Today I was lying on the beach and trying to bring some color to my academic's cadaverous complexion. It was a little muggy, and there were sand fleas hopping about, which made me think: What would it be like to live in a climate where heat and bugs weren't just summertime annoyances, but a way of life?

I've been reading The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by historian David S. Landes, and he says some interesting things about how a tropical climate has made it much harder for countries to prosper. (This is a topic that economists such as Jeffrey Sachs have studied as well.) Climate is just one of the factors that shapes a country's development, but it is an important one. In cold weather, you can put on additional clothing or build shelter or start a fire. But hot temperatures make it much harder to work, and there's little to be done about it. This is part of the reason that some societies in tropical climates turned to slavery to solve their labor shortages, Landes says (if you don't want to work, force someone else to do it for you — and while you're at it, get a few servants to fan you with fronds). The American South achieved prosperity only after air conditioning became widespread in the period following World War II. In much of the tropics today, air conditioning is simply unaffordable for most people, who don't have sufficient electricity or consistent access to it.

Then there's the matter of bugs. Winters, for all the inconveniences they cause in temperate climates of unshoveled driveways, turtleneck sweaters, and bad poetry, also perform a crucial service by killing the resident population of critters and halting their spread. In earlier centuries, the fiercely multiplying masses of insects in winterless tropical countries made agriculture almost impossible, killing off workers or making them too sick to toil in the fields. Advances in tropical medicine have saved lives, but the toll of insect-borne diseases still handicaps many societies and their economies. Malaria kills thousands every day.

So there's another side to climate change besides rising sea levels and lands transformed into deserts. There's also the fact that rising temperatures will grow the various populations of insects, parasites, and pests that already cause so much death and illness in tropical countries. These critters will also become more common in temperate climates, too. If you hate bugs as much as I do, you might have another reason to jump on the environmental bandwagon.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

The Cats of Mirikitani will be on New York's Channel 13 tonight at 10 p.m. (and perhaps other PBS stations as well). As I said in my review, it's definitely worth seeing.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

If you're in Chicago, you should check out the latest production of David Henry Hwang's The Golden Child. This Obie Award-winning play, loosely based on the experiences of the playwright's own family in turn-of-the-century China, recounts the fateful decision of a village patriarch to turn from Chinese traditions and embrace Western, Christian ways. Seeing it reminded me of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, set in colonial-era Nigeria. In telling their stories of cultural change, neither work romanticizes the past or its dying traditions. In fact, certain practices — foot-binding in the Chinese context, abandoning children in the Nigerian one — come up for especially harsh criticism, put forward as immoral and destructive outgrowths of unthinking adherence to old ways. At the same time, both works describe in tragic detail the consequences of upending an age-old social order, and the price paid by all — powerful and powerless alike. The eponymous "golden child," in fact, who escapes foot-binding thanks to her father's intervention, nonetheless learns to rue her mother's words: "Daughter, you don't know what a terrible gift is freedom."

Fortunately, Hwang's play offers plentiful comedic interludes to soften its Lear-like final blow, and the strong Chicago cast succeeds in making each character believable and sympathetic — even the conniving second wife, played with delightful malevolence by InTheFray Contributor Kimberlee Soo.

The company responsible for this production, Silk Road Theatre Project, has made crosscultural understanding its mission; founded in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Silk Road seeks to "heal rifts through the transformative power of theatre." The choice of Hwang's play seems appropriate, speaking as it does to all-too-current events. The violent divide between tradition and modernity, order and progress, fundamentalism and reason — these conflicts continue to confront us, just as they did in an earlier time, and their resolution will likely be no kinder.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

I highly recommend The Cats of Mirikitani, a deeply moving documentary on homeless New York artist Jimmy Mirikitani. At first the film is an engaging and often humorous story of friendship between the filmmaker and her eccentric subject, but as the life of this eighty-year-old painter comes into focus, so does his tragic place at the center of world events: the Japanese American internment, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the September 11 terrorist attacks. (The burning Twin Towers, clearly visible from Mirikitani's patch of sidewalk, provide a grim backdrop to the film's middle portion.) Like Mirikitani's own childlike sketches, The Cats of Mirikitani begins simply and intimately, and yet gradually reveals the harrowing themes at the heart of its artist — the pain of memory, the responsibility of governments to their citizens, and the collateral damage of war, measured in ruined lives and ruined ambitions. The film is playing internationally in select cities and should air in condensed form on PBS later this year.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Here's a fascinating interview with Tim Hardaway, the retired basketball player who said in a radio interview earlier this month that he "hated" gay people. He says he's trying to atone for the hurtful remarks he made:

I want to get my s— together…. Right now, learning. Learning that gay people are really no different than a lot of other people. Learning that they work hard, they do things in the community, they are responsible for building parks, rec centers, providing safe environments for kids, just things I had never associated with them before. [This last week] has opened up my eyes to the gay population and what they do. I'm getting a lot of knowledge about them that I didn't have. Which is going to make me a better person. And if it doesn't, then I'm a damn fool.

At the same time, Hardaway says he still doesn't "condone what they [gay people] do." He points out that he grew up in a Chicago neighborhood where people avoided gay culture like the plague. He insists that gay basketball players who keep their sexual orientation a secret are betraying their teammates.

To be fair, lots of people share Hardaway's fears and prejudices. And why not? Many have grown up without any exposure to what it means to be gay except for the jokes of insecure teens and media images that constantly portray gay people as sexual predators. Once they actually spend time with people of another sexual orientation, they realize that, no, not all gay people want to hit on them. Living with a gay roommate is not an assault on their manhood. Whatever society has put into their heads about homosexuality being disgusting or immoral or against God's plan, they have the ability to think for themselves.

In recent months a good number of celebrities have gotten into trouble for bigoted remarks. It's fun to point and laugh, but people like Mel Gibson and Michael Richards and Tim Hardaway reflect the views of many other people in our society. So perhaps all the media attention will be a positive thing, in the end. Maybe it'll force us to reexamine our own prejudices.

By the same token, perhaps all the coverage of Britney Spears will inspire us to reconsider our prejudices against bald people who don't wear underwear. I'm not sure what the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith has to tell us, but I'll let you know if I do.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Just saw Ted Kennedy’s recent speech on the Senate floor, in which he lashes out at Republicans for holding up a vote on legislation to raise the minimum wage. I’ve never seen him so angry before – it’s quite a sight to behold.

Raising the minimum wage isn’t the most targeted way of helping the nation’s working poor families, since most people who work for the minimum wage come from households living above the poverty line (see this report from the Congressional Budget Office for figures). Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax benefit that makes work pay for low-wage workers, should also receive serious consideration – especially proposals to increase this credit for workers without children, who "pay a strikingly high percentage of their small incomes in federal taxes." That said, a minimum-wage increase would lift hundreds of thousands of working families out of poverty, and economists are divided over whether this legislation would increase unemployment.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to raise the minimum wage is that it’s simply the right thing to do. People who work should get a decent wage for their labor. There’s something morally amiss in a country that has let the value of its minimum wage dwindle amid inflation for the past decade, while the pay of CEOs has risen astronomically. In 1990, the average CEO made 107 times more than the average worker; the gap in 2005 was 411-to-one. When does the greed stop?

UPDATE, 6/11/12: Removed broken links to economists’ views on minimum wage.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

I’m getting back into blogging, after a long hiatus, and my first order of business is to thank solargun, the designer extraordinaire, who provided us with lots of useful advice and help on the newly revamped site you see before you. If you need a laugh, check out solargun’s latest vid on YouTube, linked below. For those of us who have ever used Windows, it’s sure to elicit a painful chuckle (or plaintive tears).

For more videos from solargun, click here, here, or here.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Two articles that appeared this week are essential reading for those who want to understand the difficulties that America faces in convincing the world of the justice of its military exploits abroad — in Iraq above all.

One, a report in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, reveals that during the Vietnam War the U.S. Army sought to discredit soldiers who reported instances of torture and mistreatment of detainees — even though the army’s own investigators found evidence of much more widespread and severe abuse. Army records compiled in the early 1970s detailed 141 instances of detainee abuse, including the use of beatings, water torture, and electric shocks. Yet few soldiers were punished even after admitting their war crimes, and none served any prison time. In one case, military investigators recommended formal charges against 22 interrogators in an intelligence unit particularly notorious for torturing prisoners. Not one was disciplined. One of the interrogators, who admitted torturing a Vietnamese man who died soon afterward, told the Times he wasn’t “ashamed” of anything he did. “I would most likely conduct myself in the same manner if placed in a Vietnam-type situation again,” he said.

The other article, which appeared in GQ magazine, is the story of Joe Darby, the soldier who first alerted authorities to detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. For having the courage to do what he felt was right, Darby has been vilified throughout the military as a traitor, scorned by members of his own family, and run out of his hometown in Maryland. “People there don’t look at the fact that I knew right from wrong,” he says. “They look at the fact that I put an Iraqi before an American.”

That’s the crux of the problem. Whether decades ago in Vietnam, or today in Iraq, we see the same pattern: ends justifying unsavory means, expediency trumping ethics. America is rightly focused on promoting its own interests, but in Vietnam and now Iraq it has gone to the extreme of compromising its fundamental principles. Those who tortured prisoners in Vietnam and Iraq clearly believed they were doing what was best for their country. But the zeal to defend America from its enemies ultimately became a zeal for the most abhorrent cruelty.

Why does it matter if American soldiers bend the rules? In today’s world, the conflicts that America and its allies face are increasingly global in scope, and ideological in nature. They’re also harder to win. America no longer has the luxury of stamping out another nation’s conventional forces with its superior military might, as it did in the World Wars of the last century. The fighting today is asymmetrical, the endurance of guerrilla armies endless, and the conditions of victory almost impossible to attain. (Consider, for instance, that Hezbollah can plausibly claim victory in Lebanon after weeks of devastating strikes by Israel.) The key to victory under these conditions lies not just in a nation’s strength of arms, but also in its ability to stake out the moral high ground. America has failed to do that in Iraq. It has failed to present a compelling ideal that can persuade the American people to persevere in the struggle, and dissuade people elsewhere from adopting the cause of its enemies. It has failed for various reasons, but one reason is especially striking: The torture of past and present has eroded America’s moral authority.

“If they’d really taken action about the bad apples and been honest about it,” Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert, one of the Vietnam whistleblowers, told the Times, “then they wouldn’t be arguing about Abu Ghraib and different places today.” Even if Iraq is already lost, perhaps a return to principled leadership can avert similar failures in the conflicts yet to come. Otherwise, an overzealous military and reckless leadership may bring the entire edifice of American ideals — once such a source of inspiration to the world — crashing to the ground.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

You have to feel a little sorry for George “Monkey Boy” Allen, the Virginia senator running for reelection who is touted as a strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. His White House ambitions just got YouTubed. A wildly popular video clip shows Allen at a recent campaign rally, where he twice called a volunteer of Indian descent from his opponent’s campaign a “macaca” — a word that is either an ethnic slur for Africans, or the name of a genus of Old World monkeys — and then proceeded to tell the college student, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!” (The student, S.R. Sidarth, was born and raised in Virginia.)

Calling someone a monkey isn’t exactly presidential-sounding, so Allen and his campaign staff have been quick to deny any racist, derogatory, or anti-primate intent in his comments toward Sidarth. Allen speculated whether “macaca” was a play on Sidarth’s hairstyle, a Mohawk (Sidarth says it’s actually a mullet). At another point he insisted that he didn’t know what the word meant when he said it, which actually makes Allen sound rather presidential, given the current commander-in-chief’s struggles with the English language.

Allen also gave an apology, of sorts. He told a reporter, “I do apologize if he’s offended by that” — which in monkey-speak apparently means, “He shouldn’t be offended that I called him a monkey, but I’ll apologize anyway because I want to be president.”

Regardless of what Allen meant by “macaca,” there’s something unashamedly cruel about his behavior at the rally. Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. Allen is the grownup version of a schoolyard bully, singling out the kid with the funny pants (monkey pants?) for ridicule while he and his cronies chortle smugly. You half-expect him to start cracking jokes about flatulence next. Do we want this man as our president?

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Picking up the thread I began last month about the book Peace Is Every Step —

Even those who profess themselves to be peacemakers often cannot resist the trumpet call to arms. The author, Thich Nhat Hanh, relates a story from his days as a peace activist during the Vietnam War. During a talk he gave in the United States in 1966, a young man stood up and told Hanh to go home. “The best thing you can do is go back to your country and defeat the American aggressors! You shouldn’t be here. There is absolutely no use to your being here!”

The young American and his fellow activists wanted peace, Hanh says, but “the kind of peace they wanted was the defeat of one side in order to satisfy their anger.” Frustrated with the lack of progress toward a ceasefire, some activists had even begun calling for the defeat of their own country. Though they said they worked for peace, what they were really doing, Hanh says, was taking the attitude of violence that had brought war into Vietnam and unleashing it upon their own countrymen and women. “We Vietnamese who were suffering under the bombs had to be more realistic,” Hanh writes. “We wanted peace. We did not care about anyone’s victory or defeat.”

Lasting peace does not emerge from any kind of partisanship that denies the opponent’s humanity. The work of ending war cannot begin with a heart full of hate; it requires not just a worthy end, but also worthy means. To practice nonviolence, we must first become nonviolence, Hanh points out. “Because without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.”

In a world where every action, however small, has consequences, what the individual does matters. And so the choices she makes — to favor war or peace in her dealings with other people — has much to say about the choices her country makes in its dealings with other countries. “The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives — the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods,” Hanh writes. “We have to look deeply into the situation, and we will see the roots of war. We cannot just blame one side or the other. We have to transcend the tendency to take sides.”

Yet many of us are under the illusion that we have no say over matters of politics and war. We insist that the country’s top politicians and generals and intellectuals have all the power, and what say or do has no effect on the course of events. Hanh disagrees. “You may think that if you were to enter government and obtain power, you would be able to do anything you wanted, but that is not true,” he writes. “If you became President, you would be confronted by this hard fact — you would probably do almost exactly the same thing as our current President, perhaps a little better, perhaps a little worse.”

It is difficult to accept this — especially if you’re not a fan of your country’s current head of state. But the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy made a similar point in his novel War and Peace. We believe great leaders to be all-powerful, but we forget that their decisions are never made in isolation, but rather a refraction of the influence of many factors, including the actions of those they supposedly command. “The life of the nations is not contained in the lives of a few men,” Tolstoy wrote. Yet most of us live our lives under this delusion of impotence.

According to Hanh, the simple act of looking deeply into our reality and changing ourselves — a practice he calls meditation, though it is not limited by religion or belief — can bring our world closer to the peace we seek. “If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things,” Hanh writes, “we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Continuing with some random thoughts on books, I want to say something about the writing of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and longtime peace activist praised by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for his work to end the Vietnam War. Peace Is Every Step is mostly concerned with bringing awareness to one’s everyday actions, but in it Hanh also makes the crucial connection between the particular and universal — that is, how our everyday choices between peace and violence end up influencing the very policies our society implements, the beliefs it tolerates, the wars it wages. Especially at this present time, with yet another grim conflict boiling over in the Middle East, Hanh’s lessons speak simply and eloquently to those of us who are tired of the perpetual cycle of violence.

When we come across any kind of conflict — an armed struggle overseas, a bitter political debate in the capitol, a sporting event on TV — we all have a desire to choose sides. This is natural. In fact, when it comes to sports, the entire point of the game is to root for your side. (Try watching two teams you’ve never heard of play and you’ll quickly see why.) “In wars we also pick sides, usually the side that is being threatened,” Hanh writes. “Peace movements are born of this feeling. We get angry, we shout, but rarely do we rise above all this to look at a conflict the way a mother would who is watching her two children fighting. She seeks only their reconciliation.”

In matters of war, an all-consuming partisanship may bring about peace in the short term — with the victory of one side — but the fighting does not cease. The losing side regroups and continues its struggle at another time, in another venue. The destruction resumes; the grievances pile up. The cycle only ends, Hanh says, when those involved are willing to recognize suffering on both sides and seek reconciliation.

Reconciliation opposes all forms of ambition, without taking sides. Most of us want to take sides in each encounter or conflict. We distinguish right from wrong based on partial evidence or hearsay. We need indignation in order to act, but even righteous, legitimate indignation is not enough. Our world does not lack people willing to throw themselves into action. What we need are people who are capable of loving, of not taking sides so that they can embrace the whole of reality.

The last point deserves repeating. History is the story of struggle, and yet throughout its long and ponderous expanse only a few recorded individuals have had the courage that Hanh speaks of — the courage not to choose sides, the courage to turn the other cheek when one’s own safety demanded a choice.

I’ll continue this discussion of Hanh’s writing in my next post.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen