Last day in Ko-town. Last day in the Po. Three years in this town. Three years in the same area of a few blocks, bounded by the Jin Mart, the park, the fish market, Beer Hunter, Song’s Beer, Beer Funny, and other bars with great names.

We’ve been here so long; there’s no one left who came at the same time as us (barring a few weird, reclusive lifers). Our oldest friends are gone, and most of our other friends are making plans to go. There are new kids, weird alien creatures, skinny youths with their tattoos and their rock and roll. We don’t know them and they don’t know us. The old guard has dwindled. It is time to leave.

When we came to Korea, it wasn’t America we left, but Bush’s America, with its reeking paranoia and contempt for common decency and its oil obsessions. We hoped a stay abroad would give us some perspective on the homeland, and Lord Almighty, how it has! We fell in with a radical crowd here, young seditionists, anarchists and bomb-makers, vegetarians and poisoners, absinthe drinkers and polycrats, Bohemians and Luddites, Marxists and Canadians, and our politics evolved from exposure to new ideas and new people. We understand, on a level deeper than that which can easily be attained in Arlington, Texas, the many paths that the human experience can take; that there are marked differences between, say, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture, or even south South Korean and north South Korean culture. We’ve traveled to China, Laos, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan, twice, and this job and our oft-troublesome residence in this country enabled that travel. For the travel alone, it was worth the time here.

Life in Korea has often been marked by difficulty, frustration, or our ridiculous western standards of privation, but it’s also been full of good times, good experiences with good friends, or negative experiences with good friends that become good in retrospect. We love and detest many things about this country, and while we are glad to return to the US and our friends and family there, we can’t help but feel melancholy at this place we’ve made our home. I won’t miss its misogyny, its racism, its ageism, its callous treatment towards its own youth, its 1950s understanding of fulfillment and happiness; imagine a country that never had “Death of a Salesman” or Rabbit, Run or even “American Beauty” to tell them what is so obvious to us in America. They need a sexual revolution, pronto.

Oi. To digress. We got some distance from our country. Through intimacy with a foreign country, we became more aware of our own country’s faults and virtues. America may be riddled with crime, corruption, political paralysis, but at least most of us openly acknowledge that misogyny, racism, and xenophobia are wrong; we acknowledge not only that homosexuals exist but that theirs might even be a valid way of life; we have freedom of speech not only in letter but also in practice. Korea doesn’t have any of those things. But Korea does have excellent public transit, a dearth of guns and gun violence, low crime, and almost no drugs. Their Christians, while rabid, aren’t as obnoxious as America’s Christian right, and they’re sufficiently hypocritical/impious/realistic that I wouldn’t worry about being shot to death by one of them for, say, being an abortionist or a secular humanist.

In short, I have realized that not only is America fucked, but Korea is equally fucked in different ways, and, indeed, possibly every country has its fair share of crippling problems. Though I laugh when I hear Canadians fret about, say, the government giving too much aid to its native Canadian (First Nation) (Injun) population, or that their free health care has problems; come on, guys, you don’t have three million people behind bars, or a southern neighbor on the verge of total collapse, or a global empire to sustain in the age of diminishing oil! Quit yer bitchin’, Canada!

So we return to America with a better understanding its social problems. We know now that it is possible to have a cheap, effective health care system, or to have high speed trains, or universal broadband. That not having guns in the hands of every drunk or lunatic or drug dealer doesn’t equal the eradication of personal freedoms. Et cetera.

It’s a messy country to which we return. The economy is even worse, and the politics even more toxic. We’ve got a billion dollar football stadium in our hometown, the sight of which I detest. We’ll have no choice but to drive everywhere, in cars. But we’ll also have so many cheeses….

Let me tell you about cheese deprivation. You may know that in the States I was co-founder and president of the Kaleidoscope of Cheese, an august assemblage of turophiles. We convened regularly to sample and discuss new cheeses. We found new horizons, new landscapes of culinary pleasure in bries, edams, soft cheeses, crumbly cheeses, hard pungent cheeses in wedges and wheels, spread on crackers or brushed on bruschetta.

Korea is a dark land for cheeses. “Pizza cheese”, an ersatz mozzarella, the 1960s Soviet Union version of mozzarella, is ubiquitious. It seems to be a wad of plastic or wax shot at high speed through a wire screen. They have “American cheese”, too, which is even more vile than back in the states. Some lesser bries and camemberts are available. If you pay $20 you can buy a block of Kirkland cheddar, an underachieving cheddar at best.

My palate yearns for sharp, creamy fetas, for the pungency of a blue (or bleu), for the reassurance of Muenster or edam, the hearty, stolid, unassuming excellence of emmenthal. I have two young nephews who are rapidly shooting through childhood, and I miss them, but - the cheese.

And the beer! Korea has three main brands, with respective clever nicknames: Hite (Shite), Cass (Ass), and OB (Only Barf, Onerous Ballyhoo, Obnoxiously Bathetic). There is a stout variation of one of these. Never have I had a beer that tasted worse or hurt more the morning after. The taste is awful - it’s easy to make a terrible beer, I’m sure - but how do they make the hangovers so bad? DDT is the key ingredient. Give me a Shiner, anything from St. Arnold’s, anything from New Belgium. Microbrews! Heaven. Over the past three years, I have often confronted the possibility that, if I must keep drinking Korean beer, I may one day no longer like  beer. That is a beast no man should have to stare down.

To digress. Again. Our feelings for this country are complex and conflicted. I’m glad to leave, and I’ll miss many things. I can’t wait to see friends and family and cheese and beer again, but I will miss the friends I have accumulated here. I will miss the conveniences and peculiarities. It will be difficult to resume a lifestyle of car-slavery, and it will be difficult to keep from annoying my friends with sentences beginning with “In Korea…”

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I know I’ve been using English’s most versatile word a lot in my titles, but there’s no other way to describe this. (Sorry, Mom.)

1) Everyone has heard, I’m sure, about Texas’s shameful right-washing of the history books these past few months, a blow against integrity in education that will ripple outward through the country, due to Texas’s proportionately huge buying power in the textbook industry. Thomas Jefferson is gone, the importance of Latinos in western culture is minimized, et cetera et cetera.

2) Now Temple, Texas, a horrible little highway wallow where I once got a ticket for an out-of-date inspection (on my Dad’s car, no less) is bringing back corporal punishment. Wonderful. Lovely. I’m sure that teenagers these days, with bills to pay, kids to support, drug habits to satisfy, just need a paddling to steer them straight. Christ. I’ve worked for three years in a country where corporal punishment is widely, casually used, and I can testify that it is not only ineffectual, but it encourages misbehavior.

A blow is quick. You go ahead and give your elementary antagonist the finger, or pull her hair, or scream in the hallway or whatever, take your lick, rub the wound, and forget about it as soon as it stops hurting. So the teachers apply worse and worse beatings or humiliations until the kids die. Or simply commit suicide because their teenage brains are not equipped to process such cruelty from authority figures.
Corporal punishment creates a culture that condones pain as an acceptable means of dealing with undesirable behavior, which breeds callousness among the teachers and the students - and the parents. It takes the moral high ground from the authority figures, leaving them their authority not because they are right but simply because they are the authority. I don’t think this is a lesson we want to teach our kids.
(Temple parents, believe it or not, requested the revival of state-sanctioned abuse.)
(Examples of the inefficacy and casualties of the system: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. There’s more, but we don’t have all day.)

So there is the moral argument against corporal punishment and the argument from efficacy. It simply does not work. It is more for the satisfaction of the teacher than the correction of the student. And even there it is subject to diminishing returns. It poses the teachers and students very much in direct opposition; few enough students are able to understand that teachers really do want to help and really are there to help them, that education is not a struggle between authority and individuality or laziness or apathy, but a cooperative effort between teacher and student.

A step backwards for Temple and Temple youth.

3) And this - this is just sickening. Texas suffers from a teacher shortage.  Not officially - most schools are able to fill all jobs posted, but aren’t able to post all the jobs they may need; witness swelling class sizes, soccer coaches teaching history. An effective learning environment has fifteen to twenty students. More than that, and the teacher must divide his time and energy and is less effective. Take it from a guy who’s taught classes size four to forty. The average high school class in Texas has about thirty kids, too many to reasonably control. Why can’t they hire enough teachers to get class sizes to manageable levels? Because they’re broke. Everyone is broke these days. Okay then.

But not too broke to build a $60,000,000 football stadium. Let that sink in. Sixty million dollars. That is more money than you or I will ever ever earn in our lifetimes. The economy is spaghettifying in a limitless black hole. Unemployment is through the roof. The history class may have fifty kids in it because they can’t hire another teacher, and the school lunches may be all but carcinogenic because they can’t afford decent food or people to cook it; the schools may go unheated in winter and uncooled in summer, but they by god will have football. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. How the hell am I going to live in this state?

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Everyone agreed that it happened during the day.

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Did you hear? The end times! The end times! Obviously, 2010 is the new 2012. Theorist nuts are not content to wait. Why can’t we have 2012 in 2010? For that matter, why couldn’t we have it in 1999 - plot twist - WE DID. We’ve been dead this whole time. The fireball is the reincarnation of Virgil sent to guide us through hell on an ecstatic journey of the soul.

Kidding! The fireball is global warming. Yes! How could you warm the globe and not expect to get freakish flashes of light over middle America? Get used to it! Earthquakes, too. The Haiti quake - Chile - China - the Iceland volcano - global warming! You raise the temperature of the atmosphere a degree or two celsius and OF COURSE the earth is going to tear itself apart along the fault lines! I think we can expect trenches where the Himalayas and Rockies are currently. I am buying future beachside property in Wyoming. They laugh - now.

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Recently:

• First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung. Blatant false advertising. The father isn’t killed until almost halfway through the book. Just because you’re a genocide survivor doesn’t mean you can lie on your book cover, Mme. Ung! But it was a good read nonetheless, and by “good” I mean that it was so harrowing, it painted a portrait of a very recent and modern real-world hell so vividly that I felt a rush of liberal guilt all over again, just like the very first time I heard where Chiquita Bananas really come from. Ha, but seriously. There was nation-wide starvation and brutal mass murder at the same time as we Americans were watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show and complaining about high prices at the pump. I’m not saying that we should feel guilty for things we weren’t aware of, remotely complicit in, or even existing during - but, Jesus, it puts modern whinging in perspective, non? The next time you hear a Tea Partyer worrying about the safety of his social security and the risk of high taxes, beat him over the head with a legless Cambodian child’s prosthetic and explain that he has not yet begun to suffer. Apply the lesson to yourself, as well, the next time you complain about your job, your poor cell phone reception, or your botched dental surgery, and slowly, you will become a better person. FACT.
• Beyond Heaven’s River, by Greg Bear. He’s a famous scifi writer! I first tried to read Moving Mars but found it so frightfully dull that I could not penetrate beyond the first chapter. River was better; a WWII Japanese pilot is nabbed by aliens and lives in captivity for five centuries, forced to reenact a tumultuous period in Japanese history; he is then discovered by the rest of the weird, wild galaxy. What ensues is gripping, melancholy, and bizarre, and ultimately adds up, somehow, to much less than the sum of its parts. Bear presents a fascinating future setting, but he barely seems interested in it. He gives us good characters, but doesn’t really do much with them.
• Theatre, by W. Somerset Maugham. This can be described as “a novel by W. Somerset Maugham.” That is a good thing. Great dialogue, meticulously developed characters, a captivating depiction of life on the stage back when theatre meant something.

And currently:

• Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. I’m reading his Bas-Lag novels in reverse order. I am saddened that this is the last one for the foreseeable future. It is so so good. I’m 140 pages in. The characters are better than in The Scar, and the plotting better than Iron Council. The city of New Crobuzon, a better character than any of Mieville’s actual humanoids, is front and center, and the book benefits with a bustling, humming energy not found in the more sedate, leviathan Scar.

Playing:

• Bully, on PC. It’s a lot of fun! Rockstar Games are known for their fun, perhaps the first requirement by which games should be judged. The GTA formula translates with surprising explicitness to a high school setting; refreshing, too, is the fact that the protagonist is not a cold-blooded killer, and that the game is, at its heart, pretty good-natured even when it’s nasty.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor on DS. I’m playing this because I can’t get a copy of Strange Journey, but this is pretty dang good in its own right; a strategy RPG where you summon and control demons, set in modern Tokyo. The plot is interesting, the characters aren’t as annoying as JRPG standards, and the gameplay is fun, deep, and challenging. Can’t wait to play Strange Journey, though. This is my first entry into SMT; I should probably have started with a Persona game or whatever, but - whatever.
• The newest Sam and Max hits tomorrow or the day after, methinks. I preordered the season way back when. Can’t wait.

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And everyone. Just leave my teeth marks in the world. My teeth, dispensing truth and justice, poised like thirty-two ivory Batmen in my mouth; my tongue the salivary lash; chomp, chomp, THE AGONY OF TORN FLESH, and your mistakes are corrected! You see clearly for the first time!

No need to thank me; but I don’t mind if you do.

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This is the sort of thing I mean when I say things like, “It is impossible to underestimate how thoroughly Protestantism has screwed this country.”

The gist: in Wisconsin, it is illegal for minors to have sex; they can be charged with sexual assault. So sex ed teachers who teach anything other than abstinence-only education can be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, the state attorney, who happens to be a Republican, warned them.

His logic is that this sex education “sexualizes” children and encourages sexual interaction between them. Obviously, without sex ed, kids would wait until marriage to have sex; there would be no rapes; sex would not be used as a weapon, or as a tool, or for pleasure, but purely procreation, just like in the good old days, that mythical 1950s without the Bohemianism, black people, poor people, or drug use in which Republicans want to live and in which they think everyone else wants to live.

Let’s pick apart this ball of fearhate. (My brain can’t seem to recall a word that means “hatred inspired by fear”, but one would be very useful in describing the right.)

1) The main qualification of a teacher is whether they are a good teacher, not whether their opinions conform to the political majority. A good sex ed teacher teaches… sex ed. They are not charged with crimes for doing their jobs.

2) Sex education teaches the idea of sexuality as something not to be ashamed of, but an integral part of the human experience, as fundamental as breathing; goddammit, it is reproduction, a biological fucking fact, you delusional assholes. Sex ed doesn’t necessarily glorify the act, but in a matter-of-fact discussion of an oft-forbidden topic, it removes or at least lessens the stigma - a stigma around something that is almost certainly going to happen. To think it will promote sexual assault by “sexualizing” kids as “early as kindergarten” is a gross and harmful falsehood.

3) How can it be illegal for minors to have sex in any state? What sort of 17th century law is this? How can people against big government justify interfering in a biological function? (Simple - as with so many of the cognitive dissonances that characterize the right, it is because they no longer have any stance on big or small government that they follow as a matter of principle, but merely argue for or against it when it is convenient to their personal desires/neuroses. I.e., “Stay out of our bedrooms, government! Unless they are the bedrooms of gay people.”)

At the bottom of this you find the classic fear-of-the-other that has overrun the undereducated poor whites who constitute most of the Republican party these days; fear of homosexuals; fear of sexuality; fear of women; fear of immigrants; fear of African-Americans; fear of the poor; fear of free discussion of important topics because they know their ill-built structure of belief will not withstand it. All of human progress has been a march away from fear-of-the-other, and every step of that march has been opposed by mainstream religious institutions and the political parties most intimately tied to them.

Fortunately, kids hit university and they learn that sex is an even greater pleasure than self-denial and self-righteousness; maybe they can put down their hypocrisy and teach their kids that that pleasure doesn’t necessarily need to be sneaked or stolen. Every generation gets us a little closer to meeting the bare minimums of decency.

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No updates in two weeks, and for a good reason; life is batshit insane right now. We have three weeks left in Korea, where, you know, dear reader, we have lived for three years, and we are tying up the loose ends of those 1095 days and packing them in boxes to be slow-shipped back to the states. There are books and books, there are knicks and knacks, priceless objets d’art collected on our travels that we are now wrapping in scarves and tuks and shoving in the bottom of cardboard boxes to brave the Pacific. One hopes they will catch up to us in the states.

I am forced to reflect on the clutter of our lives, on how unnecessary much of it is, and, yea, verily, much is left behind or given away. One considers not only, “Is this Lego set or harmonica case worth shipping?” but also, “And do I want it around my house for the next forty years?” My scythe is discriminate but cruel and unsentimental when it strikes.

I am whittling myself down to a mere ten books for three weeks, which induces a sort of background panic, a worry that I might finish my current book and then be left with uninviting choices. Nominally, every book on my shelf is something I want to read at some point, but when you’re in the mood for say, George MacDonald Fraser, Georgette Heyer will not suffice. I like to keep my options open.

I once read an article in Real Simple magazine (when stranded on a desert isle, nothing else in reach) about uncluttering one’s life; “Do you have a lot of books to prove that you’re well read - instead of simply being well read?” To which I said, “Fuck you, Real Simple, fuck you to hell and back.” There are many reasons for keeping masses of books, and they are reasons that vary on a personal level. To whit, mine are (aside from the obvious, that I have them so I can read them, or the obvious joy of collection):

1) Memory hooks. After finishing a book, I revisit in my memory, regurgitating and chewing it for extra nourishment indefinitely; but my mental cud sometimes needs stimulation. I have read so many books, and so many good books, that it would require a disproportionate chunk of my brain to remember them all. So I have the titles on my shelf. I can pick up The Brothers Karamazov, with its heavy cloth binding, and the tactile sensation stirs memory in me; I remember where I finished it (Iris Bagels); I leaf through the illustrations, I read bits and pieces, and, most of all, the smell of the book - scent being the sense most powerfully associated with memory - conjures exactly the feelings of reading the book. Whenever I ride a ferry, I remember As I Lay Dying, because my copy lay in someone’s trunk for so long that it reeks of diesel fumes. And vice versa. So I can run my hand along the spines and images flood back into my mind, the closest thing we have to some sort of Philip K. Dick-ish memory-computer machine that inevitably backfires and scrambles your brains but is really just a metaphor for technological dystopianism.

2) Reference. Good writers borrow, great writers steal. I don’t know enough about music to write beautifully on the subject, but Thomas Mann did a hell of a job in Buddenbrooks. I’ve never had a transcendent mystical experience, but passages of Years of Rice and Salt make me feel as if I have. Writers learn from reading, and I might be writing and recall, “How was it XXXXX described a sunset?” Flip to the passage, and, ah, yes. I wouldn’t use those words exactly, but they may give me a push in the right direction, hint at some avenue of description I hadn’t thought of. And, obviously, nonfiction books are valuable for reference as well.

3) I might want to re-read them someday.

So. That’s why I must keep all the books I’ve ever bought.

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