BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S SHOWING CANCELED OVER ANTI-ASIAN SCENES

By Tom Kando

 This is a letter-to-the-editor I sent to the Sacramento Bee some years ago, in protest:

On August 23, the Sacramento Bee told us that the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's had been yanked out of a Sacramento film festival because the Asian-American community found Micky Rooney's impersonation of a cranky Japanese offensive. Here is my reaction to this:

Once again the barbarians won. Gutless Vice Mayor Cohn had no business apologizing, trying to edit and finally  canceling one of the arguably twenty five best movies ever made, then replacing it with Ratatouille.
Do the barbarians who advocate censorship understand that by their rules, just about every book, every movie, every work of art should be banned? Ratatouille most certainly, as it toys with  the French. Also the “Chinoiseries” of Van Gogh and Gauguin. And much of the work of Mark Twain, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Shakespeare  and just about everyone else should also be banned, or at least thoroughly edited. And the one book that really needs to be banished  is the Bible, especially the ancient testament, which offends women, gays, and just about every other conceivable group. Perhaps we should have a Ministry of Culture in charge of censoring bad stuff - like Goebbels, Lenin, Mao, etc.

© Tom Kando 2014

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$370,000 PER MONTH TO TAKE CARE OF A PRISONER

By Tom Kando

(originally written on 7/17/08)

    On July 16, the Sacramento Bee printed an article about Susan Atkins - a member of the Charles Manson family who had participated in the horrendous mass murder 40 years ago. Atkins has spent the past 40 years in prison. She is now sixty, and she is dying of cancer. The article was basically  about the fact that she had just once again been  denied “compassionate” parole by the parole board, even though she is expected to die within a few months.  In view of her crime  - slashing her victims dozens of times, carving out a baby from Sharon Tate’s belly, drinking the victims’ blood, etc. -  the denial is okay by me. That’s not what I want to talk about.

    What I want to focus on is a detail in the article which struck me as indicative of our society’s descent into madness: Since March 18, i.e. in four months, the State of California has spent $1.461,724 to treat and guard this inmate. That’s right: nearly a million and a half dollars. This is not a typo, not a decimal error by the Bee proofreader. The figure is quite accurate. In fact, it’s $1.461,724.17. Don’t forget that last 17 cents!

    Think about this for a moment: That’s $12,284 per day. $370,000 per month. Maybe the value of my house (yes - the subprime crisis has devalued my house a lot) every month.

    What is the State doing with our money? What can possibly cost 1.4 million in four months?
Medical treatment? Surgery, Chemotherapy? Rehabilitation? Social and Psychological services? Security? (Atkins has been treated at an “outside” hospital).

    I had cancer surgery a few years ago. They used the expensive new-fangled Da Vinci
method. It probably cost over $100,000. But Susan Atkins cost the State, the Insurance Company, whoever, fourteen times more than I did.

    If this is what one high-profile inmate costs the State, we can expect that it is multiplied  manifold, because the State houses two hundred thousand inmates, many of whom are also very expensive.

    But what on earth does the money pay for? The answer is,  first and foremost: (1) salaries/fees  paid to individuals and (2) fees paid to institutions. This means (1) paychecks of hundreds of thousands of dollars to physicians, anesthesiologists, surgeons, psychiatrists and lawyers, and (2) hundreds of thousands spent in fees to hospitals, labs and other firms. Thus, one inmate such as Susan Atkins drives a significant portion of the California economy. She is single-handedly responsible for sustaining the opulent lifestyle of dozens of upper-middle-class professionals who live lives of comfort in California’s suburbs.

    Now don’t misunderstand me: I am not singling out the public sector for being scandalously frivolous in its spending practices. I am sure that private corporations are just as bad. The current failures of dozens of banks, airlines and other companies attest to this.

    But my general point is this: the reason why our society and its economy are going to hell in a handbasket is that we have totally and absolutely lost track of accountability. Our bureaucratized social structure has become so large and so complex that nobody as any idea of what’s going on.
As a result, the economy is hemorrhaging and, when it comes to services, there is no inkling of  the meaning of the word  productivity.  That is, concepts such cost-benefit and “bang for your buck” are utterly alien to agencies which see no problem in spending $12,000 per day to maintain one sick prison inmate.

    Meanwhile, the little guy is still in touch with reality. Even the millions of Americans who lost  their homes due to imprudent borrowing, and the dozens of millions who are deeply indebted on their credit cards and otherwise - they know  what’s happening: They know that they are broke and that they are in trouble.
    But the leadership, the bureaucrats, the CEO’s, they have lost touch with reality. Maybe we shouldn’t blame them either. Maybe the problem is systemic. Maybe the outflow of money is uncontrollable - whether in the California Department of Corrections, at the Pentagon or at General Motors.

    Is there a better way to run a railroad? And does anyone know what that is? I am not sure. Sometimes a newcomer thinks he can fix things, but he, too, fails miserably. Look at Schwartzenegger.
   
    So what’s the answer? Well, if the social system’s failure is an organic phenomenon that is not amenable to any individual’s intervention, then it follows that the recovery will be likewise: Things will straighten themselves out not because of wonderful new laws and policies, but just because the collapse will lead to a natural turn-around (or not).

    The moral, then?  Let things take their course. After a while, there wont be any money left, and people will simply have to walk away from the counter, empty-handed. There’ll be pain, but most  people will manage, somehow.

© Tom Kando 2014

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DUTCH SKATING IS FABULOUS

By Tom Kando

(first written on 2/10/2014)

Now that the Dutch skaters are raking in the gold medals in Sochi, I want to share with you some very fond memories.

Dutch skaters such as Irene Wust, Sven Kramer and the Mulder twins are dominating Olympic speed skating. Wust is phenomenal. She won gold at the 2006 winter games in Turin, Italy, again in 2010 in Vancouver, and now for the third time in Russia! Over the years, the Dutch have won 90 winter Olympic medals, 86 of them for skating!

Let me tell you how I experienced the beauty of long-distance skating. I grew up in Holland. By Dutch standards, I was a mediocre skater. But by any other standard I was reasonably good. Good enough to play intra mural ice hockey for my college fraternity.

When I went to high school in Amsterdam back in the 1950s, it was before global warming. The Dutch winters were still rugged. Like many other folks in Amsterdam, we lived on a canal. So in the winter, I was sometimes able to skate to school. Early on, I had so-called “Friese Doorlopers.” This type of skate consists of a wooden platform with the metal blade/skate under it. You simply tie the thing underneath your shoe. That way, you are still wearing your shoes while you skate, and you can get on and off the ice and walk around in your shoes whenever necessary. So I would tie my skates under my shoes, step on the frozen canal in front of our house, and off I went toward my high school near the Beethovenstraat. Later, I replaced my antique skates with a pair of fine, state-of-the-art “Noren,” the regular sort of skate used by professional speed skaters today, similar to ice hockey skates, except that the blade is nearly twice as long, jutting out far in front of the shoe.

The canals of Amsterdam would freeze over most winters, sometimes for months on end. The trick was to know when the ice was thick enough to be safe. We often skated even when the ice was still so thin that it “undulated” a bit.

Bridges presented a danger: The ice was always thinner underneath bridges - sometimes it was non-existent. And of course, Amsterdam’s grid of canals passes under bridges at just about every city block. Whenever you passed under a bridge, you took your chances. Here you approached the bridge at full speed, aiming to pass underneath. But if you broke through the thin ice under the bridge, you could shoot forward under the ice and never come back up.

I never experienced or witnessed any such tragedy, only heard about them. I only experienced and witnessed the joy of Dutch skating.

The most glorious form of skating was out in the countryside. There, you could skate over vast distances, towards the horizon. The entire country is cris-crossed by canals. Every cow field is separated from the next one by a canal or a ditch. You can skate for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, from one corner of the country to another. And there are dozens of lakes, up in Friesland near Sneek, all over North Holland, everywhere. Just outside of Amsterdam, there are “plassen” (lakes) everywhere - Vinkeveen, Loosdrecht, Westeinderplassen, you name it. You could skate to these lakes from the city’s canals, starting for example at the Boerenwetering.

Once you were outside the city, you just kept going. It was grandiose. Small as Holland is, it had grandeur. Eventually, you’d reach the lakes, skating over deep black ice, a surface as smooth and slippery as a mirror. With one arm behind your back and the other one swinging back and forth for balance, you’d aim for the other side, distant and dotted with tiny and barely discernible people, as in Breughel’s paintings. The only things interrupting the perfectly flat landscape were a couple of  church steeples  and  windmills, far away. The sky could be low, with threatening clouds, the way  Ruysdael depicted it, or brilliantly blue and  sunny,  with crisp sub-zero temperature. It  was utter silence and solitude, just you and the world.

But for any of this to happen, it has to freeze. One of Holland’s great traditions is the “Elfstedentocht.” (The Eleven Cities Race). This is a 200-kilometer ice skating race that has been held throughout the 20th century. It takes place in the Northern province of Friesland, and it goes through Leeuwarden, Sneek and nine other cities. Alas, the last time that the race was possible was 1997, due to global warming. It almost happened in 2012, but had to be canceled at the last moment.

The Dutch ice skating tradition will not die easily, witness the country’s Olympic prowess. Thanks to state-of-the-art training facilities and a true love for the sport, the country continues to cherish and excel in this marvelous activity.

© Tom Kando 2013
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN AND LETTERS FROM IWO-JIMA

By Tom Kando

 
Nowhere else is political correctness more virulent than in Hollywood. The two best received movies in memory are Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Letters from Iwo-Jima (2007). This prompted me to write the following insight in February of 2007:

In many scoring systems, reviewers give four stars to the best movies, three to the next best, and so on down to zero stars for the worst films. The Sacramento Bee reproduces the scores given to movies by a sample of critics nationwide - Ebert and Roper, the New York Times, etc. Every week we can see how the latest movies have been scored by half a dozen "experts" around the country. There is hardly ever total consensus. A great movie might get four stars from half of the experts, but only three from others, etc.

In all the years that I have followed these ratings, I can only remember two movies which received a perfect score, i.e. four stars from every single reviewer: Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Letters from Iwo-Jima (2007). The first of these movies is about a gay love story between two Wyoming cowboys, filmed beautifully in the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. The other one is about the battle of Iwo-Jima viewed from the Japanese perspective. It is spoken entirely in Japanese, with English subtitles. Its director is Clint Eastwood.

These two pictures received the greatest adulation of any movie, ever. Brokeback Mountain also swept the Golden Globes and was nominated for and won numerous Oscars, as did Letters from Iwo-Jima.The unanimity of the nation’s reviewers is astounding. Were these same experts to rate today such classics as Citizen Kane, Singing in the Rain, Casablanca, Spartacus, Gone with the Wind, foreign gems like Les Enfants du Paradis, more recent masterpieces like Schindler’s List, and spectacularly entertaining movies like Titanic or Amadeus, they would not give them a unanimously perfect score.

What could account for these two movies’ stunning popularity among the opinion leaders? I am convinced that this can only be explained politically. That is, the intelligentsia saw no alternative but to unanimously declare these two movies to be the best ever - ahead of all other films ever made. Political correctness demanded this. In the case of Brokeback Mountain, giving it a perfect score was the only way to avoid the risk of being called homophobic. In the case of Letters from Iwo-Jima, the risk was being called xenophobic. So much for free and independent thought.

As for my own rating, I give Brokeback Mountain three and a half stars. It is a beautiful movie and a courageous movie. The plot is somewhat convoluted. It is good, but not the best ever.
I give Letters from Iwo-Jima three stars. It is riveting, well acted, and it renders the gruesome and bloody battle accurately.

However, in the end, it is a fairy tale, because nearly every Japanese soldier and officer is depicted as a man of courage, honor and integrity, a hero who can do no wrong. It is possible to make a balanced movie that shows the enemy’s perspective and grants him dignity while remaining realistic. Tora Tora Tora was such a movie. So was Young Lions. And there are many more.

But as I said, Letters from Iwo-Jima is a fairy tale. It is not courageous. It is opportunistic. It rides the wave of political correctness, knowing that this will produce great rewards in ultra-liberal Hollywood.

Eastwood must know that most men are flawed and that the Japanese are no exception, to put it generously. Yet the only truly beastly deed in the entire movie is committed by two American marines, when they shoot two innocent Japanese POWs. This is a cheap shot. We know from war statistics that Americans have always treated enemy POWs far more humanely than others have: When the Russians defeated the German Third Army in Stalingrad, they captured about 100,000 German prisoners. Five percent (!) of these survived Russian captivity. The survival rate of Russian prisoners captured by Germans was about the same. And what about the Japanese? Thousands of American POWs died in the Bataan death march. The Nanking massacre was pure and simple genocide. Throughout World War Two, Japanese soldiers raped and enslaved thousands of women in China, Korea, and throughout the rest of Asia.

Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have rarely shown contrition about their war crimes, and we rarely hold them accountable. Instead, the American media often bring up the tragic internment of Japanese-Americans during the war. Could this double standard be because the Japanese are non-European, and criticizing them could be construed as an expression of Eurocentrism, which is one of the worst sins, accordint to the intelligentsia?

Should someone make a movie about World War Two from the German perspective? Should Hitler be mentioned in it with the same equanimity as Tojo is mentioned in Letters from Iwo-Jima? Clint Eastwood is now getting rave reviews, perhaps an Oscar, and universal adulation from Hollywood and from the intelligentsia. However, nothing becomes as dated as a fad. Remember Billy Jack? Popular at the time, a bad joke now. Or Easy Rider? Still revered by aging hippies, but embarrassing to the rest of us. The same fate may befall the latest faddish movies as well.

As an immigrant and therefore somewhat of an outsider, I am always puzzled by the unrelenting sense of guilt which plagues American liberals. They cannot, for a moment, stop flagellating themselves and entertaining the thought that their country is wrong. Letters from Iwo-Jima is one more manifestation of this unhealthy habit.




© Tom Kando 2014

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F.A.R.T.

By Tom Kando
 
It is very difficult to get published or to even get an agent to glance at your work. Furthermore, it is not clear that what gets published and read is better than what gets turned down or ignored. This is enough to make one cry. 

So I propose a support group for failed authors called Failed Authors, Rejected and Turned Down (FART).Let's create a blog, a web site, a national network. Local support groups (chapters) will meet regularly. The potential membership is huge, because everyone is now trying to write books, especially autobiographies.We will meet every week and commiserate. We will model ourselves after AA and Alanon.We get on the wagon, i.e. we quit wasting our resources and ruining our health trying to peddle our writing to agents and to publishers. We are addicts, just like gamblers and alcoholics.

A typical confessional at one such meeting might go like this: "I have been on the wagon for three months. I talk to my spouse and to my children again. I exercise again and I return my friends' e-mails and telephone calls.Or conversely, "I thought I had kicked my addiction to sending out queries. However, I fell off the wagon last week: I Sent out another query letter to an agent I found in the Writers’ Market." 

© Tom Kando 2014
 
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AMERICAN POLITICAL PARALYSIS: A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

By Tom Kando
    (First published on October 2, 2013)

    Okay, so it’s happened: The Republicans have shut down the government. In two weeks, they may  cause a much greater disaster, namely a  government default, as happens in  banana republics.

    Applying the cui bono principle, it’s obvious why the 1%-ers don’t mind shutting down the government. The plutocracy isn’t affected. It’s no skin off their nose if government services are shut down. The overwhelming majority of the federal government’s activities is for the benefit of the 99%-ers.
    Still,  I am amused at the thought of the old Tea Party  geezer on his way to Yellowstone in his $200,000 motor home, only to find out that he can’t enter the park.

    * * * * *

    As to the specific issue at hand:  The Republicans are holding the federal government hostage  in order to repeal Obamacare, even though it is  the law of the land, approved by majority vote and found constitutional by the Supreme Court.

    Most of us remember the moron a couple of years ago with the picket sign saying that he wanted the government to keep its hands off his Medicare. Similarly today, abysmal ignorance  remains the foundation of the Tea Party’s version of democracy: Jimmy Kimmel asked people which health insurance program they prefer: Obamacare or The Affordable Care Act? Every single respondent replied that they dislike Obamacare (it is socialistic) but like the Affordable Care Act (it is not socialistic).

    On the other hand, on October 1, the Republicans’ last excuse - that most Americans don’t want Obamacare/The Affordable Care Act  - was  demolished: nearly three million Americans inquired about how to sign up, on the FIRST DAY!

    * * * * *

    As to the shutdown and our government’s increasing dysfunctionality in general: I was thinking, what happens in European and other parliamentary democracies, when the government becomes deadlocked?

    I don’t know whether  a European government would shut down over something that has already been voted into law. I’m sure it’s happened.  The history of Europe is replete with revolutions that wiped out all previous legislation and re-started a country from scratch.

    However, there is one advantage which European-style, multi-party,  parliamentary democracies enjoy over our strong presidential democracy: In places  such as France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Scandinavia, and Canada too...), what tends to happen is that the premier or prime minister dissolves the parliament, resigns, and calls for new elections.  There is nothing sacrosanct about holding elections exactly every 2 or 4 years, and for terms of exactly 2, 4, 6 or 8 years. In many countries, when the composition of parliament brings the government to a halt, the recourse is to call for new elections so as to alter the parliament’s make-up.

    I am not saying that such a system is necessarily better. Historically, no country (in Europe or elsewhere) has been as stable as America. In France, Italy and elsewhere, governments have come and fallen with such frequency that there are many jokes about this. When I lived in France, the appointment and the collapse of new governments was daily news. Until the presidency of Charles De Gaulle, the country was ungovernable. The new system he introduced with France’s Fifth Republic was modeled  after the American system. As a  result, France became stable and prosperous.

    Italy has been worse: It has had 60 governments since World War Two. Today, its problems continue. With or without the buffoon Berlusconi, Italy continues to teeter.

    But what about us? Our vaunted political stability now seems to be biting back. Were we a  multiparty parliamentary democracy akin to most  European countries, here is what could happen at this point of paralysis: The government and Congress would be dissolved; there would be new elections. The outcome could be worse, or better. The Tea Party, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party could each gain or lose strength. President (prime minister)  Obama could be replaced by someone   from another party, or he could return to power with greater parliamentary support.
   
    In sum, the outcome could be disastrous, or it could be beneficial. One thing that would be different, for sure, is that the current deadlock would cease. But listen: I am not advocating this solution!

© Tom Kando 2014

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POST-JUDICE

By Tom Kando
  
   (written on July 19, 2008)

We have been told for a century or so that prejudice is evil. True.

Pre-judice means: you judge someone BEFORE you know him. (From “pre” =  before, and “judicium” =  judgement).  This is bad. Plus, you generalize one individual’s characteristic(s) to his entire group (stereotyping). Also bad.

So today I thought, what about postjudice? If prejudice is bad, then its opposite - postjudice - must be good. And this is true. You judge something after you know the facts, after you know what it is that you are judging. Great. As  I have  told my students many times: information must precede opinion.

So then I thought: when we judge a group of people negatively, is it always prejudice, or is it sometimes postjudice? I have to tread  very careful now. Before I  know it, I could be called a bigot. But let me proceed anyway - carefully:

Sometimes, the members of a particular group are “over-represented” in some bad behavior. Or a particular group misbehaves collectively. Example: the Nazis (always the safe example). So then we conclude that this is a bad group of people. In 1945, we concluded that there had been an awful lot of bad Germans. Postjudice, not prejudice.

So the difference between prejudice and postjudice is clear: One is based on ignorance, the other one on experience.

For a long time, the most obvious victims of prejudice have been ethnic minorities. In America,   blacks have been the foremost recipients of negative labeling. Of course, this  analysis is strictly limited to the US. Elsewhere, ethnic prejudice is often the mirror opposite. In quite a few  circles, the  boogeyman is Satan America.

In America, a new group has been vying for the top spot as boogeyman since 9-11: Arabs and other Muslims (especially when they are bearded).

After that  you get,  in  descending order, Mexican-Americans, Asians, Eastern Europeans and other former communist  people (Poles, Russians, Hungarians, and don’t forget those ridiculous Kazakhstanis in the movie  Borat), various Mediterranean peoples (Greeks and Italians, but Greeks rank  a little bit lower), the Irish, the Jews (still), the French, but also the Germans, the Scotts, even the English...

So negative generalizations are made about every single group - by the members of  other groups.

    * * * * *

It’s easy to say, “just stop generalizing. Just judge each individual on his own merits.” But if we were to follow this precept, we would have to abolish Sociology, which is the business of generalizing about groups. In fact, we should abolish all the social sciences - psychology, anthropology, history, political science, economics, all of them. After all, anthropologists study cultures, right? They describe the behaviors  and the  values which the members of one tribe or one  society share with each other and which distinguish them from other  groups. It’s called  “Cultural identity.”  Psychologists also generalize  about categories of people - extroverts, introverts, type-A personalities, women, men,  etc.

So it is clear that generalizations are the essence of social science - as they are the essence of all science. After all, doesn’t science try to discover laws with general applicability?

    * * * * *
Does this leave us in a quandary? Maybe not:

Generalization is okay, but it  must be based on post-judgement, not pre-judgement (prejudice). Fine.

But maybe not everything that  has been passed off as prejudice is prejudice. Maybe some of it is postjudice, i.e. based on experience. If a disproportionate number of thefts and robberies are
committed by gypsies, then does it not make sense for a tourist to be weary of gypsies who approach him on a Paris sidewalk or a Rome subway?

 If the vast majority of terrorists in the 21st century are Muslim fundamentalists, then is it wrong to suspect that the next terrorist attack is more likely to be committed by a member of that group than by a Buddhist or a Jew or a Christian?
Yes, yes, even if many terrorists are Muslims, this does not mean that most Muslims are terrorists. Very true. Still, probabilities are what matters in life. I’ll repeat: it is more likely that the next terrorist attack will be committed by a Muslim fundamentalist than by a Lutheran from Scandinavia (oops, I almost forgot the enormous example of an exception that confirms the rule: In 2012, the Norwegian  monster Anders Breivik murdered more than 77 people, mostly children).

    * * * * *
Now don’t get huffy: Nothing is for ever. This Muslim terrorism business is just for now. As recently as the 1980s, most terrorists were European Sociology students (remember  the German Baader-Meinhof  Gang? the Italian Red Brigades? the French Action Directe? The Red Army Faction?)  This, too, shall pass.  No group has a  permanent corner on misbehavior.  If you believe that they do, then you are, indeed, a racist.

Still, at any given time, some groups misbehave more than others. And that is what people often react to, when they generalize and when they react negatively to members of certain groups and categories.
Maybe in the future, the Japanese will be the most frequent pickpockets, Norwegians will disproportionately engage in terrorist acts and Jews will have the highest  rate of rape. Then, it will be time to be aware of this,  to hold on to your wallet when you cross paths with a Japanese, to keep an eye on that tall blond Scandinavian passenger sitting next to you, and to make sure that  your daughter doesn’t date a Jewish boy without supervision.

But let’s face it: At least some of what is viewed as prejudice is in fact postjudice. The common people aren’t as dumb as liberal professors and journalists make them out to be. Sometimes their reactions are  based on experience.

© Tom Kando 2014

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