marginaliawalker

Welcome to the Shitshow: Blogging Tales of the Cocktail

2010-07-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

I traveled an obnoxious amount, showing up at Sea-Tac at 9:30 am and getting into NOLA at 8:30 pm, and I ate very little (two bags of peanuts and a chocolate donut), then found myself in 90+ degrees with obnoxious southern humidity. Here are my curt initial observations:
- Fucking neon. Holy shit, really? And classic rock cover bands in every bar on every block?
- In between the classic rock cover band bars are strips clubs. Lots of them. Wait...
- And lots of alcohol and no open container laws...
- This place, at least Bourbon street, reminds me of a hybrid of Amsterdam and Vegas meets some caricature of a Creole port town. I can't decide if I love or hate it.

I'm exhausted already and back at the hotel rallying with some water and bourbon after realizing that the peripheral moments in Tales are filled with VIP-who-you-know-kinda parties. Rather than press my luck, I'm going to go see what kind of trouble I can get into...maybe with that gang from Houston's Anvil Bar. They seemed...promising. More to come.

Tom Waits MxMo

2010-05-25T00:39:00.000-07:00

Jesus. What to say? I've been listening to Tom Waits non-stop since Andrew posted this month's theme. Here's where I'll start: usually these posts come from the 1022 South blog, but given my relationship to Tom Waits I'm not very comfortable posting them on the biz blog.

Go here to see what Andrew has to say about this month. After that, if you don't own any Tom Waits, beg, borrow or steal any number of albums (I recommend you start with Rain Dogs).

Here's my Tom Waits story. I spent my formative years becoming friends with the asshole (in the best possible way) Jason Quackenbush (J to his friends...)over at Wet Asphalt. He proselytized about many things over the years including Tom Waits, Sun City Girls, David Bowie, and The Cure, Line 6 amps, David Foster Wallace and Anthony Burgess. Before I go any further, I should note that I think this guy is brilliant. I'm sure he's not the smartest person I've ever met, but he's definitely top 5. He's eccentric, occasionally mean but usually very charming, and fixates on strange things probably for the sake of fixating on strange things. I listened to Tom Waits once or twice on his recommendation, it didn't grab and I figured it was another one of his...fixations.

When Andrew posted this months theme, I immediately thought of J. I started listening to Rain Dogs and was immediately sucked in. What I previously mocked as sea chanties or circus music all of the sudden resonated with me. Ya, I know...

So, the reason I write about J is that my memories of him and Tom Waits are all centered around a six month period when I lived in a bat-shit crazy house in the woods across the "bay" from Evergreen State College. The house was all wrong angles and doorways slightly askew or just a little too small. It was nestled in an area of dense greenbelt, I guess you could say (Most would say woods as it was kinda rural). J used to drive down from Sea-Tac (his apartment there is a Tom Waits story in and of itself) and spend the weekend. We would proceed to eat, smoke, or drink all of the drugs I had stock piled, then we would sit in the dark on the edge of the woods and smoke cigarettes and drink beers all night. We were young, felt invincible, and lord knows we were full of piss and vinegar. This challenge made me think of those many, many nights.

Without further ado, here are the god-damned cocktails:

Gun Street Girl
1.5 oz Rittenhouse 100 proof rye
.75 oz Dolin Italian vermouth
2 bar spoons maraschino liqueur
3 dashes cardamom tincture
3 dashes grains of paradise tincture
Combine ingredients over ice, stir, then strain into chilled coupe. Finish with fancy cherry.

This is a riff on the HR 1022. I'm much happier about this one...

And because I can't submit just one cocktail...

Tango Till They're Sore
1 oz Leblon cachaca
.75 oz yerba mate infusion*
.5 oz Licor 43
.5 oz lime juice
serrano pepper
cayenne pepper

Slice a smallish serrano wheel, drop into bottom of mixing glass, and press once with muddler. Combine remaining ingredients, give a vigorous, sexy shake, then double strain into chilled coupe. Top with shake of cayenne.

* 1 cup of yerba mate per 750 ml of 151 NGA. Let rest for 8-10 hours, then double strain.

Something about this month's theme has left me a bit sad. Still, it was fun...

Mad guardian of my empty room

2010-05-15T04:32:00.001-07:00

Yelp for customers. That shit is going to happen. Get ready, fatty, because your "sassy", fickle-ness that you think is flirty and totally cosmopolitan (I'm totally a Samantha...) is going up on a website somewhere. Then everyone in the world will know what an aqua vit-inspired, fishy-brined vagina you are and have. Or, they'll just know doods for what they are: closet rapists, predators, and bad tippers.

THE DAY OF RECKONING IS COMING.

Cocktails

2010-05-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

Here's why I'm good at what I do:

Strawberry drink
1.5 Sotol
.5 tarragon syrup
.5 lemon juice
barspoon balsamic reduction
10 black peppercorns
1 strawberry

Muddle peppercorns with srawberry. Add remaining ingredients and ice, shake vigorously, then double strain into chilled cocktail glass.

Life's Rich Pageantry III

2010-04-30T12:28:00.001-07:00

Here is the email and the attached letter for your reading enjoyment:

Hi Dawn. I meditated for days and nights over sending this memo to you. However, one of your employees threatened me the night of this incident after I paid for my drink and was getting up from my table to leave. We were alone on the outside patio. Cory said very clearly and emphatically I should “Be careful what I say, and who I say it to when I am at 1022.” Cory had just refused to serve me a second beverage, and asked me to leave the premises. My account of the entire experience is in the attached memo, from my first arrival until I was asked to pay up and get out by Cory. You and your partner have been so gracious to me; I wanted to provide you the opportunity to respond to this at a personal level, should you so choose. The attorney generals office has already provided me guidance, should I choose to pursue further action grounded in what I see as a clear case of discrimination.

Here is the attached letter:

Subject: MFR 1022 South J April 18, 2010
Incident: Refusal of Service on April 16, 2010
Where: 1022 South J, Tacoma WA 98405, 253-627-8588, 1022south@gmail.com
Agent: General Manager – Chris Langston; bartender known as Cory
The following two excerpts are from the RCW and refer to incidents where a company has the right and obligation to refuse service to a patron who appears to be under the influence of alcohol or is otherwise suffering behavioral or motor-sensory impairment:
[Begin Quote 1] WAC 480-30-451

Refusal of service.
(1) A company may refuse service to a person when:

(a) In the company's judgment, providing the service would be hazardous, unsafe, or dangerous to persons or property;

(b) In the company's judgment, driveways or roads are improperly constructed or maintained, do not have adequate turn arounds, or have other unsafe conditions;

(c) The customer has an outstanding amount due to the company;

(d) The customer refuses to allow company personnel, drivers, agents, or representatives access to baggage or other materials prior to it being loaded in or on the vehicle;

(e) The customer appears to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol; or…” [End of Quote 1]
[Begin Quote 2] WAC 314-11-035 What are the rules regarding sales to apparently intoxicated persons? Per RCW 66.44.200, licensees or employees may not supply liquor to any person apparently under the influence of liquor, or allow an apparently intoxicated person to possess or consume liquor on the licensed premises. [End Quote 2]

On the night of April 16, 2010, I stopped in to have a cocktail at a local restaurant in Tacoma’s hilltop district. It was Friday, somewhere shortly after 11pm. I really was not watching the clock very closely, as it was a beautiful spring night, and I came to enjoy the outdoor seating and have one of the clubs delicious cold-pressed coffee drinks. I took a patio seat under a large umbrella table near the sidewalk, and smoked a cigarette. I exchanged brief conversations with several of the regular patrons as they came and left the bar, going about their evening enjoyments. It seemed like a longer time than usual went by before someone came to take my order, but eventually Cory [sic?] who works regularly as a bartender and table server came out, said hello, and provided me a drink menu. After taking my drink order, he returned shortly and asked me how I was doing.
I responded that I was doing great, commented on how beautiful the night was, and jokingly said I was “tripping” an expression from the sixties that I invoke regularly to get a smile out of people. Cory seemed to appreciate my joke at the time. I was, in fact, quite sober and had not consumed any alcoholic beverages since the previous day. I never drink to excess, and do not engage in any illegal activities of any sort, including the recreational ingestion of drugs or so-called psychotropic or entheogenic plant products.
I spent the next twenty minutes or so enjoying my cocktail, talking with friends including a professional bartender from the Crown Bar & Grill, and watching the ever changing sky and surroundings. Cory returned to check on my drink and I said I was fine. He returned into the bar, saying he would check on me later. No problem. Another short period of time passed, and an acquaintance of mine came out to share a cigarette and we talked about her education progress, and my continuing job search. On her way back into the bar, she said she would inform Cory that I was ready for another drink. She is a bartender also, and I am sure she would never have suggested this if she thought I was behaving in a manner that would indicated I was overly intoxicated, or otherwise “impaired.”
When Cory returned in a few minutes, he was very aggressive and rude in his behavior. He said that the bar could no longer serve me, and asked me to vacate the premises. I was shocked, as I have been a regular at 1022 South J for over a year; since the day they opened almost, and even share drinks and chat at times with the funding owner and his wife Dawn, two charming people. I believe he is a retired physician, and do not recall his name. They are always overly gracious and expressive toward me and my guests and have treated us to drinks on various occasions.
Cory’s explanation for his uncharacteristically odd behavior was that the bar could not serve someone who was “tripping on shrooms.” How he came to this conclusion, I have no idea. I do not “trip” on anything. I do not encourage or suggest to others that they should “trip” either, and in fact I discourage this. I have on many occasions heard Cory express his rather adamant disdain for people who discuss the use of marijuana, mescaline, psilocin and other mild intoxicants that do not suit his frame of reference for legitimacy. Patrons of this unique bar often suggest that Anise is a mild narcotic like intoxicant of some kind, and the staff promotes and takes pride in their infusions stock and will happily pour it for you all night, at some cost. I am often interrogated in friendly exchanges with people seeking my scholastic knowledge in the area. I worked hard to obtain my professional degrees, and am proud to share what I know, or presume to know with anyone, at most any time.
I found the RCW subsections that appear to address a bartender’s legitimate right and sometimes their obligation to refuse service to patrons under specific situations or conditions. I am, however, not an attorney.
I am an expert on certain local mycorrhizal fungi and many other microbial life forms, and am happy to share my knowledge with others. I have attended 5 universities, hold two completed degrees, several professional certificates, and am a licensed health care professional in this state. My master’s thesis was based on “mushroom science,” and published last fall. I am certain Cory has no training medically or otherwise that would permit him to evaluate whether or not anyone in his presence has consumed “shrooms” or any other psychotropic substance, except that this bar serves a least half a dozen home brewed infusions including everything from Cayenne pepper to Anise, a drink of legend from world history, reputed to be a mild narcotic or euphoric of some sort, when processed and ingested properly. I do not drink it – too expensive, and it tastes odd to me. Euphoria? Nope, sorry, nada.
I explained to Cory that the term I selected was strictly meant to entertain him, and asked for my check when he began becoming more belligerent and defensive in response to my questions and expressions of disbelief. He seemed very agitated. As I was signing my bill for my one drink, Chris Langston, the general manager, came out and quickly made an about face to go back inside his store when he saw that I was leaving. He never spoke to me that evening. I am personally and professionally offended at 1022 South J’s characterization of me as some sort of frivolous user of any kind of food, chemical, or recreational drug, including alcohol and whatever other wild concoctions that this bar prides it’s self on. On a more personal level, I am absolutely dismayed that people, who had once treated me on a casual, friendly, and more or less professional level, would take such an action.
Then I began wondering if I was on the receiving end of some sort of discrimination? This business entity promotes as an alternative life style restaurant and bar, one that caters to the local and visiting homosexual community. I am straight, and make no bones about that. But I have enjoyed the company of most of the patrons, and only occasionally seen people getting out of line due to over consumption.
The purpose of this memo is simply to record my perceptions and thoughts on the incident. On the other hand, I highly resent the feeling growing in me that I was on the short end of some cryptic plan on the part of Cory or the staff to make my return to the bar highly unlikely. It seems odd, as I spend some good change there, and last summer donated a nice industrial fan to them when the temperatures were soaring, and the lounge became really hot and stuffy. I feel I was grossly mistreated by the management and staff of 1022 South J, and can find no rational explanation for being eighty-sixed from the premises. Is this how Rosa Parks felt? Was I the victim of discriminatory actions for joking with someone who took personal offense at my brand of humor? Am I a criminal simply because I am a scholar of cultural and ethnographic beliefs and practices? Around this earth, more human groups practice the use of divinatory plant products than profess to be followers of orthodox western Christ based belief systems. Like it or not, the numbers are there for any one to count. Sanctioned native tribes in the U.S southwest practice the use of indigenous cacti species for this express purpose, and do it legally, at least to my knowledge. I would actually enjoy a review of this discussion from a qualified legal expert, and will freely discuss the events of the night with anyone.
cc:
ernest.jasmin@thenewstribune.com
1022south@gmaiil.com
Et al?
[ed. - signature removed] – Poet & Scientist

Addendum I
RCW 49.60.030
Freedom from discrimination — Declaration of civil rights.

(1) The right to be free from discrimination because of race, creed, color, national origin, sex, honorably discharged veteran or military status, sexual orientation, or the presence of any sensory, mental, or physical disability or the use of a trained dog guide or service animal by a person with a disability is recognized as and declared to be a civil right. This right shall include, but not be limited to:

(a) The right to obtain and hold employment without discrimination;

(b) The right to the full enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges of any place of public resort, accommodation, assemblage, or amusement;

(c) The right to engage in real estate transactions without discrimination, including discrimination against families with children;

(d) The right to engage in credit transactions without discrimination;

(e) The right to engage in insurance transactions or transactions with health maintenance organizations without discrimination: PROVIDED, That a practice which is not unlawful under RCW 48.30.300, 48.44.220, or 48.46.370 does not constitute an unfair practice for the purposes of this subparagraph;

(f) The right to engage in commerce free from any discriminatory boycotts or blacklists. Discriminatory boycotts or blacklists for purposes of this section shall be defined as the formation or execution of any express or implied agreement, understanding, policy or contractual arrangement for economic benefit between any persons which is not specifically authorized by the laws of the United States and which is required or imposed, either directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly, by a foreign government or foreign person in order to restrict, condition, prohibit, or interfere with or in order to exclude any person or persons from any business relationship on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, sex, honorably discharged veteran or military status, sexual orientation, the presence of any sensory, mental, or physical disability, or the use of a trained dog guide or service animal by a person with a disability, or national origin or lawful business relationship: PROVIDED HOWEVER, That nothing herein contained shall prohibit the use of boycotts as authorized by law pertaining to labor disputes and unfair labor practices; and

(g) The right of a mother to breastfeed her child in any place of public resort, accommodation, assemblage, or amusement.

(2) Any person deeming himself or herself injured by any act in violation of this chapter shall have a civil action in a court of competent jurisdiction to enjoin further violations, or to recover the actual damages sustained by the person, or both, together with the cost of suit including reasonable attorneys' fees or any other appropriate remedy authorized by this chapter or the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 as amended, or the Federal Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 (42 U.S.C. Sec. 3601 et seq.).

(3) Except for any unfair practice committed by an employer against an employee or a prospective employee, or any unfair practice in a real estate transaction which is the basis for relief specified in the amendments to RCW 49.60.225 contained in chapter 69, Laws of 1993, any unfair practice prohibited by this chapter which is committed in the course of trade or commerce as defined in the Consumer Protection Act, chapter 19.86 RCW, is, for the purpose of applying that chapter, a matter affecting the public interest, is not reasonable in relation to the development and preservation of business, and is an unfair or deceptive act in trade or commerce.

Life's Rich Pageantry II

2010-04-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't know our regulars, I want to talk about a particular one who took being cut off extremely badly. He is generally sleeveless, comes in and sits at the bar talking quite a bit about hallucinogens and shamanic practices. He also hits on every lady coming in the door. Still, I thought he understood the boundaries at the bar and he was more or less well behaved. The context is that he has an awful reputation around town as being creepy and has been 86'd from a number of establishments including coffee shops and bars. Reasons include inappropriate advances towards women, violence, and homophobia. And he carries a gun.

I've heard all about him. I've taken a rash of shit from other bartenders and bar managers about letting him in the bar. I've defended the guy as being more or less harmless. I've also had conversations with him about not bringing drugs into the bar. So, a couple of weeks ago I'm bartending, Corey is barbacking, and I think John Star is training. It was busy and the regular was sitting outside. Corey went out, took and order, and things seemed to be fine. When Corey checked back, the regular said that he was tripping on mushrooms. This made Corey uncomfortable, he told me that he wanted to refuse service, and I supported that. The regular finished his drink, paid, and left.

Since then, the regular has been in contact with the AG's office and he wrote a letter to the owners. He attached to the AG's letter to the one that he sent to me and the owners. Long story short (it is quite a long letter), he denies ever using any sort of drugs, is offended that someone would say that, and feels like we (the bar staff) are discriminating against him because he is straight. You read that right. He asserts that we cater to gays in town and from abroad and that he was discriminated against because he doesn't fit the lifestyle that we cater to. I cannot convey how insane this is. He definitely doesn't fit the "lifestyle" we cater to because he makes people uncomfortable. Other than that...

O, the Madness

2010-03-06T18:39:00.000-08:00

I thought for a moment about whether I should post this, but then, well, I asked to be taken off of whatever mailing list this was sent to and I am neither a friend nor a colleague. As my dad says, fuck 'em and feed 'em fish heads. So, here we go:

"Dear friends and colleagues,

In celebration of, and to mark the passing from, one way of being into another in my life I have a request. I prefer to be called Kimberly or Kimberly Laura from this point forward. For those that have asked, why the change? I offer the following explanation:

Let me first be clear that this is not because I am in trouble with the law, it is not because I am entering a witness protection program and still, (as far as I know;-) I am not and have yet to be an undercover agent for the FBI.

My full name is Kimberly Laura Michal Malone. All of my parents' seven children have three given names besides our last and we were all called by our second. Honestly, I was relieved by this fact throughout my childhood. Growing up I couldn't stand the name Kimberly or heaven forbid Kimmy! It was just too girly sounding for me. I had two brothers in my immediate line of sight to keep up with for crying out loud and Laura is pretty enough. Well, a while back a friend of many years saw my driver's license and was quite taken aback to find out my name was actually Kimberly. He didn't think it fit me very well, he just couldn't see it. Still, neither could I and now that I was all grown up I couldn't see why I would have to keep it. I started to look into legally dropping it from the record...

Then something funny happened. As I heard it repeated by bank tellers and government agencies over the ensuing months, it hit me. The difference in other people's response to me, depending on their knowledge of my name, was palpable. Its like they were naturally more relaxed when Kimberly was around. Their eyes slightly more open and their mouths were definitely smiling more often. Especially those I was meeting for the first time. In my observation people who called me Kimberly felt much "safer" in my presence, much more at ease than those who were meeting Laura. On top of this, the more I referred to myself as Kimberly within, the more my own ease, acceptance and grace were able to surface.

I've always believed the sound of words and names to be significant. Whether we change to meet them or they mold to meet us is of no consequence in this effect. So, whether I am becoming Kimberly or Kimberly is becoming me I'm gonna go ahead and take it. In the end, as I find my way down my path in this life, I much prefer the world I live in when myself and others feel secure and at ease. I want to do my part to contribute to this at all times, no matter how small the contribution. I am finding that my purpose here is to know exactly what it means to be at home within myself, to always be "safe" in the world and to share that feeling with others at every opportunity. Kimberly fits that life much more for me now than Laura does on its own.

To Growth!

Kimberly"

...

Forthcoming

2010-02-18T01:31:00.000-08:00

I will articulate why Nate and J need to vote for Sarah Palin and whatever runs with her (imagine Beck/Hannity/O'Reilly/Leiberman/Bayh/some kinda monster...) This is posted more to remind me to articulate this later. And to remind me that we've lost and the grand stage of the war is over. All that is left is Stalingrad.

1022's website

2010-02-16T12:17:00.001-08:00

Ya, so it's finally up but of course it's not finished. That's all me. Check it out here.

Exhaustion

2010-02-09T02:43:00.000-08:00

I posted before that I am pestered, harassed, hounded by the powers-that-be about the bar not turning a tidy profit in the first year. I don't need to proselytize about the failure rate for restaurants or small businesses in general. The fact that we have broken even in the first year is a success. Now, we are turning away people on the weekends. Business over the last couple of months has increased by something like 25%. Still, it's not making enough to bring cash into those particular powers. What money we do make gets rolled back into the coffers.

Before I talk about whatever their next step is going to be, indulge me a moment and play the world's smallest violin. There is no drinking culture in Tacoma. The Swiss, Top, and Magoo's kind of sum it up. And you know what, I'll throw places like Tempest in there as well. Get there first with the most. Drink until you're blind, don't be belligerent and they will keep serving you. It's not about what you're drinking, it's about getting it in you, getting fucked up. Here we come trying to change that. If you read this blog, then you know me and you know what we are trying to do. Slow down the process, bring people together, treat each other with respect, promote active, conscientious consumption as much as it is possible. Not to sound too much like a crazy lady, but if you do it right, then the money will take care of itself.

And now here we are. I believe I have done right. I have made compromises, but I sleep well at night (at least regarding how I run a business). I treat and pay my staff well, I preach great service and facilitating the guests experience, and I also promote continuous knowledge and professional growth.

And where here is that the powers-that-be are upset with how the business is run, specifically marketing. What they want is the bar the way it is but run and marketed like the Swiss or Jazzbones or the Westend. They want two-for-one specials, free peanuts and pretzels, and, I don't know, Bud Lite. What I do know they want is more signage. More lights outside. I think they want neon in the windows. They want it marketed like a nightclub or a pizza joint and run like a craft cocktail bar. Or maybe run like a nightclub or pizza joint, I don't know. I suspect all that they really care about is money.

That is so depressing.

The broken judicial system

2010-01-29T14:45:00.000-08:00

I'll post more on this later, but the prosecution of the guy who killed Jared doesn't sound promising. He's been out on his own recognizance, he has a really good lawyer, and it sounds like it won't go to trial. A number of people have expressed concern about sending another young, black man to jail. They say things like it won't bring Jared back and that they don't have any desire for revenge.

This system is broken. It was broken before Jared was killed and it's broken today. The disproportionate number of incarcerated 18-30 year old black men is a problem. The obscene number of people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses is a problem. The lack of prosecution for crimes against women and children is a fucking problem. This system is broken and it can't be fixed. Just like everything else, I suspect we need to look for solutions that are smaller, more personal, and community based.

I am really, really unhappy today.

What Comes Next

2010-01-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

I sat last night at my work talking with a rather anxious Jen current events. It is a strange thing seeing what usually plagues painted all over another person's face. That conversation was fresh on my mind when I read Kunstler's latest. Here are a couple of passages that really jumped out at me:
"The larger underlying reality is that the United States as an entire, integral organism, has got to contract, downscale, and reorganize. The mandates of energy resource reality demand it. We can't maintain our way of life at its current scale and we have to severely rearrange and rebuild the infrastructure of it if we expect to continue being civilized. We have to get the hell out of suburbia, shrink our hypertrophic metroplexes, re-activate our small towns and small cities, reorganize the way we grow our food, phase out the big box retail (and phase in the rehabilitated Main Streets), start making some of our own household goods, and hook up the far-flung reaches of this continental nation with a public transit system probably in the form of railroads. By the way, there are plenty of "jobs" in this process, only not the kind of work we've been used to... sitting in cubicles or assigning tanning booths.
No amount of wishing for techno rescue remedies, or techno-triumphal fantasies, will overcome this basic reality. This is change you have to believe in whether you like it or not. Most of America doesn't like it and doesn't want to think about it and is doing everything possible to prop up the old arrangements. Bailing out the banks is just a lame attempt to keep banking oversized. Bailing out the automobile companies was just a way to avoid the recognition that Happy Motoring will soon be over. Bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was just a way to avoid understanding that suburbia is finished. The "green economy" that so many people idly blather about -- imagining that it will just mean running WalMart by other means than oil -- is actually an economy of awesome stringency. It's nothing like they imagine. It's a world made by hand."

For those wondering what to do, you can start with learning new skills. Learn to mend clothing, cook/garden, fix bicycles, or perform first-aid. More importantly, do acquire these new skills with other people. We are a lazy generation whose inability to stay focused on a single topic for more than a moment has warranted the creation of new disorders. Working with other people will help with our gadfly-esque attention spans but our mutual accountability; additionally, these experiences will be good for community building/reinforcing. Not everyone is going to be good at everything, so don't be discouraged if you don't immediately find skills that resonate with you. Keep looking. As our world gets smaller, there will be plenty of necessary skills.

Two skills that we all need to work on are growing our own food and learning to use firearms. For those of you in apartments, look into container gardening or community gardens. For those of you living in underground bunkers, well...As for guns, we can't let possession and knowledge of firearms be the sole domain of the right. I would much rather know how to use a firearm and never have to than not know when I need to. Additionally, the world changes very quickly. We need to be prepared.

If none of these ideas work for you and you still find yourself tossing and turning at night, go work in a soup kitchen or be a CASA. There are many ways to assuage White Guilt. Don't complain, do something.

Mea Culpa

2010-01-24T04:39:00.000-08:00

I sleep next to women that I don't deserve
They like to hurt my pride, while I work their nerves
-Atmosphere

It's too late and the night's been too long for me to articulate what I want to. So, I will take a brief moment to be a bit emo about my old lady. Click away to avoid this nonsense...

The Sheriff, for all of her myriad and colorful flaws, is the most amazing woman I have ever met. Just when I start to take her for granted, I think about all of the small things. The camping trips, bringing me food at the bar, making dinner, playing in the dirt, comic books and bad movies, taking in stray friends...

At this point (well over 8 years later) it is easy to take for granted that I am sharing my life with a beautiful, talented, fun, obnoxious and bossy woman who is inspired to make the world a better place and filled with love and passion for the people around us (and even me after all of these stinky and sometimes heartbreaking years).

Today she still makes me a better person and, frankly, I'm not sure I deserve her. Kathleen, I love you like nobody's business.

KO

2010-01-22T02:03:00.000-08:00

The Shifter

2010-01-20T10:40:00.000-08:00

People ask me all the time, what do I drink? The honest answer is everything. As much as I like not serving Bud Lite, I enjoy a cold Rainier, Oly, PBR, or High Life. And as much as I nudge and wink at people who scoff at shots, I do them. With probably alarming regularity. Probably more than I drink anything artisanal.
So, here's what I'm drinking tonight: starting with Liquore Strega and a luke-warm, half-full Henry Weinhard's private reserve. Why am I drinking a crappy beer in such a condition? Because I paid for it and it's the last one. One of my roommates, ahem: K, drank the rest. And also, frankly, because I don't care. I'm not squeamish about beer and I spend enough time in "flavor country" that I don't need my beer to be a taste explosion in my mouth. Besides pop-rocks, I probably need few things exploding in my mouth...
I'm drinking the Strega straight because it's tasty. And I'm tired. Yeah, I could break out the bar gear and whip up a tasty cocktail, but then I get to do dishes. And my shoulder is already sore from whipping up tasty cocktails for 6 hours. And I'm tired. And, finally, I like to taste, feel, experience, whatever I am drinking. For instance, up next is a glass of Wild Turkey 101. I want to feel that. The burn, the lurch, the physicality of it. Not always, but at 3 am when I am just off after negotiating screaming, shuffling, intoxicated masses and life's rich pageantry that constantly presents itself in Hilltop, I want a shot and a beer and I want to feel it.
To circuitously get the meat of the question, here's what I drink: sidecars, sazeracs, and negronis. I seriously love these cocktails when done right. They all help me get a lay of the land. I never order any of the aforementioned cocktails in bars that don't stock the ingredients. Once I've established that the bar has the necessary ingredients, I'll order the appropriate cocktail, each of which is a fantastic measure of the kind of bar you are in. Sidecars, sazeracs, and negronis are all classic cocktails with origins that tickle the tongue of any raconteur. In my humble opinion, these are the types of drinks that bartenders love to make. Simple recipes that need to be executed with care to create cocktails that stop conversations. Cocktails that dance across the palette and challenge bartenders to come up with something better. These are the drinks that are personal classics. You could throw in Old Fashions or martinis, but really, why? Only to be disappointed...?
Anyway, here's me after a long night. I don't actually have black eyes, but I might as well. I'm dog-tired and not wanting to mix much of anything at this point. That's why it's shots and beers...

ED. This is reposted as I'm taking down the more personal items from the 1022 South blog.

Dear Hearts

2010-01-17T04:27:00.000-08:00

With a big sigh I must write that I'm moving my more "personal" aspects of the 1022 blog here. With that said, holy shit here we go (I don't speak for 1022 or any organization or persons otherwise associated with me, btw), so I cut my barback loose early tonight(around midnight). Of course a total shit-show made a grande appearance. It was kind of awesome in its douchey-ness; a group of 6 mas o menos middle aged women who were getting housed at Tempest came in just before last call. Now, I have to say (again) that I don't want to run that place. I don't want to be people's last stop on their way home when they've already had too much. It's not good for the community and it's not good for me. I can't live with that.

So. We take inebriation seriously. Back to the lecture at hand, these women ( I originally wrote something else...)rolled in with that air of privilege that I've come to expect from the Gig Harbor/UP set. The bar filled up in a matter of minutes and I ended up cutting off one of their party because, well, she seemed really drunk. I half-believed they all were, but for the most part they were holding their shit together. As it turns out, the one with two lazy eyes and a wobble while she sits had only two drinks (I'm a bit...skeptical), and the entire table worked themselves into a fit because I would not serve her. Then, one of he "sober" women returned her cocktail because it apparently wasn't enough like a "lavender martini" that one of my other bartenders had made at some indeterminate point. At this point she conveyed how offended she was that I cut-off one of her party. She expressed something about understanding because she was a small business owner but...whatever. I made it clear that I was just doing my job; an explanation that didn't satisfied her.

To step back for a moment, when she returned her drink and groused about her friend that I wouldn't serve, it was close to 1:30 in the morning. Just so this context is crystal-fucking-clear.

Long story short, I had my ass handed to me tonight and what was an otherwise fun night was kinda, no really, pissed on by some really dumb, old white women. Their expectations when they came in were...discouraging.

Ugh, of course a great week and weekend had to go this way. Again, ugh.

Fun with maps

2009-12-13T21:38:00.000-08:00

Glenn Beck and The Culture of Make Believe

2009-12-06T02:04:00.001-08:00

Good Ole Glenn's show tonight was titled "Time to be Heard." Guess who he is giving a forum this evening? If you guessed conservative black Americans, then you get a ding-ding. After all, who is a bigger friend of black America than Glenn Motherfucking Beck. Find it and watch it, this shit is gold.

My plan is to try to convince everyone that if 2012 sees Palin/Beck v Obama/Biden, that we should all vote for Palin/Beck. Nevermind my feelings about the Obama administration, if Palin and Beck (or really either one) end up atop a major party ticket, then everything is already lost. At that point, we will be better served to facilitate the endgame than to continue participating.

Just sayin'.

Happy and all of that

2009-11-27T01:38:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking all night, what would Jared do? We had this same thing weeks ago with the "what would Janice do?" How would they deal with their own tragedies? I can't speak to what Janice would say, but I know Jared would tell me to get fucked and not worry about what he would do and I should do whatever I want to. And I guess that is what Jared would do... And probably Janice, at least in spirit. Shitty pun. Too soon. Ya, probably.

I missed my brother a lot tonight, but I was comforted by the (somewhat) unexpected attendance of Nate and Hope, and the baby Carmela. The little Mellow Yellow is the only small ape that I like at this point, and I gotta admit that I kinda like her (I'd lay down in traffic for that little worm...)

Holy shit, the Doctors have given me heart worms...

You know, this holiday sucked a lot in a lot of ways; but if it was going to suck, I can't imagine better people to have a sad holiday with. Thanks all. Seriously. I don't hold it together without you. Thanks for everything.

2009-11-15T18:40:00.001-08:00

"Jared left us last night for what I hope is a land of natural beauty, where he can hike, bike, swim, play music, surf, and laugh with Jen and others who've gone before him. My heart is broken - Jared was an awesome and loving son, and a good friend to me, to Devin, & to half the world, it seems. He loved life, he loved people, he loved family, and he especially loved Lynsey - life will never be the same without him. It was a priviledge to be his Mom, and know his friends, and to have shared 29 years of his life with him.
Thank you to all for loving him, and loving us - it's been a terrible and an awesome time, we couldn't survive this loss without your love & support.

Chris

We plan to have an informal memorial for the family, probably between Thanksgiving & Christmas. Next Summer we plan to have a large party to celebrate Jared's life and loves, here in the yard, with a band. We'll let everyone know as plans develop."

2009-11-14T21:44:00.001-08:00

"Jared passed peacefully this evening. Today, as every day, he was surrounded by those who loved him.

Words cannot express how much I loved him, and how much I will miss him.

Thank you all for your love, prayers and holding.

Take care, Greg"

2009-11-14T03:22:00.000-08:00

"Jared rested quietly as many friends and family came to sit with him and remember the ways their lives have been touched by knowing and loving him.

It's been wonderful to see everyone during these last weeks and it's been a window into Jared's life I might otherwise not have seen. Stories told, a gentle touch on his arm, a quiet tear, a whispered word in his ear - the tender gestures of love, respect and sadness that often only show themselves during a time such as this.

I have deeply appreciated this time with Jared and those who love him.

Take care, Greg"

2009-11-13T01:03:00.000-08:00

"This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write. Jared's struggles will soon be over - he's not expected to live through the weekend. Greg & I are very proud of the young man he became, and feel honored to have known him for 29 years, and to have been so close to him and so much a part of his life, as parents, and then as friends. It's been an awesome thing to see the deep relationships he's formed with so many. It's been awesome to see him and Devin be such close brothers and friends, and so close to both of us and our spouses, when so many families are torn apart. He loved life, & lived it with gusto. And he loved people, and wanted them to gather together - what an honor for us to be loved and supported by all of you, and to see the caliber of people he gathered around himself. Life is just unfair. We love Jared with all our hearts, and we know he knows that, and knows how much you all loved him, and how proud we all are of him. It's hard to let him go, but unfair to try to keep him here. He's fought a difficult battle, and it's been against him all the way. I hope he'll be able to relax now, and enjoy his next journey, free of the hurts from this world. I envision him taking the boat to the Summer Country - green lands, snowy mountains, and blue oceans that go on forever, surfing and hiking and laughing and playing music (& probably drinking beers). Many thanks for all your love & support."

It wasn't signed, but I'm assuming from what I've heard that this is from Chris.

I don't know what to say or feel.

2009-11-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

"Jared has been off all sedatives and pain meds since 7am, but he stopped responding to Neuro tests a couple days ago. His eyes are open, but fixed. His pupils sometimes dialate, sometimes not - depends on the time, I guess, and sometimes he blinks a little bit. He apparently feels no pain, and isn't fighting the breathing machine. Today he has a fever - about 101, despite being on antibiotics. They decided against the surgery to clear his lungs - it's too risky, especially with him in this condition - but his stats are ok for now, without it. Very, very bleak. They've spoken to us about Organ donation, and turning off the machines. They say the liklihood of a good outcome - 'good' in this case, meaning waking up, and having some semblance of "normalcy" - is unlikely in the extreme. I talked to Greg & we agreed that Jared wouldn't want that, but he would want a chance, for as long as there IS a chance - and we're not ready to make those kinds of decisions yet. There are too many cases where the "lost cause" patient has ended up recovering for us to give up this soon. We're all really down - as my neice put it, we've tied a big 'ole knot on the end of our rope, and we're just trying to hold on until Jared's ultimate fate declares itself. There is still hope, but these are very dark days...
Chris"

This is the last update from Jared's Care Page. Chris is Jared's mom. We should know more early tomorrow morning.

Damn

2009-11-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

Ugh, I think I've finally got the swine flu...

And, my laptop needs a breathalizer. Or the very least the blog needs one.

And Our Heart Breaks

2009-11-10T02:36:00.000-08:00

I met with on old friend tonight. I met with her really for the same reason that I've met with a couple of friends recently, which is to say that I needed someone to lean on. I'll spare you the dramatics and cut to the quick, I'm really depressed I have been intermittently looking for someone or something. I'm really uncomfortable with emotionally vulnerability, so it's been kinda awkward. Yea. What does Jen say? Blah blah blah? Is that it? Whatever that awkward turtle is, insert it forcefully here.

I get drunk and cry by myself. I listen to music or write words that no one ever sees and weep. I don't know how to console Scott or Katy. I don't know the words or the motions. I look at the people I love who are grieving and I've got nothing. My heart goes out, it aches, with the hope that our embrace will be comforting. But it never is. So I sit and observe their pain and they sit and observe mine and in our quiet moments we listen to songs and cry. And, frankly, it sucks.

I wish I could be more articulate than that.

The only thing that I can say is that I can't remember a time when I felt more alone.

Clarification

2009-11-09T11:51:00.001-08:00

I probably need to stop writing in any sort of public forum after work and a few cocktails. I'm going concisely explain what's going on and what I am looking at going forward.

As I think I made clear in the previous post (even if it was the only thing...)that I bluffed my way into my job. I was not qualified. Period. Since getting the keys, I've worked diligently to feel qualified and I feel like I'm finally there.

What I also tried to articulate in the last post was that in the process of pitching my business proposal, I offered what I believed to be a conservatively optimistic estimate of sales figures. The numbers that I worked with were from the Monsoon Room after it had been open a year and well established. While the expenses are about what I thought, the sales have been significantly less. This has led the owner's to become impatient. How impatient? I don't know. I don't know if I'm too up in my head or if I'm seeing some ominous signs for my future at the bar.

Jared was hit by a drunk driver. This bears repeating. Another friend we think was drugged at the bar. Try as we might, drunk driving and date rape are situations that we can't avoid. And, quite the contrary, we facilitate or abet this kind of behavior in the sale of alcohol. It is, as I mentioned, an occupational hazard. I think these are hazards we all strive to avoid, but after doing our due diligence, we avoid looking at the obvious: We send strangers, friends, and family away with maybe one too many drinks virtually every night.

I've mentioned many times how much I work. I knew going in that it was going to be something that required most of my attention, but I really had no idea what I was in for. I don't do anything else. All of my creativity and mental energy goes into the bar. If I'm not working on new product or trying to find more efficient ways to get things done, then I am negotiating personalities or state/local bureaucracies. I get home or have a free day, I am out of gas. I sit on the couch and watch television. Not only is my life passing me by, I'm doing very little with that I am experiencing. Too much of it is lost to a drunken haze in the middle of the night.

Finally, if you're reading this then you probably know me pretty well. You know that I wrestled with how to best apply my resources to make my community, if not the world, a better place. I vacillated between going back to school and opening a bar/restaurant for quite sometime before the 1022 fell in my lap. I justified it in a number of ways, not the least of which was that having a spot for people to come together and enjoy each other's company while enjoying unique cocktails would be a good thing for Tacoma and Hilltop. I still believe that this is the case. I still believe that 1022 in it's current incarnation is good for the neighborhood. I am truly proud of not only the space and my staff, but also of the cocktails and culture of drinking that we promote.

Now that caveats are dispensed with, a 600 sq. ft. craft cocktail lounge in Hilltop (or probably anywhere) is not the lever with which I will move the world. What is this lever? I don't know. I have serious doubts about it involving children. Regardless of whether or not that is where I end up, I need to go back to school. I need to take math classes, a few science classes, then go from there. It has been my intention for a while to go back to school to initially study chemistry, which would dovetail nicely with what I do now if I chose to stay in the field or would lead nicely into an environmental science degree.

I suspect things are going to change very soon.

If I only could make a deal with god...

2009-11-08T04:02:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am again. Nine months ago I was given the keys to 1022 and I gave a long, drunken, rambling account of how that came to be. Now I sit here in the middle of the night ready to give another drunken, rambling account, but this time it's in the shadow of the gallows, so to speak.

To make 1022 happen, I pitched an idea to the owners. In addition to the idea, they asked about numbers. They were clear and articulate that they have invested enough in projects that only break even, that they are ready to make money. And, yes, they have money. Enough to invest in projects...

So, I was pretty sure the project could make money. A little bit, at least. I had crunched the numbers and I thought...What I thought was really pretty irrelevant. Let's look at some facts for a moment, just for review:
- I "ran" the Moo for almost a year, but I really didn't do more than negotiate personalities, make sure the doors opened (and closed) everyday, and placed liquor orders from pre-existing par sheets.
- I wrote recipes and collaborated on a menu or two.
- I was reliable, worked busy shifts, and built up a clientele.

What I really did was be a lead bartender. I didn't do a whole lot more than that. Not because I didn't want to, but because that's all that she gave me for whatever reason. I realistically probably wasn't ready for more than that.

Fast-forward a year or so and I'm standing in front of the owner's of the building and the soon-to-be owners of the 1022 space and I'm bluffing, shucking, and jiving. I'm never dishonest, but I speak with more confidence about everything than is justified; I'm barely a bartender having worked very little high volume and a bit of "craft," if that's what you call what we did at the Moo. I present the numbers from the slower months when the Moo was up-and-going and present them as what we can do. I'd thought I'd factored in the Great Recession with my operating costs, I didn't figure that less people would show up...So, obviously they were into it, they gave me keys and money and here we are.

And here we are. And where we are is that I've felt that shadow of me bluffing myself into a position that I never had any right to be in. I didn't know enough about booze or service or the logistics of running a business to be given the keys to a place. Looking back in it now, it seems laughable. At that point in January, I knew as much about renovating, construction, and the daily grind of running a bar as I knew about elephant proctology. I didn't know how to work a power tool when I agreed to remake the place, much less a number of tools. I didn't know how to manage people, labor (hours worked plus about 20% on top to the government), liquor costs, where to source product, how to deal with vendors, what to do when...You get the idea. I had no idea. The most prominent signifier that I had no idea was that I was clueless about the extent of my ignorance. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have had the balls to bluff. I would've probably still tried (because I'm that kinda guy), but I would've shot my own dick off. It would have failed. Completely.

And now today I find myself staring down the barrel of that grand bluff to make 1022 happen. I told the owners that it could make money quickly. It hasn't. We break even every month. It's a bit disconcerting how close the numbers come. Since we've opened the bar has paid for itself and that's it. We cover operating costs and whatever arises, but no more. We paid for the patio, we pay for whatever, but at the end of the day, it breaks even. It's uncanny...and it's also not good enough. They, the owners, love the bar and are proud of it. They respect the work I've put in to make it happen. At the end of the day, they count beans and 1022 has none. This leaves me, after spending 7 months working an average of 60 hours a week, looking over my shoulder. Breaking even in a brutal economy in a fickle market isn't good enough, the bar needs to make money. If it doesn't, I think I'll either be lop-offed at the head or cut off at the knees. Either way it's an unfortunate truth that leaves me less invested than I was yesterday.

I feel like I should have a picture of my Bitburger and glass of Strega for this last disclosure, but right now I'm far too lazy and tired to get out my camera. Janice's death and Jared's (what do I call it? Devastating injury? Catastrophic? Accident?)...injury has me putting things in perspective. And let's do that for a moment. I designed and orchestrate a great bar. In any market, it's a pretty amazing bar. It does craft and it does homey, neighborhood flavor. It is both elegant and comfortable. It is something that I will be proud of for the rest of my life. And, at the end of the day, it's a bar in a working class neighborhood. We serve booze to people and make them feel good. We create a space where people can come together and in the best of all possible worlds they have a human moment. But, we also have over-service and drunk drivers as an occupational hazard – and for those keeping score, Jared was hit by a drunk driver.

And now I am digressing a fair bit, but I have to wonder about levers and fulcrums. Is this my best place to stand? Is this my best lever? Is this my best fulcrum? Is this the best application of the gifts and privilege afforded to me? To create a place where people come together where the outcome is intoxication and the occasional drunk driving? The occasional date rape? Not to be too melodramatic, but these are the realistic stakes that we work with every night.

I think I've answered my own questions.

For Giggles

2009-11-07T12:19:00.000-08:00

This is pretty fun. Cheered me up when I was stressing about the empty bar last night. Nice to know that old, educated white men aren't really being impacted by the "recession."

Insomnia lost the battle last night as I was finally able to sleep through the night. The price was that I also slept till noon.

Two Things

2009-11-07T03:29:00.000-08:00

So, I guess it's fuck you insomnia. Ya, this shit sucks, eyes burn and now I'm totally exhausted; but whatever, tonight I sleep like the dead.

And this:
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Is this a soundcheck? Where is everybody? It's still fun...

Undead, undead, undead.

Insomnia

2009-11-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

I've had only a few good nights sleep in the last few weeks, one of which involved a sleeping pill. I have no problem falling asleep, but I wake up after a couple of hours and then toss and turn for the rest of the night. For those of you not intimately familiar with insomnia, it leads to a certain fraying around the edges, an exhausted, pale view of the world. Suffice it to say, this sucks.

Ref. 71 and The Culture War

2009-11-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

MSNBC is on in the background as I, bleary-eyed and exhausted, peruse the election results from last night. Well, Ref. 71 seems to have done well, but upon closer look there are troubling results. It seems to me that liberal urban centers foisting upon rural conservative communities moral decisions that are central to the culture war (no longer a debate...) eventually might come back to haunt us. This isn't to say that I don't think gays should have rights, ladies should be able to get abortions, or whatever. My only point is that it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where unemployment continues to rise and the sprawling strip malls that that wend through suburbs out to the sparsely populated rural areas becomes desolate, with businesses abandoned and boarded up, and haunted by angry, disaffected people. How will these people feel then when things like Ref. 71 are passed?

Maybe I am worrying too much. Maybe those who oppose "everything-but-marriage" should be not only dragged to water, but forced to drink. Maybe social change is affected by legislating something that people find reprehensible. I've been reading The Man in the High Castle after having read Plot Against America and I think that it's pervaded my thinking a bit. I've also been thinking a lot about a couple of influential books, Love They Neighbor and War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. I worry that this country is inherently unstable due to a very large cultural divide. There is historical precedent for people scapegoating and villifying minorities when the societies are under duress. Will this happen here? I don't know. I do know that a trip into east Pierce County reveals a world distinctly different from the Tacoma's isolated city center. Likewise a trip south into Lakewood will do the same.

The echo chamber is reverberating with the meme that right is on the verge of a civil war between the Palin/Beck factions and the more centrist conservatives. I encourage everyone to spend a few minutes watching Glen Beck. I think it's important to understand under whose sway large swaths of this country have fallen. I think it's also important to understand the message they are carrying. I concur with Chomsky that these people - the disenfranchised that have found a voice with Palin/Beck - should be taken seriously. I don't know what that means, but I suspect it doesn't mean dismissing them as uneducated country bumpkins.

Our Friend

2009-11-03T02:56:00.000-08:00

I keep trying to be strong, to quip appropriately and to express the appropriate moments of gravity. I keep thinking (I know...), what would Jared do? I'll be honest, I don't have the strength to be funny or to talk about Janice or to do anything. I can barely work and I feel utterly lost. Because, I can't help but think about her right now. And, frankly, it doesn't help. So, I'm lost. Drunk and crying alone in the middle of the night completely helpless and just...well, sobbing, listening to sad songs and crying. I am a utter, fucking mess. Everything I do everyday doesn't mean anything anymore. So, I get drunk and cry. I guess that's it.

Except, change is coming...

The Cathedral of Unreason

2009-10-18T03:45:00.000-07:00

I wrote a really long post essentially justifying why Paranormal Activity terrified me. Bottom line, it was well done. It scared me silly. We can address why later.

And, the Sheriff told me that she'd sleep fine (which I'm skeptical about) because there were no iconic scenes. You know, the type that burns itself into your psyche. Crab walking down the stairs, blood spilling forth from elevators, rooms filled with curing human flesh. At first blush, PA was missing those moments. But, upon reflection, which I've had all day to do, I think it is actually filled with those moments of terror.

It's a good movie. For those of you who love your horror, it's a must see. Watch it so we can talk about it. Consider it an exorcism.

DMFJ

2009-10-17T02:47:00.000-07:00

So, we went and saw old DJ the other night. Since the only people who read this were there, I'll spare everyone the recap (nice sweater!) As always, that asshole inspires me. He inspires me against my better judgment, he inspires he against my rationale self. That floppy haired, D&D-playing, non-dresser somehow makes me want to quit my job and blow up a dam (of course, then I'd go live under a log somewhere and play with baby foxes (kits?), live in harmony with nature...until a hungry bear ate me.)

I read his work and it changed everything. Now, I didn't and don't buy it completely, but I buy enough that I keep listening, I keep reading. Once I read the latest, I think I will probably have read more words by him than any other author. He has a way of framing ideas that are both disputable and inspiring. Who cares if he is inconsistent in his numbers for rates of sexual assault against women? If his most conservative estimates are close, it's still far too many. Who cares if it's not "90%" of the fish in the ocean? Say, it's 60% and it's only the large fish. That's still too many. Say there's not dioxin in "every" woman's breast milk. One is far too many.

Let's talk about what we can do. We can go and blow up dams(for shits and giggles - more shits that giggles, btw - google "number of dams in us"), take down cell phone towers, or lop off the heads of CEOs. The unfortunate thing is that this isn't The Monkey Wrench Gang and that they will kill or imprison us. We lose. One dam blown up, one dead white guy, one stupid cell phone tower down and that's it. They rebuild the dam; like the hydra, another CEO pops up in its place. We cannot win. Whether it means "getting there first with the most...," or "in war, they will kill some of us; but we will destroy all of them," we lose. We lose no matter which way you count it. Or spell it. Or sing it. Or dance it.

We can have well attended protests, beautiful and inspiring words, we hustle door to door to get out the vote. We lose. No one gets to a position to being elected without selling out, without being a corporate shill. That includes Obama, whose race occludes the fact that he is an agent of the status quo, and Clinton (both of them), who are agents of industry. They don't care about you, me, us. But this is old hat...

Let's talk about how this isn't a war to be won. Let's look at each other and be frank and honest. The war is lost. It was never a war; it was a slaughter. Any bloodshed that could have (maybe...) made a difference happened a century before we were born. Let us look at each other and admit that we are not going to change the world. Whether we are woofies or school teachers, bartenders or longshoremen. Yea, we can change a life here or there; we can work in a soup kitchen, or protest outside the SeaTac Mall (or Federal Way Commons - not ironic at all - or whatever it's called), or try to teach kids to read in our "spare" time, or we can do whatever, but what we are doing is useless. I'll spare you obnoxious metaphors about tweezers and sand. What we are doing amounts to vanity projects, to padding our social resume or appeasing our guilty consciences so we can go back to eating fast food at 3AM, smoking, porn, teen romance television, getting drunk, or whatever.

Full disclosure. More than you probably want to know (although it is a blog...), so if you don't want to go there, then click away.

Porn. Ok, so it was porn, smoking, and baseball. Now it's porn, football and eating meat. Which, after typing that out, sounds really gay...These are the concessions that I make that I am not proud of. I'll allow myself some porn erstwhile feeling guilty, not because I am watching porn, but because how the women are treated. I'm almost exhausted typing that because it's such a trope, but really, if you doubt it at all, then go to you porn and check that shit out. It's awful. Best case scenario, it's actresses pretending like they like to be raped. It's fucking awful. More than likely, it's a whole lot of women who have been assaulted, are sad, lonely, desperate, and don't even really know it. I remember reading Endgame when I was in Mexico and just wanting to hug the strippers or the girls pressing their tits into tourists faces. And like so many things, the feeling faded away with time. Now, porn.

But it's not ok. It's not ok to watch women get fucked, women who most likely have been assaulted early on (get there first with the most) and whose assault reverberates throughout their lives now reenact the violence for our carnal pleasure. Everytime. Every single fucking time I look at porn, whether I am out of mind (for whatever reason) or dead-to-rights sober, I think, "She's been raped." I know it in my belly. It's the same way I know it when I see it. Still, I left click until I find something that is not quite so disconcerting, take care of business as quickly as possible, then move on about my day. But, to be completely honest, I know what just happened. I know what I watched. I know what I did. It's despicable and I should be ashamed.
Lest anyone thinks that this is me being crazy about sex and all that, I have no problem with porn (eerily enough, the same way I have no problem with the death penalty) in and of itself; it's the knowledge that a fair number of the women participating are not doing so from an exhibitionist desire ("Yah, I totally want you to fuck me in the ass on camera so lonely, sad human beings can watch it on their computers late at night..." That conversation happens...), but from something far more unhealthy.*

Porn is bad. Porn is bad because of the probability or merely the possibility that these women are only doing this because they've been assaulted. Period.

Ever since reading DMFJ for the first time, I've been unable to reconcile any idea of resistance with the fact that I smoked. I was consoled by the fact that many other people who read him or felt the same way smoked as well. Janice died. That was the last night I smoked.**

I banged most of this out with ESPN on in the background. K gets whatever teen romance makes her forget her shitty day, I have baseball and football. I can do better. We can do better. Nate once challenged me to stop watching, listening to, and reading sports. In return, he would give up meat (except at the mom's, which is fair to middlin).*** I failed long before I had a chance to catch up to see where he was at. Progress not perfection, I suppose.

Here is what we do. We are all very busy folks. This makes dinners difficult. So we rally when we can. We get together, we stay in touch, we stay close. When we get together for dinners and drinks, we savor it and appreciate it. And.

And.

We make dates. Ya, let's have dinner and rally the troops. Let's get greased and talk politics. Let's scare our more timid friends and inspire those that are ready (it's happened already...). Let's also go shoot guns, take gun safety courses, and learn how to clean and maintain firearms. Let's go fishing. Clean and gut fish. Let's garden. Then we can have real dinner parties, the way it really should happen. Harvest celebration. Let's talk first aid, preservation techniques (see gardening). Let's have pickle and jam parties. Let's have stitch and bitch, all genders welcome. Let's talk self-defense. What do we do? Let's stockpile food and each summer, if the worst hasn't happened, tap into it for our camping. Then build it back up each year. Let's be creative about this. What's the worst that can happen? And in the interim, we can work to make our community better, our world better. Hell, we can and should challenge each other continually. We can be better than we are in virtually every imaginable way.

And in the meantime, if there's any question of what we can or should do, I would say rally around the family...

*This most definitely is not the word I want, but I'm going with it for the sake of expediency.

**On an edit of the last paragraph, I'd left a sentence that I'd thought read, "And I hope I'll never do it again." I read it multiple times and I had a subsequent paragraph that mas o menos responded to the idea of hope. Well, the actual sentence was lacking the never. It took multiple passes for me to notice. While sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes it's a cigarette haunting you.

***Give me the opportunity again. I'll both go vegan and throw down with the sports abstinence. If you got it in you...

A picture, well...

2009-10-04T04:42:00.001-07:00

Yeah, that's green chartreuse and one of the Sheriff's beers. And I'm done. I'm so tired after working a shift then posting over at the 1022 blog that I'm falling asleep with a drink or two in my hand. But in the interim before passing out and finishing a few fabulous cocktails, I feel like I need to get in a few words...

It's been a rough few weeks. Down right shitty. I've been thinking about how to write about this a lot. I've been thinking about how to articulate my feelings and about who reads this. I struggled every night. Posts died (justifiably) on the cutting room floor. So, here I am. Here we are. Ready to do this.

Janice was amazing. There's no getting around that. No on is ever going to reveal one of her flaws that will change that opinion. She was one of those rare people that was beautiful. She was the type of person that was so genuine and kind that I would be embarrassed if I lapsed into sarcasm, cynicism or disingenuous behavior around her. She was one of the rare people that by dint of the quality of her person she demanded humanity out of the people around her. (There's going to be a gap between this sentence and the next that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to fill.) And here's where I need an aside to say that I knew her only casually. I never had the opportunity to ask her if she did this purposefully (which I doubt), or if it was merely a by-product of her being an amazing person. I wonder if I can stop crying today because of how beautiful she was or by my selfish loss of not getting to know her better. I can't explain why I break down every time I hear Asleep.

Really, having listened to the song again, I think I know why. You know when you meet someone who is better than you at something? For instance, you're on the basketball court and the other guy is obviously way more athletic; or the other girl is skinnier or prettier, or whatever; or you're sitting across from someone and they have a cold recall of facts that is vaguely inhuman; whatever it is, you've met that person that is better than you at whatever, painting, fucking, cooking, smiling. Janice was a better human than me and the majority of people I've ever met. Period. She was kind and gracious in a way that I always strive to be. She smiled in a way that I wish I could smile. Honest and easy, like she was happy. She was so kind and gracious that I took it for granted that she'd be around forever. I figured that I had a lifetime to get to know her. A woman as beautiful as her doesn't die a year after her wedding, weeks after she turns 30. I've cared for and loved people who've died by self-inflicted gunshots, cancer, COPD, and cardiac arrest. Her death was a tragedy. It was terrible and it shouldn't have happened. It's a testament to her person that I still cannot imagine this world without her.

I'm without a title

2009-09-30T00:05:00.000-07:00

I bartend Monday nights now, which, not-so-coincidentally, is Industry night. So every Monday night all of my tips are going to a local charity. Everyone should come in for fancy cocktails, and all of you service industry cats who are coming in and getting hooked up, your cash is going to a good place...

For October, I'm giving all of my Monday night tips to the local YWCA. Given current events, I think that this is a great place to start.

Show up for a cocktail, throw some coins in the coffers. Drink for a good cause this time.

And thanks to Nate for returning the volley. This medium is important. Don't walk away now...

Assholes, Miscreants, and the Undesirable

2009-09-29T01:18:00.000-07:00

Posted here because it's probably not the best on the posted on the bar blog...
Let's talk for a moment about 86ing people. This is something that I've never taken lightly as I have on more than many an occasion been that asshole, miscreant or undesirable in your bar (sorry Olympia and Capital Hill...if you were a bartender at one of the places and remember, then your next drink's on me).

More to the point since my days of brazenly drunken revelry are nearly over, I've only 86ed a few people from 1022 South. One because, after an obviously intoxicated woman lit a cigarette in the bar, I pulled her drink. The host of the party became quite angry and refused to pay a portion of their tab. So, that was that. I comped a portion of the tab and after the gentleman made a scene, I asked him to not return. The other far more interesting story was this evening. As I mentioned previously and in other places, we were busy tonight. We didn't set any records, but I was deep in orders for a while tonight (which, incidentally, makes me obsess about my mise en place, foot and handwork, and the general efficiency of my station). Get around to the end of the night where the bar's mas o menos emptied out except for a few regulars and locals. I pull drinks a few minutes before 2am and I go to the patio to pull the chairs in. One of the locals who I have a long history with (she's been trouble in multiple establishments) is shit-faced and decides to wander behind the bar. Not because she's curious, not because she's confused, but because she spies a beer on the back bar. I hear her say that she is going to go for it. I tell her in no uncertain terms that she can't go behind the bar as I stand in the doorway. She starts to shift and shuffle behind the bar while grasping desperately for the beer. Her drinking companion is trying to get her to leave to no avail. As she gets her hands on the beer and begins to drink, I've made my way across the bar and I take it from her. Before she got to the beer, as I was moving across the bar, I let her know that if she did continue and if she did drink the beer that I would 86 her. She continued, I took the beer after a single drink, then I let her know that she's not welcome back.

That transgression and a mouthful of beer rids 1022 of a person who has given me endless grief as a bartender at multiple establishments. Small fare for something that will pay off in the long run. I've wrestled with 86ing people, but this time is was clear and definite. I don't want my staff dealing with anything like this. Drunk people shuffling behind the bar to consume whatever open containers they can find is a great way to get shut down. And, it's awkward. And, unprofessional. And, it's gross. Sit on your barstool. Enjoy your cocktail. Then, when it's that time, go home. Don't shuffle behind the bar looking for one last sip. If that's how you gotta roll, then I'll happily introduce you to this fellow Bill W. His friends meet around the corner from us. You can work the rest out there.

For a little bit of levity

2009-09-29T00:44:00.000-07:00

Things get pretty heavy here from time to time, so I thought I'd post something that both made me smile and reminded me of one of the few reasons why I like sports. Take a listen to the two links on Shannon Drayer's blog. Before you sigh and click away, give it a listen. Giggles are always fun.

My eye is twitching,,,

2009-09-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

Why aren't we talking about what we need to do? What are we waiting for? Jen? Nate? I'm looking at you. Food, guns, first aid. Let's figure something out. The time is now. Rain barrels, water filtration, using grey water, growing high calorie crops in small spaces. Did I mention guns? Did I mention fishing? Seriously. No excuses. You both make more money than I do and I work more than both of you. Let's make this shit happen asap.

We are all guilty

2009-09-26T04:48:00.000-07:00

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. - HWT, mister Thoreau for those not keeping score.
All that is necessary for the evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. - probably misattributed to Edmund Burke, something of a badass.

We have a lot of work to do. And, base on the last few posts, I have some explaining to do...

Falling Down

2009-09-15T01:40:00.000-07:00

I'm an angry person. Not in a marketable, sexy kinda way. I'm angry in the kinda way where when I start to let go the polite facade slips (see last post) and I'm no good in front of anyone. Like, not only am I no good in mixed company, I am no good in company. I am no good venting in front of "people who would understand." Because really, I'm that guy. I've always been. I remember my first girlfriend explaining that she broke up with me because I'm "angry with rocks." Yeah, a very insightful young lady saw to the heart of things. I'm bitter and angry. Like I want to, not yell, but spit, nigger, faggot, cunt. I want to burn down houses of the privileged middle class. Like everything in the north end. I want to send my neighbors to work camps to make techo-fetishists gadgets that I can by from the pawnshop after their families pawn them for taco bell coupons. I'm filled with an explicable amount of hate and rage. This is my caveat.

I was half in the bag when I got home tonight (shocking) when I decided to cook and listen to AM radio. Coast to Coast to be exact. They had some nonsense segment about the Ouija boards that got me thinking, free associating really, about mistakes that me make. And this leads me to this:
We excuse you men and women for entering the military when they are young and impressionable. Whatever excuses we use (poor families, lack of options, blah blah blah), we are comfortable using them for military service but not for other choices. Now, (another caveat) some of the people in my life who I care about most are ex-military. These people are the kindest, smartest people I've ever had the privilege to meet. Ok, so all of this being said, and here's where I went from Ouija boards, if someone is young and they make the mistake to join the military where they are obligated to kill poor, sometimes defenseless people a world away if ordered, then we forgive them. Because, you know, they did it for our country. Or they were cajoled, indoctrinated, or they didn't think they had any other options. Or whatever.

Now, if some dood is half (or entirely) wasted at a frat party and he fucks a passed out girl, do we forgive him? Or if he commits any of the other myriad versions of rape that occur, do we forgive him? What if he does it again? And again? what if he's an alcoholic and it only happens when he drinks? What if it happens enough that he gets the moniker "Date Rape..."? What if, what if, what if...

What if he feels like he doesn't have any options and he joins the service? What if he drops bombs on an Afghan village in pursuit of a terrorist? Google Afghan village, btw.

Moreover, so say we know someone who raped someone or who killed someone. What if he killed someone we know? What if he assaulted someone we know? It's so easy for us to quote Derrick Jensen, who is being fed peanut butter sandwiches from his mother while he pounds out jeremiads on keyboards manufactured by Korean children, while we go to rallies or tour the pre-industrial world on vacations that are exploications.

I'm so close to saying something that I can't take back. I'm that pissed. And not just at you. At me. Because when I go to sleep I don't see all of the shit I don't like about you. All of your selling out or buying in or hypocrisy or sophistry goes away. Because we're family and I love you. What doesn't go away is everything I've done or abide by; is everything that I've sanctioned by silence.

The best of us fail. And the best of us are guilty. What I wonder everyday is where that leaves us.

Customer service

2009-09-13T05:10:00.000-07:00

I think about proper etiquette quite a bit. Those that know me know that I'm a sucker for social graces. These are the common courtesies that you give to people. Your greet them. You thank them. You are generally polite. It's been said about me (quite a bit...) that I'm not very nice, but I am very polite. Maybe this is why I've found myself where I am at professionally...

What I am interested in is the common courtesy due to the guests and the bartender in a bar. I had a moment this evening where I failed at my job. A young lady and her friend came in just as I was starting to get busy. Orders for craft cocktails are starting to stack up as we are making exchanging pleasantries. One on the the drink orders coming in, I politely asked for their ID's (people can name-drop common acquaintances or remark about how many times I've seen their ID's before, I don't care. It's my job. And. And! When the LCB did their sting at 1022 South, the young man looked just like all of the rest of you who are younger than a Joy Division album.) So, she gave me a bit of grief about carding her again and this and that while drinks are piling up. I'm trying to be be polite, talk to them about the bar, and figure out the most efficient way to build all of these drinks. Then after she finally shows her ID, which for her was a heartbeat but seemed like an hour, she started describing the “martini' that she wanted.

“Um...vodka. We want vodka martinis.”

No big deal. Throw some vodka martinis in the queue and I'll bang those out as soon as I can. But, I have to ask.

“How do you like those martinis?” Continue drink orders backlogging.

“Oh, well, do you have basil back there?”

Here is where I failed as a bartender. The gears in my head seized and I became that asshole. My response was totally inappropriate.

“No, I don't have any basil (anymore). So, you don't want a martini, you want a cocktail in a martini glass?”

Hem and haw, gibber jaw and nonsense ending with, “No, we want martinis.”

So, instead of being gracious and whipping something up, I obfuscated their order as my rail began to fill with drink orders. Not intentionally, mind you, I really wanted to figure out what they were looking for. I want every drink that I pass across the bar to amaze and/or mystify (it is Tacoma...) all of my guests. I want everyone to say something to the effect of, “This is my new favorite drink,” or for them to stop mid-conversation and ask me what they are drinking. Before you think I am insane, I've talked to cooks who work in open kitchens who've echoed the same sentiment. All of this being said, I'm not intentionally being an obnoxious prick when I was equivocating over what a martini is or is not. Finally, they agreed to try the special of the night (substituting vodka for tequila).

el Jimador reposado

1 orange juice

.5 raw ginger simple syrup

2 dashes kava kava

2 dashes Regan's orange bitters

1 serrano wheel

dash of cayenne

Shake and strain into cocktail glass half rimmed with Himalayan sea salt.

Real basic but with enough “stuff” going on to keep a casual drinker interested. By the time they agreed to this drink I was in the weeds. They had irritated me, so they weren't getting bumped forward in the queue, so they had to wait. It took probably 15 minutes to dig myself out after they finally decided. As I set up to make their drinks, after letting them know that they were next, the lady looks at her watch and they leave.

That's it. They walk out. The worst part is that I don't blame them.

Now, let's be clear. The type of thing we do, sometimes cocktails take a bit. I believe that artisanal work takes time. However, if I'd been more gracious initially, then they would've been less likely to leave. They were obnoxious, but I screwed up.

So, here we are. Next time they come in their first round is on me. Luckily, this time there's a mutual acquaintance so I can get in touch.

Caveats and rubrics out of the way, let's talk about customer etiquette for a moment. I don't want to get into the broader scope of how you comport yourself in public, how you treat people in the service industry, or any of that at the moment. I just want to talk about proper etiquette when dealing with servers and bartenders.

Get off your cell phone. Or go outside. Prepare to not be served if you're being that guy or gal. A friend once told me story about when she was working and an Italian restaurant in Seattle. She went to the table with multiple guests repeatedly and one girl wouldn't get off her cell phone. Eventually my friend took everyone's order but her as she continued to jibber jabber away. Finally, after the orders were put in, she got off her phone and became indignant. She asked when she could order. My friend cloyingly replied that she thought that the guest was going to call her order in.

We are not objects, sexual or otherwise. Don't treat us like such. I hear about how female servers and bartenders are treated and I am ashamed. You don't talk to me that way. You don't talk to my staff that way in front of me. Aren't you a little embarrassed? If not, then you should be.

Speaking of objects, while we are in the service industry, we are also in a trade. Be polite. Recognize us as we come to the table. We only want to facilitate your experience. We don't want attention for the sake of itself. We want you to have a good experience. It's difficult for us to do that when you won't acknowledge us.

If we are busy, then, trust me, we're sorry. The joint may not look busy to you, but we may have someone two tables over arguing about what a martini or a puttanesca is. If we are not gracious and respectful (this includes not making excuses for tardy service), then be angry. But if we are, cut us some slack. Please. Trust me, we'll make it worth your while.

The experience of going out is reciprocal. We take care of each other and it is predicated upon us being polite and facilitating your experience. In return, we simply ask that you be polite.

(Apologies for the cross-post at the 1022 blog)

And speaking of the madness, here's one for the road...

2009-09-07T05:10:00.000-07:00

Akimbo record release at the Comet. So near the end...

Jesus

2009-09-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

I have to stop. Or I have to slow down. Or I need someone or something to mitigate this. I am sitting here at 4 am obsessing about the industry. I've spent hours reading about how people make their bitters. I think about doing concept menus based on Velvet Underground records. I obsess about concepts and perfection in a world where I know, I know, it is unattainable. I'm half in the bag reading other people's resumes. I work a slow week and it clocks in around 60 hours. I eat, sleep, and breathe it. I am afraid that I am Ahab. What then?

Hold On

2009-08-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

I had a couple of instances this last week where I was concerned that some latent racism long hidden by liberal, white guilt was surfacing. The first instance was when I attempted to rescue a lost pit bull. I understand the reputation that pits have and they make me just as nervous as anyone. As a matter of fact, if I wasn't half in the bag by the time I found this thing on my lawn at 4am, I probably would have let it be. However, I was so I decided to make friends with the dog. Turns out this dog was one of the nicest creatures I have ever seen. Fast forward through me bonding with the animal and making all sorts of plans to keep him and incorporate him into our family to me being woken up by the mailman who, after Herbert (the dog) escaped from our yard, he rescued from the neighbors. It turns out that they were trying to kill the dog with bats, hammers, large sticks, etc. because the animal supposedly bit someone. Then they came over to my place with the assorted weapons looking for the dog. I had to call 911 (yeah, thanks for showing up TPD...Oh wait, you didn't despite me asking for help against an agitated, drunken group of young men with weapons). Eventually Animal Control showed up and took the dog away. This was the final straw vis a vis these neighbors. They are a blight on the block (other neighbors think so as well); the house is filled with people of various ethnic backgrounds; drug dealers and gangsters come and go; they sit in the yard and drink all day, throw trash in our yard, and then stay up all night listening to bad rap or rape-rock. Ok, so I'm done. I've long refrained from vocalizing any sort of judgment about gangster/urban/street whatever culture, but now I'm going to say that it sucks. It's bad for community, it's dangerous at worst and obnoxious at best. I'm tired of kids (yes, kids) hanging out all day next door dealing and consuming drugs, drinking, and playing terrible music at unbelievable volumes. I'm tired of the scuffles, arguments, and generally antagonistic nature of the entire house. I'm tired of the poverty and ignorance. Are these my poor? I think not. My liberal White guilt is no longer enough for me to rant incoherently about the iniquities of big business and consumer culture while remaining silent about the soul-sucking ignorance of the large majority of the poor.

Ok, deep breath. So, after the incident with the dog, I'm acutely sensitive to the brothers from the barbershop hanging out in front of the bar listening to loud music, smoking weed, selling whatever, and generally accosting nearly every single woman who walks by. I've had many conversations with a friend about how she can't walk or ride through the neighborhood without brothers yelling at her. Everyday it's a new story. It usually turns out that she ignores them or says something flippant or dismissive, which then aggravates the men leading them to become confrontational and insulting. Still, my liberal White guilt dismisses these things as "cultural differences," which now that it's typed in front of me is woefully condescending. I don't hold brothers from the neighborhood to the standards that I would any other civilized human being because they are black, listen to rap music, smoke weed, and are gangsters (literally). If all of the aforementioned were true, but it was a gaggle of white guys, I would have no tolerance. Jesus Christ, is this institutionalized racism at its worst? I consider myself a self-aware, progressive individual, but I haven't thought all that much about this. It certainly warrants more consideration.

Back to my point, I was sensitive already to the culture around the barbershop, so when I was leaving the bar the other day on my bike I had a problem with my deraileur as I was changing lanes. A guy leaving the barbershop decided to try to intimidate me by slowing down, pulling into my lane (I was in the turn lane), then basically threatening me. I stopped riding, handled the situation, then rode on. This kind of thing happens all the time with motorists of all shapes and sizes, but it just so happened to be a brother driving some ghetto fabulous car with nice rims. And! As he pulled away he was driving without hands so he could count his rather large roll of cash.

This got me thinking: is something like the barbershop necessarily good for the neighborhood? Previously, my liberal White guilt didn't allow me to ask those kinds of questions. To dare question whether a black barbershop belonged in a black neighborhood was to be part of the culture of gentrification, it was to be part of the Whiteness that makes me so uncomfortable. But after the incident, I began to wonder (not without some guilt) whether a business that also serves as a social spot for gangsters and drug dealers is really the best thing. I genuinely don't have a feeling either way. I'm not sure that a cocktail lounge where privleged, fixed gear, white belt wearing hipsters congregate is necessarily any better (or worse). What this last week did was provoke some rather uncomfortable questions about race and class that I haven't found any easy answers for.

What really inspired me to sit down and rant about my week was this: (h/t to Everything is Terrible).

Watching that made me nauseous. It's the milquetoast homogeneity of White culture that I am ashamed of. It's not just them; if you took the same crowd shots of the Apollo, I would be equally repulsed (as much as I'd let myself acknowledge it). I see previews for anything involving Tyler Perry and I want to shoot my eyes out. I also hate cars, specifically new cars. I hate shiny new cars with Abercrombie polo wearing would-be jocks with white caps askew who, along with their skinny-pretty bleached-and-waxed girlfriends, treat people in the service industry like a lesser class of human. I hate the lawyers and judges, real estate agents (Oh man, do I hate real estate agents) and property owners who "flip" houses. Middle aged, bourgeois white people. People who look like they shop at REI. Anyone who thinks it's hip to be ironic. The fucking Tacoma Police Department. You know what? Fuck you you fucking pigs for everytime you harass a bicyclist for not wearing a helmet but you don't come when called. It's 911. Get your ass out here. Fuck corporate financiers who rob everyone blind. Fuck you Matador bartenders. You should be ashamed. Fuck you you tribal tattooed, gauged ear, heavy metal woman beating rapist who malingers between Hell's Kitchen and every other shitty hard drinking bar filled with Rock of Love skanks, PBR, and grape vodka drop shots. Fuck you you fat lazy fucks waddling around Safeway looking for a Kit Kat bar. That's right. Fuck fat people. Look around at our culture. Seriously. Stop and look. Being fat is a crime. The amount of shit you have to eat to get this fat is staggering. Those faceless corporate monsters who are stripping the ocean of fish and wiping out the rain forest are doing it so you can have a $2.99 Grand Slam breakfast at Denny's at anytime, anywhere. Your bloated corpse inculcates you in every crime of this irredeemable culture from the war in Iraq to rampant deforestation to the incidents of sexual assault against women. If you stopped sleepwalking through life long enough to put the Twinkie down you might realize that your being corpulent is a crime. So, get fucked you fat ass.
.
Fuck you Christians. Get off my fucking lawn. Double fuck you Michael Bay. Fuck professional athletes who rape and murder without consequences. That includes you, Roethlisburger. You're not off the hook because you are the white QB. You're a fucking asshole. That motorcycle accident should have taken your career if not your life.

I'm fucking done. Over it. This world fucking sucks from the hood rats parked in the street who refuse to get out of the way to let cars pass to the smarmy fucking judge with the bluetooth headset who thinks he's the cat's meow. Get fucked. All of you.

Edit: Jesus, sorry guys. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed. By that I mean the side w/o spell check or a dictionary...

Crash Course and required reading

2009-07-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching Chris Martenson's The Crash Course (h/t to Nate.) This is the required reading Derrick Jensen's The Culture of Make Believe, James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and finally Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Watch Martenson's Crash Course. Next time we meet for dinner, bocce, drinks, or to run, we are going to talk about what we need to do. Then we will keep talking about it. Now, you tell me what I should be reading.

The Coming Night

2009-07-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

Those that know me know that I've wrestled with how I can best apply my efforts to either make the world a better place or simply benefit my community. In the end, I took the path of least resistance, stayed in the trade that I know, and the result is that I spend my hours, which stretch into days and months, running a bar. Before I continue too far down this path, I must offer the following caveat: I am proud of what I do. I work hard and have created a place in the neighborhood for people to come together, imbibe, and enjoy each others company. That is it. I work at what I know and I am good at what I do. Some friends are carpenters, some teach, and some push papers. I make cocktails. It doesn't change the world, but it does give people a bit of respite in the face of an increasingly ominous future. It is this future that concerns me this morning.

James Howard Kunstler over at Clusterfuck Nation does good work. His book The Long Emergency is a must read. Kunstler writes about how our Culture of Leisure and Happy Motoring is predicated upon easy access to cheap energy. This is going to end sooner or later (all signs point to sooner...), at which point what happens to the suburban sprawl, planned obsolescence, and the general toxins and detritus left behind from 60+ years of rampant consumerism? Look around you at everything that is plastic. “Except for a small amount that has been incinerated...every bit of plastic manufactured in the world in the last 50 years or so still remains.” (The World Without Us, Weisman) This plastic, a large portion of which ends up in the ocean, concentrates pollutants in the environment and as it degrades enters the food chain at the smallest levels. Now, just so we are clear, these are compounds that have a shelf life greater than the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Aqueducts. These tiny pellets and everything that we make out of them has an expected life that is measured in terms of a geological scale. Say 100,000 years. To put this in perspective, 100,000 years ago we were living caves; we were far from the only bipedal hominid; and (although still contentious), we (as Homo Sapiens) began our mass exodus from Africa. Your cell phone, plastic bag from Safeway, and potentially the majority of the buried newspaper in landfills, could be around long after our art, philosophy, and science have been reduced to dust and ash. Our great legacy will be sun bleached plastic and garbage that has reduced to the size of krill food and, the elimination of biodiversity that is being called the sixth great extinction, the Holocene extinction. This anthropogenic event promises not only to be a dark legacy of our over-consumption, but also promises to make it much more difficult for us to return to a sustainable way of living. Even after we kill each other in the streets as we run out of energy, fresh water and food; even as the coastlines rise and displace or kill millions; as the era of mass production ends and we are left with a wide swath of aggrieved, unemployed peoples looking to scapegoat someone (always the Other...); even after desertification, floods, malnutrition, AIDS, obesity, and cancer wipe out large portions of a soft, artificially-supported population; there still might not be enough for those who are left. Those that live into the Long Emergency may look out upon a world that resembles more McCarthy's The Road than Mad Max. Those left will rummage through the great wastes of the 20^th century culture looking for things that will help them grow or catch food, capture or filter water. I-pods, digital cameras, laptops, 20 pairs of shoes, and $12 cocktails will be revealed for the decadence and luxury that they are. History will not look kindly upon us as we rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic whilst talking about how to resist as the world around us ended. Already we enjoy too much at too small a price to us and too high a price to everyone and everything else. Our sporting events, muscle cars, personal electronics, fast food, and Cult of Convenience come at a price. That price is the degradation of environment, the loss of biodiversity, the subjugation of peoples half a world away, and endless background noise of wars that we no longer (or ever did) understand. Our enemy is the Other (be it the Terrorist kind or the Faceless Government Bureaucrat); we wonder why they hate us or why they send poor, brown children to kill and die for us as we listen to NPR podcasts on our techno-fetishist accoutrement while riding our ridiculously expensive bicycles (because we're Green!) to political rallies protesting the cause du jour or the bar to get drunk, get laid, to be seen. In this way, the literate, angry, rational among us are worse than the fat, burger-eating, nose-picking, reality show-watching, shuffling, gray mass of humanity; we have a moral responsibility not only to affect change directly and to resist constantly, but we have a responsibility to lead our lives by example. We have no room for laziness or excuses like, “Progress, not perfection!” How many people have died in the name of progress? How many die each day as we assuage our guilt with the petty, insignificant acts that have come to define resistance? Eat vegetarian, ride a bike, go to a protest, plant a garden. These First World choices are not enough. Do more and get ready, for night is coming. Watch the unemployment rates around the country, especially in impoverished areas. Watch what happens when a country that has moved from manufacturing “things” to a “service” based economy reacts to contraction that is permanent. What is optional resistance now will be a matter of survival soon. It will start with people pissed off because they can't have the Blue-Ray deluxe edition of the new Michael Bay explosion montage and end with people pissed off that they can't cheaply procure white fish (or any other sort of fish, which should be a luxury item) that was caught in the Great Lakes and processed in China. I fully believe that our way of life is so unsustainable and will end so abruptly that I'll dispense with the rest of this rant about broken I-pods, green Chartreuse, and the regular reoccurence of these fits in my life. We all read the same books and listen to the same podcasts. You know what has gotten me particularly agitated. I'm going to go finish my book, take some valerian root, then fall asleep with the tenuous hope that tonight is not the night that my neighbors kick the door in or simply burn my house down. Tomorrow I'll think more on how resistance is no longer an act of self-congratulatory idealism, but the groundwork for survival as the lights dim.

Edit: I'll learn to like paragraphs when I learn to be coherent. First things first. Sorry.

Staircase

2009-07-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

Since the bar opened in the last week of March, I've been trying to take mental health breaks. These are generally constituted of me being out of cell phone range from an hour to a day. It is a good exercise in patience; I fret and pace about what is going on, but I have to let go and enjoy whatever it is I am doing. With that, here are some pictures from the weekend spent at Staircase and hiking Mt. Ellinore.

The first pic is from the ascent to the summit of Ellinore. Before we reached the ridgeline, there was this staircase that went straight up into the mist.

The next pic is on the same staircase behind us. At some point we were above the trees hiking through rocks. Given that we are all pretty soft, it was intense.

The next pic is of pea climbing through rocks where the trail had disappeared. Last year we tried this hike in June and the summer path was snowed over. We made it to the chute, but probably about a third of the way up we turned around. I was committed to making the summit this time despite there obviously being no view...

The last few pictures are from what can only be called a stroll after Ellinore. They are both of the Staircase river that flows into Lake Cushman. The last one is on a giant felled tree across the river from our campsite. Serene, beautiful, exactly what I needed.

Ah, music...

2009-07-05T01:22:00.000-07:00

O dear Siren, I haven't heard your call in quite sometime. I stopped thinking about music before I stopped playing having been burned and hollowed by years of playing. I was exhausted; I had nothing left. I started playing not to become a rockstar, to play arenas and get blowjobs from groupies, but to play small venues with a devoted group of people who were into the punk rock, DIY thing that had me driving to Canada to watch Botch and Harkonen play in a cafe in the nineties. So I did what I did between Carmenzito and The Assailant and I haven't looked back (very much) since. Until this weekend.

It started at work when a couple of old Tacoma musicians sitting at the rail were geeking out about music. It started with one of the going on about how the music on MJ's Thriller was so fantastic. He was playing air drums while singing the guitar parts with (to be honest) a puerile exuberance. His friend humored him until it was his turn to geek out about Helmet's AmRep records. Eavesdropping on their drunken euphoria sent me spinning off into a Neverland where I started playing music again in a heavy, indie, noise-type band that was some hybrid of early Helmet and Jesus Lizard. The feeling lingered until the end of the night when a young kid who'd seen the assailant came in. We ended up talking music with the conversation coming around to the old Paradox (U-District, not Tacoma...) and The Edge of Quarrel movie. I went home sad and nostalgic that night...

So, tonight, Independence Day, I ended the social part of the evening talking for an hour or two in the kitchen with Liza's new bf, a nu-metal guy who vaguely understands DIY and hardcore/punk, but has toured and knows what it means to play loud music then get old. The night ended with K putting on 20 from Colera and Liza and her bf indulging us for about 1/2 the song. Nevertheless, I teared up as I thought about how it was the last song I ever played live. So, I'll try to avoid the semi-turgid prose and give you a few snapshots:

I honestly don't remember this show. We played so many at Camp Nowhere and eventually they were all packed to the rafters and some sort of nuts. It was so hot and close, these were the types of shows that got me into this. Maybe we influenced somebody there like Botch did at the Velvet Elvis did for me. It was what I wanted shows to be like. This pic kinda sums up the goofy, crazy energy that was at every show.
I want to say the funny thing about this pic is...but really there's so much. I'm drunk on a balcony in an apartment in the center of Paris in between the Iranian and Chinese embassies explaining to Rye where the bruise and knot on my head came from (basement show in the Latin Quarter where, packed to the rafters, Nate's drumset keeps moving and I held it in place as people spilled over me the entire set. At one point Jon cracked me in the skull with his head stock.) That same night in that same spot Ryan broke down crying because he was so happy. He couldn't believe that he was on tour and had just played an amazing show in Paris. All of these cute French girls crowded around to comfort him because they couldn't understand why he was crying...

Our last tour was rough. We did mas o menos 5 weeks with Elphaba around the country. As bad as it was (it's the only tour that does not shine in the flattering glow of memory), there were still great moments. We played an awesome show in Detroit, but really we played the same whether it was 10 kids freaking out or ninety. This pic kinda sums that up for me. It was a long day and not a lot of people, but I remember it because it seemed so quintessential...

I've talked about this show a lot this weekend. I didn't want to play it as I've always stubbornly resisted bar shows. I gave in to Ryan and Casey and I'm glad I did. It was the Akimbo record release show and one of our last. It was everything that I wanted out of shows. The place was packed, everyone had fun, and frankly, it reminded me of Europe.

I sit here now with a glass of bourbon reminiscing bittersweetly about it all. About how much has changed. How I work differently now. How my friends are half a world away or they work for me. About how I balance a checkbook and plan vacations. About how I worry about the future, my health, and my relationship. The Assailant was the apex of my youth where I didn't give a shit; I would quit any job or leave anything to play music, tour, to do it. Now, I work 60 hours a week running a business. Now I try to save money not to tour, but for the simple fact that I feel like I ought to have money in the bank. I don't write, I don't make music. All of my creative energy pours into the business and its management. My mental energy is drained by managing talented but willful personalities. I bring the same monomania to business that I brought to music, but with much different results. Ultimately, I am constantly exhausted and unsatisfied.

The Victory Garden

2009-06-29T16:31:00.001-07:00

I started gardening for the first time last year when I was out of work. Inspired by the convolute ramblings of Derrick Jensen a my own dissatisfaction with my life in general, I spent last summer working at a DIY bike shop and a community garden. Here I am a year later, still unsatisfied, by trying my best to make it work. Here is a little documentation of the work at home. This first pic is of the bed that is mas o menos devoted to tomatoes and basil (purple and gree). There are a few Walla Walla sweet onions and a potato going as well. I moved the peppers (Anaheim and another hot type that I don't know that name of) over to the bed with the corn. The soil here is fantastic as we composted in the box all winter, added a bit of top soil, then called it good. I must say that in a lot of ways I am pretty lazy about this kind of thing; I simply threw all of our organic matter in the box without worrying about turning it too much or really doing much of anything. The worms seemed to have taken care of everything for me.

In this bed we cut the sod, added a bit of organic top soil, then put the corn, sweet peas, artichoke, and greens in the ground. A bit later I moved over here volunteer potatoes and squash.

Finally, over behind the beds where the soil appears to be the worst, we have planted more volunteer squash and potatoes, strawberries, and a blueberry bush.

So, we have soil of varying degrees of apparent health in each spot. It will be interesting to see how each group does. Philosophically, I think that getting the plants in the ground is the most difficult part. After that, it simply requires watering, occasionally weeding (although I keep this to a minimum as well), then enjoying the fruits and vegetables. Of course, everything could die, at which point I will been proven wrong about the amount of work required...

Mise en cinema

2009-06-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

There's a great post over at IO9 about why these fake films within films are great (ostensibly because their absurd nature and obvious badness would deter anyone from making films like these...) Aside from the CG being bad and it being generally hackneyed, there is something disconcerting about this clip:

George Simmons in "Re-Do" from Justin Long

The Evolution of a Muppet

2009-06-17T11:30:00.000-07:00

In the late fifties and early sixties Henson was hired to do these commercials for Wilkins coffee. I'm not sure these are any less disturbing than the Wachowski-esque video game violence of modern television and cinema. For your viewing pleasure:

Enterainment Tonight, sorta

2009-02-12T00:30:00.000-08:00

For those of you who haven't seen it. And for those that forget, here's the younger Phoenix brother doing his best Andy Kaufman:

Here's the thing about Phoenix, I think he's staging this whole thing. I think he's going to meltdown his career, grab a bun ch of headlines as a lunatic, then whatever. My only problem is that I read a while ago that he's having a friend film this entire thing for a documentary(?). Welcome to the desert of the real, my friends.

tentwentytwo south

2009-01-08T02:44:00.000-08:00

As a few you know, I've been working sometime on a new bar. It's been part political wrangling, part salesmanship, and frankly, a good portion of luck (of course, I assert that you mas o menos make your own luck...). I've had and continue to have a crisis of conscience about running/owning a bar. My thinking is this: bars/pubs/lounges are good for communities when they promote people coming together, talking, and enjoying each other's company. When the bar promotes getting drunk or watching television or fucking in the bathroom, it's not good for the community; which is to say that one can do any of the above things and have a great night, but if it's the establishment's goal that the patrons do them, then something is wrong. What's happened is that I have the opportunity to build an establishment in my neighborhood that will be here when I'm gone, that can be a fixture, a place where people come together and enjoy and imbibe.

The quick and dirty on the background is that I worked for Laura at The Monsoon Room for a long time. I ended up managing, which is when I started to become the face of the place. Almost a year in, Laura made it mandatory that I go to a group therapy session with her. It was everything that I hate about crystal-sucking, dream-catching nonsense. I processed for a day, then wrote a resignation letter where I stepped down as manager, but I stayed on as lead bartender. Things continued to be weird until Laura hired the wife of the man who assaulted K. I asked her not to only because I didn't want him around the bar. She refused stating that it was business. I quit that night.

While I managed I worked mas o menos 60 hours a week. Part of the reason that I did this was that Laura covered for me while I went on three (four?) tours, two of them as long as six weeks. The other reason was that I felt I was gaining valuable knowledge, that if I wanted to be in this business, then this was an opportunity to learn what succeeds and what fails. I did it, I learned a lot, and when it was no longer cost effective, I walked away.

I should describe my time there to put this in context. The quick and dirty is that I made more money then I ever have. I was tipped in drugs and girls offered to blow me in the bathroom. I know it sounds melodramatic, but I felt like a rock star. It was ridiculous, but I got caught up in it. I drank for virtually free, I made a lot of money, and people treated me, well, let's say strangely because I was the bartender.

After I left I was angry with Laura for what I perceived to be her throwing me under the bus. I felt like she wanted me out, but she was too much of a coward. Looking back on it, that was probably the case. The woman she hired that led to me leaving quickly washed out like most of her hires. Maybe she wanted me out because I was becoming identified too much with her business (she didn't bartend at all), or maybe because she didn't like me (I think she tried, but we never really clicked - moreover, I think that we never actually liked each other), or maybe it was ultimately a business decision and nothing more. What matters is that I was gone and I wanted to see her fail. I kept an eye on her business, I watched what she did and how business increased and decreased until a year later I was working elsewhere and thinking about getting out entirely (grad school, teaching, farming, et al) when I received a phone call from a friend asking me if I would run the place if she lost it. Then another person asked me. Then another. Here's how it happened (I know I shouldn't air other's laundry, but I feel that this ties into my story as well, so here we go...):

Laura replaced me with a nice guy who had never before worked in the industry (see and beverage, hospitality). If I recall correctly, he was driving a forklift at the time. He does a good job all things considered, but the place begins to spiral out of control. For most of this time (and when I was running the show), Laura refused to bartend, to work in her own bar, despite the fact that labor was killing us. Eventually she did go back to work, but the damage done. It all came to a head when the guy who replaced me was caught serving minors. The LCB pulled the bar's records, found them to be not in order, and promptly shut it down. While this will sound like merely a clerical oversight, it is indicative of a systemic problem with how that business was run. Laura broke ties with her original business partner three or four months after opening. She then changed the name of the LLC that owned the bar. A year or so later she went fishing for another investor (her original business partner financed the entire bar), which is where my friend came in. I drank the Kool-Aid and now he's out roughly 40,000. In the process of all of these wheelings and dealings, she never transferred the liquor license over to the new LLC. We had stayed of the LCB's radar up until that point, and I honestly think it would've been a clerical/admin thing had they not been caught serving minors. It didn't matter in the end, they shut her down. Without a source of income, she eventually (I think she might always have been...) was behind in rent. It so turns out that her landlord(s) are my current boss(es). They asked me if they kicked her out if I would go in and make a craft cocktail bar. I agreed and they gave her a pay or vacate; she didn't pay and signed over the entire bar for back rent. Now, maybe my current boss(es) would've done it anyway, but I suspect that knowing they had someone to turn around the space fast influenced their finally getting tough with her.

Alors, here I am. The point of this really, really long preamble is that I am going to document the experience of opening a bar. I have the skeleton in place and she walked away from virtually everything, so I don't need to buy a lot of bar tools. What I have to do is some renovating so it doesn't look like the same space and I need to write a menu, hire a staff, and make it run. This is what I'm going to document here.

My Failure

2009-01-03T03:27:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't normally blog something like this, but, well, the counter inspired me. This woman I have stories about.

Go here. That's Natasha from the Volcano for whomever is counting.

I promise that I have more interesting things coming than this. I think this satisfies a certain something for those involved in the Tacoma social scene. You know who you are. Eat it up.

Winter Break

2008-12-24T14:39:00.000-08:00

I have taken a break from blogging after w/a post election hangover. I'll be back documenting a new project after the holidays. In the meantime, here's what my city looks like the last couple of days:

Why They Fail

2008-10-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

Lack of discipline and lack of composure have killed Dems the last couple of cycles, but now it seems to be doing in the McCain campaign. I'm not sure what to make of this catastrophic gaffe:

More of the Same

2008-10-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Everyday it is something new.

This is America

2008-10-13T20:58:00.000-07:00

Not to beat a dead horse, but I fear that this is America.

Rebranding and Misdirection in the McCain Campaign

2008-10-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

There are 22 days left until we vote for the next President of the United States. As the summer wore on, the leaves changed color and we transitioned into autumn, we have seen both campaigns wage at times ugly and misleading fight over the primary battleground in U.S. politics: the media narrative. This is where the Right Wing political machine has had the Left solidly beaten for quite some time. The Right has managed to define the discourse, while somehow creating a metadiscourse about how the media is an extension of Leftist ideology. While there is little evidence to support this, the term liberal media is so ubiquitous that it has become invisible; it is taken as a self-evident truth. The reality is that liberal or progressive ideology are not going to win this battleground. This not only because it is part of the American psyche that it is already been won by the Left, but also because progressives are diverse with variegated weltangschauung that makes having the kind of message discipline necessary to alter the media narrative difficult.

One small example is that the progressive attacks of Bush are that he is a bumbling, incompetent idiot whose speech is often malapropos and that he is part of an elite political dynasty with ties to corporate powerbrokers who control the machinery of our culture from the shadowy recesses of D.C. These two ideas, while not mutually exclusive, create cognitive dissonance that is (was) reconciled by taking Bush's gaffes and his image as Joe Sixpack on his "ranch" in Crawford, TX as the truth of the matter. There is a collective amnesia about Bush as the owner of an oil company or owner of a baseball team and a confirmation bias that reinforces the President as someone that a large number of Americans would like to have a beer with, as one of us, an unsophisticate who is one of the people. Maybe he would have been able to brand himself as the everyman if progressives could have stayed on message or maybe not, but it is a symptom of the problem that the left has.

This being said, now we have an inversion of this problem where Obama's campaign has managed to be rigorously disciplined in both message and its delivery. Obama has focused on the idea of change and hope, while at the same time having surrogates pursue lines of attack that would either muddle his message or dirty his hands. The McCain campaign, on the other hand, has seemed "erratic" and inconsistent vacillating from running a "maverick" campaign that would raise the level of political discourse to running a Rove-esque (thanks to his protege Steve Schmidt, who is McCain's campaign adviser and strategist) Swift-boat style attacks that inflame the collective fear of terrorism and play upon racial tensions that are largely invisible in Middle America. McCain's campaign has shown a lack of discipline that is coupled with the perception that it is disingenuous and desperate as it moves from one publicity stunt to another (Palin VP selection to the "suspension" of his campaign).

Here is where it gets interesting: McCain/Palin's polling numbers are terrible. Nate Silver and the guys at fivethirtyeight.com have Obama winning nearly 90% of the time. McCain has little to lose at this point, so playing the race card makes sense. It is an appeal to the working class, uneducated Clinton/Reagan "democrats" who are uncomfortable (which is being diplomatic...) with race, black men, Islam, or whatever The Other is. Now the thing is, the radicalization that is occurring at the rallies is reminiscent of what occurs when angry mobs of disenfranchised people are given license to express the devils of their basest nature. If McCain persisted in whipping the fears into a firestorm, then people would start explicitly drawing parallels to Nazi rallies, Klan rallies, or any of the many other examples that litter history. However, if he stops now and begins exhibiting message discipline as a "maverick" and straight talker who denounces the hate-mongering that his campaign has been perpetuating, he can position himself in a good place to win. By running an ugly campaign that reached a fevered pitch over the last couple of weeks, he has managed to embed in our collective psyches the potential that Obama is a terrorist, an unknown, a dangerous commodity with a middle name that elicits thoughts of Middle Eastern dictators.

If he starts campaigning "cleanly" and establishing himself as an agent of hope and optimism (taking a page from his opponents play book), then white voters can vote for him without guilt. He has reestablished Obama's race as part of the political narrative so that it reverberates around the media echo chamber. It has now been established that it is acceptable to be uncomfortable with Obama as an unknown, all that is left is for McCain to give the people a reason to vote for him. In the meantime, racial discourse (hell, all rational, civilized discourse) has been degraded as it has become acceptable to make billboards like the one above and for people to sell these at a conservative-sponsored summit:

Palin and the Spectre of Feminism

2008-10-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, Paglia1 et al2 have coronated Palin as the new avatar for feminism. This is complete and total nonsense. I do not want to get into the subject (again) of McKinney; I really just want to focus on the fact that, like Obama's race, people do not want to talk about Palin's gender. Really, though, we conspicuously avoid discourse about her sex. At this point, it is part and parcel of the mainstream narrative that Palin is both insufferably incompetent and insufferably corrupt. So, let's discuss her sex for a moment. I think this is a good place to start:

Or maybe here. See the thing is, if she looked like the other feminist that she quotes, Madeleine Albright:

Or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

Or this one:

We would not give this woman the time of day. Unfortunately, she is, to be both vulgar and frank, fuckable. She is a MILF. If she were not the fantasy of an "older" lady, rendered only hotter by the fact that she is a rabidly conservative nutjob3, then she would be merely another creationist, militia wingnut that alienates the middle of a country that is pretty wingnutty. Her saving grace is that we all imagine nailing her in the most irredeemable way possible, even if only in code. This might be a fake:

But, we can still dream, right?

1. I address her nonsense here.

2. McCainocrat. Priceless.

3. The crazy ones purportedly fuck like wildcats, or so the bromide goes...

Why Obama will not win the election

2008-10-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

I have long asserted that virtually every single white person in the U.S. is racist. Despite a strong ground game and a lot of money in the coffers, I have been betting friends for months that Barack Obama will not be elected President. I was originally going to write that "we are not ready for a black president." However, that is more code that obfuscates the issue: this is a racist country1. So, maybe more "civilized" people will address the issue differently:

Ok, so I did not hear anyone calling him a nigger, but is the insinuation or flat out assertion that he is a terrorist merely code for the same thing? Are those backwoods rednecks in the first video saying what all of these other people are wanting to say, but are constrained by normative behavior? I believe that instead of using racial epithets, they instead choose to emphasize his middle name, to try to draw parallels between Obama and a 60's radical (or domestic terrorist, if you prefer), and to propogate a whisper campaign that he is in fact a Muslim.

I worry deeply, not only for this election but generally, that there are dark currents that flow beneath the surface of our culture. One in three women report being physically or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. We continue to discriminate against the LGBT community. Children growing up in poor communities lack the opportunities that are available to the affluent, to the White. All of this while we promote a culture of violence that desensitizes each generation to the abstract, unmanned warfare in impoverished countries that is required to sustain our lifestyle. I worry constantly about what we are doing to the planet. But right now I am worried about the Bradley effect. I am worried that these polls are a mirage (I just saw a clip on CNN where Gergen was saying that despite a commanding lead by Obama, the race was far from over because Obama is black. He went on to mention a study done by Stanford that stated Obama might take as much as a six point hit in the polls due to race. Sorry I cannot find the link - in a bit of a hurry. Edit: Here is a link to part of the Gergen quote and a correction about the Stanford survey. Thanks, K.) What happens if Obama loses? Moreover, what happens if he loses but appears to be leading in the polls? Or, if McCain is able to whittle down the impressive national lead through withering, scurrilous attacks? Best case scenario is that the young voters who were excited are irreparably disenfranchised. More to the point, the minority vote who already look upon the establishment with skepticism after the voter suppression in the last two elections decides that they want nothing to do with a system2.

But maybe this is not the worst case scenario. Our politicians (our politicians? Are these my politicians?) are in the pocket of corporations. They manufacture both foreign and domestic policy not with the interest of working people of the world (or the planet), but with the capitalists, i.e. those who hold the means of production. The bottom line for the corporations is profit; the corporations are beholden to their shareholders and not the communities they exploit. By proxy, politicians use money given to their campaigns to get elected (or re-elected), at which point the perpetuate the policies that are in the corporations best interest. So, not matter who wins, we lose. It is only a question of how much we lose. I am going to leave off with my favorite premises from Derrick Jensen's Endgame:

PREMISE ONE: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

PREMISE THREE: Our way of living - industrial civilization - is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

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 on the 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 on the hierarchy is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

PREMISE FIVE: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the loves of those below.

PREMISE SIX: Civilization is not redeemable.

PREMISE TWELVE: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people.

PREMISE THIRTEEN: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of the illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

PREMISE EIGHTEEN: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

1. More than a racist country, it is a country where we marginalize and/or oppress the poor, chilldren, women, gays, and every ethnic background that is not Western European.
2. I originally meant to write "the system," but that typo seems to work just as well.

The Etymythology of Maverick

2008-10-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

The term maverick is from the 19th century American Southwest denoting unbranded cattle. The term came from the Texas pioneer Samuel A. Maverick who refused to brand his cattle, but the term quickly entered the lexicon as someone who was a recalcitrant independent. Neighboring ranchers suspected that Maverick avoided branding his cattle not because his stated reason of not wanting to hurt the animals, but instead because it allowed him to gather all unbranded cattle as his own. Why the term came to mean someone who is independent and stands against their associates as opposed to one who is a conniving opportunist is a mystery. What is ironic, however, is that John McCain has branded himself as a maverick when he is in fact the conniving opportunist who has made a career out of nepotism and cronyism. As we enter the home stretch of the 2008 Presidential campaign, we are going to see a barrage on untruth from both sides. For instance, while Phil Gramm is something of a douche and McCain's economic adviser, Clinton and congress have as much blood on their hands w/r/t the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. McCain's long and sordid public history has enough to take him to task w/o specious linkages. As the Rolling Stone article does a good job of demonstrating, McCain is not only not a maverick in the traditional sense of the term, he is also not a straight talker or a good person. And while we are at it, this war hero mythology is utter nonsense. He was a terrible soldier and terrible pilot who was willfully engaged in an ideological conflict that pitted U.S. containment against the threat of Communist expansion. The war cost the lives of nearly 60,000 servicemen and and upwards of 5 million Vietnamese (1 million combatants and 4 million civilians, or 2/3 of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. More evidence that Jensen was right in that "every holocaust looks different depending on the class to which the observer belongs" [Jensen, Endgame Volume II, pg 865] ). This is a man who when he was shot down flying a combat mission where he was bombing Hanoi was willfully engaging in a conflict that killed millions.

I want people to stop and think about the scale of death involved in the war that this pampered, elitist, spoiled child was willfully engaging in. It would be the equivalent of over the course of 16 years of conflict every single man, and child was killed in the city of Los Angeles. Or Chicago. Or Houston. Or any other city in the United States other than New York City. Or how about this: Roughly more than less than half of the states in the U.S. have a population of under 4 million. So, imagine that over the course of 16 years (say from the waning days of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign until today) every single human being was killed in Oregon or Iowa or Utah. Better yet, imagine that over the course of 16 years of napalm and gifts of dioxin from the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto along with more conventional munitions, every single human being was killed in Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, and Delaware1.

Every single one of them.

And make no mistake, these people died horrifically as "heroes" like John McCain rained death down from above. This womanizer who publicly mocked a teenager girl (Chelsea Clinton) for being unattractive and called his wife a cunt for teasing him about going bald. This is not a good man. John McCain and Sarah Palin (who I will get to later) are not just bad politicians and indifferent to the plight of the working man, they are enemies of humanity and the planet in general. I cannot overstate my disdain for the Republican ticket and what their election might portend.

1. All population numbers are from here.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2008-10-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

The good is that Obama has gathered a sizable lead in the polls as we head down the home stretch. As we expectantly await the October Surprise, we begin to feel the perfidious specter of Hope that the lead is substantial enough to weather whatever comes next.

The bad? It could be anything from the McCain still being competitive after running an awful campaign and Palin being an absolute embarrassment to the media not handing these people their asses for being dishonest, inconsistent, and barely coherent. The latter is exemplified by the fact that in the famous satirization of Palin by Tina Fey, they use direct quotes from the transcripts. And as for the dishonesty, let us call it what it is: Sarah Palin and John McCain are liars. All politicians prevaricate, equivocate, or otherwise challenge or skirt the truth in ways that are unimaginable in everyday life. However, these two have managed drag political discourse into the mud by focusing on soundbites, deception, and innuendo.

This leads me to the ugly: the presidential campaign is about to shift from any semblance of issue driven discourse to personal attacks. Obama was ready for McCain to play the Ayers card with a short video demonstrating the relationships between McCain and Phil Gramm and Charles Keating. In turn, McCain is going to commit an act of ledgerdemain by representing Obama as "the Other." The necessary for preconditions for this narrative to function will be the public having the attention span of a gadfly and the persistance and ubiquitousness of doublethink. The Other that McCain is going represent Obama as is an angry black man who associates with terrorists; as an effete intellectual who is out of touch with middle America, which is actually how he is an uppity nigger; how he is a threat to your safety, which, in terms of him being a black man is mas o menos that his is going to steal your blonde girlfriend after carjacking you. Barack Obama is both a terrorist loving, angry, black Muslim man and a faggoty, prissy intellectual who, as Hillary Clinton said, will fold like a paper doll when attacked. Either way, he is a threat to your freedom and the safety of your women, cars, and VCRs. People do not care about Ayers or Rev. Wright or any of this other nonsense, what they care about is that all of these stories point to his Otherness, which leads back to his blackness. Now, this is where it gets really ugly: Obama cannot win the narrative by directly addressing the narrative of his Otherness. He cannot take a time out and discuss the metanarrative of race relations or how it is being leveraged against him, he cannot unpack or dismantle the individual claims w/r/t the implicit assumptions, and he cannot ignore them. I think (and I sincerely hope I am wrong) that his only viable tactic is to counterattack. He needs to relentlessly dismantle McCain's claims, exploit Palin's gaffes, and take apart the idea of the maverick. Finally, I think that he needs his surrogates to perform the bloodiest of the operations, which will entail painting McCain/Palin as racist, soulless liars. As much as possible, he needs to stay above the fray so as to not tarnish the ideas of hope and change that he has branded himself with. He needs to be seen and heard as much as possible so as to make it easier for the public to understand that he is not the Other, but instead a smooth talking liberal who wants what is best for this country. The next for weeks are going to get very ugly. We all need to be prepared.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

2008-10-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

I have been working this week for the first time in about half a year and yesterday the bar finally opened. I was there from 10:30 until 2 working most of the time, so this morning I'm a bit groggy and very tired. After checking my email, I saw this story here and the pictures here. It made me vomit in my mouth. Enjoy.

2008-09-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

I am trying to avoid attacking Palin or McCain's person, which I'm obviously not very good at. So, I'll let the subjects speak for themselves without any unnecessary commentary. For your viewing enjoyment:

It continues:

I want everyone in our country to see this. I want everyone to watch and listen to both of these candidates. If on November 5th they have been elected to lead this country, I am going to pull my hair out. While it is unimaginable that we will elect a black man to the highest office, it is becoming increasingly unfathomable that we will elect the McCain/Palin ticket. I don't know, but I fear for our future.

The Etymythology of Hope

2008-09-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

Hope is defined as: “Expectation of something desired; desire combined with expectation; feeling of trust or confidence; expectation (without implication of desire, or of a thing not desired); prospect.” It is recorded first in Old English from which it metastasizes through other Northern European languages1. The idea is traced back further to Elpis, the personification of hope, the last of the evils in Pandora’s jar2 to be unleashed upon the world. This story, through which we can trace the Christian creation myth, began with a plea from Prometheus for a back entrance to Olympus, which Athena granted. He then proceeded to take a coal from the chariot of the sun and, stealing away, gave fire to mankind. Zeus was outraged, so to exact revenge he ordered Hephaestus to fashion the most beautiful woman ever created out of clay, which Hermes delivered to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother. However, Epimetheus, having been forewarned to never take gifts from the Olympian gods, declined. In a fury, Zeus chained Prometheus naked to a pillar in the Caucausian mountains where he was subjected to the unremitting torment of a vulture feasting on his liver during the day, and as it regrew during the night he was subjected to the elements. In fear that he might experience a similar fate, Epimetheus married Pandora who was “as foolish, mischievous, and idle as she was beautiful.” Not soon after she, being afflicted with a curious temperament as well, opened a forbidden jar which contained all of the evils of the world such as: “Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insanity, Vice, and Passion.” Freed from the jar, these evils afflicted mankind leaving behind only the “delusive Hope…whom Prometheus had also shut in the jar, [which] discouraged [humanity] by her lies from a general suicide.”3
The mythology is interesting for a couple of initial points. First, man is punished by the gods for one of the most primitive uses of technology. Have we told these stories from the beginning because of an innate fear of technology? If so, is the irrational belief that technology is evil an enthymeme in all discourse on progress? How do we contextualize anarcho-primitivism and industrial/post-industrial culture vis-à-vis the politics of resistance?

The second point that I want to briefly touch on is that the gods, or really only one particularly jealous and vengeful one in this story, punish man’s acceptance of technology by providing him with a woman of unsurpassed beauty who is afflicted with curiosity, laziness, and a proclivity for getting in trouble? Is this an early variation on the Madonna/whore complex and if so, have we held this forever? What does it say about us as a culture that we continue to tell these stories about women?

Both of these points raise a large number of questions that are better left for another time. What I am most interested in is the final scourge of humanity in Pandora’s box: Hope. It is interesting that the Greeks placed Elpis, the personification of Hope, in a jar with the world’s other evils, but does Elpis translate as hope or something else?4 As it turns out, it does not seem to matter too much. The OED defines expectation as, “1. The action of waiting; the action or state of waiting for or awaiting “something”. Now with only a mixture of sense;” and, “2. Expectant waiting.”5

What is missing from both definitions is any agency in the future events. Here is where context is important: we never speak of being hopeful for something over which we have agency; that is to say, we never have hope for something to occur that we ourselves can accomplish. It is nonsensical to say that we hope for something that we know we can achieve; we simply enact whatever we desire. However, if we do not have the power to do so, or the future is ambiguous enough that we might not have the power, then we hope. For instance, we hope that the Cubs do well in the playoffs; we hope that we get a job or promotion; we hope that a pregnant woman’s baby is born alive. What we do not hope for is a bologna sandwich. Provided we have the necessary components of the sandwich, we get up, walk to the kitchen, make the sandwich, and then return to the living room where we resume watching the Cubs game and hoping for a miracle. We hope for a good life constituted of love, shelter, minimal hardship, etc. What exactly we have agency over is a bit contentious and we experience hope for that which is in doubt, but only because of that doubt. It is the dubious nature of agency that makes hope aptly described as delusive. This is also why it is such a powerful rhetorical tool for politicians in trying times. They are playing on our unquestioned and perhaps unacknowledged feelings of powerlessness by offering hope; i.e., they are offering to affect a future outcome over which we have no direct agency.

Make no mistake my friends: Hope is the enemy of man. It seems counterintuitive, but there is mounting evidence that those who accept that which they have agency over are healthier and happier than those who are hopeful, those that dream of a future that is better than the present. This is not to say that the prisoner sentenced to life without parole or the colostomy patient are without hope, it might simply be that they are hopeful for other things (cigarettes, good weather, etc.). It may be the case that hope, like fear, is essential to the human condition. If this is the case, then it is yet another of our innate aspects that should be guarded against. We are constantly at odds with ourselves, our more primitive brain functions seeking to undermine the order established by the higher brain.

Hope, Elpis, daughter of Nyx the primordial goddess of night, is a demon that creates a vicarious world, a world of dreams that we stumble through praying or waiting expectantly for the best. Instead of living meekly in a world contingent upon the blessings of fate or the good will of others, I propose we accept the Serenity Prayer, which works just as well without religion or appeal to higher authority:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

If we accept this as a mantra and we live nec spe, nec metu, then we will begin down the path to being conscientious citizens of the world, which is in and of itself an act of resistance.8

1. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971
2. As noted in the Pandora wiki article, the early references were to a jar and not a box.
3. Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths 38g-j
4. The definition of the word elpis has been the subject of much debate with some scholars translating it as “expectation.” Again, see the Pandora wiki article for a synopsis on this debate.
5. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 19718.
6. NYtimes article here.
7. Also, see The Whitehall studies where the relative health of British civil servants is examined.
8. I've been using a Mac all day and there seems to be formatting issues, user error issues, etc. I want to throw this goddamned thing out the window. If you've made it this far, thanks for the patience.

Of Cultural Critics and Straw Men

2008-09-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

I was going to begin this blog, which is ultimately a response to that bastion of reason and intellect, Camille Paglia, by commenting on the ambiguous nature of cultural critics, political pundits, and the like who seem to manufacture their professional existence with metanarratives, simulacra, shadows and rhetoric. I was already weary as I began typing ; I watch CNN and Fox news obsessively; I read blogs and newspapers, everyday checking polls and reading analysis of whatever is reverberating around the insipid echo chamber of American Politics; and frankly, a diatribe about those who exist in the ephemeral world of infotainment seemed pretty useless. They know what they are propagating and we should know what they are doing. Unfortunately, I suspect that is not the case. Fact, reason, and critical analysis, (nevermind accountability) are absent from mainstream discourse. This is evident in the way that the Republican party uses the strategy of combining The Big Lie with volume and repetition. Al Gore invented the internet? John McCain had a black (gasp!) child out of wedlock? Mainstream discourse has devolved to the point where Swift Boating has become part of our political lexicon.

I have many friends who do not know where to go to become informed citizens. Actually, I don't really know where to go. We can collect information from as many sources as possible but we still never know how much is true. That is why it is important that we propagate critical analysis. We need to be able to assess statements for their bullshit factor. Watching as much CNN and Fox as I do, I am amazed by how much of their commentary is biased, self-reflexive, or flat out wrong. Even at their best, "journalists" commit the symmetry of sin fallacy: they endeavor to seem unbiased, so they must manufacture counterbalancing stories. As responsible citizens we must rigorously unearth enthymemes, presuppositions, and address weasel words, logical fallacies, and the like. We must recognize the limits of language and tread carefully when dealing with those things that we would much rather pass over in silence.

Speaking of things that would be better passed over in silence, Camille Paglia's take on the Sarah Palin phenomenon came across my RSS reader this morning. I am generally ambivalent about people such as Paglia. On the one hand I enjoy their inflammatory or provocative ideas even if they are bit silly, and on the other hand I tend to think that our cultural narratives are insipid or strident enough without intellectual shock jocks further exacerbating The Great Cult of Unreason. Still, I was feeling quite ready for some silliness this morning (too mush yerba mate tea, I think...), so I readily got into the article.

The first blip on my radar was when Paglia stated that she supported Obama because he represented "new generation of leadership with fresh ideas and an expansive, cosmopolitan vision." Now, before I proceed any further, I should say that I like Obama. He is mas o menos the type of candidate that I appreciate. He doesn't seem to be running from the label of liberal, which has become a dirty word, at least prior to our current economic collapse. However, are his fresh ideas? Is his vision expansive and cosmopolitan? Or is he merely the left wing of the current political establishment? His support of FISA, offshore drilling, unconditional support of Israel, among other things make me wary. I immediately wonder why Paglia isn't writing about Cynthia McKinney? That probably is a line of thought best left for another day...

The second blip on my radar, which elicited a skinnying of the eyes, was when she first heard Palin speak she compared it to "a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football" and then even more obtusely, to a Star Wars light saber battle (and, to get even wierder, linked to a Youtube video of The Phantom Menace). I couldn't help but feel I was reading Stephen King's embarassingly inept column for Entertainment Weekly where he tried desperately to seem hip and relevant. Moreover, I saw the same press conference and I had a completely different reaction. I knew nothing of Palin. If I hadn't been told, I wouldn't have known that she was a governor. My only thoughts were: shit, she's attractive; and, damn, that's a politically savvy move. At no point did I think I was watching gritty heavy weight politics. I thought that it was an intelligent way for the McCain camp to mitigate a post-convention bounce. It merely confirmed my belief that there are no battleground states, but instead the battleground is the news cycle and the media narrative. It also confirmed that the Right is far better than the left in this battleground. It is a piece of ground that I am not sure one can win without sacrificing one's integrity (I guess it's not sacrifice if you don't start off with any.)

Paglia then goes on to reference Palin as a transgender, hybrid that "was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before...In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment." Let's unpack this nonsense. What were these male and female qualities that she was demonstrating? Did I miss the part where she flashed the camera her penis and then inserted into her own vagina? Paglia seems a worldly enough person, so I am surprised at her surprise. Maybe she should meet more strong, independent women? And if she is referring to being on a national stage, the dearth of strong, independent women should not come as a surprise to anyone. I am still taken aback when I see women in any sort of position of power, so really the bar is set pretty low. To continue unpacking, the reference to Madonna seems like another attempt to reference pop culture relevancy. I don't mean to dismiss what Madonna did for feminism 20 years ago, but is that the best Paglia can come up with? Finally, her reference to ramming "pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment" seems to evoke images of sexual violence against people who are seeking to advocate for victims of such crimes. I know the type of feminists that she is referring to. The majority of my experience with them has ended badly, but I still see their point. When women make 70 cents on the dollar, when 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted (and these are only reported figures), then I'm not sure that condescendingly dismissing an establishment that seeks to advocate for a class of people who are routinely marginalized and violently oppressed as victim-mongering is the best tack.

Paglia continues with statements that are no longer blips on a radar, but are now a full-blown assault on reason. She compares Palin to Reagan as "someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it." This despite being an evangelical, believing in creationism, and being skeptical about man's part in climate change. Paglia goes on to say that "I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it." This is despite Palin's many abuses of political power ranging from taking a per diem for working at home, to the obnoxiously dubbed "troopergate," to her politics of deception w/r/t the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, and finally, right in line w/Paglia's diminishing of women as victims, Palin is tied to the charging of rape victims for the rape kits.

Paglia goes on to sing the praises of frontier women that represent "far bolder and hardier [women] than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else." Now, isn't this really a problem not with feminists or non-frontier women, but w/our culture in general? Doesn't this attitude begin w/corporations that poison the environment and are never held accountable? Maybe if we stop handing out government subsidies and we make corporations apply that same can-do attitude that we demand of the proletariat, then maybe we will see the change Paglia hopes for. Maybe we will see bolder and hardier corporations that will promote a better culture where men and women will believe that their hard work will be rewarded and that there is justice. And finally, this comes the day after the U.S. government agreed to float an 85 billion dollar rescue loan to AIG.

Finally, Paglia decides to take Dems to task for making abortion a wedge issue. She claims that for the left it is an "obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement." Now, is this a result of Roe v Wade being constantly under atttack? Is it a result of religious based opposition to family planning and sex education in schools? She commits an act of intellectual dishonesty by never addressing the issue, instead committing a bait and switch where she points to an apparent logical inconsistency with the left being both pro-choice and anti-death penalty. "I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?" This is another ridiculous sentence that requires some unpacking. First, it is a rare Dem who supports abortion (although I count myself as a outspoken supporter of abortion). Most people are uncomfortable w/abortion, but they support a woman's right to choose. This is an important distinction. I think in a perfect world, people would prefer that the woman never gets pregnant in the first place. And finally, she inappropriately combines the right to choose w/the opposition to the death penalty w/o ever going into any details about that opposition. Plenty of people ideally don't have a problem w/the death penalty as much as they are uncomfortable w/the disproportionate number of people on death row who are minorities and/or come from poor backgrounds. If there was an equitable distribution of capital punishment, then maybe it would be different. Or maybe it wouldn't because a woman's right to choose what she does w/her body is not analogous to choices that the state makes w/r/t its citizens' bodies. She ends w/an appeal to emotion that frankly doesn't deserve a response as I am not going to deal w/the problem of guilt, innocence, or who deserves execution.

I thought that reading the Paglia article would be good for a laugh and maybe a snarky conversation w/my prissy, victim-mongering friends over beers. Instead, I'm left feeling the same emptiness I feel when I spend hours watching CNN and Fox. The steady diet of nothing leaves me disillusioned w/the world and angry at myself for wasting so much of my time. Thanks Paglia for nothing.

Green is this year's black

2008-08-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

I'll return to work in a couple of weeks and I feel a sense of urgency w/r/t a few projects that I've started. While I'm happy about some of the preparations I've made for the apocalypse and my brief Mexico excursion, I am still disappointed that I haven't accomplished more. So, without further ado, here's where I am at so far:
- Volunteer at 2nd Cycle bicycle collective. This has been a great experience. I get to work with my hands on one of the most efficient engines ever created and learn about something that I use everyday that I didn't really know anything about a few months ago. The practical experience has been gratifying; I'm curious whether the administrative will prove to be equally so. We are doing something that is good for the community as well.
- Gardening. I've been teaching myself to garden by working in the community space down the street and in my own yard. Yesterday I built to 6'x6' garden boxes from cedar planks and salvaged wood from an old couch and a box spring, both of which contained a remarkable amount of easily salvaged pine. My goal is to grow most of my produce by next year. In the next couple of weeks I'm going to work on building a removable green house and a compost bin. Maybe soon a chicken coop as well...if not, then maybe a dog house.
- Writing. I've made my return to fiction. I've been writing everyday and excitedly researching a number of projects. I probably have the publication of an old story in PICTURE|STORY|SONG to thank for this. The bulk of my fiction will probably end up being graphic novels. Rob agreed to help me with 3 book proposals that I hope to have done soon.
-Sewing. I've started mending my clothes and I'm hoping to make panniers before the end of the summer. I have a feeling that this project is probably bigger than I realize.
-We've been brainstorming ways to make our house "green." We recycle significantly more than we throw out, but we still need to compost (the last attempt ended, er, badly), and I would like to reclaim graywater. Along the same lines, I need to build/salvage rain barrels. Any advice for this or any other project that promotes self-reliance or living locally, send my way.

I've got more projects on the horizon as well. I'm really excited and happy, not only because it's my birthday. Did I mention it's my birthday? Yea, so, no big deal or anything, but you know, it's my birthday. K got me awesome presents and there's going to be a party here on Saturday.

The Cult of Disinformation

2008-08-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

Unless the Jolie-Pitt twins are conjoined, I fail to see why we care. After watching an hour of CNN yesterday, I fail to realize why we care about most of their "stories". The perfect example of this was the overwrought coverage of the SoCal earthquake. This was manufactures news - they kept talking about asking people to call in with mas o menos traumatic stories. The first hour was very thin as no one had anything exciting to say about the quake. Most people didn't even realize what was going on until it was over. Then, I suspect the people that did call in embellished their stories so they could be interviewed by Wolf Blitzer. The funny thing is that the coverage of the earthquake began right as Sen. Harry Reid was about to address the Stevens indictment. I watched for hours as CNN frantically covered a few broken dishes and the rides at Disneyland being temporarily shutdown while the longest serving Republican Senator was being indicted on corruption charges. The "news" is absolutely ridiculous. The coverage of the presidential campaign is equally insipid and equally frustrating...

The Great Plague of Unreason

2008-07-23T13:58:00.000-07:00

The recent arrest of Radovan Karadžić has piqued my interest in the Balkans and the Seige of Sarajevo. Without digressing too much into that (and my feelings about the "halcyon" 90's and the Clinton administration), I simply want to point out the charges that Karadžić is facing:

Five counts of crimes against humanity (Article 5 of the Statute - extermination, murder, persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds, persecutions, inhumane acts (forcible transfer));
Three counts of violations of the laws of war (Article 3 of the Statute - murder, unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians, taking hostages);
One count of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions (Article 2 of the Statute - willful killing).^[10]
Unlawful transfer of civilians because of religious or national identity.^[11]

Do any of these charges seem applicable to our current administration in our current "war on terror"? How about any of the previous administrations that perpetrated any number of illegal acts? Shouldn't Karadžić be as immune to prosecution as any other wartime leader as his followers are suggesting? Or better yet, shouldn't the generals and politicians who commit, order, or allow these crimes be marched in front of international tribunals?

It would give me great solace to think that the abuses of power and the complete lack of accountability that we see in the current administration are an anomaly, but unfortunately I think that they are merely more flagrant examples of common practices. I think that my friends that tell me my vote counts, that the individual voices are important, that there is the possibility of change and resistance that is not direct action are missing or ignoring fundamental structure of our society. Power perpetuates and protects itself and will not be relinquished without great struggle and more than likely, much blood.

On a slightly lighter note, I am amused that this man who is being indicted for crimes against humanity has been hiding in plain sight as a self-help/new age guru. The plague of unreason is manifest in so many ways...

Welcome to the Machine

2008-07-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

We do not need any of DARPA's gadgets, FISA's allowance for dubious activities, or the umbrella of the PATRIOT ACT to keep us safe. All we need is to make sure that we watch out for each other. To that end, the US government has created a Terrorism Liaison Officer where civilians like you and me can do there part by watching other civilians like you and me. Suspicious activities include, but are not limited to, overheard threats, graffiti of a man holding a gun, the legal purchase of something that has a very quotidian use, but can also be used to inspire terror, and taking pictures or shooting video that has no apparent aesthetic value. I have always thought that crappy photography and ill-conceived video installations were not with us, but against us. Every third Thursday when I go to the local galleries during Art Walk, I am always thinking to myself, "wouldn't the world be better served with this asshole getting waterboarded at Gitmo?" Well, now I too can make the world a better place.

Slow Motion Armaggedon

2008-07-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

Reprinted w/o permission from J's LJ. While I don't agree with everything, I still think it's work reposting.

-Apparently the food crisis is real. Last night on NPR's Marketplace, they interviewed an economist from the FDA who confirmed that globally the price of staples is rapidly beginning to evade the ability of the poorest to afford it. This has led to several SE asian nations to shut down exports of rice in an attempt to stabilize local prices. This of course will have a chilling effect on domestic production which will lead to further scarcity and shortages.

-Gasoline will probably top 4 dollars a barrel for regular unleaded by the summer, and there's really nothing we can do about it. This is even though according to several studies, demand for gasoline has in fact been reduced. As Gasoline, and particularly diesel fuel, continue to rise in price, everything anyone in the first world buys will begin to cost more money. Add to this the fact that we're nearing a recession and the continual decline of real wages for the middle and working classes in north america, combined with the fact that the EU's freight infrastructure is much less robust than North America's, and we're looking at a pan first world crisis within the next couple of years. And unfortunately, it looks like it will only get worse.

-Climate Change is increasingly leading to bizarre weather all over the place. In seattle, we had snow in April, which is unheard of, and our daily weather fluctuations are strange and ugly and provide a sort of Natural Born Killers backdrop to daily life.

-The Bush administration continues its course of sabre rattling in dealing with Iran and Syria, the two nations with whom we should be attempting to diplomatically engage in much more real terms and also begin to distance ourselves from the Saudis.

-Still no legitimate replacements for fossil fuels have been found and what fossil fuels are still available are apparently rapidly approaching peak supply. As soon as peak supply is reached, the only way to reduce prices on them will be to reduce demand. with maybe a couple billion cars, trucks, airplanes, and ships reliant on fossil fuels just to move and an increasingly globalized supply chain for agricultural and industrial products, that demand is not likely to abate and as a result the prices on everything will continue to rise.

-China owns close to a trillion dollars of the US national debt, putting us a in a precarious position of being at the mercy of another state for our continued fiscal solvency. Granted that even if China did elect to dump their dollars it would be disastrous for them as well as us, and it's not likely to happen as a result, if things continue to get worse in Asia, it becomes more and more of a real possibility as a way for them to leverage assistance.

-John "The Disaster Waiting To Happen" McCain is starting to look a little too teflon thanks to the hyperfocus of the mainstream media on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's campaign gaffes. McCain's image as a Maverick Independent, carefully crafted since the early nineties when he was nearly arrested on criminal charges for his involvment in the S&L scandals, is being bantered about uninterrogated by the same people who will unashamedly attempt to tie Barack Obama to the Weather Underground, and who have more or less decided that Hillary Clinton has no chance of becoming the Democratic nominee for the presidency. This Teflonacy of McCain's makes him a more viable candidate, and given recent revelations about the nature of the Iranian and Syrian nuclear weapons programs, there is now good reason to fear that McCain might do something truly crazy in the middle east should he be elected.

-Should that truly crazy something happen, it is unlikely that we will be able to continue as we have with a completely volunteer army. Our Military Readiness is already sorely taxed by the ongoing debacle in Iraq and the escalating problems in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border. Fighting in Iran or Syria alone would possibly push us past the breaking point, never mind what might happen if violence broke out in south asia or china due to food shortages.

-What can we do to prepare?

As I see it, there are a number of things the average person can do to prepare for the collapse of western civilization as we know it.

1.) Buy Chickens: Eggs are an excellent source of protein and get a good return on investment from chicken feed. If you have a reasonably sized yard, then four or five chickens are cheap, easy to care for, and will produce eggs.

2.) Plant a vegetable garden and learn how to cultivate seeds from plants. Depending on where you live, there are any number of high input to output vegetables that can be grown. Also worth considering are fruit trees and berry bushes.

3.) Learn how to make electricity. One of the biggest challenges we may start to face as the energy markets destabilize is insufficient supply. We in the pacific northwest are likely to be spared this so long as our hydroelectric infrastructure remains intact, but people living in the southwest in particular need to look into how to construct small scarel windfarms and photoelectric panels and keep them working.

4.) buy a fishing pole, a hunting rifle, and a shotgun and learn how to use them. also learn how to skin and clean a large animal. this goes for vegetarians too. I look at hunting as a sort of last resort survival skill, but if things get truly bad to the point that the food transportation mechanisms break down, it will be a useful skill.

5.) read up on anarcho-syndicalism. In small groups, anarcho syndicalism is the most workable ad hoc system of governance. should there be a widescale breakdown of law and order, we will still need communities in order to live, and communities need a way to keep order internally. most people understand the principle of direct democracy, but in the absence of any sort of authority in times of stress, direct democracy can also be fragmentary. An anarcho syndicalist group functioning on an internal gift economy and an external barter economy will be able to function well and maintain it's internal cohesion.

6.) go to health insurance websites and find the names of young doctors in your area. if health care breaks, you will need to know who to go to to treat the sick, and younger people will have a less established group of patients demanding their attention in times of crisis.

7.) Buy a road bicycle with some sort of trailer. Bicycle travel is the most energy efficient means of transportation ever invented. it takes a lot longer to travel long distances by bike, but it will always work. Also worth your time would be to stock up on a few extra inner tubes, replacement brakes, tires, seat posts, chains, and gears. also, buy an extra helmet in case you get into a crash with your main helmet and they've become cost prohibitive.

8.) learn as much first aid as you can and if you can, invest in a home defibrulator and a top notch first aid kit.

9.) learn how to build a fire and fire pit. you never know when that might come in handy.

On the Road

2008-05-23T23:31:00.000-07:00

I went to Mexico recently for what was glibly described by the Sheriff as a Spiritquest. I managed to parlay that into a conversation starter and a few free drinks, but that’s another story…Really, I ended up in Mexico (Puerto Vallarta, specifically) because it was the cheapest place I could get to that was outside of the US and Canada. So, I packed a backpack and a sidebag with some books and clothes and was bound for Mexico on pretty short notice. Now, I don’t speak any Spanish and I had no real idea of what I was doing. When frequent tourists of PV explained that I don’t need either I was skeptical. As it turns out, they were right. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I felt that it was important to document the trip, so I packed one notebook with about 100 blank pages, a digital camera/video camera with 4.5 gigs of memory, and a pocket notebook for miscellaneous notes. I haven’t done any extensive handwriting in years and I haven’t journalled (girnalled? guyary?) in about the same amount of time, so my first few pages are really quite embarrassing. I managed to fill a third of the notebook with worthless observations and semi-coherent political rantings, the camera with about 650 pictures and videos, which a solid 80% are probably uninteresting to anyone but me, with the finally 20% being pretty evenly split between being bizarre and embarrassing. After going through the notes I made while touring and the pictures from tour, I thought that it might be interesting to post my notes from Mexico more or less unedited. The problem I noticed as I was only a few pages in is that not even I was interested by the naïve, arrogant, or insipid observations I was making about a city and a culture that I didn’t understand. So, instead I am going to distill all of the nonsense to the most interesting pictures, political rantings, and stories.

…

When I first arrived in Mexico, I wasn’t sure at all what I was doing there. The only thing that I knew was that barring a total disaster I was committed to being there for a month. This meant that I had to effectively budget my money, which is in and of itself a huge issue for me. I read about PV and all of the tourist nonsense (riding ziplines through the jungle canopy, swimming with dolphins, Spring Break! type nonsense with drunk, obnoxious children of privilege, etc.) that I was excited about partaking in. Almost immediately after arriving, I realized that not only are the tourist “excursions” a racket, but that they are bound up with the timeshare scams in some elusive way. Not only that, but the town is full of people who struggle to survive for a month on what tourists (People of the Occupation) spend in a day. They roar through the narrow, cobblestone streets on a caravan of ATVs as they storm into the jungle to ride a zipline or go see the set where memorable scenes from Predator were filmed. The flaunting of wealth was so obnoxious and apparent that I almost immediately lost any desire to engage in any of the adventures. This disillusionment was also facilitated by the fact that I didn’t bring enough money. Instead, I hunted around for cheap, “authentic” food, religiously practiced Spanish phrases that would at the very least allow me to attempt to be polite, and I laid out on the beach and read (I brought Endgame II, Welcome to the Machine, and Ishmael for company. More than once I found myself questioning my judgment.)

I had two initial experiences that deeply informed the rest of the trip. The first was my experience with the street food or more specifically, my attempt to eat street food.

As I stated before, I don’t speak any Spanish and I spoke less when I got there. Now, I have definite feelings about the fact that I’ve spent the better part of my life working in restaurants, a large part of the staff is made up of Mexicans who are almost always working “undesirable” jobs, and I haven’t picked up even “kitchen” Spanish. It speaks to the fact the liberal, “enlightened,” “progressive,” class that I self-identify with is composed of a large number of useful fictions that are meant to alleviate White Guilt. Among these fictions is the fact that racism in America is relegated to the rural, uneducated whites. Not only am I convinced that all white people in America are racist, but I suspect that everyone of privilege (which means all White people) is racist[1].

After a couple of days in the city, I decided to brave the street food. As I walked up, I was increasingly unsure of myself. I wasn’t sure how to order in English, mush less Spanish, I didn’t know where to sit, and looking at the handwritten menu on a piece of butcher paper, I realized that I also didn’t recognize a single thing. I stood there staring at the patrons, the menu, and the food in complete bemusement. It was then that someone made room for me and in a very friendly manner gestured for me to sit down next to him. I gladly joined him and now everyone around the little cart was staring at me intently. The lady who was cooking looked at me expectantly then spoke to me in Spanish. I can only assume that she was asking me what I would like, but I was totally confused, so I asked (in English) for the only thing I knew how to say, which was a fish taco. Maybe again, I’m getting ahead of myself. I really should contextual this moment before I go any further. In the couple weeks leading up to my trip I’d had many conversations with a friend who had made a similar excursion to Mexico for similar reasons. She would talk dreamily of taco pescados and beer after a day of lying on the beach. She had also told me of her adventures with Ketamine and leaping from a cruising speedboat to a yacht in what she described as her “Charlie’s Angels moment.” I tried to avoid romanticizing the trip too much so I wouldn’t be disappointed and because I know that those Ketamine-and-leaping-from-speedboat moments rarely occur when you’re looking for them. Still, I had been fantasizing about my first taco pescado from a street vendor. And when the moment was finally here, not only could I now order it, but the lady told me no, only beef. I had a moment of indecision before apologizing and telling her that I didn’t eat beef as I got up and left. I knew at that moment that I missed out on an experience fundamental to the culture because I was importing an ethical decision whose context is the working class neighborhood back home. I walked away feeling shitty, which initiated my examination of the context of my ethics and ultimately the reevaluation of many of them.

My second experience was quite silly, really. The weeks leading up to going to Mexico saw an almost complete lapse in my self-control. Not only did I spend money irresponsibly, but I also drank prodigious amounts of alcohol and stopped working out. I was already not in the best shape, but when I got down there and wandered out on the beach I, much to my surprise, was very self-conscious about my pasty, flaccid body. I spent a couple of days hiding under an umbrella trying to be absorbed by Daniel Quinn’s abysmal writing and not think about the guys at the Blue Chairs who looked like they’re carved out of marble[2]. I realized that being shy or self-conscious or whatever was only going to inhibit my experience, so I decided to lie out on the beach in the smallest item of clothing I had brought: low-rise athletic briefs that, as far as I was concerned, looked like speedos. If I was going to be self-conscious, then I was going to force myself to come to terms with whatever it was that was bothering me. Suffice it to say, I was quickly over it as I spent the next few weeks in the sun in the same outfit.

Both of these experiences are pretty trivial, but they were instrumental to what I had to figure out when I was there. After realizing that the avoidance of meat would not only inhibit my experience of the culture but would also seriously hamper my enjoyment, I quickly abandoned my dogmatism and dove right in with no ill-effects, physical or otherwise. Forcing myself to be almost naked in front of a group of strange people set the tone for the rigorous self-analysis that elicited more than a couple of my political rants. The reason I write about these experiences is that they will hopefully contextualize the rest of the experiences. However, some of them are probably without any coherent sort of context at all…

[1] These are really loaded contentious statements that I will analyze at a later date.

[2] This is great example of confirmation bias. There were obviously far more normal or fat people on the beach then Adonises, but in my neurosis I was only able to recognize the most beautiful people. That probably speaks as much to my arrogance as to my insecurity.

Examining the Limits of Rational Discourse

2008-03-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

Jurgen Habermas asserts in On Leveling the Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature[i] that philosophy and literary criticism function as “mediators between expert cultures and the everyday world”[ii] and that, in response to Derrida’s deconstructionism, the leveling of the distinction between specialized forms of discourse does a disservice to both. Habermas argues that each specialized discourse operates under different concepts of validity that are not necessarily mutually compatible. The language games and the validity claims of certain disciplines, say science and poetics, are exclusive from each other; while we can perform a Freudian, psychoanalytic read of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or seek to find an answer w/r/t M-theory in the labyrinths of Borges or the dream-like wanderings of Kafka, ultimately what we are doing is reading the works out of their context thereby rendering them floating signifiers. While I agree that relegating the “problem-solving” skills of philosophers only to metaphysics is a waste, unvetted deconstructionist reads are also cherry picking from that skill set while leaving behind one of the basic principles of critical reasoning: context.

Habermas wrote”[t]he rebellious labor of deconstruction aims indeed at dismantling smuggled-in basic conceptual hierarchies, at overthrowing foundational relationships and conceptual relations of domination.”[iii][iv] This is a noble pursuit and reason enough to utilize the basic principles of deconstructionism. “The totalizing critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction since subject centered reason can be convicted of being authoritarian in nature only by having recourse to its own tools.”[v] One need not look to the mysticism of Heidegger or the silence of Wittgenstein to answer the problem of reason finding its own functional limits; one can merely accept that its contradictions are inherent its particular language game[vi]. The performative contradictions are what inspire Derrida’s attempt to create a metadiscourse through deconstructionism (and Adorno through negative dialectics), which effectively expands “the sovereignty of the rhetoric over the realm of the logical”[vii]. The distinction between the two being that logic is “a system of rules to which only certain types of discourse are subjected in an exclusive manner – those bound to argumentation,” and rhetoric being “concerned with the qualities of texts in general.”[viii] The two are not in opposition at all, but instead deal with two different disciplines each with their own set validity claims.

Habermas goes on to speak of “poetic speech,” a particular subset of rhetoric, as “[t]he space of fiction that is opened up when the linguistic forms of expression become reflexive [which] results from the suspending of illocutionary binding forces that make mutual understanding possible.”[ix] This is world-disclosure where understanding is achieved not by the context of coordinating action and consequences relevant to action, but by understanding the statement is directed at the medium itself and can only understood as such. This is language for the sake of language, the words or messages existing for their aesthetic value. The ambiguity of these poetic messages helps convey the human experience in those opaque outlying areas where reason fails us. However, it is unclear how this differs from metaphysics aside from the convention of particular validity claims between the two.

The idealizations present in the critique of metaphysics have the same illocutionary binding force as the fictional or the poetic. Given the limits of reason and the pragmatic faith required to function in the world, philosophy was constituted of a series of constructs that all worked to obey the highly specialized language game – reason. The only way it can continue to function is the intentional ignorance of the internal inconsistencies of the closed system. It is under this rubric that Rorty speaks of language “which can receive no gloss, requires no interpretation, cannot be distanced, cannot be sneered at by later generations. It is the hope for a vocabulary which is intrinsically and self-evidently final.”[x] This sounds like the endeavor of every discourse, but more specifically, it seems to have a yearning for the metaphysical, for the Platonic Ideal.

The dismantling of the traditional paradigm of philosophy and the salvaging of its useful parts allows for us to take different tools and gain a greater understanding to discourses in other disciplines. This in turn opens the doors of philosophy to interpretation through other disciplines as well. Nietzsche, Emerson, Foucault and Baudrillard should not only be subject to the validity claims of reason, but also to the manifold interpretations presented by deconstructing their works.[xi] The constraints of language are interdisciplinary; the inability to communicate between specialized modes of discourse is limited by the reader committing a deontological stop more than an idiomatic incompatibility. Philosophy and art are not “held together by the functional matrix of ordinary language”[xii] as much as by the fact that they both function to help solidify the bonds of intersubjective agreement w/r/t those places where the logic of language games and reason fail us.

[i] Continental Aesthetics, Blackwell Publishers

[ii] pp. 317

[iii] pp. 308

[iv] This is more than unearthing enthymemes; it is about learning to see what our culture hides in plain sight. For example, the continued subjugation and domination of marginalized groups in the US such as women, children, and the poor, and, contrary to its representation on tv crime dramas, the US Justice system being more about protecting wealth and property (which translates to power), then it is about justice or defending those that cannot defend themselves.

[v] pp. 307

[vi] And by extension the sometimes incoherence that arises from this systematic problem. This does limit discourse, but as long as public policy is not being formed by or around these limits in rational discourse, then there should not be a huge problem. However, this might be an area where utilization of deconstructionism’s tools might shed some light on what can otherwise be crepuscular.

[vii] pp. 308

[viii] pp 309

[ix] pp. 316

[x] Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 93

[xi] To which these interpretations are then subject to the validity claims of the disciplines from which they arise. If interpretation itself is purported to be a philosophical treatise or lays truth claims it philosophy, then it is subject to philosophy’s validity claims. The author defines what set of rules he or she is beholden to by what sets of claims he or she makes.

[xii] Continental Aesthetics, pp.317

The Poetics of Slavery

2008-03-10T03:55:00.000-07:00

CROSS POSTED AND REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION:
A vast array of pharmaceuticals (AP) -- including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones - have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs - and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen - in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas - from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public "doesn't know how to interpret the information" and might be unduly alarmed.

How do the drugs get into the water?

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies - which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public - have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.

"We recognize it is a growing concern and we're taking it very seriously," said Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Members of the AP National Investigative Team reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants and interviewed more than 230 officials, academics and scientists. They also surveyed the nation's 50 largest cities and a dozen other major water providers, as well as smaller community water providers in all 50 states.

Here are some of the key test results obtained by the AP:

-Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city's watersheds.

-Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

-Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

-A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco's drinking water.

-The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

-Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson, Ariz.

The situation is undoubtedly worse than suggested by the positive test results in the major population centers documented by the AP.

The federal government doesn't require any testing and hasn't set safety limits for drugs in water. Of the 62 major water providers contacted, the drinking water for only 28 was tested. Among the 34 that haven't: Houston, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, Phoenix, Boston and New York City's Department of Environmental Protection, which delivers water to 9 million people.

Some providers screen only for one or two pharmaceuticals, leaving open the possibility that others are present.

The AP's investigation also indicates that watersheds, the natural sources of most of the nation's water supply, also are contaminated. Tests were conducted in the watersheds of 35 of the 62 major providers surveyed by the AP, and pharmaceuticals were detected in 28.

Yet officials in six of those 28 metropolitan areas said they did not go on to test their drinking water - Fairfax, Va.; Montgomery County in Maryland; Omaha, Neb.; Oklahoma City; Santa Clara, Calif., and New York City.

The New York state health department and the USGS tested the source of the city's water, upstate. They found trace concentrations of heart medicine, infection fighters, estrogen, anti-convulsants, a mood stabilizer and a tranquilizer.

City water officials declined repeated requests for an interview. In a statement, they insisted that "New York City's drinking water continues to meet all federal and state regulations regarding drinking water quality in the watershed and the distribution system" - regulations that do not address trace pharmaceuticals.

In several cases, officials at municipal or regional water providers told the AP that pharmaceuticals had not been detected, but the AP obtained the results of tests conducted by independent researchers that showed otherwise. For example, water department officials in New Orleans said their water had not been tested for pharmaceuticals, but a Tulane University researcher and his students have published a study that found the pain reliever naproxen, the sex hormone estrone and the anti-cholesterol drug byproduct clofibric acid in treated drinking water.

Of the 28 major metropolitan areas where tests were performed on drinking water supplies, only Albuquerque; Austin, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Va.; said tests were negative. The drinking water in Dallas has been tested, but officials are awaiting results. Arlington, Texas, acknowledged that traces of a pharmaceutical were detected in its drinking water but cited post-9/11 security concerns in refusing to identify the drug.

The AP also contacted 52 small water providers - one in each state, and two each in Missouri and Texas - that serve communities with populations around 25,000. All but one said their drinking water had not been screened for pharmaceuticals; officials in Emporia, Kan., refused to answer AP's questions, also citing post-9/11 issues.

Rural consumers who draw water from their own wells aren't in the clear either, experts say.

The Stroud Water Research Center, in Avondale, Pa., has measured water samples from New York City's upstate watershed for caffeine, a common contaminant that scientists often look for as a possible signal for the presence of other pharmaceuticals. Though more caffeine was detected at suburban sites, researcher Anthony Aufdenkampe was struck by the relatively high levels even in less populated areas.

He suspects it escapes from failed septic tanks, maybe with other drugs. "Septic systems are essentially small treatment plants that are essentially unmanaged and therefore tend to fail," Aufdenkampe said.

Even users of bottled water and home filtration systems don't necessarily avoid exposure. Bottlers, some of which simply repackage tap water, do not typically treat or test for pharmaceuticals, according to the industry's main trade group. The same goes for the makers of home filtration systems.

Contamination is not confined to the United States. More than 100 different pharmaceuticals have been detected in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and streams throughout the world. Studies have detected pharmaceuticals in waters throughout Asia, Australia, Canada and Europe - even in Swiss lakes and the North Sea.

For example, in Canada, a study of 20 Ontario drinking water treatment plants by a national research institute found nine different drugs in water samples. Japanese health officials in December called for human health impact studies after detecting prescription drugs in drinking water at seven different sites.

In the United States, the problem isn't confined to surface waters. Pharmaceuticals also permeate aquifers deep underground, source of 40 percent of the nation's water supply. Federal scientists who drew water in 24 states from aquifers near contaminant sources such as landfills and animal feed lots found minuscule levels of hormones, antibiotics and other drugs.

Perhaps it's because Americans have been taking drugs - and flushing them unmetabolized or unused - in growing amounts. Over the past five years, the number of U.S. prescriptions rose 12 percent to a record 3.7 billion, while nonprescription drug purchases held steady around 3.3 billion, according to IMS Health and The Nielsen Co.

"People think that if they take a medication, their body absorbs it and it disappears, but of course that's not the case," said EPA scientist Christian Daughton, one of the first to draw attention to the issue of pharmaceuticals in water in the United States.

Some drugs, including widely used cholesterol fighters, tranquilizers and anti-epileptic medications, resist modern drinking water and wastewater treatment processes. Plus, the EPA says there are no sewage treatment systems specifically engineered to remove pharmaceuticals.

One technology, reverse osmosis, removes virtually all pharmaceutical contaminants but is very expensive for large-scale use and leaves several gallons of polluted water for every one that is made drinkable.

Another issue: There's evidence that adding chlorine, a common process in conventional drinking water treatment plants, makes some pharmaceuticals more toxic.

Human waste isn't the only source of contamination. Cattle, for example, are given ear implants that provide a slow release of trenbolone, an anabolic steroid used by some bodybuilders, which causes cattle to bulk up. But not all the trenbolone circulating in a steer is metabolized. A German study showed 10 percent of the steroid passed right through the animals.

Water sampled downstream of a Nebraska feedlot had steroid levels four times as high as the water taken upstream. Male fathead minnows living in that downstream area had low testosterone levels and small heads.

Other veterinary drugs also play a role. Pets are now treated for arthritis, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, allergies, dementia, and even obesity - sometimes with the same drugs as humans. The inflation-adjusted value of veterinary drugs rose by 8 percent, to $5.2 billion, over the past five years, according to an analysis of data from the Animal Health Institute.

Ask the pharmaceutical industry whether the contamination of water supplies is a problem, and officials will tell you no. "Based on what we now know, I would say we find there's little or no risk from pharmaceuticals in the environment to human health," said microbiologist Thomas White, a consultant for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

But at a conference last summer, Mary Buzby - director of environmental technology for drug maker Merck & Co. Inc. - said: "There's no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations that they're at, could be causing impacts to human health or to aquatic organisms."

Recent laboratory research has found that small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast cancer cells. The cancer cells proliferated too quickly; the kidney cells grew too slowly; and the blood cells showed biological activity associated with inflammation.

Also, pharmaceuticals in waterways are damaging wildlife across the nation and around the globe, research shows. Notably, male fish are being feminized, creating egg yolk proteins, a process usually restricted to females. Pharmaceuticals also are affecting sentinel species at the foundation of the pyramid of life - such as earth worms in the wild and zooplankton in the laboratory, studies show.

Some scientists stress that the research is extremely limited, and there are too many unknowns. They say, though, that the documented health problems in wildlife are disconcerting.

"It brings a question to people's minds that if the fish were affected ... might there be a potential problem for humans?" EPA research biologist Vickie Wilson told the AP. "It could be that the fish are just exquisitely sensitive because of their physiology or something. We haven't gotten far enough along."

With limited research funds, said Shane Snyder, research and development project manager at the Southern Nevada Water Authority, a greater emphasis should be put on studying the effects of drugs in water.

"I think it's a shame that so much money is going into monitoring to figure out if these things are out there, and so little is being spent on human health," said Snyder. "They need to just accept that these things are everywhere - every chemical and pharmaceutical could be there. It's time for the EPA to step up to the plate and make a statement about the need to study effects, both human and environmental."

To the degree that the EPA is focused on the issue, it appears to be looking at detection. Grumbles acknowledged that just late last year the agency developed three new methods to "detect and quantify pharmaceuticals" in wastewater. "We realize that we have a limited amount of data on the concentrations," he said. "We're going to be able to learn a lot more."

While Grumbles said the EPA had analyzed 287 pharmaceuticals for possible inclusion on a draft list of candidates for regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, he said only one, nitroglycerin, was on the list. Nitroglycerin can be used as a drug for heart problems, but the key reason it's being considered is its widespread use in making explosives.

So much is unknown. Many independent scientists are skeptical that trace concentrations will ultimately prove to be harmful to humans. Confidence about human safety is based largely on studies that poison lab animals with much higher amounts.

There's growing concern in the scientific community, meanwhile, that certain drugs - or combinations of drugs - may harm humans over decades because water, unlike most specific foods, is consumed in sizable amounts every day.

Our bodies may shrug off a relatively big one-time dose, yet suffer from a smaller amount delivered continuously over a half century, perhaps subtly stirring allergies or nerve damage. Pregnant women, the elderly and the very ill might be more sensitive.

Many concerns about chronic low-level exposure focus on certain drug classes: chemotherapy that can act as a powerful poison; hormones that can hamper reproduction or development; medicines for depression and epilepsy that can damage the brain or change behavior; antibiotics that can allow human germs to mutate into more dangerous forms; pain relievers and blood-pressure diuretics.

For several decades, federal environmental officials and nonprofit watchdog environmental groups have focused on regulated contaminants - pesticides, lead, PCBs - which are present in higher concentrations and clearly pose a health risk.

However, some experts say medications may pose a unique danger because, unlike most pollutants, they were crafted to act on the human body.

"These are chemicals that are designed to have very specific effects at very low concentrations. That's what pharmaceuticals do. So when they get out to the environment, it should not be a shock to people that they have effects," says zoologist John Sumpter at Brunel University in London, who has studied trace hormones, heart medicine and other drugs.

And while drugs are tested to be safe for humans, the timeframe is usually over a matter of months, not a lifetime. Pharmaceuticals also can produce side effects and interact with other drugs at normal medical doses. That's why - aside from therapeutic doses of fluoride injected into potable water supplies - pharmaceuticals are prescribed to people who need them, not delivered to everyone in their drinking water.

"We know we are being exposed to other people's drugs through our drinking water, and that can't be good," says Dr. David Carpenter, who directs the Institute for Health and the Environment of the State University of New York at Albany.

----

The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate (at) ap.org

The continuation of politics by other means: Part II

2007-10-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

Blackwater is defined as wastewater containing bodily or other biological wastes, such as from toilets, kitchen sinks, etc. This is to be compared with graywater that is wastewater from household baths and washing machines that is recycled and used for gardening or flushing toilets.

An alternate definition of Blackwater is the private military company that is one the U.S. State Department’s three largest security contractors, which was founded by ex-Navy SEAL cum-millionaire Erik Prince who not only has all sorts of ties to the Republican Party, but is also is a board member of Christian Freedom International. Now I know it is a huge fallacy to extrapolate anything about the private security contractors on the ground in Iraq or their blatant disregard for the value of human life from the founder of the company’s apparent ideology, but I will say that it is amusing in a laugh-at-a-particularly –funny-Holocaust-joke-kind-of-way. Crusades, anyone?

The last definition that I am proffering today is hubris: excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance, which is from the Greek hybris meaning “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” originally “presumption toward the gods.” Now here’s the question: is it their hubris thinking that they can go into another country and kill and maim people indiscriminately without significant consequences or is it our hubris in that we are being presumptuous that the gods of commerce will hear or care about our moral outrage w/r/t what they do to preserve our way of life? More specifically, isn’t this moral outrage a little hollow when we continue to invest with groups such are JP Morgan Chase, Fidelity, and Capital Group/American Funds, which in turn are some of the largest U.S. investors in PetroChina, the public arm of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). So, as we feign moral outrage about mercenaries (let’s call these private security contractors what they are) indiscriminately using force against Iraqi citizens for perceived threats, we are feeding our IRAs, which in turn are being used to help fund the genocide in Sudan (our [well, not mine…restaurants do not help much in terms of retirement…] money goes into our IRAs, is then re-invested into PetroChina, then is in turn used by CNPC to operate the Greater Nile Petroleum Company, Sudan’s largest oil producer.)[1]

I know, I know, progress not perfection. We drive our cars to our rallies and protest about NAFTA or American Imperialism then go home feeling as if we’ve made some sort of difference. We write polemics in blogs that no one reads and less people care about that ultimately let us gain a moral neutral buoyancy so that we can sip our lattes and run our miles, but aren’t we really just assuaging our ubiquitous White Guilt? Does any of this really matter? Could we, even if we were willing to, extract ourselves from a significant percentage of the culture of oppression and domination of which we are integral parts? Everything we purchase and consume is the moral equivalent of a blood diamond. How do we resist? Stop consuming? Write our Congressmen? Blow up a dam?

It is funny, Nate challenged me to quit watching and reading about sports and he would in turn stop eating meat. I’ve found it more difficult than quitting smoking. How many other comforts will I have great difficulty giving up? Coffee? Rice? Fish? The Internet? Cable TV? Alcohol? Cell phone? Pornography in all of its many forms? As I sit here free-associating on my laptop that cost 1/15^th the estimated value of an Iraqi citizen’s life (at least according the State Departments Diplomatic Security Service) on my day off from a restaurant where people spend more on meal than I make in a week, I am at a total loss. I am not even angry anymore, only confused and depressed.

War is the continuation of the absence of politics by other means[2]; it is corporate sponsored states using force and propaganda to control the resources of those with less power. Mussolini said of Fascism that, “[it] should be more appropriately called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”[3] This brings to mind what might be “the central delusion of [our] culture, the delusion that there are rich and there are poor, that monetary wealth – and by extension food and land (which means food) – is held by anything more than social contract and force.”[4] We live in a world where we vote with our dollar and we are not really given any other choice. Freedom? “You can have all the freedom you want as long as the authorities consider it unimportant.” [5] Or at least so stated Ted Kaczynski. I doubt there can be any real freedom, much less democracy, in a capitalist state.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/worldbusiness/30oil.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[2] Eh, The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard

[3] Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization, Derrick Jensen

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

The continuation of politics by other means: Part I

2007-01-17T11:47:00.000-08:00

Embedded deep within our mass culture is the desire to see itself destroyed. Mostly unacknowledged, it is the desire to destroy the monolithic, unipolar structure (which the social and political aspects of mass culture are manifestations) that is the slowly accumulating more power. In consolidating power down to a singularity, it has subsumed all forms of rebellion up to the ultimate rebellion: death. These conditions have created a monolithic culture that is essentially committing suicide in that the only viable avenue of rebellion is both symbolic and incomprehensible in terms of the non-marginalized discourse. It is symbolic in that the acts of rebellion are not in themselves merely acts of rebellion, but they are terrorist acts, acts that by virtue of the mass culture’s monopoly on the discourse of rebellion require Others (outsiders, those who have been marginalized [either in perception or in reality – are these separable?] and are excluded from any other form of acceptable discourse) to change the rules, change the nature of the discourse of rebellion. So far, this seems to be achieved by the embracing and utilizing of death and the embracing and controlling the image-event.

Because we are unable to accept death in any form, but specifically when young men and women are sent to die in foreign countries (this is, among many other things, part of the scarring done by the Sixties and Vietnam), we find incomprehensible when men or women (children even more so) choose to use their deaths as a weapon, to make their individual deaths symbolic. We want a clean war, a war where we die as little as possible, where we are absolved in the end (which is quite often accomplished by victory). Our ideal is a war of technocratic superiority where cities are destroyed and death rains down from above, where we commit as few people as possible to the traditional concept of war where combatants meet on a battlefield and engage each other to the death. So, as everyone who has engaged in warfare since time immemorial, we have sought to use modern technology to limit our losses in the field, but we still hold that the enemy must meet us on this field, where we might show up after the “theater” has been “softened” from afar. Our enemies have taken to integrating themselves into the communities that we ostensibly seek to liberate in the vain hope that it will provide some safeguard, that we will not destroy “civilians”. What they do not realize is that the civilians are also the Others and that we do not care about those who are killed purposefully or inadvertently, which I suspect is due to a latent suspicion on our part that they are all guilty anyway. (Intuitively, I would guess that this feeling arises both from cultural and geographic distance [they are guilty for not being born here, they are guilty because they dress, eat, walk, and sing differently] and because they are necessarily the Other [non-Christian, non-Capitalist, non-White].) Still, the images of their deaths are limited as well; we accept that other people are dying as long as it does not interrupt the image-events, as long as we do not have to see it and therefore have some degree of culpability. We have made this problem of culpability a non-starter by removing from mass culture the reality of death and replacing it with at best simulacra and at worst image-events that allow for easy abstraction, digestion, or indifference.

It seems that we look upon all broadcast events equanimously, for they are not real, but are instead images of spectacles, which incidentally have become the inter-subjective agreement of what is real. This deluge of image-events through mass culture is rendered less concrete by their transience; no sooner is one exhibited, then it is replaced by another. The image-events are all morally equal: whether it is the “fiction” of cinema or television or the “reality” of broadcast news and print media, they occupy the same moral space as long as we are removed far enough from the spectacle. A friend of mine was living in Brooklyn on 9/11. He awoke as the planes where crashing into the towers. He turned on his television only to realize that he could see the event (the second plane crashing into the tower) occur outside his window. I have to wonder which view felt more real to him: the event framed by the window (much in the same way the event was framed by the television) must have been surreal, incomprehensible, or the view on the television made intelligible and thereby real by the ticker tape and captions to carefully lead him through the event. The view from the window afforded him no such luxury. It must have been an odd feeling to have an experience where one could choose between an unintelligible live event and a quasi-intelligible image-event. Ultimately, I think that we would choose (not only in this circumstance, but in most) the image-event and the simulacrum over the first hand experience of the event. If this is the case, then whoever controls the image-events controls inter-subjective agreement, social discourse, and ultimately, our shared reality.

We are all Germans

2007-01-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

The thing that surprised me most about the concentration camp at Dachau was not that I was visiting a place where tens of thousands of people were murdered, or that I was confronted by throngs of teenagers, undoubtedly out on school trips (we did the same when I was young, except we visited museums commemorating the internment of Japanese and Asian Americans during WWII), or the ovens and how serene the setting was, or how one could walk along a wooded trail and come across plaques marking where people were lined up against the wall and executed. What surprised me most, and today I still have the hardest time reconciling, is that the city of Dachau comes right up to the walls of the concentration camp. In the shadow of these walls are townhouses and small yards with children’s toys not unlike ones you would find in Federal Way or any other suburb, the notable difference being the knowledge that on the other side was the most efficient concentration camp of the Holocaust: Dachau.

I wondered then and I wonder now, how did they live there? How did they stay as the ash from the ovens fell over the city? Moreover, how do they continue to live there with its dark history? It is an easy question to ask, and probably an even easier question to answer. As I write this from my apartment in Tacoma, WA, I look out my living room window at Mount Rainier from which this city gets its name. Originally “known as Tahoma or Tacoma, from the Puyallup word tacobet ("mother of waters"),”[i] the mountain has since been renamed Mount Rainier. It reminds me that my hometown, which I am particularly fond of and that I have a misplaced affinity for its blue collar sentimentality, is here because of conquest, Manifest Destiny, and genocide. Succinctly, I am here because of a holocaust. I can sit here and unflinchingly sing the praises of a town built because of the eradication of the indigenous people while simultaneously criticizing the people of Dachau. Now, there is a longer timeline here, so I can make claims to that the collective amnesia has had more time to set in, but really as I type this I hear Jen and Nate in my head calling shenanigans. We do not need time for the amnesia to set in, we turn our heads and ignore atrocities as they are committed. Hence, the amnesia is virtually instantaneous.

If Iraqi Body Count and its lack of publicity (though the fatalites of our soldiers, currently around 2400, gets plenty of press when it hits the arbitrary marks) is not enough for you, then take a look at the estimated casualties from UN sanctions against Iraq from the first Gulf War until the second: “Critics of the sanctions say that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of them, [2] although certain skeptics claim the numbers to be less. [3] [4][5] UNICEF has put the number of child deaths to 500,000.”[ii] The now famous quote from Madeleine Albright that “we think the price is worth it” pretty much sums up our culture’s feelings on the subject. That we are willing to strangle another country so that the impoverished die from disease, malnutrition, and starvation, is indicative of the fact that we value “the abstract over the particular: of production over life; of economic…systems over living beings.”[iii] We are unperturbed by the deaths of these people, mostly children. Is it because they are brown? Is it because they live on the other side of the planet? Or is it because “every holocaust looks different, depending on the class to which the observer belongs.”[iv] To the class benefitting from such atrocities, do they even appear to be such? Can we distinguish these atrocities from the tide of history, from the progress of civilization where the conquered are subjected to the whims of the conquerors? Maybe for the class benefitting “(t)he holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.”[v]

We have sites like Iraqi Body Count because there is something of interest in Iraq: oil. We are not overly concerned about the conflict Sudan, AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, much less human rights violations in China (Ramsey Clark, attorney general during LBJ’s administration, stated that the purpose of US foreign policy is “to dominate for the exploitation of resources,”[vi] which is probably why we and/or the media are not particularly concerned with these places).

What strikes me when thinking about censorship in China is its heavy handedness. It seems to me that if you limit what people can read, say, or do, you create a black market for these things, you fetishize them. People will search these things out and eventually form a counterculture or resistance around what is banned. Whereas, if you hide them in plain sight, so to speak, then people are just as easily going to be unconcerned or unbothered by them. This is shown by our government’s making public record such things as Project for the New American Century, School of the Americas/Western Hemishphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or simply by the decriminilization of lighter drugs in Holland and parts of Canada. It is no longer as compelling for most people if it is out in the open, it becomes transparent so that it is no longer noticed. It is no accident that the current administration, while having the reputation for being one of the most secretive administrations this country has ever seen, has had leaks about such things as NSA wiretaps, the collecting of virtually everyone’s phone records, secret prisons around the world, falsification of intelligence that led us to war, and so and so forth. These things were not simply leaked, but the battlefield (being public opinion), was softened first, then we were made aware of these things. And, while the president’s poll numbers are significantly down, he and the rest of the people in power have yet to be held accountable for any number of illegal acts.

Joseph Goebbels, mastermind behind the Nazi propaganda machine, understood how to keep the masses in a perpetual state of agitated content: “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”[vii] Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What sounds even more familiar is this: “The broadcasting programmes need to be put together in such a way that while they still cater for sophisticated tastes, they are also pleasing and accessible to less demanding listeners [or viewers, I suppose]…They should offer an intelligent and skillful blend of what is informative, stimulating, relaxing, and entertaining. Of these, relaxation deserves special care…giving them a right to recuperate and refresh themselves during the few hours when they are off work.”[viii] Distract us with an enemy, placate (anesthetize) us at home with entertainment, and conceal in plain sight exactly what you are doing.

So, my question is, if there was something occurring right now that was analagous to the Holocaust, would we notice? Would we even care? When I go to work tonight at the bar, people are going to be more than willing to talk about the beautiful weather we are having, LeBron James hitting a game winning shot, The Da Vinci Code’s luke warm reception at Cannes, but are we, as they sip their $8 cocktails and as I mix them, really wanting, even if we are capable, to discuss the potential that we are all Germans living under the shadow of that wall?

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions

[iii] The Culture of Make Believe, pg. 601, Derrick Jensen

[iv] ibid. Pg. 592

[v] ibid. Pg. 593-594

[vi] ibid. Pg. 577

[vii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie

[viii] The Culture of Make Believe, pg. 594, Derrick Jensen

2006-11-21T18:25:00.001-08:00

Tacoma uberalles.