James' Room

We Know: Authoritarianism and the Empire of Information.

Courtesy Henriette Hansen

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of a book I’ll release in the coming year. Hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1: The Have and the Have Nots: Information Asymetry

Knowledge is power. A trite aphorism. But like all aphorisms, it endures because there is a grain of truth in it. Those who know have a certain advantage over those who do not know. More importantly, those who know things about those who don’t know, hold all the cards. The clash over who will have information has always been a clash over power. Who will know? Who won’t? Who will be enlightened? Who will languish in superstition and barbarism? The powerful have always manipulated information, and access to information, in order to fulfill their own aims. Throughout history the powerful have used information to make, and re-make the world in their own image; in short, the powerful have always wanted to play God. This should come as no surprise, when we delve in to the true meaning of power. It has its roots in Latin, with the word potere, meaning “possible,” or “able to.” Knowledge is power, and power is the ability to… what, exactly? Indeed, it just ability, any ability is enough. Power is pure potentiality. It is all that could be or that might be. Supreme power means supreme ability. Unfortunately, it also follows that an absence of power means an absence of ability. To the powerless, there are few options. There may be some potentiality in them, but they are never able to do anything with it. There has been stratification of power and knowledge for thousands of years in human societies.

However, we stand on the precipice of an unprecedented differential in who knows, and who doesn’t know. Ignorance, and credulity are just as potent weapons of oppression as teargas and machine guns. However much we may seek to reassure ourselves with the comforting notion that there is “more information out there now than ever, thanks to the internet,” we often fail to grasp the difference between knowledge and information, between truth, and noise. What’s worse; increasingly massive portions of our own, private lives, are being gathered as information by powerful entities, both governmental, and private. The average citizen is fighting a losing battle over who controls knowledge. At the same time that we are bombarded with more and more pseudo-news, in the form of celebrity gossip, and political bickering, our civil liberties are eroded, and we come under closer and closer scrutiny from institutions claiming to help us. From Google collecting our browsing information in order to “help,” us consume more relevant unneeded products, to the United States government flying drones over the country for our “security,” the powerful uniformly couch their information gathering in the soft, fuzzy language of security, safety, and helpfulness to the people. This is not a new phenomenon. Even a cursory glance at recent history reveals the same story played out in authoritarian societies, again and again. Hitler’s fearsome SS was the Schutzstaffel, Schutz meaning protection. The Soviet KGB stood for the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or the Committee for state security. The list goes on and on, in every authoritarian regime. Safety, protection, security. These commodities are dear, especially in a dangerous and unpredictable world. But always, and without exception, anyone who offers these wonderful blessings, demands a price, in information, in power, and all too often, in blood.

The most cunning commanders throughout history have always recognized the paramount importance of knowledge. Sun Tzu famously wrote that: “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” Knowledge is paramount here, not only of one’s enemy, but of oneself. Sun Tzu was aware that most battles were won or lost, long before the fighting ever began. Rather, they were fought over who had better intelligence, and who knew the terrain more closely. One of history’s towering figures, a powerful man in any regard, Hannibal of Carthage, provides a trenchant example. Although he was fighting in Italy at the time, and as such, could have been at a disadvantage in knowledge of the terrain, Hannibal, Livy tells us: “rode round on his horse, minutely examining the terrain,” just before the Battle of Trebia In doing so, Hannibal finds a spot to conceal his cavalry, which he knew to be superior to the Romans’. Hannibal had also made sure to understand the character and tendencies of his opposing generals, by engaging in small skirmishes. He knew Sempronius, the Roman consul, to be a rash man, and Hannibal, fond of light cavalry, used his Numidian Horse to draw Sempronius and the poorly prepared Roman army across the Trebia at dawn. The result was one of three crushing defeats that almost brought Rome to her knees in the second Punic War. And it was all a result of Hannibal’s near perfect information. He knew the terrain, his opponent, and the strength and weaknesses of his own forces. I can think of few other examples in which knowledge translates so directly to power.

Of course Hannibal’s opponents could have quite easily acquired similar knowledge, had they thought more about their own weaknesses, and reconnoitered the land. We do not live in such a time. And thus we come to the asymmetry of knowledge in the modern world. Large organizations are infinitely more capable of gathering, storing and analyzing information, than an individual. Further, when these organizations paint themselves in the gloss of “protection,” or “helpfulness,” they acquire a certain unearned morality, a mandate to exist. They have more information, and we are willing to give them even more information, for our own good of course.

Inside a nondescript office building in Berlin were files taking up 125 miles of shelf space. These files contained information, gathered by agents, and informers, on nearly everyone in the former GDR or East Germany. This office building was the headquarters of Erich Mielke’s Stasi and is still open as a museum today, with the files available, should a former citizen be interested in what the government knew about him. Stasi is a contraction for the Ministerium fur Staatsicherheit, which means, unsurprisingly, the Ministry for State Security. The Stasi was an extremely effective secret police force for East Germany, and its agents and informers had infiltrated nearly every aspect of the people’s lives. Victor Sebestyen writes chillingly that: “At the height of the Third Reich, it is estimated that there was a Gestapo agent for every 2,000 citizens. In the mid-1980s there was a Stasi officer or regular informer for every sixty-three” (Sebestyen, Revolution 1989) One of the Stasi’s crucial weapons was the omnipresence of informers. Ordinary provided information to the state security apparatus by denouncing the friends, neighbors, and colleagues. They did so for many reasons, but the overwhelming climate of fear made sure that even if you weren’t being watched, you felt as if you were. The secret police attained an almost mythic status due to their ability to know, helped along, in no small part, by the people’s willingness to tell them things, in short, to inform upon one another. Of course, not everyone engaged in such cowardly behavior. As in all instances of fear and evil, some brave few help those they can, and provide no support to the controllers. But the overwhelming sense of being watched, that you do not know, what they know, is enough to break any man. Operating without information is like fumbling around in the dark, and setting oneself against an opponent who does have information, or at least appears to, is an extremely dangerous gambit.

The Communist bloc fell more than twenty years ago now, and with it the secret police forces that held millions under their bootheels. It is easy to think that we live at the end of history as Francis Fukuyama a bit prematurely stated, and that the days of oppression are firmly behind us. Oh, that it were true. We delude ourselves with the notion that open knowledge, the internet, and Wikileaks, will set us free. Childishly, almost religiously, we put have faith that technology will somehow level the playing field. While open knowledge is a good, and noble undertaking, technology has a disturbing dark side with respect to information gathering. As I opened the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, a supposedly enlightened and progressive publication, I was greeted by a full page advertisement for Boeing. A large drone stared it me with its massive camera-eye, quizzical, cold, calculating, with the words “Enduring Awareness,” emblazoned chillingly across it. The drone offers “Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance.” All of these features could indeed, be good things. I am aware that a less pessimistic reading of the advertisement would see all the good a drone could do in a combat zone, how many brave soldiers lives it could save. The drones could indeed protect us. However, when we look at the track records of state protection agencies, security ministries, and other organizations established for the “good of the people,” they are littered with illegal surveillance, abuse of power, torture, fear, and violence.

I wish we were merely in the province of the tinfoil hat-wearing, internet conspiracy crowd, when we discuss military drones overflying the United States of America. But again, in the guise of “intelligence gathering,” and the “prevention of domestic terror,” these silent stalkers have been pulled out of Orwellian fantasy. Eric Holder did not rule out the possibility of an armed drone strike on American citizens, on American soil. Of course, he including the usual language of the powerful when the populace has not yet-acclimatized itself to whatever new form of power projection has been thrust upon them. They will only be used in “extenuating circumstances,” or “National emergency.” Of course, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history knows how easily emergencies can be declared, and, how all too often, these “emergency measures,” are among the darkest parts in a nation’s history. From the Alien and Sedition Acts, to the internment of Japanese Americans, to the Reichstag fire that ushered in the worst of Nazi Germany, emergencies can be manufactured, and universally mean loss of freedom.

Drones attacking American citizens with guns, should be the least of our worries. We should fear their cameras much more. While the government could certainly manufacture an emergency, it is almost impossible to keep a population cowed with violence alone, although many have tried. Far more effective, as we have seen, is controlling information, and that means knowing everything, and everyone. Apologists for abuse of power, and violation of civil liberties, typically the abusers and violators themselves, often cite the fact that the innocent need have no fear of surveillance. But guilt or innocence have no place in this argument. The whole notion of probable cause is completely done away with in this line of reasoning. Citizens do not have the right to break the law. They do have the right to private lives, free of fear. As we saw with the Stasi, just the threat of surveillance, the possibility that they might know something, creates a climate of betrayal. Constant information gathering directly contradicts the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It replaces them with subservience, violence, and fear.

I do not mean to suggest that the government is inherently evil, or that it seeks to create a state in the mold of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. But institutions seek to perpetuate themselves, just as power seeks to refine itself. We are faced with a never before-seen amount of information in the hands of the government and large corporations. With that information comes tremendous amounts of power, over everyone, and indeed everything. Even more disturbing, at the same time that we give, willingly or not, more and more of our information over to these entities, we are systematically denied access to information about them. In the U.S. governments, and other powerful organizations, like the Fed, operate under a thick screen of opacity, impenetrable by the average citizen. This mis-match, is informational asymetry. Worse, we the people are increasingly unable to filter and use the information we do get, due to the across the board failings of our education system, and the descent of many mainstream media outlets into hackneyed, reTweeting, servants to “politically correct” public opinion and corporate sponsorship.

Is there a way out? Where do we go from here? I tentatively hope there is. The citizenry needs to become serious about information gathering itself, and more than information, it needs to concern itself with knowing the truth. Unfortunately, this is quite difficult, as so cluttered with white noise. Which is why we move next to how to distinguish between the two, in the next chapter “Pseudo-Everything: The Semi-Real and How It’s Destroying Our Minds and Bodies.”

Tags: America, Future, History, information, military, politics, Power, sociology

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Categories 1984, America, Culture, Germany, History, internet, Military, Politics, power, Sociology

What Makes a Post Freshly Press-able: It's All in the Details

24 Jan

Reblogged from The Daily Post:

Every day, a handful of WordPress.com bloggers are featured on Freshly Pressed. And every day, many more wonder, “What do I have to do to get Freshly Pressed?”

Here on The Daily Post, we take a close look at posts that have been Freshly Pressed and explore why they were Press-worthy. We hope this series provides insight into the process and offers tips and tools to make your blog the best it can be.

Into the Mist

21 Jan

Image Courtesy of:
Anzaar Nabi, check out the site at

http://www.mobilephotographer.blogspot.com/

Here is the start of a little story I’ve begun writing. I got the idea as I read the beginning of Heart of Darkness, when Marlowe describes the fear that the Romans must have felt as they came upon Britain the first time. I thought it would be a great start for an adventure story, and here’s the start of that start. Hope you like it.

When they’d set out from Rome, all those months ago, he had never expected this. All around them, the sea roared like vengeful spirits, the unyielding cries of the sacred dead, who had gone down here before. But who had gone before? No one; screeched the wind. It howled and whipped the rigging, threatened to tear the sails from the mast and leave them hopelessly stranded, beneath a sky the color of ash, and a sea the color of lead. They were the first. And perhaps the last, if they found nothing that the tax collectors or generals deemed worthy. But maybe, just maybe… He had cast his die on this expedition. While in Gaul, he’d received word that the drought had reached his olive orchards near Syracuse. The estate was in shambles, and the debt collectors knocked at the gates like snarling wolves circling a wounded stag. They could smell blood. His blood. And they were coming for him. So when he had heard of the crazed expedition to the north, chasing shades and ghosts into the mist shrouded, myth darkened Isles. he hadn’t hesitated. The Empire was offering plots of land to any legionnaire who would fight for one year with the expedition to the world’s end.

Even if the next year brought a bumper crop of olives, it wouldn’t matter. He had taken a loan to buy rights to all of the olive presses in the district the previous year, and because of the drought, he had been left with a huge debt, in addition to the losses from his own crop. No, there was nothing to go back to. If he were to go back, he might be able to hold out for a few months, borrowing more from friends and family, but the hole he had dug himself was already too deep to climb out of. So when the aid-de-camp came into the officers’ mess tent in Gaul, Flavius Maximus had no qualms in scratching his name down onto the rough parchment that promised his life to the Empire for another year. Strange, he thought, how a man jumps willingly from the kettle and into the fire. He’d narrowly escaped death during the Gaul campaigns, after taking an arrow to the side. Its malicious barb had buried itself deep in his flesh, and the doctors had come close to declaring it a lost cause. The pain as they removed it had been exquisite. When he looked down at the soft linen he lied on, he had been surprised that the human body even contained so much blood. The pure white had been stained a shade of red so dark it bordered on black, and the loss of so much quickly carried him into a state of semi consciousness.

In his dreams, he walked a snow covered landscape. As far as he could see in any direction, stood nothing. Pure, white, nothing. A dream of annihilation. He wandered. His boots went crump, crump, crump, in the snow. He could feel each step compact it beneath him, leaving his footprints behind. He turned around out of a nameless curiosity, and saw that his steps only extended behind him for a few feet. The winter winds, howled, and erased any record of his existence before his very eyes. In a few hours, it would erase him entirely, and bury him beneath the eternal ice. Still he trudged, drawn to some nameless warmth in the distance that seemed to make his breast hum with resonance. He trudged and trudged, mechanically, until his vision was completely filled with white, and even his own feet were erased from his vision. He woke up.

He drifted in and out of consciousness for over a week, as he overcame the blood loss and a subsequent fever. The wound healed, but his mind was still pierced by the recurring dreams of nothingness. He thought of the dream now, as he peered into the gloom. It seemed that only the colors had been swapped, blue and gray, the color of new steel, had replaced the smothering antiseptic white of the dream. It still threatened to swallow him whole. To erase him for all time. The mist hung low all around their galley, as at rolled and rocked with the violent surf. These boats had been built for the tranquil, nymph ruled waters of the Mediterranean. They should have been sailing the aquamarine waters between paradise islands, laden with wool from Egypt, nuts from Syria, and headed toward the great markets in Rome. Instead they followed legends, and chased chimeras. Whispers of a land beyond Gaul had reached them since the campaigns had begun. Murmurings of a place beyond beyond. Alba. A land infested with barbarians, and ruled by spirits. The light of the Empire was strong, but had yet to reach this mythical place. And as he stared into the mist, that looked as solid as a curtain of steel, he wondered, almost sacrilegiously, if even the light of civilization could penetrate into this gloom that seemed somehow, alive.

He was cold. In fact, he could tell that they all were. His friend, the cavalry commander, Justinus, gripped the railing and shivered beneath his oiled cloak, as water beaded, and dripped back off it into the sea from whence it came. Flavius walked over and clapped him on the back, and felt the otherwise unflappable soldier flinch, just a fraction of an inch.

“Feeling, alright my friend? I must tell you, you don’t look the part of the legendary man who pacified all of Gaul.”

“Ah Flavius! Were it so. I could only wish to take all the credit, and be on my way back to sunny Rome to receive my laurels. There can be no rest for the men who would do the Emperor’s will it seems.”

He heaved a sigh and replied:

“Men do what they can with what they’ve been given, Justinus. We make our world, but we do not make it just as we see fit I’m afraid. I’m sure that most of the men would never have crossed the Alps had it been up to them and them alone. The forces outside our selves drive us to break with our everyday, our comfortable lives. Look around us. It’s hard to shake the feeling that we as men, are quite small.”

“Flavius, it is quite like you to wax philosophical in the face of misery,” laughed Justinus. “I only wish I could have your resignation to such turns of fate as this.”

“It’s not resignation so much as, well… I’m not quite sure, a certain willingness to do my duty. Not just to the Empire. But to reach something. To see absolute end of the world.

“I only hope that the rest of the men can feel such things my friend. It’s disturbing to me that we just don’t know what we’ll find there. No one does. What do we have to go on, a few stories of tin traders coming down to the northern shores of Gaul? What do we hope to find there? More barbarians? More slaughter? It seems strange to keep going, after we’ve already gone so far.”

“Asking the unanswerable again, eh Justinus? A dog digs, a horse gallops, the Empire expands. Order is the natural order of things. We draw maps, we divide into provinces, we collect taxes. This is the fate of the world, to be divided up, and conquered, classified and catalogued.”

“Perhaps,” breathed Justinus. “but even the Empire seems small out here. Just as you said we ourselves seem small before.”

And indeed, they did seem small. The whole ship did. The bright red sail with legion number, XVI emblazoned on it stood alone against the gloom, like a small fire burning on a foggy heath. The shadows and grayness threatened to enclose it, to extinguish it forever, like a foggy thumb and forefinger, clamping down on a candlewick. Off in the distance, to their left, and right, they could see other red sails, feebly held aloft against the tide of darkness and ignonimity. They stood out there, other candles holding on tenuously, like paper lanterns set afloat in in a fast moving stream. All anyone could wonder was, how long would they last, and how many would make it? They had set out in the morning yesterday, the last feeble stretches of sunshine left behind on the rocky coasts of Gaul. Men stumbled with their heavy loads down to the ships, the rocks and pebbles betraying their footsteps, as if to warn them that to go would be a dangerous leap into the jaws of the unknown. Safer to stay, boots safely on dry land, even in the province of Gaul, that still, on occasion, refused to remain subdued. Man was not meant for the sea, the rocks seemed to say. Maybe the small ponds, the Mediterranean, or the Caspian, but nothing like this. These waters were truly otherworldly, and hostile, overtly hostile to their intentions, it seemed.

There had been no one to see them off, like in the stories of old. No fair maidens to hang necklaces of flowers on their shoulders, or to give them tokens to remember them by. Of course the Consuls and bureaucrats had pontificated about the usual glory of the Empire, bringing light into dark places, and spreading the glories of civilizations to the barbarians beyond the seas. They left, workmanlike, as if they were carpenters, or masons off to build one more house, or temple. In a way they were, the workmen of the Empire. The unthanked, unthought of grunts, who fit the individual stones of the wild provinces into the massive stonework that made up the impregnable fortress that was the Empire. Somehow it had rung hollow for Flavius this time. Having already seen all the “civilizing,” done by the Legions in Gaul, he was more than a little skeptical about what sort of civilization they would be bringing to the savages of this new land, if indeed, they or it even existed. That was a main part of the anxiety, not knowing. He had always been a great planner. He kept detailed records of every harvest in his orchards, laid out each expenditure, and never borrowed for frivolous things, like excess wine or women. But somehow, he hadn’t seen the drought coming, couldn’t have seen it coming, no matter how many records he kept, or pored over in the local state archives. And here he was again, on the threshold of another journey that was impossible to plan for, to foresee, and yet hoping that it would somehow help him make up for the last time fate had gotten the better of him. Doubling down on a lame horse, he supposed.

He stared over the galley, his eyes boring into the abyss. What might be down there, lurking, waiting in the bowels of the earth? Man would never know, he supposed, one of those impenetrable mysteries, like the night sky, or women. He imagined the ruins of ancient cities, buried deep beneath the waves, on the floor of the bottomless sea. He wondered if such a fate could ever come to the Empire. Of course it couldn’t though, he reminded himself. The Empire stretched throughout all of the known world, and as he well knew, it was growing, thanks to him and the rest of the Legions.

Suddenly, off the starboard bow, a jet of white brine shot up high into the charcoal sky. Flavius’ stood transfixed for a moment, his mouth agape. It seemed as if his imaginings had somehow called this sea monster up from the depths. Somehow, they had intruded on the sacred world of the abyss, and it seemed as if this guardian of the deep was here to protect a realm in which the Legions had no business. They all stood silent for a time, struck dumb by myth treading into reality. The barrier between the two realms seemed to be collapsing, the further they sailed into the unknown.

Finally, someone forward of Flavius shouted

“Starboard bow, we have… kraken!”

“Archers! Up on deck!

Tags: DPchallenge, fiction, Heart of Darkness, Rome, writing

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Categories Exploration, fiction, writing

It’s All in the Details

17 Jan

As a child, I was always entranced by complexity. Detailed images had the ability to capture my imagination, for hours on end. I can remember staring at the intricate blue patterns offset against the bone white China of my favorite restaurant as my meal grew cold. I would trace the scroll work on a dollar bill, and puzzle over the strange Latin phrases it carried for me. The richness and texture of these designs sunk their hooks deep into my imagination. Something about having a lot of information streaming at my brain was rewarding to me, and having to pick apart the details and see the patterns was like a puzzle in reverse for my young mind.

What I had stumbled upon was the human mind’s predilection for details, minutiae, in short, data. The pleasure I derived from looking at complex images, and decoding them, was really the pleasure of constructing a narrative to the details of the image. Our brains seem naturally wired to first, want large amounts of data and details, and second, to construct some type of narrative framework to organize those details. For the most part, we humans are planners. We prefer more information to less, because planning has long constituted a major element of survival for us. The individuals who were best able to plan, were best able to adapt, and in a harsh environment, adaption is key. Of course, most changes, are unpredictable, and we will get to that point later, but the fact remains that human beings like information, be it visual cues, like in the paintings and designs I loved as a youth, or weather reports and stock prices.

Think about this. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first thing you do? For most of us, it’s shutting off the alarm, which is often on our phones now. If you already have your phone, in hand, you will probably at least be tempted to check your texts, or facebook, or the weather. If you don’t do it then, you will almost certainly do it when you turn on your laptop in the cold morning light. Even before the digital age, we consumed information, first, even before we consumed food or other necessities. Growing up in the Northeast, I spent many winter mornings bathed in the soft glow of my old, titanic Mitsubishi tube television. It towered over me as I sat there, like a religious supplicant, waiting for its divine judgment. Two hour delay, or wait, wait CLOSED, victory! During those tense minutes watching the list of schools in my area scroll by along the bottom of the talking heads, I never felt hungry, or thirsty, or even tired in the cold dawn on all those winter mornings. I needed one thing, and one thing only. Details. I needed data, information, about how my day was going to play out. I needed to know. And I had discovered one of the strongest, and potentially most dangerous of human desires.

Details were important to me then, not because of the raw information itself, but because of the plan, the narrative, I was able to construct for myself because of them. I could plan out my sledding adventures now, and start calling friends. Our minds want details and information in order to help us build a more certain, predictable world, a world we can make sense out of. A narrative world. For in my adolescent snowday scheming, I was really writing stories of the near future. I envisioned them in my mind, and the divine blessing of the T.V. gave me the information to make them possible.

For details, to a large extent, constitute the fabric, the texture, of our lives. The little anecdotes we tell, the nervous ticks we have, or the tells when we lie, they all seem to combine together to make us who we are. Great writers are able to capture the world, even a fictional world, in all its details, and bring the reader to that world through those details. What makes a series like A Song of Ice and Fire or The Lord of the Rings, so compelling, is the richness and fullness of the worlds they create for us. We have enough data and details to make predictions about the worlds the characters move through. We can reliably and realistically say “A Gondorian would never do that,” because we have enough enough information, and details about their character, their political affiliation, and past actions to make that predictions. We like surprises in our stories, even unforeseeable ones, but we like, and even need consistent worlds and characters. And that’s the importance of details in fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien was famous for his contention that he felt like he was constructing, or reporting the history of a fictional time and place. This is important, because, it makes the author more accountable. If the Battle of the Last Alliance is seen by the author as a legitimate historical event, then he must control all the details, make it consistent with the rest of the story, and perhaps most of all, not forget that it happened. Events have to have real consequences in these rich and detailed worlds, or else the worlds break down under the weight of their own complexity. This is where we can really appreciate the burden of a fiction writer, in constructing his worlds.

James Joyce was probably the most exacting of all authors when it came to details. He famously asserted that he wished for a reader to be able to reconstruct Dublin, brick by brick from his descriptions in Ulysses. While he lived in France, he frequently wrote back to relatives living in Dublin, demanding the exact time it took to walk between different locations in the city, taking specific routes. The world seems real, because Joyce has put in so much effort to construct it. He uses all the senses, the sights the smells, the tastes of the city. They are filtered of course, through the consciousnesses of the characters, but still, the level of detail, and texture is almost staggering. Joyce was able to do this because he intimately knew the city. He was able to make it come alive, because to him, it was alive.

We only grasp the details when we experience them. Writing well, and more importantly, living well, has a lot to do with being attentive to the details around us. Have you ever met a really bad storyteller? Chances are, the problem with their stories is that they are vague. They went somewhere, they did something, and came back. That’s the typical plot of most stories, and there is nothing wrong with it. The problem is that most people don’t know how to color in their stories. They leave us with a gray unpredictable world, with nothing to follow, no bread crumb trail to lead out of the woods. Think of a T.V. show or novel that has engrossed you. You probably spent, or spend an inordinate amount of time wondering the simple question, “what happens next?” Will they survive? Who will she marry? What will this world inside the story look like at the end. It’s the temptation to read the last page, or the frustration at the guy who drives by and tells everyone waiting in line for Harry Potter that Snape kills Dumbledore. We want to know what happens, but we also want to give ourselves the chance to predict, and that’s why we need details. Without them, the world is bland, and we can’t predict. The story becomes bland, because the author can seemingly do anything, and it would make sense. It takes the fun out of the guesswork, or internet forums where we try to figure out what will happen in the next episode of our favorite drama.

Too often, we’re very adept at paying attention to details in last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, than in our own lives. I don’t mean the kind of detail where you use three different lint rollers on your suit before you leave the house. Or the kind where you color coordinate your Tupperware. I mean the kind of very personal details that make our lives stories worth telling. We increasingly wander through our days in a daze, head down, engrossed in our phones, coffee in hand. This social phenomenon has been derided enough, so I don’t need to beat the dead horse, but our society suffers from a terribly short attention span. It’s evident when you speak with people, most of them can remember few or any of the details you hit them with. They can probably parrot back generalities about where you work or where you went to college, for the most part, we are very unattentive to the characters in our real lives. I know many people who could give me more information about their favorite character in Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones, than they could about many of their friends. To be sure, these are fictional shows, and we are granted entree to every recess of these characters’ lives, something we should not have and probably wouldn’t want, into the lives of real people. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’ve become filled with pseudo-emotions. People often seem more invested in fictional families, friends, and lovers, than their own.

Of course, this is understandable. The regular, run of the mill, unexamined life, is boring. T.V. shows, and movies and books are idealized, hyperactive versions of normal life. This is why we escape to them, and why they are fun. I love all of these detailed narratives, but I’m afraid we don’t bring that same attention to detail back with us to the real world. In the end, those worlds are merely a poor reflection of the richness and complexity of our real one. The real world though, requires us to dig a bit deeper though, for those complexities. Life, real life, is the best written of all works. It’s pacing may be a little slow at times, but the wealth, breadth, and depth of experience and description is second to none. Furthermore, it’s not heavy handed in its symbolism or foreshadowing. In most stories, if there is a gun on the mantle in the first scene, it will be used in the last scene. Obviously that doesn’t apply in real life. If you check in to a rugged mountain cottage with a gun on the mantle, the murderer could use a knife, the gun, or there may not even be one at all. Though the details are still there, waiting for those who live an examined life, they don’t determine anything.

Details make up our whole world, but they don’t make our world whole. One of my favorite scenes in all of fiction comes at the end of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Spoilers, the main character dies at the end, and the last scene sees his mother and his best friend going through his room:

He left everything just as it was," Bonamy marvelled. 
" Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any 
one to read. What did he expect ? Did he think he would 
come back ? " he mused, standing in the middle of Jacob's 
room.
Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop. 

*' That seems to be paid," he said. 

There were Sandra's letters. 

Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.

To us, the reader, these objects don’t add up to much. The junk one might find in any room. But to those who were close to Jacob, each item becomes almost a relic of who he once was. Bonamy knows he bought that riding crop, and even though it seems frivolous to think about paying the bill, he knows Jacob well enough to attach some significance to it. Our lives are filled with details. To a large extent, they are just clutter. If someone were to comb through your room tomorrow while you were at work, what would they know about you? Can you know anything about someone through the details they choose to exhibit in their outward lives? The answer, I would think, is an emphatic no. Those details are meaningless, unless someone pays attention to them, and not in the look at me, attention-obsessed “tag me on facebook doing something cool” kind of way. Details are only valuable insofar as we have others in our lives willing to connect them, to stack them up and weigh them, in order to find some approximation of that elusive chimera of who we really are.

Tags: art, books, Inspiration, life, Literature, Memories, Philosophy, TV, writing

Comments 48 Comments
Categories advice, art, Inspiration, Life, Literature, Philosophy, writing

Authentic Travel

28 Dec

Like so many things in our world, travel has become just another contest.

Don’t get me wrong, I love traveling, and I frequently do it, but it’s hard to weed through the forest of travel blogs, travel sites, and travel forums, without succumbing to the notion that to many, travel isn’t necessarily about where we’ve been, and what we learned there. It has increasingly become about documenting every last detail of our adventures and posting immediately and simultaneously to Facebook, Twitter, and our blog, so everyone can see just how much fun we’re having. Granted, many of these posts are well intentioned, and a blessed few are even insightful and thought provoking, but for the most part, even exotic travel has become as banal as the rest of the internet, and why? Well, because it seems like everyone does it now.

Once upon a time, it was a unique experience to travel Europe, never mind Asia. You’d be sure to at least have people ask you all about a Euro trip, even twenty years ago. Now most people will probably tell you that the restaurant you loved was “touristy,” and that you payed too much for your plane tickets. So what happened? For one, more people are traveling, and spending time abroad. Comparatively cheap airfare has made getting to other continents at least feasible for many. In addition, study abroad programs have enjoyed a massive increase in popularity among American universities. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t spend at least a summer, or a few weeks “experiencing the culture,” in another country. This all has the net effect of making travel seem less special than it once did, and it certainly contributes to the air of elitism surrounding “experienced,” travelers.

I put experienced in quotes, because all travelers, will tell you they’re experienced. It feels good to pass on information about a place like we know it like the back of our hand. At parties or get togethers, it feels nice to say “oh I’ve been there, the food’s horrible, except for this one nice little cafe operated by Fabrizio, tell him I sent you,” or “oh man make sure you validate your metro ticket, one time, I forgot to and…” On and on it goes, but if you ever bring up travel in a group of self-perceived globetrotters, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a ridiculous amount of one-upsmanship, and arrogance in these exchanges, and it all revolves around a single idea; the idea of authenticity.

Authenticity seems to be the Holy Grail of travelers across the income spectrum. High end travel agencies have increasingly been promoting “authentic experiences.” For example, a $11,795 Signature Kenya and Tanzania trip from luxury travel agency Abercrombie and Kent, offers a chance to: “Make your stay more meaningful by stopping at a local school and interacting with the children.” Now I won’t be so presumptive as to assume that wealthy people can’t be compassionate and caring, and for all I know, this is an entirely sincere effort to engage with the locals. But what’s interesting, is that this option exists at all. It means that even people on fairly expensive vacations are at least interested in an “authentic experience,” observing the locals. These excursions become more morally opaque when we look at things like slum tourism. This is where I see the desire for authenticity lose all sense of morality, where looking at people living in horrible conditions becomes just another stop on a trip that includes elephant rides and temple visits. The travel companies and apologists can couch the experience in the terms of “immersion,” and “poverty awareness,” but it’s really nothing more than just another voyeuristic grab at the elusive chimera that is authenticity.

You don’t have to be rich to be an authenticity hound though. Plenty of poor backpackers will pull the “I’m not a tourist,” card on you, if you stay in enough hostels. For the record, I’ve backpacked, and 90% of backpackers are great, but hang around a hostel lounge and you’ll eventually meet someone who just has to prove that he’s seen more places than everyone else, and not only that, he’s had more authentic experiences. Sure, Vienna must have been great, but he got to experience the “Real Slovakia,” while helping a farmer birth a baby goat in a small village outside of Bratislava. These people often consider themselves drifters, or globetrotters, untied down by worldly concerns like money. They’d surely look down at the banker who impresses people by flaunting his money. But the travel braggart is no better, and to me, even worse than the banker. He shows off his “wealth of experience,” rather than monetary wealth, but what makes him worse is that he looks down on the banker, blissfully unaware of his own hypocrisy.

When someone tells you that your favorite part of a city is “too touristy,” or tut-tuts when you grab a burger at the McDonald’s in front of the Pantheon, what they’re really complaining about is a lack of authenticity. I can understand not wanting to waste an experience abroad eating American fast food, but why should that be a waste? I think the answer for most, is that while you’re in Italy, you should eat Italian food, and that McDonald’s is not real Italian food. It’s not authentic. Beyond that, they’ll say, you shouldn’t really eat pizza there, because that’s not authentic enough either. Some of this is understandable. It’s important to try new things when away from home, but frequently, the quest for authenticity while abroad turns in to an obsession. So many of us become obsessed with “not looking like a tourist,” or “not doing touristy things,” on our trips. The Ugly American stereotype has become so revolting that we cling to our phrasebooks and city guidebooks on the plane ride, then surreptitiously hide them in our bags lest the locals find out our secret.

Here’s the thing; it’s not a secret. Everyone knows you’re a tourist. We all might like to think of ourselves as trans-continental chameleons, able to blend in to any culture seamlessly, but that just isn’t how it works. There are a select few who manage this, but for one, your language skills probably aren’t up to the task. It’s very, very hard to reach native fluency, unless you actually live speaking the target language. Sooner or later, your accent will probably show. I get trying to fit in and respect other cultures. That’s great. But there’s a lot of arrogance in the “non-touristy tourist,” that I find almost as ugly as the Ugly American. Further, the touristy stuff is touristy for a reason. It’s usually the best, or most important stuff in the city. The Vatican is touristy. The Eiffel Tower is touristy. But they’re touristy because they demand to be seen. They’re cultural landmarks that require our attention. You don’t have to wear a floral shirt with an enormous camera strapped around your neck like the millstone representing your marriage, but if you’re in these cities, you’ll go to these landmarks. And you’ll be a tourist. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

The reason we feel a little conflicted, or hollow after visiting these sights, is that we have the gnawing notion that we haven’t yet experienced the authentic, the true France, or Italy or any other country. On some level, this search for authenticity is admirable. It’s a truly worthwhile endeavor to get to know another culture, and understand it, below its surface representations and tendencies. But there’s a shadow side of this as well. Often lying underneath a stated desire to “experience the authentic culture,” is the desire to say “I saw the real (wherever) and you didn’t.” In the age of iEverything and have it your way, it’s unsurprising that everyone wants “unique” experience. We want to feel like we’re better than the crowded masses waiting for the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. I’ve know people who have skipped seeing the Mona Lisa because they didn’t feel like fighting the crowd. Seriously? This is the ultimate in what I call tourist-hipsterism. It’s the idea that anything that has mass appeal is somehow less worthy of consideration, that because everyone’s doing it, it’s beneath such worldly and experienced travelers. Maybe I’m a conformist sheep, but there are certain non-negotiables for me when I travel. I don’t care how touristy these destinations are, I feel obligated to see them. Are there more authentic experiences out there? I’m sure there are, but even if they’ve been “done to death,” I find these cultural icons worthy of respect. I’m not a practicing Catholic, but when I enter a cathedral, or even a local parish, I keep my voice down, and cross myself. It’s a ritual, and maybe an empty one for some, but I still find value in it, if for no other reason than to show some respect. My generation, the Millenials has become so arrogant and narcissistic, that it rejects anything “mainstream,” out of hand. The pompous “non-tourist,” is but one symptom of this disease. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in a tourist trap, because I’m just so darn special.”

But part of me has to feel bad for, or at least sympathize with those searching for an authentic experience abroad. Whether it’s searching for “old world charm,” in Europe or “a simpler life,” in Asia, Africa, or South America, Americans go abroad to find the authentic, because they clearly aren’t getting it at home. Implicit in our desire to get abroad, is the nagging feeling that we’re missing something at home. At some level, I think the desire to get abroad is the desire to escape from an existence that is perceived as banal and vacuous. Many of us have had our fill of iPads, overpriced cars, houses, and educations we can’t afford but financed anyway. We’ve consumed these things, and been left wanting, so, like locusts, we’ve moved on to consuming other cultures. At a very deep level, I think getting to the “authentic” other culture is about saying, “I did that country. I understand it. I have consumed that culture and now it is mine to show off at parties like my trophy wife, or my Rolex.” We’re looking out on the final frontier of our consumptive impulse: experiences. Everything is advertised as an experience now. Your Apple experience. Your Toyota experience. Of course, your College Experience. Your Abroad Experience. We’re consuming so much more than products now.

That said, I believe there are still travelers who are genuinely interested in other cultures, not as objects of consumption, but purely out of human curiosity. If we’ve been duped into consuming everything we can get our hands or minds on, we’re still hardwired to wonder. If you reflect deeply, you know why you’re doing something. You know when you share an experience to one-up all the others int he room, or to impress them with your worldliness and global knowledge. I’d just suggest to refrain from that impulse. It’s admirable to try to get to the “real,” culture of a place, but do it for the right reasons. Because you’re truly curious, or just because you want to know more about the infinite world around you. We should also jettison the arrogant attitude that says we can ever truly, completely understand a culture. I had a student ask me “How do you find the German character?” As I struggled for an answer, I realized, that I couldn’t even characterize the American character. Cultures are just too big, and too complex to really consume. We can never truly own them, not even our own. And perhaps therein lies the hope that try as we might, they’ll resist becoming commodities, just one more thing to buy and sell in our travels.

Tags: America, culture, Europe, life, Philosophy, Travel

Comments 12 Comments
Categories America, Culture, Europe, Life, Philosophy, Travel, Uncategorized

War, 140 Characters at a Time

18 Nov

The Israeli Defense Force (@IDFSpokesperson) and Hamas (@Alqassam Brigades) have been engaging each other, not just with surface to surface missiles in Gaza, but with Tweets. The two Twitter accounts have traded barbs over the past couple of days, an an effort to win the war for hearts and minds in the global media. The Israelis and the Palestinians have long fought to present themselves as peaceful, restrained actors in a hostile environment, and to paint the other side as a group of ruthless killers in the international media. What’s interesting about the Twitter campaign though, is that the two belligerents are now able to circumvent the media altogether. Sure, many large news outlets still provide coverage, and even cover the Twitter campaign, but the IDF and Hamas are able to use Twitter to bring their message directly to disparate publics in far flung corners of the world. There is no longer any need to convince the international media of one’s moral fortitude. These two belligerents can now tap directly into our iPhones, our tablets and our laptops, and spoon feed us propaganda 140 characters at a time.

The IDF has run a glossy campaign of infographics and information. Their Twitter seems aimed at educating, the masses about their aims, and detailing the steps they take to target only terrorist cells in Gaza. One infographic titled “Where Does Hamas Hide It’s Rockets?” shows a satellite image of a missile launch site nestled between factories, a mosque and a playground. The underlying message being that the IDF must be extremely precise with its strikes, and that Hamas hides its launch sites in places that endanger civilians. But the Israelis must do more than just appeal to minds, they have to win over hearts. For example, here’s one of their most recent Tweets:
“Thanks to our followers worldwide for sharing our infographics. Let’s see how many RTs you can get for this one… pic.twitter.com/s50rb1fI“

From there, they link to a Twitpic of a bombed out Israeli car in an otherwise idyllic suburban neighborhood. I understand that new media is here to stay, and that Twitter is a mainstay of that new media, but somehow, a retweet of such destruction seems crass and inadequate. The small format of a Tweet allows for quick updates, but it doesn’t allow for reflection and deep thought. Each new Tweet comes so quickly on the heels of the one before it, that we really don’t have time to process the image, and understand each death and bit of destruction for the tragedy it really is. Even by the time I hit the back button to return to the IDF’s feed just now, that tweet was already buried under fifteen new Tweets and comments on Tweets, Twit pics, and retweets.

@alqassambrigade tweeted today:

“In response on massacre committed by #Israeli occupation, led to killing 10 civilians, Al Qassam Brigades shelling Israeli sites and bases.”

The Hamas Twitter account seems focused on framing its rocket attacks as retaliation for Israeli strikes. Each side is able to present itself as pure good against pure, reprehensible evil in its Tweets. An interesting hiccup in all this propaganda though, is that each side’s Twitter feed includes criticisms. People who disagree with the IDF or Hamas say so, and tag the corresponding groups. These criticisms are displayed directly next to the organizations’ posts, providing at least some dissenting opinion, even at the nexus of biased reporting of facts.

There’s just so much noise in new media, that it’s hard to sift out what’s important, what’s real, and what we should believe. Most images and pieces of text, infographics and sound bites will get pounded down the feed by the sheer volume of new data incoming. Soon, they sink into the silent netherworld of irrelevance that is most of the internet, a sad Purgatory of half-seen, ill-considered images, bits of text and thoughts. Of course, there is the other possibility, that an image, a story, or a bit of information goes viral. It rips through the internet like wildfire, with shares on Buzzfeed, Digg and the Huffington Post. But I wonder, is that really better? Is a war, a death, a rocket that goes astray and hits a family home, any better understood; more properly mourned, because it gets one million likes on Facebook? Once we see it so many times, don’t we get a bit desensitized to the story?

One of the images that has floated to the top of the jetsam pile of tragedy in this round of violence, is that of BBC journalist Jihad Masharawi cradling his dead infant son after an Israeli rocket strike. I’ve come across this image dozens of times now on the internet, from blogs, to Twitter to Facebook. It’s a gut wrenching and visceral sight, to see a grown man in tears, cradling a child who was one hundred percent innocent of the violence around him. As I looked at his anguished face for the first time, I felt as if I were staring at a modern day Job. Here was a man being asked by God or Fate to endure unimaginable suffering, for no readily apparent reason. It was the face of human helplessness, and confusion at a cruel and dangerous world. That image haunted me. However, I began to see it pop up more and more, all over the internet. People were sharing it, and somehow, it had become a symbol, of something as old as bed humanity itself; suffering in the face of unimaginable pain. But the more I saw it, the more I questioned whether the internet, and new media in particular were really the right places for an image like this. It was powerful, of course, and it made me think. But, how many of the reshares I saw really considered the image, and the humanity behind it. How many, as crass as it sounds, were just cash- ins on a horrific scene for the sake of clicks? And how many more shared just to share, because everyone was doing it? At some point, through all the reshares, retweets, and reblogs, content gets diluted. It’s like a photocopy of a photocopy; the original might still be there, but new media has the tendency to cheapen emotional experience and involvement by mass re-producing content.

I realize, the selfsame criticism could easily be leveled at this blog and writer. And the sad, and inadequate response I have to that is; maybe you’re right. For all my arrogance in thinking that I was different, that I gave that image thoughtful consideration, here I am linking to it. And indeed, I first saw it on a website. In the end, I think it has a lot to do with one’s personal experience with an image, a news story, or even a Tweet. Even a Tweet, at only 140 characters, can be thought provoking. It can the springboard for informed dialogue. Or it can spark a flame war, where mindless retweets fill the feed, and any substantive conversation becomes drowned out by pure noise and troll-like arguments. The internet, and new media let everyone jump in on the conversation; allow individuals to share and be hear. But there’s a shadow side to all that, that substitutes breadth for depth, quantity for quality, and speaking and typing, for thinking. As images, and causes pick up and go viral, how much authenticity is there anymore? Probably the best example of this was Kony from last year. It’s so easy to retweet, or reblog something, and feel like an activist, even feel informed. It’s a little ego massage, and a way to feel involved. If I retweet an IDF update with a snarky little comment, maybe I’ll feel relevant, the most important word on the internet. How many of those retweets are considered? How many of those comments are anything other than another pile of words on the digital band wagon?

It’s simultaneously the length and the amount of content streaming at us through snippets like Tweets that’s worrisome. The staccato fire of gruesome images, propagandized posts, and self-serving irony on the internet threaten to pound us into oblivion. There’s just too much to keep up with, and even when we try, so little of what’s out there is even worth reading. What’s worse, is that even meaningful words and images get drowned out in the noise, and in the repetition of seeing them, hearing them, so many times. There’s something inherently unsettling about war at 140 characters a time. We hear that war never changes, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore, at least for the vast majority of us observers (or voyeurs). The experience of war, has been chopped up into bite sized portions, as yet another thing for us to consume. But we risk missing the forest through the trees in doing this. There’s something undeniably grotesque about retweets of mangled bodies, shorthand and hashtags for murder, slaughter and death. And this grotesqueness comes from the fact that these events are trivialized, and made less real when they’re chopped up, cut down, and splattered all over Twitter and Facebook, in a cruel mockery of the real chopped up, cut down bodies splattered all over the streets.

140 characters is not enough. But is any amount enough? I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts below.

Tags: blogging, Gaza, Hamas, Internet, Israel, News, Philosophy, Twitter

Comments 2 Comments
Categories blogging, news, Philosophy, technology, war

Nobody Likes You When You’re Twenty Three

13 Nov

;

I must have been nine or ten when I first heard the Blink-182 song, What’s My Age Again and because I was so young, a lot of its humor was lost on me. Blink was always that band that never wanted to grow up, and at least as a fan, I never wanted them to. Even at nine or ten years old, I knew I never wanted to grow up either. But most of things I was singing along with Mark Hoppus about, were in my future. I remember thinking about that age, twenty three that he was singing about, and wondering what was so special about it? Why was that such a difficult and weird time?

I actually just turned twenty three this past week, when that song came on my shuffle. Music has that special power to bring you back to a specific time and place. For me, that song brought me back to being a little kid. It brought back the excitement I had in opening Enema of the State for the first time, with it’s too hot for most middle schools, porn star cover. Music has the power to show us that the more we change, the more we stay the same. I still rocked out to that song, but I stopped when I heard that line about twenty three, because finally, I was there. It wasn’t some far off date that I’d get to eventually, after high school, after college. It was here, finally. So I decided to write down some thoughts about being twenty three, and being in my early twenties in general.

First, twenty three is just going to be a weird age. It’s a transition age. Almost everyone is done with college by now. Most have found work, or holed up in school for a while. Twenty three is hard because there’s no real right answer, no agreed upon next step. For all of our early lives, we’re put on a very set path. We go to school, play sports, maybe play an instrument or do some other hobby. At least for me, every minute of the day in high school was pre-planned and compartmentalized. There was almost no part of my life that was left completely up to choice. After high school, almost everyone went to college. For me, it wasn’t a choice, it was always an assumption that I’d be going. I realize it isn’t like that for everyone, but at least for most the goal is always to get into a good college. Once you hit college, the free time can be overwhelming, but that’s fine, because you’ve got some easily identifiable goals still. First is to do well in school, which means to get good grades, not necessarily to learn anything. So you go along in college, doing well, until you hit senior year. At first, people are calm, applying to job interviews, graduate schools and service or fellowship programs. The path begins branching, and the and the anxiety rises.

Up until that year, there’s a fairly well laid out map, that supposedly tells us how to follow the magic path to wealth and happiness. Of course, a degree from a “good” college is a major step in this process. For me, the map started to become blurry senior year. As I looked at my career prospects with an English/ Sociology degree, I wondered if I had seriously wandered astray from the success path. This was extremely disconcerting because in my mind, I had “done everything right.” I’d gone to a competitive college, I’d done very well in terms of grades and awards. But the next step was upon me, and I didn’t see myself getting to the next square: stable, well-compensated, employment. I chose a different route and headed off to Germany on a Fulbright. While I’m happy with my decision, I still have my doubts, because beyond having no one set path through life after college…

In your early twenties, it’s hard to tell who’s winning and losing. Making the “right” choice is the same as making the choice that lets you win. Unfortunately, in your early twenties, it’s really hard to know who’s winning, because there’s no one keeping score anymore. In the same way that we’re shepherded along through life up until the end of college, we’re also given constant feedback about how we’re progressing along that path. We’re constantly evaluated as kids, by teachers, coaches, conductors, and parents. In fact, it’s pretty hard not to know how we’re doing when we’re growing up. In addition, we also piece together a pretty good idea of how everyone else is doing. It may be none of our business, but every kid in class has a pretty good idea of where he stands compared to the others in terms of intelligence, athleticism, and musical ability. It’s hard not to, when we see the constant feedback. Unfortunately for our self image, and sense of where we are in the world, after college, we aren’t evaluated in the same way anymore, and that makes it hard to know who’s winning, and therefore, who went down the right path. Of course we’re evaluated by employers, and graduate schools still give grades, but it’s different. How do you equate an A in a graduate particle physics course with a Christmas bonus? You can’t unless you want to take the reductionist line that money rules all. And even if we do operate under that assumption, it’s hard to follow to its conclusion. People doing well early on in their career might not continue that success. Someone investing in more education or training now, at an early opportunity cost, might recoup those losses.

I don’t mean to suggest that we always have to feel like we’re beating other people to feel successful, but the lack of meaningful and comparable evaluation is disturbing for people who’ve spent their entire lives competing and being evaluated especially against each other. Which brings me to my next point, that…

Being in your early twenties is hard, because for the first time in your life, you’re going to have to create, instead of absorb. Yes, I know you made a nice “vase” in ceramics 101. But for the first time, creating is going to be your number one task. If you have a job, you’re going to have to start generating value for the company. I work as a teacher, and I literally have the opposite job I had just six months ago as a student. I create the lessons now, instead of sitting there, soaking them up. Even if you’re still in grad school, you’re creating original research, on top of TAing courses. But more importantly than all that, you’re going to have to create yourself in your early twenties.

Luckily, a lot of the work is already done. We aren’t blank slates by the time we hit our twenties. We have interests and ideas. But these are the times that try men’s souls. We’re caught up in this morass of confusion, about what to do next, and about how to tell if what we’re doing next is good or worth it. To me, the only way to get past these questions is to really figure out who you are. This is such a cliche term, that I shudder to use it, yet I can think of no other way to put it. If we want to figure out how to “keep score” of our lives outside of the tightly refereed game of college and high school, we have to figure out what the object of the game is. As I said, that’s hard because not everyone is playing the same game anymore. But the flip side of that, is that we can choose finally. We can play the game that suits our strengths, but maybe more importantly, we can play the game that suits our values. As we get older, success has to increasingly defined in our own terms. You have to figure out what’s important to you, for no other reason than that it’s the only way to figure which of the many directions to head off into.

I realize with a bad economy, and a sense of fear for the future, especially in America, it’s hard to swallow “find yourself hippy talk” I put up here. We have to live in the real world, and most people just don’t have the time or the money for journey’s of self discovery. Society will always find ways to “objectively” evaluate people. One of the most prevalent is by income. We have to make money in order to be taken seriously, to be “winning the game.” And it’s true. Money is important, and everyone needs at least a little. Having a nice house can be important, or a nice car. They just need to be important to you, and honestly important to you, for no other reason than that you’ve decided that’s a value you want in your life.

Just as I age, the people around me do as well. I see my parents and their friends, and the generation before me, going through a similar transition period. For the most part, the kids are out of the house, out of college, and their careers are winding down. Sadly, many of them have had a confrontation with nihilism in the absence of these formerly all consuming pursuits. What happens to a parent who no longer needs to be a parent after 23 years, or an employee who’s no longer employed? Some of them see Nothing as I call it. Seeing Nothing is the worst thing in the world, as Thomas Pynchon puts it in V.

“‘What did you see’ asked Signor Mantissa, leaning forward.

“Nothing,” Godolphin whispered. “It was Nothing I saw… A dream of annihilation.”

Godolphin is driven a bit insane (or perhaps, driven sane) by his confrontation with Nothing, but it haunts him. So many older people see Nothing because they lose the things that constituted who they were as people, kids work etc. That’s why it’s so vitally important that we put in the work in our early twenties, because in your early twenties, you see Nothing too. There’s the terrifying feeling that maybe nothing we’ve done is really worth anything yet. Maybe all the gold stars didn’t really count for much, and maybe all those “A” papers were garbage. We see Nothing when we first look ahead after college, when we don’t know what to do next; when we have that terrifying notion that we might not amount to anything after all. All the definitions we’ve used before are obsolete, and only the new ones that we forge for ourselves will do.

But it’s crucial that we see Nothing when we’re young, and in it’s place build Something. Figure yourself out. You don’t need to go spend a year in the Himalayas to do it. You can do it while you’re working or in school. Read some books. Travel. Give yourself time to think and meet new people. Staring into the abyss, seeing Nothing, is scary, but we all have to do it, and it’s better sooner than later.

And finally, don’t underestimate the power of a trip down memory lane to figure out what’s important. Listen to music you loved when you were younger. Some of it you’ll hate, and wonder how you ever listened to it. But some will stick, and that’s a good indication that it’s an important part of who you are. Keep it safe, and keep it with you, and listen to it often, especially when you’ve just seen Nothing.

Tags: advice, Growing up, life, music, Philosophy

Comments 17 Comments
Categories advice, aging, Literature, Music, Nostalgia, Philosophy, Uncategorized

Pressed for Words

8 Nov

Freshly Pressed. Are you ready kid? Can you handle the spotlight, the big time? Or will you crack under the pressure of being on the front page? I recently had the good fortune to be featured on WordPress’ Freshly Pressed front page. Like all starry-eyed rookie bloggers, when I first started this…thing, I read the “how to become Freshly Pressed” page with rapt attention. I knew I could make it on there. I could write well, I could find nice pictures. After reading some of the other entries that made it, I felt even more confident that I had the right stuff. Not because the other entries were mediocre, but because they were tangible examples, something to shoot for.

But alas, not all dreams are meant to be. I struggled at first trying to find the right voice for my blog. My topics were all over the place. One day it would be about video games, another day it might be about Sun Tzu’s the Art of War. I soon found that I wrote best about what I loved best. I love books, philosophy sociology. I love ideas, both simple and complex, and I love the often quirky people who think them up in the first place. I like figuring out how systems work, especially social, economic, and political ones. I was always the kid taking apart radios and old T.V.s when I was younger, but unfortunately for my engineering career, I was never very good at putting them back together. That’s something I’ve tried to remedy when I pick apart other systems. It’s easy to be negative, and point out flaws. But valuable thinkers, and they’re rare, are able to offer effective and nuanced alternatives.

So after I found the right tone and subject matter for my blog, it must have been sent straight to the front page, passing GO and collecting $200, right? Well, not really. As soon as I figured out one aspect of the blogosphere, I butted up against another. Namely that followers, likes and comments matter here. The blog ecosystem is an intricate mix of producing original content, and commenting; networking with other bloggers. First and foremost, I wanted people to read my blog. I know some people write exclusively for themselves, as a kind of cathartic experience, a way to relax or as self-therapy. Writing, and blogging, serve these purposes for me as well, but I have no shame in admitting I want readers. I want readers because it feels good to be valued. I want readers because I want to believe that what I write is worthwhile. But most of all, I want readers because every once in a while, I’m able to give voice to something someone else is thinking. George Orwell does a remarkable job of describing the role of a good writer:

“The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new… The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”

Writers are there to shine a light on the dim shadows of our thoughts. Writers give form to those shifting shapes. They take our nascent notions, dust them off, and present them to us made anew, but still carved from our own elemental psychological matter. The best moments when reading come when we shout in our heads: Yes! That’s exactly what I was thinking, I just couldn’t find the words to say it that way. This is extremely hard to do, but when we accomplish it, there’s a sense of elation, a sense of purpose. The comments and emails that touch me most are the ones that tell me that I’ve been able to explain a feeling a reader had, or didn’t even know he or she had. These are the correspondences that make it all worth it, that make agonizing over a word, or editing manageable.

So I had this goal, to reach readers, to give them something to think about, and to give words to the faint inklings in the back of my mind, as well as my reader’s minds. But I quickly found that an intellectual blog, focused on ideas may not always be the most popular, or successful in terms of likes or comments. It’s hard to compete with top five lists, or how to blogs, when you’re talking about the military industrial complex, or ancient history. It just doesn’t have the same cultural cache that these other subjects do. I’m not saying that my blog or thoughts are better, or more worthwhile than how to blogs or the like, just that I know I don’t generate the same mass appeal. For a while, this was hard to swallow. I figured I would comment as much as I could, like as many things as I could, and try to build up some buzz. But eventually, I came to accept that I would only ever carve out my small niche, and somehow, that was alright.

In our Web 2.0 culture, the internet is filled with a staggering amount of content. There is just so much out there to read, that we’re often faced with a paralysis of choice. There are millions of new post published just on WordPress every day. Blogs have effectively lowered the cost of entry to realm of writers to $0. It costs nothing to start a blog, if you don’t host it yourself. Anyone can be a writer today; there are no stipulations. In a sense, this is tremendously liberating. If you reach far back enough in time, you’ll find that almost all writers used to be indebted to their patrons. Philosophers paid homage to their princes, poets wrote pages of gratitude to their noble benefactors. Pick up nearly any classic work, and if it is old enough, the dedication will almost certainly be to a noble, patronage figure. The big break came when Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote a repudiating letter to one of his patrons, Lord Chesterfield, a supporter of the dictionary Johnson was writing. This letter, according to Alvin Kernan:

“Stands as the Magna Carta of the modern author, the public announcement that the days of courtly letters were at last ended, that the author was the true source of his work and that he and it were no longer dependent on patron or the social system he represented.”

Johnson, and his literary descendants began the long slog to intellectual independence. As writing became a professional pursuit, remunerated with money from book sales, writers became increasingly independent from their patrons. With this freedom, they could engage in new and controversial topics, things that their patrons would have stricken from print immediately. It seems as if writing as a form of free expression, finds it logical and perhaps terminal conclusion in the form of blogs. We can write nearly anything we want, so long as it isn’t hateful or extremely offensive. And if you really need to say something objectionable, you can always start your own site. The web is tremendously freeing in this regard, but there is also a darker side.

The sheer amount of content available is staggering, stupefying even. One can never hope to even experience the tip of the iceberg of what’s out there. With so much noise, it can be hard to pick out the beautiful melodies amid the static. At least for me, this tidal wave of content has sapped my attention span. I feel as if there is so much to read and explore, that I most often find myself skimming blogs, instead of taking the time to appreciate the quality and craft of the writing.

And we aren’t safe from patrons anymore either. That’s because you, dear reader, are now my patron. The value conveyed by pageviews, likes and comments has come to replace the court appointment in our day and age. We have to question the definition of a “successful” blog. This definition varies, but as I stated, I want to attract readers. I want to get my point across. But to get readers requires a web presence. My time isn’t spent merely writing. I also have to manage twitter, and facebook, and most importantly the comments. Luckily, I’m blessed with insightful and thought provoking readers.

As much as I like garnering readers though, I knew my subject matter would probably never attract the big crowds. But I learned to be happy, very happy, with my own little corner of the internet. It became my sanctuary, my home(page), just like the physical room it’s meant to replace. So I kept plugging away, filling the invisible shelves with tomes of my thought, and rejoicing at every like, follow or comment. So I was a little surprised to find my blog chosen for Freshly Pressed; surprised and overjoyed. As much as it might be “cool” to say, I don’t care, I just write to write man, for me that would be dishonest. Maybe it’s true for some, but I don’t write for a vacuum, I don’t even write for myself. I write for the conversations I can start, and for the hope that I might make someone out there nod their head in agreement as they read these lines of text. For that’s the power of writing, the ability to convey something, anything across time and space. To bloggers looking for readers, or clicks, all I can say is trust me, if the writing is good, it will happen. It took me a long time, but if someone can notice me, they can notice you too. So, unfortunately, I don’t have a Top Five Ways to get Freshly Pressed post, but hey, that’s just not my style.

Tags: advice, blogging, culture, internet culture, Web 2.0, writing

Comments 10 Comments
Categories advice, blogging, blogs, Culture, internet, writing

A Literature Snob Reads the Hunger Games. And Likes It.

4 Nov

It started when I was little. I would always have a problem with the books we were reading in school. Unluckily for me, I think I discovered cynicism before most of the kids in school, so I had no problem slamming Harry Potter for plot holes, or Animal Farm as ham-fisted when I was a kid. My literary snobbery only got worse as I grew older, went to college, and actually got some good books under my belt. But apparently, I wasn’t paying very much attention to the great literature I was reading, because the snobs are always the worst characters. Take Elizabeth Bennett’s mother in Pride and Prejudice. She’s controlling and ridiculous in her obsession with names, wealth and reputation. In In Search of Lost Time, Proust gives us dozens of examples of snobbery in all its forms, from the pathetic salon of the Verdurins, to Legrandin’s poor social graces, and even the supposedly irreproachable Guermantes. They all let their snobbery show, and the consensus time and time again, is that snobs are always miserable. They see the worst in people and things, instead of the best.

So, I decided to let literature actually perform its function, and let it teach me something. I originally neglected the Hunger Games trilogy out of hand. Anything I see prominently displayed as I walk into Barnes and Noble usually ends up in the dustbin of my mind. But since I have Amazon Prime, I borrowed the first one for free on my Kindle, and gave it a shot. I didn’t expect much, but what I found was far better than I could have hoped for.

Like so many readers of this series, I stormed through the first book in a flurry, and then devoured the next two immediately thereafter. I’d say the entire series took me about five days to read. To get it out of the way, I did have some problems with the books. For one, while the prose is crisp, and as evidenced, it pulls the reader in and moves the plot along, sometimes it feels as if that’s all it’s doing. Suzanne Collins is never going to blow anyone’s mind with her lush descriptions, or challenge the conventions of the novel as an art form. Sometimes the books feel like laundry list of events. One thing happens, Katniss kills something, she thinks about it. I wasn’t sure how many more descriptions of wilderness meals I could endure by the time I finished Mockingjay.

No, the charm of these novels lies not in their structure, nor their flowing elegant prose, but in the most important component of fiction: the characters. It was not Collins’ gift for intense, suspenseful writing that kept me turning the pages, but rather my sincere concern for the characters. And for me, the characters were compelling because they were all wrestling with themes that are so central, so human, that I couldn’t not find out how they resolved their problems. Truly, there may be nothing new under the sun. Collins writes about the things man has always written about, love and loss, war and peace. But she does so through the lens of characters we care about, which makes her work more compelling than a dry text on ethics or philosophical meanderings on right and wrong.

No character is more emblematic of this than Peeta. As much as Katniss might be the narrator, and the “main” character, this is really Peeta’s story, because in the end, it’s a story about good triumphing over evil. However, even in its triumph, good does not emerge without its scars and regrets. As we get older, and read more “advanced” texts, we’re told that simple two dimensional characters are no longer good enough. The perfect hero, who never makes any mistakes, is not complex enough, he’s not true enough to life. Of course, this is a matter of artistic taste, as many literary traditions have glorified the perfect unsullied hero. Perhaps it says something about our culture that we want, even need faults, even in our heroes, lest we feel badly about our fallible, fragile selves. I found the opposite with Peeta. He was so simple, so unswervingly good, that I came to rely on him, just as Katniss did, as a touchstone of morality, a compass that would always point in the right direction no matter what the gamemakers threw at them.

One of Peeta’s most interesting qualities is actually his lack of them. He isn’t particularly fast, or skilled with weapons, especially after he has his prosthetic leg implanted. Katniss is a much better warrior and survivor. Peeta sort of bumbles through, making lots of noise, and forcing Katniss to save him time and time again. Especially for a male character, this seems strange. But Peeta, crucially, has something that Katniss doesn’t. He has that unrelenting constancy of goodness, that saves not only him, but Katniss as well. Katniss may be the girl on fire, by the time she gets to the Hunger Games, but Peeta prevented her spark from being snuffed out in the rain and the cold all those years earlier. Indeed, Peeta giving Katniss the burned bread is really the “beginning” of the whole story. Without that one, crucial act of love and kindness, Katniss wouldn’t have survived the winter, and the entire shape of Panem history would have been different. If that one event drives the whole plot, there must be something special about it. And there is. It was special because, it was that special kind of love, that acts for no reason. It’s a stupid love in the best sense of the term. It sees no consequences, like the slap that awaits Peeta from his mother. It’s the same love that made Katniss volunteer for Prim, or that made Gale set off into the woods with 800 people after District 12 was bombed. Peeta got slapped, Katniss got sent to the 74th Hunger Games, and Gale got caught up in the war. But for all of them, there was never really a choice. They were victims of that irrational sense of compassion for other human beings that looks ridiculousin a context of consequences and self-preservation, but is really the best in all of us.

We’re taught a cruel accounting of cost and benefit. Help people, but help yourself first. But Collins reaches us through these characters because they aren’t calculators. We’re constantly warned to never act on our emotions, but these characters do, and somehow, it just seems right. That’s because they act on the one emotion that can never lead astray. It’s that emotion, that natural human feeling that no amount of Hunger Games nor Quarter Quells, nor Peacekeers can suppress. It’s the human spirit that Winston Smith says won’t let the Party and O’brien get away with what they plan to do in 1984. It’s something that defies control, like the Mockingjay. The Mockingjays were the descendants of the Capitol Jabberjays, but as Katniss says at one point: “they pick up on other bird’s melodies, replicate them, and transform them into something new.” The characters who act out of selfless compassion are rebellious in the same way, and are therefore just as big a threat to the Capitol. This is because the Capitol can’t plan for them. It can’t foresee when a Katniss might volunteer, or when Johanna will sacrifice herself to remove Katniss’ tracker. These acts defy logic. There is no risk benefit analysis beneath them.

Owing someone is a huge theme for Katniss. She feels indebted to Peeta, and so she shows him compassion. She even goes back to the bread scene, many years ago, and says “It’s always the first gifts that are the hardest to pay back.” And she’s right, because she can’t pay it back, because it doesn’t work like that. Peeta did what he did for no other reason than that he loved her, in a very human way. He couldn’t stand to see her suffer. Katniss continues this line of thinking even when Finnick rescues Peeta from the fog. Haymitch tells her that she could live “a thousand lifetimes and still not deserve him (Peeta).” But even that isn’t right because “deserve,” isn’t a word that applies to those feelings, and to those selfless actions. This kind of moral, balance sheet just won’t balance when you run into an inexhaustible supply of good like Peeta. He completely changes the game, which is exactly what he explains he wants to do in the first place, at night on the roof before the first Games.

Peeta refuses to play by the rules, and in fact, he can’t. He’s too good for the situation he’s been thrust into, and so he needs Katniss to bail him out, and sometimes make the tough decisions. In the end, that’s what Katniss admires about Peeta the most, and what is best about him: his defiant humanity. He’s tossed into an inhuman situation, but he still clings to his love and compassion for Katniss. If this series is about love and compassion in the end, it’s also at least partly about control. Even Snow only does what he does for fear that Panem would spiral out of control and into barbarity. But these two concepts are intertwined. Because the Capitol is a harsh and cruel place, that compassion will necessarily be defiant, like the Mockingjay, or Katniss and Peeta holding hands, or of course, the poison berries.

And that defiance is critical, because of what it awakens in everyone else. Very few would have had the defiant attitude and the presence of mind to eat the berries. It didn’t matter though, because once the rest of Panem saw it, they were affected. Perhaps infected might be a better word. Infected with the notion that things didn’t have to be the way they were. We can’t predict rare events, because well, they’re rare. Those uncalculated acts of kindness, compassion and love that keep Peeta and Katniss going are rare events. The Hunger Games operates on the assumption that the tributes will descend into barbarity and kill each other like animals. What it doesn’t account for, what it can’t account for, are the rare events, the outliers, the blips, the selfless acts that destroy Katniss’ accounting of who owes what to whom. It took 73 years for two contestants to act the way Katniss and Peeta did, but in the end, they did. Selflessness, that special kind of stupid love, may be rare, but it exists. And when it does finally show itself, and it will, it is impossible to ignore. It took Peeta to put that one spark of life into Katniss on that cold winter day. It took both of them to spark the revolt when they chose the berries. Collins does an admirable job of showing us that just one spark can start a fire. I wish more young adult books could include such an uplifting and moral message.

Tags: 1984, books, Education, Hunger Games, Inspiration, Kindle, Literature, Philosophy

Comments 84 Comments
Categories 1984, books, Culture, Education, Inspiration, Literature, Philosophy, Tyranny

The Ascent of the Military Mindset and Why You Should Be Scared

14 Oct

How we think about problems says something penetrating and insightful about us. The way we solve problems is central to who we are as human beings. It’s a creative outlet, a way for us to show off our skills, but perhaps most of all, it says something about what we value and how we think. In America, since the end of the Second World War, we’ve increasingly come to see our foreign policy problems as military problems, or, that ever popular piece of linguistic dishonesty: “security concerns.”

You’ve probably been thinking of “security concerns,” a lot lately, especially if you consume news media. With the rash of anti-U.S. protests in the Middle East, and especially the tragic murders of U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and his staff, the world once again looks like an exceedingly dangerous place to Americans. “Security,” looms monolitchically over any and all discussion on foreign policy, moreso now, than perhaps ever before. Why is this? Strangely, the word “security,” in a geopolitical sense, brings up images of the exact opposite, when we hear it. In a curious, and frightening display of Orwellian doublespeak, “security” conjures images of war, terrorism, but perhaps most of all, military might. Security necessitates it’s opposite; insecurity, fear, terror, and instability. There is an impression, sometimes correct, of a very hostile world, bent on removing that security from us. Those scary images, do what they are made to do. they scare, us, leave us looking for someone to protect us, to save us, but at the expense of allowing us to think clearly. When we’re scared, we don’t have possession of our full mental faculties. We’re easily convinced. So we have a problem. A scary world, filled with dangers. Now comes the important part; how we deal with that problem. And unfortunately, because we’ve become increasingly entrenched in the military mindset, the answers to those problems have tended to consist of increasing our ability to kill other people.

See, America wasn’t always a militaristic society. Before the first World War, America’s army ranked seventeenth in size globally, right behind Romania’s. The following global conflagrations would fundamentally change the face of the military establishment from a largely ad-hoc, assembled as need army, to a highly professionalized, and economically vital piece of the military industrial complex. Of course, the Union was born out of the Revolution, and forged in the fires of the Civil War, but the idea of a powerful, centralized, military establishment was abhorrent to the founders. Indeed, many of them saw standing armies as one of the main obstacles to freedom from tyranny. Here is James Madison on the subject of war and armies: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.” Madison adroitly read history, and indeed realized, that wars and standing armies have ever been the enemies of freedom. The problems typically arise for several reasons. For one, large standing armies enable costly military adventurism abroad, which to Americans, should ring many alarm bells if we look at the past half century. But we can go back further, and look at the history Madison would have had access to, and see the same pattern. Large armies, and entrenched military establishments do two things. First, their upkeep, and the wars they fight, drain money, resources, and human lives from the host country. France’s involvement in the Seven Years War, and the American Revolution helped bring on the financial crisis that would ultimately serve ass one of the sparks for the French Revolution. The Romans had their own problems financing the Legions, after they began to hire mercenaries, once the idea of the citizen soldier, fell by the wayside. We have today, something of a disturbing parallel to this, with the rise of private military companies. And of course, the more direct route for an entrenched military to exert power, is when it resides at home, and is given the power to control the citizenry, in times of emergency, or of course, when “national security,” is threatened.

This isn’t to take anything away from the brave men and women who serve in the military, at home or abroad. Americans have been saddled with a particular sense of guilt after the treatment of veterans following the Vietnam war, and rightly so. But fear for our safety and fear of repeating past mistakes has given the entire military-industrial complex a protective halo. It’s become unquestionable. Our enitre discourse about the military is completely skewed, because beyond even coming up with the right answers, we can’t even ask the right questions. Who in their right mind would say they want to cut defense funding, or make the military smaller? Let’s take a look at some of the campaign positions of both U.S. presidential candidates in the 2012 election. Mitt Romney has repeatedly called into question Obama’s toughness in foreign policy, frequently citing his apologetic tone, and perceived weakness towards geopolitical rivals, China and a re-emerging Russia. Here’s an excerpt from Romney’s campaign website on “National Defense,” notice, the language games at work again here. Just like “national security,” we talk about “national defense,” as if the gargantuan military apparatus the United States has in place could be considered solely protective:

“American military power is vital to the preservation of our own security and peace around the world. Twice in the 20th century, the United States was compelled to come to the rescue of Europe when it was engulfed in war. And it was American military power that enabled the United States after World War II to stand in opposition to brutal and aggressive Communist dictatorship. It was American fortitude and power that turned around the Soviet missiles on their way to Cuba. It was American resolve and power that helped to liberate the captive nations of Eastern Europe and precipitate the collapse of the USSR. It is America today that patrols the global commons and keeps them safe for trade and commerce.”

This is a nice example of selective history reporting, that holds the United States up on a pedastal, because it solved all the worlds problems. But as I mentioned before, what’s most telling about a person, or a nation, is how it solves its problems. Our answers seem to be all military. It’s nice to think of the United States heroically riding to the rescue, of poor old blundering Europe, fighting against the Fascist beast. Hitler, the Nazi’s they’re easy. Moral absolutes, evil in all its forms. But the other situations were far less clear cut. World War One was largely a product of the “entangling alliances,” that George Washington warned against in his farewell address. The Soviets would have collapsed under the wight of their economy of contradictions, although the arms race certainly sped up their demise. Finally, to argue that it is the right, or responsibility of the United States to patrol the global commons is completely unfounded. Of course, we’ve reaped massive economic benefits from our military domination of the sea lanes, but does that really mean that the only way to ensure free trade is for one nation to act as peacekeeper for all the rest? This is the model we know, as the might of the British Navy served the same purpose before the United States, but we should not be hemmed in by such archaic thinking. Implicit in this argument is to think of military measures as the only answer. Worse, when we accept this definition of reality, we aren’t even capable of asking the right questions about the situation. C . Wright Mills put it perfectly in his seminal Power Elite: “Peace is no longer serious, only war is serious… When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as ‘appeasement,’ if not treason.” War, and military ascendancy have become the model by which to see the world. Especially during the 20th century, and even more so in the early 21st century, war has been more the rule, than the exception. War has been normalized, unquestionable in a very insidious way.

It’s easy to pick on Republicans for big military stances, but the Democrats are little better. While the Obama administration has ended the war in Iraq, and cut defense budgets, he still has not seriously challenged the idea of the U.S. military as a hegemonic tool of power projection. Proof? Well, the numbers don’t lie. At least until China perfects its anti-ship missiles, the principle tool of power projection is still the aircraft carrier. The United States Navy has eleven, while the rest of the world combined has the same number, none of which are on par with American super carriers. The fiscal year 2010 budget was almost 700 billion dollars, which really isn’t even a completely accurate representation of how much gets dumped into the military apparatus, because so much can be added as “emergency,” or “discretionary” funding, and then hidden in the balance sheets so deeply that only a trained accountant can find it. This amount of spending is simply unnecessary and unsustainable. The days of Bush era adventurism abroad may be behind us, but it doesn’t have to be a live-fire war to cost money. It costs billions to man all of the over 700 military bases the U.S. has scattered around the globe, yet we never hear a a word from either majority party about packing it up. The answer always seems to be more spending, more troops, more technological wonders. Unmanned drones simultaneously fascinate and terrify us, as think of their implications in mass use in warfare. And just so you don’t sleep tonight, surveilance drones are already in use in police departments inside the United States, and many jursidictions are in the process of adding “less-lethal” weapons systems to them, like tear gas, rubber bullets, and tazer rounds. We rarely stop to think about the problems these military solutions purport to solve.

Indeed, we’re incapable of asking those questions, because the military metaphysics have prevailed. As Mills notes: “In the absence of contrasting views, the very highest form of propaganda warfare can be fought: the propaganda for a definition of reality within which only certain limited viewpoints are possible. What is being promulgated and reinforced is the military metaphysics- the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.” Sadly, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be able to ask the big questions of our military establishment anytime soon, either. As the economy struggles, more and more of us are happy just to have a job. We rarely have time for the “big questions,” that sound more and more like the prattling of Ivory Tower intellectuals. Non-military answers to international problems seem like pie in the sky, pieces of idealism. But it shouldn’t and indeed, it mustn’t. History is littered with the remnants of great militaristic societies that collapsed, from Sparta, to Rome, to Prussia, and the USSR. We would do well to heed their lesson.

Tags: America, Current Events, Election, History, military, News, sociology, Terrorism

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Categories America, current events, Election, History, Military, news, Obama, Philosophy, Sociology, Terrorism, Tyranny

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A Literature Snob Reads the Hunger Games. And Likes It.

The Ascent of the Military Mindset and Why You Should Be Scared

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