New Frames

Looking through the glass of myself will I ever be able to see you? Or value you? Or validate your right to be/exist/love/live as I wish to? How do we get to the point to which this is impossible? How do we get away from that point? Is this based in language? This ability to distinguish me from you in agreed upon words that form the frames through which I see and process what I see this you I somehow need to categorize?

How do YOU become my OTHER?

How do I become yours?

Are racism sexism and homophobia truly as "old as time" as some argue or are they more like a dead language resurrected when it serves purpose, a chiefly economic purpose, a way of ensuring my right to have more than you or to be and feel differentiated?

What would that mean to you then, if you were the one differentiated?
If you aren't following MY script, what words will you use then? Those I place in your mouth?
Or those you choke down, spit out and formulate from rage, sorrow and fear?

When did I learn to hate and fear you?

When did I learn to need to create a box to put you in?

Where does this mental file cabinet come from and who built it and how,
HOW do we dismantle it? This your issue my issue their issue way of relating is so
suffocating? How does yours become mine and should it ever? Do we even want that?
Is such a synthesis something to aspire to? What is lost to it?

How do you topple the systemic vocabulary of tyranny that is nurtured constantly in so
many minds, without becoming it? Without betraying the taste? Without giving in giving out or giving up power? Can't we have power without needing or having to wield it over another something or someone? Must we wear each other like an armband or experience one another only in the frames of ideology and idealism? The words swell the tongue and starve the mind.
I need a new vocabulary. The words I build with this one are simply sandcastles that wave after wave crash straight through. I want a new way of seeing. A new frame. A new way of speaking that privileges listening over the INSISTENCE of being heard. My prayers are spoken in this muted voice of wish want and wonder. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY can't this be easier? Why can't it be a given? Understood? Where were you lost in this translation of lovingly human equally deserving of life and love? Where was I lost in the definition of word scribbled upon the shadow of a drying ink stain mentality?

When did the hood slip over my eyes as the money slipped from my hand into the envelope that licked you, case closed? When did my hands grow used to dropping open in helplessness or clenching fingers into fist shrouded by shouts of just how willing I am to hate you, to hurt you, to forget you, to torture and even kill you if needbe? How did you come to see me only as an oppressor by virtue of my country or the actions of my government or the reaction of yours?

How do we erase outmoded words that by mere utterance, hurt? How do we begin anew? In this world that honors the narrowest of vision, the narrowness of heart and the shortest stitch of memory...how do we cut from our hands that which keeps us from reaching for one another touching one another and holding one another as human beings? Please tell me how to remove these stifling words from my mind, that choke, silence and blind.

The perfect drug?

Is religion the perfect drug? I'm sure most people are aware of or have opinions on or have at least heard that famous Marx quote of religion being an opiate of the people. I'm wondering though that if you could make a purely intellectual argument on the issue of religion and what it does to or for human beings as a drug? How has religion been used as a tool to manipulate the consciousness of masses of people? How has it been used by people to manipulate each other?
How has it been used in struggles of liberation? Does religion have a sort of stimulant or calming power over the mind? How has religion been used to both create and build community and also isolate groups of people and even kill?

Perhaps we'd need to expand the word religion into not only the theological/moral/spirituality realms of which people generally associate with the word and look at various "cults" such as the cult of advertising, the cult of beauty, the cult of propaganda, the cult of capitalism and various political-ideological cults (evidenced by nationalism and State worship) that serve as a sort of religiousity for people in ways that perhaps specific theologies don't. I said cult of capitalism didn't I? Well is there such a thing? Do people really worship money? Or perhaps is it by the very function of living in a capitalist system, one of the sole means by which a person can "transcend" the reality of their lives? I think the key is examining how religion (again, beyond the scope of particular theologies) becomes a sort of opiate, a sort of perfect drug that keeps people either docile and content in the illusions of freedoms and opportunities or angry and on edge. What IS IT that dulls our capacity for critical thought? What nurtures it? There are certainly benefits from belonging that religion offers but is it something that we inheirently want or is it something truly socially constructed and designed to serve varying purposes in a given society? Can you have community without an imposed religiousity of some sort? I'm not trying to say that religion is a drug only to raise the question of the function it serves in both the individual sense but also (and most importantly to my mind) in the larger structures of power.
I'd like to really engage this issue in a non-threatening manner so if you do respond, please don't do so out of the desire to simply attack me. Thanks.

To witness

What does it mean to witness
something or someone
a birth
a death
a thousand deaths
countless "acts of"

genocide rape and war crimes

Does this make you some sort of guardian angel
or does it mean you're a voyeur
standing staring unable to touch intervene or look away

Does it mean you live in a world without punctuation
where time is split into shards of memory
here a scar
there a still open wound
here a grave
this one for him
that one for you

They want classifications determinations and explanations
They need to know just how many and how much
before that great dinosaur will move
spread itself too thin you see
on the edge, dear, of extinction
they said it was sleeping
and some catastrophe woke it up
but really this is code for planning
hibernating perhaps
but planning the next big show

I'm so sorry
If I let go of your hand
I couldn't say that it was only because my fingers slipped
To be honest, I've been staring too long
from the edge of myself
A bit concerned over when my time will come
and who will be there for me
when the gloves come off
and the dinosaur reveals itself for what it always was

Initiate the Other

Into myself
into me
but what does that mean
To separate
is to distance. How exactly
do I measure this box to box
to fit in box check box marked
OTHER?

The boundary feels so
arbitrary
like a cut that doesn’t heal smoothly
that leaves the itch of angry skin
as a reminder
that no matter how I move
it doesn't quite move
with me.

Skin of sentences
flesh of you

if I peeled off all of the labels I wear
I could draw such an image
but would you see me
there
beneath the veil and gag of bumper magnet bumper sticker
flag and fist pornography of the how quickly hate sells philosophy
in the lines on faces drawn in on themselves
the voice gone
from years spent choking down screams

if I removed
scraped
cut
excised
and laser burned
all the words used to describe define and categorize me
to differentiate me
to alienate me

if I finally broke from the weight of it
and handed it all back to you
free of my heart
free of my hands and my head
free of you

if I laid all of these words at your feet
What would you do?

How then would you define me?

How then will I define you?

Reclaiming Human Rights?

The Washington Post offers an interesting challenge to the State department memo insisting that the hallmark of the U.S. foreign policy will be "upholding human rights." As Glenn Kessler (from the post) points out, this does not address the violations caused by "the support of nations with less-than-stellar records on democracy" or the "credibility issue" of the use of outsourcing torture or prison abuse. I wonder though if the bigger issue isn't what the administration touts as crowning achievements in human rights but that they are so very capable of co-opting the rhetoric and posturing of advancing human rights while simultaneously violating them? Is this a sort of Vietnam syndrome in which a U.S. soldier commented (infamously) that they had to destroy a village in order to save it? How does a nation advance human rights by increasing arms trades, increasing weapons manufacturing, increasing debt, underfunding and undermining social programs (here and abroad), waging pre-emptive war (and thus setting one HELL of a precedent), "detaining" indefinately possible terror suspects and sanctioning, bombing and working countless other human beings to death? How does that promote human rights? How does that add up to a viable humanistic diplomacy?

Will the UN be the space in which a universal vision of human rights is realized? Is this possible given the ability of those with the most military, economic and political power to manipulate, use and abuse the rhetoric of human rights in actions that seem anything but humane? What needs to change to reconcile these two "visions" of what human rights means and how "upholding" human rights is accomplished?

Human rights and the "right to die"

I have been pondering this issue for awhile, particularly given the extensive media focus on Terry Schiavo. I work on an oncology (cancer) ward and have for six years now. Tonight I asked my co-workers what they thought of the whole "right to die" issue and they were pretty mixed on it as well. The framing of this as a "right to die" or "right to live" issue bothers me personally because as others have argued, I think that it is an entirely personal choice and NOT one to be legislated yet alone taken to a "presidential" level. The question to me, is why this case? Why this family? When does one life and one circumstance merit media attention when countless lives go unreported, unconsidered and without remark? Why is it that the media can put out videos which cause passionate debates over a right to live or die while simultaneously censoring news footage of what "smart bombs" are doing on a daily basis or how many "prisoners/detainees" are dying in custody?

I find it more frustrating to think about how this woman's life is being exploited as a politically expediant morality issue. That said, I feel for her family. I've watched many familes (my own included) grapple with the issues of intubation and of when to "pull the plug." To me, this ties in perfectly with the relationship between politics and the quality of medical care, especially how you are (or can be) defined as a human being, by illness, by politics, by life and by death. I can easily list "issues" that are near and dear to my heart such as the treatment of persons living and coping with AIDS (a single example) or those being tortured and held indefinately as potential threats, but I would like to find a way or see a day in which people are less "issues" upon and through which political games are played.

II.
The cases that make the news are rarely the success stories. More often than not they are the horror stories. I had always thought that once you "pulled the plug" on a ventilated patient or removed their feeding tube they simply died. This is not the case for most people. Some nurses will tell you that to do so means that a person "starves to death" or "drowns" in the fluid in their lungs. They also explain that they will do everything in allowed by law (and their own ethics) to help a person die as painlessly as possible. I have watched nurses refuse to administer morphine (asking another nurse to do it) if they thought it might speed up a person's death because it went against their personal beliefs.

I just wanted to throw out a side I don't think the news is really putting out there. Hospice is not just some throw away space where people go to die alone. Much hospice work is done in the person's home or they can be admitted to a hospice care facility as well. The spectacle surrounded Terry's life and her death really feeds off people's fear: RIGHT to LIFE/RIGHT to DIE as if there were no other questions or points to consider. There are always other points to consider. For example, the book I am reading right now, And the band played on, addresses the early stages of AIDS when political expediency and "morality" fueled a crisis which went underfunded, unresearched and in some cases, welcomed as a "gay plague." This to me begs the question, when does a person become less a person because of a disease or an illness or for that matter a socially constructed category of difference? Likewise, when does a person become relevant enough to become the face or "heart" if you will, of a cause? My "understanding" of the AIDS crisis came from Ryan White's battle with the school system, NOT with Rock Hudson. How many people died before Ryan White's face hit my television screen and woke me up out of my little world? How many lives are lost to AIDS minute by minute while political expediancy and those screaming "morality" tie up funding for research AND programs that are not abstinance-only based? Why are these questions not being asked and hotly debated? I wish they were.

Love This!

As reader of this blog is well aware, I love comics. Alternet ran a great piece today called "The Case for Comics." Here's an excerpt. Do check it out for the rest of the story and some snippets from the comics themselves. peace!

The Case for Comics
By Kristian Williams, Columbia Journalism ReviewPosted on March 17, 2005, Printed on March 17, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21520/

It has been nearly 20 years since comics could safely be dismissed as kids’ stuff. In 1986 three books changed the way Americans saw the medium. Two of them — Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns — brought a sense of gloomy realism to the superhero genre. The third, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, used cartoon conventions to tell of his father’s experience in the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Magazines were suddenly full of stories about comics “growing up,” and the term “graphic novel” entered the literary lexicon.
Somehow “graphic journalism” didn’t make the headlines. But since the renaissance of the mid-'80s, more and more writers and artists have been producing serious nonfiction comics about current events, from war crimes to hip hop. In the mid-1990s, Joe Sacco’s two books on Palestine were hailed as groundbreaking works and made Sacco the best known of the new graphic journalists. Now comics, or graphic, journalism is turning up in daily newspapers, where its inherent subjectivity contrasts sharply with the newsroom’s dispassionate prose — another round in the debate over what journalism should be in the 21st century.

Dancing on the shattered glass of the peripheral

So I had a discussion this weekend about why some people might choose to see art and politics as seperate spheres and this has been bugging me. What does that mean for someone who considers themselves a political poet? How does that coincide with people who maintain this view that all language is political therefore all poetry is political and what art isn't political in some way?

Sometimes, the logic of people's arguments feels more like glass slowly shattering. You can't move for the fact that you're weary of being cut.
So you stay still but even this is tiring. Lack of movement. Lack of thought.
And things get pushed to the periphery because everyone has causitis and everyone's causes have to vye for the myopic attention of everyone else's causes.

A fractal existence if you please.

A woman just walked by me carrying the most beautiful baby as if he were a burden. How can you read that just from looking at someone? Well, she held in him on her hip as if he were some sort of appendage, like one hell of a heavy coat or box or something. I think we rarely realize how we appear to others. I'm sure I seem quite scattered to people. Sometimes quite too serious.
Sometimes the air and the heaviness of your thoughts can feel so heavy.
When do we become burdens to ourselves and to one another? When do we move from out of whatever paling virture lies in being human to an existence that feels at times so very empty?

peace!

Violence

When do children "learn" to be violent? Is this all children or just some children? Bullying isn't something specific to one gender, after all. I was picked on my girls as much if not more than boys. Yet today my son came home and waited until dinner to tell us that some damn "teenage" boy had STOPPED HIS CAR and got out and tried to grab him, punching him in the shoulder and back as he ran. My son is ten and fairly small for his age. Still, he couldn't describe the kid or the car and apparently NO ONE on a very busy street felt the need to stop it or to report it even. My son ran from him and made it to school but told the school nurse he "fell." After we began asking him questions about him he became upset and felt we were "making a big deal out of nothing." This kid had apparently been part of a group of kids who'd thrown rocks at my son and another child as they were coming home from school one day.

I can't understand why some kids would choose to target younger children. This kid is clearly doing this. What worries me more though is my son's reaction to it. Denial. Embarrasment. Anger. I'm glad he even told us about it.

I don't know if girls are targeted in this way by other girls. I know that most of the bullying I endured as a child happened right on the school play ground or in the locker room before or after gym. The issue of bullying has made for very disturbing films recently out of Hollywood such as "The United States of Leland" and "Mean Creek" and documentaries such as "Bowling for Columbine." Is it possible that there isn't an easy answer or an easy solution to it? I mean if I catch this kid, will that guarentee my son's safety or that of some other child? Maybe this kid is being beaten at home. Who knows? I wish I knew.
I suppose it doesn't really matter what I know about it. Bullying nations. Bullying politicians. Mass dehumanization. Mass objectivication. Torture. Abuse. Poverty and Privilege. Boys being taught to be "men" in the most NEGATIVE connotations of that word. Tough. "real men." "real men don't do pussy politics," is that it?

Jesus I'm mad. The crazy parental instinct (in most parents anyway) to try and keep your children safe really goes haywire when you find out that someone has hurt them, purposefully and without remorse or consequence. Should this be surprising though? We live in a nation that does this minute by minute to other people. We live in a society that devalues men and women and the earth. Is this a society that lives in mental wall lockers with the dimensions of a television screen and the aptitude of reality t.v. and centuries of "traditional family values" that still perpetuates the bullshit idea that violence against another human being is not only "normal" but part of growing up? To toughen them up. When does it become assault? When does it become domestic violence? When does it become child abuse? WHEN does it become a POLICY of war and torture? You can dislike these lines I'm arguing all you want. I don't know of any parent that likes the idea of seeing their child beaten like that. Still, I know plenty of fathers and mothers who will tell their children to stop crying when they're hurt or will punch them and "wrestle" as a sign of affection, often the only affection they'll get. Where do you begin to unravel this stupid stupid system?

Here in my head...rage within the machine

I've been madly slacking when it comes to blogging on this. Sorry.
For what it's worth, I've actually been reading. Voraciously. So much that the school librarian offered me a box rather than a bag to carry my twenty some-odd books out. I've almost reached my checkout limit.

Cool projects I'm working on right now:
a historiography on the scholarly debate over the history on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

a research paper on the word "Holocaust" and how it could, (should) theoretically speaking, apply to what Israel has done/is doing still to the Palestinian people. If you disagree, please before you send me hate mail galore read the dictionary definition of the word and then go read the WEEKLY human rights violations perpetrated by the state of Israel (funded primarily by America) or read the YEARLY findings by the UN that not only view Sharon & co as "war criminals" but that the very creation of that state VIOLATES international law. I wonder who the real trendsetter in that department would be...hmm...

Anyhow, offshoots of these are going to fuel a zine and a mock wall replica (not even anywhere near the scale of the real thing Israel is attempting to build).

Beyond that, I'm reading (for soc theory) the "Fetishism of Sociology" and for my own curiosity
Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man" and "Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas."

I'm also working on creative/critical applications of "theory" in the form of art and poetry but also music history. I'm a huge fan of "industrial" music or I suppose it's tagged "EBM" music now. I'm currently listening to VNV Nation's FUTUREPERFECT and earlier to the Android Lust song "Unbeliever." Many people wouldn't call this style of music, music but I find the creative, deconstructive, dissonance of it coupled with rampant socio-political critiques quite worth my money. If you'd like to learn more about these two bands go to http://www.industrial-music.com/and http://www.projekt.com. Learn. Expand. Explore.

Listening to this music made me think about why there are some forms of music I find painful to listen to. I cannot stand country music for example. The "twang" of it makes my head hurt and yet I could listen to techno all day. I'm also not a huge fan of rap or hip-hop. I DO enjoy bands such as Rage Against the Machine who have created hybrids of hip-hop and rock. How far do you think Adorno's critique of pop music applies? Do you think there are no truly original artists anymore? Nothing beyond soundbytes and propagandistic advertising?

One of the other reasons I love "industrial" music (what we USED to call it way back when?)
is the way that many of the artists use their music to address political issues way before "the masses" realized these were political issues. Sort of a sci-fi type analysis exists within alot of the music. Sort of a pre-Matrixy merge with the wild art of man in the machine, man ruled by machine, man becoming machine. The whole cyborg fascination but also the murder of man by way of murdering the earth in the addiction to mechanization. To ease. To thoughtlessness at the touch of a button. Some "Industrial" bands used their videos and songs to raise awareness about other issues as well. Skinny Puppy's "Vivi-sect" comes to mind. Also their c.d. "The Greater Wrong of the Right" is well worth buying for anyone worried about the ever increasing hegemony of that one political ideology (value system?).

I thought it would be really cool to have the freedom (as if!) to do a course where you apply critical theory to varying works of art, film and music, specifically examining the "subculture" genres to see the impact of "independent" artists' efforts. I'm sure no one would be letting me do this any time soon but I would LOVE to eventually offer a course on subversive "art" where you encourage students to analyze why some art is labeled subversive and where that line is drawn and by whom. That's really important to consider. By whom.

Everything threatening is either co-opted, shut down or discredited. People are very good at labeling Michael Moore and even Marilyn Manson as "sell-outs" or "corporate whores" and yet I think if you're going to say that you really need to ask yourself to what extent an artist is capable of remaining truly independent of systems of power. If the Busheviks (I found that on some other website and thought it well worth sharing) decided tomorrow to ban all "potentially subversive" music could they? What about those who critique the government with almost every breath and yet their livelihoods and their "artistic freedom" depend upon the capitalist economic system just as much as everyone else's does. Sure they are probably more able to trade their dollars in for euros then most people but I'm curious with the multiple systems all vying for absolute power over "entertainment" (i.e. the "Culture Industry") how autonomous can any artist hope to be or hope to remain? What about the use of art (I'm including everything here from comics to music to those weird urinal sculptures) as a space of protest and dissent? AdBusters ran a great layout using the cut and pasted heads of Michael Moore and Ann Coulter where she said something like "great job, you won the election for us" or something like that. It's in the newest edition. Pick it up for yourself. My friend borrowed my copy or else I'd have it as an exact quote. Anyhow, at what point does that lovely term "freedom of expression" become an economic/socio-political noose by which the powers that be will let you hang yourself. So to speak...


Do something good for yourself: Read. Question Everything. Grow.
In the meantime, consider this:

"Veal meat, that's what we've become, especially the young 'uns." That's what anyone raised by the corporations, fed their version of "fun," "excitement," and above all, "hip," becomes-
pale, docile, and unmuscled, a creature finely attuned to the aesthetics of its own flesh but incapable of standing on its own legs. Your movement beyond the TV box may be restricted, your opportunity to frolic in uncommercialized fields may be nil, but it's OK, being veal: all your life, the corporate stock feeders bring you sugar food and hormone entertainment. Raised to consume, kept soft in the head and belly-
the modern spirit is slaughtered easily."--Leslie Savan, The Village Voice
(From ADBusters, March/April 2005 edition)