Princess v. superhero: a kid rants about gendered toys

Kind of gives me hope that one day we'll all wake up and leave the whole gender thing in the ashtray of history, along with segregated water fountains, internment camps, primogeniture, the whole boatload of mistakes.

The Continuing Holocaust

Corpses at Buchenwald, shortly after liberation.

For better or for worse, Schindler's List occupies a lofty spot in our culture as the film about the Holocaust. When NBC aired the film uninterrupted and nearly unaltered in 1997, it was an unprecedented event, and despite the chaos in which I was watching it, it impacted my sense of humanity. Some 65 million of my fellow Americans are estimated to have viewed it, as well. This is about the same number of human beings, by the way, that were murdered during the war. Only about ten percent of the dead were European Jews.

Chinese civilians being buried
alive by the Japanese in Nanking.

The mass murder of the European Jew, although the most intensively bureaucratic mass murder in history, was only the largest wave in a tsunami of purposeless annihilation. In the course of the war, some 40 to 50 million non-combatants were slaughtered across the world. Hitler's regime alone killed up to 12 million Soviet civilians, 2 million non-Jewish Poles, 500,000 Roma (Gypsies), 275,000 disabled and mentally ill persons, 200,000 Freemasons, 15,000 gay men, and many thousands of Catholic clergy, Jehovah's witnesses, leftists, Communists, etc. The Japanese killed nearly as many Chinese civilians (4-5 million) as the Nazis did the Jews (and often in more horrifying fashion; see the Rape of Nanking). The Americans and British killed tens of thousands of civilians firebombing Dresden and Hamburg, and the Soviets may have killed over a million German civilians in the course of their invasion.

A victim of Truman's decision.
From nucleararmageddon.blogspot.com

And, of course, Harry S Truman personally ordered the deaths of well over two hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This statement is true regardless of one's position on the necessity of this decision.

Schindler's List focuses on a narrow slice of a worldwide conflagration, a conflagration that claimed one out of every forty lives on Earth. And though it clocks in at more than three hours, the film does little to illustrate the scale of destruction of the Shoah, let alone the larger Holocaust. What it does do, it does well, of course. Its hallucinatory violence, its depictions of the pragmatics of a genocidal, antihumanist system, are perhaps unparalleled in film. But it fails to account for its own violence. There is no context to the film, or rather, the context is assumed. It comes off at times as nothing more than a morality play. Yet Schindler, himself, was arguably responsible for as many or more deaths than the number of lives he is credited with saving.

I'd argue that Spielberg's film suffers from the same deficiency as most films about the Jewish experience in the Holocaust: it fails to place this historical violence in relation to the propensity towards violence of the human race as a whole. To consider the campaign against the Jews that occurred under a single regime in a brief blink of human history as exceptional, as motivated by unique and separable factors, as different in kind (rather than degree) from the violence, persecution, dehumanization, and disenfranchisement that continues to this day. . . this just sullies the legacy of the Jews that died such unaccountably senseless deaths. The Holocaust is far too commonly conceived of as an exception; genocides are far too commonly conceived of as distinct from everyday brutality and hatred. A tsunami can kill you, but one can drown in just a few inches of water.

Until human civilization leaves physical force and the confiscation of human liberty in the ashcan of history, the Holocaust will continue. Sometimes it will appear to flicker like a candle; sometimes it will rage across the land. But every murder, every act of violence, every incarceration of a peaceful person, is part and parcel of the same forces which crystallized into the Nazi system. The human race remains badly in need of evolution. Only embracing non-violence as a fundamental human value can save us. We need to recognize that it is our right to live in a peaceful world. We have a right to live in a non-hostile environment.

We need to recognize that all violence is criminal, no matter the colour of law under which it claims its justification.

aphorism # 142

If justice is impossible in this world, and there is no other, you'll just have to do without justice. Don't fret. Comfort yourself in the knowledge that justice is a whore.

-my aphorisms, v. 2.

John Lennon's "God"

God is a concept/ by which we measure our pain/
I'll say it again
GOD is a CONCEPT/ by which we measure/ our pain/ yeah 

 John Lennon was shot dead by a mentally ill person on Monday, December 8, 1980, when I was a little under two years old. The photo at the right, taken about eight hours before his death by Annie Leibovitz, eventually appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. John was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital, near Columbus Circle, having lost 80% of his blood.

John's now-famous song "God" was released ten years earlier, on December 11, 1970, shortly after the catastrophic breakup of the Beatles. Atheists have co-opted the song for their ends, but I'd argue their interpretation is both cynical and prosaic, and, more to the point, masks Lennon's intent. "God" strips the human conception of God down to its naked existence, to the point where it is understood as a function of suffering. This is most definitely in contrast to the Judaeo-Islamic-Christian concept of "original sin," where human suffering is understood as a function of our intransigence vis a vis God. No; God and man go hand in hand; the creation is reciprocal. Suffering applies to God as much as it does to us.


Apropos or not, my favourite word in the English language is "holophrastic," which can be defined as "expressing a complex idea in a single word." God is not a word that properly applies to an individual, per se. God and the universe are coextensive, and all human attempts to identify, to codify, and to localize God are not only misguided, but actually blasphemous. In my opinion.

 I don't believe in magic/  I don't believe in I-ching. . ./  I don't believe in tarot/  I don't believe in Hitler. . ./  I don't believe in Kennedys/ I don't believe in Buddha. . ./  I don't believe in [Bhagavad] Gita/  I don't believe in Yoga/  I don't believe in kings/  I don't believe in Elvis/  I don't believe in Zimmerman [Bob Dylan]/ I don't believe in Beatles

I just believe in me
Yoko, and me
And that's reality

John's song destroyed God as an instrumentality of faith, and redeemed God as a living conception of the human soul. Once John disclaims the false conceptions of God, he is free to believe in what is naked and alive: his own psychic reality, and that of Yoko's. Their Double Fantasy. A philosopher might argue that this line of thinking descends from Descartes, but I prefer to believe that this understanding is divinely inspired, and that John Lennon found, in his mutual reality with Yoko Ono, an iteration of God's love which transcends all human conceptions of God. If we listen closely, the scriptures warn us against programmatic interpretations of the divine:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
 Job 38:1-2

The story of Jesus's martyrdom is so powerful to so many of us precisely because it is a human quality to sacrifice one's self for an ideal, for the human race as a whole.  This quality is not an aberration; it is the sine qua non of our race. It is what we work towards every day, it is what we measure ourselves against. Nietzsche thought this self-sacrifice weak, of course, but that's just Nietzsche being Nietzsche. The really interesting question, to me. . . what precisely is the relationship between the ideals of the human race and the divinity of God? This question, it seems to me, can only be answered anthropologically, so to speak: through a cross-cultural study of various forms of advanced life "across the universe."

Yeah, I guess I'm a deist.

8 min. documentary about "God"

Buy Nothing

Imagine him without eyes, but just as intense.

I spent the holiday caring for "poultry" at Forever Wild Animal Rehab Center. I learned how to quickly dispatch a mouse for Boondock, a blind burrowing owl kept as a potential foster parent. (He literally has no eyes; the owl on the left is a burrowing owl I found online.) The first time around, I'd tried to just grab the mouse by the tail and whack his head against the wall like I'd seen other volunteers do, but this mouse was tough. He didn't want to die. The outer sheath of his tail came off in my hand, and he started running around the avian center bleeding. God, I felt like an asshole. Darleen showed me how to crush his neck quickly with a pair of forceps.

The moment I'm choosing a mouse out of the cage, though, is the worst. They're all happy in there with their wheel and their mouse chow. I pick whichever one sticks its tail in the air in such a way that I can grab it easily. . .  I just feel like an undeserving arbiter of the fate of this little soul.

I also distributed a lot of chopped collard greens and tomatoes to a lot of ducks and geese. God, how they love tomatoes. Tomatoes, cantelope rinds, and sunflower seeds. That's what these guys like.

I'm just thankful I've got someone to feed this year.

What the hell is SEO?

Well, if SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, then I figure SEO's gotta be the Search for Extraneous Orangutans or something. (LMNO. . .)

Anyway, SEO is merely a sadistic-sounding acronym for "search-engine optimization." (I've posted an uninformed primer on this subject down below.) Journalism-ista Mark Briggs writes about the importance of SEO in his 2010 book Journalism Next as such: "Remember, you have two audiences online: readers and robots."  He goes on to discuss an apparently apocryphal liquid he calls "Google juice," making me think he was either moderately thirsty or exceptionally horny while working on this chapter.

And but so, Briggs's point is just that if you want to get Googled, you have to craft searchable headlines. Think about it. If you didn't know what SEO was (perhaps that's how you got to this page), you'd type in something like "what's SEO?" or maybe just "SEO". If you were looking for "cheap gourmet recipes," you'd type in just that. Your headlines/post titles should reflect this. But crafting searchable headlines is only half the battle: the other half is inticing someone to click on you when you come up in their search results. So add some flavour: "cheap gourmet recipes that totally kick/won't-go-straight-to-your ass." Or some such.

Anyhow, Briggs also talks a good deal about analytics [insert sophomoric pun here]. If you have a Blogger blogg, you can get an idea of what he's talking about by going to STATS on your Dashboard and playing around. You'll get a sense of your traffic sources (i.e., which webpages people are on immediately before they end up on your blog), and you can take a peek at a graph of visits to your site. If you don't want to track your own visits (presumably you're not interested in how interested you are in yourself, although you should be) you can check a box and Google will insert a blocking cookie on your browser.

Slightly more advanced is Google Analytics. Create a free account with them (could you have imagined ten years ago how many "free accounts" you would one day have?), and they'll give you a chunk of inscrutable text which you can insert on your blog's template. (Go to Design, click on the Edit HTML tab (you may want to click on Download Full Template, which will save you a copy of your blog in case you screw up the HTML), open the Find on this Page box on your browser (probably under Edit), type    </head>    into the Find field, go to the space immediately before it, and paste in the chunk of text.)

Go back to Google Analytics after a couple of days to get more data than you can "shake a stick at."

Coca-Cola's death squads

"and i know the biggest crime/ is just to throw up your hands/ and say This has nothing to do with me/ i just want to live as comfortably as i can"
-Ani Difranco, 1993

Uh huh. Coca-Cola, that paragon of American exceptionalism, has for years hired paramilitary groups to intimidate, harass, kidnap, torture, and murder union organizers at its bottling plants in Colombia. It's all at killercoke.org. And it's not just in Colombia. There's currently a civil lawsuit pending against Coca-Cola in a U.S. District Court which alleges a systematic campaign of violence against unionistas in Guatemala. Prominent among its victims is union leader Jose Alberto Vicente Chavez: paramilitary forces attacked his family on March 1, 2008, killing his son and gang-raping his daughter.

In India, Coca-Cola contains such high levels of pesticides (DDT, malathion, etc.) that farmers have been spraying it on their crops with great success. And what do they do with their waste products? The solid stuff they distributed as fertilizer until recently: it contained such high levels of lead and cadmium that the local government finally ordered them to stop. And they've solved their liquid waste problem by pumping it into the holy River Ganges.

So that's how a sausage gets made.

Last year's film "The Coca-Cola Case" is an excellent primer to Killer Coke. Here's the trailer:

That's capitalism, served fresh daily.

Tell me, is it worth the dizzying highs when the hard times hit like hammers on your skull? Is it worth it, thumb-wrestling the invisible hand, when you know the house will always win?

Growth in gross domestic product is the cocaine that our current economic system needs (and totally freaks out about when it temporarily runs out). Growth requires one of two things: ever-increasing population ("new markets") or ever-increasing consumption, i.e., everyone spends more every year. We're pushing the limits of what our planet can hold population-wise, and credit-wise, we're tapped out, as we've seen in the last couple years.

It's got to stop. We need to transition to a steady-state economy, now.

Good Old NEon

Just wanted to share a great post I found on another blog about one of David Foster Wallace's greatest short fictions, "Good Old Neon," from his 2004 collection Oblivion. I haven't gone back and read "Good Old Neon" since Wallace's suicide in 2008, as I loaned it to a friend in Albuquerque in 2005 and never got it back.  I'll have to find that book again, though, it's a masterpiece, although his 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men resonates more deeply in my memory.

"Good Old Neon," by the way, is a 1st-person account of the suicide of a fictional character named David Wallace.

selling out, in the land of the Amazons

To me, advertising is to art what prostitution is to love; one exists in the negative space of the other. Which is not to say that I find prostitution to be immoral; it's just unfortunate, uninspired. (What I find odd is that advertising is legal and prostitution is not.) And I don't oppose the vigorous and creative promotion of ideas, nor the efforts of the small-time entrepreneur to carve out a niche for himself. But the road is fraught with Faust's temptations at every turn. And what profits a man, when he gains the world and loses his soul along the way?

Ah. And so but how does a humble blogger earn a living? There's Google AdSense: they will brand you with a hot iron if you're interested. Some bloggers sell e-books, which I think is great, although many harmful chemicals are released when e-books are burned. (And any book that no one would want to burn is not really a book.) Some hide behind paywalls, which is kind of like wearing a lot of makeup.

Then there's selling out to Amazon, which is the path I've chosen. Here's how it works: you sign up for an Amazon associates account, and post links on your blog which shoot right over to the Amazon "product" you're referencing. If your reader then purchases the item from Amazon, you get 15% of the total. So, in my previous post on Jonathan Franzen's much-ballyhooed new novel Freedom, I have linked to both this work and to the other books I mention (Franzen's The Corrections, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Joyce's Ulysses). Simple text links, no pop-up or image ads, no clutter, nothing. If you're curious to know how, for me, Ulysses changed the fabric of reality (i.e., the template), you'll click on it and be able to order it immediately. Of course, Ulysses is probably the least likely impulse purchase one could possibly make, but anyway.

So yes, if you order a book through my blog, I will profit. Of course, Amazon is destroying independent bookstores, and I don't feel good about it. But actually, I don't care about independent bookstores per se. I care about what they do, and what they do is provide a portal between writer and reader, with (hopefully) a mere diaphane of commercial mediation. As I'm an unfunded writer, and I'm directly speaking to my readers and urging them to step out of the nightmare ("History," says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake"), I don't think this is unethical. Amazon is trying to snare them as customers, and so it's worth it to them to give the profits to me. If my readers have got the pliable steel guts they're going to need to make it in this world, they won't end up Amazombies.

I will soon be setting up a booklist on my blog, as well, which will guide my readers through the land of the flowering canon, and help them distinguish between what is nourishing and what is merely saccharine. I'll include a disclosure, too, concerning my policy of linking to Amazon for books that I reference or recommend.

Soylent Green is corporations!!!

A great, concise, and cutting opinion piece by Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting, which explores exactly how for-profit corporations are antithetical to democracy. It's not the usual structuralist argument; Gutting instead underlines something we all instinctively know ("The corporate threat is most apparent in advertising, which explicitly aims at convincing us to prefer a product regardless of its actual merit."), and concludes that corporations are necessarily a "threat to truth," a value fundamental to democracy. He contrasts corporate speech with the political speech of groups such as the ACLU and the NRA, who at least theoretically represent the convictions of actual people. Corporations, in Gutting's analysis, are not evil, per se. They are, however, necessarily amoral, and that's what makes them dangerous.

I commented on the piece as follows (tongue in both cheeks):

     If corporations are people, do their lives begin at conception? What about a corporation conceived in an ill-advised, late-night financial planning session? Should the parties be allowed to terminate their creation on the morning after, or be forced to bring it to term, even if they're not ready to raise a corporation? What if the partnership ends? Visitation rights?

     There's a lot the Supreme Court didn't think of, methinks.

     Although, if corporations were people, you could take out restraining orders on them, right? As it stands (at least here in Arizona), a corporation can obtain an "injunction against workplace harassment" against a journalist or whistleblower. (This is absolutely true, and yes, it's oft abused.) But it doesn't work the other way around: you can't get a restraining order against a corporation. Corporate peoplehood would change that, no?

     Wouldn't it be nice to get a restraining order on your favourite bill-collector? One stray communique, and they're suddenly doing time for felony harassment. . .

The Banality of Freedom: Jonathan Franzen

Franzen, Time, inverted.

Calling a writer experimental is now the equivalent of saying his work does not matter, is not readable, and is aggressively masturbatory. But why is it an experiment to attempt something artistic? A painter striving for originality is not called experimental. . . Without risk, you have paintings hanging in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. 

      -Ben Marcus in Harper's Magazine, October 2005

If you're the kind of person who suffers from cultural bucket-list anxiety, you've been introduced to a new little gremlin of a meme over the past several months. Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, Freedom, has manifested itself in the manner of a solar eclipse: its viewers have gathered in worship from coast to coast, but none have looked directly at it. None, would seem, except the Atlantic's B.R. Myers, in his cutting review "Smaller than Life."

Freedom's title says everything you need to know about Jonathan Franzen: it's ostentatiously lazy, presumptuously avuncular, headline-grubbing, Europe-snubbing, all-encompassing without bothering to encompass. Yet it's been greeted as a liberator, drooled over; palm fronds have been strewn promiscuously in its path. The cues are from the horse's mouth, of course. Not only has it been compared with War and Peace; it actually compares itself with War and Peace. (One of the protagonists is reading Tolstoy; the pertinence to her own life of Natasha Rostov's confusion about whom to love is, quote, "psychedelic.")

I haven't read Freedom. I spent this past summer reading War and Peace instead. (Yes, it's worth it, if you have a hundred days to kill.) But I did read Franzen's 2001 novel The Corrections. No, I couldn't put it down while I was reading it. It brimmed over  with nefarious Lithuanians, extramarital shenanigans, hip urban gardens, pharmaceutical chicanery, voyeuristic accounts of lesbian sex. Cheap pop hooks by the score; paint-by-numbers pop-culture references? Galore.

I haven't thought about The Corrections, though, since I finished it. Not once. It's breeding dust on the shelf with the other crap I'll never touch again. I would contrast this with Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book I found vastly frustrating and pointless while I was reading it. But when I closed its pages, I became obsessed; transformed; a different person. (And Ulysses? It's a tough book to read all the way through. But for me, it's changed the fabric of reality.)

In 2005, Harper's Magazine published an essay by Ben Marcus with the (ironic) title of "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A Correction."  (Only the first page is available free online, although even that much is worth reading. The rest is behind a paywall.) At the time, I had just given up six years of my young life to the writing of an "experimental" novel, and I was twisting in the wind; Marcus's essay brought me back to myself. He excoriates and ridicules the "realist" establishment in modern literature, deriding as a "desperate argument. . . the notion that reality can be represented only through a certain kind of narrative attention." Two persons are identified, here, as the main current ambassadors of the narrative realism perfected long ago by John Updike and others: Jonathan Franzen, and "dour" Atlantic Monthly critic B.R. Myers.

Which is why I was fascinated that the latter was the only major critic to not only pan Franzen's "masterpiece," but to drag it out into the sun and leave it to rot dry.

Myers appears most often in the pages of the Atlantic dissecting the underpinnings of North Korean fascism; although originally from New Jersey (as am I), he has lived in West Germany and apartheid South Africa, and holds both an M.A. in Soviet Studies and a Ph. D. in North Korean literature. So he knows something about "freedom," maybe even more than Jonathan Franzen. (He is also a supporter of the Green Party of the United States (as am I).)

By the end of his first paragraph, Myers has summed up Franzen's novel as a "576-page monument to insignificance." Quoting heavily from the original, he blasts Franzen's insipid prose as "insecure":

We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang.

And Franzen, I'd argue, is the worst kind of elitist: the kind that won't admit it. The kind that panders. (The Corrections has a major character named "Chip," for God's sake!) An unrepentant liberal, he nonetheless has this common with right wing demagogues like Bill O'Reilly of Fox News.
I admit, there's a little pinge in me for coming down so hard on Franzen; I know that he was a close personal friend of David Foster Wallace. I got my start in publishing by writing Wallace's obituary for the Tucson Weekly, a circle-of-life moment if ever there was one, and I'm still struggling with his suicide. It seems to me that Franzen, sadly, lacks Wallace's genius: the ability to lay one's intellect out on the page without coming off like a snob. And so he went off in the opposite direction.

The NY Times called Freedom "a masterpiece of fiction;" Maureen Corrigan, NPR's in-house reviewer, called it "revelatory and ambitious." So I'll read it, eventually, maybe the next time I come down with bronchitis.

Don't click on this

"he not busy being born/ is busy dying" -Bob Dylan

PAPARAZZI: pl. n., sing. PAPARAZZO: one who lacks a moral compass; also, a parasitic photojournalist. [from Ital., "daddy rats"]

Ok, that's not the real derivation, though it probably should be. In case this folk etymology goes viral, remember, you heard it here first. Anyway. . . "The Day I Trailed a Paparazzo," a feature piece for Jezebel by Dodai Stewart, recently wafted out of the miasma and appeared on my computer screen. I think it came out of the pipes or something. There are no surprises in it, except for the fact that there are no surprises. If you're picturing a Fellini-esque circus of pop stars, crotch-shots, split-finger telephones, and well-dressed fistfights, well you've got it all wrong. The average day in the life of a paparazzo is, to put it bluntly, boring. And reading about it is profoundly boring. Life is too short. I can never recover those grains of sand; they've gone down the hatch of time, never to be recovered, dead as Elvis, dead as Michael Jackson.

There's an old Twilight Zone episode, ever since widely parodied and referenced, where a bibliophile (played by Burgess Meredith) who could never find enough time to read ends up as the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, discovers the ruins of a library, and happily settles down to spend the rest of his existence reading his way through every word that was ever written. And but then, he stumbles, drops his eyeglasses, and finds that they've shattered. As the camera pans out, he's left blind, despairing, among the rubble.

It could have been worse. He could have stumbled upon an US Weekly warehouse, or a truck full of People.

Please, don't waste your time with this crap. The human race needs you.

How to get your blog on a search engine (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Google)

Here's some basic info for neophytes about how to make your blog visible to search engines.

First, some creepy technofascist stuff. Google (along with the other engines) uses "spiders" to "crawl" around the web, moving link to link, searching and mapping the Internet. They don't look at your actual blog; they subsist entirely on your HTML. Unfortunately, we actually want to attract these insidious monstrosities to our blogs. Search engines don't search the Internet itself; they search an index their spiders have made for them. And so we must learn to dance their dance if we want to get our content out there.

The big websites are crawling with spiders, but out here among the stars, they're few and far between. To attract their attention, you have to set off a flare. That's what "pinging" is. It's jumping up and down and waving your hands. If your site is hosted by GoDaddyLongLegs or whatever, they'll do that for you (I'm pretty sure that's right). If all you've got is a lowly Blogger blog, you're on your own.

So here's a few beginning steps to lure those arachnids your way.

First, go to your PC's Start Menu, click on Run, and then enter "cmd" and hit return or press OK. This opens up the command prompt window. This is how you talk to your computer directly, without an operating system (Windows XP or Vista or whatever) to get in the way. Type the following (if you have a Blogger blog; obviously, "yourblognamehere" is a placeholder):

          "ping www.yourblognamehere.blogspot.com"

Ok, you just pinged yourself. How does it feel?

What your computer just did was to send a tiny packet of data to your blog and back. It took less than a tenth of a second. If that website didn't exist, it wouldn't work. (I just tried http://www.seahorse-magistrate.com/ and the ping failed.)

Next, you want to ping Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., with your blog URL (your web-address). I'm going to stick to Google for the moment; there's a simple form that you can use to submit your URL for crawling/indexing. You can find it here. Just type in your URL, verify that you're not an android, and Google will come and check out your site. Sometimes it can take a while, and they say that they won't guarantee that your site will actually get indexed, but it didn't take that long for me to be able to Google "realitysand" and find my blog.

(In fact, a Google search for "Tucson Sentinel Green Party" comes up with my post about the Sentinel's non-coverage of the Green Party as #5!)

Here's the problem, though; your site is indexed now, but how will Google know when you post new content? You're still not big enough for the spiders to remember where you are. That's where pinging comes in. There are several (free) web services that will ping to tons of different search engines and blog listings for you, but as far as I've been able to tell, you have to actually go to their websites every time you update your blog. But if you only update your blog infrequently, this shouldn't be too much extra work.

So here's how you do it: go to one of these free sites (Pingoat and Pingomatic worked for me; Autopinger is supposed to have more coverage, but I kept getting error messages when I tried to register on their site). Pretty much all you have to do is enter your blogname and URL. Then, bookmark or add to Favorites on your web browser; you can either add them to your Favorites Bar or create a separate folder under Favorites. Each time you update your blog, just click on that link and it'll start pinging for you all over again.

Check out the Blog Doctor for more. This is an old post, so some of the links no longer work, but it's a good starting place nonetheless.

Five (and a half) worthy Blogs

I normally don't endorse mainstream media figures, but I have to say that columnist Paul Krugman (a Nobelist in Economics) maintains an excellent blog on all things politico-economic for the New York Times. This week, Krugman flashes back to the 1930s with a short clip of the great economist John Maynard Keynes, and comments on how Keynes' evident upper class British accent belies the "impishness and radicalism of his thought."

The Green Party Watch (not affiliated with the Green Party per se) is a great source for Green news and opinion. Recent posts concern the Green Party's call for a "Green New Deal" in contrast to Obama's enervated "jobs" package and speculations about who the Greens will nominate for President at their 2012 convention. I'm hoping that Dr. Jill Stein will be our candidate: she has an impressive resume, is an effective communicator, and is photogenic to boot. I voted for her when she ran for Governor of Massachusetts back in 2002 (alas, some Mormon named "Mitt" won that race, so we left town).

Find out more.

My next choice is SandersForPresident.org, a blog that's agitating for independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to challenge Obama in the Democratic primaries (there's also a rumour that he might run for the Green nomination, although I doubt that would actually happen). Sanders recently called for a progressive candidate to challenge Obama in 2012. You can sign the petition to draft him here. . .

Also, check out Democracy Now!'s blog, which features a lot of "Web Exclusives." In a broadcast in March of this year, Juan Gonzalez jointly interviewed Daniel Ellsberg (he of the "Pentagon Papers") and four-time Presidential candidate Ralph Nader. The Web Exclusive went into more detail, and included Ellsberg seconding Nader's call for the impeachment of Obama for war crimes.

Here's a snippet of the original interview:

Finally, I recommend ThisIsntHappiness.com, which is like a beach awash with the flotsam and jetsam of our culture: stick-figure cartoons, hacked images, random old sign-of-the-times pieces. It's hilarious, in a melancholic sort of way. You have to check it out.

The following is not the cartoon I found on ThisIsntHappiness, but it's from the same website:



 

A 19th Century View of American Jews

One of the happy effects of light and liberty upon a religious body is to divide it. . .  Black night is uniform: daylight shows a thousand hues. Ignorance is a unit: knowledge is manifold. As long as the Jews were persecuted, they clung to ancient usage and doctrine with thoughtless tenacity; their whole strength being employed in the mere clutch. But when the repressive and restrictive laws were relaxed, the mind of the Jews resumed its office; divisions arose among them; and the world began to hear of the Orthodox and the Reformed.

[from "Our Israelitish Brethren," James Parton, 1870] 

  
          The Atlantic Monthly (the dead-tree version of which I still get in the mail) has dusted off an old gem from its archive; believe it or not, it still shines after 141 years. It's probably the most perceptive piece I've ever read about Judaism. No, strike that: it's the most perceptive piece I've ever read about how a free society, if officially agnostic towards religion, encourages a proliferation of religious perspective that ennobles all: from the most adamant secular, to the middle-of-the-road heterodox, to the fastidiously devout.

        The authour, one James Parton, is an interesting character himself. A cursory glance at Parton's Wikipedia page suggests that he was the most popular biographer of his day in America; he wrote tomes about Jefferson, Franklin, and Voltaire, and also authoured The Life and Times of Aaron Burr. [Full disclosure: I'm a blood relation of Aaron Burr on three different branches of my family tree.] Anyway, when Parton's first wife died in 1872, he married her daughter from a previous marriage. That kind of puts the whole Woody Allen thing in perspective, huh? As is my wont, though, I digress. Parton's narrative, first-person in parts (he describes the voluminous array of Jewish texts spread out on his desk at one point), is of a piece with the other great liberals of his day. In particular, I'm thinking of John Stuart Mill, and his 1869 essay "The Subjection of Women." Parton, like Mill, was writing from an outsider-looking-in perspective, and both wrote with amazing clarity, humility, and compassion, and against the grain of the day.
         The central character in Parton's feature is the Jew, past and present (present being October 1870). The Jew is the most famous piñata in world history; a thousand desecrations have scarred his body, yes, but if you're receptive, if you seek to understand, you'll find that the greatest suffering comes from humiliation, from being falsely accused. Remember: it's humiliation that creates monsters, and monsters that create humiliation. The iconic Taoist image of the yin-yang is value-neutral, like Taoism itself (some might say like God). Everything contains its opposite, yes, but it also gives rise to its opposite. Engenders it. Births it. Pushes it out of itself. (This is why we're more like our grandparents than we are like our parents, although we don't realize that until it's too late.)

         What do I mean by value-neutral? Just that nature itself is profoundly agnostic about the human race. (Note here that the words "diagnosis," "prognosis," and "agnostic" all share the same Greek root.) Cycles are the natural order of things; but man is not entirely a natural creature. We are, in a very significant sense, the product of ourselves; we are artificial. And thus our fate is not dictated for us by social Darwinism or any other crackpot theory. The Jews are what they make of themselves, as are the rest of us. We can choose to continue the cycle of rerererevenge, or we can end it.

         I vote for ending it.

   



Fast neutrinos, fast booze, the IMF's prodder-in-chief, Saudi women can vote!, and the most important story of the week

. . .Neutrinos are wily creatures, able to pass through solid matter and change "flavors" en route; 65 billion of them just passed through your fingertip and you didn't notice a thing. Until now, though, they hadn't figured out how to make headlines. That changed this past Friday when a team of researchers announced that they had accidentally incited neutrinos to travel faster than the speed of light. It's possible this could allow Michael J. Fox to travel back to the summer of 2001 and convince George W. to allow stem-cell research. It'd be cake; Fox could trade on his future knowledge of the whole Chandra Levy thing.

          You're telling me you built a time machine. . . out of a neutrino?

. . .Speaking of changing flavors, here's a NY Times piece about how Sonic (the drive-in, not the hedgehog), Burger King, and Starbucks are testing the waters with serving alcohol at some of their "restaurants." I don't eat corporate food if I can avoid it. . . but most of this country is so infested by these chains, there are plenty of places in the heartland you can't find a nugget of non-corporate food in a hundred-mile radius. Trust me, I've been there. So I applaud this trend. . . although it doesn't look promising that it'll be in my neck of the woods any time soon.

Europeans: why haven't their societies crumbled?

. . . Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn filed a Motion to Dismiss in a hotel maid's civil suit concerning a sexual encounter they had in a New York Hotel earlier this year. In the motion, his attorneys argue that his diplomatic immunity should protect him from the suit. Kind of a bogus notion if you ask me; if he did force her to perform oral sex on him (and wasn't afraid of her teeth), then I don't care if he's God's own ambassador, he should be held to account. No, the suit should be dismissed on account of the salient fact that it's clearly bullshit. Listen, I hate the IMF, and I despise those who act like they believe (with Henry Kissinger) that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," and that their status in society gives them the right to pressure others into sexual favours. But there's no worse fate than being falsely accused, and the courts in this country are stacked in favour of women. Judges and prosecutors bend over backwards to accommodate the most outrageous claims. Yet the prosecutors themselves dropped the criminal charges against Strauss-Kahn after realizing the alleged victim was lying to them left and right. That in itself should preclude a civil suit, and Ms. Diallo should be charged with making a false police report to boot.

. . .Speaking of Muhammad's wives. . . Khadija (خديجة) was a successful merchant when she first hired a young Muhammad to oversee her caravan, and later married him (he was fifteen years her junior). It may or may not be fair to describe Muhammad as a proto-feminist, but he certainly believed that men and women are equal before God. "You have rights over your women," he is reported to have said, "and your women have rights over you." Yet in Arabia, the land of Muhammad's birth and of his revelations, women are oppressed like nowhere else on earth. Not only is it illegal for women to drive, it's illegal for them to leave their house without a male chaperon. That's why it was so heartening to hear today that the absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia has decreed that women will henceforth be able to vote in muncipal elections, and even stand as candidates. Of course, Saudi Arabia is not a democracy in any meaningful sense; even men don't have full suffrage. Still, it's a positive change. Call it the Indian Arab Spring ("indian summer" plus. . . you get it, right?).

. . . And, finally, the most important story of the week.

Israel: the REAL Mad Dog of the Middle East

          Change we can believe in? You bet. Just a few months after taking office, Barack Obama sold 55 of these to Israel, something that even George W. refused to do (at least at first). Apparently the idea is for Israel to unleash them on Iran to destroy nuclear research and production facilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (the same that correctly concluded that Iraq had no WMDs before the invasion) continues to verify that Iran has not diverted any nuclear material towards military purposes, although it says that it cannot confirm the absence of such activity. (Read the IAEA's report here.) Iran, like Iraq before it, has got a difficult task ahead of them if they have to provide evidence of absence. Can I prove that I'm not a child molester? I wouldn't know where to start.
          Meanwhile, Iran has called for a nuclear-free Middle East, and appears to be in compliance with the broad principles of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a treaty that Israel has always refused to sign. In fact, Israel is the ONLY nation in the Middle East that hasn't signed (or acceded to) the NPT, and one of only four in the world that remain outside its purview (India and Pakistan are the others; North Korea withdrew in 2003). Here's a pretty stark graphical representation (green is for "we agree not to proliferate nuclear weapons"):

          Israel's nuclear weapons program is almost half a century old; they've had The Bomb since the time of the Six-Day War back in 1967. Israel refuses to admit that it has any nuclear program whatsoever; estimates of its arsenal range from as little as 60 to more than 400 thermonuclear devices, deliverable by aircraft, submarine, ICBMs, or in the form of "suitcase nukes." In 2009, the IAEA called on Israel to join the international community in fighting non-proliferation by signing on to the NPT; Israel's response was to "deplore" the idea (read the article at antiwar.com).
          Moreover, Israel has defied United Nations resolutions for decades. Notably, there's Resolution 242 (1967), which called for Israel to withdraw from the lebensraum it seized from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan (it still holds all of its seizures but the Sinai). And then there's Resolution 497 (1981), which reads in pertinent part:

[T]he Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.

          Since then, Israel has hid behind its "special" friend in the Security Council (that would be US) to avoid scores more such resolutions, to provide cover for its widely substantiated crimes against humanity, and just this week to prevent the international community from recognizing Palestine as an independent and sovereign country.

          So tell me, which is the real rogue nation?

          Why is our President selling bunker-buster bombs to Israel so they can take out Iranian nuclear capabilities, and not the other way around?

The Tucson Sentinel refuses to take the Green Party seriously

I had the opportunity recently to participate in a Q & A session at Pima College with Dylan Smith, editor and publisher of the Tucson Sentinel. Although I applaud the Sentinel's decision to refrain from endorsing candidates for public office, I was disappointed to hear him spouting the conventional wisdom about third-party candidates, i. e., "they're not likely to win, so why should we cover them?." From my point of view, the media in this country is in collusion with the over-represented parties (sometimes called the Repugnicrats) to enforce an information blockade between the other major political parties (the Greens and Libertarians) and the public at large. (Full disclosure: I currently sit on the Steering Committee of the Green Party of Pima County.)

An example of the Sentinel's unconscionable bias towards the two-party duopoly can be found in Mr. Smith's coverage of the recent primary election. An eighteen-minute video features long speeches by Republican mayoral nominee Rick Grinnell and Democratic nominee Jonathan Rothschild; there is no video coverage of either of the Green Party candidates, and scant mention of them in the text.

Green Party candidates have won hundreds of elections across the country, from Mayoral and City Council races to State Assembly seats. The Green Party of the U.S. is our third largest political party; in many places around the world, the national Green Party is the second largest. In Colombia, a Green Party candidate came in second in the 2010 Presidential race; Die Grünen, the German Greens, hold the state legislature in Baden-Württemberg, and have been part of the governing coalition of Germany on and off for years. The Greens also hold the balance of power in the Australian Senate.

In past City Council and Mayoral races in Tucson, Green candidates have won the votes of between one quarter and one third of the electorate. As citizens, we should demand full and equal coverage of all serious candidates for office.

Budrus v. bulldozers: Satyagraha in Palestine

I found this video on this blog, so check out the original post. Julia Bacha is a 30-year-old Brazilian-American filmmaker and director of Budrus, which chronicles the successful campaign of the residents of the tiny Palestinian village of Budrus (بدروس) to peacefully resist the Israeli army's attempts to build a "security barrier" through their town, next to their children's school, through their olive groves, and through their cemetery. The New York Times review describes the film as "Eyes on the Prize with olive trees." A pithy summation, to be sure, but a little too glib for the subject matter. The olive trees destroyed by the Israeli bulldozers are the bread and butter of the local economy, as well as their connection to their ancestors. (In the end, Israel pulled back and built the Wall along the pre-'67 borders to the west.)

In the above-embedded video, Bacha forcefully indicts the Western media for giving short shrift to the peaceful resistance displayed in the Budrus uprising, while sensationalizing those in the Palestinian community who instead engage in violence to get their point across. She invokes child psychology (I'm undecided about whether her analogy comes across as condescending) to explain how Western media are actually reinforcing the violent undercurrent in Palestinian society.

If you're interested in the tactics of peaceful resistance, an excellent (and brief) summary of the Gandhian concept of satyagraha can be found here. (The best in-depth study remains Gandhi's own Satyagraha in South Africa (1926). (You can find the full text here.) Satyagraha is a Hindi word which loosely translates as "truth-force" or "soul-force;" it calls for active resistance against injustice without the use of physical violence, for noncooperation without enmity. Courage in the face of overwhelming odds is its defining attribute.

Hope. . . and its discontents

But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering. [from "Pathologies of Hope"]

Having read (and loved) Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's tale of her anonymous immersion in the world of minimum-wage America, I'd argue her 2007 Harper's essay "Pathologies of Hope" is seriously predicated on that earlier experience with the unglossy side of high capitalism. Going with the flow of consumer culture might make you feel better and look younger, but I guarantee it's having the opposite effect on your fellow human beings further down the supply chain.

I grew up in a faraway land called the 1990s. Until September 11th blew it out of the water, our generation's "where were you?" moment was April 8, 1994, the day Kurt Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound. Along with Cobain, Vedder, Corgan, Reznor, and their imitators, we had Seinfeld, a love letter to self-conscious cynicism, as the other lynchpin of our culture. Computers were lame, back then, and no one wore happy poofy skirts, but it was cool to be tortured. This was fortunate for me, because, more than anyone I knew, my family life was a maelstrom and I was tortured anyway.

But that was then; that was before "the President wants you to buy this magazine."

As Ehrenreich relates in her essay, the cult of positivity destroys as many lives as it saves; telling the long-term unemployed or the seriously depressed that their mental attitude is at the root of their problems is "victim-blaming at its cruelest." The most basic fact of life is that existence is suffering. Nihilo-hedonism is one response, of course; the archpriest of that faith famously told an audience (after denying belief in astrology) :

I think it's a bunch of bullshit, myself. . . but I tell you this: I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'm gonna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

[Jim Morrison, if you haven't guessed.]

And yet, hope somehow still sprung in my breast, back then, and it carried me out of there. Hope, real hope, is about idealism, the notion that what we do matters whether or not we're rewarded for it. It used to be called "dignity," as in "He died with dignity." Like anything else, it comes down to semantics (sigh).

Ehrenreich is right to decry petty hope, hope-for-hope's sake. Gandhi did not "hope" to bring down the British Empire. But as a little green man once said, "Try? There is no try. Do. . . or do not."

That's self help.

Transcendence

I have always found peace in tombstones, and I still haven't seen one with an advertisement on it. You can find an interesting piece on the most "literary" graveyards here; most of them are in Europe, but we've got Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, which houses the remains of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. Haven't read Emerson's powerful essay "Self Reliance?" The full text is here, or you can get the Dover Thrift edition for a dollar. Either way, read it; it will transform how you view your own mind.

While you're in that neck of the woods contemplating mortality and free will, drop into Lowell's Edson Cemetery and pay your respects to Jack Kerouac. I've done so several times, and I'm always profoundly moved by his simple stone. (And by the way, if all you've read is On the Road, you don't know Kerouac. Read Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans, and Visions of Gerard, and then tell me he was a hedonistic hack.)

Kerouac's great achievement lies not in his carefully crafted classic (in the tradition of Huck Finn and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise), On the Road; it's to be found, instead, in the pure expressive prose of his panreligious writings and in his intense confessionalism, conditioned as they both are by the paradoxical view of reality implied by Buddhism.

Kerouac gazed into the mirror and was blinded; but he left his visions behind for us. I can't imagine a greater sacrifice.