IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM AMERICA, TO ITS POLITICIANS:
If you deny our state workers' unions the right to collective bargaining,
we will occupy state capitols.
And if you savage the economies of Latin America for a century,
we will re-elect you.
If you cut funding for education,
we will organize school walk-outs.
And if you grind children into dust in Afghanistan for nine years running,
we will re-elect you.
If a gallon of gas costs more than $4,
we will scream bloody murder.
And if you sell out our pristine wilderness to oil & gas companies,
we will re-elect you.
If you threaten to defund Planned Parenthood,
we will organize & we will protest.
And if our soldiers abroad make a habit of raping people under occupation,
we will re-elect you.
If your sexual indiscretions are made public,
we will shame you in our corporate media.
And if your torture regime is made public,
we will re-elect you.
If people on the other side of the world risk their lives for self-determination under authoritarian rule,
we will demand you support their struggle.
And if you tighten your authoritarian grip here at home,
we will re-elect you.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
A Piece On/Of Propaganda
All of this is true, that you are being lied to. Fooled, tricked, misled. You are being deluded, hoodwinked, cheated, defrauded, disenfranchised. You are being conned, duped, influenced, brainwashed. Your arms are twisted. Your hands are tied. Your back is against the wall. You are cornered, trapped, caged, coerced. Patted down, beat up, worked over. Deceived, manipulated. Your thoughts are controlled, your ideas are not your ideas. What you know about the world and how it works is false, dangerously so, fatally so.
As sure as privacy is a thing of the past, you will learn to unremember independent thought. Groupthink is a reality and your thoughts are it. You are a party to mass delusion. There are entities that will not abide ideas that they themselves did not source. You have never had a dangerous thought in your life. Your speech betrays your long conditioning by a despicable cadre of public relations experts.
When you have information you can trust, you can navigate it to form your own opinions and map out a way of being in the world. When you plot a course based on lies and deceptions, your steps are unsure, your movements irrational, your trajectory a farce.
You are bombarded with loaded information at every turn. Your life is utterly mediated. In print. On screen. Across radio waves. In classrooms. On billboards. At the office water cooler. People are even hired to walk around and nonchalantly extol products, films, brands. They are paid to subvert personal taste and desire merely by being overheard. You know the names of 100 poisonous products that you voluntarily put in and on your body each day, but cannot name the songbird singing outside your window, or the tree he is sitting in. And this according to plan.
Is it okay? Are you comfortable with it?
*
Into the struggle to scale down America's rampant militarism strides the propaganda of the Pentagon. Into the struggle to heal the hurts of industrial civilization stride million dollar corporate greenwash campaigns. Into the struggle to know our selves, our desires, our needs, step unscrupulous public relations firms.
We are meant to feel like inadequate, unattractive outsiders unless we buy the right future junk. We are meant to feel contempt for science, for facts, for recognizing the consequences of our actions: all is right in the world the white font on a bright green background happily declares. We are meant to believe that security and peace come through the prosecution of endless war and the long, righteous arms of American imperialism.
This is really happening. Is it a conspiracy? How do we negotiate our daily lives when such juggernauts of influence bear down on us so consistently, so forcefully, without reproach of conscience?
*
Propaganda, from the Latin word that means "to propagate", didn't always carry a negative connotation. Propaganda is the targeting of receivers' emotions for the purpose of disseminating ideas and promoting specified actions. It differs from rational discourse in that it appeals to feelings and not reason. It is selective information, yes, but it doesn't have to be bad, or dishonest. Just like not all violence is evil--think of a lioness killing an antelope to feed her pride--not all influence is wrong. Bertolt Brecht, a playwright of conscience who lived in times of aggression and deceit not unlike our own, was a type of propagandist in his extraordinary work. So was George Orwell. So was Emma Goldman. Heroes, all, and we can name our contemporary analogues.
Now, however, power structures of incalculable evil stretch over the entire planet and out into space. We live at a time when interconnected sociopathic oligarchies actively and explicitly threaten the existence of our species, and that of many others. And yet these contemptible few constitute such a small part of the population that their authority can be toppled by an informed movement of dedicated individuals. (Witness the fact that a mere ten percent of the population of Egypt ousted the dictator Hosni Mubarak last month.) In order to maintain the global authoritarian order of industrial civilization, it is necessary for the majority to believe that all is well. Join the imperial army to bring about peace. Pay the companies that make you feel inadequate, that poison you, to make you feel better. The only kind of environmentalism that will be tolerated must be ineffectual. (The kind of environmental activism that actually works is deemed "eco-terrorism", and you're not a terrorist, are you? Are you?)
We are beaten down, prodded, invaded, demeaned, pushed around, infected with and waterboarded by propaganda aimed at breaking our will to challenge it. Is it a conspiracy? Is it okay? Is this really happening?
To echo Noam Chomsky, whose Manufacturing Consent (written with Edward S. Herman) is an essential text in the comprehension of contemporary media propaganda, consciousness raising is the first step in lifting oneself out of oppression. The biggest challenge to overcoming propaganda may be the failure of its targets to recognize themselves as such. The propaganda of the Pentagon, of profit-driven greenwashers, of the PR firms, is the brittle, easily overcome ammunition of a cowardly, paranoid, hate-driven authoritarian minority. Recognize it for what it is and the tide begins to turn.
I am a propagandist. Proudly. I am not fair. I am not balanced. I am not neutral. Because all this is really happening. Enlist.
*
[Written for The Ithaca Post to publicize an event sponsored by the Park School of Independent Media at Ithaca College that featured investigative writer John Stauber and civil rights advocate Lisa Graves speaking on PR and the Pentagon. Stauber and Graves are the founder and current director of the Center for Media and Democracy based in Madison, Wisconsin.]
As sure as privacy is a thing of the past, you will learn to unremember independent thought. Groupthink is a reality and your thoughts are it. You are a party to mass delusion. There are entities that will not abide ideas that they themselves did not source. You have never had a dangerous thought in your life. Your speech betrays your long conditioning by a despicable cadre of public relations experts.
When you have information you can trust, you can navigate it to form your own opinions and map out a way of being in the world. When you plot a course based on lies and deceptions, your steps are unsure, your movements irrational, your trajectory a farce.
You are bombarded with loaded information at every turn. Your life is utterly mediated. In print. On screen. Across radio waves. In classrooms. On billboards. At the office water cooler. People are even hired to walk around and nonchalantly extol products, films, brands. They are paid to subvert personal taste and desire merely by being overheard. You know the names of 100 poisonous products that you voluntarily put in and on your body each day, but cannot name the songbird singing outside your window, or the tree he is sitting in. And this according to plan.
Is it okay? Are you comfortable with it?
*
Into the struggle to scale down America's rampant militarism strides the propaganda of the Pentagon. Into the struggle to heal the hurts of industrial civilization stride million dollar corporate greenwash campaigns. Into the struggle to know our selves, our desires, our needs, step unscrupulous public relations firms.
We are meant to feel like inadequate, unattractive outsiders unless we buy the right future junk. We are meant to feel contempt for science, for facts, for recognizing the consequences of our actions: all is right in the world the white font on a bright green background happily declares. We are meant to believe that security and peace come through the prosecution of endless war and the long, righteous arms of American imperialism.
This is really happening. Is it a conspiracy? How do we negotiate our daily lives when such juggernauts of influence bear down on us so consistently, so forcefully, without reproach of conscience?
*
Propaganda, from the Latin word that means "to propagate", didn't always carry a negative connotation. Propaganda is the targeting of receivers' emotions for the purpose of disseminating ideas and promoting specified actions. It differs from rational discourse in that it appeals to feelings and not reason. It is selective information, yes, but it doesn't have to be bad, or dishonest. Just like not all violence is evil--think of a lioness killing an antelope to feed her pride--not all influence is wrong. Bertolt Brecht, a playwright of conscience who lived in times of aggression and deceit not unlike our own, was a type of propagandist in his extraordinary work. So was George Orwell. So was Emma Goldman. Heroes, all, and we can name our contemporary analogues.
Now, however, power structures of incalculable evil stretch over the entire planet and out into space. We live at a time when interconnected sociopathic oligarchies actively and explicitly threaten the existence of our species, and that of many others. And yet these contemptible few constitute such a small part of the population that their authority can be toppled by an informed movement of dedicated individuals. (Witness the fact that a mere ten percent of the population of Egypt ousted the dictator Hosni Mubarak last month.) In order to maintain the global authoritarian order of industrial civilization, it is necessary for the majority to believe that all is well. Join the imperial army to bring about peace. Pay the companies that make you feel inadequate, that poison you, to make you feel better. The only kind of environmentalism that will be tolerated must be ineffectual. (The kind of environmental activism that actually works is deemed "eco-terrorism", and you're not a terrorist, are you? Are you?)
We are beaten down, prodded, invaded, demeaned, pushed around, infected with and waterboarded by propaganda aimed at breaking our will to challenge it. Is it a conspiracy? Is it okay? Is this really happening?
To echo Noam Chomsky, whose Manufacturing Consent (written with Edward S. Herman) is an essential text in the comprehension of contemporary media propaganda, consciousness raising is the first step in lifting oneself out of oppression. The biggest challenge to overcoming propaganda may be the failure of its targets to recognize themselves as such. The propaganda of the Pentagon, of profit-driven greenwashers, of the PR firms, is the brittle, easily overcome ammunition of a cowardly, paranoid, hate-driven authoritarian minority. Recognize it for what it is and the tide begins to turn.
I am a propagandist. Proudly. I am not fair. I am not balanced. I am not neutral. Because all this is really happening. Enlist.
*
[Written for The Ithaca Post to publicize an event sponsored by the Park School of Independent Media at Ithaca College that featured investigative writer John Stauber and civil rights advocate Lisa Graves speaking on PR and the Pentagon. Stauber and Graves are the founder and current director of the Center for Media and Democracy based in Madison, Wisconsin.]
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The Imperial Theater of Barack Obama
I did not intend to write on the incident in Tucson, Arizona last week, where a deranged and impressionable young man named Jared Loughner stands accused of killing six people and wounding thirteen others with the bullets of his semi-automatic Glock 19. But the dissembling words of US President Barack Obama yesterday were cutting in a deeply personal way.
A common refrain in my work is the violence our culture perpetrates on children. This is not only because I experienced it so close and so devastatingly. In 1988 one of my younger sisters, Sybil, was killed when a car smashed into her as she was crossing a street after school. She was nine years old and every bit the bright light that Christina Taylor Green, a victim of the Tucson attack, seems to have been, every bit the bright light that all kids, everywhere in the world, tend to be: energetic, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, full of love, curious, charitable.
Years ago, as I went through a process of abstracting my personal tragedies and grief--attempting to dismantle the formulation that one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic--I found resonance in the words of Howard Zinn: All wars are wars against children. The work of Derrick Jensen was also influential to me in this context, particularly his notion that most aspects of industrial civilization--how it abuses its environment, miseducates the young, objectifies women, loathes the "other", twists language--are "strangely like war". I see strange wars perpetrated against children throughout the culture and it makes my stomach turn.
Last night, by chance, I happened upon the transcript of Obama's eulogy for the six people killed in Tucson. (The environmental organization 350.org, which I follow on facebook, linked to it, adding that the speech "beautifully shows the humanity we're all working so hard to save.") I avoid watching or listening to political speeches, especially if I haven't read them first; I am as susceptible as anyone to the manipulations of a good performance. So I read the speech and was nauseated. Here is a piece of utterly unscrupulous imperial theater, even without the tenor and cadences that have made Obama so frustratingly beloved by so many.
For the arch-defender of war that Obama is to say the things he said--to applause and adoration--about how the incident should be reflected on and how the victims should be honored, seems beyond perverse to me. Audacity indeed. Even as the Nobel Peace Prize-winner spoke, armed drone aircraft under his command continued their mission of circling and dropping bombs indiscriminately over far-away Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And what did he say? "None of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future."
But one would be a fool to expect Obama, who spoke these words on the occasion of a memorial service for six innocent people, to examine all the facts behind the tragedy or to challenge old assumptions. Not even for a day did Obama halt the atrocities at his command in honor of the victims in Tucson. He did order a moment of silence on the Monday following the shooting, but I suspect little girls in southern Afghanistan could hear the continuing roar of American warplanes overhead.
What else did he say? He said God Bless America. Peppering his speech with bits from both the Old and New Testaments, Obama (or his speechwriters) sought to express spirituality (and perhaps a specifically Christian angle) while forgetting that, at least in Dante Alighieri's vision of Hell, there are special places for fraudulent and violent politicians.
God bless America, Obama. And god bless its little girls, and little girls everywhere. Little girls suffering from the continuing American Predator drone attacks. Little girls suffering from the continuing war on Afghanistan. Little girls suffering from the continuing US occupation of Iraq. Little girls suffering from American material and political support of Israeli occupation in Palestine. Little girls suffering from American dismissal of climate change. Little girls suffering from American economic policy. Little girls suffering from corporate healthcare. Little girls suffering from corporate welfare. Little girls suffering from American institutional racism. Little girls suffering from the horrid notion of American exceptionalism: what a mean, uncharitable conviction creeping through its mainstream political culture, imbuing its people with the cognitive dissonance necessary to applaud a war criminal for gentle words offered back in eulogy! But only to little American girls.
And so on and so forth. To say nothing of little boys, and women and men. Pseudo-liberals who idolize Obama like to remind his left critics that he is not a superman. We are mocked for holding him up to his own rhetoric. I understand, as George Monbiot put it, that hypocrisy is the gap between aspirations and actions. But where are the actions that signal aspirations? They have military operational titles. They are apparent in signatures to laws and decrees that bolster empire. And to hell with little girls.
Call back the jets and the tanks and the soldiers, Obama. Call them back, every last one. Close the military bases littered across the planet. Defuse and decommission each and every nuclear bomb, submarine, and power station. Signal aspirations, impossible though they may be to realize in a capitalist democracy, to end wars against children, even if it means ending your career. End your wars.
It must be difficult to organize a funeral or memorial service, especially for tragic deaths. I would not want to have that job. But if I did, and the memorial service was for victims of violence, I would rule out inviting someone with a proven record of violence against men, women, and children. It was not mere hypocrisy on display. I may be a hypocrite, sitting here typing away at this computer and despising the hurts of industrial civilization. But I believe Obama's performance goes beyond hypocrisy, beyond cognitive dissonance and into the realm of deliberate political and emotional manipulation. If it's not pure theater then it's pure insanity, and if it's not that it's puppetry. As with his predecessors and successors and the perpetrator in Tucson, we can "examine all the facts" that lead not only to lone tragedies, but to systemic tragedies. One little girl killed is a tragedy. So are two. And so are a million.
What else did Obama say? "I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us--we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations. (Applause.)"
Then stop committing the atrocities.
A common refrain in my work is the violence our culture perpetrates on children. This is not only because I experienced it so close and so devastatingly. In 1988 one of my younger sisters, Sybil, was killed when a car smashed into her as she was crossing a street after school. She was nine years old and every bit the bright light that Christina Taylor Green, a victim of the Tucson attack, seems to have been, every bit the bright light that all kids, everywhere in the world, tend to be: energetic, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, full of love, curious, charitable.
Years ago, as I went through a process of abstracting my personal tragedies and grief--attempting to dismantle the formulation that one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic--I found resonance in the words of Howard Zinn: All wars are wars against children. The work of Derrick Jensen was also influential to me in this context, particularly his notion that most aspects of industrial civilization--how it abuses its environment, miseducates the young, objectifies women, loathes the "other", twists language--are "strangely like war". I see strange wars perpetrated against children throughout the culture and it makes my stomach turn.
Last night, by chance, I happened upon the transcript of Obama's eulogy for the six people killed in Tucson. (The environmental organization 350.org, which I follow on facebook, linked to it, adding that the speech "beautifully shows the humanity we're all working so hard to save.") I avoid watching or listening to political speeches, especially if I haven't read them first; I am as susceptible as anyone to the manipulations of a good performance. So I read the speech and was nauseated. Here is a piece of utterly unscrupulous imperial theater, even without the tenor and cadences that have made Obama so frustratingly beloved by so many.
For the arch-defender of war that Obama is to say the things he said--to applause and adoration--about how the incident should be reflected on and how the victims should be honored, seems beyond perverse to me. Audacity indeed. Even as the Nobel Peace Prize-winner spoke, armed drone aircraft under his command continued their mission of circling and dropping bombs indiscriminately over far-away Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And what did he say? "None of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future."
But one would be a fool to expect Obama, who spoke these words on the occasion of a memorial service for six innocent people, to examine all the facts behind the tragedy or to challenge old assumptions. Not even for a day did Obama halt the atrocities at his command in honor of the victims in Tucson. He did order a moment of silence on the Monday following the shooting, but I suspect little girls in southern Afghanistan could hear the continuing roar of American warplanes overhead.
What else did he say? He said God Bless America. Peppering his speech with bits from both the Old and New Testaments, Obama (or his speechwriters) sought to express spirituality (and perhaps a specifically Christian angle) while forgetting that, at least in Dante Alighieri's vision of Hell, there are special places for fraudulent and violent politicians.
God bless America, Obama. And god bless its little girls, and little girls everywhere. Little girls suffering from the continuing American Predator drone attacks. Little girls suffering from the continuing war on Afghanistan. Little girls suffering from the continuing US occupation of Iraq. Little girls suffering from American material and political support of Israeli occupation in Palestine. Little girls suffering from American dismissal of climate change. Little girls suffering from American economic policy. Little girls suffering from corporate healthcare. Little girls suffering from corporate welfare. Little girls suffering from American institutional racism. Little girls suffering from the horrid notion of American exceptionalism: what a mean, uncharitable conviction creeping through its mainstream political culture, imbuing its people with the cognitive dissonance necessary to applaud a war criminal for gentle words offered back in eulogy! But only to little American girls.
And so on and so forth. To say nothing of little boys, and women and men. Pseudo-liberals who idolize Obama like to remind his left critics that he is not a superman. We are mocked for holding him up to his own rhetoric. I understand, as George Monbiot put it, that hypocrisy is the gap between aspirations and actions. But where are the actions that signal aspirations? They have military operational titles. They are apparent in signatures to laws and decrees that bolster empire. And to hell with little girls.
Call back the jets and the tanks and the soldiers, Obama. Call them back, every last one. Close the military bases littered across the planet. Defuse and decommission each and every nuclear bomb, submarine, and power station. Signal aspirations, impossible though they may be to realize in a capitalist democracy, to end wars against children, even if it means ending your career. End your wars.
It must be difficult to organize a funeral or memorial service, especially for tragic deaths. I would not want to have that job. But if I did, and the memorial service was for victims of violence, I would rule out inviting someone with a proven record of violence against men, women, and children. It was not mere hypocrisy on display. I may be a hypocrite, sitting here typing away at this computer and despising the hurts of industrial civilization. But I believe Obama's performance goes beyond hypocrisy, beyond cognitive dissonance and into the realm of deliberate political and emotional manipulation. If it's not pure theater then it's pure insanity, and if it's not that it's puppetry. As with his predecessors and successors and the perpetrator in Tucson, we can "examine all the facts" that lead not only to lone tragedies, but to systemic tragedies. One little girl killed is a tragedy. So are two. And so are a million.
What else did Obama say? "I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us--we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations. (Applause.)"
Then stop committing the atrocities.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Oh, Do Tell.
The United States Senate has just voted to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", the 17-year old controversial law that prevented openly gay people from serving the causes of empire and injustice in the United States Armed Forces.
I imagine indigenous people around the world at this moment, gathering at the gates to a thousand American military bases and torture chambers, cheering in relief that now, along with other Americans long denied their civil rights, homosexuals will legally be among the invading, occupying, destabilizing, violating, murdering forces of empire.
The military strength of the civilized has always relied on the disenfranchised to do its killing and become its cannon fodder. It doesn't surprise me that racist America is happy to have Blacks and Hispanics and Asians and Native Americans in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that patriarchal America is happy to have women in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that pseudo-Christian America is happy to have Muslims and Jews and Hindus and atheists in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that plutocratic America is happy to have the economically depressed in its armed forces.
But I have found it strange that a government willing to deny civil rights to gay people--that must therefore hate gay people as much as it does non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy--did not want all the objects of its hatred to serve as its cannon fodder. One would think the government would want to out those to whom it accords lesser value and send them directly to the front lines.
But they didn't. Until now.
To be more accurate, it wasn't that homosexuals could not kill and be killed for the American empire. Rather, they were to do so without revealing their sexual orientation. That was the great compromise that noted friend-to-the-disenfranchised Bill Clinton made in 1993. With the law repealed, gay people in the US Armed Forces can take pride in who they are: trained killers.
Another clarification: it's not that now gays and lesbians will merely be pushed to the front lines. Sure they'll be allowed to murder and die for empire. But also, along with non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy, non-heterosexuals will be welcome to perform support roles as nurses, doctors, clerks, engineers, and communications [sic] and language experts. They will be able to write press releases and fabricate stories. They will be able to operate drone aircraft from comfortable control rooms thousands of miles away from their targets. They will be able to spy on people. They will be able to negotiate the transportation and use of land mines and chemical and nuclear weapons. There are so many ways for devalued and marginalized Americans to join the racist, plutocratic, patriarchal, pseudo-Christian empire in devaluing and marginalizing people all over our beloved planet.
So congratulations to gays and lesbians in the United States, who are now poised to legally and proudly join the racially, economically, and religiously marginalized in openly participating in the American worldwide imperial bloodbath. You've come a long way, babies!
I imagine indigenous people around the world at this moment, gathering at the gates to a thousand American military bases and torture chambers, cheering in relief that now, along with other Americans long denied their civil rights, homosexuals will legally be among the invading, occupying, destabilizing, violating, murdering forces of empire.
The military strength of the civilized has always relied on the disenfranchised to do its killing and become its cannon fodder. It doesn't surprise me that racist America is happy to have Blacks and Hispanics and Asians and Native Americans in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that patriarchal America is happy to have women in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that pseudo-Christian America is happy to have Muslims and Jews and Hindus and atheists in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that plutocratic America is happy to have the economically depressed in its armed forces.
But I have found it strange that a government willing to deny civil rights to gay people--that must therefore hate gay people as much as it does non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy--did not want all the objects of its hatred to serve as its cannon fodder. One would think the government would want to out those to whom it accords lesser value and send them directly to the front lines.
But they didn't. Until now.
To be more accurate, it wasn't that homosexuals could not kill and be killed for the American empire. Rather, they were to do so without revealing their sexual orientation. That was the great compromise that noted friend-to-the-disenfranchised Bill Clinton made in 1993. With the law repealed, gay people in the US Armed Forces can take pride in who they are: trained killers.
Another clarification: it's not that now gays and lesbians will merely be pushed to the front lines. Sure they'll be allowed to murder and die for empire. But also, along with non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy, non-heterosexuals will be welcome to perform support roles as nurses, doctors, clerks, engineers, and communications [sic] and language experts. They will be able to write press releases and fabricate stories. They will be able to operate drone aircraft from comfortable control rooms thousands of miles away from their targets. They will be able to spy on people. They will be able to negotiate the transportation and use of land mines and chemical and nuclear weapons. There are so many ways for devalued and marginalized Americans to join the racist, plutocratic, patriarchal, pseudo-Christian empire in devaluing and marginalizing people all over our beloved planet.
So congratulations to gays and lesbians in the United States, who are now poised to legally and proudly join the racially, economically, and religiously marginalized in openly participating in the American worldwide imperial bloodbath. You've come a long way, babies!
Monday, October 11, 2010
Conquistadors
The United States still celebrates "Christopher Columbus Day," which makes a ton of sense to me. Columbus was a savage conquistador, after all, and the legacy of the conquistador is alive and well in the way the US perceives and treats the world.
So if we hate on that murderous bastard Columbus, we might equally hate on all conquistadors, regardless of where they killed and raped and infected and indoctrinated their way to bloody supremacy: Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. It's all the same.
A more recent celebration on the same day, initiated in the US but celebrated in a number of other countries, is National Coming Out Day, centered on awareness of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues and civil rights for LGBT people. Even in places touted as "tolerant" LGBT people still find themselves marginalized, harried, denied equal rights, and subject to violence. Recent events in the US attest to this sad fact.
I imagine that an individual from any marginalized group would feel a particularly intense hatred of conquistadors in all their guises. What are conquistadors anyway but madmen who run roughshod over the lives of others, attempting to subjugate or destroy populations they fear, rob them of their identities, livelihoods, lifeways? Whether the endgame for conquistadors is real estate or religion or bloodsport or politics, the attitude is the same.
I believe that all people, regardless of their sexual orientation (or race, or gender, or age, or nationality, or ethnicity, or creed, or physical abilities) have equal rights in - and similar obligations to - their communities. These may be usurped by force, but that does not obviate them. So I am always confused when marginalized groups fight passionately for their rights at the expense of others: when they succumb to the consciousness of their oppressors.
This is a very real issue for the gay community in the US, where people struggling to be free (from violence and to openly express themselves and to enjoy the same rights and benefits of society as others) also struggle for the right to join the US Armed Forces. The USAF is always a force for subjegation and violence, irredeemably so, always, always, always. To conquer others is wrong. To agitate for the right to do so is also wrong.
I am an ally to LGBT people struggling for liberty, and to all people struggling against the conquistadors.
So if we hate on that murderous bastard Columbus, we might equally hate on all conquistadors, regardless of where they killed and raped and infected and indoctrinated their way to bloody supremacy: Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. It's all the same.
A more recent celebration on the same day, initiated in the US but celebrated in a number of other countries, is National Coming Out Day, centered on awareness of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues and civil rights for LGBT people. Even in places touted as "tolerant" LGBT people still find themselves marginalized, harried, denied equal rights, and subject to violence. Recent events in the US attest to this sad fact.
I imagine that an individual from any marginalized group would feel a particularly intense hatred of conquistadors in all their guises. What are conquistadors anyway but madmen who run roughshod over the lives of others, attempting to subjugate or destroy populations they fear, rob them of their identities, livelihoods, lifeways? Whether the endgame for conquistadors is real estate or religion or bloodsport or politics, the attitude is the same.
I believe that all people, regardless of their sexual orientation (or race, or gender, or age, or nationality, or ethnicity, or creed, or physical abilities) have equal rights in - and similar obligations to - their communities. These may be usurped by force, but that does not obviate them. So I am always confused when marginalized groups fight passionately for their rights at the expense of others: when they succumb to the consciousness of their oppressors.
This is a very real issue for the gay community in the US, where people struggling to be free (from violence and to openly express themselves and to enjoy the same rights and benefits of society as others) also struggle for the right to join the US Armed Forces. The USAF is always a force for subjegation and violence, irredeemably so, always, always, always. To conquer others is wrong. To agitate for the right to do so is also wrong.
I am an ally to LGBT people struggling for liberty, and to all people struggling against the conquistadors.
Friday, August 06, 2010
Less Mellow, More Harsh
I never do this, but I am posting an addendum to my previous piece "Harshing Your Mellow". I am posting this for anyone who considers my position to be somehow pessimistic (the epithets have started to flow in) or feels that small victories should be celebrated to help urge others on.
Friend:
Though I often agree with the formulation of Antonio Gramsci: "I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will" I don't think the label pessimist is appropriate in this case. You call my opinions pessimistic because I am not cracking open champagne over the New York State Senate's vote in favor of an 11-month moratorium on new hydrofracking drilling permits. For you, this is a victory.
I think writing what I wrote--because someone, somewhere, may be comforted knowing there are others who see through the smoke & mirrors--is actually an act of optimism. Humankind is better than the shit we are in. It is civilization that is fucked. Witness cultures that are tens of thousands of years old interacting & surviving. I have great "faith" in humanity. Pessimist is a lazy epithet that I get over & over from people who hold me & my convictions at arm's-length, who are quicker to identify with our young culture (industrial civilization) than our ancient species. They mistake comfort for love.
Imagine, friend, that instead of soil & water & air we are discussing a person, perhaps you, perhaps your child. And instead of multinational drilling & extraction corporations we are discussing a serial rapist that you, or your child, is in some sort of relationship with.
The abuse has happened, is happening now & will continue to happen. We want it to stop, so we take our case to a judge, who rules that it must stop temporarily to study the ill effects the abuse has on you, or your child. It must stop IF a second & third judge agree. The second judge will consider this matter in a month's time. Meanwhile you, or your child, continue to be abused by this monster rapist. If the second judge rules in favor of temporarily halting the abuse (again: to study its ill effects!) a third judge will consider the matter. If the third judge agrees with the first & second judges (this could be months from now, meanwhile you, or your child, are being violated by this monster) you will have a legal respite until May. It is now August. You might have rape to look forward to in late spring.
But there will be loopholes. "Exploratory" abuse will continue. "Conventional" abuse will continue. You have friends in other states, where the laws are different, who continue to suffer from completely legal abusive relationships. The laws do not protect the victims, you see, they protect the abuser.
Drilling leases are still being signed. The abuse continues. I cannot & will not celebrate a sham victory that allows something that I love--in this case the soil & water & air--to continue to be abused. It is twisted pessimism to think so small as to celebrate, now, to think that this slap in the face is a sign of hope. Such thinking is why we're in this mess in the first place: we too often celebrate sham victories & fail to fight for substance. People around here are still drunk from celebrating Obama's campaign victory (to take one of my least favorite examples). So drunk, they fail to notice the torture chambers are still active (those are not screams of delight, friend), the bombs continue to drop (those are not celebratory fireworks), the prisons are overflowing, the deceit compounds.
If you or I were involved in a genuine struggle to prevent these multinational corporations from turning our planet into toxic swiss cheese, we would not stop to celebrate now. (I am reminded of what Bob Marley said when he chose to perform two days after being shot: "The people who are making this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I?") As I wrote yesterday, this possible moratorium, this sham victory, is written into the script for us. We decide if we want to change the script. All we have to do is wake up to the abuse that continues around us, call it what it is, & stop it.
There is so much to do & we have the power to do it. What could be more optimistic than that?
Friend:
Though I often agree with the formulation of Antonio Gramsci: "I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will" I don't think the label pessimist is appropriate in this case. You call my opinions pessimistic because I am not cracking open champagne over the New York State Senate's vote in favor of an 11-month moratorium on new hydrofracking drilling permits. For you, this is a victory.
I think writing what I wrote--because someone, somewhere, may be comforted knowing there are others who see through the smoke & mirrors--is actually an act of optimism. Humankind is better than the shit we are in. It is civilization that is fucked. Witness cultures that are tens of thousands of years old interacting & surviving. I have great "faith" in humanity. Pessimist is a lazy epithet that I get over & over from people who hold me & my convictions at arm's-length, who are quicker to identify with our young culture (industrial civilization) than our ancient species. They mistake comfort for love.
Imagine, friend, that instead of soil & water & air we are discussing a person, perhaps you, perhaps your child. And instead of multinational drilling & extraction corporations we are discussing a serial rapist that you, or your child, is in some sort of relationship with.
The abuse has happened, is happening now & will continue to happen. We want it to stop, so we take our case to a judge, who rules that it must stop temporarily to study the ill effects the abuse has on you, or your child. It must stop IF a second & third judge agree. The second judge will consider this matter in a month's time. Meanwhile you, or your child, continue to be abused by this monster rapist. If the second judge rules in favor of temporarily halting the abuse (again: to study its ill effects!) a third judge will consider the matter. If the third judge agrees with the first & second judges (this could be months from now, meanwhile you, or your child, are being violated by this monster) you will have a legal respite until May. It is now August. You might have rape to look forward to in late spring.
But there will be loopholes. "Exploratory" abuse will continue. "Conventional" abuse will continue. You have friends in other states, where the laws are different, who continue to suffer from completely legal abusive relationships. The laws do not protect the victims, you see, they protect the abuser.
Drilling leases are still being signed. The abuse continues. I cannot & will not celebrate a sham victory that allows something that I love--in this case the soil & water & air--to continue to be abused. It is twisted pessimism to think so small as to celebrate, now, to think that this slap in the face is a sign of hope. Such thinking is why we're in this mess in the first place: we too often celebrate sham victories & fail to fight for substance. People around here are still drunk from celebrating Obama's campaign victory (to take one of my least favorite examples). So drunk, they fail to notice the torture chambers are still active (those are not screams of delight, friend), the bombs continue to drop (those are not celebratory fireworks), the prisons are overflowing, the deceit compounds.
If you or I were involved in a genuine struggle to prevent these multinational corporations from turning our planet into toxic swiss cheese, we would not stop to celebrate now. (I am reminded of what Bob Marley said when he chose to perform two days after being shot: "The people who are making this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I?") As I wrote yesterday, this possible moratorium, this sham victory, is written into the script for us. We decide if we want to change the script. All we have to do is wake up to the abuse that continues around us, call it what it is, & stop it.
There is so much to do & we have the power to do it. What could be more optimistic than that?
Thursday, August 05, 2010
"Harshing Your Mellow"
Interesting conversation with a stranger today. Cooling off with a $1 beer on the stoop of one of my favorite locals, I was asked how I felt about the August 4th passage in the New York State Senate of an 11-month moratorium on new hydrofracking permits in the Marcellus Shale. Hydrofracking is something that I have thought deeply about, and intermittently acted and advocated against, since I first learned of the issue late last year.
(To summarize: Hydrofracking (high volume slick water hydraulic fracturing) is a particularly toxic method of natural gas extraction. The Marcellus Shale formation, stretching from northern New York State to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, has been identified as especially ripe for drilling. In Pennsylvania (and many other states) where the laws have been more lax, residential tap water has been shown to be flammable due to the effects of gas drilling. Hydrofracking uses a toxic mix of secret, proprietary chemicals (owned by the vile assholes at Halliburton, of course), sand, and millions of gallons of water to fracture gas pockets in the shale and force precious fossil fuel to the surface. In the process, a portion of the toxic fluid remains in the ground, while most of it returns to the surface. This fluid is industrial, radioactive waste that is known to cause birth defects, brain damage and cancer. And so on and so forth.)
So what did I say to the stranger who wanted my opinion? I said that the drilling continues. So-called "exploratory" drilling, which is presumably not covered by the moratorium, allows ecocidal corporations to drill without environmental oversight. But whatever. The Senate vote will first be reviewed by the State Assembly in September. Who knows how long they will discuss the matter, while current and new drill sites poison the water table. When they are done discussing, the Governor will review the issue. (The current Governor, by most accounts, appears to be a bought-and-paid-for, inept dick.) Meanwhile, if I am deciphering the insane politics correctly, the moratorium does not go into effect. At all.
The stranger who had asked for my opinion of this wonderful news countered with something about how "we did all we can" and "it worked" and the Senate vote "offers some hope." To which I responded that "we" did not do all we can. The main thrust of public effort on this issue has been political, and is moving in typical sludge-like political time. But the Earth cannot wait. I responded with the thought that "we" did all we wanted. Were we to do all we can, "we" might have slashed the throats of ecocidal maniacs willing to drill (to go to one extreme), or "we" might have set their machines on fire, or monkey-wrenched them to uselessness, or blockaded drill sites. I was not overtly advocating such behavior. I was pointing out the gulf that exists between what was done and what could be done. What was done was legal and sanctioned by the same forces ready to destroy the soil, water, and air tomorrow for a buck today. Calling for a moratorium, and maybe getting it passed (later, maybe, and perhaps with a shit ton of loopholes, why not, that's how this garbage always goes down) was already in the script.
There is a bottom line. What is it? It is clean air, clean water, and clean soil. That is the minimum requirement for species survival (our species and the various species with which we interact). The fraudulent, corrupt, make-believe, quote-motherfucking-unquote democratic process is a wholly inadequate channel for protecting the bottom line. How many tragic reminders do folks need? How many oil spills? How many "severe climate events?" How many extinctions per goddamn day? How many asthma sufferers, cancer patients, victims of brain damage? It is not a victory when the ecocidal corporatists that would readily sell your survival down the toxic river set the terms of your victory. (Hope & Change, anyone? I bet the hundreds of thousands of mothers and children killed during the Bush/Obama Imperial holocaust in Iraq are celebrating in their irradiated graves over President Peaceprize's announcement earlier today of the end of U.S. combat operations in their former Earthly home.)
Back to the stoop, and my friendly conversation. I added that there ought to be in place an "underground railroad" for heroic people dubbed "eco-terrorists", animal liberationists, monkey-wrenchers and so on. Not everyone will stand up, bodily, to the engines of war against the Earth. But when such folks do, and when they are on the run, they deserve our protection physically, legally, rhetorically, philosophically, spiritually.
The stranger, who claimed to be a 30-year veteran of anti-nuclear activism, then announced (like a perfect, left-liberal fauxgressive) that I was "harshing his mellow." Which was just fine by me. Fuck his fucking mellow. People sometimes ask me why I am so angry. I want to know why those same people aren't.
(To summarize: Hydrofracking (high volume slick water hydraulic fracturing) is a particularly toxic method of natural gas extraction. The Marcellus Shale formation, stretching from northern New York State to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, has been identified as especially ripe for drilling. In Pennsylvania (and many other states) where the laws have been more lax, residential tap water has been shown to be flammable due to the effects of gas drilling. Hydrofracking uses a toxic mix of secret, proprietary chemicals (owned by the vile assholes at Halliburton, of course), sand, and millions of gallons of water to fracture gas pockets in the shale and force precious fossil fuel to the surface. In the process, a portion of the toxic fluid remains in the ground, while most of it returns to the surface. This fluid is industrial, radioactive waste that is known to cause birth defects, brain damage and cancer. And so on and so forth.)
So what did I say to the stranger who wanted my opinion? I said that the drilling continues. So-called "exploratory" drilling, which is presumably not covered by the moratorium, allows ecocidal corporations to drill without environmental oversight. But whatever. The Senate vote will first be reviewed by the State Assembly in September. Who knows how long they will discuss the matter, while current and new drill sites poison the water table. When they are done discussing, the Governor will review the issue. (The current Governor, by most accounts, appears to be a bought-and-paid-for, inept dick.) Meanwhile, if I am deciphering the insane politics correctly, the moratorium does not go into effect. At all.
The stranger who had asked for my opinion of this wonderful news countered with something about how "we did all we can" and "it worked" and the Senate vote "offers some hope." To which I responded that "we" did not do all we can. The main thrust of public effort on this issue has been political, and is moving in typical sludge-like political time. But the Earth cannot wait. I responded with the thought that "we" did all we wanted. Were we to do all we can, "we" might have slashed the throats of ecocidal maniacs willing to drill (to go to one extreme), or "we" might have set their machines on fire, or monkey-wrenched them to uselessness, or blockaded drill sites. I was not overtly advocating such behavior. I was pointing out the gulf that exists between what was done and what could be done. What was done was legal and sanctioned by the same forces ready to destroy the soil, water, and air tomorrow for a buck today. Calling for a moratorium, and maybe getting it passed (later, maybe, and perhaps with a shit ton of loopholes, why not, that's how this garbage always goes down) was already in the script.
There is a bottom line. What is it? It is clean air, clean water, and clean soil. That is the minimum requirement for species survival (our species and the various species with which we interact). The fraudulent, corrupt, make-believe, quote-motherfucking-unquote democratic process is a wholly inadequate channel for protecting the bottom line. How many tragic reminders do folks need? How many oil spills? How many "severe climate events?" How many extinctions per goddamn day? How many asthma sufferers, cancer patients, victims of brain damage? It is not a victory when the ecocidal corporatists that would readily sell your survival down the toxic river set the terms of your victory. (Hope & Change, anyone? I bet the hundreds of thousands of mothers and children killed during the Bush/Obama Imperial holocaust in Iraq are celebrating in their irradiated graves over President Peaceprize's announcement earlier today of the end of U.S. combat operations in their former Earthly home.)
Back to the stoop, and my friendly conversation. I added that there ought to be in place an "underground railroad" for heroic people dubbed "eco-terrorists", animal liberationists, monkey-wrenchers and so on. Not everyone will stand up, bodily, to the engines of war against the Earth. But when such folks do, and when they are on the run, they deserve our protection physically, legally, rhetorically, philosophically, spiritually.
The stranger, who claimed to be a 30-year veteran of anti-nuclear activism, then announced (like a perfect, left-liberal fauxgressive) that I was "harshing his mellow." Which was just fine by me. Fuck his fucking mellow. People sometimes ask me why I am so angry. I want to know why those same people aren't.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Thanksgiving Questions
I grew up loving the Thanksgiving holiday without giving it much thought. I celebrated my last Thanksgiving in 2000. The following year, while the United States was bombing weddings in Afghanistan and locking up children in Guantanamo who had the temerity to fight back, I finally realized how utterly obscene it was to participate in a holiday which essentially has its roots in invasion and occupation (not to mention the horrendous cruelty and environmental degradation of factory farming). As another Thanksgiving approaches, a few questions occurred to me.
What if Thanksgiving in the USA was a celebration of locally sourced, locally seasonal, organic food grown on small farms, home gardens, or hunted and gathered, like it was for the Puritan colonizers in 1620?
Or what if it was a day of national mourning and fasting in solemn rememberance of the genocide perpetrated against cultures that revered the land?
What if on Thanksgiving people refused to eat poisoned food sold in toxic containers? What if they invited not just family, but neighbors into their homes, shared the fruits of garden harvests and traded heirloom seeds to sow the following growing season?
What if the national dish did not revolve around the charring of a fellow animal after it lived a life of fear huddled in a tiny cage?
What if the genetic integrity of the foods Americans eat was respected, left alone, and not invaded and destroyed as though it were just another territory claimed by divine right?
What if the culture was not so apocalyptic? What if everything, all the way up to the planet we inhabit, was not so disposable?
What if the famous Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City didn't celebrate opulence, excess, the victory culture and affront after afront to history, but instead was marked by the determination of its participants to invade and occupy government buildings until the government ceases to invade and occupy other countries?
What if the televisions were turned off? What if we put our boots through them, and left the remains at the entryways to the headquarters of the news networks, just as a warning?
What if instead of Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving we all gave something back, besides our thanks? Better, what if we reclaimed something that has been taken from us?
What if instead of watching corporate sporting events in a food coma after dinner, we organized and played our own sports? Or used our energy to build something that's broken, or dismantle something that should never have been?
What if thanks were only offered by those who know what gratitude means - not the word but the concept, with its implications of respect and interdependence?
What if these questions were asked at American Thanksgiving tables? What if they weren't considered vulgar, or out of place, or (ho hum) unpatriotic?
What if there was no Thanksgiving holiday, no Thanksgiving parade, no Thanksgiving sports or movies or Christmas shopping or slaughterhouses or presidential messages or anything?
What would you do? How would you signal your gratitude for the good fortune, the comforts, the privileges that you have? What if it was for you to decide?
You are the pilgrim, your ship has landed, the world offers its bounty up to you. You decide.
What if Thanksgiving in the USA was a celebration of locally sourced, locally seasonal, organic food grown on small farms, home gardens, or hunted and gathered, like it was for the Puritan colonizers in 1620?
Or what if it was a day of national mourning and fasting in solemn rememberance of the genocide perpetrated against cultures that revered the land?
What if on Thanksgiving people refused to eat poisoned food sold in toxic containers? What if they invited not just family, but neighbors into their homes, shared the fruits of garden harvests and traded heirloom seeds to sow the following growing season?
What if the national dish did not revolve around the charring of a fellow animal after it lived a life of fear huddled in a tiny cage?
What if the genetic integrity of the foods Americans eat was respected, left alone, and not invaded and destroyed as though it were just another territory claimed by divine right?
What if the culture was not so apocalyptic? What if everything, all the way up to the planet we inhabit, was not so disposable?
What if the famous Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City didn't celebrate opulence, excess, the victory culture and affront after afront to history, but instead was marked by the determination of its participants to invade and occupy government buildings until the government ceases to invade and occupy other countries?
What if the televisions were turned off? What if we put our boots through them, and left the remains at the entryways to the headquarters of the news networks, just as a warning?
What if instead of Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving we all gave something back, besides our thanks? Better, what if we reclaimed something that has been taken from us?
What if instead of watching corporate sporting events in a food coma after dinner, we organized and played our own sports? Or used our energy to build something that's broken, or dismantle something that should never have been?
What if thanks were only offered by those who know what gratitude means - not the word but the concept, with its implications of respect and interdependence?
What if these questions were asked at American Thanksgiving tables? What if they weren't considered vulgar, or out of place, or (ho hum) unpatriotic?
What if there was no Thanksgiving holiday, no Thanksgiving parade, no Thanksgiving sports or movies or Christmas shopping or slaughterhouses or presidential messages or anything?
What would you do? How would you signal your gratitude for the good fortune, the comforts, the privileges that you have? What if it was for you to decide?
You are the pilgrim, your ship has landed, the world offers its bounty up to you. You decide.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Billie Holiday, David Simon and the War on Drugs
I am reading Billie Holiday's 1956 engaging autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (ghostwritten by William Dufty), and found a passage on the failed war on drugs that sounds like it was written in opposition to the failed war on drugs of the Reagan years, or indeed today. She says:
People on drugs are sick people. So now we end up with the government chasing sick people like they were criminals, telling doctors they can't help them, prosecuting them because they had some stuff without paying the tax, and sending them to jail.And here's David Simon, creator of The Wire, speaking on the subject on Bill Moyers Journal:
Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day.
I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we're basically treating our underclass. The drug war's war on the underclass now. That's all it is. It has no other meaning.
Monday, November 10, 2008
If the music isn't activism, it's the wrong music
Excellent, brief essay by composer John Luther Adams: Global Warming and Art. From the essay:
Three decades ago I came to Alaska to "get away" from the world. But the world has followed me here in an inescapable way. I came here also to help save the wilderness. For years I worked as an environmental activist. When I left that work I did so feeling that someone else could carry it on, but that no one else could make my music. Implicit in this choice was my belief that, in a different way, music could matter as much as activism.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Of Exasperation and Democracy
I sometimes send an email update to a few hundred people to inform them of my creative activities. To my latest update I added a paragraph detailing some of my main reasons for not voting in the U.S. (Not much changes, here’s a link to what I had to say about voting two years ago.) This paragraph was not only pertinent to the time I sent out the mailing (a week before the 2008 presidential elections) but also to an audiovisual installation of mine Registering Our Exasperation currently on exhibition at the Melkweg in Amsterdam.
I will not be voting in the upcoming U.S. elections, though I am eligible to do so. I see the electoral situation as not so different from that of Belarus, wherein the democratic process is so obviously flawed that participation only seems to indicate legitimization. I wouldn't bet on a horse that I knew in advance would not make it to the race. Only the extraordinarily well-funded are given access to the public through mainstream media. And they--the well-funded (and forked-tongued)--maintain attitudes that are so obviously divergent from the majority of the people that even with their obscene funding they will not allow other ideas to compete for public attention and support. I am not suggesting that there is no difference between the two main actors this particular year, but that the difference does not speak to the breakdown of democracy. Given the various extinction-level crises that an American president sits at the helm of, I am not willing to be pragmatic in the question of government, at least not with regard to the illusion of choice. As I have written many times before, this is not only an American issue. However one chooses to participate in democracies flawed or perfect, I advocate a particpation in community that obviates mega-powerful, centralized governments. To be clear, I am refering to the kind of participation that Henry David Thoreau had in mind when he wrote "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." Because without a community actively defined by those who live within it, any government is irrelevant and any election is ridiculous. If it is change that one wants, it is change that one must do (and not change that one must vote for).
Anyway, I received a number of thought-provoking responses, some from people who share my attitude. The majority of the substantive responses, however, were from people who thought my decision poor, although all agreed with the notion that American democracy is in a very sorry state. But the suggestion seemed to be vote for the candidate who is black, because he is black, and that is historic, and he talks about change, and change would be good, and the other candidate is really much much worse. Which all may be true, but how that would address the democracy issue I do not know. As it happens, I found this to be exasperating, again appropriate to the work I am presenting at the Melkweg. So I wrote the following to be made available at my exhibition. It has some cursing in it.
How do I register my exasperation? How do I indicate the frustrating understanding I have come to that mega-nations & governments run by madmen are causing all of the problems—problems that, year in & year out, someone, somewhere, is telling me I should solve by voting for different madmen? Could everyone please stop telling me to vote?Go ahead & vote, vote, get your candidate or political party of choice to win some sham election, vote. Pat yourself on the back for participating in democracy & then go back to sleep for the next few years, while politicians & the corporations that own them ride roughshod over the earth, killing people & rivers, enslaving children & the integrity of genes, slaughtering languages & rainforests, mocking democracy.
Or do they? Do they mock democracy? Hitler, Mugabe, Lukashenko, Hussein all won elections. Even that shit-brained son-of-a-bitch Bush nearly did, twice. What is democracy anyway in our age of perverted information, when all information is commercialized, when shit floats, when access to your intellect is sold to the highest bidder, when soundbites will have to suffice because neither you nor your candidate have time to read the policies drawn up in backrooms by people whose names no one even knows?
How do I register my exasperation? Stop telling me to vote. Stop telling me to participate in a counterfeit electoral process, in a democracy in which political parties can be divided over whether human industry is cooking the planet or not, over whether the violence should be conducted by insufferable idiot jerk-offs or charming intellectuals, over whether this or that group has the right to self-determination, over whether torturing someone constitutes ‘torture’, over whether the integrity of borders is more precious than the integrity of the lives of those who wish to cross them, over the extent to which women’s reproductive rights & the civil rights of homosexuals threaten the nation.
I am not part of a community that stretches across multiple mountain ranges, over rivers, beyond the corpses of once-proud & impenetrable forests, that has asserted its right to pave the planet & pour chemicals into the eyes of bunnies to create new cosmetics or find cures to cancers the culture causes in the first place.
No. How do I register my exasperation? What place does democracy have in the mass extinctions we are witnessing, mass extinctions of a magnitude only seen when a comet smashes into the planet or an ice age covers it for centuries? Vote. Vote for liars who pay lip service to the builders of bombs, to the financiers of fire & brimstone, to the high priests of pedophilia and misogyny, to the conquerors of carbon, the gangsters of genetics, the vanquishers of forests. Vote for them & encourage everyone around you to do the same, get the vote out, they say, get it out. Rock it. Get it out & then go back to sleep, & in a few years’ time another cast of back-alley elite, socialite sociopaths will dance on camera for you in expensive suits, with flecks of corporate shit in their teeth & the fresh blood of a million children on their breath.
You raise your voice & say no, no, these are not my nations & this is not my way, these democracies are killing my planet, my first & last & only beloved planet, & listen to the response you get, they say, with less subtlety than Chavez or bin Laden: but do you want a dictatorship? And that’s when you realize just how shallow all this fuckin’ democracy is, you knew it stank, you knew it was false, a fraud, a fake, but it wasn’t until democracy loving people—& it’s true you are surrounded by intelligent and creative people, & they love democracy, just love it, every time an election comes around they get hard with hatred for the greater of two evils—but when such creative, intelligent, imaginative & democracy loving people as those around you fail to imagine anything but this violent shithouse, this fiction, this sham, this obscenity parading as righteousness, this vile method to slowly annihilate the whole goddamn toy, well that’s when you ask, how do I register my exasperation? How do I register my exasperation? How, midst all this skullduggery, all this shallow & pernicious blather, do I register my exasperation?
For a while, I listened to the radio program Democracy Now! I listened & I listened & all the guests were getting tortured or incarcerated or had brothers & sons about to be executed for the color of their skin or the sexual orientation of their partners, or were lawyers fighting against the latest surveillance laws & bipartisan gladhanding to fund more war & on & on & on. So I took away the words & left the aspiration, meaning both what these beleaguered activists & dissidents wanted and literally the sound of their breathing & pausing while they spoke. And it sounded like exasperation. They were all exasperated, like me, perhaps like you.
This was in 2006 & everything they were saying was something no one wanted to hear, people just wanted the economy to go up, up, up & for news of the wars to go away. Well the wars are still here & at the moment the economy stinks the way it has always stank to me, like shit, but back to the artwork in question all that audio of exasperation was of things no one wanted to hear, so I put it together with the text from my video Things You Cannot See, which I had just made & the two seemed to go together very nicely, things you cannot hear & things you cannot see, I put them together & gave the work the title Registering Our Exasperation, & so to answer the question How do I register my exasperation? I think a pretty decent start is to make some art, something that relates & transports at the same time, in which the content goes together very nicely, as artwork should, form is important after all, yes, to make some art & to talk to people, to vote with my whole influence & to turn my back on the madmen.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Disputing Augmented Unreality
from TAGMAG 06, a publication of <>TAG in The Hague
I never feel better than when I'm walking in mountains far from urban civilization. I carry a heavy pack filled with my sleeping bag, a small tent, some food, some cooking utensils and other gear, and some spare warm clothing. I keep a map of the area and a liter of water. And some chocolate. My best walks have been in the south of Poland, where I can wake up and spend eight hours following good trails through the most sparsely populated terrain—just a tiny village here and there in the valleys far below—before arriving at a clearing to set up the tent or stay in a rustic hostel or farmer’s place. I fall asleep tired and sore shortly after sundown and awake at dawn energized and ready to cover more ground.
It really is an ideal way to use my energy and spend my time, especially in the company of good friends. Enjoying my time out here is something that I had to learn to do, and I am certainly no expert at it (and I go all too infrequently). I can only identify a very few types of flora and fauna. I have not learned to successfully navigate with the sun or the stars. The only foods along the trail I recognize as safe to eat are blackberries and raspberries. (On some walks it is possible to literally fill buckets with them without pausing, so plentiful are the bushes by the path in late summer.) When I have the opportunity to drink water straight from streams—it is always excellent, utterly refreshing—I have no way of knowing for certain that it is safe. I can recgonize when distant clouds are bringing with them rain, but not so far in advance as to change my course.
I am not a mountain climber; most of the walking I do is not particularly risky, but I have made some foolish decisions. I once wandered off an isolated alpine trail and crossed a very recent avalanche in the Dolomites, in Italy, and as I slowly zig-zagged my way I watched as stones loosened beneath my boots and tumbled hundreds of meters down sheer cliffs. On another walk I climbed across a fresh mudslide in the Beskid Zywiecki region in Poland, balancing precariously on upturned tree roots and mud-encrusted boulders that defied gravity as they jutted out of the mountainside. But perhaps the most foolish thing I have ever done in my life was set out alone on a day-long walk around Hogsback, in South Africa, without a map or water or any local knowledge. I lost the path and spent hours exposed to bright sun, winding my way through dense prickly brush, navigating around unexpected cliffs dropping off to nowhere, and endeavoring not to lose my footing in the many holes dug by unseen animals in the ground. I returned to my hostel hours later than planned and completely dehydrated.
I have never gone walking with a mobile phone.
***
Imagine: I am on a walk somewhere, lost and thirsty and hours away from any shelter. The sun is setting and menacing clouds are rolling in and, not knowing what to do, I begin to panic. But I have a small Augmented Reality (AR) unit with me, connected to a sensor that monitors my heart rate and a lightweight pair of sunglasses with embedded translucent video screens. The unit takes barometric readings, it cross-references GPS data with the latest Internet-based ordinance survey information, and plots a route to safety that takes into account weather conditions, the terrain, access to water, and my own physical condition. As I look through the sunglasses, a map customized to my needs appears superimposed over the wilderness, displaying place names, likely places of shelter, and calculating distances and walking times. Data about local flora and fauna I should avoid is provided in image, text, and sound. All of this reassures me. I calm down and set out confidently and safely for civilization.
Yes, but I would rather leave such a device at home.
***
Augmented Reality refers to the layering of virtual (computerized) data upon one or more of an individual’s senses for practical, entertainment, medical, military, or artistic purposes. It is also a syntactical misnomer. Reality is not—cannot be—augmentable. Unlike breasts and penises, we cannot modify reality on a whim. Reality is not a show. In order for us to have a discussion that doesn’t resemble an LSD trip or a stay in an asylum for the insane (or a televised American political debate) we cannot qualify or quantify ‘reality’. To do so would be to dispute it. And there are only two possible consequences of disputing reality: insanity or art.
I am not a philosopher, I cannot address here the philisophical history of our culture’s conception of reality. I am also not a religious person, I do not believe that reality is ordained by the supernatural. I am often flabbergasted in philisophical conversations by questions such as ‘How do you know everything did not begin five minutes ago?’ or ‘How do you know we are not all just brains in a jar?’ It is difficult to properly articulate my certainty that I was in fact here more than five minutes ago and that my brain is not in a jar. My reality exists between the soil and the sky. And that’s that.
So how is it that I can communicate with others with different understandings about the nature of what is real? Like you, I am a human animal and, like you, I have the capacity to empathize. I was discussing this with my friend, the composer and computer musician Tom Tlalim, who observed that AR, like the Internet (and I would add like mobile phones, like anything that can be abstracted from specific perceptions of time, space, and connectivity), threatened the notion of the local. And I think he is correct. ‘The soil and the sky’ poetically defines the largest entity that I can grasp as local: my planet. And not only my planet, but tangible, physical aspects of it that others experience and are subject to. When I watch you drink water, I cannot taste it but my mind may trigger a memory of the taste of ‘water’. That, I think, is empathy. An AR device might allow me to actually taste water. And that is insane. There is no water!
***
My notions of empathy and ‘the local’ are closely intertwined. Since we are living in a global village, a small world, a litterbox playground for capitalist ideologists, it seems we are unable to value and respect the local. In multiple ways we are torn away from the local, torn away from the positive and negative realities before us. We live in the same local global village as billions suffering from starvation, or preventable disease, or political disenfranchisement, or state terror, or environmental degredation, and we fail to empathize. We relate, rather (or many of us do, anyway), to layer upon layer of digital unreality: gadget fetishism, video games, rampant militarism, the false corporate prophecies of a green future fueled by capitalists, the celebration of shit-brained celebrities.
There is a word for all of this, and the word is insane.
***
Why is it that some sort of AR unit have been helpful to me in Hogsback? Because I was a damn fool for doing what I did. Technological progress should not be used to medicate stupidity. I for one will not submit my animal body and my animal mind to Twenty-First century cyborgification. I never cease to be disturbed by the fact that people willingly wear those idiot bluetooth devices in their ears. I certainly never will. And no one cares if I do or not. But AR is advancing along with another phenomenon, called ‘ubiquitous computing’. Ubiquitous computing, the idea that everything we create can be networked, constantly processing and syncing a variety of data, seems to be widely accepted. In a world of ubiquitous computing there will be no ‘opt out’ possibility. Individuals may well become simple conductors of machines that talk to each other. Go ahead and try to opt out, now, of all the things that have become ubiquitous, the air and water and noise and light pollution, the transmission waves that flow through your body whether you want them to or not, whether you know it or not, the carcinogens and chemicals.
We march fullspeed ahead towards openly disputing reality at every turn. This is what the ubiquitous disputation of reality is called: mass insanity.
***
There’s a tangential comment I need to make on the subject of ‘ubicomp’ (does it get more 1984 than some of the words and phrases we use for technology these days?). I wrote above that within ubiquitous computing, data from the things we make can be networked. It may seem touchy-feely to some reading this, but I’m pretty sure trees and birds and bees and earthworms and people who are awake to their unaugmented senses are networking and syncing too. I know this to be true; the longer I spend away from devices doing the networking for me, the more I feel alive to the world around me. I need no products to facilitate the connectivity between my perceptions or amongst them and my surroundings. It is all wireless when you spend days walking in the mountains.
***
Insofar as we can influence and instigate aspects of our evolution, I propose in the strongest possible terms that we do not evolve away from our empathetic, animal, and locally-conscious selves. What advocates and developers of AR might see as augmenting not only our experiences but also our capabilities, I see as forfeiture of our experiences and capabilities, and this should be considered very carefully. I can and should learn about the flora and fauna in the mountains where I walk (to make an example of my own stupidity), but this ought to happen at the speed of experience, not the speed of a wireless or GPS network. I neither need nor want to submit my autonomous humanity to military and corporate augmentation. We can all make our own choices about how many gadgets we own and how many starving people we refuse to see. But when the augmentation, when the insanity is not only expected but ubiquitous, it is reasonable, it is utterly sane to say no. And to do more: to act on that refusal.
***
There is a layer of experience and perception and action that is maleable, that is augmentable. I first saw the formulation ‘art disputes reality’ in the work of Albert Camus, whose own grasp on the realities of the Twentieth century were manifested clearly in his writing and activities. ‘Art disputes reality,’ he wrote, ‘but it does not hide from it.’ I believe art can dispute reality when artists address it forthrightly and bring creativity to bear on the enigma of being, on the problems and beauty embedded in our perceptions. And by sharing in reality, consciously, conscientiously, and with clarity. Which is to say: sanely.
I never feel better than when I'm walking in mountains far from urban civilization. I carry a heavy pack filled with my sleeping bag, a small tent, some food, some cooking utensils and other gear, and some spare warm clothing. I keep a map of the area and a liter of water. And some chocolate. My best walks have been in the south of Poland, where I can wake up and spend eight hours following good trails through the most sparsely populated terrain—just a tiny village here and there in the valleys far below—before arriving at a clearing to set up the tent or stay in a rustic hostel or farmer’s place. I fall asleep tired and sore shortly after sundown and awake at dawn energized and ready to cover more ground.
It really is an ideal way to use my energy and spend my time, especially in the company of good friends. Enjoying my time out here is something that I had to learn to do, and I am certainly no expert at it (and I go all too infrequently). I can only identify a very few types of flora and fauna. I have not learned to successfully navigate with the sun or the stars. The only foods along the trail I recognize as safe to eat are blackberries and raspberries. (On some walks it is possible to literally fill buckets with them without pausing, so plentiful are the bushes by the path in late summer.) When I have the opportunity to drink water straight from streams—it is always excellent, utterly refreshing—I have no way of knowing for certain that it is safe. I can recgonize when distant clouds are bringing with them rain, but not so far in advance as to change my course.
I am not a mountain climber; most of the walking I do is not particularly risky, but I have made some foolish decisions. I once wandered off an isolated alpine trail and crossed a very recent avalanche in the Dolomites, in Italy, and as I slowly zig-zagged my way I watched as stones loosened beneath my boots and tumbled hundreds of meters down sheer cliffs. On another walk I climbed across a fresh mudslide in the Beskid Zywiecki region in Poland, balancing precariously on upturned tree roots and mud-encrusted boulders that defied gravity as they jutted out of the mountainside. But perhaps the most foolish thing I have ever done in my life was set out alone on a day-long walk around Hogsback, in South Africa, without a map or water or any local knowledge. I lost the path and spent hours exposed to bright sun, winding my way through dense prickly brush, navigating around unexpected cliffs dropping off to nowhere, and endeavoring not to lose my footing in the many holes dug by unseen animals in the ground. I returned to my hostel hours later than planned and completely dehydrated.
I have never gone walking with a mobile phone.
***
Imagine: I am on a walk somewhere, lost and thirsty and hours away from any shelter. The sun is setting and menacing clouds are rolling in and, not knowing what to do, I begin to panic. But I have a small Augmented Reality (AR) unit with me, connected to a sensor that monitors my heart rate and a lightweight pair of sunglasses with embedded translucent video screens. The unit takes barometric readings, it cross-references GPS data with the latest Internet-based ordinance survey information, and plots a route to safety that takes into account weather conditions, the terrain, access to water, and my own physical condition. As I look through the sunglasses, a map customized to my needs appears superimposed over the wilderness, displaying place names, likely places of shelter, and calculating distances and walking times. Data about local flora and fauna I should avoid is provided in image, text, and sound. All of this reassures me. I calm down and set out confidently and safely for civilization.
Yes, but I would rather leave such a device at home.
***
Augmented Reality refers to the layering of virtual (computerized) data upon one or more of an individual’s senses for practical, entertainment, medical, military, or artistic purposes. It is also a syntactical misnomer. Reality is not—cannot be—augmentable. Unlike breasts and penises, we cannot modify reality on a whim. Reality is not a show. In order for us to have a discussion that doesn’t resemble an LSD trip or a stay in an asylum for the insane (or a televised American political debate) we cannot qualify or quantify ‘reality’. To do so would be to dispute it. And there are only two possible consequences of disputing reality: insanity or art.
I am not a philosopher, I cannot address here the philisophical history of our culture’s conception of reality. I am also not a religious person, I do not believe that reality is ordained by the supernatural. I am often flabbergasted in philisophical conversations by questions such as ‘How do you know everything did not begin five minutes ago?’ or ‘How do you know we are not all just brains in a jar?’ It is difficult to properly articulate my certainty that I was in fact here more than five minutes ago and that my brain is not in a jar. My reality exists between the soil and the sky. And that’s that.
So how is it that I can communicate with others with different understandings about the nature of what is real? Like you, I am a human animal and, like you, I have the capacity to empathize. I was discussing this with my friend, the composer and computer musician Tom Tlalim, who observed that AR, like the Internet (and I would add like mobile phones, like anything that can be abstracted from specific perceptions of time, space, and connectivity), threatened the notion of the local. And I think he is correct. ‘The soil and the sky’ poetically defines the largest entity that I can grasp as local: my planet. And not only my planet, but tangible, physical aspects of it that others experience and are subject to. When I watch you drink water, I cannot taste it but my mind may trigger a memory of the taste of ‘water’. That, I think, is empathy. An AR device might allow me to actually taste water. And that is insane. There is no water!
***
My notions of empathy and ‘the local’ are closely intertwined. Since we are living in a global village, a small world, a litterbox playground for capitalist ideologists, it seems we are unable to value and respect the local. In multiple ways we are torn away from the local, torn away from the positive and negative realities before us. We live in the same local global village as billions suffering from starvation, or preventable disease, or political disenfranchisement, or state terror, or environmental degredation, and we fail to empathize. We relate, rather (or many of us do, anyway), to layer upon layer of digital unreality: gadget fetishism, video games, rampant militarism, the false corporate prophecies of a green future fueled by capitalists, the celebration of shit-brained celebrities.
There is a word for all of this, and the word is insane.
***
Why is it that some sort of AR unit have been helpful to me in Hogsback? Because I was a damn fool for doing what I did. Technological progress should not be used to medicate stupidity. I for one will not submit my animal body and my animal mind to Twenty-First century cyborgification. I never cease to be disturbed by the fact that people willingly wear those idiot bluetooth devices in their ears. I certainly never will. And no one cares if I do or not. But AR is advancing along with another phenomenon, called ‘ubiquitous computing’. Ubiquitous computing, the idea that everything we create can be networked, constantly processing and syncing a variety of data, seems to be widely accepted. In a world of ubiquitous computing there will be no ‘opt out’ possibility. Individuals may well become simple conductors of machines that talk to each other. Go ahead and try to opt out, now, of all the things that have become ubiquitous, the air and water and noise and light pollution, the transmission waves that flow through your body whether you want them to or not, whether you know it or not, the carcinogens and chemicals.
We march fullspeed ahead towards openly disputing reality at every turn. This is what the ubiquitous disputation of reality is called: mass insanity.
***
There’s a tangential comment I need to make on the subject of ‘ubicomp’ (does it get more 1984 than some of the words and phrases we use for technology these days?). I wrote above that within ubiquitous computing, data from the things we make can be networked. It may seem touchy-feely to some reading this, but I’m pretty sure trees and birds and bees and earthworms and people who are awake to their unaugmented senses are networking and syncing too. I know this to be true; the longer I spend away from devices doing the networking for me, the more I feel alive to the world around me. I need no products to facilitate the connectivity between my perceptions or amongst them and my surroundings. It is all wireless when you spend days walking in the mountains.
***
Insofar as we can influence and instigate aspects of our evolution, I propose in the strongest possible terms that we do not evolve away from our empathetic, animal, and locally-conscious selves. What advocates and developers of AR might see as augmenting not only our experiences but also our capabilities, I see as forfeiture of our experiences and capabilities, and this should be considered very carefully. I can and should learn about the flora and fauna in the mountains where I walk (to make an example of my own stupidity), but this ought to happen at the speed of experience, not the speed of a wireless or GPS network. I neither need nor want to submit my autonomous humanity to military and corporate augmentation. We can all make our own choices about how many gadgets we own and how many starving people we refuse to see. But when the augmentation, when the insanity is not only expected but ubiquitous, it is reasonable, it is utterly sane to say no. And to do more: to act on that refusal.
***
There is a layer of experience and perception and action that is maleable, that is augmentable. I first saw the formulation ‘art disputes reality’ in the work of Albert Camus, whose own grasp on the realities of the Twentieth century were manifested clearly in his writing and activities. ‘Art disputes reality,’ he wrote, ‘but it does not hide from it.’ I believe art can dispute reality when artists address it forthrightly and bring creativity to bear on the enigma of being, on the problems and beauty embedded in our perceptions. And by sharing in reality, consciously, conscientiously, and with clarity. Which is to say: sanely.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Aesthetics of Ecocide
[From TAGMAG 05 (March 2008), a publication of <>TAG in The Hague. Cross posted here and here.]
For most of the past 200,000 years, since Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Africa, all humans lived in sustainable relationships with their landbase. They fed and were fed by the organisms with which they shared diverse environments and prospered as a species, eventually inhabiting many regions of the world. They brought with them their capacity for language, tool-making, complex organization, aesthetics.Around 13,000 years ago some human populations began to develop the earliest attributes of civilization. A very few notable river cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (and later in North and South America) established year-round human settlements, later to evolve into cities, city-states, and empires. Instead of moving to sources of food, water, and shelter, they brought these things to single locations, sparking the first large-scale, human-instigated deforestations, desertifications, water pollution, and disease, as well as early instances of animal extinctions, genetic engineering, genocide.
These settled cultures were the exception to the overwhelming majority of other human cultures, spread out around the globe, which remained in states of sustainable interdependence with the natural world. Wherever these non-civilized cultures have been met by the civilized, they have either been absorbed or eradicated. I am not romanticizing. This is historical fact. There are very few non-civilized human cultures left. Present-day hunter-gatherers are the only examples of humanity not serving a death sentence to its own ecology.
Fact: civilization is on a mass-murderous rampage that is destroying its home and everything in it. It’s called ecocide, from the Greek oikos, meaning ‘house’, and the Latin cidium, meaning ‘to kill’. Civilized humanity is killing its own house. Your house. My house. Everybody’s house. Or if you prefer: your mother, my mother, everybody’s mother.
Those of us concerned about global environmental collapse wonder if there is any meaningful thing that the civilized can do to prevent the destruction of our species and most other species. Some people have dedicated their lives to issues such as wildlife and rainforest preservation. Others, for a variety of reasons, have come onboard recently with technological innovations. One American politician made a highly popular powerpoint presentation.
But is any of this effective? Is it meaningful? Can civilized humanity do anything more effective to stop environmental meltdown than cease to exist? Not humanity, but civilized humanity. Sorry if you’ve grown attached to civilization, but if we want to stop being ecocidal we are going to have to give up either civilization or our lives. If we hang on to civilization for as long as we can (perhaps a few more decades, perhaps, before it collapses under its own weight), we not only guarantee our own destruction, but the destruction of everyone and everything we love.
The good news is that the only thing you have to do to save your home, save your mother, save everything you love, is give up civilization. And that’s how it goes. While this is not particularly controversial if one looks at the environmental indicators, my guess is that many readers will resist agreeing. The inability many of us have imagining life without civilization is a sad comment on how attached we are to our mass-murderous ways. The violence has become more important than life itself. We identify more with consuming the planet than being an animal in it. Crazy, huh?
Take an hour or two and think deeply about this. Appraise civilization, as one of many distinct human cultures. Can we really be so deluded by our own participation in the killing as to think that what civilization is doing to the planet can continue without leading to utter disaster?
And let’s be clear: civilization is not some benign cultural phenomenon that makes art, trades corn for wool and builds cities, with millenia of ecocide and genocide an inadvertant and regretted side effect of its otherwise good works to prolong life expectancies, invent haute cuisine and turn out mind-numbingly stupid sitcoms. Civilization thrives on the subjegation of everything around it. It is insatiable. History tells us that its appetite is infinite. Common sense tells us that our world is not.
British physicist Stephen Hawking apparently agrees with me. In April 2007 he stated that, due to the threats of “global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers...the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space”, essentially claiming that humanity’s only chance for continued survival is to leave this planet. Hawking then got in a jet and floated around in zero gravity for a few seconds. A leading thinker of our civilization considers our home to be like so many mass-produced, excrement-smeared baby diapers in a landfill: disposable.
Heartbreaking, especially if you love this planet.
Is Hawking right? Consider what our species requires to survive: clean air and clean water, to begin with. An atmosphere that neither chokes nor cooks nor freezes us. We need to interact with other species—those we eat, those that eat us and help dispose of our waste, those that shelter us. We need diversity, the diversity of our genes and that of the things we eat. But do we need better, cleverer products? Do we need monumental architecture?
Our water is utterly poisoned. National Geographic has recently reported that on this planet, 71 percent of which is covered with water, none of it is pristine. None of it is untouched by civilization. There are growing dead zones—massive areas where no marine life can exist—in the oceans. Civilization is killing rivers daily: dumping toxins into them, damming them (yes, and even for ‘clean’ hydro-electric power), eradicating the forests that once lined them and brought precious nutrients to them. Whole lakes have caught fire or disappeared. Rains have been composed of acid. Glaciers are melting because it is the right of the civilized to eat beef and drive an automobile.
Civilization has succeeded in killing water. And even where there is clean drinking water, the civilized increasingly prefer the bottled variety, the production of which does violence against our planet in its water- and oil-guzzling production, bottling, transportation, and disposal. (We can leave aside, for now, the violence that marketing it does to our intellect.)
And our air is filthy. Conduct a little experiment: go into the woods, or the mountains, somewhere far away. Take a deep breath. The degree to which you enjoy taking that breath and it makes you feel good is the clearest possible indication of how unclean the air is that you breath every day. The air that you breathe is the air of the civilized. It is filthy, filled with poison, and it makes you sick and unhappy. This is an objective fact: refer to your experiment in the woods for proof.
Humans are a hardy and adaptable species. Although civilized humans have almost completed the elimination of all non-civilized human cultures (those still living in balance with their ecosystems), the rest of us will outlast many other species. But our survival depends on our interaction with other species. While in our civilized wisdom we turn our back on these interactions, our actions continue to raise the planet’s temperature and cook vital amphibian, bird, insect, and plant species. Our own demise is thereby precipitated.
What will happen if we fail to respect the integrity of genes, when some inevitable disease strikes a staple in our monocrop agriculture? It is happening now with bananas and with bees. Yes, and what will fish-lovers do when, as is widely and uncontroversially predicted, edible fish species disappear altogether within the next few decades?
May I vent? I am bored to tears by the faulty and false solutions parading as the new hope for our civilization. While I respect recent efforts to alleviate the most obvious hurts of ecocide, I sometimes wonder if failing to recognize and name the real problem isn’t making it worse. Civilization will not fix civilization. A brilliant scientist is telling you to fly into outer space if you want your children to survive. One assumes that only the civilized get a ticket on the Great Airlift of the Future, and hunter-gatherers be damned. Hello?
Listen: there is no hope for civilization. Civilization is not redeemable. Civilization will not be reformed. It—we—will continue to consume what we can, and destroy what we cannot, until there is nothing left. Unless, of course, it is stopped, it is ended, it itself is subjected to the same sort of violent and systematic program of eradication that it has subjected everything in its path to for the last several millenia. Or, more likely, it collapses under its own weight. Either way, as it has hurt for millenia, it will hurt when it goes, kicking and screaming. Feel it now?
Yes, yes, there is no hope. And that may well be a good thing. Without relying on hope, that is, without externalizing the problem, our problem, we have nothing to wait for but our own good actions. What would it take for us to demolish all of our reasons for not acting against ecocide? How can we smash our false hopes for the baby steps we occassionally take against the juggernaut of civilization? We will all feel stronger when we stop playing victims to our own crimes.
The excellent and uncompromising radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen, whose flawlessly argued and highly recommended work Endgame inspired much of this article, often asks his readers to consider what they love and what they are capable and willing to do to protect and preserve it. He writes:
“One of the good things about everything being so fucked up—about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive—is that no matter where you look—no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies—there’s good and desperately important work to be done.”
So do it. Figure it out and do it. It is beyond the scope of this article to instruct anyone as to how, just to recommend we all take our minds out of the gutter of civilization and find a way. Not just this year, while it is fashionable. (Jensen has noted that for the last few decades environmental issues have returned to the headlines approximately every seven years. But the rainforests still get eaten up.) Not just until all of our automobiles run on pseudo-solutions like bio-fuel. But as a matter of course and a way of life.
Yes, and I’m typing all of this into my laptop, produced by one of the most environmentally offensive and aggressively marketed corporations in the industry. And yes, I type at 35,000 feet, as I cross the Atlantic Ocean. And yes, it is the eighth time I have crossed it in the last six months. We can discuss carbon footprints, alternative energy sources, the phoney greening of polluting industries. Or we can be honest.
Or we can talk aesthetics. Lost as I am myself in the delusions of civilization, I came up one afternoon with the name of the <>TAG exhibition, ecoAesthetics, as though the aesthetics of ecology ought to be of concern. Aesthetics? I live in The Netherlands, a country where the utterly arrogant concept of eco-aesthetics has been writ large on the landscape, even by the idea of ‘landscape’: there is hardly any ‘eco’ left here, just aesthetics, the entirety of the envirnment controlled—‘stewarded’, the policy writers of George W. Bush’s government would say—for centuries by the civilized, presumably because the civilized think they know better. I find it hard to do better than 200,000 years of survival through ice ages, floods, and volcanoes, but what do I know?
Here I sit in an airplane, cooking the atmosphere around me and strangling the environment below, playing the good soldier in civilization’s war against the planet Earth. And reformulating what has been said about the mass-murderous culture that prosecuted a more commonly agreed ‘war of aggression’ in the last century: at least the planes run on time.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Violence and Gandhi's Blunders
I do not, as I once did, maintain an ideological commitment to non-violence. I do believe that (non-violent) civil disobedience can be a useful tactic in opposing illegitimate authority, rejecting empire, preserving one's rights and dignity, and so forth. But it is only one tactic. There are others, and success depends on how a multitude of tactics are employed by a multitude of actors.
In his book Endgame and in his talks Derrick Jensen goes to great lengths to point out the fundamental flaws of maintaining an unwavering "commitment" to non-violence in the current climate of State and Corporate Aggression. He describes how "non-violent" protesters at the WTO thing in Seattle in 1999 actually fought, physically, with other protesters who were willing to up the stakes and destroy corporate "property". Jensen even mentions how these "peaceful" types---who presumably had agreed in advance with the authorities on where and how many could march, how many would get arrested and so forth---how they actually assisted the police in hauling in those who sensed that engaging state/corporate violence with love and kindness wasn't going to get anyone anywhere.
At a certain point, refusing violence as a tactic ceases to be about one's own spiritual health; it becomes, instead, an unwillingness to protect others under fire. Someone once said that no ideology is so good that it is worth committing cruel acts for. Fair point. I think a refusal to prevent cruel acts is in itself cruel. And if you need to get physical, to step away from the armchair and the computer, in order to prevent acts of cruelty, then by all means do it.
Sure: one man's cruelty is another man's profit, moral authority is a tricky issue, and perhaps at least some of what I am suggesting here might sound like it validates the worst crimes of, say, the Bush Administration. But don't misunderestimate me.
For years my own rejection of violence was centered on the idea that I did not want to become that which I despise, that which is destructive, that which my values stand in opposition to. So much did I believe in universal justice and "the rule of law" that I even said that, given the chance, I would not assasinate someone like Hitler. Not even a universally accepted archetype of pure evil like Hitler could get me to take on his tactics, I thought.
Well, I don't anymore. The people controlling and destroying the world want nothing more than for their opponents to always and ideologically stop short of preventing the destruction by any means necessary. I want to be clear that I am not advocating violence. But---and I credit Jensen for arguing this point powerfully enough to get me to reconsider extremely deeply held views---I think an honest look at useful versus useless tactics might get us thinking differently about violence.
It's 1936 or so, and there we are, with the IEDs, standing just outside Adolf Hitler's house. But we don't ignite them, because to do so might just encourage more state repression. You know what Jensen says he would say to a guy like Hitler if he had the chance to meet him? "Bang. You're dead." I love it.
I'm not pro-gun. I don't think we all ought to arm ourselves to fight the State by dressing up in black and using walkie-talkies and throwing molotov cocktails at business fatcats when they step out of their limousines. I'm against violence. I don't allow it to manifest in my daily personal interactions. Still, I think we're not being honest if we don't even discuss provoking the same degree of state repression and violence for ourselves that (for example) the US government and military---along with their proxies, hired guns, and political and corporate allies---dispense to others in our name every second of every day throughout the world.
I wonder if a sustained campaign of property destruction and violence (or the threat of it) against planet-raping elites would be more or less effective than the sustained campaign of "consciousness raising" and occassional rally attendance many of us have presumably taken part in.
It's not just some rights and freedoms we risk losing by not fighting back by any means necessary, but the planet itself as a giver of whatever it takes for this generation and the next to survive on a practical level.
From Endgame: "Those in power are responsible for their choices, and I am responsible for mine. But I need to emphasize that I’m not responsible for the way my choices have been framed."
And this: "Defensive rights always trump offensive rights. My right to freedom always trumps your right to exploit me, and if you do try to exploit me, I have the right to stop you, even at some expense to you." ...to which I would add: not only the right, but the responsibility, even at some expense to me.
Jensen says over and over again, and he's right, that the violence will not stop because we ask nicely. It won't stop if we organize 15 million people to march peacefully against war on the same day throughout the world (remember that one? I was there). It won't happen because we write a lot of intelligent stuff and "get it out there".
I'm not giving planet-raping elites any more credit than their willingness to do harm merits. No one needs moral or philosophical (much less political) authority to push back. When you're literally gasping for air you don't seek out authority for access to something breathable. You don't ask permission for water (or human breastmilk) to not be poisonous, or for children to not be slaughtered for profit, or to prevent everything in the non-human world to rapidly---rapidly---disappear (read: get ground up).
We serve no good purpose by openly informing violent state/corporate criminals that their offences will never be met with counterforce. It just doesn't make any sense. The gas-guzzling, hyper-consumerist jerk-offs of America and the rest of the world would do well to take note when open season is declared not just on their political representatives, but on their ecocidal civil works, shit-house media propoganda dispensers, and corporate flagships as well. That might get them to poke their heads up from American Idol for a sec.
What I'm noticing is that my allies are really fewer and further between than I would like to admit. Upping the stakes and making sacrifices definitely means taking an honest look at tactics, physical tactics. There's no reason to be nice and I think people who for whatever reason won't get physical need to be supporting like crazy those who will. In this sense I support the insurgency against US and allied forces in Iraq. I wish no harm to those American troops. I think they should just leave. Now. But if they won't, well, I support efforts to force them out. Unfortunately.
Unwillingness to make sacrifices to do the killing is one thing, but the state violence will continue unless more people make sacrifices to prevent it. Cindy Sheehan's recent conclusion seems to be that such sacrifices are basically unthinkable for a population that doesn't really give a damn.
The following list may be well-known to some. I have just discovered it myself. Shortly before his assasination Gandhi gave this list of "Seven Blunders" that lead to passive violence to his grandson Arun, who added the eighth.
In his book Endgame and in his talks Derrick Jensen goes to great lengths to point out the fundamental flaws of maintaining an unwavering "commitment" to non-violence in the current climate of State and Corporate Aggression. He describes how "non-violent" protesters at the WTO thing in Seattle in 1999 actually fought, physically, with other protesters who were willing to up the stakes and destroy corporate "property". Jensen even mentions how these "peaceful" types---who presumably had agreed in advance with the authorities on where and how many could march, how many would get arrested and so forth---how they actually assisted the police in hauling in those who sensed that engaging state/corporate violence with love and kindness wasn't going to get anyone anywhere.
At a certain point, refusing violence as a tactic ceases to be about one's own spiritual health; it becomes, instead, an unwillingness to protect others under fire. Someone once said that no ideology is so good that it is worth committing cruel acts for. Fair point. I think a refusal to prevent cruel acts is in itself cruel. And if you need to get physical, to step away from the armchair and the computer, in order to prevent acts of cruelty, then by all means do it.
Sure: one man's cruelty is another man's profit, moral authority is a tricky issue, and perhaps at least some of what I am suggesting here might sound like it validates the worst crimes of, say, the Bush Administration. But don't misunderestimate me.
For years my own rejection of violence was centered on the idea that I did not want to become that which I despise, that which is destructive, that which my values stand in opposition to. So much did I believe in universal justice and "the rule of law" that I even said that, given the chance, I would not assasinate someone like Hitler. Not even a universally accepted archetype of pure evil like Hitler could get me to take on his tactics, I thought.
Well, I don't anymore. The people controlling and destroying the world want nothing more than for their opponents to always and ideologically stop short of preventing the destruction by any means necessary. I want to be clear that I am not advocating violence. But---and I credit Jensen for arguing this point powerfully enough to get me to reconsider extremely deeply held views---I think an honest look at useful versus useless tactics might get us thinking differently about violence.
It's 1936 or so, and there we are, with the IEDs, standing just outside Adolf Hitler's house. But we don't ignite them, because to do so might just encourage more state repression. You know what Jensen says he would say to a guy like Hitler if he had the chance to meet him? "Bang. You're dead." I love it.
I'm not pro-gun. I don't think we all ought to arm ourselves to fight the State by dressing up in black and using walkie-talkies and throwing molotov cocktails at business fatcats when they step out of their limousines. I'm against violence. I don't allow it to manifest in my daily personal interactions. Still, I think we're not being honest if we don't even discuss provoking the same degree of state repression and violence for ourselves that (for example) the US government and military---along with their proxies, hired guns, and political and corporate allies---dispense to others in our name every second of every day throughout the world.
I wonder if a sustained campaign of property destruction and violence (or the threat of it) against planet-raping elites would be more or less effective than the sustained campaign of "consciousness raising" and occassional rally attendance many of us have presumably taken part in.
It's not just some rights and freedoms we risk losing by not fighting back by any means necessary, but the planet itself as a giver of whatever it takes for this generation and the next to survive on a practical level.
From Endgame: "Those in power are responsible for their choices, and I am responsible for mine. But I need to emphasize that I’m not responsible for the way my choices have been framed."
And this: "Defensive rights always trump offensive rights. My right to freedom always trumps your right to exploit me, and if you do try to exploit me, I have the right to stop you, even at some expense to you." ...to which I would add: not only the right, but the responsibility, even at some expense to me.
Jensen says over and over again, and he's right, that the violence will not stop because we ask nicely. It won't stop if we organize 15 million people to march peacefully against war on the same day throughout the world (remember that one? I was there). It won't happen because we write a lot of intelligent stuff and "get it out there".
I'm not giving planet-raping elites any more credit than their willingness to do harm merits. No one needs moral or philosophical (much less political) authority to push back. When you're literally gasping for air you don't seek out authority for access to something breathable. You don't ask permission for water (or human breastmilk) to not be poisonous, or for children to not be slaughtered for profit, or to prevent everything in the non-human world to rapidly---rapidly---disappear (read: get ground up).
We serve no good purpose by openly informing violent state/corporate criminals that their offences will never be met with counterforce. It just doesn't make any sense. The gas-guzzling, hyper-consumerist jerk-offs of America and the rest of the world would do well to take note when open season is declared not just on their political representatives, but on their ecocidal civil works, shit-house media propoganda dispensers, and corporate flagships as well. That might get them to poke their heads up from American Idol for a sec.
What I'm noticing is that my allies are really fewer and further between than I would like to admit. Upping the stakes and making sacrifices definitely means taking an honest look at tactics, physical tactics. There's no reason to be nice and I think people who for whatever reason won't get physical need to be supporting like crazy those who will. In this sense I support the insurgency against US and allied forces in Iraq. I wish no harm to those American troops. I think they should just leave. Now. But if they won't, well, I support efforts to force them out. Unfortunately.
Unwillingness to make sacrifices to do the killing is one thing, but the state violence will continue unless more people make sacrifices to prevent it. Cindy Sheehan's recent conclusion seems to be that such sacrifices are basically unthinkable for a population that doesn't really give a damn.
The following list may be well-known to some. I have just discovered it myself. Shortly before his assasination Gandhi gave this list of "Seven Blunders" that lead to passive violence to his grandson Arun, who added the eighth.
1. Wealth Without WorkAnd I have one of my own:
2. Pleasure Without Conscience
3. Knowledge Without Character
4. Commerce Without Morality
5. Science Without Humanity
6. Worship Without Sacrifice
7. Politics Without Principles
8. Rights Without Responsibilities
9. Turning the other cheek twice.Please add your own in the comments section.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Decay, Destruction and Waste
Note: written for the program book of the fourth edition of new music festival Dag in de Branding. Also appears at the <>TAG website.
Decay, destruction, and waste. I could be writing a history of the decline and fall of an ancient empire. Or a modern empire. Or the much more devastating and long-lived empire of Civilization. But I’m not: I’m describing the twelve hours of new music that make up the fourth edition of the Dag in de Branding Festival.
If you’re inclined to see this red thread of explicit decadence as just so much doom and gloom, I invite you to look more carefully. Albert Camus, a hero of mine who worked in times not unlike our own---times that were and are unfortunately “interesting”---wrote that the greatest art speaks to the time in which it is created. That is exactly what the events in this program do.
This is not doom and gloom. It is an absolutely essential state of the Arts at this interesting moment. Indeed at any moment. I have written elsewhere that artists are the sensory organs of the culture. We are its eyes, its ears, its mouths and its hands. If our works of art fail to recognize the decay, destruction, and waste, then our eyes, ears, and mouths are shut, and our hands are bound. How encouraging then, in these seemingly senseless times, that (some) artists haven’t lost their senses. To rephrase yet another observation of Monsieur Camus, art may dispute reality, but it does not hide from it.
How so? At the start of the program we are brought face to face with the reality of decay in the abstract in Bill Morrison’s film to Michael Gordon’s extraordinary symphony Decasia wherein ancient filmstock is seen suffering the ravages of time. But the work masterfully disputes this reality by preserving the decay itself, turning the visible death of a beloved artifact of industrial civilization into a thing of aesthetic beauty. An underlying question of this work, at least for me, is whether to mourn or celebrate the decay of a culture that has paid for its wonderful creativity with unspeakable environmental devastation.
Or this: the destruction referenced in Bob Ostertag’s music to the Living Cinema project Special Forces is the real destruction that the world silently (and to its great shame) witnessed in Lebanon last summer. Ostertag is never one to hide from the reality of destruction, having earlier brought his Yugoslavia Suite to the Balkans, post-Nato, and Special Forces to Beirut. Yet, I think, he disputes this reality, constantly, by using these works as opportunities for beginning dialogues on the themes he treats. Ostertag disputes the reality of the destruction his work reflects with uncompromising dedication to social justice through and beyond his music.
Or this: Egon Kracht and the Troupe bring us the Faust story as a rock opera (with a nod to Frank Zappa) in The Seduction of Harry Faust. In this updated version, guess how God, Mephisto, and Faust are portrayed? As a media tycoon, his marketing expert son, and a loser they destroy by bringing him into their world, of course. This is right on target for our uber-consumerist, narcissistic, and celebrity-infatuated culture (though I must say, sadly, that satire and reality are more often than not one and the same thing these days).
Or this: Boxing Pushkin, ostensibly about the life of the famous Russian author, consciously throws the audience into the role of spectator. Meanwhile the very definition of freedom, as embodied by Pushkin, seems to be at stake. While this work is perhaps the least overtly connected to our red thread, even a cursory glance at the synopsis (and the battles over Pushkin’s legacy) calls to mind the violence one witnesses done to language to legitimize this or that regime.
Or this: “Waste equals food” write the authors of Cradle to Cradle, a remarkable book that examines natural life cycles and nutrient flows as paradigms for how to reinvent industrial design in environmentally sane and ethically responsible ways. I mention it here in connection with Wasted, the mini-festival of decayed, destroyed, and degraded sounds-turned-breakbeats (and more) hosted by Jason Forrest and Pure. This gathering feeds its audience-participants with energy, exuberance, and catharsis mined from some of the darkest reaches of our culture. What is wasted here and what is eaten, I will not say, nor will I venture to put into words what reality is under dispute.
* * *
“Create dangerously” urged Albert Camus toward the end of his life. The American civil rights and social justice leader Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the world is in dire need of creative extremists.” Both were destroyed early by two of the more nefarious designs of Civilization: the automobile and the gun. What a waste.
We may not have asked for this red thread---I mean the red thread of decay, destruction, and waste running through the lives of humans and non-humans, through our values and wound tightly around our planet---but it is what we have and what we are. To present a program of new music revolving around aspects of the decay, destruction, and waste of our culture, our Industrial Civilization, from material to social decay, from self-destruction to the destruction of our neighbors, from the wasting of our planetary environment to the wasting of our youth---to present works that reflect this historical moment is not necessarily to celebrate it, but to recognize it.
It is to come to our senses as listeners, as artists, as social beings.
It is to know who we are, what we are, and what we must do. It is to be awake, alive, and up to the task.
Doom and gloom? If art should be uplifting, and if the world is in fact in dire need of creative extremists, what could be more uplifting than that?
Decay, destruction, and waste. I could be writing a history of the decline and fall of an ancient empire. Or a modern empire. Or the much more devastating and long-lived empire of Civilization. But I’m not: I’m describing the twelve hours of new music that make up the fourth edition of the Dag in de Branding Festival.
If you’re inclined to see this red thread of explicit decadence as just so much doom and gloom, I invite you to look more carefully. Albert Camus, a hero of mine who worked in times not unlike our own---times that were and are unfortunately “interesting”---wrote that the greatest art speaks to the time in which it is created. That is exactly what the events in this program do.
This is not doom and gloom. It is an absolutely essential state of the Arts at this interesting moment. Indeed at any moment. I have written elsewhere that artists are the sensory organs of the culture. We are its eyes, its ears, its mouths and its hands. If our works of art fail to recognize the decay, destruction, and waste, then our eyes, ears, and mouths are shut, and our hands are bound. How encouraging then, in these seemingly senseless times, that (some) artists haven’t lost their senses. To rephrase yet another observation of Monsieur Camus, art may dispute reality, but it does not hide from it.
How so? At the start of the program we are brought face to face with the reality of decay in the abstract in Bill Morrison’s film to Michael Gordon’s extraordinary symphony Decasia wherein ancient filmstock is seen suffering the ravages of time. But the work masterfully disputes this reality by preserving the decay itself, turning the visible death of a beloved artifact of industrial civilization into a thing of aesthetic beauty. An underlying question of this work, at least for me, is whether to mourn or celebrate the decay of a culture that has paid for its wonderful creativity with unspeakable environmental devastation.
Or this: the destruction referenced in Bob Ostertag’s music to the Living Cinema project Special Forces is the real destruction that the world silently (and to its great shame) witnessed in Lebanon last summer. Ostertag is never one to hide from the reality of destruction, having earlier brought his Yugoslavia Suite to the Balkans, post-Nato, and Special Forces to Beirut. Yet, I think, he disputes this reality, constantly, by using these works as opportunities for beginning dialogues on the themes he treats. Ostertag disputes the reality of the destruction his work reflects with uncompromising dedication to social justice through and beyond his music.
Or this: Egon Kracht and the Troupe bring us the Faust story as a rock opera (with a nod to Frank Zappa) in The Seduction of Harry Faust. In this updated version, guess how God, Mephisto, and Faust are portrayed? As a media tycoon, his marketing expert son, and a loser they destroy by bringing him into their world, of course. This is right on target for our uber-consumerist, narcissistic, and celebrity-infatuated culture (though I must say, sadly, that satire and reality are more often than not one and the same thing these days).
Or this: Boxing Pushkin, ostensibly about the life of the famous Russian author, consciously throws the audience into the role of spectator. Meanwhile the very definition of freedom, as embodied by Pushkin, seems to be at stake. While this work is perhaps the least overtly connected to our red thread, even a cursory glance at the synopsis (and the battles over Pushkin’s legacy) calls to mind the violence one witnesses done to language to legitimize this or that regime.
Or this: “Waste equals food” write the authors of Cradle to Cradle, a remarkable book that examines natural life cycles and nutrient flows as paradigms for how to reinvent industrial design in environmentally sane and ethically responsible ways. I mention it here in connection with Wasted, the mini-festival of decayed, destroyed, and degraded sounds-turned-breakbeats (and more) hosted by Jason Forrest and Pure. This gathering feeds its audience-participants with energy, exuberance, and catharsis mined from some of the darkest reaches of our culture. What is wasted here and what is eaten, I will not say, nor will I venture to put into words what reality is under dispute.
* * *
“Create dangerously” urged Albert Camus toward the end of his life. The American civil rights and social justice leader Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the world is in dire need of creative extremists.” Both were destroyed early by two of the more nefarious designs of Civilization: the automobile and the gun. What a waste.
We may not have asked for this red thread---I mean the red thread of decay, destruction, and waste running through the lives of humans and non-humans, through our values and wound tightly around our planet---but it is what we have and what we are. To present a program of new music revolving around aspects of the decay, destruction, and waste of our culture, our Industrial Civilization, from material to social decay, from self-destruction to the destruction of our neighbors, from the wasting of our planetary environment to the wasting of our youth---to present works that reflect this historical moment is not necessarily to celebrate it, but to recognize it.
It is to come to our senses as listeners, as artists, as social beings.
It is to know who we are, what we are, and what we must do. It is to be awake, alive, and up to the task.
Doom and gloom? If art should be uplifting, and if the world is in fact in dire need of creative extremists, what could be more uplifting than that?
Friday, May 11, 2007
Callibration
"It's not disillusionment, it's callibration."
---Mihnea Mircan, a curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, speaking at a curators conference organized this week by Stroom in The Hague. He was answering a question about a shift in the way he deals with the political ramifications of his work. See a brief essay by Mircan here.
I am the recipient of a grant from Stroom and was asked to write a short description of my work for an online portfolio the organization maintains. This is what I wrote:
My work, all of it, from music to video to installations to texts and so on, is an attempt to answer a question posed by environmentalist author Derrick Jensen: "What are sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?" Or this question, from architect/designer William McDonough: "How do we love all of the children of all of the species for all time?" It is a reply to the call to arms of Albert Camus: "Create dangerously" or that of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The world is in dire need of creative extremists". It is a recognition of the extraordinary danger industrial civilization poses to the natural world, and a reaction to this danger, spoken in a language the people destroying the planet cannot speak.
Which, as it happens, doesn't change a damn thing. Have a nice day.
---Mihnea Mircan, a curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, speaking at a curators conference organized this week by Stroom in The Hague. He was answering a question about a shift in the way he deals with the political ramifications of his work. See a brief essay by Mircan here.
I am the recipient of a grant from Stroom and was asked to write a short description of my work for an online portfolio the organization maintains. This is what I wrote:
My work, all of it, from music to video to installations to texts and so on, is an attempt to answer a question posed by environmentalist author Derrick Jensen: "What are sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?" Or this question, from architect/designer William McDonough: "How do we love all of the children of all of the species for all time?" It is a reply to the call to arms of Albert Camus: "Create dangerously" or that of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The world is in dire need of creative extremists". It is a recognition of the extraordinary danger industrial civilization poses to the natural world, and a reaction to this danger, spoken in a language the people destroying the planet cannot speak.
Which, as it happens, doesn't change a damn thing. Have a nice day.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Real quick:
The incident in which a mentally disturbed man shot and killed thirty-something people at Virginia Technical University earlier this week is certainly not the "worst" shooting massacre in US history.
Any "news" source which reports the incident as such is contributing to a conspiracy of disinformation. You are being lied to. The facts as reported are false.
The dubious pride of place for most innocent victims of a shooting rampage (in North America) should undoubtedly go to any number of planned mass murders of indigenous people or Americans of African descent.
What you consumed as news was not news. It was entertainment. It was not entertainment. It was whatever it takes to shift product between commercial breaks. It was not that. It was propoganda.
Period.
It is not the television that is lying to you. Who is lying to you?
The incident in which a mentally disturbed man shot and killed thirty-something people at Virginia Technical University earlier this week is certainly not the "worst" shooting massacre in US history.
Any "news" source which reports the incident as such is contributing to a conspiracy of disinformation. You are being lied to. The facts as reported are false.
The dubious pride of place for most innocent victims of a shooting rampage (in North America) should undoubtedly go to any number of planned mass murders of indigenous people or Americans of African descent.
What you consumed as news was not news. It was entertainment. It was not entertainment. It was whatever it takes to shift product between commercial breaks. It was not that. It was propoganda.
Period.
We are not the consumers of the media, we are the product.
---Kevin Danaher, 10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank
Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
---Derrick Jensen, Endgame
It is not the television that is lying to you. Who is lying to you?
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Frog with Implanted Webserver
I just returned from the opening night of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam. I am not happy.
The first work visitors are confronted with is something called Experiments with Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver. Here is the official description of the work:
Asshole takes the corpse of a frog---amphibian corposes are easy to come by in these days of human-instigated global warming, toxified water, and poisoned air---sticks some motors in its legs and wires in the gallery, and invites visitors to participate in his shit-brained glorification of an artistically bad, technologically backward, and morally repugnant idea.
(Hey, you don't think it's morally repugnant to use a frog's corpse? How about we use your grandmother's corpse instead? Put her in a clear glass container of mineral oil and click the mouse to make her legs kick. Sorry: if you don't get what's wrong I don't know if I can explain it to you.)
The single redeeming factor in the inclusion of this otherwise utterly useless, horrendously uncreative and straight up tasteless attempt at "art" in the DEAF exhibition is that at the very least it alone demonstrated (brazenly, arrogantly, proudly, shamelessly) something inherent in everything else on display: the absolute affrontery to the natural world necessary to be a good and cooperative "media artist" in this trash heap of a culture.
Your little art goes beep and lights flash and another sixty or so Iraqi children succumb to some strange form of cancer to make it happen. Safely tucked in here at the end of history you make a witty installation with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology---my, what big subsidies you have!---while brown people somewhere else are forced to show their ID cards at (American, British, Israeli, whatever) gunpoint to get to the other side of town.
Besides leaving, there was nothing I wanted to do---as an experiment, of course---so much as shut down the electricity on some of these artists. For good.
Now is as fine a time as any to let you know that I'm just about through reading volume one of Derrick Jensen's heartbreaking call to action Endgame. Jensen---whose earlier work A Language Older Than Words was, until now, perhaps the single most important book I have ever read---is turning my bad attitude even worse.
And yet: You. Must. Read this book. Start here.
Back to cutting off the electricity. I wonder what these "media artists" or "electronic artists" or whatever would do if there were no electricity to juice their little gadgets and installations (and fucking "bio(tech) art"). So much of it---and this is a conclusion Jensen would quickly make if he bothered to dally in the minutiae of this ultimately inconsequential and wine-soaked world---so much of it simply legitimizes and glorifies harmful technologies, often without any meaningful content to at least somewhat call out the culture's persistent violence.
Guess what the theme of DEAF 07 is? Ready for this? Interact Or Die!
Now I suppose this could be understood a number of ways. For example, it could be a call to all of us to start interacting with each other in meaningful ways. After all, it is the absence of our own nurturing of community that allows governments and corporations to set the agenda and limits of human interaction. Or "interact or die" might be a warning that we fail to recognize the fact of interdependence in the natural world we (should) inhabit at the risk of spiritual and ultimately literal death.
But since the natural world was so completely absent in this exhibition (with one or two minor exceptions: a video with leaf cutter ants carrying little national flags instead of leaves, for example) I have to assume that what we were invited to interact with was the unnatural world of these works. The field for interaction is the field defined by these uncreative creations, mobilizing under the banner of the unusually explicit "interact or die" theme to do further violence to lingering memories of the Planet Earth (where once upon a time frogs ate mosquitos, not ethernet impulses, and lived on the banks of rivers, not clear glass containers of mineral oil).
I do realize that I might be alienating myself from the few friends in the art scene here who even bothered to read this far. I know some of this may be unpopular with my computer-programming, electronic musician colleagues. And sure: part of my work exists within the realm of electronic art, insofar as it uses electricity and electronics. (I'm even using electricity and electronics now to fire off this mediated communique.) This is not a fact in which I rejoice, but an issue with which I wrestle constantly.
But this isn't about me. I don't stick ethernet cables in corpses.
The first work visitors are confronted with is something called Experiments with Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver. Here is the official description of the work:
Garnet Hertz has implanted a miniature webserver in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container of mineral oil, an inert liquid that does not conduct electricity. The frog is viewable on the Internet, and on the computer monitor across the room, through a webcam placed on the wall of the gallery. Through an Ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani's original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal. Experiments in Galvanism is both a reference to the origins of electricity, one of the earliest new media, and, through Galvani's discovery that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, a nod to what many theorists and practitioners consider to be the new new media: bio(tech) art.Let me translate for those readers not accustomed to the morally vacuous language of the wine-soaked art world:
Asshole takes the corpse of a frog---amphibian corposes are easy to come by in these days of human-instigated global warming, toxified water, and poisoned air---sticks some motors in its legs and wires in the gallery, and invites visitors to participate in his shit-brained glorification of an artistically bad, technologically backward, and morally repugnant idea.
(Hey, you don't think it's morally repugnant to use a frog's corpse? How about we use your grandmother's corpse instead? Put her in a clear glass container of mineral oil and click the mouse to make her legs kick. Sorry: if you don't get what's wrong I don't know if I can explain it to you.)
The single redeeming factor in the inclusion of this otherwise utterly useless, horrendously uncreative and straight up tasteless attempt at "art" in the DEAF exhibition is that at the very least it alone demonstrated (brazenly, arrogantly, proudly, shamelessly) something inherent in everything else on display: the absolute affrontery to the natural world necessary to be a good and cooperative "media artist" in this trash heap of a culture.
Your little art goes beep and lights flash and another sixty or so Iraqi children succumb to some strange form of cancer to make it happen. Safely tucked in here at the end of history you make a witty installation with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology---my, what big subsidies you have!---while brown people somewhere else are forced to show their ID cards at (American, British, Israeli, whatever) gunpoint to get to the other side of town.
Besides leaving, there was nothing I wanted to do---as an experiment, of course---so much as shut down the electricity on some of these artists. For good.
Now is as fine a time as any to let you know that I'm just about through reading volume one of Derrick Jensen's heartbreaking call to action Endgame. Jensen---whose earlier work A Language Older Than Words was, until now, perhaps the single most important book I have ever read---is turning my bad attitude even worse.
And yet: You. Must. Read this book. Start here.
Back to cutting off the electricity. I wonder what these "media artists" or "electronic artists" or whatever would do if there were no electricity to juice their little gadgets and installations (and fucking "bio(tech) art"). So much of it---and this is a conclusion Jensen would quickly make if he bothered to dally in the minutiae of this ultimately inconsequential and wine-soaked world---so much of it simply legitimizes and glorifies harmful technologies, often without any meaningful content to at least somewhat call out the culture's persistent violence.
Guess what the theme of DEAF 07 is? Ready for this? Interact Or Die!
Now I suppose this could be understood a number of ways. For example, it could be a call to all of us to start interacting with each other in meaningful ways. After all, it is the absence of our own nurturing of community that allows governments and corporations to set the agenda and limits of human interaction. Or "interact or die" might be a warning that we fail to recognize the fact of interdependence in the natural world we (should) inhabit at the risk of spiritual and ultimately literal death.
But since the natural world was so completely absent in this exhibition (with one or two minor exceptions: a video with leaf cutter ants carrying little national flags instead of leaves, for example) I have to assume that what we were invited to interact with was the unnatural world of these works. The field for interaction is the field defined by these uncreative creations, mobilizing under the banner of the unusually explicit "interact or die" theme to do further violence to lingering memories of the Planet Earth (where once upon a time frogs ate mosquitos, not ethernet impulses, and lived on the banks of rivers, not clear glass containers of mineral oil).
I do realize that I might be alienating myself from the few friends in the art scene here who even bothered to read this far. I know some of this may be unpopular with my computer-programming, electronic musician colleagues. And sure: part of my work exists within the realm of electronic art, insofar as it uses electricity and electronics. (I'm even using electricity and electronics now to fire off this mediated communique.) This is not a fact in which I rejoice, but an issue with which I wrestle constantly.
But this isn't about me. I don't stick ethernet cables in corpses.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Not-So-Innocent Bystanders
From Society Under Seige by Zygmunt Bauman:
Five per cent of the planet's population may emit 40 per cent of the planet's pollutants, and use/waste half or more of the planet's resources, and they may resort to military and financial blackmail to defend tooth and nail their right to go on doing so. They may, for the foreseeable future, use their superior force to make the victims pay the costs of their victimization (were not the Jews under the Nazis obliged to pay the train fares on the way to Auschwitz?). And yet responsibility is theirs -- not just in any abstractly philosophical, metaphysical or ethical sense, but in the down-to-earth, mundane, straightforward, casual (ontological, if you wish) meaning of the word.
[...]
We are all bystanders now: knowing what needs to be done, but also knowing that we have done less than what was needed and not necessarily what needed doing most; and that we are not especially eager to do more or better, and even less keen to abstain from doing what should not be done at all . . . There are more and more goings-on in the world which we sense are crying for vengeance or remedy, but our capacity to act, and particularly the aptitude to act effectively, seems to go in reverse, dwarfed ever more by the enormity of the task. The number of events and situations that we hear of and that cast us in the awkward and reprehensible position of a bystander grows by the day.
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