Scribblings of the Metropolitician

A Hot Button Topic

OK, I'll bite.

I think the kid's right, and I've written about the same things, although I think he's just guilty of thinking he's showing the expat community "the light" with his undergraduate Ethnic Studies tools (I should know, since I've taught, at some point, most of what he's regurgitating here) when he's pointing out the perfectly obvious to anyone who's lived here a long time.

And I don't think he's talking "mumbo jumbo" or getting too deep into "critical theory" – it's pretty simple and straightforward, actually. I HATE critical theory, but it is sometimes useful, even if it's fun to bash its most many bad writers and the egregious cases of mental masturbation onto paper. I'm one of the ones who rolled my eyes and groaned the most in my department's core course seminars; I also got a reputation for being the "conservative guy" in my department. Oh, the irony.

In any case, I think it's pretty simple: There is the fact of European and American colonialism, and the power of English, whiteness, and American policy does exert force on the world. If one is "white," you cannot exist outside of it (nor can anyone who is not "white"). The problem with calling it "white privilege" is that you can't talk about WP within the United States and WP outside as exactly the same thing, although they are linked.

That's the mistake I made with my first major post on the topic, and the comments to that post (mostly rude and irrational, but a few made some real valid points) made that critical slip in logic clear; I think I defined WP too broadly, painted it with too large a brush, especially when we're talking about the real fact that whites are indeed "raced" in a place like Korea, and do not enjoy social power here. This is an important and easy-to-miss fact that many US-based considerations of American power vis-a-vis Asia continually miss, since extending American hegemony from slaves to Indian policy to Hiroshima to camptown girls is an easy thing to do rhetorically, but to leave the analysis at that masks the complexities of the issues and cultures and history involved.

That's why Chungmoo Choi's piece in the book Dangerous Women seemed so thin and her lead-in to her part of the book so hard to swallow: to argue that primping to show a good face to the white highway patrolman who's pulled her over, as the alleged symbol of white male American power, and link that to the camptown prostitutes whom she imagines does the same to American GI's, implying that both her (as a comfortable American academic with most likely a pretty nice car) and a Korean woman in a markedly different situation (a prostitute who lacks social options and advantages for a whole lot of reasons besides just American hegemony) share some essential subjectivity – that's a crock of shit, to put a fine, academic point on it. And it comes from not examining one's own point of privilege and and critical difference (being an upper-class American academic who has likely never been in the socio-economic position to even consider selling her body to any man, let alone an American GI) from the people with whom you claim to share a common point of view.

Americans have to be careful before looking at things in terms of identity politics that really only apply on the American side of the big water; and too many Asian American scholars, theorists, and undergraduates often make this mistake – and I include myself in that group.

"Whites" may enjoy advantages over people who are stigmatized both by Korean cultural patterns as well as the influence of say, the American media, which has perpetuated the same stereotypes of blacks as dirty, dumb, and dangerous across the world – but in the end, foreigners here are generally in the same boat when it comes to being part of a social group devoid of any real social or political power. And what that means for whites who live say, in Vietnam or the Philippines, also depends on how American (white) power connects to the actual, lived conditions of life in those countries, which depends on their particular histories, cultures, and other more specific factors.

That's why I think many whites here in Korea – from what I see in my comments, as well as here, as well as talk about with friends – bristle when people start talking about "white privilege" in the Korean context.

Which is also why I think Lee's being careful to point out the immense privilege enjoyed by some kyopos – especially, in Korea's case, American kyopos – is key; in a way, there are the benefits of being both insider and fetishized Other, and even the apparent disadvantages of being a kyopo (being held to unrealistic linguistic and cultural expectations of native Koreans, for example) are a function of what is an expectation – an affective inclusion – that few "real" foreigners ever get access to.

I think this is a point worth emphasizing, much more than the "white privilege" allegedly "enjoyed" by so many here. Lee's talking on a level much higher than the standard "git yer hands off 'my' wimmin!" mode that defines a base level of critique for many (male) kyopos and Korean nationals, so I think to attack him on that point is a bit straw man in itself; but I also think that Lee's missing a major point, one that I missed myself in the critique (and link) I mentioned above.

In the end, I think Lee's critique to be totally valid, he needs to have a real point; that's what I think is wrong with his analysis. So whites get treated differently here than most Others? Sure. But you gotta complexify it and think about what that means here – not just extend one's American Ethnic Studies learning, which can be arguably valid in the specific context of America. One has to nuance any critique with a consideration of what it means in terms of historical/cultural factors, i.e. being "white" doesn't help apparently white women from being stigmatized as Russian hookers and bar girls, and being "black" in a certain way gets you treated a whole lot better when you are an American who speaks American English, as opposed to a Nigerian laborer with an accent, demeanor, and different "look" that even Koreans instantly pick up.

Why do you think so many Nigerians here bend over backwards to show off the accoutrements of being unmistakably "American," with the hip-hop clothes and other "American" affectations? That's the power of American hegemony, too.

I just think that what we see as "white privilege" here isn't the "white privilege" that we see back home. If anything, the fetishization of, preference for, desire to experience "things white" are simply one more manifestation of American hegemony in general, more than the extension of the power that comes with having white skin in countries in which whites have always enjoyed the majority of economic, political, and social power.

To say that WP here and back home are the same is a critical mistake, an easy-to-make elision that can really undermine any attempt to delve deeper, or have a real conversation about this.

And a P.S. –

To those who simply dismiss this as "mumbo-jumbo" and the product of "Equality Studies", which I guess, is a sarcastic stand-in for real-world departments such as "Ethnic Studies" or "Peace and Conflict Studies" or "Women's Studies", all of which many in the academy would have to admit, no matter how begrudgingly, have contributed a great deal to the way even the most conservative departments and disciplines such as History, Anthropology, or Political Science conduct themselves – have you actually read a lot of the work in those stodgy departments before these new fields from the 1960's and 70's shook things up? One shouldn't be so quick to write off these new ways of producing academic knowledge, even if one doesn't like their styles or most extreme practitioners.

They, Them, They, Them, Them, Them

Well, that's about the level of complexity of thinking that goes with this inanely ahistorical diatribe printed in The Korea Times. The author starts off by asking some good questions, which require historical answers argued in terms of structure, processes, and other specifics:

Why is it that the Japanese are incapable of expressing the same remorse as the Germans about the atrocities they committed? Japan was defeated just like Germany in WWII. One reason is that WWII’s victors imposed a rigorous “denazification” program on the Germans, through aggressive social and political reform, as well as outright propaganda.

No such “deimperialization” program was imposed on the Japanese. The Japanese did not in fact ever “endure the unendurable.” In the light of Koizumi and Abe’s offenses, perhaps the Allied Forces should consider implementing the deimperialization program, belatedly, today.

But the article ends, even as it talks about some of the factors and actors that went into the process of creating a certain kind of "Japanese people", all arguments that he dismisses altogether:

In the decades prior to WWII, the Japanese people watched as their Emperor and military began a campaign of mass killing and conquest across Asia. The Japanese people could have overthrown their government and halted this barbarism, but they chose not to. The Japanese people made a choice to support a government, which raped, tortured, and murdered thirty million other human beings.

The Japanese people today are not unlike the Japanese people in the decades prior to WWII. Due to the absence of any postwar deimperialization program, they grew up in an amoral environment free of guilt or remorse.

Their view of Japan’s WWII war criminals is not shame and revulsion; instead, they think they should be honored. Their view of Japan’s WWII sex slaves is that they deserve no apology, because they were just a bunch of whores. If they did not hold these views, they would certainly not have voted for atrocity-denying Ahmadinejads like Koizumi and Abe.

Talk about some ahistorical history. And "ahistorical" doesn't refer to a lack of names, dates, or events in history, but rather a complete ignorance of the complex process that goes into creating the Japanese, Korean, or just about any "people" in the first place – whether you call that das Volk, the minjok, or minzoku.

Good history isn't just listing facts; it's also historicizing concepts, categories, identities, into the processes that created them. The concept I always use is that of the "minjok" ("race" or "people" in Korean) – it's a concept that's just over 100 years old, yet people employ it as though it spanned over the supposed 5,000 years of Korean history. It didn't, and I have yet to have anyone meet the challenge of finding a reference to minjok (民族) as a referent to a singular people or national identity before the turn of the 20th century. No one has because no such reference exists. But the power of such concepts lie in the ahistorical way people use them, even as they falsely believe the concepts themselves to be historically ancient. It's like the Matrix – the illusion relies on you not even questioning the reality before your eyes, or the logic of the "obvious." This even goes back to Plato's cave, man.

Looking at the Japanese people as some singular historical agent, irrespective of then or now, who should be blamed for the crimes of "their" government is as historiographically irresponsible as saying that "the American people" are "responsible" for the "crimes" of everything from the present Iraq wars back to invading Vietnam, to bombing Hiroshima, to committing clear acts of genocide against Indians, and building the institution of slavery.

I didn't vote for Bush, nor do I approve of the war, nor do I want to have any truck of racist, sexist, or any other-ist policies in my society. Yet, these things do happen, even when many historical agents within a society do exist.

But there is an "America" that is responsible for those things, because governments represent the people and exist as a singular, responsible entity for the sake of their "people." So governments can owe apologies. They can and should owe compensation.

As examples, I think the former "comfort women" deserve(d) apology and compensation. The question of whether or not they received legal compensation is the one that sticks with me; the question of "if" isn't even one.

As an American example, I think American blacks who can trace their roots to slaves brought to the United States, or as late as GI's denied the benefits of the GI Bill after WWII because most colleges wouldn't accept blacks and the Feds generally wouldn't pay for tutions at historically black colleges, or the then legal practice of denying blacks the low-interest loans that was responsible for creating a white middle class and suburban America – blacks were legally, fiscally, and socially discriminated against in concrete and calculable ways; only the historically misinformed (and that's a lot of people, unfortunatley) think that "reparations" is just a general handout for "slavery."

Naw, brah. It's the fact that my father's father's generation was subject to the legal discrimination of the Federal Housing Administration's official policies of not offering loans to blacks that resulted in specific and traceable financial harm to blacks as a group, the effects of which are visible to this day, especially in the form of the black ghettoes that formed as white took flight, and blacks were legally and financially crippled from leaving.

And that's just one reason. You don't even have to get to slavery to talk about the possibility of "reparations." Just take me back to the 1950's and it's easy to demonstrate clear and specific harms committed categorically against blacks as a people in the US. Yeah, most white people didn't own slaves; but a whole lot of white folks lived in houses that blacks weren't allowed to buy with loans forbidden to them and the option of receiving higher educations blocked because the GI Bill didn't apply. The routes of access to middle-class upward mobility were legally and socially blocked. There were laws in place. On the books.

So all the middle-class homes, against which many whites borrowed to fund open their own businesses, make investments, and send kids to college – a lot of white folks materially benefitted from things that blacks weren't allowed to. Are individual white people responsible? Well, no, technically. Is that a part of "white privilege," as argued in group terms, in the US? Sure, but that's a different conversation. Is the US government responsible for its past actions against black people? Damn skippy. So where's my check?

But when you get down to talking about how the "people" are formed, and past whole "peoples" being responsible for things and not specific entities and as the result of real and specific policies, you get into complexity. There is ideology, education, indoctrination, and force. There is collusion, collaboration, and willful giving over of one's loyalties. When you start saying "all Japanese are responsible" or "white people are responsible" – what use is that, on top of being a historically specious argument?

In other words, if you want to historicize "them," then do so. Back to the "Land of the Rising Sun," look at the fact that "Japan" went from being a feudal society under lords and military chieftains – and with no singular national or racial identity in the modern sense of the concepts – into a revolutionized nation-state from 1868 in which most of the population did not even know the Emperor's name, nor did they care, to a state asserting its power and authority in the 1870's and 1880's and which often had to put down peasant rebellions in order to do so, to a state that had begun to form a real identity after the "success" of the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education turning the school system into an ideology factory teaching that killing Chinese was actually morally preferable to killing a useful cow or pig.

By the time we get to the kids in the early 20th century becoming soldiers and adults in their 20's and 30's who would commit the "Rape of Nanking" and myriad other atrocities, the question of "why" isn't really one, is it?

And given the fact that Koreas under colonial rule in the 1910's, 20's, and 30's were being subjected to the exact same processes that had turning a nation of mostly civilian farmers, peasants, merchants, and artisans with no particular common interests into a "Japanese people" in the 1870's, 80's, and 90's – one should be so careful about so glibly labelling an entire people a singular, Otherized "Them."

Because looked at another way, the Japanese "people" were as much ideologically victimized as the Korean people had been. Thank God someone stopped the Japanese war machine and ended that process, though, right? Imagine the state of Korean national identity if the Japanese had held the peninsula until the present day.

Given as much time as the Japanese had to turn peasants into "Japanese", one wonders if the Japanese programs to erase Korean culture (which actually began in earnest very late in the game, in the late 1930's) had been held for three or four generations. The most die-hard nationalists would decry the idea that Korean identity would be erased, but a true scholar of history – not a ideology-blinded patriot – would recognize the power of education systems and total social control.

Hey, the very same system was successful in creating a strong Korean nationalism under Park Chung Hee, wasn't it?

The point is that the Japanese "people" were subjected to the exact same processes as the Korean "people" were and are, as most "peoples" on God's not-so-green Earth are.

The "facts" of most of this history isn't in dispute; all the bluster over who invaded whom, who owns which rocks in the sea, who apologized or didn't when and why – that's all child's play and pretty un-fucking-important against the context of the history that made all this possible in the first place: the problematic construction of national identity itself and the suspect interests such identity engenders on the individual and collective levels.

Yeah, that may sound complex, but it's a complex issue, and should be treated as such. That's one of the problems with such matters; no one doubts that the economy, the political system, or breaking down the nuanced meanings of a culture's classic works of literature requires theory, a deft hand, and an elevated level of thinking.

Yet, when it comes to clashing nationalisms, lay idiots who should even know better as lay idiots, write inflammatory pieces with absolutely no thought being given to the argument than "they" did this or "they" are responsible.

If you want to look at "who" or "what" is responsible, then it might yield the answer that kneejerk nationalist governments who utilize processes of extreme ideological control are at base, the culprit.

Problem is that once you look at things that way, you realize that the Korean "us" under Park in the 1960's was not too different from the Japanese "them" under the Meiji regime in the 1870's, when Japanese peasants had to be taught how to bow when the Emperor's procession passed.

In that sense, to talk about the Japanese as a singular historical agent, with a common set of interests and identifications over decades or even centuries at a time, is about as stupid as it is wildly historiographically irresponsible.

And that's the triple truth, Ruth.

The Dangers of Politically Correct History

It's unfortunate that something so obviously a valid argument (English and Korean) – that there were Koreans who collaborated, especially in the recruiting of the so-called "comfort women" – are still beyond the bounds of scholarly debate.

Given the fact that there is a good bit of evidence to show that there were Koreans who collaborated in this horrible, ongoing act, making the assertion is a reasonable thing for a scholar to do.

What makes me suspicious about any "correct" vs. "distorted" history is the political context in which certain issues are raised, and the fact that there is a "right" answer before the question is even fully articulated. The Korean government and media seem to want to construct a history of black-and-white absolutes, in which Korea was a hapless victim; and even beyond the issue of the colonial period itself, if we're assigning national "blame" and talking about collective guilt, then isn't the Korean government, by having fostered, protected, and developed a sex industry (based in no small part on Japanese roots) around the US military for the gathering if capital for the nation – if we're talking about guilt on national and government levels, how is the Korean government also not morally culpable for having perpetrated a continuation of nearly the same kind of oppressive system of sexual labor?

Put another way, from the perspective of the so-called "comfort women," was being forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers much different from returning to Korea and having no other social option than to do the same for American soldiers, especially at the behest of the Korean government?

On a related note, it is also scary to me is how convicted Korean war criminals can be absolved of responsibility after having been convicted of war crimes from eyewitnesses who identified them as having been infamous to their cruelty in the prison camps where they had served as guards over captured American servicemen. There's even a site demanding that compensation be given to the Korean war criminals, with no additional evidence other than they were Korean, and couldn't have really been morally culpable.

The rationale, in a nutshell? They were Korean, and just doing what they had been told. Well, the Americans tortured under certain of these individuals apparently couldn't make that distinction as their guards went above and beyond the call of duty to psychologically and physically torture them.

Huh? Even the Jews had the kapos in the death camps. But Koreans are somehow, by virtue of being Korean in the colonial period, with no additional evidence presented, impervious to guilt, because a court in 2006 assumes so?

So basically, being Korean during the colonial period absolved individuals of any responsibilities for their actions, and by retroactive extension, the then non-existent Korean nation under colonial rule.

And then for the Korean government to sell away future moral culpability for past wrongs – without informing the victims nor ever having compensated them since (which declassified documents talked about here and here and here and here and here revealed to be true in 2005) – isn't that enormously problematic?

And then there's also the fact that the government actively suppressed any talk of this stuff for decades, since it seriously contradicted with the state's interests in keeping this quiet?

How is that not sharing in a great deal of moral culpability for the lifelong pain and plight of the "comfort women" who lived on for far, far longer than 1945? Does anyone really think their suffering was due solely to the Japanese before 1945, or that that suffering ended immediately upon liberation and thereafter?

In other words, when did I step into an alternate universe in which Korean society has valued women's bodies at all throughout most of Korean modern history?

Was that when the Korean government was sending representatives to encourage prostitutes in the "camp towns" around the US military bases to gather capital for the nation? Or perhaps that was when the Park government was exploiting feminized labor throughout the 1960's and 70's? Is that why there are estimated from 300,000 to a staggering one million prostitutes working in the Korean sex industry in South Korea today (4.1% of the GDP by the government's own 2002 estimates)?

Why is this news, from a hardcore feminist perspective, at all surprising? There were Koreans who colluded in the kidnapping of the comfort women. Wow – not surprising, since most of the Koreans involved in the ongoing sex industry employing Korean women, as well as the importation of Filipino and Russian women under the same conditions that Korean women were kidnapped in the colonial period, as well as in the recent upsurge in the human trafficking of Korean women now all over the world since the 2004 Anti-Prostiition Law crackdown...

Seriously – are people around the nation holding their hands over their mouths and fainting in disbelief? In a country in which there are "masturbation rooms" and brothels next to elementary schools?

Come on.

And all the accounts you see present serious problems for the serious historian (as opposed to the kneejerk nationalist kind). As I tell my students of history all the time, refrain from using the passive tense as much as possible. This is not just for stylistic reasons, but also because it's an easy way to elide concrete historical references and credible evidence, which is what good history is based upon.

Most accounts read "were abducted" and "were taken" or "were misled into thinking they were applying for domestic labor" – something like this. If we have the facts evenly laid out and they are apparently distributed such that they offer a similar level of credible density across the entire argument, then why don't the histories tend to read, "After having been kidnapped by a roving band of Japanese soldiers searching for young candidates to be recruited into the ranks of the so-called "comfort women," Yumi found herself placed on a train and bound for..."

Too many of the accounts tend to skip right over recruitment and procurement and emphasize only the horrors of being a sexual slave itself. I'm not pooh-poohing that description, but merely pointing out that I know; I get it. I fully acknowledge the horror of that experience as well as the Japanese military and government's well-documented and historically compelling participation in the entire process.

But the question no one on this side of the East-Sea-of-Japan/Tokdo-Takeshima divide wants to look squarely in the face is the extent to which the overall low value of women's bodies in both societies at the time (which is still partially reflected now) contributed to not only the easy operation, but the relatively easy procurement of soon-to-be "comfort women."

Given the fact that the Japanese state and Korean/Japanese-run industry were in collusion at the time (which brings up the thorny issue of Korean collaboration), and that industry and organized crime were also closely linked (and were well into the development period as well), and that we know that many of the Korean women were brought into the industry by paid domestic recruiters, why is it akin to career suicide to pose the same question of collaboration, especially since the same historical actors – the state, industry, and organized thugs, for example – were on the scene.

Because that's a messy question.

But we forget that historical narratives are constructed around political purposed. The "Holocaust" didn't gain that moniker until the mid-1960's. It didn't become the historical lesson for the world that it is until a significant amount of time after the fact.

This doesn't change what happened. It changed how it is represented. "The Holocaust" happened like a motherfucker, but it took some time for the West to make sense of it, for the considerable political power of both Israel and those who support her to makes its presence felt (and not as a worldwide conspiracy, but as a political force like any other that exist in the world of politics, especially one enabled by a mixture of nationalism and a recent historical "quickening"), as well as for the rest of the world to begin to mold a coherent historical narrative out of such an overwhelmingly horrible act.

The situation with South Korean politics and constructions of "correct" versus "distorted" history makes for any true, deeper exploration into the painful, complex, and stomach-turning morass of the Japanese colonial period nearly impossible, quite ironically, in South Korea.

Think this isn't true? Look at the reactions to professors who even hint that Korea might have benefitted materially from the colonial period – they are summarily fired and their names turned into mud. And to the crazies who don't tend to read very closely before hitting the comment area, I'm not concerned with whether Korea benefitted or not at the present moment; I am only concerned with the fact that, given such a complex period with so complex and dependent factors, this isn't even considered a legitimate historical question.

"Did the Holocaust happen at all" is not something I consider a legitimate question, given the staggering, mind-boggling amount of evidence that anyone who has taken even a passing interest in the subject is faced with. Holocaust denial is political extremism because it is so very historically untenable a line of reasonable inquiry. You would have an easier time convincing me that Neil Armstrong never went to the moon (and yes, I've seen all the conspiracy theory videos and been to the web sites). And it is even more suspicious because it is usually only political extremists who are ever behind it.

However, "To what extent did Korea materially benefit from colonial occupation" is a legitimate historical question. "To what extent was there Jewish collaboration in the camps?" is also a legitimate historical question. And outside of a very narrow zone of unreasonable, undocumentable, and untenable extremes, most historical questions are at least worth asking, even if they may not be fun to hear answered.

And what is frightening about the Red Guard, knee-jerk reactions to Koreans in difficult moments in history, the logic behind people wanting certain professors' heads for even broaching certain historical topics seems to essentially stem from the idea that "they were Korean; that couldn't have happened."

It such professors were met with overwhelming, damning evidence of just how daft and dumb their arguments were, I wouldn't have a problem with this; but most of the reaction, as in the past with similar incidents, is simply knee-jerk nationalism guiding historical and popular discourse, even in the face of someone who might have something worthy of hearing. I'm not saying she's right about her historical assertion; I'm just saying that anyone covering their ears while calling for her head on a silver platter is most unequivocally wrong.

And given all the other sacred cows of Korean national ideology that poses as history from the colonial period, I think I'd like to hear what she has to say. And I'd like to hear more about who did the recruiting, how it was done, and what role the Korean government played in covering up this entire period after the war.

Fascism Isn't a Mere Aesthetic

Ben Applegate, in his recent review of the film 300 in the Chungang Ilbo, warned us all that "Hitler's hiding in your movie theater." Really? Oh, word?

My site has also talked about Hitler and fascism, specifically in relation to aspects of Korean national ideology. So one would think I would tend to agree, right?

Here's the problem with the assertion, as is the case anytime people starting throwing Hitler's name around – there has to be more than an aesthetic resonance with the concept; in other words, there has to be some meat to the assertion.

Quoting Susan Sontag? Leni Riefenstahl? Triumph of the Will? Armies marching in procession? The fetishization of physical perfection? Sound compelling?

The problem is the missing factor – ideology as a function of state interest.

Riefenstahl's hauntingly beautiful imagery in Triumph of the Will (which, unlike most people who quote the film, I've actually seen, taught, and sits on my bookshelf) is employed in a lot of films since its initial showing, and her cinematic techniques have become part of the filmic grammar used down to the present day. It's no wonder that film is commonly described in film theory classes as "the most greatest documentary ever made" – because, by definition, it was.

And the imagery in Riefenstahl's Triumph (and the far less visible film Olympia, which has been made available for the first time ever from last year on DVD, and is in the cue for my next Amazon run) have been quoted far more deliberately, all over the cinematic map, than in the film 300.

If simply glorifying the general ideals of physical perfection through the depiction of ripped abs and pink, perky nipples is "fascist," then surely the direct quotations of Riefenstahl's technique – shot for shot in the film Gladiator – when the camera comes down through the clouds to merge into a low-angle profile shot of the Roman armies standing in relief as the crowds chant with fists thrown in the air, with all the Roman regalia on full display (which is the historical "quotation" that Göbbels used in constructing the pageantry of Nazism in the first place), this is much more fascist.

Or the film Starship Troopers, which was indeed accused of being fascist, in that it used oodles of fascist imagery lifted directly from Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will as well as Capra's Why We Fight series and Know Your Enemy – Japan, which were produced for the U.S. Army during WWII, which themselves quoted Riefenstahl. In fact, Capra made it a point to procure a copy of Triumph of the WIll before making his own films for US propagandastic purposes, and borrowed her techniques even as clips from the films were used to show just how crazy the Germans apparently were.

If you watch the humorous opening sequence of the troops in Starship Troopers standing in formation as the camera moves across their proud, youthful, perfectly-formed faces, you'll see a direct reference to Triumph even as director Verhoeven playfully lays over the very American style WWII-era prompting "Are you doing your part?" with the kid "surprising" everyone in his little battle get-up and affirmatively answering, "I'm doing my part, too!" Ha ha ha – ah, I just love little child soldiers. So cute!

And that's just the beginning. What most people didn't get – including the Washington Post and CNN – was that fascist imagery was being used as part of an anti-fascist, anti-militarist message (although Heinlein's original book was fascist as a mofo), a fact I pointed out in a graduate paper I wrote during the film's premiere.

In that film, the humans are the bad guys. And the significance of the young, eye-candy actors, bombastic fanfare with trumpets, along with clear and obvious quotations from just about every actual fascist and propagandistic piece of film ever made, was missed by even movie reviewers, who simply saw some of the imagery and accused the film of being fascist, and not getting the fact that he was poking dead-serious fun at it.

Indeed, in the middle of the film, when the fictional commentator for the "Federal Network" asks Johnny Rico his response to the accusation that it was actually the human race that had infringed upon "Bug" territory, Rico replies "Kill 'em all!" as the commentator looks suspiciously into the camera.

Indeed, "the only good bug is a dead bug."

The quotations of Hitler's "breathing room" policies as the leader of the Federation talk about making space safe for "human, not insect civilization," or the images of Doogie Houser, M.D. machine-gunning a captured enemy warrior in front of the camera for the sake of a medical experiment – they were so over-the-top that one would think any film reviewer would have gotten the obvious fact that the film wasn't "fascist" on its face, but was rather being so ridiculously fascist that it could be nothing other than parody.

Starship Troopers was the Naked Gun of Triumph of the Will, yet too many people didn't seem to get it as anything other than an imagined "Triumph of the Will 2."

My point is that mere accusations of utilizing the aesthetics of fascism, or the fact of utilizing them, do not in themselves constitute fascist art itself. If this were the case, Starship Troopers, Gladiator, and even Lord of the Rings – umm, especially that one – would all be guilty of being "fascist" art, regardless of the purpose behind the work.

Well, in the latter case, I think LoTR would more guilty of "Orientalism," which is another inappropriately and too liberally-applied term, one confused with being simply "anti-Asian" or somehow depicting "the Orient" in a negative light. That's not what it means, and I'll use a quick explanation of it to get back to my original point.

In the sense that Edward Said constructed the term, it was clearly a trope in British literature, a conventional way of representing "the Orient" as an ideological part of the very real and very bloody imperial plan to justify the continued domination over and subjugation of "inferior" peoples by the British empire.

It's about ideology used in the service of real goals, those of the state. In the "fascist" art that one sees in Nazi Germany, Communist China, or even in North Korea, there is a clear ideological imperative to sacrifice the needs of the individual for those of the corporate body; written into the aesthetic of the imagery is the desire to make that sacrifice – it is beauty defined, like the shining face of an Aryan warrior, the forward march of youthful maidens, or the proud, beaming stare off into the horizon of a strong and sturdy farmer.

Does mere fetishization of the body, of courage, or even violence itself constitute "fascist" art? I argue that if this is the bar, then many artistic works would fit the bill, and the movies I could quote here would run down my keyboard: The Matrix, The Terminator, Rocky, etc.

The latter film definitely relies on existing tension between whites and blacks, through the Italian-American lens of race and manhood. As each blow pummels Apollo Creed into submission, The Great White Hope has been rekindled, re-empowered, reborn.

White pride itself is on the line, as it has been since the beginning of boxing history, and had been dethroned with the rise of Mohammed Ali and other black boxers to domination of the field. That film was every bit racial fantasy as personal journey.

And by the time we got to Rocky IV, and the racial trope had been exhausted with a match with Mr. T in the previous installment, the fantasy had become more national, as Rocky's homegrown American fists violently chastise the hypermodern, freak-of-fascist-science that was Drago, the Soviet superman. Rocky wins, and is draped in Old Glory, but only to make a speech about cooperation that gets brings the Soviet premier to his feet. But that step towards Soviet-American cooperation was crucially contingent on American victory and magnanimity.

Was the first Rocky "racist" because race was used as an emotional anchor in that film? I'd say no. Was the latter Rocky film "fascist" or even merely jingoistic or propagandistic because national pride was a theme? Slightly more so, but it barely got above the level of kitschy pap that was mere fodder to set up another character for our hero to pummel, and the race card was looking pretty ragged by the fourth installment.

But none of these films were "fascist" in style or intent. They didn't even effectively imply a role for the citizen, nor a destiny for the nation, or anything nearly that coherent for the viewer. Nor does 300.

The popular reading of King Leonidas as Bush, Xerxes and his empire as Iran, and the 300 who go into battle against the wishes of a corrupt and reticent people is superficial and facile at best, given the fact that this is one of the oldest and most retold stories in Western civilization on the one hand, and finds its origins in a comic book written well before the present crisis was at hand.

The styling of Xerxes as exotic, erotic Other is as old as British Orientalist depictions, and an ancient, decadent Orient steeped in mystery is a trope as old as the hills.

The muscles rippling on sweaty soldiers marching off to their sacred duties to orchestral fanfare and the sentimental, vaguely ethnic wail that started in Gladiator and continued through to Troy, Black Hawk Down, and now even the opening sequences of Battlestar Galactica) didn't strike me as "fascist" any more than The Rock did.

If anything, all the talk of Maximus and others fighting and preserving "the glory that was Rome" was truly "fascist" – and hey, at least the main characters with whom we were meant to identify were busy defending an empire that spanned continents, subjugated entire peoples, and was the actual, historical inspiration for Mussolini's fetishization of the fasces itself – his "fascismo," a term that this would-be modern Roman emperor coined.

In contrast, and if anything, 300 is heavily laced with a heady dose of American-style emphasis on free will and its importance to democracy itself. Importantly, Leonidas could have chosen a situation of subjugated suzerainty to the Persians, without bringing down the hammer of war and destruction upon his people; but it was a matter of both pride and principle for this Spartan king, and he could not bear to live without free will.

In the same way, it is also crucial that the 300 warriors were true volunteers and through their sacrifice, led their nation to fight by virtue of their example, not by taking over the reins of their nation by force, nor by pressing anyone to do anything outside of their own, individual volition. Even the psychological bait of "duty" wasn't dangled before hesitating members – the decision to fight and die for the state was intensely personal, which gave their deaths even more meaning.

And in the film, the intrigues and corruptions of the Senate were solved internally, not by sway of the sword (except through the gut of one obvious traitor who had obfuscated the "truth"), but by sway of logic and reason, something else that came up as a recurring them in the film.

So to facilely apply Sontag's argument into a simplistic argument that echoes of fascist style, or even fascist style itself is actually fascism in resurrected form seems pretty flimsy. The bar is too low, the definition too broad, and the depth of analysis too lightweight. Indeed, in the very Sontag article quoted in the review, the relationship between fascist art and the state are made far clearer than Applegate indicates:

“Fascist aesthetics,” wrote Susan Sontag, “endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” Fascist art is a dance between a leader and a growing mass of identical, devoted subjects, shifting “between ceaseless motion and... ‘virile’ posing.”

Fascist work “scorns realism in the name of ‘idealism.’” It “glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”

The subject of Sontag’s essay was Leni Riefenstahl, the notorious Nazi propagandist who constructed her twin propaganda masterpieces, “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” for Adolf Hitler.

But Ms. Sontag’s words are also a perfect description of the special effects bloodbath that is “300.”

But one important thing is being forgotten here, and left out of the quotefest from Sontag's landmark 1975 Sontag's landmark 1973 article:

What is interesting about art under National Socialism are those features which make it a special variant of totalitarian art. The official art of countries like the Soviet Union and China aims to expound and reinforce a utopian morality. Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics—that of physical perfection. Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

As a special subset of "totalitarian art" – which she defines as having a specific, official message, "fascist art" is especially employed as part of an argument that physical perfection in the individual is in itself a sign of the overall perfection (health and superiority) of the body politic.

That is the function of the fascist art Applegate thinks he sees in 300, that physical perfection is a reflection of the state itself, but is really little more than eye candy for the girls and macho inspiration for the boys.

That's why Riefenstahl got off the hook, to some extent, in going down to Africa and filming the physical perfection of the Nuba tribe, which she published as the book Sontag was reviewing in the article in question – she was thereafter able to say that she had never been engaged in worshipping the aesthetic of beauty specifically in the service of fascism, but that she had been merely obsessed with the pursuit of beauty itself, quite apart from any political concerns.

From her film Olympia:

From her later work in The Nuba:

Whether or not that ship holds water in terms of Riefenstahl's spotty and suspicious past, as well chronicled in an amazing recent article on the subject in The New Yorker, it does hold water in terms of this film, which is not all that original in style, although visually quite compelling. But the point isn't to rouse crowds into action, or even, I think to do something so mundane as justify an American incursion into Iran, or justify the recent war in Iraq.

The film exists squarely within a genre of epic battle pictures populated by men with ripped torsos, beautiful women writhing in sheer fabrics, and dying for the sake of king and, ahem, cuntry.

And speaking of which, even in pornography itself, where images are lifted directly from Nazism itself, no one is confusing the fetishization of the body – in its ultimate, pornographic form – as anything remotely fascist, even thought the imagery is clearly such. Sontag notes:

Of course, most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did, if indeed they have more than the sketchiest idea of what that might be. Nevertheless, there are powerful and growing currents of sexual feeling, those that generally go by the name of sadomasochism, which make playing at Nazism seem erotic. These sadomasochistic fantasies and practices are to be found among heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, although it is among male homosexuals that the eroticizing of Nazism is most visible. S-m, not swinging, is the big sexual secret of the last few years.

Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. "Fascism is theater," as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are expert costumers and choreographers as well as performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people. Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience. (Riefenstahl put it: "What is purely realistic, slice of life, what is average, quotidian, doesn't interest me." As the social contract seems tame in comparison with war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting. The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be "nice," as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged.

In the same way, when engaging in the construction of a film such as 300, which is so overtly and obviously a visual spectacle, especially given the comic book form and over-the-top violence that is the trademark of Frank Miller's style of writing and drawing (in this way, 300 does not differ much from Sin City), fascism, if you can find it, is indeed theater, but nothing more.

300's visual elements are designed to give us the thrill of violence-as-pornography, which is the virtual, sensual draw of pornographic experience in the first place – to allow the virtual chance to do things you could not or would not do – such as participate in group sex, run a spear through another man's heart, or eat an expensive German chocolate cake made by a master Swiss chef.

Hence, graphic depictions of sex, violence, and food are often labeled "pornographic" – because they are. Indeed, Ron Jeremy, 300, and the Food Network all have something in common. We like the images hot, extreme, and served up on a silver platter – or screen.

The roots of the word "pornography" actually mean "graphic depiction", and when it comes to sex, violence, and food, there is no way we can sate our desires as they exist in our minds. So we sate them with our imaginations, with still and moving images, with the words of literature both great and vulgar; but to mistake the superficial pageantry of something that titillates for the thing itself is a pretty silly thing to do.

Excellent Series on the Korean Education System

Wow – I'm sort of impressed.

Given enough time and preparation, The Korea Herald, newspaper I've been known to take potshots at on quite a few occasions, seems to be able to put out some pretty decent coverage.

Take a look at the series they did – in PDF form – on the Korean education system, which actually covers quite a bit, from the equalization policy to problems on the college entrance exam – good job.

For someone familiar with the basics of the how the education system works here, but wants a bit more in-depth information, this is a report that hits in the right spot. I wish they had been more hard-hitting with certain issues, such as the problem of suicide, but I think they were trying to cover a lot of bases fairly honestly.

It's a good read, especially for those of you as interested in education reform as I am. One bonus for me was finally getting to see a good picture of Kim Shin-il, whom I've known as the only obscure scholar writing about the education system when I was writing my first seminar paper about the subject in 1994, but who is now the Minister of Education.

His scholarship was always frank and brave – let's continue to watch how he does as a politician.

I've punctuated this post with videos uploaded to YouTube by an ambitious student somewhere out there. It echoes my experience of working in a real Korean school to a T – although my memories were even more harsh, and were they on camera, would be even more indicting.

Announcing the Korea Journal Blog!

It's been a long time coming, but finally here – the Korea Journal announces its blog to the Korean Studies community and those interested in a more academic take on Korean society, culture, literature, and history.

Although I am the administrator of this blog, I do have a real job, and right now, I'm writing to you in my capacity as a consulting editor for the UNESCO-published Korea Journal, the oldest English-language academic journal there is, having been in print since 1962. The Journal publishes quarterly issues organized around a specific theme.

We have covered everything from Korean Buddhism to Korean cyberspace in our issues, and deal with current events, traditional fare, as well as assorted esoterica. If you don't know about us, you should check out some of the issues.

We are a new blog, and really look forward to developing an active community of people with Korean concerns. Since we have the academic background, resources, and institutional history, we thought it the perfect time to finally join the blogging community and offer ourselves as a resource for your debates, discussions, and deliberation about things Korean.

So come on over to the blog, register to leave comments, and join our growing community of Korean Studies scholars!

A Great Historian Passes

One of America's most influential historians and thinkers passed on today. I'll let The New York Times do the explaining first, though, which is where you should start before reading any further.

I still remember coming into first intellectual contact with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. as an undergraduate at Brown grappling with identity politics, multiculturalism, and the notion of "political correctness" during the height of the so-called "Culture Wars" of the early 1990's on American college campuses. My university, with its liberal reputation and crunchy disposition, was one of the main battlezones.

These ongoing debates were mostly sources of fun for me, and were more thought-provoking than bloody or painful. I only winced when the "true believers" apparently on my side of the debate – I was pretty active on campus as a peer counselor and in minority issues – sometimes displayed as little critical thinking skills as the supposed buffoons on the "other side."

I remember this most vividly when Martin Bernal, author of the then-controversial book Black Athena, was coming to campus. At a meeting of some minority campus activists, a group of pretty intelligent and socially conscious people, as I made the announcement, one particularly thoughtless guy in the group just wanted me to make it simple for him, "Just tell me whether to bring eggs or flowers."

He was only half-joking, and when I explained that the book and his talk had to do with historically neglected connections between Greek and African cultures, connections that had been pretty actively erased in the Eurocentric and often overtly racist scholarship that informed the way we understood ancient Greece, he seemed happy. When I mentioned that the author was an old white dude, he seemed genuinely kind of confused.

Ah, identity politics.

When Schlesinger himself weighed in on the issue in person, after the publishing of his book – The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society – in which he attacked the doctrine of "multiculturalism" not for its intents but its methods, he was set up almost like an arch-conservative demagogue, which he most certainly was not. But when you have to pigeonhole someone into either the slots of "on our side" or "establishment conservative", there isn't much room to maneuver.

I decided to go buy the book myself, which I read before the talk. It was my first education in watching people talk past each other on such a grand scale. Well, to be honest, I saw lots of 20-somethings who thought they knew a lot talking to a learned man in his elder years being very patient with us.

I also saw that many people were attacking him for what they feared he represented, not for his very reasonable arguments. And I think in retrospect, the superficial, T-shirts and African pendant mode of "multiculturalism" we were in is now somewhat quaint, outdated, and...kind of embarrassing. As we move into an America that is becoming "post-race" – or at least trying to get over the follies and pitfalls of identity politics – the clarity of his points about the nature of what we were dividing ourselves over seems all the more crystal. I now firmly believe that many Americans are more similar than we are different, as opposed to the opposite being the case. His book was the first time it dawned on me that my own sacred cows might actually be worth slaying.

Anyway – his accomplishments were far greater than simply getting one crunchy undergraduate to think, to use the powerful intellect that I like to think I'm developing. So to that, I am really grateful.

Here's an excerpt from The Washington Post that I'll leave you with:

Being a liberal, Schlesinger once observed, means regarding man as "neither brute nor angel." Whether discussing the Kennedys, Vietnam or the power of the presidency, Schlesinger sought moderation, the middle course. He blamed the Vietnam War on the moral extremism of the right and left and worried that the executive branch had become "imperial," calling for a "strong presidency within the Constitution." He saw American history itself as a continuing "cycle" between liberal and conservative power.

In 1998, Schlesinger opposed Republican-led attempts to have President Clinton removed from office, and he later criticized President George W. Bush for his doctrine of "preventive war," saying "I think the whole notion of America as the world's judge, jury and executioner is a tragically mistaken notion."

America will miss his wisdom, even as it continues to benefit – mostly unknowingly – from his lifetime of contributions.

"Korean comic author: Jews rule U.S."

Kudos to the expat blogosphere!

From original blogging of the book in question, to reporting on all the major websites on the widespread nature of Korean anti-Semitic attitudes, including my "Korea and the Nazis redux" post, for which I was castigated for not only talking about the Nazis and Koreans in the same breath, but for implying that there was *GASP* anti-Semitism in Korea.

From April last year, which itself was from a string of posts on the subject that runs back to February of that year, but was first really broached in my "Gates of the Minjok" post, which went a little far with the interpretations of the anthems and some of the pageantry (although I don't think the suppositions so far-fetched), but which asked some hard questions about anti-Semitism even then, which were dismissed as mere functions of some reality I was just making up in my head.

Well, vindication's a bitch.

At least if CNN's reporting on it, then I'm not totally crazy, right?

Thanks to the Monnara man, for doing the work and bringing the reality of contemporary Korean anti-Semitic attitudes to light.

Kudos to the Korean blogosphere for whipping things up enough for the Wiesenthal Center to get in on things and demand an apology, which sparked a lame-ass response by the author, which then got Korean Americans up in arms, which got new outlets like CNN to notice:

"The Jews are the invisible force that controls the U.S.," Rhie, a professor of visual arts at Duksung Women's University in Seoul, told The Associated Press. "I wrote the chapter to let people know that you can't understand the U.S. without knowing the Jewish community."

Too bad this professor of visual arts (and not history) isn't knowledgeable enough to realize that this same basic notion lay at the root of much of modern European anti-Semitism, which was worked up into a fever pitch of national scapegoating that was carried out to its deadliest conclusion in National Socialist Germany, manifest in a particular and peculiar kind of ideology that itinerant historian of the Holocaus Daniel Goldhagen calls "eliminationist anti-Semitism."

Basically, if "they" control society, and "they" are the root of all of society's evils (when the economy goes bad, or we lose the big war, etc.), then the logical thing to do is eliminate "them."

And that's a bit of basic history that this visual arts professor, who probably never even took a basic introductory European History course, has likely never heard of.

The real questions: Why is this man making books about history? Why do people accept this man's claims? Why didn't the publisher red-flag these obvious problematic and simplistic stereotypes? What other kinds of distortions and horrible stereotypes are being propagated by his series?

I'd like to read the entries on China and Japan. Anyone up for translating those?

For the full chronology of this whole thing, though, you gotta read The Marmot, of course. The grand mammal of them all.

Dizzam!

Go, Korean expat blogosphere!

Let's Get Crunk Cuz Camille is Back!

Or so I felt like singing.

"Let's get it crunk, we gon' have fun / Up on in this dancery..."

No, really. I did a little dance. Ooh. Ahh. Spin. Repeat.

There's still a hole in my soul from Spy magazine (check out the infamous nude Arnold Schwarzenegger) having taken a fall, where Camille Paglia (whom I wrote about not too long ago) sliced and diced history, literature, politics, and pop culture in her "Ask Camille" columns on a level that I've never seen paralleled.

I try to be her, although I am inevitably and perpetually doomed to failure. But we gotta have role models, right?

A "libertarian Democrat" who voted for Nader but likes to listen to Rush Limbaugh, who is a lesbian feminist from the academy yet called Susan Faludi a "whiny little mouse" (ouch!), who debuted as a columnist in the issue of my beloved Spy that infamously featured the more dour Clinton's head atop a dominatrix's body – oh, and that's just the beginning.

Why do I celebrate her return?

Because she's one of the most gifted writers I've ever encountered, mixing elitist academic prose with street slang and pop culture panache. It's what I default to, although she does a far better job than I could ever hope to do.

Because she's not predictable, nor is she a wannabe politico – she calls 'em as she sees 'em, and skewers everybody in need of being skewered, regardless of whether they wear red or blue on their sleeve.

Because she realizes that the liberal "left" tends to be as boorish, elitist, and dogmatic as the radical "right" tends to be morally bereft, pendantic, and narrow-mindedly "un-American" as either side would never admit.

Because she has a killer sense of humor that stops at just short of outrageous, in the original sense of the word.

And all the while, she's just so fucking obviously smarter than everybody else who would dare call her out for a match of dissing and dismissing.

She's back as a regular columnist for Salon.com, from her original stint on that news and culture site back in 1995.

For those in the expat blogosphere who want, like me, to keep in touch while actually using some of the brain cells and neural connections left on hold by a lot of the work many of us are forced to do in Korea, her writing is one refreshing way to help do that.

I wouldn't be surprised if you are excited, impressed, suspicious, and possibly even offended by what she writes; I like that. Sort of like a fine wine hitting all the taste buds, she covers a lot of interesting bases.

Time to dance again. Ooh. Yeah!

Happy Birthday, George!

For those of you who might have forgotten one of the reasons George Washington was regarded as such a great man, here's a reminder. And also, here's a little history to go with it, courtesy of The Washington Post.

This speech has been in the history books, but

At the end of the war, Washington was held in such high regard, and people were so weary and shell-shocked, that they were eager to return to what was familiar; so there was a popular desire to crown Washington as king.

Hard as it is to believe that Americans wanted to crown Washington king, even more difficult to believe, in the shadow of history at least, was how Washington the general turned down the request and decided to leave public life. He had decided to move the cult of the individual out of the way of the more democratic form of rule that was, as of yet, untested, untrusted, and still unstable.

Indeed, economic and regional tensions would pull at the inadequate Articles of Confederation, requiring a "Constitution 2.0" – what we now call our revered Constitution, which would become the template for just about every other democratic constitution and movement in the world, from French revolutionaries to Haitian slave revolts, all the way down through history to even Ho Chi Minh (whose declaration of Vietnamese independence was modeled on the American one) and even our former Communist enemies, which still call themselves "democratic republics."

Little do we remember that pure "democracy" was considered a bad and scary word, even well into the times the writing of the present American Constitution, and Senators were generally required to own a certain amount of land as members of a propertied elite, to offset the "riff-raff" of the "democratic" representatives who constituted the lower house of Congress.

Also, little do we remember the public distress over how to define and maintain a sense of "republican virtue" and commitment to the republic over personal, material "interests" in a society in which political participation was increasingly open to the masses. Traditionally, only those educated gentlemen with wealth and the privilege of leisure were thought to be able to be "disinterested" from the concerns of the dirty, material world; what James Madison did was find a way to make "interests" balance to make an overall fair whole.

Such was the genius of men like Washington, and the idea of "democracy" was out of the bag, although it wouldn't take the modern form we now recognize – along with the word "democracy" being celebrated – until the 1830's and the time of Jackson.

Washington, Jefferson, and many other Founders were slaveholders, and women were denied (in most states, but not all) the right to vote, Pandora's Box had been opened. Even the very idea that no one has any inherent political rights over another is very American, although very uncomfortable, unusaual, and economically impractical at the time.

Some might point to this as a mere "contradiction," which it was, to some extent; but many historians of the United States also see this as part of a larger question, an unresolved issue that would only be able to be resolved through violence; in this way, John Quincy Adams called the Civil War "the last battle of the American Revolution," which was a very apt way of understanding the single issue in the Constitution that wouldn't go away – the problem of slavery.

Although its ultimate solution could not have been found at the time, in the circumstances of material interests and the limits of moral courage at the time, the ideas and actions of people such as Washington were indeed momentous ones not just for all Americans, but for people around the world.

And George Washington never cut down a cherry tree. He should be remembered for making the historically unprecedented act of laying down power when it was most crucial to do so, and for returning to public life when it was requested of him to define and assert the authority of the President and the federal government.

He's more than just the old white dude in a wig.