Mitt and humanity

The new Netflix documentary about Mitt Romney, Mitt, is a good reminder of what Obama said back in 2004 when he electrified the country at the Democratic National Convention: that there is no red or blue America, but the United States of America.

The documentary mostly stays away from politics, focusing on Mitt the man, and on his family, as they go through the hard experience of two presidential campaigns. Still, there was enough there to remind me why I voted against Mitt Romney: his comment about the 47 percent of Americans who are takers, his sense that Democrats simply don't understand how hard it is to start a business, his sincere belief that we're headed off a tax-and-spend cliff that will destroy America, his willingness to chase the president on Benghazi and other non-issues to try to win points.

What stands out strongly, though, is that Mitt Romney, his family and his supporters are fundamentally good people who wish America well. I don't know if that's true of everyone in the Republican party, but it seems to be true of the Romneys. There's a moment on election day when the campaign plane lands, and they look out the window to see that a nearby parking garage is packed with people. I thought to myself, How can all those people be so wrong? They want Mitt to win as much as I wanted Obama to win, maybe more. And they're right about some things. They're probably right that small businesses get taxed too much. If their whole campaign had been about how to lower taxes on small businesses, instead of all the things it became about, they might have done better.

No matter our politics, we do need to remember that those people are human beings who worry about their country, their futures, their families. They disagree with me, and I think I'm right and they're wrong about a number of things, but they deserve respect. Democrats shouldn't make the mistake Mitt Romney did in writing off 47 percent of this country as racist, anti-gay, gun-toting, Obama-hating, or anything else. We shouldn't write off 1 percent of this country as callous plutocrats. Writing off human beings is easy and dangerous.

Swiss gods don't like rice cake

My latest term paper, "Swiss Gods Don't Like Rice Cake: Authentic Paths to the Korean Divine" is now online. This one has pictures! Enjoy.

Paths to success

"It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control."

So say Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in an opinion piece in the New York Times. In a take that's not surprising for Amy Chua, success is defined largely as financial success, decorated with other external signs of achievement: the authors note all those Jewish Nobel laureates and Mormon CEOs.

Further down, they note -- in kind of a surprise move for Chua -- that Asian-Amerian students have the lowest self-esteem of any group. The authors even quote Amy Tan describing her inability to please her parents as "a horrible feeling."

In the end, despite messages to the contrary proclaiming that you can have it all, you will inevitably make compromises in life: current happiness at the expense of later financial security, current education at the expense of more time with family, etc.

Finding the priorities that are right for you is no simple matter, but it's worth thinking broadly about what success means to you. What is your big win? A fat salary? Recognition in your field? Following your bliss? Security? It's a lot easier to succeed when you know what you're trying to succeed at.

Honk

It's 7 on a frozen morning, snow still on the ground from a blizzard a few days ago. You're in your car, going somewhere important. You turn down one of those narrow residential streets in Brooklyn, only to find that traffic is at a standstill.

And so, you honk.

Then you honk again.

Because that honking is going to remind some driver up ahead -- you can't see because there's a large truck between you and whatever is causing the delay -- that roads are for driving, not parking. Your honking is going to make the difference for everyone. Never mind that it's going to wake 50 people who need to rest before they get up on a freezing morning to go somewhere important. Waking those people up is totally worth it because you're fixing traffic. Whatever that delay is up ahead, your honk will help the people involved to solve the problem. It's like you're cheering them on! Without you, that traffic snarl would never have gotten fixed, and I might have slept all through the quiet morning.

Honker, you're an American hero.

Be inspired

It's hardly breaking news, but back in 2010, South Korea changed its tourism slogan to "Be inspired."

Back when I first went to Korea, in 2001, the tourism slogan was "Dynamic Korea," created by Kim Dae Jung's administration. The idea seems to have been to represent the South Korean economy primarily, marking Korea as a modern nation capable of hosting major events and serving as a corporate hub. The trouble with the slogan is that it doesn't mean very much to an actual tourist.

The replacement campaign, "Korea Sparkling," was a hasty mess. It meant even less than "Dynamic Korea," though it appeared to emphasize Korea's shiny new buildings and economy. Unfortunately, that focus gave short shrift to much of what is best about Korea: its earthy vitality, its sour and pungent cuisine, its bloody cinematic thrillers, its forested mountains jutting up out of the big cities. It overlooked Korea's dynamism, ironically enough. "Sparkling" could just as well describe Singapore or Dubai.

The "Be inspired" slogan moves in another direction entirely. First of all, it's something of a step for Korea to feel that it can go beyond describing itself and venture to tell you how to feel. That in itself is a kind of confidence that wasn't there before. But it's also a shift from economy to culture. "Dynamic" is where you hold regional trade shows and build ships. "Sparkling" is where you open an office on the 35th floor and go shopping for international luxury goods. But inspiration comes from genuine experiences: delicious meals, pop stars you adore, good friends, mountain Buddhist retreats, the Boryeong Mud Festival.

For the first time in the modern era, Korea appears to be confident that it has something unique to offer the world, something worthwhile. South Korea has developed personality.

Sing for freedom

As we approach Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I thought I'd share some extraordinary music, sung by some of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.

I recall a moment that made clear to me just how much that movement changed America. At a Noah's Bagels in Mountain View, California, my father cast a nostalgic glance at a large-format photograph of a packed Coney Island beach from the 1950s, when he was young. I looked at it too. "No black people," I said.

My father hadn't noticed. He is not a racist -- in fact, he and my mother marched in Civil Rights rallies in the 1960s -- but he grew up in a world where segregation was normal. He learned that segregation was wrong, and he fought to wipe it away, but it's what the world of his childhood looked like. He once told me that the residents of Parkchester, where he grew up in the Bronx, were all white, while the help were all black, and no one thought anything about that.

I didn't grow up in such a world. Though racism is still a profound problem in many ways in America, that should not take away from the extraordinary achievements of those who fought and too often bled for civil rights in the fifties and sixties and beyond. Because of them, because of their bravery and sacrifice, America is different and better.

I work with people of every skin color and background. I date interracially. My president is biracial, and my mayor is in a marriage that would have been illegal in most states when my father was a boy. These changes did not come by magic. They came with the blood, sweat and tears of heroic ordinary people who said Enough.

And maybe this will even inspire us all to think about those things in our world where we will say Enough, where we will stand for the change that we know in our bones, in our very souls, must come.

The bamboo elevator

There's a concept known as the bamboo ceiling, a set of cultural expectations that prevent Asians from reaching the highest levels of American corporate life. But what about the bamboo elevator?

In Slate, Philip Guo has an article about silent technical privilege: the ways that looking like a programmer, which in this case just means being an Asian guy, enabled him to fake his way into becoming an actual programmer. He was given opportunities based on the way he looked, and he made the most of them. The bamboo elevator lifted him up into positions he might otherwise not have reached.

In general, it makes sense to make the most of all the opportunities that come your way (barring those that involve genuine moral compromise, like the opportunity to get a job by lying or to win a deal through bribery). The aspects of our lives that are beyond our control -- gender, age, race, appearance -- affect how people perceive us, and the effects are likely to be varied: sometimes good, sometimes bad. I say use the good ones.

But be conscious of it. Understand what's happening, and when you can, work to mitigate those arbitrary differences. You'll be working to create a fairer, more diverse world, with more Asian athletes, more African-American mathletes, more women executives, etc. That might mean a diminishment of opportunity in certain areas for you personally, but hopefully it will lead to more and better opportunities for all of us.

The Choco Pie-ization of North Korea

Fans of Park Chan-wook, or of his classic thriller Joint Security Area, may remember the scene in which a North Korean soldier spits out a Choco Pie to declare his loyalty to his home country: rather than flee south, where he can get all the Choco Pies he wants, the soldier insists that he will wait until North Korea can produce the best Choco Pies in the world.

Choco Pies have long been a symbol of South Korean modernization: cheap, tasty, popular, utterly manufactured, completely divorced from any preexisting Korean tradition. Now South-Korean born artist (and Columbia alum) Jin Joo Chae has an exhibition at Julie Meneret Contemporary Art on the Lower East Side entitled The Choco Pie-ization of North Korea. Chae highlights the significance of the lowly Choco Pie in North Korea, where a single pie can fetch as much ast $10 on the black market in a country where the average monthly wage is $150.

I'm happy to see South Korean artists finding new ways to acknowledge and engage with North Korea. In this case, Chae focuses our attention on the marketization of North Korea, which often goes unnoticed beneath the news stories about Kim Jong Un and Dennis Rodman and nuclear weapons. I definitely plan to check out the show, and I hope you can too.  

Facebook piece

1. Create a Facebook page as an artist who works in words: Yoko Ono, Bruce Nauman, Basho.

2. Post the artist's works as status updates.

3. Collect the text from the ads that appear.

4. Create a Facebook page as the artist's ads.

5. Post the ad texts as status updates.

6. Collect the text from the ads that appear.

7. Create a Facebook page as the ads' ads.

8. Post the ad texts as status updates.

9. Repeat until the ads and statuses reach equilibrium.