Red Puritans, Blue Cavaliers

I’m always racking my brain for connections I can make to the things I see around me, especially historical parallels to the times we see now. And something that struck me recently is that the “Culture Wars” in red state vs. blue state America have a very similar feel to the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Think about it: on the one hand there were the Cavaliers, a very privileged, cosmopolitan, jaded and sophisticated set. They’d seen and done it all. They partied and lived for their celebrity culture (though of course it was more about the nobility and royalty than movie stars), and were really only nominally religious, if that. On the other hand, there were the Puritans, or Roundheads, a religiously-motivated group who were disgusted by the excesses of the culture around them, and felt the need to reform the Church and, by extension, the State (to which the church was connected, in that historical setting).

The Cavaliers thought the Puritans were dour, cranky, very likely crazy people who wanted to smother all that was fun and bring together a theocracy where having fun was against the rules. The Puritans thought that their culture was teetering on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall into Hell, and that desperate measures were needed to haul them back away from the brink.

Sound familiar? I should hope so. (Because I’m describing it in a way to play up all the similarities between those times and ours, of course.)

However, as I thought of this comparison, I wasn’t thrilled with the conclusions it presented me with. If this is a historical precedent, then what might lie in our future? There’s no New World for large numbers of the Puritans to flee to, this time around, so the coups and resulting warfare option might be more likely.

What an interesting future history novel this might make! The Culture Wars resulting in another Civil War, where instead of one region against another, it was cities versus less cosmopolitan sorts. Bands of marauding soldiers going through the countryside testing people’s loyalties, and a large lower class of people who tried to just do their job, stay out of the way, and let the elites fight it out among themselves.

I’m not sure it’s a good parallel, but at least it’s a reminder of the fact that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Even in our English-speaking history, we’ve had a time where there was a deep division between devout and fervent believers and everyone else, who wanted to enjoy life and take advantage of all it had to offer. (Whether it was sinful or not.)

Fervor and fanaticism

I’m going to pick up on what I talked about yesterday, about the rise of religious fervor in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and the lack of understanding of this movement that you can see among the mainstream urban Western secular population.

I don’t know–having grown up as a part of one of those religious cultures, I feel like I’ve got more of a sense of where the motivation for the rest of them comes from. I don’t always agree with them–obviously, I don’t condone suicide bombing–but I also know that they’re definitely not doing this out of a sense of personal despair because they don’t own enough STUFF. If you were taught from childhood that the greatest thing you could do with your life is give it up in a way that helps to defeat the oppressors of your people, then a suicide in that context would be almost as far from an act of despair as you could get. Indeed, you’d probably do it in a state of religious euphoria (which was something that the producers of United 93 and Syriana clearly didn’t understand).

A thoroughly secular Westerner is pretty unaware of how pervasive, stifling, and oppressive their worldview can seem to a devout believer. We in the West have perfected a cultural hegemony that centers around consumerism, with healthy dose of greed, lust, gluttony, envy, and a smattering of the other deadly sins. Yeah, maybe it does universally appeal to people, though perhaps only to our baser instincts. It’s rough going for a devout person who’s seeking to please God in their life, to be surrounded by a society that believes everything is and should be permissible. (Except hate speech or being fat, of course.)

Like any other majority, this mainstream consumerist culture really can’t see how thoroughly it tramples all over the beliefs of other cultures. Somehow, the purveyors of “tolerance” can’t see that they’re unilaterally attacking all that many other cultures hold dear, by their very insistence that everyone must accept everything. (Except hate speech or fat people, of course.)

Wouldn’t it work better to have a rule that everyone must coexist peacefully, but that you don’t have to agree with or accept everything that the people around you believe or do in their lives? Respect them, but let them make their own decisions, and free them from your expectations for them? Well, maybe that’s unrealistic.

Maybe it worked better before the world was as interconnected as it is now. Perhaps the fact that we’re perpetually bumping up against, and having to deal with, people who are so profoundly different than we are, has made this war of conflicting values so much more virulent. A hundred years ago and more, there weren’t many places where cultures were coming into direct contact, but now it’s everywhere, in everyone’s home, if you have any connection to the outside at all. I wonder what this will mean for us in the future?

Warriors of God

Over the weekend, I watched a series of “CNN presents” documentaries done by Christiane Amanpour called God’s Warriors. This series of three two-hour documentary pieces looked into the resurgence of religious political activism among the three “religions of the book,” Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

They focused on settlers and the most extreme of the Zionist factions in Israel, on Islamic fundamentalists (of course), and on the Religious Right and their political emergence in American politics. Not a complete picture, at all, but interesting to pull together some of the same themes in three distinct cultural settings. It’s not unlike a book I’ve been reading called The Revenge of God, by Gilles Kepel, which talks about the resurgence of religious fervor among the same three religions.

The whole documentary series was fascinating, especially as a look through outsiders’ eyes at some things that I’ve only seen from the inside. What strikes me as odd, I guess, is that Ms. Amanpour, as a representative of a sort of urban Western secular perspective, seemed to find the resurgence of religion as a scary and potentially threatening situation. It’s just funny to me to equate terrorists with the sometimes kooky but ultimately not at all threatening megachurchers and homeschoolers. Then again, I grew up among homeschoolers (though the phenomenon was still just starting to gain popularity when I was in school–it was still thought pretty weird even among my friends from the Christian schools I went to), and though we never went to megachurches, I attended enough retreats and youth gatherings over the years to have a good solid grasp on what they are all about.

I’ve been sort of befuddled by this phenomenon before, when I read a novel with a wild-eyed group of Christian radicals as the villains, who bombed a string of abortion clinics and were hunting down the women and doctors who’d been in these clinics. I know a few of those sorts of incidents happened, back in the ’90s, but they’re far from representative of even the most confrontational of Christians. And I’m sure if any had happened recently (or if plots had been uncovered) it would have been splashed all over the news for weeks, so I’m reasonably certain it hasn’t been an issue for quite some time.

Though I can see how the very alienness of a life centered around religion could seem sinister and slightly frightening to someone who lives completely outside of those circles. Perhaps without any real religious bearings of one’s own, there’s no way to tell the differences between the weirdly mesmerized behavior of Christians in their praise services and the chanting of suicide bombers to be…

Last week starts

Wow. Last week was a BUSY week! It felt good to be busy, as I mentioned, but it was hard to fit in all the other things, like sleep and eating and blogging, that I usually try to fit into a day. Thankfully, I’ve had a couple days to catch back up, and now I know that by this time next week, I should be home! (Hooray!)

This next week will be busy, too, probably, but it’s definitely a light at the end of the tunnel kind of feeling, now. Looking around my hotel room, I just hope that I didn’t accumulate enough stuff to be a problem to get home. I don’t think I did, but I’m not sure, either. I’ll tell you what–even if Alabama is still in the grips of a heatwave, I think I’ll be pretty happy to get home where everything isn’t damp all the time.

I had to iron my purse (it’s a tote bag styled one) in order to get the dampness out of it, earlier today! Goodness, it’s like being in Florida or something! Though I guess that makes sense… Korea, like Florida, is a peninsula jutting into the ocean. I think that Korea tends to get colder in the winters than Florida does, though. I’m not sure about this, however.

No one here believes me that it’s drier in Alabama, but it really is! Maybe not if I were living in Mobile, right on the Gulf Coast there, but in central Alabama, the humidity isn’t nearly as soupy as it is here. My hair (being curly, it’s a very reliable measure of atmospheric water vapor concentration) is four times more difficult here than it is in Alabama!!! Yeah, I know, it’s a strange gauge, but heck, whatever works. (BTW, this picture is NOT me, but it’s about what my hair looks like most days here…)

I picked up the last little souvenirs today, things that will remind me of being here. I didn’t get a fake designer purse, which I’m sure will disappoint some people I know, but I’m really not an accessories person. I like functional bags that are convenient, easy to carry, and maybe look slightly exotic (like the current gold-embroidered tote bag I carry that came from World Market). I’ve never really understood the whole purse thing, probably because my mom was never into them, either, so I never got trained into the cult of accessories.

Besides, I don’t like to bargain, because I’m always afraid I’ll offend someone by doing it incorrectly, so I’m sure I’m being ripped off (usually because I am), and thus my shopping transactions in other cultural settings are never very satisfactory for me. I really do prefer having a straightforward price set on something, that I can pay and feel comfortable about paying pretty close to what it was worth.

Though perhaps most of that just is because you need to be familiar with a cultural setting to know what the goods are worth. That way, when you went into a marketplace, you’d know how much or how little the vendors are overcharging, and how much bargaining room there was in the price. Maybe I should do more homework when I travel??? Hmmmm. It’s a thought.

Update between shifts

When I left work this evening, it was with one of the worst cases of Excel-induced brain static that I have ever experienced. (So if my writing seems disjointed, that’s the reason. Also my excuse if I make any weird typos.)

It’s funny how easy it is to please people with fairly rudimentary analysis of massive databases. I guess that it gives them a new angle on what’s happening. They’re excited every time we give them something new, and making noises about asking for us by name next year, writing personal thank-you letters to our commanders, and so on. I guess we’re doing a decent job…

As more people see the various reports and graphs that we put together, they start asking for them, too. Of course, each individual wants their own particular spin on the report in question, though… Ahhh, such is life. I like that I’m providing something useful to people–in fact, the Korean colonel who’s working as the senior person with our General (retired) has even started to ask me for some reports, too. He had a translator write down my name and title to be quoted as a source in one of his briefings… (Yesterday a couple of the Korean Air Force guys asked her to ask me if my hair was “naturally that color”… I tried a new haircolor and it’s a particularly brilliant red right now–think MJ–Kirsten Dunst–in the first Spiderman movie.)

I just wish that I could work three times faster than I can. The most frustrating thing is when I’m putting something together and the computer freezes up, or the data for a project somehow corrupts itself (it does this pretty regularly, too). But man, it makes for packed and interesting days. And actually, when I had a day like this yesterday, and followed up with a long workout at the gym, it was as good as I’ve felt in ages. I think that working hard mentally and physically during the day agrees with me. Though it was hard to get up this morning–I was tired and sore.

OK–I’m racking my poor addled brains to think of anything else to say, and they’re just not cooperating… I guess that working as a human data processor has overtaxed my gray cells. (Wow–it’s great feeling like I actually DID something, for a change–and something useful…)

Hurricanes and politics and work, oh my!

Well, the shifts have started, and between working out some nights, doing laundry on others, and blogging, that pretty much accounts for all my time. Though I can tell I’ll be tired by the end of my time here, this is good, because I’m busy enough now to not worry about not being home or not having real Internet access (I like my laptop but it’s a pain having to carry it around and watch for it to run out of power).

I’ve been watching Hurricane Dean come in. Is it just me, or do the weatherpeople seem disappointed when a Category 5 storm doesn’t hit the U.S.? Because at times I swear I can see them catch themselves before saying something like, “Unfortunately, this didn’t turn to the north, so it’s not going to impact us directly.” (To tell the truth I understand the sentiment–I have the makings of a weather nerd, and I’ve been known to stay up all night to watch some of the big ones make landfall, Ivan and Katrina among them… It’s not that I wish the devastation on anyone, it’s just that it’s so interesting seeing what happens when one comes ashore. Like disaster movies. I’m sure I’ll change my tune whenever I experience something like this firsthand.)

I heard a little segment on the radio yesterday–a guy was talking about the sorry state of contemporary politics, and he said something that I thought was interesting–basically, that politics have become just one more kind of televised reality show, and that political tactics really aren’t different from reality TV. Politicians are essentially the same thing as reality show contestants–would-be entertainers trying to get America to like them enough to “vote me in”. I thought it was an interesting notion, and close enough to the truth to be unsettling. He went on to say that he had faith that the American people would get sick of this and would turn to politicians who had more substance and, oh, say, policy to back them up than all the glib-tounged slickness that we’ve been seeing increasingly for the past few decades.

Now, I’d be as happy as anyone if we’d actually let our leaders be leaders, and stop all these idiotic popularity games that we’re playing in our politics, but the US isn’t going to stop being “High School: America” anytime soon, IMHO. I don’t see any real trend toward people wanting more substance and more leadership from our leaders–on the contrary, it seems like we automatically resent anyone who shows an inkling of leadership ability (or just comes into power) and do our best to subvert them from that moment on. A culture of resisting “the man” means that no man, or woman, in authority is going to have much ability to do what they’re supposed to. Besides, I think we’ve let our brains get soft and we’re ruled completely by emotions (on the whole–there are still exceptions). Until a lot more changes happen, I think we’ll still have Presidential Idol.

Suicides and deployments

We’ve been hearing a lot about a recent release on the rising number of suicides among soldiers, particularly among those deployed, on the news for the past couple days. Of course when they say soldiers, I think it’s just referring to the Army–from what I recall of the stats from my last Air Force suicide awareness and prevention briefing (a fun two-hour event that we are mandated to attend annually; made even more fun by the fact that the briefing, slides and all, doesn’t change from one year to the next–I assume that next year I’ll be able to recite long sections of it along with the presenter), the AF has had fairly steady (and much lower) suicide rates for the past few years.

Then again, the Air Force as a whole isn’t dealing with the kind of deployments that the Army has been. While there are certain career fields in the Air Force (Public Affairs, Intelligence, and Medical, off the top of my head) that go out for one deployment after another, we’ve also got large swaths of people who never have to head overseas unless they volunteer for it. We’re all assigned to “buckets” where we’re vulnerable to deploy, but the fact of the matter is that most of us technical specialists don’t have to go unless we ask to. In my career field, for instance, there are so few overseas slots that getting into them can be quite competitive. I think it works similarly for the engineers as well.

But about deployments and suicide… I see how it could happen. I knew a large number of people in the Embassy, when I was there, who were taking various forms of medication for anxiety, depression, insomnia… there’s something inherently soul-crushing about knowing that your life is in this place, day after day, week after week, and there’s no foreseeable release… for us who were on the 6-month tours, the light at the end of the tunnel was never too far away, but for the year-longers, especially right after they returned from their two weeks of R&R, you could see it was just too much. And so many of them were on their second or even third deployments, too!

In fact, in front of the Embassy clinic, there was a sign pictorally warning against self-inflicted gunshot wounds (in case anyone got the bright idea of shooting themselves in the foot in order to go home). Arrrgh! I can’t imagine contemplating such a measure, but I know that it happened.

I wonder if all these “kinder, gentler” standards we’ve been adopting into the military, all about tolerance and equality and fairness and letting your voice be heard, and zero-tolerance for discrimination, hazing, harassment, etc… It’s not that I think any of those things are a good thing to have going on, but I do wonder if eliminating them entirely has led to our fighting forces not having the necessary mental toughness to fight long, hard, painful wars. But then again, as I think over my history of American wars, no group of veterans has been unscathed by the psychological effects of war. Perhaps knowing that they’re not crazy and they’re not “soft”, it’ll help them get healthy more quickly on the back end?

I am curious, I must say, about when we’re all going to have mandatory PTSD checks. It sounds like some of the rhetoric is aiming in that direction… and for whatever reason, these sorts of public education and public health strategies are always very tempting for people to try out on the military. (As a large, compliant, government-controlled population of guinea pigs, perhaps???) I mean, just the fact that we’re having required annual Suicide and Violence Awareness and Prevention education should tell you something…

No connections…

What did we do at work before there was an Internet? This is a question that I’ve asked myself fairly often. What’s funny is that, during my first office job during college, I actually did work in a pre-Internet office. I worked there for two summers; in the first they had no Internet, and in the second they’d just gotten their LAN line installed. But remembering back to that time in the mid-nineties really seems like ages ago…

So working in a setting where I don’t have access to the Internet, because we’re on a closed network, is a reminder of how it used to work. Though I still wonder how people functioned in office jobs without computers–when things got slow, did you read books? The newspaper? Do crosswords?

Anyway, on a closed network, there’s plenty of files to snoop around in, and stuff to look through. My coworker tweaks VBA coding on our software tool (I keep nagging him to back it up so that he doesn’t render it inoperable before we need it) and I read through old files, old briefings, and use the Paint program to color in maps of Korea as underlays for some of the charts we may be producing. Actually, that paid off today–one of the people who’d seen me working on it asked me to print the map out so that she’d have a visual reference when she was briefing her team about some stuff! So I felt like my time hadn’t been wasted, after all.

Several of my favorite authors had desk-job careers before they eventually wrote their signature series, and each of them talked about how they’d spent lots of time writing stuff down when things were slow at work. I think that, without the Internet where I could spend time rabbit-trailing down obscure lines of research, I probably would have done something similar–spent my days developing extensive notes for an eventual fantasy epic or something of the sort that I intended to write. I might even have done the actual writing there… though the office environment isn’t the most conducive to the kind of focused creative effort that goes into really writing a story when the words are flowing…

Land of the PSA

Am I the only one with this problem? When I am told repeatedly to do something (or, perhaps more to the point, to not do something), my immediate response is to desire to do the opposite. When the pastor snaps his fingers in the sermon and says “Look right here!” my knee-jerk reaction is to look away. When a particularly invasive TV ad tells me to “ask your healthcare provider about this NOW!” I make a mental note to never ask about it.

Well, I’m in Korea, which has turned out to be, TV-wise here on base, Land of the PSA (Public Service Announcement). Instead of commercials littering the breaks between TV programs, we get told what to do and not do, and it covers the gamut, from making wills to not chewing tobacco to spending quality time with the family… I made a list the other night but it was three pages long and still growing as I kept the TV on, so I gave up in disgust.

Like anything in the military, it’s the official government-endorsed public health-type information, which is generally one or two trend-cycles behind the current scientific studies of the relevant subject. For instance, we’re still doing situps (though as a cosmetic change they call them “crunches”) on our PT test, though any fitness guru could tell you that they’re probably more harmful than good for a body. Also they’re behind the curve on the whole cholesterol thing–we’re still being told never to eat eggs and fat, while the rest of the world has moved on from that outdated set of instructions.

But I digress. The problem with all this is that those preachy, well-meaning but correspondingly maddening pseudo-commercials have the effect of making me want to go out and do exactly the opposite. I swear, someone could probably get me to go out and… skydive (something that I’m not particularly interested in doing), if they just followed me around and told me how bad it is to skydive and how you should cut all skydiving out of your life as quickly as possible. It’s a weird knee-jerk response, but if I’m feeling this way, surely there must be other people who do, too!

Advertisers in the business world seem to have worked out the correct formula–make a person want to do something instead of heavyhandedly telling them to do something. It’s a pity that our disseminators of public health information aren’t more savvy to this concept! As it is, I’ll have to keep having the conversation with my id that goes like this: “I know that was obnoxious, but you really don’t want to chew tobacco / drive without a seatbelt / do drugs / etc … So don’t be so malleable that the annoying PSA makes you do it!” Because seriously, I have to remind myself in this way just about every time I hear one of these ads.

(Every now and then I notice how much I hate being told what to do and wonder why, exactly, I chose a military career! )

… Wow, I just searched on YouTube and there are lots of these for your viewing enjoyment. Apparently disliking AFN PSAs is a common experience…

Whiling away the time

So, in the very secure building where I’m working for my time here, the only computers I have access to are closed networks (nothing I can email in or out of), and other than surfing through briefings that are stored on the closed networks (I have a limited tolerance for briefings) or messing around in Excel for no reason (I didn’t like doing this in Iraq, either), I don’t have much to do with the free time between things that seems to be much of the spin-up for this particular job. Sigh.

But I decided to use the blank book that I brought with me (for notes during briefings–all right, to be honest, it’s to doodle during briefings or make the puzzles I’m doing look official) to good reason, so I wrote, longhand, some thoughts for my blog today. If this works and things are slow at other times around here, I’ll probably do the same thing.

Here goes:

My counterpart is using the computer for some other project he’s working on. It’s irritating not to have access to the computer, but to be fair, I’ve been hogging the system for the last day and a half and it’s only right that he should have a turn. (We have twice as many people as computer stations because once we go on shifts, our ranks will be correspondingly thinned.)

I find myself looking forward to the time when we do start shifts, etc, because the past week has been very much without form, and I don’t function well without any schedule at all. My natural bent is to, when I’m not required to be anywhere and not needed anywhere, just take the time to myself and do what I want with it (reading books in my hotel room with the news on in the background). But such is not to be…

I had one of the Korean translators today explain the Korean writing system and alphabet to me. It was very interesting, and not nearly so complex as I thought it was. He thought that my interest in Arabic was crazy–”it’s all just a bunch of squiggles”. Which is funny; I remember thinking the same thing. Now that I can pick out individual letters in Arabic (though I only remember about half of them for the sounds that they make), I don’t see the language in the same way at all. (For comparison, the Arabic alphabet is below.)