something positive - comics past
Ah, maestro...give me a song for the bitter, shall we?
Tuning up - yes, there's the beat, and we're playing "Give me my money back, you bitch" by Ben Folds Five.
Before I earn the title of "Bitchy McCripple", I shall only say that I'm finished, done, out of here with meeting 'Net daters. Completely. I'm tired of hearing, "Well, you're such a nice guy" - or finding a flip side to it. There's no normalacy to the rhythm of meeting someone you've only spoken to via phone or email.
Henceforth, I shall cheerfully remain single. I quit smoking. I will take capoeria classes and yoga. I will curb my impulses to drink heavily tonight immediately following what shall be gracefully termed a "bad coffee date". I'll jam with the guys twice a week and take bass classes. To wit - I'm going to be my own damn girlfriend and see how well she does. I'm going to volunteer more on the Dean campaign. I'm going to build my trailer for SCA camping, I'm going to sew garb for my soon-to-be nephew (no KJ, NOT your as-of-yet unborn children). I'm going to learn to draw and start an online comic of stick people. I'm going to drive 312 miles south every month and visit my folks, brew beer with my friend Greg, and drive home.
And as for the sex...
Well hell, I have the Internet, yes?
Monday, September 22, 2003
EFF: How Not To Get Sued by the RIAA for File-sharing
After hearing a program this morning on the local NPR affiliate, KUOW I got in my car and headed north to my job, where intellectual copyright infringement is a naughty, naughty thing.
See, where I work, it's generally considered bad form to rip off someone else's design and pass it as your own. But sometimes that's how things get done. For instance, one of our SUPER SECRET projects had to get shared...and immediately afterwards there were rumors that someone was leaking secrets.
Or, for instance, when I wrote a short story and published it, in addition to my addendum that ALL WORKS WRITTEN IN ANY MEDIUM AT ANY TIME BY MYSELF ARE THE SOLE PROPERTY OF MYSELF AND LEGALLY BOUND TO DIONYSUS MEDIA, LLC , I included a short list of RATES for my work's publishing at the gently nudged standard of $.50 per word if you ask me nicely and go through the aforementioned company (or email me, hammer out publication rights - you get the first North American publishing rights and that's it, period, one-shot, nada else) and write me a check upfront before publishing, we're hunky-dory.
There was a small note that said, "If you choose NOT to go this route and choose to steal my work, you will be charged at the going rate per word that The New York Times pays notables such as Stephen King to write 2,000 words. Namely, around $65 per word. But it was there.
And yes, someone stole one of my stories.
After writing several polite letters to the publisher complete with prepublishing dates (the jerk hadn't even bothered to change the title, just the name of the guy who wrote it) I finally broke down and sent them an envelope containing three things. An intellectual property lawyer's card from Seattle (which I obtained by just walking in, asking for one, and walking out), a short letter noting that I was prepared to give the lawyers all the proceeds from the settlement just to see their pathetic little publishing company go down in flames, and a phone number with a cut-off date.
They pulled the story from the web, published an apology, and cut me a $500.00 check. Nice of them to provide me with tequila and mixers. I don't think I'll ever forget the Patron and Grand Marnier Special Reserve margaritas. Oh no, no, I won't.
The point being, if someone rips off your work and publishes that as their own, that's out and out nastiness. So in a sense, I understand where these people are coming from. But when you sue a 12-year old girl who's living in public housing for $2,000, that's...well, not cool. At all.
The RIAA is a consortium of big-name music industry labels who claim to represent the artists they publish. This is much like saying the slave overlords in Central Africa who use child slavery to harvest cacao beans are really just looking out for the best interests of the children.
Sure, they might not eat if they didn't have the work, but at the same time, the music industry is notorious for screwing artists out of their money - while some exec who couldn't play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" is busy watching an illegal immigrant wash and wax his $100,000 2004 Hummer. Beck was one of these poor souls - a man who had hit records galore and yet somehow wound up OWING his label $100,000 after his tour was over (oh, yes. Anytime a tour date got canceled, he had to shell out for it. Don't get pneumonia if you sign with Sony, apparently.)
The hypocrisy is somewhat unbelievable. According to the logic of the RIAA, I should only buy music I've never heard before. If that were true, Great Big Sea and the Paperboys would never have had a fan who bought their entire discography. The Barenaked Ladies wouldn't have a fanatic pounding on their door to get the Yellow Tape at 3 AM. And I would never have known Sarah Harmer sucked moose butt.
But wait! These are the same guys who said selling used CDs was illegal and proceeded to try to sue record companies that sold used CDs. AND they represent the same companies that attempted to ban all VHS units in the US that had a "record" feature on them. They attempted to make it difficult for independent artists to use CD burners to make music. The theory being, apparently, that if you're not Britney Speared or Madonna/Whore and someone doesn't write your music for you, you're not worth listening to.
Unfortunately for many of the bands I -might- enjoy, this also means that any record company dealing with the RIAA as represenatives are no longer going to get any of my business. If a distributor goes through Columbia - off my list. Avirl Lavingne - gone. Dixie Chicks - not a great loss. Pink - dear god. Elton John - never had any of his CDs. Springsteen - out. Rolling Stones - well, they'll die soon enough anyway.
Columbia Records - Nope.
Island Records - Nope.
Capitol - out.
I'm sure with some more digging I could find a few more out there, but those are the ones I could find who wear the RIAA banner with pride.
From the RIAA.com website:
Of course, the most important component of a CD is the artist’s effort in developing that music. Artists spend a large portion of their creative energy on writing song lyrics and composing music or working with producers and A&R executives to find great songs from great writers. This task can take weeks, months, or even years. The creative ability of these artists to produce the music we love, combined with the time and energy they spend throughout that process is in itself priceless. But while the creative process is priceless, it must be compensated. Artists receive royalties on each recording, which vary according to their contract, and the songwriter gets royalties too. In addition, the label incurs additional costs in finding and signing new artists.
Once an artist or group has songs composed, they must then go into the studio and begin recording. The costs of recording this work, including recording studio fees, studio musicians, sound engineers, producers and others, all must be recovered by the cost of the CD.
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn’t just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.
So in other words, an ad executive will get paid more than Sheryl Crow for having the "vision" to release her CD at the right market time. Someone out to laud Pink's image will get her another raunchy music video with prepubescent girls dancing around in skintight outfits. Britney Spears' virginity (oops, we meant chastity, oops, we meant madonna/whore image) becomes a marketable commodity.
Does ANYONE else find this a mite offensive?
So rather than deal with the geeks here, I'm going back to the roots. I'm hitting cafes and bars and buying my CDs from guys who play in smoky clubs. Who still dream of hitting the big time. And when they sign with a company that's more about advertising than it is about the music, I'll gently refuse to buy their next CD.
Sigh. Who knew being a responsible consumer could be so much fun?
After hearing a program this morning on the local NPR affiliate, KUOW I got in my car and headed north to my job, where intellectual copyright infringement is a naughty, naughty thing.
See, where I work, it's generally considered bad form to rip off someone else's design and pass it as your own. But sometimes that's how things get done. For instance, one of our SUPER SECRET projects had to get shared...and immediately afterwards there were rumors that someone was leaking secrets.
Or, for instance, when I wrote a short story and published it, in addition to my addendum that ALL WORKS WRITTEN IN ANY MEDIUM AT ANY TIME BY MYSELF ARE THE SOLE PROPERTY OF MYSELF AND LEGALLY BOUND TO DIONYSUS MEDIA, LLC , I included a short list of RATES for my work's publishing at the gently nudged standard of $.50 per word if you ask me nicely and go through the aforementioned company (or email me, hammer out publication rights - you get the first North American publishing rights and that's it, period, one-shot, nada else) and write me a check upfront before publishing, we're hunky-dory.
There was a small note that said, "If you choose NOT to go this route and choose to steal my work, you will be charged at the going rate per word that The New York Times pays notables such as Stephen King to write 2,000 words. Namely, around $65 per word. But it was there.
And yes, someone stole one of my stories.
After writing several polite letters to the publisher complete with prepublishing dates (the jerk hadn't even bothered to change the title, just the name of the guy who wrote it) I finally broke down and sent them an envelope containing three things. An intellectual property lawyer's card from Seattle (which I obtained by just walking in, asking for one, and walking out), a short letter noting that I was prepared to give the lawyers all the proceeds from the settlement just to see their pathetic little publishing company go down in flames, and a phone number with a cut-off date.
They pulled the story from the web, published an apology, and cut me a $500.00 check. Nice of them to provide me with tequila and mixers. I don't think I'll ever forget the Patron and Grand Marnier Special Reserve margaritas. Oh no, no, I won't.
The point being, if someone rips off your work and publishes that as their own, that's out and out nastiness. So in a sense, I understand where these people are coming from. But when you sue a 12-year old girl who's living in public housing for $2,000, that's...well, not cool. At all.
The RIAA is a consortium of big-name music industry labels who claim to represent the artists they publish. This is much like saying the slave overlords in Central Africa who use child slavery to harvest cacao beans are really just looking out for the best interests of the children.
Sure, they might not eat if they didn't have the work, but at the same time, the music industry is notorious for screwing artists out of their money - while some exec who couldn't play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" is busy watching an illegal immigrant wash and wax his $100,000 2004 Hummer. Beck was one of these poor souls - a man who had hit records galore and yet somehow wound up OWING his label $100,000 after his tour was over (oh, yes. Anytime a tour date got canceled, he had to shell out for it. Don't get pneumonia if you sign with Sony, apparently.)
The hypocrisy is somewhat unbelievable. According to the logic of the RIAA, I should only buy music I've never heard before. If that were true, Great Big Sea and the Paperboys would never have had a fan who bought their entire discography. The Barenaked Ladies wouldn't have a fanatic pounding on their door to get the Yellow Tape at 3 AM. And I would never have known Sarah Harmer sucked moose butt.
But wait! These are the same guys who said selling used CDs was illegal and proceeded to try to sue record companies that sold used CDs. AND they represent the same companies that attempted to ban all VHS units in the US that had a "record" feature on them. They attempted to make it difficult for independent artists to use CD burners to make music. The theory being, apparently, that if you're not Britney Speared or Madonna/Whore and someone doesn't write your music for you, you're not worth listening to.
Unfortunately for many of the bands I -might- enjoy, this also means that any record company dealing with the RIAA as represenatives are no longer going to get any of my business. If a distributor goes through Columbia - off my list. Avirl Lavingne - gone. Dixie Chicks - not a great loss. Pink - dear god. Elton John - never had any of his CDs. Springsteen - out. Rolling Stones - well, they'll die soon enough anyway.
Columbia Records - Nope.
Island Records - Nope.
Capitol - out.
I'm sure with some more digging I could find a few more out there, but those are the ones I could find who wear the RIAA banner with pride.
From the RIAA.com website:
Of course, the most important component of a CD is the artist’s effort in developing that music. Artists spend a large portion of their creative energy on writing song lyrics and composing music or working with producers and A&R executives to find great songs from great writers. This task can take weeks, months, or even years. The creative ability of these artists to produce the music we love, combined with the time and energy they spend throughout that process is in itself priceless. But while the creative process is priceless, it must be compensated. Artists receive royalties on each recording, which vary according to their contract, and the songwriter gets royalties too. In addition, the label incurs additional costs in finding and signing new artists.
Once an artist or group has songs composed, they must then go into the studio and begin recording. The costs of recording this work, including recording studio fees, studio musicians, sound engineers, producers and others, all must be recovered by the cost of the CD.
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn’t just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.
So in other words, an ad executive will get paid more than Sheryl Crow for having the "vision" to release her CD at the right market time. Someone out to laud Pink's image will get her another raunchy music video with prepubescent girls dancing around in skintight outfits. Britney Spears' virginity (oops, we meant chastity, oops, we meant madonna/whore image) becomes a marketable commodity.
Does ANYONE else find this a mite offensive?
So rather than deal with the geeks here, I'm going back to the roots. I'm hitting cafes and bars and buying my CDs from guys who play in smoky clubs. Who still dream of hitting the big time. And when they sign with a company that's more about advertising than it is about the music, I'll gently refuse to buy their next CD.
Sigh. Who knew being a responsible consumer could be so much fun?
Salon.com News | Would you let your sister vote for this man?
Oh HELL no.
Then again, my sister's not a mucking foron.
That's why I love her.
Oh HELL no.
Then again, my sister's not a mucking foron.
That's why I love her.
U.S. News: For better or worse, the Internet is radically changing dating and romance in America(9/29/03)
Oy. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have Internet dating. Aside from the fact that nobody else in my social circle does it, or thinks it's a good idea...well, let's just say I've had several dates both online and offline since it became a phenomenon.
Online, I've had good dates. Bad dates. Dates where I had to fake a phone call to get out of the room in fifteen minutes. Dates where the girl thought we'd get married in Vegas over the weekend. Dates I thought went swimmingly until the words, "I'm in an open relationship" cropped up. One date, two date, red dates, blue dates. I've been out on the beach and cramped in a Geo Metro, stuck with a girl and all her friends (none of whom I could stand) on a blind date to make it a couples' night out, and when I asked why we weren't going dutch on a blind date, she said, "Oh, because none of my girlfriends ever pay for anything on a date."
Then I've also had marvelous times with people I've never met before, with all sorts of things in common. But, when it comes down to it, I'm just tired of it. Tired of running through the game. I'm over the cheap fling or the three-month relationship that goes nowhere.
Sigh. I suppose the marks are still out on Net dating, but compared to the dating scene in the bar, I'd rather be surfing for women who I know I'll get along with. Once in a while I'll get a man posing as a woman, but the phrase, "Sorry man, I prefer my women with vaginas" usually turns them out the door in search of someone else. I'd still hug or shake hands on the first date and it's rare that I'll go out more than twice with someone that it's obviously NOT working.
My photo was taken in March; I'm updating and surfing for the right one. Maybe I found her; maybe I didn't, but in the meantime, I'm not willing to give up the chance at "Twue Wove" just because someone four years ago called Internet Dating the "loser pages".
Me, I'd rather meet the girl of my dreams - and not lose sleep at night about what I haven't found in the ones I've gone out with.
Oy. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have Internet dating. Aside from the fact that nobody else in my social circle does it, or thinks it's a good idea...well, let's just say I've had several dates both online and offline since it became a phenomenon.
Online, I've had good dates. Bad dates. Dates where I had to fake a phone call to get out of the room in fifteen minutes. Dates where the girl thought we'd get married in Vegas over the weekend. Dates I thought went swimmingly until the words, "I'm in an open relationship" cropped up. One date, two date, red dates, blue dates. I've been out on the beach and cramped in a Geo Metro, stuck with a girl and all her friends (none of whom I could stand) on a blind date to make it a couples' night out, and when I asked why we weren't going dutch on a blind date, she said, "Oh, because none of my girlfriends ever pay for anything on a date."
Then I've also had marvelous times with people I've never met before, with all sorts of things in common. But, when it comes down to it, I'm just tired of it. Tired of running through the game. I'm over the cheap fling or the three-month relationship that goes nowhere.
Sigh. I suppose the marks are still out on Net dating, but compared to the dating scene in the bar, I'd rather be surfing for women who I know I'll get along with. Once in a while I'll get a man posing as a woman, but the phrase, "Sorry man, I prefer my women with vaginas" usually turns them out the door in search of someone else. I'd still hug or shake hands on the first date and it's rare that I'll go out more than twice with someone that it's obviously NOT working.
My photo was taken in March; I'm updating and surfing for the right one. Maybe I found her; maybe I didn't, but in the meantime, I'm not willing to give up the chance at "Twue Wove" just because someone four years ago called Internet Dating the "loser pages".
Me, I'd rather meet the girl of my dreams - and not lose sleep at night about what I haven't found in the ones I've gone out with.
U.S. News: Was the mission accomplished?
I find this a little disturbing. Recently Bush has been backpedaling his former statements. The "bring 'em on" swagger that characterized a wartime president in full military gear, landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier with his parachute harness emphasized for a crotch-forward photoshoot - has now become a "well, we never really SAID that..."
It's a little like Monica Lewinsky all over again. "I never had sex with that woman." Oh, but she went down on me! But I thought you meant intercourse as a modifier for sex! Of course, the American public knew precisely what happened the minute Monica took the stand, and more media coverage on Monica's presidential fly-tugging ensued than on the massive bombing campaign conducted in Kosovo last year.
What's really disturbing is not that President Bush appeared to lie to the American people - on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, on how much the war would cost, on the economy, on jobs, on education reform, on welfare for crooked CEOs, on financial links from the United States to radicalized Islamic factions pre-9/11, on the $245 million dollars paid to the Taliban regime in the U.S. government's fiscal year of 2000-2001. No no, what's really disturbing is that Americans seem to accept this as par for the course.
We're used to having our public figures lie to us. It's flagrant; it's even in every attack campaign advertisement. Remember Ralph Nader's speech on Al Gore's environmental record? When the Republican National Committee saw it, they found a gold mine. Equally important was Nader's attack on Bush's environmental record (lamentably well-documented in Molly Ivin's recent article in Playboy).
In Bush's America, nothing he says in public can be held against him, politically or otherwise. The people who still support Bush overwhelmingly think of him as an honest guy - when the truth is quite the opposite. There were no smoking holes where WMD could be found, so immediately the blame was laid upon the CIA and the British for providing faulty intelligence to the United States. The spinsters in the White House used the president's image as a goofy, flap-eared, plain-spoken man to conjure up an image of a man who could do no wrong, because the assumption is always made: Bush just ain't that smart.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are right. Bush WAS a nitwit to stand under a banner that read, "Mission Accomplished." As commander-in-chief of the military, Bush had the authority to demand the banner be removed. By virtue of being the highest ranking officer on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of what words came out of his mouth, Bush SAID, "Mission Accomplished". The past five months have proven him more wrong than he could have possibly imagined. If he doesn't want to take responsibility for it, that's fine, but he's the President. And sometimes, the buck has to stop somewhere. If he wasn't responsible for that banner, who was? The captain of the ship? It's hard to believe the captain would leave it up if the President's handlers didn't think it was a good idea. And as Bush has proven time and again, he's not apt to go off the script. It was choreographed to the second, from the press to the speech, to the sailors and soldiers he mocked by wearing a uniform he lost the right to wear when he skipped out on his 18-month stint in the Texas Air National Guard.
Had the occupation of Iraq gone much more smoothly, perhaps the White House would be singing a different tune - one that goes, "Neener neener neener." But caught in a lie of bravado and presidential publicity, the Bushies are scrambling to do damage control. Rumsfeld's Lean, Green Military is stretched thinner than Silly Putty on a Baghdad sidewalk. Ashcroft's police-state Patriot Act is getting the grilling it richly deserves. Rice is dancing from one foot to the next, trying to make things work smoothly, while Powell, cap in hand, must return to the United Nations like a child asking for an allowance after moving out. Ridge resigned from the Homeland Security, and Cheney has returned to the role of aggressive assertion - even when his speeches contradict the President's own words - and the hiding of the Halliburton contracts has started to unravel.
With critics like Ivins, Franken, Hightower and even conservative senators hounding the Bushies' heels, it's easy to understand why Bush and Company aren't standing up straight and admitting they were wrong. It's simple enough to deny things over and over again, as Clinton demonstrated, until you're finally faced with the inescapable truth: Americans may be slow, but they do catch on, eventually. And with more than half a trillion dollars in deficit, the serious questions about the nation's problems can no longer be dismissed with the equivalent of a "Because I said so, that's why! Don't you believe me?"
Maybe the reason Howard Dean is so popular is that so far, he hasn't lied. He hasn't said one thing, then done another. He hasn't given fat contracts to his cronies in backroom deals. He wants to solve the problems - go through, and spring clean. It's an attractive alternative to living in a political and financial squalor of our own making. The Bushies just want to pile everything back in the closet and sweep the blood under the rug. And like any fourth-grader will tell you - that never fools anyone.
Bush talks of sacrifice, and tough roads ahead to march. So who's to make the sacrifice? You can bet it's me and you, and the people Bush calls "hard-working Americans" - men and women in the Heartland of America who don't make enough money to vote Republican - but do anyway. People who know the cost of a loaf of bread. People who can buy a gallon of milk. People who understand what it really means to live on $25,000 a year before taxes, buy their clothes at Target and Wal-Mart, and were never rich enough to get around those pesky drug possession charges. They're of all colors, IQs, creeds, religions, and backgrounds - but unfortunately for the Bush administration, they're finally listening. And they're not liking what they hear.
In his recent address to the American people, Bush talked of sacrifice. I want to know which son or daughter, of which military family he will offer up to the gods of foreign policy next. Three yesterday, maybe one today. Either way, it's going to be a long fifteen months until the fakir's secrets get revealed - and the American people boot Bush and his ilk out of office.
I find this a little disturbing. Recently Bush has been backpedaling his former statements. The "bring 'em on" swagger that characterized a wartime president in full military gear, landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier with his parachute harness emphasized for a crotch-forward photoshoot - has now become a "well, we never really SAID that..."
It's a little like Monica Lewinsky all over again. "I never had sex with that woman." Oh, but she went down on me! But I thought you meant intercourse as a modifier for sex! Of course, the American public knew precisely what happened the minute Monica took the stand, and more media coverage on Monica's presidential fly-tugging ensued than on the massive bombing campaign conducted in Kosovo last year.
What's really disturbing is not that President Bush appeared to lie to the American people - on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, on how much the war would cost, on the economy, on jobs, on education reform, on welfare for crooked CEOs, on financial links from the United States to radicalized Islamic factions pre-9/11, on the $245 million dollars paid to the Taliban regime in the U.S. government's fiscal year of 2000-2001. No no, what's really disturbing is that Americans seem to accept this as par for the course.
We're used to having our public figures lie to us. It's flagrant; it's even in every attack campaign advertisement. Remember Ralph Nader's speech on Al Gore's environmental record? When the Republican National Committee saw it, they found a gold mine. Equally important was Nader's attack on Bush's environmental record (lamentably well-documented in Molly Ivin's recent article in Playboy).
In Bush's America, nothing he says in public can be held against him, politically or otherwise. The people who still support Bush overwhelmingly think of him as an honest guy - when the truth is quite the opposite. There were no smoking holes where WMD could be found, so immediately the blame was laid upon the CIA and the British for providing faulty intelligence to the United States. The spinsters in the White House used the president's image as a goofy, flap-eared, plain-spoken man to conjure up an image of a man who could do no wrong, because the assumption is always made: Bush just ain't that smart.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are right. Bush WAS a nitwit to stand under a banner that read, "Mission Accomplished." As commander-in-chief of the military, Bush had the authority to demand the banner be removed. By virtue of being the highest ranking officer on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of what words came out of his mouth, Bush SAID, "Mission Accomplished". The past five months have proven him more wrong than he could have possibly imagined. If he doesn't want to take responsibility for it, that's fine, but he's the President. And sometimes, the buck has to stop somewhere. If he wasn't responsible for that banner, who was? The captain of the ship? It's hard to believe the captain would leave it up if the President's handlers didn't think it was a good idea. And as Bush has proven time and again, he's not apt to go off the script. It was choreographed to the second, from the press to the speech, to the sailors and soldiers he mocked by wearing a uniform he lost the right to wear when he skipped out on his 18-month stint in the Texas Air National Guard.
Had the occupation of Iraq gone much more smoothly, perhaps the White House would be singing a different tune - one that goes, "Neener neener neener." But caught in a lie of bravado and presidential publicity, the Bushies are scrambling to do damage control. Rumsfeld's Lean, Green Military is stretched thinner than Silly Putty on a Baghdad sidewalk. Ashcroft's police-state Patriot Act is getting the grilling it richly deserves. Rice is dancing from one foot to the next, trying to make things work smoothly, while Powell, cap in hand, must return to the United Nations like a child asking for an allowance after moving out. Ridge resigned from the Homeland Security, and Cheney has returned to the role of aggressive assertion - even when his speeches contradict the President's own words - and the hiding of the Halliburton contracts has started to unravel.
With critics like Ivins, Franken, Hightower and even conservative senators hounding the Bushies' heels, it's easy to understand why Bush and Company aren't standing up straight and admitting they were wrong. It's simple enough to deny things over and over again, as Clinton demonstrated, until you're finally faced with the inescapable truth: Americans may be slow, but they do catch on, eventually. And with more than half a trillion dollars in deficit, the serious questions about the nation's problems can no longer be dismissed with the equivalent of a "Because I said so, that's why! Don't you believe me?"
Maybe the reason Howard Dean is so popular is that so far, he hasn't lied. He hasn't said one thing, then done another. He hasn't given fat contracts to his cronies in backroom deals. He wants to solve the problems - go through, and spring clean. It's an attractive alternative to living in a political and financial squalor of our own making. The Bushies just want to pile everything back in the closet and sweep the blood under the rug. And like any fourth-grader will tell you - that never fools anyone.
Bush talks of sacrifice, and tough roads ahead to march. So who's to make the sacrifice? You can bet it's me and you, and the people Bush calls "hard-working Americans" - men and women in the Heartland of America who don't make enough money to vote Republican - but do anyway. People who know the cost of a loaf of bread. People who can buy a gallon of milk. People who understand what it really means to live on $25,000 a year before taxes, buy their clothes at Target and Wal-Mart, and were never rich enough to get around those pesky drug possession charges. They're of all colors, IQs, creeds, religions, and backgrounds - but unfortunately for the Bush administration, they're finally listening. And they're not liking what they hear.
In his recent address to the American people, Bush talked of sacrifice. I want to know which son or daughter, of which military family he will offer up to the gods of foreign policy next. Three yesterday, maybe one today. Either way, it's going to be a long fifteen months until the fakir's secrets get revealed - and the American people boot Bush and his ilk out of office.
Friday, September 19, 2003
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Galileo on course for suicide mission
So I read in the paper today that because Europa has a surface of nothing but ice and the crash of Galileo would "affect" Europa for future study (jeez, the thing's not much bigger than a computer desk) the NASA scientists decided instead to smush the poor thing down in one of the most volcanic moons of Jupiter.
Wow. And here I thought dropping crap off on random planets was something only stupid people do.
Here's a thought - wouldn't it be slightly less ecologically dense to just send the thing off into the outer rim, past Pluto and Neptune? So why bother crashing the thing at all? To keep a planetoid "pure"? But, since we couldn't do anything with Io (it's ALL volcanoes) we drop it right in the middle of good ol' molten lava.
This is almost as goofy as Bush saying that by cutting down trees we're saving the environment. By killing kids, we're making America safer. By pulling toenails out of Al'Qaeda members, we're making Iraq okay for democracy.
Some days you want to just get one good bitchslap in before they haul you in for assaulting a public figure.
So I read in the paper today that because Europa has a surface of nothing but ice and the crash of Galileo would "affect" Europa for future study (jeez, the thing's not much bigger than a computer desk) the NASA scientists decided instead to smush the poor thing down in one of the most volcanic moons of Jupiter.
Wow. And here I thought dropping crap off on random planets was something only stupid people do.
Here's a thought - wouldn't it be slightly less ecologically dense to just send the thing off into the outer rim, past Pluto and Neptune? So why bother crashing the thing at all? To keep a planetoid "pure"? But, since we couldn't do anything with Io (it's ALL volcanoes) we drop it right in the middle of good ol' molten lava.
This is almost as goofy as Bush saying that by cutting down trees we're saving the environment. By killing kids, we're making America safer. By pulling toenails out of Al'Qaeda members, we're making Iraq okay for democracy.
Some days you want to just get one good bitchslap in before they haul you in for assaulting a public figure.
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Friday, September 12, 2003
The bear cub going home
Okay. I'll buy the idea that in some area of the world, bears are nuisances, not lovable critters.
I'll buy the idea that bear cubs are cute and cuddly.
I'll even buy the idea that some people do not have the same concept of right and wrong.
But this article made me seriously contemplate joining an offshoot of PETA dedicated to dispensing some Hammurabian justice up in the wilds of Canada.
In short - a man on a jet ski raced up to a mother bear and stole one of her cubs. The cub clawed its way free from the man and fell in the river. The man then ran over the cub on the jet ski to try to subdue it, got it back on the ski, dunked it in the water by the hind legs to "subdue" it, then took off again.
I truly, truly wish I'd been there. Just so I could wade out to the asshole, slug him upside the head, steal his jetski, run said idiot and cub BACK to the mother bear, and deposit both at the shore. Then drive off.
There's this concept of manifest destiny some people have about the wild animals that share the planet - in essence, that all the critters on earth are made for man's use or amusement. The cruelest part of this was not that he wanted to have the baby bear as a pet - but that he DUNKED his "pet" underwater and ran it over with a jetski in order to obtain it.
That, more than anything else, says that the man has severe emotional problems. To put it in perspective - if a man walked into a bar, found two teenage girls with their mother, found he fancied one, wanted her as his girlfriend, slugged her, then put her on the back of his motorcycle, ran her over a few times after she managed to get free to subdue her, then dunked her head in a wayside toilet...would we slap his wrist with a $2,000 fine or would we draw names out of a hat for the lynch mob? (Oh yes, these are Canadian dollars. Make that $1,200.)
The barriers we have to that kind of behavior are shown most vividly when put in that kind of perspective. I'm NOT (not not not) saying that kidnapping a teenage girl from her mother is at all comparable, but the acceptance of this TYPE of behavior, not to mention the assumption that it's okay because it was just a dumb animal sometimes just horrifies me.
The link is that the children who torture animals and display sadistic qualities when preteens and teens often grow up into abusive individuals who have a severe lack of understanding of the way society treats itself.
It's...scary. You see something like this, then you place a human in that same situation, and you have a war crime tribunal or some serious jail time.
For the love of the children, I hope this guy does not have a wife or kids. I truly do.
Okay. I'll buy the idea that in some area of the world, bears are nuisances, not lovable critters.
I'll buy the idea that bear cubs are cute and cuddly.
I'll even buy the idea that some people do not have the same concept of right and wrong.
But this article made me seriously contemplate joining an offshoot of PETA dedicated to dispensing some Hammurabian justice up in the wilds of Canada.
In short - a man on a jet ski raced up to a mother bear and stole one of her cubs. The cub clawed its way free from the man and fell in the river. The man then ran over the cub on the jet ski to try to subdue it, got it back on the ski, dunked it in the water by the hind legs to "subdue" it, then took off again.
I truly, truly wish I'd been there. Just so I could wade out to the asshole, slug him upside the head, steal his jetski, run said idiot and cub BACK to the mother bear, and deposit both at the shore. Then drive off.
There's this concept of manifest destiny some people have about the wild animals that share the planet - in essence, that all the critters on earth are made for man's use or amusement. The cruelest part of this was not that he wanted to have the baby bear as a pet - but that he DUNKED his "pet" underwater and ran it over with a jetski in order to obtain it.
That, more than anything else, says that the man has severe emotional problems. To put it in perspective - if a man walked into a bar, found two teenage girls with their mother, found he fancied one, wanted her as his girlfriend, slugged her, then put her on the back of his motorcycle, ran her over a few times after she managed to get free to subdue her, then dunked her head in a wayside toilet...would we slap his wrist with a $2,000 fine or would we draw names out of a hat for the lynch mob? (Oh yes, these are Canadian dollars. Make that $1,200.)
The barriers we have to that kind of behavior are shown most vividly when put in that kind of perspective. I'm NOT (not not not) saying that kidnapping a teenage girl from her mother is at all comparable, but the acceptance of this TYPE of behavior, not to mention the assumption that it's okay because it was just a dumb animal sometimes just horrifies me.
The link is that the children who torture animals and display sadistic qualities when preteens and teens often grow up into abusive individuals who have a severe lack of understanding of the way society treats itself.
It's...scary. You see something like this, then you place a human in that same situation, and you have a war crime tribunal or some serious jail time.
For the love of the children, I hope this guy does not have a wife or kids. I truly do.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
The Devils Panties - Friday, September 12, 2003
I might also add this comic rocks.
I'll post more happy comics links soon enough.
But I will share with you my secret shame: I read "Luann". Yes. My name is Brian, and I read "Luann".
I need a hug.
I might also add this comic rocks.
I'll post more happy comics links soon enough.
But I will share with you my secret shame: I read "Luann". Yes. My name is Brian, and I read "Luann".
I need a hug.
Oh yeah. Happy 9/11 everyone.
Or: Yet Another Good Excuse to Drop $200 Billion on Next Year's Hunt for That Wascawwy Wabbit Bin Waden.
I don't know what gets me more depressed - the fact that 3,000 people died two years ago as I was driving to my 3rd week of official employment as a nonleeching member of society (to a job exclusively dependent on airline security and a healthy economy) or the fact that this tragedy was used to deprive thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and American citizens of small little things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I'll salute the president of the United States when he makes his acceptance speech next year (as Bush sneaks some of the White House ashtrays out to Crawford, Texas).
Dear God, for the love of American security and retaining US citizenship as a good thing - ANYONE ELSE in 2004.
Or: Yet Another Good Excuse to Drop $200 Billion on Next Year's Hunt for That Wascawwy Wabbit Bin Waden.
I don't know what gets me more depressed - the fact that 3,000 people died two years ago as I was driving to my 3rd week of official employment as a nonleeching member of society (to a job exclusively dependent on airline security and a healthy economy) or the fact that this tragedy was used to deprive thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and American citizens of small little things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I'll salute the president of the United States when he makes his acceptance speech next year (as Bush sneaks some of the White House ashtrays out to Crawford, Texas).
Dear God, for the love of American security and retaining US citizenship as a good thing - ANYONE ELSE in 2004.
Wasn't there something about giving back to the community planned this year? Somewhere on the top ten list of things I should do?
I think the list went something like this:
1. Lose weight.
2. Quit smoking.
3. Try to be nice at least 65% of the time, even when you're being nice by laughing at someone else's pain and suffering.
4. Quit smoking with friends during stressful moments.
5. Finish one of the books.
6. Work out at least four times a week.
7. Stop drinking tequila straight.
8. Form bond with intelligent, sexy, non-issues laden woman (by non-issues meaning there's no therapist getting $80 per hour to listen to parental relationship problems)
9. Play more bass guitar and sing more.
10. Build something each three months that means something to you.
I think I got 6 and 9 down, working on numbers. Which means I have 2.5 months to see the rest through.
Will it work? Who knows? Will he wind up dating a psycho girl with attitude? Who knows? Will he complete 2 and 4? We don't know. Yay.
I think the list went something like this:
1. Lose weight.
2. Quit smoking.
3. Try to be nice at least 65% of the time, even when you're being nice by laughing at someone else's pain and suffering.
4. Quit smoking with friends during stressful moments.
5. Finish one of the books.
6. Work out at least four times a week.
7. Stop drinking tequila straight.
8. Form bond with intelligent, sexy, non-issues laden woman (by non-issues meaning there's no therapist getting $80 per hour to listen to parental relationship problems)
9. Play more bass guitar and sing more.
10. Build something each three months that means something to you.
I think I got 6 and 9 down, working on numbers. Which means I have 2.5 months to see the rest through.
Will it work? Who knows? Will he wind up dating a psycho girl with attitude? Who knows? Will he complete 2 and 4? We don't know. Yay.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
So I'm tired, exhausted, and pulled two nasty long days in a row - on top of having my very good friends here until just this morning. So this would explain why there hasn't been a blogpost or even a social "hello" to anyone save my friends from out of town for three or four days.
Not that the general disappearance of yours truly for three days bothers anyone who minds my vanishing acts too much. Those whom it does qualify as "weirdos" in my book. Unless they're related to me. Then they're just clingy weirdos. Yes, I love you all.
Weirdos.
In other news, smoking is ending shortly. I have my last American Spirit yellow tonight. I would cheer, but I feel sad in a way. But one of my good friends from work passed away last week from lung cancer at the age of 52. I have an uncle who smoked for years before developing stomach cancer. I think now might be a good time to quit. From 18 to 28 is a long enough time to indulge a bad habit.
Speaking of bad habits, I'm cheerfully going to stop drinking the following:
Cognac
Vodka
Rum
Schnapps
More than 1 glass of wine per night
More than 1 beer per night
More than one large pot of tea per day.
Perhaps this may calm me down somewhat. And keep me from thinking that my liver is about to lunge through my body cavity and kiss me on the lips before diving down south each time my hands pick up a shot of tequila.
I don't get it, I really don't. But Fred and I developed a long-standing relationship, and much like any other obesely happy critter, it's time for him to go on a diet. Speaking of, the cat's back on his. We're trying half a cup of dry food per day. We'll see how that goes.
Not that the general disappearance of yours truly for three days bothers anyone who minds my vanishing acts too much. Those whom it does qualify as "weirdos" in my book. Unless they're related to me. Then they're just clingy weirdos. Yes, I love you all.
Weirdos.
In other news, smoking is ending shortly. I have my last American Spirit yellow tonight. I would cheer, but I feel sad in a way. But one of my good friends from work passed away last week from lung cancer at the age of 52. I have an uncle who smoked for years before developing stomach cancer. I think now might be a good time to quit. From 18 to 28 is a long enough time to indulge a bad habit.
Speaking of bad habits, I'm cheerfully going to stop drinking the following:
Cognac
Vodka
Rum
Schnapps
More than 1 glass of wine per night
More than 1 beer per night
More than one large pot of tea per day.
Perhaps this may calm me down somewhat. And keep me from thinking that my liver is about to lunge through my body cavity and kiss me on the lips before diving down south each time my hands pick up a shot of tequila.
I don't get it, I really don't. But Fred and I developed a long-standing relationship, and much like any other obesely happy critter, it's time for him to go on a diet. Speaking of, the cat's back on his. We're trying half a cup of dry food per day. We'll see how that goes.
Friday, September 05, 2003
When I went to the University of Oregon, I worked in a computer lab. That’s not precisely the best description. What should be said is that I worked in the worst computer lab on the entire campus in the bowels of the largest building.
What made it the worst computer lab was not the equipment (although we spent a good amount of time replacing hard drives, turning off computers, and banging monitors when the traditional, gentler methods such as degaussing and threatening the computer with the cold contact points of an oscilloscope failed to produce results). It was the staff. And being a member of this staff made life hell.
Not for us, by any stretch of the imagination. For a collegiate job, it was perhaps the best I had ever had for terms of effort expended and money received. The proportions of the latter so far exceeded the responsibilities of the former that most of us spent our hours lounging about in rickety old chairs, doing homework, writing papers, and taking “smoke breaks” that could easily have allowed us to consume entire packs of cigarettes.
It was more of a culture of slackerism than anything else. We weren’t allowed to do anything specifically to help students outside of getting their computers running, sending them to resources that could help them, or switching their computers. A good portion of my job as supervisor entailed making command decisions – such as whether or not to play hockey with a broken hard drive; or which stressed-out monkey should be given the Commodore 64 computer in the back we brought to play Red Baron and Ms. Pacman.
There have been nighttime video surveillance jobs with more action. Guard post duties. Crane operators at a downtime plant, where one 10-minute lift equaled the entire shift’s responsibilities. But just as those jobs have their 15 seconds of panic, so did ours. For example, the miracle of reconstructing an entire thesis paper with no backup copy from a magnetized hard drive requires ingenuity and finesse…and plenty of creative hacking. Building a spare computer with Internet access while telling someone how to paginate in Word over the phone – difficult, but not impossible. Dealing with patrons who decide to collect pornography for “educational purposes” in front of the entire computer laboratory – highly challenging. But fortunately these required solutions creative and swift – the best type when your game of Dungeon Siege has been rudely interrupted by a diarrheic laser printer.
Hence, in our job descriptions, we were defined as “technical staff”. Nominally, our position was created to assist students in the operation of their computers. Due to the fact that on rare occasions we were able to find a fully functional keyboard or a computer that had not yet been infected by a virus bent on destroying all files within the entire University system, much of our time was spent fixing stupid problems that required neither technical ability nor brains – just common sense.
To define a stupid computer problem is fairly easy. Sometimes a user would pop the CD-ROM tray out and place their fresh, piping-hot cup of coffee in it to rest and easily sip at their leisure as they worked over their files. While most of the computers we owned could have had 12-molar hydrochloric acid spilled into their CPUs and it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference in their operating speed, we felt that food in the computer lab was, like the rule “no running with scissors”, a golden rule that should never really be broken. And aside from using a $200 computer part as a cupholder, we also felt smug as we walked back to the desk, having shown a poor, unintelligent plebian the miracles of technology.
Then we’d go to the coffeehouse next door and order three tall lattes, and promise to help with the barista’s computer science homework in lieu of payment, lounge about, smoke, and then amble back inside, having earned a nice long break from the stressful job we had as technical support.
Other stupid problems:
One day a young man wearing a “Save the Earth” t-shirt, a ring of cowry shells around his neck, and a pair of pants that had appeared to be made from quilt patches followed the ten-foot aura of unwashed body and patchouli into the lab. He bent down, smiled beatifically at me, and asked for a writing machine.
Thinking that he meant a typewriter, I looked up long enough from my hack-and-slash Dungeons and Dragons game to say, “We don’t have typewriters.”
He shook his head and smiled again. “No no, man, I needs me one of the computers, right? I have to get my paper written, so I need to do it on one of the machines.”
We set him up with a word processing machine and went back to hack-and-slash. Five minutes later he tapped my friend Jenny on the shoulder. “I think my computer thingy is busted.”
I took the opportunity in the game to backstab her character, loot the body, and steal the sword she’d been refusing to swap me for those useless poison potions. Nothing like a little friendly theft and mayhem to brighten up a blossoming relationship. Ten minutes later she came back, a dizzying look in her eyes. “What?” I asked.
“You need to go see this,” she said. “I need a cigarette and a stiff drink.” She leaned back into the chair and pinched her nose.
“Second drawer on the right, smoke outside, bourbon is Ezra Brooks,” I said, stepping into a portal and whisking myself off to a safe, happy place where she couldn’t get online revenge for my Machiavellian scheming – on the other side of the technical support barrier. I heard a shriek twenty steps from the desk and saw twin pinpricks of blue glaring at me from over the desk.
Fearing the worst for my poor paladin, I entered the ten-foot sphere of smell that had cleared people from our nirvanic neophyte, coughed once, and leaned over his shoulder, my eyes watering, managing to choke out, “So what’s the problem you’ve been having, then?”
“Look, man, this machine of yours is, like, busted and totally harshing. I tried to tell that girl what was up but she got sick and started coughing or something. Anyway, it won’t read my paper.”
Eyes starting to stream from olfactory overload (and mentally estimating three cigarettes to deaden my already-stricken smell sensors), I said, “So it won’t read the disk you brought it on?”
He looked at me strangely. “No man, I don’t know disks. It just won’t read my paper right.”
“Okay, so show me what you’re trying to do with it.”
The happy ditz leaned back, picked up a wad of crumpled and wrinkled paper that had remarkably neat, tidy handwriting, and folded it up into a perfect disk-shaped size – then stuffed it into the 3.5” floppy drive. He looked at me, pointed at the screen, and said, “See? Nothing happens.”
After a ten minute explanation that the computer he was using was four years old, and that while technology had indeed advanced to the point where handwriting recognition did indeed exist, it didn’t exist in this computer lab, and that he would have to learn how to type, spell, and print all in the same day, the fellow shook his dreadlocks and said, “Man, this college stuff is hard work,” gathered his things, and left the lab, stopping only to tell Jenny how “that dude totally harshed on my work, you know, and he’s kind of a jerk, because he expects things to go linear, man.”
Jenny and I split the bottle of bourbon, and the next day, the bottle of aspirin. Fortunately, we lived next door to each other and could wake each other up from the stupor of alcohol when necessary. Jenny only much later told me this is why she chose to sleep with me – that and she’d looted MY body in the game, thus proving that not only can you be a complete bastard at work, but also a pathetic-looking bastard in desperate need of consolation against the human race. It helps when your partner in crime and sex lives in the apartment next to you and can split the costs of alcohol, debauchery, and shared cigarettes – and time wasted killing each other in a computer-generated universe.
At that point, though, we were not on such friendly terms, and merely glowered at the next few patrons – an act we kept up until the next day, that same beatifically spacey hippie came ambling back in, smelling strongly of skunk and eucalyptus, asked for a “pretty computer” and wound up staring at the screensaver for four hours. The boss had five complaints that the staffers must be smoking pot behind the counter, because they couldn’t seem to stop giggling. True story.
There were also surprising perks to the job – outside of playing video games all day and being able to surf for pornography indiscriminately. These always arrived in the form of clueless individuals with little knowledge of a computer’s inner workings. One day a young, buffed-up male wearing freshly laundered fraternity-lettered sweats arrived, cap firmly tucked low on his forehead. My friend Nick and I happened to be manning the desk. Having been the last one out on a “service call”, when our testosterone-laden friend charged up, demanding that we fix our scanner or write a note to his professor to explain that our equipment was ruined; thereby making it impossible for him to complete his assignment, I stood and ambled over to the computer.
Ten minutes later I could not stop laughing, and was reduced to miming the interaction of the fraternity member. First: the gesture to the computer. Angry look. Gesticulation. Questioning look from petitioned employee. Frat rat picks up photo. Places photo on the monitor, colored side in. Pulls it back. Demanding look as to why picture has not magically transferred like iron-on image to the screen. Employee attempts not to giggle like a madman, points to photocopy-looking machine by the keyboard, explaining THAT is the scanner.
In retrospect, he was very polite to me after that, and when he had finished turning twelve different shades of red and purple, he listened carefully to what I had to say, and to his credit, later became a computer lab employee, and was able to laugh his head off at new people who could not figure out what to do with the computers.
We always found these people hilarious. From the woman who ate her way through twelve boxes of Girl Scout cookies and complained of the messiness of the desks around her to the man whose cellphone conversation was interrupted by splotchy service and required him to shout – then later coming up to complain about the loudness of the headphones of the person sitting next to him – all of these we lumped cheerfully into “losers!” categories.
But it was entirely agreed that there was one computer user none laughed at. Nor enjoyed working with. They were the Ageists.
I say ageist because each time someone would be asked to help them, immediately the first things out of their mouths would be their age. From 43 to 72, these returning students held a “higher” attitude – mainly due to the fact that many of them got 24 credits for what is euphemistically called, “Life Experience” – a pleasant way to explain twenty years spent behind a grill flipping burgers or pushing a bucket through grade school toilets. Some returned to finish degrees and others just wanted to go to college. Both admirable goals. But the one thing always common was that the “children” could use a little of their aging wisdom.
“Now, you always know when you’re going to get somewhere hard, because back when I was your age, we didn’t have computers. And I don’t see why I can’t handwrite this essay or why I have to do research on this Internet thing, but I know that you can learn all you need to know from the library and the Bible.” This was the actual quote of a 71-year old woman who was required by her class of Women’s Studies to research the lives of women in different countries who labored under oppression – and for whom corresponding with a foreign woman was a requirement. I got the impression her idea of Women’s Studies was a tea party every Tuesday and Thursday, with macaroons and the conversation held about new boyfriends and potential fiancées, warming one’s feet and teaching how to quilt new baby blankets and the proper care of eiderdowns. She certainly fit the profile – one day, when walking by a protest of the campus health clinic, which had just considered dropping the morning-after pill for students to save funds, she was accosted by a young woman, topless, in braids, who smiled and handed her a flier explaining the necessity of this if women were raped or had had sex without protection. This sweet little grandmother of five stopped, held her hands gravely in front of her, and said, “We shoot people like you where I come from.”
I hate to say it, but this torrent of unwanted advice spewed forth from many of the older students we helped. While completely incapable of double-clicking on an icon and beginning to type, they managed to inundate our heads with more knowledge than we ever thought we were capable of absorbing and ignoring. The ironic thing was, I found that these people would spill their life stories to completely random strangers with no regard for whether the story wanted to be heard. A mild “mmm-hmm” NEVER indicated disinterest in their musings – rather an eager, “Please! Please! Tell me more!” Somehow I thought my own banal problems, ranging from trying to get Jenny to sleep in the same bed with me to attempting to remain awake during the Astronomy lectures began to pale in comparison to solving THEIR problems in order to get the hell away from them as quickly as possible.
It was heavily pronounced the older the student got. Gradually, I came to the realization that we were operating in two separate tribal functions. The first, and majority of the students there, were at college for four years to garner a degree and set about the process of making our way in the world. We did not want advice from parental figures – we had enough of that when we went home for Christmas. We were there to soak up education in the rarefied world of college, where alcohol, sex, drama, and drugs combined into a passion play of the night, crossing over into the daytime world. Ours was not a realm of harsh realities, nor did we want to think of them. We had learning, exploration, and discovery to do, and nothing puts a crimp in the mood of an expedition party like an old sherpa mumbling, “Damn kids don’t know crap about the crevasses out there, I fell in them more than three hundred times, and I cut me my genitals on some shaved ice, and I gots me some hemorrhoids from sitting on top of a cold mountain, and those there hills they just ain’t what they used to be. Hey, did I tell you that kids these days have no respect for their elders? Sit down and shut up, you young whippersnapper, I got all these stories to tell you.”
What came to be was that I realized society had led me to believe respect for one’s elders is a fine thing. And truthfully, I follow that. I respect age and wisdom, but what I cannot respect is idiocy clothed – even beautifully – as wisdom.
We weren’t even following the old trails the Sherpa had blazed before us. The idea of manual labor, for many of the younger classmates, had never even become an issue. Plenty of us had worked as interns in government offices and clerked for our summer jobs – or stayed on, knowing that the sooner we got out the door, the sooner we could pay the bills coming due from four years of grand, eloquent unemployment.
Rarely were there people who worked construction as a trade during the summer, preferring the cooler library stacks and computer classrooms, or the outdoor sailing team. Some worked as roadies for college bands, many others pulled coffee, but not one student I knew of went out and pushed a broom to earn enough money for the year’s worth of collegiate bacchanalian spending on books, paper, computer parts, CDs, clothes, shoes, and booze. (And food, but that usually came as an afterthought.)
We simply couldn’t. Our lives and our work experience had shifted from being able to work your way through college to working through college to pay the bar tab. The costs of tuition, room and board, even transportation COULD NOT be handled by twenty hours a week in the cafeteria – it had to be financed for the cost of a brand-new luxury car.
The picture of the world and our roles in it were different between the two. The paradigms had shifted. And coming back into the mix were people who had never seen a mouse, or thought of a software program, or heard of imaginary numbers, barging forward to the front of the class and failing, miserably, to learn what the rest of us were learning.
There were major exceptions to this rule. Two men in their 40s were taking classes in philosophy with me and became my study partners. Together we discussed religion and politics, social psychology, chemical dependency and theories of education deep into the night. Finally I broached the subject of the Old Sherpas with them, and Mark, the elder, in his 50s, a former VW mechanic whose dream had always been to become a travel writer, looked down at his grease-stained hands.
“I think sometimes we wonder what our lives are supposed to be like,” he said. “We have our children, our wives, our dogs, our houses. We make the payments on the car and we put food on the table. For women it’s different, but not so much. My wife raised four kids on my salary and spent all her time with them, in their lives, wound up in them. When they all left for college or got married, they weren’t our livelihood any more. So we got to look at who we were and who we wanted to be.”
He lit a match to his pipe. “Some of us know our lives could have been different. We’re all here because we want to do something else with ourselves. We want to find out what that difference is.”
He paused, and I caught a look in his blue eyes. “Some folks accept their lives as they are, and as they were. The people you call the Old Sherpas…they’re the ones who’re still trying to justify them.”
And he shrugged. “Just watch. I know lots of them in the Returning Student Association. The ones who tell stories and give advice drop out after six months. Too hard. Their dreams aren’t enough to carry them through and they go back to what they do best – complaining about how things should be, could be, have been. That’s why you don’t need to respect ALL your elders, kid.” He stopped and gave me a wink. “Just the ones who respect YOU.”
Later on I thought about this, and it seemed more problematic than he let on. Did that mean I needed to show respect to people until they failed to show me respect? Should I ever think about talking down to someone – god forbid, to my own children, explaining the life lessons I learned the hard way and hoped they never would, but then see them charge forth and make them all over again? What if I was seventy or eighty, an old, wizened man walking with a stoop and a cane, muttering to the kids with holographic earrings, portable eyetop computers and access to every byte of information in the word, saying, “In my day, we had eighty-pound monitors we hauled around and had to plug in. That was a computer, let me tell you.”
And then there was something else, a flash of golden (ha ha!) brilliance – the generalized Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Turn the other cheek. Suffer not a fool. The list of banalities started growing. But basically, he’d told me three things.
1. People want to make the best of things. They like to give the truth breadth and meaning. Some do this honestly, with only minor tinkering. Others reinvent entire chapters of their life and expect everyone else to be dazzled with their stories and their experiences – even if it happens to be clerking at a gas station for twenty years.
2. Everyone deserves an open ear and respect as a human being. There is no belief that culls us from the human condition; no words to be said that separates a walking biped from the essence of what it means to be human, and to be alive.
3. Some people don’t understand Thing 2 or Thing 1. They still deserve it, regardless of how they walk over other people’s beliefs, deeds, or accomplishments to promote their own. Treating people with respect is not something that comes easily to anyone, and we have codes and rules of whom and when you are to give it – yet it is more comfortable to receive respect than it is to get it, and many people view respect as some people view the right to vote – that they, and those that think, feel, and act as they do should be allowed to cast their lot, but those who don’t should be permanently banned from that right. It’s cold, callous, mean-spirited and xenophobic, but many people share that mentality, and there is literally no way to change their minds – save to withhold the respect they take as their due.
4. Even when you think someone’s done, or finished absorbing “wisdom”, regardless of its source, perhaps the worst thing you can do is to belabor the point. Dusting off an old idea and refinishing it for someone else’s benefit, or turning the point around works maybe once out of ten times – especially if someone uses the phrase, “I just got myself settled in my ways.” Which, to me, says more than they only want those around them to adapt to their ways; seeing another point of view would only take time and energy away from the espousing of the view as seen from the front porch of their own eyes.
That was ten years ago, and I caught up with Mark. He still works on VWs, but he and his wife travel around the world and write small books on perfect travel destinations. He and I took classes from professors who treated us like cattle, and others who taught us as if each would bring something brilliant to society. We started to avoid the cattle-herders and educated ourselves with those who respected intellect. We would meet for coffee and talk about anything. Last I heard, Mark was working on a mechanical engineering degree – not because he needed to, or wanted to, but, in his words, “because I want to know how things work these days.”
It must be said that there were also people who never descended into the Old vs. the Young title fight for wisdom and learning. These people were usually men, sometimes women, whose careers had not been what they wanted, and thus came back to find a new way. But they didn’t discuss it or the role they might play in the world – they KNEW what they wanted, when they wanted it, and the quickest route to it lay in a Master’s degree or second bachelor’s degree. They didn’t think of college as an extension of their own selves – they saw it as a hoop or a hurdle and with kids, mortgages, car payments, marriages and careers, no hour was spared in the acquisition of knowledge, and no philosophy was spared. They weren’t agents of questionable Wisdom – they were people out for Survivor – the Real World game. They glided through without making an impression – on their way out the door somewhere else, and fast.
So I’m still accused of being Ageist. I still glare at older men who give me “young whippersnapper” or lecture me about young men showing respect to older folks. Old women who push in front of me in line are pushed right back out of line, or a sharp word of, “Show some respect, lady” can completely shock a 60-year old woman.
The reality is, many people, young or old, believe that due to an arbitrary number of times they have traveled around the sun, their worth has somehow increased. Mark taught me that the increase of worth only comes from knowing you CAN increase it – and taking the necessary steps to do so. Those who talk as much as possible of their worthiness, in the gospel according to Mark, are often the most deficient – and also the ones who spend most of their time trying to convince others to purchase it.
Last year I dated a woman who was 42 for three weeks. We had a marvelous time, enjoying dinner, movies, walks in the park, and yes, even makeout sessions. One of my friends asked me how the hell I could make out with a woman old enough to be my mother, and I replied, “I’m not making out with a woman old enough to be my mother. I’m making out with a woman old enough to be my lover.” (Which was later realized to be an indeterminate age between 18 and 45 – exactly the average age range on most Internet personal ad search engines.)
We broke up not because of her age or mine (26 at the time) but because we realized one day that we’d fallen into the cycle of teacher and student…and suddenly for both of us, it was no longer a journey of discovery, but a hand-holding of sorts through unexplored ground (for me) and well-mapped lands (for her). Nothing was new, and it became excruciatingly obvious to both of us. My next girlfriend was more in my range – an aged crone (in terms of life experience) of 23. One of these times I’ll get lucky and find someone right at the same crossroads I’m at, and perhaps we’ll figure out how to get down the road together.
I know that some day I’ll look back upon this chapter in my life and think of how damn cheeky I was; how full of myself; how confident that I knew the biggest problem of the generation gaps. Crossing those generation gaps takes work – work most people aren’t willing to make, but demand others take the energy to perform. It’s selfish; it’s unreasonable – it’s human nature.
In the meantime, I will always refuse, politely, but firmly, to teach anyone over the age of 55 the spatial relationships between a mouse pointer – and the mouse itself.
In the sweetest words of Louis B. Armstrong, “You gotta ask, you ain’t never gonna know.”
What made it the worst computer lab was not the equipment (although we spent a good amount of time replacing hard drives, turning off computers, and banging monitors when the traditional, gentler methods such as degaussing and threatening the computer with the cold contact points of an oscilloscope failed to produce results). It was the staff. And being a member of this staff made life hell.
Not for us, by any stretch of the imagination. For a collegiate job, it was perhaps the best I had ever had for terms of effort expended and money received. The proportions of the latter so far exceeded the responsibilities of the former that most of us spent our hours lounging about in rickety old chairs, doing homework, writing papers, and taking “smoke breaks” that could easily have allowed us to consume entire packs of cigarettes.
It was more of a culture of slackerism than anything else. We weren’t allowed to do anything specifically to help students outside of getting their computers running, sending them to resources that could help them, or switching their computers. A good portion of my job as supervisor entailed making command decisions – such as whether or not to play hockey with a broken hard drive; or which stressed-out monkey should be given the Commodore 64 computer in the back we brought to play Red Baron and Ms. Pacman.
There have been nighttime video surveillance jobs with more action. Guard post duties. Crane operators at a downtime plant, where one 10-minute lift equaled the entire shift’s responsibilities. But just as those jobs have their 15 seconds of panic, so did ours. For example, the miracle of reconstructing an entire thesis paper with no backup copy from a magnetized hard drive requires ingenuity and finesse…and plenty of creative hacking. Building a spare computer with Internet access while telling someone how to paginate in Word over the phone – difficult, but not impossible. Dealing with patrons who decide to collect pornography for “educational purposes” in front of the entire computer laboratory – highly challenging. But fortunately these required solutions creative and swift – the best type when your game of Dungeon Siege has been rudely interrupted by a diarrheic laser printer.
Hence, in our job descriptions, we were defined as “technical staff”. Nominally, our position was created to assist students in the operation of their computers. Due to the fact that on rare occasions we were able to find a fully functional keyboard or a computer that had not yet been infected by a virus bent on destroying all files within the entire University system, much of our time was spent fixing stupid problems that required neither technical ability nor brains – just common sense.
To define a stupid computer problem is fairly easy. Sometimes a user would pop the CD-ROM tray out and place their fresh, piping-hot cup of coffee in it to rest and easily sip at their leisure as they worked over their files. While most of the computers we owned could have had 12-molar hydrochloric acid spilled into their CPUs and it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference in their operating speed, we felt that food in the computer lab was, like the rule “no running with scissors”, a golden rule that should never really be broken. And aside from using a $200 computer part as a cupholder, we also felt smug as we walked back to the desk, having shown a poor, unintelligent plebian the miracles of technology.
Then we’d go to the coffeehouse next door and order three tall lattes, and promise to help with the barista’s computer science homework in lieu of payment, lounge about, smoke, and then amble back inside, having earned a nice long break from the stressful job we had as technical support.
Other stupid problems:
One day a young man wearing a “Save the Earth” t-shirt, a ring of cowry shells around his neck, and a pair of pants that had appeared to be made from quilt patches followed the ten-foot aura of unwashed body and patchouli into the lab. He bent down, smiled beatifically at me, and asked for a writing machine.
Thinking that he meant a typewriter, I looked up long enough from my hack-and-slash Dungeons and Dragons game to say, “We don’t have typewriters.”
He shook his head and smiled again. “No no, man, I needs me one of the computers, right? I have to get my paper written, so I need to do it on one of the machines.”
We set him up with a word processing machine and went back to hack-and-slash. Five minutes later he tapped my friend Jenny on the shoulder. “I think my computer thingy is busted.”
I took the opportunity in the game to backstab her character, loot the body, and steal the sword she’d been refusing to swap me for those useless poison potions. Nothing like a little friendly theft and mayhem to brighten up a blossoming relationship. Ten minutes later she came back, a dizzying look in her eyes. “What?” I asked.
“You need to go see this,” she said. “I need a cigarette and a stiff drink.” She leaned back into the chair and pinched her nose.
“Second drawer on the right, smoke outside, bourbon is Ezra Brooks,” I said, stepping into a portal and whisking myself off to a safe, happy place where she couldn’t get online revenge for my Machiavellian scheming – on the other side of the technical support barrier. I heard a shriek twenty steps from the desk and saw twin pinpricks of blue glaring at me from over the desk.
Fearing the worst for my poor paladin, I entered the ten-foot sphere of smell that had cleared people from our nirvanic neophyte, coughed once, and leaned over his shoulder, my eyes watering, managing to choke out, “So what’s the problem you’ve been having, then?”
“Look, man, this machine of yours is, like, busted and totally harshing. I tried to tell that girl what was up but she got sick and started coughing or something. Anyway, it won’t read my paper.”
Eyes starting to stream from olfactory overload (and mentally estimating three cigarettes to deaden my already-stricken smell sensors), I said, “So it won’t read the disk you brought it on?”
He looked at me strangely. “No man, I don’t know disks. It just won’t read my paper right.”
“Okay, so show me what you’re trying to do with it.”
The happy ditz leaned back, picked up a wad of crumpled and wrinkled paper that had remarkably neat, tidy handwriting, and folded it up into a perfect disk-shaped size – then stuffed it into the 3.5” floppy drive. He looked at me, pointed at the screen, and said, “See? Nothing happens.”
After a ten minute explanation that the computer he was using was four years old, and that while technology had indeed advanced to the point where handwriting recognition did indeed exist, it didn’t exist in this computer lab, and that he would have to learn how to type, spell, and print all in the same day, the fellow shook his dreadlocks and said, “Man, this college stuff is hard work,” gathered his things, and left the lab, stopping only to tell Jenny how “that dude totally harshed on my work, you know, and he’s kind of a jerk, because he expects things to go linear, man.”
Jenny and I split the bottle of bourbon, and the next day, the bottle of aspirin. Fortunately, we lived next door to each other and could wake each other up from the stupor of alcohol when necessary. Jenny only much later told me this is why she chose to sleep with me – that and she’d looted MY body in the game, thus proving that not only can you be a complete bastard at work, but also a pathetic-looking bastard in desperate need of consolation against the human race. It helps when your partner in crime and sex lives in the apartment next to you and can split the costs of alcohol, debauchery, and shared cigarettes – and time wasted killing each other in a computer-generated universe.
At that point, though, we were not on such friendly terms, and merely glowered at the next few patrons – an act we kept up until the next day, that same beatifically spacey hippie came ambling back in, smelling strongly of skunk and eucalyptus, asked for a “pretty computer” and wound up staring at the screensaver for four hours. The boss had five complaints that the staffers must be smoking pot behind the counter, because they couldn’t seem to stop giggling. True story.
There were also surprising perks to the job – outside of playing video games all day and being able to surf for pornography indiscriminately. These always arrived in the form of clueless individuals with little knowledge of a computer’s inner workings. One day a young, buffed-up male wearing freshly laundered fraternity-lettered sweats arrived, cap firmly tucked low on his forehead. My friend Nick and I happened to be manning the desk. Having been the last one out on a “service call”, when our testosterone-laden friend charged up, demanding that we fix our scanner or write a note to his professor to explain that our equipment was ruined; thereby making it impossible for him to complete his assignment, I stood and ambled over to the computer.
Ten minutes later I could not stop laughing, and was reduced to miming the interaction of the fraternity member. First: the gesture to the computer. Angry look. Gesticulation. Questioning look from petitioned employee. Frat rat picks up photo. Places photo on the monitor, colored side in. Pulls it back. Demanding look as to why picture has not magically transferred like iron-on image to the screen. Employee attempts not to giggle like a madman, points to photocopy-looking machine by the keyboard, explaining THAT is the scanner.
In retrospect, he was very polite to me after that, and when he had finished turning twelve different shades of red and purple, he listened carefully to what I had to say, and to his credit, later became a computer lab employee, and was able to laugh his head off at new people who could not figure out what to do with the computers.
We always found these people hilarious. From the woman who ate her way through twelve boxes of Girl Scout cookies and complained of the messiness of the desks around her to the man whose cellphone conversation was interrupted by splotchy service and required him to shout – then later coming up to complain about the loudness of the headphones of the person sitting next to him – all of these we lumped cheerfully into “losers!” categories.
But it was entirely agreed that there was one computer user none laughed at. Nor enjoyed working with. They were the Ageists.
I say ageist because each time someone would be asked to help them, immediately the first things out of their mouths would be their age. From 43 to 72, these returning students held a “higher” attitude – mainly due to the fact that many of them got 24 credits for what is euphemistically called, “Life Experience” – a pleasant way to explain twenty years spent behind a grill flipping burgers or pushing a bucket through grade school toilets. Some returned to finish degrees and others just wanted to go to college. Both admirable goals. But the one thing always common was that the “children” could use a little of their aging wisdom.
“Now, you always know when you’re going to get somewhere hard, because back when I was your age, we didn’t have computers. And I don’t see why I can’t handwrite this essay or why I have to do research on this Internet thing, but I know that you can learn all you need to know from the library and the Bible.” This was the actual quote of a 71-year old woman who was required by her class of Women’s Studies to research the lives of women in different countries who labored under oppression – and for whom corresponding with a foreign woman was a requirement. I got the impression her idea of Women’s Studies was a tea party every Tuesday and Thursday, with macaroons and the conversation held about new boyfriends and potential fiancées, warming one’s feet and teaching how to quilt new baby blankets and the proper care of eiderdowns. She certainly fit the profile – one day, when walking by a protest of the campus health clinic, which had just considered dropping the morning-after pill for students to save funds, she was accosted by a young woman, topless, in braids, who smiled and handed her a flier explaining the necessity of this if women were raped or had had sex without protection. This sweet little grandmother of five stopped, held her hands gravely in front of her, and said, “We shoot people like you where I come from.”
I hate to say it, but this torrent of unwanted advice spewed forth from many of the older students we helped. While completely incapable of double-clicking on an icon and beginning to type, they managed to inundate our heads with more knowledge than we ever thought we were capable of absorbing and ignoring. The ironic thing was, I found that these people would spill their life stories to completely random strangers with no regard for whether the story wanted to be heard. A mild “mmm-hmm” NEVER indicated disinterest in their musings – rather an eager, “Please! Please! Tell me more!” Somehow I thought my own banal problems, ranging from trying to get Jenny to sleep in the same bed with me to attempting to remain awake during the Astronomy lectures began to pale in comparison to solving THEIR problems in order to get the hell away from them as quickly as possible.
It was heavily pronounced the older the student got. Gradually, I came to the realization that we were operating in two separate tribal functions. The first, and majority of the students there, were at college for four years to garner a degree and set about the process of making our way in the world. We did not want advice from parental figures – we had enough of that when we went home for Christmas. We were there to soak up education in the rarefied world of college, where alcohol, sex, drama, and drugs combined into a passion play of the night, crossing over into the daytime world. Ours was not a realm of harsh realities, nor did we want to think of them. We had learning, exploration, and discovery to do, and nothing puts a crimp in the mood of an expedition party like an old sherpa mumbling, “Damn kids don’t know crap about the crevasses out there, I fell in them more than three hundred times, and I cut me my genitals on some shaved ice, and I gots me some hemorrhoids from sitting on top of a cold mountain, and those there hills they just ain’t what they used to be. Hey, did I tell you that kids these days have no respect for their elders? Sit down and shut up, you young whippersnapper, I got all these stories to tell you.”
What came to be was that I realized society had led me to believe respect for one’s elders is a fine thing. And truthfully, I follow that. I respect age and wisdom, but what I cannot respect is idiocy clothed – even beautifully – as wisdom.
We weren’t even following the old trails the Sherpa had blazed before us. The idea of manual labor, for many of the younger classmates, had never even become an issue. Plenty of us had worked as interns in government offices and clerked for our summer jobs – or stayed on, knowing that the sooner we got out the door, the sooner we could pay the bills coming due from four years of grand, eloquent unemployment.
Rarely were there people who worked construction as a trade during the summer, preferring the cooler library stacks and computer classrooms, or the outdoor sailing team. Some worked as roadies for college bands, many others pulled coffee, but not one student I knew of went out and pushed a broom to earn enough money for the year’s worth of collegiate bacchanalian spending on books, paper, computer parts, CDs, clothes, shoes, and booze. (And food, but that usually came as an afterthought.)
We simply couldn’t. Our lives and our work experience had shifted from being able to work your way through college to working through college to pay the bar tab. The costs of tuition, room and board, even transportation COULD NOT be handled by twenty hours a week in the cafeteria – it had to be financed for the cost of a brand-new luxury car.
The picture of the world and our roles in it were different between the two. The paradigms had shifted. And coming back into the mix were people who had never seen a mouse, or thought of a software program, or heard of imaginary numbers, barging forward to the front of the class and failing, miserably, to learn what the rest of us were learning.
There were major exceptions to this rule. Two men in their 40s were taking classes in philosophy with me and became my study partners. Together we discussed religion and politics, social psychology, chemical dependency and theories of education deep into the night. Finally I broached the subject of the Old Sherpas with them, and Mark, the elder, in his 50s, a former VW mechanic whose dream had always been to become a travel writer, looked down at his grease-stained hands.
“I think sometimes we wonder what our lives are supposed to be like,” he said. “We have our children, our wives, our dogs, our houses. We make the payments on the car and we put food on the table. For women it’s different, but not so much. My wife raised four kids on my salary and spent all her time with them, in their lives, wound up in them. When they all left for college or got married, they weren’t our livelihood any more. So we got to look at who we were and who we wanted to be.”
He lit a match to his pipe. “Some of us know our lives could have been different. We’re all here because we want to do something else with ourselves. We want to find out what that difference is.”
He paused, and I caught a look in his blue eyes. “Some folks accept their lives as they are, and as they were. The people you call the Old Sherpas…they’re the ones who’re still trying to justify them.”
And he shrugged. “Just watch. I know lots of them in the Returning Student Association. The ones who tell stories and give advice drop out after six months. Too hard. Their dreams aren’t enough to carry them through and they go back to what they do best – complaining about how things should be, could be, have been. That’s why you don’t need to respect ALL your elders, kid.” He stopped and gave me a wink. “Just the ones who respect YOU.”
Later on I thought about this, and it seemed more problematic than he let on. Did that mean I needed to show respect to people until they failed to show me respect? Should I ever think about talking down to someone – god forbid, to my own children, explaining the life lessons I learned the hard way and hoped they never would, but then see them charge forth and make them all over again? What if I was seventy or eighty, an old, wizened man walking with a stoop and a cane, muttering to the kids with holographic earrings, portable eyetop computers and access to every byte of information in the word, saying, “In my day, we had eighty-pound monitors we hauled around and had to plug in. That was a computer, let me tell you.”
And then there was something else, a flash of golden (ha ha!) brilliance – the generalized Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Turn the other cheek. Suffer not a fool. The list of banalities started growing. But basically, he’d told me three things.
1. People want to make the best of things. They like to give the truth breadth and meaning. Some do this honestly, with only minor tinkering. Others reinvent entire chapters of their life and expect everyone else to be dazzled with their stories and their experiences – even if it happens to be clerking at a gas station for twenty years.
2. Everyone deserves an open ear and respect as a human being. There is no belief that culls us from the human condition; no words to be said that separates a walking biped from the essence of what it means to be human, and to be alive.
3. Some people don’t understand Thing 2 or Thing 1. They still deserve it, regardless of how they walk over other people’s beliefs, deeds, or accomplishments to promote their own. Treating people with respect is not something that comes easily to anyone, and we have codes and rules of whom and when you are to give it – yet it is more comfortable to receive respect than it is to get it, and many people view respect as some people view the right to vote – that they, and those that think, feel, and act as they do should be allowed to cast their lot, but those who don’t should be permanently banned from that right. It’s cold, callous, mean-spirited and xenophobic, but many people share that mentality, and there is literally no way to change their minds – save to withhold the respect they take as their due.
4. Even when you think someone’s done, or finished absorbing “wisdom”, regardless of its source, perhaps the worst thing you can do is to belabor the point. Dusting off an old idea and refinishing it for someone else’s benefit, or turning the point around works maybe once out of ten times – especially if someone uses the phrase, “I just got myself settled in my ways.” Which, to me, says more than they only want those around them to adapt to their ways; seeing another point of view would only take time and energy away from the espousing of the view as seen from the front porch of their own eyes.
That was ten years ago, and I caught up with Mark. He still works on VWs, but he and his wife travel around the world and write small books on perfect travel destinations. He and I took classes from professors who treated us like cattle, and others who taught us as if each would bring something brilliant to society. We started to avoid the cattle-herders and educated ourselves with those who respected intellect. We would meet for coffee and talk about anything. Last I heard, Mark was working on a mechanical engineering degree – not because he needed to, or wanted to, but, in his words, “because I want to know how things work these days.”
It must be said that there were also people who never descended into the Old vs. the Young title fight for wisdom and learning. These people were usually men, sometimes women, whose careers had not been what they wanted, and thus came back to find a new way. But they didn’t discuss it or the role they might play in the world – they KNEW what they wanted, when they wanted it, and the quickest route to it lay in a Master’s degree or second bachelor’s degree. They didn’t think of college as an extension of their own selves – they saw it as a hoop or a hurdle and with kids, mortgages, car payments, marriages and careers, no hour was spared in the acquisition of knowledge, and no philosophy was spared. They weren’t agents of questionable Wisdom – they were people out for Survivor – the Real World game. They glided through without making an impression – on their way out the door somewhere else, and fast.
So I’m still accused of being Ageist. I still glare at older men who give me “young whippersnapper” or lecture me about young men showing respect to older folks. Old women who push in front of me in line are pushed right back out of line, or a sharp word of, “Show some respect, lady” can completely shock a 60-year old woman.
The reality is, many people, young or old, believe that due to an arbitrary number of times they have traveled around the sun, their worth has somehow increased. Mark taught me that the increase of worth only comes from knowing you CAN increase it – and taking the necessary steps to do so. Those who talk as much as possible of their worthiness, in the gospel according to Mark, are often the most deficient – and also the ones who spend most of their time trying to convince others to purchase it.
Last year I dated a woman who was 42 for three weeks. We had a marvelous time, enjoying dinner, movies, walks in the park, and yes, even makeout sessions. One of my friends asked me how the hell I could make out with a woman old enough to be my mother, and I replied, “I’m not making out with a woman old enough to be my mother. I’m making out with a woman old enough to be my lover.” (Which was later realized to be an indeterminate age between 18 and 45 – exactly the average age range on most Internet personal ad search engines.)
We broke up not because of her age or mine (26 at the time) but because we realized one day that we’d fallen into the cycle of teacher and student…and suddenly for both of us, it was no longer a journey of discovery, but a hand-holding of sorts through unexplored ground (for me) and well-mapped lands (for her). Nothing was new, and it became excruciatingly obvious to both of us. My next girlfriend was more in my range – an aged crone (in terms of life experience) of 23. One of these times I’ll get lucky and find someone right at the same crossroads I’m at, and perhaps we’ll figure out how to get down the road together.
I know that some day I’ll look back upon this chapter in my life and think of how damn cheeky I was; how full of myself; how confident that I knew the biggest problem of the generation gaps. Crossing those generation gaps takes work – work most people aren’t willing to make, but demand others take the energy to perform. It’s selfish; it’s unreasonable – it’s human nature.
In the meantime, I will always refuse, politely, but firmly, to teach anyone over the age of 55 the spatial relationships between a mouse pointer – and the mouse itself.
In the sweetest words of Louis B. Armstrong, “You gotta ask, you ain’t never gonna know.”
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
GRORWL GROWL GRRRRRRRRRRRR STUPID INTERNET EXPLORER EAT LONG POST SPENT HOUR WORKING ON DIE DIE DIE MORON WHO DESIGNED INTERFACE ALL WILL PERISH UNDER MY CURSES OF EVIL.
Ahem. May the fool who thought, "Close group" as a command in IE XP would be a good thing find themselves strapped to a table with ferrets shoved down their pants to prove his manhood.
That is, unless they like that sort of thing.
I hear multimillionares get bored some weeknights.
In which case I hope your stock portfolio tanks. That is all.
Ahem. May the fool who thought, "Close group" as a command in IE XP would be a good thing find themselves strapped to a table with ferrets shoved down their pants to prove his manhood.
That is, unless they like that sort of thing.
I hear multimillionares get bored some weeknights.
In which case I hope your stock portfolio tanks. That is all.
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
National Dean in 2004 Meetup Day -- Join other Dean Supporters near Seattle, WA
My Goal for the Night - To make it to Piecora's Pizza at 1401 E. Madison in Seattle, WA for the 7 PM Dean for America Meetup. Yay.
I am so damn political it's not even funny.
My Goal for the Night - To make it to Piecora's Pizza at 1401 E. Madison in Seattle, WA for the 7 PM Dean for America Meetup. Yay.
I am so damn political it's not even funny.
Monday, September 01, 2003
Cat My Cat's Breath Smells Like (Wet) Cat Food
The cat is one persistent Son-Of-A-Female-Cat-That-Was-Improperly-Neutered-And-Thus-Spewed-Forth-A-Rain-of-Kittens. He now has EIGHT, count'em EIGHT boxes of wet cat food.
I have lost the argument.
I am officially NOT the Master of the relationship.
I am the big warm hairless ape that brings food.
So nice to know your place for once.
The cat is one persistent Son-Of-A-Female-Cat-That-Was-Improperly-Neutered-And-Thus-Spewed-Forth-A-Rain-of-Kittens. He now has EIGHT, count'em EIGHT boxes of wet cat food.
I have lost the argument.
I am officially NOT the Master of the relationship.
I am the big warm hairless ape that brings food.
So nice to know your place for once.
WE MUST DISSENT.
I have been playing a game by Microsoft called Freelancer. For those of you unfamiliar in the gaming world, Freelancer was sparked by Starlancer and Escape Override – starship games where you take the role of an intergalactic trader and start heading through the Sirius sector, out to make your way in the world. Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, as it were – and maybe you’ll get rich.
It appeals to me. I like games like The Sims and Pharaoh – where you act as the omnipotent presence and direct your people’s lives – in Pharaoh, to where they live, play, and fight to defend the ancient cities of the gods; in the Sims, to when they sleep, bathe, go to work, get up, call in sick, and dance. Each comes with add-ons to continue the game until you’ve spent more than twenty-four hours playing, and it’s very easy to get sucked in, playing in an electronic world generated by vertical lines and pixels interacting with your eyes.
Freelancer, though, is different. You begin as an out-and-out down on your luck mercenary who gets picked up for a small government contracting job by the nation-state of Liberty. Pretty soon, though, you find that the same government desires a small item in your possession – and has changed all the rules to accommodate its own needs. It invades systems to procure more resources. It sparks fights with “Old World” nation-states and labels people fighting to end corruption in monarchistic regimes as terrorists. Soon, you’re on the run. You’re scrapping and taking anything on you possibly can – because oddly enough for you, you’ve found out there’s an alien presence slowly taking over the world’s leaders. And it’s up to you and a small, handpicked group to make sure mankind doesn’t blow itself to bits under their influence.
Don’t believe me? Think this is just some political statement, one of many that come through this particular pipeline? T for Teen, $29.99 at Best Buy. Runs best on a PC workstation with at least a Nvidia Game Card, and came out in 2002.
How were we to know games mirror reality so well?
Two days after 9/11/01, I ran a search. Sure enough, in the Microsoft Flight Simulator, you could pilot a 747 past civil defenses in the United States into a skyscraper. Obviously, in the simulator, this is a bad thing, but the kick of it is, you were able to fly as a 747 pilot with similar controls. And yes – to confirm this, I found plenty of pictures showing precisely how it could be done.
Oh, it’s not what people might think. The 747 was a modification made to the game later so people could have an idea of what it was like to fly these big unwieldy aircraft. Aside from the fact that in 1969 Boeing’s test pilots made the aircraft do a barrel roll for its demonstration (and is still the ONLY passenger aircraft that can perform that maneuver), the Flight Simulator is still one of the most popular franchises for MicroSoft. And it’s a quality program. Realism has been corroborated with former pilots, military and civilian. From the MiG fighter jets to the F-16 Raptors and Cessnas, the Flight Simulator shows precisely what happens from takeoff, to landing – and even when crashing.
But the newest finger-pointing (or oldest, as far as blaming outside influences on children for society’s accelerated demise) masquerading as good moral character and influence on America’s youth states, simply, that by playing a video game, impressionable people, such as teenagers, are inable to distinguish between the polygons on a screen and an actual human being. Their minds, the argument goes, are warped by playing violent videogames, games that show us anger, senseless violence, and domination.
Freelancer sticks with me because I find it curious that such a game exists – and even more curious that while Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City is a game abhorred by parents, psychologists, cheap-suited talkshow hosts and self-appointed Morality Police…”America’s Army”, a game developed by the U.S. Army as a recruitment tool, and one that encourages its players to become lethal combatant, snipers, and strategic, methodical killers…stays quietly under the radar.
Perhaps Freelancer, being in the realm of “science fiction”, does not apply to the “violent” category, whereas a game in which you play a drug dealer out for vengeance, with every painful underside of human existence exposed and raw, upon the table, is simply too much for the soft-palated American society to handle.
Or is it? We seem to be quite good at finding small things to scream about as the primary source of decay in our society – from MTV down to subversive “cultures” corrupting our children – without looking at the broader picture of our world’s stage. Perhaps we should.
Perhaps it is not without a sense of irony that children who grew up in urban Washington D.C. and Los Angeles laugh about the impression violent video games have upon America’s youth – when children not above the age of 12 were dealing crack cocaine two blocks from where the nation’s leaders forged new legislation to improve America’s drug and crime problems.
Perhaps it is not a mocking laugh that casts itself from the cells of the gunmen who shoot innocent schoolchildren, nor a dark, ugly snigger as zealots of the High Altar of Morality blame videogame makers for showing blood spraying from exit wounds, and the ability to snipe at one’s enemies – without blaming those who would fail to properly keep a gun out of the hands of a convicted felon or emotionally troubled person.
Perhaps it is not the shrieks of shameful agony that burn through the eardrums as a mother hears her son or daughter has shredded themselves in a crowded marketplace, killing indiscriminately, convinced only that God has granted them the ability to wreak dire vengeance upon those who have wronged them.
Perhaps it is a bitten lip as a father receives his son’s remains, with only the words, “He died serving his country” – not in combat, but in “peacekeeping” an area where more men and women have been systematically slaughtered not for the color of their skin or the religion or their creed – but because the nation they serve dare not lose face in the eyes of the world – and the red, white and blue flag they wear stains them with the blood-red of a target for their killers – ordinary, soft-spoken people for whom death is not such a curse, but more a blessing.
Perhaps it is not fair to blame these things on a moral code, nor to lay the finger upon a shoulder. Nor, perhaps, is it fair to want to rip the tongues out of those who would stifle, shame, berate and curse us for speaking our minds. Perhaps we should not think evil of those who would tell the world what we do now, in this year, in this time, is wrong – and for those who say our decisions have been WRONG since the inception of our much-vaunted Department of Homeland Security, our USA Patriot Act, or the decision to link Iraq and al-Qaeda together to form a world-changing strategy to protect “American interests”.
I think of these things tonight, and I write them and send them to you because I can. I can say these things, and play my video games, and think of what freedoms others may not enjoy. I may play the role of a psychopathic serial killer dressed as a clown or a kleptomaniac spiderman, a starship pilot destroying alien races for their fuel rods, or I might take upon myself the role of a gaijin-slaughtering daimyo – not once believing that perhaps I should delete all evidence that I have played these games from my hard drive, or run a magnet, or send this through an anonymizer in the event it is intercepted. I may stand on a street corner and paint my car with political slogans, demanding an exact accounting of our government and swearing to fight its injustices until they are corrected. I may write my politicians and swear to never send those who fight for us to battle in an unjust war fought for political dominance and energy resources.
I may do these things – the thinking, and the sending - because I am an American, and that is not only my right, but my duty.
WE MUST DISSENT. It is our right. It is what won us the right to the forty-hour work week. It is what allowed children to attend school until the age of 18 without worry of finding work for their family. It prevented child slavery, racial slavery, taxation without representation. The right of women to vote.
WE MUST DISSENT. Dissent gave us the civil rights afforded to all men and women, regardless of color, religion, creed, gender or sexuality. Dissent gave us zoning laws and prevented the deaths of millions who may have been sent to their rotting graves in the jungles of Vietnam. Dissent gave us the right to choose our own elected officials – and to change those officials when we deem it necessary to do so. DISSENT gives us the right to an attorney, regardless of our poverty. DISSENT is powerful – and a powerful tool, at that.
YOU MAY NOT SAY DISSENT IS DEAD. You may not tell me, EVER! You may not say, "I wish those people would just accept the government's decision, because they're the government, and they must know more than we do." WE MUST NEVER BELIEVE THAT. Stupidity and arrogance never are erased with a suit and a tie. The smartest men in the 1950s helped grow South Africa into one of the most brutally repressive societies. Racism and arrogance do not die with a college degree - honorary, conferred or otherwise.
YOU MAY NOT TELL ME to shut up or get out of the country. If you want to live in a nation where only one opinion is permitted, please, by all means, move to Cuba, and enjoy the warm, sunny climate.
Please, by all means, move to North Korea, and find new opportunities as a nuclear reactor chamber cleaner.
Please, by all means, find yourself a job in Myanmar, where the killing fields are still fresh in the minds of the people.
YOU MAY NOT EXPECT ME TO LAUGH AT YOUR FOOLISH, TRITE, CHILDISH JOKES that mock people for speaking their minds. You may not say, "The only good liberal is a dead liberal" and expect me to react in any other way than to pity you for your lack of wisdom, class, or grace - or to even understand the underlying values of the society in which you live. This, of course, is your right - to be ugly, petty, mean-spirited and childishly petulant with your politics and your defense of "our way of life" - but in my heart I WILL DISSENT - while upon my lips and upon my fingertips, I shall remain wordlessly, tight-lippedly polite.
For today is the day of DISSENT.
Today is Labor Day, and for many of us, it means only a day when we lay down our tools, our pens, our computer keyboards, our aprons and our brooms. It means barbecues and back-to-school, and bright yellow buses and new crayons, fresh paint and newly-shined shoes. Some may barbecue ribs, and eat corn on the cob, fresh with butter, ripe peaches glowing fuzzy orange in a red-and-white striped bowl. We will eat the potato salad we glop from cold ceramic bowl to plate, with pickles or onions, held with egg and mayonnaise. And afterwards we will have our apple pie and our homemade white vanilla ice cream – and not think about what this Day means. Why it is a holiday - for which this country sets this day aside from our labors.
Dissent brought us labor day. President Grover Cleveland, in 1894, tried unsuccessfully to put down a labor strike at the Pullman factory in Cleveland. The strikers were demanding pay equal to their skill – and an eight-hour workday, with Saturdays off. The company was, simply, using all the labor they could and paying as little as possible to their workers to make more profits. Matthew McGuire, an Irish machinist, organized a 20,000-strong march through Chicago. Cleveland signed a labor law, but lost his re-election anyway. Not three years later the Spanish-American War would blossom, wiping labor and economy issues from the nation’s mind until the Great War – and the inequalities would continue to flourish.
is now a nasty, awful word. It is the drunk’s 12-note fart in the opera house and the small child’s screech during the Holy Sacrament. It is gauche, foul, and utterly bohemian to protest. To disagree. For those who live and breathe academia this “agree to disagree” – that is, to quietly have a different point of view, but not to broach the mainstream with one’s ideas or evidence – this is not a foreign concept. For mass media is for the war (what war? Any war – just as Randolph Hearst told his photographers, “You provide the pictures – I’ll provide the war. And we’ll sell more newspapers than ever”) because of the grand stream of revenue it pours in. And for every person who buys a “NO WAR” sticker, twenty more buy a “PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN” sticker and purchase Chinese-stitched flags.
DISSENT is something the Chinese government knows all too well. For Christians who dissent in China, there are few options for work or for living – both are often taken away without recourse. DISSENT is foreign to our administration – nobody wants to say no to the man with the blue suit and the red tie. DISSENT is not something over one million people conducted on the steps of the Washington Memorial in 1963 – it was a “peaceful rally to encourage the passage of racial desegregation.”
So today, this Labor day, I ask you to think of your dissent. What you would fight to prevent. What you would stand upon a box in a park and scream aloud to the world to tell everyone, “HERE! HERE IS SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NEVER BE! HERE IS THE STRENGTH OF MY CONVICTION, TO BE TESTED ALWAYS, TO FALTER NEVER! HERE IS ATROCITY, HERE IS VICE! HERE IS PRIDE! HERE IS GREED! HERE IS MENDACITY! HERE IS GLUTTONY! HERE IS MURDER AND here is hate…”
For this labor day I will dissent. I will dissent from people who attempt to kill my countrymen – whichever language they speak or whether they have the power of elections behind them. I will dissent from those whose policies kill, rather than protect. I will dissent from the people who have turned our nation from a nation out to build ourselves into something noble and great - to one fighting to hold onto the things we do not need, nor want, nor deserve.
I will not be the man who says, “They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up for me.”
Our nation was founded upon dissent. Tomorrow, when you think of the jobs you have had, the scars you bear, the food you set into your mouth, I wish only that you think of these things. The time you have spent. The unfairness you have set right by speaking up. The jury trials you have served upon. The right to public hearings that you expect for yourself and your children. The flurry of spending by a government who borrows and spends without checking the balance in the checkbook to finance a war fought for no other reason than “To dispose a brutal dictator who MIGHT have access to chemical weapons”.
If you think of these things, and you speak up when your right to them is challenged by those in the government, you know how to DISSENT.
And as any founding father (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams) might tell you…
PATRIOTISM –IS- DISSENT.
I have been playing a game by Microsoft called Freelancer. For those of you unfamiliar in the gaming world, Freelancer was sparked by Starlancer and Escape Override – starship games where you take the role of an intergalactic trader and start heading through the Sirius sector, out to make your way in the world. Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, as it were – and maybe you’ll get rich.
It appeals to me. I like games like The Sims and Pharaoh – where you act as the omnipotent presence and direct your people’s lives – in Pharaoh, to where they live, play, and fight to defend the ancient cities of the gods; in the Sims, to when they sleep, bathe, go to work, get up, call in sick, and dance. Each comes with add-ons to continue the game until you’ve spent more than twenty-four hours playing, and it’s very easy to get sucked in, playing in an electronic world generated by vertical lines and pixels interacting with your eyes.
Freelancer, though, is different. You begin as an out-and-out down on your luck mercenary who gets picked up for a small government contracting job by the nation-state of Liberty. Pretty soon, though, you find that the same government desires a small item in your possession – and has changed all the rules to accommodate its own needs. It invades systems to procure more resources. It sparks fights with “Old World” nation-states and labels people fighting to end corruption in monarchistic regimes as terrorists. Soon, you’re on the run. You’re scrapping and taking anything on you possibly can – because oddly enough for you, you’ve found out there’s an alien presence slowly taking over the world’s leaders. And it’s up to you and a small, handpicked group to make sure mankind doesn’t blow itself to bits under their influence.
Don’t believe me? Think this is just some political statement, one of many that come through this particular pipeline? T for Teen, $29.99 at Best Buy. Runs best on a PC workstation with at least a Nvidia Game Card, and came out in 2002.
How were we to know games mirror reality so well?
Two days after 9/11/01, I ran a search. Sure enough, in the Microsoft Flight Simulator, you could pilot a 747 past civil defenses in the United States into a skyscraper. Obviously, in the simulator, this is a bad thing, but the kick of it is, you were able to fly as a 747 pilot with similar controls. And yes – to confirm this, I found plenty of pictures showing precisely how it could be done.
Oh, it’s not what people might think. The 747 was a modification made to the game later so people could have an idea of what it was like to fly these big unwieldy aircraft. Aside from the fact that in 1969 Boeing’s test pilots made the aircraft do a barrel roll for its demonstration (and is still the ONLY passenger aircraft that can perform that maneuver), the Flight Simulator is still one of the most popular franchises for MicroSoft. And it’s a quality program. Realism has been corroborated with former pilots, military and civilian. From the MiG fighter jets to the F-16 Raptors and Cessnas, the Flight Simulator shows precisely what happens from takeoff, to landing – and even when crashing.
But the newest finger-pointing (or oldest, as far as blaming outside influences on children for society’s accelerated demise) masquerading as good moral character and influence on America’s youth states, simply, that by playing a video game, impressionable people, such as teenagers, are inable to distinguish between the polygons on a screen and an actual human being. Their minds, the argument goes, are warped by playing violent videogames, games that show us anger, senseless violence, and domination.
Freelancer sticks with me because I find it curious that such a game exists – and even more curious that while Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City is a game abhorred by parents, psychologists, cheap-suited talkshow hosts and self-appointed Morality Police…”America’s Army”, a game developed by the U.S. Army as a recruitment tool, and one that encourages its players to become lethal combatant, snipers, and strategic, methodical killers…stays quietly under the radar.
Perhaps Freelancer, being in the realm of “science fiction”, does not apply to the “violent” category, whereas a game in which you play a drug dealer out for vengeance, with every painful underside of human existence exposed and raw, upon the table, is simply too much for the soft-palated American society to handle.
Or is it? We seem to be quite good at finding small things to scream about as the primary source of decay in our society – from MTV down to subversive “cultures” corrupting our children – without looking at the broader picture of our world’s stage. Perhaps we should.
Perhaps it is not without a sense of irony that children who grew up in urban Washington D.C. and Los Angeles laugh about the impression violent video games have upon America’s youth – when children not above the age of 12 were dealing crack cocaine two blocks from where the nation’s leaders forged new legislation to improve America’s drug and crime problems.
Perhaps it is not a mocking laugh that casts itself from the cells of the gunmen who shoot innocent schoolchildren, nor a dark, ugly snigger as zealots of the High Altar of Morality blame videogame makers for showing blood spraying from exit wounds, and the ability to snipe at one’s enemies – without blaming those who would fail to properly keep a gun out of the hands of a convicted felon or emotionally troubled person.
Perhaps it is not the shrieks of shameful agony that burn through the eardrums as a mother hears her son or daughter has shredded themselves in a crowded marketplace, killing indiscriminately, convinced only that God has granted them the ability to wreak dire vengeance upon those who have wronged them.
Perhaps it is a bitten lip as a father receives his son’s remains, with only the words, “He died serving his country” – not in combat, but in “peacekeeping” an area where more men and women have been systematically slaughtered not for the color of their skin or the religion or their creed – but because the nation they serve dare not lose face in the eyes of the world – and the red, white and blue flag they wear stains them with the blood-red of a target for their killers – ordinary, soft-spoken people for whom death is not such a curse, but more a blessing.
Perhaps it is not fair to blame these things on a moral code, nor to lay the finger upon a shoulder. Nor, perhaps, is it fair to want to rip the tongues out of those who would stifle, shame, berate and curse us for speaking our minds. Perhaps we should not think evil of those who would tell the world what we do now, in this year, in this time, is wrong – and for those who say our decisions have been WRONG since the inception of our much-vaunted Department of Homeland Security, our USA Patriot Act, or the decision to link Iraq and al-Qaeda together to form a world-changing strategy to protect “American interests”.
I think of these things tonight, and I write them and send them to you because I can. I can say these things, and play my video games, and think of what freedoms others may not enjoy. I may play the role of a psychopathic serial killer dressed as a clown or a kleptomaniac spiderman, a starship pilot destroying alien races for their fuel rods, or I might take upon myself the role of a gaijin-slaughtering daimyo – not once believing that perhaps I should delete all evidence that I have played these games from my hard drive, or run a magnet, or send this through an anonymizer in the event it is intercepted. I may stand on a street corner and paint my car with political slogans, demanding an exact accounting of our government and swearing to fight its injustices until they are corrected. I may write my politicians and swear to never send those who fight for us to battle in an unjust war fought for political dominance and energy resources.
I may do these things – the thinking, and the sending - because I am an American, and that is not only my right, but my duty.
WE MUST DISSENT. It is our right. It is what won us the right to the forty-hour work week. It is what allowed children to attend school until the age of 18 without worry of finding work for their family. It prevented child slavery, racial slavery, taxation without representation. The right of women to vote.
WE MUST DISSENT. Dissent gave us the civil rights afforded to all men and women, regardless of color, religion, creed, gender or sexuality. Dissent gave us zoning laws and prevented the deaths of millions who may have been sent to their rotting graves in the jungles of Vietnam. Dissent gave us the right to choose our own elected officials – and to change those officials when we deem it necessary to do so. DISSENT gives us the right to an attorney, regardless of our poverty. DISSENT is powerful – and a powerful tool, at that.
YOU MAY NOT SAY DISSENT IS DEAD. You may not tell me, EVER! You may not say, "I wish those people would just accept the government's decision, because they're the government, and they must know more than we do." WE MUST NEVER BELIEVE THAT. Stupidity and arrogance never are erased with a suit and a tie. The smartest men in the 1950s helped grow South Africa into one of the most brutally repressive societies. Racism and arrogance do not die with a college degree - honorary, conferred or otherwise.
YOU MAY NOT TELL ME to shut up or get out of the country. If you want to live in a nation where only one opinion is permitted, please, by all means, move to Cuba, and enjoy the warm, sunny climate.
Please, by all means, move to North Korea, and find new opportunities as a nuclear reactor chamber cleaner.
Please, by all means, find yourself a job in Myanmar, where the killing fields are still fresh in the minds of the people.
YOU MAY NOT EXPECT ME TO LAUGH AT YOUR FOOLISH, TRITE, CHILDISH JOKES that mock people for speaking their minds. You may not say, "The only good liberal is a dead liberal" and expect me to react in any other way than to pity you for your lack of wisdom, class, or grace - or to even understand the underlying values of the society in which you live. This, of course, is your right - to be ugly, petty, mean-spirited and childishly petulant with your politics and your defense of "our way of life" - but in my heart I WILL DISSENT - while upon my lips and upon my fingertips, I shall remain wordlessly, tight-lippedly polite.
For today is the day of DISSENT.
Today is Labor Day, and for many of us, it means only a day when we lay down our tools, our pens, our computer keyboards, our aprons and our brooms. It means barbecues and back-to-school, and bright yellow buses and new crayons, fresh paint and newly-shined shoes. Some may barbecue ribs, and eat corn on the cob, fresh with butter, ripe peaches glowing fuzzy orange in a red-and-white striped bowl. We will eat the potato salad we glop from cold ceramic bowl to plate, with pickles or onions, held with egg and mayonnaise. And afterwards we will have our apple pie and our homemade white vanilla ice cream – and not think about what this Day means. Why it is a holiday - for which this country sets this day aside from our labors.
Dissent brought us labor day. President Grover Cleveland, in 1894, tried unsuccessfully to put down a labor strike at the Pullman factory in Cleveland. The strikers were demanding pay equal to their skill – and an eight-hour workday, with Saturdays off. The company was, simply, using all the labor they could and paying as little as possible to their workers to make more profits. Matthew McGuire, an Irish machinist, organized a 20,000-strong march through Chicago. Cleveland signed a labor law, but lost his re-election anyway. Not three years later the Spanish-American War would blossom, wiping labor and economy issues from the nation’s mind until the Great War – and the inequalities would continue to flourish.
is now a nasty, awful word. It is the drunk’s 12-note fart in the opera house and the small child’s screech during the Holy Sacrament. It is gauche, foul, and utterly bohemian to protest. To disagree. For those who live and breathe academia this “agree to disagree” – that is, to quietly have a different point of view, but not to broach the mainstream with one’s ideas or evidence – this is not a foreign concept. For mass media is for the war (what war? Any war – just as Randolph Hearst told his photographers, “You provide the pictures – I’ll provide the war. And we’ll sell more newspapers than ever”) because of the grand stream of revenue it pours in. And for every person who buys a “NO WAR” sticker, twenty more buy a “PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN” sticker and purchase Chinese-stitched flags.
DISSENT is something the Chinese government knows all too well. For Christians who dissent in China, there are few options for work or for living – both are often taken away without recourse. DISSENT is foreign to our administration – nobody wants to say no to the man with the blue suit and the red tie. DISSENT is not something over one million people conducted on the steps of the Washington Memorial in 1963 – it was a “peaceful rally to encourage the passage of racial desegregation.”
So today, this Labor day, I ask you to think of your dissent. What you would fight to prevent. What you would stand upon a box in a park and scream aloud to the world to tell everyone, “HERE! HERE IS SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NEVER BE! HERE IS THE STRENGTH OF MY CONVICTION, TO BE TESTED ALWAYS, TO FALTER NEVER! HERE IS ATROCITY, HERE IS VICE! HERE IS PRIDE! HERE IS GREED! HERE IS MENDACITY! HERE IS GLUTTONY! HERE IS MURDER AND here is hate…”
For this labor day I will dissent. I will dissent from people who attempt to kill my countrymen – whichever language they speak or whether they have the power of elections behind them. I will dissent from those whose policies kill, rather than protect. I will dissent from the people who have turned our nation from a nation out to build ourselves into something noble and great - to one fighting to hold onto the things we do not need, nor want, nor deserve.
I will not be the man who says, “They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up for me.”
Our nation was founded upon dissent. Tomorrow, when you think of the jobs you have had, the scars you bear, the food you set into your mouth, I wish only that you think of these things. The time you have spent. The unfairness you have set right by speaking up. The jury trials you have served upon. The right to public hearings that you expect for yourself and your children. The flurry of spending by a government who borrows and spends without checking the balance in the checkbook to finance a war fought for no other reason than “To dispose a brutal dictator who MIGHT have access to chemical weapons”.
If you think of these things, and you speak up when your right to them is challenged by those in the government, you know how to DISSENT.
And as any founding father (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams) might tell you…
PATRIOTISM –IS- DISSENT.
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