A few weeks into my doctoral program at the University of Colorado I was attending my qualitative methods course, which was taught by a professor who had co-written a book on the subject and who, by most regards, was a giant in this methodology. Some of his earliest work were diamond exemplars of how to conduct qualitative methods and produce publishable work from it. He had since moved on to write award-winning qualitative research and cultural studies pieces about aspects of the nuclear defense industry, namely its memorials.
This experience was a vivid one, and perhaps it's a collapsed composite of several warm fall evenings in that lecture room with the sounds of the undergraduates playing music and socializing in the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court outside our window. I remember him commenting, in an aside to the lecture topic, on the drums wafting in through the room's open window. "New tribalism," he said, and I couldn't help but think that this man was out of touch. But I was just out of touch with him and his ways. And in the process of learning those ways he taught me a lesson about word usage.
At one point during our discussion that evening I engaged the teacher and the class as I had learned through twenty years spent in the classroom by asking a now-seemingly overused question: "Is this a good or a bad thing?" Instead of responding to my question, he responded to my choice of words. He told me to substitute for 'good' or 'bad' 'more useful' or 'less useful.' To me, that seemed like the essence of pragmatism, a distinctly American school of philosophical thought. Not only was he trying to teach me to be less vague but to focus on the use-value of my focal concern. So, for example, if I were to 'go native,' so to speak, in conducting qualitative research, would that be more or less useful given a certain set of circumstances under which I, as a researcher, were to conduct and eventually produce my research? I was, at that time, 25 and at the zenith of my youthful, dogmatic idealism. Elders, such as this man, were equipping me to steer off that lemming's course leading to the asymptote of a dream figure: perfection, superlatives, up, up, away, death--scholarly or otherwise.
As I said, this experience was a vivid one, and adjunct to this classroom moment was one, before class, at my chest-of-drawers, in my home, across town, in Boulder. There, I had taken the last pill from a bottle of Vicoprofin prescribed to me by an oral surgeon who had extracted four 'wisdom' teeth a few months earlier. During a moment of doctor-patient small talk as he stereo x-rayed my head to plan his attack on these four aspects of my wisdom he asked me what I did. At the time, I was a starry eyed intellectual whose future lay before him. I told him that I planned to study organizational communication to which he offered that pat response: "What's that?" I gave him a seemingly sufficient response concerning communication, representation, and workplace identity as they relate to the meaning of the work itself to which he responded: "Well, don't go around organizing hospital nurses because then they'll demand better working conditions and pay." Here was an oral surgeon, of the old school, wearing a somewhat colorful surgical scrub, counting me among his many thousands of extractions, providing a rather gruff and decidedly Midwestern professional's response to what threat he thought I posed to the order of any organization, especially his. I suspected that he mistook "organizational" for "organizer," which isn't far afield of what many can and want to do in my field but who get subverted by the pay coming from the executives who request them as 'consultants.' I wonder where that surgeon is now? He could just have easily retired in Edwardsville as in Florida, I'm sure, handsomely either way. Me? Well, I just took out the trash this morning, and I am sometimes indistinguishable from the detritus of my life. Translation: I am of my shit, unlike Joe Oral Surgeon, who followed a recipe for success and who, through hard work, intelligence, race- and sex-based institutional privilege, and imposing, athletic build bullied his way through school and into his respective field of work. I, the meek and distracted person I was, ended up taking out the trash at 5 a.m., with leftover soup heating on the stove, coffee brewing, cat mewing, and decided that today was not a good day to visit the Ironworker's hall, the access to which was handed to my by my father. Why? Well, I decided that instead of framing my choice in terms of 'good' or 'bad' I decided to frame it terms of use-value, and my god, what I am doing now is so much more useful than speaking to that high school clique known as the unemployed labor pool, sitting at a cafeteria table, "shooting the shit," awaiting a job call.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
mental, illness
Mental, illness is a state of mind accomplished through the coordination of an emotional affect and a sense of self, which attempts to adopt that affect into a 'real condition' of its existence. Mental, illness occurs at the point that one's self identity (self)abusively re-enacts this emotional affect after the underlying chemical or neurological state that precipitated it has waned.
Mental, illness is a state of mind that, through time, becomes a component of self-identity. Over time and through the aid of legitimating institutional discourses this albeit 'administered' self becomes a reality through bureaucratic workings and health care diagnoses. And what was once a private experience with a state of mind becomes a performance, a public stigma, a sick role, carried potentially for life.
Mental, illness is a state of mind that, through time, becomes a component of self-identity. Over time and through the aid of legitimating institutional discourses this albeit 'administered' self becomes a reality through bureaucratic workings and health care diagnoses. And what was once a private experience with a state of mind becomes a performance, a public stigma, a sick role, carried potentially for life.
Monday, March 17, 2014
The abusement park
The abusement park is a place where you go see marine life trained to do tricks for a paying public.
In the abusement park intelligent marine mammals are separated from a life-long pod, put into small holding ponds under unnatural conditions, and re-trained through a steady diet of fish to do clever tricks for a viewing public.
This viewing public, that fiction of suburban advertising and petroleum fueled fantasy, wants that world to be before it as if everything conformed to a television fiction. Shows like "Flipper," which emerged, perhaps, from World War II and Cold War training of marine cetaceans to conduct military operation, would become a model for the entertainment industry situated in marine theme parks like Sea World. Sea World, situated near another World, created by Walt Disney follows Walt's template for always-consistent, always-fun, always-white-washed entertainment involving people and animals and people-as-animals. It's a combination of circus, acrobatics, and that eye-popping spectacle of marine cetaceans measured by the ton.
Killer whales, orcas, those wonders of the ocean, those pack animals with large brains and sophisticated sonar, those creatures who live in pods comprising multiple generations have their cetacean sociologies cross-sectioned when they're forcibly removed from their environment and environs to be placed in a man-made pool in places like Florida where a paying public watches them jump out of the water, slide out into the open air in stylized poses, and launch their white trainers into the air to the astonishment of the audience.
This abusement park, a place where fictions are spun at the expense of the creatures caught in its narrative. This abusement park, a place where science is distorted to support a narrative that explains away the obvious signs of containment shown by the whales: the collapsed dorsal, the rake marks of aggression spawned from mixing whales of different sexes and different pods into the same small enclosure. This abusement park, an aquarium, a curio containing some of the world's largest, most intelligent, and socially sophisticated marine mammals in spaces much, much smaller than the many miles of open sea that the creature would normally inhabit, safely, and without mental distress. This abusement park, a place that inspires countless generations of white kids from suburbia to join its ranks only to realize the cruel underside to the whole enterprise. The abusement park, a marine themed zoo with a profit motive, pimping animals in its captivity for the sake of a paying public.
The abusement park is the theater of the spectacle where animals (human and otherwise) were harmed in its making.
In the abusement park intelligent marine mammals are separated from a life-long pod, put into small holding ponds under unnatural conditions, and re-trained through a steady diet of fish to do clever tricks for a viewing public.
This viewing public, that fiction of suburban advertising and petroleum fueled fantasy, wants that world to be before it as if everything conformed to a television fiction. Shows like "Flipper," which emerged, perhaps, from World War II and Cold War training of marine cetaceans to conduct military operation, would become a model for the entertainment industry situated in marine theme parks like Sea World. Sea World, situated near another World, created by Walt Disney follows Walt's template for always-consistent, always-fun, always-white-washed entertainment involving people and animals and people-as-animals. It's a combination of circus, acrobatics, and that eye-popping spectacle of marine cetaceans measured by the ton.
Killer whales, orcas, those wonders of the ocean, those pack animals with large brains and sophisticated sonar, those creatures who live in pods comprising multiple generations have their cetacean sociologies cross-sectioned when they're forcibly removed from their environment and environs to be placed in a man-made pool in places like Florida where a paying public watches them jump out of the water, slide out into the open air in stylized poses, and launch their white trainers into the air to the astonishment of the audience.
This abusement park, a place where fictions are spun at the expense of the creatures caught in its narrative. This abusement park, a place where science is distorted to support a narrative that explains away the obvious signs of containment shown by the whales: the collapsed dorsal, the rake marks of aggression spawned from mixing whales of different sexes and different pods into the same small enclosure. This abusement park, an aquarium, a curio containing some of the world's largest, most intelligent, and socially sophisticated marine mammals in spaces much, much smaller than the many miles of open sea that the creature would normally inhabit, safely, and without mental distress. This abusement park, a place that inspires countless generations of white kids from suburbia to join its ranks only to realize the cruel underside to the whole enterprise. The abusement park, a marine themed zoo with a profit motive, pimping animals in its captivity for the sake of a paying public.
The abusement park is the theater of the spectacle where animals (human and otherwise) were harmed in its making.
The Polytechnic Heritage
I've been getting angry lately, and this has been the focus of my anger. Beginning on page 134 of his work, "The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford writes:
The post-traditional society, as the name suggests, is one where the individual has radical freedom to pursue the profession of one's choosing and will not be forced, before the age of consent, into the family industry. The post-traditional society provides a notion of freedom from this very thing. It comes at a specific cost to both mastery and to identity management. By the age of 18 the person living under the mandates of traditional society had logged the ten thousand-hour floor set to measure mastery in a profession. By that token, the professional in a traditional society knew what to do. Contrast this with the young adult in a post-traditional society. By 18 he has mastered passive television watching, product consumption, and the disposable identity formed by taking part in social groups through the adoption of fashion trends. The post-traditional society hasn't deviated much from the social forms that existed prior. Now, the choices one has are presented to the individual and his personal growth work helps him to secure some sense of a self amid the din of advertised choices and the diversity of lifestyles that grow from them. But the choices and resources available are managed by a profit-seeking institution instead of a family member motivated by the survival of a peculiar social concept: reputation.
Reputation is a check to a social organization that relies on a degree of specialization. The reputation of the artisan would motivate this person to both cultivate a craft skill and the good graces of a public that would need his services.
Because the era before the eighteenth century is mistakenly supposed to have been technically backward, one of its best characteristics has been overlooked: namely that it was still a mixed technology, a veritable polytechnics, for the characteristic tools, machine-tools, machines, utensils, and utilities it used did not derive solely from its own period and culture, but had been accumulating in great variety for tens of thousands of years.
Consider this immense heritage. If the watermill went back to pre-Christian Greece and the windmill to eighth-century Persia, the plow, the loom, and the potter's wheel went back two or three thousand years further; while its grains, fruits, and vegetables derived from a much earlier period of paleolithic food-gathering and neolithic domestication. The bow that won the battle of Crécy for the English was a paleolithic invention, once used in hunting Magdalenian bison. As for the paintings, and sculptures in public buildings, these issued from an even more ancient paleolithic past: the Aurignacian caves. The introduction of new inventions like the clock did not necessitate on principle the discarding of any of these older achievements.
Not the least significant fact about this 'backward' technology is that the areas in which technical skill and engineering audacity were highest, namely, in the massive Romanesque and the towering Gothic cathedrals,p. 135
drew on the oldest parts of our technical heritage, and were associated directly, not with any utilitarian purpose, but solely with attempts to add significance and beauty to the necessitous round of daily life. It was not the need for food or shelter, or the desire to exploit natural forces, or the effort to overcome physical obstacles that raised this constructive technics to the highest pitch of effort. To express their deepest subjective feelings, the builders of these monuments posed for themselves the most difficult technical problems, often beyond their mathematical insight or craft experience, but calling forth a daring experimental imagination, so daring that it sometimes fatally outran their capacities--as more than one toppled tower revealed.
To build these monumental structures, groups of workers of diverse capabilities and talents were assembled, to perform a wide variety of tasks, from the monotonous shaping of stones into square blocks, small enough for a single man to handle, to the acrobatic feats needed to place the carved stones on the topmost pinnacle. not merely muscular strength, mechanical skill, and physical courage went into the fabrication of these buildings: emotions, feelings, fantasies, remembered legends--in fact, the community's total response to life--took form in these supreme technological achievements. Technology itself was a means to a greater goal: for the cathedral was as near to Heaven as any earthbound structure could get.
Such mastery of the complex processes of architectural creation was not for the purpose of either "making work," as in ancient times, or of doing away with work, as under today's automation: neither was it just to increase the personal prestige of the Master Mason or the incomes of the workers, still less to 'expand the economy.' The ultimate end of such a magnificent technical effort was not the building alone but the vision it promoted: a sense of the meanings and values of life. This achievement has proved so valuable that successive generations of men, with far different religious beliefs and aspirations, have nevertheless felt a fresh infusion of spiritual vitality on beholding these buildings, even as William Morris did, as an eight-year-old boy, when he first confronted, breathlessly, the marvel of Canterbury Cathedral.
Not every aspect of handicraft, it goes without saying, offered such happy working conditions or such ultimate rewards. There was back-breaking drudgery, hardship, crippling organic maladaption, and chronic disease in occupations such as mining, smelting, dyeing, and glass-blowing: yet today, despite our superior medical diagnosis and treatment, many of these disabilities still exist, and have even been magnified in technically 'advanced' industries where the workers are exposed to radioactivity, to lead poisoning, to silicate and asbestos dust, or to malign pesticides like malathion and dieldrin.p. 136
The other human weakness of some handicraft industries, like weaving, their fixation in routine motions and unrelieved monotony, paved the way for mechanization: but the effect of the latter, until automation took over, was to intensify the boredom, while the speeding up of the processes took away the soothing effect of repetition that makes such crafts so useful to the psychiatrist in the concluding phases of psychotherapy, as William Morris discovered by personal experience during a troubled period in his own marital life.
In certain departments of handicraft, the rewards and the penalties were, admittedly, almost inextricable. In some of the highest reaches, as in the Persian rug-making of the sixteenth century, the perfection of both the design and the process of work, demanding as many as four hundred knots to the square inch, might call for a lifetime enslavement of the worker, to reach such a pitch of artifice. There is no need to conceal these ugly blemishes: but also no excuse for hiding one of the great compensations--the work itself was prized and preserved. One of the beautiful rugs that now covers a wall in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London demanded the whole lifetime of the temple slave who made it. But this slave was an artist, and in his art enjoyed freedom to create. At the end of his task, he proudly signed his name to the masterpiece. he had not lost his identity or his self-respect: he had something to show for his working life. Compare the death of this slave with Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman.'
To understand the older polytechnics, partly mechanized by the sixteenth century, but not wholly committed to mechanization, one must remember that its dominant arts were solidly based on ancient neolithic foundations: mixed farming--grains, vegetables, orchard crops, domestic animals--and buildings of every sort, from houses and barns to canals and cathedrals. All these occupations required an assemblage of craft knowledge and skills; and the work, in the very process of growth and construction, changed form hour to hour and from day to day. the process itself did not demand staying in the same position, performing a single uniform task, accepting monotony and uniformity, without at least the relief of a change of weather or seasons, or a change of pace.
Consider the performance of the old-fashioned Japanese craftsman cited by Raphael Pumpelly in his 'Reminiscences.' Pumpelly wanted a door that could be locked, so he called in a metal-worker to make screwed-in hinges; but unfortunately this craftsman had never seen a screw. When Pumpelly presented him with an iron screw, the worker went away and the next day brought a dozen brass screws, beautifully made and polished, after being ingeniously molded. "He also asked permission to copy my Colt's revolver. Before long he brought an exact duplicate working wellp. 137
in all its parts, and it was more highly finished." One would look far to find such confidence and resourcefulness in a modern machine shop: it was long ago exiled from the assembly line.
In the workshop and the household there were plenty of tedious tasks, no doubt: but they were done in the company of one's fellows, at a pace that allowed for chatting and singing: there was none of the loneliness of the modern housewife presiding over a gang of machines, accompanied only by the insistent rumble and clatter and hum of her assistants. Except in servile industries like mining, playful relaxation, sexual delight, domestic tenderness, esthetic stimulation were not spatially or mentally separated completely from the work in hand.
Though hand labor brought many skills to the highest point of perfection--no machine can weave cotton as fine as Dacca muslin with number 400 thread--and even more important characteristic was its wide diffusion, which is another way of referering to the tool-user's essential autonomy and self-reliance. Nothing proves this better than the annals of overseas exploration, with their repeated record of building seaworthy ships to take the place of a wrecked vessel. "The ship's carpenter who marched in Cortes' army, directed the building and launching on Lake Texcoco of a whole fleet of brigantines big enough to carry cannon." Such a mode of work was equal to any emergency: neither the skill nor the overall knowledge of design was restricted to a few specialists. That our present gains in horsepower have been diminished by a loss of effective manpower, and above all cooperating mindpower, widely distributed, has still to be sufficiently appreciated.
Karl Buecher gave an account of this inter-relation between handicraft work and esthetic expression in his classic study, 'Arbeit und Rhymus,' unfortunately never translated into English; and I have emphasized, in 'Art and Technics' and elsewhere, the fact that mechanical invention and esthetic expression were inseparable aspects of the older polytechnics, and that, down to the Renascence, art itself remained the principle field of invention. The purpose of art has never been labor-saving but labor-loving, a deliberate elaboration of function, form, and symbolic ornament to enhance the interest of life itself.
This ancient reciprocity between folk work and folk art reached its apogee in music between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries: witness Samuel Pepys choosing a serving-maid partly for her qualifications in holding her part in song around the family dinner table--or Franz Schubert, who, according to legend, translated the work song of the pile drivers on the river into the melody and rhythm of his Nocturne in E-flat Major. If orchestral music reached its climax in the symphonic works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, it was perhaps because it stillp. 138
obviously drew upon the wealth of folk songs and dances that were tied to the rural crafts: a heritage that Verdi, in an industrially 'backward' country like Italy, could still draw on.
Had this craft economy, prior to mechanization, actually been ground down by poverty, its workers might have spent the time given over to communal celebrations and church-building on multiplying the yards of textiles woven or the pairs of shoes cobbled. Certainly an economy that enjoyed a long series of holidays, free from work, only fifty-two of which were Sundays, cannot be called impoverished. The worst one can say about it is that in its concentration on its spiritual interests and social satisfactions, it might fail to guard its members sufficiently against a poor winter diet and occasional bouts of starvation. But such an economy had something that we now have almost forgotten the meaning of, leisure: not freedom from work, which is how our present culture interprets leisure, but freedom within work; and along with that, time to converse, to ruminate, to contemplate the meaning of life.
Aside from the agriculture and building, the most radical weakness of the older handicrafts was their excessive craft-specialization, which prevented the free circulation of knowledge and skill, and deprived the individual crafts outside the building trades of the great corporate assemblage of knowledge that had made the engineering feats of the cathedral builders such marvellous vehicles of cultural expression. At the end of the Middle Ages, this excessive specialization began to break down through an invasion from above. Note that Rabelais made the study of arts and crafts part of Gargantua's education: on cold and rainy days he devoted himself to carving and painting and went with his tutor to observe "the drawing of metals or the casting of cannon, or paid visits of jewellers, goldsmiths, and cutters of precious stones; or to alchemists and coiners, or to tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, and other craftsmen of that sort; and everywhere ... they learned and considered the processes and inventions of each trade."
In this description, Rabelais was recording, in effect, the great innovation effected in person by the Renascence artist: the audacious all-around amateur who, though he might still have to attach himself to the Goldsmith's Guild, was actually breaking through a cramping and obsolescent craft isolationism; for this new figure was equally ready to paint a picture, cast a bronze, plan a fortification, design a pageant, or construct a building. Whatever he could think he could draw: whatever he could draw he could do. Through defying the constrictions of craft specialization, the artist restored the full exercise of the mind.
This facility was not the product of a special genius: was Vasari a genius? It was due, rather, to a disruption of older municipal, guild and ecclesiastic institutions by princely despots and patrons. This gave anp. 139
opportunity for detached, non specialized minds to move freely from one craft to another, utilizing their hoarded skills, but not having to invent them alone, de novo, as the machine designers after James Watt were largely forced to do. But note: the most successful of these artists, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Christopher Wren, derived their strength mainly from the ancient, if highly organized, building crafts--as a later industrial giant, Joseph Paxton, did from horticulture.The past, as imagined by Mumford, is assessed through a rosy prism. I cannot help but think that he reveals his agenda in passages like this. This passage does show a clear break that we see now between traditional society and post-traditional society, and we feel it in our generic institutionalization through school and the mantras of self-exploration and self-expression with very little if any training in the practical skills of a trade. Instead, children are trained to sit passively in rows before a single point of information, and train their attention on a lecture delivered orally, in print, and through multimedia presentation.
The post-traditional society, as the name suggests, is one where the individual has radical freedom to pursue the profession of one's choosing and will not be forced, before the age of consent, into the family industry. The post-traditional society provides a notion of freedom from this very thing. It comes at a specific cost to both mastery and to identity management. By the age of 18 the person living under the mandates of traditional society had logged the ten thousand-hour floor set to measure mastery in a profession. By that token, the professional in a traditional society knew what to do. Contrast this with the young adult in a post-traditional society. By 18 he has mastered passive television watching, product consumption, and the disposable identity formed by taking part in social groups through the adoption of fashion trends. The post-traditional society hasn't deviated much from the social forms that existed prior. Now, the choices one has are presented to the individual and his personal growth work helps him to secure some sense of a self amid the din of advertised choices and the diversity of lifestyles that grow from them. But the choices and resources available are managed by a profit-seeking institution instead of a family member motivated by the survival of a peculiar social concept: reputation.
Reputation is a check to a social organization that relies on a degree of specialization. The reputation of the artisan would motivate this person to both cultivate a craft skill and the good graces of a public that would need his services.
Friday, March 14, 2014
A culture of amendement entitlement
In the sage view of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel society progresses towards greater and greater freedom. And with that freedom comes greater and greater responsibility to uphold the norms, institutions, and laws, which support this free society.
We can contrast this early 19th century picture of history and society with the contemporary United States and its version of consumer democracy under the natural law of capital. And we need look no further than a movie theater in Florida where a retired cop shot a man dead for using his cellular phone during a movie.
To appropriate an internet meme: "I'm sorry. I cannot hear your First Amendment rights over the sound of my Second Amendment rights."
But perhaps there's a truth to this turd of wisdom. Gun fire is louder than the human voice, speaking freely.
Three aspects to the story stick out in my mind, which make it a representative anecdote for contemporary American culture, especially in the jingoistic Republican state of Florida, that dangling dick of America, the same one that corrupted 2000 presidential election results leading to the Constitutional crime of delivering the presidency to George Bush by Court-ordered fiat.
First, a man was using his cellular phone to send or answer a text. Why? Because he could, not because he knows he shouldn't have. He simply had the capability to use his phone as easy as his capability to speak and he did something that he does countless times throughout the day and in so so doing he violated the public social norms regulating movie theater behavior.
Second, a man retaliated against this affront to his right to an unperturbed theater experience through the use of his concealed weapon. This man, elderly, retired from the police force at 51, perhaps having spent too much free time before a Fox news broadcast, himself, a product of his own media consumption habits. Trial testimony reveals that he was texting as well. Go figure.
Third, another theatergoer to the event noted that "it sounded like a gunshot, but [I] wasn't sure if it was real or from the previews because they had just shown a preview for 'Robocop,' which had a lot of gunshots in it."
This little time capsule sums up the contemporary American experience. One man exercises his first amendment right simply because he can, emboldened by the always-present, always-on communication technology: the cellular phone. Another man exercises his second amendment right to bear arms, simply because he can conceal this small firearm, unimpeded, on his person, emboldened by a culture flanked by images of John Wayne and Wayne LaPierre that turn gun possession into a (w)holy American right. Third, a witness is unsure if the gunshot was real or part of a movie trailer showing at the time given the ubiquitous presence of the gun and its continuous discharge in our forms of entertainment.
Only the third man gets a pass. The first two are led like a horse to water by the technologies at hand: the phone and the gun. The function of each and their presence on the person offer logics of practice that circumvent alternatives. A recent article concerning the rude gestures of parents and loved ones who stop, mid conversation or mid presence to answer texts is but one way in which people get enslaved to the cellular phone's constant interpellation of the user. When the phone hails you, you stop what you're doing to look at the screen and respond. Likewise, the man who has gone so far as to see his life in enough danger to pack heat has conceded to the logic of use. Under normal circumstances he may de-escalate conflict or walk away but in this case he has the answer to conflict. Bang. Bang.
Florida is rife with instances of conflict precipitated by the gun where a man who normally wouldn't confront another does so through his surreptitious self-deputization via the gun. He engages in risky conversations with people he normally would not, and so emboldened by his hidden power, he challenges the other to produce an answer to why he's walking in this neighborhood or to turn down loud music only to have the manner and nature of the query be an affront to the person confronted. The demand escalates into a conflict that ends with the concealer producing his "right" and using it with the effect of ending the conversation in a pool of blood.
Guns aren't simply a manifestation of a philosophy of liberty. They aren't simply a bulwark against encroachments on those liberties. They are discursive resources deployed in interactions with others. And like any mode of power in discourse, they distort that discourse. The gun, a monologic weapon, means "I'm going to tell you what to do because I can." Furthermore it has the tendency to impose the gun wielder's meaning upon the situation. As others have said about using violent force: "It sends a clear message." The irony here is that a dead person has a better 'understanding' of your message.
I'm reminded of that cellular phone commercial: "Can you hear me now?"
The phone annihilates space like the gun. It allows the voice to travel a greater distance than it can normally can, unaided. The gun allows the teeth to travel a greater distance than they normally can, unaided. The phone a weapon in its own right, allows strangers and even stranger behavior to persist in the presence of others by a user blinded by numerous robotic uses of this device to often not recognize the social violation its use causes.
And that poor guy in the theater can't differentiate what's real from what's in the movie. This theater, that analogy for the practical limits to free speech. You can't scream fire in there. This theater, a theater for the drama of the gun. You can't open fire in there.
But you pay to watch the actors do just this all the time. And you carry that phone or that gun all the time, each providing you a reality shaped by the very technologies at hand. When you pretend to entertain others through a clever text, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona. When you wield your weapon in the defense of a phantom concept against a phantom menace, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona.
"Go ahead, make my day."
@loudtribesmen
#secondamendment
We can contrast this early 19th century picture of history and society with the contemporary United States and its version of consumer democracy under the natural law of capital. And we need look no further than a movie theater in Florida where a retired cop shot a man dead for using his cellular phone during a movie.
To appropriate an internet meme: "I'm sorry. I cannot hear your First Amendment rights over the sound of my Second Amendment rights."
But perhaps there's a truth to this turd of wisdom. Gun fire is louder than the human voice, speaking freely.
Three aspects to the story stick out in my mind, which make it a representative anecdote for contemporary American culture, especially in the jingoistic Republican state of Florida, that dangling dick of America, the same one that corrupted 2000 presidential election results leading to the Constitutional crime of delivering the presidency to George Bush by Court-ordered fiat.
First, a man was using his cellular phone to send or answer a text. Why? Because he could, not because he knows he shouldn't have. He simply had the capability to use his phone as easy as his capability to speak and he did something that he does countless times throughout the day and in so so doing he violated the public social norms regulating movie theater behavior.
Second, a man retaliated against this affront to his right to an unperturbed theater experience through the use of his concealed weapon. This man, elderly, retired from the police force at 51, perhaps having spent too much free time before a Fox news broadcast, himself, a product of his own media consumption habits. Trial testimony reveals that he was texting as well. Go figure.
Third, another theatergoer to the event noted that "it sounded like a gunshot, but [I] wasn't sure if it was real or from the previews because they had just shown a preview for 'Robocop,' which had a lot of gunshots in it."
This little time capsule sums up the contemporary American experience. One man exercises his first amendment right simply because he can, emboldened by the always-present, always-on communication technology: the cellular phone. Another man exercises his second amendment right to bear arms, simply because he can conceal this small firearm, unimpeded, on his person, emboldened by a culture flanked by images of John Wayne and Wayne LaPierre that turn gun possession into a (w)holy American right. Third, a witness is unsure if the gunshot was real or part of a movie trailer showing at the time given the ubiquitous presence of the gun and its continuous discharge in our forms of entertainment.
Only the third man gets a pass. The first two are led like a horse to water by the technologies at hand: the phone and the gun. The function of each and their presence on the person offer logics of practice that circumvent alternatives. A recent article concerning the rude gestures of parents and loved ones who stop, mid conversation or mid presence to answer texts is but one way in which people get enslaved to the cellular phone's constant interpellation of the user. When the phone hails you, you stop what you're doing to look at the screen and respond. Likewise, the man who has gone so far as to see his life in enough danger to pack heat has conceded to the logic of use. Under normal circumstances he may de-escalate conflict or walk away but in this case he has the answer to conflict. Bang. Bang.
Florida is rife with instances of conflict precipitated by the gun where a man who normally wouldn't confront another does so through his surreptitious self-deputization via the gun. He engages in risky conversations with people he normally would not, and so emboldened by his hidden power, he challenges the other to produce an answer to why he's walking in this neighborhood or to turn down loud music only to have the manner and nature of the query be an affront to the person confronted. The demand escalates into a conflict that ends with the concealer producing his "right" and using it with the effect of ending the conversation in a pool of blood.
Guns aren't simply a manifestation of a philosophy of liberty. They aren't simply a bulwark against encroachments on those liberties. They are discursive resources deployed in interactions with others. And like any mode of power in discourse, they distort that discourse. The gun, a monologic weapon, means "I'm going to tell you what to do because I can." Furthermore it has the tendency to impose the gun wielder's meaning upon the situation. As others have said about using violent force: "It sends a clear message." The irony here is that a dead person has a better 'understanding' of your message.
I'm reminded of that cellular phone commercial: "Can you hear me now?"
The phone annihilates space like the gun. It allows the voice to travel a greater distance than it can normally can, unaided. The gun allows the teeth to travel a greater distance than they normally can, unaided. The phone a weapon in its own right, allows strangers and even stranger behavior to persist in the presence of others by a user blinded by numerous robotic uses of this device to often not recognize the social violation its use causes.
And that poor guy in the theater can't differentiate what's real from what's in the movie. This theater, that analogy for the practical limits to free speech. You can't scream fire in there. This theater, a theater for the drama of the gun. You can't open fire in there.
But you pay to watch the actors do just this all the time. And you carry that phone or that gun all the time, each providing you a reality shaped by the very technologies at hand. When you pretend to entertain others through a clever text, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona. When you wield your weapon in the defense of a phantom concept against a phantom menace, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona.
"Go ahead, make my day."
@loudtribesmen
#secondamendment
Repetition, robotics, tweet, tweet
Where to begin? Let's start at the top. Right click the image to open it in a new tab or window so that you can zoom in and read along.
Jessi Klein is a comic and a comedy writer who has a twitter account that others follow. The Twitter interface encourages the reader not to 'miss any updates from Jessi Klein' by joining and 'following' what interests 'me.'
Following: Like so many geese imprinted to a passerby.
Jessi Klein, owing to her comedy writing skills, appropriates an oft stated axiom of empowered women that is, itself an empowerment message, that being, "real women have curves." First, it's an assertion of epistemic authority by including a trope of representation, i.e., the adjective 'real.' And I agree that images of women and femininity starting with childhood toys tend toward the skinny, white, and long-legged at the expense of a normal distribution of body types and skin shades. In a media-saturated society the assertion of what is 'real' is a policy-level pinch to wake us up to what is and is not representative of the world at large. We already watch a nightly newscast that creates a representative world of murder, robbery, car crashes, and four-alarm fires. News is about the outliers of everyday occurrence, not about norms, which are themselves repetitive occurrences.
In her tweet Klein has adjusted her empowerment message to read "Real manatees have curves." Why? Because, well, manatees are the rubber chicken of the sea. They're funny, cute, and beautifully elegant floating exemplars of corpulence.
Comedic potential noted, line delivered, laughs had. Well done.
So where do we go from here? A seemingly context-less post initiated by what is unknown, but the post itself invites imitators and respondents.
The first comes as a modulation of the sentence to read "real women ARE curves." And from a gestalt model of human sensory reconstruction I'd agree. Shapes are everything. Illustrators know this and advertisers know this because everyday people tacitly respond to shapes. What is in a butt, a body profile, or cleavage but simply the curvature of lines anyway? Well noted, first respondent. With its emphasis on a 'be' verb, the first response is an appeal to an ontology, that is, an appeal to 'what is.'
Our next respondent defers to another media trope: the artistic exemplar "Positively Rubenesque." This respondent repeats an idiom concerning round people by referring to an early artistic champion of this type of human body, the baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. To say that something is Rubenesque is to both comment upon the shapeliness or buxomness of a body, specifically female, and to give representative authority to Peter Paul Rubens' style of presenting this body on canvas.
Do you see where we're going here?
Twitter user Christina Barrett has a more pedestrian view but once again calls this a 'fact' the source of which has yet to be confirmed outside of the representative image of our non-consenting manatee floating before a diver's camera. Roland Barthes' commentary on the image presages this moment when he recognizes the ascendancy of the image over the word. So the picture becomes a self-evident fact of seeing as believing. The sentence that 'real manatees' are such is simply a symbolization of that which already is. Her concluding remark is that "It's all @ what you can eat," suggesting that personally and culturally imposed dietary restrictions are the real battleground with the absent signifier here, the 'real woman' and her body type. The use of the word 'all' is an attempt to sum it up, to totalize the experience of one's body and the pressures to look a certain way. It's a representative end-game move to frame the experience of being a woman as that of being under the pressure to look 'like' a woman, which is practiced at the dinner plate. The @ sign is simply a lazy appropriation not meant to trigger a computer algorithm but to substitute for its prepositional referent "at."
The next tweet fits into the genre of the troll, a gently rolling knoll of a troll that simply deconstructs the word manatee itself for its sexist potential. Twitter user Klaus Squirrelhammer runs through the clever portmanteaus relating to the use of different gender-specific nouns, finally resting with "personatee" instead of "manatee" or "womanatee" and ends with the hashtagged word "dignity." As a troll this tweet not only makes a clever word-association joke but also makes the tongue-in-cheek reference to dignity as if the user is attempting to raise awareness to a sexist use of gender-representative language to encapsulate the whole of a species. In this instance, saying "manatee" is akin to saying "mankind." As they say in the parlance of 'on-line,' "well-played," as if all internet discourse were a contemporary version of the gentlemanly banter among English blue-bloods playing croquet on an Asian tea plantation circa 1882. Time is so easily laundered in tweet streams like this to suggest that when the viewer arrives at a feed of this length these clever ideas, as presented, just occurred in the minds of the users without any undo hesitation and testing prior to the tweet that gets posted.
The next three tweets simply repeat the message, making it a mantra, and each completes it with a link to a twitter picture, a redirection to other twitter accounts and their feeds through the use of the "@" tag and in the final case a hashtag reference to a French word for a sexual encounter involving three individuals.
This is an online conversation masquerading as entertainment. It comes from a relatively well-known individual and garners comments from others of varying online renown. This kind of occurrence happens all the time, every day, the sum effect of all these is to demonstrate how often internally meaningful little worlds of significance emerge out of word play that have little meaning outside of the small cabal of twitter users engaged in each feed. If we contrast this use of twitter with the use of it during the Arab Spring in Tarhrir Square we see a bunch of relatively safe and free-feeling whites in the West tapping miniature golf balls with the muzzle end of the 'people's gun' of the revolution. That's a testament to the relative adaptability of communications technology as well as to the culture of distracted auto-entertainment asphyxiation cultivated by U.S. internet users.
But "there's an app for that," and with it comes a more important future substantiation of information technology: the web-enabled robot. Enter a discussion occurring contemporaneous to this tweet from Google chairman, Eric Schmidt. The future he sees for Google is in providing the products of automation that will replace "a lot of the repetitive behavior in our lives." He continues with the vague panegyric for his company's proposed application of robots: "Robots will become omnipresent in our lives in a good way." If the twitter feed is representative of what we already do with technologies like Google's, then the next generation of products that Google develops will be to address some of the unintended consequences of its first generation of products. Connect, search, copy, paste are an OCD cultivated by the information technologies in our hands, in our homes, and on our faces as they get tethered more closely to the ad-savvy search technologies that his company provides.
With the contemporary internet we already stand before something larger than human thinking and human culture. And the powerful search interfaces that we have at our disposal to 'navigate' this leviathan of human communication distort our interests around being before a very big thing and carving out personal spaces within it through search queries. This jungle of discourse that we hack through and rebuild webs of significance is powered by the search machete. But to square this metaphor with our actual habits online its as if we are simply a pair of disembodied eyes using this machete to both carve us up for submission and to cut from that which has been submitted for consumption.
Strange I know, but it's strange "in a good way."
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Creating Writing: December 1, 1987
JASON LESKO
DECEMBER 1,1987
WHY I LIKE WINTER
I LOVE IT BECAUSE IT IS SNOWING AND IT IS WET SO I LIKE IT BECAUSE THE SNOW WILL COVER WATER AND IF IT SNOWS IT SHOULD BE COLD AND THE WATER WILL FREEZE. I LIKE IT BECAUSE IF THE SNOW DOESN'T STOP AND IT LASTS FOR THREE DAYS YOU'LL BE ABLE TO SLED.
ONE DAY I WENT OUT AND SLED OFF A RAMP AND I WENT TO FAST AND I JUMPED UP 89 FEET IN THE AIR AND LANDED IN THE ROAD AND MY ROPE ON MY SLED WAS HOOKED TO A CAR AXLE AND HE WENT 80 MILES PER HOUR I WAS HANGING ON AND HE WRECKED I JUMPED HIM AND WENT UP A 102 FEET IN THE AIR AND GOING 98 MPH. I LANDED AT AN INDIANAPOLIS SPEEDWAY AND WAS HOOKED UP TO AN F1 MACHINE. I WAS GOING FASTER NOW,I WAS GOING 225 MPH. THE INDY CAR SLID INTO THE SIDE AND BURNED THE ROPE AND I WENT UP A RAMP. I SAILED UP 198 FEET IN THE AIR AND GOING 280 MPH. I HIT A BIRD AND LANDED AT A CAR SHOP.I HOOKED UP WHEELS,STEERING WHEEL,JET ENGINE,AND WINGS I WENT OUT THIS TIME BETTER. I UNHOOKED MY WINGS AND THREW THEM IN THE BACK.I SAW A LAMBORGHINI ON THE ROAD SO I SAID,"YOU SHOULD MAKE CARS FASTER LEE IACOCA."I FLOORED IT AND BURNED PAST HIM AT 800 MPH. BUT SUDDENLY I HIT A RAMP AND I FLEW 1 MILE IN THE AIR FOR 2 MINUTES AND THEN WENT DOWN TO 300 FEET. BUT SUDDENLY MY WINGS FELL OUT OF THE BACK AND LANDED IN THE ROAD.I JUMPED OUT AND THE HOLE SLED DEMOLISHED INTO THE SIDE OF A DATSUN. I FELL IN THE LAMBORGHINI AND KICKED THE DRIVER OUT,I DROVE 2OO MPH. BUT I HIT A PAINTERS SCAFFOLDING AND THE PAINTER FLEW OFF. I WENT ON BUT JUMPED A CITROEN WICH IS A CAR SHAPED LIKE A LAMBORGHINI,I FLEW INTO MY NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR HOUSE. I GOT OUT AND WALKED HOME.
THE END
DECEMBER 1,1987
WHY I LIKE WINTER
I LOVE IT BECAUSE IT IS SNOWING AND IT IS WET SO I LIKE IT BECAUSE THE SNOW WILL COVER WATER AND IF IT SNOWS IT SHOULD BE COLD AND THE WATER WILL FREEZE. I LIKE IT BECAUSE IF THE SNOW DOESN'T STOP AND IT LASTS FOR THREE DAYS YOU'LL BE ABLE TO SLED.
ONE DAY I WENT OUT AND SLED OFF A RAMP AND I WENT TO FAST AND I JUMPED UP 89 FEET IN THE AIR AND LANDED IN THE ROAD AND MY ROPE ON MY SLED WAS HOOKED TO A CAR AXLE AND HE WENT 80 MILES PER HOUR I WAS HANGING ON AND HE WRECKED I JUMPED HIM AND WENT UP A 102 FEET IN THE AIR AND GOING 98 MPH. I LANDED AT AN INDIANAPOLIS SPEEDWAY AND WAS HOOKED UP TO AN F1 MACHINE. I WAS GOING FASTER NOW,I WAS GOING 225 MPH. THE INDY CAR SLID INTO THE SIDE AND BURNED THE ROPE AND I WENT UP A RAMP. I SAILED UP 198 FEET IN THE AIR AND GOING 280 MPH. I HIT A BIRD AND LANDED AT A CAR SHOP.I HOOKED UP WHEELS,STEERING WHEEL,JET ENGINE,AND WINGS I WENT OUT THIS TIME BETTER. I UNHOOKED MY WINGS AND THREW THEM IN THE BACK.I SAW A LAMBORGHINI ON THE ROAD SO I SAID,"YOU SHOULD MAKE CARS FASTER LEE IACOCA."I FLOORED IT AND BURNED PAST HIM AT 800 MPH. BUT SUDDENLY I HIT A RAMP AND I FLEW 1 MILE IN THE AIR FOR 2 MINUTES AND THEN WENT DOWN TO 300 FEET. BUT SUDDENLY MY WINGS FELL OUT OF THE BACK AND LANDED IN THE ROAD.I JUMPED OUT AND THE HOLE SLED DEMOLISHED INTO THE SIDE OF A DATSUN. I FELL IN THE LAMBORGHINI AND KICKED THE DRIVER OUT,I DROVE 2OO MPH. BUT I HIT A PAINTERS SCAFFOLDING AND THE PAINTER FLEW OFF. I WENT ON BUT JUMPED A CITROEN WICH IS A CAR SHAPED LIKE A LAMBORGHINI,I FLEW INTO MY NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR HOUSE. I GOT OUT AND WALKED HOME.
THE END
Creative writing: 05/04/1999
Creative Writing: Essay The Mystery of the Duck
Ms. Victoria Carlson
Hunting has always been a big part of my father’s life. From the camouflage apparel to the extensive firearm collection, hunting was a permanent fixture within the house. In the freezer you would find packages marked as deer, squirrel, rabbit, with an occasional coffee can filled with goose and duck. The kitchen held numerous hunting hats as reminders of memorable hunting experiences at clubs throughout the United States.
The basement was a maze of hunting paraphernalia for all occasions: blaze orange jackets for deer season, rubber hip waders for duck season, numerous pack boots for cold treks, and a coat woven from straw for dove or goose season. A corner bench held two shotgun shell loaders: one for 12-gauge and one for 20-gauge.
Lying dusty in the attic were many hunting trophies: a stuffed duck, antlers, and a deer head. Among stacks of hunting magazines were countless guns, gun parts, and accessories left for my brother and me to inherit.
In my youth hunting fascinated me. My dad’s exotic squirrel and rabbit recipes were always exciting to taste, and eating duck required a cautious tooth poking about for steel and lead shot buried deep in the meat.
The moment my dad got home from the hunt with his kills I would be there, standing over the piles of dead birds watching my dad clean the animals, the steam rising from his bloodied hands. I was always eager to help clean the doves, for they required no knife. All you needed to clean them was your hands. Ripping off their wings and pulling out their breast meat with my fingers offered an intimate relationship with animals that few experience. I was still a skeptic though. I read Ranger Rick.
I asked my dad one evening why people had to kill animals. At the time
I was concerned with people killing rabbits. My dad offered his succinct reply.
“If we don’t kill them they will starve,” said my dad.
I respected his wisdom but didn’t understand why the rabbits had to starve. My father left out the fact that many of a rabbit’s predators had been killed off or left in unstable habitat due to human encroachment. Humans, with their guns and their machines of progress, are left to keep rabbit populations in check, so they will not exhaust their limited food supply. In many ways it is a justified activity.
I joined the ranks of the hunters when I turned eight. I took a hunter safety test and received a hunting license. Hunting was enjoyable at first. Missing more than I actually hit, the animals seemed like fair game. But something would change my mind.
My brother, my dad, and I went goose hunting one cold January morning. We trekked for miles out to a place aptly named the “killing fields” by my father and his friends. As the sun rose we began calling the geese. As the geese honked their replies, we lied in hiding ready to ambush. Quickly our guns were ablaze sending shot wads careening off in front of us, spent shells to our feet, and the birds to their demise. I was a lefty, using a right-handed gun, so the spent shells would careen off of my arm before falling to my side. At times I knew what it felt like to be on a W.W.II navy ship, the constant firing and the falling targets.
Since I was new to the sport, I was designated the gofer. My job was to pick up the fallen geese. Walking out onto the decoy spread was like walking onto a stage. In front of me were hundreds of stationary plastic decoys, animated windsock decoys, and giant feeding decoys, each the size of a small horse. Taking directions from the people in the blinds behind me, I would search about for dead and dying birds. I would carry these 20-pound birds two or three at a time back to the blind where we were hiding. Since the bodies were still warm I covered my boots with them to keep the penetrating cold away from my toes.
During one of the silent moments in between flocks I could hear something gurgling. One of the geese was still alive, breathing at a regular pace. I found it among the dead, blood bubbling from its beak as it exhaled. I told my dad about the bird clinging to life in the pile of dead around my feet. He responded by grabbing its head and twisting it in a complete circle, but it didn’t die. With its head dangling only by the skin of its neck, the bird's chest heaved as it gurgled blood, mocking death with every breath. I started crushing the bird’s head under my boot trying to kill it, but it fought harder to breath spreading its warm blood into the snow. Every stomp of my boot brought a queer squeak from the bird. The melting snow had prevented me from crushing its skull ending its misery.
Up until that point, hunting was a game. The animals were like carnival targets; every hit produced a trophy. This was something totally different. A flock of migrating birds had been tricked into believing they had found a safe spot to land and to eat. Lying on my feet was one of these unlucky birds clinging to its life.
As the morning wore on and we reached our limit, we began packing our gear and game. I noticed that the goose had finally quit breathing, it had finally died. After picking up all of the dead birds on the ground, I noticed the ground was littered with pools of blood melted through the thick ice and snow. The whole experience was disconcerting, so I never hunted again.
Hunting was a big part of my father’s life. He confronted death on nearly every outing he took. He had probably killed countless animals finishing them off with his bare hands. He was comfortable in doing this, which brings me to the great mystery.
One evening my dad came home from work carrying a box. My brother and I were curious as to what lay inside. My dad told us to quiet down. He did not want us to startle the wounded duck inside the box. He took the box into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, and opened the box up. A small duck flapped around the bathroom startled by the bright light.
On the way home from work, my dad noticed the injured duck on the side of the road, a casualty of an automobile. He kept it safe from our cat. He tried to give it water and feed it. The duck was not responding, so my dad insisted on taking it to the veterinarian the next day.
The doctor looked at the duck and could see the tremendous amount of stress that it had been through. He knew it had little chance of survival. My father paid for the duck’s euthanasia and remained quiet for the rest of the afternoon. It was obvious that putting the duck to sleep had upset my dad. My dad had killed countless ducks and many other wild animals prior to this duck, but he took this wounded duck to a veterinarian to heal it instead of killing it.
My grandfather has always loved animals. When he lived in Canton, IL, my grandfather shared a home with a dog, a handful of cats, and a fox he had raised from a cub. He would come over to our house every day to talk to and play with our cat, and he has a cat of his own. He builds birdhouses that can only be called bird manors due to their scale and complexity. He feeds squirrels and calls to the birds. When I mow his grass, my grandfather warns me about hitting rabbit nests or snakes. My grandfather loves animals. My grandfather is the answer.
Stripped of his camouflage coat and boots, a steaming coffee thermos, a necklace full of calls, and his gun, my dad was just as sympathetic as his father. I have never asked how my father became such a zealous hunter. It is possible that he believes he is saving animals by hunting them. As a member of Ducks Unlimited he has helped fund the restoration of millions of acres of wetlands throughout the North American flyway that many waterfowl travel, and he spreads this information to his kids, enriching them. By renewing his hunting licenses each season he ensures conservation funding. And by hunting animals he delivers them from possible starvation and relieves the stress on their habitat. My father the animal savior, donning his camouflage, gripping his rifle, and employing his wits to deliver animals from their uncertain futures. Outside of that context he is not an animal killer but a sympathetic human being like my grandfather.
Ms. Victoria Carlson
Hunting has always been a big part of my father’s life. From the camouflage apparel to the extensive firearm collection, hunting was a permanent fixture within the house. In the freezer you would find packages marked as deer, squirrel, rabbit, with an occasional coffee can filled with goose and duck. The kitchen held numerous hunting hats as reminders of memorable hunting experiences at clubs throughout the United States.
The basement was a maze of hunting paraphernalia for all occasions: blaze orange jackets for deer season, rubber hip waders for duck season, numerous pack boots for cold treks, and a coat woven from straw for dove or goose season. A corner bench held two shotgun shell loaders: one for 12-gauge and one for 20-gauge.
Lying dusty in the attic were many hunting trophies: a stuffed duck, antlers, and a deer head. Among stacks of hunting magazines were countless guns, gun parts, and accessories left for my brother and me to inherit.
In my youth hunting fascinated me. My dad’s exotic squirrel and rabbit recipes were always exciting to taste, and eating duck required a cautious tooth poking about for steel and lead shot buried deep in the meat.
The moment my dad got home from the hunt with his kills I would be there, standing over the piles of dead birds watching my dad clean the animals, the steam rising from his bloodied hands. I was always eager to help clean the doves, for they required no knife. All you needed to clean them was your hands. Ripping off their wings and pulling out their breast meat with my fingers offered an intimate relationship with animals that few experience. I was still a skeptic though. I read Ranger Rick.
I asked my dad one evening why people had to kill animals. At the time
I was concerned with people killing rabbits. My dad offered his succinct reply.
“If we don’t kill them they will starve,” said my dad.
I respected his wisdom but didn’t understand why the rabbits had to starve. My father left out the fact that many of a rabbit’s predators had been killed off or left in unstable habitat due to human encroachment. Humans, with their guns and their machines of progress, are left to keep rabbit populations in check, so they will not exhaust their limited food supply. In many ways it is a justified activity.
I joined the ranks of the hunters when I turned eight. I took a hunter safety test and received a hunting license. Hunting was enjoyable at first. Missing more than I actually hit, the animals seemed like fair game. But something would change my mind.
My brother, my dad, and I went goose hunting one cold January morning. We trekked for miles out to a place aptly named the “killing fields” by my father and his friends. As the sun rose we began calling the geese. As the geese honked their replies, we lied in hiding ready to ambush. Quickly our guns were ablaze sending shot wads careening off in front of us, spent shells to our feet, and the birds to their demise. I was a lefty, using a right-handed gun, so the spent shells would careen off of my arm before falling to my side. At times I knew what it felt like to be on a W.W.II navy ship, the constant firing and the falling targets.
Since I was new to the sport, I was designated the gofer. My job was to pick up the fallen geese. Walking out onto the decoy spread was like walking onto a stage. In front of me were hundreds of stationary plastic decoys, animated windsock decoys, and giant feeding decoys, each the size of a small horse. Taking directions from the people in the blinds behind me, I would search about for dead and dying birds. I would carry these 20-pound birds two or three at a time back to the blind where we were hiding. Since the bodies were still warm I covered my boots with them to keep the penetrating cold away from my toes.
During one of the silent moments in between flocks I could hear something gurgling. One of the geese was still alive, breathing at a regular pace. I found it among the dead, blood bubbling from its beak as it exhaled. I told my dad about the bird clinging to life in the pile of dead around my feet. He responded by grabbing its head and twisting it in a complete circle, but it didn’t die. With its head dangling only by the skin of its neck, the bird's chest heaved as it gurgled blood, mocking death with every breath. I started crushing the bird’s head under my boot trying to kill it, but it fought harder to breath spreading its warm blood into the snow. Every stomp of my boot brought a queer squeak from the bird. The melting snow had prevented me from crushing its skull ending its misery.
Up until that point, hunting was a game. The animals were like carnival targets; every hit produced a trophy. This was something totally different. A flock of migrating birds had been tricked into believing they had found a safe spot to land and to eat. Lying on my feet was one of these unlucky birds clinging to its life.
As the morning wore on and we reached our limit, we began packing our gear and game. I noticed that the goose had finally quit breathing, it had finally died. After picking up all of the dead birds on the ground, I noticed the ground was littered with pools of blood melted through the thick ice and snow. The whole experience was disconcerting, so I never hunted again.
Hunting was a big part of my father’s life. He confronted death on nearly every outing he took. He had probably killed countless animals finishing them off with his bare hands. He was comfortable in doing this, which brings me to the great mystery.
One evening my dad came home from work carrying a box. My brother and I were curious as to what lay inside. My dad told us to quiet down. He did not want us to startle the wounded duck inside the box. He took the box into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, and opened the box up. A small duck flapped around the bathroom startled by the bright light.
On the way home from work, my dad noticed the injured duck on the side of the road, a casualty of an automobile. He kept it safe from our cat. He tried to give it water and feed it. The duck was not responding, so my dad insisted on taking it to the veterinarian the next day.
The doctor looked at the duck and could see the tremendous amount of stress that it had been through. He knew it had little chance of survival. My father paid for the duck’s euthanasia and remained quiet for the rest of the afternoon. It was obvious that putting the duck to sleep had upset my dad. My dad had killed countless ducks and many other wild animals prior to this duck, but he took this wounded duck to a veterinarian to heal it instead of killing it.
My grandfather has always loved animals. When he lived in Canton, IL, my grandfather shared a home with a dog, a handful of cats, and a fox he had raised from a cub. He would come over to our house every day to talk to and play with our cat, and he has a cat of his own. He builds birdhouses that can only be called bird manors due to their scale and complexity. He feeds squirrels and calls to the birds. When I mow his grass, my grandfather warns me about hitting rabbit nests or snakes. My grandfather loves animals. My grandfather is the answer.
Stripped of his camouflage coat and boots, a steaming coffee thermos, a necklace full of calls, and his gun, my dad was just as sympathetic as his father. I have never asked how my father became such a zealous hunter. It is possible that he believes he is saving animals by hunting them. As a member of Ducks Unlimited he has helped fund the restoration of millions of acres of wetlands throughout the North American flyway that many waterfowl travel, and he spreads this information to his kids, enriching them. By renewing his hunting licenses each season he ensures conservation funding. And by hunting animals he delivers them from possible starvation and relieves the stress on their habitat. My father the animal savior, donning his camouflage, gripping his rifle, and employing his wits to deliver animals from their uncertain futures. Outside of that context he is not an animal killer but a sympathetic human being like my grandfather.
Work and self worth
Monday I got the call from the Business Agent.
"Have you worked in a while?" He said.
"No," I responded.
"Have you done much rebar?" He said. "The guy said he didn't want anyone green."
I squared with him. "Well John, the last rebar job I had sent me packing after about three weeks."
"I'm a firm believer if you can keep the pace then you can do the work." He said, coaching me through the basics. "Just put a snap tie on and move on."
"You're green as fuck!" said the foreman at the job site. He was an employee of Rebar Specialists, reinforcing steel operation out of Missouri with ironworkers employed out of the Saint Louis local.
He told me this on my second day at the job site. I was welcoming the cold breeze and the pellets of icy rain hitting my face. It took my mind of a circular rip on my finger where the raised skin of a blister had peeled and ripped off from continuous friction from twisting wire to hold rebar together. My right forearm, which held the pliers for holding, pulling and twisting the wire felt like a swollen balloon from use. My right leg was sore at the femur, the muscle ached from carrying the load of reinforcing bars and bending over continuously to tie the rebar laid out at my feet. I walked with a slight limp. I was tight, sore, a little broken, and doing my best to hold back my hesitance to begin a second day. I knew that through the rest of this week and into the next I would slowly grind down into a ball of muscle soreness and torn skin, physical exhaustion and mental agitation. The drinking would pick up and the sleep would follow soon after.
I'm not made for this. At the least, I'm not in shape for it. Within a few hours of the first day tying wall mats my legs and arms were shaking under the loads of several 20 foot bars as I walked on to a tall mesh-work of finished walls, each laid out according to the foreman's plan.
"Pick it up. You're 90-dollars an hour labor." The foreman said within a few minutes of us beginning our day. This much was true, and 90 dollars an hour is a king's ransom in today's wages. It was a privilege to earn this much, and it's a privilege to get into the union that grants access to this work and these wages.
I can't contest that fact. I cower before the privilege and the duty to that kind of money. As a little man, showing his age, sometimes leaking his education through his speech I am ill-equipped to appreciate the historical forces that bring me here, to this muddy hole, the future site of a hospital. I am ill-equipped to use my education to find a magically better job with more secure rights and working conditions. As hard as the work is, we work by the clock almost exclusively, and we always are in the presence of a union representative, a steward. He was coaching me through the first few minutes at the job.
"Just stay busy." He said.
I stood before a lattice-work of wall mats up to my thighs. My co-worker, a younger, more experienced guy with probably five relatives in the same union as mine, was carrying rods with the foreman. I froze before the mats, looking for something to tie, a bar to grab. And virtually everything I grabbed was the wrong thing. The foreman kept barking orders, I replied simply, "Yes. Okay. Thanks for the advice."
But I was doing everything wrong, from how to feed the wire through the back side of two intersecting bars, to the amount I should break down on the overlap and twist to hold the bars together, to my posture and positioning over the connection I was making.
I was green as fuck.
I'm not an ironworker. This job was handed to me given my family connections to the union. My father is a retired member and an instructor in the apprenticeship program. My brother is acting vice president of the union. I catch a lot of flak for this from the other ironworkers. I also garner a lot of unwarranted respect. Because when it comes to ironwork I rarely--and when I do, barely--pass muster.
Work entails doing an activity that produces an effect, a proverbial widget of productivity, that visibly indicates the presence of your effort, your labor. Personally, work is an engaged interaction with the world and the acceptance of feedback from it. Steel bars are heavy and stubborn, which makes them good for building strong edifices. Work sites are treacherous, hilly, cloddy, muddy, loud, and messy. That muddy hole, carved into so much foundation and wall space, would result in a clean, high tech medical building, the site for medical practice, and doctors.
Ah yes, doctors. I wanted to be one once. I was simply parroting the intents of my parents, who drilled me from an early age that I should use my intelligence to be one. I wasn't good at math, but I loved science, and I excelled at 'language arts.' After one year at the university I dropped out. When I was scheduled to meet with my first-year advisor I told her, a nun in civilian clothing, that I was no longer interested in pre-medicine. I had some writing ideas, story ideas that came to me after watching an episode of Star Trek:Voyager. I was a little high, had an epiphany, and sat in bed emboldened to do well through the rest of the semester and stew on my big ideas about space and fill that empty, black hole with stories. Fitting metaphor.
My parents, my grandparents, and my grandparents' sister all got involved in my intervention. They produced a meager sum of money in check form to ensure that I did return, and I did. My mother talked with an advisor at the school who recommended 'communication' as a field of study. I was late enrolling, so I had a rather odd schedule built around 4 classes Tuesday and Thursday and one class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was too busy staring at the girls in class and weighed down by the fear of asking them out. I did end up asking a girl out who came through the check-out line at work through a circuitous effort at a Valentine. Spurned by no return call that Friday I ended up drinking at a co-workers house that night and wrecking my truck on the way home early Saturday morning.
Another tragic moment. I had hoped that she'd see the connection. Fat chance. Years later a friend of hers told me that what I did was the nicest thing that she's ever gotten. Alas, she had a boyfriend at the time. In high-school, nobody wears rings to indicate their relationship status. I wasn't looking at her fingers anyway. I wrote a song about her. I was 19. She was between 16 and 17. The relationship seemed kosher from an abstract, legal sense. That's all that came of it: a note tucked into a card, tucked into the hands of a stuffed bear, nestled into a modest flower arrangement, connected to some balloons, sent to her door.
That moment of reaching out would mirror future efforts at reaching out to women/girls. I would close my eyes and grope about with a hand to touch that person, terrified. In the process I would terrify the person to whom I was reaching. When a woman tells you she loves you and she says she knew it was inevitable, and for you to sit down next to her with your leg touching her and see her horrified reaction, who do you blame? I blamed me for not reading that nonverbal cue correctly and attempting another drunken pass at her, which ultimately culminated in losing a friend to some awkward situation where she told me I objectified her.
Well, we're all objects in the world with a sense of a self that exists in the interstitial moments when we're not merely engaged in serial object relations with work and world through rote and repetition. Those heavy objects, out there in that muddy hole, they bore their imprint upon my body in so many sore muscles and agitated contact burns and blisters, a pinky finger buzzing asleep while I lay in bed, not drunk enough to be able to simply sleep.
I hate my life in moments like this, and my recourse is to poetry. To write out what I see into a string of significance for no other reason than to give it some semblance. And in doing so I conjure it into a thing that didn't exist but as so much rote, repetition, labor, objects before self, other, and world, a time spent filled with activity so as to not think oneself to death, a spiral of self doubt.
I am worth more than 90 dollars and hour, but I cannot seem to sell that idea past the 20-dollar-an-hour gate keepers and their 0-dollar an hour resume parsing software. I simply am not there. Any worth I have goes unnoticed by a world in need of smart, critical thinking, healthy, moral individuals. And any 'true' worth, that is, worth that can be presented meaningfully to others goes unnoticed by me. I stare at the prospect of suicide only to pity a self that was created out of a smarting ego long, long ago by a mother in need of a fix, walking to the basement to hit on a roach, cussing under her breath at a kid who wouldn't leave her alone.
"Motherfucker" She'd say. In her most motherly moments, she'd simply say "You're a five o'clock shadow." So many times I'd make that transit down into the basement, following her, looking at the fading gray paint that led to one of several landings into the basement. I'd sit on the final one, Oreo cookie in hand, being berated by a woman who's mother she never really knew because she was in too much pain from a growing brain tumor to handle voice or touch, resting under 1950s pain medication in the dark.
There is an imprint, a shape, a contour to our lives like that of a tree's trunk that grows around and through a wire fence or other such obstacle. Ours is one shaped by dos and don'ts, wire mommies, and physical barriers. And so, whether I like it or not, I inherited that abject loneliness, that dessicated inner space that should be filled with supportive growth and love. It emerges from me in observable behavior that is slow, plodding, unsure, shaking, nervous a person doubting his place in that muddy hole, on this earth, in the embrace of others. The recalcitrant features of this earth are a motherly "motherfucker" directed squarely at my existence, the shape of a vehement "don't" the intent of which is to automate the response: avoid, avert gaze, keep quiet, hide if necessary--a preemptive strike at opportunity.
I sit here, aching throat, watery eyes, going through the mental motions of tendering my resignation from the ironworkers, one year from graduating to journeyman--an eternity. I am afraid to signal operators. I'm afraid to walk on high beams. I'm afraid to greet some of the freakish monsters that work in the trade. I'm afraid to piss in public, let alone into a cup. I'm afraid to be in this world before others. A part of me is dying, a future in a building trade. I am hesitant to politick, to make friends and alliances, to find work through familiars. So many dead, so many dying, so many pushed from an occupation by powerful forces that scoff at 90 dollars an hour. I'm afraid to be me.
This line of work doesn't make me happy, nor does it offer much other than some comfortable income. I sit and I write and for this I get paid nothing, no mind, no recognition. And the flipside of me "pimping" my authorship through link promotion seems disingenuous. I recoil at this image of me, a babe lost in the woods, with no family, no home, found by someone generous enough to give it a life, love, meaning. I'm so far past that, yet here I am, at nearly 37 still courting a vague outline of it, still, reaching out blindly, groping for acceptance, love, just consideration. There is no soft-reset to this mentation. I need to stop thinking like this. I need to make this wishful invisibility invisible, to negate this self-negation.
"Have you worked in a while?" He said.
"No," I responded.
"Have you done much rebar?" He said. "The guy said he didn't want anyone green."
I squared with him. "Well John, the last rebar job I had sent me packing after about three weeks."
"I'm a firm believer if you can keep the pace then you can do the work." He said, coaching me through the basics. "Just put a snap tie on and move on."
"You're green as fuck!" said the foreman at the job site. He was an employee of Rebar Specialists, reinforcing steel operation out of Missouri with ironworkers employed out of the Saint Louis local.
He told me this on my second day at the job site. I was welcoming the cold breeze and the pellets of icy rain hitting my face. It took my mind of a circular rip on my finger where the raised skin of a blister had peeled and ripped off from continuous friction from twisting wire to hold rebar together. My right forearm, which held the pliers for holding, pulling and twisting the wire felt like a swollen balloon from use. My right leg was sore at the femur, the muscle ached from carrying the load of reinforcing bars and bending over continuously to tie the rebar laid out at my feet. I walked with a slight limp. I was tight, sore, a little broken, and doing my best to hold back my hesitance to begin a second day. I knew that through the rest of this week and into the next I would slowly grind down into a ball of muscle soreness and torn skin, physical exhaustion and mental agitation. The drinking would pick up and the sleep would follow soon after.
I'm not made for this. At the least, I'm not in shape for it. Within a few hours of the first day tying wall mats my legs and arms were shaking under the loads of several 20 foot bars as I walked on to a tall mesh-work of finished walls, each laid out according to the foreman's plan.
"Pick it up. You're 90-dollars an hour labor." The foreman said within a few minutes of us beginning our day. This much was true, and 90 dollars an hour is a king's ransom in today's wages. It was a privilege to earn this much, and it's a privilege to get into the union that grants access to this work and these wages.
I can't contest that fact. I cower before the privilege and the duty to that kind of money. As a little man, showing his age, sometimes leaking his education through his speech I am ill-equipped to appreciate the historical forces that bring me here, to this muddy hole, the future site of a hospital. I am ill-equipped to use my education to find a magically better job with more secure rights and working conditions. As hard as the work is, we work by the clock almost exclusively, and we always are in the presence of a union representative, a steward. He was coaching me through the first few minutes at the job.
"Just stay busy." He said.
I stood before a lattice-work of wall mats up to my thighs. My co-worker, a younger, more experienced guy with probably five relatives in the same union as mine, was carrying rods with the foreman. I froze before the mats, looking for something to tie, a bar to grab. And virtually everything I grabbed was the wrong thing. The foreman kept barking orders, I replied simply, "Yes. Okay. Thanks for the advice."
But I was doing everything wrong, from how to feed the wire through the back side of two intersecting bars, to the amount I should break down on the overlap and twist to hold the bars together, to my posture and positioning over the connection I was making.
I was green as fuck.
I'm not an ironworker. This job was handed to me given my family connections to the union. My father is a retired member and an instructor in the apprenticeship program. My brother is acting vice president of the union. I catch a lot of flak for this from the other ironworkers. I also garner a lot of unwarranted respect. Because when it comes to ironwork I rarely--and when I do, barely--pass muster.
Work entails doing an activity that produces an effect, a proverbial widget of productivity, that visibly indicates the presence of your effort, your labor. Personally, work is an engaged interaction with the world and the acceptance of feedback from it. Steel bars are heavy and stubborn, which makes them good for building strong edifices. Work sites are treacherous, hilly, cloddy, muddy, loud, and messy. That muddy hole, carved into so much foundation and wall space, would result in a clean, high tech medical building, the site for medical practice, and doctors.
Ah yes, doctors. I wanted to be one once. I was simply parroting the intents of my parents, who drilled me from an early age that I should use my intelligence to be one. I wasn't good at math, but I loved science, and I excelled at 'language arts.' After one year at the university I dropped out. When I was scheduled to meet with my first-year advisor I told her, a nun in civilian clothing, that I was no longer interested in pre-medicine. I had some writing ideas, story ideas that came to me after watching an episode of Star Trek:Voyager. I was a little high, had an epiphany, and sat in bed emboldened to do well through the rest of the semester and stew on my big ideas about space and fill that empty, black hole with stories. Fitting metaphor.
My parents, my grandparents, and my grandparents' sister all got involved in my intervention. They produced a meager sum of money in check form to ensure that I did return, and I did. My mother talked with an advisor at the school who recommended 'communication' as a field of study. I was late enrolling, so I had a rather odd schedule built around 4 classes Tuesday and Thursday and one class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was too busy staring at the girls in class and weighed down by the fear of asking them out. I did end up asking a girl out who came through the check-out line at work through a circuitous effort at a Valentine. Spurned by no return call that Friday I ended up drinking at a co-workers house that night and wrecking my truck on the way home early Saturday morning.
Another tragic moment. I had hoped that she'd see the connection. Fat chance. Years later a friend of hers told me that what I did was the nicest thing that she's ever gotten. Alas, she had a boyfriend at the time. In high-school, nobody wears rings to indicate their relationship status. I wasn't looking at her fingers anyway. I wrote a song about her. I was 19. She was between 16 and 17. The relationship seemed kosher from an abstract, legal sense. That's all that came of it: a note tucked into a card, tucked into the hands of a stuffed bear, nestled into a modest flower arrangement, connected to some balloons, sent to her door.
That moment of reaching out would mirror future efforts at reaching out to women/girls. I would close my eyes and grope about with a hand to touch that person, terrified. In the process I would terrify the person to whom I was reaching. When a woman tells you she loves you and she says she knew it was inevitable, and for you to sit down next to her with your leg touching her and see her horrified reaction, who do you blame? I blamed me for not reading that nonverbal cue correctly and attempting another drunken pass at her, which ultimately culminated in losing a friend to some awkward situation where she told me I objectified her.
Well, we're all objects in the world with a sense of a self that exists in the interstitial moments when we're not merely engaged in serial object relations with work and world through rote and repetition. Those heavy objects, out there in that muddy hole, they bore their imprint upon my body in so many sore muscles and agitated contact burns and blisters, a pinky finger buzzing asleep while I lay in bed, not drunk enough to be able to simply sleep.
I hate my life in moments like this, and my recourse is to poetry. To write out what I see into a string of significance for no other reason than to give it some semblance. And in doing so I conjure it into a thing that didn't exist but as so much rote, repetition, labor, objects before self, other, and world, a time spent filled with activity so as to not think oneself to death, a spiral of self doubt.
I am worth more than 90 dollars and hour, but I cannot seem to sell that idea past the 20-dollar-an-hour gate keepers and their 0-dollar an hour resume parsing software. I simply am not there. Any worth I have goes unnoticed by a world in need of smart, critical thinking, healthy, moral individuals. And any 'true' worth, that is, worth that can be presented meaningfully to others goes unnoticed by me. I stare at the prospect of suicide only to pity a self that was created out of a smarting ego long, long ago by a mother in need of a fix, walking to the basement to hit on a roach, cussing under her breath at a kid who wouldn't leave her alone.
"Motherfucker" She'd say. In her most motherly moments, she'd simply say "You're a five o'clock shadow." So many times I'd make that transit down into the basement, following her, looking at the fading gray paint that led to one of several landings into the basement. I'd sit on the final one, Oreo cookie in hand, being berated by a woman who's mother she never really knew because she was in too much pain from a growing brain tumor to handle voice or touch, resting under 1950s pain medication in the dark.
There is an imprint, a shape, a contour to our lives like that of a tree's trunk that grows around and through a wire fence or other such obstacle. Ours is one shaped by dos and don'ts, wire mommies, and physical barriers. And so, whether I like it or not, I inherited that abject loneliness, that dessicated inner space that should be filled with supportive growth and love. It emerges from me in observable behavior that is slow, plodding, unsure, shaking, nervous a person doubting his place in that muddy hole, on this earth, in the embrace of others. The recalcitrant features of this earth are a motherly "motherfucker" directed squarely at my existence, the shape of a vehement "don't" the intent of which is to automate the response: avoid, avert gaze, keep quiet, hide if necessary--a preemptive strike at opportunity.
I sit here, aching throat, watery eyes, going through the mental motions of tendering my resignation from the ironworkers, one year from graduating to journeyman--an eternity. I am afraid to signal operators. I'm afraid to walk on high beams. I'm afraid to greet some of the freakish monsters that work in the trade. I'm afraid to piss in public, let alone into a cup. I'm afraid to be in this world before others. A part of me is dying, a future in a building trade. I am hesitant to politick, to make friends and alliances, to find work through familiars. So many dead, so many dying, so many pushed from an occupation by powerful forces that scoff at 90 dollars an hour. I'm afraid to be me.
This line of work doesn't make me happy, nor does it offer much other than some comfortable income. I sit and I write and for this I get paid nothing, no mind, no recognition. And the flipside of me "pimping" my authorship through link promotion seems disingenuous. I recoil at this image of me, a babe lost in the woods, with no family, no home, found by someone generous enough to give it a life, love, meaning. I'm so far past that, yet here I am, at nearly 37 still courting a vague outline of it, still, reaching out blindly, groping for acceptance, love, just consideration. There is no soft-reset to this mentation. I need to stop thinking like this. I need to make this wishful invisibility invisible, to negate this self-negation.
Money: Two views
View One: Money, begets wealth.
Cash investments in ideas, projects, and design efforts can become tomorrow's products and the businesses that support them. Money is an abstraction and an application of a resource.
View Two: Money supports the self-interest of its holders.
Money is an abstraction of wealth that places people onto comparative scales with others and subsequently empowers a 'factual' view of worth around assets held.
Summary:
Money can be counted, but it's not a number in the manner of mathematical operations.
Cash investments in ideas, projects, and design efforts can become tomorrow's products and the businesses that support them. Money is an abstraction and an application of a resource.
View Two: Money supports the self-interest of its holders.
Money is an abstraction of wealth that places people onto comparative scales with others and subsequently empowers a 'factual' view of worth around assets held.
Summary:
Money can be counted, but it's not a number in the manner of mathematical operations.
Friday, March 7, 2014
The one percent's one percent
The one percent consists of two demographic categories: the 1% and the 99%.
The 1% of the one percent are those who started from no wealth to make it into the highest conceivable bracket of wealth in the world.
The 99% of the one percent are those who were born into an already sizable amount of wealth, access, and family influence.
I made these percentages up.
The 1% of the one percent are those who started from no wealth to make it into the highest conceivable bracket of wealth in the world.
The 99% of the one percent are those who were born into an already sizable amount of wealth, access, and family influence.
I made these percentages up.
Justifying wealth
The wealthy justifying their riches are like a tapeworm justifying its numerous body segments because it can live without them.
metaphysics of presence
Cloning life is possible. But you cannot clone consciousness.
Cloning humans is inevitable. But you cannot clone "being human."
The ineffable quality of being human is the great inheritance of humanity that each of us carries. It's a vast catalog of significance about self, other, and world. It first courses through our off-on switch board as oughts and naughts: do this, don't do that. Why? Because the authority figure who lended you her breast milk said so. This, like so many beginnings, is a study in contradictions: affection and authority, creation and destruction, sacred symbol and desecrated object. Each of us babes, passing through a tube centimeters away from another, the conveyance for shit, a denatured world.
No greater meaning exists outside of the poetry with which we make sense of our existence. The poetry, itself, is a supernumerary, nonessential to the organism's abject survival on earth. The poetry issues from our voice, which itself must be silenced while the body eats. And to see a body for what it is--to undress that violent sea creature, that writhing tube, which must ingest its world to remain organized amidst a universe of chaos--is to recognize that any activity aside from its survival function is simply fancy for the sake of enrichment. Every thing else is violent appropriation.
But that's what makes us human, angels, beings in transcended time, speaking as if from no where to no place. We, the denatured object before its own regard, weighted by a history that gives meaning its force.
What makes us human cannot be cloned. What makes us human exists in none of our DNA. What makes us human gets stored, over time, in our reflex nets of nervous activity. The gait of the walk, the cadence of the voice: these make us human. They are an achievement of the organism to organize culture into a repertoire of habits and aptitudes. Yet what makes us human is not so much our rote replication of the culture into which we are born. That's the stuff of automatons, which we are for greater and greater parts of our day.
No, what makes us human is the way in which each of us tries to carve an "I" specifically out of those features of our culture which are the least tractable. "Features" is a starving analogy. Features are those indurate structures of human sense making, which marshal the forces of matter, existence, and temporal sequence. Meaning is a moment frozen in time and carried out in the present as a moral about how to act when in the presence of its object.
This body, that terror from the deep, paraded about like a perverse fantasy, a dragon parade float, the body as such. Its is the logic of complex organization, afforded by matter slowly decaying through varying elemental states, each with profiles of interactivity that mark them as different states of existence.
More poetry is all we find. The deeper we go, the more 'fundamental' we get. The more fundamental we get the closer we come to disrobing the very nature of of our inquiry: the organizing principles of our dialectical mentality lie barely concealed behind this tapestry. Science is a wet t-shirt contest for gazing indirectly at first principles while allowing them to remain concealed.
These scientific eyes on their empirical wet t-shirt trek will not find what makes us human. Humanity is in a meaning, which is achieved through time, exists through time, and finds home in no specific place but our own.
Cloning humans is inevitable. But you cannot clone "being human."
The ineffable quality of being human is the great inheritance of humanity that each of us carries. It's a vast catalog of significance about self, other, and world. It first courses through our off-on switch board as oughts and naughts: do this, don't do that. Why? Because the authority figure who lended you her breast milk said so. This, like so many beginnings, is a study in contradictions: affection and authority, creation and destruction, sacred symbol and desecrated object. Each of us babes, passing through a tube centimeters away from another, the conveyance for shit, a denatured world.
No greater meaning exists outside of the poetry with which we make sense of our existence. The poetry, itself, is a supernumerary, nonessential to the organism's abject survival on earth. The poetry issues from our voice, which itself must be silenced while the body eats. And to see a body for what it is--to undress that violent sea creature, that writhing tube, which must ingest its world to remain organized amidst a universe of chaos--is to recognize that any activity aside from its survival function is simply fancy for the sake of enrichment. Every thing else is violent appropriation.
But that's what makes us human, angels, beings in transcended time, speaking as if from no where to no place. We, the denatured object before its own regard, weighted by a history that gives meaning its force.
What makes us human cannot be cloned. What makes us human exists in none of our DNA. What makes us human gets stored, over time, in our reflex nets of nervous activity. The gait of the walk, the cadence of the voice: these make us human. They are an achievement of the organism to organize culture into a repertoire of habits and aptitudes. Yet what makes us human is not so much our rote replication of the culture into which we are born. That's the stuff of automatons, which we are for greater and greater parts of our day.
No, what makes us human is the way in which each of us tries to carve an "I" specifically out of those features of our culture which are the least tractable. "Features" is a starving analogy. Features are those indurate structures of human sense making, which marshal the forces of matter, existence, and temporal sequence. Meaning is a moment frozen in time and carried out in the present as a moral about how to act when in the presence of its object.
This body, that terror from the deep, paraded about like a perverse fantasy, a dragon parade float, the body as such. Its is the logic of complex organization, afforded by matter slowly decaying through varying elemental states, each with profiles of interactivity that mark them as different states of existence.
More poetry is all we find. The deeper we go, the more 'fundamental' we get. The more fundamental we get the closer we come to disrobing the very nature of of our inquiry: the organizing principles of our dialectical mentality lie barely concealed behind this tapestry. Science is a wet t-shirt contest for gazing indirectly at first principles while allowing them to remain concealed.
These scientific eyes on their empirical wet t-shirt trek will not find what makes us human. Humanity is in a meaning, which is achieved through time, exists through time, and finds home in no specific place but our own.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Recent job application
I love doing these because they are the most degrading ways to sell oneself as a bunch of lines of information regarding fit and fitness for a job. In a feat that would make competitive limbo pale by comparison I hocked myself to a small law firm, looking for a data entry grunt. Unfortunately, I have no tits nor do I fit the stereotype maintained by a conservative law firm run by equally conservative white men in what could possibly be described as a "Jewish ghetto" in a county west of the city.
To whom it may concern:As is customary with most job applications I do these days I received nothing in return, not even recognition that the message made it to the other end. Another attempt at straight talk probably rankled the sensibilities of the professional sophist himself, the trial lawyer.
I am writing in application for the word processor position that you have available at your Creve Coeur law office. My skills as a writer and communicator are indicated by my educational background, which is outlined in my attached CV and resume.
To help inform your decision I am 36 years of age, with 11 years of college experience, including 6 years of post graduate work in Communication with a completed Masters Degree in Communication and with completed course work and passing comprehensive exams in Doctoral work. My studies focused on technology use in organizations and technology and science policy. During these studies I have completed certificates in creative writing and in science and technology policy in addition to acquiring college teaching certificates as a Teaching Assistant during my post-graduate studies.
While my skills may run far afield and sometimes in excess of what you are looking for I assure you that I am a professional worker and writer with a record of high-level writing, analysis, and research. In addition, my brief employment at Facts and Comparisons introduced me to legal writing as a copy editor for their book, "Pharmacy Law Digest."
More appropriate to your request is probably my writing speed and work ethic. I tested my typing speed three times using an online measuring test located here (http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php). My three test results are 85 WPM, 65 WPM, and 62 WPM. I can assure you that at my age I am not enamored with the use of social networking to maintain constant and shallow updates with a friend network, nor do I own a smartphone to fill my interstitial time "looking for deals." I come seeking work and intend to do so in an appropriate manner. I own business casual clothes, maintain a conservative look, practice proper hygiene, own a reliable car, and live within convenient commuter distance to your office location.
Please find my attached CV and resume with current address and cellular phone number. This or the listed e-mail are both appropriate for replies to my application.
Thank you for your time.
with regards,
Jason Lesko
God
God is in words and the purity of their meaning. God is Being. Being is that category that precedes our coming-to-consciousness in existence. God is the weight of history and the meaning it brings to everyday life, making us marionettes to an idealized tripartite division of time into past, present, and future.
Better yet. God is in our recreation of the feeling and meaning of absolute understanding, pure meanings, and pure consciousness with an Other in our reflection upon a purely imagined relationship that grounds understanding in the imaginary and symbolic.
God is a slavish representation of words as commands for human behavior, which cloak the machinations of social organization.
God is the consequence of matter and our chastened foresight in reverence to this ineffable reality in spite of words.
God, as we achieve a deeper awareness of the architecture of this farce, the inherent and native "theorietics, " the response to ignore its presence will increase. And for that response we pay a price.
"God" is in our current iteration of the absolute gridwork of coordinate space teased into existence by the "perverse calculations" of mathematics. God is the explanation for how people use this gridwork to dissect, in word, others. The subdural form upon which 'word' and 'meaning' rest is presence before a world. On the other side of each compelling word we presume the existence of a world occupied by another. The pregnant fulness of meaning to the word reconstructs fateful and meaningful natures for their existence when nothing is there. We do the work, mentally, hermeneutically to make a reality that we populate. The motive present in this "coarse" existence is temporal transcendence.
Once time is transcended so begins memory.
Memory is the hermeneutics-in-use of people, operating on the basis of social "programs," to recreate the past through its bodily transmission in gesture and symbol. Below talk is a neural network reaching out to touch so many points of its environment, that ancient oak inside us all. In reaching out it reaches 'in' to self-understanding, which is recreated through a self-awareness that is at once fully in recognition of the existence of an other that is uniquely mine and whose meaning is up for grabs. This layer of certainty accompanied by a layer of ambiguity provides the conditions for social control. "I" is accompanied by a body, and it comes to awareness of its existence in a milieu of thought and symbol that give this awareness a shape that existed prior to its occurrence on earth. The off-on dynamics of neurology provide the standard template for dialectics and of meaning itself, which is cast in difference as a meaningful relationship.
Consciousness is a parent-less generation.
Existence is undeniably present and meaningless. What we do with it defines our understanding of ourselves and it because nothing is outside of existence, only the theoretical perspectives we take, outside of time. And that's the vantage point we purchase through our cultural inheritance of existence, and so we are haunted by a past populated by our ghosts.
Better yet. God is in our recreation of the feeling and meaning of absolute understanding, pure meanings, and pure consciousness with an Other in our reflection upon a purely imagined relationship that grounds understanding in the imaginary and symbolic.
God is a slavish representation of words as commands for human behavior, which cloak the machinations of social organization.
God is the consequence of matter and our chastened foresight in reverence to this ineffable reality in spite of words.
God, as we achieve a deeper awareness of the architecture of this farce, the inherent and native "theorietics, " the response to ignore its presence will increase. And for that response we pay a price.
"God" is in our current iteration of the absolute gridwork of coordinate space teased into existence by the "perverse calculations" of mathematics. God is the explanation for how people use this gridwork to dissect, in word, others. The subdural form upon which 'word' and 'meaning' rest is presence before a world. On the other side of each compelling word we presume the existence of a world occupied by another. The pregnant fulness of meaning to the word reconstructs fateful and meaningful natures for their existence when nothing is there. We do the work, mentally, hermeneutically to make a reality that we populate. The motive present in this "coarse" existence is temporal transcendence.
Once time is transcended so begins memory.
Memory is the hermeneutics-in-use of people, operating on the basis of social "programs," to recreate the past through its bodily transmission in gesture and symbol. Below talk is a neural network reaching out to touch so many points of its environment, that ancient oak inside us all. In reaching out it reaches 'in' to self-understanding, which is recreated through a self-awareness that is at once fully in recognition of the existence of an other that is uniquely mine and whose meaning is up for grabs. This layer of certainty accompanied by a layer of ambiguity provides the conditions for social control. "I" is accompanied by a body, and it comes to awareness of its existence in a milieu of thought and symbol that give this awareness a shape that existed prior to its occurrence on earth. The off-on dynamics of neurology provide the standard template for dialectics and of meaning itself, which is cast in difference as a meaningful relationship.
Consciousness is a parent-less generation.
Existence is undeniably present and meaningless. What we do with it defines our understanding of ourselves and it because nothing is outside of existence, only the theoretical perspectives we take, outside of time. And that's the vantage point we purchase through our cultural inheritance of existence, and so we are haunted by a past populated by our ghosts.
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