Monday, March 18, 2013

Writing


I just woke from this wonderful dream where I finally gave up writing. It happened like this:

I had this big suitcase full of all my writing: all my scribblings, all my poems and luggage. It was bulky and awkward to carry, so I left it outside and went to dine in an Indian restaurant alone. It would be safe, I thought, by the curb.

The meal was fine and exotic. The busboy was Mexican—and I made a mental note to write that down. But when I came outside, all my notebooks and pens, all my stories, all my luggage was gone.

homeless man motioned toward the street. “It was just...," he began—and then I saw the culprit. A younger, more-attractive man sprinting through the park, handling the bag as if it were weightless.

There was some good stuff in that bag too, including all fifty two of my favorite story's revisions, an idea for a new character—a perfect one, to be placed in some story or other—and the fourth start of my first novel. All gone.

So I went back to school. I took a cab and when we pulled up out front I realized I didn't have money to pay the fare. The driver turned around and said it was OK. After all, my bag had just been stolen. And in a motherly way, she opened the door such that it seemed to open on its own.

I thanked her and walked up under the stony arches of University, cutting through the bright-eyed, babbling freshman in the dark museum halls where colorful banners for bands and sea turtles and marine biology programs hung from the rafters. I wondered why I hadn't studied marine biology, or turtles, or bands. Everyone seemed so happy.

Then as if by miracle, there she was—walking right beside me. We were in the bookstore where we'd first met. I glanced to my side and thought to ask if she hated me yet, but she was smiling, exploring—babbling about literary theory and psychology—adding more and more books to a wheelbarrow-borne stack that nearly touched the ceiling. 

I couldn't afford to buy them, and of course neither could she. But she didn’t seem to mind. I just gazed at the books as she floated there, speaking in quiet little cycles that reminded me of silence produced by a stream. Then she turned to me, cheerily, and exclaimed, “Me and you in the bookstore!”

I tried to return her toothy grin, but as I scanned the books she’d chosen I was stunned to find that I’d read every single one. I wanted to know if she remembered that it was I who first introduced her to John Irving, and if she knew that all his books were the same. I wanted to know why she’d never read Tolstoy, Melville or Dostoyevsky—and if she intended to read War and PeaceMoby-Dick, and The Brothers Karamazov, or just buy them.

And I wanted to point out that she should have said “’You and I in the bookstore’ not ‘Me and you,'" and moreover admonish her for lying—(I couldn't be ‘in the bookstore’, as she’d claimed, because I was obviously in my bed, dreaming). But then I stopped. 

Because I was in my bed dreaming. And really I'm most intrigued by the things I can't control.  

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

When Did the Chicken Cross the Road?


It’s January 1st, 1999. The Euro is established. A month later the U.S. Senate acquits Bill Clinton of impeachment charges. Then Star Wars Episode I, Napster, the Columbine High School massacre—and in an article entitled “Fragmented Future,” Darcy DiNucci states that, “The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear…”

That was fourteen years ago, and I don’t remember anything called Web 2.0. What I do remember are static web browsers, the screech of the dialup modem, mom yelling from the kitchen about the busy phone line, sister screaming from her bedroom about the computer, Hotmail, and AIM chat rooms — certainly not the Post-Internet suggested by DiNucci.

So what was she seeing that I wasn’t? When she said, “The web we know now… is only an embryo of the Web to come,” did anybody stop to ask what she meant? Is the Internet of today even knit from the same fabric as that of 1999? Perhaps, but it takes benchmarks to notice the change. Here was my wake-up call: Chick-Fil-A.

Perennially targeted by LGBT advocacy groups for their stance on gay marriage, their endorsement of the "Biblical definition of the family unit," and heaping contributions toward ultra-conservative lobbyist groups, the conservative corporation now finds itself in hot water for creating a Facebook profile (a 14-year old girl named Abby Farle) and using it (her) to defend the CEO's decidedly old-fashioned beliefs. Abby Farle, the would-be Chick-Fil-A defender, ended her posts exclusively with “Derrr!” or "John 3:16” and was finally exposed for being non-existent after a lengthy battle on the company’s own FB page when a visitor adroitly pointed out that Abby had joined the social network only a day prior, and that her profile picture was drawn from a website that supplies publicly licensed stock photos for commercial use. 

Shortly thereafter, little redheaded Abby Farle fell silent.

What caught my attention wasn't that we have another example of corporate dishonesty, but just how depressingly fickle this entire story is. What’s more concerning than the fact that Chick-Fil-A (a quick-service chicken restaurant) is opposed to gay marriage is that we care that a quick-service chicken restaurant is opposed to gay marriage. Sure: they’re a 4 billion dollar (and growing) corporation, but they’re not shaping public policy...Are they?  


[1] (Following the 2008 recession, many formerly middle-of-the-road Americans acknowledged that corporations had huge incentive and opportunity to lie [and likely were] or listened to conservative talk radio.) [2]  (It's worth noting that the Tea Party [a loosely affiliated group of anti-immigration, anti-spending, anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-government patriots] is not a political movement, an apolitical movement, or, really, anything at all. Evidence suggests that The Tea Party did not come to prominence from an organic, grass roots movement comprised of dissatisfied citizens. Instead, it was created by the Koch family as a means to launder and disperse politician-bound funds and lobby for tax breaks for the rich. The Koch brothers' namesake, Koch Industries, is the second-largest private company in the United Stated. It's referred to as The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of. And that's the rub. 



With its roots in the golden age of oilthe time of the American tycoonThe Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of hasn't lost a step. Though the cultural sea change of the 60's and 70's may have been more impassioned than planned, the masses could no longer be ignored by their representatives; sweeping environmental reforms passed into law, the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. Teetering on the edge of revolution, the Government could not abide such wide-spread public disillusionment. A challenge with overt force could signal to moderates that the government had ceded its right to alter and/or define a free society, thereby absolving the contract from which their authority was derived. Many had already seen that moment pass, but not moderate Americans. So Koch-like corporations took a hit in the form of government regulation. 



With annual revenue in the hundreds of billions, Still enjoying the profits from a century-old stranglehold on the American tobacco market, and annual revenue in the hundreds of billions, Koch nevertheless found itself suffering from 'heavy' taxation. After Ron Paul's disastrous defeat in 2008 it was clear that tax breaks for the mega wealthy was not going to change. In order to maintain its market position and increase its God-slapping revenue in the face of regulation and economic downturn, Koch had to evolve, diversify. 



What follows is how Corporation killed Democracy, like Paper beating Rock. 



Because their money funds the killing of hundreds of thousands of Americans every year (many of them middle-of-the-road Americans who now comprise the Tea Party) the Koch brothers knew that they could not personally lead a tax revolt [it would take lots of work, and it might seem insensitive]. So, under cover of darkness, disguised as average Americans, they created  the Tea Party. None of this made any sense. Fox News was first on the scene, then it all made sense, for it is the world of words that creates the world of things, so it matters very little what the words mean (or what the chicken is made of). Defined by its volatile opposition to nearly everything and offering nothing in return, the Tea Party and its creation story serve as an  example of how tens of millions of dollars and the Word of mass media can make the unreal real, and create chicken-or-the-egg causality dilemmas, appropriately, out of thin air.)


What else could cause this commercial behemoth to resort to such childish techniques? Is this what DiNucci was talking about?

FB and Twitter may be ushering us toward an unexpected conclusion: that objective truth never existed, and only a lack of alternative viewpoints could create the illusion that there was one. It’s not that people are more apt to mislead—that we’re an especially rabid generation of liars—but that there are just far more voices for the truth to contend with.

Even the article that broke the Chik-Fil-A story seems strangely suspect. Published on Gizmodo.com under the title “Did Chick-fil-A Pretend to Be a Teenage Girl on Facebook?” the story’s hard evidence consisted of no more than a screenshot. And whoever took the screenshot (presumably someone from Gizmodo or one of the belligerents) had only one friend on their FB chat—and, at any given time, who only has one friend online? Was this a case of a fake person exposing another fake person? Is this Web 2.0?

Maybe it doesn’t matter—when a chicken company cares about public opinion enough to create fake [3] (Arranging these words in this order is, for some reason, not troubling.) advocates to support an ideology that’s unrelated to their product (i.e. lie, which isn’t very Christian) something is wrong—and it’s not just Chick-Fil-A. It’s us.

If social media has come to serve as the hammer and anvil of truth and transparency (see Wikileaks, Tahrir Square, Syria) and our voices are to be the liberalizing agent, what’s to be done when a conservative voice like S. Truett Cathy (Chick-Fil-A CEO) starts chirping? Mr. Cathy doesn’t appear to be affecting my life, so why can’t an asshole be an asshole in peace?

While a democratic society provides a somewhat-perfect nest for social media, let’s not forget that society and democracy are only somewhat perfect. They are only as good as we are—and the same applies to even the most public and most inclusive forums on the Internet.

FB seems rather in-line with the everyone-matters, everyone-has-a-voice, everyone-gets-a-fair-shot underpinning of the middle-of-the-road American psyche, and maybe that's what makes it so addicting. There’s a face I can control; there I’m always smiling; there I am, before X,Y, or Z bankrupt, left, or forgot me; there’s my idealized life. I’m still skinny, married, tan. So has FB made for us the illusion of a second life?  

Is this 2.0? Is it real? If this internal/external, personal/communal relationship doesn’t constitute a second life—or if having one isn't that important—why was Abby Farle conjured up in the first place? What could she hope to accomplish? And what are we to do with our dead friends who (now) never really die? Should FB bury its dead?

As we grow with FB, our enthusiasm dwindles. Of late, a cynical (albeit more addicted) lethargy toward the social network seems to be prevailing. Maybe this is due to the realization that corporations have also embarked on their own second lives—following us through the wormhole. Or maybe it's the widening, (probably) unsubstantiated fears that Facebook will allow local, state, or federal government agencies to access our online identities, messages, and secrets—which (presumably) would point to offline identities, our interpersonal relationships, and our geographic locations.

I wonder if these possibilities strike anyone else as so completely ironic that the irony is itself difficult to discern. Despite the volumes of our lives we put on FB, there’s no life within it. Even the mildly devoted user must know that they will never truly meet someone on the Internet. Is it not obvious that the Internet seems to present us, really, with more of a social buffer than a conduit? I wonder. 

And it's getting bigger every day. It expands, and its growth appears increasingly organic. In many ways, it is. So, perhaps we need to acknowledge that this new mode of communication may actually alter what it means to “meet” someone (in the same way that KFC [the vanguard of chicken producing conspirators] altered our understanding of “meat”[4] {Life, nature, God, and science} by genetically modifying their birds.

Maybe, in 1999, everyone knew that the web was going to change—and maybe when Darcy DiNucci said “Web,” she really meant us, our human condition. Or maybe she was just more prophetic than she intended. [5] (Otherwise known as luck.)  Either way, what “Fragmented Future” reminded me to do was look back and remember how things were just a very short time ago, and then to ask whether this instrument—with its capacity for beauty and creativity, complete good and evil—is the signal or the noise of human progress. 


Go smell a flower.