I really do not know what it was about the column that enamored me. Maybe it was the earnest tone with which she presented the fact that people lined up to eat at an Olive Garden in Grand Forks—GRAND FORKS!—North Dakota and it was written with so little self-consciousness about what the coastal communities from sea to shining sea would think about her and her city. Maybe it was the fact that she had given us a glimpse of communities outside our own—with our blazing fast Internet and “artisanal” dining and our hipster culture—communities that are just as American as ours, only with more heart and soul and yes, Virginia, for some communities in the Midwest, Red Lobster happens to be where you take your girlfriend to propose in front of a crowd and make her your fiancee.

Not a month ago, on Valentine’s Day, there was a tweet making the rounds about how men shouldn’t give their girlfriends mall jewelry store baubles and how you don’t take her out to Red Lobster on a date. To which I said that these people have no clue whatsoever about the backgrounds  of the people who are dining there. That young twentysomething guy with his girl? You don’t know how much he worked, to save up money for a dinner for him and his girl that would cost upwards of  forty dollars. You just don’t know. But sure, let’s sneer at them for their commercialized tastes and their plebian preferences? I’d rather not.

There was a lot of sneering directed at Marilyn Hagerty and the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota, whose citizens lined up outside a new Olive Garden, whose citizens used to drive an hour and a half to Fargo just to eat at one, who now  have to put up with judgment from Coastal elites who exclaim in sheer horror about their lack of local and organic, farm-to-table dining options in the city of Grand Forks—GRAND FORKS!—North Dakota and why would anyone even want to live there much less eat at an Olive Garden and much less line up for one?

My vocal admiration of Mme Hagerty landed me a phone interview with Ryan Bakken in which I just poured out my thoughts. Grand Forks is Grand Forks. There was a scene in Friday Night Lights where colleges were trying to convince the individual Dillon Panthers to go to their schools and what they have to offer in terms of football and an education and one, one coach even said “we just had a new Costco open up recently.” Friends, this is America. And it’s bigger than what  you’re used to, and there’s so much more out there than what you think you already know.

So why judge? Why sneer at them from your nose that sits higher than your brow? Why is this so weird for so many of you? Why is it so bizarre to you that on karaoke night in a regional chain when the DJ plays the Cupid shuffle for an intermission about three fourths of the people leave their seats and their booths and just dance?

In my phone interview I critiqued restaurant reviews for being highbrow and pretentious. I had mentioned the Internet’s addiction to irony and mean-spiritedness. That’s about as much fire and brimstone I can bring up. Tomorrow we’ll be mean to each other. But tonight, I’ll borrow a page from Mme Hagerty’s interview with the Village Voice and just tell all the haters to go get a life.

Certainly it doesn’t merely mean knowing the accidents of American history and existence. There are things you can ignore—fried butter, Harley-Davidson, Viet Nam era student protests—as white noise in the data, but there is still a there to being American. There’s a je ne sais quoi, some might say, but I disagree. The whole concept to being American is so simple, it’s frightening.

It’s about Liberty: the kind that allows you to do as your conscience tells you; the kind that makes you face the consequences of your actions; the kind that doesn’t protect you from your own mistakes.

There is, however, an even more powerful freedom that this Liberty offers all Americans, immigrants and natural-born alike. Here’s a clue, from Max Brooks’ World War Z in the words of a (thinly veiled) Howard Dean as he recounts his time as vice president under (an equally thinly veiled) Colin Powell:

I was pointing to them, shouting and gesturing with the passion I’m most famous for. “We need a stable government, fast!” I kept saying. “Elections are great in principle but this is no time for high ideals.”

The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military training … he said to me, “This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don’t have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have … [struggling to remember] all we have is what we want to be.“

American existence is freedom from ethnographic baggage, if you choose to do so. As in immigrant, this is an exhilarating opportunity, and I am not alone. Listen to our stories, but most of all, listen to us when we start telling you about how we wouldn’t be anywhere close to the horizontal and vertical mobility we enjoy in this country.

If I had stayed in the Philippines with my biology degree, my mother would’ve broken her back trying to fund med school. Or, she could’ve dropped dead from the strain of working 60 hours a week here and living a life of self-denial, such that I wouldn’t have been able to finish and, well, who knows what I would’ve done. How many immigrants would tell you today: “I wouldn’t have gone anywhere back home.”

For an American born and raised in America, this freedom is an unbearable lightness. The story of natural born Americans is the search for identity. In this context, one can view the caricatural search for self-esteem and self-actualization in a fairer light. Europeans sneer at how Americans of Irish descent (and of not) celebrate St. Patrick’s day. Cultural celebrations of Old World customs reach comical proportions, and there is a reductive quality to the way natural born Americans pick and choose cultural aspects of their heritage. On its face it seems disrespectful. What does a natural born American of Irish descent know about the Irish’s struggle for survival during the great potato famine? Should he bear the weight of IRA’s terrorism?

Consider the Stuff White People Like blog in this light. It’s been called a damning critique of yuppie hipsterism, but more than that, it is the story of how Americans try to find or build their identity. I want to tell my American friends: by all means, go to the country of your lineage. Visit it. Take it in, whether it’s Warsaw or Prague, but remember: being American means you don’t have to worry about what it means to be Polish, or Czech.

I was born and raised in the Philippines, as I am wont to remind everyone. Many Filipinos in central Luzon—especially in the great rice plains of Pampanga, the ranchlands of Bulacan and the Metro Manila megalopolis—are of mixed descent over many generations, but an equally large population have features that are more provincial (rural) in nature. This is not just a question of fair skin as inherited from our Castillian colonists or the Chinese, but a matter of bone structure, of facial features and body types.

Humans crave the exotic, and there are anthropological bases of beauty grounded in signals for good health and symmetry that transcend cultures, but the sheer assault of Western—not just American but European—aesthetics upon other lineages has gotten ridiculous. And it’s not just Asians, but African Americans with their history of living with their White masters that serve as cautionary tales of how worship of the different can—when taken to extremes—be detrimental to the psyche not just of an individual but to that of an entire people.

Hair straightening in black people is not a new phenomenon; their girls in the slave era have been observed as trying to straighten their hair with everything from kitchen grease to tar. All to wash the stink of difference, to achieve a sense of sameness that may lead to the respect that comes with being equals. Tough shit, though the Afro hairdos as popularized in the disco era, along with creative ways to deal with the unruliness of curls, are making headway into the popular culture.

But what of my people? Culturally we have always been a melting pot, so I am in no mood to indict those among us who like to adopt the mannerisms of rap artists or gangbangers nor exclusive school preps or whatever catches their fancy. However, what of our standards of beauty? The Filipino male, given the proper diet, will tend towards a barrel chest and a mild paunchiness of the belly despite being generally low in body fat. We are shaped differently, and yet the media we consume—Stateside or back home—fills us with imagery of statuesque Caucasian men and svelte women. Perhaps Zainudin Maidin, then Information Minister of Malaysia, had a good idea striking Brad Pitt from a car advertisement airing in his home country.

Some of the best male physiques in tv and movies—Teddy Sears, Alexander Skasgaard, Paul Walker, Peter Facinelli, Ryan Gosling, Cam Gigandet—to name a few (of my favorites) all have shapes that are unachievable by anyone who isn’t white. I see this at the gym every day. We have a lot of non-white lifters in varying degrees of fitness, but despite being low in body fat (and skin taught enough over their muscles and whatnot) they do not come close to the sillhouettes of white paragons of physique.

And where did this contemporary standard come from anyway? Look no further than Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, a modern marvel of sports photography and cinematography. That’s right. That Leni Riefenstahl, whose art I have praised in this blog years before and still do so today for its technical merit, skill and craftsmanship. Despite that, we must recognize her role in reviving the popularity of Classical sillhouettes as the standard for beauty.

As for how Madison Avenue has messed up the self images of women, with the unrealistic goals of unhealthy emaciation, let us cite the insightful Nora Vincent, in her book Self Made Man:

[...] A lot of women have asked themselves why so many men are so fond of modern porn stars and centerfolds, women who aren’t real women, whose breasts are fake, whose hair is bleached into straw or perversely depilated, whose faces are painted thick, and whose bodies have ben otherwise altered by surgery or diet to conform with doll-like exactitude to something that isn’t found in nature. Why, I had so often wondered, didn’t men want real women? Was it misogyny, a kind of collective repressed homosexuality or perhaps pedophilia that really wanted a body type that more resembled a man’s or a child’s, fatless and smooth?

For some, this is no doubt true, or why would magazines like Barely Legal, full of pre- and parapubescent girls, sell so well? Why would the fashion industry, long dominated by gay men, demand that women starve themselves until their bodies, hipless and breastless, look like the bodies of adolescent boys?

I’m going to let the gay-as-a-pedophile stereotype pass for now. Not in the mood. But Madison Avenue—such a beautiful metonym for such a vicious industry—is not in the habit of creating beauty; it used to be, but now it’s been reduced to assaulting one’s self-image, convincing a person to hate himself enough to just want their product as in insufficient salve against the sense of deficiency that they inflict upon their customers. Advertising hasn’t always been like this. Advertising shouldn’t stay like this.

Plants have evolved fruits to benefit themselves: they are seed-dispersal mechanisms with benefits to the animals that would aid them in their effort to perpetuate the species. Yes, the trace elements found in fruits and vegetables are miniscule in amount and easily supplemented. Yes, fruits are about 90% water and greens are about 70%. Yet, it is the dietary packaging of a whole fruit or a fresh vegetable that provides the best means to get the best benefit. Instead of trying to make a case for fruits and vegetables here, just look at the health profile of a person who lives without roughage. Find me a man who lives on grains and the flesh of animals alone and I will show you a very unhealthy man.

But because Mrs. Obama has chosen to promote fruits and vegetables, Rush has chosen to attack the low hanging fruit instead of going after the real prize. Sarah Palin is equally guilty of this by celebrating with baked goods in response to Mrs. Obama’s finger-wagging.

I have a personal rule. I prefer not to advise pundits and public figures on what they should say. Whenever I do, I imagine myself wearing their faces and bodies—pundit-drag if you will—just to resist the temptation. I can bear to do it this time tonight. Rush and Sarah are doing their adherents a disservice. Eating fruits and vegetables are an act of free will, of personal responsibility to one’s own health and long-term enjoyment of life. Just because Michelle Obama wants to beat us over the head and tell us we’re such horrible fatasses for not eating enough fruits and vegetables, doesn’t mean that we should go after the fruits and vegetables themselves.

If you still can’t separate the tyrant from her vegetal yoke, think of it this way. We like to say that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Well, fruits and vegetables don’t oppress people; the mannish fishwife married to the President of the United States does.

Some have questioned the responsibility and judgment of her parents: what kind of parent would encourage a child to circumnavigate by sail at such an age? Have their critics considered the commonsensical assumption her parents trained her in sailing, and that her circumnavigation is not the first long-distance sailing trip she’s done? I can’t be certain the assumption is true, but it’s very likely. Others wanted to debate whether her parents should be charged with negligence for “allowing” Abby to sail around the world. These same people, without the benefit of hindsight, wouldn’t even pass judgment on them if she completed her voyage safely. The question remains: how young is too young?

Legally, there are three age-related milestones: birth, adulthood, and retirement. There’s plenty worth discussing on these three topics, but important to understanding the Abby Sunderland issue is that adulthood is much fuzzier a concept than the other two. Children in Maryland can start working at age sixteen, and new adults can vote but still can’t buy alcohol. Young girls in some states can get an abortion without parental consent in some states.”Children” can now enjoy being on their parents’ insurance plans until the age of twenty-six.

Laws have adjusted the priveleges of adulthood beyond the legal, clear-cut definition mainly because some groups have gotten burned due to tragedy and would like to make adjustments for everyone else as a result. Abby Sunderland could have been yet another case that could have added yet another adjustment to the definition of adulthood.

What a lot of people miss is that people like Abby Sunderland, and the other children who’ve done this, are intrepid people. Not only do they have the potential to do great things, they are already on their way to realizing it. Let’s not let Abby Sunderland’s near-unfortunate outcome be another excuse for overbearing parenting. There’s plenty of that to go around as it is.

Composition and technique really aren’t all that exemplary, but they show practice. They capture what seems to be the intended qualities in each scene: the bustle of city life, the majesty of a palace, the tranquility of a lake. If one were to use the work alone as a means to look into the mind of this heretofore unidentified artist, what insights might we gain when studying this work?

Would you make the same insights when you learn that those paintings were made by none other than Adolf Hitler?

To a certain extent, art can be separated from the artist. Leni Riefenstahl’s anthropological photography of Africans is excellent work. However, at what point can art remain separate from the artist? Does it come with the knowledge of the artist’s identity? If I hawked these Hitler paintings as postcards in some community who have never heard of his art, what does that make me? Even harder, if I had no idea these hypothetical postcards featured Hitler’s art, what does that make me?

The appreciation of art is a multi-phase experience. Our feelings change based on what’s depicted, the artist itself, what we know and do not know. It’s truly fascinating.

If I were a believer, I would have commemorated the Jewish revolt against the Greek religious imperialism of the second century B.C. this month. Fun.

You, on the other hand, are far more likely preparing to celebrate the birthday of the one true messiah, the son of God, the King of Kings, he who died for all our sins and brings peace to all mankind.

I grew up Catholic and though my lifestyle doesn’t reflect my upbringing—to be caricatural, I do not fast, nor eat merely fish on Fridays—I still celebrate the holiest of days by dropping by for Mass. I also greet people “Merry Christmas,” even when I receive a “Happy Holidays.” I hate a lot of this political correctness crap. So, what does Christmas mean to a non-Christian in the United States?

It’s a day of rest, for one. Since the country is densely populated with people who actually celebrate Christmas, they have little incentive to work. Many places offer holiday pay, which means they don’t have to work for the day, too.

It’s a day to be with family. Since they know they’re getting paid, they get to hang out with family. Some people travel across the country to do this. If for any reason, people can’t be with their families, they reach out to their friends and spend the day together.

It’s a great time for business, and the better non-Christian businessmen don’t mind greeting people “Merry Christmas,” except the obviously non-Christian clientele, of course.

It’s a time for good will. I mean, ferChrissake, a large majority of the world is celebrating the birth of our Christ and Savior on this day that our Church agreed to do so. It’s a time for people to be nice to each other, or at least, nicer than they usually are.

If you’re Jewish, Muslim, or whatever non-Christian believer, the option is there on this day to do with it as you please. This invitation applies to atheists, too, but too many of them are in this terrible funk that just makes you want to punch them in the mouth.

I mean, what do militant atheists want? They want people to reject religion for reason. Sure. By logical extension, they want people to not celebrate Christmas, which removes the reason to take off work in droves on that date. They want people to work on December 25. They want people to not go meet their families on this day. They want people to stop being nice to each other on this day. They want people to reject this holiday because it offends their sensiblities and to them, the irrational behavior surrounding this day would be imprisoning. No wonder that (from same article, emphasis Harsanyi’s):

USA Today also relayed that a University of Minnesota study taken that year found that Americans rank atheists as the most disliked minority group in the entire country, topping other groups who richly deserve such honors, like journalists, for instance.

Any other day, I would tell the militant atheists to get the fuck out of our lives and pull that stick out of their asses. But today, well, at least tomorrow, it’d be great to rub salt in their woods and greet them a “Merry Christmas.”

The concept of a patriarchy, as demonized in the States and other Western societies, is a boogeyman constructed by Radical Feminists (note the proper noun usage) to explain the sorrows of women in society. As a part of the second wave of Feminism, its aim is to “end” the patriarchy. It’s at this point where I have to elevate beyond the political and talk about gender politics from a more anthropological approach.

Men have always been mystified, enamored, attracted to and bewildered by women. Nothing frightens men more than the effect women have on them: for her, a man will deny his identity, isolate himself from friends and family and engage in self-destructive behavior. Hell, even her genitalia provoke a whole slew of irrational responses, as described in this article on vagina dentata (potentially NSFW). The reverse is also true: in her name, men are also capable of great good and nobility. It is this incitement to the irrational (whether for the good or evil) that strikes fear in the heart of men.

It is the woman’s capacity for bearing life, for organizing the household, for tending to the children while men hunt, for bearing a man’s children in the first place, that makes her valuable to men. The man’s strength, his ability to provide and protect are what makes men valuable to women. This has been true for thousands upon thousands of years. Combine the value of women with the fear that men feel towards her power over them, and what you have is the motivation for what feminists consider “control.” What Radical Feminists damn as control, is merely the societal compromise that the sexes have agreed upon to ensure survival. Modern living has challenged this to an extent, but so many revert to “traditional” gender roles sometime between the ages of thirty and fifty (a guesstimate, I admit).

When one gets involved in politics, sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. I’m well aware of Kownacki’s view that religion is used to enslave women. This is the same critique of religion vis-a-vis its role in race relations, foreign policy and colonialism. What so many fail to realize is that religion itself, anthropologically, is a social construct. While, I, having been raised Catholic believe in the existence of the Eternal And Divine (God), He is unknowable without people. Religious beliefs are a codification of the society’s mores and ethe at the time. As societies grow, religions evolve, too.

I told Justin: “It’s a chicken and egg question. Anthropologically, all religion is built around morals of the day not the other way around.” To which he responded: “But the morals of the day are always more varied than it seems. History just happens to be written by the loudest voices.” Variations in morals do not mean that every moral perspective is equally meritorious. Societies and the people who form them decide through cycles of conflict what is “generally accepted to be moral.” Even in a cultural practice as irrational as religion, there is a constant exchange of ideas and debate. The results of these little conflicts are what we live with today, and what our children will live with in the future.

While @JonHenke takes a turn for the disappointing:

How dare he deign to ascribe one intention on all of us? There were kids like these in high school, who’d speak “on behalf of the room” after being reprimanded by their teacher. Jim Treacher (@JTlol) perhaps issued the best response:

This is one of those patriotic holidays where even Google makes a custom logo, despite their ignoring Memorial Day, of all days. It’s the kind of day that only the most hardened of anti-American Americans don’t honor. Sourpussery, while certainly within one’s right to exercise, is within my right to ridicule.

Jeff at onQSM has similar thoughts.