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Thursday, June 12, 2003
A period of transition
I haven’t been very funny lately. Have I ever? Seems like I started out this blogging thing laughing at myself and my willingness to let a buncha stuff out online. I tried to be creative and it was fun. For a while there, it was like a great party where more and more people kept dropping in, drawn by some inexplicable energy. Not referring to my site specifically, just the whole blog ecosystem I found myself in. That would be the progressive one. The intelligent one, the humorous one, and most definitely the concerned one. I guess it was serious then too; it’s just the laughter that’s changed. The lack of it.
But I didn’t know how else to be, or what else to be, or why I would be something else. Now, it’s time to be something else. It’s time to separate the blogging and the life. Yep, it’s time to unplug a bit. It’s time to welcome myself into the desert of the real, and see if I can coax forth some tender shoots. I’ve got two named Eleanor and Audrey. And blogging has given me some clues to some others.
I’ve about worn myself out reading blogs and other online content. I feel like snapping at every conservative I run across. I’m feeling stretched thin. Things are not funny anymore. Call it the post-democratic blues.
We live too much in our minds, and it’s time for me to find some balance. Neither mind, body nor spirit have it, and consequently, none of them are terribly healthy. And blogging has brought on a vicious case of ADD. I’m so scattered, I don’t even have time to read the stuff I’ve linked to. (I’m reading the Bill Moyers speech and writing this at the same time.)
It’s time to work when I should work, and play when I should play. It’s time to figure out what that means. I need to find the lightness in either activity, and in myself.
Leigh once e-mailed me in response to one of my posts: “I think your blog is about the need to turn off the noise in one's life, particularly anything issuing from the mainstream media, and think about how one can make a difference, how one small voice crying in the wilderness could make the world a better place.”
I’ve met the noise, and the noise is us.
Time to take stock of my own personal wilderness, offline. So no blogging and much less reading blogs. That’s gonna be hard, but I think it’s something I need to do right now.
And if and when I come back to blogging, it will be a new site. So (sniff) say goodbye to High Water.
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Bill Moyers points to emperor's lack of clothes
Condemning "the unholy alliance between government and wealth" and the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make "the rape of America sound like a consensual date," Moyers charged that "rightwing wrecking crews" assembled by the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies were out to bankrupt government. Then, he said, they would privatize public services in order to enrich the corporate interests that fund campaigns and provide golden parachutes to pliable politicians. If unchecked, Moyers warned, the result of these machinations will be the dismantling of "every last brick of the social contract."
"I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," said Moyers, as he called for the progressives gathered in Washington -- and for their allies across the United States -- to organize not merely in defense of social and economic justice but in order to preserve democracy itself. Paraphrasing the words of Abraham Lincoln as the 16th president rallied the nation to battle against slavery, Moyers declared, "Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free."
There was little doubt that the crowd of activists from across the country would have nominated Moyers by acclamation when he finished a remarkable address in which he challenged not just the policies of the Bush Administration but the failures of Democratic leaders in Congress to effectively challenge the president and his minions. In the face of what he described as "a radical assault" on American values by those who seek to redistribute wealth upward from the many to a wealthy few, Moyers said he could not understand "why the Democrats are afraid to be labeled class warriors in a war the other side started and is winning."
--From a John Nichols article in The Nation.
onegoodmove has the entire text of the speech here.
Thanks Norm.
Friday, June 06, 2003
Book Review: A Fine Balance
Dave Eggers can joke about it, but heartbreaking works of staggering genius are still produced, and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is one. That’s my humble opinion, anyway.
Why, you ask. What makes this a work of art, a genuinely moving experience? I don’t know, but for two weeks and 600 pages, I lived in India in the 1970s. I ate chapatis cooked by a skinny teenager in a small apartment. Thanks to the independent spirit and vision of my father, I learned a trade, sewing, that I could use to escape the cruel slavery of my village’s caste system. I felt the crack of the police officer’s truncheon against my elderly skull, not just the violence but the cold, impersonal nature of the injustice. I watched in horror as men with great power, and my Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, directed acts of violence safe in the knowledge that they could escape justice (in this world).
I lived it all through four main characters, and a rich panoply of supporting players.
These four – a single woman on her own, a college student, and an uncle and his nephew struggling with poverty in a big city -- have little in common, except an independent streak. They don’t believe in passive acceptance of their intended lot in life.
The two characters that center the novel, the impoverished tailors Om and Ishvar, are periodically swept up in one governmental atrocity – or, program designed to deal with the “excess population,” i.e. the poor -- after another. And they often meet others who comment on how the government is completely corrupt and vile and what a shame it is that India is being ruined from the top down. How it wasn’t always like this; how things keep getting worse. And if their leaders are completely criminal, what hope is there for the common man? There are dark hints of the IMF and World Bank, and the CIA.
But, a la Steinbeck, the common man and woman endure, finding refuge and humanity through solidarity, through acts of kindness and love. How the protagonists breakthrough society-forged manacles, how they negotiate the fine line between “passion and foolishness, kindness and weakness,” how they come to stand with mercy over cruelty, consideration over callousness is the novel’s beating heart.
We’re in this freak show together, “sailing under one flag,” Mistry seems to be saying. The suffering can be overwhelming, human dignity continually beset by impersonal forces, but life can and does offer bittersweet moments, small and great triumphs.
Do they balance out, hope and despair? After Mistry’s anything-but-sentimental ending, I’m still struggling with that, but I find that this line from one of the characters hits close to home: “Losing, and losing again, it is the very basis of the life process, till all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence.”
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Happy B'day Spalding Gray
Originally from Rhode Island, Gray came to New York to become involved in theater. A writer, actor, and performer, Gray is the author of several books, such as IT'S A SLIPPERY SLOPE (1997, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He has created more than a dozen monologues, including the VILLAGE VOICE's Obie Award-winning "Swimming to Cambodia." His appearances on and off-Broadway include roles in the revival of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" and the New York premiere of Sam Shepard's "Tooth of Crime." Gray's film credits include roles in Roland Joffe's THE KILLING FIELDS, Steven Soderbergh's KING OF THE HILL, and Ron Howard's THE PAPER. He also has appeared on television, including several HBO specials. (from here)
Monday, June 02, 2003
First Google hit on "Matrix Corporations"
The Matrix describes corporate America
If you have worked in corporate America, you may have at one time felt like a battery, imprisoned at a desk or cubicle. Employees are cogs, essential to the livelihood of the whole, but expendable and easily replaced. Neo's boss reminds him of this fact. "You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken... Every single employee understands that they are a part of the whole, thus if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Anderson. Either you choose to be at your desk on time, or you choose to find yourself another job."
The choice can feel like life or death. Agent Smith, a sentient program designed to eliminate human resistance, talks about this further. "In one life you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, a driver's licence, and you help your landlady carry out the garbage. The other life is into computers where you go by the hacker alias Neo and break virtually every computer law there is. One of these lives has a future. One of them does not." Quitting or being fired can mean losing the ability to buy the things we need to survive, pay the rent, and live life as a participating member of society. The employee believes that the corporation provides us life, just as the system constructs the matrix to define life to the trapped minds.
It is the goal of every corporation to create a system that generates profits, regardless of who is operating the machinery, so to speak. Blue collar or white collar, the employee works for the good of the entity. Corporations are living beings by law. They have rights, just as any citizen, they pay taxes, and they live and die. They are sentient beings, just as the machines, given artificial intelligence by man, became sentient in The Matrix. It was as Morpheus describes, "a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines." Corporations, too, share a singular consciousness: the will to achieve profits.
Corporations also attempt to rule our thoughts. In The Matrix, the machines control what humans perceive to be reality, keeping the mind alive to sustain the body. In life, humans are free to walk and live as they choose, while corporations construct reality through marketing. It's all designed to further their existence through consumption of the goods and services they produce. Choices to support them are linked to vital human needs. We are told we need to buy their merchandise in order to succeed in life. Sex is almost always associated as the end result of having consumed products. If we choose to drink this beer or drive this car or buy this pair of pants, we will be rewarded with sex.
More abstractly, they tell us how to act through the use of the media. (more)
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