June 2008 Archives
Ten minutes on June 17, 2008
For Father’s Day, I decided to stay in bed for a while and read The Economist and The Atlantic. My room has a huge window that looks out into the top of a big old tree with green green leaves, so I feel like I’m in a tree house sometimes. The day was gray, but promising; downstairs I can hear voices, the sounds of breakfast being made, the general chaos of children playing.
Two things immediately occurred to me. First, reading The Economist is like listening to someone who’s just traveled the globe, probably in business first class. This is not a stupid person, but it also isn’t someone who has much patience for perspectives outside the ‘realist’ political view that corporations and capitalism are here to stay, pretty much in their current shape, that Western governments make poor choices but are also the best hope for solving global conflicts, and that a fine-grained view of the internal political machinations of nations is useful. Second, looking at the ads for GE, Citi, Canon, Qatar, Shell, Emirates, Vanguard, the uses of such knowledge seem geared toward people who are interested in things like a reliable labor market, not workers, if you follow.
Given that, it was quite interesting to read:
In highlighting the improved conditions in Iraq, we do not mean to justify The Economist’s support of the invasion of 2003. Too many lives have been shattered for that. History will still record that the invasion and occupation have been a debacle.
Now this is the ending to an article that introduces a ‘briefing’ on how Iraq may be turning a corner. The cover story has an Iraqi man sitting in a small space fixing a traditional stringed instrument, rather like an oud. The cover proclaims, Iraq starts to fix itself. I want so much to imagine this man finishing his work, handing the beautiful handmade wooden instrument to a young Iraqi who will play the songs of a future Iraq, or a future landscape in which, perhaps, Iraq is no longer what we call this big square of land drawn by Western interests and ignorance.
As I read the article I am struck by a kind of double vision. The economy is growing, the government is afloat in tons of oil cash, death rates are down, a poll shows many Iraqis feel better about their future, al-Quaeda in Mesopotamia has supposedly been dealt a “near strategic defeat.” On the other hand, there is the Sadr militia, the implicit mistrust and conflict between Sadr and the government of Maliki, the conundrum of America protecting Iraqi borders while somehow not appearing to occupy the country or establish long long term military bases. The numbers in the article are like characters in themselves:
$70 billion (projected annual oil earnings this year, as in, one year)
12 million (cellular phones in use)
216, 000 (Iraqi internet users)
2.8 million (Iraqis displaced)
2.2 million (Iraqis fled abroad)
25-40% (the official unemployment rate/s)
22% to 4% (fall in share of US TV airtime devoted to Iraq war)
Notice: no real numbers on how many Americans or Iraqis actually died recently in the “better times” nor how many Americans are in the country, including not only strictly military personnel but also the legions of privatized contractors, consultants, advisers, and so on.
The effort to talk about how for the first time since the insurgency, the tide is shifting can be seen in this ending sentence: “But for the first time since the insurgency against the Americans took off, the tide, which may quickly ebb, is flowing in the direction of the new order.”
I took a deep breath and read on about the other areas of the world, and learned:
The Economist is worried that Wen Jiabao, “Grandpa Wen,” may not manage his “populist” leanings, and the ideological positions of pro and anti populist groups are represented.
Hong Kong is in the middle of a culture war pitting mandatory Cantonese in schools as the primary language (as it is the first language of most Hong Kong citizens, and of Southern China) against the teaching of “power and money” languages: English and putonghua, that is, Mandarin.
The foreign direct investment in Pakistani, and its national reserves, boomed in 2006-7, but are now going south, due to the Bhutto assassination, fertilizer prices, a crippling hailstorm, and of course that little fuel cost hike ($8.6 billion, that is Billion, for the last ten months of fuel imports by Pakistan).
The ‘grey man” of Japanese politics, Yasuou Fukada, in the midst of one crisis after another, is somehow on the rise: he is somehow now positioned as a critic of the rotten “construction state,” nurtured by all parties including his own, and he is turning from gray to green, hosting a G8 summit on climate change, and calling for cuts in Japanese greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 80% by 2050.
The air strike from American forces that killed at least 11 Pakistani paramilitaries on the border of Afghanistan shows how complicated the border war really is. Pakistanis are furious; many of the Frontier Corps, as they are called, belong to the same Pushtun ethnic group as the Taliban, and strike local truces with Taliban forces who then go over the border to attack the Afghan National Army. This is basically what happened: the Afghans came to the border to set up a post; they were dissuaded by the Pakistani Frontier Corps; then the Afghans were attacked as they retreated by the Taliban; then the US called in a strike, but hit the Pakistanis instead. Or at least this is what The Economist says happened.
In South Korea 700,000 people demonstrated in Seoul found themselves trapped between huge shipping containers thrown onto the street by police. They were angry that the president, Lee Myung-bak, had once again ok’ed the importing of American beef, stopped in 2003 after the mad cow disease was found in American cattle. Lee seems caught between the imperious Americans who refuse to renegotiate the opening of beef trade, and the mass of people who are already unhappy about rising prices and unemployment.
Kazakhstan is full of sycophants.
Ethiopia has suffered hailstorms, late rains, and too heavy rains, and insects; animals and children are listless, especially as you go deeper into the country from Goru Gutu. No wheat, no maize, no eating, food prices too high for the vast majority who make 80 cents a day. Rising fuel prices make things worse, as do the increasing unpredictability of rains. The government refuses to help Goru Gutu.
South Africa has just had a horrible wave of xenophobic violence; mobs chased many African migrants from places like Congo, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe to police stations. At the peak of the post-violence displacement, 20,000 people were living in temporary shelters in Johannesburg, scared of their now violent neighbors, scared to go home to political violence and collapsed economies. Why the violence against the migrants? Unemployment, soaring food and petrol prices, a feeling that most are forgotten by their government. South Africans accuse foreigners of stealing jobs and housing.
The Congo is better than it was five years ago (does this seem like the same story as Iraq?) but horribly violent and unstable. The genocide in Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Hutu rebels responsible for mass murder (1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed in 1994) fled to Eastern Congo; these FDLR are at war with the Congo military, and since the “peace accord” in January 70,000 more refugees from the fighting have fled into Northern Kivu in Congo. The UN peacekeepers – mostly Indian – refused to support the Congolese army, instead are now accused of supplying the Hutu rebels with ammunition in exchange for poached Ivory. This is right out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The cost of food and transport have doubled since January, and crime is also up. Rape is endemic as a war strategy.
Budweiser may end up in the hands of InBev, a huge Belgian brewer.
Sweden has for-profit schools that are gaining in popularity; the head of the main Swedish company running such schools proudly compares their approach to Ikea…and McDonald’s.
European biotech firms have a “Peter Pan” complex when facing big-ego, big thinking American companies. Even an apparent exception, Genmab in Denmark, has an American woman as CEO, and an aggressive American approach to the business of trading on future products.
Margann came up and wished me happy Father’s Day and I shut The Economist, looked out at the big tree, now holding sunshine in each of its leafy fingers, and headed downstairs for breakfast, eggs, toast, coffee, fruit.
The world – or that world that comes to life in print, in statistics and analysis and map and assessment – receded to that part of the brain where it continues to spin. Perhaps somewhere, many wheres, people live with my little world in a separate part of their brain. There a world spins where the father sits with the mother and the son and the neighbors, and there is plenty, plenty for everyone, and the sounds of laughter is heard, sounds like the sounds of heaven.
For Father’s Day, I decided to stay in bed for a while and read The Economist and The Atlantic. My room has a huge window that looks out into the top of a big old tree with green green leaves, so I feel like I’m in a tree house sometimes. The day was gray, but promising; downstairs I can hear voices, the sounds of breakfast being made, the general chaos of children playing.
Two things immediately occurred to me. First, reading The Economist is like listening to someone who’s just traveled the globe, probably in business first class. This is not a stupid person, but it also isn’t someone who has much patience for perspectives outside the ‘realist’ political view that corporations and capitalism are here to stay, pretty much in their current shape, that Western governments make poor choices but are also the best hope for solving global conflicts, and that a fine-grained view of the internal political machinations of nations is useful. Second, looking at the ads for GE, Citi, Canon, Qatar, Shell, Emirates, Vanguard, the uses of such knowledge seem geared toward people who are interested in things like a reliable labor market, not workers, if you follow.
Given that, it was quite interesting to read:
In highlighting the improved conditions in Iraq, we do not mean to justify The Economist’s support of the invasion of 2003. Too many lives have been shattered for that. History will still record that the invasion and occupation have been a debacle.
Now this is the ending to an article that introduces a ‘briefing’ on how Iraq may be turning a corner. The cover story has an Iraqi man sitting in a small space fixing a traditional stringed instrument, rather like an oud. The cover proclaims, Iraq starts to fix itself. I want so much to imagine this man finishing his work, handing the beautiful handmade wooden instrument to a young Iraqi who will play the songs of a future Iraq, or a future landscape in which, perhaps, Iraq is no longer what we call this big square of land drawn by Western interests and ignorance.
As I read the article I am struck by a kind of double vision. The economy is growing, the government is afloat in tons of oil cash, death rates are down, a poll shows many Iraqis feel better about their future, al-Quaeda in Mesopotamia has supposedly been dealt a “near strategic defeat.” On the other hand, there is the Sadr militia, the implicit mistrust and conflict between Sadr and the government of Maliki, the conundrum of America protecting Iraqi borders while somehow not appearing to occupy the country or establish long long term military bases. The numbers in the article are like characters in themselves:
$70 billion (projected annual oil earnings this year, as in, one year)
12 million (cellular phones in use)
216, 000 (Iraqi internet users)
2.8 million (Iraqis displaced)
2.2 million (Iraqis fled abroad)
25-40% (the official unemployment rate/s)
22% to 4% (fall in share of US TV airtime devoted to Iraq war)
Notice: no real numbers on how many Americans or Iraqis actually died recently in the “better times” nor how many Americans are in the country, including not only strictly military personnel but also the legions of privatized contractors, consultants, advisers, and so on.
The effort to talk about how for the first time since the insurgency, the tide is shifting can be seen in this ending sentence: “But for the first time since the insurgency against the Americans took off, the tide, which may quickly ebb, is flowing in the direction of the new order.”
I took a deep breath and read on about the other areas of the world, and learned:
The Economist is worried that Wen Jiabao, “Grandpa Wen,” may not manage his “populist” leanings, and the ideological positions of pro and anti populist groups are represented.
Hong Kong is in the middle of a culture war pitting mandatory Cantonese in schools as the primary language (as it is the first language of most Hong Kong citizens, and of Southern China) against the teaching of “power and money” languages: English and putonghua, that is, Mandarin.
The foreign direct investment in Pakistani, and its national reserves, boomed in 2006-7, but are now going south, due to the Bhutto assassination, fertilizer prices, a crippling hailstorm, and of course that little fuel cost hike ($8.6 billion, that is Billion, for the last ten months of fuel imports by Pakistan).
The ‘grey man” of Japanese politics, Yasuou Fukada, in the midst of one crisis after another, is somehow on the rise: he is somehow now positioned as a critic of the rotten “construction state,” nurtured by all parties including his own, and he is turning from gray to green, hosting a G8 summit on climate change, and calling for cuts in Japanese greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 80% by 2050.
The air strike from American forces that killed at least 11 Pakistani paramilitaries on the border of Afghanistan shows how complicated the border war really is. Pakistanis are furious; many of the Frontier Corps, as they are called, belong to the same Pushtun ethnic group as the Taliban, and strike local truces with Taliban forces who then go over the border to attack the Afghan National Army. This is basically what happened: the Afghans came to the border to set up a post; they were dissuaded by the Pakistani Frontier Corps; then the Afghans were attacked as they retreated by the Taliban; then the US called in a strike, but hit the Pakistanis instead. Or at least this is what The Economist says happened.
In South Korea 700,000 people demonstrated in Seoul found themselves trapped between huge shipping containers thrown onto the street by police. They were angry that the president, Lee Myung-bak, had once again ok’ed the importing of American beef, stopped in 2003 after the mad cow disease was found in American cattle. Lee seems caught between the imperious Americans who refuse to renegotiate the opening of beef trade, and the mass of people who are already unhappy about rising prices and unemployment.
Kazakhstan is full of sycophants.
Ethiopia has suffered hailstorms, late rains, and too heavy rains, and insects; animals and children are listless, especially as you go deeper into the country from Goru Gutu. No wheat, no maize, no eating, food prices too high for the vast majority who make 80 cents a day. Rising fuel prices make things worse, as do the increasing unpredictability of rains. The government refuses to help Goru Gutu.
South Africa has just had a horrible wave of xenophobic violence; mobs chased many African migrants from places like Congo, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe to police stations. At the peak of the post-violence displacement, 20,000 people were living in temporary shelters in Johannesburg, scared of their now violent neighbors, scared to go home to political violence and collapsed economies. Why the violence against the migrants? Unemployment, soaring food and petrol prices, a feeling that most are forgotten by their government. South Africans accuse foreigners of stealing jobs and housing.
The Congo is better than it was five years ago (does this seem like the same story as Iraq?) but horribly violent and unstable. The genocide in Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Hutu rebels responsible for mass murder (1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed in 1994) fled to Eastern Congo; these FDLR are at war with the Congo military, and since the “peace accord” in January 70,000 more refugees from the fighting have fled into Northern Kivu in Congo. The UN peacekeepers – mostly Indian – refused to support the Congolese army, instead are now accused of supplying the Hutu rebels with ammunition in exchange for poached Ivory. This is right out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The cost of food and transport have doubled since January, and crime is also up. Rape is endemic as a war strategy.
Budweiser may end up in the hands of InBev, a huge Belgian brewer.
Sweden has for-profit schools that are gaining in popularity; the head of the main Swedish company running such schools proudly compares their approach to Ikea…and McDonald’s.
European biotech firms have a “Peter Pan” complex when facing big-ego, big thinking American companies. Even an apparent exception, Genmab in Denmark, has an American woman as CEO, and an aggressive American approach to the business of trading on future products.
Margann came up and wished me happy Father’s Day and I shut The Economist, looked out at the big tree, now holding sunshine in each of its leafy fingers, and headed downstairs for breakfast, eggs, toast, coffee, fruit.
The world – or that world that comes to life in print, in statistics and analysis and map and assessment – receded to that part of the brain where it continues to spin. Perhaps somewhere, many wheres, people live with my little world in a separate part of their brain. There a world spins where the father sits with the mother and the son and the neighbors, and there is plenty, plenty for everyone, and the sounds of laughter is heard, sounds like the sounds of heaven.
Ten minutes on June 16, 2008
Wandas on Father’s Day
Hot tub to end it and then the tucking in of the little prince. The hot tub was 106 the night was coolish Peter Cat and me after a day of talking we were talked out or so I thought.
Then we started talking about the name Wanda. I am about to see my friend Wanda in Salt Lake, and go camping with her and Anna and Paul. The last time I saw her we’d just gotten off the Green River, Desolation Canyon, and I wondered whether, seeing her, I’d feel that same crazy solidarity I’d felt when we got back to her house put our kids to sleep put her friend to sleep. I remember coming home and telling Kevin I’d had this great talk with her. And we recalled how she had almost single handedly gotten her raft across the river in the teeth of an insane wind that came around the bend and just drilled the rafts backwards. I think I mentally called her Pioneer Woman for a while after that.
Then my brother told a story about a girl he met roller skating named Wanda. She was crazy I think she more or less tackled him he left out some details she was from West Springfield (pretty far away – about ten miles and at least one class level away) and one day Peter was sitting in his Business Math class and he looked up and there she was looking in the school window at him.
Cat remembered a friend named Wanda was she the middle of eight kids in Oakland and had a magnificent voice gospel?
Then I told the story of how my family went to Plymouth (as in Plymouth Rock Pilgrims etc. etc.) when I was a teenager and I wanted to stay home and be with my girlfriend and with my All Star baseball team but my parents wouldn’t let me stay home alone and I was bitter alienated glass nine tenths empty. I wore a hat pulled over my hair and my hair pulled over my face I was reading Huckleberry Finn and identifying with him and I wanted to light out for the territories. And I fell in with a group of kids from Eastern Massachusetts, I think from Framingham, and they had intense Eastern Massachusetts accents:
Card cahd
Car cah
Wanda Woahndah
Yard yahd
Etc.
And there was one girl named Wanda that I liked and wanted to notice me but I was not from their tribe. And one day they were hanging around as usual doing nothing bored without imagination more or less identical to my own frame of mind and the kids went over to this place back from the ocean and there was an old funky shack and they all started throwing rocks at it and missing I figured well this is one thing I can do and then this girl might notice me so I picked up a rock and broke the window that they were aiming at.
This, sadly, or perhaps not sadly, did not win me any face time with the lovely if thickly accented Wanda.
Later I was in our beach house upstairs and I heard the doorbell and my dad answered a cop asked if I was home and I came down and my dad was standing with him and the cop asked me if I broke the window and I said yes and my father said we’d fix it and then the cop left and my dad said I’m glad you didn’t lie.
And that is how the story would end if this were on TV.
But the next day we went looking for a precut window for the shack and we drove up the gridlock-prone Cape Cod highway to different hardware stores where no one had precut glass that size (it turned out the place really was a funky shack and the guy had jury rigged the whole thing including weirdly measured window panes for the offsize and not even truly square door) and the longer it took the more furious my dad got and I recall him just fuming away unable to control it talking to himself to me to himself.
And that kind of erased the whole wow my dad is pretty cool for not lowering the boom on me for the rock throwing incident feeling of the previous evening.
As I was telling the story I seem to recall putting up one of those shields, an invisible shield, like the kind Sue Storm puts up in Fantastic Four, an energy field that can hold back dangerous rays from weapons and stuff. Or like the Jedi ability to protect themselves with energy fields. And it didn’t feel, doesn’t in hindsight feel, like it was simply a teenager thing to do. Of course it was, partly, but also it was the sense that I didn’t want to be implicated in this elaborate emotionally bruising ritual of anger.
Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don't need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don't need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along... move along.
This is not the only way to express frustration and anger. Move along.
After the hot tub we came home Peter and I and Kelsey was just finishing reading to Bailey his room was a wreck the hour was late I made his bed with him in it tucked in the sheet laid the softest blankest on went and got Cliff and put him on his favorite blue blanket which he nurses and paws in a kind of canine OCD way.
Peter and I talked, and he thought about that girl and said, she was crazy again. And then he thought for a moment and said, Wait. Her name wasn’t Wanda. It was Candy.
And I thought about my own story. Did all that happen just as I imagined it?
I thought tonight about how so much of what we imagine to be our realistic view of the world is actually a creation of our mind, our self or selves, a story that is always straining to explain and give meaning to. And intersecting our bubble are the bubbles of other people, and also all the elements of nonhuman reality. So reality is a diffraction pattern, which forces us to constantly revise our overall story even as it also forces us to consolidate that story.
It is Father’s Day and I realized that probably my view of my father is the myopic view of the first son, up too close and personal to get the entire complicated view, though not without truth or insight.
But perhaps he was a cunning banker warrior?
Luke: No, my father didn't fight in the Clone Wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter.
Obi-Wan: That's what your uncle told you. He didn't hold with your father's ideals; he felt he should've stayed here and not gotten involved.
Luke: You fought in the Clone Wars?
Obi-Wan: Yes. I was once a Jedi knight, the same as your father.
Luke: I wish I'd known him.
Obi-Wan: He was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. I understand that you've become quite a good pilot yourself.
I’m trying to be a good pilot, Dad. Not easy, as I’m sure you know. Which way’s the Death Star?
Wandas on Father’s Day
Hot tub to end it and then the tucking in of the little prince. The hot tub was 106 the night was coolish Peter Cat and me after a day of talking we were talked out or so I thought.
Then we started talking about the name Wanda. I am about to see my friend Wanda in Salt Lake, and go camping with her and Anna and Paul. The last time I saw her we’d just gotten off the Green River, Desolation Canyon, and I wondered whether, seeing her, I’d feel that same crazy solidarity I’d felt when we got back to her house put our kids to sleep put her friend to sleep. I remember coming home and telling Kevin I’d had this great talk with her. And we recalled how she had almost single handedly gotten her raft across the river in the teeth of an insane wind that came around the bend and just drilled the rafts backwards. I think I mentally called her Pioneer Woman for a while after that.
Then my brother told a story about a girl he met roller skating named Wanda. She was crazy I think she more or less tackled him he left out some details she was from West Springfield (pretty far away – about ten miles and at least one class level away) and one day Peter was sitting in his Business Math class and he looked up and there she was looking in the school window at him.
Cat remembered a friend named Wanda was she the middle of eight kids in Oakland and had a magnificent voice gospel?
Then I told the story of how my family went to Plymouth (as in Plymouth Rock Pilgrims etc. etc.) when I was a teenager and I wanted to stay home and be with my girlfriend and with my All Star baseball team but my parents wouldn’t let me stay home alone and I was bitter alienated glass nine tenths empty. I wore a hat pulled over my hair and my hair pulled over my face I was reading Huckleberry Finn and identifying with him and I wanted to light out for the territories. And I fell in with a group of kids from Eastern Massachusetts, I think from Framingham, and they had intense Eastern Massachusetts accents:
Card cahd
Car cah
Wanda Woahndah
Yard yahd
Etc.
And there was one girl named Wanda that I liked and wanted to notice me but I was not from their tribe. And one day they were hanging around as usual doing nothing bored without imagination more or less identical to my own frame of mind and the kids went over to this place back from the ocean and there was an old funky shack and they all started throwing rocks at it and missing I figured well this is one thing I can do and then this girl might notice me so I picked up a rock and broke the window that they were aiming at.
This, sadly, or perhaps not sadly, did not win me any face time with the lovely if thickly accented Wanda.
Later I was in our beach house upstairs and I heard the doorbell and my dad answered a cop asked if I was home and I came down and my dad was standing with him and the cop asked me if I broke the window and I said yes and my father said we’d fix it and then the cop left and my dad said I’m glad you didn’t lie.
And that is how the story would end if this were on TV.
But the next day we went looking for a precut window for the shack and we drove up the gridlock-prone Cape Cod highway to different hardware stores where no one had precut glass that size (it turned out the place really was a funky shack and the guy had jury rigged the whole thing including weirdly measured window panes for the offsize and not even truly square door) and the longer it took the more furious my dad got and I recall him just fuming away unable to control it talking to himself to me to himself.
And that kind of erased the whole wow my dad is pretty cool for not lowering the boom on me for the rock throwing incident feeling of the previous evening.
As I was telling the story I seem to recall putting up one of those shields, an invisible shield, like the kind Sue Storm puts up in Fantastic Four, an energy field that can hold back dangerous rays from weapons and stuff. Or like the Jedi ability to protect themselves with energy fields. And it didn’t feel, doesn’t in hindsight feel, like it was simply a teenager thing to do. Of course it was, partly, but also it was the sense that I didn’t want to be implicated in this elaborate emotionally bruising ritual of anger.
Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don't need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don't need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along... move along.
This is not the only way to express frustration and anger. Move along.
After the hot tub we came home Peter and I and Kelsey was just finishing reading to Bailey his room was a wreck the hour was late I made his bed with him in it tucked in the sheet laid the softest blankest on went and got Cliff and put him on his favorite blue blanket which he nurses and paws in a kind of canine OCD way.
Peter and I talked, and he thought about that girl and said, she was crazy again. And then he thought for a moment and said, Wait. Her name wasn’t Wanda. It was Candy.
And I thought about my own story. Did all that happen just as I imagined it?
I thought tonight about how so much of what we imagine to be our realistic view of the world is actually a creation of our mind, our self or selves, a story that is always straining to explain and give meaning to. And intersecting our bubble are the bubbles of other people, and also all the elements of nonhuman reality. So reality is a diffraction pattern, which forces us to constantly revise our overall story even as it also forces us to consolidate that story.
It is Father’s Day and I realized that probably my view of my father is the myopic view of the first son, up too close and personal to get the entire complicated view, though not without truth or insight.
But perhaps he was a cunning banker warrior?
Luke: No, my father didn't fight in the Clone Wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter.
Obi-Wan: That's what your uncle told you. He didn't hold with your father's ideals; he felt he should've stayed here and not gotten involved.
Luke: You fought in the Clone Wars?
Obi-Wan: Yes. I was once a Jedi knight, the same as your father.
Luke: I wish I'd known him.
Obi-Wan: He was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. I understand that you've become quite a good pilot yourself.
I’m trying to be a good pilot, Dad. Not easy, as I’m sure you know. Which way’s the Death Star?
Ten minutes on June 12, 2008
Fire, magical thinking, and art
Duncan Maxwell said from Redwoood Elementary School, a couple miles north of Boulder Creek, [the fire] “looks like a mushroom cloud.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel, Thursday, June 12, 2008.
I often read the newspaper, or consider the experience I am in the middle of, and think “In the movie…” As in, “In the movie about the end of the Bush administration, there are fires everywhere, and the people losing their homes to fifty foot high wildfires storming across fire lines drive to evacuation areas, passing on the way people who lost their homes to the invisible fires of late capitalism, the sub prime mortgage fiasco, the concentration of capital in the hands of fewer mammoth companies.” Cue music. More and more I feel myself slipping back into what I used to consider “floating poet” mode, in which reality keeps providing metaphors, synecdoche, narratives alive in contrast and image. And in fact that is what we are all faces with in late modernity, managing all this information coming at us from all angles as we also manage increasingly complex, even chaotic and frenetic lives. Which, if you think about it, is another one of those damn similes. Staying sane, imagining ways forward, is similar to gathering the fragments Picasso used in his collages, or seeing from the multiple perspectives of cubism or futurism, and finding a way to continue to make art, make lives, that never cease to question the inevitability of current evils, that continue to dare to believe in an unwritten future, that are always beginning to write that future with their largest and least actions.
I was driving a couple days ago listening to KPIG, the eclectic local radio station that specializes in hog noises, an often-irreverent DJ lineup, and songs not on the top forty, but more the back forty, of the musical ranch. An ad came on for a company that told me I had done it all, had the kids and house, had the sailboat, life was good, but what about my future? Would I continue to sail calmly, or…I was in stop and go traffic, and was clearly not the target demographic, but waited patiently through the metaphor to the end, where I was in a safe harbor with a bank that would take care of my retirement and investment needs, apparently while shining my shoes and serving me a tall cold drink with an umbrella in it every afternoon after fetching the paper. I punched the button and immediately listened to a story about Darfur, where a man had borrowed his relatives’ portion of food to tide him over, but was then stiffed with his ration of rice and now was caught between the demands of his hungry children and his relatives, themselves living one handout at a time. I looked up at the traffic, the cars in line, each one smoking a petroleum cigar, some with huge bodies in glistening red or black, tires the size of millstones. I blanked on the actual vision through the glass, and instead saw a series of images: corn made into biofuels, corn prices going up, food shortages and crises all over the globe, massive population destabilization, aid workers watching as a line forms, some refugees, some militiamen just back from machine gunning refugees and villagers across the border…the light changed and people turned left, right, turned in U’s back the direction they came, flowed forward toward the temples of consumption past the mostly invisible people and systems and structures that keep everything from completely going under.
We just had a huge fire here in Santa Cruz, three weeks ago. 4,270 acres off Summit Road, 35 homes burned. It was horrible, inevitable perhaps, fuel that had lain there for fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years went up, potential turned into thermal energy. For the people who suffered through it, it was an apocalypse; for others, it was a very interesting news item for some days, but less and less compelling perhaps unless you knew someone, knew some ones, who had experienced it first hand.
I was talking with my friend Kevin about the inability of the Santa Cruz city or county government to get on the same page with the fire department around fire abatement. Our little community of 60 brought the fire department in to look at our arroyo, which is considered a triple threat fire area, and then started doing what they recommended. For our efforts we were called in by a neighbor for cutting down eucalyptus trees, fined by the city, forced to do work to counter erosion (work we were going to do after we completed fire abatement work). Now, a year and a half later, we are clear of the city’s fines and censure. We did all the work they asked. And in turn, nothing has been done about fire abatement. Nothing. My house could burn up in fifteen minutes if a fire like the one now burning within sight of our land broke out in the arroyo. I said to him that it was the perfect time to mobilize our neighbors to get the city to do something besides impede and paralyze anyone’s efforts to prevent fire. The big Summit fire was warning enough. But was it? We pondered. Perhaps people needed even more of a wake up call, or, if you will, a fire lit under them.
About 12 hours later the Martin fire started.
Magical thinking is the notion that you can control certain things with your mind, or actions, things that are unlikely in actuality to be affected by your efforts. Sacrificing a goat or lamb, say, to appease the fire gods. Mentally imagining a hated politician caught in a scandal, and thinking it will happen because you imagined it so hard. I saw the fire and immediately thought, damn. Be careful what you wish for.
Then I turned my suddenly powerful mind to other projects. I could tell you what they are, but then I would have to reach out with my mind and kill you. Suffice to say, these projects are complex enough to involve the entire global economy and its networks, the ecosystems and their subsystems, the NBA playoffs, and, possibly, the uncanny return of Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday to Northern California.
After a cup of coffee (once again sub par because my neighbors have suddenly stopped drinking half and half, while my son mixes it with nonfat milk when the 1% is gone, resulting in a rash of creamer shortages in my immediate vicinity) I tried to stop thinking magically (the wild fires strangely target only military contractors and weapons manufacturers, sparing the houses of the humble) and consider the bubble we all walk around in.
This fire that I can see with its massive plumes of smoke is the second one in my county in a month. And like the other, less visible fires of our economy, our political system, the more you look into it, the more it looks shaky. It turns out there are a bunch of wildfires going off in Northern California alone, way early for the fire season, and given that, we might move into August with no reserves left to fight the even more intense fires of that hot hot month. The firefighters are like our military, spread too thin over too vast an area, weakened by all the effort. Paul Van Gerwen, Bay Area spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in an interview "The resources we have stationed around the state are all being tied up. When you have five or six fires going, you start to have things spread pretty thin . . .. Any new fires that occur, there's a risk of not being able to control them."
Afghanistan. Iraq. Darfur. Somalia. Yemen. All fires, burning on. Things spread pretty thin.
Other fires burning in Northern California on Wednesday included:
1. A 860-acre fire near Cloverdale in Sonoma County that was 80 percent contained.
2. A 1,200-acre fire near Highway 132 and Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County that was 30 percent contained.
3. A 4,200-acre fire in the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County that was 10 percent contained. About 15 summer cabins in the Santa Lucia Tract remain evacuated as a precaution.
4. A 3,300-acre fire about 10 miles north of Fresno in Madera County that was 100 percent contained.
Major fires. All burning now. All taking resources to combat. All wearing thin the nerves of those battling them, some of whom are simply twenty somethings from places like the state correctional centre in nearby Ben Lomond.
Global warming, yes, but also simply drought, all this building in areas where fuel builds up and fires are prevented and suppressed for long periods of time.
Is fire like war? I don’t know. But they are on my radar at the same time.
According to globalsecurity.org,
The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen "lesser" conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.
So much of the violence in the world, it seems to me, is fallout from the kinds of war developed via modern technology married to large industrial states led by political parties keen to gain land and resources and labor and control over these things. So much of the fuel for fire was laid down by colonialism and imperialism. Yes, wars have plagued Africa for centuries, as they plagued other areas where aggressive humans lived and shaped cultures around patriarchy and authoritarian modes of control. But the current wars are much, much worse, like the current fires, because of the historic fuel that has never been properly cleared. So the fires, and wars, burn hotter, overwhelm things designed to withstand them, like certain trees or certain human capacities for empathy and peace.
I think most people in the world today desire a peaceful life. And a life that includes animals and habitat, farmland and clean air, cultural diversity and creativity. But it seems that more and more, in postmodern societies, they have given over practical control over most areas of life to those who promise to take care of these areas: political parties, corporate entities, national security and military structures. And these groups, living in their own bubbles, threatened by their shadows, the parallel structures in other nations and peoples, are massively out of touch with the feedback loops of the natural, social, and economic. Most people are kept busy, or distracted with entertainment, or controlled by fear and police, or all at once; most leaders are busy preparing the next fire, or selling countries and militaries the fuel and tinder with which to make an even hotter fire.
During World War I, civilians made up fewer than 5 percent of all casualties. Today, 75 percent or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non-combatants. The reward to civilians for giving over more control of these systems to our current leaders is an increasing share of the pie…of death.
Many brave people are right this minute working so that the fire I can see doesn’t come and burn down my house and leave me and my wife and son and neighbors homeless. If it came down to it, I’d be beside them, cutting trees so that the fire is less able to leap the road and hit Pete and Beth’s house, or the chicken coop, or Tycho and Kristina’s yard. In times like these, when disaster hits, people often cooperate and help each other and rise to the occasion.
And right this minute, many brave people are working so that these invisible fires which most of us can’t see don’t come and lay waste to our present and our future. They work to connect the visible to the invisible, the present to the future, the everyday to the epic. We have an idea, I think, of how to better prepare for fire in times of drought; it begins with knowing that droughts happen, and not making them worse.
And it begins, perhaps, with art. That is, with putting together the fragments of the present and past, and composing new narratives of the future that engage all of our abilities to create and to live out our creations. That is what I think we get, besides blessed escape, from good novels, short stories, essays, blogs, films, painting, what have you. Models for creating our own lives and stories, and collaborating with others as we join stories to create cultures and subcultures. We need the escape from the relentless repetition of the dismal story of What Is (appears to be) Real, in order to get the distance requisite to re-see, to revise; then we need models of alternatives, new narratives, to remind us of what is wrong with What Is and what seeds of the possible lie in what is wrong.
Every fairy tale has, at its core, a realistic story of human beings, psychology, what is involved in the quest for power and happiness. Every realistic novel, with its take on dysfunctional families, or every realist political analysis that feels compelling, has, at its core, a fairy tale that such writing can make a difference, that power and happiness and grace are possible. Even a fire can reveal human abilities of cooperation and competence that allow us to imagine putting out those other, invisible, conflagrations.
Fire, magical thinking, and art
Duncan Maxwell said from Redwoood Elementary School, a couple miles north of Boulder Creek, [the fire] “looks like a mushroom cloud.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel, Thursday, June 12, 2008.
I often read the newspaper, or consider the experience I am in the middle of, and think “In the movie…” As in, “In the movie about the end of the Bush administration, there are fires everywhere, and the people losing their homes to fifty foot high wildfires storming across fire lines drive to evacuation areas, passing on the way people who lost their homes to the invisible fires of late capitalism, the sub prime mortgage fiasco, the concentration of capital in the hands of fewer mammoth companies.” Cue music. More and more I feel myself slipping back into what I used to consider “floating poet” mode, in which reality keeps providing metaphors, synecdoche, narratives alive in contrast and image. And in fact that is what we are all faces with in late modernity, managing all this information coming at us from all angles as we also manage increasingly complex, even chaotic and frenetic lives. Which, if you think about it, is another one of those damn similes. Staying sane, imagining ways forward, is similar to gathering the fragments Picasso used in his collages, or seeing from the multiple perspectives of cubism or futurism, and finding a way to continue to make art, make lives, that never cease to question the inevitability of current evils, that continue to dare to believe in an unwritten future, that are always beginning to write that future with their largest and least actions.
I was driving a couple days ago listening to KPIG, the eclectic local radio station that specializes in hog noises, an often-irreverent DJ lineup, and songs not on the top forty, but more the back forty, of the musical ranch. An ad came on for a company that told me I had done it all, had the kids and house, had the sailboat, life was good, but what about my future? Would I continue to sail calmly, or…I was in stop and go traffic, and was clearly not the target demographic, but waited patiently through the metaphor to the end, where I was in a safe harbor with a bank that would take care of my retirement and investment needs, apparently while shining my shoes and serving me a tall cold drink with an umbrella in it every afternoon after fetching the paper. I punched the button and immediately listened to a story about Darfur, where a man had borrowed his relatives’ portion of food to tide him over, but was then stiffed with his ration of rice and now was caught between the demands of his hungry children and his relatives, themselves living one handout at a time. I looked up at the traffic, the cars in line, each one smoking a petroleum cigar, some with huge bodies in glistening red or black, tires the size of millstones. I blanked on the actual vision through the glass, and instead saw a series of images: corn made into biofuels, corn prices going up, food shortages and crises all over the globe, massive population destabilization, aid workers watching as a line forms, some refugees, some militiamen just back from machine gunning refugees and villagers across the border…the light changed and people turned left, right, turned in U’s back the direction they came, flowed forward toward the temples of consumption past the mostly invisible people and systems and structures that keep everything from completely going under.
We just had a huge fire here in Santa Cruz, three weeks ago. 4,270 acres off Summit Road, 35 homes burned. It was horrible, inevitable perhaps, fuel that had lain there for fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years went up, potential turned into thermal energy. For the people who suffered through it, it was an apocalypse; for others, it was a very interesting news item for some days, but less and less compelling perhaps unless you knew someone, knew some ones, who had experienced it first hand.
I was talking with my friend Kevin about the inability of the Santa Cruz city or county government to get on the same page with the fire department around fire abatement. Our little community of 60 brought the fire department in to look at our arroyo, which is considered a triple threat fire area, and then started doing what they recommended. For our efforts we were called in by a neighbor for cutting down eucalyptus trees, fined by the city, forced to do work to counter erosion (work we were going to do after we completed fire abatement work). Now, a year and a half later, we are clear of the city’s fines and censure. We did all the work they asked. And in turn, nothing has been done about fire abatement. Nothing. My house could burn up in fifteen minutes if a fire like the one now burning within sight of our land broke out in the arroyo. I said to him that it was the perfect time to mobilize our neighbors to get the city to do something besides impede and paralyze anyone’s efforts to prevent fire. The big Summit fire was warning enough. But was it? We pondered. Perhaps people needed even more of a wake up call, or, if you will, a fire lit under them.
About 12 hours later the Martin fire started.
Magical thinking is the notion that you can control certain things with your mind, or actions, things that are unlikely in actuality to be affected by your efforts. Sacrificing a goat or lamb, say, to appease the fire gods. Mentally imagining a hated politician caught in a scandal, and thinking it will happen because you imagined it so hard. I saw the fire and immediately thought, damn. Be careful what you wish for.
Then I turned my suddenly powerful mind to other projects. I could tell you what they are, but then I would have to reach out with my mind and kill you. Suffice to say, these projects are complex enough to involve the entire global economy and its networks, the ecosystems and their subsystems, the NBA playoffs, and, possibly, the uncanny return of Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday to Northern California.
After a cup of coffee (once again sub par because my neighbors have suddenly stopped drinking half and half, while my son mixes it with nonfat milk when the 1% is gone, resulting in a rash of creamer shortages in my immediate vicinity) I tried to stop thinking magically (the wild fires strangely target only military contractors and weapons manufacturers, sparing the houses of the humble) and consider the bubble we all walk around in.
This fire that I can see with its massive plumes of smoke is the second one in my county in a month. And like the other, less visible fires of our economy, our political system, the more you look into it, the more it looks shaky. It turns out there are a bunch of wildfires going off in Northern California alone, way early for the fire season, and given that, we might move into August with no reserves left to fight the even more intense fires of that hot hot month. The firefighters are like our military, spread too thin over too vast an area, weakened by all the effort. Paul Van Gerwen, Bay Area spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in an interview "The resources we have stationed around the state are all being tied up. When you have five or six fires going, you start to have things spread pretty thin . . .. Any new fires that occur, there's a risk of not being able to control them."
Afghanistan. Iraq. Darfur. Somalia. Yemen. All fires, burning on. Things spread pretty thin.
Other fires burning in Northern California on Wednesday included:
1. A 860-acre fire near Cloverdale in Sonoma County that was 80 percent contained.
2. A 1,200-acre fire near Highway 132 and Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County that was 30 percent contained.
3. A 4,200-acre fire in the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County that was 10 percent contained. About 15 summer cabins in the Santa Lucia Tract remain evacuated as a precaution.
4. A 3,300-acre fire about 10 miles north of Fresno in Madera County that was 100 percent contained.
Major fires. All burning now. All taking resources to combat. All wearing thin the nerves of those battling them, some of whom are simply twenty somethings from places like the state correctional centre in nearby Ben Lomond.
Global warming, yes, but also simply drought, all this building in areas where fuel builds up and fires are prevented and suppressed for long periods of time.
Is fire like war? I don’t know. But they are on my radar at the same time.
According to globalsecurity.org,
The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen "lesser" conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.
So much of the violence in the world, it seems to me, is fallout from the kinds of war developed via modern technology married to large industrial states led by political parties keen to gain land and resources and labor and control over these things. So much of the fuel for fire was laid down by colonialism and imperialism. Yes, wars have plagued Africa for centuries, as they plagued other areas where aggressive humans lived and shaped cultures around patriarchy and authoritarian modes of control. But the current wars are much, much worse, like the current fires, because of the historic fuel that has never been properly cleared. So the fires, and wars, burn hotter, overwhelm things designed to withstand them, like certain trees or certain human capacities for empathy and peace.
I think most people in the world today desire a peaceful life. And a life that includes animals and habitat, farmland and clean air, cultural diversity and creativity. But it seems that more and more, in postmodern societies, they have given over practical control over most areas of life to those who promise to take care of these areas: political parties, corporate entities, national security and military structures. And these groups, living in their own bubbles, threatened by their shadows, the parallel structures in other nations and peoples, are massively out of touch with the feedback loops of the natural, social, and economic. Most people are kept busy, or distracted with entertainment, or controlled by fear and police, or all at once; most leaders are busy preparing the next fire, or selling countries and militaries the fuel and tinder with which to make an even hotter fire.
During World War I, civilians made up fewer than 5 percent of all casualties. Today, 75 percent or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non-combatants. The reward to civilians for giving over more control of these systems to our current leaders is an increasing share of the pie…of death.
Many brave people are right this minute working so that the fire I can see doesn’t come and burn down my house and leave me and my wife and son and neighbors homeless. If it came down to it, I’d be beside them, cutting trees so that the fire is less able to leap the road and hit Pete and Beth’s house, or the chicken coop, or Tycho and Kristina’s yard. In times like these, when disaster hits, people often cooperate and help each other and rise to the occasion.
And right this minute, many brave people are working so that these invisible fires which most of us can’t see don’t come and lay waste to our present and our future. They work to connect the visible to the invisible, the present to the future, the everyday to the epic. We have an idea, I think, of how to better prepare for fire in times of drought; it begins with knowing that droughts happen, and not making them worse.
And it begins, perhaps, with art. That is, with putting together the fragments of the present and past, and composing new narratives of the future that engage all of our abilities to create and to live out our creations. That is what I think we get, besides blessed escape, from good novels, short stories, essays, blogs, films, painting, what have you. Models for creating our own lives and stories, and collaborating with others as we join stories to create cultures and subcultures. We need the escape from the relentless repetition of the dismal story of What Is (appears to be) Real, in order to get the distance requisite to re-see, to revise; then we need models of alternatives, new narratives, to remind us of what is wrong with What Is and what seeds of the possible lie in what is wrong.
Every fairy tale has, at its core, a realistic story of human beings, psychology, what is involved in the quest for power and happiness. Every realistic novel, with its take on dysfunctional families, or every realist political analysis that feels compelling, has, at its core, a fairy tale that such writing can make a difference, that power and happiness and grace are possible. Even a fire can reveal human abilities of cooperation and competence that allow us to imagine putting out those other, invisible, conflagrations.
Ten minutes on June 6, 2008
Iron Man and mundane cyborgs
So I saw the film Iron Man finally. Bailey had his last day of school yesterday, and then the Achievement Night was at 6PM, so we had some time to, if not kill, at least toy with. Bailey’s attitude toward school is less than enthusiastic, and since he lives so far away, it has been nearly impossible to establish friendships with the few boys he has liked at his school. So watching him walk up to the car on the last day, I wondered if he would feel the joy of Summer Vacation, or the bittersweet feeling of leaving something you’ve done for a long time behind. He immediately picked a fight with me and had no patience whatsoever for about fifteen minutes. Luckily, I am a Jedi dad, and so used my mind tricks to not make things worse, and soon we were tooling down the highway and he was telling me a story about an invention, and we got to Pacific Grove and there is was: the Lighthouse Theatre, in all its restored art deco movie palace glory. Park the car, go in, movie starts in ten minutes, repark the car, trade out the shades for indoor glasses, buy the requisite drink, and kick back in the fully functional recliner chairs.
First day of summer kid done with school dad done with school, his own and kid’s. Cyborg movie in the afternoon. Deep breath – oooooo, yeahhhhh!
Full disclosure: I read Iron Man when I was seven, in Jimmy’s Barber Shop. My dad would go there and take me, and then my brother and me, and we’d get the serious Catholic buzz cuts, the ones that last for months and that make you look disturbingly like a camp survivor, as in refugee or concentration, not summer. But I loved going there, partly because it was one of those Male Mysteries that I always wanted to find but never did, quite. My dad had gone there as a kid! And so everyone knew him, all the old guys from the neighborhood, and he’d talk to them and they’d establish that comforting patter of saying not really anything but jointly invoking the old days, to everyone’s real pleasure. And my brother would go and be afraid (at least that is my memory) and he’d sit in the horse chair, the kid chair with the horse head and saddle, and I think he cried some and my dad and the other men would try to do non-feminine things to soothe him, like talk gruffly and in the “you’re ok little man” style. Which I still find adorable, though that probably isn’t the word I’d use with them.
Anyway Jimmy had one of those barber shops with a long long mirror and three chairs, and at the back of the room there was a huge rack of comic books. All comic books. No Time Magazines or small print newspapers to pollute the glorious tsunami of super heroes, all read and reread until the covers were ripped and all the pages slightly smeared and the corners worn. Reading those comics, you felt you were part of a community of readers, others who had gone before you, so it didn’t matter that you weren’t the first to read this version of The Submariner. Instead, you were a kid and you got to read them all for free, as many as you could slam until Dad had his haircut and Billy had his and it was time for your own depilatory experience.
I liked Iron Man. I liked Tony Stark, the whole suit thing, the glowing disc, the notion of the business guy with a cooler backstory. I liked the problems and conflicts they’d throw in to make things interesting. I liked the nonsense words that Kirby and Lee threw in to signify Epic Battles, though I can’t remember the ones from Iron Man (my favorites were from Sgt. Rock – the machine gun budda budda budda, sniper shots k-ping, krak). I didn’t quite get the playboy thing, but I sensed that Tony was kind of like James Bond, the guy who had it wired in all parts of life, but who risked all of that to fight the Evil that was beyond the skills of mere mortals. And apparently this Evil just keeps coming. You’re never done with Evil, because just when you’ve overcome the odds to beat down Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #5, and you are thinking, hey, time to take a short vacation, maybe fix things on the home front with the secretary and the girlfriend, bam! Here comes Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #6. It’s like Mr. Incredible says in the interview that starts the eponymous movie: “No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, you know?”
That has got to be frustrating, I imagine.
Anyway, I will end with my beginning, which is the figure of the cyborg. Tony Stark as Iron man is a cyborg as we have come to know it: an individual human with extraordinary prosthetics that enable him/her/it to be a kind of super hero with Superhuman Powers. We have seen lots of these kinds of cyborgs: the Six Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Terminator. They are the Only One of their kind; they are involved in dramatic Action featuring Evil Ones that threaten to destroy the world. Often they are based on the moral world of Superman and his superhero family from D.C. comics (the paterfamilias of big comic companies, originally Detective Comics from 1934), or the more interpersonally fraught, wisecracking heros from Marvell (the comic series that I, personally, based much of my early identity-making on, for better or worse).
Thus we tend to see the figure of the cyborg as larger than life, as either threatening the ‘human’ or saving it, but in both cases the cyborg is somehow not human because of its technological additions. It is forever apart, and that affects its psychology. Like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, it has an outsider mentality that both scars it and offers it a potent drive.
But more and more I am thinking about the other kind of cyborg, what I have been calling the mundane cyborg. That is, instead of massive technological interventions on one human body, using the formidable resources of the state, the military, and Big Science, the mundane cyborg is us, as we are changed and reinvented in our use of myriad smaller technologies: cell phones, cars, personal computers and computer games, mp3 players, myoelectric arms, cochlear implants, Jarvic hearts and pacemakers, virtual reality arcades, online courses, blackberries, rfid chips, smart classrooms and smart consumer electronics and smart houses and toy lions and tigers and bears with chips that let them move and growl. Instead of a defining moment where we become Iron Man, or RoboCop, we move imperceptibly toward being cyborgs one tiny insect bite of technology at a time. Late capitalism’s rejuvenation by niche marketing combined with the increasing pace of life and human fascination with machinery has meant a massive invasion of organic life, but in tiny increments for each person.
So this is what I am interested in now, in parallel with the more extreme cyborg dangers that military people will increasingly look like Transformers, or that in two generations everyone will have sockets in their neck for inserting software, or regularly change sex/gender, or boast multiple implants that allow us to see and sense inhuman, or superhuman, areas of the spectra.
I don’t mean this to be a “run from your toaster it’s alive” kind of fear segment of popular technology writing. I am trying more to see how we can be more skillful not only in using the technologies modern capitalism has given us, but also how we can begin to shape the overall life that these prostheses are attached to, and to be more selective in the ones we become, ahem, attached to. And as we approach a world where energy is not necessarily available to all, and where environmental degradation will threaten to make us all cyborgs in the sense of beings able to live in inhospitable environments (the first notion of cyborgs was enabling astronauts to adapt to conditions in space and on other planets), this question of smaller technologies and our use of and by them will become even more important. I like the notion that we develop these rich communication systems and social networking technologies, and then use them to…well, use them to co-produce the next reality show, featuring new hybrid cultures, new basic ethical units where animals and plants and the biosphere have standing and voices, where we move more electrons and less protons, tend the Garden we’ve inherited, respect the work evolution has done, and continue the recent human experiment with identities, psychologies, titrating happiness and respect and gratitude in shaping our collaged lives.
Which is, after all, another way of saying, save the world.
Iron Man and mundane cyborgs
So I saw the film Iron Man finally. Bailey had his last day of school yesterday, and then the Achievement Night was at 6PM, so we had some time to, if not kill, at least toy with. Bailey’s attitude toward school is less than enthusiastic, and since he lives so far away, it has been nearly impossible to establish friendships with the few boys he has liked at his school. So watching him walk up to the car on the last day, I wondered if he would feel the joy of Summer Vacation, or the bittersweet feeling of leaving something you’ve done for a long time behind. He immediately picked a fight with me and had no patience whatsoever for about fifteen minutes. Luckily, I am a Jedi dad, and so used my mind tricks to not make things worse, and soon we were tooling down the highway and he was telling me a story about an invention, and we got to Pacific Grove and there is was: the Lighthouse Theatre, in all its restored art deco movie palace glory. Park the car, go in, movie starts in ten minutes, repark the car, trade out the shades for indoor glasses, buy the requisite drink, and kick back in the fully functional recliner chairs.
First day of summer kid done with school dad done with school, his own and kid’s. Cyborg movie in the afternoon. Deep breath – oooooo, yeahhhhh!
Full disclosure: I read Iron Man when I was seven, in Jimmy’s Barber Shop. My dad would go there and take me, and then my brother and me, and we’d get the serious Catholic buzz cuts, the ones that last for months and that make you look disturbingly like a camp survivor, as in refugee or concentration, not summer. But I loved going there, partly because it was one of those Male Mysteries that I always wanted to find but never did, quite. My dad had gone there as a kid! And so everyone knew him, all the old guys from the neighborhood, and he’d talk to them and they’d establish that comforting patter of saying not really anything but jointly invoking the old days, to everyone’s real pleasure. And my brother would go and be afraid (at least that is my memory) and he’d sit in the horse chair, the kid chair with the horse head and saddle, and I think he cried some and my dad and the other men would try to do non-feminine things to soothe him, like talk gruffly and in the “you’re ok little man” style. Which I still find adorable, though that probably isn’t the word I’d use with them.
Anyway Jimmy had one of those barber shops with a long long mirror and three chairs, and at the back of the room there was a huge rack of comic books. All comic books. No Time Magazines or small print newspapers to pollute the glorious tsunami of super heroes, all read and reread until the covers were ripped and all the pages slightly smeared and the corners worn. Reading those comics, you felt you were part of a community of readers, others who had gone before you, so it didn’t matter that you weren’t the first to read this version of The Submariner. Instead, you were a kid and you got to read them all for free, as many as you could slam until Dad had his haircut and Billy had his and it was time for your own depilatory experience.
I liked Iron Man. I liked Tony Stark, the whole suit thing, the glowing disc, the notion of the business guy with a cooler backstory. I liked the problems and conflicts they’d throw in to make things interesting. I liked the nonsense words that Kirby and Lee threw in to signify Epic Battles, though I can’t remember the ones from Iron Man (my favorites were from Sgt. Rock – the machine gun budda budda budda, sniper shots k-ping, krak). I didn’t quite get the playboy thing, but I sensed that Tony was kind of like James Bond, the guy who had it wired in all parts of life, but who risked all of that to fight the Evil that was beyond the skills of mere mortals. And apparently this Evil just keeps coming. You’re never done with Evil, because just when you’ve overcome the odds to beat down Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #5, and you are thinking, hey, time to take a short vacation, maybe fix things on the home front with the secretary and the girlfriend, bam! Here comes Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #6. It’s like Mr. Incredible says in the interview that starts the eponymous movie: “No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, you know?”
That has got to be frustrating, I imagine.
Anyway, I will end with my beginning, which is the figure of the cyborg. Tony Stark as Iron man is a cyborg as we have come to know it: an individual human with extraordinary prosthetics that enable him/her/it to be a kind of super hero with Superhuman Powers. We have seen lots of these kinds of cyborgs: the Six Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Terminator. They are the Only One of their kind; they are involved in dramatic Action featuring Evil Ones that threaten to destroy the world. Often they are based on the moral world of Superman and his superhero family from D.C. comics (the paterfamilias of big comic companies, originally Detective Comics from 1934), or the more interpersonally fraught, wisecracking heros from Marvell (the comic series that I, personally, based much of my early identity-making on, for better or worse).
Thus we tend to see the figure of the cyborg as larger than life, as either threatening the ‘human’ or saving it, but in both cases the cyborg is somehow not human because of its technological additions. It is forever apart, and that affects its psychology. Like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, it has an outsider mentality that both scars it and offers it a potent drive.
But more and more I am thinking about the other kind of cyborg, what I have been calling the mundane cyborg. That is, instead of massive technological interventions on one human body, using the formidable resources of the state, the military, and Big Science, the mundane cyborg is us, as we are changed and reinvented in our use of myriad smaller technologies: cell phones, cars, personal computers and computer games, mp3 players, myoelectric arms, cochlear implants, Jarvic hearts and pacemakers, virtual reality arcades, online courses, blackberries, rfid chips, smart classrooms and smart consumer electronics and smart houses and toy lions and tigers and bears with chips that let them move and growl. Instead of a defining moment where we become Iron Man, or RoboCop, we move imperceptibly toward being cyborgs one tiny insect bite of technology at a time. Late capitalism’s rejuvenation by niche marketing combined with the increasing pace of life and human fascination with machinery has meant a massive invasion of organic life, but in tiny increments for each person.
So this is what I am interested in now, in parallel with the more extreme cyborg dangers that military people will increasingly look like Transformers, or that in two generations everyone will have sockets in their neck for inserting software, or regularly change sex/gender, or boast multiple implants that allow us to see and sense inhuman, or superhuman, areas of the spectra.
I don’t mean this to be a “run from your toaster it’s alive” kind of fear segment of popular technology writing. I am trying more to see how we can be more skillful not only in using the technologies modern capitalism has given us, but also how we can begin to shape the overall life that these prostheses are attached to, and to be more selective in the ones we become, ahem, attached to. And as we approach a world where energy is not necessarily available to all, and where environmental degradation will threaten to make us all cyborgs in the sense of beings able to live in inhospitable environments (the first notion of cyborgs was enabling astronauts to adapt to conditions in space and on other planets), this question of smaller technologies and our use of and by them will become even more important. I like the notion that we develop these rich communication systems and social networking technologies, and then use them to…well, use them to co-produce the next reality show, featuring new hybrid cultures, new basic ethical units where animals and plants and the biosphere have standing and voices, where we move more electrons and less protons, tend the Garden we’ve inherited, respect the work evolution has done, and continue the recent human experiment with identities, psychologies, titrating happiness and respect and gratitude in shaping our collaged lives.
Which is, after all, another way of saying, save the world.
Ten minutes on June 4, 2008
" Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
I want to talk about phantom ring, and mundane cyborgs, and the way the words cyborg and cybernetic have evolved, devolved, and revolved. But I can’t talk about those things now, I just can’t. So first, a word from our writer.
I went up to Calistoga with Claire for her 50th birthday party, and we stayed in a little cluster of doll houses for people, very nice, and Kevin and Claire brought their espresso machine, and we went to Groth and Plump Jack (the loser!) and Cuvaisson and a place called Ovid (more of that in another post) and ate at the Martini House on Friday night which might have been one of the top five dinners I’ve ever eaten in this particular life cycle.
In the way of the Fates, not that I believe in fate but in happymaking accidents that keep happening to me, we strolled out of Martini House feeling oh so wonderful but also late for our date with Cat’s friend. Oh well let’s go so we arrived house is dark downstairs but we ring anyway and down comes Janet in her bathrobe and graciously invites us in and we all begin to talk about wine and her husband Lester has a paper from Iceland. So I say it looks like Old English, and he mentions the Eddic sagas, and I mention I teach Beowulf, and he mentions the translations of the sagas by that Victorian writer, and hands me the tale of Howard the Halt, in a beautiful edition, and I mention Tolkien, and he asks me if I’ve ever read On Fairy Stories, and off we go.
Lester is remarkable. He can talk about Yeats, and in a moment switch to yeasts, as in industrial yeasts vs. European yeasts, alcohol conversion rates, and the micro-ecology of wine. He has eyebrows like Gandalf, and come to think of it, similar eyes and expressions. Separated at birth? Not impossible!
Anyway we talked about Tolkien’s notion of how the fairy story and faery. Tolkien hated the way fairy stories had become cutesy stories about diminutive folk who could hide behind a pansy. He blamed not only the Victorians, but also the Elizabethans like Shakespeare. And he went on to contemplate the pre-shrinking of the faery, the world where all sorts of beings lived, and where humans wandered when a-mazed and under spells, often to their doom, always at their peril.
I sat there, having eaten a meal from Another World, ready to be transported into faery by Lester, and so it wasn’t long before all sorts of ideas came into my head.
I talked with Lester. The next day we drank wine starting at around 10:30, had wine with lunch and dinner, and in general were all wandering across that invisible line between Regular Life, which has a lot of tooth brushing but not nearly so much imbibing and general hilarity, and Something Else, very different, magical, where other sorts of things can and do happen on a regular basis. We explored caves deep in the earth, sang three part harmonies and heard the walls give us back our own voices; some of us found ourselves up to our necks in mud, or hot water, eyes closed, far away from all our own personal Kansases. We ascended up above the valley, above the world of mere mortals, up to the land of metamorphosis, of Giant Rocks lifted from the ground, of a mead hall made of glass perched like an eyrie, looking across at the heavens and down at the world below. We drank wines whose grapes reigned hundreds of years ago; we drank wines not yet released to the world, as in anywhere, that danced on the tongue and made me want to compose songs praising the lord of this manor, and the noble vintner, and the company, and the writings of Ovid.
We traveled, that is, to the places where change happens, and change itself seems changed, magical, metamorphosed into something rich and strange.
And I wanted to write about faery, the world Tolkien defended so angrily and with so much energy, in the face not only of the disempowered fairy story, but also in the face of industrialism (it would take a very unimaginative reader not to read the scenes of orcs tearing trees up by their roots and throwing whole forests into the fires, to forge the weapons of Saruman’s army, and not see Industrialism tearing down whole forests to forge the weapons of war and the weapons of peace, suburbia in all its imagination-blasting, same producing glory). That is I wanted to see how the world of faery that Tolkien wrote into being and studied and saw as real in the past but irreal in the present, mapped onto my world.
I saw a circle. Inside it is always already the world of what is real and rational to most people of a particular time and place. What is inside the circle is always changing, and certainly so over long historical stretched. But the relation of inside to outside seems to stay the same. Some would call it reason vs irrational; others, instrumental reasoning vs metaphysical reasoning; others, science vs art; and so on.
As I thought about the world of faery, and Tolkien, and talked to this or that person, over a week or so, I realized that it was a wildly productive idea for me. I felt it in my own life: the desire to be enchanted, to allow for enchantment whatever that might mean. I like my life, toothbrush and all, my nice house and the network of friends and family that I help keep real and alive each day. And a part of me longs to be transported, to be a-mazed, to enter the realm of the sublime and powerful.
And as the idea kept growing I got writer’s block, or got lost in too many meanings, or not enough meaning, and didn’t write.
So this is my first crack at it. What do you make of it? Tolkien clearly didn’t mean Lord of the Rings to be about the atomic bomb, or Hitler, or even about hippies going back to the land with banged-up copies of Return of the King and jokes about pipe-weed. And yet in the world of the nuclear weapon and massive rationalization of work and edge cities of suburbian tsunamis, people flock to see the hobbits on the Big Screen, and Harry Potter and friends in their parallel to the muggles universe, encountering faery everywhere. He Who Must Not Be Named – is it faery?
And if so, what is the relation of this clear need of humans to find alternative places to be, and the parallel need of humans to gain more control over the impacts of our technologies, our world-eating appetites? Is the former simply a flight from Reason? Or a flight from reasoning fed on too much junk food and 64 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew?
I want the world to right itself, humans to find the middle way and use our technologies, those fires stolen from the gods, wisely. I want humans to realize that science is not opposed to imagination, that what we think about the cosmos and the origin of life is as stunningly sublime and wild as any creation myth, and ought to have the same effect of humility and magic on us. I want love, friendship, food, drink, music, inspiration, grace under pressure, the re-enchantment of the everyday.
”Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
"Everything which I said could not happen will happen now.”
Ovid
" Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
I want to talk about phantom ring, and mundane cyborgs, and the way the words cyborg and cybernetic have evolved, devolved, and revolved. But I can’t talk about those things now, I just can’t. So first, a word from our writer.
I went up to Calistoga with Claire for her 50th birthday party, and we stayed in a little cluster of doll houses for people, very nice, and Kevin and Claire brought their espresso machine, and we went to Groth and Plump Jack (the loser!) and Cuvaisson and a place called Ovid (more of that in another post) and ate at the Martini House on Friday night which might have been one of the top five dinners I’ve ever eaten in this particular life cycle.
In the way of the Fates, not that I believe in fate but in happymaking accidents that keep happening to me, we strolled out of Martini House feeling oh so wonderful but also late for our date with Cat’s friend. Oh well let’s go so we arrived house is dark downstairs but we ring anyway and down comes Janet in her bathrobe and graciously invites us in and we all begin to talk about wine and her husband Lester has a paper from Iceland. So I say it looks like Old English, and he mentions the Eddic sagas, and I mention I teach Beowulf, and he mentions the translations of the sagas by that Victorian writer, and hands me the tale of Howard the Halt, in a beautiful edition, and I mention Tolkien, and he asks me if I’ve ever read On Fairy Stories, and off we go.
Lester is remarkable. He can talk about Yeats, and in a moment switch to yeasts, as in industrial yeasts vs. European yeasts, alcohol conversion rates, and the micro-ecology of wine. He has eyebrows like Gandalf, and come to think of it, similar eyes and expressions. Separated at birth? Not impossible!
Anyway we talked about Tolkien’s notion of how the fairy story and faery. Tolkien hated the way fairy stories had become cutesy stories about diminutive folk who could hide behind a pansy. He blamed not only the Victorians, but also the Elizabethans like Shakespeare. And he went on to contemplate the pre-shrinking of the faery, the world where all sorts of beings lived, and where humans wandered when a-mazed and under spells, often to their doom, always at their peril.
I sat there, having eaten a meal from Another World, ready to be transported into faery by Lester, and so it wasn’t long before all sorts of ideas came into my head.
I talked with Lester. The next day we drank wine starting at around 10:30, had wine with lunch and dinner, and in general were all wandering across that invisible line between Regular Life, which has a lot of tooth brushing but not nearly so much imbibing and general hilarity, and Something Else, very different, magical, where other sorts of things can and do happen on a regular basis. We explored caves deep in the earth, sang three part harmonies and heard the walls give us back our own voices; some of us found ourselves up to our necks in mud, or hot water, eyes closed, far away from all our own personal Kansases. We ascended up above the valley, above the world of mere mortals, up to the land of metamorphosis, of Giant Rocks lifted from the ground, of a mead hall made of glass perched like an eyrie, looking across at the heavens and down at the world below. We drank wines whose grapes reigned hundreds of years ago; we drank wines not yet released to the world, as in anywhere, that danced on the tongue and made me want to compose songs praising the lord of this manor, and the noble vintner, and the company, and the writings of Ovid.
We traveled, that is, to the places where change happens, and change itself seems changed, magical, metamorphosed into something rich and strange.
And I wanted to write about faery, the world Tolkien defended so angrily and with so much energy, in the face not only of the disempowered fairy story, but also in the face of industrialism (it would take a very unimaginative reader not to read the scenes of orcs tearing trees up by their roots and throwing whole forests into the fires, to forge the weapons of Saruman’s army, and not see Industrialism tearing down whole forests to forge the weapons of war and the weapons of peace, suburbia in all its imagination-blasting, same producing glory). That is I wanted to see how the world of faery that Tolkien wrote into being and studied and saw as real in the past but irreal in the present, mapped onto my world.
I saw a circle. Inside it is always already the world of what is real and rational to most people of a particular time and place. What is inside the circle is always changing, and certainly so over long historical stretched. But the relation of inside to outside seems to stay the same. Some would call it reason vs irrational; others, instrumental reasoning vs metaphysical reasoning; others, science vs art; and so on.
As I thought about the world of faery, and Tolkien, and talked to this or that person, over a week or so, I realized that it was a wildly productive idea for me. I felt it in my own life: the desire to be enchanted, to allow for enchantment whatever that might mean. I like my life, toothbrush and all, my nice house and the network of friends and family that I help keep real and alive each day. And a part of me longs to be transported, to be a-mazed, to enter the realm of the sublime and powerful.
And as the idea kept growing I got writer’s block, or got lost in too many meanings, or not enough meaning, and didn’t write.
So this is my first crack at it. What do you make of it? Tolkien clearly didn’t mean Lord of the Rings to be about the atomic bomb, or Hitler, or even about hippies going back to the land with banged-up copies of Return of the King and jokes about pipe-weed. And yet in the world of the nuclear weapon and massive rationalization of work and edge cities of suburbian tsunamis, people flock to see the hobbits on the Big Screen, and Harry Potter and friends in their parallel to the muggles universe, encountering faery everywhere. He Who Must Not Be Named – is it faery?
And if so, what is the relation of this clear need of humans to find alternative places to be, and the parallel need of humans to gain more control over the impacts of our technologies, our world-eating appetites? Is the former simply a flight from Reason? Or a flight from reasoning fed on too much junk food and 64 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew?
I want the world to right itself, humans to find the middle way and use our technologies, those fires stolen from the gods, wisely. I want humans to realize that science is not opposed to imagination, that what we think about the cosmos and the origin of life is as stunningly sublime and wild as any creation myth, and ought to have the same effect of humility and magic on us. I want love, friendship, food, drink, music, inspiration, grace under pressure, the re-enchantment of the everyday.
”Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
"Everything which I said could not happen will happen now.”
Ovid
