Arclist

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 03:46:40 GMT

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: The Player Date: June 20, 2006 9:13:42 PM MDT The Player An Inconvenient Truth is the most important movie of the year. There is not much that is new here for those who've been paying close attention to environmental issues over the years, but it's presentation is both comprehensive and visually stunning. Many will see it as a sort of covert campaign advertisement for an impending Al Gore run for the presidency. Perhaps this is so, or perhaps it's wishful thinking. Whether or no, the movie manages to document, in a carefully prepared scenario built out of a lifetime of observation, reflection and presentation, a crises of such immense proportion that only the most inspired and dedicated leadership, both moral and intellectual, can get us through it with our civilization more or less intact. The film also offers a biographical view that offers a model for true leadership in a century that promises changes beyond anything we have known. The most poignant moment for me in An Inconvenient Truth occurs when we follow Al Gore moving through an airport security checkpoint on his way to a slide show presentation somewhere in the world. We follow him through the airport concourse, a lonely figure with laptop in hand as his voice-over recounts his constant search for signs that people are ready to listen or to change, and his frustration that, as yet, he sees little indication of it. Still, he continues, calmly and purposefully, overcoming both rage and despair, accepting the role of message bearer for a society so caught up in its own self-image that it refuses to see the precipice toward which, with increasing speed, we are heading. What occurred to me as I watched the man's dignified and determined progress was that, no matter how dark the age becomes it appears that the possibility of good leadership has not left us. Although my generation appears to have, by and large chosen to forsake itself and everyone's future in order to build a nest egg of false security, and so many of our leaders have perished, either naturally or by assassination, there are still players in the game who are capable of taking the long view and leading those who are awake and willing toward a more promising future. Some are gifted, or cursed, either by intuitive leap or sheer circumstance, with an ability to see perhaps too far forward for their own good. This can lead to depression or madness or serious maladjustment, and I've known quite a few over the years who've been driven over the edge into various forms of self-destruction. It occurs to me that a society willing to sacrifice the sanity of its most far seeing members, either out of fear or an over-riding need for immediate gratification, is a society that probably deserves the worst that comes to it. Of course this is the dark voice that speaks to me out of my own sense of futility, and I struggle with it daily. When I was about twelve years old I started work on my first unpublished and unfinished novel, which I called Day of Epoch. It was about the struggle of human society to survive in the shadow of a newly descended ice age. I don't remember what gave me the idea. It may have been a combination of reading Andre Norton's science fiction novel about a post nuclear future, Starman's Son, combined with my school lessons about the cyclical repetition of environmental cycles. A large contributor was the constant fear of nuclear extinction held over the heads of my whole generation throughout the ebbs and calms of a long running Cold War. Perhaps something in me had caught a whiff of the future. Along with spinning tales in my imagination I sketched diagrams of futuristic self-contained underground cities in my grade school steno-pad. I designed them to keep the inhabitants safe against all external deprivations. In all of the years that have passed since those fantasy visions I've found myself returning to similar themes, as if a vision were stuck in my head, of a world that is cold and desolate with people hanging on the very edge of survival. Over the years the vision has been sometimes clearer, sometimes not, while something similar has actually begun to emerge in alarming projections made by scientists as they review environmental data. In 1985, almost twenty years after my vision in the form of fiction, I attended a conference in Boulder, Colorado, named Gaia Synthesis, after a theory then proposed by James Lovelock, who observed that the earth when viewed from space appears and acts exactly like a living organism. The conference explored implications and influences of this idea, one not new in the context of human thinking, but apparently so to a scientific establishment long mired in a swamp of logical positivist thinking. That gathering of scientists, teachers, students and spiritual leaders was privileged to be shown slides of hundreds of then unpublished photographs taken by orbiting NASA satellites showing the rapidly accelerating changes taking place across the planet, due apparently in some part to the actions of human societies. Lakes and seas were drying up, vast forests were on fire, glaciers were receding and deserts were spreading. We were also shown emerging data from the National Atmospheric Research Center that indicated average wind speed all over the world was every year increasing, and had been doing so steadily worldwide since global measurements had been taken. Evidence was accumulating that human civilization, with it's unrestrained growth of population and industry, had for centuries contributed to trends appearing to climax in this century due to the consequent elevation of carbon dioxide collecting in the atmosphere. Whatever the source of these accelerations in climactic processes, the enormity of what we could see with our own eyes was daunting. Along with the alarm dawning on a then small but growing segment of the scientific community there was a crescendo of voices arising from indigenous communities and spiritual visionaries standing at the edges of the mainstream, warning us that we were dangerously out of balance and nearing some kind of threshold for decision that would determine the success or failure of whole civilizations. Profoundly moved by all that I'd been shown I started cornering friends and acquaintances and anyone I came in contact with in order to weave a narrative of the future, not only out of my own visions but supported by facts, educated speculation and scientific theory, that I began to carry around with me in charts and graphs and maps and sketches. It appears that many people were also sensing a change in the weather, and pretty soon I was invited to give presentations at organized gatherings. This was during the Reagan years, when much of the population was reeling from the after effects of the 'inconvenient truths' revealed by a war in Vietnam and the fall of two presidents. Americans had seen the dark face of evil in its' own mirror, and many reacted by refusing to look. Reagan fed that denial with a thin veneer of false optimism based on the shallow urge to return to a time of unrestrained social and technological changes that followed one after another in a rush after the great war. As we watched the collapse of our long running enemies at the end of the Cold War, we hoped to dream again of our endless progress in a world where we solved all of our problems by building solutions with our wealth. It would be like wishing them away. For those who saw beyond the political games and marketing hype of the era, all of this was an ominous herald of the descent of a long dark age. In the 20 years since that time of turning, a thick curtain has descended, deliberately drawn by people whose power and wealth grow out of the very circumstances which lead us toward danger. Our economic model appears to be based on scarcity rather than plenty, and when an essential commodity becomes scarce it rises in value. By cornering and controlling this market of essentials our power is made secure. Unfortunately when the world inevitably resists our arrogant assumptions of righteousness and power we are all forced into thralldom by the most profitable industry of all, which grows out of the pursuit of endless wars. in the invention of our war on terrorism the leaders have declared the state of war to be virtually eternal. It will last as long as anyone resists our self-righteous priorities, and it will insure an ongoing flow of profits by providing an unending supply of enemies in those who lash out at those who presume to be their masters. 30 years after the facts began to emerge we are still, as a society debating the reality of things that have been known for years. Even as evidence accumulates, even when we can see year by year the accelerating consequences of our actions, we allow ourselves to be convinced that what we are seeing is untrue. I recently visited the junkscience dot com site with its lengthy pieces debunking everything from global warming theories to the 'claims' that DDT is dangerous (I'm not kidding. You can even buy a t-shirt and mug that reads: "DDT: A Weapon of Mass Survival" and watch a clock counting the ongoing cost to the American economy of the Kyoto Protocols). This site is bought and paid for by the Free Enterprise Action Fund which is a subsidiary of the oil and chemical industries who have paid billions of dollars over the past two decades to instill doubt and promote ignorance. The whole purpose of their impressive looking array of confusing charts and graphs and numbers is to convince us that what we can observe with our senses isn't really going on. There is no increase in wind and hurricane activity or melting of glaciers or breaking of the polar ice caps or changing of the ocean currents because, look, these statistics say it couldn't be so! As a result of these relentless efforts to obscure our vision many if not most Americans choose to believe the 'evidence' of numbers that they don't really understand, because it's easier to do so than to admit we are living and promoting a toxic culture. We've sacrificed as a result many years of creativity to these obscene manipulations of the public will. If American corporate power gets its way we will loose many more years, until it becomes too late to slow down the logarithmic acceleration of what, as every year shows us, is happening all around us. The epiphany I received at that conference 20 years ago was that the earth, as a living organism is much larger and older than any human society, and like any organism it has internal processes that can bring it back toward balance despite the temporary disturbances we cause, exactly as a living body throws off a rash or a sickness by reestablishing its relationship to health and balance. It may be that the winds will grow stronger, the heat will rise, the ice caps will melt, the ocean currents will be altered and disease will conquer an out of control population, or perhaps a more radical rebalancing will occur in the form of another ice age. Perhaps the fanciful story I told myself as a twelve year old will come true. Whatever it takes, I believe that the earth itself will endure and a new balance will be achieved, even at the expense of humanity's fragile social constructs. The outcome for us at this time remains a matter of our own reckoning. I figure the role of prophets, poets, artists, visionaries and all the mad dreamers who have seen this coming for so long grows from practice. With An Inconvenient Truth we are given the updated picture of an event that has been the conscious backdrop of many lives like Al Gore's. Whatever has taken place, whatever roles we play or power we wield, in the back of our minds is always the image of that train, that wall, that broken bridge...It may be that Al Gore's movie will only be seen by those who already know or suspect the oncoming troubles, while the majority continue to play increasingly irrelevant games of war and bigotry and religious fundamentalism and the like. Perhaps for now we can only sit by, telling our tales and knowing that one day the world will catch up to itself. We, who have been out here on the edges for so long, will be waiting. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You can't stop the signal. http://internet.cybermesa.com/~melcher/

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 04:15:29 GMT

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: [Arclist] Groceries Date: February 19, 2006 10:03:06 PM MST Groceries When we think about oil and politics do we think about food? From my bedroom window I can hear the sounds of traffic streaming by on Interstate 25, carrying folk around the last corner down from the pass through the Sangre de Christo foothills at Glorieta and the Pecos river, toward Santa Fe. They descend the mountain toward their jobs or they come down to vacation from points north, crossing a gateway where populations and commerce of the great midwestern plains passes into a strange and almost alien country of the southwest, where civilization appears to change in some subtle manner, just like the landscape. Between the soft hiss of passenger cars there's the deep restrained thrum of big rigs; truckers coming down from Colorado across the vast 'staked plains', from Raton past highway towns called Springer and Wagon Mound and Las Vegas. They cross in the night, to deliver the groceries in the early mornings to Santa Fe and Albuquerque and points south. America's food travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table. The interstate passes within a few hundred yards of our house. At the bottom of a long curve the road curves past two small hills and branches onto an exit that carries Route 285 south in the direction of small highway towns like Lamy and Clines Corners, eventually to connect with Interstate 70, the major artery going east and west through Albuquerque and Santa Rosa. Just off the exit and to the immediate right is the bedroom community of Eldorado, where a vast spread of former ranchland has become prime real estate, with houses and lots still within reach of an upper middle class income. At the second intersection is a small shopping plaza with a midsize supermarket. Once it served mainly the small towns and ranches up and down 285, but recently it made a move to capture the more upscale and educated population of the Eldorado subdivision, who commute the ten miles or so into the city to find alternatives to the overprocessed commodities that fill most commercial rural markets. My mind drifts to memories of a group of us meeting in a late night office in 1979 to talk about another impending crisis of food and fuel. We'd just opened a new warehouse in the growing wholesale natural foods business that we'd pioneered, and it then dawned upon us how much we remained hostage to our nation's energy policies. In those days America's lifestyle had led to bad karma in the middle east, as the Iranian people rose up to throw out a colonial dictator and threaten the nation that had kept him in power. This was our first major oil crises, and long lines at the gas pumps and the rising price of commodities brought down a presidency. Fuel shortages were barely being absorbed by the trucking businesses which carry the lifeblood of our whole economy. Then, as now, the source of our food was far from the consumer. Those of us who pursued and supported more sustainable agriculture knew that not only shipping, but the growing of most of our commercial crops required uninterrupted flows of cheap petroleum. The postwar boom in corporate farming had forced small local and family farms to give way en masse to enormous energy intensive industrial spreads that depended on large machinery, wasteful irrigation methods and artificial petroleum based fertilizers to replace the soil that was wasted and ruined or allowed to wash away. The idealistic movement for sustainable farming that we supported was still in infancy, and still as dependent on long distance trucking and warehousing as the mainstream. Although we had the inspiration and energy of youth to drive us and had no doubt that necessity would in the long term play in our favor, those days were scary, as we watched the scarcity of oil bring our dreams perilously close to collapse. Nothing much has changed in twenty-five years. In a slightly delayed response to the pressures at the gas pump, the cost of our breakfast cereal, our milk, our water, our frozen entrees and cookies, our baby cereal, crawls up by multiple percentage points with alarming frequency. The movement for more sustainable farming practices has gained ground along with an increasing demand for less industrialized and processed foods. Once an insignificant part of the grocery business, the natural foods industry is growing at more than 20% a year while growth in the rest of the food industry is relatively flat. Once made up of small neighborhood speciality stores that sold mostly supplements and bulk commodities, the natural foods business has entered the world of Wall Street with the growth of large corporate entities like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, which have fashioned themselves according to the one-stop shopping model of traditional supermarket chains. Distribution giants like United Natural Foods have gobbled up their competitors and now control prices and availability in most of the industry. More and more mainstream supermarkets are featuring 'organically grown' products as well, usually at gourmet prices, while companies like General Mills, Beatrice Foods and even Pepsi buy up regionally based natural foods companies to include 'natural' product lines in their marketing mix. The idealism of the past has been tempered by economic necessity as well as the promise of lucrative profits. There's a contradiction here. The original idea of the natural foods business was a return to a smaller, more localized and regionally sensitive model which fosters a healthier environment and a stronger sense of community and connection, as an alternative to the big, bigger and biggest mindset that governs the corporate climate. Sooner or later a clash of cultures is inevitable. Since the primary duty of a corporation is to shareholders rather than cunsumers the result is an inevitable echo, in many ways, of the questionable practices that have resulted in our precarious situation. While our neighborhoods and communities are replaced by shopping malls and sprawl, the land that produces our food recedes in our minds to something of a distant abstraction, and food becomes something that apparently 'grows' on grocery shelves. Like a lot of entities in the natural foods business we started a small buying coop in the mid seventies. A group of people seeking alternatives, many of us had opted out of our parent's lifestyles and gathered in communities motivated by spiritual and political concerns, founding our own institutions to provide us with the necessities for living. One primary objective was to return to a sense of community based upon a stronger connection to living close to nature and the land. What started as a loosely connected network of like-minded individuals and communities became the fuel for an explosion of technology and communication that would revolutionize the economic landscape of the post industrial world. What was a revolution in values led to an explosion of prosperity that became the engine driving the middle class boom of the eighties and nineties. For the most part we were more educated than our parents, and having grown up in a rapidly changing world we were able to take full advantage of the new wave of innovation that fueled that boom. Having participated in the early growth of the natural foods business and grown disillusioned with it's increased corporatization, I came to New Mexico almost 17 years ago to help start another small neighborhood sized natural food store. Our venture didn't work out as planned, and circumstance landed me for the next decade and a half working in various aspects of the publishing business, marketing, advertising, writing, editing, even printing. During all of that time something in me longed for the essential earthiness of the food business, partly as relief from the abstraction and hype that goes along with marketing and publishing. I missed the fundamentals of relating to people and society at the basic level of what we eat and how it gets to us. Recently, I answered an ad in the local paper for a supermarket needing a 'natural foods head.' I applied, made a proposal, and was hired to help in the expansion of a small rural grocery store, wishing to attract local customers who traveled into town from this expanding 'bedroom' community of middle class professionals to shop in one or more of Santa Fe's ever expanding proliferation of natural food outlets. The store I agreed to work in could be called a 'hybrid', as it carries both the commercial brands found in most rural chains and a growing number of items familiar to customers of Whole Foods and Wild Oats. The store is a hybrid in other ways, as the employees are mostly people who live in low income apartments and communities like Pecos, while the customer base is increasingly middle and upper-middle class professionals inhabiting the semi-rural subdivision and working in prosperous Santa Fe. Attitudes and practices of management are a long way from giving the rather progressive lip-service to community and healthy practices that one encounters in most of the natural foods business. The employer-employee relationship appears to harkens back to the ancient 'patron' system more indigenous to New Mexico. By and large the awareness of food is governed solely by the bottom line, and my role is seen by management and many of my fellow employees as the 'weird foods guy.' With the attraction of new customers the bottom line works in my favor, but the task is a relatively lonely one, and I feel that I run an almost independent entity encased within the shell of a traditional supermarket. For anyone who thinks that food isn't the stuff of politics, let me tell you that the grocery business is as political as it gets. Every inch of shelf space in your local store has been fought for or negotiated. The feeling of being the 'weird foods guy' in a 'hybrid' store is akin to that of the wild west; of being at the edge of a frontier (or a wasteland), battling for a few acres of land, or a few feet of space, in order to prove myself and the viability of the products that I stock. As I listen to the swoosh of traffic, a sound that's like an intermittent river, breaking the otherwise peaceful atmosphere of these old hills, I think about how this road connects us, and how my life has once again brought me to serve at the concrete and asphalt edges of our world, on the boundaries between rich and poor, Anglo, Spanish and Indian, urban and rural. Early in the morning, three mornings of every week, I meet the long truck out of Denver, full of products I've ordered from our wholesaler, a natural foods conglomerate that scooped up the company I once worked for and helped to build, along with most of it's former coast to coast competition. I often think about those times, when we were creating the business, making up rules as we went along, expanding from small food cooperatives and buying clubs and vitamin stores into the next generation of mainstream upscale grocery stores and suppliers. In those days we mostly thought of ourselves as revolutionaries, our enterprises having grown out of cooperatives and communities that wanted to change everything in the world we found to be wrong and out of balance. We reputed the avarice and hypocrisy that led us into wars and resulted in human waste and destruction. We were then only beginning to see the magnitude of the potential destruction. Deep down we all felt that something in our humanity was being threatened by untamed profits, although we were unclear of either the scope of the danger or of the alternatives. Many of us traveled west, because the fast growing urban centers of the west were relatively unformed and less constrained by the inherent limitations of established eastern and midwestern cities in decline. The industrial axis shifted first to the south and then overseas, transforming the Norman Rockwell vision of American prosperity and security into little more than a billboard illusion. The war in Vietnam brought down the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, replacing him with Nixon and the ascendency of another set of political assumptions. Nixon went out with a disgraceful whimper and the short term social reaction that followed the interim rule of the innocuous Ford administration led to the rise of the first rock and roll presidency, that of Jimmy Carter. Carter was elected largely by the rising 'youth vote.' The baby boom generation had finally arrived at voting age, weaned on an 'alternative' press embodied then by Rolling Stone magazine and the irreverent social and political commentary of writers like Hunter S. Thompson and history as told in Gary Trudeau's 'Doonesbury.' For the newly spawned enterprises of the alternative food business the Carter years were a boon, as a bank of solar panels went up at the White House, the Department of Agriculture published and issued studies supportive of organic farming and a newly formed Department of Energy began to seriously look into strategies for conservation and alternative power generation. Jimmy Carter, being a former farmer and engineer, appeared willing to contemplate new ways of thinking about things, both practical and spiritual. Unfortunately, a national crises ensued, brought about by international policies going back to the Eisenhower years. We'd supported the reigns of tyrants in several of our major oil suppliers and when the tyrants were overthrown America, for the first time, found itself hostage to a dependency it had inherited as the price of it's own power. For a nation addicted to oil, that had enjoyed unprecedented economic growth since the end of the Great War, to curb our rising economic expectations was unacceptable. The Carter presidency was held responsible for dampening our expectations of endless upward mobility and with the so-called Reagan revolution came a new national commitment to the values of individual acquisitiveness, even at the expense of the collective good. Unrealistic expectations fostered by social upheavals during two decades were overturned, the solar panels and the alternative energy effort stalled, and in many ways America began to turn in on itself, seeing it's role as the main defender of a narrow set of assumptions upon which the so-called progress of a corporate world order is based. At this stage of the struggle it all looks like a game, a battle for 'market share.' The natural foods business, once founded on the basics, less on processed foods and commodities, increasingly imitates the traditional market. More and more of the business has shifted toward the marketing of 'fast foods' and convenience foods in order to keep up with the often hectic lifestyle of its mostly middle class parishioners. We now buy most of our water off the shelf, We consume inordinate amounts and varieties of snack foods and chips. Do we need twelve different varieties of corn puffs? Indeed, water, sodas and chips are my fastest moving items. Next comes frozen entrees and prepared meals of countless variety. We pay the highest prices for bath salts and body lotions in stunning array. Every month I'm approached by industry reps with a dozen new products straining for differentiation from those that have gone before. The corporatization of the industry has moved us once again from a sense of community and connection toward the desire for convenience and speed, and the eternal availability of that which will satisfy our every appetite. The natural foods business has continued to depend on cheap transport, and grown as dependent on processing and exotic packaging as any other part of the food business. Still, we tell ourselves there is a growing awareness that it makes a difference how our foods were grown and prepared. Until the government manages to dilute the meaning of the term 'organic' to one as meaningless as we've made 'natural' there is a growing demand for foods that are not produced in a way that harms the earth. The 'revolution' is presently confined largely to the well-healed and highly educated, and the pricing structure of an industry in hoc to Wall Street will keep it so for the foreseeable future. By and large, the poor are forced to be satisfied with the cheap products of subsidized and wasteful industrial production. They aren't exposed to new ideas, even when it means their health is the ultimate price. To look at the way foods are presented in the media we appear to be still addicted to fast foods while obsessed with being overweight. Diseases like obesity and diabetes disproportionally effect the poor, while incidents of cancer and heart disease continue to rise across all population groups. As our economy continues to grow our health declines, including the health of our communities. While we play the game, the population suffers. Someday perhaps all of this will become real to a majority, and we will shift our habits of living toward a life that respects the connections between us and our collective connection to the earth. That time has not arrived. There are encouraging signs in the industry of a return to the desire for the 'neighborhood' store. This is accompanied by a revitalization of the inner cities and the peaking of the trend toward uncontrolled suburban sprawl. Stores like Trader Joe's and local cooperatives like The Marketplace in Santa Fe have not only succeeded, but thrive in the presence of large national chain stores by offering people a familiar and intimate environment and being responsive to the needs and desires of particular neighborhoods and communities. The growth and popularity of local farmers markets all over the country are another indication of this trend. My own store's appeal is essentially that of a neighborhood business, a one of a kind establishment that responds to the desire to feel that the place they buy their food is uniquely tailored for them. in a sense the customer in these places are stakeholders in the business, and the place provides them a place where they not only shop, but meet other people who share their sense of place. At this point, the distributors from which they purchase most of their products have been consolidated under only a very few suppliers, and they are subject largely to the policies and prices of large national distributors, who often make up for the deep discounts they provide their large chain customers by overcharging their smaller accounts. Their ultimate advantage over both the short and long term lays in their ability to change and be responsive to their particular customer base. People are beginning to turn toward businesses that can offer an experience of something more intimate than the traditional anonymous supermarket environment. Over time, as the increasing cost of fuel puts pressure on the industry to turn more to commodities that require less processing and transport it's businesses with the ability to respond and change quickly to changing local market conditions that are most likely to succeed. All of this will require changes in the way we view our lives and the importance of the connections we have with one another. For me, this job provides a unique opportunity to know a community, a neighborhood, by what it eats. I don't know yet whether the experiment will succeed, but I know it's success will be in direct proportion to our ability to respond to that community's perceptions of itself. The task of drawing connections across all of the frontiers of class and consciousness and economic reality, from management to employees to customers is a daunting one. It may be that this particular business isn't ready to make the best use of the opportunity, and I'll find myself looking toward a different frontier, not as tied to conventional standards. One thing I've noticed in almost all of the people I've met in the food industry, is that they are uniquely devoted to serving other human beings. This is one thing that makes any struggle for the future worth the effort. Ultimately, we are all what we eat, and the politics of food are close to the root of whatever kind of society we wish to be. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You can't stop the signal. http://internet.cybermesa.com/~melcher/

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 11:16:29 GMT

Test Post

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 19:40:20 GMT

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: [Arclist] France Is Burning Date: November 10, 2005 7:24:19 AM MST France Is Burning The news about Paris and riots is not altogether unfamiliar. I remember Hough, Glenville and Detroit and Watts in the 60's and again in the 90's.. Those who follow mainstream American media probably think that all this has something to do with Jihad or terrorism or another of our paranoid obsessions, since we are after all dealing with arabs here. those who watch Fox probably think the French somehow had it coming for being so snotty in the face of American wars. Rich white people everywhere probably grow a little nervous. Perhaps the George Bushes in the world will use this to raise their falling political capital. In truth the news from France as well as South America these days gives a pretty good picture of the emerging state of the political world in the new century; the rich versus the poor, the dark skinned versus the light, the once colonized nations versus the colonizers. For America, which pursues its own war on the 'underclasses' with relentless abandon, the bell is certainly tolling. To those who believe that the essence of freedom is the 'right' to pursue individual wealth absolutely without restraint (Republicans) the curtain is beginning to fall. The world is turning and those who must absorb the consequences of greed and arrogance manifested by the wealthy nations are stirring from their sleep. How many more hurricanes, wars and famines do you think it will take? Paris is burning. Just one of the cities of empire, and I don't imagine society will alter its collective course any time soon. The police and the armies will 'clamp-down.' The people in the street will be called 'terrorists.' The proud and the boastful will meet at conferences in isolated cities to avoid civil unrest. The demonstrators will chase them down as best as they can. While the poor of the world awake to the source of their plight and in some cases explode into violence, most people will refuse to wake up, lost to the televised propaganda we call the 'news.' The alternatives cause too much discomfort. To understanding why Paris is burning is to watch the clock winding down. ______________________________________ CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NO 3 1000 Days 023 09/11/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker Event-Scene France Is Burning ================= ~Thierry Bardini~ How does it feel to see the country of your birth burning on television? Today it makes me feel like a migrant worker, watching the kids of other migrant workers rioting in the streets of cities you've probably have never heard of -- but that they have been cleaning for two generations. Today I am reminded of the same scenes I once witnessed first-hand in the streets of Caracas and Los Angeles. Today I am reminded by all these comparisons I read in the papers, Paris-Baghdad, Ile-de-France-Tchetchnia, that bring back images and feelings to my mind. Flashes of light, Carnival, riot. My neighbor, this insignificant dog-walking-little-man, breaking a window, shoplifting. Black uniforms on motorcycles with very long sticks and machine guns. Fires. Dionysian parties, tomorrow tears. ~Hepa chamo~ why did you burn our car, and your school? Flashes of Curfew (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1988, Caracas, Venezuela, 1989). ~Toque de queda~, my poor Thomas. What to do but keep on partying when I can't get back home in time? Avoid the crowd, stay in well lit areas, talk to the cops only if you have to, only if they ask you a question or if you fear something worse. Be ready to run. Don't stay too close to the windows. Watch the same General over and over again on TV, lying through his teeth, back to order. That was then, in the Third World, homeland of the migrant workers before migration. There riot rhymes with coup, as in "coup d'Etat" or "coup sur la gueule." There the troops take three days to deploy in streets on fire, and the troops are eighteen years old, wearing helmets too big and carrying ten ammos apiece. Needless to say, they are scared shitless. And so are you and so it seems is everybody -- past this third day. A week later, the streets are cleaned, a thousand people are dead. Order is restored, until the next coup. There, in Caracas, the poor and the desperate came down to the heart of the city and burned it. Their targets of choice were the ~abastos~, the dammed little capitalists on each street corner who were shelving coffee, rice and pampers, waiting for the prices to come up, or the ~caritos~, the damned little capitalists who doubled the price of the ride, just a few days before they burned. Just a step above them on the starvation ladder, barely out of the ~barrios~. In Los Angeles (1992) I was working for the University of Spoiled Children, thanks to a Japanese endowment at the famous Annenberg School. The building was rumored to have been a Republican think tank, unless it was an intelligence think tank I don't remember; a massive eagle was covering the entrance hall. The first strange thing that I noticed that day was a guy armed at the gates of the University. He was not yet eighteen years old and wore no helmet. I bet that he had plenty of rounds on his belt. I jumped into my car and saw the rest on TV -- from my rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica. Downtown and Watts seemed very far away, until I noticed the smoky skies from the window. It felt like I was watching images of Caracas on CNN -- It can't be here. Sounds concrete suddenly, pockets of the Third World in the First World. They too, started in a party-like atmosphere, burning their own neighborhood. Starting with the liquor stores. I bet I could have seen my neighbor from Caracas, Residence Sans Soucis, Avenida Libertador, Chacaito, stepping out of the broken window of this ~licoreria~, carrying a full case of Red Bull. The troops, the National Guard that is, took two days to deploy, and prevented any damage from reaching North Hollywood. In the meantime, the small-business owners from little Seoul made use of their own NRA licensed machine guns. There, in a so-called civilized country, they only burned their own neighborhood. A week later, one house out of two was left to ashes on Normandy Street, but order was back in the city (or so they said on CNN). Who knows how many died, in a democratic country and land of hope we do not keep stats like this. Some of them did not officially exist anyway; they were just some migrant Chicano workers. I thought about my own ~abuelo~, Nicolas from Pontremoli, who migrated in 1921 from his native Tuscany because of too many black shirts and no jobs. I thought about him, the ~rital~, reconstructing the war destroyed north-east of France, near ~Le Chemin des Dames~, quite a charming name for one of the worst WWI battlegrounds. Hell if you're a poor bastard out of fascist Italy in 1921, you'd better be a mason. Back to the street ~compadre~, wait for the next job pickup. Today I am a ~emigre~ in well-kept Canada, a legal alien, still a French National; aside from my name, I am French to the bone, as my fellow compatriots often remind me here. I am no more the grandson of a ~rital~ but quite simply put a ~maudit francais~ (and so might my son, if the trend goes on). There, there are no Muslims (as they said on Fox) nor blacks (as they wrote in the Teheran Times), but quite simply second generation African descent born in France -- and being French I know of at least ten derogatory words to call them, my fellow compatriots, ~fils de l'emigration~. Sons and grandsons of migrant workers for whom the law of the State of Emergency was first designed, back in 1955. Before ruling the projects of even the smallest towns of the country, it was used thrice, twice in Algeria (1955, 1961) and once in New Caledonia (in 1984). Bringing the colonies back to order before it brings the ~metropole,~ back to the same order. Before bringing the colonies into the Metropole. Pockets of colonies in the metropole, patches of periphery in the old center. There the troops did not deploy yet. They would have no crowd to face, only pockets of sons and grandsons practicing urban guerrilla, patches of little gangs striking at random, hidden behind the hoods of their latest fashion terrorist jacket, you know your basic hoody, but with a zipper at the front and just two holes for your eyes. You know, like in Baghdad, or better yet, like in Jerusalem or Beyrouth. You know, young people of their time, mobile and networked, flash mobs if you will. Kids of the viral marketing age, junkware. Except this time their rap shoots at firemen and nurses, and kills a poor guy in charge of the street lights -- they say he was taking pictures in Epinay. What a Sunday for a family trip, for this only casualty of a riot with no crowds, no protest, and no end. A bus burns... It feels like I am watching pictures of Caracas on CNN, back in Santa Monica, but I am watching Paris on CBC, unless it is Watts on France 2. How does it feel, to see the country of your birth burning on TV? Estranged. At home, if you call yourself a migrant worker. Montreal, November 9, 2005. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Thierry Bardini, a sociologist, is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the Universite de Montreal, Canada, where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism (with Brian Massumi). In 2000, he published _Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing_, at Stanford University Press. He is currently finishing his second manuscript, entitled _Junkware: The Subject without Affect_. _____________________________________________________________________ * * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and * culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in * contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as * theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape. *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net *** Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You can't stop the signal. http://internet.cybermesa.com/~melcher/

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 02:39:19 GMT

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: Winter is Coming Date: November 1, 2005 8:27:26 PM MST I look forward this fall to the release of a new book by George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows, fourth in his cycle of medieval modern fantasy epics collectively titled, A Song of Ice and Fire.(1) Martin, perhaps immodestly, displays the same middle initials as J.R.R.Tolkien, while departing radically from Tolkien in his construction of a world based as much on history as on myth (England's "War of the Roses" provided inspiration for a tale of two battling royal families). Where Tolkien weaves an apocalyptic tale of a Manichaen clash between ultimate good and evil in which most of his characters appear more like classical archetypes than as familiar people, Martin's narrative proceeds through revealing the evolving perceptions of a cast of very recognizable human characters. In Tolkien's world every character's move is the culmination of larger forces with origins deep in the mythical history to which he dedicated his creative life. As massive and ambitious as this popular masterpiece The Lord of the Rings was for Tolkein, it was only a small piece in a much larger and more ambitious tapestry tracing the prehistory of humanity all the way back to a time of creation. George Martin's intentions are modest in comparison; to tell a good yarn with engaging characters. As different as these works appear, they each represent significant milestones in the evolution of a literary genre, as well as the underlying foundations of the culture out of which they emerge. William Irwin Thompson in his many explorations into cultural ecology, presents a critique of literature as cultural artifacts, in which there are three stages of unfolding. The kinds of text that define a particular stage of consciousness are the formative, dominant and climactic. "The formative work enters into a new ecological niche of consciousness through the work of solitary and shamanistic pioneers; the dominant work stabalizes the mentality through the work of an institutional elite; and the climactic work consummates and finishes the mentality for all time through the work of an individualistic genius." (2) Although Thompson sites James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake as most clearly epitomizing the climactic work of the (last) age, I would argue that Tolkien's epic more clearly and definitively fills that niche for a number of reasons, not least of which is it's spectacular success as a genuine artifact of mass culture. Tolkien lived and wrote his myth while witnessing the titanic struggles of a century defined by the rising power of technology and industrialization. In opposition to the dominance of the machine he identified with an attempt to maintain some vestiges of tradition and memory and culture. The author is clearly conscious of the scope of the intent to summarize his age. He states in a quote sited by David Day; "I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country (England): it had no stories of its own, not of the quality that I sought, and found in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandanavian, and Finnish; but nothing English, save impoverished chapbook stuff...I had in mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story...which I would dedicate simply to England; to my country."(3) David Day goes on to compare Tolkien's undertaking as the equivalent of Homer first inventing Greek mythology single handedly before embarking on the "Illiad" and "Odyssey". What is England if not the fount and seed carrier for so much that reflects the transition from the medieval European world of moral absolutism to a transatlantic culture that worshiped progress and modernity? "The Lord of the RIngs" is a text that depicts in markedly Christian terms the final battle between good and evil, in which an agrarian civilization faces down the rising power of the machine. After heroic struggles humanity emerges forever transformed, while the ancient powers and principalities of an older time are either defeated or simply fade away. Tolkien both sums up the moral landscape of a pre-modern civilization while proclaiming its ultimate replacement by a new world order in which the heroic tribal quest ultimately leads to a new bourgeois world of trade and acquisition governed by new rules and individual initiative. At the end of the tale, the heroes disappear in the west while Merry and Sam and Pippin take up the settled life of the Shire. What better characterization of the twentieth century, where ancient tribal mythologies mingled with the ascending powers of technocracy fueled the rise of new empires? Ultimately the nation state was subdued by a new order of globalized commerce and transnational communication where the centers of power were continually challenged and then overtaken by explosive evolutionary forces generated at the boundaries of the known. At the end of the century a reaction set in as people sought retreat in the familiar rules and texts of a world that is passing away. Tolkien's fantasy wistfully recounts the passing of a time when the simple desire for comfort, family and the hearth, represented by the hobbits of the shire, was sufficient. The War of the Ring is nothing less than the passage into a new age and a new order where values must be forged anew without the assistance of the guardians of the past. Tolkien's work portrays in many ways the rise and final conflagration put forth in the Judeo-Christian paradigm of creation and apocalypse. His work inventing cultures, races and language echoes the birth and rise of nation states. As in the Christian mythos all things proceed toward a final apocalypse resulting in the ascension of the savior-king as ruler of a new order of at least temporary peace governed by principals of honor, charity and love. If, as Thompson proposes, the solitary and shamanistic explorations of Shakespeare's King Lear and The Tempest, Cervantes's Don Quixote, and Descartes's Discourse on Method,(4) created the formative texts of the new mentality that replaced the medieval Mediterranean with the modern Atlantic cultural ecologies, then Tolkien's Lord of the Rings surely fills the bill for "the work of an individualistic genius" which characterizes a climactic work that "consummates and finishes the mentality for all time." Interesting as well is the fact that Tolkien's tale truly came into its' own as a work of mass popularity when it was turned into a movie; and not just any movie, but one that marked the transition from film as primarily an optical/mechanical artifact at the pinnacle of the industrial process, to the fully realized digital creation of total worlds out of the imagination. George Martin's novels can be seen in this light as a preliminary shamanic exploration into a new level of culture. Its' structure owes more to television than to the classic film or novel. Film has tended toward an epic format, in which the background, or mise-en-scene is as much a character as the actors within the frame. Television, due to the most common size and shape of the screen, as well as its' role as a "virtual presence" within the modern household, has evolved around the close-up, or talking head. Television narratives are generally driven by a succession of character portraits which emphasize individual points-of-view, and which change rapidly from one to another in a sequence of abrupt edits. Martin unfolds his tale in a sequence of character sketches. Every chapter is named for a single character, and as the narrative proceeds our feeling for each character deepens as their name comes around again. The book could be read as a score of separate tales, each about a single character, all woven together through a tapestry of time. In a sense, the story begins where Tolkien leaves off, in an age of men, where evil and virtue are no longer carried by external forces, but in the heart and mind of every individual. One could say that The Song of Ice and Fire is a postmodern fantasy, where the battle between good and evil is played out in the choices each person makes in a moment of crisis based on their own unique perception of right and wrong. Yet, underlying the human drama and giving it ultimate shape is a much larger unfolding, determined not by good and evil, darkness and light, but by the immense and irrevocable powers of the natural world. The fortunes of men are less a factor of their moral virtue than a result of an awareness of the ultimate relationship between society and the complex and inevitable cycles of summer and winter. In this realm the timing of the seasons is unpredictable, every summer lasting more than a decade followed by an equally long cold winter. In a sense the summer fosters the powers of the day while winter brings forth the demons of the night. These cycles are long enough that generations can forget the fact that all that is will change. The lesson to be learned is that the castles and kingdoms built by men are only as strong as their memories. Although the timing is unpredictable there are plenty of signs and warnings for those who remember. It's on this stage of the inevitable cycles of nature that the dramas and struggles of human society are waged, and we are made conscious that the quest for temporal power will meet final judgment in the face of what is to come. If there is ultimate virtue it's in the value people place on wisdom and long term vision over short term ambition and greed. Two families epitomize the poles of this very human struggle. In the north are the Starks of Winterfell, whose family motto is "Winter is Coming." Their demeanor is conservative, their colors white and grey, their values shaped by necessity and tradition. In the south, near the colorful fountains of trade and culture and civilization is the throne of kings. There dwell the Lannisters, hungry for power and jealous of all those who would rule over the lands of men. The common order of heroic fantasy is followed faithfully, as it's the outsiders in both families who emerge as heroic figures as the story unfolds. When the seasons begin to change, awakening long forgotten dangers out of the northern wastes, and as another force driven by fire and signaled by the rebirth of dragons rises in the south, one gets a sense that the synthesis of seemingly implacable powers can only be found by those less invested in things as they are. As I look on at the absurd struggles that rage across our lands in a time when a future filled with looming crisis; pandemics, climate change, water shortage, overpopulation and the rest, I find the Stark motto, Winter Is Coming, the most succinct characterization of the realities we collectively face as a species and a civilization. Many of us are outsiders, with little at stake in the petty power struggles of politicians and our so-called leadership. We find ourselc=ves in a shamanic role, as observers on the periphery of social events, living in a reality that appears to challenge the powers-that-be to transcend the narrow limits of an obsolete world-view. Tolkien's magnificent epic leaves us with a challenge, to face the future as moral and responsible human beings, without the crutch of certainty provided by ancient texts and ancient prophecy. We are in a new world after all. George R. R. Martin offers a rather dire tale of the consequences of short sightedness while giving us hope that we may find a way, as we always have, through new leadership and pragmatic vision. Our constant temptation is to dwell on what we lack, and so to be trapped in a struggle that keeps us bound to a world that is passing away. Our salvation lies not in belief but in clarity, and our faith must be found not in the past but in the future. ___________ 1. Martin, George R. R. Martin's cycle: A Song of Ice and Fire, includes: A Game of Thrones (1996), A Clash of Kings (1999), A Storm of Swords (2000) and A Feast for Crows (2005). 2. Thompson, William Irwin, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, St. Martin's Press, 1996 (p. 233). 3. Day, David, Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, Simon & Schuster, 1993. 4. Thompson, William Irwin, Coming Into Being. St. Martin's Press, 1996 (p. 143). # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You can't stop the signal. http://internet.cybermesa.com/~melcher/

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 02:08:57 GMT

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: When The Levee Breaks Date: September 12, 2005 8:01:50 PM MDT When The Levee Breaks "That mean ol' levee taught me to cry and moan." -Memphis Minnie An argument in defense of the government regarding its belated hurricane response is that there was no racism involved. President Bush, according to his wife, "cares for all Americans." Another argument is that the federal government wasn't in charge and that the privations of New Orleans' citizens were the fault of local and state officials. The stories coming out of Louisiana bear witness to a level of incompetence that borders on the criminal. As the months role by, and more than a million displaced people either find a new place in a strained civil order or the opportunity to return and rebuild, we will see a side of America that we've too long wanted to ignore. "That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I just don't believe it." --Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Friday, September 2 Was racism involved in the failure to rescue a major American city? In a nation infected by the de facto discrimination of people of color and real discrimination against the poor, an intentional policy of racism or classism is hardly necessary. The view from above, from the high perch of an elite cadre of rulers and functionaries may contradict in all aspects the experience of those on the ground or in the water. As we listen to the stories from the disaster a new sense of reality emerges. With the uncovering of the truth we may see what really lies underneath the surface of spin that too many Americans have come to accept as reality. The danger is that as the truth overflows its' carefully restricted banks an enormous quantity of pent-up rage could be released, and the challenge will be to direct that anger into passionate response that can deal honestly and fairly with the obstacles in our way. The alternative is very grim indeed. "This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We're going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control." --Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task Force, Friday, September 2 We must confront the facts. Refugees from the flood in New Orleans were turned into criminals for trying to escape and to survive. The city was closed down, and only those who were fortunate or well connected were able to get away. People were directed to places of refuge that were unequipped to handle them. Routes of escape were blockaded. Buses that were promised did not arrive. Food and water were not provided and those who tried to fend for themselves were demonized or worse. Vigilantes were unleashed on a population struggling to survive. People died by the dozens in hospitals and nursing homes from dehydration. Who was in charge? When the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency on the friday before Katrina hit the federal government was in fact given full authority, BY LAW, to take charge of the situation. When the president on saturday concurred in that declaration the Federal Emergency Management Agency was officially IN CHARGE of the situation. As the disaster escalated, regulations governing the new Department of Homeland Security gave the federal agencies full power to take charge of the emergency situation EVEN IN THE ABSENCE OF STATE OR LOCAL REQUEST. True, the response of state and local authorities was abysmally inadequate, but the actions of a nation preoccupied with a war overseas and an obsession with political expediency is unforgivable. "The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week...The country has to choose whether it wants to rebuild the levees and destroyed communities, with no expense spared for the future - or once again brush off that responsibility, and blame the other guy." - Mark Wells, BBC Bill O'Reilly warned that if you don't get an education and a good job in America you'll wind up poor and when you're in trouble help won't be coming anytime soon. His statements contribute to the impression that it's a crime to be poor in this country. To be poor and especially to be poor and black is to be essentially without the fundamental rights that Bill O'Reilly and his fan club take for granted. The problems in New Orleans he attributed to the breakdown of the social order and the spread of lawlessness. In a desperate situation when all authority has failed and survival has been placed in the hands of a disorganized citizenry the boundaries of the law become a subject for interpretation. "You aren't turning the West Bank into another Superdome." - The Sheriffs and police blocking refugees from crossing highway 90 on the way out of New Orleans. Ever since Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" we've dealt with poverty in our nation by pretending it doesn't exist. If the poor make too much noise we just put them in prisons. If we run out of prisons we build more. Prisons are one of the biggest growth industries in America. A bigger percentage of Americans are in prison than in any other industrial power. "I want the folks there on our Gulf Coast to know that the federal government is prepared to help you when the storm passes." --President Bush, Monday, August 29 As the waters very slowly recede in New Orleans some Americans would like to leave the flood behind in a fading sequence of passing news cycles or buried in endless and ongoing self serving investigations. The events of New Orleans resemble a tragedy in a distant third world nation. But Katrina has brought much of what we've hidden from ourselves too close to the surface to be ignored, and there is the matter of those refugees, who won't allow us for long to avoid the face that stares at us from the mirror. The hurricane brought us closer to the crest of a larger flood, one set in motion long ago and propelled by willful ignorance. Out of the hurricane, and the war, and a thousand different pressures building across the land we are witnessing a slow explosion of social consciousness, the likes of which America hasn't been willing to face in decades. "The good news is...that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast.... Out of the rubble of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire house--there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." --President Bush, Friday, September 2 Over the past twenty years America has been turned into a cult. Those who don't share the social standing or viewpoint of the party in power are excluded, considered to be in some way inferior, outside the circle, not worthy of full recognition or rights. Those at the head of the line are considered, and consider themselves, essentially infallible, never themselves accountable because their every thought and action is the expression of a higher, transcendent power. To disagree is to be disloyal, a traitor, not worthy of sharing the sacred ground. Until now, about half the American voting public consists of those appear to be blind, deaf and dumb to anything that crosses the party line, a line that's continually redefined by some of the the most powerful and wide ranging voices of an ubiquitous and too often cooperative media. While many thousands of Americans open their hearts and pocketbooks to provide aid an intentionally crippled government puts its resources into war at the price of preparedness at home. At least a half million of the excluded, the poor and disadvantaged, people of other colors and of other faiths, having lost what little place they had on the margins of the American dream, now dwell in crowded amphitheaters, ballparks and makeshift refugee centers. Will they continue to be left behind, not by any sort of rapture, but by sheer neglect? Are these, the largest displaced population of poor and homeless since the Great Depression, expected to vanish? Will they be added to the poor sections of other American cities, already overburdened by joblessness crime and drug addiction? In the wake of this hurricane we've already seen on the news elements of an America willing to turn upon the victims. Is this America ready to deal with this magnitude of social dislocation? How long will poverty be blamed on the poor? "The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management...his mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home. And every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama. Somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night. [Crying] And she drowned Friday night." --Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, Sunday, September 4 When I was of high school age I spent my summers in a young black community on the east side of Cleveland. We were brought together by Lyndon Johnson's "War On Poverty" as disadvantaged underachievers who had shown early promise but were being failed by conventional education. We lived and played on the beautiful campus of Case Western Reserve University, living in student dormitories, taking classes from enlightened teachers, supervised by a diverse mix of young graduate student counselors who introduced us to politics, music and a taste for culture that would otherwise have been hard to reach. The campus extended down from the wealthy heights out into the ghetto communities below, standing like a fortress of privilege against the poor. When the Hough and Glenville riots erupted in the summers of 1966 and 1968 the campus where I stayed was used as a staging area for the police and national guard. Cleveland, like most cities was divided down the middle into distinct racial and cultural enclaves. In a city with a large population of blacks I never saw a black person until I was about eight. Black neighborhoods were across the river in the oldest and most run down sections of town. They were the most recent immigrants in a city of immigrants and had not yet won the right to be treated as first class citizens. They suffered the highest rate of poverty and unemployment and the high rates of drug addiction and the crime rate that go along with it. This was the situation for too many decades of de facto segregation, where the northern white assumed that blacks, having been freed from forced labor after 200 years, had the same opportunity as whites to succeed in a 'free' society. As long as they kept to themselves and stayed out of white neighborhoods the 'problems' with blacks could be largely ignored or at least shuffled away to someone else's set of priorities. "People are now beginning to voice what we've all been seeing with our own eyes -- the majority of people left in New Orleans are black, they are poor, they are the underbelly of society. When you look at this, what does this say about where we are as a country and where our government is in terms of how it views the people of this country?" --Lester Holt of MSNBC, to House majority leader Tom DeLay, Friday, September 2. DeLay's response: "What it tells me is we're doing a wonderful job and we are an incredibly compassionate people." One night in 1968 a group of us had gone on a field trip way out in the country, to the newly constructed Blossom Center Amphitheater, to a concert by Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie. We didn't get back until late and when we got to the dorms all of the lights were out and we were greeted at the doors when we knocked by an obviously frightened counselor who told us to come in and be quite and avoid standing by the windows. "There's somebody shooting out in the yard." We were bewildered as to what was going on that night, but I remember going up on the elevator to my floor and walking down the hall to my room and seeing a sight that's one of the formative experiences of my life. At the end of the hall was a corner room with a large picture window looking north over the neighborhoods and toward Lake Erie. A group of students sat silently watching, and the whole horizon of the city was filled with enormous leaping flames. This was one of formative experiences of my life, certainly of my political life. I witnessed the awesome destructive power of collective rage, to bring a city and a country face to face with itself. The unique diversity of New Orleans, where so many of the streams of American life flow out to meet the larger ocean, gave birth to jazz, a uniquely American music, and in many ways it was a birth place for much in the American soul. Yet, so many of its citizens are to this day not treated as full members of the club. Too much of the soul of our America has been sacrificed in the name of expediency and profits. When George W. Bush speaks about rebuilding New Orleans does he mean replacing only the casinos, condominiums and oil refineries, or will he allow the fullness of its culture, born out of slavery and poverty and immigration and struggle to reassert itself? Was Hurricane Katrina a program for urban renewal on a massive scale, to replace the heart of the people with some gentrified Republican theme park? The people who made the heart and culture of New Orleans are now in exile, and I know that they won't be kept away without a struggle. "We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame." --Open letter to Bush from theNew Orleans Times-Picayune editorial board, Sunday, September 4 At our political conventions we parade people of color to demonstrate our transcendence of race and class. These subjects have become virtually taboo in the house of our political culture. Since Katrina, however, anyone can see the huge elephants making a shambles of the rooms. In the coming political and cultural storms it will be impossible to keep these factors out of sight and out of mind. I expect the wars that we have chosen to fight abroad will finally be coming home. I've seen what that war can look like. "New Orleans now is abortion-free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras-free. New Orleans now is free of Southern decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion--it's free of all of those things now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there--and now we're going to start over again." --The Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, Friday, September 2 *quotations taken from "New Orleans, Voices in the Storm", The Nation Magazine on the Web, Sept. 9, 2005 _______________________________ "Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit for the rest of our lives." - Bill Mckibben (full essay at: http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/09/07/mckibben/index.html) ______________

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 05:19:28 GMT

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: 90 Minit Man Date: August 7, 2005 11:07:20 PM MDT 90 Minute Man "We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being." - Antonin Artaud (1938) Preface to "The Theater and It's Double" Usually when we look out over the ocean of culture we only see the top of the waves. We've been trained by the movies to expect life to unroll in a series of reels - generally five - 90 to 110 minutes - from set up to confrontation to resolution. Truncated versions of the same arc are made to fit around timed rituals of consumption, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, a little bit of news with commercials; short stories, essays, descriptive paragraphs, routines. I've always preferred epics, continuous, complex and open ended. I like works that are about everything, like Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysseus or War and Peace or Dune. I like trilogies and continuing series' and sequels and episodes and the long running miniseries. Although I don't have cable I'm in love with HBO, which I watch on DVD. Subscription television has taken the sensibilities of cinema and returned it to the small screen, yet extended it into long studies of character and complexity that stretch over weeks and years. Here's something that begins to reflect the real complexities of existence, and isn't constrained to the formulas laid in stone that dominate the 90 minute movie or the ten minute segments between commercials. The magic of storytelling is that we get caught up in identifying with the personalities and characters we listen to or read about or watch on the stage or screen. Antonin Artaud, in his manifestoes for what he called "The Theater of Cruelty," proposed a form of culture in which the audience was engaged not merely as spectators but as the medium itself upon which the artist strives to act. For Artaud the theater was culture and its' purist motivation was to confront society in a manner that caused it to change. He rebelled against the conventional notions of art as entertainment and catharsis, where in proscribed arcs of time good invariably conquers evil or vice versa, or a set of characters are briefly analyzed and a set of problems solved. To Artaud theater should ask the questions and incite an audience to action. In the 30's and 40's when he wrote and acted television had not yet been born. Both theater and the movies were a relatively formal spectacle in which audiences politely took their seats and obeyed the rules of the house. No one fancied that the spectacle could be confined to a small box and placed in the corner of the living room where it would become the actual centerpiece of both domestic and social life as well as the primary vehicle for both social control and evolution. As we sat around the screen and gazed along with the Captains Kirk and Picard and his crew at what was projected on the surface of another screen which dominating the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, we felt the distance between fictional narrative and social reality narrowing. A television series creates characters and situations that mirror the audience and then responds in turn to the needs and desires of that audience over a hopefully long span of ratings and seasons. Actors live with their characters as the viewers live with the show, growing into them and their situations, allowing them into the day by day conversation and flow of our lives. What we choose to look at both reflects and illuminates our personal superficialities and depth of consciousness. The other night I watched the DVD edition of the first episode of one of my favorite short-lived television shows in the last years of the twentieth century, Chris Carter's "Millennium." Something about that series captured for me the waves of building dread that accumulated in those years of growing anxiety before 9/11 and the breakout of endless unwinable wars. The main character in the series, Frank Black, could see directly through the gaze of that which upsets all of our moral certainties. Before Chris Carter with his 'X-Files" and "Millennium," David Lynch entered similar psychological territory in his earlier series, "Twin Peaks." From Lynch, Carter borrowed plot and narrative elements and even actors. Both artists are fascinated by the dark layers that lay between the Norman Rockwell facades of American culture and the truth of who we actually are. Both used the FBI as a metaphor for an essentially spiritual investigation into the nihilistic realms where evil born of ignorance and fear threatens those of us in search of something real in which to believe. In the decades of dissolution following the sixties Americans were haunted by dreams of apocalypse and vanished utopias. Gradually many of us covered over both nightmare and dreams with our will to power and the drive for acquisition, all the while floating on an undercurrent of vague dread and the loss of meaning. Many of us retreated from despair into the simplistic world of fundamentalist religious fantasy. When "Millennium" was cancelled I gave up on watching American network television for many years. Not until the rise of cable and the recent packaging of several long running series' on DVD did I start looking seriously at the form again. In the ensuing years the ninety minute theatrical Hollywood release pretty much lost the nerve that briefly held sway in the seventies when control passed to a new generation of young directors who had honed their skill on television. They turned the tables on the old studio formulas, but were overturned eventually by financial realities. Since then Hollywood has once more returned to the creative control of financier. The necessity of making back huge investments in increasingly competitive and narrow markets has resulted in more and more films that appear to be created by committees. Outside of the occasional breakthrough of independent films mainstream American cinema has pretty much become an extension of Disneyland and Marvel Comics; thrills, spills and light entertainment sprinkled with social commentary at about the level of a Jay Leno monologue. As the price of admission goes up and the technology comes home to living rooms fewer and fewer people are actually going to the movies. In the 90 minute arc there's really only time for endings, for bringing things to more or less satisfactory conclusions. Movies leave us with little sense of the ongoing, or of the future. We've all wondered when the happy couple fades behind the titles 'what happens next?' How can these people keep things going when they aren't in crisis mode? Television breaks out of these constraints, carrying the narrative from week to week, introducing new characters, getting rid of old ones, creating a sense of something that continues toward ambiguous futures. The ongoing series using its' extended time to create characters with the depth that can only be achieved through exploration and the input of many creative minds. As mainstream movies dive more and more into action and effects, television has taken on the task of exploring character and society. Even in the old fashioned cop dramas and situation comedies, not to mention the plethora of reality shows, the real fascination we have is with the characters and how they expose what's under our own skin. In cable series that aren't caught in the commercial constraints of having to meet the common denominators of mainstream taste America is actually fulfilling somewhat the promise of cinema to hold up a mirror to what we are. In long running dramas like The Sopranos or Deadwood or Six Feet Under we see culture illuminated and perhaps begin to understand the motivations of ourselves and others. This is truly adult television, made for those who are ready and willing to look underneath the skin of who we appear to be. The ability of Hollywood movies to deal with reality has always been hopelessly compromised by its' own formulas and the demands and economics of of the studio and star systems. Revolutionary creativity mostly takes place around the edges and in the technical and special effects realm. Here imagination and creativity are allowed relatively free reign, particularly within the burgeoning cinematic genre of science fiction and comic book fantasy. Of course, those of us interested in the big picture, and questions of who and what and why have always found refuge in these worlds of speculation and fantasy. Only recently, through the miracles of digital media which enable moviemakers to create entirely convincing imaginary worlds have these genres begun to dominate the popular mainstream. Perhaps in times of great uncertainly and social dislocation we are naturally attracted to works that spring out of the world of dream and vision. The only thing that carried me through several decades of narrative mediocrity on television was the "Star Trek" franchise which, in all of its' incarnations, stubbornly cast its' gaze back to a more hopeful time when we dreamed of different futures. The trekkies carried forward a uniquely American vision of techno-utopian possibilities. The original series allowed a crew of slightly anarchistic pioneers and explorers to make up rules of engagement on the fly as they encountered alien races and realities in time and space. With "The Next Generation" we had entered the technological expansion that came on the heels of the end of the cold war, when new forms of media and the computer revolution began breaking America out of its' paranoid straitjacket. The crew of Picard's Enterprise approached their journey from the board room, as the new corporate messiahs of a multiracial world order. "Deep Space Nine" took us into the Clinton years, when the dangers of a new world order emerged and we saw ourselves to be the responsible leaders of a still hopeful world, We approached problems with our good faith and superior mediation skills, backed up by the unstoppable force of multinational armies. "Voyager" wanders into new territories of uncertainty. A diverse crew made up of both rebels and soldiers is lost in a chaotic sector of the galaxy, and must come together in common necessity to face a hostile universe. The crew is united under the auspices of an ultimately autocratic captain who enforces the benign but ultimately militaristic order of the Federation. In the most recent incarnation, "Enterprise," the Trek universe turns from a tale about exploration to succumb to a bleak post 9/11 vision of escalating war and paranoia. While echoing the descent of American culture into fear, the show betrayed an essential "Star Trek" vision of humanity embodied in Gene Rodenberry's concept of the Prime Directive, which was essentially a principle of non-interference in alien cultures. Certainly this was in response to a valid threat of extinction, but the choice of preventive war violated something essential to Rodenberry's vision, and once the step was taken the show got stuck in a gear of permanent unresolved conflict, which likely led in part to its' eventual cancellation. During all this time, in a parallel universe, George Lucas was providing us a mythical dimension where technology and human freedom are continually polarized. In virtually every scene and every character and situation "Star Wars" poses the conflict between a complex and ultimately mysterious natural force and the absolute will to power of human culture entirely in thrall to the logic of unrestrained technological power. As of the more recent 'prequels' he left us facing a too familiar scenario - a society governed by fear where an imperial leader uses war as a pretext to assume absolute power. In this mythical and parallel universe we've been left hanging, although we know from the original episodes that the rebels eventually triumph, and there's twenty years between the rise of the Empire and it's fall. We are now embarked on a process of creating narratives that can fill in the blanks. It's not surprising that Lucas' original vision of the battle between the Jedi and the Empire was inspired by the Japanese films of Akira Kurosawa, These days the younger generation is becoming hooked on Japanese cinema, through anime and video games. Our children, who daily watch their culture, community and families being methodically destroyed by the addictive machinery of post capitalist greed, look across the waters to those we once threatened with oblivion. The Japanese have looked directly into the face of absolute technological destruction and survived. You can see it in their narratives and particularly in their movies, going back to the giant rubber monsters like Godzilla and Rodan that used to repeatedly devastate Tokyo, and probably still do. Where the spiritual direction of western culture has always been up and out of the body, until we project our problems in the four dimensions of outer space, the Japanese and Chinese cultures emerge out of the ancient worship of nature spirits. In their worlds of fantasy and science fiction technology invariably confronts and is eventually humbled by the awesome powers of the natural world. The two most uniquely American genres in fiction are the western and the space opera. Both are apt characterizations of aspects of America's own relationship to the natural world. On the one hand Americans see themselves as restless independent spirits, having escaped the confines of an obsolete social order, always looking to the next horizon where we can newly recreate ourselves. Our heroes in movies and literature tend to be loners who resist submission to the collective while making themselves indispensable for it's survival. These two narratives are in continual tension and generally find their resolution when the lone hero either sacrifices himself for the greater good or takes up the reins of command. Our double nature is reflected in the institutions of governance with the dichotomy between president and congress, and in our spirituality, where we seek personal revelation and yet fall into slavish patterns of submission before both charismatic leaders and media celebrities. America is a fabrication that emerges not out of relationship to the land, but from the imagination of a Christian culture that visualizes its' future to be in a place apart from the precincts of birth and death. Our collective connection to the physical world is at best indirect, viewed as something to exploit or mine or rape for it's resources in order to construct the fabric of our idealization. Americans don't generally view the earth as protector or nurturing spirit, but rather as an adversary to be conquered and controlled. Between ourselves and nature we exude an insulating layer of well regulated technology. In this sense the wandering space ship is an accurate characterization of America's self image. Two new narratives in the realm of sci-fi television approach this dilemma from two different directions. The new "Battlestar Galactica" offers the familiar military model, common to the majority of space dramas, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Star Trek" and "Star Wars." In all of these epics the character of the loner, the cowboy, the independent spirit is ultimately submerged to the demands of the collective. The needs of the many supersede the needs of the one. The society within the "Battlestar" is constantly perched on the edge of extinction where the forces of individual desire threaten to pull things apart in many directions, any of which could lead to ultimate destruction. It's an extremely refined model for society tenuously balanced on the cusps of a spiritual crisis. In an interesting variation on classical themes, the machines that seek to destroy humanity worship a single god - a reflection of the scientistic god that has come to dominate human cultures in the modern age - while the humans, true to form, worship numerous gods and goddess in a pantheistic reflection of the true varieties of our spiritual experience. There's little room here for the anarchistic spirit of the outlaw, as the narrative is one of mass exodus versus total destruction. The other narrative is delightfully portrayed in the short running series "Firefly" and its' spinoff, the upcoming movie, "Serenity." Josh Whedon (creator of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel") has captured the essentially American outlaw spirit, and successfully taken it into outer space. The show could in some ways be seen as the "anti-Star Trek" since none of the heroes wear uniforms. Instead the narrative breaks entirely with the military mythos that defines so much of the American psyche in these days of growing terror. In Whedon's outlaw fantasy the uniformed functionaries of the centralized federated government are mostly adversaries and mostly to be avoided. "Firefly's" lead character, Malcolm Reynolds, is in fact taken from the same mold as the George Lucas' space outlaw Han Solo; he drives a freighter, he wears the clothes of a rebel, he deals in contraband, he distrusts the authorities. Where the Solo character's distinguishing feature was a rather adolescent but endearing persona which constantly fled from responsibility (his trademark line: "It's not my fault!"), the character of Reynolds chooses to be responsible for the well-being of a closely knit collective of outlaws and misfits. He follows an absolute and well-defined code of personal honor and loyalty, and his resistance to the apparatus of the state is a matter of conscious and calculated choice. He is essentially a freedom fighter who lives a life of resistance in the face of an over-weaning government. His most notable line is, "I aim to misbehave." When I stumbled onto the starship Serenity (pre-emptively cancelled by the brain dead folks at FOX television only to be brought back to life on DVD and at the movies by an overwhelming fan response) I discovered a narrative space filled with the genuine warmth of human respect and kindness. As much as I like science fiction it can very seldom be characterized as having warmth. Here was a story about an isolated island of humanity drifting beyond the authorized edges of the socially acceptable. It felt very familiar. I liked the sense of place created in the show. It felt a little bit like home, and I liked these characters, so flawed and uncertain and determined to find new ways to live. The closing images of the last two "Star Wars" films are those of war and oncoming darkness. In this collective theater we call western civilization where culture is so much shaped by mass media we increasingly need new images and narratives of rebellion that aren't destructive but instead nurture both the earth and our views of other people. These are the elements that attract me to Serenity's journey and crew. I will stop gushing now. Check out the movie "Serenity" at the end of September or find and watch the DVD package of the whole single season of "Firelfy."