tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-192782642024-03-07T22:48:32.019-05:00Time For DecafChrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.comBlogger172125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-50855092937563658372015-06-21T12:21:00.001-04:002015-06-21T12:21:52.721-04:00"The Revolution will not be Televised"Twice in the past week I’ve come across essays suggesting that resistance isn’t merely futile, but that it plays right into the hands of the enemy. (As an aspiring pacifist, it feels strange to write the word “enemy,” but note that the Prince of Peace said “Love your enemy,” not “Don’t have any enemies.”) In the first instance, found in Tim Parks’ marvelous collection of essays, <i>Where I’m Reading From</i>, which functions as something of a State of the Union address for contemporary literature, the brand of resistance in question takes the form of the written word. Since this blog mostly exists so that I can participate in the resistance via writing, my ears instantly perked up as Parks quoted Orwell’s beef with Dickens’ satirical resistance to a stultifying British bureaucracy:<br />
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“In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling…. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.”<br />
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Parks then proceeds to frame a question that he aims squarely at satire: “Orwell treats Dickens as if he were a special case, but the question he raises here is whether all satire isn’t to some extent in connivance with the object of its attacks.” This is disturbing enough, except that I am left wondering if all forms of resistance (as we know them) aren’t to some extent in connivance with the objects of their attacks.<br />
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Slavoj Zizek suggests as much in the second essay encountered, “Resistance is Surrender,” (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/slavoj-zizek/resistance-is-surrender) written in 2007 before anyone had begun to forget that Bush the Younger’s Iraq War may well have been the single worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president. (The recent upward creep in Bush’s post-presidential approval ratings feels more like willful forgetting than forgiving, and like the worst kind of “I’m okay, you’re okay.”) Here is Zizek, in perhaps the definitive take on “I have met the enemy, and he is us”:<br />
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“The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of (the) strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’”<br />
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It seems that peaceful demonstrations and resistance are either co-opted by their target (as per Zizek), or, impotent and erasable. Case in point for the latter my own Baltimore City, where a week of peaceful protests and marches in response to the circumstances of the death of Freddie Gray were a) largely ignored, and then b) completely forgotten once the “real” response of rioting and looting began. (And that’s “real” as in really newsworthy; actual events are over the second the cable news trucks roll up.)<br />
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Where does this leave us? As one reader responding to Zizek puts it: “‘Sit at home and watch the barbarity on television’ seems to be Slavoj Žižek’s new slogan for fighting capitalism.” But even if we take Zizek with a grain of salt, it seems nevertheless that both he and Parks <i>in re</i> Dickens have put their finger on something rather frightening, something that recalls the inevitable scene from every TV show in my youth when the hero lands in quicksand only to quickly discover that frantic efforts to get out only make one sink faster. So, is the only possible response to “sit at home and watch the barbarity on television” in the hopes that we might sink to our deaths a little slower? Zizek’s own answer is one of the most condescending non-answers ever proffered: “So what are we to do? Everything possible (and impossible), just with a proper dose of modesty, avoiding moralising self-satisfaction.” Since Zizek’s “everything possible” is an obvious disguise for his real answer, “I don’t know,” the second half of his answer actually contains everything he has to say about the way forward, which boils down to “Whatever you do, just don’t make an ass of yourself, have some dignity please.” Except I have a feeling that saving the world is going to require an awful lot of us making complete asses of ourselves until somehow, some way we get past our collective “I don’t know.”<br />
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We “don’t know” because although Zizek has no cure, his diagnosis of our larger dilemma is, if not an exact bull’s eye, exceedingly close to the mark. In short, we’re damned if we do resist, and we’re damned if we don’t. One is left wondering if this catch-22 isn’t just the human condition, as if the Woody Allen joke about two old women dining together in a restaurant, with the first exclaiming “Oh my, this food is horrible,” to which her friend adds “Yes, and the portions are so small,” is both the beginning and the end of the story. <br />
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But perhaps our dilemma isn’t the human condition at all (maybe there is no such thing?), and civilization has just painted itself into a corner. Does making this distinction even matter if the end result is that there’s no way out? I would argue that the reason it does matter is that it is the difference between there being well and truly no way out (i.e. this is the human condition, and maybe we should retire to our televisions after all) and the possibility that we just haven’t thought of a way out; think a riddle in which we’re locked in a room with no exits and a can of paint in which the only way out is summoning our inner MacGyver. Note that, per Wikipedia, MacGyver “prefers non-violent resolutions and prefers not to handle a gun.” Plus, if we’re fated to have yet another white guy as our symbol for saving the world, at least this white guy has a mullet.<br />
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And since we’re talking about white guys trying to save the world, we would be remiss not to mention Pope Francis’ release this week of a breathtaking encyclical on climate change in which he “advocates for a radical transformation of human society.” (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/06/15/pope_francis_in_leaked_climate_change_encyclical_we_re_on_a_path_to_destroy.html) Interestingly, the Pope cautions against my MacGyver imagery, warning against “a blind trust in technical solutions.” (ibid) Instead, among other proposals, the Pope argues for “the creation of a ‘true world political authority’ that would be tasked ‘to manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis, to prevent deterioration of the present and subsequent imbalances; to achieve integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to ensure environmental protection and pursuant to the regulations for migratory flows.’” (ibid) But whether one agrees with the Pope’s top-down approach or prefers a world of anarchic individual MacGyver’s reassembling the earth even as they disassemble (dare I say <i>deconstruct</i>?)” true world political authority” altogether, one must admit that the Pope has outdone even Zizek with a timely, accurate diagnosis of what ails us, and a call to radical, seemingly unthinkable change. <br />
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Since I harangued Zizek for failing to propose any meaningful solutions, I will don MacGyver’s mullet and close with some of my own thoughts on how we might use the can of paint that got us here to get out of the locked room. Lately I have taken to going around and referring to myself as a socialist. More so than identifying as some kind of latter day Marxist, it is my way of announcing that I don’t in any way agree with <i>this</i>, this being what Pope Francis describes as “the spiral of self-destruction in which we are sinking.” (ibid) But if I am going to go around calling myself a socialist it is important that I acknowledge the many failures of really existing twentieth century socialism. Stalin’s murder of 50 million Russians, echoed by the further murder of millions more by Mao, Pol Pot, et al., is the obvious place to start. Strangely, this murderous madness was born as an attempt to undo the notion central to our own current (non-socialist) “spiral of self-destruction,” which is the simple notion that the world is neatly divided into two categories, winners and losers. I would submit that the origins of socialism’s murderous madness came in its effort to overcome the (equally mad ) split between winners and losers by declaring “Everyone’s a winner!”, as if the world could be saved not by MacGyver but by a carnival barker. <br />
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Socialism got it wrong, and in the process went completely mad, by espousing something that was both happy and false. Actually: Everyone’s a loser! All of history co-signs this as a true fact. But we would make an even bigger mistake than the socialists if we decided that this was both true and sad. Because it is actually funny, which is the key to everything, because the revolution will only succeed if it makes us laugh. <br />
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Everyone’s a loser. Put another way, the meek shall inherit the earth, and we’re all meek, i.e. we’re all losers. So let’s grow our loser mullets and save our world, MacGyver-style. After all, becoming a television character to save the world is better than watching the end of the world on television.<br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-49769503658990875122015-05-13T16:34:00.001-04:002015-05-13T16:34:48.544-04:00Watch ThisThe <i>New York Times</i> reported last week that France, like clockwork, has responded to January’s terrorist attacks with its own legally authorized surveillance state, one that “would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.” This unlimited data gathering would include, <i>mais oui</i>, “almost no judicial oversight.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/world/europe/french-legislators-approve-sweeping-intelligence-bill.html?_r=0) <br />
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The only way for the <i>Times</i> to put the French legislation into perspective was by way of comparison with an American surveillance state that is, with a nod to Governor Tarkin, fully armed and operational: “Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.”<br />
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The <i>Times</i> also notes that “American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11,” which judicial activity is like attending to the fact that one was once pregnant when one is long since an empty nester. The peculiar horse known as the American surveillance state has already left the proverbial barn. Or, since we are discussing France here, we might just call it a <i>fait accompli</i>. <br />
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Like anyone else attempting to understand a confusing and frightening world, I consulted the oracle for guidance on my life under surveillance. When I typed “surveillance state” into Google one of the first few items on my search results was a 2013 article, “The Internet is a Surveillance State,” by Bruce Schneier. (http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/) Schneier cuts to the heart of the matter with a pithy summary of digital surveillance that sounds like hyperbole, except it isn’t: “All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever.” And if you think your data’s safe with your corporate friends at Facebook or Instagram, Schneier has this to say about a lot of mutual back scratching going on between Big Data and, e.g., Uncle Sam:<br />
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“Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments.”<br />
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But Schneier’s conclusion, in which he is as exasperated with us folks as he is our demonic overlords, raises at least one important question. Here is Schneier: “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.” So: Why haven’t we fought back?<br />
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As the situation so very recently unraveled here in Baltimore I instinctively turned, all kidding about the pseudo-oracular aside, to my own version of a prophetic voice in the wilderness. We all have shit we turn to when, as Pema Chodron puts it, things fall apart. But while dear Pema has been much help in the past when my own personal things were falling apart, when the whole world is falling apart I prefer the late Jean Baudrillard, an arrogant French intellectual who earned at least some of that arrogance with self-described “theory-fictions” that somehow still meet the criteria of “Just the facts, Ma’am.” Especially when it is the very facts of events like those just passed in Baltimore that are in question; if you can get down with this quote from <i>The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact</i>, then you can get down with Baudrillard: “Hence the dilemma posed by all the images we receive: uncertainty regarding the truth of the event as soon as the news media are involved.”<br />
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But back to our question: why haven’t we fought back against the surveillance state? Another passage in <i>The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact</i>, one that details our relationship with the digital, may hold some clues:<br />
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“The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn’t see you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of ‘response’).”<br />
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I would translate that by saying that the loneliest feeling in the world is checking your status update for likes or comments.<br />
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We haven’t fought back because our fear that no one is watching is so great that it leaves no room for the fear that Big Brother is watching. In fact, it is our certainty that no one is watching (“The screen reflects nothing”) that drives our desire for Big Brother’s gaze. We haven’t fought back against the surveillance state because, in the words of Princess Leia (whom, we should note, was exactly whom Governor Tarkin was explaining his fully operational battle station to), it’s our only hope.<br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-32563623797038187632015-04-15T18:41:00.000-04:002015-04-15T18:41:43.583-04:00Ambivalence: the Pros and ConsMy favorite Groucho Marx line has always been “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” Basically, I want to be a contrarian when I grow up. In <i>The Secret Language of Birthdays</i>, the description of those born on November 4th (my birthday) is “The Provocateur.” It is safe to say that this very blog exists so that I can practice at contrarian provocations. But since the truest words ever spoken were “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” in real life the closest I get to Groucho is “Whatever it is, I am both for it <i>and</i> against it.” <br />
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Having constructed an entire life out of ambivalence, I would say that the most interesting thing about the condition is that, far from being undecided, ambivalence is the state of being doubly decided. Sometimes this means that my ambivalence charades as Groucho’s contrarianism. For example, when confronted with outspoken atheism I can only think how obnoxious the ill-founded certainty in materialism is in the face of the stupefying mystery that anything exists whatsoever. But when confronted with religious piety I find my thoughts turning towards a) natural selection and b) how much more I’d rather watch a college basketball game than go to church/synagogue/meditation hall etc. This presents a façade of “Whatever it is, I’m against it” consistency, but is in fact the thoroughly inconsistent condition of being both for and against religion at the same time that I am for and against scientific secularism. <br />
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It should come as no surprise that this ambivalent Episcopalian ended up with a devout Jew, which arrangement protects me in equal parts from 1) my religion, 2) her religion, and 3) the absence of religion, while exposing me to each. Along these same lines, in my professional life I work hand in glove with management, while remaining an active member of the line worker’s labor union. And while my personal beliefs about human behavior are grounded almost entirely in a Freudian psychodynamic model, in my professional practice I am a strict behaviorist. The topography of my everyday world becomes: the ayes <i>had</i> it, but when and for how long? <br />
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So, by way of a possible explanation of ambivalence, and given that I am off the clock and we are deep in the weeds of my personal beliefs, Freud. Note the precise word Freud uses in his landmark 1923 essay, <i>The Ego and the Id</i>, to describe the change that takes place in a boy once his Oedipus complex takes hold:<br />
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“… until the boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus complex originates. His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relation to his father is <i>ambivalent</i>.” (emphasis added)<br />
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But perhaps the die isn’t merely cast for a complicated relationship with <i>mon pere</i>, as Freud goes on to explain that “The super-ego retains the character of the father.” It does so because the super-ego is essentially established in the father’s image:<br />
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“The child’s parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting this same obstacle within itself. It borrowed strength to do this, so to speak, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily momentous act.”<br />
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So if, connecting the dots, “henceforward his relation to his father is ambivalent,” mustn’t we also recognize that henceforward his (my) relation to the dominant element of his (my) very own psyche, the super-ego, is also fundamentally ambivalent? And if religion, workplace hierarchy, and theory <i>qua</i> truth are the worldly elements which carry much of the super-ego’s water <i>in re</i> authority, then it should come as no surprise that, as noted above, my predominant stance to each of the three is one of ambivalence. <br />
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Freud consistently held that humanity’s foremost problem can be found in our inclinations and instincts towards aggression. If he was wrong about everything else he ever said, he was indubitably quite right about this. (We don’t have religion because he was wrong, we <i>need</i> religion because he was right. We <i>need</i> somebody to <i>command</i> us to love our neighbors as ourselves.) But let’s suppose that Freud was also right about the super-ego:<br />
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“It is remarkable that the more a man checks his aggressiveness towards the exterior the more severe- that is aggressive- he becomes in his ego ideal (super-ego)… the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s (super-ego’s) inclination to aggressiveness against his ego.”<br />
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I.e., if you love your neighbor as yourself, you become your own worst enemy. <br />
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Unless, that is, you slip out the back door as your super-ego comes gunning for you through the front. Under threat, human beings have two basic choices: fight or flight. And since you have as much of a chance in a brawl with your super-ego as you did as a toddler against your dad (“As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego,”), you are left with the options of submission to the aggression (“Thank you sir, may I have another” by way of an unflagging towing of whichever party line is carrying the super-ego’s water), or flight. Ambivalence, I would suggest, is exactly the latter.<br />
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We all hear what we want to hear. And, it seems, the super-ego is no different. Ambivalence trades in the paradox of being simultaneously for and against the very same thing, whereas the super-ego’s common coin is that all too familiar binary oppositional pairing: “You’re either with us or against us.” So while I very well know that I am both for and against e.g. religion, there is no receptor on the super-ego’s brain for that particular agonist, if you will. Under such circumstances, like everyone else the super-ego hears the part that it wants to hear, that, in this case, I am for religion, and, satisfied of my obeisance, leaves me the heck alone.<br />
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I say my prayers every night, try, and fail, to love my neighbor as myself each day, because I really am for religion. This is, apparently, enough for my super-ego. But I also walked out of church eighteen years ago and (almost) never looked back; dutifully escorting my wife to shul on Shabbos or Passover is just a reenactment of walking out of church, not because I’m going to synagogue instead of church, but because it is, taking inspiration from my favorite Raymond Chadler novel, something of a long goodbye. So, I really do want nothing to do with religion (although, as the saying goes, goodbye is not always goodbye). <br />
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I am ambivalent. I am a paradox. I am free. Or as free as it gets on the lam. <br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-74321881259681305012015-03-10T22:09:00.000-04:002015-03-10T22:09:17.254-04:00The DressHuman beings seem bound and determined, hard wired even, to divide up the world into two kinds of people: male/female, white/people of color, rich/poor, believers/atheists, righty/lefty, northern/southern, straight/gay. The list goes on and on. What every single pair on this list has in common, save for the possible exception of believers/atheists, who seem to have settled into a determined stalemate (though each has held the upper hand at various points in history), is that each is an example of the binary code that informs reality in very much the same way that zero and one structure a computer program. Our master code: winners/losers.<br />
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Postmodernism seems more than anything a loosely organized but consistent effort to overcome the division of our world into two kinds of people, all the assorted versions of winner/loser, by shattering each of the pairs into a million little pieces. I can still remember the time my sister, Pailin, a student in one of postmodernism’s academic footholds, informed me that there were not two genders, but (and I making the number up because I can’t remember it exactly, but you’ll get the point) sixteen. Because of sibling rivalry I pretended that this was the silliest thing I’d ever heard, when in fact, I too being a product of postmodernism, it rang so true as to be painfully obvious. Obvious enough, anyway, that I was soon incorporating it into my worldview, e.g. the best part of every astrology book is when it tells you how good of a romantic pair various signs such as Scorpio and Pisces are, so, even if it failed to undo masculine domination, the profusion of genders at least held out the prospect of making dating a lot more interesting. Interesting, that is, if like me you find the advice on Chinese restaurant placemats for Tigers to avoid romantic entanglements with Monkeys simultaneously mysterious and authoritative. <br />
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And just last year I also pretended to balk at the news that A had been added to LGBTQI, making it LGBTQIA, in acknowledgment of asexuality as another healthy, normal niche on the sexuality spectrum. Never one to pass up the opportunity to play the role of intellectual contrarian (see this entire blog), I outwardly harrumphed that this was yet another case of what Terry Eagleton has described (and I paraphrase Eagleton through the fog of memory) as the American fantasy that there are no disabilities, just differences, which, more to the point, is just a way of pretending away suffering. I think I actually just said that asexuality was a disorder, which is less pretentious, but amounts to the same thing. But even as I outwardly sat in judgment of asexuality in the very same way that the <i>DSM-III</i> once coded homosexuality as a mental illness, i.e. even as I obscured prejudice with false authority (reading the history of the <i>DSM</i> is to understand that it was quite literally made up, and, what’s worse, made up by committees), every postmodern bone in my body inwardly rejoiced that now there were nearly half as many sexualities as there were genders, which, factoring in both the eastern and western zodiac signs in addition to the myriad genders and sexualities, would make for a dating manual even longer than the <i>DSM-5</i>. <br />
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Postmodernism is not without its victories. The LGBTQIA movement’s success in promoting same-sex marriage rights may be its signal accomplishment. But if we grant that the main point of postmodernism has been to smash up the master binary code of winner/loser into a million little pieces, then postmodernism has been, by and large, a failure. The profusion of letters in LGBTQIA notwithstanding, almost all of us, including those of us supposedly inoculated against the practice by postmodern <i>academe</i>, go around dividing the world up into binary opposites all the time, and inevitably these pairs end up following the master code. Perhaps it’s not even that postmodernism has failed in shattering the code, but that we have an uncanny knack, if you will, for putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. <br />
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In other words, it’s impossible for us not to see the world in pairs of opposites. You can shatter straight/gay into LGBTQIAS (the S standing for straight, if I can be permitted the liberty of tacking it on as just another of the smashed up pieces of the straight/gay pairing), but for each letter we will inevitably divide that up into a binary pair, e.g. top/bottom, butch/femme, etc. Binary pairs may just be the cost of doing business. Postmodernism’s failure, then, in as much as it has attempted to undo domination by way of fracturing binary pairs, was inevitable. With binary opposites as our given, the only remaining opening for transformation is by way of rewriting, or at least erasing, the master code.<br />
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If you were paying any attention to the internet last week, you know about The Dress. But just in case you missed it, The Dress is a really existing dress that appears to some to be blue and black, while to others it appears to be white and gold. It has nothing to do with camera angles or lighting; as verified by my wife, Jen, in a group of people looking at the dress together on the same computer screen, roughly half saw it as blue and black while the other half saw it as white and gold. This was going on all over the planet last week. <br />
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So, there really are two kinds of people in the world. The white/gold perceivers and the blue/blacks. What’s the difference between them? There is no difference (excepting the obscure neurological triggers that explain the differing perceptions- the dress, apparently, is blue/black in “real life”), which is the best difference of all. This particular meaningless difference is stupefying and absurd in how it undermines everything we think we know about reality. This makes it precisely the kind of meaningless difference that can radically destabilize the content of everything we think we know about reality, which is that we think it consists entirely of winners and losers. Because while it may just be too hard to accept the fact that, using myself as an example, I happen to be a straight, white, male, Christian, right handed northerner entirely due to an accident of birth (and since I landed in the catbird seat on the “winning” side of each of those halves of binary pairs it certainly is ego-reinforcing to think that they somehow mark the quality of my character, and therefore all the harder to recognize them for the accidents of birth that they truly are), only a complete nincompoop would argue that perceiving The Dress as white and gold marks him as superior to those who see it as blue and black. (If the blue/blacks attempt to persuade the white/golds that they (the blue/blacks) are superior because they are seeing the “real” color, the white/golds can engage in the late, great Dean Smith’s Four Corner Offense and take the air out of the ball by asking the blue/blacks to adequately define what they mean by “reality,” which question three thousand years of western philosophy has failed to persuasively answer.)<br />
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The hope held out by The Dress, then, is twofold. First, in the meaningless difference found in The Dress we will come to recognize that binary pairs don’t necessarily contain winners and losers, and going one gigantic step further, may in fact never contain what we think of as winners and losers. There may, remembering Eagleton, be more suffering on one particular side of a binary pair, e.g. the disabled side of the able bodied/disabled pairing, but I would argue that the first rule of sanity holds that another person’s suffering is not, and can never be, a win for me. (If being a Christian has any meaning for me, it’s almost only exactly that rule. And that’s more than enough, a Grace of God that’s as dependable as the sunrise.) Second, we will begin to recognize how arbitrary our assignment to either side of a binary pair is, and find our attachment to that assignment ridiculous in a way that is funny enough to laugh the whole thing off. If I could just as easily have seen the The Dress as blue/black, couldn’t I just as easily have been a southern, gay, Zoroastrian, left handed, female of color? It is only when I perceive the obvious humor in the absurdity of these arrangements that existence becomes, like the NBA in the 1980’s, Fantastic!<br />
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Now, I know as well as you do that it will take a lot more than The Dress to erase the Master Code. (In the final estimation, I side with erasing, rather than rewriting the Master Code, as the world has had quite enough already of its various masters.) But The Dress is important not because it will accomplish the end of domination in one fell swoop, but because it is itself a code that, once cracked, points us in exactly the right direction. Einstein famously said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” In response, I would suggest that God is constantly flipping coins, randomly assigning us to one side or another of the binary pairs the entire universe seems to be made from. This is clearly a ridiculous way to run a universe, meaning either that we’ve been let in on the joke, or the joke’s on us. Only the latter creates a universe full of losers, and, <i>ipso facto</i>, winners. We could, then, do much worse than heed Han Solo’s advice when he says to Chewbacca, in a moment of pique, “Laugh it up, fuzzball.” Because, who knows, we could just as easily have been born wookies. <br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-4365561444539234912015-02-26T16:48:00.000-05:002015-02-26T16:48:33.966-05:00I'm Getting StaticI’ve been wearing the same buzzed haircut now for about eight years, largely for the same reason that Jim Harbaugh wears the exact same pair of khakis every day. Harbaugh explains “It’s gotten to the point where I have so much time in the day knowing that I don’t have to stand in front of the closet, trying to decide what outfit to pick out.” (http://blogs.mercurynews.com/49ers/2015/01/06/jim-harbaugh-weighs-in-on-his-49ers-exit-kaepernick-khakis-twitter-and-michigan/) Exactly. I never, ever have to think about my hair. Or at least I don’t have to think about my hair anymore than I do my toenails. <br />
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Like Harbaugh, I would happily wear the same clothes each day, at least to work, like my seventh grade Industrial Arts teacher Mr. Wilken, who had a grand total of three outfits that he rotated on a weekly basis, e.g. week 1- navy slacks, light blue short-sleeve button down, navy necktie; week 2- dark green pants, light green short-sleeve button down, dark green necktie; etc., and who was so humorless that he demanded absolute silence from us, his pupils, as we used t-squares to fill our papers with the desired combination of geometrical shapes. Humorless, that is, but for his one joke: “Why do they call it a Sears & Rowback motorboat engine? Because it always breaks down and you have to row back.” If anyone ever made a sound in Mr. Wilken’s classroom he would promptly exclaim “I’m getting static!” Nothing further was ever required.<br />
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I was well prepared for the rigors of Mr. Wilken’s shop class by Ms. Travers, a 4th grade teacher at my elementary school to whose classroom I was not assigned, but who did take her regular turn monitoring the cafeteria for all of 4th grade. Ms. Travers had but one rule for the lunchroom: no talking. On days when absolute silence was kept, she was sure to pop onto the loud speaker during the end-of -day announcements, genuinely thanking us for our beautiful behavior. Not once, ever, did one of us give Ms. Travers any static. <br />
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The great thing about silence is that, like buzz cuts and uniforms, you never have to think about it. It’s always the same, always beautiful. Many Buddhists love the movie <i>Groundhog Day</i>, finding in it the paradox that it is only in the repetition of the very same day over and over again that we find the opportunity for change by way of slowly, haltingly, but assuredly increasing our compassion. But I am left with the distinct impression that Ms. Travers’ and Mr. Wilken’s insistence on the repetition of silence had nothing to do with a paradoxical opportunity for growth and change. And I am only left wondering which is the more emphatic “yes!” to life: the Buddhists’ “Once more, from the top,” or Travers’ and Wilken’s “Let’s check the instant replay.” <br />
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Even more to the point, do I always wear the same haircut in order to free up time to improve on the past or in order to assure more of the same? Jim Harbaugh is lucky in that he can definitively answer that question based on the outcome of his last football game. Without wins and losses balancing the ledger, the question basically boils down to whether you would prefer to live forever or never die. Strangely, you can’t have both. I owe my own recognition of this distinction to the author of the Gospel according to Matthew and David Shields. <br />
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Perhaps wanting to live forever is the surest sign that you are making a mess of the effort to never die, a twist hinted at in Matthew 16:25’s “For those who want to save their life will lose it.” For a more contemporary take, Shields, in <i>How Literature Saved my Life</i>, writes the following about Raymond Kurzweil, the futurist who expects that nanobots will, in the next twenty years or so, cure all disease and reverse aging, an eventuality the 62 year-old is preparing for with a regimen that involves, per Shields, 150 daily supplements, weekend intravenous transfusions, and, for a worst case scenario, plans to cryogenically freeze his body:<br />
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“He wants not so much to live as never to die. He seems to me the saddest person on the planet. I empathize with him completely.”<br />
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Kurzweil and, it seems, Shields both take their Woody Allen much more literally than their Matthew 16:25. I am, of course, referencing Allen’s famous “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” <br />
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Things will get very interesting if Kurzweil is right about the nanobots. I have a feeling I’ll be sitting in my apartment, with the exact same haircut, wondering if I am still alive. <br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-85436053134076317352015-02-15T14:41:00.000-05:002015-02-15T14:41:24.381-05:00The Trap You Set for YourselfRaymond Chandler ‘s masterpiece, <i>The Long Goodbye</i>, reminds us that fiction is the best, perhaps only, place to find truth. And if we grant that truth is stranger than fiction, then we should go one step further and stipulate that fiction feels less strange than real life to us because it has the ring of truth to it. On page four Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s protagonist and literature’s most sublime first person voice, having just happened upon a drunk named Terry Lennox, delivers the truth: “I guess it’s always a mistake to interfere with a drunk. Even if he knows and likes you he is always liable to haul off and poke you in the teeth.” Marlowe being Marlowe, he proceeds to interfere with the drunk, befriending Lennox and, on page six, he gives us the whole truth: “Terry Lennox made me plenty of trouble. But after all that’s my line of work.” Then, on page eighty-six, having just received a letter from Lennox explaining how he (Lennox) is about to kill himself to avoid being murdered in a mountain town in Mexico, Marlowe tells us nothing but the truth: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” <br />
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Chandler’s equation: <br />
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Truth=Truth<br />
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The Whole Truth= Ignoring the Truth<br />
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Nothing but the Truth= Ignoring a problem, i.e. the truth, doesn’t make it go away. <br />
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Reading Marlowe, it is impossible not to think about the many traps we’ve set for ourselves, the truths ignored. And, rather ironically, we’ve set our biggest traps by pretending to the throne of true knowledge. In other words, the pithy diagnosis is that we are “often wrong, but never uncertain.” Speaking specifically about climate change while at the same time generalizing his observation, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert restates the diagnosis when he says “In the United States, can we actually have a reality-based, serious deliberative process about anything anymore?” (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/02/nrc_geoengineering_report_climate_hacking_is_dangerous_and_barking_mad.2.html) <br />
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One of the things that has often worried me about the idea of an omniscient God is that if God knows everything why would God need to listen to me? This worry might be indigenous to the United States, where everyone knows everything and no one is listening. Or, as Marlowe puts it:<br />
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“It was the same old cocktail party, everybody talking too loud, nobody listening, everybody hanging on for dear life…”<br />
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What, exactly, are we hanging on to? At the same old cocktail party in 1953 it’s “a mug of the juice.” Today we’re hanging on to something equally intoxicating, and you can still call it juice if you are willing to dig back into pop culture circa 1992, when the movie <i>Juice</i>, starring the late Tupak Shakur, told the story of “4 inner-city teens who get caught up in the pursuit of power and happiness, which they refer to as ‘the juice.’” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104573/mediaindex) So, to mash up Raymond Chandler with <i>Juice</i> auteur Ernest R. Dickerson, <i>Everybody is hanging on for dear life to power and happiness, to a mug of the juice</i>. <br />
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It is this desperate clinging to power and happiness that makes a collective “reality-based, serious deliberative process,” a process you might simply call being adults, well nigh impossible. To understand exactly how this all happens we could do much worse than to turn to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the subject supposed to know. According to Lacan, transference, that fundamental exchange between analysand and analyst, has nothing at all to do with the analyst’s actual fund of knowledge. Instead:<br />
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“It is the analysand's supposition of a subject who knows that initiates the analytic process rather than the knowledge actually possessed by the analyst… the analyst is often thought to know the secret meaning of the analysand's words, the significations of speech of which even the speaker is unaware.” (http://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Subject_supposed_to_know)<br />
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All of which leads to the analyst being “credited at some point with a certain infallibility.” (ibid) Infallibility. What could possibly lead to more power and happiness than that? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Because, to do justice to psychoanalysis, we must note that “the analyst is aware” (at least in theory) “that there is a split between him and the knowledge attributed to him…. The analyst must realise that, of the knowledge attributed to him by the analysand, he knows nothing.” (ibid)<br />
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My gambit is that we walk around supposing that there are subjects who know all the time in everyday interpersonal relations, but without ever acknowledging the split between the subjects and the knowledge attributed to them. We know well and truly that <i>we</i> know nothing, but we keep that dirty little secret locked up tight because no one else seems to be owning up to this, which further leads us to suppose that quite possibly we <i>are</i> the only ones who know nothing. Everyone else, then, is supposed to know everything that I manifestly don’t. Making it all too easy to fall under the subject supposed to know’s spell, e.g. at Jiffy Lube when they inevitably tell me I need a new air filter yet again. <br />
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But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and we’ve locked our dirty little secret up so tightly that we too can be supposed to know that, e.g., Philip Marlowe is “literature’s most sublime first person voice.” (Full disclosure: I was inspired to read Raymond Chandler by the praise heaped upon him by one of my own personal subjects supposed to know, Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is, famously, a Lacanian, so I guess I obviously haven’t yet achieved the end of my “analysis” with Zizek by recognizing that he, too, knows nothing, i.e. “The end of analysis comes when the analysand de-supposes the analyst of knowledge.” (ibid)) <br />
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To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with the pursuit of knowledge, in and of itself. When I take my car in to Jiffy Lube it is important that they do know how to change my car’s oil, just as it is important that I know that air filters do not actually need to be changed every 3,000 miles. Our civilization’s pathology is not to be found in the pursuit of knowledge, but in the trumping up of provisional knowledge as absolute certainty in the service of power and happiness. We are all like bad Lacanian analysts, who occupy the position of the subject supposed to know without ever acknowledging that, in fact, we know nothing. And when I say that we know nothing, I am interpreting Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing” to mean I know that I know nothing for certain. If there’s one thing that we human beings aren’t allowed it’s certainty. The second we had certainty all science and prayer would end. (The fact that science and prayer are both linked to uncertainty perhaps provides at least a glimmer of hope that the war between science and religion is, at bottom, unnecessary.) <br />
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More equations:<br />
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Knowledge= I know nothing<br />
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Knowledge= power<br />
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I know nothing= power<br />
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Edward Brown, in <i>Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings</i>, quotes his teacher Suzuki Roshi explaining that “Zen is to feel your way along in the dark, not knowing what you will meet, not already knowing what to do.” Strangest thing in the world: we are at our most powerful when we are feeling our way along in the dark, together.<br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-81788097791601638402015-01-25T10:10:00.000-05:002015-01-25T10:10:05.226-05:00Gaming the SystemIn a provocative but flawed <i>Grantland</i> column about the deflated balls controversy currently swirling around Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and the New England Patriots, Charles P. Pierce explains that “as soon as the story broke about the possibility that the Patriots had been up to some shenanigans with the game balls while they were obliterating the Indianapolis Colts, 45-7, in the AFC Championship Game, the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject.” (http://grantland.com/the-triangle/brady-belichick-and-great-balls-of-fire-a-front-row-seat-for-the-foxborough-farce/) Pierce, here, is exactly right, i.e. there isn’t an ounce of hyperbole in his description of our collective response to “DeflateGate” (a generic and clichéd label for a scandal, yes, but still preferable to the other label being tossed around, “Ballghazi,” which is too uncomfortable in its implicit linkage of professional football, that proxy for war, with the Global War on Terror, that proxy for what Woodrow Wilson once described as “normalcy.”) Case in point, yours truly, who despite moving house this week has devoted approximately 30,000 of my 50,000 thoughts per day to DeflateGate (with another 10,000 reserved for monitoring the chance for snow). <br />
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But while Pierce grasps the breadth of this latest <i>scandale du jour</i>, he has no sense of its depth. Ignoring its depth, Pierce writes “The whole thing is flatly hilarious.” (ibid) And while the dramatics are not without their comic elements, the affair’s tragic elements are at least as prominent as the obvious comic surrealism. Although I would note that Pierce’s explanation of what exactly is so funny about all of this is more than a little bit troubling: “The whole thing is flatly hilarious. The way you can be sure of this is that the ladies of <i>The View</i> pronounced themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots on Thursday morning. Rosie O’Donnell wanted them booted from the Super Bowl. (Trolling or insane? Our lines are open.)” If you’ve been listening to sports talk radio all week, as I have, you’ve heard one sports pundit after another pronounce themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots, some of whom have also suggested that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl. But what almost all of these sports radio personalities have in common is that they’re men. But given that “the ladies of <i>The View</i>” lack the prerequisite equipment between their legs, any opinions they might offer necessarily reduce the discussion to hilarity. Is it mere coincidence that O’Donnell, who famously has no interest in the equipment between men’s legs, is singled out by name? Does Pierce not even realize that a few paragraphs before he dismisses O’Donnell for the audacity of suggesting that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl, he writes that “Serious people in serious media venues have proposed disqualifying the Patriots from playing in the Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks”? Seriously, Charles P. Pierce? In short, Pierce is saying loud and clear that the scandal is reduced to mere “farce” (the exact word used in the title of his column) precisely because women feel entitled to express their own opinions about it. Pierce goes on to say the following: “This is what I think: Once a scandal starts being discussed on <i>The View</i>, it stops being a scandal and becomes a sitcom. I think this should be a rule.” Memo to Charles P. Pierce: The notion that women are not to be taken seriously has been a rule for thousands of years. It’s called patriarchy.<br />
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Just as troubling is Pierce’s repeated assertion that the public reaction to the scandal has been so intense “because we are a nation of infantilized yahoos.” Infants, of course, can’t think for themselves. But I would suggest that the “the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject” because of a very well reasoned, and deeply felt, line of thought. Let me briefly sketch how the thinking goes. The Patriots have had the great good fortune over the last fifteen years, an eternity in pro football, to have arguably the greatest football coach of all time (Belichick) partnered with arguably the greatest quarterback of all time (Brady). And they got there by hiring a guy who got canned from his first gig as an NFL head coach and by drafting a guy in the sixth round, i.e. a quarterback prospect who was just as likely to get cut as he was to make the team. The Patriots essentially hit the football equivalent of the Powerball lottery. Because it turns out that Belichick is one of the maybe three or four authentic football geniuses who ever lived, and Brady is an assassin. <br />
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So, when you have the greatest coach of all time and the greatest quarterback of all time you already have every advantage a football team is ever going to need. And everybody knows this. The combination is not unprecedented, having occurred at least once before in the tandem of Bill Walsh and Joe Montana on the great San Francisco 49ers teams that won <i>beaucoup</i> Super Bowls in the 1980s. The interesting thing is that nobody hated the 49ers the way they hate the Patriots. Sure, you might have rooted against the Niners because you were tired of them winning all the time the same way that you might have rooted against Roger Federer when he was winning every time he stepped onto a tennis court, but no one truly hated the Niners or hated Federer because you can only develop so much antipathy towards simple greatness. Greatness might breed a certain amount of envy but it also breeds respect, and there is no respect in the level of animosity we all feel towards the Patriots. Because, beginning with the Spygate scandal in 2007, when the Patriots were first caught cheating red handed, the Patriots have come to represent something altogether different from greatness: gaming the system for an advantage you don’t need. The Patriots, who in the persons of Belichick and Brady have everything, (Belichick’s brains, Brady’s looks, success, wealth, fame, and supermodel wife) are the 1%. The Patriots, like the 1%, embody the paradox of already having everything but still wanting more, and, moreover, trampling the rules that everyone else is expected to follow in order to extract that paradoxical surplus from those who have little to nothing precisely because they follow those very rules. How interesting that on the very same day that the DeflateGate story broke, Oxfam released its report detailing that the 80 richest people on the planet have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion combined, and that by 2016 the richest 1% will have more wealth than all the rest of the 99% combined.<br />
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Pierce, then, is dead wrong in labeling us “infantilized yahoos” for “losing (our) freaking mind on the subject” of the New England Patriots’ deflated balls. A more telling critique is to press those, like me, who couldn’t stop thinking and talking about Belichick and Brady gaming the system for an advantage they manifestly don’t need, but who, like me, heard about the Oxfam report on the radio while my sports talk radio station was on commercial break, and quickly forgot about it as soon as ESPN radio’s <i>Mike and Mike in the Morning</i> came back from break to joke about <i>Seinfeld</i>’s “shrinkage” episode in re: deflated balls. If denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, then projection ain’t just how Belichick and Brady watch game film. The problem in projecting everything onto Brady and Belichick, of course, is that at least we get to watch those two squirm during their respective DeflateGate press conferences (which turned out to be little more than exercises in plausible deniability), while the 1% are as hard to find in their piles of money as a needle in a haystack. Note that we have yet to hear about DeflateGate from the real money behind the New England Patriots, team owner Bob Kraft. Perhaps the most important element of being rich these days is that money talks, so you don’t have to. And we only make it easier for them (the 1%) when all we talk about is football, even, as in the case of DeflateGate, when we are really talking about them. This doesn’t make us “infantilized yahoos,” but it does make us unwitting accomplices. Nevertheless, I hope they boot Brady and Belichick from the Super Bowl, i.e. I’m with Rosie O’Donnell. Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-74405424595446414682015-01-17T16:40:00.001-05:002015-01-17T16:40:40.261-05:00"Democracy" and its DiscontentsI was walking in my local grocery store parking lot this week when I saw the following bumper sticker: “Re-elect no one!” Now, this being the parking lot of that progressive enclave known as Whole Foods, it might be tempting to dismiss this expression of political disenchantment as little more than liberal whinging. But <i>pace</i> the cherished caricature of whiny effete leftists which enables us to get on with the masculine business of getting our hands bloody, kvetching about the United States’ Congress spans the entire political spectrum. Gallup polls indicate that “In 2014, an average of 15% of Americans approved of Congress,” and, more importantly, that “The same percentage (15%) of Republicans and Democrats approved.” (http://www.gallup.com/poll/180113/2014-approval-congress-remains-near-time-low.aspx) Gallup does note that congressional approval percentages are lower when the chambers of Congress are split between the parties, as they were in 2014, but even when Congress was undivided, as it was most recently in 2009, approval still maxed out at a mere 30%. So, depending on the year, anywhere from 70 to 85% of Americans are kvetching en masse. <br />
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If Congress is getting consistent F’s from we the people, it is clear that we expect more from our representative body. The dynamic is one of “You work for us, but this isn’t working for us.” With this as our unstated or implicit consensus, it then becomes a matter of uncovering just why Congress isn’t getting the job done. So, for example, we might look at the gerrymandering of congressional districts: “If a substantial number of districts are designed to be polarized, then those districts' representation will also likely act in a heavily partisan manner, which can create and perpetuate partisan gridlock.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering) But if gerrymandering dates back to at least 1812, when the word was first coined in honor of gerrymandering Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, then how do we make sense of the fact that “over the past four years, Congress' approval ratings have been among the lowest Gallup has measured”? (http://www.gallup.com/poll/180113/2014-approval-congress-remains-near-time-low.aspx) I would suggest that things begin to make sense when we accept the fact that Congress is getting the job done, it’s just that they don’t work for us anymore.<br />
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Support for this suggestion comes from a recent research article authored by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin I. Page. Gilens, in an interview with Sahil Kapur, describes their methodology thusly:<br />
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“What we did was to collect survey questions that asked whether respondents would favor or oppose some particular change in federal government policy. These were questions asked across the decades from 1981 to 2002. And so from each of those questions we know what citizens of average income level prefer and we know what people at the top of the income distribution say they want. For each of the 2,000 possible policy changes we determined whether in fact they've been adopted or not.” (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview)<br />
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Survey says!:<br />
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“Contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests.” (ibid)<br />
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But a few factors make the obvious handwriting on the wall into more of one of those doctor’s office eye test Snellen charts. In addition to the aforementioned “decades of political science research,” there is the intense emotional investment that Americans have in our small-d democratic self-image; asking an American whether they live in a real democracy has, since 1776 (or since the Civil Rights movement, if you don’t happen to be white), been the equivalent of asking if the Pope’s Catholic or if bears shit in the woods. Add to this the fact that the voting polls are still open, and that elections are still fiercely contested between two seemingly opposed political parties (only seemingly, given that they both dance to the same twin tunes “of economic elites and of organized interests”), and the idea that the United States is no longer a democracy begins to shrink down to the illegible font size at the bottom of the Snellen chart. <br />
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All that to say that the American public is likely to express its discontent with Congress by kicking Democrats and Republicans out of congressional majorities on a rotating basis for the foreseeable future. And it is almost certain that they will maintain record low approval ratings for Congress regardless of which party holds the majority. The former behavior is invested almost entirely in maintaining the illusion of democracy, i.e. it is a blatant form of that primitive defense mechanism, denial (“acting as if a painful event, thought or feeling did not exist” (http://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-defense-mechanisms/0001251)), while the latter behavior ventilates the rage of our unacknowledged loss. In other words, having lost our democracy, we are stuck in the first two stages of grief, denial and anger. <br />
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Since we need our democracy back, lest civilization devolve into hell on earth over the next few decades (time is of the essence!), I would also suggest that we don’t proceed out of anger and denial through the other three stages of grief: bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead, we need to cut the denial, and, necessarily but at great risk, work with our anger. The risk is that our anger will burn out of control, taking the form of what is known in America as domestic terrorism, and that the repression of this violence will be more violent still, and that our nascent police state will emerge from the other side of all this, enabled by previously unthinkable invasive technologies, in a position of total and implacable domination. Even given this risk, anger at the loss of our democracy is the only possible catalyst for resistance. But that anger must be yoked to the recognition that while war may very well be the continuation of politics by other means (politics having thus far been our saccharin substitute for democracy), peace is the actualization of an authentic democracy-yet-to-come. All of which makes me wonder if our late poet-prophet rock star, Kurt Cobain, was thinking of democracy when he wrote these lines:<br />
<br />
“Come as you are, as you were,<br />
As I want you to be<br />
As a friend, as a friend,<br />
As an old enemy.” <br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-34618719950949644822014-12-28T14:18:00.000-05:002014-12-28T14:18:58.577-05:00Never AgainThe horse has already left the barn, Pandora’s Box is already open, or the genie is already out of the bottle. Whichever cliché you prefer, each describes our new relationship to state-sponsored torture. Once beyond the pale, torture has crossed over as effortlessly as Taylor Swift making the switch from teenage country crooner to grown-up pop superstar. We now have a sitting Supreme Court justice, one Antonin Scalia, who, when asked about torture as a tool for interrogation, publicly opines that “We have never held that that’s contrary to the Constitution.” (http://www.salon.com/2014/12/22/7_worst_right_wing_moments_of_the_week_%E2%80%94%C2%A0rick_santorum_wants_you_to_know_hes_not_a_virgin_partner/) <br />
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For Scalia, torture is only ruled out by the Constitution as a “cruel and unusual punishment” for those already convicted of a crime. How convenient, then, the post-9/11 rolling back of <i>habeas corpus</i> rights, which intend the enabling of indefinite incarceration without trial for any individual the state identifies as an “enemy combatant.” Scalia’s reading of the Constitution legitimizes torture for the full duration of any such individual’s indefinite incarceration, i.e. the only way to stop the torture is to be convicted of acts of terrorism, except that as an “enemy combatant” one doesn’t have a right to stand trial for those very acts of alleged terror. Scalia’s brand of justice sounds rather like the old witch trials in which the suspected witch was subjected to dunking and could either a) admit to being a witch or b) prove that she wasn’t a witch by drowning. The only difference now is that with water boarding you get to drown again and again; as an “enemy combatant” one doesn’t really quite exist so one can’t actually die.<br />
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Even more troubling than this are the results of a recent <i>ABC News- Washington Post</i> poll conducted in the aftermath of the US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture. 59% of poll respondents think the CIA’s treatment (i.e. torture) of suspected terrorists was justified. William James once described religion as “a forced option,” reasoning that “We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in this way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.” Torture, I would argue, is a forced choice in much the same way, such that the 9% of poll respondents who hazarded “no opinion” as to CIA torture have, in their indecision (or, worse still, apathy) definitively decided in favor of torture in the same way that agnostics have, per James, decided against religion. This, if my math is correct, brings the percentage of Americans approving state-sponsored torture up to 68%. Which, given the wiggle room of polling margin for error, allows us to comfortably conclude that 7 out of 10 Americans are on board with water boarding. For context, note that this 68% is ten percentage points higher than the 58% of Americans who watched last February’s Super Bowl. <br />
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I was eating lunch with a colleague at work the other day when Senator Dianne Feinstein appeared on the café TV screen explaining why the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report had been made public, an explanation that can be boiled down to the two most important words of her speech: “Never again.” But when Feinstein delivered these words my colleague didn’t hesitate in her reply, “Oh, like that’s ever going to happen.” For my colleague, torture was already in the same category as death and taxes, leaving me wondering how we got from the unthinkable to the inevitable in the seeming blink of an eye.<br />
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The answer, I would suggest, stems primarily from our deep-seated need to think of ourselves as fundamentally good people, a need that frequently manifests in the individual psyche, but which in this case also plays out in the realm of our collective identity. For many, if not most Americans, one of the keystone reasons we believe ourselves to be good is that we are, indeed, Americans. Whatever our personal foibles, simply by virtue of living and working in the United States we contribute to and participate in what is perhaps best summarized in the opening credits for the old <i>Superman</i> TV show: “Truth, justice, and the American way.” So even if I’m just an average Joe (or Jane), I am a part of something larger than myself, and that something isn’t just good, it is, essentially, the Good in the Platonic sense of the term; just as Plato’s form of the Good “allows one to realize all the other forms,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_Good) the American Way allows one to realize truth, justice, and all of the other goods accruing to citizens of a land made, per Woody Guthrie, “for you and me.” Which Good isn’t all bad, at least when we kinda live up to the communitarian ethos embedded in Guthrie’s secular hymn. But what happens when the Good, like Marsellus Wallace in <i>Pulp Fiction</i>, announces its intent to “get medieval on yo’ ass”? <br />
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The “yo’” in question here, of course, is Islam, but it could just as easily be communism, China, or Mars, because all that really matters to the collective identity is that the Good is going to get medieval on <i>somebody’s</i> ass. The Good, you see, can’t get medieval on anybody’s ass. The Good can’t, to quote Marcellus Wallace again, “call a couple of hard, pipe-hittin’ (blokes) to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.” Or at least the Good couldn’t. Past tense. But, per the 68 percent, now it would seem that the Good can. Get medieval. It’s not the American Way until suddenly it is.<br />
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Which brings us back to our need to need to think of ourselves as fundamentally good people, and the solution of subsuming ourselves in a greater (American) Good. The need doesn’t change, even as circumstances do, and even if those circumstances involve the Good perpetrating bald-faced evil. So when the Good gets medieval/evil, those of us who derive much of our sense of ourselves as basically good and decent people from the fact that we are Americans are subject to one of psychology’s most potent phenomena, cognitive dissonance, that “feeling of discomfort caused by performing an action that is discrepant from one’s self-concept.” (http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205796621.pdf) Or, in this case, the feeling of discomfort when the Good perpetrates evil in your name. <br />
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Dissonance theory maintains that there are two primary ways to respond to cognitive dissonance. The first involves “changing our behavior to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition.” (ibid) Senator Feinstein’s “Never again” is a perfect example of this approach. “Never again,” however, is extremely difficult and fraught with risk. Terrorism, as perpetrated on 9/11, is terrifying, indeed. Facing it down without resorting to ultra-violence of our own requires a courage that is excruciatingly difficult to muster. And it may fail. The attacks may come again. <br />
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Given the outsized difficulty and risk of “Never again,” it should come as no surprise that the 68% have managed their cognitive dissonance with the alternate approach of “attempting to justify our behavior through changing one of the dissonant cognitions,” or “by adding new cognitions.” (ibid) Put another way, “once we are committed to our views and beliefs, most of us distort new information in a way that confirms them.” (ibid) Making things even less surprising is the fact that the “closer people are to committing acts of cruelty, the greater their need to reduce the dissonance between ‘I am a good, kind person’ and ‘I am causing another human being to suffer.’ The easiest route is to blame the victim.” (ibid) <br />
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From here, it is all too easy to connect the dots: <br />
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1) America is Good (and by extension, so am I)<br />
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2) America engaged in the evil act of torture (and by extension, I am implicated, triggering cognitive dissonance)<br />
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3) <i>Ipso facto</i>, the torture of suspected terrorists was, far from evil, morally justified (and by extension, I am exonerated and cognitive dissonance is defused, despite the fact that torture was unequivocally evil right up until 9/11/2001)<br />
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No one, of course, is talking about any of this because no one is actually thinking about it: “the process of reducing dissonance is largely unconscious. Indeed, dissonance reduction works better that way.” (ibid) Perhaps this is yet another reason that Feinstein’s “Never again” fell so flat in the café at work last week and with 7 out of 10 Americans. You can’t get to “Never again” without stopping, facing your fear, and, crucially, thinking. And it is thinking that is sorely lacking in our unconscious resolution of cognitive dissonance, because even if torture weren’t unequivocally evil (which it is), one doesn’t have to think long and hard before realizing that the very best reason to abstain from torture is so that we, and especially those young men and women we send to the four corners of the earth to prosecute the war on terror, don’t become victims of torture ourselves. To our list of clichés we should add what goes around comes around. Pandora’s Box, indeed.<br />
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If we were to Monday morning quarterback the unforgivable decision to engage in state-sponsored torture we could modify another cliché and say that some rules are meant to never be broken. Taboos are taboos for a reason, and that reason, it turns out, is cognitive dissonance. Human weakness being what it is, it is all too likely that we will, as we have with torture, distort the truth in service of our sacred self-image. Kant’s categorical imperative might be helpful here: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” As impractical as the categorical imperative often is (we should indeed, contra Kant, lie in order to prevent a murder), we just need to know when to use it. And, it turns out, the categorical imperative is <i>essential</i> to the preservation of necessary taboos. As an intellectual/emotional exercise, ask yourself if you would rather live in a world where Scalia’s “We have never held that that’s contrary to the Constitution” or Feinstein’s “Never again” should become a <i>universal law</i>? <br />
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But the horse (torture) has already left the barn, and the truth (torture is evil) has already been distorted. In describing the future (“Never again”), Feinstein is talking to the past. But, if dissonance theory is correct and the only alternative to distorting the truth is to change our behavior to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition, then Feinstein and the rest of us 32% need to keep preaching to the empty choir stalls until they are fit to bust once more. And the only way we get there is if the truth matters a hell of a lot more to the 32% than the personal comfort that comes from feeling good about yourself does to the 68%. Knowing just how deeply I myself am committed to my own personal comfort and to my own self-image, I’d say that the odds, as they are if we choose to fight terror non-violently, are against us. We may fail. Torture may well continue. All we can do is fight to keep the barn door open, all along asking what is the meaning, the truth, of the empty barn? <br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-14031067524461822452014-12-14T13:29:00.000-05:002014-12-14T13:29:35.284-05:00Here Comes TroubleLast week, within the space of twenty four hours, my Uncle Bill snail mailed me a well-intentioned copy of a <i>Consumer Reports</i> article putatively debunking the benefits of gluten free eating, and <i>Slate.com</i> published an account of the burgeoning gluten free backlash. (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/12/gluten_free_fad_don_t_be_annoyed_says_celiac_disease_memoirist.html) <br />
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Note that I went gluten free voluntarily a little over three years ago a few months before we found out that my daughter, Sammi, has Celiac disease. For me, a gluten free diet has resulted in reduced fatigue and anxiety, results that haven’t flagged after 36 months, while for Sammi it has produced a return to basic good health. So I am your basic true believer; quitting gluten changed my life and, essentially, saved my daughter’s. Accordingly, I scanned Uncle Bill’s mailing so that I didn’t feel like the guy who only ever consumes one version of the news (be it Fox News <i>or</i> NPR) because he doesn’t have the humility and/or confidence to admit that his side might be wrong about a thing or three. It turns out that the best <i>Consumer Reports</i> could come up with is to assume that if you have given up gluten you must be eating gobs of rice, which rice, <i>Consumer Reports</i> is happy to report, might be high in arsenic. (The high in arsenic rice sounds a lot like the high in mercury tuna, which means that tuna might finally get some respect; just imagine how exhausting the whole “chicken of the sea” label must be for tuna, leaving tuna no choice but to constantly remind folks that the actual sequence of events had life evolving in the ocean first and then crawling out of the sea onto dry land, i.e. chicken should rightly be considered “tuna of the land,” although this label may now fall to toxic-in-high-quantity rice.) Other than considering giving up eating rice cakes lathered in sunflower butter and jelly for breakfast, which I consider a daily confirmation of security in my masculinity, I tossed the article into the recycling bin without a second thought. (The sheer femininity of rice cakes makes the English language’s lack of gendered nouns seem stifling; why can’t we have la rice cake and le Manwich, even if this would lead to the difficulty of deciding on a gender for more androgynous foods like the marshmallow, which takes nature’s most androgynous shape, the equally round and straight cylinder.)<br />
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The gluten free backlash described on <i>Slate.com</i> did, however, hold my interest. Mainly because of a <i>New Yorker</i> cartoon it quoted thusly: “I’ve only been gluten-free for a week, but I’m already really annoying.” <i>Moi?</i> Annoying? But perhaps that’s exactly why I’ve taken so well to a gluten free lifestyle. Nothing, you see, gives me more pleasure than annoying my wife Jen by, e.g., pronouncing words in a way that really annoys her. I have a whole repertoire: <br />
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• Catsup instead of ketchup<br />
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• Pronouncing falcon so that the first syllable rhymes with all rather than Cal<br />
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• Pronouncing karate like the original Japanese’s “car-ahh-tay” rather than the Americanized “ka-rah-tee” and with the emphasis spread equally across all three syllables as opposed to the standard American pronunciation’s emphasis on the second syllable<br />
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• Pronouncing the s on the end of Illinois<br />
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• Pronouncing vegan “vay-gan” instead of “vee-gan” (Since I enjoy being annoying, and not being an asshole, I don’t use this pronunciation in front of actual vegans. Although this doesn’t mean that I am not an asshole, or that being an asshole doesn’t give me pleasure that I am too self deluding to acknowledge.)<br />
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But the strange thing is that unlike my relationship with Jen, in which I am annoying on purpose as a way of playing with her, in being gluten free I am unintentionally annoying; I am gluten free so that I can be anxiety and fatigue free, not so that I can turn down pieces of homemade cake offered to me in a spirit of kindness (which isn’t fun at all) and not even because I get to nonchalantly explain that it is gluten free bread when a friend calls me out for eating a sandwich (which <i>is</i> only fun if it does manage to annoy my friend; what more annoying response to “Gotcha” could there be than “No you didn’t”- as an example see Pee Wee Herman’s preemptive “I meant to do that,” which is both funny and annoying). <br />
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This sheds light on one of the strangest dynamics in human interpersonal relations, which is that if I do something for myself that feels really good and that I’m really excited about, I naturally want to share it with others, if only by talking about it and how good it’s making me feel. But this sharing, defined as any outward expression of passion for my new undertaking, even including simply engaging in the behavior that makes me feel good, is automatically interpreted by any individual who doesn’t either share my enthusiasm, or at least some form of sympathy towards it, as a judgment against them. In other words, “This is really cool, it changed my life and I’ve never felt better, and I highly recommend it,” gets automatically translated into and heard as “Excuse me, but they way you’ve been living your life is a big mistake.” And you can’t stop the translation by keeping your mouth shut; just going about your day and ordering a gluten free meal in a restaurant without otherwise making a peep is inevitably subversive.<br />
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In <i>Tiger Writing</i>, Gish Jen tells the story of a writing teacher who, in the midst of insulting Jen’s potential as a writer, explained that all good writing is subversive. The teacher was manifestly wrong about the exceptionally talented Jen, and I would suggest that he or she was also wrong about good writing. Writing needs to affirm as much as it subverts. But if we subtract one word from the lousy teacher’s formula, I think we are definitely on to something: All good is subversive. For whatever reason, we human beings seem to be hard wired for a zero sum game. If you have more access to the good, be it through gluten free eating, religious conversion, or simple luck, I necessarily have less. How else to account for <i>Consumer Reports</i>’ schadenfreude in their discovery of arsenic in the presumed staple of the gluten free diet? <br />
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My own faith tradition hints rather strongly at the subversive nature of the good: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Let us not be confused, Jesus is still very much the Prince of Peace, it’s just that establishing peace on earth requires rather a lot of conflict, even if this conflict takes the form of non-violent resistance. A pithy way of saying this in the Christian tradition might be to assert that there is nothing more subversive than spreading the good news. But whatever your faith tradition or lack thereof, the larger point in play here is that the good, however we experience it, be it via gluten free living or veganism, Christianity or Judaism, doesn’t make our life any easier. Instead, it does just the opposite, stirring up trouble for us wherever we go. That trouble could range from, on the low end, being the target of snarky <i>New Yorker</i> cartoons, all the way up to having your life threatened because of your religious beliefs. <br />
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In sum, the good leads to trouble, and the only way through that trouble is fidelity to the good, which guarantees more trouble. Annoying, isn’t it? But kind of funny, too. <br />
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<i>Consumer Reports</i>: “Looks like you’re eating arsenic for breakfast, buck-o.”<br />
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Me: “I meant to do that.” <br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-84037690267508855232014-12-04T16:43:00.001-05:002014-12-04T16:43:46.495-05:00What Does a Man Really Want?I happened to be driving in Delaware the other day when I passed a Harley Davidson dealership with a sign out front that read as follows: “Your wife called, and she says it’s okay.” This is quite possibly the most effective advertisement I have encountered since Miller Lite’s “Tastes great! Less Filling!” debate (the genius of which hinged on reformulating an age old question into its new, consumer-friendly form: “Is the glass half full or is it half full?”, which mutant question covers the range of sanctioned options living and voting in a 21st century western liberal democracy), and it works so well because it overtly winks at the fantasy on sale in the showroom. Which is the fantasy of male autonomy. The Harley’s signature exhaust blap is the trumpet fanfare announcing a man alone on his motorcycle, with the slight but noticeable edge of the outlaw, i.e. one who makes and lives by his own set of rules. So, in regards to the winking signage, what exactly does it mean to ask and receive permission to pretend to be that (autonomous) man?<br />
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Every married straight male knows that it is impossible to win an argument with your wife; if he doesn’t know it, he won’t be married long. As Camille Paglia puts it, “It is woman’s destiny to rule men.” (Us blokes do play our part, though, for, as Paglia also explains, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”) So it turns out that for men it is better, indeed, to ask permission than forgiveness. In order to spare us this indignity, women have always known that the best way to get a man to do or agree to something is to make him think it’s his idea. Along these lines, perhaps the best way to get a man to feel autonomous is for a woman to let him pretend that he is. <br />
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The danger in this thinking, however, is in painting women as the source of male frustration, when, in fact, women have been, and always will be, the fountainhead of (straight) male desire. We must be careful to portray the woman who preemptively calls into the Harley dealership in order to grant her permission as a woman playing along with the fantasy, as opposed to understanding her as the demonic force undermining male autonomy, even, and especially, if that autonomy is an illusion perpetuated by female fiat. Because the former maintains the fragile male ego even as it sustains women in their place as masculinity’s legitimate holy grail, while the latter plants seeds of misogyny. <br />
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Understanding all of this requires getting at the root of male desire in order to see exactly why the illusion of male autonomy is enough, why men will (almost) always be satisfied by a game of make believe, by a Harley Davidson. Doing so requires asking two simple questions: 1) Is marriage a better deal for men or for women?; and 2) Which exactly is the weaker sex? Correctly answering both of these will provide the answer to a third elusive question, one that eluded Freud, who famously never asked “What does a man really want?”<br />
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Taking our questions one at a time, we begin with #1) Is marriage a better deal for men or for women? The data, quoted from Foxnews.com of all places (http://magazine.foxnews.com/food-wellness/love-better-mens-or-womens-health), is nearly unanimous, category by category:<br />
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• Longevity: “The link between marriage and longevity is much stronger among husbands than wives… Marriage is especially good at warding off fatal accidents, violence, and other semi-avoidable calamities, which are more common in younger people… <i>But regardless of age, men's life spans appear to benefit more from marriage than women's</i>.” (emphasis added)<br />
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• Heart disease: “While married men are three times less likely to die from heart disease than men who have never tied the knot, marriage only halves the risk of cardiac death for women.”<br />
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• Healthy choices: “Simply put, women may be a better influence on men than vice versa. Wives tend to be the more emotionally supportive partner and are more likely to encourage their husbands to refrain from drinking or smoking.”<br />
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• Stress: “Contrary to popular belief, men tend to get stressed out more easily than women. Lab experiments have shown that when given a stressful task, men exhibit greater spikes in the stress hormone cortisol than women. Fortunately for men, being in a romantic relationship — not just marriage — may curb their stress response. A 2010 experiment found that paired-off men had smaller spikes in cortisol levels than single men after taking part in a competitive game, whereas single and spoken-for ladies had comparable cortisol increases.”<br />
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• Sex: “where sex is concerned, marriage appears to be a better deal for men. In a landmark national sex survey conducted in the 1990s, 49 percent of married men said they were ‘extremely’ emotionally satisfied with their sex life, compared to just 33 percent of men who were unmarried or not living with a partner. By contrast, only 42 percent of married women were extremely satisfied with their sex lives, compared to 31 percent of women who didn't live with a partner.<br />
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So, men get more longevity, better health, less stress, and better sex out of marriage than women. One can either wonder at the odds of a marriage proposal being accepted, 1 in 1.001 (it goes without saying that 95% of proposals come from men), or one can consider the possibility that men get more out of marriage because they need more. Which brings us to question #2) Which exactly is the weaker sex? If we take our Darwin seriously, the data regarding this question are just as definitive. Because women, it comes as no surprise, outlive men, i.e. they are basically fitter. But what just might surprise are the facts as reported by Robert Krulwich at NPR.org :<br />
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“Women, it turns out, don't just win in the end. It seems that women consistently outlive men <i>in every age cohort</i>. Fetal boys die more often than fetal girls. Baby boys die more often than baby girls. Little boys die more often than little girls. Teenage boys, 20-something boys, 30-something boys — in every age group, the rate of death for guys is higher than for women. The difference widens when we hit our 50s and 60s. Men gallop ahead, then the dying differential narrows, but death keeps favoring males right to the end.” (http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/06/17/192670490/why-men-die-younger-than-women-the-guys-are-fragile-thesis)<br />
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Of all the possible reasons Krulwich explores for this longevity gap, only one seems to stand up to the simple fact that the gap exists in every age cohort, even in utero, and it is also the one which dovetails nicely with the idea that men bring more needs into marriage. The culprit? Simply put: male weakness. Krulwich’s 1934 quotation from Mayo Clinic doc E.V. Allen is well worth repeating:<br />
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"For each explanation of the lack of inherent vitality of the male there are objections, but these do not influence the fact; the male is, by comparison with the female, a weakling at all periods of life from conception to death. Venery, alcoholism, exposure, overwork, and various other factors may influence the susceptibility to disease and the greater mortality of the adult male, but they are only straws placed on the greater burden of his sex-linked weakness. There seems to be no doubt that, speaking comparatively, the price of maleness is weakness."<br />
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I would argue that men intuitively know this about themselves, and that a man’s greatest wish is to transcend this weakness. To answer the question Freud never asked by way of borrowing a phrase from Spok, what a man really wants is to live long and prosper. Given what we know about the effects of marriage on male longevity and prosperity (in the holistic sense of the word), when we say that what a man really wants is to live long and prosper what we are really saying is that what a (straight) man really wants is a good wife. <br />
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It would, however, be naïve to close without recognizing that this arrangement is not without its complications. Or else the odds of a married couple reaching their 25th anniversary would be higher than 1 in 6. (These odds, as well as the aforementioned odds of a marriage proposal being accepted are courtesy of Stewart O’Nan’s captivating novel cum meditation on marriage, <i>The Odds: A Love Story</i>.) I will leave it to the stronger sex to explain why men are so bloody difficult to cohabitate with, but will take a brief stab at explaining the undercurrent of resentment that men feel towards women, even and especially as women function as our salvation, a resentment perhaps best captured by the old saying “Women, can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.” By way of explanation: Women, can’t live with ‘em (because, per Paglia, they rule over us), can’t live without ‘em (because without them we will quite literally die). The solution to this paradoxical masculine impasse: the fantasy of male autonomy. <br />
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So ladies, do let your man have his Harley Davidson, and do call up the dealership to let them know it’s okay. Let your husband spend quality time in what Mr. Rogers liked to call the Neighborhood of Make Believe, and he will, again quite literally, have more years to spend right here on earth with you, his good wife, which is all he really wants.<br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-84645108140537675742014-11-23T13:38:00.000-05:002014-11-23T13:38:18.488-05:00These are not the Droids You're Looking ForOne of my favorites among the many unforgettable scenes in <i>Star Wars</i> comes when Obi-Wan Kenobi is trying to slip through the Empire’s tentacles in the Mos Eisley spaceport with Luke, R2D2 and C3PO in tow. The latter two, of course, were wanted by the Empire for stealing away with the plans to the Death Star when jettisoned from Princess Leia’s consular ship, the <i>Tantive IV</i>, and landing on Tatooine. With Mos Eisley crawling with Storm Troopers, Kenobi’s party eventually comes to an Imperial checkpoint. With the two droids in plain sight, the gig appears to be up. But, with a wave of his hand, Obi-Wan simply says “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” Like a perfectly compliant husband, the Storm Trooper immediately repeats back the required thought: “These are not the droids we’re looking for.” Moments later, Kenobi, Luke and the wanted droids breeze through the checkpoint, scot-free. <br />
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One of the interesting things about the Jedi Mind Trick, the Force power utilized by Obi-Wan at the Mos Eisley checkpoint, is that you’ll actually hear people here on earth talking about using it themselves. This, in my own experience, is unique to the Jedi Mind Trick among all of the Force powers; people generally don’t go around, e.g., talking about how they levitate their car keys to themselves from across the room. But they do go around talking about how they used the Jedi Mind Trick to, e.g., get out of a speeding ticket. Until recently, whenever I heard a claim like this I took it as a cute way of saying you had talked your way out of said speeding ticket. But a new understanding of how the mind works suggests that the two methods of getting out of the ticket are distinct, a distinction which (accurately) presumes the reality of the Jedi Mind trick. <br />
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The really existing Jedi Mind Trick is made possible by mirror neurons: “A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron ‘mirrors’ the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron) In other words, if I’m sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner and you’re standing in front of me doing jumping jacks, the same neurons that are firing in your brain as you jump are firing in my brain as I laze. This has all kinds of implications, and potential implications:<br />
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“mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people, and for learning new skills by imitation. Some researchers also speculate that mirror systems may simulate observed actions, and thus contribute to theory of mind skills, while others relate mirror neurons to language abilities… In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy. It has also been proposed that problems with the mirror neuron system may underlie cognitive disorders, particularly autism.” (ibid) <br />
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A close reading of this laundry list of potential implications reveals that research on mirror neurons to date (they were only discovered by researchers in the 1990’s) has focused on the impact of mirror neurons on the receiving end; mirror neurons have been conceptualized in what I would call a passive voice. Because of my mirror neurons I empathize, I imitate, I relate, even and especially verbally. But a far more interesting (to me) way of understanding the possible implications of mirror neurons comes when we think of them in the active voice. Because what does it mean that I can fire whichever neurons in your brain I wish to simply by firing them in my brain in your sight? It means, of course, that the Jedi Mind Trick is real, and that instead of spinning a convincing tale of exactly why I should not be held accountable for doing 55 in a 35, e.g., I am hurrying home in order to get dressed to go to church (a real excuse shared with me by an old friend when we were teenagers- and one that worked), one simply needs to exhibit the mannerisms and tone of voice of someone who should, at worst, be let off with a warning. Of course, the genius is in knowing exactly what those mannerisms and tones consist of, which is why it is the <i>Jedi</i> Mind Trick, i.e. this is advanced stuff. But I would hazard a guess that more than practicing 7 particular habits, the world’s highly effective people, those who get things done, are all people who have mastered the Jedi Mind Trick. <br />
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As everyone knows, the Force can be used for good or evil, and the Jedi Mind Trick is no exception. “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few find it.” Among the many potential abuses one thinks of seduction, and the adoption of the mannerisms and tone of someone who truly, deeply cares when nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. <i>Caveat emptor</i>, indeed. But, if we are going to get on with saving the planet, mirror neurons and the Jedi Mind Trick just may supply the means to do so. Because the radical truth found in mirror neurons is that the social world is essentially a mirror. The most powerful act in the world is simply to quite literally gaze peacefully into that mirror. And never blink. Or, more realistically, try again tomorrow when you inevitably blink. Here on earth, Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try.” must always be translated into Beckett’s “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Look longer.<br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-33193421658232614042014-11-09T11:46:00.001-05:002014-11-09T11:46:58.272-05:00Get Thee to a Primary SchoolEvery now and again House of Pain’s bombastic 1992 single, “Jump Around,” still gets played on the radio. Naturally, I turn it up full blast and wait for the opening of verse two, at which point I rap along with Everlast to my favorite single line of lyrics in record industry history: “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe”<br />
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Unpacking the lyrics’ impact first requires tearing off the sport of tennis’ country club veneer to reveal the truth at its core, captured precisely by David Foster Wallace when he described tennis as a hybrid of chess and boxing. In other words, tennis is the ultimate combination of physical and mental combat. And yet the force of the lyrics is almost entirely embodied by McEnroe, if not the sport’s greatest player, certainly its singular genius, as perhaps best described by Dick Enberg’s remarks that “everyone else plays tennis, McEnroe plays music.” So, McEnroe was artist and, per D.F. Wallace’s definition of tennis, warrior. But, just as importantly, he was also quite infamously the anti-hero. And because we all tacitly acknowledge that almost every hero is on some important level a fraud, leaving anti-heros as, to borrow a phrase from Princess Leia, “our only hope,” we loved McEnroe not in spite of, but precisely because of all the <i>Sturm und Drang</i>. Artist, warrior, anti-hero. In evoking John McEnroe, Everlast has captured the three primary elements of contemporary masculinity. “Jump Around,” then, becomes the response, twenty years later, to Helen Reddy’s 1972 smash hit and the unforgettable lyrics, “I am woman, hear me roar.” <br />
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Would that we could stop there, declare “Jump Around” the <i>yang</i> to “I am Woman’s” <i>yin</i>, and celebrate our enlightened post-feminism. But the potpourri of art, war, and anti-heroism that makes up contemporary masculinity has a certain stench to it. And the odor wafts right out of “Jump Around,” in particular those opening lines of the second verse; “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is but the first half of a couplet. Completing the rhyme is this: “If your girl steps up, I’m smacking the ho”<br />
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That “Jump Around” pairs the definitive image of really existing masculinity with violence against women is, I would suggest, no coincidence; there are any number of words that end with a long-o sound. The couplet could just as easily have been, e.g., “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, and my girl drops elbows like as if she fights for G.L.O.W.,” (G.L.O.W., of course, standing for the quite real Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), or “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, if you step to me in battle you’ll get doused by my flow.” That’s battle as in <i>freestyle rap battle</i> folks, which, based on the quality of my imaginary substitute “Jump Around” lyrics, is a battle I am clearly not yet ready to wage. But you get my drift, which is that when Everlast penned the lyrics that would come to define modern man, he had no choice but to complete the definition with the second half of the couplet. I.e., language was speaking through Everlast, as it so often does with all of us, when the picture of today’s man was paired with the image of male violence against women. Language knows what so many of us pretend ignorance to. Language, the Symbolic Order that Jacques Lacan (rightly) suggests is the cost of doing any human business, knows that “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is the dictionary definition of the word man, and “if your girl steps up I’m smacking the ho” is the picture in the dictionary next to that definition. <br />
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How exactly have we arrived here, here being the time and place where manhood is not just inextricably linked to violence against women, but in fact emerges out of violence against women? Because if art, war, and anti-heroism dominate the foreground of masculinity, that foreground is thrown into sharp relief by the backdrop to it all, a background scene of symbolic and actual violence against women perfectly captured by Everlast’s “smacking the ho.” (See “smacking” for the actual physical violence, and see “ho” for the perhaps more dangerous and inevitably more potent symbolic violence.) Author Judy Y. Chen’s new book, <i>When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity</i>, offers some new insight into just how we’ve taken this extraordinarily wrong turn. (Full disclosure: when I went to pick up <i>When Boys Become Boys</i> from the local <i>bibliotheque</i>, it was already checked out. So we are relying here on the informative review posted at http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7231. ) Chen’s research-based thesis is that boys become boys “in opposition to femininity,” i.e. a boy is that which is not a girl, but, more specifically, not a girl by virtue of aggression, and, ultimately, aggression towards the feminine. <br />
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Just so, Chen (as quoted in the mentalhelp.net review) writes that "…boys' socialization towards cultural constructions of masculinity that are defined in opposition to femininity seems mainly to force a split between what boys know (e.g., about themselves, their relationships, and their world) and what boys show. In the process of becoming ‘boys,’ these boys essentially were learning to disassociate their outward behavior from their innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.” Moreover, Chen’s research supports the disturbing reality that the split between what boys (and men) show and what they know plays out as violence against girls (and women), as per the mentalhelp.net review:<br />
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“Another significant find in her study was the fact that one of the high status boys in the class came up with an all boy group named ‘The Mean Team.’ The Mean Team targeted girls in the sense that they teased them or were mean to them. Being a successful Mean Team participant ensured a higher status and participation in a group and became another way for the boys to establish hierarchy and segregate themselves based on gender.”<br />
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Being one of the boys, which is precisely how one becomes a man in this culture that has no truck with rites of passage, requires joining The Mean Team. That is to say that the harsh reality is that men are The Mean Team. And the even harsher reality is that this includes just about every last one of us, which sounds confusing given the relative abundance of nice guys, until one realizes that nice guys are the good cops to the overtly mean guys’ bad cops. While bad cops busy themselves “smacking the ho,” and while good cops go about the business of making nice to only those women the world deems “good girls,” rest assured that they are both policing female bodies and the symbols that represent those bodies. (As an example of this policing, see every 13 year-old good girl who wears skirts and shorts that would make even Daisy Duke blush in the desperate hopes of earning the attention of the nice guys in 7th grade.) If the only way forward is to first admit that you have a problem, then the unvarnished problem is this: like the doctrine of the privation of good, which holds that evil is the absence or lack of good, masculinity <i>as we know it</i>, and as understood in the work of Chen, is the absence of femininity. To connect the dots, masculinity as we know it, is, to the degree that it is constituted in the absence of the feminine and then organized in aggression towards that very constitutional lack, evil. <br />
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The monumental task before us is to reinvent masculinity so that, returning to an image from the third paragraph of this essay, masculinity at long last takes its rightful place as the <i>yang</i> to the feminine’s <i>yin</i>. Building on Chen’s work, masculinity must be reinvented such that it is no longer born out of opposition to the feminine, but instead, building on the concepts inherent to the <i>yin</i> and the <i>yang</i>, blooms in complement to the feminine (with, to be clear, both masculine and feminine paths open wide to people with either sets of genitalia, although I would maintain that it is certainly reasonable to expect certain sets of genitalia to generally gravitate towards one pole of the masculine/feminine continuum- at least for now). Borrowing from the idea that real human history will only begin once a genuine socialism has taken root, I would argue that authentic masculinity will only begin once genuine nonviolence has won the day. But in a time when “world peace” has been reduced to clichéd punch line, global nonviolence isn’t even a glimmer in our collective third eye. So, we need to take the very first baby steps towards reinventing the masculine and undoing the current chokehold of evil. In planning these very first steps we would be wise to note that 98% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are women, as are 81% of elementary and middle school teachers. Is it any wonder that boys are defining themselves in opposition to women, when there are quite literally little to no men around to model themselves after? If you are a man with even the vaguest sense of commitment to nonviolence, and if you want to (again quite literally) save the world, you should take a job in any primary school that will have you. It is a place to begin now, in a hurry, before we find that the show is abruptly over. <br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-11183106725954569552014-10-26T13:01:00.000-04:002014-10-26T13:01:17.874-04:00The Wisdom of LeisureIn his provocative 1927 essay, <i>The Future of an Illusion</i>, Sigmund Freud outlines his take on the root source of humanity’s seemingly unflagging suffering, finding it in “the sacrifices which civilization expects… in order to make a communal life possible.” These sacrifices consist, for Freud, in a coerced “suppression of the instincts,” foremost among which instincts are sex and aggression, with a nod to death. But a crucial passage, and as I will argue a crucial error, in the opening pages of <i>The Future of an Illusion</i> points us in an entirely different direction from Freud’s theory of civilization as the ground of an inevitable discontent. And, while not a guarantor of unguarded optimism (our earth is far too close to the brink for anything but the most closely guarded forms of optimism), this opposite direction is, or has the potential to be, hopeful. <br />
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The passage reads thusly:<br />
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“For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.”<br />
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His near bottomless contributions to our understanding of the human psyche notwithstanding, Freud here has it exactly backwards. Because masses are (quite often individually and without question collectively) so intelligent I would call them wise, and, furthermore, their genius consists precisely in what Freud calls laziness, but what I would describe as the wisdom of leisure. <br />
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In short, I am suggesting that the root source of suffering isn’t Freud’s suppression of the instincts (or, for that matter, Buddhism’s desire, or Christianity’s original sin, etc., etc.), but simply the fact that civilization (as we know it) is so much damn work. (There is some irony in the fact that Freud, a self-described “godless Jew,” sounds, in the passage quoted above, like a mouthpiece for the God-subscribing, goyish “Protestant work ethic.”) <br />
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While exercising caution that we don’t romanticize hunter-gatherer civilizations as some kind of Garden of Eden, it is nevertheless instructive to consider the relative workloads of our ancient forebears. To do so, we turn to Charles Eisenstein’s <i>The Ascent of Humanity</i>: “Ethnographic studies of isolated Stone Age hunter-gatherers and premodern agriculturalists suggest that ‘primitive’ peoples, far from being driven by anxiety, lived lives of relative leisure and affluence.” Eisenstein then describes anthropologist Richard Lee’s study of the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, which found that, for the !Kung, “an average workweek consisted of approximately twenty hours spent in subsistence activities,” and that “Moreover, much of the ‘work’ spent on these twenty hours of subsistence activity was by no means strenuous or burdensome.” Compare this to the typical forty hour work week, which forty hours is a paltry sum when one considers the hours clocked by anyone with any real aspirations to climb the career ladder. (America is run by workaholics; we know this because they are emailing the rest of us between midnight and 3:00 AM.) Ask yourself also if some or much of the work you perform in your forty-plus hours isn’t “strenuous or burdensome.” <br />
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In sum, “premodern” civilizations worked a lot less than us and were also a lot less anxious. Work less, feel better. A simple formula that we, in all our technological glory, just can’t seem to grasp. But, of course, civilization isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Leaving us stuck with Freud’s “love and work,” when what we really need is “love and play.” But the closest we seem to be able to get to the latter, as reported by <i>The Washington Post</i>, are employers (usually outdoorsy activity gear companies) who encourage us to take a half hour break for a hike, or a five day paid vacation to go camping somewhere really pretty, with a nod to the bottom line. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-company-that-profits-as-it-pampers-workers/2014/10/22/d3321b34-4818-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.html?hpid=z5) Happy workers make productive workers. Just so, in our civilization, play is always in the service of work (and profits). We will know the revolution has finally come when we can each devote our lives to working really hard on something out of sheer pleasure, i.e. in a spirit of play. As Terry Eagleton says, socialism is about “leisure, not labor.”<br />
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Of course, Eagleton is quick to remind us of Oscar Wilde’s wry observation that “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” Wilde’s insight provides much needed ironic distance from the cruel truth that the source of the never-ending tide of strenuous and burdensome work can only be undone by yet more such work, making the dismantling of labor in favor of leisure something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t proposition. All of which makes going through the automatic motions of showing up for work every day in order to put food on the table a symptom of the paralysis that comes from knowing that the only possible cure for what ails us is more of what ails us. In assessing the depth of this paralysis I would submit that the double bind diagnosed by Wilde has as much if not more to do with the failure of really existing 20th century socialism to displace capitalism than the atrocities propagated by Stalin and his ilk. Whereas the latter marked socialism as a brutal failure in Eastern Europe and Asia, the former made it a non-starter in the west, meaning it was over before it ever even started. <br />
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In place of socialism’s cure, perhaps the best we can hope for at this moment in time is a therapy, with at least one eye always watching for the event that will break open the possibility of playful leisure, which is the possibility of the reemergence of the human. We need new words for socialism anyway, given the tragic emptying of the term via unstaunched 20th century bloodletting, and playful leisure just might do. We need words that can never again lead to the gulag and the show trial, but that are still apposite to the soul crushing age in bloom on both sides of where the old Berlin Wall once stood. If the revolution is to succeed, it has to be funny (i.e. playful).<br />
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In the meantime, our therapy takes the axiom for our age, “Work less, feel better,” and translates it into a question that can be applied at every last decision point: How much is enough? <br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-83496966878236527142014-10-14T18:14:00.000-04:002014-10-14T18:14:17.394-04:00Making the Unpredictable InevitableAs I make my daily internet check of the news headlines, of which the outbreak of Ebola and the brutal beheadings by ISIS followed by the subsequent renewal of perpetual American bombing are but the latest typical installments, I am now realizing that I can’t even imagine a potential major news event that would qualify unequivocally as good news. The only recent exception, and an exception exactly because its glad tidings were so unexpected, was the announcement by LeBron James that he would be returning to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers after publicly jilting them four years prior in one of the biggest PR blunders of all time, pursuant to infamously “taking (his) talents to South Beach.” Perhaps there were just enough overtones of the Parable of the Prodigal Son to evoke that quintessential book of good news, the gospels. I would also venture that LeBron’s return to Cleveland qualifies as one of Alain Badiou’s events, which are described by Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins in <i>Religion Politics, and the Earth</i> thusly: “when a singular event occurs, it is an event, because there is something completely unpredictable or unforeseen, and it enables people to invent new ways of thinking and living in response.” Just so, LeBron’s return to Northeast Ohio from South Beach contains the radically new (for us) perspective that the best and most important place in the world is wherever one’s soul happens to be rooted. Before LeBron, moving from Northeast Ohio to South Beach and then, voluntarily, back again to Northeast Ohio was as unthinkable as reversing the flow of time. And while LeBron hasn’t reversed time, the event of LeBron’s return to Cleveland has shifted the flow of this particular river of spacetime that we call home in a slightly, but also noticeably better direction.<br />
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But outside of LeBron, the daily rundown of news headlines has begun to feel like a countdown to The End, each news item the tick of one more second off the fast expiring clock. When the news media, and the world, is experienced precisely this way, one particular piece of bad news mutates into the exception that proves the rule found in the inverse of “no news is good news,” i.e. all news is bad news. That exception, the bad news which gets translated into good news by the filtering effect of all the other bad news, is, of course, climate change. I know this because when I scan the daily headlines I always click on the articles about climate change in the hopes of hearing the good news that there is more bad news about climate change. And I know this because the people writing these climate change update pieces can barely contain their glee, too. Case in point, a recent <i>Salon</i> article reporting that the oceans are heating up more quickly than previously realized. (http://www.salon.com/2014/10/06/the_oceans_are_heating_up_a_lot_more_quickly_than_we_thought/) The article was subtitled “New data is bad news for anyone who hoped global warming was on hiatus,” but is understood by the <i>Salon</i> readership to actually mean “New data is good news for anyone who feared that global warming was on hiatus.” After explaining how the slowing of global warming is more than offset by a rise in the oceans’ temperatures “about 24 to 58 percent more quickly than models suggested,” the article quotes oceanographers Gregory Johnson and John M. Lyman’s assertion that “One could say that global warming is ocean warming.” (Oceanographers renaming global warming as ocean warming does sound a little bit like a football team’s offensive coordinator exclaiming that “the best defense is a good offense.”) From there, it is short work for article author Lindsay Abrams, whose byline identifies her as “reporting on all things sustainable,” to close by declaring that “In other words it (climate change) isn’t over. It’s just getting started.” Which, like her subtitle, comes off like appropriate handwringing about climate change, if, that is, one ignores the subjective heartbeat thrumming throughout the entire article. Subjectively speaking, Abrams closing thought is, quite simply, ecstatic.<br />
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This ecstasy is grounded in the political left’s understanding of climate change as the guarantor of the left’s belief that the future belongs to us. It is a vision grounded in the mythological narrative that the left has conflated with the brute facts of climate change. This mythology pictures climate change as the flames of late capitalism burning itself down, and then, rising from the ashes like a phoenix, <i>voila</i>, a new democratic socialism. Or anarcho-syndicalism, which is fine because it isn’t capitalism. As someone who traffics in this teleological fantasy as often as I scan the news headlines, “It’s just getting started” sounds like a battle cry of freedom. The fantasy hinges on the seemingly commonsensical logic that since it is abundantly obvious that globalized capitalism caused climate change, and since climate change is horrifically bad, then capitalism will at last be seen for the malignant cancer that it is and, at long last, be consigned to the dustbin of history.<br />
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The problem with this is that it ignores the first axiom of commonsense, which is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Which makes it highly probable that capitalism will be able to succeed in turning climate change into yet another business opportunity, e.g. by commodifying “sustainability” via a “green economy.” This process is already in full swing at your local Whole Foods and Toyota Prius dealership. Which is not to say that eating organic or conserving energy are bad in and of themselves, but that, like recycling, they not only won’t save us, but will also pave the road to hell with good intentions. (That intention, of course, is a “free market economy” that works for all of us, which is akin to running on a platform of “Elitism for everyone!”, making us the gullible fools who really believe the carnival barker when he says of capitalism, “Step right up, everyone’s a winner!”) This is not to say that climate change won’t ultimately render the earth uninhabitable, but to say that climate change may not present a “limit to growth” until that rendering is a <i>fait accompli</i>. Two metaphors may help. The first is of a giant balloon that keeps expanding right up until the moment it has sucked in the very last drop of air. Or, if you prefer, the Blob, which continues expanding until it has consumed every last molecule. <br />
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In short, we should be seeking our own liberation, and hope that in the process we save the earth, as opposed to counting on the death of the earth to save and liberate us. The problem is that just as I can’t imagine any good news other than more climate change, we can’t think of anything we can do to liberate ourselves. Our challenge, then, in imagining our liberation is in thinking the inconceivable. We should ask ourselves, “What is an impossible future?”, and start there. And if we lose our nerve, recall that LeBron is <i>already</i> back in Cleveland. So, because it would only be appropriate to close by putting a paradoxical spin on Badiou’s events with a line inspired by a sports movie, <i>Field of Dreams</i>’ “If you build it, they will come,” I would say this:<br />
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If we can think it, the completely unpredictable and unforeseen event is inevitable. Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-83698665487483803752014-10-05T14:31:00.001-04:002014-10-05T14:31:55.975-04:00Definitely MaybeYou know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. Case in point: the <i>Baltimore Sun</i> recently reported on a City Council bill to outfit all 3,000 BCPD officers with body cameras. (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-09-22/news/bs-md-ci-police-cameras-20140922_1_body-cameras-police-brutality-baltimore-police-officer) The bill comes on the heels of several instances of alleged police brutality, including the death of “44-year-old Tyrone West, who died while he was in police custody,” (ibid) and an incident in September in response to which “Baltimore police officials suspended an officer shown on camera beating a man at a North Avenue bus stop.” (ibid) <br />
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To get a sense of how the proposed body cameras fit into the ideology of total surveillance, one must first situate the police within the structure of the surveillance state. Police officers contribute very little to the actual surveillance of the American citizenry; that function is filled quite capably by a slew of other actors, most notably the NSA by way of its monitoring of our email and cell phone accounts, but also by corporate America through the monitoring of its employees’ and consumers’ behavior. Regarding the former, if your job involves a computer your boss essentially knows your every move. And as to the latter, cameras are ubiquitous in brick and mortar stores, and every click on the internet is reduced to raw data. So, whether one is on-line, at work, or in the (“virtual” or “real”) marketplace, or even just in range of a cell phone camera, one is essentially in Bentham and Foucault’s panopticon, where a “single watchman (can) observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon) But if the police aren’t the panopticon’s “single watchman,” what, then, is their role? Which is where police violence, exponentially increased by police militarization, comes into play. Because if surveillance is the brains of the operation, police are the muscle. <br />
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Foucault was perhaps most famous for <i>Discipline and Punish</i>, a work exploring our panopticon culture. Playing off the title of that work, I would say that if we are <i>disciplined</i> by surveillance, then we are (corporally) <i>punished</i> by the police. Violence always carries a message. Where domestic violence says “This is our little secret,” and where terrorism of all stripes (i.e. including State terror) says “This could be you,” police violence now says, to borrow a famous phrase from George Orwell, “Big Brother is watching.” Police violence must needs only explode intermittently to serve its purpose; like the watchman’s gaze in the panopticon, just the fact that it might happen upon you is enough. Because, as Orwell explains in his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… you had to live… in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” The NSA might be watching, and the police might decide to treat me like Abner Louima. The whole point of which “mights” is that it is, as Orwell astutely points out, safer to live in the assumption that maybe is, paradoxically, definitive. <br />
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You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. This is just a fancy way of saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. By pinning our hopes for relief from police brutality on police body cameras, we are endorsing the very surveillance that police brutality announces. In doing so we are continuing to follow Orwell’s script, retreating from the rushing darkness by escaping into an enveloping darkness. <br />
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The old question, “Where are the police when you really need them?”, has taken on new meaning in our surveillance state <i>cum</i> militarized police. Once a rhetorical question, it now has an answer. They are on camera. And if you’re wondering whether this means you should be preparing for your big close up, check out the title of Oasis’ (bitchin’) first album, <i>Definitely Maybe</i>.<br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-83436170666640635202014-09-28T14:31:00.000-04:002014-09-28T14:31:15.350-04:00Asking the ImpossibleI should be clear from the start that football has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. More to the point, it has been a pleasure, a source of joy, even. As a kid, I played back yard football whenever I could, which was more often than you might think given that the closest pick-up game was over a mile way, most of which was down a long dirt driveway. When I couldn’t get a game I spent hours punting and kicking back and forth across the front yard, which wasn’t much smaller than a proper gridiron (we lived in the country). During this same period a picture of the Heisman Trophy cut from a magazine hung from my bedroom door for years. In high school I finally got to play organized football, and I can still remember the twinge of melancholy whenever our coach got us focused in practice by reminding us that these eight or nine games a year were the last football games in which almost every last one of us would ever get to play. (We weren’t bad, top ten in Delaware my last year, but Delaware isn’t Texas so only a couple of us would go on to play Division III college football, and I wasn’t one of them.) I have watched football on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall since at least 1980, the year of the first Super Bowl to enter my consciousness, XV between the Raiders and Eagles, when we still lived in Pennsylvania. (My childhood dog, Riggins, was named after the hero of Super Bowl XVII.) And now that we haven’t had a TV in nine years, I’ve still managed to watch football on Sundays at my mother-in-law’s house. And any time my favorite teams win, I get a blast of dopamine in my head. I listen to sports radio, which is at least 75% football-focused in-season or out, every day that I drive my car. I check the sports page on the internet every day, and probably 75% of the content is similarly devoted to football. Most years I have a (losing) fantasy football team. (Like sands through the hourglass, so far this year my squad, Aqua Velva, has one win to two losses.) <br />
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I once heard it said that one shouldn’t make a religion out of literature, because it is at the same time both more than and less than a religion. Without knowing exactly what that means, I would both agree and say that this is also exactly how I feel about football.<br />
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All of which is to say that for me, like tens of millions of other Americans, football matters. It has emotional heft and occupies significant chunks of the synapses in my brain. Which has made the revelation in the last several years of the brutal head trauma suffered by so many professional football players, a pattern of trauma which simply isn’t captured by the word concussion, more than a little troubling, twisting football from a pleasure into a guilty pleasure, and not the kind we mean when we say we get a guilty pleasure out of watching <i>Jersey Shore</i>; i.e. we don’t think “Isn’t it funny that I’m watching this,” but instead think “Maybe I shouldn’t really be watching this anymore.” And that was before this month’s epochal scandal, the video footage of Ray Rice’s explosive domestic violence, through which we have arrived at a defining moment. But the question remains: definitive of exactly what? <br />
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The phrase looping around and around in my head as I try to come to grips with the punch Ray Rice threw at his beloved is this: the compartmentalization of violence. We expect professional football players to engage in ultraviolence on the field of play, and comport themselves as <i>gentle</i>men everywhere else, which means that we expect the impossible. In a schizophrenic arrangement (as the term is used colloquially), one compartment holds David Banner, the other the Hulk. Unfortunately, aggression leaks and eventually someone pisses off David Banner. There is an old saying that if you keep going to see a surgeon, eventually you’re going to get cut (i.e., it’s what they do). By the very same logic, if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit. Inside <i>and </i>outside the lines. (The latter of which, ironically, is the name of the ESPN news outlet which has alleged that the NFL’s league office and the management of the Baltimore Ravens have engaged in an ongoing cover-up of what they knew about Ray Rice and when they knew it, which, if true, is a topic for another day. I would only point out here that the fact that the cover up is always worse than the crime is the universe’s way of insisting that we learn from our mistakes instead of denying and/or burying them. Okay, I will also point out that I don’t know which is worse, if I am Roger Goodell’s employer: that Goodell knew the videotape of Ray Rice punching his fiancé was in the league office -<i>note that it has been factually established that the tape was in the office</i>- and he has been lying about it, or that the tape was in the league office without Goodell having a clue, i.e. he’s a liar or a fool, as in a commissioner from the planet Krypton who supervised underlings without expressly warning them about the possible effects of Kryptonite on their beloved boss is foolish, indeed. But I digress. Okay, okay, one more digression- Another tragic aspect of all of this is that prior to the incident Ray Rice would have been the very last Baltimore Raven anyone would have imagined punching his significant other’s lights out. He seemed to be the embodiment of the ideal of compartmentalization, lethal on the field and a model citizen in the community, an officer <i>and</i> a gentleman, if you will.)<br />
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If the logic of “if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit, inside <i>and</i> outside the lines” is valid, it would stand to reason that the arrest rates for NFL players involved in violent assault would be off the charts. When, in fact, the arrest rate for NFL players in cases of non-domestic assault is only 16.7% of the national average. (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/) So, at first blush, pro football players seem to be the kind of guys you actually <i>would</i> want your daughter to bring home. But that picture drastically and tragically changes when you account for domestic violence:<br />
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“Domestic violence accounts for 48% of arrests for violent crimes among NFL players, compared to our estimated 21% nationally. Moreover, relative to the income level (top 1 percent) and poverty rate (0 percent) of NFL players, the domestic violence rate is downright extraordinary.” (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/)<br />
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Given that the rate at which American domestic violence cases are reported is found in research studies to be as low as less than 1% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_United_States), and given that the economic incentive alluded to above (“top 1 percent”) provides the victims of domestic NFL violence literally millions of reasons not to report, the depth and breadth of the NFL’s domestic violence problem could very well be unthinkably vast. The tendency of domestic violence victims not to report is also a stark reminder that the NFL players are, in one very grim sense of the term, <i>rational actors</i> in the perpetration of domestic violence; “we only hurt the ones we love” has been replaced by “we only hit the ones who won’t press charges.” <br />
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Although perhaps “rational actor” is a bit of a misnomer, implying as it does the process of conscious reasoning, when what’s really in play here is the unconscious process of displacement, defined by Norman A. Polansky in Integrated Ego Psychology as “turning one’s impulse aside from its original unacceptable target to one that involves less anxiety.” And, it goes without saying, there is certainly less anxiety involved in targeting those who won’t call the police, i.e. players’ wives/girlfriends, then everyone else they have the impulse to punch in the mouth. The classic example of displacement is the worker who takes crap from his boss all day, only to come home and take out (displace) his anger on the family dog with a swift kick. It is, then, the cruelest of ironies that the women getting punched and kicked by professional football players are also tagged by machismo locker room culture with the moniker “bitches.” <br />
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I am left wondering how to dole out the blame between the pro football players throwing the left hooks and we adoring masses. It is we, after all, who expect (and reward) the compartmentalization of violence, which is akin to expecting water to flow uphill. If we can say anything definitive about violence it is that aggression spreads. In this, it is no different than love. Violence, it turns out, cannot be compartmentalized; the closest it can come to disappearing is to be aimed at the vulnerable in the hopes that their invisibility will rub off on the violence. Which is why it is no surprise that within days of the release of the Ray Rice videotape, pictures surfaced documenting star Minnesota Viking Adrian Peterson’s alleged felony abuse of his son. In the National Football League, the compartmentalization of violence is code for violent displacement onto women and children. If Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson have accomplished anything, it is the removal of every last shred of our collective plausible deniability about that. Meaning Hannah Storm’s eloquent question to the NFL can be asked of all of us who love the game and feed the machine: What exactly do <i>we</i> stand for?<br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-52970495756648817152014-09-21T13:57:00.000-04:002014-09-21T13:57:31.992-04:00When Safe is Just a FeelingTwo key markers have appeared in what is almost certainly a response to the waves of school shootings that crested first at Columbine High School and then again in New Town, Connecticut, but which have lapped steadily at the national consciousness since that fateful April morning in Littleton, Colorado: 1) We have begun the process of arming our teachers (or, as we shall see in at least one case, they are arming themselves, or at least their vice principal is), and 2) We are beginning to militarize our school police, who, it should be noted, already come equipped with the standard issue Glock sidearm. <br />
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As to #1, <i>The Washington Post</i> reports that “The Argyle Independent School District in north Texas has started the 2014-15 school year, as KDAF-TV noted, ‘with guns blazing’ — or, rather, with newly armed teachers who have been given the right to use them ‘to protect our students.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) The <i>Post</i> adds that “In fact, nearly 20 states have laws allowing adults to carry licensed guns into schools.” And where schools aren’t proactively arming teachers, individual school personnel may be taking matters into their own hands, as, per <i>Salon</i>, in the case of one California public school administrator:<br />
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“Kent Williams is the vice principal of Tevis Junior High School in Bakersfield, California, and ever since he got his concealed-carry permit in 2010, he’s been bringing a handgun with him to work. Until recently, this wasn’t an issue (chiefly because other school administrators didn’t know he was doing it).” (http://www.salon.com/2014/09/10/middle_school_administrator_fights_for_right_to_bring_handgun_to_work/)<br />
The <i>Salon</i> article goes on to explain that while Williams is currently on paid leave while the Panama-Buena Vista Union School District investigates matters (even as Williams’ lawyer threatens a lawsuit if Williams isn’t returned to the job), Williams faces no legal recriminations, with authorities “having concluded that his permit did not have any restrictions.” (ibid) <br />
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And regarding #2 above, the militarization of the school police, <i>The Washington Post</i> has also reported that “some school police in Compton will be permitted to carry semiautomatic AR-15 rifles — the same kind of rifle used in a recent Oregon school shooting – in schools… ‘in response to situations that clearly evidence a need or potential need for superior firepower to be used against armed suspects.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/21/in-compton-school-police-can-use-semiautomatic-weapons/) One can only imagine the potential crossfire, and wonder as to exactly how much better off we will be when our schools are battlefields instead of killing fields, i.e. will the post-battle carnage be any less than post-massacre?<br />
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Still, we’re used to cops with guns, and, increasingly, cops with military grade weaponry; the American police state is something of a <i>fait accompli</i>, sold to us as the cost of doing business in the post-9/11 world, and part and parcel of the national security state. No one says “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” anymore, but we all know how to say “Yes, officer.” But putting guns in the hands of your friendly neighborhood seventh grade social studies teacher, whose private life could heretofore be politely ignored as long as the teacher’s use of social media stayed within certain unspoken boundaries but whose every sick day must now be parsed for hints of distress and/or despair, gives one pause. Does Mr. Johnson have a nasty head cold, or does his recent break up with his fiancée have him reaching nihilistic conclusions about the point of it all such that I think I will just keep the twins home from middle school for the rest of the week? How many of America’s 3.1 million public school teachers could hold it together long enough to e.g. meet the Argyle Independent School District’s requirements to “obtain a license to carry it (the gun), pass a psychological evaluation and get training in how to use the weapon,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) but who have absolutely no business packing heat on lunch duty. (Anyone who can effectively run lunch duty will have long since mastered the Jedi Mind Trick, and, it goes without saying, guns are much too “clumsy and random” for Jedis.) <br />
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When one reads, again in <i>The Washington Post</i>, that an Idaho State University “instructor carrying a concealed gun accidentally shot himself in the foot in the chemistry lab,” and that “students were in attendance at the time but luckily none of them were hit,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) one begins to get a sense of how misguided the effort to protect children by arming their teachers really is. One is immediately reminded of the infamous data, accessible via a quick Google search, that a gun in the house makes homicides 2.7 times more likely. (The pro-gun websites pooh-poohing this data are just as easy to find on Google, but the critiques are robustly parried here: www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm) And since there’s no reason to think that the schoolhouse is immune to all of the contingencies of the household, as exemplified by the accidental shooting in the Idaho chem lab, making it obvious to any rational observer that we don’t actually know how to make our children safe from school shootings and instead choose to place them at increased risk, then what are we really on about when we arm our teachers? <br />
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The answer, praise Jesus (or the Sacred of your chosen tradition ☺), is not that we <i>want</i> to place our children at increased risk, but that this increased risk is a (still deeply troubling) side effect of the adults’ own efforts to feel safe. We are pointed to this conclusion by two further Google-accessed data points. The first of the two involves a classic case of belief’s conquest of the facts on the ground; <i>pace</i> “2.7 times more likely,” “for the first time a majority of Americans say having a gun in the household makes it a safer place to be, according to a new <i>Washington Post-ABC News</i> poll. By a wide 51 to 29 percent margin, more people say a gun in the house makes it safer rather than more dangerous.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/) In other words, guns make those who possess them feel safer, even as gun ownership increases the risk of gun violence (e.g., “for every time a gun in or around the home was used in self-defense, or in a legally justified shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven attempted or completed homicides. That’s one self-defense shooting for twenty-two accidental, suicidal, or criminal shootings, hardly support for the notion that having a gun handy makes people safer.” (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/purple-wisconsin/184209741.html)) <br />
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Our second follow-up data point highlights an inverse relationship between gun owners’ feelings and those of everyone around him: “By a margin of five to one, Americans feel less safe rather than more safe as more people in their community begin to carry guns.” (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/firearms-archives/) Apparently, “2.7 times more likely” means different things to different people. The confusion even extends into the home of the gun owner: <br />
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“Drill down on the 75% of the people in gun-owning households who think it makes their house a safer place to be, which leaves 25% who do not. Of those people who live in gun-owning households, 31% do not own a gun themselves. If you make the fair assumption that almost all of the people who actually own the guns think they make their home safer, that leaves almost all of the people who don’t personally own a gun, but live in a household with one, <i>don’t</i> think it makes them safer.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/)<br />
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In sum, school shootings are horrifying, and teachers faced with the possibility that such an event could happen in their school and in their classroom understandably reach for the feeling of safety that comes with a gun, most likely telling themselves that the aura of safety fills the classroom, when in fact they have only ramped up the fear for the children they believe they are protecting. This process, coping with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, is, tragically, the common coin of our stunted social realm. It is elemental, to speak in the Christian idiom, to our fallenness. It doesn’t have to involve guns or even physical violence; as part of our everyday human scenery it is called blaming. I do it all the time, especially around the house, no matter that when I am whining yet again about who moved my stuff where I can’t find it almost invariably I discover that I moved my stuff. And even if it wasn’t me, big deal, let’s try for some perspective here.<br />
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Since perspective is in such short supply when one is busy blocking out pain by offloading it onto others (see the whining), I have in the last few weeks started a daily practice for some help in this area. Each morning I visit www.random.org to receive a randomized number between 1 and 59, which is how many <i>Lojong</i> slogans there are. These slogans are, according to the dust jacket for <i>Always Maintain a Joyful Mind</i>, the collection which houses all 59 slogans with commentaries by Pema Chodron, “a collection of 59 pith teachings to help… develop wisdom and compassion amid the challenges of daily living.” Random.org promises me that the numbers it provides are truly random, not, for example, like the random function on my old CD player which always cued up the same sequence of songs on Tom Petty’s masterpiece, <i>Into the Great Wide Open</i>. Nevertheless, in the first weeks of my new practice several of the numbers have been repeating, i.e. I am hardheaded and need to hear things more than once before getting the point. (I think the Buddhists call this <i>ego</i>.) Yesterday, I got #34 for at least the third time. It is a pithy prescription for those who would otherwise cope with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, i.e. for teachers who would carry guns and for forty-year olds who can’t shut up about who had the audacity to move their cell phone charger cord. <br />
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So, for all of us, #34, with Pema Chodron’s commentary in parentheses:<br />
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“Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow. (Don’t transfer your load to someone else. Take responsibility for what is yours.)”<br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-68769739048189854952014-09-07T14:58:00.001-04:002014-09-07T14:58:06.900-04:00What's in a Name?In the current edition of <i>ESPN Magazine</i>, Howard Bryant’s column delves into exactly why, in the wake of the events surrounding Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, so few professional athletes, including the many African Americans in their ranks, have spoken out. Bryant’s piece is highly recommended, touching lucidly on “fault lines of race and class,” and “the growing culture of militarism that is now everywhere in America.” But I’d like to use one peculiar, provocative element in Bryant’s column as a jumping off point for an entirely different conversation, if one that also sits unsteadily on “fault lines of race and class.” That subtle provocation occurs smack in the middle of Bryant’s report on the near-silence from pro jocks re: Ferguson: <br />
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“In the wake of curfews, arrests and tear gas, the St. Louis Rams offered tickets to the youth of Ferguson; some of the Washington football players held their hands up as they emerged from the tunnel before a preseason game, adopting the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ symbol of protest in solidarity with a community roiling.”<br />
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How ironic that virtually the only professional athletes in America willing to take the risk of making public their support for the Black folks, and especially the young Black males, of Ferguson, Missouri are the very athletes who play for a team whose mascot Bryant cannot in good conscious even mention: the Washington <i>Redskins</i>. <br />
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The controversy surrounding the Washington football club’s mascot has reached a crescendo during a summer which saw the team lose its trademark protection from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (a ruling the team is, predictably, appealing), fifty United States senators sign a letter urging the NFL to take action and force a name change, and the announcement this week by the <i>New York Daily News</i> that it will no longer include the word Redskins in its newspaper (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sack-article-1.1926865), an announcement that follows on the heels of the hometown <i>Washington Post</i>’s editorial page announcing that it will no longer print the word Redskins either (though the <i>Post</i>’s sports page will continue to refer to the team as the Redskins). (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/washington-post-editorials-will-no-longer-use-redskins-for-the-local-nfl-team/2014/08/22/1413db62-2940-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html )<br />
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But before delving into the reasons that 71% of Americans still believe the team should not change its name (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/new-poll-says-large-majority-of-americans-believe-redskins-should-not-change-name/2014/09/02/496e3dd0-32e0-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html), and that team owner Daniel Snyder has, per NBC’s Al Michaels, stated that the team will change its name “over my (Snyder’s) dead body,” some personal history is in order. I have been a Washington Redskins fan since moving within their TV broadcast territory as a 6-year old just at the dawn of the team’s golden age, a ten year burst in which the franchise would bring home three Super Bowl championships under the guidance of likable obnoxious rich guy (team owner) Jack Kent Cooke, California surfer dude (general manager) Bobby Beathard, and nascent NASCAR kingpin (head coach) Joe Gibbs. Everything about the team was <i>fun</i>, especially the winning, but also the nicknames (Hogs, Smurfs, Fun Bunch, etc.) and the cast of characters, e.g. the performance art of Hall of Fame running back John Riggins passing out drunk on the floor of a White House dinner after telling Justice O’Connor “Loosen up, Sandy Baby.”<br />
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But all good things must come to an end, and before long Cooke was dead, Beathard was guiding the San Diego Chargers to their first ever Super Bowl appearance, and Joe Gibbs was winning the Daytona 500. The Daniel Snyder era, with perpetual mediocrity punctuated by brief bursts of total incompetence, had begun. Not even Gibbs, in his brief second run with the team, could put things right; he got the hell out of Dodge after squeaking into the playoffs enabled him to leave with his dignity, and reputation, largely intact. It hasn’t been much fun to be a Redskins fan for the last twenty years, and without the fun to distract you, there’s that name. Just sitting there. On my 1987 Super Bowl t-shirt. On my 1982 Super Bowl Coke bottle. Talking to me. Telling me that the reason I was a Redskins fan for all the good years without once even thinking about the implications of the team’s name was because I could. Which doing things because you can without even thinking about them is the very definition of white privilege. And I continued not even thinking about it even several years into the losing, until a girlfriend (now ex) who had worked actively to change the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek mascot as an undergraduate at Champagne-Urbana, looked at me a certain way whenever I used my MBNA Washington Redskins Visa card. Which is how my ’87 t-shirt is looking at me right about now. My privilege, singing “Hail to the Redskins” without ever once thinking about the words coming out of my mouth, was undone because my girlfriend made me think. Getting white folks to stop and think, and then hopefully feel, is the only way we ever change, and was the chief strategy of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance movement.<br />
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Fast forward to 2014 and, slowly, more folks, white and otherwise, are beginning to stop and think about the name of the football franchise that represents our nation’s capital. While 71% of Americans still think its hunky dory if the Redskins keep their name, that number is significantly lower than 1992’s 89%. And, his “over my dead body” stance notwithstanding, Daniel Snyder may be starting to see the handwriting on the wall, as rumors have begun to circulate that Snyder may be willing to change the name for the right stadium deal (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/shutdown-corner/former-gm--dan-snyder-might-drop-redskins-name-for-new-stadium--super-bowl-144942689.html). But given that the latter is currently mere internet speculation, as well as the fact that Snyder and his minions have been mounting an aggressive defense of their beloved mascot, including a creepy new charity campaign aimed at select American Indian tribes, the task of answering the arguments floated in favor of keeping the name is still at hand. The four most oft repeated arguments turn out to be, respectively, false, (almost) real, stonewalling, and ironic.<br />
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The false argument, and one put forward in bad faith, is that the name Redskins is intended to honor American Indians. This is patently absurd, mirroring other lies such as segregation’s “separate but equal” and Fox News’ “fair and balanced.” In all three of these cases, the lie functions to announce the real intentions (i.e., respectively, making sport of a dominated civilization, terrorizing Blacks, and shilling for the neoliberal militarists) in a socially acceptable manner. The truth is that using and maintaining the name Redskins is just a perpetual game of Cowboys and Indians, a game that has never been about honoring American Indians, but about casting them as brutal savages to be overcome by western civilization. Cowboys and Indians is the children’s version of a ritual, here being played by grown men and women, the sole purpose of which is to absolve (European) Americans of any lingering guilt over genocide.<br />
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The only (quasi) real argument being made in favor of keeping the name goes something like this: “You’re just a bunch of uptight liberals trying to ruin our harmless fun.” Real as in honest, if only honest to a point. Honest that it is a lot of fun playing Cowboys and Indians (Redskins fans claim to hate the Cowboys, when really we’re all Cowboys fans too, enjoying with our Dallas brethren the thrill of a victory that delivered an entire continent; the only difference is that we get to play the Indian while our Dallas brethren get to play the Cowboy), but deeply disingenuous in its denial of the incalculable harm done to an entire people. <br />
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The (not quite) real argument is closely related to the argument that is used more frequently than all of the others combined, i.e. the stonewalling maneuver of stating some version of “Man, I’m not into all that political correctness stuff.” This strategy depends on the logic that 1) all reasonable people recognize political correctness for what it is- a liberal mind control device that deflects our attention from attending to matters that are actually important, 2) and therefore anything judged to be politically correct can be dismissed out of hand, 3) and furthermore the concern over the Redskins name is a classic case of political correctness run amok. Repressed and implicit in this logic is the nefarious belief that the bloody history between European colonists and indigenous American Indians, not to mention the current relations, are of negligible importance. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter because the victors have already accrued their spoils. <br />
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The final, ironic argument is perhaps the darkest: “We must keep the Redskins name because it is a source of unity for the people of the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs.” Putting aside the fact that this so-called unity is entirely non-contingent on the name Redskins, i.e. it has been just as readily provided by the Ravens in Baltimore despite the city’s historic connection to the name Colts, let us note what we are really saying when we claim that the price of the unity between Blacks, Whites, Latinos and Asians is paid with the name Redskins: It (North America) is ours now. <br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-44816144053017810142014-09-01T12:35:00.000-04:002014-09-01T12:35:42.078-04:00Back SoonIf, like me, one’s spiritual foundation was laid down in the Christian tradition, one must reckon with a number of events which are, if one is in a religious mood, plainly miraculous, or, if one is feeling secular and (post?)modern, rather kooky. Among these are, of course, the virgin birth, walking on water, sundry healings, the resurrection, and the second coming. All of these, save the last, are in the past tense, the upshot of which leaves Christianity hanging on a prediction which can be paraphrased in two words: Back soon. Which two words, interestingly enough, are also at the center of a rather amusing passage in <i>The House at Pooh Corner</i> that may help sort out whether Christianity leans over into the abyss or leans back to pull us out of our own.<br />
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But, before we get to Pooh, a brief summary. Jesus’ account of the end times and his prophesy of “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven,” i.e. the prediction of his very own second coming, appears in all three synoptic gospels. The denouement at first seems to find Jesus putting all of his chips in the middle of the table as he tells us exactly when this will all go down: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” But then, one sentence later, it devolves into what can only be described as history’s biggest mixed message: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” A few verses later, the confusion is compounded: “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” “Back soon” is scrambled into a garbled mess before the ink of “Truly I tell you…” is even dry; we are seemingly left to make do with “hurry up and wait.”<br />
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It is the garbled mess which brings us to Pooh. Twice. Because the key words, “Back soon,” don’t just appear in A.A. Milne’s second volume of Pooh stories, published in 1928. They are back again, one might say with a vengeance, in the 2011 animated film, <i>Winnie the Pooh</i>. And strangely enough, the two different readings of “Back soon” in the Winnie the Pooh universe just might inform our reading of Jesus’ own “Back soon,” which reading, on a grand enough collective scale, just might in turn help make the difference in the direction our material universe makes as we (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Seculars, etc.) stand at the proverbial fork in the road. <br />
On our first pass we turn to the passage in <i>The House at Pooh Corner</i>, in which Christopher Robin leaves his garbled version of Back Soon in a note, happened upon by Rabbit: <br />
<br />
“GON OUT<br />
BACKSON<br />
BISY<br />
BACKSON<br />
C. R.”<br />
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Rabbit takes the indecipherable Message to Owl, whose modus operandi is to maintain an air of deep wisdom. Since putting on these kind of airs always depends on making things up (see all of western philosophy; not that this is a knock on western philosophy, it’s actually what makes it so damn fun and helpful, therapeutic even, as long as we remember that it’s all made up), Rabbit does exactly this:<br />
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“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’<br />
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with<br />
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a<br />
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’<br />
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask<br />
you. What are they like?’<br />
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is<br />
just a—‘<br />
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘<br />
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘<br />
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know<br />
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.<br />
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see<br />
Pooh.”<br />
<br />
We should note several crucial elements of this passage before moving on to the return of the Backson in 2011. Perhaps most importantly, there is nothing whatsoever at all about the Backson that is threatening. In fact, Owl from the very first imagines the Backson as a <i>friend</i> for Christopher Robin. Completely befuddled by Christopher Robin’s garbled “Back soon,” Owl has filled in the gap with something good. But something that is no less mysterious for its certain goodness. The “Spotted or Herbaceous Backson” is a friend, but beyond that we can say no more. Even Owl must admit “I don’t know what they’re like.” (Happily, Owl isn’t quite as far gone as your standard outfit narcissistic humanities professor.)<br />
<br />
Fast forward eighty three years, and the scene in the Hundred Acre Wood has taken an alarming turn. With boss man Disney now calling the shots, both the Backson and his back story have mutated beyond recognition. To begin with, Rabbit has been elbowed to the periphery; with apologies to Piglet, it is Pooh who brings home Disney’s bacon, so it is Pooh who has the honors of discovering Christopher Robin’s note. Apparently Pooh is now the early Michael Jordan, and has to take every big shot, making Rabbit into John Paxson. (Tigger would have to be Dennis Rodman, and I think Eeyore would make a really convincing Bill Cartwright.) This much I could stomach; would that our only problem was the celebrity cult of personality. For a moment it even seems like we’re back in safe, familiar territory, as Pooh consults Owl about Christopher Robin’s mysterious note.<br />
<br />
But then we remember that it’s the second decade of the 21st Century and violence is the air we breathe. We should note that it’s not as if A.A. Milne wrote the original version of the Backson story in the Garden of Eden; 16 million had died just a decade before in World War I. But if violence was already the out breath then, it is now also the in breath. Where Tolstoy once wrote of war and peace, we now have war and war, i.e. wars hot and cold and a subsequent peace dividend in the form of the war on terror. And where Owl once pictured Christopher Robin “gone out somewhere with Backson. He and Backson are busy together,” Owl now informs Pooh and friends “of their new enemy. He is a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/The_Backson) That the torture is put in Hundred Acre Wood context, the Backson is “responsible for holes in socks, broken teeth, aging, theft, catching colds, etc.,” makes not a lick of difference. Winnie the Pooh now lives in the same world as us, which is where Abu Ghraib and ISIS are. So, not surprisingly, Pooh and friends make their martial preparations for the Backson, preparing to trap it (evoking extreme rendition and Guantamo), or “to battle the beast if necessary” (evoking Iraq and Afghanistan). If this sounds daft or melodramatic, I would but ask if it is really mere coincidence that a 1928 Pooh story rewritten in 2011 includes torture as a central narrative element? (If Phase 1 of the American shift to the techniques of violence without limits was accomplished in the foundational act of the Cold War, i.e. the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima <i>qua</i> shot across Moscow’s bow (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7706-hiroshima-bomb-may-have-carried-hidden-agenda.html#.VASeFaCdCFI), Phase 2 began with the establishment of western democratic state-sponsored torture as the boundary condition for the Global War on Terror; in considering that the US was the first to think both of these unthinkables we should acknowledge that the first is rarely the last, and secondly hope that this week’s revelation of ISIS’ use of the waterboarding they learned from watching us (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/captives-held-by-islamic-state-were-waterboarded/2014/08/28/2b4e1962-2ec9-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html) is not a foreshadowing of a similar symmetry with Phase 1, i.e. ISIS, with its terrifying the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense stratagem, doesn’t seem likely to follow the logic of nuclear weapons as deterrent that we’ve all been clinging to, despite evidence to the contrary from 8/6 and 8/9/45.)<br />
<br />
I would suggest that the twinned surges of relativism and fundamentalism (twins explored in the previous post, “Doubt without Doubt,” on this very blog) between 1928 and 2011 go a long way to explaining the link between first Rabbit and then Pooh’s interpretations of Christopher Robin’s “Backson” and the contemporaneous respective interpretations of Jesus’ own “Backson.” In other words, A.A. Milne and Disney were each, without knowing it, doing theology- and doing the kind of theology native to their time and place. In 1928, even after The War to End All Wars, it was still possible to believe without knowing; the Backson could be both Christopher Robin’s friend and, per Owl, something we know absolutely nothing about. And that other Backson, Jesus’ second coming, could still be understood exactly as it was described in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which is to say our dear friend is on his way, he’s almost here in fact, although he’s altogether the type of fellow who’s likely to get held up at the train station for God knows how long, so we better use this time to get things in as good an order as we can. <br />
<br />
By 2011, with relativism and fundamentalism in full bloom, one can either believe that it isn’t possible to know anything at all (relativism), or believe that one knows everything (fundamentalism); and since Christianity has by and large become the purview of the latter, Disney’s Backson is “a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” Which, natch, sounds a lot like the kind of (fundamentalist) Jesus whose “Back soon” involves the Tribulation, i.e. a “period of time where everyone will experience worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth before the Second Coming takes place.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) Except, of course, “those who choose to follow God,” i.e. the fundamentalist Christian God, “will be Raptured before the tribulation, and thus escape it.” Lucky them.<br />
<br />
All of which is not to say that there weren’t people before 1928 who believed in the Tribulation, or that there aren’t Christians in 2011 or 2014 who believe that God’s infinite and reckless love and mercy extend to every last one of us. But it is to say that the latter has been divorced from what the word Christian symbolizes in the popular imagination, which I’d like to believe as recently as 1928 was (often) an imagining of a close friend who was nevertheless likely to appear to us as a stranger on whichever road we’re traveling. Instead, the symbol of Jesus on the cross has been reduced to a straw man for the relativists to stick their pitch forks in, and the cross itself has been inverted into the fundamentalists’ sword, whose literal reading of “I came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword,” is roughly as nuanced as understanding the “Open joints on bridge” road signs as an invitation to toke up. <br />
<br />
As C.S. Lewis once said, “if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer… Going back is the quickest way on.” In this case that means going back to <i>The House on Pooh Corner</i> (this being a discussion of the second coming, it is hoped that the reader will indulge ending with a bit of repetition):<br />
<br />
“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’<br />
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with<br />
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a<br />
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’<br />
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask<br />
you. What are they like?’<br />
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is<br />
just a—‘<br />
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘<br />
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘<br />
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know<br />
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.<br />
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see<br />
Pooh.”<br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-33315168334763948952014-08-19T16:44:00.000-04:002014-08-19T16:44:39.460-04:00Doubt without DoubtWith <i>In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic</i>, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld confront the warring but ultimately conspiratorial twin fanaticisms of cynical postmodern relativism and religious fundamentalism. These twins have become something of a contemporary <i>Yin</i> and <i>Yang</i>, comprising all, or at least almost all of the available social space. Relativism and fundamentalism are so entwined that Berger and Zijterveld go so far as to assert that they:<br />
<br />
“are two sides of the same coin. Both are profoundly modern phenomena, and both are reactions to the relativizing dynamic of modernity. The relativist <i>embraces</i> the dynamic; the fundamentalist <i>rejects</i> it. But the two have much more in common than either one would have with a genuine traditionalist. Their commonalities explain why we said… that in every fundamentalist there’s a relativist waiting to be liberated, and in every relativist there’s a fundamentalist waiting to be reborn.”<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKCQgbKkrhjAGzKh-ZVhYPAFEMWNpHAd85bnA2v2asrEpl_l4wa7WPTHwT1a5i_klNcGQ-F-2uFxigaYgnc2LUvXok7vZ9aykMNzyCWDFJnyKlb1hWmnaCspe1kvlKaVnasxmM/s1600/Doubt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKCQgbKkrhjAGzKh-ZVhYPAFEMWNpHAd85bnA2v2asrEpl_l4wa7WPTHwT1a5i_klNcGQ-F-2uFxigaYgnc2LUvXok7vZ9aykMNzyCWDFJnyKlb1hWmnaCspe1kvlKaVnasxmM/s320/Doubt.jpg" /></a></div>Berger and Zijderveld have more in common with the fundamentalists than the relativists, if only by virtue of the fact that they <i>reject</i>, rather than <i>embrace</i>, both sides of the coin. Their rejection of relativism and fundamentalism relates to the quantity of doubt in play on either side of the coin: “If the danger of relativism is an excess of doubt, the danger of fundamentalism is a deficit of doubt.” Too much doubt, i.e. relativism, “leads to both individual and collective paralysis,” while not enough leads to “fundamentalism, religious or secular, (which) is always an enemy of freedom.” If you’ve been having the feeling that nothing at all seems to be getting done (exhibit 1, the US Congress), even as the foundations of our free society are slowly chipping away, welcome to relativism vs. fundamentalism (or, shall we say, relativism <i>cum</i> fundamentalism). <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgErcW1D2OadFMkQ61NoPTwfN8CzhyQ0xOHl-CVyw9xKvU1s7D79_jIgHPyQRC_TL1708XgkQigC0BeHu9GORy-Qzva9jByE1vJeCyI0cbo7BzuylTRzTfYVqwEpZkTwKm80B3N/s1600/goldilocks.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgErcW1D2OadFMkQ61NoPTwfN8CzhyQ0xOHl-CVyw9xKvU1s7D79_jIgHPyQRC_TL1708XgkQigC0BeHu9GORy-Qzva9jByE1vJeCyI0cbo7BzuylTRzTfYVqwEpZkTwKm80B3N/s320/goldilocks.gif" /></a></div>Berger and Zijderveld propose their solution in the guise of Goldilocks: relativism’s doubt is too much, fundamentalism’s doubt is too little, but somewhere in the “middle ground” is an amount of doubt that is just right. In fact, in a bit of a semantic sleight of hand, Berger and Zijderveld leave off referring to the quantity of doubt, and begin to identify doubt as a place between relativism and fundamentalism:<br />
<br />
“The middle ground of all of this is doubt- a basic uncertainty that isn’t prepared to let itself be crushed by belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance. Precisely because it occupies this middle ground, genuine doubt can never end up in the many ‘-isms’ that people have invented and propagated. Doubt can’t be relativistic , since relativism, like all ‘-isms,’ stifle doubt.” <br />
<br />
But it remains unclear how a plenitude of doubt is any less “genuine” than doubt in moderation. A glutton is precisely someone who eats too much. Just so, a relativist whose doubt goes a bridge too far is in trouble precisely because of the quantity, not the quality, of their doubt. <br />
<br />
Ironically, it is differentiating between the quality and the quantity of doubt that just may deliver a cure for the symbiotic growth of relativism and fundamentalism. Berger and Zijderveld’s solution, for all of us to live on the side of the coin in the “middle ground” of moderate doubt, is troubling because of how easy (and tempting) it will be for us to fall off that narrow band back to either side of the toxic coin. On page 108 Berger and Zijderveld note that “doubt is the hallmark of the agnostic,” seemingly having forgotten that on page 6, in a riposte to the notion of advancing global secularism, they note “an enormous explosion of passionate religious movements” and declare that “it cannot be plausibly maintained that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion.” Last I checked, agnosticism was the opposite of passionate religious engagement. So we have a globe full of folk looking for passionate religious experiences who are somehow expected to be mollified by the middle ground of agnostic doubt. This sounds like the perfect recipe for more relativism and fundamentalism.<br />
<br />
Berger and Zijderveld’s misguided solution asks us to be neither relativists nor fundamentalists. I would suggest that understanding the difference between quantity and quality of doubt will empower us to be both. Where Berger and Zijderveld ask us to live on the side of the coin, I hope to demonstrate that we can live on both sides simultaneously. The demonstration begins by opening the dictionary. Merriam-Webster offers two definitions of the word doubt:<br />
<br />
“1: to be uncertain <i>about</i> (something) : to believe that (something) may not be true or is unlikely<br />
2: to have no confidence <i>in</i> (someone or something)” (emphasis added)<br />
<br />
Berger and Zijderveld’s error is in restricting their understanding of doubt and its role in our belief systems to the first definition. For Berger and Zijderveld, relativism and fundamentalism are, respectively, the conditions of being either too uncertain or not uncertain enough <i>about</i> the beliefs in question. The solution, then, can only come with the correct formulation of certainty <i>about</i>. But everything I am going to ague can be boiled down to this: we must learn to be pure relativists <i>about</i> our beliefs, while simultaneously being strict fundamentalists re: confidence <i>in</i> our beliefs. In place of Berger and Zijderveld’s “doubt about doubt,” which is intended to save one from relativism, I proffer “doubt without doubt.” In doing so I would note that Jesus said “Oh ye of little faith,” not “Oh ye of the incorrect faith,” while also noting the research which demonstrates that it doesn’t matter what technique your therapist uses, only how confident she is in using that technique. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnl3O52gyKrzEGXOzK5kEYwRFtwPhJZYMWfkWbhkjhX4XS4dxKfwmhlYLfsBIHCvUsGr-qdjUuZxFfrp_RlwaCDQrAynafHvd-q8aeerKDXs6mAiihpkqYpcUuT6pAvGi9NpUG/s1600/Hegelian+Dialectic.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnl3O52gyKrzEGXOzK5kEYwRFtwPhJZYMWfkWbhkjhX4XS4dxKfwmhlYLfsBIHCvUsGr-qdjUuZxFfrp_RlwaCDQrAynafHvd-q8aeerKDXs6mAiihpkqYpcUuT6pAvGi9NpUG/s320/Hegelian+Dialectic.bmp" /></a></div>In essence, I am suggesting a return to Hegelian dialectics, in which the thesis of relativism has given rise to its antithesis in the form of fundamentalism, and that the only possible resolution of the tension between the two takes the form of synthesis. In recognition of the greatest failed dialectics of all time, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and in solidarity with dialectical materialism’s vision of a class free society, but also in recognition of the genesis of a (brutal) failure in a stubborn blindness to the immanence of an immaterial spirit, I would like to humbly make the grand gesture of naming this doubt without doubt. Ladies and gentleman, I give you dialectical (im)materialism, in which a never ending doubt <i>about</i> means that whatever you happen to believe about God is immaterial, and your unwavering belief <i>in</i> an absolute mystery is the only material with which you can ever work. <br />
<br />
Perhaps counterintuitively, in this era when faith is conflated with fundamentalism, doubt <i>about</i> is inscribed in the world’s various wisdom traditions. Doubt <i>about</i> is so central to faith that it makes up the first four lines of the Tao Te Ching:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkyBBVw8pE0jNFRMt6IvpBusFfIdFp8iMUKxh_fWzBe7i63x0yElpqYsDw0ikRygN2Eu2kdGXXW3nrQcYMWjXeIEvrNZloNoP8u8EhNIEh7Pj3Y80xRJbb6vgyjQD5VEx1qugO/s1600/tao+eternal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkyBBVw8pE0jNFRMt6IvpBusFfIdFp8iMUKxh_fWzBe7i63x0yElpqYsDw0ikRygN2Eu2kdGXXW3nrQcYMWjXeIEvrNZloNoP8u8EhNIEh7Pj3Y80xRJbb6vgyjQD5VEx1qugO/s320/tao+eternal.jpg" /></a></div>"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao<br />
The name that can be named is not the eternal name<br />
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth<br />
The named is the mother of myriad things"<br />
<br />
It is also etched into God’s self-proclaimed definition, “I am that I am,” which in Christian tradition is understood as “at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is- <i>infinitely</i> above everything that we can understand or say: he is the ‘hidden God’ , his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.” (emphasis added) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am) It is only when we accept that our doubts <i>about</i> God should be “infinite” in scope that our belief in God (or the Sacred of one’s chosen tradition) escapes the orbit of relativism and fundamentalism. Thusly untethered, blind faith miraculously avoids all blind alleys, and the blind leading the blind means everyone feeling their way slowly forward in the dark together.<br />
<br />
And none of this is an intellectual parlor game. Being human beings, we will still build institutions and craft rituals to buttress our belief <i>in</i>; the hope is that disarmed by doubt <i>about</i> we will refrain from killing on behalf of these institutions, but that our belief <i>in</i> will run so deep that we’d willingly die for it, again and again and again, as in this Lojong slogan: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.”<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdDtC4KcxBc6DQ0hHE74O3PMUbhqD_E8X3UIbnUYQlagZ_caiPFrLXbCPBNMpWnCxk1uYpKfAxMuvLffb4lLSG50w9G4FulWLM_LtGVfPM8BHaBvP2xNLa7XHkQyHQn3UIBEgL/s1600/ufo+v.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdDtC4KcxBc6DQ0hHE74O3PMUbhqD_E8X3UIbnUYQlagZ_caiPFrLXbCPBNMpWnCxk1uYpKfAxMuvLffb4lLSG50w9G4FulWLM_LtGVfPM8BHaBvP2xNLa7XHkQyHQn3UIBEgL/s320/ufo+v.jpg" /></a></div>Being a human being, I can’t resist having a go at constructing my own edifice in order to have something to doubt <i>about</i>. Because I am constantly doubting <i>about</i> but always struggling to believe <i>in</i>, my edifice is in perpetual flux but ever present. Sometimes it hovers over me like the giant UFOs suspended above the world’s cities in <i>V</i>, at other times it’s more like a sore throat. This week it is a word, teleology, which is my way of saying that this universe is going somewhere. Outlaw theologian John D. Caputo rightly points out in <i>The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps</i> that “life is not telic because life is cyclical and circles have no end, and it is not teleological because any possible <i>causa finalis</i> is finished off by a final terminal blow. Life is and can only be its own ‘because.’ Life is lived for itself not for an end.” To which I would reply with my own outlaw definition of teleology, taken straight from my Dad’s favorite Joe Ely lyrics: “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.” <br />
<br />
So my current belief <i>about</i> the universe is that it is going somewhere, and that it has extended us an invitation to a timeless party, which we will either accept or decline by virtue of our collective choices, i.e. we can contribute to where this is all headed if we so choose. But my current belief <i>in</i> the universe is that Ely’s lyrics are true, even if, to paraphrase the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we choose… poorly. (i.e. There’s gonna be a party, with or without us.)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz62BfYgZnGo9x8-mup8givQaCEM3nJCg837DvoE9S2uwhedWYJghAjj80MRKBh0hC9zhe-yUbr1QJ_3Njx5dCDye8PZ8fA6pR61X8DEKIRgLDhj5mFmvGi21gXY88v-fUIB4e/s1600/grail+knight.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz62BfYgZnGo9x8-mup8givQaCEM3nJCg837DvoE9S2uwhedWYJghAjj80MRKBh0hC9zhe-yUbr1QJ_3Njx5dCDye8PZ8fA6pR61X8DEKIRgLDhj5mFmvGi21gXY88v-fUIB4e/s320/grail+knight.jpg" /></a></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-26569770320610960242014-07-31T13:28:00.000-04:002014-07-31T13:28:56.399-04:00"Welcome to the (food) desert of the real"It’s official: my wife, Jen, and I don’t like to travel (although it goes without saying that we love seeing the ones we love so much that we travel to see them). Ours is not an aversion born of social conscious, like e.g. the folks I’ve heard tale of who will never again leave Oregon in the hopes of I’m not sure exactly what, but which almost certainly involves undoing the legacy of the Enlightenment while simultaneously forestalling climate change (whereas if I threatened to never again leave Baltimore I’d likely be deported to Canada, spiritual home of all threats related to one’s putative location). No, ours is a red blooded American antipathy grounded in the fact that everything we want and need is right here at home, i.e. this is where we’re comfortable. (Note the obvious irony in the fact that the initials for the old Soviet Union, U.S.S.R, when spelled in Russian letters, C.C.C.P., align precisely with what the initials U.S.A. stand for in 2014: Comfort, Convenience, Cat videos, and Pizza.)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDx9-CqRc48x48FQlirMM72xuUBdzNdnyEPhGVqF7XldcMQdTxEJlnTdBQ7z4D6eyC7KnshDdtD7ouhJpj1EalPNz2o20nghTocNrr99AsSqSVwy31jnZT2yQuutXKMlRpbpvK/s1600/cccp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDx9-CqRc48x48FQlirMM72xuUBdzNdnyEPhGVqF7XldcMQdTxEJlnTdBQ7z4D6eyC7KnshDdtD7ouhJpj1EalPNz2o20nghTocNrr99AsSqSVwy31jnZT2yQuutXKMlRpbpvK/s320/cccp.jpg" /></a></div><br />
So it was on a recent trip to North Carolina that, save for the fact that one can travel back and forth between Chapel Hill and Durham from La Quinta Inn on Rt. 15/501 without making a single left or right turn, I might as well have been in Rangoon. (GPS was invented for me, as my fear of getting lost is such that e.g. when travelling I typically like to give myself a four hour cushion when trying to find the airport, which makes my lack of any 21st century navigation devices either masochistic or evocative of Joseph Campbell’s observation that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”) And save for the Kroger grocery store, located just one straight shootin’ mile from La Quinta on 15/501. Dazed by the combined effects of spending 6 hours in the car with my three children, the younger two of whom spend the full 6 hours combining the hijinks of Moe poking Curly in the eyes with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and passing the night in La Quinta Inn with our dog Sy, which felt strangely like sneaking into the girls’ dorm at boarding school (or at least what I imagine that feels like, given that the closest I ever got to the girls’ dorm at St. Andrew’s came during my visits to Ms. Blenkensop’s dorm-abutting apartment for help with my pre-calculus), entering through the Kroger’s automatic doors felt as comforting as checking to see whether I turned the oven off before leaving out of my house. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLqr0vJbSaWq7YVZ2OAp-F5EA9r_146Ut8hVXFusAOUWDSNaY1tNffhe-d8i1quxFbKxNodOBXVWx_OU-i3nGvlkr9ynBkYGiEtRULHdwVV7JsNMK9czZjuu-jP07ep-V7g2ff/s1600/kroger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLqr0vJbSaWq7YVZ2OAp-F5EA9r_146Ut8hVXFusAOUWDSNaY1tNffhe-d8i1quxFbKxNodOBXVWx_OU-i3nGvlkr9ynBkYGiEtRULHdwVV7JsNMK9czZjuu-jP07ep-V7g2ff/s320/kroger.jpg" /></a></div><br />
There is something about grocery stores. I submit that that something is the pinnacle of western civilization. In many ways the secular west is just a grocery store chain with a slogan: “Man cannot live by bread alone, but it’s a damn good start.” The secular west is also in many ways just an army, and armies, as we all know, march on their stomachs. And one cannot walk into a grocery store without feeling, even if just a little bit, that the world is at your fingertips, which feeling is, of course, the whole point of the secular west. The world is your oyster, at $19.99 a pound. And though I was far from home, the Kroger warped space and time with the very same assortment of Little Debbie products available to me in Baltimore, especially the Oatmeal Creme Pies and Star Crunch (which tellingly, like money, is a noun that can’t be made plural). Like Foucault declaring “<i>Ceci n’est pas une pipe</i>,” the Kroger assured me that, appearances notwithstanding, “<i>Ceci n’est pas</i> North Carolina.” <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFW2aYdeO-toeBV_nqLdQ2DuAxf8-EJNFYuislJXLs0A2LKDwLusuZv80z1eB_JTrtb9Ab_cgDVzRLu45_GWkatVpyM5rZuU1NxOW1PBz81iJYGc6HuKK9lvu2RSI2iqqdI2fs/s1600/star+crunch.GIF" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFW2aYdeO-toeBV_nqLdQ2DuAxf8-EJNFYuislJXLs0A2LKDwLusuZv80z1eB_JTrtb9Ab_cgDVzRLu45_GWkatVpyM5rZuU1NxOW1PBz81iJYGc6HuKK9lvu2RSI2iqqdI2fs/s320/star+crunch.GIF" /></a></div><br />
But if we are to assert that grocery stores are the pinnacle of western civilization, remapping its coordinates by the logic to be found in “home is where the food is,” then we must go one step further and confront the mystification rendered by that elusive adjective, western. Go west, young man. To which we may reply, like the legendary Bostonian blue blood asked where she would most like to go in all the world, “But darling, I’m already here.” Unless, after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there,” there is no west here. <br />
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Case in point is Baltimore City, where you will find tens of thousands of civilized folks enduring <i>sans</i> (western) civilization, where “there’s no place like home” has given way to “there’s no place near home with any food,” a reality that has entered the popular imagination under the moniker of food deserts: “populated areas with little or no food retail provision… where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) This straightforward, intuitive definition can be found on Wikipedia, where, a few paragraphs later we learn that:<br />
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• “Remaining food retailers in inner-cities are gas stations, convenience stores, tobacco stores, drugstores, and liquor stores. A diet based on foods from these locations consists primarily of processed foods high in calories, sugars, salt, fat, and artificial ingredients.” (ibid)<br />
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• “Fringe food retailers in food deserts can have a 30-60% markup on prices, provide a limited selection of products and a dominant marketing of processed foods.” (ibid)<br />
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• “Areas with a majority of convenience stores have a higher prevalence of overweight and obese individuals, compared to areas with only supermarkets.” (ibid)<br />
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• “The availability of supermarkets in African American neighborhoods is 52% of their prevalence in white neighborhoods.” (ibid)<br />
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I.e. in food deserts you pay more for toxic foods that will make you obese and give you diabetes and heart disease, all because you happen to be Black. Or, as we say in western civilization, “Prevalence of food deserts in poorer neighborhoods is driven by lack of consumer demand, as the poor have less money to spend on healthful, nutritious food. From an economic standpoint, low demand does not justify supply.” (ibid) The logic in that statement, which is <i>the</i> logic of western civilization, boggles the mind: “Low demand does not justify supply” is just to say “You can’t be hungry unless you have money.”<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVp8zLrXhgCJyMdDtkewdPySywZqfmIB5slCp9KlYjrmVxFltfq2C9BSJ2voiNFiXLzqkHzSvLDhlJ-OkoYxZ83v3Ug0gSfXUw_4Oph1YwwI7HCeuYxm3mXIvf7CLwFKitLUI9/s1600/food+desert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVp8zLrXhgCJyMdDtkewdPySywZqfmIB5slCp9KlYjrmVxFltfq2C9BSJ2voiNFiXLzqkHzSvLDhlJ-OkoYxZ83v3Ug0gSfXUw_4Oph1YwwI7HCeuYxm3mXIvf7CLwFKitLUI9/s320/food+desert.jpg" /></a></div>Because you can’t be hungry unless you have money, Wikipedia goes on to suggest that “adding neighborhood supermarkets may have little benefit to diet quality across the income spectrum,” which is a fancy way of saying that food is not the solution to hunger, and that “the study of food deserts requires further research, including longitudinal studies of food environments, to support associations with obesity and to support neighborhood interventions,” which is a fancy way of saying “Let them eat (Hostess) cake.” <br />
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Note that “We now know that agriculture first evolved in the world’s harsh, hot, arid deserts, then spread to more temperate climes – not the other way around, as one might expect. All civilizations first took root in the deserts of the world.” (http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/du_peo_ancient.html) I take this to mean that as western civilization fast approaches its zero hour, (“zero hour- <i>noun</i>- the time at which a planned operation, typically a military one, is set to begin”; at this point is there any other possible ending?), we may find the roots of a new way of life in a most unexpected place, where we too might learn to endure in the desert of the real, where the demands of hunger are universal and, necessarily, graciously, so is the food.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh68ec79rgg3OXXzhYZOhubBWDvrX7yaWD1paS5o_HC0Sowsxx1CKDI4uK_V5VFmJ1O_MJuI3PePi2OcJFtax7hBvs9jDgbXzoSnjFUvoNimwfxbWkNfYAknCgS6UF1tb9t1Ej/s1600/matrix-desert-of-the-real.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh68ec79rgg3OXXzhYZOhubBWDvrX7yaWD1paS5o_HC0Sowsxx1CKDI4uK_V5VFmJ1O_MJuI3PePi2OcJFtax7hBvs9jDgbXzoSnjFUvoNimwfxbWkNfYAknCgS6UF1tb9t1Ej/s320/matrix-desert-of-the-real.jpg" /></a></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-25087699256823440632014-07-21T12:31:00.000-04:002014-07-21T12:31:55.140-04:00Buckle Up, IndeedHilton Als’ remarkable genre blending and bending work, <i>White Girls</i>, in which memoir, essay, and fiction seem more like different musical instruments than different forms, includes a discussion of Richard Pryor, by way of a fictionalized first person account from Pryor’s sister, which asserts the following: “Everyone looks for someone to tell them what to do.”<br />
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Three pages later, looping back to the kernel of a thought much like Pryor returning to a joke from the first half of his set, Als’ (not Richard) Pryor expands:<br />
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“In actual fact, no one can handle vast quantities of power or fame. Richard couldn’t. It nearly burned him alive. He was always looking for something bigger than himself to tell him what to do. We all are. Being an actress is one of the few jobs on earth that tells the truth about this need that exists in humans- to be told what to do.”<br />
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If one followed the scientific polling practices of <i>The Family Feud</i> and surveyed 100 people as to what everyone is looking for, it is doubtful that you would get the two necessary responses out of the hundred in order for “Someone to tell them what to do” to appear on the <i>Feud’s </i>board. The number one answer, of course, would be love. Money might be the number two answer, but it would be a far distant second. Just turn on the radio. There is the occasional song about money, one thinks of classics such as Madonna’s “Material Girl”, Liza Manelli singing “Money Makes the World Go Around” in <i>Cabaret</i>, or Snoop Dogg’s refrain- “With my mind on my money and my money on my mind,” but at least ninety percent of popular music is devoted to love and its various leitmotifs: not having it, having it and then losing it, waiting for it, looking for it, looking for it in all the wrong places, etc. The Beatles go so far as to say that “Love is all you need,” which would limit the <i>Feud’s</i> board to two answers (not needing money in no way prevents one from looking for it; no one looks harder for more of it than those who already have an excess of it), leaving no space at all for “Someone to tell them what to do.”<br />
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Unless, that is, the need for love and the need for someone to tell you what to do are one and the same. Consider “God is love,” the definition of that final authority, God, which meets the following two criteria: 1) It is announced in scripture (see 1 John 4:8) and it would be the number one answer if the definition of God were queried on <i>The Family Feud</i>, i.e. it has both de jure (legal/scriptural) and de facto (popular) status. “God is love” would outdistance the second most popular definition of God by at least as much as love outdistanced money above. That second most popular definition, “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent,” is simply, at the last, too fraught for a world with this much suffering. We just can’t bring ourselves to believe in an omnipotent, all powerful God who allows (dare we say, causes) this much suffering, but we just barely <i>can</i> believe in a God of infinite love who never stops loving us even as we suffer (and, we must add, even as we turn our back on that love). Our ability to believe in the latter begins to make sense if we flesh out the definition of love (and thereby God, and thereby authority) with an observation from Marie Luise Knott in her book <i>Unlearning with Hannah Arendt</i> that is equal parts accurate, tragic, and hopeful. To “God is love,” then, we add Knott’s “And although it (love) may fail, it is inexhaustible.” Inexhaustible. Those five syllables contain countless worlds in which to wander through and wonder at this fallible God, in which, to quote John D. Caputo, “religion is risky business, no guarantees.” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/deconstructing-god/?emc=eta1)<br />
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To be clear, I am suggesting that “God is love” be read like a mathematical equation such that Authority=Love and Love=Authority, and that when looking for someone (or something) to love, one is always at the very same time looking for someone (or something) to tell you what to do. Many men meet these twin needs by getting married. Unfortunately for the women, after telling their husbands what to do their own needs for love and authority remain unmet, which helps to explain why 61% of American churchgoers are women. (http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-10/why-do-men-stay-away) But the decline of religious beliefs and practices in an increasingly secular age, paired with an American divorce rate that hovers around 50%, has rendered the social institutions of religion and marriage insufficient to meet a need that is as insistent as hunger. <br />
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All of which helps explain the road signs in Maryland which, in a sublime formulation of love and authority, say “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law.” Because in the absence of God and/or our wives, when we look for something to love us and tell us what to do we increasingly turn to the State. In particular, the secular left has in many ways simply substituted the State for God, e.g. only a left-leaning news outlet could sub-title an article thusly: “I hated government—even as it was the only thing trying to save me. Here’s how, one day, I finally saw the light.” (HTTP://WWW.SALON.COM/2014/07/16/I_WAS_POOR_BUT_A_GOP_DIE_HARD_HOW_I_FINALLY_LEFT_THE_POLITICS_OF_SHAME/) <br />
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As we move towards taking “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law” to its logical conclusion, we would be wise to recall that in recent history when a modern State has been absolutely identified with God, ironically evidenced by an explicit and official atheism, totalitarianism has never been far behind. This is not to give the religious right and its own logical conclusion of theocracy a free pass; recent history is every bit as emphatic about States that are absolutely identified with God by way of an explicit and official theism.<br />
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When we go looking for something to love us and tell us what to do and it seems like we have found a branch in the road between empty secularism and corrupt fundamentalism, we are really just walking in (the same) circles.<br />
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If we are ever to meet our need for love and authority in a way that isn’t pathological, i.e. in a way that insists on some degree of autonomy (as when my Dad used to always tell me I was not allowed to move back in after college in order, at least in part, to prevent himself from engineering precisely such a move back in), we must be at the same time radically secular and deeply religious. The failure of contemporary (left secular) multiculturalism originates in its insistence that no one choose a side, leading to what Slavoj Zizek describes in <i>God is in Pain</i> as “the paradox of the tolerant multiculturalist universe of the multitude of lifestyles and other identities: the more it is tolerant, the more it is oppressively homogeneous.” <br />
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The future will be radically secular when everyone chooses a side, i.e. when everyone is deeply religious. If, that is, there are enough different religions to make the world safe for religion. (The old line “Ask two Jews, get three opinions” hints at the notion that it is only within an unaccountable, miraculous excess of religions that we are ever safe and secure in the one that we choose, even when the excess and the choosing occurs within one religion.) An authentic multiculturalism, which is the only possible contemporary secularism, requires the deeply committed adherents of multiple faiths to act as checks and balances on one another. It requires these multiple faiths to have clear boundaries even as they are equally clear allies. Allies whose collective action, informed by each faith’s naked self interest, never allows any single group to make the otherwise inevitable thrust towards theocracy. In this future, all faiths will love their enemies, if only because the enemy of their enemy is their friend. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to go ask my lovely wife what she needs me to do. <br />
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-77499933927358691972014-07-14T12:29:00.000-04:002014-07-14T12:29:08.595-04:00Pick a SideOn walks around the neighborhood I have recently taken to saving the lives of still-squirming worms stranded on the sidewalk. The proximity of worms to sidewalks and driveways is a great reminder that we live life “in the foothills of death,” a brilliant turn of phrase from philosopher Mark Johnston. Worms have been dealt a rotten hand; to put things in perspective just imagine if mice spent their entire lives adjacent to a gigantic glue trap that expanded towards them in the rain. So far I have rescued at least three worms. <br />
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But I still swat mosquitoes with the lethal accuracy and superhuman speed of Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland Deschain, and I don’t think twice about drowning the scores of ants who, forming a division of the army invading my kitchen, have pushed the western front forward into my dishwasher. My approach to the pesty members of the lower animal kingdom who encroach upon my person or my real estate, perhaps best embodied by my practice of using the aforementioned glue traps to catch mice whom I immediately euthanize, is one of certain speedy death with a minimum of suffering. So, it seems, for the worms I wear the mask of Vishnu the maintainer, and for the ants et.al. I portray Shiva the destroyer, all of which reveals my basic philosophy to be “I bidthe old joke goes, Catholic Lite (as in Miller Lite), then I am also Diet Thich Nhat Hahn, i.e. Peace is (not quite) every step.<br />
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If a philosophy is to be considered truly basic, however, it should be universal. When gaps open up it means you still don’t know why you do what you do, which is ultimately to be in the same position as the worms, ants, mosquitoes, and mice. Which is why I found it so unsettling to encounter a bug squirming in a spider web on my porch the other day. “I bid you peace on two conditions…” was, in this case, about as useful as “When lost, never ask directions from strangers; get your wife to do it, or failing that, panic” which, while also basic to my approach to life, wouldn’t have filled in the gap left by the bug squirming in silk. If I bid peace to the bug, by freeing it, I starve the spider. And if I bid peace to the spider, I kill the bug. (And, to state the obvious, neither the bug nor the spider gave a rat’s ass about me or my house, meaning that “I bid you peace…” wasn’t nullified by its qualifiers, just merely meaningless.) <br />
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I once had an acquaintance whose basic life philosophy was “When in doubt, do nothing.” It was on the back of this philosophy that he gave his heart to a woman with whom he technically did nothing. “When in doubt, do nothing,” is both convenient (my married acquaintance had a “best friend,” not an emotional affair) and, as a means to choosing while pretending not to, bad faith par excellence. Just so, after I left the bug to die I rationalized that since I hadn’t known what to do I had simply chosen to let nature take its course. In pretending not to have chosen the spider over the bug I was simultaneously lying and suspending disbelief, which is known in the vernacular as believing your own bullshit. Believing your own bullshit will likely get you through the day, but it will just as reliably maintain your soul vibration at a low enough frequency such that you keep managing to piss off your wife. <br />
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Determined to stay married ‘til death do us part because a) my wife Jen is a badass sexy mensch who is the best thing that ever happened to me and whom I love with an OCD reckless abandon that involves a lot of checking (imagine the staccato rhythm of the Verizon guy’s “Can you hear me now?”, but substitute “Do you love me now?”) , and b) because I would never grant my enemies the schaudenfreude of my divorce, I have just recently, for the first time in my life, decided to begin aiming my bullshit detector at myself in a concerted effort to address what my shaman, who seems to have momentarily forgotten that flattery will get her everywhere, likes to call “my arrogance.” In fact, I used my bullshit detector in this novel fashion for perhaps the very first time when I caught myself pretending to let nature take its course with the spider and bug, leading, inevitably, to thoughts that I might just be a natural at this self-BS-detection thing (i.e. to more BS). But, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.<br />
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The unvarnished truth is that I chose the spider. If its captive had been, say, a ladybug or a lightning bug, I would have chosen differently. But this was an average bug, in no way special or glamorous, completely lacking e.g. the erotic danger of the praying mantis, the mystical overtones of the butterfly, or even the grotesquerie of the cockroach. It was only too easy to imagine the generic bug in the web as the equivalent of a pale orange tomato pressed between cellophane and light green Styrofoam.<br />
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It is likely that my “I bid you peace on two conditions…” is as self-delusional as “When in doubt, do nothing.” Where the latter denies the inevitability of choosing, the former, as in the case of the bug and the spider, denies the inevitability of choosing sides. Note that Jesus said “Love your enemies,” not “Don’t have enemies.” <br />
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And re: my choice of the spider over the bug because the bug basically looked like someone who might be sitting next to you on the bus, there’s clearly still plenty of grist for my shaman’s mill in our next session. <br />
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Plus, my math was all wrong. Since when is missing lunch the equivalent of becoming lunch? That’s some bullshit. <br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19278264.post-35549970396784217892014-07-07T15:05:00.000-04:002014-07-07T15:05:57.236-04:00Between You, Me, and the LamppostIn 2004, just as he was launching a spectacularly lucrative NBA career, albeit one bereft of even a sniff of championship hardware, Baltimore native Carmelo Anthony got caught up in something of an imbroglio after appearing in the infamous <i>Stop Snitchin’</i> “homemade DVD.” (One should note that “homemade DVD” is the terminology proffered by Wikipedia, presumably because the makers of the homemade DVD came off as poor and Black, which meant that they were categorically incapable of producing a <i>documentary</i>, documentaries being the purview of those who sympathize with being poor and Black; whatever one thinks of the message contained in <i>Stop Snitchin’</i>, which message we will get to in just a moment, stripping it of its medium is but one more example of how we allow Black males to talk without really granting them freedom of speech. Witness LeBron James, who entered the NBA the same year as Anthony, and who will never be forgiven for an appearance on a talk show, “The Decision,” that was, at worst, tacky.)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTDKMjz0k6Qx8OrraAZAlN98iX0BVkZ2B58DSmdLuMLgoOby0eVyU1zbD58Ygxf0DB1fSBtAIeQnbPFU6XepiXIb-nEYY0m0xrV_QxmodOJyp67q9gDmAEiZUAWBEBlZNTGof0/s1600/carmelo+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTDKMjz0k6Qx8OrraAZAlN98iX0BVkZ2B58DSmdLuMLgoOby0eVyU1zbD58Ygxf0DB1fSBtAIeQnbPFU6XepiXIb-nEYY0m0xrV_QxmodOJyp67q9gDmAEiZUAWBEBlZNTGof0/s320/carmelo+2.jpg" /></a></div> <br />
It would be easy to sit in judgment of Anthony and Rodney Thomas, <i>Stop Snitchin’</i>s creator, given the film’s ethos of violent vigilante justice, an ethos perhaps best captured by its corresponding slogan: “Snitches get stitches.” Except it is better captured by the actualization of the violence contained in those words:<br />
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“National examples of violence due to ‘snitching’ include Angela Dawson of Baltimore, who was killed along with her five children and husband on October 16, 2002, when their house was firebombed after she alerted police to illegal activities in her neighborhood. Another example is Terry Neely of Phoenix, Arizona, a 46-year-old man confined to a motorized wheelchair, who was tortured for days and then killed by Angela Simpson in August 2009. A third example is Michael Brewer of Deerfield Beach, Florida, a 15-year-old who, in October 2009, was doused in rubbing alcohol and set on fire after assailants yelled, ‘He's a snitch, he's a snitch.’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Snitchin')<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FmbQ5EuCLMTVjRNIwhFkMXXYZj8c-h36u6cESZYZClGcI2Cd3vkFbqLhuegcyB2f9xLEosvKcGAWtX8wBrK75CnkedMsvFovsH2g2ld2n1GB9E8HJ1pvQkL6YSsfNh05R3PT/s1600/stop+snitchin+stitches.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FmbQ5EuCLMTVjRNIwhFkMXXYZj8c-h36u6cESZYZClGcI2Cd3vkFbqLhuegcyB2f9xLEosvKcGAWtX8wBrK75CnkedMsvFovsH2g2ld2n1GB9E8HJ1pvQkL6YSsfNh05R3PT/s320/stop+snitchin+stitches.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Easy to sit in judgment, that is, until one gets a sense of exactly how <i>Stop Snitchin</i>’s Pandora’s Box was first pried open. The history is laid out, point by point, in Tom Farrey’s excellent article for ESPN.com, and it is a story that begins, coincidentally, with another local basketball player. Farrey pieces together a narrative beginning with the fatal cocaine overdose of Maryland basketball star Len Bias shortly after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics, a tragedy harnessed by Boston’s man in the US Congress, “Tip” O’Neill:<br />
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“As his constituents raged over the death of Bias, O'Neill sensed a political opportunity to make the Democrats look tough on drugs, according to Eric Sterling, a former counsel to the House judiciary committee, who explained the legislative machinations in a PBS <i>Frontline</i> report. Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced, stripping judges of the ability to consider mitigating circumstances. Getting caught with five grams of crack (25 doses), for instance, meant five years behind bars, and that was that.” (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?id=2296590)<br />
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Unless, as Farrey goes on to explain, you “become a confidential informant. A snitch.” (ibid) The upshot of all of this was a) numberless Black men either incarcerated or otherwise bound up in the justice system, and b) a sub-population of Black men turned against their neighbors and neighborhoods in a desperate attempt to avoid hard time. Farrey’s article draws on the work of former Baltimore public defender turned law professor Alexandra Napatoff to summarize the end results thusly:<br />
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“The policy has helped fill up penitentiaries, while inducing a state of paranoia in high-crime neighborhoods that she (Napatoff) likens to the former East Germany under the secret police. On street corners and at family barbecues, anyone's a potential rat.”<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeECSglaxh_9g4cF53qi6k9uYoRG0OYjTQGjp64AuEupTveJt26eKoXZ7sbpgZdcSYkbVkcWwaKDKm_VKgug5ff4kCNDBedZlyppy3-fvGzetPHIOmlV9wIfntG3w5JMGAfDjb/s1600/stop+snitchin+shirt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeECSglaxh_9g4cF53qi6k9uYoRG0OYjTQGjp64AuEupTveJt26eKoXZ7sbpgZdcSYkbVkcWwaKDKm_VKgug5ff4kCNDBedZlyppy3-fvGzetPHIOmlV9wIfntG3w5JMGAfDjb/s320/stop+snitchin+shirt.jpg" /></a></div> <br />
Stop snitchin’, indeed. Except, of course, snitches get stitches. One seems caught between the rock and the hard place of either condoning state terrorism (i.e. the “war on drugs”) or vigilante terrorism (see the firebombing of Angela Dawson and her family). <br />
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It is all troubling enough to make the rush to judgment even more urgent, judgment establishing distance. If the violence, which is first institutional and then reactionary and then both all at once on every side, is endemic to the poor and the state that police’s them, then it isn’t my violence. It is precisely this logic that enables one to know that there are two to three hundred annual murders in Baltimore without thinking they actually happen. I am reminded of the time my old next door neighbor explained to me that “We don’t turn around in other people’s driveways in this neighborhood,” which, of course, is not the kind of thing one says in a neighborhood where people actually don’t turn around in one another’s driveways. (I was mature enough to 1) only think, and not say, “But I just did,” and 2) never turn around in her driveway again, maintaining a relationship that would ultimately prove to be of great comfort when my other next door neighbor repeatedly leaf-blowered his leaves into a pile in front of my house.) <br />
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The distance established by believing “Snitches don’t get stitches in this neighborhood” also reminds me of the stickers you used to see in driver side mirrors: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The comforting distance is pure illusion, and not just because the violence can erupt at any time and any place. (In my twenty years in Baltimore, most of which have been spent indoors, I have been robbed at gun point in a fast food drive thru lane in addition to walking from my car to my then-apartment only to see someone pull out a gun and start shooting, thankfully not at me, a block away.) The illusion is that Stop Snitchin’ is an ethos circumscribed by class and race, when, in fact, it is a national mythos that informs every station of society, from the very top to the very bottom, and everywhere in between.<br />
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To understand how “Snitches get stitches” operates outside of the environs with which it is explicitly associated, one must both recall that a) the pen is mightier than the sword, and b) there is more than one way to skin a cat. Combining them reminds us that there is more than one way to make a snitch bleed, most of them having to do with words. To wit, Edward Snowden. Whatever one makes of Snowden’s epoch making decision, it has resulted in at least two indelible outcomes. Before Snowden, everyone knew we lived in a surveillance state, we all just figured they were watching e.g. the vaguely ethnic guy who lives on the corner who smokes and never cuts his grass; now we all know they are watching each of <i>us</i>. Secondly, Snowden has left this plane, emerging as the Platonic form of 21st century American snitch the moment Secretary of State John Kerry branded him a “coward” and a “traitor,” (who knew the Platonic realm was in Russia?), making each of us Snowden’s flawed copy. “Each of us” because they are reading <i>everyone’s</i> email, i.e. we are all potential snitches, and “flawed” because, based on our collective non-reaction, we consider the NSA’s clinical filtering of our personal data on par with a “friend’s” perusal of our Facebook page.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR2OZFrAM9SWbQI8xnYJyCdDl0lofsEYjXoU9yFp9GA7i09RSurKpYkV8XmhI4gclC70txJcf8hEoYHa4gEpj5Y5CH5zwQKqQQ-IYq1My3xmqvcQDnimKpGNjhww3of4MfG53Y/s1600/edward-snowden-interview.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR2OZFrAM9SWbQI8xnYJyCdDl0lofsEYjXoU9yFp9GA7i09RSurKpYkV8XmhI4gclC70txJcf8hEoYHa4gEpj5Y5CH5zwQKqQQ-IYq1My3xmqvcQDnimKpGNjhww3of4MfG53Y/s320/edward-snowden-interview.jpg" /></a></div> <br />
Although it should be said that our collective non-reaction also functions to establish distance. If I say out loud to my kith and kin that I have nothing to hide and that if the NSA wants to waste its time reading my boring emails they are welcome to have at it, then I’ve used magical thinking to once again establish the illusion of comforting distance. It is the belief that by simply saying “Snitches don’t get snitches in this neighborhood,” one can prevent the NSA from ever showing up on one’s doorstep. All of which functions to repress the intolerable thought that they wouldn’t be reading one’s email if one weren’t already a suspect and, prima facie, a snitch.<br />
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But even if we grant that it is possible to keep one’s thoughts, words, and deeds pure enough not to raise any of the NSA’s red flags, perhaps by keeping every last online transaction linked in some way, shape, or form to one’s fantasy football team, one still has to make a living. Which, per a report last week in <i>The Washington Post</i>, increasingly involves “tak(ing) an unusual oath.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/workplace-secrecy-agreements-appear-to-violate-federal-whistleblower-laws/2014/06/29/d22c8f02-f7ba-11e3-8aa9-dad2ec039789_story.html) These oaths are “nondisclosure agreements” which, e.g., prevent “contract employees at the Hanford plutonium processing plant in Washington state… from reporting wrongdoing at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear facility without getting approval from an agency supervisor.” (ibid)<br />
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And, it goes without saying, workplace snitches get stitches, too:<br />
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“Donna Busche reluctantly signed the agreement. ‘It was a gag order,’ said Busche, 51, who served as the manager of environmental and nuclear safety at the Hanford waste treatment facility for a federal contractor until she was fired in February after raising safety concerns. ‘The message was pretty clear: “Don’t say anything to anyone, or else.”’ ” (ibid)<br />
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In a strange echo of Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” it is as if every employee is being required to declare “I am not a snitch,” precisely because, like Nixon, it is already an established fact that you actually are. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUddWAF2h_qTGYwq38uXxPHCmXLJY2f9xWkLSXojY5FyZjZJNDtXasaY3tPwkcu2wFCLunoCTaXIeBZP5D1GPtJbBBiAMsafHBe0i2A3ttxPQhg-RJlokmacvREwZNsa8JZ625/s1600/nixon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUddWAF2h_qTGYwq38uXxPHCmXLJY2f9xWkLSXojY5FyZjZJNDtXasaY3tPwkcu2wFCLunoCTaXIeBZP5D1GPtJbBBiAMsafHBe0i2A3ttxPQhg-RJlokmacvREwZNsa8JZ625/s320/nixon.jpg" /></a></div> <br />
In the Salem Witch Trials, suspected witches had their hands and ankles tied together before being lowered into a lake. If they survived and floated to the surface it proved that they were witches, which meant that they were then put to death. If they sunk to the bottom and drowned, it proved that they weren’t witches after all. Just so, if there is one thing we can say about the Stop Snitchin’ world we find ourselves thrown into, it is this: All of us are gagged, and we all get stitches anyway. <br />
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The violence will end when there is nothing left to hide or when there is no one left to hide it. Which means the only path forward is truth and reconciliation, even, and especially, when the truth is irreconcilable; the only available future is an impossible one, which is a marginally better deal than the Salem witches got. I suggest we accept the offer, and, taking our cue from the old Master Card slogan, master the impossibilities. <br />
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07681314314102761754noreply@blogger.com0