That nerve has been painfully twisted in me for the last several years, not least by the revelations of systematic, planned torture and degradation in the prisons of Iraq, performed by the army that entered that country in order to “liberate” it. It is hard to look at those pictures, to read the reports, and imagine Iraqis taking seriously our claims to be bringers of freedom. The pictures, the policy they make visible and the cover-up intended to keep them from becoming public knowledge paint us as hypocrites, people who preach large and glorious principles but do selfish and brutal things. Dr. Johnson put his finger on the eternally sensitive question of whether we are who we claim to be.

What does liberty have to do with the United States in middle 2008? Other values are associated with the United States, to be sure, by Americans and by others. It is the home of military power, of great wealth, of opportunity, of “freedom of choice” (as interpreted for consumerist purposes), of technological progress, of unregulated markets, of expanding frontiers. I don’t think any of these define the United States as having a moral mission; while good things in themselves, perhaps, they are defective as ethical ends. They are interests rather than principles. Which of them would come first, if we had to choose? Now that we are being maintained in a constant state of emergency through threats of terrorist action, amplified by government and media reminders, I think we have to consider the choices we do make, and resist the wrong ones.

Ever since the morning of September eleventh, 2001, one version of that choice has been circulated and found persuasive by many of my countrymen. I was listening to the radio at around 8:00 on that shocking day (11:00 New York time), and already, as the towers were coming down, you could hear a government expert telling the public that some of the freedoms we had come to take for granted would have to be restricted in the interests of security. Exactly what freedoms this meant was not clear, but I suspected (correctly, as it proved) that the basic civil rights of habeas corpus, due process, the freedom from search without warrant, and protection against self-incrimination would be taken as applying selectively to different groups in the population. Americans in general were extraordinarily restrained in the expression of their anger and horror: a few people who “looked Middle Eastern” (often Sikhs, with their prominent turbans) were beaten or killed in the streets, and though any such violence is scandalous and inexcusable among a civilized and pluralistic people, the restraint of citizens contrasts strongly with the activism of government, which has expanded its powers of investigation and detention well beyond the limits fixed by the Bill of Rights, using the threat of terrorism as a mugger uses a gun to persuade Americans that the erosion of their constitutional freedoms does not matter. While trade-offs between security and freedom were much talked about, freedom was not the only value being put on the block. Prominent center-liberal magazines such as the Atlantic ran articles proposing scenarios in which torture could be justified.[2] The situations scrupulously constructed by ethicists (a ticking time bomb, lives of many civilians at risk, one terrorist captive whose refusal to speak holds up the investigation) may have made literate Americans think twice about their rejection of torture as an information-gathering method, but as we have seen, once taken to the field of operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, the license to make free with the bodies and minds of prisoners, even in the absence of any identifiable intelligence motive, has been interpreted quite broadly. At the same time, the idea of “empire” has been made to sound respectable, with Iraq a test case for an empire of freedom under American tutelage.[3] The contradiction between subjugating people and setting them free is a little too bald for dialectical mediation; in any case, when we say “empire” we are not just talking about taking charge of a chaotic situation in order to create conditions for freedom. Empire means ruling others as subject peoples, not citizens, and doing it in a durable fashion. It means becoming “drivers of negroes.” Does anyone remember “the free world” that we were supposed to be leading? Just as in the case of torture and civil rights, an important piece of the American identity has become negotiable, an option, a mere interest to be downgraded when other interests are paramount. Let us hope the aberration will soon be over.

For many years, critiques of “the West” have centered on its “universalism”—the unearned privilege Western speakers claim for their own ideals, which they treat as intrinsically superior to the ideals of other peoples. But in the case I am talking about, it is rather the failure of universalism that causes problems. As Confucius put it so long ago, “what you yourself do not want, you must not push upon others”; or as John Rawls put it, “justice as fairness” begins when the members of society “contract into” the laws governing not others, but themselves.[4] A law made by an authority that is not subject to the law does not pass this common-sense test of fairness. Similarly, hypocrisy invalidates ethical claims because it presents as universal a rule that the hypocrite does not apply to himself. So, for example, the American government claims to represent and support “the rule of law,” even international law, while excepting itself and particularly its soldiers from the International Criminal Court. What is in evidence here is not universalism, but fake universalism exploited for the advantage of a few. The difference is worth marking.

Post-September 11, the verdict of hypocrisy can be moderated in at least one respect: if Americans have given up their own civil rights and protections so willingly, their consent to the non-observation of these rights and protections in the case of others can be construed as fair dealing, submission to the same law to govern self and other. But in fact the abandonment of civil rights has not occurred publicly, would be a scandal if applied across the board, and so does not pass the ethical test of fairness. Arrest a “normal” American (white, Christian, prosperous, law-abiding, etc.) at random, hold him without trial for a year or two, and see if he’ll claim to be protected by the Constitution: I think this experiment has a foregone conclusion. But most such “normal” Americans have yet to learn that the laws passed in the wake of September 11 put few limits on the executive branch’s privilege to suspend civil rights, and that this applies to them. “That sort of thing won’t happen to me”: this certainty is where the rot sets in, for it divides the ethical community into rulers and ruled. Freedom without equality is privilege. “Liberty” then becomes a hollow word ready for cynical exploitation: some people have it, and think they can keep it even while denying it to others. In practice, then, there is still a hypocritical mismatch between the law we endorse and the law we endure. Nor do I expect this gap to shrink. Either the standard will continue to dip, as justice is progressively replaced by brute force, or Americans will remember what the Bill of Rights was all about and demand their old protections back. Maybe, if we are not to be “drivers of negroes,” we will demand these rights for all citizens, even all people.

***
“The loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes”—though Dr. Johnson’s formulation of the American flaw was no doubt meant as a soundbite, an accusation of absurdity for instant, indignant consumption, it invites a more patient interpretation. Like many of my ancestors, the Continental Congress proclaimed liberty for themselves but did not bestow it on those they controlled; they rejected empire above them but saw no objection to setting up an empire of their own, with power given to a dominant people over a subservient people. Dr. Johnson’s critique amounts to saying: although they yelp for liberty, they are nonetheless drivers of negroes. They demand something for themselves that they deny to others. They were inconsistent; they had no true principles, only a self-interested charade of high-sounding words. Suppose, per absurdum, that the rebels spoke sincerely: “It has been proposed, that the slaves should be set free, an act, which, surely, the lovers of liberty cannot but commend. If they are furnished with firearms for defence, and utensils for husbandry, and settled in some simple form of government within the country, they may be more grateful and honest than their masters.”

But what if Dr. Johnson was wrong in assuming that a true principle, a universally binding maxim, was at stake? What if the American rebels of 1775, far from proclaiming an intrinsic human right to liberty and self-government (Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration was a year in the future), were pushing a more factual claim, to the effect that their domination over others conferred on them a lordly status incompatible with servitude to the British Crown, or any other external power? In that case, the situation would need to be revised to read: because they have become drivers of negroes, they yelp for liberty. My freedom is not an abstract principle or a rule to be demonstrated in universal practice, but a victory I gain through struggle with another, who must lose if I am to win. This Hegelian-sounding account yields a darker reading of American history, to be sure, in which Southern history gives the truth of which progressive, Unionist history only offers a mythicized variant. Liberty is a zero-sum game in this interpretation. There is only so much liberty to go around, and those who can possess it, do, if possible without ceding any particle of it to outsiders (the British) or inferiors (the slaves). This reading makes the early Americans out to be non-hypocritical, but devoid of any other moral grandeur or persuasiveness.

The Hegelian reading is buttressed by the awkward use, in American rebel documents, of the imagery of slavery. The colonist, forced to pay taxes to the Crown but deprived of representation in Parliament, represents himself as a slave in order to justify rebellion against that enslaved status. But the metaphorical representation is doubled by actual slaves (on whom colonists had paid taxes!) whose rebellion is not here justified or even envisioned. The rub between the two contexts of “slavery” leads to a Johnsonian sense of the hypocrisy of the colonists’ self-description (if they were really slaves, what status would their slaves hold? If one set of slaves is to be liberated, what of the other set?). The metaphor is denounced as false and empty by its literal meaning. Once you look at the actual slaves, you no longer believe in the metaphorical enslavement. But the same rub, read differently, would also show the emergence of an idea of freedom in the fact of the enslavement of the other: in so far as my slave is not free, I know what it is to be free; insofar as my slave provides a factual basis for my knowledge of unfreedom, I have the imaginative freedom to declare, through metaphor, that I am what I am not: namely, an unwilling slave of the Crown.

The American understanding of sovereignty, likewise, saws back and forth between these two understandings of freedom. To be a sovereign people, as the colonists desired to be, is to admit no higher authority than “Nature and Nature’s God” over oneself. In the days of the frontier, this absence of higher authority was literal enough: it was possible to move out into areas where one made the law by hand, knife and rifle. The Hobbesian conditions of the frontier gradually yielded to societies ordered by law, compacts freely entered into by those who had the power of entering into such agreements (of course, these societies never encompassed the entire human population of the frontier areas). Authority, in this version of frontier history, could always emerge from below, rather than being imposed from above or enforced by rivalrous neighbors. That is an American exception, however imaginary. A set of rebel populations in Europe or Asia, for example, would have had to contend with the surrounding monarchies on all sides: the liberty of each would have to be won at the cost of another person or state, there was no moving out into the “empty” territory (of course never empty in reality).

In a more closely-knit world, American sovereignty bumps up against that of its neighbors. International compacts, the law of the sea, United Nations resolutions, arms control agreements, environmental conditions, and so on show that the program of unrestrained self-government is an impossible ideal. And yet Americans seem unprepared to view this reality realistically. American troops can never be put under foreign command, we hear; agreements that cramp our freedom to act are ipso facto null and void; treaties last only so long as the underlying interests that prompted their signing do; allies are welcome so long as they agree with all our plans and don’t get in the way. This impatience with international law and cooperation takes quasi-religious form. To give up that precious sovereign right of absolute freedom of action would amount to forsaking the American soul. In a strange way, what is supposed to be true of each American as an individual—that he or she is always in principle free —is also claimed for the United States as a collectivity. Moreover, it is simply not done to imagine or speak of an end to American world dominance. Former President Bill Clinton raised a storm of criticism in 2003 by alluding to a future time when the United States might be unable to tell the rest of the world what to do, when we might need allies, when we might even have to listen to their wishes. This sort of talk is virtually precluded in the United States today (though I know that in China, where the idea of a coming “Asian century” is an immense blank check on which many interests draw, it is a topic of lively speculation). But American sovereignty cannot be an absolute value, at least for the international ethicist, because it does not translate into a universal, the recognition of a parallel sovereignty for every non-American citizen or state. Rather than try to handle this practical and logical difficulty, Americans, since the age of Wilson, have opted for isolationism or unilateralism. Those choices do not put before our eyes the incompatibility between our sovereignty and that of others. They allow us to yelp for our own liberty and forget about the slaves we drive.

The issue about freedom is whether it is the sort of thing that can be extended indefinitely, or is a finite quantity such that if I have more of it, others have less. Dr. Johnson’s denunciation of American rebels as hypocrites assumes that liberty ought to be the sort of thing that can be multiplied without loss: if they want liberty for themselves, they ought to want it for others. Liberty is not the same sort of thing as oil, say: it would be absurd to say, if they want oil for themselves, they ought to want it for others. Americans would be vicious, but not logically self-contradictory, in wanting all the oil in the world for themselves and seeing no benefit in sharing it around. A Hegelian understanding of freedom as something that is taken or conquered from the other makes freedom out to be like oil, and frees the selfish American from taint of hypocrisy: it would be, rather, self-contradictory to want oil or freedom for both you and me.

Policies like those the United States has pursued in recent years, seeking to cast off any restrictions on American freedom of action; the denial of Geneva Convention assurances to captured “combatants” (both soldiers and civilians); even more vividly, the photographs of torture and abuse: all these make freedom a finite substance like oil. They confirm that the American is free because—insofar as—the person he or she is torturing is not free. The American is wealthy because—insofar as—the person he or she is exploiting is not rich. The American is healthy because—insofar as—there are other people not benefiting from new medicines but serving as trial subjects in medical experiments. And so forth. At the end of the road: the American has rights because others do not. This account of freedom, fortune, health and security is utterly damaging to the American moral mission. In fact it deprives the United States of any semblance of a moral mission, for it only invites non-Americans to collaborate in their own enslavement, perhaps with the incentive of milder treatment for good behavior. This is not a message that will win us any friends worth having. It is the message of empire. And it is worth while trying to prove, through action and discourse, that it is wrong, that freedom given to one is not taken away from another. Let us sneer with Dr. Johnson at American hypocrisy, only let us, as we do so, hold Americans up to a standard of fairness and consistency that preserves a distinction between what exists and what is right, between selfish interests and universal obligations. Concretely, let us hope in the near future for an American administration that sees the difference.

***
Having thought at length about Dr. Johnson’s sharp remark, I then went to see the context in which he made it (a pamphlet called Taxation No Tyranny). I found it enveloped in an argument that I had not been expecting. Given a common-sense understanding of the ways in which terms like “freedom,” “slavery,” “ought,” “right” and so forth are used, the remark is self-evident, and that is why it is usually quoted all alone. But the detailed context relates also to the problem that concerns me, the problem of empire and autonomy.

Johnson is particularly irritated by the language of unlimited sovereignty, spoken in the name of individuals or of collectivities that suddenly aspire to be self-governing. “The Americans are telling one another, what, if we may judge from their noisy triumph, they have but lately discovered, and what yet is a very important truth: ‘That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property; and that they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever a right to dispose of either without their consent.’” Recognizing no limits to their own entitlements, the colonists, inspired by “principles… wild, indefinite, and obscure,” have spread “the madness of independence… from colony to colony, till order is lost, and government despised; and all is filled with misrule, uproar, violence, and confusion.” But if they only stopped to think about it, they would know that this claim of pre-existing, unrestricted freedom is “false. We virtually and implicitly allow the institutions of any government, of which we enjoy the benefit, and solicit the protection.” So, Johnson holds, the Americans benefit from English laws and English arms, and should see themselves as under an obligation to England. They are wrong to want liberty for themselves. “He who goes voluntarily to America, cannot complain of losing what he leaves in Europe. He, perhaps, had a right to vote for a knight or a burgess; by crossing the Atlantick, he has not nullified his right; but… by his own choice he has left a country, where he had a vote and little property, for another, where he has great property, but no vote.” Those sacred and immemorial rights of Englishmen obtained only for those who stayed in England: why? What but the dead hand of custom allows members of Parliament to be elected for Birmingham, but none for Boston?

The answer is that colonies, for Johnson, are not political but legal-commercial entities. “An English colony is a number of persons, to whom the king grants a charter, permitting them to settle in some distant country, and enabling them to constitute a corporation enjoying such powers as the charter grants…. To their charters the colonies owe, like other corporations, their political existence.”[5] When the colonists came to America they abandoned their rights as subjects of the Crown and became servants of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the East India Company, and so forth. Perhaps today we would say that they became “civilian contractors.” They no longer existed in direct relation to King and Parliament and for that very reason lacked some part of the legal status of subject, for example the right of parliamentary representation. “Great property, but no vote.” The colonial enterprises prefigure the privatization of public space which we are now experiencing in our cities, in our communication technologies, in the shrinking “public domain.” If Parliament levied taxes on the colonists, and the colonists took that badly, they had only to cease being colonists, by breaking their relation to the corporations by which they were governed and seeking return passage to England. To follow Johnson’s larger story of the history of colonization in the Americas, the answer to those transatlantic yelps for liberty is most accurately put thus: They shouldn’t want it for themselves and they shouldn’t want it for others. The true and proper understanding of affairs is this: the colonists are not free, but live under contract. The terms of their contract permit them to own slaves. Only a misunderstanding of the contract between the colony and the mother country creates the rub between the American yelps for liberty and the suppression of the liberty of other persons existing in the Americas. If Americans would only forgo their ambitious dreams of sovereignty, the logical flaw in their self-description would vanish: they would see themselves correctly as contracted personnel employing other personnel, and stop objecting to their own status. That too is the voice of empire, of commercial empire.

A strange menace uttered by the Pennsylvania legislature provokes Johnson’s most memorable remark.

In this Philadelphian nightmare, the history of English liberty from Magna Charta to circa 1825 will be a mere six-hundred-year interlude in a long-term strategy of royal power-grabbing. The rents of America, levied on a people without political representation (the many Roman Catholics being, as far as anyone could see, a permanently disenfranchised group of passive taxpayers), will serve to consolidate a royal power irresponsible to parliament and able to “purchase” (with mercenary troops, presumably) “the remains of liberty” in England. It is to scoff at this prospect that Johnson lets fly his most memorable arrow: “We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

My dear British readers, how do you feel today about the “diminution of your own liberties”? In 2008, many British subjects no doubt feel that a government they had no part in electing, heedless of parliament and ready to “purchase… liberty” wherever it can, indeed overwhelmed the traditional structures of protest, advice and consent housed in their Parliament. (Blair's cabinet with its “sexed-up dossiers” was just an instrument of the ex-colonials' will.) This is what empires do. Johnson was wrong to scoff at the Philadelphian menace, however accurately he laid bare the nerve that links the idealism and the baseness of American practices of freedom. In the bargain, he discovered the “special relationship,” though he thought it was a long way from reality.

---

[1] Samuel Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (1775), in The Works of Samuel Johnson (Troy, New York: Pafraets, 1913), 14:93-144, also available at http://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html.
[2] Mark Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” Atlantic Monthly 292:3 (October 2003), 51-76.
[3] Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire (Get Used To It),” The New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003.
[4] For 己所不欲, 勿施於人, see Analects 12.2, 15.24; on “contracting in,” see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 13.
[5] Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny. “Corporation” is not to be taken entirely in its modern sense. Guilds, university colleges, certain cities, and charitable foundations were “corporations” just as were the East India Company and other corporations founded for profit. See William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69; reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 1:455-473. “Of Corporations” is there the last chapter in Book I, “Of the Rights of Persons.”

1. Mommy
2. Daddy
3. the toilet
4. the bathtub
5. his World Cup soccer ball

It is interesting to compare his lists from then and now. While I try to mix mine up every day he has developed a long litany that always includes God, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Earth, Star Wars, and his Nintendo Game Cube — got to cover all the bases, I suppose.

I wrote in my blog at the time about how hard it was to hold onto a feeling of thankfulness. Gratitude is often fleeting; the day seems to revolve not around appreciation but desire — what I want to do, to have, to eat, to feel. Even when we take time to name the things for which we are grateful it is hard to summon a deep emotional tribute to that which has become a normal, and thus largely invisible, part of life.

However, this ritual began at a moment in time in which the feeling of thankfulness was palpable and strong. We had been living in Seoul for about three years and I was just reaching the point of comfort. Around the year or two-year mark anxiety had been replaced with a feeling of relief whenever I could get through the day without serious misunderstanding or frustration, but by three years I had begun to really enjoy my life here. The glee that I felt being able to navigate certain procedures and social situations was accompanied by a feeling of pride in myself and a dawning comprehension of the way things worked. I had developed an instinct for Seoul, and in its early, fetal stages I wanted to hold onto and savor it, even show it off. (This explains why I began blogging at around the same time.) The bedtime ritual was as much for me as it was for W — a way of consciously inhabiting and extending a moment in time in which I could truly feel gratitude.

And now I’m getting ready to leave, and although I have barely begun to pack, feelings of thankfulness have emerged again, much sharper this time because of the accompanying sense of loss. From the mindset of planning, another move seemed like a good, logical idea, a way of opening more doors. But as the countdown has hit the one month mark I think not about what we will gain but about all that we will give up by leaving.

Although they have been the source of a great deal of hand-wringing and hair-pulling (as I’m sure I have been the source of the same for them), I’m thankful for my in-laws who have helped us enormously since we’ve been here. I’m thankful to have had a place to drop the kids on Sunday afternoon so that my husband and I could catch up on Battlestar Galactica, knowing they would be well-loved, well-fed, and possibly well-spoiled. It’s taken five years to learn how to avoid fighting with them but the bond that has developed between them and the kids is irreplaceable and could not have developed in several decades of living in different countries or cities. They have been a part of our daily life here, permanently woven into the children’s early memories.

I’m thankful for our apartment and neighborhood. Our apartment looks rather humble and small, but it has heated floors and lots of sunlight. I like being able to hear kids playing in the playground out front and walking to school past the back windows. I like the open halls in which I run into our neighbors. I appreciate the proximity to my in-laws’ place, the airport bus stop, the subway, restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, and banks. I like not living in a fortress and yet feeling safe — a part of the neighborhood rather than separate from it.

I’m thankful for my kids’ schools and teachers.. W counts his piano teacher as the adult he is the closest to after Mommy and Daddy. I will really miss M’s bilingual preschool (which W also attended), where the teachers spent a great deal of time holding M as he developed comfort with the place, allowing him to emerge as an loquacious, cake-loving charmer.

I’m thankful for the network of busy moms who have patiently explained to me that oil paper is tracing paper and sent me scanned copies of textbook pages when W has left his book at school.

I’m thankful for store workers that answer all my questions about what ingredients I need to buy for japchae and what size origami paper a 2nd grader needs to carry, who bow and smile to me when I encounter them on the sidewalk or the bus stop, and who ask me where I’ve been if they haven’t seen me in a while.

I’m thankful for my friends, American and Korean, who have put in the time and effort to build a friendship despite my continuing proclamations that we would leave “soon.”

I’m thankful for the city of Seoul (despite its often unpleasant smells), for its neighborhoods, safe atmosphere, and great public transportation. I’m thankful for an economic system that depends on volume, in which anything and everything can be delivered and goods ordered on the internet arrive within a day or two.

Despite being stared at I’m thankful that being an English-speaking foreigner mostly triggers envy and not disgust or anger.

I’m thankful for public baths.

I’m thankful for kimbab, bibimnaengmyeon, and galbitang. I’m thankful for neighborhood cafes, where I wrote most of my posts and spent a lot of money on coffee.

Goodbye Seoul. I’m glad I made a home here. I’m coming away with an expanded sense of what the good life might look like, and I won’t forget it. While I finalize details for our new apartment and schools, that sense of thankfulness becomes desire again as I try to find ways to fill the next stage of the journey with that which I appreciate in my life now.

1. There was the way you mistagged our luggage when we departed for Long Beach, CA from Chicago’s O’Hare. It wasn’t a busy day, there was no one else in line ahead of us. Did the quiet cause you to sleep on the job? When we got to California and found a small black suitcase with red trim with our tag on it instead of our large black Samsonite, you made it seem like it was our fault.

2. You at first pretended you were going to fix the problem, chase down our luggage in New York, maybe even get it to us before our trip was over. But then you didn’t call when you said you would; you bounced us from person to person and left us hanging. Even though there was supposed to be a record of our case, we had to explain the details anew to everyone we spoke to. Glad technology is working so well for you.

3. We returned to Chicago with no answers and no luggage. Attempts to get answers, updates, anything about the likelihood of getting our things back met with vague assurances and a string of “I’m sorry”’s and “we’ll get back to you”’s.

4. And then the lies. Oh, the lies! Or was it further incompetence? Or indifference? Who’s to say? You told us that the person whose bag had been switched with ours had taken our bag home with him. This seemed hard to believe – why would someone take a suitcase that was obviously not his? And yet, you said, this sometimes happened. You were trying to get in touch with this person. More phone calls (from us to you), and finally a message that our bag had been located and that a courier would be picking it up and putting it on a flight from NY to Chicago. We could expect the bag to be delivered on Thursday, May 1. What a relief, we naively thought. I even wrote an e-mail to our neighbors asking them to bring the suitcase into the lobby of our building should they see the bag in the unlocked entryway before we got home. For several hours, I actually expected to see our things again. Alas, when we called you back (for the umpteenth time) the following Monday, we were told that the bag hadn’t been located, that the courier hadn’t picked it up, it wasn’t on a flight back. No one could tell us where our bag had disappeared to. Were you just making shit up?

5. At this point, you turned our case over to the special claims department in Central Baggage, and assigned us one Jennifer G, who sent us a claim form to fill out with assurances that she would do everything she could on our behalf. This claim form asked us to provide original receipts for the contents of the lost bag. Original receipts? Who keeps original receipts of clothing bought months or years ago? Original receipts for cosmetics and toiletries? Underwear? What about the suitcase itself, which we’d bought at a Sears in another state? To get clarification, my husband e-mailed Jennifer, who didn’t respond.

6. Next, unable to reach Jennifer, I talked to a Craig, who, in conciliatory tones, said, “oh I wish the wording were different on that form.” It was meant, he said, for any very expensive items that we wanted to claim, but that shouldn’t keep us from itemizing all the things that we’d packed. For example, he very helpfully pointed out, if I wanted to claim that I had a Louis Vuitton purse in my luggage, I’d have to produce an original receipt. Very nice, Craig – you made JetBlue sound so reasonable. And when pressed about the still confusing details of our case, you revealed that by the time a claim comes into your office, the likelihood of getting the lost luggage back was quite slim. Which was news to us, because the last time we talked to one of you, you were still claiming that you were working to locate the bag, giving us the impression that it could be returned to us any day.

7. And, to top it all off, having lost our bag not just once, but twice (or having let it be stolen by one of your employees), you refused to compensate us fairly for your fuck-up. Filling out that claim form turned out to be a farcical exercise, which by this point we could have predicted.

Oh, but JetBlue, you knew it would end this way, didn’t you? You knew you had the lawyers on your side, that tucked away in the fine print was a clause about how customers packed such items as eyeglasses, dental devices, electronics, medicine, ceramics, and so on at our own risk, whether in checked baggage or carry-on. (So, readers, now you know. If you don’t want your orthodontic nightguard to be misplaced or stolen by the airline, you better carry it on your person, along with your glasses, cellphone charger, prescriptions, and anything else a sane person might pack in a bag. Of course, none of this would have been an issue if the war on terror didn’t dictate that all carry-on toiletries need to be in miniature 3-ounce containers. Yes, no possibility of liquid explosives being carried on board, and the reassurance of knowing that JetBlue security is so tight that a suitcase can just disappear into thin air.)

JetBlue, now I see that the only reason you ask for original receipts is so that you can more accurately calculate the depreciation of value on all claimed items. And exactly how do you calculate the depreciation of a sports coat bought 6 months ago? Are well-made leather shoes assessed differently from cheaper versions? Does the brand new blouse you stole depreciate in value as soon as I carry it off the lot?

It would have been so easy for you to keep our business if you’d only backed up your “sincerest apologies” with actual customer service, if you’d decided that what we’d claimed on the form was reasonable for a couple traveling to California for a 3-day academic conference, and compensated us accordingly. Instead, you made us jump through hoops only to trot out the legalese and tell us that if we wanted the settlement you were willing to squeeze out, we and our descendants had to release you of all liability forever and ever and ever.

Oh, Jennifer G, I’m sure you think you’re just doing your job. And what a job you’ve done. You’ve succeeded magnificently in saving JetBlue a couple thousand dollars and cheating us of our lost belongings and guaranteeing that we will never fly your airline again. I release you.

This video teaches you how to use the internet:

---------------
The best part is when he says “finger's tip.” Fantastic.

This next video is a very well acted tribute to the legalization of gay marriage.

This actually features a pretty great spit-take--the funniest part is the noise he makes after he spits the water out.
---------------
If you don't know anything about Spore, then you should read this Wikipedia entry so that you know what everyone is talking about in the fall. And then once you've read the piece, you should check out this article on the Spore's creature creator, which looks pretty fantastic.

I'd download it myself but I'm supposed to be getting some reading done.

Next week: some amazing facts that I learned from reading a historical linguistics textbook.

Even stranger is an old voice-mail that Denise Richards has released in which ex-husband Charlie Sheen calls her a “f***ing n****r.” In his apology, Sheen mentions that the best man at his wedding was African-American.

$200 billion: initial estimate of the cost of the war by Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey
$50-60 million: revised estimate proposed by Donald Rumsfeld
$2.4 billion: estimate for reconstruction costs, according to the head of the Agency for International Development, Andrew Nastios (including $700 for humanitarian relief)

$634 billion: amount approved by U.S. Congress so far for direct expenditures on the war
$285 billion: estimated lifetime veteran benefits for soldiers fighting in the war
$400 billion: estimated disability and social security costs for war veterans (assuming some fairly optimistic numbers about troop withdrawal and drops in casualty rates)

The issue of how the war has effected oil prices is complicated, but estimates on the global costs related to this wander into the low trillions.

Anyway, my husband has been studying a kind of breathing technique called “Seokmun Breathing Meditation” (석문호흡) for about eighteen months now. He started, not because of some deep interest in breathing or in the idea of storing and moving his qi, but because he noticed that after a heavy night of drinking the only person who could get up for a early round of golf (besides him) was a guy who does SeokMoon breathing. K is already a pretty strong, healthy person, but we both noticed a difference within six months or so: he seemed to have a healthy glow, his skin looks great, he sleeps really well, he’s able to handle stress better, and he feels healthier. Despite all that the party pooper in me resisted joining. But with less than two months left and the insomnia becoming increasingly debilitating I thought, What the hell.

I don’t have time (or the inclination at this moment) to write anything long, serious, or detailed about this school of breathing; what follows are just my notes and impressions from the first week.

There are fifteen stages to Seokmun Breathing Meditation. The first stage is called Wa-sik Su-ryeon (와식 수련) and involves learning how to breathe in a prone posture in order to create a Dan-jeon (단전), which, the book explains, is like a pitcher that holds qi. The Dan-jeon created in this stage is located about two finger widths below one’s belly button (but inside the body). After a series of warm-up exercises (stretching and kicking) we go through a series of eleven positions, called Haeng-gong (행공), for two minutes each. Some are easy; the first involves lying on the floor, arms at a 45-degree angle and palms up, legs no more than a shoulder width apart. Some are hard. The hardest one for me is number 8, pictured above. I can hold it for about a minute now and that’s taken a week or so. After Haeng-gong we lie in the first position for quite a long time and breathe. Many people fall asleep (though I have not yet). After than we do Hoe-geon-sul (회건술) which are sort of recovery exercises.

While doing each Haeng-gong position we’re supposed to focus on that spot below the belly button and imagine qi flowing like water towards that spot. We’re also supposed to focus on the breathing. The master says to relax the body and the consciousness; the body I can deal with but the consciousness part I find very difficult.

The first day the master evaluated my qi and put a small patch on the area where the Dan-jeon is supposed to be. He told me my qi is strong but very disorganized, which sounds about right. When I’m lying there trying to relax my thoughts are running a mile a minute, helter skelter, in all directions. I’m thinking about things I need to do, people I need to call or email. I’m calculating how much more time I need to hold the position. I’m timing the rest of my day, wondering if I should take the bus or a tax to my next destination. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to write in this post and the other posts I’ve been working on. I’m thinking about what to have for lunch. I’m wondering how long it will take for my skin to look better. I also catch myself wanting to outperform the others in the class and impress the instructor. Every few seconds I try to place my focus back on the Dan-jeon but then I start thinking about how weird it is to try to focus on a part of the body that I can’t feel. When I do focus on that spot, it feels like I’m sensing the body from the outside, not the inside. I have a mental picture of where it is but it doesn’t really correspond to the physical reality. Even my legs — a part of the body I’m more familiar with — are hard to feel when they are completely relaxed and not in pain. Without the sensory stimulation they become invisible to my consciousness.

I realized at one point that even though I’m not a particularly verbal person my thoughts are very verbal. I talk to myself a lot, automatically evaluating and analyzing things as if I’m going to write a blog post about them. I wonder if I was like that before blogging. It was too hard to replace the worded thoughts with a focus on some physical area which I cannot really perceive so I started repeating nonsense syllables (“om”) to shut out the mental chatter. That has helped.

So far all I can really say is this: I have been sleeping better. I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night but it is easier for me to push the panicky thoughts away. Perhaps somewhere down the line I’ll have more insight into the ways in which this practice affects my sense of the body, of consciousness, and of the relationships between mental and physical health, but for now being able to get a little more sleep is enough.

Being multicultural is more than being mutilingual. Multicultural means being integrated, in some way, into the social and cultural networks of a place. We travel a lot, but I wanted to make sure that each trip would help my kids accrue and understand their ongoing relationship to these different countries and people. There is also a psychological aspect to being multicultural; I train, not just my children’s linguistic skills, but their attitudes as well. So I began to develop special tools to help my kids narrate their very global lives.

The main tool is a travel book, one for each trip. The books are simple to make, especially now that we have a digital camera. In the beginning, I took the photographs from our trip and glued them to pieces of construction paper. Then my son and I went through each page and wrote down the story of our trip. I punched holes in the side and tied to together, making a book that we read together until it was so tattered that I had to laminate it back together. Now I paste the digital pictures into powerpoint and we type the story together, then I take them to a printer to be printed and bound with a spiral binding and a plastic cover.

The books are told from kids’ perspectives, including a lot of information about the food we eat, the various animals we meet, the presence of wet paint in the hotel lobby, the different rules in different places (bowing versus shaking hands, shoes on or off in the house), gifts they receive and playgrounds we frequent. As my kids have gotten older, we’ve started building the books before the trip, researching a little about the history, landmarks, and architecture of a place so we know what to look for. We pull images of flags, maps and famous buildings off the internet. We look through books from previous journeys and remember the people who live there. As we travel, my kids will now often say, “Mommy, let’s take a picture of this and put it in the travel book!” or “Mommy, this trip is going to make a good travel book!”

The travel book started as a way of reminding my sons of their connection to people they may see once a year at best. But it has become a much more important tool, teaching them not just to passively consume their travel experiences, but to be thinking like adventurers and explorers, participating in the construction of the story of their lives, and giving them the tools to develop relationships to these far-away people and places above and beyond that which my husband and I have imposed on them.

Some travel book tips:
- before: Prepare parts of the book in advance, as a way of letting your kids know what to expect. If you have pictures of family members or friends living in those places, familiarize your kids with those faces. Talk about the different rules in those places, the different languages, food, climate, etc. Talk about the process of traveling — waiting in line, airport security rules, etc., as a way of letting them know what to expect.

- during: Take many pictures — not just of the landscape but of things your kids may be interested in. Allow them to take pictures or decide what pictures they want to take. They may find the color of the police cars interesting, or a pile of pipes on the street, or a construction site — remember, this is a story about they way your kids experience the trip, the things they find interesting or jarring may not be what you find interesting or jarring. You can use the book to discuss the ways in which different places and people are the same or different.

- after: Let your kids shape the narrative, but feel free to add to it. I’m always inserting things about language (“So-and-so only speaks Chinese, and I was able to say a few words to him, which was really exciting!”) and about relationships (“Uncle Bob went to school with Daddy, that’s why they’re such good friends. I hope I can visit my friends after we’re all grown up too.”) The books are records of the trip but also ways of shaping and reinforcing your kids’ interests. My son is interested in tall buildings so we tend to include many observations about buildings. He’s also interested in “secret” things: secret passages and the like. For that reason, every time we’re in Shanghai we return to Yu Yuan and take pictures of the secret passages and hiding places in that garden.

- focus: Use the books to cement the kids’ attachment to these places, by focusing on people, activities, and familiar places. The books express and reinforce the relationship you and your kids have to those places.

* Originally written for the July 2007 issue of Multicultural Living Magazine

Traveling with Kids 1

Traveling with Kids 2

Traveling with Kids 3