so i immigrated to the US at age 9, right, and one of the first things my family did was join the local Chinese church. as far as the whole “figuring out how to do things so we no longer have to live in the back shed of Uncle Joe’s* Magic Emporium” thing goes, it’s a pretty sound strategy! now we had people to teach my dad how to drive and give us old furniture and say “hey, Seattle is pretty rainy maybe you should rent an apartment-like space before either a) the shed roof caves in b) your daughter with the famously delicate constitution falls dramatically ill from a strain of black mold or possibly herpes”
*is not my uncle, that’s what his store was called. he sold magic gadgets and my dad knew him because???? possibly in a past life they ran a meth empire in Albuquerque, who knows
ANYWAY. thanks to the church i did not fall dramatically ill from black mold or possibly herpes, but there was an unforeseen factor in joining a Christian church, which was that they? were pretty hardcore? about Jesus?**
**in a nice “we build houses for the homeless” way, not in…the other way
given that we’d just immigrated and that China’s religious policy is
worshiping Mao’s preserved corpseehhhhh…let’s call it “freedom of atheism,” my family was decidedly not hardcore about Jesus. my parents mostly took the bemused “i guess Jesus is okay since he indirectly led to us living in a place suited for human habitation” route, but iwas
DISGUSTED.
i was the first kid in my class to get her red scarf, okay, and when we sang the national anthem and saluted the flag every morning i fucking meant what i was singing. we almost didn’t come to America; my dad had more lucrative job offers in Germany and Belgium, but i put my foot down because everyone knows Europe is full of gross imperialists Dad, GOSH, and the Americans helped us fight off the Japanese.
so seeing all these fellow Chinese believing in THE CAPITALIST GOD was basically the worst thing to ever happen to my delicate psyche. my parents’ tacit approval was even worse: DID PATRIOTISM AND COMMUNISM MEAN NOTHING TO THEM? DIDN’T THEY KNOW THAT DOING NOTHING AGAINST OPPRESSION MADE THEM OPPRESSORS THEMSELVES??
clearly something needed to be done.
so because the church was pretty hardcore about Jesus, it was understandably also hardcore about Christmas. big party, massive intricately decorated REAL TREE, sleepover for the kids with presents in the morning—you name it. everyone was going to be there.
WHAT A GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO PROVE TO EVERYONE HOW WRONG THEY ARE ABOUT JESUS.
my plan:
- sleep UNDER the giant real Christmas tree: y’know, the one with real pointy needles reaching all the way down to the base? that sheds? with lots of pokey tinsel?
- catch Jesus in the act of depositing presents***: look. i’d seen like, ALL of Scooby Doo by this point. i knew Jesus was probably a real person, just not the Son of God.
- subdue Jesus so he’s still around when everyone else wakes up: CLEARLY VERY FEASIBLE, given that Jesus was a heavyset white dude who used superhuman agility and strength to deliver presents around the world overnight and possibly had reindeer minions and i weighed 70 pounds at most while sopping wet.
- (who is Santa Claus?? who cares)
- ????
- EVERYONE MAGICALLY BECOMES AN ATHEIST AGAIN, AMERICA BECOMES A COMMUNIST STATE
***even if i didn’t believe in him, why was i slavishly devoted stopping a highly altruistic man who gave? people? presents? did i hate joy????
sure enough, at around 3 in the morning i heard soft boots approaching the tree. i reached out and snatched one of the Ankles of Jesus
—whereupon Youth Pastor Liao screamed “OH MY LORD” and kicked me in the face.
and THAT, dear friends, is how i spent my first Christmas in America with a concussion.
I think this is the greatest Christmas story ever told
This is the most beautiful story I’ve ever read.
oh my god
I need a film about this
Tiny communist patriot attempts to defeat GOD OF CAPITALISM
Tag: america
In 1952, an American attaché in Moscow was innocently fiddling with his shortwave radio when he heard the voice of the American ambassador dictating letters in the Embassy, just a few buildings away. He immediately reported the incident, but though the Americans tore the walls out of the Ambassador’s office, they weren’t able to find a listening device.
When the broadcasts kept coming, the Americans flew in two technical experts with special radio finding equipment, who meticulously examined each object in the Ambassador’s office. They finally tracked the signal to this innocuous giant wooden sculpture of the Great Seal of the United States, hanging behind the Ambassador’s desk. It had been given as a gift by the Komsomol, the Soviet version of the Boy Scouts.
Cracking it open, they found a hollow cavity and a metal object so unusual and mysterious in its design that it has gone down in history as ‘The Thing’.
‘The Thing’ had no battery, no wires, no source of power at all. It was was just a little can of metal covered on one side with foil, with a long metal whisker sticking out the side. It seemed too simple to be anything.
That night the American technician slept with ‘The Thing’ under his pillow. The next day they smuggled it out of the country for analysis.
The Americans couldn’t figure out how ‘The Thing’ worked, and had to ask the British for help. After a few weeks of fiddling, the Brits finally cracked The Thing’s secret.
That little round can was a resonant cavity. If you shone a beam of radio waves at it at a particular frequency, it would sing back to you, like a tuning fork. The metal antenna was just the right length to broadcast back one of the higher harmonics of the signal.
The resonator sat right behind a specially thinned piece of wood under the eagle’s beak. When someone in the room spoke, vibrations in the air would shake the foil, slightly deforming the cavity, which in turn made the resonant signal weaker or stronger.
As the attaché discovered, you could listen to this modulated signal on a radio just like a regular broadcast. ‘The Thing’ was a wireless, remotely powered microphone. It had been hanging on the ambassador’s wall for seven years.
Today we have a name for what ‘The Thing’ is: It’s an RFID tag, ingeniously modified to detect sound vibrations. Our world is full of these little pieces of metal and electronics that will sing back to you if you shine the right kind of radio waves on them.
But for 1952, this was heady stuff. Those poor American spooks were up against a piece of science fiction.
Today I want to talk about these moments when the future falls in our laps, with no warning or consideration about whether we’re ready to confront it.
Another amazing talk by the creator of Pinboard. I first heard Maciej speak at XOXO, he blew me away. This transcript of his Webstock talk was also amazing.
Technically outside the scope of this blog, but this was way too interesting/cool not to share.
The Super Soldier and the German Psyche
Hoo boy, we’re going deep down the rabbit hole with this one. I hope you’ll bear with me, as this
might bewill be a disturbing post. Here, have some shirtless!Seb as a precautionary measure:
(source)
He’s laughing at me because I’m kind of a masochist. Anyway, check back with him if you need to.
I have German heritage on both sides of my family – my paternal great-great grandparents came over sometime in the early 20th century (don’t know much about them) and my maternal grandmother grew up in Nazi Germany. Plus I was a history major specializing in European history from 1871 to the Cold War. So…I know some things. You could chalk up all that to another reason this movie was like catnip to me. That said, it will take a bit to unpack all of this, so bear with me.
The idea of there being a superior race was pretty much unheard of before European imperialism and the Atlantic slave trade. Before then, Europeans didn’t have much cause to compare themselves to the rest of the world. But over the course of the 17th-19th centuries, that small part of the globe came to control the remaining 85% of the world. Suddenly, they were faced with millions upon millions of “savages,” and had to justify their superiority. Their right to subjugate the rest of humanity.
Eugenics started [in America], Germans just ran with it.
THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS. This is something that we do NOT get taught (or that we didn’t get taught when I was taking community college history classes, let alone high school), and I know it’s just an aside, but THANK YOU.
Nazi Germany based all its initial forays into eugenics on programs in America that were active in over 20 states. That may not really be the topic of this post (which is a good one), but it is very very important to make sure people know.
Bucky Barnes and dating in the 40’s.
So, wow. Yeah. Another one of those “I’ve been reading a lot of.. and.. (insert my opinion here).”
So, yes, I keep reading about Bucky as the ladies man: all sexed up and such. It’s a bit baffling to me, as this is a very modern way of thinking. Dating – or courtship – was very different in the 30’s and 40’s than it is today!
For example, take this excerpt from A Brief History of Courtship and Dating in America, (Part 2):
Beth Bailey and Ken Myers explain in the Mars Hill Audio Report, Wandering Toward the Altar: The Decline of American Courtship, before World War II, American youth prized what Bailey calls a promiscuous popularity, demonstrated through the number and variety of dates a young adult could command, sometimes even on the same night.
In the late 1940s, Margaret Mead, in describing this pre-war dating system, argued that dating was not about sex or marriage. Instead, it was a “competitive game,” a way for girls and boys to demonstrate their popularity.
This describes a situation in which dating was more about one’s reputation than any sort of romance. It was very important not only to be seen with many dates, but with the proper people. This explains why Steve would have had such a difficult time securing a partner: being seen with someone unpopular was worse than not being seen at all. However, this gives us a clue as to how popular Bucky must have been! If he was able to leverage himself in order to get Steve dates, Bucky must have been pretty high-ranking on the dating scale.
For men, desirable dating traits included a good personality and dance skills, as well as being “tactful, amusing, well dressed, prompt, and courteous” (Great Depression and the Middle Class…). Lasciviousness was not a good quality! Women communicated with one another concerning a man’s suitability, so for Bucky to have been popular he couldn’t have been the sex-centric playboy that fans like to imagine. It’s far more likely that he was well-spoken, funny, charming, and a great dancer. Remember, Bucky was from the lower classes, so he wouldn’t have had the money – despite the Depression, it was expected that men pay for the entire date (barring Sadie Hawkins themed events and once a couple started to go steady) – to impress women with a car and fancy clothes, nor would he have been able to take them out to dinner, so his dance skills would have been pretty important!
In fact, dancing was such a popular form of entertainment that, in one year, the University of Michigan fraternities held over 300 evening dances!
According to this web page “young people in the 1930s dated and double-dated by going to movies, getting something to eat, going for ice cream, driving around, spending time with friends, going to dances, and even ‘necking.’” That’s right folks, necking. Not fucking.
Women were expected to straddle a fine line between being too forward or too “frigid,” both of which could harm their reputations. Young people engaged in kissing, necking, and petting (meaning anything short of full intercourse). Petting was becoming more common – due, in part, to rising automobile-culture – as was sex itself; heavier petting typically came from going-steady, and engagement “came… to mean that partners would at some point ‘go all the way’” (Teen Culture in the 1930’s). Ladies who were known to be free with their sexuality prior to commitment were in danger of being known for exactly that, and could easily become popular merely as a means to an end (the wrong kind of popularity).
So, it likely wouldn’t have been hard for Bucky, as a popular young man, to find a willing partner (and I’m certainly not suggesting that he was virginal). However, if he were the sort of man to focus on easy women, it’s not likely that he would maintain his own high rating (which, again, we can guess at by the fact that he was able to not only secure himself dates, but Steve as well).
This is a really quick and dirty run-down of dating and sex during the 30’s into the early 40’s, but there is a lot of information available out there. Bucky is presented as a stand-up guy, so I don’t really understand why so many people seem to view him as some sort of a man whore. I sincerely doubt that he was entirely chaste (particularly once he went into the Army, a topic which I avoided on purpose), but I imagine that he was a desirable companion for his charm and dateability far more than for his sexual prowess.
Note also how these same qualities (“tactful, amusing, well dressed, prompt, and courteous”) are very attractive today, too, and regardless of how well the filmmakers did their research, that’s exactly how Bucky comes across at the start of the film. Depending on his background, he might or might not be a man you’d seriously consider marrying, but he would definitely be someone to recommend to a friend as good company for an evening. (This means that a writer can plausibly interpret Bucky as anything and everything between virginal to modern serial monogamist -level of sexual experience or even very experienced – consider, if you will, the attractions of a charming man with an absolute sense of discretion.)
And then contrast this with pre-serum!Steve, who comes to their double date dressed – the best you can say is that he tried (and remember, he’s literally coming there after a fight in a dirty alley), is nearly silent, awkward almost to the point of tactlessness, and generally projects an air of wanting to be anywhere else but there, up to and including the trenches getting shot at.
It’s no wonder that his date is so upset, because pre-serum!Steve might be a doll once you get to know him, but as a blind date, he is an utter and total tragedy.
It also underlines how far from OK Bucky is after his rescue – he’s scruffy, unkempt and his uniform is a mess, he’s drinking hard liquor alone, and his attempt to channel the old charming Bucky at Agent Carter falls flat. He does get somewhat better later, as we can tell from his improved appearance in the new blue uniform jacket, but there’s a sharp edge there that wasn’t before. On the other hand, this is no longer New York with is dates and dances; Bucky wouldn’t be the only man on leave who’d lost the bright easy shine.
War changed a lot of things, and that includes the attitudes of women. Before, Private Lorraine probably wouldn’t have dreamed of ambushing a man with a kiss in a public place, no matter how handsome or heroic, but in wartime, people occasionally reconsidered the rules. (I’m not sure what the rules were for dating in England, but I do wonder if a part of the confusion between Steve and Peggy might stem up from different cultural approaches to dating between Britain and USA, in addition to the difficulties that a romance with a fellow soldier could cause her professionally.)
But to get back to Steve – consciously or unconsciously, who do you think he’s trying to emulate in company now that his body, fame and military rank have suddenly bumped up his social rating, if not Bucky-from-before?
(Side note: of the rest of the Howlies, Monty probably did respectably well for himself in his elevated social circles, which IIRC worked a bit differently; as for Dum-Dum, I doubt he ever even tried to play the game Bucky used to excel at; Jim probably was okay, but he doesn’t strike me as a man with the patience for being a social butterfly. Gabe Jones? He must’ve gone to all of the dances. All of them. Remember that suit from the very end? Now, there is one dapper gentleman with savoir-faire.)
Thank you for all this awesome information! 😀 I already knew that, while post-WS Bucky can easily be portrayed as a bit of a “bad boy”, he definitely wasn’t BEFORE that, bit it’s cool to have some insight into what dating was like back then!
Polite, dapper, dashing gentleman Bucky Barnes and his questionable, fight-picking punk of a best friend Steve Rogers is my fave thing.
7.23.14
George Takei describes the moment when he and his family were sent to an internment camp.
knitting in the dark 