisible is safe.

Nearly half a decade ago, I was brutally attacked in the middle of the afternoon by a stranger in a public place. I have still not recovered either physically or mentally from the attack yet it is only one in a long series of targeted assaults on me, nearly all of which have taken place in brightly lit public places within view of groups of bystanders who simply let it happen.

We have laws in this country. Any developed nation has many laws. But what people often forget is that laws aren’t designed to stop a person from committing a crime. They’re designed to make a person weigh their choices. It’s not about not doing something. It’s about figuring out before you do it whether the punishment is worth suffering for the crime you are about to commit. For example, if you wanted to steal a car, you would know that if you are caught you may spend several years in a prison. So you would weigh the likelihood of you getting caught with the car (if you’re not going to drive it, there’s not much use in having it and disassembling the thing for parts is a whole lot of complication that I’m not even going to think about here) and the years living in a cell against the possible benefit of having the car. The vast majority of people will look at this equation and quickly decide that, whether or not they lust after a new set of wheels, it’s not worth years of prison time to get it. The vast majority, though, is not everyone.

The same goes for physical violence. If, for example, you live in a disastrous situation, prison suddenly doesn’t sound nearly as prohibitive. Perhaps living in a room that’s not freezing in the wintertime with three meals a day prepared for you and no requirement to go to work, that could be an improvement on your daily life. This is a huge problem with modern society — we allow people to drop into situations that are far worse than prison and expect them to still see criminal prosecution as a prohibitive determiner on behavior. There was a well-known sixth-circuit judge from New York whose name I cannot remember who once said that a college graduate with an apartment on the upper east side can’t understand why anyone would risk years in prison to steal a few hundred bucks from someone at gunpoint. A banger from Queens, though, sees it not simply as no worse than his life already is but as an escape, even in some ways a vacation, often with friends from home, all expenses paid. That’s of course not to say that this jurist had anything against people from Queens, just that socioeconomic background is a pretty good determiner of motivation and how much of a deterrent criminal procedures are going to be for someone.

But for some people, it’s even stranger as an equation. Some people simply don’t do the thinking. They don’t do the calculation. Perhaps more people than ever have been taught that they should embrace their emotions and desires and act on those. We live in a society that pushes the notion of being proud of who we are and indulging in it rather than always striving to be better people. So when you think you want to reach out and hurt someone, perhaps because you think they deserve it or because they’ve done something of which you don’t approve, you do it. No law is going to stop you if you don’t think about it. That’s the key to laws. They only work if they train people into a mindset of stopping action because they are afraid of the consequences. To be afraid of them, you have to think about them. And if you don’t think before you act, they can’t possibly stop you from acting.

Sometimes this happens because of our society’s acceptance of alcohol and recreational drug use. Now I have to comment at this point that it would be incredibly odd for someone to smoke a joint and then go out on a violent rampage. The vast majority of drug users are using them for personal relaxation — marijuana, for example, usually has the effect of diminishing any potentially violent thoughts and actions. Those taking tranquilizers are very unlikely to become violent offenders while using the drugs. But there are a few drugs that do tend to make people more violent. And what’s worse is that those drugs also tend to make people unlikely to be able to think about things like consequences of their actions.

So we have a society that encourages drug use (in particular, alcohol, the worst offender in these cases) and compounds that by encouraging people to act on their desires and impulses without either thinking or feeling guilt about the consequences, especially not before acting. We are creating a society that simply doesn’t need laws as we know them anymore. They’re obsolete. Preventing crime by making people fear the consequences of their actions doesn’t work if people are neither afraid of nor thinking about them.

So what about the hammers and nails?

I am different. My Japanese culture is strikingly odd to people in the west, especially here in the UK. My fundamental allegiance to equality — not to equal opportunity or equal worth but equal everything, everyone having the same things, nobody owning more than others, no wealth or privilege or status or authority — tends to get a severely negative response from people. My hatred of democracy and conviction that propagating representative government simply becomes an exercise in mob rule and persecution of the minority along with a disaster in that the majority almost never chooses the right path, this makes me an object of derision among western populations who have been raised to believe that democracy and self-government are synonymous with freedom and happiness. I believe that we should never indulge in what we want or what we desire or express emotion in our actions. I believe that all life should be preserved — that we should never kill or cause to be killed, which is a huge problem for those who wish to put dead animals inside their bodies and call it lunch. As I said, I am different.

And, of course, I am genderless — nonbinary, if you prefer the awkward yet more common term for it. I am reasonably comfortable being called “she” if people really have to. I will accept “they” if people have a weird relationship with object language. I prefer “it” if people have overcome their silly arcane prejudices against nonhuman items of discussion. What I cannot abide is being called “he” or, far worse, “sir”. Every time someone calls me “sir”, I feel tears in my eyes. “He” is nearly as bad. It’s just an emotionally painful experience when people look at me and for some reason see a societally-determined gender of male, that in some way I am masculine to them. Gender is artificial. It has nothing to do with biology. It’s about expectations and performances. Somehow I am not performing well enough to be rewarded with an acceptance of my being completely lacking in gender. And this is sad.

But that is what makes me a target more than anything else. I have been brutally assaulted on more than one occasion because of the way I speak, the way I dress and the beliefs that people know I hold. Particularly, those that relate to gender. Why do people feel they have a reason to do this?

It is about how they are trained to see violence. They believe many things about violence. They see wars and read the history of battles. They are taught to believe that men are strong and powerful, that they seek conflict and are only men because they can overcome and overpower others, control and possess and conquer. This is the notion of masculinity that is propagated. It leads to many things, including the rape culture in which we live, yet I believe the most problematic thing it leads to is that people believe that violence is justified and acceptable. It’s far larger than using that violence for sexual things, which is a huge problem in itself. But the greater problem is that people are trying to make a decision as to when violence is permissible, justified and acceptable rather than accepting the moral absolute that violence is never acceptable.

If you fight, you are wrong. If you think about fighting, you are wrong. If you display anger, you are wrong. Always.

I am attacked with words and fists because I am different. Sometimes I believe that’s because people are afraid of what’s different. Mostly, though, I believe it’s because people want to exercise their violent desires and society has taught them that you can use violence against others under certain circumstances — when you feel disrespected, for example. And since I have nothing but disgust and disdain for most people, they certainly feel that. It is, of course, absolutely no justification for being violent. I am no threat to these people. I will not hurt them. But they hurt me.

What’s worse is how that reaction is received. Not by me, of course, as I am likely unable to respond in any way, either departed or unconscious on the ground. By society in general. When I was attacked most recently, one might expect that a fractured skull and shattered bones would result in a quick prosecution and a lengthy prison sentence. But no. They quickly found the person responsible and summarily dismissed everything. Video evidence and a dozen witnesses? No problem. But they had no thoughts of conviction not because they couldn’t prove that the thing happened but because they imagined that the judge and jury, either in this case, would be lenient because they would see it as justifiable violence.

As if there were such a thing.

If someone attacks you and you defend yourself, perhaps that would be explicable. I don’t think it’s justifiable but I could see a sensible argument for it. But when someone beats another person nearly to death and that person has neither attempted to make contact with nor succeeded in doing so, with objects or fists or feet or anything — what is the justification of which they speak? Cultural justification. They feel their beliefs are threatened. That their way of life is under siege from my thoughts and words. Because when you can’t fight back with words, it’s ok to fight back with fists. That is the society in which we live.

I have learned to be the invisible short nail.

I spend my entire life well aware of the hammer that seeks me.

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

What meal will you always remember?

As most of you have likely already surmised from my writing, I suffer from a severe mental difficulty, that I am obsessed by, consumed by and terrified by food and eating. I fight this all day every day. I can still write and teach and speak. But it makes life unimaginably painful. I have tried almost everything possible to improve the situation but it has only gotten worse. More than anything, I blame the inept public medical system in the UK and Canada for their incompetence in attempting to address not just mine but everyone’s medical issues, especially mental health ones. It is a system designed for emergency response rather than preventative or long-term treatment. The specialists and generalists are both paid regardless of success rate and their success is in no way linked to outcomes or even effort. They have no incentive to help. Waitlists are incredibly long, people often waiting years for basic treatment to begin but worse than that, patients are simply ignored and dismissed. This is not a lack of funding. It’s a lack of intent. There is plenty of money for healthcare in these countries. There’s just far too much paperwork, too much administration, far too much oversight and absolutely no reason for any of the medical professionals to want to do anything but sit in their offices and dismiss patients. If you got paid the same amount every day for sitting in your office ignoring everyone or actually doing a good job, which would you choose to do? If you think you’d work hard, you might be a far better person than most. Most humans are lazy and will do as little as possible to get by in life. What’s wrong with the system? Simply put, we are rewarding laziness and dismissiveness.

It’s an easy problem to solve. Private medical practice works. As much as I am a hardcore communist who believes in the elimination of money and commerce and the forced equality of possessions and results across all humans, we live in a capitalist society where money is the one and only mark of success. It is what people are motivated by. Sure, some people are motivated by an intrinsic desire but those people are few and those desires pale in comparison with the ability to make money and have a pleasurable life — except for a very small number of people who truly do sacrifice themselves for the greater good. If you haven’t noticed, though, most of those people are already very rich before they start doing it. Most but not all, of course. But still most.

The solution is to eliminate public provision of medical care while maintaining public payment for it. Regulate costs to keep them manageable and reasonable but instead of paying the doctors and nurses and technicians directly, provide the money as it would be given by an insurance company, to cover the payments for individuals seeking treatment. That way, the medical professionals are competing for business and good treatment is rewarded by more success, good reputation, increased patient requests and, as a result, far more profit and a better income. Lethargic and lazy practitioners are punished and eliminated to a large extent from the system. Excellent doctors and nurses and technician are rewarded, as they should be, given more than they get now for doing a good job and helping people. Those who help more people and give more attention, more care, more treatment get a better life in return. Those who don’t help leave the profession and make room for those who will put in the time and effort and caring.

Sure, it’s our human duty to care and be compassionate to others. But if you want to see just how much that isn’t working, spend a few hours in a public hospital in the UK or in Canada. Then go to a private hospital in New York or California and see how much better it could be. Ask people in the waiting room in any department how long they’ve been waiting. How much attention they feel they’re getting and if the treatment and testing is reasonable given the level of their suffering and how long they’ve been fighting with the illness. Ask if the doctors seem to care about them. If you haven’t noticed that public healthcare is failing, you’ll be stunned by the results.

If you hear politicians talk about how important it is that people not have to pay for medical treatment, they’re absolutely right. If you hear them say that the only way to accomplish that is to have public-maintained healthcare, they’re off their heads. It costs vastly more for each patient seen in either of those countries in the public system to be treated than it does in the private system. Private hospitals are vastly more efficient. They have far less overhead but the medical professionals are paid better. They embrace new technology and are not hampered by the whims of the government. The follow regulations but they’re not forced to maintain massive staffs and stick to rudimentary paperwork — on paper, in many cases, or public works projects for digitization. The government should keep us safe and healthy. It’s a useless hospital administrator, though. It should play to its strengths. Pay the bills. Let the professionals do the rest.

What does this have to do with the meal I will always remember? Because I remember every single meal. I am terrified after I eat, every time. I spend hours, sometimes days, shivering in panicked fear. It sometimes stops me from being able to accomplish anything but most of the time I am relegated to sitting and working through the rest of the day in unbelievable panic. I believe there is a solution to this, that someday I may be able to eat a meal and forget about it after. That I might be able to prepare to eat in the moment rather than thinking about everything I’m going to eat for hours, days, sometimes even weeks before — every measurement, every amount of time to prepare, every single detail. But because of the medical system in the countries where I have lived, I see no real way out of the mess because the only way to have doctors pay attention to you, unless you’re unconscious and bleeding from the head, is to pay for that attention. And without getting better, my earning potential is intensely diminished.

Of course, there will be many who tell me that if I believe the American medical system is far better, I should get out and move to America. And yes, I would love nothing better than to be able to go back to the west coast where I am so much more at home and spend the rest of my life there without once having to entertain the thought of returning to the hateful shores of the once-imperial British Isles. I’d get on a plane this afternoon given the opportunity. But there’s a problem. I’m not an American.

That doesn’t stop a lot of people who want to live there but they have to have something before they can go and it’s a fairly large and significant something. They have to have a job offer — which then allows them entry into the country. And if I were able to get hired for a full-time position that would pay me enough to live and to get the treatment to solve these problems, I’d probably not need the treatment anymore. How are we spelling catch-22 these days?

So I will have to fight alone until I don’t have to fight anymore. Then I can go to the home that’s not mine but feels closer than anywhere that legitimately is. There are few places I even feel slightly at home. Without money, none of them ever will be. Why is money the thing that determines our futures? Why do we still cling to an ancient system where those who have money do well and those who don’t aren’t really equal in any sense of the word? What does it matter if we have the right to vote if we don’t have equal ability to choose where to live or where to study? The world isn’t going to hell. There is no handbasket. There is no descent.

The world is hell. Right here, right now. Hell isn’t other people. It’s that other people are better, are worse, simply aren’t other people but are players in a game. Until we are equal, not in opportunity but in life, practical everyday life, we won’t be free. We’ll just be trapped.

And those people who tell you that equal opportunity makes us free, that money doesn’t lead to inequality as long as we work hard, that free speech is what’s important, not that we have the same daily lives, you’ll notice something about those people. They all have money. Not always masses of it but always plenty. They’re not afraid of how to pay for their next doctor’s appointment or rent payment. Money is like air. It’s only a problem to those who can’t get enough of it to live.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

When did you know glory?

I have done many things in my life that other people seem to think are impressive — starting university early or getting a job as a bank programmer in my teens, for example. But I don’t feel anything other than a mild sense of accomplishment at most of them. And there’s the issue of hypersubjectivity. When I have done well in a course, I don’t really see that as something that I’ve accomplished. It’s that I’ve been assigned the grade by someone. Maybe they really like the way I write or the way I think. Maybe they just like me. But I am under no illusions about it being objective, because I have written good assignments. I believe I have indeed written well and produced excellent work. But I don’t see any real connection between doing that and getting a high grade. Much as I see no real connection between doing work badly and getting a poor grade — if there was a connection between them, the courses in which I was assigned a terrible grade would be a sign of having done bad work and those with good grades would be that of excellent work and I am absolutely certain that’s not the case.

I was, in my second year at college, given a final grade of five percent in a course. Not just in a single assignment but a course. The professor obviously didn’t like me — not because of the grade but because she made that very clear in class. I didn’t want to fight so I figured I’d just ignore her and do the assignments and have it over with that semester. But when I received my final grades (which, at that point, was done by mail, as there was definitely no online interface for it, that being the nineties), I had completed seven courses, five of them 90% or above, one in the high 80s and 5. Five. I was shocked someone would do that. I mean, if you’re going to fail someone, you can definitely do that — and I definitely have on occasion when the work wasn’t up to expectations. And if the work is completely useless, I’d have no hesitation at all about assigning zero. But five is a calculated insult.

Anyway, I availed myself of the appeals process to have the final paper reread by an independent marking committee at the university and was assigned a new grade for the course. It wasn’t even close to five. It was in the mid-90s. There was a subsequent investigation into the professor’s conduct and a significant portion of her grades were changed, although I can’t remember how far back they looked into it. Last I checked, a few years later, she had still not returned to the department but I hadn’t had to take another course in the department in awhile and I soon graduated and went to another school for grad studies. My point, though, is that glory is an odd thing. Most of the things we work hard to achieve aren’t dependent more than vaguely on that work. Most of the things we really achieve are given to us mostly by other people based on our personalities and how much they like or hate us rather than being accomplished.

Except writing and studies and music. Sure, there’s external recognition of those things. But people are always talking about how important it is to be self-confident. I think the idea is far overrated but this is where it does indeed matter. You know whether you’re doing well. You know if you’re studying something and understanding it. You know if you’re making good music or haven’t graduated from shower-singing and car stereo karaoke. Perhaps that’s where the real intrinsic sense of achievement, of glory arrives.

Music is what really comes to mind, though. I have a love-hate relationship with Christian church music. I love a lot of it and hate a lot of it. It’s not that it fluctuates. My personal view is that there has been an incredible amount of beautiful music written for the church — Palestrina, Montaverdi, Byrd, Tallis, Bach to name a few. But here’s the problem I have. The English had a fantastic level of talent at one point. And then, as the Baroque period took over, it disappeared and never again recovered. The result? Who was the last English composer whose work is worth performing? Not sure. But it was definitely in the Renaissance. You might ask about Handel but seriously, we’re talking about someone who is German and wrote in a Germanic style. Sure, there have definitely been some contemporary English composers in the religious music scene but how far back does that go? Twenty years? Maybe thirty before you run into the absolute worthless detritus of Rutter and Vaughan Williams. So going into a church is often a musically painful experience. You can go in and hear beautiful Latin masses and Bach chorales. Or you can get Victorian excrement. It’s hit or miss. I prefer the certainty of spoken ritual unless I can be sure.

But I have no illusion about having to believe the text to set it to music. Neither do most choral composers, I suspect. The reason this comes to mind is that the Gloria, a movement of the standard Christian mass (not just the “ordinary” but all modernized versions, I believe) is something that I have set to music more times than I have fingers.

The question, though, is one of knowing. Have I ever known a piece of music in the way people mean that? Perhaps. Do I believe that’s a valuable exercise in the choral scene? Not in the slightest. There are so many choirs that go to the extreme of memorization, of imposing that instead of using the score to be perfect in performance, relying on the memory. It doesn’t work. It’s a huge amount of effort and the music generally lacks polish as a result. It’s nothing but fundamentalist silliness — just because choirs in ancient times may have performed from memory doesn’t mean modern ones should. They often had a very small repertoire and could sing the same things in performance every day. There was also often no other work for the singers, them being hired specifically to perform and having the entire week to learn the music from memory. Added to the fact that in much of that time period in question the scores weren’t standardized — nor could a lot of the performers even accurately read the words.

If a director is expecting memorization, it’s nothing but amateur theatrics. Looking impressive. As if holding a score on stage is in some way not impressive. Yes, pop singers can do it — but look at the relative complexity of the music. Memorization makes things incredibly difficult for us as composers and arrangers. We expect the singer to be able to read the score and sing the music that’s written. Not to have to learn it. Shakespeare wrote for memorization. As a result, his language is stilted and programmatic, expectation-based and rhythmically patterned. It kills innovation and diversity. It makes things sound the same. Things that were once seen as merits and now are an affront to the compositional art. The takeaway from this? Memorization, in music as in all other forms of education, is worthless. If you’re being asked to do it, it’s probably for show and will have an unkind effect on your performance in the long-run. How sad.

[estimated reading time < 1 minute]

Every writing teacher (and every writer, for that matter) will tell you that it’s far more important to write often than to write a lot. So I’m challenging you all to turn the miserable, wet month of March into a time to sit down for a half hour or an hour every day and write a really short piece of fiction. I’m going to give you some help with ideas, of course, but you’re definitely welcome to participate by writing whatever you like. It’s totally up to you. Feel free to send me a message if you’d like to get some advice on your writing or your process. Otherwise, good luck and happy writing. Don’t feel too bad if you can’t make it work every day. Just do it as often as you can — if 31 pieces takes you six months, so be it, you’ll still be proud of yourself for getting it done!

Enjoy!

#marchshorts

Click for the details!

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

Which clock have you seen many times?

Two clocks come to mind. The first is rather esoteric and displays in binary. That can come later. The other, though, is the one that sat on my parents’ bedside table when I was little. There was a series of them that lived on my own but every few years, given how much I moved around when I was trying to sleep, they would die. Mostly because they could only survive being knocked onto the floor in my sleep so many times before they would give in the towel. And since they weren’t lasting all that long, my father would drop by one of the department stores and pick up something that looked like it might have a longer life expectancy from floor-impact death. The only thing that saved them that long was that I had gloriously-high-pile carpet in my bedroom. It saved my feet from a lot of pain, too, but that’s rather less related to clocks.

But the clock in my parents’ room, although it did get replaced a couple of times, was much hardier. It didn’t get dropped on the floor so I suspect that has a lot to do with it. But they’d last for years and then get replaced with a new version of the same. I don’t remember them ever changing significantly but they definitely did over time. But what was the key in my mind was that they were tiny Japanese-made clock radios. In white. And I don’t remember a single time when the radio was turned on except by accidentally hitting the on button while putting down a glass of apple juice or some such. But the alarm sounded like a cross between an air raid siren and a school bell — of course, that’s when schools had actual bells and not recorded chimes and when we did drills in case by some lucky accident hiding under a piece of plywood with spindles for legs would protect our fair skin from a nuclear holocaust. Which is exactly what felt like it was on its way when waking up to those noises. I think Sony and Panasonic got together in more recent years to make a collective decision about waking up, that if you think the army is about to break down the doors, it doesn’t bode well for a relaxing breakfast. Hence neutral beeping. And, what I much prefer, if it’s necessary at all, the alert sounds from the Tokyo subway — if you’re not familiar, think gentle synth broken triads.

We didn’t really do television and movies much as kids in my house. And that’s something I credit with a huge amount of my ability to think properly and read for hours. If you are hyperstimulated by a box of wonder, you’re likely to expect that kind of in-your-face entertainment from everything you encounter and books and education simply can’t compete. Not that watching movies is a bad thing. It’s just a bad thing to expect as the baseline for all experiences in your life. There’s something else about it, too. Broadcast media doesn’t just tell you what to watch and listen to. It tells you when to watch and listen to it. That means that if your life contains a large amount of it, you are training your subconscious to be unable to make decisions about when to do things — those decisions are all made for you. You just sit at the television set and watch what happens to come on. I’ve never understood the desire to sit and watch “something”. I will certainly sit in front of a screen and watch a show. But I sit down and turn it on at the beginning, turn it off at the end and that’s the end of the experience. I suspect this has a lot to do with not training myself to sit in front of the television for hours on end as a child. It’s got no attraction for me now.

There was no television in my bedroom, certainly. That would have been unthinkable. But we weren’t encouraged to spend a lot of time either in bed or in our bedrooms. Eventually, I did acquire a desk and computer in there but that came rather later, when I was nearly a teenager. Most of the time, homework and reading and study would be done at the dining room table or on the couch and what television watching there was would be done out in what we called the “family room” — what some would refer to as a den but with far more natural light than the name would imply. But when illness (as it always does in humans) arrived, being out in the middle of the daily activity wasn’t going to work very well for recovery, especially when lying under a blanket was the quickest way to renewed health.

This wasn’t all that frequent a thing, of course, but it did happen. The earliest memory I have of it is when I acquired chicken pox — what a truly atrocious name for the thing. It’s worse than the actual disease, some disgusting implication that the grease and entrails of poultry are contaminating your being and that’s why you suddenly have itchy spots and a fever. As a child, it’s not usually all that bad. I think I was six or seven when I first contracted it — my sister was spared at that point, interestingly enough, and got it when she was a similar age, years later. Anyway, despite its usual mild course, I wasn’t so lucky. It was quite severe and I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of three weeks in bed with raging fevers, covering myself in ointment.

There became a bit of a routine. I would be awake through most of the night, reading and listening to soft flute and string music (no, I’m not kidding, I really was that kid) but completely unable to get any rest. I drank endless cups of fruit juice and made hourly pilgrimages to deposit it in its flushing-dependent place. But by morning, I was glazed and dizzy. But there was sunlight and everything felt a bit better. So once my parents were up and about, breakfast being well underway (to the hateful sound of the CBC morning news, something I hated then and still to this day abhor, broadcast radio, especially the most populist of all of it, sensationalized morning news and drivetime talk), I would wrap up in wool socks (courtesy of my grandmother’s fingers, her knitting being both full of talent and prodigious, thankfully for my feet) and loose fluffy clothing and cross the hall to take up residence in their bed, where there was a mercifully warm electric blanket, a tiny (yes, it was probably all of eleven or twelve inches at that point, barely larger than an iPad of today) television that received two channels, a vcr (what fun!) and the latest iteration of white, Japanese clock innovation blinking red digits at me as the minutes turned into hours and hours turned into days.

I have always loved animation. Sadly, the animation that I enjoy the most wasn’t easily available in my childhood as it is now. Actually, most of it hadn’t been made yet. Even in Japan, what we think of as modern animation didn’t really get started until the nineties and two-thousands so in my eighties childhood, I had to make do with what was on offer. Thankfully, there was one absolutely stunning example of artistic prowess in western animation. Tintin. Sometimes it was in English, sometimes French, made really little difference to me either way. I enjoyed it more then than even I do animated movies now. Yes, I’m well aware most of it is borderline racist but it was written as an artistic fight against the Germans and the Soviets so it has an interesting political undertone. My mornings were children’s cartoons (and Tintin, which is questionably child-friendly when you pay attention). My afternoons were mostly taken up with reading, interspersed with cooking shows. I certainly wasn’t going to watch the news (who the fuck cares?) or sports (maybe if I was the one playing them I could see the attraction). But for someone for who food is absolutely terrifying and the very notion of eating is beyond disgusting, I was curiously attracted to the calm presentation that people showed as they prepared meals. That being said, I actually enjoy cooking as long as it’s not food that I have to eat.

Anyway, I did recover from the chicken pox and everything else I had to fight through as a child. Some of the other things that relegated me to bed have had far longer after-effects, one might say, especially emotional ones. But my daytime sleeping amid the sunshine has always been far more restful than anything that happens at night. Waking up after one of many lentil-soup-preceded naps feeling that my fever has finally broken was always a welcome experience — especially since it meant I wasn’t trapped in school being hurt by the words and actions of others, especially the hateful teachers I had as an elementary student. I opened my eyes and the red numbers told me I had achieved some rest. Thanks be to clock (forever and an hour).