Cyberspace Glass House

When The Bronx Is Up And Your Battery's Down

2012-01-23T09:30:00.001-08:00

a story

Warren never thought he might be a voyeur. Not ever. It muttered perversity, hidden motives, raincoats and humiliation. A little too abnormal for Warren.

He was watching this week's talk show. The producers had selected sexual addiction. The talk reminded Warren that he needed a drink.

He poured himself a Bombay over ice.

The show focused on this addiction with voyeurism as an example. The addiction expert talked about voyeurism as the singular manifestation of the sexually addictive personality. Those were his words. Warren shrugged off a tic of relevance. He looked at the panel of guests. They had been through therapy and had been freed. They smiled mirthlessly. Warren sipped some Bombay.

He thought of himself as an observer, but he wondered what they would think of him anyway.The host hadn't asked them that. About ambivalent or unconscious voyeurism. Warren investigated lives first hand, personally. He desired an intimate view, unobserved, from a distance, yet absolutely concerned and focused. Warren cared about people. He really did.From a distance. He could recall being that way as a child. But this was not an addiction. It was life. It made him feel good and safe. Like a child.

The screen's digital blinked 3:23. He had to be at Consumer Enhancing, Inc's brainbash at 8:00.After work, he had to get the 6:00 train to be on time to his Applied Microlinguistics class at The New School.

His recent lapse into self-absorption had been keeping him awake like this. Margrit, on the other hand, had discovered her own pace and moved more quickly. That made her sleep more peacefully, more deeply. Her Group had told her that it would, and it did. And that was all she needed. She smiled mirthlessly, too.

One of the show's guests talked about having high levels of low self-esteem. The key was to avoid negativity. That triggered guilt and obsessive behavior. Like sexual addiction. Warren suspected his self-absorption had to do with low self-esteem as well as obsessive behavior. He had gone to college, so he could make some connections. But none of the guests was discussing the anxieties part. Warren always thought having anxieties was one of those givens he kept hearing about. Givens are important for connections, especially when you discuss things like self-esteem. He had made the connection, but they hadn't. In fact, Warren had recently concluded that his anxieties had been his guide through adult life.

That's what first led him to take up the ad's teaser for the course on Applied Microlinguistics.He mentioned it to Margrit one day before she left for work, and she said it was something that would probably appeal to someone like him. So he enrolled. Margaret had also suggested some therapy, but Warren thought he'd try The New School first. The thought of applying the new technologese to the improbabilities inherent in language amused him. The experience also might give him an edge at work. That he could use. It would be an applied connection, sort of.

But the New School jaunts had tweaked something quite unexpected. It came to mind amid the gin and the talk show. He had never connected his observing with anything aberrant. It also never seemed addictive. Perhaps that connection was a bit too visceral. The New School trips had made him feel invisible. It brought a lightness, an airiness to him that had never before accompanied his observing. Someone else might have called it a liberating experience. Warren wouldn't concede that much. He held liberation in very high esteem, sort of beyond reach.

He first noticed this invisibility when he became conscious of following complete strangers down the sidewalk and into shops. An outsider might have thought they were acquaintances.But Warren's feeling was that he was invisible. No one knew him in The City. No one cared what he did so long as it wasn't overtly criminal or threatening. But now with this addiction idea and how important the trips to The City had become, he began to have some concern.

Perhaps one Bombay would be insufficient. He deferred to experience and poured another. Less ice this time. His diversions always led in this direction, especially late at night.

He liked the invisibility. It covered him like a cocoon, being there without being there, sort of.And The Apple provided the perfect environment. The chances of being sighted were as remote as a DNA match up.

Mostly he pursued females along the various strange streets and parks. He studied them like an artist auditioning models. They held only superficial interest for him, and then only so far as they brought him closer to a truer understanding of the female form.

to be continued

GO TO

2009-01-28T16:27:00.000-08:00

Go to:

rcsnmi.blogspot.com

Farewell

2009-01-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

And Happy New Year!

This is the final post for Cyberspace Glass House. I decided that I'm neither sufficiently angry nor sufficiently happy to continue blogging. Besides, the more I learn about the Web and the scadillions of bloggers out there, the more I imagine this metaphor that we bloggers are like very small suns, sources of light, as we might prefer to think, in our average solar system that's part of an average galaxy that forms some sort of huge nova among millions of other novas.

I see blogging now as public diary writing, which is, of course, an oxymoron. When one's audience is oneself, one is engaged in rather boring onanism. And that doesn't make for very interesting public display. In addition Google is now tempting bloggers to place ads on their blogs and thus initiate the commodification of the blogosphere, where bloggers become new age commoditrons.

Anyway, I've enjoyed our little sojourn from our tribulations. I leave you with these thoughts from Neil Gaiman's American Gods:
"People believe…It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen...This [America] is a bad land for gods."

Fergus

2008-12-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

Galway Kinnell is one of America’s genuine good souls. We know this from reading his poetry. I chose this one for our holidays, because it shows why we have this season of solstice celebrations: our humanity is grounded in the hope and trust of unconditional love.

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run - as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears - in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players -
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body -
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Misogyny

2008-12-21T08:17:00.000-08:00

I don’t usually comment on this issue. I’ve been around many intelligent women who have taught me the nuances involved. The best of these women, some colleagues and my wife, are aware of the ways other women have turned misogyny into a discourse on the anti-Christ. On the other hand, they also clarify the subtleties that fly right past and over the heads of most men…even the well-intentioned ones.

To be sure, Chris Matthews is not a well-intentioned male. He’s a showman who apparently used to be a fairly good journalist. I say “apparently” because you couldn’t tell that he had any connections to journalism from his frothing on Hardball, which should be called “Puffball”, because of the effusiveness he showers on the DC insiders he has as guests. He’s the archetype of the media whore, doing everything he can to keep his place on the hierarchy of DC personalities. He’s come a long way from his Catholic schooling and Peace Corps days.

But he has retained his condescending, patronizing and schoolboy gender chauvinism. I don’t know which is worse, his blatant references to the beauty and brains and/or bitchy-witchy ways of the female guests on his show or his bumbling, fumbling attempts to cover them with apologies. Perhaps his producer shouts in his earpiece. In any case, he hasn’t learned, and the experience would make P.T. Barnum proud.

I could shake all this off as, well, how far some of us males have yet to evolve, except when it involves more serious matters. A couple of days ago I was talking with my wife about this Matthews business, and suddenly out of nowhere Martha Stewart popped into my brain. In case you’ve forgotten, Martha did actual jail time for what amounted to a minor felony, especially compared to what’s been happening on unregulated Wall Street. Now, I’m pretty careful about keeping up with the news about those crooks, and I don’t recall that any of them have even been brought before a grand jury. I know that Bernie Madoff (notice the current news media use of his boyish nickname) has been accused, but do any of us think he’ll actually do jail time? No, no. He’ll flip all over the place like a Mexican jumping bean, ratting out all and sundry, work out a plea deal and be off to his villa in southern France.

Misogyny comes in many forms, the worst being institutionalized misogyny, the stealthy kind that came down on Martha Stewart. Actually, the serious issue is how very little males and females know and/or want to know about each other. The little jokes and nostrums we make about each other’s behavior seem only to intensify that fact.

Felons

2008-12-20T23:06:00.000-08:00

In Crime and the American Dream, the authors state (and demonstrate) that America is a society organized for crime—meaning not necessarily that we are all felons but rather that our society is fertile ground for criminal behavior. And, given a minimal risk of being caught, over 62% of US would gladly become felons to nab a six figure job.

Despite recent headlines about billionaires and various politicians, as well as ongoing stories about the nefarious dealings on Wall Street and how much those dealings cost each of US, I'm fairly certain most of US merely shrug at this bit of news. Same old, same old. But that, indeed, is old style. With globalization and all that snarly stuff, you could become an international felon, especially if bribery is your expertise.

What about you? In these days of family budget squeezes and anxieties about having a job, how do you feel about this? Who would notice a few million missing here or there? Who would care?

Mexico

2008-12-19T12:20:00.001-08:00

Looking for something else to worry about this holiday besides the credit card bills you swore you wouldn't engorge, the job you're barely clinging to and what's going to happen to US after 1.20.08?

Well, you need only look to Mexico, our failing state neighbor just across the river from all of Texas, Cali, and Arizona. As we (and Russia) know, those Islamic medieval-loving "insurgents" just love to creep into failing states and ply their trade. The nice thing about Mexico for these people is that it has a nicely established drug network linked to the political corruption, so the money flows freely.

All this combined with the porous border must have them licking their chops. Maybe we ought to send Joe Leiberman down there. With all his bravura about homeland security, I'm sure he'll make everything just fine. He could chat it up with the drug lords and show them a better way.

Scribes

2008-12-18T10:11:00.000-08:00

For reasons essentially irrelevant, I recently looked into the roles of those belonging to covens…as in witches. Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about the spiritual workings of covens or the wiccan culture. My interest was drawn to the role of the scribe, which I suspect involves more than being a simple recorder, communicator or archive tender.

The scribe is the coven’s communicator…record keeper. Now as I see it, this makes the scribe perhaps the most important person in the coven. This person selects the language, which determines the coven’s meaning to the outside world. Scribes render the coven and its experiences in language selected by them directed to concentric worlds from nearest to farthest. As one scholar has put it, if we read their texts, we experience their “use of contextual commentary and evaluative adjectives or adverbs which suggest [their] attitudes and values…and reflect the pragmatic context.”

This makes the scribe a very powerful person—a person who determines truth. Think here of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the onerous task they faced as evangelicals of a gospel promising eternal life based on faith in an eternal truth. Their “good news” was as much about them and the way they wanted the truth to be known as it was about the hero of their stories…perhaps more so.

But I don’t really want to discuss the various permutations of Christian or Wicca faith. I’d be happy to do that some other time. Right now, this idea of scribes rendering the truth of spiritual or corporeal experience raises a point I used to emphasize in my creative writing classes. I’d refer to James Joyce’s comment that to create stories, one must first live a deliberate life. Then, armed with the stuff of living, step back, alone, and become the creator-god of whatever story you wish to make. It’s a little like playing the old video games, SimLife and SimCity. You create an environment, arrange life forms in it and have them interact according to a history and a plot, i.e,, conflict, rising action, resolution and denouement.

Some stories are for the entertainment value of the drama. And some are for the purpose of making some general point about human existence and how it can be improved and/or made less painful (e.g., the gospels and the scribe recordings). What I’ve learned in my frustrations at trying to be a creator is that the scribe/evangelical must have a compelling story and a reasonable plot (whether comedy or tragedy). Think of how much the gospellers had to leave out in order to make a compelling story. Think of how the wiccan scribes must focus on the viability and future of the coven to engage the believers.

History is actually merely good and often not so good story telling. A historiography professor I knew began each class by telling the students that all history is fiction; one picks and chooses among the varieties depending on what one wants to believe. We live through daily facts and periodically along the way we create a self-satisfying truth from those facts. The rest disappears through the sieves of our minds.

Achievement?

2008-12-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

According to Richard Friedman, MD, our economic crisis has spawned a crisis on the human psyche. Dr. Friedman’s insight is the result of some anecdotal conversations he has had with his patients. These patients, especially the males who depend in one way or another on the business of Wall Street, come to his psychiatric practice with disturbing anxieties about when the maelstrom will end and how they will recover their masters-of-the-universe (MOTU) status. The most disturbing anxiety among them was feeling like a loser. That’s the men. The women, who also have achieved MOTU status, however, have experienced none of the same deleterious psychological reactions.

Setting aside, for the moment, any gender issues that arise from Dr. Friedman’s discourse, let’s consider this as a general cultural issue. A fundamental question in any culture (although often overlooked in America) asks: What is the ultimate measure of a person’s value or personal worth? For Americans, the answer is success. And the ultimate metric of success is money. This monetary success is open-ended, having no final stopping point and requiring never-ending achievement. The failure to achieve equates with a failure to make any meaningful contribution to society at all. The individual thus becomes literally worth-less.* As the aphorism has it, those with the most toys at the end win, and those without the most are less than winners and are probably losers.

But then you ask, what about all the “dedicated” teachers, nurses and clergy? “Dedicated” is the word our culture reserves for those who toil in noneconomic social institutions, locked out of the 4 foundations of American culture (achievement, individualism, universalism, and money fetishism) beyond America’s cultural ethos. They are the dross, the necessary foils to the achievers. They are good people all, especially because they provide moral comfort to the MOTUs. These underlings’ roles are devalued in our culture relative to the ends and means of economic activity. Their positions are ascribed as dedicated, because they have no otherwise logical, operative role in the culture. The word also keeps them in their places.

Speaking as one who has done his time in education, I have difficulty sympathizing with the anxiety-ridden MOTUs. Dr. Friedman suggests that these MOTUs set themselves up for this misery by being lured by the casino-like atmosphere of Wall Street. “For many the lure of investing is the thrill of uncertain reward. Now that thrill is gone, replaced by anxiety and fear.”

Yep. Exactly. I have the same feeling toward them as I do toward the suckers who walk into the Bellagio being thrilled by the possible uncertain reward, knowing absolutely that the house always wins in the long run. And we don’t even own the house anymore.

*Notes taken from Messner and Rosenfeld. Crime and the American Dream.

Dots

2008-12-12T08:16:00.000-08:00

Whether it's a curse or a blessing, I can't ignore connecting dots. Especially if, during a short period of time these dots, seemingly insignificant, merge to form what to me is a significant bit of info. Here's how it worked this morning.

1. As we speak less of the tragedy that continues in Iraq and of the "plans" to withdraw, a suicide bomber kills 48 people and injures some 100 others in a restaurant near Kirkut.

2. Secretary Gates is moving forward with plans to deploy 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan as we gin up our next war. More brigades will follow shortly. This initial deployment will come probably in January. They're from Fort Drum where troops are trained in below freezing conditions.

3. Derek Black, a self-identifying racist who won a committeeman seat in the Palm Beach County Florida Republican Party, was denied access by the Party because he failed to sign their loyalty oath—that candidates avoid activities that are "likely to injure the name of the Republican party."

4. An inch of snow brought holiday cheer to New Orleans yesterday. The Tiber River that runs through Rome has flooded everything including the first floors of some hotels. Today's forecast is for more rain. Venice continues its vain battle against the rising tides of the Adriatic.

5. A study has found pedestrians 65 and older are more prone to be killed crossing the street than younger people.

The dots connected: All these items indicate how so many of us passively glide along our paths in 21st century life, doing stuff as though we are still in the 20th century.

Numbers 1 & 2 remind us that we still think this challenge by various insurgencies (according to experts in the area, Afghanistan has anywhere from 25 to 100 independent, autonomous insurgent groups) should be met with a full frontal military response. But anyone who knows anything about these challenges contends they are actually intelligence and police matters. This is a case of medieval minds using 21st century means to taunt a 20th century war mentality.

Numbers 3 & 4 challenge our contemporary smugness. We're in denial about climate change, and we think that, because we elected an African-American to the presidency we've solved the racism embedded in our society. The irony of the Party's clause about injuring its name likewise fits the hubris of an empire stuck in its 20th century glory.

And poor number 5 connects with how grant proposals can always scheme to research and discover the obvious. All in all these dots demonstrate how much we remain entombed in our linear, 20th century thinking.

Education2.0

2008-12-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

I guess what attracts me to David Brooks’ ideas is that he represents an alternative to the humdrum commentariat, who are more interested in the flash and bling of political flim-flam than in the hard core cultural significance of the flim-flam. I also like him because he offers me the opportunity to disagree, especially when he writes about events that give me the advantage of an insider’s perspective. In his article on Obama’s selection for Education Secretary, he simply lacks significant information, his perspective being too far removed.

Back in September, I posted Education, which responded to Obama’s vision to invest in improving education nationwide. I’ll try not to repeat those ideas here, although they still are the issues that remain beyond acceptance by the powerful. Brooks contends that the established and the reformers dominate American education. Unions and schools of education (a.k.a. education leadership) represent the established, and the “new idea” people represent the reformers. Brooks sees the reformers as the group from which Obama ought to select his Education Secretary. Let’s lift the covers and look at the actualities of these two groups.

The Established: The NEA and AFT have so bloated themselves through lobbying and questionable liaisons with government that they have morphed into easy targets for the Know Nothings (take your pick). Despite their large treasuries and leveraging in DC, they are basically ineffectual at the local level, which is where actuality lives. They are bereft of any power to deny their services. They are denied access to curriculum change. They do affect contract negotiations, which mostly have to do with salaries and little to do with learning. The Ed. Schools generally represent a repository for mediocre teachers and/or teachers who want to use the system to make more money than they can make in the classroom. Let’s call them the American Dreamers; their success conforms to the American metric of success—money.

The Reformers: To reform literally means to reshape a given; the thing will look different but its substance will be the same. NO Child Left Behind is a good example. Test for the fundamentals. Make the aggregate scores be the metric of stuff. Have the results be punitive or not, and move on. At no time is a metric for learning discussed. Reformers want to start with a system and reshape it. But it’s still THE SYSTEM. Reformers usually come from Ed Schools accompanied by their EdD’s, chock full of theories to reshape things, the implementation of which requires large budgets (learning grant proposing is paramount in their learning process). They should be managers, but they can't manage—that would require intense communication skills.

OK. So what? Let me suggest:
1. As long as there is The System, we will teach The System. So let's ignore The System.
2. Classroom teachers must have autonomy over the curriculum they teach. My most engaging, inspiring and effective work experience was the result of participating in a from-scratch creation of a K-12 writing program for the local school system I worked in as a high school English teacher. We voluntarily tweaked the program daily, had only “how’s it going?” inquiry from the hands off administration and got many thanks from the affluent community who could see the results in their children’s acceptance by highly competitive colleges.
3. Ensure participation and involvement by ALL parents and guardians in their children’s ability to learn. This requires that the schools become less community social agents (providing food, shelter, psychological treatment, self-esteem developers, etc.) and more learning centers. The community must restore the notion that actual parental responsibility is essential to their children’s well being. Schools cannot continue to be responsible for this. States ought to revisit the idea of school being in loco parentis. For example, “in school suspension”—my favorite System oxymoron—must be replaced by actual suspension. I can hear the wailing now. “We all work! Who will take care of her?” That’s your job, i.e., proper food, clothing and shelter. Do it! And, by the way, try to find the time to cherish her. Resolving anti-social behavior can no longer be the responsibility of the educational institutions.

This post is long, because the choice of Secretary of Education is an enormous obligation. My suggestions might seem impossible, but they are not. They do require imagination and risk taking. We hoped but couldn’t know for sure that our writing curriculum would succeed, but it did. And it did, because we had risked our integrity to make it succeed. The success didn’t show up in our bank accounts; it showed up in the changed attitudes among the faculty, the students, the administration and the community towards having people learn.

Barbarians

2008-12-02T08:17:00.000-08:00

When we conjure this word, images of gruesome hordes overcoming a medieval village flash on our mental video screens. Fortunately, we have come far beyond those harsh days, I guess. What if we think of the word in its more idiomatic usage? When you look that up you’ll find “a brutal, cruel, warlike, insensitive person.”

Does this fit the Black Friday massacres? The Sunday Times ran a short piece by Peter S. Goodman in which he attempted to give a cultural accounting for such anti-civilized mass id-driven slaughter. My only quarrel with the piece is that Goodman doesn’t go far enough. But he does offer some perfectly worded thoughts for US to dwell on this season, which Christians believe offers the promise of Good News.

In case you’ve been traveling in a parallel universe, the event was a horde of 200 mindless barbarians trampling to death a part time worker at a Wal-Mart. Goodman gets right to the point: “American business has long excelled at creating a sense of shortage amid abundance, an anxiety that one must act now or miss out.” He clarifies the messengers by adding, “Hollywood and Madison Avenue have excelled at persuading us that the holiday season is a time to spend lavishly or risk being found insufficiently appreciative of our loved ones.”

Part of what I research are the ways marketers tweak images and contexts of brands in order to manipulate our consuming behavior. The latest is a method of branding called “neurological marketing.” Basically it’s about accessing “hot spots” in our brains with images and sounds that are impossible to overcome by our intelligence and intellects (see Martin Lindstrom’s “buy•ology”). This process is designed for and is most effective with children. And I can’t help reviewing the scenes in our home when the little ones tear through the pile of gifts in front of them, and when they finally get to the last one, they look a bit dismayed as if to say, ”Is that all?” Then they grab one or two, the ones they actually wanted, and ignore the rest. Listen carefully to and watch your young ones and note how much of what they want are all about brands.

Goodman created a perfect American metaphor to frame our supreme cultural phenomenon: “Chinese-made flat-screen televisions sitting inside Wal-Mart have become American comfort food.” He also refers to a new phrase creeping into the news media drone, which I‘m fairly certain is falling on our cultural deaf ears: “Live within our means and save: This new commandment has entered the conversation, colliding with the deeply embedded imperative to spend.”

Back in June this year I entered a post, “Consumerated,” dealing with this embedded concept. It indicates that with both the idea and symbolism of the phrase “Black Friday,” we Americans don’t and can’t begin to consider the cultural significance and consequences of the event and its representation of who we are.

Notes

2008-11-24T05:48:00.000-08:00

Happy Note
Let's start with a happy note. Here's a church liturgy we can all welcome. Allow me to don my mortar board for a second and remind you that all social gospels are basically feel good gospels, that is, ex cathedra, so to speak. This lends extended meaning to the idea of low lights and candles.

Less Happy Note
Yesterday's Times Magazine supplement's issue was all about we the people being dominated by digital technology. For example, in Becoming Screen Literate Kevin Kelly acknowledges how we are inundated with screens. We watch movies while we pump gas, we look at the cell phone screen as we text message, we look at the CID screen (hard wired or remote) at home to determine if we will answer the call, we look at the laptop screen at home and the desktop screen at work, we look at the TV screen, we look at the microwave screen, and so on ad nauseum. We even look at screens within screens—video and computer games, YouTube, Face Book, etc.) As Kelly says, "We are headed toward screen ubiquity." In the same magazine, a group of ad experts, all of whom are involved in digital and/or online advertising give their views on how these bombardments of digital images and sounds effect our lives in ways we are not even conscious of. As Robert Rasmussen says, "Remember 'Star Wars'? The bigger narrative was about the way people involved 'Star Wars' in their lives: the T-shirts, all the talk about it, the fan fiction, the nicknames, the dialogue people quoted. People were willing to brand themselves with all these other elements that were outside the movie experience." The important clause is that people were "willing to brand themselves." Thus Mr. Kelly's ubiquity becomes Mr. Rasmussen's commodification.

Least Happy Note
In his review of Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997 Geoffrey Wheatcroft notes how the British fancied themselves to be the modern heirs to the Roman Empire. Despite a few demurring historians who warned about the consequences of such emulation "lest the tragedy of the Roman Empire, whose extremities grew at the expense of its heart, should repeat itself," the Brits soldiered on. How did the Brits rationlize against that warning? They took to the moral high ground—they contended that they were bringing the blessings of freedom, liberal politics and liberal economics to essentially retrograde societies. That is, blessings all around! If one agrees with Mr. Brendon's numbers, the British Empire lasted about 216 years. If you do the math, you'll note that so far the US empire has lasted about 227 years, starting with 1776, and that's obviously arbitrary. Better starting points could be the French and Indian Wars, the Louisiana Purchase and/or the Mexican War. So do modern empires last only 200+ years? In any case, here's the significant question: Is the social and economic turmoil we're currently facing a harbinger of the end of the growth of our "extremities at the expense of [our] heart?"

ADD/FDA

2008-11-19T10:47:00.000-08:00

My blogging usually begins with a greater than usual reaction in me to something I’ve read in a newspaper or online. It immediately zips through my synapses, linking it with all manner of significant human or personal grievances.

And that’s what happened this morning. As I roamed through the newspaper, I got stuck on this article about the over prescribing and overuse of antipsychotic drugs in children and their serious consequences, including death. I think the lead sentence nailed it; these drugs are being used “far too cavalierly.” And apparently, Risperdal, is the drug of choice to quell symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD, ADHD), especially among elementary age boys—more on that in a minute.

The medical expert community is alarmed and says more must be done to alert physicians and parents as to the dangers in overuse of the drugs. The FDA says the use restrictions written on the labels should be made clearer. The drug companies say they can’t be made clearer than they are. Wait! What happened to the word “cavalier”? Yes, what about the psychiatrists and physicians who write the scripts to ease the parents and patients out of their offices? As the article indicates, this is not some minor glitch among medical professionals. This is life and death, and for far too many male children, social stigmatizing that can last for a lifetime. This gets me to another matter that needs clarifying.

Guess what folks! Young males and for that matter old males do not learn, do not communicate and do not “share” the same way young and old females do. Watch the boys in your care and in your classrooms. They squirm or “fidget” almost all day. And when they communicate with each other, they start by making silent physical contact. It’s bump-and-run everyday, all day. When they discover something they think is worthwhile to communicate, they will tell it and do it. They won’t share it and thoroughly contemplate it. Tell it, do it, done. That’s boys for ya. It doesn’t make them cute or beguiling. It just makes them who they are.

Maybe the old system of segregating boys and girls in the school building was not such a bad idea (although I wouldn’t have been able to fall in love at age 10 if my school had that rule). Boys are hyperactive by virtue of their gender. That’s not meant to be an excuse. It’s meant to indicate the actual world. Most boys would like to learn by walking around doing something, even if they’re writing an essay or learning geography. Sitting in rows or at tables or in movable desk-chairs contradicts the how of their learning. We who have taught would prefer that they sit down and be quiet. Yes. But that is no reason to create this false positive we flag around called ADD/ADHD.

People who push kids into further reliance on prescription drugs because those kids don’t fit snuggly into an arbitrary learning paradigm ought to be denied access to anyone’s children. Parents who give up on their kids ought to stop fretting and start observing and listening to their kids. We all should stop worrying about where these kids must be 10 years from now and worry more about where they are now.

Marriage

2008-11-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

Apparently California’s Proposition 8, a yes vote to ban homosexual marriage, passed by a margin of about 5%, a considerable drop from the 23% in 2000. I say “apparently” because lawsuits and recounts are still being mounted. What does this tell US about US?

Perhaps the most obvious thing is that during times of actual stress and challenges to our existence, rather than imagined or perceived challenges, we tend to get real. Things like meals and places to live supersede the need to intervene in other peoples’ lives and moral codes. It just doesn’t matter so much. Practical matters and common sense experiences generally guide us through our choices.

This all got me thinking not so much about sexual orientation and civil unions but rather more about marriage. It got me thinking about all the reasons people give for banning gay marriage. They include everything from the sublime to the mundane. Heading off the sublime is the Biblical reason. This is OK, I guess, for people who need a guide book to get through life, but that’s not everyone. Next is procreation. In fact two men or two women (minus in vitro) can’t procreate. But they certainly can adopt, and I know about the hue and cry over sexual identity and social ostracism, but in the long run, if a child feels love in the home, the child will prosper very well. Besides, heterosexual marriage doesn’t guarantee stellar parenting. We also have the fraying-of-the-social-fabric concern. We have so many things fraying our social fabric that this would simply be another yet very minor one. Then there are proprietary concerns: In gay marriages which of the two partners has more dominant rights to the property. Much of this has been resolved by the courts, but we still have tons of law suits about it, no matter the sexual orientation. Similar to this are the health and death benefits concerns. Notice that these and proprietary rights obtain no matter who’s doing what with whom.

But the most important issue is not being dealt with —What in fact is marriage? What should it be based on? How does it function? Incidentally, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, my only credentials to answer these questions are my experiences. Having married twice, having three married children and having lived a fairly long time mostly among married people, I have learned things that are not articles of faith or sociology. They simply are.

First, let’s make clear that marriage can by only a secular covenant or only a religious covenant or both. My position is that the only people who should be concerned about this are the two who want to partner for life. This idea of partnering for life ought to be viewed, in fact, as an awesome decision. Think about it. Under any other circumstances would you choose to live with any other person for that long. We don’t even usually live that long with our parents! And we are obliged to love each other! So marriage is both a secular and a spiritual bonding; it needs to be sanctioned by the state and needs to be consistent with our spirituality (with or without formal religion).

But mostly it is a bond. And like all bonds (or covenants, i.e., contracts the terms of which are agreed upon by both parties) it is founded on trust and symbiotic interests. That seems simple enough, but when you consider the long haul and the human tendency (perhaps even requirement) to change attitudes and lifestyles during time, it is indeed daunting.

And here’s my point, which I hope I have at least hinted at during this discourse: Marriage is daunting for anyone, because he or she cannot possibly know the consequences during forever. And this is a human thing. It is not contingent upon sexual preference or Biblical codes. What makes the Wife of Bath one of the most intriguing characters in all of Anglo-Saxon literature is that she is so remarkably human, combining crassness, humor, sensitivity and especially perseverance all in her discourse on the plausibility of marriage—of which she has had five! And what she demonstrates is that marriage is all about experience. Her first four marriages included everything except the essential thing a marriage needs: Love. The love in her fifth marriage finally allowed her to have trust and to appreciate her husband’s interests in light of her own. Marriage is the ability to allow one’s love to carry one through the years of adjustment marriage requires. If you have it and you know it, you are fortunate. If you think you don’t, think again and keep on seeking it.

Why would anyone want to take this away from anyone else among us?

De-gourmandizing

2008-11-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

A gourmand is a person who delights in eating and drinking excessively. The delight is not so much in the fine tastes, but rather in the gross amounts. We Americans are painfully aware of this trait. For all the diet industry’s efforts, our per capita weight increase continues to climb. And this gourmandizing has become the signature characteristic of our culture. It has been, in fact, the metaphor of our lifestyle.

Everything about us is more for the sake of more. Think of the fast food advertising. You can supersize any meal. You can buy soft drinks in half-gallon sizes. Clothing is buy one, get one free. Groceries are buy 2 get the third one free. And we are told that wanting more expresses our constitutional freedom. That makes wanting more a distinction of appropriate citizenship. Wanting and having more, therefore, is the ultimate demonstration of one’s patriotism.

But then, of course, somewhere along the line we must think of paying for it. And not paying for it is how we got to the place we’re in now. We can point the finger of blame all the way round the compass—credit card companies, various media formats (especially those that combine database formation and facilitate database mining), advertising exploitation of all these—but the devil is in us. All these agencies of exploitation have been doing this for a long time, so much so that we have become a then-some culture. That is, “We’ll have that and then some.”

The fact is that consumers will draw down their consumption, when and if they think it will provide a temporary remedy for the pain they’re suffering (i.e., bankruptcy, credit card trauma, foreclosure, overdrawn equity on property, etc.). Apparently this is already going on. The spending spree is ending suddenly. That in my view is a good thing. But notice how our culture views this. “Nobody doubts that families need to start saving more than they saved over the last two decades. But if they change their behavior too quickly, it could be very painful…If the consumer slump continues, there is a potential for a dangerous feedback loop, in which spending cuts and layoffs reinforce each other.” In other words, we must consume our way out of this downward helix, or things will get much worse. But if you have much less to spend, and the current financial crisis has taught you that over indulging on credit is the cause of the crisis, what can you do?

My answer is to de-gourmandize. We need a cultural retro-fit of how we distinguish need from want. I also think we make a mistake if we inveigh against the capitalist manipulators and exploiters. We should recognize that they are exploiting and manipulating our own gluttonous zeitgeist. We actually believe that we are deserving of everything we want. If we were to begin with an exorcism of that singular delusion, our society would immediately move in a more civilized direction. Think of it: Veteran’s Day might have its original intention restored, rather than merely being an excuse to take advantage of break out sales of overstocked merchandise by managers who don’t know their jobs. And so on. I’m not saying stop buying. I’m saying use your common sense—don’t buy yourself and the rest of US into a deeper hole.

Atoms

2008-11-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

Partially as a reaction to the victory of proposition 8 in CA (banning gay marriage), emails among people in my email loop began arguing that this indicates that organized religion and its practices allow doctrine to trump fundamental morality. A few even contended that religions are bereft of morality. The anti-doctrine folks argue that doctrine seeks to control behavior, especially moral behavior (i.e., ethics). And the pro-doctrine folks argue that the anti-s basically don’t know religious doctrines. They both might be right. Let’s consider a look at both sides. I’ll get to atoms toward the end.

First, what is church doctrine? More to the point, why is church doctrine? Church doctrine among Christian sects (including Roman Catholicism) is grounded in the Sacred or Hebraic Laws of Judaism. Without the Sacred Laws, no Christianity. The doctrine of this and those of all other religious doctrines are to sustain the believers in their beliefs, give them a system that makes sense out of the nonsense of being human. All doctrines offer an explicit or implicit contract (e.g., the Ten Commandments) gathered around articles of faith (Christians have the Apostles’ Creed or simply The Creed).

One either accepts them or does not. To accept is to express a desire to have faith (blessed by omnipotence to belong to the believing group and its aspirations); to not accept is not to belong. The doctrine embodies a code of moral and ethical standards. To violate any stipulation of the code is to distance oneself from the core group and to create personal doubt. Questioning and/or doubting initiates the slippery slope. It’s not so much that one becomes a sinner; it’s that one displays a lack of faith. And, by the way, you can’t believe your way into faith. And if you lack faith, you lack moral standing.

So morality or moral standing is very much a part of believing. The doctrine maintains that we are known by our behavior or moral actions around the issue of free will. We can choose to follow the contract or not. The Puritans, for example, had a sub-contract called the Covenant of Works, which generally maintained that we express our condition of grace as we display it in our good works, contributions to the society of saints (i.e., believers). The morality of doctrine wants to keep the community together by the adhesion of common belief. It’s like the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.

Which leads me to what I’ll call secular humanism. That too concerns the viability and integrity of the human community through its efforts to declare the correct behaviors in order to make sense and safety out of our divine comedy (yes, the Greeks had a much clearer system for all this—humanity’s efforts form the light entertainment for the gods). The humanist doctrine is a little scary, though. In it, we humans are basically alone. We share the idea of free will, but we have only immediate consequences, especially the good consequences. We have a system of morality, but only we can speak for its legitimacy. What is moral for us might and often does violate someone else’s moral code. For example, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” for me might mean my goal is peace and well being, whereas for someone else in the next block it might mean as much greed as he or she can muster by whatever means necessary, which might include some suffering for me and others in the community. It is, after all, a moral code. In the best of all possible worlds, the humanists believe that humans are basically a good lot, who by and large look out for the welfare of others, and who will benefit by that, because the others will return the favor. This so-called Golden Rule is based on one of the Christian beatitudes, love (or caritas). But notice that it relies on an article of faith.

This is where the atoms come in. One of America’s most famous and most derided poets, Walt Whitman, is also perhaps the most religious in both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular humanist traditions. His detractors see him as a hedonistic primitive, not worthy of any moral consideration whatsoever. And he was not only homosexual but perhaps also bisexual. Yet this poet embraced the nobility and extraordinariness of all humans and all things. He observes the natural world and everything in it as the glorious and exhilarating expression of endless spiritual energy, which is impossible to give a name. He tells us this up front in his “Song of Myself.”

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
…
Creeds and schools in abeyance, 
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
 I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, 
Nature without check with original energy.”

All physical things are atomistic. We can know them by what we see and by what we can examine. But ultimately when we get down to the atom, we are confronted by a mystery. What is the source of the force and energy that binds its matter? And because we can’t know, we are better off to hold questions and creeds in “abeyance” and simply exalt in being alive. And all things human have equal status in this living. That is the Whitman article of faith. Being or having been human is miracle enough. And this energy never ends.

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

De-Sorting

2008-10-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort excellently explains and delineates how the cultural explosions of the 60s fragmented and factionalized the US into satellites of “like-minded” communities. Thus, we Americans sorted ourselves into comforting mutual admiration mini-cultures, which, for the most part, disdained but did not confront the other mini-cultures. It would seem that such a life would be the happiness that we were ordained to pursue.

But we had forgotten and forsaken the better wisdom of the founders. The states and the mini-cultures in them were not to be singular; they were to be united. The problem with our post-industrial, post-modern world is that it has sparse memory. What little memory we have involves only the chaos and fear of the 60s. We sought the solace and serenity of our like-mindedness as a bulwark against what we could not bother to contemplate and understand. It got in the way of our rampant consumerism.

A few years ago I did some research into the origins and manifestations of rap and hip hop. One manifestation that warrants a great deal more research and analysis is the graffiti, or, as the “writers” preferred to call it, “taggin’.” Taggin’ is the more appropriate term. When it began (partially as a reaction to the chaos and terror surrounding the representative neighborhoods, the likeminded communities), it functioned as shout outs to the home community and competitive call outs to the other satellite communities in the region. A debate remains whether it started in the Bronx, Brooklyn or Philadelphia. The debate notwithstanding, the fact remains that its bedrock was social and psychological communication.

For all that Bill Bishop tells us about the religious, tribal and economic causes of “the big sort,” he neglects to discuss this phenomenon within the marginalized communities. And what distinguishes them from the comfort-seekers among the dominant communities is that they were reaching out to each other.

I won’t go into the historical sources of this re-socializing phenomenon in the history of the American and South American slave trade. My point is that it sustained a survival mechanism based on shared cultural identifications, grounded in competitive art forms. That is, as the turmoil around these marginalized groups imminently threatened to sort them and re-migrate them into increasingly impotent satellites, they promoted a traditional de-sorting procedure that promised to re-group their energies and their identities.

I have a feeling that this is precisely what Barack Obama has in mind when he talks about change. He wants to de-sort our nation. He wants to dislocate the 40 year emphasis on difference and divisiveness. He wants to shout out the identity that we all share, a United States of America. Reject our fear and acrimony. Re-charge our energies to do the right things. Ignore calls for dishonor. Make US a good people again.

Ironic end notes: Near the end of his book, in a footnote, Bishop cites Obama, saying “Illinois senator Barack Obama presented himself early in the 2008 campaign as the man of the earth candidate [a class of arbitrators in the Nuer tribe of the upper Nile…[who] had no formal powers, but they had cultural authority to settle disputes], the politician able and eager to speak to—and listen to—all sides.”

This phenomenon might just be what McCain and the other retrogrades fear the most about the Obama rush.

Dodger

2008-10-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

I had to smile with a sense of satisfaction when I saw clips of Alan Greenspan testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. There was the Gran Poo-Bah, his face worked up to a juvenile wonderment, his lips even seemed to be quivering. Slings and arrows came at him. What had happened? How had it all come to this? Where were the friendly lawmakers who could be counted on to dote on this awesome sage? Where was the maestro's sighing audience?

I will give him this: He was as cunning as Charles Dickens' Artful Dodger. He shifted and pirouetted masterfully around any questions of his responsibility or culpability. I was reminded of a little T-shirt I saw in a children's clothing store that boldly announced "It wasn't me!" Greenspan refused to accept any blame for the economic crisis and chaos but admitted that his belief in deregulation had been shaken. Oh my! A little shaken! Much more eye-opening than the loss of one's home and retirement fund! This is, after all, about prestige and gravitas!

He said, "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief." NYTimes, B1, 10.24.08)

This reminds me of the famous scene in Casablanca between Rick and Captain Renault, the corrupt law officer:

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
[A casino worker gives Renault a wad of money.]
Casino Worker: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [Quietly] Oh, thank you very much. [Loudly] Everybody out at once.

When Greenspan was finally pushed for the slightest semblance of responsibility, he acceded. Well somewhat.

"'Were you wrong?' Mr Waxman [the Committee chairman] asked.

'Partially,' the former Fed chairman reluctantly answered." (NYTimes, B6, 10.24.08)

Ah, the fall from grace! If only he had been born simple and common!

Encouraged?

2008-10-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

These are difficult times for us. They're difficult, because we Americans need to be optimistic. And when times—like these—are chaotic...for every small up, there's a larger down, for every common sense, logical statement, there's a longer, more convoluted, absurd and nonsensical statement...optimism seems to be hiding. We've achieved longer lives, which we will now fill more with work than with pleasure. It takes courage to search for optimism right now.

The good news is that encouragement and optimism still survive. The less-than-good news right now is that they survive outside our borders. The things about Barack Obama that everyone can agree on are that he represents hope rather than fear, alteration rather than stagnation, actuality rather than mythology and truthfulness rather than mendacity. As general Powell said, he indeed, represents transformation. And who realizes this? According to a recent survey of 22 nations by the BBC, the voters in those countries preferred an Obama America by a 4 to 1 margin. And—here's the important part—nearly half said the election of Obama would fundamentally change their perception of the US. The optimist remaining in me assumes that means they will regard US at least as a respectable nation.

On the other hand, I feel seriously that we must increase our vigilance toward the way some people among US are reacting to the Obama surge. On her way home from work last night, my wife caught some of Michael Savage's and Bob Grant's bile. These monomaniacal troglodytes push their withering envelopes to such outrageous levels I can assume only that they want to discover at what point their apostles will finally lose interest. But they never do. These seriously troubled listeners keep heaping praises on these two haters and feeding their nefarious ends.

But I'm not worried about the two troglodytes. I'm worried about those lonely loser denizens, fearful of change, of the loss of their "dream," of "that one" and those ones and, finally, of difference. I can feel in my bones the day time stopped for an entire weekend when JFK was assassinated. I felt the same thing only more in shame than fear when MLK was assassinated. Then Bobby Kennedy was taken down. And that final blow I think created my loss of hope and optimism for a very long time. As history has shown, we have been numb for 40 years. This is not the legacy we want.

We can't talk hope alive, and we can't shout fear down. It takes vigilance, identifying with cultural purpose and—more than anything—the certainty that people are more important than any bottom line.

Comments

Barbara said: "It brought tears to my eyes."

Obscenity

2008-10-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

Back in the mid-60s, when our culture was fragmenting into what have devolved into safety zones (what Bill Bishop calls "like-minded communities"), Justice Potter Stewart writing in his opinion on obscenity expressed his quandary over defining it, saying "perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so...But I know it when I see it."

These days, when so many Americans, especially those in the "like-minded communities," know exactly what the proper and righteous moral path is, notions of defining obscenity have become rather quaint, perhaps something, they assume, has already been settled. I'd like to offer an alternative exception to this absolutist thinking (unfortunately I'm one of those confused relativists cum socialists cum whatevers).

A story in today's business section exposes for me the truer, more gut-wrenching obscenity that perhaps most of us disbelieve, ignore or champion. The banner reads "Drawing a Bead On Debtors," and the subhead reads "Banks Mine Data and Pitch to Troubled Borrowers". The article goes through the details of how a cabal of banks, credit card issuers and mortgage brokers are using "target lists" created by research companies to contact specifically people who are distressed by foreclosure, bankruptcy and overblown credit card debt. These are the very people that all the politicians and bloviators say they are so concerned about. As I suggested yesterday, the bottom feeders in this "industry" are prime examples of achievement and success-by-whatever-means-necessary for whom money is the sole metric. They are reaching into the muddy waters, pretending to offer a helping hand to the drowning person who, once her head is above water, is summarily shoved back under water by the same hand, a kind of debtors' water-boarding.

And the hunter/gun language resonates. "Drawing a bead," "trigger" and "target" run throughout the piece. The person in the lead example even uses it to describe how she feels. As a cancer survivor, who, as a consequence of her cure, ran up $50,000 of credit card debt and was forced to leave her job, nevertheless has received 6 to 10 credit card and auto loan offers every week. "It's like I've got some big tag: target this person so you can get them back in debt."

Remember: Loans to troubled borrowers have been cited as one of the chief causes of the current crisis we all suffer. This is an example of the sickness of our culture. This threatens the soul of our society. This is a boldface obscenity.

Fortunately for all of us we still have Margaret Atwood, that venerable sage who regularly shows us the light behind the dystopia darkness, who offers us a better path to re-discover our humanity. In her post-bottom feeding obscenity-driven world, "people will stop walking around in a daze, roll up their sleeves and start picking up the pieces. Things unconnected with money will be valued more—friends, family, a walk in the woods, 'I' will be spoken less, 'we' will return, as people recognize that there is such a thing as the common good."

Thus, the first dose of our antidote.

Stability

2008-10-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

Maybe the thing I like most about conservative columnist David Brooks is that he never stops trying to understand contemporary American life. He's obviously well-read and well-learned, but his daily vision has this gaussian blur of assumptions about the culture that really don't stand the test of tighter focus and really don't apply anymore.

Today he offered yet another archetype American human to be added to the current growing pile (all the Joes and the pro-Americans, etc.) whom he calls Patio Man. You can read the details, but he's generally talking about the 30-40 year old married guy with family who bought into the post-modern suburbs seeking sanctuary from the swirling disarray and cacophony of this p-m life. But unfortunately that disarray and cacophony have re-emerged, especially now in this election year, so that this decent Patio Man seeks only quiet succor in stability.

David put it this way: "But the shift in public opinion is not from right to left, or from anti-government to pro-government, it's from risk to caution, from disorder to consolidation...against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order." So what's the problem?

David overlooks the singular issue of our culture, especially in our post-modern era. We have no established order. We have ensconced institutional structures put in place during our agricultural and industrial past. But we are learning quickly and to our dismay (the current economic crisis, our increasing irrelevance in the ways of the 21st century international world, etc.) that our former structures do not suffice and we have no established order to stabilize us. We do have four fundamental core values: a belief in in the sacredness of the individual, the encouragement of everyone to aspire to social ascent (democracy), success as the ultimate measure of a person’s value or personal worth, and the accumulation of money as the signifier of success. The problem now is that these core values have been fuzzied by the experience of our actual lives. The sacredness of the individual has become the drift of the lonely dingy seeking safety from the storm.

These former core values provide the opposite of stability. Achievement is now grounded in greed. Social ascent runs into economic barricades. Success has more to do with celebrity than with community. If we were to go into the street and ask people what the American established order is we would first face head scratching and then the familiar shibboleths—freedom, democracy, common man, etc. that have become the tedious media mantra we can't escape.

This is why Colin Powell's statement that his endorsement of Obama as a transformational president can be troubling to Americans. In fact what that means is that Obama represents the very stability creation Patio Man desires. Obama as the transformative force will establish a new and probably different order, an order prepared to channel the disarray and cacophony into unifying principles that will stabilize our culture. Lots of Americans are very anxious about this.

Vulgus

2008-10-20T06:33:00.000-07:00

In today's Times, William Kristol, not known as the champion of the common person, writes a stealth column, extolling the virtues of the "vulgas," the ordinary, non-elite person, who over the course of the last century has mostly been correct about things—so says Kristol. His vain effort is to bring Joe What's-his-name and Sarah What's-her-name into the fold of prophetic voices of the demos, the spine of democracy. Kristol's cynicism truly sets a new standard.

Later, as I was trashing some old files, I came across a piece I posted on my other blog (rcsnmi.blogspot.com) back on February 18, 2008, "Exaltations of Ordinariness." The following is what I said at that time:

I came across this phrase in an article by Susan Jacoby in the Washington Post. I let it mull overnight, because I wasn't sure of its degree of significance, though I had no question that it has special significance for contemporary America. I was fairly certain that it resonated with something I had posted over the recent months. So I sought, and there it was "Our Ignorance Crisis" (rcsnmi Jan. 23, 2008) . As Ms Jacoby indicates, the problem with people like us pointing this out is that the hordes of the proudly ignorant will shrug us off with a passing reference to our " elitism." Ms Jacoby cites this mass response as the expected extension and personalization of the anti-intellectualism behind what I have called the arrogance of ignorance. But Ms Jocaby's most challenging conclusion just might be her references to the "anti-rationalism"; this insidious brand of cultural hubris seems to be our culture's preferred approach to its current dilemmas, rather than the thoughtful, logical approach. This is where the "exaltations of ordinariness" come at us like tsunamis, which, by the time the first alarms sound, have already begun their destruction.

During my consideration of our country's resistance to thought and reasoning, the word "dunciad" bubbled up. From somewhere in the recesses of the what's left in my memory of my undergraduate studies I recalled Alexander Pope's famous poem, the source of the word. A writer at Wikipedia sums it up very succinctly: "The poem celebrates the goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the kingdom of Great Britain."

Apart from being "elitists", I'm sure that Ms Jacoby and others in our small group will also be called cultural Chicken Littles, claiming that this arrogant embrace of dullness and ignorance will bring down the greatness of America. Well, as I have written elsewhere, if the "demos" would stop rooting for their personal fave "American Idol", stop their tragic onanistic dedication to Facebook and stop thinking that "hope" will float their boats—they might see that America has finally consumed its empire (that's right: literally eating its global viability), feeling it in virtually every corner of its daily life and (here's the tragic part) hoping for a solution from somewhere or somebody. That's the critical problem ordinary people have with empire: They assume it will always be there and that by numbingly mouthing the mantras "hope", "freedom". "liberty" and such, and failing to pay attention to the rest of the world, that world will accept the imperial swagger.

When hoping and believing trump knowing and thinking as cultural norms, the culture has pretty much become something other.

Plumbing

2008-10-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

By now the McCain campaign’s Joe-the-plumber setup has been flogged to its vanishing point. The actual person has been mediated to the realm of fantasy. Now Joe must return to his sub-mediocrity and continue to wail about his personal slings and arrows.

But sometimes keen reporters don’t allow for filters; they let real stuff flow through. They plumb way down into the gummy sludge of the cesspool and get at the problem. Just such a reporter is Larry Rohter in the New York Times. After offering the details of the actual Joe Wurzelbacher, he got to the bottom of his story and let Joe speak for himself. Joe wanted “to ask one of these guys a question, and really corner them and get them to answer a question for once instead of tap dancing around it. And unfortunately I asked a question, but I still got a tap dance…He was almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.”

Racism is a wily demon. It’s so embedded in US it’s most likely in our DNA. It darts around our synapses, and just as we’re focusing on and articulating some clever idea we have, it hops a ride and spews itself all over the place. Joe carries a lot of stress early on in his 34 years. A divorced single father, he makes around $40K a year as an unlicensed plumber’s helper at a small plumbing supply place. He’s young enough to want to start over, but he’s old enough to know he needs to make a leap not take a step. So he dreams, and dreamers are ripe for setups. And that’s probably what happened. And in all the excitement, the demon, unleashed by Joe’s frustration and anger, got a free pass.

My only surprise is that he didn’t use Bo Jangles as his analogy. You have to wonder why he didn’t use Fred Astaire. Or maybe we don’t have to wonder. You see, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m an addicted conspiratorialist. At 34, Joe can’t be thoroughly aware of Sammy Davis, Jr, the tap dancer. The comic side-man of the Rat Pack, maybe. Someone fed Joe the image of Sammy Davis, Jr as a racist image of 19th century American minstrel shows to reduce Obama’s stature. If you think the US has risen above that level, then you think pigs can fly. It takes only a little social and economic stress, and the demon gets its free pass.

Ulteriority2

2008-10-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

(when want trumps need)

They come as if from nowhere
Like the grounded finely clipped

Twigs when things get hungry.
Probably squirrels. You can
Always bet on the squirrels,
The cute ratty crooks.

But they go also, like the
Clippings and prunings you
Left to the whimsy of winter.
If you look closely though in early
Spring, the first of the balming days,
Something comes out,
Nothing you’d ever want, but
That’s the way they are. They come
Out as if from nowhere.

Someone said it better, ”the force
That through the green fuse
Drives…” us, but how can that be
We being so much above this or
That, we’ll never really know?

But there are times, like a chickadee’s
Frustration to tell you that it needs you,
Or that ratty crook clacking its warning
To its pals that you, yes you, might
Just take them on.

And you go to lift a rock and there they
Are and have they been waiting for you
To lift a rock and why did you and they
Pick that rock when sometimes they
Aren’t even there? Something didn’t care
About you and so still they come as if from
Nowhere, especially at times that ought
To be Usual.

These exceptions then will never not be
Around for us you and me who seem
Still unready for the comfort in the

Wonder they offer in such gentle

Jolts from out of nowhere.

Ulteriority

2008-10-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

This begins with a weekend trip to Vermont. Although my wife and I have been there a couple of times, we never did a hardcore touristy thing. This time that was our purpose. We inhaled the blaze of color as the low hanging sun front-lighted the maples. We got off the four-lane monotony and took the alternate routes, and that’s when we knew we were tourists.

We had read about the Robert Frost museum at the Old Stone House, so we set out to find it. We could easily have missed it. On the way, we had to deal with one of Sarah Palin’s heroes, a small town pick up trucker, who apparently was taking some umbrage over my anti-war bumper stickers. I put them on my car, not so much to boost my sentiments as to get in people’s faces, perhaps even to make them think. In this case it worked with Joe 6-pack, who rode my rear bumper intimately until I pulled over and let him pass as he leaned on his horn. In my former lives I might have been tempted for a confrontation, but in my latter life those things take too much time and energy, both of which have become precious to me.

Just ahead we saw the tiny sign indicating the Frost museum. As a student and teacher of American literature, I had always been ambivalent about Frost. On the one hand, he was the archetypal American poet, the 20th century voice of Jeffersonianism, the rough hewn perspective of commonality, the goodness of living in the land as well as on it, the beneficence of minimalist opportunity. On the other hand, his poems nearly always have a 20th century nastiness, a shadowy cynicism and doubt about the opportunity, the drudgery of being human, the miles to go and with each mile a receding promise of the gift outright.

The museum, this small house, however, delivered on its promise. For me, long ago a person who thought poetry could be a way to talk about things that challenge printed language, it delivered a lesson. Frost’s famous statement about the essence of poetry is that “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Frost wrote what is perhaps his most famous poem, “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening”, at the Old Stone House. And this poem captures this duality of delight and wisdom—a little bit like a trip to Vermont to recharge in the midst of so much natural beauty but in the end realizing the ephemeral quality of it all in the midst of our cultural malaise.

Frost spoke of this as poetry’s essential ulteriority. That is, “saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.” We all learn about metaphor somewhere along the way, and this is what he is talking about. Because of this, some people think Frost’s poetry suffers too much from obscurantism. But that is only because we don’t have the patience for poetry anymore. We are fast-food readers. Ulteriority requires patience; it is the art of experiencing the energy of wisdom in delight, as Frost said, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” And we must allow it.

This ulteriority comes from the need, the welling up in the poet to get to the poem. After the return home, I was sufficiently inspired by the Frost museum to try writing a poem. But immediately I was slapped with the truth that you can’t get to the poem because you want to. You get to the poem because you need to. The delight, the wisdom and their ulteriority are the force behind that need. Without that you are left with perhaps well-schooled words on a page.

And the final lesson? Ulteriority is a good thing. All of us should allow it. We might even take the risk of reading a poem or two.

6-Packs

2008-10-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

Over the span of my 70 years, I’ve known a few Joe 6-packs. Some are like the voice in Toby Keith’s “I Ain’t As Good As I Once Was.” He’s a charming person, pretty much aware that he’s into about as much future as he’ll ever have, but not the future he assumed was his birthright. A nice guy, from our point of view, which, of course, never sees him after he helps close the bar.

Then there’s the somber, quiet Joe 6-pack, the guy hunched over the end of the bar, just on the fringe of the shadowy section, making sure he’s seen in case someone’s buying. We don’t think he’s charming, but we don’t think he’s dangerous either. Like the charming guy, he’s part of our community. He opens, and, along with charming guy, he’ll help close up.

The third Joe 6-pack creates his 6-pack world once his house is empty, the kids off to hockey or soccer or play-dates and the wife gone to her book club. He’s a nice guy—neither somber nor charming. He’s quiet and rarely goes to a bar. He’ll go to a lounge but then only if coaxed by co-workers. When he’s there, he’ll have only one draft of light beer. He’s typically asleep at 8:00 pm, and he complains to his wife in the morning that he can’t understand why he keeps waking up at 3:00 am.

And finally there’s Joanna 6-pack, but technically we’ll call her Joanna Pinot Grigio. Whether she’s stay-at-home or mid-level management, she’s a nipper at lunch and a full bore sipper as dinner gets ready, as dinner is eaten and as after-dinner talk is muffled by whatever she has chosen to surround herself with—husband, kids, partner…or aloneness.

So there’s an array of our Joe 6-packs. These are the American icons Sarah Palin has branded or have self-branded as heartlanders. But I don’t think so. I think the 6-packers feel they have nothing left to lose. I think most of us non-6-packers, so-called Main Street people identify with two jobs each, selecting which bills to pay this week, whose turn it is to get a check up…things like that. We don’t like being branded and don’t self-brand. We're stressful and angry enough not to be patronized.

What’s my point? What if news media were to cut through the cynical branding? Here’s my proposal for Keith Olberman, Bill O’Reilly and/or Wolf Blitzer. Have your next guests be representatives from MADD and AA. Ask them what they think of 6-pack being the branding icon of a political campaign for President of the United States. Ask them if the phrase “6-Pack” is the best idea for voters to run with when they are considering their vote for someone to lead this country through its current dire straits. And ask them if they think it’s cute or funny or charming.

Comments
Kristin said:
"I really enjoyed that, thanks."

the masons said:
"I don't watch The View but somone sent me a clip of their discussion about the debate. One of the women finally said out loud what I had been thinking about John McCains health care plan. If the Joe 6-packers get handed a $5000 tax rebate ($3500 after taxes) from a President McCain, what will they do? Buy health insurance or pay their mortgage and buy groceries? Imagine how many uninsured Americans there will be then."

Comments

2008-10-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

People have made me aware that it is very difficult (not user friendly) for someone outside the Google realm (especially outside gmail) to make comments on my blog posts.

So let's do it the old fashioned way. Email your comments to me at this edress:

conway.rt@gmail.com

This way we don't need to deal with one of those nefarious media filters Happy Snappy Sarah Palin keeps nasaling about. You betcha!

Rope-A-Dope

2008-10-08T06:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome pugnacious, little Napoleonic white hope to the square circle of Black America. You are learning, as you swing wildly and grunt loudly and land the heaviest blows you can muster, the art of mastery and survival that you and most of white American disdain and condemn as uncivilized.

Obama glides and dances around the political ring as you amp up your sweating, grunting pursuit. Then Obama notices that your energy is beginning to drain, so he finds a comfortable spot in the middle of the ropes at ringside, raises his forearms in front of his face and with a wave towards himself invites you to punch. The invitation angers you and motivates you to deliver your most explosive punches. You dig way down into the slime and grit of the canvas and bring up your low blow upper cut. It hits Obama below the waist and slides to his elbow. And he smiles and waves you on.

Your anger increases, your face gets red, you try to match his smile, but all you can muster is some kind of skeletal grimace, which calls out your panic. Obama glides and dances to another side of the ring and leans on the ropes. You see that he’s not even breathing hard. You rush, even run toward him to smash that smile, to pummel him with your best haymakers, and you rat-tat a series of blows that leave you breathless. And when you finally back off and lean forward to try to catch a breath, you look up and see Obama waving you toward him to give it another try.

And now you hear your crowd’s cheering morphing into jeering. Your last best effort at capturing the crown and besting your father’s and grandfather’s milestones has lapsed into the hapless tragedy of self-mockery and the low comedy of your seconds.

Obama leans forward from the ropes, shakes his arms out and begins a floating circular dance around you. Your energy has been sapped, and your eyes can barely focus on what is happening. And just as you think you have your focus back and just enough energy to finish this final round, it begins. You don’t see it coming. Flick, sting. Flick, sting. You dodge to avoid it, but your dodge moves you right into its path. Flick, sting. You can barely make your wobbly legs move, and he’s dancing circles around you. You hear the crowd cheering him on. Flick, sting. And you dig deeply into what you think is your righteous purpose, clench your fist tightly into glory and throw the best punch you ever made. Obama slips the punch and delivers his knockout into the space left by your overwhelming lack of knowing what you got yourself into.

That’s the way it works. It’s what elevates the candidate to the major playah. Someone among your African-American advisors should have stopped trying to be as white as you and given you a dose of some real straight talk. You should have taken the fist pump more seriously. The audience did. You’re on your back on the canvas and Obama’s ascending to the next challenge.

Comments on “Rope-A-Dope”
Diana said:
“Nailed it to perfection”
Barbara said:
“Wow! I think it is terrific and ‘that is what happened last night.’”

How?

2008-10-07T07:18:00.000-07:00

Head note: Am I the only one feeling like I‘m on the other side of the looking glass? Seriously, WTF has become my mantra. Is this how it felt for the sane people of Germany during the 1920s? Or maybe I’m not one of the sane people (It wouldn’t take long to get a caucus of people to confirm that I’m not.). The McCain kabbalah is doing its best to send out warnings that the middle-of-the-road Obama group is secretly coding the voters to some kind of pre-end-of-days immersion into left wing radicalism. Oh no, Mr. Bill! Not the radical universal health care program! We’ll lose our most cherished freedom—the highest infant mortality rate of any “advanced” society! What are we to do?

And that question leads conveniently to today’s homily. People are feeling like a bag of cats. What happened? How, suddenly, did we get in this mess? How could this exceptional people become so distraught and bereft of answers to our unarticulated questions? Well, one answer, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s marvelous response: We can’t handle the truth!

A less dramatic and quieter approach would be for each of us to do the following:
Pick a time when your home is absolutely quiet and empty of people except for you. Go to the nearest large mirror. Look the person staring back at you straight in the eye. Then out loud ask this question: When was the last time you denied yourself something that you really, really, really wanted and absolutely deserved, because, after all, you do your job and do your best to be a good person…but you didn’t have the cash to buy it?

The answer isn’t blowing in the wind.

The toughest part of what’s going on is that we all need to change, by which I mean revolutionize our identity. Our culture has to change. And that’s the longest shot of all the gambling that’s going on these days in politics, finance, education, religion and family…in all the institutions of our culture. Beginning with the first pill—that we are a basically a good, but not a righteously exceptional culture—we have lots of bitter pills to swallow.

The last question is: Do we have the mentality, energy and guts to do it?

Gifts

2008-10-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve been told that when I explain things my language is too uncommon (esoteric?). Today I’ll try to make things seem more common, because I think the subject matter calls for it

(warrants it?).

In one of my recent posts, I referred to consumer restraint. Today’s subject matter is how and why we buy stuff. If you’ve been to any large retail store lately, you know the hustlers are piggy-backing Christmas on the shoulders of Halloween and Thanksgiving—that Pilgrim myth that now serves only to preface Black Friday, our holiest of shopping days. The current financial and economic turmoil (curfuffle?) have forced this on the hustlers. So the malls have Halloween shops and Christmas shops competing for consumerated America, we who lust after the right things because that’s what we feel we should be doing.

And the large mega stores, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, etc., are stuffing mailboxes and newspapers with bait-and-switch come-ons to get you to chase the brands and the buys your kids and grand kids are screaming that they want for the holidays. All is the same as before.

Except now the credit line on your plastic account has plummeted, and you’re getting notices to pay on your penalties, or they’ll up your interest rate. Join the mourners. You have lots of company. According to Moody’s Economy.com, US household net worth (your cash flow after expenses) fell $6 trillion over the past year and $1 trillion of that was just in the last 4 months. That’s how much will not be going to the malls and mega stores Black Friday. Our free-spending orgy has run its course.

So what’s to be done? Let’s focus on Black Friday and Christmas. Before you do anything, have a chat with the kids and grand kids, and indicate that Santa has to cut back just like everyone else. So give Santa the top 3 on your gotta-have-list. As for the other gifts on your list, remember the warmth is in the act of giving and receiving, not in the what. If you must splurge, because that’s how Scrooge retrieved his soul, then splurge on the food and whatever goes into the eggnog.

Don’t punish yourself and your family by heaping debt on top of the debt in your plastic. Instead of feeling free to consume, feel the freedom of restraint. And please don’t think that you need to feel responsible to free up the liquidity in the credit markets.

Governance

2008-10-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

I’m a word person. Sometimes they fascinate me all by themselves. Like “avuncular.” It sounds wholesome and kind, like the uncle we all wish we had had. But I’m also concerned when we ordinary sublunaries morph and wrench words to force them to serve our nefarious or sepharic purposes…you know like sublunaries or media or the media.

But I digress. I got thinking recently during the “crisis” and “rescue” curfuffle (category one) these days, and how it amplified the glaring paucity of leadership in our government. That led mean to thinking about the word “governance” and how it’s been skewed to mean mostly politics. In fact, rather, govern and governance actually mean and derive from the quiet guidance and forbearance used to calm the society in times of stress and crisis. As you can see in the following information I got from a visit to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the origin of the word had to do with control, staying on course and guiding the ship of state.

Govern “1297, from O.Fr. governer "govern," from L. gubernare "to direct, rule, guide," originally "to steer," from Gk. kybernan "to steer or pilot a ship, direct" (the root of cybernetics). The -k- to -g- sound shift is perhaps via the medium of Etruscan… gubernatorem (nom. gubernator) "director, ruler, governor," originally "steersman, pilot." Gubernatorial (1734, chiefly in Amer.Eng.) preserves the L. form.”

This all got me thinking of O Captain! My Captain!,Walt Whitman’s popular paean to Lincoln at the time of the assassination. Whitman used the nautical metaphor, because Lincoln’s presidency was so marked by his efforts to stay on course to preserve a united country, above all else, including his rationale for suspending habeas corpus, so nefariously (see above) and egregiously manipulated by the recent “presidency.” I’m not naïve about Lincoln, the politician; I’m well aware of his support from the railroad industry. He could be as clever as he was eloquent.

My point is that when the country screamed for governance, Lincoln knew what it meant and knew how to execute it responsibly. Since Lincoln, how often have we witnessed this? FDR, maybe Truman, Eisenhower, maybe JFK and maybe Johnson. And it’s been downhill from there. Since Johnson we have witnessed politics shredding governance. Leadership has yielded to leveraging interests. Nobody cares where the ship is headed so long as the cargo retains its profit.

This election might provide a resuscitation of or it might provide the final coda of the way we could be.

Change

2008-09-29T05:24:00.000-07:00

Apparently, change is coming. But it won’t be the consequent efforts of the presidential candidates and their minions. And it won’t be some latter day emanations of Bob Dylan’s apocryphal promises. And it won’t be a post-modern puff up cover by Bill and Hillary of Fleetwood Mac’s admonition “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” It will instead be drudgingly and boringly mundane and pedestrian. Not tomorrow but today, we will be housecleaning our 20th century bacchanals.

The latest (11:00 am Sunday, 9.28.08) from the scrum going on in the US capitol seems to be an agreement that everything American will demonstrate a lowering of the risk level. Anything we want to buy on credit will require that we pony up actual evidence that exhibits our actual capacity to pay for it. This represents a profound revolution in how we will be living our lives. And it will require much more than a fine-tuning of the way small and large businesses execute their business plans. The result will probably mean a diminishing of our strutting and preening, but it will also create a more real and less surreal manner of living. We might even (my greatest hope) refrain from being the land of the spree and home of the knave. We, in fact, will most likely need to get used to being #2, rather than #1. Don’t fret. Other post-imperial powers—Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain to name a few—are moving along quite nicely in their quiet moderation.

Tom Friedman, writing in the NYTimes (9.28.08) quotes K.R. Sridhar, one of his “Indian-American friends,” who said, ”Infants and the elderly who are disabled obsess about survival…As a nation, if we just focus on survival, the demise of our leadership is imminent [Wouldn't this be a cause for cheer rather than anxiety?]. We are thrivers. Thrivers are constantly looking for new opportunities to seize and lead and be No. 1.” Well, the US has been seizing and leading and being No. 1 for a long time (since the end of WWII), and Sridhar’s neologism (no such word as “thrivers”…but perhaps that’s his point?), which incorporates a helter-skelter mind-set, has brought US to the present circumstances. In other words, been there, done that, and what do we do now? Maybe attention to survival is exactly what each of US should “thrive” on.

Sridhar might do well to bear witness to a comment by one of our northern neighbors. He speaks precisely about the consequences of our “thriver” mindset:

“While I agree that the everyday thinking of many Americans is self-delusional, it may well be that such a mind-set is what made your country great. After all, where else is the right to the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in a country’s founding documents?

“Although the American ‘self-made man’ may largely be a myth created by those in positions of power and influence, it has certainly been a most effective myth, inspiring countless millions to work long and hard in the service of the corporate elite.” (David J. Martin’s letter to the editor, NYTimes, 9.29.08)

Special note: Those of you who are curious about John McCain’s signature ADD behavior might find the beginning of its source in his gambling addiction. Check it out here.

Houses

2008-09-18T05:26:00.001-07:00

Theres a black man with a black cat
Living in a black neighborhood
‘ got an interstate runnin through his front yard
You know, he think, that he’s got it so good
And there’s a woman in the kitchen cleanin up the evening slop
And he looks at her and says: hey darling,
I can remember when you could stop a clock

Chorus:
Oh but aint that america for you and me
Aint that america we’re something to see baby
Aint that america, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

Well there’s a young man in a t-shirt
Listening to a rockin rollin station
He’s got a greasy hair, greasy smile
He says: lord, this must be my destination
cuz they told me, when I was younger
Boy, you’re gonna be president
But just like everything else, those old crazy dreams
Just kinda came and went

Chorus:
Oh but aint that america for you and me
Aint that america were something to see baby
Aint that america, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

Well there’s people and more people
What do they know know know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the gulf of mexico
Ohhh yeah
And there’s winners, and there’s losers
But they aint no big deal
cuz the simple man baby pays for the thrills,
The bills and the pills that kill

Chorus:
Oh but aint that america for you and me
Aint that america were something to see baby
Aint that america, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

Oh but aint that america for you and me
Aint that america were someting to see baby
Aint that america, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

—(John Mellencamp's "Little Pink Houses")

McCain, with every fleeting day, demonstrates that he has no sense of irony…or maybe just no sense. Like so much of his perspective, he just doesn’t get it. And never will. He’s locked in the 50s of his youth, a much simpler time for the American Dream.

By trying to force the square peg of that increasingly foggy American Dream into the round hole of actual American life—especially during our current American Nightmare—McCain and his yahoo “reformist” running mate trumpet their lack of qualifications. The first qualification for office is to comprehend actualities.

Gaming

2008-09-18T05:26:00.000-07:00

My original title was “Greed.” So let’s begin with greed and then, “going forward” (Don’t you love that Wall Street, faux capitalism phrase?) we’ll get into this gaming business.

“It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal…We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you…I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.” —Gordon Gekko (the cynical, amoral character Michael Douglas plays in the 1987 movie Wall Street).

Have you had your fill of greed yet? Wasn’t it exciting during the bubbles of the 90s and 00s to plop your money on the green felt of Capitalism’s Great Casino and pretend to be a playah? As Dire Straits mused, “Money is for nothin’ and the chicks are free.” So much of what we’re currently experiencing seems surreal, as though it’s actually a dream, and we’ll wake up and the stuff we buy and the property we own will have actual value. But when we wake up, we have this feeling of emptiness, perhaps more like hollowness. Things have surface but no substance. Yes. A bubble is the perfect metaphor we keep repeating. And why?

We suffer, at least partially, from affluenza. We confuse want and need. Greed, as Gordon Gekko says, is not only good, but it is also our national salvation. It is what we strive for. Our right of opportunity has become our right to have. The bubble metaphor is especially apt, reminding us that Glinda, the good witch in Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, who never grows old and is always cheerful and helpful to the Munchkins and is also blatantly self-centered—first appears to Dorothy inside a bubble. In fact, Baum’s point in the satire is that everything is hollow, especially in the Emerald City (the metaphor for greenbacks).

Recently, my son steered me to Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse. I haven’t read it all, but its opening chapters spoke loudly to me about this confusion we have these days about what we’re doing. Finite games “have internal limitations on what the players can do to and with each other. To agree on internal limitations is to establish rules of play…it is, in fact, by knowing what the rules are that we know what the game is…rules are not laws…but only restrain the freedom of the players…If these restraints are not observed, the outcome of the game is directly threatened. The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.” Everyone knows the beginning of the solution to Wall Street’s greed is transparency; that is, investors’ direct knowledge of what’s happening to and with their money is a rule of Wall Street’s finite game. But the greed-keepers argue against transparency on the grounds that it represents over-regulation. That is, the rules appear to be for everyone except when they’re not. The rules are for the mass of minority players (finite games have no hierarchies, says Carse), not for the greed-keepers. What the greed-keepers are whining about is what Carse calls necessary restraint, the purpose of which is to assure that all players can be certain that everyone is playing by the same rules. If or when that restraint is compromised, “the outcome of the game is directly threatened.” An actual representation of that is now occurring in the financial institutions game. And it’s payback time for greed.

Think of it this way. The rules of the insurance game are pretty simple. You buy an insurance product, which has certain policy rules, called coverage per premium value. The insurance company determines the cost of the premium based on the degree of risk involved in your coverage. That’s their rule. You understand that rule as it’s spelled out in the policy, and you sign the contract and pay the premium accordingly. What’s not part of your rules is what the insurance company does with the premium money. And the more that’s flummoxed the more the outcome of the insurance game is threatened. And thus we have AIG linked Gordian knot style with everything from sailboats to home mortgages.

There is a solution to this, but it’s so unpopular that no one (except me) will call for it. The citizens of US need to create a new game with one overriding rule—consumer restraint. Don’t use dream money to buy your dreams. It’s a Wall Street 3 card monte; and the secret is that you only see the pea when they tempt you to play the game. And it creeps into everything our culture does. For an overview, go to Alexander Cockburn’s Fatal Distraction.

Banality

2008-09-11T06:34:00.000-07:00

I saw a picture in the art section of today’s paper that connected with this Pig Thing and how this Pig Thing has triggered this robust rush of average American enthusiasm. It is called “Ushering in Banality”

This sculpture (currently on exhibit at Versailles) by Jeff Koons, represents Koons’ view of how far we have “progressed” as a culture; according to ArtNet, Koons feels “the banality of modern life is, after all, the life we have, and that we should make the most of it.” As the sculpture indicates, we should consider banality a gift from the seraphim.

So I got to thinking about “banality” and connections with pigs and then connections with the uneasy feeling I have about the current political campaigns.

First, what is “banality”? Three separate dictionaries agree that it is a situation that is “unaffecting, drearily predictable”, “trite, commonplace,” “hackneyed, devoid of originality.” Do these seem familiar? Listen to the empty, unaffecting phrases and cartoon metaphors from the candidates that are mushed up and passed along by the mainstream media as substantive.

Then I got to imagining the pre-Nazi cartoons of George Grosz and how they showed the porcine and obscene culture of 1920s Germany and its banality. As a New Yorker art critic has written, “Grosz gave Weimar Berlin a face--one with predatory pig eyes and a swinish snout punctuated by burst blood vessels.” This then led to Hannah Arendt's

the banality of evil, “a phrase coined in 1963…in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal. (emphasis mine)

And finally, according to The American Thinker (an anti-liberal site) “Sarah Palin is the ultimate All-American Girl, beautiful but not glamorous, powerful but unpretentious, high-powered but down-to-earth, a reformer who speaks up while others cower in fear of rocking the boat. Like Ronald Reagan, she can reach right through the television camera into people's minds and hearts. We recognize one of us.”(emphasis mine)

In 1935 in It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis warned us that democracy in extremis is indeed susceptible to tyranny, and tyranny will seep into our culture as a salvation led by one of us.

Education

2008-09-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

According to this morning’s newspaper, Obama’s national education plan almost gets it right.

Most of his plan is re-cycled old ideas, including a re-imagined No Child Left Behind idea (I hope first on that list is a new title.). Of course, it will all cost more money; for example, he’ll propose $18 billion per year on early childhood education (and there’s more). Nothing new there: Throw money at education until people see that the problem’s not solved by more money.

Increase student achievement at all levels, and “student achievement is highly dependent on teacher quality.” First, student achievement (whatever that means besides test scores) is fine, but learning how to learn and have respect for lifetime learning should be the ultimate goal. Increasing teacher quality is one of those “duh” things. How to do it and how to retain it have been the questions of the ages. Tenure and glacial pay increases haven’t worked. How about this? Give the teacher actual professional responsibility; for starters, bottom up educational policy procedures (i.e., faculty generated) rather than top down (administration generated). Oh my! What would happen to the educational leadership degree mills?

Head Start has always been a great idea that demonstrably works, and it leads to my final point. Without system-wide local participation and responsibility, none of the above matters. Achievers will achieve and separate themselves from non-achievers, widening the learning and earning power gaps. Until education, that is, the process of learning, not the results of learning, is paramount among the community, the administration, the faculty and the students—that is, pride in learning, not only in knowing—we will see flickers of change but not measurable change. The following quotation from the article gives me some hope. The economist, Dr. Heckman, cites how making learners has a specific economic and social impact on the community.

“Mr. Obama has brought a similar intensity to discussions of early childhood education, on which he proposes to spend $10 billion a year. A Chicago expert who has influenced his thinking on this is the Nobel laureate, James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago. Mr. Obama’s plan cites Dr. Heckman in connection with research that found that for every dollar spent on prekindergarten education and the care of infants and their families, there is a $7 to $10 decrease in spending on special education, remedial education and prisons.”

Channeling

2008-08-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

Welcome to 21st century presidential campaigning! John McCain might be bumbling and forgetful (I’m empathetic; I’m 70), but someone in his campaign is very savvy, very attuned to 21st century communication, and McCain is listening to that person. That person knows what everyone knows: McCain’s entire being has only one final identity—to be president of the US, by whatever means necessary.

And McCain has an image problem. It’s not what he represents or the symbolism of his dour visage or the aged withering of that visage. McCain is unattractive…even in his younger images. But the precise word is unattracting, which is not so much about beauty per se as it is about how it makes the audience feel.

At the risk of seeming pedantic (a professional hazard), I’d like to explain the “attracting” concept. Effective communication is not so much about “getting across to your audience” as it is about getting your audience across to you. In other words, if someone is going to accept your idea, that someone must accept you as the messenger. You must function as a magnet, so much so that no matter what idea you have, the someone will recall that it is important, because you said it. You must be the first and the best channel. You are the medium within the medium no matter if it’s live, YouTube, TV, or fascia stadium technology. Your appearance simply makes the audience feel good.

Everyone wonders how Barack Obama got so far before he articulated his substance. If you watched the close ups of him smiling on the stadium screens, you had your answer. His smile is attracting because it makes us feel good, comforts our anxieties and makes us ready to receive whatever he wants us to receive. Obama is literally channeling himself; his smile is the message that counts.
Now think about McCain in the same context. His image does not make us feel good. Then think about how in the world he could have been motivated to pair up with this squirrely, gun-toting, mega-mom, anti-women’s rights, oil caballing, hockey mom from the state that nobody wants to know about. Now look at her smile and listen to her voice. She could be reciting the Jabberwocky, and the audience would be fascinated to learn more, just so they could have more time with her.
Consider these assessments from two politicians who ran against her for governor and lost: “She wouldn’t have articulated one coherent policy and people would just be fawning all over her…Tony and I looked at each other and it was, like, this isn’t about policy or Alaska issues, this is about people’s most basic instincts: ‘I like you, and you make me feel good.’…You know…that’s kind of like Obama.”

McCain’s choice had less to do with getting the women’s votes than it had to do with getting everyone’s vote. He had to do something about attracting people, because nothing matters so much as that attraction. I’ll go out on a limb here. McCain will rarely appear with Palin, especially at large, stadium-size rallies, especially if they have fascia technology. That is, he won’t if he’s smart. He also has another problem when he appears on the same stage with her—he can’t keep his eyes off her body (check out the 2-shots from her rollout appearance in Dayton)..

Responsibility

2008-08-29T06:57:00.000-07:00

Can Americans “get it”? Here’s something Barack Obama said that many of us probably tuned out as too vague or indistinct. But, in Senator Obama’s own words, it’s the essential part of his compact with us.

“And Democrats, Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America’s promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our intellectual and moral strength…Yes we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents, that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children…Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility, that’s the essence of America’s promise.”

But who will provide parents with a sense of individual and mutual responsibility? Who will provide the guidance that will admonish parents to stop consuming themselves into pernicious debt? Who among the millions of Senator Obama’s listeners would deny herself a new car, as his grandmother did, in order that she can contribute to her child’s college fund? Or not go on a vacation? Or not be au courant with the latest fashion dictates? Which of the millions of struggling fathers would forgo the flat panel HD TV the better to watch sports? Most of us would call this “sacrifice,” but Senator Obama calls it “responsibility.”

The questions go one. Are consumerated Americans prepared even to consider denying themselves what they want in order to provide what they desperately need? Senator Obama might have mentioned that it’s time to stop blaming the advertisers for our consuming behavior. We need to own it.

Unless we truly realize and practice “individual responsibility and mutual responsibility”, while our vision strains with hope to experience the marvels awaiting us just around the next corner, the odds are that we will continue to stumble and fall, because we neglect to watch where we are going.

Bergeron-ized

2008-08-27T16:37:00.000-07:00

In 1961 Kurt Vonnegut published a story called Harrison Bergeron . It presents a dystopia in a future US that seemed absurdly unlikely in 1961, and so the story became a plaything for the Vonnegut admirers and millions of high school and college literature students.

But as with so much of Vonnegut’s work, which held a mirror, as much to our hubris as to our lives, this story was prescient and just this week has turned actual.

Jericho Scott, a 9 year-old baseball pitcher in New Haven, Connecticut, is too good to play against his peers. Parents and coaches from other teams think his precise control and fastballs are too intimidating for the league. They offered two solutions: 1) If he’s on the field, he cannot pitch, and 2) He must be removed from his league (i.e., banned) and play in some other league (we assume among older players).

Everyone opted for #2.

The Decider in “Harrison Bergeron” is called the Handicapper General (the agents of his office being called “H-G men”). His job is to handicap severely anyone who excels in physical or intellectual or artistic competition to be certain that everyone has equal skills and opportunities. That is, to assure that no one excels.

The story was a good laugh in the 60s. I wonder if Jericho Scott would appreciate the laughter.

Ishmael

2008-08-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

[Note: This is a lengthy post. I hope that by sticking with it you’ll be rewarded. If you don’t have time right now, it will still be here when you do.]

When I read the final paragraph of Michael Powell’s The American Wanderer, in All His Stripes (NYTimes, “Week in Review,” 8.24.08, p10) a shudder ran across my shoulders. First, I must acknowledge Mr. Powell’s courage in attempting the onerous task of compressing the archetype of America’s picaro or isolato into a very brief article. This archetype includes some of America’s fondest and most ferocious characters, such as Natty Bumpo, Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Jack Kerouac (some of the many whom Powell mentions in his review), and, of course, Ishmael.

Powel is not so much interested in literary character analysis as he is in tracing the legacy of wanderlust in the American cultural personality. He cites familiar census data to illustrate this, but I think most American families can feel it in their bones. We are, in fact, wanderers by virtue of our being here. With the exception of what’s left of Native Americans and the descendants of slaves, we all got here willfully to move away from somewhere else. For most, this became a cultural modus vivendi— it’s what we do and who we are. And for a few it was and is the result of desperation. To put it succinctly: This is a highly complex part of American human character, which first came under scrutiny in the wake of Frederick Jackson Turner’s proclamation that American freedom, as illustrated in this urge to roam, had finally come to an end—the frontier was closed.

[Please bear with me. I will be dealing with Ishmael and my shudders very soon. This is all very important background. It’s the stuff most of your literature instructors neglected to tell you.]

American authors have tried, often successfully, to capture the voice of this persona. Many scholars cite Fenimore Cooper as the first to create this in his character of Natty Bumpo, the white European who felt more comfortable among the Native Americans than he did among his fellow encroaching Europeans—when he heard the sound of the axe felling trees, the first sounds of settlement, he knew it was time to move on. This sets the tone for the American who at least seriously doubts the virtues of civilization, who openly opposes it and willingly “plays” its true believers (cf. Melville’s “Confidence Man” and Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger). As Powell indicates, Jay Gatsby, literally a “self-made man”, was just such a character, his wandering being part of the cover he needed to gain respect from the higher social orders as well as criminals. Powell also cites this anti-tolerance for the ways of civilization in Huck Finn’s coda to his funny, painful and ultimately dismaying narrative: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it.” What Huck, Natty, Nick Caraway, the voices of the Beats, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, etc.—and Melville—felt was that civilization American style was not an especially humanizing experience.

So what about Ishmael and why is this relevant to the current presidential gavotte? Last part first, Mr. Powell demonstrates that the biographies of our current presidential candidates fit the literary and cultural archetypes that he discusses. He strongly implies that this neat fit will comfortably resonate across the media, so that each candidate will have (I suppose) sub-textual identity with the American voter. That’s my inference, be that as it may, but the really serious issue is a deep understanding of the Ishmael personality.

First, he is subtly duplicitous. Powel cites this, quoting the famous opening sentence, “Call me Ishmael.” This provides the narrator with two essentials for his purpose: a cover for his anonymity (see Melville above) and a direct, sympathetic biblical connection to the wandering son looking for his mother (Freudian scholars loved that part). Powell also cites the first part of Ishmael’s self-characterization, “Some years ago, having little or no money in my purse and nothing to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” Remember: This is after the fact of the cataclysmic fate of the whaler Pequod, its monomaniacal captain and its inter-ethnic crew. Directly after that introduction (this part Mr. Powell does not cite) Ishmael gets us a little closer to the truth of his life and personality, saying “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzily November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos [melancholia, blues] get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.” A little more severe than “nothing to interest me on shore.”

OK. So here’s a person that most people would give a wide berth to (sorry, couldn’t avoid that). Let’s keep this picaro, this isolato where he belongs—isolated. And now for the source of my shudder. Powell links both Obama and McCain with this character type. And he closes the article by quoting from Arnold Ramparsad: “The next U.S. president is going to be Ishmael, whether we like it or not, and whether he knows it or not…Fortunately, both Obama and McCain know that they are Ishmael.”

Personality analysis from literary character to living humans is a stretch, no doubt. But what if it’s not? Ishmael learned a lot from the trauma of his “sail about…the watery part of the world.” First, don’t trust people; don’t expose who you actually are. Second, knowing the dangers inherent in the “drizzily November of [your] soul”, get away from people, at least get away from normal society’s “sivilizing” behaviors. And finally, tell your story to evoke the greatest sympathy among your listeners. This, then, is our choice in our November? Hence, my shudder.

****************************
Addenda
Conventional wisdom among literary scholars is that the Pequod symbolizes the world, and its crew symbolizes representative humanity (albeit exclusively male, but that’s another long post. Meanwhile, you could read Melville’s Redburn to get an idea of his exclusively male universe. ).

Ishmael is saved by the buoyancy of the empty coffin of Queequeg, his soul mate, which echoes back to the “coffin warehouses “ of the opening paragraph.

Presidentialism

2008-08-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

-Isms are things we don’t give much thought to. That is, we don’t give them much thought until someone creates a new one. An –ism is a belief system. It requires no facts, no logic, none of that. It requires only faith and belief. Like Creation-ism. Or Capital-ism. Or Commun-ism. So presidentialism is the belief that the presidency is beyond facts and logic. Its responsibility is to the believers. In our tripartite system of governance, presidentialism has come to shun the other two parts, disregard them as nattering nuisances from the People.

As we enter the voting booths this fall, we might consider what exactly we are voting for. As David Sirota indicates, when we pull the lever for president of the United States we ought to be aware that we are not partaking in a coronation process. The president is not the Ayatollah. The president should represent the will of the People—for the moment the Electoral College notwithstanding.

If we again elect a president who we believe will deliver us, we will be turning even more toward authoritarian government, no matter if it’s under the banner of Hope or Exceptionalism. Let’s vote for the rigors of governance and not for the ephemera of nuance and Hope.

P.O.W.

2008-08-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

Does being a Vietnam War POW uniquely qualify you to be president of the United States?

Not according to this former Vietnam War POW who spent 8 years (not the 5 and a half that McCain spent) as a guest of the North Vietnamese. He also lived across the hall from McCain at the Naval Academy, and still wonders how McCain graduated even fifth from the bottom of an 800 member senior class.

The writer, Phillip Butler, also tells some facts about POWs overlooked by our effete info media. These facts put everything in a much more believable light. For example, the McCain-the-exceptional-hero story does not tell us that 600 people shared the torture and confinement.

Dr. Butler doesn't hate or even dislike John McCain. In fact, he holds McCain in high regard (as he does all his fellow POW sufferers who endured the same and worse torture as McCain). But he absolutely does not want McCain to be our president.

Abdication

2008-08-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

Everyone who cares about the results of the upcoming election must view this interview.

I think the key to everything Mr. Bacevich says turns on his phrase "abdication of responsibility." And in his use of the phrase he implies that the abdication begins with the citizenry and runs throughout our political system, including especially our so-called information media.

If Barack Obama were to specify this in his upcoming acceptance speech, I would sign on to his campaign in a NY minute. And I don't mean imply it...I mean say straight up, "We the people of the United States of America have abdicated our responsibilities as citizens." Then we would have some stuff to chew on for the next two months.

OMG!

2008-08-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

And can I get a WTF! also? The next great idea about how to reduce gun killing in schools— arm the faculty! When we hear these stories, we think, “OK, another urban—or small town—legend.” But when you read further into the story, you understand that this is not surreality. It is actuality.

Regular readers know that I’ve been in classrooms and among faculty my entire adult life. The majority of my colleagues have been more or less level headed people, some of whom might radically vent or blow out, but most could easily be calmed by a happy hour larded over with vodka shots and Southern Comfort chasers. Self-loathing and high levels of frustration are commonplace. But most faculties take out their aberrant thoughts on themselves or their families. And a few will get very quiet and wrap themselves in the nearest corners to envision odd outcomes. In a few cases, I even have some as friends.

I know of no one from other vocations who can possibly grasp how teachers feel after a day in the classroom. You need to spend at least two years trying this out in order to get it. After ten years, the scars have calcified so that only numbness remains.

Let’s imagine, then, the upside and downside of making firearms readily available to these people. According to Superintendent Thweatt, “the small community is a 30-minute drive from the sheriff's office, leaving students and teachers without protection. He said the district's lone campus sits 500 feet from heavily trafficked U.S. 287, which could make it a target.” You can’t fault that logic! Again in Thweatt’s words: "When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started [Of course, blame it on the feds!]. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog…If something were to happen here, I'd much rather be calling a parent to tell them that their child is OK because we were able to protect them {presumably, by killing someone?!]." And that’s the upside! One can imagine a mini arms race between students and faculty. The downside is that a learning environment becomes a killing field.

Using this logic in other communities that haplessly thrive in the outer reaches of our culture, why not require bank tellers to tote weapons? How about the cashiers at the local supermarkets? And in the larger communities, why should the cab drivers be left defenseless?

The more we learn about the stewardship of the communities in this land of the spree and home of the knave, the more we will need to accept Poe’s wisdom: “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream.”

Their

2008-08-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

I’m fussy about language usage. Sometimes I’m just fussy for fun. For example, why do we even have the word “take” if people use “bring”, whether they’re bringing or taking something. It’s really a simple and logical distinction: You take from here to there; you bring from there to here. Please, take me to the movie and bring me home. I drive people crazy with that. And they, of course, go along saying bring for everything…except when they use “take” in the absurd colloquialism, “Take this for example.” Take it where?

But like I said, we can have fun with this; nobody gets hurt. On the other hand, we can get into some linguistic binds when we try to insert political or sociological demands into language. Such are the hazards of forcing gender neutrality on pronouns.

“Everyone needs to bring their books.” No problem with the subject/verb agreement (in number); “Everyone” (singular pronoun as subject) agrees with “needs” (singular form of the verb). But the next pronoun, “their” (plural possessive form of “they”) has no word to refer back to (antecedent). The logic of the English grammar system (by which we explain how our language makes sense) has been mugged.

Some will say that common usage recognizes “everyone” represents single members of a plural group. Well, that might get by, but what do we do about the verb, the very heart of any sentence. We truly must choose. If we are led by our impulse to de-genderize the language, we still need to have it make sense. So the verb must take on the strength (I guess) of the de-gendered “their” and become the plural “need.” Let’s see how that works out. “Everyone need to bring their books.” This clearly raises another socio-political problem.

The simplest solution is to pluralize everything. “All students need to bring their books.” Thus, we have clean, clear and logical meaning. But what if you want to emphasize “each”, as in “each and every one…” (which, of course,, is unnecessarily redundant)? That’s where the risk, either way, comes in. Be neutral or be logical. Which is the greater risk?

And just think, we haven’t even begun to discuss the contortions of “fun.” Things can be “so fun” (adverbs don’t modify nouns), “the funnest” and or “funner”. All of this demonstrates that language, perhaps more than any other cultural institution, alters itself “going forward.” Don’t you just love that one? As though “forward” is a place necessarily that we want to be, going there will be an improvement in our lives.

Shamed

2008-08-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

We, the citizens of US, have been shamed once again. And once again, perhaps a handful of US know about it. And, once again, a dismal few orts in that handful will spend a fleeting moment to wonder over this shame.

While you read the story of this hapless person, your jaw perhaps will gradually drop and your mouth will hang open. But for most, during the past eight years we have become inured to the outrages committed by our nation at home and abroad in the name of our security and in the bestowing of the blessings of our outrageous exceptionalism on the heads of people whether they like it or not, so they might muster a vacant shrug.

The pathetic irony in this story is that we are shamed by the indifference of technocrats, much the same kind of technocrats as Adolph Eichmann. They are doing their job and have no time to worry about illness and pain. At least the perpetrators of Abu Ghraib felt justified because they were dealing with presumed terrorists. The “crime” in this case (being tardy for an INS hearing) is about as life threatening to the nation and the world as someone violating the driving-while-on-the-cell-phone law.

Nevertheless, the bulk of US “go forward” getting and spending in the blindness of our righteousness.

Candidate

2008-08-11T10:47:00.001-07:00

Now here's a candidate we all can appreciate.

Let's call him the best of the Frank White School of American Politics.

You'd better appreciate him.

Hair

2008-08-08T14:16:00.000-07:00

I read in today’s Times the review of the Delacorte Theatre’s revival of “Hair.” The review got to me the same way anything about that unique creation gets to me—always, always, there’s more to it than you can know…until later…when you pick up a latter day review.

So this time it got me wondering about a post I had put up on my former Web site (Fuel For Thought) back in 2005. I’ve read “My ‘Hair’ Problem” over and think it’s about as good a piece of writing I’ve done or better over the past four or five years, so I offer it below, mainly because three years later the topic is as real and resonant as it was then. On that site the header was the most recent toll of American dead and wounded. Anything in brackets represents a point of clarification.

MY "HAIR" PROBLEM

American military deaths in Iraq: 1,353
American military wounded in Iraq: 10,2521

A few years ago some friends and I re-experienced the tribal rock musical "Hair." The Bridgeport [CT] Downtown Cabaret's production precisely and enthusiastically re-created the version I gawked at in 1968. I again held the same vision of life and wasted death I marveled at from the orchestra of some Broadway theatre a whole lifetime ago.

And that has become my problem. That sense of life and travail is now more than I wanted to remember, and my eyes see with those other eyes every day now, and I know that the prophecy has come real. All that poetry and laughter has soured in our passionless lives and in the closeted cynicism of Washington.

I had just turned thirty that year, had just fathered my third child into a marriage that was on the wane, was new to Connecticut and in a new job, and was going to graduate school in lower Manhattan, bearing witness to the tempting lust and rage of Washington Square. And I didn't know why I was doing or being any of it.

My Silent Generation did what we were told, listened and watched. That socially acceptable voyeurism allowed me to be in the Sixties on the Square, on the train and on the job, but kept me from its harm as well. I lived an invisibility provided by my thirty year old mask and costume, short-haired, drifting in and out of demonstrations and parlors, urging it on willfully but blending with the rest of the tourists my age. And what a party it was.

The conventional wisdom claims we were a nation torn by the times, especially by the Vietnam War issue. But what I recall is a brawling, sprawling national family that cared enough about all its members to hate them and call them pigs and commies and hippies. Everyone was desperately proclaiming superior morality and acting on that claim. As I see again the rushing crowds pushing into the streets and buildings now, I see a nation that cared deeply about all of it and argued endlessly over the differences. I'm looking into the face of a Parkway toll taker as he's declaiming against my McCarthy bumper sticker. And we're heading for a demonstration somewhere, anywhere.

But today as I look around with the eyes that "Hair" gave me, I see blank faces on kids and anger in the eyes of two separate parents, scrambling at their separate jobs and fretting over day care, a nation of cellular phone drivers sealing their deals from the steering wheels of their imported four-wheeled cubicles. If it's all for fun, then nothing is funny enough. At least, the fun of the Love Children had an edge of desire to it. The fun of our Yuppies and their acquiring children mews empty phrases in pursuit of soft memories. They have hard bodies and healthy lungs, and they have vapid minds speaking smarmy jargon to justify their latest crystallized morality that avoids the snarling looks of honest people.

"How can people be so heartless?" runs the lament of Sheila in "Hair" as she confronts her lover's choice to leave. And that earnestness and desire make me cringe in the face of the mean-spirited avarice we wallow in. Her lover leaves for an ideal he's not sure of except that it promises more than the overload of ritualized drugs and nameless sex partners in the tribe. As it turns out, he dies like some 50,000 others, wondering what it all was for, what the ideal meant to all the people at home and in Saigon who didn't want to fight.

Even so, he held a belief. His short life meant more than a Volvo or a Hummer and the latest wonder toys from the Silicon Valley and Japan. As I look at the faces of my students and my forty-something neighbors, I see the look of a beater, flicking fierce eyes around to see the opening, the squeeze to get over on the system or the sucker.

We don't live in an age of greater morality or new morality. We live in an age of amorality. The only values are the codes of easiness and success. For all the health crazies around, my Hair-ed eyes see precious few people who are willing to exert a pinch of real effort to work on large problems that don't directly benefit them individually.

And so I have this "Hair" problem. Actually, it's an eye problem. With these eyes, I can't overlook things anymore. Like a few of my contemporaries, I had compromised with the spiritlessness of our age. I had blinded myself to the rudeness and crudeness that is commonplace. I had learned carefully to avoid the spin and curl of the slick-lipped hustlers. But then along came last year's emptiness, and I couldn't turn the other way.

I saw the bathos in local politics and could see how its canker festered exponentially in national politics. The Kerry/Bush Follies was hyped as a nasty campaign. But my eyes saw a soapbox derby with mediocrity's lowest common denominator the face at the finish line. The country didn't win or lose. The country sent a clear message. It doesn't care, because nothing about those guys matters. The most justified addition to Mount Rushmore for the 21st century would be the Happy Face.

So the Age of Aquarius has shmoozed into the Age of Putty. The starshine of the Sixties is the American Idol of the 21st century. Perhaps, despite all our fun, the sound behind our laughter is the whimpering that closed T.S. Eliot's vision of the modern era. Perhaps, in this new century it's the nasal sneer of the cashiers when they say to me, "Have a nice day."

Top-notch?

2008-08-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

As we scurry around like ants, trying to find our way in the 21st century, making certain that we are properly in physical shape, up-to-date on all the sense and nonsense available, manifesting appropriate and sufficient religiosity, prideful in being top-notch and highly organized...is it possible that in the process we have fucked up our priorities?

Some Israeli airline officials are scratching their heads today, searching for the answer.

Icons

2008-08-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

People accuse me of taking too seriously our culture’s radical consumerism. Actually, however, I don’t consider myself to be some sort of consumerism Luddite; I occasionally buy stuff I want rather than need. But sometimes something comes along and simply mega-confirms how I think our culture in fact makes consuming a religious experience; that is, we buy as an expression of our faith that buying validates our self-concept. At least, that might be our rationalization.

If you’re a fan of YouTube, you’ve probably already seen this; if not, play it, and please pay close attention to the language of the interview audio. The subtext of this manufacturer of female mannequins is that their product, indeed, presents an idealized representation—an icon—of women. Connecting this intentionally with religious (i.e., church) iconography, he “believes” that these mannequins, just as the iconic figures of saints and prophets, represent a “connection with salvation and all this [sic].”

He concludes, saying “people have to believe in something…Is Barney’s the church of today?”

Occasionally, cynicism gets down so low it actually delves into the mire of truth. Having just seen “Wall-e” with its satire of consumerism gone ballistic (“BnL” meaning “Buy and Large”) and the consequent burial in its inevitable waste, I wonder if any of us make these connections. I recall that George Bush, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, urged us to go shopping. As the faith-based president, was he asking us to pull together this way as an overt expression of faith?

Boon?

2008-07-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

In his review of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0, Ben Van Heuvelen (Salon) writes, “the Internet has been a boon to democracy in all sorts of ways, Sunstein acknowledges -- but if new technology gives us unprecedented access to information, it also gives us more ways to avoid information we don't like.” Sunstein’s position is echoed in Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, in which the author focuses on national geopolitics as evidence of this shrink-wrapping of our society into smiley-faced mutual admiration neighborhoods. We seek places and people that accommodate our feelings, ideas and beliefs. This way we are, at least superficially, mollified.

So the media person’s question is: Does this represent potential integration or disintegration of democratic impulses? And either way, what does it augur for our culture? We can call our political constitution (i.e., construct) anything we want—democracy, corporatocracy or, my favorite, state capitalism. The behavior it represents is what counts.

If “boon” means beneficial, how is our what-ever-cy doing?

Emily

2008-07-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Lately my reading and my conversations have been immersed in ideas and lessons in understanding social networks, social network analysis, Web 2.0, the devolution of demographics (what I once termed “divergency”) and so forth. In a comparatively short span of years, with the indulgences provided by computer hardware, software and the Web, we have become a culture of comfort-zone seekers. Facebook, Second Life and their copies provide comforting cocoons and welcome mats to like-mindedness. The good news is that we are facilitating the work of those who want to study and use their research to control and anticipate our behavior. The bad news is that while we individually feel more comfortable about ourselves and our “companions,” we are actually becoming increasingly detached from each other. The process creates the illusion of self-validation as well as community.

This got me thinking about the individual’s relationship to cyberspace. And that got me thinking about Emily.

Emily was an unacknowledged creative genius who, despite the fact that she lived during a period of extreme turmoil in our culture, lived almost all of her life in the protective seclusion of Amherst, MA (with the exception of a visit to Philadelphia, which is a very interesting sidebar in her life). The singular poem she wrote that resonated with my concerns about our cocooning in cyberspace is the following:

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me.

Emily, like so many of us (yes, especially us bloggers), shouts out into the void, seeking a kind of secure connection, which, in fact, is an illusion of connection, a hope associated with “hands I cannot see,” and those hands' willingness to “judge tenderly of me.” Emily’s poetry was at least 75 years ahead of its time, and her prescience of our time can be very discomfiting.

Anti-Americanism?

2008-07-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

From Europe with schizophrenia. They love receiving our money. They love coming to America to exploit the opportunity to make dollars (then go back). They love the worst of our pop culture. They even love (temporarily) Obama.

They just don't like US. Ever.

Read a cynic's summary.

Actual

2008-07-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

“Just wait until you get into the real world.” “Things aren’t like that in the real world.”

We hear these jeremiads when we are in…what? The unreal world? The surreal world? Mostly we hear it from people who are in the commercial or business world, the world of pirates, con artists, “masters of the universe”, the population of the “competitive” world, which exerts most of its energy and time scheming and scamming ways to avoid direct competition.

But that’s not my point. My point is about our blithe acceptance of the word “real” to mean something akin to “substantive.” Whatever is real is not only what we perceive but also how we perceive it. All that is in our real world runs through the filter of who we are and what made us who we are. For example, a person like me, partially color blind, does not see a green traffic light but rather a sort of grey-blue-green (maybe) light. My wife sees orange lights, not yellow lights. That person over there is tall only because the perceiver is short. That’s the easy stuff. There’s harsher stuff. For example, every Vietnam veteran I talked to told me the experience “over there” was reality; this homeland stuff isn’t reality.

So any “real world” is about the perceiver of his or her outer experience. The world exists as perceived, not as it is. This used to be called subjective idealism. I’m certain it has a more obscure label now. So, is there another world? Yes. It is the “actual world.”

The actual world is a stand-alone world. As I look out the window to my left, I see various tree and bush leaves gently swaying in a shadowed breeze. Seen from my air-conditioned room, it is a cooling experience. But the outside temperature is actually nearly 100 degrees with high humidity, not at all cooling. I know there is a bird feeder on the other side of the house, but I don’t know what its current condition is. Have the squirrels ravaged it? Has a new species decided to visit it? Are the chipmunks having a picnic underneath it? These things have occurred, and actually might be occurring now. Before we humans actually landed on the actual moon, the moon held all sorts of visionary realities for humanity. Actuality has a nasty tendency of draining the romance from reality.

And these days, by virtue of the new magic of digital imaging, we have the virtual world. The virtual world is a created combination of the real and the actual. Some of each is placed in there, depending on the whimsy and perception of its creator. In this sense, the virtual and the real worlds share a common progenitor—the mind of the perceiver/creator.

The irony in all this is that most of us prefer the real and the virtual to the actual. We seem to prefer our perceptions of the actual world to the actual world, in fact.

Sorry

2008-07-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

My wife and I were strolling the hard sand of the beach, as the high tide worked its way toward us. We were pretty much chatting about stuff unrelated to the beach. Out of the corner of my eye, I monitored a game of paddle ball between two teenage girls. No matter where I am these days, I monitor things going on that might pose a mild or terrifying hazard, in this case an errant paddle ball in my good eye or on my wife's nose.

One shot did get away and rolled slowly into our path. One of the girls chased it and as she bent to pluck it from the sand said, "Sorry," and dashed back to her game. My wife and I stopped and looked at each other. "Did she say 'sorry'?" I asked. "Yes," my wife said.

We talked about it a little. And it has remained with me. This is the quiet sound that most of us don't hear, because we suffer all the noise around us. This is the sound of civility that we have become unaccustomed to. And I'm willing to say this is the sound of true hope, which is a fact, not a vision, not audacious. It is the glue, apparently still out there, that just might pull us back together.

Listening

2008-07-10T14:02:00.000-07:00

We commonly think of communication as sending a message. Let me offer an alternate, more practical and proactive idea. Try this: Communication is attracting your audience by using language and images that will be about them and not about you. In other words, nuancing for the sake of filling in communication gaps is not a good idea.

Barack Obama responded to the disillusionment of his supporters regarding his shifts (nuanced positions) on various policy issues as their problem, because they were not listening carefully to what he says (Gail Collins offers a not-so-convincing explication of this.). This is the Obama brand of condescension that violates his efforts at communication. Failure to communicate rests with the person who wants his audience to feel, think about and act on his message. His audience doesn’t need a lesson in listening, not from Obama and not from Collins. It’s not nice to diddle with your audience. They will walk away from you.

Thus, Obama is enlarging what I’ll call a fundamental polarity gap. The polarity gap is the space between the communicator and his audience. The idea is to have the audience move toward the communicator across this gap. The extent to which the communicator does things and says things, which make that movement more difficult or less likely, will determine his degree of failure.

Obama has tendencies toward this in many ways. When he referred to Wesley Clarke’s “inartful” remarks about McCain’s military experience not necessarily qualifying him to be Commander-in-chief, he was talking at his audience, not with them. “Inartful” is a nuancing word. Consider the degrees of wiggle room it provides Obama. That is, Clarke wasn’t inaccurate; he lacked panache. By the time we all dig through that we have forgotten what it was about. And thus we have. It’s no longer on the radar.

When Obama recently got into a throw down about growing up in a fatherless home, indicating that minorities, especially blacks, should assume their proper responsibilities, his condescension arose from his implication that he rose above it so anyone can. Jesse Jackson’s sotto voce response when he thought Fox’s mics were off played it to the street. He said he wanted to “cut his [Obama’s] nuts off”. Jackson was actually calling out Obama’s condescension. What Obama has illuminated in this little fracas is actually how far he is from his African-American base. They know what he’s doing—and that includes Rev Wright—and my guess is that they’ll let him know about it as the campaign forces him away from them.

It’s really tough to be a communicator for all the people of America. And Obama has demonstrated that recently. He apparently wants to be more like Reagan (the great communicator), but he’s actually more like Clinton. Clinton thought you could play the audience with nuanced language. Reagan realized it was all about feeling; he could tell bold-faced lies, and his audience would feel good about them.

Base

2008-07-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

So things have become a bit sticky for Barack Obama. When he sees Bob Herbert slipping away, he’d better consider the meaning of “base” and how he’s going to reconstitute it.

I don’t know what advice Obama’s getting from his marketers, but the results of their efforts so far are putting the spotlights on the chinks in Obama’s princely armor. They’ve confused a bulging campaign war chest with a solid base. Money’s the easiest thing to do in America. Americans consistently confuse money with dedication. Obama’s up-tilted chin and prophetic gaze just over the heads of his audience easily overlooked this.

Some of my best friends and closest family members are liberals. In general, they support painless economic and social justice, are attracted by equanimity of pesona, adhere to principles of niceness and these days want less federal government interference in their lives. Their religious hearts hide behind their secular demands. They are not a particularly unified demographic. Politically elusive and evasive, they tend to be unpredictable and unreliable. Their political hair triggers will respond to the slightest whiff of betrayal or not-niceness. That’s why the Obama of change and hope appealed to them so much and why he’s hoping his recent change mode will go unnoticed by his liberal base.

And just who constitute his base? Originally, these amoebic liberal feel-gooders clamored after his youth, his apparently resolute anti-warism and his acceptable African-American persona, a community builder but not actually of the street. So he thought he had his feet firmly in both places, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of what those places are. He has had the white liberals, but he hasn’t had the white workers and their darker brothers and sisters. They know the street and how it works. And they can sniff a con man a mile away. So what appeared to be some sort of fusion base has begun to wither under the strains of the actual campaign.

A poignant indicator of Obama’s con is his Web site’s offer of a place for his supporters to voice their concerns. Lately it has been loaded with WTFs from his liberal base. This in fact is a clever politial rope-a-dope, Muhammed Ali’s defensive maneuver, which sapped his opponent’s strength and will by having him punch himself out and set himself up for a knock out. The complaint forum serves much the same purpose. Obama shows no indication of responding to the concerns of his hapless base and every indication of creating a bastardized center out of the moneyed class and disaffected former McCainiacs.

If this sounds like the cynical maunderings of a disaffected liberal, it is not. I’m far to the left of American liberalism. On the other hand, perhaps I’m a bit cynical, but isn’t that the healthiest place to be in our current political culture?

Winning

2008-07-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

Now that American and Iraqi deaths in the Iraq slaughterhouse have been reduced (and deaths in Afghanistan have increased), the temperature in the punditry’s haggling rises around the meaning of “winning” sort of like the meaning of “is” (Sometime soon I’ll write something about “is”—not such an easy word to pin down, despite the info media’s scoffing, which comes as a result of their fundamental ignorance of language.).

If the US wins in Iraq, what will Iraq look like, and what will the US look like? If you bother to trace the etymology of “win”, you’ll find that among many meanings a generally accepted meaning is “to be victorious.” If one is victorious, one has supremacy over the vanquished. Does anyone know who the vanquished would be in Iraq? Is the “surge” for or against winning something tangible (besides fortunes in oil that most people will not know about)? Is it important for the only superpower in the world to have bragging rights over someone or something?

The enemy we seek to assail is medievalism. When will we know that we have won? Medievalism has long since passed. Modernity rules the world…or so we had thought. But now, like beads of mercury, when medievalism gets squashed one place on the planet, it pops up having been reinvigorated somewhere else. As we mount our surge-cum-winning in Iraq, medievalism reclaims its control of Afghanistan and melds into a conglomerate medievalism in the pan-Mediterranean Maghreb.

So when people like McCain and others speak of winning in Iraq or in the war on terrorism, they’re really talking about fighting ghosts. These ghosts are everywhere and nowhere. They can kill some people, but compared to actual war in actual killing fields they are paltry players. If we need to fear them, we should fear them as we do organized crime, for that is what they are. They are losers in the gamble of life. They are not interested in “winning” by gaining privilege or substance. They are playing for us to think we should win, because we fear that they might win. The irony is that they lost long ago. The only power they have is the power we give them through our fear mongering.

If actual people were not actually dying and actual billions were not being wasted in this shadow game, it would indeed be a tragic comedy. Someday it will be viewed as such.

Pow! Redivivus

2008-07-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

What Wayne LaPierre, the arms industries he shills for, and gun powder technology don’t want you to think about are how the legal world can smother the gun toters. Despite the NRA’s strutting in the wake of the Supreme Court’s seriously limited decision on the Second Amendment, Paul H. Robinson’s essay spells out just how much law those gun toters need to be mindful of before they pull the trigger and offers a legally far wiser and safer alternative.

Just so the pistol packin’ mammas and Wyatt wannabes know, here are excerpts from Robinson’s cautionary advice.

First, the states still limit the legal specifics of the use of deadly force. That is, “a person may use only as much deadly force as is ‘immediately necessary’….If a less lethal means of defense is available, the use of deadly force is illegal.” So if someone picks your lock and walks in, and his presence is the only thing you think endangers you, you can’t shoot and kill the person. Also, “legal imitations on self-defense typically do not allow use of deadly force at a distance.”

Second, “a defender can lawfully use deadly force only to prevent death, rape, kidnapping or bodily injury serious enough to cause long-term loss or impairment of a body part or organ.” When one considers how one might be called to prove such specifics in a courtroom, one should have great pause in ordering up that TEC-9 or Glock-C or even the 38 Lady Smith.
Robinson indicates that non-lethal weapons, like Tasers, are much more effective, because the user’s accuracy is far less important. Unless you’re good enough with a pistol under stress to hit the intruder between the eyes, the chances are very good that he or she will still be mobile enough to do you serious harm. Tasers will effectively stop an assailant from 35 feet away.

So if one is serious about self-defense and household protection, a gun is the least probable solution. As Robinson points out, as Tasers, microwave beams and light lasers become more popular and less expensive, the Court’s recent decision will most likely be relegated to “an odd little opinion, one that works mainly to ensure some special constitutional status for gunpowder technology.”

Illusions

2008-07-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

“Hollywood and Washington have a symbiotic relationship. They both deal with illusions.” [Gore Vidal]

I think Gore’s favorite enemy, Norman Mailer, would add that the concrete evidence of this is that both cities rely heavily on their factoid industry. A factoid is a person created entirely by a publicity office, whose job is to hide whatever actual person existed or exists beneath the factoid creation. The creation is complete and viable when the actual person believes he or she is really the factoid. Factoids can also be “realities” created by publicists. But the people factoids are much more powerful, because often they hold positions of influence and/or actual power.

Ronald Reagan was a meticulously skilled factoid president. He knew going onto a set (stage, podium, TV interview, anything public) down to the head tilt, the middle America smile, the anti-elitist tone, exactly what his audience expected and wanted (not needed) to hear. He knew in his bones, and expressed it in body language and script, that, a la Jack Nicholson, Americans can’t handle the truth, the actual. Iran-Contra was high crimes and misdemeanors against America, and all of us heard his stammering as his desire to speak the precise truth, which was precisely a lie.

We know that Barack Obama finds much to admire in Ronald Reagan. He speaks of Reagan’s way of stepping apart from the crowd in order to do the right thing. Obama doesn’t tell us what the right thing is. He knows we don’t care. What we care about is his stentorian concern, his uptilted chin as though he were getting some distant message and passing it down to us, and his mask of sincerity.

Oh yes, Barack Obama found much to admire in Ronald Reagan, and most of it has nothing to do with policy, strategy or doing the right thing. All of it has to do with the illusion of presidential. He wants us to experience the warmth of his smile and the comfort of his deep, soft voice. We so want comfort, and we feel so comfortable with images and tones, and we are so inured to media. We groove on feeling and believing but shrink from knowing. And the young, energetic Barack illusion understands that. He is leading and we are following and nobody cares to know where we’re going.

Independence

2008-06-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

This morning my wife and I were reminiscing about how the 4th of July was in our childhoods. My 4ths were during and after WW II. Hers were during the 50s. But the similarities are more significant than the differences. They have to do with community.

Drexel Hill, PA is a sub-section of Upper Darby Township, a section of Delaware County, all bordering Philadelphia. I lived in Drexel Hill. We didn’t think of ourselves as suburban (I don’t think the word had gained currency yet). We thought of ourselves as an interconnected community, some parts being a little better or worse off than others. But each of us identified with the community. At no time was this more apparent than the 4th.

We had a parade, but the parade was a competition of float themes, all grounded in families or small neighborhoods, a friendly competition of various prides, not the least of which had to do with American pop culture. So we had this external (America) internal (Drexel Hill) matrix of identification focused on similarities, everyone joining in, because we shared something. I visited the neighborhood not too long ago. Under the heft our commodified America, I couldn’t imagine that the parade would go on these days, unless it were bankrolled by some huge investment firm, in order to hire bands and ready-to-go floats. I even drove down the street where our parade would muster. People on the street were looking down or away from the people they passed. Over the years, someone had let the air out of the neighborhood.

My wife grew up in Bridgeport, CT, in the 50s a highly energized, mostly prosperous city muscled by various immigrant groups, whose pride in their city and their new country gloried in the celebration of the 4th. It would always be on the 4th, no matter what day of the week. Everyone woke up at 5 or 6 a.m., the adult males driving down Main Street to save a prime space curbside for the extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents…everyone, so they could get the best of the parade. At home the women, as they talked family and neighborhood gossip, worked to put together the feast, which would be ready for the return of all the parade attendees. The celebration lasted throughout the day and culminated with the fireworks over Long Island Sound. Some people never made it to the big boomers, having had too much beer or coffee royals. But everyone was satisfied from celebrating family, friends, community and country…in that order.

We don’t have those 4ths now. It’s all obligatory, not anticipatory. The day of the 4th is determined by the work-week schedule. The parades have been shortened and consumerated. The feasts are dominated by big package store prepared foods. The empty seats around the picnic table testify to absent family members on the job. Our independence is dispersed into our cell phones and computers. The 4th is, for some, a day off, not a celebration. And our day off is soured by our necessity to stay out of the car to get to the fireworks so we can have enough gas to get back to work. Too bad. It used to be some spontaneous fun and some wonderful dazzle. Now we watch it on TV between commercials.

Responsibility

2008-06-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like my "Pow!" post got at least one gun toter up in arms (sorry, couldn't resist that). Her point, after dueling with some commenters, seems to be that until the people of the United States act responsibly those of us who are smart, responsible and care about our castles will need to keep at least a 38 Lady Smith somewhere in our castle, ready to fire at whatever threatens us in real or imagined ways, assuming that we are all willing to shoot and maim or kill someone face-to-face.

The key to this is a statement buried in her last comment:
"Coping with these at risk children.... Coping... that's all you can do until people, as in the parents of these children, are made to act responsibly."

Coerced responsibility. Now there's a thought whose time, I guess, has come (again). Fool that I am (or fuzzy-brained, over-the-hill academic, whatever), I actually thought when that was tried in the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, it eventually was found lacking in popularity. I could list many others, but you get the point. The citizens of those countries, coerced to be responsible to any manner of regulations and responsibilities (like having or not having certain numbers of babies), decided that was not such a good idea. They decided that responsible people decide for themselves whether or not a governing community deserves responsible citizens, to the degree that the governing community is responsible and, even more so, responsive to the citizens.

Sometimes I get so frustrated when I think that things would be much clearer to all of us if educationists—whether public, private or home-school—had not decided to remove from the reading lists the writers who the Founding Fathers read. In this case, we should all be reading John Locke. In Locke's world, responsibility flows both ways, individual to community, community to individual. Eventually, killing machines—all manner of guns—become moot, except to get meat.

Our culture is most proud of the primacy of the individual. We might want to re-think that, especially in the case of responsibility. Or we might end up preferring the alternative, guns all around, mining camp justice, and the Devil take the hindmost. No need to cope and wait for law enforcement. Have it your way!

Poetry

2008-06-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

“Death is often a good career move in poetry.” (William Logan reviewing SELECTED POEMS by Frank O’Hara, NYTimes “Book Review”, 6.29.08)

Even if it’s only that one in one thousandth time you get it right—not the poem, but the line or phrase; the poem is never right—that singular moment can lift you to where nothing besides music can. This, I guess, explains Logan’s comment.

I used to write poetry. First, I did it for romantic notions of fame. That was before I awoke to the fact that no one reads poetry anymore. Then I did it when I learned that it was easier and mostly more satisfying than my inability to write a good story. I finally decided that I did it, because it was fundamentally defiant—it challenges language to be more than prosaic. Or, perhaps, less than prosaic.

People who ask what a poem means should not read poetry. The best poems use language so that whatever meaning might be in the language is essentially trite or absurd. The best poems seek to feel rather than mean. One of my favorite American poets is Galway Kinnell, a Pulitzer Prize winner who maybe one-fiftieth of the population have ever heard of. Many of his poems ("St. Francis and The Sow", for example) are simple observations of nature that soar beyond the meaning of their words. His best poems, like the best of all poetry, are about the simplest moments and things and about how our appreciation of them is finally beyond language.

This might be what Logan meant when he concluded his review, saying “giddiness in the face of despair…animal pleasure in gossip…false bravado…frantic posturing and guilelessness and petty snobberies…give us as much of life as poetry can.” It might be.

Instead, I prefer to think that poetry can move us to much more of life, call it our internal life. The best efforts in poetry push harder against the restraints of language to get us to where we experience the potential human nobility that has been too long dormant in our times.

Pow!

2008-06-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

That’s the sound of various handguns, semi-automatic weapons, shotguns and other weapons of various destruction triggering around the land of the spree and home of the knave in celebration of the right to kill our families and friends…and, oh yes, the occasional intruder.

Our ass-toot supreme courtesans have ruled that we all need to have the right to have weapons in our homes. Praise God and pass the ammunition and can I get an Amen! And let’s hear it for Wayne LaPierre, the devil in the blue dress!

Yet again the yahoos and camouflage couture set win the day. The pathetic irony is that they think this will protect them from an overbearing and insidious government. Ask not for whom the black whirlybirds whirl—they whirl for you!

The Second Amendment was pathetic when it was written, and it’s even more pathetic now. But what the hell, maybe it’s the ultimate evidence that Darwin has been right all along.

Courtiers

2008-06-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

Kudos and many thanks to Chris Hedges for his timely reality check. He has called out the circus performers, the courtiers and fools much more clearly than I did in "Consumerated."

And as we also learn that the Internet will be consumerated by 2012, where will go to discover the actual, the unincorporated facts?

Consumerated

2008-06-25T12:27:00.000-07:00

I know. This seems to be a funky coinage, someone (me) trying too hard to make a point. Actually, if you Google it, you’ll find it’s been around for a while. OK, but what does it mean? First, let’s see why I bring it up. I got the impulse when I read the following:

“It turns out that we’ve been split up and atomized for so long that real grassroots politics isn’t really possible; we don’t respond to problems as communities but as demographics. In the same way that we shop for cars and choose television programs, we pick our means of political protest. We scan the media landscape for the thing that appeals to us and we buy into it” (The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi, Spiegel & Grau, 2008, p. 9)

Our culture has reached the point in our hyper-consumption that we are unconscious of the degree to which market targeting has reduced us to niche (atomized) wanters of whatever producers think we’ll buy. This process—I see a warp-speed production/consumption highway with its atoms (us) exponentially increasing speed and volume—is consumeration. We, and all the traditional social institutions (religion, family, government, education, etc.), care only about the next version of a consumable, which marks us in our special niche. As we select our comforting brand, we are by that selection branded. Let’s see how it works in two distinctly different consumerated groups.

Around 2000, I decided that our newly founded Media Studies Department needed a boost to get some enrollments going. I decided to see if what I already knew about African-American cultural history combined with my very sketchy knowledge of Rap music and Hip Hop culture could rise to the level of a university course of study. After 2 years of research and listening, I developed a course and had discovered a turning point in this pop culture phenomenon. I determined that the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”, combining a dance beat and a simple “rap” lyric (no ruptures in this form), marked the beginning of the consumerating shift away from the origins of Afrika Bambatta and Gil Scott Heron, resistive signifyin’ voices of the nation’s urban neighborhoods. Parrish Smith confirmed this when he visited my class in 2003 and discussed how he and his partner, Eric Smalls, (EPMD) had to decide in 1992 to stay with the street and not move toward the pop mainstream.

Parrish and me.

During that same period, gangsta rap became consumerated and moved to videos, “tats”, and gangsta costuming. Lots more can be said about this, but you get the idea. This is why P-Diddy is a phony rapper.

The second, much larger, atomized group is the health-nutty boomers. My theory about their health-nuttiness has to do with the influence of Mr. Rogers on their lives. He claimed that each was special, which resulted in their retaining their solipsistic specialness by being healthy. And the health industries licked their lips and rubbed their palms. The manifestations of this are everywhere. We suddenly experienced ever more atomized branding of bottled water and health drinks, consumerated to identify with perfect teeth smiles and 6-pack abs as boomers lean on their specialized 12 speed bikes and sport ludicrously designed wind resistant helmets and spandexed Tour de France uniforms. And, of course this is all integrated with their memberships in the appropriate commercial gym and/or hiring of a personal trainer. For the lower end of the Mr. Rogers generation, we can find a basement full of the niche exercise machinery and free weights sets many of which now languish in cobwebs and molder beneath layers of dust. All manifest the consumerated lives of those in the family room, watching cable 24/7 news shows cum supermarket tabloids, being certain that the various images of hope, or change, or a secure America are produced just for them.

Forgetting

2008-06-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

News media anchors and guests continue to pump the idea that “the Iraq war remains a critical issue for Americans.” You need to wonder where those Americans are. I can guess that for 190,000 American families (total families involved in Iraq and Afghanistan) our imperial wars remain a critical issue. But what about the rest of us?

Start with the front page of your local newspaper. Mine always has a happy, touchy feely story above the fold with a 4-column color photo, usually a smarmy family or community theme. Days and weeks will go by with no stories about Iraq or, especially, Afghanistan. The majority of Americans can’t locate either country on a world map.

As I have said in various ways on my blogs, we the people are shamelessly and arrogantly proud of our ignorance of the world and its affairs. We are an utterly consumerated (see my next post) glob of humans, concerned only with what gimmick, toy, commodified celebrity/athlete, and/or network inanity meant to appeal to our so-called tastes. If it’s “fresh” and can be purchased, we want it. If it promises to titillate, we must see it. If it promises riches, we’ll give it a try. Why not? Wealth is how we measure goodness.

But the facts of war? Not so much. Back in the 60s, people proposed the slogan “What if they gave a war, and nobody came?” (apparently taken from a Carl Sandburg poem: “Little girl, someday they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”). Not only is that slogan no longer contentious, but it is also no longer of any importance to Americans. We seem to look at war as a side issue, perhaps a necessary tangent of being “the greatest power in the history of the world,” exactly what the Romans, the Soviets, the Dutch, the British, the Chinese, the Japanese, et al said. You remember them, of course, the former masters of the universe.

As our empire continues to wane under the increasing drain from its enormous debt (perhaps the greatest in the history of the world), we ignore the essential necessity of empire—to sustain the reach without overreaching. And the more we overreach, the more we forget. Our consciousness can’t bother with what things cost, whether human life or the military/industrial complex. It’s all the same to us, so long as we can keep buying our way into oblivion…the ultimate state of forgetting…the ultimate state of cupidity.

Contortions

2008-06-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons. But when you really get old (Prufrock was projecting from a perspective of youthful self-pity), you measure out your life in contortions. You discover that for years you’ve been tolerating contortions daily. Arthritics, like me, especially must contort to avoid design and location petits mals.

People who design and locate toilet paper dispensers don’t have older people in mind. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say they do their thing for design purposes or to make the dispenser as inconspicuous as possible. One needs to twist, turn roll and tear, while in the process dislocating the seat and getting uneven sheets of paper. And the dispensers in public toilets seem designed to fall apart.

I’m not Catholic, but my wife is, and I occasionally attend services with her. The kneelers in Catholic churches (Protestant churches don’t have them; Protestants, having a closer relationship to God, more Father/child than Lord/serf, don’t need to kneel) present all kinds of contorting challenges when they’re down—no comfortable place to put one’s feet. My arthritic knees can’t stand the pressure, so sometimes I’ll need to hop up and unlock them. I suppose those around me assume I’ve had a spiritual moment.

The twisty lamp switches, especially common on tri-level light bulbs create surprisingly significant pain in my bone-chipped, arthritic right thumb. To avoid the pain of the twisty, I must use my left hand, and to do this I must contort my left arm and hand to get some light. Similarly, the pressure-release buttons on the super-sized laundry soap containers make me use my right index finger (significantly less muscular than the thumb and almost as arthritic). Then there’s the crafty hand soap dispenser that I once learned to do one-handed in order to speed things up with less mess. But to do that, I need that incommodious, arthritic right thumb. So I do the two-handed plunge and frequently get soap on the marble countertop, which is difficult to clean.

I won’t even go into the left-handed can openers and twist-top soda bottles. You get the idea, and Prufock was a whiney complainer.

Oops, almost forgot. When people deliberately contort ideas, they are liars. The American five years of disgrace in Iraq was about WMD, ousting a horrible monster, bringing freedom and self-governance to a nation pleading for it and other nice things. Except for this: “Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP…along with Chevron…are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest oil fields…The contracts…would…give the companies an advantage on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.” [NYTimes, 6.19.08, p.1] 4,101 American deaths, 30,333 American wounded (many beyond rehab) and 1,225,898 Iraqis dead…all this and more sacrificed in a contortion for profit. Sometimes the truth rather than setting you free, makes you sick.

Learning

2008-06-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

I don’t know when I began being fascinated by language. I can’t remember not being curious about it. Etymologies can even be funny. Diminishing tense forms are intriguing. And why does American English insist that simple verbs need prepositions to make them real? “Please finish up your work before you leave?” Like that. Certain urbanisms thrive despite the curious images they provoke; “He was over her house.” Like a helicopter?

In any case, this leads me to the proposition that what language we choose to label something predisposes us to regard it in ways that might not be terribly reasonable and practicable. It can prejudice our thinking so much that our efforts at positive and constructive efforts actually work the opposite effect. We definitely have made this mistake with the word “education.”

“Education” represents the interests of the provider or producer, as in “We want to provide education for every child.” (No Child Left Behind) One high school I know of puts a techno-spin on their slogan: “We work each day to make our students college ready.” (as in “cable ready” TVs) All of these catch-phrase concepts originate in the providing sphere, education departments and educational leadership programs. They are articulating theories as proposed remedies. They are all about education and educators. They are not about learners and learning. They are about telling and not about listening and observing.

Classrooms, lecture halls and labs are tough places. In the traditional procedure (educational), the leader (teacher/professor) provides stuff, which someone has determined is what a follower (student) needs. Right there is what makes it tough. Traditionally, because time is not on our side, we jam all this stuff (curricula) into this funnel and consider its value in terms of who gets it best, better and not at all. When the educational “system” works poorly, we question the system but not whether an educational system, or any system, is the reasonable and practicable approach.

We need to concentrate on LEARNING. Are people engaged in learning? They need to learn survival skills, yes, but beyond that will they learn things that will inspire them to continue learning, to respect the idea that becoming a lifetime learner could make them feel better about their lives in their community and country? Is being an auto technician any less fulfilling than being an actuarial manager? (The high school cited above has quit all of its shop classes.) The two examples I cited above illustrate how education creates boxes, the prescriptive NCLB box and the college degree box. We all know people who have BAs, MSs and PhDs that have rendered those people incurious, because they have that job that they hoped for while they were grueling through their education. And we all know how top down prescriptions make everyone feel lousy. So let’s replace the Department of Education with the Department of Learning. Let’s think of each other less as educated and more as learners.

Peace

2008-06-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

Peace be with you. Give peace a chance. Nice thoughts. Offerings really, supplicants’ wishes very much, indeed, in the form of prayers.

Why do I say this? In the first two sentences, the words “be” and “chance” are the indicators. In its sentence “be” is one of the rare instances in modern English when one uses the subjunctive mode, i.e., indicating a condition contrary to fact but in the realm of possibility. And in its sentence, “chance” strongly implies luck or fortune, again, something that doesn’t exist but we all nicely believe ought to.

This is probably the reason we have more war than peace. If we hoped for war and spent on peace, desired to give war a chance and worked to make peace real, we probably would have peace. Even the smallest aboriginal group prepares for war while they live peacefully. So-called developed cultures spend huge percentages of their national treasure preparing for and working toward the expectation of war. But do they do the same for peace? In my 70 years, I have never experienced an organized effort to prepare for peace practically and systemically. Organizations express their purpose to work toward peace, but does the culture at large, the populace, the government, the economy, every institution prepare for the probability of peace with the same energy and conviction that it uses to prepare for the probability of war?

We in fact have the technology and more than sufficient resources to accomplish peace, especially if we see peace rather than war as our existential imperative. But our Department of Defense is actually our Department of Imperial Security. And we are with ever increasing frequency discovering that this Department is losing its authority by the simple force of global attrition—by what Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World, W. W. Norton, 2008) calls “the rise of the rest”; that is those countries, large and small, that we used to exploit for our economic purposes, but which now through a varied network of alliances are sapping the energy of our singular status. We need look no farther than the demise of the Soviet empire to see how an overreaching state must plow huge sums of good money after bad to sustain an anachronistic governmental institution; we are at the stage now, as Matt Taibbi writes, “not at all unlike that of the old Supreme Soviet, where the daylight hours were occupied with ‘political debates’…while behind closed doors fat bloated party functionaries conducted the real business of divvying up military contracts and highway concessions.” (The Great Derangement, p.3).

Brazil is a good example of Zakaria’s thesis. It has expanded its economy peacefully by cooperating with other major and minor players in “the rise of the rest.” How much did it spend in 2007 on the military? US $3.5 billion. How much did the US spend in 2007 on its military? US$ 439.3 billion. Brazil’s economy is in a credit mode; the US economy is in a staggering debit mode. The US fights two wars; Brazil fights none.

I’m not an economist or a political scientist. But I read a lot, and I can still make sense out of what I read. Preparing for peace trumps preparing for war.

Energy

2008-06-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I heard or read about the two categories of energy, stationary and mobile. Stationary mostly has to do with electrical power; that is, how can we produce it without using fossil fuels? And we all know the litany: wind farming (a comfy title, taking us back to Jeffersonian agrarian democracy), tidal generation (harnessing the ocean), thermal generation (harnessing volcanic pressure), solar power (very popular, can be formed as roofing to fit all styles, etc.) and nuclear power (everyone’s favorite Chicken Little bête noire, also tres, tres Francophile). Believe it or not, during my undergraduate days in my geology minor, wind, tidal and thermal energy were discussed in some detail. But back then gasoline was around 35 cents a gallon. This geology stuff was just for academics. They had all these pie-in-the-sky ideas that were slid off the table as impractical, hardly suited to a maniacal growth economy.

Which brings us to mobile energy. I caught a clip of Senator Larry Craig (remember? toilet stall, sliding foot, “wide stance”) bloviating about our energy dilemma recently. His advice: We can diddle with these academic ideas in the future, but right now we need to produce more of our own fossil fuel. We need to drill, drill, drill everywhere and anywhere. We need to stop insisting that refineries retro-fit to accommodate our lungs and our environment. This is an emergency! We need fuel for our transportation needs, to keep this economy growing! And so on.

Let’s focus on this transportation thing. We are all numb from hearing about tweaking internal combustion to get another 10 or 15 mpg. We are all numb from hearing about animal fat diesel fuel and electric cars. Incidentally, I’m told by someone who does research in the field, that we could have hydrogen fueled (that is, water) cars up and running in a very short time for what we spend in one week or one month on Iraq. We are all numb, because whatever all these bandaids hope might or might not fix, they won’t make getting to my work any easier.

All this emphasis is misplaced. We are a car culture. Most of us identify personally with our cars. Our cars are our adult wombs; they are our security, our inmost pacifiers, our rant rooms, our private phone booths…and they keep us away from the outside world. All of this is why we need to change that culture. And please don’t think that Americans will never do that. We’ve done all sorts of things that seemed like hair-brained schemes. For example, the interstate highway network, odd numbers North and South, evens East and West. This was sold in the 50s as a very practical defense program (we’d call it homeland security today). No one objected to the outrageous cost, because it facilitated our car culture (to say nothing of those of us who’d go to the unopened sections at night and do a little drag racing) and our freshly ordained suburban Valhallas. Another example is JFK’s man-on-the-moon-in-a-decade program, which we take for granted.

So what do we need to do? Just as they did with the Interstate, we need to map out a networked mass transit system that accommodates the necessary connectivity to get us to work and back in a timely and reasonably priced manner. We all will need to get used to sitting and standing next to each other. We will need to trade our sanctum sanctorum for economy and health…and perhaps less volatile weather. We will need to accept someone else being the driver. This will be a tectonic shift in our cultural perspective. And here’s the difference: The Interstate and the moon shot were not personal. This is. And it won’t be good news for the energy companies who are blinded by fossil fuel solutions. But some smart ones are already doing R and R in alternative sources. So let the dinosaurs pass on. We need to begin the tectonic shift yesterday, because it will take much more than a decade to make it happen.

Mystique

2008-06-10T06:56:00.000-07:00

One of the things about me writing this blog that needs behavior modification is that when the idea strikes, I must run with it. Never mind the slow simmer over a few days. Let the pot boil, and let it run over onto the Net. If I don’t, somebody else out there on the same vibe and (usually) with greater heft will scoop me, and I’ll seem like microwaved leftovers.

That’s where I am today. Over the weekend I caught clips of Obama’s and McCain’s pandering to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Both said straight out that Israel’s security and ongoing alliance with US is an article of faith (they didn’t exactly say “faith”, but that’s how it works…besides I need that to connect with what I’ll be saying in a moment). Meanwhile, here’s old Olmert strongly fronting the idea that Israel ought to take out Iran’s nuclear plants. A few well-placed missiles ought to do it. Talk about chutzpah!

As I worked in the yard and garden, the more I thought about these campaign throwaway lines and Olmert’s “idea” to push Iran to the curb, the more outrageously dangerous they became. I’m certainly no genius, but even I could imagine the hell fire this would create.

Start with Tehran’s missile response, accompanied by another Jordanian Hezbollah and Syrian invasion of Israel, mixing in Palestinian insurgencies, then second that with various Shiite uprisings and civil war in Iraq, Iran and other places around the world. Get ready for the Rapture! All you evangelical whackos can start ironing your white robes!

And I sit here having been scooped here and here. I’ve learned my lesson.

Of course, unlike the Times, I need to carry this forward by looking back at what created all this ammunition for the end of the world, as we know it. I think of this as the Israel Mystique. First, Israel is a country legitimized by belief and justified by Biblical exegesis. Imagine that. It’s not difficult for Americans; the same Biblical stuff was used to justify us (cf. Manifest Destiny). Second, militarily, Israel depends mostly on US to fund and expedite its security. Keeping that in mind, this is a really bad time for Olmert’s saber rattling. We can’t even secure our own imperial adventurism (and Iraq is only the beginning; S. America is in the wings). We don’t have an army large enough to handle the current exigencies (the ultimate fate of all empires).

My larger issue is the question of why Israel is so untouchable in American political discourse. Even Israelis are more critical of Israeli foreign policy than we are. Thus, this mystique, I suppose, born out of the collective global guilt over our indifference to the Holocaust (see, even I capitalize it). as though the Jewish holocaust were any different from the Native American, Chinese, etc. I’m not anti-Semitic, but I am anti-disingenuousness and anti-willful-ignorance. America is having enough trouble struggling with the slow death of its own empire. We certainly don’t need to be engaged in the salvation of a mystique.

Branding

2008-06-06T04:21:00.000-07:00

We live this life of branding. But we think about it probably as much as we think about breathing. It's part of who we are and where we live. We couldn't even imagine a place without it. Places without it exist, but we wouldn't choose to visit there and certainly wouldn't live there.

I wonder about this. For example, at the diner I place my order with my server (or waitperson), and he asks me if I'd like something to drink. I answer, "Sure. Give me a diet Coke." Now, if I had been in the mood for some iced tea, would I have said, "Sure. Give me a Tetley iced tea."? Probably not. Branding. That's how it works.

We even selectively brand ourselves. We proudly wear clothes with brand logos or slogans on clear display. It signifies who we are, whom we probably hang with, who we don't and do like, and, through tie-in branding, we choose other things we're likely to buy and display. If I brandish my FuBu hoodie, I might have a Zoo York tee underneath it. Or I might complete my new 3-piece Armani with a subtle pair of Magnannis.

We also use branding as a quisine default. We're on a trip somewhere we've never been…like small town Alabama. And suddenly we're all very hungry. So, as we look around for a place to get a meal, we see signs offering all sorts of alien sounding food. We don't want to take a chance. (I ordered pizza in Tallinn, Estonia and got a tasteless doughy disk, covered with something red and topped with cabbage…you gotta be careful on the road.) So we desperately look for some Golden Arches. We're not disappointed. Especially in small town Alabama. (By the way, the same Tallinn has a Mickey D's on one of its main streets…very good fries, not so much the burger. Tallinn also offers lots of Russian organized crime under bosses. Not included in the Tallinn tourist branding. The bosses come out at night. But not at Mickey D's.)

I get thinking about the word…branding. Where'd it come from? What else is it used for? Well, wherever there was/is slavery. Cattle used to be. Like I said. It's about identity, about belonging to a herd. I have an antique branding iron, passed on to me from my father's antique weapons collection. I guess all this means, as we possess and own our brands, the brands possess and own us. Ya think?

A Smile

2008-06-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

My last post dealt with nice. Today I want to discuss the physiognomy of nice…the smile.

As a child, I would always know when my mother was especially depressed (as distinguished from her general malaise). She'd sing and hum "Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella On A Rainy Day." Apart from learning a lot about good hiding places inside and outside our house, I thus got a firm grasp on the nature of smiles, especially on the people who smile continually in one's presence. For whatever reasons these people have entrenched duplicitous natures. They don't lie. They stiletto.

Once, where I worked, a colleague, a particularly adept, duplicitous smiler, had the temerity to ask me why I was always so glum (i.e., don't smile very much). I told her I don't trust people who smile all the time. Her face drooped into a grimace, and she walked away. If I had known it would be so easy, I would have done it when I first met her. As things turned out, she gathered a group and set about mobbing a colleague she wanted out of our workplace. She stilettoed. A few others and I left with the mobbed colleague.

I always wonder what's behind a smile, particularly a gracious, "winning" smile, what was once branded as the "Pepsodent smile". Much like The Joker's smile.

The Democratic Party has just embraced such a smile and will soon wrap it in royal robes to lead us into our next imperial forays.

Perhaps we should all pause and try to discover what's behind such an attracting smile. For example, does the smile represent "change" in fact or change in image and language? Will this be a person for all people and all seasons or will this be Obama, Inc.?

Babies smile to win you over, to be held, to make you do that funny face or funny sound again. Too many adult smilers merely want to win you over…so they can use or abuse you.

Nice

2008-06-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

Does anyone besides me choke on nice. Nice might be the ultimate 4-letter word. We are so inured to it we don't even hear it any more. And yet it expresses clearly the root cynicism of our lives…

She's such a nice person. She always has a smile and a have-a-nice-day for everyone. Who was that woman? I think she was from Texas. The one who drowned her 4 kids. Linda or Laura, something like that. Did you ever see her family photo? She has one of those beaming nice smiles. Apparently she and her husband were nice to each other. The kids were probably nice, too.

Did you see about those people in today's paper, the ones on the front page, they were such nice people. Never bothered anyone. Certainly not me. I'm from the neighborhood. I knew them. Well, like we say, in a passing way. I'd see them working in the yard, and we'd smile and say, "What a beautiful day! Great for working in the yard. Have a nice day." I just don't understand how such horror could happen between such nice people. Sometimes I just wonder what's going on, don't you?

The best thing about the serving staff—still have trouble getting used to that instead of waitresses—at that restaurant was always how nice they were. Always a very pleasant smile and what can I get for you tonight? Such a shame though. Turns out one of them is one of those transgendered people or whatever. Sometimes you just can't trust your eyes. You know? And there you go. They seemed so nice, too.

Well, I know one thing for sure. I'm still going to be a nice person. I think that's the best way, don't you? I won't say "Have a nice day" though. But I'll be sure to wish everyone to have a great day! Who could argue with that?

My Glass House

2008-06-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

I have worked 70 years to create a glass house. I think I now have the right materials. Cyberspace glass is in fact nothing. So like the old song says, nothing from nothing is nothing. That's my comfort zone.

The best thing about a glass house in cyberspace is that no one can shatter it. The second best thing is that it fulfills Mr Rogers' vision that each of us is special. That's right, and Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an older man...and all Italian men are great lovers...and George Bush is a charming person...

As they say, if we're all special, then no one is special. Welcome to the funhouse.

This is my newer blog. The old one, like me, was stuffy and derivative. This will be
top of the head...like we're all used to. We think it's important, more honest. We call it fromtheheart stuff. We like that now, because we don't need to worry any more about accuracy and precision. We need to think only about I. About getting a groove back. About getting over. About the next about.

I might even spew some poetry at you. I used to think it was important. I know it isn't important, but it's still challenging to try to do it. It's a little like masturbation...fleetingly satisfying but essentially a bummer.

So we'll try this. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets wiser. Nobody cares. It's cyberspace.