Site Review

I apologize for interrupting my philosophico-historico-politico-misanthropy about rurality and orality, but for once I'm going to write a blog entry like everyone else's blog entry. I'm going to write about something I did. I hope you'll all forgive me.

I ain't telling where I found that scene, because I ain't writing about that place. Instead, I want to offer a site review. Before we were all addicted to "microblogging" (as if blogging weren't already a miniaturized form of expression), people used to offer up reviews of websites. Before that, we used to write reviews of restaurants and stores and things -- reviews of places. That's what this is.

In NYC, a popular bit of graffiti was, "Pray for Pills." Well, let us take time to at least hope for Xanax. I went to Best Buy yesterday.

I went to Taulkinham, because I had me some things I needed to do. That's a 100 mi., 2 hr trip, but it's the nearest non-Wal*Mart shopping to me. While there, I visited Sabbath Lily, and Old Navy and Barnes Ignoble, as well as a mall-bounded Earth Bound Trading Company (where one can buy the religious objects of all sorts of exotic cultures and put your weed in them). When I left the behemoth mall, I thought that I would look at the world of appliances and noisy electrical gadgets at Best Buy. Like going to see a "Brokeback Mountain"/ "Time Traveler's Wife"/ "Julie and Julia" triple feature, I wish I hadn't gone. (Scenery is not a character. Trying to come up with ways to keep the man and woman apart so as to prevent having to explain romance's endurance is not interesting. Julia Child is fascinating; bloggers should do something half so interesting before they get to be part of the story.)

Best Buy has always been the place to find out what our corporate overlords want our future to be. They declare that they sell "what's hot," but, of course, they do no such thing. They, in fact,
participate very, very actively in creating demand. Ever since they went with an all-Windows/no OS/2 software policy, in order to get synergy with Microsoft, Best Buy has been a "synergy" kind of place.

Disney coined the term "imagineer." I have a new term: imaginerr. An imaginerr is a person who imagines a future that will generate maximum profit, and then shapes the consumer to fit the product. It is a person who designs people rather than entertainment. The Disney folks were evil for creating tinfoil simulacra and then saying, "This is American history." They Bowdlerized and forced narrative frames onto reality and sold the result as reality. That was and remains plenty bad, but in boardrooms of MBA's right now, marketeers (like mousketeers, but without the charm) are designing you.

Best Buy have been in bed with the imaginerrs of our future. They don't sell 3G phones before they're popular because 3G is hot: they sell them to make 3G ubiquitous and then to become the "the place for 3G." They have a long, long history of moving exclusively toward whatever product line or product type the major corporations are planning to shove us toward.

If you go to the Best Buy, be prepared to read the future. The subtext of their sales floor is what the goobers and yaboes of next year will be. They will show you tomorrow's yawning maw. When I went yesterday, the subtext was not below the line at all. It was bold, and it said: THE TELEVISION IS YOUR DEITY. Your television will eat your computer, your telephone, your games, your stereo, and everything else. You must serve your television, because your television will be the SOLE "entertainment module" in your home.

Everything, and I mean every damn thing, plugs into the television or the iPod. Their computer selection is off to the side, but those they have boast of their media server readiness. Their stereo equipment has ceased to exist, except in the form of A/V componentry that plugs into your television. Stereo speakers are ALL for your television, to provide the greatest Sens-o-round experience in Doubly 5.2 Direct X. Telephones are for video and send to your video server. Their DVD's are almost all Blu-ray now. Even small stereos were not to be found, as they were all extensions of iPods.

I looked for a CD player and some bookshelf speakers. Alas, fool that I am, I should have stayed in my cave. CD players are not good. Now, mp3 players rule. The irony that mp3, which was a compression method designed to allow us computer nerds to back up our higher fidelity .au files, has replaced the .au file because of the sheer gluttony of the idiocracy is only painful if you think. You see, the iPod/mp3 player is "better" than the CD player, because "you can get, like, thousands of songs on there." They sound like junk, but, when you listen on a 0.25" cell phone speaker, subtlety isn't your game to begin with. Speakers? Sure. Center channel, or satellite, or subwoofer? Is it for behind my television or beside my television?

The store was loud, extremely.

The blue golf shirts were following me around (they may have been people, but I'm not sure).

The customers, though, were that added element that made the soup's bilious toxins really pop. They were a mixture of extras from Axe body spray and Mountain Dew commercials, with some Ford Truck background extras woven between them, wallets extended like offerings to pagan gods. In the parking lot, these animated rag dolls were trying out the latest moves they'd learned on Grand Theft Auto or auditioning for MTV Rims, or whatever it's called.

Walking into the store was an insult. Looking at the merchandise was a confirmation that the corporations of the world want me to suffer needlessly for their amusement. Walking out was like surfacing after being held underwater by a bully.

So, do I want to go look at electronics again? The web is safer, closer, and, fortunately, devoid of people.

Heel America (part two)

I should give some background and dull the blade a bit on my attack, since I appear to be drawing more blood or causing more damage than I had intended.

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." -- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Book II, King of Brobdingnag.

"Real America" is a term that Sarah Palin uses -- one endorsed and gathered into the flaps of the cloak of Republican discourse -- as code. For her, given her most recent usage of the phrase, it seems to mean only "my supporters," with the dullard's implication that those who do not support her are not only not patriotic, but not American. However, in the nibs and mouths of other Republicans, the ones who urged the phrase into her in the first place, the term refers to a geography that the party believes it can win and a demographic that interlaces a different geography.

The geography implied is the "blank America," the America between the cities, the America of the towns without names, the unincorporated America, the rural America. Facing an election in 2008 where they believed that they had lost the northeast and the west coast, they began to speak of "Real America" as everything between. In fact, the target of such talk was not altogether between the coasts, and it certainly wasn't really the 20% of the population living in the blanks on the map, but it was the South, which perceives itself as rural. The target was a demographic that believes itself to be rural, even as it commutes to work an hour on interstates in an SUV instead of a pickup truck, listening to anger radio the whole way in and back.

The demographic of angry (white) (male) voters isn't my concern, though. My concern is the reality of the "Real America" that Sarah Palin herself actually does represent. She may mean to represent angry white men with fixations, but her actual story as small town mayor and her rise are true representations of the microtown and the rural real.

This blank America is an artifact of the Interstate Highway system. Prior to the Eisenhower Interstate system, many, if not most, of these small towns had a reason to exist. At the very least, it had a deterrent to evacuation. Prior to the interstates, the few national routes slithered through hundreds of small towns, giving hotels and restaurants and novelty architecture and regional raree shows boosts. There was neither a possibility nor an incentive to have a franchised, uniform business conquer the whole of the stretch, nor for one business or business model to homogenize the whole. For small towns like Louisville, North Carolina to be cut off from the nodes and cities of the state, there had to be a line to make the cut, and the interstate provided that line. Prior to the rationalized, massively freighted lines, small towns had their own transportation and industrial routes. River traffic that had once been a logical and profitable localism ceased before the reliability of road transport. Money, then agriculture, then people flowed toward centers nearer and nearer to the line that would connect to the big dots on the map, and the shaded parts of the states grew more blank.


Therefore, the Real America of Sarah Palin's discourse is a post-1960 phenomenon (yes, the interstate system is 50's, but they have to get built, and then they have to have an effect). After that point, regionalism, both in accent and manners and identity, diminished as the cities and suburbs came into their own, and the idea of family roots and localism were less and less adherent for the wealthy and educated. We have seen many, many politicians on the national stage who have come from small towns. Many eminent women and men, many sages and saints come from small towns. Indeed, it seems that being from a small town is a great thing, especially.

Jimmy Carter, for example, came from a small town in Georgia. His was a semi-patrician family (his dialect, though, is purely patrician and not native), but we note that he took his talent and his values and left the small town. He left in order to practice his virtues on a larger stage than his town could offer. He left first to the U.S. Naval Academy, and then he sought to be Governor of his state, picking up from the rather odd traditions of Lester Maddox and the Talmages. Jimmy Carter's small town upbringing shows in many things about him. His religion and his marriage and his attitudes toward forgiveness are all shaded by the values instilled by the post-bellum Southern rural world, but one thing he has never been is a small town politician, a happy small town mayor.

My premise, you will recall, is that the last thing we should want is a politician from "Real America." I should take the ambiguity out and say that we do not want a person who is a politician in "Real America," rather than a person who is a politician and once was in or of "Real America." The latter individual may be superior. The former is an a priori disaster.


The microtown suffers from blight and recycles itself every year. Because building is more beneficial than renovation, large buildings are left empty more often than they are refurbished, but each part of the town experiences a spasm of paint and beams, new banners, crowds, closings, decay, demolition, and then building again. Where I am, steps along the sidewalk lead to empty fields over and over. Once, houses perched there, and the steps led to their stoops. Now, the gardens of 1925 are wildflowers.

In a city, power comes from one's job. In the Real America, power is land. "Real America" is neo-feudal, in that land ownership is common, and it marks out the basis of power and wealth beneath anything so transitory as a particular generation's children's inclinations. That feudal structure had been in place in the South in the Reconstruction era, and it was famously written up by Faulkner. However, that was feudal, not neo-feudal. That came complete with noblesse oblige, education, and its Atticus Finches. After Faulkner's people went to their mixed rewards, the next up dispensed with the bother of families and kept right on with honoring the owners of the land. The owners of the land were, by the 1960's, the working class whites who had bought every time an aristocrat in distress had sold, every time a well trained noble had gone to the city to make a large impression on the world with a small town upbringing (and first class education), every time an antique family died without issue. The land remained the power.

In the "middle," the pace was accelerated, as there hadn't been the bother with ancient rites. Ranchers, farmers, any "original settlers" or "pioneers" (i.e. the people who came in and displaced American Indians or flooded into the vaccuum, legal or military, after they "had been" displaced) that had been town founders had been town powers and had been town owners. Being from a small town before 1960 meant being from a well established family that guaranteed a strong drive for education, as well as values of service to the less fortunate and, especially in the midwest and west, constructing a town. In other words, town founders worried about what makes a town work and had to have a touch of the altruistic in them. Again, though, as the microtown develops, the people "from small towns" who have these skills and values leave, and the power stays with the land.

In a movie Western, good or bad, one hears about some character or other, usually corrupt, and then that "he's a major land owner in this county" and so, "You can't buck him, Sheriff." Of course that is all a shadow cast by the Lincoln County War, as Hollywood (and I am, too) is on the side of the sheep against the beef. But, at the same time, that line resonates, if it does not telegraph out to the real land owners who watch movies, with small town America.

I am the scion of both the fallen and risen groups. I am mainly, though, the son of two people who are "from a small town." Both grew up, one in a family that had been very important before the Civil War and become impoverished during Reconstruction, and the other that had been part of the southern professional class during the whole time and therefore had remained prosperous, before the interstate system, and both had memories of their towns as important places with set social orders and strong value systems. My observation is starkly different, because I return after their professional lives, after the interstates made their towns otiose. I had seen before, though, what I have seen here, more than once.

In the blank American town, the person with land owns, and retains ownership. That person has the capacity to generate wealth when necessary, and usually to gain more wealth. More to the point, such a person gains the ability to rent. In the actual terms of Adam Smith, such a person becomes a naive capitalist. Because the microtown is cut off, because the Interstate is forty miles that way or that way, because "those people in [Big City]" do things differently, the landed individual inherits the social position of the founder without inheriting the values of the founder.

The pioneer who crosses the plains to set up a community and decides to put his life, wife, and future at stake to live with the rest of his wagon train in a particular valley is dedicated, vitally, to the concept of cooperation. Contrary to NRA pamphlets, such persons were not dedicated to shooting things and people and "freedom." Even if the people who settled were weirdos there to get gold, the ones who stayed were pretty passionate about the idea of a town that functioned by law and fairness. Those "founders," like the aristocratic families of the south, took care to inculcate in their children a code of compassion and fairness (at the end of a lash, if necessary). The person who acquires simply to overcome the unfairness of the capitalist system, on the other hand, may inculcate a different set of values, may have a different lesson to teach. In microtowns now, that is the person, through abdication and abnegation, who is the town leader.

[I've detained you enough for one essay. I will continue with part three, but it will come sooner than this one did. Rising gorge wants out.]

Heel America (part one)

Alaska "governor" Sarah Palin has resigned. William "Wrong Way" Kristol had praised her last year as a vice presidential pick for John McCain precisely because she represented both "energy" and "Real America." This latter theme is something that Mrs. Palin was eager to promote. She was consistent in telling all who followed her that she was "real" in a way that other candidates for office were not.

Now, there are all sorts of questions that arise from this.

One is George Chapman's statement from 1612, "Ignorance is the mother of admiration." The more we know about anyone, the less we admire that person, and Sarah Palin was completely unknown -- a set of cheekbones onto which we could paint the cosmetics of our own political desires. All of us who had been snubbed by the junior high school Pom-Pom, either for a date or friendship, could project our nastiness, and all of us who wished still to cuddle up to that same bundle of confetti on a string could do so again. Was that all that Palin was? Was she just Dan Quayle in drag?

I think, instead, of something Swift said in one of his sermons: "The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit." Sarah Palin was a happy woman, a "pitbull in lipstick" and a "hockey mom" and a "small town mayor," and, most of all, a success story from real America.

Long before I moved (back) to "real America," I knew what it was. Long before I moved to a very small micro-town, I knew what it meant. I knew what it was to survive and thrive in one. It is not quite the same thing as surviving and thriving in high school, although my suburban high school in a major city had more students in it than my current "city" does citizens, but it means that rules and conditions that apply nationally are simply in abeyance, and, in their place, a different set of expectations and demands function. These are not, Republican rhetoric designed to pander to its only voters notwithstanding, better or more "real" than other expectations and demands, and they are certainly not more sincere. They have only one claim to greater "reality," and that is a greater realpolitik to them, a thinner margin between personal greed and political gain.

The "real America" or "real American town" is always in economic crisis. Whether there is a recession or not, but more when there is, it has trouble with unemployment. Its "underclass" is not abstract, not dislocated, not in a vague "other" place. The unemployed and underclass are visible every day, wandering through town, and the Section Eight housing is a major feature of city architecture. The town usually worries about "the plant." It may be "the textile mill" or "the bag plant" or "the control" maker, but there is a single monocultural employer that will dominate and overshadow the town's economy. Similarly, a single merchant will overshadow the retail opportunities for the town (usually Wal*Mart).

Towspeople will not congregate at "the mall," and "mall culture" and such talk as that is as foreign to them as talk of sushi bars. Instead, whether it's Bill's Dollar Store or K-Mart or Rite Aid or Wal*Mart, there is a single general store that will expand to take in most of the retail activity of the town, and it will have virtual monopoly power. Grocery stores will be scarce. Usually, there will be two. One will be general, and the other will be low cost, with a featured section for immigrant cuisine (brands known south of the U.S. border, with packaging written in Spanish). There will almost inevitably be a crisis of empty store fronts. If the empty store fronts are not the vacated downtown, they will be the evacuated Wal*Mart, and they will prove impossible to rent, long term. Agriculture will take place around the town, and so the city's population will never reflect the actual economic residents. Fast food restaurants will proliferate, with perhaps two or three older restaurants barely surviving on slim margins. The population will flange out, with old and young, but little in between. Children and elderly will outnumber mid-life adults, and so there will be a constant tax crisis for schools and social services and therefore a constant need for state and federal assistance in these places where state and federal agencies can least find the population. There will be community colleges and technical schools, but universities and four-year institutions will constitute "going away" and going into debt, and therefore they can only exist as online degrees or for the children of the upper class. As a result, the independent businesses that really boom are loan and medical supply businesses.

The disparity between upper and lower classes is personal, not abstract. It is encoded in families, in names, in street and place marks, and in attitudes. "Fallen" families do not get respected the way that Emily Grierson did, at least not since the 1960's. Rising families do not have to endow public works and make the Snopes municipal building, or the Tweed City Hall. Instead, the signifiers are more dynamic, as the fortunes are, and more affected.

Open the door to the homes of the real America, and you will find satellite televisions and Internet connections, and these are, in my estimation, the only actual changes and erosions in what had been a petrified forest of certitude and cultural ideolect. Inside, you will see the women decorating in Martha Stewart's imagineered New England style, or Paula Deen's reclaimed South, or a neo-native Southwestern, or a clumsily distilled and purified northern immigrant cute, but it will be as expensive as anything could be, and it will be practiced as a debutante's bow or a best man's toast.

Go out the back door, and you will find the disturbed soil of acres of all-terrain vehicle tracks or vainglorious gardening. The men will have thrown themselves outward in a jovial, lite-beer, back strain and hoed or roto-tilled or chain sawed or fenced or shot, and land will be desired or damned for its recalcitrance or promise.

This is the town, the village, the dimple.

When you who live in cities look at a map of your state, or when you who live in other nations look at the United States, you will focus on the centers and then see shaded areas inside the lines, as if cartographers had too much color and too little data. Within that big box of "state," you will know of things -- Chicago, Raleigh, Kansas City, Mobile -- and then you will, if you are bothered enough, notice all of these freckles on the surface of the plain. They have unimaginative or improbably hallucinatory names, and they do not appear at regular intervals. No one lives there. For all the evidence you have, sitting in an apartment or flat, these are mere accidents of penmanship at the map companies. When the elections occur, you hear about them, and you hear that all of these divots on the surface of the nation have only one opinion, one mood, one thought, and that is resentment toward the people who ignore them.

Well, I'm here, here in "Real America," as Sarah Palin puts it. I will take two more posts to talk about it, to be your spy, to report on it as a fact and artifact, and I'd like to tell you why, of all the things the world may or may not need, a politician from Real America is the one thing we need least.

Stray Marks

Reader, I have spared you many images. It isn't the subject of my post today that I need to protect you from, but the environment that it prefers.
For now, let's say that's rice.

"This man is fortunate who can get for himself
praise and good will;
very difficult it is when a man lays claim
to what is in another's heart." -- "Sayings of the High One" 8, Poetic Edda

Now that Summer is icummen in, we are plagued with stray animals. The problem with the strays can be laid upon our municipal authorities, upon our culture, upon the animals themselves, and upon our selves.

Oh, I know how it is. Every child wants a young one. Who isn't broken-hearted when he sees a little pupae wriggling in decomposing flesh? The kids all demand that the parents adopt, and all the little pupae are cute, their cute spots on their trunks as they squirm through a wound or the corpse of an opossum on the side of the road. However, adopting a maggot is serious business.

Soon, that cute little larva "dies," and then the children lose interest. If only it were true. Instead, Wiggy, your pet maggot, has just gone into metamorphose, and it will come out a fly, a fly that you do not want to feed and train. Just thirty-six hours after emerging, the no-longer-cute pets are breeding. This is why we have such strays clouding the skies.

It is important to spay or neuter your housefly as soon as it emerges from its chrysalis, if you want to control the population.

Ambition

My long time readers, who were pleased to hear, in my last post, that I live, will be even more pleased to read that I have at long last settled the important issue of how to die.

You will all, of course, know that the injustice of funerary architecture these machine-made days is an evil that afflicts all of us, from paupers to titans of industry and decidering. After all, everyone gets at least a little concerned about how one will be remembered. For me, the question has been what sort of outward mark one makes. Oh, there is the mound of earth one displaces when freshly interred, but, once that swelling does down, what mark on the landscape is left? Once, the pauper hated poverty for fear of the potter's field, as dying without a proper grave was somehow sinful to the living and the society. On the other hand, rich folks planned ahead, and some of them really planned ahead. That has always been the key. If you want people to remember you, you need to plan ahead.

What can I do, though?

I'm in my 40's, and I'm poor. I have not purchased a plot, although I'm told there is "room" for me in places in various pieces of ground in the sandy soil soon to be covered by ocean, thanks to SUV's and bovine gastritis. Besides, the reason most everyone has only a slab with birth, death, and "a nice person" for a memorial is that no one has the time to plan, even if a person has the inclination and the mental capacity to dwell on the great null point. (Try thinking about unbeing. No, really. Don't try to think about heaven or floating as a ghost or sleeping. Try thinking like your body, as just not. Can't do it, can you? I believe in the afterlife, but even there, it's kind of complicated with particular and general judgment. Now, keep thinking about it for a long enough time to do something about it. That's fortitude.)

Well, it has taken me all of these decades to finally realize that the industrialized, inhuman, inhumane, world we live in is my ally, not my enemy, in being memorialized. I cannot find the news release now, as it was really just one of those headline grabbing alarms from two years ago or so, but the FDA reported some time ago that humans are unsafe to eat. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that, what with how many pills and powders and cremes and supplements humans ingest, apply, inject, and wear, humans, if they ever were to be meat, would be hazardous.

Too bad for the would-be cannibals (yes, of course there are some). Still, it makes one sad, and then it makes one sadder, and then it lights up the old 40-watt bulb.

I have a plan, and you can join in. I plan to eat as many hotdogs as I can stomach and stomach as many fried cheese sticks, Jimmy Dean sausages, Vienna sausages, "creme"-filled confections, and "ice-milk" and "sugar free" and "fat free" and "fat substitute" and "butter substitute" and "jumbo" sized miniature food items as I can. I intend to take medications for every ailment the television convinces me I have. I feel fatigued, and the television says that's a symptom of all sorts of things. I have PMS, PMDD, PTSD, depression, shyness, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and Legionnaire's disease. I feel fine, so I have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder, and erectile dysfunction. I think I peed too often, or not enough, so I need to medicate, and I'm sure my stool is all wrong for a man of my dignity. I'm too fat in the wrong places, too soft and too hard.

I plan to operate microwave ovens while talking on the cell phone, while I work on my laptop, with the batteries gently warming my testicles. I plan to breathe deeply as I fuel my car. I will be sure to keep my air conditioning and central heat going at the same time. I want the temperature to be exactly 70 degrees. I will put fluorescent bulbs everywhere.

My plan is simple.

I will turn my body into a toxic waste.

When I die, my grave will become a Superfund site. I cannot hope to put up a mauseleum for myself. I cannot afford a tomb. I cannot have anything that will mark me or indicate my personality. Nothing will show even the next day's visitor any sign of who I was. However, when the whole cemetery gets roped off and men in HazMat suits have to remove 4' of topsoil just to deal with my rotten, rotting corpse, I'll have made my memorial.

I Live

I just wanted to let the assembled world know that I'm still alive, and I'm still thinking.

In fact, that's the problem. I think all sorts of blog posts. In several instances, I have "written" them entirely out in my mind, complete with the satisfaction of completion and the thrill of the total feedback that I usually get from blogging (i.e. none, really, which is ok, as I have assiduously avoided taking even the most basic and automatic steps that would increase my profile and readership).

Let me explain why I "blog," and then I'll be able to explain why I sometimes fail to blog for long periods of time.

I am bothered by ideas. We all get ideas, I hope. However, ideas actually bother me. They keep annoying me, keep irritating me, keep cropping up. It's not that I think I can make any difference or that I have any genius or that my ideas are going to be better than anyone else's -- it's nothing so egoistic. It's purely medical. When I notice something, it actually annoys me, and this is true of noticing something good or bad.

The more I think I am seeing something that is novel or powerful, the more aggravated I get, and I have to let it out. It is not the blog that I need, but the essay. Long before blogs existed, I wrote essays, because I needed a sort of emesis of logic and fancy. Nor do I mean that this is that teenage romantic's selfishness, either. It's not about me. These are not ideas about myself, not ideas for myself, and not things I want to communicate to reflect on myself. Usually, they're ... as you can see... ideas about ideas, and I want to communicate because there is a value in the proposition itself, I think, and because my job is to fashion the raw observation into a pleasing expression.

Assume that observations are constant. Assume that annoyance with ideas is constant, too. What varies is only whether the ideas are too big for the format, too trivial to communicate, or already satisfied by another means.

When you see no new entries, it's usually because I've gone back to paper and ink essays or because I'm struggling with a rather massive thing and cannot make it presentable.

If there is interest, I will share a paper essay that I've done recently that has gotten very good reviews. It's long, though, because it's on paper, and that's just tough. If you don't have the time or concentration, then go read the Yo' Mama Joke of the Day.

The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

As I mentioned in my previous post, and I should go on record as saying that the most annoying thing about blogging is that the newest is on top, and so there is reverse apparent chronology, I lived in da Branx for a few years. I was praised frequently for being "brave" for moving from Goldsboro, North Carolina, to New York City, New York. (The Bronx address was simply a matter of finding an affordable apartment. I would like to say, loudly and clearly, that I loved my landlord there: he was a good egg, a good guy, and an honorable person. I was very lucky.) There was no courage involved. Is a city going to hurt you? What a dumb thing to say.

Anyway, I meant to tell y'all about a dream. I dreamed that I met Death. He was vague, so don't ask me to tell you what he looked like. He was also, by the way, a he. In all the odd protest about "foregrounding" in language and assuming that people must be male unless otherwise specified, I have not once heard anyone protest at the way that most societies (all?) assume that Death is male. This is especially surprising, when you think about it, because Death keeps his pelvis covered, so how do we know Death is male? It's not like there are any secondary sexual characteristics left... or primary, for that matter. Anyway, Death was male, blobby gray but male (look: I'm blobby, myself, and I'm male), and I said, "I have been waiting for you all my life, you know." (I see now that that was a joke, but, in my dream, it wasn't intended to be a joke, and Death, who is reputed to have no sense of humor, didn't get it.) Death said that he wasn't free to come and go whenever people thought about him. I asked him, then, who exactly is in charge of him, and he said, "Mostly, it's you." (I don't think he meant me, particularly.)

I started to think that was a cool answer. In my defense, people, I was asleep. Anyway, I quickly began to have some brain function and told him that was a stupid, 1960's answer. That, unfortunately, woke me up. It was a choice of not getting to call Death on his B.S. or not getting to talk to him.

When I lived in da Branx, I used to play a game. I woke up every morning at about 5:30, and I was on the train by 6:15 AM to be at work. I absolutely LOVE THE SUBWAY! Yeah, I know -- death, trains, tunnels, mysterious houses, etc., but we're not talking about death now, so get your mind out of the dirt.

>Hey! Close the cell phone. Don't answer that text message: I'm trying to tell you about the game I played.

Ok, so I had this game. The objective was simple. Without using headphones before the train was in motion or after it came to a stop, could I journey from my home in Pelham Bay to my work beside the Guggenheim Museum and return at the end of the day without once hearing the "F word" used in anger? If someone used it in a joke, or as an interjection or ejaculation, that would be acceptable, but I couldn't hear it as a weapon in the whole time. I lost. In two years of working, I never won the game once.

I moved from New York to a really dangerous town, Baltimore, and then came down to a suburb of Taulkinham. I went from 8,000,000 people in my town to 394. I think that was brave. I also went from riding the train to work every morning and afternoon and reading books to driving a car every morning and afternoon and listening to CD's. I'm agitated by that, because I can find more interesting books than interesting CD's these days, but it puts me back into Mainstream Merica. Merican's drive, and I drive. Mericans have bumperstickers, and I have one, too. I went to a church where no one noticed to one where I get phone calls about every event and where my denomination was almost a majority to where my denomination is frequently confused with alcoholism.

I also developed a new game. The Branx game wouldn't be interesting, as hearing that word used in that manner ever, here, would be a special occasion. Instead, the game is getting to and from work without seeing Death. Opposums, nature's speed bump, are ubiquitous enough that they are difficult to mourn. Somehow, these creatures must have adapted their reproductive cycle to the natural predation of the automobile. (Q. Why did the chicken cross the road? A. To prove to the 'possum that it could be done.) Armadillos show up, too. They don't belong here, and they're really, really good at digging up plants, so no one frets over their tiny eviscera scooped into their shells on the roadbed. Deer, too, lie beside the road -- their dead eyes gazing down the highway as if they were searching for a destination. Most distressing, to me, are the dogs and cats, and there are far too many of them. Some have collars, most do not. Whether their deaths are grisly or "clean," they are dead, and all the love and joy they could bring is dashed, all the love and joy they had elided.

Do I win this game? Yes. Sometimes I make it. It's not often, though.

The point of these games, though, is not merely satire. The reason I'm telling you about them at all is that both were violence, both force. Both the hate and anger I heard, eructations of unquiet souls, and the dead who lie in the median like passengers waiting for their conductor to stop the train, were compulsions to the world. The book blurred, and the song goes to hiss and noise, when these interruptions come. I cannot then pretend that I am traveling alone, that there is beauty or wisdom to go with me. If I listen to a delicate Brahms air in my car and see the crushed animal, or the animal pointing its broken snout at the yellow line, then Brahms is a liar, and if I were reading Shelby Foote's chivalrous prose when Angie screamed at Tricia that she was a bad person, then Foote fled.

Death said that he mainly waited for me, that I was in charge. What a stupid lie. The bastard interrupts.

Sloganeering

It sickens me that "slonganeering" is a word, but I'm pretty ill to begin with, so it can hardly be the only pathogen.

This morning, the BBC said something quite innocent, and I have no fault with it, but it set me to thinking. They were speaking of My President Obama, and they said that "he has a way with words" and therefore expected a grand inauguration speech from him.
That's the thing, folks. Words don't mean anything, and yet American business and Americans themselves have concentrated on words as if they are the primitive, runic spells that we find on lintels saying, "This house will stand." Magical words and words as magic... this stuff is old, and we're somewhat past it in general. I think there are "magical" words, in that if you call my name, I will answer or look, and so the word by itself has done something. In such a way, the divine invests some words the way that I invest my name. However, it is not the word that did that, but the divinity.

Anyway, there are all sorts of people who look at Barrack Obama's speeches and decide that what they need is "rebranding" and that he is a "brand." It doesn't help that Obama's people allowed all those "Hope" posters up. I'd like to think, though, that the one word posters were the magician's moving hand -- distractions for the audience -- because I know that they didn't sway any voters, and they were nothing to My President Obama's speeches.

If you don't believe I. A. Richards, who said that a word carries no meaning, that a word's "meaning" is only a listing of its potential syntactic positions, then perhaps you'll believe St. Paul, who said, "Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3:6). Richards, by the way, was saying that "meaning" in a dictionary is simply a list of positions, for a word has no meaning outside of a sentence or an utterance.

Imagine some poor fellow with a brain injury who shouts out, "Martians!" every few minutes. Is there a meaning to that word? Will he increase awareness of life on Mars? During the Democratic primaries, and then during the General Election, all anyone could say was "Change." Every comedian had a joke about that, and I had my own memory that made me wince every time I heard them get a verbal spasm.

You see, I used to live in da Branx, in New York. (More about that when I get a chance.) Lotto playing was a plague there. I used to go to a tiny bodega for...magazines. The thing was one body width wide and four steps deep. The magazines I wanted were at the very end of the shotgun shack. Anyway, panhandlers were common there, in Tremont Square, and I was used to them. Next door to the bodega was a "doughnut shop" that I went to every day. (In NYC, donut shops are usually diners, and diners are restaurants, and restaurants are bars.)

Anyhow, one day, there was a haggard and repulsive woman in her fifties outside the bodega. She shouted, in the most nasal tones, "Change?! Change?!" People would give her a dollar every so often. She would then take one step, inside the bodega, get another scratch off Lotto card, rub off squares, lose, throw the card on the ground, and shout out, again, "Change?! Change?!" That's all she did. She was begging to play Lotto. She had a home. She had a family. She had some kind of major neurological disability.

Anyway, I kept hearing her when the candidates put up their "Change" banners.

Barrack Obama's magic is not words. Let Republicans and lesser Democrats imitate his words, if they want. In Baltimore, they went nuts for a "Believe" bumper sticker. It didn't do anything. Let corporate weasels concentrate on "brand images." It won't help their products. They will simply grab another Lotto card, have no luck, and go back to more "change" in their "brand."

My President Barrack Obama is amazing because of his sentiments, thoughts, expressions, speeches, utterances, and feelings and that is not a matter of a word.

The Unborn

I have been thinking about birth and its rights, members, and appurtenances whatsoever. More particularly, I have been thinking about how we talk about birth.

Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. . .
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools. -- King Lear

Indeed, we are "born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed," as Thomas Fuller said, and certainly I have done my bit along those lines. That said, there is a term that bears consideration, for we have increasingly begun to use it in a novel manner. That word is, as you can foretell from the title, "Unborn."

On a literal level, "unborn" makes no sense whatsoever. It is the opposite of being "born again," despite the number of people who call themselves "born again" who worry about the "unborn." To be unborn is to reverse birth, to undo delivery, to return to sender. To be placed back in the womb.

Some smug psychoanalysts would say that being "unborn" is the source of all our desires. Residual fetal memory, you see, is the source of the concept of the Garden of Eden, Marx's idea of "primitive Communism," and any other lost idyll. Therefore, getting un-born would be every human's greatest desire.

That, of course, bears no relation to the meaning of the term "unborn." "Unborn" does not mean unborn. It means "not yet born human being." As such, it is a begging the question term in a political argument. The abortion argument, after all, is not an argument about when life begins. No one is fool enough to say that the zygote isn't alive. The argument about abortion is about when "human life" and "separate human life" from a legal standpoint begins. The term "unborn" suggests that there is a "person" in there, waiting. It therefore presupposes the answer to this question of whether a fetus is a "person" or a collection of cells. If you use the term "unborn," you are very definitively stating that the lump is not a part of the mother, that it is a person who simply has not yet experienced birth.

The abortion "argument" will never be solved by science, because the question is not scientific. The question is purely legal: when is something attached to the mother's body not the mother's body? When is the potentiality an actuality? These are questions palliated, slightly, by holding to standards such as "viability" (when can a fetus survive being removed from the placenta?), but those questions are only attempts at achieving the real need: social consensus on a social designation.

I assume everyone has her or his own position on the matter. I do not. I haven't a clue. I know that I won't have to have an abortion, and I know that I wouldn't want one, but that's about all I know.

The odd thing about "unborn," though, is that it was conceived and delivered in politics. It was a very precise statement of a position, and yet the news media have employed it, as they have generally given the anti-abortion forces more camera time than those in favor of the status quo, and now we see the term being used generically to mean "fetus." Congresses in various states and in Washington D.C. have attempted to normalize the term, as well, by passing laws making it a crime to kill an "unborn" human in the commission of a crime (e.g. killing a pregnant woman makes you guilty of two murders). These measures seem superficially acceptable -- who doesn't think it's worse to kill a gravid woman than otherwise? -- but they sneak in the concept that fetuses have the same protections as the born.

The point is that this political term, this rather nonsensical one, that was so obviously a statement of beliefs, has gone somewhat neutral.

There is a movie out now called "The Unborn." The premise of the film is that, once upon a time, a woman was pregnant with twins, but only one of them survived in utero and was born. The one that did not survive then haunts and strips naked the living one for ninety minutes. The film is directed by Michael Bay, so you know it's deep.

Now, there is something profoundly odd about this premise. I have nothing against spectacle. Ok, I do, but not every time. However, there is some seriously odd metempsychosis being implied here. So, we have a fetus that has a soul. We have another fetus with a soul. Sketchy...but alright. Now, one twin gets more nutrients from the placenta than the other. Alright: this happens frequently, and it's why our hearts are broken so regularly by the runt of the litter. The term "unborn" is here obviously a euphemism for "stillborn" or "aborted." The villain in the film is stillborn or aborted.

So far, although it's a rather icky thing, we're dealing with a familiar, natural, and infinitely sad question of reality, except that, in this case, the "unborn" child is literally unborn. It goes back. The soul that migrated into the zygote must go "back" to wherever it would have migrated from, and, from that perch, start looking for other types of "birth," such as possessing precocious ten year olds, mirrored glass, and shower stalls.

How odd is it that we have "unborn" used as a euphemism for natural abortion or failure to thrive or stillbirth, and then extend that to the idea of a soul hanging around, looking for a body, and then getting royally annoyed by the wait for flesh?

"No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one." -- E. M. Cioran

"Birth," in the context of this movie's discourse, has nothing to do with gestation. It is purely a matter of some sort of pre-existing entity that employs a mother and father as a method. The problem there, and I know some of the eschatologically minded will be annoyed that I say this, is that it is, prima facia, absurd.

Why do I single them out, when I could be annoying many more people than that? Well, a lot of people have a very, very particular understanding of the anti-Christ. They believe that the anti-Christ is an already-existing entity that dwells in Hell and who will be born in a sinister mirroring of the Incarnation. I will take no time arguing with them that they are wrong or resting on incredibly slender theological legs. The actual Incarnation is special, because Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. I do not in any way accord Satan equality with God, and therefore I do not see how there was the Word and an anti-Word from the beginning. If Satan is going to have a child, I think it's going to have to be by possession or infusing with infernal soul, and not be incarnation.

You see, sperm and egg unite and create a nearly always unique combination of genes that are further expressed in pretty unique ways due to conditions in utero. Whatever the creature is who results from fertilization, he or she needed both sets of genetics to get there. If he goes back, he goes away. So, if there is a soul that waits for parents to be expressed, then it's only a soul, not a "person." In Michael Bay's profound cinematic universe, though, it's a creature, and Mommy was merely a way station.

Mothers and fathers are only carrying cases? This takes the assumptions of "unborn" to the most irrational position it has ever occupied.

Last on the ship

Note: I had hoped, prayed, and even believed that I would be done with the character sketches. It's a nasty business, even if "Difficile est satiram non scribere" (Juvenal, Satire I, 30). However, they come to me: I do not go in search of them.

"He that complies against his will,
Is of his own opinion still." -- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

There are professional disciplines that have gotten into the habit of experiencing revolutions. "Revolution" and "habit" should be antonyms, but, for some, the cycle of revolution is roughly the same as the cycle of rank-and-tenure committee appointments. I am not talking about the tiresome, petty, pettifogging tedium of "theory" of any sort, either.

Harold Bloom is the saint, in a way, and the visionary of the perpetual revolution. I do not mean to suggest that the phenomenon waited for The Anxiety of Influence or the egoism of "strong readings" to begin, but he is the Ann Coulter of avid sniping in academics. As you will recall, Bloom suggested that each poet despises the previous generation's greatest poets. He related this to a sort of Oedipal struggle: each generation of poets has to kill its daddy to have its mommy, although I never did figure out what consummation was devoutly wished in Bloom's scheme. Without the prospect of having the desired mother, it's not really an Oedipal struggle: it's homicide. However, the book stated a widely observed truth in new lingerie, so it worked for him:

"Envy's a sharper spur than pay.
No author ever spar'd a brother;
Wits are game-cocks to one another. -- John Gay, Fables

The point is that some professions have to have new ideas, because new ideas, not the application of old ideas, are easier to recognize and make greater headlines. Of all of the fields riven by perpetual tumult, the most astonishing to me is Education. I recall being told, authoritatively, that the traditional classroom is a disease, an act of aggression, an offense against liberty, equality, and sensibility, that it is, additionally, a method by which no one may learn. (This sentiment, by the way, is commonplace. It may be surprising to anyone not taught "pedagogy," but consensus is universal that the one thing that can never work is the method of Aristotle's Academy.) I thought it was an astonishing thing to hear, and I suspected that the person telling it to me could not possibly believe it, as he had himself been the product of the traditional classroom. Was he telling me that, in fact, he was uneducated?

This is a widely held belief, as I said, and I'm not going to defend the "stand and deliver" lecture or the "sage on a stage" or the other commercial jingles that get sung. I don't much care. If there is some superior method, I want it. I'm sure most teachers approach their goals with as much vigor as possible, strive as diligently as they are able, and devote as much of their lives to educating as the world will afford them, and I doubt the good will of no teacher. I cannot say the same, however, of a field that achieves its revolutions solely by questioning the motives, methods, and intelligence of every previous practitioner of the trade.

"It is tiresome to hear education discussed, tiresome to educate, and tiresome to be educated." -- Attrib. William Lamb

What I find particular and noisome about the recent revolutions in Education is that they all begin with the premise that each and every colleague is a fool, at best, or a dupe of the Empire. This is a horrid thing to think, and it is fated to produce intolerant individuals and either low morale or low individuality. A person whose starting point is the conclusion that all other individuals are knowing or unknowing villains is going to see himself or herself as a hero who must achieve by defeating the rest. It is a philosophy that does not demand tyrants and bullies but which is a welcome fit for them.

The other factor in recent Education that makes for discomfort, for me and for many, is the external pressure of what No Child Left Behind means. It is very, very hard to find a defense of NCLB. It is a mooncalf. The only defenses I have seen were, in fact, defenses of selected portions, vague aims and goals of the thing. It is otherwise universally dispraised, and rightly. That said, even those who most despise the thing seem to have adopted its central message: documentation and statistical evaluation is the only valid method of assessing education.

This is a shocking thought, if you're not trained in Pedagogy.

Reader, think for a moment. Can you prove that you are educated? Can you come out of a meeting and statistically validate the amount of the message you have absorbed? Can you prove not only that you have learned, how much you have learned, but at what pace? What about pointless meetings? If a meeting seems pointless to you, a waste of your time, would you still be able to weigh, measure, describe, and quantify the information you got from it?

This is the same of education. Just as some meetings seem "stupid," so some classes seem that way to students. Is it because the class is stupid, or because it's not applicable? Are all educational processes equally efficacious with all humans at all times? If they are not, is that the fault of the educational method? Is it, in fact, a fault at all? Well, the formalist (it does not deserve to be called "empiricist") rage in Education assumes a "Yes" to all of these questions and, in fact, demands it.

For twenty years or so, state secondary education has moved to more and more "proof" of education, and "proof" is a number. The naive, hopeless belief in numbers is either charming or jaw dropping, depending upon how far away from it one is, but it is everywhere. Whether it comes out of a "CYA" impulse or some genuine belief that "Johnny Can't Read" because Johnny's teachers haven't filed their lesson plans with the District Office on North Avenue in time, it is a legal and institutional imperative now -- an imperative that has folded into the core of educational philosophy and pedagogical pedagogy.

I hope to bore you less, always, and, believe it or not, this really is a character sketch. I needed to establish these features only to explain the environmental conditions necessary to create a particular character (or to foster such a character).So, let's assume that a profession now encourages all of its stars to believe that they are the sole possessors of the truth and that all of their colleagues are hideous affronts. Let us assume a profession that encourages its leaders to look at all other departments as obstacles. Add to this a true believer in quantification. Quantification is not, of course, the philosophy, but it is the background against which all philosophies must emerge. The individual star of Education may believe in peer-centered-education, holistic grading, computer-mediated-communication, the curriculumless classroom, or whatever else, but each and every one will either be predicated on the need for forms or will have as a part of its core the generation of forms and, most importantly, compliance among all practitioners.

It would not be surprising, then, if someone who is drawn to such a field were a bully, common or uncommon. It would not be surprising if a person drawn to it were an expert at passive-aggression or the carefully lodged complaint. This is not because the study of education is in any sense wrong, but only of the dual functions of tenure depending upon revolutionary ideas and the external pressure to ossify education, the verb, into a noun that fits on a spread sheet.

Personally, I have had three Professional Educators (meaning people in charge of setting educational policy) that I have worked near (never with, because one only works for or near such a person), and all three of them have been tyrannical. I do not say this with hyperbole, and I am not particularly anti-authoritarian. I am not given to taking umbrage much, either. However, I do believe that I received education, and I recall both lecture and discussion and group discussion, and I recall that none of those methods mattered a whit, except that each was what the educator felt most inclined toward. I also realize that my education lagged quite a bit behind my classes, that no one, least of all me, could have said what I had learned from any class, that "learning" was something that could only be assessed in recollection.

What I write, above, is not intended as an indictment of this or that person, but, rather, a warning about a social phenomenon that is, at present, either creating or drawing persons who, in the name of Education, forget the goal, forget knowledge, forget freedom, forget talents, and turn to the method, the method first and last, and hope to achieve not enlightenment, but obedience. These are people who will produce data, not information.