I understand where they are coming from. Honestly, I do. Besides pointing out that Michelle Bachmann makes the crazy-eyed lady who played the Mom in “Malcom in the Middle” look like Betty Davis, the mass media says all sorts of things that don’t jive with how the far right sees the world. Things like…

• Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to invade Iraq.
• Dinosaurs were on earth long before humans were. (Oh, and “Eve” was a black australopithecus hominid who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.)
• If you don’t have enough money, you can reduce spending *or* raise more of it through taxes.
• Global warming is real.
• Stories of gays in love, and, crazily enough, in marriage!
• President Obama is, indeed, an American.
• etc.

If you don’t share these sentiments, statements like this sound incendiary, or even downright treacherous treasonous. They become clear evidence of a bias in the media against your worldview and in favor of people with whom you don’t agree. It’s hard to fault this logic – The media is indeed biased and hard right conservative viewpoints don’t get nearly the airtime or space that more liberal viewpoints do. The question shouldn’t be whether it is biased or not, but to what it is biased and why. I’ve asked this question before of some of my conservative friends, and never been able to get a coherent answer. The question goes like this:

Given a free press with minimal oversight and regulation, such as we have in the United States, and given very minimal media financing from the government, such as we have in the United States, and given a free market with minimal oversight and regulation, such as we have in the publishing industry in the United States, why would the media bias itself in any particular direction?

Since I’ve never been able to get an answer, I’ve attempted to answer it myself, and the answer lies firmly in capitalism.

The mass media is indeed biased, but it is biased toward making money. Jon Stewart, in his recent appearance on Fox News with Chris Wallace, put it a bit more cynically by claiming that if anything the media was biased toward sensationalism, but the idea remains the same whether sensationalism is the lowest common denominator or not. The media is owned by organizations that exist to make money, nothing more and nothing less. As such, they look at the market and provide a product that is designed to get them the highest rate of return possible on their investment. What this means is that when Rupert Murdoch saw an underserved market and created a product to serve it, birthing Fox News, he didn’t do it for politics any more than Ten Turner did when he created CNN, or when General Electric created MSNBC with Microsoft. These media outlets were created for the same reason that the automobile industry creates models as varied as the Prius, the Taurus, and the Hummer: Different people want a different product. The designers or managers of these products may indeed have been successful because they were predisposed to think in ways that made these different models successful, but the purpose was not to get the world to believe what they did. It was to make money.

Let’s think about this for a bit. We all can likely agree that different people want different types of vehicles. They want these different vehicles because of many different reasons, some of which are based on hard requirements and others which are based on perception and personal preference. A consumer may buy a Ford F250 because they have to haul a massive trailer for work, or because they pull a boat up to the lake every weekend. That’s a hard requirement. Another person, however, may use an F250 only to commute, but they perceive the F250 to be safer than an alternate vehicle. Or they may simply have, for whatever reason, a preference for it over, say, a Ford Fiesta. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these choices, and in a free market we are all allowed to make them as we see fit, with companies competing to capture our business by providing products that match our requirements, perceptions, and preferences as closely as possible. We expect this competition, and it would never cross our minds to complain about a ‘bias’ in the marketplace simply because there are more large trucks sold every year rather than small compact cars. We might complain that the market doesn’t offer us enough choices for the particular type of vehicle we want to purchase, but we all understand that this is not political bias, but a function of economic demand.

Why don’t conservatives recognize this in the media market as well? There is a ‘bias’ in the media, but it is a bias stemming from Adam Smith’s invisible hand, not from any liberal elitist conspiracy. The bias exists because more people want a centrist approach to how news is reported than want a conservative perspective. The bias also exists because Rupert Murdoch capitalized on a changing market quickly and very effectively, capturing it in the same way that Apple has captured the market for iPads: Other companies may indeed want to come in, but Fox has created a very high barrier to entry. The remaining old-line media outlets stay clustered to their original centrist positions, and if you prefer Fox News, they all feel liberal. They feel liberal, however, not because they are pushing a liberal agenda, but because everything looks liberal when you stand as far right as Fox does.

The bias exists because the market segment demanding a conservative take on the news is a fringe segment of the overall news market. Put another way, if you enter a crowded room and go over and stand against the far right wall, everyone is to the left of you. They are not, however, to the left of you because someone made the room incorrectly. They are to the left of you because of a choice you made. That is not bias by the room, it is bias by you. It is also instructive to consider that the left wing anchor outlet for mass media is MSNBC, which has a much smaller audience than Fox News does on the right wing. If Fox viewers can logically complain about a liberal media bias, then MSNBC viewers should be able to complain even louder of a conservative bias. Of course, they’d both be correct, because they inhabit the two tails of a marketing bell curve where just as in any market or population there is a large group of people in the center surrounded by a thinner and thinner circle of fringe participants as you move towards the edges.

Undoubtedly the market for news is different than the market for most other products. Primarily, I would argue, this is because the hard requirements when selecting your news source are typically few and far between. We select our news sources based on timeliness and convenience, but other than those requirements our choice comes down mainly to perception and preference. In the cases where there are additional hard requirements, as with business media like The Wall Street Journal or a business outlet such as CNBC, the real bias stays in the editorials and away from the fact-based reporting that makes up the bulk of the product. Just as with that F250, you don’t want to push away the consumer whose hard requirements you have met by adding something that they don’t like, such as lace seat covers or hot pink trim.

For reporting on social issues, politics, and other topics with more room for opinion, when we see a media outlet saying something that doesn’t match our sensibilities, the only thing we have to fall back on is perception and preference. We cannot, in the absence of other information, hypothesize that the reason a particular choice was made was because of a hard requirement. This is why you end up with headlines proclaiming “The Queen of Rage” and get the response that occurred. In this case we have a very politicized (She is a politician after all…) topic that would raise hackles somewhere no matter how it was handled. Newsweek, I am sure, knew this and tried to capitalize on it by making a sensationalist story that very effectively garnered them a large amount of free publicity and, I am equally sure, a jump in their weekly circulation. Is that bias or just capitalism in full swing? I don’t think that you can effectively argue anything other than it is simply our markets working the way our core capitalist ideology says they should. It allows all ideas to be heard in relative proportion to the people who adhere to those ideas, and by accurately reflecting our society through the unfiltered lens of the free market, it gives us a better understanding about who we are as a country and what we believe. It is not bias. It is a reflection of our society.

There is one area, however, where blatantly spinning an article to suit your audience is neither beneficial to your consumer nor to society as a whole. This is when ideology overrides reality. It used to be that the mass media was very concerned with getting the facts right, but as both heavily liberal and heavily conservative media outlets have expanded there has been a growth in inaccurate and indefensibly partisan reporting. Whether it is MSNBC with its smaller footprint or Fox with its much larger one, the amount of spin, selective editing, and outright falsehoods that appear in these media outlets today has greatly increased. Neither side is innocent of this, but I would be dishonest myself if I didn’t say that I think that Fox is by far the biggest committer of this type of bastardized ‘reporting’. That, I believe, goes back to Mr. Murdoch and his undying commitment to winning in the market as opposed to behaving in an ethically sound manner, so it has nothing to do with politics – just the person at the top of the heap of that particular pile – Remember, this is also the guy who gave the go-ahead to The Simpsons and many other “liberal” programs.

In any case, falsehoods and misunderstandings are what a healthy news organization should be designed to rid society of, not burden society with, and to have major players in our media ecosystem foster ill will and misguided decisions while nurturing incorrect understanding about our world should not be tolerated by anyone, whether or not they agree with the message being sent. I’ve said before and will continue to say it until the day I die: Facts matter. In this case, the fact is that there is no “liberal” bias or any other bias other than a market bias. Someone needs to explain this to the folks over at Fox right away — at least this falsehood can be corrected rather quickly.

But do we really need to look at that level of detail? The Obama 2012 budget has a clear 19.27% of total spending dedicated to our Defense budget. That’s just shy of Social Security total spending at 20.04%, but add in Veterans’ Benefits and you end up with 22.53% of total US Government spending being dedicated solely to defense and the support of people who worked in our defense. Is the world really such a scary place that we, the most powerful,  richest, technologically-advanced country in the world, need to spend almost a quarter of our budget on feeling safe? Is that last marginal dollar being spent on our security really the providing the best return on investment that we can get?

To understand, it helps to look at US military spending compared to military spending around the world — After all, maybe we just spend more because we’re bigger. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has been compiling data on global military spending for many years. And before you run off thinking that this is a liberal Scandinavian snow machine, think about this: SIPRI is funded largely by the Swedish government. Sweden is a major arms exporter, so knowing who has the biggest military budgets is just good marketing research. For reference, about 1% of Sweden’s GDP is arms exports, which is approximately double the percentage for the USA.

So, how does the USA stand in terms of how much of our GDP we spend on defense? We actually come in 9th in the world for 2008, which was the last year for which I could find data. Here’s the list for the top 20 countries.

Percentage of GDP Spent on Defense 2008, Source SIPRI

Looking at that list, you see a lot of unstable places — Iraq, Georgia, Chad, Lebanon — so the initial reaction might be that we need to be spending at least as much as these guys — After all, they could become a problem. But we’re talking about percentages here, and these countries have itsy-bitsy economies. Not one of these countries has an economy as big as New York City — In truth, not one of them has an economy half as big as New York City’s. What this means is  that one percent of our GDP is HUGE compared to one percent of theirs. The same chart above, but changing the percentage into dollars,  looks like this.

USD (millions) of GDP Spent on Defense, 2008 (2009) Source: SIPRI, Google

We dwarf the other countries, most to the point of insignificance. The largest other country on the list is Saudi Arabia, who gets most of the weaponry and training from us.

But what about China? They must be huge, right? They just announced a stealth fighter (And only 30 years after we did!) so perhaps they’re the big threat we need to pour billions into defending against?

Well, it turns out that China is number two to the USA in terms of money spent on their military. On the face of it, that makes sense because China is the world’s second largest economy. Here are the actual numbers.

So we outspend China almost 7-to-1 in defense in real dollars, and almost 3:1 in terms of percentage of GDP. And don’t forget, China is #2 in the world in defense spending. And we outspend them almost 7:1. To put it in perspective, if the USA did not increase its defense budget, but simply kept it at the current level, and the Chinese increased their defense budget by 10% a year for the next 20 years, they’d finally be at the same spending level we are at right now. Somehow I think that over 20 years we would notice the buildup and could develop an appropriate response with plenty of time to spare.

Here’s the full list from SIPRI on global defense spending at almost all countries. North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Myanmar are the only significant countries not included, simply because of lack of data.

Global Defense Spending, 2009. Source: SIPRI

If you do the math, the USA comes out with 43% of global defense spending according to SIPRI, and while it is certainly true that every country hides some of its military spending, the black boxes that are US  intelligence budgets dwarf anything else out there. The SIPRI numbers also do not include Veterans’ benefits or foreign aid that gets used for military purposes, so it is not a stretch to see the USA coming very close to the 50% mark in a more holistic view of defense spending.

There is one place, however, where the Chinese absolutely did outspend us, at least in terms of percentage of GDP. When the economy turned sour in late 2008, the Chinese initiated a stimulus package that totaled USD$586 billion. Smaller than the US stimulus package in dollar terms for sure, but in terms of GDP it was enormous — a full 13% of GDP. For the US to have done the same would have required a stimulus package of around $1.8 trillion, and we came nowhere close. To put it another way, the Chinese stimulus package was almost 6 times bigger than its defense budget. For the US to have done that would have required more than $3 trillion.

What it comes down to is something we’ve been told countless times over the past twenty years: The Chinese are better at math than we are. It also seems that they’re better capitalists. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who sees irony in the fact that a dictatorship spends more on its economy and less on its military than the supposed leader of the free world. Or maybe I am. Either way, we need some cosmic Suze Orman to shout “Denied! Have you lost your mind?” to this defense budget increase and to any that come for, say, the next 20 years.

We can afford Social Security. We can afford Medicare. We can afford health care. What we cannot afford is our defense budget. You want to drop $40-$100 billion from the US budget next year, that’s the place to hit hardest and first. We’re stretched thin as a country right now and because of that we also need to stretch our dollars. That last marginal dollar is more important now than it has ever been, and it is extremely hard to argue that defense is where it should be spent. President Obama made a great speech (Referenced here by me before in a post.) during his campaign that talked about defense in terms of police, firefighters, teachers, health professionals, and other parts of our society that provide for defense against problems that come up from within our country, not from without. Seems to me that he was on the right track. Spend the money at home and on our people, not overseas and on our defense industry. That’s where that last marginal dollar will make the most sense.

I look outside and decide not to open the window. My taxi is scuttling through the margins of some construction site that has pushed itself out into the roadway, stirring up giant clouds of dust. The construction site, like so many others in India, has a big sign touting the arrival of yet another IT center, and it shows an artist’s rendition of a  gleaming block of glass and steel set against an improbable background of trees. Near the sign, a slowly revolving line of Indian women goes between a giant — but shrinking! –  pile of sand on one edge of the site and, pails of sand balanced firmly on their heads, another steadily growing pile on the far side where they dump off the pail and trudge back through the dust for another load. I can’t figure out exactly what the purpose is — the way the site is arranged, the original pile of sand could just have easily been dumped where they are now manually transferring it one small pail at a time.

Suddenly the taxi skids to a halt and the driver curses something in Tamil. I look at him and he smiles back through the rear-view mirror. With an Indian head-bobble he gestures to the front right of the car, and as I peer out the window I see a baby goat still wet from its birth. It is all wobbly-kneed and trying to move toward its mother, who bleats at it from nearby.  A dapper young man in a dark suit that seems straight from Seville Row sees me looking out the window and laughs before lunging at the two goats, causing the mother to scramble away while the newborn kid shakes with fear so hard it almost falls down. He then turns his back, deep into the conversation with whomever sits on the other side of his Blackberry. I notice that his shoes and lower pant-legs are filthy with construction dust while his head is shiny with pomade. A diamond stud glints from one ear.

As we continue on toward the hotel, the Sangeetha restaurant I ate at last night (All Veg! 29 Establishments Around the World!) has an Audi A8 pulled up in front of it. It’s a nice car, and it looks startlingly expensive next to the bullock cart piled high with rope that slowly moves between it and me as we wait in traffic. The cart is being pulled by a barefoot man who looks like he is 60 years old. He’s probably younger than I am.

I lean back into the seat and think about going home tomorrow. India is the one place that I go to that tires me out as much mentally as it does physically. It’s a sea of barely contained chaos that seemingly threatens to explode at any given time while never quite making it there. It makes me tense in a way that no other place does, but at the same time I always come away impressed at what is being done and thinking about what could be done. As my local friends point out, truly anything’s possible here, unlike China, because India is the world’s largest democracy and everyone has the freedom to become whatever it is they desire.

That’s a lie, of course, just like it is anywhere in the world where poverty, lack of infrastructure, and social inequality are present. The man pulling the bullock cart was almost predestined to do that work from the day he was born. His caste and community foretold a limited education with a life of backbreaking labor. The beauty of India right now is, however, that this man’s children have a genuine chance of breaking this cycle and moving from the ant-lines shifting sand to a desk in an air-conditioned office where they will shift bits of information instead.

The little Maruti’s engine revs and strains as we pull up a short slope to my hotel entrance. It is all granite, marble, and chrome under bright lights, staffed by a giant Sikh in full doorman regalia who lets me out of my battered car and leads me through the metal detector so that I can quickly get into the cool and spacious lobby. My driver eases the car around the corner out of sight and I breathe in the fresh air I have been craving.

The lobby is full of businesspeople, both international and local, and could be anywhere in the world. But it isn’t. It’s in India, and when I arrive in my hotel room and go to close the curtains I look out and see where the taxis go. They are huddled in a typically Indian way, unorganized and haphazard, ready to go back out again when called. The drivers are squatting in the dust.

As I take off my jacket, I notice that it has picked up a bit of the taxi funk and that I will need to air it out. Almost simultaneously I see my driver below by the taxis. He has just seen something as well and I follow his eyes to a small boy of perhaps seven or eight running across the open space. He’s dressed in a school uniform of bright white shirt, dark pants, and black shoes. His father sweeps him up in his arms as he gets close and I now notice a woman walking toward the two of them. She looks poor and tired, the same as my driver, but even from four stories up I can see the pride and hope in how they interact with their child. I watch for a while as they stand there and then my driver walks over to a car and flips on the headlights. The boy sits in the door of a nearby taxi, opens his bag, takes out a book, and begins reading. His mother and father squat in the dust nearby.

Here’s the first few lines of the American monthly update.

こちらのメールをご覧いただけない場合は、こちらhttp://link.aa.com/r/9PM23E/KN0JO/CJ864D/UHBTJN/WZXB4/7M/t?a=9PM23E&b=04MEI&c=EXM85X1&d=LT7M9F&e=1&f=7b0b25646801738e8c3からご覧ください。

mailto:americanairlines@aadvantage.email.aa.comをアドレスブックに加えてください。

この E メールを英語でご覧になる場合は、次のリンク先にアクセスしてください： http://link.aa.com/r/9PM23E/KN0JO/CJ864D/UHBTJN/TV5LM/7M/t?a=app.aa.com&b=9PM23E&c=04MEI&d=QO87X&e=EXM85X1&f=LTM9F

“Okay,” you’re thinking, “So you can read Japanese. Lah-dee-dah.” And you would be right, I can. Lah-dee-dee. However, there are a *lot* of non-Japanese who move here and must have the same thing happen to them. Most of them cannot read Japanese. American obviously understands this as well, which is why they so kindly provide the final link above to see this e-mail in English just in case you cannot understand it in Japanese.  Too bad they explain this in Japanese only…

(It’s the last sentence and link, btw, and I’ve altered the links because with them American also allows you to see my account details without having to log in. They seriously don’t get this whole digital world thing.)

Uff da.

Reloading the Surveyor's Intrument?

To be very, very clear, I do not believe that Sarah Palin has any direct connection to the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and I think that it is extremely unlikely that one could ever lay responsibility for something like this on a single poster or slogan. That said, she cannot be allowed to claim that these were “surveyor’s symbols like you see on maps” as her media aide is saying now.

The screen capture of her Twitter post shown here is still a live part of Ms. Palin’s feed. It points to the Facebook page here . She also refers to the “bullseye” message here.

To portray this as anything other than an emphatic underline that these are gunsights is political asshattery of the highest order. You don’t, of course, reload surveyor’s instruments, and Ms. Palin knows this. If she really wants to be the bigger and better person, she should follow her own advice. I don’t agree with much she says, but “the more honest you are about the past, the more likely it is you will gain the support of the American people” statement she posted here rings true.

I’m not the first to say this by any means, but this tragedy can become an opportunity if we use it to enforce some introspection and honesty upon our political system. Calling for 2nd Amendment “remedies” or using violent rhetoric of any sort in politics is wrong. Note that I’m not saying that it should be illegal. This is something that should transcend any need for laws and should spring from a place far deeper in our souls than any political or legal concept; It should be taboo. Given her lightning rod status in US politics, imagine the impact of Ms. Palin making a public pledge to refrain from using violent imagery or words. A pledge of this sort by Ms. Palin would almost certainly force the middle and left to follow suit (While you are at it, Ms. Palin, make a similar pledge to not use any more PAC money — Look at the trouble it caused you this time…). If she really wants to make America a better place, this would be a great way to start.

In the end, the only thing we should be targeting is our lack of honesty as a citizenry. When we accept utter lies as truth because it makes us feel better about who we are and what we believe, how can we expect those who lead us to take the more difficult road of introspection, honesty, integrity, and tough decisions? We flap about and expend great energy  demanding these qualities from those whose ideas we oppose, but the truth is that we should demand an even higher level of commitment from those we support. We’ve all seen it in our families — Criticism hurts most when it comes from close to the heart. It also is the criticism that is most likely to take hold and make a difference.

But they’re wrong. All of them. The “American” in American Dream isn’t possessive, it’s purely adjectival. The American Dream is the dream of opportunity, nothing more and nothing less. It is a dream shared of course by many Americans, but also with dreamers across the whole world. A tailor in Calcutta bending over his cloth, a rice farmer in Vietnam working in his field, a shopkeeper in China tallying the day’s sales, or a carpenter in Mexico framing a house have the same dream. It is the idea that if you obey the rules, work hard, and try to be a good member of society, you will be rewarded with success, and, yes, maybe that house in the suburbs. It is a dream that has perhaps best been realized in America, but it is owned by the world.

We must be careful, however, not to tie the American Dream to only material things. It is about potential. It is about getting back from the world what you put into it, and also about giving back to the world when you get a bit luckier than the person down the street, the next city over, or across the border. The American Dream, in the adjectival sense, is simply aspirational. It captures the very human desire to better ourselves and to build a better world for our children. America, for all its problems and follies, is in many ways the best we as a species have been able to achieve. The world knows this. It’s why we are admired, despised, hated, and loved. We are – or at least could be – anything to anyone.

And that’s where things get sticky. Aspirational dreams can become nightmarish quagmires when we continually struggle towards them without seeming to get closer to the goal. Tied too closely to material success, the American Dream transforms into a horrible race of keeping up with the Joneses. To prevent this, the focus must be on the dream, and the dream must change as the people dreaming it change. Americans who ask “What happened to the American Dream?” don’t get it. They don’t understand that you can’t look backward for the American Dream because it is inherently a forward looking construct. They don’t get that while they may be actors in the Dream, the Dream is not only dreamt in America. They don’t get that the Dream never ends, and that every generation has necessarily different aspirations.  Without that, the value of the Dream disappears and we fall back into the trap of trying to buy our way to the next level of happiness.

For much of the late 1990s and into the new millennium the Dream became less attractive. The world changed and much of America did not. Sure, parts did. Silicon Valley innovated with a speed not seen since the Renaissance, and Wall Street brought in quants and used some of that technology to launch a revolution in the markets. Capitalism won the day, but somewhere along the way we lost sight of the nonmaterial things we were losing. We gave up on the idea of a greater good, and when we did that we gave up a part of our collective soul. Unfortunately, the part we lost was the part that dreams.

America is going to survive the current financial, structural, and social schisms that now threaten to overtake our lives. To achieve this, however, we need to stop the multitude of delusions that afflict us. We need to realize that the American Dream is only that, a Dream. We deluded ourselves into thinking that we could pay for things today with money borrowed from tomorrow, and that somehow the Dream would make things work out all right. It didn’t and it won’t, because it can’t.

We need to reflect on what made America great. It wasn’t people of a certain nationality or skin color, it wasn’t members of a particular religion, and it certainly was not because the system of government America offered was radically different than other places. What made America great was that the people who came here were willing to work hard, they were willing to persevere in the face of adversity, and they were willing to learn to live within a new system, a new society, and a new culture. They were willing to do all this because at the time the potential and opportunity in America were outstanding, and they wanted a shot at building a better life. They were the original Dreamers, and it is from them that the Dream spread and became what it is now.

Today, America still has its Dreamers. The immigrants of today may not look like or speak the same languages of the original Dreamers, but they and their children share the drive and hunger of those original Dreamers all the same. Now, however, America also has a huge number of people who were born here, grew up here, and who have lived the Dream. Only some of them don’t think so. They look at their home, their car, and their TV, and they wonder why all of them aren’t bigger or newer. They look back on the gains their parents made, and they feel that they should have more. They feel as if the system somehow shorted them on what they were due. They’ve bought into at least the material side of the Dream, but they’ve forgotten that the Dream isn’t a promise. The Dream only shows what’s possible, and those possibilities constantly change. None of us can reclaim the American Dream of our forefathers because it doesn’t exist any longer.

In two weeks we will go through another election cycle, one that promises to be a milestone in American history. Americans on both sides of the aisle are aghast at the financial situation the US has found itself in after years of spending without reason or reward. It is our challenge as US citizens at this time to find the political will to know we have some hard times coming, to accept that fact, and to make the cuts and raise the taxes necessary to balance the books. It is our challenge as Americans to prove Marx wrong and show that Capitalism is not inherently corrupting, and that it is possible to better a society through progressive social reform while still maintaining the efficiency and drive of a capitalist system. It is our challenge as Dreamers to take it upon ourselves to fix things now so that our children have a better world in which to live in the future.

It’s time for America to reset. Two years ago we took a first step in this direction by electing a President who spoke of hope, of possibilities, and who evoked another era and man who also spoke of dreams. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the importance of President Obama’s arrival in the White House showed clearly that the United States was reevaluating itself, what it was, and what it wanted to be. The world cheered at those elections because the world had already dreamt them, and we showed the Dream to still be alive and true. But the Dream moves on and the world moves on. The economic potential and opportunity in America is being challenged by China, Brazil, and other models. The countries of Europe have changed radically in the past 30 years and now in several cases outpace the US both in economic growth and socioeconomic stability. The Dreamers don’t just dream of America any longer. They have options that previous generations didn’t have; they can seek their Dream elsewhere.

It is inevitable that the time will come when America is not the largest economic power on earth. We do not, however, have to lose our role as a leader. It is critical, in fact, for America to maintain it, but we need to do so not by force of will or force of arms. We need to do it by force of spirit. We need to recapture the indomitable spirit of the pioneer, of the bold face willing to try new things and forge a new way. Most importantly, we need to remember that the Dream will forever be changing and that the ability to adapt always beats the desire to hold on to the status quo.

So, go and vote. Make your voice heard. But before you do so, think about the American Dream and what it really is, a global referendum on the United States and what it stands for. Right now it’s still the American Dream, but remember, “American” is an adjective and that adjective can and will change unless we provide leadership. The world doesn’t just want our military to act as a global police force or for our economy to power the world out of yet another economic downturn. It wants something much greater, something much more human.

It wants us to dream back.

The noise is incredible. Sukhumvit is three lanes in each direction, and red taillights stare from both sides as far as one can see. Scooters nuzzle up to huge tractor-trailers in a bid to gain a few more centimeters of progress. Taxi drivers call out to potential fares. A policeman’s shrill whistle pushes back on the din and attempts to draw some order on the chaos. I look over at the officer and notice that while he is waving his arms and making a show at moving traffic, his eyes never leave the row of women selling themselves. He almost certainly gets a cut.

At one stall, a lady-boy is busy shuffling bottles around. She looks up at me and smiles, inviting me to sit for a drink. She’s beautifully made-up, and her words and actions are cute and playful – the perfect bar hostess. She has a top on that reveals just enough cleavage that you can see that she has at least started the physical transformation into whatever it is she wants to become. I smile back and wave her off – No more drinking tonight.

The smells are a complicated mixture of old and new. Sweet strawberry and apple scents from the hookahs on Soi 5 mix with the smells of garlic, prik kee noo chilies, and nam plah fish sauce from the ever-present food carts. Diesel fumes jar against the smoke from cheap incense sold at one of the tourist stalls. The older Caucasian gentleman walking in front of me smells distinctly of too much Old Spice, while the overweight Middle Eastern man in flowing bisht I just edged past reeks of masala and sweat.

At the corner is what I’ve been looking for. Food stalls are everywhere, but I’ve been coming to this one for years. Two pots simmer away, and I point to the lighter colored one and then the yellow noodles. The lady nods and gestures to a line of cheap plastic tables and stools near the curb. As I sit, I notice that under the stall lies a dog, fat as a pig and with teats stretching out from her belly like stubby octopus arms. She’s oblivious to the chaos around her in the way of city strays across the world. She’s safe under her aluminum and plastic shell, free from the possibility of a crushing step or well-placed kick. Like all of us, she knows that the night in Bangkok is the best part of the day and she’s making the most a dog can of it.

My noodles arrive. I pay my 30 baht and add dried chilies, pickled chilies, and chopped peanuts in almost equal amounts, followed by a small spoonful of sugar. A quick swirl to distribute them through the liquid and I take the first sip from a cheap stamped-metal Asian-style spoon. The liquid is OMG hot, and as I choke it down I manage to get a big chunk of chili tucked up just under where my sinuses drain into my throat. No choice but to push forward at this point, so I grab a tangle of noodles and noisily slurp them up. They clear the chili, and as they slide into my gut I sit back and take what feels like the first real breath I’ve had all day. I notice that the old lady who tends the stall is looking at me and smiling. I give her the thumbs-up sign and we both laugh.

I get back to work. The soup is amazing as always. It is pork-based, with that rich umami that comes from pork bones boiled for oh-so-long. The noodles are fairly typical egg noodles, and their purpose is really just to add some body to the soup and small pile of toppings added just before serving. The toppings consist of a couple of thin slices of red-stained pork, another small pile of what I think is sliced bits from the pig’s heart, and an assortment of fish balls with two or three bright green leaves of something fresh laid on top to blanch in the soup’s heat as the bowl is carried to the table.

I’m almost half-way through the soup when I look up and see an overweight white woman looking at me with an odd mixture of fascination and disgust. From the looks of it she’s in her mid-fifties, and I imagine that two things disturb her. First, I’m eating at a street stall while a few meters away a pile of garbage is rustling with long-tailed rats grabbing juicy bits of things that people like me left earlier in the evening. Her bright pink, red, turquoise, and yellow muumuu might as well be a giant blinking neon sign floating over her head that says “AMERICAN TOURIST ON FIRST TRIP TO ASIA”, so I’m guessing that she arrived late that night and came out from one of the four or five-star hotels nearby for a quick look around before going in to shower and sleep. She’s appears to be in shock at the overall scene, and I am sure that a thousand dollars couldn’t convince her to try a sip of this incredible soup.

More likely, however, her fascination with me is not so much what I’m eating, but how I’m eating. I’m deep in the bowl, hunched over and sucking up the noodles and soup in equal and loud measure. You have to do it this way – Hold the noodles in your battered pink plastic chopsticks too long and the delicious soup drains away leaving you with a mouthful of bland starch. Try to eat too fast and all the next day your tongue will be able to play with flaps of skin hanging off of the roof of your mouth.

The trick is to slurp hard and mix air in with the soup as you eat. The air cools the liquid to a merely painful, as opposed to dangerous, level, and it helps aromatize the chili, garlic, and other spices, allowing you to get a deeper and more rounded flavor from them. So you slurp, you slosh, you get your face down into the bowl, and you assume the intense demeanor of someone with an important and difficult task to accomplish. Your eyes narrow to slits against chili and steam. Lips pucker out to gingerly grab the top strands of blisteringly hot noodles. Your chest heaves with each influx of heat and air, and sweat blossoms from every pore in your body as you make small grunting noises. It’s as close to heaven as I’ve even been in public, but for this lady looking at me I am something she cannot understand and perhaps even the topic of a postcard she will write to her church group tomorrow while sitting in Starbucks after the morning group tour.

In the few seconds we are staring at each other, my mouth hits the jackpot. There are always two or three in each bowl, and this is the first one tonight. My eyes roll back in my head a little bit as I lift away from the bowl. There is a rivulet of liquid running down my chin, soup or sweat I don’t know or care. I chew again and get another burst of flavor before the pea-sized source of my pleasure dissolves and I swallow. I’m not sure what this is, but it’s why I come back to this same stall every time – sometimes multiple times – I am in Bangkok.

I know that it is deep-fried, and the closest I can come to describing it from a western vocabulary is a small piece of crispy pork fat, but that doesn’t do it justice at all. There’s definitely pork and shrimp in it.  And salt, and maybe garlic, and most likely other things that I can’t even guess at. It arrives in your mouth still crispy, and I swear that even before you bite into it you know that it’s there. When you do bite into it, it crunches once in a single staccato counterpoint to all the soft noodles and then immediately dissolves into an intense burst of rich flavor that caresses your mouth for an instant before you double down and renew your efforts in the bowl, trying to find that next Nirvanic morsel. That’s what I do, and I don’t look up again until the bowl is empty except for a few chili flakes stuck to the bottom. When I do look up, the lady is gone, but Sukhumvit is exactly the same.

I wipe my nose and mouth from the roll of toilet paper sitting on the table, stand up, and am lucky enough to immediately catch the light so that I can cross the street and walk back to my hotel. My back is now plastered with sweat and I’m thankful for the short haircut I got that afternoon. The heat from the soup and the chilies has stood every hair on end and opened every pore on my body. I feel like a live antenna, and I am blinking a quick Morse code to keep sweat out of my eyes. Ten minutes later I’m in the ice-cold hotel room and stripping off clothes to shower. I leave the water at a cool temperature and stand there for a few minutes. I’m very alive, the world is very good, and I’m going to sleep very, very well.

The trip started because of a simple post by Sherry — no last name necessary. She asked a rhetorical and highly provocative question about the new health care bill that garnered from one of her friends the label “jackass” and listed the post as “asshattery”. Two things struck me about the exchange. First, the person who made the jackass-asshattery comment had summarily been defriended, so the original post was gone and he was no longer around to see what was being said. Second, and the only reason that I knew it had happened at all, was that Sherry took the offending post and placed it as her status, talking about how rude the post was, how she wouldn’t stand for it, and how he was now gone.

Fair enough, I suppose, although it seemed pretty in-your-face to defriend someone, then take their post and put it in your status. If someone calls you a jackass and you don’t want to be their friend any longer, that’s entirely up to you. Posting about it and calling the person rude, when the instigating comment was yours and was completely designed to evoke a strong reaction, seemed incongruous. Also, as neither the late friend nor anyone else was still able to see the original post (As I learned later, when you get defriended, everything disappears into that great Facebook in the sky.), there was no way for any of us to know if the post had been edited, selectively quoted, or kept in its original form.

So at this point I entered the rabbit hole by asking whether, just perhaps, Sherry’s post might be a little over-the-top. We soon went through the “It’s my opinion” phase and I suggested that we discuss, or debate the topic a bit. Things started out slowly — Sherry wasn’t interested in debating — but the deeper down the rabbit hole I got, the more cookies were laid on tables and the more potions I was asked to drink, the more disturbed, but interested, I became. You see, one of the very few advantages of being a citizen of a country while not living in that country is that you get to see things from a distance. This distance takes out a lot of the emotion. Not all of it, but a lot, and in my case it had made me almost completely unaware of how radicalized parts of the US populace had become.

In the past two weeks I was given direct, full-frontal exposure, with all the hairy and dangly bits in place, to something that I had thought was a caricature. I had Sherry tell me that President Obama was brainwashing children. I had her tell me that the new health care bill would cause children on Medicaid to get worse service than before. I had her direct me to a video claiming that President Obama was raising a private army to station in the USA. I had her tell me that YouTube and other internet sites were being censored to prevent the truth about President Obama from coming out. I watched her make a backhanded comparison of him to Satan. I had her tell me that he was subverting the Constitution. And, something that irritated me the first time I heard it and which continued to gnaw on me in almost every following post, I was told that President Obama is not listening to the people, that he was not listening to the citizens of the USA.

Let’s think about that last statement and the implications it makes. President Obama is not listening to the people, the citizens, of the United States. I’m a citizen, and I think he listens (More or less, but that’s politics…) to me. I think that he listens to a lot of people. In fact, he was elected with the most absolute votes in his favor in the history of the United States. If you want to look at percentages, you need to go back to President Reagan’s victory over Walter Mondale to find a win by a larger percentage.

The implication of this statement, then, is that the people President Obama is listening to are not citizens of the United States.

Ouch. And I just paid my taxes.

In any case, Sherry and I were discussing things and slowly I was beginning to get a picture of who she was. I showed respect. I stayed on-topic. I was consistent in my arguments. Sherry got frustrated — angry perhaps — with me on several occasions, but that happens. In some places we agreed, and in some places I even saw her make some effort to rein in the even more radical statements being made by some of her other friends. What made me break down and write what I thought really needed to be written, however, was not anger. It was a little smilie emoticon tacked on at the end of a sentence. The sentence said that if I posted anything further, it would be deleted.

Ahh, censorship. You can, of course, defriend someone on Facebook, which is exactly what Sherry did to me after I posted again. I would have much preferred her to have said that — “I don’t want your posts on my wall. If you post again, I will take you off my friends list because I don’t have the energy or time to deal with it.” What I got, though, was a long post that twisted my words (A common occurrence over the exchange…) and made some outright false accusations about me before ending with,

This is my last reply to this thread any other comments will be deleted I’m a woman I get the last say :)

Nope. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t piss on third base and then threaten to take your ball home if anyone complains.

So, I posted, and in the end I challenged her on her openness to the ideas of other people and on her censorship. I challenged her to leave what I posted up and prove my allegations wrong on both counts. She didn’t, which I expected, and which was why I kept copies of the three later and longer threads. I knew that she would either delete the last one, or potentially defriend me and therefore delete them all.  I hate it when I fail to give people the benefit of doubt and then they still prove me right.

So here are the copies. As you will see, we had already had a short exchange about censorship and the fact that it wasn’t possible on the internet. In my last post I reminded her of my position and wrote that if she attempted to censor me, I would be be forced to prove that it is impossible in a free world with an open internet. I like to keep my promises.

Thread 1: In which Peter learns a Joke and New Song

Thread 2: Where Peter begins to bow to reality

Thread 3: The light at the end of censorship

Eisenhower bows to Pope John XXIII

Or here.

President Eisenhower bows to Archbishop Lakovos

Or (Merci!) here.

President Eisenhower bows to French President de Gaulle.

Or, perhaps, its better to kiss?

The Bush family and the Saudis have a strong relationship.

No, bows are definitely better.

President Bush (Jr.) bows to the Pope

Nixon liked them, too. Here with Mao.

Nixon bows to Mao

And also to Emperor Hirohito.

Nixon bows to Emperor Hirohito.

And there are more of these — Many more. Go back to the 1800′s and everybody bowed to everybody else — Handshaking was a much more informal way of greeting someone else, so for formal occasions, one bowed.

What it comes down to is that traditions change with the times. Asia never had a strong tradition of shaking hands and yet they accepted the Western practice for dealing with the international community. Now that the Asian nations are gaining more standing and their cultures are more well-understood around the world, it is only natural that some of their practices also gain more exposure.

This all said, it is often dangerous for a non-Asian to bow, not only because they may do so incorrectly, but because the other party is likely to not expect it and may already have a hand extended or be otherwise unprepared. In the case of Obama’s bow to Emperor Akihito of Japan, the bow was done correctly and in accordance with Japanese protocol. I am sure that it was discussed with the handlers on both sides prior to it being done, and except for the blusterly outrage of what I have to believe are uninformed people, it was nothing particularly special. Ironically, the same people who criticized the Obamas for not following British protocol strictly enough on their trip to the UK are typically those who have also criticized President Obama for his adherence to Japanese protocol during his trip here. You can’t have it both ways, people — When you try, you get seen for what you are.

President Obama’s bow to President Hu Jintao, on the other hand, was most likely an off-the-cuff response and it should never have been done. First, things like that among world leaders shouldn’t ever happen without planning — People read far too much into it and the rabid masses on both sides have a field day. Also, modern Chinese don’t normally bow. It’s an old tradition that — almost exactly like the USA — has died off except for use in some religious ceremonies. That said, it probably went over better than this did.

President Bush getting President Hu Jintao's attention

Some things are just never correct protocol.

Uff Da!