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.
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