dark matter indeed

{Warning: Spoilers ahead!}

I 'just' finished Dark Matter, Season 1 on Apple TV+* and I think it might be my strongest television recommendation possibly since Lost (!?).  I will say that this show is not for the faint of heart.  It's not scary, precisely, but the philosophical implications of this particular theory of multiverse are somewhat harrowing.  

The show (and evidently Blake Crouch's novel from which it was adapted) seems largely based upon^ my own personal theory of the multiverse, which was initially a bit surprising, but as the season progressed, made it comforting.  The wrinkle I hadn't anticipated (and what I found most disturbing about the show) was the extent to which navigation of the multiverse is dependent upon Mind.  

I'm not sure I find the science too compelling (a bit too human-centric {self-centric} for my taste), but for the sake of storytelling, the plot mechanic is inspired.  Jason Dessen (the protagonist, played by a very good Joel - Joel Edgerton) is a physicist in Chicago who has invented The Box, a giant version of a box several versions of him have invented that allows particles to exist in superposition (in this case existing within multiple iterations of the multiverse simultaneously).

The big Box allows not just a particle to exist in superposition but a whole thing - a person, say or even a couple of people - to enter the box and navigate through the multiverse.  The tricky bit is that the way that you determine which of the infinite realities you are going to emerge into when you once again open the box is based on your mind - not just your conscious thoughts, but your unconscious and subconscious state of mind when you open it (plus all of the same of those who you might be traveling with!).

Source: https://tinyurl.com/564drzcz

There's a bunch more plotty bits that happen that make for a really great season of television, but what struck me hardest was the moment when Jason emerges into a Chicago in a world that has been ravaged by plague.  He makes his way back to his house to find his wife, visibly ill, shocked to see him (because this world's him succumbed), and she is wrecked.  It's a very realistic glimpse into what a truly catastrophic outbreak might look like at the street level in America...

I'm most of the way through Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, a sweeping chronicle by Kyle Harper of how all of human history has been shaped by (or guided by) the micro-organisms that have made us sick.  Alternately it's a history of how human civilization has created and caused the uniquely massive variety of tiny little things designed to (and actively getting better at) kill us because we've gotten so good at existing... The book is really a constant questioning of which of those definitive interpretations is more true at any given time in human history, and emphasizes the degree to which our collective Thrownness operates not just on an individual level, but also at a biological level (and also at a cosmic level, naturally).

The version of you that you get to inhabit is inherently arbitrary, but certainly doesn't feel that way to us.  Choice - Action - Self... These are the things from which we build our narrative - our lives, right?  The idea that it is chance and circumstance where we find ourselves runs contrary to our modern American sensibility.  We work harder and harder to get further and further away from The Uncomfortable Truth** by filling our attention with screens and faiths and mantras, but the reason that the uncomfortable truth is truth... well, it's because it is, right?  

But I think it's easy to interpret The Uncomfortable Truth as something akin to Nietzschean nihilism, but the comfort (!!) of Humanism is its clear antidote.  We may not be much, us, here toiling away at living on this small out of the way planet - but our over-arching trend, tending toward progress for more of us - and constructing our grand Civilization, which endures and attempts and evolves - that is the thing that we're all here for.  What is a civilization but a narrative - a collection of all of the little narratives, most forgotten (heck, most of them were side quests to begin with!). 

So I suggest that you enjoy your story - if it's not exactly the version of it you were hoping for, rest easy in the knowledge that there very might well be another one where it's that, but you can soak up what you can here... maybe strive for a bit more of that other preferred one, but as Jason/Joel learns when he gets in the Box, you may like the look of another version, but you were made (or perhaps you made yourself) ready for this one right here, and no other.

Enjoy it (and by it, i also mean Dark Matter... it's really good).

 

* It seems to me that Apple TV+ produces nothing but bangers - like they just aren't interested in getting content out for the sake of content, but everything is really quality.  (That's not to say that I have seen all of it, nor that all if it is necessarily my thing, but I just went through a list of their productions, and everything on it that I've seen some or all of is really quite very good!).  In this era of lapsing quality in all things, that is really quite remarkable, but I'm going to put a pin in it for the moment, and move back to my starting point.

^ keen observers will note that Crouch's novel hails from 2016 whereas my own theory wasn't articulated fully on Roman Numeral J until early 2018.  

** I've been reading around a bit as well in the self-help and satirical self-help genres (it's often hard to tell those apart) in Mark Manson's Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and reading Lead it Like Lasso earlier this year as well as a bit of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits.  Generally these are not my types of books - but I've been on a bit of kick on the concept of "Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable" and working on a project, for now it's just a PowerPoint presentation, and I'm figuring out if it's enough to be even that, or maybe something more - a blog post, perchance a little book (!?)...

the Radical Grace of Dolly Parton

 As you may have noticed, I've been on a bit of a Dolly kick lately.  We re-orchestrated a road trip to Georgia to include an evening and a night in Pigeon Forge, TN in order to experience the Dinner Theater Insanity that is Dolly Parton's Stampede!  

En route to Pigeon Forge, we listened to Dolly Parton's America, a WNYC podcast that asks the question "Just what is the deal with Dolly Parton?" (or, "why is it that everyone {and by everyone we mean every constituency of the American populace} is pro-Dolly?")

At one point in the podcast ("Dollitics") they are talking about Dolly's refusal to talk about politics, but digs in to the political bent of her music, and they come to a moment during an awards show (CMAs, I think) in recent years when there was the first reunion of the 9 to 5 trio of stars, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly.  The host talks about a moment when first Fonda and then Tomlin lay in to a newly elected Donald Trump, and when Dolly's moment to speak comes she makes what could be read as a painfully banal statement about "why don't we just pray for President Trump [and all of our political leaders] rather than defaming them?"

It makes me think a little about those yard signs you see around that espouse a hate-free space (a space with grace, in other words).  I like those signs (we've talked about getting one, but haven't as of yet), but they make me think about the real level of commitment to such an ideology.  Not hating is easy when it's object is something you're aligned with (refusing to hate based on race or religion or because of who someone loves, etc.), but I would be curious to have genuine conversations with the raisers of those signs about being anti-hate when it comes to Donald Trump or white nationalists or other people who are committing acts of hate in our world.  That is where Dolly's brand of radical grace comes in: it's meeting and accepting people where they are.  It doesn't mean accepting the bigotry and violence perpetrated in its name, because grace isn't about thoughts and feelings (or even actions), grace is about the humans that do all of those things (and also do all the good bits, too).

Radical Grace, in the form that Dolly seems to embody it, is about being willing to meet people where they are, and engaging with them, and understanding with them that just being in the world is a fairly hard damn thing to do.  Hate isn't created in a vacuum - it is fed by flames of inequality and resentment, but also by avarice and isolation and spite.

I think that the reason that we feel so on the brink (of a hate-pocalypse, of a neo-fascist era, of a cold civil war) is largely due to the fact that we have forgotten how to talk about politics (or economics or history or anything really).  Saying Dolly Parton is a-political is a complete misunderstanding of politics.  We have come to think of the word "political" as meaning only 'practical politics' (or electoral politics, featuring party politics), when in fact the political is just about anything that has to do with people.  Dolly Parton is one of the greatest political songwriters of all time (having inspired not just humans, but oppressed, down-trodden civilizations across the galaxy!) In the same way that politics is not just the biennial tradition of casting a ballot for (and usually against) someone or another - in fact that's the worst part of it, so too we have come to think of the economy in an equally toxic way - as if it is only the financial sector that is "the economy" and not all of the activities of our daily lives. 

It hurts us to think only in terms of practical politics or practical economics, because then, when our efforts don't show up on the scoreboards (our bank accounts or the outcomes of specific elections rather than the outcomes enacted for us in the world by our elected leaders) we are each of us diminished.  I found it interesting, when I was looking for links for some of my various Dolly Parton, and first exploring the term 'radical grace' I found a lot more out there about radical self acceptance than I did about radical acceptance of others, and I think that's also telling given the era of mental health crisis that we also find ourselves in.

So let's all be hyper-political like Dolly in our daily work and lives.  Like Dolly would have said, "Be Excellent to Each Other..."

This is COVID-2 of COVID-19, not COVID-1...

 I have once again contracted the hottest not so new infection, COVID-19, and similar to my last encounter with the biological assault, I am finding the social ramifications amongst the most noteworthy. 

But first, at the strictly physical level, man this version that I had this time is so much worse than the 2020 model.  I'm feeling okay now (thanks), but these new strains really kick your butt - even your vaxxed and boosted butt...

The confirmation process of "having COVID" has changed a lot - In November 2020, I drove to Miller Park, and sat in my car in in hundreds - of - cars - long line, and had an armored (in PPE, as if for a minor nuclear disaster) health care professional stick a seemingly far - too - long swab up my nose, and collect a sample that would eventually confirm my diagnosis (which was, pre-vaccine, to be sure, a very very minor case).

This time around, when my wife suggested I take a test because I was coughing and sneezing on Friday afternoon, I walked upstairs and grabbed the little box - read through the instructions (this was just the second time I'd taken an at - home test), and set all the bits and bobs out to be ready to take it.

And so I took my test downstairs in the kitchen whilst Brooke was working in our upstairs "home office"* and I stuck a short-ish swab up my nose and rooted around a bit (quite a bit, as the instructions encourage).  And then I was standing there downstairs and I had (one line, two lines? a dot and and a line?) a positive result... And I was like, "oh fuck" [not, to be clear, because I was any longer worried about getting COVID having been vaxxed and boosted^), "I am going to be in trouble with my wife" because her work had specific protocols for close contacts testing positive.

So I thought - I have a choice here... Obviously, I had COVID, but that knowledge was now entirely in my own control.  I didn't report my positive test to the State or Federal government (and didn't have any sense of how to do that if i had wanted to), and it was entirely up to me to whom or whether at all I report this latest contraction...

See, as we enter the post-pandemic phase (and I think the US government is planning to make it official in a couple month's time) and the disease itself is no longer a terrifying and life threatening affair in most cases (at least for those properly vaxxed and boosted) the disease has become a socio-economic one.  Because I am presently working health care adjacent, a positive test necessitates missing work (unpaid) until I secure a negative test.  Similarly, the day I tested positive preceded a week for my wife's work where she was meant to be heading out to several in person events (and not the fun, celebratory kind, but the work your ass off for whomever happens to be in charge of this one kind).

As an earnest and conformist person, I followed the rules, and missed out on a week of work (and also forced my wife to renege on her work obligations... but it easily could have been different had I made a different choice.  I think this has become a common theme for me here, but we seem to be building a culture that is primarily driven by resentment and shame.  When I was back at work a couple weeks later, and telling people why I had been absent, the most common question I heard was "where did you get it!?" (even from people who had had it several times!) as if it were a social shortcoming to have gotten it once again.  As long as this is our collective response to COVID (to ills of all sort, really be they medical, cultural, economic, etc.) those people who 'just have allergies' are going to creep back in to workplaces all over, and we're going to continue to get unhealthier in all sorts of ways... 

Memories...

 ... colored PIC--tures

inthebottomofmymind...

13 years ago today, Matt Trease suggested I follow a set of instructions on Facebook to determine 1) the name of my band; 2) the title of our first album; and 3) the picture on the cover of that very album.

So I give you (opening for Iron Maiden) Provost of Cumbrae!

I post it here, for your consideration, because I don't like Facebook all that much, and I like Meta even less (even less than MetaWorldPeace), and because I have become a dearth of content in recent months (Oh, I'm writing - just not posting, rather, tweaking and deleting and reconsidering; just like Dan Carlin's Common Sense).  

Tyler Ledger Joker Fi

I went and saw Joker last night - dutifully.  It was violent, very well made, well acted (and heavily acted), wonderfully shot, all like you've heard.

I would also like to submit that it may just be the most thought-provoking piece of cinematic commentary on our current socio-economic condition in decades.

It is a radical film full of radical ideas and radical violence.  Although it saddens me that it is radical to say that the current economic status quo is wildly immoral and that an existential cognitive dissonance is necessary to participate in the system honestly.

The central question of Joker is whether any of the events of the movie actually happened or not within the confines of the fictional Batman universe.  This question is revealed in the final moments of the movie when Arthur is locked up for treatment of his mental illness.  It becomes clear that this moment is chronologically prior to all of the violence that has previously occurred in the film.  Arthur describes all (or possibly just some) of that violence as a "joke" that as occurred to him as we was speaking with his case worker.  When she asks him what it was, he says that she "wouldn't get it".

Source: tvOvermind.com

This 'final reveal' parallels the 20-year-old final reveal of what I consider the last really radical movie focused on these same themes, Fight Club.  In that movie we learn that our previously reliable narrator was actually Tyler Durden the whole time.  (Also, in a partial re-viewing the scene where Lou drops in on a fight club evening, Tyler's hysterical laughter after having his ass kicked by Lou is preminiscent of Arthur's own manifestations of his mental illness).

Earlier in the film, it is revealed that Arthur's mother was diagnosed with delusional psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder (a diagnosis that may be pretty close to part of Arthur's own plus a dash of schizophrenia - which is reified in the moment when Arthur is actually standing in the room as an adult when his mother is being booked into Arkham after abusing him as a child).  While many reviewers have made much of the portrayal of mental illness in the film, I think the underlying argument of both of these movies is that some forms of thought and action (including some violence) that we casually refer to as mental illness are in fact radical responses to the immoral status quo.

To be clear, I am not condoning any real world violence here, but I do think that artistic depiction of radical political violence can pose important questions that perhaps can't be voiced within the current socio-political climate.  Questions like - what might happen if we take the modern-era royalty (i.e. the super-rich) out of power.  In Joker the one piece of violence that we know "really happens" (although perhaps not exactly as we see it occur in the movie) is the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne.  This event is formative to the future Batman, so it has to occur within the larger mythology of the film.

We also tend to forget in our modern and enlightened era how rare it is to have massive social change without violence.  Although the "clowns" in Joker are easily read as violent criminal thugs engaged in looting and riots, they are also the lumpenproletariat activated by their clown prince.  They are engaged in a modern iteration of the French Revolution and their King Louis XVI (i.e. Thomas Wayne) needs to topple.  One wonders what, exactly, this makes Batman in this historical parallel?

Pre-prequel

Anticipatory plagiarism is a concept I used to struggle with - coming up with a brilliant idea only to come to realize that someone else had thought of it and published it decades or even centuries earlier than you had the opportunity to get it down.

This also happens in literature when a writer unwittingly writes a similar story to something they had never come across. In general, this happens by some sort of collective osmosis (perhaps it’s a Jungian phenomenon) by which these thoughts and ideas are in the ether - part of the existing background. It’s in the groundwater. 

This morning I read a short story in the Bradbury-edited collection that I’ve been making my way through.  It’s called “Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman”, by Helen Eustis. It is an unintentional prequel to Piers Anthony’s On a Pale Horse (by which I mean of course, Anthony unintentionally wrote a whole series of novels {of which I’ve read the first few but not all} as a follow up to Eustis’s very fine story).

I've been getting back into Wikipedia as of late, particularly as I've been reading Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited and with an introduction by Ray Bradbury.  As I started digging into the stories, I was struck first by the sense of time - of being tales from a different (but not entirely unfamiliar) era.  Much like when I read The Thin Man last year, one of the most enjoyable parts of every story, is a real insight into how folks lived 'in the before'.

The stories have also been enjoyable in their own right, but because they are primarily speculative as opposed to pure fantasy, they each have been deeply and fundamentally rooted in the time they are written (or when they are portraying in the rare case it's not meant to be "present day").  Bradbury finished the introduction on 1 July 1951, which means the collection is made up of stories all from before that time (and likely mostly well before, given that they're mostly being re-produced and collected here in this book).

As I read the first couple stories, I wondered who the collection of writers were that Bradbury had collected.  I've heard of many of them, but the first two at least were completely unfamiliar to me.  Henry Kuttner's story, particularly, excited me as he had worked within the Cthulhu Mythos (and had corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft).  Kuttner also worked closely in collaboration with his wife, C.L. Moore and the authorship of much of his work and her work were intermingled (so much so that the story in this collection could likely have been in good part her work).

 I plodded forward, and for each story resolved to read the Wikipedia entry for each author in concert with the story.  Which brought me to Christine Govan's story, where I found no corresponding wiki-entry (though she was mentioned in a few other articles, often as a family member to someone else).  A writer in her own right, I created her article and have now noticed that Helen Eustis also has one missing.

Govan and Eustis were the second and third woman authors collected in this book, and the first two authors in the book without their own wiki-entries.  It's a problem and I am working on solving in a small way.  I created a stub for Govan, in the same way that I had Faustin E. Wirkus years ago.  I don't have the time or inclination to go in depth and create a full article, but a sourced stub about someone who definitely deserves a wiki-page will grow on its own.  It takes time, but eventually the world will help do the work (as long as it doesn't get deleted!).

Florida Man hates Triangle Man

… lives his life in a garbage can…

Florida, man…

I am constantly amused by the fear of IDENTITY THEFT


it's a thing, sure - I myself had my identity stolen. Twice in fact. One was a pypal scam and the second was my discover card being used to buy gas and take cash advances.

Both times it was a hassle, but I ultimately lost 0 dollars. I know that's not always the case, , but generally it seems to be.

The real theft, tho, is corporate grift. My 5 year old LG refrigerator has ceased refrigeration. I am a prisoner of Wells Fargo bank these last 20 years and they and every other credit card company is guilty of usury upon me and all of their "customers". We are made to fear scammers of all varieties, but the real scam is out in broad sight. 

Open Letter to Brian Reed

Hello Brian,

I have just listened through to the last episode of S-Town, and am just now passing by Flint, Michigan to my right on Southwest Flight 336 (I promise I’m responsibly on airplane mode!).

I would first like to say, thank you for this podcast and all of your work that has gone into it.  You might just as well have called it Walden III (note: I am a former English major with an M.A. in Humanities and am in the death throes of a PhD program in Modern Studies, but fully admit that I’ve not read Walden II and Thoreau’s original is more years away from me than I care to admit, and though I think I recall it well, I likely am remembering it mythologically).  Nonetheless, the project, whether it’s really yours or John B. Macklemore’s, is a revelation for the humanist project – and I appreciate the time, and work, and life, and effort that went into it.

I started Chapter VII shortly after boarding this flight and I have to say that I was, for a moment, welling up all umbrage and outrage when I thought your final episode was going to posit and explore the idea that John (he is John to me too, now) killed himself because of a brain chemistry madness brought on by 35 year’s worth of poisoning himself.  By the end of the episode I was joyfully weeping – afraid that my flight attendants would think I was soused, because I ordered a second scotch and soda! – at the genius of John’s words describing a well-lived life, and at the heartbreak of the vast amount of ‘lost genius’ we have in this world (and perhaps, in particular, in this America), and, most of all, at the amount of life John was estimating we all spent at living (less the sleep, and the “jobs” {different from work, in capitalism}, and the administration {Kafka-esque waiting in late capitalism}).

Thank you for a well-made product – a fine podcast.  And thank you for your ability and your curiosity.  The time this took to put together and the distance between ‘episodes’ (not yours, but those that make up this whole story: the first email; the questionable call and follow-up trip; then the follow-up and follow-up…), coupled with the themes and ideas at play here, are epic.  You have created a modern epic.  Thank you.

I don’t write fan letters – or express appreciation of works to those I do not know – because I’m thoughtless and unkind and have an inflated sense of my own brain and generally think that I could have done – could have created a thing into being had I had the space and time and initiative.  (This is of course an arrogant and foolhardy notion, but it’s a part of the reason, I think, that I don’t express appreciation toward most works I enjoy).  This podcast – the editing and vision and content – is a masterwork of intellectual and empathic genius.  I am in your debt for making it.

Regards,

Joel

Joel Seeger
Milwaukee, WI

On Travel and Tourism

I am on vacation.

I am traveling. I’m taking a trip. Playing tourist. I will be out of the office starting on Monday… I am staying at… Going away. Touring. Doing a little sight-seeing. Going abroad. Taking some time (off). Visiting.

It seems to me that there is some important weight, some cache, for how we describe (or are described) ourselves when away. “I love to travel” has to be an almost ubiquitous response to any conversation that arises on the subject (unless you’re a happy contrarian, like Woody Allen, who proudly never leaves the island of Manhattan*). To not proclaim to be interested in travel is to risk being perceived as provincial or uncultured. Of course, there are a lot of socio-economic assumptions wrapped into this line of thinking – and others have done much of this thinking already, most notably, Dean MacCannel's work: The Tourist.

In the course of my week away, it occurred to me that a large part of the attraction of traveling for me (whether abroad or an hour out of the city) is to help strengthen the muscle that has to do with imaginary thinking. We took a day sail (a day motoring, really), and passed by a massive freighter in the port that was being loaded with shipping containers. As we passed, I looked up at the bridge of the ship, 100 or more feet up from the deck (I am a bad estimator, but it seemed quite far), and I wondered about the life of someone captaining or serving on that vessel. I thought about what sequence of choices in my life might I have made to land myself in Aruba, working on a boat, and waiting for it to be loaded and weigh anchor (way anchor? whey anchor? not a boat guy, clearly), and be off to Fort Lauderdale, or wherever our next port of call would be. I also thought about the arbitrariness of our station in the world – the blind luck (not saying whether good or ill) of being born in Wisconsin in the year 1978. And the ease with which the former sequence of choices might have been lightened – made more probable – were I born in Aruba or Fort Lauderdale or Monrovia…

In classic RPG-ing, a player chooses a class or profession for her or his character – a bit like we do in life – based on strengths and weaknesses, and preference. Almost invariably, a player also goes on to select his or her race (human, elf, dwarf, etc.). This has always struck me as a bit out of place (though fine, of course, for a good bit of fun – convention gaming and what not). Gary Gygax’ Dangerous Journeys is one of the only games I know where players roll to determine their birth (if I remember correctly, even their birth order – that game has a lot of tables). Now, for some, developing a character back story is half the fun of gaming (for non-gamers, imagine the amateur thespian who created the four-page back story for his or her one-line character in the high-school musical… for non-gamers who’ve also never been a part of an amateur theater production, you have missed much in your life…), but playing the arbitrariness – experiencing the thrown-ness^ of your life (real or gamed) – is a gran part of the payoff of traveling (and of gaming, I would argue).

We went to a bar called Charlie’s in San Nicolas, Aruba. It’s a great bar, and an average tourist trap. Famous for having been family-owned for over 70 years, it used to service (along with the rest of the red light district where it finds itself {stattfinden is amongst my favorite German verbs, because it embodies Heideggerian German, and German itself strikes me as a language that was constructed by great thinkers more so than it is a derivative of the Indo-European languages that linguists would have you believe}) the refinery workers – first for the American company that ran it (and built the ghost town Sero Colorado for its workers), and now for Valero (a company whose origins is just a google away, I’m sure).  We had a couple of drinks, and looked at the museum of left memorabilia for a short time, and then headed down to Baby Beach for the afternoon.

It seems to me, though, that the way to experience Charlie's is as it was intended.  You should go to Charlie's, a little after lunch, with the full intention of spending the whole afternoon there, getting drunk, talking with tourists, bartenders, and locals alike.  There was a man sitting at the bar, holding fort (holding forth?), occasionally singing and riling up the crowd.  We called this man Sam, because we'd read a book, An Island Away,^^ in which he'd seemed to appear.  It seems to me that to really experience Charlie's - to travel there, as opposed to be a tourist there (although I am disinclined toward this distinction) - is to while a way the afternoon, make friends (because what else are bars for?), and be a part of the collection, at least for a time.  Now, most likely, you've got a week - maybe two - in Aruba, and spending a whole day getting drunk and chatting folks up seems bit of a waste of your vacation...

But I would say that perhaps this is in fact the purpose for your trip.  The reason to travel.  It is the hardest and the easiest thing to do - to put yourself in someone else's shoes, and methinks our time on earth is better spent trying to inhabit those shoes - in your mind if you can't in actuality - for a moment, an hour, two weeks, or the rest of your life... whatever it takes... to better understand and appreciate our present condition.

I had thought to write about Recalibration Travel Narratives - travelogue stories where someone commits to walking away from their life for a time - in this entry, but I've rambled further than I thought I might. I thought these RTN would, perhaps, a way to distinguish the traveler from the tourist... again, not something I'm actively engaged in, but something worth reflecting on I think.

Another time for the RTN...  Now, hit the road.

*Note: Non-New Yorkers will be quick to celebrate this mentality, because – it’s New York, and where else would you need to go? – but that logic only holds if you’re not from a place, and are celebrating a distant locale, a ‘travel destination’.
^Note: For those of you playing along with Roman Numeral J Bingo, you can mark Heidegger off on your boards, if he appears there… “that’s Heidegger, Heidegger, the sunshine vitamin…”
^^Note: Finally, I think I've found a use for my goodreads account.  To track all of the books (not many, but a good sum over time) that I don't ever finish, but may eventually decide to do.

Monuments of Future's Past

In the midst of Icepocalypse 2015: Midwest Edition - a lazy day and evening, featuring some bad-TV watching, some less-bad TV-watching, some reading, and a movie - some deep thinking about bad art has ensued.

There's evidently a movie called A Little Chaos - I think it's the 2nd in the Alan Rickman Rose Trilogy* (first was Blow Dry {dir. Paddy Breathnach}, unless I missed something).  On this new film (came out in 2015, who knew!?), Rickman takes the directorial reigns himself, and crowns himself king (Louis XIV).  My general rule regarding movies that pop up on premium cable, Netflix, or On-Demand, is that if you haven't heard of it, you can probably stay away.

In this case, I will say Chaos is worth an exception to my rule.  The premise of the movie centers on the construction of the Gardens at Versailles.  The silly premise has to do with a lady gardener (imagine that! in France, in the 15th Century!) who challenges the status quo at court.

I have not been to the Gardens (perhaps I will visit soon on my fancy new treadmill!), but the film had some anachronistic elements (and I apologize, i'm going from memory and sense here, not from rewatching) not in the plot but in the filming.  In the shots and composition. 

And those shots and that composition gets one thinking, not so much 500 or 600 years, but 500 or 600 years into the future, and legacy, namely, what we leave behind.  That is what A Little Chaos is really about.  Sometimes weather, and natural phenomenon give us a glimpse into this thinking.  Major events (hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami) can give us immediate and obvious examples of what the future may well hold.  300 years of "time equivalences" pass by in a matter of minutes or seconds or hours of destructive power. 

So too, even a bit of odd or strong weather, can offer us smaller glimpses if we know how to look.  Take a walk outside after there's been a sizeable blizzard or during a rain storm, or walk around on an extremely cold day for your area.  Watch the corners of your perception and see things (for it's mostly things you'll see, few people) anew.  There's an abandoned, moved on quality to them.  What folks you do encounter (not in your own neighborhood, mind you) will be over-warm or over-cold.  Warm because they're lost, and feel desperate lucky to have found ye (for some reason, this blog post is coming through in my head in Calla-speak, say thankya); cold because they feel desperate, and fear (oddly) that you plan to take what's his.

These are moments - interstices - when time has grown thin, and we can glimpse what this space might be like in 200, 500, 1,000 years.  We, in the U.S.A. are 10 years away from living in a country that is a quarter millennium old.  To us, this seems a surprising development, and quite a very long amount of time, and it feels natural, to us, to assume that while the USA of 500 or 600 years from now, may look very different, and be very different, the USA will be, naturally. 

We always build, always create, as if we are permanent.  What Rickman's little film helps us see through to, is imagining what these spaces of ours will feel like when they are existing in another world.  His King Louis was building a grand garden for a history of perpetual royalty.  Half way between that construction and where we stand today is the Age of Revolution, and the world changed unexpectedly. 

Just imagine what will be halfway to that next era, looking back at us... Or mayhap, we are that halfway point.

* The Rose Trilogy is an as-yet-completed (and unacknowledged) trio of movies starring (or possibly involving, depending on what we decide the 3rd movie is) Alan Rickman, where the image of the rose is invoked.  The 1st (again, unless someone has one I missed, and we can be done with searching) was the hairdressing competition movie, Blow Dry, in which Rickman reveals a long-hidden tattoo of a rose on the bottom of his foot.  In A Little Chaos, King Louis is sneaking about out of disguise, and runs into his gardener (Kate Winslet) - they discuss roses, and Kate later uses the Four Seasons Rose as a tet-a-tet to put the king in his place.

* * *

In a strange oddity of coincidence, I started this post in late December - when was actually holed up in blizzard! - and since, sadly, dear Alan Rickman has died.

For someone my age and filmic disposition, I doubt Rickman was a favorite actor**... But he was for certain a known actor, and perhaps even a well loved (or well despised) one.  He was Hans Gruber, the first fun terrorist of the 80s.  And he played the Sheriff of Nottingham in a Bryan Adams video vehicle film (but truly a coming of age piece for us cuspers). 

Rickman was a wonderful villain actor - later embodying all that we loved to hate about Snape - but it was in his smaller, simpler roles that I think he really demonstrated why he was truly great at what he did (he was an actor...).  The doofus husband that he plays in Love Actually is a perfect example - he's not a bad guy... he's just a schlub.  And when a schlub is offered the chance to be a stud, inevitably, he takes it. 

Rickman is an actor who embodies the (possibly apocryphal, and possible entirely made up by me) story that Harrison Ford tells about his early days in the business.  A big-shot (director? producer?) allegedly told Ford that he would never be a movie star, because he didn't have that star quality.  The big shot tells Ford that when Cary Grant (this name is grabbed at random, but it stands in for some household name actor from days of yore) first walked onto screen, even though it was just a small role as a waiter, Big Shot says, "you saw him walk onto screen, and you knew! right there, that There!, there is a movie star".  For deadpan (in my memory of this telling), "I thought the point was that when he walks on to screen you're supposed to say, 'there is a waiter'".

It is a good story, and characterizes Rickman's acting perfectly I think.  He wasn't always likeable, nor always laughable, nor always anything.  He was what he was meant to be.  And it's a shame to have lost his craft.  I am sorry for it.

** Since the dawn of J, I have felt that the concept of "favorite" was fraught.  I have never really thought that I have what I would call a favorite actor.  Although, JP once told me that Paul Bettany was his favorite actor, which struck me as an odd choice at the time, but the more I learn about Paul Bettany, and the more I encounter  him, I find it to be an inspired choice. 

What time is it?!!?

4:30...

4:30 PST that is.  As I publish this post, it's currently 5:30am in Los Angeles, and the entire West Coast of the US, but it's 4:30 Pacific Standard Time.

Now, there aren't a lot of places in the world that (celebrate?) observe PST year round, but once you move a little further east, and get a little more Pacifically-challenged, other time zones don't behave quite so orderly...

For example, go to Phoenix tomorrow, (oh my gawd, wouldn't it be hilarious if twos upon twos of my readers went to Phoenix tomorrow!?  That reminds me of a social media experiment I want to try called #letsGoToRookies - it's based on the theory that everyone lives fairly close to a bar called Rookies.  Probably, you've never been there or maybe you went once and haven't been back... Anyway, on this certain moment, we all go to Rookies, and around the country, places called Rookies' business explodes, for like 40 minutes {stay and have a couple beers!} and regulars and bar owners are flummoxed for a while) and figure out what time it is.  Sure, it will seem like it's whatever time it is Pacific Time, but in fact it is Mountain Time, Mountain Standard Time.

Let that soak in a moment, while you think about the last email you received from your client in Denver.  They were likely confirming a call (did you know that today, 15% of all emails are confirming times for future calls? That's a fact.) with a consultant in Flagstaff, Arizona for 3:00pm MST (because the middle initial makes everything seem so much more business-like!).  Point of fact, those two people will (I think I don't know if all of Arizona follows the same rules - there is no research budget for RNJ...) be on the phone exactly one hour apart.

Of course, our glorious savior Microsoft Outlook, solves these sorts of scheduling snafus, if you use calendar invites (USE CALENDAR INVITES!), but I've been seeing this in far too many places, and blatantly mistaken, and it's time that someone finally says something.

It's quite simple, really... also, those of you who are reading this as news and use middle initials in your time stamp, we who know better have been laughing at you for years... YEARS!!!  Most of the world honors daylight saving time (this is, of course, a wildly inaccurate statement, but as an American, it's true for most of America, so it becomes true... "from a certain point of view" - name the movie quote i'm thinking of and win a VMP {very minor prize} shipped to you at no expense -), but I would estimate that 83% of all administrative professionals are using CST or EST right this very moment.

Well fear not, help is here:

• Daylight Standard Time (DST - hugely confusing because S!!! is the middle initial - happens, generally, in the summer time for the Northern Hemisphere)

• Standard Time (ST - standard time is what we more commonly refer to as time.  Of course, time is relative, but as long as we all are still land-bound, it makes sense to come to some accord with regard to what time it is.  That said, Standard Time is the closest we have available in the US to GMT.

I think this distinction is fairly clear to most calendar purveyors.... that said, I will stand by my 83% statistic that most administrative and support professionals misuse (or perhaps disable) the correct language.

The reason for this is complex/simple as most things are... D is less serious than S.  At a momentary glance this sounds crazy - that said one need only look at the (i.e. vs. e.g.) example.  I.E. which is a couple of glorious vowels, working together to say - literally - "in other words".  E.G., of course, mean "for example".  Somehow, seriously, G makes things seem less serious to some folks, and so almost invariably in standard business writing and most non-academic prose, you'll see i.e. when the writer clearly means e.g.  Oddly, I think part of the reason for this is also that e.g.  sounds like the start of the way that many Americans say the word "example", and they may be afraid that it's an abbreviation, rather than a Latin derivation.

I think it's also, maddeningly, related to the "I/me" idiocracy that holds that using the word 'me' makes people sound less intelligent, and so you get fools using phrases like "between George and I".  Please learn this, people.  Really, I'm just asking for the time one today.  D is a less-oft used letter, I know, but using it more often will improve your Scrabble scores, and, at least until November, stop infuriating those of us already in the know.

Elven Intellectualism

Re-watching The Desolation of Smaug and the elven torture scene got me thinking about Elven Intellectualism. 

The idea of alignment in D&D is fairly straightforward:

Source: http://throughThePrism.blogspot.com

• You are either good, evil, or neutral.
• That orientation, is determined by one of three worldviews: Law & Order (lawful); Good & Evil (chaotic); Libertarian (neutral)

The whole system is easily systematized and graphed (see right), and play follows general rules proscribed by the logic of this system.  Players generally play good (or perhaps neutral) characters, so wanton slaughter of innocents is reserved (again generally) for the monsters, and quests to save personages of historical significance, or more often to enrich PCs personally, are undertaken.

Others, and in particular Degolar, from whom I swiped this rendition of the chart, have put more thought into the concept and viability of alignment theory for socio-philosophic application.  Just search "Alignment Matrix D&D" on google image search, at the poster meme of applying alignment to fiction and real world environs is readily apparent.

I want to think instead about the historicity of alignment.  Namely, how good and evil (and law and chaos) might be affected by the passage of time. 

If you're a person who is capable of (or perhaps it's fairer to say 'in the habit of') thinking historically, or if you're an elf, who has lived through centuries and millennia, and passed time has warped notions of good and evil, law and chaos: what then might alignment mean to you individually, and socially?

Note: this is a work in progress, and will be continued (and perhaps even concluded!), but I wanted to get the thinking out their in its nascent form for consideration...

Vote Happy

Election Day will soon be upon us, once again.  Milwaukee has a Socialist running for Sheriff (she seems really lovely, smart, and on the right side of history!), and a Green Party candidate for State Treasurer (and in September, his numbers were pretty okay!).

In this sad/silly era of bought & sold candidates, dangerous zealots (as well as more clown-ish zealots), and a political campaign and lobbying system that encourages corruption, a progressive looking for genuine reform options often doesn't know which way to turn.  Of course, Democrats being in charge of things is less bad than Republicans.  So, the sensible choice seems to vote for Democrats in close races, and vote more radically (Greens, Socialists, liberal Independents) when it's expedient.  The fear-mongering lessons of Ralph Nader loom large, despite the fact that they're misguided.

Nationally, there are a lot of interesting races.  That said, the US House is guaranteed to remain in Republican hands, despite the fact that more people will probably end up voting for Democrats.  Thank you gerrymandering.

Unfortunately, the same reason can't be given for why the Senate seems poised to fall into Republican hands as well.  Though it would be awesome, wouldn't it?  To re-draw the state lines to re-organize people into more culturally appropriate regions? 

• East and West Dakota - East Dakota would be a 40 or so mile wide strip surrounding the I-29 corridor, stretching from Grand Forks all the way down to Kansas City (anything north of GF we can give to Canada).
• Up North - the northern part of Minnesota and Wisconsin, along with the UP.

  

  Source: www.pastemagazine.com

• The Middle Bit - a utopic plot of mostly rural farmland, focusing primarily on the biography of me, including Clinton, Wisconsin, stretching up north to Madison, then over to Decorah, Iowa, then up to Minneapolis.  It looks a bit like those Tetris pieces that go down one, over one, down one again (see picture, except the other one, and turned vertically).
• Austin, Texas - Austin, Texas.
• Yellowstone - Just a really cool state to visit.  First bear governor.
• Iraq - I know we're mostly moved out, but it's time to start colonizing, people.

The State of Wisconsin has a useful resource for figuring out what all is going to be on your ballot: 

At the top of the ballot, of course, is the Mary Burke / Scott Walker race for Governor.  This one will come down to turnout, and while I'm not overly excited about Mary Burke, she's the choice.

Down the ballot a ways is our rootin'-tootin' Sheriff Clarke, running against Angela Walker.  It seems the last time the Journal Sentinel deigned to mention her in an article was August 8th, when Chris Moews was being backed against the gun-loving sheriff by Michael Bloomberg. 

I was on a jury... and it was really awful... but hugely important

Last month I was called for jury duty and was ultimately selected to serve on a criminal trial involving two young black men who were accused of perpetrating an armed robbery in the Western Suburbs of Milwaukee. The experience was singularly unpleasant, not only in the ‘this is jury duty and it sucks” way, but also in the resulting loss of faith in humanity (which was already fairly unsteady).

The trial itself took the better part of a week, starting on Monday afternoon (after a couple hours of jury selection) and ending Thursday afternoon. Almost all of that time was spent on the prosecution, which made a fairly circumstantial case that the two young black men in the room were in fact the two, similarly shaped, young black men appearing on a poor-quality surveillance video. The defense* re-called one witness, a Milwaukee cop, and asked a few questions to demonstrate how little police work really went into all of this (not following up on additional leads or suspects, etc.)

At that point, after some final arguments, the case was given over to us, the jury. This is the point at which everything went to hell.

It was approximately 4:15pm by the time we adjourned to the jury room (a dreary room with a long table and mis-matched chairs, the windows covered in privacy tape and an alarm on the door). As we took our seats, the bailiff came in and said we would need to elect a foreperson. He asked for any volunteers and the old woman seated next to me (who will hereafter be referred to as Crotchety O’Lady) said, “I’ll do it.” She was eager, but worked hard to seem resigned to it.

The long and short of it was that most of the folks on the jury were convinced by 'authorities'.  The prosecutor and police officers who testified laid a flimsy groundwork based on burner cell phones and the aliases assigned to burner phones in the contact list of one guy who was not very believable, and whose vehicle was at both locations according to the grainy video footage.

*   *   *

3 May 2018
I am sorry that i didn't post this in real time... It was a lazy period for me (regular life, in other words).  [Is it just me #iijm or do we find ourselves creating irl type abbreviations in the real world (#itrw) - i wanted to abbreviate #irt and #iow when i was typing earlier this paragraph, but then realized i was making those up.)

I was called to be a juror in late 2013, and it was in the early days of my being a person with a real job.  When i was actually called into a court room, i answered honestly (mostly**) when the attorneys were selecting jurors.  I did make myself sound banal (a "staffing specialist" rather than a "graduate student"), and not overly opinionated.

Mostly what i found being on a jury is that people crave leadership and most people have strong prejudices that they are astoundingly unaware of.  There were a few (or perhaps a couple) people on this particular jury who were actively and obstinately racist in their preference for convicting.  But at the beginning of deliberations, almost all (actually all, except for a middle aged African American lady, who described the defendants as "guys who could my kids", and me) jurors were initially in favor of conviction despite the lack of any compelling evidence.

In the end the two of us had convinced enough of the jurors that there was enough doubt to acquit one defendant entirely and get a hung jury for the other. 

Since serving on the jury, i have been shocked by the number of times i've heard friends, colleagues and other folks discuss openly how they have or planned to avoid jury service by answering introductory questions to the effect that they are prejudiced or would not be able to be impartial.  Jury service is a pain in the ass, but the fact that so many middle and upper class and educated people shirk their responsibility means that juries are largely and disproportionately peopled by under-educated and  underprivileged people... people who are more likely to be unintentionally prejudiced.

And these people need a leader in their midst in order to do the right thing.

*Note: In point of fact there were two separate “defenses” as each defendant was being tried independently of the other, with separate counsel. This becomes important later in the post and only one of the two “defenses” called anybody to the stand.

** Defense attorneys asked whether any of the potential jurors had any "pre-conceptions" of whether the defendants in this case were guilty or not.  My immediate instinct was to answer that, "yes, i would go into the case starting with an assumption about their guilt - namely that they are not guilty, unless the prosecution can prove otherwise."  I withheld this smart-alec remark, which i think would've gotten me tossed by prosecution despite it's accuracy.  

Star Trek - Ranked

I watched Trek Nation this evening... It was okay, but not hugely enlightening...

Essentially it confirmed my idea of the Trek mythology as a mode of world making.  The philosophy of WWZCD?  Make decisions based on which one is most likely to lead to the outcome of our world being most like the Star Trek world.  Because, what else would we want the world to look like in 200 years?  Anyone have any better ideas?

Source: http://lordOfTheWings.BlogSpot.com

Trek is a religion.  It's a collection of canonical (and some non-canonical) texts that create a world modeled after our own.  In a world of dystopic futures, Star Trek is uniquely positive - a vision of what we might be able to achieve.  It's blindly hopeful, and particularly in a leadership environment that we live in today, we have trouble imagining a way forward that produces positive outcomes, let alone working toward some sort of utopic end goal.  Of course, in the Star Trek canon, it takes an aftermath of a third world war to make the space for creating the imagined future.

But that's not really what this post is about.  Someday, I'll put those thoughts together, but this is a best of list, an attempt (incomplete until it's not) to rank the films and seasons of Star Trek.  There are other lists by Trekkers, I'm sure (including this one, which ranks series versus films).  To my mind, though, ranking an entire season at one quality (5th or 25th, say) doesn't make a lot of sense.  For example, Season 3 of Star Trek: Voyager has too much Kes for my taste, but season 4...


* * *

January 2020
I don't think I'm going to do this anymore... I'm already in the midst of the chronology, and while i think this idea has some merit, it's just a lot to take on.  Maybe someday, but for now, i just wanted to post the pre-amble, which i like quite a lot...

* * *

December 2020

I had a thought to finally post this, after having found just such a list (or almost) as I was intending to create only to find that I had already done so at the outset of this (clusterfuck of a) year...

On this Border in History

Rather than choose what day this write-up belongs in, given its border-ity, I choose a historical Roman Numeral J entry dualism, with a 9/10 and a 9/11 entry and want to gain insight from the separations from the two different years.  What might we understand by looking at Joel 2006 & Joel 2008?

Here are some dates in history to try to dig...

2008 - Grad-school

2006 - Just done (and pre-) Grad School

It's useful to understand the way that your thinking has changed over time... My curiosity is whether mine really has.  Certainly I now, as a stooge for the right-est economy, would see my earlier take as a youthful-fool, an un-refined see-er.  That said, I am what I have been.  Radicalism is a situation of convenience.

I am decidedly inconvenient, but am happy to listen...

The Dangers of Corporate Censorship

On Monday my television received Current TV (though by that time it was mostly showing mostly the penultimate and final days of people like Jim Morrison and Richard Pryor - or maybe it was non-stop episodes of Vanguard, which is has been among the best American journalism in the past eight years or so).  On Tuesday, when that channel had transitioned to Al Jazeera America, it was no longer available for my viewing pleasure.

We are in the throes of a debate about information and the power of information, though that may not be obvious to most of us.  Sure we've all watched the spectacle of Edward Snowden's escape to Russia, though much of our attention has been centered on Snowden's weirdness (he's got sort of a 'foreign vibe', even though he was born in North Carolina... or it may just be a 'geek vibe', though I, myself, am a bit of expert with that and it doesn't usually trigger my odd-radar), but the real debate about who ought to have access to what information and how much that should cost (if anything) is raging.  This debate is also not just a debate, it's a battle and has already had casualties.

In the era of WikiLeaks, the end of internet privacy (at least for people cool enough to have twitter followers or loads of Facebook friends), and corporate data-mining, information has become a commodity (and to say so, a cliche).

The other side of #openInfo, though, is, necessarily, the free dissemination of all perspectives.  Right now, corporations have access to all manner of information about our everyday lives, preferences, and activities (governments may also be privy to the same), however, as soon as a private news organization, with a stated desire to broadcast all perspectives and de-centralize American journalism, begins its broadcast (or even its earlier Western Hemispherical movements), American corporations say, "no, that information is not suitable for your consumption" to its customers.

This has been largely covered by the mainstream infomedia... (the Slate article I link to here focuses on the unusual financial situation of Al Jazeera and raises the "problem" of non-profit news [though I, for one, cannont understand why anyone would think it a problem that an organization whose purpose is to disseminate information is not primarily focused on profits.  To me it's a similar no-brainer to the {non}question of for-profit colleges or health care companies that are more interested in profit than patients]).  

#RachelMaddow has been on a kick of late, focusing on information-redaction in a North Carolina county election board.  She's also been smartly encouraging folks to subscribe to their local newspaper, which is a great idea and the only true possibility today of keeping in touch with actual local news.  The logic runs like this: if you don't subscribe to a hard copy or online pay portal of your local news, that organization will have less money to pay actual local journalists...  So, in addition to the problem of profit motive, this leads to a problem of non-local news (or local news which is more 'earned media' by corporate interests, commentary and fluff than actual reporting).  Sound familiar?

Al Jazeera America reveals another obvious pitfall of American journalism, which is its inherent 'coastalism.'  Coastalism has, necessarily, been a problem of our nation since its inception, but the continual focus on our geographic extremes has lead to our polarized political standing today.  The disintegration of hard news and the 'talking-head-ification' of news broadcasts has re-centered journalism on the conversation and not the content.  Just imagine what it will mean when there are journalists in news bureaus in Chicago, Nashville, New Orleans, and Detroit (DETROIT!) to name a few, who are vying to get their stories on the air.  

AJAm will approach American news, I hope, with a fresh set of eyes, realizing that their is a whole middle of the country, which is under-represented in most American journalism.  Reactionary companies like Time Warner and AT&T should be boycotted as much as possible until they come to understand that restricting the type of information available to people is immoral if not criminal.  In the end, I expect AJAm will be available on U-Verse, but the attempt to destabilize the launch makes AT&T yet another American corporation worthy of scorn.  Not that that's really news to anyone...

ooh! ooh!, did you read Joel's new tweet?!

Talking about a tweet you read (or in this case wrote) on a blog is kind of like discussing what you heard on the radio later in the day...

That being the case, I am, and have never been, cool.  I have re-watched the movie, Bulworth, and found it as redeeming as I did when it was first released.

It is my firm belief and desire that you do the same... on both counts.

Let me know.

What is the opposite of Freedom?

If we take this question at face value we probably come up with some obvious preliminary answers like slavery or oppression. A more etymological answer might try to contend with the idea of free- first, where unfree- would mean something like ‘being subject to someone (or something) else’ and then deal with –dom. “un-dom” might mean being outside the state of (or realm of) free-ness (or in this case un-free-ness). Then the opposite of freedom becomes something like ‘a state of existence outside of subjugation’, which I think we might also define as ‘freedom’.

a picture of freedom generally involves standing with spread arms

I might add to these initial (good) answers the troubling notion that debt might be a very good contemporary answer to our question. Or even commerce or exchange in general. A more radical answer might even be love or friendship or community.

I think what I am most concerned with here is the notion of a presumed value or good.  Freedom seems like something we all agree is good.  We like it.

I'm rereading House of Leaves with my Theories of Revolutions class and on this go-round (it's more of a maze for me now than the labyrinth it once was) it seems to me that the central metaphor of the novel holds that life is a journey... through a labyrinth.  However, there also appears to be a certain amount of cheats built into it, either you can cheat it (break through a wall or imagine new solutions) or it can cheat you by shifting its architecture and 'changing the rules'.

In the novel it becomes clear that the metaphor is just a shell game, but my title question occurred to me as I was reading this earlier today:

"Dialectical thought thus becomes negative in itself. Its function is to break down the self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense"
— joel seeger (@stogie10) May 3, 2013

Marcuse goes on to say, ", to undermine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts, to demonstrate that unfreedom, is so much at the core of things that the development of their internal contradictions leads necessarily to qualitative change: the explosion and catastrophe of the established state of affairs" (Preface to Reason and Revolution, italics are mine).*

Another resource to help us think this through a bit might be the actual definition of freedom and what the entries seem to think freedom might not be.

Without confine or constraint, what do we have to do but stand, arms spread wide, trying to take up as much space as possible.  It seems to me that we need the limitations if for no other reason than to have common space on which to start a conversation (or relationship).  I think Marcuse/Hegel's point is that we need to be able to think outside of those limitations, but inevitably cannot actually act outside of them.


*As a side note, I think this quote also does a fairly good job of articulating why people tend to not enjoy talking to me at parties or late at night...

"The American Crisis"

I'm reading through Thomas Paine's "The American Crisis" and at the outset of the essay (actually a series of pamphlets) Paine invokes the term 'slavery' to explain the American situation at the outset of the war.  He writes:

"Britain...has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but 'to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,' and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon the earth." (formatting from the original)

What gets me is of course that the idea of slavery for Enlightenment thinkers like Paine was so universal when the actuality of slavery (and indentured servitude, which we might think of as slave temps) was everywhere in the actual world at the time.  Most Western philosophers, prior to Hegel "we" might argue, used the concept of slavery as convenient short hand for any abridgment of liberty.  All this while staring actual examples of horrific and lucrative slavery in the faraway face of The (still) New World.

Source: www.ktersakian.com

Even if normal European citizens weren't faced with daily examples of slavery, the spoils of that trade were part of their daily lives*.  Though I suppose you could make the same argument in our post-enlightenment (HA!) age.  From my iPhone and it's problematic origins to my occasional (and shamefully delicious) Big Macs, it is a common refrain of the modern left that poverty is just the new(est) form of slavery.  Barbara Ehrenreich argues it (in not so few words) in Nickel and Dimed and Aristide's book, Eyes of the Heart, makes the argument directly. Tales of the evils of globalization as creating a slavery of poverty is an old new idea.  At the same time, I can imagine an ill-conceived, Norquistian argument about increased taxation representing a new form of slavery and the looming, largely imagined fiscal cliff a mass ensnarement, an abridgment of liberty.

My attention meanders from these comparisons to slavery to my more recent encounter with (imagined) actual slavery in the form of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.  While there have been several reviewers bemoaning the historical usefulness of the film's central drama regarding the passage of the 13th Amendment, I think it should go without saying that looking to Hollywood for significant historical lessons leaves one wanting.  (Both of these reviews, however, are excellent and well worth a read).  It's a well-worn truism that historical films are more about the time in which they are made than the time they pretend to represent.

But I do think that Lincoln does make some fairly sophisticated historical arguments.  The desire to find a super-hero in the figure of important historical figures is better articulated in Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (which I think is actually a better biographical sketch when it comes down to it), but it's definitely present in this movie.  I was struck, though, that when I was thinking of what the film might be saying about contemporary political figures, I wasn't reminded of 'our man from the Land of Lincoln', but more often found myself thinking about W (or perhaps more accurately, Josh Brolin's portrayal of W in W, which has become our historical W).  Lincoln is really funny, because the president constantly wanders off on tangents, tells dirty jokes, and tells stories at odd times.  With Lincoln, though, we are meant to believe these meanderings are acts of secretive genius (his super power is being able to get anyone on his side by telling stories about his suicidal barbers).

I guess all of this is to say that the world is not so big a place, that experiences and history are largely communal (or perhaps even universal), but we act as if each instance, our instants, are unique.  I tell my students that we (and especially they) frequently seem to act as if the world is something that is happening to us, rather than a place that they are actively engaged in.  The catastrophic activities that we take part in every day exist regardless of our recognition (and hopefully thoughtful critique) of them.


*I've been reading lately about the economics of the Age of Revolution (and the age of slavery) and in particular the "triangle trade" as it is known, where slave traders brought captured Africans back to European centers of the slave trade located in secondary port cities like Liverpool and Bordeaux.  Slaves were marketed in these centers and then forwarded on to the Americas, generally.  The result was a booming economy in what were formerly provincial areas.  In fact, Carolyn Fick argues in her excellent book, The Making of Haiti, that it was these growing, outlying economies that directly produced the very middle class nouveau riche who were the main drivers of the French Revolution (and therefore the Haitian Revolution), thus undermining the very system that made them riche in the first place.