Waxing Poetically: Addressing Culture with a Twist of Poetry

Today is Earth Day in America and the following rant is one of my personal favorite op-ed/comedic monologues on the subject of the planet from the late George Carlin who died just last year at the age of 71. While we didn’t share all views, this particular one has always made consider that events like today’s Earth Day are simply postured excuses for the real problem - namely ourselves. That pollution is bad, trash is dirty and recycling is a common sense, good thing go without my saying. But sometimes when I’m told to turn out the lights at a set time, or to not eat a burger for a day because some woman on the local news says so, or that the coincidentally cute polar bear on my TV screen needs my donation, but the icky, prickly spider on my window can go to Hell — I cannot help but feel propagandized.

George Carlin - “The Planet is Fine” from his HBO special, Jammin’ in New York (1992)

We’re so self-important, so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another, we’re gonna save the fucking planet?

Well, that’s a poetic note. And it’s a start. And I can dream, can’t I? See I don’t worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron…whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while.

Wax poetically for the planet… and other people as well.

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The folling is an excerpt from the 2001 film Walking Life. It is a rather long-winded version of the question, “Does free will exist?” Is free will just an illusion based on series of past descions? Is it all just one colossal, electrochemical accident? Are human being just Evolution trial an error lab experiment? Some say “Yes.” to all these.

Others maintain a sense of artistry, mechanism, even genius about life - that even in sickness, death and seeming chaos, there is a prime movement, an essential “it” playing out from the deepest recesses of the Universe.

What’s your take?

“In a way, in our contemporary world view, it’s easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem has been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 B.C. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you’re gonna do. Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they’re so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We’re just physical systems too, right? We’re just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We’re mostly water, and our behavior isn’t gonna be an exception to these basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether its God setting things up in advance and knowing everything you’re gonna do or whether it’s these basic physical laws governing everything, there’s not a lot of room left for freedom.

So now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will. Say “Oh, well, it’s just an historical anecdote. It’s sophomoric. It’s a question with no answer. Just forget about it.” But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty, or you can only be admired or respected for things you did of your own free will. So the question keeps coming back, and we don’t really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all our decisions are really just a charade.

Think about how it happens. There’s some electrical activity in your brain. Your neurons fire. They send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. They twitch. You might, say, reach out your arm. It looks like it’s a free action on your part, but every one of those - every part of that process is actually governed by physical law, chemical laws, electrical laws, and so on. So now it just looks like the Big Bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of human history, and even before, is really just the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we’re special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat. I mean, that’s really challenged by this picture.

So you might be saying, “Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it’s not really like that. It’s really a probabilistic theory. There’s room. It’s loose. It’s not deterministic.” And that’s going to enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it’s not really going to help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random. They swerve. Their behavior is absurd in the sense that its unpredictable and we can’t understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that going to help with freedom? I mean, should our freedom be just a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That starts to seem like it’s worse. I’d rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving. So we can’t just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons with all that that entails; not just bodies, but persons. And that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality.”

Video and transcript uploaded by YouTube member prokofiev678

Note: Photo of the Day and Video of the Day return on Monday.

Wax freely… if you can!

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Photo source:synthstuff.com

Oh, how seasons seem to roll on so constantly in the steady and (at times) laughable course of history. As you may already know, a March 4, transcript of conservative talk titan Rush Limbaugh’s radio show has stirred up and likely brewed a a sizable bit of hot soup for politicos on both sides of the isle (presumably the side with soup on it) with Limbaugh’s adamant request that President Obama debate him on core issues of the economy, heath care and social welfare. Though there is no official reply from the President as of this writing, I would suggest that President Obama should without question take on Limbaugh even if only for the purposes of intellectual discourse and a certain reassurance to the public that its commander-in-chief has thought his views over quite a bit. So in the same vain, I take you to an earlier post from January 28 concerning Limbaugh’s comment in January in which Limbaugh decreed with full indigent fortitude, “I hope he fails.”

Quoting Poetically: Rush Limbaugh on Why He Wants Obama to Fail

“I got a request here from a major American print publication. ‘Dear Rush: For the Obama [Immaculate] Inauguration we are asking a handful of very prominent politicians, statesmen, scholars, businessmen, commentators, and economists to write 400 words on their hope for the Obama presidency. We would love to include you. If you could send us 400 words on your hope for the Obama presidency, we need it by Monday night, that would be ideal.’ Now, we’re caught in this trap again. The premise is, what is your “hope.” My hope, and please understand me when I say this. I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, “Well, I hope he succeeds. We’ve got to give him a chance.” Why? They didn’t give Bush a chance in 2000. Before he was inaugurated the search-and-destroy mission had begun. I’m not talking about search-and-destroy, but I’ve been listening to Barack Obama for a year-and-a-half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don’t want them to succeed.” - Rush Limbaugh January 16, 2009

GOP juggernaut Rush Limbaugh said the above comment about Barack Obama on a January 16 edition of his talk-radio show. He argues that because he does not agree with a great many of Obama’s policies, he wants those to fail. But that kind of failure is quite different the total, unilateral societal collapse which pundits like Limbaugh seem to blame on liberal media and the “liberal agenda.” Sure Obama wants to close Guantanamo Bay’s prisons. Sure he wants affordable healthcare, and a large federal oversight of banks. But then of course, there is reality. Guantanamo detainees will not be just walking the streets; they will in fact be prosecuted, sentenced, executed or shipped out of the country and separated from their terrorist cohorts in all likelihood. also, affordable healthcare, Socialist or not is something all people tend to want, and furthermore Obama’s plan is not for government-mandated coverage that makes every citizen a number, but coverage which by virtue of its very existence allows every citizen to be treated. Lastly, the banks’ socialization is indicative of an under-regulated system - if it were not, the word crisis need not apply.

What Limbaugh fails to see is that Obama’s policies are aiming to be 180% distance from those of the Republicans solely because of a certain law of opposites. That is to say, if the previous attempts by the GOP flopped, logic will inform the wise to do the reverse. Thus, America stands at a new place in history in which change may mean all the things you hate, Mr. Limbaugh. But in the name of common sense, what choice do you have? Couple that what Obama’s willingness to hear opposing arguments and actually listen to words of dissent and one may see how the sum of these parts can very likely lead to solutions; and is that not what you want? I should think so, Sir.

Wax for a better America!

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Regular posts return tomorrow.

Archived from February 4, 2009

Cummings in middle age

“To be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” - E.E. Cummings

The poet known for his distinctly grammarless and structureless style speaks to what most of the human race may say is a society’s undeniable tendency toward unity structure, rules and regulations. The very definition of civilization is very often that which has been tamed of its spontaneity, stripped of its need to break out of the bonds of whatever group mindset it may be in at a given point. Race, gender, religion, nationality, size, shape and number are the labels that tend to define a group or even an “individual.” If any person should dare to break the cycle of similarity, that person is often jilted to outer limits of Any Place, Planet Earth and thought to be, as fate would have it, a non-conformist - the anti-label label. That person is a stranger to the normal ways of doing things and generally just an “odd thing” to be appreciated for its frankly visible freakishness.

Scenario: Matt has a job interview a with local business firm. He prepared ahead of the interview with a brilliant resume and questions and some answers to the questions he thinks the interviewer is the most likely to ask him. He has researched the firm and sees they are very keen on punctuality, so Matt plans to arrive early to the meeting. He presses his best suit and tie: The tie is combination of blue and black stripes matching perfectly against almost all the rest of his outfit - shiny, black shoes included. But his shirt is a bright racecar red and clashes and contrasts flagrantly against the rest of his clothes as if it had just been coated with a house painter’s hand while the painter had painted the inner walls of Matt’s living room as if Matt had somehow gotten in the painter’s way on the way to his interview.

When Matt arrives, he is calm and cool-minded and eager to make a good impression. He sits down alongside a few other male candidates all dressed in black suits, a few staffers too. All in the room are immediately drawn to Matt’s bright, red shirt as some workers around the office begin to murmur amongst themselves. One young woman lets out a faint chuckle while others just stare at the shirt for a few short but palpable seconds. Finally, Matt is called in for his interview. He his sits in the HR office in a chair near the door. The interviewer closes the door and sits down to begin the interview.

“Mr. Devlin you seem to be highly qualified, the interviewer asserts.” Recent MBA, you seem hardworking…. But I’ve got to tell you…” The interviewer clears his throat with a loud eh-hem. The folks you’re up against are pret-ty good as well!”

“Really?” Matt raises his eyebrows in reply.

The interview rolls on as per usual with all the expected Qs and A about Matt’s previous employment and Matt rattles out questions about daily duties and such. Suddenly, the interviewer is caught in trance. His eyes are locked onto Matt’s shirt. He quickly snaps himself back to reality.

Well, anyhow, we’ll be in contact by Friday morning,” the interviewer says getting up from his chair to shake Matt’s hand.

“Thank you, Sir! Have a good day,” Matt replies with a smile.

Upon Matt’s exit from the room the interviewer thinks to himself, “Holy Jeez! What in the hell was that shirt!” The shirt has just cost Matt the job of his dreams.

Here is an illustration of the conformity of a society being so well woven into a culture that it has cost a brilliant and savvy business man his ideal job. Matt is fully qualified for the job in all aspects but his shirt; and because that shirt choice was a departure from the norm, his interviewer decided to opt for a more color-coordinated candidate. There is not really any logical reason for Matt’s not being chosen other than the fact he is dressed differently from all others in the firm. In reality, Matt’s outward appearance has no baring whatsoever on his skills as a human being and yet, the interviewer places and enormous emphasis on it. In this climate, Cummings’ dare to be different is not only difficult, but detrimental as well even if the circumstances are in fact completely absurd.

Wax freely.

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Regular postings will return tomorrow. For now please enjoy this tasty treat from December 2, 2008 (with minor alterations)

Also featured at Art from the Outskirts.

Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.

“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”

He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.

In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief ” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight. - Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker essay “Late Bloomers” October 20, 2008

I, like Mr. Fountain, received a calling so to speak a bit later in life than most my age. Like probably many of you, I had big dreams growing up. There were so many things I wanted to do, to be, to make. Early on at the age of eight or nine I wanted to make toys. Then, for a couple of years, I fiddled with the idea of broadcasting. Voice-over work became my passion’s fruit of choice, but that dream soon fizzled away with a teeny, little, nagging demon of voice modulation called puberty - suddenly my Mickey Mouse was turned to “Mickey Moose” before I could say “genitals.” So my sights turned to computers. I liked them, thought they were cool and I had a pretty awesome collection of video games in my bedroom, so it seemed the next logical step. Several years and a few flunked math courses later, that dream flew out of the window too. College came and in first two years or so, I decided to get a bit creative. My list of classes included TV Production 1 and 2, Ancient World Literature, Contemporary Poetry, History of Rock [Music], and Theatre but also Cultural Anthropology, Prehistoric Life and even a Quantum Physics course I’ve since forgotten the name of for good.

With my mind all ablaze with curiosity, I graduated from junior college in 2002 with a Plain Joe Liberal Arts Associates degree and absolutely no further clues as to what I wanted to do with my life. I took a year off, deejayed a bit, dated an Autism programming specialist, explored religion, and developed a screenplay. The year somehow morphed into a year and a half only for me to find that my college of choice had lost my transcripts. I re-sent them and was placed in my handicapped accessible dorm in the fall of 2005 during which time I hosted my own radio show, joined a poetry club, met the love of my life…. Oh yeah, and I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Management after flirting with the idea of getting an MBA in Marketing. I now stand (or sit due to my wheelchair) before you one and a half years into a career in freelance writing… I turn 28 this month.

I have money… not a lot but I have it. I moved back home to help myself with getting my career started. My lady and I are going strong and she knows there is a ring in her near future . Above all this, I’m very, very, happy!

Never give up!

(Read Gladwell’s full essay).

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Archived from December 13, 2008

After a quick googling of the phrase “philosophy of charity” I came across this blog post of a graduate student named Jon. Jon presents an extreme argument to prove a point:

I. Peter Singer on our Obligations

The argument here comes more in the form of a story. We are asked to imagine a person who has a very valuable car (perhaps there are no others like it). This car brings this individual a great deal of pleasure (perhaps even pleasure he could not otherwise attain). Unfortunately, this individual parks his car on some railroad tracks. Sure enough, a train is coming. Worse yet, though the tracks fork and he could redirect the train before it hit his car, there is a young innocent girl stuck on those tracks. He must choose his car or the girl’s life. What should he do? Well, hopefully the answer is pretty obvious. He should let his car be destroyed.

What’s the big deal? Singer claims that each of us is in the very same situation as the man with the car. Pick any of your favorite possessions, costly habits, savings, etc. that bring you pleasure. It is the case that you having those is coming at the cost of other individuals in the world dying by starvation or some other means. If you think the man ought to give up his car to save the girl, Singer thinks you ought to do the same. Further, the problem is recursive, so once you give one thing up, the claim still applies until you are living at the same level with least of the world.

II. Dan Moller on letting people starve — for now.
Moller gives the following argument:

1. Future lives count just as much as present lives (we have an equal obligation to them as we do to present lives).
2. There will continue to be at-risk people in the forseeable future.
3. The cost of saving lives will decrease over time.
4. There are ways to increase your wealth over time.
5. It would often benefit you to delay providing aid (your life would be more enjoyable).
6. Therefore, we should let people starve — for now, since we can do more with our resources for future generations.

The dilemma is that human beings no matter how charitable, can only do so much for so many. A person for instance, cannot know every plight of every living being. Rather he or she must make a choice to support one and not the other in some way. This was my own struggle this week in presenting Charity Week. I thought, How much should I give to each charity and to whom is the cause more vital - if any?

There is a Buddhist theory that is quite factual that for every person’s gain there is another’s loss. While one eats a meal, another doesn’t partake of that same meal. For every job gained there is a rejection, every sports win - a loss.

In another example Christ’s Gospel in Matthew tells the listener to give freely when asked. in Singer’s scenario the heart of the car owner may compel him or her to save the girl. Yet that car owner is likely to guess that similar situations may be arising at any given moment. Yet, he or she is still only one human being and the laws of physics in no way allow that person to save all people.

There is also the theological/conscientious idea of vocation or “calling” by which a person feels called usually by God or by conscience to do a common good for the betterment of another. In this way, the person need only be concern with the specific duty he or she feels called to by a kind of personal truth.

Ultimately, it seems up to the individual to make “the call.” May it be for better or for worse.

Peter Singer is a Professor of Bio Ethics and a noted author currently teaching at Princeton University.

(Singer’s university homepage)

Dan Moller is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland.

(Moller’s university homepage)

Wax well.

*Note: Regular posts return tomorrow.

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Photo source: e-rockford.com

Often in gathering content for this blog, my mind meanders down a great many divergent paths. It ponders what the newness of the day many bring - good, bad or all but uninteresting; and it often comes to my attention, when in the course of blogworthy events, just how startlingly little my fellow Americans and I know or even think about the rest of the world around us.

More and more, I see the cable news machine gobbling up one political story after another: The hopes of president Obama, the missteps of the president’s cabinet, the misdeeds of an unrepentant, political ego in Illinois governor Rod Blogojevich and a nation in the largest recession since the Great Depression. I see my local newspaper filled with gossip of political corruption as well and some sports scores, (Superbowl catches and all) and still more political banter about economic bailouts, budgets and billing filling up the figurative cups of local, national and international institutions while somehow tying some part of it to Britney Spears until it all runneth over like lava as it drips and sloths its way down an overstuffed volcano of mass media - all the while missing so much of the world around it.

Yes, through all the mess and slop, worry and wardrobe changes, news and life is more than America. Although these things are important in there own distinct ways, they are more than any stimulus plan, presidential flub or celebrity comeback. News is also a civil war in Sri Lanka, an epidemically suffocating economy in Zimbabwe, and the latest scientific discovery on how to give safe drinking water to millions of people across four-fifths of the globe. But usually while the volcano is fed, America is anesthetized with political infighting by social commentators, (on all sides) and the latest news on a missing person or a bit of gossip from Hollywood as if the whole world need not surpass the good ol’ U.S of A.. Bollywood may want to refute such a claim with its many millions of fans in India. Darfur may also request some attention be paid to its rampant genocide as well… But maybe I am crazy after all.

The news, however important, is not always so bleak. Americans are seemingly sold day and night on fear, terror and health and safety threats - cancer statistics, climate change, crime, nuclear war. But what is there in the way of new hope, innovation and good will? What kind of medical progress has been made in the world? Are we improving education anywhere? Are we negotiating peace anywhere? It is mathematically impossible that all these good things are not happening, but it seems Americans will never hear about them because if media is to be judged fairly, it is to be judged by its actions - and from what most anyone can gather, happiness and contented optimism just ain’t sellin’ in the American news business.

Wax informatively.

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Cummings in middle age

“To be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” - E.E. Cummings

The poet known for his distinctly grammarless and structureless style speaks to what most of the human race may say is a society’s undeniable tendency toward unity structure, rules and regulations. The very definition of civilization is very often that which has been tamed of its spontaneity, stripped of its need to break out of the bonds of whatever group mindset it may be in at a given point. Race, gender, religion, nationality, size, shape and number are the labels that tend to define a group or even an “individual.” If any person should dare to break the cycle of similarity, that person is often jilted to outer limits of Any Place, Planet Earth and thought to be, as fate would have it, a non-conformist - the anti-label label. That person is a stranger to the normal ways of doing things and generally just an “odd thing” to be appreciated for its frankly visible freakishness.

Scenario: Matt has a job interview a with local business firm. He prepared ahead of the interview with a brilliant resume and questions and some answers to the questions he thinks the interviewer is the most likely to ask him. He has researched the firm and sees they are very keen on punctuality, so Matt plans to arrive early to the meeting. He presses his best suit and tie: The tie is combination of blue and black stripes matching perfectly against almost all the rest of his outfit - shiny, black shoes included. But his shirt is a bright racecar red and clashes and contrasts flagrantly against the rest of his clothes as if it had just been coated with a house painter’s hand while the painter had painted the inner walls of Matt’s living room as if Matt had somehow gotten in the painter’s way on the way to his interview.

When Matt arrives, he is calm and cool-minded and eager to make a good impression. He sits down alongside a few other male candidates all dressed in black suits, a few staffers too. All in the room are immediately drawn to Matt’s bright, red shirt as some workers around the office begin to murmur amongst themselves. One young woman lets out a faint chuckle while others just stare at the shirt for a few short but palpable seconds. Finally, Matt is called in for his interview. He his sits in the HR office in a chair near the door. The interviewer closes the door and sits down to begin the interview.

“Mr. Devlin you seem to be highly qualified, the interviewer asserts.” Recent MBA, you seem hardworking…. But I’ve got to tell you…” The interviewer clears his throat with a loud eh-hem. The folks you’re up against are pret-ty good as well!”

“Really?” Matt raises his eyebrows in reply.

The interview rolls on as per usual with all the expected Qs and A about Matt’s previous employment and Matt rattles out questions about daily duties and such. Suddenly, the interviewer is caught in trance. His eyes are locked onto Matt’s shirt. He quickly snaps himself back to reality.

Well, anyhow, we’ll be in contact by Friday morning,” the interviewer says getting up from his chair to shake Matt’s hand.

“Thank you, Sir! Have a good day,” Matt replies with a smile.

Upon Matt’s exit from the room the interviewer thinks to himself, “Holy Jeez! What in the hell was that shirt!” The shirt has just cost Matt the job of his dreams.

Here is an illustration of the conformity of a society being so well woven into a culture that it has cost a brilliant and savvy business man his ideal job. Matt is fully qualified for the job in all aspects but his shirt; and because that shirt choice was a departure from the norm, his interviewer decided to opt for a more color-coordinated candidate. There is not really any logical reason for Matt’s not being chosen other than the fact he is dressed differently from all others in the firm. In reality, Matt’s outward appearance has no baring whatsoever on his skills as a human being and yet, the interviewer places and enormous emphasis on it. In this climate, Cummings’ dare to be different is not only difficult, but detrimental as well even if the circumstances are in fact completely absurd.

Wax freely.

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Are Indian women being beaten up over their pub tabs?

In a post 9/11 world, news reports of insurgencies killing infidels, bombing cars and vilifying the supposed “other” have become synonymous with terrorism and dare a blogger say, with Muslims, Arabs, Persians or Pakistanis. Prominent among these stories are those of native women whom the western media feature as archetypes of oppression. A great many are documented as being mistreated, subjugated and generally held down by men. As such, women are seen in some circles as always having to be subordinate to men.

But according to an editorial featured in the Feb 2 edition of The Times of India in its scandalously titled Subversive-Opinion section, this has not been just a Muslim or Middle Eastern issue. Contributing writer Jug Suraiya in his editorial “Girls can’t pub, saala.” suggests that just as the Taliban and others have an Islamic sect, there is currently a Hindu extremist element in India who stands ready to batter and concave the head of any woman who shows social independence from an eagerly threatened masculinity by who they see as overly care- free, emasculating cogs in the wheels of progress. But in this instance, the root of blasphemy is the female pubgoer, blue jeans and all.

Suraiya asserts with a stoic certainty that there is indeed such a terror in the midst of the pub: A Hindu-centered type of Taliban willfully beating up young maidens, not because the girls had refused to date the strapping brutes but rather… just because the girls had a few suds; and while Indian women can do many things from hold public office to run businesses, the bombastic male tigers seem to think these females have come into the pubs to mark their territory in the wrong part of the jungle. Suraiya points to point to the errancy of this thinking by noting that many of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad’s disciples were claimed to be women and that the power of the Hindu goddess cannot be ignored within traditional circles. He continues,
“Indian culture - if so amorphous and all-encompassing a way of life can be given a single tag - [that name] has often been called ‘tolerationism’: tolerance of difference has always been the essence of what we call Indianness.”

But while Suraiya jokingly suggests that men simply cannot imagine their pubs with out the “bullocks” (a.k.a. testicular fortitude) needed to knock back a few cold ones, one may wonder what a culture that invented yoga meditation, Buddhism and the Kama Sutra is doing creating bar brawls with the fairer sex. What might they see in it? Could it be be control? (But Hinduism teaches detachment, right?) Could it be honor that these models of restraint seek? It cannot surely be honor in the least. Free beer - that could be it. These guys are quite sick of ladies night and they want free beer!

Clearly, for such vile behavior any rationale is none at all. In a country whose traditions have fostered both a caste system and a counter-spirit of love and selflessness several centuries before Christ’s effort with the Sermon on the Mount, daily occurrences like those of India’s pubs seem foreign, cold and unconscionable - probably because they are.

(Read Suraiya’s column).

Wax for human rights.

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As you may be aware, there is now a buzz among the American public that the newly gelling Obama Administration may be considering a instituting the first ever Secretary of the Arts cabinet position. This peace archived from September 22, 2008 is dedicated to that very pursuit.

Happy kids make art vivagallery.org

“I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

Think back to your childhood. Did you play? Did you run around your house in your underpants pretending to be your favorite hero or heroin trying to save the world from an evil scientist? Did you ever build anything: a house of cards, a tower of crackers, maybe a simple fort? Did you ever play cop and fight imaginary villains and try to thwart a robbery? Maybe you were the one who pretended to have a family of five, a beachfront vacation home and an office in the city. Even if you did none of these, back when you were six, nine, eleven years old your mind wandered if your normal, day-to day got too boring.

Now contrast your play life with that of school. First, the adults made you go. There was no compromise, no voting and no writing to your local senator or the ACLU about how you feel your parents may have violated your constitutional right to stay home and eat Fudgie the Whale ice cream cake all day (or maybe it was Count Chocula… whatever). You had to go to school. No amount of negotiating would change that. You rode your school bus, arrived at school, and soon thereafter would learn whatever the day had in store: spelling, grammar, math and history for which you had no point of reference. Flashcards were equally monotonous - you sat in your chair memorizing each card to the point your brain would just shut off and proceed to rattle off answers like a Pavlovian pup waiting to be rewarded with that peanut butter and jelly masterpiece your mother prepared while you were negotiating the Fudgie the Whale particulars.

Then it was lunchtime! Lunch was great because you could always compare the other kids’ food with yours. Even if yours was crappy the kid at the end of the table who ate crayons for money would devour your cafeteria meatloaf like a vulture on a deer carcass! Lunch was a time to talk about your favorite pastimes. Baseball was popular with the boys and for some unknown reason, fortune telling was the girls’ thing with little paper-folded demon machines which always said something like “You smell like pee and have a hairy butthole!” Recess would follow and someone would always get maimed by a dodgeball or innocently and precociously chased by a member of the opposite sex (usually) and another kid would get inadvertently beaten with the double dutch ropes.

Next you’d have more science work to do, memorizing ten categories of plant life or you’d learn how to type like a speed endurance champion or maybe go to a gym class, art class, music class (these all varied depending on your school’s budget). But these were the times that seemed most free. In art class you could paint the sky purple and no one could tell you it was wrong. Music class had all those silly 1920s “flappertastic” classics that you by all accounts hated… but at least it didn’t have any long division or decimals! On the days you had gym, you ran in a circle for ten minutes and then perfected your volleyball serve to a tee while you gave your best Olympic-style grunt. Ah, those were the days, heh?

It is without question sadly prophetic that I should speak in the past tense about your and my collective school experience because right now as I speak to you only likely only half of K-12 aged students receive regular physical education - and art classes, while the highlight of many a child’s day are now a luxury. This is largely due to the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act which brought about stricter and more streamlined testing standards for schools nationwide that focus primarily on math and literacy skills. Kids are tested three times a year and thus have to spend a considerable about of time preparing for tests. But the evidence suggests that the arts that with out the arts and exercise, U.S. Children may be actually losing their ability to process, analyze an dissect information in ways that are essential for innovation in business, science, engineering and medicine. A Centers for Disease Control study completed this past year suggests that girls who get at least 70 hours of exercise per week perform significantly better overall than those who average 35 hours per week. Boys, the study says, may need even more activity. Arts have been shown to be even more paramount to healthy brain function. Playing music for instance requires vigorous processing on both sides of the brain while creative expressions in writing and visual arts require critical thinking and an ability to view the world and its problems in new and uncharted ways for the fact that art is not usually restricted to 2 + 2 = 4. This was probably best expressed in the words of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his existential classic Notes from the Underground when he opined, “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

What No Child Left Behind robs from children’s education is the imagination of childhood and also fails to cultivate that all important physical instinct to run, jump, climb, push and explore which physical exercise provides. Children have an uncanny and innate ability to conquer their world just by looking around it, exploring digging, running or playing make-believe. It is just that simple. In this way, children who make art are the future architects and engineers, the most curious minds are often among those who cure diseases or build spaceships and the best actors are often the best undercover investigators on the face of the earth! Then there are the entertainers who make you and me smile at the end of a bad day, artists who allow us to look at our lives with newborn eyes, athletes who make us realize that our human bodies have oh, so much untapped potential! It is My Friends, these elements which compose the human being in all his glory and you and I have known this ever since we first began to play. So I say to you: Play on, create and imagine. Imagination is after all, your most sacred tool with which to discover the Universe [of possibility] which lies before you!

Wax imaginatively!

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