I left the dorms at a jog, quietly letting each foot fall to the pavement as it chose, not rushing the strides or their pace. The air was cool and sharp, free from the humidity of summertime and still resisting the bite of early winter breezes. The sun had begun its fall - its fall fall that is - an early, sort of sideways jaunt toward the horizon that seems to be going away for hours - but would sustain the shadows and their chill for a few more hours. I could not run the loop today. I would not run the loop today.
I turned down Commonwealth Avenue instead, preferring the beat of the moving world, its car horns and train screeches, cell phone rings and laughter to the strange pseudo-nature of the reservoir. The pace was determining itself, and I began to look around. People moved back and forth to school, the traffic moved in spurts of red and green behind me, the urbanized wildlife chittered in the trees. Tiles of pavement passed beneath me, concrete dotted with iron, the covers of the inner workings of the material world. Lightposts towered above me, wires lined the streets. And as I passed, I was most likely picked up on the security cameras of several different dwellings and businesses, a moving blur captured forever in static motion, in that one second of passing, like a ghost image in an under-developed photograph.
Down past the intersection, which I avoided, cutting across the marked lanes of the road and dodging delivery trucks, flashers on in that great, semi-acceptable gesture of double-parking we New Englanders love the most and hate the worst. A matter of perception, point of view, and time until the liquor store closes. Down beacon street, left side for a block. Within half a mile of the Circle the housing gets expensive. The feet keep moving, still of their own accord, and the light that filters down through the barely green trees reflected off my sunglasses and bathed my eyes in the glowing amber of late afternoon. I crossed the street, newly paved and lined, the thick black pavement unaffected by its first winter, the granite sidewalks not yet subjected to their first early November frost heave. Across the train tracks. One way.
The first row of apartments quickly give way to the hidden Eden of residential Boston, the gems just off the street that could be placed in middle American suburbia if not for their price tags and cordoned yards. The cars lined along the side look out of place in this more pastoral environment, the large ones even more so. Who lives here? I see a young mother pulling a stroller out the front door of a home on the left - a modest home, with light blue trim and a small but well-maintained garden posted up before the front windows, a model of Renaissance symmetry transplanted 500 years. An older gentleman in a grey suit, trousers hemmed high in the style of the recent past, bowler cocked on his head in the style of the not so recent past. He walked, as I ran, in the dead center of the street, and we moved slightly to our respective right hands as we passed, exchanging a brief, cordial head nod. We were, on foot, both an affront to the motor vehicle-centric infrastructure on which we travelled, and I suspect we both did it for the same reasons - because on this sunny day we could.
The street came to dead end and I looked for a way out, legs still pumping alternately and aloof below me. Cutting through a park, I passed a couple playing tennis, another couple walking slowly with their groceries, she with a beautiful red and gold cloth covering her head and he with a subtle black yarmulkah carefully placed upon his salt and pepper hair. Climbing the stairs on the far side of the park two young black men coach and instruct a group of youngsters in an after-school program, hopping up the hill like frogs. The top of the stairs brought more fresh pavement and yellow-white lines, a new set of stoplights, and the general pervasiveness of high-end autos. I crossed the street onto Beaconsfield road, a winding, traffic-less, residential street with homes that towered above on the left and fell off below to the right. I could be anywhere, I thought, and find a road like this. A small Vermont town might have a small cabin like the one beside me, the tall Victorian ahead could be stamped on a corner in Indiana, the split level ranch coming up on my right stood somewhere next to its brethren in the heart of Pennsylvania or Ohio, and the saltbox 1950's pre-fab was a clear refugee from the West coast suburbs that dotted California, Arizona, and New Mexico. But this was Boston, and the clank of my right foot on a sewer lid reminded me of the municipal system that lay beneath and above the pavements.
Three more miles down, as the crow flies, and I'd be in Roxbury, running through abandoned lots, fast food restaurants, bodegas, and tenement housing. I turned left, up and away from the city proper and chugged up a small hill to the street that would lead me back to the black arteries of asphalt that tied all to the center, converging on the crotch of the system, the Pike/93 confluence, South Station, Government Center. All of the major roads lead here, find some intrinsic connection to the movement of goods and services and labor. But between them, in the gaps between the restraining belts of Beacon and Commonwealth and Boylston, were myriad twisting, turning, poorly paved streets and convoluted infrastructures. You can get lost in these strange conflations of one-ways and cul-de-sacs, cut-throughs and alleys, parking lots that work as streets and vice-versa. I recommend it. To be turned around in a city, bounded by thoroughfares and abandoned by street signs, is a remarkable experience, and a valuable one.
There is a direction to the madness, a general understanding on my part that I know where I am going and where I will end up. But the path is uncertain, and by no linear means will I arrive back at the starting point. These uphill, downhill, curving stretches of road, now turning through the residential alcove that hides between Beacon and Commonwealth, will guide me back through this maze of sunlight and green air, back to those places I know well, taking me back in memory even as they take me forward in the present. The feet keep moving, the pace is fine, and though the chest heaves higher and further from rest there is catharsis to this movement, the energy I've consumed coming back to me in fluid motion - left, right, left. Up on my right there is a gingerbread house with frill yellow trim set against a sky blue exterior and a bright red door. And on the steps of this 18th century Victorian are two kids, both in jeans and skeakers, both sporting Red Sox hats, one over his tight-cropped, curly black hair and deep skin, the other over blond swatches and freckles. The sun sees them both the same, they see each other as peers, and luckily, on this afternoon, no one else sees them at all. Two massive oak trees mark the corner of the block and cast shadows over the stop sign in diagonal relief. I turn right, onto the sidewalk for a moment until the traffic clears and I run sideways across the lines, white then yellow yellow and white again, off the next side street and up, sloping, towards the backside of Comm Ave.
The streets get even dicier here, and I find myself tangled in a maze of parking Do's and Do Not's, mangled in the concrete and steel infrastructure of ill-planned condo complexes and one-way driveways that lead to nowhere. A block further and the image of the VIctorian with its artistic aesthetic, gated yard, and flora is gone altogether. Bricks dominate my view, perched in staggered row after row to form massive square boxes with glass portholes to keep the prisoners' hope alive. I can't make out who might live here, or how they found this place to live, or decided that this was what their life would be. And I can't tell for sure that I won't be in a similar situation in the months to come, untethered, lost between the selves I knew very well at one time and the self I am beginning to understand anew with each block and each step and each passing minute. I am here, actively, and yet here passively, too - caught once again in the intersections of time-space and thought-memory, doomed to overanalyze even as I move with the most concrete motion. Up, down, up, down. Left, right. Left.
And I come up between two buildings, pass a cable company van and a screaming cab driver, wind passing over my ears, bringing the sounds rushing to the center of my brain and me rushing back to the center of this sensory, sensational experience. Just a run on a Tuesday afternoon in Boston. Just the movement of my feet on the pavement, trapesing through the turbulent middle of a city without a center. I can hear the first clicks and turns of the T, the medieval screech of an outdated transportation system whose convoluted design barely outpaces the spiderweb of pavements, some named and some not, that constitute a quaintly archaic infrastructure. There is no method to the madness other than madness itself, and yet as I dodge Range Rovers and Priuses hauling ass on the backs of fossil fuels I am comforted by the ability to make journeys of un-straight lines that still lead me back to the known world. And I am convinced, once again, that there is an appreciable difference between being lost and not knowing where you are going. I am going forward, and sideways, and backward all at once, but there is only one motion involved, the simple corporeal stepping of my feet beneath me and my heart within me. So I will take these tools to be my own as I skip past South St, a place I once knew well that has forgotten me now. And I cross the train tracks a last time as the confines of the campus coming running towards me even as I remain running away from them, a mere flash in the time-space ether away from leaving them altogether. Busses pass me, fences hem me, the road is straight and wide, and my feet continue to move deliberately underneath me, supporting the motion of limbs and mind, the exercise of vision and thinking and hearing and being, all at once, twisting and turning through a world of lost souls and broken hearts. There is only the light that still comes down green through the trees, the angle growing flatter with passing minutes, the sound of shoes on the pavement, left, right, left. Right. And the chest heaves in recognition of the beginning, as if just now feeling the collective weight of trip and telling the body and the mind to stop, STOP, stop. Lost in one place, found in all the others.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Running on Fumes
As we march deliberately into the end of the era of the United States as hegemonic world power like so many lemmings over the edge of a cliff, the government and the rich people keep telling us that nothing is wrong. For most people, that's enough.
Since the abandonment of the gold standard during the era of New Deal reforms, the economy has been slipping steadily into an insurmountable hole, or debt and write-downs and outsourcing that is beginning to catch up with us. And we stand now poised at the precipice of a collapsing world financial infrastructure, looking straight down the barrel of a gun loaded with international fiscal ruin - and with Dick Cheney behind the sights that's a dangerous proposition. As far as I'm concerned, it might be the best thing that happens to humanity in my lifetime.
The steadily increasing national debt, now standing around $9 trillion is only the least of our problems. The concept itself is a quagmire, explainable only in jumbled economic jargon and a long discussion about modern monetary theory. But strip off all the bullshit and the idea is simple: we're using money that only kinda sorta actually exists on a material basis. And we're using lots and lots and lots of it. Since the advent of the Reagan revolution we've been trapped in a continuous reaffirmation of Keynesian insanity - the notion that supply-side economics was ever going to work is interminably couched in a system of privilege and inequality that knows no bounds. Giving to the poor by giving to the rich? Seriously?
In the meantime, we've deregulated almost every industry, gutted the environmental reforms of the 1970s (which made us then, unlike now, a world leader on the subject), corporatized the media, opened the revolving door between Washington, K Street lobbies, interest groups, and the private sector, ruined Social Security and subverted the Health Care system, made a mockery of mental health and veterans benefits, clamped down on immigration while opening loopholes for immigrants' exploitation, and gotten to the point where the President can hand out military contracts to his buddies in the context of an un-endable, un-winnable, extremely profitable war. I think we're doing terribly, to be honest.
Add to this the fact that even the most astutely realist political scientists agree on the fact that China's economy will be larger than ours in the next fifty years and the fact that we currently operate on a 300 million dollar-a-year trade deficit with that country and the picture gets grimmer. India isn't far behind. What's left is an America trying to retain the world heavyweight belt by force instead of retiring gracefully and changing the nature of the sport. It's like we have the choice to be Ali or Tyson and instead of thinking it over we've bitten off the ears of everyone who even sniffs in our direction the wrong way. Instead of stepping down and encouraging mutual competition, we are the bully who has been outnumbered and continues to talk shit. And we all know what happens to that guy.
If we could only stop now and try to mend the mistakes of the past instead of rewriting the Monroe doctrine and stealing from third world countries in a last ditch attempt to line our pockets we might realize that there is something altogether more important at stake than being the world's strongest nation-state: being the world's smartest. Aside from the fact that kids in America are, on average, dumber and fatter than their European, Australian, and South American counterparts (do a little looking on this), the country as a whole is missing a great opportunity to use the last gasp of our cultural influence (America as a culture is still cool, apparently) to create a worldwide movement of tolerance and subsistence instead of division and consumption, we might just manage to tip the scales back to neutral, especially on the environmental question.
The nature of international politics, as any PoliSci professor over 50 will tell you, is anarchic, unpredictable and violent. But this assumes that politics and the international system have some specific nature that dictates them instead of realizing that the whole fucking discipline is less than a few hundred years old and that a lot has changed even in the last 20 years. Imagine an international politics that involves white kids and brown kids thousands of miles away playing the same videogames on a worldwide invisible network, talking to each other in real time as they interact in a virtual world. Fuck anarchic, this shit is incredible. In the context of a world where that goes on everyday, telling me that we didn't sign Kyoto because of differences in linguistic understanding and policy restrictions is a slap in the face. Why won't we act like normal human beings that live in a finite world for once? This is our children's future.
The simple answer is deafening and silencing at once, and it crushes the spirit of those of us who see more clearly (or perhaps more vaguely). The simple answer is that a few people are making a lot of money, and they don't want to stop making that much money. And what's worse, they can't be blamed. They live in a system that constantly requires them to preform a simple and never-ending task - make more money. And he we stand, faced with the realization that the system we live in is fundamentally opposed to our material reality, a reality that includes a dwindling oil supply, a skyrocketing debt, a mortgage and credit crisis, rampant poverty and unemployment, and a planet that is screaming at the top of its poisoned lungs for us to slow the fuck down. But the engines of the system are churning along full tilt, all cylinders firing, churning liquid capital out of the earth as the economy sucks in fresh dollars out of thin air.
Simple physics tells us that combustion engines need three things: fuel, air, and ignition. The system has plenty of sparks to go around - nationalism, the American dream, stuff upon stuff upon stuff. But what happens with the oil runs out and the mystical, airborne mint breathes its last dollar bill? We all seem to know the answer, somewhere between our hearts and our stomachs, and yet we remain defiant, our foot stamped on the accelerator as we grind down the gearbox, doing 95 in a 60 in 3rd gear. I hope we have the sense to hit the brakes before its too late. But right now, it looks like I'd better get ready to tuck and roll.
Since the abandonment of the gold standard during the era of New Deal reforms, the economy has been slipping steadily into an insurmountable hole, or debt and write-downs and outsourcing that is beginning to catch up with us. And we stand now poised at the precipice of a collapsing world financial infrastructure, looking straight down the barrel of a gun loaded with international fiscal ruin - and with Dick Cheney behind the sights that's a dangerous proposition. As far as I'm concerned, it might be the best thing that happens to humanity in my lifetime.
The steadily increasing national debt, now standing around $9 trillion is only the least of our problems. The concept itself is a quagmire, explainable only in jumbled economic jargon and a long discussion about modern monetary theory. But strip off all the bullshit and the idea is simple: we're using money that only kinda sorta actually exists on a material basis. And we're using lots and lots and lots of it. Since the advent of the Reagan revolution we've been trapped in a continuous reaffirmation of Keynesian insanity - the notion that supply-side economics was ever going to work is interminably couched in a system of privilege and inequality that knows no bounds. Giving to the poor by giving to the rich? Seriously?
In the meantime, we've deregulated almost every industry, gutted the environmental reforms of the 1970s (which made us then, unlike now, a world leader on the subject), corporatized the media, opened the revolving door between Washington, K Street lobbies, interest groups, and the private sector, ruined Social Security and subverted the Health Care system, made a mockery of mental health and veterans benefits, clamped down on immigration while opening loopholes for immigrants' exploitation, and gotten to the point where the President can hand out military contracts to his buddies in the context of an un-endable, un-winnable, extremely profitable war. I think we're doing terribly, to be honest.
Add to this the fact that even the most astutely realist political scientists agree on the fact that China's economy will be larger than ours in the next fifty years and the fact that we currently operate on a 300 million dollar-a-year trade deficit with that country and the picture gets grimmer. India isn't far behind. What's left is an America trying to retain the world heavyweight belt by force instead of retiring gracefully and changing the nature of the sport. It's like we have the choice to be Ali or Tyson and instead of thinking it over we've bitten off the ears of everyone who even sniffs in our direction the wrong way. Instead of stepping down and encouraging mutual competition, we are the bully who has been outnumbered and continues to talk shit. And we all know what happens to that guy.
If we could only stop now and try to mend the mistakes of the past instead of rewriting the Monroe doctrine and stealing from third world countries in a last ditch attempt to line our pockets we might realize that there is something altogether more important at stake than being the world's strongest nation-state: being the world's smartest. Aside from the fact that kids in America are, on average, dumber and fatter than their European, Australian, and South American counterparts (do a little looking on this), the country as a whole is missing a great opportunity to use the last gasp of our cultural influence (America as a culture is still cool, apparently) to create a worldwide movement of tolerance and subsistence instead of division and consumption, we might just manage to tip the scales back to neutral, especially on the environmental question.
The nature of international politics, as any PoliSci professor over 50 will tell you, is anarchic, unpredictable and violent. But this assumes that politics and the international system have some specific nature that dictates them instead of realizing that the whole fucking discipline is less than a few hundred years old and that a lot has changed even in the last 20 years. Imagine an international politics that involves white kids and brown kids thousands of miles away playing the same videogames on a worldwide invisible network, talking to each other in real time as they interact in a virtual world. Fuck anarchic, this shit is incredible. In the context of a world where that goes on everyday, telling me that we didn't sign Kyoto because of differences in linguistic understanding and policy restrictions is a slap in the face. Why won't we act like normal human beings that live in a finite world for once? This is our children's future.
The simple answer is deafening and silencing at once, and it crushes the spirit of those of us who see more clearly (or perhaps more vaguely). The simple answer is that a few people are making a lot of money, and they don't want to stop making that much money. And what's worse, they can't be blamed. They live in a system that constantly requires them to preform a simple and never-ending task - make more money. And he we stand, faced with the realization that the system we live in is fundamentally opposed to our material reality, a reality that includes a dwindling oil supply, a skyrocketing debt, a mortgage and credit crisis, rampant poverty and unemployment, and a planet that is screaming at the top of its poisoned lungs for us to slow the fuck down. But the engines of the system are churning along full tilt, all cylinders firing, churning liquid capital out of the earth as the economy sucks in fresh dollars out of thin air.
Simple physics tells us that combustion engines need three things: fuel, air, and ignition. The system has plenty of sparks to go around - nationalism, the American dream, stuff upon stuff upon stuff. But what happens with the oil runs out and the mystical, airborne mint breathes its last dollar bill? We all seem to know the answer, somewhere between our hearts and our stomachs, and yet we remain defiant, our foot stamped on the accelerator as we grind down the gearbox, doing 95 in a 60 in 3rd gear. I hope we have the sense to hit the brakes before its too late. But right now, it looks like I'd better get ready to tuck and roll.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Democracy of Misrepresentation
Stop trying to figure out who's going to win the election this year. It doesn't matter.
As of right now, the imperialist swine that dictate campaign finance and strategy (read: Karl Rove) have your nuts in a fucking vicegrip. The democracy has been taken over by the hegemony of propaganda. You no longer control your own destiny.
It may sound like a bit much, but the truth remains: the voters are now, more than ever, a market to be cornered instead of served. Manipulation of media and word wars between Yale-educated system pawns dictate the flow of information, deciding what voters see, hear, think. And while the YouTube debates are certainly a step in the right direction, for the most part we are doomed to live in the blackhole of reliance on mainstream media instead of the golden age of oration. We have little or no idea what any of these candidates will do once in office, and we must realize the limiting factors of the office itself. A President, though influential, cannot change the system.
A bunch of old white guys still make laws for a country that is harly old, or white, or male. The representative democracy the United States has always claimed has always been a democracy of representation - representation of freedom, of wealth, of equality. But on the ground these things take on different guises and meanings, become entirely different things. Tell a businessman in the suburbs he's a free man and he'll tell you he knows; tell a migrant worker in Texas the same thing and he'll scowl at your hubris. Policy and politics and language mean nothing on the ground, and the beat of work and of the sun reminds our worker just how far from Washington he is, and just how far Washington is from him.
The unspoken arrangement of politics in this country is simple: we know better than you. We know the way the world works, we know the how to manipulate it, we know what's best for America. We know because we are white, and male, and rich. We know because we sat in classrooms and listened to people like us. We know because we got jobs working for people like us. And we know because of the money we've made off of people like you.
Make no doubt about it, the power elites understand this relationship. Politicians know that their power is couched in the denial of agency. CEO's know their fortune is couched in the exploitation of labor. And oil companies know their future is couched in the rape of the environment. They understand the way their world works - as a zero sum game. One up means one down, and more often two or three or ten down.
So as you watch this election season, perhaps the most ridiculous of all time, remember that you are a target. You are a consumer, a piece of the market to be cornered and exploited. You are put into groups based on race and gender and class and religion; a demographic and a number and nothing near a human being. Whether you purchase Romney or Clinton or Guiliani or Obama or, God willing, Huckabee, remind yourself that your vote comes at a price. And if you choose to be apathetic, at least do so with passion.
As of right now, the imperialist swine that dictate campaign finance and strategy (read: Karl Rove) have your nuts in a fucking vicegrip. The democracy has been taken over by the hegemony of propaganda. You no longer control your own destiny.
It may sound like a bit much, but the truth remains: the voters are now, more than ever, a market to be cornered instead of served. Manipulation of media and word wars between Yale-educated system pawns dictate the flow of information, deciding what voters see, hear, think. And while the YouTube debates are certainly a step in the right direction, for the most part we are doomed to live in the blackhole of reliance on mainstream media instead of the golden age of oration. We have little or no idea what any of these candidates will do once in office, and we must realize the limiting factors of the office itself. A President, though influential, cannot change the system.
A bunch of old white guys still make laws for a country that is harly old, or white, or male. The representative democracy the United States has always claimed has always been a democracy of representation - representation of freedom, of wealth, of equality. But on the ground these things take on different guises and meanings, become entirely different things. Tell a businessman in the suburbs he's a free man and he'll tell you he knows; tell a migrant worker in Texas the same thing and he'll scowl at your hubris. Policy and politics and language mean nothing on the ground, and the beat of work and of the sun reminds our worker just how far from Washington he is, and just how far Washington is from him.
The unspoken arrangement of politics in this country is simple: we know better than you. We know the way the world works, we know the how to manipulate it, we know what's best for America. We know because we are white, and male, and rich. We know because we sat in classrooms and listened to people like us. We know because we got jobs working for people like us. And we know because of the money we've made off of people like you.
Make no doubt about it, the power elites understand this relationship. Politicians know that their power is couched in the denial of agency. CEO's know their fortune is couched in the exploitation of labor. And oil companies know their future is couched in the rape of the environment. They understand the way their world works - as a zero sum game. One up means one down, and more often two or three or ten down.
So as you watch this election season, perhaps the most ridiculous of all time, remember that you are a target. You are a consumer, a piece of the market to be cornered and exploited. You are put into groups based on race and gender and class and religion; a demographic and a number and nothing near a human being. Whether you purchase Romney or Clinton or Guiliani or Obama or, God willing, Huckabee, remind yourself that your vote comes at a price. And if you choose to be apathetic, at least do so with passion.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)