the turkey butcher

In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday I present a poem my sister and I wrote for a creative writing assignment when she was in junior high and I was in in high school. It is a parody of the poem "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I'd encourage you to read the original before reading the parody because it makes more sense that way.

The Turkey Butcher

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The turkey butcher stands;
The butcher, a bloody man is he,
With red and calloused hands;
And the muscles of his scrawny arms
Are strong as rubber bands.

His nails are crisp, and black, and long,
His eyes are like the tan;
His hands are wet at the turkey’s debt,
He years to clean his hands;
The whole world looks him in the face,
He is a mental case, you understand.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his mallet blow,
You can hear him swing his heavy hand,
As he screams, “Yowwwwwwwww!:
Like an Angus ringing his old cow bell,
When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school
Looking at the open door;
They love to see the fatal hand,
And hear the turkeys roar,
And catch the feathers that fly,
Like the snow of the blizzard of 1624.

He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among the boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears an angel turkey’s voice,
Singing with the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like dinner’s voice,
Singing from Paradise!
He needs not think of it once more,
How in the pot it lies;
And with a hard rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling, hungry, sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning he sees the turkeys come in,
By evening on a plate it goes;
Something attempted, something done,
Will this poem never close?

Thanks, thanks to thee my sort of worthy friend,
For listening when thou needed not!
Thus at the flaming oven of life
Our turkeys must be brought;
Thus on the butcher table shaped
Each cutting deed and thought.

national pride

Last week I watched the movie Ip Man, which is a Chinese film about the person who would eventually be Bruce Lee's martial arts trainer While it is a well-made film, liberties were obviously taken to make the protagonist into a national hero. It is further obvious that the movie is meant to inspire patriotism in Chinese viewers in the same way that The Patriot was meant to inspire patriotism in American viewers. Most of the film takes place during World War II in occupied China after Japan has ravaged the country, so while it is not a war movie it is a movie that depicts a well-known war.

Something that stuck out to me was that in the closing credits the film notes that China eventually defeated Japan and won its freedom. That stuck out to me more as an American viewer than it would to a Chinese viewer. Regarding the war with Japan, I am more likely to think that Japan's losses across the Pacific and the nuclear warheads dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the reason Japan lost the war. This got me to thinking about how people from different countries view wars that their country has participated in, and World War II in particular.

I don't know this for a fact, but I would bet most British people view their nation's role in World War II as the most important because they offered the last staunch resistance to Germany in Western Europe. I would bet most Russian people (and perhaps Ukranians) view their nation's role in World War II as the most important because Germany's failed invasion of Russia marked the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. Most Chinese people probably view their nation was instrumental in defeating Japan because the conflict between Japan and China predated World War II. For my own part, I am pretty certain that most Americans believe that the United States is almost single-handedly responsible for Germany's and Japan's defeat. In such a large conflict people from every nation involved on the Allied side can point to something that their countrymen did that was pivotal to the outcome of the war.

This nationalistic pride is intriguing in part because most people alive today did not have any role in the things that happened during World War II. I can be proud of the people I know and have known who went through the war and contributed to the effort, and I can be thankful that an earlier generation sacrificed to make the geopolitical situation better today. Do I have any right to feel more personal pride in regard to World War II because I was born in the United States than I would if I had been born in one of the countries that did not fare as well in the war, though? I don't believe I do.

privacy or safety

Possibly the biggest fuss that I have seen in the news and on Facebook posts in the last couple of weeks has been regarding the new TSA screening that is happening in a lot of airports. Travelers have the choice of being screened with backscatter scanners that reveal a lot of what is under your clothes or being patted down in a very personal way. As always, I have some thoughts about this whole situation.

First, while I understand why people would not like these two choices, few of the outraged appreciate that this is an issue of trade-offs. People reacted with outrage that the government did not offer protection against the underwear bomber last Christmas, but frankly most of the steps the government can take to provide against terrorism require sacrifices to personal privacy. Some people have pointed out that the underwear bomber might not have even been caught using the current scanners. This is possible, but it completely side-steps the real issue that the rights to safety and to privacy are usually at odds with each other and must be balanced. I am not saying that using the scanners is right or wrong, but rather I am saying that by taking the position that using the scanners is wrong you are implicitly saying that you are willing to sacrifice some rights to safety for this right to privacy.

Second, I don't personally like the options much, but since I accept that this is a trade-off, whatever we decide as a society is the proper trade-off is what I am going to accept. Since my threshold for what I consider unreasonable is apparently not as high as many others, I suspect that I will have more to worry about regarding my rights to safety than my rights to privacy. I don't suspect that I'm going to worry much about either, though.

Third, I have heard that a lot of people are going to request pat-downs this holiday season to make a point. Isn't that just ruining things for everyone, though, if it causes congestion in the system. I think it's a selfish way to make a point and I would be irritated if I was flying anywhere this holiday.

Fourth, I am sure this is different for men and women, but I am far less bothered about going through the scanner than through a pat-down. I'm not really scared of the radiation level since I don't travel much and the picture does not feel like it invades my privacy as much as the pat-down would.

Fifth, I heard someone make a point that it was not Christian-like to allow yourself to be exposed like that. I didn't want get into argument about that, but it would be a difficult point to establish through Scripture. It's actually far easier to argue against that point than for it using Scripture. If someone has a scruple about that, though, then it is something I have to respect.

Sixth, Despair.com has a couple of hilarious shirts relating to the issue. I know there have been a lot of jokes about the issue, but those two shirts are my favorite so far.

Finally, and probably most importantly, remember that the TSA employees who are implementing these policies have little to no say in the process, so don't take things out on them when you are being scanned or patted down. If I were a TSA agent, I would not like having to pat people down any more than they would want to be patted down, so I know I wouldn't appreciate people being jerks through the process because they thought the attitude was justified. Take your complaints to the people who actually do something if you really don't like the policy.

the end of privacy

This is the post where I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. I generally deride the claims that the government is watching every move we make; and I am not either pro- or anti-government, but rather believe we are placed under the systems that God has ordained. I am hoping that these facts provide a little validity to some of my anti-government-sounding, paranoid views below.

I read 1984 one time and that time was about fifteen years ago. While a lot of people view the society described in that book as a likely danger I thought the ideas proposed were ridiculously paranoid when I read them, and I largely still do think that way. I do think that there is one thing about that book that is an eventual inevitability in every society because of advances in technology, though. We will be monitored and that monitoring will be functionally similar the thought police described in the book.

One of the main focuses of 1984 is that people are constantly monitored and that potentially subversive elements of society are detected and spied on by thought police. While I do not like the government conspiracy aspect of the idea, the fact is that technology is going to get to the point in the not-too-distant future where every government (and corporation, and many individuals) will be able to almost accidentally monitor almost everyone in the world effortlessly. It will just take a different form than the book described.

One example is through social media. There is a lot you can tell about people from what they write even when they are purposely trying to hide it. The types of reactions that people post to things they read online, what they say about their preferences or who they admire, when they are active online, what aspects of themselves they decide to share or not to share, et al. I know there is already enough information available on this blog to provide a rather comprehensive personality and psychological profile on me if you know what to look for. Some day automated profiles will be created for everyone who has ever done anything public online simply because the software will be available to collect, parse, and categorize the relevant, freely-available data. Eventually, it will be easy to know everyone who is a threat to commit a certain crime in the future, or who poses a likely threat to a government, or who is the most prone to overpay for the things they buy. Not only that, but the profiles will provide information on everyone's weaknesses and drives, and so will detail how to keep them from doing those things the government does not want them to do. There will not be people who are thought police, but the function will exist through the stuff that we willingly share because that will be the price we pay for a convenient life.

Another example is through old-fashioned monitoring, but in a far less centralized way than was foreseen in 1984. In the book the government did all of the monitoring and no one else really got to know anything meaningful about their neighbors, but in reality we will do the monitoring and our connection with those around use will be what also provides information about us to everyone else who wants to know. People already geo-tag images and video that they upload to cheap or free. Eventually, there will be little point to not be recording and uploading your own video constantly, and some service will exist to collect all of that live video to get monitoring of everything happening everywhere where someone happens to have their device-with-a-camera-in-it (cellphones now, but who knows in the future) running. This is only one source of video. A lot of household products will eventually use video as a source of input (sort of like how the XBox 360 Kinect works), so a lot of inadvertent household audio/video will be made more public than people realize. This sounds bad, but it gets even creepier.

While most people will have video on them most of the time they are in public, simple images are not going to be the only thing that will be collected. Again, since it will be so easy to do, most of that video will eventually be hooked up to software that measures microexpressions. These are small and involuntary expressions that exist on people's faces for short enough periods of time that betray how they are feeling, and they are generally too short for most people to notice. A microexpression would not give away what specifically the person was thinking, but rather that he or she was unintentionally expressing boredom, distraction, contempt, physical attraction, stress, or any number of other feelings. With constant video and software to detect our feelings, the necessary facades of civilized society will disappear. To some people this may sound like a positive thing, but it truly will be more a curse than it will be a blessing. There are a lot of things that we really should not know about each other, and much of it has to do with how we feel about each other in specific situations. On top of that, the video that is collected containing peoples' reactions to different situations will be used to build personality and psychological profiles for every person alive who ever ventures into public or interacts with anyone else.

So, my prediction here is simply this. I think the people who are paranoid about online privacy are right that almost no one appreciates what they are giving up by using social media services, such as this blog for example. I also think, however, that resistance is futile simply because it will be impossible to hide from all of the possible ways to collect data, and even if you found a way to successfully do so that would only make you look suspicious to those you are trying to hide from. Frankly, it will say something about you that you are trying to avoid detection in the first place. Our experiences, our emotions, and our very existences will be naked and on display for the world to see. So, rather than being scared about what is going to happen anyway, enjoy your privacy while you still have it. Fear and paranoia won't look good on a personality profile anyway.

fat, lazy, orange, and offensive

One of the news stories that made the rounds today was that Garfield creator Jim Davis apologized for the offensive timing of one of his strips. The punchline of the strip, which is possibly his funniest for the year, refers to "National Stupid Day." It was unfortunately released on Veterans' Day.

While Davis probably needed to issue the apology to clear things up, the question I have is who in their right mind actually thinks that Davis would intentionally insult the military. Is there a humorist of any form anywhere who actively avoids insulting anyone as much as Davis does? If anything, one of the first things that most people think of when they think of the strip Garfield is that it is inoffensive to a fault.

If there really is a significant group of people who believe that Davis was intentionally disrespectful to the military that says a lot more about society than Davis. Are people really that easily manipulated into manufactured anger? I sincerely hope not.

to dye for

I almost posted this on Facebook, but it seemed more appropriate here. The following conversation occurred last week in our house.

Golden: "Should I look for hair dye for you, or do you think it's already too late and it will look too obvious?"

Me: *Loud Laughter*

From certain angles and in the right light it looks like I am going salt-and-pepper. I still have a few years to go before I will truly be salt-and-pepper, but I'll be there at a younger age than the average.

I'm actually not all that bothered about the idea of having some gray hairs. I've had random ones for years, and I don't think it harms a man's image much to be graying. Going very gray in my early thirties probably is not ideal, though.

So, the question is should I dye my hair at some point in the near future? Is it one of those things that once I start I have to keep up? Am I actually at the point where I need to be taking steps to make myself look younger rather than older? What's next? Eating right and exercising? The horrors.

election results

I have been watching the election returns tonight with some interest. What I have been rooting for is not a landslide, but a close split. It is my opinion that government operates the best when no one party holds control, either symbolically or in reality. This is because there is not enough motivation to come up with compromise except in situations where the government is evenly split.

If the government is truly controlled by one party, then that party has little motivation to work with the minority party or parties because they don't appear needed. If the government is not controlled by one party but one has the appearance of much more control than the other, then the minority party has little motivation to work with the party in the most power because more political points can be scored by disruption. We saw examples of the Democrats refusing to work with the Republicans in 2009 as an example of the first problem and with the Republicans refusing to work with the Democrats in 2010 as an example of the second problem. Watching both major parties play those games was disturbing.

Even though many of the newly elected lawmakers are being brought in on combative platforms, it is my hope that compromises will finally be struck as enough people realize it is in their best interest to find solutions that pluralities of both major parties can accept. If they cannot do that, then a lot more politicians will be getting the boot in 2012.