The U.S.A.--The United States of Afraid?

Great Wall of China

All the political talk about building a wall between us and Mexico is more than disturbing, considering history.
Remember, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall"? Now, we're saying, "Mr. Trump, Build that wall."
Consider the historic walls, many designed to keep people out, or is it to keep people in?  
What's the difference? A matter of perception, perhaps. Aren't they all built on fear? Today there is a story on the front page of the New York Times about Hungary building a fence to keep immigrants out. 

What kind of mindset does it create

for those living behind a wall?

Consider our high-priced "gated communities," many with guards at the gates and medieval architecture. All the houses are cookie cutter and all the people living inside think alike--perhaps medievally, excluding those who are different. 
You become hostages in your own land, thinking like medieval people seeking refuge in a stone castle for protection against the barbarians. I understand armed guards at military gates, but those living inside are not living in fear.
Has the U.S.A. become the United States of Afraid?
And, in the long span of history, have any of these walls actually worked? 

Here are some other famous walls, in historical order.

Hadrian's Wall, England

Maginot Line, France

Berlin Wall

North-South Korea

Israel

U.S.-Mexico

The blog at 130 "countries"--Las Vegas east

• 2-14--Palestine
• 5-14--El Salvador
• 8-14-Albania
• 8-14--Liechtenstein
• 10-3--Macau

I am continually amazed at the people around the world who click on this blog--I wish I knew who they were, and their stories. More than a year ago, I started running short posts about those countries, with brief histories, maps, stories and photos, but got "blogged" down.

And frankly, being a goal-oriented type A journalist, I slacked off because I assumed I'd about reached the limit of reach for Coffee with Clark.
I do check the stats on the blog almost daily, and have been meaning to write about more readership from Ukraine and Hong Kong, those places where freedom is under attack from authoritarian despots and brave people are risking their lives for what we Americans take for granted. More on that later.
But this week, a reader from Macau, the former Portuguese colony near Honk Kong, became someone from the 130th  country to at list click on the blog. Macau, a former hell-hole of sin, was ceded back to China in 1999 the same year Britain give up Hong Kong, which is only 64 kilometers east of it.

Macau's flag

It, with Hong Kong, is one of the two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China. With an estimated population of around 624,000 in an area of 31 square kilometers, it is the most densely populated region on the planet.
It is also the richest, and in 2006 became the world's largest gambling center, dwarfing Las Vegas.
Communist authoritarian China leaves it alone, at least so far, because of the the money (as it has Hong Kong until the current crisis.) Under the policy of "one country, two systems," China is responsible for the defense and foreign affairs, while Macau maintains its own legal system, police force, monetary system, customs policy, and immigration policy.
At the top of this post are the other countries where citizens have clicked on the blog for the first time this year--Palestine (another area of suffering), El Salvador, Albania and Liechtenstein.
If you're interested, here is my earlier post on Hong Kong from March a year ago.

Country at top of world, No. 119 on the blog

Mountains speak to me, and to many others, but I imagine they speak no louder anyplace in the world that in Nepal, where a reader clicked on the blog this week, making it the 119th country to have done so.
"The roof of the world" sounds trite, and understates this place I've always dream of visiting for two reasons. The first is the mountains. Nepal is home to the world's highest point, Mt.Everest, (Sagarmatha (सगरमाथा) in Nepali, "Forehead of the Sky"), at 29,029 feet, on the northern border with Tibet/China...and the country is home to 240 Himalayan peaks topping 20,000 feet.

It's not all mountains however, with a fertile, humid lowlands in the south. The other reason I'd like to visit is the name of its capital, Kathmandu. That is just so beckoning of adventure and being far away. I've been fortunate to have one Nepalese student here at UCO.
The country is a little larger than Arkansas and a little smaller than Oklahoma. It stretches 487 miles from from east to west, and from 150 to 250 miles wide, landlocked between Tibet--now ruled by China--and India, with a population of about 27 million.

About 80 percent of the population are Hindus, and, although Gautama Buddha was born in the country, about nine percent Buddhist.
The country was a monarchy  from 1768 until 2008, when a civil war ended and a federal multi-part republic was adopted. There is still turmoil between  the communist party and others, and elections are scheduled for this November.
The flag is unique in the world, the only one not a square or rectangle. Based on a design almost 2,000 years old, red is the national  color and that of the rhododendron. Blue symbolizes beach, and the triangles perhaps the mountains, the two symbols the permanence of the universe. (Some Material for this post came from Wikipedia.)
View a YouTube video of a flight over Everest below:

This gives me a chance to quote my favorite writer, John McPhee, who writes about geography. In Basin and Range, he wrote: "When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone."
At the top are 400-million-year-old fossils--the bones and shells of creatures that died in ancient seas--Ordovician limestone. The Himalayas began forming about 65 million years ago when the Indo-Australian plate of the earth's crust moved north and under the Eurasian plate, pushing the rocks up. 
The earth's crustal plates are still moving, India going north more than an inch a year, and the mountains rising up to 10 millimeters a year. That gives you an idea of how long this took, pushing mountains up more than five miles. We are small, and brief indeed.

The blog at 101

The country defines remote. And somewhere, there's a new reader of Coffee with Clark, bringing to 101 the number of countries with readers here.

Today, a reader from Mongolia showed up, raising more questions and story possibilities for me. How in the world...?
When I was growing up, there was Outer Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, the inner being part of China. After all these years, there's now only the former Outer, now Mongolia. I know more about this country because I've had a student from there this past year, a smiling, intelligent young man about to graduate. He's from the Chinese Mongolia, but has relatives in the country to the north. His presentation on Mongolian Media was a highlight of my International Media class in the fall.

History

It's most famous in the west because of Genghis Khan who founded the Mongol Empire  in 1206, and continued under his son Kublai, dominating China and central Asia. Tibetan Buddhism conquered the country in the 1500s, and then it was ruled by a Chinese dynasty until its collapse in 1911. It gained independence in 1921 and wasn't recognized until after WWII, and then the USSR took over, making it a satellite state. With that collapse in 1989 the country declared independence again, elected a multi-part parliament and turned to the market system. 

Mongolia is the most sparsely settled country in the world, with only about 3.5 million people, (the size of Oklahoma  in an area bigger than our entire Great Plains) almost half of whom live in the capital, Ulan Bator. Its harsh country and weather makes it a natural for about 25 percent of the population who are nomadic. It is indeed remote, with mountains to the north and the Gobi Desert to the south, bordered on all sides either by Russia or China.It's the second largest landlocked country in the world. About 20 percent of the population live on the equivalent of about $1.25 a day.
Its flag, adopted in 1992,  carries blue for the vast sky, and red for the harsh climate and country. A yellow symbol, the "soyombo,"  represents the four elements and the Yin/Yang.

China--flags of conflicts and centuries

The Hong Kong Flag

How do you write about  thousands of years of conflicts and civilizations and the flags that represent them?
Perhaps one person at a time.
So my procrastination about writing about readers of this blog from the People's Republic of China and The Republic of China ended today, when I had a reader from Hong Kong.
If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that we Americans don't really understand cultures older than ours, and world histories, so I'm reticent to write about them. Trying to be a journalist and be even-handed, that means keeping an American perspective out of world events, and it's not really possible. But I try.

I grew up when "Red China" was one of the evil empires threatening the U.S., and bent on destroying freedom. The Republic of China on Formosa was the democracy and Hong Kong was a British colony. There's no doubt in my mind that the current People's Republic of China is still a threat of the U.S., now primarily economically, and it is a foe of freedom of expression. But I've also learned that money and capitalism between countries, called "markets," overrules ideology most of the time, and that affects the three of the flags in this post. And that I wasn't told the whole story of Hong Kong and Formosa.

China's population--the largest in the world-- and economic potential dwarfs ours in many ways, but nothing compared to its history. Here it is in a shallow nutshell. China is old, very old. For years it was ruled by dynasties as an empire, until 1912, when a republic was formed. By this time western nations had seized parts of the country, including the British at HongKong to protect the opium trade which China was trying to suppress.
In the 1920s with the rise of Chiang Kai-Shek the nationalist party couldn't negotiate with the communist party and a civil war started. A truce was declared when the Japanese invaded and slaughtered hundreds of thousands. (America's Flying Tigers operated with the Kuomintang, the nationalist party, against the Japanese).

After WWII, the civil war resumed and Mao Zedong and the communists won in 1950, driving Chiang's forces t 50 miles off the coast to the island of Formosa--now called Taiwan. The U.S., involved in Korea and at the start of the Red Scare, sided with Chiang, even though he was no less a dictator than Mao. The US has come close to war in this Chinese rivalry, including in the Kennedy years over a couple of non-descript little islands, Quemoy and Matsu. During this time Red China also "annexed" Tibet, a dispute still going on. The two Chinese countries continue to claim all of China, but the fact is after all these years, it's pretty much status quo--which means there's no economic reason to alter it.

Flag of the People's Republic of China

Then in 1999, Britain gave up its colony of Hong Kong and it reverted to Chinese control,but with a difference. Socialist China realized the capitalistic powerhouse of Hong Kong, and allows it to so operate. If this summary offends you, then so be it, but money talks. And Americans should certianly be in favor of ending colonialism, shouldn't we?
Hong Kong operates under the saying, "one country, two systems." Its regional flag shows that. It carries the festive red of Chinese people. The Bauhinia flower, discovered in Hong Kong, is the main symbol, but it has five petals and stars to coincide the stars of the flag of the People's Republic of China.
The flag of China carries five golden stars, one  large and four smaller ones. The red is for the Communist revolution, the large star is for the Communist party and the others for the four classes, proletarian workers, agricultural peasants, bourgeoisie, and capitalists.

Across the straight of Formosa another Chinese flag flies, this one also red, but with the blue and white symbol of the Chinese Republic before WWII.
I have had students from both Chinese countries, and in sort of a wake up  to me, when I was working on my doctorate at OSU many years ago, one of my fellow students was from "Red" China. Her father had flown Migs in the Korean War.
With the death of Mao and of Chiang, both countries have changed. The Republic of China is now truly democratic and an economic dynamo, and The People's Republic of China, while still communist, is adjusting to the practical constraints of a world economic power. That includes allowing Hong Kong to be capitalist.

I find it fascinating, that the communist state, with control of so much media, and in the news for hacking US computers, has citizens who read this blog.  The world is small.
China is complicated, and will be a force in America for a long time, including most recently, in putting pressure on its not-so subservient North Korean rogue state.

A "Red" state's flags and impact on America

Among the readers of this blog are citizens of another of the real "red" states, Vietnam, a country with a long history of invasion, colonization, and war, again deeply involved in American history and now culture.
For my generation, Vietnam went from someplace we'd never heard of to a years-long nightmare for the country and thousands of servicemen and families. That country has had a huge influence on America.
Vietnam first gained independence from China in 938 and flourished until the mid-1800s when the French occupied and colonized by the French. Today's flag, with the yellow star on the communist red background, was first used in 1940 in a communist uprising against the French, and later in 1941 against the Japanese in WWII. Ho Chí Minh declared Vietnam independent in 1945 and it became the flag of North Vietnam in 1954 after the French were defeated and the country divided.

The flag of South Vietnam

That's when the yellow flag with three red stripes--for the country's tree main divisions, became the flag of South Vietnam, the one that adorns U.S. veterans'  combat medals today. Fearing Communism and the so-called "domino theory," the US was drawn into the country's conflict less than five years later, to repeat the French mistakes. Those were the years, in the mid- 1960s to the early 1970s,  I lived in fear of the mailbox bringing a draft notice. I wouldn't have run, and came close to serving. Ironically, my final deferment is now a member of the U.S. Armed Forces.

With the capture of Saigon, the American retreat,  the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the reunification of the country, the red flag now flies,  the red background of the communist part honoring the Paris commune of 1871, symbolizing blood and revolution with the yellow star representing the unity of workers, peasants, intellectuals, youths and soldiers in building socialism.After the war the country languished but initiated free-market reforms beginning in 1986 to become a robust Socialist country, with a burgeoning American tourist trade.

Some American notes on the effects of Vietnam:

• The war divided America politically as much as Vietnam was divided. 
• Thousands of Americans who fought and died in that war are named individually on the stunning Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. 
• The war is still with us. Sen. John McCain, and newly appointed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel are both survivors and veterans. Servicemen still hate Jane Fonda, "Hanoi Jane."
• Among the healthiest, hardest working, most vibrant and growing populations in America are the Vietnamese. You have to look no further than the "Asian District" of Oklahoma City around Classen and 23rd to see.
• Conclusion: fresh blood  and diversity revitalizes and energizes America. But the costs to both countries has been huge.  

"French" Indochina in 1913--including what is now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia 

 

Daily flags and countries and blogs

 Among the readers of this blog today are residents of Germany (the second highest number of all time followers, after USA), and China.

Blogging, the power and risk

This article abut a citizen journalist and blogger in China from today's New York Times shows the power and risks and reach of blogging. It's a perfect assignment for my blogging class, and for this fall's International media class. I find it interesting that China has a muckraker, but America doesn't seem to have any.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/asia/chinese-blogger-thrives-in-role-of-muckraker.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0