Beauty and The Art of War

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“Every overseas Chinese is a warrior!”

China’s leaders, in 2020, writing to useful idiots and secret agents—call them prostitutes—who are physically living in Canada, but without love of Canada.

Hello reader,

Got beauty?

Leaving last week’s land of thought police, (Part One)

I go to (Part Two) seeing beauty, with Asia in the background.

I’m feeling contemplative.

Before me is a thing of beauty. 

Here is traditional Chinese bookbinding, a method developed during the Ming dynasty. (1338-1644) Scarlet ribbons are stitched across the spine, the thick-stock pages folded in half with the printing on the outside only, pages with both nice calligraphy and print. The cover is black with gold lettering; yet not as stark as that sounds, being offset by a red plaque, with gold calligraphy, pasted into an indentation.

The volume, from the Amherst press, is The Art of War by Sun Zu. (Sunzi) I’ve long owned a paperback copy, in English. This new translation, 2011, is by James Trapp. Does the world need yet another translation of this 2,500 year old text? Actually, yes. I’ll explain below. For now, I’m just contemplating this piece, dipping into it, and thanking another James, one James Clavell.

Clavell, once a starving prisoner of war of the Japanese, is best known to the TV watching public for the mini series Shogun, of old Japan, featuring the handsome actor from the weekly TV series Doctor Kildare, Richard Chamberlain. A huge tome, Shogun is about as thick as a paperback can ever be, a best seller, a book that might especially appeal to fans of Star Trek or history, with its intricate fantastical depictions of a lone Englishman cast ashore, a stranger in a strange land: Castles, ninjas, even great public bathhouses—it’s all good.

I remember, in the 1970’s, lending the book to two brothers still living on our old homestead. When I returned I found my book battered and wilted, like it had been through a whirlwind. “What the heck happened?” I asked. “We both read it, twice.”

I never did return to Shogun, but I read Clavell’s Tai Pan (colonizing Hong Kong) and King Rat (P.O.W.s of the Japanese) twice each. 

Remembering how the Chinese have a cradle-to-grave belief against democracy, and against the democracy of Taiwan… what I also have read twice—later as a little book, first as a Reader’s Digest article—is James Clavell’s grim and controversial The Children’s Story. It’s set down home in the USA. They called Clavell a communist for that one. 

I dimly recall the Readers Digest people having to defend themselves in the next issue. They said the story of poor Johnny, who’s father had been taken away for re-education, was only to dramatize how easily children can be led, and not for any other purpose. This would have been during the good old Kennedy or Johnson years. (Wikipedia mistakenly says 1981) 

For me, it’s nice to contemplate the beauty of Clavell’s idealism. Besides his best sellers, he also took time to write independently, to do what he thought was right. 

As I see it, Clavell wanted to help inform his fellow citizens, realizing that many people know about only their own town and family, and maybe don’t care to know much more. In contrast, I remember when some of us, at least, cared about South Africa’s practice of apartheid, (apart hate) and we helped to stop it, with college students arguing over sanctions. Caring may not be the default, yet it readily follows after efforts by others who do care. 

Clavell realized something: The average educated Chinese housewife knew The Art of War as well as she and her American counterpart both knew a work of English literature, but the American housewife, at the same time, had never heard of The Art of War, and she didn’t have any of its classic concepts as part of her vocabulary. Over here, no one did. 

In the west, as best I can judge by the writings before-and-after World War II of Captain Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, even army officers did not read the book. Not even during the conflicts in French Indochina and Vietnam. 

(Nor during the war in Malaysia, where the British would ultimately defeat the Chinese communist guerrillas, partly because the British cared enough to design their armoured cars to fit between rows of rubber trees, mostly because the Chinese insurgents were too chauvinist to convert the surrounding nonChinese to communism) 

What the Europeans did read, unfortunately, was a famous book, On War, by Karl Von Clausewitz, a Prussian staff officer who encouraged “blood.” 

Westerners, when I was a boy, would have thought I was crazy if, agreeing with Sun Tzu, I tried to say the highest form of generalship is to get the opposing army to surrender without any bloodshed. 

It’s queer to contemplate how—I’m thinking of the US Civil War and the First World War— the westernmost powers might have avoided so many, many sorry casualties if only the husbands and wives, in the U.S. North and among the Allies, had chosen an “anaconda plan” (as one lonely Union general did in fact advise) of naval blockade and sanctions without fighting. 

(Note: At the end of both the Civil War and WWI, both losing armies were starving—as were, come to think of it, the WWII Japanese armies in the Pacific. Out there, awful things happened. An imperial soldier was ordered to report to the cookhouse without his rice tin: He promptly deserted—he didn’t want to be cannibalized)

But about the only translation, in the west, was by a Jesuit priest long ago. And so matters remained, even when I was a boy. 

Then something happened. Today there is a mainstream movie, starring Wesley Snipes, called Art of War, and the business section of a bookstore stocks Sun Zu’s classic as surely as it stocks books about samurai businessmen (‘swords’ and ‘rings’)… such books as would never have sold during my boyhood, by the way. Not back when “made in Japan” meant poor quality. 

(As in Back to the Future where the 1950’s professor says something (I forget) like, ‘No wonder your time machine broke down, Marty, this part is made in Japan.’ 

One of my friction cars from Christmas, when I was a boy, was from a tin can showing fruit and Japanese writing within, but turned inside out and painted like an automobile)

Over in the social studies area of the local big box store, one evening last April, while I don’t remember if I specifically counted the actual number of translators, I know I counted eleven different editions of the work. Well! The western world has sure heard of it now! 

What happened was classic: One man made a difference. Someday I will read again James Clavell’s desperate forward to the first modern Art of War. I would have read it at a community college around 1981-ish. (Wikipedia has the date wrong) First Clavell began having various characters, in his various best selling “Asian novels,” mention the book. And he worked on a translation. Then he had to persuade an otherwise sane editor that a book ostensibly about warfare, about long dead guys with bows and armor, would sell enough copies to break even. The rest is history. The irony, to me, as I looked in vain, was that not one of those eleven editions I found that April evening was the first one with the introduction by James Clavell. How sad. He knew Chinese communism, and he had seen close up what happened to Japan in defeat, and so he desperately told how important national survival is, and how the book of Sun Tzu could help. Poor Prometheus!

Never mind the bows and armoured horses. What makes Sun Tzu’s (Sunzi’s) work suitable for the business section, and other parts of the bookstore too, is, as James Trapp puts it: “…the elegance of the prose and the underlying Daoist principles.” 

James Trapp has crafted an elegant translation, a much more humane one than the old standard translation on my shelf. Yes, plainly there is room in the world for a translation as clear and lyrical as this one. 

I think I would like to meet Trapp, with his interesting artistic past, a past that must have fed his soul, not just his bank account. His specialties include Bronze Age art and early Buddhist sculpture. Today he works part-time at the British Museum, and also as a consultant to the UK school system for integrating China studies. 

Dipping into the piece before me, I like Trapp’s choice of footnotes, useful yet concise. In a footnote to page one of the final chapter, Using Spies, Trapp writes, “Sunzi’s understanding of the necessity of an effective intelligence network, its efficient organization and the various levels of expendability of its agents is chillingly calculating…and modern.” 

James Trapp’s introduction ends, “In the eyes of Sunzi a general is no mere jobbing soldier: he is a scholar, gentleman and philosopher. The depth of meaning which this element of mysticism imparts is undoubtedly responsible for the work’s continuing and universal appeal.”

Now I contemplate citizenship; I cherish the responsible competence of James, James and Sun Tzu… And I truly appreciate the beauty of the work of art before me. 

Art and Music Of Japan and Germany

As for Asians knowing The Art of War, tonight I was watching the Japanese animated (anime) series Ghost in the Shell, (2^nd Gig) dubbed with English subtitles. In one episode the major shows up at a den, with luxurious furniture, of three wealthy old criminals. She is there to retrieve something stolen. Three angry young hoodlums are there too. One of the old men asks the major, “Are you the same race as Roh?” 

She answers, “Can’t you tell?” Meaning: Yes, the major has a full prosthetic body. So formidable! 

The major backs away with her prize and the hoodlums want to chase after her. The old man forbids them, and quotes Sun Zu: When you know your enemy and you know yourself (voice over as the major flees into a taxi) you can fight a hundred battles without defeat.” The implication being: The hoods can’t know how powerful the major’s prosthetics are.

Beauty onscreen: 

Did you ever see the 1980’s German art-house movie, with Peter Falk as a human, filmed in black and white, called Wings of Desire, about invisible angels on the roofs of East and West Berlin? In the very next episode of Ghost In the Shell, Battou is in Berlin, on stakeout on the roofs, near the major, using his invisibility thing—but a girl in a wheelchair can look up and see him. In homage, the TV episode was given the movie title. I thought the whole episode, with an angel motif, was well done. 

The Americans once attempted a remake of the German movie, for mainstream audiences, starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan: Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “But it's not really a remake. It's more of a formula story that benefits from some of Wenders' imagery (solitary angels standing in high places, solemnly regarding humanity) and his central story idea…”

At least the remake was better than the live action remake, (2 stars) staring Scarlet Johansen, of the anime feature movie (3 stars) Ghost in the Shell.

I like the artful words of Roger Ebert, a pulitzer prize winner, as he reviews Wings of Desire. “The film evokes a mood of reverie, elegy and meditation. It doesn’t rush headlong into plot, but has the patience of its angels. It suggests what it would be like to see everything but not participate in it…. For me, the film is like music or a landscape: It clears a space in my mind, and in that space I can consider questions… ”

Review of the Peter Falk movie (4 stars)

Review of the Nicolas Cage movie (3 stars)

Music: 

The Japanese, once fascist, now welcome the world. Here the incomparable Origa sings in Russian, graced with Latin, over graphics for the TV opening of the Ghost in the Shell series. 

Here Origa sings in half Russian, half English, a song of determination, over the opening of the second series—anime truly not intended for the “Saturday morning cartoons” of children, nor for adults on their couches wanting a relaxed evening cartoon sitcom.

I like how the joy of music, like a thirst for peace, is worldwide. In Japan, here is a choir like in Bulgaria, and instruments like in my local philharmonic. For 18 minutes of something completely different, a Japanese symphony plays music of the original Ghost in the Shell movie. (which I still haven’t seen) 

I’m no passive angel up high, I walk down in the world, a world where a sadder, now wiser German said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

This week, I see beauty. 

Last week, I looked at the ugly Chinese leaders being un-truthful, with their agents operating secretly in dirty shadows in Canada. 

This day, my eyes are clear… in my own words, after John Keats, 

Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth. And that’s all we know, or need to know.

Sean Crawford

Alberta,

May, 

2020 

Footnotes: 

~“Remember Taiwan.” Here’s what the various liberal party Members of Parliament don’t want you to see. “Speak truth to power.” 

~Are you still thinking of last week’s post? I am. You know what? The Chinese can keep their thought police. It’s time to recognize Taiwan.

China Molests Canada

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

New up to the minute  “now generation” quotations

An adult: 

“Taiwan (population 24 million, Chinese-speaking) has had only six COVID-19 deaths. SIX! But we are censored from knowing how they did it, and when they started doing it. This while their COVID progress graph line is never included on world graphs in the media, not like South Korea’s line, because the World Health Organization is ordered by China not to recognize Taiwan as existing.”

(National Post story with fun video of reporter quizzing the WHO)

A child in Canada (not Taiwan): 

“How come when fascists lie, we stop believing what they say, but when communists lie, we always hit the reset button and go back to believing?”

Someone on twitter: 

“China lied, people died.”

Hello Reader,

Got “shelter in place?”

I suppose I really should attempt a COVID-length post: long and leisurely, complete with music and art reviews.

But no. So here is only part one,  with links to THIS WEEK’S JAW-DROPPING NEWS. (see below)

Part One:

Old rerun

China and Communism

Next week:

Beauty and the New Art of War

Art and Music Of Japan and Germany

Old Rerun

China is on my mind, being twice in the media "this week" (in 2015) I will review The Art of War, but first:

China and communism

As a baby boomer, I still think of students as being longhaired idealistic “peace and love” types. At Harvard University’s model-United Nations this week the students from China were not peaceful, just hateful. They truly didn’t like Taiwan being called a free country. Their belief that Taiwan, covering the island of Formosa, “belongs” to China is, of course, part of their cradle-to-grave communist propaganda they are so used to hearing.

(In the dystopian Asia of the movie Cloud Atlas, the propaganda was “womb to tomb”)

We forget how powerful propaganda is, especially in a controlled environment, as do the students. For example, my buddy Blair once had a Chinese student, here on a student visa, tell him the followers of Falun Gong kill their parents. Blair paused for thought, and then pointed out that Canada doesn’t allow violators of human rights, such as parent killers, into the country as refugees. “But Falun Gong refugees are allowed in, right?” (Right) 

“Your government,” Blair said, “has been lying to you!” Blair told me this “really stopped him in his tracks.” 

As for Taiwan, never mind what Chinese schoolchildren are told, I have a Canadian viewpoint: A baby boy can come to Canada in 1919 from Germany or Japan and when he grows up, he will love Canada and then, if he becomes an adult during World War II, he will go off to fight against those fascists. Perhaps alongside my dad who advanced from the beaches of Normandy to Bremen.

Later, when Canadian troops fought and died in Korea, in the Commonwealth Division, my father was not pressured to rejoin: He remained a civilian, raising preschool children. From that war, I have an idea why China so fiercely resents Taiwan. 

I will tell you what I know: You may recall that during the Korean War China did not declare war on South Korea. The Chinese armies in Korea were not sent by China, at least not officially, but instead were officially "volunteers" from the People’s Liberation Army." These official volunteers, as prisoners of war, while being held behind barbed wire by the United Nations forces, told the UN they did not want to go “home.” No, they simply wanted to be released from the wire, set free, as soon as the war was over. Perhaps to make their way to Taiwan. 

To the UN this sounded fair but… No! Nay! Never!—peace negotiations dragged on, casualties mounted, the war prolonged—because the Chinese rulers insisted the volunteers be forcibly repatriated against their will… This would have been a few years after the western communists had built the Berlin Wall as part of an iron curtain across Europe. 

At last, to make peace, the UN agreed to force those innocent soldiers to disappear forever behind the bamboo curtain. A win for China… but I guess the Chinese Communist Party officials have never forgiven Taiwan for existing.

I am reminded of South Africa, back during my student years, when we might hypothetically say that “guest workers” are not citizens, AND we would surely say that any of their babies born and raised to adulthood in South Africa must given full rights and responsibilities to vote and love their country. 

In Taiwan the hopeful soldiers and idealistic young students who had escaped the communist takeover of the mainland in the late 1940’s would today be as old as my father—in their nineties. Their children, (baby boomers) and their children’s children, (Generation X, Generation Y and millennials) would have grown up loving the green hills of Taiwan, without any belief in communism.

(Writer’s note: My father, born 1919, who came to Canada when he was five, has since died)

Taiwan grandparents my age may, like me, own the Quotations of Chairman Mao, AND they relish their golden safety. Meaning: Safe to read the Common Sense of Tomas Paine, safe to think about the republican Sun Yat-Sen, and safe to speak with any Falun Gong… as I have. Near the British Museum, the Falun Gong handed out information brochures not just about their sunny religion, but also the dark oppression by the Chinese Communist Party/the regime/ Beijing—call it what you will. 

Late breaking news: From April 25 2020, comes this story of an imprisoned Hong Kong bookseller who escaped from China and safely opened a bookstore in Taiwan: A happy ending for folks who want life to be fair. 

Back in Canada, where my writer’s group meets at the old King Edward school, there were big beautiful paintings of gentle angels looking down as the communists harvest organs from the Falun Gong.

The other mention of China this week is in Maclean’s magazine (February 16, 2011?, p 74) where book reviewer notes a man “offers a rather frightful look into the mindset of China’s rulers.” The book is The Hundred Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury. 

“His book would appear to be his attempt to make up for the neglectful advice he offered America’s leaders over the years. It concludes with a number of straightforward recommendations for the U.S. to adopt.” 

I read Michael Pillsbury’s Chinese quote: 

“Don’t let the enemy know you’re a rival until it’s too late for him to stop you,” Then I immediately thought of similar advice in The Art of War.

—WHOAH! Late breaking news MY GOD! 

This week, the Chinese quote is:

“Don’t let the Canadians know there will be a pandemic until it is too late for them to stop you from buying up all their Canadian PPE, while also accepting a donation from them of quote tons unquote of PPE.” (personal protective equipment, such as gowns and masks)

When China did that, they molested Canada..

Here is a link from Canada’s Global News for April 30. There are other links in cyberspace too.

If, dear reader, just like Canada’s Liberal Party folks who are Members of Parliament, you cannot “take in” this shocking news, and instead you just have to close your eyes and instantly forget, then I forgive you… Too bad the liberal MPs in positions of responsibility won’t exert themselves to keep their conscience-eyes open, won’t STOP believing in China. 

I feel like it’s again the 1930’s, my dad sees Adolph Hitler on the cover of Time Magazine as “man of the year,” and no one’s brain will retain anything bad about the Nazis. So I forgive you and me. Just as back when we bully-worshipped the Germans, I know in advance that (Hello to anyone reading this in some future year) this story of Chinese immorality will be as forgotten as a nightmare from yesterday morning. And for that, I am sorry.

Sean Crawford

Alberta,

May, 

2020 

Cloud Atlas movie review, 4 stars, “…a repeated motif is that all lives are connected by a thirst for freedom.”

Footnote for liberals: The patriots of Taiwan are just as much members of the Mongolian race as people in China: While trusting the one nation and distrusting the other, don’t let your local Liberal Party MP escape his conscience by calling you racist, not if he or she flatly refuses to watch this Global TV news report by an investigative journalist. Never mind the liberal party, the price of freedom is the rest of us having eternal vigilance.

You know what? The Chinese can keep their thought police. It’s time to recognize Taiwan.

Peers of. Social Media

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Head Notes

Four regular (not fake) news stories:

BBC news: Coronavirus Doctor’s Diary: “Fake news makes people think we want them to die.” (link)

Abc news: Due to social media “news,” people are attacking 5G communication masts (towers) across Europe, so then sometimes loved ones cannot speak to dying relatives in isolation in hospital. (link)

Sun news UK, with photographs: celebrities are advising followers that 5G towers are dangerous, as of 18 April social media followers have attacked 53 masts. (link)

Aljazeera news: Yes, it’s a Russian conspiracy: SOMEONE wants us to believe that masts cause corona. (link)

Hello Reader,

Got social peers?

Everybody likes having peers, everybody. A man once told me he bought a heavy metal concert T-shirt so that other fans of metal would find him. Not all peers are so obvious. It was E.M. Forster, in his oft-reprinted essay Two Cheers for Democracy, (link) who said that he belonged to an unspoken society of people who silently recognize each other. I suppose we can belong to overlapping groups, some vast and public, some small and quiet. 

As for those who are unthinking, unreflective, and reflexively trying always to conform as much they can, I wonder if they feel special, perhaps comforting themselves that by being so much in the majority they are so much more special than nerds and folks less classy. I really don’t know. 

A computer nerd, Paul Graham, once wrote that if you find yourself agreeing with absolutely everything believed by your surrounding culture, then you might want to think about that… I’ve read every one of Paul’s essays on the web. Read them without commenting, that is, as I don’t like his commenting peers. (On sites like Reddit and Ycombinator)

Yet I often comment for musician and computer programmer Derek Sivers, another original web writer. His peers I like. On one of Derek’s comment threads someone complimented him by saying Derek had done like Cameron in the teen movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Derek replied, “Huh?” (link to blog) So I joined in. I said I didn’t get the compliment either, but at least I enjoyed the excuse to watch the movie, on DVD, and I provided a link for everyone to a review by critic Roger Ebert, a review with a thread of eight comments. (link to review)   

I reflected on how (except maybe once on VHS with a few university students) 

I hadn’t seen the movie since I had first caught it in the theatre. Around that time, speaking of conformity, I had noticed that folks would rush out the instant the credits started. So I would tell my movie companion that if we had a good reason to rush, such as to get to a car park, then OK, but let’s not rush blindly for no reason. So I saw the end of the Ferris credits. This would have been back when only funny guys like Peter Sellers or Jackie Chan added anything at the end, decades before Marvel started adding treats. 

It was on the Web, on some thread I’ve long forgotten, that I found several people saying that Ferris comes out of the bathroom at the end of the credits. How distasteful. I privately thought, “No way, the movie is not that low!” But who was I to disagree with social Internet media?

Now I’ve rewatched it. My memory has been right all along, the “several people” who are not my peers are not correct. Who are these people? I will tell you what I imagine: They are the sort who forward social media. Who write social media. Whose peers are each other, a low sort who carelessly play the stereo louder than they know their neighbors would like, drive with a fuzzy regard for the two second rule, cheat at solitaire and murmur vague obscenities. (Janis Ian) They are people who innocently pass on social fake news as truth, innocently get alarmed at what’s on social media, and then tell folks right away about the COVID social news they just read… while seeing their peers, with self-satisfaction, as being worldly.

I wonder: Do these guys mean to lie about the ending of Ferris Bueller? I can’t say, but I can say they don’t mean to take pains to be honest about everything they say or write. I get it: As long as many people are most comfortable around peers who believe in “careless, fuzzy truth” there will always be a place for fake social media.

Meanwhile, in the regular, traditional media where any reporter’s peers, including her editor, demand “journalism ethics,” comes this COVID story: According to a hospital doctor in the UK, social media fake news is causing people to avoid hospitals. (see the first link at the head notes) I can sympathize with the doctor. 

I’m sure it’s hard to explain to a patient’s distraught wife “the theory and practise of social media” with only a quick sound bite—better to try to discredit a specific falsehood— hard to explain that her beloved brother-in-law, meaning no disrespect to him, is mistaken when he endorses and forwards something on social media. 

In everyday life? Perhaps a good compromise is to say to your brother-in-law: If the social media story is true, and if we can wait for a day, then ethical journalists will pounce on the story and report to us in detail. 

Furthermore, if real media does not show 5G towers causing any COVID, then please don’t attack the towers! Don’t attack based on social media. Let’s remember that real journalists practise “real journalism,” while many people cannot even define proper journalism. 

My not-so-common sense is: If from social media you hear something such as electrical towers causing a virus, or white vinegar curing COVID, or alien flying saucers have just landed on the Washington Mall, and if you wait just one day… and then all you hear from the eager capitalist reporters is crickets… then you might want to think about that…

In my own life—where “I don’t do Facebook,” because I despise the ethically-challenged company director, Mark Zuckerberg— …my secret peers remain homely everyday folk who would act, speak and write with the same self-respect as a journalist.

Sean Crawford, 

as COVID fake “news” infects social media, 

Spring, 

2020

Footnotes: 

~A Texan who has a “bachelor of science degree in mass communications” was arrested and lost his job after his fake COVID news on social media. He is now out on bail. (link)

~Mark Manson on his blog says something similar to me, and he even provides a URL for you to re-post it on social media.

~My recent social media piece is archived March 25.

~I documented how Russian Trolls Meet Social Media, archived December 2019.

~Gordon Corera, BBC News Security Consultant, recently recently reported on an EU report:

The authors also say there is "significant evidence of covert Chinese operations on social media", citing reports of networks on Twitter with ties to the Chinese government.

The report also singles out Russia for spreading disinformation, saying pro-Kremlin sources and Russian state media were continuing to run a coordinated campaign with the aim of undermining the EU and its crisis response and sowing confusion about the origins and health implications of Coronavirus.

~Janis Ian sang At Seventeen back in the seventies. I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a remake of her piece. Some songs, like Mac the Knife, and some movies, like Casablanca and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, just can’t be remade.

Kind to Clerks

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

“In the end, only kindness matters.”

Jewel, singing These Hands

"She's a living being! Not a means to an end! 
Captain Dylan Hunt of the Andromeda, to folks wanting to revive a critically ill woman to help them.

Hello Reader,

Got kindness?

It’s late November. Grey and cloudy. You may have seen that perennial favorite, The Value of a Smile at Christmas. So true. Now, how about the value of you and me being kind to clerks, during all seasons, regardless of cloudy weather?

Kindness is its own reward. After all, being kind reminds me that, unlike how I might have felt when I was unemployed, I am not alone, not some hard billiard ball on a cold plain bouncing off alien spheres: No, I’m a part of our warm human community. To be kind means I have to get off my couch and out of the house; kind means opening my eyes; kind means widening my heart for the priceless grace of seeing the careworn shoes of others. And that’s why tender green Boy Scouts will do good deeds, and seasoned old capitalists will give aide to charity. 

Being frugal, I do nearly all my shopping at big stores. Nevertheless, there is a local convenience store where I go inside saying, of course, a few words for our brief transaction, and, beyond that, I often manage an extra sentence or two. One time, the clerk remarked I wasn’t wearing my usual (My neighbor Totoro) baseball cap. Another day, he told me I was his favorite customer. I walked out into the night feeling blank. I didn’t know what to feel—maybe angry. Obviously his less frugal more important customers, the ones who fly in the door more often than I, and buy more stuff than I, aren’t his favorites. How baffling. Why were his frequent flyers ignoring him? Did they at least give him a smile? I guess I was angry.

In Calgary, by chance, I once met two excited teen age girls, in from the town of “Chesty,” who assumed I was visiting Calgary too. “You are our favorite customer! We like how you leave us magazines to read.” I knew them from the Chestermere donut shop, one where a young man had thanked me, saying he especially liked how I left a magazine-sized book on how to draw comics, manga, in the style of Japan and South Korea.  It was at the Chestermere Safeway (grocery store) that a cashier had told me that another cashier had asked her to tell me, “her favorite customer,” that she had moved to British Columbia. …I will confess I’m not positive which cashier she was. My point is: I have credibility for an essay on being nice to clerks.

Kindness. Knowing that smiles enrich the giver as much as the receiver, I “set my intention” to be nice. I remember what an old man once said: “I try to have everyone come away from me without feeling worse.” Also I remind myself that clerks may be on auto-pilot, amidst a dull routine, tired, with shoes that hurt their poor feet. I could therefore smile, and at least make eye contact, to welcome them as fellow beings. It logically follows that I could try to see them not as my means, but an end in themselves.

I got “people as means verses ends” thing off some European philosopher. (Kant) He thought regarding people as a means was beneath one’s dignity. Too often people are undignified, and don’t even know it: Some folks, for example, can be cruel and callous towards a professional ball player. To them, he is merely a paid means to their entertainment. 

Meanwhile an amateur, such as an Olympian, we watch with benevolence: She is not being paid, she is not there to be used by us, as a “sports object,” but instead she acts for herself and the “spirit of the Games.” Olympians will still compete even if the TV cameras are broken and the crowds absent.—And hey, don’t expect any cameras from Yankee imperialists: those clowns, while covering Vancouver 2010, couldn’t even show K.D. Lang singing Hallelujah. Not very kind to Canadians, eh?

Here’s a scene: I was in the “lobby” of Sobeys liquor store, just past the two cashiers. A  middle aged lady stood at a card table to give away free samples. Considering that maybe her feet hurt, and without treating her as a robot with a recorded sales spiel, I chose the red wine over the brown beer sample and some sort of novelty drink. She told me the red was made with “a hint of oak.” I shopped around the aisles, came back, and brightened her day by saying, “Some trivia for you: Speaking of ‘hint of oak,’ there’s a famous perfume in Europe that uses a hint of moss… but it’s not sustainable, because all the moss is being used up.” 

She was all ears, so I told her of going to a perfume exhibit (at Sutton House) with laboratory experts as part of the exhibit. As we talked, a cashier came over. Last week she had helped me settle on a backpack. She said, “That cooler pack you bought? I got one for my husband.” I nodded back to her, including both ladies in our talk, and said, “That’s the one where hubby will have a bottle opener on the front shoulder strap, (looking towards the first lady) and the insides are lined with reflective aluminum.” (for Steam Whistle beer) We three continued our moments of good fellowship. 

As Christmas approaches, I think even nonChristians can agree with Tiny Tim: “God bless us, everyone.” 

Sean Crawford

November

Calgary

2019

Footnotes: 

~Thinking of clerks, I remembered what a grandmother advised a girl about her date: If your date is less than nice and polite to your waiter, then he’s “not marriage material,” for he will one day be less than polite to you.

~Speaking of manga, and My Neighbor Totoro baseball cap, the last time I pointed curious parents towards specific animated comics, anime, was in URLs Again, archived September 2019. You know, I still haven’t posted my first URL piece: So I guess now I’ll save it for Christmas.

~I mentioned the perfume exhibit in my essay about Sutton House, archived as Welcome Without Savoir Faire, March 2018. 

~I’m not trying to offensively push onto you my 25th of December religion, but here are two sweetly offensive religious songs:

A song to offend cynics: (link) It’s Jewel singing These Hands (with God at the end)

A song to offend homophobes: (link) It’s out-of-closet K.D. Lang, but not at Vancouver 2010, no, it’s the one where she bows to Leonard Cohen, the creator of Hallelujah.

~The way I avoid feeling “used” by rude web surfers is by requiring my dear readers to take two seconds to go to my archives— because I am not a “link object!” 

(Note: When surfers of my Death of Buffy piece (January 2012) were impolite, I went back and took out the links I had made for them. But I left the essay) 

You may depend on it: Impolite people will never make a two-second effort. See No Links is Good Links archived July 2012.

Knowing Sarah Connor

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women in Canada the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

Sean Crawford, excerpt from below

Hello Reader,

Remember Sarah?

In the wake of the third Terminator movie—the others don't count; it has sure been a long time since T2—I decided to re-run a post by my idealistic younger self from ten years ago.

But first:
Here's what full-time writer and former journalist John Scalzi said on his blog, Whatever, for November 3, 2019:

As I walked out of the film last night I posted a five word recommendation of this film: “It gets Sarah Connor right.” This actually matters because despite the name of films, the “Terminator” films are about Sarah Connor, and the arc of her life dealing with the terrible fate that life has dealt her: Victim to fighter to avenger. Sarah Connor is realistically (within the context of these films) damaged by this fate of hers; particularly in this film she’s a PTSD wreck. And, well, she would be, wouldn’t she. It’s important that the Terminator films show her this way. It’s for better or worse the grounding the films need to make every other absurd thing that happens in them function on the level of plausibility.

My old blog essay:
Having a hatred for war and a fondness for feminists, I have a soft spot for the tormented Sarah Connor in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah is a single mother who knows that an atomic war is coming but instead of being paralyzed by her knowledge of Judgment Day she is determined to do whatever she can. One might assume that T2 is violent, (yes) action-filled (yes) and ... nonfeminist. (no) No, it is a moral movie: To see Sarah is to glimpse feminism. 

 For several years I was a nonvoting member of the University of Calgary Women's Collective and Resource Center. One of the other males at the center did that thing where a man dresses in spongy body armor head to toe, (cap-a-pie) and then the women are encouraged to hit him as hard as they can. The results may go beyond learning literal self-defense: On a metafilter web site a woman describes how from such practice she swiftly became empowered to react differently in so many aspects of her life. Feminists believe in empowerment.

 Were I to hit a man in such armor, my first blow would likely be at half strength, but then my next blow would probably land at mostly full strength. For a number of women, though, blow after blow is delivered at only a teeny fraction of what they are capable of: such is the power of social conditioning. Call it “learned helplessness.” In all fairness, those same women would strike desperately hard if their child was being threatened. I respect Sarah Connor for her self empowerment to strike hard: Not only does she learn to use various military weapons but even after she has a life sentence to the insane asylum-prison, even when her life is over —or at least into limbo— she is determined to stay as physically fit as she can. In that hopeless jail, if she has nice muscles, it has nothing to do with attracting men—she is trying to Be Ready. 

Of course feminists can attract boyfriends and have families and worry about their children. Sarah’s tribulations are during the cold war, when all children, worldwide, are at risk. Some day our grandchildren may be baffled at how we could learn to live with the horror of missile silos, but we did, the same way we could ignore how women didn’t have equal rights: Humans are good at denial. During those dread times we could choose to try our best to stave off Armageddon, or we could be passive.

In those strange days when most people would wimp out, be overwhelmed, throw up their hands in defeat...
if I felt like Crazy Eddie who, after being condemned by the king to death, got the king to commute his death sentence "for one year" so that he could "teach the king's horse to sing..."
 then, in those trying times, I could always depend on the Women's Movement to keep up with me, to keep slogging away at my side. Feminists believe in peace.

 When a man confronted Eddie for being crazy enough to think a horse could ever sing, Eddie answered gaily, "A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might learn to sing."

As a boy I learned the lyrics to a spiritual: "...Joshua fit (fought) the battle of Jericho, and the wall come a-tumbling down." During those years when I was encouraging people to "hold on," to "never give up," because there might be a miracle, I never imagined that one day a horse over in Berlin would sing. Sarah never gives up. She can't: She can't forget the vision of herself in a gingham dress, which Sarah could never wear, in a park with her children, whom Sarah could never know. Who can forget seeing her other self and the children in that searing wind of death? Not Sarah. She won’t dial down her consciousness. Feminists are willing to know things.

 Given her obsessed lifestyle, with no chance to attend a weekly women’s consciousness raising group, it is unlikely Sarah would stop to think long enough to call herself a feminist. But she acts like one. Sarah is barren of sisterhood yet in her lonely way, she finds a philosophy.

In T2 she angrily confronts a scientist, Dr. Dyson, who will soon be largely responsible for triggering our Day of Judgment. Losing her temper she yells that people like him kill because they cannot create life, cannot feel a child growing. In the book version by Randall Frakes she goes on to point out that men's version of creating is to give their name to the guns that they create. Meanwhile, the Calgary Police Service has adopted a new service pistol and wouldn't you know, it is named after Mr. Glock.

 In my young adulthood I watched as a few "woman's libbers" got other women the freedom to have jobs as notary publics and judges, doctors and police officers. We take this for granted now, but not then. It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

 My own mother believed in peace, but I can't deny there are other cultures, equal to ours in the sight of Allah, but not the same as ours: There are places where mothers teach their children to hold on to a double standard for women, and for foreigners, to hold fast to their hatred, and, in the end, to value hatred over peace. “Oh well,” says Eddie and I, “at least in my father's lifetime no two democracies have ever declared war on each other, so perhaps as democracy spreads...?”

Democracy is where two heads are better than one. Sarah, unfortunately, has little access to the democratic give and take of free speech. Bereft of a circle of empowering sisters she is alone with her knowledge of the coming horror...

 Alone, Sarah almost destroys her soul but then she suffers a child to be her call unto sanity. As young John says to someone else, "Don't you get it? Haven't you learned anything? You can't go around killing people." And Sarah cries.

 Feminism, being for equality, includes men too. As my dictionary says, it means “political and social and economic equality to men.” I am picturing, from just before "women's liberation," a “power to the people” 1960’s male activist: As he feels confident and equal, as he feels truly empowered, then he will no longer need the silly crutch of having women make the coffee.

A feminist visiting Sarah's asylum would ask if the patients, men and women, are being empowered to be all they can be, by growing as much as they can, by making as many decisions as they can. Democracy in America, as the French observer De Tocqueville once explained in his 1835 classic, is where a free people make little decisions, often, so they will grow fit for making big decisions, occasionally, at the voting booth. Perhaps democracy, then, is a prerequisite for people to be motivated to even care to know what growth is, let alone care, Allah willing, for the growth of women.

 When I first saw Sarah she was a simple girl. An emissary from the future warned her: She was going to find strength she never knew she had, grow in ways she never thought possible. And grow she did. 

 Sarah reminds me of my own world. It wasn't very long ago that editors would not publish Andrew Vasche's mysteries about an ex-con, Burke, who fights child pornography rings, because nobody could believe such rings of men and women existed. Now we believe. Feminists, at first feeling alone, and being told they were crazy, have helped us to know that such horror exists.

If Judgment Day is a moral movie then it must have karma. It's only right that a shrink who messed with Sarah's mind has his own mind blown, such is the shrink’s karma, but what of Doctor Dyson? How could a husband and father have a rendezvous with death? Easy: Because of Cyberdine Industries.

 That's where a suspended pteradactal alludes to nuclear winter, where their secret vault requires two keys, turned simultaneously, to open up. When I was a child during the cold war hearing the sad air raid sirens being tested, “sorrrrrryy,” we all knew that if the man in Washington ever “pressed the button” it took two keys to empty out the silos. In that vault at Cyberdine was the “button." There rested the preposterous robot hand and the impossibly advanced chip. 

Dyson saw. He was a scientist and citizen who knew that science and democracy requires questions and transparency, knowing that if an invention requiring a previous series of steps suddenly appears, then either the steps have been kept secret or the device has been stolen; he was a scholar who knew how to search the science literature and scrutinize the newspaper files, those files which would have led him to Sarah Connor's story; he was a man of planet Earth who knew we all must be alert to question strange new paths of death, from factories putting mercury down pipes into the sushi of Tokyo bay, to pesticide sprays killing the higher animals, to fluorocarbons rising up to blast the ozone; … and so when Dyson was ordered, "don't ask!" and when he agreed not to question that button in the vault, when he passed along those orders, when he silenced an idealistic young long haired scientist, then, like a good Muslim German, he failed in his duty as a scientist, citizen, scholar and moral human being. Dyson failed.

 "The future is not set," said the emissary to Sarah Connor. "There is no fate but what we make." I agree. I believe devoutly, “Our greatest enemy is despair.”

 So hurray for Sarah! For me it is almost worth the price of admission just to see, for one second, my hero do a victory hop and skip in the prison hallway. In that second I see a human being go from victim to survivor, from shuffling peasant to purposeful citizen. In that moment I see our lady of holy fire: Sarah will always create her own empowerment.

Sean Crawford
Still traveling through time,

at one second per second,
November
Calgary
2019

footnotes:

~For more on karma and morality, see my essay Morality, Boys and Hollywood, originally entitled Terminators and Boys, of July 2013.

~I still get homesick reading the pre-feminist 1940's Martian Chronicles. We had thought the future was set, that we were fated to more gadgets but no social change.

~Roll call:  Alexander Kalishnikov, (AK-47), Heckler and Koch, (HK33), Mills bombs, (British grenades) Maxim, Vickers, Samual Colt, Henry Derringer, Gatling, Winchester, Browning,  Beretta, Martini-Henry (Kipling's troops) Lee-Enfield (my dad's rife) Ross (the infamous dysfunctional rifle) Gerber (the commando knife) ... and others too, down a long line.

~The biggest surprise ovation I will ever receive was at a weekly (for ten weeks) peace meeting.

The meetings were so big that a huge lecture theater proved inadequate for the first meeting; (people were sitting in the aisles) we subsequently had to use a music recital hall. Most of us were from off campus.

After someone complained about the futility of declaring the campus a "nuclear free zone" I said that yesterday I felt the same, but here, today, I was trying to be positive, for such declarations are not an end but a means to an end, a way of moving us further along the road to a solution that we cannot conceive of yet. 

Without mentioning Crazy Eddie I reminded them of other unpredictable miracles such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stopping the White (A-bomb) Train, miracles that offered a way out from a hopeless terminal condition.

I said building peace is like everyone working together on a giant mural while you can only see the one little leaf that you are painting so painstakingly. You don't just quit. Instead you have a blurred vision of this big world that we are all working towards... And then, starting from off on the right, everyone in the hall applauded long and loud in solidarity.