First, let us define national debt. This is necessary so that we may evaluate it as something that may or may not be essential to life as we are accustomed, and if it is, then let us suggest alternative targets.
In order to examine the national debt we have to first determine how it comes into being, and the answer very simply is: when the Federal Government makes expenditures which total more than its revenues, the result is a budget deficit. Over time, the sum of each year’s deficit spending minus any payments is calculated as a whole and called the national debt.
In order to still meet its spending goals, the government has to borrow money, which is achieved by the sale of US securities (savings bonds, T-bills, and such). Most of these securities (i.e. loans) are similar to the types of loans an individual would receive from a bank to finance a house or an education, for example.
Therefore, what we are talking about here is a promise to repay a certain amount of money at a set length of time and at an agreed upon rate of interest, which may be fixed, or may vary according to the terms of the loan.
Why does a bank loan an individual money to buy a house? There are at least two major reasons to begin with, number one being the bank has researched the individual’s credit history and income along with other factors to determine that it can afford to loan the money to that person, since it feels reasonably sure that the loan will be paid back within a set period of time plus interest. This is one of the ways banks make money. The second reason a bank will make a loan to an individual for a home is to help maintain stability in society. The bank is investing in that family, so to speak, with the return being good, law-abiding children who will hopefully turn into future bank customers; perhaps even bank employees.
One can see the parallel in government loans to college students to help pay for their education, because in essence the government is making an investment in students, who in turn will become part of the workforce, and who will not only eventually pay back their student loans (with interest) but will also continue to work for salaries from which the government may draw revenues in the form of taxes.
This is the general way that the American economy has run since just after WWII and the end of the Great Depression. Before that, the Government had generally played a small role in regulating the economy and had balanced operating budgets most of the time with very little debt comparatively.
The two big issues around deficit spending and the cumulative national debt are who is funding the deficit, that is—who is loaning the US government the money to operate? Furthermore, on what is that money being spent?
This becomes an emotional issue, because the people of the United States historically have been very hostile at the idea of raising taxes to fund the government’s operations, therefore the government has had to sell bonds, most of which are not sold to Americans since bonds have a relatively low rate of return, and they take a long time to mature.
However, they are considered to be very safe investments—backed by the full Authority and Confidence of the American government, so large foreign banks love the bond market, so much so, that from some points of view, much of the American government is owned by foreign entities.
Americans, regardless of our self-proclaimed “All Men Are Equal...etc,” tend to be very xenophobic, and though I’d reckon the vast majority of the populace is unaware of how much of this nation is owned by foreigners, there are enough people within the government who do know, and they are generally displeased with the fact.
Moreover, the second, and probably more important issue than where the money is coming from, is that very few Americans agree on where it should go to.
In 2002, the government spent $2.05 trillion, which is four times as much as it did in 1960 with about 24% being spent on national defense. 64% was spent on human resources including health, welfare, veteran’s benefits, and education, with the most money being shuffled into the two largest programs, Social Security and Medicare. Physical resources including, transportation, the Interstate Highways system, energy, and the Environment accounted for 6% of expenditures. While only 4% went to agriculture, National Parks, science and technology, and the courts with a paltry 1% being spent on foreign affairs (most of that in the form of aid to Israel) and the remaining 9% or so earmarked solely for the interest on the debt.
Remarkably, despite achieving the highest Gross Domestic Product of $11.7 trillion, of the top 17 industrialized nations, the United States ranks lowest in every category indicating quality of life such as life expectancy, literacy, access to health care and education. We are highest in unwed teen pregnancies, infant mortality rate, illicit drug use, consumption of over the counter and prescription pharmaceuticals, and have the highest percentage of our population in prison at any given time (which is both linked directly to the illicit drug trade and an appallingly high rate of recidivism.) The US is also the number one polluter of toxic wastes from depleted uranium shells to greenhouse gasses to heavy metals in the aquifers, and we are the world’s number one arms dealer.
Perhaps most distressing, despite the grotesque, ostentatious displays of gratuitous wealth by the top ten percent of the population, nearly 30 percent of the population can be classified as “the working poor” while a further 14% live at or below the poverty line, and most of these are children and the elderly.
Therefore, I am not especially concerned about paying off the national debt in and of itself, because a.) I don’t mind foreigners investing in our country—I take it as a compliment that they feel we are a safe investment, and b.) I am not especially happy with how that money is spent.
I would much rather recall all our troops and train them to build light-rails and efficient mass transportation systems and hospitals than waste another dollar on killing people who wouldn’t hate us if we stopped killing them.
I would much rather we sign the Kyoto treaty and commit ourselves to reducing pollution and developing clean, renewable sources of energy, than opening up the Arctic wildlife refuge just to keep the oil barons fatter and richer beyond conception.
I’d much rather rebuild and revitalize our inner cities into centers of art, architecture, learning, music, and medicine than waste another dime on a so-called drug war, which wouldn’t exist but for the slimy politicians and CIA operatives who seeded the fields of Colombia with cocaine and the mountains of Afghanistan with opium so that they could illegally fund their own death squads and terrorists to keep the masses docile and afraid.
Those are all lofty goals, probably out of reach of any one person, or any one class to shoot for with our little bake sale, but maybe if we shot for something within our reach—like say, planting a seedling tree for every cupcake we sell, or using the money to fund a trip to Sacramento to lobby our congressmen and women about environmental issues, or to recall Proposition 13 which sliced California’s educational budget to bits back in 1978 just so a few selfish people could get a tax break on their homes.
There are any number of issues to get mad at, but true political efficacy requires realistic goals, commitment, and patient baby-steps, and I suspect that our needle prick at the National Debt will be ineffectual and soon forgotten.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
F-I-R-E-T-R-U-C-K-S = Funny!
Friday, January 23, 2009
Okay, gotta get this out while it’s still fresh.
So, Tucson and I were meandering woefully home in the rain tonight, after what might possibly could be considered the worst day yet at the Academy of Tits-on-a-Bull & Red Tape Policy.
I had to gather my cat, Chase, who had the great misfortune to be seen as a therapy animal, rather than a service animal by the Powers (by which I mean of course, the Nazgûl and the Dark Lord of Môrdor, herself) and was first confiscated by campus security (thank Allah! we have a security team here well-equipped to deal with such acts of wanton rebelliousness and potential sedition!) and then given 72 hours—no wait, she recanted—48 hours before the feline terrorist would be handed over to the NSA for waterboarding and other such refinements.
Thus, it was with great alacrity and even a bit of haste that I woke early, sped down the street to the cafetorium, ate my Cheerios™, discussed strategy with Tucson over a Krispy Kreme™ and our morning café au lait, and then raced through the ubiquitous drizzle for which San Francisco is beloved and renown the world over to the basement security pen—I mean, office—to forcibly remove Chase from the security personnel (who by this time had fallen prey to his willy charms and were reluctant to let him go) and then walk-jog upstairs and down the street to meet the Golden Gate Transit Authority™ Bus No. 80, via which I had pre-meditated a plan of extradition to parts far from the Unblinking Eye called San Rafael, whither a friend of mine and his mother operate a sort of retreat for the yoga-and-crystals inspired. (Chase of course, is a master of the Arching-Cat yoga stance, among others.)
Anyway, I was striving to call the family to meet us at the bus station at a certain time, and after the call I put my mobile phone atop the crate within which Chase paced and growled as Growly-Cats are wont to do.
Nonetheless, before you could say “Son of a Witch” some ill-mannered passerby snatched my near-to-new mobile phone (on which I had affixed my Rainbow Graduation tassel from UCLA as a wrist strap) and made off with it (back to Isengard, no doubt) and thus, I was left wet, whimpering, and without means to neither confirm nor deny the time and place for Chase’s transferral.
I will admit to some utterly spontaneous vulgarities amidst the growing crowd of fellow travelers, which I’ll not repeat, but consisted of some (but not all) of the same letters used in Scrabble™ to spell F-I-R-E-T-R-U-C-K, and that made me feel passingly better, although that moment of peaceful, yet vociferous reflection soon faded.
Being as well-travelled and worldly an individual as myself oft times bears fruition in real-time moments of crises such as these, and so it was that I recalled there was a T-Mobile™ store some six or seven blocks away, although the saliency of those estimates may have been slightly exaggerated by the unrelenting downpour and the necessity of having to juggle Tucson on leash with one hand, while toting the massive Rubbermaid™ crate in which our hero had been imprisoned.
Moving along, I eventually secured another mobile phone, downloaded the contacts from T-mobile’s customer service website (I trust you are paying attention, underclassmen—there is a synchronize button on nearly all mobile devices nowadays. Use it, and be glad!)
I then contacted Markus and made arrangements for the hopefully-temporary transferral later in the day, and then scrambled back to the Dark Tower, surreptitiously tucking the enormous Tupperware™ crate behind the security desk when the guard wasn’t looking (hey, if I could pilfer the occasional leftover corsage from one of the ubiquitous weddings at the Hotel Bel-Air, without getting sniped by one of the Mossad agents staffed by the Bel-Air as their security team, I hardly think any one or more of the Urûk-Hai was a match for me {Jason Bourne, eat your heart out!}) and met with Shelob, the Director of Classroom Services, who (that’s right, kiddies! you guessed it!) assaulted me with yet more forms, documents, waivers, living-wills, and generally, a ginormous stack of useless papers, comparable in size to Chase’s mobile prison (if this was Humboldt, they’d kick her tree-munching ass!) and needing to be signed in triplicate and have less than nothing to do with my course of study.
Anywho, after this test of patience, (Holy Mary, Mother of God, give me strength!) I marched me-self back downstairs, snagged the above mentioned plastic prison and darted down the street to await yet another shining coach to carry us across the bridge into Rivende-- I mean, Marin County.
Things seemed to be looking up, yet, when I did, in fact, look up to meet the gaze of the bus driver, he actually shouted, “I hope you don’t think you’re going to bring that f---ing thing onboard!” which made me sigh, but after 8 years, you get used to it, so I started to explain Tucson was a service dog, but he cut me off with a sneer that would make the Grinch flinch and indicated that he was referring to the mountainous Tupperware™ crate.
Now, I know this next bit is probably going to make y’all roll your eyes, but I swear to Krishna, I was dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and rendered speechless! (Scary, but true…)
Knowing he had won this round, he departed sans The Three Amigos and decanted a final curse, “The next bus driver who comes along is gonna tell you the same (expletive deleted) thing! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!”
Among my rollercoaster of emotional states already enumerated, I was also a tad nonplussed.
What to do with the paddy wagon?
Flustered as I was, you’ll remember I am an International Man of Mystery™ with more than a few tricks up my sopping wet sleeves, so, I rearranged the useable space within my backpack in such a way as to make Martha Stewart proud, and I, uh, “let the kitty into the bag!” Heh, heh…
I’ll not bemoan the loss of the Sterilite™ camper—surely some homeless person will make good use of its gaping size and weatherproofing, and so, without a hitch, the next carriage to come round, granted us passage across that most Golden-Gate-ly of Bridges.
Tears were shed when I passed Chase into the gentle arms of Sir Markus, but temporary or permanent I knew he was in good, strong hands not unlike the Rockbiter’s.
Now, I’ll admit to a bit of petulancy and was determined that I had had a Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day, and nothing was going to lift my spirits.
However, it was spirits, themselves which lifted mine, by which I mean Pineapple-infused vodka doled liberally from an iced tea jug and a cheap, but unpretentious Pinot Grigio, both availed by the timely passing by of an art gallery just up the street from my dorm.
As is my norm, I floated in on Tucson’s coattails, an inauspicious part of his celebrity entourage; a queer (sic) sight among these gentrified and dog-less streets.
I realized a couple of things at that point: one, I still have a knack for artsy-fartsy small talk, a skill polished by my innumerable “assignments” for the A & E section of MSU’s Exponent™; and two, I still have the sort of nimble dexterity with a wine key that would put Houdini to shame.
Merriment ensued.
Eventually the bottles ran dry, and together, Tucson and I wobbled down the street to the dorm like old chums (sic) across from which is a fabulous café/nightclub sparingly called Sugar, and though I have yet to actually enter the establishment, the designers have erected two mirroring, extra-wide screens on which a variety of scenes are projected.
Perhaps sound accompanies the scenes inside, but out on the street any soundtrack or dialogue is eclipsed by the general hubbub of the City.
Nonetheless, tonight they were broadcasting music videos from the early ‘80’s, and believe it or not, I realized the quintessential rebellious & rouged rock band Twisted Sister had mastered the art of exaggerating their vocals such that if you couldn’t read lips before, you could now, as they silently mouthed the lyrics to their one-hit-wonder “We’re Not Gonna Take It (Anymore)”
I observed with glee, whilst Tucson peed, and together we watched this silent sort of me-dia until the next video came on.
I think I may well have been the only person within a fifty-mile radius who could have appreciated the subtle hilariousnessicity of the following video, “I Can Dream About You”—a tune written, and sung by my man, Dan Hartman, probably best known for his timeless lyrical wizardry on the early 1970’s anthem “Free Ride” (although, personally, my favorite Hartman tune is the disco staple “Re-light My Fire.”)
(Okay, Mr. Smarty-pants, get to the punchline!)
Well, here it goes: the video for “I Can Dream About You” depicts a quartet of black and ostensibly straight men alá The Four Tops pandering to a concert hall filled with women.
The Joke, is, Gentle Readers, Hartman was white and gay, and whoever the four black crooners were, they were simply mouthing the words to his song, much like how C & C Music Factory replaced divine, disco, diva, Martha Wash, in their early 1990s’ video for the hit single “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” with a more camera-worthy songstress (read: Martha could sing like nobody’s bizness but she was deemed too fat for the Music Factory’s image.)
Hmm, now that I come to think of it, the lyposuctioned, lypsyncing replacement had suspiciously familiar features to über-bitch and tabloid favorite, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the femme fatale star of Donald Trump’s exercise in flaunting his asswholery The Apprentice back in 2004—2005.
Things that make you go, “Hmm,” indeed!
So, anyway, if you didn’t know the E! True Hollywood Story about Hartman, who sadly remained closeted until his death from AIDS in 1994, you’d still think the four black dudes Milli-Vanilli-ing his song were actually the real singers, especially since you couldn’t actually hear them singing, capice?
Wow! That was a loooong one, and perhaps it’s the sort of humor that only appeals to a certain sort of humor, namely mine, but I hope somewhere out there in Blogsville, there may be at least one other person who digs my torrid, self-congratulatory tale.
If not, as they say, “Go F-I-R-E-T-R-U-C-K yourself!”
12:03 AM
Okay, gotta get this out while it’s still fresh.
So, Tucson and I were meandering woefully home in the rain tonight, after what might possibly could be considered the worst day yet at the Academy of Tits-on-a-Bull & Red Tape Policy.
I had to gather my cat, Chase, who had the great misfortune to be seen as a therapy animal, rather than a service animal by the Powers (by which I mean of course, the Nazgûl and the Dark Lord of Môrdor, herself) and was first confiscated by campus security (thank Allah! we have a security team here well-equipped to deal with such acts of wanton rebelliousness and potential sedition!) and then given 72 hours—no wait, she recanted—48 hours before the feline terrorist would be handed over to the NSA for waterboarding and other such refinements.
Thus, it was with great alacrity and even a bit of haste that I woke early, sped down the street to the cafetorium, ate my Cheerios™, discussed strategy with Tucson over a Krispy Kreme™ and our morning café au lait, and then raced through the ubiquitous drizzle for which San Francisco is beloved and renown the world over to the basement security pen—I mean, office—to forcibly remove Chase from the security personnel (who by this time had fallen prey to his willy charms and were reluctant to let him go) and then walk-jog upstairs and down the street to meet the Golden Gate Transit Authority™ Bus No. 80, via which I had pre-meditated a plan of extradition to parts far from the Unblinking Eye called San Rafael, whither a friend of mine and his mother operate a sort of retreat for the yoga-and-crystals inspired. (Chase of course, is a master of the Arching-Cat yoga stance, among others.)
Anyway, I was striving to call the family to meet us at the bus station at a certain time, and after the call I put my mobile phone atop the crate within which Chase paced and growled as Growly-Cats are wont to do.
Nonetheless, before you could say “Son of a Witch” some ill-mannered passerby snatched my near-to-new mobile phone (on which I had affixed my Rainbow Graduation tassel from UCLA as a wrist strap) and made off with it (back to Isengard, no doubt) and thus, I was left wet, whimpering, and without means to neither confirm nor deny the time and place for Chase’s transferral.
I will admit to some utterly spontaneous vulgarities amidst the growing crowd of fellow travelers, which I’ll not repeat, but consisted of some (but not all) of the same letters used in Scrabble™ to spell F-I-R-E-T-R-U-C-K, and that made me feel passingly better, although that moment of peaceful, yet vociferous reflection soon faded.
Being as well-travelled and worldly an individual as myself oft times bears fruition in real-time moments of crises such as these, and so it was that I recalled there was a T-Mobile™ store some six or seven blocks away, although the saliency of those estimates may have been slightly exaggerated by the unrelenting downpour and the necessity of having to juggle Tucson on leash with one hand, while toting the massive Rubbermaid™ crate in which our hero had been imprisoned.
Moving along, I eventually secured another mobile phone, downloaded the contacts from T-mobile’s customer service website (I trust you are paying attention, underclassmen—there is a synchronize button on nearly all mobile devices nowadays. Use it, and be glad!)
I then contacted Markus and made arrangements for the hopefully-temporary transferral later in the day, and then scrambled back to the Dark Tower, surreptitiously tucking the enormous Tupperware™ crate behind the security desk when the guard wasn’t looking (hey, if I could pilfer the occasional leftover corsage from one of the ubiquitous weddings at the Hotel Bel-Air, without getting sniped by one of the Mossad agents staffed by the Bel-Air as their security team, I hardly think any one or more of the Urûk-Hai was a match for me {Jason Bourne, eat your heart out!}) and met with Shelob, the Director of Classroom Services, who (that’s right, kiddies! you guessed it!) assaulted me with yet more forms, documents, waivers, living-wills, and generally, a ginormous stack of useless papers, comparable in size to Chase’s mobile prison (if this was Humboldt, they’d kick her tree-munching ass!) and needing to be signed in triplicate and have less than nothing to do with my course of study.
Anywho, after this test of patience, (Holy Mary, Mother of God, give me strength!) I marched me-self back downstairs, snagged the above mentioned plastic prison and darted down the street to await yet another shining coach to carry us across the bridge into Rivende-- I mean, Marin County.
Things seemed to be looking up, yet, when I did, in fact, look up to meet the gaze of the bus driver, he actually shouted, “I hope you don’t think you’re going to bring that f---ing thing onboard!” which made me sigh, but after 8 years, you get used to it, so I started to explain Tucson was a service dog, but he cut me off with a sneer that would make the Grinch flinch and indicated that he was referring to the mountainous Tupperware™ crate.
Now, I know this next bit is probably going to make y’all roll your eyes, but I swear to Krishna, I was dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and rendered speechless! (Scary, but true…)
Knowing he had won this round, he departed sans The Three Amigos and decanted a final curse, “The next bus driver who comes along is gonna tell you the same (expletive deleted) thing! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!”
Among my rollercoaster of emotional states already enumerated, I was also a tad nonplussed.
What to do with the paddy wagon?
Flustered as I was, you’ll remember I am an International Man of Mystery™ with more than a few tricks up my sopping wet sleeves, so, I rearranged the useable space within my backpack in such a way as to make Martha Stewart proud, and I, uh, “let the kitty into the bag!” Heh, heh…
I’ll not bemoan the loss of the Sterilite™ camper—surely some homeless person will make good use of its gaping size and weatherproofing, and so, without a hitch, the next carriage to come round, granted us passage across that most Golden-Gate-ly of Bridges.
Tears were shed when I passed Chase into the gentle arms of Sir Markus, but temporary or permanent I knew he was in good, strong hands not unlike the Rockbiter’s.
Now, I’ll admit to a bit of petulancy and was determined that I had had a Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day, and nothing was going to lift my spirits.
However, it was spirits, themselves which lifted mine, by which I mean Pineapple-infused vodka doled liberally from an iced tea jug and a cheap, but unpretentious Pinot Grigio, both availed by the timely passing by of an art gallery just up the street from my dorm.
As is my norm, I floated in on Tucson’s coattails, an inauspicious part of his celebrity entourage; a queer (sic) sight among these gentrified and dog-less streets.
I realized a couple of things at that point: one, I still have a knack for artsy-fartsy small talk, a skill polished by my innumerable “assignments” for the A & E section of MSU’s Exponent™; and two, I still have the sort of nimble dexterity with a wine key that would put Houdini to shame.
Merriment ensued.
Eventually the bottles ran dry, and together, Tucson and I wobbled down the street to the dorm like old chums (sic) across from which is a fabulous café/nightclub sparingly called Sugar, and though I have yet to actually enter the establishment, the designers have erected two mirroring, extra-wide screens on which a variety of scenes are projected.
Perhaps sound accompanies the scenes inside, but out on the street any soundtrack or dialogue is eclipsed by the general hubbub of the City.
Nonetheless, tonight they were broadcasting music videos from the early ‘80’s, and believe it or not, I realized the quintessential rebellious & rouged rock band Twisted Sister had mastered the art of exaggerating their vocals such that if you couldn’t read lips before, you could now, as they silently mouthed the lyrics to their one-hit-wonder “We’re Not Gonna Take It (Anymore)”
I observed with glee, whilst Tucson peed, and together we watched this silent sort of me-dia until the next video came on.
I think I may well have been the only person within a fifty-mile radius who could have appreciated the subtle hilariousnessicity of the following video, “I Can Dream About You”—a tune written, and sung by my man, Dan Hartman, probably best known for his timeless lyrical wizardry on the early 1970’s anthem “Free Ride” (although, personally, my favorite Hartman tune is the disco staple “Re-light My Fire.”)
(Okay, Mr. Smarty-pants, get to the punchline!)
Well, here it goes: the video for “I Can Dream About You” depicts a quartet of black and ostensibly straight men alá The Four Tops pandering to a concert hall filled with women.
The Joke, is, Gentle Readers, Hartman was white and gay, and whoever the four black crooners were, they were simply mouthing the words to his song, much like how C & C Music Factory replaced divine, disco, diva, Martha Wash, in their early 1990s’ video for the hit single “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” with a more camera-worthy songstress (read: Martha could sing like nobody’s bizness but she was deemed too fat for the Music Factory’s image.)
Hmm, now that I come to think of it, the lyposuctioned, lypsyncing replacement had suspiciously familiar features to über-bitch and tabloid favorite, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the femme fatale star of Donald Trump’s exercise in flaunting his asswholery The Apprentice back in 2004—2005.
Things that make you go, “Hmm,” indeed!
So, anyway, if you didn’t know the E! True Hollywood Story about Hartman, who sadly remained closeted until his death from AIDS in 1994, you’d still think the four black dudes Milli-Vanilli-ing his song were actually the real singers, especially since you couldn’t actually hear them singing, capice?
Wow! That was a loooong one, and perhaps it’s the sort of humor that only appeals to a certain sort of humor, namely mine, but I hope somewhere out there in Blogsville, there may be at least one other person who digs my torrid, self-congratulatory tale.
If not, as they say, “Go F-I-R-E-T-R-U-C-K yourself!”
12:03 AM
Thursday, January 22, 2009
On Irony
Ever since that really great episode of Vh1’s I Love the 90’s, wherein the jolly cast dissects Alaniss Morrisette’s song “Irony” I have been pretty obsessive about the correct usage of such terms, particularly in light of my self-appointed vow to uphold the ideals of Logic and Consistency, and the never-ending war betwixt Vagueness & Ambiguity, and my deep personal struggle for Clarity in the face of Proof-Surrogates like “clearly” et al.
Yes, I am that anal, pleaseandthankyouverymuch!
“Irony” is a special case all to itself since it holds a place in my heart and harps way back to my high school daze when a classmate named John McKee defined Irony in perfect stoner speak, “Uh, dude, whut do ya callit when sumthins’ funny, but ya haveta think about it furst? Oh yeah, irony!” (Which in and of itself some might deem ironic.)
And then there’s that great sequence from Reality Bites when struggling assistant producer Winona Ryder is asked to define irony and stumbles over it, and much to her chagrin, shortly thereafter sexy pothead philosopher Ethan Hawke is quick to quip, "Irony is humor that occurs when the exact opposite of what is expected happens."
Or something to that effect.
(Just for the record, my handy-dandy World Book Digital Dictionary definition reads:
irony: an event or outcome which is the opposite of what would naturally be expected.)
Thence, we fast-forward a decade to a group of social analysts cum pop culture experts raggin’ on that poor Canadian songstress and her groovy but lexically flawed tune.
“It’s like rain on your wedding day?! Michael Ian Black scoffs, “That’s not irony—that just sucks!”
His comrades in wit similarly smear poor Alaniss’ misconceptions and analogies as she bewails the pains in the Ass-of-Life like “...meeting the man of your dreams...and his beautiful wife...” (Nyah-ha! I just made a rhyme! Life--wife, get it?)
Aneewho, it’s my man Mo (Rocca, that is) who finally deduces that pretty much nothing in the song itself is ironic per se, except...unless...perhaps...for the fact that in enjoining a group of cynical critics, who think they are just too damn smart for their own good, about a simple, likeable song called “Ironic” that in itself is ironic. At which point "Everything is Illuminated," as them say, and he tips his proverbial hat to Miss Morrisette with an, “Oh...Canadians are crafty!”
That they are, my friend, that they are...
Funny stuff, but I think I’ve got them all beat with this sordid, squishy tale of misery and hardshipness.
As chance would have it some three years ago I came to a proverbial and literal crossroads in my life whereupon fleeing a fucked up life in Phoenix, I was forced to choose a direction--East or West, when I came to the junction of I-10 as it crosses the I-17 or thereabouts, and I pondered the opportunities and what fortunes I might begat in the LA to the East (LA, of course referring to the abbreviation for Louisiana) or the L.A. to the West, meaning of course our own fair city.
I’d long had an urge to try out the Deep South and get all Creole on the bayou with the barbecue and the Bourbon and streetcars and such, but I were still a bit dazed from the year and a half of baking under the un-tender mercies of the Phoenician sun so I opted for the gentle breezes and coastlines of Southern California, a locale with which I had some familiarity having done some traipsing hither and thither in my early twenties resort-hopping, etc.
Thus, I thunk mighty hard about the bullet I’d dodged last summer when the Gulf of Mexico got all riled up and pissed down the worst storm the USA had ever seen and done near well wiped New Orleans off the map.
Ah must be psychic or sumpin’!
Well, imagine my surprise and the hilariousnessicity I enjoyed when last night the rain decided it wanted to come for a little visit up and out of my garbage disposal, overflowing the counter in a morass of sewer sludge and mossy-black, pus-water. Yep! Taint seen nuthin that thair disgustin in eh mighty loon time!
Caint win fer losin’ as them say!
So, I’ll just slip out of this dialect or whatever I was trying to affect, and speak plain. I’ve had a toilet or two back up in my day, but at least you could shut that water off, and usually it required nothing more than a plunger and some elbow grease to get things fixed up quick.
This, on the other hand was a fucking mess, no hands down. Totally ruined the carpet and tile in the kitchen, living and dining room.
And it stinks too.
What are you going to do but laugh, right?
Pretty damned ironic in my book! I’ll have to have a word or two with G-d over our nightly sherry.... Ha ha ha!
Yes, I am that anal, pleaseandthankyouverymuch!
“Irony” is a special case all to itself since it holds a place in my heart and harps way back to my high school daze when a classmate named John McKee defined Irony in perfect stoner speak, “Uh, dude, whut do ya callit when sumthins’ funny, but ya haveta think about it furst? Oh yeah, irony!” (Which in and of itself some might deem ironic.)
And then there’s that great sequence from Reality Bites when struggling assistant producer Winona Ryder is asked to define irony and stumbles over it, and much to her chagrin, shortly thereafter sexy pothead philosopher Ethan Hawke is quick to quip, "Irony is humor that occurs when the exact opposite of what is expected happens."
Or something to that effect.
(Just for the record, my handy-dandy World Book Digital Dictionary definition reads:
irony: an event or outcome which is the opposite of what would naturally be expected.)
Thence, we fast-forward a decade to a group of social analysts cum pop culture experts raggin’ on that poor Canadian songstress and her groovy but lexically flawed tune.
“It’s like rain on your wedding day?! Michael Ian Black scoffs, “That’s not irony—that just sucks!”
His comrades in wit similarly smear poor Alaniss’ misconceptions and analogies as she bewails the pains in the Ass-of-Life like “...meeting the man of your dreams...and his beautiful wife...” (Nyah-ha! I just made a rhyme! Life--wife, get it?)
Aneewho, it’s my man Mo (Rocca, that is) who finally deduces that pretty much nothing in the song itself is ironic per se, except...unless...perhaps...for the fact that in enjoining a group of cynical critics, who think they are just too damn smart for their own good, about a simple, likeable song called “Ironic” that in itself is ironic. At which point "Everything is Illuminated," as them say, and he tips his proverbial hat to Miss Morrisette with an, “Oh...Canadians are crafty!”
That they are, my friend, that they are...
Funny stuff, but I think I’ve got them all beat with this sordid, squishy tale of misery and hardshipness.
As chance would have it some three years ago I came to a proverbial and literal crossroads in my life whereupon fleeing a fucked up life in Phoenix, I was forced to choose a direction--East or West, when I came to the junction of I-10 as it crosses the I-17 or thereabouts, and I pondered the opportunities and what fortunes I might begat in the LA to the East (LA, of course referring to the abbreviation for Louisiana) or the L.A. to the West, meaning of course our own fair city.
I’d long had an urge to try out the Deep South and get all Creole on the bayou with the barbecue and the Bourbon and streetcars and such, but I were still a bit dazed from the year and a half of baking under the un-tender mercies of the Phoenician sun so I opted for the gentle breezes and coastlines of Southern California, a locale with which I had some familiarity having done some traipsing hither and thither in my early twenties resort-hopping, etc.
Thus, I thunk mighty hard about the bullet I’d dodged last summer when the Gulf of Mexico got all riled up and pissed down the worst storm the USA had ever seen and done near well wiped New Orleans off the map.
Ah must be psychic or sumpin’!
Well, imagine my surprise and the hilariousnessicity I enjoyed when last night the rain decided it wanted to come for a little visit up and out of my garbage disposal, overflowing the counter in a morass of sewer sludge and mossy-black, pus-water. Yep! Taint seen nuthin that thair disgustin in eh mighty loon time!
Caint win fer losin’ as them say!
So, I’ll just slip out of this dialect or whatever I was trying to affect, and speak plain. I’ve had a toilet or two back up in my day, but at least you could shut that water off, and usually it required nothing more than a plunger and some elbow grease to get things fixed up quick.
This, on the other hand was a fucking mess, no hands down. Totally ruined the carpet and tile in the kitchen, living and dining room.
And it stinks too.
What are you going to do but laugh, right?
Pretty damned ironic in my book! I’ll have to have a word or two with G-d over our nightly sherry.... Ha ha ha!
Gypsies I have known…
As a teenager, although I had long claimed a Gypsy heritage, that is, I knew I was at least biologically related to the Roma people as an ethnic group via my biological father; I still had little concept of what it was like to be among “my people,” much less observe their treatment by the rest of society.
However, in the Spring of 1995 I found my way across the Atlantic; first to work in a homeless shelter in London where I met quite a lot of Scottish and Irish Gypsies, dubbed “tinkers,” but it wasn’t until I backpacked my way through eastern Europe that I encountered Roma; first in Athens and later in Budapest, Prague, and Paris.
At a youth hostel in Germany, I was warned of various “Gypsy tactics” where a crowd of Gypsy children will surround the hapless traveler, and a Gypsy mother throws a baby at the traveler, who invariably scrambles to catch the baby, at which point the mother starts screaming that her baby is being kidnapped while the rest of the kids pick the poor backpacker clean.
I never actually saw this happen, but I heard the same story at a number of hostels, and I reckoned it must be some sort of urban legend.
In Budapest, a great open-air market lined the western bank of the Danube River, and there was a semi-permanent cluster of shops/huts at one end—the Gypsy end—the end I was warned to avoid by the “kindly” folks at the hostel in Pecs.
“They’re so dirty! And they’ll rob you blind if you’re not careful.”
I more or less ignored my hosts, and much to my amusement and secret delight, because I looked like one of them, I wasn’t even approached by any of the many panhandlers in the Gypsy market.
Ah! At long-last I fit in! Forever, it seemed like I would always be on the outside. Other kids when I was growing up in Montana thought I was Mexican or maybe Italian. I certainly didn’t fit the mold of fair skinned, blue-eyed WASP’s. But here, below the walls of the Imperial Palace, I passed within, if you can dig it.
In Budapest, I just saw my brethren as peddlers, beggars maybe, but as I moved on to Prague, where the largest music festival of the year was just kicking off, I was entranced (as many of their audiences were, no doubt) with the vibrant music and intricate dances the Gypsies performed, impromptu; deliciously medieval in the shadow of the great gothic cathedral; skipping in the moonlight across the cobble-stoned bridges.
Sadly, when I headed back to Western Europe, I chanced upon one of the darker realities of Gypsy life, this time in Paris, during the WWII Victory celebration mid-May (akin to America’s Memorial Day.)
Along the Champs d’Elysee, tourists could not help but fumble for a few bits of spare change every few blocks, because they were entreated with the most adorable puppy-dog eyes looking up from quaintly dirty, cherubic faces, mutely begging a franc or two, while the Gypsy child, sometimes no more than 2 or 3 years old, fingered a toy accordion.
At sundown, like something from Oliver Twist, an old Gypsy woman in a massive coat and dress arrived and gathered up each child and its earnings. The children disappeared into the folds of her cloak, just as she herself melded into the crowd of evening window shoppers and disappeared like smoke on the wind.
It was fascinating and terrible to watch, but what could I, a green-behind-the-ears kid from Montana, who just barely spoke enough French to get by in a café—what could I do to save those poor kids?
What child welfare authorities could I turn to?
Who would want to take care of a bunch of Gypsy kids (thieves, hoodlums, ragamuffins)?
Who was I saving them from?
What if they didn’t want to go?
Who the hell was I to make such judgments?
I stood there on the pavement beneath the Arc de Triomphe confused and upset.
I still don’t have the answers.
********************************************
Several years passed before I returned to Eastern Europe, this time spending the winter (sic) mostly in Bulgaria, although my friends and I spent the Christmas holidays in Budapest; traveling there via a Cold War-era train through the snow-choked Carpathian mountains. At one point we were stopped and boarded by “customs” (?) officers in Romania, who suspiciously scrutinized our passports, while we just so happened to offer them a smoke (read: 2 cartons of Marlboro lights) before the train was allowed to continue.
Budapest was freezing cold but cheerfully swathed in holiday colors and welcoming, and our spirits were jubilant.
On our second night, I met a beautiful, raven-haired Gypsy boy; graceful and sultry—he swept me into a passionate, 3-day fairytale romance. Even now, when the wind blows cold, and I have to huddle deep in my jacket to keep nature at bay, my thoughts turn to Tibor…
I pretty much ditched my American friends and went to stay with Tibor in his cold-water flat in Buda, which he shared with several other Gypsies. They were actually all from Serbia, refugees from the never-ending war which tore apart the former Yugoslavia during the 1990’s.
On New Year’s Eve, a dozen or so of his friends gathered at Tibor’s flat to celebrate. One guy brought a fiddle, another a flute; one of the girls had something like a tambourine, but it was strung with little bells rather than cymbals. They started pouring Raki—a plum brandy, which I was told was a traditional Romany drink, and we proceeded to get fairly pissed.
Tibor seemed out of sorts though, moody and restless. His friends invited us to join them to watch the fireworks at midnight down by the river, but he begged off, claiming a migraine. I was his guest, so I stayed with him, assuring him I didn’t need to go see the fireworks; that I dreaded the biting cold—that we could find more interesting things to do alone at his flat.
Still, he seemed nervous.
Tense.
Angry.
Suddenly, he shouted that his friends were just hanging on to a poisonous past with their folksongs and their bastard instruments—there was nothing good about being a Gypsy—that it was some sort of romanticized notion that someone—probably an American—he seethed, came up with to sell crappy packaged tours in Prague and Vienna.
He fumed, “They never bring the tours to the real villages—all broken down cars, and bombed out houses!”
“Except maybe someone wants to come and buy a baby to take back to the States or Canada. But any of the kids over 2 are fucked! Nobody wants a kid that old. Not even us.”
He told me bitterly about his father who left his mother to fend for herself after birthing a third child (him) and how difficult things were for his mother and grandmother to raise three kids.
The war.
Abruptly he asked me, “You want to go out, right? Go out dancing?”
I was at a bit of a loss. He seemed so angry, so bitter, “Yeah, okay, whatever you want to do—,” I stammered while he yanked on his coat and grabbed me by the hand, and we stumbled off into the cold.
At first, it seemed to me like we were just ambling aimlessly through the icy warren of twisting streets. He would start off in one direction, stop and swear, and then jerk me along another pathway, but eventually we came through a hunched-over passage at the top of the Imperial Palace. From a cupola on the outer wall, we had a spectacular vantage point, and we watched the fireworks burst over the Danube, sparkling streamers mirrored on the black, frozen surface of the river.
“I thought you wanted to dance,” he whispered tight against my ear.
I shrugged, but he towed me away from the fireworks, and we started wending our way down the outer wall. Before long I could feel a tremendous thumping—something very loud was beating up from the bowels of the earth. The curtain wall trembled.
“What the—?” I gasped, but he only grinned and turning a corner, we came to a heavy wooden door set into the base of the wall. He gave a secret knock (or so it seemed to me) and the door creaked open onto a stairway dropping into darkness. Tibor passed some money to the doorman and led me down into the catacombs of the Imperial Palace!
After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I discovered a massive, pounding rave—thumping bass beats and screaming chords echoing in the sub-cellars and dungeons of the Palace!
Only a few candles and flashlights dimly illuminated the frantic, sweaty crowd, who writhed to the beats until invariably a fuse blew out, and amidst much swearing and shouting, the sound crew would manage to restore the music, eliciting a cheer from the crowd until the next one blew out.
The air was 3-parts cigarette smoke;1-part dust sifting down from above; the crowd violent, thrashing, gleeful, and crazed. I broke open the two glowsticks I had brought all the way from America, and I was an instant celebrity, pounded with cheers.
Tibor crushed against me, and we danced to hard-core Euro-techno-trance like there was no tomorrow. The Velvet Underground, indeed! and I was in heaven.
Dawn broke crisp and painfully bright when we staggered out of the dungeons at last, steam and smoke rising from our sweat-soaked clothes, which flash-froze into ice: glazed, cutting, denim-brittle.
On the flight home I tried to make sense of the bewildering holiday, one part laced with tradition—the other at almost hateful odds with the past.
I am still uncertain of what role, if any, I will or should or ought to play in reconciling the dichotomy. I tell myself it is in my blood, but I also ruefully acknowledge I have never danced with anyone quite like Tibor.
Dancing seems a good reason to get involved.
However, in the Spring of 1995 I found my way across the Atlantic; first to work in a homeless shelter in London where I met quite a lot of Scottish and Irish Gypsies, dubbed “tinkers,” but it wasn’t until I backpacked my way through eastern Europe that I encountered Roma; first in Athens and later in Budapest, Prague, and Paris.
At a youth hostel in Germany, I was warned of various “Gypsy tactics” where a crowd of Gypsy children will surround the hapless traveler, and a Gypsy mother throws a baby at the traveler, who invariably scrambles to catch the baby, at which point the mother starts screaming that her baby is being kidnapped while the rest of the kids pick the poor backpacker clean.
I never actually saw this happen, but I heard the same story at a number of hostels, and I reckoned it must be some sort of urban legend.
In Budapest, a great open-air market lined the western bank of the Danube River, and there was a semi-permanent cluster of shops/huts at one end—the Gypsy end—the end I was warned to avoid by the “kindly” folks at the hostel in Pecs.
“They’re so dirty! And they’ll rob you blind if you’re not careful.”
I more or less ignored my hosts, and much to my amusement and secret delight, because I looked like one of them, I wasn’t even approached by any of the many panhandlers in the Gypsy market.
Ah! At long-last I fit in! Forever, it seemed like I would always be on the outside. Other kids when I was growing up in Montana thought I was Mexican or maybe Italian. I certainly didn’t fit the mold of fair skinned, blue-eyed WASP’s. But here, below the walls of the Imperial Palace, I passed within, if you can dig it.
In Budapest, I just saw my brethren as peddlers, beggars maybe, but as I moved on to Prague, where the largest music festival of the year was just kicking off, I was entranced (as many of their audiences were, no doubt) with the vibrant music and intricate dances the Gypsies performed, impromptu; deliciously medieval in the shadow of the great gothic cathedral; skipping in the moonlight across the cobble-stoned bridges.
Sadly, when I headed back to Western Europe, I chanced upon one of the darker realities of Gypsy life, this time in Paris, during the WWII Victory celebration mid-May (akin to America’s Memorial Day.)
Along the Champs d’Elysee, tourists could not help but fumble for a few bits of spare change every few blocks, because they were entreated with the most adorable puppy-dog eyes looking up from quaintly dirty, cherubic faces, mutely begging a franc or two, while the Gypsy child, sometimes no more than 2 or 3 years old, fingered a toy accordion.
At sundown, like something from Oliver Twist, an old Gypsy woman in a massive coat and dress arrived and gathered up each child and its earnings. The children disappeared into the folds of her cloak, just as she herself melded into the crowd of evening window shoppers and disappeared like smoke on the wind.
It was fascinating and terrible to watch, but what could I, a green-behind-the-ears kid from Montana, who just barely spoke enough French to get by in a café—what could I do to save those poor kids?
What child welfare authorities could I turn to?
Who would want to take care of a bunch of Gypsy kids (thieves, hoodlums, ragamuffins)?
Who was I saving them from?
What if they didn’t want to go?
Who the hell was I to make such judgments?
I stood there on the pavement beneath the Arc de Triomphe confused and upset.
I still don’t have the answers.
********************************************
Several years passed before I returned to Eastern Europe, this time spending the winter (sic) mostly in Bulgaria, although my friends and I spent the Christmas holidays in Budapest; traveling there via a Cold War-era train through the snow-choked Carpathian mountains. At one point we were stopped and boarded by “customs” (?) officers in Romania, who suspiciously scrutinized our passports, while we just so happened to offer them a smoke (read: 2 cartons of Marlboro lights) before the train was allowed to continue.
Budapest was freezing cold but cheerfully swathed in holiday colors and welcoming, and our spirits were jubilant.
On our second night, I met a beautiful, raven-haired Gypsy boy; graceful and sultry—he swept me into a passionate, 3-day fairytale romance. Even now, when the wind blows cold, and I have to huddle deep in my jacket to keep nature at bay, my thoughts turn to Tibor…
I pretty much ditched my American friends and went to stay with Tibor in his cold-water flat in Buda, which he shared with several other Gypsies. They were actually all from Serbia, refugees from the never-ending war which tore apart the former Yugoslavia during the 1990’s.
On New Year’s Eve, a dozen or so of his friends gathered at Tibor’s flat to celebrate. One guy brought a fiddle, another a flute; one of the girls had something like a tambourine, but it was strung with little bells rather than cymbals. They started pouring Raki—a plum brandy, which I was told was a traditional Romany drink, and we proceeded to get fairly pissed.
Tibor seemed out of sorts though, moody and restless. His friends invited us to join them to watch the fireworks at midnight down by the river, but he begged off, claiming a migraine. I was his guest, so I stayed with him, assuring him I didn’t need to go see the fireworks; that I dreaded the biting cold—that we could find more interesting things to do alone at his flat.
Still, he seemed nervous.
Tense.
Angry.
Suddenly, he shouted that his friends were just hanging on to a poisonous past with their folksongs and their bastard instruments—there was nothing good about being a Gypsy—that it was some sort of romanticized notion that someone—probably an American—he seethed, came up with to sell crappy packaged tours in Prague and Vienna.
He fumed, “They never bring the tours to the real villages—all broken down cars, and bombed out houses!”
“Except maybe someone wants to come and buy a baby to take back to the States or Canada. But any of the kids over 2 are fucked! Nobody wants a kid that old. Not even us.”
He told me bitterly about his father who left his mother to fend for herself after birthing a third child (him) and how difficult things were for his mother and grandmother to raise three kids.
The war.
Abruptly he asked me, “You want to go out, right? Go out dancing?”
I was at a bit of a loss. He seemed so angry, so bitter, “Yeah, okay, whatever you want to do—,” I stammered while he yanked on his coat and grabbed me by the hand, and we stumbled off into the cold.
At first, it seemed to me like we were just ambling aimlessly through the icy warren of twisting streets. He would start off in one direction, stop and swear, and then jerk me along another pathway, but eventually we came through a hunched-over passage at the top of the Imperial Palace. From a cupola on the outer wall, we had a spectacular vantage point, and we watched the fireworks burst over the Danube, sparkling streamers mirrored on the black, frozen surface of the river.
“I thought you wanted to dance,” he whispered tight against my ear.
I shrugged, but he towed me away from the fireworks, and we started wending our way down the outer wall. Before long I could feel a tremendous thumping—something very loud was beating up from the bowels of the earth. The curtain wall trembled.
“What the—?” I gasped, but he only grinned and turning a corner, we came to a heavy wooden door set into the base of the wall. He gave a secret knock (or so it seemed to me) and the door creaked open onto a stairway dropping into darkness. Tibor passed some money to the doorman and led me down into the catacombs of the Imperial Palace!
After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I discovered a massive, pounding rave—thumping bass beats and screaming chords echoing in the sub-cellars and dungeons of the Palace!
Only a few candles and flashlights dimly illuminated the frantic, sweaty crowd, who writhed to the beats until invariably a fuse blew out, and amidst much swearing and shouting, the sound crew would manage to restore the music, eliciting a cheer from the crowd until the next one blew out.
The air was 3-parts cigarette smoke;1-part dust sifting down from above; the crowd violent, thrashing, gleeful, and crazed. I broke open the two glowsticks I had brought all the way from America, and I was an instant celebrity, pounded with cheers.
Tibor crushed against me, and we danced to hard-core Euro-techno-trance like there was no tomorrow. The Velvet Underground, indeed! and I was in heaven.
Dawn broke crisp and painfully bright when we staggered out of the dungeons at last, steam and smoke rising from our sweat-soaked clothes, which flash-froze into ice: glazed, cutting, denim-brittle.
On the flight home I tried to make sense of the bewildering holiday, one part laced with tradition—the other at almost hateful odds with the past.
I am still uncertain of what role, if any, I will or should or ought to play in reconciling the dichotomy. I tell myself it is in my blood, but I also ruefully acknowledge I have never danced with anyone quite like Tibor.
Dancing seems a good reason to get involved.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Hope Redux, a book review of The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
The Book of Job
The Divine Comedy
My own Sharing the Joke
And now The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.
What’s the underlying message? Pretty simple: God has a sense of humor.
Shit happens, in the vernacular, but what can you do except laugh about it? No need to tie yourself up in knots about the drama going on in your life, because for all intents and purposes the rest of the world isn’t interested in it.
They don’t have the time.
‘Cause we all have our own drama, and ultimately we are all alone.
Except for those of us who know God; are on friendly terms with him—smoking cigars with him over a late-nite glass of sherry while the rest of the world sleeps fitfully.
Alex-li’s father dies on him early on in the story, and that’s a bitch; no doubt about it, but life goes on…well, it tries to go on, but as far as he is concerned, life ended on that day, at least enjoyable, sober, living-life, kind-of life, and rather like old Queen Victoria, he fades into a limbotic mourning, consciously or no; searching for the ever-elusive memorial that will pay his father proper tribute.
Ironically, the day Alex ‘s father dies; he bonds with three mates, who forge a covenant of friendship, nay, brotherhood, despite their differences, which follows them into adulthood. Four men bereft of their Father, whatever remnants of parental units linger ever after.
Three of the Four, however, manage to come to terms with their loss, excepting Alex, who refuses to say Kaddish and thereby “acquit the parent and bring him peace…”
Instead Alex hurtles through life like a pinball, bouncing and smashing through his friends lives, or as his friend Adam puts it bluntly, “the Tandem Road show.”
His closest friend Adam cannot fathom Alex’s behavior, saying: “You have the weirdest idea that everybody’s here to help you!”
Alex is a child grown larger in body, but not emotional maturity largely because he cannot accept the stages of grief over his father’s death and strives to maintain a state of denial as long as he can—probably for the rest of his life, if given his preference.
In order to stave off the inevitable, Alex takes up the odd profession/hobby of collecting autographs of the famous (or at least, once famous) because as even his friend Rabbi Mark Rubenstein admits, “…collecting things is what you are meant to do, placing them between you and death, as an obstacle course."
However, as he grows older, despite the insularity of his mediocre life in the London suburbs, Alex begins to suspect that there might be something out there besides collecting autographs and smoking pot. For years, he writes fan letters to his idol, B-movie queen Kitty Alexander, initially seeking a priceless autograph, but later, painting a life for her as seen through his mind’s eye. Though Jewish, he seeks Catholic redemption via the confessional of letters he sends blindly and without response.
He also sporadically and compulsively makes note of an ever-expanding list of Jewishness as compared to Goyishness in his own, self-absorbed struggle to come to terms with the world. “He was barely capable of faith. Confronted with spiritualism, he found only humor.”
Hence, he strives for fame in a quiet, reserved, British & Jewish sort of way, writing a book significant in meaning only to him, dreaming that when his obituary is read, the world will discover “he was the greatest, most famous person you never heard of.”
A dealer in signatures, headshots, and memorabilia--the stuff sought after by fans around the world, he thinks he has no fans himself.
But like most people who pity themselves, he is most assuredly wrong, and besides the trio of friends from youth he also is loved by at least one woman, Esther—the sister of Adam, as well as his Buddhist mother, and another Buddhist, an American woman named Honey Smith, with whom he develops an intimate, if surreal bond at an autograph convention in New York.
Most importantly, Alex is confronted by his muse, and Kitty Alexander herself takes up the mantle of mortality and ironically becomes both friend and fan of Alex.
The whole book is a joke, much as life is just a joke. There are points which are bleak and/or nonsensical, but what it boils right down to, is that we’re all in the same boat, and the ship itself is sinking, and no one gets out alive, yet, wouldn’t it be lovely if the string quartet played something stirring ere we dip below the waters?
It is indeed a fairly easy thing to become depressed and get caught up in the melodrama of all the strife and ugliness and despair going on all around us; just as easy to overlook the friends and companions who patiently wait to be noticed and appreciated.
Jessica Tandy’s character Idgie Threadgoode in Fried Green Tomatoes may have put it best when she says, “You know what I think the most important thing in life is? Friends.”
Philosopher Johann Huisinga proposed that humanity was on the edge of another stage of evolution, moving from homo sapiens—effectively “the people who know” into homo ludens, that is: “the people who laugh.”
So, it is no longer the point in life to figure out all that there is to know about the workings of the world; we ought now to appreciate the beauty, nay, the design of it. And laugh, baby, laugh!
And laughter is best, when shared with friends.
The Divine Comedy
My own Sharing the Joke
And now The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.
What’s the underlying message? Pretty simple: God has a sense of humor.
Shit happens, in the vernacular, but what can you do except laugh about it? No need to tie yourself up in knots about the drama going on in your life, because for all intents and purposes the rest of the world isn’t interested in it.
They don’t have the time.
‘Cause we all have our own drama, and ultimately we are all alone.
Except for those of us who know God; are on friendly terms with him—smoking cigars with him over a late-nite glass of sherry while the rest of the world sleeps fitfully.
Alex-li’s father dies on him early on in the story, and that’s a bitch; no doubt about it, but life goes on…well, it tries to go on, but as far as he is concerned, life ended on that day, at least enjoyable, sober, living-life, kind-of life, and rather like old Queen Victoria, he fades into a limbotic mourning, consciously or no; searching for the ever-elusive memorial that will pay his father proper tribute.
Ironically, the day Alex ‘s father dies; he bonds with three mates, who forge a covenant of friendship, nay, brotherhood, despite their differences, which follows them into adulthood. Four men bereft of their Father, whatever remnants of parental units linger ever after.
Three of the Four, however, manage to come to terms with their loss, excepting Alex, who refuses to say Kaddish and thereby “acquit the parent and bring him peace…”
Instead Alex hurtles through life like a pinball, bouncing and smashing through his friends lives, or as his friend Adam puts it bluntly, “the Tandem Road show.”
His closest friend Adam cannot fathom Alex’s behavior, saying: “You have the weirdest idea that everybody’s here to help you!”
Alex is a child grown larger in body, but not emotional maturity largely because he cannot accept the stages of grief over his father’s death and strives to maintain a state of denial as long as he can—probably for the rest of his life, if given his preference.
In order to stave off the inevitable, Alex takes up the odd profession/hobby of collecting autographs of the famous (or at least, once famous) because as even his friend Rabbi Mark Rubenstein admits, “…collecting things is what you are meant to do, placing them between you and death, as an obstacle course."
However, as he grows older, despite the insularity of his mediocre life in the London suburbs, Alex begins to suspect that there might be something out there besides collecting autographs and smoking pot. For years, he writes fan letters to his idol, B-movie queen Kitty Alexander, initially seeking a priceless autograph, but later, painting a life for her as seen through his mind’s eye. Though Jewish, he seeks Catholic redemption via the confessional of letters he sends blindly and without response.
He also sporadically and compulsively makes note of an ever-expanding list of Jewishness as compared to Goyishness in his own, self-absorbed struggle to come to terms with the world. “He was barely capable of faith. Confronted with spiritualism, he found only humor.”
Hence, he strives for fame in a quiet, reserved, British & Jewish sort of way, writing a book significant in meaning only to him, dreaming that when his obituary is read, the world will discover “he was the greatest, most famous person you never heard of.”
A dealer in signatures, headshots, and memorabilia--the stuff sought after by fans around the world, he thinks he has no fans himself.
But like most people who pity themselves, he is most assuredly wrong, and besides the trio of friends from youth he also is loved by at least one woman, Esther—the sister of Adam, as well as his Buddhist mother, and another Buddhist, an American woman named Honey Smith, with whom he develops an intimate, if surreal bond at an autograph convention in New York.
Most importantly, Alex is confronted by his muse, and Kitty Alexander herself takes up the mantle of mortality and ironically becomes both friend and fan of Alex.
The whole book is a joke, much as life is just a joke. There are points which are bleak and/or nonsensical, but what it boils right down to, is that we’re all in the same boat, and the ship itself is sinking, and no one gets out alive, yet, wouldn’t it be lovely if the string quartet played something stirring ere we dip below the waters?
It is indeed a fairly easy thing to become depressed and get caught up in the melodrama of all the strife and ugliness and despair going on all around us; just as easy to overlook the friends and companions who patiently wait to be noticed and appreciated.
Jessica Tandy’s character Idgie Threadgoode in Fried Green Tomatoes may have put it best when she says, “You know what I think the most important thing in life is? Friends.”
Philosopher Johann Huisinga proposed that humanity was on the edge of another stage of evolution, moving from homo sapiens—effectively “the people who know” into homo ludens, that is: “the people who laugh.”
So, it is no longer the point in life to figure out all that there is to know about the workings of the world; we ought now to appreciate the beauty, nay, the design of it. And laugh, baby, laugh!
And laughter is best, when shared with friends.
Making sense of the senseless.
In building a logical syllogism, let us agree to the following:
There are only two kinds of war: offensive and defensive.
There are only two justifiable options once war is engaged, to win or to lose.
If one agrees to both premises, and if one has a careful eye to history, the following conclusion can be made: the only way to “win” either of them is to wipe out the opponent.
Stalemate is not a logical option, as evinced by the Cold War. One does not play a game involving the deaths of ten men, much less millions, unless one is set on victory.
Masters of warfare from Genghis Khan to Winston Churchill understood this necessity.
The only reason to have mercy on an enemy is to spare a breeding population by which the aggressor self-propitiates and justifies its own existence—an infinitely more devious and wicked philosophy than the pragmatic solution by which genocide becomes not only a possibility, but a necessity.
Why would one leave behind survivors to plot against the conquerors? Any prince would not leave would-be assassins at his back, so we learn from Machiavelli.
Those that oppose such ruthless tactics do not understand the principles of war, if that itself is not an oxymoron, “principles of war(?)” since any tactician or historian understands that in war, there are no principles, no scruples, no so-called rules.
Only a fool engages rhetorical bantering about the proper way of killing.
Especially the fool who initially professes a regard for life as intrinsically valuable, but at the fool’s whim becomes disposable.
When one speaks of senseless killing, one ought instead to speak of dollars-and-cents-less killing, and then, as a matter of efficient economics, genocide is rendered cents-ible.
Spending taxpayers’ money on weaponry becomes justified only when those weapons are used; a weapon unused is a useless weapon, n’est ce pas?
Thus, the only practical means of reducing a threat is eliminating it entirely.
One does not speak of treating a cancer by excising only a portion, even a majority of it. A surgeon knows even the smallest piece left will return with a vengeance, possibly metastasizing in the future beyond any hope of treatment.
To take the medical analogy further, the logical recourse is to treat a cancer aggressively using chemical and nuclear weapons. The holy books of all three Abrahamic religions teach the prudence of razing the bastions of the infidels to the ground and salting the earth such that no seed of opposition may root there again.
The only sensible course of action, regarding war, is not to engage in it, yet that becomes problematic on a planet where human populations are multiplying exponentially.
Adolf Hitler, cold-blooded he may have been, managed to grasp the concept that every species needs lebensraum—breathing room.
A scientist understands in her earliest experiments that she can only support a certain number of rats in a cage of finite dimensions. A threshold of maximum capacity will establish itself such that the introduction of merely one additional rat will send the others into a frenzy of biting and clawing; only when a balance of sustainable levels returns, i.e. after the others are dead, will peace return to the cage.
Comparatively, Rwanda became the most overpopulated nation on the African continent immediately before the 1994 genocide. Is it any wonder that the carnage was so violent?
The next logical consideration i.e. the most sensible question, therefore, is how best to deal with over-population as the root problem, rather than the inevitable genocides, which result from ignoring it?
There are only two kinds of war: offensive and defensive.
There are only two justifiable options once war is engaged, to win or to lose.
If one agrees to both premises, and if one has a careful eye to history, the following conclusion can be made: the only way to “win” either of them is to wipe out the opponent.
Stalemate is not a logical option, as evinced by the Cold War. One does not play a game involving the deaths of ten men, much less millions, unless one is set on victory.
Masters of warfare from Genghis Khan to Winston Churchill understood this necessity.
The only reason to have mercy on an enemy is to spare a breeding population by which the aggressor self-propitiates and justifies its own existence—an infinitely more devious and wicked philosophy than the pragmatic solution by which genocide becomes not only a possibility, but a necessity.
Why would one leave behind survivors to plot against the conquerors? Any prince would not leave would-be assassins at his back, so we learn from Machiavelli.
Those that oppose such ruthless tactics do not understand the principles of war, if that itself is not an oxymoron, “principles of war(?)” since any tactician or historian understands that in war, there are no principles, no scruples, no so-called rules.
Only a fool engages rhetorical bantering about the proper way of killing.
Especially the fool who initially professes a regard for life as intrinsically valuable, but at the fool’s whim becomes disposable.
When one speaks of senseless killing, one ought instead to speak of dollars-and-cents-less killing, and then, as a matter of efficient economics, genocide is rendered cents-ible.
Spending taxpayers’ money on weaponry becomes justified only when those weapons are used; a weapon unused is a useless weapon, n’est ce pas?
Thus, the only practical means of reducing a threat is eliminating it entirely.
One does not speak of treating a cancer by excising only a portion, even a majority of it. A surgeon knows even the smallest piece left will return with a vengeance, possibly metastasizing in the future beyond any hope of treatment.
To take the medical analogy further, the logical recourse is to treat a cancer aggressively using chemical and nuclear weapons. The holy books of all three Abrahamic religions teach the prudence of razing the bastions of the infidels to the ground and salting the earth such that no seed of opposition may root there again.
The only sensible course of action, regarding war, is not to engage in it, yet that becomes problematic on a planet where human populations are multiplying exponentially.
Adolf Hitler, cold-blooded he may have been, managed to grasp the concept that every species needs lebensraum—breathing room.
A scientist understands in her earliest experiments that she can only support a certain number of rats in a cage of finite dimensions. A threshold of maximum capacity will establish itself such that the introduction of merely one additional rat will send the others into a frenzy of biting and clawing; only when a balance of sustainable levels returns, i.e. after the others are dead, will peace return to the cage.
Comparatively, Rwanda became the most overpopulated nation on the African continent immediately before the 1994 genocide. Is it any wonder that the carnage was so violent?
The next logical consideration i.e. the most sensible question, therefore, is how best to deal with over-population as the root problem, rather than the inevitable genocides, which result from ignoring it?
Yeah, man, I know just how you feel! (Not!)
Kodwo Eshun does a handy job beginning his series of articles of elucidating the subtle differences between the varieties of electronic music that has evolved over the past 20 years, starting from the so-called Last Days of Disco (as it were) with Donna Summers’ seemingly endless mix of “I Feel Love” and ranging up through the scales to the, uh, Born-Again Days of Disco with the sweet groove of Thomas Bangalter’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” which just goes to show that disco, in fact, never sucked, and those of us that held on to the flame were at the very least secretly cool.
The folks that claimed disco sucked were likely those that just couldn’t keep dancing through the wee hours—at least not without the white powder fuel of cocaine and speed, and round about 1983, they burned out, cut their hair, got real jobs, and headed for suburbia to start familes.
Ironically, at around the same time the inner cities of Detroit and Chicago also headed off to yuppie-dom, led by the Belleville Three: Juan Atkins (a.k.a. Model 500), Derrick May (a.k.a. Rhythm is Rhythm), and Kevin Saunderson, who started to forge a new, hip “futuristic” brand of house music—so named by legions of club-goers surrounding Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse nightclub.
Though these two followings marched to the beat of subtly different drums—in that the Detroit, electro-house and acid-house inspired legions of sober dancers to get up and “jack it” as compared to the Chicago deep house, which was clearly much more chemically altered—both came around to converge at the onset of the 90’s in a darker, harder style of music. Scary stuff for the suburbanites, whose suspicions and worries about their kids were pumped up by acid house producer Bam-Bam’s “Where’s Your Child?” and brought to a full scale panic in 1995 with Green Velvet’s “Flash”—the prototypical rave track—evoking strobe-lit basements and warehouses jam packed with little kiddies sucking on laughing gas or worse.
I suppose the parents’ fears were not misplaced.
I’ll be the first to admit that there are more than a few pictures circulating out in cyber-space of yours truly sucking on a balloon. Indeed, it’s something that rather warms my heart to think about those manic, choking guffaws; blood rushing through my ears; a high pitched ringing blasting through my head, and I, myself, snapshotting my cluster of friends with flash after flash from a disposable camera.
Fun times.
Quite coincidentally, on the other side of the Atlantic, a U.K. producer also named Dan Tyler was injecting house music with a Samba flare, along with the other half of the Idjut Boys, Conrad McDonnell. Actually, I had never heard of them until about 5 years ago when I had first moved to Los Angeles, and they were spinning one of the last truly underground warehouse parties downtown—that is—(dare I say it?)—an old skool rave—the kind you had to find about on the down-low; back when ecstasy was still hip, and had not quite been eclipsed by crystal meth and GHB.
That said, however, I will acknowledge the days of glowsticks and matching Manic Panic neon-dyed hair were quickly fading. Armand Van Helden’s dark garage in the U.K. was teeter-tottering with the gay circuit’s jungle into very black, very grim, very scary places indeed—as evinced by the many raids and eventual closures of even the swankiest clubs in NYC—the Limelight, the Tunnel, and TWILO. One too many overdosed, under-aged bodies forced the police to shut them down, despite the huge influences of master DJ/producers Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, and Victor Calderone (who, strangely, goes unmentioned in Eshun’s article) all of whom would collaborate with the biggest names in mainstream pop music like Madonna and Whitney Houston to produce the extended re-mix singles, which often outsold the radio-edited full-length albums.
I found it also odd to note that Eshun doesn’t mention quite possibly the most famous DJ of all: Boston’s Moby, who managed to straddle both the world of club tracks as well as produce his own songs as an artist. “Play” would go on to reap multi-platinum sales figures, and Moby would also scratch his own initials in the history of dance music with the most beats per minute in a song.
Speaking of scratching, Eshun’s next article covering breakbeats and Drum ‘N Bass, touches on some of the pioneers of scratchidilea, as he call it, but again, I heard the notes he wasn’t playing, so to speak—where was San Francisco’s Q-Bert, who claimed a title of the Fastest Scratcher in the industry? Where was Bad Boy Bill, who, similarly, awed fans and executives alike with his mastery of not two, but four turntables at once?
Truth be told, much of that article would have come off as unintelligible gibberish—that is: if I didn’t know what Eshun was talking about, I wouldn’t know what he was talking about.
Eliding words like robovocallization or rhythmatecian might seem kitschy to those of us whose club experience encompasses enough points of reference to make some sort of sense of his lingo, but I would also postulate that it is a that much smaller audience who can comprehend the symbolism of a Cartesian prison in terms of dance music.
I feel my beliefs about the overly pretentious and obscure terminology are valid, particularly in Eshun’s last article, in which he attempts to deconstruct, then reconstruct, and vice-versa, ad nauseum the language and very alphabet of so-called Black music with vague references to French author, Arthur Rimbaud, quintessential 80’s horror director John Carpenter, and even WWII German Panzer tanks.
Any way you read it; it’s a mess—sort of like how Alicia Silverstone’s character in 1995’s “Clueless” describes one girl, but while Eshun manages to fumble through the last decade of dance, never does he manage as succinctly as she.
The folks that claimed disco sucked were likely those that just couldn’t keep dancing through the wee hours—at least not without the white powder fuel of cocaine and speed, and round about 1983, they burned out, cut their hair, got real jobs, and headed for suburbia to start familes.
Ironically, at around the same time the inner cities of Detroit and Chicago also headed off to yuppie-dom, led by the Belleville Three: Juan Atkins (a.k.a. Model 500), Derrick May (a.k.a. Rhythm is Rhythm), and Kevin Saunderson, who started to forge a new, hip “futuristic” brand of house music—so named by legions of club-goers surrounding Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse nightclub.
Though these two followings marched to the beat of subtly different drums—in that the Detroit, electro-house and acid-house inspired legions of sober dancers to get up and “jack it” as compared to the Chicago deep house, which was clearly much more chemically altered—both came around to converge at the onset of the 90’s in a darker, harder style of music. Scary stuff for the suburbanites, whose suspicions and worries about their kids were pumped up by acid house producer Bam-Bam’s “Where’s Your Child?” and brought to a full scale panic in 1995 with Green Velvet’s “Flash”—the prototypical rave track—evoking strobe-lit basements and warehouses jam packed with little kiddies sucking on laughing gas or worse.
I suppose the parents’ fears were not misplaced.
I’ll be the first to admit that there are more than a few pictures circulating out in cyber-space of yours truly sucking on a balloon. Indeed, it’s something that rather warms my heart to think about those manic, choking guffaws; blood rushing through my ears; a high pitched ringing blasting through my head, and I, myself, snapshotting my cluster of friends with flash after flash from a disposable camera.
Fun times.
Quite coincidentally, on the other side of the Atlantic, a U.K. producer also named Dan Tyler was injecting house music with a Samba flare, along with the other half of the Idjut Boys, Conrad McDonnell. Actually, I had never heard of them until about 5 years ago when I had first moved to Los Angeles, and they were spinning one of the last truly underground warehouse parties downtown—that is—(dare I say it?)—an old skool rave—the kind you had to find about on the down-low; back when ecstasy was still hip, and had not quite been eclipsed by crystal meth and GHB.
That said, however, I will acknowledge the days of glowsticks and matching Manic Panic neon-dyed hair were quickly fading. Armand Van Helden’s dark garage in the U.K. was teeter-tottering with the gay circuit’s jungle into very black, very grim, very scary places indeed—as evinced by the many raids and eventual closures of even the swankiest clubs in NYC—the Limelight, the Tunnel, and TWILO. One too many overdosed, under-aged bodies forced the police to shut them down, despite the huge influences of master DJ/producers Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, and Victor Calderone (who, strangely, goes unmentioned in Eshun’s article) all of whom would collaborate with the biggest names in mainstream pop music like Madonna and Whitney Houston to produce the extended re-mix singles, which often outsold the radio-edited full-length albums.
I found it also odd to note that Eshun doesn’t mention quite possibly the most famous DJ of all: Boston’s Moby, who managed to straddle both the world of club tracks as well as produce his own songs as an artist. “Play” would go on to reap multi-platinum sales figures, and Moby would also scratch his own initials in the history of dance music with the most beats per minute in a song.
Speaking of scratching, Eshun’s next article covering breakbeats and Drum ‘N Bass, touches on some of the pioneers of scratchidilea, as he call it, but again, I heard the notes he wasn’t playing, so to speak—where was San Francisco’s Q-Bert, who claimed a title of the Fastest Scratcher in the industry? Where was Bad Boy Bill, who, similarly, awed fans and executives alike with his mastery of not two, but four turntables at once?
Truth be told, much of that article would have come off as unintelligible gibberish—that is: if I didn’t know what Eshun was talking about, I wouldn’t know what he was talking about.
Eliding words like robovocallization or rhythmatecian might seem kitschy to those of us whose club experience encompasses enough points of reference to make some sort of sense of his lingo, but I would also postulate that it is a that much smaller audience who can comprehend the symbolism of a Cartesian prison in terms of dance music.
I feel my beliefs about the overly pretentious and obscure terminology are valid, particularly in Eshun’s last article, in which he attempts to deconstruct, then reconstruct, and vice-versa, ad nauseum the language and very alphabet of so-called Black music with vague references to French author, Arthur Rimbaud, quintessential 80’s horror director John Carpenter, and even WWII German Panzer tanks.
Any way you read it; it’s a mess—sort of like how Alicia Silverstone’s character in 1995’s “Clueless” describes one girl, but while Eshun manages to fumble through the last decade of dance, never does he manage as succinctly as she.
Racketeering for Marketing a Deadly Neurotoxic Drug for Human Consumption, otherwise known as Nutrasweet™ a.k.a. Aspartame™, Equal™, and Spoonful™
Dateline: September 17, 2004
San Francisco, CA (Sent as a Courtesy of the World Natural Health Organization)
A Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations (RICO) complaint has been filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Plaintiff: Joe Bellon, individually and as a Representative of a Class of Plaintiffs’ Damages totaling $350,000,000.
The suit charges the defendants with manufacturing and marketing a deadly neurotoxin unfit for human consumption, while they assured the pubic that aspartame, also known as Nutrasweet™ and Equal™, contaminated products are safe and healthful; even for children and pregnant women.
As evidence, an explosive affidavit from a former translator for the G.D.Searle Company, the developer of aspartame, was made public at a national press conference on Thursday, September 16, 2004 at the Sheraton Grand Sacramento Hotel.
For 16 years, the FDA denied approval of aspartame because of compelling evidence of its contributing to brain tumors and other serious ailments.
Donald Rumsfeld, present Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration, left President Ford's administration as Chief of Staff to become the CEO of aspartame producer G.D. Searle Company in 1981 and is mentioned numerously throughout the lawsuit.
Soon after Rumsfeld became the CEO, and the day after President Reagan took office, aspartame was approved by FDA commissioner Arthur Hayes over the objections of the FDA's public board of inquiry.
Hayes had been recently appointed by the Reagan administration, and shortly after aspartame's approval by the FDA, Hayes joined Nutrasweet's™ public relations firm under a ten-year contract at $1,000 a day.
In January 1977, the FDA wrote a 33-page letter to U.S. Justice Department Attorney Sam Skinner, "We request that your office convene a grand jury investigation into apparent violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act."
However, Skinner allowed the statute of limitations to run out, and along with three FDA commissioners and eight other officers quickly took jobs in the aspartame industry.
The Food and Drug Administration listed 92 adverse reactions including seizures, blindness, sexual dysfunction, obesity, testicular & breast cancer, brain tumors, and death along with dozens of other serious diseases arising from the consumption of this neurotoxin after registering more than 10,000 consumer complaints.
However, in 1996 the FDA stopped taking complaints and now denies existence of the report.
Defendant Moser, past CEO of Nutrasweet™, is cited for misrepresenting facts to public and commercial users with full knowledge of the deceptions.
The toxin is sold to Bayer™, Con Agra Foods™, Dannon™, Smuckers™, Kellogg™, Wrigley™, Pepsico™, Kraft™ Foods (Crystal Light™), Conopco™ (Slim-Fast™), Coca-Cola™, Pfizer™, Wal-mart™ and Wyeth™ (among others) who use it in many of their products including children's vitamins.
A 35-year American Diabetes Association specialist, H.J. Roberts M.D., discovered aspartame can precipitate or aggravate diabetes and its complications as well as simulate the complications especially neuropathy and retinopathy.
His report, intended for the Annual Scientific Meeting of the ADA, was rejected for presentation but was later published in another scientific medical journal.
The 7-count indictment includes charges for violation of the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act, fraud, violations of California Civil Code §1780-1784 with injunctive relief that defendants be restrained from future use and/or sale of aspartame.
For more information or to request an interview, contact:
Britt Groom, Attorney at Law and spokesperson for the National Justice League.
2205 Hilltop Drive
Ste.#2022
Redding, CA 96002
Fax requests to (530) 248-3483.
Moral of the story: anything marked diet or lite, is neither and just might kill your fat ass!
San Francisco, CA (Sent as a Courtesy of the World Natural Health Organization)
A Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations (RICO) complaint has been filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Plaintiff: Joe Bellon, individually and as a Representative of a Class of Plaintiffs’ Damages totaling $350,000,000.
The suit charges the defendants with manufacturing and marketing a deadly neurotoxin unfit for human consumption, while they assured the pubic that aspartame, also known as Nutrasweet™ and Equal™, contaminated products are safe and healthful; even for children and pregnant women.
As evidence, an explosive affidavit from a former translator for the G.D.Searle Company, the developer of aspartame, was made public at a national press conference on Thursday, September 16, 2004 at the Sheraton Grand Sacramento Hotel.
For 16 years, the FDA denied approval of aspartame because of compelling evidence of its contributing to brain tumors and other serious ailments.
Donald Rumsfeld, present Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration, left President Ford's administration as Chief of Staff to become the CEO of aspartame producer G.D. Searle Company in 1981 and is mentioned numerously throughout the lawsuit.
Soon after Rumsfeld became the CEO, and the day after President Reagan took office, aspartame was approved by FDA commissioner Arthur Hayes over the objections of the FDA's public board of inquiry.
Hayes had been recently appointed by the Reagan administration, and shortly after aspartame's approval by the FDA, Hayes joined Nutrasweet's™ public relations firm under a ten-year contract at $1,000 a day.
In January 1977, the FDA wrote a 33-page letter to U.S. Justice Department Attorney Sam Skinner, "We request that your office convene a grand jury investigation into apparent violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act."
However, Skinner allowed the statute of limitations to run out, and along with three FDA commissioners and eight other officers quickly took jobs in the aspartame industry.
The Food and Drug Administration listed 92 adverse reactions including seizures, blindness, sexual dysfunction, obesity, testicular & breast cancer, brain tumors, and death along with dozens of other serious diseases arising from the consumption of this neurotoxin after registering more than 10,000 consumer complaints.
However, in 1996 the FDA stopped taking complaints and now denies existence of the report.
Defendant Moser, past CEO of Nutrasweet™, is cited for misrepresenting facts to public and commercial users with full knowledge of the deceptions.
The toxin is sold to Bayer™, Con Agra Foods™, Dannon™, Smuckers™, Kellogg™, Wrigley™, Pepsico™, Kraft™ Foods (Crystal Light™), Conopco™ (Slim-Fast™), Coca-Cola™, Pfizer™, Wal-mart™ and Wyeth™ (among others) who use it in many of their products including children's vitamins.
A 35-year American Diabetes Association specialist, H.J. Roberts M.D., discovered aspartame can precipitate or aggravate diabetes and its complications as well as simulate the complications especially neuropathy and retinopathy.
His report, intended for the Annual Scientific Meeting of the ADA, was rejected for presentation but was later published in another scientific medical journal.
The 7-count indictment includes charges for violation of the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act, fraud, violations of California Civil Code §1780-1784 with injunctive relief that defendants be restrained from future use and/or sale of aspartame.
For more information or to request an interview, contact:
Britt Groom, Attorney at Law and spokesperson for the National Justice League.
2205 Hilltop Drive
Ste.#2022
Redding, CA 96002
Fax requests to (530) 248-3483.
Moral of the story: anything marked diet or lite, is neither and just might kill your fat ass!
Watt's Echoes
Two months ago I was heading home from the grocery store, taking my usual route, riding my bike—pretty much the same old routine I follow day in, day out.
Unfortunately, just as I came into the intersection just steps away from my apartment, a car sped through the stop sign and slammed into me. I went flying, my bike was crushed; and the load of groceries I had in the rear basket exploded and shattered all across the street.
It was 3:58 pm.
The time really only becomes a salient fact in that it was the peak of pedestrian traffic on my street, and no less than twelve witnesses came dashing to the scene, but here’s the rub: were they proverbial Good Samaritans, concerned about my welfare, given that I lay in a heap of piss and blood and scattered books and gym clothes, moaning with my left ankle at a right angle? I like to think they were anxious to help, but then again, even as I contemplated the situation I felt the low, angry rumble of the mob that was quickly forming, fueled by their common hatred for the Evil Driver whose first words upon stopping her vehicle were not, “Omigosh! Are you okay?” but rather, “It’s not my fault!” quickly followed by a hasty call for back-up submitted via her police-band radio.
Irony of ironies: I had been bowled over by a parking enforcement officer!
(Pause for effect)
Faster than you can say “Johnny Cochrane!” eight (count ‘em) eight police cars, a fire truck, two ambulances, and (curiously enough) four more parking-ticket-mobiles shut down traffic in the lower Whitley Heights section of Hollywood for a three block radius.
The shouting and swearing and gesticulating dimly filtered through my pain-fogged senses as I watched the real become surreal even as I teetered on consciousness. I vaguely remember growling through clenched teeth, “I hate to be the voice of reason here, but can you guys just let the paramedics through so they can get me to a hospital?” This to a crowd, which had become a mob, and as more siren-topped vehicles arrived, there evinced a legitimate concern for the First Responders to break out the riot gear.
Fun times.
En route to the Kaiser Emergency Room I broke into hysterics, crying from the pain, laughing at the absurdity of the situation, all the while episodes of The Simpson’s running through my head with Mayor Quimby snarling at the ubiquitous mobs, “Can’t you people go one day without a riot?”
It is only recently, since I’ve gotten out of the hospital and finished up an intensive course in physical therapy that I have come to reflect on the deeper picture here.
I’m not a native Angeleno, but like the rest of America, I was glued to the TV when the riots broke out back in 1992 after the acquittal of four police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King, despite evidence caught on tape and hence televised to the troubled city. The verdict and the damning tape incited looting, burning, pillaging and murder. After three days, ten thousand businesses had been destroyed; fifty-five people lay dead; and an estimated $ 1 billion of damage had been suffered by the “City Where Dreams Come True.”
Perhaps it’s egotistical to compare my “little riot-that-never-quite-happened’ to those grim days, even more so compared to the infamous Watts riots of 1965 which turned the South Central into a war zone where thirty-four people died with thousands more injured, and property damage costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
In both instances National Guardsmen, state troopers, and local police joined arms with the Army and Marines to quash the rioters and restore order to the city.
“The mistakes of history are repeated in farce.”
All these thoughts tumbled through my head as I was lifted onto a stretcher and taken off to the ER. I watched the yelling and screaming crowd; angry faces indignant.
Enraged!!
For what reason?
Is it because we live in a police state, that is, under martial law, despite the assurances to the contrary from the talking heads?
Is it because of the sullen impotence we suffer each time a parking ticket is written (Fuck you, and have a nice day!) with no recourse but to pay fines, which are assessed to those with the least ability to pay them.
How about when we are required to show I.D. for no particular reason (apartheid, anyone?) other than the man with the badge and the gun requests it.
Maybe you’re one of the millions who have assembled to protest some indignity and wound up being clubbed and handcuffed and brutalized (if you are lucky—they carry guns to kill, silly!) and even arrested for disturbing the peace, despite the fact you bore no arms, and dealt no blows. Perhaps looking into the face of supposed “authority”—brutal, uncivilized…evil…catches in your throat and burns deep in your chest and resonates with your neighbor whose experience echoes your own, and you feel the rage.
RAGE!
Rage of the righteous, of the Marxist proletariat.
Rage against the machine—the evil empire.
Rage and shame—that you were cowed by the pigs and their dogs, as Orwell might say.
Come to think of it, I rather doubt that crowd formed around me out of concern for my health and safety. Looking back at them through the ambulance doors, I couldn’t help but sense a tension, an itching, a burning waiting, just waiting for a reason…any reason to ignite.
And burn.
Unfortunately, just as I came into the intersection just steps away from my apartment, a car sped through the stop sign and slammed into me. I went flying, my bike was crushed; and the load of groceries I had in the rear basket exploded and shattered all across the street.
It was 3:58 pm.
The time really only becomes a salient fact in that it was the peak of pedestrian traffic on my street, and no less than twelve witnesses came dashing to the scene, but here’s the rub: were they proverbial Good Samaritans, concerned about my welfare, given that I lay in a heap of piss and blood and scattered books and gym clothes, moaning with my left ankle at a right angle? I like to think they were anxious to help, but then again, even as I contemplated the situation I felt the low, angry rumble of the mob that was quickly forming, fueled by their common hatred for the Evil Driver whose first words upon stopping her vehicle were not, “Omigosh! Are you okay?” but rather, “It’s not my fault!” quickly followed by a hasty call for back-up submitted via her police-band radio.
Irony of ironies: I had been bowled over by a parking enforcement officer!
(Pause for effect)
Faster than you can say “Johnny Cochrane!” eight (count ‘em) eight police cars, a fire truck, two ambulances, and (curiously enough) four more parking-ticket-mobiles shut down traffic in the lower Whitley Heights section of Hollywood for a three block radius.
The shouting and swearing and gesticulating dimly filtered through my pain-fogged senses as I watched the real become surreal even as I teetered on consciousness. I vaguely remember growling through clenched teeth, “I hate to be the voice of reason here, but can you guys just let the paramedics through so they can get me to a hospital?” This to a crowd, which had become a mob, and as more siren-topped vehicles arrived, there evinced a legitimate concern for the First Responders to break out the riot gear.
Fun times.
En route to the Kaiser Emergency Room I broke into hysterics, crying from the pain, laughing at the absurdity of the situation, all the while episodes of The Simpson’s running through my head with Mayor Quimby snarling at the ubiquitous mobs, “Can’t you people go one day without a riot?”
It is only recently, since I’ve gotten out of the hospital and finished up an intensive course in physical therapy that I have come to reflect on the deeper picture here.
I’m not a native Angeleno, but like the rest of America, I was glued to the TV when the riots broke out back in 1992 after the acquittal of four police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King, despite evidence caught on tape and hence televised to the troubled city. The verdict and the damning tape incited looting, burning, pillaging and murder. After three days, ten thousand businesses had been destroyed; fifty-five people lay dead; and an estimated $ 1 billion of damage had been suffered by the “City Where Dreams Come True.”
Perhaps it’s egotistical to compare my “little riot-that-never-quite-happened’ to those grim days, even more so compared to the infamous Watts riots of 1965 which turned the South Central into a war zone where thirty-four people died with thousands more injured, and property damage costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
In both instances National Guardsmen, state troopers, and local police joined arms with the Army and Marines to quash the rioters and restore order to the city.
“The mistakes of history are repeated in farce.”
All these thoughts tumbled through my head as I was lifted onto a stretcher and taken off to the ER. I watched the yelling and screaming crowd; angry faces indignant.
Enraged!!
For what reason?
Is it because we live in a police state, that is, under martial law, despite the assurances to the contrary from the talking heads?
Is it because of the sullen impotence we suffer each time a parking ticket is written (Fuck you, and have a nice day!) with no recourse but to pay fines, which are assessed to those with the least ability to pay them.
How about when we are required to show I.D. for no particular reason (apartheid, anyone?) other than the man with the badge and the gun requests it.
Maybe you’re one of the millions who have assembled to protest some indignity and wound up being clubbed and handcuffed and brutalized (if you are lucky—they carry guns to kill, silly!) and even arrested for disturbing the peace, despite the fact you bore no arms, and dealt no blows. Perhaps looking into the face of supposed “authority”—brutal, uncivilized…evil…catches in your throat and burns deep in your chest and resonates with your neighbor whose experience echoes your own, and you feel the rage.
RAGE!
Rage of the righteous, of the Marxist proletariat.
Rage against the machine—the evil empire.
Rage and shame—that you were cowed by the pigs and their dogs, as Orwell might say.
Come to think of it, I rather doubt that crowd formed around me out of concern for my health and safety. Looking back at them through the ambulance doors, I couldn’t help but sense a tension, an itching, a burning waiting, just waiting for a reason…any reason to ignite.
And burn.
What am I afraid of?
When I was a teenager, I noticed mental illness ran in my family, and my worst fears used to be that I would go crazy without realizing I was crazy.
Five suicide attempts, three nervous breakdowns, and six years of therapy later, I had finally decided to accept that I was mentally ill.
It’s not a lot of fun, but at least I had sort of come to terms with it, that is, I had accepted that I was crazy.
Short and simple.
Then my therapist informed me that I was not crazy.
“Crazy people are delusional, they have little or no grounding in reality,” he said during one session, “Whereas, you, Dan, are firmly rooted in reality. You just don’t like it very much!”
Touché, I thought, there goes my excuse!
The bumper sticker reads: “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.”
Maybe that is my problem; I pay too much attention; hence, I swim along in a general haze of outrage on a day-to-day basis.
I want to make a difference, whatever that entails—war protests, volunteering at homeless shelters, recycling, etc., but I usually get so overwhelmed by the immensity of the task at hand and how futile my attempts seem at making any sort of dent. Then I notice all those other people who just couldn’t seem to care any less, and the outrage kicks back in, and then I feel both overwhelmed and crabby.
Not making a difference. That’s one of my fears.
Probably the best classes I took at Los Angeles City College were Professor Enrique Auza’s Principles of Economics I & II. By “best” I mean that the information was both extremely interesting and had useful implications in just about every aspect of my life, especially as I struggle to make sense of society and discern what motivates people to do the crazy things they do.
Economic factors seem to be the underlying reasons for most of the horrible things that go on in the world today--which is not to say that makes it okay, but it helps me understand things better.
One of the historical figures we discussed was economist Thorstein Veblen, who was a brilliant theorist, but something of an outsider. He died in ignominy, and his inclusion in the book was something of a surprise, since I have asked other professors at LACC and now here at UCLA if they knew about Veblen, and I usually just get a blank face in response. Anyway, one of the things that I admired about Veblen is when he taught for several years at the University of Chicago he always gave his students C’s, no matter the quality or caliber of their work.
Many of his students took issue with this grading policy, and eventually he was fired over it, but I understood the point he was trying to make, viz. in the long run, pretty much everyone is the same--no different or worse than anyone else.
We are all reduced to the same mediocre equality.
Moreover, let’s face it, he wasn’t wrong.
There are only so many Einstein’s and Mozart’s out there, and even they, with the passage of time, will fade from the collective memory of humankind.
For example, John Maynard Keynes, an infinitely more successful economist-- the man who single-handedly saved capitalism and shaped the way governments would adopt fiscal spending policies around the world, is not a name recognized by many people outside the field of economics, especially with the passing of each generation.
He himself knew this, and he wrote that, "...in the end, we are all dead." His deepest regret in life was not drinking champagne more often.
Unlike most folks, I did not come to L.A. to become famous. I realized a long while back, that fame didn’t really interest me, but I do want to count for something, and thus, it was no small irony when I fell into the trap of working for various fancy-schmancy catering companies wherein I dissolved into a mere shadow of a human; just enough to fill out a tuxedo and serve up plates of food, pre-ordered months in advance, then silently dropping back to a wall to stand at attention for any of the glitterati who might happen to want another glass of champagne. I became invisible and was treated as such—totally disposable, inherently replaceable.
That part of my reality I really came to hate, especially after getting hit by a car last year, and nobody came to visit me while I was in the hospital or later at home.
So, I have become afraid of being alone, of not having any friends, that no one would notice if I finally succeeded in killing myself.
Weeks would go by before a neighbor noticed the smell.
Not very happy thoughts.
But what am I most afraid of?
I am afraid that I will slip into a self-fulfilling pattern of feeling bitter, depressed, and hopeless, which inevitably ends up in some disaster that I had consciously or unconsciously created, because paradoxically, it is when I’m in “survival mode” that I feel most comfortable; or if not comfortable per se, at least that is what feels most familiar to me.
I suppose that implies what I really fear is success.
Maybe that’s because I am so uncomfortable with what defines “success.”
I know I do not want to become some corporate hotshot with a fat wad of bills in a money clip, who struts about thinking he can buy his way through life, even if he cannot afford manners.
I do not want to have power over other people and what they do with their lives, so I have actively chosen not to have children, and while politics fascinates me, I would surely go mad as a politician.
In fact, there are a lot of times when I just want to slip away to some sparsely populated island in the South Pacific---nothing but some elephant seals, the occasional pelican, and me.
However, I know eventually I would get lonely for human companionship.
Now that’s irony: I have come to dislike people as a whole, but I still long for that soul mate, someone who understands me and accepts me, for good or for ill.
That’s pretty much what all of us wants, isn’t it? Someone to love, and to be loved in return.
I reckon Veblen and Keynes were both right. So, I’ll start looking for a medium-priced bottle of champagne, and maybe I’ll meet Mr. Right at the liquor store.
Maybe not.
Five suicide attempts, three nervous breakdowns, and six years of therapy later, I had finally decided to accept that I was mentally ill.
It’s not a lot of fun, but at least I had sort of come to terms with it, that is, I had accepted that I was crazy.
Short and simple.
Then my therapist informed me that I was not crazy.
“Crazy people are delusional, they have little or no grounding in reality,” he said during one session, “Whereas, you, Dan, are firmly rooted in reality. You just don’t like it very much!”
Touché, I thought, there goes my excuse!
The bumper sticker reads: “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.”
Maybe that is my problem; I pay too much attention; hence, I swim along in a general haze of outrage on a day-to-day basis.
I want to make a difference, whatever that entails—war protests, volunteering at homeless shelters, recycling, etc., but I usually get so overwhelmed by the immensity of the task at hand and how futile my attempts seem at making any sort of dent. Then I notice all those other people who just couldn’t seem to care any less, and the outrage kicks back in, and then I feel both overwhelmed and crabby.
Not making a difference. That’s one of my fears.
Probably the best classes I took at Los Angeles City College were Professor Enrique Auza’s Principles of Economics I & II. By “best” I mean that the information was both extremely interesting and had useful implications in just about every aspect of my life, especially as I struggle to make sense of society and discern what motivates people to do the crazy things they do.
Economic factors seem to be the underlying reasons for most of the horrible things that go on in the world today--which is not to say that makes it okay, but it helps me understand things better.
One of the historical figures we discussed was economist Thorstein Veblen, who was a brilliant theorist, but something of an outsider. He died in ignominy, and his inclusion in the book was something of a surprise, since I have asked other professors at LACC and now here at UCLA if they knew about Veblen, and I usually just get a blank face in response. Anyway, one of the things that I admired about Veblen is when he taught for several years at the University of Chicago he always gave his students C’s, no matter the quality or caliber of their work.
Many of his students took issue with this grading policy, and eventually he was fired over it, but I understood the point he was trying to make, viz. in the long run, pretty much everyone is the same--no different or worse than anyone else.
We are all reduced to the same mediocre equality.
Moreover, let’s face it, he wasn’t wrong.
There are only so many Einstein’s and Mozart’s out there, and even they, with the passage of time, will fade from the collective memory of humankind.
For example, John Maynard Keynes, an infinitely more successful economist-- the man who single-handedly saved capitalism and shaped the way governments would adopt fiscal spending policies around the world, is not a name recognized by many people outside the field of economics, especially with the passing of each generation.
He himself knew this, and he wrote that, "...in the end, we are all dead." His deepest regret in life was not drinking champagne more often.
Unlike most folks, I did not come to L.A. to become famous. I realized a long while back, that fame didn’t really interest me, but I do want to count for something, and thus, it was no small irony when I fell into the trap of working for various fancy-schmancy catering companies wherein I dissolved into a mere shadow of a human; just enough to fill out a tuxedo and serve up plates of food, pre-ordered months in advance, then silently dropping back to a wall to stand at attention for any of the glitterati who might happen to want another glass of champagne. I became invisible and was treated as such—totally disposable, inherently replaceable.
That part of my reality I really came to hate, especially after getting hit by a car last year, and nobody came to visit me while I was in the hospital or later at home.
So, I have become afraid of being alone, of not having any friends, that no one would notice if I finally succeeded in killing myself.
Weeks would go by before a neighbor noticed the smell.
Not very happy thoughts.
But what am I most afraid of?
I am afraid that I will slip into a self-fulfilling pattern of feeling bitter, depressed, and hopeless, which inevitably ends up in some disaster that I had consciously or unconsciously created, because paradoxically, it is when I’m in “survival mode” that I feel most comfortable; or if not comfortable per se, at least that is what feels most familiar to me.
I suppose that implies what I really fear is success.
Maybe that’s because I am so uncomfortable with what defines “success.”
I know I do not want to become some corporate hotshot with a fat wad of bills in a money clip, who struts about thinking he can buy his way through life, even if he cannot afford manners.
I do not want to have power over other people and what they do with their lives, so I have actively chosen not to have children, and while politics fascinates me, I would surely go mad as a politician.
In fact, there are a lot of times when I just want to slip away to some sparsely populated island in the South Pacific---nothing but some elephant seals, the occasional pelican, and me.
However, I know eventually I would get lonely for human companionship.
Now that’s irony: I have come to dislike people as a whole, but I still long for that soul mate, someone who understands me and accepts me, for good or for ill.
That’s pretty much what all of us wants, isn’t it? Someone to love, and to be loved in return.
I reckon Veblen and Keynes were both right. So, I’ll start looking for a medium-priced bottle of champagne, and maybe I’ll meet Mr. Right at the liquor store.
Maybe not.
An Open Letter To Janna Shaddock-Hernandez & My Friends, Classmates, Cohorts, And Colleagues In The Department Of World Arts & Cultures At UCLA.
“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life...”
--Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
Then, Renton says, “I chose not to choose life; I chose something else…”
(Which, if you’ve seen Trainspotting or read the book, you discover that “something else” is heroin.)
I’ve never tried heroin, but that’s about the only drug I haven’t tried. Most of the stuff I have tried was experimental, sometimes recreational, only rarely have I used drugs to numb the pain—the haunting hunger for approval, the lonely need for a caressing hand of friendship on my shoulder, the aching wish for someone to be there to tell me things will be alright.
No, I’ve born that sadness, that chain about my neck, sober and awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering how long it would take for the stench of my rotting body to bother the neighbors enough before they’d call the police to break down the door…
Those are the bad days, and I try to have more good than bad, but sometimes—yeah, it gets that bad, and there’s not much to keep me away from the box cutter or a bottle of pills—not much except a big, fuzzy, black and brown friend, who, though he lacks opposable thumbs, finds his own way of reassuring me—that things will be okay. The sun will come out tomorrow, and all that stuff.
Feeling fucked up, in a fucked up time, in a fucked up place, doesn’t necessarily mean you are fucked up, or as one therapist told me, “Dan, you’re not crazy. Crazy people have no grasp of reality, whereas you have both feet firmly planted in reality—you just don’t like it very much.”
So, what is it? Am I fucked up, or just crazy? Or maybe just hypersensitive?
It’s hard to say, but when I look into those golden-brown eyes and he winks as if to say, “Maybe things would be better if we just went outside and rolled around in the grass,” crazy or not, I feel a whole lot better, and I think most of you do too—without picking my brain or vice-versa, Tucson (well, dogs in general) is the best therapy, and I am telling you all now: that bringing him with me to school everyday—that has been my own secret work of art through activism.
Peter Sellars tries to change the world through food and hugs; my medium is dog-oriented. (Hugs help out, though too.)
Dogs make the best socializing agents—far better than alcohol, or even campfires—and I’ve even done a fair amount of research into the evolution and development of our species, which have played complementary roles in the propagation of both humans and dogs on every continent, in nearly every culture.
It always seems ironic to me that here in America we churn out weepy-eyed movies about dogs like “My Dog Skip” and “Old Yeller,” which everybody loves, and there are a zillion books out there alà Chicken Soup for the Soul, which strongly advise people to adopt a dog—you’ll live longer, and with less stress—I swear it’s true—yet, when I take my dog on the bus, people freak out like I’m attached to an alien.
I reassure them by muttering something about being disabled, and there’s this collective sigh of relief (Whew! Glad that guy has a disability and needs a dog to help him out!) (?!?)
Sometimes my grasp of reality slips a bit then, but whatever—I get to take him with me everywhere, and I reckon he makes more people smile that upset (museum security guards, excepted.)
Folks don’t like to talk about mental illness—it makes them uncomfortable—something you whisper like cancer.
Again, I can’t figure this one out, especially when our campus has its own psychological services center, which has to limit the number of sessions any student can receive because the therapists are so back-logged, plus there’s the Center for Men and Women running dozens of workshops and group sessions targeted at dealing with depression and anxiety. There’s a counselor at the LGBT Center to specifically help students deals with those kinds of issues, and let us not forget the giant industrial-hospital complex with entire buildings full of psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, researchers, and doctors.
Nevertheless, when I transferred to UCLA two years ago, I was the only person with a dog in class (there weren’t/aren’t even any seeing-eye dogs around!) and most people had never heard of therapy dogs until I explained it to them.
It warms my heart immeasurably to note there are at least three other dogs on campus now, and I’d like to take some small amount of credit for that.
I’ve tried my hand at a lot of charity/non-profit work from in-home health care for mentally retarded adults to roaming the streets looking for homeless people to bring back to a shelter. Most of that work was pretty thankless, and when you throw in the government monitors, paperwork, and bureaucracy, it was enough to make a person crazy. (Which, obviously, in my case, it did.)
So, I quit trying to change the world, quit trying to be the reformer, the follow-up to Martin Luther King, Jr., the next Gandhi, or another Jesus. Besides, look where their efforts got them—all dead at the hands of other people they pissed off.
I have enough problems with pissing people off without trying to take on the world (although I DO have a German Shepherd/Rottweiler who’s got my back, yo!)
So, before our Commencement Commences, I advise the underclassmen, graduate students, and professors to make room in your lives for a dog. Maybe even two dogs. You’ll be glad you did, I promise.
On that note, like Vanessa Williams, “I went and saved the best for last,” and I bid you all a fond farewell.
Dan Tyler & Tuc’s
PS If we’ve made any sort of positive difference in just one of your lives, let us know, and I’ll feel this project has been a success and deserves an “A.” ☺
*Author's note: I got the A and a standing ovation at UCLA's Class of 2007 Graduation.
--Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
Then, Renton says, “I chose not to choose life; I chose something else…”
(Which, if you’ve seen Trainspotting or read the book, you discover that “something else” is heroin.)
I’ve never tried heroin, but that’s about the only drug I haven’t tried. Most of the stuff I have tried was experimental, sometimes recreational, only rarely have I used drugs to numb the pain—the haunting hunger for approval, the lonely need for a caressing hand of friendship on my shoulder, the aching wish for someone to be there to tell me things will be alright.
No, I’ve born that sadness, that chain about my neck, sober and awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering how long it would take for the stench of my rotting body to bother the neighbors enough before they’d call the police to break down the door…
Those are the bad days, and I try to have more good than bad, but sometimes—yeah, it gets that bad, and there’s not much to keep me away from the box cutter or a bottle of pills—not much except a big, fuzzy, black and brown friend, who, though he lacks opposable thumbs, finds his own way of reassuring me—that things will be okay. The sun will come out tomorrow, and all that stuff.
Feeling fucked up, in a fucked up time, in a fucked up place, doesn’t necessarily mean you are fucked up, or as one therapist told me, “Dan, you’re not crazy. Crazy people have no grasp of reality, whereas you have both feet firmly planted in reality—you just don’t like it very much.”
So, what is it? Am I fucked up, or just crazy? Or maybe just hypersensitive?
It’s hard to say, but when I look into those golden-brown eyes and he winks as if to say, “Maybe things would be better if we just went outside and rolled around in the grass,” crazy or not, I feel a whole lot better, and I think most of you do too—without picking my brain or vice-versa, Tucson (well, dogs in general) is the best therapy, and I am telling you all now: that bringing him with me to school everyday—that has been my own secret work of art through activism.
Peter Sellars tries to change the world through food and hugs; my medium is dog-oriented. (Hugs help out, though too.)
Dogs make the best socializing agents—far better than alcohol, or even campfires—and I’ve even done a fair amount of research into the evolution and development of our species, which have played complementary roles in the propagation of both humans and dogs on every continent, in nearly every culture.
It always seems ironic to me that here in America we churn out weepy-eyed movies about dogs like “My Dog Skip” and “Old Yeller,” which everybody loves, and there are a zillion books out there alà Chicken Soup for the Soul, which strongly advise people to adopt a dog—you’ll live longer, and with less stress—I swear it’s true—yet, when I take my dog on the bus, people freak out like I’m attached to an alien.
I reassure them by muttering something about being disabled, and there’s this collective sigh of relief (Whew! Glad that guy has a disability and needs a dog to help him out!) (?!?)
Sometimes my grasp of reality slips a bit then, but whatever—I get to take him with me everywhere, and I reckon he makes more people smile that upset (museum security guards, excepted.)
Folks don’t like to talk about mental illness—it makes them uncomfortable—something you whisper like cancer.
Again, I can’t figure this one out, especially when our campus has its own psychological services center, which has to limit the number of sessions any student can receive because the therapists are so back-logged, plus there’s the Center for Men and Women running dozens of workshops and group sessions targeted at dealing with depression and anxiety. There’s a counselor at the LGBT Center to specifically help students deals with those kinds of issues, and let us not forget the giant industrial-hospital complex with entire buildings full of psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, researchers, and doctors.
Nevertheless, when I transferred to UCLA two years ago, I was the only person with a dog in class (there weren’t/aren’t even any seeing-eye dogs around!) and most people had never heard of therapy dogs until I explained it to them.
It warms my heart immeasurably to note there are at least three other dogs on campus now, and I’d like to take some small amount of credit for that.
I’ve tried my hand at a lot of charity/non-profit work from in-home health care for mentally retarded adults to roaming the streets looking for homeless people to bring back to a shelter. Most of that work was pretty thankless, and when you throw in the government monitors, paperwork, and bureaucracy, it was enough to make a person crazy. (Which, obviously, in my case, it did.)
So, I quit trying to change the world, quit trying to be the reformer, the follow-up to Martin Luther King, Jr., the next Gandhi, or another Jesus. Besides, look where their efforts got them—all dead at the hands of other people they pissed off.
I have enough problems with pissing people off without trying to take on the world (although I DO have a German Shepherd/Rottweiler who’s got my back, yo!)
So, before our Commencement Commences, I advise the underclassmen, graduate students, and professors to make room in your lives for a dog. Maybe even two dogs. You’ll be glad you did, I promise.
On that note, like Vanessa Williams, “I went and saved the best for last,” and I bid you all a fond farewell.
Dan Tyler & Tuc’s
PS If we’ve made any sort of positive difference in just one of your lives, let us know, and I’ll feel this project has been a success and deserves an “A.” ☺
*Author's note: I got the A and a standing ovation at UCLA's Class of 2007 Graduation.
Hanging on to Hope (Revision)
Choose life
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose family, cars, a big fuck-off TV. Matching luggage, washing machines, compact disc players and electrical tin openers.
Choose sitting on that couch, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth watching mind- numbing, spirit-crushing game shows.
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in some stupid home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.
Choose life.
But I chose not to choose life.
I chose something else…
So opens Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, a lurid tale of life and anti-life in the streets of Edinburgh’s heroin addicts. They chose heroin as the next best option to life.
I chose crystal meth, no, wait! Maybe it was suicide! Or was it the other way around?
Either way, I deliberately chose not life, or at least not the life availed to me as portrayed in Don DeLillo’s Americana, which, though written nearly thirty years ago is as truthsome a tale as ever I read.
The experience of Americana, or perhaps better stated: “the American Dream” as seen through the eyes of DeLillo’s anti-hero David Bell is bleak and inelegant.
David is pathological (spitting into the ice cube tray at cocktail parties), misogynistic (affairs with various secretaries; fucking and beating up the police chief’s daughter in high school , and sexually …confused (?) at best, deviant at worst, as evinced by his narcissistic self-examinations at every mirror, his fetish for describing in detail every outfit he wears throughout the story, and his near idol-worship of Burt Lancaster.
At the same time, he holds contempt, if not outright abiding hatred for his father, a brusque businessman who is crass, uncouth, and only marginally related to himself.
His father, the last of a dying breed of ad-men, treats David as more of a drinking buddy rather than son, dispensing business advice: “If you know your job, you can afford to be yourself (and your men will respect you) because you can do their job better than they,” as well as practical tips on romancing the police chief’s daughter: “If he finds out you are fooling with his daughter, he’ll blow your head off.”
He seems to have a lightly beneficent air towards his son, though it probably would not surprise him to know that David, in fact, hates his old man and “wished he were dead.”
Perhaps David’s hatred for his father stems from their mutual connection to the ugly, backbiting world of TV network sleaze and the attendant whorish advertising, which, if anything is just that much worse
However, they did have a “clean” point of commonality once upon a time through David’s mother, a Virginian-born minister’s daughter who is, was, and shall ever be the purest personality either man shall know in their lives.
“She was a different breed of cat…there was something magic about her.” David’s father recalls.
She is a woman of grace, yet she is stained not just by an unfair, spiteful cancer, but also by the indignity of suffering a sexual assault by her physician Dr. Weber.
Before she dies she divulges this bit of horror to David alone, and thus plants a putrid seed of darkness, which germinates and festers in his ear, ultimately driving him mad.
After attending an exclusive, experimental liberal arts college in Southern Californian, David returns to New York, landing a network job via his father’s connections and quickly rises through the ranks; the prodigal son as far as the other executives are concerned. He eliminates any rivals and uses dirty secrets, gossip, and the tips whispered to him by his secretary-who-is-fucking-his-boss to full advantage.
Despite the high salary, office with a window, and expense account, David’s existence is shallow and lost and meaningless; moreover, he recognizes it as such, and scrambling for a lifeline, he leaps at the chance to rediscover America, ostensibly to shoot a documentary about the Navajos, but the idea of the Great American Road Trip catches hold of his imagination and last dregs of romanticism, and hope is re-lit in his soul for the chance at redemption; a return to innocence, perhaps.
His enthusiasm infects several friends equally lost in a country shuddering under the blight of the Viet-Nam War.
Sullivan: the chain-smoking, SoHo-lesbian-artist-archetype.
Brand: the young Republican drafted to commit atrocities in 'Nam all in the name of God and Country and returned Stateside to become an assistant plant manager of the general foam division, Tenneco Chemicals. In that order.
And Pike: a Timothy Leary doppelganger, Ivy League educated, experimentally chemicalated.
Along the way they encounter Richard Specter who, ghostlike, and disenfranchised drifts away from his Pentagon appointment in Washington, D.C., turns his back and begins walking to California.
Also in a sleepy, non-descript mid-western town –could be Iowa, could be Illinois—they meet actors Austin Wakely and Carol Deming with whom David elects to film a series of monologues soliloquies, transparently in retaliation against the network heads who cancelled his own program of the same concept.
With the help of some interested locals, David tapes a wide and wonderful, bleak and beautiful, grim and hilarious series of slices of Americana pie, juicy with wormy apples.
Examples include:
Recollections of the Bataan Death march.
Falling in love with a racketeer and hit man.
One-on-one high school basketball.
Ad nauseum.
One day, however, David is inspired to capture the essence and beauty of the stillness of the small-town streets. He and Pike clamp their camera to the doorframe of their truck to reduce vibration and unnecessary movement, and they slowly drive up and down the dusty, silent streets. “An interview in a new language,” they claim, whereas I am reminded of the song America the Beautiful and the film American Beauty concurrently.
Yet the beauty of these few moments are fleeting pinpricks of light compared to the ocean of darkness which swallows the rest of the novel.
David abandons his friends after discovering they had each had carnal relations with Sullivan—the only woman he has never been able to dominate/intimidate, and he flees south, hitchhiking where he eventually encounters a series of grotesqueries en route.
First, a test-track manager named Clevenger picks David up in Missouri, and together they speed up and down Route 66, blazing a swath from Kansas to New Mexico, across the southern edge of Colorado, and whirling back down into Texas like wild horses, crazed on loco-weed (as it were), bereft of direction, but pumped up on booze, testosterone, weed and the need to run, run, run, as fast as they can.
For they know that just behind them, gaining through the dust of their passage is the ultimate horror: the luke-warm, suburban nightmare---the propriety of the savages now dully tamed, whom David now recalls he has meant to make a documentary about.
Over a week of fierce, burning days, across the hot, painted deserts, David and Clevenger finally come across the Navajos.
…a sad lot indeed.
For starters, most of them are white, that is, the small group of squatters David interviews has been infiltrated by white hippies, trying to get back to the Earth Mother or somesuch, and while suitably poor and wretched, they are not romantic.
Dirty.
But not romantic.
Clevenger returns for David and takes him to his test track and garages whereupon a vulgar orgy of the basest designs commences.
Once again David flees and hits the road, and in one final depraved encounter (sort of a final fuck-you from DeLillo to the readers he has jerked through the mud and muck of this so-called “great nation”) he is propositioned/threatened by a psychotic one-armed sailor.
In the end, David returns to the soothing security of his native New York.
What to make of it?
Americana is real. Too fucking real. Too-weeping-Christ-for-our-sins, may-He-have-Mercy-upon-Us motherfucking real.
DeLillo is either a master of his craft, or a first-hand witness, ‘cause you generally just can’t make up shit like that, you know what I mean?
But disturbing can be enlightening, if you dig, just like my own life story, short and sweet:
I tired to kill myself, botched the job, and struggled for five years to overcome the consequential disabilities: the deafness, the dizziness, the panic attacks, and the incapacitating stutter.
What’s it all mean in the end?
I’ll tell you what: if there is a God, and I do mean IF, then that motherfucker has got a heavy, blacker-than-black sense of humor. And while I have come to learn to appreciate His twisted jokes on us, that still don’t mean they ain’t black.
By that same token, however, that doesn’t mean those beautiful moments of stillness, with only a sweep of golden dust in the air, falling silently on the roadsides of Americana are any less beautiful.
Perhaps more so.
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose family, cars, a big fuck-off TV. Matching luggage, washing machines, compact disc players and electrical tin openers.
Choose sitting on that couch, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth watching mind- numbing, spirit-crushing game shows.
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in some stupid home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.
Choose life.
But I chose not to choose life.
I chose something else…
So opens Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, a lurid tale of life and anti-life in the streets of Edinburgh’s heroin addicts. They chose heroin as the next best option to life.
I chose crystal meth, no, wait! Maybe it was suicide! Or was it the other way around?
Either way, I deliberately chose not life, or at least not the life availed to me as portrayed in Don DeLillo’s Americana, which, though written nearly thirty years ago is as truthsome a tale as ever I read.
The experience of Americana, or perhaps better stated: “the American Dream” as seen through the eyes of DeLillo’s anti-hero David Bell is bleak and inelegant.
David is pathological (spitting into the ice cube tray at cocktail parties), misogynistic (affairs with various secretaries; fucking and beating up the police chief’s daughter in high school , and sexually …confused (?) at best, deviant at worst, as evinced by his narcissistic self-examinations at every mirror, his fetish for describing in detail every outfit he wears throughout the story, and his near idol-worship of Burt Lancaster.
At the same time, he holds contempt, if not outright abiding hatred for his father, a brusque businessman who is crass, uncouth, and only marginally related to himself.
His father, the last of a dying breed of ad-men, treats David as more of a drinking buddy rather than son, dispensing business advice: “If you know your job, you can afford to be yourself (and your men will respect you) because you can do their job better than they,” as well as practical tips on romancing the police chief’s daughter: “If he finds out you are fooling with his daughter, he’ll blow your head off.”
He seems to have a lightly beneficent air towards his son, though it probably would not surprise him to know that David, in fact, hates his old man and “wished he were dead.”
Perhaps David’s hatred for his father stems from their mutual connection to the ugly, backbiting world of TV network sleaze and the attendant whorish advertising, which, if anything is just that much worse
However, they did have a “clean” point of commonality once upon a time through David’s mother, a Virginian-born minister’s daughter who is, was, and shall ever be the purest personality either man shall know in their lives.
“She was a different breed of cat…there was something magic about her.” David’s father recalls.
She is a woman of grace, yet she is stained not just by an unfair, spiteful cancer, but also by the indignity of suffering a sexual assault by her physician Dr. Weber.
Before she dies she divulges this bit of horror to David alone, and thus plants a putrid seed of darkness, which germinates and festers in his ear, ultimately driving him mad.
After attending an exclusive, experimental liberal arts college in Southern Californian, David returns to New York, landing a network job via his father’s connections and quickly rises through the ranks; the prodigal son as far as the other executives are concerned. He eliminates any rivals and uses dirty secrets, gossip, and the tips whispered to him by his secretary-who-is-fucking-his-boss to full advantage.
Despite the high salary, office with a window, and expense account, David’s existence is shallow and lost and meaningless; moreover, he recognizes it as such, and scrambling for a lifeline, he leaps at the chance to rediscover America, ostensibly to shoot a documentary about the Navajos, but the idea of the Great American Road Trip catches hold of his imagination and last dregs of romanticism, and hope is re-lit in his soul for the chance at redemption; a return to innocence, perhaps.
His enthusiasm infects several friends equally lost in a country shuddering under the blight of the Viet-Nam War.
Sullivan: the chain-smoking, SoHo-lesbian-artist-archetype.
Brand: the young Republican drafted to commit atrocities in 'Nam all in the name of God and Country and returned Stateside to become an assistant plant manager of the general foam division, Tenneco Chemicals. In that order.
And Pike: a Timothy Leary doppelganger, Ivy League educated, experimentally chemicalated.
Along the way they encounter Richard Specter who, ghostlike, and disenfranchised drifts away from his Pentagon appointment in Washington, D.C., turns his back and begins walking to California.
Also in a sleepy, non-descript mid-western town –could be Iowa, could be Illinois—they meet actors Austin Wakely and Carol Deming with whom David elects to film a series of monologues soliloquies, transparently in retaliation against the network heads who cancelled his own program of the same concept.
With the help of some interested locals, David tapes a wide and wonderful, bleak and beautiful, grim and hilarious series of slices of Americana pie, juicy with wormy apples.
Examples include:
Recollections of the Bataan Death march.
Falling in love with a racketeer and hit man.
One-on-one high school basketball.
Ad nauseum.
One day, however, David is inspired to capture the essence and beauty of the stillness of the small-town streets. He and Pike clamp their camera to the doorframe of their truck to reduce vibration and unnecessary movement, and they slowly drive up and down the dusty, silent streets. “An interview in a new language,” they claim, whereas I am reminded of the song America the Beautiful and the film American Beauty concurrently.
Yet the beauty of these few moments are fleeting pinpricks of light compared to the ocean of darkness which swallows the rest of the novel.
David abandons his friends after discovering they had each had carnal relations with Sullivan—the only woman he has never been able to dominate/intimidate, and he flees south, hitchhiking where he eventually encounters a series of grotesqueries en route.
First, a test-track manager named Clevenger picks David up in Missouri, and together they speed up and down Route 66, blazing a swath from Kansas to New Mexico, across the southern edge of Colorado, and whirling back down into Texas like wild horses, crazed on loco-weed (as it were), bereft of direction, but pumped up on booze, testosterone, weed and the need to run, run, run, as fast as they can.
For they know that just behind them, gaining through the dust of their passage is the ultimate horror: the luke-warm, suburban nightmare---the propriety of the savages now dully tamed, whom David now recalls he has meant to make a documentary about.
Over a week of fierce, burning days, across the hot, painted deserts, David and Clevenger finally come across the Navajos.
…a sad lot indeed.
For starters, most of them are white, that is, the small group of squatters David interviews has been infiltrated by white hippies, trying to get back to the Earth Mother or somesuch, and while suitably poor and wretched, they are not romantic.
Dirty.
But not romantic.
Clevenger returns for David and takes him to his test track and garages whereupon a vulgar orgy of the basest designs commences.
Once again David flees and hits the road, and in one final depraved encounter (sort of a final fuck-you from DeLillo to the readers he has jerked through the mud and muck of this so-called “great nation”) he is propositioned/threatened by a psychotic one-armed sailor.
In the end, David returns to the soothing security of his native New York.
What to make of it?
Americana is real. Too fucking real. Too-weeping-Christ-for-our-sins, may-He-have-Mercy-upon-Us motherfucking real.
DeLillo is either a master of his craft, or a first-hand witness, ‘cause you generally just can’t make up shit like that, you know what I mean?
But disturbing can be enlightening, if you dig, just like my own life story, short and sweet:
I tired to kill myself, botched the job, and struggled for five years to overcome the consequential disabilities: the deafness, the dizziness, the panic attacks, and the incapacitating stutter.
What’s it all mean in the end?
I’ll tell you what: if there is a God, and I do mean IF, then that motherfucker has got a heavy, blacker-than-black sense of humor. And while I have come to learn to appreciate His twisted jokes on us, that still don’t mean they ain’t black.
By that same token, however, that doesn’t mean those beautiful moments of stillness, with only a sweep of golden dust in the air, falling silently on the roadsides of Americana are any less beautiful.
Perhaps more so.
On William Wymsatt, Erasure, Whitley Heights, and Changing the World.
William Upski Wimsatt wrote No More Prisons in 1999.
Ostensibly, the text is about the disparity between American class systems, which he has delineated mostly according to race, i.e. rich whites vs. poor blacks.
His thesis suggests that the prisons in question are both literal and a metaphor for the way so many American imprison themselves, “…in nation based on a culture of fear.” This book is based on observations and lessons learned while hitchhiking to America’s “worst” ghettos while trying to promote his book Bomb the Suburbs, which in turn, was an effort to “breakdown cliques in American life.”
In addition to writing these books, Wimsatt’ s methods to change the world revolve around hip-hop culture, which he addresses at lectures, readings, developing an inner-city youth center, tagging trains and subway cars with graffiti art, and breakdancing competitions et al.
While Wimsatt claims a vast number of mentors including former Black Panther Eddie Ellis, who earned his degree in prison and later headed the Community Justice Center in Harlem; Phil Villers, a Harvard graduate who made more than $80 million and then gave it away; and writer and home-schooling advocate Grace Llewellyn. Drawing inspiration from these (and innumerable others) he hopes society can be changed for the better, thus, he offers this book as a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Community Organizing.” addressing five key issues:
1.) Urban Life
2.) Home schooling and Self-education
3.) Hip-hop leadership
4.) The Cool Rich Kids Movement
5.) Why Philanthropy is the Greatest Art Form of the Twenty-first Century.
Inasmuch as Wimsatt holds certain values, he acknowledges that life is not static. Things change. Neighborhoods change. The walls of suburbia expand and contract, yet the prisons remain or worse, actually multiply at a furious rate; again, both literally, as well as in the sense that worries perpetuated by the American military-industrial complex have reached a terminal velocity such that freedom has become a vague and purely hypothetical notion for most people.
We have become imprisoned by our fears.
I have long held these very same convictions, and yet I have not been able to find a means of effectively countering the downward spiral of this nation into one of apathetic, ostrich-ing, gated-communities.
Taking a cue from the band Erasure, I once sent out invitations to all the tenants of my old apartment in Hollywood to have a getting-to-know-your-neighbors brunch on our communal deck.
How can I explain, when there are few words I could choose?
How can I explain, when words get broken?
Do you remember, there was a time...?
When there were open doors,
An invitation to the world!
We asked to talk about the weather,
making friends together,
days would last forever...
Chorus Come to me!
Cover me!
Hold me!
Together we’ll break these chains of love!
Don’t give up...
Don’t give up, no!
Together with me and my baby,
We’ll break these chains of love!
Do you remember once upon a time...?
When people on the street,
Were walking hand-in-hand-in-hand!
They were falling in and out with lovers,
looking out for others,
sisters and our brothers...
(Repeat chorus)
Sound familiar? It seems like this is what Wimsatt is shooting for—what all community organizations are shooting for—this idyllic, nostalgic sense of better days; safer days; the Norman Rockwell prism in place of Aldus Huxley’s prison.
Nobody showed up, however, because the management company got word we were going to have an unsanctioned tenants party and ordered the janitors to secretly and swiftly yank all the invitations from our mailboxes.
I had to do a lot of deep breathing afterwards, but eventually it occurred to me to broaden my scope and meet with my neighborhood council.
At the first meeting I attended, I opined that there were quite a number of ways our 5-block radius of Whitley Heights could be improved—from planting trees to collecting the piles of broken furniture abandoned on the sidewalks. My enthusiasm led me into that year’s elections, and before I knew it, I had become the Chair of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council of Whitley Heights Committee on Housing.
Initially, I thought this an honor, but soon I learned the (unpaid) job offered constant headaches and no rewards. My constituents thought my ideas were great—just so long as they didn’t have to do any work, and since I had no budget to hire anyone else, if I wanted to see my campaign promises enacted, I usually had to do them myself, although sometimes my boyfriend pitched in.
Grassroots became a four-letter word, and this has often been the case for most of the non-profit organizations and charities with which I have tried to become involved before or since—from UCLA’s LGBT newspaper to a series of lectures I gave at an adult-education center to inspire people to travel overseas.
I get props for being so gung-ho about creating change, but when it comes time to fill in the roster, most folks shuffle their feet.
What I have concluded is that I have come up with any number of ways to make the world a better place in my eyes for other people, but that in and of itself is rather like playing God—the furthest thing from what I want, and apparently not what they want either.
Humbled, disillusioned, and jaded, I have come to understand that many, if not most of my efforts have gone or will go in vain, and that is a bitter pill to swallow, indeed.
To ask me about passion, one had better expect a grimace or a sneer, and it is something about myself I acknowledge, hate, and am working on in therapy.
Right now that is just the best I can do: plug away at securing my degree and hope someone else will make the world a better place. For the time being, I have to focus on the man in the mirror.
Ostensibly, the text is about the disparity between American class systems, which he has delineated mostly according to race, i.e. rich whites vs. poor blacks.
His thesis suggests that the prisons in question are both literal and a metaphor for the way so many American imprison themselves, “…in nation based on a culture of fear.” This book is based on observations and lessons learned while hitchhiking to America’s “worst” ghettos while trying to promote his book Bomb the Suburbs, which in turn, was an effort to “breakdown cliques in American life.”
In addition to writing these books, Wimsatt’ s methods to change the world revolve around hip-hop culture, which he addresses at lectures, readings, developing an inner-city youth center, tagging trains and subway cars with graffiti art, and breakdancing competitions et al.
While Wimsatt claims a vast number of mentors including former Black Panther Eddie Ellis, who earned his degree in prison and later headed the Community Justice Center in Harlem; Phil Villers, a Harvard graduate who made more than $80 million and then gave it away; and writer and home-schooling advocate Grace Llewellyn. Drawing inspiration from these (and innumerable others) he hopes society can be changed for the better, thus, he offers this book as a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Community Organizing.” addressing five key issues:
1.) Urban Life
2.) Home schooling and Self-education
3.) Hip-hop leadership
4.) The Cool Rich Kids Movement
5.) Why Philanthropy is the Greatest Art Form of the Twenty-first Century.
Inasmuch as Wimsatt holds certain values, he acknowledges that life is not static. Things change. Neighborhoods change. The walls of suburbia expand and contract, yet the prisons remain or worse, actually multiply at a furious rate; again, both literally, as well as in the sense that worries perpetuated by the American military-industrial complex have reached a terminal velocity such that freedom has become a vague and purely hypothetical notion for most people.
We have become imprisoned by our fears.
I have long held these very same convictions, and yet I have not been able to find a means of effectively countering the downward spiral of this nation into one of apathetic, ostrich-ing, gated-communities.
Taking a cue from the band Erasure, I once sent out invitations to all the tenants of my old apartment in Hollywood to have a getting-to-know-your-neighbors brunch on our communal deck.
How can I explain, when there are few words I could choose?
How can I explain, when words get broken?
Do you remember, there was a time...?
When there were open doors,
An invitation to the world!
We asked to talk about the weather,
making friends together,
days would last forever...
Chorus Come to me!
Cover me!
Hold me!
Together we’ll break these chains of love!
Don’t give up...
Don’t give up, no!
Together with me and my baby,
We’ll break these chains of love!
Do you remember once upon a time...?
When people on the street,
Were walking hand-in-hand-in-hand!
They were falling in and out with lovers,
looking out for others,
sisters and our brothers...
(Repeat chorus)
Sound familiar? It seems like this is what Wimsatt is shooting for—what all community organizations are shooting for—this idyllic, nostalgic sense of better days; safer days; the Norman Rockwell prism in place of Aldus Huxley’s prison.
Nobody showed up, however, because the management company got word we were going to have an unsanctioned tenants party and ordered the janitors to secretly and swiftly yank all the invitations from our mailboxes.
I had to do a lot of deep breathing afterwards, but eventually it occurred to me to broaden my scope and meet with my neighborhood council.
At the first meeting I attended, I opined that there were quite a number of ways our 5-block radius of Whitley Heights could be improved—from planting trees to collecting the piles of broken furniture abandoned on the sidewalks. My enthusiasm led me into that year’s elections, and before I knew it, I had become the Chair of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council of Whitley Heights Committee on Housing.
Initially, I thought this an honor, but soon I learned the (unpaid) job offered constant headaches and no rewards. My constituents thought my ideas were great—just so long as they didn’t have to do any work, and since I had no budget to hire anyone else, if I wanted to see my campaign promises enacted, I usually had to do them myself, although sometimes my boyfriend pitched in.
Grassroots became a four-letter word, and this has often been the case for most of the non-profit organizations and charities with which I have tried to become involved before or since—from UCLA’s LGBT newspaper to a series of lectures I gave at an adult-education center to inspire people to travel overseas.
I get props for being so gung-ho about creating change, but when it comes time to fill in the roster, most folks shuffle their feet.
What I have concluded is that I have come up with any number of ways to make the world a better place in my eyes for other people, but that in and of itself is rather like playing God—the furthest thing from what I want, and apparently not what they want either.
Humbled, disillusioned, and jaded, I have come to understand that many, if not most of my efforts have gone or will go in vain, and that is a bitter pill to swallow, indeed.
To ask me about passion, one had better expect a grimace or a sneer, and it is something about myself I acknowledge, hate, and am working on in therapy.
Right now that is just the best I can do: plug away at securing my degree and hope someone else will make the world a better place. For the time being, I have to focus on the man in the mirror.
Randy Pants
His name was Randy Carver.
It was the summer of 1999. The Summer of Love.
I was 24, and had just come Out, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever laid eyes on.
He was 27, cool, stylish: the way he danced, the way he talked, the car he drove.
Not only was I in love with him, I wanted to be him—great body, great hair, trendy as all hell, yet so nice, so kind, so friendly—without any of the cunty, queeny, “Who-are-you- Miss-Thang?!” that scares off so many fledgling gay boys like myself.
No, Randy embraced me first thing when we met, through my then boyfriend, Brian, and he exuded charm and when he said “It’s so great to meet you. Welcome to Portland!” I was immediately put at ease and always found myself smiling whenever we hung out.
That summer I tried e for the first time, and really came to know what music felt like. To be able to dance all night long at these wonderful underground after-parties, and then, cuddling and laughing with a fabulous new set of friends in a park overlooking the bay, waiting for the sun to come up.
I thought I knew how to dance before, but with e as a catalyst and Randy as my guide, I started moving and twisting and locking and twirling like I never knew I could.
Absurdly, his boyfriend cheated on him and then dumped him, and Randy was hurt, terribly hurt for months afterwards.
There was a sexual tension, an almost tangible chemistry between us from the start, and although we would hold hands and give each other back rubs, after-rolling, whenever we started kissing or becoming too intimate, he would draw away and choke, “Dan, I’m sorry, it’s just too soon after Jim,” which pissed me off to no end, and I thought he was just brushing me off, because up until then I had never been hurt like that before.
Just the same, he was my idol, and I emulated his style, combing the shops and boutiques from Portland to Boston to New York for just the right outfits—fierce club kid clothes—tight spandex t-shirts. Blinky—flashy watches, earrings, and bracelets. You know the routine. And phat pants with lots and lots of pockets—Randy pants—like the kind he always wore. I always looked good in them, felt confident, stylish, self-assured, sexy.
I started going to circuit parties. New York, Montréal, D.C. I grew in confidence and met so many people, and I would return to Portland with a thousand stories and a million phone numbers and email addresses and guest tickets to all the clubs: Twilo, the Tunnel, Rise, Stereo, Avalon.
Randy would laugh, and say “My god, Dan, when you first got here, you didn’t know anyone, and now you’re everywhere, and everybody knows you!” It was hilarious to me that he didn’t understand that it was in trying to impress him, I became this professional club kid.
Then I met the man of my dreams in Boston, and I forgot about Randy and all my friends in Portland—left them all behind to be with this guy, which at first seemed to be a good idea, but then it turned bad. So very bad. So very quickly. And he hurt me, broke my heart, ripped my guts out, and tramped on my soul, or so it seemed, and I was left all alone, having alienated my friends in Portland, and it took a long, long time for me to heal.
Fast forward three years, and by this time I had moved out to California, but I made plans to meet up with friends in Montreal for the Black and Blue, and there I was, flagging up on stage at Millennium while Manny spun behind me, and this guy at the base of the stage beckoned with a finger for me to come closer…and it was Randy!!!
I leapt off the stage and into his arms, and we kissed like long-lost lovers, and then we caught ourselves and broke apart, and I was all like, “Omigod, look at you, you look great!” (He did!) while he was all, “Me? Look at you! You look fantastic!”
The next thing, simultaneously was “ Wow—do you have a boyfriend?”
“No?!”
“Oh…” “Oh…!”
My heart jumped, and I think I saw his did too, and we wanted to say more, but just then his friends crashed into us, and we couldn’t really talk, but we danced close, so blissfully, achingly close, and I made plans to meet up with him at his hotel after the club closed in case we got separated (which, unfortunately, we were, dammit!)
So, the next morning I stumbled across from the Olympic Stadium to his hotel, and when he let me in, there were a couple of his friends asleep in one bed, and he was slightly K’d out.
Not to be denied, I let it all out: how I had fallen in love with him at first sight all those years ago. How I hadn’t understood how badly his ex had hurt him, but now, after my own failed relationship, I did. I told him about the huge effect he’d had on me; on how I wanted to be cool like him, to be nice like him, to have a great body, great hair, all that and more.
He just sat there with mouth agape, eyes wide, and a child-like expression, “I really did that? You really thought all that?!”
And then his eyes glazed over, and he dropped asleep in my arms, and I had to ruefully laugh. He probably hadn’t even comprehended the last few minutes I’d been talking. But that was okay. He was O-Kaaaaaay….
Yet, the next day I flew back to California, knowing where I’d come from; having experienced the magic of recognizing one person’s touch on another’s life.
I still look great in my Randy-pants.
It was the summer of 1999. The Summer of Love.
I was 24, and had just come Out, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever laid eyes on.
He was 27, cool, stylish: the way he danced, the way he talked, the car he drove.
Not only was I in love with him, I wanted to be him—great body, great hair, trendy as all hell, yet so nice, so kind, so friendly—without any of the cunty, queeny, “Who-are-you- Miss-Thang?!” that scares off so many fledgling gay boys like myself.
No, Randy embraced me first thing when we met, through my then boyfriend, Brian, and he exuded charm and when he said “It’s so great to meet you. Welcome to Portland!” I was immediately put at ease and always found myself smiling whenever we hung out.
That summer I tried e for the first time, and really came to know what music felt like. To be able to dance all night long at these wonderful underground after-parties, and then, cuddling and laughing with a fabulous new set of friends in a park overlooking the bay, waiting for the sun to come up.
I thought I knew how to dance before, but with e as a catalyst and Randy as my guide, I started moving and twisting and locking and twirling like I never knew I could.
Absurdly, his boyfriend cheated on him and then dumped him, and Randy was hurt, terribly hurt for months afterwards.
There was a sexual tension, an almost tangible chemistry between us from the start, and although we would hold hands and give each other back rubs, after-rolling, whenever we started kissing or becoming too intimate, he would draw away and choke, “Dan, I’m sorry, it’s just too soon after Jim,” which pissed me off to no end, and I thought he was just brushing me off, because up until then I had never been hurt like that before.
Just the same, he was my idol, and I emulated his style, combing the shops and boutiques from Portland to Boston to New York for just the right outfits—fierce club kid clothes—tight spandex t-shirts. Blinky—flashy watches, earrings, and bracelets. You know the routine. And phat pants with lots and lots of pockets—Randy pants—like the kind he always wore. I always looked good in them, felt confident, stylish, self-assured, sexy.
I started going to circuit parties. New York, Montréal, D.C. I grew in confidence and met so many people, and I would return to Portland with a thousand stories and a million phone numbers and email addresses and guest tickets to all the clubs: Twilo, the Tunnel, Rise, Stereo, Avalon.
Randy would laugh, and say “My god, Dan, when you first got here, you didn’t know anyone, and now you’re everywhere, and everybody knows you!” It was hilarious to me that he didn’t understand that it was in trying to impress him, I became this professional club kid.
Then I met the man of my dreams in Boston, and I forgot about Randy and all my friends in Portland—left them all behind to be with this guy, which at first seemed to be a good idea, but then it turned bad. So very bad. So very quickly. And he hurt me, broke my heart, ripped my guts out, and tramped on my soul, or so it seemed, and I was left all alone, having alienated my friends in Portland, and it took a long, long time for me to heal.
Fast forward three years, and by this time I had moved out to California, but I made plans to meet up with friends in Montreal for the Black and Blue, and there I was, flagging up on stage at Millennium while Manny spun behind me, and this guy at the base of the stage beckoned with a finger for me to come closer…and it was Randy!!!
I leapt off the stage and into his arms, and we kissed like long-lost lovers, and then we caught ourselves and broke apart, and I was all like, “Omigod, look at you, you look great!” (He did!) while he was all, “Me? Look at you! You look fantastic!”
The next thing, simultaneously was “ Wow—do you have a boyfriend?”
“No?!”
“Oh…” “Oh…!”
My heart jumped, and I think I saw his did too, and we wanted to say more, but just then his friends crashed into us, and we couldn’t really talk, but we danced close, so blissfully, achingly close, and I made plans to meet up with him at his hotel after the club closed in case we got separated (which, unfortunately, we were, dammit!)
So, the next morning I stumbled across from the Olympic Stadium to his hotel, and when he let me in, there were a couple of his friends asleep in one bed, and he was slightly K’d out.
Not to be denied, I let it all out: how I had fallen in love with him at first sight all those years ago. How I hadn’t understood how badly his ex had hurt him, but now, after my own failed relationship, I did. I told him about the huge effect he’d had on me; on how I wanted to be cool like him, to be nice like him, to have a great body, great hair, all that and more.
He just sat there with mouth agape, eyes wide, and a child-like expression, “I really did that? You really thought all that?!”
And then his eyes glazed over, and he dropped asleep in my arms, and I had to ruefully laugh. He probably hadn’t even comprehended the last few minutes I’d been talking. But that was okay. He was O-Kaaaaaay….
Yet, the next day I flew back to California, knowing where I’d come from; having experienced the magic of recognizing one person’s touch on another’s life.
I still look great in my Randy-pants.
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