A Mask that Unmasks Amerika: A Frightening Masquerade - Part 2

Okay, enough backstory! Here it is. My official personal 2025 Halloween costume, the mask that says so much about the USA.

The frightening masquerade began for me with a single product: a Halloween mask, a $1.75 bit of plastic and rubber, through which we can see a seminal moment in world history. It’s a clown mask stamped with an American flag.

The character of the evil clown must predate Stephen King‘s IT, but I'm not sure about that. I don't remember evil clowns being part of the standard pantheon of Halloween monsters. That said, although it has never particularly frightened me, its perversion makes it scary, representing something that shouldn't be. I’d never seen anything like it. 

I can't really get a gauge on what an averagely patriotic American would feel about non-Americans using Americana internationally for reaching market segments that admire the US of A. Some might see it as appropriation of our symbols for foreign needs. 

America doesn’t license the Stars and Stripes, but it is a kind of soft power. Certainly, I've seen the American flag iconography and colors used awkwardly to promote lots of different products in what used to be a very Yankee-friendly Asia.

I won't dwell on how the most admired country in the world, at least in the last hundred years, has become what it is today. I'm worried about my country, and here in my hands is a sign of its decline.

There's an industrial designer somewhere, likely in China, who had the actual notion that popping the Stars and Stripes atop this frightening facade would resonate with the consumer. I've never seen such a mask. Designed for this year, there are shops just like Happy carrying the latest American holiday theme crap all over the world. I would venture that only in 2025, are we finding the USA flag expressed via a frightening masquerade.

This is what we have become to the world: an evil clown. A costume. A frightening masquerade. It may have shock value, but ultimately, the fear fades, the masquerade ends, revealing nothing more than the clown.

I wonder who that might be?

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The Frightening Masquerade - Part One

 

Part 1: How American Chaos Landed on 35th at 80th

 

It wasn’t the first time I had found something while shopping at Happy, a renowned retailer in the heart of Mandalay, that changed the way I look at the world. So much so that I had to buy it.

What is Happy? I first came to shop at Happy back in November 2021, after asking a more experienced foreigner where in town I could buy a Santa Claus costume.  Anyone who knows Mandalay will happily answer with Happy. 

Happy has their core product lines of children’s clothes, school supplies, toys, games, tiaras, 925 silver, costume jewelry, hair accessories, cosmetics, cigarette lighters, leather goods, luggage, motorcyclist essentials, J-culture collectibles, road wear, educational posters, dinosaurfigurines, all kinds of hats, and God-knows-why, tucked by the back door, adjacent to a single freezer of ice cream treats, they offer a wide variety of tropical aquarium fish. All this in about 8000 sq feet of retail floor.  Happy is the source for all seasonal holiday merchandise, like Halloween costumes. Suffice to say, you never run into the same collection of merchandise any time you go to Happy on 35/36 at 80th.

As it is Halloween, enter Happy today and you might think you’re at the gift shop of Platform 9 ¾ after it’s bought by Spirit Halloween. Amazing how the role of witch of the West has gone from an evil to be ostracized or burned alive to now hanging out with Arianna Grande and is your daughter’s costume of choice.  

Halloween predates the founding of America by millennia, ie, it’s not specifically an American holiday. However, like Valentine's Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and of course Christmas, Halloween has been embraced by American capitalists and made into something new.  It has a proven otherworldly ability to convince every family in the country that they've got to go buy something.

Here in Asia, I can speculate that there were lots of businesses and interests that wanted to create something like that here. Over the last decade, I’ve seen it happen. Last year, the crush of parents and children all descending on Happy  just before the class costume contest at various functions was quite a surprise when I stumbled upon it. 

At Mandalay’s many private schools, kids and adults alike dress up for Halloween. Down in Yangon, there are even Halloween parties among its modest youth nightlife.   Its significance as the eve before All Saints’ Day has been left out of the story. Here, it’s what the candy makers, Pixar and gifts industry intended:  a non-religious celebration of costumes, contests and fun.

Some elements of the Halloween holiday seem quite familiar to the locals. Just a few weeks back, for the October Thandingyut Buddhist holiday, every family dutifully bought candles and lit them in front of their homes. Like Jack-o'-lanterns without pumpkins. I'm sure it's a big day for the candle industry. 

Last week, as I perused the 2025 collection of ghoulish goods at Happy, the frightening masquerade was about to begin for me.

Part II:

Leavnig Greensleaves

 

Google Translate ရေ... စိတ်အေးအေးထားပါတော့။

To demonstrate the point I made in yesterday's blog, here is yesterday's post translated without edits by Gemini: 

ကျွန်တော့်ရဲ့ ဒေသခံ သွားဘက်ဆိုင်ရာဆေးခန်းကနေ လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ရက်အနည်းငယ်က ထူးခြားတဲ့ Viber မက်ဆေ့ချ်တစ်ခု လက်ခံရရှိခဲ့ပါတယ်။ အောက်မှာ ကြည့်လိုက်ပါ- 

"မနေ့က ယာယီနေထိုင်ရာကို သွားဖို့ အဆင်ပြေရဲ့လား။" ဟမ့်? ပထမတစ်ချက်မှာ နားမလည်တာကြောင့် နှစ်ခါပြန်ကြည့်ပြီးနောက် ဒါဟာ ဘာလဲဆိုတာကို သိလိုက်ရပါတယ်။ ဒါက Google Translate ရဲ့ မှားယွင်းတဲ့ ဘာသာပြန်ခြင်း တစ်ခုပါ။ ဆေးခန်းက ဝန်ထမ်းအမျိုးသမီးတွေဟာ အင်္ဂလိပ်စကားကို ကျွမ်းကျင်စွာ မပြောနိုင်ကြတဲ့အတွက် Google Translate ကို အသုံးပြုပြီး ကျွန်တော့်ဆီကို တစ်ခုခု ပြောချင်ကြတာ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။

အခုလို ပြောပြနေတာဟာ သူတို့ကို နောက်ပြောင်ချင်လို့ မဟုတ်ပါဘူး။ ဒါပေမဲ့ ဒီလို လုံးဝ နီးပါး နားမလည်နိုင်တဲ့ Google Translate မက်ဆေ့ချ်မျိုး ကျွန်တော် နောက်ဆုံး လက်ခံရရှိတာ ဖြစ်နိုင်တယ်လို့ ယူဆတဲ့အတွက် မှတ်သားစရာ ကောင်းတယ်လို့ ထင်ပါတယ်။ နေ့တိုင်း နိုင်ငံခြားဘာသာစကားတွေနဲ့ ထိတွေ့နေရတဲ့ သူတစ်ယောက်အနေနဲ့ ဒီလိုအတွေ့အကြုံမျိုး အများကြီး မြင်ဖူးပါတယ်။ ဒီနေ့ခေတ်မှာတော့ ကျွန်တော် Google Translate ကို ရှားရှားပါးပါးမှ သုံးဖြစ်ပါတော့တယ်။ အဲဒီအစား ကျွန်တော့်ရဲ့ ဘာသာပြန်လိုအပ်ချက်တွေအတွက် Google Gemini လိုမျိုး AI ကို အသုံးပြုပါတယ်။ Gemini ဟာ Google Translate ရဲ့ မိသားစုထဲမှာပဲ ရှိနေတာဖြစ်တဲ့အတွက် ဘာလို့ တစ်ခုနဲ့တစ်ခု ပေါင်းစပ်မထားရတာလဲဆိုတာ ကျွန်တော် မသိပေမဲ့ မကြာခင်မှာ ပေါင်းစပ်သွားမယ်လို့တော့ ယုံကြည်ပါတယ်။

ကဲ... Google Translate ကို အသုံးပြုပြီး တရုတ်တီးတိုး စကားကစားနည်း (Chinese whispers) ကို စမ်းသပ်ကြည့်ရအောင်... ကျွန်တော်ဟာ "In peace may you rest" (ငြိမ်သက်ခြင်းနဲ့ အနားယူပါစေ) ဆိုတဲ့ စကားလုံးနဲ့ စတင်ခဲ့ပြီး အဲဒီနောက်မှာ ကျပန်း ဘာသာပြန်ခြင်း ငါးမျိုးဖြစ်တဲ့ English-> Burmese->Swahili->Japanese->Sicilian->Batak စတဲ့ ဘာသာစကားတွေကို အဆင့်ဆင့် ပြောင်းလဲပြီး နောက်ဆုံး English ဘာသာကို ပြန်ပြောင်းတဲ့အခါ "Please calm down" (စိတ်အေးအေးထားပါ) လို့ ထွက်ပေါ်လာခဲ့ပါတယ်။ အဲဒီလိုနဲ့... သူတို့ဟာ ကျွန်တော့်အတွက် စကားဝှက်တစ်ခု ချန်ထားခဲ့တာကို မမေ့သင့်ပါဘူး။

ဒီမက်ဆေ့ချ် မပို့ခင် တစ်ရက်အလိုမှာ ကျွန်တော်ဟာ အဲဒီဆေးခန်းမှာ သွားအလုပ်တစ်ခု (သွားတံတား စိုက်ခြင်း) လုပ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ "တံတား" (bridge) ဆိုတာ အဆောက်အအုံဖြစ်သလို၊ နေထိုင်ရာ (residence) ဆိုတာလည်း အဆောက်အအုံ တစ်ခုပါပဲ။ ဒါဟာ အဲဒါပဲ ဖြစ်ရမှာပါ။ ဒါပေမဲ့ ကျွန်တော်က ယာယီသွား အတွက် ကျပ်ဆယ်သိန်း (တစ်သန်း) အကုန်မခံနိုင်ပါဘူး! ဘယ်လိုပဲဖြစ်ဖြစ် ကျွန်တော့်စိတ်ထဲမှာ Google Translate ရဲ့ အဓိပ္ပာယ်ကို "မနေ့က လုပ်ခဲ့တဲ့အလုပ် (သွားတံတား စိုက်တာ) အဆင်ပြေရဲ့လား" လို့ ကောက်ယူလိုက်ပါတယ်။ 

သူတို့ဟာ လူနာကို အခြေအနေ စစ်ဆေးတာ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။ ဟုတ်ကဲ့၊ အဆင်ပြေပါတယ်။ 

ကျွန်တော် ပါးစပ်ရဲ့ နှစ်ဖက်စလုံးနဲ့ ပြန်လည် ဝါးနိုင်ပါပြီ။

Is it okay to please calm down, Google translate.

  I got a very unusual Viber message from my local dental clinic a few days ago. You see it below: 

"Is it okay to go to the temporary residence yesterday?" Huh? 

After my initial double take, I recognized this for what it was—here was a bit of bad Google Translate. The ladies at the dental desk did not have strong English, and they were trying to communicate something to me via Google Translate. 

Now, I'm not making fun of them by reporting this. Instead, I think it's notable because it might be one of the very last times I ever get a message Google translated to near to—well—complete incoherency. As someone who deals in foreign languages every day, I've seen more than my share.

Nowadays, I rarely use Google Translate.  Instead I use an AI like Google Gemini for all of my language translation needs. Given that Gemini is under the same roof as Google Translate, I don't know why the one has not been incorporated into the other, but I'm certain it will be soon.  

Let's do an experiment - Chinese whispers using google translate... I started with the phrase:
"In peace may you rest."  then I put it through 5 random translations  English-> Burmese->Swahili->Japanese->Sicilian->Batak---and back to English where it emerged as: "Please calm down."

Let's not forget it's leaving me one last riddle to decipher.   

The day before, I had some work done at that very clinic—a bridge implant. A "bridge" is a structure, as is a residence; that must be it. But I didn't shell out one million Kyats for temporary teeth! In any case, I mentally interpretted the Google Translate to "Is all okay with the work done yesterday?"

They were just checking up on a patient.

Yes, it is. I can chew on both sides of my mouth again.