Analogs

A curious thing began to happen in the 1970’s and 80’s. A new creature emerged from the primordial soup of intellectual evolution, a creature destined to dominate the future development of that soup, reshaping the thought-environment in new and unexpected ways, while virtually annihilating its predecessor. The creature I’m referring to, of course, is Digital Technology. You see, in the creation or reproduction of waves (generally sound waves at that point), people had always relied on the principle of analog reproduction, which maintained the smooth shape of the sound wave, preserved the curve, so to speak. Ye olde dinosaur Vinyl Record was one of the last true species of Analogosaur, except for the rugged survivor the Film Camera.

When Digitalus Erectus showed up on the turf, with its ability to store vast amounts of information in a small space, it multiplied so rapidly and easily that its evolutionary advantages made a rational mockery of the analog systems (consider the ease of copying a tape, or a CD, compared to copying a vinyl record). And yet, with all such dramatic evolutionary changes, so much that was beautiful is lost... must cold, heartless reason always govern evolution, or can aesthetics, can beauty have a say as well?

And just what is lost under the reign of the digital paradigm, you ask?

Allow me to explain.

The digital transfers its information, its sound, or its image by dividing it up into little blocks, little pixels, rather than transferring it in a direct representation of its original, curvy self. So if we look closely at the digital image, listen closely to the digital song, we see blocks and corners, blocks and corners. The audacious Etch-a-Sketch of Progress has carved right angles into the sumptuous curves of the Grand Design, and much of the integrity of analogy (some would argue) has been lost in cutting those corners.

When we think of using words to communicate our thoughts, for example, we’re tempted to think that the transfer of information, the exchange of ideas, takes place solely in the words. However, particularly with some of the more muttish languages like English, a great many words have three or four, or more, meanings, and can mean entirely different things in different contexts. Some words, like “so,” for instance, don’t even have any meaning on their own. “So” is completely reliant on context, on its relationship with other words: “I have so much time,” or “I can take only so much”; “and so,” “like so,” and so forth.

You get the picture.

Words, like little digital blocks of info, don’t carry the entirety of the meaning, then, do they? Ah no, Great Etch-a-Sketch! The music lies in between the words, in the lyrical spaces wherein dwell the Goddesses Intention and Context. When we focus too much on the discrete particles, on the isolatable pixels, we lose the transliteral, we lose the curves that bring the contours of Beauty to the communication of ideas. When we focus on the digits, we grow deaf to the Divine Whispers in the interstices.


Where am I going with all of this?  Ever toward the Mystery.  Living is a dance, yes a dance that requires music and image.  The little blocks of meaning and consequence we pick out of the pixellated landscape of Time cannot hold the pattern that ties us all together, step by step.  It is the steady stream of Consciousness, the mysterious flow of relationship, that allows us to dance, to write poetry, to make art, to LOVE.  And I would argue-- I have experienced-- that all manner of communication can happen in those spaces between.  One might call it telepathy, or psychic abilities, but I believe it is only the organic ability to transpose the sibilant curves of life-energy into understandable information.  Before, that is, the digital Left Brain, with its almost compulsive insistence on linear cause and effect (blocks and corners, blocks and corners) pulls out the pixels and mistakes them for the picture.

Don't get me wrong, the Left Brain is almost half of the whole; the Etch-a-Sketch must have a say as well.  But, whatever else I may be, I am a poet.  Let me draw my tongue along the curvy lines of Life.  Let me not get so stuck on single moments, single words, single acts, but dance the vibrant timelessness between.

Who's with me?

American Imperialism is Catching Fire: an Analysis of the Hunger Games Trilogy

I recently watched Catching Fire, the film production of the second book in Suzanne Collins' riveting Hunger Games trilogy.  I had high hopes for this film, as I found the first one to be a stunning manifestation of the grim world of the Capitol and the indentured Districts.  I was not disappointed.

I feel the need to say a few things about the film itself, such as the usual praise: the continued fine performances of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss and Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, the superb casting of new characters, like Jena Malone as Johana Mason, Jeffrey Wright as Beetee, and Sam Claflin as Finnick Odair, all of whom perform beautifully.  Stanley Tucci again proves himself one of the most skilled actors of the age with his incarnation of Caesar Flickerman.  The visual effects, the costuming, on and on.

But watch the film for yourself and make your own evaluations based on your own tastes.  I'd rather talk here about the story itself, about the world of Panem, because I think Suzanne Collins deserves a closer look at what she's done.  And for those of you who have thus far condescended to read the series because it looks like young adult fiction, another coming of age, or coming into her power narrative, I challenge you to look again.

The nation of Panem, perhaps a linguistic derivation of "Pan-am" or "Pan America," is a futuristic world in which the fabulously wealthy and technologically superior Captiol, nestled in the Rocky Mountains, rigidly controls the outlying twelve Districts, the citizens of whom live in poverty behind electric fences under martial law.  As explained in the the first book and film of the series, each year the Districts must suffer the Reaping, in which two of their children are chosen at random to compete to the death, gladiator-style, in the Capitol's favorite sporting event, the Hunger Games.  This event is a constant reminder of the Districts' failed revolution attempt 75 years prior, and of the overwhelming might of the Capitol.

In Catching Fire, the second book and film, we get to see more of the culture of the Capitol, in which fashion is everything, the citizens vacuously follow the publicly televised narratives and lavishly indulge their every luxury, either unaware or unconcerned that their own wealth is bought at the expense of the Districts subservience. In the books, Collins hints, through beautifully rich characters like Effie Trinket, that the Capitol citizens whose awareness brushes that harsh truth excuse it quickly as a just consequence of the old Rebellion.  In Catching Fire, we also get to see the Ball at the Presidential Palace, the opulent event that culminates the Victor's Tour.  At the Ball, Katniss and Peeta, both of whom grew up in severe poverty and near starvation, witness a Saturnalia kind of excess at which cocktails are served that instigate vomiting so that guests may continue to eat and sample the full array of dishes.  Saturnalia, if you're not up to snuff on European history, were Roman celebrations of luxury and excess at which feasters would do the same.  Collins makes frequent other references to Rome by means of the character names of Capitol citizens, like Flavius, Octavia, and Plutarch, the current Game-master played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

But let's not get too distracted by allusions to that classical paragon of imperialistic might and hubris.  This series can be as much a commentary on the American Empire of right now as the Roman Empire of posterity.  When I read Collins' novels, and when I watch these films, emerging as powerful mouthpieces for more-than-ever-needed self-reflection, I see an increasingly vacuous and selectively ignorant American public glued screen-to-eyeball to "Reality TV" shows, to Ultimate Fighting tournaments and to Call of Duty first-person shooter games.  I see an American marketplace so awash in fashion and appearance that, on the whole, we are either unaware or unconcerned that our vast selection of apparel comes out of District factories in Bangladesh and Guatemala, made by workers who get paid less than two dollars a day and few other options thanks to "Free Trade" agreements.  And most horrifying of all, I see an American foreign policy predicated on martially enforcing economic interests in the oil-producing Districts around the world, like Iraq and Nigeria.  Should any be so brazen as to withhold their resources from our market shares, American Peacekeepers will shortly be arriving at their borders.  How long before reality TV gives us live footage of foreign battlefields and opportunities to gamble on the outcomes?

Of course, the parallels only go so far.  Even as I see American Imperialism in the Panem of Suzanne Collins' trilogy, I also know that, more than ever before, citizens of the Capitol are waking up to these truths.  More than ever, we are investigating drone warfare and the grave implications of a vast Defense establishment coupled with an arms industry motivated solely by profit.  More than ever, Americans are attentive to and critical of the so-called Free Trade practices that have crippled and indentured other nations around the world.  (If you want to research this for yourself, by the way, I recommend reading up on the history of family-owned sugar cane plantations in Brazil over the last century.)  I really want to believe that readers (and viewers) of the Hunger Games trilogy see these connections, but I'm afraid that too many see the Capitol only in the much-villified One Percent , and not nearly enough in their own Roman excess and roaming attention spans. 

Even so, I am hopeful.  Collins, in the highest use of science fiction, as social commentary, has given us much to consider and a possible future against which to measure our present course.  It is up to you and me, Fellow Citizen, to watch closely, to think carefully, and to use our vast resources for something more than Empire.

The Phoenix

The Phoenix speaks to me through signs and happenstance—

like all good spirits do—through strangers’ words in passing,

increasing frequent emblems sidling through my glance.

“Do you really want to burn?” he asked, out-gassing

in a moment when my ego-mountain reared and rolled,

reminding me how much I still do care when former friends

judge and criticize my motives—so I’m told,

friends I’d have thought would know my heart and share my ends. 

But my ego-mountain, says the Phoenix, is volcanic,

filled with fire, destined, like Saint Hel’n, to blow her top.

Not much help, when my inner Pleaser starts to panic,

and shame informs me that my rhymescheme has to stop—

It’s not your business, says he, what others think 

of you, you must know this first, 

before any talk of death, rebirth or fire.

Your ego-mountain is a molehill, little man,

though crucial (like a cross), to understand desire,

to know who you are NOT, with all the masks you hold

before your soul to shape and mold perceptions rather

than let your spark be seen for what it is—

a singularity, infinitely hot and dense

from which escapes no light or sense

that prods each nodding ending to begin

and warms awaiting universes poised within.

“Do you really want to burn?” he says again.

“Once burnt, you cannot live in blissful ignorance,

cannot ignore the duty, debt or ken.

The path of fire is no easy, lazy dance.”

The question hangs like dawn and greets my everyday,

even as I reassemble sense and rhymescheme,

that Phoenix animates each step along my Way,

ignites whatever else it is that I may dream.

On Labor Unions, Militias, and Big Govern-business

Maybe I’m missing something.  It could be that I simply don’t understand, in a comprehensive way, the complex relations between government and commerce, between the ethics of the personal human conscience and the inhibitions enforced by legal mandate.  But even so, I see some patterns that I can’t help but point out.

For example, I often find myself, as a natural converser with people, meandering into conversations about politics, the economy, regulation, and so forth.  Such conversations are, of course, treacherous territory in modern America.  I was raised largely by Texans and Southerners and was often told never to talk about religion or politics.  Apparently those subjects are too emotionally charged to be included in genteel discourse.  But those particular subjects happen to be my very favorite, so they always seem to come up when I’m around.  Of course, in broaching those topics, especially politics, and especially insofar as politics relates to the economy, one immediately runs the risk of being branded either with the ominous epithet “Liberal,” or still more ominous “Conservative.”  Generally, I cheerfully run the risk and talk to people, and emotions get charged, and then I get to practice my conflict resolution skills, another hobby of mine.

Here’s the example I was making: When I do talk politics and economy with people, I often find that those who brand themselves “Conservative” hold great contempt for both labor unions and the government regulation of trade, indoctrinated into those opinions, I think, largely by that Great American and Friend of Freedom Rupert Murdoch.

And here’s where I scratch my head.  When I think about free market capitalism, which I’ve spent a modest amount of time doing, I humbly submit, it seems to me very akin to anarchy.  In Wealth of Nations, that great anarchist Adam Smith argues that it is simply the nature of competition that, in the end, the people will vote with their pocketbooks and the businesses that best supply the community’s needs will be the ones that prevail.  As long as government keeps its dirty hands out of it, that is.  It’s an interesting argument, and the Industrial Revolution has provided us with ample evidence for exactly how often the unhampered wealthy have been forced by competition to act in the best interests of the community.  (Only slightly less often than unhampered dictators have, which is to say, almost never).  And even more to the point, when I hear people argue that free market capitalism will take care of itself if the damned Big Government just quit regulating and let it do its Thing, I usually ask this question:  Do you believe in Anarchy too?  Do you believe that, if there were no laws, people would eventually do the right thing on their own?  That the powerful would never take advantage of the less powerful for their own gain?  I don’t often get an affirmation of that one.  Ironically, most anarchists I know are also dead opposed to free market capitalism.  Go figure.

Here’s another thing that I find befuddling.  A lot of zealots in the Church of Rupert Murdoch these days have been singing rabid hymns against the labor unions.  Again, maybe I’m just confused and don’t really understand these relationships, but it seems to me that if government regulation of trade is objectionable, that it places too much power and too many resources in the hands of a government that the Common Folk don’t have a lot of control over, then somebody needs to be around to keep hounding the big corporations.  Somebody needs to be organized enough to be investigating the board room decisions and clandestine behaviors of the big businesses that have such an enormous impact on the world.  If unions shouldn’t do this, and government shouldn’t do this, then who?  The clever, well-informed and level-headed American consumer?

More and more I think of big business like government.  In fact, I think that, in every real sense, the massive multinational corporations that drive our debt-based, fractional-banking, petroleum-dependent Cardhouse Economy hold most of the political power in the world.  As we saw with the Bailout in 2008, expecting the government to regulate unethical business practices is like expecting a standing army to keep an eye on the weapons manufacturing business, in case it gets too extravagant.  And if government regulation of business is akin to a standing army, then I think labor unions are kind of akin to militia groups.

Very few people these days really pay much attention to the history of the conversations around standing armies in this country.  In fact, very few people even know that the U.S never had a standing army at all until after World War 2.  President James Madison considered a standing army one of the greatest threats to liberty.  “The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home…The armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.”  And so it was throughout much of the first 200 years of this country’s history that the arguments against maintaining a standing army always prevailed.  That is, of course, why the Second Amendment was so important as well.  A standing army, argued the Framers, allowed a small number of people to command too much brute force.  Even through World War 1, this argument was maintained, and when the nation’s leaders decided to go to war, they drafted and trained troops then.

Hitler changed all of that, of course, that rascal.  He and Mr. Hirohito and Il Duce all made having an “ever-vigilant” standing army look like a good idea, which the weapons manufacturers naturally encouraged.  Standing army plus private arms industry equals lots of sales on guns and tanks and other fun toys.  But even as Eisenhower, on his way out of the White House door commented on the necessity of having a “defense establishment of vast proportions,” he also said famously, “we must not fail to understand its grave implications.”  Thus did he coin the term “Military Industrial Complex,” and thus did big business and government start sleeping together with a standing army as the bedsprings.  Sure, you could go back further than that to Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve Act, or to J.P Morgan before that, but my point is, the squeaky bed of the Military-Industrial Complex reveals a much deeper sort of affair

That is to say, if Big Business is in bed with Big Government, then labor unions are one of the last protections that workers have.  Sure, we need to keep an eye on the ways that Unions have become like big Businesses themselves.  And sure, we need to be vigilant about those unions, especially the public employee unions, having too much influence in government spending.  But the American public needs to be vigilant about everything right now, and this vacuous idea that somehow big business is more trustworthy to keep the public’s best interests in mind than labor unions or elected officials is pretty preposterous to me.

And finally, I want to know what the hell happened since the last McCarthy-era Red Scare that made capitalism synonymous with democracy, when the international business conglomerates that dominate trade are looking more like empires than ever.  There seems to be a concerted effort to keep these kinds of questions out of our schools, out of our public debates, and even out of newspapers with any kind of circulation.  Am I really missing something?  

Maybe it's intelligent conversation...

Uncomfortable Truth: We Live in a Culture of Violence

It’s time we face some uncomfortable truths.  Last Friday, as the news poured in about Sandy Hook, I was teaching my peace studies class with my high-schoolers.  It’s a class which investigates the roots of violence and war on personal, as well as international levels (if that doesn’t sound important to you this week, I’ve got some questions for you.)  When I heard that those gunned down were largely 1^st graders, I lost it.  I’m a dad.  All children are my children.  And while those with the nation-wide microphones begin clamoring for answers and causes, responses and policies, oversimplifying the problem to gun control, or mental illness, I say we need to look with broader eyes at our culture.

In America, we have the blissful luxury of pretending we’re somehow different from the rest of the world.  Call it American exceptionalism if you like, the notion that somehow we don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else; call it a sort of national Peter Pan Syndrome; or perhaps you prefer Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra—the idea that our simulations of reality have more meaning than reality itself. (Think “reality TV”).  Whatever we call it, it’s time we face some uncomfortable truths. 

TRUTH:  Children die.  Around the world, kids get gunned down every day.  They get killed during drone attacks on wedding parties in Pakistan.  They get hit by Israeli airstrikes taking out Palestinian batteries that were set up in schools.  They get forced at gunpoint to shoot family members to make them child soldiers.  It’s brutal, it sucks, and most Americans, if they hear about these things at all, might think “that’s brutal and it sucks,” but don’t take the time to put themselves in the place of those parents, or get pictures of the children’s faces to make it real.  And if we can ignore that reality, we will, because it’s brutal and it sucks.

TRUTH:  Our culture is obsessed with violence.  Consider cage matches, Call of Duty, snuff footage on the internet, a century-long foreign policy that thinks it appropriate to bully other countries with military force into doing what we want them to.  We are a nation of children with guns, given only the tool and driven by a foolish fuse to use it for a powder-flash of power that ignores the hour of consequence.  People like this guy in Newtown, or that guy in Aurora, or those boys at Columbine, or this kid over in Thurston (I won’t say their names)—they’re just acting out a national drama.  Feeling powerless, they’re trying to find power in the only way our culture appears to respect.  And until we can work on consciously evolving our cultural definition of power, we’re stuck in what Gandhi called the “law of the brute.”

TRUTH:  It’s a male thing.  The simple fact is that it’s not women who do these things.  Sure, we occasionally see a Squeaky Fromm or a Nannie Doss, but overwhelmingly it’s men who respond to conflict with brute force, who launch the missiles or pick up the assault rifles and go for a shooting spree.  As a man, I refuse to believe that there’s something inherently violent about testosterone, though I could be fooling myself.  I do, however, think we’re facing an epic crisis in masculinity.  If we cannot figure out, as men, how to evolve past that “meet you at the flag pole after school with our patriot missiles,” mentality, then putting an armed security guard at the door of every school in America will not prevent the next Sandy Hook.  The problem is not a lack of adequate defenses.  It’s a lack of adequate consciousness.

I wish I had better answers—I wish I had any answers.   Speaking as someone who has spent the last ten years trying to create educational models that reduce violence and teach kids peaceful ways of being, all I have are suggestions:

1)      Pay attention to how you speak to other people—especially your kids.  Do you use your words to dominate, manipulate or belittle?

2)      Pay attention to what you and your kids watch on TV or play on their Xboxes.  There are clear relationships between violent video games, saturation of violent images and a desensitization to violence in life.  What entertains us reveals a lot about what’s going on inside of us.

3)      Pay attention to how we create culture.  About 75% of our State standards for teaching history in high school highlight some war or another.  Is this because war really is the dominant force in history or because that’s what we’re taught to focus on?  Eisenhower didn’t coin the term “military-industrial complex” to be cute.

You might notice that all three of these suggestions start with paying attention.  If human beings really are conscious creatures, which I sometimes doubt when cynicism gets the better of me, then we are responsible for living and developing consciously.   That’s why I work in education, which is not about teaching Stuff, but in helping kids figure out how to ask the right questions.  And asking the right questions invariably requires us to face uncomfortable truths.

Flow

How often do angelic spirits speak through the mouths of passing strangers?  How often does the very wisdom we seek spill off the tongue of some random we pause to trade casual words with?  

Today I spoke with a stranger at the Y, who asked about my Aikido weapons, and after a brief exchange about Aikdo’s principles, harmony and energy, we quickly launched into the metaphysics of purpose.  Here was a sixty year-old man, living in “a broken down van,” who had given up a job at a nursing home because it was “oppressive.”  Having studied yoga and herbalism and alchemy for years, he was struggling to find his path.  “Where is the place for me in this world?’ he asked.  “How can I share my gifts and still make a living?”

Dazed after a long and strenuous day, I found myself in a bit of a trance, speaking to him of bliss.  “Money is simply a form of currency,” I told him, “of energy.  When we are living out our truth, living our bliss, we keep the energy of life flowing and we are provided for.  We have to trust that.”  I spoke passionately and firmly, and I can’t be sure the words were mine.  

He got excited, and said: “Yes that’s it!  Maybe what’s holding me back is that I’ve only put one foot in that flow, and I just need to put both feet in.”

“Leap, they say, and the net will appear.”

His smile was radiant.  “Thanks for the reminder!”

And yet it was he who reminded me.

It never ceases to amaze me how many things come out of my own mouth that I struggle to hear.  If someone else had spoken those very words to me in that moment, I would have said "thanks for the reminder!" and smiled radiantly.  How humbling and beautiful to remember that we all carry tiny fragments of the great Wisdom of Consciousness, and often all we have to do is listen to ourselves.

And, of course, stay open to the wise radiance of strangers asking the right questions.

Winter Solstice 2011

It is the Long Night, the heart of Winter, and the remoteness of the sun allows the shadows to rest more heavily on our minds. The shadows that whisper things like “hope is lost,” or, “life sucks,” or simply blur our sight to show the obvious flaws of our friends and loved ones. For countless centuries our ancestors have honored this Long Night with candles, and song, and the dogged love of green things, to remind us that, even when the Dark seems thick enough to pet, there is Light. There are children to be loved and tousled; there is music to be voiced; there is the memory and the anticipation and the presence of Warmth. In this Long Night it occurs to me that, if we can do nothing else, we can always breathe a Thank You: to Love, to Night, and to the forgiving Earth as She slowly swings around the corner and trudges once more toward Spring.