Lost In Me

I stayed up all last night reading a book titled "Crimes of Obedience" by Kelman and Hamilton. It turned out to be an in-depth analysis of authority, from the psychological, social and political perspectives. Much of the theoretical discussion revolves around a case study of the My Lai massacre.

It's amazing how reading about America during Vietnam reminds me of America today. For example, LBJ told the American soldiers in Vietnam that they were fighting communists in Indochina so that they wouldn't have to fight them in the future on the "beaches of San Diego". Just hours ago, Bush told his soldiers in Iraq, "You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so we don't have to face them in our own country". It seems that what Bush lacks in creativity he makes up in glitz and media coverage.

It's almost like Hollywood today.

Speaking of the My Lai massacre, the only American ever convicted of the killings, a Lt. Calley, was charged by an American military court with the murder, "with premeditation, [of] an unknown number of Oriental human beings, not less than seventy, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown". Those were the words of the official court document, as if the murder of an Oriental human being was somehow different from the murder of a white human being in the eyes of the military prosecutors who wrote the charge.

Which, incidentally, explains why American soldiers who run over teenage schoolgirls in Korea with their tanks are allowed to go free even today.

It's a little hard to go straight from listening to Galwang complain about being chronically single, to hearing Panna talk about how much she hates relationships, hers in particular. Sigh, those two... so much for giving thanks.

It's Thanksgiving break, and I'm feeling exactly like I did one year ago. Ah well.

I got back from my counselor training class not so long ago. Of course, the first and second rule is that I can't talk about it. Well, suffice it to say I listened to two people, and it left me feeling a bit sad, as it often does. Hmm... just a couple more months and my training should be complete.

Today, I ended up giving blood, kind of as a spur of the moment thing. As I was squeezing on the little sponge ball, I found the sight of my own blood incredibly amusing for some reason, and started laughing uncontrollably. The tremendous Polish lady who was my nurse found this rather odd, and called me a giggly kid.

And now I'm sleepy from losing the pint of blood. Mmm... sleep.

Lee is broke again. He is missing meals, and when he wakes up sometime this afternoon, he will want either Galwang or me to feed him. But I can't help thinking, maybe he is going hungry now because of all the food that he wasted during freshman year. Which is a terrible application of my morbid sense of humor of course, but as a pseudo-catholic, I have to consider the possibility of cosmic retribution. Or at least jest about it.

Ah well. I couldn't sleep because I had too much to think about. Most of it was more serious than this though.

Hmm... I've forgotten to blog for a long time now. I've been pretty out of it lately. Tonight, I'm having trouble sleeping and nursing a massive headache. My mind is too active; I'm thinking of quantum physics, social psychology, my upcoming trip to Asia, and of course, Hanna, all at the same time, as Kent is singing in Swedish softly in the background, about broken hearts as usual.

I called an old friend in Korea tonight, and as always, the conversation was very intellectual, a sharing of some of our deepest ideas without ever showing any feelings. Which is a great thing, something I should be grateful for, as opposed to taking for granted and being negligent about keeping in touch. It was good to get a fresh, un-American perspective on the world, about things that are important to me such as education, society and nationality.

I'm also reading through the Asia section of yahoo news, as usual, though I sometimes wonder why I bother, given the total propaganda machine that AP really is. (This is what WMD really means to me... weapons of mass deception.) Of course, it would be biased to only read the likes of ZNet. It really bothers me how every attempt by the South Koreans to reach a rapprochement with the North is frustrated by the Americans... it infuriates me not on an immediate emotional level but rather an ideological level, if that makes any sense. In a way, the Americans have every right to oppress Koreans (or any other minority) living in their society, since it is, after all, their society, but the Americans have no moral basis on which to interfere in what goes on in our peninsula. I view the right of a people to choose their own destiny as sacrosanct, and indeed I believe the same goes for every individual on the face of this planet. As my friend pointed out, the Americans do a good deal of moral posturing, shouting very loudly claiming to have built their nation on this very principle, but it's hard to understand how any of them could believe their own words when every action their government takes abroad betrays their own ideals.

I just don't think such a gilded nation built on hollow ideals and hyprocrisy could have a future. And that worries me, because by now, there are people here that matter to me.

Tonight, I'm warily reading through the news, and wondering if the fascists in the White House are starting to step up their propaganda as a precursor to another colonial war, this time in Iran. After all, about this time last year they were busy accusing the Iraqis of daring to possess the same kind of nuclear weapons that the Americans themselves have stockpiled in huge supplies. These days, it's the Iranians who are on the receiving end of such blatant hypocrisy. Maybe worries like this was why I stayed up all night yesterday to get a little farther in Fromm's book. Which reminds me that I've been awake now for perhaps 50 hours and I should head off to sleep...

But yeah, as Drew says, Fuck Whitey.

Not a lot to write about this weekend, since I spent most of it passed out after finishing my second round of prelims. I wasn't nearly as productive enough this weekend to meet my quotas. I've also been listening to techno for some reason, and techno tends to prevent me from reflecting on the subtleties of life, or, for that matter, think in general. To me, techno is the musical form of Soma.

I checked out a copy of The Fear of Freedom by Erich Fromm the other day, and have been slowly reading it. It was written during WW2 by a German psychoanalyst in criticism of his society, so I figured it would be relevant to America today.

I stole something from school today. It was fun.

The past week has been incredibly exhausting, and being tired and moody tonight I'm thinking again of J, the one person who has made me hurt more than I ever have, for longer than I ever have. Looking back, it was understandable for her to leave me for somebody she saw more of a future with, but the contempt and animosity that she showed towards me afterwards was uncalled for, and left scars that hurt me still, that hurt me tonight. What she did wasn't as important to me as how she did it... she was completely uncaring after betraying the trust that she had begged me for, and left me to deal with the scars alone. The way she chose to break my heart was simply brutal. I still feel betrayed because I was betrayed, and I still feel abandoned because I was abandoned.

Every day, for more than a year now, I've lived with pain always by my side. And I feel as if a year of my life has been stolen.

Drew here. I always liked to quip that all Ivy League schools make these days are tools. From making men to making biological artifacts, artifices, the implements with which other folks (The Man) continues the system. And that's what it is. Skill sets. Rational management techniques. Everything become externalistic. I am trying to be pithy as I need to go elsewhere. I will elaborate later. But this is the sort of thing I used to feel in an inchoate way freshman year, when it was more about my classmates throwing off the albatross of work for their own pursuits, however trivial, but now of course it has a more political spin to it. More later.

I was just reading an AP news article on the latest developments in Iraq. The story details the deaths of 15 American soldiers in another clash between the occupiers and the resistance fighters. The AP writer meticulously lists the home states of the dead Americans, their assigned units and destination of their shot-down helicoper.

At the bottom of the story, I see a small paragraph, which notes that on the same day, American soldiers opened fire into a crowded Baghdad marketplace, which for some reason they were trying to disperse. There is no mention of how many Iraqis were killed; no mention of where they were from, or what they were doing in that marketplace that day.

It's parents' weekend here, which is a plus for me since the dining halls put on their best face and present their best food in order to convince the visiting parents that the ridiculous prices they pay for their kids' meal plans is worth it. Tonight I had fried fish, grilled chicken, curried veggies, roast duck salad and sushi. Not bad, though it's troubling how noticeable the difference in the food is, both at the beginning of the school year and during parent weekends, when the administration has reason to suspect that the quality of their service is under scrutiny. It bothers me how corporate the environment here is.

Speaking of school, I've been thinking of something a Frenchman named Saint-Exupery once said: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." In the context of my college life, and having done a small share of teaching myself, I take this to mean that in order to educate, one should be less worried about passing on pure knowledge, and more focused on inspiring young minds to see the beauty of that knowledge and desire to learn more on their own. Education is more than mere training, after all, and the curious mind does not need to be fed a continuous stream of facts, as it will go out and find it on its own.

After two and a half years as a student of the sciences and liberal arts, I don't think I've ever felt that my professors here would have agreed with me on this point. To me, education in this society is industrial; a sort of support infrastructure for the greater consumeristic industry that drives the capitalist cycle that this culture has become imbued in. Every problem set that I struggle through, it seems as if my mind is being pounded and molded into yet another fine piece of machinery that will take its place in the industry, but I'm still left thinking that being educated should not feel like being caught in some kind of giant factory. I don't know when I became so obsessed with the material that I'm learning that I lost track of why I'm learning it in the first place, to a point where sometimes I'm not sure where the factory ends and I begin. It seems like the way that my classes here are taught and the way that my classmates react to it tends to perpetuate this kind of an attitude; the lectures uninspiring and the problem sets long and difficult.

So it seems that to my ever-distant professors, it is not the learning that counts, but rather the results. It is not as important to think about and appreciate the implications of the problem that I just solved, as it is to finish it and turn it in; there is another problem that must be moved on to, after all. It is an overwhelmingly consequentialist kind of attitude, as that is the trend in this society, but as Drew points out, it is also only the most immediate consequences that matter. I take classes with students that are being that are being trained to become the best scientists they can be, yet never have we been challenged to consider how our work affects the world and those around us... the challenge has always been "how much work can you get done?" It's as if we've become so obsessed with maximizing the efficiency of our factory that we've forgotten it was never supposed to be a factory in the first place. I, at least, came here hoping to be inspired, and to grow.

So, the corporate attitude that I see even the dining service of this Ivy League institution take has been something of a final insult. The cherry on top, as it were. Well, at least it was a delicious cherry... I do have to applaud them on the curried veggies.