Fighting Climate Change Through Prevention

In this article in the NY Times, analysts correctly ascertain that climate change could result in threats to national interest. What is sad about this form of analysis–which as, of course, the FOXNews reporting eagerly highlights (Climate Change Could Warrant U.S. Military Action)–is the reactive mentality that this lends to the debate about policy and strategy. Instead of talking about methods of combating climate change in terms of establishing carbon emission reducing policies, funding ‘green’ technologies, and mitigation of climate change in those areas most affected, war hawks eagerly begin anticipating increasing weapons cachets and military budgets. But what good will it do to send in troops to areas devastated by climate change? That’s like trying to staunch a wound with a toothpick. The only effective measures we can take to address the potential threats to U.S. interests and security from climate change will be preventative: through policy, funding, and diplomacy. And that must happen now, not later.

My $.02 On Health Care Reform

Health care reform. Does it need to happen?  Is it going to happen? Does it require an inclusive public health insurance option? God yes. Depends on your idea of reform. And yes.

This is a sticky issue that has been largely avoided by politicians who don’t want to tango with sticky issues. Props to Mrs. Clinton for even attempting it years ago, back when it should have been done. President Obama has elected to tackle it head on, and the issue has punctured his seeming political invincibility. But one cannot dock him points for giving it an honest effort. He could just sit back on his ranch and pretend that allowing the status quo to continue is the right thing for all Americans, not just the top 5%.

It’s amazing how much debate there even is revolving around the issue of public health coverage. Apparently the reality has been rendered so opaque to analysis that many a folk appears to have missed the obvious: that national health care coverage needs to be as universal as possible, or else all public health, both nationally and globally, is endangered. That’s the reality. Now the other reality at the moment, politically speaking, is how do we pay for it. But to me, at least, the answer to this is also clear: we need to tax the rich and use that money to cover public health insurance. The poor have never been able to afford health insurance. That’s why they go to the ER and make the public pay for it anyway. And the middle class can no longer afford health insurance either. Why? Because it’s big business. Health care is a luxury in this country. But public health can not be relegated to luxury/big business status. If we do not cover the majority of the population, then all of the population is put in grave danger due to outbreaks of disease. Evolved microbes do not recognize class distinctions.

A sidebar on “middle class”: apparently, the President seems to consider households that make below $250,000 a year to be “middle class”. I’m sorry, but if your household is making that much, then you are not middle class. You are doing just fine. You should be paying higher taxes so that the rest of us can get health care.

New Paradigm

You may have noted that I have been relatively quiet on the political/news front as of late, mostly because I don’t have any free time anymore, but furthermore because I think that most of the events, such as Obama’s inauguration, speak for themselves and we are all somewhat inspired and hopeful for the future, finally. But there are a few things that I want to say about the pressing economic and political events of our time.

First of all, former George W. Bush’s presidency was a complete and abject failure. Please, let’s not forget that. There have been a lot of interviews and articles before the switch-over that offered a somewhat benign retrospective of Bush’s reign, and it looks like reporters have been attempting to remain “objective” by entertaining the notion that Bush may have represented integrity because he never backed down from doing whatever the fuck he wanted, or something like that.

Bush was a terrible mistake, and a giant mar on the already besotted history of US politics. He stood as a representative not of personal integrity, but rather as the exact negative of what a leader should be. He didn’t listen to his opponents nor his own constituency. He didn’t utilize diplomacy in dealing with world bodies and foreign leaders. He took more vacations than any other president in history. His administration was peppered by yes-men, neo-cons, and nepotism. This is completely ignoring the myriad scandals that marred his administration. Basically, he didn’t do anything that he was supposed to do as a LEADER. The real “leadership” in the Bush presidency were the people who actually ran things, such as his vice-president and Karl Rove. Presidents in the past have oft been puppets on strings, such as Reagan, but at least Reagan had charisma and could instill some kind of false confidence, even when his actual policies resulted in terrible outcomes that we are still paying for today.

So yes, thank god we have closed that terrible chapter in our history. But we will be continuing to pay for those 8 years of bullshit for a long time hence, Obama or not. The Republican Party, as evidenced by their cold response to bipartisanship in the passing of the stimulus plan, are awaiting an eventual rebuttal to the centrism of the Obama presidency. They will do all they can do to ensure that his policies fail, so that they can renew their onslaught of the poor and middle class. Bear that in mind in the coming years: W. Bush was not an anomaly. He was the epitome of hard-line right-wing divisiveness. And again, let me be perfectly clear about the policies of such an administration: they failed. Period. They will never be effective. The myth of free market capitalism has been—with finality—debunked.

The history that Obama has made in his ascendance to the American presidency is not simply about a black man becoming a US President, nor reductively about simple “change”: it is about the forceful backing of an American public for a government that will utilize its policies for greater control and responsibility of economic tides. A government that does what it is supposed to do, rather than absolving itself of any and all responsibility beyond that of blatant militarism.

Now I want to discuss these “tough economic times,” as they like to say everyday on the news. This is indeed a time when the failed economic policies of the past are coming home to roost. This is also a time when “the American people” are beginning to pay for their years of living wantonly off of money that they never had and never will have. This is a time when issues of sustainability are no longer simply concerns of hippies, but of academic professors and Washington policy wonks. This is a time when America has to wake up to the fact that we have been sleeping, while the rest of the world has been quietly surpassing us in their investment in business and educational competitiveness.

Even though comparisons to the Great Depression can be fruitful simply for waking up people to the fact that this recession is real and its effects on people devastating, let’s also abstain from going too far. No one is jumping out of windows on Wall St. The lines for unemployment may be exceedingly long, but there’s no extensive lines for soup kitchens, at least, not yet. Retail chains that have stretched themselves too thin on the promise of endless sales have indeed been shutting their doors. Banks are decisively slimming their ranks with a butcher’s knife. And this impact cannot be understated on the economy nor on men and women now without salaries. But for many, it also doesn’t mean much of anything other than that they won’t waste their money like they might have before. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Because the fact is that transitioning into what they call a “green” economy can not be easy, nor even possible without the recognition that it is necessary. These “tough economic times” are not about a housing market bubble collapsing, nor about over-investment in bad securities and over-lending of easy credit: it is about the transition into a new economic and political and social paradigm. A paradigm in which we recognize our interdependence on each other and other nations, acknowledge the interconnectivity of mankind with that of the earth, and begin to take responsibility for the actions not only of ourselves, but of our governments and world bodies.

So as tough as these times are—and yes, these times are tough for me personally, thank you very much—they are also a necessary time for buckling down and gaining a clearer vision of what we need to achieve.

Look at how far we’ve come

I don’t really like saying “I told you so,” but. . . just re-read this past post of mine to see how far we’ve come as a nation. Now do you still think all Americans are stupid?

It’s Obama Time

Well, I’m staying up past my bed time, which means 5 hours 4 hours of sleep or so tonight, but what the hell. I feel the need to post something; what was once only oft a means of circumventing loneliness or merely a form of mental masturbation has now become a luxury in my life.

First of all, what can I say about Obama getting elected? It has turned from hope beyond hope into reality. It is a paradigm changing event. I went to bed once he took Ohio, but couldn’t sleep anyhow because everyone in my neighborhood proceeded to uncork champagne bottles, scream, and set off firecrackers once he had reached the necessary amount of electoral votes. I went to sleep happy.

I then attended some management training classes for 2 days, which were useful even if only for ascertaining that I’ve learned much of the right stuff mostly on my own already. I think the Tao Te Ching is ultimately the best piece of literature on effective management techniques.

Obama seems to have taken to heart the Tao Te Ching. He is able to influence vast and sweeping change without appearing to break a sweat. He knows how to let others act and speak for him, how to maintain constant discretion, discipline and restraint. He is indeed a capable leader.

If ever there was a “mandate” behind an election, I think this has been it. Regulation and the curtailing of unrestrained markets have been given a clear green light, which sets the stage, finally, for a possible regenerative economy and environmentally sound agenda.

To be perfectly honest, I think electing Obama came down to a matter of our children’s survival. We would have been fucked otherwise. Free market capitalism and individual rights to do whatever they damn well please is apparent as no longer viable in an age when the failure of an emerging nation to develop its economy and to sustain its natural resources is recognized as critically important to the success of rich nations. An interdependent globe is only as strong as its weakest link.

So thank god Obama is our president. The world and the sane members of the United States can collectively breathe a sigh of relief. Now it’s time, finally, to get to the real work of dealing with the mess we are in. Let’s get to it.

In other news, I am now engaged. You heard it here first.

Looking Beyond Election Day

As you know if you read my frequent political rants and shpeals, I am a firm supporter of Barack Obama, and have vociferously petitioned for him to become the next President of the United States. I have also donated, for the first time in any election, a number of times to his campaign.

Now that the election is looming, I want to again remind all of you to get out there and vote. But I also want to begin looking beyond the current election, and shed some of the starry eyed endorsement that I have portrayed here on my blog for Obama. I’m assuming that Obama is going to become elected, which might seem conceited of me, but it simply is due to the fact that I found out that my Dad, of all people, is voting for Obama. Listen: if my Dad is voting for a non-Republican, than you know that times have a-changed. He’s about the most stolid conservative I can imagine. When he told me over the phone that Obama was the best candidate, I knew that there was hope.

(A caveat: I also don’t want to be sticking my foot in my mouth here, either. His election is neither certain nor definite at this time, and like all other supporters at this moment, I am still slightly frightened. In a post Al Gore-Florida-2000 world, nothing in an election is ever certain.)

Obama, as defined by Colin Powell in his eloquent and intelligently framed endorsement, is indeed a “transformational figure”. He is transformational not because he represents, as so many conservatives seem to be petrified of, a radical shift from right to left, but rather because he represents a bridge between right and left. He is a center-left politician, but it would be a stretch to try to hoist any radical ideologies onto his shoulders. He is unique at this particular moment in American politics because he can appeal not only to left wing progressives, but furthermore to fundamentalist Christians and neo-conservatives (except for the blatantly racist ones). Such a politician has been hitherto unimaginable.

In recognizing his centrism, however, it is important to note, for a radical tending left winger such as myself, that he represents for progressives simply the potential for change, not the guarantee. McCain represents a step back, the step back that W. Bush so horrifically embodied. A step back in the sense of a bureacratic rejection of scientific and intellectual advancement, a continuing division between a tiny populace of rich and a large and ever increasingly larger populace of the poor, and a similar boorishness in foreign policy that guarantees that the United States as a society and civilization is destined to collapse in the face of environmental and economic changes.

Obama represents a step forward in that at least we know that with the right kind of applied pressure, he will make decisions that are based more heavily on pragmatism rather than ideology, and on populist necessities as opposed to super-rich welfare. But what I want to emphasize is that we cannot afford to sit back on our laurels after Obama is elected and expect him to make all the right decisions for us. He is an able and intelligent leader, and he requires the right information and feedback to respond effectively to our needs. And as progressive as he may seem in the light of the past 8 years, he is also simply a politician and he must respond to all constituencies, and he is severely limited by the controlling majorities in the House and Senate. The most we can hope is that he can start the ground work for the herculean struggle of righting the United States from its spiralling path to the precipice and begin paddling back upstream, bit by bit.

So while I may have seemed to be that uncritical starry eyed supporter of Obama, in fact my support is due in large to political pragmatism. He is the only candidate who can become elected that will potentially respond correctly to the challenges that our nation and our globe currently face. We need a leader who recognizes the intrinsic value in diplomacy, compromise, and bridging partisan divides. We need a leader who recognizes global interdependence and will respect and strengthen global institutions such as the UN and global drives for aid to the poor, collaborative environmental objectives, and international law and regulation.

I would prefer a candidate whose platform was built entirely on sustainable environmental policy reform and more solidly and specifically on building a regenerative green economy, with foreign aid to developing nations. I would prefer a candidate who was more proactive and radical on pushing through environmental legislation, with the aim of achieving oil independence within a shorter time frame, such as Sweden has already done. In an ideal world, I would be voting for the Green Party. But the time, unfortunately, has not yet come for a third party candidate in US electoral politics. In being pragmatic, I recognize that the candidate who is realistically electable and will potentially respond to environmental challenges effectively can only be Barack Obama at this moment in time.

I don’t expect the man to change the world. I expect that the world can only be changed if we apply appropriate and effective pressures onto his administration in order to affect necessary changes, regulations, and policy reform. But at least with Obama’s administration, we know that these changes are possible. With Bush, no change, other than regressive, has been possible, and the only hope has been in getting rid of the bastard.

It is indeed a brighter day. But the challenges remain ever more difficult. And it’s only potentially another 4 years that we have to move forward. In looking forward, we must bear in mind that we have to be active in politics constantly and consistently, not only on election day.

Death of laissez faire?

The Economist posted an interesting article defending free-market capitalism. What surprised me about this article is how unusually defensive, clear and one-sided its perspective is. While I agree in principle with the premise that what we need is “not bigger government, but better government”, I think the author mistakes the movement in general towards greater regulation and government oversight. No one wants a communist government nor to refute capitalism (other than for fringe idealists who don’t understand economics), nor, for that matter, to overly constrain the market economy. We simply want government to do what it is supposed to do—formulate responsible policies and regulations—rather than sit idly by and allow the market to run wanton (and destroy the environment in the process).

Part of this is making government policy and electoral processes more transparent and efficient, which entails utilizing internet and software technology. That means streamlining government, not adding to its bureaucracy. I don’t think that the way to the future lies in more overtly “Great Society” type of programs, but rather in simply attempting to bring the government back up into the present age, to keep up with businesses and civil society.

I would like to say much more on this timely and interesting topic, but I have to dash out the door to work right now. Talk amongst yourselves.

The Bigger Picture, Based on Our Current State of Affairs

Well, it’s ’bout time for me to post some thoughts about the current state of the world. I sometimes wish that I had a column in a major newspaper, so that I could generate national debate and establish talking points for The View. But, alas, my blog is just too random, too all-over-the-place, too largely mundane and only intermittently insightful, too much me, to ever hold such a place in the pantheon of established punditry. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. I will hold forth, in any case, as if the entire world listens attentively to my every last quest for meaning.

To the point: the major news item on our collective plate is the economy. We all know that the “bailout” plan, as it is called, is pretty much a bunch of hogwash, but we also all know that we need to do something, and not many of us are economically minded enough to know quite what that is. We just know that we want our retirement funds to stop being depleted, etc. First of all, I recommend checking in with Paul Krugman’s blog from time to time for some academic economic insight parsed down, relatively speaking, for the average Joe. He has written a short paper explaining what he thinks is going down right now, and to parse it even more simply into my own think-speak, it basically has to do with the global interdependence of financial markets. Which is why shortly after our economy started nose diving, the European economy has started feeling the effects of free-fall gravity as well.

If you follow my random output of thought consistently, then you’ve noted that I have a certain fascination with the concept of interdependence (go ahead and check out my posts filed under the topic of ‘interconnectivity‘ if you don’t believe me). I see interdependence, interconnectivity, the intwinement of multiple beings into one collective entity, as a source of greater strength. An individual vulnerability that establishes greater collective depth and power. This is the strength of the artist, the strength of the family, the strength of the nation. It makes us more open to superficial attack, but better resilient to sustained barrages.

Our economy—and hence, the global economy—is undeniably, at this point, in for some hard times. For how long, of course, no one can say. I have discussed elsewhere about how the economy is inevitably headed towards seeming disaster, but also about how what appears as tragic at the moment could potentially turn into a deeper manifestation of something necessary and redemptive i.e. the movement towards a more sustainable society. However, this transformation can only occur if we are willing to make some changes, such as move towards more Democratic—even *gasp* Socialist—notions of political governance as opposed to continuously giving in to Republican “small-government, big business” ideals. Obviously, putting Barack Obama into office is a great first step on this path. But beyond the presidential campaign, we need to push much harder for a move towards responsible government policy and regulation.

It’s sort of ridiculous that it takes a crisis or tragedy for people to awaken to the importance of individual sacrifice for collective betterment. It’s what we do in hard times, and it’s what people who live in poverty always do: help each other out. It’s about time that we start taxing the rich, taxing or putting caps on destructive and wasteful practices (such as lawns, SUVs, and plastic product packaging), and investing back into our society as a whole.

We all know that Communism and/or Fascism has failed. We all know that we believe in freedom and democracy for all. But it’s time that we grew up and recognized, as mature adults, that firm regulation, investments, and incentives must be established for people and businesses to do the right thing. And we must further recognize that we can’t go this alone. We need Government, with a capital ‘G’, and that means ‘G’ as in Global in addition to national. The US, for far too long, has been able to get away with insouciant and unconsidered behavior because we once were a superpower. We will henceforth be known as the last of the world’s superpowers. There will be no more superpowers, just as there will be no more Picassos. There will always be nations that have greater power, just as there will always be individuals who have greater influence. But no longer will there be a singular entity that can completely dominate and determine the direction of world commerce or culture.

What does this mean for us as a nation, and as individuals, then? It means that we have to become a team player. It means that we have to know our place in the world. It means that we have to not only compete, but cooperate. That’s what it means, at an extremely basic and fundamental level.

This ultimately ties back into deeper issues such as environmental stewardship, spirituality as opposed to religious fundamentalism, scientific advancement and technological development coupled with social progress, etc. But I’m not going to get into any of those wonderful issues at the moment because I’m beginning to get sleepy, and I’ve got another long week looming ahead of me. Due to my inability to post as frequently as I would like to, I’m going to begin utilizing WordPress’ nifty new function of sticking old posts up on my front page, so that you can see some selections of my old shit that I feel is worth perusing. Til next time, piiiiigs iiiin spaaaaaaace. . .

American Change (Outside of the Box of Media)

Inevitability: this is the crushing weapon that the Republican party so effectively wields, bludgeoning the American public with such a banality of lies, misinformation, and bluntness of political manipulation—all oriented around sidestepping deeper issues of actual policy—that people talk wearily of the inevitability of McCain being elected president. Here are the arguments for this position:

The American vote is skewed towards the middle American states, where most Americans are so brainwashed that they would vote for a melon if they thought it stood for fundamentalist Christian values and gun rights.

Americans are simply stupid in general.

George W. Bush was elected for 2 terms. Enough said. Americans are hopeless.

These are perhaps convincing arguments if you tend towards fatalism. However, it disregards and slanders the majority of the American people. Yes, many Americans are extremely misinformed and formulate their political ideas based on petty and irrelevant issues. Yes, the vote is heavily skewed towards Americans who think red meat, rifles, and religion are the defining issues of our day. However, these Americans, known colloquially as rednecks, are the ones most affected by bad policy in Washington. They will be the ones losing the most jobs, they will be the ones most affected by environmental degradation, they will be the ones continuing to have their working wages taxed by a government they distrust and loathe.

Were they fooled by W. Bush? To a certain extent. But they understood, more fundamentally, that he stood for status quo. He would give us exactly what they thought America stood for: individualism, small government, and big business. Now McCain is playing the status quo card once again, while pretending to give just enough of a hip “maverick”-ness to the situation to win over those on the fence.

Many Americans, while the economy was still apparently riding high, didn’t want change. They called for status quo. They called for continuing to do just what America had been doing. It seemed to work, sort of.

Now it’s not working. It’s failing terribly. And the prospect before us is harrowing. Even while official analysts shrug and dismiss the current economic downfall and refuse to call it a recession, Americans who are most affected by the downturn know exactly what it is: hard times. Unemployment is high, the divide between rich and poor is untenable, health care consists of ER visits, basic food item costs are increasing, and SUVs no longer make much sense to working folk who can’t pay off their mortgages or credit card bills.

This has not much to do with failed foreign policy that has led to neverending warfare, or a regressive position against contemporary science. It doesn’t even have to do with the impending and disastrous consequences of climate change, nor with the depletion of topsoils and overall degradation of our earth.

It has to do with a fundamental flaw in the American conception of what has been working in the past, and what will work in the future.

We fought ferociously against the concepts and institutions of communism and socialism, and we relished the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. It was the triumph of capitalism. It was the triumph of individual choice, freedom of markets, competition between all for the benefit of the common good.

We’ve been so knee-jerk allergic to ideas of government involvement in economics that we’ve failed (officially) to recognize that the times have changed. A little dose of government intervention is necessary in times of crisis. And therefore, the Democratic vision of politics is no longer quite as unsavory as it once was. The idea of “change” (in the sense of a non-Republican dominated government) has begun to make sense. The status quo is driving America to its knees before the world. The dollar is falling, our imperialist foreign policies are antiquated, and our fierce individualism is costing the entire world the possibility of dealing effectively with united stances against climate change.

I don’t think Americans are as stupid as the media and the Republican party assumes it is. I think that the majority of Americans simply allow themselves to be led when they see no reason to change the way things are, when it seems to benefit them. It is becoming quite apparent that change—real change—must occur for America to remain a viable force in our world. Our businesses will fail if they cannot innovate. They cannot innovate if the government does not provide incentives for them to innovate. The government cannot provide incentives if the people do not call for policy change.

The time has come for Americans to unite, truly unite, not in the sense of warfare, not in the sense of blind following of political deceit and big money, not in the sense of willful ignorance and bigoted small-mindedness. Americans will unite because the only path to a hopeful future is clear. And it is not the status quo.

The Teetering Unifocalism of the Republican Party

Well, so the question in the presidential campaign of the moment is: will the blatant strategic political maneuvering of the Republican party, which has worked so well for Bush/Cheney, still work its deceitful magic and captivate big media and its captive conservative audience? I think another phrasing of this question is: are Americans as a nation still too easily manipulated and gullible to put 2 and 2 together?

The media has been blabbering ecstatically about the strategic “daring” of McCain’s pick of an almost neolithically conservative Alaskan woman, but let’s recognize it for what it is: an act of both cynicism and desperation. The strategy behind it is obvious: pick a woman to appeal to women voters, as well as to pretend that suddenly McCain is a progressive (simply because he’s picked a woman), while at the same time, conversely, appealing to their essential Christian Coalition base of voters, because Palin may be a nice looking woman, but she’s also a Christian fundamentalist.

To the Republican strategists, who are always eager to harness the most unsavory aspects of fundamentalist religion (whether Christian or Islamic) to garner power, such an act of political theater is hardly daring. It is right in line with the type of cynical PR strategy that’s been used for Bush and his administration time after time. To the rest of the nation, however, I hope that this act of desperation is seen through for what it is: a demonstration of what McCain and his backers are really about: a blind grab for power at all costs, utilizing any means and political posing that will take them there. Please note that Obama chose his VP carefully, picking someone who not only would aid him strategically in winning the bid for presidency, but would more importantly serve as a strong addition to the White House in the role of Vice President.

It’s no secret that Palin has absolutely none of the qualities (she’s currently got a scandal brewing in Alaska) nor experience (they say that Obama is inexperienced? Give me a break.) to serve our nation as an effective Vice President. She’s just there to fill a symbolic strategic role. Seen for what it is, this purpose is actually quite demeaning to women. McCain’s pick for VP is not daring at all; it’s a pathetic excuse to try to gather in a hypothetical mass of voters who would judge only on shallow appearance. The Republicans are hoping that with enough of the media (we all know that Fox will be doing the cheerleading) in their pocketbooks, they can manage to mockingly sweep aside the obvious implications of their strategy.

So the question is: does this approach of putting voters into one-dimensional boxes really work? They have looked at the power of the votes of women, they have noted the power Hillary Clinton generated amongst women voters, and they have single-mindedly decided that women will vote for women. How incredibly reductionist of the plurality of identities that women can occupy beyond their gender designation. Did they stop to consider that women may have supported Hillary not simply because she is a woman who champions women’s rights, but furthermore because she is an incredibly intelligent and adept public representative?

This ploy is desperate because it demonstrates that however strategic and cynical this maneuver was, ultimately, it means that McCain’s puppet-masters are responding to the tone that Obama has set in the campaign, rather than calling the shots. Obama has struck the chord in America that finally, we have a politician with integrity, someone with energy, populist agendas, and the diplomacy and intelligence to work across partisan divides. Obama has run his campaign stressing the importance of change and a new direction in American politics. McCain has been turning against his own record in Washington by now pretending to be a “maverick” and “progressive.” He has positioned himself as a decoy of change by simulating seemingly progressive stances, such as picking a woman as VP and verbally denouncing our dependence on foreign oil. Wow, how progressive of him. Good thing his VP strongly supports big oil, has already demonstrated political abuse of power in her home state, and is fiercely anti-abortion.

So will the desperate and cynical strategems of the Republican party work this time around, even when Bush and his party’s popularity is at an all-time low, both within the nation and around the globe? Will the farce of Republican progressive change win over the true progressive agenda of Obama? Will the decoy win over the real thing? Superficiality over integrity?

I think not. There was a lot of true positive energy generated at the Democratic National Convention. There was a palpable force felt in that stadium that reached out across the dry and drab news network television coverage. The hunger for real change stirs somewhere in America, and I don’t think it’s just in liberal enclaves. People are waking up to the cynical, power and money hungry political maneuvering that operated the Bush administration, and hopefully, they have learned to navigate past the bland relativism presented by the media, where somehow truth seems to have no meaning until it’s already too late.

I believe the one-dimensional, unifocal political strategies of McCain’s puppet-masters will fall over on themselves. They have built the fantasies up a little too high this time around. Casting Bush Jr. as a born-again working rural man with divine conviction may have worked for a little while, but casting McCain as a simultaneous agent of progressive change AND conservative fundamentalism is just too much of a stretch. It can readily be seen through to what it is: a blind and misguided and desperate fumbling for power by a Republican party riddled with cronyism, corruption, scandals, and neo-conservative simple mindedness.

I will enjoy watching their politics of deceit finally topple over and fail in the public eye. Like Obama said in his speech at the convention: “they just don’t get it.”

Think Politics Are Tired? Think Again.

I don’t care if you are Republican, Green Party, or Anarchist: watch Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. This is what we all have been aching for. It is graceful, eloquent, emotional, direct, forceful, filled to the brim with conviction, politically adept, aggressive, embracing, beautiful, and intelligent enough to wow all the politicos and policy whonks.

And watch the Obama biography video that came directly before his speech as well. It’s truly powerful, and it answers the questions that people on the fence that don’t know much about Obama might have. He is the candidate that America so desperately needs.

Do I sound captivated? Don’t take my word for it. Don’t listen to the talking heads on television. Go see this shit for yourself. It’s wonderful, and it will make you not only believe in politics, it will make you believe in the promise of America again. Really.

Vote

I’d like to make the case for voting in the upcoming elections. I’ve made some of these points before, but I feel that it is an issue that requires some more attention. I’m going to be orienting this argument towards the people out there that believe that voting is a pointless and meaningless endeavor.

There are a lot of people who choose not to vote—not because they are apathetic, but because they believe that by boycotting the electoral process they are “making a statement”. Unfortunately, this statement doesn’t result in any kind of positive affect. In fact, this “statement” seems to be welcomed with open arms by the neo-conservatives who have been running our country, because they wouldn’t have the opportunity to hold such blatant power and influence otherwise. You non-voters out there who refuse to vote in order to make a statement: the only statement you are making is that you are selfish and small-minded.

So you choose to withhold your vote because your single, individual vote doesn’t hold much sway. But is it not obvious that if everyone voted, then that cumulative total could make a quite powerful statement?

So you choose to withhold your vote because you don’t even believe in either of the two parties that hold power. But is it not obvious that by becoming completely uninvolved in the political process, you are allowing the politics in the US to become even more deeply divided and distant from your personal needs and beliefs?

What would you have? That your country should collapse and fail because you are so selfish that you can’t allow yourself to compromise and utilize whatever limited tools and options you have as a citizen to become involved?

Yes, the democracy in this country is mostly a sham. Yes, the choice between party A or B is almost as bad as no choice at all. Yes, the individual voice is lost and suppressed in the clamor and lobby of moneyed interests.

But my question to you is: what are YOU doing to change this situation? Are you hiding away in your pseudo-intellectual hole? Are you going to move to Canada?

We indeed have limited tools available to us in order to enact progressive change as a people and as a nation. But the choices before us in this upcoming presidential election couldn’t be more clear: either you choose not to become involved, and you send this country down the path of another four years of bad policy, bad foreign affairs, poor economic decisions. . . or you vote for Barack Obama, and you vote for an intelligent politican who has integrity, clear and strong progressive policy agendas, and who stands as a living representative to the world of what America wants to be about: diversity, intelligence, and charisma.

This election will determined by whether the non-voters out there get involved or not. If you choose to make your statement by boycotting the vote, then who do you think you are putting into power? The same kind of administration that has been winning consistently in the past for that very same reason. Is that the kind of statement you want to make? Think about it.

I’m sorry that American politics are not ideal and perfect and truly democratic. Getting involved in politics is involving yourself in an imbalanced, often one-sided, and messy relationship. You have to compromise. You have to be patient and determined. But you have to be involved if you want to make change.

We need to get Barack Obama into office. Then we need to stay involved in order to put the pressure on his administration to roll out the changes that we want to see.

Or we can just sit back, and keep complaining. Watch our country fall apart as the super-rich get richer and the rest of us lose our jobs. At least it will give us something to feel righteous and indignant about.

Collaborative Interdependence

I’ve been undergoing a mild case of “writer’s block” lately, wherein everything that I attempt to write just comes out flat or completely uninspired. Frustrating, because then it drives me to playing mahjongg instead of articulating deeper sentiment (mahjongg here being the virtual “bottle” in which to drown my woes).

One of the things I’ve been constantly trying to write about but having trouble clearly spelling out is my perspective on enacting progressive change. I’ve discussed elsewhere my evolving views on politics and economics, and I’ve been trying to find a way to more fully explicate my new views while still embracing, intellectually speaking, the perspectives which I’ve developed out of, such radicalism, anarchism, anti-globalization, postcolonialism, etc.

Rather than present a cohesive thesis, therefore, let me just discuss what my thought process is at the moment vis-a-vis these general topics and maybe I can work my way over the obstacles I’m currently facing just by talking it through.

I think what I’m finding is that I can still relate very well to viewpoints such as socialism and anarchism because such perspectives are ultimately humanist, in that there is an idealistic attempt to extricate humanity from what are perceived as inhuman and oppressive structures. There is still a lot of misunderstanding out there about what “anarchism” really means, and you can see this quite powerfully in The Dark Knight as depicted by the Joker, as one current example. People think of chaos, terror, pimply youth in black apparel heaving Molotov cocktails as an expression of aimless hormonal angst. But anarchism is not about chaos and terrorism: it is simply a philosophical rejection of the need for institutionalized systems of governance. Extending out of this are many disparate branches of anarchist philosophy, but that is its central tenet. Contrary to being a negative and nihilistic perspective, this is in actuality an extremely positivist take on human nature, in that anarchists believe that human society will run much more efficiently and naturally when not subsumed to overarching systems.

I was drawn to anarchist philosophy because of this deep humanism, and some anarchist writing is the most well-articulated writing out there on politics. You don’t feel like you are being talked down to. Go here and browse through the library to see for yourself. It isn’t much at all about violence or chaos. It’s about believing in a world that can be better than what we are taught to accept.

However, one of the problems with this perspective is in answering the question: well, how do we get from here to there? There are many different answers to that, some of which I will agree with, but ultimately, what one comes to understand is that holding the highest of ideals makes it extremely difficult to come to terms with the existing state of the world, generating anger, bitterness, and violence and/or apathy.

I will devolve into an oblique comparison here: in a long-term relationship with another human being, you come fairly quickly to realize that compromises must be made between you and your partner’s ideals in order to live together. If your ideals are too high, it may be that instead of coming to terms with the human reality of your partner and accepting them as they are, you are rejecting parts of them in order to try to fit or mold them to your ideals. These high expectations can blind you to the beauty of the person that already exists right before you, if you could allow them to be themselves rather than what you want them to be. You both can work together on developing towards the ideals that you share and cherish.

This does not mean that you should accept a drab reality. What I am getting at is that there is a process in working towards ideals. There must be development and evolution in order for ideals to become reality. Perfect harmony does not just fall into your lap without extensive effort. So one could feasibly hold anarchist philosophy as the ideal state of human society, but still work within and around existing government and market structures in seeking to achieve that ideal.

That is fairly self-evident, I suppose, but as I talked about in my other post, it seems to me that there are a lot of idealists out there who are constricted, rather than motivated, by their ideals.

In any case, even though I sympathize with the philosophy of anarchism and of radical thought in general, I ultimately feel that it is misguided. Anarchists and other philosophies of dissent rightly perceive that there are problems with institutional and market systems, but they wrongly perceive the correct redress as being a complete rejection of these systems. To use another obtuse analogy, it is like looking at a fan which doesn’t blow air very efficiently or equitably about a room, and deciding that the solution is to throw out the fan. While such a solution might appeal to instinct, it would make much more sense to attempt to analyze the failure of the fan and seek to alter, jerryrig, or otherwise upgrade to a whole new model.

To say this, however, doesn’t mean that one couldn’t choose to live ones life according to anarchist or other radical ideals. One has that right and capability. But what I am talking about is being involved in the greater community, and subsuming some of those ideals to accepted law and policy in order to extend greater influence.

Another issue I think I see with philosophies that reject existing market and government systems is that they are often mired in a mentality of a bygone era. We have come into a time, due to the unforeseen confluence of technology and rapid information dissemination and sharing, in which civil society and individuals as a whole have a power and command that they did not once have. Civil society thus is becoming evolutionarily enabled to play the critical part in balancing and restraining and guiding the efforts of institutions and markets in providing a fairer and more sustainable society. Demonstrators and protesters, even when not covered explicitly by the big media outlets, have a strength that corporations and governments have had to pay close attention to. Anti-globalization protesters, though misguided in their conclusions (multi-national corporations and interconnected markets = evil), have had a tremendous and positive impact on drawing attention to economic inequity and iniquitous barriers to trade. Similarly, the increased influence and power of “bloggers” has given big media a run for its money. Due to this increased power of civil society and of individual citizens, people are not simply oppressed workers underneath the inhumane strictures of the one-dimensional demand of capitalism. In collaboration—not opposition—with public policy, the legal system, and economic investments and incentives, civil society, government, and the economy can work in tandem to address the problems that exist in society.

This is not an argument against dissent or protest. What I’m attempting to get at is that the process of speaking up and getting involved and asking critical and probing questions is in fact a necessary and positive aspect of well-organized and functioning social systems. It is not a movement against the “system” or against the “machine” or whatever one chooses to call government and business structures: rather, it is a movement that enhances, collaborates, and guides these systems into greater harmony.

I have argued elsewhere for the need to view these systems in the sense of design, with a holistic, whole-systems approach. This is especially apparent when it comes to entrenched issues such as the current failure of many of our public schools to adequately and equally educate all our nation’s children, irregardless of race, class, or gender. Educational policy, on both a federal and state level, often nobly, but wrongly, attempts to tackle their problems solely within the confines of the classroom by initiating misguided programs that work to increase performance on standardized tests. Obviously, there are circumstances outside of the classroom that are critical to a child’s success, such as family, friends, and wider local community support, in addition to institutional programs. It will take a multifaceted approach, addressing not only education, but furthermore socio-economic conditions, access to information and technology, not to mention access to healthy, positive, inclusive environments and public spaces for children to study and play in.

Our schools have become effectively segregated due to the seemingly innocuous effort by well-to-do parents to place their children in “successful” schools. The successful schools being the ones with money and community support. It is thus apparent that investments must be made simultaneously not only in education and the public school system in general, but furthermore broader investments must be made in low income neighborhoods, to provide access to healthy public spaces, to provide access to technology and information, to provide smart planning for a sustainable future in employment, etc. The more that the middle class divides itself from the poor, the greater problems will become.

What is evident in an issue such as this is the approach that I am talking about: a whole systems, collaborative approach. Civil society must do its part to draw attention to the problems. Government must do its part to respond with effective and unbiased policy changes. The market must do its part with directed investments and innovative micro-businesses. What is apparent, to me at least, is that we can’t rely on any one of these systems to do the job for us. The market is not going to solve any of our problems unless we direct it and harness it with policy and incentives. Government will not update its policy or open up funding unless it has its attention drawn to the problem. Civil society, NGOs, citizen organizations must agitate, petition, utilize the media, and organize to focus on the problems.

Furthermore, policy making and business governance and legal affairs cannot be over-specialized. They can’t be compartmentalized and vivisected such that they can’t work effectively across the fields of public health, education, fiscal tuning, management philosophy, environmental departments, etc. They need to be able to unite and work within these fields all at once.

This kind of approach demonstrates that no matter what ones particular ideals may be, what is the most important is a pragmatic and responsive attention to the current climate and issues in our society. Putting our heads in the sand, whether due to reactionary or radical or centrist thought, is simply unacceptable. Good management, governance, and policy practices are forged by looking ahead to the future, constantly and consistently. Our future lies in our children. Whatever our beliefs may be, we all want our children to be healthy, to be successful, to have access to the resources that will empower and enable them. We want them to be educated, to be well fed, to be well read, to be sound of body and of mind. We want them to be positioned to respond effectively to reality, to be positioned for a market that looks ahead to sustainability.

The process, therefore, in achieving an equitable and sustainable future is determined by the collaborative interdependence of differing aspects of human identity, mind, infrastructures, and society. Only when these multiple points converge and work together are effective and positive changes made. It is misguided to focus ones efforts solely in rejection and opposition to existing systems. The more positive approach is to focus on working across boundaries to enact changes beneficial to all.

Phew. You can see why I’ve had trouble laying this out. It’s kind of a big mess in my mind. I’m working on getting this out in a more concise manner.

Movement Towards Inclusion

“The bell jar [as described by Braudel, signifying the exclusivity of the capitalist sector of society] makes capitalism a private club, open only to a privileged few, and enrages the billions standing outside looking in. This capitalist apartheid will inevitably continue until we all come to terms with the critical flaw in many countries’ legal and political systems that prevents the majority from entering the formal property system. . .

Few seem to realize that what we have here is one huge, worldwide industrial revolution: a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale to life organized on a large one. For better or for worse, people outside the West are fleeing self-sufficient and isolated societies in an effort to raise their standards of living by becoming interdependent in much larger markets. . .

Like computer networks, which had existed for years before anyone thought to link them, property systems become tremendously powerful when they are interconnected in a larger network. . . .

Political blindness, therefore, consists of being unaware that the growth of the extralegal sector and the breakdown of the existing legal order are ultimately due to a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale toward one organized in a larger context. . .

The primary problem is the delay in recognizing that most of the disorder occurring outside the West is the result of a revolutionary movement that is more full of promise than of problems.”

—Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

De Soto’s insights are tantalizing: his essential message is that the poor are seeking to become a part of the larger market system, but are denied access through exclusive laws and fiscal policies. Faced with the inability to become a part of the global market, the poor then must operate within small-scale, community “extralegal” markets and negotiations. I have referred to this market activity, so visibly abundant and active within South America, as a “micro-economy,” not recognizing that this teeming market life was not necessarily included within the larger economy in a formal sense.

What I also like about De Soto’s vision is his recognition that the poor have always historically recognized the opportunities inherent in a larger market. The movement to urban centers during the Industrial Revolution is well documented, and the same movement is now occurring in developing countries daily. The poor innately recognize opportunity when they see it, and recognize that fundamentally, global markets can provide access to a wider network of capability and progress.

Of course, simply giving the poor land titles and opening up their economies to globalization does not necessitate a better life, due to the great imbalance of power and wealth in favor of developed nations and small populations within developing nations. De Soto’s simplistic diagnosis has thus been rightfully critiqued. But with corrected fiscal policy and global law, these imbalances can be addressed to become more inclusive. De Soto’s insights can very neatly be coupled with the insights provided by social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus. With the tool of microcredit, the poor can be given the ability to become included within the wider market and use their properties as capital assets.

The wider the embrace of networks can become, the more powerful and effective they will be. A market that can include and embrace all of the teeming activity of the micro-economies of the poor (and thus raise them out of poverty) is a healthy and balanced market.

What I also appreciate about De Soto’s vision is his emphasis on the global movement towards interdependence. Accepting membership into a greater community is to shed a degree of self-sufficiency and isolation. There is a strong undercurrent within environmental activism as well as nationalist reactionaries towards self-sufficiency and isolationism. It is certainly important to have integrity and inner strength. But at a certain point, interdependence within greater networks provides a greater strength and resiliancy.

I can best phrase this within the context of death: when someone you are close to passes away, you can feel a humongous hole cut out from inside of you. It makes you realize just how interconnected you are with everyone else in your life, and of how illusory is the concept that you are alone and detached.

When acts of violence and terrorism are committed, they are best viewed as perverted and desperate attempts to become included into the networks that they have been excluded from. The answer, therefore, in fighting terrorism is not in utilizing weapons and occupations, but rather in fighting poverty, by seeking to include, in an effective and positive manner, the developing nations and those in extreme poverty into the global market and body politic.

It is no secret that those nations mired in extreme poverty harbor terrorists. So what should we do? Bomb them? Or seek to include them into the greater networks of which they so desperately want to become a part of and which they have been routinely denied. Isn’t the answer obvious?

Change

The economy is sinking, the dollar is weak, McCain still somehow has enough popularity to be elected, the age of cheap oil is over, global warming is accelerating and past stoppage time, ecosystems are collapsing, and people are still eating trans-fats like there’s no tomorrow. My oh my, what is an attuned human being to do?

Contrary to the chatter on the news, I see some of these developments as a good thing. Not all of them. Just the ones that will actually wake the sleepers up, like rising gas prices and paranoid banks. As long as mindless consumers could drive their SUVs around, pumping their gas on overcharged credit cards without a care in the world, then why would they care? As long as you can shit downstream, then who cares about the people getting shat on? Well, now they will start giving a shit because shit is hitting the fan and swinging right back into their face.

Unfortunately for most people, it takes a heart attack—maybe even two—before they begin to enact lifestyle changes. The large-scale heart attacks are occurring. But still people sleep, still they sit back, thinking its just all a big burp in the never ending growth of the American economy.

Those days of having everything come easy (for some people) are gone. From here on out, it’s going to take a certain level of innovation, sensitivity, and wisdom, a certain forethought and diplomacy, to work across boundaries and borders and enact successful changes.

This is another way of saying Vote for Obama, you fucking morons.

The Hypothetical Clinton Supporters for McCain

Alright, so would someone like to explain to me this now common media pundit snippet about irate Hillary Clinton supporters who now say they will vote for McCain? What the fuck? It just doesn’t make any sense. Anyone who supported Hillary Clinton would recognize that Obama clearly supports many of the same initiatives, and relative to someone as contrary McCain, is in fact nearly indistinguishable on the political spectrum of things.

It makes one wonder if this supposedly substantial percentage of voters now claiming to vote for McCain in the absence of Clinton is simply a creation of the media. And if there are any voters out there that exist who would vote in such a manner, well, let’s just say that they must be extremely confused people, with perhaps little capability of utilizing the critical faculties of their noggins.

Geography of the Mind

Why can’t we look at people based on the color of their minds, the fruit of their perspectives, their intriguing meshed inner map of happenstance and outward trajectories of decisions, the varying shades of individualism interwoven within the living fabric of all that exists? We’ve got people convinced that somehow the color of their skin defines their capability and outlines their personality. That the accoutrements of one’s gender defines their ability to succeed or perform. That we’ve got to talk a certain way, act a certain way, perform a certain way.

It’s now been proven that sexual orientation is a formation of the brain before thought. There is no will, no choice in the matter. What appears can and often will contradict what is.

In the United States, we have furthered and maintained the myth of an identity known as the ‘black’ or ‘white’ person. Is the type of genes that one possesses relevant to anything but one’s healthcare provider? The color of one’s skin only becomes relevant outside of such concerns in a society that has bigotry at its core. The classification of black and white should not be used to subdivide cultural identity. We are all citizens of our country, with common goals and standards. Our perceived differences should merely lie in geography and ideologies, not in genes.

We live in a world based on diaspora. The identity of the citizen of a country is no longer based on the color of one’s skin nor even necessarily on the language one speaks. We create artificial subdivisions based on wealth and seclusion, and use excuses like racial identity to explain away inequity.

There is no escaping the conclusion that we all share common goals and agree to accept the standards of capitalism and democracy and human rights. Beyond that, why are we divided? Beyond that, why are we afraid? Beyond that, why do we classify ourselves as limited due to our appearance, when all of the evidence around us points not to what we look like, but where we happen to live, or what we happen to belief in?

All this hullabuloo during the presidential campaign has revolved around race and gender politics. What a petty misdirection of our attention from the issues that truly matter, and what concerns us all. It’s like everyone is patting themselves on the back because a woman and a black man are finally considered viable candidates for president of the United States. But guess what people? Wait to pat yourselves on the back until the day comes when we dismiss race and gender as completely irrelevant to the realm of politics—and to any other realm of public domain.

Thoughts On Money & Poverty: Part III

I’ve had some more thoughts to add to my developing perspective on poverty that stems and evolves from my last post; there I had begun the line of thought that poverty is not an issue of charity and indifference, but rather of a systemic need to provide recourse for the poor to make their own money in a legitimate manner (duh!). Continuing this direction in thought, I would like to now confront a fundamental obstacle in the path to the poor helping themselves: those with the money and the power.

It is the onus and privilege of those with money and power to pretend that they have nothing to do with poverty. I am now going to begin speaking of these folk as “we”, in the assumption that if you are reading this post, you are probably not living in poverty. And I include these poor, destitute 20 somethings in NYC who are forced to flirt for free drinks and eat junk food while living in their loft apartments in midtown Manhattan (follow that link up there to read yet another article that demonstrates just whom the NY Times caters their news towards). At this point, you are probably throwing up your hands and backing out the door, saying, “I’m not responsible for poverty. I can barely afford my credit card bills, fill up at the pump, or pay back my student loans.” But you are. We are all responsible, because of the very reason of such a denial. We are responsible because we are complicit.

Don’t worry, this is not going to turn into one of those liberal assays of guilt and blame. I simply wanted to make my point very clear: the major obstacle in the way of the poor raising themselves out of poverty is not themselves—it is those who hold onto money and power and deny it from the poor. We are all complicit in this act because of reasons such as I had detailed in my last post on this issue: we believe that the poor are poor because they are lazy, stupid, or simply because we need poor people in order for there to be rich people. And so we either extend charity or pity, or we remain indifferent. And thus complicit.

Beyond complicity, there are those who work directly to keep the poor poor, and these are the people with the major money and power. The Bush Administration, along with groups like Enron and Halliburton, have clearly demonstrated what kind of stripes these people wear. They are greedy sons of bitches who will not hesitate to lie, cheat, and betray all of the world in order to get what they feel is their entitlement. And because we are complicit, we slap their hands, but we do nothing to stop them. Because we all want to be this powerful and have that much money. We all want to become the real life embodiment of the American Dream.

But to assume that simply because we live in a capitalistic society and that our market thrives on competition that we require for there to be have and have-nots is ridiculous, and in fact completely anti-capitalistic. The more people that we can allow onto the playing field of the economy, the more that there will be enhanced competition as well as collaborative growth, and the more the market will develop. Poor people need to be extended credit and resources to start their own businesses, fund their own developments, build their own communities, and invest back into the bigger pool. The more that micro-economies thrive and teem and interact with smaller fry, the more that the macro will be stabilized and efficient and healthy.

The fact is, there is no credible reason to keep poor people poor. The only thing that keeps poor people poor is the greed, complacency, bigotry, short sightedness, and all other forms of small mindedness from those with money and power. It is therefore only extreme indifference and cruelty that allows us to see, when taxes are cut and budgets are slashed and essential programs and social services are jettisoned, not the devastating effect on human lives, rather solely the hypothetical increase in our own coffers. We put up blinders to our own humanity to think in such a manner. The fact is that there is no excuse. There is no acceptable reason for accepting poverty.

And there is no acceptable reason, for that matter, of accepting any kind of tainted and bitter revolt against our own humanity. Compassion is much stronger than pity. Understanding is much more powerful than fear. Everyone on this earth has the potential to be beautiful. Everyone deserves to be beautiful, to shine, to be seen as the treasure and gift that they are.

We need to fight back against the ugly despair, disgust, and terror that is our nightly news. We need to fight back against the complacency and indifference that is so easy to succumb to, the avoidant eyes on the subway, the challenging aggression on the streets, the burning short fuses on the freeway.

No one said it would be easy. But there is a fundamental step within our own minds that must take place for anything good to happen: we must determine whether we will fight for joy, fight for beauty, fight for wonder, and fight for humanity, or whether we will simply step back into the shallows of our temporary alliances and turn against what we know is true. We know that the existence of poverty—ever, anywhere, but most especially now—is simply

unacceptable.

So what do we do? Do we start throwing our pennies in the cups of homeless on the street? No, of course not. We need to start affecting change in the structures and environments of the most destitute and impoverished areas of our cities. We need healthy, beautiful, clean, and affordable living spaces. We need access to public transportation. We need the extension of credit and access to money. We need access to well-funded educational and youth development programs. We need nutritious food. We need potable water. Is any of this complicated?

Essentially, all that the problem of poverty and its related issues requires is ATTENTION. The solutions then flow from creativity, community, and collaborative dedication. And turning our attention to these matters should not be seen as charity, selflessness, and other forms of saintliness. Rather, we turn our attention to these matters because we recognize that we are enhancing our greater community—because we are removing the root source of fear, bigotry, and despair from all of our lives. Like what I was saying in another post about the need, in our personal lives, of cleaning and organizing every hidden and unattended spot in our living spaces and mind, so too in our civic spaces and minds we must focus on those areas that are ignored, have been left to fester and decay, have turned into dumping grounds. Because these are areas that are parts of ourselves.

We cannot detach ourselves from each other, except to the detriment of everyone’s humanity.

The More the Problems, the Simpler the Solutions

In this day and age, as the perennial problems of humanity grow ever greater in the face of our increased global interconnectivity and environmental fragility, it becomes more evident that all of our problems are interrelated and cannot be solved without an enlightened holistic approach. We cannot tackle the problem of public health without tackling the problems of poverty, which cannot be tackled without confronting the issue of rampant hydrocarbon dependency, which cannot be conquered without resolving fundamental issues of human rights and freedom, and this goes on and on and on. It can also be phrased thus: we cannot ignore human rights abuses in Sudan, nor environmental degradation in China, for the cost will ultimately fall upon all of us.

While that may at first make resolving any of the major dilemmas humanity faces in the oncoming years of increased natural disaster and antibiotic resistant microbes seem especially daunting, these compounding converging problems in fact present us with opportunities to enact revolutionary structural changes that can work to harmonize disconnected and fragmented elements of humanity and bring them together in a greater, unifying global interconnection.

An example of this point could be taken quite literally down to the case of a human body. Our bodies eventually let us know when we have pushed them beyond their capacities of maintaining health, and some organ will fail, or a disease will take hold, or a heart will exhibit stress. At that point, we look at immediate symptoms and seek a means of addressing that sole symptom. Beyond that, however, we then seek to discover how to prevent a reoccurence of this problem, as well as to prevent other related issues springing from the same source, and we thus must seek manners of altering our lifestyles, our behaviors, and our perspectives in order to resolve more fundamental issues.

Our environment is letting us know that we are toeing the line–and may well have already significantly crossed–on the path to complete destabilization of all life supporting habitats. There is no doubt in the mind of any cognizant scientist, activist, politician, nor concerned citizen that we are facing some major problems due to global warming and widespread environmental stress. And so we are now looking at immediate ways to address these symptoms, such as by seeking alternative sources of energy, carbon emission cap and trades, and worldwide standards of environmental regulation. But as we begin to look beyond these immediate symptoms, we also begin to see that we must address even more fundamental issues in our societies, governments, economies, cultures, and perspectives, as they all stem from the same source.

So now is the time that we are really gaining the opportunity, as a human species, to deeply address issues that we have had since the birth of human consciousness, such as disparity between the rich and the poor, segregation and bigotry due to birth and appearance, and all other manifestations of hatred, division, and greed. Does that sound idealistic and glorifying of my own age and time? Undoubtedly. But what can also undoubtedly be stated is that the world we are living in, as of this writing, is a world quite unlike the world that it was a mere 50 years ago. We are globalizing, networking, trading, and traveling at an exponentially snowballing rate. And due to this global interconnection, all of our actions and behaviors become magnified in effect. So while once upon a time we were only destroying some land downstream, now we are destroying the entire globe. We cannot detach ourselves from the fate that we are creating. We cannot ignore the effect that our actions will have on our children.

Anyway, I could go on like this for a while. The point that I wanted to make is that all of these major problems that we are now facing can be seen as an opportunity for widespread positive change. Never before has humanity as a species been so positioned as to fundamentally address our disconnection from our planet, from each other, and from ourselves. The time is now.

Let Obama Stand for What He Truly Represents: US

Well, corporate media has done it, you gotta hand it to them: they’ve consistently portrayed the presidential campaign as completely boring, distanced from all real issues, and overblown so many small dramas out of proportion that most people are sick of it all already. Good job guys! Way to promote apathy!

And guess who the winner will be if this environment of apathy and disconnect continues to be so convincingly portrayed? Why, the party that appears to best benefit from voter apathy, ignorance, misunderstanding, bipartisanship, and bigotry: the Republican party.

I don’t want to see this happen. So I’m urging you to please bear in mind when scanning your newspaper or Google news or whatever source you use to get your information that politics is not simply about soundbytes, allegations, and big media-backed rebuttals. Politics can be whatever people demonstrate concern about. We don’t have to allow ourselves to be steered into gossip politics, where the “hot topic” revolving around Barack Obama is something that his pastor said. Who cares what his pastor has said? (Heard what some of McCain’s spiritual advisor has said?) What about what Obama himself is saying, or any of the other candidates, for that matter? Have you been listening to any of that? Well, the media sure ain’t. They are just looking to sell drama and sensationalism. Apparently they don’t think that issues that actually matter will mean anything to the masses.

What’s frustrating is that the whole national discourse has changed, and politicians are reflecting this change, but the big media is still desperately plugging away with the same routine. Haven’t they gotten it yet? I want to see headlines describing the environmental policy stances of the candidates. I want to see investigative articles about long-term plans the candidates will have to combat our country’s educational system decline, global warming and carbon emissions, and suburban sprawl.

What’s especially interesting when it comes to Barack Obama is that they are obviously looking for some weakness in his armor, something they can use to bring him down. But the worst they can find is something his pastor has said. The worst they can find is the fact that he is calling for trying diplomacy first before wildly dropping bombs and invading all enemies (remember why we ended up in Iraq in the first place?). These tactics must be seen as the pathetic diversion that they are: attempts to keep the public from concentrating on the real issues that matter that Obama and Hillary have been bringing to the fore, such as increased coverage of health care, working together across party lines to create a common plan and vision for the future, dealing with climate change, and attempting to address the problems in Iraq in a more healing manner than simply throwing contracting money and troops at it.

I’m going to keep bitching about big media until I consistently see important issues reflected in the presidential campaign, not just squabbling, gossip, and smear tactics.

Political Transformations

7-10 years ago, whilst embedded in what was seen as the necessary destination after completion of high school—college (I can’t believe it was that long ago)—I was a very angry and depressed young individual, aware to some degree that many of my peers were sheltered and unconcerned with problems in our society that existed visibly and blatantly all about them (this was in Los Angeles, a city which provides immediate and stark contrasts between those who have and those who ain’t got). Like many other somewhat intelligent folk I know, this resulted in a lashing out (psychologically speaking) against the structures, edifices, and assumptions of my society. Part of this backlash in my mentality was the rejection of a vanilla cultural identity, as well as a rejection of the standard mentalities of history, economics, politics, progress, and science. I also deliberately sought to detach myself from family structures and their repressive definition of self, as well as reviled the destructive processes of globalization and corporate defined superficiality. Nothing could be more sinister in my mind then a corporation, tied into the political structure of commerce and propaganda, backed by a heavily armed police force and hazily endorsed by a god.

But I’ve undergone some fundamental shifts in perspective since those bitter days of yore, and I’ve come to recognize the bittersweet value in structures, histories, economies, political congregations, and general networks of humanity. I’ve come to terms with capitalism, evolution, and superficial identities. And I’d like to share the reasons for these shifts in my own mentality in the hope that perhaps I can help bring into the fold other similarly angry, deliberately disenfranchised folk.

I know a lot of intelligent people out there who share a lot of the misconceptions I had, and who thus do nothing for themselves nor their society because they refuse to be part of a profit generating workforce—i.e. “becoming a suit“. They are frightened of losing their identity and integrity to commerce—even though they never really had a solid identity to begin with—and they fear structures due to reluctance to be put easily into a box and defined. So instead, they drift laxly from one menial seasonal job to another, growing older but not wiser, allowing all of their personal power to be subverted by “the system,” despite their thinking that they are the ones keeping their power. They fail to recognize that there are many profit generating and non-profit institutions which are working within the system to change it dramatically from within.

I have not shifted my mentality in the sense that I no longer think my society—and the world et al—has any problems. I still see the same problems I did—and more—than when I was angry and detached and bitter. However, I view these problems through a much different lens. I no longer see the solution to these problems as being a matter of attempting to dismantle the greater “system” and all overarching structures, and letting it all collapse in something like a revolution, and starting it all over again “the right way”. A lot of people think this is the answer, either overtly or unconsciously, and they aren’t usually the fist pumping anarchist that such ideology might seem to produce. Rather, they are simply confused, apathetic, and storing pent up frustration, because they don’t see any sure and definite methods of achieving their idealistic visions. So instead, they complain about how fucked up things are, and they do nothing about it, except to abstain from interacting and changing the “system” in positive ways, which only ends up increasing its problems.

An easy example of what this attitude results in is demonstrable in the election process in the US. For a long time, I refused to vote, because I didn’t want to take part in something I didn’t believe in. I used to view politics as an exclusive club run by the super-rich in which my actions had no influence. And then when I finally did start voting, guess who kept getting elected? Exclusive club/dynasty member #1, born again son of the Bush clan. It was disheartening, to say the least. But the reason such politicians keep getting elected is simply because no one who really wants it to change is voting. And this is because they are so idealistic that they are in actuality apathetic.

My argument for voting is simple: pragmatism. I don’t believe that by placing a vote I am going to change much of anything. I don’t believe I’m making the world a better place. I don’t believe that my chosen politician will turn things around, start raising the impoverished out of poverty, start taxing the rich, and refuse to listen to the siren lobbyists for corporate welfare. BUT—if I believe that the system needs to change, whether I believe the system needs to be completely overturned, revamped, updated, or just slightly tweaked, whether I am an anarchist, Libertarian, Green Party member, Republican, or Democrat—then the fact is that voting should be viewed for what it is: a very, very limited tool to implement change from within the system. And as someone who wants to alter this system, I need to use whatever tools I have been given. Starting with voting. Then extending logically into lobbying, petitioning, writing, calling, e-mailing, pamphleting, blogging, networking, and so on. THAT is what democracy is about. It’s about people using whatever limited tools they have been given to enact the changes they want to see. Otherwise, all of their power has been relinquished, and the super rich who abolish all taxes for the super rich and subsidize the corporations of the super rich will continue to be placed into positions of power. And as long as the idealists refuse to get their hands dirty and utilize limited tools to effect limited change, then politics will continue to not reflect their concerns and interests.

So to bring this all back to myself and my evolution in mentality and where I am today: I have subdued my rampant idealism in favor of an optimistic pragmatism. I believe that I can change the world, but that I can most effectively do this by working with whatever means I have—whether it is within established structures, or whether it is outside of those structures. Altogether, any action that I choose to make has a consequence and a power, whether it is part of a “system” or not. I no longer completely reject these systems, these established structures, these histories, these given identities. Rather, I embrace them in order to change them, to enhance them, to re-design them, retrofit them, work within them and outside of them to strengthen them for the future. I can change my identity to suit whatever need I have at the moment: I can be what others tell me I am, I can be what I think I am, I can be what my job function is, I can flit from box to box without being confined in any, because I know where my integrity lies, and I am not frightened of losing an identity I never had any longer. My identity is all these things, my face, my heart, my genes, my nation, my soul. Undefinable and easily photographed.

I no longer believe that corporations are evil, or that capitalism is contrary to human nature. I think that such views are kind of like someone who comes into a plot of land which hasn’t been farmed well, and they decide to level everything, till the earth, hose down the weeds with roundup, apply fertilizer, and start completely anew. It can be done, but it’s not the best way. It’s better to look at what is growing well, and to learn from it, and chop back what is not doing well and mulch it, and utilize knowledge from all sources to enhance and nurture new plantings to add nutrients to the soil. To look at the system as a whole, and seek to balance all components with each other and foster interrelationships that work together, instead of in opposition.

So politically speaking, I’ve come to learn the value of meeting with the “other side” halfway and understanding where they are coming from. And I think a lot of other people are coming to the same conclusions, because if you look at the current run-up to the presidential campaign, you see that there’s a lot of people straddling what were once indivisible walls between left and right. There’s a movement and struggle not simply towards the left, but towards the center. Republican, Democrat, and everyone who is undefined by such categories are all attempting to find a common standard of political understanding, a basis for shared understanding of what we all need to do to move forward into this great evolutionary unknown that is the future.

Obama’s Speech on Racial Issues

Rather than heed the media’s endless spinning and soundbytes of Barack Obama’s amazing speech, read the full transcript for yourself and make your own decisions.

Disillusionment and a Comfortable Acceptance

Here’s an interesting article in the Village Voice by David Mamet on his belated discovery that he has been a closet conservative during all those years of supposed liberalism.

Democratic Race Still On

So the race between Hillary and Obama is still on! Though I am mostly in the Obama camp myself, I respect Hillary’s intelligence and political polish, and I’m excited to see both of them competing and reflecting the political paradigm shift of the times. Both of them share the same fundamental positions—with minor differences—on policy, and both would enact much needed critical change in Washington (taking politics back to somewhere in the center, as opposed to the far, extreme, distant and cold right). Like most of my generation, I am excited simply by the fact that politics is suddenly exciting. I’ve been frustrated by apathy and withdrawal by progressive and independent voters in the past, and it’s nice to finally see some of them getting off their high horse (i.e. lazyboy sofa) to cast some votes, make some calls, sign some petitions, and get involved. That’s the only way we can get some real democracy going in this quasi-democratic nation. We’ve got to use whatever limited tools we’ve got to make whatever degree of change possible.

Clinton vs. Obama on Economic Policy

Here’s an interesting comparison in Mother Jones of the Democratic candidate’s stated positions on economic policies. Clinton comes out with the leading edge.

Obama-mento

Are you wondering whether there is any substance behind all of this Barack Obama fervor? Here is a great reference letter written by one of his friends for the Independent.

Keep the Presidential Campaigns Intelligent

Now that Obama has gained so much momentum, he’s entered into the crossfire of the Republican juggernaut media force, which means barely veiled racial slurs, fabricated insinuations of wrongdoing in the past, etc. We all know just how powerful these smear tactics are, as we’ve witnessed the ugly and expensive campaigns against Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as whosoever has dared get in the way of Dick Cheney.

Barack Obama represents a fundamental shift of political concern in the populace: people are quite clearly stating that they are fed up with corporate thieves running our economy, public administration, and public opinion. Politics as usual is not what is going to win this presidential campaign, unless all the voters that have been currently mobilized get sick and tired of the whole scene again and retreat back into apathy—if that occurred, it would be thanks to the media dragging the debate through the mud.

I think that we need to fight back against the media even carrying smear stories, which gives credence to their insinuations simply by entering the national discourse. There is obviously a certain segment of the American population which will gleefully take up the refrain, “Barack Obama is a terrorist.” But they should be obtaining that song not from major news sources; let’s leave that shit up to Rush Limbaugh and all the other big-mouths of bigotry and small-mindedness. Write or call into your paper or news station and let them know that you don’t want to see that kind of crap in this presidential campaign. Let’s hear what the candidates are saying about their political and economic positions, not about an outfit they wore as an act of diplomacy, or about their middle name. Let McCain question Barack Obama’s stance on foreign policy, not his ethnic or racial background. Let Barack Obama question McCain’s economic policy, not his personal sexual trysts.

Let’s keep this debate on the level of adults, not small-minded children. Let’s talk about issues that actually matter.

Barack Obama and “Experience”

I’ve noticed that the main “concern” voiced by other politicians and mimicked by the media in regards to Barack Obama’s candidacy is that he may lack “experience.” I find this negative appraisal a bit preposterous. In case no one has noticed, the current President is a no-good silver-spoon son who found god on the back of a dollar bill, and who has absolutely no credentials for being President other than that his daddy has a lot of connections. So now tell me, if a politician such as Barack Obama, who has integrity, who is well-spoken, intelligent, and inspirational, exactly how does this politician lack “experience” for President of the United States? Is that just a really polite and convoluted method of questioning whether he’s got the right connections?

Thoughts On Colombia as a Whole

If you came to Colombia without paying attention to the news, or if you hadn’t told anyone where you were going and listened to them freak out about it, then you would have no idea that there was an ongoing civil war. Colombians themselves don’t seem too keen on discussing it. I’m quite certain that many of them would rather just ignore it, and remain just as blissfully unaware as many of us Americans are of the increasing divide between rich and poor in our country. There’s also a certain kind of hardened exterior that Colombians have in general, due to the fact that over half their population lives in poverty. Life here is certainly never easy. The cities never seem to sleep, and everyone is running on caffeine or maybe a little aguardiente. Everyone is just trying to get their little piece of the action, whether it be selling tintos, shining shoes, or standing still and pretending to be a statue on the street corner. Many people’s occupation (including children), apparently, is just to walk the streets all day long and beg for money. These beggars are shameless, approaching you with the hand outstretched, the begging face on, the pleading voice, and most of them will immediately curse you out loudly when you deny them money, which doesn’t make you any more inclined to give them any.

You can tell that the economy, at least for a certain selection of the populace, is booming. Just look at how many high-rises are still being added to the already condensed, busy skyline of Bocagrande in Cartagena. But this growing economy is young and uncertain, and is overshadowed both by the United States on one side, with its questionable infusions of ‘drug war’ money, and Venezuela on the other, with Chavez’ seemingly psychotic manipulations of markets. And the ongoing civil war further increases this shredding and upset from two completely different angles: the right-wing paramilitario on one side, and the rebel guerillas on the other, with the Colombian government somewhere in the middle trying to quell the violence, stablilize the economy, and somehow eradicate (or at least make a show of eradicating) the cocaine trade, which is complicated by the fact that cocaine is largely grown and trafficked by both the rebels and the paramilitary. And now that I’ve seen a cocaine manufacturing plant and realized just how easy it is to make the paste, and considering just how easy it is to grow the plant itself, as it grows like a weed, it seems like a pretty hopeless task to continue to attempt to just eliminate the crops. The fact is, as long as rich Americans continue to stuff that shit up their noses and continue to pay high prices for the stuff—even though it’s easy to grow, easy to make, and is cut endlessly with crap (like flour) before it reaches those high-end nostrils—then it will continue to be grown and traded, because it makes some people with guns and connections a lot of money.

So with an awareness of what’s going on here, somewhere, in Colombia, it makes it all the more remarkable just how invisible it all is. As a tourist, you are in absolutely no danger, unless you go into the lesser visited outlying rural regions where the paramilitary and/or rebels are in control. And even then, simply if you act like an idiot and put yourself into dangerous situations. (As they say here, “No dar papaya“, which is a saying that means, “Don’t put yourself in dangerous situations.) Colombia is safer to visit, I would venture to say, then most major cities in the United States. At least here in Colombia, you don’t have to worry as much about some random unhappy Joe with the inability to socialize mowing you down with a semi-automatic. There’s enough official-type dudes with guns standing idly about here to prevent such occurrences. If you’re gonna get shot, it’s probably gonna occur somewhere out in the jungle, not in the middle of a city street. About the most danger you feel as a tourist is that a taxi driver (or a restaurant in Santa Marta!) will rip you off because you don’t know the appropriate price. Or that someone will steal your wallet or I-pod when you’re sleeping on a bus. That kind of thing. I’d worry about that on a Greyhound in the States, too. And in the States, I’d also be worrying about getting an unwanted reach-around in the bathroom at the bus station (maybe even from a US Senator!), whereas here in Colombia, you have to pay to use the bathroom, so it’s not a concern. Which as my girlfriend observed, may be annoying at first, but then you realize that charging to use a public bathroom is actually a good thing, because the bathrooms are cleaner, and more importantly, because there aren’t random sketchy people in there shooting up or trying to hump you as you urinate.

It’s been hard for me to get a handle on any deeper sense of the situation here in Colombia as I haven’t had any deep political discussions with anyone, and because it’s not, as I’ve said, visible in any immediate sense. I do know that the Colombian military isn’t exactly the most scrupulous in the world, as the military boys out in the jungle on the Ciudad Perdida tour sold and smoked pot with some other trekkers that I’d talked to in Parque Tayrona. And considering also that we were told to hide our valuables from them when we were staying in their camp. Not the most disciplined of soldiers, which makes you question as well just where the boundaries between the paramilitary and the military lie. But these are questions I can’t possibly get any insight on myself without some research from other sources. Boundaries are never quite clear here in any sense, and sometimes one wonders if there really are many observed laws at all, especially when there’s money involved. It’s like the Wild West out here in many ways, and not only in regards to the traffic.

At the moment of this writing, Colombia is making a visible attempt to broaden its tourism industry and to beautify its cities and fix up its roads. This means that for me, a lot of Colombia has been closed or in a state of active renovation, which has been highly annoying, but I can tell you that if you came here in a few years, it would probably be much nicer. For example, the Museo del Oro in Bogotá is being renovated, and I really wanted to see it. They have a little throw-away exhibit at another site, but it’s nothing much to look at. On all the major roads, the road is actively being worked on, which has meant a lot of bumpiness and one-way controlled traffic. In Santa Marta and in Bogota, many sidewalks are half-complete, and you have to step around people working on carefully placing colored bricks into patterns. The whole waterfront walk in Santa Marta was being worked on. It looked like it would be nice someday, but while we were there, it was just one big obstacle course. The Botanical Gardens in Medellín were being renovated, and there was absolutely nothing there to look at when I went. I’m sure they will be very nice in a few years. I’m still a little bitter that I had to pay 2 bucks to go into a park where there were no plants to be seen. And on and on. There’s a lot of public projects being done here, which further reflects the rising economy.

So that’s my thoughts and impressions of Colombia as a whole, in addition to the other lists I’ve made of the little details and quirks. I’ll add more thoughts as they arise.

Sick of Partisanship

As the whole presidential race idiocy begins winding itself up in the media, I grow increasingly agitated at the state of politics in this country (the ol US of A for those of you who stumbled acrost this page randomly). The whole nature of all interactions here, whether political, economic, or legal, all seem to have to be made on adversarial terms. It’s always A vs B. It’s never A working with B to produce C. It’s Democrats vs Republicans. It’s capitalism vs socialism. It’s environmentalist groups vs corporations. It’s good vs evil. Etc, ad nauseam.

The problem with this state of affairs is that when it comes to issues where all parties involved need to work together to create any kind of real solutions to major problems, such as in the arenas of public health, or reducing carbon emissions, then there is never any progress made until things attain such a state of degradation that it is undeniable to everyone that drastic measures must be made. And by that point, of course, it’s just a little too late. It’s “damage control,” instead of “preventing catastrophe.” It’s “rebuilding from the ground up,” instead of “retrofitting existing structures.” Aside from those of us who subscribe to neither liberal nor conservative, nor Democrat nor Republican, most Americans are quite happy to delimit their perceptions to one side or the other. Once you’ve picked a side, most issues resolve themselves rather conveniently into black or white. And you will never understand the perception of the “other side.”

If you’ve read any of my political rants in the past, then you know that I obviously don’t hold much patience with Republicans and conservatives of most any stripe. I really don’t have any interest in seeing their point of view, because it dominates enough of the political and cultural scene as it is, even as “liberal” as Americans pretend their major cities might be. But I also despise Democrats and people who blindly adhere to notions of liberalism as simply ideological opposition to Republicans, while mostly, in action, still just big-business economic ass-kissing just like conservatism. But ultimately, I really don’t give a shit about Republican or Democrat. I care about issues that truly affect the world and the nation, and that truly need to be addressed, one way or another. Issues such as revitalization of the economy, global warming, and public health. And the only way that such issues will ever get addressed is if people in positions of leadership put their fat heads together and work out the nitty-gritty details as a team, instead of squabbling over ideological issues that they will never resolve simply so that they can maintain political supremacy.

And this is the exact point where the pseudo-Democracy of the United States begins to look a bit out-dated and inefficient. Because it seems to be in the very nature of our economic, legal, and political systems to be adversarial, partisan, and privatized and individualized. Any kind of notions of “teamwork” seem to invoke knee-jerk allergic reactions to the ideologies of socialism and communism. But addressing and resolving trenchant issues such as those embedded in public health and global warming require a social cohesiveness that will not be achieved through mere partisanship. We must somehow go beyond ideologies, whether political, economic, or otherwise, and attempt to look at issues through a cumulative scattered cohesion of lenses, the liberals and conservatives and goods and evils all sewn together into a temporary visage of futurity. A rainbow quilt of different perceptions, meshed into a higher vision, beyond that which could have ever been achieved through the simple antagonism of isolated fragments. Such a networked collectivity of expression can still be competitive, aggressive, and progress oriented. But it must necessarily demolish the currently seemingly intractable obstacles of factions squabbling over (largely irrelevant) ideological issues.

Reclaiming Christianity

Some watered down, politicized form of Christianity has swept across the nation, and it’s about time that real Christians began reclaiming it from the fundamentalist conservative “Evangelicals” who are tainting its name.

There is a basic and fundamental insecurity behind the so-called faith of these Christians, these hypocrites who dare to label themselves as believers without any attempt at understanding the bible for themselves, or any real faith in god. The only way that such people can pretend that they are good Christians is by surrounding themselves with other people who will pretend along with them. It’s a big collective fantasy, wrought with hysteria and fanaticism. They have created some idea of Christianity, filled with politicized propaganda and half-baked idealogies, that has little to do with any teachings to be found in the bible, and even less to do with any practical application of thought. These people are shallow, and dangerously susceptible to pointing fingers at anyone who might threaten their fragile illusions.

It’s pretty easy to tell a real Christian from these fake ones. When you discuss theology, God, etc with any real Christian, they are open to having their beliefs challenged, because they seek to find a way to deeper communicate these beliefs. They have a faith and deep-seated seeking for spirituality that will not be unsettled by such discussion, and they have an ability to articulate what they believe. When you talk to a fake Christian, they will not tolerate any challenges. They will either be attempting to “convert” you to their way of thinking, or they will simply not want to talk to you at all, except to label you as an enemy and shut their hearts and minds to you. This is because they do not truly know what they believe, because they have been told by their “group” what kind of beliefs they should hold, and have not gained these beliefs through their own seeking.

There is a reason that Church and State have been separated in the United States, and it’s a good one. But Republicans and the Christian Coalition, with their onslaught of Evangelical cheerleaders, have been attempting to render this separation null, claiming that the United States is a “Christian” nation. It is irrelevant what religion the majority of the people of the United States adheres to. Religion and politics are a dangerous and volatile mix, and the only reason that Republicans and any one else might attempt to harness it is for the simple, greedy cause of increased and absolute power. These power hungry “Christians”, voiced so loudly and crassly through firebrands and hypocrites such as Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Ted Haggard, have colonized the name and image of Christianity in the United States, and tainted it, bitterly, with blood, bigotry, and money.

When you watch the news in the United States, all you see in the world are the latest doings of Islamic extremists, and the media has built up this distorted image of Islam as defined by terrorists and fringe groups. Similarly, you can imagine how the rest of the world must be viewing the United States and its brand of Christianity. It has become defined by bullies, blasphemers, and intolerant unilateralism. Is this really what Christianity is about? Money, power, and absolute greed? Absolute intolerance? Of course not. And it’s about time that real Christians began speaking up for themselves, instead of allowing their faith to be dominated and distorted by political propaganda and a militant small-mindedness.

The American Justification

The polls have demonstrated again and again that Americans are sick of the Iraq ‘war’ and disapprove of George W. Bush. As well they should. But as in most politics Americana, these are for all the wrong reasons. Both Democrats and Republicans disapprove of the Iraq war because it failed, not because they disbelieve in the root causes of going to war over “freedom and democracy”. In other words, if we could see some kind of signs of possible success in Iraq, then there would be nothing for Democrats to criticize, because they would never challenge the deep-rooted American belief in fighting for a ‘good’ cause. They know that this would be political suicide. Who would challenge the belief in fighting for a just cause? Would argue against sending troops with guns into other countries for “humanitarian” reasons?

And this is the very problem. That Americans think that we are somehow gifted by God to rule and dominate the world. We use this line of reasoning in not only going to war for resources, but in seeking to give our corporations free reign in the world economy. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Christian or not: chances are that at some level, you agree with the premise that America should use force when necessary to defend just causes. And those just causes are what are defined by America.

So at root, George W. Bush was not the cause of the problem. He was just as much a puppet to American fundamentalism as was all of the American people. We were not fooled by W. Bush simply because of propaganda and deceit. We were fooled because we WANT to believe, so desperately, that America is God’s country, or the best country in the world, or the most powerful, or whatever designation you want to worship it by, and that we are performing acts of justice, in the defense of freedom and human rights.

We are all fools, if we would so easily allow ourselves to be blinded to doubt and reason, if we would so easily subvert morals in favor of power, wealth, and a self-created superiority. And as I watch the lead up to the 2008 presidential campaigns, I am struck by how mindless most of us are to the real reasons of why the Iraq ‘war’ was a bad decision, and the real reasons of why George W. Bush is misguided.

Whatever cause which commits us to action without discussion of opposing points of views is misguided. America needs to doubt itself. America needs to criticize itself. And so I am criticizing you, if you are a fellow American. I challenge you to challenge yourself, and question your commitment to your country. I challenge you to question this on the grounds of your commitment to the world, to the planet, to humanity. I challenge you to question what kind of world we would live in where we would justify war not because we feel it to be right, but because we think things are “more complicated than that.” Because “sometimes we have to go to war.” Because we need to spread the gospel seed of “freedom” and “democracy”. And I would further challenge those of you who are “anti-war” to question what kind of world we would live in where the reason people are in opposition to certain wars is not because they feel war to be fundamentally wrong, but because they feel that we fought the wrong way. Because we “failed.” Because we are “losing.”

As long as Americans continue to think in such limited terms, then yes, perhaps the world is doomed, because as we all know America is so friggin important. Apparently, if the U.S. goes awry, then noone else in the world has the capability to get anything right. Well. We’ll see on that point. In any case, one thing is for certain: if Americans continue to allow themselves to be misled so easily by fundamentalism, then more wars will occur, and more terrorist attacks will occur. And on and on and on the wheels of war and righteousness will go. All we have to do is watch the interaction of Israelis and Palestinians to know how that one goes. . .

Positivity

Of course we could discuss endlessly the notions of ideologies, systems, and expectations. But the only fundamental thing that could ever be changed in this world is your own perception. Is you allowing yourself to see beyond what you have been given. And there are really only two types of perceptions, when you pull everything out to the very big penultimate picture: there are negative perceptions, and there are positive perceptions. If you subscribe to negativity, as we all do at some point in our daily lives, then you tend to talk shit about your neighbors, your coworkers, the world. If you have faith in the positive, you believe that you have the ability to relate and talk to anyone.

It’s really quite unproductive to be negative. Ever. And I’m can be a largely negative person, so I know this first-hand. At any point in my day, if I allow myself to step into the steeped downward spiral of negative thought, on any matter, whether it is about myself, or about someone else, or about my environment, then it just drags everything else down. This isn’t to say that one should ignore or pretend away negative shit. Rather to say that in acknowledging negativity, one can still find something positive, constructive, and move onward from it.

I would go so far as to say that all of the problems in this world stem from negative perceptions. For example, one common negative perception in the U.S. is that poor people are poor because they are lazy and thus they deserve to be poor. This is such a harsh and superficial judgment, especially considering all those of us who break our backs working 9 to 5s just to break even. Yet it is a commonly held belief, reinforced especially by super-rich and powerful people who can influence the media and the political process.

Negativity creates divisions and boundaries where they do not exist. It creates us, and them. It creates good, and evil. It creates gossip, and hatred, and self-induced blindness.

Positivity is to embrace, to reach across distances and formulate understanding. It is to give people the benefit of the doubt, to give them the space to grow, the forum to be themselves. Every single person in this world has a context within which they are beautiful. Until you understand that context, you cannot understand that person, nor see them for what they are. You see fragments, you see pieces, and you string these together into some kind of definition which you use to put them into a box.

We put the world into boxes because it makes it easier for us to pretend that we know what we are, and what the world is. We look at these little boxes and we label them and we think that we have things figured out. We are children sitting on the floor of our bedrooms with pieces of a puzzle whose frame is in the night sky. We can’t ever know how it all fits together. We can’t ever see the big picture. All we can do is accept that the pieces which we have been given are a part of a whole of which we are also a part.

I don’t want to allow myself to become petty. I don’t want to pretend that I know what other people should be. I want to be positive. I want to forge connections, not distance. I want to understand, not separate. I want to truly fulfill my potential, rather than wasting away all of my life, all of the gifts that I have been given. If I cannot be positive, then what is the point in breathing?

Intelligent Design

A lot intelligent people swear off humanity, because people make a lot of stupid decisions, are easily misled by unscrupulous “leaders” like cattle to the slaughter, eat fast food, and watch stupid television programs and movies. The problem with such a perspective is that it does not take into account that when you are looking at a large mass of humanity, you are not looking at “people” per se: you are looking at the cumulative effects of social/economic/political systems. Humanity reflects the decisions that have been made in how their daily lives flow and in what direction they move. If they are unemployed, violent, and lazy, that is a sign of poor social systems, of bad decisions made by those interests which determine in which direction money moves, in what manner a city is planned, etc.

In other words, “problems” such as homelessness, poverty, and crime are systemic problems of design. Problems such as destruction of the environment, high percentages of needless waste in every sector of industry, and general unhappiness in career choices, are problems that can be solved through better design.

If intelligent people sat down at the drawing board and thought through plans before acting upon them, we could largely eliminate the vast amounts of waste that we each currently create every single day. We could eliminate global warming, pollution of groundwater, and destruction of topsoils. Yes, we could even eliminate world hunger. These are not the perennial problems of human nature, never to be solved. Slaves, illegal immigrant labor, third world underpaid underage workers, and suicidal smalltime farmers do not need to exist in order to support global economies. Homeless people do not have to wander through alleyways muttering to themselves and plundering dumpsters. Women and children and men of all colors and types and sizes do not have to be made to feel inadequate, ugly, and useless. Teenagers do not have to plot out acts of heartless rage. SUVs do not have to tear thoughtlessly through mile wide suburban streets.

We do not have to be addicted to hydrocarbons to lead fulfilling lives. We do not need myriads of multi-colored plastic packaged useless products screaming for our attention in the supermarkets.

In a well designed system, such as Nature’s, there is nothing wasted. What is one creature’s waste is another creature’s food. Everything is recycled, rebirthed, renewed.

American culture has been birthed on action, progress, manifest destiny. Without consideration of the later effects of our actions, we have moved forward to trample dreams, cultures, peoples, histories. 50,000 species of plants and animals become extinct every year, largely as a direct result of our and other industrial nations actions, our appetites, our businesses, our politics. We are indeed the world’s number one superpower, meaning that we are the world’s largest bully, the world’s largest devourer of natural resources, the world’s largest creater of waste. No, don’t point your finger at China. Don’t point your finger at India. Those nations take the exponential industrial growth of the United States as a beacon and guide, rather than as a warning.

Inaction, time devoted to thought, to attention, to observation is essential to action made with integrity. Without this space of critical focus, actions made will necessarily be destructive, flailing, meaningless. Our culture doesn’t live anywhere near “the moment.” We exist either in some state of longing for a golden age that never existed, or we exist in doldrum half-awake states of TV-movie entertainment suckling. To truly exist in the here and now is to go beyond partisanship, beyond political ideologies, beyond economic theories. It is to look at things as they most truly are, beyond yourself, within yourself, as a part of yourself as a part of a team as a part of a community as a part of the global network. Collaboratively, working as a team of designers, each special interest working with every other specialized interest, we can redesign, retrofit, and renew all aspects of social, economic, and political systems to more accurately reflect mental, spiritual, and biological reality.

Vanity is in Holding Yourself Apart

I’ve been an elitist in the past, and I often still consider the majority of the populace to be stupid. But my fundamental belief is that within every living entity there is the potential—most often unrealized—of beauty and power, of divinity. We attempt to express this inner potential in a variety of ways, and we often fail to do much more than fumble ourselves blindly into misunderstood gestures. But given the right environment, given a certain amount of respect and love and leeway, we bloom inner light into the world like flowers.

It bothers me when I go out dancing, and most people are standing along the sidelines, just watching, as if they are waiting for some perfect place, some perfect person, some perfect music, some perfect substance to open them up and make them free to dance. All these factors are important, of course, to having a good time. But it’s never going to be perfect. Sometimes you just have to go out onto the dance floor and enjoy yourself even if there’s no hot chicks there, even if the music is just the typical top 40 songs from the last 10 years, even if the drinks are too expensive and watered down. All that we need is simple: a steady beat and a few simple melodic hooks. Your ass can shake in a variety of ways that won’t be defined by the music. Your hips can move in a variety of ways that don’t have to be uninhibited by alcohol. You know what I’m sayin? Your degree of openness and freedom and creativity are ultimately only determined by yourself.

Again, continuing with the metaphor of the dance floor, all it takes is one person letting themselves loose to get the party started. Then others begin to respond to the call of your challenge. And soon its just one big fiesta competition.

All the limitations that can be found in society can be found in yourself. If you are too good, if you are better than everyone else, if you are better looking, got more money, got bigger cars, got a bigger ego, than all you do is perpetuate the walls that make you petty. If you are not good enough, not pretty enough, not talented enough, too insecure, than all you do is perpetuate the walls that make you needy. Everyone else is held back because you are held back. All the world is bad because you are bad. All the world is vain and petty and desirous and hungry because you are holding yourself apart from it, because you are holding your divinity apart, because you are separating yourself from something that cannot be divided.

You are god, and if you can’t realize that, then who else will? And if no one else will, then how can you realize it? It takes humility. It takes confidence. It takes getting beyond yourself in order to know yourself in order to share yourself.

Closer than you Think

How well most of us control and repress ourselves. We are quite capable of never allowing ourselves to enjoy anything. Rather, we conform our minds into a daily numbness, we are addicted to maintaining normality and status quo. We are afraid to feel beautiful, to reach ecstasy, so we pay others (“stars”) to act these things out for us. Why dream, why imagine anything when fantasies are manufactured for you by Hollywood? Why enjoy your body when there is already a whole industry producing more desirable images?

If corporations had their way, we would be mindless slugs hooked up to machines that force-fed us our automatic daily 24-hour manufactured consumer sludge. We would eat, we would accept, and we would consume; we would be like baby birds, voracious, always wanting to be fed, unable to do anything for ourselves except clamor for more and open our mouths and orifices to be willingly raped by inhuman forces. We would secrete toxic waste, our noses would run with polystyrene, our eyes would tear with pesticides. We would eat fish made of plastic, and lick our wax glossed lips. The world would be barren and empty, but we would be content, swaddled in our tinted tanks, well connected by a series of pipes and wires that would tie us forever into what is known, what is accepted, what has been extracted and dissected and labeled and reduced and derived and bottled and devalued and sold below any meaningful cost.

What is it that makes us human? What is it that makes us alive? What connects us to this thing known as existence? What are we that we can feel?

The water the thirsty man seeks is nearer to him than his jugular vein.

Change the Market to Reflect Reality

“While we derive a great deal of wealth from natural resources, we have not found an effective way to reinvest in or preserve that wealth. We are losing those resources, because they are either controlled by private companies or by the state, and neither has proved successful in establishing long-term strategies for ensuring the enduring well-being of the commons. Governments the world over give resources to corporations that are not required to take care of them, and therefore do not. The reason . . . is the failure of the market to internalize fully all costs. If the market is rewarded for externalizing costs and extracting wealth, then individual producers can be expected to leave to the state, wherever possible, the job of restoration and clean-up. On the other hand, it is quite impossible for a state agency to maintain ecosystem health when its main function is to deal with aftermarket degradation. When you then compound the problem with revolving-door relationships between regulator agencies and the very enterprises they are supposed to monitor, the viability of the ecosystem is hardly a primary concern.

To argue today that the free market should control the extraction and sale of natural resources ignores the state of the commons and the free market. The market works to the benefit of the whole of society when it includes all costs and benefits. Only when the market accurately reflects the replacement costs of a resource (a virgin forest or salmon or Arctic oil) and the social costs of its consumption (tobacco being the most obvious) will society begin to respond to the market in a rational way.”

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

Bad Dream

Years from now, we’ll look back, and we will be ashamed of ourselves. Ashamed of our country. Ashamed of our businesses. Ashamed that we were acting collectively like we were on a cocktail of crack, speed, anti-anxiety medications, anti-depressants, and heroin. We were junkies, addicted to oil, addicted to heedless consumerism, addicted to harvesting nonrenewable resources in the face of the destruction of everything meaningful all around us, addicted to making a few people more and more rich and most people more and more poor. We were manufacturing weapons and selling them to the highest bidder. We were devastating the topsoils of every piece of land we developed. We were polluting the very oceans, the very wombs of life from which we had originally evolved. We were cutting down forests that had existed since before we had a Constitution. We were killing each other, killing ourselves, killing our children.

Worst of it all were not these devastating and inevitable outcomes of industrial capitalism. The worst of it was that in the face of the quite obvious failure of our ideologies and economic systems, we chose to dig ourselves yet deeper into blindness and despair. We allowed greedy, unscrupulous warlords to plunge our country into despicable battles in foreign soils in the name of religion and freedom. We allowed ourselves to become implicated in this pillaging by lending it our full support. We allowed ourselves to become inured by false promises of success, progress, and happiness. We allowed ourselves to think that we had somehow conquered racism, grown beyond sexism, escaped the harness of enslavement, and achieved a free and equitable economic playing field. We pretended that the devastation of the environment, the outsourcing of our jobs, and the ever increasing rifts between us and our children were problems that could be solved through band-aids and half-assed measures and complacent gestures.

Seems like it must have just been a bad dream . . .

The Root of the Problem is Private

“However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporation, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us . . . always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed—no doubt about it—by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand. There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.”

Wendell Berry

Future Building

In a post a little while ago, I attempted to introduce the concept of living life with the awareness of the potential of natural (and unnatural) destruction to your home and possessions. But I think this idea is necessarily vague, because exactly how, one would ask, are we supposed to stop living in homes? Should we live in mobile homes, or large communal spaces that we all own?

I think the problem is something else, that I was attempting to work towards, and sensing the pulse, but not digging deep enough. I’m thinking now that the problem is the whole structure of our society; everything from the way we make our money to the way we organize our communities. Again, this is vague, but let’s just stop and consider for a minute where current events like global warming, pollution of groundwater and oceans, peak oil, and depletion of topsoils is leading us. These dire symptoms of the dessication of the biosphere are the direct result of the way we live our lives right now. They are the direct result of the products that we manufacture, the food that we eat, and the lifestyles that we have grown to think are our birthright.

So to bring this back to something down to earth—when a natural disaster occurs, as I had said before, what we should be learning is not just how glad we are to have it be over with and to have survived—what we should be learning is just how disconnected we are from some of the most fundamental and basic of natural cycles. And these cycles are what we need to be mimicking and learning from in order to progress.

I am reading a book right now, called The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken (which I fully recommend if you’re interested in either economics or ecology at all), that elucidates these points very clearly in terms of business and the need for a new ‘restorative’ economy. The focal point of the book is to try to wake businessmen up to the fact that the economy must be altered to accommodate human beings and the earth. One point of Hawken’s vision is the need to recycle products nearly endlessly, as nature does, thus conserving resources, eliminating toxic waste, and building a sustainable economy that will produce fulfilling jobs.

What is insightful about Hawken’s book is that while we are all, understandably, pointing fingers at McDonald’s and Halliburton and Walmart, what we are failing to do is to begin considering, positively, how these corporations can be changed, and what kind of economic environment could be created that would reflect this change (which Hawken’s book addresses). What we are doing is pointing our fingers at symptoms of the structure that is failing, and labeling what is causing the world to fall apart as evil. Instead, we should be focusing our energies on what way the structure can be re-created sustainably and in tune with the lessons of nature. Almost everyone, other than the dinosaurs and rich idiots that have their heads stuck in the sand, recognize that there are problems. Now it’s time to start conceptualizing in what way these problems can be solved, and laying down the blueprints.

To bring this back to my immediate environment, right now the citizens of Lake Tahoe are pointing their fingers at the TRPA, the regional planning agency, which attempts (admittedly imperfectly, given that it is governed mostly by moneyed interests) to impose regulations on development in the region and keep the environment healthy. People are angry and blaming the agency as the cause of the wildfire, because they do not allow homeowners to cut down whatever trees they want, and restrict the wanton clearing of forest. This is obviously ridiculous. If you are building a home made out of wood in the midst of a dense forest, then you should be aware that the forest is subject to wildfire. Lightning is all it takes to set such an occurrence off, let alone idiots with cigarettes and camp fires, such as what set off this most recent and cataclysmic Angora fire.

So people are seeking to blame a governmental agency simply because their homes burned down and because there were a lot of dense trees on their properties. But obviously, the fact that trees are dense in inhabited areas has more to do with the very fact that humans are developing there in the first place—fires are suppressed and brush and trees are condensed with fuel. So the problem is much deeper. It lies in the very planning and design of human communities. It lies in the disconnection with natural processes that accompanies every step we currently make within our economic, social, and mental structures—from the food that was shipped from across the nation or globe to be wasted on our tables, to the tropical wood we used to build our kitchenette, to the conversations we make about ideas distant from what we actually feel.

When I talk about “disconnection with natural processes,” I refer to the whole conundrum modern society has placed us into with relation to the biosphere, from agri-business that depletes the soil and devastates insect populations and pollutes the groundwater, to the production of non-degenerative toxic substances to house a product that will last 2 months. We don’t know how the products we buy were made, we don’t know what the cow we ate in the form of a cheeseburger was fed, we don’t know how the stitches were sewn into the clothes that we buy. We are disconnected from the most fundamental aspects of how we live our lives. This is a form of arrogance compounded by ignorance.

And when a cataclysmic event like a wildfire or a terrorist attack occurs, it temporarily shreds this veil apart, and you see just how deeply the rifts that separate you and your society from the rest of the world are. And there’s two reactions to this: 1) you embed yourself even deeper in blind ideologies that will support your short-term comfort and complacency; or 2) you begin to seek how to address these rifts and heal the deeper wounds. Once you’ve made the obviously correct decision, then suddenly things don’t seem so bleak anymore. Yes, the challenges that are ahead of us are massive and possibly insurmountable; but they are also great opportunities for positive change, social mobility, and creative design. This is where the future lies: in intelligent and creative people hunkering down to work, with their minds clear, their visions unclouded, and their anger and bitterness released. The task at hand is much greater than any loss that you personally have ever undergone. The task at hand is the distinct possibility that human existence could be obliterated by our own past ignorance and current inefficacy.

So it’s about time to work past guilt, blame, and anger. It’s time to begin the building of a future. This will necessarily be in conjunction with governments, corporations, and everyday people—but only in new and completely altered forms.

Disaster as a Way of Life

Wildfires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc are generally natural occurrences. We term these “disasters” in the context of their effects our lives. They destroy our homes.

We are never really quite prepared for these events, even when we know that they will eventually occur. It is hard for us to mentally conceive of events that could completely level all the structures that give us our daily existence. We like to think that it will not happen to us. It happens to people in other parts of the world, and we watch it on the news.

The tragedy, it seems to me, does not lie simply in the devastation of homes and personal possessions, although of course these are tragic to us when we are personally involved. The greater tragedy is that our lives have not been structured to accommodate natural cycles of destruction and renewal. Our lives have been formed on stasis, on day by day continuance of normalcy and homogeny. We build homes which are intended to be permanent. As individuals we accumulate possessions that are of such value and personal meaning that we are devastated by their loss.

But perhaps these accepted structures—normally so firmly embedded into our everyday psyche such that we don’t even think to question them—are not synonymous with natural movements and cycles. Forests periodically alight with flame. This is an inevitability. The earth periodically releases pent up pressure along surface fault lines and volcanoes. The currents of the air and sea form into torrents of wind and rain. These are all necessary and natural occurrences. And when they happen to us, we are devastated, because they lay waste to what we have structured our lives upon.

But the very fact that these are natural processes makes one think that perhaps mankind should be attempting to find a way to adapt our everyday habits and comforts to these distant portents of ‘disaster.’ In our efforts to build structures of commerce and habitation that are the most conducive to short-term stability, we lose sight of the possibility that there are forces much more powerful than us that sway our lives and that are beyond our control.

Our necessity to try to preserve our ways of life at all costs necessitates a constant battle against the forces of nature. Fire-fighting is a dangerous and strategically advanced undertaking, and the only reason that it is necessary is because we have structures intended to be permanent that we need to protect. Because we prevent forest fires and shrub fires from occurring as they would naturally, we have created unnaturally dense thickets of fuel and tinder, thus abetting the catch-22 of creating more and more dangerous and devastating fires that must be fought with an ever greater pooling of resources and manpower.

In the effort to create lives structured around permanency and constant stability, perhaps we are turning a blind eye to our own destruction.

What environment you talkin about?

What often is left out in all the trendy industry talk about environmentalism is that our current culture of rampant consumerism is completely unsustainable. What that means, in everyday terms, is that ethanol will not replace oil. Nor will solar and wind energy. In fact, no alternative energy source will support our current lifestyles.

This isn’t what people want to hear. People want to hear that everything will be the same, the course will be stayed, as long as we pass a few bills and start driving hybrid hydrogen fueled Humvees.

It’s heartening to see that talking about concern for the environment and making conscious decisions to reduce emissions and impact is now an acceptable political, ethical, and economic topic, and no longer relegated to hippies, fringe activists, and bitter apocalyptic visionaries. But it is at the same time disheartening to know that most of the populace still remains completely ignorant of the devastation of their current modes of existence coming their way to a reality near them. The only way we will survive this paradigm collapse is if we can adapt quickly to the dream that has been put aside in our hearts to make way for a flat-land one-dimensional world of commerce, cultural colonization, and mass produced franchise mentalities: the dream of shared plots of land, fresh vegetables, simplicity, and local community. You know, the things that we really want to think that we have evolved beyond, with no hope of return, distant in our immutable individuality and greed.

We’ve got to let go of a lot of the so-called progress we think we’ve attained. The progress of complacency, specialization, and homogenization. The domination of centralized sources of technology, media, and banks. We’ve got to re-wire our brains, re-wire our social relations, re-wire our currencies, re-wire our hearts.

A revolution can only occur synonymously with evolution. Are we ready? Ready to let go of our fears, let go of our illusory separations from each other formed from myths of class, race, and birthplace? Or do we want to keep blindly forging our ways like lemmings towards the cliffside of inevitable gravity from this pinnacle of consumption we’ve created?

World leaders mean nothing. Corporations mean nothing. Banks mean nothing. Nuclear weaponry means nothing.

We—collectively, byte by bit, our desires, our everyday decisions, our subconscious compulsions, our loves, our relation ships—are everything.

Self Perpetuating Fear

Just so as in a field in which the soil has been upturned, baring subterranean life to the cruel face of another world, so too in society we unearth, endlessly, the depths of what we cannot consciously understand. We look at these strange unintelligible truths we have unearthed in our cultivation, these creatures of a world before sight, and we are afraid. Because what we are destroying through our shallow misconceptions are the roots of our survival. We are wholly dependent upon the most simple and basic aspects of the earth, and we are destroying these structures like a man kicking at the essential pillars holding up his roof. And then we evince shock when we see our illusions crumbling? Shock that this civilization based on the myth that the earth is ours, that our minds are ours, that our bodies are ours, is falling all around us, leaving us as mere blind destroyers, simpletons sitting in the ravaged dirt?

(But perhaps this is our very function as a part of Nature, to serve as murderous wardens of restrictive mentalities. The dark to counterbalance the light. This is not for us to determine, either way.)

Again, go back to the field, the plot of land that has been blindly cultivated following tradition and convention. Weeds spring up at every turn, like viruses in a weakened immune system, and manufactured chemicals must be sprayed relentlessly, as weeds attack viciously like barbarian hordes. All along when in reality weeds are simple seeds attempting to capitalize on an open market, a market opened wide by methodical devastation. Insects infect the crops, capable of instantaneous destruction if not immediately ridden with poison. Poison leveling beneficial and invasive alike, like carpet cluster bombs in a city, like radiation in a cancer patient.

By creating environments that are based on the illusion that human life is the pinnacle and cream of all creation, we have set ourselves directly on the path of addiction and self-destruction. And we watch with confusion the nightly news repeats of murder, war, famine, suicide, refusing to draw the connections that would render ourselves complicit in all of this madness. The line that would link us to perversion, terrorism, and murder. The line that connects the dots of the individual and the masses. The line that swaths a path direct from innocence to guilt. From hunger to power. From resources to capital.

There is a reason why we fear certain things. These certain things are what we have created through our ignorance, by our deliberate ignoring of all other life that we are wholly dependent upon to survive. It is ok to be afraid. But it is better to be at peace with death. To accept that life is not the central meaning of the universe. That we are in fact nothing in the face of what we are a part of.

Once this fact has been faced, then we can get on with the tasks of enjoying dancing, enjoying breathing, enjoying eating, enjoying shitting, enjoying being alive, and fuck all of this stupid shit like fear.

Disillusionment Americana

As Americans, we suffer from a vast disillusionment with our nation and ourselves. We still adhere, through appearance and hearsay, to ideals and mental strictures that we have lost faith in, yet won’t admit it to ourselves or each other, whether through fear or through clinging to these lost fragments like a drowning ship passenger to a piece of wood siding. We look back at the countercultural backlashes of the 60s as if they were mere adolescent throes of desire and drug use. The 50s still lives on, ironically, in simulacrum, in our repressive mentalities and jaded TV shows. Racism still thrives everywhere, although so cunning and interwoven that it no longer is simply black and white, but whiteblack and blackblack, cultural and psychological. The American Dream that never really existed now quietly plans for its retirement, with investment portfolios and hopeful bets hedged in to an economy whose tenuous reality folds in continuously, although we keep forgetting, so busy in speculating on stillborn futures. As if the monopoly game of real estate would simply keep expanding into some endless horizon, into the invisible properties of Atlantis. As if roads can simply keep on being built, widened, overpassed. As if nothing would ever run out. As if lakes would never run dry. As if Manifest Destiny continues on into outer space.

We all know that the fantasy is over. That the United States can no longer even remotely pretend to be a representative of freedom and democracy. That building bigger and higher tech weaponry does not promote peace. That police and military only protect the interests of those with money. That privatizing public health, or public anything, does not produce savings for the consumer. That the rich getting richer does not eventually pull up hard working folks from poverty.

And yet we find ourselves unable to say these things in everyday discourse without confronting some kind of religious zeal of denial. There are people out there, and they are a majority, who will quite happily go down with the ship, taking their lawns and SUVs along with them. Forget the children, they say. Forget the future. Let them fend for themselves while supporting us as we grow old and are kept alive by drugs in hospitals.

Is it simply that we Americans, as a culture and a nation, have become so enamored of our exported ideals, so regimented by our supermarket pitches of complacency and freedom of purchase, so wrapped up in the structures that are sucking our souls dry, that we are unable to step free of its wreckage? That we are so guilty, so intimately involved in what we know at some level to be false, that we are nearly incapable of the psychological ability to look at ourselves in full honesty?

It is depressing though, people. It’s depressing because the prisons are still getting built and overfilled daily with men whose only crime was to not fit the profile of what we think we are. Because weapons are still getting made and shipped overseas and sold to the highest bidder. Because our waste stream is still a direct, flooding line straight to the sea. Because even all this talk of global warming only has us talking about how to find new sources of energy we can waste, rather than reexamining our very lifestyles, our very economic systems, our very outlook upon life.

It is this reexamination we need. Openly, critically, honestly, and as publicly as possible. Democracy can be recreated. Capitalism can be reinvented. The United States can be something other than a representative of false hope and denied dreams. But as long as we keep holding onto our fallen images, then nothing will change, and we will continue to be the bitches of advertising campaigns hinged on our complacency and political campaigns dependent on our lethargy.

Gyms and Metrosexualism

So it’s kind of an established thing these days for a guy to go to a gym to get muscles simply so that he can look good in a tight fitting shirt when he goes to a club. Does no one else think that this is kind of weird? That people build muscles solely for appearance sake, and that beyond the gym visit and picking-up-the-drink-at-the-bar flex, these muscles have little function? Working out just to look desirable has always seemed frankly neurotic to me. You aren’t getting muscles so that you can lift big things up, or so that you can be stronger. You’re getting muscles so that some shot addled airhead will oggle at your biceps strapped in by your tight fitting metrosexual t-shirt.

I believe that working out should be something you do first and foremost for yourself. Because you can push yourself, apply yourself, discover deeper depths of capability and achievement you never thought possible. You can reach beyond pain and into ecstasy. You can work yourself into a trance, letting all of the day’s woes and stress drop away. It’s like you’re conquering something each and every time, building, strengthening, stretching, going further, faster, higher. It teaches you to respect yourself and to listen to yourself. It teaches you patience. It teaches you humility, it teaches you integrity.

Which obviously, guys who are going to their 24-Hour Fitnesses so that they can wear tight fitting t-shirts to the club on friday night haven’t really gotten from their little sessions in front of the mirror listening to their IPods. They’ve missed the whole point of working out. Real women are impressed by real men who have muscles because they use them. Fake women wearing fake perfume with fake boobs are attracted to fake men wearing fake cologne who build muscles simply to attract fake women. What an interesting downward spiral that one is. Fakeness compounded by fakeness. Fakeness attracting more fakeness, producing yet more fakeness, with fake children, and fake grandchildren, and fake fake fake pets, and fake promises, and fake vacations, and fake lives. All because the whole premise of life—self-discovery—has been circumvented from the get-go.

Restorative Justice and Perspectival Shifts

There’s an interesting article in The Independent on ‘restorative justice’ methods in Britain which deal with bullying in some schools. The restorative justice approach, based on Maori cultural principles, attempts to deal with bullying not through punishment, but through face-to-face facilitated discussion and reconciliation between victim and offender. Having been bullied once upon a time myself in my childhood, simply because I was a quiet and introverted kid, I can well understand the ineffectiveness of attempting to “tattletale” on the bully. All that happens is that you make them more angry, and they will only seek later to make you pay for telling on them and getting them in trouble.

The restorative justice approach sits the bully and their victim down together, and the victim tells the bully what the effects of their bullying have done to their lives. The bully is thus shown quite viscerally what the effect of his/her actions has wrought, and he or she is thus given the full action-and-consequence perspective that they had not thought through before. It teaches them to understand the victim’s perspective. Once this perspective is developed, 9 times out of 10 the bully has lost all desire to continue abusing another human being. Because no longer can they pretend they don’t know what they are doing.

What a unique and deceptively simple approach to justice! Community and communication based as opposed to hierarchical law based. Because law, even when developed with noble ethos and egalitarian interests in mind, is set in stone—well not stone, because it can be amended, but more like thickly stirred sludge—and is little able to adapt to unique particular circumstances and contexts. Our law is a law focused on punishment and retribution, suing and money kickbacks, with little to no compassion and healing.

I just realized from the article that I had already unwittingly been training some of my workers in restorative justice approaches when it came to dealing with matters of poor cleaning jobs done by staff under them. I tell them that instead of yelling at people and making them feel bad, simply take the person into the place where they failed to clean adequately and show them visually what they missed. Once they have an understanding of this, they will not usually make the same mistakes again, unless they really are just asswipes. The fact is that most people simply do not always have the oversight and follow through of thought that takes them to the point of realizing the bigger picture, unless they are specifically shown the bigger picture. Then they get the A-ha moment.

Our culture, I often think, works from the angle of assuming that people are inherently stupid and pretty much worthless except as mindless consumers, spoonfed drivel and guidance from above. But on the contrary, I think that people are innately quite capable of doing highly creative acts of beauty, if given half a chance. It’s this ‘half a chance’ that is oftentimes missing in most situations. The most potent power that we all hold in the world is our perspective, and if most people’s perspectives are delimited and negative, then that has a profound affect on everyone. Even the simple inner act of allowing another human being to exist beyond the box that you daily choose to confine them in can have amazing consequences. All you did was change the way you look, and then the outer world shifted! Is this possible? It is. It happens every day. The little revolutions. The little openings of light shining from within making their way into another’s eyes.

American Misogynistic Culture: See it?

It is often hard for most people to really understand that we live in a masculine centered, misogynistic culture. I think one of the simplest ways to clarify this reality is by looking at the conflicting values that we ascribe to women: we tell them that they should shave their legs and their armpits, wear make-up, work out a lot and eat right and have a tight body, that they should have big boobs in order to get noticed—and all of this simply to please men, to be desirable. And then yet, if a woman takes pleasure in her own sexuality, if she empowers herself to enjoy her body, then she is a whore. So we tell women both that they should be sex symbols—objects of desire—and yet that they can’t take undue pleasure in their own sexuality.

Men, on the other hand, are given increased status for their sexual prowess and conquests. Every boy secretly wishes to be a pimp, like Snoop Dogg (before he got rich and discovered the small joys of parenthood and home life). To use em and leave em, like all women were just tools designed by god to get men off. And all of our culture reinforces this notion of women as commodified objects, including many women themselves, who are trained as youngsters to compete to be the most successful objects of desire possible. Sure, women are lawyers, politicians, army officers, etc. But all you have to do is turn on the TV to see just how far they’ve still got to go.

Women should be revered for their beauty and sexuality, there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is when their beauty and sexuality is used to sell products to children. What’s wrong is when goddesses are rendered so confused and insecure by all the conflicting values thrown at them that they don’t even know how to see their own beauty. What’s wrong is when men are given all the power, and as in any situation where there are those who have power over those who have relinquished their power, women are mentally, spiritually, or physically abused.

The deleterious effects of masculine values—such as of aggression, territoriality, and short peak climaxes—can be seen the world over. Aggressive corporate shortsightedness, little or no political diplomacy, global warming, global sex and drug trading, you name it. Of course feminine powers are everpresent and quietly intertwined, working always to balance. But until the feminine values of intuition, empathy, flowing continuous risings, and flexibility are given greater prominence and cultural enforcement, the misogyny will continue. Our children will continue to be sexualized in order to sell them products, our women will continue to relinquish their own power to be successful, and our men will continue to think that treating women like sperm receptacles is the right thing to do.

Honey Bees Be Dyin’

Have you heard about the honey bees? That they are dying in vast numbers, and nobody knows why? That’s kind of scary. First and foremost, because I love me my honey. Second, because they pollinate most of our flowers, fruits, and food plants.

There’s endless speculation as to the cause, such as that the bees are getting “stressed out.” Whatever. More like “they’re getting bombed with toxic chemicals.” Let’s face it, the agribusiness in this country essentially grows its plants on steroids and antibiotics. And it’s like we’re surprised when suddenly all the adults start getting cancer, all the children are born with some kind of disorder, whether physical or mental, and all the food tastes like crap unless you add some of that manufactured “natural flavoring.” And we’re in the midst of what is quite soberly termed an “obesity epidemic.” So the human signs are quite readily visible, if you realize what you’re looking at: the cumulative effects of years of growing and serving food based on business instead of health. And so I guess it shouldn’t be all that surprising that now we’re beginning, inevitably, to see the devastating effects on animal, plant, and insect life. And microbial life, such as the growing amounts of “superbugs” that are completely resistant to any form of antibiotic. Forget global warming. I think this complete disassociation of human life from natural cycles is what constitutes the greatest danger to our survival as a species. We collectively have only the dimmest awareness that we are wholly dependent on biodiversity and connectivity with animals, plants, insects, microbes, and the soil.

In order to survive, we have to understand just how connected we are with everything around us.

Rant Against the Good Ol Boys

Don’t you love the way our government’s dirty hands are smeared all over the spectrum—from Enron, to false documentation on WMDs in Iraq, to Valerie Plame’s exposé, to abuses at Abu Ghraib, to the firing of appointed attorneys across the nation, to deliberately misleading the public on global warming, to [fit whatever scandal you can remember here]—and yet, mysteriously, none of the people truly responsible are ever held to account. There’s always a fall guy. This is, of course, the name of the political game. Like how Bush Senior had his hands deep in the Iran-Contra affair as VP under Reagan, and yet only a bunch of underlings took the fall, and then there he was later, serving as President of the United States, happily fucking up the world and the nation.

And all of this stuff is headline news. And yet nothing is done. The White House says it has done nothing wrong and destroys documents and cuts loose some people and that’s that. Just some headlines, maybe some panels, some investigations, even damning evidence, memos and statements released to the public. But the source of all of these unethical dealings is never dealt with. On and on it goes. The spokesman for the White House or the Pentagon, or robotic hearted Cheney himself, just says that the dudes in power had no idea such dastardly goings on were going on. My goodness, they say, what a surprise! I didn’t command them to do that! I had no clue! Let’s burn those evildoers at the stake!

Yet take those denialists at their word, and you still arrive at a rather disturbing conclusion: if the guys supposedly in seats of extreme power, with myriads of diverse daily information at their fingertips, had no idea what was going on within their own administration, within their own minions, within their own corporate moneyed interest ties—then doesn’t that mean that these guys who are supposedly running our country are not fit to run our country? Because they should have known what was going on in all of these situations. That’s their job. That’s what we hired them for.

So in other words, one way or the other—whether you believe all of the quite clear and cumulative evidence that points to the fact that our government is deliberately deceiving and cheating its own people (not to mention all of the rest of the world), or whether you believe that they are indeed pristine and clean of all involvement in the exponentially growing list of scandals—the basic summary of the situation is that we have either A) evil rich arrogant pricks, or B) clueless rich arrogant pricks, running our country. So why, oh please tell me why, my fellow American citizens, are these rich arrogant pricks still in office? Could we not at least get us some intelligent scrupulous rich arrogant pricks at the least?

Time to Grow Up

Systems of exclusion—this is what we learned in primary school. Find a niche, fit yourself in, make fun of the kid who stands out (even when you were one of them). This is survival mechanics, biological manifestation, pattern recognition. Learned behavior. Although there was always that part of you that understood that the outcasts, the sore-thumbs, were in fact much closer to you than you cared to admit. That you were in fact dependent on them to give yourself purpose and meaning.

You grow older, and as your awareness of the wider world extends, so too does your need for readily definable enemies. Again, there are given culturally or sociologically established minorities: the homeless, perhaps, if you need something closer to home; or homosexuals; or maybe simply the dark-skinned turbaned men from gutteral lands on the evening news waving guns. “Here, it’s ok,” your peers and consumer media tells you, “you can hate these people. They are different.” And thus, you can pretend to know who you are. You are not them—you are God fearing, freedom loving, money making, success driven. You are clean, you are whole, you are pure.

Maybe you come to realize—or maybe you do not, given your level of intelligence and ability to imagine—that at some level, you are only hating yourself. That you are not representative of some cultural, sociological elite. That such an elite does not exist. That this so-called “elite” in fact consists of a conglomeration of power hungry, unscrupulous warlords, gang leaders, fighting like rats for their little piece of turf. And everyone in between either living their lives heedless, caught in the crossfire, or simply pawns in the play by play, puppets on strings. And this is the part of yourself, this subservient mass of complacent fodder and indignant impotence, that you have been pushing away as an “other” and hating. This is the part of yourself that you don’t want to see. The part of yourself that sits at street corners and begs for money, the part of yourself that turns a trick in the spaces between lamplight on side streets downtown, the part of yourself that sleeps in doorways, the part of yourself that picks pounds of fruit during harvest seasons for a few cents, the part of yourself that crosses the border in the desert without food or water, the part of yourself that talks to yourself in tongues, the part of yourself that shakes uncontrollably, the part of yourself riven, stricken, striped with a subharmonic pulse of the moon that can’t be named, can’t be helped, can’t be driven into the light of the day.

Children are reflective of this rift. They are growing increasingly distant from what is understood, while ever increasingly congealed as an easily groomed consumer group. They are labeled with acronyms, thrown into detention centers, fed with pharmeceuticals, whipped with crafty standardized fill-in-the-bubble questions. Toxins, radio waves, video games, free porn, Doritos, Pepsi, Britney Spears shaved sex symbol trailer trash meltdown, ADD, ritalin, SATs, cellphone ringtones, Clear Channel. You know the rest. It’s overloading everyone. The mercury is raiding the fish. The carbon is filling the air. The phosphates are flooding the deltas.

The world collectively awaits its adulthood. We all need to grow up. The biggest threat to our existence, the greatest enemy to be overcome, is ourselves. Ourselves. Not some Korean, Arabian, Venezuelan enemy. Not some teenaged runt with a trenchcoat and a gun. Not some poor, destitute, homeless, drug addled nameless on the street. Not them. Not other. Just us. Just you and me and our kids and our future. Time to include, accept, embrace. Time to grow up.

More Billionaires, Great, Just What This World Needs

Forbes magazine just released its annual list of world billionaires, and the number has jumped from 793 last year to 946. Yippee! “‘In the last five years… despite all the turmoil in the world, all the conflict in the world, the global economy in real terms expanded over 25%,’ said Steve Forbes, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.’ So let me get this straight. The “global economy,” in very “real terms”, has expanded. Despite “all the turmoil.” So a bunch of stinky filthy rich bastards are getting even more super rich. I don’t call that a global economy in any terms: I call that corporate colonization. Because while this list of billionaires is expanding, the list of people living well below poverty is also expanding.

As long as there are people who control music, who control information, who control seeds, who control access to medication, then there’s going to be a select group of very rich people at the detriment of a large mass of very poor people. I don’t understand why anyone still subscribes to this bullshit Reagonomics trickle down theory. The fact is that this supposedly thriving middle class is only connected to their limited wealth by a umbilical cord hooked on a speculative bubble. Once that bubble bursts, the super rich are still chaffeured comfortably along to their social dinners while all the once climbing middle class, complacent and spoonfed drool from above, will suddenly find themselves sunk down with all the rest of the masses of people out there who never could climb out of 9 to 5 minimum wages.

I want to see the list of world billionaires diminish, year by year, until there is no one single human being out there who is ever estimated at a net worth of 56 billion dollars. I want to see all the rest of the world, “all that turmoil,” become rich. I want to see no one living at or below poverty. Is that too much to ask? Cuz I think it seems pretty feasible if all the accumulated riches of the super rich were actually put towards something more productive then some motherfuckers collection of Humvees.

US Clandestine Middle East Activity

Click here to read a long, extremely informative article by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker about the Administration’s current shift in overt and covert operations in the Middle East, and what effect these might have on the future. It’s always sobering to recognize that a small but powerful portion of our government is actively engaging in clandestine operations with the end result of a potentially devastating escalation of world violence, and that neither the American people nor our elected representatives are given the chance to be informed nor given the voice to affect these actions. Our government has demonstrated time and time again that it cannot and should never be trusted to make ethical decisions on matters of involvement with foreign nations. Remember Iran-Contra, remember Cambodia, remember Haiti, remember El Salvador, remember any of the countless and innumerable other underworld US government funded covert operations and black money scattering across small nations all over the world resulting in violence, death, destabilization of societies, brutal dictatorships, arms smuggling, drugs trading, extremist sectarianism, and all other forms of chaos and terror? Oh yes. That would be our good old God fearing, freedom loving, pro-capitalist government! Out there working hard to benefit world peace and solve world hunger and eliminate world poverty, oh yes!

And Americans wonder why the US is feared/hated/despised in some parts of the world! Learn some American History.

War Against Reality

Here’s a good article in The Independent on the end result of idealistic wars against drugs. It’s something I’ve thought for a while but usually hesitate from articulating because of the seeming extremism of the statement: that the best way to combat drug use and addiction is to legalize drugs. But it’s really quite a simple formula: whatever you push underground is going to be run by the underground, which translates into armed street gangs, violence, and shattered families. It’s the end result of all idealistic and righteous actions: a blind eye is turned to reality in favor of some perfect universe that will never exist. It’s akin to something I’ve observed in certain unhappy middle-aged women: they almost seem to relish health issues–their own and everyone else’s–as well as the general deteriorating state of the world in general, simply because it gives them something to talk about and feel righteous about, like they are victims in some tragic play that only they are watching.

The fact is that there will always be a market for drugs. There is no eliminating this reality. In light of this, it is quite logical that there must be a legal acceptance of this drug use, and subsequent regulation. Instead, we condemn all drug users and drug trafficking like Calvinistic Victorians, and pretend that a ‘War On Drugs’ is something that could ever be won. Meanwhile, watching the nightly news, we shake our heads righteously at the latest gang killing, at the proliferation and ease of attainment of guns amongst the youth on our streets.

Gangsters are simply trying to make a living. They are black market businessmen. And we provide them with ample opportunity by turning our blind, righteously indignant eyes away from drug trafficking and addiction. The quickest way to turn a profit on the streets is through smuggling and selling illegal substances, and subsequently, through the illegal weapons market, because wherever there is a source of quick money and power on the streets, there will be turf warfare. The feds and local police, meanwhile, skim easy targets, like picking off stragglers in a pack, and pretend as if they are making a dent in this black market.

By legalizing substances currently prohibited, we can subject these substances to transparent control and regulation. We will eliminate one of the biggest black market employment opportunities on the streets, and then gangsters will have to turn to less profitable and appetizing markets, increasing the chances of ghetto youth turning to legit means to seek their way out of poverty.
But the campaign against drugs and drug users has been so effective that to even suggest that illegal drugs should be allowed and monitered on a controllable scale is to raise righteous and indignant hell in all the armchair moral crusaders in the nation. And frankly, I think there’s a certain level of interest in powers that be in the government and CIA to see that things are kept the way they are. Which can only lead one to think that they must be getting some good kind of payback from the illegal drug market. (Afghanistan, anybody? Lots of good poppy fields there, funny that we should have invaded it.) Meanwhile, families mired in poverty in the ghettos are broken apart by violence and the power struggles of street gangsters. As in any warfare, whether the War On Drugs or the War In Iraq, children bear the greatest casualties.

Hypocrisy & Politics

OK, so all that is in the media about Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid is that she voted for the Iraq ‘war.’ And she is refusing to apologize for it. Good for her. I would hereby like to remind all the liberal Democrats out there who are getting all righteous and angry about this particular piece of news that they themselves probably were supporting the invasion as well back then. Maybe they didn’t vote for it, but they weren’t blocking weapons factory trucks from making deliveries. They weren’t attempting to stop the shipment of troops over to the Middle East. Most Americans, let me remind you, according to the polls, were quite supportive of the war, due of course to misinformation in the media and ignorance of the situation in general. So now that the tide has turned and suddenly its fasionable to be against the Iraq invasion, and George W. Bush isn’t even really a topic of conversation anymore because he’s passé even while still in office, the media and righteous Democrats jump on Hillary’s back and make it into a huge issue. If the media is going to get so worked up against Hillary about this, why didn’t they get worked up about facts and do a little investigative reporting when the invasion was being proposed? Why don’t they get worked up against the American people, who by and large supported the war and support any and all wars until they start to realize that the casualties aren’t worth it?

I don’t like that Hillary supported the invasion. But the fact is that she is a highly intelligent woman, and she’s got a lot more going for her if people could get past some legislative act from years ago. Try listening to what she is saying NOW rather than harping about shit that you didn’t do anything about at the time.

The Average American

What does the average American know of the Arab world, of its history, its hospitality, and its music? What does the average American know of themselves, of the vast hidden chambers of their own inner worlds? What does the average American know of the spirituality of sexuality, of what it is like to value another’s flesh like the finest of wines? What does the average American know of empathy, of how to relate to another human being regardless of class, sex, or appearance? What does the average American know of sustainability, of self-empowerment, of vision for the future? What does the average American know of thought, reflection, and observation? What does the average American know of silence?

Are you a statistic? Are you an average? Are you a consumer, a waster, a feeder on the bilge of media scum? Are you another number in a herd, another follower in the cult of nationalism, another ignorant, complacent parasite of trickle-down economics?

No, I don’t think you are either. But this might be what you would look like on a martian nature program on Americans.

To Suffer, To Heal

Something I thought of while feeling my heart cracking open and tears streaming out–I could feel how in some strange way, pain is the only way in which to heal, grow, and expand. It is the numbing of emotion that is the greatest of danger. Human beings numb themselves with alcohol, drugs, TV, dead-end jobs, abusive relationships, destructive gossip, religion–you name it. The only way for us to keep moving is by opening ourselves to what we know will cause us suffering.

When you are addicted to something, then you seek to alleviate the suffering of withdrawal by continuously getting more and more of what you are addicted to. You seek to numb yourself into normality, just so you can get by. This is not a disease or abnormal behavior. Everyone in this society is addicted to something, whether it is money or weed or sex or wanting other people to think of you as good looking. We look down on those who shoot up heroin or smoke crack, and then we turn around and purchase the latest video game system, or we pretend to laugh at someone else’s stupid joke just because we want them to like us.

The point being that all of us, in some way, seek to numb ourselves so that we don’t have to suffer. To suffer is to lay open your heart, surrender your illusions, and look fully at reality. And once you do that, then you have to change, you have to evolve, you have to accept responsibility for your life.

There is no more pain then when you see someone you know and respect and love destroy themselves. There is no denying suffering in the face of that. It overwhelms you, it overcomes you, it plows you into the emptiness beyond yourself, it rips your soul out of your body. And in this storm of emotion, you begin to see the light of love. How you are not only yourself–you are everyone connected to you. Because you can feel the hole torn from you where that person once was. There is no denying, in the face of such pain, that for someone to tear themself from life prematurely is like pulling a full grown tree from the earth. All of the roots extend into the same soil that nurtures you. All of the limbs and leaves reached out into the same light that bathes your days. That tree was you, is you, and will always be you. There is no isolated, separated, detached individual here in this world.

So to know of this man’s suffering . . . this is to know of my own suffering.

“Winning the Iraq War” and Other Myths

I think it’s interesting that when political figures–most notably the always loquacious President himself–discuss the Iraq “war,” it is always in terms of “winning.” And the media just runs along with it, as if an occupation of a middle eastern nation–which, just a reminder, never was justified on any grounds–is a situation where something can be “won.” Does anyone ever stop to think about this? What exactly is it that one can win in any war? And if something is won, is it simply resources and strategic power? And does this ever balance out with the lives lost on both sides and the devastation of the land where the battles took place? Did we “win” anything in Vietnam?

It disturbs me that this idea of winning something, anything at all, through militant attacks can be so blithely accepted by the media and general society. Such an outlook basically accepts the very premise of war as a completely logical and acceptable course of action, because if one can “win” something by attacking a foreign nation and killing tons of innocent people along with our own soldiers and devastating that society and destroying its history, well, I sure as hell am confused about it.

So all they talk about–both Republicrats and Democans–is whether or not we are “losing” or “winning” the Iraq “war.” Shit man, how many lives have we lost now? Almost 3,000 American soldiers, and an untrackable and probably horrific number of Iraqi citizens and “dissidents.” And what else have we lost? Respect and credibility from the rest of the world. Now let’s see what we’ve gained: an ever increasing drain on the national budget and a whole new generation of young militant Islamic extremists. I’m searching desperately here for any reason, any at all, to be found that could even remotely justify this occupation of Iraq–but just like when the whole bullshit propaganda campaign leading all the way up to the “shock and awe” bombing in Baghdad was started, there ain’t no good reason at all. It was never a matter of winning or losing. It was a matter of complete idiocy and short-sightedness based on an idealogical Neocon conception of “A New American Century.”

George W. still believes that “we’re going to win” in Iraq. That’s charming that he’s so naive and faithful. I just can’t believe how much this country still just rolls along with it, with no seeming skepticism beyond a gentle prodding at him about the polls. This guy is a moron, and anyone who for a second is hem-hawing about how “history will be the true test” of whether the Iraq invasion was a “success” or not is one as well. We invaded a country, a civilization, a society, and we tore it apart with guns, bombs, and ideologies that have no application in that world, nor in any real world. You want to know what’s going to happen to Iraq? Take a look at Vietnam now. Remember that country? Yeah, it once was a country, and not just a name for a “war,” before we went in there and fucked it up. Take a look at Afghanistan now. Remember that place? We went in there to warm up for Iraq. We were supposed to be making all of these places better, we were freeing them from their antiquated mentalities and governing systems, we were giving them the wonderful joys of Democracy and IMF Bank Loaned Capitalism. Ah, yes, we Americans are indeed honorable and God lovin’ folks, as long as the God lovin’ comes floating down on a green back note. We’re winning all kinds of battles, and all of them completely imaginary. But as long as the media keeps spinning those sweet songs of mindless numbing acceptance, will any of us ever really know the difference?

To be free

What is it to be free? We invade foreign nations under the banner of “freedom.” Mel Gibson shouts the word, heartrendingly, as his character’s flesh is being torn asunder in Braveheart. People kill and die for the idea of it. But what, really do we mean when we say “freedom?” Do we mean the freedom to rape and pillage? Do we mean the freedom to buy all the consumer products we desire? Do we mean freedom from oppression, freedom from definition, freedom from poverty?

We are chained to our physical bodies, we are determined by our particular circumstance of placement by birth, nation, and society, we are locked into our own selves, as all others are distinguished and separate and locked into their own individual selves. Is escaping such confinements even possible, and does the escape thereof constitute complete and total freedom?

We talk of the United States as a free nation. Free from what? The rule of the British? I do not feel free. I have to work 5 days a week to feed myself and put a roof over my head. I have to wear clothes. I have to go pee frequently, and poo at least once a day. I have to speak in an intelligible language to be understood. I have to drive on the right side of the road. I have to watch my language around children and fart quietly in public spaces and click that “I have read and agree to all terms of service” whenever I install a new software program. I DON’T FEEL FREE, goddammit!

Really, I have to say that it appears there is no such thing as complete and total freedom, unless you are nonexistent, and thus bound by nothing.

United Nations needs to be truly United

One great thing about the internet as an informational sea-haven is that when you get sick of the mainstream media’s spin of speeches, you can just do a search and go direct to the source yourself. I did that yesterday with Kofi Annan’s speech to the UN, which has been spun in the US media as being some kind of attack on US values. His speech is wonderful, and I recommend reading it through if you’ve got a minute. Far from being an attack of the US, he rather attempts to remind the American people of their own history, and why the UN exists, as created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. All you hear in the US media these days, as spun by Fox News, is that the UN is an abominable institution, seeking to restrict our freedoms and halt action through beaucratic hem-hawing. The UN sure as hell ain’t perfect. But the idea behind it remains critical to the survival of humanity: that we need a shared global vision and policy, and subsequent enforcement. If the US cannot abide by diplomacy and collective decision-making, then the US must be considered a rogue nation, armed and dangerous to the rest of the world. And the US has only proved this perception by its hasty actions taken in Iraq and Afghanistan. The world is beginning to view the US as a threat rather than a protective power, and that is something we need to deal with. For it was the US itself which originally served to bring together the UN in the first place. It’s sad that it takes other leaders and the UN itself to remind Americans of their own history.

Americans certainly are notorious for having no collective conception of their own history and government. When the Iraq “war” was beginning, with the seemingly united support of all simple-minded Americans, I was asking, “Does nobody remember the Vietnam “war”? The Pentagon Papers?”Anybody? Remember the Iran-Contra affair? Does anybody pay attention to these little tidbits of readily available official documentation and news information that quite blatantly affirms that the American government has no interest in freedom or democracy or human welfare? That it acts solely in interest of power and money?

We need a body like the United Nations, except we need a body like the UN that is actually effective. And for the UN or any other world body to be effective, it will require the support of the American people. War crimes such as Iraq can not be allowed to continue. Rapings and genocide in Darfur can not be allowed to continue. And its quite obvious that no longer can one nation be allowed to do whatever it wants, no matter how many nuclear weapons it may possess.

Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel Peace Lecture

Dr. Muhammad Yunus, accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, gave a stirring speech today detailing how to fight poverty effectively. He has demonstrated, through his work with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, that the poor, if given half a chance, will work to better themselves and their community. Contrast this to most middle to upper-class American’s viewpoint, which will be something to the tune of “poor people are poor because they are lazy, stupid, etc.” As in, poor people deserve to be poor. Dr. Yunus, on the other hand–obviously an enlightened human being, as opposed to most middle to upper-class Americans–states, “Poverty is created because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions which under-estimates human capacity . . . Poverty is caused by the failure at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people.” Yes. His words come from the depths of understanding, compassion, and everyday connection with the struggles of poverty.

Dr. Yunus also clarifies some ideas on capitalism which I had been moving towards as my social awareness has been expanding bit by bit. He states that our current conception of capitalism and business “originates from the assumption that entrepreneurs are one-dimensional human beings, who are dedicated to one mission in their business lives — to maximize profit. This interpretation of capitalism insulates the entrepreneurs from all political, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental dimensions of their lives. This was done perhaps as a reasonable simplification, but it stripped away the very essentials of human life.

Human beings are a wonderful creation embodied with limitless human qualities and capabilities. Our theoretical constructs should make room for the blossoming of those qualities, not assume them away.

Many of the world’s problems exist because of this restriction on the players of free-market. The world has not resolved the problem of crushing poverty that half of its population suffers. Healthcare remains out of the reach on the majority of the world population. The country with the richest and freest market fails to provide healthcare for one-fifth of its population.

We have remained so impressed by the success of the free-market that we never dared to express any doubt abqut our basic assumption. To make it worse, we worked extra hard to transform ourselves, as closely as possible, into the one-dimensional human beings as conceptualized in the theory, to allow smooth functioning of the free market mechanism.“

How simply and pointedly stated. He very clearly explicates the issues surrounding poverty without getting bogged down in political or theoretical constructs. The fact is that our current definition of capitalism and human capability is extremely one-sided, and it’s destroying the entire world. Yunus also brings out a key element of poverty: that “poverty is a threat to peace.” That when people live in squalor with no immediate or visible means of escape, they will turn to terrorism, theft, and rage. That as long as we have those who have and those who have not, then we will have warfare.

Finally, Yunus offers a vision of humanity that is filled with hope. He obviously believes in the power of the human mind to create whatever it desires. He states that “we create what we want: we get what we want, or what we don’t refuse. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.” In other words, all it takes is the simple will to make the world a better place to begin making it a better place. Amen.

Fuel Reduction

Winter hath begun. We’ve been doing a “fuel reduction” project after the facility closed with the remnants of staff that remain, which entails walking through the woods with handsaws, clippers, and polesaws, and essentially gardening the forest. We gather the branches and dead trees and make piles and burn them. Because the forest is now a dense thicket of white firs and brush set amidst the older junipers, incense cedars, and white pines. Originally, back in the day when the natives came to this region for their summer vacations, forest fires were a cyclical process that cleared, weeded, and returned organic materials to the soil. The pines and cedar trees had ample space to grow. Now forest fires are cataclysmic events, spreading rapidly and destroying whole forests, rather than a small percentage of its undergrowth. All because Smoky the Bear, in his infinite wisdom, decided that fires, all fires, were bad, bad things. So for years the forest service did all it could to prevent all fires from erupting, thus effectively creating a forest dense with fuel. The natives, of course, understood the necessity of natural fires, as they understood many other simple things through observation. The industrial “revolution” and its subsequent detachment of humanity from nature created a mentality of manifest destiny, in which men decided that all of nature lay underneath their jurisdiction, that in fact nature needed to be controlled, regulated, and harnessed. Because they thought the forest couldn’t regulate itself.
Well, so now we seek to emulate what was once completely natural. We must prune the trees, thin the shrubs, collect all the dead materials and burn them. Because if we don’t, all that shit is just waiting to go up, and take our homes, and the entire forest, along with them.

There is always a tendency, in civilized (repressed) societies, to delimit everything to one-dimension, in which it is either totally bad or totally good, black or white. Complexities, subtleties, many faceted aspects of things are destroyed in our obsessive demand for appearance and immediacy. Doesn’t really matter what’s right or wrong, as long as we are reassured that it is right. Polls have demonstrated time and time again that George W. Bush strikes (or used to strike) a key note in the populace due to his “integrity”–meaning that he sticks to a plan of action, even if it is a completely misguided plan of action, even if the original intent behind the plan of action is false, even evil. In other words, we don’t care about true integrity, only the appearance of integrity.
Going back to the subject of forest fires, we painted all fires as “bad,” and so sought, quixotically, to put all forest fires out as soon as they began. And thus created a situation 20 times worse than anything we could have imagined. Through the attempt to control something that was already self-regulatory and natural, we created imbalances that now lead only to greater disaster and destruction.
I had talked earlier about how this misguided idealism, this noble attempt to control all nature and eradicate all bad, is leading to problems in the field of healthcare, such as antibiotics being rendered nearly completely ineffective. This misguided idealism is rampant everywhere in our efforts, whether it is the effort to make pest resistant or drought resistant food crops, or the effort to eradicate crime. We label things, one-dimensionally, as “bad,” and then operate based on these one-dimensional assumptions, while the actual reality grows ever more dire and destructive due to our own destructive, limited perceptions. Because–as any policeman or politician could tell you–things are much more complicated than they appear.

More on this topic later.

Multifaceted Universe

You think, perhaps, as you are entertained, that you are simply an observer. You think maybe when you sit alone in your apartment watching your TV that you are detached. You might pretend to be completely uninvolved in politics, war, and other issues relating to the outer world. You might tell yourself, and you may be told: I am a civilian, I am a consumer.
But such reductions of reality eventually lead only to pathologies. Looking at a three-dimensional world in one dimension will only get you so far before you see the blood on your hands, or see your blood on other hands.

You are not a mere observer. You are a creator. You are a destroyer. You are not alone, not when every thought and feeling within you have eventual impact on another human being. You are not uninvolved in politics–every move you make has political ramifications. You are not a civilian, you are a potential target. You are not simply a consumer; you guide the market.

Things are much more complex, much more deeply interconnected than we are taught to admit. We aren’t supposed to know that the decisions we make affect people on the other side of the globe. Remember the butterfly of the chaos theory? A butterfly flaps its wings and a hurricane blows somewhere else. Forget the theoretical butterfly. Consider this: you flap your lips and a storm will blow inside of someone else’s heart. Imagine the compounded effects of that.

People watch sports, they gather together in stadiums, they rise together in staggered sequence, their arms rising and falling in the air, the intentional mass reproduction of a wave. It is cute, it is tame. It is like a child trying out a bicycle with training wheels.

People amass into crowds, into mobs, they can grow suddenly violent, suddenly barbarous. Nothing can get in their way. Cars will be overturned, whole city blocks destroyed. It is disturbing, it is wild.

The inherent power in an individual lies in that individual’s ability to identify with a collective. An empowered collective, aware of itself, can do almost anything.

New Roll-Call In the Government

So the political climate in the US administration has shifted dramatically in these last 2 days. This will have far-reaching consequences, probably much more so than many people would believe. But the one important thing that remains to be seen is whether the change will really have any eventual positive, personal impact on you and me. Because we all know that the Democrats fit just as snugly in the pockets of corporate money as do the Republicans. And simply shifting the control from one partisan political group to another does not change the way the system already runs. It will still be the same game, only run on a different team.

What I am hoping is that in the shifting regime, pressure from the body politic, from normal people and what they need–not corporate lobby groups–will guide the Democratic party into standing closer for what it was supposed to represent all along–the interests of people over that of money.

Open-source Economies?

Something I was thinking about this morning in relation to the world going to shit, etc: the need for a global governing/discussive/economic body. And I was thinking of how that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon–at least, not in terms of politics as we know it. Nations currently are only looking out for number one, and that’s the name of the game in terms of world politics: garnering resources, power, and economic stability.

So I then thought of the only other possibility of correcting a world that’s been thrown to the dogs of money-grubbing and power mongering: the people, the individuals who are all attempting simply to live their lives and love and survive. The internet has proven to be a powerful networking medium, never subject to predictability, subversive but also harnessed just as tightly to consumerism and the market economy. Decentralized networking–a connection directly between individuals, without centralized policing or governing structures–has been proven on the internet to thrive and be effective. Furthermore, the internet has also proven that open-source information empowers individuals to create and innovate far beyond whatever original intention was behind a software or social engineering project.

And I was thinking: this might be the key to our future, to the survival of our species. Not to be overly dramatic, but anyone with any level of awareness beyond their own selfish needs and ideologies recognizes that the problems that we face in the near-future are almost apocalyptic in stature, and will require the utmost in creativity, practicality, and love in order to overcome. It will take money, policy, lifestyle, and consciousness-level changes on a global scale. And I think it is quite readily apparent that we can not rely on our current governing structures to enact these kind of revolutionary and evolutionary changes. It will be much too late by the time politicians and those with over 70% of the globe’s wealth and resources will take their heads out of their oily asses and take a look at what’s beyond themselves. The only ones who can change it are us–the everyday people who put 2 and 2 together. And I’m thinking that the internet may just be the forum in which we can change it.

Beyond MySpace and YouTube and Gnutella other such networks of entertainment and time-passing, it may just be that the internet can provide nodes of not only social and cultural consciousness–but also that somehow money can be utilized and activated across national boundaries. I haven’t envisioned how this could ever happen, because I’m not very technical nor very economical-minded. But I do see a generalized notion here, a possibility, a potentiality.

As in a network may be formed, in which not only ideas, people, and hearts are virtually conjoined, but also in which a new market may be formed–a market in which money goes towards what it is supposed to be going towards: local economies and social programs, rather then to gluttonous super-structures that nickel and dime the shit out of everything so that some fat motherfucker can play golf and perform perverted sexual fantasies with whores and neglect his kids.

How can this happen? I don’t know–but I’m hoping that somebody else will.

Report on Economic Impact of Climate Change

Here’s an interesting report looking at the impact of global climate change from an economic viewpoint. The author, a British economist, calls for preemptive spending of 1% of the world’s GDP now in order to save what will eventually be at least a 20% loss in GDP, given the devastating effects of climate change to come. Makes sense. This is along the lines of something I always bring up when discussing the future and sustainability and such: it actually makes more monetary sense to be sustainable, looking towards the future and the environment. This is why it is ridiculous to listen to idiots who push for short-term profit at the detriment of everything except themselves. Unfortunately, these idiots currently run the country and most corporations. It’s funny to think that in idealized terms, a politician is supposed to be someone who is looking towards the future and making plans and budgets in order to prepare for that future. Yet our politicians look only about as far as their own ass–which might be big–but they ain’t big enough for the shit that’s about to be hitting the global fan.

Onibus 174

I watched an interesting Brazilian documentary called Bus 174 last night. I’m not sure that I would recommend it for viewing, necessarily, because it isn’t the most pleasant and light-hearted movie in the world; however, it is an incisive look into the structure of Brazilian–and by extension, all–society. It concerns an event which took place on a bus in Rio, where a street kid held all of the people on the bus hostage for several hours. On the surface, it’s just another crime in the city, another sensationalized piece of terror on the nightly news. You normally would have been watching the event and commenting on what kind of sick individual would hijack a bus. You wouldn’t have known that sick individual’s name or life story, where he came from and what brought him to the point of violence. This movie provides all the background, all the societal settings which led to this event. And by the end of the movie, you come to realize that it is not just that individual who is sick–it is society itself, with its inevitable populations of homeless and prison-bound and destitute, that is sick.

I won’t go too in-depth into the movie, as you may want to watch it–but I found it an enlightening approach to a criminal act. Rather than casting blame and simply labelling the criminal as a monster or drugged up or crazy, the movie takes the time to humanize him, to examine his personal history, to examine the world that he lived in. And through this process it becomes evident that there is no such thing as an individual apart from the world–even when that individual is one of the “invisible,” one of the street kids who have no identity apart from hustling because they are given no place to be themselves. Sandro’s act of holding people hostage is then seen as an attempt at empowerment, to make himself heard and seen to an audience that normally wouldn’t look twice at him.

Violence of all forms is, I believe, at root level a desperate plea to be known and understood–it is all of the words and thoughts and emotions that had never before been released. If you are reading this blog right now, then you are obviously articulate and literate–articulate with technology and able to read and write. Imagine if you were illiterate, and that you had no forum in which to give voice to your thoughts and feelings, that in fact the environment in which you lived would not allow you to give voice to your feelings except through the mediation of drugs, social workers, or TV. So you’ve got this whole world inside of you, needing to be shared, but finding no cathartic outlet–only in short bursts, fragments. Eventually it build to a point where it is seething, explosive. It is at that point that a gun becomes a twisted substitute for the pen.

Seen through this kind of light, where one attempts to understand a criminal and an act of crime from the point of view of empathy, rather than anger, fear, or hatred, violence is understood then as a kind of tipping point, of which there are warning signs and pressures–and always a chance of finding a resolution, rather than allowing it to explode. Which means that the violence of the individual is a symptom of the larger body of society. Which means that when some random guy in Wisconsin, or Colorado, or wherever it happens to take place next, walks into a school and shoots random kids–this is an event which should concern all of us. Not only as a media spectacle, but as human beings attempting to relate to other human beings. What drives people to do such things? What sickness is there in society?

Stepping Outside of the US

Let’s do a little exercise together. For this exercise, we will perform some visualizations. First, I’m going to ask you to step outside of yourself, your American-ness, your cultural identity as an Estadounidense (unless of course you are not from the United States, in which case, you are already outside of such an is-ness, and can immediately proceed to step 2, which is as follows): Think of the United States as if you had no personal attachment or cultural fondness for its sports teams, its Christian fundamentalism, its Hollywood icons, its myriad consumer products, its McDonalds, its Starbucks–none of these. Now, standing outside of the United States, looking at it apart from all of its sprawling, ravenous conglomeration of consumers and consumees, tell me what you might think of this fact: The United States of America is the only nation in the history of mankind to have actually utilized weapons of mass destruction AGAINST OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. Now remember, you are standing outside of your Americanness, outside of Pearl Harbor and whatever racist or patriotic and cultural and political and historical reasons you might dig up to explicate the usage of said atom bombs. You looking at the simple fact, the piece of data, the raw information that the United States has dropped 2 bombs that harnesses the energy of the sun in an immediately explosive and long-lastingly radioactive manner onto a major city in another country. We’re talking a product of science manufactured explicitly for the murder of the largest amount of living creatures possible. We’re talking a conscious intention to eliminate mass amounts of human beings, to consciously inflict a tremendous amount of suffering onto another peoples. We’re not talking collateral damage, precision bombing, unfortunate casualties of war here. We’re talking families, dogs, fish, butterflies, birds, trees, buildings, whole histories and existences purposefully decimated, obliterated, scalded, maimed eternally–because no city, no people, no nation, no world could ever forget such an act committed.

Ok, now think of the fact that North Korea just tested a nuclear weapon. And now ask yourself: if I were a smaller country that has been directly labeled as “evil” by the United States of America, wouldn’t I want a nuclear weapon, even if it was just 1 or 2 vs the 10,000 that the US harbors, even if only as a negotiating piece, a shield, a dark assurance that at least maybe the US would think twice before invading or decimating my population?

Seems entirely reasonable, now, doesn’t it?
It’s an interesting exercise, to step outside of your given identity for a minute, and think of how an “outsider”, an “other” may perceive you. Because we have been trained since day one never to consider such perceptions. And so normally, we may not even bat an eye when our government chooses to murder other peoples, not so long as we can pretend that it is an act of self-defense, even if only “preemptive.”

I’m a little fed up with the tendency of many Americans, whether liberal or conservative or trailer park raised or silver spoon fed to purposefully close themselves off to anything that might challenge their well-being and comfort. It’s easier, sometimes, to simply create an enemy that embodies all evil, so that instead of questioning yourself, you attack, attack, attack. Progress, movement forward.

I don’t think that the United States, whether as a political and military body, or as a cultural institution, or as a consumer of resources, is evil. I also don’t think North Korea is evil. I think that maybe there’s a little evil everywhere, whether in your own heart, your own home, or in your nation or corporation or globe. And the only way this evil will ever come to light is through a constant looking inward, at yourself, at your intentions, at how you may be perceived by others. Scandals like Enron or Duke Cunningham or whatever the latest Washington downfall may be are examples of men who have chosen to only look outward, blinding themselves to their own loss of integrity.

While North Korea is testing nukes, our own people are going into schools and shooting themselves and each other. Which of these is the most threatening to our existence? I’m not really sure, but all I know is that it is a lot easier to cast North Korea as evil, a country and culture you most likely know zilch about beyond Team America’s portrayal of Kim Jong Il, then to look at the more complex and opaque issue of disturbed and dangerous Americans with guns.

So what should we do? Trumpet the horns, ride out into the East with guns drawn and hearts high, ready and willing to eradicate all Evil and spread the gospel seed of capitalism? Or maybe its time, as a people, as a nation, that we took a time-out, and took a closer look at who we are, and what we have become.

Chavez Calls Bush the Devil

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela once again demonstrates his ability to call things as they are, at the expense of political politeness. He called Bush “the devil” before a United Nations assembly, asked its members to read a Noam Chomsky book, and said that the United State’s current political system “doesn’t work” and is “anti-democratic.” He also said that the United Nations as it is no longer works and needs to be recreated. It’s always nice to see someone who is willing to be honest and forthright about political affairs before the world.

One can only imagine how such honesty will be treated by Fox News and other such fronts for the Christian Coalition. It is time, however, that mainstream Americans became aware of how much of the wider world views our eloquent president. To many people in other countries, Bush is indeed a devil (and this unfortunately often translates into all Americans being devils as well). To many of his own constituents he is a devil. And beyond Bush, it is obviously becoming apparent to the wider world that the United States as a representative of democracy is a big fat lie.

Chavez has balls. But pretty soon other less extreme politicians from other countries will begin also vocalizing their loathing of the United State’s squish em and suck em dry policies. Forces in the world are shifting.

Political Visions

I have seen the light. Estadounidenses need more vacations. I am currently on vacation in sunny southern California, and I feel like a bear has climbed down from off my back. (Back in the days when I used to run track, we would say that someone had “the bear on their back” when you could see them struggling around the last corner of the homestretch and slowing down.) I needed a break from the daily grind, a break from the habits and normality of my sort-of settled cabin mountain life. No wonder most Americans are so close-minded and one-dimensional. We are so occupied with work and then subsequent TV and habitual existence that it is nearly impossible for us to envisage situations outside of our immediate and limited scopes. We need vacations to see the other side of things now and then, to break from the same-old and remember who we are outside of the people and circumstances that surround us everyday. It is so easy to get stuck in the mire of other people’s perceptions and gossip.

That said, I wanted to talk a little bit about some political stuff. What started the train of thought was reading an excellent article on the atrocities in Darfur, describing the rogue janjaweeds employed by the Sudanese government to perform “ethnic cleansing” (do we really have to use the word ‘cleansing’? Couldn’t we just call it what it is–mass murder?). The United States has actually been fairly active in providing aid and attempting to garner international action, which unfortunately has proved ineffective due to the loss of respect by the rest of the world for our dishonorable actions in Iraq and our hostile behavior to the UN, and Europe in general. Although of course our actions have still not been enough to save lives, but at the very least we have been more active than in the case of Rwanda, in which we did absolutely zilch.

Anyway, to get to the crux of my discussion: I used to consider myself an anarchist, more for lack of attachment to any political ideology or group than actual adherence to anarchic values. (By the way, if you think anarchy is about molotov cocktails and chaos, then you need to read some Emma Goldman or other real anarchic literature. It’s some of the most intelligent and humanist political writing in the world.) I distrusted the US government for the secret and public crimes it committed and continues to commit against its own constituents and against the world. I distrusted the idea of government en total, for large systems of beauracracy and money seem to lead only to corruption and atrocity.

The book that began leading me to a more balanced and integrated view of centralized governing systems actually was on public health (Betrayal of Trust by Laurie Garrett), in which the reporter meticulously disects the causes and effects of the current despicable state of public health in the US and the World Health Organization. I suddenly realized, through this book, that centralized governing systems are essential for the preservance of human life–we need a centralized public health system, we need clean water, clean air, safe homes. The problem is not the idea of government itself–the problem is that most governments, as they are, fail to perform their basic function and purpose–which is serving and protecting their people.

I never fail to be amazed that the Republican party can make “national security” one of its cornerstone issues, when their xenophobic cowboy war games have jeapordized our nation for years to come, and their slashing of social supportive programs and funding have devastated the heart of their own people.

But let me not go off on a rant lambasting Republicans or conservatives, because that isn’t my target right now. They are too easy to bag on, actually. I could go off just as easily on Democrats, for that matter. Politicans, in general, are easy to pigeonhole, because they almost universally only have one thing on their mind–election time. Which leads me to my main topic. Our political and cultural and economic system is seriously screwed up and needs some jerryriggin’.

I’m not against capitalism, per se. But our current form of capitalism (capitalism in the sense of profit as the goal of the economy) ain’t working. It CAN work. See, the problem is that currently our politics and economy is ruled by short term profit and very large corporations. And these corporations are cut-throat, greedy, and extremely short sighted. They can barely look past one season, let alone one year, in terms of their profit margin. But if they took their head out of their asses, and looked a little closer at the bigger picture, at the wide horizon of the future–then they would notice that in the long run, their current actions in pursuance of solely short term profits are unsustainable. Let me rephrase that in terms of money: they will not continue to make money if they continue to function the way most of them currently do. They’ve got to restructure and re-envision themselves and their functions in society and the economy. If they want long term, steady profit, than they will have to become sustainable operations–sustainable in the sense of taking responsibility for their effects on their society and environment, and making subsequent amendments and changes.

Another way to put that last paragraph is that based on our current economic, political, and cultural trajectory, we are destroying the future of our children and grandchildren. Our current way of life is unsustainable. Plain and simple. So if we want to make changes, REAL changes, then we must look ahead, even as far as 30-50 years down the road, to a time when we will no longer be able to be reliant on hydrocarbons as a source of energy.

As to how all of this got started by an article on Darfur: we live in a time in which the globe is quite obviously deeply interconnected, sometimes forcibly so, by commerce, politics, and lifestyle choices. One earth, all that kind of thing. And it is becoming more and more apparent that we need a world governing body that is effective and able to stabilize volatile situations. The UN was a good attempt, but it’s quite obviously not very effective, especially when it’s so easily dominated by the politics and weaponry of a rogue superpower like the US. We need an effective world public health system, again, something able to distance itself from politics and commerce, which the WHO has unfortunately been unable to do. The time of the United States pretending to play policeman and peacemaker to the rest of the world is long gone. There has to be an international force and body, composed of people unattached to partisan interests, which has the capability both of being an effective peacekeeping force, as well as a strong policing force. Because in situations like Darfur, that is what is needed.

More on this topic will probably be forthcoming: any input would be useful.

Healing and Understanding, Not Morbid Wallowing in 9/11

It being 9/11, I wanted to take this moment to raise awareness of all the ways that propaganda from politicians and big media will be deploying the memory of the act of terrorism in the twin towers from 5 years ago. They will get sappy and then subtley morbid, replaying footage from the day of tragedy; they will attempt to harness the feelings of anger and righteousness and direct them outward towards whomever is the current target of warfare, which at the moment seems to be anyone who is dark-skinned and wearing a turban. They will make you feel like you are unpatriotic if you react in any way but blind, unfocused anger or fear.

Resist the urge to “remember the tragedy,” as comemmorative news programs will ask. Replaying tragedies so that you can embed yourself further in anger and fear is sick. It would be ridiculous to suggest that you would ever forget. Who the fuck could forget September 11th? If you are going to “remember” anything, simply honor the memory of the innocent people whose blood was shed for ideology, and remember the lesson that we should have learned from that: fundamentalism of any kind leads to murder.

What should be remembered is that we are currently in a state of everpresent warfare; young Americans are right now dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. And them dying in these foreign lands has not much at all to do with 9/11, and much more to do with the power agendas of the ruling conservative forces in our country. Go read the utter nonsense Cheney is still grinding out through his teeth. He is now saying that if you so much as whisper the fact that the war we are involved in is bullshit, then you are fulfilling the goal of the terrorists. That’s an interesting reversal of truths. The war we are involved in WAS the goal of the terrorists, and every day that we occupy Iraq we are increasing extremist fundamentalism in the middle east.

Let’s say that we considered the act of schoolchildren taking guns into their schools and gunning down their fellow classmates an act of terrorism (which it is, of course). So does that mean that because this has happened in our schools, that we should bomb schoolchildren, then occupy the schools with an army? Do you think that would help us to counter acts of schoolchildren killing each other? It doesn’t make much sense, does it? What would be a more intelligent way of dealing with such a problem?

Think about it. And get over your fear and anger. Healing does not come from getting sappy and righteous about tragedies that have been done to you. Healing comes from attempting to understand “why?” And then moving on.

Fortress Sport Utility Lives

Something I was thinking about today as I was running down the one-lane mountain road around the lake, and an SUV hurtled by: SUVs manifest a trend currently going on in the middle to upper class that is further exemplified by their houses. There is this trend of going bigger and more threatening, of creating this steel-reinforced outer shell, erecting fortress tower walls around lives that are supposedly picture perfect yet are in essence nearly psychotic. People buy SUVs not because they plan to go off-roading or because they have a lot of freight to ship around–they buy SUVs because they think it makes them safe, while at the same time still serving as a status symbol. It is a strange combination of waste and fear.

In the neighborhood where I grew up in San Diego, the houses on my street used to be fairly normal wooden structures, one or two stories, with lots of trees and a sizeable back and front yard. As the nouveau rich from other cities came flooding in during the 80s and 90s, they bought up the land and tore down the houses and erected these gigantic 3 storey mansion type edifices that take up every inch of the land and remind me more of fortresses than houses. It really perplexes me as to why they need gigantic rooms, when they could have had a beautiful backyard instead. The only reason I can think of is that they are again satisfying two needs–the urge to show off their wealth, while at the same time demonstrating their fear of other people by the subtly militant architectural style.

You’ve all seen Fahrenheit 911, and remember the scenes where Moore rather comically demonstrates the levels of fear that Americans have of one another. And it’s a catch-22, because this fear feeds into the fact that we grow increasingly more dangerous to each other. But the funny thing is that the danger comes not from serial killers. It comes from children. It comes from parents driving their Hummer SUVs. It comes from frightened people trying to protect themselves from something they can’t even recognize: their own way of life.

Newspaper waste

One of my tasks during the summer is to collect the waste from the 22 bear-proof trash cans we have located around where I work. It’s frankly depressing, the sheer volume of trash and recycling which is generated every single day by families. One of the recycling items always overflowing the bins are newspapers.

Look, I understand that this is the information age, and that people like to “keep informed” and what not. But newspapers are made from paper. Paper is made out of trees. And a newspaper’s value is pretty much zilch after the day it is printed, except to be used as bird cage floor coverings.

But how could newspapers be replaced? I think they kind of already are, in that many people are shifting from getting their news from newstands to getting their news on-line. Shit, it’s mostly free that way anyway, and if news only has value around the time it occurs anyway, then keeping up with your information on-line is much more effective, as news happens all day, all night.

The problem is that people without constant and reasonably priced access to the internet need to stay informed, too. However, there are extremely cheap laptops that have been designed for distribution to underdeveloped countries which cost roughly 100 dollars. These could be made available in areas of poverty in the US. Or, alternatively, cheap internet cafes, such as what I visited daily whilst in Peru, could supply the need for internet access. Everyone should have access to the internet, because it is a vast resource of information, as well as a means of networking and communicating outside of the bounds of your immediate social and cultural environment.

Searching for Life

Something I was thinking about the other night was mankind’s endless search for alien lifeforms. And it suddenly seemed kind of silly to me. What exactly will other lifeforms in the universe do for us? Save us from ourselves? Teach us how to not devastate our biosphere? Give us cool new weapons?
Chances are that if we ever did encounter new lifeforms, given our track record, we would kill them and take their resources and destroy their history.
I understand the curiosity, of how life might be on another planet. But my generation is that of the Challenger, not of the man on the moon. And it seems a waste of human time, ingenuity, and effort on dead space, when there is so much to explore here, on our earth, in our own homes, in our very hearts and minds. I understand the quest for the Final Frontier. But I think it is misguided. Look at what our government wants to do with the space program now–make lasers, make weapons. Good old boys, always excited to get some new overly expensive useless guns.
Chances are, even if there is life out there somewhere, that it will be completely different than anything we would ever expect. It won’t be ETs with giant heads and eyes and fingers. It will be some tiny amoebas that thrive in adverse conditions.
Isn’t the sun alive? Isn’t the moon and all the planets alive? The comets and the stars? Aren’t these alive? They may not breathe, but they have a beginning, a movement, and an end, a pattern and harmony in the cosmos. We are looking for something to surprise us, something new, to entertain us, to feed us the wisdom that we’ve been ignoring all around us. Like a saviour. If I ever met an alien, I’d tell him to run for it while it has still got a chance.

Cleansing

After a period of accumulation of toxins, pollutants, stress, and other various poisons, there must be cleansing, a purging, a denial of comfort and habit. I fasted and burnt sage in my cabin and washed my bedding, and as I did these things I thought of how cleansing was important not just in my own life, but in every one’s life, and for Gaia en total. Scientists of different concentrations and environmentally minded politicians are all pointing, increasingly agitated, at the quickly approaching tipping point for atmospheric pollutants and other man-made disturbances of the delicate balances which sustains life as we currently know it. One way or the other, nature and the earth–la pachamama, Gaia, the biosphere, Amazon, what have you–will cleanse itself through its own inevitable purgative processes. In my own lifetime, I am resigned to seeing increasingly dangerous endemics and epidemics, on the level not seen since the so-called Dark Ages (read A Betrayal of Trust for more information on the destitution of our public health institutions), I will not be surprised to see increasing warfare for diminishing resources such as water and oil, and I will further expect to see more hurricanes, more earthquakes, more of the signs of an embattled earth struggling to regain its footing. These are not signs of the apocalypse, these are the inevitable results of our unsustainable lifestyles.
I think that there are certain people–of fundamentalist religious orientation–out there who are quite excited to view signs of impending doom and destruction, thinking them signs of the coming Rapture or something, when all bad people will go to Hell and all the close minded people will go to Golden Paved Suburbs. I am not excited at all about the current trajectory of our planet and people, but I feel that if I care at all about my loved ones and family, I need to begin looking ahead, even 50 years down the line, thinking about what kinds of challenges we will face. There is paranoia, and then there is clear sighted preparation. There were probably many people in New Orleans who dismissed scenarios of impending disaster and refused to consider the loss of their homes and livelihoods, the loss of their very city. It is not paranoia to consider such things. In fact, it is a civic duty, and our federal government has already demonstrated its incompetency in this regard, as in most other areas. So it really comes down to local governing systems, inevitably down to the very neighborhoods and households of the communities, to be ready to help one another in times of disaster. In such times, you can’t rely on the President or the Police to bail you out. In fact, you can rely on them to present themselves as enemies and obstacles to unity and sharing, as they were in New Orleans. (They always have been, it simply becomes more apparent in such times.)
So looking ahead at such admittedly discomforting scenarios, I wish to find clarity. Clarity of purpose, clarity of mind, heart, and spirit. And this will only be found by cleansing myself of all that is negative and severing all that binds me to anger, bitterness, and hatred. All human beings wish to live, and all deserve their chance to struggle.

Spam Rant

Spammers are kind of amazing. I don’t imagine that there is really any kind of real money involved in such advertisement–firstly, because it’s always some stupid crap no one would want anyway–and then secondly, because they are fucking annoying, and who in their right minds would ever sponsor someone who invades and persecutes innocent people’s private space? But they are, as I said, kind of amazing; their ingenuity and perseverence in invading every single inch of cyberspace that any human being could ever come across is frankly overwhelming. Their latest thing is posting bullshit comments on my blog. The format is all the same: it says something like “Great!” or “Wonderful blog!” followed by a website address. They have some kind of engine that crawls through blogs and posts such retarded spam all across the WordPress realm.

I’m wondering if there are any anti-spam crusaders out there, righteous hackers who through sleuth and innovation do a reverse spamming program against those businesses or people which are producing the spam. I really hope there are. Cuz spam pisses me off. It’s a product of laziness and greed. The people who produce and send that shit are the kind of people who try to do those “make money at home! 600 dollars a week and all you have to do is send out mail!” pyramid schemes and think that they work. Let’s say that they actually make some kind of income from spamming, enough to support a couple of bags of nachos for their lazy fat-ass sit around all day lifestyle. Yet even with a minimal income coming from such endeavors, the fact is that they are persecuting, yes persecuting, innocent people. The whole production is about waste. Spam is a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of resources, all along the line. I think spammers should be captured and tortured, or at least given a good talking to. Yes, I really do. Just like I think the Enron scandal people should have been shot or hung in a public square. The Republican party and the Christian coalition are always talking about having morality, family values, and other such bullshit. Well, it’s about time they put their money where they mouth is. Lock up Rush Limbaugh for using prescription medication illegally. Cut off the hands of George Bush for stealing the lives, money, and faith of the American people. Send Tom Delay to Guantanamo Bay. Draw and quarter Duke Cunningham on national television. Let’s educate our children on ethics!

Anyway, I remember seeing some article a while back on how even though spam is increasing, people are used to it now and it doesn’t really bother them, because it’s a fact of life. I think that’s sad. Why should having to filter through your personal email address EVERY SINGLE DAY and pick out the masses of viagra, sex enhancement, mortgage loans, etcetra ad nauseum advertisements be a fact of life? It’s annoying, it takes time and bandwidth space, and it raises my blood pressure. I don’t think spam is a right of businesses to invade my personal space nor a fact of life.

Vegetarianism Rant

I ate a lot of meat this winter in Peru, and maybe that influenced my thinking (and my colon) a bit. But I’ve been altering my thoughts a little on vegetarianism. Before, I basically considered myself a vegetarian in spirit if not in action. I’ve never rightly been a vegetarian, but I do avoid meat in general and red meat in particular, and the times (winters) when I do not have massive meals prepared and laid out for me and I have to buy and cook food for myself, I do not eat any meat at all. I have always been sympathetic to the cause of vegetarianism, which is, as I see it, a socio-political one. There are many things wrong with our huge agri-business in America, not the least of which is the gross mistreatment and terrible living conditions of the animals being prepared for mass consumption. Then of course the sub-standards of the meat packing industry. I don’t think that eating the meat of highly stressed and overcrowded animals can be healthy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of linkage between increasing cancer rates and this nasty meat people are eating way too much of.
Anyways, all of that said, this does not mean that I do not enjoy eating well-prepared animals, nor do I object to their slaughter. As I said, I see the cause of vegetarianism as that of a socio-political one–I do not believe that it is wrong to take the life of an animal in order to gain sustenance from it. I love animals and respect them. And as long as the animal that I eat was respected in its life and respected in its killing, than I have no problem in eating it. Unfortunately, there are no kinds of guarantees on packaging which states that an animal was cared well for and lived a fairly healthy life and was slaughtered humanely and with respect. Simply because an animal was “free range” or “grass fed” does not mean it was treated with respect, although its meat will certainly be of higher quality than that of animals fed crap and stuffed into cages. Maybe we could have a designated official who puts a “kosher” type marking on respected and healthy meat packaging.
But here is the thing. I work and live and eat at a place which prepares a substantial amount of food for its guests and staff. This includes, of course, a lot of meat. And this meat will be there whether or not I choose to eat it. One beneficial cause I attribute to vegetarianism is that it does have an eventual effect on the meat market, because the less there is a demand for meat, the less it will be produced. But when it is already cooked and laid out for you. . .exactly what good does it do to avoid it, other than ensuring that it isn’t clogging your colon? In moderation, anything is ok. And this applies to meat, even disrespected and agri-business enslaved meat.
So basically, my beef is this: there’s vegetarians and vegans out there who act like they’re committing some kind of religious infraction (I’m not referring to those for whom it IS a religious infraction) by putting a tiny morsel of meat in their mouths, let alone eating vegetables or rice cooked alongside meat. These animals–they gave their LIVES to sit on your plate. So show them and the person who cooked it for you some respect. Eat it with respect. Give a prayer or some token of appreciation for the animal that gave its life so that you could enjoy it. Burp appreciatively.
I think the biggest problem with people is not that we eat too much meat. The problem is that we eat without any consciousness or concern for what we are eating, no matter what it happens to be. There are vegetarians who show no level of awareness of the crap they are putting into their body. Meat, veggies, cheese, whatever–it needs to be prepared with love and consciousness. It needs to be chewed well with love and consciousness.
And here’s another thing: I’m sick of hardcore vegans who make a big deal about how much they care for the well-being of animals, and then turn around and are abusive and angry towards other human beings. If you really have compassion for animals, then you should be able to have compassion for all that lives. I’m tired of vegetarians who act like they are better human beings because they choose not to eat meat, like they’re all self-righteous because they are abstaining from what the majority of people partake in. vegetarianism, done consciously, I support. But I do not support fanaticism of any kind, and frankly, I think there are way too many fanatic, obsessive vegetarians out there. It’s healthier to be a selective omnivore, in my opinion. It’s healthier to be able to appreciate anything and everything that might be prepared for you. A vegetarian, for me, becomes fanatical when they are in a stranger’s domicile, and they are given a home cooked meal that consists of meat–and they refuse to eat it. Hey, just suck it up and eat it. ONE MEAL of meat is not going to kill you. It is not lessening your cherished ideals. It is returning the hospitality and love which a stranger has given to you.

Gay Marriage or Manipulative Politics and Media, Take Your Pick

Let’s all recognize what this sudden focus on gay marriage from the Bush administration and the Republican party (sponsered and broadcast by big media conglomerates, of course) is all about: 1) first and foremost, a distraction from all of the scandals and fuck-ups that Bush and his administration are sinking into the mire of at the moment (I was discussing one scandal the other day with a friend and we realized that there were so many scandals at the moment that we had to figure out which one, exactly, we were talking about); 2) a political “wedge” issue that the Republicans are using to try to gather up the vestiges of bigoted conservative support (as in, oh, those Democrats support gay marriage! We may have fucked up the economy and accepted bribes and have plunged the country into a hopeless occupation of foreign land and cut the budget for all programs that would have any social benefit–but THEY SUPPORT GAYS!).

Whether gay people should be married or not is quite irrelevant in the face of an ever increasing deficit, when 1 out of 8 Americans live in poverty, when most Americans can no longer afford health insurance, when quality jobs are decreasing, when we are involved in the ever sinking quagmire of Iraq, etc, etc, etc etc. As in, there’s fucking plenty of shit to worry about other than what our ethical evaluations of homosexual lifestyles happens to be. I’m sick of hearing about stupid shit like that when election time starts rolling about. It’s gays, or it’s prayer in schools, or it’s abortion, or it’s some bullshit that gets spat about in the media as if they are suddenly issues of national security.

And people wonder why we don’t even bother to vote.

Corps of Engineers Honorably Takes Blame

The US Army Corps of Engineers came out clean and admitted that they had failed to adequately and consistently protect the city of New Orleans with their levees. This is quite honorable of them. However, more interesting in this article is that an independent study put out by UC Berkeley “found that New Orleans flood protection was routinely underfunded.” So the US Army Corps of Engineers may have failed to build and repair their levees adequately, but that wasn’t exactly their fault if they lacked the federal funds to do so. So guess what department is to blame, thus and therefore? This is what I was saying back when it happened.

The Official English Language

The senate just passed a law decreeing English as the “official” language of the United States of America. Yes, a country founded by immigrants, developed on the backs of more immigrants, and continuing to thrive off the work and cultural input of immigrants (whether legal or not) is designating it’s “national” language as English. Such an act strikes me mainly as a form of xenophobia. What is so wrong about fostering other languages within the United States, a country formed on many different peoples and cultures? Why are people so scared to learn other languages? People say that if immigrants are going to come here, than they should learn “our” language. Why? What is “our” language? Colonialists took this land from Indians and Mexicans. The English language is currently dominating the global language landscape, and the biodiversity of languages is being depleted. One researcher has forecasted that roughly half of the world’s languages will be extinct by the close of the 21st century.

I would rather have my child learning to be bi-lingual or tri-lingual in school than simply learning one language and one perception and one history and one bullshit.

California filing lawsuit against Bush

Go California. Our attorney general is filing a lawsuit against the White House for it’s bullshit auto industry ass-kissing fuel standards. Could it be that the American people are slowly waking up to the fact that they and their children are getting fucked over by their government?

Why do Americans want to kill themselves and each other?

Well, so apparently this phenomenon of young men taking guns or cars or some form of weaponry and going on a rampage, intentionally slaughtering as many people as they can for no [immediately apparent] reason and then killing themselves, is not simply some anomaly–it seems to be an almost habitual occurrence, a gruesome symptom of post-modern existence. I base this conclusion on my checking of the headlines now and then, and although I am not going to compile a list of these events, it seems like it happens pretty damn often to me. Often enough so that it should be something that should be worrying us more than Al-Qaeda does. Why do these young men feel the need to destroy others before destroying themselves? It is a sickening display of monstrous intention. These acts are generally premeditated, and their targets are innocent, everyday people, only connected to the murderer by proximity.

The media and horrified parents immediately point their fingers at easy targets such as video games, music, and movies. And while it is possible that the seed of the idea of running rampant with ammo and slaughtering random people could be gleaned from such glamorized violence as depicted in popular forms of media, it is certainly a big step to make from shooting people in a video game to actually gathering arms and ammo and loading them and walking out and shooting real people. It is a step into a complex disturbance much deeper and darker than most people would care to even acknowledge exists anywhere. But, obviously, it exists. And it is affecting minds that seemingly are totally fine, they are totally “normal,” maybe a little quiet or weird. . .and then, suddenly, something happened. What happened?

Anything that could be said about what goes on in the minds of such people is all pure speculation, of course, unless I went out and interviewed a bunch of them, which would be hard given that a lot of them kill themselves in the process. So I won’t try to fathom what might have broken the camel’s back in their minds. But I do think it would be helpful to speculate on why fairly average people would want to kill each other and themselves for no apparent reason.

One thing that always frustrates me with the media and with the way people approach crimes and the criminals who commit them is that rather than trying to understand what might motivate such a crime, the criminals are written off as monsters and their heinous acts are written off as unintelligible acts of primal bestiality. But unfortunately, most people in this world, being intelligent creatures, do the things they do for some kind of reason, whether consciously intentional or not.

To me, when someone commits the crime of killing innocents in a horrific, and also extremely public, manner, it is an extreme call for help. It is a call for help so late in the game that nothing can be done except shoot them or watch them shoot themselves. And that’s just what is so horrible about it to me. These people are not monsters. They have intentionally made themselves appear as monsters in their last act of trying to connect to the outside world, and this must be because they really believe that’s what they are. But they probably know, somewhere within, that they are not such monsters, and so they feel the need to convince the world of such. That is what is horrible to me. Because there is no turning back at that point. That is a sign of such complete and utter hopeless despair.
And so I try to think about what could have made someone think that they are that horrible. Who could really think they were so horrible that they had to show all the world how horrible they were by killing other people? What would lead to such a feeling of oneself? And I think there must be some kind of feeling of impotence, obviously of rage. It has built up so much it explodes. Their only attempt to make themselves known, to be heard, to be powerful, is to kill. That is extreme and terrible and sad. And what that means to me is that something is terribly wrong with our society right now.

Crimes such as these are symptoms of something much deeper that is eating away at the core of our society. People will always kill each other, such is the sadness of humanity. But for people to kill each other in such a manner as this, that is not normal nor does it have a precedent in history as far as I know, although I don’t claim to know such histories. It seems to me to be a symptom of our society as it is right now. And something is wrong, terribly wrong. Why should people feel so outside, so monstrous, that they commit deliberately monstrous acts? When people kills themselves and other people for religious fanaticism, or under the banner of patriotism, or some such thing, at least their acts are intelligible, even if just as horrific. But why would someone just kill, just . . .to kill? And what kind of society would breed the environment of such killers?

Why I Don’t Got A Car

Hi, my name is Mark, and I don’t own a car. This is a conscious decision that I have made, not owning a car. It is not that I can’t drive. I consider myself a pretty good driver, having only been in one accident ever in my life, involving only the corner of a small parking garage wall which suddenly LEAPED out at the side of the car and scraped up the door, which of course was in somebody else’s car (sorry Gitig!). I enjoy driving very much, in fact, especially when I’ve got some sweet R&B or hip-hop or electronic music bumping. When I was a youth, I used to cruise through the streets of my hood at night just so I could drive, zone out, chill, and listen to music.
In college, and beyond, (8 or 9 years total) I have been essentially car-less, although I drive other people’s cars now and then, or rent a car to go wine-tasting in Mendocino or drive to San Francisco, or drive the vehicles at my work. Frequently enough so that I can maintain my driving skillz and feed the fix of the open road. But I do not personally own and possess one of these vehicles, nor, in fact, do I truly desire to own one of these vehicles. OK, yes, if I was a millionaire, I would probably have a car or two. But money isn’t the only reason why I do not own a car.
The fact is that I refuse to own a car. That’s right. I’m one of those idealist people, somebody who enacts diminutive changes to their personal lives in order to fulfill idealist fantasies of the way the world should be.
In case you are interested in what kind of insanity I might suffer from that compels me to throw away my social life and all chances at success in meeting hot and successful American women, here are my reasons:

1) Since when did a luxury item become a necessity?
2) I produce a substantial amount of waste simply by shitting every day. I don’t really care to produce any more than that by polluting the air with yet another car.
3) I refuse to give in to the dominance in my society of the greedy auto and oil industries, who basically have controlled and shaped all of our lifestyles, products, and city planning.
4) I don’t even know how to fix the damn thing. I don’t know how an engine works. Why would I want to own this thing that requires constant maintenance and upkeep if I can’t fix it myself?

I haven’t exactly been living in the greatest places for carlessness. I’ve lived in San Diego, Los Angeles, and now South Lake Tahoe, none of which has adequate, integrated, nor extensive public transportation systems. And so my social life has suffered, and I have been at the mercy of others in order to “go out.” Basically, I’m pretty much restricted to the social sphere of where I live and where I work, both of which, right now, are combined. This is fine, this is dandy. But where one lives and works can become restrictive after some time if there are not all that many womenfolk thereabouts.
I need to live somewhere where I can walk or bike to the local market. I need to live somewhere where I will not be stigmatized by attractive women because I do not have a sleek oil guzzling machine. I need to live somewhere where I can hop on a bus or subway or whatever and get to where I want to go! Dammit!
But such is the price one must pay to live according to ideals, no?

Iraq Rant

It’s disheartening how the media and its roster of conservative talking heads ensists on discussing the Iraq ‘War’ in terms of ’success’ and ‘failure.’ This so-called war was never anything but some neo-con agenda to establish Western dominance in a strategically located Middle Eastern territory. Notice how the goal and purpose of the ‘war’ shifts whenever some new alibi is needed. It goes from eradicating non-existant weapons of mass destruction, to deposing a dictator for war crimes that we did nothing to stop at the time they occurred, to installing ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ for the Iraqi people whom we slaughter indiscriminately with cluster bombs. The Pentagon spits out lovely little catch-phrases like “insurgency,” “sectarian violence,” etc, to try to present what is occurring over there as if they’ve got some kind of hold on it. Have we learned absolutely nothing from the war in Vietnam? Trying to impose our values and our economics and our governing systems on other peoples is a mess–it’s a fucking bloody mess and does nothing for anyone except demonstrate the utterly sad ridiculousness of idealism used as a shield for mis-guided power struggles.

One thing many people said, even if disagreeing with the war, was that “well, at least the Iraqi people will be better off.” I hope that I don’t have to elucidate now why that is bullshit. If anyone wants to make the argument that the Iraqi people (and we are talking all of the population, not the elite 20%) have benefitted in any way from what we are doing to them, I would be interested in hearing it. They are not benefitting from the continuing occupation of our troops, nor our continuing campaigns of bombing and terrorism. Yes, the country will continue to sink into the mire of bloody civil war and “sectarian” violence. But our troops and our bombs and our “noble pursuits” are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

So is it a ‘failure’ or is it a ’success’? Can we ‘win’ this ‘war’? Failure to whose interests? Which of the aforestated goals would we be fulfilling? What would be won?

Fear as Needling of Futurity

I was beginning to think about the psychic underbelly of homogenized America, the gated communities in which the houses look all the same but not many people can relate to their own neighbors. There’s this undercurrent of steady, unspoken fear running through all of these people toting their status symbols and wearing the fasionable uniforms of first-world privilege. It’s a fear that became horribly, surreally captured by the constantly looped playbacks of 2 passenger planes slamming deliberately into the twin towers. It’s a fear, of course, fed by the nightly news and the Pentagon propaganda machine. But it also, disturbingly, seems to be a fear fed by a prescient collective awareness, a subconscious inkling of what is to come.

Think of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, walking from their parked, polished SUV down 6 city blocks to the opera house. Yes, a rather far distance to traverse by foot in this day and age–but Mr. and Mrs. Smith are fit, trim, health-conscious Californians who eat lots of fruit and vegetable based cuisines paired with red wine. The night is brisk, Mrs. Smith locks up the car and sets the alarm with a push of a button, and they stride, fashionably attired, down the sidewalk. Mr. Smith walks with his arm protectively at his wife’s back, both guiding and establishing ownership. He is afraid of the downtown streets at night, the lounging, leering homeless and drugged, the muttering alcoholics, the catcalling perverted insane. Mr. and Mrs. Smith become aware of how their appearance presents them here as targets, as possessors of objects of desire. Their status–their class–is given heightened clarification–they become uncomfortably aware of how they have set themselves apart, of how their very lives, their unconcious thoughts and habitual modes of being have set them apart. Because here on the street there is dirtiness–and they are clean. Because here there is ugliness–and they are desirable. Because here there is poverty–and they have money to spare. Their fear is palpable, an intensity in the air. They walk a little bit quicker, unspeaking, Mr. Smith’s hand at Mrs. Smith’s lower back, prodding onward, hoping to just be there, to be safe, to be enveloped by the glassed fortress walls of the opera house.

That was a re-enactment of the way it might have looked. Scanning the local section of the paper the next day, you just see another crime in the city, two murders downtown, not even very late in the night, when people are out and about and business is still mostly legit. What’s going on with this world? you wonder.

Because somehow this fear extends beyond simple paranoia. Yes, it has a lot to do with the fear of loss–because when you own something, then you also gain the fear of losing it, you’ve got to start worrying about protecting it, securing it, guarding it. But it’s more than just that. There also is an element of awareness that maybe some of these things do not belong to you in the first place. There is an element of awareness that it is not just about things at all, that it has to do with what is taken for granted. Yes–there it is:

That your very way of life subsists on what is taken for granted.

Thoughts in San Diego

Back in the land of San Diego, a sprawled sunny place streamlined with polished sport cars and gleaming SUVs, a desert beach implanted with flowers and shrubberies from all around the world. The people, too, seem to shine surfacely with some transplanted synthetic reflectant.

I always gain a sense in suburbed cities such as this that the freeways and wide-stretched streets don’t really lead anywhere, that indeed the traffic itself is the most cohesive expression of the cities’ collectivity, the only place where it’s people are somewhat gathered together and united for a brief space of time before separated and off-ramped into some outlying distant gated immunity. In the traffic there is danger, there are fatalities and accidents and fender benders, well-dressed anguished people on their cell-phones standing displayed on the side of the freeway in their full humanity, looking over the destruction of their crunched and dented vehicles as everyone slows down alongside to ogle, wondering perhaps if they too could ever be un-horsed in such a manner.

Swaths of empty pavement seem to best express the landscape of such a city, capped with a vast blue desert sky, the hint of an ocean somewhere in the breeze.

There is of course something captivating in its beaches lined with drugged out remnants of failed marriages and bronzed bodies rollerblading untouchably taunting along the boardwalks. There is some kind of laid-back but primal energy expressed in the waves on the shore that is sometimes glimpsed in the spaces between the reversed baseball caps and baggy shorted uniforms of the wannabe frat boys of Pacific Beach, a kind of stoic and vacant beauty pictured in the frame behind the halter tops and the designer purses of the moneyed sun-glassed mamas of La Jolla.

Everything is spread out and nothing is contained.

Of course what overtly plagues this city plagues every American city, and San Diego alone shouldn’t be castigated or targeted alone as completely unique, although it is certainly representative. Every American city suffers from some congealed homogenized mass of middle and upper classes. Once known as yuppies, although the term, like that of hippies, seems to have lost its force and meaning in the face of cross-pop-cultural fertilization. My understanding of the term is that it referred to the nouveau rich and their love of trendy gleaming franchises. But now it seems like all Americans–except those who can’t afford them of course–love their trendy sterilized franchises. Or maybe love isn’t the correct term, more like non-critically accepted. And who can really differentiate these days between the rich and those who simply live and spend as if they were rich? Everyone of course is simply mimicking Ol Uncle Sam in being good citizens and patriots and living in the glorious happy credit land of endless horizons, where if we all just keep on spending then everything will be ok. This is all tied in with suburbanization and sprawl and SUVs and strip-malls and Starbucks and Pizza Huts and all the other symptoms of decay erupting daily across the face of America.

Because these people, these so-called “yuppies,” are representatives of the fulfilment and end-game of the “American dream.” They are “successful,” they work kind of hard and commute to work sometimes 2 hours both ways stuck in traffic and they drive their beef-hormone and McDonald’s trans-fatty filled children to their football games in these gigantic gas guzzling machines that seem to serve more as symbols of unnecessary waste and possession of space than as functional cars. And these multi-ethnic, one-dimensional Horatios are scattered throughout the suburbs of America, J Crewed, equipped with cellphones and Ipods, and largely uninformed outside of the nightly news propaganda. And they are the hordes of the blinded cradled lifestyles that will be thrown into the cold when our nation hits the wall of economic and spiritual destitution to which it is speeding forward to so recklessly. And as I sit and type this out on my laptop in a Starbucks in La Jolla, yes, I am fully aware that I am included in this prognostication.

Boycott Craig

Thank god we have activists out there fighting for truth and justice in the world. Forget about stupid things like declining oil supplies, widespread governmental and bureaucratic corruption, conflict in the middle east, shady and downright evil corporate practices, child labor, global warming and subsequent increase of natural disasters, depletion of the Amazon rainforest for wood, gold, and oil, etc, etc. . .
These activist knights have plunged straight to the heart of the matter, and are bravely calling for a boycott of the new James Bond, because he is blonde and doesn’t comform to their cherished ideal of what this fictional character should truly look like. Thanks to people like these, who lay down their time and lives for all the rest of us, we can continue driving our SUVs about our suburbs, eating our McDonalds, and watching mind-numbing dramatizations on TV. Hooray! Join this boycott and worldwide crusade of concerned and outraged citizens today!

I’m moving to Sweden

Got to hand it to Sweden for taking the future into account in it’s policies: they’re planning on having an oil-free economy within 15 years.
Meanwhile, the US administration is still denying the existence of global warming and refusing to take any measures to curtail it’s excessive consumption of the world’s swiftly ebbing resources. In fact, they’re just building more SUVs.

Globalization with the intent of nurture, not necrophilia

Something kind of clicked in my mind last night while smoking un cigarro and watching the rain. I realized that here in Perù the contrast between modernity and tradition are rather stark. The people that are truly poor are mainly the indigenous Andinos. They are the ones begging, sitting in doorways on the street. They wear the native garb, the women with faces like leather and rather dapper looking hats, colorful but worn ponchos, a woven sack slung over their shoulders. The affluent Peruanos wear gortex jackets, not alpaca. And this contrast is something which all of the world is undergoing–it’s simply more apparent in “developing” nations.
Tourists flock to this country and other latin american countries because here there remains still the burning embers of a living past. But in many ways the very fact that people of the world come here with their cameras to snap pictures and reimagine the Incan empire seems to speak of the slow but steady ebbing of the living existence of these traditions. People come here because everywhere the cultural heritage of our ancestors is suffocating or has already long since passed. Much is still active here. But how much of it is truly active and how much is generated by the providence of rich tourists coming for las fiestas and dropping cash about them like turds? Sometimes watching traditional dances reenacted for commerce seems to me like visiting a museum. It has become sterilized by a growing awareness of itself that suppresses the meaning which once lay behind its archetypal subconscious narrations.
The chimera we face in these days and times is the ever certain prospect that our current mode of living is completely unsustainable. It seems to me that if our past cannot be reconciled with our future, if the campesinos cannot even eke out at least a decent lifestyle and are destroyed by global commerce and urbanization, then the human race doesn’t stand a chance.
We can never go back home again, of course. But we are certainly capable of pulling our heads from the sand of inertia and considering what we can do to incorporate greater consciousness of time and space and alternative lifestyles into our daily lives.
In my mind the worldwide movement of organics has demonstrated quite clearly that there is a profitable market for locally and consciously produced products that are of higher and distinctive individual quality. The agri-business corporations and their minions in DC continually make statements about the need for greater control over nature (i.e. genetically modified patented seeds) so that they can conquer world hunger. To quote William S Burroughs: “Beware of whores who say they don’t want money; what they mean is they want more money, much more.”
Solving world hunger would involve fostering communities that are not completely junkie dependent upon robber baron businesses and bureacracies and aristocracies outside of themselves. The more self-reliant a community could be, the less poverty and hunger there would within that community. The small time farmers all around the world are suffering terribly because they have no choice but to accept sub-standard payment for their goods. I know that the concept of “globalization” is a complicated and intricate affair–but in a very generalized and simplistic nutshell, it looks to me like what it generally entails is rape and pillage of developing nations. So called “free” trade in other words, refers to privateering, not libertad. Just in the same way Republicans continuously say things about diminishing “big government.” What they really mean is they want corporations to have free and untrammelled access to our anuses.
I am by no means advocating the regression to city-states. There is no going back. But there is time for pause and consideration rather than blind plunging into a bleak and faceless future. It is possible to have a level of maturity and responsibility and accountability in our actions. If we want to survive as individuals, then we have to begin thinking about other people in our community. If we want to survive as a nation than we have to begin thinking in terms of the globe. Currently our nation acts just like a self-destructive adolescent, reckless and blind with desperate selfishness.
Heritage. Meaning as imbued by tradition and specific locality rather than homogenized mass consumption.
Again, we cannot go back.
But cannot we find a way to incorporate what is passing into what has yet to come?
Otherwise, what will be left to feed the future with except hollow images we never really knew?

political stuff

Para la Navidad, Peruanos comen Panetón, pan dulce de frutas secas. ¡Que rico! Esta noche compro algo panetón y la cerveza Pilsen grande y dividir con mis amigos aca. Mañana salgo para Cuzco. Veinte horas en un bus. Ay!

If you keep up with international news, you know that Evo Morales just swept into power in Bolivia. Morales is an Indian and a strong supporter of native farmer rights to grow coca. He desires to strengthen government control of hydrocarbons and wrest the power back nationally from international investors. With Venezuela’s example, it certainly seems possible without destabilizing Bolivia’s economy. Interesting turn of events, to be sure. Peru is also having elections fairly soon next year. El último presidente, antes Toledo, was Alan Garcia, who also was an Indian and came from humble beginnings. However, he turned out to be a disappointment. I hope Peru can find someone with some integrity.
There is a growing contingent of fairly radical left-leaning politics in South America, and I’m sure the US administration is gathering in clandestine meetings to grumble and shift their haunches menacingly. The exponentially growing market in China for hydrocarbons means that no longer can the US turn the screw and expect the poor oil-rich nations to tremble in supplication. It’s the dawn of a new century in global politics, and it certainly doesn’t look like the US can possibly maintain the kind of dominance it once had at the cusp of the cold war. There’s the EU, China, and rebellious developing nations to deal with, not to mention an ongoing pointless war in Iraq (remember that one?) that I don’t think even Cheney really has the palate for anymore. Believe it or not, the US may at some point in the near future have to actually exercise real diplomacy as opposed to strong-arm thuggery, world bank bullying, and other subtler forms of terrorism such as Hollywood. Imagine that!

And You Wonder Why Americans Are Perceived As Stupid By The Rest of the World?

Beware, citizens of Dover! Thou hast exposed thineself to divine retribution and hellfire! Because thou hast chosen Proven Rationality over Blind Fear and Incomprehension, all denizens of your once semi-Godly town shall perish!

–Pat Robertson

Dick Cheney’s Reptilean Heritage

Go here to find out why you should not harbor hatred against Dick Cheney (and his robot heart).

continuation of an idea

Another way to put it is in the recognition that there really is no “right.” There are certain actions and mentalities which enact destruction of all that is beautiful. But everyone here exists for a reason, even if it be to cause suffering upon others. Once understood, even the most pathological asshole is seen as life struggling to know itself.

The Cock Crows Three Times

Here’s a little anti-rant against my own ranting. A piece of writing written in rebuff against its own past already written. I hate writing these indignant things about Bush and current events and then reading back over them and seeing the single-simple-mindedness of it all. I know even as I write it that I am settling for rhetoric over substance, for substance is not so easily confined to righteousness. Not that the two cannot meet, but when they do, it tends not to be in the forum of blame and anger. As if to be so naive to say that because one does not agree with George W Bush then one should become a Democrat, to solve all the world’s problems.

And another thing I can say with all due respect is fuck Republicans and fuck Democrats alike and equally. Fuck anyone who would spin events to construct a false reality based on strategic motives. Such as myself when I grow weak and feel the need to associate myself with political ambitions. We all do it for different reasons. I do it because I want to believe in something, I want to feel self-righteous, I want to feel that I can quell the destructive consequences of the structures I live within.

But there is only one thing which I can control in my life. I can control how I perceive things. That is a power that I have that no one can take from me if I refuse to relinquish it.

I forget sometimes and begin to think that there is this notion of “the people” and there is this notion of “the state.” As if “the people” were some coherent entity, gaining awareness, moving in a certain direction. As if “the state” were this repressive consciousness, manifested in billy clubs and guns and hoarded money. But all there really is are structures of definition. Avenues of coherence, paths of articulation. Watch a fish swim for long enough and you will begin to notice its personality. Everything has a line of understanding that can be hooked into invisibility. Pull it up and unearth the life living with or without your desire.

The only politics that I can speak with some authority upon is the politics of my life.

Politics

So how long will the media outrage over Bush’s inenept administration last? Til the spin machine spits out something new for them to drivel over. Til another disaster somewhere else strikes. Bush and Co are probably waiting/plotting for another terrorist attack to divert attention back to propaganda, war, and fear mongering.

How long did it take for the polls to start showing a slight majority of American’s awareness that things were awry? 2 terms of blantantly criminal bullshit. I suppose late is better than never, but what distresses me about the whole thing is realizing that as soon as the average American gets his/her span of attention diverted again, and grow complacent and used to high gas prices, they will go back to supporting whatever the top idiot over at the Pentagon is spooging.

The disaster in New Orleans will be turned into some story about the horrible tragedy of nature, and the unfortunate inability of FEMA to immediately respond. What will be ignored and subsequently erased from offical history is the funds taken from the Corps of Engineers by the Bush Administration for the ‘War’ in Iraq. What will be ignored is the Bush Administration’s signing away of protective natural wetlands to developers. What will be ignored is the plain truth that the disaster in New Orleans was due to negligence, not nature. It was not a tragedy. It was a crime.

So let’s be honest. I know that Bush and Co are not any more to blame for this fucked up world than many other individuals. Ultimately, of course, we’re all getting fucked over. But who is going to take responsibility for this mess? If I were President of the United States, would I ignore all of the poor and destitute people of this nation? Would I ignore all of the increasingly unhealthy lifestyles and lowering junior high school grades of my constituents? Would I take vacations on my fucking ranch? No. I can honestly say that this is not the way I would ever run any nation under my jurisdiction. I can honestly say that there is nothing going on right now in politics beyond my understanding, and that anyone with any kind of knowledge right now knows that our current administration is fucking all of us and all of the world in the worst way. There isn’t any kind of secret to politics. Politics stands for the interaction of officials. Officials are supposed to stand for the constituents who they represent. What has happened between your life and the old dumb greedy motherfuckers in Washington? What has happened is propaganda and blinding lights and mass hysteria. The plain truth is there for all to see.

The plain truth is that the power lies within your mind. A mind without blinders can see plainly that nothing can be controlled. But all can be harmonized.

Some would argue that the whole system should be destroyed. I might agree, if I thought it would lead to anything better. Some might argue that the whole method of our current way of thought should be erased. I might agree, if our neural pathways weren’t historically established. But I would argue that all that needs to really change is that all of us human beings open our minds to what must occur for us to survive as a species. What must occur is purging and clarity. What must occur is embrace and forgiveness. What must occur is movement forward. What must occur is balance and sustainability and acceptance of pain and suffering and hard work and love and siestas and festivals. What must occur is what is already happening with or without us. So let us join with what is happening. Let us join with what must happen. Let us happen.

Hurricane Blues

You’ve got all these systems set up, you know, avenues of normalcy, the daily routine, pumping in water, pumping out oil, feeding the market with tourism. And then something like a hurricane comes along and floods every ghetto, every suburb, every living and working place indiscriminately to the point where there is no hope of return. When the toxic waters are finally drained, and the carcasses desposed, what is left are ravaged memories, and the settling in for the long haul of struggle and renovation. Everyone suffers in this process, but of course it is the poor and dispossessed who will bear the brunt of this breakdown of civilization. The winds rose out of the sea with indifferent vengeance and flooded the countryside and the city with overwhelming brute force and the people are starving and living in refugee camps and you wonder why they are looting stores empty of cashiers? Taking what is no longer possessed. The tenuous lines that separates people from one another are laid bare with the universal devastation of natural force. And then humanity is seen for what it has become while hidden in shelled chambers of society: a creature feeding on itself, impervious to the suffering of its own neglected roots, frightened of adapting to the idea of an unknown and newly painful world, where survival is dependent on creation and not on cannibalism. We can flip on the news and tell ourselves that the suffering depicted therein is not our own–until it happens to us, and it is our city that is broken and laid to its knees by the wilderness of what is beyond our control. We can pass by the projects in our cars and ignore the destitution apparent in the streets–until we find that everything that we thought we had has been taken.

Yes, like all things, devastation will pass, move on to another location, and some kind of future will be rewoven from the wreckage, pieces strewn on a string of need, and the lifeblood commerce of the city will begin to pump steadily again, and cars will go and stop and go–but the scars cannot be painted over, the stained memories of what once was. Remember, people of New Orleans, people of the world, think. What was it that you lost? And what is it that you can gain? Is normalcy, is the daily numbing routine of organized profit, is the ghettoes and the suburbs and the downtowns what you strive for in your soul? The city I knew briefly at night was a place of music in the face of despair. People came from all over the nation to stumble like a drunken child through your voodoo streets. What they came for was not racism, was not for oppression of the poor, was not for the forced separation of individuals from each other. They came for the uniqueness of your spirit, for the celebration of light and dark.

When you are broken, you can never be the same. You can be stronger.

who are you?

introversion–the folding within yourself, the witholding of immediate definitive information of your feelings from the world. in the daily, moment-by-moment, play-by-play, press conference of your life, sometimes it is wiser to wait for events to fully unfold before offering up your honest analysis of the situation. it is nice, of course, to vent your feelings in the form of gossip, to feel reassured that your current assessment and course of action are supported by your friends and peers. but you are role-playing then, are you not? you are staking out a position, strategizing, acting the part of victim, or of hero, or whatever you may deem most favorable to your career as a human being. but who are you, really? did you stop and ask yourself that before you spoke in judgment?

yes, politics is a tricky game–even when you claim to not be playing it, you are playing it. we like to think that we are untouched by the ivory halls of justice and boardroom policy making–just as perhaps silver-haired men in suits surrounded by secret servicemen may like to think that they are untouched by us, the underground individuals–but those are thoughts bound by convention. for our every movement, thought, and manifestation of ourselves is political. politics is about more than power, despite what Chomsky may say–there are more to the dynamics of law and order and commerce than simple mafioso maneuvering and slick, shifty-eyed lies. there is also the fact of human interaction, in the marketplace of the everyday, in the information of the flesh passed subconsciously on the subway, in the gaze of the enlightened upon the statue in the park, in the brush of words sputtered out of my inversions–there is no escaping our connection to each other through ourselves. so look–look at yourself, take a good look at yourself and reflect on your ephemeral beauty. what is the use? what is the value? who is this that determines your worth? the eye of the beloved is in your mind. the light of the sun is in your spine. the music of the ages issues forth from your mouth. bow to yourself, and everything else. and let the movement of the world go on around you in its endless chorus of need. because there is nothing that you can take, and there is nothing that you can give. so when the reporters come up to ask you, Who are you?

You can answer them with a smile, and point back at them, and wait, patiently, til the end of the world, for their reply.

I Still Clear

are we gonna step up and dance, or are we gonna watch ourselves stumble into despair? the beat is there, you can feel it in your lips when words form like waterdroplets to fall into meaning. why should we be frightened of what might come out when we release our body to a greater rhythm than our mind? how good do you have to be to move? is freedom learned?
no. freedom is earned by letting go of all the bullshit accumulated by years of bullying, freedom is there for those who choose to not police themselves, who choose not to fear each other, who choose to love, love, love everything that touches their heart, and leave behind everything for that moment of connection, for that spark of rapture in the glowing eyes of their beloved.
the only thing that is learned is how to better hide ourselves from suffering. but this suffering is the only thing that leads us to feel, to free ourselves of inattention, to focus on what truly matters. freedom is not necessarily happiness. but it provides the ability to gain happiness, to reach across seemingly insurmountable boundaries, to talk to that beautiful queen whose eyes met yours and flashed with the future, to vault your insecurity and touch what you know is there even if you can’t believe it, to press your lips to her honeyed sweetness and taste ecstasy. what could have prepared you for this?
we have everything we need. we have eyes to see, ears to hear, mouths to breathe. everything else is a shroud hiding us from each other.

Are You An American?

I’m sick of all these bleeding heart liberals, these socialists and communists, these losers who try to tell us that we shouldn’t be going to war. You know what? Fuck all the bullshit. Let’s stop this lying and reassuring of humanitarian interests by politicians. Politicians and the military and corporations–their main interest is money. So why do they have to bullshit to these bleeding heart losers? War is good for the economy. All these tree hugging bastards would rather see the American nation be poor and destitute, have us be swinging from the trees. Who cares about those smelly barbarians in third world countries? Fuck em. They’ve got all of our oil. That’s OUR oil. We’ve got 20,000 nuclear weapons. I think that entitles us to whatever the hell we want. We’re the most powerful nation, EVER. And we didn’t get that way by pussyfootin around. We did it through blood and sweat and war. We came here and we told them Indians, “get off our motherfucking land, cuz you’re not using it, you’re wasting it.” We told them blacks, “work our motherfucking land, cuz you’re lazy asses and you might as well be doing something for civilization and progress other than just singin and dancin.” We told them Mexicans, “give us your motherfucking land, cuz we need more, cuz we deserve to spread from sea to shining sea.”
I’m sick of all this politically “correct” bullshit. Let’s tell it like it is. There’s a real simple way to solve the world’s problems. For instance, this Palestinean “problem.” Well, if they just get rid of them, then there’s no problem, is there? And what’s with this terrorist bullshit? Why don’t we just nuke all the goddamned Arabs, get rid of that Islamic bullshit. This is a Christian nation, and this is the strongest nation in the world. I think that says something about whose side God is on.
So what use is it to stand in the way? What’s the use in all this complaining and whining? All these commie bastards should be lined up and shot. They’re all just losers, whining about their “victimization.” Shit, they’re making themselves victims by not getting with the program. You’re either with us or you’re against us. And guess who is going to win?

Rant

ok, so i apologize, but i think it’s about time i went off on a rant. i feel the need to be righteous, to be holy, to declare the boundaries of good and evil. i figure that if W. Bush can declare to the world, via public television, without any apparent shame or hesitation, that certain countries constitute an “axis of evil,” then i too can declare what is right and what is wrong.
i try to think of our future, and it doesn’t seem so bright. it seems full of cancer and dementia and nuclear holocaust. what kind of future does a people have when they are feeding their own children filth?
it seems so obvious that it’s almost disgusting. in our public schools, think about what kind of food they are serving our children. Taco Bell. Pizza Hut. Hostess. Coke. Doritos. This food is absolute shit. It’s sugar and synthetic syrupy crap. Do you even want to see a chart of the obesity levels of our children, of how it’s increasing? Few is the child whose parents have the time and resources to prepare a healthy lunch. And those few most likely have rich parents. All the kids who eat cafeteria food are poor. And cafeteria food is disgusting, and i don’t just mean in how it tastes.
So you’ve got all these kids eating this junk in the very institutions that are supposed to be “educating” and edifying. Hell, we even offer junk food as rewards. Do this, we tell Jimmy, and we will give you a donut, or a pizza.
And so some public official or school administrator with some piece of sanity left in their head decides to try offering some healthier food.
”Let’s give them apples,” they say, or “let’s have a salad bar.” And of course, all the apples end up in the trash. And the salad bar remains full.
Oh, the taxpayer’s dollars are being wasted. But these kids are certainly buying up the Hostess cupcakes. “Let them eat cake.”
So where’s the bottom line? The kids buy the junk. So the kids eat junk.
And now let’s think of why the kids eat this junk. Ever drink soda for any length of time? Ever try to stop drinking it? Yeah, it’s addictive. So is junk food. McDonald’s, Hostess, Doritos, who do you think they market all their junk to? Children. Anyone who will buy that crap and eat it on a regular basis. Hell, it “tastes good.” Right? Well, if that’s all you eat all the time, try eating a well cooked meal. Probably doesn’t seem so great. Where’s my Big Mac? Because if all you’re eating is addictive shit, then of course you’re not going to eat that fucking shriveled little apple they put on your tray along with the oily nasty goop of the day.
So the corporations of junk food have a nice little destructive cycle going on. That’s great. They’re making money off of the processed hooves of cows. I don’t mind their ingenuity. But I do mind the fact that millions of people are eating this shit every day, and that a good percentage of these people are children. Children are growing. Children need nutrients, just like a plant poking out of the soil. They need Real Food. They need fruits, they need vegetables. And we’re feeding them McDonald’s. Am I the only one who thinks this is not only insane and disgusting, but just downright evil?
And all we’re thinking about is what they’re buying. We want these kids to do well in school? We want them to score well on achievement tests, to go to college? Fuck, why don’t we just feed them some fucking good food first before we even think about any of that shit!
Ok, but it doesn’t stop there. We’re feeding them all this shit, and they’re addicted to eating this shit and wouldn’t even eat good food if you put it in front of them because it isn’t synthetically processed and chemically charged, and they’re getting fatter and fatter and fatter. And what are these kids doing for several hours of the day, every day of the year? They are watching television. And what do they see on television, besides the advertisements for If You Don’t Get It All Over The Place, It Doesn’t Belong In Your Face, and Brittany Spears whoring for Pepsi? They see beautiful people, they see thin, airbrushed made up beautiful people. Desirable people. People who they would like to be. But these kids look nothing like that. For one, they are fat. And fat people are always the butts of all jokes on tv. For another, they are not immaculate and beautiful, not in the strictly superficial sense of money making. And they are not desirable. Who desires these kids? We feed them shit. You think that makes them feel desirable?
And so what kind of mentality does this create? It creates a mentality that makes you want to go out and eat some more of those Hostess cupcakes, dammit, that’s what it creates. It’s a sick, destructive cycle. And it’s evil!
what is the bottom line? the bottom line is money. the bottom line is that our schools, our businesses, and our governments are concerned not with the welfare and betterment of our species, but with money.
this is wrong. something is wrong here. shouldn’t schools be concerned with the health of our children, both emotionally, physically, and mentally? shouldn’t our businesses be concerned with the social, physical, economic ramifications of their actions? shouldn’t our governments be concerned with the well-being of its constituents?
we’re ruining our future, we’re sealing it off like a Zip-Lock baggy. maybe it’s time we started calling out evil for what it is, and fighting for what is good. for what is healthy.

Speculative Revolution Part V

Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.

Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.

Why do people think so little of death?
Because of the greatness of their labors in seeking for the means of living.
Therefore the people think little of death.

Having to live on, one knows better than to value life too much.

–lao tzu

so i haven’t been telling you anything you don’t already know. i think we live in a time where it is hard for anyone to claim innocence. stupidity some might rightfully be entitled to, but innocence, no. everyone knows what commercials and advertisements and the media are doing. we’re just trying to make the best of it, enjoy what entertainment is provided, go with the flow. i think many of us are apathetic because of this, because we can see it but we don’t know what to do about it. and so i’m here today to tell what you can do about it: nothing. absolutely nothing. nope. you can’t change the world. you can’t make people’s lives better for them.

part of the whole problem for me has been that i was looking for something to DO. what can i DO to MAKE a change? well, the world is already changing all around me, every second. and i find that a big part of the problem is that i have been ignoring this, engaged as i am in some kind of grand, ambitious endeavor, even though i am not yet clear on what is exactly involved. imperialism, colonization, the abandonment of domesticity in favor of exotic adventures beyond–these are things that have been a problem with our western civilization for centuries. we’ve been looking outside of what we’ve got right here, right now, and instead been focusing on that OTHER, that THING out there, that OBJECT. glory, ambition, making the world a better place–these are the desires of the tyrant. and really, all it is is some form of insecurity. because what i have isn’t good enough. so i’ve got to get more, more. manifest destiny. idealism.

think about your brain for a minute. i have heard one professor describe the two hemispheres of the brain as if they were two separate selves coexisting at the same time, independent of one another, almost with their own identities. right brain and left brain. even within your own body, your own mind, you are divided. and growing up and living your life means learning to balance this, to unify the whole. the two hemispheres must maintain a dialogue, an interaction. the harmonious mind, where neither right nor left dominates.
think of this in terms of male and female relations. we still live in a misogynistic society. males and females act as if they are completely different species, as if there is a gigantic line dividing them, and they are at war. but this is ridiculous. male and female exists within our heads. are we different? yes, we are different. but this difference is something to share, not to possess. when you make love to someone, you understand their body. it is not yours, but you feel it as if you were them, momentarily. and you grow from this into a closer understanding of yourself.
now think of this in terms of international relations. we still live in a hegemonic society. nations act as if they are completely different peoples, as if those lines on the map are real, as if you could look down from the moon and see all the names. what is america doing in vietnam? what is america doing in haiti? what is america doing in bosnia? what is america doing in iraq? what is america doing? nations, territories, bodies of land. these should be spaces of sharing, not lines of possession. we should not enter them with objectives, with purposes, with score cards. not to claim, not to own. not to change, not to make better, not to take and to leave.

most of the evil in this world most likely came from good intentions. anyone with an overtly negative agenda is immediately castigated. but under the guise of goodwill, brotherhood, religious fervor, and love for one’s country the most horrible acts are committed. torture, for example, is common practice by those powers that feel the need to police and occupy another people’s land. routine procedure. they make a man feel pain to the point that he gives up his self-respect and tells them exactly what they want to hear. this is what they call “information.”

Speculative Revolution Part IV

the saying “what you can’t see won’t hurt you” has a certain truth to it. this kind of attitude is inherent in the way we walk down supermarket aisles–we don’t see how these products were formulated, tested, slaughtered, chopped up, and we really would rather not see that. for instance, meat. if we witnessed what is done every day to the animals
that were sacrificed to sit in spongy chunks frozen and wrapped, then we would get sick to our stomachs when we looked at it. but take away the product from the process of creation (or destruction), and what you have is just this detached thing, isolated, hidden behind layers of coding, marketing strategies, masks of complacency. and so what you don’t see isn’t necessarily hurting you–but someone or something else is getting hurt. ultimately, i would argue, it does hurt you. but that’s a different can of worms. let me stick with the idea of blinders for a minute. think about yourself walking down a city street, let’s say on your way to class, or to work. you pass by numbers of people, some you look at, some you ignore, some you look at and then reject and ignore. think about that second when you take them in your eyes and see what they are, or what you think they are. think about that second when you look away. think about that as a form of destruction, as a form of murder. you have rejected them completely, at that moment, for whatever reason. they were not good-looking, not interesting enough, too weird, too yuppie, too not appealing, not worth your acceptance. i am going to make the argument
here that little rejections like this, which occur in an instant and may not even be perceived by the other person, are one of the major problems in our way of perceiving the world and in the way we live our lives. the way you look at others affects them. the way they look at you affects you.
one of the worst things you can do to a human being, or to any creature, is not to persecute it, but to ignore it’s existence completely, to let it pass by anonymously like a thing, like an it, to use it only to get somewhere, like a freeway. alone, in your car, on the street, what are you to anyone else but a set of darkened windows, a moving vehicle, an obstruction, a danger, an irrelevance.
do you think you can handle walking down skid row alone, without the barriers of your car locked doors? the people on the street would eat you alive, would tear you to pieces with their eyes. unless, of course, you learned the mentality of the police force, which is to ignore them as people and see them only as objects, as trash.
it’s easy to ignore the life around you when you’re secure, safe behind fortress tower walls of lifestyle signifiers you are barely aware of. walking the streets downtown are some of the most terrifying and appalling and beautiful and distorted forms of life. many people have become the monsters that society abhors in the news, creates in the inhuman working and living conditions, and leaves to roam the earth, hoping, like victor frankenstein, that this life arisen out of death will just go away and leave them to their imagined romances. you can see it in the people’s faces, hardened and stripped of emotion, devouring whatever they can get a hold of.
and some of these people have become god-like apparitions, goddesses of the night, their eyes liquid fire. i find women from the streets to be more attractive than the skinny teenagers in fashion magazines. and chances are that skinny teenager in the fashion magazine is wearing an outfit derived from the luring designs of the streetwalkers. what i am trying to get at is that there is a relation between the visible and the invisible in society, that there is a direct correlation between mass consumer culture and individual castigation. we marginalize in order to ignore what is not relevant to the lifestyle narrative we immerse ourselves in. and yet, without these margins, without these ignored
spaces, we would not be able to construct the heroic history of our triumphs, the tragic drama of our losses, the totemic identities, the nostalgic yearning for what never was. in order to maintain the polite surface illusion of society, we cover over aberrations, we ignore the dangerous, the unwanted, the unacceptable. we wear masks for the performance.

Speculative Revolution Part III

when i say that direct opposition is not the only way to fight, i am not condoning apathy, or trying to provide intellectual rhetoric to excuse personal lack of motivation and passion, or even trying to promote a turn-the-other-cheek stance of love and acceptance under conditions of extreme oppression. i am suggesting a new direction in thought. when confronting an opponent outright, you are not only creating (or at least, renewing) and solidifying a force in opposition to yourself, but you are filling the role of their misdirected energy, you become their image, their scapegoat, their oppressor, their teacher, their student, their lover, their killer. in other words, you are recreating opposition by opposing.
the reason why i say i am not promoting a stance of love and acceptance, in the traditional notions of the words, is that in some situations, under certain circumstances, it is necessary to make real and clear and visual the opposition to a force that is coming like a thief in the night. direct opposition is a legitimate and natural response to a force that is
indirect, pervasively ignored, and destructive.
but we are talking about a force that can’t possibly be directly confronted, as it exists in everyone, everywhere. direct conflict only becomes necessary in those specific situations where it’s effects are directly manifest.
hence the violence in certain racially and/or economically segregated districts. instead of ignoring the violence, or despairing over it, or getting authoritarian about it and trying to throw everyone in prison, we should be looking at this violence as a symptom. someone who commits an act of violence is trying to tell us something. and we should listen. ignoring these destructive voices is only leading to their greater need to be heard, and thus, escalating the urgency and hurtfulness of their acts. it’s like the homeless “problem.” they will never disappear as long as there remains the concept of property.
suddenly you realize that they are everywhere, in every little niche that you brush by without giving it a glance. just like the way you drive by in your car. drive by.

Speculative Revolution Part II

what i am suggesting is a way of life. thinking about things around me in terms of politics and commercialism only makes me angry, and then hopeless, and ultimately negative and pessimistic. and in becoming this, i am only furthering the whole bullshit. you see the problem is that a system is inhuman, and has no relation to my emotions. i thus say that it is not the system that is at fault, but our relation and interaction with it through each other. in tangible terms, take the example of our relations with each other based on cars, personalized packages of modern wonder. we get in our cars and turn on the radios and ac and drive deftly through streets we only know by sign-names and intersections. we get on the freeway and pass by a big bill-boarded advertisement every couple of seconds, just like commercials on tv, only faster. and when someone gets in your way, couldn’t you just kill them? it’s amazing how the most gentle and laidback people can suddenly become monstrous at the helm of an suv. you step into your vehicle and your relationship with the world changes. you become a machine, speeding towards your objective. it is hard to feel much compassion for a machine that is driving too slow in front of you, or cuts you off. now think of how this is similarly affecting your attitude towards the communities you drive through. you couldn’t care less, it’s just scenery, background to the game level you’re on. i’m not accusing you. it’s a natural response to the way we live our lives. we might crash if we started looking around us and stopped focusing straight ahead.
i’ve always been somewhat cynical, but i’ve always been basically positive in my view of general humanity. i’ve been getting more negative in recent years, and i realized suddenly that i’d begun hating people i don’t know personally. i had no relation to these people. they were usually getting in my way. and this isn’t the right way to live. so i blamed corporate colonization of our minds through tv and news and movies. i blamed imperialist minded politics. i blamed gender and sexual misunderstanding. i blamed academia, i blamed science, i blamed religion, i blamed family, i blamed self. and guess what? nothing, noone, holds up to this accusation. not the one asleep and innocent in their dreams, not the one looking away, not the one fucking someone else, not the one holding them down, not the one on the ground naked getting raped. not the one who judges, not the one who is imprisoned, not the parents, not the children, not the man and not the woman.
we are only as strong as our weakest link. anyone ever involved in some group setting understands this on the most basic of levels. it therefore is quite logical that those who are weakest are the ones who place themselves in positions of “power,” “dominance,” and “knowledge.” feeling threatened, feeling in need of some security? the nazis sure did. and somehow a cult of weaklings exterminated millions and threatened other countries’ boundaries. you remember that bully in elementary school? it’s a cliché, but most likely his parents either abused him, or his parents ignored him. and so he is insecure, and the only way he can relate to other people is by dominating them, so that he knows they will take him for real. this is what i mean by weakness. could this boy help the way he acted? maybe, maybe not. but i think it is clear that he is not the one who deserves all the blame. and i think it should not be too much of a jump to say that the parents are not the only ones who deserve the blame. and so on. and so on.
we are all involved in the violence that occurs everyday. this is what it is to be weak. this is what it is to be connected. this is what it is to be a human being. we must be “weak” together to be strong.

Speculative Revolution Part I

i have been becoming more politicized lately, more activist oriented, at least in spirit, speaking of such things as “corporate conspiracy” and “imperialist agendas.” i have felt the urge to become extreme, to don a black mask and throw objects at police. and i feel that these things are necessary, should be done and will continue to be done. but i was thinking today that perhaps such opposition to a constructed “force” of capitalism is ultimately only feeding into such a system, is promoting it by the very action of opposing it. there is a reason that police wear uniforms and politicians wear suits. distinctions are a manner in which opposition is created, for there is immediately created a caste of exclusion. in this way, those who oppose are really simply feeding into this game of illusion and power, for they reinforce these differences and further them to a position of direct warfare.

i will here remind you that direct warfare is social lubricant. when there is a physical enemy in confrontation with you, you of necessity bond and unite as a society. it keeps you in line, in service, focused.

there is thus perhaps a reason why the extreme violence and persecution of the ghettoes exist. you will notice that the newest trends in fashion come not from runways in paris but the streets in compton. you will notice that cop-killing is featured prominently on the highest grossing CDs.

our socio-economic system thrives off of the creation of compressed sectors of space filled with pain and pressure and confrontation. as the 60s demonstrated, corporations bank off of rebellion, off of youth counterculture. the reason capitalism has not gone the way of marxism is because of this great ability to assimilate instantaneously its
opposition. in fact, it even seems, in a sense, to control and regulate this opposition.

but i am of course exaggerating to make a point. i don’t want to feed into the notion of bureaucratic conspiracy here. i would never give corporations or governments that much credit. it seems to be more accurately a reflection of the market economy, of the oceanic rise and fall of a system that uses self-conscious irony in its advertising.

there is really no way to oppose a system that takes a self-opposing stance in preparation.

at least, not directly.

Direct

hertice p. domo: so where does one sluice the juice?
jaz: perhaps it is more a question of when. because i believe, i really feel deep down somewhere, that the passageway will be there if you just do it at the RIGHT TIME.
freda: i extemporize with every breath. what other way is there to live? let it go. i find that it all ends up being something that has happened before in some form or another. nothing is ever wholly new, wholly distinct. you would be lost. i don’t even want to contemplate such possibilities. . .
hertice: right. it’s like blindness in certain areas is required.
p.: to be aware and not aware at the same time.
domo: to see where you’re going and ignore what is unessential to you.
freda: i find it hard to ignore, however, the perceptions of all those around me. they seem to demand my attention. they seem to need me to smile at them, to perform for them, to give them something of myself.
hertice p. domo: devouring. the crowd devours, it swallows you up, it cuts you down if you pause to understand what you’re feeling.
jazzy j. rockefeller: here i am, fragments. my body, desired, desiring. we dip into each other, lose ourselves in the spray, become something ferocious. it’s terrifying.
freda: and yet–all this space, all this distance in this claustrophobia. it makes me want to hurt you to make you understand. how i want to get away from you, how i need you to lose myself in. how i understand myself only through you.
jaz: and i don’t like what i see.
freda: so i smile.
domo: and so i pose the question again: how, or when, to sluice this juice? because i feel all this, and where is it going to come out? how? i lose it all in the midst of anonymous faces, i lose everything, i feel ready to destroy myself in order to regain control.
freda: perhaps it’s a matter of contact. i find my energy calmed when someone reaches out to me and touches me while talking to me, letting me know how they really feel, animal. but personal, real. not some empty predator in the jungle sucking my blood in the crowd. but giving me themselves in little, silent ways that i’m scarcely aware of until i realize that i feel good.
hertice: right. communication, learning to pass the light unseen. but it’s not always there.
jaz: and when you’re not getting that connection enough, you get a build-up. you get negatively charged. you need an outlet.
hertice: and then how can i reach out without causing destruction, leaving a trail of pain in my wake? the wall builds, my surface becomes a mask and you look into me and what do you think you’re seeing? everything is bright and neon and shrouded by some pop snippet like a car commercial, dreaming “buy me! buy me! buy me!” and then just when you feel safe suddenly i come out of somewhere invisible and destroy you, devour you, take you into myself.

[hp explodes. blood covers jaz and freda and the walls.]
fade out.
show a pan of the sea, dolphins swimming, gleaming their sleekness into the air, melancholy, yet perky, acoustic guitar plucking.

[domo's face appears in the clouds in the sky, looking down. he smiles beautifically.]

jaz: he looked in, he shouldn’t have looked.
freda: i think there’s a new Tarantino movie out. Let’s go

Preterit Theory

Isis gave me a lap dance last nite. I nuzzled against her tattooed dolphins. And I realized, you know, that sometimes you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. To just say, hey, ok, I’m going to perform for you, I’m going to play this role in this game so that we can both get some enjoyment out of it. Let’s throw ourselves forward into the night and meet as masks on the other side. And you intellectual types who try to pretend like they something other than everything, it’s hard for you to let go of your identity, to let go of all this accumulated information about yourself, hours of mirror-time surveillance, replaying selected moments of your history and pasting them together so that you fit into this certain pattern of behavior, progress marked systematically by birthdays. But it’s all in the skin you know. When you are naked with another person, skin pressing together, are you yourself? You are something more, something less, something human. Something creature, breathing. This is your history, pores of skin sweating a deep musk, creating something new. Why do you feel the need to destroy this immersiveness with distance? Why do you watch yourself? You keep trying to keep everything inside, storing it all up like treasure for heaven, thinking that when the time comes you’ll be prepared. The time has already passed. You can’t wait to be saved. You’ve got to sell yourself in order to survive. Might as well enjoy it. Because you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. Noone’s gonna come to you and open you up. Noone’s gonna come to you and give you their heart. You’ve got to make deals to get past the pretense, you’ve got to agree to certain rules of the game. And the rules, honey, are this: we are what we don’t give each other. Hell, I’m selling out the system. I’m not gonna have anything left after this clearance. I’m not holding anything back. And who will be able to say, “This is what you are”? Because I’m yours. Because I’m everyone. Because I’m out there. And I’m enjoying myself.

Voices In A Hearing

the magistrate roosts worriedly upright, his eyes gleaming with the horizon city sun reflection: “i hear myself speak. a distant spark at the end of a long line, cross worked, networked into somewhere descending across the sea, draped over the heaving mountain-breasts of the earth, dangling its way into your life-moment like an infant dropping raw and alien into the electric light.”
judy, 37, the schoolteacher, drinker of neon colored wine coolers, sits purposefully crossing her legs so that her right flank displays a succulent parting of the upper and lower femoris: “i can tell you about infinity. what it feels like growing. it passes every year through the plateau doors of my room like water breaking out of warm and fetid captivity. i hang on. i dominate. i stalk through the minds of children like a whipping wind, pushing them into corners, enforcing alphabetic order, teaching them lessons.”
frat boy #43178a-0023 conscientiously ignores any displays of difference, knowing that he is entitled to whatever he is told to want, that there is plenty of meat in the market for the righteous upholders of the Status Quo. Sensing a weakness in lengthened silences, he speaks loudly, his papered face eagerly pink with the confidence that everyone is just like him: “sections, divisions, ranks of ignorant flesh devoted to keeping knowledge, understanding, true perception of all living things confined within small silent, violent sectors of space. we take pictures of the area and watch it moving in real-time, live, motion-picture fragments keeping it far away, shocking, unbelievable, unrelated to any of the headlining events of your own life. we ride on soft cushions of ignorance, never knowing what hands are keeping us floating. sailing into death tanned, crew cut, and smiling for the camera.”
coffee percolates deftly in the corner.
bobby the bum’s eyes are filled with gargoyle brightness, his aura uncertain, jagged, the indistinct medleyed color of waste. he hunches against the wall, an invisible horror lurking in the shadows of purposeful, structured minds. he looks goggly-eyed askew at a cruise liner pacing silently above the city and farts explosively, with a gurgling, sickening trickle that smells vaguely reminiscent of styrofoam: “lies, lies, manufactured data, it’s howdy-doody time! there’s a suspect wearing jeans and a blue hoody down the corner looking at the clouds. put all the death into a box and keep it cordoned off with clearly visible lines on maps and make children memorize, other countries recognize. name the child, call it horus, label it into a room set up just for it. death, lies, information flooding out reality. the truth is out there, dispersed, silenced, made into static, into noise, into just another piece of a million pieces of a universal hole. the baby screams watching silent fingers twitching the mobile to dance for him, sensing that it is reducing him into something he cannot believe. can you hear yourself? is that you? who is speaking through you?”

This Is What We Need

take the light back. journey into the past and remember our heroes. the tree, the flower slewn, the silver falling, the dark running. myths of the empire, dreams of a birth, of a formulate rising out of chaos like venus in the half-shell. she is not all that beautiful–but the idea, you see, the ideal. what she is supposed to be, in her innocence. not coy, not a salesman suckering in another sucker, not an empty mask created for the express purpose of stirring desire, no. where would we be if we started looking at reality instead of our conceptions of what it should be? we would be lost. remember who we are. remember our place in history. we are different. we are special.
it’s about keeping everything in perspective. satellites. moon. orbital reality, distanced communication. venus rising out of the sea for you to look at.
it’s amazing how much we know, how much we can share with each other, how little need there is for us to say anything. when i trace my fingers across the steppes of your shoulders i imagine the electricity charging, flashing across cells of the networked synapsed swirl of information. what effect am i causing in you? how are you going to respond? i feel as though i already know. i feel as though i’m touching myself, reaching across into infinite space, coming out the other side of the mirror, awestruck, mimicking.
does this feel good? i know it feels good. it feels good. there is no need to say anything.
and when we hurt each other, we can already see ourselves moving away, and we push each other forward. it’s time to move. suddenly our mouths fill with words, with sounds we cannot explain. explosions occur. skins fill with heat, with blood. take the light back. remember our beginning. we are here for a purpose. we are different, we are special.

yes, you begin to see the end. we set ourselves to fall, crashing into the waving earth, rippling the surfaces apart, shattering the mirror, the light falling, the dark rising. the myth was made so we could be destroyed, so this world could end. this is what we need.

re: dispossession

hey, i hate to tell you but the world is flat, and square. i get my information from mars. you’d better listen.
the good news is that we can set it on fire.

(they have machines sent encircling a distance, maintaining for 24 hours a day 365 days a week the image of the earth as blue enfenced rotundity. turn on the weather channelTM. they will tell you what the clouds look like. they will predict the weather for you.)

i get my information from the voices in my head.

i’ll tell you about our world. this world is flat. this world is square. this world is split into claimed sections, pieces of a pie, all orbiting around the belly-center of the united states of america. Russia may be big, but it’s split
in half.
that’s right. our world exists in the form of image. our world exists in memory. pure memory space. now you stand for what you’ve truly accomplished, for all your successes, for all your purchases.

what have you accomplished?

oh, so you’re filed. oh, so you’re squared away. watch the tv and let it tell you what you look like. you are square, and you are flat, and you can see all the world with the push of a button, with the opening of a cover, with the click of a pointer.
hmm. it’s got pretty good special effects. hmm. can it keep your attention? hmm. it’s cutting away for an advertisement. . .

what
are your purchases? where
are they from?

)i get my information from mars. they’ve sent their machines there but they
can’t get a lock on anything. the truth keeps
shifting.(

so where is the good news? they feed you with all the latest disasters, with all the latest deaths, with all the gruesome images of their tragic wars.
where is the good news? that’s right, open up your bible. that’s right. fold up your hands. that’s right, you should be ashamed. that’s right, you’d better open up your mouths and pray.
alright, now try opening your mind. try looking at the world in 3d. try looking out the corners of your eyes. try listening to the sounds far away from you, to the sounds close to you, to the sounds inside of you.
it’s trippy, isn’t it? alright, now look at yourself. alright, now look at yourself.
where is the good news?
yeah, bend your head down to the board and bleed your fingers til they’re raw. yes, gather together with others in fear and fill the space of a place-time with sound. yeah, sit your ass down and listen.
yeah! get your ass up and dance!

where is the good news?

the good news is that we can set ourselves on fire.

the good news is that we can light each other
on fire.

the good news is that the world cannot be contained. the good news is that we spill out over the edges. the good news is that no matter how hard, straight, and square the information is, we can put it in our mouths
and we can swallow it
in fire.

american dream

What is the future you’ve got stocked away in your heart? Gonna make it? Gonna make your parents proud? Are you holding all your happiness for that distant rock in which you’ll plant your flag and secure for all eternity?
Someone’s walked on the moon. It means nothing. We have gotten
nowhere.
Generations upon generations of people building mountains of money out of other’s flesh and blood. Someday, they tell their children, we will have it all. Someday, we will escape. Someday, we will be safe.
And so there is fear, and there is darkness, and there is locked rooms, guarded.
Open the door to your heart and let me in. I’m starving. Do I have to prove myself to you? Do I have to speak your language?
How close to the earth must I sway, sweeping in the wind like a broken tree?

Territory

Liquid, water forming steps. Slide down. The earth pulls. Forming and reforming with movement forward. Centering, dispersing. A motion picture as a succession of frames. On/off. On/off. The way light bulbs flicker just beyond perception. Transience, a continuous progression of establishment. There is much beyond. There is too much beyond. Focusing on what is immediate, what is sensed, what is felt, what is touched. Driving, stop go, green red. Pieces circling endlessly around an imaginary whole. Construction of narrative from selected layers. What you see is what you live confined within. A continuous passage, shuttling between perceptions. Negative capability. Man/woman. What space does the body occupy? What space do i occupy in my body? What space do I occupy in your body? Claiming, reclaiming. The only territory that i can truly possess is my own. Right here. Right now. This is mine. Always shifting, transforming. Boundaries are permeable, porous. In the search for an identity to occupy, in the search of the i for the I, i must find a space, i must fill it, and I must leave my mark, scented, scarred, burning. And then I must defend it.
You can have it. i am no-where. i am gone by the time You sniff me in the wind.

Tribe

Watching. Distant our minds grow from our bodies. We gaze at ourselves through the television, intelligence pouring from our faces like the fall of water onto rocks, streaks of lightning from a clouded sky breaking into the earth. We become objects, glistening with light, charged forms of desire, tremoring, moving across the surface of time like possessed animals, indefinable symbols.

Do you see the flood, O man in the suit, O man of the mirrored fortress?
Do you see what you have ruined in yourself? Do you think words will save
you now? Do you think that your past will teach you how to breathe
under
water?

There is no narrative that can encapsulate us. We are not a nation, we are not a generation. We are eyes, taking out the world, giving in the world.

We are love,
consuming everything,
holding onto nothing.

(Feb 7, 2000)

Did i say “love”? Such a trademarked term, traditional, safe. Not love, then. It is the experience of the moment i’m speaking of, the pushing forward like the prow of a ship through time, the forward falling pulse of a hi hat in a jazz stream. It’s the refusal to hold back any longer, the sudden spontaneous agreement to let go of everything and let yourself be whatever it is you are doing, whatever it is you are feeling. it is letting every single wave of consciousness that hits you run through you, refusing to stop, refusing to fall back onto what is known, what is certain, what is dead.

so then when you watch, when you sit and gaze at these dead images moving, dancing before your eyes, you are looking past everything you see. you know that these forms are meaningless, these words, these illusions. but you go with it, you let it take you, because you are no longer scared, you know that there’s nowhere that you can go that will take you away from what you aren’t. it is acknowledging that you could never possibly capture it, that you could ever possibly understand. it is accepting that every moment is a death, every moment is a birth.

we are the dead watching the dead,
living somewhere
in between.

here’s the scene

Gorgono (turning): the city. it floods me veins with broken light. my blood cuts across my vision and sometimes all i can see is cells, chaotic, strewn throughout my body fighting.
Jana (skipping): i would like to love it, i would like to feel good sucking in the brown air like a vacuum, wrapping my eyes around the passerbys. i’m even easy to use. and all you got to do around here is plug in, lay back, and play.
Gorgono (dancing): but somewhere deep the drum keeps the language running. the television could talk to me forever and never tell me anything i didn’t already know.
Jana (stripping): i’ve got a double mask. i’m breaking ahead, waiting around the corners, ensnaring every divorced movement of my radiation-glazed skin. i’ve got a double mask. i’m watching myself appear like a screen in the scenario. i’m nobody you can get in touch with. the only currency i take is sacrifice.
Gorgono (pumping): i’m watching myself. i want to fill every slot in the channel of time. i’m breaking apart. i’m flooding. i’m a thousand faces reflecting light shining in from nowhere.
Together (collapsing): i the city. i-and-i, we the system. how far we go before we come back?

purple motion

signing my name, i suddenly feel like i’m drowning. there’s a part of me here that i can’t see that’s flowing from me and coagulating into a larger system, something symbolic, invisible, representative of a certain quantity of moments i’ve sold of myself, exchanging my time for a shell, for a brand that i can exchange with anybody. i sell my freedom, my boundlessness so i can be defined, so that i can be represented, seen, and experienced. i become an image, i become a dead thing to be resurrected in others eyes.
drowning feels like breathing fire, a shredding ecstasy that consumes whatever i held as my own, whatever i held back as distinct and separate from the rest of the world. at first it’s blinding, painful, frenzied–but soon it’s filling every cell, incorporating every space with maximum efficiency into a purposeful stillness, a frozen potential, a waiting that knows completion.
i break apart then into the ocean of energy.
and somewhere, in some darkened room at some certain time i smile down upon a somnolent form and fill their current dream with light.