Did you get pears??

Old man: “Did you get pears?… Did you get pears?… Did you get pears??”

Old lady: “We’ll discuss it inside.”

–One of the best pieces of TV writing ever. Tear-inducing laughter. Wow.

Thank you, Mad Men.

Prop 8: Don’t be that guy.

So Prop 8 has been repealed, and now the repeal is being appealed. Everyone expected this of course, but I’ve been thinking about how the whole Prop 8/Perry v. Governator journey will be remembered by generations to come. The odds of equality not being granted to the tax-paying homosexual citizens of this country are extremely low. I’d honestly bet my life on it, because this is not the first civil rights battle we’ve had in this country, and historically, however long it took, forward thinking prevailed and a bunch of bigots ended up looking phenomenally stupid. Lets take a nauseating trip down American memory lane:

“Americans” killed the Native Americans. Somehow, a bunch of assholes convinced themselves that they were entitled to this land that they just “discovered”, despite the fact that other human beings already lived there. Eventually we realized how disgusting that was and cut it the f!^% out, but it took quite a while for that to happen. I don’t think giving the Native Americans a smidge of land and the ability to run casinos is any type of reparation, but the historical consensus is that we were being assholes.

Americans had slaves. Many, many slaves. Human beings treated like objects. Isn’t that amazing to you, my computer-owning friend who probably has never had your life and family threatened over your ability to pick crops? Yeah, we were being assholes. We had a big war about it, and it nearly broke up this country. Let me repeat that: people were so outraged that the government was telling them to stop “owning” other people that they picked up their guns and killed people over it. They thought the government was getting too big, and that it had no business telling them how to run their lives. Some considered owning slaves to be a God-given right. Some people on this dirty, dirty rock still do. History does not smile on these assholes.

American women couldn’t vote until 1920. Anglo white women haven’t had it as badly as a lot of other races of women, but for the purpose of this blarticle I’ll just use this example. Women–half the population–weren’t allowed to vote. Hell, until the last half of the 1900′s, women weren’t allowed to leave their husbands without the man’s permission. So the suffragettes fought, and a bunch of assholes–including the president–fought back. Now we can vote, we’re taking over the work force, we have 2 new female supreme court justices, and… Well… Sarah Palin. But hey, we never would have been gifted with “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin” if women weren’t in politics, and we have the suffragettes to thank for that! (Just for poops and giggles, I recommend researching women’s suffrage in the US vs. polygamy in Utah.)

Americans were segregated. While women were celebrating their suffrage, blacks were still getting utterly and truly f!#ed by their former massahs, and if you youngsters have been watching Mad Men, you know that it wasn’t all that long ago. In fact, it hasn’t even been 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed. A lot of people fought to uphold segregation and the ‘Merica of their youths–that perfect, utopian ‘Merica where the economy was good, government was smaller, women didn’t vote and where white men were proud of themselves for not owning slaves, but didn’t have to drink from the same water fountains as the darkies. They said blacks were dangerous, a menace to society and a threat to the white way of life. Despite that passionate argument, segregation ended.

I was born in the 80′s, so I really don’t understand how large groups of people in this giant narcissistic country of ours, so proud of its ability to lead the world and herald the future, could ever have thought that segregation was any type of sane. South African apartheid is a whole other brand of crazy, but South Africa has never gotten onto a podium and jerked itself off while talking about how much the entire world looks up to it. My point being that history regards the people who fought against ending segregation as a bunch of assholes.

Now we have Prop 8, and a bunch of assholes are once again fighting to continue oppressing a group of fellow human beings. The most ironic, and saddest thing people should know about Prop 8 is the degree to which the African American population in California was manipulated in order to get Prop 8 passed. I don’t know the exact figure, but exit polls showed something like a 75% “yes” vote for Prop 8 by the black community, and without that, Prop 8 would not have passed. (Is it any coincidence that Prop 8 was on Obama’s ballot?) The pasty white assholes who 50 years ago would have been fighting to uphold “Separate but Equal” spent a pretty penny manipulating African Americans, and it’s extremely sad to me that it didn’t occur to them that their voting “yes” on Prop 8 turned them into the assholes their families fought against.

Perry vs. Schwarzenneger is ultimately going to pave the way for equal rights for our gay brothers and sisters. Gay and transgendered marriages will no longer be put in a separate category, DADT will be repealed, and a lot of people are going to feel phenomenally stupid. I can’t tell you how long it will take, but I will say this to everyone fighting against it: Do you really want to be that guy on the losing end of a civil rights battle, fighting to keep human beings from being treated equally?

No matter how disgusted I get with the BS happening on this planet, I know that on a long enough timeline, our understanding of humanity evolves towards compassion. I don’t think we’re in a very good place at the moment with our civil rights blind spots, environmental murder and this whole “selfish is the new generous” movement, but critical people, both conservative and liberal, have always been saying that the world is going to hell, and that now is the “worst” period in history (see my EFH2T post “The Superlative Now for more on this).

You don’t have to get a banner and wave it around to show what you believe in, but you should decide which side of history you want to be on. And hey, if you disagree with me, we’ll just let history decide who is the asshole.

Still think having children is every human’s right?

Jail for couple whose baby died while they raised online child – CNN.com.

I honestly believe that the world would be much better off if we weren’t all brainwashed to believe that we must all make babies, or worse, that we are entitled to make babies. Sucks when people who are ill-equipped to be parents realize that taking care of a baby isn’t as much fun as playing video games.

EFH2T: Wait for the Birthday Girl, Don’t Whistle, Bless You

My latest post on Everything from here to there:

Everything From Here To There » Blog Archive » Wait for the Birthday Girl, Don’t Whistle, Bless You.

I’m back online after many agonizing weeks of living in an internet-free apartment. And no, I couldn’t just go to a café. It’s cold out…!

Wait for the Birthday Girl, Don’t Whistle, Bless You

There are a lot of different social conventions by which we measure each others’ agreeability, some of which may seem obvious to us, although a bit random to an outsider. A recent incident got me thinking about social indexicality, the signs and signals we give that indicate who and where we are in relation to one another. Indexicality is a general term for signs that indicate state or causality (ie, smoke is an index of fire). Socially, we can make strong judgments about a person’s overall character based on small individual signs and of what those signs are indications.

The incident was this: one of my students made a special birthday cake for me this past weekend and brought it to the club where we perform so we could all enjoy it after a late show. The group sat together with the cake, waiting for me to finish working to begin eating. As I was just about to join them, I heard the group telling one girl to wait for me, but she said that she didn’t want to wait any more, and so took the first piece of my birthday cake. I was a bit baffled, because it seems like such an obvious social agreement that the person whose birthday it is should at the very least be there before the cake is eaten, which is what the rest of the group tried to tell her. By itself, it’s not a very big deal, but from the perspective of social indexicality, does an action like that indicate a deeper character state?

I’ve been on both sides of the question, having worked and lived in several other cultures. You could call culture shock “indexical shock”. Many years ago, I worked with a group of Russian women who had a lot of superstitions and traditions of which I was oblivious. One day I really upset them by absentmindedly whistling, because they had a very strong superstition about whistling in the workplace—something about blowing money away from the business—which they considered extremely rude. They were also very adamant about everyone frequently knocking on wood (or your head, if no wood was available—I still do this sometimes!).

Living in Germany, it’s been difficult to not judge people as individuals for the culture’s lack of similar social indexicality to mine—for example, I’m used to the indexical of “if you hold the door for other people, then that means you are a nice person.” Berliners don’t generally hold doors, nor do they engage in many other pleasantries that many Americans find essential for whatever we consider to be civilized coexistence. Feeling that judgment against a large group of people is very alienating, though, and can become a persistent subconscious preoccupation.

Some of our American indexicals include things that baffle many Europeans, like our compulsion to extend invitations out of politeness without actually wanting to fulfill them and our general will to over-consume as a sign of prosperity. One English-culture convention I don’t understand is that we’re still compelled to say “bless you” when people sneeze out of sheer politeness or fear that someone will think we don’t care, despite the fact that the action is based on thousand year old superstitions in which no one actually believes any more. Sneezing, in itself, is not an event that warrants any reverence, yet it’s a popular notion in our culture that if a person doesn’t say “bless you” after someone else’s sneeze, then that person is being rude.

None of the actual conventions are the point, of course, because whether or not something is considered the “right” way to behave is entirely relative to the culture and the subject of endless debate. Essentially, it comes down to what we respect as individuals; a convention becomes a convention because enough people agree with it that it becomes the standard indexical of fill-in-the-blank: nice, rude, generous, hygienic, considerate, selfish, etc.

So how much can we know based on indexicals? Is it appropriate to judge based on a person’s agreement or lack thereof with popular cultural conventions? I think it is valid in a lot of ways, because it helps us feel relaxed to know we are surrounded by people who value the same characteristics that we do, and we can’t very well go around asking people, “Hey, are you nice or are you rude?” We need some sign that indicates in a way we understand that a person possesses these qualities in a way in which we sympathize.

However, there is a difference between social agreement of indexicals and social conformity. Indexicals, as indicators of character traits, are more intuitive, or at the very least associative on a deeper psychological level. But if we’re consciously agreeing to a convention like saying “bless you” without actually respecting its validity as an indicator of character, which I have done and still do sometimes, much to my own dismay, then that is where the action stops being an indexical of individual character and becomes a sacrifice to conformity. Whether or not that sacrifice is worth making is up to you.

I recommend thinking about what you do and do not respect as indexical indicators of character versus blindly accepted cultural traditions. As we go through the major changes expected over the next few years, this could help us feel more relaxed with each other and in general. Personally, I do support the indexical of “if you wait for the birthday girl, then you are considerate”, but I firmly resolve to stop saying “bless you” when people sneeze. Why not say “bless you” because I mean it instead? That seems much nicer.

EFH2T and H.G. Wells: The Superlative Now

Everything From Here To There » Blog Archive » The Superlative Now.

My second post on Billy Corgan’s holistic livin’ blog looks at H.G. Wells’ description of the world in Comet, and compares the “bad” world then with the “bad” world now.

I’m honestly starting to wonder if we’ve always hated the world, or if there’s ever been a time in the past where people have been generally cool about things the way they were. It seems that as the world gets smaller, our complaints get bigger.

The Superlative Now

I just finished reading In the Days of the Comet, written by H.G. Wells over one hundred years ago, which is a before and after description of the world and relationships around the time of a great “Change”. Without giving too much of the story away, I’m amazed by the similarities in the lead character’s description of the “before” world, the bad world that everyone was so happy to see disappear, and our world today, the world that we all seem to be hoping will disappear as well. Aside from the dated vocabulary and writing style, quite a lot can be readily adapted to describe the world as it is now.

On the economy:

” Here… we’re on the verge of the biggest lock-out in the history of this country-side; here’s distress and hunger coming, here’s all the capitalistic competitive system like a wound inflamed…”

On war:

“On no conceivable grounds was there any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material, and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.”

On material inequity:

“…Through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of living.”

On religious extremism:

“You can no more understand our theological passions than you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from a day’s expedition because he had med three cows.”

“Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of God and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.”

On the environment:

“Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with which we had to deal…”

On health:

“…A large part of the physical decline that was apparent in our people during the closing years of the nineteenth century… no doubt due in part to the miscellaneous badness of the food they ate…”

On popular culture:

“…Penny fiction, watery, base stuff, the dropsy of our nation’s mind… warped and crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions.”

And so on.

Reading this book, I’ve been reflecting on the idea that we seem to be generally convinced that “now” is always the greatest challenge, the most dramatic time, the superlative moment, and it continues to be. But if we have felt that way in the past, why do we keep feeling that way? And why do we continue to have reason to feel that way?

There’s a whole school of thought around the concept of focusing one’s energy and attention exclusively on “now”, not living in the past or in the future. I’ve studied that idea and been convinced of its merits, but I feel that something is being left out. If we don’t reflect on the past or consider the effect of today on the future, how can we have any perspective on the present?

Here’s a silly example: as I write this, I am recovering from what is, in reality, a very minor cold. I hate being sick, as do most of us, so I tend to feel a bit pathetic and dramatic whenever it happens, probably just because of that feeling of general helplessness and lack of control over my body. That, and it feels nasty.

Amazingly enough, however, I have to go out of my way to remind myself that I’ve been much more sickly in the past—in fact, I know that the worst flu I’ve ever had happened about a year and a half ago—and that in just a few days I’ll be fine again. Even though I completely understand those facts, it still feels just a little bit false, because I can only really experience the way I feel right this second.

As a larger example, if I look at my life objectively, then the lowest point has to be when I was 15 years old. Even now, I go back and forth between feeling like it was all a horrible nightmare, and feeling like I’m reliving everything I went through all over again. But somehow, even though intellectually I see that as the worst of the worst, it still feels as though all the pain I feel today, now, in this moment is somehow bigger; even though I “know” that whatever trials I face today are trivial by comparison, it’s sometimes hard to muster the energy and motivation to face them.

Wells’ protagonist, on his former life:

“…Has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?”

Wells’ book demonstrates this “superlative now” idea on the large scale; we, as a global community, seem to understand intellectually and have some perspective on the challenges we face today based on the trials of the past, but in practice, that understanding sometimes feels false.

I’m currently living in Berlin, a place with some obvious dark points in the past. Everyone still talks about the Wall all the time, but it’s very romanticized and glamorized the way people tell the story now. Then there’s the Nazis, which the Germans on a personal level try their hardest not to talk about, but on a national level take a stern, confrontational stance to talk about publicly.

But the things people are upset about these days are taxes, the Deutsche Bahn, the welfare system giving people too much money, the welfare system not giving people enough money, the weather, how lame the Berlin club scene has gotten, etc. I’m generalizing, but the point is that I have never once heard anyone say, “Y’know what? This is nothing compared to WWII.”

I am not suggesting that we all start living in the past, or to take the problems we face today—both personally and globally—less seriously, but I feel that at least for myself, freaking out about every little thing that comes up in the “superlative now”, regardless of how trivial it might be, is a waste of energy.

When we feel that now is the most difficult time ever, I think it can seem like an extremely daunting task to try and improve things. So maybe having just a bit more perspective could help us put the energy we use freaking out to practical use; that energy could be motivating instead, as if to say, “We’ve gotten through greater challenges, so we can do this.”

The characters in Wells’ book figure this out as well. After the great Change, everyone is immediately struck with horror and guilt over what they now considered to be a lifestyle based on utter insanity and cruelty. But they don’t allow themselves to dwell, knowing what work there is to be done to make the world the place they envision from their new perspective.

“I was doing nothing to prevent it all! …And it’s fools like us that lead to things like this! …But this is being a fool. Talk! I’m going to stop it.”

Nobel prize as encouragement?

I am certainly an Obama supporter, but I think his Nobel win is not such a good thing at a time when he is subject to such merciless criticism over his 9 month tenure as president; some of the criticism is justified, and some of it is based solely on our overblown expectations of the man we assigned the job of “hero”.

From a CNN.com article:

Jagland said he hoped the prize would help Obama resolve the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, last year’s laureate, said it was clear the Nobel committee wanted to encourage Obama on the issues he has been discussing on the world stage.

“I see this as an important encouragement,” Ahtisaari said.

What I and I’m sure many others on both sides of the debate are wondering is whether or not this form of incentivizing is really helpful, and what kind of message it sends to the people with whom Obama is trying, albeit sometimes passively, to influence in a positive way. If someone was trying to negotiate with me, and I hated everything that person stands for, I don’t think I’d be encouraged by that person getting rewarded preemptively for an assumed victory in pressing their agenda upon me.

That said, I do hope it works.

The timing is terrible. The announcement of the Nobel award comes just days after Obama’s decline to meet with the Dalai Lama, which has been criticized as a placating move to appease China, a renown human rights offender. Also, Obama’s under fire from the LGBT community for his lack of follow through on his promised support for gay rights, including his policy on repealing the “Don’t ask don’t tell” policy, which is that, well, they’re just not going to deal with it right now.

But the biggest problem with this award is that he’s under fire from pretty much everyone in the U.S. who went to bed on election night with Utopian dreams of equality, peace and prosperity on January 21st, only to discover nine months in that unfortunately, Obama is human and not miraculously flipping off the partisan bicker switch, pulling money out of his ass, and making everyone in the world love each other. We had high hopes for him–what happened? Well, we saw an imaginary superhero, and some people don’t want to admit that maybe our expectations were a little bit deluded. And some people have elevated themselves to Lex Luthor status to foil the plans of this superhero, also not willing to admit that maybe it’s all a bit overdramatic.

So I think this award is a bad thing for Obama because it reinforces the delusion. I’d rather wait until he actually stops a speeding bullet.

random thoughts: cats vs. humans

i wonder if some cats’ urge to pee on stuff is like some humans’ urge to clean stuff. what would happen if we were the pets of large, slovenly creatures, to whom nothing is worse than to walk into their bedroom and find that their human has tidied up? would they shove our noses in the not-mess and scold us?