writing Archive

3

On Centrism and Civility, Briefly

By
Tom OHare
– May 12, 2012

I was having dinner with my friend-and-sexual-associate not too long ago, and we got into a discussion about civility versus decency, which, if you’ve read our Inflammatory Writ, has been a hobbyhorse of the proprietors of this website for a while now. Her point was that people are more likely to take you seriously if you don’t use bad words and argue in good faith, and mine was that some people simply aren’t worth arguing with — since their minds will never change — and can simply be told to fuck off.

I understand that this opens me up to criticism from the right along the lines of, “Fuck off, libtard,” and I’m perfectly fine with that. I think that’s a legitimate criticism, all things considered. But I only think it’s legitimate because it fundamentally expresses the truth: to wit, the right-winger and I will never agree on certain issues, and there is basically no point in discussing those issues with each other. So, “Fuck off”? Gladly. Why waste each other’s time?

My audience, however, isn’t (I hope) on the fence about issues like LGBTQ rights, or global warming, or the military-industrial complex’s negative effects on American foreign policy, or the disaster that is deregulated capitalism. If you are, can I please request that you kindly fuck off? We have nothing to talk about. These issues are urgent, and I profess absolutely no regret for being earnest in my advocacy for the far left position I take with regard to each. The Overton window either moves left or right, after all. I confess to hoping that I do some small service on behalf of making our national discourse more amenable to left-wing political views.

Which brings us — AS ALL THINGS DO — to William Lloyd Garrison, who expressed my position considerably more succinctly than I’ve been able to do so here:

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. [Bold added.]

I’ve got “never give an inch” tattooed on my left arm. In one respect it is an ironic statement on the foolhardiness of brooking no compromise — which is, I would argue, the central theme of the book from which it was derived. That is, I don’t think Kesey was endorsing the notion that one should never give an inch, even if his protagonists lived and died by the slogan. But in another respect, it speaks to the meaning of core principles. What do you stand for? To what extent are you willing to back it up? And most importantly, where do you draw the line in the sand?

Ultimately, like it or not, you have to draw it somewhere. You don’t, of course, if you’re trying to make a living in the Tom Friedman/David Brooks version of the universe where intellectual consistency means a pay-cut. But you do if, like most of us, you’re simply trying to be a decent human being. To do so requires staking out positions and making arguments, regardless of how popular or unpopular they make you. Believe it or not, I have considerably more respect for a principled bigot than a pundit who tries to play both sides of an argument and ends up defending that bigot. While the bigot and I may never agree about anything, at least I know that a gentle “Fuck you” adequately expresses my point. With the pundit, one is tempted to mistake smarminess for an argument, when in actuality it’s simply a ploy to mask cowardice and intellectual dishonesty.

Taking a stand is important. Knowing what you believe in is important. Having principles is important. And, crucially now, making compromises is important, too. But with compromise, you always have to be playing the long-game, and you have to have an idea of what audience is worth playing games for. There are simply some people you’ll never be able to reach. In the meantime, never give an inch.

1

Day 5

By
Tom OHare
– April 20, 2012

Robin is OCD, or has OCD, or whatever the preferred nomenclature is for people with obsessive compulsive disorder. At our first book sale, last September in the basement of a church where I do most of my work, she told me as much.

“I just, I go down there, and everything’s out of order and all over the place!” she said, visibly exasperated. Robin is short, wiry, and birdlike. She has a white mid-sixties Beatles’ haircut, thick rimmed shields for glasses, and she never looks you in the eye when she talks. She walks with a pronounced limp, but I’ve never asked her about it because I don’t want to come across as rude.

“We didn’t have time to organize it,” I explained at the time. This was last September, Indian Summer, a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I was telling Robin the truth. The day of the sale it was Marc and me, a chapel filled with chairs , my dungeon on the other side of the church basement stacked to the ceilings with books, and eight hours to set the whole thing up for opening night. We did not concern ourselves with putting all of the Harry Potters with the other Harry Potters. We concerned ourselves with hauling ass.

Robin was having none of it. “Listen, when I go to a book sale I don’t want to be looking all over the place trying to find what I want. That’s just crazy! I’m OCD, and I swear,” she said, shaking her head, “I just want to go around organizing everything! It’s like a madhouse down there!” At the time, I took her complaints to be a minor annoyance on an otherwise beautiful late summer day. But my boss, manning the cash register, had heard it all downstairs before me, and she had signed Robin on as a volunteer for our next book sale.

These days, Robin devotes her time to the kids’ room. She spends hours upon hours putting, say, the Full House collection of Mary-Kate and Ashley stories in chronological order. She has an R.L. Stine section, a parenting section, a boardbook section arranged according to the genus and species of the title animal. Which is to say, it is under control in the kids’ room, because Robin is on top of that shit. When we had a group of twenty Raytheon HR volunteers come in to physically put all of the boxed books on the shelves… when Robin came in the day after that, with everything misplaced and disorganized and crazy — but, crucially now, on the shelves – well, she just about fainted. And then she spent the next three days in that little 8×12 box, putting everything in its right place for the sale.

Today I put a rock between the back door and the doorjamb, not just because it’s nice out, but because Robin can’t handle stairs well and the rear entrance only has one little step. She’s due to arrive at noon, and I’ve been clearing out bins all morning, boxing things up for her to fiddle with. She doesn’t ask for much. None of the volunteers do. When my boss and I sat down with them for the first time and asked them what they might like to make their volunteer time a bit more pleasant, they were only so extravagant as to request a radio. I haven’t heard them listen to it once.

“Hey, Robin,” I greet her as she walks in. “How are ya?”

“I’m good, Tom. How are you?”

“Oh, you know. Books, books, books.”

She laughs, awkward.

“I’ve got three or four boxes waiting for you in the other room, and I’ll have another one for you before I take off for the day,” I tell her.

“Great. I guess I’ll get right to it, then,” Robin says.

When I bring the last box in for her a little while later, I notice that “The Te of Piglet,” companion/follow-up to “The Tao of Pooh,” is sitting on a table beside her purse. “This is actually an adult book,” I say.

“Oh, I know,” Robin says, trails off, and turns a bit red. I realize that she’s planning to take it home with her, and that she probably feels like she’s just been caught stealing. Let me put it to you like this: if you come to my bookstore and alphabetize books for free for fifteen hours a week, you can have a “Te of Piglet” whenever you please.

“You should check it out, I’ve heard good things,” I say. “‘The Tao of Pooh’ is supposed to be good, too.” I head to the door and wave. “Have a good weekend, Robin. Thanks for all your help.”

0

Day 4

By
Tom OHare
– April 19, 2012

I get to the main office/occasional-impromptu-bookstore around half past one. Rose is in the back room, consolidating tattered mass market paper backs into those cardboard trays beer sometimes comes in. You know the ones. The book sale we hosted last weekend kind of went bananas, and the three rooms we’ve taken over on the first floor, to flood with shelves and boxes and tables full of books, are a mess. Rose is a volunteer, probably in her 70′s, five foot nothing, round but nimble — an avid walker. I don’t really need her to be sorting through mass market paperbacks. I’d just as soon throw them all away — there’s certainly no dearth of them. But she’s restoring a semblance of order to the place, which is appreciated. And when I get to the point where I do need her to do something, she’ll do it. I couldn’t really ask for much more from a volunteer.

Rose once called me on a Friday night at around eight o’clock, just around dinnertime. I was in New York City for the weekend. I was, if you can believe it, eating dinner because, as mentioned, it was just around dinnertime. I was, moreover, eating a dinner that my, um, “friend” had prepared for me — the very first meal she had ever cooked for me, as a matter of fact. So, of course: phone number I don’t recognize from an area code in Massachusetts while I’m on a date? I better answer that call!

“Hi, Tom, it’s Rose.”

Rose, Rose… who on earth is Rose? Ohhh. Rose. ”Um, hi… Rose? What’s, uhm, up?” Waving to pretty lady across table, This will only be a second, promise.

“Well, I was thinking, I can get you all the leftover books from the library sale in Marblehead. Do you have a minute? You aren’t eating dinner or anything, are you?”

“No, yeah, no, it’s fine. I ju–”

“Well, what we could do is…”

It was only a couple minutes later, when Rose said something about how we could discuss her plan to get books “tomorrow” since I was “going to be at work” (she was thinking about stopping by the office to help set up the book sale, anyway, and why not kill two birds with one stone, right?), that I realized she probably didn’t really keep track of her weekdays all that well.

“I’m actually in New York City this weekend, Rose.” I made sure to emphasize how very weekend it was. “I probably won’t be back at work until Tuesday. But we can definitely talk about it then.”

“Oh, is today Friday already? Well, how about that, you’re right.”.

In the end the two of us did end up making the NYC-dinner-date-interrupting trip to Marblehead to salvage thirty boxes of unwanted books. I chauffeured in the company dump truck. “When you said you had a truck, you really meant it,” Rose said as she opened the door. I have rarely feared more for a person’s life than watching Rose try to climb into the passenger seat that day. It was like watching a grape trying to do the monkey bars. My plan was that if she let go of the oh-shit handle and started to fall, I’d grab her arm and hold her up. It’s only now that I realize I probably just would have dislocated her shoulder if that’d happened. Or, like, ripped the entire arm right off. You can pluck a stem from a grape pretty easily, after all.

So today, when I’ve finally finished sifting through a giant blue laundry hamper full of books and magazines books and three ring binders and books and video tapes and CDs and books, I ask Rose if she can give the mass-markets a rest and put all the non-fiction books I’ve boxed up onto the appropriate shelves in the non-fiction room. “I’ll wheel them in on the dolly and put the boxes on the tables. Can you just go through them and plop the books down where they belong?” (The volunteers have established a weird genre-bending, pseudo-Dewey decimal shelving system for the non-fiction room. I let them roll with it because it’s less work for me, and because it seems to make them happy. It’s all about the illusion of control, I guess.)

“Sure, yep. I can do that,” Rose says. And that’s exactly what we do.

0

Found Art of the Day

By
Tom OHare
– February 17, 2012

In a book about the craft of writing:

“On this particular occasion, writing helped sort out my life. I was in an awkward stage in my life and i was on the verge of a break down. A friend of mine told me that writing can sometimes help you sort out thoughts, get emotions off your chest and pretty much just let you clear your mind and focus on the problems that matter. In this case i was dealing with my parents divorce. It was a tough time for me and i began to struggle with work and life in general. I started to right in a journal. Just thoughts, how my day went, certain goals i wanted to achieve and all the personal problems i was experiencing. I found that once i got all the things on paper, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. I no longer had to stress about everything and was able to focus on work. While writing, i descovered that i wasn’t in the place in my life that i wanted to be. So over time i started making changes, doing things that made me happy instead of worrying about everything. Finally I decided to move out from where I was staying and chase the girl that i wanted. I moved back home and rekindled things with this girl and right then i knew i was back on track. Shortly after that i found a good job, and was able to do the things i wanted to. It felt good to have control of my life again because honestly I almost gave up.”

0

Blogging for Bucks

By
Trevor Macomber
– February 16, 2012

Because the real world sucks again, rather than make you wade through any of my usual half-assery, please open your mind portal to legendary VR hobgoblin Laron Lanier instead, as he tells you why we should all get paid for the innumerable word vomit we produce on a regular basis:

0

Chuck Klosterman is great at everything

By
Trevor Macomber
– January 20, 2012

Which is to say, he’s great at writing about everything. There is simply no topic that this guy can’t put his deliciously unique spin on if it catches his attention. To wit: this month-old Grantland column on Tim Tebow. Even if you would rather convert to Scientology than read about Tim Tebow again, and even though his dramatic narrative has declined rather precipitously since the column was originally published, Klosterman’s innate ability to connect Tebowmania with broader world issues while offering his usual display of uncanny armchair psychoanalysis makes the whole read worthwhile.

The briefest of snippets:

I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West. I’m sure a few hardcores might, but not many. However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume this assumption infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he’s so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to. Their negative belief is that penitent, conservative Americans look at Tebow and see a man being “rewarded” for his faith, which validates the idea that believing in something abstract is more important than understanding something real. And this makes them worried about the future, because they see that thinking everywhere. It seems like the thinking that ran this country into the ground.

0

Caitlin Flanagan v. Joan Didion

By
Tom OHare
– January 16, 2012

I read the much-hyped Caitlin Flanagan piece on Joan Didion the other day (someone linked it on Facebook, I forget who), and came away thinking, “God, this woman doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.” But I had shit to do, and didn’t have time to do a proper takedown. Suffice it to say, Didion is one of my favorite writers, and she’s a goddamn national treasure, which is considerably more than Flanagan will ever be.

So, here’s SEK explaining exactly what a pompous turd Flanagan is, since I was too lazy to do it.

Update: While we’re shitting on Flanagan, here’s a review of her new book. It is scathing.

Update 2: It was Ben who put it on Facebook.

0

Book of the Moment: Updated

By
Trevor Macomber
– November 4, 2011

Currently listening to an audio version of Vonnegut’s Armageddon in Retrospect – awesomely narrated by Rip Torn, incidentally — and I’ve gotta say, even without Rip’s amazingly raw and quavery voice, my awe at Vonnegut’s ability to distill even the most awful atrocities down to their putrid, beautiful essence has increased yet again. His first essay (not including the intro) about surviving the firebombing of Dresden is so horrifically compelling at times, I had to actively remind myself that I was still driving along a major thoroughfare — so easily was I sucked into the telling.

More to come tomorrow — including excerpts from a posthumously delivered commencement speech that I rank right up there with David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Speech. Damn, dude could deliver lines. (Vonnegut, I mean — but obviously DFW, too.)

***

UPDATED 11/4/11: Finally found a transcript of the aforementioned speech, which Vonnegut wrote just two weeks before his death and which subsequently had to be delivered by his son Mark as part of a series of events held to honour his father in his home city.

I won’t steal anyone’s thunder by quoting the entire thing (it’s rather long), but a few good chunks wouldn’t go amiss…

Kurt Vonnegut at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27, 2007

Listen, I studied Anthropology at the University of Chicago after the Second World War, the last one we ever won. And the physical anthropologists, who had studied human skulls going back thousands of years, said we were only supposed to live for thirty-five years or so because that’s how long our teeth lasted without modern dentistry. Weren’t those the good old days? Thirty-five years and we were out of here! Talk about intelligent design! Now all the Baby Boomers who can afford dentistry and health insurance—poor bastards—are going to live to be a hundred. Maybe we should outlaw dentistry. And maybe doctors should quit curing pneumonia, which used to be called “the old people’s friend.”

[...]

And there is certainly nothing new about a tragically and ferociously divided United States of America. And especially here in my native state of Indiana. When I was a kid here, this state had within its borders the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan and the site of the last lynching of an African-American citizen north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Marion, I think. But it also had and still has in Terre Haute, which now boasts a state-of-the-art lethal injection facility, the birthplace and home of the labor leader Eugene Debs. He lived from 1855 to 1926 and led a nation-wide strike against the railroads. He went to prison for a while because he opposed our entry into World War I. And he ran for president several times on the Socialist Party ticket, saying things like this: “While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs pretty much stole that from Jesus Christ, but it is so hard to be original. Tell me about it.

[...]

But seriously, my fellow Hoosiers, there’s good news and bad news tonight. This is the best of times and the worst of times. So what else is new? The bad news is that the Martians have landed in Manhattan and have checked in at the Waldorf Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless people of all colors, and they pee gasoline.

Am I religious? I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves Our Lady of Perpetual Consternation. We are as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy. Actually, and when I hold up my right hand like this, it means I’m not kidding, that I give my word of honor that what I’m about to say is true. So actually, I am Honorary President of the American Humanists Society, having succeeded the late great science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, in that utterly functionless capacity. We humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectations of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. We don’t fear death, and neither should you. You know what Socrates said about death, in Greek of course? “Death is just one more night.”

[...]

Does this old poop have any advice for young people in times of such awful trouble? Well, I’m sure you know that our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has a death penalty and torture chambers. I mean, why screw around? But listen, if anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal injection facility, maybe the one in Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: “This will certainly teach me a lesson.” If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time: His ideas are just too liberal.

My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

[...]

And I think maybe we might be wise to stop bad-mouthing Communism so much. Not because we think it’s a bad idea but because our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now in hock up to their eyeballs to the communist Chinese! And the Chinese communists also have a big and superbly equipped army, something we don’t have. We’re too cheap! We just want to nuke everybody.

[...]

You want to know something the great French writer Jean-Paul Sartre said one time? He said it in French of course: “Hell is other people.” He refused to accept a Nobel Prize. I could never be that rude. I was raised right by our African-American cook, whose name was Ida Young. During the Great Depression, African-American citizens were heard to say this, along with a lot of other stuff of course: “Things are so bad, white folks got to raise their own kids.”

[...]

The very best thing in life you can be is a teacher, provided you are in love with what you teach and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one.

[...]

I consider anybody who borrows a book instead of buying it, or lends one, a twerp. When I was a student at Shortridge High School a million years ago, a twerp was defined as a guy who put a set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the backseats of taxi cabs. But I hasten to say, should some impressionable young person here today, at loose ends or from a dysfunctional family, resolve to take a shot at being a real twerp tomorrow, that there are no longer buttons on the backseats of taxi cabs. Times change.

I asked Mark a while back what life was all about since I didn’t have a clue. He said, “Dad, we’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” Whatever it is. Whatever it is! Not bad. That one could be a keeper. And how should we behave during this apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another certainly, but we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog if you don’t already have one. I myself just got a dog. It’s a new cross-breed. It’s half French poodle and half Chinese shitzu. It’s a “shit poo.” And I thank you for your attention. And I am outta here.

8

The Beginning is Near

By
Dark Sevier
– October 31, 2011
The Beginning is Near
I think I have End Times fatigue. Global thermonuclear annihilation, rogue meteors, swine flu, AIDS, alien invasion, magnetic pole shift, climate change, Y2K, 9/11, planet Nibiru, The Australian Jesus that looked like Mark Twain in a jean jacket, Economic Meltdown, etc. I’ve followed them all closely. It’s a family tradition that wasn’t supposed to be.
I don’t know what stressed my parents out more, The End being so close or The End not showing up. The more elusive the American Dream became for my parents, the more attractive The End became. When I was much younger, say four, God (speaking through my Dad) and my Dad both told me that we were in the tribulation, and the shit could be expected to hit the fan at any moment. In the interim, I was expected to not touch my penis, pursue a business degree, and keep my hair short. The notion of the apocalypse is a large part of what made it possible for me to live in a fundamentalist household. For those of you that have had actual relationships with fundamentalists, you know: The idea that their suffering through life could be shortened through divine destruction has an understandable appeal. It’s no fun being right all the time.
I’m over 40, I’m not a fundamentalist, and I’m not miserable enough to want the entire world to end just so I can stop pretending to be a good person and have my debt wiped. But still, I cannot get enough of the apocalyptic notions — especially when served up with conspiratorial zeal. Tasty. I feel compelled to engage in them. I’m addicted to the high that the specter of doom provides. Just a little suspension of disbelief, and BOOM — aliens could be living among us, but as trans-dimensional algorithmic forces engaged in the hijacking of the human narrative in order to steer us into a side gig of creating an artificial life form for them to mate with and spawn the next big thing in Life. Or somesuch.

The conspiracy threads on the web often entertain me far more than the bland, rehashed, blockbuster narratives of the broader culture. If we agree that truth is stranger than fiction, and say the most extreme conspiracy/doomsday stories are fiction, then that just makes life even more interesting, as far as I’m concerned. I see it as our modern mythology. Metadata. A conspiracy/doomsday story, true or invented, will only live and grow if it appeals to the kind of anxiety that we are addicted to as a culture.

It’s natural for people who feel powerless in their lives to be prone to the doom-adrenal fix . Sudden, immanent annihilation of the status quo can be seen as a beacon of hope to people with lots of credit card debt and hateful spouses. “I feel powerless to change the circumstances of my life, so, please, can we just get this over with? Jesus…” The prospect of extinction can become favorable to the onus of reclaiming personal sovereignty, or even just continuing on. I can see lust flash in the eyes of the true believers as they enthuse about the Apocalypse. I think the apocalyptic fetish of our culture comes largely from a national sense of powerlessness and hopelessness.We were raised on a stress-inducing diet of dueling doomsdays, economic boom and bust, energy scarcity, Them against Us — forever! (…Er, until the apocalypse.) The specter of Doom spikes fight-or-flight adrenaline, and our eyes widen and while we get high on worst case scenarios. A thrill here and there is nice, but it’s become a chronic condition in vast numbers of the modern world. And that’s not healthy.Prolonged stress can be very hard on a human. It clogs arteries. It’s been shown to actually gnaw at the nubs of ones chromosomes and fray the ends like an old shoestring. Stressed humans are not as effective as unstressed ones. Stressed people are more prone to violence and illness. Meanwhile, we have become addicted to our media prescribed stress. We’re hooked on fear- the MSG in our media diet. We wouldn’t eat the nightly news without it, not with the low content infotainment they serve up.We need 100% real journalism, at some point, for a healthy society to live and grow. A focus on collective human issues instead of the partisan cockfighting. The cocks like to fight, and they like us to watch and cheer them on. We like to watch, cheer, and support as a passion pacifier . Eventually, soon eventually, some one has to rise above the cockfight and point out to the spectators that the arena is on fire.

So, how do we make a break from the chronic stress we feel on a national and global level? What would ease our collective survival anxieties? Perhaps working on a pressure point to release some blocked energy? (Hello, Wall Street.)

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist from Stanford, studies the deadly effects of chronic stress in humans and other primates. Here he describes a moment in the day of a typical baboon colony hierarchy;

“You’ve got some big male that loses a fight , he chases a sub-adult, who bites an adult female, who slaps a juvenile, who knocks an infant out of a tree; all in 15 seconds. A huge component of stress is a lack of control, lack of predictability. You’re just sitting there watching a zebra, and somebody who is having a bad day comes along and it’s your rear end that’s gonna get slashed. It’s tremendously stressful for the folks further down on the hierarchy.”

A Baboon colony that he had been studying in the wild for a number of years suffered a tragedy that yielded a provocative finding. The colony came across an abandoned camp and rummaged through the rubbish. When meat was discovered, the most aggressive alphas, the source of the stress that trickles down through the colony, took it all for themselves. It so happened that the alphas contacted a fatal illness from the meat and all died. The colony continued, sans abusive alpha class. Health improved, violence went down, prospects of longevity went up. As outsider males entered into this liberated colony, they were adjusted or rejected.

The events of one day dramatically altered the stress level, and well being, of a colony for generations after. They Occupied DoucheBaboon Street in the midst of a self created Alpha Male Meltdown. Having suddenly lost the stress of unpredictable hierarchical abuse, and feeling life without it, the colony of baboons was inspired to perpetuate it through regulation and enforcement.

In my experience, being proactive in civic and social life can serve to cure apocalyptic anxiety. We have an opportunity to have national dialogue beyond the arena of partisan politics. I think most will agree that there must be an intervention in the corporation/lobbyist/politics game. It’s an easy thing to rally around. There are solutions available. That hasn’t been the issue. The issue has been lack of participation in the governance of our nation by the best and brightest members of our society. The Fat Cats have thoroughly dominated our political sandbox with their buried offerings, so that any one who jumps in to earnestly shape solutions runs into shit. What decent person wants to jump into a sandbox full of shit? It’s too big for one personality to handle cleaning out. We all have to get our hands a little dirty on this one.

We need our system of representation gutted and retrofitted before it will have the integrity to effectively reflect the will of the people now clamoring for attention. Mike Gravel’s proposal of a National Referendum should be dusted off. Everyone votes directly, bypassing the house and senate. Initiate the new and improved tamper-proof ballot process nation wide, put a muzzle on Wall Street with a public examination and auditing. Let sanity have a say in the matter.

The etymological roots of the word apocalypse are “revelation, disclosure, uncover”. The modern interpretation, “a cataclysmic event”, I think, applies to those that are invested in a concealment. As the scale of the corruption and collusion becomes more apparent, more and more of the population will have to face their personal responsibility in allowing the scam to have happened, or even their collusion in it. Our economic system has been ravaged. I think a certain level of shame is responsible for our not talking about it much until now; shame for having suffered the brutality, or shame for having profited from it. The people flowing into our streets in New York and elsewhere are an apocalyptic force, in that they are uncovering and revealing the truth of our condition. This is where the helpless are very helpful: coming down and showing up to sustain and support as the reality of the occasion percolates. They may not know why they are there, but they feel why. It would be a shame to remain shameful when the opportunity to reveal and heal comes on this scale.


The reality of our condition — as a country, a species, a planet — has been badly photoshopped, and edited far out of context. I don’t believe that the solutions for our collective well-being are as difficult and abstract as we are led to believe. The impotent alphas that need big stacks to compensate for the lack in their souls have the bullhorn and are writing the narrative. In that narrative we are all doomed without them. Without their guiding hand we will start having sex with donkeys and burning the elderly for winter heat (I suspect that that would not come to pass, though I concede that isolated instances could be inspired by the suggestion). We are due for a new narrative. We can pull out the hook and clear the stage of the hacks. The finiteness of the world has never been more apparent, and at the same time, blithely dismissed as an issue devoid of any real importance.The age of sustainability is dawning, casting long shadows of the dark age predators exiting the stage.Rats have chewed their way into the pantry, which isn’t surprising. Not bothering to patch the holes has compounded the misfortune. At this point they almost have us convinced that it is their pantry, and that they are busy working on fixing it up. We get the updates from the cockroaches that scurry under the blocked door. We neglected to notice that the cats we hired to patrol the scene were becoming fat, not with rats, but rat kickbacks from our stash. They stopped bringing us heads and gall bladders some time ago, and we were happy not to have to deal with the little messes.

As this recent movement swells, I believe that the already overstated rhetoric of apocalypse will grow as well. I’ll start: This is an apocalyptic event. The Occupiers are doing the revealing, what gets revealed behind the corporatist veil of Wall Street/Washington will be The End of something. We can be minion victims of the mighty corporate menace, or the producers of the show, willing to pull the plug of a vulgar and abusive segment.
0

Because Creative Work Is Its Own Reward?

By
Ben Nolan
– September 29, 2011

Sentimental, maybe, but I think it is.

Russell Smith in today’s Globe (& Mail).

 Why don’t creative young writers care if they get paid?

There now exists an entire generation of intelligent people who have grown up without any expectation of compensation for imaginative work. Ever since they were teenagers, they had clever thoughts, they posted them online, people reacted immediately. They take a photo, they upload it right away; they don’t even try to sell it. Somehow, they know, money will come in from another source. They can get famous fast this way, and it’s gratifying to have a huge audience.

Furthermore, they can write about, or film, whatever they want, and that’s very attractive. They never have to prove themselves by chasing down police radio calls on the night shift, or by writing a dozen numbing profiles on local hair-salon owners. They can go right into wise observations on Iraq and gender roles.

It’s true. The idea of planning to being paid for imaginative expression is remarkably like the idea of planning to win the lottery. And it’s not like we have other jobs to go to. And writing stuff is fun.

Oscar would likely point out that this whole argument’d be moot if only we grew up as a society, and leveraged our technology to actually free ourselves as a society (as opposed to as plutocrats) from labour for the sake of the kind of individualistic “imaginative” “creative” “whatever” work he’s talking about:

Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

Farhad Manjoo’d likely point out that the argument will soon be moot since the young people glutting the talent supply will soon be glutted out by the robots:

But this time could be different. Artificial intelligence machines are getting so good, so quickly, that they’re poised to replace humans across a wide range of industries. In the next decade, we’ll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we’d never suspected possible—they’ll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one. Economic theory holds that as these industries are revolutionized by technology, prices for their services will decline, and society as a whole will benefit. As I conducted my research, I found this argument convincing—robotic lawyers, for instance, will bring cheap legal services to the masses who can’t afford lawyers today. But there’s a dark side, too: Imagine you’ve spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner—and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?

Dramatization.

Cormac McCarthy’d likely point out that this whole argument will be mooted when the environmental crisis turns catastrophic, global food and energy economies collapse, and everyone starts nuking each other. In his (lead character from the Road’s) words…

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.

Page 1 of 3123