First work I’ve put online in ages.  Enjoy, and comment as you will–I’ll mod them, however.

via Andrew Sullivan:

Right now, I’m correcting 8th grade compositions on theme “what is your dream for the future”.  One of my students wrote this sentence: “I want to be a police men in the future”.

To use this as an opportunity to teach about plural/singular nouns, or to suggest ‘police officer’ as a gender neutral alternative: that is the question…

Tilt-shift photography.

I’ve been giving some crazy thought to investing in an SLR camera.  Shots like this are just one more reason why.

To my amazement, a gem from a member of the editorial board of the National Review (via The Opinionator at NYT):

[referring to comments opposing the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and co. in Federal Court] These readers disagreed with my decision to welcome a trial here in New York —precisely because they fear that it will be a fair trial, in which the defendants may be acquitted. Here’s one: “I think what has people very worried is the perception that our legal system is so biased in favor of the accused that a conviction is hardly a sure thing. . . . Many things can happen which would result in our enemies walking away free; that is my worry, and I suspect the worry of many others.” Here’s another: “It is not that we fear 12 jurors cannot be found to mete out justice in New York City. It is that we fear that defense attorneys will obstruct justice and make this trial a circus of the worst kind. Can you say ACLU?”

In other words: Some people oppose this trial precisely because they fear it will not be a show trial. They recognize that there is always a chance that the prosecution might lose. I ask readers to stop for a moment and think about what that says about our country.

Potemra pretty much hits it out of the park here.  I’ve always been bewildered by the question of whether terrorists ‘deserve’ constitutional protections or the process afforded by the United States criminal court system–not because I think the answer is ‘yes’, but because it strikes me as beyond irrelevant.  Do those who attack the Justice Department’s decision suggest that while someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad does not deserve a fair trial, individuals such as Ted Bundy, or domestic terrorists such as Scott Roeder and Eric Rudolph do?  What about Timothy McVeigh, or Nadal Malik Hason–individuals against whom the evidence was and, respectively, is, rather insurmountable?

The question isn’t what these despicable creatures deserve.  Not a one of them, empirically speaking, deserve any protections, rights, comforts, or provisions whatsoever.  And I doubt there’d be much argument that in the retributive sense, at least, the justice appropriate to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad is beyond the capability of any society to mete out.  Had the Attorney General announced at his press conference that KSM would be burned, drawn and quartered on Wall Street, I’m sure there would be some who’d be disappointed at the leniency of such a sentence.  But having a threshold of heinousness at which we throw trials out the window completely negates the purpose of having any trials for any purpose.  It seeks to codify the principle that the more serious the crime, the less we as a society care about justice for the victims, and about truly punishing those responsible, so long as someone is punished–swiftly and mercilessly.

So no, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his band of murderers do not deserve the protections they will be given.  And that frankly could not matter less.  Because when we seek to deal out that which is deserved without regard for that which is fair and consistent, we become an ugly, ugly society indeed.

Much as I love reading the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Feministe, I’m making a conscious effort these days not to deliberately stoke my outrage at the hysterical right-wing.  Life is too short to get bent out of shape about the latest outbursts from the Michelle Malkins of the world, and frankly there’s usually nothing truly new to see there–nine times out of ten, it’s the same hate, different day.

But I truly had to laugh at the kerfuffle that President Obama created while in Japan this past week by offering a bow to Emperor Akihito upon meeting him at the Palace in Tokyo.  The right-wing blogosphere, predictably, wasted nary a second in jumping on this gesture as an example of Obama’s degredation of the American position in the world, and a self-effacement that signaled weakness to an ally.  Politico even devoted a thread on ‘The Arena’, a pundit forum, to the question “What Does Obama’s Bow Say?”

The number of times each day that I bow to people, be they above or below my status in the hierarchy of things, is too high to count.  Janitors, secretaries, construction workers, my vice principal, elderly people on the street, checkers at the grocery store, and even just my friends.  Every workday begins with an office meeting that starts with a staff-wide collective bow to each other.  Every class begins with the students standing as one to bow to the teacher–a gesture that the instructor invariably returns.  Yes, there’s a little status involved in how deep one bows, and there are various types of bowing involved in instances of, say public apology.  But suffice it to say that bowing is far more common in Japan than handshakes are in America, and if I have hips that still function once I leave, it will be a small miracle.

So, what does Obama’s bow say?  I think it says that he has a State Department protocol officer who is at least minimally competent (though not competent enough to advise him against the awkward handshake/bow), and that Obama himself might, in all his education, have heard about probably the most distinctive cultural practice in Japan.  Those who are critical of the President frame their hit pieces in terms of ‘deferring to royalty’, or placing himself–and thus, implicitly, the entirety of America–on a lower plane of respect.  Maybe there’s some truth to the latter, actually, and it’s a good thing in the eyes of Japan.  Showing humility here is a sign of wisdom and respect, not timidity or cowardice.  To criticize a gesture that, had it not been made, would have been perceived as an enormous slight by the Japanese media that swarmed around the President’s visit, suggests that the hysterical Right would rather stoke the collective American ego than make a harmless, 45-degree bow that leaves a lasting impression on our most important Asian ally.  What, after all, is the point of any President traveling overseas if the most important thing is to send messages that will look good to Americans?

On the note of throwbacks to my days at Concordia Language Villages, what does it say about me as a person that I can still perform this dance in its entirety to a group of uproariously laughing Japanese senior citizens?

Personally, I think it’s worth a bullet point on my resume somewhere…

If you don’t happen to live in the D.C. Metro Area, there’s a chance you’ve missed one of the larger news stories of the week in that region.  Tonight, at 9 p.m. EST, John Allen Muhammad–the mastermind of the D.C. Sniper attacks that left 10 people dead back in October 2002–will be executed at Greenville Correctional Institution near Jarratt, Virginia.

The Washington Post, in its coverage of what will likely be the final chapter of a nine-year-long news story, has a series of articles up ahead of tonight’s execution.  As in most capital cases, they touch on some of the thorny ethical and legal issues in play–an alleged attempt by the Virginia courts to circumvent  the usual timeline for review by appellate courts, lingering questions about Muhammad’s competency, among many others that were likely beneath the notice of the Post.  But really, by the egregious standards of the American death penalty system, Muhammad’s case is about as open-and-shut as it gets.  From the legal and political perspective, there is no ground to be covered here.

But the series caught my attention because it had the courage to touch, however briefly, on the deep reservoir of emotions that keep this relic of justice lurching forward.  Most articles written about judicial executions in this country–and I read most of them–tend to include a few sentences about the victim’s family, a good quote if one can be had.  Statements of forgiveness for the inmate, or simple expressions of relief that at the fact that ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ is, exactly) is finally over, tend to make the cut easily.  Statements of satisfaction are touchier, but in particularly brutal murders might pass the test.  It covers all the bases, and leaves it at that.  There are, after all, wire reports to file, and articles that are quick and clean lend themselves well to deadlines.

What so rarely makes it into print, then, are statements like these, given to the Post’s article by Marion Lewis.  His daughter, Lori Lewis Rivera, was shot by Muhammad while vacuuming her car at a gas station in Kensington, Maryland on October 3, 2002:

“I want to see what he made me see,” Lewis said. “He forced us to look at our little girl laying in a coffin. I want to see justice done. I want to see him take a last breath. . . . I want to be able to describe it to the rest of the family.”…Lewis said he would favor a more “gruesome” method of execution. “Let’s give the guillotine a shot,” he said…

Virginia corrections officials said Muhammad will have a chance to say some last words.  Lewis said he wishes he could, too. ”It would be short and simple: ‘I’m here to see you die . . . son of a bitch,’ ” he said.

I find it very difficult to stand in judgment of a passionate outburst from someone in Lewis’ position.  I hope if I ever found myself grieving for a loved one lost in a violent crime, I would be able to forgive, or at least to resist the inclination toward visceral hatred.  But forgiveness, by its very nature, is not something that I can demand of another human being, and certainly not for a moral transaction in which I have no part.  I hope that I would be different.  But confronted with such trauma, such an assault on the anchors of love and happiness in my life, it would be near the height of arrogance to say with even an ounce of certainty that I would be.

This is what we do not like to see about the death penalty.  When we think about it all–and the fact that executions are often held in the dead of night, with few witnesses, no photographs, and strict confidentiality, speaks volumes about how rarely we like to do so–we like to think of it as impassive, and unswayed by passion.  I remember reading something that then-Governor Ben Nelson said in 1994, after he signed the death warrant for Harold Otay in Nebraska.  To paraphrase, it “We are all feeling the pain of this sentence, but it is Nebraska law”.  The legal and philosophical merits of that approach are pretty-much ironclad.  Law applied based on the whims of enforcers would be an entirely new, and far worse, form of cruelty and injustice.  But it’s a vivid reminder of how sanitized we like our system, in which everyone’s just does their unfortunately, but necessary job.

Marion Lewis’s remarks open a window, however small, into the hatred and–there is no other word for it–bloodlust that lies behind capital punishment.  When you strip away the hollow and statistically de-bunked arguments for capital punishment as a crime deterrent, the rush to stand under the banner of ‘victims rights’, disavowals of responsibility, or the pointing triumphantly to Levitican logic, you are left with this image: hundreds of people standing outside the Florida State Prison in Starke on the morning Ted Bundy was electrocuted.  Standing, holding gruesome signs, and, after Bundy’s death was announced, getting to their feet and cheering, wildly. Without that sort of collective howl for vengeance, there would not be a death chamber anywhere in America.

True hatred like that which consumes Marion Lewis is one of those funny things.  It is simultaneously a moral absolute, but also understandable, forgivable and even condonable.  And we have little choice but to forgive it, lest we abandon compassion completely for one who so thoroughly deserves all that we have to offer.  Maybe that gives human beings a de facto license to not be better than that. So be it.  But the death penalty, in the end,is a mechanism of celebrating that our worst instincts, and perversely elevating them to the level of virtue.  Whatever just cause drives it, hatred is still hatred.  Just as whatever the context, be it war, self-defense, or what have you, ending a human life is never worth a peep of applause.  Sometimes such tragedies are necessary, of course.  That’s the world.  But necessary or otherwise, they lower us.  Maybe not in the adrenaline rush of the moment, or the euphoria of retribution, but in the end, they always do.

Tonight, John Allen Muhammed, the murderer of ten people that we know of, will be put to death by the state of Virginia.  And while a three-drug cocktail is pushed into his veins by an anonymous executioner, Marion Lewis will be watching through a one-way glass window.  I hope that he is able to muster some iota of forgiveness, compassion, and yes, even love, for the person strapped to that gurney.  But from the sound of things, he will judge the world a better place for Muhammad’s death.  And we will be the lesser for giving a voice and power to that logic.

The Japanese love English words.  And I don’t mean the sort that wind up on engrish.com.  I mean complicated words that have been adopted–mangled only by the pronunciation limits of the Japanese alphabet along the way–into the language.  I thought I’d heard some pretty good ones while I was studying in college.  セクハラ(sekuhara) , which means ‘Sexual Harassment’ is a personal favorite, as are ワーキングヲマン (Working Woman) and ホチキス (Hochikisu) for stapler.  Yeah, the stapler manufacturing company [although as the fine folks at WWJDIC remind us, it's a bit more complicated than that] . You pretty much learn about this on the first day of Japanese 101, and it’s rather difficult for me at this point to muster up a serious laugh at linguistic assimilation.  It’s one of those things that most people get plenty of good laughs about when they start learning Japanese, but loses its entertainment value pretty soon after your mind starts being slowly pulverized into a quivering pile of gray jello by kanji and keigo.

But then last night, I discovered the word ディンクス.  That’s transliterated as ‘deenkusu’. It puzzled me for a little bit, but then I realized that in this case, an entire acronym had been imported: DINKs.  Double Income, No Kids.

Turns out that sometimes, katakana never loses its humor.  Who knew?

When I was studying in Cairo almost two years ago, a few friends of mine returned to our classroom at AUC after lunch with a very interesting story.  Rather than sample the fare of the many nice restaurants in Tahrir Square –more accessible than usual, with an exchange rate of 5£ to the dollar—my friends had opted for one of the ubiquitous corner fruit stands in that section of the city, and a few of their delicious tangerines.  As chance would have it, the proprietor of their chosen stand happened to speak some English, or at least enough to ask them where they were from in the United States.  When one of them answered “Chicago”, however, the stand owner’s eyes widened in accord with the newfound gravity of the situation.  He lowered his voice and, leaning in toward her, asked with the utmost seriousness: “Are you carrying your gun on you right now?”

In the nearly three months since I arrived in Japan, I’ve had cause to ponder that conversation quite often indeed.  A big part of my job here, I’m learning, is being a cultural liaison in addition to a language teacher.  Particularly out here in Tohoku (the region of the main island that is north of Tokyo), there are relatively few people who have traveled in the United States beyond the obligatory Hawaiian Honeymoon, and scarcely a handful who have lived or studied there for any length of time at all.  As a result, some of the images that Japanese people have of life and customs in the U.S. are as strange as they are revealing.  Some of the highlights:

• Americans are practically a militia unto themselves.  I’ve been asked a couple of times about how many guns I own—and always about the specific number, as the notion of Americans not being armed to the teeth is hopelessly naïve.  My friend Koji, for instance, traveled to the U.S. back in August with my predecessor for about ten days.  The photo albums from his trip feature at least four shots of him at sporting goods shops, pointing excitedly at the wall of hunting rifles behind him.  And that’s all before you flip to the pages of his excursion to the firing range.
• Americans are reckless drivers.  My first three weeks here in Japan, I received daily reminders about traffic safety, including specific threats of being thrown in prison for speeding, talking on my cell phone, and drunk driving.  I can’t help but notice that my supervisors still drive at least five k.p.h below the speed limit whenever I or the other new JET are in the car.
• American teenagers are, by and large, delinquents. The notion of a school dance, I’ve found, is truly appalling to most Japanese teachers and parents.  That’s not to say the idea is any more palatable to their American counterparts.  But if you happen to have children of your own, think of the movie Animal House, but replace the lead characters with your offspring, circa seventh grade.  The expression on your face is roughly akin to that of my colleagues when they picture American middle schools.
• Random Street Crime is Everywhere.  Having survived walking around New York on my own, conventional Japanese wisdom has it that I lead a charmed life.

Outrageous as these perceptions may seem, particularly to those of us who have lived inside the sheltered bubble of Madison, Wisconsin in recent memory, pause for a second to consider something: relative to Japan, where gun ownership is all but verboten, the legal limit for driving is a whopping 0.0, and the homicide rate per 100,000 people is .44—that’s approximately 13 times that of the U.S—all these perceptions are, to a large extent, true.

I like to view my job here, and really language education in general, as being in the service of breaking down barriers of prejudice and inequality.  I can’t fight every one, or even many of those battles from a classroom in Northern Japan, but I do what little I can by living and learning with humility, and working diligently to be a positive influence on my community in an area that has had more than a few negative encounters with Americans in recent years.  But whenever I’m asked about one of these or countless other impressions of the United States that, while terrible, also happens to be true, I am thrust into perhaps the greatest dilemma I’ve faced here: how to strike that balance between an obligation to the truth, and trying to build constructive intercultural relationships.

I don’t believe that genuine, meaningful interactions can be based on obscuring truths.  And while Japanese culture demands a certain obliqueness in discussing such things—a trait I’m attempting to master—I desire to represent the America that is constantly striving to improve, first and foremost by owning up to its failings and its past.  That takes on added importance here in Japan.  A nationalism that does not allow one to admit shameful mistakes continues to victimize thousands of survivors throughout East Asia today.  Even though the stereotypes I’m asked to comment on daily are far from the truths of comfort women or Nanjing, being a stalwart cheerleader for American greatness is not a way of presenting one’s country that I am prepared to model.  Not ever, but certainly not five hundred miles from the Korean coast.  Not here.

Yes, affirming the post-apocalyptic state of some corners of America day in and day out takes its toll.  And not just on me, but on the primary goal that led me want to be on JET.  It’s difficult for me to say that I’m encouraging students and others whom I encounter to step outside of their comfort zone, and to open themselves to new ways of thinking, living, and understanding when, for the sake of honesty, I reinforce the negative impressions that many Japanese have about the United States.  I could try to give the details, and talk about how some problems are confined to only small sections of the country.  Depending on the situation, that sort explanation is all that my Japanese ability will allow.  But really, that only suggests that I have no interest in solving endemic problems that plague millions of Americans.  And that the majority of us do is perhaps the only greater shame than the fact that these problems exist in the first place.

It’s a painful irony that encouraging internationalism and representing one’s country are ever at odds.  And I try to remember that what I confirm or say will not be the only factor in forming one’s perception of a society. But given a choice, telling the truth will always win out over giving a uniformly good impression for me.  The first step toward intercultural understanding starts at understanding better where one comes from, perhaps.  It might not meet with Sarah Palin’s approval, but I can at least have some hope that I’m modeling a way of thinking for my students that is as valuable as anything else they might gain from this cultural exchange.