The old knit tablecloth

Emanuel Pastreich

“When I was a kid, I asked my father about the old knit tablecloth we had in the dining room. He told me this story. After the war my great grandmother had written to see if any family had survived in Hungary. After a few months, they received a response from some surviving relatives and a correspondence started up. The family sent the tablecloth as a gift to my great grandmother in Brooklyn at that time That was many years ago and my grandmother was still alive. The next time I mentioned this matter was when I was a recent college graduate. I had grown interested in Europe and was curious, after a trip to Poland, as to whether I might have family in Hungary My grandmother passed away when was a freshman in college so my father was the only one I could ask. My father had forgotten all about the exchange of gifts he had told me about. He only remembered that the tablecloth had been in the family for a long time.”

Emanuel Pastreich’s Maternal Grandfather:

Louis Rouff

There is a photograph of my grandfather Louis Rouff  holding me in his lap when I visited with my parents at the age of six months in 1965. I was too young to remember anything, or even to be aware of who the stranger holding me was. My grandfather Louis Rouff also had not been well and was suffering from dementia that made him rather unaware of what was going on around him. He died soon after and it was only when I was a professor in my thirties that I started to wish I could have spoken with him and had a deeper understanding of what he had done.

My mother tells me that although he was not quite as tall as I am, my face resembles him, and my personality as well. But he was not much of a talker; a product of a rather closed and formal European society of a previous age in which conversations between family members were limited.

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A Visit to Gabriel House 

November 22, 2015

Emanuel Pastreich 

I had the chance to volunteer with my daughter Rachel today at the Gabriel House (가브리엘의집) near Namsan for about three hours. We did not know anything about Gabriel House before we arrived and simply assumed it was an orphanage (the Korean term for a foster home as many of the children in so-called “orphanages” have parents who simply cannot, or will not care for them). But Gabriel House is a Christian home dedicated to caring for children with severe mental disabilities such as autism and retardation. Some of the children were capable of speech, but no small number of them sat alone, some banging their heads against the walls.

It was hard work and a bit of a shock for my daughter who had not had such an experience previously. But it was extremely valuable and I hope to go back again soon. I know from my previous experience that if you do not go back repeatedly, you cannot make much of a difference to children in such a situation.

I volunteered with autistic children for years back in graduate school, both in the United States and in Korea, but it had been some twenty years since I had done so (although I have volunteered with foster children in Korea more recently). I realized that I have become much more stand-offish and full of myself over the years. I have not had to work with people who require real attention and who you must feed and clean and care for. So it was extremely difficult to start that work up again after that many years.

I was also profoundly aware of how alone these children are. Not only that their disabilities cut them off from the world, but that they do not have a family around them to give them attention, negative and positive, day in and day out. I found that just sitting next to the children was the best that I could do.

The first boy I worked with was extremely difficult and I eventually left him because I could not make any progress at all. But I found a few other young children with whom eye contact was possible and even occasional smiles. Perhaps I should have just stayed with the first boy, but there were some fifteen children and not that many volunteers.

I also was forced to think about just how little I understand about the world. I thought to myself first about how little these children understand about the world we live in, from climate change, to economics to geopolitics. But after contemplating this angle for a few minutes, I was led to the conclusion that in fact in the larger scale of things I am much closer to these kids than I imagine as there is so much in the universe, in my own society that I simply do not understand.

Look at all those stars in the sky!

There are countless stars out there circulating around in hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Imagine how many of those stars have planets circling them.

Then imagine how may of those stars have water on them.

And how many of those planets with water have developed life?

Then how many of those planets have life that has evolved to a level of high intelligence?

And how many of those planets inhabited by creatures with high intelligence have developed advanced civilizations?

And then imagine how many of those planets inhabited by creatures with high intelligence that have developed advanced civilizations have technologies that let them expand their impact on their planet to the point that they bring about their own extinction?

Here is my quote for the day as we witness people trying to start a nuclear war with Russia:

“Climate change and nuclear war are not an ‘either or’ proposition. You can have both. In fact  if you get one, you will get the other one for free.”

Emanuel Pastreich

February 8, 2015

Newspapers everywhere talk about deflation and I guess I understand the argument in a general sense, but I do not believe it. Or maybe I should say that I believe that deflation and inflation can occur simultaneously. That is to say that you can have deflation in the sense that currencies increase in value relative to other currencies, or that products decrease in cost in this confused economic environment. But at the very same time that such a phenomenon takes place only in the limited sphere of economics proper. The truth is that the value of currency, the value of anything, is declining rapidly. Objects are losing all value. Institutions are losing all value. Currency for that matter is based not merely on a equation between money circulated and demand, but rather on ideology itself. In this age we are witnessing a radical inflation of institutions and beliefs that is gutting the world, and specifically the United States. Currency is but a small part of the picture. But I would argue that currency as well, yes, is subject to a radical inflation. That inflation is hidden by the association of currency with other institutions which look stable but are themselves dangerously inflated.

Emanuel on the Rogen and Goldberg’s “The Interview”

December 25, 2014

I had a chance to see today the new movie The Interview produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The movie has gained much attention because of the supposed hacking of Sony by North Korea in response to this comedy about an attack on the Dear Leader. The claim that North Korea was responsible has been increasingly disputed in the media over the last few days.    

I was more interested in the actual content of the movie. In terms of plot, is really nothing to give away about this poorly-structured and pandering film. I obviously would never have watched it if I had not felt a necessity.

It is an interesting question what the response of the American government would have been if North Korea, or any nation, had produced a film that made light of an assassination of a specific living president of the United States and both justified the assassination and also showed him in a grotesque and compromising manner. It is hard to know what would happen, but I think we can safely say that it would have resulted in an extremely serious diplomatic disagreement.

But the more important part about the movie The Interview is simply how decadent and grotesque the film is in terms of its language and in terms of the sexual acts—and innuendos—that it presents. The film goes beyond the sophomoric humor of Animal House into some extremely disturbing mixture of sex and violence that suggest a mix of militarism and sadism. After watching the film, I started to wonder whether country we need to worry about is the United States, the nation that produced this “comedy”  about killing and about the exploitation of women.   

The conversations between the two protagonists are an unending barrage of references, some cloaked, some more explicit, to pornography. The movie does not actually qualify as pornography with an X rating, but in terms of tone, it is indistinguishable.

I could not get out of my mind Chris Hedges excellent book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle as I watched. As Hedges suggests in that book, politics in the United States is increasingly a spectacle that defies any rational discourse or appeal to the common good. Politics has become, Hedges argues, pornography.

Here in this film we see American foreign policy also reduced to pornography: An instant gratification realized through a sensationalized cyber interaction between nations—not unlike the on-line cyber-sex of pornography.

Hedges explains in his book,

“The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality.The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation.”

The various sex scenes and parties that make up a substantial part of the film are simply degrading of all participants. I hope that the controversy about this movie may lead us to take this all too American problem more seriously.