Force Recon--Forever Faithful

 I have watched the vice-presidential debate last night and took some notes.  After watching such a polite but violent debate I was deeply moved by Sen. Biden and Gov. Palin for their points of view whose collision brought America forward and for their rich experience of life, of politics, of economy, and, the most important of all, people’s feelings.  They are both a model of American exceptionalism.

Firstly I would like to state what is in my point of view as “exceptional”, because what American people are used to since the very first day that marked the birth of the nation will probably be viewed as “exceptional” from the eyes of others who themselves might be called “exceptional”, as what is happening in China is viewed in the contemporary world.  I agree with the definitions on Wikipedia that  “American exceptionalism (cf. "exceptionalism") refers to the belief that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its national credo, historical evolution, or distinctive political and religious institutions.” Only except that, due to my lack of qualification to compare America with other developed countries that I have never set foot on, my definition of American exceptionalism is on the background of my own country, as Yang Lian once mentioned when he found it astonishing that in American poet there should be such concept as “doggie bag”!

During the whole debate, especially in foreign affairs, the two candidates for vice president have unanimously focused on the following keywords that they think are good for their nation as a top official: “our freedoms, our democracy, our tolerance, our respect for women's rights”.  These are just the value that American people believe in common, which explains the public remark the two candidates make, and meanwhile that they are not quite the same as some other countries, which to some extent cost the lives of millions of lives during the time when “sky where once was steel, smoke where once was flesh” as Hammad has said, and when the America’s best and finest lost their lives in a military action with a sole purpose of helping another nation to realize what Americans have always believed in.  I am not willing or daring to comment on whether such an action is right or wrong, but what I admire greatly is that the American people are brave enough to think something that is completely different and lethally dangerous to their own lives with a firm belief to stick to it.  This is proven by that the candidate who runs for leadership will say that explicitly and agree on that despite various differences in their idea of policy, because only in this way will people vote for them.

There has been a lot of criticism, especially from the other part of the world, on “their freedoms, their democracy, their tolerance” with a hash tone that this is but a hypocrite’s appeal.  However, after my experience in U.S. I feel it real that it is just the belief for “our freedoms, our democracy, our tolerance” that is realizing Martin Luther King’s dreams that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”, that accepts the ideas and criticism of the core value of the Americans by Baldwin that “probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately.” And therefore, after awareness and improvements is brought in healthily, are on the road to perfection far ahead.

There is a second issue about foreign policy is that Sen. Biden, when attacking Sen. McCain, said that “John McCain said as recently as a couple of weeks ago he wouldn't even sit down with the government of Spain, a NATO ally that has troops in Afghanistan with us now.”  When watching this and others’ attention are on major issue this caused my attention.  Why wouldn’t McCain sit down with the government of Spain?  What has Spain done as a NATO ally?  If Spanish sons and daughters are fighting shoulder by shoulder with Americans’, would there even exist a problem that serious that McCain does not even want to sit down as what he would probably think to the enemies?  Why did not Palin refute Biden on this?  Is this a shortage of time or McCain did remarked like that?  Were McCain a Chinese leader and made such a “mistake of political unawareness and immaturity”, only god can help him! 

And this reminded me of Hobsbawn, who warned that “the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been striking resistant to following the model of U.S. politics and society.  That is probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, base on the universal principles of individual freedom, than this patriotic ideology and Constitution suggest.”  Here I would like to have some very shallow analysis.  The fact that America is subject to terrorist attack so seriously is just due to the fact that America is strong enough that other than aiming at civilians America’s enemies cannot every possibly win a war.  And the reason that American has been so strong, to a very large extent, is because that Americans have picked an advanced value than the rest of the world, and are born on a land where there is so little a possibility to be invaded by others.  But this does not form a natural feeling after witnessing the loss of life as well as buildings that “anyone who is not a friend is an enemy”, and the feeling does not justify the origin of any war without authority of the United Nation’s Security Council.  America is under a challenge now.  How to face the challenge, without either giving up the firm belief or abuse such a belief with patriotism and consequently derive from its original meaning is the key to the success over the challenge.  I sincerely wish that U.S. will come over the barrier and run more comfortably in the world, with more friends and less enemies.

From my personal perspective, there are two qualifications necessary in commenting on American culture: Know or understand what American culture is, and know or understand how to comment, i.e. how to define something as “good” or “bad”. The advantages for those commentators who are American lies in that they know much more about what American culture is, since they have been inside this culture for the most of their life. The advantages for those who are not is that they know slightly better in how to define something as good or bad, which comes from their comparison of their culture and the American culture, and a deeper thinking consequently. My following writing serves as the evidence that supports my point of view.

America is a controversial country. It is controversial because it is magnificent. It is magnificent because it attracts all eyes from all over the world.  It attracts all eyes from all over the world, with all intentions of praise and criticism, because everyone that knows America wants to comment on American culture. They want to comment because of their view and their experience in America.  I am, therefore, of no exception.

If Hammad, an American citizen, who “cried when” she “saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart”, who speaks to greet the “shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen”, if Hobsbawn, who among foreign academics sees the peculiarities that “are integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of American culture”, who fails to see the solution to the problem that “the U.S. empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits.  It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it”, if de Tocqueville, with his “best book written about the U.S.A.” Democracy in America, sees from “journey of not more than nine months”, if they can comment on American Culture, Why can’t I?

The very phrase “comment on the American culture”, involves two key concepts: “comment on” and “the American culture”. One should both be able to “comment on” and be able to know about “the American culture” to “comment on the American culture”. But the problem is not that we suspect that American people do not know much better about American culture, though they might not be able to put these down into words and sentences, if this is also of American culture. What we refuse to believe is that “non-Americans do not know enough about the American culture”, because America is so famous that everyone watches America and tried to read the valuable part of the American culture to adopt to adapt theirs.  The threshold of knowing enough American culture is to have enough time, energy and interest to touch American culture, whose entity will never be completely understood for anyone with a limited time in this society.  Since everyone is exposed nowadays to the American culture, and no one can know everything about the American culture, citizenship, therefore, is not of critical importance.

I even hold the perspective that non-Americans will be slightly better at commenting a culture other than theirs.  Because they experience slight more at a same concept or idea or part of culture being called “good” here and “bad” there.  Being an honest person we all have patriotism in our mind, no matter which country benefits from such a feeling, and it is just this feeling that sometimes aggravates us non-Americans on hearing the countries we love being downgraded, sometimes even “to the extent of mockery and ridicule” (GA MacArthur, farewell to West Point cadets).  Therefore we debate, occasionally dogfight, defending our culture against the attack from the American one. The very exercise of debating, even thinking how to debate, will force us to stand on the ground of different values, of different cultures, of different points of view; of different source of information. As a consequent of such experience that happens in all walks of our lives we can proudly call ourselves as “veterans of value controversy”, we can state that we are slightly better at commenting a culture because we have been thinking across the two or more cultures that we are confronted with, since day one they came before us.

There is a James Baldwin, who left America because of the doubt of his “ability to survive the fury of the color problems here”, by the time he left America, his idea of social status in Europe would be something merely better than racial discrimination, as can be proven by his later astonishment, as this is what the American never believe in. After he went exile away from his own land, and, historically, to his own land, his idea of the status is no longer a “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”, but a natural form of the society for those who opposed to such a status actually create a status, with the only difference of not naming this as a “status”, because those who have status created the language.  So he found that there is an “American Myth”, not because he thought of such a name by “being hit by an apple”, but because he has another culture as a reference, helping him to comment by an almost intuitive culture comparison.

I have hereby stated my opinion as above that the qualification of commenting on American culture is knowing America and being able to comment good from bad.

Dr. Zou’s Essay

Deep inside the pond, in the sweltering summer whose heat waves almost destroyed the sense of beauty to the very extent that nothing but an air-conditioned room appears appealing, I stopped by to enjoy the lotus, the vitality and elegance displayed by the power of nature and by the contrast of the soothing scene against the uneasy environment.

The beauty of the lotus seems not possible to discover further since in poems and essays they are illustrated by our great Chinese ancestors as the symbol of beauty with some of the great characters they are born with.

That they come out of mud and are not polluted by the silt

That they are washed by springs and are not coquettish because of their charm

That their stems are hollow from inside and straight from outside, without clinging vines or manifold branches.

That their fragrance becomes increasingly fascinating with range as they stand gracefully in the water

That they can only be appreciated from a distance but never makes it possible for any actions of indecency

The lotus is named, consequently, as the “angel of flowers”.

…

And miraculously, inside a virtual summer, to which an after-binding of its meaning is required, I find the lotus leading the way to an oasis, which can at least temporarily relieve me from the disorienting sandstorm.

The thought, away from the lotus, came straightly to my present situation. With a major in Electrical and Computer Engineering I shared the same opinion with many others that the learning of programming was just as sweltering to us as summer to everyone. Within four years I shall become a professional suppose to be proficient and to put what we have learned in school into practical use from an ordinary boy ignorant to even the most basic data structure. Bug is never a stranger to me, and what was worse was that due to the lack of knowledge I did not even know what caused the bug, let alone how to debug. Many a time when the lines of code increases, my brain begin to be confused about the exact data structure I am using, thus making the program an unreadable mess. Many a time while others easily finished their program within two days, I struggled for debugging and exception processing until the last minute before the deadline. To me programming was no less than a canicule in a desert where I desperately struggled for water while there seemed no sign for an oasis.

And I take it as an act of grace that during the course Programming and Data Structure the concept about programming becomes clearer and the very root of data structure is illustrated, via thousands of artful questions. And what was most important, from my perspective, is that I know the very fact that omnipotence is only a possession of God, and therefore as a program designed by human, the program is always imperfect. What we have always been being supposed to do is to triage for a more acceptable solution to any problem we have or could have encountered. The following truths are among the instances

Those who have a basic knowledge of C++ all know that we cannot define a variable twice. Does this result from the incompetency of the complier or the unwillingness of the designer of the complier? Is it because we cannot or we do not want to? It is not because we cannot since we actually can but is because we do not want to because we triage the possible convenience for the obvious security of the program in case confusion arises for a differently-overdefined variable that has the potential power to crash the whole program.

One of the key points in this course is Abstract Data Type (ADT). After all the tedious introductions and arduous projects we all have a question: why above all we need to study the ADT? Most instructors and books do not give an answer but here it is given quite clearly:

Information hiding, because more often than not we do not need to know the details of how the object is represented nor the operations on those objects are implemented for generalization of a certain period of code. ADT provided us with exactly such a chance to hide information, thus to save space, time and effort.

Encapsulation: the objects and their operations are defined in the same place. The ADT combines both data and operation in one entity for saving space while needed in many places.

Language-independence: can be implemented in many languages. So that later on what is defined in C++ can be used elsewhere, this can be regarded as a major leap in the field of programming and algorithms.

Moreover, the study of programming does not mainly lie in the concrete lines of code, specific debugging experience or detailed programming projects. The top priority is to learn the essence of simulating our language and behavior logic into executable code, in spite of what the language we are using, which, in essence, can be called the “Programming Philosophy”. We do not have the ability of knowing every aspect of the characteristic of every compiler, but if we know in general the preferred representation of human thought, we can predict the behavior of the compilers and probably the guess will be correct. For every computer engineers, C++ is not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but may just be an end of the beginning. After the solid basic programming training in C family, later on in our work we may deal with so-called “advanced” Java or even some new language to be invented. And in order to transit more smoothly in the furthering of our studies, we are supposed to learn not primarily what to do, but why to do and how to do.

And when I seek bitterly for the reason and solution of my bugs, I learned explicitly the incompetency of human being, by whose influence I have always been confused and frustrated. Every time we program, we want our program to be perfect on a perfect system that is perfectly safe, effective, efficient, good-looking and error-free. But as the experience of programming accumulates, besides some common sense, we know that the only one who is perfect is the Lord, we as human beings are never perfect by any means. It is just this fact that involves the very concept of a “philosophy” that tells us what to do and what not to do, because there must be something we are unable to do.

Programming philosophy, yes, that is what I am learning this course for. A new but always existent philosophy that would serve as a compass, navigating us in the ocean of programming, and, from a certain aspect, what He wants us to do and to complete and not to do and to leave incomplete.

……….

The thought went back to the beautiful lotus, whose leaves directed my sight onto the withered flowers that were once blooming in spring. In spring everything is so beautiful that a real beauty is hard to distinguish, and in summer, the hostile climate may actually contrast such fascination and such elegance, for the name “elegance” is always the opposite of “worldliness”.

In the long history of literature carved the beauty and thoughts of William Wordsworth, to whom I like the most:

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
to catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

We are here not to appreciate the beauty and the technique of this poem, because the scene of this poem could be a sad thought from sweet mood and we are dealing to some degree the opposite. But what I want to state here, as I read and look into this poem, is that after a study of programming, a tough course to possibly everyone, and after being taught by Dr. Zou, with his style not appreciated by everyone:

If this belief from heaven be sent

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

I may see a tiny clue

What man has made of man.