With enemies like these

Well I was not expecting to go on vacation right after NaBloPoMo started when I first signed up, and I have a few things to say about the idea that by missing a couple of days I have “blown it”–especially since my own motives for undertaking this challenge boil down very simply to “make myself write.” But first let me tell you about this:

In case you have not heard, a transgendered woman named Duanna Johnson was shot and killed in Memphis TN last Sunday, November 9. Yes another transgendered woman murdered. So what? Well, besides the obvious so what–that The Targeting of Transgendered People for Abuse and Murder Must Stop–Duanna Johnson, if you will remember, was the same woman whose abuse at the hands of the Memphis Police was caught on tape last June. The two officers involved, the one who beat her and the one who held her down for the beating, had been fired, and at the time of her murder, she was in the process of suing the City of Memphis for $1.3 million.

If you, like myself, suspect that there might be some nasty retribution motivating this murder, or worse, that the city and the police department might have actively facilitated this murder, we are not alone. Monica Roberts at TransGriot and Autumn Sandeen at Pam’s House Blend are reporting developments in the case and in their posts and subsequent comment threads you will find many misgivings about the propriety of the Memphis Police Department’s investigating the case on their own. What’s more, none other than the trans-if-they-do, trans-if-they-don’t double agents at the Human Rights Campaign, featuring Joe “Stop Crashing Our Party” Solmonese himself, is calling for a federal investigation of the murder, which was my own first thought on hearing the news.

Whether you think it is overly-sensitive trans- paranoia to suspect that the City and/or Police Department of Memphis might have had some hand in Johnson’s murder, it seems obvious to me that they cannot be objective investigators in this case, given the dismissal of the police officers for beating Johnson–something that never would have happened had the tape not leaked out into the blogosphere–and Johnson’s pending lawsuit against the city. Personally I think the City and Police Department are logical suspects in the murder, and I have no problem whatsoever imagining–as one commenter conjectures in one of the above blogs (forgive me if I cannot find the link to the specific comment. Since I cannot put post-it stickies on the internet, I frequently move too quickly through several pages to remember my way back to the right ones where I read something I want to quote–but so in this case the idea is not my own but does not seem out of the realm of the possible to me)–a hit arranged so that a handful of black males may take the fall, probably with “drugs and prostitution” stirred into the mix so that all this seems the fault of the multiple victims there would be in such a setup.

But no matter whether your level of suspicion goes that far, it seems to me obvious that this murder needs to be investigated from outside and higher up, and probably by the FBI–not because they are necessarily the most sensitive agency to violence against trans- folk, but because they are charged with upholding hate crimes law and also simply because this case demands high priority: we cannot sit by while trans- people are silenced in this way for coming forward with the charges that Johnson’s assailants faced and that the City of Memphis itself faced. This case in particular must be picked up as emblematic of how we are going to allow our own government to treat us: as citizens worthy of the same protections as other citizens, or as marginal creatures whose rights to live and to live unmolested are suspended by virtue of our own need to be true to ourselves–and at no harm to anyone else!

I hesitate to endorse anything the HRC is involved with, but if they truly want to throw their muscle behind demanding a federal investigation of Johnson’s death, then I think that it might be worth our while to employ them in that regard. Who knows why they are doing this–to make up for certain, um, colossal political betrayals and disingenuous efforts to rewrite queer history without gender variant individuals in the center of it all, where they actually stood for decades–but you know? If they want to make up for all that, I am willing to suspend disbelief for now.

I think, though, that it might be helpful to do some organizing of our own, in case the HRC cannot see this one through whatever obstacles the feds might throw up in their unwillingness to protect the lives of trans- individuals. In a Pam’s House Blend comment I can actually find the URL for, Kathleen suggests that we demand an FBI investigation ourselves as well: anyone can file “a civil rights complaint with the FBI ‘Under Color of Law’”. It is not clear to me whether multiple complaints involving a single incident will encourage the FBI to investigate or have the unwanted effect of making them less likely to do so. I do think, though, that as a community, however you might conceive of it in relation to yourself, we need to find a voice in this case that is separate from or “back-up” for that being offered by the Human Rights Campaign, who have proven themselves extremely untrustworthy in speaking for us. Watch the above blogs for further organizing efforts–I myself cannot promise to keep abreast of all developments but wanted to put this out there for whatever limited audience I have to keep in mind and to monitor.

We cannot allow Memphis to investigate this crime without oversight from higher up; to do so would be to abandon Duanna Johnson and any trans- person who might find themselves staring at the wrong end of police officers’ assumptions and prejudices, facilitated as they are by the surrounding culture. We need to let Memphis and the rest of the nation know that we are not going to be their punching bags to use for working out their own insecurities about gender–which is what drives this literal policing of gender boundaries to begin with. Send ‘em to therapy to cure them of hate. Leave us the fuck alone.

A short treatise on religious rhetoric

Because I am nobody sitting here in a deserted corner of the intarwebs, my post on the subject is not in this list, but bloggers all over the place are still talking about the racism inherent in blaming California African Americans for passing Proposition 8 on Tuesday. Alas, a blog has posted a list of a number of them and it all makes for instructive reading. I still think that homophobia is by and large a white institution and that the Religious Right bears the blame for keeping it alive in America. The Religious Right is overwhelmingly white but certainly not completely so; however the fact is that race does not matter particularly when talking about Mormon and conservative Christian efforts to amend the California State Constitution to enshrine discrimination against anyone who has relationships that cannot be defined as involving one man and one woman. Religion is the culprit here, and has been since day one, whenever that was: when Christian missionaries whipped the natives of this continent for daring to commit “unnatural acts”? Probably one could pin the blame on conservative Christianity starting a good 500 years ago, yes. And interestingly enough in this context, it appears as the handmaiden of white colonial power.

I am not actually going to write a whole lot more about the topic of Proposition 8 and racism, but I am going to write about conservative Christianity–or more accurately, fundamentalist Christianity. What got me to thinking this evening was an especially revealing look at the Phelps family, provided by this short feature on Nate Phelps, one of that family’s “prodigals” who left both the abusive family and the abusive religion that was the family’s alibi for egregious physical and psychological torture–or Fred Phelps’ alibi, more likely, given that he also beat his wife into submission. My LiveJournal friend altamira16 posted this link for me, knowing that I share a little of Nate’s personal history; although I was never physically beaten, I did fear burning in Hell from the time that I could understand it as a concept, probably around age 7 or so. It was startling news, and it took some time for me to get it straight, because up until then we had sung songs like “God is Love” in Sunday School. But the older you got, the more Hell you were threatened with.

After reading Nate’s story, short as it is, I found myself wishing that he would write a book. And then it occurred to me that I am trying to write a book, but not one that exists solely to expose fundamentalism for the child abuse that it is when taught to young children in the way it was taught to me–I am writing an autobiography that attempts to say a little about Everything, which is probably why I am not yet finished with it. Be that as it may, whether or not I ever get a book published, and whether or not Nate ever gets a book published, one of the things that I am committed to as a writer is to shining some worldly light into the sanctuaries and family devotionals of fundamentalist Christianity.

In fact, the passing of Proposition 8 and the simple incredulity of many of my friends at the failure of the campaign to defeat it has made even more clear to me that many who have not been personally acquainted with it do not understand the power of fundamentalism itself, nor the power of its fear-based rhetoric. California is not an overwhelmingly religious state, but there are plenty of “conventional” families and individuals who are not particularly well-acquainted with queer culture or who believe that they do not know anyone who is not straight (but of course they do). The Religious Right persuaded many of them that this amendment needed to pass in order to “protect” their relationships–which makes no rational sense. But very little of what passes for “reasoning” in fundamentalism would stand up to any rational inquiry.

But that is precisely its charm. Here’s an example. One of the most popular rhetorical moves within conservative Christian doctrine, and one of the most abusive when wielded against young children, is the double-bind, which can be explained briefly by the following construction: if you agree with what I say, that means I must be right; if you disagree with what I say, that is also a sign that I am right. Anyone employing the double-bind places themselves in a win-win position over their mark, who will lose no matter what argument they make or what reaction they have, and no matter how absurd the proposition to which they object.

A concrete–and ubiquitous–double-bind employed by fundamentalist preachers, parents, and proselytizers everywhere runs something like this: “You know, if what I am saying makes you so angry, then I must have hit a nerve,” or “If you have any doubts at all about your position, that is a sign from god that you are wrong.” A short version of this is “The truth hurts,” and thus it follows that anyone speaking out against injury is implicitly agreeing that the injury was deserved and/or that they understand the righteousness of the blow. This is a particularly ugly power play when a child is involved, because the younger you are, the fewer rational strategies you have to defend yourself against this sort of “argument.” All that children put in this position know is that they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: the result can often be an inability to act or a persistent feeling that those around you are going to demand something of you that you cannot deliver and then tell you that your inability to deliver is a sign of your own shame and guilt.

It has taken me most of my life to free myself of the influence of double-bind thinking. Or, that is, it has taken this much of my life to be however free of it I am so far; I did internalize a huge library of this and similar persuasive strategies and they can be reactivated at the drop of the most innocent discourse. I have spent days and weeks and even months under fire of the most ludicrous arguments from the voices in my head, concerning everything from whether I should continue to see someone to why it is I have lost so many games of computer solitaire in a row. It sounds funny now–or maybe it does not–but it is during those times that I would most like to find a gun and discharge it into my skull, where those voices reside and thus are most vulnerable. Unfortunately, this is not the sort of move I would be likely to survive. So I work at various cognitive strategies and I take certain chemical enhancers for my neurochemistry and I hope, as the days pass and I have fewer run-ins with the preachers that live in my head, that they are dwindling for good or at least running out of whatever life force it was that got attached to them.

So then this is part of what consumes my energy now: keeping the voices under control. It takes less effort than it used to. The main thing I want to say is not so much that I Hate Fundamentalism, but that it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it were, and not the positive force for change that religion is so often characterized as. I did not suffer the physical beatings that Nate Phelps did, but the mind-control so evident in his sister’s comment, the first one following the article, is a very real and very dangerous institution in fundamentalist organizations and families. Many do not even realize they are using it; my parents thought they were giving me a gift by giving me the “secret” to not burning in Hell. But first they had to create within me a fear of Hell sufficient to get me to stand up in front of the entire church and say that I had accepted Jesus into my heart.

Given that I was more introverted as a child than I am now, and given that I never score a single “extrovert” point on any test ever devised to measure sociability, I think perhaps you can imagine to what lengths that had to go.

It was hell, I think I can say fairly accurately.

I know I said to wake me when it was over, but..

It is Friday for me although the clock says Saturday and Saturday is streaking across the Pacific Ocean towards the International Date Line where it will turn into Sunday streaking across the Pacific Ocean towards Asia and eventually back through here again and then it will be Sunday but right now it is Friday and I can tell because I’m working.

What a week.

A friend of mine, someone I’ve known for many years online but have only met face to face once but who is still a very good friend (still? There is no reason why online friends have to take a back seat to “real life” friendships and the whole split between online and real life has of course by now been refuted many times but there remains a widespread belief that online life still cannot quite compete with face-to-face life but I will beg to differ until I am too old and infirm to sit at my computer although by the time I am old and infirm we probably won’t have to sit at our computers but they will be ubiquitous and integrated more seamlessly with our bodies so that the interface is no longer way out there at arm’s length. That is just a guess and sure it is informed by cyber sci-fi but I think that this one is a good bet so I suppose I will be doing this until I am so close to death that I cannot really think or talk or interface with anyone except–I do not know whom I will be trying to interface with at that point. I hesitate to think about it as it is quite possible that I will outlive everyone I love. Note: find very young friends) mentioned earlier today that they were feeling quite depressed this week and felt as if they had just lived through something rather harrowing and now that it is over it is as though one looks out upon a decimated landscape and wonders whether it is enough to start planting new seeds or do we need to detoxify the soil first or abandon the land for someplace new and start over.

OK that was my metaphor. This friend used a different one but since about Wednesday evening I have been feeling oddly similar to how they reported they were doing. Tuesday night I danced in the streets with everyone else. Well, that is a lie. I did not dance so much as run around high-fiving and fist-bumping and occasionally receiving the random hug here in the city between about 9 and 11pm. The party continued after I was out of energy but although I eventually went to bed that night–i.e., the next morning–I found myself quite unable to do much productive really until I would say about fifteen minutes ago. Oh, actually I did some paying work earlier this morning before I went to bed so lets say about 14 hours ago was when I was able to stop reading post-election coverage and turn my attention back to normal life.

The thing is, though, I have not been having a great time reading the post-election coverage, or not after I had been up for a little while on Wednesday night.

Today’s post is about what happens when you live through a national political nightmare, wake up when you think it might be over, and then cannot seem to shake a sense of emptiness and vague dread. I hope that is ok. I will not be talking about broad political issues except to the degree that they have created this funk. I am curious to know who else is feeling this way–besides those who voted Republican or people who still support George W Bush (they are said to be out there), for I assume that you all have something to be upset about now. To which I can only say nyeah although it does not really make me feel all that good to say it but I am relieved as fuck that you all will not be leading the country for the next four years but I have time to talk about why that is and probably will, later.

So I am trying to figure this out. The nightmare image: I do not know about any of you, but when I wake up after a particularly virulent nightmare I am of course relieved, but especially if it was my last dream of the day/night, I do not spend subsequent waking hours exulting that I am no longer in the middle of my nightmare. Instead, I will often feel like utter shit, wondering why my unconscious chose to take us there, and why now, and what it is I am supposed to do with the horrifying imagery that then haunts me all day long. I do not necessarily think dreams are the key to great psychological questions but they can certainly provide jumping off points for interpretation and it seems to me that even if dreams are a mechanical process whereby our brains figure, order and store memories, it can be useful to take a look at what memories are being processed in what ways at any particular time.

So what can this metaphor do for me now. The only other one I have is that of trauma, and although it might be stretching things to say that the last eight years have been personally traumatic–sure, things changed in my life, but mostly having nothing to do with anything the Bush administration did; however, it was angering, frustrating and, actually, at times psychologically harrowing to watch them do the things they did do, seemingly without restraint or any kind of oversight from anyone anywhere.

It may be that in order to figure this out I have to take into account that I was raised by a fundamentalist, Southern Baptist family who took me to fundamentalist, Southern Baptist churches, which, although the Southern Baptist Convention had not yet been “steeplejacked” by Christian Dominionist ideologues, were certainly already “ripe for the harvest.” I was taught, from a very young age, that until I “made my decision for Christ,” that when I died I was going to burn forever. Or rather, I was going to burn forever after the Final Judgment, and that sometime in between and probably very soon, like any day now, I was going to be Left Behind to face the tribulation when my entire immediate family was taken up in the Rapture. Now, I grew up 3000 miles away from the closest relative, so my parents and my brother were all the family I had. Their closest friends were church friends, so they would all be gone too (although chances are I would have been pleasantly surprised by who did not actually go–er, I mean, were that whole mythology real and the rapture actually did occur). I came to understand this, at least in these stark heaven vs hell terms, by the time I was about seven or eight years old. It took me till I was, I think, about 12 before I “walked the aisle”–something which terrified me all the more being introverted to so great a degree that I believe I operated then and now under a social disability.

Anyway. I do not mean to be inviting you into my therapist’s office with me, but I thought the background might make it a little more clear how and why a so-called Christian for US President, with nothing between his ears but ego and brutality, doing the sorts of things he and those orchestrating his policy did and for the reasons often stated, might flip my shit on a regular basis. I will write about this again without a doubt: the psychological casualties of fundamentalism are more numerous than our relative silence in public life might lead one to believe. We are starting to talk, now, and starting to find others like ourselves with much help from the internet, but up until recently very few ex-fundamentalists had much of a voice in the public sphere.

Well, when you have a bunch of self-proclaimed “Christian” bullies running the nation, and you are an ex-fundamentalist with, say, a raging case of PTSD–and I am serious as a hemmorrhaging artery about that: mine comes complete with psychotic breaks–a large part of national life starts to take on the choir robes and baptismal vestments that still lurk in the most self-destructive parts of your psyche. Or, that is, it can, it may. In my case, it did.

I have not watched a mainstream newscast since September 11, 2001. When someone in my house turns the tv on and anything about national politics is being said, I turn up the volume on iTunes and try not to try to make out the words that float mumbling under the music during the quiet parts.

So now, it seems, I might be able to watch the news again. But I am telling you, I am depressed as fuck about the last eight years, and bewildered as to what to do about it. If I were Barack Obama, I would be sweating like crazy just how I was going to propose to put the country back together and try to create order where we instigated chaos across the globe. My friends and I often talk about how we felt in 2000, after GWB was handed the office of President, and most of us were thinking well I sure did not want him to win but I guess we will just have to hold our noses and lay low for four years but then the World Trade Center was destroyed, which was bad enough, but then all these other horrible things started happening and Would. Not. Stop.

I guess I am in shock. It is weird, because materially, the only thing that changed for me between 2000 and 2008 was that in 2007 I finally finished grad school. Well, other things changed too, but I am not going to go into great psychiatric detail here on the intarwebs. I still live in the same place and although making ends meet is actually harder since I graduated, my economic status has not shifted a great deal one way or the other. But I still feel a little like something terrible just happened, now it is over, and I have no idea what should happen next. I do not even know if there is anything for me to do–national politics were machinating along before I got here and will probably continue to do so for some time after I die–but still I cannot quite seem to get a grip on myself.

So. I am taking suggestions if anyone has any.

speechlessly the idiot faced the crowd

Tonight I felt like saying things in a slightly different way, but it turns out that I have paying work to do and so all I have to offer is this unfinished image. I realize it does not really have what one would call a central focus, which is not necessarily a fault, but I have not yet decided whether I need one or not:

Wildlife (in progress)

The original is 6000 pixels wide onscreen, so I thought I’d be nice and not try to overwhelm your monitor with the whole thing, but below is a detail at full size. I will probably work a little to soften some of the edges. Otherwise, I have a few things in mind that I still want to add to break up the monotony a little but it is always fun editing large images on a 15″ laptop. Yes I would love a bigger monitor. Stay tuned for the tip jar! Here is the closeup:

Wildlife detail

You can see a larger version here, but this still is quite a bit smaller than the original. I sometimes wish that I could line my walls with glowing lcd screens because I have always found their luminosity especially fascinating in a way that old CRT screens just never did it for me, you know?

The working title is “wildlife.” Beyond this I cannot tell you any more about what it will look like when “finished” because I myself do not know. I work intuitively most of the time and rarely plan out work like this in advance. In fact, when I do plan them out in advance is usually when I get the poorest results, so whether or not there is method to my madness, there is at least sometimes a sense of direction and that uncanny feeling you get when you know it is time to stop. I have not reached that point with this piece yet.

***

Just to keep the political fires fanned, here are a few links for you:

LJ user sparkymonster on racism in the queer community

Obama’s mandate is not to keep America treading the center-right path

Maya Angelou answers the question, “Is there a tiny little part of you that says ‘Did this really happen?’”

NOW can we talk about Queerness and Racism?

So. Yeah. I am still stunned at how quickly the election seemed to be over last night, how soon McCain conceded–8:45pm Pacific Time–and I am still mightily relieved that the Republican/NeoCon/Religious Right has lost its stranglehold on the federal government. Perhaps now we can, as a nation, make our way towards being seen as rational, impartial, and committed to human rights rather than to making the world over in our image. Science may once again be used as a valuable resource for deciding domestic environmental policy and our global environmental stance, rather than censored, distorted, or simply thrown out when it does not agree with our ideological views. Hopefully, some sort of solution can be found to the grave mess we have made in the Middle East. And with some very good luck, we can stop blaming the economically and socially disadvantaged for conditions they were born into and offer them viable assistance in rebuilding their relationships to their own cultures, and, where necessary, rebuilding those cultures themselves.

One can hope that sanity will creep back into the American consciousness, until we again have a grasp on empirical reality that actually takes into account empirical consequences.

One thing though: yeah. Proposition 8. I have so much to say on this subject that I cannot hope to put it all in this post, and may have to sit and ruminate before I tackle various aspects of the question of how we handle its passing as a community of queers. Yes, I am talking to a specific “we” at the moment, although it also includes non-queer allies who voted No and/or who contributed time and money to the effort to help California citizens understand that writing discrimination into the state constitution is not what a freedom-loving population wants to do. Where to start?

Well, first I think one fire in particular needs to be put out, and it needs to be put out now, loudly and firmly, by anyone with a sense of history and justice. Case-in-point: over at the Daily Kos, d edmonds is demanding that “we talk about Race and Homophobia”, but as you might imagine, “we” is turning out to be a bunch of white folks deciding that it is time to bring the African American community to task for its role in passing Proposition 8.

OK. If “we” is to be white men, then what “we” need to be focusing on is the following: America’s overarching homophobia in that is continually and viciously fed by the Religious Right, which is overwhelmingly white; the millions of dollars that were pumped into the Yes on 8 campaign by the Church of Latter Day Saints, aka the Mormons, a church that is overwhelmingly white; the fact that the African American population of California currently hovers around 7%–far, far too small to have made the decisive difference in this vote; the fact that, according to the numbers, hundreds of thousands of white voters must have voted both for Obama and in favor of banning non-heteronormative marriage, so that the onus of “hypocrisy” leans at least as heavily on whites as it does on anyone else; and last but not in the least, um, least, Anglo-European culture’s long history of cultural imperialism, which is overwhelmingly responsible for the world-wide propagation of conservative Christian or crypto-Christian social mores–through brutal violence when necessary.

Do I need to say more? I realize that a paragraph cannot really stand in for an argument, but is any of the above actually controversial? Blaming a small portion of the population for accepting the values of the dominant culture seems disingenuous to me, like asking someone to conform enough to their environment that s/he is not living under the threat of constant physical and psychological violence, and then castigating her/him after s/he does so very, very well. Rock, hard place. Can you see how this might look to someone who is harassed daily on the basis of their presumed race?

I do want to add this, though: the only way that white folks can “help” with fighting homophobia in African American communities is to reach out to African-American queers in a way that does not silence them, does not ignore them, and does not try to erase their experiences or identifications. What “we” must do is listen to them, while working to clean our own house. If you need me to name the multiple obvious ways in which the queer mainstream is itself already (and still) racist, in ways that have little to do with the passage or defeat of Proposition 8, I’ll do it.

Right now, though, we need to settle the fuck down and stop fingering racial “others” as responsible for this horrible moment in California’s political history. One could say quite accurately that Proposition 8 passed on a wave of white religious conservative capital. “We” have spent a number of centuries trying to Christianize the world, and “our” people worked very hard to extend that tradition in the past few months. Guess what? It worked here. Is there such a thing as cultural karma?

Now it is over

OK so today is November 4 even though this post is dated November 5 and if you find this puzzling, consult the first few sentences of yesterday’s post, which was the post for November 3. This may happen regularly throughout the month, but in the end I will be awake for approximately 30 longish periods and I will post in each one of them until I wake up on December 1, probably around 8pm. I probably will not explain this again, but anyone arriving late to the party is probably not going to notice that I started the month an apparent day behind.

What can I say. Last night I was walking around the chilly streets of San Francisco, where winter moves in on the first of November, supplanting the late, October-only summer that we get every single year–and every single year, people say “it wasn’t this hot last October” but of course it was and they are just annoyed that it is hot now. But so after McCain gave his concession speech I could hear people shouting joyfully in the streets, honking horns and setting off fireworks and so I, a little stunned at the rapidity of the results and the concession and the declaration of the winner, all of which practically coincided with the closing of the polls here on the West Coast, decided to go take a walk to let off a great deal of anticipatory anxiety that hadn’t yet found a way to breathe in the relief of a political nightmare now over.

Some say Obama is not that exciting of a president-elect, and that Democrats and Republicans are so much alike that it no longer matters who takes the White House, but I just want to say a little bit about why it does matter, and very much so: the unholy alliance between the Religious Right and the Neo-Conservative movement, which is now, apparently, in a shambles.

But if the Republicans had taken the White House, that alliance would have taken on yet another incarnation, this time with an actual Dominionist Christian in the White House and, as they say, a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Now, I think Barack Obama has a lot going for him: he has withstood the pressures of being a black man in America and made it to the top political office in the land without once losing his composure in the face of what, to most black Americans, is an unrelenting onslaught of racist inferences, insinuations, and assumptions, as well as explicit epithets and insults, as it buffets them from a dominantly racist white culture. I will not go into great detail right now in describing how it is in fact embarrassingly obvious that America is still deeply racist and deeply divided along racial lines–or “racialized” lines, given that “race” itself is a white supremacist construct that we cannot seem to give up. I might talk about this at some length later, but for now I will just say that for people of color the racism in our culture is flagrant, excessive, and so deeply rooted within white institutions and discourse that white Americans on the other hand can almost never see it until it is pointed out to them in a way that hits home.

Obama’s grace under this sort of relentless cultural antagonism is nothing short of remarkable, and a testament to his integrity and dignity as a public figure. He won this election mainly on charisma, which is not a superfluous quality in a president. Quite the contrary: it is the sort of personality that makes building alliances and healing rifts in ideology much easier than they are in the hands of someone with less grace, and right now the US is in great need of just that sort of social and cultural reintegration, to the degree that it is possible at all. Unlike the current resident of the White House, Obama conducts himself with impeccable restraint and sensibility in the face of insult. Do we really doubt that this in itself could greatly improve the bearing of the face America turns to the rest of the world? George Bush has made us laughable in the eyes of the rest of the world; the Neo-Conservative agenda has made us into a law-shirking rogue nation. I think that an Obama administration has the potential to repair not only our public image on the world stage, but to back it up with empathy and discernment, rather than relying on reactionary displays of machismo to bluster our way through our relationship with the rest of humanity.

But this is not the source of my biggest sigh of relief this evening. The thing that I am truly thankful for is that the party that has openly courted the forces of conservative Christian theocratic ideology is now out of power. Democrats have taken Congress and the Presidency, leading us back away from what I believe was a dangerous precipice: that American fascism that would rule according to simplistic, distorted, and cruel interpretation of the Christian faith. I have lived within those beliefs, and I can say unreservedly that they rely on cult-like techniques to subdue followers into accepting just about anything that one could construct a Biblical argument to support, and they browbeat people into despising life on Earth as a sinful, evil realm. The casualties from these churches are numerous, and if right-wing Christians are ever allowed back into the most powerful office in the country, anyone who is not a “real” Christian–according to their strict criteria–is at risk of the same harsh, inhumane treatment that they give to all things “worldly”: including anyone who cannot or will not march lockstep with their strict ideology.

We find it so easy to spot the immorality of Islamic fundamentalism, but we seem to have a curious blind spot for the same sort of worldview as it is espoused in Christian fundamentalism. Neither movement would be friendly to those who dare to act and believe in ways that diverge from the approved dogma; either would be happy to see the world destroyed in order to hurry the advent of god’s kingdom as they perceive it.

This is why I and many others feel they have awakened from a long political nightmare. There are other reasons as well, but this has been the most compelling one for me: it is time to stop believing that god is on our side no matter what we decide to do, and to stop believing that war and violence are sanctioned by heaven, so long as we are fighting “evil.”

Evil is not a cosmic force. Humans invented it and perpetrate it on each other endlessly, each faction more often than not believing that theirs is the righteous cause. This is a cultural myth that needs to die, to be demystified and faced as what it is: human fallibility, greed, and aggression. Until we can see it at our own level, we cannot take proper responsibility for it, and the atrocities that we visit on ourselves in the name of Good will continue unabated.

Any step we can take away from this particular abyss is a positive step. Tonight we managed to inch our way back from a flirtation with theocracy that many of us did not realize we were engaging in, for reasons that are unclear to me, but that seem to stem from a denial that anything we are familiar with could be dangerous to us. But vigilance over the destructive forces within us may be more important to securing our freedom than we realize. For now, at least, we have eluded a particularly tenacious one.

Between the word and the flesh

This post is a little late, but as I may or may not have made clear the other night, my administrative day runs from about 8pm till sometime after sunrise, so to me it is still the third, and this post still counts. To demonstrate, I will most likely post my fourth post later on the fourth, local time, but to me it will be tomorrow, which is the fourth, as far as I am concerned.

If that makes sense.

Not that I am writing in order to make sense. At the moment, I am pondering three things: the US Presidential Election, the why of writing, and the state of the blogosphere as it appears to me. I do tend towards metacommentary, as you might infer from two of the three things preoccupying me. At any given time some portion of my brain is evaluating what language is doing. I mean, what it is doing in my head, what it is doing in the media, what it is doing online, what it is doing for lunch–you name it, I’m thinking about how it is talked about. This is my own fault for getting a degree in Rhetoric, but of course I chose Rhetoric because I’ve been in a death struggle with language my entire life. Ok maybe that’s not an “of course” statement: I could have chosen Rhetoric for any number of reasons. But the fact is I did choose it because language and I have been in a love/hate relationship since my first attempts to form words in my head.

But I think I’ll talk about that another day.

Right now, I cannot think of anything to add to the shitstorm of writing about the Election, not because I have had no thoughts on the subject that might be novel to someone, somewhere, but at the moment I am incapable of thinking any of them. This Election has me on pins and needles to an extent as yet unforeseen. I am not sure exactly why this is; the older I get, the worse politics seem to get, and the more important to try to influence what goes on around me. But I do not know if this is a function of age or a function of the particular–that is, wrong–direction the country has been headed over the last horrifyingly ill-advised eight years of neo-conservative rule behind our face puppet president. Whatever the cause, right this second I am unable to speak coherently on the topic.

Every act, though, is political, and every act of writing is a political act of writing. Perhaps it would be a good time to undichotomize speech and action, that dilemma of political life and the basis of much of the antipathy between intellectual circles and the American populace as a whole: the view that book-learnin’ isn’t worth the paper it is printed on but that decisive action is somehow always to be looked upon as honorable, if not downright heroic.

Why is this important now? Well, for one, I think that by this time tomorrow either the country will breathe a collective sigh of relief or people will start to pour into the streets and begin to act in ways that are unpredictable right now. And it will be time to write furiously, as we have never written before.

This is not because thought guides action, or because writing can be a prelude to deciding what to do, but rather because thought is already action, and that writing is already a choice as to what to do: both have real consequences for those who undertake them and for those with whom they might be shared. Theory is not something one consults in order to figure out how to behave: it is behavior’s primary gesture, determining not merely the “beliefs” behind what we do, but inhabiting the core of every movement.

Just as the empirical event is emergent from the encounter between perception and its environment, and is so to the extent that perception and environment turn out to be inseparable, constantly oscillating around one another and interpenetrating one another, one could say that action is the working out of physical theory, or that theory is the unconscious of every muscular movement.

Let me see if I can explain. We are–or, it seems, most people I meet are–used to dealing with concepts such as “frame of reference” to explain why a given situation (which is never given without the frames: hint.) will appear and/or be interpreted differently by the various individual points of consciousness that are involved with it (think of “individual points of consciousness” as a fancy term for “people,” but one that does not disallow the possibility of non-human frames of reference). The way that most Anglo-European-American minds are trained, this makes sense to us only insofar as we introduce frames of reference as an independent term from that which they frame: as though they were literally picture frames, except that they might contain something like inscriptions that a person will refer to to translate what is inside the frame in such a way that they, from outside the frame, can understand it. Put a frame of reference around a painting and embed within it the voices of art critics, and perhaps this model could be made concrete (No really. Do it and see if you can get a grant or something).

But the frame of reference model is too simplistic and too compartmentalized, when in fact the entities that meet at the frame, as a kind of boundary, actually communicate through it, to the degree that neither remains completely independent of the other, the frame itself starts to dissolve, and soon what one has is an encounter that sparks an event: an event that contains neither the painting nor the observer, but which confounds them at the place where they meet.

Think of it this way: when you encounter an object, it impinges upon you. Light hits your retinas, your hands are blocked at points where the object will not let them pass. You stub your toe on the base of the thing and the resultant boing-oing-oing assaults your eardrums. All these things happen in a region where the difference between your perception and the physical bluntness of the object is not easy to make out: if the object is blue, it is so only because your retina is sensitive to a certain wavelength of light striking a nerve, which sends a signal to your brain where, through processes I cannot pretend to understand fully, you “see” the color you have been trained to call “blue.” Without you, the object may or may not be blue. It may or may not be hot. It may or may not be soft, noisy etc.

So what has this to do with the difference between theory/words/speech and action? When you move, you theorize. You process information about your environment and you synthesize “hypotheses” about what you can and cannot do while enmeshed with that environment. Conversely, when you theorize, you move. You not only change the way in which neurons in your nervous system fire in concert with all the others, but you change your perceptions according to whatever modified frame of reference proceeds from your theory/thought/writing/speech. If you are speaking out loud or theorizing publicly, the same thing happens to those around you, whether or not they agree with you. We say we are “moved” by a speech, or that the play was flat and “unmoving,” as though we recognize intuitively that change actually results from the way in which language and other signs affect our perceptions, and thereby, our environment and the events which arise when all of these moments coincide.

Tomorrow then, or tonight–however you yourself experience the way in which hours pass in this world–when you decide what to do in response to whatever your environment presents you with, be aware that speech and action both have consequences in reality, that motion can be achieved in thought, and that the right word–Flaubert called it “le mot juste,” which we can understand as both “precise” and “just”–is perfectly capable of motion and carries with it a specific energy. I cannot say, myself, right now, exactly what you should do with this thought, or how it should move you, but I think that beginning to understand the way in which even language is tangled up with the world of phenomena might be of help in understanding how a butterfly moving its wings can cause a windstorm on the other side of the world.

To sum up: take care. It is both the easiest and hardest thing for those of us brought up in a post-platonic world to do.

I will explain more on that later, but by all means, give it a whirl yourself.

On crowd control, post-2008 election

Day two of NaBloPoMo: Erik rifles through his anxiety-clotted thought processes for a topic for today’s post, realizing that the US Presidential Election is but a little more than 36 hours away and that everyone is sick unto death of hearing about this or that pet issue but that he has been fairly quiet through the whole campaign, posting only several PSA’s on LiveJournal for the benefit of whoever could find them useful.

I had thought about going into the subject of Palin’s relationship to the Dominionist ideals of the Assembly of God denomination and its spin-off churches but you know? I really do not want to go there right now. At this point, other people have said it as well as I could: Palin’s association with End Times fanatics should be clear to anyone who can read by now.

But I still have my paranoia hat on. I think I mentioned yesterday that I do not watch or read major news outlets if I can help it. Sometimes I read the New York Times, but for the most part, the rest of the mainstream media is so unreliably sensationalistic that they are completely incapable of delivering any substantial information. The reason I do not pay attention to them is because I find using mainstream media to follow current events to be extremely anxiety-provoking and depressing, partially because I am susceptible to appeals to pathos and to apocalyptic rhetoric, having been exposed to fundamentalist preachers, parents, and Sunday School teachers for the better part–or “worst part,” to be more psychologically accurate–of my formative years. One of these days I will tell you about the extremely tenacious PTSD that I began to develop by the time I was in elementary school, in response to the spiritual barnstorming I experienced all while growing up.

In the meantime, though: I do glean a fair amount of information about what is going on from various friends and carefully chosen sources on the internet. So I found this one piece of news entirely by accident, as it arose in the comment threads to a post that bore little relation to the comment itself: the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade has been deployed in the US since October 1st, according to the armytimes.com website.

Now, I am not a law scholar, but I have been told that this sort of thing was illegal until very recently. Google “posse comitatus” for more information on what used to be “strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement,” which were loosened considerably in the little-publicized John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, signed by our favorite president of all time, George W Bush. Read about it, think about it, and then take a look at at the armytimes.com article.

This new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

ArmyTimes paints a fairly benign picture–mostly. The headline says the Brigade is deployed to “help people at home”; but somewhat troubling is exactly what they might be helping with. The article emphasizes “response” to disasters as the Brigade’s main mission. With some added detail: “They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological [attack],” etc etc.

Interesting choice of priorities in that statement; nevermind how one might imagine that military troops would work to restore order in case of natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina or Rita, a job for which a combat team seems a sobering pick, but not unsurprising these days. Using combat troops for civil unrest or “crowd control”–especially “crowd control”–seems something akin to declaring martial law. Does it not? What, exactly, are the military and the administration expecting to happen in the near future? And what will be the nature of the military response?

The following passage lends both clarity and confusion to this question:

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

The package is for use only in war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.

“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

“I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered,” said Cloutier, describing the experience as “your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.

“I’m not a small guy, I weigh 230 pounds … it put me on my knees in seconds.”

Subduing unruly individuals. Like whom? And with what, exactly? The “package” contents list does not include Tasers, but we are given a description of what it feels like to be “shot”/shocked with one. And the one line disclaimer, that the package is for use only in war-zone operations, seems somehow incredible. And I do not think that is simply my paranoia or PTSD talking–why would such a long passage about this package appear in a short article about the deployment of the Brigade within the US if it were an entirely different topic from that deployment?

Forgive me for being somewhat skeptical. And a little perturbed: more than one person has told me that they will be out on the streets if the McCain/Palin ticket manages to steal this election. I know I will be. In the original comment thread where I caught wind of this news, one respondent noted that a single brigade for the entire country seems inadequate, in case of widespread disturbances, and that is true. But how long would it take to mobilize more units in addition to this one, and what excuse would the current administration need?

I will not venture answers to these questions, because I do not know what they are. But I think that it is important that we be aware of what is happening around us, which is why I still go information seeking even though the mainstream media makes me twitch so hard that they are more than useless to me.

Of course, no one you know will actually ever experience whatever it means to have the military “restore normalcy”:

“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this,” said Cloutier, who took command in July. “We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home … and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones.”

Yeah. They certainly would not taser crowd-control real Americans. Would they?

nablobloYourHorn. or Boat. or something.

I am keeping nocturnal hours lately, like the bush babies and fruit bats and the two-toed sloth in the Night Exhibit at Woodland Park Zoo, still one of my favorite places in the world to visit. Well, my world. For all my distress over US politics, I’ve never left the North American continent, except for one visit to Hawaii when I was 19. And I like it here–that is, I like the American West for its geography and I like the urban American West for its culture. You know: cities, where most Americans live.

But so my November 1 just started about an hour ago. It is also Monday: I took the last two “days” off because.. well, because working for other people wears me out so much that I find it necessary to take frequent breaks. If I were independently wealthy, I would stay in my room and write all the time, but since I need rent money and other sorts of money, I have to find ways to convince other people to give me their money, by offering them services of various sorts, since my only domestic products are the things I write, an occasional drawing, or an even more occasional piece of music, none of which have netted me an appreciable amount in sales over the course of my life.

Thus I am starting National Blog Posting Month a few hours behind most others on the continent, I imagine, although writers are known for keeping strange hours. Writing a blog post every day is going to take a fair amount of creativity, especially since I am used to blogging about once a month and so am but a faint and flickering blip in a remote corner of the blogosphere. I am hoping that having to come up with something vaguely interesting every day will help to loosen the internal censor who tells me every day why I should not write on this or that topic.

So the theme of the month for me will be Screw It I’m Going to Write Whatever I Want to Write and If People Don’t Like it They Can Take a Walk. Or something like that. In my head the title is filled with profanity because I curse like a drunken frat boy although I am not nearly as obnoxious as one; but I thought that for now I would clean it up. We shall see if I am cursing by the end of the month.

I have been unnecessarily shy about posting here because not only do I feel like every post has to pivot around some sort of Topic rather than resembling my diary-like entries at LiveJournal. I make mostly public posts there but rarely are they focused on anything in particular other than Here Is What I Did Today, which is not what I want to do with my blog, exactly, although there is always an element of that in the Here Is What I’m Thinking About Today or Here Is Something I Made Today approach I take towards my “real blog.” But the other thing that keeps me from posting here is the fact that I do not like arguments but I do of course hold controversial positions on various issues just like anybody else does. And so I am going to take the plunge into a conversation that may or may not even go anywhere, much less anywhere heated and contentious, but should any argument arise here, chances are I will not follow it to whatever a logical conclusion of an argument might be.

So there may be times when I simply stop replying to comments. This is a tactic of self-preservation (although yes the concept of the “self” is problematic for me but for now I will just go with the colloquial meaning to stand in for something like “emotional and mental shelter,” which itself will probably be expanded upon when I write about psychological disabilities, which I am fairly certain I will); try not to take it personally as either defeat or triumph when I do not answer. It may simply be that I need to disengage from a conversation that has turned into a shrieking chorus of hellfire and brimstone preachers in my head. Because this happens to me, you see.

Otherwise, the only rule I follow here is to make it vaguely coherent. Sometimes I post pictures and sometimes I post odd bits of proetry which is a word for the cross between poetry and prose that I am fond of stringing out on a regular basis. It may not be the word I stick with but I will use it here as another make-do term. I hope that, by the end of the month, I will have more than the five readers I think I have now. There may be some research on finding an audience and hosting my own blog and even placing advertising and/or a tip jar since fuck it (see?) I live in a capitalist culture and I need money as badly as any other writer, which is pretty darned badly.

I suppose that is enough for Opening Day? I am sure the topic of the National Election in the US has been covered in great depth by others although I might write between now and then a little about why I do not pay attention to the news anymore, especially before crucial elections. I get my information in other ways, which I think is probably for the better, given that the national media do not really provide much in terms of actual information anyway. But so later for that.

The first day of classes when I teach is the day when I want to blurt to the gathered flock in each classroom Please don’t kill me! They haven’t yet. I hope I survive this as well.

fragment 01

This might not be finished. Or that is I know it is not finished or rather it goes in there somewhere in that thing I keep claiming to be writing but so I thought I’d post it here on my blog just to make sure that no one labors under the illusion that this place is for linear thought only.

Fragment:

the miraculous thing about language is that it always says something even when there is nothing to say. which also makes it sometimes despotic and sometimes seemingly quite helpless to do anything about anything at all for what is there to do but to talk about what happened.

I could say that I’ve spent my life in search of a diagnosis. today I would say that it would not matter what classification I was slipped into in the language that medicalizes what it does not know: the intricate switches that run the length of the spine and the femur and the tibia and out to tarsals and meta-tarsals so-named just as though they stood for something else but the heck of it is that no matter what one says about the charge that is borne along continuously arcing low-voltage sparks across intervals smaller than anything one can see and how all braided together like the metal grounding strap that used to sometimes hang off of the engine block like it was supposed to go somewhere but stopped short of its destination and you never knew if someone had yanked it away or if it had slowly corroded to powder at that point where the washer around the bolt was supposed to hold it close to the automobile body quietly thumping over the tar-pitched expansion seams in the concrete freeways running under a sun that prevailed over its black sticky elasticity until it ran in rivulets off into the grass holding nothing together anymore except your shoes to the ground.

there were no words for that and he knew it and it was not even a matter anymore of trying to work something out for himself in his head it was or was it that to enter polite society and not to ask for more than one’s due one had simply that is you had to talk to them. there was no other way. in all of the universe where both potential and the real took on the blazing insignia of infinity and wore it rushing against what was frequently referred to as heaven but which chafed too at its own bindings revolting even against the patterns it etched in archaic habits ever scratching the same number again and again until what was written there was no longer the same but something like a crowd unleashed with every intention of doing nothing other than turning itself inside out with the energy that crackled from ligament to bone.

but it was not like that. if there is anything I do not know, it is that I do not know what eventual significance might ensue upon taking flint to the skull and spreading its contents on the bare rock in the sun to be read as bird’s entrails might be read or offering the interior of passion itself out pounding the sidewalk or blindly sweeping the floor for spare change and pulling up dust mites and paper clips.

there was not really anything anyone could do or that is there was not really anything that anyone would do realistically one hears the question all the time if only there had been something we could have done and there probably was but it would have been against all good moral and economic principle to do it. as I said you could interminably question what precisely you deserved out of it all but it is not as though you do not ask to be shown every possibility and then be served up two: if whatever it is cannot retire itself to the contours of a negative dialectic then whatever it is is probably demonic and should not be encouraged lest a message be sent to the youth of this nation to do other than nod sleepily or rather gregariously mingle on the cutting floor of what I always thought of as the film that would be made if the script were written on the floorboards of the elementary school where I walked with my satchel and waited solemnly for someone besides the deities I was offered to bear me up on their wings and away.

I cannot tell a regular story. I cannot work a regular job. I cannot hold a regular conversation. I cannot keep a regular schedule. I do not follow the regulations requiring me to hold onto my financial information for however many years it is one is supposed to do that because it strikes me as patently absurd to do so.

I cannot tell you what I was going to tell you but it is not like there is something else that I cannot tell you but more that the eyes and skin of the universe sit waiting in each of us but not even waiting to squeeze through this bottleneck where superstition and belief are both indistinguishable and incomprehensible but more than likely to kill us off because apparently what the universe cannot do is believe in itself or it is not yet intelligent enough to do so dumb things whirling about and colliding and occasionally sparking that wildfire that spreads so far in such a short time that whole empires rise and fall without each other’s knowledge in this far corner or that and if out of all of this there is only good and evil if workhammers are pulled as often as guns and brandished at this or that one life without a nose for wealth in the colloquial sense but that everything we need presents itself literally makes of itself a gift and no other hand driving it or giving it only warm blood giving itself up for cold blood or viscosity for capillary expansion or any of so many more possible exchanges that naming them would run off of every page and continue doing so forever the myth that one must tug at the earth and crack it and otherwise batter it being the founding tale of one of our stonebroken clan among many brought up on the hard dried mud flats of petrified riverbeds in all bad luck but now in the middle of tall trees that drip their own rain on moss and teeming loam day and night since before anyone even had the sense to write it down then why not describe a dream less impoverished before turning over to sleep sated with the radical generosity of the dirt that is not ours but only itself only.

I may have said this but I used to count the rows of planks in the tall vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary surreptitiously looking up as though that were not the most appropriate place to look given the sermon but counting them made it clear the arbitrary nature of everything that unfolded underneath it and I knew it and I knew it but it was not something enough to hold onto me when they grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to the baptismal pool I had long hair then and come to remember it was not just the walk which kept me so long from walking but it was also the dunking I had been afraid of being submerged since breathing in that lung’s worth of chlorinated pool water and I opened my eyes underwater for the first time and recognized nothing but kicked harder to find the ladder we all were swimming towards and as soon as my hand found the rail and my head broke the surface I gulped in a mouthful of oxygenated relief and then began to cough and kept coughing and could not stop coughing and through nausea and chest cramp coughed and coughed and coughed and the teacher who had not noticed before taking us to the deep end that unlike the other kids I had not learned to turn my head up out of the water to breathe asked with a laugh did you swallow the whole pool.

so there was that too. underwater for even a second was too long. I started practicing in the bathtub when it became clear there was no escape.

I cannot tell you how many planks there were in the ceiling but I can tell you that I knew already that there would come a time like no time when my having sat there would be of no consequence even to the heavenly beings invoked on my behalf on a daily basis. what I did not know is that the church had no door out or rather that one church contained another church contained another and another and if there were anything at all to do it would have to be to dismantle every one of them piece by piece examining each component and setting it in random piles to be used not ever again for edifices but as recombinant DNA that might fly and take off without notice for parts unknown and find the rhythm of the time spent heading there itself granting that exuberant peace speeding not home but home speeding itself but although I have managed almost to disassemble one single church it appears to me that the next and the next and the next are each slightly bigger holding more territory more armaments and more crowds willing to die rather than see them taken down even when they know the buildings themselves obscure both sight and sound of the unbearable reach of interstellar space waiting with more patience than we may live to see for us to live to see it.