A reading from Stigma

At about 3 in the morning last night I decided that the beer wasn't cutting it, nor was the internet comradery. I turned to books. I dug into my social theory texts. The first I picked up was Bourdieu's 'The logic of practice" and began reading chapter 3. I'll summarize. What he advocates very efficiently is that practice is a 'ground-level' knowledge that doesn't presume, in the abstract, what objects in our social field mean. Rather, practice is much more situated in a sequence of action and meaning formation. He's getting at what Burke would call the action that occurred before we formulated our motive for it. It's a rather keen insight.

Then I turned to Erving Goffman's "Stigma," which details the process of social marginalization. His point is that we form a repertoire of 'types' in which we place people. Some don't fit and are deviant in specific ways, which lead them to be stigmatized. At about this time, my neighbors came home bringing two into tow: one man, one woman. I know both. I fought with the man over the woman, briefly. I fought with my neighbors over the woman, briefly. They were preparing for a sex party.

Play the video and read this excerpt. This was my uncanny moment at about 4:30 a.m. December 24, 2009.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts--

I am sixteen years old now and I don't know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose--although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didn't do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don't believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?

Sincerely yours,
Desperate

As I read this passage over and over, and paged through the book to some of the more distressing parts, the continual shifting of clothing, sheets, and bodies on the floor above me gave way to the occasional moan. That was my manna floating down, the food that fed a lack that grows larger and stronger by the day. You see, I was born with a hole in my self. On nights like this I am the abyss.

am I programmed to kill myself?

Somewhere along the line from egocentric prepubescent self to my current fading manifestation of manhood I became keenly acquainted with my negation. Everything I touched challenged my existence. Voices shook me from numerous slumbers from which I dreamed of a me who was free. A game of accumulation is what I call capitalism. From the fractionated aura of the thing itself we're sold it's slowly fading embers in the form of numerous sugar coated, machine pressed, polymer extruded, disinfected, carefully-labeled and tracked stuff. This stuff is never enough.

We live in a world saturated with suggestions. They seep through anywhere there's a gap in meaning. I've dammed the flow of suggestions. I got rid of television. Now I am beginning to see through the cracks. Many strange creatures dwell in these cracks.

It started with a moment from my childhood at my grandparents' house during an afternoon lunch. Everything was routine, and everyone was enjoying their dinner. I pulled myself back from the plate of food and the ritual of eating to witness everyone at the table, completely oblivious to me, eating. My grandfather in particular was oblivious to the rest of the table as he ate. He would cover his forehead with his free hand and use the other to shovel food into a mouth situated hovering lips-down over the plate. My grandmother, stricken by blindness since she was a child, only looks ahead and off to the side. Her gaze is peculiar. The turrets are unmanned so to speak. She looks ahead and carefully uses her fork to position food close to a piece of toast that's in the other hand. As she gets the two near, her head, still looking forward, leans down with her mouth open. Her countenance is much more of a crane's shovel being guided from numerous sources, numerous viewpoints. The hands bark orders, the inner ear barks another, and my grandmother moves her head into position. Her lips feel out in front of her. Bingo.

Then there's my brother. This is the scene that marvels me the most. He's eating, not paying attention to anyone, and he's out of character. Instead of being yelled at, continuously throughout the day, he's eating quietly. He's minding his manners, and he's eating everything on his plate. We all are. I paused briefly to take note of this ritual, and I am forever destined to test this view out again and again. I do it at least two more times at the same afternoon lunch and receive the same results. It was a strange ripping of oneself from the context, but it was hard after that to put me back. I was outside of context.

Being in this hinterland between role and reason, I found a self that was attuned to this environment. I enjoyed being the non-entity, the eyes without a body. I took perverse enjoyment in watching but hardly in being watched. The names given me and my body had alien meaning. Either I didn't fulfill the meaning or it didn't speak to me at all. Gaps appeared between symbol and matter. For a boy raised to address himself through symbol this was a tough place to be. A no man's land, an interstitial space between things. I should have played sports.

With nothing holding me up I'm a raw entity. Small signs spark me to life: a kind smile or compliment swell me up instantly. In the absence of meaning for myself, these events spark like wildfire inside me. I come to life, effervescent with with a joy I rarely feel. But I'm still driven by the alienation. I desire to put the signifier in my mouth, to encompass it and become it.

I sit and I ponder this and I wonder if, perhaps, my life is one programmed out of the incidental features of our common language. That a person would systematically glom onto some words and meanings and not others suggests that an agency is at work. Yet the closer one approaches contexts where words and meaning are batted about, the words and meanings reveal their patina of usage. It structures our activities and provides us with subjectivities, some that make us more comfortable than others. I desire to be known, to be seen, to reappear every so often, but I can't dignify myself to do it for me. I don't trust my opinion on the matter. I need advice from the outside.

I am raw and meaningless, but I seek out meaning for me in others' kind voices. I retreat when those same voices turn viscious and hurtful. I just want the message. I am growing weary of the continual vacillation of life-meaning. Someone give me the sign. Put me in coach. I'm your tool. Steer me toward your glory or my destruction. I'm ready to make real meaning, the meaning that only a lifeless body could prove. I just don't have a reason at the moment.

I suppose there are others out there like me. The young adult whose life lacks purpose, whose life has no meaning, who awaits a sign. We're all out there looking for a sign. When some receive it they step into the crowd and detonate themselves. It's kill or be killed. This emptiness gnaws at me. I take comfort in the fact that we're all inside of nothing. It's the limit condition for everything.

i'm not here

The walls close in on me at times. Right now they are. I moved. I lost weight. I lost my appetite on the way to losing it. I can't eat. It's a control thing, this weight issue. I need control. To do so, I consume the nothing. I'm not here. This is what I tell myself. I'm nothing. I leave no trace. My objects look untouched, absent of my trace. I'm not here. I don't exist. It's my only safe place, where I don't exist. Look in my door. What do you see? A potted plant, a light, and shadows, but not me. You see light. You see structure. You see the insides of a lighted building that looks closed, no vacancy. That's me. I'm in there. I'm not eating. I'm chewing on my skin, chewing on my teeth, chewing on my pride, but I'm not here. I want the world to not exist when I consider myself. The world is hard to disappear, but I am not. I erase myself. I'm not here. I hear noises. They resonate off the walls. My room is underneath the stairwell to the adjacent apartment. The staccato-cadence of people walking down the stairs. A door squeaks and a dull thud resonates through the floor. The place becomes eerily still. I dissipate through the building, leak through the cracks. I am a mist and all is still around me, and I am not 'here.'

Dream: 1/15/08

I took a nap this afternoon at about 3:00 and awoke with teeth clenched from a very vivid dream at about 5:04.

The dream was autobiographical. I was in my hometown, riding my bicycle to a local university, SIUE to work on my dissertation there. I was humming in my head and aloud that I was engaged in an affirming activity of finding a public place to work on this paper and that I was, in fact, going through the motions of finding a place to write. I was humming this as I arrived at what looked to be the library. I opened the door and was flanked by books in a dimly lit building. Along several walls were lit reading rooms where college students were engaged in reading stories to children. As I walked around the book stacks I noticed that all of them were children’s books. I was in the children’s library. I exited and in the hallway were two study carrels at which two students were reading. One student made eye contact and I kneeled down and told him my predicament.

“I went inside there and all I saw were children’s books. Do you know where the college library is?”

“Yes, the library you want is downstairs.” He pointed down the hall toward the stair well.

“Ok, thank you sir.”

In my mind this was a very affirming conversation. We were very attuned to the moment. I wasn’t bothering him. He was happy to oblige my request for information. All was good at that moment. I began my descent and turned a corner in the well to the next floor below. That’s where I saw a man with a gray plastic tub walk past. In it was a dead gray rhesus monkey splayed out like a drunken man in a wheel barrow with his arms and legs draped over the sides. The monkey’s eyes were closed and it was perched atop numerous body parts of monkeys. I caught briefly an eye as the man carrying this tub passed and continued down a very cramped corridor and out of sight. I turned and looked around. This floor was also dimly lit except for the light from offices and rooms that were occupied. This place was alive with the conversation of researchers. I looked into one room and there was another rhesus monkey strapped into some kind of devices that kept it firmly in place. Its eyes were looking up above its head at the researchers who I couldn't see from my vantage point into the room. Its gaze was a mix of resignation and puzzlement, and I knew that its fate would be that of its brother or sister that was carried past me in the tub.

Tom Waits sings that what keeps mankind alive is "his billiance in keeping his humanity repressed." He's takling about the bestial acts of humanity that retain our humanity. What strikes me about the dream was the environmental detail of this research floor full of normal conversation while monkeys stood by forced into the role as objects, living systems, surfaces upon which hypotheses would be tested. They were mere elements in a scene of scientific research taking place one floor below a library filled with children attending to the storytelling of older women. The human care one floor above matched the callousness one floor below.

Jingle for the day

"The best part of not going to bed is the voices in your head."

This jingle should be an overlay of the old Folger's jingle: "The best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup."

Practice it, teach it to others.

Charles Shultz, the master

I present you pigpen. We've come to believe that this is his dust cloud because he's so dirty and unkempt.

Au contraire.

It's his probability cloud. He's a Bohr model of his own pluripotent action potential. He's the Tralfamadorian. He's in more than one and less than two places at once.

Charles Shultz, the master.

Stranger than a fact list

I'm sitting on the floor, my back against the wall adjacent the closet, nursing my beer. The film plays on the tiny television screen, a documentary about Tom Flanagan, supermasochist. I share a story about a friend I had who loved pain, who was hit with a pipe and left for dead, who died. All the stories end sadly.

I sit on the floor, bathed in the glow of the television screen, I look over at the bed. Three bodies are tucked under the covers. One woman, two men. My friend Bryan is in the middle, he spoons the girl. Her name is Amanda. Thomas is on the outside, spooning Bryan. Giggles, moans, talk of the last condom. I nurse my beer.

I'm struck by the moment and what it signifies for me. It's Thanksgiving night. We've celebrated a founder's feast. I'm reminded of the bedding practices that I read about in a book of facts called "The People's Almanac." I'll paraphrase.

Travelers up and down the eastern colonies would often lodge at stranger's houses. It was a common practice to accept in travelers as they moved about. Another common practice, as was customary in the era of the potbelly stove, was to huddle together on cold nights, sharing a bed. There, bathed in the glow of the television was a practice as old, and older, than the 13 colonies. I was witnessing it, the bed as a chronotope. I was amused by this idea that the travelers and their hosts would share a bed and let the random shifting of bodies play out its own logic of titillation. I was witnessing a similar act. I was invited in. I avoided the invitation. I'm a prude, but I also want my mystery to remain. Perhaps she wants me to join her for many reasons.

We were playing Risk. In the middle of my roll, I went on a roll. I wouldn't shut up. The booze and the pot were kicking in. Thomas was sharing. I was partaking, laughing, smiling. I'm still full from the dinner, the beer is cold, the night is dark, the light glows warm, and we exchange glances, practice our global politicking. I have this idea to defeat all the other players but her, retreat my armies into Australia and 'give her the world.' Hopelessly romantic. She tells me that I made the stripper's night. I'm glad for this. A smile is a great gift to give someone. I play the clown, the goofball. I laugh and I cry. I'm singing falsetto, thinking of the story my grandmother told me about her father. He serenaded women from their window at night. Two women put out candles. He married the blonde. She was bright. She was from a rich home. He was a poor man who made a living working for a pharmacist and earning extra by carrying coal to the Jews on their day of rest, helping them stoke the hearth. It was the gay 90s, New York. Jacomino sang. Jacomino worked. Jacomino was my great grandfather.

It's impractical and cumbersome, this persona I create. It's clunky and selfish. I live out of my head like others live out of their car, a liminal life, a temporary condition. The body comes crashing down to the floor--a reminder of our mutual affinity. Beyond the words, beyond the promises, beyond the elaborate displays of affection, we're two bodies with compatible plumbing.

Mad like a teardrop in a storm.

Mad like a teardrop in a storm. Effervescent and wondrous, lost in the tempest mist.

A woman's eggs are finite. A man's sperm sputters to a halt. I have a finite amount of hugs, kisses, laughs, smiles, and doting woman worship inside me.

And I've been saving it up.

You come near and the flood gates open. When you touch me I burn. Communication leaking like a sieve.

I throw it all at you. You, my highest of summits, my holiest of holies. It's an intimidating interpellation this subject position I grant you. I build you an altar that's too discomfiting, too tight, form fitting. My worship is oppressive. Hit me. Are you there? I'm here. I force you back from a distant look. I'm afloat in your ocean. I'm afraid. It's dark in here. Perhaps I shouldn't do this. I'm not in control either, and I'm taking advantage of you. I want to hug you, but that would kill the moment, snuff the flame. I burn. Your face is burnt from a beauty therapy. You avoid the sun until you heal. You drown the pain in pills and alcohol. I am pain. You soften my fall.

No, I don't have a potato fetish. I liked it when you fed me, but I was also afraid when you got near. I fear losing control. I fear losing my composure. I want to be the private dick, the private eye. You can be my Girl Friday. I'm the brains. You're the beauty. We're an operation. I keep a bottle of whiskey and a .38 in my drawer. One or the other. I'm on the case. You hand me the note. You pick up my dry cleaning. "A man needs a maid," quotes Neil Young. You complete me. Do I complete you?

I'm mad like a teardrop in a storm. Effervescent, meaningful, lost in the tempest mist.

Game over son. One more dad.

I feel like we're losing touch, but I don't want the icy touch of telepresence to be mistaken for the warmth of a fond look and soft embrace. The socio-technical order doth make dead mannequins of us all as we fiddle with a small lighted screen, as we return a phatic response to another. The marriage of action and techno-fiddling is an interesting phenomenological insight about our time--our problems are gadgetry oriented. I suppose the coming of the age of quiet technology renders us much more quiet in social settings when each of us take time out from social participation to check our messages and scroll through our personal screens to feed our need for our fragment of esoterica.

Search.

Search is a representative anecdote for our time. The post-modernists ached at the post-material information order and recognized how it transformed our politics, our values. Search is here, and search is how we figure ourselves as participants in that information order. Search spells out the tactics that we employ to be searchable and to be found. The 15 minutes of fame notion is broken into an infinitely divisible soundbyte through which we seek to have our stamp of authorship. A forest of mirrors, a moment's notice, a sly remark, a performed persona, a mere textual element signifying no more than a sound and behind which hides a you a you you always wished you could be, fantasia on a theme by technology. Technology, telepresence, being no where, getting burned right here.

I moved gentlemen. I moved just down the street from my old place, and I moved into an odd situation. My new landlord and life-long friend is living the swinger's lifestyle. He tried persuasively to sell it on me. I moaned in my best Rossini that I'm living the catholic life. Obsessive, possessive, oppressive, I fancy what I am is a dusty relic made by my projection onto Renaissance ideals, Renaissance concepts, science, kitchen chemistry, learning as a hobby--the stuff that made us challenge the monolith of the ancien regime. Now I'm the dusty relic. I won't slide into that bed with one beautiful but distant woman and two of my guy friends. I sit outside nursing my beer, orally fixated, my nookie. I'm back there, playing Pac-Man.

Pac-man is the oral fantasy, an allegory of addiction. You're a mouth and an eye in a darkened maze littered with edible items. You seek things to eat and run from your ghosts. Occasionally you eat something special that allows you to eat your ghosts. Is it a drug? It's an oral coping mechanism, and the upshot is you get points and perhaps a cameo on the "top 3" screen. The girl sips her Tab. Her hair is feathered. I stand, transfixed, a 6-year-old.

"One more quarter dad."

"Game over son."

"Just one more dad."

"I'll do it right this time dad."

"Game over son."

In the box

“Calls from the Public” was a recurring segment on the Sifl and Olly Show, a 30-minute comedy show starring two sock puppets, which ran from 1997 through 1998 on the cable channel MTV. In “Calls from the Public” Sifl and Olly would field phone calls on any topic from other sock puppets who were presumably part of the show’s viewing public. In episode four from the first season one of the calls comes from a voice in a box who asks Sifl and Olly how to get out. This simple question becomes wry existential humor when Sifl and Olly reveal that he is the box and not simply in it. Yet, one must still probe what caused this box to believe that it was stuck inside itself or that it had any awareness of an inside at all. Was the identity created from an inner projection? The call follows:

Caller (C): Yeah, why am I in a box?

Sifl and Olly (SO): Why are you in a box? Are you dead?

C: No

SO: I don’t know.

C: I’ve been in here for ages.

SO: Well, can you move around inside?

C: What do you mean?

SO: What I mean is can you feel around inside?

C: Inside?

SO: Oh wait, I think you just are a box.

C: I am?

SO: Yeah.

C: Alright, I’m a boxer!

SO: No, you are a box.

C: I’m a box?

SO: Yeah, you’re a box. You got that?

C: Oh… (The caller’s voice indicates that it may be upset by this realization.)

SO: Ok, See you box. Yeah, thank you box.

The identity of the voice begins the conversation obscured by the walls of the cardboard box and its folded top flaps. Sifl and Olly’s questions investigate how the voice became located inside the box. This is a proper tack given that the voice’s query also presumes that it issues from its awareness that it is inside a box. Sifl and Olly’s questions reveal that the voice lacks any common awareness of being inside a box. The voice used the word “in” when asking why it was in a box. When asked whether it can feel around inside, the voice fails to understand what “inside” means. The original question presumes one’s existential status as entrapment in a box. Sifl and Olly’s questions reveal that this cannot be the case, since the box’s self-identity lacks the perception of a being who is enclosed inside a box. This perceptual voice reveals that the voice does not arise there. The space that the box walls entrap is empty. Therefore, the voice is that of the box, not of some other entity hidden behind its geometric exterior.
This short exercise lends some understanding to the trickiness of extension-related metaphors when they are applied to self-identity. Extension-related metaphors use object relations and perception of a material world as the metaphorical vehicle for self-identity. Self-identity is that tricky place where awareness of a material world is extended to that location of self-awareness, which reveals the material nature of awareness. Self-awareness is located within the body’s self-organization around its persistent perceptual interface with the world. Our body is an agent whose purpose is engaged by changes in the salient features of its environment. The box’s mistaken identity of being entrapped within its own four walls issues from none of the common awareness of being a body unable to leave a box. The caller presumably can see to use the phone and has learned how to speak, plus it has acquired a cultural gestalt of what boxes can do and grafted it onto its experiential gestalt of being accompanied by a box “for ages.” The mistake is that it had acquired the experience of an other that is wholly other than itself, therefore it has mistaken itself for a common object. The sadness in the voice at this self-realization issues from a smarting ego, a shattered self-identity. That which it has displaced to protect its own self-identity is the very thing it is. It is the box. The box’s fresh self-awareness still borrows, in sadness, the ego’s discursive construction using an other’s language. In wanting to create a common experience of identity, the box appropriated a constitutive discourse used by bodies outside of boxes. But in its fresh realization, the very discourse that constituted a common identity instead became an estranging discourse.
The word communication, which we apply to a host of behaviors bodily, gestural, verbal, symbolic, social, cultural under the purposive framework, sharing information, finds its Latinate roots in the word, communicare, which is to make common. The dialectical tail of this notion would be estrangement, the interminable gap that we continually smooth over with communication. Our angelic desires for soul-to-soul connection mistake us from recognizing that this ideal is never practical. One cannot be sure of one’s own mind let alone another’s. The atomically discernible surface of bodies, no matter how closely they are pressed together, never meet. They never met, and only in Seth Brundle (Cronenberg’s “The Fly”) have two bodies become one. The gap remains. A language that allows us to know another as occupying a type misdirects us from knowing another in the particular. Words are ammunition from old battlegrounds. A simple gesture or statement can bring the cavalry, trumpets, and cannons roaring back into a simple social exchange. Yet that which estranges us from knowing another offers us an opportunity to step outside our skin and occupy, ideally, the skin of another. We presume a superaddressee and communicate to another’s superaddressee avoiding talk that issues from the flesh. Sometimes we stand pious before one’s superaddressee, at others we are profane. But this is a precarious balancing act between meeting another “half-way” and leaving one’s self behind. Communication is self-alienation and it is built into the social contract of communication. The dialectical tail of making common is making strange or estrangement. This gap, a yawning gulf of roaring nothingness structures communication negatively as its practitioners enact it positively as the essential somethingness that makes any connection possible. We happily exist within this constitutive space blissfully unaware of the facticity of its non-existence at all the specific interface points where we enact it—in the give and take of simple conversation. Hopes, dreams, fears, fate, fights, hate are just that, words, that structure a complex host of bodily experiences that have long since lost their strangeness socially, yet are never reconciled personally. One presumes they are these existential states or moods by carrying out the performative mandates built into them as a matter of the social contract.
“I am sad” is an existential statement. It’s a constitutive act. A performative act that builds entailments that must be carried out for its fulfillment. It’s a tiny well into which our protean identities slide. The well, presumes a telos, a specific parameter or an outline for the fulfillment of an action. To communicate is to create little depressions into which our identities continually slide. A motor or arrow does not push us and we don’t control the process’ fulfillment. The process entwines beginning and ending into a simultaneous occurrence. The wisdom of the act is in the act. Given our estrangement from the act, we continually divine it as a source of wonder. And we continually slide our discursive pseudopodia forward by a pulling movement experienced as the tiny fate of a tiny act whose fate we mistake for agency. Communication as estrangement gives merit to: distributed intelligence and ecological psychology’s affordances, a dialectical philosophical stance that presumes the primacy of non-existence, and one’s mistaken occupation with an ideal existence projected through the fateful, constitutive act of communicating.

A depravity of seeing

An off-duty police officer is accosted by an amusement park worker when a customer tips him off that he is using a well-placed digital camera to capture shots from up the dress of his toddler as she sits on her plastic scooter. On a candid photo sharing site hosted by Yahoo! one photographer details how he separates the lens from the viewfinder to allow him to look unaware and away while he captures similar shots. Sites like this and other are quickly removed and more re-emerge. A college professor relates a conversation he overhears carried on by two men inside a Barnes and Noble at Colorado mall. “They called the book stores at the mall ‘masturbation libraries’.” The expanding consumption of internet bandwidth in recent years points to the popularity of video streaming sites like Youtube where young and old, male and female prance, dance, and shake in the presence and absence of music, friends, intoxicants in hopes of reading positive comments and for a general sense of attention from web-goers and subscribers. Social networking sties like Myspace and Facebook bring people and their friend networks together, giving their blog entries a growing reader base. A student in my class checks the Facebook profile of a student who had committed suicide the night before. His current status reads, “finally happy.” A teenage girl in Alton, Missouri kills herself after her friend and mother create a fictitious cute boy who grows interested, but then breaks off contact after he hears about her recent ‘selfish’ treatment of that friend.

A list of accounts like this revolve around a few converging technologies and their media forebears. Video, the direct descendent of film expanded the access and availability of visual media, moving pictures. Its digital counterpart has expanded that access by placing the visual and editorial power of Hollywood production equipment into the hands of any consumer with the money (or credit) and interest in using a camera. The personal computer neatly marries two media, print and television, by settling on the QWERTY keyboard as the sine qua non for creating and managing a database of information and the CRT as a proper way for presenting that data in a WSISWYG visual environment benignly called a ‘desktop.’ The reasons for this are clear when we trace its history. Xerox corporation sets up the Palo Alto Research Campus (PARC) through the capital gained from leasing its copiers to the world’s businesses and organizations to create the next information environment. It marries one business-native tool, the typewriter, with a home-based interface point, the television. Media scholars point out that the television, given its native dimensions and reduced resolution, is better as an up-close medium. It captures the head and face quite well, but loses that dramatic focus by widening to the action of bodies. By tying typewriter to television, the computer—in its current software-led manifestations—truly ties visual data with text and forces an up close and personal look at the particular editorial productions that a person with a web-connected computer produces. The upshot of this marriage of typewriter and television and the imaginative horizon it casts for early adopters, users, and innovators of its networked counterpart, makes the screen a stage and publicly accessible mirror upon any activity produced through it. The imaginative horizon for networked personal computing—the one that appears for good or naught to collapse in on itself—is interactive television. The charmed loop between user and public viewer that it creates becomes a self-fulfilling medium of perverse enjoyment made all the more perverse through the buffer of distance and anonymity that one can achieve by assuming only a textual nom de plume. This relaxes the usual social proscriptions that emerge from being within bodily and visual range of one’s interlocutor and affords each a greater amount of control over the persona they choose to present before a public. A single-pane comic strip illustrates this with two dogs, one operating a computer by handling the mouse and telling its companion that “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

… or not a dog. Because often more than not the person will interact with the visual or text-based avatar with some reference to its face value. If the name is feminine the interlocutor at the other end treats the person as such. Interpersonal research calls the great amount of control and relaxed inhibitions hypersocial interaction. This greatly increases the intensity and speed of the online relationship. The two quickly move from greetings to divulging secrets as if each were afforded the cloak of a confessional booth. Yet this confessional, with all of its power-laden history in relation to the Church is lacking in the context of two relative strangers going on names, ideas, imagination, and context alone. Perhaps the superaddressee or some other pious other mediates the context for social intercourse in a way that lends some sense of authority to the between space of the interaction, its visibility, and its ultimate publicity as evidence for implicating any actions. Group communication researchers point out that GDSS technology leads to more tightly coupled groups. In my comprehensive exams defense I called this tendency among GDSS users to become meticulous curators of interaction data and in fact are overwhelmed by the content such that curatorial duties are a stop-gap measure. But the data take on a life of their own. The curatorial work becomes a fact, a task—Sisyphean at that—that consumes the psychic life and memory capacity of its users. This was the very thing the early visionaries saw as the expansive potential of a networked visual data storage technology Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider both dreamed, and in the latter, carried out business ventures in developing group presentation and decision making software. A more practical Tim Berners-Lee developed the mark-up language for distributing sharing of data and projects at CERN in Switzerland. He calls this HTML. The tool conquers a sea awash in data but conquering is a matter of firsts and seconds in choosing a tool to handle a problem. The tool exists as a fact and users quickly put it to task of handling search, retrieval, and storage tasks for an increasingly redundant, obsolete, and enormous amount of data. We curate the history of our computing.

At least some of us do. The others remain blissful in their forgetting, perhaps sometimes frustrated. Those that curate become frustrated in trying to remember the where or when of an idea in order to retrieve a file. Often the looking takes on greater significance than the drivel one typed out hastily one enlightened moment. You often remember the aura of the idea rather than the data collected attempting to capture some of that. Hence, the old proverb, you can’t capture light, makes pure and simple metaphorical sense in this case. The luminescence of a moment of insight, an epiphany, cannot be captured. The luminescence must be performed.

Performance is what most do on this new public interactive stage I call interactive television. The networked, personal computer operated by a user in the current age spends an inordinate amount of time curating data, continually retracing the metaphorical paths on the information super highway, looking for the familiar patina of interest from posters, admirers, yet ultimately from the original author, seeking comments as implicit editorial device.

The doing, the seeing, the remembering, the task of curating search terms, ideas, meta-data, dates, mnemonics form the nexus of what we call our current manifestation of networked personal computing as interactive television. What it leads to is clearly a perversity of seeing—seeing others, self, cataloging seeing, hiding in the anonymity of the seer or cavorting in the cruel editorial world of self-presentation before the anonymous, self-described expert on you and your genre.

Whether you like it or not.

The depravity emerges from both the anonymity and the distance underlying mediated computing and the tendency to associate with like-minded individuals so that each other can support and grow a community of diaper wearers, pedophiles, lovers and role-players of Japanese culture. This tendency to scan endlessly images of death, pain, wrecks, flatulence, obesity, clever edits of several frame of video feed this depravity of seeing. Images like goatse.jpg, depict a man prying open his anus with his fingers revealing a glistening raw inner space of sphincter muscle and colon wall. Videos like 2girls1cup depict two women defecating into a cup and sharing it while they kiss each other. Both become phenomena that emerge on personalized car license plates, inspire artwork, and are carefully curated via wikkis to become well-documented, searchable, and memorable internet phenomena. Everyone is watching, reading, editing, commenting, pontificating, posting and most of all they are rereading what they wrote, read, edited, commented, pontificated, posted to see who may have responded. The flame trail continues; I spend a half hour attempting to assume a profile and add to the litany of posts about a video on Youtube or on a forum where a man posts pictures of a pig hunt. I realize that I too am doing it more for the sake of the publicity of my post than for any real meeting with the original poster. Occasionally I reread what I posted to see if any have responded to my post, but I too have skipped to the last page, passing over the pages of posts that came before. Was my post redundant? How many people did the same as me and passed me up? A forum post serially depicts numerous posters’ comments, striating the posts temporally into a sedimentary layer until the post dies, becomes forgotten, becomes a broken link. The visual metaphor that the internet resurrects into a reality contributes to the contemporary cultural activity, trains its focus, and forges its memory. Endlessly useless entries are curated, helping some to remember and leaving others baffled by the labor of maintaining the internet’s recent history. The Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online repository of Internet phenomena, calls this “last Thursday” to address the real-time decay of internet history. Posts, activity, become long broadsheets that required scrolling down the screen and form the sediment of activity. A neat stack of activity assumes the patina of old news and is forgotten, cleared from the databases. A meta-community does its best to glean the best of what happened that week, and so they assume the role of journalists, capturing and commenting on the goings on during a week on a community website.

An over-reliance upon vision as a form of remembering is used in the relatively constrained activity of blogging, browsing, or commenting.

Manifesto for now

It all started with a public speaking project. I was going to make an impassioned speech to my audience to buy the Atari 2600 (or some other simulated wood home gaming system created by that company). All I needed was a picture. Instead of a picture I stumbled upon a world.

Chalk it up to serendipity, consider it an answer to that value question of why libraries promote the 'collect everything' OCD--I found a mountain of information. A couple of things stick out at that time. Arcades were at that time a threat to the youth. It stole their lunch money. Using their narrative savvy, the news reporters would report about all the young adults, men with jobs, on their lunch break, pumping quarters into these machines, aiming for that lucrative high score. Regulations were passed. I'm certain that town halls were amassed. All of this 'sturm und drang' over a silly machine. But I remember the kind of hold they had on me. My adrenaline would flow, my heart would race, I'd die continuously as I fumbled with the controls, and I'd continue to beg for quarters. I became rather acquainted with my dad's hand reaching into his jean pocket. Therein lay my video game Valhalla, the quarter. From the ages of 6 to 8 I basked in that arcade glow, which economists recognized was a video-game industry bubble, and I loved it. That same transfixed gaze and cast iron attention that I exhibited toward the arcade would be the same that inspired Gibson to write Neuromancer.

I found out something else about games in that afternoon I stood transfixed on the microfilm machine. Stories of great feats on games were also making the news. One kid mastered the game of Defender so well that he played it for a stretch of 8 hours, letting lives that he racked up during his virtuoso piloting to expire while he used the bathroom. He drew a crowd and at least one reporter who's long-forgotten story I found amid the dim glow of the microfilm's screen. I found and read the book "Zap," which I did in an afternoon. I had tapped back into that excitement. It inspired my writing and led me to some provisional views about interfacing with technology. I'll present them.

Interfacing with technology is a performance. Aside from commenting upon the world that opens up, the avatar you control, the narrative that plays out, I was merely interested in how technology bisects bodily action. I tied this performance concept to that of musicianship. The reason I did this was merely because I found some affinities in how people spoke about Paganini's violin performances and how people spoke about computer hackers. I was seeking something on the order of transcendence, the arena of action and interfacing that lay beyond the code not only of the technology but the social code that regulates how this technology is used. I wrapped that up into a paper, got my A, shipped it on to a national conference, and had my moment on the panel. My god, a beautiful woman was in the crowd, and I did my damndest to put on a show. That was my last great moment of academic show.

But now I'm back and I'm fired up about this notion of how computer algorithms or technical logic form a basis for tactics out of which emerge discernible human performance--the stuff of Victor Turner's culture, performative anthropology, the lived now in which an old idea finds new life in the cultural actor's body. Fun stuff. The prose is still clunky, but I come back to this idea. Now what do I want to do with it?

Well, I really want to dig down to that point where I think I can marry the materiality of the machine with the materiality of the body. Interface works for this, but how deep does it go? Provisionally I say it goes to the code, but I suspect it goes deeper than that. What's to say about code? In playing the idea in my head, I wanted to explore code by doing 'viral criticism.' What's that you say? Rhetorical criticism of a computer virus: where I splay the code out and describe its finite elements in detail that demonstrates how each element can be figured as persuasive elements, persuasive enough for a host computer to reproduce them or reproduce actions contained therein. But I suspect these actions aren't discreet. I'm not going to find a code that says, 'host computer, jump on one foot and bark like a dog.' No, what I suspect I'll find again are the tactics employed by the virus' author to exploit elements of the computer. More tactics.

Another word: bricolage. Piaget considered this the lesser learning practice to its counterpart, conceptual learning. Bricolage is working with what you have and mucking through, theory in practice. Conceptual learning is making your blueprint and carefully following it to completion. Yes, two different ways of learning. Turkle and Papert recognized these as two epistemologies operating in the computer programming classroom. Conceptual learning is the canonical view. Bricolage is the hacker's MO. Let the logic of practice, the logic of the machine, and the emerging intimacy with how the person interfaces with that machine to define the experience and the learning. That's a simple ethical stance and the grain of a pedagogy. But I'll leave that aside to consider the other version of bricolage. Bricolage, as it is defined in a footnote to Rabinow's book on the invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), is simply any extraneous movement, a ball's ricochet during tennis, the follow-through after a swing, the stuff that isn't necessarily part of the match. But it is, am I right? We're back to tactics. Ricochets are part of the game. A quickly returned ball can take advantage of the time it takes the other player to re-cock for a return after just swinging. It's tactics, adjusting play, upping the ante, finding an exploit.

My manifesto for now is to do viral criticism. My manifesto for now is to explore how the game narrative is itself built upon the computer algorithm. Think about it. The first video game was a showcase of the ability to connect a few simple transistors to a monitor to move a point of light. The next showcase was moving that movement knob away from the exposed transistor and onto a spill-proof surface built for the rough wear of a bar. Why is this important? We're witnessing proof of concept. Techno-poesis in making a manipulable object on a screen, and using this to create a game for metered play--the beginning of an industry. While the narrative has gotten more complex and involved, there are still algorithms underneath.

"No matter where you go, there you are."

An industry that started by figuring out how to move a point of light on a screen has evolved into a billion-dollar entertainment industry. That doesn't interest me. What does is that, everyday, the development crew, the creative army, is still working within the confines of the algorithms that define movement, shading, dimension, space, color, fluidity, realism. Those can't be forgotten. An industry and a discipline have grown around tactics for working with these algorithms.

I witnessed something in an HTML training course that interested me. I was studying them, more or less, and I witnessed a student become excited by watching something he programmed his page to do, show up on him refreshing the page. He commented upon it, and it stuck out for me, that it's this interactivity between us and this graphical Galatea that enamors us to it. We fall in love with the thing that we create. This takes me into new territory. This forces me to read Hegel, not all, just some--the Hegel I need.

That's my manifesto for now. Will I accomplish either of the two agenda items? We'll see.

Monday won't come soon enough

Back before I moved from Colorado I was convicted of a DUI. Over the course of my state-sanctioned rehabilitation I told the support group that 'you're my only friends.' I said it halfheartedly and one guy seriously believed me. I believed his belief; it was stronger than my belief in myself. At that time my family consisted of a cohort of graduate students struggling through a tough program, finding jobs, finding love, marrying, and moving on. I had been there 4 years, completed my comprehensive exams, and watched my close friends and professors fade into their busy schedules.

I moved to Muncie. Alone, hating my job, my students hating me, I began to play this game. Somewhere along the line the job ended. I ended it early. I gave up on writing a dissertation, thumbed my nose at academia and moved back home.

Home is where you hang your hat.

I live on the cusp of poverty, and I give all my kind words to an itinerant group of online students at the university of phoenix. The pay is paltry. It lacks benefits. I enjoy their stories and I share mine. I call the job 'occupational therapy,' owing to the subject matter. Every day feels like practice for a job interview. 'How do we balance task and social communication?' I say in a thousand different ways. Some students are widowers. Others await their husband's return from Afghanistan. So many soldiers, so many military wives. Godly and good people. I feel foolish teaching them, knowing that my beliefs are antithetical to their own. It will show up as organizational communication on their transcript. I soak myself in beer, and I attempt to make 'funnies.' I teach and I learn.

The last couple of weeks had me moving, meeting my neighbors' new friend, flirting, fighting, drinking, and saying some pretty mean 'truths' in all their faces. I've watched the sun come up every night this weekend. Brief images of lucidity are burned in my mind. Speaking with my life-long friend's girlfriend as moans leak out from behind a closed door. A veiled comment about revenge sex. Being a curious bystander to my life out of control. I keep speaking to them about 'our solar system' and how the new planet is upsetting the balance. I scream at them because the walls and the floors are thin, and I can't help but be part of a situation to which I wasn't invited. I press my friends' 'buttons.' My friend chokes me and kisses the girl that I thought liked me. I feel used. Thumping of shoes stomping overhead, giggles coming from a bed full of naked bodies, and me retaining my sanity by pretending that I'm talking to people who aren't there. Practicing my 'I hate you; you're trash; go away.' Trying to convince myself that I have a hold on my life, a life that is careening out of my control. I scrub years of black hair care products from an old tub. The toilet clogs on rumors alone. Biracial children play outside on an old coal bin. I look outside a world apart.

The highs and lows that I've felt are intoxicating. Having romantic interests built on false promises taken away. Watching this romantic love interest get naked and head into a darkened room with other men. Seething with anger. Doting and kneeling next to a girl puffing her cigarette, indifferent. Finding myself disgusted by a woman to whom I was sold and who I've progressively alienated by my whirlwind of emotions and odd humor. Throwing my money at a stripper who is missing a hand, smiling uncontrollably at a moment in my life that is stranger than make-believe. Repeating like a broken record that I'm happy. I watched a white man pay for a black man to have sex with his girlfriend. I watched us watch the act. I cheered the guy on. It was swingers night at PTs. I was, once again, trying to upset my friend. I pushed. I pushed. In the middle of a strip club, I danced. I motion to the women around me to come dance. Nobody is dancing but me and the strippers. He blew up. I didn't know what I was doing. We talked. He hugged me. I went to bed and awoke to a locked door behind which are simple possessions: a coat, a hat, and some gloves. I placed a five on my face and laid across the stage as the stripper with a stump for a hand picked it off with her crotch. It wasn't for me. It was a show, a show for a woman who entered my life by way of my neighbors, who entered my life by way of my friends, who was sitting with a friend of ours, the same friend who choked me the night before. I gave up on that situation, but I couldn't help but put on a performance of indifference, of suave, macho indifference. I dance, leave a trail of singles on stage for the stripper with a stump for a hand. I feel a bond with her through her deformity. I stare and I smile. She smiles at the money falling out of my hand. "In God we trust" the money says as it floats to the stage floor. I trust that what I'm doing is sending a message. 'I'm better than you.' I want my actions to say to the woman sitting with my friend. It's all a show. I'm with a stripper on a stage.

I can't hide from this situation. I can't park my car down the street, dim the lights, and avoid contact with these people. They stomp overhead. I leave messages trying to extract my belongings from behind a locked door. Subtly, I'm being held at arm's length, forced to watch a life that I wish I could have occur without me. I'm jealous, possessive, obsessive, and I find solace in writing things, imagining myself someone else. I pretend that I'm back on stage, speaking to the crowd, being adored, walking through a forest of mirrors. The sounds leak through the floor. I roll in bed. I play the music loud. I scream at the walls and convince myself that I'm OK and it's they who are going to get burned, they who have upset a balance, they who have me as a contrapuntal contraption, screaming my jokes, drinking their beer, buying more, fading in and out of consciousness, fading in and out of relevance. I sit on the floor as the party goes on, and I begin telling myself that 'It's not me. It's all in my head.' I believe as much but it's bigger than me.

I was so used to living alone. I was so used to not caring about the sounds leaking through the floor. I live in a house that is not my own, I rent from a life-long friend who seeks to control his world and by extension mine. He works with the unfortunate, the poor who become victims of drug abuse, who get processed by a system that turns people into numbers and feelings into psychology. I work with people. I work with ideas. I play my Renaissance humanism card; it's dog-eared and fading with overuse like a teamster's union card.

I can't wait for Monday. I can't wait to hear your voices. But we're all just pixels and voices to each other, and I'll take these pixels over the fleshy reality that I've been struggling through of late. I don't have friends. I have a friend through whom I have made other friends. I feel like I'm kept around for the sake of his menagerie, and I hate this sense that my life is not my own. They won't even call me by my name. 'Jay,' they say. It's Jason. She sarcastically corrects herself. 'Jason,' she says slowly with a mischievous grin. I say nothing. I fade away. I interject stupid philosophy, book learning that nobody wants to hear. I'm obsolete. I'm an oddity. I'm a curio to my worldly friends. My nose in a book, theirs in a travel guide to Cuba. I've lived so long alone that I convince myself that they're trash, that they're not worth my time. If they won't go away I will.

Monday won't come soon enough.

Quote of the hour

In a news article about President Obama refusing to participate in the National Day of Prayer I found this gem.

But, despite numerous attempts to get a representative from the executive office to attend, "it doesn't appear they are going to fulfill our request," said Becky Armstrong, marketing and media manager of the National Day of Prayer Task Force.

I understand that some can see Obama's refusal as a lack of religiosity. But when the National Day of Prayer has a marketing and media manager and a Task Force, how can we call it prayer? It sounds to me like one of those hyped events to force people into bandwagoning for an empty cause to promote religious affiliation. At what cost would non-participation come? Nothing but being the focus of whispered gossip in your small nook of Anytown, USA.

Gotta start somewhere

Intolerable Beauty

Beautiful photography

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

The eyes of a dialectical thinker

I knew you needed some kind of physiological enhancement to make the both-and move and make it stick.

I recall Burke writing in his Attitudes Toward History in a later foreward or afterword that he had begun seeing everything double for a bit there in early 1980.

So, mudskippers and chameleons might be the wisest creatures in the universe? Talk amongst yourselves.

The anatomy of a joke gone wrong

1.
Dear Friends,

I was wondering if anyone might be able to suggest a reasonably priced
(affordable to a graduate student) yet reliable plumber?

Thank you,
Matt Vorell

Matthew S. Vorell, MA
Department of Communication
University of Colorado at Boulder
UCB 270
_________________________________________-
2.
Mario, my building's superintendent , is a reasonable plumber.
.....................
Jason Lesko
Department of Communication, UCB 270
University of Colorado
Boulder CO 80309-0270
.....................
_______________________________________________-
3.

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the referral. What is Mario's phone number?

Matt


Matthew S. Vorell, MA
Department of Communication
University of Colorado at Boulder
UCB 270
Boulder, CO 80309
________________________________________________-
4.
I apologize Matt. It was a joke: Mario my superintendent = Mario the Super = Super Mario
Now that guy had a way with plumbing.

The facist ideology of Star Trek

http://www.friesian.com/trek.htm

Brilliance ensues.

Don't fear the reaper

Writer Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself - Police

1 hour, 8 minutes ago Top Stories - Reuters



DENVER (Reuters) - Hunter S. Thompson, the renowned American journalist and novelist who wrote "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself at his Colorado home on Sunday night, police said. He was 67. "We do have confirmation that Hunter Thompson was found dead this evening of an apparent self-inflicted wound," said Tricia Louthis, spokeswoman for the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office. Thompson was found dead at his home outside the ski resort of Aspen. The Sheriff's Office was unable to provide any further details.

Check out these pics though. I think he was racing the reaper.


May 15, 2001


June 21, 2004

That's either the three hardest years of living or he's cancer filled and fading fast.

White supremacists in the news

If only Karl Linnaeus knew the can of worms he opened when he classified the four races.

Supremacists Split After Race Allegation

Fri Feb 4, 9:36 PM ET Strange News - AP


SOUTH ST. PAUL, Minn. - A high-profile white supremacist record company appears to have gone out of business after one co-owner accused the other of having a Hispanic mother.



Panzerfaust was behind Project Schoolyard USA, which last year distributed thousands of free compact discs to teenagers across the country, particularly in Minnesota.


The company is now appears dormant, with its Web address directing views to another white power site called "Free Your Mind." No working telephone number for the Panzerfaust could be found Friday.


The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, reports that co-owners Byron Calvert, 33, and Anthony A. Pierpont, 38, had a falling out after Calvert saw a copy of Pierpont's birth certificate.


The document, which is posted on the center's Web site, indicates that Pierpont's mother was named Maria Marcola del Prado and she was born in Mexico. Also, Calvert claimed in an online posting that Pierpont had sex with Thai prostitutes.


As a result, and Pierpont's refusal to take a DNA test, Calvert wrote last month that he would quit the company and so would its webmaster. The center reports that influential hate groups Hammerskin Nation and Volksfront also denounced Pierpont.


The Free Your Mind site said that any business done with Pierpont should be considered "an act of treason."

Considering this from a rhetorical angle one can see the curious interplay between bureaucracy and the body. That a white supremacist would do a background check of sorts on his business partner to verify his racial identity (and purity), and that such a thing could be gleaned from a birth certificate demonstrates the curious nature of race in the world.

Race doesn't exist. Karl Linnaeus made it up. He also believed in troglodytes, a race of sub-human night-dwellers with light sensitivity and other such attributes.

Yet, so many legitimate discourses in the world still support a notion of race: census taking, social science surveys, birth certificates, national identity.

The issue that ruins racism as a constitutive discourse is that it's ultimately built upon an absurd foundation. Racialism and racism rest upon the presumption that that blood and body constitute the person and that the flesh does not lie. Yet the deeper you go into the flesh the more absurd a picture you get. Instead of more definitive answers, you muddy the concept of race and any notion of its integrity. Based upon genomic comparison alone the part that makes us human as opposed to plant or snail is so miniscule. Secondly, a genetic census of one person's body would reveal that most of the genetic material therein isn't at all human. Microbes off all types residing in and on the body quickly crowd out human cells at a ratio of 1.5 foreign cells to 1 human cells.

Racists and just about everyone in the world have drawn a line of demarcation that to them is as plain a fact as the sun in the sky: race exists. Differences exist, differences we see. Skin color, skull shape, and stature represent such a miniscule measure of difference I wonder why we bother. Overwhelming evidence about the material nature of our inheritance points to our likeness with all living things.

While we're on the topic of race, let's talk about the unicorn who rides down a rainbow to administer IQ tests.

Ideas for bumper stickers

"Solidarity is gay."

"I'm having a bad half-life."

"I'd rather be working."

"Bumper sticker for president."

"I'm the proud parent of a statistic."

"Read this."

I am the night

http://brandonbird.com/i_am_the_night.html

This guy has amazing technique, to say the least. Some elements look like cut-and-paste photos, but the grabber is his technique and attention to all the things that made being a kid in one of those shitty knock-off costumes great: shameless television/movie title plug, a representation of the character worn (normally much better than the mask), and those fucking die-in-a-suffocating-fire-of-melted-plastic pants. The composition of that painting is very much as we remember, from the plastic camera lens of mom's or dad's camera. With his thumb pressing down on his forefinger, the kid is mildly inconvenienced by the deferral of his candy gathering, while the parent is just as certain to select a flattering element of the house. The door bears the mark of the culture: mass production, mass identification, consumption, and an attendant fear of lack. The address is the unique identifying feature of the house that is just as certain to conjure a childhood ritual of reciting vital information in the event the child is lost as it is to function as placeholder in a vast databases of households and demographic metrics used to calculate property value, to determine the mass mail that is sent, or to plan the kinds of entertainment programs it--and others like it--will watch.

A couple more notables:

http://brandonbird.com/battle_of_the_heroes.html


And this is how I remember my childhood, time spent in soft-focus.

http://brandonbird.com/sears.html

Because he's feeding old icons back through the lens of nostalgic memory each cuts a heroic profile among the mise en scene of childhood play with manufactured goods. I am going to tentatively call his art the syndicated sublime.

wargame, please insert quarter

Not really a wargame but footage of the current Israel-Palestine conflict. The bird's eye view and false color infrared vision of the video provides a rather serene and somewhat video-game like quality for the viewer. The Hebrew translation indicates that the superior training of the Israeli soldier wins the day.

The imagery, the perspective, and the commentary all contribute to a genre one might call war porn. It's cool. It's exciting. You want to take sides.

But...

Those who rise up suck at aiming. Those who rise up suck at tossing grenades. Out skilled, out-gunned, out-supplied, those who rise up can never play this war game on a level playing field with those of a world power or an elite fighting force. So let's go back to playing our video game in god's eye view mode.

Wal-mart worker killed in sales rush

Pithy quips aside, this story is a gem in that the news of her crushing is literally crushed itself by the trample of economic news.

US stores lure hard-up shoppers

US stores have opened early and offered steep discounts to encourage consumers to part with their cash as the Christmas shopping season kicks off.

Crowds of shoppers turned up at dawn to snare the best deals.

A worker died and at least three people were injured after being trampled by a crowd of shoppers at a Wal-Mart in the New York suburbs.

The day after the Thanksgiving holiday is viewed as an important test of how willing consumers are to spend.

Police said a throng of shoppers broke down the doors to the Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, Long Island shortly after 5am, knocking the 34-year-old worker to the ground.

Electronics retailer Best Buy and department stores Kohl's and Macy's also opened their doors at dawn.

Toys R Us offered up to 60% discounts from 5am to 10am.

Initial reports from several major retailers indicated that crowds were at least as large as last year's, but deep discounts are likely to hurt retailers' profit margins.

Bargain hunters

Some shoppers queued up to bag the best bargains.

"The recession is kicking in," Tammy Williams, 36, told the Reuters news agency as she waited for a Kohl's store in New Jersey to open at 4am.

"I'm just looking for a bargain, anything to save a couple of dollars. I'll save the rest for food shopping."

Analysts said that retailers will closely monitor store traffic and the amount of time spent in stores.

Many retailers have suffered as the US economy nosedives although value chains like Wal-Mart have fared better.

US retail sales recorded the biggest monthly decline since 1992 in October as consumers cut back on spending.

When a discriminating organization wishes away it's discriminating past

From the article:

Dunwoody becomes first female four-star general

"The recognition makes her a little bit uncomfortable from the standpoint of the gender aspect — that we're making a big deal (that) she is the first female general officer," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday in announcing that Defense Secretary Robert Gates would attend her promotion ceremony."

This language baffles me - 'makes her a little bit uncomfortable from the stanpoint of the gender aspect...' Even Whitman is having difficulty discussing the fact that she's a woman and that that makes her appointment newsworthy; the Pentagon doesn't talk about women on the staff that often.

"I grew up in a family that didn't know what glass ceilings were," she said. "This nomination only reaffirms what I have known to be true about the military throughout my career — that the doors continue to open for men and women in uniform."

Another example of the person who succeeds pretending that systematic forms of discrimination just don't exist. I guess being the daugther of a former four-star does help her wish things like discrimination away. And just look at her rough features.



That woman couldn't ask to look more like .


Marshall Murdock.

Quoth Rambo: "Colonel, you're the only one I trust ..."


[Queue the chopper and arm sweat.]

File under 'post colonial'

The guy leading the horses lacks a dental plan.

Purity ritual

Quotable:

When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. "We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today's world," she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet--a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. "On my wedding day, he'll give it to my husband," she explains. "It's a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I'm supposed to be loved."

Toss this salad with psychoanalytic vinaigrette.

Something looks amiss in this picture. A father's love pushed to violent self-ownership. That's the point. While they call themselves the promise keepers, these fathers are the ones who get to decide when and where their daughters get fucked for the first time. That's symbolic rape to me.

War story

A public makes heroes in the theatre of war, while the hero struggles off the stage with a performance that just won't end.

Soldier in famous photo never defeated 'demons'

By ALLEN G. BREED and KEVIN MAURER, Associated Press Writers 57 minutes ago

Officers had been to the white ranch house at 560 W. Longleaf many times before over the past year to respond to a "barricade situation." Each had ended uneventfully, with Joseph Dwyer coming out or telling police in a calm voice through the window that he was OK.

But this time was different.

The Iraq War veteran had called a taxi service to take him to the emergency room. But when the driver arrived, Dwyer shouted that he was too weak to get up and open the door.

The officers asked Dwyer for permission to kick it in.

"Go ahead!" he yelled.

They found Dwyer lying on his back, his clothes soiled with urine and feces. Scattered on the floor around him were dozens of spent cans of Dust-Off, a refrigerant-based aerosol normally used to clean electrical equipment.

Dwyer told police Lt. Mike Wilson he'd been "huffing" the aerosol.

"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged Wilson. "I'm dying. Help me. I can't breathe."

Unable to stand or even sit up, Dwyer was hoisted onto a stretcher. As paramedics prepared to load him into an ambulance, an officer noticed Dwyer's eyes had glassed over and were fixed.

A half hour later, he was dead.

When Dionne Knapp learned of her friend's June 28 death, her first reaction was to be angry at Dwyer. How could he leave his wife and daughter like this? Didn't he know he had friends who cared about him, who wanted to help?

But as time passed, Knapp's anger turned toward the Army.

A photograph taken in the first days of the war had made the medic from New York's Long Island a symbol of the United States' good intentions in the Middle East. When he returned home, he was hailed as a hero.

But for most of the past five years, the 31-year-old soldier had writhed in a private hell, shooting at imaginary enemies and dodging nonexistent roadside bombs, sleeping in a closet bunker and trying desperately to huff away the "demons" in his head. When his personal problems became public, efforts were made to help him, but nothing seemed to work.

This broken, frightened man had once been the embodiment of American might and compassion. If the military couldn't save him, Knapp thought, what hope was there for the thousands suffering in anonymity?

___

Like many, Dwyer joined the military in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

His father and three brothers are all cops. One brother, who worked in Lower Manhattan, happened to miss his train that morning and so hadn't been there when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

Joseph, the second-youngest of six, decided that he wanted to get the people who'd "knocked my towers down."

And he wanted to be a medic. (Dwyer's first real job was as a transporter for a hospital in the golf resort town of Pinehurst, where his parents had moved after retirement.)

In 2002, Dwyer was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas. The jokester immediately fell in with three colleagues — Angela Minor, Sgt. Jose Salazar, and Knapp. They spent so much time together after work that comrades referred to them as "The Four Musketeers."

Knapp had two young children and was going through a messy divorce. Dwyer stepped in as a surrogate dad, showing up in uniform at her son Justin's kindergarten and coming by the house to assemble toys that Knapp couldn't figure out.

When it became clear that the U.S. would invade Iraq, Knapp became distraught, confiding to Dwyer that she would rather disobey her deployment orders than leave her kids.

Dwyer asked to go in her place. When she protested, he insisted: "Trust me, this is what I want to do. I want to go." After a week of nagging, his superiors relented.

Dwyer assured his parents, Maureen and Patrick — and his new wife, Matina, whom he'd married in August 2002 — that he was being sent to Kuwait and would likely stay in the rear, far from the action.

But it wasn't true. Unbeknownst to his family, Dwyer had been attached to the 3rd Infantry's 7th Cavalry Regiment. He was at "the tip of the tip of the spear," in one officer's phrase.

During the push into Baghdad, Dwyer's unit came under heavy fire. An airstrike called in to suppress ambush fire rocked the convoy.

As the sun rose along the Euphrates River on March 25, 2003, Army Times photographer Warren Zinn watched as a man ran toward the soldiers carrying a white flag and his injured 4-year-old son. Zinn clicked away as Dwyer darted out to meet the man, then returned, cradling the boy in his arms.

The photo — of a half-naked boy, a kaffiyeh scarf tied around his shrapnel-injured leg and his mouth set in a grimace of pain, and of a bespectacled Dwyer dressed in full battle gear, his M-16 rifle dangling by his side — appeared on front pages and magazine covers around the world.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to interview the soldier in "the photo." Dwyer was given a "Hometown Hero" award by child-safety advocate John Walsh; the Army awarded him the Combat Medical Badge for service under enemy fire.

The attention embarrassed him.

"Really, I was just one of a group of guys," he told a military publication. "I wasn't standing out more than anyone else."

___

Returning to the U.S. in June 2003, after 91 days in Iraq, Dwyer seemed a shell to friends.

When he deployed, he was pudgy at 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds. Now he weighed around 165, and the other Musketeers immediately thought of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dwyer attributed his skeletal appearance to long days and a diet of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). He showed signs of his jolly old self, so his friends accepted his explanation.

But they soon noticed changes that were more than cosmetic.

At restaurants, Dwyer insisted on sitting with his back to the wall so no one could sneak up on him. He turned down invitations to the movies, saying the theaters were too crowded. He said the desert landscape around El Paso, and the dark-skinned Hispanic population, reminded him of Iraq.

Dwyer, raised Roman Catholic but never particularly religious before, now would spend lunchtime by himself, poring over his Bible.

When people would teasingly call him "war hero" and ask him to tell about his experiences, or about the famous photo, he would steer the conversation toward the others he'd served with. But Dwyer once confided that another image, also involving a child, disturbed him.

He was standing next to a soldier during a firefight when a boy rode up on a bicycle and stopped beside a weapon lying in the dirt. Under his breath, the soldier beside Dwyer whispered, "Don't pick it up, kid. Don't pick it up."

The boy reached for the weapon and was blasted off his bike.

In late 2004, Dwyer sent e-mails to Zinn, wondering if the photographer had "heard anything else about the kid" from the photo, and claiming he was "doing fine out here in Fort Bliss, Texas."

But Dwyer wasn't doing fine. Earlier that year, he'd been prescribed antidepressants and referred for counseling by a doctor. Still, his behavior went from merely odd to dangerous.

One day, he swerved to avoid what he thought was a roadside bomb and crashed into a convenience store sign. He began answering his apartment door with a pistol in his hand and would call friends from his car in the middle of the night, babbling and disoriented from sniffing inhalants.

Matina told friends that he was seeing imaginary Iraqis all around him. Despite all this, the Army had not taken his weapons.

In the summer of 2005, he was removed to the barracks for 72 hours after trashing the apartment looking for an enemy infiltrator. He was admitted to Bliss' William Beaumont Army Medical Center for treatment of his inhalant addiction.

But things continued to worsen. That October, the Musketeers decided it was time for an "intervention."

Minor, who had moved to New York, overdrew her bank account and flew down. She, Knapp and Salazar went to the apartment and pleaded with Dwyer to give up his guns, or at least his ammunition.

"I'm sorry, guys," he told them. "But there's no way I'm giving up my weapons."

After talking for about an hour and a half, Dwyer agreed to let Matina lock the weapons up. The group went for a walk in a nearby park, and Dwyer seemed happier than he'd been in months.

But Dwyer's paranoia soon returned — and worsened.

On Oct. 6, 2005, when superiors went to the couple's off-base apartment to persuade Dwyer to return to the hospital, Dwyer barricaded himself in. Imagining Iraqis swarming up the sides and across the roof, he fired his pistol through the door, windows and ceiling.

After a three-hour standoff, Dwyer's eldest brother, Brian, also a police officer, managed to talk him down over the phone. Dwyer was admitted for psychiatric treatment.

In a telephone interview later that month from what he called the "nut hut" at Beaumont, Dwyer told Newsday that he'd lied on a post-deployment questionnaire that asked whether he'd been disturbed by what he'd seen and done in Iraq. The reason: A PTSD diagnosis could interfere with his plans to seek a police job. Besides, he'd been conditioned to see it as a sign of weakness.

"I'm a soldier," he said. "I suck it up. That's our job."

Dwyer told the newspaper that he'd blown off counseling before but was committed to embracing his treatment this time. He said he hoped to become an envoy to others who avoided treatment for fear of damaging their careers.

"There's a lot of soldiers suffering in silence," he said.

In January 2006, Joseph and Matina Dwyer moved back to North Carolina, away from the place that reminded him so much of the battlefield. But his shadow enemy followed him here.

___

Dwyer was discharged from the Army in March 2006 and living off disability. That May, Matina Dwyer gave birth to a daughter, Meagan Kaleigh.

He seemed to be getting by, but setbacks would occur without warning.

On the Fourth of July, he and family were fishing off the back deck when the fireworks display began. Dwyer bolted inside and hid under a bed.

In June 2007, police responded to a call that Dwyer was "having some mental problems related to PTSD." A captain talked him into going to the emergency room.

Later that month, Matina Dwyer moved in with her parents and obtained a protective order. In the complaint, she said Dwyer had purchased an AR-15 assault rifle and become angry when she refused to return it.

"He said that he was coming to my residence to get his gun back," she wrote in the June 25, 2007, complaint. "He was coming packed with guns and someone was going to die tonight." She declined to be interviewed for this story.

In July 2007, Dwyer checked into an inpatient program at New York's Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He stayed for six months.

He came home in March with more than a dozen prescriptions. He was so medicated that his feet flopped when he walked, as if he were wearing oversized clown shoes.

The VA's solution was a "pharmaceutical lobotomy," his father thought.

But within five days of his discharge, Dwyer's symptoms had returned with such ferocity that the family decided it was time to get Matina and 2-year-old Meagan out. While Dwyer was off buying inhalants, his parents helped spirit them away.

On April 10, weary and fearful, Matina Dwyer filed for custody and division of property.

Without his wife and daughter to anchor him, Dwyer's grip on reality loosened further. He reverted to Iraq time, sleeping during the day and "patrolling" all night. Unable to possess a handgun, he placed knives around the house for protection.

In those last months, Dwyer opened up a little to his parents.

What bothered him most, he said, was the sheer volume of the gunfire. He talked about the grisly wounds he'd treated and dwelled on the people he was unable to save. His nasal membranes seemed indelibly stained with the scents of the battlefield — the sickeningly sweet odor of rotting flesh and the metallic smell of blood.

Yet despite all that, Dwyer continued to talk about going back to Iraq. He told his parents that if he could just get back with his comrades and do his job, things would right themselves.

When Maureen Dwyer first saw Zinn's famous photo, she'd had a premonition that it might be the last picture she'd ever see of Joseph.

"I just didn't think he was going to come home," she said. "And he never did."

___

An autopsy is pending, but police are treating Dwyer's death as an accidental overdose.

His friends and family see it differently.

The day of the 2005 standoff, Knapp spent hours on the telephone trying to get help for Dwyer. She was frustrated by a military bureaucracy that would not act unless his petrified wife complained, and with a civilian system that insisted Dwyer was the military's problem.

In a letter to post commander Maj. Gen. Robert Lennox, Knapp expressed anger that Army officials who were "proud to display him as a hero ... now had turned their back on him..."

"Joseph Dwyer who had left to Iraq one of the nicest, kindest, caring, self-sacrificing and patriotic people I have ever known," she wrote, "was forced to witness and commit acts completely contrary to his nature and returned a tormented, confused disillusioned shadow of his former self that was not being given the help he needed."

While Dwyer was in the service, Minor said, the Army controlled every aspect of his life.

"So someone should have taken him by the hand and said, `We're putting you in the hospital, and you're staying there until you get fixed — until you're back to normal."

But Dr. Antonette Zeiss, deputy chief of the VA's Office of Mental Health, said it's not that simple.

"Veterans are civilians, and VA is guided by state law about involuntary commitment," she told the AP. "There are civil liberties, and VA respects that those civil liberties are important."

The family would not authorize the VA to release Dwyer's medical records. But it appears that Dwyer was sometimes unwilling — or unable — to make the best use of the programs available. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Lennox, the former Bliss post commander, wrote that Dwyer "had a great (in my opinion) care giver."

Zeiss said the best treatment for PTSD is exposure-based psychotherapy, in which the patient is made "to engage in thoughts, feelings and conversations about the trauma." While caregivers must be 100 percent committed to creating an environment in which the veteran feels comfortable confronting those demons, she said the patient must be equally committed to following through.

"And so it's a dance between the clinicians and the patient."

Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, feels the VA is a lousy dance partner.

Rieckhoff said the VA's is a "passive system" whose arcane rules and regulations make it hard for veterans to find help. And when they do get help, he said, it is often inadequate.

"I consider (Dwyer) a battlefield casualty," he said, "because he was still fighting the war in his head."

___

The Sunday after the Fourth of July, Knapp attended services at Scotsdale Baptist, the El Paso church where she and Dwyer had been baptized together in 2004.

On the way out of the sanctuary, Knapp checked her phone and noticed an e-mail.

"I didn't know if you had heard or not," a friend wrote, "but I got an email from Matina this morning saying that Joseph had died on Saturday and that the funeral was today."

Knapp maintained her composure long enough to get herself and the children to the car. Then she lost it.

The children asked what was wrong.

"Joseph is dead," she told them.

"You said he wasn't sick any more," Justin said.

"I know, Justin," his mother replied. "But I guess maybe the help wasn't working like we thought it was."

The kids were too young to understand acronyms like PTSD or to hear a lecture about how Knapp thought the system had failed Dwyer. So she told them that, just as they sometimes have nightmares, "sometimes people get those nightmares in their head and they just can't get them out, no matter what."

Despite the efforts she made to get help for Dwyer, Knapp is trying to cope with a deep-seated guilt. She knows that Dwyer shielded her from the images that had haunted him.

"I think about all the torture that he went through when he came back, and I think that all of that stuff could have happened to me," she said, stifling a sob. "I just owe him so much for that."

Since Dwyer's death, Justin, now 9, has taken to carrying a newspaper clipping of the Zinn photo around with him. Occasionally, Knapp will catch him huddled with a playmate, showing the photo and telling him about the soldier who used to come to his school and assemble his toys.

Justin wants them to know all about Spc. Joseph Dwyer. His hero.