It's Always Happy Hour In Flint

Driving Through The Storms

The days are cut shorter, the nights cooler. I think that the midwest's reward for a glorious summer will be an early and hellish winter. This is what I dread-- another dose of snow, cold, blah, ick. I hate winter. Hate it, especially the Michigan kind. Part of my motivation in doing what I'm doing is to free myself from Michigan's damning cycle of psychotic weather. I don't mind making snow angels once in a blue moon, but the daily drudgery of winter is too ugly for words. I'd rather be smoking out in Cozumel between scuba lessons.

Alas, I will have to endure that cycle of summer fall, winter one more time, this time, through mid 2006 before I'm free of this bondage. Maybe I can get out sooner with good behavior, but I'm not sure. To paraphrase Auden, I'm sometimes neither gentle nor good in this haunted wood, and karma will want to twist it in my guts a wee bit longer, just to let me know who or what is running the show.

In Detroit, former great mayoral hope and hip-hop maven Kwame Kilpatrick has the approval of some 23% percent of his fellow Detroiters heading into this fall's election. Pol Pot wouldn't do much worse. I like Kwame as a style product, but any fool will tell you that the mayor of a town like Detroit can't get away with charging Escalade's and various bling trinkets on the city's credit cards. Sure, Willie Brown did that kind of thing, but he was running a city that shat money. Detroit still faces a net outflow of people, it's public school system is falling to pieces, crime is still too high, and blocks upon uninterrupted blocks are filled with a mix of ruins and vacant lots. Kwame did not create any of this, and it was too much to expect him to fix it all in 4 years. Maybe Detroit will be back on its feet in 20 years, but I don't have the faintest idea how they'll do it. Sports stadiums and casinos help, if you're in to kind of thing, but basically any high performing burg needs motivated smart people, lots of them, who would rather build than destroy. Since the '68 riots, the destroy camp has held ultimate sway.

That comes across in how people drive in the Rust Belt. I thought that the Bay Area ruled the roost in terms of freakjob motor-jockeys, but after my last sojourn to lady k's place, I think that Detroit and Cleveland are neck and neck as the worst our funky nation has to offer. It's one thing for someone to cut in front of you on a six-lane expressway with plenty of open space on the road, but something worse for that person to rudely cut across to your lane, come within inches of sideswiping you, and then, only then, turning on the blinker once the maneuver is complete. This is the kind of person who thinks it's funny to wear defective condoms. Then there's the driving culture that crops up near freeway lane closures, when most of us dutifully line up to proper side of the blinking yellow merge arrow only to watch one prick per 50 cars zoom down the shoulder and cut in at the very last moment. I come away from these things surprised that more people don't get shot around places like Detroit and Cleveland. Either these folks are exceedingly stupid, malicious, or whacked on powerful downers, like a cocktail of Boone's Farm and Smack.

I can't imagine how people were driving down south the past couple days when Hurricane Katrina was barreling in from the Gulf. Crisis either focuses the mind or turns it into shit, and some folks never know which way that worm turns until the crisis itself is past the event horizon. From the video footage I've seen, it looks like the evacuation was orderly, at least on the interstates. No one was cruising down the shoulder, cutting line and drawing bad karma upon themselves like botflies to a turdball. That's interesting on a couple levels. For one thing, if you're evacuating from a monster storm, knowing in the back of your head that when you return, most everything you own might very be in splinters and rag, dispersed across the northern half of the Gulf, then driving with due caution and courtesy is a trick.

My own experience with the dirty south says that while I don't appreciate their voting habits, and can only take their love of all things fried in small doses, they tend to be the most polite people on the planet. Caveat: I'm pretty white, and walk around in a normal-looking shell, no extra paintings or holes. Southern politics smacks of the same combination of slick-talking and graft as what pervades Detroit. At least the rust belt doesn't have to worry about getting flattened by a hurricane. It sucks that Southerners have had to deal with major hurricanes on what seems now like a regular basis. They keep their charm, and hopefully their optimism, well strike that, the Southern Thing has always been fatalism mistaken by the drunken visitor as optimism, and sometimes I think that my be the bug that affects the Rust Best as well. Get kicked around enough, and you become inert, and from that, our projections become their identity.

Global warming is making things hell on the south these days, and cheap manufacturing overseas makes residents of these parts twitch like never before. The Us and Them attitudes are the same regarding those two regions and their views on the wider world, but apparently in the deep south they still have the decency to drive like civilized beings. They won't let 160 years of hard knocks kick them down to a state of nature. Conversely, I don't think that Detroit will rise above its state of nature until the Lions win a Super Bowl, no matter who has the keys to the city. That is another rant.

- k

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Life Is So Strange, When You Don't Know

Practice what you preach

There are few constants in life

Look before you leap

Beware the brown acid. DO NOT TAKE THE BROWN ACID, MAN

Right-o.

I need something sonically surly and aggressive to accompany this babbling, but I can't write to anything harsher than typical indie-rock. Sometimes it makes writing itself difficult because writing down anything more clever than a shopping list requires a certain spark and energy, or at least it does for me. Maybe the marauding hordes of geniuses that surround me in this lucid corner of Flint can write hungover with a jackhammer boring into their skull, and if so I envy them. I don't have that kind of power, or focus. As much I love a nice dose of Meshuggah or Isis during a workout, long drive, or even designing and programming or drawing, writing requires the kind of music that soothes the savage beast... veneer of civilization be damned.

Every once in awhile I'll push aside the quill and parchment and throw on Meshuggah's Destroy Erase Improve at a volume set to loosen every bowel inside a five-mile radio just to remind the feral neighborhood children to stay well back of the property line during my designated work hours...the pool won't go away kiddies, come back at 2, make all the noise you want then, but for now, heed this sonic shot across your bow. You'll come to understand many dark and terrible things about your world, and since you're in Flint, many of these understandings may come sooner than later. Some of your lady friends will get knocked up before scoring a driver's license and few of you will score free lodging in the Jackson State Penn for violence and drug issues, but by all means push that stuff out of your head for the time being, close out your wider environment. Sleep is good.

So today I'm writting to my 'yo la and the lab' playlist, shuffled and fried. Although Yo La Tengo and Stereolab albums make up half the playlist, there are also Thievery Corporation, Queen, and Dengue Fever selections aplenty. There's melody galore, so pretty, this. I can write to intrumental trip-hop, but not to dirty south. Alt country, yes, boogie woogie, no. I'm still not sure where the line of demarcation is, or maybe it shifts a little every day, and it should, since the situation, both mirco and marco, is fluid. Oh, what's this flashback, Missing Persons-- life is so strange, when you don't know.

Oy, freaking brilliant, that! Life is so strange, when you don't know-- the burdens of change, the chaos of evolution. Funny, but only someone reasonably intelligent and completely self-centered could have written the lyrics to Destination Unknown, because to the eyes and ears of the stupid among us, life is not so strange after all. Everything happens for a reason and incremental change happens under your nose, leaving you to gasp in horror every 15 to 20 years when something shakes you up from your slumber in the guise of complete surprise.

Remember how outraged and horrified white mommy and daddy America was when hard-core hip hop started bleeding over into suburban neighborhoods? Folks got antsy about punk and new wave way back in the day, but at least they understood THAT trip, or thought they did. Ah, but when the ghetto started making some serious noise for the first time since them late-60s riots, it was like an alarm clock. People were so freaked out over Straight Outta Compton that the FBI started a casefile on NWA, honing skills that would help them later on in seizing Mohammed Atta and his gang of murderous....wait a minute, nevermind.

Aggressive black music, and definitely ghetto culture, predates Straight Outta Compton by decades. The crack explosion in inner city America added more acid to the funk, setting the seeds for making hip hop so huge, and strains of it so nihilistic, just like that tall turbaned bastard who declared war on us SEVEN years ago and who still wanders around free in Pakistan while DEA agents kick down the doors of pot smokers...like Tommy Chong is ever going to inspire somebody to strap on a bomb vest and take out a rail station. Indeed, life is strange, when you don't know.

The evolution of city soul and funk into hardcore rap took many years, and there were many stops along the way: The Breaks, Maggot Brain, Wild Wild West, Yo Bum Rush The Show...you get the idea. Artists for years were talking about the growing perils of inner-city life, the breakdown of community, the short worth placed on human life, and when these fears were crystallized so famously in 1989, sleepyhead suburban America woke up for a second to say holy shit, sent Tipper Gore to the senate floor, and wondered aloud what was it about that crackrock thing that dem inner city folk found so pleasing, and many of them found out when crack migrated to the suburbs 10 years later.

Whether it be the evolution of musical styles or geopolitics, you're only going to be surprised when you haven't been paying attention all along. Today there are more sub-genres of hip-hop then there were genres of music altogether 100 years ago. Most of your answers are analogous to that last sentence.

Ye have the ability, but nary the desire.

- k

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Humanism Without Strings

I had been inside the weight room for about 15 minutes when an uber-buff middle-aged black fellow named Ronnie summed up a long pep-talk with a lanky kid in a Lebron James jersey about staying on the straight and narrow, or at least staying above ground.

"Play your best game when tryouts come, I like your game," Ronnie said. "Kick ass, and don't look back, and stay off the streets. Don't go around selling 8-balls like half those chumps in your neighborhood."

"Right," the lanky kid said.

"People say one thing and do another. You keep quiet and do your thing best you can, everything else you want will come from that."

The kids starts to walk away and Ronnie says "Hey!"

"Yeah?"

"Respect yourself, man. It's these cats who don't respect themselves that end up where you don't want to be."

"Right."

That's Ronnie's standard advice whenever he's chatting up a youngster inside Flint's downtown Y, and he chats up a lot of inner-city teenagers. He gives a little of the Jesus talk, but doesn't overdo it because he's very conscious of the kid's perspective. Ronnie then presses forward with any kind of positive message the kid in question might relate to. When I came into the weight-room after doing cardio Ronnie was in full counselor mode, serving this tortured community as best he can. Ronnie is about 55, looks 30, and is evangelical, seriously evangelical. He saw some jail time back when everyone had tall fros and bellbottoms. He knows about the narcotics game and knows what it feels like to turn a girl out. Yet in conversation he rarely goes there unless you're a youngster and obviously heading down the same path. It's not the kind of thing he's going to bring up under the guise of idle chit-chat. Ronnie's quite a ways beyond that. He believes in his salvation, and the root cause of it-- letting Jesus into his heart. It's maybe the most powerful experience for a Christian, our President talks about it often. I've always submitted that the change in question comes from within, entirely, but I've also been told plenty that many if not most born-agains just never learn to understand the power of the individual in society, and therefore cannot pin such a great change on themselves...it must be coming from beyond. Of course, that but one of 100 reasons why I don't fit in so well here.

I think people listen to Ronnie because he has, no other way to put it, presence. Despite his non-stop motivational chatter, he's a dedicated monster in the gym. He does every set with crisp form and pushes himself to the limit every time. He's always there within 15 minutes of leaving his GM factory post at ~2:30. The mental toughness required to produce a stellar 2-hour workout after a numbing 8 hours on the shop floor is substantial. Kids respect strength, and Ronnie has that in spades. He can also still post up decent JuCo players and bury a three every now and then during a pick-up on the court. Kids respect that too.

As it stands, Christian influences are the only reliable source of outreach to at-risk Flint kids, and obviously, most of these kids never get the message. In thousands of cases, parents and government have failed the youth of Flint, that, and brutal economic realities. Driving across the north end of Flint is like coming to terms with the darkest side of our humanity. Razed buildings, makeshift memorials with bottles of E&J and Jesus candles, liquor stores wrapped in bars and bullet-proof glass surrounded by dealers ...buffeted by an angry resignation among the residents that this is the present and the future. Even Ronnie has trouble reaching these folks. A city kid who wants to polish his game inside the Y has at least taken a step in the right direction. Two-thirds of his peers aren't even that far. If an evangelical message is going to keep the kid in the Lebron jersey from landing in prison, I gotta support it, it's not like the Flint area is teaming with alternative positive influences.

To understand how bleak it is for someone growing up in Flint these days, look at it this way: The city has lost almost 100,000 middle-class jobs over the past 25 years. To the extent they've been replaced at all, it's happened with low-end service sector jobs. The medical industry manages to add jobs in the area at a reliable clip, but that's in large part due to the net aging of the Flint area. People with the means to do so have moved south to Oakland County or out of the state entirely. If you believe that your only way out is to pimp of sling rock till you're over enough to move away, then that's what you'll do. $5 an hour doesn't give you social mobility. $5 a rock does.

I'm disappointed that secular forces have so utterly failed to tackle the problems of poverty in this nation and throughout the world. While I'm fine with many of the moral teachings of Christianity-- don't kill, don't screw the neighbors wife, etc., and other mainstream religions, I don't think that the belief in divine presence or a book being the 'word of God' really moves us forward in the long run. As long as we as a society can pin things on entities beyond ourselves, we are going to have serious problems. One religion will always claim superiority over another, and if you believe that the most powerful force in existence is on your side, it's tough to negotiate in good faith with your foe.

I hope to see, in my lifetime, the rise of an agnostic secular humanism that values all of humanity equally, that judges a person based on character, not belief system, and that doesn't spend time fretting over divine interpretations and whims thereof.

I know, I know. Might as well ask for flying pigs. We'll see. In the meantime, Ronnie is making a difference his way, one kid at a time.

- k

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15aug05

Structure is Freedom

I made a promise to myself and a couple friends over the weekend that I'd be a beacon of positivism vis a vis this site for the next week or so. After all, if I'm typing this and you're reading this then we can't be doing too bad, you know, in the big scheme of things. Alas, Pops used to tell me I'd bitch if I was hung with a golden rope, and he was prolly right. Complaining is something Americans cherish to a fault, and come think of it, we like our faults too. We just don't like other folks, especially them dang foreigners, pointing out our faults and foibles to us in person or on the tele. Our existence with the inherent faults, and how we relate and dissolve with the march of time, guarantees that many messes will cross us and come though us, and often enough, envelope us.

Scott McCoy, and old friend and musical theorist, used to tell me that 'structure was freedom.' Back in the day I thought that was utter nonsense. Freedom through order? Are you nuts? But Scott first said that to me before I came to understand Hobbes, Democracy, and human nature. When Scott wrote a musical piece, and I admit that his tastes ran too far into the atonal for me, he made sure to define what he was going to do, how he was going to do it, how long it would take for him to do it. Then he would add another layer of complexity, and another, until he had a good idea what every bar was going to sound like. Finally, he'd sit in front of his baby grand and plink away using the sketches he'd written until he found the note-combinations he sought for that particular piece.

"Jesus," I used to tell him, "Why don't you just sit and play until you get what you want?"

"Because that's messy and ignorant." Scott would say tactfully, knowing full well that was how I went about writing my school essays and short stories at the time. "You can accomplish much more during your brief stay inside this mortal coil by defining what you want, then airing out the creativity stuff. Structure is freedom."

It was a notion antagonistic to how I wrote at the time, and certainly antagonistic to just about everything jazz and jamband musicians did, but with time with learning animation, I climbed onboard Scott's dictum.

For me, creating cartoons combines three essential elements-- writing, sounds, and visuals. When I have a story idea, the first thing I need to do is flesh it out in manuscript form, creating and toying with character development, plot, dialogue, etc. Before I can draw anything, and certainly before I can set drawn objects into motion, I need to know what my characters will look like, what they will say, how they will move, and where they shall move to.

After I'm finished writing drafts, I need to give voice to the characters. I also need to insert sound events and soundtrack pieces. Then I need to sync everything with the main timeline of the cartoon as I drop in drawn keyframes of animated product. Finally, once all the characters, and background settings, and sounds are in place, I can tweak around with different motion schemes or play around with dialogue-- replacing a new 6 second audio spot is pretty easy so long as you use a multitrack sound editing program.

For animation, like computer programming, there is no other way. You can't just sit down at your desk and dick around until something nice emerges from the ether. It's a tremendous waste of time, as sloppiness tends to be. Okay, by now loyal readers know where I'm going with this:

Had the Bush Administration planned and executed the Iraq occupation in the same rigorous manner as a good programmer writes an application, or the way ol' Scotty wrote his atonal but wonderfully symmetrical music pieces, then we'd be looking at a very different Iraq today. That Donald Rumsfeld had the sack to say 'freedom is messy' while hordes of Iraqis looted everything not made of sand after we took Baghdad shows that he's obviously growing senile.

Freedom is messy?

Oh really? I always thought anarchy was messy. I thought that failed states were messy. The results of war are certainly messy, but war itself is supposed to be carefully planned.

The freedom that generates a rheumy twinkle in Rumsfeld's eye is the freedom to buy SUV's and Aruban vacations with cash from home equity loans. It's the freedom to eat and drink anything you want so your last 20 years on the planet can be spent coughing up half your income to hospitals and drug companies. Then again, it's also the freedom to move from one place in this vast land to another without much fear of being kidnapped and beheaded on video.

We have all these wonderful freedoms, certainly the freedom to either self-actualize or self-destruct, to practice yoga, karate, or 40oz curls, because ours is a very orderly society. The government's relative monopoly on violence gives us that order and freedom. Shit, 8 Mile is a damn sight more orderly than Baghdad. Ain't nobody going to drive a carbomb up in you while trying to score a kabob or crackrock in the hood.

So hubristic is this administration, that after Saddam's statues fell, President Bush and his crew figured the Iraqis would dance in the streets for a few days, and then a working democracy would just emerge, since you know, democracy is better than tyranny. That makes sense, right? Since democracy is better than tyranny, if you cut a tyrant loose from the nation he has terrorized for 30 years, then something better just has to emerge in the vacuum, right? People just forget about being controlled and watching their children dunked into vats of acid by government officials and wipe away those scars and fears and inhibitions the moment the tyrant is gone. Right? Abused children are always more clearheaded and sane once they leave home, and almost never carry those issues with them to the grave.

Well, I guess no one in The White House chewed on these things, and obviously no one in the White House had read Hobbes, or Conrad, Rushdie, Kipling, or Mill. Why read all that high-minded wordy claptrap when it's easier just to rely on cold political expedience. Pres. Bush and company also used Iraq as a test lab for some serious social experimenting. Sorry Iraq, America like a good guinea pig, it's in our ad-hoc culture. Let's just see what happens if we remove all order in a broken land and wait for the natives to take over. This'll make a good documentary for PBS. To the Administration's surprise, it turns out democracy needs security to emerge. Who woulda thunk it?

Amazingly enough, millions of dedicated Iraqis are working with everything they have to build a just society, the first Arab democracy. They have taken Administration pronouncements more seriously than the Administration itself has taken them. Somehow, some way, I still think a good Iraq will emerge, because there are enough Iraqis willing to die for that. However, lets all agree, now and forever, that some honest and serious post-war planning would have made the transition from tyranny to democracy many thousands of lives easier to swallow.

- k

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Cultural Geography

The neighbors are hosting a campout in their backyard. There are three family-sized tents, a fire-pit, two 30ft clothes lines full of towels and swim trunks, and a dozen homo sapiens of some sort or another all milling about on a plot of land no more than a quarter-acre. Being that we're in southeastern Michigan, or southcentral, or mid-Michigan, depending on your preference and orientation, there are a dozen good campgrounds and state parks within a 30-minute drive from my neighbor's back yard. When I hear the neighborly drunken yelping when I'm trying to render my freakin' robots for my freakin' cartoon, it makes me grind my teeth a bit. Six kids coming to my front door three times a day to ask for pool access is something else entirely. Sure, use the pool. It's summer, and ye are too young to understand maintenance costs and whatnot, and I can't blame the little ones if the parents and uncles and lackeys are too wasted to drive your loud souls on over to Goldenrod Beach ...approximately four miles from here as the crow flies.

I would rather the tamp down their evening singalongs, mainly because acoustic Toby Keith does as much for me as the electrified version, which is to say conjures an interesting mix of pity and rage. The backyard campfires are kinda neat in an urban renewal way. Down a bit south in the D, folks clear space and clear out crackheads by burning down abandoned houses. Thing is, the wind has been blowing from the southwest lately, and my neighbors and their jamboree are due west to my dwelling, so not only can I hear the country music and redneck rock rituals whenever I'm not blaring something myself, but the campfire smoke wafts through my place as well. The meager of heart among you would say call the cops or pitch an IED into the campfire, but I'm not a cruel man, not yet anyway. The kids need some fun during the summer, and I need to accommodate. It's that simple. I gotta grin and bear it for the kids, who, by the sound of things, have been having a blast.

My neighbors are decent people. They stay out of jail and reproduce prodigiously. If not for the weed smoke I smell from their property and fondness for New Country and David Allen Coe songs, I'd have these folks pegged as strict Southern Baptists, a strange little discipline that tried to shape me between the ages of four and eight, until I told my Sunday School teacher that her ideas were bullshit and flipped her off. Guess she wasn't fond of being challenged on her facts, nor did she seem to have a hankering for debate, because she knocked me off my chair with the back of her hand before I could pull the offending finger back into my fist. Ye vengeance is mighty when stirred. Maybe the wiccan crowd ought to pay heed and come around.

The kids do as they're told, and ask nicely when they want to swim in the pool or shoot some hoops into the driveway basket. Kirby, the nine-year-old leader of the gaggle, has a well developed curiosity about aquatic life, animals in general, and girls. To my way of thinking, if he gets out of here in one piece, he has a good shot.... I feel the same way.

David Brooks penned a nice column about the growing study of Cultural Geography. This embryonic discipline seeks to understand how and why groups of people cluster themselves in given spots. It's like gerrymandering squared. Think San Francisco-- the vegan uber-liberal pot smoking tekkie capital of America, or right here in Flint, MI, the bitter blue-collar reactionary ride-the-ATV across the neighbor's lawn while Busch-drunk captial of the Midwest. My neighbors don't give a crap about Conrad or Fellini, but you know they can recite Judge Judy's best lines, and they can change a tire in under five minutes. They'd also take you in if your house burned down, even if they were the ones who set matchlight to gas.

I've grown weary of being surrounded by people whose views are antagonistic to mine. Here in Flint, I'm so deep into the minority in matters of economic philosophy and religion, that I might as well be a little green man with a death ray when I toss forth ideas to strangers in a tavern, or old friends anywhere else in the area. Being agnostic alone separates me from 90-something percent of the locals, and being a free-market social liberal pretty much seals me off from everyone else. Sometimes I feel like I've been sent on one of those National Geographic missions where I'm asked to live with the natives in Paupa New Guinea for a year and come back with a detailed report on the native's worshiping and courtship habits. That rubs both ways.

There are about 1000 people who live in the immediate neighborhood, and I can guarantee, by sum of conversations, visible lawn ornaments (including Cameros and pick-ups for sale), and fealty to Toby Keith that maybe three or four people out of that thousand would feel comfortable in San Francisco, and that's assuming the first stops they made after landing were at the liquor store and coke dealer. Between cultural outposts like SF, Flint, Dallas, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Wyoming, Aspen, and NYC, are thousands of variations of the aforementioned primary colours. Most people are content where they are, well, as content as most folks can be. We live in a restless society no matter where we hang our hat, and about the only things that make us feel at ease is a little good lovin' and being around people who think like you do.

The information age is geographically clustering us by education, religious preferences, and cultural tastes. Think about how music has splintered in the last 50 years into innumerable genres and sub-genres, and extrapolate that to other areas of human production and consumption and you get my point. I read certain things, and listen to certain things, and associate with certain people, and my neighbors do too, yet the only overlap, the only shared experience we have has to do with physical proximity. But that's an anomaly, for as far as I know, I'm the only person in the county to return to the Midwest after a lengthy stint in California, and for sure, I will feel like ET boarding the spaceship when I drop a trailer full of my gear onto the hitch of my jeep and point it west for the voyage home, mission completed.

- k

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The Government We Deserve

Oil is bobbing ~$64 a barrel and Bush has just signed an energy bill that is rife with pork for oil companies awash in high profits and slim towards methods that will wean our nation off from foreign energy sources. Talking heads of every stripe have justifiably ripped this bill as stagnant partisan nonsense, something that rewards cronies and leaves Americans vulnerable to energy shocks in the long term. However, one cannot blame the snake for being a snake. Bush is a evangelical oilman, so everyone should have seen this coming from the mountain-top. Meanwhile, we Americans, who validate ourselves by consuming as much as possible, feel better when our leaders tell us our grotesque habits are just fine. Once-American virtues such as saving and prudence have gone out the window with the hearty encouragement of Bush and his claque of petro-executives.

Our politicians love to talk up American patriotism. Yet I find it odd that one who borrows against their home equity to buy a Hummer for a 70-mile-a-day commute can be considered a patriot simply because he puts a magnetic "Support our Troops" sticker on his car. The borrowing reduces personal savings, which increases the trade deficit, which forces the U.S to depend on Chinese foreign investment more. The Hummer consumes ungodly amounts of fuel, a large percentage of which is produced in Saudi Arabia, a country whose largest export after oil is fanatical Muslim terrorism. This doesn't seem very patriotic to me. - Dr. Nate

Speaking of overseas fanaticism....

In Iraq, democracy-minded US and Iraqi forces are locked into a struggle with Baathist and Jihadist elements, and to this point, the results seem painfully close to a stalemate. Fanaticism of the suicidal kind is a force multiplier. Though the number of active insurgents in Iraq and Syria is somewhere between 15 and 30k, they strike fear into the average Iraqi civilian who knows that in a country without security, those who are most ready to kill pose the most danger. Again, freedom can not be won without security. I'm not sure what it is about that last sentence that confounds Bush and his strategy team, but trying to produce a good outcome in Iraq with a paucity of forces in the face of a metastasizing insurgency and a population on the fence bodes ill for the democracy experiment there.

The occupation of Iraq has played equally as tragedy and farce. There is no accountability in the Administration, and no commiserate revulsion and demand for change from the electorate-- many of whom have less than kind thoughts about Arabs anyway, and like our leader do not think an Arab life if worth even a tenth of an American one. That the occupation is being mismanaged should not surprise anyone. Bush has never shown himself to be a good manager / administration, not as a frat boy, not as an oilman perched atop positions gained through nepotism, and not as a politician. He can produce clear and simple agenda's and hire folks to work them through. Nor is Bush a student of military history, including previous US and European engagements overseas. Growing up with major money and minor intellect, Bush has shunned traveling, foreign languages, and understanding any culture or subculture beyond his circle of Texan elites. Thus his worldview is not complex nor imaginative enough to envision failure in Iraq, because it is simply the shining Americans versus them evil-doing darkies. Bush's yes-men tell him everything will be okay, and that's good enough. Many American people have known for years that Bush is ignorant of foreign affairs, and the ones who don't know any better are Bush's biggest supports. Score another point for our crumbling public education system. Bush talks tough, and he seems sincere. That's good enough for the electorate.

Bush is also giving a nod and succor to 'intelligent design' folks who seek to drive evolution out of academia. Though I doubt that there are enough backwards thinking people in important places to send us into another intellectual dark age, I have to restate, again for the record, that fanatical religion of any stripe has always bode ill for the objective pursuit of truth and scientific work in general.

From SFGate:

Intelligent design has been gaining political support in school districts in several states, but the vast majority of the nation's scientists, starting with the president of the National Academy of Sciences, says intelligent design is not even worthy of being compared to the theory of evolution on a scientific level.

"The president and most people in this country don't understand how science works," said Lindberg, chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology and curator for the UC Museum of Paleontology, which created a Web site, evolution.berkeley.edu, to help teachers fend off the attacks of evolutionary challengers.

Most people don't have the foggiest idea what they're putting into their bodies, or what their kids are putting into other peoples bodies, let alone what our elected leaders are trying to pull out from our pockets. To presume that we were made in the image of an omnipotent being who carefully guides us through life is arrogance to the cusp of insanity...but you know if enough people do it, it can't be wrong, right? Bush has made no secret that he is an evangelical Christian who believes in 'a creator' and thus believes in creationism, or intelligent design, as folks now call it. Judging by the number of abandoned bowling alleys I've seen converted into mega-churches, most Americans support that mindset. Why not, if your life is bloated and trite here on Earth, might as well employ a requisite number of waking hours securing membership into an egalitarian afterlife...where everlasting comfort rests only on one's sincerity in proclaiming an ethereal master of everything.

Whether it is the revival of creationism, Iraq, global warming, or an energy bill that fattens oil companies and funnels billions to hostile regimes while prodding us to continue our obscene levels of consumption, most Americans either support the Bush agenda, or are too busy in the Wal-Marts and casinos to give a rat's ass either way.

In this space, I've ripped the Bush administration on more issues and in more variations than I can possibly name right now. One thing I never said, was that Bush Co. were illegitimate holders of the throne. Even if Gore had won Florida after a recount, it's moot because our Supreme Court can put an end to recall madness, and we the people give it power to do so. We the people put this monstrosity into office. We took a look at the alternatives and decided that a ridiculously narrow-minded, spoiled, and uniformly average Texan rich kid was the man to lead the most powerful nation in the world. That's why this country is so ridiculed overseas. We have everything and we're f**king it up on just about every level:

The act of our leaders putting their hands over their ears going "LALALALA" to these grave problems is really the apathy of the US population crystalized. We, the people, are really who is responsible. No matter who is in power, there is always this voice of America that denies any responsibility of what our governement is doing, which must sound pretty retarded to the rest of the world, particularly in countries where people aren't allowed to elect their government officials. We as a nation are spoiled brats with very little concept of what our excesses really cost. - Matty The Gent

The issues that will bring about our demise are up for all to see, and we ARE empowered to do something about it, but alas in a land of fad diets and interest-only mortgages, the majority of Americans simply have no stomach for doing something that is both difficult and requires the virtue of deferred gratification. India and China have no problem with deferred gratification, and that's just one reason that, with all things on their current trajectory, they will be kicking our collective asses within 30 years. See, a representative democracy fails when the masses plod gleefully in their ignorance and sloth. In other words, it is what it is.

Or as Lou Reed once put it: You're gonna reap just what you sow.

- k

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03aug05

Hot Heat and Conrad's Rules

August: Late summer already. WTF? When I was in SanFran, Summer in the calendar sense meant nothing because any given day of the year might bring a daytime high of 68°. Here in the Midwest it means a great deal because unlike the California Coast wintertime 'round these parts lets you know exactly what you're dealing with, because it doesn't reach 60-anything in January in Detroit, bro.

I'm a little bitter that all these hot gorgeous days are flying by one after another while I spend 80-90 percent of these daylight hours plugging away on my cursed animation projects. Okay cursed is not right word because if I wasn't really into it I wouldn't be doing it. Ye pick your own battles and do the best ye can with the fallout.

My humor lately has been such that I'm re-reading Heart of Darkness for a chuckle. The erudite among you ought to cringe at that, and sometimes I do too, but laughter is where you find it, and there is something about Conrad's descriptions of the folly and offhanded brutality of Victorian-era colonialism that draws the guffaws out from me. Sometimes my favorite colour is rue. Much of colonialism was totally rotten, but what did we know? The developed countries needed raw resources and if'n we could tame the natives in the process, so much the better. The results are posted for all to see: Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, De Clerk, Congo, Amin, Hussien, Nasser, Khomeini, Bin Laden.... India and South Korea have turned out okay, but still.

It's usually hot as hell around the Middle East and Africa, unless you're perched atop a very high mountain, or inside an air-conditioned palace. I once spent an April in Bahrain, when the average daily temp shoots up 20° from the first through the 30th. That requires adjustment. And fuel for fans. Iraqis are being told to adjust, but they have no fuel to keep themselves cool. That's okay though because they have democratic aspirations to keep their sweat glands puckered and dry. They give us music, good food, literature, the cradle of civilization, and fragrance, least we can do is give security and fuel for fans when we take over their country.

There is an unspoken assumption among us Western Developed types that Arabs can deal with the heat better than us, so in the case of Iraq, why do they bitch about their fuel-for-cooling issues? I mean, since they're, you know, swarthy people of the sand and whatnot, what's keeping them from rebuilding their country amidst 120° heat and non-stop carbombs and sniper fire? This is what our policy makers were thinking. At this point I'd rather think my leaders were simple bigots than dangerous idiots, though those two words share many properties beyond rhyming with one another.

Conrad would've chuckled sourly if he were around to witness our adventures in Iraq. How disrespectful is our government that we invade and take over a country and yet will not commit the resources to secure that country? Security is the first and most important task of a functioning government, but when our light and mobile Yankee-blitzkrieg tore down Saddam's statues, we gave not a thought to actually securing the country cept the Oil Ministry. Let chaos reign for a spell, cause Rumsfeld says Democracy is messy-- that's what he called the loot-fest immediately following 30 years of tyrannical rule, implying that rampaging Iraqis looted with full understandings of due process and habeas corpus...divined to them the moment Saddam was ousted from power. Rumsfeld was a successful Company Man, so he surely knew that neither security nor a democratic government could emerge from a vacuum. Yet we still tore apart every level of the Baath party and all components of the former Iraqi military and police force, and replaced all that with an occupation force three-times too small. We kind of spit in the face of these people...who are sadly used to this kind of thing.

When Conrad was writing his best stuff, a game of secure-the-wealth was being played across the third world-- Africa, South Asia, Middle East, etc. by the first world-- England, France, USA, Germany, Japan, etc. Globalization was in motion and smart people predicted that we were at the end of history. All the major powers got along, and in the process of securing our gold, ivory, oil, and cheap labor, we'd do the right thing and bring Civilization and Christianity to them darkies strewn about all those southern places. Of course you'd need to shoot the natives that needed shooting, and rape the women that needed raping, but as Conrad (and Kipling, and later Naipaul) reminded us, civilizing whole continents while stealing their wealth was delicate business. England never sent too many troops to their conquered lands...only enough to get what they wanted. Security and democracy were afterthought then, as they seem to be now.

We know how that all turned out. Colonialism and the global market economy gave rise to unstable movements such as the Anarchists, and those non-state instabilities eventual graduated to World War I. To spell it out, The Anarchists and The Jihadists, both for vision and purpose, tie the knot nicely. When we stormed the gates in March 2k3 I really thought we were operating on a 'lessons-of-history' learned mindset, but how can I expect that from a leader and electorate who are functionally ignorant of history?

Two and a half years on we still wait for Iraq to figure out how to build a sturdy institution out of sand. That in the end Iraq may succeed should not make us feel better about ourselves. Bush decided long ago to fight the War on Terror in Iraq. WMD concerns were secondary, and Democracy concerns were good copy of course, after the WMD excuse fell apart, but again, we wanted to kill'em all on their own turf. The Sun Tzu in me says bravo decision. It is better to fight on captured territory while building strength and war-infrastructure on the home turf proper. Yet the humanist in me weeps because no matter the outcome, we've shown without a doubt that we consider less prosperous sections of civilized earth nothing more than chattel roaming atop precious resources.

- k

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