Things, arranged.

We all live in Plato’s cave now

Recall that in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the prisoners are shown shadows on the wall created by firelight and diffuse sunlight. These shadows are created by those who aim to distract and deceive. After a time, the prisoners accept that the images on the wall are reality itself.

Indeed, should one of the prisoners be freed and led into the true light of day above, they would be painfully blinded by the sun and desire to immediately return to the familiarity of the cave.

It doesn’t take much to see ourselves as those prisoners, gazing intently as we do at our mobile phones, tablets and computer screens, Facebooks, Twitters and Instagrams. It doesn’t require a huge leap of imagination to envision outselves as gaping cave dwellers as we switch from FOX to CNN to MSNBC to SNL to Oprah to HBO to NETFLIX and back again.

Our reality is the reality we consume for most of our waking life. It is a manufactured reality in the age of convergence where fiction, fact, fake news, entertainment, headlines, commercials, causes, spin and ratings all blur into one great miasma of non-stop images and sounds.

For me the most important aspect of Plato’s allegory is the notion that the prisoners actually prefer the shadows on the wall to reality. It is far less painful and far more entertaining.

What then should those of us do that are willing to endure the harsh sunlight in order to better ourselves in the long run? We will have to engage the parts of our minds that have been atrophied over time and by those who prefer we not think too much.

Critical thinking. Slow thinking. Dialectical reasoning. Semiotics: understanding the difference between a Sign and The Thing Itself. Recognizing who and what is to gain when a new shadow is presented to us in the cave. Seeking elusive objectivity. Resisting the urge to seek the lowest common denominator. Embracing complexity. Living with uncertainty and doubt. Denying extremism and polarization. Exalting learning. Valuing intelligence. Knowing reason.

These once lauded attributes are becoming rarities in the 21st century as more and more of our reality becomes digitized, pixelated, commercialized and profitized. I can attest to being a first hand witness to the extinction of whole mind thinking. For 12 years I taught in higher education as a tenured professor who always endeavored to inform every subject I presented to students with a caveat: develop the tools so that you can make up your own mind. In order to do that, develop a mind first. Learn how to think critically. Most of my students simply wanted to know what was on the test and how the material being presented would help them since employers never listed having a whole mind as a job requirement.

Thankfully, a small percentage of my students came to believe that thinking critically was important. Perhaps one day they will come and lead us out of the cave and into the sunlight. If it hurts too much and we need to crawl back inside, we can always return to our virtual reality and lose ourselves by spending too much time writing and reading articles online.

Fast Food May Days

 

On May 1 2018 some people decided to petrol bomb a McDonald’s in eastern Paris.

It was the 50th anniversary of the famous student May Day riots of 1968, which was a turning point for French cultural, political and economic thinking. The May Day events of 1968 were begun by students. Workers, unions and their supporters joined. President Charles De Gaulle fled the country, and when he returned he dissolved parliament and called for new elections.

It’s hard to say who burnt the McDonald’s. They wore masks and are called the “black bloc” by authorities. It’s doubftul students were involved, because most of them really like McDonald’s. Same with workers and union types. They eat at McDonald’s often.

The Paris riots were a level up in violence from May Day demonstrations past and those that took place in other parts of the world.

Why is the “black bloc” so angry at McDonald’s?

There is the symbolism of attacking a global capitalist enterprise that pays low wages and has no regard for the health, safety, culture or well being of the countries in which it chooses to open stores.

There is the resistance to the seemingly inevitable corporatization of the globe, where sameness and lowest common denominator goods, products and services come with a heavy dose of crassness and shallow profiteering.

There is the highlighting of the wage gap and working conditions of poor workers who increasingly feel like lifelong serfs.

However, the so-called “black bloc” seems to be less concerned with messaging and more interested in provocation. That’s what you do when you are an anarchist. You don’t actually want to promote anything, you just feel a deep passion for tearing things down.

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the poor of the world need events like May Day to remind us all that poverty, disaffection and dissilussionment are very real. Curiously, a watershed work on global poverty by Bourguignon and Morrison proposes that fewer people on earth live in “extreme poverty” than ever before in human history.

(Our World in Data: Global Extreme Povery by Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty)

Perhaps the May Days of out time are not about highlighting, resistance or symbolism. Perhaps they are about visibility. Perhaps they are about the deep human need to be acknowledged as existing. Perhaps the target of the petrol bombers on May 1 2018 was the singular, greedy eye of the a corporate cyclops, who obsessively counts its sheep and guards its cave with covetousness. Perhaps the petrol bombing was a kind of heated stake driven into the eye of this global cyclops. An act of literally “sticking it to The Man.”

As Norman Mailer wrote in his 1974 Esquire article on the graffitti phenomenon: “Perhaps that is the unheard echo of graffitti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apolcalypse less and less far away.”

(Test Pressing; Esquire magazine, March 1974 http://testpressing.org/2012/06/esquire-the-faith-of-graffiti-norman-mailer/ )

Did you know that the French name for the Big Mac is “Le Royal”? Did you know that the first two names McDonald’s tested for the Big Mac were “The Aristocrat” and “The Blue Ribbon Burger”?

Vive la revolution and one Happy Meal, please.

The Sameness of All Things

 

The date is February 4th, 2018.

The event is the National Football League championship gama, AKA The Super Bowl.

The moment is when a Dodge Ram advertisement airs during the broadcast.

The ad is a collage of images of the Dodge Ram truck, supported by the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his iconic speech about the nature of 'Greatness'.

The message is clear: The Dodge Ram truck is equivalent to an entire race striving to overcome incredible historical, political, social and judicial oppression by embracing personal greatness.

In this moment, the long and tragic road America has been traveling, where everything, everyone and every aspect of American life becomes a commodity reaches its final destination as a place where only the bottom line exists.

We, as a nation, now agree that everything is the same, and everything that is the same is also for sale.

Totalitariam regimes and empires of the past have been overt about their insistence that all that exists has some fealty to the dominant power structure. Rome, The Soviet Union, pre-capitalist China to name a few of the well known. To render unto Caesar what is Caesar was to acknowledge who really owned everything. To serve the state and the party was the patriotic duty of every Soviet citizen. To declare unwavering commitment to Chairman Mao and the Communist Party was to be an upright citizen.

Now, in early 21st century America, to accept that persons, bodies, lives, thoughts, politics, deeds, ideals, principles, beliefs, cultures and all else are indeed commoditites in service of profit and power is to be a patriotic American. 

All the faux hashtag "movements" that inundate our lives, all the identity politics and culture wars that inform our existence are simply the by-products of this commodification phenomenon. The most vivid example of this is those in Hollywood who have allowed themselves to be bought and sold as products now wearing a certain color or lapel pin to awards shows where their self-commodity narcissism is celebrated on television by America. 

The question now is: whence goeth a nation when everything has been sold?

I like Snowflakes

 

I have heard the rants. They all revolve around this central idea:

"This generation are a bunch of snowflakes. They think they are so special, so unique, so precious. It's sickening."

First of all, get your metaphors right. Snowflakes are in fact unique. That's just science.

Now, let's consider the source.

Every generation since the beginning of generations has blamed, vilified, dismissed and been disappointed by the next one.

The retreat into the faux wisdom of raging age is nothing more than self-loathing spewed outward when it finally overflows.

The so-called insights the aged purport to possess is often a manifestation of disappointment, a deflected blame that comes from realizing their own failures. 

Human beings are unique to this reality because they can dream, imagine, ruminate and consider abstract concepts. Often humans can make real the seemingly unrealistic. Yet on some level, there seems to remain a constant, consistent dissatisfaction with the ways things have turned out. 

Some revelations that have become cliches:

"It was better in my day."

"We knew what it was like to struggle."

"There's no more _______ anymore."

"Rock music is dead."

"This generation just doesn't get it."

The truth is, the generation before yours said this about you, and the generation before them said this about them, and so on, and so on, and so on.

What is behind the particular "snowflake" attack is a deep resentment towards a generation that may or may not be seeking an authentic individual human identity. This is combined with a supposition that this generation of proto-narcissists are particularly sensitive and vulnerable.

The snowflake is to be despised for attempting to define individualism on a fundamental level and for being aware of both themselves and the world around them. 

I am reminded of some other revelations that may now be cliches:

"America is about Individualism."

"E Pluribus Unum"

"Land of the free, home of the brave."

In order to be free, one must recognize themselves as individuals first. In order to be brave, one has to know what it is to empathize with something worth fighting for that belongs to the many.

In other words, one has to possess certain snowflake-like qualities.

If age and wisdom are so invaluable, then why is the world the way it is? The aged and the wise have their hands on the steering wheel of history, yet they careen into the unknown like carnival clowns, all the while their contorted faces turned to the back seat, spewing venom at the bemused kids.

Take a good look at yourself in the rear view, sage of sages, and just keep going. The snowflakes are right behind you.

 As The Who said, the kids are alright.

A Simple Proposition

A simple proposition as a contribution to the debate over whether a government should fund the arts.

Fundamental Human Needs:

1. Food and Water
2. Shelter and Clothing
3. Endeavors and the Arts

Food and Water because we cannot live without them.

Shelter and Clothing because we cannot thrive without them.

Endeavors because we are conscious and physically inclined to consider, build, make and do.

The Arts because they make meaning out of endeavors, clothing, shelter, water and food.

Without MEANING, there is no reason for anything else.

Simple.

Tennessee

About half way between Nashville and Memphis on Interstate 40, there is a strange quiet when you get away from the all-the-same-across-the-country main highway exits. The exits clustered with the uniquely American blight of convenience stores, gas station-marts, fast food, motels and sad little chain restaurants. 

It's here that you realize you are standing at the intersection of the Blues and Country music. Nashville is the white person's mecca of twang and Memphis is the black person's temple of bent notes. Somewhere in this place the two blend together and yet remain far apart. The Blues has always been about the Troubled Life. Country music has always been about the Simple Life.

Two American histories, two uniquely American music styles. Tennessee is also where the northernmost part of the Old South meets the southern part of the Great North. It is a special kind of crossroads.

It's also a place where you hear an interesting political identity, one that sort of symbolizes the opposing forces that make up the Volunteer State:

"Yep, I hear ya. That Trump is a no good sonofabitch, to be sure. But I tell you what...If I said it once, I said it a thousand times...this country sure as hell didn't need no Hillary goddamn Clinton, either."

A crossroads, to be sure. One isolated conversation overheard at a gas station, to be sure. However, this might be symbolic of  how for many uncommitted voters the choice came down to a perceived lesser of two evils. County music and the Blues co-mingle and co-exist gracefully here in the Tennessee countryside, and the southern pride of the Volunteers is blended with a hard nosed norther pragmatism.

Yet these folks, like so many Americans, found themselves between a flinty rock and a sharp hard place in 2016 and still don't know how to reconcile that fact. 

The Square is Red

I teach classes in at the University of Washington School of Drama about 300 yards from where a shooting occurred last week during a campus speech delivered by a guest of the University of Washington College Republicans. Red Square is a bricked over field which was the site of a temporary U.S. government building durng the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. It was covered with red bricks in 1969, just in time for the mass student protests that would take place in opposition to the Vietnam War.

After the now infamous incident, the issue of "Free Speech" has become the political football. The positions are well-defined and over-stated daily, both on campus and nationally. Speaking controversially is protected speech, censorship of any kind is un-American. Incitement, dog-whistle politics and Hate Speech are not Free Speech. The battle lines are drawn. In the midst of this, there are guns. Plenty of guns, even though the University of Washington has a no firearms policy. As a professor I have to live with the fact that I may be lecturing to students who may be carrying firearms. That is the world in which I now live. Talk about your "trigger warnings."

Free Speech. A hallmark of our democracy. A fundamental right. The guarantee that opinion and diverse points of view will not be censored in our republic. I recall the old question: does freedom of speech give one the right to yell "fire!" in a public place when there is no fire? How does the well being of the many intersect with the rights of the few, or the one?

Perhaps you've seen the bumper stickers: FREEDOM ISN'T FREE. This is one way some express their support for American military interventions abroad: there is a cost to safeguarding the freedoms we enjoy.

If this is true, there should be an inherent responsibility in the nature and spirit of "free speech."

Getting a driver's license affords one the freedom of the road, but that freedom does not include the right to drive over pedestrians in a clearly marked crosswalk.  What if gun rights advocates agreed that responsible gun owenership, like responsible car ownership, was inherent in the right to bear arms? What if those who cloak themselves in the mantle of "free speech" agreed that such speech carries with it a responsibility due to those who will hear it?

This would require a move away from selfishness, stridency, absolutism and a narrow, reductionist view of the word "Freedom." Perhaps this is too much to ask of the average American citizen. It would ask one to view "freedom" as a privilege as well as a right, not as a bludgeon and a weapon.

In our time, we have learned to weaponize words to advance self-interests: Freedom, Truth, Rights, etc., and once these words become weaponized, then the shootings escalate accordingly.

So, the square is red.

The Rooster

"The rooster is the dawn announcer waking people up on time in the morning. Since the ancient times, it has been thought to have the ability of divining the future. Also in Greek mythology, it is said that the rooster can feel what will happen in the future. So, it is regarded as the god's ambassador."

• YourChineseAstrology.com

 Things that happened in 2016 that had little or nothing to do with the U.S. presidential clown show:

David Bowie died, but he was working on something called LAZARUS. That is cool.

Bombs kept going off and people kept getting shot all over the world, as has been happening since anyone can remember. We are numb to it all.

It was the International Year of Global Understanding. Really, now...

England voted to leave the European Union. That's a bit like your drunk uncle Bobby telling you he left the circus just before the tent collapsed.

Umberto Eco died. That is not cool.

Elie Wiesel died. The world lost its conscience.

Paris is still the city of light.

And we still await the awakening.

What would you ask the rooster? 

 

 

Babble Election Babble 2016

I have finally found the spokesman and the words to sum up my deep and seething loathing of this year's presidential election. Marilyn Manson.

To see our country fester and rot before one's eyes stirs emotions that are hard to express.

My mother and father came to America after losing their home country to civil war. They were true believers that despite the struggle, racism, hardship and unforgiving nature of American capitalism, there was something noble about the idea of the United States of America.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton personify the worst of what we can become: Trump, an egomaniacal narcissist who flouts ignorance and arrogance as ideals; and Clinton, a paranoid sociopath whose obsession with power and the oligarchy of her self-righteousness are symptoms of a disheartening trend: the decline of American democracy in the 21st century.

From the unrequited HOPE of 2008, to the nadir of 2016, the only question that remains is: how much farther will we fall?

Cue Mr. Manson:

Everything's been said before
Nothin' left to say anymore
When it's all the same
You can ask for it by name

Babble, Babble, Bitch, Bitch
Rebel, Rebel, Party, Party
Sex, sex, sex, don't forget the violence
Blah, blah, blah
Got your lovey-dovey sad and lonely
Stick your stupid slogan in
Everybody sing

Are you motherfuckers ready for the new shit?
Stand up and admit that tomorrow's never coming
This is the new shit
Stand up and admit

Do we get it? NO!
Do we want it? YEAH!
This is the new shit
Stand up and admit

The Crossing - A Short Video

The elaborate pedestrian social dance of urban Japan is a global marvel to behold.

In Tokyo, a combination of tradition, necessity (how do you move 30 million through a city with some level of efficiency?) social agreement and experience with living in close quarters has evolved to transform a simple street crossing into an adventure.

Watch the 60 second video:

If the YouTube link isn't working, here is a Vimeo URL: https://vimeo.com/176021363