Must every American story be built on a racist foundation?

OK, so after a long theater hiatus, I broke down and saw Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. There were some good bits, in particular the fight in the bus at the beginning, but after that it was a long slide down to end in a lot of CGI goop to wrap it up and incorporate the hero and Awkwafina in some kind of Avengers/superhero gemisch.

The big flaw in the movie was that there was so much exposition and so many flashbacks that the story never really got any momentum going. It’s a martial arts movie! Why are you stopping the kicking and punching and flying leaps to fill in a rather humdrum back story?

There’s a good reason for that, though. We have no cultural background on which to frame the story — they had to explain everything, because you won’t find it anywhere except in comic books from the 1970s. Shang-Chi was invented by two white American guys, based on their assumptions about Chinese culture, which were in turn formulated by an English novelist in the early 20th century. This has zero connections with Chinese culture and mythology — except for the idea that all Chinese guys should know chop-sockey.

Furthermore, that English novelist is best known for … Fu Manchu.

According to his own account, Sax Rohmer decided to start the Dr Fu Manchu series after his Ouija board spelled out C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N when he asked what would make his fortune. Clive Bloom argues that the portrait of Fu Manchu was based on the popular music hall magician Chung Ling Soo, “a white man in costume who had shaved off his Victorian moustache and donned a Mandarin costume and pigtail”. As for Rohmer’s theories concerning “Eastern devilry” and “the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese,” he seeks to give them intellectual credentials by referring to the travel writing of Bayard Taylor. Taylor was a would-be ethnographer, who though unversed in Chinese language and culture used the pseudo-science of physiognomy to find in the Chinese race “deeps on deeps of depravity so shocking and horrible, that their character cannot even be hinted.” Rohmer’s protagonists treat him as an authority.

Rohmer wrote 14 novels concerning the villain. The image of “Orientals” invading Western nations became the foundation of Rohmer’s commercial success, being able to sell 20 million copies in his lifetime.

Marvel originally based Shang-Chi on that concept. Shang-Chi was the son of the evil Fu Manchu. He was renamed in the movie as Xu Wenwu, because Marvel lost the rights to the Rohmer character. I notice, too, that although the movie has an amazing Asian cast, these are the writers:

Cretton, at least, is Asian-American, born to a mother of Japanese descent, but otherwise, this is a story by white guys built on a framework created by a racist idea of the Yellow Peril. At least Marvel is doing a bit of white-washing of its ugly history.

Correction: David Callaham is also Chinese-American, so two of the writers have appropriate connections.

I’ll also add that the movie has significant Asian contributions, and representation is important. I just think the source material has a troubling derivation.

What were they trying to hide?

Would it be suspicious if, after you committed murder, you immediately deleted your email records and shredded all your files? Because that’s what the Minnesota police did after they killed George Floyd, just ripping apart anything that might allow investigators to figure out what they were doing.

Minnesota State Patrol officers conducted a mass purge of emails and text messages immediately after their response to riots last summer, leaving holes in the paper trail as the courts and other investigators attempt to reconstruct whether law enforcement used improper force in the chaos following George Floyd’s murder.

In a recent court hearing in a lawsuit alleging the State Patrol targeted journalists during the unrest, State Patrol Maj. Joseph Dwyer said he and a “vast majority of the agency” deleted the communiqués after the riots, according to a transcript published to the federal court docket Friday night.

This file destruction “makes it nearly impossible to track the State Patrol’s behavior, apparently by design,” said attorneys for Minnesota’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the state patrol and Minneapolis police on behalf of journalists who say they were assaulted by law enforcement while covering the protests and riots.

“The purge was neither accidental, automated, nor routine,” said ACLU attorneys, in a court motion that asks a judge to order the State Patrol to cease attacks on journalists who are covering protests. “The purge did not happen because of a file destruction or retention policy. No one reviewed the purged communications before they were deleted to determine whether the materials were relevant to this litigation.”

Quick, check their dictionaries — you’ll probably find they also deleted the word “accountability”.

They also deleted case files, throwing some drug prosecution cases in peril (which seems like a good thing).

The revelations come as Minneapolis police say they’re also investigating why officers in the Second Precinct — across the city from where the riots took place — shredded case files during the riots last summer. Attorneys say police destroyed key evidence to charges in a drug prosecution and have asked a Hennepin County Judge to throw out the case.

In the July 28 hearing, Dwyer said they were not acting on an order from on high to delete records, but it’s “standard practice” for the troopers to so.

“You just decided, shortly after the George Floyd protests, this would be a good time to clean out my inbox?” asked ACLU attorney Kevin Riach.

Dwyer answered in the affirmative.

Now I’m curious. If there was no coordination, and no instructions from on high, why did so many police officers suddenly get in the mood to do some serious house-cleaning, and how many policemen were involved? It’s not necessarily a conspiracy — I mean, I get in the mood to clean up my office when I’ve got a major deadline in my face and want to procrastinate — but something motivated these officers to up and throw out evidence. What was it, if not a command from a superior?

Could it be…guilt?

Why academia doesn’t lean right

Dang, this is a good video, succinct and to the point.

Why are there so few conservatives in academia? Because the the things conservatives want to argue about are no longer debatable. You can’t seriously operate as a biologist, for instance, and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old…much less put together a class within the curriculum that tries to teach that nonsensical idea. I’m not as familiar with other disciplines, but are there economics professors who aren’t fringe cranks who teach trickle-down economics, Laffer curve and all that, when the evidence makes it patently clear that it just doesn’t work?

Don’t get me wrong, I know professors who are more conservative than I am — very few of us actually go so far as to suggest that the proletariat must rise up and seize the means of production — but we do tend to exclude the extremist positions. The problem is that modern conservatism consists entirely of extremist madness. Your typical professor is not some wild-eyed radical, but a cautious, moderate advocate for incremental improvement of society, and just that level of tepid support for betterment is antithetical to conservative thought.

I knew that

Why else do you think I’ve been aghast at our university’s policies for starting up school as if we’re back to normal?

Somehow, though, the lyrics for “Enter Sandman” seem entirely appropriate.

Just basic science

I want to know where these people learn their “basic science”.

That reminded me of this post on We Hunted the Mammoth.

They are so confident and certain when they state absolutely batshit looney misinformation. Where do they learn that kind of confidence? In church, I suspect, because they aren’t getting it in any legitimate school.

I wonder if he confused conception with photosynthesis? Nah, that would be light plus carbon dioxide.

Don’t worry that something might shatter that astonishing confidence. He’s currently doubling down.

Today’s agenda

I slept in until 8:30. I have now lingered over my coffee for a whole hour. Time to get to work!

  • Get my shoes on. (this is a major thermodynamic hurdle — I’m hoping the coffee provided enough activation energy to get the process started.)
  • Walk out the door to the lab. Usually by this point the reaction is mildly exothermic so it should go smoothly.
  • Say hello to the grass spiders living in the shrubbery outside my lab.
  • Feed all the spiders inside my lab.
  • Walk home.
  • Stretch. Crack my knuckles. Open up all the lab reports my students submitted to Canvas last night. Stare at them, mildly stupefied.
  • Start grading them, eventually. Do that all afternoon.
  • Return to awareness. Eat dinner. Wonder where the day went.

Tomorrow they turn in a homework assignment, and I’ll do exactly the same routine on Monday.

The bee don’t care about deadlines either, she’s just doing her thing.

There’s one thing my students haven’t quite figured out yet. I do set deadlines on all the assignments, because the software requires it, but…I don’t care. I just want them to do the work so they know how to do the work, and so I can see where maybe they’re going down the wrong path, but deadlines are an invention of The Man (or maybe Satan). Try to turn things in on time so they don’t pile up on you, but if it’s a few days late, I’m OK with that.

But these are all conscientious Midwestern kids, many of them first generation college students, so I get an amazing flood of email the day of, full of apologies and reasons why they didn’t meet the deadline, which I have to read, too. I get all these panicky messages sent just before midnight, “oh no I couldn’t solve this problem, I’m struggling with it, I can’t get it done on time” followed by a 3am follow-up, “I figured it out, I submitted it a little late, I hope that’s OK”.

I just want to say…Dudes. It’s fine. The software sets this specific 11:59pm deadline minute, but I’m sleeping then. I’m not hovering over the computer, ready to dock points from anyone who turns it in at 12:01am. Or even noon the next day. The only real deadline is when I go over the answers in class a few days later, because I want you to think them through yourself, rather than getting handed them. If you turn something in a little late, well, that’s a time-management issue you should work on, but I’m going to pretend it was turned in precisely on time and give you full credit, because I don’t care. All I care about is whether you learned the subject matter.

I guess I’d have to worry if every student procrastinated and I couldn’t get the bulk of the grading done at the time I set aside for it, but that hasn’t happened yet in 40 years, and the Midwestern work ethic means it’s not going to happen in the near future. Chill. Go for a walk. Enjoy the flowers and the spiders while you can. Biology isn’t a punishment drill, it’s supposed to be something that makes you happy.