Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
The Lesson of the Wave
I have a new place and I don’t live here yet. It has golden walls and I don’t even own a couch yet. There is too much running around and too much fighting all the time. The books are stacked up to the roof and there is not even a bookcase. I left my car in South Philly somewhere and I watch Parking Wars and pray it’s not been towed or stolen. It is not, as they say, “street legal” here, and I don’t think I consider myself that either. I am definitely not “street legal,” although I want to be, and I bought my first go-go CD yesterday.
I spent most of the Fourth of July weekend sitting on plastic chairs listening to storytellers older than myself. I am in research mode. I am reading John McPhee books so I can learn how to write about the Internet because he rocked the abstract.
I have never had to spend so much time absorbing and translating information. My friend who is one of the best writers in the movement told me it took a YEAR for him to even learn to speak coherently about the communications industry; I am at month seven, and growing mighty impatient.
I thought going to the Folklife festival would be a tonic of sorts, because I am in need of guidance right now, and it was. One thing I am learning is that your requests are answered in the most unexpected ways, and I had the most terrifying and touching moment at one of the performance spaces called ‘The Stoop’, where the great Sonia Sanchez from her perch onstage turned and looked right at me in front of 60 people and started talking to me in front of the crowd, telling me that “you have to find time to write, dear sister, you have to carry a notebook around with you, I hated that I had to work and write in my spare time but that’s how it is, I loved my work too and it was hard, and you will find your process, dear sister, on the plane or in the airport, when you go to Peru and South Africa, you will find it, and if you don’t, please come and find me.”
And it blew me away, to be so recognized, and I was speechless, because I walk around all the time with my head in a cloud of imaginary beings, places, loves, wars, characters, drained lakes, animals, newly invented games involving rubber bands, the flotsam of words from billboards, etc etc, all of the story I tell myself in order to make my day to day non-existence a trifle more exciting. This cloud is so thick that I am in constant danger of stepping off the bridge into the river and drowning one day. (Knowing too, that, if that happened, I sure would be telling myself one hell of a story.)
Plus I thought: do I really get to go to Peru and South Africa someday?
I was in Seattle for ten days and just got back Sunday. It was such an astounding adventure I am trying to keep it with me. It was a city that lay completely under the spell of the sky and the weight of the water around it and the trees (even as far as they were in the distance – great Ent trees, some of the tallest trees on the planet).
Ferries poke back and forth across the Sound, and on one of the piers there’s a tiny hut made of bark and twigs with a sign that says “Wild Woman Coffee” where womaned by a tanned blissful being with a miniature espresso machine. There is something that all that water does to you, even in June when I went – it’s sunny then. The fish might as well be swimming down the sidewalk; I think the drunks are part fish. There are certainly a lot of watering holes.
If you are sensitive enough, you can feel the layers of a city’s history emerge in its present, and in Seattle, the wild, brutal frontier town layer – the boom town layer – is still there under the software. It might well be another country entirely – a self-sustaining economy that relies in no way on the federal government but yet creates more value for the country than any other industry.
Everybody looked so outdoorsy and they offered to take me kayaking and about half the men were licensed massage therapists and the city had a pagan parade with large floats of sea animals or comical tributes to the Seattle rain, all headed up by about two hundred naked people riding bicycles in body paint.
I went to a Mariners game with friend Steve, an expatriate New Yorker and Mets fan, and he had to explain at the beginning that it was a “family-friendly” ballpark. “You notice, something’s missing here,” he said.
I looked around. I listened.
“There are no obnoxious drunk guys!” I said. “Where are they?”
I tuned my ears for the sound of insults, grunts, boos, etc., but all that was around me was a small sea of beautiful multiethnic middle school children fiddling with their IPhones, bounded by a phalanx of men in yellow ALCOHOL ENFORCEMENT t-shirts.
“This is weird,” I said. He nodded. The middle-schoolers did a giggly wave.
Ichiro did that cool Japanese-archery flourish he puts on every swing. And the Mariners won, of course.
---
I want to say something important. I have realized something about myself and my endless love-hate relationship with my own career, and I need to write it down. All the advocating I am going to do from here on out is going to be done in the spirit of enlightenment, possibility, education, freedom, hope, and love. When fighting for something, it is easy to motivate oneself by darker emotions – anger, ego, a desire to kick (fill in the blank)’s ass. But all of that is corrosive. It is not that anger cannot be a legitimate force, but it is heavy, and it weighs you down.
There was not a hint of payback in the Obama campaign – although that campaign could have been filled with it - and that is why it was so aerodynamic. It flew. It was weightless.
When one is attempting to organize a miracle – which is really what public-interest people in my field do, and I have a couple on my plate right now – the only forces that have the power to accomplish such a thing are hope and love: love for those on behalf of whom you fight, love for the future… and boundless hope, I mean boundless unfathomable hope that humanity can turn back from the cliff on which we stand teetering and find our way back to civilization and a humane world. This kind of optimism comes close to insanity, but such are the confines of our world, and such is the need to break them.
There is no room for destruction.
These are the only transformational forces on earth. It took me so long to learn this, but it’s true, especially in a job where my primary objective is to hold up the voices of silenced multitudes so that they may sing.
The world that I am helping to create is so beautiful that I simply will not get to it if there is so much as a shred of the fog of anger drifting about me. I do not know if I am going to be successful at this, but it is important that I draw this line now. I have had it with thunderstorms and destruction. From here on out it’s waves only.
The earth turns on its axis and the moon pulls and the wind shears and you get: big beautiful blue waves. Wave… wave…wave… wave. Like the sky over DC this spring – it was like the ocean itself raining down on us. People complained, and the Washington Post ran an article on Mami Wata, but nothing truly spooky happened.
And … maybe once in a while a mild tidal wave… but no one drowns. And the boats get moved a little bit up the shore, but they are fine, and maybe some friendships are formed amongst the comically and mildly angry fishermen who must of course complain but, in the end, simply cannot curse the ocean.
And the sand on the beach is purer, and the land is quenched, and there is an abundance of seafood for all.
This... now I think that this might be a way to live.
I spent most of the Fourth of July weekend sitting on plastic chairs listening to storytellers older than myself. I am in research mode. I am reading John McPhee books so I can learn how to write about the Internet because he rocked the abstract.
I have never had to spend so much time absorbing and translating information. My friend who is one of the best writers in the movement told me it took a YEAR for him to even learn to speak coherently about the communications industry; I am at month seven, and growing mighty impatient.
I thought going to the Folklife festival would be a tonic of sorts, because I am in need of guidance right now, and it was. One thing I am learning is that your requests are answered in the most unexpected ways, and I had the most terrifying and touching moment at one of the performance spaces called ‘The Stoop’, where the great Sonia Sanchez from her perch onstage turned and looked right at me in front of 60 people and started talking to me in front of the crowd, telling me that “you have to find time to write, dear sister, you have to carry a notebook around with you, I hated that I had to work and write in my spare time but that’s how it is, I loved my work too and it was hard, and you will find your process, dear sister, on the plane or in the airport, when you go to Peru and South Africa, you will find it, and if you don’t, please come and find me.”
And it blew me away, to be so recognized, and I was speechless, because I walk around all the time with my head in a cloud of imaginary beings, places, loves, wars, characters, drained lakes, animals, newly invented games involving rubber bands, the flotsam of words from billboards, etc etc, all of the story I tell myself in order to make my day to day non-existence a trifle more exciting. This cloud is so thick that I am in constant danger of stepping off the bridge into the river and drowning one day. (Knowing too, that, if that happened, I sure would be telling myself one hell of a story.)
Plus I thought: do I really get to go to Peru and South Africa someday?
I was in Seattle for ten days and just got back Sunday. It was such an astounding adventure I am trying to keep it with me. It was a city that lay completely under the spell of the sky and the weight of the water around it and the trees (even as far as they were in the distance – great Ent trees, some of the tallest trees on the planet).
Ferries poke back and forth across the Sound, and on one of the piers there’s a tiny hut made of bark and twigs with a sign that says “Wild Woman Coffee” where womaned by a tanned blissful being with a miniature espresso machine. There is something that all that water does to you, even in June when I went – it’s sunny then. The fish might as well be swimming down the sidewalk; I think the drunks are part fish. There are certainly a lot of watering holes.
If you are sensitive enough, you can feel the layers of a city’s history emerge in its present, and in Seattle, the wild, brutal frontier town layer – the boom town layer – is still there under the software. It might well be another country entirely – a self-sustaining economy that relies in no way on the federal government but yet creates more value for the country than any other industry.
Everybody looked so outdoorsy and they offered to take me kayaking and about half the men were licensed massage therapists and the city had a pagan parade with large floats of sea animals or comical tributes to the Seattle rain, all headed up by about two hundred naked people riding bicycles in body paint.
I went to a Mariners game with friend Steve, an expatriate New Yorker and Mets fan, and he had to explain at the beginning that it was a “family-friendly” ballpark. “You notice, something’s missing here,” he said.
I looked around. I listened.
“There are no obnoxious drunk guys!” I said. “Where are they?”
I tuned my ears for the sound of insults, grunts, boos, etc., but all that was around me was a small sea of beautiful multiethnic middle school children fiddling with their IPhones, bounded by a phalanx of men in yellow ALCOHOL ENFORCEMENT t-shirts.
“This is weird,” I said. He nodded. The middle-schoolers did a giggly wave.
Ichiro did that cool Japanese-archery flourish he puts on every swing. And the Mariners won, of course.
---
I want to say something important. I have realized something about myself and my endless love-hate relationship with my own career, and I need to write it down. All the advocating I am going to do from here on out is going to be done in the spirit of enlightenment, possibility, education, freedom, hope, and love. When fighting for something, it is easy to motivate oneself by darker emotions – anger, ego, a desire to kick (fill in the blank)’s ass. But all of that is corrosive. It is not that anger cannot be a legitimate force, but it is heavy, and it weighs you down.
There was not a hint of payback in the Obama campaign – although that campaign could have been filled with it - and that is why it was so aerodynamic. It flew. It was weightless.
When one is attempting to organize a miracle – which is really what public-interest people in my field do, and I have a couple on my plate right now – the only forces that have the power to accomplish such a thing are hope and love: love for those on behalf of whom you fight, love for the future… and boundless hope, I mean boundless unfathomable hope that humanity can turn back from the cliff on which we stand teetering and find our way back to civilization and a humane world. This kind of optimism comes close to insanity, but such are the confines of our world, and such is the need to break them.
There is no room for destruction.
These are the only transformational forces on earth. It took me so long to learn this, but it’s true, especially in a job where my primary objective is to hold up the voices of silenced multitudes so that they may sing.
The world that I am helping to create is so beautiful that I simply will not get to it if there is so much as a shred of the fog of anger drifting about me. I do not know if I am going to be successful at this, but it is important that I draw this line now. I have had it with thunderstorms and destruction. From here on out it’s waves only.
The earth turns on its axis and the moon pulls and the wind shears and you get: big beautiful blue waves. Wave… wave…wave… wave. Like the sky over DC this spring – it was like the ocean itself raining down on us. People complained, and the Washington Post ran an article on Mami Wata, but nothing truly spooky happened.
And … maybe once in a while a mild tidal wave… but no one drowns. And the boats get moved a little bit up the shore, but they are fine, and maybe some friendships are formed amongst the comically and mildly angry fishermen who must of course complain but, in the end, simply cannot curse the ocean.
And the sand on the beach is purer, and the land is quenched, and there is an abundance of seafood for all.
This... now I think that this might be a way to live.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Confirmation Hearing
I was standing in the basement of the Senate Russell building with fellow communications advocates yesterday, waiting for the Commerce Committee to bring the pain to Julius Genachowski (of which they brought very little), and my friends were complaining about how everything in our whole field is plugged up and not happening since the administration is dragging its feet about the nomination process.
And I pointed up the marble spiral staircase with a three-story queue of line-sitters paid by lobbyists to hold their spot extending to Room 253 and I said, “Well, this is it, you know. This is like pushing a stalled car and getting it going.” And thought but didn’t say, that I think a lot of really extraordinary things are going to happen soon in very rapid succession. Like a dam breaking.
Intuition is a bizarre thing, it’s so vague that I don’t even know if it’s about work, or my actual life. But I want to write it down so I can go back so I can see if I’m right. Even intuition needs verification sometimes.
I think I’m going to actually like it here. DC is just a bunch of silly rituals and everyone looks so comical and kind of touching going through them, even though they often aren’t aware of it, their little bellies hanging out over their belts, the young women in the flip flops with the many-times-reused crumply Ann Taylor bag containing their heels, the Red Line in the morning full of cut-rate Masters-of-the-Universe-in-training. All there, all waiting for one future or another to start. In just two years, you could be just as lame as Timothy Geithner is today!
I think I was wrong. We are not really running the planet – we are simply showing up for work in the most elaborately over-constructed edifice of language and money that has ever existed on Earth, and it actually prevents us from hearing the saxophonists and keyboardists and mandolin players who stand outside the Farragut North exit and play beautiful rush-hour morning music for the thousands of commuters who flow out silently to their jobs, their eyes averted, pretending to not hear so there will be no obligation to tip - a sea of cheap handbags, idealism, credit card debt, professional jealousy, anti-depressants, sunglasses, diet tips, Netflix to return, thoughts of home, and whatever solitary music they prefer to listen to on their IPods. Usually not involving saxophones.
They say, those ships, they sail into the Golden Triangle and just … vanish. They’re never heard from again. They lose all radio contact with shore.
I guess its time to reestablish.
And I pointed up the marble spiral staircase with a three-story queue of line-sitters paid by lobbyists to hold their spot extending to Room 253 and I said, “Well, this is it, you know. This is like pushing a stalled car and getting it going.” And thought but didn’t say, that I think a lot of really extraordinary things are going to happen soon in very rapid succession. Like a dam breaking.
Intuition is a bizarre thing, it’s so vague that I don’t even know if it’s about work, or my actual life. But I want to write it down so I can go back so I can see if I’m right. Even intuition needs verification sometimes.
I think I’m going to actually like it here. DC is just a bunch of silly rituals and everyone looks so comical and kind of touching going through them, even though they often aren’t aware of it, their little bellies hanging out over their belts, the young women in the flip flops with the many-times-reused crumply Ann Taylor bag containing their heels, the Red Line in the morning full of cut-rate Masters-of-the-Universe-in-training. All there, all waiting for one future or another to start. In just two years, you could be just as lame as Timothy Geithner is today!
I think I was wrong. We are not really running the planet – we are simply showing up for work in the most elaborately over-constructed edifice of language and money that has ever existed on Earth, and it actually prevents us from hearing the saxophonists and keyboardists and mandolin players who stand outside the Farragut North exit and play beautiful rush-hour morning music for the thousands of commuters who flow out silently to their jobs, their eyes averted, pretending to not hear so there will be no obligation to tip - a sea of cheap handbags, idealism, credit card debt, professional jealousy, anti-depressants, sunglasses, diet tips, Netflix to return, thoughts of home, and whatever solitary music they prefer to listen to on their IPods. Usually not involving saxophones.
They say, those ships, they sail into the Golden Triangle and just … vanish. They’re never heard from again. They lose all radio contact with shore.
I guess its time to reestablish.
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Flowers in the Square
Sometimes you have something that follows you around for a while, waiting for you to take notice or pay attention to it. Sometimes it’s a word, sometimes it’s an idea, sometimes it’s just a picture. For me, lately, I have been followed around by rivers. Pictures of rivers, maps of rivers, watershed maps on my wall at work. There’s a picture of the Delaware on my desktop now, but this Friday, I dreamed about the Mississippi, that of it I know.
It was a beautiful dream, like a prism made of water. It was light, light on water, during the day, summer, the part of the river with the three steel bridges up by the border with Arkansas. The riverboat casinos even, down on the Mississippi side, in the north Delta. The green. Too powerful to get in the water, always, a mighty, a massive, like a city itself in motion but instead all water. All water. More water. Move down. Move down, water. Move down, city. Move down.
Move down,
Miss
I
Sip
I.
After that dream, I figured that the River that is all rivers was trying to tell me something, and has been for a while, and it was about time I listened. On Saturday I put on cutoffs and flipflops and got on the Orange line and went straight into to the marshes around the Anacostia River here in D.C., a small patch, 77 acres of what used to be 2,000, which they had to reconstruct from the ravages of progress.
There was a grating of cheap apartment buildings all around the park, and I wandered for a good long time, but eventually I got in. I managed to stay a long time there, walking around, looking at turtles and herons, mostly left to myself; I fell asleep on the banks and was awakened by some teenage boys in canoes who I think were slightly disappointed that they hadn’t found a dead body. “Sorry to wake you up,” they said, and paddled away. I yawned and brushed off a bunch of ants, and immediately went back to sleep.
The Anacostia is a brown river swollen with all sorts of nameless sludge, but there are fish in it, some of them quite large. It’s too bad its so polluted, because it has a beautiful name, but it is not powerful enough to be feared, and it’s obvious that people regard it as a dump. Apparently it’s against the law to swim in the river in the District of Columbia! I was very troubled by this but now I have seen the water I understand. At least there is still a forest there. Best of all, I got to ride home on the Metro promiscuously covered in mud.
This year, the two floats that I saw at the Cherry Blossom Festival were the Anacostia Roller Stars, a roller skating troupe that I think survives off of childrens’ birthday parties, and a flotilla of young Maryland women in Scarlett O’Hara dresses, parasols, and bonnets.
The Anacostia Roller Stars were dressed in superhero costumes, including “ObamaMan”, an African American superhero dressed in blazing white and sporting an “O” on his chest. He was a hit. Little kids wanted to be him. Women wanted to photograph him. After ObamaMan left, the Belles of the South were the next in line, and quite the letdown.
The South is on my mind because my grandmother Angelina Josephina Cuicchi Miller is sick now, in Leland, MS, and her spirit is still very strong, more so that her body. Some people are too strong even for their own bodies to hold, and that is a hard thing. She is 78, and my dad bought her an IPod for Christmas this year on which she still listens to the Three Tenors. When I was born, in 1976, she made me a Bicentennial quilt with emblems of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall on it, and I didn’t even know what they were until I moved to Philly in 1999, and then walked by them every day.
Angie Miller ran the Leland Flower Shop for 20 years, and running a flower shop means caring in a small and beautiful way for everyone in town at the most crucial moments of their lives: births, weddings, illness, funerals. There are always divorce flowers too, of course. And Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year, which in my family meant the day that everyone had to help Mama at the shop, and work all day, driving all over town and delivering hundreds and hundreds of roses.
It is the place where I learned that some flowers come in humidors flown overnight from Venezuela, and how to strip a rose of its thorns in 2-4 seconds, and other things, as countless as the stars in the Milky Way, the great river of light in the sky.
I still don’t know all that I have been given by this astonishing woman. I am a conduit for it but I don’t even know what it is – I don’t even understand it. It is mostly wordless, and comes and goes without name.
I would be an alchemist with it, all that I have been given; but I hardly know how. All I can do is listen, just listen to the water move.
It was a beautiful dream, like a prism made of water. It was light, light on water, during the day, summer, the part of the river with the three steel bridges up by the border with Arkansas. The riverboat casinos even, down on the Mississippi side, in the north Delta. The green. Too powerful to get in the water, always, a mighty, a massive, like a city itself in motion but instead all water. All water. More water. Move down. Move down, water. Move down, city. Move down.
Move down,
Miss
I
Sip
I.
After that dream, I figured that the River that is all rivers was trying to tell me something, and has been for a while, and it was about time I listened. On Saturday I put on cutoffs and flipflops and got on the Orange line and went straight into to the marshes around the Anacostia River here in D.C., a small patch, 77 acres of what used to be 2,000, which they had to reconstruct from the ravages of progress.
There was a grating of cheap apartment buildings all around the park, and I wandered for a good long time, but eventually I got in. I managed to stay a long time there, walking around, looking at turtles and herons, mostly left to myself; I fell asleep on the banks and was awakened by some teenage boys in canoes who I think were slightly disappointed that they hadn’t found a dead body. “Sorry to wake you up,” they said, and paddled away. I yawned and brushed off a bunch of ants, and immediately went back to sleep.
The Anacostia is a brown river swollen with all sorts of nameless sludge, but there are fish in it, some of them quite large. It’s too bad its so polluted, because it has a beautiful name, but it is not powerful enough to be feared, and it’s obvious that people regard it as a dump. Apparently it’s against the law to swim in the river in the District of Columbia! I was very troubled by this but now I have seen the water I understand. At least there is still a forest there. Best of all, I got to ride home on the Metro promiscuously covered in mud.
This year, the two floats that I saw at the Cherry Blossom Festival were the Anacostia Roller Stars, a roller skating troupe that I think survives off of childrens’ birthday parties, and a flotilla of young Maryland women in Scarlett O’Hara dresses, parasols, and bonnets.
The Anacostia Roller Stars were dressed in superhero costumes, including “ObamaMan”, an African American superhero dressed in blazing white and sporting an “O” on his chest. He was a hit. Little kids wanted to be him. Women wanted to photograph him. After ObamaMan left, the Belles of the South were the next in line, and quite the letdown.
The South is on my mind because my grandmother Angelina Josephina Cuicchi Miller is sick now, in Leland, MS, and her spirit is still very strong, more so that her body. Some people are too strong even for their own bodies to hold, and that is a hard thing. She is 78, and my dad bought her an IPod for Christmas this year on which she still listens to the Three Tenors. When I was born, in 1976, she made me a Bicentennial quilt with emblems of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall on it, and I didn’t even know what they were until I moved to Philly in 1999, and then walked by them every day.
Angie Miller ran the Leland Flower Shop for 20 years, and running a flower shop means caring in a small and beautiful way for everyone in town at the most crucial moments of their lives: births, weddings, illness, funerals. There are always divorce flowers too, of course. And Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year, which in my family meant the day that everyone had to help Mama at the shop, and work all day, driving all over town and delivering hundreds and hundreds of roses.
It is the place where I learned that some flowers come in humidors flown overnight from Venezuela, and how to strip a rose of its thorns in 2-4 seconds, and other things, as countless as the stars in the Milky Way, the great river of light in the sky.
I still don’t know all that I have been given by this astonishing woman. I am a conduit for it but I don’t even know what it is – I don’t even understand it. It is mostly wordless, and comes and goes without name.
I would be an alchemist with it, all that I have been given; but I hardly know how. All I can do is listen, just listen to the water move.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
On Unmanufacturing Consent
So my old friend from Philly Adam Fieled has asked me to "come out of literary retirement" and read at a poetry reading he is organizing of DC poets on August 8. Despite the fact that this would require me to write poetry again, which I haven't for years, I said yes, and now I have to think about what to write.
There is something a bit angelic about Adam himself - his Facebook picture has been the same for years: pallid and underfed, wearing too many layers of sweaters, as if he found the world to be something one had to bundle up against at all times.
In general, I’ve been thinking for a while that I have to find my language again. That campaign business just strangles it out of you. Control and endless testoterone and wretched egomania and bad food and a masochistic learned fear of creativity and the weird ‘fucking up your neighbors’ primary game in Philly – it’s like being a rock doomed to a life of endlessly banging into other rocks.
I think sometimes I should sit down and write down what I learned from it all, except then the thought of reliving it is distasteful. (Anne Dicker is somewhere barbequing right now, doubtlessly thinking the same thing). Sometimes in DC I talk to people who have also just arrived here, and they say things like, “oh, yeah, I got the campaign bug too!” and give me a grin, and I kind of grimace and make them go away.
I know we are all organizers, but there is a big difference between asking a Democrat to vote for Barack Obama, and asking a worker to stand for unionization when it might cost them their job. If just a few of these little puddings could get sidetracked by OFA into something else memorable (like the Dean campaign did quite admirably), then I would feel better about the future of the American left.
But then again, I’m in Washington, so I have absolutely no connection to the American left other than my brother’s feel-good earthy Palo Alto employer restarting Republic Doors and Windows, the factory where the workers had taken over after a shut down– a weird blend of 1930s communism and 2000s California ethical-business principles-cum-marketing-ploy. (For their trouble, they were mentioned in a speech by the president.) I suppose ethical business is the natural response to the historical singularity of consumer capitalism, and so it’s just another iteration.
There was hail in June today, coming down on 18th and L streets; I worried. I had had this terrible dream the night that Air France plane went down, that I was standing on the middle row of a plane in a horrible electric storm, full of terrified passengers, with lighting all around, and telling everyone to be calm, that it was going to be alright. At the time it was so real, so I feared it was foreboding of something, but then I came into work and heard on WAMU about the crash.
Resulting thoughts included a) Is it possible to hear echoes from others, in your dreams? and b) if I am clairvoyant then what the fuck am I doing in political advocacy?
Answers:
a) Yes, with the right drugs, and
b) Since I am doing communications work, it’s probably appropriate. Someday we will be able to get information directly through our skin by touching a metal pad or something. It’s gonna happen. Might as well get spooky and get ready for the future.
“Breakfast of Champions”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about a science fiction writer, has 50 (at least) topics for science fiction books that Vonnegut himself thinks of but doesn’t bother to write.
THINKTANK RANT #1 (of many to come): One of the most amazing things I’ve seen since coming to Washington is the existence of an entire “future-projection industry”, which runs endless numbers and makes endless prognostications in order to determine what is going to happen over the next 100 years so those in power can make “informed decisions.” Water. Climate change. Oil. Agriculture. The military strength of Mongolia.
The trend became apparent to me precisely because it is in the filed of technology alone that chaos is assumed, and valued. The hilarity really ensues when you get to things like foreign policy, which covers the ‘behavior’ of ‘nation-states,’ which if I remember correctly are large clumps of really chaotic people mostly completely uncontrolled. The journals go on and on: which nation-state is eating too much or too little? Which nation-state is sick, or too religious? Which nation-state is in trouble and needs an ‘intervention’?
As a former sociology student, I don’t dispute the innate demographic needs of human beings to count and tabulate, but what’s so weird watching this vast machinery of think tanks and publications and press conferences, is that it seems so bizarrely solipsistic – so, we have written a paper on how you are running the world, and this is what’s going to happen later on after you continue to run the world a little more, and here how you can continue to get your grubby little hands on the resources you need, because if you have this projection you can point to it in a hearing and then be absolved of responsibility for your decisions. As bizarre as it is, I suppose it is an improvement on a court priesthood or consigliere.
And then again sometimes it’s worse when people ignore it.
I started reading Leaves of Grass this weekend. I decided that if I were going to write and read a poem in DC I was going to do a little riff off Whitman, since he wrote the great song of democracy, and that’s my bag.
I started reading it and I realized how much love he had for America, for every scrap of it. The whole book is just an unbelievable work of love. Our country has changed so much since then, just the fiber of it, and I don’t know what song we would sing now – or if we even have a song in us. We play video games, everything is mushy, we have soft butts in soft car seats, we don’t look out for our neighbors. Sometimes I love everybody on the whole damn miserable train platform so much I can barely look at them, which is the essential starting point of Leaves of Grass, except that how do you start writing about all of that at once?
Do you just start writing about your friends?
Maybe your friends.
Fuck.
That's Spoon River Anthology.
I hate Spoon River Anthology!
There is something a bit angelic about Adam himself - his Facebook picture has been the same for years: pallid and underfed, wearing too many layers of sweaters, as if he found the world to be something one had to bundle up against at all times.
In general, I’ve been thinking for a while that I have to find my language again. That campaign business just strangles it out of you. Control and endless testoterone and wretched egomania and bad food and a masochistic learned fear of creativity and the weird ‘fucking up your neighbors’ primary game in Philly – it’s like being a rock doomed to a life of endlessly banging into other rocks.
I think sometimes I should sit down and write down what I learned from it all, except then the thought of reliving it is distasteful. (Anne Dicker is somewhere barbequing right now, doubtlessly thinking the same thing). Sometimes in DC I talk to people who have also just arrived here, and they say things like, “oh, yeah, I got the campaign bug too!” and give me a grin, and I kind of grimace and make them go away.
I know we are all organizers, but there is a big difference between asking a Democrat to vote for Barack Obama, and asking a worker to stand for unionization when it might cost them their job. If just a few of these little puddings could get sidetracked by OFA into something else memorable (like the Dean campaign did quite admirably), then I would feel better about the future of the American left.
But then again, I’m in Washington, so I have absolutely no connection to the American left other than my brother’s feel-good earthy Palo Alto employer restarting Republic Doors and Windows, the factory where the workers had taken over after a shut down– a weird blend of 1930s communism and 2000s California ethical-business principles-cum-marketing-ploy. (For their trouble, they were mentioned in a speech by the president.) I suppose ethical business is the natural response to the historical singularity of consumer capitalism, and so it’s just another iteration.
There was hail in June today, coming down on 18th and L streets; I worried. I had had this terrible dream the night that Air France plane went down, that I was standing on the middle row of a plane in a horrible electric storm, full of terrified passengers, with lighting all around, and telling everyone to be calm, that it was going to be alright. At the time it was so real, so I feared it was foreboding of something, but then I came into work and heard on WAMU about the crash.
Resulting thoughts included a) Is it possible to hear echoes from others, in your dreams? and b) if I am clairvoyant then what the fuck am I doing in political advocacy?
Answers:
a) Yes, with the right drugs, and
b) Since I am doing communications work, it’s probably appropriate. Someday we will be able to get information directly through our skin by touching a metal pad or something. It’s gonna happen. Might as well get spooky and get ready for the future.
“Breakfast of Champions”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about a science fiction writer, has 50 (at least) topics for science fiction books that Vonnegut himself thinks of but doesn’t bother to write.
THINKTANK RANT #1 (of many to come): One of the most amazing things I’ve seen since coming to Washington is the existence of an entire “future-projection industry”, which runs endless numbers and makes endless prognostications in order to determine what is going to happen over the next 100 years so those in power can make “informed decisions.” Water. Climate change. Oil. Agriculture. The military strength of Mongolia.
The trend became apparent to me precisely because it is in the filed of technology alone that chaos is assumed, and valued. The hilarity really ensues when you get to things like foreign policy, which covers the ‘behavior’ of ‘nation-states,’ which if I remember correctly are large clumps of really chaotic people mostly completely uncontrolled. The journals go on and on: which nation-state is eating too much or too little? Which nation-state is sick, or too religious? Which nation-state is in trouble and needs an ‘intervention’?
As a former sociology student, I don’t dispute the innate demographic needs of human beings to count and tabulate, but what’s so weird watching this vast machinery of think tanks and publications and press conferences, is that it seems so bizarrely solipsistic – so, we have written a paper on how you are running the world, and this is what’s going to happen later on after you continue to run the world a little more, and here how you can continue to get your grubby little hands on the resources you need, because if you have this projection you can point to it in a hearing and then be absolved of responsibility for your decisions. As bizarre as it is, I suppose it is an improvement on a court priesthood or consigliere.
And then again sometimes it’s worse when people ignore it.
I started reading Leaves of Grass this weekend. I decided that if I were going to write and read a poem in DC I was going to do a little riff off Whitman, since he wrote the great song of democracy, and that’s my bag.
I started reading it and I realized how much love he had for America, for every scrap of it. The whole book is just an unbelievable work of love. Our country has changed so much since then, just the fiber of it, and I don’t know what song we would sing now – or if we even have a song in us. We play video games, everything is mushy, we have soft butts in soft car seats, we don’t look out for our neighbors. Sometimes I love everybody on the whole damn miserable train platform so much I can barely look at them, which is the essential starting point of Leaves of Grass, except that how do you start writing about all of that at once?
Do you just start writing about your friends?
Maybe your friends.
Fuck.
That's Spoon River Anthology.
I hate Spoon River Anthology!
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
My Article on Racialicious on Hate Speech
On Media Reform and Hate Speech
June 2, 309
Racialicious.com
by Guest Contributor Hannah Miller
The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a racist manner, while refusing to show any coverage of the civil rights movement.
Because of their pressure, the FCC shut down a Mississippi TV station, stating that the power and influence that media companies have gives them the responsibility to operate with the broader public interest at heart – with special consideration given to oppressed minorities.
Since then, political pressure has been brought to bear against the FCC and Congress on a wide variety of issues: female and minority ownership of stations and publications, the dangers of consolidation of the media, the need to build public communications infrastructure like cable access stations or city-owned Internet networks, and the need for everyone to have broadband access.
The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.
Why is this important? I will take an extreme example of the media’s power, when it is used by one group over another. In 1994, radio stations played a significant role in the Rwandan genocide, broadcasting hate-filled rants and giving directions to how to kill Tutsis, resulting in a genocide that killed approximately 500,000 Tutsis in 100 days.
Continued here.
June 2, 309
Racialicious.com
by Guest Contributor Hannah Miller
The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a racist manner, while refusing to show any coverage of the civil rights movement.
Because of their pressure, the FCC shut down a Mississippi TV station, stating that the power and influence that media companies have gives them the responsibility to operate with the broader public interest at heart – with special consideration given to oppressed minorities.
Since then, political pressure has been brought to bear against the FCC and Congress on a wide variety of issues: female and minority ownership of stations and publications, the dangers of consolidation of the media, the need to build public communications infrastructure like cable access stations or city-owned Internet networks, and the need for everyone to have broadband access.
The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.
Why is this important? I will take an extreme example of the media’s power, when it is used by one group over another. In 1994, radio stations played a significant role in the Rwandan genocide, broadcasting hate-filled rants and giving directions to how to kill Tutsis, resulting in a genocide that killed approximately 500,000 Tutsis in 100 days.
Continued here.
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