Bangkok, day two: Wat Suthat and the Giant Swing

After I left Wat Phony I walked all the way around the National Museum, the royal palace and Wat Phra Kaew. Seemed to take hours, though it was barely one. No tuk-tuks today, remember? I'd promised myself. 

I'd originally intended to tour the palace and Wat Phra Kaew, but I changed my mind when I came around the corner of the palace wall and saw the pulsating throng crowding the main gate. White tourists buses kept rolling up and disgorging clamoring heaps of pudgy, fatuous, ridiculously-dressed Asian and European tourists, and I "couldn't get no show" as Mark Twain would say. I walked on, past the museum, fighting my way through the stagnant afternoon heat, trailing a japing pack of young Thai army cadets on a long and completely unnecessary detour around Saranrom Park. I probably should've stopped and strolled through this park, but didn't because another pack of army cadets was doing drills in it and I didn't want to have anything to do with the military while I was here. 

On the east side of the park I was accosted by a plain-clothed policeman of Chinese descent with a bristly, pencil-thin mustache and a whiny, nasally voice who wanted me to walk (or rather, hire a tuk-tuk) to take me to the giant standing Buddha at Wat Intharawihan. I nodded, said I'd consider it, and walked north to Wat Suthat (and the Giant Swing, which isn't really a swing at all). 

In this temple, I found Nirvana—or the closest thing to it on such a hot, miserable, swampy day. I sat down on the red velvet floor and gazed contemplatively over the enormous sitting Buddha, with his long earlobes and his languorous hooded eyes and his lips tinged with that old Angkor smile. I liked Wat Suthat better than any other temple I'd been in, and I've been to temples in six Asian countries. I've been to temples with Buddha statues of solid emerald and floors of pure silver, temples with heaps of glittering gold artifacts sitting at the Enlightened One's feet, temples saturated with the smell of incense and washed with the rays of the sun and the spray of the sea. To blazes with them all; I liked Wat Suthat. 

It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was airy and breezy and cool. There were hardly any phonies. The ceiling was high and vaulted and had all the quiet reverential quality of a church. The pillars and walls were coated in scenes depicting the life and trials of the prince Siddhartha, fantastically intact after all this time. There were a few worshipers—old men, mostly—quietly meditating and bowing. Electric fans hummed soothingly away in the background. I sat on the temple grounds for 40 minutes and inside the temple proper for 15, just soaking up the atmosphere (and drying off after my long walk). 

the death of Neo-Confucianism in Korea...?

All eyes are once again on Asia this week, President Obama having wrapped up his four-nation Asia tour (leaving hearty Filipino protests in his wake) and the Sewol disaster fresh in everyone's minds. However, yet another disaster—or near disaster—in South Korea has stolen the public eye. 

You might have heard about the subway train accident we had this Friday. QiRanger does a very thorough video update about it here, where you can get all the facts.

I'm not here to debate particulars, cast blame or express relief that everyone aboard those two trains survived. I'm not here to tell you that I travel on Line 2 all the time and could have easily been involved in the accident. (I have, actually, been aboard a Line 5 train that braked so hard and so unexpectedly that all six dozen people in the car with me went sprawling like dominoes, and I wound up flat on my back with a rucksack full of booze under me and my livid fiancée on my stomach.) 

I just want to say two things. 

First, subway accidents in Korea never happen. They are the exception, not the rule. Korean railways are tightly and safely run. The Seoul metro is one of the cleanest, safest, most efficient and easiest-to-use metropolitan light rail systems in the world, despite being one of the busiest. Its safety record was, to my knowledge, flawless up to this point. There was a nasty incident in December 2013 when an inexperienced train operator filling in during a strike ordered the subway doors closed too early, and an 84-year-old woman was dragged a short distance and killed. Oh, and the Daegu subway fire ten years before that, I suppose. But those were freak occurrences brought on by circumstance: a vengeful cab driver and an unschooled scab, as it were. This recent subway accident took place during regular hours, and wasn't caused by a mass murderer or a strike. It just happened. I would have said it was impossible.

Second...you may be witnessing the death of Neo-Confucianism in Korea. 

An Hyang (1243-1306), widely
considered to be the founder of
Neo-Confucianism in Korea.

As I discussed in my previous post about the Sewol sinking (which I linked to above), Korea's guiding star has been the Neo-Confucian model ever since the early days of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). Some of Confucianism's central tenets are filial piety, respect and reverence, loyalty, and shame. It is unthinkable to disobey or show disrespect to one's elders. There is a very strict social hierarchy wherein each individual is classified according to age, experience, seniority, and other factors. Someone who's above you on that scale deserves the highest respect; anyone below you is yours to command. 

And in fact, this system, which served Korea well throughout its long and often brutal history, was just what caused the deaths of so many children during the Sewol debacle. The children and other passengers were told to stay put in the cabins and corridors, and bowing to the captain's lofty position and experience, they obeyed. Unfortunately, the captain proved to be an incompetent and untrustworthy coward, and many children met their fates as a result. This event, as I noted in my blog post about the sinking, has shaken Korea to its roots, particularly the younger generations. Many in Korea seem to have begun to doubt the worth and universal applicability of Neo-Confucian values. 

Nowhere is this growing doubt more apparent than in the subway train passengers' reaction to the drivers' instructions in the moments following the collision at Sangwangsimni Station. They were told to stay put, and hardly any of them listened this time. Quite a number of passengers pried open the train doors and leaped down onto the tracks and into the tunnel.

Now there's something I never would have believed possible. Korean folks disobeying instructions from a competent authority? Prying open doors and leaping onto train tracks? Anarchy!  

Does it mean that the Neo-Confucian underpinnings of this country's culture and society are beginning to erode? Only time will tell, but I think the signs are there. Goodness knows what will happen if I'm right. A complete paradigm shift might be in the offing. You may rest assured that I'll keep an eye on things over here, and let you know if I see anything noteworthy. 

But now you must excuse me. I have a four-day weekend to get back to. Children's Day is Monday and Buddha's Birthday is Tuesday. Two unrelated lunar holidays in a row. That never happens here, either. The unexpected double-whammy has convinced all the foreigners on the peninsula to throw a grand Cinco de Mayo bash. Colored lanterns are strung up all across the city, Seoul's high society are turning out in droves in their best tailored suits and tulle skirts, and the Americans and Canadians are getting blitzed in the bars and staggering around Itaewon wearing sombreros in broad daylight. Me, I'm taking introspective walks by the Yangjae Stream and meeting friends from out-of-town for a bite of Thai-Japanese fusion and a sip of beer. Oh, the expat life. 

Postie out...

Dostoevsky revisited

As none of you are currently aware, I just finished rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. It is and shall remain one of my favorite books of any genre. For the longest time I was never able to say exactly why. It resonated with me, certainly; I could relate to the corrosive, self-deprecating tailspin of insecurity and the crippling, isolating lack of self-confidence. (It was the hallmark of my school years—where, like Dostoevsky's unnamed protagonist, I looked upon my ant-brained classmates and their crude ambitions with disgust.) But thanks to Dostoevsky's evocative style, and the quality translation which preserved it, Notes from Underground interested me—compelled me—far more than any other work I read in school. The exact reason eluded me.

Then, on this third reading, more than six years after I first laid eyes on the novel, it hit me.

Dostoevsky hit the nail on the head.

He exposed a universal but uncomfortable truth.

With the jolting truthfulness which no other work has achieved so bluntly and plainly, Notes from Underground lays bare a portion of the human psyche which absolutely rules human interaction and individual ego. And yet, it is the most secretive, skulking, shameful part of us. It imparts a need unto our consciousness which we staunchly deny in public, but furtively—even subconsciously—seek to assuage.

And that need is, simply, the need to be recognized as a worthwhile human being. No, not even recognized—simply acknowledged. 

This is not the weirdest thing I want to tell you about tonight, though. It does have something to do with acknowledgement, rest assured. Listen to this:

I have not yet met the director of the academy where I work.

Weird, right? I've been there four months and I've only seen the guy in the corridors, or ensconced in his office. Mr. Rah is his name. At my first hagwon, the director, Mr. Hwang, met me at the airport, introduced himself, and did everything in his power to make my stay more comfortable. In the present day, Mr. Rah can't even be bothered to introduce himself or ask me how I'm doing. It makes a person feel mighty insignificant, let me tell you. I mean, I realize I'm not much more than chattel as far as he's concerned. I'm a warm body. A brain that know English. A mouth that can teach Korean children. A foreign name Mr. Rah can slap on a newsletter and send to potential customers.

Still, being reminded of that fact is unpleasant. Nay, cankerous.

Two weeks ago at work, Mr. Rah and I had...an encounter. You can't really label it as anything else. It was not a conversation, or even an exchange. The bell had rung for third period. I got up from my desk, grabbed my teaching materials, and sauntered into the hallway. Approaching me down this hallway was Mr. Rah himself, strolling along as though he owned the place. His mouth was set in a firm line. His thick body dominated the narrow space. His idle gaze swept the corridor. Our eyes met. There was no one behind me. We were alone in that passageway. The squeals of bleating children, the thunderous beat of their sneakers and sandals as they charged in through the main entrance, submerged into a pool of silence. The moment stretched into infinity.

With an internal monologue that would've made Notes from Underground's protagonist proud, I wondered what to do. I had been told that it was respectful to bow to Mr. Rah (in the Korean fashion, with a swift jerk of the head) upon seeing him. He was the Great and Beneficent Director and all. My mind and spirit rebelled against the idea. Why should I pay him his due as my employer, when he had done nothing to formally accept me as his employee? What did I owe him? "One good turn deserves another," they'd readily cry at me, but what if the inception of that goodwill is lacking altogether?

And, of course, I decided to comply. I lowered my head to him. I gave an almost spastic yank of my neck. My reluctance must have been painfully obvious. But I did it. Why not? After all, it couldn't hurt. It would force him to acknowledge me. He'd see my show of respect, the extension of goodwill, a selfless act of international cooperation. He'd be compelled—no, forced—to reciprocate. I knew the Koreans by now. They were bound by such laws as these. A cockroach living in Mr. Rah's pantry, eating his rice, could've jerked its head at him, and he would have been forced to bow back, just to calcify the relationship between benefactor and beneficiary. To have left such a gesture unanswered would have been unthinkable, anathema, contrary to millennia of cultural norms.

He didn't bow back.

Far from it. When my head came back up, his eyes had slid away from me, and were pointing purposefully down the hall, already forgetful of my presence. I might have been a dust mote wafting through the air. I was reminded, jarringly, of Aesop's story of the gnat and the bull. But then came the crowning humiliation. Without once looking over at me, Mr. Rah lifted his index finger and made a sort of twirling, hurry-up motion with it, indicating that I was loitering in the hallways and needed to get to class. The bell had rung mere seconds before. I was in the hallway, in the very act of stepping toward Room 203, materials in hand. And yet I received the "get to class, thou sluggard" treatment.  

I stood there for perhaps 5-10 seconds, stunned beyond belief. My mind had caved in. I could not conceive of it. The nerve! The impoliteness! The callousness! How rude! How crass! How impolitic!

And here is where I really channeled Dostoevsky's underground man again. Outwardly, I remained calm. Inwardly, I gnashed my teeth, foaming at the mouth in fury. I squirmed like a worm stuck with a pin. It was too much to bear. I hadn't been insulted; I had been ignored, which was a million times worse. If he'd stuck out his tongue at me as he'd passed, I'd have branded him a loony and contentedly passed the remainder of the day. But being ignored was indigestible, insoluble. I felt like hurling my books at him. Mentally, I stuck out my foot and tripped him as he walked past. I spat on him, hurled invectives at him, plotted the sweetest and vilest of revenges. I even went so far as to ask my coworkers in the staffroom whether intensive courses were voluntary or not. (Intensives, which will take place in August, mean an extra round of morning classes for us, as we metamorphose for a time into a full-blown cram school.) Upon learning that they were, I thought "Hang them! And hang Mr. Rah! I'll take a vacation that week!"

Later, over beers with my friends that night (again channeling the underground man) I calmed down. I mellowed out. In fact, I felt as though I had overreacted (and later regretted feeling this way, and gnashed my teeth again). I was persuaded to believe that Mr. Rah was an odd duck, who took funny turns, and liked to twirl his hands and snap his fingers when the mood took him. Perhaps he was strolling the halls with a sort of restrained but barely-containable jollity about him. I must have tweaked his sensibilities, triggered a reaction, loosened a brick in the emotive dike, and coaxed some strange gesture of gaiety from him. Later, when the beer had worn off, I saw that this was hogwash. One doesn't twirl his fingers with a deadpan expression on his face. Innocuous his gesture may have been, but it made me mad. It wasn't just a personal slight. I sensed some monstrous injustice in his actions, a base incorrectness, a gross discrepancy between zeitgeist and reality. With a wave of his hand, the director had epitomized the callous Korean (nay, Asian) corporate mindset, which holds that people on the lowest rung are mere bugs compared with the executives. They can be bullied, coerced, taken advantage of, and ignored in equal measure.

Miss H and I took a night cruise along the Han River last evening. As the ferryboat slid under bridges and past the twinkling lights of Seoul (one of the most intentional cities on Earth, as Dostoevsky might have written), we had occasion to meet an American couple. I'll call them Betty and George. They lived in Daegu, and taught at the U.S. military base. Betty had run a half-marathon in Seoul that morning, and George was part of a jazz ensemble, and played concerts and gigs around Korea. Still stung from my encounter with Mr. Rah, I asked George for his opinion of his employers and managers. Did they treat him like a commodity, or like a person? His answer gave me food for thought. He said that the greatest obstacle to proper business relations was the language barrier. The more English the Korean speaks—or the more Korean the foreigner speaks—the more human the relationship. Frostiness becomes friendliness, impersonality fades away, familiarity breeds cooperation and harmony and companionship. Learning the languages, he said, did wonders to improve the interrelation between employer and employee.

To that end, I have resolved to learn Korean to the very best of my ability. I'll lay in wait. I'll let Mr. Rah cruise along, master of his domain, comfortable in his position and his superiority. Then I'll rattle his cage. I'll knock the foundations out from under his castle. I'll be Dostoevsky's underground man, dressed in his finest clothing, going to slap Zverkov and challenge him to a duel. I'll invite myself into Mr. Rah's office, plonk myself down in a chair (maybe even his chair) and say, in flawless Korean, "Howdy boss-man, what's the good word today? You don't know me, because you've never bothered to meet me, but I'm one of your employees. Don't you think it's about time we had a confab and got to know each other?"

And, just like the underground man, I will probably never do it.

That's why I like Notes from Underground.

Thoreau's hit list

If he had one, I'm on it. And probably Karl Marx's and Friedrich Nietzsche's, too.

Why?

I have way too much crap.

Way too much.

If Thoreau, Marx and Nietzsche were teleported into my bedroom at this very instant, and perused the absolute disarray to which it has been reduced, with piles of junk and trinkets and baubles occupying every flat surface, and umpteen bazillion hats and coats and shoes in the closet (yes, I'm a clothes-horse), and papers and notes and photographs and picture frames lying everywhere, and no less than seven cardboard boxes of books shoved into my brother's room for safekeeping, they'd be appalled. Thoreau would holler at me to simplify, Marx would fulminate about my materialism, and Nietzsche would aim a few mocking jibes at my sentimental and pointless memorabilia.

I wouldn't blame them. I've been doing likewise.

The intervening time between this and my last post has been spent desperately trying to whip my small room into some semblance of order, to cram the trappings of my life into manageable containers. I've lugged some cardboard boxes out of the shed, taped them together, and have been steadily stowing away all the detritus of my quarter-century's existence. I cannot believe I let this go so long, nor the sheer volume of material I'm dealing with. There are so many things which I should have let go long ago: old pictures, greeting cards, outdated documents, rough drafts of stories too puerile to preserve...the list goes on and on.

But I'm making progress. My nightstand has been cleared of CD cases, notebooks and electronics; my filing cabinet has been purged; only the dust remains under my bed. I still have, however, the daunting task of clearing the larger gewgaws out of my desk drawers, and packing up the clothes in my closet. This'll take some doing. And I must exercise caution and restraint as well. The well-worn seat of my armchair, now a repository for the equipment and essentials I will bring with me to South Korea, is near to overflowing.

Where did I pick up all this crap, anyway?!

I look around the room (a roadrunner just ran by the window, making me think of Jerry's desert musings). I see a beaten canteen hanging from the chair, along with the plastic bag full of taco sauce pouches I promised Smithy I'd take to Korea with me. Suspended from the other side is the plastic bag with all my medicines and first-aid equipment in it, and a shoulder holster with a ripped seam. Lying on top of the desk is a boggling assortment of trinkets: a Lego seaplane, several sets of headphones, cables and power cords to who-knows-what, a packing tape dispenser, an old Walkman, my new laptop speaker, a photograph from our trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific, a coffee mug with my name on it, library books, a jar of Korean wishing stars painstakingly handmade by my lovely girlfriend, and a desk lamp that has my prized Stetson fedora and the tassel from my university mortarboard hanging from it.

To my left, on the top shelf of my closet, I can see an untidy jumble of hats, a mosquito net in a drawstring bag, and the glow-in-the-dark hockey mask I wore at the Halloween party and scared the bejesus out of John and Matt with.

On the small TV tray in front of the bed there's a picture frame showcasing my great uncle's uniform patches and insignia from the cavalry regiment he served with in Vietnam; a pair of orange hat brushes; my brand-new HD webcam, still in its package; a tin of Icebreakers Sours; a lottery ticket; my checkbook; and the DVDs for Spider-man 2 and 3, awaiting transferal to some less discerning owner.

In and around the armchair are haphazardly piled a couple of laptop briefcases, several decks of cards, a small heap of books (concerning alcoholic beverages and card games, mostly), passport pictures, address books, important papers, artifacts from my travels, and my precious journals.

The dresser is by far the worst offender, a fountain of materialistic indiscretion. Quite apart from the raiment overflowing from its drawers, its summit is crowned with flotsam. Shammies and chemicals for cleaning spectacles and LCD screens; a small vanity filled with loose buttons, batteries, ticket stubs and foreign coins; a pinochle deck; more books (Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me); a ledger where I keep track of my spare change; rolls of quarters and nickels and dimes; a flashlight; a disassembled music-box, given to me by one of my Korean students; a nifty black pouch containing my five USB drives, and thereby my entire writing career; several pairs of glasses and sunglasses snug in their cases; a can of lighter fluid; a toy Model T and several metal-and-plastic warbirds; and a whiskey-tasting certificate from the Old Jameson Distillery in Dublin, Ireland.

On the hooks behind the door are two mostly-pristine flight suits in desert tan, American flags gaily gleaming from their shoulders; my old blue TacAir  baseball cap; two pairs of bathrobes; and a dusty ocarina from who-can-tell-where.

The walls are mostly bare; I've taken my Korean flag down, and all the pages torn from various warbird calendars; but the framed jigsaw puzzles and the Indiana Jones theatrical posters remain.

I've gotten rid of us much as I possibly could. I'm no hoarder, but it's difficult to lightly pass up the virtues of the pack rat. It seems like every bauble, every half-faded line on a wrinkled sheet of paper, every dog-eared book and creased photograph holds some happy memory within it.

I'll stop there. You know what comes next: a load of maudlin reminiscence. I'll spare you.

Suffice to say, this is a more monumental task than I anticipated (but isn't it always?). I'm slogging through it. I anticipate having my room entirely packed up, my existence encapsulated, by the middle of the month. All of it will go into storage while your humble author and a few select garments and trinkets and novels will sally forth unto East Asia. More about that later.

And by the way, Happy New Year.

one Briton, one Scot, and one Irishman

A poor attempt at satirizing a George Thorogood tune, I know. But I didn't want an awkward title. I was going to originally call this "a few of my favorite Scotsmen" but then I thought the English and the Irish would get ticked off (and the Welsh would probably feel that way, too, but I've already talked about them, so they haven't got a leg to stand on). If nothing else, I'm a fair man. So I said, "The heck with it. I'll do what I do best: a play on words." I thought since I'm heading to the U.K. in LESS THAN A WEEK (grooooooooooooooooovy), I'd pen a little article about some of my favorite people who are from around there. There's quite a few. I mean, I have favorite people all over the world. Miyamoto Musashi, in Japan; Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Russia; Montezuma, in Mexico (just for the name); Hypatia, in Greece; and Leonardo da Vinci, in Italy, just to name a few (and NO, I don't like him because of that stupid Dan Brown book). But I've always been something of an Anglophile. You remember how I said I'm on a secret mission to impress British folk? That's part of it. Plus it's hard not to appreciate a country where some of the world's greatest writers, poets, rock-'n'-rollers, explorers, and pirates—all folk I admire intensely—originated. So, in alphabetical order:

England - H.G. Wells
Occupation: Writer I agonized over this decision, believe me. There are a great many English authors who made the final round. But I had to go with the ultimate. H.G. Wells, the first and greatest science fiction author, deserves far more recognition than he's gotten. (Jules Verne was Wells's contemporary, and that Frenchman wrote some excellent sci-fi too, but he was a little heavy on the description.) In all seriousness, I believe that Wells's grave should be platinum-plated. Statues of the man ought to be put up in temples, and his works fired into space on rockets for publication on a galactic scale. The reason Wells deserves such accolades is this: even now, over a hundred years after he wrote his stories, many many years after his death, the man still has the power to scare the sweet bejesus out of us. Honestly, even the dumbed-down, abridged version of The War of the Worlds I read as a kid spooked me something righteous. (The creepy black-and-white illustrations helped.) Horrific aliens fire space capsules from Mars to Earth, pop out in their unstoppable war machines, fry everybody in the vicinity, and proceed to subjugate humanity with laser beams, poison gas, and aircraft. Come on, how scary is that? It's a timeless theme, one that's been done and redone over and over again. But Wells did it first. Don't forget that the mere radio broadcast of this story, done by Orson Welles in 1938, threw the United States into mass panic. Wells's works were oddly prescient, too. The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, long before laser beams, poison gas and flying machines were anything more than, well, science fiction. In TWOTW, Wells predicted tank warfare (his visions of walking tripods armed with guns presaged the rolling war machines on the battlefields of the Great War), chemical weapons, lasers, and airplanes (not to mention space travel), and correctly anticipated, with his usual anthropic cynicism, that such inventions would be put to military use. Unlike a lot of science fiction today, Wells's actually had a point. Ol' Herbert made excoriating observations about human nature, civilization, and society in his books. The War of the Worlds used his invading army of Martians to satirize British imperialism, which had reached its peak at the time of the book's publication. In creating a technologically superior alien race, wholly without conscience, which readily subjugates those judged inferior, Wells showed up the theory of social Darwinism as the rich and privileged of Western society were applying it to society. Wells also hinted darkly at the implications and results of total war by having his Martians attempt to utterly destroy the infrastructure and population of planet Earth. As deep, observant, insightful, incisive, and thrilling as TWOTW is, my favorite book by Wells is one that no one else has ever heard of: The Island of Doctor Moreau. The gloves come off in this one. A shipwreck survivor lands on a tropical island where dwell an enigmatic doctor, his alcoholic assistant, and a race of strange half-men, half-animals. The castaway, named Edward Prendick, first believes these strange creatures to be men, surgically altered by Moreau into beasts; but he later finds out that the reverse is the case. Moreau is a vivisectionist, and through a process of painful trial and error, he has transformed mindless beasts into a travesty of humanity. These half-beasts talk, make primitive tools, walk upright, build houses, cook, even have a religion of sorts. But the beast inside them refuses to be quelled. Infractions are common. The beast-men occasionally lose control, kill animals for food, suck up drink, run wild, break the Law which they have established among themselves. Constant surgeries are required to keep them tame. Moreau, like a vengeful god, summons these transgressors back to his lab, its name whispered among the beast-men: "The House of Pain." All hell breaks loose when a particularly vicious specimen escapes the laboratory and runs wild on the island. The beast-men revert back to beasts, the protective compound burns down, and Prendick is forced to live like a beast himself, hunting and fishing, fighting off the savage and horrific inhabitants of the island, trying to build a raft and escape. Escape he does, but he is never quite the same. He now sees the primitive in the eyes of every man he passes on the streets of the civilized world. He understands now just what a thin line separates the rational, sentient human being from the ravening monster, the savage, the primal thing lurking in the hearts of humans. With The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells simultaneously reinvented the mad scientist archetype, skewered the callous, sinful, bestial side of Victorian society, and wrote a chillingly good piece of science fiction. For writing some of the most intelligent and meaningful essays on humanity, and couching it in some of the most creepy, engrossing and masterful science fiction on the planet, H.G. Wells is my favorite English person. Well, aside from Princess Eugenie Victoria Helena Mountbatten-Windsor of York, that is.

HONORABLE MENTION: Cuthbert Collingwood (Admiral of the British Navy, noted for his service in the Napoleonic Wars and his association with Lord Nelson; biggest Geordie hero besides Brian Johnson); Queen Victoria (grandmother of Europe, come on); Emma Watson (enough said); Douglas Adams (galactic hitchhiker); Gertrude Bell (explorer extraordinaire); Sir Tim Berners-Lee (without whom I would not have a blog, nor an Internet to write it on); John Cleese (and the rest of the Monty Python bunch, including Terry Gilliam, who's American, and Terry Jones, who's technically Welsh...but John's my favorite. Silly walks, dead parrots, albatross, argument clinics, "and now for something completely different"). And, of course, no list of awesome English folk would be complete without that king of renegades, the eminently quotable, fantastically witty, hard-drinking, hard-fighting bad boy, the Man Himself, Winston Churchill.

Ireland - George Bernard Shaw Occupation: Playwright I love this guy. I really do. A wit to rival Samuel Johnson, and facial hair to blow Mark Twain, Santa Claus and Friedrich Nietzsche out of the water. And, kind of like H.G. Wells, he was something of a misanthrope. But he was a smart-ass on top of it, which is the best of both worlds. He was primarily a playwright, and used his characters as his own personal mouthpiece, dispensing various ribald pearls of wisdom unto the unwitting world. You should have heard some of the things that came out of this guy's mouth:

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

"Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…"

"A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."

"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer."

"Lack of money is the root of all evil."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

"Democracy is a device that ensures we will be governed no better than we deserve."

"The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation."

"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."
Shaw made one observation that both I and Robert Kennedy have used as a personal slogan:

"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"
Or here, read this one. Here I am, calling Shaw a misanthrope and Wells a cynic, and then Shaw goes and sets me straight:

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
And wait! There's more. Here I am giving George some blog love, paging through some quotes of his, and I find this. It seems as if Shaw knew I was going to be writing a blog post about him:

"Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them."

The best Shaw quote in recorded history, though, is this one, in my opinion:

"We should all be obliged to go before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation."
Shaw tickles me pink. Nobody's got the guts to say stuff like this these days and (a) really mean it, and (b) not care what anybody else thinks of you for saying it. Shaw never cared about that. He didn't think much of politics, nationalism or public education, and he made no secret of it. Yeah, sure, he was a Socialist. But he spoke his mind, wrote plays, novels, articles of all sorts, was an amateur photographer, won the Nobel Prize and an Oscar (both of which he hated), and penned most of his best works in a tiny, movable shack in the corner of his backyard. Those are all things I can identify with. For being an intelligent and prolific writer, a curmudgeonly philosopher, an eminently quotable sage, and an opinionated cuss, George Bernard Shaw is my favorite Irishman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Bram Stoker (inventor of one of the coolest literary villains of all time, Count Dracula); James Joyce (rewrote one of Homer's epics, setting it in the modern era, and was even gutsy enough to include a clinical description of the sex act, which got him banned from every bookstore in the Northern Hemisphere); Frank McCourt (rough life, good writer); Gráinne Ní Mháille (better known as Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen); and John French. Don't know who John French is? Well, I'll tell you. He was born in County Wexford. I never met anybody from County Wexford I didn't like. (Heck, I never met anybody from County Wexford, period.) Mr. French emigrated to England (Liverpool) and married Louise Woollam, a local girl. Their daughter, also named Louise, grew up and married a local bus conductor named Triple-H—ha ha, no, really, his name was Harold Hargreaves Harrison. Harold and Louise settled down in Liverpool together and, in 1943, they had a little boy, who they named George Harrison. That is why I love John French.
Scotland - John Paul Jones
Occupation: Badass Uh, hello? John Paul Jones? Honestly, do I even need to explain this? He's every American's favorite Scot (well, except for anybody wearing a kilt). I don't care if he was a dropout. I don't care if he was a deserter. I don't care if he flogged one of his sailors to death. I don't care if he only joined the Continental Navy just to get a piece of the English. None of that matters. The guy was awesomeness incarnate, and probably would've had to hire somebody to carry his balls around for him if he didn't have the steel backbone to hold them up. He got his first naval command when the captain and the first mate of the ship he was on (the John; origin of the phrase "on the john") caught a fever and died. Most people would've been scared stiff by being thrust into a command on the open sea like that, but not Jones. He went and piloted the ship back to port, and the John's grateful owners made him the master and gave him a cut of the cargo. He buddied up with Benjamin Franklin while in France in 1778, and the two of them apparently joined a frat together. Imagine the secret handshakes they must've put on while John Adams and stood nearby and rolled his eyes. When France formally allied with the United States that same year, Jones's new ship, the USS Ranger, became the first American military vessel to be saluted by French forces. Jones got a nine-gun salute from a French flagship as he was heading out to England to terrorize British shipping. Then the Ultimate Act of Bad-Assitude took place. While in command of the USS Bonhomme Richard, running wild in the North Sea off the coast of England in 1779, Jones was engaged by the 50-gun British warship Serapis. During a rare lull in the battle, the British commander yelled across, "You blokes had enough yet?" "Are you kidding, asshole?" Jones shouted back. "I haven't even started in on you sons-of-bitches yet!" This quip is commonly edited in high school history books to read "I have not yet begun to fight!" Rock on, John. For being a feisty short guy, beating the heck out of British shipping during the Revolutionary War, having consistent problems with authority, inspiring the stage name of Led Zeppelin's bassist, and pursuing one of the most colorful and versatile naval careers of the 18th century, John Paul Jones is my favorite Scotsman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Alexander Graham Bell (can you hear me now?); John Shepherd-Barron (inventor of the ATM); Mungo Park (explorer with a cool name, first Westerner to explore the Niger River); Bon Scott (AC/DC's original front man and one heck of a vocalist and bagpipe-player); Angus Young (best guitarist EVER); John Ross (admiral and Arctic explorer); and Ian Anderson (latter-day minstrel, prog-rocker and musician more worthy of the term "poet" than any rapper who has ever lived, or ever will). And now, I'd like to leave you with another of my favorite Scotsmen.

THINK WITH YOUR DIPSTICK, JIMMY!