Protect me from what I want.

If you're expecting much commentary on our great nation's most recent homage to the Second Amendment, look elsewhere. Frankly, I think we can all empathize with the families and loved ones of the victims, using our indoor voices, and beyond that there isn't a hell of a lot to say on the matter that hasn't already been beaten into the ground. There was a massive march here in the District yesterday to demand that the federal government extend the same pretenses of democracy for which we're occupying Iraq to our fair city... A demand recently underscored by efforts on the part of states like (wait for it...) Virginia to repeal our assault weapons ban against our will. Betcha didn't hear about any of it, due entirely to Virginia not being able to hold down its own fort. Well done, guys.

Moreover, a recent guest on Democracy Now! pointed out an interesting statistical nuance to american culture: Since such records were first kept (around the late 1940's), indexes of americans' happiness and fulfillment with their lives peaked in 1956; or at least so americans surveyed have said. Since then, the stats have steadily declined. Conspicuously, this has accompanied massive and sustained economic growth, throughout. There are two obvious (one more so than the other) ways to read said correlation. One: This steady and sharp economic growth has (at best) not left people with the impression that their lives are significantly better, or (at worst) has involved shifts that have significantly encroached upon or diminished happiness and fulfillment as americans experience it. Two: The steady economic growth in question owes something to economic opportunities offered by widespread dissatisfaction and alienation.

So, while one set of profiteers underwrites the entire mainstream political spectrum, to ensure the durability of the gospel of quantitative economic growth at the expense of qualitative improvements in the lived experience of those pinned beneath it, another set does everything in its power to see that we're armed to the teeth; usually against each other.

For those who haven't yet seen the film The Weatherman, I highly recommend it. It's a beautifully understated work that kinda came and went before anyone really noticed. Roger Ebert's review kinda hit the nail on the head, remarking that most depictions that fall within the tragic hero genre involve some titanic figure set against some expansive and foreboding backdrop, at an equally dizzying height; their fall from which constitutes the trajectory of the film. In the case of The Weatherman, the protagonist didn't have very far to fall, to begin with, which makes for a narrative into which one can quite easily read oneself; a narrative that in this particular case I would argue says something rather profound about how we see ourselves, and the vignettes we labor to replicate in our lived experience, often at the expense of what's front and center.

All of the people I could be... they got fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to only one -- and that's who I am. The weather man.


Bigger Picture Darwinism.

A year or so ago, on a cool Thursday mid-afternoon, I soaked with a friend in a rear-deck hot tub just north of 4th and D SE, on Capitol Hill. It was a work day, and a client's house; a client that had invited me to make use of the extravagance, given her home's impending sale. Earlier in the week, I'd been forced to retire a cell phone after plunging it into the tub, attempting to multitask text messaging and swatting at a mosquito. By all accounts, it'd been a good week.

"So, let me get this straight," my co-tubber quipped. "You dropped out of high school, dropped out of college, earn more walking dogs four hours a day than either had to offer in the way of job prospects, and you're currently playing rockstar in someone else's backyard hot tub while the rest of Capitol Hill is just getting back from lunch. How does this work, again?"

Short of an explanation that involved the Good Lord lookin' out for me, or some speculative metaphysics vis a vis the rewards of "staying true" to oneself, I really didn't have an answer. Last I checked, the classifieds weren't exactly brimming with openings for Amateur Intellectual or Serial Flatulator, so I opted for the most honest answer I could offer (after insisting that Crimethinc had nothing on me): "I don't know. Necessity is the mother of invention, I guess."

And that's probably true in two relatively distinct, but intertwined, dimensions. I wasn't always doing what I now do. I've done everything from jockeying the graveyard shift in a 24hr copy shop, to selling roses to commuters on one of the more remote connectors between northwest DC and the Beltway, to gigs at bookstores, to pulling admin duties at an animal rights organization, to staffing a haven for homeless women . Oh, and I went to college for a bit.

Nonetheless, my fidelity to institutionalized learning was always short-lived. And my patience with the arrogance of employers who kept me at their whim for measly returns was threadbare by 21. No career that might entail any promise wanted the smartass who told the university to take a flying fuck. And my willingness to allow the small miracles of daily life play second-string to helping Larry King find the new OJ tell-all bought the farm about the time I saw my last retail paycheck. All of the people I could be... they got fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to only one -- and that's who I am. The dogwalker.

So theory's dead, eh?

I'm hesitant to speculate as to the upbringing of others, but in this particular narrative, it's fair to say that mine was characterized by a dialectic of faith and disillusionment. Not in the dramatic sense of routine heartbreak or emotional duress (per se); more in the sense that virtually every time I took adults seriously, as to their descriptions of the world I was coming into, I ultimately discovered that taking the path(s) depicted therein as necessary was invariably little more than a gamble. And in most of those instances, I frankly hadn't signed up for a gamble; I'd sacrificed my time, desires, and (often enough) dignity for what I'd been instructed was a necessary chapter of some progressive narrative inhering tangible reward.

Well, shit. Life was a matter of gambling about the time I started breathing, I reckon. And if we're to (for instance) dispense with the notion that throwing ourselves through a set of hoops inextricably bound up with market imperatives (ask any of the umpteen-thousand med students defaulting on their loans on a given day) is somehow a fact of life, then we perhaps have the space to approach our decisions in terms of what they meaningfully offer us here and now, tangibly (see Foucault's Aesthetics of the Self). We have the space to determine what gambles we will and will not shoulder. We have the space to see our lives, not as something to sacrifice, but something to curate, something to adorn, something to fill out, and perhaps something that fits quite nicely between the gears of any of a number of repugnant systems.

And while I mean to denote something altogether different, it's perhaps ironic that I invoke the impasse any of us might pose to a given "system"; Lyotard's rejection of Systems Theory (in the closing passages of The Postmodern Condition) offers a fairly concurrent logic:

The system can only function by reducing complexity, and... it must induce the adaptation of individual aspirations to its own ends. The reduction in complexity is required to maintain the system's power capability. If all messages could circulate freely among individuals, the quantity of the information that would have to be taken into account before making the correct choice would delay decisions considerably, thereby lowering performativity. Speed, in effect, is a power component of the system.

The objection will be made that these molecular opinions must indeed be taken into account if the risk of serious disturbances is to be avoided. Luhmann replies, ...that it is possible to guide individual aspirations through a process of "quasi-apprenticeship," "free of all disturbance," in order to make them compatible with the system's decisions. The decisions do not have to respect individuals' aspirations: the aspirations have to aspire to the decisions, or at least to their effects. Administrative procedures should make individuals "want" what the system needs in order to perform well. [Emphasis added]

Perhaps that requires a bit of unpacking (and Dr. Seuss works just as well). Regardless, the operative tension is between our desires and a given system's performativity; its ability to meet some pre-determined objective efficiently; objectives to which our aspirations are daily "quasi-apprenticed."

The last few months, Brighter Days has been (no pun, here) like a dog, sprinting ahead of us with the leash whipping about, behind. We're all doing quite well materially, have been throwing resources to local projects in need of support, and are individually plotting a number of months away from work, pursuing everything from band tours, to language immersion in Europe and Mexico, to possible presentations at the US Social Forum in Atlanta and a conference on Self-Management in Buenos Aires. Slammed as I tend to be with my work, I wind through my day atop a 49x17 gear ratio, in a hoodie, jeans and beat-up slip-ons, kept company by whatever news I dumped onto the iPod during my (nearly) daily breakfast date with Seager at Sticky Fingers.

Life could be a lot worse. And not by accident. This week, the rest of the collective has agreed to free up my Fridays to allow me time to work for the IAS; a prospect I'm allowed largely because I didn't make other decisions. Namely, I chose not to want what the system in which I'm daily immersed needs in order to function efficiently; I chose to accept that when I shuffle off this stage, nothing I've accumulated will come with me and nothing that system could ever sell back to me will replace what it's taken away. That realization could've produced altogether other results, as I would hope Virginia Tech... and Columbine... and every other unspeakable act of despair might remind us.

"Even if this system were to go to the point of bluntly proclaiming that it imposes such an empty and hopeless existence that the best solution for everyone would be to go hang themselves, it would still succeed in managing a healthy and profitable business by producing standardized ropes. But regardless of all its capitalist wealth, the concept of survival means suicide on the installment plan, a renunciation of life every day." - G. Debord

I stand corrected, it would seem.

Once a member, I've grown quietly dismissive of recent IWW campaigns (particularly on the east coast... The west coast has accomplished some substantive shit, for sure). Most of the folks I know in the union resemble very little in the way of a departure from your average Civil War re-enactor; lovelorn for an era and a tactical format that breathes in the Postwar US the way a trout breathes on a river bank.

Nonetheless, this is an encouraging blow to the PR machine of an entity whose odiousness is only surpassed by its own ubiquity. My hat's off to you, brothers and sisters. DC folks may notice that a member of a certain, sorely-missed dance-punk trio had a hand in the Post's coverage of the campaign.

And while we're at it, abrazos to the Immokalee Workers in their second big win of recent years.

Notes on Misplacing Tragedy

[Note: Regular readers may find this particular post a bit esoteric and/or opaque. Apologies. My intent was to give words to a number of things for which I'd had little occasion or audience over the last ten or so years, and the audience in question is rather specific. If you find you're not part of it, do feel free to skip it. In the end, dispensing with shorthand and common references would've rendered this a rather boring read. Do feel free to skip it.]



Yes. So many memories. But sad? Really?

No, friends. Sad is that this selfsame NATO installation was used to carry out one of many massacres, while our vice principal was busying himself disabusing me of the notion that any institution exists to do more than perpetuate its own status quo. Sad is that prior to said massacres, and the impending UN sanctions that killed over a million people (half of them children), Iraq had one of the most secular and highly educated populations in the Arab world; certainly one of the most favorable toward women. Those fundamentalists driving payloads of explosives into produce markets? Yeah, they didn't just fall out of the sky. We created them, when we carelessly murdered their mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, wives; when we encouraged them to rise up, realized any democracy they'd establish wouldn't take orders from us, and then stood down while Saddam wiped them out; when we destroyed their health and sanitation infrastructure and banned the import of anything that might rebuild it; when we left their children to die of gang green resulting from paper cuts.

Sad? Sad was sitting at in a church at 15th and V, nine years ago, at Greg Proctor's funeral... And realizing that probably none of the Sig faculty ever apologized for making him their patsy in the infamous "Tennis Court Incident." Sad was being regaled on my morning bus jaunt from Nicolosi by a thirteen year old girl whose father routinely ordered her brother to "slap her till she bleeds" when the hot water happened to run out during her shower. Sad is that said brother took Greg's place overseeing the student council.

Sad is that no one blinked when certain athletes in our midst were quietly bee-lined Stateside when the cops came looking for the drunk americans that had put a Sicilian man in the ER during a night of rock-throwing in Motta; or when "Bum Day" was half the student body showing up with signs reading Will Work for Food. Sad was hearing all the third-party accounts of who sexually manipulated and/or abused who on whatever bus trip was masquerading as piety, charity or school spirit that particular week, and the fact that this was humored and filed under "not a problem" by every responsible party, top to bottom (never mind that said tropes remained more or less water tight).

And perhaps it's just the default american high school experience (Columbine, anyone?), but ... so many memories," as though it's somehow nostalgic? My memories involve watching my peers abuse alcohol like it was going out of style, watching them fail to experience any sort of epiphany or cognitive dissonance at the moment they found their lips around the nozzle of a gas can, retrieving them from the ER after a drunken game of "corners" (don't ask) in Motta, watching them abuse each other in some of the most vicious displays, hearing about the Ex-O's daughter poisoning a teacher's drink, seeing teachers bend the rules to cover for and enable the most thuggish and anti-intellectual of our ranks (diplomas were issued to athletes whose tirades against evolution betrayed a staggering ignorance of even the most rudimentary biology, for instance), and the recurring nightmares my first year Stateside, where I'm riding shotgun with my mother, sobbing, begging her to let me leave.

Let's not shit ourselves, last I gave it a gander (likely some eleven years ago), The Stars & Stripes was reporting that Sig's academic sphere suffered one of the worst behavior and lifestyle crises of the region. Kids setting locker rooms on fire, throwing each other through walls (in computer labs, no less), kleptomania, and youth center on the verge of structural collapse... And let's all not forget that (now legendary) incident in which a former wrestling team captain's ass-flesh was left dangling from the remains of a shattered glass pane. Anyone paying attention knew something was very, very wrong. And I'd go so far as to say that any of my peers who doesn't recall half their waking hours being swallowed up with their peers (quite rightly) verbalizing their outright misery is just plain lying. We lived for our departure the way many around the District live for Bush's last day in office, and the effort young women around me put into snagging whatever guy made for a flattering photo and envy-worthy story to send to friends Stateside (no matter how degrading, abusive, or just plain unremarkable he was in real life) was nothing short of dizzying. Most of us lived and breathed for a scenario well beyond our reach, and therein sought refuge from our actual conditions.

Perhaps most instructively, I remember the six months I got to skip my first class Mondays, to see a therapist after confessing to my mother that I'd begun to believe there might be a God, and that he had carried out every facet of his plan with painstaking precision and success... Except for one: He'd put me in a world in which all indicators suggested I was to aspire to the examples of the thuggish intellectual/ethical/spiritual bankruptcy and self-interest of my peers, or the mediocrity, resignation, and (in the worst cases) downright cowardice of the adults around me... All of this being the world He had planned; a world with which I felt fundamentally incompatible, with every inch of me that breathed... A world with which I had accepted I would never be reconciled.

She suspected I might've been suicidal, and she might not have been wrong. Sig provided me with such an unappealing (read: repugnant) sense of what adulthood and the world in general had to offer me, I'd come to accept that I probably wouldn't live beyond my early twenties. I don't say that for dramatic effect, I genuinely believed that. I'd not grown so cynical as to call it a day just then, but I was not confident that whatever cursory run I gave adulthood would be so compelling as to to prevent me from taking my leave of it shortly thereafter. And (as any who've known me for any recent period of my life can likely attest) the years since have seen me flatly refuse to hand over any quantity of my dignity, time, or energy in a gamble on my "future;" I'd given five years to one transparent lie after another, under conditions in which I had no choice. Even if longterm stability were at stake, I would never again cede my present to the idea that it would somehow pay off later. And the last twelve years have seen these legs carry me as far from what Sig offered as was physically, spiritually, and ethically possible.

The day I turned my books in and walked out, halfway through my junior year... It wasn't out of an apathy toward the life of the mind. It was the first day I'd seen my biology teacher in months, sure. But had anyone wanted to, I wouldn't have been hard to find. I was holed up in the library, reading. The school library, no less. And (quite shamefully, though perhaps desperately) much of what I was reading found its way out of the library with me. I walked out that day after being diagnosed with severe stress headaches. The closer we hurdled toward being released from that space, it seemed, the more adults around us became our cheerleaders. And for what? What exactly had we learned or become? It scared the shit out of me that anyone was satisfied with it, much less championing it. And it foreshadowed the precarious and (indeed) catastrophic mediocrity that awaited me. I left because my body could no longer take that.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, I was sitting on a couch in the home of a staffer at the US Embassy in Vienna, with a friend who'd grown up in East Germany and spent five weeks of his nineteenth year incommunicado, after being imprisoned for attempting the climb the Berlin Wall. Those in my company were appalled by the story coming out of Iraq. Fully nothing about it shocked me. Nothing. It was a logical and intuitive elaboration of the very racist arrogance that served as the foundation of life in Sig; a world in which we unquestioningly celebrated, rationalized, and believed any and all in which we saw oursevles, no matter how vacuous, violent, malicious, or transparently false. A world in which we ignored, dismissed, or suppressed all in which we did not. A world in which such patterns were afforded official sanction (indeed, encouragement). And not a day passes in which I'm not absolutely terrified by the casual and indifferent gaze cast upon such worlds, much less the manner in which hindsight might leave one with a nostalgia for them.

Worse still, after all those years suffering that shit hole right next to all of you, hearing and sharing your pain (perhaps in different ways), watching you cope (often in equally disturbing ways)... I've -- in all seriousness -- mourned the fact that so many of you have opted to duck right back into that community. Not for your own sake, mind you. The world is not a cake walk, and I don't discount that material stability and lack of contingency provided by life in the military community. But I mourn that you would be so willing to possibly subject your children to what we endured. I mourn that you've forgotten what that looked and felt like.

Ultimately, whatever paths we've chosen upon getting out from under that experience (certainly, many of you have not found your way back to the military)... Seeing all the emails back and forth waxing nostalgic about Sig, and our time there, and what a shame it was to see the structure that rendered much of our experience invisible demolished...

I guess I just worry that it's a reflection of what we've failed to do with our lives, since. If something so miserable, something that often drove us to the brink of irreparable self-destruction, something that stole so much of the challenge and promise and unknown of what those years should've held for us... If that's worthy of romance, if its physical representation is worthy of mourning in contrast to what's found its way into our lives since... It perhaps marks a point of reflection.

And in that reflection, I sincerely hope that every last one of you is happier than you've ever been.