Literary Corner: The Internet Cleanse Cycle, Part I

Korean tea bowl, 16th century, with gold kintsugi repair work, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, via Wikipedia. 

From David Brooks, "Longing For an Internet Cleanse":

Kintsugi¹

By David F. Brooks

They look like they have golden veins
running through them, making them more
beautiful and more valuable² than
they were in their original condition.
There’s a dimension of depth³ to them. You sense
the original life they had, the rupture and then
the way they were so beautifully healed.
And of course they stand as a metaphor⁴
for the people, families and societies
we all know who have endured their own
ruptures and come back beautiful,
vulnerable and whole in their broken places.⁵

¹ The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer colored with the dust of precious metals, so that the break remains visible as a gold or silver seam, and the associated philosophical view that an object has its own life, of service, which is not ended by breakage, and can be restored.

² In the first wave of its popularity in the late 15th century, it's said collectors often smashed valuable pieces for the opportunity to turn them into kintsugi bowls, the way our wealthy philanthropists vote against a government-run social safety net in order to ensure a supply of broken people they can fix.

³ Unlike unmended bowls, which are always two-dimensional?

⁴ Of course! In reality, making the thing into a metaphor is the most un-Japanese thing you can possibly do with it. The deepest idea of the kintzugi philosophy is that of the mono no aware, the poignancy of things, in themselves, not as representatives of something else; as deserving the same tenderness we want for ourselves.

⁵ "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. Most, I think the point is, aren't. The old tea bowl is in fact as strong as ever after the kintsugi work, though the Japanese beauty of the gold seam consists in its reminder of past suffering; the damaged human rarely is. You can send your broken human to the shop to see what they can do, but it really would have been better if it hadn't happened.

Is that rude?

Image via Buddy "L" Trucks.

So some of us thought it was hilarious when Trump, in Japan, asked Japanese car makers to start manufacturing cars in the United States, when in fact they build 4 million vehicles a year in the US, in comparison to the 1.5 million they export here (in 1986 it was 3.5 million)—"Is that possible to ask? That's not rude. Is that rude?"—and some didn't think it was hilarious at all, like this Aaron Blake bloke writing for the Washington Post:

But this is completely unfair to Trump. A look at this fuller remarks makes clear he did know that Japanese cars are built in the United States. He even talked about it at-length and praised the manufacturers for the amount of jobs they've created here.

It's Awash

Three kabuki actors, by Toyohara Kunichika, 1868, via Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks writes ("The Shame Culture", New York Times, March 15 2016) [PARODY ALERT]:

In 1987, the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that American campuses were awash—awash, I tell you—with moral relativism, or the decadent new idea that one should not judge lest one be judged, closing their minds, as his title suggested, to the rich traditions of intolerance and self-righteousness, and dogmatically insisting that everybody ought to be morally open-minded.

"If it feels good, do it," they proclaimed, unmooring people from their traditional ideas of right and wrong and thereby depriving them of those fascinatingly varied peaks and valleys of wickedness and virtue and making life flatter and emptier.

He was right, of course, but now he's wrong, because everything is totally different. Campuses today are still awash, but they're awash in judgmentalism.