What America is to me

On the question of identity

What is remembering? I had forgotten to throw out my cat's litter this afternoon and tomorrow morning was garbage day. To ensure I wouldn't put it off, I draped a ribboned trash bag over a chair in the living room; after attending to immediate matters, I looked at the trash bag, thanked myself for having the foresight to put out a visual reminder, and then moved to my cat's litterbox. I scooped the clumps of sand that adhered to his, let us say, transparent and brown waste, tossed them into an old bag, removed said bag and replaced it with the new one. I noted the smell of digested grain and fish in the old one, tied it up, went down the stairs of the apartment and threw the bag into a garbage can overflowing with similar-looking bags. I then walked upstairs, not thinking anything in particular, scooped more sand into his litter box, and washed my hands with soap, before returning to the next event in the day, whose details I had already forgotten.

Now, how did this scene come to be? Or rather, why did I remember it in this way?

When I went outside to toss the old bag, did I remark on where the sun was? What time was it? Did I turn on the lights to descend the staircase? Did my cat leave more waste than usual, or less? Where was he, at that time? What soap did I use? For the sake of the narrative I did not recall these, and even now I couldn't tell you them. The question is, did I forget them at the time, or when I began telling the story?

Our awareness of the omission of these details becomes sharper when we realize what details I added, which do not add onto the narrative: for example, I did not need to mention I set a reminder for myself, I could have began the story from the litterbox onward. I only added it to comment on myself: to laugh at myself, partially, for my fickle memory, but to also reward myself with praise for having thought of reminding myself to take out the cat's litter.

The same can be said when I add that I washed my hands afterwards with soap. That points to my conscientiousness, and I want you the reader to know of the virtues I think I have. But did I, really, wash my hands after scooping sand into the litterbox, or did I do it when I came upstairs? Logically, in order to ensure true sanitation, I would have done it after interacting with the litterbox, and yet psychologically I could have done it once I got up the stairs because the bathroom is just right there, I would have had to expend more energy to refrain from doing so.

And I added I noted the smell of the litter - but how do I know that memory is genuine? I have thrown out his litter for years; why would I now remark on it? Logically, no matter what day or mood, I would always be surprised by my cat's smells; and yet, what if I were backfilling my memory with memories from the past? What if, for the sake of the narrative, I added that detail, so you, the reader, not familiar with my cat whatsoever, know the emotions that go behind removing his litter?

And then - how do I know this is the true and final record of events? What if, in the middle of the task, I had kicked the sandals in the hallway, so that I felt obliged to rearrange them before continuing onward? What if there was a leaky faucet, and I paused to fidget with its handle? What if I decided, then, to shut off my laptop for the evening?

This long, tedious exercise, of which we can raise even more doubt if we had the will or strength to, shows that memory is fickle. We can't trust memory. We do not perceive "facts". Rather, we digest the emotions and conclusions of a series of events, and then retroactively fill in the events to get there. I know my cat's litter box is empty of feces. I know I have the satisfaction of removing my cat's litter for the week. These are all that matter. There is only the end; the end is all we have to work with.

What can we then call identity? Are we able to name ourselves? Are we only what other people define us - as in, we can never touch on an objective reality concerning ourselves? Are we only ever the stories we recount of ourselves, stories we made up? Is it the case that the stories we make up - the bits of truth, the undercurrent of lies - reveal something about our character? For example, I want you to think I'm clever, I want you to think I'm conscientious. That accords with the vanity of having a blog. That is what I think I am, and it's revealing to you that I value cleverness and conscientiousness.

Perhaps this is a roundabout way of saying that, yes, we do not know ourselves, and we are only what other people see in the stories we tell of ourselves. The conclusion then is that we must tell stories of ourselves, for the sake of other people hearing them, otherwise we'll never know what our true mettle is. And perhaps we listen to other people's stories so as to find the means to discover ourselves.

Well, then I shall proceed with remembering, then, right or wrong, well- or ill-conceived.

On what I remember

I remember the 2019 Hong Kong protests. I remember it was warm, even hot at the time. My first memory comes from watching CNN in the air-conditioned office, into which the sunshine blared. Had the protests escalated then, or were they still peaceful? Was it CNN, or a different television network? Did I see this during lunch, or during my occasional trips to the coffee machine? Or, did I begin to be aware of this from my phone as, during that time, like most white-collar workers, I was addicted to reading political-sounding-existential news?

Now another memory I struggle to reconcile: at some point in time I saw, in a cobblestone alley in the Financial District of Boston, a book in the "used" rack of Commonwealth Books, titled "The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800–1985" by John King Fairbank, which title, to be clear, I did not recall at all, I had to look for it. Boston had treasures lying on its streets, but they weren't weighed in gold, they were in ink; I read it briefly, was interested in its discussion, and then purchased a copy online, though I don't recall the book ever entering my doorstep. I only remember reading it that long, sun-drenched summer on my armchair, where the trees outside left pollen on my windowsill.

Since the beginning of adulthood I struggled with being Chinese. In America the settlers displaced the Indigenous populations, who, when I was younger, were still called Native Americans - maybe they are still called so to this day. The settlers were white - Dutch, English, German. This "white" did not include Irish and Italians, who surged in the 19th century. The settlers' slaves were from the west coast of Africa; however, in the United States, we simply call them "black", we deign to distinguish Africa as we do Europe. That is the legacy of African-Americans in the US: a struggle to remind the rest of the country that they exist, in spite of innumerable legal and cultural hurdles, which struggle resulted in Alain Locke's "New Negro" and the Civil Rights Movement. Lastly, in America, our southern neighbors are Hispanic; their influence is greater around the border than up here in the North, but they're woven very tightly in American culture regardless.

From a historical sense, the model for Asian representation in America would be Japanese. This goes back before our implementation of democracy in their country, and before our relationship with the Pacific; it may not even be correct to start with the Perry Expedition. We can look at Hokusai's influence on Monet and the fame of Sessue Hayakawa. There has always been a mutual respect between Japan and the West; not a respect that transcended racial boundaries, but a kind of acknowledgement.

This is why I don't think too fondly on the Chinese migrants escaping the last gasps of the Qing Dynasty at the latter half of the 19th century. I don't have much to say, publicly, on the Century of Humiliation, except that it was largely self-inflicted. And, because I am an inheritor of that legacy, I don't have much to say on myself.

Adding onto the friction of being American was the resistance to being Chinese. College was the first time I met international Chinese, and they always put a barrier between myself and them, with the acronym "ABC" - or, "American-Born Chinese". There were things I simply couldn't understand about China, without having been there or lived there.

In America, there's a simple equation in being Chinese - "Chinese" equals "good at math." That was about it, that was all there was to expect from us and that was all we amounted to. It didn't help, either, that my family was quite indifferent to our history and culture. We celebrated traditional holidays as Lunar New Year, the Qingming Festival, and the Autumn Festival, and that was about it. I simply participated in them; I didn't know why and what purpose they served. Being Chinese, for me, was what I Was, albeit Was consisted of very few traits and expectations.

In America, in the context of the relationship between China and Hong Kong, you're supposed to root for Hong Kong. Hong Kong is, in Capitalized Words, Democratic and Free; China is Authoritarian and Oppressive. In short, Hong Kong is, or was, Westernized; China is ... well, what was China? ... China is Chinese.

And yet China is complex. China is not a country where the government, through the military, takes the population hostage - a population which is approximately a thousand times greater in size than its military. In nerdspeak this is three orders of magnitude, comparing 1 to 1000, 1000 to 1,000,000. The population, for good and bad reasons, accepted their current government, and not the 200-year-old Qing Dynasty, not the short-lived Republic of China, not the Warlord Era, not the Japanese Empire, and not the Kuomintang.

In that same vein, the country accepted the aggressive posture of the People's Republic of China to regain any territories that had been lost by the Qing Dynasty, including Hong Kong. Neither Hong Kong nor its British sovereign were innocent concerning China's intentions. Indeed, China, as it acts for every question of sovereignty, was adamant that the Hong Kongers had no voice in the 1997 handover; to them, this was an issue between two sovereigns, not the constituents of those sovereigns. So why did they agree to the handover?

I am certainly not victim-blaming here; I, in the course of threading myself through my memories and my logic, am merely observing that real life is much different than our introspective lives. The common American reaction to 2019's proposed extradition bill, which would essentially collapse Hong Kong's status as a distinct legal entity apart from the Chinese mainland, is, There was a promise! And yet promises are only memories; we can fill them in with whatever emotions we want to, that doesn't make them any more true or factual.

In educating myself on the history of China and what motivated the Chinese people, I came to understand that both sides were rational actors; I couldn't ascribe one as truly good or bad. It was rational for the Hong Kongers to preserve their unique culture and identity, and it was just as rational for the People's Republic to exercise control on an "autonomous" territory, when the very nature of their government was founded on collective action. Indeed, the PRC's government was agreed upon, long ago, by the citizens of China: a strong centralized government divided into geographical regions and yet not divided by political faction, meant to serve the diverse needs of an eighth of the entire world. You can list the evils of that government all day - I certainly can - and yet it is a government shaped by the people, that is, by what the people wanted to control and by what the people tolerated. The government is, in some way, created in the image of the DNA of China's culture.

There is a tension in control, that reveals a people's character. I'm always astounded by how relatively peaceful China was throughout its history; for two thousand years, China more-or-less stayed the same shape. The French and Germans were once Gauls; Ancient Greece was in actuality individual poleis; and yet China was always Chinese. China, amusingly, was so Chinese, that the Mongolians and the Manchus could not divert it nor dilute it; they themselves had to accept Chinese customs to, in turn, be accepted by their Chinese constituents.

In the background of this seeming stability, however, are violent successions.

This is what I concluded from Chinese culture: it is calcified. It desires to be one shape and one shape only. The only way to compel it to change shape is to influence it destructively. The Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, Yuan Shikai's dissolution of the Republic of China and the consequent Warlord Era, and Mao's Cultural Revolution in the middle of his term, all pointed me to this conclusion, though you could also look at the events starting and splintering the Tang Dynasty as well.

On July 1st, 2019, the Hong Kong protestors stormed the Legislative Council Complex ("LegCo"), vandalizing and damaging the property. I remember - again, I myself don't believe my own memories - watching protestors ram an iron bar into a glass door, destroying it, in that aforementioned, air-conditioned office building. I then remember thinking, "I'm not Chinese." But if I wasn't Chinese, what was I?

I decided, then, I was simply American.

On identifying as American

What motivated me to deny, in so dramatic terms, my Chinese heritage? Between 2017 and 2021 was Donald Trump's first administration; 2018 saw the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. I'm not looking at the outcome of either of these events; looking at them from the distance of many years, I don't feel any particular emotion towards them. But one has to admit there was palpable chaos in American society; ignoring the political and administrative outcomes, these and many other events shattered American traditions and expectations, leading to social discontent. I know I myself had questioned often the American part of my identity.

It wasn't necessarily the violence of LegCo's storming that convinced me, so much as the incentives behind both sides of the argument. I saw in the Hong Kongers the ancient dispute between the rebellious common-folk and the imperious dynasts, trained in Machiavellian psychology. The protests revealed China's impenetrable culture, retained for thousands of years.

In contrast, in America, we sink our brutality, our barbarity, our rage and aggression and hatred and loathing and our love for violence, into our elections.

This is a joke, in part. We well know what we did to the Indigenous populations. We know of the evils of the Jim Crow era. And yet violence has never been the method of ending debates in America, as far as the constituents of the American government go; in fact, the aggravating side tends to lose, as in the Civil War, as with Emmet Till, as in Birmingham.

Elections convert the physical violence of a war into the rhetorical violence of a debate. There is not much of a boundary between threatening violence and instigating it, though the route is irreversible. Passionate people conflate an attack on their ideas with an attack on their person. By 2024, the United States held 60 presidential elections; double that for the House and Senate, and quadruple for local government. In these, no one died, nor did anyone have to die to affect change. (Well, this isn't universally true, but you know what I mean.)

You couldn't even attribute this trait to the origin of our liberal tradition, Western Europe. England and France literally waged a hundred year war. The history of Europe is a history of people squirming uncomfortably within their geographic boundaries, no different than the history of Asia, of the Persians, of the Arabs. Americans are a peculiar people within a peculiar species.

Furthermore, concerning my feelings of the storming of LegCo, I looked at Confucius, whose belief system I take to be the dominant expression of Chinese culture, and Plato, the bedrock of Western philosophy, and I sided with the latter. I will compress the philosophies of both in extreme ways; forgive me for oversimplifying them, though this whole essay is, after all, my thumbing through my memories. Confucius, who observed the deterioration of the Eastern Zhou and the events leading to civil war, thought: There is a set of standards we must adhere to; but peaceable relations are key. Plato, who observed the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, a disaster wrought by Athenian supremacy and arrogance, thought: What reason says, one must. Confucianism is the model with which I consult for my relations with other people, and yet Platonism is my personal star.

I observe that Confucianism is the philosophy of government, politics, and bureaucracy, whereas Platonism is the philosophy of the individual and intellectualism. That is not to say Confucians were not intelligent, nor that Platonists were scientific; this is a comment on what both philosophical traditions allowed to grow over them. Confucianism was the bedrock for the unique synthesis of the spiritual, cultural and political as embodied by the emperor, a system that was actually quite flexible when it needed to be, religion not overriding culture not overriding politics. Platonism was the bedrock for nation-states and feuding, but it also allowed Hobbes to grant universal rights, Adam Smith economic freedoms, and Spinoza religious freedoms. Another way of reducing Confucius and Plato is, Plato believes Man is a source of beauty, whereas Confucius believes Man is a source.

I agree with Confucius in the abstract, and yet I agree with Plato without any further argument. These are beliefs woven into my frame, my way of thinking. The fact I don't need an argument is a sign.

The second viewpoint that convinced me came from art, which in my view is an expression of a philosophy and a character. In literature, one of the loves of my life, it's difficult to ignore the national character in writing: Shakespeare and Dickens love drama; Flaubert and Stendhal value intellectual precision; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are psychologists; and Rilke and Kafka are private to a near-austere degree.

Most of my experience with Chinese literature is in poetry, but one can skim the summaries of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Journey to the West" and see that Chinese writing is a very social literature. If we move away from ancient sources and look at the relatively-modern Cao Xueqin, of "Dream of the Red Chamber" fame, or Lu Xun or Nobel laureate Mo Yan, their writing always consists of people, the individual's evolving relationship with the world around them. No one in Chinese stories is alone for a very long time. Contrast this with the soliloquys of Richard III and Raskolnikov's monomania. Even when one inspects the most celebrated of poems in the Western tradition, that of Homer's "The Odyssey", one should be reminded Odysseus's crewmates go unnamed; the poem frames the story as a series of trials Odysseus undergoes alone. There is even a loneliness, despair and fanaticism in the depiction of Achilles in Homer's more social poem "The Iliad".

American literature is at the complete opposite end: it is extremely egotistic, extremely lonely, and extremely selfish. William Faulkner's "The Sound and The Fury" depicts three perspectives, and none of these perspectives are able to empathize or feel empathy from another source. It's hard, too, to think of a culture that could come up with works as hermetic as Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland". Mark Twain did little dour writing, and yet Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Hank Morgan are seen as the single sources of truth in their respective novels. "The Tale of Two Cities" and "The Red and the Black" have near-diametric endings, and yet the fortunes and misfortunes, the triumphs and failures of the protagonists are shared and enhanced by their onlookers; both novels admit that happiness is relative to the crowd's. This is not at all true for the American novel.

Even comparing it to the extremely reduced environments of Samuel Beckett's work, Beckett's "heroes", through the mechanism of walking, are always approaching and inspecting things; Quentin Compson's monologue consists of his feeling, he positions himself at an extreme remove in the universe he occupies.

Again, Chinese literature is alien to me; I can understand it logically, and yet I can't grasp its subtleties immediately. I accept American literature with a nod. This extends to other American artforms: the joy of listening to Beyoncé is obvious to me, as well as Bob Dylan; I used to stare at Martin Johnson Heade's paintings for hours in rapture; and I can hear in my head Jim Gaffigan spend ten minutes of his setlist telling jokes about horses.

Why did literature develop this way? Why does Chinese literature extol loyalty and commiseration? Why is American literature so lonely? Why do Chinese writers carve the world into many disparate groups? Why do American writers carve the world into many independent individuals? Why do Chinese plots often consist of searching? Why do American plots consist of the protagonists accepting?

There is no answer. We are left to mull on this mystery until we die.

Art, after all, is expression. We can try to describe a story through plot, character and dialogue, and yet these are descriptions and do not explain what is the purpose of the word and why the word was written. It's a pointless exercise in the final analysis to look for a message or a symbol in literature, but the most constant thing we can find in art is the impetus for writing. Why did Homer compose "Odyssey" (if ever there was a Homer in human history)? He preserved Greek virtues and failures as Virgil preserved Roman filiality and ambition as Dante preserved the Italian faithfulness to truth and beauty. He composed so that it would not all be gone some day.

It's also wise to look at this in a philosophical manner. Simply because Chinese writing is social does not mean the Chinese are social people. At a minimum, it means there is the belief that actions are only significant when they involve groups. For example, a thought has no power unless it is shared with other people; a goal will not be achieved unless there are many bodies bringing it to fruition. There are many lonely people in Lu Xun's short stories, but they are lonely with other people; their loneliness is defined by their inability to relate to the people around them. In this sense, no one in Chinese literature lives a fully independent life.

In American literature, this is clear enough that every American knows this intuitively: we have the belief that action begins with the individual. A protagonist can fail a hundred times throughout the course of the novel, but there is a fundamental belief that the hundred-and-first time may do the trick - in fact, one has to try again.

In a reductive way of speaking: in Chinese literature, failure is final, but in American literature failure is component to life. We have a tendency to see the person who has never failed as having never really lived.

We can see this in Theodore Roosevelt's famous "Man in the Arena" passage. Lincoln, in his famous address to the union in 1862, did not describe America's peculiar freedom as essential, but as the "last best hope of earth". Washington, in his last address as president, asked the American people to forgive him for his faults.

Fiction is speculative; by no means is it real. The writer's fixation on a subject means they think the subject is important, to the omission of other subjects. If a writer is fixated on poverty, then they value wealth; if a writer is fixated on infidelity, then they value marriage; if a writer is fixated on evil, then they value justice. You wouldn't write about something unless you believed the consequences were of paramount significance.

As a result of this analysis, I'm not interested in the Chinese concern for material wealth, but I find very interesting the American concern for matters of the spirit. The Chinese see the spirit as something to be tamed for the sake of the material world; Americans see the spirit as a country unto itself, with ranges of humility and shame and ambition and sin, and the maintenance of this country is answerable to a God. Philosophically, this concept appeals to me; intellectually, this concept is far more interesting to me; and, well, I believe in God, so I find this concept accords more with reality.

That is not to say there are no morals concerning the material world; the Chinese have developed interesting concepts relating to justice and the like. Further, the American's obsession with introspection and independence has given the country some blindness concerning equality which other countries would have easily sidestepped (and, to be clear, equality is by no means the same as equity). Very simply, I just cotton to this worldview more.

It is peculiarly American, based on these observations, to reject American culture. Salinger's Holden Caulfield famously popularized the insult of "phony". Americans praise those character traits that allow a person to "go against the grain". Consequently, we tend to forgive - sometimes to an extreme - an individual's faults, if we perceive those same faults to be a result of iconoclasm. Perhaps there is some trace of the father of the prodigal son of the Bible in American culture.

What America is to me

Henry Rollins, beginning Black Flag's profile in Michael Azerrad's "Our Band Could Be Your Life", said,

When you say, 'Be all you can be,' I know you're not talking to me, motherfucker. I know I'm not joining the navy and I know your laws don't mean shit to me because the hypocrisy that welds them all together, I cannot abide. There's a lot of people with a lot of fury in this country - America is seething at all times. It's like a Gaza Strip that's three thousand miles long.

Again, I find an expression of what the speaker thinks is "bad" also an expression of what the speaker thinks is good. American anger and loathing are products of American independence and rebelliousness, which are themselves products of an American desire to strive higher.

I'm an American, even if no one else thinks I am, even if other Americans think I am not. In this political climate, I'm sure there are many who think I have no claim to this soil. But every part of my reason and my intellect tells me otherwise - and what channels, other than intellect and reason, does God communicate and breathe truth into us?

Being American is not about speaking English, though you won't understand the beauty of American culture unless you read American writers. Being American is not about having a white skin color, because Americans were never completely white, anyway - and besides, what color is the earth? Being American is not about having European attitudes, because every instance of our history is in defiance of everyone's culture. Finally, and most importantly, and most disappointingly that I even have to argue this, being American is not about having wealth, neither having wealth in fact nor having an attitude of wealth. To allow oneself to be defined by wealth is to force oneself to be defined by many indifferent objects, a true loneliness of the soul American writers find so bland they don't even bother writing about it. One ought to have riches in character.

So then, what is being American, beyond all the examples of what it is not? That's the beauty of it: we are in the process of finding it out.

I have great respect for Chinese culture, but it's difficult to look at it at times as if it were not a museum of values, whose powers come not from the luster of those values themselves but from the mere fact that they're in the museum. Values are things meant to be lived with, in the sunlight, as we struggle with our being in the world, they're not ironclad contracts our ancestors have bound to our hands and feet. Of cultures, we have one of the most dynamic and vibrant. We have a cipher, sure, reminding us of what we've done and what we're likely going to do, but that doesn't mean we have to go about naming our principles, as if the word is sufficient to encapsulate our complexities.

My fear is that the country's future will be codified into causes and consequences, of citizens needing to fulfill so-and-so requirements and check so-and-so boxes in order to be accepted into society; we would, essentially, be formalizing a kind of social hierarchy. I understand this may be a logical outcome, but I don't think this accords with the country's founding principles. Such a freezing of our social life, such an attempt to defend social stability at the cost of social variety, strikes me as the death knell of a once-prosperous society.

We live in evil times. The evilness of the times is directly related to the inability and lack of courage to call them evil. For the first, ignorance causes us to be blind to the consequences of our actions, and therefore unable to call evil "evil". For the second, we may dimly see the end our actions take us, and yet we without reason hope the path will, somehow, simply not be our path, and therefore we lack the courage to call evil "evil". These have the final effect of cowing our spirits and injuring our strength, such that we don't have the ability to accept things as they are, to accept our humbled fate or to accept our role in improving it. We live in Thrasymachus's time, where good is bad and bad is good, and to simply call the good good and the bad bad is, in the eyes of our modern-day Sophists, to be "virtue-signaling". We can no longer see what is to human advantage or disadvantage because such a process is "woke".

Because virtue is valuable, and because virtue is beautiful, it is hard to get. I understand that virtue is not easy to discern and not easy to find. Virtue has no appearance; virtue wears no clothes; virtue makes no announcement; virtue, interestingly, has no principles, but concerning itself; we dress our vices every day in colorful garbs and call them virtues. No wonder the word is hated. Virtue comes only by reason, which has no color and shape, but is like a lightning bolt hurtled through the dark of the mind; and who is the thrower of thunder? When has Man ever been reasonable, can't the dog be trusted to eat, won't the lion kill?

Only the child thinks we live in a naturally good earth; we need only disturb the soil of history to find a million evils committed by our supposedly-noble race. I have no hope; I can only hope that times can be good or times can be bad, and that there is no possibility beyond these two. Our reason has no protector, no guardian, no referee, no judge. I therefore put my trust in God. I think this sentiment is American also.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" is often attributed to Dr. King. We're wise enough to know, you can't let the universe do all the work. The writers of the Constitution divided the powers of the federal government between an acting branch (our Executive), a deliberating branch (our Legislative), and an introspective branch (our Judicial). The writers also provided great powers to the states, the constituents of that federal government. To Thomas Hobbes, this is a nightmare and a tragedy inevitable. But the writers trusted that, in a democracy - nay, in an American democracy - humans will do the remaining work. To Hobbes's discredit, there is no system, as descended from God, that shall make men immortal; there is only the momentary but powerful electricity of men working to renew and reinvent their covenants.

This is what America is to me. My feeling was arrived at through mortal means, the fragility of my memory, the emotions events instilled in me, and the reasoning, strong or ill, that lead me to these conclusions. If I come upon them badly, the fault is my own; but they're mine, and so I don't deny them, ignoble and poor as they are.

A (possible) exercise in hysterics

And now, something that may be an exercise in hysterics but is an observation I've had for a while:

I've put in a substantial amount of time to study my ethnic origin; I believe firmly that to know one's future one must know one's past. Most of my knowledge is in contemporary China, though it admittedly becomes very weak towards the end of the 20th century. I'm aware of the tensions that plagued the country at the beginning of the 20th century, I'm aware of the struggle it went through in forging its own identity in the contemporary era, I'm aware of the challenges it more-or-less placed upon itself, and I'm aware of the, je ne sais, spirit that guided all of this, a spirit I'm trying to tangle with as I forge my own identity.

It's hard to look at the 2025-2029 executive term as anything other than a Cultural Revolution in miniature.

As I discussed before, China under the Communist Party of China (the CPC) had good spots and bad spots in the 20th century. I imagine this strains most Americans' belief, but, again, the country began the century literally at rock-bottom in civil war and then invasion. The CPC is but a government: it is an organization the country puts trust into and what remains to be seen is what comes out of that trust. The minimal thing the CPC had to do was to protect the country, which the Qing government and Kuomintang could not do. And it pretty much accomplished that for the 20th century.

What, then, has to be observed is, with the great power given by the people - in terms of trust and taxes - what does the CPC do with it? Well, the answer is, Not much.

And the problem begins with an overly-powerful, whimsical and ideologically-driven executive.

Which, hilariously, is what the 2021-2025 executive was accused of being.

The key to governance is that you have to govern. There was an ideological spirit driving the 2021-2025 executive, sure, but you could argue every executive has been driven by that spirit. How else can one describe Reagan or Roosevelt (either) or Eisenhower's administrations? The 2021-2025 executive, in my memory, is marked by three things: 1. international turmoil in the forms of Ukraine and Gaza; 2. the economic and political consequences of those aforementioned conflicts; 3. a meaty effort to drive the economy by subsidizing costs, notably with student debt relief. We can argue whether the admin's actions were good and bad, but these actions are ultimately about governance.

I think dramatically curtailing executive functions (as USAID), starting wars with countries who weren't a threat to American sovereignty, threatening relationships with American allies who are the cornerstones of our hegemonic power, for "reasons", is not really about governance, particularly when the people governing are unwilling to confront the consequences of their actions. Because it's fine to try and it's fine to make mistakes, but it's extremely problematic if you don't see the result of your attempt and don't acknowledge the flaws of your plans.

It's Maoist. It's the Chairman ordering the public humiliation of his generals - who FOUGHT BESIDE HIM IN THE WAR OF SUCCESSION (all-caps because this makes me angry) - putting ideological servants in technical roles to purge those offices of "rightists", and then inflaming the public into thinking the real problem is not in what one does but in what one thinks. It's the President using the Department of Justice to attack his political enemies, putting ideological servants in technical roles to purge those offices of "woke-ists", and then inflaming the public into thinking the real problem is not in what one does but in what one thinks. (By the way, I thought I would have to write a new sentence for this, but it turns out the comparison is literally apt. Fucking amazing.)

It's not realizing the framers of the Constitution deliberately made elections frequent and terms short such that if the American people wanted to effect change, they simply had to vote. It's attempting to extend one's ideological reign by bullying the country's legislative organ into agreeing with them, undermining the legitimacy of elections, and harassing one's political opponents. Again, it's all Maoist.

The thing is, if Mao had terrible ideas, people would disagree with his ideas and ignore him. But Mao was the hero of the republic - sure, he worked with lots of other people to make it, but the work of mythologizing himself began as early as Yan'an (which, to be clear, is not peculiar to Mao and is in fact a historical custom for Chinese rulers-to-be) - and so had great concentrations of power around himself. The issue lied in the complete lack of flexibility in terms of governing decision-making. Mao, to the end of his days, was crafty and able to justify his hold on power, and the people, for quite a long time, tolerated his whimsies so long as he had exerted effective control over his administration.

So yeah, as a Chinese person whose Chinese parents left China because of the chaos that came from Mao's succession, I would not want to see America become 20th-century China. That would suck the shit out of the balls of Christ.

And to clarify, the real issue - and this may show my considerable conservative bent here - is the problematic concept of the "triumph of the will", that anything can be accomplished by simply directing oneself toward it, to which I retort by saying, "If I had wheels I'd be a wagon." Americans are no strangers to "wishful" or "willful thinking", in fact it's component to all human psychology regardless of identity, but it's disturbing to see this "close one's eyes and hum and ideate" approach be adopted by the American government, whose sole purpose is to work with reality.

It's not a left-or-right problem, it's an issue with radicalism, which confuses ends with means. It is the same problematic belief that ending all racial division in the world will solve the world's problems, so we best get working on that racism; not considering that maybe the relationship is bidirectional and the world's problems are a cause for racial division (which Dr. King inherently understood and coupled his anti-segregation rhetoric with discussions on poverty). It is the same problematic belief that there is insufficient "manliness", for real "Men" accomplish real "Man" things and fight real Man wars and build real Man machines, when the result is blind to the gender and sexuality of the person doing it. It is the same problematic belief that the REAL issue is the "capitalistic" system, even though capitalism refers to, of course, capital, which is a real thing, which acts in an observable and researchable way, and whose problems don't suddenly disappear when you use a different word, and what one really wants to pinpoint as the problem is greed, which no system can defend completely against as it is the same eternal attribute that leads people to commit fratricide and patricide and similarly irrational acts.

But, as I look backwards in American history, I guess we were always like this.

And the reason why I use formal language to describe politics is because political bodies aren't people, they have goals pertaining to that political body. They see the energy that comes from American chaos and think, "We can get votes from that." That's what they're designed to do, in the same sense that a corporation will use every lever available to them to ensure its survival.

There are no words nor are there thoughts that can save us, this has been clear since the literal fucking beginning of our existence on this earth. There's only action. To which I point to the framers of our Constitution again, who gave the American people the sole lever of power they have in their own governance: voting, for presidents, for senators, for representatives, for mayors, for comptrollers, for judges, for county clerks. The issue is not whether we are helpless - the answer is, we are not - the issue is whether we are able to accept the wisdom of the people of the past and our better judgment to pave the path for our future, and then to have the courage to accept our mistakes in judgment and rectify those mistakes. But boy, it's looking fucking grim.