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Not "Harold & Kumar"?: "Gran Torino" (2008)
Gran Torino
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Double Nickel Entertainment, Gerber Pictures, Malpaso Productions,
Media Magik Entertainment, Village Roadshow Pictures, Warner Bros.
Rated R
116 minutes
2008
2009 February
Right now, the three things in mass entertainment media that may be
doing a lot to influence the image in the United $tates of Asians are
"Gran Torino" (2008), Chinese YouTube comedy sensation KevJumba, and
actor John Cho of the "Harold & Kumar" films. Perhaps this reviewer
should also mention "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008), but this reviewer
finds that even supposedly educated people have difficulty including
Indians with East Asians in the "Asian" category. Poor people in
India have been compartmentalized. What "Gran Torino," KevJumba and
Cho have in common is that they represent Asian people living in the
United $tates.
In the "Harold & Kumar" movies," John Cho plays a stoner, whose
stoner Indian friend avoids going to medical school. Despite one
video in which he proclaims love for his father, part of KevJumba's
popularity is based on making fun of his parents as being culturally
inept. Recently, KevJumba has raised the idea of Asians dropping out
of college. The recent work in progress of Cho's close competitor,
Aaron Yoo, is "Kid Cannabis," a movie to look out for.
Whites start seeing stereotypes about Asians as invalid primarily
when they see Asians acting like whites, because whiteness is the
norm. (This is true generally, but things break down demographically.
John Cho does for pot-smoking Democrats what Michelle Malkin,
seemingly paradoxically, may do for Republicans. That some
Republicans find Malkin useful is not all there is to say about
Malkin.) Whereas John Cho's roles, and KevJumba implicitly, deal with
the model minority minority idea by representing Asians as being able
to enjoy a joint as much as whites, "Gran Torino" focuses on the
crime element of model minority status. Central in the movie's plot
is a Hmong gang. Clint Eastwood's character has found himself with
Hmong neighbors and becomes involved with their problems. One of the
neighbors is a boy who struggles with the gang.
Can a whole group of people assimilate without becoming whiny,
self-centered, assertive in a cocky way, demanding for themselves as
individuals but not their group, and willing to take racism against
themselves in stride, and without a bunch of its youth heading to
prison? "Gran Torino's" answer to this question seems to be "no."
Because of the connection to Westerns via Clint Eastwood, "Gran
Torino" reminded this reviewer of "The Searchers" (1956), another
movie depicting an outspoken racist white man. Also, Walt Kowalski
(Clint Eastwood) suggests that people should mate within their own
kind. Unlike "The Searchers," though, it cannot easily be said that
"Gran Torino" itself is racist. "Gran Torino" points out the truth
about assimilation. And, it deals with Hmong people in the United
$tates in an expected way. The way Kowalski comes closer to the Hmong
community in Detroit by accident is a metaphor for how Amerikans
never gave a shit aout helping Hmong people in Asia and has pit Third
World people against each other with tragic results. Korean War
veteran Kowalski relives his experiences by attacking a Hmong gang on
behalf of one Hmong youth (who is in fact cousins with the gang's
leader), who might have ended up in the gang without Kowalski's
interventions. Without a revolutionary anti-imperialist movement
uniting Thao (Bee Vang) with his gang tormentors, the events in "Gran
Torino" seem inevitable and necessary, but the ending of the movie is
fitting in a way.
Without spoiling the movie too much, at one point in the middle of
the movie the Hmong gang violently attacks both Kowalski and his
Hmong neighbors, with whom he had formed a relationship. The gang
lives in the local Hmong community. The violence in the movie
obviously accomplishes nothing politically except getting the police
involved, but metaphorically the image of Hmong fiercely struggling
with other Hmong who seem to be building something with whites (and
excluding other Hmong) is necessary. Hmong people continue to have
difficulty shaking the image of being perpetual collaborators,
something that Amerikans reinforce by telling simplistic stories
about Hmong people fleeing to the United $tates from persecution. It
is just unfortunate that disturbing this image took the form of
depicting Hmong people as gangbangers threatening to whites.
Supposedly, when someone is near the end of his or her life, they
start thinking more about heaven and good deeds done or not done.
Because of fame and fortune, Clint Eastwood may be able to do some
things others may not be able to do. "Gran Torino" is actually not
that bad. This may be difficult for Amerikans to understand, but old
Westerns including Eastwood's and John Wayne's are popular in East
Asia and Southeast Asia to the point of being subtitled in the
languages of those regions and sold in stores. Perhaps "Gran Torino"
makes up a little for the negative consequences of that. "Gran
Torino" is not going to inspire much thinking among Amerikans with a
progressive direction to it, but Clint Eastwood fans in Asia after
watching "Gran Torino" may wonder whether there is something wrong in
U.$. society and the situation of Asians there.
Thinking about how Asians could stop being a so-called model minority
in the United $tates, it is important to think about the
low-criminality aspect of model minority status and not just academic
achievement, income, etc., and realize that Asians are being compared
to other minorities, not just whites or the population average --
something that should be obvious. In order to shake off the model
minority reputation, it might be necessary for Asians to be
imprisoned as disproportionately as other minorities. Such a
development would need to be accounted for. How are the East Asians
whom middle-income and high-income people in the United $tates
interact with -- from Hong Kong, Japan, southern Korean, and Taiwan,
and descendants of businesspeople and Chinese and Japanese migrants
who became petty-bourgeois -- going to be imprisoned at greater than
then population imprisonment rate, for starters?
Asians as a model minority is not going to go away unless Asians
invade the United $tates, more low-income Asians are allowed to
migrate to the United $tates, or the distribution of super-profits
becomes more even. Barack Obama ran partly on the idea of
redistributing super-profits within the United $tates, something that
looks increasingly fascist with large-scale nationalization on the
horizon and no end to either war or exploitation of external working
classes. Since those focusing on Asian success aren't calling for
open borders, let alone international proletarian rule, implicit in
various complaints about Asians as a group is a demand to repress
them. The only way Chinese people from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and
Arabs, Indians, Iranians, and Pakistanis, are going to be imprisoned
at a 3% ratio or greater is if there is fascism. There has been
above-average imprisonment of Asians in recent U.$. history: the
Japanese internment.
The real proof that the United $tates is not "post-racial" is the
continuing prevalence of the Asian model minority idea and the
toleration of naked racism against Asians and Asian-descended people,
unless raciality is confined by what was said in Martin Luther King's
"I have a dream" speech and Asians seen as perpetual foreigners are
to be excluded from the racial category. Whites call their minority
"friends" racial and ethnic names, but things that are out of bounds
for most minorities are not out of bounds when it comes to Asians. No
minority group is left uninsulted by Kowalski in "Gran Torino," but
"Gran Torino" merits attention for focusing on racism against Asians
and also highlighting that there is something more important than
racist language, like violence caused by Euro-Amerikans.
It may have been a mistake to depict Hmong people specifically.
Rather than think not all Asians are the same, people may think Hmong
people are an exception. Unfortunately, Amerikans who do look further
into Hmong people often end up repeating propaganda among the Hmong
people fighting communism and persecution by majority groups and
needing the United $tates. Like Tibetans, Hmong people are selected
out of other groups in East Asia by Amerikans to attack communism and
so-called communism, and governments in East Asian countries, and
tout the so-called democracy and freedom of the United $tates.
However, "Gran Torino" suggests that Asian migrants face an uphill
struggle if they want to be accepted as equals in Amerika. Shooting
the shit with Amerikans like Amerikans do will get one only so far.
At the same time, individualism may be destructive to the group with
less power and privilege. One persyn can live the Amerikan dream that
was interrupted for some whites by war or old age, but at what
expense? Ending on a note of uncertainty, "Gran Torino" suggests
multiculturalism's limited prospects in the United $tates.
Regarding previous criticism of the model minority idea, much
criticism concerns the idea's impact on poor Asians, recent migrants,
lower-performing Asians, expectations for Asians in general connected
to double standards, and awareness of discrimination against Asians,
and the model minority idea's impact on non-Asian minorities. Most of
this is fundamentally connected to a desire to have imperialist
super-profits distributed more evenly in the United $tates and
prevent social disorder. Consequences of the model minority idea
unrelated to the economic conditions of individuals and psychology
are marginalized. That is, concerns in the United $tates about
minorities are connected to trying to make imperialism work or work
better for more people in the United $tates. It is important, though,
for people to understand that there is nothing special going on in
the United $tates in terms of race and culture to be emulated. What
the United $tates has is Liberalism based on super-profits. Whites
already have more than others and do not need to upset a good thing,
and to some extent permit Blacks and Latinos to complain about whites
as a group. For the most part, people of different cultures get along
at work and in professional settings. Confrontations remain at a
verbal level -- bitching and moaning, often not in front of the other
persyn or her or his group. Business goes on.
When the status quo changes -- when there is demographic change
connected to migration, for example, or when one group appears to
advance relative to other groups -- conflicts intensify. Whining
about migrants turns into repression of migrants. Whining about
outsourcing, and rich or seemingly upwardly mobile Asians from Arab
countries to India and China, turns into protectionism and
warmongering.
Within the unproductive sector of the United $tates, East Asians are
concentrated in education-intensive occupations relative to whites,
possibly making East Asians less expendable. The exclusion of Asians
from upper management in corporations is not looking like such a bad
thing now with the economic situation and increased scrutiny of
executives, etc., but white job losses are going to lead to increased
heat on Asians. There is a parallel in academia. People who
specialize in writing poetry, and refining white ideologies and
political correctness, are going to lose some ground to Asians
concentrated in more quantitative and problem-solving-oriented areas.
With the economic situation and Barack Obama as President, the United
$tates can cut back on academic departments associated with political
correctness and diversity training. White people in arts departments
and women's studies departments who have excluded culturally
different Asians and pushed them toward other areas will wonder why
the Asians have better opportunities. Bullshitting your way to a job
with flowery language and by projecting a certain aesthetic doesn't
work in the long run.
It does not matter that the number of Asians in certain fields may be
exaggerated, that there are stereotypes about this. The perception is
enough. Attacking a minority of the allegedly rich in an imperialist
country as is done in fascist movements has never been based on
science. Barack Obama has riled Amerikans up against millionaries and
caused pointless commotion that may actually exacerbate the United
$tates' difficulties coming up with a non-military solution to its
economic problems. There is no false consciousness, blocking
anti-capitalist revolution, among exploiters in the United $tates
called "workers," but Asians in environments such as this potentially
occupy a position similar to that of Jews.
So, there are recent reasons to be thinking about anti-Asian racism.
For some time, on the other hand, anti-Asian racism has been the
bitching that just won't shut the fuck up. It insists on being heard
even among supposedly informed and critical people complaining about
everything from their job prospects to why that
Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese waitress looked at you that way at
the restaurant. Arrogant white people do not understand that they
cannot go around invading other people's spaces and expect the people
there to accommodate them perfectly. In "Gran Torino," Walt Kowalski
is invited to his Hmong neighbors' home and before that receives
unwanted hospitality from Hmong people, with whom he had been
interacting unwilling or reluctantly. So, things play out a bit
differently. Food is the key to understanding, according to this
movie, but Kowalski initially rejects the hospitality showered on him
after helping his neighbors by accident and wants to be left alone.
Not only do people have to respect Kowalski; they have to read his
mind.
"Gran Torino" raises and treats as comedy material the idea that in
order for a Hmong persyn to succeed, he or she has to adopt a certain
style and talk in a certain way. Kowalski calls Thao's sister (played
by Ahney Her) a "dragon lady," but Sue breaks the ice by rolling with
the punches, projecting self-confidence, and trying to turn
Kowalski's bitching into banter. It's OK to be manipulative, but
people have to present themselves as formidable, independent
individuals. In one memorable scene, Kowalski teaches Thao how to
approach whites to get what he wants. That's a pretty shaky
foundation on which to end racism, though. Borders and the global
distribution of wealth are decisive. These shape ideas about
productivity, superiority, and migrant groups with different economic
characteristics.
The priest character, Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), refines
his ideas about salvation through his interactions with Kowalski.
Because of his battlefield experiences, redemption and salvation for
Kowalski must be different than what they are for Kowalski's wife,
for example. Kowalski's redemption involves yet more violence.
Retired, Kowalski has family members waiting for him to die and leave
an inheritance. He finds more congeniality with his Hmong neighbors
than with his own family. Euro-Amerikans have more in common with
Asians the closer the Euro-Amerikans are to death, Kowalski suggests.
People should go with this idea rather than seeing "Gran Torino" as
confirming the possibility of white redemption (or intolerance going
to the grave with the older generation -- an obvious interpretation
of "Gran Torino" depicting youth and the elderly, including Thao's
grandmother, who speaks the most harshly of Kowalski).
The Gran Torino is a Ford car. Kowalski objects to his son's Japanese
car. "Gran Torino" is timely at this time of economic downturn and
renewed protectionism. The more subtle message of "Gran Torino" is
that younger generations of Amerikans can drive foreign-made cars and
consume things produced by Asians, but may more distant from Asians
in their country than even a crusty old white man. It's hard to
imagine Kowalski's Generation Y granddaughter having more to do with
Hmong people than Kowalski, who ends up with Hmong neighbors by
accident.
This reviewer was going to say something about the Catholic Church,
but at the moment the Vatican with its clear stands and some of its
principles, without claiming to be revolutionary, is looking not that
bad in comparison with the so-called revolutionary movement in the
West. That's pretty sad, because as everyone knows the Vatican is
counterrevolutionary.
One of the most problematic things about "Gran Torino" is that it
seems to consistently equate the experiences of Asian migrants with
the historical experiences of non-English migrants, suggesting that
Asian migrants are simply retreading the path of European migrants.
Irish, Italians, Poles, Central Europeans -- these are all
represented in "Gran Torino," and their presence is made obvious in
various ways.
Lately in general and for long time in some settings, it has been
fashionable to claim difference from the Anglo-Saxon stock (or the
straight Anglo-Saxon male, in liberal and individualist identity
politics environments). So, if someone can claim to be
seventh-generation Welsh, that is supposed to mean something in 2009,
bonus points if one also has some other non-English European
ancenstry. Connected to people calling each other racial and ethnic
names in an affectionate way is pride in individual uniqueness, white
uniqueness in the case of European people. Outside anime, New Age,
etc., communities, though, Asian identities are some of the least
desirable identities. (Anime in the West clearly involves Asian
fetishism, but this reviewer is not talking about sexual desire
here.) And, the addition of other identities often makes things
worse, not better, for the Asian persyn. A homosexual Asian might
been treated as being pathological -- more madness on top of supposed
madness -- while gay whites are hip. Margaret Cho seemed to have
potential to change this, but things are looking shaky now with
George Takei's being called "sick" and "psychotic" and appearing in
minstrel-type comedic situations.
"Gran Torino" raises that Irish can call Asians "slopes" if Asians
can call Irish drunk paddies and so forth. In reality, most such
name-calling is just bitching, not jovial assertiveness, and most of
the bitching is against non-whites, not between whites raising each
other's ancestries. Euro-Amerikans sit on a hill watching non-whites
attack each other: Blacks and Latinos complaining about Asians as a
group, Blacks and Latinos complaining about each other, and
shortsighted Asians who think the model minority idea is a good thing
validating white discourses about Blacks and Latinos. Political
correctness is based on super-profits, but some of what would happen
in the place of political correctness favors whites in the short run.
Of course, racism is already implicit in political correctness. It
can be expressed in language like this: Instead of a Mexican persyn
being called a "lazy Mexican" and a Chinese persyn being called a
"crazy chink," they are called "unmotivated" and
"passive-aggressive." Without Kowalski opening his mouth and spewing
slurs, "Gran Torino" depicts a Latino gang and a reserved Asian boy
with no so-called social life. Some of this is explained and there
are contrasts with other Hmong youth, but it takes a white persyn,
someone outside the Hmong people, to man Thao up, so to speak.
It's not that people should spend a lot of time whining about other
people's racist whining about work- and leisure-related things. It
all seems unimportant in comparison with the bombing of Asians in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example. The point is that Amerika has
not come up with a structural or ideological solution to ethnicity
and nationality problems that is good. Overall, so-called progress in
the West cannot be separated from having more imperialist
super-profits to go around. Something else that "Gran Torino" raises
is that people of different cultures should not associate too much.
Uniting whites around such an idea would be reactionary, and
Kowalski's remarks on mixing are obviously accompanied by racist
name-calling, but Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey are looking
better than ever right now. What exists now is a country of
exploiters with an internal national structure, where Euro-Amerika
dominates other nations and different nations are separated or
integrated as required by imperialism. Liberal individualism masks
this structure. Asians confronting unclearly defined Black,
Euro-Amerikan and Latino nations in U.$. urban centers face an
uncertain role in U.$. society, drawn toward inclusion and away from
Asian or Asian-descended nationalism but subject to informal
processes and structures of exclusion, and formal ones like rules
pertaining to recent migrants. This will not stop until the United
$tates is destroyed, possibly by being divided at first into
occupation zones belonging to different foreign nations.
Mostly, the effect of "Gran Torino," besides being food for hungry
Eastwood fans, will be as a vignette about one people's journey in
the United $tates and a movie about humyn nature, but treating people
as individuals. Asians can be gangbangers just like Latin Americans
-- deep. For others, "Gran Torino" will provide excuses to repress
migrants. There is little that can be learned in "Gran Torino" about
Hmong people that cannot be learned in a law enforcement agency study
of Hmong gangs. Why let Hmong people in if they are just going to end
up like those Mexicans, may be an idea that occurs to viewers, not a
statement about the myth of the American Dream. However, there may be
a critique of individualism in "Gran Torino" intersecting with white
nationalism. In addition to the movie's raising the idea of Black
males molesting Asian girls on the street in one scene, Kowalski
speaks negatively of the date Thao's sister was on with a white boy,
whom he calls a wimp. Through "Gran Torino," there is a theme of
self-centeredness destroying the family, and community, including
Kowalski's own rugged individualism accentuated with Kowalski's
reprising a Wild West role and exercising his right to exclude people
from his private land with a gun. If nothing else, Kowalski's
attachment to property discourages him from moving to a place with a
greater concentration of whites. This reviewer can see some whites
nodding their heads and thinking that something is wrong with
Amerikan culture (not just so-called liberalism), that it is bad for
white people, too. This reviewer has not done in-depth investigation,
but according to 2000 U.$. census data the number of Hmong people in
Metro Detroit was less than 5,000, the size of a few large high
schools. This reviewer does not know whether Hmong people can avoid
inter-ethnic dating and gain from that avoidance without promoting
fighting between groups of exploited people globally,(1) but there is
going to be a difference between the impact a culture has on a
minority scattered in a country and the impact the same culture has
on two hundred million people dominating them.
The idea that a white male can find acceptance in the East via an
Asian female itself smells of Asian fetishism. "Gran Torino" actually
seems to criticize Asian fetishism in various ways. On certain levels
opposing colonialism and "objectification" in the abstract, "Gran
Torino" looks good. The problem is that white opposition to
inter-ethnic relationships is more likely to lead to closing borders
more, and racism with more negative ideas about the females, than
anything progressive. At this point in history, there is going to be
either Asian fetishism, or ideas about Asian wimmin as being depraved
that have historically been connected to anti-Asian white lynch mobs.
White females benefit from the second image of Asian females where
objectification of Asian females is replaced with ideas about white
females as being romantically desirable and Asian females as being
romantically undesirable. Of course, a kind of Asian fetishism with
accompanying ideas about Asian males is involved in current wars on
Muslim oppressed nations. Maybe that is a place to oppose Asian
fetishism -- where military, CIA and State Department recruiters are.
The proletariat does not need to send out a single message to whites
in the United $tates, unless those whites are being addressed as
potential revolutionaries. It's not that U.$. military recruiting
material etc. is communist material. Euro-Amerikan does not have a
proletariat or a revolutionary bourgeoisie. It is among the oppressed
and in supposedly revolutionary contexts where consistency is
crucial. The image of English-speaking Hmong youth not socializing
with their elders and turning to gangs for social life (in the real
world, this is also a response to other things, including racism) has
a basis in reality, and the situation of Asians surrounded by
Westerners is different from the situation of Asians who are
majorities in their countries. But something able to unite both large
and small groups of oppressed people, and minorities and majorities,
would be ideal.
The theory of bloodline most specifically refers to cross-cultural
breeding -- having children. It is necessary to separate bloodline
ideas from correct ideas about opposing Western culture. Among the
oppressed-but-pre-scientific, one comes across the idea that there
must be something wrong with white people's genes; people of European
descent seem so uniquely violent and oppressive. One merit of this is
that it may support more marriage between non-whites of different
nations, but it isn't scientific and also becomes a problem in the
context of the Soviet Union. Within a panethnicity such as Asians,
intermarriage can be based on some shared culture, and marriages
between people of different continents can be based on Catholicism,
but inter-ethnic mating in Western countries ends up being associated
with the individualism of romance culture. People then make the
mistake of associating Western culture with inter-ethnic mating,
resulting by poor reasoning in bloodline ideas opposed to the
supposed decadence of inter-ethnic mating. The alternative to
unscientific ideas about white blood and categorical opposition to
inter-ethnic mating is anti-Amerikanism, which addresses the
underlying concern about culture that people have. There is no need
to add ideas about blood or ethnic separation in the abstract to that.
A culture cannot be effectively opposed by discouraging individuals
from dating people with white skin color -- the topic of recent
Amerikan movies -- for one because Amerikan culture is not confined
to whites. Rather, anti-Amerikanism in gender could manifest as
supporting monogamy, for example. Monogamy benefits the oppressed at
this time. One can imagine Amerika projecting a more pro-monogamy
image, but demographic and social trends don't support that. More
important than encouraging or discouraging certain practices is
opposing imperialist/neo-colonial ideology and politically opposing
the United $tates. If it is unclear what anti-Amerikanism is in
practice in regard to mating or such cannot be achieved without what
Maoists call "sub-reformism," then other things should take
precedence over trying get people to mate certain people or in a
certain way; changes may take place in lifestyle without any central
direction that benefit anti-Amerikanism, but are not caused by
anti-Amerikanism. However, opposing the theory of bloodline is not
sub-reformism, but a matter of opposing genocidal intra-proletarian
fighting.
To the extent that anti-Amerikanism is not yet a realistic solution
for the preservation of Asian communities in the United $tates,
people should think about why that is. Super-profits impact the
development of political struggle among oppressed-nation people in
the United $tates, and history is another factor, connected to some
Asian migrants' thinking that U.$. involvement in Asia was a good
thing or partly a good thing -- these are obvious considerations.
Less obvious is what is going on when people oppose inter-ethnic
mating but also oppose monogamy. It goes beyond desiring integration
to imitating the racist white master's lifestyle, and its shifts, in
a general way, a lifestyle broadcast on global television and
otherwise depicted in global mass media. This could be avoided with
an anti-Amerikan focus orienting the oppressed's struggles.
Anti-Amerikanism needs to be prioritized. No guideline is perfect;
so, some groups in the United $tates may not get everything they are
seeking.
The grandmother character who sits on the porch adjacent to Kowalski
is interesting. Typically, one imagines that elders preserve culture,
but are reactionary. In theory, in the abstract, the younger
generations become more advanced than the older generations were. So,
some migrant elders discourage saluting the Amerikan flag, for
example, but hold "conservative" views and attitudes, may even be
fiercely anti-communist, and have an attitude toward integration
ranging from lukewarm to "ambitious"; 'anti-Amerikan' doesn't really
describe them. In the United $tates, there is a situation where many
children of Asian migrants, particularly among the high-income, are
more backward than the elders or parents. They may whine more about
petty things than their elders -- such whining being a foundation for
integration -- whether their elders came to the United $tates under
duress, reluctantly, or intending to assimilate. This reviewer does
not count Liberal individualism, right-wing bourgeois
internationalism, social-democracy, or postmodernism and lazy
anti-Marxist, anti-nationalist ideas, learned in college as being
more advanced than the less-articulated Asian or
origin-country-nation nationalism of migrant elders. Since Kowalski
is on his way out the door anyway, it is hard to object to Sue Lor's
trying to smooth things out, but Lor seems to play an additional role
of introducing her family to supposed liberal democracy. Sometimes
subtitles are missing (curiously), and it will be hard for the
non-Hmong-speaker to understand the grandmother, but she doesn't get
along with Kowalski as much as Sue does. That much is clear. She
wonders why Kowalski doesn't leave the neighborhood. She seems to
have something else to say, but it doesn't quite come through.
Euro-Amerikan elderly people aren't much more reactionary than
younger Euro-Amerikans and can be less reactionary for some purposes,
but there is a difference between elderly Third World migrant people
and elderly Euro-Amerikans. Euro-Amerika is one mass of exploiters
who have all settled down, with no progressive thrust. Kowalski is
together with the Hmong grandmother neither in the dustheap of
history, nor at the forefront of progress except in the sense that
old people like Kowalski may want to have fewer headaches in their
remaining years and fewer questionable actions on their record
possibly requiring trips to the confessional. Even if they weren't
known to be sins when they were committed, some sins are too great to
be handled by confession and going to the police and corrected before
dying in a war.
Notes
1. "Resolutions on Cross-Cultural Breeding,"
http://prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/crosscultural2004.
html