Coronavirus Diary: I am cursing a lot

Just a quick note: I think the relative isolation of not-quite-full quarantine is getting to me. I am cursing more these days, more likely to lose my temper than I have been for awhile. Most of the time, I don't even realize that I'm on the raggedy edge until I hear myself say something kind of shitty out loud. I don't like this. For the sake of my family and my own sanity, I need to figure out how to better let off steam.

I worry I am becoming this guy:

Common Book: Cornel West

"Intellect is an interrogation of the most basic assumptions and presuppositions. So intelligence makes immediate evaluations, intellect evaluates the evaluations."

Do Americans even know we're at war in Somalia?

NYT: 

The Pentagon has admitted for the third time that its bombing campaign against terrorist groups in Somalia, which has been underway for more than a decade, had caused civilian casualties there, a military report said on Tuesday.

“Our goal is to always minimize impact to civilians,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the commander of Africa Command, said in the report. “Unfortunately, we believe our operations caused the inadvertent death of one person and injury to three others who we did not intend to target.”

A couple of observations: First, I hate how the Pentagon language about a terrible tragedy that has caused grief for an innocent family -- or families -- is treated as a technical oopsie. This is horrific. It is not a clerical error. We shouldn't treat it as such.

On a related note: I do wonder how many enemies the United States creates -- versus the number it eliminates -- with these kinds of attacks. Do Americans even know we're at war in Somalia?

“If everyone around me is wrong, would I have the wisdom and courage to know and do what’s right?”

David French: "When the crowd says yes, consider the option of no. When the crowd says go, discern whether we should stop. And through it all, pray for God’s grace—that we’re not too foolish to know the truth or too weak to do what’s right."

Read the whole thing.

Personal update

Taking a little bit of a Twitter break right now to get my head clear.

Suicide and the passive voice

In the last few years, the way journalists write about suicide has changed greatly. We now say that people "died by suicide" instead of "committed suicide." Other measures are taken to try to prevent glamorizing suicide, blame the person who died, or to inadvertently encourage copycats.

This is all generally to the good, and well-intentioned. (I don't love all the guidelines, which urge journalists to avoid describing "personal details" about people who have died in favor of keeping the information general, because that renders an individual somewhat faceless, IMHO.) A story in the New York Times demonstrates a complication with the approach: It can obscure clarity.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

AMSTERDAM — One hundred and thirty years ago, Vincent van Gogh awoke in his room at an inn in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, and went out, as he usually did, with a canvas to paint. That night, he returned to the inn with a fatal gunshot wound. He died two days later, on July 29, 1890.

Scholars have long speculated about the sequence of events on the day of the shooting, and now Wouter van der Veen, a researcher in France, says he has discovered a large piece of the puzzle: the precise location where van Gogh created his final painting, “Tree Roots.” The finding could help to better understand how the artist spent his final day of work.

Now: If you know anything about art history, you know that van Gogh died by his own hand. The opening paragraphs obscure that fact. You know he was shot. You don't know who!

More than a dozen paragraphs go by before clarity is offered:

There has long been debate about which painting was van Gogh’s last work, because he tended not to date his paintings. Many people believe it was “Wheatfield With Crows,” because Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic “Lust for Life” depicts van Gogh, played by Kirk Douglas, painting that work as he goes mad, just before killing himself.

This is a story in which van Gogh's death is a critical element: Finding out where the painting originated probably isn't a big NYT story if not for the fact of his death. But it feels like that critical element is the object of hide-and-seek in this story. I suspect the recent conventions on how to write about suicide shaped this approach. Perhaps I'm wrong.

I don't mean to be insensitive. I would like to figure out a way forward that is sensitive and yet doesn't create confusion instead of clarity. Any ideas out there?

What the IP MAN movies can teach us about the New Cold War with China

I think I've said this before, but it is worth repeating in the current context: People who want a better understanding of China -- as the United States moves toward a more confrontational posture toward that country -- could help themselves a lot by watching Chinese movies.

I'm thinking particularly of the IP MAN series, starring Donnie Yen. You can find all four movies on Netflix right now.

The movies are fantastic martial arts flicks, so they're worth watching from that standpoint alone. But they are also loosely biographical, telling the story of a real Wing Chun master -- he was Bruce Lee's mentor -- and taken as a whole, they signify something about China's relationship with the west.

The first movie takes place in Foshan, China, around the time of Japan's 1937 invasion. The Japanese oppress the Chinese, Ip Man defeats a Japanese martial arts hotshot in single combat competition, and his countrymen are given the pride they need to defeat the aggressor.

In the second movie, Ip Man moves to Hong Kong -- ruled by the British, who are snarling, sneering colonialists. Ip Man defeats a gigantic English brute named Twister. The whole affair leads to a corrupt British officer getting his comeuppance.

In the third movie -- well, this one's a little different. Ip is still in Hong Kong and the story basically revolves around him proving the superiority of Wing Chun over other fighting styles. (Also, Mike Tyson is involved. Yes, it's ridiculous.)

But in the fourth movie, Ip Man goes to the United States, is treated as inferior by arrogant, racist Americans. Ip defeats the most arrogant American in single combat competition, and his countrymen in San Francisco find newfound pride.

You get it. It's a story of a proud Chinese man refuting the "weak man of Asia" stereotypes that justified decades upon decades of outsider incursions to demonstrate that Chinese are just as strong, and maybe even a little better, than the outsiders who have misjudged them. Some of this is propaganda -- movies don't get made in China without official sanction -- but it is also rooted in the last 200 years of Chinese history.

It's not just Ip Man. Chinese historical epics -- especially those set since the beginning of the 20th century -- are telling us a story.

• Westerners are big, bad, and haughty. “Ip Man 2” isn’t the only movie to depict white guys as oversized grunting meatheads. Check out this clip from “Fearless,” which is about the real-life martial artist Huo Yuanjia.

• If Westerners are bad, the Japanese are worse. It’s hard to find a Japanese man in these movies who isn’t playing the villain. No wonder: The Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s and 1940s is estimated to have killed at least 10 million Chinese civilians — some estimates range much higher. It’s safe to say that hurt feelings linger still.

So you wouldn’t expect “Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen” — a sequel of sorts to Bruce Lee’s “Fist of Fury” — to seem so triumphant: It ends, after all, with the Japanese invasion of China underway. But the closing moments are defiant, with Yen — him again — defeating a series of Japanese combatants and crushing the testicles of one particularly nasty officer, before disappearing to join the resistance.

• The Chinese are resilient, strong, and nationalistic in the face of such indignities. “Legend of the Fist” opens with Yen and his comrades winning a battle for the French against the Germans in World War I; “Bodyguards and Assassins” depicts fictionalized efforts to protect real-life nationalist Sun Yat-Sen from those who would do him harm.

In these movies, the setbacks for the Chinese against outsiders is always temporary. Nationalistic pride might go under cover, but it never disappears entirely. Even the worst defeats tend to be triumphs of the spirit.

Now: None of this is to say the Chinese government is good and Americans are bad, or anything so simplistic. The Chinese government is authoritarian in its treatment of the Uighurs and crackdown on dissent, and has even been murderous at times.

But it is also simplistic to go "America good, Chinese government bad." Not just because President Trump has his own authoritarian inclinations, but because in a conflict between America and China, the Chinese people are going to be factoring the ugly history of outside domination in their views of the conflict. They might not think that America is merely aiming for their freedom, but that America intends to limit their country's ambitions, and perhaps eventually to subdue them.

I'm not quite sure how understanding this Chinese view of history modifies American policy going forward, but I can't help but sense that it should. There's a real history here. It matters. You don't have to be a scholar to begin to understand that. (It helps, but not everybody has the time or interest.) All you have to do is watch a few movies.