Shappemundi

A link to a post

2006-04-17T23:35:00.000-10:00

I wrote this little essay about how George Orwell's theory of war relates to the impending, though I hope not imminent, Iran conflict. It generated a little stir on Daily Kos, so I though it worth linking to.

The Decline of the English Language

2006-02-21T23:48:00.000-10:00

The first in a series.

Those of you who know me know that I spend most of my life as a professor of English. But I've allowed few glimpses into that dark world. Each day I, like a shaman, descend into the netherworld of English composition and literature classes, and return, shaken from the experience.

Our poor, beautiful language. In my lifetime, I've experienced a serious attenuation in not only people's ability to use language precisely -- to say what they mean in the best possible way -- but also a corollary decline in students' ability to think.

I teach an online English composition course at a local college. Most of my students are adults returning to school for degrees in nursing, criminal justice, business, and a few in English. Many are military. Some few (one in every thirty, I'd guess) can string a decent sentence together, but for the most part, I get stuff that makes one wonder whether there really is too much mercury in the tuna. Here's a recent gem from a paper about corporate downsizing:

Mattel toy company continued to monopolize the toy industry within the past decade by purchasing has bought six major competitors to include Fisher-Price and Tyco (Eyal 1).

Maybe this is a simple proofreading error. But even so, this is a sentence in what ought to have been a polished final draft.

Or this:

Where does all the money go? Yes, blatancy it remains in the United States economy but into whose pockets? How is it that the United States economy appears to be growing but the prices continue to go up and the job market and security seems to be going down. Or why is it that we American products but are obviously subject to it manufacturing in another country. And raise question on how foreign trade It would be inevitably to focus in on the leaders of our country. We need to make know our global awareness on the effect of North American Free Trade Agreement and its effect on our global economy.

Where does one even begin to edit a paragraph like this? How does a student like this make it through their freshman level composition course? And finally, how the hell can I help this poor lost soul?

It's baffling. Even without proofreading, errors like those are unfathomable. With proofreading, they evidence some form of brain damage. But this student is not learning disabled.

Then there's that critical thinking deficit. Here's a little fun -- the first paragraph of a recent paper I received (this is an adult student). My comments to the student appear in bold:

This paper is about how money is more important than job satisfaction.
To whom?

In the early days
When was that?

people worked to support their family.
Unlike now, when people don’t work to support their families?

Back some time ago
When?

a man would farm only to grow and raise enough food for his family to survive.
But wouldn’t he sell his produce at market?

A lot of them had carpertentry
Carpentry…there’s no reason for a mistake like that; all you need to do is run a simple spellcheck.

skills to build their homes. Some farmers also sold what they grew and raised to make a little money on the side. Money wasn’t that big on the list of people in those days.
I’m not sure when you mean, but ever since the rise of agriculture in about 3,000 B.C., money’s been pretty important.

And this isn't even the worst of what I see. My Japanese students are, for all their missing articles and incorrect verb tenses, far better writers than most of the native speakers I teach.

I expect this will be only the first installment in a series of examples of the Decline of the English Language. Perhaps I'll terrify you all with some examples of the email correspondence I receive from students. It uses English letters, some of the syllables sound like English, but in most other respects it is a completely alien tongue.

Fuck it. I give up. I'm gonna become an advertising executive.

We're Fucked

2005-08-17T23:07:00.000-10:00

Oy, what a mess.

I really don't see any positive resolution for the Iraq war, or as future historians might call it, The Great Debacle. And even this appellation would suffer from understatement.

For the record, I opposed the war from the beginning. I opposed even the invasion of Afghanistan, that knee-jerk militarism that only exacerbates the problem. My friends all scoffed at this notion, asserting with absolute certainty (which is a character flaw found in most of my friends) that invading Afghanistan was necessary. We had to bite back. Never mind the reductive simplicity of such an argument, nor its ad misericordiam fallacy; it was a done deal.

But Iraq is an altogether different beast. An adventure in modern empire-building, and a dramatic failure, so far, on every front. Although it has succeeded in its primary mission -- regime change -- it has quite obviously created more problems than it has solved. And now we're trapped there, with neither the manpower to "win" nor the realistic option to withdraw. It is rapidly draining our resources, making us ever more vulnerable to attacks, which when successful activate very expensive and repressive response systems (the aftermath of the London Tube bombings being a recent illustration). $250 billion into the war and counting, we may not have the resources to deal with real-world problems like dwindling energy supplies, climate change, the possibility of an avian flu pandemic, health care, education, etc. etc. etc. We don't have the resources to deal with a legitimate national security risk.

A lot of us on the left are agitating for withdrawal; the Cindy Sheehan thing (you go girl) has now made this seem like a realistic option, something beginning to enter the discourse on Iraq, if not in the White House then in the country at large.

Leaving aside the moral questions, looking at the pure realpolitik of the situation, I have to disagree...guardedly. I don't support the war, but it looks as though withdrawal would set the stage for a dramatic power shift in the middle east toward Islamic theocracy and away from -- I hesitate to call it "democracy," so let's just say: something less dangerous than a nuclear-capable Islamic state run by a hardline terrorist-turned-politician such as the thoroughly bearded gentleman who is now in power in Iran.

The Iraq war was undertaken in part to equip the U.S. with a launching stage for the eventual invasion of Iran. (Or as a threat to Iran to change their regime themselves -- or else). Hence Iran's rush to develop its nuclear program; with no deterrent, they'd be "easy" to knock off the chessboard from a client Iraq. Well, now that the US has demonstrated the limits of its power, the tables have turned. Iran has a Shia majority, just as Iraq does. The Sunnis, so long oppressors under Saddam, would be fantastically outnumbered. The Kurds are a sideshow except to the Turks and Sunnis. Without a US presence, I can easily see Iraq devolving into total civil war, with the Shias receiving support from Tehran. This would not only be extremely ugly fighting, it would in the long run be unbelievably detrimental to global stability (such as it is). Given Iran's recent overtures to Venezuela (which is the world's 5th largest oil producer and governed by Hugo Chavez, who has no love for the US), and China's relatively chummy relations with Tehran, the whole balance of power would shift to Asia.

Now, I'm not really that concerned about American power. I think we'd be better off as something of a failed empire, sort of like England after WWII, turning inward and creating a state more dedicated to serving its citizenry than to wars of acquisition. But I am opposed to mass destruction, which is what such a shift is likely to require. I also do believe that IF Iraq can function with a democratic process (even if they elect someone that displeases the US), it would be better than a repressive theocracy. But rushing a constitution isn't going to provide this, and the much-touted Iraqi security forces are doubtful both in competence and loyalty.

So where does that leave us? We can't win. We can't stay. We can't leave. Touchdown BUSH!!!!!

Aside from escalation, which may require a draft and would not have popular support, there's only one solution, so far as I can see. BEG the international community to lend us resources to stabilize the situation. Do whatever it takes -- offers of aid, access to oil, promises to be very nice to the UN...whatever it takes. Bush & Co. need to swallow their pride, admit their folly, stop bullying other nations and provide some real leadership. This thing can still be used as an opportunity to bring the democracies of the world to the table and help Iraq find its own way.

This, though is even less likely than winning the war.

Like I said: we're fucked.

Notes on Intelligent Design

2005-08-10T22:14:00.000-10:00

Well, Toto, it isn't just Kansas anymore.

As is well known by now, the Preznit has come out in support of the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) in school. He thankfully didn't provide any details; even Rick Santorum backed away from the teaching of ID, saying that he was "uncomfortable" with the subject being taught in science class. I suppose one could teach it in the mythology unit of a world religion class, but only alongside any number of other creation myths.

Bush emphasized that our children should be learning about ID so they could be more aware of what the debate is about. I have nothing against engaging in debate, but in this case, there IS no debate. Scientists on the whole accept evolution. End of debate. Debating ID with scientists is like arguing about whether the pain of childbirth is greater than the pain of passing a kidney stone through one's penis. There simply aren't any common terms by which to frame the argument.

A few things that the theory of evolution isn't:

It is NOT an explanation of the origin or creation of life. It is an explanation of how organisms change over time. These changes are not a matter of debate. They are not subjective. They can be observed, both in the fossil record and in nature. Notable examples include the changing coloration of the pepper moth near coal mines in northern England, which in a few years became black to match the color of the soot which had collected on nearly every surface. Another is the simple fruitfly, whose evolution can be replicated in a laboratory and traced at the genetic level.

Evolution is not a "theory" in the layman's sense of the word. In science, a "theory" is an explanation of observable phenomena. The theory holds true until new data emerges that's incompatible with the theory. The theory then changes to accomodate the new data. That process is called "science." So far, no data has called into question the central tenets of evolution. "Missing" evidence is not sufficient to negate a theory. Evidence must be proof positive to qualify. Evolution is about as much of a "theory" in the layman's sense as is the theory of gravity.

Evolution is not an assault on religious belief, nor is it a refutation of the notion of divine will or intelligence. It is a description of the mechanics of living systems. In the same way that the heliocentric theory did not disprove the existence of God (only of a few erroneous passages in the Bible), so evolution need not threaten one's sense of divine intelligence; rather, as is the case with so many scientific observations, it can be seen as further evidence of its genius. Is it through refutation of fact that Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein were all religious men? No, it is through the careful observation of creation, the meticulous unfolding of its schema, that they affirmed their respective faiths. That was the upshot of Copernicus' introduction to his De Revolutionibus, which posited that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. He anticipated the Vatican's response to his observations, and offered up the idea that the sun is a more fitting symbol of God's power and constancy than the Earth. He dedicated his volume to the Pope, who, as we know, wasn't impressed.

Intelligent Design is, as we all know, the Genesis story rebranded for a secular age. It's a bit of a misnomer, since the universe, exhibits intelligent design even to the atheist. Any complex system in which various parts interact to achieve an outcome (existence) is by definition intelligent. Such a system, which changes over time in response to changing conditions, is by definition a design. The question really becomes: is it "Intentional Design?"

And there is no way to answer this question. Not through science, philosophy or even faith (for faith, by definition, denotes belief without evidence). Asking it is certainly useful, but in any science class, whether in Kansas or Vatican City, will arrive at the same conclusion: we don't know, and we can't answer it using science. So, let's move on to the next unit.

Intelligent Design cannot survive scientific scrutiny for many reasons that others have ably discussed, but one I haven't seen much is the problem that ID is based in "missing" or negative evidence. The argument seems to be: life is too complex to be the result of randomness, therefore, it cannot be random. Supposition A cannot be proven with positive evidence, therefore conclusion B does not follow. It's a pretty simple argument that any halfway decent critical thinker can deconstruct in about thirty seconds.

It's sad that people think they need to sacrifice their God-given capacity for logic to bring themselves into alignment with human-given religious dogma. Sadder still that in 2005 I should even be writing a post like this.

A Paucity of Posts

2005-06-02T00:46:00.000-10:00

Only denotes how frikkin busy I've been. I have come to think that the greatest measure of a cultured civlization is the time one has to contemplate a wall. My mind has been in hyperdrive for about six months, relieved only by sleep. And even then, my dreams disserve me with low-grade anxiety.

I have put the finishing touches on Rock the SAT, the musical vocabulary study guide I've been working on with Mike Moshan and Dave Mendelsohn for, oh, about six years now. When we started it, I was living in New York, and after several near-successes over the years, we had thought it dead in the water. Now, with all the heat and mishigas surrounding the revised SAT, there's been sudden interest from a couple of publishers; we're working on a contract now with MacGraw-Hill. I only hope some 11th hour snag doesn't torpedo the whole thing (how's that for a mixed metaphor? My brain -- she don't work so well these days...)

In between, I've been working full-time (actually, two teaching jobs...my regular gig and two adjunct online classes), writing two freelance articles for a local magazine, getting married (twice), moving (twice), and then hosting a Peruvian shaman who was less than emotionally stable.

Adding a mass of insults to each injury, Bush's presidency will drag on until 2009. OH how I long for a whistleblower.

I need a good three months off-line to recover. I feel old.

Tell Me Why

2005-05-19T20:31:00.000-10:00

I shouldn't crawl in a hole and hug my knees, gibbering, until I wither from hunger.

I can't tell whether things are genuinely getting worse or if it's just that I'm back to reading the news again. Intelligent design in Kansas. On the BBC today, a NASA study of Greenland's glaciers suggests that things are worse than anyone suspected, and that the recession of the ice fields is proceeding more quickly than anticipated. The US senate is actually arguing about changing filibuster rules to clear the way for appointing radical right wing judges...a badlfaced display of bad form. American soldiers defacing the Quran to intimidate Muslim detainees in Guantanamo Bay. A republican White House functionary appointed as president of Public Television. The Downing Street Memo, the smoking gun that puts to bed any doubt about whether the administration lied us into Iraq, is buried on page 18 of the Washington Post. I have to argue with people to point out that America was not founded on "Christian ideals," but rather Enlightenment ones. Stuff that anyone who graduate from even a public high school ought to know. And, today I learned, slipped into the most recent 82 billion dollar appropriations bill for Iraq was a provision that paves the way for national ID cards, called RealID, which is poised to replace Social Security cards, drivers' licenses and eventually passports. We will, of course, have to carry them at all times. They'll have an RFID chip which can be read remotely. Do I have to start wearing a suit of aluminum foil?

It's funny, almost. All the nightmare sci-fi stories I read as a kid that posited a dark, dystopian future in which people were controlled without even knowing it, are now slowly coming to pass.

Those glaciers should hurry up already. We need a right good flood.

Makua by Lucille

2005-03-07T20:15:00.000-10:00

This was on our wedding invitation
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

COMMENT

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows...

2005-03-07T20:11:00.000-10:00

Make it a double
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

COMMENT

They're in the Mail!

2005-03-07T19:54:00.000-10:00

Look carefully at any letter you receive through the US Post Office in the next day or two. Notice anything odd?

What about that postmark? Do my eyes deceive me, or is that a character from the new animated flick Robots covering the stamp?

Now, I know that the Post Office has a history of marketing deals with Big Media -- someone's making a killing off the royalties from those Looney Tunes stamps. But at least I have the choice to lick Bugs Bunny and stick him on my mail. I had no say about whether Rodney and Fender should grace the postmark on our recently-mailed wedding invitations. Suffice it to say, their presence somewhat cheapens the dignity Andrea and I were going for with our invites.

But it's just one more manifestation of private industry infiltrating our public institutions, and we are the captive target market...I have no other Post Office I can use. Doesn't this violate some sort of antitrust law? Can a government agency advertise for a private media company? Or is there any such thing as a difference between government agencies and private media companies anymore?

I would be more pissed off, but I'm tired. And the metaphor really is beautifully apt: Robots representing the USPS. Ah, sweet serendipity.

2005-02-23T00:20:00.000-10:00

Another Perfect Evening in Paradise
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

COMMENT

Channeling Nostradamus

2005-02-22T22:09:00.000-10:00

Because my view is basically apocalyptic (though not pessimistic), I spend a lot of time thinking about the way it's all going to go down. And what the aftermath will be like. It's morbid speculation, but fun in an escapist way. It gets me out of the reality I spend so much time wishing destroyed.

I think the United States has entered its baroque period. Typically, empires follow a basic narrative from their humble inception to their bloated collapse. Just as the empire passes its peak (in terms of productivity, resource extraction, population capacity, etc.), it enters a period during which, only slightly sensing its oncoming decline, its rulers begin massive public works projects, like the pyramids for example, or Versailles. Gardens, games, and monuments. A monument, of course, is testimony to something already past -- namely the golden age of the society that could produce such wonders. The contemporary art repeats the central myths of the culture, its heroic tales, its self-image even as that image is undermined by economic or geopolitical reality. The baroque manifests also in tenets, paradigms and systems that serve to breathe oxygen into the empire's failing lungs. These forms represent, then, the empire past its peak, the Incas at Macchu Picchu just a couple of centuries before they vanished. Roman expansionism at the end of the third century. The religious vanity of Angkor Wat. American predatory capitalism in the 21st century.

We're seeing evidence of the baroque all around, in which sign becomes an unknowing parody of the ideas they signify. A soaring new tower rises in the footprints of the World Trade Center, taller than the structures it replaces. An homage to resurrection (though of course the economic engine of the empire that birthed it was never damaged in the first place). It testifies to continued strength and prosperity of American idea, while the public institutions suffer and poverty grows. Or look at the ongoing narrowing and homogenization of cultural life -- of ides and discourse, of artistic expression, of consciousness itself -- through corporations and mass media, resulting directly in the accession to power of a radical political movement that disserves the public who "elected" it. The Superbowl's unmatchable pageantry, at halftime yes, but even more in every commercial spot beamed during the "game." The consensual delusion of elections. The consolidation of information sources into a single propaganda engine for private, multinational conglomerates that have serve no aim but their own enlargement. Industrial scale agriculture. Suggesting a manned mission to Mars. The lionization of the military at the very time when the limits of its power have been demonstrated to the world. The Iraq war itself is an exercise in the baroque, designed in part to acquire the resources necessary for the empire to sustain the illusion of its glory.

Add to this the unrepentantly stubborn destruction of the natural systems that sustain us, and methinks trouble is ahead.

It's all right with me. We're due. We had it good. Great in fact. We've probably had it better than any other civilization in history. Period. I'm glad to have been able to experience the wonder of it. But we're past peak, well-bloated and vain. Things move more quickly in our day than in ancient Sumeria, but the arc is the same. We're on our way down. Will it be slow? Will social repression get worse before the central government loses authority and people start looking after themselves again? Will we suffer privation? When will it be too freaking hot in the summer and too cold in the winter to produce enough food for a nation of 300 million, most of whom have no idea how to grow a tomato? Will it happen in my lifetime?

Barring divine or extra-terrestrial intervention (which you can't completely rule out), an asteroid strike or world-cleansing plague, here are a few things I think might be on our way:

2006-7: After Republicans sweep the mid-term elections in a highly contentious election of questionable validity, another war. Possibly Iran, but more likely Syria. Protests within the US are more harshly put down. The draft debate resumes, eclipsing the religious rights latest attacks on gay animated characters. U.S. Army conscription ads intimate that those who don't sign up are treasonous liberals. After a hopeful start to Bush II Redux, the world turns against the US, continuing to organize trading and military alliances that exclude the US. China and the EU are setting up to become the powerbrokers as the US dollar loses its status as the world's reserve currency. Meanwhile, unregulated corporations continue to exploit the third world's cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. The War on Terror has gone on quietly, mostly as a smokescreen keeping citizens frightened. Homeland Security reports that it's foiled a terrorist attack at a chemical plant. There are no convictions. Domestically, more rollbacks on civil liberties and rights. Repression of opposition groups through audits. A 30-second advertisement during Superbowl XLI costs AOL/Time Warner 6,000,000. Country music is played during the halftime show. The winning Jets, jubilant in the locker room, thank Jesus.

2007 is the worst Atlantic hurricane season on record. Cape Hatteras is flattened. No one notices. In the Sierra Nevada and Rockies, brush fires burn hundreds of square miles of forest, forcing the evacuation of Nevada City, Lake Tahoe and Boulder. Tahoe is spared, but Boulder, to the secret delight of the state's homophobic governor, gets what it deserves. One of the country's biggest chemical companies, Monsanto, is indicted for knowingly releasing GMOs into the environment in several countries to infect produce with its patented genetic codes. A year earlier, it had sued the Thai government for growing rice using its patent, winning nearly a billion in restitution through the IMF. In late 2007, the worst oil tanker spill in history befouls Miami Beach, blackening 15 miles of coastline and decimating local fisheries.

2008 Jeb Bush is president. The Supreme Court has only two liberal judges. The FCC levies a hefty fine against NBC because someone on the new reality show Up the Wall -- in which a group of strangers, guided by a team of psychologists, conspire to drive an unwitting victim to attempt suicide -- said "Goddamn, I'd love a burger right about now." Evolution is taught in all public schools concurrent with the theory of Intelligent Design. The textbook about Intelligent Design is beautifully photographed, with four-color transparencies. It comes with a DVD and an offer for free mp3 downloads from Virgin Online. A high school in Oklahoma sells itself to Coca-Cola, first in mocking protest at the infiltration of advertising into the public schools, but later in earnest, when Coke offers teachers a five-figure salary. Arithmetic is taught with bottlecaps. The winning word in the spelling bee is "effervescent."

2009 Global climate change is undeniable. The Bush administration makes a feint to the environmental lobby, pushing the Cool Breezes Act, which provides billions of dollars to corporations for R&D of alternative clean-burning energy. The money is quietly diverted to stockholders.

2010 Periodic shortages of seasonal foods. You can no longer walk into a supermarket and get an apple at any time of the year. There is no shortage of cabbage and rutabaga. A hip restaurant in Chelsea designs a menu heavy on cabbage and rutabaga. The signature dessert is fried rutabaga sorbet. The restaurant does poorly. Gasoline costs $8.00 a gallon. The Italian company that produces the Vespa is Europe's biggest moneymaker on the strength of the American market.

2011 The first clinically assessed, scientifically certified completely uncritical thinker is produced. He works as a paralegal and likes the previews better than the movies.

2012 The end of the Mayan calendar. Divine Intervention by plague-bearing extraterrestrials riding in on an asteroid. They land on Boston Common and work outward from there.

The Article's Out

2005-02-21T21:54:00.000-10:00

Check it out...if you're into birds or happen to be a personal friend (which clearly obliges you to at least click on this link.

I like to take a hiatus

2005-02-07T23:09:00.000-10:00

Every now and then. Just because the word sounds almost obscene.

I haven't been posting because I'm a lazy fuck. All my previous posts teeter on the brink of being essays, diatribes, treatises, manifestoes, discourses, or novellas. Just thinking about writing another one daunts me. So, I think I'll try to lighten up. There's nothing wrong with the occasional meaningless post, is there?

Is there?

Christmas in Danger!

2004-12-23T23:15:00.000-10:00

More curious behavior from Christian fundamentalists.

And they've got Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity now defending Christmas against assault from the phantom enemy of secular America. For some reason, the fundies have got it into their heads that the attempt to secularize Christmas by businesses who hope to use the "holiday spirit" to hock goods to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists (who are hard to target), Zoroastrians and other assorted heathens is an all-out attack on the foundation of their belief systems, their religion and their nation. The consideration that some communities are extending to their non-Christian members (such as one town in New Jersey deciding not to include Christmas carols in a high school music performance) is, in O'Reilly's words, "an affront to the majority."

For us Jews especially, this whole "Christian nation" thing the right is now pushing vibrates with scary resonance. As in the late 1930's, a minority is being accused of assaulting the principles of the majority through its self-appointed demagogue proxies, in this case the Republican and Christian pundits. They've even started a political action committee, The Committee to Save Merry Christmas, replete with website, the mission of which is, I kid you not, to "save Christmas" by boycotting stores like Macy's that greet their customers with the secular and inclusive "happy holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas." O'Reilly likes the idea, and thinks that people who don't get on the Christmas bandwagon should move to Israel, or like Pat Robertson, to the Sudan.

Last time I turned on the television, Christmas seemed about as endangered a species as the cockroach. I can't get it out of my head. It's EVERYWHERE. I haven't seen a single menorah in Hawaii, where few people have ever even met a Jew (and knew it). I, like every other American, have been exposed to an unendurable flood of Christiana. I wouldn't mind the carols so much, except that so much Christmas music -- how to put this delicately -- sucks. What damages people's taste in music (not to mention exterior decorating) at this time of year is a mystery to me. Perhaps it's the poinsettias. They are, after all, toxic.

No, by every visible measure, Christmas is in no danger, except perhaps by gross commercialization which benefits, I need not point out, the very same economic elite that paid to get Bush where he is and who support (and profit from) O'Reilly and his ilk. But the Right has never been very concerned with things like "visible measures," or "facts." The key here is to create a sense that Christians in America are the victims of some insidious persecution by a vague enemy of secular humanists (many of whom are Jews, artists, intellectuals -- does this sound like an old pattern?) who are, once again, poisoning the wells. The fundies are now seizing on any minor indication that businesses or communities may wish to try to accomodate people of all faiths, including the faithless, in the celebrations.

To successfully include others, one must try to understand the "other" point of view, the point of view of the minority, e.g., the Jew at Christmas time, who looks on the proceedings with a sort of bemused impatience. It's hard for Christians to understand the complexity of feeling a Jew may experience when someone says "Merry Christmas" to him or her. However heartfelt and well-intended, it reminds one of their own exclusion. It reflects the dominance of a narrow worldview that excludes by its assumption that the receiver of such good tidings is also a Christian. I always smile and say "thank you," because I know that it is intended with good cheer. But the Jewish part of me feels a little tired.

The Christian right has no interest, however, in attempting to see things from anyone else's point of view. They do not care a whit how I or any other non-Christian feels. They have no interest in creating a more inclusive society that accomodates a variety of beliefs. It's their way or the highway. The constitutional separation of church and state is, to them, something of an error that should be corrected. And to correct it, the Christian soldiers must be mobilized by a shared belief that they are under attack.

Of course, as a corollary, we're seeing increasing examples of anti-Semitic statements in the right wing media. Menorahs in New Jersey were vandalized several evenings in a row (a menorah that was placed, by the way, next to a much larger Christmas tree).

As an American Jew, or as I am now becoming, a Jew in America, I appreciate the fact that most people are Christians. I'm happy that people are free to celebrate their religious holidays, and it is to be expected that the beliefs of the majority will have greater representation in varied domains of our society. The materialism of Christmas bothers me, of course, as it does many Christians as well.

What we're seeing here, though, is far more dangerous. Scapegoating is a powerfully effective way to rally frightened or angry people round the flag of false persecution. It further marginalizes those already at the margins.

And it's something every Jew has seen before.

Mana'o Mind

2004-12-21T01:00:00.000-10:00

I am suffering from a case of what may be the most pernicious, insidious and pervasive epidemic of modern times: mana'o-mind.

"Mana'o" is a Hawaiian word that roughly translates as "thought" or "belief." It includes not simply individual acts of mentation like rememberance, prognostication, analysis, diagnosis, debate, agreement, disagreement, judgment, synthesis, etc., but also belief systems, philosophies and epistemes both conscious and unconscious.

To some native Hawaiians, or "Kanaka Maoli," haoles like me are afflicted with an overabundance of mana'o-mind. Basically, we think too much and then talk too much about what we think. We are creatures of the mind (not necessarily of the intellect, though that too contributes to the problem), and filter most of our experiences -- experiences that are not sensed by the mind -- through it. We've gotten quite good at this; our educational system develops it, our cultural engine runs on it. We acquire cultural capital based on our facility at various forms of mentation. Some of us, like me, are paid for doing it well. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with the mind. It serves its purposes and helps us in obvious ways. But when the mind develops exclusive of the heart and spirit -- concepts that are almost entirely absent from our cultural mainstream or exist in debased forms -- what you get is sickness, profound sickness that is so pervasive that it's become accepted as normal. And so, normalcy, as defined in the modern west, is, I am learning, actually a form of psychosis: a tyranny of mind.

I might be too far gone ever to fully heal. Raised in a materialist New York suburb, over-educated in the humanities and sciences (I love them both but they give me headaches), and bad at sports, I always found refuge in my intellect. I'm almost wholly identified with it now. Even when my heart nudges against my brain, it's my brain that says "hmm, isn't that interesting. I wonder what it means. Let's have a closer look at this." Even when my eye apprehends the beauty of a dragonfly wing, my brain steps in; "ah, yes. Iridescence is lovely, is it not? And the fine reticulations of veins in the wings. Truly a wonder. Reticulation is a nice word...perhaps I'll include it in a poem..." My education has given me the ability to appreciate the design of things, nature's remarkable machinery, its infinite palette, but this appreciation originates as a vibration in my heart. I can't stay with that vibration long enough to let it expand me. My brain exults in appreciation before my body and spirit can reach the necessary frequency. And when my body aches or I get ill, I look for external causes and symptoms, not realizing that I've put the cart before the horse: my physical illness is a manifestation the imbalance in my whole person. My finely-honed mind is in reality working against me; indeed all our minds working together against us. They are conspirators in our continuing subjection to what we have collectively agreed to call "civilization." So it is no accident, I think, that the cultivation of the spirit and heart are noticeably absent from our inculturation. The heart and spirit liberate, whereas the mind, if left unchecked, imprisons.

But what to do? Even when I realize I'm thinking too much, that recognition is primarily intellectual. Plus, I'm addicted: my mind, so often outraged (of late) by our communal somnambulance and failures of governance, fills me with a temporarily satisfying hit of righteous disgruntlement.

Put simply, I don't know how to get out of it. As you can probably imagine, meditation is a nightmare experience for me. My dreams are fragmented and often troubled. I feel disconnection, anxiety or vague dissatisfaction more often than I feel the simple joy of being. I am sick with my brain.

The next step in our evolution will occur when westerners start to awaken from the fog of our minds and begin to be. Realizing this, however, is still an act of mind, at least for me. Living it is the key to our healing and the way, I think, to inspirit matter. To re-enchant the world.

But for now it's aimless cogitation until I can get the gibbering, logorrheic monkey in my head to use his indoor voice.

Toward a Politics of Spirit

2004-12-16T23:06:00.000-10:00

I struggle to understand the religious right. I don't mean its scoundrels and scalawags. I don't mean its fanatic political wing in particular, that peculiar brand of scum that seems to float to the surface whenever people get scared. I mean the good, honest, genuinely humble spiritual people who want only peace and love and connection with God. There are a lot of them. Most of them, I suspect. Most of them are probably not the spluttering, gay-hating, censorious moralist the secular left uses to caricature them. (Though, I have to admit, a lot of their public figures don't need us to caricature them; they do a pretty fine job of it on their own). Surely among the true believers in this "Christian" nation, there are those who understand moral complexity, the necessity of skepticism, and the humility to admit that they aren't really certain about what God wants. Surely many of them accept that there are many paths to God and don't seek to impose their version of Christ's teaching on others. Surely some even read the Bible critically, as an incomplete, flawed text transcribed by humans over the centuries who, like that control freak Leviticus, had their pet peeves.

How have they gotten suckered into supporting a political creature that achieves the opposite of their highest moral principles? That, if the Ten Commandments are any barometer, has committed most of the principal sins. Why have they bought into the demonization of urban culture as some sort of elitist pagan Babylon? How can they simultaneously quote Jesus while supporting the war in Iraq? Why on Earth would any true Christian vote for Bush?

I can't answer these questions succinctly, if even at all, and it might be presumptuous to try. But. Even if you're an atheist, one can't help but feel that, at some very important level, our leaders are disconnected from spirit. They're pious, but not spiritual. A pious man prays to God that his army will be victorious. The spirital man avoids the war. A pious man cites scripture. A spiritual man cites his heart. A pious woman excludes those with whom she disagrees. A spiritual woman neither agrees nor disagrees; she seeks to understand. Can you imagine a president guiding his electorate toward love, freedom from economic and mental slavery, inner contentment , simplicity, service and stewardship? Of course, we hear platitudes about service, volunteering and charity, but does anyone question that these are masks, like plastic turkeys at a photo op?

I long...long, I tell you...for a leader who can articulate a shared vision for the future of humanity, summoning our greatest resources of ingenuity, desire for community, compassion -- all the virtues that will guide us collectively toward a true political spirituality, or politics of spirit, that can be applied to reinvigorate any given religion. Including, significantly, atheism. And there is something of this same longing, though it takes a more restrictive form, in Christians who feel that secular society (which to many of them may be a euphemism for crass materialism) is leading us away from the sacred. They just got befuddled by a president whose piety is symptomatic of his deeply damaged spirit.

But what would happen, really, if a president started talking about love? Made it a central philosophy of his or more likely her policy? Repeated it thousands of times in our media? She'd be ridiculed out of office, her pie-eyed idealism shredded by the homonculi in charge of cash flow and homeland security. She'd be accused of being too religious -- or not religious enough. No one would listen; they would want to know only whether or not she supports baby killing and sodomy. Any answer that accomodates the diversity of views on social issues would be viewed as "too nuanced."

Or, just maybe, she'd resonate with an American longing for connection -- spiritual elevation -- that no corporate noise machine could outblare.

Is this what the true believers on the right see in Bush? Though his the language of messianic militancy rather than Christ-like radiance, does he represent to them that type of prophet?

As far apart as I am from the evangelicals in every matter of social policy or "moral values," (I eat sushi and drink lattes...iced), I share that deep desire for a leader who does not only govern the affairs of state, but who moves us collectively toward greater fulfillment. Not in an individual or material sense exclusively, but as a nation, a world of nations, a species of sentient beings. All our work -- our cities, our stable institutions, our science, our finance, our art -- is for nothing if not plied in the service of this greater project. To find out who we can become and what we can achieve when finally we learn to live in balance with the Earth and with one another.

For many Christians, I expect, balance is irrelevant. It will be restored by God on Judgment Day, and to each person their lot. But I submit that Armageddon is a choice. We need not choose it. Perhaps the Bible is not correct on this point of teleology. Perhaps we can achieve revelation without annihilation, in this dimension and at this time. Perhaps that is what is meant by "heaven."

Say it with me now...UGH!

2004-12-15T23:16:00.000-10:00

I logged on to the New York Times web site this evening. I had hoped the second headline, "A Flood of Troubled Soldiers is in the Offing, Experts Predict," would be a story about imminent mutiny in Iraq. It was, instead, a grim and predictable warning about returning veterans suffering from severe mental problems like post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal depression. Not to mention their (incipient) rage when they accept, as I hope they eventually will, that they have been exploited by a cynical government.

But I digress. When I clicked the link to the article, I was first directed to an advertisement -- for Absolut vodka.

Yes, PSTD and white Russians -- the perfect holiday mix!

Sort of gives a bit of deeper significance to these two paragraphs from the article itself:

In his platoon of 38 people, 8 were divorced while in Iraq or since they returned in February, Mr. Rieckhoff said. One man in his 120-person company killed himself after coming home.

"Too many guys are drinking," said Mr. Rieckhoff, who started the group Operation Truth to support the troops. "A lot have a hard time finding a job. I think the system is vastly under-prepared for the flood of mental health problems."

What the hell is wrong with at the Times? Nothing more than is wrong with the rest of corporate media -- a refusal to confront reality. Worse, to veil that reality with ironies like running a holiday-themed booze ad in front a story about shellshocked vets. The Flash ad featured a party I'd sure like to be invited to: young, attractive couples dancing on a beach like Cabo San Lucas, plam fronds festooned with colored lights, dancing and drinking at chatting each other up almost as if...almost as if...there were no war going on at all! The ad's hookline, "Absolut Wonderland," was about as succinct a summary of life in Holiday/Wartime America as anything I've read. Irony that good could only be unintentional; being so it's just pathetic.

Now perhaps this was a random ad; click on any given link, and you might be directed to one ad or another, or to none at all. Maybe this is a case of monumentally poor taste combined with bad timing.

But it illustrates, starkly if accidentally, an ugly reality. How many of these guys are going to hit the bottle hard when they get back? How many will be left drunk and and babbling on a New York street corner, or like the Vietnam veteran (and subsequent ex-convict) who once nearly beat the shit out me for having long hair, roaming the green line of the Boston T? They might be irreversibly scarred and irrevocable to the society they fought to protect, but at least we damn well have the lifestyle to which we've grown sorta accustomed, depending upon, of course, the cheap oil they're giving up their sanity to secure. Rest easy: there'll be plenty of Absolut for all here in wonderland. Especially since there won't be enough anti-psychotics to go around.

It is official. Corporate America has overwhelmed my considerable faculty for sarcasm.

More Light!

2004-12-14T23:57:00.000-10:00

Another Perfect Evening in Paradise
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

COMMENT

Almost a Writer

2004-12-10T01:10:00.000-10:00

It's easy to be a failed novelist. All you have to do is start a novel. Most likely you'll fail. I am currently failing to write a novel, as I'm sure so many other of my kindred spirits are as well. Though I occasionally open MS Word and start typing, I struggle against the continous sense that whatever it is I'm writing is a failure. I have that sense even now; I wonder how many other writers share this problem. It results largely, I think, from the gap between what one wants to say and what one actually says. Does that gap ever close? Is the difference between the successful writer and the failed writer simply that the successful writer stops caring?

However, I have just finished an article for a Hana Hou, the in-flight magazine for Hawaiian Airlines. As corporate publications go, it's relatively hip, though I do feel some cognitive dissonance at seeing my article -- a short piece about a migratory bird that winters in Hawaii -- surrounded by advertising. That's all corporate publishing (all corporate media) really is: an advertising delivery system. And here I am both contributing to and benefitting from it. And I'm about to do it again.

But I tried as much as I could to treat my subject with respect. The Pacific golden plover (known here as the kolea), is, as far as birds go, pretty cool. They summer in Alaska and migrate here in October, making one of the most grueling nonp-stop migrations in all of bird-dom. The next article will be more of a challenge, but also something I'm deeply personally interested in: Hawaiian healing.

I wanted to answer, or at least explore the question: what makes Hawaii so healing? So many of my expat friends came here broken, dispossessed, fleeing or seeking something. For my part, I've dreamed of living in the tropics since I can remember, but never really thought it could happen. But something drew me here. And many of the kama'aina I know felt something similar. There's just something powerfully magnetic about these islands. The HTA (Hawaii Tourism Authority) has of late been trying to package the islands as a healing destination. Spas and wellness centers have been sprouting everywhere; most are too expensive, of course, for the natives whose traditions, like lomilomi, they draw upon.

It's not just that the islands are beautiful; of course they are. Hawaii, for all the development it's endured, resembles its postcards more than any place I've ever been. You may have to stay a while to discover its beauty -- I've been here 8 years, and I'm still astonished on a daily basis. But it's more than that. There's an ineffable power -- the Hawaiians call it mana -- that vibrates in this place. The longer you stay and the more aligned with it you become, the more you feel it. It takes time, of course. You have to cleanse yourself, especially if, like me, you're from a toxic place. You might sense only a shudder of it if you're a casual tourist, but for the dedicated seeker, you get shocked.

Hawaiians have known this for centuries, and though westerners sought to bury native medicine and spirituality, there remains an intact oral tradition the roots of which predate Cook. The Hawaiian word, 'aina, literally translated means "land." Kama'aina means "child of the land;" it has come simply to mean a person who lives here. But unlike "land," which is inert, 'aina connotes not only the physical world, but also one's relationship with it and, importantly, its mana. 'Aina is not just a piece of ground, it is a living presence, to be treated with humility and respect, but which is also not separate from oneself. In this relationship is, I think, the fundamental idea behind the Hawaiian idea of wellness and something which is vanishing from the modern world, much to our shared detriment.

So I'm off to the Big Island at the end of the month to meet with some kahuna in the three main traditions of Hawaiian healing: lomilomi, ho'oponopno, and la'au lapa'au. Most people associate lomilomi with the massage, but that's only one of the techniques. Ho'oponopno is a sort of psychotherapy that examines negativity in one's thinking and relationships and seeks to restore balance. La'au lapa'au is herbal healing. I feel blessed to be able to pursue this research because it not only affords me the opportunity to write and to earn money, but to seek out connections with elders and healers. For whatever reason, I was given this opportunity and responsibility. I only hope I can do it justice in 3,000 words or less.

In Wildness

2004-12-05T01:14:00.000-10:00

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

I guess I'm on a Thoreau jag lately, and it's not a bad time for it. Reading about the Bush administration's latest giveaways to timber and developers -- gutting environmental legislation intended to protect salmon and trout -- I began to wonder (again) how it is that humans could callously continue to damage what so obviously sustains us. How the children could turn against their mother. How we could, as a species, continue to create environments no one wants to live in at a cost no one, if they knew it, would want to pay.

Bush portrays himself as an outdoor sort of guy. Not, of course, your L.L. Bean gentleman flyfisher in plaid, but a reg'lar joe who likes to clear wood and play cowboys and injuns; a genu-ine Teddy Roosevelt (without, of course, all that dangerous Rough Riding). Environmental protection often makes strange bedfellows -- hunters and fishermen joining with tree-hugging, wolf-restoring conservationists to protect wilderness areas and streams. You'd think that Bush -- as a man and not as a tool of his corporate sponsors -- would make at least a feeble attempt to protect what he professes to personally enjoy. But no. Instead he dismantles the environmental protections hard-won since the 1960's as as quickly as he can, opening the floodgates (pun intended) for corporate raiding. Indeed, he would privatize the National Park System if he thought he could get away with it (and he may yet). It isn't only Bush, of course -- it is a whole movement in American culture sustained by, I think, one fundamental deficit in its character: its loss from wildness.

Other writers wiser and greater than I -- Thoreau, Edwin Muir, John McPhee, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder -- have written on wildness. I don't know that I can add much to what they've already so eloquently said other than to corroborate it with my own experience.

I have always been attracted to wild places. On Long Island, where I grew up, they were difficult to find and even twenty years ago existed only in slowly shrinking patches of woodland among housing developments. Behind the house where I spent most of my youth was a small deciduous forest of oaks, hickory and maple. Occasionally a fox would wander the border where our lawn began. Once we saw deer. Raccoons were occasional visitors, and in the summer, rabbits grazed our grass. The woodland was several continguous acres of forest -- large for Dix Hills, a fast growing community throughout the seventies and eighties for New York City dwellers creeping eastward in search of some peace and quiet, some greenery, a sense, however artificial, of being in nature. The wood was bounded to the south by my street, Red Oak Court (for the construction of which a fair number of red oaks had to be sacrificed) to the east by Vanderbilt Parkway (an extension of Motor Parkway, the first road built on Long Island and used by the wealthy elites -- Vanderbilt among them -- as a race track) to the north by Village Hill Drive (it was, in fact, on a hill, though one would be hard pressed to call the collection of 1-acre single family homes a "village") and to the west by the "high-T's," a line of immense towers supporting electrical lines thick as a body. We would sometimes play on the highway of grass that had been cut through the woods to make room for the towers, a different kind of wilderness where adults rarely ventured, all the time hearing the electric sizzle of the juice in the cables far above our heads.

Though this stand of trees was among the largest undeveloped patches left in town, I understood even as a boy that this was not a wildnerness; it was an island. I wandered the pathless wood (no one went back there, and so it was overgrown with brambles and covered by a foot of soft leaf-litter) in search of something I couldn't name but that made itself felt in me as an inexplicable and ineluctible longing. There were moments of perfect quiet, but these were quickly interrupted by the sound of passing cars along Vanderbilt Parkway. As I grew up, the wood slowly disappeared as the trees were converted to new homes.

Next to my elementary school was Dix Hill's only natural pond, kept undeveloped I learned from the landowner whom I once met while walking by its shore, because he didn't want the last natural refuge for water birds to be paved over. Though no one in the town knew it, he had named it "Lake Julia" for his daughter. It was hardly more than a puddle, perhaps a square acre of standing water, dark and tannic and only a few feet at its deepest, fringed by a thin margin of woods bounded on every side by suburban roads and houses. But it was my sanctuary. I broke the rules every recess during school to make my way down to the pond, catching garter snakes and turtles. Several dozen species of birds gathered, including the Canada geese. When a goose flock swooped in to land on the pond's still face, I could feel the sudden rush of wind their massed wings pressed ahead of them. Over the years, the pond eutrophied. It's probably gone now. The last time I visited a couple of years ago, it had shrunk to a quarter its size and was full of trash. A magnificent snapping turtle that, judging by its size must have been decades old, lay dead in the shallows. Someone had shot it.

Growing up in such a place, something had always nagged at me, pulled at the edges of my consciousness. It was a longing for wildness. I had never seen a true wilderness, yet I seemed to have some innate, preconscious sense of and passionate desire for it. A place where one could turn full circle and see no man-made thing. Where no sounds but those of the earth itself could be heard. Where the notions of morality and duality and property and law were absurd. Where necessity's intelligence had born such beauty as man could all his days hope to imitate but never achieve. A place where death was as present as life. A wilderness.

Some people think that nature is indifferent to us. That the tooth-and-nail business of survival requires a radical callousness to even the highest human faculties for altruism, generosity and apprecation. We think that nature cannot appreciate us as we appreciate it, and thus we feel alone among a world of living things that are barely aware of themselves. But I disagree. I believe that it is we who are indifferent to nature. It has not rejected us, but we who have rejected it, pushing it to the edges of our consciousness and our habitats where it exists only as "other." The delight we take in seeing a red-tail hawk nesting above Central Park is possible only because nature has been so thoroughly othered. It is we who have reduced nature to ornamentation, where, bereft of its wildness, it fails to satisfy; indeed, experiencing it in its domesticity only makes us hunger more acutely for an unmediated experience of the wild.

And those unmediated moments of wildness can be among the most inspiring and transformative experiences of our lives. But fewer and fewer of us seem to have the opportunity, the time, the requisite intrepidity or, most troubling, the desire.

Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!

2004-12-02T21:35:00.000-10:00

I've always taken some pride in the idea that, relatively, I don't consume much. I don't own much. I don't make much waste. We have trash pickup twice a week, but I take the trash to the curb only twice a month. Though we have no recycling program here in Hawaii (if you can believe that -- next to a few of those little New England states, we have the least land to spare), Andrea and I truck the our corrugated cardboard, newsprint and containers to the voluntary recycling dumpster. I own few large things (my car, a bike, a surfboard), and any furniture or appliances I have are borrowed. I don't drive often or far. I rarely shop.

And still, I feel that I have, and consume, too much by far. All my clothing put together would fill maybe one large duffel bag (not including shoes), and yet I feel this is still too much. Having traveled to third-world countries like Mexico, Thailand, Jamaica and other tiny Caribbean nations, I've seen what frugality necessity thrusts upon people, and how they adapt. I've been to places where my baseball cap was considered a prize possession, and people have bargained with me for it.

Once, wandering the back streets of Bangkok, I found myself among a collection of shacks on stilts above a pool of fetid water. It was hard to tell what the living arrangements were, whether it was all one large family, a group of families, or a neighborhood. The huts were all bunched together, connected here and there by catwalks of rotting planks, separated by walls of corrugated iron held up by rope that appeared to be handwoven from old rags. The children were all naked, and the adults wore the remnants of what were perhaps once clothes draped around their shoulders or tied around their waists with twine. There were holes in the floor through which the inhabitants dropped their refuse, and, I assumed, their human waste into the water. These people literally had nothing, and what they did have was used, reclaimed, damaged, dirty, and endlessly repaired. They used plastic colanders as dishware and sat on punctured gascans. And here I, an American in comparatively brand new clothes, be-cameraed and in possession of all my most useful teeth, stumbling through their homes, elicited not angry stares or derision, but open, genuine smiles.

Most of the world is poor. Perhaps not so abjectly as these people were, but even with what little I have, I have more than maybe 90% of the world's population, and access to anything I need, any time of the year. It is hard not to take these things for granted, even when I daily remind myself to be grateful. But with that gratitude comes also guilt. Why should I be so lucky while others suffer? How can I best balance my own comfort with my responsibility to social and environmental justice? Am I using more than my share? Am I, with what few possessions and relatively frugal lifestyle I have, pressuring the earth too greatly? How much would I willingly give up so that others may have more?

I don't know the answers to these questions, and the fact that I interrogate them does little to assuage my guilt. But I believe that very soon things will begin to shift. The lifestyle and opportunity to which we in the US have become accustomed will begin to diminish, and sooner than we think. Never has Thoreau's exhortation to simplify been more pressing than it is today, balanced as we are on the cusp between the end of our Golden Age and the beginning of what may be a long decline. Those who simplify, who disburden themselves of the material possessions that weigh us down, who prepare ourselves intellectually for a time of privation will be more free than those who cling to their lives as they are.

To that end, I am beginning in earnest a process of disburdenment that I have long planned and desired. I will begin to rid myself of the unused, the over-specialized, the difficult to move. Old books (who needs a book other than the one you're currently reading?), unlistened to music, unworn clothes. At the end of my process, I would like the sum total of everything I own to fit into one small room at the most, be easily portable, and have multiple uses.

I would also like to have nothing that I would hate to lose.

The only two exceptions at this point are my guitar and my computer. Everything else I can do without pretty easily. Except maybe indoor plumbing and thermoregulation, the only two benefits of civilization that make all the other crap worth suffering through.

Mele Kalikimaka

2004-11-23T20:01:00.000-10:00

There are few things more ironic than Christmas in Hawaii.

It should be noted, for those who don't live here, that Hawaii is one of the most Christian places I have ever been (outside of the Salt Lake City). Along the three-mile stretch of highway between my house and Hawaii Kai, there are no less than 15 religious schools and churches representing every Christian denomination except maybe Quakers. (Are Quakers considered a Christian sect?) Right across the street are Episcopalians. Catty corner to my house are Jehova's Witnesses. Down the road a bit are Methodists, Catholics, Baptists, Adventists, Lutherans and Unitarians. Just on the other side of the school where I teach are a strange (and very wealthy) group of evangelicals. Pentacostals, I think. They try to surf out on my home break and are invariably in in the way. Landmines, we call them. One of my ongoing complaints about living here is that whenever you go to a coffee shop where someone is reading, more than half the time they're reading the Bible. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this, but it would be nice to stumble upon someone plowing through Anna Karenina or checking the concordance to Ulysses. Ah, how I long for the East Village.

Back to Christmas. It began on October 13th this year. Every year, it gets earlier and earlier. I track it by the first "seasonal" television commercial I see. It might have come earlier still, but I just don't watch that much television. All the Starbucks have already stocked their "seasonal" merchandise: mugs with snowflakes, little stuffed Santa Clauses and reindeer on the ends of candy canes. "White Christmas" and "Winter Wonderland" piped in over the PA. Same deal at all the big mainland chain stores: Pier 1, Williams Sonoma, the brand-spaking new Wal-Mart, what have you. The malls are slowly infested by ever-growing forests of poinsettia and plastic evergreens.

It won't come as any surprise to those who know me that I loathe Christmas. Perhaps "loathe" is not strong enough a word. I despise the fact that corporations have become so blatantly opportunistic and that consumers eat it up, all the while knowing on some level -- even complaining -- that they're being preyed upon. I hate the compulsory consumerism that plunges those who can ill-afford it into even deeper debt. I abhor the fact that a deeply Christian holiday has become "seasonal;" it is thereby acceptable for people of all faiths to celebrate the birth of Their Lord and Savior. Even my tribe, the Jews, have gotten into the act, either by having Christmas trees in their homes ("oh, it's not religious, it's just seasonal! Don't you think it's festive? Don't be such a grinch...") or by celebrating Hannukah by gift-giving. Not that I minded it so much as a child, but now that I understand that it's become an ersatz Christmas, I'm back to loathing.

I also hate cinnamon and nutmeg. Passionately.

But in Hawaii, the whole nasty affair is thrown into stark and ironic relief. There's no winter wonderland. No chestnuts roasting on open fires. No sleigh bells ringing. The whole notion of winter and its associated symbology is ludicrous. Santa would sweat to death. The few evergreens that grow here (Norfolk pines and ironwoods) are invasive species. Beyond this, they don't look sufficiently like firs and spruces, so those trees must be imported by the thousands every year from the mainland in huge shipping containers which are offloaded from the freighters and trucked to directly mall parking lots specially cordoned off for tree sales. After Christmas, the curbsides are littered with desiccated dwarf Douglas firs. In the Costco parking lot in Hawaii Kai, ice machines run all day and night to create a small mountain of ice. Children slide around on it for the few hours before it melts. A great many of the islanders have never seen real snow.

Of course there are syncretic elements: Christmas hula shows and "Mele Kalikimaka," which, by the time Christmas is finally over, has driven half the local population to self-mutilation.

Christmas, like Christianity as a whole, is a legacy of the missionary and colonial period, which if you talk to Hawaiians hasn't ended yet. It's a foreign tradition, born of a foreign religion from a foreign climate and environment. Traces and remnants of that climate are imported here, stamped on the landscape for a few weeks of the year and consumed by locals who ought to know better. And that's the crux of why I loathe Christmas in Hawaii -- not so much that it flies in the face of reality to bring pieces of winter to a tropical island, but more because the local people accept, perpetuate and have come to love a holiday that symbolizes the decimation and absorption of the native culture, and which continues to keep them subject to a consumerist juggernaut that is expanding its reach ever more deeply into the private sphere with each passing year.

More Electoral Fraud

2004-11-18T17:08:00.000-10:00

It's not making its way into the mainstream much. Even Jon Stewart isn't covering the REALLY BIG STORY, which is the myriad ways in which the 2004 election was stolen. But if you're cruising the left-leaning internet sites, you've probably been seeing some relatively scary stuff. Here's a recent sampling:

US Election: Democracy In Question
Thom Hartmann on Fraud in Florida. This one's revolting. A must-read.
A particularly scary study by statisticans at Berkeley

And this is just today. One of two things is going on. Either these are all anomalies or isolated incidents which put together neither suggest a conspiracy nor represent enough of a discrepancy to bring the election results into serious doubt (this is the mainstream media's take on it, in the rare moments when it's covered), or it is quite the opposite: a coordinated effort to hack the vote. Given this administration's track record and the pattern of behavior indicated by the GOP's various attempts at voter disenfranchisement and suppression in the weeks prior to the election, I am more inclined to believe the latter case. It also explains the discrepancies between the exit polling and the results.

Something's rotten in the state of Denmark, and has been since 2000. I'm thinking now that the GOP gains in the mid-term elections and their sweep in the 2004 election has little to do with the disarray of the Democratic party or with the "morality" voters. That Bush, the most controversial president in modern history who has so badly bungled the last four years would be able to pull off such a massive hoodwinking of the American electorate is really hard to imagine. The simpler explanation is probably true: he cheated.

The questions now are: what does this mean, and what is to be done?

On the latter question, the answer is simple: publicize, investigate, fight. Don't back down. Get every lawyer in America working on it, bring in the heavies: Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Kerry and Edwards. Don't back down until the issue is settled beyond a reasonable doubt. This should be THE issue of the American left for the time being. There is no other, because if this issue is not addressed, then nothing else matters. And the media has to get on board with this; without their continued attention to the matter, the democratic process is sunk. But if, as someone suggested to me recently, the Democrats are so compliant (could John Kerry have possibly conceded more quickly?) because they, like the Republicans, are beholden to their corporate sponsors, then it will take a grass-roots movement the likes of which have not been seen since Gandhi led India to freedom from the British Raj. Given the current divisions in American society, I don't see this as very likely.

It's the former question that we need to examine with a clear, cold eye. Without the blear of sentimental idealism or the taint of our innate sense of fair play, because the foxes are in the henhouse. There are a lot of people out there -- most people, I imagine -- who cannot accept the possibility that the Right would even attempt such a disgusting coup, much less get away with it. For many, trust in our most fundamental institutions is a necessary precondition to their basic sense of security and happiness. To admit that our entire democratic process has been hijacked by a pernicious radical element that wraps itself in the flag, the family and God is to relinquish that security. Then there are others who accept the possibility that such a coup could occur but don't really believe it has occurred. Their reasoning? If it were really that serious, it would be on the news. Again, it comes down to denial. Such a thing happens in third world countries, in dictatorships. It could never happen here. And then there are those who don't care, as long as their party is in power, what difference does it make whether they employed Machiavellian methods to get there? Our will be done.

But burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the lessons of history, or remainingly stubbornly blind to the machinations of power (and thus complicit in its overreaching) does not obviate a reality that is becoming increasingly difficult to deny. It is happening here. It has been happening for a long time. And it may be too late to turn it back. Even those who are pleased by Bush's reinstallment may find themselves in the not-too-distant future regretting their support. Like all corrupt leaders, he will exploit whom he needs to and then cut them loose. The religious right is probably in for a big surprise when they realize that all the God-talk was just a bait-and-switch. The real agenda is the hostile takeover of our commons by corporations.

It is time to wake up and call it what it is: a revolution. The quietest revolution in history, possibly, and carried out not merely without popular support, but in direct contravention of popular opinion. History's greatest mind-fuck. If you've been reading science fiction for any length of time, you're not unfamiliar with the methodology of mass mind-control. But it is a surprise to see it in action. And in all those sci-fi dystopian novels, the corrupt always fall and humanity is freed. It remains to be seen whether that narrative is pure fantasy.

It is becoming clear to me that we are on the cusp of a new and dangerous sort of fascism. Loyalty oaths at campaign events and purges of the CIA are only the first timid steps to a manufactured consent that rivals anything McLuhan could have envisioned. What makes this fascism more dangerous than Hitler's or Franco's or Mussolini's is that people simply aren't aware that it's happening. There have been few direct interruptions in the normal flow of our lives, regulated as they are by a cycle of work, consumption and war that feeds the dominant power. Stalinist communism was doomed to fail because the people recognized propaganda when they saw it. They went along with it out of fear for their lives. In modern America, we go along with it because we don't, on the whole, see it as propaganda. And when those who are awake and conscious try to awaken others -- to point out the propaganda -- they're summarily dismissed as conspiracy theorists or radicals. They're cursed, accused of treason, of "hating America," or lambasted as "liberals," the newest invective in the English language.

But every day my certainty grows, and it is based on a reasoned combination of fact, historical precedent and common sense. No media assault, no gibbering winger is going to convince me otherwise. America is about to enter the darkest period of its history, and it is anybody's guess how long it will last or how much damage will be done.

Don't Like Rules?

2004-11-18T16:32:00.000-10:00

Change 'em!

That's the GOP strategy. Pesky ethics rules got you down? Change 'em!

Earlier today, House Republicans met in caucus for a private voice vote on changing House ethics rules to protect Tom DeLay. DeLay is about to be indicted on charges of money laundering and violating campaign finance laws. These are, to my mind, among the lesser offenses of one of the most corrupt sons-of-bitches to infect the House of Representatives since the McKinley administration. The ethics rules state that a member of the House cannot retain his or her position if s/he is under indictment. The House, feeling which way the wind is blowing for DeLay, voted today to do away with this unpleasantness simply by, well, changing the rules. Now DeLay can both serve in the House AND be indicted for a felony. Paves the way rather nicely for the rest of the family, knowutahmean?

Gee, and those poor ex-felons in Florida couldn't even vote.

Even so, I think DeLay's days are numbered. The guy's too loose a cannon even for this administration. Pretty soon he's going to go off in even more spectacular fashion than he has already. There won't be any way to protect him, one hopes.

But this affair is yet another manifestation of the GOP's strategy: void or change whatever rules of conduct (or laws) that prove disadvantageous. Don't have enough cash to fund your foreign misadventures? Raise the spending limit by 800 billion. Want to make sure that conservative (read: pro-life) judges get confirmed to the Supreme Court? Change the filibuster rules. Want to protect civilization from anal sex? Amend the Constitution! Finding the National Park Service doing too good a job at protecting our national treasures from resource extraction? Ignore them. Don't like intelligence that contradicts your pre-existing conclusion? Purge the CIA! Got a Secretary of State who tells it straight? Replace him with a fawning sycophant!

Sweeping it under the rug: guaranteed to work every time for at least a few minutes.

Autumn Night

2004-11-15T19:50:00.000-10:00

Palm & Crescent
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

NOW I understand the Islamic symbols.

Six Days

2004-11-14T21:31:00.000-10:00

without food will change anyone. And that's not even a long time, really.

I went into this fast feeling closed. Closed off from my heart, closed off from others, from the world. I got continually trapped in mental loops as my mind circulated through the election, my job, my life, the various vague dissatisfactions that serve as our common inheritance in the modern west and is the subject of so many disappointing short story collections by young and upcoming authors. I wasn't dreaming vividly, and the things which had once struck me as beautiful seemed lackluster. Life was a game of endurance rather than pleasure. Everyone goes through this. For some, it's a way of life.

But when you purge your body and reconnect with being, when you increase your vibrational frequency and feel yourself growing less dense it's a relief. I feel as though a literal hood has been pulled back from my head, and now I'm feeling much better thank you.

The second day was the toughest. I went through what's called a healing crisis -- a moment when your sickness worsens before it improves. Luckily I wasn't working that day. I suddenly became listless and tired. My anger and dissatisfaction increased to such a degree that I thought I'd have to tear out my eyes. Which of course would have proved nothing other than how angry and dissatisfied I was. Following some remote instruction, I laid down. I tried to read, but I couldn't keep my mind to it. Eventually I fell asleep, and had vigorous and dark dreams; they shifted so rapidly and were so full of confusion and non-sequitur that I recall only fleeting images. Black widow spiders among them, which I think symbolized the illness. When I woke about an hour and half later, I felt healed. It was amazing. The anger that had seemed so insistent was now only a vapor. The world seemed literally brighter. My vision had sharpened, and everything was so clear that I had no choice but to be struck by how beautiful it is, and remark on what a wonder it is to see.

It only confirms to me how interconnected our emotions are with our bodily health. Toxicity is a dynamic feedback system. Toxicity in the body creates disturbances in the mind, which then re-manifest as illness in the body. The whole system makes one feel quite like shit, and though we may cast about for causes to our suffering, looking for excuses in our environment, our conditions, our relationships, our histories, it really all comes down to one's physical and mental purity.

The next several days were easy, and this lightness grew as the week went on. I remembered my ayahuasca experiences more clearly, and the messages and information I had learned in my interaction with the medicine came back to me in all their simplicity and truth. I felt deep gratitude, which I have not felt for several months. I reconnected.

On the last day of the fast, I tried the gallbladder/liver flush. I drank 3/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil with equal part fresh organic lemon juice. It sounds grosser than it is. I went to bed, laid on my right side in a fetal position and went to sleep. I could feel something moving in my gut all night, and I slept fitfully. I was somewhat nauseated the next morning, but with my first B.M. at 11:00, I passed a large clot of gallstones. Two of them the size of marbles. Unbelievable. I literally didn't know I had it in me. And years from now, those stones could have calcified, requiring surgery to remove. Now that they're out, my liver is functioning more efficiently, and I can feel the difference. Drinking olive oil is hardly a pleasant experience, but I imagine surgery would be far worse.

Now it's back to eating, and the challenge is to control my diet to maintain my purity and health so that I don't fall so easily back into my lower-frequency patterns which, if left unchecked, will make me miserable. But two chocolate chip cookies later, I still feel pretty good.

Why Are Christians Scared Shitless?

2004-11-11T23:07:00.000-10:00

It seems counterintuitive, given that we in America have everything. One of the highest standards of living in the developed world, a rock-solid constitution that values equality and social justice, the world's largest if not best-funded military, relative geopolitical safety, access to fresh fruit no matter the season, health care and emergency services, functioning infrastructure and a landscape that rivals any in the world in diversity and beauty. We also have, for the time being, relative freedom.

And yet some dark magic is on the wind. The religious right is getting practically hysterical. Perhaps they always were and now feel they have the freedom to let it all hang out. But some of the things I've been reading and hearing are beyond ridiculous. It's always been their propensity to project their fears on others, to externalize and personify evil (hence, Satan), but their apoplectic fits against liberals, gays and Hollywood now has the rank stench of violent fanaticism. Like James Dobson, the "social policy director" of the Bush administration stating that homosexual marriage will "destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth." Sheesh. Who knew that the combined power of the Castro and the West Village rivaled all the nuclear arsenals of the world? Besides, I thought that's what the Christians wanted: the End Times, the destruction of the Earth. They should be all FOR gay marriage if it triggers the Rapture.

Or this tidbit from Bob Jones' (of Bob Jones University) letter to the Preznit:

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America--though she doesn't deserve it--a reprieve from the agenda of paganism...Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years--a brief time only--to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God.

In Wisconsin, another fight over whether creationism (aka "Intelligent Design") ought to be taught in biology class. Why do we keep having to revisit this idiocy? "God" may or may not have created the world. That's an issue for religion and is properly taught in religious schools. But it ain't science, which, last time I checked, is what's supposed to be taught in science class.

To those vibrating at even a slightly higher frequency, it's clear that these people are terrified. But what is it that's scaring them? Their own repressed capacity for evil (not that it's so repressed anymore -- it's just cloaked in piety)? It's somewhat reassuring to know that my lifestyle choices will scare the bejesus out of these gibbering zealots, but I can't say I understand why they think my support of government-run programs like Social Security is blasphemous. I'm not sure that we can explain the fear only as the result of continous programming by the government and its PR wing, the media. Nor purely as the psychological habit so evident in children of projecting one's own fears and insecurities on the "other." (That certainly doesn't explain how those fears and insecurities originated). And it ain't the terrorists that the religious right is afraid of; note that terrorism didn't even make it into Bob Jones' list of issues Congress should tackle.

It's a spiritual sickness that's been around for two thousand years. At least. It's never left us, and as a species, we've never been able to pinpoint this adversary, much less defeat it. If we cannot overcome it, we're done for. Eventually.

Alien Flower

2004-11-10T22:52:00.001-10:00

Alien Flower
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

I took this one with a macro lens. This is the real color; it's not even photoshopped.

I Can't Help It...

2004-11-09T16:51:00.000-10:00

I'm depressed.

I know a lot of us have been going through the stages of mourning -- denial, anger, etc. -- but I'm a long way from acceptance. And yet that's where I need to be.

How many other people out there are having conversations in their heads, or out loud to no one, wherein they try to make some archetypal Bush supporter see the light? How many of us are talking to our radios and televisions? How many of us wince when they remember? I wince about ten times a day now. More if I read the news. More still if I read the alternative media. Here's a lovely piece of right-wing nuttery that makes the case for expelling the "blue states." Even when they win, they're angry. Don't read this if you're having a peaceful afternoon.

I wrote a few days ago that I refuse to be angry. But I am tasked. I am tasked. The only way to clear my head is to shut off the flow of information from the outside world, and that's just not sustainable. I'm starting to feel it in my body, in my dreams, even. Not just my own anger, but the resonance of the collective anger echoing through the ether.

All my life I've wanted to become open to spirit, and now that I'm on my way, I get flooded with other people's crap. My thoughts more readily scatter. I can't concentrate. I'm overcome by a desire to flee the country about four times a day.

Now, I'm already predisposed to anger (shitty childhood and all). I've already been a misanthrope since about the age of five. This is the last thing I need: justification for and reiteration of all my beliefs about human idiocy. I want to believe that there's a higher design at work here, that this oncoming darkness will unify and galvanize those of us in the light, but I'd have preferred another method. Even if we eventually regain political power, we'll be so long in undoing the damage that we'll be decades behind where we might have been. And given the state of the planet, decades could make all the difference.

So, the short term task is, then, to stay free of anger. And, I gotta tell ya, I don't know if I can do it.

Fasting

2004-11-08T09:21:00.000-10:00

First day of a fast. I'll try to make it two weeks, but one day at a time. Every few months of the past couple of years, I go a week or more without solid food. Most of my friends doubt my sanity. Rightly so. It's not something anyone in their right mind would do. But we've all see what happens to people in their right minds.

Fasting is an intense physical/mental/spiritual cleansing. By not eating, you give your body a chance to direct energy normally used for digestion (rather an inefficient process) to healing at the cellular level. The body's native intelligence takes over and it begins to rid itself of accumulated toxicity. In modern America, we've got a lot of it. Environmental pollutants, food additives, not to mention the psychic poisons of mass media, consumer culture, and being perpetually at war. (Fasting helps to get rid of that crap as well, believe it or not).

The first few days of the detox are a challenge. You get waves of hunger, but they're easy to overcome. 90% of the battle is simple resolve. You tell your body that it's not going to get the food it's craving, and the hunger ebbs. The hunger comes less and less frequently as the fast goes on, and by the third or fourth day you're not hungry at all. I miss eating -- the taste, the physical act, the way it regulates the day -- but I'm not hungry.

Detox begins in earnest after a couple of days. The first time you fast, it can be painful. Headeaches, irritability, wild fluctuations in energy and concentration, odd odors and nasty tastes. But you aren't starving. You're just purging all the gunk through every possible organ of elimination, the largest of which is the skin. And it ain't pretty. You get zits. Your tongue turns white. But it's all part of the human glory.

After a few days of fresh fruit and vegetable juices, I move on to what's called master cleanse, a concoction of organic lemon juice, water, grade-b maple syrup and cayenne pepper. Sounds nastier than it is. I don't like the cayenne, which is necessary to help cleanse the digestive tract of the excess mucus generated to assist with the detoxification process, so I take it in capsule form. You can drink master cleanse for weeks -- some people even do it for months -- before your body begins to digest itself. I only do it for a week or two at the most. This is when the serious detox happens.

I combine the master cleanse with colon-cleansing. 2 drinks a day of psyllium husk (a fiber like Metamucil), bentonite clay and spirulina. This will eventually break the "walls" of the intestine, which is a hardened lining of impacted food detritus that never comes out of you unless you do something like this. John Wayne died with something like forty pounds of wall in his gut. That's what happens when you never eat a frikkin' salad.

In addition, I do a salt-water flush three times a week. This is a really lovely experience: you drink a quart of warm salt water in the morning. The salt concentration matches that of your blood, so you neither absorb the water you drink, nor is water drawn out of your bloodstream. The result? The whole thing plummets through your gut like Draino, taking with it anything that's still there. And you'd be surprised at what's still there after four or five days of not eating. The flush sometimes leaves me feeling faint, but in the end incredibly healed.

This time, I'm going to do something new: a liver/gall bladder flush, which consists of drinking a nasty (I'm told) concoction of olive oil and epsom salts. This removes gall stones and cholesterol.

At the end of all this self-abuse, you feel revitalized and rejuvenated. Your skin clears up, you lose weight (of course), you have more energy and you're less susceptible to negative emotions. I often have more concentration, better recall, and my normally lousy attitude is a little less lousy.

Fasting isn't for the meek, but it's something I think everyone should try once in their lives. The whole point is transformation, evolution. To become stronger, better, faster. To raise your frequency just a little bit higher and come one step closer to truth.

The Evidence Mounts

2004-11-07T15:33:00.000-10:00

Well, that damned liberal media seems to have accepted the legitimacy of the election lock, stock and barrel (a cliche metaphor that has never been more appropriate than it is in this context). They've gone on breathlessly -- even on NPR and PBS -- about the whys of the results and what went wrong for Kerry. Or what the "decisive" loss means for Democrats, yadda yadda. Even progressives have taken as writ the infallibility of the process, despite widespread reports of lost ballots, voter intimidation, voter suppression and computer "error." Why hasn't anyone out there started asking the obvious questions: why did the exit polls indicate a Kerry victory? (Their answer: the exit polling was flawed. NEWS FLASH: except for 2000 and 2004, exit polling has never been wrong). No, the exit polling was spot-on. It was the election that was flawed.

And now the information begins to trickle out. Thom Hartmann, one of our great warriors, discusses the anomalies of optical-scan voting machines in Ohio. This is scary stuff. And Greg Palast, who has been tracking problem with the electoral process since the 2000 coup discusses the erroneous Florida result.

Not that it really matters. The political will to do justice doesn't yet exist. Unless the intelligence and law enforcement agencies mutiny against the Commander in Chief (you listening, FBI?), these crimes will go unnoticed and unpunished.

It's gonna be a looooooooong night.

Kualoa

2004-11-05T18:05:00.000-10:00

Kualoa
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

One of the last (mostly) unspoiled valleys on Oahu. Jurassic Park was filmed here.

Constructing the New Reality

2004-11-05T14:54:00.000-10:00

It's true that Bush isn't an intellectual, and he hasn't got much use for science. But when it comes to quantum physics, his adminstration is way ahead of the curve. They know that time and space are as manipulable as evangelicals in Vegas. They know that reality is created by thought itself. Hence, they've never been hamstrung by such pesky epistemological categories as "true" and "false." One of the more frightening quotes I've read comes from an Oct. 17 article by Ron Suskind of the New York Times, who quotes an unnamed Bush aide:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore...We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Later in the article, Suskind describes an interview with Mark McKinnon, senior media advisor to Bush:

He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

These two quotes have been making the left-wing internet circuit for some time. They explain a lot about Bush's remarkable resistance to factual information. For him, there are no facts. There is only the reality you personally create. And if you call invasion "liberation," if you say that things are improving as the bombings and beheadings mount, if you attack your opponent for committing the very crimes you yourself have just committed, then that becomes the new reality. It's really quite simple. How does it work? Well, here's a quote from David Brock of Media Matters for American, a website that catalogs the ridiculous things right wingers say in the media (he's a busy man, that Brock):

"It's a well run machine. Rove comes up with talking points, gives them to talk radio, which gives them to their minions, who repeat them to their friends day in and day out. They do create an alternative reality. One in which people believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 for example."

Now, those of use who don't live in caves and who occasionally turn off television sets already know that this has been going on for some time. The failure of a liberal agenda in the last election, in spite of the fact that at least half and probably more of the country believes more in that agenda than in its alternative, is due in part to the left's inability to understand the silly-putty nature of what everyone thinks is "real." We haven't caught on to what religious people have believed for centuries: that pure intention can affect material reality (hence, prayer). The right wants to create a new reality, not just as a fictive illusion, as a facade, but as a genuine experiential construct. They're doing it from the outside in -- first by creating the appearance of that reality, and then allowing it to resound in the minds of its uncritical minions thereby eventually becoming, not just representing, that reality. And once the history books have been inscribed, there it is for posterity. Possibly eternity. So while Bush is out there making his new reality, we just stand by spluttering about how fucked up and wrongheaded it is. We can reject what McKinnon says, but I submit we'd be better off accepting the truth of it and then starting to use it to our advantage.

Most people of good sense, of reason, have generally taken a phenomenological approach to setting policy. That is to say, events occur, conditions happen and then we act accordingly, trying to accomodate the "reality" of those events. Sound policy tries as much as possible to direct future events to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. But that approach, as we're seeing, is clearly for pussies. It's reactive. As the right has learned, events don't just happen and conditions are neither random nor beyond control. The world exists in the mind, nowhere else. Reality is not an external condition, it is an act of consciousness. To change the world, all that need be done is to change the mind. And that's what they're attempting to do. Succeeding quite famously, I might add. How else do you get people making minimum wage to re-elect the guy who wants to eliminate overtime pay (without eliminating overtime, of course)? "Cut my arm off? You sure? Sounds crazy, but...okay."

It's bold. It's innovative. It's inherently corrupt. But it's there. The only way to fight it is to imitate it. We need to create an alternate reality based not on "facts" or "truth," but on our stubborn insistence that up is down. By the simple act of repetitively and forcefully reiterating that truth, no matter what anyone says the "facts" really are. We will summarily ignore anyone who points out contradictions in our approach, we will not be swayed by the desire for consensus (clearly, more than half the country is too dumb to see our wisdom), we will not be constrained by the limitations of logic. All criticism will slide from us like a redneck from a greased pig. Our truth, though, will be one rooted in genuine equality, social and economic justice, environmental stewardship, peace and all the higher faculties with which we've been gifted and which it is our duty to manifest in this world. To inspirit this inert matter with the force of our compassion, our generosity and our love.

There's no time to lose, everyone. We have to create this other reality continuously, in our every thought, every action, every word. A critical mass, once achieved, will succeed in reshaping the very nature of our physical reality. Love is stronger than fear. But it requires more patience, persistence, and steadfastness in the face of adversity.

October Surprise?

2004-11-05T13:34:00.000-10:00

Here's a really cynical reading of the October surprise: the bin Laden video, wherein the man voted "most evil" by his senior class of Riyadh High West calmly detailed precisely why the 9/11 attacks occurred. I'm reminded of Orwell's "1984" (I mean, who in the past four years hasn't been), wherein Big Brother has fabricated the perennial Enemy of the State, a shady character named Goldstein who threatens always to attack. And occasionally bombs fall, killing a few dozen people here and there. All this is blamed on Goldstein, whom no one has ever seen except on vidscreens and who continually eludes Big Brother's attempts to destroy him. Periodically, video of Goldstein threatening the Party are run on the screens, and Party members are expected to react with vitriolic hatred at daily choreographed viewings called the "two minutes' hate." But Goldstein exists only as a useful idea, a means by which endless war can be justified. It is a propaganda tool designed to keep people living in constant fear and anxiety, thereby necessitating Big Brother's protective tyranny.

Need I point out the obvious?

I'm not saying bin Laden is a fabrication. But is he really the threat that the administration says he is? Or might he simply be a very convenient baddie trotted out whenever the polls go south? If the color-coded alerts fail to scare you, well then, BOO! Here's Goldstein (Goldstein, bin Laden, or mix-n'-match to make your own swarthy Semitic type!) on your tv just three days before the election. And note that bin Laden didn't threaten to attack. That would be a little TOO scary, possibly hurting Bush more than helping him. bin Laden might try to attack again, and he might succeed in small ways. Just enough to get people behind the Bush agenda but not so much as to make the administration appear completely unable to protect us from terrorism.

But I sure am glad he can protect us from gay marriage. That was really starting to worry me.

Manoa

2004-11-05T01:45:00.000-10:00

Manoa
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

Manoa Valley, looking west from Pu'u Pia

Evening Meditation

2004-11-05T01:05:00.001-10:00

Lying outside by the ocean tonight, I remembered the Earth. How could I have forgotten it? It's big. It's always there. At the shoreline, three tall palms lean out over the water. I lay in the middle on my back, looking up the trunks to the crowns and the tropical stars beyond. Orion crept up in the southeast, blurred by clouds. The wind blew through the branches of a keawe tree. I could hear the crabs skittering on the sand, the chirp of a gecko, the night-call of a kolea.

Being in nature is a matter of relearning how to hear. How to be quiet enough to understand the world's language. In the cities, at work, we get half heard phrases -- a bird call here, a breeze, the occasional rustle of leaves -- as though listening through a wall. We can't hear the conversation. Much less realize that we're participants in it with nothing to say. As I lay there, I remembered to listen, and the intelligence of the whole mind slowly unfolded, in ever deepening levels of complexity and interaction. The mind of the Earth. Its vast unified consciousness whispering in a thousand different voices. The only message I could decipher, and the only one that mattered, was life. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who hear it and those who don't. Those who don't are suffering badly. Those who do suffer a little less.

I realized then how my anger had been hurting me. Anger over everything -- the election, our country of sheeple, the (attempted) colonization of my mind by media and corporations, the ascension of greed and violence -- righteous and abiding anger. But my anger however justifiable is doing me no good. It's deafening. It coils up in my left shoulder and my brow. It changes nothing except for me. And it is exactly what the executors and legislators and mediators want me to feel. Because it feeds them. My anger is evidence of my mind's having been colonized without my even knowing it. It enslaves.

Knowing it rationally and feeling it in the heart are different things however. But I get glimpses, under a canopy of stars and palm fronds, of the connection from which anger keeps me divided. I wish my friends living in cities around the country could have more such moments every day. I fear that urban life leaves the spirit undernourished, rendering it exploitable.

So I resolved not to allow these events to unleash my anger. Neither to let my identity be fashioned by the arbiters of proper thought nor commodified by the marketers of desire. There is no greater form of political activism than to refuse the conscription of one's spirit by staying in the heart, however painful it may be.

Going on the Record

2004-11-03T23:15:00.000-10:00

After the 2000 "election," I asserted that it had been stolen. I maintain that assertion to this day. It wasn't an election. It was a bloodless coup.

When 9/11 occurred, I asserted and still believe that the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the attack and at best did nothing to prevent it or at worst enabled it. How else would a candidate who had lost the popular vote, who had been installed by a Supreme Court along party lines and who had his eye on the Middle East's oil get the mandate he needed? It was a little too pat. And then there were those questions of why NORAD delayed scrambling the jets. That empty stare as Bush read My Pet Goat while the Reichstag...er...I mean the Twin Towers burned? Not so much "What do I do now? Condi? Ari? What do I do?" as "What hath I wrought?" Probably no one will ever know the full story behind the 9/11 attacks, possibly because no one really wants to know. And because no one would really believe it anyway. I certainly hope I'm wrong to think that this president would exchange a few thousand American lives for a shot at Empire. I certainly hope the whole thing was an honest mistake. But given the track record, the connections with the house of Saud, and the cost/benefit ratio, I think it's even odds that Bush & Co. know something they're not telling us. Why else stonewall the 9/11 commission?

After 9/11, I was vociferous in my resistance to invading Afghanistan. I was a member of a small minority that most of my traumatized friends dismissed as ridiculously idealistic; I was clearly too naive to understand the realpolitik of violence. That's all these terrorists understand, so the argument went. But, my argument went (and still does), had the US turned the other cheek, had we responded with restraint, we could have seized an opportunity not only to build genuine alliances against terrorism, but also to ratchet up humanity to the next level of evolution. I know. I'm ambitious. Instead, we got the same old same old. Lots of bombs. The 24 hour's hate on Fox. Low frequency garbage and black mojo. No bin Laden. No progress. It was an act of vengeance, not strategy. It was heresy to say it then and it probably still is: 9/11 was not, in the grand scheme of things, that bad.

Let me qualify: it was of course a tragedy, and shock and a trauma. A terrible psychological wound. But largely symbolic. In terms of disabling American military power, infrastructure and economy, it had little impact. We were barely dented. There was no continuing threat from bin Laden; he'd shot his load, though no one knew it at the time. Three thousand people is a great deal...even one is too many...but it was not the Somme. It was not Tet. It wasn't Hiroshima. We're still here, changed more by the administration's subsquent war mongering than we were by the attacks themselves. Is it not the mark of an evolved civilization that it can choose not to react in fear and vengeance, that it has the objectivity to rise above its trauma and set policy based on reason, sound judgment and strategic efficacy? Is that not what separates us from animals and children?

And then, of course, Iraq. Need I say that I maintained at the very beginning that the WMD story was concocted (if the evidence was so very strong, then why didn't they show it to us...or to Congress? Why didn't the inspectors find anything...ANYTHING...on the ground?). Obviously, 9/11 was being exploited to justify an unnecessary and illegal war that would benefit Halliburton, Bechtel and earn the reptiles in the White House moat a gazillion dollars? Not to mention letting Rummy test out his Military Lite.

Like many Americans, I just couldn't fucking believe it. Not that Bush was playing us, but that Americans were buying it. Didn't anyone remember Vietnam? I wasn't even 6 when it ended, and yet I knew it was a good ol' American mindfuck. Had the whole country forgotten that governments lie and that news can (gasp) serve the lies?

And now I'll say it for the record. I think the 2004 election was a fraud. I have only circumstantial evidence. The highest voter turnout in history to protect the incumbent? Unprecedented numbers of African American voters in Florida, yet the votes were decidedly in favor of the Republicans? Could the Cuban American vote really offset the massive black voter turnout? The youth vote? Come on people. Nearly 1/3 of all the voting machines used in the last election were electronic, paperless and manufactured by Diebold, a company that gave mucho bucks to Bush and whose CEO had promised in 2000 to "deliver Ohio" to the president. Isn't anyone at least going to try and CHECK to see whether votes had been flipped? Not that it really matters at this point, but it would be nice to know for sure that our democracy is dead rather than to have to carry on this wearying charade.

And let me predict: it will be a few months from now that Dubya will appear on our tv's, solemn as can be, telling America that the time has come to ask for sacrifices to preserve our freedoms and protect us from "terror." He'll look into the camera, lightless eyes receding into his head as he tells us that he's "asking" Congress to reinstate the draft. Hopefully that will be BEFORE Tehran vaporizes Tel Aviv. But I wax apocalyptic. I'm not betting on a nuclear strike, but a draft...I'll put five bucks on it.

The next four years are going to be very ugly indeed. So much for the middle class. See y'all up to our knees in the mud pits, making bricks for Pharoah.

Mauna Lani Sunset

2004-11-03T23:04:00.000-10:00

Manua Lani Sunset
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

Life can get worse. And does. But sometimes and only briefly you get a band of visible light that makes you happy to be alive.

Maunalua Sunrise

2004-11-03T23:03:00.000-10:00

Maunalua Sunrise
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

This one is from my back yard (facing southeast). That's Koko Head in the background.

My House

2004-11-03T22:55:00.000-10:00

My House
Originally uploaded by mshapiro.

My little plywood shack in Aina Haina

Here Goes...

2004-11-03T08:20:00.000-10:00

My first foray into the world of blogging. What motivated me? First, Bush. I've been reading the leftie blogs for nearly four years now, and I have developed an appreciation for the potential of the form. Props to you, Josh Marshall, Kos, Atrios, and all the others who've kept me profoundly nauseated at the utterly repellent behavior of that cadre of goons now picking nits from each other in the halls of power.

Second, a lurid desire to expose myself to ridicule, hate mail and possibly to punitive action from the Dept. of Homeland Security.

Third, to git the chicks. Cuz chicks are hot for a good blog.

Fourth to keep my chops up. I weary of writing in journals, wherein I seem to recycle the same old complaints, making all my nowhere plans for nobody. Because someone might (god help them) read this, it keeps me honest. Forces me at least to aim for grammatical accuracy n' good ol' 'Murican spellin'.

Who knows? Maybe something will come of it. At least it'll force me to squeeze out thoughts worthy of general circulation. I have one or two on a good day.

So welcome.

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate!