How Do You View You?

Growing up Adventist, I was taught that all other Christian sects were either deluded or vaguely evil. This was not merely an academic point: people who didn't know of God's true word - as percolated through the innards of Ellen G. White - deserved the eternal torment they'd soon be facing. The Catholics were damned because they'd essentially deified Jesus' mom and because they thought people went to heaven when they died; the Episcopalians believed that gay folks were, like the rest of us, the children of God; the Methodists allowed dancing. To make matters worse, the whole lot of them worshiped on Sunday, which, as any upstanding Adventist will tell you, was set aside by God specifically for NFL football. Go check Genesis, you'll see: "...and on Sunday God did create Steve Largent, football widows and baked beans."

Religions are odd this way: no matter how moonstruck - or patently delusional - their ideas may be, the members seldom fail to gasp in horror at what some other sect has cooked up.

To wit:

For the first time, a Mormon has a legitimate shot at being the next president of the United States. At first glance, this would seem to indicate that America has opened its collective mind, become more tolerant and decided to give these latter-day saints a shot at the White House. And I suppose it is all that, but the candidacy of Mitt Romney has also given American Christians further occasion to play pot to the proverbial kettle, never once stepping back to consider the applesauce of their own views.

By all indications, and however politically slippery he may be, Romney seems like a decent fellow and a competent executive. To the best of my knowledge, he's not in the slave trade, addicted to crank, or running guns for the Janjaweed. He just happens to think that the Son of God, when he returns, will be arriving in Missouri.¹ Jesus, by the by, is rightly pissed that TWA went belly up, because that St. Louis hub sure would have made his second coming a helluva lot easier, logistically speaking.²

The big gripe against Mormons - as made by other sects - seems to be that the LDS church has taken traditional scripture and riffed it out of all recognition, rather like a Grateful Dead cover band. Most Christians will tell you that Mormonism, as a faith, isn't to be trusted because it was founded by some crazy fellow who went around making shit up to fit his whim and fancy. Objectively speaking, of course, they're right: Joseph Smith was a certified loon, but no more or less so than whoever cooked up the other doctrines and tenets that we have come to associate with the Great Religions.

So the Mormons have a history of polygamy? Well, the Bible says that I can own slaves from neighboring countries,³ but like the Mormons and their plural marriages, most Christians got shut of their bondsmen a long time ago. No one's railing against the other Christian candidates because their religion backed bondage in the distant past.

The Mormons have magic underwear? Leviticus says I can't approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight,⁴ and I know a lot of people who attend church regularly with their spectacles. For my part, I have to wear a suit and tie everyday, usually with underwear. Dress codes, as you've no doubt learned by now, abound. So what?

For outright, comic dottiness it's hard to top the Holy Bible - particularly the elder testament - though I'll admit the Book of Mormon takes a fair stab at it. Point is, even Joseph Smith had to start somewhere and he didn't cook up his religion in a vacuum. Rather, he was indeed riffing on a centuries-old canon of specious dogma, the entirety of which looks awfully goofy to anyone who bothers to step outside the fray for even a moment and look at religion with any distance.

I don't expect that any religion or sect will perk up and recognize the jive of their own convictions anytime soon, no more, at least, than I expect the Shiites and Sunnis to lay down their small arms and have a beer together in Diyala next week. Religion, unlike journalism, doesn't even strive for objectivity and it's hard to tell a person who believes that woman was created from Adam's rib that God will, in fact, be turning up in the Midwest at some time in the future. Once a person is locked into a notion, no matter how askew, it's hard to talk them off the ledge.





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¹ The LDS' 10^th article of faith, in case you wondered, which states that Zion will be built in the American continent

² I'm not a religious person but it'd be doubly hard for me to get behind a God who chose as his place of reemergence - of all places on His own green earth - Missouri. I'd like to think that my god had better taste. After all, if Missouri is His idea of a good time, imagine Heaven, which is probably like southern Iowa. Given the choice, I'd take sinful mortality.

³ "Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids." - Leviticus 25:44 (KJV)

⁴ "...or a crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken..." - Leviticus 21:7 (KJV)

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The Return of Rip City

There was a time when I had to be in bed by 7 pm. For some reason, my parents didn't think I could function with any less than twelve hours of sleep every night and, as such, I had to go to bed straightaway after MASH ended. This really needled me because I always missed Three's Company, which for some reason looked like a better show than MASH, though I can't for the life of me think why. Probably it was the opening credits, with the scenes of bike riding and sailing in the Santa Monica sun - or Suzanne Summers' chest - but I guess we'll never know. This bedtime was enforced until I hit the second grade, at which point it was pushed back to 7:30 and then a further thirty minutes for each year I advanced in school.

This will all sound like progress until you consider that, by the fifth grade, I was still having my lights doused at 9:00. By this time, however, I had matured in some small way and the bedtime stakes had been raised. What really rankled me about going to bed so early - in addition to the daylight - was that, during the NBA season, no Portland Trailblazers game ever finished until at least 9:30. Didn't matter: I had to cut the TV and head for bed at 9:00 sharp, forcing me to wait until the next morning to see if Rick Adelman had led the troops to victory.

All that changed somewhere around 1989, when I got my first clock radio. My parents did not abide oversleeping and, to that end, bought me the alarm clock with the understanding that I would get myself and my sister up in the morning and out the door to school...on time. That alarm clock, as it happened, ended up serving a dual purpose: it got me up on time and it made me noticeably more pliable when it came to bedtime. Hell, no respectable Blazers fan ever watched a game on TV with the sound on, anyway: fathers taught their sons at an early age that the only way to watch was to mute the TV and tune into Bill Schonely on KEX 1190 AM. With Schonely calling the games you didn't actually even need the TV. Closing your eyes was good enough.

"Porter brings the ball across the cyclops at midcourt, moving left to right on your radio dial...

"It's three on two and here comes Drexler with the ball, lickety-brindle down the court. He drives...and scores!

" Bingo! Bango! Bongo!"

Bedtime, at least when the Blazers were playing, became pretty damned special with the arrival of that clock radio. I'd pull the covers over my head and form a sort of sound barrier using some pillows, being careful not to have the volume too high.

In those days, the Blazers actually won more than they lost - a lot more, in fact. It was the culmination of a twelve year wait for Blazers fans since the team had won their first and only NBA title in 1977, putting Oregon in a national spotlight it had never known. But Bill Walton had left the team shortly thereafter and the franchise slipped into a decade of mediocrity, consistently making the playoffs but rarely advancing beyond the first round. Such were the 1980s for Trailblazers fans, though I didn't suffer much because I had to be in bed by 7:00 and didn't have a clock radio yet.

Blazermania - as the medical condition is known - never died out in the 1980s; rather, it idled about in subdued dormancy through the years of Kiki Vandeweghe and Sam Bowie. But the spirit was alive. My father had - and probably still has - an old T-shirt that he bought in the wake of the '77 championship, an ugly old yellow thing that was probably screen-printed by a high school kid in his bedroom. On the back of the shirt was printed the roster of the squad that won the title. On the front, as I recall, was the Blazer logo with 'World Champions' below it. Once in while, when my dad was cleaning out his T-shirt drawer - when it was finally time to get rid of the Spuds MacKenzie and Lamborghini Countach shirts that had become too tight - he'd pull out this old Blazers shirt and I, for some reason, would get such a kick out of seeing it. He'd get a wistful look in his eyes and tell me about Bill Walton and Larry Steele and Dave Twardzik and I - not having been born until '79 - just tried to imagine what it felt like to have your team actually win the whole danged shooting match.

I almost found out in the early nineties. A Blazers squad led by Clyde, Terry, Jerome, and Buck would have brought the trophy back to Portland had they not run up against the Bad Boys of Detroit and Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls. Those were bitter years for me as an eleven year-old kid: the parents divorced, another change in schools, and then the Blazers went and dragged us through the muck of near-elation. It was, in fact, to these years that Jim Morrison referred when he said, "let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God."

And that was a high point. By the mid-nineties, the Blazers had traded Clyde Drexler, fired Rick Adelman and slouched into the years of Uncle Cliffy Robinson, Rasheed Wallace and, all too soon, Isaiah Rider. They were still a competitive squad, to be sure - coming awfully close to the finals again on a couple occasions - but they were no longer a team I stayed up late to watch on TV, let alone to hear on the radio. That I was older and busier was part of it, but the Blazers also brought it upon themselves with their slide in the infamous 'Jailblazers' period.

I've said before that I'd root for this team even if they started five death row inmates, but I wouldn't feel right about it and wouldn't go out of my way to support them. I, like a lot of fans, felt betrayed by what Blazers' management had allowed this team - and, by extension, the city of Portland - to become. All those years, I thought, of furtively supporting the Red & Black after my bedtime and this is the thanks I get? The Rose Garden ticket sales told the tale: thousands of others had taken a conscious step back, too, and decided that winning wasn't worth the price of putting up with this bunch of miscreants and malcontents.

Much like those years in the early nineties, however, the Blazers are quickly moving into a new era of respectability - where the team is becoming both frighteningly talented and, for the fans, terrifically endearing. After the vexing general managerial reigns of Bob Whitsett and John Nash, Kevin Pritchard has brought a new culture to the team and, by extension, to the city of Portland, which may finally embrace the Blazers again after years of living apart. It's a cautious affection on the part of the fans: they've been hurt too many times this decade and don't want to be the fool again, but they're willing to work things out and give it another try. Players like Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, Ime Udoka, and Jarrett Jack - guys who, at least on the merits of their personality, deserve to win championships - make the reconciliation a whole lot more likely to take root. Were I not in Korea, this is a team I'd happily stay up all night to hear on the radio.

As though this resurrection wasn't exciting enough already, luck went the Blazers one further and somehow handed them the first pick in this year's draft lottery, meaning they're about to pull either Kevin Durant or Greg Oden - players who, even if they still breathe oxygen like the rest of us, have the potential to change the league for the next ten years.

This change has been a long time coming, but the wait seems to be paying off. There stands to be, in the years to come, a whole new generation of kids being sent to bed early only to curl up under the blankets with their radios (if, indeed, kids even listen to the radio or have bedtimes anymore) and listen as the Blazers bring the pride back to Portland. Here's hoping this team will earn another shirt for my dad's t-shirt drawer, too, while they're at it.

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Ding Dong, Yummy and Pissing Racehorses

Scattered Notes

If I've learned anything in the past two weeks it's that girls named Yummy and Ding Dong should not be allowed to sit next to each other. Nor, come to that, should fifteen other people be locked in a room with those two for four hours a day.

I mention this because my Korean language classes started up again a few weeks ago at Seoul National University. In addition to Ding Dong and Yummy - who make preschoolers seem like a paragon of maturity - I also study with an Uzbeki fellow who wears a cologne that smells like buck urine. "Elk Musk," I believe it's called. A few days ago, after he'd been especially liberal in dousing himself with it, he leaned over to me and asked,

"Does this classroom smell funny to you?"

It's certainly a pocket of humanity, this class of mine. There are people from ten countries,* three continents, a range of ages and four genders. For the most part, everyone gets along - or pretends to - but the course has not been completely lacking in nationalist attachments.

For our first project of this summer term, we had to give a short presentation on our home countries. Giving hers, a Tawainese student made a casual reference to her country's geographic location "across the water from China." The Chinese students in the class, recognizing something that didn't quite jive with their prescribed worldview, immediately shot a few furtive glances at one another. After class, there was carnage in the hallway.**

None of us - as speakers of Korean - have reached anything approaching fluency, though, so that keeps the bloodshed to a minimum. At this point, our want of basic grammar and vocabulary have prevented most arguments, instead giving us a common purpose and goal. Here, incidentally, are a couple phrases that we all, regardless of ethnic background, found useful this past week:

그 남자는 경주마처름 오줌을 싸요. ***

하인을 부르세요. ****

No matter your race, religion or creed, there comes a time when you need to conjure images of a urinating racehorse, or, better still, to ring for your servant and have him conjure them for you.





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* Mongolia, USA, China, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Canada, Denmark, Japan, and Britain.

** Mongolia, USA, China, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Canada, Denmark, Japan, and Britain.

*** That man is pissing like a racehorse.

**** Please ring for the servant.

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One-a-Day

Courtesy of The Yangpa...

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Joong-Ang Ilbo: In the Shadow of Idiots'

Once again, the Joong-Ang Ilbo finds itself in the unenviable position of trying to keep up with idiot's collective. Many have tried, but well...actually, most have succeeded. Outpacing this site isn't too difficult.







photo from Joong-Ang Ilbo

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Across the Tracks

As we were walking home last week, my wife pointed out a dead baby chicken on the side of the street near our house. It looked like it had been running along, lost its footing and done a face-plant...and died. But I doubt it: chickens don't just come running out of nowhere, after all. More likely, some kid bought the poor chick from someone selling them out of a box nearby and then handled the thing to death.

"Nevermind," I said. "The cats'll carry it off."

Funny thing about cats, though: they'll kill every songbird in sight, but where are they when you need them to cart off a dead chicken? Down eating the songbirds, no doubt. Nor, come to that, was the person who bought the chicken anywhere to be seen, so it sat there in the gutter for a day or two before some civic-minded person disposed of it.

This sort of scene happens all too often in Seoul. People buy kittens or puppies or baby wildebeests because the little buggers are just oh-so-cute, only to realize that those same animals have a puzzling tendency to grow into life-sized cats, dogs and, yes, wildebeests. Don't be surprised, then, when that chick you bought off the guy in front of the schoolyard for $3 matures into a full-fledged rooster with a penchant for crapping on the sofa. Lucky for everyone, then, that a child's love will usually kill a chick in an hour flat.

Especially children in Guro. This here's a rough neighborhood, the poorer quarters where the ragged people and their children flock for cheap housing, factory work, and barbecued pork intestines. Chickens don't stand a chance. More than any other area of Seoul, Guro is known for it's production of street pizza and morning oysters and grandmothers who squat on the street corner in the craptaking position staring blankly at the passing cars. Some have said that the residents of Guro are little more than a bunch of uncouth shitkickers, but I wonder if that's not unfair to the shitkickers.

Everyday I go to work over in the leafy, glass-and-steel Gangnam district, where well-heeled housewives carry themselves like they were the last empresses of Rome and pay $160 for a box of nine oranges at the Hyundai Department Store. Their husbands work in the offices nearby, making the money that keeps the family in expensive citrus and occasionally getting themselves tossed in the joint for it. I wish I had a nickel for every executive who talks of needing to stop by Anyang prison to visit an ex-colleague in lock-up. In fact, make it a dime. One Company Man I work with is even making a special stop in Los Angeles next week on his American business trip just so he can drive up to see a friend in Lompoc. None of this should come as a shock, though: the lust for a $17 orange has driven many a man to unsavory means.

But in Gangnam - and Cheongdam and Apgujung - the crime is sleek, the whitest of white collar, and agreed upon over bottles of Johnny Walker in room salons with a busty hostess on the lap. Over here in Guro, it's Darwin on Parade. The Chinese gangsters run the bars and - judging by the local citizenry - you'd stand to catch something if a hostess sat on your lap around here. Folks in this area measure their alcohol in five-liter soju jugs, all the better for mixing with the intestines and creating that famous Guro Deep Dish on the sidewalk as they make their way home. Watch your step in the morning.

The city is trying to clean the place up, they really are. Their first step was to rename the subway stations in the shabbiest areas, but Guro by any other name is still unsightly. Slowly but surely, however, the district is getting a face-lift as venture companies move into the new glass towers going up a few blocks from our house and the factories move across the Yellow Sea to China. Hell, there are even two Starbucks within walking distance of our house.

Eventually, of course, Guro will gentrify and the current tenants will be forced to take their boorish manners elsewhere. Ditto for me and mine. Just where we'll all go is a mystery, although it certainly won't be to Seoul's slums because she hasn't got any - just ask PJ O'Rourke. Only the Gasan district, just over the hill from here, is more decrepit and loutish than Guro, and the developers will get their hands on that place soon enough.

But maybe that's all good news for the baby animals that are up for sale over at Daerim Station. While it's not clear that a woman who spends hundreds of dollars on oranges would take any better care of a chick, I doubt she'd want a dead one sitting on her stoop. Of course, I doubt she'd even have a stoop in the first place. People of means usually don't.

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The Great Champagne Disappointment

When we were kids, in the 1980s, my sister and I spent our Saturday afternoons waiting for The Lawrence Welk Show to come on. This was not because we enjoyed Welk's champagne music - we hated it, actually - but rather because we didn't have cable and the show aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting at about the time the sun went down on any given Saturday evening. We were also Seventh-Day Adventists, and when you're raised in a church that was founded on "The Great Disappointment," you learn to keep your cultural standards at knee-level and just look forward to the next polka.

Like the Adventists, most American kids will tell you that Saturday is God's chosen day: little league baseball, no school, the next day is Sunday, and the sun always shines. The Adventists, however, have their own reasons. They believe that Saturday is the holy day because, according to The Good Book, God rested on the seventh day after spending the previous six days knocking everything together. This seventh day was, of course, Saturday and we know this because God has always used the same calendar that we use today.

By church standards, I was raised in a liberal Adventist household. We ate meat, went to see PG-rated films at the movie theater on occasion, and listened to secular music. I grew up with CCR, Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, though my mother fretted about letting me listen to the Top Gun soundtrack when I informed her, at the age of nine, that I wanted an earring. I was becoming worldly - rebelling, Adventist-style - and perhaps all her years of furtively listening to Anne Murray on the Sabbath had ruined me.

"The Heritage Singers never would have driven you to this," she said.

Lapses into worldly music notwithstanding, my parents insisted that we keep the Sabbath every week. Adventist Saturdays were, to my recollection, godly only to the extent that they were god-awful. The high point of the afternoon, after we'd returned home from church, was watching our father take a nap on the sofa. Maybe he'd fart in his sleep.

From an early age, my sister and I knew exactly where in Friday morning's newspaper to find the official Saturday sunset time for that week (say, 6:37 PM) and we waited for that time to roll around so that we could turn on the TV and watch...anything. The first show was usually The Lawrence Welk Show, which came to symbolize Freedom from Sabbath for us. In addition to Mr. Welk, we looked forward to watching The Golden Girls later that same evening. Are you beginning to see what Adventism can do to a person's standards and taste? A ten year-old American boy should not know who Estelle Getty is. Luckily, I attended Adventist schools, where the kids came from families strictly opposed to the salty tongue of Sophia Petrillo. Otherwise, I'd have been beaten up every Monday morning when I quoted Getty's latest wisecracks on the school bus.

It's strange that our devout parents let us watch The Golden Girls at all - with its loose morals and sexual innuendo - but I can only guess that they found the locker room talk of menopausal women to be harmless. On the whole, however, my mother was a one-woman ratings board when it came most of the films and television we could watch. My father got his comeuppance when he took us to see Look Who's Talking, rated PG-13, when my sister and I were only eight and ten, respectively. The film, thought Mom, was "suggestive." That was her favorite word to describe any movie that she wouldn't allow us to see. Great Balls of Fire was suggestive. Dirty Dancing was suggestive. Just what these films suggested, I never learned. All I knew is that we were allowed only to watch the erudite works of Paul Hogan, James Garner and Steve Guttenberg. Consequently, I was well into high school before I ever saw the Star Wars trilogy. Those films, too, were suggestive.

We didn't care what we watched on Saturday evenings, so long as it was on TV. Just being able to turn on the television told us that we could be normal again, that we could return to human society after twenty-four hours in a world where the only board games we were allowed to play were Miracles and Pitfalls¹ and Egypt to Canaan.² Sabbath for us, as Adventist kids, was its own minor Egypt and if Lawrence Welk was the only horse headed out of town, so be it. I'll take his polkas over watching my father nap any day.




¹ Miracles and Pitfalls
Learn to negotiate mighty miracles and perilous pitfalls while plundering the treasure trove of Scripture and learning God's Word in this exciting board game.

² Egypt to Canaan
This colorful and challenging board game tests your knowledge of the people and events of the Bible. Learn about the travels of the children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. Includes game board, playing pieces, and question cards. For two to six players, ages 8 to adult.

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