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2011 Review: This One Was Worse Than the Last

“The arc of the moral universe is nonsensical, and so it bends towards might.”

The turning of a MLK phrase

I wonder how many people who prattle on in their year-in-reviews look back to their previous one, and then see how their observations – not necessarily predictions – stack up alongside what happened this year.
I read over my 2010 review (click). Here’s the choice quote:

“So what does all this mean? At this point, not much. It’s like a joke with a near interminable pause before the punch line. An overdose of information and a dearth of action. All talking, no walking.”

Well, 2011 saw to it that such unruly, uncertain potential found an outlet. And it didn’t take long. In January we had the revolt in Tunisia, and Egypt soon followed. Quite quickly it took on the name, The Arab Spring. It’s such a glowing title (and y’know, never mind that most of the fireworks – save for Libya’s slow burn – occurred in the winter) that most people applied to it with fully understanding what 1968’s Prague Spring actually entailed.

When leader Alexander Dubcek introduced basic freedoms (speech, press, travel) back to Communist Czechoslovakia in January 1968, it was a heady, pro-West utopia that lasted for eight months, until the Soviets sent troops to invade the country and ‘return’ Czechoslovakia to its ‘communist’ state. Easy come, easy go, the people suffer.

The recent 2011 revolts seems a like triumph for the people of these nations (at first, anyway), and for democracy itself, but much of the Western leaders found themselves in the rather awkward position of burning the dictators they had for so long supported (constantly: Mubarak and Ben Ali; recently: Gaddafi). So when in preliminary elections Islamist parties take a big chunk of the vote, one can’t exactly be surprised, since the public is repudiating the slightly-more-secular-Western-friendly scourges that brutalized them for so long. The exact form of the relationship between these countries (and the handful of others where violent revolts continue, like in Syria and Yemen) and the West remains to be seen, but it’s going to be one of resentful dependence rather than independence.

But this is only because the world is, in some rather important ways, becoming the west – or at least the principles that have governed it for decades. Even if China claims to be communist, it became a superpower by serving capitalism, and if one considers that most of the billionaires in that nation are party members, the precepts of Marx rings pretty hollow. And jailing political dissidents and artists isn’t really in line with anything that the people and governments west, east, north, or south should quietly tolerate. Am I hypocrite for decrying this while typing on a Mac that was mostly like manufactured in Guangzhou?

So if the rest of the world is angling for western-style freedom, what are we in the West doing these days?

Well, the first flashes of populist anger in North America and Europe took place over sports teams losing and the possibility of window-shattering five finger discounts. In Vancouver and London respectively, the youth took to the streets because the Vancouver Canucks stunk it up in the Stanley Cup, while at least in London their were vestiges of an excuse that this was a reaction against the cut-happy, wealthy-coddling policies of conservative David Cameron (who’s trying to sell the 1984-ish ‘Big Society’ plan on his cash strapped country). So while Canada has to squirm and consider anger management classes while grabbing a broom, at least the UK can at least find a semblance of political purpose behind smashing up stores and stealing cell phones.

So starting in the middle of September, Generation Y (and X leftovers and Baby Boomer entrails) tried to redeem itself with Occupy Wall Street.

Concocted in part by the editor of the anti-corporate magazine Adbusters, the squatting at Zuccotti Park gained attention the more the overreaching arm of the law and media that tried to contain it. This doesn’t necessarily give added weight to the protesters’ rather superficial and utopian demands, but it did create a talking point, which means Obama will use it carefully in his re-election campaign rhetoric.

Anything else? It inspired protests around the world, but no real concrete reforms have come out of the halls of power since the protest was broken up around its two-month anniversary.

It’s tempting to say that it’s the thought that counts, but that old timey thinking died in committee about five years ago. Public organization over the internet doesn’t hold a candle to corporate and political organization, if only because one has a more direct ear to those who make (and therefore can no longer break) the laws.

Probably the ugliest thing that came out of the protests – not only on Wall Street, but similar ones across America – was the seemingly random and completely unnecessary violence of the police, who were filmed multiple times using pepper spray on kneeling, sedentary protesters. Journalist Matt Taibbi sees this militant and dismissive approach by the law as an example of just how far America has fallen when it comes the limits of state power and the rights of the individual. Coupled with Obama approving the indefinite incarceration of suspected al Qaeda supporters without a trial (key word: suspected), one can’t help but feel particularly uneasy of the dark path American freedom and justice is stumbling down (and the President’s a constitutional law professor, for fucks sake!).

If you’re a democratic nation and your strategy for fighting terrorists involve the removal of basic civil rights, it’s safe to say they won. Both the Patriot Act and now the authorization of indefinite detention is a shockingly brazen display of thumbing one’s nose at a hard fought liberties, and it’s all the more hypocritical that is done in the name of ‘defending freedom’ (true Orwellian doublespeak). You should treat the terrorists with much more respect, more justice than they would treat you. That’s proof that you are better than them. Subverting the Geneva convention just because al Qaeda or the Taliban does lowers yourself to their level, and that immediately makes you weaker in the eyes of your own citizens, the rest of the world, and only foster increased hostility from the terrorists, as it’s proof their tactics are working.

But perhaps the world’s most powerful nation is doing the only bureaucratic activities it can actually turn into half-functioning legislation, even if they’re terrible ideas. America’s political system is more broken than even before. That is, unless you’re the one percent, then it’s working pretty well. Corporate influence has become the way of conducting ‘business’ in Washington. The incestuous revolving door of politician-lobbyist-board-member means that the power of the nation resides in the hands of the few. It’s a clique that almost anyone can join, provided you go to the right schools and work hard and bury your conscience and hope for the future in the backyard, or simply uninterruptedly kiss the requisite asses.

It’s gotten to the point where this isn’t even really happening below the surface.

The dysfunction of trying to run on ideology rather than practicality has gone to such ridiculous extremes that almost every citizen in the country and their worth are nothing more than poker chips in the halls of power.

In the waning days of this year, The House Republicans relented from their position of not letting Obama do anything (which has otherwise worked well for them and terrible for the country), and passed a bill extending pay-roll tax cuts and unemployment benefits.

Ideologies can be hierarchical. For present-day conservatives, not letting your opponent get what he or she wants is one, tax-cuts-always-tax-cuts is two, legislation that might help your constituents vote for you next election is a distant third, and doing whatever your financial backers want supersedes everything.

And the lines kind of got crossed over the pay-roll tax cuts. Stopping Obama is good, but by doing so they’re shitting on rules two and three. Do those combined defeat number one? Various Republican leaders/advisers agreed it did, from McCain to Rove. But it wasn’t necessarily because of their desire to help the millions of people out of work, but because they understood that it was bad PR otherwise.

The reasons behind supporting or objecting to pieces of legislation is no longer purely whether it benefits the nation, but rather how it fits into a narrative strategy that is sold every two and four years through corporate-political complex.

‘It looks bad if you do/don’t do this’, is the nebulous comment pundits, writers, and professional Beltway-Bots, but it’s never clear who this looks bad to.

Is it the American public? Perhaps, since such commentary is usually followed by the reminder that the approval rating of congress has plummeting further, hitting record lows.

But this would suggest then that the behaviour of congress is dependent on the support of the American public. Which at first seems like a given, but if one looks at the major pieces of legislation passed for the last several years – bridging several Democrat and Republican administrations and congressional majorities – you would be hard pressed to find a law that benefits the bulk of the citizens first and the special interests and the wealthy second.

At least a floundering America has a sympathetic skint friend across the pond. The flailing of the Euro continues, with a shrinking of the amount of countries continuing to use the currency suddenly becoming a best-case scenario, when compared to total collapse. It’s tempting to blame the Greeks, but that’s still one letter off from the true reason: Greed. Too many people wanted something for nothing. An economic system can support a small class of citizen exploiting a larger one (and if the wealthy are careful about it, for quite a long time, too), but there can’t be more exploiters than exploited, and quite quickly in Greece – where income tax was optional, annual government salaries reflected fourteen months of work, and there were bonuses in every sector being given away like candy – it became this untenable situation. And the downside to not only a single continental currency but a global economic system so ridiculously interdependent, is that one crack is enough to make the whole damn dam give way. And these systems – pursuing the latest, most complicated financial instrument –sometimes take on the appearance of a soccer game for seven year olds. A chaotic, haphazard bee lining for the ball without much thought to what it’s doing for the overall game.

So France and Germany are throwing money at the problem and, because they are doing so, feel entitled to tell the other countries what’s what and how’s how, which is really blowing a massive hole in this pan-European feel-goodery that’s been building since the end of the Cold War (except in Russia itself, which doesn’t get to use the title ‘Arab Spring’ for the recent spat of anti-Putin protests, in part because it’s too damn cold).

Beyond the horrible mismanagement of the people we’ve voted into power, the earth is also showing its disappointment in us.

Another big natural disaster, this time in Japan. Although with the Sendai earthquake – as opposed to Haiti’s – the questions are not so much of a general lack of infrastructure, but what kind of infrastructure they are going to replace the old with. It’s tough to spin ‘the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl’ into anything remotely positive, except that it might force the country into seriously developing alternative energy, and suddenly the country is on the forefront of this industry, like it was for electronics in the seventies and eighties. And already it becomes too easy to look at this in a not-exactly-human-cost. That the discussion quickly becomes ‘how is the country going to afford the clean up and bounce back’, and not focus on the tens of thousands of sons, daughters, parents, and grandparents that perished on that day in March. The emotional cost – the true human cost – is such a difficult one to put into words without resorting to clichés, which means, sadly, it’s been told many times before. And it doesn’t have to be something so devastating as an earthquake. Complaining about the politics of job creation and debt relief effortlessly masks the people who suffer under these crises. And I’m not saying the suffering of losing one’s job, or having to sell your car or house to make ends meat is the same as dying in tsunami, but in the world of ‘news’ both of these stories are covered in a way that treats the people very much like a statistic.

And perhaps that’s because people put a hell of a lot of stock in cold, bloodless statistics. It’s a more authoritative, objective way to compare things (also the basis for the scientific method). We judge the horrible-ness of things based on people out of work or body count, and can say that almost 16,000 people died in the Sendai Earthquake with 3,500 still missing. Yet those numbers suddenly mean a lot less if your spouse also died. Suddenly that one is all that matters. But because that can’t be applied to the people around the world watching or listening, 16,000 is meant to represent the catastrophe. Such a number made later disasters – Chilean volcano, flooding in southeast Asia, earthquake in Turkey – pale in comparison. And also because of a earthquake’s immediacy and shocking footage, it rather effortlessly takes hold of the average citizen’s attention span over Somalia’s continued famine, whose numbers are much worse (total estimates are not known, but 29,000 children have died since July). And how does the civilized, developed world deal with that? How much money can you throw at the problem to fix it? How do you deal with criminals who are stealing and re-selling basic food supplies which you’re giving away for free? Considering how the powerful take advantage of the situations of the powerless in developed countries, suddenly it doesn’t seem that surprising…

At least bin Laden is dead.

Of all nations you couldn’t tell ahead of time you were coming in to kill the world’s number one terrorist, it would be Pakistan. It’s the one country that seemed to have solidified out of the craziest conspiracy-paranoid parts of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. They haven nukes, a government held hostage by the military, which is leaned on by the intelligence service, which has deep sympathies for the Islamist rebels trying to bring down the government. And it hates the fast-developing country that people are rooting the most for, India (it’s China with democracy!). If there’s any place in the world where something is going to go horribly wrong and everyone else has to do something about it in 2012, it’s Pakistan.

And as for students and youth celebrating the news that Osama is laying at the bottom of the Indian Ocean (where he gets picked at by the worms and weird fishees), well, they’re taking whatever good news they can get these days, and everyone can agree it’s slim pickins.

Almost sounds like the future.

The opportunity to cling to the old system is fading. It has been seen in already volatile and repressive regions of the world – as they are examples of the very oldest systems, violent totalitarianism – but is moving to other regions, that for much of the previous century were bastions of stability.

And like culture, what’s to be done is split in a thousand little pieces across people and power. It’s so easy to forget that we are all in this together, that we can’t break down along old lines of borders, race, or religion, or even class (the easiest and most tempting. 99% versus 1%! How can we lose?) in the same way as before. The wealthy are dependent on the support (even tacit, grumbling support) of the rest of the population, and the rest are dependent on the wealthy and powerful for the global social structure they provide (not because they are wealthy and powerful, mind you, but because they took the jobs that we as a people have created/allowed; you want to change the world, start working in finance, politics, or technology).

Is there rampant abuse of this relationship? Fuck yes. From both sides. The greed and indifference of the rich toward others that make us all spit blood are performed by the rest of us on a much smaller scale every day.

Case in point: the $700 billion bailout of the banks in fall of 2008 (although only a fraction of what was eventually thrown at the problem) that people thought was crazy? That amount wouldn't cover the combined credit card debit of all Americans, circa June of this year (and that’s after it’s gone done from nearly a trillion in late-2008). And sure, it’s spread out over a greater amount of people, but that’s still a massive amount of ‘spending money they don’t have’, which sounds a lot like what every institution (run by people, may I remind you) does, from government to corporations.

Is it still the great recession? What are we going to think about it when we finally make it to the other side? What kind of solutions will we have come up with to get there? Hopefully we can come to our senses quicker rather than later, and through hard work and not sudden shocks.

And I’m assuming it gets better. Everyone bets on the future. Both in money – that your investment will be worth more than at the moment you actually invest it in something – and in time – that your hard work for little money at present will be repaid with not-as-hard work and more money down the road.

But the future is impossible to know for sure. While there are indicators that can suggest trajectories – both good and bad – nothing is set in stone until the present. And that’s when it can’t be undone.

2011 was a pretty crushing wave. Here’s to getting our heads above water in 2012.

A Notable Person of the Year

In 2011 politics/economics/blah, the individual succumbed to the faceless masses. The idea that individual political leaders can efficiently usher in much needed reforms that a great majority of citizens believe need to be enacted immediately has taken incredibly devastating credibility blows. Barack Obama was not ‘The One’. We need a ‘the many’. And they need to be organized.

So the choice for A Notable Person of the Year is one far away such things. It’s Louis CK, a comedian-writer-actor-director, who – in addition to releasing a hilarious stand up special and offering another season of hilarious and bizarre scenarios with Louie – brought the world one thing it could always use more of: transparency.

When he released Live at the Beacon Theatre three weeks ago for five bucks on the internet (through his own website, avoiding not only media corporations like HBO, but also online sites like YouTube and iTunes), he let the public in on its success, stating how much he was making each step off the way, explaining how he was going to break up the money among his small company, charities, and a new penis ("I'm keeping the old one...I'm gonna have an old one and a new one, right there. It's gonna be nice").

In his letter that he wrote on December 21^st, he states:

“I never viewed money as being "my money" I always saw it as "The money" It's a resource. if it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.”

It’s kind of sad when some of the most sensible economic advice in years comes from a comedian.

Does the world still laugh with you when you laugh?

Archive

The Occupation of the Abstract (on the Wall Street Protests)

Ah, protest culture!

It starts simply as a problem – not difficult to locate, there are plenty of those these days – and as more and more people become informed or aware of the situation (at least as far as they understand it) a subculture grows, in a fashion not unlike subcultures in the world of arts and culture (from Dada to punk). And like any good subculture, ‘protest’ festers and grows, creating/absorbing an incestuous language, style, and knowledge bank.

Most people who somehow pass by or interact with these groups ignore them, deride them, or roll their eyes at what is considered just another fad. If it’s Dada you ignore the urinal in the art gallery, if it’s punk you call it a lot of noise coming out from some basement club, and if it’s a bunch of dissenters in some open space, you try to spot a witty sign to tell you all you need to know, then go about your day, silently wishing them good luck, ‘cause boy howdy, they’re gonna need it. 

This can go on for years, months, or – in an always-depending-on-fresh-meat news cycle – a couple days, until the mainstream finds it, at which point it transforms into something inherently compromised (as emergence into the mainstream is wont to do. Dadaism shot itself or became Salvador Dali, punk tried to go underground, but was found, cleaned up, and sold as grunge). Protests get big money donors, celebrity endorsements (Ted Nugent on the right! Kanye on the left!), and a blunted message.

Both these narratives can be applied to the recent ‘fringe’ movements, The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (even if the former’s namesake was derived from a stock exchange floor rant on a business show on cable). These two campaigns have more in common than either would like to admit – Tea Partiers have condemned Occupy Wall Street – and that is perhaps seen best in that both unite a wealth of citizens from disparate backgrounds against forces that are bloated and entrenched with corruption, but wholly vital for the functioning of a modern global society.

The awkward truth about post-industrial and post-modern society is that it is extremely complicated (which is putting it rather simply). Pushing legislation through the bureaucratic and congressional morass is full of compromising, hand-greasing, kowtowing, contradiction, trepidation, and special interests having a bigger last word than one would consider sensible. Same goes for the finance industry. If it were as easy as, ‘Buy low, sell high’, we could all be Wall Street millionaires. But it’s not, it’s complex and convoluted, and not necessarily intentionally so.

The Tea Party’s attempt to fix what they saw as the problem – ‘big government’, if we must reduce their argument to almost nothing – involved getting as many of them as possible elected into the congress or senate under the wing of the Republican party, and then saying ‘no’ to pretty much everything that might expand government power or spending (for many, the difference between the two is negligible). What might have seemed to be a good first step in theory, in practice nearly caused America to default on its multi-trillion dollar debt in August, because this group of politicians initially refused to raise the debt ceiling. Even though most economists agree that government spending does more to stimulate the economy than cuts (either spending or tax), this does not sway them. This obstinate position may appeal to the Tea Party base, but the lack of headway in fixing America’s financial crises means that much of the nation has cooled on Tea Party politics, as polls suggest only about 25% of the country supports them.

Occupy Wall Street (or OWS, although that makes it sound like some sort of elite military force) should probably take heed of this rise and fall. The Tea Party went from a small series of protests to being carried on the shoulders of cable news pundits and wealthy conservative businessmen to the Washington Mall, carefully courted by those in Republican Party establishment. They were lambasted by their opponents for being vitriolic, uninformed (or under informed, or misinformed), and irrational.

OWS is now being faced with same challenges and opportunities. The news media has invaded Zuccotti Park in big enough numbers that the protesters had to erect a communications tent. From that comes a nice fresh pundit debate as to whether the protesters are tapping into an underlying anger in all Americans towards the privileges of the rich or are a bunch of anti-American hippies acting like a mob. So of course the Democrats are looking for ways to – oh, let’s go right out and say it – exploit this energy for the 2012 campaign season (Lichtblau, 2011).

Just like the Tea Partiers complaining about a broken government whose processes and actions many of them might not understand like the role the House Committee on Ways and Means has on taxation, the OWS is tackling a series of corporations, financial laws, and economic foundations whose functioning has typically been morally dubious and understood by a woefully small segment of the population (a disappointing notion, considering the role it plays in all our lives).

Many books – It Takes a Pillage, Griftopia, The End of Wall Street, The Shock Doctrine – successfully portray greed as almost a blinding force for the CEOs and boards of Wall Street’s biggest financial institutions. These people in positions of power had either limited understanding of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit default swaps (CDS’), synthetic derivatives, and structured investment vehicles (SIVs), or knew that they were playing with Greek fire.

Either option is inexcusable, and their behaviour since the meltdown of summer and fall 2008 hasn’t endeared them to many people around the world (getting trillions – yes, trillions, that $700 billion was just the iceberg tip – in bailout money, denying it was their fault in front of Congress, giving out ridiculous bonuses while their firms nearly died, claiming they were ‘doing god’s work’, and preventing legislation from being enacted that might rein in their uber-risky behaviour).

What is most horrifying to many people – protester or otherwise – is that much of what Wall Street was investing in the last decade or so wasn’t manufacturing companies or energy concerns but Wall Street itself, atop a housing bubble that deflated throughout 2007 and 2008. Banks would invest in a bundle of thousands of mortgages, some reliable but most risky, and then divide them into other bundles and sell them to other banks. Unrestricted credit default swap trading meant that you could buy insurance on these mortgage bundles, and collect when they went kaput. But you didn’t even have to own these mortgage bundles to do this. Anyone could buy insurance on these volatile investments (the popular analogy being that it was like you having the ability to buy insurance on your neighbour’s house, when you happened to notice smoke pouring out of their basement windows).

All this added up to trillions of not-exactly-dollars, because much of it existed as the promise to pay, not actual capital. Although Wall Street might not appreciate the reductionism here, it was a massive game of passing the buck, dependent on the person further down the line coughing up the money to the person beside them. When anyone at point in the line doesn’t have enough cash for the next person, everyone else after that guy (or gal) is fucked. Such are the perils of credit, also known as ‘trust’, and Wall Street trusted a lot of people they shouldn’t have, both people who worked on that street and on Main Street.

Credit is supposed to grease the wheels of commerce, but too much grease just ruins the smooth functioning of this delicate and complicated machine. To further that analogy (once again proving how difficult these problems can be to understand), everyone was so preoccupied with their own cog or attachment that they never bothered to check that the whole thing was actually working properly. This wasn’t an epic scam by all of Wall Street to let the public on the hook for their losses in the billions of real (and trillions of fake) dollars. It was pathetic shortsightedness based on mindless optimism and endless greed, not that unlike people who thought they could afford a house without any down payment or steady income, even if their mortgage broker told them they could (if it sounds too good to be true…).

The difference was that they people running these banks were expected to be smarter than that. All of these risky investments were being made by people who were not looking at the bigger picture around them (except maybe Goldman Sachs, but that’s another (big) story). The goal was to make you and your firm a shitload of money each quarter (the next one be damned until it comes), and everything else was a distant second. A glut of short-term plans can easily beget unintended long-term consequences. Deregulation means a lack of oversight, the very practice necessary to connect these dots that were inadvertently joined in ways few people could understand.

The above summation of a slice of the many high finance abuses is a tough thing to march against. It can’t fit on a sign, be chanted, or even be whittled down to a talking point suitable for television viewing.

So many things must be changed in this system to make the American financial industry – and with it, the global financial industry – healthy and trustworthy again. The Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill was a punch line, dead on arrival, not restricting or regulating any of the risky financial instruments above, or even being written when it was passed into law (a year after Obama signed it, only 38 of its 400 statutes have been written, mostly by the banking industry itself).

So yes, if this is one of Occupy Wall Street’s hot buttons, good on them. It seems that they are overflowing with good intentions, and while that’s what the road to hell is paved with, it should be noted that there’s also a bin full of them behind the half-finished condo building everyone in the world seems to somehow own a part of.

Without becoming too cynical, I would say that if worldwide protests couldn’t stop a war – a concept that everyone can understand – in 2003, it has little chance of banning (or at least regulating) credit default swaps. If the message from the Tea Party was too inflexible and dogmatic, then the message from OWS is too drippy and unfocused. How exactly does one camping in Zuccotti Park close a corporate tax loophole? Is calling up your local representative or senator and complaining going to do anything if the same person gets thousands in corporate fundraising donations?

It is as if the best the OWS folk can hope for is that the idea of corporate, financial, and tax reform – all three targeted at the wealthiest 1% who own 50% of America – remains a talking point for next year’s elections. But that’s no guarantee for success. Both political parties have a penchant for channeling public anger into support for their candidates, but once the voting is over, little gets done regarding the issue. This is truer for Democrats, as both chambers in Congress lean centre-right, meaning most issues labeled ‘liberal’ are heavily water down or compromised. Look at the attempts to end the Iraq War in 2007, health care in 2009 (and into 2010), and how they seem to avoid talking about energy/environmental policy with a ten-foot pole.

And I believe OWS is aware of this strong possibility, which is why they are wary to embrace the party closer to their convictions, as they don’t want to get burned yet again. Instead they seem to be trying to keep this as grassroots as possible, which is certainly easier than in the past, thanks to the magic of the internet (invented by those damn socialists in the government-run Defense Department).

(INTERLUDE)

There is going to be a ‘Wall Street Related’ protest in Toronto on the 15^th of this month, the same time there is going to be dozens across cities in the States. I am not sure what to make of this. While showing some level of solidarity towards those protesting south of the border could be appreciated, it seems odd that Canadians would be getting involved, since our financial institutions have thankfully weathered the storm better than almost any other nation on earth.

Much of this can be attributed to decades of jurisprudence (Paul Martin is sadly never going to get the credit he deserves for keeping our economic ideas sane throughout the nineties and early 00s.) Even Harper deserves some kudos for keeping it working well during his time at the helm, although I am wary as to what changes he might institute now that he has a majority in parliament.

So people shouldn’t necessarily be showing up on the 15^th to rage against our federal government (although certainly there can be small examples of pro-business policy that the protesters can focus on, such as HST and the fact that income equality is rising for the first time in many years), but raging against another country’s economic policy should be done with care. Yes, the United States has a massive political and economic influence on the rest of the world and many countries are feeling the pain from a problem that originated in the United States, but what is our role in these protests? Simply reminding the ‘occupy wall street’ folk that we are supporting them in their struggle for stronger financial regulation? Is it comparable to the worldwide protests in the lead up to America going to war in Iraq in 2003? Is it a subtle ‘try to be more like us’ showing? An acknowledgement of how much Canada’s economy is dependent on America’s? Is it just going to be an anti-Harper bitch out?

And to play devil’s advocate, the reason Canada can ‘afford’ to have a more conservative financial industry is because we can rely on selling to the world our wealth of natural resources (if we didn’t have that, maybe we would be more tempted to raise cash in such risky, CDO-like ways). And once again, we’re back to the fact that we are peddling oil – and soon, fresh water – to the world, with damages to the environment that can be just as disastrous to the world as massive risk-taking in the financial sector. We should be very wary with any sort of sense of superiority.

(END INTERLUDE)

Even Obama is not immune from OWS attacks, as there are signs demanding that the man ‘grow a pair’ and ‘walk the walk’. Such anger is not surprising, as the rhetoric that brought Obama the presidency seemed to be made for fixing such problems. The left and even many of those classified as independents want a strong, functioning government. But when it’s neither of those things – while at the same time statistics show that middle class incomes haven’t risen in decades while upper class ones have skyrocketed – a helplessness can overtake people, because it seems like power is no longer in the hands of the many but rather the few.

Which is why the Tea Party initially had such wide appeal. If the government isn’t part of the solution, it’s part of the problem and needs to be fixed (read: shrunk). The Tea Party fielded candidates for the 2010 elections and while the label isn’t set in stone, 40 candidates (35 in the House, 5 in the Senate) won. It remains to be seen whether this will be tactic pursued by the OWS folk, but it doesn’t seem likely that a handful of obstinate far leftists in congress will win any major legislative victories.

If corporations have soaked up political influence to the point where the act of voting has become akin to – in George Carlin’s – ‘jerking off’, then another form of political expression must be utilized. OWS can remind people that they are not alone in their frustration, but beyond that, it truly is up to the individual to make a difference in the way they live their own lives.

One possible solution that I will drum up now is not new, but is one of the few that everyone could try in baby steps, which is really the only way to get a large swath of people to change their behaviour:

Vote with your money.

If money is power (as the corporations that dictate much of how this world is run certainly believe), use that power every day. Spend wisely. Buy what you need from organizations and stores whose policies you agree with. Yes, it will require a bit of searching on the internet to find out which companies do this or own that, and maybe dumb questions at the supermarket or clothing store when you ask about where the apples were grown or sweatshops in Malaysia. Even when finding answers to these inquiries, it can become quite daunting when you realize how much of your basic needs are met by giant corporations (food, energy) or government institutions in conjunction with giant corporations (insurance, security). Sometimes it will be more expensive to buy local, or support alternate forms of energy, and you will have to compromise (I’m writing this on a MacBook, made by a company that keeps its billions in profits offshore so it doesn’t have to pay corporate taxes in the States).

Is that enough? Well it’s a start. We’re already in a financial crisis that seems to slowly be congealing into the new normal, and when people are pinching pennies and tightening budgets, it makes for a particularly bad time to push for solar or invest strictly in ethical stocks and mutual funds.

OWS is a blip of frustration, and as long as it stays peaceful, it will remain a respectable reminder that for the last thirty years the corporations and the wealthy people who run them have taken a much bigger slice of the economic pie at the expense of the rest of the American public. That frustrating fact alone will not usher in change, but its acknowledgement is a much-needed step in the right direction.

The problem is the next step: Who can possibly break the back of Wall Street, for the good of itself and the world economy? With millions indifferent and Obama ineffective, probably only Wall Street itself. But vampires can’t see themselves when they look in the mirror.

Sources

Lichtblau, Eric. “Democrats Try Wary Embrace of the Protests”. The New York Times. October.11.2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/us/politics/wall-street-protests-gain-support-from-leading-democrats.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

2011 - Summer of Discontent

The early May head-exploding of Osama Bin Laden kept most of the world mentally buoyant for about two month, and only when we actually crossed into the sticky haze of summer did the heat come in full force and get us all hot and bothered once again.

With good reason, at least. It would be rather awful to get all in tizzy over nothing. Plenty of problems are plaguing our poor little planet these days, some slow and continually simmering, others like quick and violent snaps of a whip. Together the two make for an unrelenting assault of bad news, sowing seeds of confusion and despondency.

The economic crisis is the least exciting but most important problem in terms of the shaky and uncertain future, with giant numbers and terrifying percentage points being thrust in the face of unsuspecting citizens by politicians and journalists alike.

This soon-to-be-double-dip-recession is getting hot oil body massages from the American debt crisis, which was solved in little more than name only. President Obama noted that, ‘this is not the deal I would have wanted’, which – considering all the other compromised and watered down bills he signed no problem – tells you how goddamn awful it is. The blame can be distributed quite easily. Poor leadership from the White House, pointless sniping by the entrenched political parties, and obstinate hostage taking by the new and misinformed kids in town, the Tea Party.

The gulf between how these supposedly powerful institutions/groups operate and what the populace expects from them is catastrophically huge. If up to three-quarters of your country want tax increases on the wealthiest citizens and the government can’t accomplish this, is one still living in a democracy? If your health care law benefits heath insurance companies first and your citizens second, can it really be said to have been created with the ‘public’s interest’ in mind? How about closing down a military prison holding ‘enemy combatants’ that live in a legal netherworld so that they can be subject to enhanced interrogation techniques (you know, torture)? If a government doesn’t reflect the will of the people? Is it still of the people, by the people, and for the people?

America appears to be run by and for the rich to a greater extent than ever before. And rather than waste words blaming the ‘job creators’ alone, it should never be forgotten that this catering to wealthy’s every whim is the fault of everyone in the country. The rich for doing it, and everyone else for letting them. ‘Constant vigilance’ is the price of democracy, and the electorate letting that slip away slowly allows for a host of those who would abuse this power – the euphemistically termed ‘special interests’ – to take a larger chunk of control than they deserve.

 The sound of uninformed and misinformed voters scribbling jotting an x on their ballot is the first death knells of a democracy (technically it’s the second. The first is abject silence of the non-voter). Getting people to vote against their interests is a terrifying prospect. It is democracy in reverse.

How does this happen? Lack of proper information being meted out from the news media. Complicated issues being given a ridiculously simplistic, bullet-pointed explanation.

The result of the rising power of the corporation is the weakening of government power, even as the latter bloatedly grows larger and larger. And with government no longer a viable plan A or B, there is little way to alter or replace the corporate structure with something better. One cannot get elected to government without a blessing – read: donation/support – from this facet of the global economy. Matt Taibbi wonders in a recent blog post if the late removal of tax increases from America’s debt ceiling plan was going to happen all along, as the superdelegates that helped give Obama the democratic nomination made it clear that higher taxes on them and their investments and corporations were not going to be tolerated.

No one would deny that there are huge faults with the contemporary American political system, but the extremely poor showing at how it attempted to fix the debt ceiling crisis – whether the crisis was inflated or not – was enough to get Standard and Poor’s to knock the nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA+. Suddenly America doesn’t appear to be a safe investment bet. Well that’s been true for most people living there since they’ve lost billions (trillions?) in their retirement plans since 2008.

So while this is bad news for the world economy (being the world’s most important and powerful country means we all trip up when they do), it’s not the worst/most shocking news of late.

In terms of utter disgust, the UK’s News of the World scandal offers up failure on every level of institution meant to protect the public. The law, the media, and the government, corrupted at every stop along the way for the most pathetic, money-grubbing gains imaginable. Hacking the messages on a murdered girl’s cell phone. Breaking the ‘news’ that the Prime Minister’s child has cystic fibrosis. Following athletes, celebrities and royalty with the intensity that Woodward and Bernstein followed the Watergate leads.

Unpleasant connections between political and media industry leaders are the more wide ranging ramifications (and that the police could easily be bought off to look the other way or even help with the phone hacking), but it only boiled over because apparently there is a line in the sand for people willing to absorb the personal and irrelevant information of others.

But even before that line is crossed there is something disappointing with the intense microscopic focus of so many upon the lives of so few, regardless of their chosen profession, and it being acceptable. ‘News of the World’ – the now dead weekly – had a print circulation of about three million people, one of the highest in Britain (comparatively, The Guardian has just over a quarter million daily). Sample headline: “F1 Boss Has Sick Nazi Orgy With Hookers” (this was later proven to be false).

The drive for profit in the media has forced it to appeal the more superficial concerns of the masses. The history of the media has always been one of presenting and shaping information, with countless instances of press releases and news stories meant to tilt an issue one way or another, but should the issues at least not be pressing? There is a responsibility of giving the public what they need, and not what they want. A position that certainly requires someone to make that exact and daunting decision, but that still a much better plan than the outright and egregious abuse of power that comes when a profit margin makes the call.

It seems less of an abuse of public trust when it’s a private corporation, even though it is providing a public service.

News International head Rupert Murdoch said, after he found out the Hitler diaries he published in his newspapers were fake, “after all, we’re in the entertainment business”, two words that should really make anyone who works in the gathering of information relevant to the interworkings of a globalized society and attempts to distribute it to the masses shudder.

Poor Rupert had to not only had appear in front of a government inquiry where he denied any knowledge of such malfeasance and confessed to be very disappointed with his rotten employees, but in response the British government denied him the chance to buy a sexy satellite company he had his eyes on.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for News International because of an ace-in-the-hole they’ve helped create: This was only going to be news for a week or two. Chairs will be kicked over, heads will roll, people will grumble, but then everyone will move on to whatever happens next in the world, which apparently was the debt crisis.

Murdoch has the guns of novelty and salaciousness in his pockets, and if one fires them often enough you’ll forget what the earlier shots were over. His corporation just has to weather the storm and wait until it all fades into the background. In the 1994 film The Paper, an exasperated editor says, “we only have to be right for a day”. Well now it doesn’t seem to matter. Right or wrong becomes irrelevant if it’s going to be forgotten tomorrow.

The News of the World scandal is particularly aggravating when around the world there are actually several shocking and pressing issues that should be addressed and discussed in greater detail. If you want to see people actually fighting for something important, take a look at that whole Arab spring phenomenon, which in some cases is starting to look like it’s decided to skip the warm glow of summer and move into the bitter cold of late autumn.

Uprisings in Syria and Yemen have been violently crushed, the former particularly shocking as Assad has long been a dependable Middle Eastern ally for the West, held up as a moderate and restrained leader.

In Yemen the country has actually splintered into fragments, with tribal regions far from the capital simply no longer acknowledging the leadership of Ali Abdullah Saleh, while the government opens fire on protesters that are in Sanaa or Taiz.

And it can come off particularly awful considering how Western nations have – and utilize – the luxury of picking and choosing how involved they are going to be in dealing with these regimes. Gaddafi in Libya is carpet bombed, Syria and Yemen get a finger wag. Saudi Arabia, with its deep pockets, pays off the youth to not get unruly, continues treating women as second-class citizens, and no one says boo west of Turkey.

Perhaps luxury is not the proper phrasing, as the economic crisis certainly plays a factor in just how far a nation can intervene. Bombs, bullets, and troops cost money. Lots of money. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, both broken and bought at prices never initially imagined.

The unspoken attitude seems to be, ‘sorry protesters fighting for freedom, but we’ve bounced too many cheques here at home, whether it be health insurance or education. We can’t spare a platoon or predator drone.’

Who or what comes off worse? The United Nations, that’s who. The UN Charter has been treated like toilet paper for many years, first by superpower nations who could ignore its rules without fear of reprisal, but over time this form of hypocrisy – trumpeting the UN powers while practicing exceptionalism in your own personal and apparently pressing case – has trickled down to the smaller countries that might have previously cowered at the threat of sanctions or a deploying of peacekeeping forces.

So we stay out of certain Arab Spring revolutions and the protesters get slaughtered.

And even that’s a simplified assessment. Not surprisingly, many of the protesters have a rather love-hate relationship with the West, as even if military intervention was offered, there is no doubt that it would be accepted coolly at best. The West helping you winning your battle gives the old regime an opportunity to convince those on the mushy middle politics-wise that the uprising is not an actual reflection of the citizens, but of foreign meddling (in the 2009 Iranian protests, this is how situation played out, the ‘Green revolution’ eschewing as much public support from other nations as possible). Plus you have a foreign army stuck in your suddenly broken country, not sure if they can hand over the reigns to you just yet.

Really, is it the responsibility of a nation’s citizens alone to free themselves from tyranny, real or perceived? Hell, even France assisted the United States in their war with the British way back in the 1770s, and the US reciprocated, by supporting the French revolutionaries of 1789 (kind of spitting in the face of Louis XVI, who helped them years earlier, but hey, that’s politics).

Revolutions are huge pains in the ass that might not bear any fruit at all. Thomas Jefferson thought one was necessary every twenty years or so, but he said that only after his generation slogged through one and succeeded. Try a failure on for size and you might rethink such an oft-repeating time frame. If you lose, you get jailed, killed, or exiled (at best), and the leaders you try to dispose tighten their grip to make sure it doesn’t happen again (see: Syria and Yemen). If you succeed in the early twenty-first century, where our Western obsession with quick-fix solutions no matter what the problem has seeped into the Middle East, you have only a couple months to get a provisional government up and running again before the masses who only too recently had your back try to stab you in it with massive counter-protests (see: Egypt).

But at least there is noble rhyme and reason behind the actions of those being attacked by government forces. The recent shootings of Norway cannot claim to have such thing, despite the xenophobic ravings of the perpetrator. Nothing discounts your opinions – regardless of what they are – quicker than resorting to violence in a state that already guarantees you freedom of speech.

Killing scores of children at an island to ‘make a point’ destroys any notion of a point ever existing, and actually harms the efforts of those that might feel similar (one is certainly free to hold an anti-Islamic, anti-socialist positions), but are still smart enough not to pick up a gun over it. What was later revealed of Anders Behring Breivik only made the case of insanity that much stronger.

Pilfering parts of his treatise from the work of Ted ‘The Unabomber’ Kaczynski (while imaging a coming civil war in ‘Eurabia’), building himself up with steroid injections, and calling Richard the Lionheart (the 12^th century King of England, best known for fighting in the Crusades) his mentor, it’s hard to call him completely sane. Just because he planned the attack for years doesn’t mean he’s mentally sound.

So if he is simply a horrible unstable anomaly – and hopefully full of shit about their being other like-minded cells across Europe – can anything positive be gleaned from these events?

Is this what has to happen to start the dialogue over the dangers of extreme anti-Muslim (or anti-anything) sentiment? While reactive endeavours are typically done with more effort and passion, proactive ones are accomplished with more levelheadedness and clarity. Is the solution a marginalizing of such views, or will that only increase the chances of these types of attacks happening again (since those that hold them will feel increasingly persecuted)? And on the other side to bridge a culture gap that is being felt in almost all European nations, is ‘forced’ assimilation permissible, let alone possible? The strongest Europe is a united one, with common goals and freedoms, and that cannot be done if the ever-expanding Muslim communities in large cities are not a part of it. But the expectations of hyper-modern, globally connected society for immediate solutions to complicated issues – which this certainly is, straddling politics, culture, economics, and the personal lives of millions – are particularly unreasonable here. It took several generations for the many waves of immigrants to be assimilated into North American society, where even the vestiges of the original slums have become tourist attractions in large cities (Chinatown, Little Italy). The rush of Muslim immigrants in the last two decades has been coloured by the West’s continual involvement in Middle Eastern politics, meaning it is too easy for people to (erroneously) assume that people from this region now living in London, Paris, or Oslo are associated with the people making the news from this region (namely, terrorists and fundamentalists who, for example, forbid women from going to school).

These barriers can only be broken down over a long period of time, with continual outreach and support from both sides, the ‘natives’ and the immigrants. And while it may be difficult, honest and straightforward dialogue has to occur. By understanding both cultures better, it becomes easier to shrink such gulfs between people. And that is the only true way to combat the propaganda and beliefs pushed by Anders Breivik.

Perhaps the only thing worse than this senseless massacre is the tens of thousands of people living in the horn of Africa starving to death. One of the worst droughts in decades – coupled with the general political instability of the region – has resulted in a famine consuming Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

Twenty nine thousand have died in Somalia alone so far, and a total of twelve million – according to the UN, who, despite their lack of action, is still is one of the best monitors and assessors of crisis situations – are at grave risk in the coming months.

The financial woes of the rest of the world mean that the humanitarian response is woefully inadequate. Both governments and citizens are watching their own cheque-books and look upon the darkest part of the dark continent with a helpless shrug.

There is little shock to the news of the famine in the West. Since it has happened several times in recent decades, we’ve become immune even from some of the most shocking photographs of malnourished children. Live Aid, Live 8 and numerous world charity advertisements and promotions have given the idea the problem is continually being addressed, that only a couple more years and we should have the problem nipped in the bud.

But this simply isn’t true, as droughts, genocide, corruption, a mockery of any sense of democracy and an always-temporary infrastructure has ensured that large portions of the continent remain as unstable as ever. Certainly this is true in Somalia, which has been in a state of civil war since 2009. Almost a million people have simply walked out of the country as refugees to either Ethiopia or Kenya compounding the crisis there. It is a situation that in many ways dwarfs everything else discussed above. These people are abandoning their country because there is no country, only a loose web of armed factions that could cost you your life if they happen to come upon you. There is no support, no infrastructure, no survival.

So you leave and you hope not to die on the way to wherever you decide to go.

That’s the world in early August 2011. And just for good measure, toss in London riots that are too quickly explained away as the fault of the welfare state (‘culture of dependency!’) or the fault of the erosion of the welfare state (‘austerity cuts help the rich and hurt the poor!’). Knowing that there is a famine in one area of the world while in another youth are smashing up stores for sneakers and cell phones can leave a particularly bad taste in one’s mouth.

In these trying times those in the developed world complain and bemoan the luxuries they must now sacrifice. Those in the developing world simply perish in droves, under fascist boot or due to starvation.

These are symptoms of both poor institutional decisions many years old and the dark side of humanity. The latter will never fully be corrected, but the former can certainly be improved upon. How bad is it? Well it’s just not good, which is a clearly unsatisfactory answer, which might mean that it’s perfect for this time and place.

Waiting out the storm is a Herculean effort in itself. And then the rebuilding begins.

Uh Canada

May 4th Edit: Well so much for me having my finger on the pulse of the Canadian populace...

“YOU HAVE NOT BEING PAYING ATTENTION” – Radiohead, 2+2=5

Confession: I am Canadian.

Much of my nonfiction writing output focuses on political and cultural theories in general, but I would certainly concede that many of my references and commentary are America-centred. I could chalk this up to a multitude of reasons, ranging from the fact that the influence of American socioeconomic culture and policy has dominated both Canada and the rest of the world for nearly a century, to simply that there are more books and articles concerning America, which means more people will be familiar with such sources, and so when I put forth arguments of political nature, it would be most advantageous to use such sources.

One rather shameful reason, however, was simply that Canada – at least in the political sense – seemed happily dull, unimpressively straightforward, and not worth discussing. In some odd way, this is a backhanded compliment of the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ sort. Everything was going swimmingly on the domestic front last time I checked. We had one of the highest living standards in the world, an open and efficient parliament, and one of the best reputations throughout the globe.

So I felt comfortable and secure enough to put my own country on the backburner and cluck my tongue at the foreign and domestic boondoggles of the Bush administration and the lackluster attempts to clean up the mess by Obama’s ‘team of rivals’ (who all seem to agree that the corporate beast must be lovingly caressed). With a wary eye I balance China’s incredible economic growth with their continued jailing of political dissidents who push for more freedoms for the average citizen. I worry about the Middle East remaining as simply ruthless petroleum producing states that the West and East have no true interest in changing. I had high hopes for South America, low expectations for Europe, and just hoped for the best in terms of aid and climate for Africa.

And I’ve found that I’m not alone in this thinking. Many people I know would be much more at ease lamenting the world’s problems than consider the everyday goings-on upon our own Parliament Hill. Well, complacency is democracy’s enemy, and we’ve all been asleep at the wheel.

There’s nothing like the announcement of an upcoming election to yank your mind out of such pleasant and ignorant doldrums. That they can really come out of nowhere – albeit a couple weeks of rumours leading up to the official word – is a huge benefit of the parliamentary system. No ‘twelve months campaigning up to the first Tuesday in November’ like our neighbours to the South (see how easy it is to compare?). Instead our politicians can spend much of their time actually doing stuff in Ottawa, not stumping and fundraising. Of course, the problem has been that we’ve been letting them spend much of their time actually doing stuff in Ottawa, without really looking into what the ‘stuff’ was. And that’s actually what these election cycles mean. We dust ourselves off from our slumber, looks over some platforms and maybe the odd Walrus, Globe & Mail or – god forbid – Toronto Sun article, shake our heads wearily, and shuffle over to the voting booth.

Granted, this apathy can certainly be attributed to the fact that we’ve had elections in 2004, 2006, 2008 and now 2011, but that can be seen as a failure of our own collective will as much as is in the uninspiring leadership of the largest party in the minority government. From 2004 to 2006 it was Paul Martin leading the suddenly beleaguered Liberal Party, losing support due to the Quebec sponsorship scandal. Successfully uniting the Conservative Party with the Reform Party – a bizarre offshoot that had little impact on the Liberal Party’s power in the 1990s that’s already become little more than a footnote in the history books – Stephen Harper rode in as an alternative to a centrist-left party that seemed to have grown inefficient due to having no reason to truly exert itself.

But as he was not the only alternative – what with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois also stealing the Liberal Party’s seats – Harper found himself with only a minority government, and he has done little in his time as Prime Minister to earn a ‘promotion’ to a majority.

So now that we are called up to serve in perhaps the easiest way possible – so easy that a large percentage of us won’t bother doing anything at all – what do we see when we look at our country on the runway, witness stand or operating table?

Well just as it was the ethical improprieties that sunk the Liberals after over a decade of near-invincible rule, the biggest threat to the Conservatives is a myriad of flesh wound-like scandals, with Harper just missing the fatal shot to the heart that would certainly sink him.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Canadians are policy wonks – even when compared to our neighbours to the south, who are frequently and unfairly caricatured as a nation who votes for their leaders based on whether they would like to have a beer with them or exemplify oversimplified ideas like ‘hope’ and ‘change’ – but I would say that we have insulated ourselves from a level of cynicism that believes the government is inevitably corrupt, and that we hold the opinion that people who abuse their power are no longer fit to have it. There is a proud tradition of this, going all the way back to our first prime minister, when MacDonald was forced to step down due to taking money from certain companies vying for railroad contracts (and perhaps some one of our other qualities are forgiveness, second chances and flightiness, as we voted him again years later).

But in 2011, because there is no smoking gun, it’s shaping up to be an election that is going to be promoted and covered like one of miniscule change and passivity (certainly the fact that experts have already weighed in and suggested the likely outcome is another conservative minority government, and maybe, if Harper somehow flubs it, a Liberal minority), when it really is much more than that.

It is a federal referendum on the glaring shortcomings of the Stephen Harper government

I will go into greater detail on his drawbacks a bit later, but we must consider what we will be getting if we do, in so many words, ‘throw the bum out’. After all, it was fatigue of what was there that brought Harper into power in the first place, not an active desire by Canadians to see him lead. So, not wanting to make the same mistake twice, it’s rather difficult to then honestly and with a wholly clear conscience endorse the only party leader that can beat him: Michael Ignatieff (despite Jack Layton’s late surge). While one shouldn’t see his time away from Canada as a drawback, certainly this fact can be drummed incessantly into campaign rhetoric enough for it to affect some people’s perceptions of the man’s policies. No, the real concern is how much of his platform is not that much different than the current Conservative one.

As a way to appeal to the much-needed middle class vote, Ignatieff is stressing health care and education, like any good liberal candidate. But that’s not what we need the most in Canada. Certainly keeping those programs strong, well funded, and out of corporate hands as much as possible is important, but this time it really is a matter of character and conduct. Certainly not in the sense that we want someone who we’d like to have a have a double-double with, but that we have a leader that respects the rules of parliament, and will adopt policies that are supported by the majority of the Canadians, not the industries that employ the majority of Canadians (yes, there is a sizable and essential difference). The Liberal Party platform states that it will increase tax and regulation for large corporations, and with Ignatieff stressing this on the campaign trail, it’s probably the most hopeful sign that the people of Canada will oversee the corporations found therein, and not the other way around.

Additionally, this hard line stance on the ever-more powerful global corporate sector is imperative for Canada to reclaim its status on the world stage as a nation that stands up for the average citizen. Certainly how a country is ‘seen’ by the rest of the world is nebulous and divisive thing, depending greatly on the individual or group doing the assessing, but there are both a handful of well-researched and reputable lists based strictly on quantitative criteria and gestures by the international community as a whole that can be utilized as a litmus test. For much of the 1990s Canada consistently ranked first on the United Nations’ Human Development Index. Since 2000, Norway and Iceland have constantly vied for the top spot, with Canada falling to number eight in 2010. On the 2009 Global Integrity Report Index – which measures “the strengths and weaknesses of national level anti-corruption systems” – we were rated ‘moderate’, behind such illustrious nations such as Latvia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

While these assessments are occasionally reported in the press, actions by global authorities certainly speak louder than them. We were turned down by the UN for a seat on the Security Council, an unthinkable outcome a decade ago, when we were still considered a leader in advancing freedom and safety across the globe. Now the rejection can be seen as a something of a public scolding.

While peacekeeping is still a vital role in ensuring the safety and security for the globe, there remains serious questions as to whether Harper’s military commitment to Afghanistan was (and we can use the past tense as troops are leaving this year) for the benefit of the region or, sadly, an ineffective (and therefore tragic) use of our nation’s soldiers. President Obama’s recently outlining of how America has to pick and choose in which nations to intervene militarily was a back-burner debate in Canada for the last several years.

Our international reputation as a beacon of peacekeeping and goodwill has recently been replaced with one of parliamentary malfeasance and big oil calling the shots. While it’s shameful the way nations like Saudi Arabia and Libya have used their the their vast oil fields to manhandle their populace and feed the West’s petroleum addiction, we should never forget that we’re America’s number one dealer, and have been selling them – thanks to the oil sands – some of worst, crack-like crude available (to further the drug metaphor, the crap comes naturally ‘cut’ with other chemicals that we have to excise out before selling, to our detriment and theirs).

As for what are goals are within our own borders, the 2006 Clean Air Act proposes a cut of 45 to 65 percent (never a good sign that such a wide result is apparently acceptable) from 2003 greenhouse gas levels by 2050, with a decrease not expected at all until 2020. These weak-kneed proposals meant that according to a Climate Change Performance Index of the top sixty developed countries, Canada ranked 59^th in terms of environmental policy, beating only Saudi Arabia. China and America came in at 52^nd and 53^rd.

Would we get better results under the policies of any other party? Certainly yes for the Greens, but we are long way from them being a viable consideration (in fact, the best they can hope for is perhaps a seat or two at most, and in other ridings where the outcome is all-but-certain, a handful of citizens vote for them only so they can persist as a reminder that there’s an alternative to the alternative).  Both the Liberals and the NDP are supporters of the oil sands, and both their overall environmental platforms are not as strong as possible, but at the very least they wouldn’t be nearly as dismissive as the current government has been to the idea of environmental reform. In a 2002 letter to party supporters, Harper called the Kyoto protocol a ‘socialist scheme’ meant to funnel money out already successful nations. It is this type of attitude towards any large-scale political issue that Canadians should find upsetting.

That one of Harper’s key points of criticism towards Ignatieff is that the Liberal leader is supposedly wasting the Canadian people’s time by forcing this exercise in democracy should speak volumes about the man, who is willingness to portray the act of democracy as a point of attack. An excellent take on Harper’s move not to the right or centre of the political spectrum, but towards a more insular and secretive handling of power is Erna Paris’ April 2011 Walrus article, “The New Solitudes”, which makes a brutally efficient argument that the Harper government is undermining Canada’s reputation as a fair, transparent, modern democratic society.

In Paris’ pie e, the allusions to an ‘Americanizing’ style of political discourse are hard to miss. The caricature of Harper on the first page has him sitting down for a haircut, showing a picture of George W. Bush to the wary barber. She opens with her account of attending parliament in November 2009, around the time of Afghan prison detainee scandal, when it was just coming to light that Canadian troops handed over Taliban prisoners to Afghan authorities, knowing that they were to be tortured. Paris found Questions Period in the House of Commons was a ostentatious affair, with opposition MPs demanding that the investigation be expanded and key military figures be questioned, while the Conservatives denied any wrongdoing, promised to cease any inquiries, and accused the other side of politicizing the issue. In handling the issue, Paris concludes that, “the Harper government’s actions called into question the right to free speech; to freedom from obstruction and intimidation; and to institute inquiries, call witnesses, and demand papers — all of them essential to democratic governance.” (Paris, 2010)

It should have been a watershed moment for practically everyone involved in Canadian politics. Citizens should have been in uproar, and the oppositional parties should have ridden that populist anger to electoral dominance, if not early in 2010, then certainly today. But that didn’t happen, and it looks like for the first time a scandal is not going to burn the party in power. Which is quite alarming, and Paris wastes no time in getting to the bottom of this transfiguration of Canadian politics:

“Errol Mendes, a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa, thinks that what drives the prime minister is not traditional libertarianism, which may be socially progressive because of its core commitment to unfettered personal freedom, but rather a version of hard-right, US-style Republican politics that might be termed the modern “Night Watchman.” The Night Watchman is a nineteenth-century theoretical construct in which government assumes only minimal responsibility for the citizenry. Its role is limited to protecting individuals from crime, and the country from foreign aggression: in other words, it is responsible only for the police, the judiciary, prisons, and the military.” (Paris, 2010)

But these are not the conditions that the great steps forward in standards of living during the twentieth century took place. A strong, well-financed bureaucratic state that ensured the gap between the rich and poor was a small as possible – practically enforced through progressive taxation – was a key to the post-WWII developments in North America and Europe that championed a limited-market capitalist system (that was certainly watched carefully by those in the government, when regulatory agencies actually meant something).

While deregulation has not caught on here like in the States – and Harper trumpeted our much more rigorous banking laws that prevented them from making as risky investments and creating dangerous financial instrument like on Wall Street – there has been a courting of the extending certain aspects of neoliberal economics theories. This can start simply with corporate tax cuts – usually with the explanation that it will jump-start the economy, but this is rarely the case – but can quickly move into altering the regulatory fabric of what corporations are accountable for and how easily they can evade punishment.

In fact, the most blatant form of American kowtowing, is the decentralizing of federal powers that should be of most concern for Canadians. When it comes to large-scale government projects like health care in the United States, one of the biggest challenges is dealing with the already existing insurance providers that differ from state to state. Granted their population size requires a more segmented organizing of such institutions, but it doesn’t mean that Canada needs to follows this plan. Yet even this has been put on the chopping block in the last few years: “’Harper is incrementally putting into place this ‘community of communities,’ because he thinks it will enable Quebec to obtain greater autonomy without formally separating from Canada, while allowing Alberta to acquire ever greater independence and taxing powers,’ argues University of Ottawa historian Michael Behiels. ‘On the full range of related constitutional powers — health, social welfare, you name it — the provinces will go their own way. It’s a fine balance between maintaining unity in Canada and losing it. We’re fragile’.” (Paris, 2011)

A granting of more autonomy to the provinces could lead to a fragmentation of national programs that for a long time has been the pride of the country. There has been enough debate over the funds given to both Quebec and the Maritimes at the expense of other regions in the country, so it’s particularly audacious that Harper’s plan seems to be fanning these flames by making other provinces vie for federal funds and fend for themselves (forgetting the words of a particularly prescient American politician, who noted that a house divided against itself cannot stand).

Not to be outdone by aping the American approach to bureaucracy, we apparently followed our southern neighbour’s approach to letting the threat of terrorism subvert our constitution:

“Canadian human rights organizations began to lobby for [Omar] Khadr’s repatriation on grounds of citizenship in 2007. Between 2009 and 2010, three high courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada, ruled that the Harper government had breached his constitutional rights under the Charter. Essentially, the prime minister ignored these legal decisions. Canada became the only country to refuse to repatriate a citizen from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.” (Paris, 2011)

Granted, the scandals that ‘rock’ Ottawa would be mere footnotes, and get buried on page 14 of the New York Times, but for too long the indifferent byline by us has been, “well, I’m glad at least I’m not living in the States”. Said so often, with our eyes and ears focused on the problems down below, we failed to noticed that in many respects American political ideologies and discourses we detested came to roost in our own halls of government.

Echoing the occasional threat of ‘shutting down the capitol’ in Washington, the twice-proroguing of parliament can be complimented as only as form of excellent use of political sleight-of-hand. Beyond that, it is nothing more than an attempt for the ruling party to avoid the democratic process, and to play for time in hopes that the dissatisfaction of their most recent decisions will cool and be forgotten.

The only thing more loathsome is that it seems to have worked. We rely on a healthy and diverse fourth estate to keep us informed and (ideally) help us see the broader pictures of complex issues and not just feed the twenty four hour news cycle. And while the quality of a Canadian news media that has been shaken with closings and corporate mergers galore can always be up for debate, certainly Harper is winning no favours from them thanks to limiting his press conferences all through this campaign to only five questions from reporters. And throughout his prime ministership it has been a common complaint of journalists that Harper’s office releases travel itineraries much too late for them to make corresponding plans, whether travelling across the country or the globe. Apparently Harper is the one politician for whom it is safe to get between him and a camera.

Is this the horror-upon-horror, we-have-to-throw-the-tyrant out type problems? Of course not. But evading the press is a just a more acceptable form of proroguing parliament. Avoiding answering questions, refusing to own up and address what it is you’ve done. How can a nation be proud of leaders who do such a thing?

A ducking of responsibility should be particularly unwelcome in a country that prides itself on its modesty and a ‘do the right thing’ ethos. There’s just an incredibly large amount of little things rather than a single, Watergate-like scandal to ruin him once and for all. And of course, thank goodness for that, but our supposed reticence shouldn’t prevent us from thinking that we can do better. Ignatieff is portrayed in Conservative Party attack ads as an outsider, who bailed on Canada for Harvard decades ago and is only returning for personal gain, but it is Stephen Harper’s minority government that better embodies actual American policy. Should the Liberal leader stress the danger of what might happen if Harper had an actually majority government? Certainly, but talk of respect for the rule of law and an effort to improve transparency would be much more in accordance of what Canadians would like from their government.

The election campaign itself has a Canadian take on the typical political discourse one can come to expect for a Western nation. Superficial yes, but comparatively courteous. The television commercials (whether hyping one candidate or attacking another) have quality production that match those of America, but lack that unmistakable bile. The debates found the party leaders sniping at each other’s shortcomings in the House of Commons, while trying to cram policy platitudes whenever they could.

While this writer is aghast that Green party leader Elizabeth May has been excluded from the debates, it’s not hard to see why none of the other parties would want her at the table. Harper doesn’t want to be lectured on his poor environmental record, and Ignatieff, Layton, and Duceppe don’t want to lose precious votes to a party that doesn’t stand a chance in winning and so could actually help Harper (all the other parties also have the problem that they aren’t exactly decrying the oil sands, a fact which May will most likely remind them all of).

In other words, it remains unclear whether in this final week whether Harper’s wounds have been sufficiently exposed for voters to decide that we’d have had enough of him. And certainly much of this has to do with the fact that Ignatieff and a late surging Layton hasn’t truly made the case that they would certainly do better. It doesn’t seem like it’s been five year of conservative minority-rule. It felt like something that was awfully easy to tune out.

In “The New Solitudes”, Paris observes that, “we have, in other words, a tradition of trying to bridge our differences: promoting unity is as Canadian as backyard hockey and Tim Hortons” (Paris, 2011). Harper’s tenure has fragmented the country in such a way that we haven’t even got the energy to properly to vote him out. We seem to remain in parliamentary limbo, between uninspired realities delivered by the conservatives and the heady promises of the Liberals and NDP that all those angling for the top seat make. Sensibly, we’re not thrilled or hoodwinked by either, but it truly leaves no middle ground.

It appears that we either continue down the path we are on until the other shoe finally drops, or we make a shift slowly tip toe towards an alternative that has no clear and definitive target (is a transparent and constitution-abiding majority party possible in the 21^st century?).

Well, sometimes change for the sake of change is all you can really ask for.

Sources

Climate Change Performance Index. (http://www.germanwatch.org/ccpi)

Paris, Erna. “The New Solitudes”. Walrus.com. March 2011. Accessed March.8.2011.

Global Integrity Report. (http://report.globalintegrity.org/)

United Nation’s Human Development Index. (http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2010_EN_Table1.pdf)

2010 and all that…

“Depending on who you are and what’s happening to you during any set period of time, either nothing ever occurs of much importance or one big thing changes the course of life forever. It’s the reconciling of these extremes that much of human progress rests upon.”

2010 was full of missed opportunities, and thank god for that, because it’s unlikely that civilization as we know it could have withstood the true and (in some cases) necessary changes that might have happened. Summing up the twelve months with, “it could have been worse” is just about right, as it is one of the few bland maxims that people from almost anywhere on the sociopolitical spectrum can agree upon.

“Weathering the storm” is another middling cliché that seems particularly apt, as no one in their right mind would say that the economic crisis is anywhere near over, even though according to certain statistics it wrapped up nicely in the summer as certain industries (read: financial) began to report record profits and the Dow hit record highs. Which just go to show how irrelevant many of the measures of the economy truly are to the average citizen, regardless of what country you live in. 2010 was yet another year where the gulf between the rich and poor widened, and the powerful wrote the rules to benefit themselves first and everyone else second. Nothing new, to be sure, but the question to ask now is just how much more everyone else can take. What does a Western World clearly in its twilight years do now? Perhaps the most revealing international development is just how much weaker America’s wagging finger at China’s supposed improprieties has become. Yet China can’t gloat too loudly because no one is really sure what bringing half a billion people out of poverty and into a materialist consumer culture is going to do to worldwide resources. Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a jailed Chinese dissident reinforces an image of an authoritarian superpower that grouchily snubs the rest of the world when things don’t seem to go it’s way (America has apparently taught them well). As for the rest of the world, Europe is cutting spending to plenty of protests, Africa is no more stable than in 2009, South America is just minding its own business, and Antarctica is giving away giant pieces of ice for a song.

2010 was a year of patchwork. The big family that is civilization somehow agreed that a complete overhaul of our one and only house (and the rules that govern it) is out of our budget, so we’re just going to once again buy some wallpaper and WD40 and do a bit of superficial fixing up.

The many events of the last twelve months attest to this dismal theory quite nicely. How the world handled the big problems was half-assed rather than head-on.

The earthquake in Haiti killed approximately 300,000 people, which unfortunately said more about the infrastructure of the country than the severity of the earthquake. Relief workers were frustrated by entering the country and finding no one in control (doctors coming from other nations to treat the wounded were shocked to find that the only places they could reside in insisted on charging rent) and eleven months later – even after a general election – most of the country remains in ruins.

The BP/Transocean/Haliburton oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico set off an epic chain reaction of failures. The corporate push for profit at the expense of safety was initial problem, which manifested itself in the form of an uncontrollable geyser of oil and gas, which caused a series of devastating explosions that took the lives of eleven deck workers on the Deep Water Horizon oil platform. Emergency procedures were not followed exactly to due a reluctance to miss certain production benchmarks, as cutting off the well would mean a waiting period to start drilling again. The Obama administration looked particularly foolish, having extolled the virtues of off-shore deep-water drilling only weeks before the disaster, and introducing only a temporary ban on the practice afterwards. Any notion of a revamping of American energy policy – along the notion that the current extraction method for the current dominant energy source is dangerous and causing incalculable environmental damages – was never seriously considered (the biggest missed opportunity for unquestionably necessary reform this year hands down. Would’ve changed the world if someone actually punched the petroleum trade in the gut). The various multinational corporations involved passed the buck on down the line. The $20 billion dollars set aside for those that lost paychecks and profits due to the spill was set upon by lawyers and opportunists. No charges have been filed against BP, despite running up a record amount of safety violations in the last two years across the globe. The other shoe seems to never want to drop when it comes to the power and reach of corporate culture around the globe. It can get away with practically anything and the worst that might happen is to be hauled in front of a committee or conference and explain with hat in hand that mistakes happen from time to time (see also: financial, real estate, and weapons industries).

On the Middle Eastern front, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have just not collapsed completely. That’s all the good news coming out of these regions. Throwing bales of money at a problem won’t solve it, but it will definitely keep enough government-type people protected by enough people with heavy artillery to keep any rebel groups from successfully overthrowing them. Iraq went on for months without a government as internal squabbling between political parties kept anything from being done as violence rose again. Many of the middle class intellectuals who returned after leaving in the years after the invasion are leaving once again. No one wants to call whatever’s happening in Afghanistan a war, which is fine, since that’s not what it is, but no one in any position of authority wants to call it what it really is: an occupation. When tens of thousands of foreign troops are required to prop up a government most of the country’s citizens regard as inefficient and corrupt, you aren’t simply there to hunt out the Taliban; you’re there to keep it from becoming the political opposition.

American foreign policy critics like Chomsky, Boggs, and Johnson warn that America is coming to the limits of its power in regards to its empire building. Hundreds of billions of mostly borrowed dollars are propping up flailing Middle Eastern states while on the domestic front economic growth remains stagnant while the middle class – the true measure of a successful society – continues to shrink. Obama is fighting wars in so many different guises that the only way to pay for the required work is to raise the debt ceiling once again.

Money woes plagued the rest of the world as well. Canada – least hurt by the financial crisis thanks to a regulated banking industry and with a not very popular minority government – went all deer-in-the-headlights and did absolutely nothing (including ignoring the problems with the extremely toxic oil sands in northern Alberta). Meanwhile, certain European nations only almost failed economically. For most of the eighties and nineties, globalization meant building cheap crap in another country and then sending it to the West. Now globalization means private (big banks) and public (government) economies are interdependent and fused together so tightly that the whole world paid for the bank bailout in the fall of 2008. A global regulatory industry is only as strong as its weakest party, which is why derivative/CDO mad America was able to pulverize more responsible international markets as well.

But much of the reform that most sensible people believe must occur didn’t get that much press this year. Instead the media focused on the more nebulous reactions to how lousy things had gotten. Like in 2006 and 2008, when the democrats welcomed the leftists who hated Bush for temporary electoral gains, in 2010 the Republican Party embraced the Tea Party and their spendthrift ways to win back to House.

Outside of voting the old-fashioned way, anger in America took the guise of peaceful and aimless protest that rested on mostly empty platitudes. The right meeting behind Glenn Beck in August and demanding a return to Christian principles, the left meeting behind Jon Stewart in October and demanding a return to civility. Good luck with that.

Europe, however, remembering 1968 in spirit, took to the streets not to protest war (take your pick of which one) but government austerity measures. The Greeks didn’t like the medicine it was prescribed by the powerhouses of Germany and France and tossed bombs in its own street protesting a government that had been giving itself more than it had. In England, the removal of tuition caps threatened to triple the cost of a university education and the youth who marched in the streets and lit fires were reminded yet again that any political coalition typically means two parties getting together to screw the lowest common denominator, as opposed to one party doing it all by their lonesome.

But at least there are different political parties to speak of. China’s attempt to shower it’s citizens with Western style consumption levels to cover up for the fact that the billions living there don’t have a say in government can fall apart any moment. And if we check out the dangling peninsula up in the northern part of that country, we find a truly mad dictator and his probably crackpot sun. After years of stringing them along and being just generally paranoid and schizophrenic, North Korea egged on South Korea to such a point – after sinking a military boat and firing some missiles – that the latter began practicing military drills with assistance from America, but as of yet it has not yet grown into anything more than grave threats, with the North promising to use nuclear weapons if the South attacks. For the hawks who are tired of ‘economic solutions’ for everything that ails the world, it sets the stage for a proxy war of influence between America and China, backing the South and North, respectively.

Which won’t happen. Everything blathered about above is a form of exposition or prologue for real change, good or ill. There could have been war, but there wasn’t. There could have been a double-dip recession (or a super-slide into depression), but it just wheezed along. There could have been great reforms to finance or energy policy, but we ducked that, too.

The status quo remained steady, and the lucky leaders breathed a sigh of relief and gave themselves a healthy bonus. Most frustrating perhaps, is that we know more about these misdeeds and behind-the-scenes goings on by the people in power than ever before, but nothing seems to change. It’s the sad truth about Wikileaks. You can dump all the he said she said cables that embarrass some government officials, but the reality is that no one trusts the people in power that much, anyway. Confirming out suspicions only proves we’re right to be cynical about such things; it doesn’t necessarily get the masses throwing rocks at city hall. I don’t know what a devastating, life altering ‘news leak’ would look like, but it would have to be more damning than finding out that the leader of Saudi Arabia doesn’t like the leadership of Iran.

So what does all this mean? At this point, not much. It’s like a joke with a near interminable pause before the punch line. An overdose of information and a dearth of action. All talking, no walking.

Fear was stoked by anyone who wanted a shortcut to a bit of power. The ever-alien ‘them’ still plotted on coming for your jobs, your guns, or your religious paraphernalia, and it didn’t matter if you were talking to people in Alabama, Lyon, Kabul, or Shanghai. One was meant to take shelter in either the state or the collective fighting against the state. The middle ground shrank again 2010, and on occasion when certain political decisions landed there for the sake of expediency, no one on either side walked away happy.

The world of art and culture reflected these chaotic-but-not-quite-epochal situations perfectly. The declining relevance of television was seen in the Late Night Talk Show Wars, Part II. The most exciting thing on TV was a behind-and in-front-of-the-scenes fight of what time a long running program would be on, with no one involved really noting that with advent of digital TV and recorders, people now watched television whenever they wanted, 11:35, 12:05 and 12:35 be damned (plus there’s this thing called the internet…).

Some of the acclaimed albums of the year didn’t know whether to run towards or away from the madness. The title of LCD Soundsystem’s third album asserted that This Is Happening, but spent all of its runtime on the dance floor, as if it was the most capable location to push out all of the uncertainty. James Murphy sings of how he can change, how his needs are meager and that he just wants to get home. Whatever is happening, he can turn away from it and look for solace in the private life. Just Dance Yrself Clean. Kanye West acknowledges the unrealized with My Dark Twisted Fantasy, and with grand, symphonic musical style spent most of the album wondering why his life – or really, why anybody’s – has become so complicated and, in many ways, so unfulfilling. Not wanting to mince words, the last track – which contains a lengthy snippet of a near-apocalyptic Gil-Scott Heron poem – is titled “Who Will Survive in America?”

The best-reviewed films of the year portrayed the corporate culture enveloping youth and innovation (The Social Network), the danger of balancing duplicity in one body (Black Swan), and the importance of superficial concerns of figureheads (The King’s Speech). Documentarian Charles Ferguson simply made a devastating, vitriol-inducing film on the causes behind the financial crisis and names it after a most underhanded crime: Inside Job. Everything is breaking down, going in circles, or void of value and power.

And hey, on that note, what Broadway show could better exemplify this year than Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark? A nonsensical title with great hype and high-quality talent coming in, only to be faced with a series of delays, cast injuries, and middling reviews. A complete mess, with no one seemingly too sure who thought a singing superhero would be a good idea. But with so much money invested, there’s no real choice but to aimlessly plod forwards.

The expectations of 2010 were minimal to begin with – thanks in part to the unresolved clusterfuck that was the Copenhagen environmental summit in December 2009 – and the boat barely rocked, the whole way through even when many people hoped it would for future benefit (the spill in the gulf wasn’t a come-to-Jesus moment for the energy industry or energy users in the West). On the other hand, it didn’t get that much worse. Never have so many people concerned for the future been so miserably satisfied with the endless holding pattern that was 2010. Another year of ‘successful’ deferral.

Let’s hope 2011 blows off all this bottled up steam by heading to the gym instead of the couch or firing range. No reason for all the wrong people to get used to the feel of remote control or steel in their hands once again. Cooler and more sensible heads have to prevail in the next 365 days. All this fucking around can’t be good for the evolutionary process.

Good night 2010, good morning 2011, and good luck to one and all…

The Periodic Table Problem: Einsteinium

I call bullshit on that one. Not that I doubt the existence of the actinide series element that does not occur naturally and was first found in 1953 in the remains of the first hydrogen bomb explosion. No, my objection is the name.

Poor famous Albert Einstein certainly got the shit end of the stick on this one, but that happens quite frequently when it comes to our attempts at honoring people and their work. We certainly have the best intentions at heart when we name something after someone, but that’s exactly what the road to hell is paved with (soon to be title, I’m sure, the Charles Manson expressway).

The nucleus of this idea is an extremely old one. Having a monument or tomb with your name plastered on it was as close as you could get to living forever, as it gave a chance for people to remember you whenever they passed by. For the ancient Egyptians, the pyramids were massive tombs meant for the Pharaohs. Ideally, whenever you walked by one, you’d think about them and how nice it was that they didn’t kill you or your family (the closest thing we have for that today is naming airports after political leaders, except in LA, where they name them after Western stars). Living for a moment in one person’s thoughts is the best thing we can get to conquering death, but clearly this works better for a select group of people than most of us.

Roy ‘Pretty Woman’ Orbison was once asked by a reporter how he’d like to be remembered, and the singer confessed that he’d just like to be remembered, ‘nuff said. Which is a nice humble response, but one subject to the fragmented and forgettable minds of the many, many people who are going to live after you kick the bucket. And most of them are going to have no problem reducing your life to a single song, haircut, or felony.

In fact, I would but forth the opposite maxim of Roy ‘Only the Lonely’ Orbison: How we remember a person is more important than whether we remember them at all.

At my Alma matter, there was an arts and sciences building cleverly called The Sidney Smith Building for Arts and Sciences. I don’t know who Sidney Smith was (it’s an old building, so I assume he is dead), I don’t know if he loved his wife and children, or whether he strangled puppies in his spare time. Other than the rather safe assumption that he gave a lot of money to the university to get his name on a building, he is nothing to me, so I am therefore left with little else to judge him by. My experiences in the building named after him is – on an admittedly superficial level – shaping my opinions of the man.

When I got a disappointing grade on a paper for a class that occurred in Sid Smith, I projected my hate onto this mystery benefactor who had the nerve to have building erected in which my hard work would not be fully appreciated. Everyone in the Arts and Sciences program had at least one class in this building, so it was possible for everyone to know exactly what you meant when you bitched about Sid Smith, and they would offer their heartfelt sympathies for what this horrible man place had done to you. Perhaps if we were more charitable 18-21 year olds we would have Googled Mr. Smith and learned a bit more about him as a way to enlarge our minds and not be so judgmental.

But we had drugs and alcohol for that.

The Sidney Smith Building – and almost any small city park or renovated art gallery wing – are desperate grasps for immortality by those on the recognisability D-list who just happened to have deeper pockets and bigger egos than most. To your friends and family you are considered a generous philanthropist committed to the future of postsecondary education or the fine arts. To everyone else you’re steel, glass, and concrete at best, and where dreams go to die at worst.

John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Albert Einstein are all recognized the world over for their professions and level of success, even if most don’t remember details like the Bay of Pigs, Reaganomics, and marrying your cousin. There’s enough there to remember the person as more than simply a name, and with that, there should be little reason to plaster it onto airports, buildings and chemical elements. In fact, in these special cases of near-universal recognition, it almost cheapens the people’s memories. How many enlightening experiences have you had in an airport? You curse a blue streak when you hear that your flight is going to be late arriving at JFK. Today you don’t even have to call it ‘JFK Airport’. The three letters alone is enough to make the mental connection (unlike your next flight), not to the man, but the place where planes take off and land.

It seems below Einstein to have his name attached to any product, service, or thing (his ‘brand’ name recognition is high enough to have a line of educational baby toys with his moniker built into the title). He has his own line of memes, like ‘E=MC2’, ‘theory of relativity’, and ‘veery eenterestink!’ (I piece my history together from discarded sugar packets), that at the very least, reflect the fact that he was an exceptionally brainy German scientist who spoke out against the use of nuclear weapons after the first use of nuclear weapons. So in the case of Einsteinium, we honor him by naming a radioactive metal element after him: ‘Hey, we found some new stuff in the destructive chemical reaction you hate! We’re naming it after you!’  It’s a bit like naming the rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald the ‘Kennedy’. Uneasy remembrances all around. And just like a gun, Einsteinium – being radioactive – can kill you if you’re not too careful. Behind the public face of the cheery scientist who proved that spacetime is warped are tiny little particles that would love to give you cancer if given half (life) a chance.

But this labeling was done by esteemed scientists who were rummaging through atomic debris.  It takes a very a special city full of very ‘special’ people to take the idea of the name and fuck up so amazingly in its attempts to have people ‘live forever’. The Hollywood Walk of Fame has made it inevitable for you to physically walk upon the names of the ‘greats’, although even that term might generous for, say, Cliff Arquette.  At least a building is large enough to give one pause as you might just glance at the name overhead or beside, but in the harsh wilds of Hollywood Blvd. and Vine Streets, you have the opportunity to not only ignore thousands of dead people but spit, toss garbage, and ask for spare change upon them. If the only time people think about you is when they ask, ‘Who the hell is Gower Champion?’ as they get lost trying to find the Viper room, then it’s clear Roy ‘In Dreams’ Orbison’s humble hopes were misplaced. Being remembered isn’t for everyone, but that’s only the first hurdle that’s need to be jumped regarding how we handle memory and honor. When you’re dealing with the cream of humanity’s crop – an Einstein, a Roosevelt, a Willis – you’re kind of throwing the world a curveball when you name them after near-invisible radioactive poison. If Einsteinium is how we salute our best, it’s a good sign that our exuberance usually gets ahead of our rational thinking. I mean, wouldn’t it be better if we named such a nasty particle after something we hate, and end up with something like, say, ‘Dahmerium’?

The Ascetic Generation

The Baby Boomers and Gen-X fucked up. We have to right the world all by our lonesome, millennials….

Well shit. The hottest summer on record. And in one place, the driest, and in another not too far off, the wettest. The dire warnings of those stressing the dangers of climate change aren’t for some nebulous time in the future. The horrible effects of burning insane amounts of CO2 are being felt the world over. It’s just that we here in the west are wealthy enough to literally write off the problems with increased energy bills (and by using more energy in the form of AC and heating, we are amplifying the basic problem, resulting in an ever widening vicious circle) and food prices (crops that die because of drought or flooding costs everyone money).  The developing world is falling apart because they don’t have an infrastructure that (so far) can manage with these problems. Food riots, acres upon acres of inhospitable and infertile land, and the spread of disease is the face of climate change, but it’s hard to sell this connection to the public at large because these problems have always been the hallmarks of these regions. Only now it is amplified, and therefore nullifying the effects of decades of aid being pumped into the developing world.

What’s to be done? Well, the answers are obvious. They’ve been pushed around and debated over for many years. And if you do any superficial research into alternative energy, you frustratingly find that we have the technology to start up many of these reforms and programs immediately. What there is a lack of is political capital, because the current energy industry that ‘assist’ lawmakers in making decisions isn’t interested in switching horses (coal, oil) midstream (while coal and oil are still around). This is particularly annoying in that if the energy industry invests their vast profits into alternative forms of energy, they can retain their financial stranglehold on us, but at least now we aren’t crippling the planet in the process, meaning their profit making can go on forever. Despite this seeming ‘win-win’ situation, the most essential and influential players in the energy resources world aren’t biting but rather fighting against reforms that would eventually make them rich, so sadly, we cannot legislate our way clean. Corporate lobbying culture has seen to that. But as the director of the excellent documentary Food Inc. reminds us that, in relation to the multibillion-dollar food industry, ‘you vote three time day’.

This basic aphorism – that your only real political power is your wallet – has to be applied to a myriad of other sectors in society. If your choice on the election ballot is between Corporately Funded Candidate A and Corporately Funded Candidate B, then it’s clear that voting, elections and the political discourse is not where any real reform is going to emerge.

If corporations are the true leaders of our society, then we must stop supporting corporations that make money off such harmful practices. This isn’t, easy, obviously, but many people chipping away at the giant’s armor does have a noticeable effect. And ‘many people’ is the key; that communal aspect of coming together for a common goal. If the leaders, those that we are told are the finest citizens that can possibly represent our democratic ideals can’t pass a worthwhile energy or carbon tax bill, we have to do the equivalent ourselves. And that means changing our lifestyle, in both minute and massive ways, because hitting the corporations in their profit margin is the only way we are going to get necessary change in the twenty-first century.

The easy ways are stuff cynics can deride as hippie shit, but if millions of people do it, the cynics can kiss our collective ass.

EASY

-buy locally grown food, either at the supermarket or a farmer’s co-op (which is definitely fresher and sometimes – if you buy co-op food packages – cheaper, too).

-buy energy efficient light bulbs (a bit more expensive at first, yes, but many of them last longer, and then your heating bills go down).

-and Captain Obvious recommends that you, uh… don’t leave lights on in rooms you aren’t in, and that you turn them all off when you leave the house. And hey, don’t turn the dishwasher on unless it’s full. Ditto for loads of laundry.

-yes, climate change is making the world hotter, and that means the temptation to crank the AC is greater than ever. But resisting is key. Buy a fan and keep your ice cube try well stocked, as both are cheaper than running the air conditioning. And back to Captain Obvious: make sure the air conditioning or heating is off when you leave the house.

            The Easy ways above are almost nothing more than common sense reminders that can actually save you money. It gets a bit harder now, as some of the most effective ways of cutting your carbon footprint is spending more money, or changing your daily routines.

NOT AS EASY

-buy energy saving appliances, especially refrigerators. So far, these cost more than traditional appliances, but plenty of government programs offer discounts, rebates, and subsidies to bring the cost for you down.

-try not to own a freezer. Obviously a lot of hardworking people don’t have time to cook a meal from scratch every night, and a frozen pizza is an easy dinner shortcut, but even stuff like this can be bought on the way home instead of lying around for days in a not necessarily full or useful freezer in the basement that is sucking up power like a vacuum.

-don’t drive when you can walk or bike. Even if you’re going to the store down the street, bring a couple reusable bags and enjoy the walk. Exercise is a nice byproduct of this method of transportation.

The tough stuff deals mainly with the most devastating cause of climate change: transportation

HARD(ER)

-carpool. If a bunch of you are going to the same location, meet at a sensible central location and take one car there. It makes getting there quicker, too, since everyone else is also carpooling.

-attached to this is public transportation. It can be incredibly frustrating, as in some cases governments are unwilling to spend massive amounts of money on these construction projects. But if enough people use whatever buses, trains, or streetcars are in place, the greater the chance that the routes will be extended and improved.

-ask yourself if you and your partner really need two cars. Or even one car. There are plenty of car membership rental places that can easily provide you with four wheels and an engine once or twice a week when you need it.

-and if you do need a car, consider a hybrid. Or anything that isn’t an SUV, because chances are you don’t fucking need an SUV. Admit it: No one does. If you need it for work, you buy a pick up truck or a van. If you need it for leisure, you’re an asshole. A decent sedan can pull your boat.

-by far the worst form of pollution is air travel, in part due to the fact that jet exhaust is released at thirty five thousand feet, essentially ruining the ozone layer at its doorstep. So if you can just use the magic of cyberspace for a business meeting, consider that. And if you really need to get up in the air and over land and sea for your vacation – having exhausted all the lovely spots that are bus, train, or driving distance from your house – at least by some carbon offsets. Once again, a drop in the bucket if one person does it, but a worthwhile endeavour if enough people get on board.

-the last insanely hard thing is to make your entire house carbon neutral. This is the equivalent of a complete renovation, right down to your foundation. It’s all the rage in many northern European countries, which is why they look at us ruefully most of the time.

A lot of these points are listed in many excellent books on how to make your home and lifestyle more environmentally friendly (try George Monbiot’s Heat, Bill McKibben’s Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, or David Orr’s Down to the Wire), so please don’t take this list as the most authoritative or extensive. The fact that so much of this (mostly) practical information is available to all is what makes it so aggravating that corporations/governments have done so little to push for changes on a wider scale.

Now outside of carbon neutralizing your home, none of these recommendations really ‘stick it’ to the giant energy companies. Sure by using less energy by doing simple stuff like turning of all the lights and not blasting the AC we’re very slightly lowering their profits, but it’s through using less of their services they’re offering, not turning our backs on them completely.

What does the true switch look like? How much can we really cut out of our energy use to make them change their economic model? How much does the government have to subsidize – which translates to how much do we have to subsidize – alternative forms of energy until the energy industry wholly embraces it?

One almost wants to believe that the executives at these energy companies should see these long-term problems and are just trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the old way before making the inevitable switch. No one would argue that oil is either getting harder and harder to access (which results in risky ventures like deep water drilling), or harder and harder to purify and filter (the oil mud in Alberta is so expensive to clean that until the incredible rise in oil prices a few years back, it wasn’t an economically viable choice). This alone comes off as piss-poor long term planning, but it boggles the mind that they are actively distancing themselves from alternative energy – even fighting its introduction by smaller companies – instead of embracing it so it can charge they shit out of us for using their wind turbines and solar panels.

But throwing up our hands in disgust at the sluggish reluctance of the powers that be is one of the temptations that have to be avoided. The real problem is our ‘new year’s resolution’ phenomenon. This is the one time where sticking to the new routines is essential. Unlike your decision to diet or quit smoking, the ramifications of going off ‘the program’ three months in is not only going to affect you, but all of us.

While I can save a rant against pointless materialism for any other column or article, it goes hand in hand with being more environmentally conscious. If we keep consuming only what we want, we’re going to run out of what we need. We’ve been inundated here in the West that more of everything is the cure for what ails you. Psychologist Barry Schwartz notes that more choice just depresses people because we have that many more options that we can agonize over for not taking.

It’s time to start doing more with less not only for ourselves, but our rapidly decaying and unstable blue and green ball. We’ve exhausted the ‘natives used every part of the buffalo’ analogy in terms of how wasteful we are, but it is getting to the point where our novelty obsessed culture will result in a wealth of commodities and products being available almost exclusively to the upper ten percent income earners that before was typically consumed by all. The middle class in some of the most powerful Western nations is shrinking, just when nearly a billion people in China and India are ascending out of poverty. There isn’t enough stuff for everyone, plain and simple. And when supply can’t meet demand at the same time the planet is overheating and costing governments a fortune, we are on the way to a real global financial catastrophe, not just having to bail out banks for trading invisible money. Just giving up certain things, altering the way we live our lives just so, is a good start to taking a step back from the abyss.

A doomsday tone is not exactly the best way to get people off the couch, but I’m not asking you to take it to the streets. Instead just get up and make sure the lights are off in your home. ‘Ascetic’ isn’t a primitive, dirty word. It can be considered an opportunity to consider what exactly is important to one’s life. Cut down on space, energy, two of everything, and multinational-made luxuries, and maybe there will be enough for all of us in the decades to come. The question we can ask ourselves with pride twenty years from now might be, ‘what did you give up?’

Generation Y: Inheriting the World that Sold the Earth

(this text is based on the immediate (or so) reaction to a New York Times article from May 9^th, 2010 by A.O. Scott, in the Week in Review Section, concerning Gen X-er’s hitting middle age: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09aoscott.html)

Everyone shut up for a minute.

My generation just needs a moment to get its head together.

We have got a lot of messes to clean up.

Our bank accounts are smaller than the chances of getting an effective global environmental policy instituted.

And there’s barely any places left to sneak a cigarette.

That’s other people’s fault. Older people’s fault. We’ve got quite the selection of people to blame. Two big, bad horribly over-categorized and overanalyzed generations to choose from. How about the Baby Boomers, having been in power for three decades or so, overseeing the corporatizing of the entire world, and now entering into their Autumn Years having partied in the sixties and seventies, sobered up in the eighties, grown nostalgic yet self-righteous in the nineties, and then completely bitter and insane in the new millennium? Or should we cast the rueful eye at Generation X, those who are just getting comfortable in the corporate/government corner offices, having crawled over their young parent’s stashes, being raised by advertising and finding the internet in college, but never having a reason to live because the Cold War ended with a whimper? A.O. Scott says Gen X (defined as those born between roughly 1962 and 1979) is the one generation that never grew up? That missed the fighting on the other side of the world and only felt the end of communism through the 24 hour news channels and so had to settle ‘the beginning of aggressively marketed nachos’? (itself a quote from Burke’s ‘The Ask’).

Well we of Generation Y (say, those born between 1980 to 2000/2001) not only did indeed grow up, but had our midlife crisis by twenty. By the mid nineties, the internet had invaded our homes and the marketed nachos went from aggressive to eat-it-or-risk-social-ostracization  - right around when the oldest of us were hitting our teens – and these not-so-subtle changes marked a rapid acceleration in how Western society interacted with itself and the world on a myriad of levels. ‘Accelerated’ might seem like a term every generation uses to describe their distinction from the previous, but it wasn’t just the amount of changes in how we experience the world, but how quickly they came and altered nearly everything.

We’ve seen, heard, and done it all in a rapidly shrinking time frame.

Cell phone have gone from bricks with an antenna sticking out of them to a video-camera-word-processing-music-playing device the size of your palm. We were given these by high school.

Music? Haven’t paid for some or all of it since 2000. And who needs a record label? Or instruments? Just use garageband.

Information? Everything is at my fingertips. Seconds away. There’s no reason to live with a question unanswered.

Sex/Porn? Seen it all by thirteen. (and I mean, all. Not just some Playboy pictorials or a father’s basement Penthouse. Facials, gloryholes, bestiality, and two girls, one cup. It got to the point where goatse.cx became a popular rick-roll meme)

The media? Has been in a hyper drive state with the advent of hundred of cable channels, including a news culture completely reorganized and reoriented since 9/11 as a freakout machine.

Oh yeah, that 9/11thing. The first wave of us hit university and high school around the fall of 2001. While this alone is a shocking world changing event on its own, thanks largely in part of that day we’ve grown up with the faint idea of perpetual warfare (a war on ‘terror’, which is a noun also used to describe seeing ghosts and feeling earthquakes) becoming real… into a horribly misguided and mishandled war.

And it’s not just the bombs. Outside military conflict, the state of the world has become completely fucked up. Impending environmental disaster. Energy shortages coupled with insane energy prices. The rise of China and India. Loose nukes. Large swaths of the planet still living under oppressive regimes and/or extreme poverty. Absolutely disappointment in the democratic governments who seem to be mired in bureaucratic inefficiency while frolicking in the pockets of special interests. And just to top it off, an epic financial disaster when we first began to grab the reigns and become the up and coming adults.

But this is all happening somewhere else. Or maybe down the street. It’s getting hard to tell the difference when you spend so much time in a virtual cyberspace world. We have to talk to our friends. (all seven hundred of them) And keep an eye on our perceived enemies. (Al Qaeda and Goldman Sachs, unless you work for either) And find out what people in LA/London/Tokyo are doing. Right now.

Our idea of time has become centered around instant gratification. If there’s an internet connection, the distant between stimulus and response should be zero. Maybe Gen X built it, but we turned it from the work of geeks into gospel. This is how society works now. If television was the technology that defined the baby boomers, and the expansion of it to cable was for Gen X, we got the internet, the television we could talk back to and alter and deconstruct. We became the shitty, shitty stars of our own global television program. This is what is expected. This has changed our DNA. The world has three seconds to fix my problem or I am changing everything about myself on my facebook profile.

            But the downside to the embracing of this incessant now is that we’re aging faster than you. We’re growing even number than you, at a much younger age.

We’ve had to do this, to drown out an incessant buzz and chatter of the technology we’ve embrace too quickly, but only because materialism has widened its message of accessible essentialism.

We haven certainly a fuzzy, slippery sense of value, but only part because we’ve come after a generation who was practically defined as not having one. We should aim to do good (whatever that is, since doing good locally is probably killing dozens globally, and doing good in Africa is probably costing people jobs in Germany or America), we should probably be humble (but we’ve had it drilled into us that we’re so fucking special, and we are sometimes called ‘trophy kids’), and we should probably respect our elders (even though we’ve been told that all the problems this world has is the fault of all you greedy, graying, short-sighted jerks who sold our future for a cottage renovation). There’s good reason to take any maxim with suspicion. Postmodernism has overlapped several generations, but we’re the ones who get it in their children’s programming. The media is linked to advertisers, who are linked to corporations, and all of this becomes obvious and being aware of it becomes second nature, but the subculture/underground alternatives last for three months before being swallowed and bought out by something bigger and secretly insidious. There is no truth, just temporary agendas. Chomsky has gone from professor to sage to ‘well, obviously’.

With culture splintering, the ability to slip into specific niches of society, politics, theology, what have you, more concepts and ideas of these disciplines have become more tolerated than ever before. Especially since this is a global phenomenon, and the large morass of whatever Western Culture is has become increasingly global.

OH, AND THAT BRINGS UP THE OTHER MAJOR CHANGE WE’VE HAD HAMMERED INTO OUR HEADS SINCE WE STARTED SURFING THE NET:

We’re on our way out. If not the planet (thanks to this thing called ‘Global Warming’ and ‘Climate Change’. Ask some of us about it) then certainly Western Dominance of the World, thanks to those numerous and hardworking Indians and Chinese. We grew up knowing outsourcing was a way of life. That China became a super power in record time. That it was gobbling up western business, western energy sources, and finally western power.

We grew up to hearing Gen X being told that everything was on overdrive and falling apart. Our way of life, our arts and culture, our knowledge of history, the very molecules of our being…

Time is of the essence, because it’s slipping away, Great changes are forecast; so smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. And a disappointingly large segment of the population – our generation or not – believes that the world is going to end of December 21^st, 2012, which says a lot about how people feel about their place in the world and its overall state. Best for all to go away than grow up in it.

What Gen-X grew into accepting through their youth and young adulthood, we began to have drilled into when we were learning to read, and it’s never stopped. Everything is coming at us in shards and pieces, to reiterate a hallmark of postmodernist thought. There are no grand claims or ultimate truths. And maybe we’re all just vibrating strings, if quantum mechanics has anything to say about the makeup of the universe. So much of what we’ve been smacked in the face with culturally has reeked of these ideas:

We started watching The Simpsons before hitting double digits, and wondered about all these weird segues into movie images and cultural references we’ve never seen or understood. We became familiar with Apocalypse Now and A Clockwork Orange in ‘sanitized but twisted’ cartoon form before the actual films. Even the fictional real wasn’t real for us.

We found that irony and self-referentiality was written into the understanding of the world.

We caught grunge in the mid nineties (oldest of us were tweens), meaning we just got the tail end of it. Something about rejection and screaming, but then it blurred into commercial hip-hop (lead partly by Puff Daddy), preteen-girl-marketed boy bands and Madonna clones (lead partly by Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears) and respectable art rock (lead partly by Radiohead). Everything was either slick, artificial, and instantly disposable, or so fucking real and genuine it became an obsession to follow it

We’ve seen politics split, splinter, sees the splinters reunify in horribly misbegotten shapes, but the larger split remained. It has hit new level of impotence, irrelevance and corruption. It’s mindboggling to us that the only thing that is staying constant is the power of the business world. Corporations have become the way the world operates. It’s not taking over, it’s taken over. And when it stumbles, we have to band together while screaming at each other over who is to blame, and feed it money until it can back on its feet to dominate us once again. And excising its more damaging tentacles from society will probably destroy us all.

We’ve been inundated with the idea that everything is going to get harder, while being told to buy a condo, a prius, an iPhone, a hip t-shirt, and a three-piece career.

We’ve had to ‘keep up with Joneses’ since we were twelve. Our ‘grand tour’ our Europe was expected between the last year of high school and the first year of university. We went proverbially grey at eighteen. Saw the drudgery of the nine-to-five as twenty two year old interns. Has it all be done? How the fuck should we know? Apparently knowledge is based on subjective, cause-and-effect, meta-narratives, and a bunch of other gibberish passed off as an excuse to show how complex the world is and why things aren’t easier.

We were the generation that felt and saw the entire processes of the technology revolution. We saw the rise and fall of new inventions in five-year period. The life spans of our goods and service has given us the belief that nothing lasts. Ideas and techniques are expected to be temporary, with something newer and better coming to replace it. Sure, gen x matured to these changes, but we – their younger brothers and sisters or their children – were reared on them.

I [do you want a first person reference?] remember learning how to put on Sesame Street LP’s on my parents record player. Then it became CD’s, and my Dad repurchased all his old Rolling Stones, Beatles, and Dylan albums. But by my waning years of high school, the compressed MP3 and the transition from modem to cable, made this new disc obsolete.

I remember computers with only one colour. I remember having to ask my father repeatedly for help whenever MS-DOS fucked up, I remember the switch to windows, windows 95, and America Online. I remember printer paper with the perforated sides. I remember 5.5 floppy discs for my reader rabbit game. Now I can order a pizza online while mashing up Quasimoto/My Bloody Valentine samples for my powerpoint presentation on third quarter earnings.

The speed at which these older ways of doing things become useless – not even getting a chance to be retro – is extraordinary, and certainly gave rise to an obsession with novelty. Not just in our personal lives, but how we expect the world to operate. And the transfer of these expectations from personal activities to public interactions is a shaky one.

After easing into the world of politics with a sex scandal (the definition of ‘is’? That’s what the government did?), and then eight years of a moron cowboy manager, we catch Obama-mania (not just in America, but the world), and then tune out when he acts like the centrist politician he has to be (which we kind of knew was going to happen, deep in our cracked, disenchanted hearts).

Our comedy guru, Conan O’Brien – despite being decidedly in the gen-x camp, his Harvard background coupled with off-the-wall self-deprecating antics fits the serious/silly dichotomy we look for to a tee  – asked on his final night as host in of The Tonight Show (after seven months! How’s that for demonstrating to us that all hope is fleeting?) for us not to become cynical. Too late, Conan, but we can assure you, it’s not ‘cause baby boomer executives squeezed you out of a job.

Being cynical and cautious has been ingrained for us. We don’t know how to fix it. The problems you’ve (not you specifically, Coco, but the generations before) left for us are massive. The baby boomers are being unwillingly dragged from their positions of power with their fingernails dug deep into their desks by the gen x-er’s, and we don’ t know how to and if we can wait. We don’t know if they have the right answers and the ability, and we don’t know if we have those two things, either.

But whatever we decide needs to be done, we know every step is going to be laced with epic red tape.

            Fuck.

            Sorry for swearing.

            But can you blame us?

February 21st - New York Minutes

Probably the most blog-like thing ever dumped onto this sacred ground. But hey, it's a busy time of year, so this raw, uncut, meandering will have to do. Mazel tov!

Making lemonade out of a tall bold pick of the day and mallorca sweetbread at a starbucks at 7^th and west 28^th street in Manhattan.

The fashion institute of technology just across the street.

I am fresh off the bus. The two hours late and completely unremarkable Megabus. Doesn’t even have it’s own spot at Penn Station/Port Authority bus terminal. Just pull over on seventh avenue, crank up the local radio station to jolt awake anyone still dozing, toss the ‘check in’ bags onto the sidewalk and you can all go fuck yourselves.

I was lucky my bag was tossed out first. Why? Because I was the second-to-last passenger back on after the full customs disembarkment at the border, where I was grilled by a chip-on-the-shoulder-the-size-of-a-boulder type officer who wanted to know which band I’m seeing, how long I’m staying, where’s my return ticket, why are my hands in my pockets, why my hands are shaking (12AM in February, anyone?) , what I do for a living, how I afford graduate school, will I pull up my pants legs for sock inspection, do I have anything in my bags he might not like, and what’s in that bag over there?

The French backpackers and a couple other cash-strapped Europeans had it worse. At least I didn’t have to put my fingertips on the pad and be sucked into the American Identification System.

Doesn’t matter now. I’m here. Here.

After a blizzard through most of New York state. Stopping for agonizing minutes in the shithole of downtown Buffalo and the aerial gateway to said shithole, the Buffalo airport.

The passenger behind me fell asleep with his crappy hip-hop blasting from his headphones.

Another snored epically.

We stopped by at some of the most identical rest stops one can imagine.

My particular window was a section that was ‘painted over’ on the outside, so I could only see through thousands of tiny holes, making signs just blurry enough to always be impossible to read, meaning I never knew exactly where I was until I was fortunate enough to catch a glance from the other direction of a ‘Lincoln Tunnel’ sign.

And the AC power outlet didn’t work. And the wireless barely did.

New York. Alone. I will finally absorb it all. Is that what is required to feel the vibes of the city? Isolation of sorts? No one else’s whims or ideas for direction or dinner getting in the way?

Metropolitan museum of art

I’m very nearly breaking a rule writing this here

Surrounded first by chipped Greco-roman statues

And now finally ensconced in cubism, surrealism, and oodles of early twentieth century goodies

With the advent of the photograph painting lost its interest in mimesis and thank god for that

Painting an idea a possibility of an object instead of the object itself

It’s how we remember anyway

Photographs don’t change over time

Challenging art does nothing else

I just changed the font for the location heading at the top of this page and I must say I think it’s excellent

Battery is low on camera and manageable on laptop

These practical concerns seep into everything

I am not running on very much sleep

Expected

The art is art

I am moved slowly but surely towards the desire to ape the works badly in my own particular… ‘idiom, sir?’

Hands up or the clown dies

This was a way to get through the days and nights

Through falling bombs howling winds and broken hearts

Doing something on a canvas or blood soaked rag

What happens when it goes into a museum

What kind of different inspirations would it inspire in a more private location?

Fewer people but strong like bull

I am listening to ‘Boards of Canada’

And am able to forget it’s on from time to time

Not sure if I should head to tickets booth for Fela! for 2pm

Or 3pm

And whether I should stay down in the times square area for dinner and showtime

Decisions decisions

They will stand over me until their moments pass

(later)

a Pollock is bearing down on me

black white grey on beige

splotches and streaks

Already a mess but prepared to go that extra mile in the blink of an eye

There is creativity here

And maybe I’ll decide not to find it

Sometimes that’s when it sneaks up on you

Gloriously

(even later in museum library)

I’ve been murdering time in the basement library, which kind of doubles as a daycare as there are computer games and arts-based toys in the first section of the library before it becomes more academic and book filled.

All I’ve been doing is surfing the net listlessly, the stack of books I should be flipping through beside me.

I’ll sleep like a rock tonight, but still need a coffee to get through the evening.

And I’ve just finished the bottle of pepsi I snuck in via my water bottle, which cost $2 at a hot dog vendor outside the met

Mental tiredness is floating around with physical tiredness

I’m going to rush through 20^th century European art on the second floor, cut back through central park to the hostel, rest for a brief period then zip down to try and get box office tix for fela at the Eugene o’neil theatre

I am writing this out both for posterity’s sake and so I won’t forget in an hour.

10PM – return from ‘Fela!’

Fela was exactly what I suspected and that’s…a good thing- no, a great thing for $27.00. Excellent chance to see a first run broadway show.

Camera died before I could take a picture of the room (At least I got a good day of photography in central park and the met). Looks like I’m going to be forced to use my words.

The room.

More has been written in less.

10x7. Three walls white, one red. The red has a framed painting of a flower – Andy Warhol-print style – hanging in the middle of it. Below the painting is the single bed. At the foot of the single bed is an end table. At the end of the end table is a small radiator and the wall. At the head of the bed is the other wall, with the door – traditionally used for entering and exiting.

On the wall facing the painting is a rectangular mirror. Beside and below the mirror is a small chest of drawers, and on top of that is a television with a diameter no more than a foot. It is not a flat screen.

The wall facing the door is mostly window. It looks out over this building’s fire escape, a white non-descript building whose roof is not much higher than the window (even though I’m on my building’s first floor) and a basement alley of an apartment building not directly behind it, but slightly to the right.

Small but distant. Not at all cozy. Functional. I’m sitting cross legged on the bed, laptop on the expected lap, watching my battery slowly drain because the room (despite the hostel’s website claim that they have been refurbished) only offers two pronged outlets, which isn’t enough for my highly advanced, three pronged Macbook charger.

At Brooklyn Museum:

Girl on a Chair (1970) – George Segal (not the actor) (in a black box is part of a red chair and woman sitting on it)

Fallen Bierstadt (2007) – Valerie Hegarty (a destroyed landscape painting and frame, the pieces piled onto the floor) 

God, kids are so very annoying. Why are you taking them to museums, you’re lucky if one thing isn’t boring them to tears. Now, this is quite the generalization, and I’m sure a handful of kids would get a real kick out of portraits of wealthy merchants, Victorian furniture, and impressionist landscapes. But I am near-certain most kids won’t give a rats ass.

So please, leave them in the playground at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and out of the nearby Brooklyn Museum.

Which was excellent. Just plain excellent.

Well, the building was excellent. The collection was rather underwhelming.

But it was mostly empty (save for the children), so it takes its place alongside the Bavarian History Museum in Munich as ‘great museum experience’ instead of ‘great museum’ (which the met certainly is).

My back hurts. The Four Tet show’s gonna kill me. It’s Starbucks at 8:36PM, at 8^th Street and 4^th Avenue.

I’ve been bombing the area with my precious few copies of TDD, and fear for the single one I left out in the cold on top of a newspaper box beside the Strand, and I may ‘rescue’ one that I put in a newspaper box that apparently has run out of the Asian newspaper it’s supposed to offer. (I thought it would be cool to put it there, but no one I would imagine liking the magazine would open that particular box and hope for a counterculture newsletter instead of the Chinese (?) paper that’s supposed to be there).

My laptop battery is still kicking my ass.

Brooklyn library was nice – lovely building – but too loud. With few reading rooms. I’d still go back.

Walking around Brooklyn was like walking around the 1974 with imposing apartment buildings taking up so much more space than anything else. On and on.

The slowest McDonald’s service in the world. First time I felt ill finishing a burger (Angus bacon and cheese).

Four Tet’s Rounds is an excellent album for walking the streets around Soho, when it’s dark and the shops are closed.

I forget the name of the pizza place at the corner of Thompson and Spring Streets, but it was excellent, despite the gruff manners of the dude who tossed my two pepperoni slices in the oven.

I didn’t have to pay for this Starbucks coffee, as I should have done the online survey to get a free one. I’ll try to get the access code tonight to get a free cup tomorrow before I get on da bus.

Sign on NY 17: ‘Rockland House Restaurant: Eat here or we’ll both starve’

So that means I have left the city. The true and only city. The city of the present and with fingers crossed the future.

Birdshow/Nathan Fake/Four Tet was just lovely. Just a great stress exploder. Strange how pounding beats, rising and falling for hours, can be so soothing. I left the show in a state of content euphoria, despite the slight buzzing of the ears. I sweated out the three pints of beer.

The dropping went as well as I could have hoped. The same Toronto indifference, as opposed to the possible New York ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ type attitude.

The ‘morning’ bus is nice and empty. Maybe twenty people in total. Hopefully we won’t pick up many in Syracuse so us NYC passengers can keep up this luxurious living. Also nice is working power outlets. Pity the internet is completely down in the Catskills – I’m surprised to find us taking the extremely scenic NY 17 instead of the interstate – and is slow on the streaming video no matter where we are.

The fear of forgetting is a strange one. I’m doing it now on a rather simplistic level. Try to write down events – nuanced or not – that occurred during this sojourn that may fade from memory or get twisted while residing there.

But we are doomed to forget. Not everything, but time twists and distorts all. I may look back on these notes and think that I was wrong or mistaken when originally written. But it was true then/now, even if it might not be so in the months and years in the future when I read this again.

If certain truths (most truths) are dependent on temporality, how do we as a society operate within such a daunting challenge to reality?

Animal Collective telling me no more runnin’ about ten miles outside of Binghampton.

The audience at the red fish were not particularly more animated than most concerts, which is a nice thing. And the beer - $7 for a pint, or close to a pint in a large plastic cup – was fair, especially considering the ticket price. Only rip off was the three dollar coat check (six for me cause my backpack was considerate a separate attachment.

They played Floyd’s Dark Side after the show, and one dude ragged on Floyd with vigour bordering on violence. The guy in front of me tried to argue the connection to electronic music, but ‘dude’ was having none of it, and started spouting about taking acid.

Cold but tasty apple from a fruit seller on the street corner near those…uh… apartment blocks whose names escape me. It’s south of Washington Square Park and almost fused to the hip of NYC

Brooklyn Botanical Gardens needs some entrances on Flatbush Avenue. That was a long and pointless walk, it was.

Bleecker Street feels like a series of commitment bars. If you’re going to pay $5 cover to see a band or artist, you’ve kind of attached yourself to that location for the evening. Bar hopping doesn’t work as well as one would hope. Although I’m sure there are plenty of ‘regular’ bars, it feels that the pay-to-pound-pilsner attitude is dominant here.

-sign on I-81 North, twenty miles or so outside of Syracuse: ‘Next Area: 80 Miles”

January 20 - “Before man was, war waited for him.” -Blood Meridian

If you lose your humanity, can you ever get it back again?

And what kind of question is that, really? Who decides what ‘human’ values are? For centuries they were believed to be absolutes, handed down from the divine, with men doing their best to ape the ever-perfect gods. And when disaster still struck, the fault fell on the shoulders on man’s own imperfections, not the laws and ideals themselves. Only recently – when compared to the long thread that is civilization – has the authoritative power of the laws themselves been questioned. How real are they? Because we have decided them to be sacred and essential, does that make them so?

After all, if they are in fact artificial, that means they are malleable and subject to the horrors of context and fallibility, so of course they can be shunted aside momentarily and re-appropriated when the danger has passed. Ethics/morality/what-makes-us-human is a notion that can be best understood as a tool, something that can be picked up and put down whenever the need for its use arises. When we decide we must act like animals or economic automatons – slaughtering a neighbouring culture, exploiting impoverished nation states on the other side of the planet – we can and do. Looking over human history, one finds this form of action more common than any form of peaceful or diplomatic means.

‘Survival of the fittest’ is an atrocious ethos for a species that deems itself above the brutish theatre that is nature, but it doesn’t take many glances at twentieth century history to see that brief screed be employed in a number of momentous events. (Nazi policies, the overthrowing of leaders in politically unstable countries by both America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the economic castrating of South Asia and Africa)

Chomsky notes that every US president since World War II have broken laws that would have sent them to the gallows if the verdicts of the Nuremberg trials were applied to them. Along with dozens of other heads of state across the globe. It’s not mentioned much - or is spun with euphemisms to seem less shocking and immoral when it is – because, hey, who wants to admit that there’s a gaping hole in our ethical logic? That the victors are exempt from the laws they enforce and push upon the losers.

The challenge then is to essentially practice what you preach. One of the judges at Nuremberg said they – that would be the victorious and righteous allies – were creating a poisoned chalice for the defendants that they the winners dare not sip from. If similar crimes are committed, are the leaders of America, the UK, Russia, and France going to be subject to the same justice? ‘Protecting one’s country’ is always supposed to be ultimate argument, one that can ignore the peripheral and supposedly incidental atrocities, even if the stated goal is not even met. (see: Vietnam) But then, even the losers of battles – whether they be on a battlefield or in the halls of government – cling to the same reasons behind their actions as the victors. Claiming the moral high ground, even if it took immoral activities in the attempt to preserve said ground. And out of this double standard comes revolting and burning hypocrisy. Winners don’t commit genocides. Only losers do that. Hypocrisy is one of the most vile and pernicious vices, the only one that – for all you leaders wrapped in the cloak of Christianity – Jesus specifically noted as being the one that would lead to the pits of hell.

And for those that believe in the concept of eternal damnation, how soothing an idea it can be that all those who take part in such practices shall receive their comeuppance.

But what if there isn’t a hell? What if there isn’t a final judgment? What if this is all there is? What happens to the tyrants who explain away their transgressions with, ‘I had to do it for the good of my country’? Did Pinochet, Amin, Pot, and ‘American Foreign Policy’ beat the system?  How do we account for travesties after the fact? A shrug of the shoulders and a try-better-next-time attitude? A Truth and Reconciliation commission? A couple thousand dollars for the families of victims who died in the name of ‘freedom’? Is that supposed to make up for the temporary jettisoning of human civility? The idea that some people are above the law punctures these egalitarian notions of community. After all, crucified in the court of public opinion is not the same as facing the pulleys and weights of the justice system.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Obama stressed our fallibility as a species, claiming that humankind’s brutal and bloody history speaks for itself. Certainly true, but then are we fooling ourselves – even harming ourselves – by clinging to this idealistic world of peacefulness and unshakable integrity?

We have many terms for the glorious virtues that humankind has deemed the most noble and essential. And all of them seem to exist in a utopia we are continually striving for but never getting closer to.

We know what peace looks like, so where is it? How does it happen? Is the concept impossible in a world where the economic system is based on scarcity and inequality? Is it because ‘peace’ is not real enough in the same way that bread is? Much is talked about democratic countries bestowing wondrous rights upon their citizens, but if inalienable rights were real like, say, molecules, then there would no way for them to be taken away, or not given in the first place. They would simply be in the air. The notion of someone not having them or having to be granted them by another would be as foreign as the concern of gravity suddenly cutting out and all of us suddenly floating into space because the UN Security Council refused to recognize its existence.

But this is not the case, as virtuous ideals and the rights drawn from them always exist in a tenuous position, and it’s disconcerting that this really isn’t acknowledged more often. Political lip service has been paid to these terms so often that they’ve become like wallpaper. You have the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness because we told you that you do.

The ignorant disconnect between the states that are able to offer those three high concepts and those that aren’t can be seen in the long-standing history of exploiter and exploited. Where the citizens in a developed country do not associate their standard of living with the fact that it only exists because citizens of a developing country are forced to do with less.

If we truly cherish our virtues of fairness and civility, then to not be aware of this dichotomy every moment of your waking life is akin to sitting on the World Bank’s board of directors and deciding to put economic and corporate interests above human decency.

At the furthest end of this spectrum, the not-so-subtle elephant in the room – war – has been justified as often as its been vilified as the lowest and most base form of human interaction. The ‘spoils of war’ has nothing on the true reward of victory: Writing the history books. Justification. Rationalization. Either a gentle massaging of the truth or a complete rewriting of the lead up to the conflict. The victory makes the victors right. A very old notion, which was the reasoning behind duels to determine the guilty and innocent.  For many millennia it defined the social hierarchy. With kings – and a handy dandy all-powerful god looking out for said king – the justification of power was absolute.

Until it wasn’t and he had his head cut off.

Everything twists, rattles, and falls apart in the tempestuous winds of change. Whether it be deposing monarchs, or having to watch what you say in the land of the free. Skimming on virtue inevitably leads to vice, and this skimming seems to be an essential human condition. And until we acknowledge that in some functional way, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for a foreign policy that isn’t based on exploiting another, whether it be socially, militarily, economically, politically or culturally.

Which is certainly not an easy task. On first glance, saying that all moral codes are completely arbitrary seems to be an advocating of anarchy, or at least a license for the people and nations of the world to continue as they are.

The difficulty is stressing that the virtues we have – while artificially constructed by our fevered egos and are as strong as a house of cards without our constant practicing of them – have truly done much to create a stable society. That we have climbed out of the muck and live in a house with heating is proof in the idea of civilized, peaceful progress truly works.

Of course, that’s an easy defense of a particular form of morality if you believe the simplicity of this story. It’s also an easy argument to make that the ‘stable’ ‘Western’ society we have is built on the backs of the billions of poor and oppressed around the world.

Has there ever been a time when everything was equal? When greed and manipulation was not part of human civilization? Well, no. Not even close. Science has never been as cold and impersonal as when it espoused the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’, but it may never have summed up the true nature of life on earth so succinctly, either. The strong rule over the weak. Despite our big brains, we are still animals, and whether you’re a human, mountain goat, or dung beetle, your size and power dictate your position in your species hierarchy, regardless of whether you believe in fair trade practices or political amnesty.

But perhaps what’s shocking is when our faults become political jargon and are adapted as government policy. Personal vices are one thing that humanity will always have to deal with, but when a state introduces measures to curb liberties for the sake of security or introduces changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many, it’s another sign that belief systems are subject to massive tweaking, depending on factors that have nothing to do with ‘doing the right thing’. How is this done? How do the leaders continue to get away with it in a time of unprecedented dissemination of information across the globe?

Foucault talks of the powers-that-be reducing the body to a cog in elaborate machine or superstructure, where the value of life is in direct relation to the functioning of the machine. Anything can be manipulated into a tool for meeting the goal of power retention. Including morals. Bombing other countries can be excused in a myriad of ways. People who lose their lives in these military endeavours – regardless of how they began – are lionized as heroes, sacrificing their lives for the greater good. Nobility and virtue is fused to their death, and therefore to the larger reasons of their death. Because these people were sacrificed, then the war must be virtuous. Deceased soldiers play a role in legitimatizing the war after its beginning. They add emotional weight to the power structure, which can be used for further manipulation. Suddenly expenditure is no longer for just objects, but those that use these objects. People as an extension of production. Right and wrong blurs into temporary irrelevance. After hostilities have ceased, the finger pointing and denials of knowledge can begin, the morals of the leaders placed back upon their sleeves, but the damage – whether it be physical, mental, cultural, or economic – has been done. The short-term suspension of ‘true’ virtue has done its job.

How do we get out of this mess? Is it reasonable to believe that technology will eradicate the lack of basic human necessities – food, clothing, shelter – which should be able to go to great lengths to closing the gap between what we believe are inalienable rights and the reality of the world today? And if so much of this is rooted in human nature – in human fallibility – are we insane to even try to remove it from ourselves, as if it could be extracted like an organ or through a genetically altered strand of our DNA? This horrible, horrible flaw makes us different from each other as we are shaped by our needs and wants that alter our views and ideas about life and everything else in grossly unique ways. What happens when everyone is truly equal? Do we gain virtue and peace but lose a part of ourselves? And is it a worthwhile trade?

The answer to the question/title of this essay then is certainly yes, at least today, on the cusp of a new decade. You can call yourself a great and virtuous person/leader/state/corporation, then put these ideals of humanity on the shelf as you conduct your unpleasant business, and then put them back on. However, what these ideals are worth now after the fact is a different matter entirely. History may be your final judge, but you’re rarely around to hear the verdict.

Dec.8 - It's a long way to go, before we can rest, but it's all for...

My/Our Favourite Things

I don’t really know what I like the best, and I think that’s a good thing. Someone recently heard that I liked reading books, and asked me what my favourite one was. And I couldn’t really think of one that stood head and shoulders above the rest. I thought of the authors I liked and some of my favourite books of theirs, but I found it difficult to pick the number ones out of these smaller categories and have them fight it out for the undisputed top spot. I mean, I really don’t know how to properly compare book A and, say, book B.

Oh, I could write you an essay on their stylistic and thematic similarities and differences, and how one might be more effective in this or that respect, but personal favourite means going beyond all that. Beyond rational argument, because that’s what it means to have a personal favourite, not a professional one. It doesn’t have to be defensible. You don’t have to convince someone of why it’s the best to be right. Everyone in the world can disagree with your choice, but you cannot be wrong. It’s the only time where, ‘fuck you, I like it’, can make perfect sense. You have a dangerously fragile psyche if someone can talk you out of what your favourite book is.

So it should be easy to answer then. Effortless, even. The question is simple: What do you like the best?

But it should be noted that this isn’t only an icebreaker, we-have-nothing-else-to-talk-about-over-dip-at-a-party type question. Discovering the best and the sometimes interchangeable term ‘favourite’ in today’s society are cherished by a milieu of disparate forces. The corporate world goes to great lengths to ensure that the best product or service is known and properly offered to the masses, however arbitrarily the best is decided. It’s a bizarre circuit of finding out via test groups what the public likes and then spending millions of dollars on advertising to convince them that they should like it. The act of cobbling together what the ‘they’ are pushing on us all as the best – whether it be pasta sauce, book, airline, vacuum or supermodel – is paradoxically in and out of our own hands. Somewhere in this transmission of ideas there is personal preference being analyzed with as much detail as possible, which is filtered into a single concept or unit that is to have as broad appeal as possible. So there’s no sense in being vague or abstract as to what you like just because something is being fashioned for you. Detail is a good! And they want as much as possible. Market research has essentially proven that when it comes to designing new products, people don’t know what they want until they have it. Well, how about categorizing what you’ve already consumed? Don’t think about it. Just say it. Favourite book. Or movie. Or album. Go.

But when asked, my mouth opens but nothing comes out right away.

Sometimes it comes in a moment of two. Sometimes it doesn’t at all. Why do I like something? How much of it is informed or shaped by the cultural forces that swirl around me in a haze? Do I really like band a, or has it been drilled into me that I should like it by popular music culture, and if so, how much? Do I listen to album and think, ‘this is album is Rolling Stone magazine’s in the top 5’? How can I separate these influences from myself? Not knowing about them? Is tabula rasa – the clean slate – the only way to properly judge art? Judge anything? What are my own criteria, and how often does it intersect with other people’s criteria? Can these common threads mean ‘favourite’ as universal term can be applied?

That’s a lot of questions. And a lot of the answers are spotty at best.

A book that entertains me and tells me something about the world I live in and how to operate within it. Is that favourite? Something ‘I can’t put down’, to use a clichéd blurb? There is danger of using units of measurement here – ‘on a can’t-put-it-down scale, this book is definitely an eight!’ – which is a universal criterion. It’s beyond that. Just because shitty band g sold millions of records doesn’t make it that many times better than shitty band j that only sold hundreds. And who am I to call a band shitty if at least one person out there claim it’s their favourite? Is living in a ‘democracy’ forcing us to democratize things that could clearly exist in a more fascist form, namely, people’s favourite chunks of culture?

Saying the first thing that comes to your head reeks of the word association test armchair psychiatrists use: kneejerk. Besides, three seconds after book c or book d reaches the tip of my tongue I think of three or four others. Is a carefully thought out answer more genuine and honest than one spouted at first thought? People are different in how they process and present information. A single form of evaluation – the first words out of the mouth – is incredibly arbitrary.

Which leads to the problem of supposed individualization: What are we, beyond our temperament? We are processers of information, and each of us does this in a different way, and through our experiences in the world – whether it be your job, your diet, or your internet surfing habits – we will arrange and categorize these bits in a unique fashion, and that’s what others see when they interact with you. So with that in mind, is so surprising that I should hum and haw when someone asks me my favourite book? Aren’t they really asking me to tell them about myself, my outlook on life and possible future goals?

What are we to make of the people that answer with steely-eyed convention a half-second after the question is poised? Are they the people that wear their heart and best of lists on the sleeve, who are so sure in themselves and their goals that they proudly with confidence? Or are they illiterate morons who watch Gossip Girl and listen to Top 40 radio? And of course, is that so much worse than the people who buy/steal music according to Stereogum, read a single issue of Vice and model their life and tastes on whatever is the hipster flavour of the month?

We are afraid that our tastes tell us more about ourselves than we might like to admit so quickly. ‘Favourites’ are supposed to be condensed versions of your likes and views. If Waiting for Godot is your favourite play, it suggests a hell of a lot about your worldview (bleak, absurd, darkly comical, philosophical), especially when comparing it to someone who might answer Mama Mia! (I checked. Yes, the title does have an exclamation mark in it).

Is this slightly insincere, you yourself being judged in some way on someone else’s work? Well, yeah, but life is full of social shortcuts. Icebreakers and small talk are based on the grand, overarching cultural commodities that we ‘might’ share. That’s how you meet people, and finding out that someone like x, y, and z can tell you a lot as to whether you want to spend the next ten minutes shooting the shit over bottles of beer.

You don’t come right and tell someone you have difficulty with expressing yourself to people when they are going through a traumatic period in their life. Instead you talk about sports or something in the news, or what’s playing in theatres this week. And that eases into what you like to watch, read, or listen to. Favourites. And suddenly, you’re talking about yourself while talking about someone else’s creations.

In this the world is a more complex and convoluted web than we can ever hope to understand fully. Science is nothing more than a form of categorization, so if they’re scratching their heads with the mysteries of string theory, what hope do we have in coming up with a top 100 movies list that won’t have vitriolic bloggers making comments in scathing capital letters? Even the most popular ‘best’ movies that film critics and theorists attest are the greatest have contextual relationships with these experts that are affecting them.

And music is even more insane, because it’s so much more universal and easily consumed. Books can takes hours or days to read. Movies take about ninety minutes to two hours of your time. But music? Shit, you can listen to twenty different songs by twenty different artists in twenty different subgenres in the time it takes to watch one film. It is so easy to go ‘off the beaten path’ with music that there is no ‘independent music scene’ anymore. It’s all independent. The concept of favourite in the world of music can no longer apply because it’s gotten too big. Music accessibility – for both creators and fans – has made it the social measuring stick from hell. We don’t have to look any further for proof of this than ‘best of’ lists. There’s so many of them that you don’t have to argue about the choices on the lists, but the lists themselves. What’s your favourite ‘best of the zeros’ list? Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Guardian The A.V. Club? Do numbers 33-16 really reflect you the best? And how many of the songs/albums do you own, let alone recognize? It’s become a common assumption that the more culture you consume the better position you are to make objective judgments on the term ‘best’ and more respected calls on ‘favourite’. Suddenly qualitative properties lead to qualitative ones.

Which is great in one way, but an expert isn’t going to convince person A that person A’s choice for favourite album is utter shit. There needs to be the awareness that all the expertise in the world is still arbitrary when referring to the term ‘favourite’ and ‘best’. At least in terms of popular culture. (clearly the best way to build an energy efficient power grid should be left to the experts)

So you like what you like, right? You’ve gotten over the possible frown or eye rolls that might come from strangers or friends when you tell them that band b are the greatest band on the planet. Does the defiance count as another impetus? Is trying to avoid outside influence another form of relating to outside influence? Do all these factors fester and pop in the back of your mind as you think about favourite? Are you aware of them or are they shaping us all in our own shadows?

As much as these conversations and articles and ideas of favourite can enlighten and entertain us, they are simply another form of the individual trying to make his or her unique stamp on the world. Everyone does the same thing but in slightly different ways, and there’s constant pressure to keep absorbing more culture, to change views, adapt. I don’t want to be labeled. Maybe that’s why I always have a couple favourite books simmering around the top, but no definite favourite. I really, really like movie a, but I don’t want movie b to always be the bridesmaid and never the bride. And movie c is looking pretty damn sweet in the second row. All of these bits of information are a part of me and a part of the world. The relationship between these two objects is always going to subjective and shifting, the meaning of all three components existing in a state of uncertainty, like particles surrounding the nucleus of an atom like a cloud. Our concepts and ideologies of categorization and difference tumble down like a house of cards on a windy day after a brief examining of their foundations.

Or maybe I’m full of shit. After all, my favourite album of all time is OK Computer hands down, no questions asked.

And I know I’m right.

October 5 - Turn and face the strange...

Pieces of Green

An environmental movement intent on strong relations with big business? It’s not pretty, but it’ll have to do…

A long, long time ago (2006) I wrote a little missive titled ‘An Open Letter to Oil and Chemical Companies’, asking them to, y’know, cut out all the polluting that came from them trying to power the planet. Not for our – the human citizens and other animal species – sake, but for the sake of their own bottom-line. After all, profit margins tend to shrink when the people you hawk your products to are ten feet underwater or choking on poisonous smog (two likely scenarios with melting polar ice caps and no decrease in the amount of air pollution entering into the atmosphere).

Surprisingly, I have not yet been awarded a single prize or honour for my valiant effort to save the world (heh…). It appears that turning a blind eye to the many climate related problems that are now occurring (it’s just been reported that Mexico is suffering its worse drought in decades, as well as the city of Sydney having to deal with a massive dust storm because Australia is also choking on a lack of precipitation) is considered a better long-term financial plan than to do anything at all.

But hey, it’s no shock that private enterprise is reluctant to cut down on anything – while eying the short term or long term – if it’s going to get in the way of profits. With the economic collapse of 2008, we all know these morons can’t police themselves. After all, that’s what we have a government for, right? The power of the public, which can create mandates and regulations that the private companies must follow, right?

Well, looking on the very dim bright side, the halls of government are not necessarily where good ideas go to die, but instead they are simply where good ideas are held down on a cold steel table and are neutered, amputated, and heavily sedated.

Environmental groups in the United States are demanding that there needs to be a 40% cut in future carbon emissions as just a start to combat climate change. The latest bill that is slowly trudging through the American bureaucratic system is pushing for a cut of 4%.

Yikes. And of course, it won’t be astounding to anyone that this reduction of goals occurred because of the direct influence of major corporations upon the elected members of the government, either in the form of fundraising during the election season, or the general practice of lobbying. Other disappointing developments involve a watered down miles-per-gallon standard that doesn’t have to be in place for another seven years, and an outright admission by the US government that they’ll be too tied up with the health care mess to address any huge climate change reforms in time for the global environmental talks in Copenhagen in December.

Therefore, the conclusion (at least until the great toxic concavity Wallace writes about in Infinite Jest becomes a reality):

It’s unwinnable. The corporations have triumphed. The concept of profit via unrestrained capitalism has forced its way into every aspect of not only Western but global society that we cannot excise it without destroying the very fabric of our civilization. We cannot defeat the monster, because we live in its belly.

It’s not that certain ventures are too big to fail, it’s that there is only one true venture – the almighty dollar (soon to be yen, probably) – and all of us play a consensual role within it, whether we are aware of it or not.

So, with that in mind, we will have to get creative, and start talking to the corporate behemoth in language it understands. And words it likes to hear. Like: Profit, share (not the generosity thing), investment, profit, return, fiscal growth, margin, diverse buyer segment, and profit.

And once we become fluid and natural with these terms, it would be time to execute a coup of feasible proportions. The plan is called ‘Pieces of Green’, for rather obvious reasons. Money has to be the dominant factor, otherwise no one with a lick of power is going to listen to you (oh, the crushing truths of modern, capitalist society!).

You will note that is a disemboweling of the name of one of the earliest and largest environmental movements. But it’s pretty clear (and unfortunate, certainly) that Greenpeace has no tread anymore. Their goals are admirable, their drive is passionate and genuine, but the people who run this world see them as nothing more than animal loving hippies. I suppose stopping whale fishing boats is one of the most exciting and spiritually rewarding green jobs out there, but the decisions that are going to destroy or save the planet are being made in the board rooms in skyscrapers in New York, London, and Shanghai.

So I’m flipping the compound word a bit so it sounds a bit more like something to do with money, the language of business (‘The world is a business, Mr. Beale’ – Network). It’s something a pirate’s parrot would squawk while perched on the man’s shoulder.

Pieces of Green will offer oodles of cash to some of the world’s largest corporations. Not solely my cash, mind you (I don’t really have …any…in the grand scheme of things), but everyone’s cash. We’re gonna foot yet another bill for the greedy, obstinate and all-together asshole-ish global corporations like Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon to finally step in line and join the 21^st century.  And we’re gonna groan and grumble at the costs, and they’re gonna fuck up several times along the way, but the alternative (floods, drought, food shortages, disease, etc.) will always be three shades uglier.

Of course, giving money to any organization whose sole goal is to make money regardless of the human cost is rife with challenges. What we have to avoid is the rampant corruption that is found in any other government plan that ‘outsources’ the work to private enterprise. And it’s not only in America where this is a problem. In the UK, a construction job to widen the M25 was estimated by an independent organization to cost approximately 478 million pounds. The government is paying 6.2 billion for the job to be done. This has been the subject of a George Monibot column, and he notes that the rest of the money goes to the banks, construction companies, and other service industries, with the taxpayer picking up the tab.

But it should come as no surprise that where blank cheques are issued without much of a background check or follow-up there is going to be a system rife with problems. Rolling Stone political journalist Matt Taibbi notes that this same type of corporate corruption is certainly going to come into play when carbon credits are finally introduced to G8 countries. This is strongest move yet to create a financial incentive to curb harmful emissions. Now that there will be a dollar amount set to the units of carbon released into the atmosphere, those companies that go over the prescribed limits will have to pay x amount as a form of penalty. Companies that can stay under the limit can ‘sell off’ the difference to companies that can’t.

Taibbi notes that a rather unusual player is going to be entering into the carbon credit market, one that has absolutely nothing to do with pollution, but a lot to do with buying and selling pieces of paper, or the promise of pieces of paper: Goldman Sachs, the same banking organization that towers over wall street and whose alumni holds several top economic posts in the American government.

That’s right, carbon credits – the stock meant to save the planet – are going to be in the hands of the people who helped pioneer the credit default swap and algorithmic trading (look it up, it’s crazy), which were instrumental in steering the global economy into a ditch. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, it might not even have to become so nefariously complicated that a corporation will have to buy credits from a superbank for permission to release chemicals in the air that will slowly kill us. If you’re an oil company whose profits are in the billions, a couple carbon fines may not be anything more than flies easily swatted away. If the fines are in the millions of dollars (unlikely to be that high at the start) and it would cost hundreds of millions in upgrades to get back under the limit, what’s your incentive to change? Just pay the fines as go on your horrible, earth-killing way.

Which is why my ‘here you go, you fuckers, we’ll kill you if you screw this up’ environmental stimulus package is clearly superior. Load it with regulatory strings that will promise them future profits, as the money we’re giving them now should fulfill their ravenous desire for present day profits as they get the nuts and bolts for renewable energy sources that already exist in order. If they fail to change, we all fail and civilization takes a thousand year step backwards. And if they succeed, we all succeed (even if they succeed and get even fucking richer thanks to our initial ‘investment’, that’s fine, once we get the environment under control we can work on the much-needed overhaul of capitalism and global equality…heh).

Sure my three page Pieces of Green plan of giving large corporations shitloads of money for environmental reform seems ridiculous, reductionist, and unfeasible, but hey, Hank Paulson’s three page request for $700 billion dollars for his Wall Street pals passed, so what another, oh let’s say, $300 billion or so amongst friends?

Aug. 18 - We Are the Dollars and Cents...

Corporations as countries as corporations

Leave it to a James Bond satire to teach the teenage/adult me the truth about 21^st century politics and economics:

Number #2: Dr. Evil, you say you want to take over the world, but there is no world anymore! There are only corporations.

You tell ‘em, Robert Wagner! Newsflash, folks: Privatization is no longer slowly taking over the world. Now it is taking over very, very quickly.

We have to get used to it. I’ll repeat it: We have to get used to it. It’s a bitter pill to take, and we can certainly skewer the odds in our favour ever so slightly so that these private institutions will at least look after us some of the time, but we have to start seeing ourselves as commodities, as part of an economic equation, nothing more, at least in terms of how we consume good and services. Sorry, Naomi Klein. We lost. Not that I myself was particularly heartbroken. ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst’ is a great motto, but considering most people are lazy, ignorant (which is worse than being dumb, as it’s choosing to be dumb) and will take what is easy over what is ethically right nine times out of ten, I was ready for all of us to go ahead and fail ourselves without too much fanfare.

Maybe I’m being cynical about the human condition, but seeing the world overact to Michael Jackson’s death and allowing only a minute or two in the news for the passing of Robert McNamara – the man that saved Ford, oversaw most of the Vietnam War, and was president of the World Bank – made me throw in the towel. The insipid and childish debate over health care in America hasn’t allayed my fears much, either. And note that the much vaunted ‘public option’ is being tossed to the wolves in favour of…well, no one seems to be one hundred percent sure, but I’m sure Blue Cross and Aetna are somehow going to get by just fine…

And just to be clear, I don’t feel that I’ve become a broken hearted liberal or anything. I don’t have the time or temperance for that. No, it’s a buyers and sellers market now for absolutely anything, no matter what your political stripe or bent. Look at Blackwater (now called Xe): Now even war is fought for corporate profit. Of course, maybe it’s always been this way since we climbed out of the muck, where money talks and everything else stumbles lemming-like behind it. The only difference now is that we are going to acknowledge it openly and with a healthy dose of suspicion and cynicism. When we hear a corporation’s PR machine claim that the customer is always right, we must now snort loudly and demand that they prove it by showing us the numbers.

Adopt, adapt, and improve.

To operate in this new paradigm, you have to remember some new and basic rules about the world of today and tomorrow. You may not like them – I sure as hell don’t – but you’re definitely going to have to get used to them:

-Privatization puts profit before people.

End of story. Nasty? Immoral? Will possibly destroy civilization in the end? Yes, yes, and…mmm… yes. But to consider that nasty and immoral tendencies are entering the world commerce for the first time is to forget the history of the world. Slavery is as old as civilization itself, and has powered many of the greatest ones (Egyptian, Greek, Roman). And as for the excuse, ‘we don’t do that any more’, well, we certainly don’t have any problem with polluting the shit out of this planet. Or letting billions of fellow humans live in impoverished squalor. Or have many of those same billions manufacture trinkets and toys for the lucky several hundred million of us who live in the developed world. So let’s put aside the idea that either then or now there was ever a moral high ground in the world of business.

Good old fashioned greed is at the heart of profit, and the Western World has been insanely fortunate that we’ve exploited technology and other cultures to the point where it’s not only kings, queens, and heads of state and companies who benefit. Oh, the usual lot get the biggest slices of pie, but with the vast economic gulf between how 1/3 of the world lives and the other 2/3, you realize that we have been feeding on a parasitical system that we supposedly detest for centuries.

Americans got quite upset at wall street bankers getting huge bonuses even though they were responsible for an economic clusterfuck, but that only makes sense if you frame it so that the average American is on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. And that means a lot of ignorance as to how the rest of the world lives (ignorance again? A pattern is emerging…).

We can’t destroy the power of profit, but if we can twist it ever so slightly by promising a profit after [CORPORATION] has sold us a functioning and dependable product or service, then all the better. Awarding failure is the death of capitalism and corporatism. Nothing is too big to fail. If you’re not posting profits, fuck off and die. But if you’re going to post a profit by cutting corners on your products’ safety standards, people will start dying, meaning people will stop buying, which means you’re not posting profits, so fuck off and die.

-If profit is god, then you have a price on your head

Money is power. But you knew that already. A big bank account means you can have very special friends who also have big bank accounts as well as very impressive strings that can be pulled for you from time to time.

In the future, we won’t have to use visual cues such as clothing or vehicles to determine the size of people’s wealth. Products will be based solely on their function and aesthetic quality. No one will buy something to keep up with Joneses’, because everyone will know the exact worth of the Joneses’ assets, just as they will know yours.

Finally you won’t be judged on the colour of your skin, your religion, or your clothes. It will just be a simple number, with two decimals tacked on the end, to be exact.

The bigger the number that sits in your bank account defines the totality of your life on earth as far as the important institutions are concerned. The more you’re worth, the more you can do, in every sense of the word.

It’s better than a passport. In fact, if you reach a certain level of power it can completely replace one. Incidentally, that’s also the level where you are able to make whatever you want to do suddenly legal (by tweaking laws and statutes), or if not that, are able to get someone else to do your dirty business with enough distance in between that it’s never traced back to you.

We are on the cusp of a vast form of dehumanization. One of the consequences of globalization and unrestrained corporate mergers is that the economy has become so complex and interdependent that many facets of it ARE too big to fail (contradicting what I said above, but corporations care not a whit for paradoxes).

Not everyone may actively participate in the stock market, but you can be damn sure that anyone with a pulse has a share in this thing we call human civilization, and boy howdy are we hoping for it to inch ever higher so we can all afford that plasma TV and ivory backscratcher!

-Borders will be replaced with consumer zones

One day you will stand up at the beginning of a sports event and praises the virtues and economic reach of [your country in question], brought to you by Dow Chemical.

Nostalgia is a very powerful force, and marketers know this. Despite the fact that corporations have a greater say most of the time in the direction of a nation than it’s citizens, eradicating the structure of the government itself is bad for business. People like the idea of nations, and what they are supposed to represent (American hegemony! German beer! Japanese friendliness!), so there’s no reason to dismantle a comforting mask that soothes the general populace.

But these symbols will be empty symbols, with no real power to back them up. Borders will melt away, much like they have in the European Union. But instead of a political body representing the populace, it will be a corporate body representing the needs and wants of consumers in that prescribed zone.

What is available in these zones – whether it be a product, service, or bureaucratic system – will be determined by the corporations examining their bottom lines for that particular quarter with limited feedback from the customer base (for old times’ sake, it will still be called ‘voting’). ‘What’s your poison’, they’ll ask, and depending on how you answered the fifty questions they will offer up Northern California as brought to you by Ben & Jerry’s and Google, The National Council of Evangelical’s Cola-NORAD-o, or maybe the Peugeot-Socialist Zone of France. 

Think I’m crazy? Go visit Atlanta – home of Coca-Cola – and try asking for a Pepsi.

Corporate Interest is the new Law

People don’t own corporations, we’re slaves to them. Corporations have become the new conquering nation, perpetually expanding its reach, and diversifying when market research suggests it has reached saturation with its original product. The laws we were bound to follow and uphold for the good of civil society have been replaced by the fine print found in new, corporation-friendly laws that allow Mosanto to patent genetically modified food (like seeds that are resistant to Mosanto-manufactured pesticides) and for Dow to dismiss charges of negligent homicide with a big fat check that doesn’t put a dent in their overall profits.

Let’s lay it out, shall we? Haliburton is a more powerful and relevant foreign policy arm of the United States than its military. Haliburton controls energy the way the mob control southern Italy. They have become so large that the services they offer are frequently surmised in corporate doublespeak. I mean, what exactly is ‘production volume optimization’? How much easier it must be to do absolutely anything when you can call it absolutely nothing.

But just as the previous administration had dozens of ex-oil executives running the show, it seems fitting then that in the middle of financial disaster that the current administration has its halls chock full of Goldman Sachs alumni. 

It’s not a conspiracy, folks, it’s just good business. Remember the wall street banker bonuses that came out of the bailout money? Don’t look at it as the government – and therefore the American taxpayer – getting screwed. These corporations own/manipulate the government for all intensive purposes, so it’s really the same people moving the money from one pocket of theirs to another.

If you think about it for a moment – and leave morals at the door, which we’ve already agreed is the best way to understand international politics and finance – you’ll realize it’s easier this way. And what’s wrong with a little Occam’s Razor in the early years of the twenty first century?

I think the picture is becoming clearer. Nothing much is going to change, because so much of how the world works is already like this. In fact, the only difference is that we’re going to admit to ourselves the unpleasant truths, and maybe it’s just me looking for anything resembling a silver lining, but I think that’s a pretty big and important step, all things considered.

Perhaps it seems like I’m selling the positive side of the human spirit short (hell, I used the ever-spooky term ‘dehumanization’), but there’s still plenty of room for the soul. There’s been art, creativity, and desire for endless novelty and unbridled chaos in both the most oppressive and open societies on earth. A world where everyone has (or is) a number isn’t much different from a world than what we have now. A full and well-lived life won’t be squelched under the iron fist of political corporatism. It will still be a personal journey full of friends and family and unique human experiences. The obstacles will be the same, just sponsored by a shoe companies.

It will be a better ordered world, but definitely not a dystopian world hiding behind the veneer of a fake utopian one. After all, let’s not think everything was completely rosy and perfect once. Let’s not nostalgize our past, because by doing so we will be both naïve and bitter about the future.

So…meet the new world. Same as the old world. Hopefully we’ll just know the difference this time.

June 21 - There Goes Your Corpse Again...

America DOA: Money Talks, but only Real Money

I

            Barack Obama has inherited an economic corpse, and it looks like he’s on the verge of destroying America while attempting to save it. And no, it’s not because of these ridiculous accusations of an onset of socialism being tossed around by the conservatives and their well-paid media pundits because of the increased taxes and demands for market regulation. It’s not mentioned very often, but the wealthy were taxed more heavily under Regan than under Obama’s current readjustment plan. And that says a lot. A reluctance – even by a democratic president whose party controls both the house and senate – to return to a time when much of America’s financial difficulties could be alleviated or lightened by taxation suggests a society that wants the perks without the hard work that comes with it. Instead, they’re going to borrow money from China and other nations and organizations via the sale of treasury bills. That’s right, more banking shit.
            The final result of a laissez faire/free market: wealthy people get much wealthier; everyone else stumbles along, borrowing more than they can ever repay. So when you look at the most basic economic figures of the last decade, yeah, it looks like America’s income has been growing, but it's misleading as most of this growth is only for the superrich. And while they can weather an inflation bump or a mortgage crisis earthquake (depending on where their money is invested), the middle class and below cannot.

            Sob stories of superrich losing millions frequently overshadow the more common stories of the middle class losing everything.  It's the eternal struggle: the few rich versus the mostly poor. For thousands of years it was kings and emperors, then it was kings and advisors, and then it was politicians. Throw in the odd medicine man turned priest and you’ve got human history wrapped up in a couple sentences. But surely now in the 21^st century, with our fingers burnt once again with dizzyingly bizarre economic concepts like credit default swaps and eight years of uninspired leadership, we’ve moved on, right?

            Well unfortunately, the dumbfuckery never ends. Lawrence Summers is a chief economic advisor to President Obama and was the Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. His take on the economy just before the bottom fell out:
“We’ve probably done a better job of the last 20 years on the problems the market can solve than the problems the market can’t solve. We’re doing pretty well on the size of people’s houses and televisions and the like. We’re not looking so good on infrastructure and education.” [NYT Sunday Magazine, Aug 24, 08]
Great buddy. Good job at focusing on what makes a nation great. A fourth bedroom and a 50 inch flat screen are more important than a country with safe bridges and a generation with college degrees, right? Are we supposed to be impressed that he knows education is in the ditch, or that he tried to find the ‘bright side’ of this problem by praising mindless, unrestrained material consumption?
            Without question, the financial crisis is a failure of government and private industry on a massive scale. That’s what this was and still is. Corporations and the handful of people who run them hate oversight and regulation because they get in the way of profit. The oversight and regulation is there to ensure they don't rape the fuck out of the little people (whether in the form of polluting the planet, exploiting and monopolizing vital resources, or simply taking advantage of human labour), but little people stop looking like little people when they start seeing them as an age demographic or consumer base, and suddenly you’re a company that only does product recalls if it’s cheaper than dealing with lawsuits.
            So it's clear the deregulation of pretty much of everything in the last twenty five years has shown that the market cannot police itself when greedy cocksuckers are in charge (and I don't believe you have to inherently be a greedy cocksucker to run a company, but it seems that it doesn't take long to become one once you get an expense account and your own snazzy private plane. Eternal cliché: Absolute power corrupts absolutely). This means that the future must lie in the increased power of a regulatory body representing the will of the people, also known as, an effective government.
            Sure corporate America spits on the welfare socialism of western Europe (and thanks to corporate America jamming the airwaves that they own with anti-socialist rhetoric, middle America has followed suit), but thanks to higher taxes they have 'free' health care, education, social programs and a better standard of living. A fact overshadowed in the mainstream American media by focusing on the horror of overtaxing the wealthiest citizens. In the Netherlands the highest tax bracket hands over about 60% of their annual income, but what they get in return includes not only childcare, but also your kid’s schoolbooks. You are guaranteed by the government four weeks vacation, and are paid your regular salary during that time. And while the best Dutch hospitals don’t compare with the best American hospitals, every Dutch citizen can afford the care that is offered because it is paid by the government, not out of the individual’s pocket. Going bankrupt to pay for a life saving operation – a common occurrence in America – seems like a negative effect of capitalism that no one likes to think about.

            But as tempting as it is, you can't make too many comparisons with Europe, as America is almost four times the size of the largest European country. To offer the same amount of services to the United States, the size of the bureaucracy that would be required is mind-boggling. Perhaps technology will exist decades from now that could permit such a society, but certainly not right now.
            And that’s why people who demand a much higher tax rate fall into the same trap that those clamouring for free markets and deregulations fall into: oversimplified answers to insanely complex problems. Throwing lots of money at a problem doesn’t make it go away (see: Iraq). Sure, the stimulus package will build some bridges and improve telecommunications technology in many fields but it’s going to be a slow, gradual process of the bankers growing back balls and brains.

But the problem isn’t just the broken state of economy, and whether the president can get the banks simply lending again. The question to ask is whether what Obama is offering is nothing more than just a couple chemo blasts of radiation when what America needs is emergency surgery on its entire financial superstructure. Getting the economy out of the wheelchair and onto crutches is great, but what do you when social security and medicare collapse in the next two decades? China and the middle east have billions and billions invested in America, and what do you do when they begin saber rattling for their trunks of cash to be returned with interest?
            When you cannot grow, you have to at least sustain. Weather the storm. Unfortunately, the only possible comparison to the current economic crisis is the great depression, and those tides didn’t really start to turn until Hitler marched on Poland. And that’s what we do in these times. Turn to history, explore how or forefathers worked through grave situations. The problem with this is that sometimes by studying history you end up doing the exact same thing, which results in a wide but no less vicious circle. Bill Clinton may have said, 'it's the economy, stupid', but it's a rather unsettling fact when you realize that Marx essentially said the same thing nearly 150 years ago.

II

            But I would posit that all of these problems that America has to address are symptoms of an even larger one. And this overarching problem can be condensed to one word: Size.

            There has never been a country as rich and as powerful as America. A democratically elected government for over 300 million people, where, despite obvious class divisions, are guaranteed protection under the law (taking into consideration human fallibility), education (up to the age of eighteen), offered quality emergency health care (granted, the bill eventually becomes your problem in many cases), and basic levels of infrastructure that allows for safe transport and purchase of a wide selection of goods (although the higher you are on the economic ladder, the more choices are available to you).

            No country with such a large population is able to offer its people so much. And while it can be argued with little effort that much of these advantages are available to every citizen at the expense of American foreign policy throwing its weight around in international affairs, this reckless ‘self exemption’ of certain international laws and treaties are also nothing more than a symptom of America’s size.

            The massive bureaucracy that gives America its armed forces, its roadways and bridges, and its social security and welfare cheques is subject to every negative stereotype about any government program you could think of. It can be slow, corrupt, ineffective, confusing, and – depending on where you stand on the political spectrum – completely unconstitutional. But despite this, it works more often than it doesn’t for now, the proof being the fact that everything hasn’t fallen apart yet. The American military is the world greatest (give or take some body armour), the bridges don’t fall down (very often), and the cheques arrive in the mail (oh yeah, the post office is also under their control, which nothing to scoff at it considering America’s physical size is impressive as well).

            When size becomes too much to deal with for one institution, it seems like the sensible thing to do would be to pawn off certain tasks to other groups, but only if said groups are as dependable as the original single institution. The attempt of the Bush administration to privatize as many government services as possible came under fire from a wide swath of America, and the criticism was certainly not without merit. Corporations which put profit ahead of the services they provide become an abhorrent thought when the service in question is people’s health and safety. It is no wonder that most would hope for the government to take this matter into its own hands, as, despite rampant and unending corruption, at its very core it is a body dedicated to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness for its citizens.

            But in the big institution known as the Federal Government, it’s unwieldy size makes it easy for backdoor dealings and greased palms to go by undetected. For a long time corporate America had its hands tied with regulation, meant to keep it from becoming too large and powerful. But the defense of corporate interest still continues unabated, of course, because of the massive influx of cash these companies float down the Potomac, which is eagerly snatched up by helpless senators and congressmen. Even the upstanding, heroic, historic and current president did not resist the lure of the megabucks in his 2008 campaign. Obama promised that changed had come to Washington, but some of his biggest financial supporters were from banks that were quickly imploding in the fall of last year. Money talks more than votes, and that’s always been the case, but today it’s as if money doesn’t talk, it demands (or swears, for all you Zimmy fans out there).

Just what going to be the result of, ‘stemming corruption, earmarks, and vanity projects’ that linger in the small print and margins of legislation? Are we to believe that this is the sole impetus from keeping America from reaching the promised land? Earmarks may be insidiously inserted into annual government budgets, but their eventual resting place is a construction project that provides jobs and requires resources that stimulate the local economy. This is business as usual in America, for better or for worse. Sure a stamp museum in Wisconsin may not be the wisest spending of taxpayer money, but have you got a load of the defense budget?

And beyond the nonexistent intellectual discussion of the pros and cons of a couple billions dollars worth of earmarks stuck inside of a three trillion dollar budget, what is most dangerous about ‘business as usual’ politics is the difficulty in excising all these supposed negative qualities from the governmental process. Kind of like trying to remove a tumor from the brain. There is a good chance that in trying to save patient you’ll kill them. The United States government has never existed without a twisted, money loving relationship with private enterprise – George Washington was both the richest American and its largest landowner when he was president – and are we just assuming that trying to do so now would be… better? Amazing? Worth a try?

I’ll take anything for a spin around the block, but what are the chances of honest governance being given a far shake in Washington? ‘Honest’, I suppose means greater transparency in it’s dealings, as ideally citizens would cry foul whenever they see something in a budget or bill that seems wrong or unfair. But bringing the equivalent of a watchdog to Washington is just adding another office that stares at paper and computer screens all day. Despite its good intentions, it quickly becomes a legislative speed bump. A streamlining of the bureaucracy is simply not possible, especially considering that even after massive budget amputations (‘cuts’ just don’t do it justice), Washington seems to be mired in papers and pending approvals for everything save the military, which gets the royal treatment to keep the country safe, by any – and as many costly – means necessary.

But a country that focuses solely on the strength of its ability to defend itself from the outside is more susceptible to rot from within, and that’s true of a country no matter what its size. America just happens to be in the unenviable position that simply because of its size every country is to some degree dependent on its actions, and when the big dog get sick like it is right now, everyone in the pound suffers.

III

            The problem is that everyone knows change is needed – that’s the slogan that won the presidency last fall – but no one wants to get their hands too dirty and spend political capital, namely because there isn’t any actual capital to spend. It is absolutely ridiculous that in this environment – of a three trillion dollar budget – that Obama is trying to push a health care initiative. Don’t get me wrong, universal health care should be the staple of every nation – and especially the wealthiest nation on earth – but trying for it now is like shopping for skis after becoming paralyzed. Beyond the most basic problem of not being able to afford the estimated one trillion dollar price tag (Iraq costs $10 billion per month, a deficit that is once again increasing, foreign investment taking a bigger and bigger bite out of what American corporations ‘own’), the creation of such a department that co-exists with current health insurance companies and their own plans would take an incredibly long time to set up, go over budget in its infancy, either offer good service to few Americans, or poor service to many Americans, and would be a perfect piñata for financial conservatives criticizing government programs of any kind.

This isn’t a single term process, either. If the administration in power that is pushing for these reforms is booted out in four years time and the plan barely has time to take root on the national stage, the next president can easily dismantle the program, decry its difficulty, and with that, universal health care becomes a dirty word for another decade or so. Size challenged problems in a size challenged nation have to hit the ground running and sprint to the finish in record time to be considered a success. Anything less would be labeled a failure, whether warranted or not. This is the peril of government programs in the early twenty first century.

The stock saying is that Democrats want to make the government bigger, and I suppose that is true, but if the Dem’s were better at selling ideas, they’d simply say they’d prefer to make the government smarter (yeah, a hack clichéd phrase, but the uber-simplistic lines, ‘it’s the economy stupid’ and ‘you’re either with us or against us’ have won elections, so go with what works). But the Democrat’s base is so much more widely diverse than the Republican’s that no matter what the president does or how he sells it, some of his most ardent supporters during the election are going to be pissed at him. Obama treading the boards lightly on the Guantanimo closing and how to handle the detainees has upset a large portion of his base, which makes sense, as the closing is supposed to represent a complete eradication of the Bush-era policies of pre-emptive extraction of suspected terrorists. Obama hasn’t really done this yet, only closing the base itself. Grabbing suspects in the middle east in complete secrecy and whisking them to god knows where to do god knows what to them is still permitted in the Obama administration. Take that, lefties!

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not wanting to shit all over the rich industrialists how helped get him elected, he is also being careful with the implementation of new and stricter environmental policies. And this could be the nail in the coffin that no one is aware they are currently lying in. I hate to be Greenboy McHippiebottom for a moment, but Washington DC is going to have a lot problems making any changes at all if it’s under several feet of water, which is what experts estimate will be the scenario if the polar ice caps keep melting like they are. Weaning the country off of foreign oil is usually cited as the perfect marriage of national security and environmental policy, but electric cars and better MPG is just a drop in the bucket compared to the effects of domestic coal plants and the prevalence of non-biodegradable plastic. America has been so busy since the end of World War II playing policeman – for good or ill – to the nations of the world that it never bothered taking much interest in the quality of the physical land these nations sat upon, and in the next decade or so, it is going to have to reap what it has sown in that respect.

So when you look at it in those doomsday terms, the only thing that will save America from imminent financial and social disaster is the invention of a cheap, clean renewable resource that they can market to the rest of the world. Perhaps much more efficient solar panels. Or clean coal, which is clean but incredibly expensive. Or how about that crazy cold fusion shit? Maybe that’s just kooky with a capital ‘k’. But hey desperate times call for desperate, crazy measures. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman – while having a hit-and-miss record on his support for the Iraq war and an annoyingly sanctimonious yet pedestrian writing style – has hit the nail squarely on the head in this instance, repeating ad nauseum in his writings that America needs to lead the world in this emerging industry or suffer the possibility of becoming a second tier nation. I guess you could say size matters…until it doesn’t.

Of course, it’s hard to be naively optimistic about this future. Bureaucracy and the already dominant industries will certainly put up barriers to radical changes in energy policy, or any legislation that may curtail profits. We know this because it has happened as is still happening (the death of the electric car, revising EPA reports, tax benefits to oil companies). What is maddening to many about the need for alternative energy is that most proposals and plans are not pipe dreams. The technology is there, ready to be developed on mass scale. In a world that is always moving faster and faster, only atrophy is the true killer.

IV

In conclusion, America is hanging onto the side of the cliff, fingertips dug in tight. It’s the economic reality that nobody is really talking about – all this stimulus money is being borrowed from China and other countries – that is the very real threat on political terms. On general shit terms, the environment is the sick elephant in the room, barfing on everybody. The only good news for America is that most likely the effects of pollution will wallop China first, and so proper – and revolutionary – legislation will pass in other countries soon after, hoping to avoid the fate of two hundred million Chinese who died inhaling poisoned air.

Either way, we’ve got great depression sized problems to deal with the world over, and we’re certainly not out of the woods yet. Just as people have made the same types of mistakes getting the world into this economic mess, they are now making the same types of mistakes that the experts during the depression made one year in. Namely, saying that the worst was over, and that there is light at the end of the tunnel. What actually happened was that the markets bottomed out in 1931, two years after the great fall crash. Yikes.

Still, Obama’s got a smile so shiny it can bring down a plane, so who knows what the future has in store. The human element is the most unpredictable one, and flipping coins is sadly the best thing we have as to the direction of our future. Hopefully our civilized good can outpace our tendency to embrace the absurdly awful.  And don’t forget our inexhaustible charm as a species. As Jules Winfield tells us in Pulp Fiction, perhaps in anticipation of our cool as a cucumber 44^th president: ‘Personality goes a long way.’

April. 8 - Whatever you Do, Don't Tell Anyone...

(Oh Zeitgeist, my Zeitgeist…)

            Remember the old X-Files tagline, ‘I Want to Believe’? So many people do. Oh god, how they want to. And it’s not aliens anymore. The Roswell cover up? That’s so pre 9/11. Flying saucers, rectal probes, area 51, what a load of shit. The real murmurs ‘round the darting-eyes water cooler now concerns controlled demolition, the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, and throwing body parts onto the lawn of the Pentagon. And the size of this allegorical water cooler is growing. In the past the fringe elements of society that called the moon landing a fake and the JFK assassination a grassy-knoll omitting bullshit story were confined to meeting in leaky basements and handing out poorly spelled pamphlets on street corners.

            But that’s all changed thanks to the infotainment superhighway. The internet has made it easier to do…well, almost everything. Including putting together a conspiracy film that can be viewed by millions of bored, average joes and janes that would rather delve deep into poorly argued political conspiracy than watch another rerun of CSI. The template is Loose Change, a documentary that suggests not only that the government explanation for 9/11 a bunch of crap, but that there is a cover up of epic proportions involving pretty much everyone who doesn’t believe that 9/11 was an inside job.

            In a big ass nutshell, the argument is that the United States government – with a heck of a lot of help from most branches of the CIA – had jet airplanes fly into the World Trade Centre, a missile fly into the Pentagon ‘pretending’ it was a plane, and ‘pretended’ another plane crashed in field in Pennsylvania that was also headed towards Washington. Additionally, this group also hid explosives in both Trade Centres and World Trade Centre Seven, detonating them not long after the planes hit (WTC 7’s bomb went off later in the day). Also, the planes that didn’t crash into the Pentagon or a field outside Pittsburgh landed safely in secret the morning of September 11^th. The people on them were either killed or remain hidden by the government. Take your pick.

            Why was this done? Simple. To rule over America with fear, spend a shitload of money on defense and security, and then blame it on the Middle East so America can go in and shape the region like it was made of silly putty.

            A real doozey, eh? Loose Change has the flashy edits, damning news clips, and a commanding-yet-nerdy voice that makes everything sound so clear and obvious. In other words, it’s the type of propaganda that the people they accuse of being involved in this vile conspiracy would be proud of. The official website trumpets that fifty million people have watched the film, but I wouldn't advise taking it for a spin. Loose Change is a bit on the long side, to be honest. A file footage compilation more than anything else. Maybe it would work better if Michael Moore had a chance to do a snappier edit.

            For those that squirm in their seats and check their watch as we hear yet another witness claim they heard ‘strange bangs’ in lower Manhattan on September 11^th, I recommend the readers digest version plus more crazy theories in Peter Joseph’s own crack kook doc, Zeitgeist. It’s much more entertaining, complete sound bites from Bill Hicks and George Carlin (always the hallmark of a serous documentary film uncovering history-altering government crime). Instead of focusing its two hour run time on one particular untruth, Zeitgeist cheats, and offers up three forty minute conspiracy summations that are tied together very loosely.

            To wit: Jesus is a sham cobbled together from other religions, 9/11 was an inside job, and the Federal Reserve has the world’s balls in a vice. The end. Points 1 and 3 are pretty much on the money in the ‘well, probably, but so what?’ realm, just amped up with ‘too good to be true’ damning facts.

            When it comes to debunking Christianity’s saviour, it’s a simple matter of plagiarism. Apparently every messiah was a sun god born on December 25^th and crucified, and the three days Jesus was dead for represents the three days between the winter solstice (the day with the least sun of the year) and his constant rebirth on December 25^th. It’s a bit watery and doesn’t hold together that well – especially when you go online and find he’s exaggerated some of the ‘other god’ similarities for Horus and some Hindu deities – but the overarching point of Jesus being a run-of-the-mill messiah with characteristics found in a great many other world religions comes through loud and clear. More important, of course, were the religious/political decrees that were done in his name, many of which that seem to diverge sharply from a man who asked everyone to ‘turn the other cheek’.

            The third part is an interesting expose about the Federal Reserve and how it’s in cahoots with the IMF and the World Bank in controlling the flow of money around the world. In some ways it’s the least jaw dropping and full of math, so it probably means it’s more factually correct than the other two segments. I mean, a small group of bankers control the world? No surprise there. Sure, they don’t sit in a supervillain lair inside a volcano and cackle about world domination, but they do tell over half the world’s countries how and when they can spend their money, and use the developed countries’ political and military clout to enforce these decrees.

            The problem is that this is boring ass-shit to your average conspiracy buff. Wading through pages of banking loan applications and neo-liberalist economic tracts that you can pick up in any government office or textbook. Even if you find some secret, buried document, what’s their big crime? Giving contracts to their friends in other industries at Davos or Sun Valley. Yaaaaaaawn.

            Remember ‘the’ conspiracy of the seventies, Watergate? The one that turned out to be true and is more or less responsible for people trying to dig up proof on other crackpot theories in hopes of finding a Deep Throat-like helper or a tape with eighteen minutes missing? FBI associate director Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt gave journalists Woodward and Bernstein the cryptic line, ‘Follow the Money’, which eventually led to the conspiracy being blown wide open and Nixon giving the peace sign in disgrace.

It’s a good thing to keep in mind when looking at the Federal Reserve, an organization that lends money out to the American government. Not gives, lends. The American people are eternally in debt to this organization that gives them the cash for houses, candy bars, and glass bongs.

            The real conspiracies are the one’s that aren’t even conspiracies, but rather forms of public legislation that grants an insane amount of power on small groups of people.

Take the bailout, for example. A swindling on a grand scale. Without really notifying the public, the Federal Reserve has directly given billions of dollars to the ailing banking system on the public’s eventual tab. Just because they can.

            But instead of focusing on these genuine crises, we are stuck with thousands of people who dream much bigger than augmenting the legislative process through democratic means. Accepting the truth about 9/11 is the non-Matrix equivalent of ‘taking the red pill’. It grants you access to a bunch of pissed off nobodies that lack basic organizational skills, as reporter Matt Taibbi found out when he went to one of their meetings. One of their resolutions was to create a new form of media, as all other forms – TV, papers, internet – have been corrupted by the rulers of the American empire. Then it was on to the name calling (‘Bush and Cheney are a bunch of gangsters!’).

            It’s a tough gig. While a majority of Americans believe that the US government hasn’t been completely up front and honest about their knowledge of the events of September 11^th – considering how the intelligence community and the Bush administration dropped the ball that day, it’s no surprise seeing them try to keep their ineptitude under wraps – that assessment is a far cry from swallowing some of the horseshit that the 9/11 Truthers believe, like that Popular Mechanics magazine is in on the conspiracy because they concluded that the Towers fell down only because jet aircraft smashed into them.

            In other words, truthers, don’t give us that controlled demolition stuff. Watching 9/11 highlights on a loop and calling a university’s physics department does not make you an expert at what happens when an airplane smashes into a twenty seven year old building. Suggesting that the ‘missile’ hitting the Pentagon was designed to look like a plane crash by having soldiers litter body parts on the ground is disgusting, insensitive, and desperate.

            Know what the cure for all this shit is? Legitimate research. The one thing that stuck in my craw was World Trade Centre 7 seemingly imploding for no apparent reason, as it wasn’t hit by an airplane and very little falling debris. Truthers believe the building housed a secret CIA office which had to be destroyed, so the whole building was leveled. In actuality, because two massive superstructures collapsed in a heap of debris, much of the underground piping systems in close proximity collapsed, leading to gas leaks that essentially started a massive diesel fire in the basement of WTC7, allowing it to implode in a very ‘ordered’ manner. How did I find that out? I read an article by a respected journalist – George Monbiot – who quoted it from a report from a Popular Mechanics journal article. (the same one that disproved the controlled demolition theory)

            And sure, maybe the first reaction from the conspiracy theorist is claiming that a British essayist focused on global warming and an unremarkable American science magazine are in on it, but when you start throwing accusations of compliance and ‘political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all’ (as Monibot was accused of being), you start to sound, well, paranoid. Bugs on your skin paranoid. 1984-everyone-is-watching-you paranoid. When disagreement is viewed as insubordination and ‘them vs. us’, you are quickly becoming just like the people you’ve accused of being dictatorial masterminds.

            Although it must be said that despite every scientifically disproved fact that the Truthers mindlessly cling to, the only nagging point about 9/11 for me is historical precedent. While the details of the government involvement vary from conspiracy theorist to conspiracy theorist, the basic belief is that certain clandestine government officials knew this was about to happen and did nothing to stop it, or actively (but covertly) took a part in the planning and executing of the attacks. At face value this seems, well, evil to the very core, and something that no country would ever do its own citizens.

            Not true, of course. Going back only fifty years we have governments turning on huge segments of it’s own populace in the Sudan, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, El Salvador, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Cambodia, East Timor, and China (oh great leap forward! Has irony ever been so monumentally bitter?), to name a few.

            Well, those are unstable countries, you may argue, America is a different kettle of fish altogether. You’re right. America’s usually too busy helping the aforementioned genocides to go against their own people in any way. The clandestine forces of the US government have a nasty habit of meddling in other countries affairs, and that included plenty of blood – if not on their hands – then on the hands of the people they got to do their dirty work. Supporting foreign military dictators that will go along with American economic policy with weapons and cash is a typical play. In 1973, democratically elected Chilean leader Allende is overthrown and killed by American-endorsed General Pinochet, who goes onto the rule with an iron fist and kill hundreds of thousands of people (conservative estimate). They also overthrew the Prince of Cambodia in 1970 and gave the keys to Pol Pot after he agreed to help them fight the Vietcong. A swell movie called The Killing Fields resulted. There was also funding and training the Contras in Nicaragua in the 80’s, and the CIA booted (read: shot, cut up, burned in acid) the elected leader of Congo in 1961, letting crazy dictator Mobutu loot, pillage, and murder for three decades. Oh, and hey, remember how the US supported Saddam Hussein and gave him biological weapons in the eighties before calling him a threat a couple years later because he gassed his own people while the US backed him? Yeah, that thing.

            If they’re willing to have hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans and Africans continuously die for decades for – ultimately – their own financial gain, is it that crazy to imagine 9/11 as something beyond a bunch of pissed off terrorists living in the Afghan wilderness? Crazy doesn’t look so crazy when you flip through the history books. After all, if Germany won WWII, it would be common knowledge that Poland invaded Germany in September 1939.

            But even just considering all this is a fair cry from the controlled demolition crap (and historically accurate!), as punching holes in one official theory does not a new crazy theory make. And just because horrendous things that have happened in the past had a particular imprint from one organization doesn’t mean that every horrible event has something to do with that same organization.

            Occam’s Razor is a great little argument that simply states in so many words that the simplest explanation for a problem or situation is most likely the correct one.

Obviously this is not a popular position for Conspiracy Theorists, but looking at the events of September 11^th and the people in charge of America at the time, the official story of a couple Middle Eastern terrorists catching the country’s security force asleep at the switch sounds pretty damn sensible.

            It’s especially welcoming when you start to realize how far the net the Truthers are willing to cast over society. Hundreds of employees at the CIA and the Department of Defense and The White House, thousands of soldiers and other military commanders, and tens of thousands of experts and professional in mainstream America that confirm the government’s findings are all involved in this conspiracy. And not one of them is willing to break down and tell the truth.

            If you believe all this, then you truly believe that the men who created these events are supermen. Some sort of all knowing, high priests of the earth. They control not only the government and the devastating events that change the course of national policy, but how the public reacts to said devastating events. If you cease to believe in accidents – including horribly big ones – then everything is intentional, even failure.

            George Monibot received a great wave of hate mail when he criticized the 9/11 truth movement, and in a response column he makes the important point that the 9/11 movement – while good natured in at least it’s original intention of seeking truth – is taking a lot of energy out more pressing and legitimate problems, like globalization and climate change. Moreover, he notes that the conspiracy theories actually encourage antipathy, by painting the adversaries as supermen that cannot be brought down or overthrown. One who buys into these theories are suddenly free to do…what? What does ‘swallowing the red pill’ of 9/11 allow one to do? Meet in recreation centre basements and rage against the machine? Sit smugly in front of their televisions knowing that they are through the looking glass? What is the next step to overthrow a massive multifaceted organization when you and a handful of people find out what they’ve allegedly been up to? Run for office? Hire a lawyer? Buy a gun?

            Here's a tip: If your conspiracy sounds like a bad action movie, it's probably full of shit. If it makes you fall asleep as you try to run through pages of legal documents and convoluted economic equations, you might be onto something. The truth may very well be out there, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to like what they find, as it could dash either your belief in government or your belief in a super secret global government. Bitter pills are overwhelming evidence and detailed reports. Red pills may taste better going down, but are delusional flights of fancy.

Feb. 13 – City of Tiny Lights, Don’t You Want to…

            Even though it’s getting brighter day by day it’s still the dead of winter. Shoveling. Mittens. Slush. Funny hats. It’s the same old shit if you’re used to it. The story of the world, I suppose. But for some places on our blue and green globe, a little bit of winter can be catastrophic. London was paralyzed with snow recently. Apparently there’s not a single snow plow truck in the entire city. That somehow seems irresponsible to me. Any city that is above 50 degrees north latitude should probably have something to keep freak snowstorms from turning one of the most important financial centers in the world to a temporary white apocalypse.

            So it’s global warming, three wars in the Middle East, economic meltdown, and there’s still nothing good on television. Leave to CNN and Fox News to cover anything remotely interesting and complex with superficial analysis repeated ad infinitum. Elections are dull and boring, so it makes sense that the coverage of them are dull and boring, but somehow they’ve turned coverage of a financial meltdown into a series of manage-your-money-better segments, apparently aimed at preschoolers (how do you look for a new job? By going to a job centre!).

            I’ve already bitched about the media too much (and they don’t seem to be listening). I’m not out of material, just out of patience. With Obama elected I’ve pretty much left television news entirely. It’s the information superhighway or nothing. I’m finally riding the wave, which is to take me to the city of the future.

            A virtual city, but a city nonetheless. With work, play, mail, commerce, sex, and tolls. Your commute is your computer start up and at the ‘office’ you never have to wear pants. Most of the shit is free, but the best stuff you have to pay for (music, premium news, porn), unless you have no problem with stealing it (torrents!). And no need to worry about not having a fleet of snowplows. But stupidity is coming to the net, too (right, because it was an astrophysicist’s paradise before). The new banner ads – from the sides of buses to the centre of my monitor – peppering the cyber landscape are asking me if I’m smarter than George Bush, Miley Cyrus, Alicia Keys, or the average football fan (who apparently has an IQ of 118). I have some friends in the internet advertising world, and they swear to me these things work, and I find myself hoping that they’re lying or delusional.

            I’ve been using thedailybeast.com for a unique perspective on daily events, but more and more of it is becoming mindless entertainment gossip. An interview with a guy who wrote a book about a criminal who nailed Paris Hilton. Why Jessica Simpson gaining weight is good for her career. R&B artist Chris Brown beating up R&B artist Rihanna. And according to the site these are some of the most popular articles. It seems we are addicted to a side dish of lighter fare. Beside the bailout stories and updates on the Afghan conflict, here’s a quick article about female orgasms to make the bad news go down easier. And yeah, it’s a cop out. Chomsky didn’t insert knock-knock jokes between chapters of Hegemony or Survival. Marx didn’t interrupt Das Kapital with, ‘so what’s the deal with class warfare? Are we supposed to be fighting with pencils and erasers?’

            The palette cleanser is just another way of using the carrot to get the people’s interest instead of the stick. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s always the danger that people just gorge on the carrot and ignore the reason why the carrot was placed there in the first place (and even the carrot metaphor isn’t accurate. A healthy vegetable shouldn’t represent celebrity gossip. Maybe a proverbial big mac would be better). You can’t force people to care about the economy or the environment. Even promising pics of Brad and Angelina arguing on the next page won’t make ‘em read it if they don’t want to.

            Woe betide us all for the segment of the population that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about politics. I’ve been reading about the rise of fascism in Italy in the early nineteen twenties, and much of its initial support came from the near-illiterate rural areas that had little interest in both participating in the young Italian democracy and understanding how it worked. Ignorance won’t bring down a nation, but it will certainly bust a kneecap or two.

            And cities (preferably non-cyber) are one of the best ways to combat this ignorance. Cities force people to address new ways of thinking because there are so many unique opinions flying around the streets at all times. Problems with societal growth, poverty, pollution, social acceptance, and culture exist across every nation, but in the cities they can be condensed into a single neighborhood or block. You are overwhelmed with different ways of living a life. The poor beg outside some of the tallest skyscrapers that house the richest companies. Various races and creeds bring their culture from countries on the other side of the earth set up shop beside each other. Gridlock roars alongside framed park spaces. Flyers and sidewalk preachers clamoring for socio-political-religious attention. Like I wrote earlier, a government can’t force people to care, so the city is the closest thing to make people aware of situations they would have otherwise never thought about.

            Of course, not all cities are bastions of discovery. Some are smoldering holes in the ground. Take Gaza City, for example, on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean Sea (ya know it’s a city ‘cause of the second word in its title). Nothing like starting the New Year off with a carpet bombing followed by a ground invasion, am I right? Most cities get to deal with diversity by having mindless summer cultural festivals. In Gaza City, you celebrate diversity with a tank vs. rock fight.

            And how about Jerusalem – just down the road from Gaza City – as one serious clusterfuck of a city? A holy place for three major world religions, fought over for more than two thousand years. The Christians eventually moved onto Rome (the crusades were just a spring fling or summer romance), but Muslims dug in their heels and the Jews took another swing after WWII. But it’s not really about religion any more. Calling one group ‘Jewish’ and the other ‘Muslim’ is just denigrating the religions themselves. The fate of human souls shouldn’t have anything to do with squabbles over land, even if one side believes god ‘gave’ them the land thousands of years ago (how the hell does mean anything? Ask Native Americans how their gods giving them the North American continent worked out). Today it’s a fight between nationalities. The Israelis versus the Palestinians. Making it any more complicated than doesn’t help one bit.

            Not that this term distinction makes much of a difference. There won’t be peace in Israel-Palestine because of the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, which the settlers won’t give up without a fight. The Israeli government seems to be bipolar, first allowing their citizens to encroach on Palestinian land, then telling them to move back. The latter hasn’t worked out well. The Israeli army tried to move some families out awhile back and met stiff resistance from fellow Israelis. And while that’s the biggest problem, even if it is miraculously solved – with all of Israel, not just handfuls, telling the settlers to hightail it out of there – the Palestinian militant group Hamas is going to make sure it can piss in the party punch every chance it gets and still send rocks and rockets flying into Israel (fun fact: during the January air strikes, Hamas members would go into Gaza hospitals and kill the injured adult males who were critics of the group).

            Bah. Current events are so close to last year’s events. Or decades ago events. The only thing that ever changes is the quality of the TV graphics.

            Is chaos supposed to be this dull? Many exciting and dangerous events occurring the world over and I’m sitting on my sofa, trying not to spill the chip dip. I’m sure I’ll eat those words someday. In some bizarre forty eight hour period in a hopefully distant future my world will turn upside down and I’ll end up being struck by a car whilst trying to head for the hills on bike to avoid the plague and then die in a ditch. Days later maybe some stragglers will pilfer my backpack for food and possible weapons.

            And that will be it. I’d miss the fireworks on TV because of my chickenshit escape to the pastoral safety of the country. It reminds me of the concept of city versus country in the Elizabethan period. At least on stage. The city was a place of filth and corruption, and young lovers would flee to the harmonious paradise of the lush forests, tiny villages, and rolling fields. There they would throw off the shackles of the ruling dukes and fathers and rhyme in iambic pentameter to their hearts’ content (see As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Sad Shepherd).

            Are cities worse than the country? The city is dangerous because of money. The country is dangerous because of the lack of it. And I’m stuck in the limbo between them – the suburbs – but am still part of a five million-plus metropolitan area. Am I the city? Where exactly does it end? Some invisible border? Shoulders on the roads? The first sign of farmland? When full sets of teeth among the populace falls below 70%?

            That was a dumb joke (I seem to be good at those). And a stereotype. But the stereotypes city dwellers have concerning country folk aren’t all that different than the ones country folk have concerning city dwellers. Perverts and drugs versus incest and moonshine. ‘Fuck the pigs!’ vs. ‘Fuck the pigs!’. A friend of mine, her cousin’s family came in from the boonies because one their sick children were taken to a distinguished city hospital, and they refused to walk the streets at night, even for just four or five blocks. They’d hail a cab and be ready to fight a homeless person to get to it. It seemed crazy to me.

            But hey, I don’t know how to properly neuter a horse, so why should I look down on anyone from the country. All I know is you can’t get good California rolls in a town with a one room schoolhouse.

Oct 29 - The Last Week (This is the end, my friends, of our elaborate plans, the end...)

            Finally.

            It’s telling that you only have to watch thirty seconds of network or cable news before becoming an expert on the current state of the 2008 presidential campaign.

            ‘Now we are talking about negative ads.’

            ‘Now we are talking about expensive clothing.’

            ‘Now we are talking about how McCain is the underdog.’

            ‘Breaking news: McCain says he is ‘comfortable’ in underdog position.’

            ‘More breaking news: Palin 2012!’

I’ve exhausted all my rhetoric of comparing election campaigns to sports coverage, so let me just say it’s a shame CNN is pulling in record ratings this year, because it will only encourage them further.

            Only a ‘new’ piece of technology will force me to make one more comment on the media. During all four debates, CNN had undecided Ohio voters rate their feelings raging from agree to disagree on whatever was being said IN REAL TIME on a creeping line on a graph at the bottom of the TV screen. I’m not sure what the appropriate insulting comparison is. Is it like a heart monitor, meaning I am watching the last moments of in-depth political discourse on its deathbed? Or is it akin to the laugh track on a sitcom, as I am finally being instructed how to feel at certain times when the hero or villain appears onscreen?

            The debates were as exciting as a debate can possibly be. Old man McCain punched like an old man, and the youthful Obama dodged the shots like a pro, not bothering to throw any himself.

            We’re only seeing shadows of these men, anyway. They’re true selves retreated into their respective body cavities months ago. They had to save their minds for the few moments that were permitted to be their own. When in front of the cameras or the adoring public, the 2D man-of-platitudes must step forward. Handshakes, small talk, bowling, ‘my friends’, choking down greasy spoon shit. I am so determined to be president I will talk like a parrot for months on end. Listening to both candidates now, you’d never think that McCain pretty much earned his cred thanks to speaking like an actually interesting human being on the straight talk express and that Obama was a professor of constitutional law. I guess one thousand stump speeches will do that to a person.

            What a sacrifice both these men have made. To become political parody that isn’t funny. Regardless whether they thirst for ultimate power or a chance to fix their broken country, you have to give credit where credit is due. These men have put every chip they have on the table – from seven houses to crazy inner-city pastors – all for a crack at the big job. So now, a quiet moment for John McCain and his campaign, since his only hope now lies in some crazy event that puts national security back at the forefront. Funny, since that’s exactly what one of his campaign aides suggested a couple months back: That a terrorist attack would be a huge plus for the Arizona senator. Some bloggers speculate that Bush is trying to help out McCain (since he’s been nothing but poison) by being especially aggressive right now on the Afghan-Pakistani border in a last ditch effort to capture Bin Laden.

            So, barring the above, Obama will take it thanks in part to a crappy veep choice by McCain but more because of an imploding economy that is that people are naturally associating with the ruling party which McCain (unfortunately for him) represents. There. The summation of the 2008 presidential campaign in three lines. Granted, these two factors didn’t coalesce until August-September, but how much of what happened before will be relevant and pondered when it’s time to write the history? Christ, it seems like years have passed since Hillary bowed out. Remember when Rudy was the Republican frontrunner in December of 2007?

            But maybe I’m already jinxing it for the Democrats. Despite huge leads in swing states, they are guarding their joy with shotguns they don’t want anyone else to be able to own. After the last two presidential elections, you can’t blame them for expecting victory to be snatched from them and crammed up their collective assholes. They won’t believe they’ve won until Obama kicks up his feet on the Oval Office’s desk. And then lick it so everyone knows it’s his and won’t want to take it from him.

            Yet it really is important to remember that no matter who wins on November 4^th, there won’t be that much difference come January. Oh sure, taxes will go up for the rich and that will strengthen some social programs that have been starving over the last eight years of budget cuts with a chainsaw, but as far as foreign, economic/corporate, and cultural policy goes, in the stadium of political diversity, the democratic ticket is only a couple seats away from the republican one.

            The media hype – which has to exist for the sake interesting television for the sake of advertising revenue – calls this the most important election of this generation. And in terms of bridging racial and social differences on a superficial level, it is. The election of Barack Obama would be a huge symbol of hope for disenfranchised minorities not only in America but across the world. And while this crosses a divide that would be unheard of forty years ago – a black President – expecting immediate change in some of the poorest neighbourhoods in large American cities is unreasonable. Expecting immediate change in the hearts and minds of bouth rural and suburban racists is unreasonable. A symbol’s effects can take years to actually be felt. While certain figures can crystallize the great social changes in society at a given moment, seeing top-to-bottom results in said society can still take decades. In terms of the current and future perception of America as a place where every individual can be truly free and succeed, regardless of race, creed, or culture, the importance of Obama’s election to the Oval Office cannot be understated.

            And while this certainly a huge accomplishment, it comes at a time where Obama cannot just make history by winning, he also has to make history by being an incredible president, ‘saving’ a fading superpower that is fighting two wars during a global economic crisis. The ramifications of being the first black president and also a political disaster will only re-enforce racist mutterings and erode many of the gains the minorities of all kinds (visible or not) seek to make with Obama. And it will be tough going from day one. The economic disasters of the last two months have rendered both candidates platforms to ash and cinder. Campaign promises will have to be tossed overboard as the government just tries to keep the ship from taking on any more deadweight. The Illinois senator is said to be a figure akin to John F. Kennedy, so it’s only fair that I should quote the latter, since when he stepped into the White House in January of 1961 he noted that: ‘the one thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.’

            Obama’s going to be criticized from day one from both sides. Leftists who complain he isn’t liberal enough and conservatives who will insist he’s destroying the fabric of America just because he’s a liberal in the broadest sense possible. Fortunately, if how Obama’s campaign has been run is any indication, the United States is about to take a four year degree in ‘Grace Under Pressure’. Both Hillary and McCain tried to raise his ire, but it seems that Barack runs on some sort of advanced cooling system that should be studied and applied to climate change research. He’s got the attitude, he’s got the liberal policies to assist and delight the masses, and the only thing beyond his control is the tempestuous world at large, which has been known to thrash administrations from one place on the opinion polls to the other (see 9/11, but then see a prolonged middle eastern war, devastating Hurricanes, hostile countries developing nuclear weapons, etc).

            So in conclusion: For what you’re about to take on, kid, there’s no shame in picking up smoking again, even if it’s on the sly.

Sept 1 - Veep! Veep!

McCain chose a lady as his veep. So fucking what? Who cares if either winner will now ‘make history’? If McCain wins, it’ll be more likely to be shitty history (don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Obama can’t fuck it up, either, but isn’t it time to tax the rich motherfuckers who made off like bandits in these last seven years?).

Of course, some people do care about McCain’s backup. Lotsa people. And if they don’t care yet, the media will beat them over the head demanding they should care. McCain chose Palin because he crunched the numbers and found that a Christian woman would drag in more overall votes than another dose of wrinkled white experience to the ticket (apparently McCain was really considering the pro-choice independent, Lieberman).

And that’s a damn shame. Skin colour and private parts, and a knocked up seventeen year old shouldn’t be the defining issue in this election. Tax, energy, and foreign policy should be at the forefront. Actually, maybe with McCain choosing a girl the ‘history’ aspect of this election will become null and void and it will become an ‘issues-driven’ race (ha!).

            So maybe it’s a good thing that Obama chose someone so…bland. With Biden he covers the experience/foreign policy issue. Great. Watch me yawn.

            Regardless of who wins, the day after the inauguration, it’ll become business as usual. ‘History’ will be pushed aside for lobbyists demanding their cut for funneling campaign donations to the winner (a recent Rolling Store article showed Obama and McCain getting the same mega donations from the same rich, scratch-my-back corporations and rich assholes that give to all campaigns). In a good sense, we’ll suddenly have the same expectations with these new officials – whether they be black or white, man or woman- as we had with previous elected officials. On the other hand, the previous president was a complete fucking disaster for everyone unless you were on the board of directors for Haliburton or Blackwater, and the one before that was impeached for lying about giving an intern a rim job.

And I’ll go right out and say it: ‘Daaaaaaaaaamn, that Sarah Palin is fine!’ She’s the first candidate in the history of America I’d think about while jacking off. The sexy librarian/hockey Mom look and all that. Take off the glasses, unbutton the blouse, have a glass of red wine, maybe quote a couple sexy Psalms, and she’ll have a daughter younger than her granddaughter if Juneau what I mean…

July 6 - 'Meet the new boss, same as the...'

Obama: Honeymoon over?

            Has the shining star become just another Democratic presidential nominee? Wait, was he ever anything else? The media had a great time pushing up Obama as the glorious, shining underdog while they kicking Hillary in the shins. But now that she’s exited stage right, the hounds are out for blood, and McCain’s seventy two year old plasma is too damn thin. Some of the stuff they’re rustling up on Obama is laughable (‘terrorist jab’? It’s like Fox News is thinking, ‘well, they all expect us to come up with dumb shit…’), but it’s more alarming that they aren’t taking more shots at his actual policies. I mean, are they that damn good that they’re critic proof? Or am I once again being my naïve self, expecting for heavy policy coverage on CNN or Fox News? I suppose if you’re against basic democratic party policies there isn’t much of a reason to debate them, as you can just label them ‘socialist’ and move back to convincing people that Obama is a secret Muslim (wait, is this the same Obama whose recent pastor made controversial remarks at his church? Oh yeah, that was months ago. Never happened, really).

            ‘A change you can believe in’; so say the signs. Why? Will he close Guantanamo? Will he repeal large chunks of the patriot act that permits the government to spy on citizens without any regulation or legality? Is he going to sign the Kyoto accord? Shit, will he at least shut down the practice of earmarks, since the last budget was still bursting with them? What can we expect from this guy? And I’ll totally understand that maybe he can’t do a lot of these things because the democrats in the house and the senate will still buckle to republican pressures even if they still hold the majority, but I’m even curious about Obama’s dream scenario. If you have 60 seats in the senate and a strong majority in the house, will Americans have subsidized health care by 2010? How good will Obama be?
            Answer: It depends. Certain domestic programs will be flooded with cash after an eight year drought, and I bet he’s gonna try to make the EPA an actual force to be reckoned with (even more so than under Clinton). As for that health care, I’d say the jury’s still out. It’s gonna cost a fuckload of cash, and if cracks start appearing before it seriously gets off the ground, it will probably be scrapped in a very embarrassing fashion. It will definitely be set up only with the shadowy blessings of the insurance companies who will certainly expect (and get) a big piece of the pie.
            However, some major changes might not happen:

Patriot Act – I can’t believe I’ve never heard Obama say he’d weaken this piece of legislation. It makes me think that while he may not be for it, he realizes he can’t neuter it without being seen as ‘soft on terrorism’ (yep, those three words are still worth something 2008). But really, letting telecommunication companies give private phone and internet records to the government at the drop of a hat reeks so much of fascism you’d think Mussolini’s ghost has been farting in the oval office. How do the conservatives who praise the virtues of the constitution possibly defend this gross invasion of privacy? Oh yeah, there’s a ‘war on terror’ going on, and as long as you’re blindly pro-war-on-terror, no one’s going to be eavesdropping on you.
Iraq – Barack is inheriting the royal shit storm. Why? Because Iraq's is on shaky but better ground than it was a year ago. Bush's surge worked just enough for him to get off the hook and slink away without absorbing the entire blame for the fiasco (unless Iraq somehow explodes in the fall, which isn’t out of the question). Now he can leave in January, slap Obama on the shoulder with a 'good luck, buddy'. Most people want the troops out immediately. Most generals and the top brass in the military say it would be pulling the much needed security blanket out from under the country's feet. Unfortunately - even though the military have made so missteps in the Iraq war so far (although a lot of these problems stem from Rumsfeld) - you gotta trust them on this point.
Do you know why there's a lot if anti-American resentment in the Middle East? Because we're there in the first place (oh, and unconditional support of Israel doesn't help none, either). So while that's always a good reason to move out, it still looks like that Iraq will become a failed state par excellence if America flees. And if you think the moderates in Iraq are pissed now, wait until their real form of security leaves. The Iraqi military is about as stable as the country. Watch it become a tool of one particularly charismatic general who knows how to use religious division as a weapon (or they'll all just make it easy (read: difficult) and follow Al-Sadr). If the Shiites declare ‘war’ on the Sunnis, expect Saudi Arabia to back up the latter. Then Iran will come in to back the former. When the dust settles, there won’t be an Iraq, and oil will be $200 a barrel. Scary visions of things to come…

            Now Obama’s multicultural background should come in handy when it comes to foreign policy (compared to other president’s I could name, he is certainly aware of the rest of the world having been raised for a while on the other side of it), but it’s been twisted into becoming a liability. He’s had to downplay the fact that his father was raised Muslim, which is ridiculous, as any association to Islam is a clear advantage when it comes to having to deal with the Middle East. Of course, conservatives are trying to paint this as a horribly negative thing, which is easy to do as The Bush administration has tried to keep the public as confused as possible when it comes to that area of the world. To them, it’s full of America’s enemies like al-Qaeda and Iran, but also full of friends who sell us oil (in the end, Bush’s take on the Middle East for the average American: shut up and let us deal with it). So to keep from having to defend his patriotism at every turn, Obama has had to keep Muslim supporters away from photo-ops, never be even remotely open minded when talking about Iran, and love that Christian god ‘til the cows come home.

            So instead, when it comes to rounding up vice presidential choices, Obama has to balance it out with a more typical candidate: old white man with military experience. Retired General Wesley Clark seems like a grade-A cut, but then he went on Face the Nation and spoke his mind instead of in talking points, and said that getting shot down in Vietnam and tortured for six years doesn’t make John McCain an authority on military matters. Furor erupted, even if Clark happened to be right. I mean, being tortured on behalf of you not selling out your country makes you a hero, but it’s not much practice for being president. Not surprisingly, certain conservative pundits twisted Clark’s words and started to claim he was outright disrespecting McCain’s war record.

            The Arizona senator didn’t say anything himself, because he’s above that. He doesn’t take the usual potshots that have come to define the Republican Party. He’s a maverick, right? Right? Do people still buy that? McCain stopped being a maverick when he realized how many conservative voters loathed him. So to get in their good books he kissed Falwell’s ass before the fat man died and is currently kissing the oil company’s puddles before they dry up completely. The straight talker accidentally said he didn’t understand how the economy worked back in the fall of 2007. Republicans seem to forget that as long as America isn’t constantly being attacked with suicidal jet hijackings, that it’s the economy, stupid (actually they do know that. On of McCain’s staffers said it would be a boon for his boss if another terrorist attack happens before November).     

            Unfortunately, despite all his hard work, it looks like John McCain can’t read. The Republican nominee doesn’t have to fear the elite black man, only teleprompters. He comes off wooden giving speeches and has messed up pronouncing the name of his energy policy three times. McCain seems more animated and thrives in a looser town hall meeting-like environment, with Q and A’s instead of one long scripted A. Thing is, off the cuff remarks and party lines rarely go together. Claiming dumb on the economy is one example, but he’s also said that the US might be in Iraq for up to one hundred years. Both of these remarks had to be cleaned up and fixed in a dull speech. I wonder how soon it will be until McCain is gonna get all Jesus-friendly and pro-life to get back some of that tasty fundamentalist Christian vote. He was told last week by advisers he can’t win the presidency with his current campaign, and he took it to heart by shaking his staff up again. A real pickle for McCain. He has to get the 2000 and 2004 Bush votes without being associated in any way to George W. Bush. His new campaign head helped Bush get re-elected in 2004. Maverick, indeed.

            But even Obama – whose bread and butter have been his stirring rhetoric for change – has been toning down his leftist talk. Suddenly ‘troops out of Iraq in sixteen months’ is ‘but only if the ground commanders say it’s a good idea’ (I kind of expected it, but it certainly pissed off the anti-war pack). He’s even come out in favor of government funding for religious groups (a Bush program! Imagine that!), which most analysts have come to agree as a ploy to woo Christian voters.

            The maverick and the symbol for change slowly shedding their excess ideas and personalities to become the one dimensional candidates all presidential hopefuls become. Should we have expected anything different? Naomi Wolf’s The End of America would have made a better essay than a book, but she brings up a great point about candidates: ‘Politicians are not bland and inhibited because they are naturally boring; they are bland and inhibited because they know they are being watched. So they censor themselves.’ (Wolf, pg. 84) Soon it becomes like any other two party election. Vague liberal promises versus vague conservative promises.

            Can’t believe I am about to say this, but where’s Ralph Nader when you need him?

May 1 - ‘Your mouth only moves with someone’s hand up your…’

Fallout from the Transylvania Primary

            I stopped writing about politics for two months and it felt great. It was getting too aggravating. Reading about the campaign was fine, I could deal with that. Even discussing with friends over its irrelevance and how the media was twisting the latest mindless sound bite slip up into 'breaking news' was okay. But writing about it? I’d get a coronary. Shaping my opinions on the news of the day into manageable sentences comes off ridiculous: 'Wait...we're back on the flag pins thing?' 'We're surprised a pastor from a poor neighborhood who wouldn’t have had equal rights fifty years ago said some things questioning America's values?' 'A candidate is labeled an ‘Elitist’? So fucking what? Look what happens when you vote for a guy you'd rather have a beer with.'
            Stuff like that. I don't know how people can expect to watch CNN and be informed. Obviously print media can fall victim to the same superficial bullshit topics as anything on cable and network television, but at least when you're reading it you skip the vapid smile of the poll analyst, the condescending tone of the democratic strategist, and the totally ridiculous, what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about verbal diarrhea of the paid political consultant.
            If the medium is the message, what is televised political coverage saying? ‘We are the Washington tabloid’? That poor, irrelevant coverage of 'politics' is all we deserve from the giant media corporations? When was the last time Wolf Blitzer mentioned Hillary Clinton's reputation for being the Queen of Pork when it comes to earmarks? What makes that dirt so much less interesting than whether she mistakenly said she came under fire when traveling in Bosnia as the first lady? I mean, yeah there's guns and lying involved, but it has shit-all to do with 2008 Hillary and her policies (unless you want to extrapolate from the Bosnia story and conclude that this means Hillary will say anything to get elected...which sounds like every other politician).

            The problem with the news coverage is that it’s all character buildup and assassination. It’s hammered into anyone who even tries to follow this race only superficially. Ideally the media should ask a gaggle of supporters what their candidate feels about NAFTA. Or NATO. Or anything with a series of initials. Let’s see if anyone really knows what these candidates stand for beyond meaningless sound bytes (‘I’m for the American worker.’ No shit!). It is called policy, and right now we’re all supposed to be getting fancy promotional trailers from the candidates and the media of what the next four years would look like. Instead, we get reports on the recipes of the future first wives and an obsessive analysis of the delegate count, as if it was an unending basketball game.

            It’s nice to think you’re only voting based on character. People understand character. Their friends have character, as do their enemies. They can analyze and engage with the people around them based on these things called personalities. But politics is just a popularity contest in the end, and sometimes you ‘portray’ your character as a good ol’ straight talkin’ boy from Texas to mask the fact that you are promoting a quasi-free market economic policy that aims to get your business friends even richer at the expensive of the working class. Or you ‘portray your character as a good ol’ straight talkin’ boy from Arkansas to mask that fact that you are promoting a quasi-free market economic policy that aims to get everyone in America, rich, but mainly your campaign donors and friends (ah, the subtle differences between Republicans and Democrats). It’s a cheap sleight-of-hand that the candidates put forth and the media encourages without much question. And then blows completely out of proportion. Hey, talking about Barack shooting his mouth off is a lot easier than talking about his ideas on education reform!

             What's disappointing on top of this is that CNN's ratings are up. Don't get me wrong, it's nice that people are interested in politics in some fashion and it’s great that this increase means less people are watching the ever-laughable FoxNews, but it's a pretty weak introduction to politics. I remember the democratic filibuster debacle of spring 2005, and there was a nightly news report lamenting the fact that the average American didn't know what it was. Well how about informing people of the political process more often, dickheads?

            The only candidate trying to push people beyond this form of political coverage is Barack Obama. Which might sound like an endorsement from me, but in truth his policies don’t differ that much from Hillary. In one of the few debates where policies were actually discussed, Obama and Clinton quibbled over the difficulty in filling forms for each other’s health care plans. It was breathtakingly dull, but it was something that would actually matter to Americans. But instead we get round-the-clock coverage of Obama telling Californians that the working class in Pennsylvania ‘clings’. Gasp!

            Oh come on. People have always clung. And they aren't even such 'noble' pursuits such as religion, firearms, and…uh… bigotry. Sometimes it's just crystal meth. Even affluent suburban white collar people cling. Sometimes it’s to redecorating the kitchen ever three years. So how's that for a slogan that encompasses 2008: 'What are you clinging to?' It’s perfect for an economy going belly up.

            But instead Barack had to defend himself by feeding a bottle of milk to a calf in rural Pennsylvania. Congratulations, Obama! I'm sick of you now, too! Nice to see you move beyond the superficial bullshit that is contemporary American politics! Maybe Barack needs to break out some James Brown dance moves. It’s a bizarre question with no real answer yet: How does a black senator educated at Harvard connect to the common people?
            And without a good reply, it was time on April 22 to chalk up a-not-quite-empty victory for Hillary Clinton. Hillary the corned dog. When Barack said Pennsylvanians cling to guns, Hillary said she loved shooting them when she was a kid (which kind of counters every stance she’s taken on gun control). She’s also brought up obscure Obama connections to a member of the weathermen and Louis Farrakhan. Sigh…
            Am I jerk for expecting Hillary to do everything to get elected (taking shots! both literal and figurative) and hoping Obama will avoid that demeaning activity? It is true, though, that the only thing that can save Hillary is what every politician promises to stamp out when they get elected: dirty secret math. The stuff budgets are made of. Why oversight committees were created. It sounds too pathetic for Hillary to say, 'If you count the states we're not allowed to count, I'd be winning’, so she got the head of her campaign to say it ad infinitum after winning last Tuesday.

            How much you want to bet that if the situation was reversed, Obama would have asked/forced to bow out looooooong ago.
            You should never want something so bad that you would destroy not only the people who support you and your own political past but the aura of the thing itself (not that the current president is keeping the oval office in pristine condition, but still...). Hillary seems to be doing that, taking any position that seems to be the one she needs on that very day. The voters matter. Then the delegates matter. Then the voters matter again. Becoming pro-gun for a week. Doing shots of whisky. Kind-of-but-not-really playing the race card.

            Christ, is it true you have to lower yourself to the level of the mob to be allowed to completely fuck with their lives in Washington? I mean, both the idealistic and power hungry would say it's worth it, but doesn’t it do something to your conscience?  And yeah, we’re talking about politicians here, but I think all three of them have some semblance of right and wrong, and certainly the alarm bells of ‘what the fuck am I doing/saying?’ should have gone off several times this year. I guess absolute power can preemptively corrupt absolutely.
            Oh yeah. That third candidate. Johnny Boy. With Barack and Hillary still squaring off, McCain is lapping it up. Does he have a chance? As of the end of April, no. People are still turned off of the republican concept of governance, as it’s been hard to forget these last seven-plus years. But the longer the democrats stay in the corner and fingerfuck themselves, the more appealing the Arizona senator is going to be to the average independent voter. After all, it’s amazing what some people will cling to…

March.30 - All I want to do, is to get back to you, Connection, I just can’t make no-

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

            It’s the newest craze that’s sweeping the nation. It’s the ultimate bored-at-work game (provided your IT department hasn’t blocked the website). It’s trivial pursuit for the 21^st century. You can finally close that solitaire window and maybe even learn something at the same time. It is called Six Degrees of Wikipedia, and all you need is an internet connection and two nouns.

            A brief recap: Aside from being a movie star, Kevin Bacon holds an unusual place in the public consciousness as he embodies the interdependency of the movie industry that is manifested through a parlor game. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (strangely, the title taken from the movie Six Degrees of Separation which he does not star in) challenges players to link movie stars together via films that they both starred in, ideally ending on Kevin Bacon in less than seven film links. Wikipedia is an information website of over nine million articles in BLAH languages (two million in English alone).

            To play this game you take your standard Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, but apply it to the cyber warehouse that is wikipedia. Where one used movies to get from, say, Richard Burton to Mr. Bacon (Burton was in Cleopatra with Martin Landau who was in Ed Wood with Bill Murray who was in Wild Things with Kevin Bacon), one uses links found in articles on everyone’s favorite settler of disputed knowledge to travel from a predetermined beginning article to a predetermined ending one. Like any good thinking game, a time limit (say, two minutes for beginners) can add to the excitement.

Example:

Stone à Blood in less than six steps:

Stone (there are several references, but let’s go with rock) à Homo Sapiens (human) à Human anatomy à Blood

Kevin Bacon à Bacon in less than six steps:

Kevin Bacon à [Great] Depression à New Deal à Farmers (agriculture) à Livestock à Bacon

Coming up with good rounds is more difficult than it may at first seem. Sometimes one forgets just how interdependent wikipedia is. Linking geographic locations is almost as easy as opening an atlas. Any two articles even remotely similar like ‘battleship’ and ‘war’ can be linked with a single click of the mouse. The more random, the better.

            In terms organization, simplicity is the goal here. Have ten rounds, each player plays in every round (although they will all need different starting and ending articles each time), count up the amount of steps each player used per round, and the one with the lowest score is the winner. It’s simple, fun, and there’s no board to lug around or game pieces to lose. Plus, you might learn something you never knew about blood. Or bacon.

            As an added bonus, like all good games, this one can also involve drinking. Establish an amount of steps. Once the round is complete, the player must drink the amount he or she used, and is permitted to dole out to others any steps remaining.

Strategy

All the best games have some form of shortcut, or at least offer them to people with a sharp mind and a bit of luck. For the Kevin Bacon game, using a movie jam packed with popular actors (A Few Good Men, Glengarry Glenross, Oceans 11, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World if you want to kick it old school) is a great way to cross generations of celebrities in one swift move. For Wikipedia, there are certain cultural memes that make linking up seemingly unrelated articles that much easier. Obviously some key traits of these ‘hub’ articles are length (the seemingly unending article on The Beatles covers all the highlights of sixties music and culture) and content (some articles are nothing more than lists of, say, various New York City neighborhoods). At the same time, there are a handful of anomaly articles that, while short on total information, may hold the exact the two items you are looking for. Many of these happen to be Simpsons episodes, as it allows one to get from an obscure 70’s television show (Sheriff Lobo) to William Randolph Hearst in one go (this would be obviously be the one titled Rosebud, from season five).

Themes and Variations

Unlike the Kevin Bacon game, which because of its very nature is mostly focused on a handful of above average films from the mid eighties to the present, the two million English language articles on wikipedia allows for a host of variations. Just like Trivial Pursuit had its categories, so too can Six Degrees of Wikipedia: And they can be as broad or narrow as you so choose. Examples:

Sports

Wilt Chamberlain à Buffalo Bills

Politics

Donald Rumsfeld à Pitt the Elder

Popular culture

Cocaine à Cocoa Puffs

Ironic Commentary on Music

Trout Mask Replica à Platinum 

Popular 21^st century writers and their pastimes

Chuck Klosterman à mixtape

Analysis
            While pushing the limits of trivial knowledge to its absolute extreme certainly sounds like fun, it's pretty clear that one of the more damning revelations of this game is just how much information wikipedia actually contains.
            We are simply overwhelmed by information today. Accessing too much, too quickly. Awash with knowledge is supposed to be a free society's [wet] dream, but the old cliché claiming 'there can be too much of a good thing' rings alarmingly true here. Today’s society is able to absorb a wealth of information without really having to question its origin. The phrase, 'it's on wikipedia' is becoming a typical debate triumph card.
            And while no one is questioning the importance of having long and multi-paged articles on such topics like the Treaty of Versailles and Stem Cell Research, what are we to make of the reams of information on things that are simply not true and completely irrelevant to the world at large? I am referring to (although there are many others) the extent of the Star Trek universe. Should a fictional world have more pages devoted to it than quantum physics or the Vietnam war?
            I suppose this is what you get when it’s the people's encyclopedia. But just who these people are seems to be Wikipedia’s big mystery. Site co-creator Jimmy Wales have noted that a vast majority of the articles are written up and edited by a group of volunteers numbering only in the hundreds. Rather small for a website that has millions of visitors every day.
            Wikipedia’s not only changing what we know, but the way we think. In the wikipedia world, ignorance is not an option. If you are on the site, you are proving that you are interested in something and are actively learning about it. In cyberspace there are only varying level of experts, some of whom are intensely focused not on current world events but on the broadcasting history of The Larry Sanders Show.
            Sure hardcore leftists can laud wikipedia for their extensive articles on third world atrocities and unfair trade practices, but at the end of the day, regardless of where you get your knowledge of the world around you, wouldn't you just rather crack open a beer with some friends and argue about the greatest albums of all time? (an article longer than the one on Darfur)

            Perhaps, like the Six Degrees game itself, Wikipedia should really be looked at not as a compendium of knowledge but a cultural project of epic proportions. An art exhibit that is constantly redefining how 'we' see the world. We’re hypnotized by it’s size and simplicity that we’ve forgotten that it’s just an encyclopedia. You know, those volume of dry, dull books published every ten years that gather dust in libraries and are the butt of jokes for door-to-door salesmen the world over.
            An encyclopedia is not 'everything', but a miniscule summary of everything. Having this information at your fingertips is no substitute for going out an experiencing the real thing. But first, before you go, come play a couple rounds and see how many links it takes to get from, oh let’s say, computer à nature.

Dec.31 - But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now…

2007 Year in Review

            Oh yeah, this year is done. Like dinner. I stopped caring in May, I think. 2007 is like a big fake number. I didn’t believe it was coming when it was 1998. Then, the whole 21^st century seemed implausible. All these new numbers starting with ‘200’. They don’t seem real, they seem to be eternally in the future, even as we deal with them every single day. We’re living in a science fiction movie without any funding. Stanley Kubrick promised us moon colonies, homicidal robots, and spooky black monoliths. I’ve been patient for the last seven years, waiting. But space travel isn’t the only thing that’s been fucked up. No interesting invention to cure our increasing environmental and natural resource ills, either. For the third of their 40^th anniversary issues, Rolling Stone asked a plethora of artistic and political luminaries what they expected from the year around 2007 (or the time around it) when they were children. A lot answered simply, ‘flying cars’. Flying cars! We don’t even have electric or solar powered cars! We still have gasoline, which is slowly choking us to death (which is why it’s a positive and negative that it’s a finite resource). A couple periodicals have bequeathed 2007 as the year ‘going green went global’. Why, because of the mundane afternoon that was Live Earth? Al Gore winning an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize was nothing bit preaching to the choir, a choir who doesn’t make billions of dollars from oil and coal and doesn’t have the ear of government (either its ear, or its balls in a vice). Just like in 2006. And 2005. Ditto 2004. A pattern is emerging.

            In terms of politics: Forgettable. Completely. Darfur, Iraq, and Palestine are still steaming piles of shit no one has the time or money to properly clean up. We all weathered a crap year of bullshit exhibition games for the official US presidential campaign season. A campaign that everyone is already sick of. As for the current government in Washington: Toothless democrats and whiney republicans and the lamest of the lame ducks. Democracy is steady where it’s always been steady, tenuous where it’s always been tenuous, and a sick fascist joke in countries where it’s always been a cardboard prop for the military dictatorship. And how’s Africa doing? Oh. I see. Well, here’s to a better 2008. No, no! Don’t toast with me! Save that champagne for when the drought hits! I don’t think I can stress enough how little happened this year in terms of world politics. I suppose it comes off quite glib and ignorant, but it was a bland, featureless desert until Bhutto was killed in this last week of the year (James Brown in the end of ’06, Bhutto now, look out…uh…well, I guess that’s not much of pattern…Tom Wolfe, perhaps?). And sure, Pakistan suspended some civil liberties this fall, but ragging on that seems to suggest that Pakistan was paradise in 2006, which isn’t really true, either.

            Art: A couple good movies (No Country for Old Men, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Bourne Supremacy). Some nice music, mainly electronic in nature (MIA, LCD Soundsystem, Burial), according to the oh-so-wise indie media. Amy Winehouse was okay. Queens of the Stone Age still rock with Era Vulgaris. Radiohead gave us four years of work with In Rainbows. Oh yeah, that Radiohead thing. Radiohead shat out In Rainbows for free, which finally told the record industry point blank that not many people are buying music anymore. Not the chief demographic, anyway. And if the rest of the entertainment industry had any sense, they’d take heed, as music is the first domino to fall, with TV going next, followed by movies. We see this already online. A bunch of black market websites exist for a few weeks that have every season of all your favourite series, and as soon as it’s shut down another one with the exact same listing pops up in it’s place. TV is becoming free. Watch out, movies. 2007: The year the public realized that paying for anything you can’t hold in your hand is for suckers.

            Sports: The music industry is dying because it’s becoming ‘free’. The sports industry is alive and kicking, but at least 23% of the credit should go to good ol’ steroids. From ‘who is using?’ in 2006 to ‘well, okay, then who isn’t using?’ in 2007. If a record in baseball has been broken in the last decade, you can be pretty sure an extra special asterisk will be there beside the name in the history books. Olympic medals from decades past being stripped from sprinters and the relay teams they were on (a bitter, bitter pill to swallow for all those teammates). And while football’s hard line stance against banned substances is great, a new problem emerged for them this year. Apparently being repeatedly attacked and piled upon on the field for decades is not good for one’s brain. Ex-players in their fifties are exhibiting symptoms of dementia that you only see from eighty year old Alzheimer’s patients. Sports: Millions of dollars at your powerful fingertips, as long as you’re willing to trade it for shame and crippling physical disabilities.

             Over six years since 9/11 and we’re already back mental autopilot. This year, Paris Hilton in jail and Britney Spears becoming a trailer trash icon got more press than all the world's ills. Those are ‘downer’ stories! Let’s see Lindsay Lohan passed out in a car! And Bush is even a bigger loser now than before September 2001. It seems like the same things are happening but they are happening faster than before. 2007 was a year of vague, boring, déjà vu. Kudos to it going out not with a bang, but a whisper.

            Anyway, it’s done with and 2008 is coming. First thought: It’s an even number, meaning we’re getting the Olympics. Pollution, steroids, and crappy governance will come to a head in Beijing this summer. August is going to be a month full of fireworks, and hopefully only literal ones (and the Democrats have their convention that month! Yawn!).

            With the world they way it is today, it's tempting to say find happiness in your own life, turn inward, get spiritual, but the reality is that we are material beings that exist in a tangible world. To quote the Good Doctor, 'Kill the body and the head will die'. We need our earth healthy to keep ourselves healthy, both physically and spiritually. The Buddhists acknowledgement that all desire leads to suffering is pretty damn worthless when all you desire is a piece of bread to stave off death. And those who feel transcendental meditation can get us beyond the need to replenish our body with nutrients, well, that's always the dream, isn't it? Drop me a line telepathically when you make headway on this.
            I may sound like a cynic, and I guess I am, but I really don't want to be. I want a lot of my pessimistic views on the direction the world is heading to be completely wrong. When a cynic is right, everybody loses.
            So here's to 2008. It can get a lot worse, or it can get a bit better. Depending how you want to look at it, the glass right now is half-empty or half-full, and I don’t care how we end 2008, just as long as we don't break the fucking glass.

Nov. 30 - It’s gettin’ dark, too dark to see, feel like I’m…

            Thanks to the onset of winter it’s getting darker and colder ‘round these parts, but at the same time, if you look at the big picture – the only picture that matters* – it’s getting warmer. This is because of either global warming or the oncoming hellfire of eternal damnation. Many people believe we are approaching the end times, but as to the suggestions of just what is causing it can divided into two separate camps. Al Gore and Thom Yorke blame car exhaust. Pat Robertson and Kirk Cameron blame gay butt sex (and, to a lesser degree, straight butt sex).  Isn’t it nice that people who read books can blame the downfall of civilization on one thing and the people who read one book can blame it on something completely different? It’s win-win, baby.

*-Go Clash!

            The end of the world. Predicted for millennia, allegedly finally here as 25% of America expect Jesus to return before 2008, but why? Too many SUV’s or too many abortions? Dwindling natural resources or dwindling moral integrity*? I don’t mind civilization grinding to a halt and everyone feasting on each other’s remains in a crazed frenzy as the nukes anointed with holy oil are launched, but I sure would like to know why. I mean, yeah, I think it’s because we’re sucking the life and abundance out of this little green and blue planet with a vacuum cleaner and not caring about the consequences, but at the same time, the idea of benevolent/malevolent force from beyond our universe coming down to sort us out in a series of climactic battles is just so much more…what’s the world I’m looking for…Hollywood! It’s exciting! I mean, what’s the average joe gonna want to pay attention to? Climate reports and proposals to lower the amount of greenhouse gases in the air or the final battle between good and evil on the battlefields of Mediggo? It’s a choice between going to school and going to a movie. Now wonder so many people look forward to the end of the world. It seems a lot more exciting than what happens in most people’s lives.

*-as defined by various organized religions, anyway, who are lax some things (poverty) and come on a bit strong with others (evolution). Check your own particular holy book (or television show 1-800 number) for additional info.

            Damn book of revelation. That’s what’s got all the fundamentalists rubbing their hands in anticipation, ready to burn down California (San Francisco in the North, Los Angeles in the South, its Sodom and Gomorrah with Interstate 5 running through the middle).  The book is a psychedelic vision of the apocalypse meant to buck up the thousands of Christians being persecuted by the Roman empire at the end of the first century AD (don’t worry about being tortured and killed! Jesus is coming back…eventually!). It pits the true believers against a giant heretical empire, but unbeknownst to the books author (being dead and all not long after he penned it), the whole matter resolved itself rather peacefully in the 5^th century when the true believers essentially inherited and took over the giant (albeit crumbling) heretical empire.

            Yes, Emperor Theodosius I ruined a real mindfuck of a book by rendering the struggles of the Christians moot when he made Christianity the official religion of the empire in 391AD. And it didn’t take long for the newly powerful Catholic Church to become the corrupt, tyrannical empire it despised years before. Something about suddenly wielding power over millions of people and an entire continent makes one forget about their faith’s central tenets of charity, humility, and poverty. For centuries the papal seat was in complete control of whoever had a big army close to Rome and a big pocketbook. The youngest pope ever elected was eighteen way back in 955AD (make your stocking shelves job at that age look even more pathetic, eh?), almost all of them brokered deals with every emperor and king around for plots of land, and some other early ones were known to get their grove on with widows, family members, and animals. And to think some people were suspicious of Benedict XVI brief tenure in the Hitler Youth.

            So despite this major ‘win’ for the Christians, Revelation wasn’t pushed out of the picture. In fact, in of the best ironies in history, many people across the European continent in the medieval period started to see the bloated, corrupt, ‘donkey-blowing’ Catholic Church as the giant heretical empire that most be overthrown by the pious multitudes (it wasn’t hard to find tracts and illustrations of the Pope described as the anti-Christ). And with the second millennium approaching, much of European serfdom worked itself into a froth over leaving the fields and entering god’s heaving bosom. The good news was that the apocalypse has not occurred anytime in the last two thousand years, and the bad news was the poor masses across Europe kept preparing for such an event by frequently burning down Jewish neighbourhoods and killing their inhabitants to prove their piety.

            How could people suddenly interpret a prophetic vision in the exact opposite way that it was originally intended? Simple. Revelation gets a kick out of being very, very, ambiguous. Kind of like prototype Nostradamus. Perhaps to make the book more, shall we say, timeless… the Roman Empire isn’t mentioned by name. Taking a page from Jesus’ parables where you dance around the message with analogies, the writer (John, perhaps the apostle, perhaps not) refers the big bad empire as the long since crumbled (and one time enemy of the Israelites) Babylon. Remember? The infamous whore from that place, who makes it with a seven headed dragon over the city of 7 hills?* No? Well, don’t worry about it. It’s a tough book to get into. The first half of the vision is John hanging around in heaven, watching nothing happening. So here are the crib notes: God punishes the evil empire on earth with bowls, trumpets, and scrolls full of wrath. Enter the four horseman. Then Jesus comes and saves the faithful, throwing the dragon into the lake of fire. The end. To clarify: Famous city of 7 hills in 1^st century AD? Rome. And regarding the seven headed dragon: It’s a rather unremarkable manifestation of pure evil, but John does note that one of the heads ‘appeared to be slain’, which is a reference to Emperor Nero, who so enjoyed persecuting Christians he promised to continue the practice beyond the grave. Oh, and that 666 stuff? The mark of the beast? I’m not a rabbi so I can’t do the math, but using the Jewish numerical-alphabet combination of gematria, those numbers ‘spell’ Nero in Aramaic.

*- damn, john! What were you smoking?

            Of course, because these analogies to real situations are not literally spelled out in the text, the book of revelation has been able to take on a life of its own and still seem relevant to each passing generation of fundamentalist Christian. Until people see a slut getting it on with a dragon, and watch bowls and trumpets full of death and pestilence be poured out over the land, it can be said that the prophesies have not yet been fulfilled, so we need to have constant vigilance so we’re all prepared! Some Christian hardliners are trying to look at the book with a slightly more open mind, as some modern day literalists claim the mark of the beast are UPC codes. And for decades the godless Soviet Union made a great stand in for the evil empire (Stalin would have made a great whore of Babylon). But at least they’re trying to ‘modernize’ the mythological aspects of the book. Imagine actually believing in dragons and talking lambs and the four horseman spreading evil across the land?*

*-some do. To them, the end of the world will look like the Evil Dead films, with scripture quotations instead of hack catchphrases.

            What are signs that we’re living in the end times? Pamphlets handed out to me on busy street corners say we should keep our eyes out for one or all of the following: war, famine, disease, pestilence, floods, fires, and, to some degree, rampant immorality. Okay, but that sounds like stuff that’s been going since the onset of recorded human history, so I suppose we’ve always been living in the end times (woah, man. How very zen).

            Of course, that doesn’t mean that fundamentalists of any stripe won’t claim the wrath of god is here when we get the melting of the big glacier melting, or when the bombs get launched. Especially since it’s so popular nowadays to say that god is working through us. And this is where things get all muddled up. What’s the difference between god causing natural disasters him or herself and natural disasters caused by our own actions that many people believe are the work of god? If we’re all dead in the end, there isn’t a difference. Except, of course, our legacy. How sad it would be that if in the face of global warming chaos that a majority of the earth turns to religion and the concept of divine wrath, which means that suddenly our civilization’s lasting legacy is that the human race ended with us believing that we were squashed by an almighty force because of gay marriage. Ouch. How embarrassing for us when super-intelligent apes start digging through the rubble five centuries from now. So if we are doomed, let us spend our remaining time on this planet calmly teaching religious fundamentalists that greenhouse gases are the culprit before they string us heathens up.

            And if there is a benevolent/malevolent force beyond our universe ‘up there’, you know it’s rolling it’s eyes as us this whole time…

Aug 18 - Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do, 'cause there ain't no cure for...

            It’s seem like the not very old political saying is true: ‘From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August’. Rather than risk putting a foot in their mouth or invade another country, no elected official says or does anything of value, and they all flee from the shores of the Potomac like rats on a sinking ship.

Nothing is really happening in Washington. The president takes his regular August vacation so he can be well rested for the string of September 11th memorials/reminders at the beginning of next month. Any politician with even a hint of personality is certainly running for president, which means they are hundreds of miles away from the capital, forcing down their third Denny’s breakfast of the week while having an awkward conversation about health insurance with the waitress. All the rest of the senators and representatives are tearfully breaking up with their personal gang of lobbyists, I suppose. Hell, even the pseudo-government of the constantly exploding state of Iraq is successfully applying the bloated bureaucracy tactics of this country and taking the month off. (Tony Snow kindly reminded us that it was needed because it’s darn hot in Iraq in August).

            The only news nugget from Washington was that Turd Blossom has voluntarily flushed himself into the private sector. Most likely as to not completely besmirch the White House when he is finally dragged kicking and screaming in front of a senate committee investigating, well, pretty much anything and everything this administration has done (but most likely it’ll be for the US attorney firings. Even though the country doesn’t seem to care, any democracy scholar knows you can’t let this sleeping dog lie. The Justice Department is the justice department is the justice department. It’s not a strong arm for the White House. Even crazy ol’ John Ashcroft knew that).

            So until Karl Rove is raked over hot coals for an afternoon, it means a slow news month. You knew it was going to be a long, plodding crawl when the big news for an entire week is a collapsing bridge in Minneapolis. The big three anchors were all there, interviewing witnesses and survivors, trying to make a big traffic accident sound as tragic as possible. Even Bush went to see it, since it’s a PR move with no downside (other than having to go to Minnesota). Of course, leave it to the president to still screw it up by pledging to NOT increase funding to the department of transportation for structural upkeep on older bridges and highways. That was a freebie, Mr. President! Give money in the general direction of a disaster! It’s common-fucking sense! If you can give hundreds of millions of dollars to NASA after a space shuttle explodes, how about doling out some money for potholes and girders? No wonder over two thirds of Americans would be happy to see George Bush’s presidency end immediately (I would imagine they mean it in the theoretical, he-suddenly-disappears way, not the practical, fingers-crossed-for-assassination way).

            Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, it’s presidential campaign season, and there’s a whole group of candidates you can follow who haven’t yet sold off every personal value and opinion they hold in order to appeal in any and every way to the base of undecided voters. ‘Did saying that I’m willing to hold an open dialogue with countries that have questionable, authoritarian leaders make me look weak? Then tomorrow I’ll say that I’m willing to use nukes on Iran.’ (in case you’re deaf, blind, dumb, friendless, and have been camping for the last couple weeks, the previously noted ‘blunder’ was committed by Barack Obama).

            And sadly, the media doesn’t really weigh the positives and negatives of Obama’s decision, but simply questions whether this ‘stance’ will help or hinder him on the road to the White House. The focus on style and strategy over substance and policy in today’s media – especially when covering politics of any sort – is completely mind boggling. Actually, it’s 50% mind boggling, 49% pathetic, and 1% giant media conspiracy. The excuse ‘we’re only giving the people what they want’ is insulting. You’re the ‘news’. You don’t give the public what it wants, you give it what it goddamn needs. Obama’s choice to have meetings with countries like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela might be one of the best diplomatic moves America can make on it’s ‘war on terror’. If you’re going to declare a war on a word, you may as well try fighting using words instead of guns. Winston Churchill himself – who neo-cons love to embrace as the original pre-emptive strike, pro-military hawk – said that, ‘talk, talk is better than war, war’. Republicans have always been able to attack the Democrats for being soft on terror, so it comes off pretty disappointing to see other Democratic candidates gang up on Obama in the same fashion. Then again, the democratic race is the only one worth watching, as it looks like the Republicans are just lethargically preparing a loser for 2008. Romney? Giuliani? That’s the top of the heap? Of course, who’d have guessed in 1999 that W. would end up being president, let alone for two terms? In the Financial Times, squinty bald strategist James Carville recently put forth the idea that the last seven years of Bush has turned off an entire generation to the Republican party. That's wishful thinking, as it only takes a bit of down home charm plus a real loser of an opponent to win an election (see 2004).
            Carville’s belief might explain why Fred Thompson hasn’t officially thrown his hat into the ring, though. I mean, it can’t just be because of Law and Order reruns, and ‘never introduce new products in august’. Perhaps he hasn’t had his ego fellated enough to forget that has a snowball's chance in hell at winning. He's too levelheaded to kiss the religious right's ass (god, I hope I'm right about that), a group whose votes he really needs, plus he really looks like a chip off the old, cranky white man block (see Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.), and America seems to be sick of that minority running things. That's why the Dems are fielding a black, a woman, and a youthful southern boy with great hair (it worked the last time). The Pubs are running on 9/11 fumes, but only because they haven't done anything recently that can endear them to the country. And I mean nothing. The economy sucks for 95% of Americans, and the war on terror is a joke (that's the problem with the governance via the war on terror. If the people you need to follow you blindly aren't reminded of TERROR every so often, what's the point?). And that's all the republicans can offer: money and security, with a bit of 'traditional family value' mixed in. This is why not-quite-hero-but-not-quite-scumbag Rudy Giuliani (a president named Rudy? Really?) is somehow the frontrunner of the Republicans right now. But even that won’t hold him in first up to the primaries. He maybe financially and militarily conservative, but pro-gay and pro-abortion may allow Romney to pull ahead in the fall thanks to his courting of the baby-kissing, god-lovin', flag-wavin' crowd, Mormon or not.

            There. I’ve just hammered into shape the next year of the American Presidential Campaign. How? By oversimplifying all the candidate’s policies and summarizing them in a single sentence, like almost every media outlet does everyday. Potential leaders of the free world reduced to factoids. Three twenty four hour news channels, covering the shit out of the upcoming election, and they still aren’t able to tell us anything about the candidates’ domestic and foreign policies beyond a sound bite. No wonder they love it when a bridge collapses or Paris Hilton is sent back to prison. Covering that is easy work.
            The point? Going through the motions for two whole years to find out if the next president will be a black man or a white woman, both of whom barely meet the definition of liberal. It’s shameful that these two senators (and John McCain makes three! Anyone remember him?) are too busy eating homemade pie and being as ambiguous as possible about getting out of (or into) Iraq to hang out in DC and, you know, do the job they were voted into office for. Running for president has always been an amped up version of a high school popularity contest in the last couple decades, but it’s ridiculous that the campaign is now over half the length of the winner’s term in office. It’s a glaring reminder of how inefficient democracy in America has become. Bush ran as an outsider in 2000 and has been anything but, and anyone who runs claiming DC experience has been infected with bureaucratic doublespeak and a penchant for earmarks. The solution: A personality stronger and smarter than all of Washington, but I don’t see anyone like that running for 2008. It’s damn hard to clean the muck when you have to dive into it headfirst to get started.

Keep holding onto your hats, the ride’s not going to get any less bumpier any time soon…

‘Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!’ – Homer Simpson

May 26 - I go forward, you go backward and somewhere...

Politics as Entertainment

      Noam Chomsky once said that the proof that Americans can absorb and analyze large amounts of complex information is seen in their obsession with organized sports. And he certainly has a point. Saying that the average American cannot possibly understand a filibuster or the tax code doesn’t carry much weight if you actually consider the mental dexterity that is required to compute a pitcher’s ERA, decide when to employ cut blocking, and catalogue and reflect upon the amount of triple-doubles held by Wilt Chamberlain.

      Now Chomsky made this comment with the intention that it would provide hope for the disillusioned masses that believe the government is infected with a corrupt, bloated inefficient bureaucracy that does not have the citizen’s best interests at heart. An important point of Chomsky’s is that the powers that be try to dissuade the average American from participating in politics because it is too complicated for them, and that it’s best to just trust the people in charge and not ask any nagging, troublesome questions. For Chomsky, it is important that the Yankee prole doesn’t get suckered into this type of thinking, and he cites sport statistics and analysis as proof that abstract thought is within everyone’s grasp. If the average American can care so much about and devote so much time and effort to the movement of a ball up and down an outlined space, surely they can understand and fix the problems with the nation when the times comes.

      Well, the bad news is that we’re still waiting for Joe Six-pack to replace Sports Illustrated with Mill’s On Liberty, but the worse news is that the media has seemingly taken Chomsky’s quote as something akin to an epiphany and has attempted to make the delivery of the news as sports-like as possible.
      First out was meaningful, lengthy discourse. An interview with a basketball, hockey, or baseball player lasted thirty seconds and included mindless questions like, ‘what do you think worked for you out there today?’ This was carried over to most types of political journalism, where reporters seemed to not so much ask questions about the issues, but instead ask how the politician is dealing with the strategy needed to deal with the issue.

      Strategy became the new paradigm. Everyone loves strategy. It’s the hallmark of games from football to monopoly. Forget what you are doing, that’s obvious (trying to win), what is more important now is how you’re going to do it. And this is fine in sports, because sports don’t really matter. You can’t say, ‘well there’s always next year’ when it comes to fixing health care. Actually, not only can you, but many frequently do. With the democrats coming back to power in 2006 elections, it was treated as if Washington got a whole new roster, that there are new things to focus on. The flailing 109^th congress just got some new heavy hitting recruits! It seems that everyone is conveniently forgetting the dangers of being so glib and carefree when it comes to analyzing and discussing pressing political issues. Pundits and politicians today - when they discuss the Iraq situations, illegal immigration, or health care - sound as if they may as well talking about how to get their local team above .500. They take issue with their opponents as if they think the best thing to do is get a stronger relief pitcher, while the other side chooses to strengthen the lower batting order. Some of the most blatant tweaking of the nightly news has been to its studio environment, the goal of which seems to be to make it look like a set for ESPN’s Sportscenter. Hell, CNN has Wolf Blitzer eternally stationed in the ‘Situation Room’, which is covered with wall to wall monitors, so they can cover as many ‘issues/games’ at once. Political experts and party analysts come on to discuss how politicians are dealing with the public perception of issues: 'They have to adjust this, convince people of that, and then wait to see if it works.’ Headlines on the cable news networks usually go something like, 'What will it take for Bush to get out of his slump?' which completely skirts the issue of why the president may be in a slump in the first place.     The disconnection between the importance of politics and sports should have been obvious from the onset of making news a series of rapid-fire factoid reporting done by attractive talking heads. No one asks, 'is it right to play baseball?' on sports shows, but that's exactly the type of question that is avoided when it comes to important issues like Iraq. The question: 'Is it right to be in Iraq?' is never directly addressed. It's always brought up in a political context, as if holding a certain position on Iraq is only part of a larger strategy for one side to 'win' the debate over the issue, the congress/senate vote, or the election.

      And that’s what politics has become in the media: Winning. The media has groomed politics for its close up, and has smoothed over any challenges to its game-like presentation. First you have to build the two teams, which is convenient, as America currently has a two party political system, the Democrats (liberals) and the Republicans (conservatives). Third party? Tough shit, you have to be one or the other for the sake of the game. People are lumped (sometimes hammered) into these two groups, because who ever heard of a three way game? it's too hard to imagine. Keep it simple. Move those on the fringes into the middle as much as possible. Gray is confusing, black and white is nice and easy. Wear this label, this 'uniform'. The fans need to know what team you're on when you go on the air.

      Then there’s the actual ‘game’, the fighting over the two sides of the issue. Depending on your turn (did you make the bonehead decision to invade ‘country x’? Or did your opponent make it?), you either go on the offense or defensive, or sometimes you utilize both at the same time. Among the equipment at your disposal: attack ads, responses to attack ads, incessant polling, discussing the strategy of delivering new ideas/accusations/positions at pancake breakfasts, rewriting parts of the playbook with billionaire investors, etc. All this ‘strategy’ completely overshadows the ‘goal’ of the issue. In sports you can dance around the ‘issue’ (winning the game by running around the bases more often than your opponent), because everyone can pretty much agree on it and can therefore focus on and squabble over strategy (where to put the DH in the batting over, when to bring in a southpaw reliever, etc.). Unfortunately, the media is trying to bring that archetype to politics, which is why everyone seems to be so obsessed with whether Bill Clinton is a help or hindrance to Hillary’s presidential run, instead of discussing the feasibility of her universal healthcare plan.

      Worst of all is the concept of ‘winning’ in politics. Sure, you ‘win’ elections and that’s a reason for celebration, but after you are in office, ideally, there is no ‘winning’. Everyone is there to make the country a better place (how idealistic I suddenly am!). When the Republicans or Democrats get a bill passed, the winners are supposed to be the American people. To make government appear to be more like sports, the media has essentially turned the political parties against each other and into rottweiliers that are trained to hate the other based solely on principle. Nobody ‘wins’ when you pass a spending appropriation bill, or a troop increase, and as long as it’s portrayed as such politics in America will remain as divisive as ever.
      So where do we go from here? What’s next? I mean, forget sports, how far are we from elections as a reality show? Will people be voted into office in the style of American idol? More people participated in the voting of contestants for that show than in last presidential election, so maybe it's closer than we all want to admit already. Running for president is a two year long, awkward audition filled with cranky pundits, ass-kissing advisors, and superficial stump speeches replacing Burt Bacharach's entire catalogue. At this point it’s not just the cynics who keep reminding us that politics today is more about personality and style than honesty and substance. The forgettable comedy film American Dreams had a currently unpopular, aloof president acting as a celebrity judge for an American Idol-style competition, but why be a judge when you’ve become the main attraction? It would be much more believable if the president himself was onstage, crooning about the benefits of his new immigration reform bill.

Considering Chomsky sounded off the alarms to the sinister simplicity of the media conglomerates decades ago, I wonder if he wishes he was dead just so he would able to spin in his grave.

April 1 - God is concept, by which we measure our...

I didn't go to missionfest because it was snowing out. Forgive me?

      Since even the post office has a slogan about how they won't let precipitation slow them down, I can't imagine god would tolerate such an excuse (I had to get all this info via newspaper articles). Certainly I would be a pariah to the 500 or so people who braved the weather to make it to convention centre near the airport.

‘It’s no surprise to god. He knew the storm would take place this evening,’ claimed speaker Reynold Mainse. I should certainly hope so. In fact, I would take it a step further and hope that god created the storm. Not because I have anything against missionfest, but because I don’t like the idea that there are possible storms out there that god is not aware of and has no control over. Mainse quickly moved on to asking the congregation for money ($40k), and started passing out collection buckets.

      Buckets? I remember when they were just plates at my church. And just why exactly do they need money these days? Because there might not be many more days left. A popular theme at this year’s missionfest was the approaching apocalypse, known to fans as the greatest show on earth, and to scholars as the unfolding of events described in the controversial final book of the bible, The Revelation of/to John. Apparently the organizers feel that this time, the final change really is in the air, and point out that increased persecution of missionaries in non-Christian nations is proof that a hard rain’s gonna fall. Also, the fall of the godless Soviets, and the rise of god-incorrect Middle East somehow enters into the realm of fulfilling biblical prophesy (Jesus hates commies).
      So with only a few choice statements, we can see the glaring criticisms so many people have with the many groups within the bowels of evangelical Christianity: the belief of God controlling every aspect of our lives to the point where we seem to be nothing but puppets, the obsession with the coming end of the world, and the demand for piles and piles of money.

      This is a shame, because at the same time missionary work is probably one of the most important, difficult, and unrewarding professions that is available to absolutely anyone. To become a priest it takes years of study at a seminary, but to sign up for preaching the word of god to heathens on the other side of the world, all you need is to walk into a agency such as Light of the World, Believers World Outreach, the Association of Christian Dental Technicians (really), and the American Leprosy Missions (swear to god). Tell them you found god and want to help others find him, and sign up. In fact, you don’t even have to leave your house and convince anyone of your religious fervor. Most of these groups allow you to sign up over the internet.
      Recruitment is necessary for any type of organization, whether it be religious, political, or economical, but since the benefits of following the first type can only be reaped after you are buried or burned, the church, temple, and mosque have had to use rather dubious methods. Christ’s request for the apostle Peter to, ‘feed my sheep’, doesn’t say much about assimilating pagan festivals into Christian doctrine, handing out pamphlets on street corners, and killing doctors who perform abortions. While the conversion of the Roman empire was at first a slow, steady process of not renouncing Jesus while being feed to lions, Christianity was permitted and then embraced by Emperor Constantine in 313, which made everyone else in the empire suddenly ‘embrace’ the religion as well. The next, say, 1500 years or so, were full of forced conversions of entire societies, inquisitions, crusades, and some extremely poor choices for pope.

      Unfortunately around the time of the Industrial Revolution, many people’s lives got better, and Christian influence over the world tapered down to the point where the Pope Pius IX issued an edict outlawing liberalism and rational thinking (listen for the slow, sarcastic applause). So the church went back to square one, and decided to spread the word of god to the poor, sick, hungry, and uneducated. Which meant every European colony the homeland had fucked over for the last century or so.

      Namely, Africa. Which, depending on who you talk to today, has stayed shitty, gotten worse, but certainly hasn’t gotten any better. An eternally broken axle, Africa is the poster child for man’s desire to do good and still fuck up completely. While many would suggest the key to reviving Africa is a complex formula of investment, education, and ending government corruption, most Christian missionary groups try to bypass all that with a nice, thick, blanket of conversions. All you need is love. Specifically, god’s eternal love. Once you see that, poor African child, then you can have some cookies and clean clothes. Or that malaria shot you’ve been hankering for.

      And herein lies the rub. Regardless of how you feel about Christian dogma, the fact that these missionaries are coming in as a spiritual savior with supplies kind of destroys any possibility of these poor people having a genuine religious epiphany. When does preaching become proselytizing? When you won’t give a piece of bread to someone until they acknowledge it is in fact the body of the lord Jesus Christ? Religion may be the opium/opiate of the masses, but for the millions of poor starving around the world, the analogy need not be a drug. It doesn’t even have to be an analogy. It can just be a bowl of rice. When you and you’re family haven’t eaten in days, you’d almost surely say that you believe whatever the person dispensing the food wants you to believe. And what kind of religion conversion is that? You have to find god in your heart, not your stomach. If you have to stand in a dilapidated shack for an hour and listen to a man read from a book you’ve never heard of for clothing and food, why not? What do you have to lose? It would seem, then, that the joke is really on the missionaries.

      And of course, the missionaries realize this. It’s not over a single meal that a poor Indian or African becomes a Christian. It takes a good month of bible class and tearing down the local beliefs in spirits and medicine men before they get results.

      Sometimes this backfires completely and the locals run the missionaries out of town, or into the ground. Yes, as the folks at missionfest mentioned, attacks on those spreading the word of god have gone up, especially in India, where those no-good Christians have begun approaching the Untouchables (Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, 1987) and telling them they shouldn’t spend their lives (literally) in the gutter. Now dying for god is nothing new. Sure, most missionaries would prefer to just doing good work and dying peacefully at a ripe old age rather than be painfully martyred, but there are always a couple rotten apples in any group. Some people who want to get on to that express lane for the great gig in the sky.

      Early Christian missionaries to North America were known for remaining remarkably calm while being tortured and killed. Some of them even accomplished their missions through their deaths (a true nod to their messiah if there ever was one). Native Americans were impressed by the way these strange, pale, non-combative men willing accepted such extreme pain, that they willingly converted in hopes they would have the same strength in battle. Sadly, the courage they may have found for battle was no match for taking on their real eventual enemy, smallpox.

      In the end, missionfest seemed to be exactly what I would have expected. A lot if cheap kiosks, a bunch of identical speeches, and a guy sat in a makeshift jail cell on the convention floor to protest the persecution of women teaching Sunday school in Indonesia. He represented a group called Open Doors International, and from his cell gave a rather closed minded statement, putting forth the idea that the devil is using other religions to bring down Christianity. He added: ‘[Satan]’s a defeated for, but he hasn’t given up.’ Gotta hand it to Satan. Even when the odds are against him, he doesn’t go down without a fight. He would have made a great missionary.

Jan. 22 - My hands are turnin’ red, and I found out my baby was…

Announcer: Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the nineteenth annual Cleveland Monster Truck Supershow, here at the Modell Coliseum right on the shores of beautiful Lake Erie. We’ve got a whole evening of action ready for you with machines having a combined roar of well over 286,491 horsepower. We’ve got them all here tonight, like the Gouger, the Trouncer, the American Masher, the Yankee Grizzly, the Confederate Lemme-at-‘em, the Bandit, the Burglar, the slicer, the dicer, the car-zilla, the T-Wrecks, spelt W-R-E-C-K-S, the crusher, the metal head, Jeffery Paul’s truck the Paulverizer, spelt P-A-U-L-V-E-R-I-Z-E-R, the Lion, the Witch, the Warrior, the Medusa, named after the famous mythological Greek hag who could turn all those who looked upon her into stone, yet no word or not whether her driver, Steve Johnson, will have the same power tonight. We also have the mangler, the ravager, the omniscient narrator, that truck, I’m led to understand is named after the literary device in which the voice of the novel is everywhere, reading the minds of the characters while speaking in the third person. That driver, Jerry Harnel, is racing tonight in memory of his brother Wendel, who died when his vehicle, the focalizer, that is, whoever’s point of view the narrator continually focuses on, usually the protagonist, burst into flames while battling the Philosopher’s Stone, named after the mythical substance that turns all matter into gold and can create an elixir that renders the drinker immortal. I understand that Alfred Farnsworth III, driver of the Philosopher’s Stone, is driving for his father, Zeke Abrams, who was critically injured at the pig rendering plant where he works. Tonight we’re also proud to bring you the Psychotic Sixteen Tournament, where the best drivers we have face off in a no holds barred demolition derby. Involved in this mind blowing dance of death is the Iron Maiden, the Widowmaker, the Theory of Relativity, that is the general principles of the universe, energy equals matter combined squared, driven by Hank Einstein, we also found time on the card for the Bruiser, the Gravedigger, the Grave preparer, and Little Boots, which happens to be the nickname of famed Roman emperor and tyrant Caligula, who eccentricities made him legendary. (pause) Besides appointing his favorite horse a senator, he slept with his sister, killed his mother, massacred thousands of Christians, and had hundreds of mistresses, many of which were executed after he tired of them. (pause) Cleveland, are you ready to make some noise?!!!

            Does Nascar seem too much like astrophysics to you? Do crashes involving regular sized cars elicit nothing from you but a shrug and a yawn? Do you want to go deaf before you go grey?
            Then you should attend a Monster Jam monster truck rally.
            Yesiree, there is nothing quite like spending a Saturday night in a large stadium watching vehicular abortions bounce over clumps of dirt for fifteen bucks. It was always a dream of mine to go to one of these things (one of those grade three dreams, after becoming an astronaut, but before massaging breasts), but the parental units never thought it was a good idea. And now with my independence firmly in check, I headed over to the local domed field to avenge my parent’s sensible refusal.
            After plunking down almost the full ticket price for two plastic cups full of lukewarm budweiser we headed to the nose bleed section. Once there, you realize the very top of the stadium is optimal seating because: a) the trucks are bigger than the lineup of an entire baseball or football team combined, b) if it's this loud up here, then all the ears of the people below you must be bleeding.  If I can get any point across in this article – avoiding as many value judgments as possible – I would like it to be this: It's loud. It's really, really, really fucking loud.
            Although having a 10,000 pound monster truck drive over a couple school buses sounds like the most amount of awesome you could possibly pack into ten seconds, it's actually incredibly boring. First off, there are no children in the buses. Second, there's no gasoline in the bus, either. In other words, it is nothing more than a deluxe road block. And while going over a roadblock at full speed might be fun if you're actually in the car or truck currently on steroids, watching said vehicle going over a roadblock is significantly less fun. Especially when you watch it happen six times in a row by essentially the same monster truck, save for a different pain job and a different hick driver who didn't have enough of a need for speed to race real cars.

            And despite all this, the one guy you really feel sorry for is the commentator. You know he's waiting for a chance to call some real sporting event, and sit by the phone every night in case ESPN calls, but is instead stuck here, spending half his time flogging the souvenir stand. Every fifteen minutes we were cheerfully remind that if you do not have a ‘Gravedigger’ pennant, you are nothing, you are worthless, you are a rotten, scum sucking, Koran-reading, commie atheist hippie pig…unless you buy your own right now.

            It’s also the commentator’s sacred duty to interview the winner of the racing tournament. In out case, it was the legendary (as far monster trucks can be, I suppose) ‘Gravedigger’. Which although seems to be a pretty cliché name, considering one of the trucks there was called 'the Broker', is still a rather catchy one. And the interview: With these shows going on almost daily with only about sixteen trucks competing, pretty much every driver has spent at least time on the winner’s podium. And you have not heard a stump speech until you've heard one from a man who drives a vehicle with wheels bigger than a corner office. Key things to remember:

-It felt good out there.

 -He just had to blah, blah, blah at the something, something, something and it was all smooth riding after that.

-The other drivers are all great athletes, especially the one who just lost to him.

-hi mom!

He even got to open a bottle of champagne and spray it everywhere, which is clearly the sign of any classy sporting event these days.
            And the fans? Why they're the nicest goateed rednecks who hate paying 6.50 for beer just like the next person (as long as the next person is a cheap bearded redneck). To be fair, most of these rednecks aren't conforming to their stereotype (except the beer drinking and facial hair), but are just bringing their kids, who of course love stupid things like this. The only time a young male is happier than when he is building a new toy is when he is breaking it. Kids don't have control over anything in their lives except their toys, and the monster truck rally is where they live vicariously, watching grown men driving and hopefully breaking giant toys (there are no practical uses for a monster truck, therefore it is a toy).

             If anything goes wrong, or the nightly schedule is put in jeopardy thanks to a wheel falling off, there is only one solution: free t-shirts. Like clockwork, some random guy with a handheld air cannon shows with a rather attractive but conservatively dressed young woman at his side, firing rolled up t-shirts into the crowd. The commentator asks with as much fake enthusiasm as possible if anyone wants a free t-shirt. If the response is anything less than a deafening roar, he tells the crowd that he can't hear them (considering he's down on the stadium floor the whole time, he might be telling the truth), and asks the question again. I’m not sure if the overall desire for t-shirts had increased in that moment or whether the congregation just wants the commentator to shut up, but they oblige by yelling their prepubescent or drunken heads off.
Some final event notes for all you diehards out there: The Virginia Giant lost its rear steering and gave up halfway through the freestyle event. Or maybe the driver lost the will to do this anymore. Now that would make for an interesting evening. A man in a flame retardant suit having a nervous breakdown in a massive big-wheeled truck, tears rolling down his cheeks as he clears four impounded chevy impalas. Also, no one went apeshit in the stands until the Ninja Turtle truck tried to run up a dirt ramp and flipped over on its side. Batman beat Superman for all those keeping score.
            So all in all it was exactly what I expected, meaning it was bad and couldn’t have been worse unless I got caught up in a bleacher riot. And maybe this is just another case of The Simpsons once again ruining reality for me, but it really bugged me that there wasn't even a truck-a-saurus equivalent at this event. And for a final bit of info, after the first couple events the smell that suddenly permeates through the entire stadium will make it seem like the entire the night is taking place inside a giant muffler. Enjoy.

Dec. 24 - So this is Christmas, and what have you done?

Know what’s great about the holidays? Throwing up egg nog. It doesn’t have that acidy aftertaste, it’s nice and creamy. Just toss your cookies in the toilet, wipe your mouth, and head back out to the party. Most of the staff here at the station swear by it, as long as rum is included (otherwise, what’s the point?).

But festive puking is only one of the ornaments on the holiday tree (we’ve got a kwanza covert on staff, so ‘christmas’ is kind of a dirty word in the office). There’s also presents, mistletoe, annoying carols, and awkward conversation with rarely seen family members (‘Uncle Ryan?! I can’t believe you’re not dead!’).

Of course, it’s not all tinsel and turkey. Apparently there’s a war on. No, not the boring ol’ Iraq war, silly! The war on Christmas! The war that really affects us these days (remember, if you say, ‘Seasons Greetings’, the terrorists and Hanukah Harry win). See, America used to balance Christmas perfectly, with the star of Bethlehem shining happily over the local shopping centre and no one minded a single bit. But now those godless politicians and money grubbing department store owners are banning Christmas trees in government buildings and welcoming us to buy cheap shirts and vacuum cleaners with Satan-inspired hellos. What’s next, banning Christmas altogether? (like, um, the Christians did in England in the 17^th century)

But maybe that’s excessive. Perhaps we just need to do a bit of housecleaning. Here’s an idea. Let give the Jews and Muslims Santa Claus. And I don’t mean that Christian nations should dump the jolly old elf, I’m just saying Santa has shit all to do with the birth of Jesus, so everyone may as well welcome him in their homes at the end of December. And let’s not get into this ‘St. Nick’ argument. Saint Nicholas was a fourth century bishop on the island of Myra. One of the miracles attributed to him was that he resurrected three boys killed by a butcher who planned to sell their flesh as ham (thanks, wikipedia). He also gave money anonymously to a poor man so he could have dowries to give away with his three daughters (this doesn’t seem as miraculous, but that doesn’t matter since it might have actually been St. Basil, anyway). Santa Claus was created by the coca cola beverage company in a marketing campaign, was fleshed out in a mediocre 19^th century poem that even the author disavowed, and etched into our collective consciousness via cheesy but classic Hollywood films (Miracle on 34^th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, Toys).

The whole world should embrace Santa Claus. What a great way to put a friendly face on the America-dominated globalization of the planet. A happy fat man who seems willfully ignorant of the great humanitarian disasters across the world (I’m waiting on the edge of my seat to hear these fateful words: ‘How could Santa allow this to happen?’). Santa and his liberty deer, soaring across the skies, giving away toys to all the good little nations that embrace democracy and free markets (I wonder if Santa will have to move his workshop to the South Pole in the next ten years due to global warming).

And of course there’s the terrifying aspect of Santa (best documented in a slew of appallingly bad horror films), since he is essentially a benevolent-yet-disturbed individual who breaks into millions (or billions) of houses in the middle of the night. Plus his criteria for good and bad children remain a closely guarded secret, and god knows how he pays his elves, or how he obtains copyright from a whole host of toy manufacturers, and why he seems to boycott almost all of Africa.

So yeah, there are more holes in Santa’s story than in a well planned gangbang. Some people doubt his existence completely. And to them I say, ‘You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time. But you can fool all the children all of time, so you may as well do it.’

I mean if you need proof that large groups of people can be manipulated into believing a massive secret by carefully controlling the information they have access to, look no further than Santa Claus. Sure, they’re only kids but that’s the whole point. A group of people who don’t ask questions because asking them doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to how they live their lives (‘Why do I have to eat all my vegetables?’ ‘Because I said so’ ‘Why do I have to go to school?’ ‘Because you have to’ ‘How does Santa fly around the world in just one night?’ ‘Magic. Finish your vegetables’).

And from there it’s only a small hop, skip, and jump to what happens with older segments of the population. Really. There are far too many people in this world who are nothing more than big children with driver’s licenses. Parenting is essentially just telling a small person you have complete power over to, ‘trust me’. And they do. Just like government is just telling every person they have complete power over to, ‘trust us’. And we do, rarely asking any questions (and when we do, we get answers akin to, ‘Magic’). Children are living under a massive illusion, and the rest of us are not too much further up the road.

But it’s not that there is a massive conspiracy that most of don’t know about. There is no conspiracy. The secrets are right in front of us (the government cares more about the welfare of the corporations that put them in power than the welfare of the citizens… but at least we’re second). We just choose not to look at these things. It becomes an inconvenience to think about. We’ll let others worry about problems with the government (unfortunately we usually let the government try to solve the problems with the government). To go back to the Santa Claus example. Resourceful young children can easily find contrary positions on the existence of Santa Claus (older siblings, the internet, the newspaper, certain channels on TV), but why should they bother? They just want the presents, and to hell with the logistics. In fact, what if asking too many questions means no presents at all? Why risk that? Just keep your mouth shut, sit on Santa’s lap, and wait for the tickle me elmo.

And for us, we can end world hunger. We can find cheap, renewable resources. We just don’t care enough to seriously look for the answers. After all, they might be unsettling, and require – shock! Horror! – changes and sacrifices on our behalf. It’s a damn shame that it will take the problems to hit home before we will do something about them.

I guess this is kind of a downer way to end the year, so try to focus on the sugarplums that are supposed to be dancing in your heads (what is a sugarplum? Just a sugared plum?).

Just remember that before we can all take DMT and ascend to the higher plane of existence we have to make sure we’re all well fed and warm.

Merry Christmas and/or happy holidays, and good luck with 2007. We’re all gonna need it.

Nov. 29 - Protected by a silver spoon...

I’ve just noticed something. We haven’t had a well-publicized defenestrating case for quite a long time. Defenestrating is, of course, the act (or art, depending on where you spend your Saturday nights, I suppose) of throwing people out of windows. Preferably high ones. It wouldn’t do much good throwing somebody out of a first floor window unless your real goal was to just ruin the flower bush out front. Like all cultured historians, the first thing I think of when it comes to famous defenestrating is the Mel Gibson movie, Braveheart. Remember that scene when the evil King of England tosses his son’s ‘friend’ out the window? I think it was a good fifty feet up. Anyway, the guy lands hard, and three soldiers come to investigate, probably thinking, “Murder! Oh my god!” Then they look up and see that the King did it. Then they run away. ‘Cause hey, what are you going to do? It’s the King. He can throw anybody he wants out of a window. I bet that’s the one thing Prince Charles really wished he could still do. Can’t make laws, fine. Aren’t in charge of the army, hey, it happens. But please, don’t take away a royal person’s god given right to toss other men and women out (or off) of high places.

That brings up another good point. I’m willing to bet only wealthy, powerful people would go to the trouble defenestrating someone else. I can’t see them getting down a dirty and using something like a gun or a knife. They’d go for something devious like this. Something that won’t crease their pants or skirt. Just a slight nudge, and there goes your competition for the new senior VP opening.

Defenestration is frequently linked with civil unrest and political upheaval, at least in the medieval and renaissance periods. This probably has something to do with the fact that they didn’t have many guns, couldn’t read, were in the clutches of a feudal system, the rats were really in control, etc. Back then, corrupt leaders and officials were brutally murdered along with their families and tossed out of windows to be torn apart by an angry mob. Today, disgraced political leaders are given high-level consulting positions with government defense contractors and the angry mob has been replaced by gun show enthusiasts and NASCAR dads. We have to leave it to the last bastion of tradition these days – organized crime – to find defenestration in the twentieth century. In the early forties, a mob informant went missing from his hotel room in New York City and was found on the ground below the day before he testified in court (one day before? That’s cutting it close). I assume this was because WWII was starting up, and the mafia wanted to do its part to save scrap metal by not using bullets, cement, piano wire, or a meat hook.

Yeah, I can’t really think of a good reason why defenestrating got out of style. It’s quick, you don’t have to be really strong, and it can easily be fixed to look like an accident. I mean, most murders, you have to have an alibi, you don’t want to be anywhere near the crime scene, and of course there’s evidence… it’s hard to make certain deaths look like an accident (“He was cleaning his gun, when it went off…uh… right between his forehead”, “He fell backwards onto the knife…seventeen times”). But with defenestrating it’s different. You should be there. You’re the one that tells the police that your friend “was just trying to get a better view of a blond down on the street when he leaned to far out and…” I mean, what are the police going to do? They have no reason to suspect you. Hell, you were his friend. You went into the building together. They realize that people are generally klutzy. I know I am. That’s why avoid any invitation to high buildings. ‘Cause if I got bumped off, there wouldn’t even be an investigation. That’s how much of a stumblebum I am. The cops might call my parents, and my father would probably tell them he was surprised I made it this far.

Then there’s self-defenestrating. Not to be confused, though, with suicide via tall building. You see there’s really only one case of someone unintentionally throwing him or herself through a window. As it so happens, it took place a couple years ago in some city that I can’t recall at the moment. See, a young executive was in his office of some large downtown skyscraper, showing off to a couple of women he invited up the strength of the ceiling-to-floor glass window. And how did he show this off, you ask? Simple. By throwing himself against it. Several times (I think you can guess how this ends). Sure enough, he did one body check too many, and went flying through the window. Unfortunately, the flying quickly became falling, and the sidewalk below never knew what hit it (although I’m sure it had a good idea). Cruel, yes, but as Homer Simpson said while watching a gruesome movie about car accidents as punishment for driving drunk: “It’s funny ‘cause I don’t know him”.

            Then there are the cliff jumper types who dive out of windows with parachutes, which is only defenestration if you remove the rule that the person in question must be a splattery piece of muck at the end. Unfortunately, the ‘person-muck’ is pretty much the key to defenestration (without it, you’re pretty much just doing an eighth grade science project). After all, it’s not the fall that kills you and makes the gods giggle like schoolgirls, but the sudden stop.

Of course, just because it’s easy, and you have a good chance of staying out of jail, doesn’t mean the act of defenestrating is as innocent and pure as freshly fallen snow. There are many ethical and moral questions that one must consider: ‘Is murder ever right?’, ‘Can I live with myself if I do this?’, ‘Will the person land on anything I own?’, and ‘Is it wrong to serve dip at the wake?’

Sept. 10 - I can’t even touch the books you’ve read…

This column is about good ol’ idiots. They span the globe, transcending race, creed, culture, and sex. Many people rag on idiots (me included), and with good reason. But it’s not all bad. Idiots are able to play valuable roles in a society that accepts mediocrity from so many of its traditions and institutions. Now while this is a obviously a bad thing, and makes even the most bluest liberals wish for some form of despotism, for people like me who have written off the world as a dying cocktail party, it is a source of much amusement. Idiots, through no real fault of their own, have their own kind of silver lining for their clouded, tiny minds.

First off, idiots make other people feel better about themselves. When someone says, ‘I’m sorry for acting like such an idiot’, it’s really them pointing out that there are people who act that stupid all the time. And the problem is, these people don’t exist. If you screwed up 100% of the time, you probably didn’t make it to toilet training. You probably choked on marbles one too many times and are reading this column in heaven or hell right now (heaven has DSL, and hell has dial up, but you’re allowed to surf for porn in the latter). No, the people who are labeled as idiots are those who screw up about 60-70% of the time. Now, this has nothing to do with intelligence quotient or mental handicaps. Real idiocy flies under the scientific radar. These people can hold jobs, finds spouses, even (horror upon horror) mate with alarming frequency. This last observation is particularly important, as it reminds us how valuable it is to not be an idiot. Hardworking, intelligent people like you or I can walk with an extra spring in their step knowing the chances of us getting our hands caught in a vending machine or snowblower is astronomically low. Idiots cannot be so sure of this, but being idiots they aren’t even aware that it’s possible to be so sure (hence why they are more likely to get involved with said vending machine or snowblower). For idiots, absolutely anything is possible in the course of an average day, but being an idiot means to be totally unaware of this. ‘Be prepared’ means nothing to an idiot, even those that were in boy scouts (they were the ones who burnt their tongues when roasting marshmallows, and somehow started a fire while wood carving).

Idiots make life worthwhile provided that we are bystanders to their tomfoolery, not victims of it. Standing in line behind an idiot may be one of the most nerve-racking, murder-suppressing ordeals there is, but watching a fat oaf trying to open a bag of M&M’s on a bumpy, crowded bus makes even that worthwhile. Arguing with an idiot is damn near impossible, as they don’t let small things like logic or facts get in the way of their point. An idiot’s sole weapon in an argument is reiterating their point in as many different ways as possible until their opponent just gets fed up and concedes with, ‘Ah fuck this, I’m going to get another drink’. And yet on the other side of this coin, confusing or convincing an idiot of something that just isn’t true is as easy as, well, convincing an idiot of something that just isn’t true. If there’s something an idiot isn’t sure of, but wants to believe, a simple anecdote that supports their hopes is good enough for them (‘oh yeah, gravity is a lot weaker on the second floor of a house. Once my cousin jumped up in a condo on the twelfth floor and hit his head on the ceiling.’).  Convincing idiots of the inherent safety in dangerous activities can be one’s own personal eugenics program (‘no, no, no. Inflammable and flammable don’t really mean anything. It’s unflammable that you have to worry about’).

Idiots give us television that we can hate. Television that we can watch with ironic detachment. Television with see-it-coming-three-miles-away clichés and two dimensional characters to remind us all that the good guys always win and there’s a discount on wax paper at the local grocery store (really, you shouldn’t be spending more than ninety-nine cents a roll). Happy endings, car chases, and all the PG-approved titties you can imagine. Now all three of these things are not cultivated solely by the idiot (perhaps the intelligent bohemian prefers R-rated titties, but we’re splitting heirs here), but these three ingredients are presented in such a regular, poorly scripted fashion (first titties, then the car chase, and finally the happy ending…possibly with a titty reprise) that it becomes teeth-grindingly awful to anyone who is not an idiot. For example, CSI: Whatever is the idiot’s Law & Order.

Fortunately television has nothing resembling scruples, and will gladly mock and deride the very people it relies on for its existence. ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ gives viewers a glimpse of the idiot in his or her natural habitat. Oh sure, many of the videos display harmless, innocent activities that go hilariously wrong, but the ones that involve people doing asinine behavior right off the bat are of much more value to the amateur sociologist. The outcome is predictable (pain), but the journey is fresh and open-ended. Is the idiot in question acknowledging the camera with a shit eating grin and waving before he tries to light his barbeque for the first time since last summer? Excellent. Is his whiny five year old with ice cream on his face wandering aimlessly nearby? Even better.

            So yes, the idiots have taken over, whether it is in the halls of government or the world of television programming (and maybe it’s just me, but even the internet feels stupider these days. Everything is either a link to celebrity gossip or an ad banner which asks you to shoot a gopher to win an iPod). But don’t despair. We can rest comfortable at night knowing that we know what’s going on, and how to do all the card tricks that will enthrall the masses (go sheepdogs, go!). Besides, when the revolution finally comes my fellow witty and well-read friends, think of all the slaves we’ll have!

August 8 - The House Party: An Analysis

Another old one. Summer reruns and all that. I'm sure you understand...

July 24 - Anatomy of a Night Out

This was written a long time ago in place far, far away.

May 27 - Riding along in my automobile...

It's car season again, and all the cool people have 'em and are payin' an arm and a leg and any other spare body parts for gasoline. Who knows, this may be the last summer where a road trip actually involves a car (next summer: get on the Harleys and tail the last remaining gas truck across a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland!).

Lucky for me, I get carsick nowadays, so I walk or fly or get carried everywhere, but for the rest of you who are forced to pound asphalt, I offer these suggestions to make your journey a tad more bearable (not too much more bearable, though. Some parts of the road trip should be a tremendous pain in the ass. Like eating Burger King for the sixth time in five days).

So take out a couple loans to pay for fuel and get behind the wheel. Nervous? Pound back a few (know your limit, both alcohol and speed). Balance the booze buzz out with some pep pills and as long as your car can outrun the average cruiser, you're all set. After all, getting there is half the fun, and driving fast adds an extra quarter.

Remember to indulge in all type of diversions (punch buggy game, truck honk fist pump, road head, Spam Museum in Minnesota), and don't be afraid to talk to the locals (to break the ice, try something along the likes of, 'I'd like a burger and fries with a can of root beer. To go'). Also, since you’re spending money like a drunken sailor at a discount whore and gambling emporium, you may as well buy a durable but useless souvenir, like a paperweight with the name of the town or attraction you've just visited (what a great conversation starter: 'Nice rock' 'I got it in Fresno'), or an extra-large t-shirt bought in a rush that won't fit until you're twenty years older and forty pounds heavier.

In the end, though, it’s all about the destination (unless you’re the type of sick freak who gets off on spending their two week vacation traveling the entire route of Interstate 90*), and unless you’re a dentist, where you end up when you turn off the ignition should have some fleeting concept of ‘fun’.

*- I’m not joking. They’re called ‘road geeks’. There’s even an entry on them on Wikipedia.

See, recreational travel is somewhat of a new phenomenon. In the past, people used to travel long distances only for the purposes of killing and persecution (crusades), fleeing from killing and persecution (pilgrims), or money (the colonization of every continent that wasn't Europe). It was only thanks to the emerging merchant class in the Renaissance that 'Kids Stay and Eat Free' billboards now dot the landscape. And the child factor is pretty influential. For couples, a vacation usually revolves around the idea of a new place to have sex - since all the rooms in the apartment have long since been christened - and that’s about it. And since sex with the offspring isn’t an option for parents (unless you’re from a close-knit religious community), you better hope the hotel pool has a slide, or a balcony you can lock the kids out on while you get busy (at least draw the curtains. Save on future therapy bills). 

But ideally, you don’t have children, and can travel wherever you want and not have to worry about who stumbles across the porn on the motel TV or who falls into the gorilla habitat at the zoo. So round up a couple acquaintances, bestow upon them the honorary title of best friend, and getting going. Just bring some Tylenol threes, quality headphones, and don’t be afraid to bail out if you find your true love while pissing on the side of the road outside of Lubbock, Texas.

While the highlights of a vacation usually come down to throwing up in a completely new alley and quietly screwing on a hostel bed, traveling can also be full of learning and make you a more open minded person (another reason I don't do it), and you can't do that if you don't get out of your car and push over a cow every so often. Seeing how other people plod through their miserable little lives really lets you appreciate how much shit you don’t have to put up with. City dwellers should always try and visit rural communities to see an actual conservative voter, and those from nowhereville, Iowa should put down their cousin and check out all the wonders a modern city has to offer (drugs, strip clubs, upscale shopping, and poorly hidden racial intolerance). Traveling off-continent can be nice too, but it helps to know which countries still shit in holes before you leave (for the record, in America, it is customary to leave shit in a toilet or on the Saturday evening TV schedule).
So thanks to whatever globalization really is, there isn't any good excuse for you to not travel and explore your planet (unless you’re bedridden, in which case, my sympathies). It isn't your patriotic duty or anything like that, but it sure does help you look like less of an ignorant jackass. And it’s being less ignorant towards the locals of wherever that keeps your restaurant food sperm and urine free.

May 2 - You Had to Piss on Our Parade...

What rotten luck sometimes, I swear. Every so often I feel the need to write down a list of people that have interfered with my perfect plans, but I know so few of their names and aren’t even motivated enough to write these column more than once a month (I was hoping for a biweekly thing when this website climbed out of the swamp, but c’est la vie…), so nuts to that. Big swift kicks to the nuts, to be more exact.

Having a schedule quite unlike most people on the planet, I aware that I must make some immediate concessions (sunlight, fresh bread at the store, less aggressive bums), but really, should I be made to suffer mad hours – on a weekend, no less – to be able to purchase Radiohead tickets? And hey, I don’t go to or even like McDonald’s, but what kind of breakfast hours are they pedaling at the Krocateria*? Don’t they know how much more money they’d rake in if they ran a second breakfast period starting at ten PM?

*- Don’t waste too much time on this one. It’s not too funny

And it’s not just faceless corporations on this continent, either. People on the other side of the globe are somehow affecting the way I conduct my business (although the term ‘business’ really does sound formal for lying around). Globalization sucks. I’ve had to share the sweet fruits of the first world with way too many Westerners, and all of a sudden I’m fighting for attention in myspace and Halo 2 with millions of Chinese and Indians. Now I’m not even the least bit racist (stupidity transcends race, creed, culture, and sex), I’m just all-around selfish. I don’t care who you are, what you want, or whether you think America is the last bastion of freedom or the great satan, don’t suck up my precious bandwith. Two billion more people are slowly entering into industrialized society, and even if the environment can take the hit (it can’t), and the natural resources hold out (they won’t), we still have to accept the same majority of them are going to be as useless, ignorant and lazy as in North America and Europe (we might have the edge at first, having had so much more practice). I wonder who’s going to make all our cheap shit now. Maybe Africa or South America. You know, I think I may have stumbled the real way we spread democracy and capitalism. Get the freedom-challenged governments to make spongebob squarepants t-shirts and plastic watering cans until they scrape together some real cash and start buying the crap themselves (Hellooo, Kitty!*). So then it costs too much to make stuff there and the world’s richest sniff out another dirt poor, bribe-friendly country where they can build another factory that ignores health and safety regulations. It’s called the Wal-Mart Domino theory.

*- Japanese, I know. But aside from secret police, chow mein, and the occasional basketball player, what does modern Chinese culture consist of?

But at least I can’t see the people who are causing all this traffic on the information superhighway. It makes it that much easier to imagine them as malicious robot demons on every other computer in the world, going to all the websites I’m visiting (friendster, facebook, dumpstersluts) five seconds before me. I can accept that it’s forces beyond my control (Clapton, Crowley) giving me the royal screwjob, since I have to burn off all the bad karma somehow. It just becomes particularly worse when you can put a voice or face to these creatures. And I don’t mean the obvious crap, either, like the people who buy all the toilet paper at each supermarket, or the guy on the subway who keeps touching himself while staring at you, or the violent mob that attacks you because of your humorous and ironic pro-war protest sign and leave you for dead. It’s the ordinary stuff – the invisible (or near-invisible) stuff – that gets my goat. Now I don’t want to steal Dennis Miller’s typical opening line here, but people cannot walk properly anymore. First off, I give fat people a free pass on this one, as I’m sure a 300 pound spherical object is treated more like a satellite than a person, but there are too many cripple free thin people walking like slugs or drunken slugs. And goddamn it, a busy city sidewalk is no place to stop…completely… on a dime. You do not need to test your braking in the middle of the day. Walk around in your kitchen before you leave your house to see if you will stop moving when your feet do. And I feel bad for hating these people for those few seconds that I’m forced to maneuver around them. They seem like regular people who are just getting on with their day, but my god, do they have to do it so slowly? And are they the exact same people who clog up the lines at supermarkets by purchasing an Oh Henry with a credit card? Now I’m not mister swift and punctual, but I do my very best to make sure my laziness doesn’t interfere with others. It’s an individual’s vital contribution to society, trying to stay out of other people’s hair as much as possible (how’s that for a public service announcement during Saturday Morning Cartoons? ‘Don’t dawdle kids, and always use bank machines quickly and efficiently. When there’s a line, don’t deposit cheques or print out lengthy statements. Otherwise the terrorists win’).

            As a particularly eloquent and diminutive French philosopher once said: ‘Hell is other people’. Of course, that’s marking heaven as being pretty damn lonely, if you think about it.

Oh well…let’s get on with it.

April 6 - Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather...

It’s hard to find good leather shops in this town. Oh, I’m not into that kind of thing (I’m rather conservative when it comes to sex, I’m afraid. Just the boring ol’ insatiable lesbian supermodel twins fantasy for me, thanks); we need it for a bit that’s not yet written. We don’t know who we’re going to hand the job to. Duke doesn’t usually start getting good ideas until he can hold the topic of the skit in his hands (he’s forbidden to write penis jokes in front of us). It’ll probably have something to do with sex. Or a skit that completely avoid sex (which would make it funny, see, ‘cause everyone in this one would be wearing S&M attire but no one acknowledges it, so that’s funny… see, that’s juxtaposition… it’s when two opposite…a literary device…okay, now I’m giving our secrets away…).

Right. Leather. Maybe we’ll just find a riding crop. Compared to other devices, a perfectly PC S&M toy. And what a great sound when you try to whip the air (although these days we seem to be punishing oxygen enough…). I can see the riding crop being the gateway toy to the world of sadism and masochism (like weed is the evil gateway drug to the five star powders). You don’t have to walk into a store adorned with mannequins wearing ball gags called the ‘Gothic Castle’ to buy one, just stop by your local equestrian shop (it would be in the good part of town, or, if you’re from Montana, any part of town). If the clerk strikes up conversation, tell them you plan to use it on an ornery one hundred and twenty pound female (make sure you’ve paid and have the bag in your hand during this comment). Now you go home, have a couple glasses of wine and laugh your ass off at the idea (maybe it was a gag gift first), but you give it try. So you take spanking to the next level, then get good enough with it to raise welts, and then it’s a quick and slippery slope to vibrators, rusty trombones, pegging, golden showers, Monroe transfers, and the Dirty Sanchez. Soon trash TV looks like the 700 club, and you don’t even get in the mood until you’ve had a half hour of extreme rough ball play. Nothing seems to float your boat anymore. When you see sex everywhere, you don’t really see it at all. Even words that used to make you titter, like panties, boobs, erect, wank, and erogenous zone, are render valueless (for the last one, picture alarms going off in a giant desert army base, soldiers running everywhere under a dark night sky, and from a loudspeaker booms, ‘WARNING! WARNING! BASE ON HIGH ALERT! THE ENEMY HAS BREACHED THE…‘). Finding time for your usual sexual experience requires you to leave work several hours early. You doodle possible sexual positions on bar napkins not out of interest but bored necessity. One time you even fall asleep while being fisted. But that mind of yours keeps spinning, flying ever higher on sexual fumes until you drive past someone walking their dog and you spend more time thinking about the one on the leash than the one holding it. And then suddenly you’re back where you started…at the equestrian store…

At least that’s what I assume happens. Hell, if half of the above is an accurate portrayal of the mad descent into sexual perversion, it would make a mesmerizing graduate thesis, or at the very least, a three star movie of the week, with an option for a spinoff series on basic cable.

We ourselves could never film the sordid but alluring tale above, though. Not without some sort of members area that requires a monthly subscription fee (that’s the sad truth about having a website. It’s a quick, slippery slope from listing stuff you like to comedy/satire bits to bizarre videos to having five gigs worth of streaming XXX action). And of course it’s not really the same once it’s being done for money, regardless if one or all parties get a cut of the check. All that disgusting stuff that requires you to lay a tarp on your bed should come from the heart. It’s not my place to question the legitimate motives behind every successful professional dominatrix (the amateur dominatrix is usually wanted by the police), and I know they need to pay the electricity bill like everyone else (probably less for them, because of the atmosphere), but it would be nice to know that after a particularly enjoyable session (or un-enjoyable, depending on your position…er, point of view), they would tell their captor that tonight was free of charge and spit in their face.

See, that’s where the slave-master relationship fails for me. For DeSade and Nietzsche, the relationship was not a choice or an hourly session, and did not take place in some aging goth chick’s basement. It was real, and something that must be fought against, for the good of one’s own individuality (and in DeSade’s case, sex itself was the weapon, not just the way to spend a Friday night). How can one put a price on defying societal conventions to remind themselves that they are not necessarily bound to them? Maybe its proof that this supposedly fringe activity has entered mainstream society. That a world of complete submission can be sought out in the want ads and achieved via regularly scheduled appointments. Hell, that must be the case. I’m trying to eke out a living making fun of it, after all. So how much further can we go? What’s left to be packaged and commoditized? Last year it was that murder case in Germany concerning one man who let another guy kill and eat him with the promise that doing so in such a fashion would result in the most mindblowing orgasm ever (good thing he’s dead. It would have been an embarrassing breach-of-contract lawsuit if the big moment wasn’t up to snuff). Since the time this was first reported, other people across the globe have sought out this guy (currently in prison) asking to do the same to them.

Suddenly a trip to the equestrian store doesn’t sound so strange, does it?

March 19 - I...don't know...just where I'm going...

I haven't written for awhile. It's hard to when inspiration is as dead as the democrats (I have just been topical. I promise you it won't happen again).

Nothing's coming easy. A general feel of aimlessness is ever present. It's like trying to whittle titanium. Hours at work and nothing to show for it but a dull blade. Searching for answers is only fun when you're on acid. The rest of the time the meaning of things dance in front of you like banshees, always seventeen to twenty three feet out of reach (when you're tripping, the answers come in a sealed envelope like at the academy awards, but they're written in some secret, untranslatable monkey language. Can you picture Jeremy Irons opening that up? "And the ultimate cause of suffering in the world is...ulma kafenti hoobootucalla *beeping noises, like a truck backing up*").

In an attempt to filter out the more superfluous answers, I got rid of my cable recently. It doesn't matter much. The internet is becoming more like TV everyday. The difference is that instead of using sex to sell products
like TV does, the internet has just moved right to the penis pills. Do you drink Pepsi so the gals will like you? Who cares, now you can grow 2 inches in a month. I usually ignore the ads that are nothing more than a crude cartoon or softcore model looking vaguely impressed, but any of those that begin as personal letter, "hey man,
i didn't think this stuff would work, but i took a chance and, 'wow!'..."   are good for at least a chuckle. The internet: Where the promise of a unified, multicultural technological community and a bigger wang are almost
indistinguishable from each other.

The only real boon of axing the twenty eight channels (yeah, it was just a basic cable package. Some people probably count that as living like a hermit these days, anyway) was getting rid of the 24 hour news networks. Don’t get me wrong, I suck that shit up like a sponge on the net (and the blogs! All those lovely, topical blogs!), but at least I can read it faster than some empty, talking head who just escaped the local Wichita station by ditching all trace of the okie accent and climbing to the all powerful post of Headline News at 2:46 AM can spout it. With the internet I can be terrified of the Muslims, the young black males, and the secular humanists when I see fit (usually after learning how to ADD YEARS TO MY SEX LIFE!! TRY IT FOR FREE FOR TWO WEEKS!!), and can conveniently ignore the human interest stories that tend to be shat out at the end of every half-hour television newscast.

And speaking of pinching out loaves for public consumption, here we/they are, putting together quasi-professional humor videos on this site for god  himself… Lorne Michaels…some suit at universal pictures…anyone with a fast car and some empty promises, ourselves. This brings me back to my main point of aimlessness and answers (which is great, because this suddenly feels more like a column and less like paragraphs of tired bitching). They're paying money to put up videos and not paying me anything to help write a couple of them. I haven't yet dared ask anyone I respect if it's even being done it well. "My cousin likes it, and he's barely cracked a smile since his wife left, so it must be brilliant"' Why the hell are they doing something so… aimless, rudderless, hopeless (or maybe I should be asking myself that question)? Why not head to Chicago and take some Second City classes? Why not head down to sunny LA and take a couple shots on the knees for a TV pilot? Christ, even an abandoned warehouse in Staten Island is considered a hot off-off-Broadway theatre these days. Why not do something there? With the exception of the one of them that’s wanted by police for failing to show up to a court date, why are they hiding behind a website? Taking my outside helmet off and putting my detective's cap on, I questioned a co-‘writer', and received the following query as a response: 'Who cares?' Such is the mind of the optimistic, large testicled, video humorist. 

A friend of mine who hasn't found much of life worthwhile recently complained that he wished god would just punch him in the face and make it clear what he was supposed to do (apparently whatever you want just isn't
good enough for some people). I told him that the lord works in more mysterious ways than that. He told me through gritted teeth that he thought that was a bit too convenient, and that if the position of god could be
attained through a democratically elected process, we'd certainly see some changes. I didn’t bother to point out how well humanity was fairing under that particular form of government (if god truly is an all powerful benevolent force incapable of lies, treachery, and deceit, I don’t think he’d be able to cut it as a politician, let alone get elected in the first place. Well, maybe the Old Testament god…whom, I should sheepishly mention, I always picture a bit like ‘King Homer’*).

On a ending note, not only have I finally ignored my new years resolution, but I've forgotten it as well (how do I know I'm ignoring it, then? Certainly the lifestyle that I am currently living is not the kind one would resolve to continue ...or maybe that's the problem...or maybe that was my resolution...nuts. I need a drink).

* -“14 karat gold!”

March 1 - Always took candy from strangers, didn't wanna get me no trade...

There’s tension down at the ol’ writers table because there’s an increasing tendency to pitch ideas that require more financial resources (‘okay, we’re gonna get a horse, right? And feed it a whole bunch of ex-lax…’). Personally, I’ve always been an advocate of less is more (although that horse shitting thing really does become some clever political satire…), so my stuff tends to revolve around two people arguing over a small item in an empty room and ends with the stronger killing and eating the weaker (I’m a Nietzschean at heart). There’s talk of robbing banks or, at the very least, dealing drugs, but beyond vague promises and shady contacts, there’s little initiative, and we’ve all seen Oz so we’re kinda worried about breaking the law. Besides, we’re a bunch of weirdo writers. We’ll probably just spend it all on DVD boxed sets of cult sixties TV shows. Lousy nostalgic commercialism. Next week I’ll probably blow half my paycheck on lego or a swing set.

But I shouldn’t be so negative about money. I’ll probably bitch even more if I ever actually have any. At least things are finally getting accomplished. No one knows whether we’ll all end up on the cover of Rolling Stone or in some Peruvian jail, but the open possibilities makes each day a bit more interesting. Hell, the last time I felt like this was when I was in high school, and that’s particularly important for me because I don’t remember much from high school (and it wasn’t all because of pot. A lot was alcohol poisoning). I’m sure it helps that we aren’t expecting much in the long run (in fact, that’s probably the main reason we’re not sullen and grumpy).

Having vague goals make the day so much easier. I’d much rather promise myself that I would eat something than write something in the course of a day (and I’d count the questionable molecules in tap water as ‘food’. Tap water: a great source of refreshment and mercury). Then if I do end up scribbling some lame idea down (usually something about what I ate), I’m ahead of the game. Of course, with an attitude like this, meeting so-called accomplished people is not conducive to a healthy mental state (especially if you’re meeting them before noon, in an old Animaniacs t-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms).

Case in point:

Once I was in this bar in Houston with some friends, and it was just my luck to be at the end stool of our group, making myself susceptible to any drunken yahoo feeling just lonely and desperate enough to talk to someone who clearly wasn’t from Texas. Bracing myself for the possibility of actually having some grizzled ranch hand say, ‘I don’t like your face’ (and regardless whether it comes from a straight or gay man, it would definitely be a bit of a blow to the self esteem), or even worse, ‘You got real purty eyes’, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself talking to some businessman from LA who sold cleaning solvents to corporate farms. Fortunately he didn’t delve into the details of his profession, and instead focused on telling me about the three homeless guys he killed. Now I’m a cynic if nothing else, and part of me still doesn’t believe it, but just the matter-of-fact tone in his voice seemed to suggest a mixture of pride on his behalf and indifference towards me if I thought him a liar. And he didn’t look crazy. It’s not like the TV’s in his hotel rooms were secretly telling him to gather blood for the coming of Baal. He didn’t even use the term bloodlust once. Without prying too much into his private life, I think I can safely say he did it because he knew he could get away with it (or maybe he wasn’t so sure he could and was just looking for a thrill. He sells barrels of Ajax for a living, after all).

I won’t lie. I lost just the tiniest iota of respect for him when he told me he choked sleeping ones to death with his belt, but the point remains: I’m not doing anything about the problem of homelessness in our cities. I mean, in this case, most people would feel that my complete indifference to the problem is preferable to his pro-active approach, but from a more general, ideological standpoint, it’s pretty clear Americans have no problem taking someone with action-packed bad ideas over someone with passive, good/mediocre ideas. So for the sake of the argument as far as I see it, the murder charge is pretty much moot.

The point is…don’t become homeless.

Okay, the point is really that this man had successfully juggled his job, his family, his leisure time, and his occasional blood thirst, while most of us can’t hold a job for six months and a girl for more than six minutes (even if you try to think about dull shit like taxes or bus schedules in the middle of getting funky). In this increasingly impersonal, fast paced, prescription drug addicted society, there has to be some sort of admiration for this man (and for serial killers who bring their victims home with them! I can barely keep my room clean and I don’t have to worry about blood on the walls or dissolving body parts in acid).

After the man paid his bill and left (run hobos, run!), I mentioned it to my drinking compatriots. First they thought I was a liar, and then they thought he was a liar and that I was an idiot. No one said anything about calling the cops, and when I pointed this out we all went silent. Regardless whether this man did/does the things he said, we weren’t going to do anything about it, so suddenly it didn’t matter if he killed hobos or not. He could, because no one would believe him, and therefore no one would stop him. SO now the new point is that the biggest crimes and conspiracies can go on right under our noses because they’re too unbelievable, too crazy. Respectable men kill hobos, the moon landing was a fake, aliens caused 9/11, and politics can be reduced to a bunch of horseshit.

Feb.19 - People just get uglier, and I have no sense of…

Timing is of every essence. Time changes faster than space, as far as the philosopher is concerned (I make no money from my college degree, so I may as well be a philosopher).

I don’t remember how old I was when I got my first watch. It takes a special kind of kid to always care about the time (‘Quarter to four? Oh man, I should have been on the swings ten minutes ago!’). You could rely on parents and school bells for that, and when they weren’t around the day could easily be divided into light and dark, the former of which was occasionally punctuated by food. The argument that ignorance truly is bliss is never more apparent than when one considers childhood. The fact that a couple hundred pieces of Lego can entertain a child all day (or for toddlers, a plastic rattle or ev