Friday, April 25, 2008

WVW: Theory of Social Change

(I have decided to write a series of posts elucidating my world view. As this is a bunch of vaguely related concepts and ideas, not necessarily in any specific order, but more strands of a whole, I have decided to call it my World View Web. Today, I tackle my Theory of Social Change.)

I don't consider myself a Democrat. I don't identify that way. When I fill out voter registration forms, I always end up putting independent. Not that I don't invariably end up voting for the Democrat. I do. It's just, my politics are so divergent from the Democratic positions, that pretending to be one of them would seem ... dishonest, somehow. At the end of the day, in the statistics, I should just not be counted among their number. I need to in that small way register my divergence, even if for all purposes (thought not intents) I am a Democrat.

My politics vibrate between the poles of democratic socialism and anarcho-communism. i am not to the left of the left, but to the left of the left of the left. I am out there, an extreme outliers. Now, to say I am somewhere between a democratic socialist and an anarcho-communist is not to say that the policies that I should be enacted now at this moment are those policies. It is to say that I think that these policies, these systems, would be those that reflect a true and just society. I don't think society, as it stands now, has the structure or cultural opinions necessary for such systems to work. Before those systems would be viable, people would have to come around to my way of thinking about a variety of issues.

Needless to say, I think that my opinions are correct, and that the nature of the culture at large is based on erroneous assumptions. If I'm wrong, however, well, I am wrong, and since I support the endpoint policies that I do based on my other opinions, which is where my true fealty lies, then I have no problem changing my political opinions if or when my views are proved wrong. My fealty is to Truth, not ideology.

But in the meantime, those are the positions I take.

And here is where we get to my Theory of Social Change. Since my opinions are so far outside the mainstream, I don't think it is possible for my ideas to just be argued for on the political stage. I may argue for them on my own, but I accept that there is no place for them yet in the mainstream.

Yet.

As far as I see it, socio-political change needs to occur at a gradual rate. It needs to move through stages, like on a staircase. Sometimes, We falter and walk back a couple of steps, like we have after WWII. Sometimes we take the stairs two at a time, like during the new deal. However, if you try to just jump up the entire staircase, and it's a big staircase, you will fall flat on your face, probably somewhere around midway, and spend a while falling down. Like Soviet Russia. Or the French Revolution.

So social change needs to be gradual, to a degree. America is just not ready for socialism. The world just isn't ready for anarchy.

So what do you do if you think that those should be the actual endpoints for society? Well, obviously, make sure we walk up the steps! As quickly and as safely as possible. Perhaps even taking two at a time sometimes.

This means, the real goal for anyone who agrees with socialist or anarchist views is voting green or burning down buildings or rioting. That is sowing seeds that simply will not grow, my friends! No, it is working to push the conversation as far to the left as possible, doing whatever at the moment will lead to the conversation moving as fast as possible.

If this view is accepted, then the correct topic of debate concerning politics, not just for socialists and anarchists, but for anyone to the left of the mainstream, anyone who could qualify as being mocked by the Judean People's Front, is what tactics will lead to the advancement of left-wing goals, and at the fastest rate.

Well? What is it?

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Running away with the plot

Yesterday I called up my sister to chat. She had left a message a while back that I just get around to hearing about wanting to talk about writing, so I decided to follow it up. We had a nice conversation about writing and the creative process and how characters develop in your mind.

Afterwards, deciding to run with this state of mind, I sat down and started working on a story I had been working at. Four characters were sitting down at a table and talking. I worked through the section, writing what the characters said.

Something weird happened. Eventually, one of the characters verbally confronted another, and the second got angry. In fact, the first actually accused the second of being very risible. I had not really been expecting the conversation to go in this direction. I stopped writing, not knowing if I should go on or not, or start over. The first character was calm and impassive, usually. This seemed to kind of come out of the blue. Yet it also felt rooted in his character. And I had wanted to these characters to share a close bond, or so I thought. But now it looked like I was setting them up to be kind of antagonistic. This completely messed up where I thought this story was going. What to do?

Yet later that night, I was sitting around, and thinking about these characters, and it occurred to me what was going on.

Now, this story, or at least this scene, is supposed to be slightly allegorical. The characters sitting at the table represent life, death, nature, and human will. The character representing life is the main character, and is almost a blank slate. Death sits passively, has almost no discernible personality, but has a power of presence that allows him to dominate, with hardly speaking, the entire atmosphere of a scene. Nature is the calm, passive one, and the one who rebukes the other the Life. Human will is large, good-humored, but with a bit a bit of a sadistic streak.

And it made sense to me that Nature would Rebuke life in such a way. It is nature with makes life brutal, that forces living things to engage in the world, reminding them of their isolation and violence, a fact of existence that cannot be escaped. The point of most world religions is dealing with how life, or existence, in the world invariably leads to suffering. Why wouldn't Nature remind Life of how brutal he can be?

And what happened next worked to. Will laughs. The human response to the suffering of existence to make light of it, to revel in it. Or perhaps just deal with it with a common nervous response.

Death chastises Nature, by only saying his name, leading Nature to apologize. Death referees the battle between living things and their surroundings. The continued death of species allows creatures to continue existing in nature, and puts limits upon what nature can accomplish. It is the moderator between us and our surroundings, and it does this with barely a word.

Also, I thought about where I know the story is going. Two books later in the story. The characters that I am imbuing as Nature and life will meet for the last time that the Nature character with be alive. At this point I will probably have abandoned these particular allegories for the characters, allowing them to shift into something new. But Nature character will be about to die, due to speaking his mind to the wrong people. The Life character will be in a kind of exile, in part for an part of violence he committed in the grip of an almost divine fury. This first confrontation will echo the place these characters find themselves in when they last speak. And I hadn't known that when I wrote the rebuke.

Now, keep in mind, I didn't plan any of that, or write it with allegory in mind. I had just come up with characters whose personalities, I thought, reflected certain vague concepts, then let them sit and talk. And they ended up doing something I hadn't expected, and being more interesting than what I had planned.

So I have decided to keep it. Hell, I think I will lengthen it, add in some commentary that underlies the metaphor a bit more (as well as some other issues).

I love when characters run away with the plot.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Politics, part 2: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obama

(Hey, I got an audience last time! Neat!)

When I left off, I was talking about how I had developed an emotional connection to Barack Obama.

Well, this was not good. One of the fundamental points of being a cynical, wounded-idealist leftist is that you are convinced that all politicians are corrupt, are "scum until proven human" (as I saw it put in a blog comment somewhere). How can a person be a good person, a person deserving of your trust and support, if they pursue a career in politics?

So for me, liking Barack—and I have always liked Barack: as I write this, there is a Obama-Democrat-U.S. Senate sticker within viewing distance, plastered on my printer—was always kind of a guilty experience. “Sure,” I told myself, “you may think you like him, but he's still, at the end of the day, a politician, like all the rest, and not worthy of respect.”

"You need to stay critical, Matt," I would tell myself. "Watch out. Don't let him pull the wool over your eyes."

So I tried not to get involved. Though I felt so proud to have voted for him—my first senator!—I tried not to follow him too closely. I didn't want to get my hopes up. And it hurt, too. Whenever I heard things about him in the Senate, it was almost invariably things pointing about how he wasn't the Great Liberal Hope that we had thought he would be. He was just too damn conciliatory! Sure, I told myself that he had to strike a low-key tone in the Senate, because no one can show up in the Hall of One Hundred Kings with buzz of being the Future High King and have that go over well. So you better be quiet and be modest and work at not rocking the boat. Because the Kings would love to just freeze you out and skirt those vaunted prospects. At that point, you can get more done by working within the system, than by getting up and taking a stand. The political realm is a realm of pragmatism and strategy, not of ideals. I understood that.

Unfortunately, not everyone seemed to understand that. In fact, a lot of people with a lot more info on politics seemed to conclude the exact opposite thing (these people being bloggers). They concluded that Obama had amounted to nothing, let the side down. He had taken no heroic stands. Never mind that there taking heroic stands never accomplished anything in electoral politics; it just would have meant something to them if he had put his head on the chopping block for a lost cause at some point. But he didn't so he was same old, same old. Which really, it was hard to argue with. What had he done for me lately?

Then the motherfucker announced he was running for president. For 2008.

"Too soon!" I thought. "He needs more experience! He's just going to make an ass of himself now, and ruin his chances for later. Besides, Hillary has this thing in the bag. He should just wait it out, and run in 2016."

Even thought I thought this, I had a pretty good idea why he was running. And it was all our fault. By "we," I mean "people from Illinois." For all those people who live outside Illinois, or supported Hillary, sorry. We fucked it up for you.

There's an anecdote that I feel conveys this phenomenon pretty well. It was Thanksgiving 2004, at my aunt's house. Obama had just been elected to the Senate. Kerry had lost the election. We were talking about politics. Now, Mom's side of the family is very Democratic, as far as I know. In fact, the only person there who I knew to have ever bothered to identify was Republican was my Uncle Rick. Rick had been a pretty proud Republican, and still, I think, carries some of the knee-jerk assumptions of a standard Republican. But then Enron happened, and Uncle Rick followed that thing after it fell off the front page, and it made him livid. It was obvious to him that those guys were all crooks, and the Republican Party was complicit in their crimes. And after that, Uncle Rick stopped identifying as a Republican. (I believe my dad's line had always been, "He doesn't earn enough to be a Republican.")

Anyways, it was Thanksgiving, and the conversation turned to politics, and the lost election, and what to do next, and without prompting or mention from anyone, my Uncle Rick said "You know who could be president, is Obama."

And that was when I felt, for sure, that it wasn't all in my head. It wasn't just me. There really was a desire, writ large, for this man to be president. I imagined people all over Illinois having similar experiences, talking to each other, telling each other they wanted this man to be president. Then I imagined Barack, the elected official, talking to groups of people, all of them spontaneously telling him, "We want you to run for president!" That kind of thing can go to your head.

Now, I am not sure exactly when I wanted Barack to run for president. I didn't have it fit into any kind of schedule. I just knew I wanted it to happen at some point, and I knew I couldn't wait.

And then he went and declared himself for the next bloody election.

I thought this was a huge misstep. "No!" I thought. "Barack, what are you doing? Don't you know you have to build up a head of experience first, get some legislative successes under your belt? Otherwise they will treat as some punk kid who doesn't know what he is doing. And you might even damage your chances for later!"

So I was not optimistic. In fact, I kind of didn't even want him to run. I wanted to save him for later, like some sweet from Easter that I was hoarding.

Plus there was that whole Hillary Clinton thing going on. But I'm not ready to speak of Hillary Clinton.

And there was another thing. I had been, have been, am, a pretty heavy reader of political blogs. I don't think it's so much that I care about the world of politics. I don't really have a stomach for organizing and activism and stuff like that, to my detriment. I think I am just too hermetic in character to go for that whole "engaged in the world" thing. But I respect the people who are, lord knows the rest of us need them.

Anyways, the bloggers seemed to be downright skeptical of Barack Obama. "Where is this coming from?" I thought. "Why are you getting down on Barack? Can't you see how he is awesome? Ok, he hasn't done much in the senate, and he's not really taking any out-there stances but, but ... Damn it, why can't you just get behind him like I want you to?!" (There are some pretty good reasons why I don't try to be more politically engaged.)

So eventually I relented. Maybe he just wasn't the Great Liberal Hope. I let it go.

This all happened before he actually entered the race, incidentally. Another reason I didn't really care when he jumped in. And so, I didn't really pay attention to the election coverage for a while. But I was still kind of rooting for Obama, for old time’s sake, even though the bloggers I was reading were going for Edwards en masse. The only refuge I really had was talking to my sister, Anne, every so often, about Obama, and how he would be awesome, and we really preferred him to anyone else. (Unless Gore decided to enter, in which case, history just had to be corrected, ya know?)

Then Anne and Mary just had to watch those fucking debates and switch to Hillary. Hillary! (I and not ready to speak of Hillary.) I was alone again. And Obama seemed like a lost cause. And well, I noticed that, you know, he really wasn't as far to the left as I was, so really I should support someone like Dennis Kucinich, right? Someone closer to my end of the spectrum? So I said I was for Kucinich. But really, that was just despair talking. I didn't really know Kucinich from Adam. I never looked up his specific positions. I never watched him speak. (I saw Obama speak the night before the 2004 election in a Unitarian Church in Champaign. Dick Durbin was there too. Only elected officials I have ever seen in person.) I didn't find him inspiring at all, and didn't really think he had the political skills to pull off anything I wanted done. I was just grumbling. I might as well have just supported Ron Paul or said I would write in Eugene V. Debs.

And that's were I was, disaffected, angry, and just wanting it to be January 2009 already so that that cocksucking motherfucker would not be in office.

Then Iowa happened.

The day of the Iowa caucuses, I spent the entire day sitting in my apartment. I had only recently gotten back home from my Christmas visit. I was on anti-depressants, waiting to feel somewhat different, unemployed, and basically working at actually getting out of bed in the morning. I can't really remember what I did that day, but I do remember occasionally thinking about how somewhere, nearby, there were people caucusing, including my sister and her boyfriend, and feeling a little bad about not being out there too. I also remember that the polls showed a nearly three-way tie between Edwards, Clinton, and Obama. Iowa was likely to not actually even matter, despite the hype.

Late in the day, I checked some blogs to see what the outcome was. Obama had won with an 8 point margin of victory.

Where the fuck did that come from
?

And then it all came back. I was happy. My guy had won! Wait, my guy? Yes, yes, I suppose he was my guy! I mean, here I was, telling myself he had been my second choice, but, realistically, I had been rooting for him all along.

Now, the thing about the result in Iowa was, the victory in and of itself was not important. It was the margin. All the polls showed a dead heat, and here he was with an 8-point margin? In Iowa? The black guy?

That changed the narrative of the race. Suddenly, he had a chance. Suddenly, it was a competition between Hillary and Barack.

I don't have any interest in rehashing the ups and downs of the next couple of months, with New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and beyond. That way madness lies. So let me just say that after Iowa I started really following the campaigns, and as time went on, I found myself getting farther and farther into the tank for Barack Obama.

See, what the Iowa caucus did, what it did for me, and what I think it did for other people, was prove as a kind of validation. Whatever it was Obama was trying to do—and I will talk about that later—he had shown that he could pull it off. He wasn’t just some empty suit with a lot of charisma, because charisma is not something that wins you a dead heat caucus state. Obama actually had serious political skills, skills that no one was paying attention to, skills that, for me, encapsulate why it is that he is the best candidate for the presidency, not just for someone like me, for anyone who is restless about the state of America.

I’ll get to that next time.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Deep Thought of the Day

Universal individualism is Anarchy.
Universal democracy is Anarchy.
Pure Christianity is Anarchy.

Corrupt individualism is Libertarianism.
Corrupt democracy is oligarchy.
Corrupt Christianity is slave morality.

inspired by.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

"The Gloaming"

A poem by noted poet W.B. Yeast*:
Staring at the candle I fritter away
The last few hours of a winter's day.
Thinking deeply, on all that has past
On fractured remembrances of friend's days last.

Lost in the gloaming, the darkness creeps in
On the flickering light that is all that was been.
The candle goes out! Now what shall I find
In the deep, dark recesses that I call my mind?

The mind, the mind! Tis all we have left!
When the world turns funny and all reason has left.
Tis there we feel peace, tis there we feel calm.
Its meditative space is the Gilead balm!

Yet tis there I feel sad, tis there that I hurt!
There festers Paranoia, who keeps me alert!
Is nowhere safe? Is my temple profaned?
Maybe demons live in it to keep me insane...

Is that what tempts me? Some phantom, some ghost?
Is the world at large not what devil's me most?
Perhaps it is something beyond understanding...
Or maybe tis someone on some distant landing...

High up the gods, those distant great figures
Look down on us like we are low crawling creatures.
They break us and burn us and blow us to pieces.
Might also they stride in our most sacred places?

My thoughts aren't my own! My temple is theirs!
From them comes all that I think unawares
My love, my hate, my passions and fears,
All whispered by voices that I never hear.

Do I still sit darkness? No, only a wind
Had flickered the candle; the light it had hid.
But now I see more, the wax that is burned
It is not alone, to be by the gods turned.
*White Bread Yeast, that is. Who is actually a character in a story I am working on. The real person who wrote it is me. While subbing in health class. The kids were watching a video.

Voice

Recently, I have been working on a scene that would take place in one of the much later parts of SK, in, oh, Book III or so. It's a short scene, and I am stalled on it by having to write a passage of dialog from. It's fun to just jump around like this, write a scene that comes to me, even if it is not related to the place I am actually on in the story. I feel that actually writing these scene that pop into my head fullformed is an essential part of getting over my Fear of Writing.

An interesting part of working on this piece is that I think I have begun to develop a voice for the SK material. I think part of why I have been hesitant in writing this one (I have been stalling on it since last week) is that I am not sure if it's the right voice, partially because its very similar to the very first attempts I have had at writing this story.

It's very sparse. It relies heavily on simple descriptions of setting, sometimes, when I'm on, embracing imagist language. I tend to excise prepositions and linking words, resulting in long sentences that functions as lists of actions committed by the characters. I avoid narration of internal thoughts and emotions, relying more on a careful description of mannerisms, facial expressions, movements within a space, and vocal tone to convey what characters are thinking. In a sense, this shows almost a cinematic influence, as if I am describing the choices that actors would take to express their characters inner worlds. It is also very heavy on dialogue and portraying specific scenes.

There are a variety of reasons why I think I keep settling into this voice, but it keeps giving me pause. I guess I wish it was more flourid, more artful, more lyrical, with words that sang and danced off the page. Instead it feels more workmanlike, and boring to read. Which is discouraging.

Anyways, here's a taste of it. Tell me what you think.

Torquesville found Ahasaurus among a glade of trees along the river. They were sparsely popular, but once you walked a few dozen yards in, the outside was hidden. Ahasaurus was standing at the far edge, where the trees began to part, revealing a cliff overhanging the Rhine; he was staring at a pile of stones about as high as a man’s knees. There were many of these piles of stones scattered throughout the wood, all roughly the same size, made up of stones that went from being as small as a fingernail to as large as a head.

Ahasaurus turned, startled, then breathed out uneasily. Torquesville smiled kindly in return. “Oh, it’s you,” said Ahasaurus. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to stalk off like that, like a small child.”

Torquesville raised an eyebrow, smirking, looked down intently at one of the piles of stone. He nudged one stone about with the tip of his foot. “Oh, that’s quite all right,” he said, looking up. “I know how it can be. He can be quite insensitive, can’t he?”

Ahasaurus let out a little laugh, more of a breath than anything. “Yes, well, thank you. But really, I shouldn’t be so, so…”

“Touchy?” asked Torquesville. He was rolling the stone about on the ground like a ball.

“Yes,” said Ahasaurus. “Like a woman.”

Torquesville laughed.

“It’s just that I should be more…thick-skinned about it now. Not getting all hysterical and rushing off in a huff all the time.” His voice quieted almost to a whisper. “It’s been four centuries, after all.”

“Hmm,” said Torquesville, frowning slightly. He stared intently at the stone he was rolling with his foot.

They were quiet for a moment. Birds were chirping in the distance, and the Rhine hummed quietly along beyond the cliff.

It was Ahasaurus who broke the silence. “What are these stones doing here?” he said.

Torquesville kicked the stone he was playing with back into place. “You mean you don’t know?”

Ahasaurus turned and looked squarely at him. “Am I supposed to?”

Torquesville shrugged. “Not necessarily. It’s just, I thought it was obvious. They’re graves.”

Ahasaurus stepped back quickly from his pile, looking frightened.

Torquesville laughed.

Update: The scene is now finished.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Politics, part 1

Though it has never been stated quite this clearly, I can't shake the feeling that the reason everyone else in my family supports Hillary is because she's a woman.

I feel like that's not supposed to be said, that it feels like I'm impugning their judgment, but that's what I think the case is. No matter how much Anne tries to talk about how she watched all the debates, and she clearly and rationally saw that Hillary was just the most ready capable and the best speaker of the bunch, I just don't buy it. Because at almost a drop of the hat she will start talking about how it is harder for a (white) woman to elected president than a black guy. And when Mary said that voted for Clinton because felt like it was her duty, I was pretty sure she wasn't talking about how devoted to Clinton's policies she was.

I can kind of understand where they are coming from. I can understand that emotional connection to a candidate. I think I actually have something similar with Barack Obama. It's not really a identity thing, although we are both lefties. I feel an emotional connection to Barack Obama because of his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

That speech was the first time in as long as I could remember that I had felt proud of my country.

I actually remember the day pretty well. I was at the Zeiger's house. Dave and Colleen were home. It was the summer that I was taking off from work to try my hand at writing. I remember talking to them about how I wasn't writing much at the time, but I was reading a lot. Specifically, I was reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut, who Anne had suggested to me. We were talking about the election then, and the seemingly awesome Senator we were about to elect, and he was speaking at the Convention, tonight you know, and then we were downstairs, and we watched the speech on PBS. I think it was just by luck that we ended up catching it. But I got to see it live.

I remember being reticent at first, as I am about just about everything concerning politics, I didn't want to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. I never want to give politicians the benefit of the doubt. I don't trust them. I didn't trust them then, I don't trust them now. It's like I freeze up, like there are nails on a chalkboard, whenever I hear them about to speak. That's how I was at first with Obama: prepared to distrust him.

But as the speech went, I started to get wrapped up in it. I was following him. Not just the rhythm of his speech, but the things he was saying. The substance. There were some parts I kind of thought, "eh." The whole red state/blue state comparison sticks out to me, for some reason. But the part that got to me was the part where, after talking about his father, how he grew up in Kenya and raised goats and all that, and walked through his family history, was the bit where he said (something like) "This is the only country in the world where a story like mine is possible."

It was like a light dawning on me. Because it was true. I mean, there are countries that have economic systems that are better. There was ways in which America is like a third world country. And there is all sorts of racial divisions and ugly sectarianism and really really ugly sentiments crawling all over this place.

But no other country has that kind of promise. It's the only country that you can come here, and make a home for yourself, and you belong. Anyone can be American, and no one can take that from you. America is the only country that is not a nation. What is a nation? A set group of people living in a set geographic location, sharing a common language, religion, and culture. There is no set group of Americans; most of our ancestors didn't live here when the country was founded. Sure almost everyone speaks here speaks English, but it's not official, and it's more a lingua franca than a official part of our culture. Just check out some parts of downtown Chicago to get a sense of just how unofficial it is. Some might argue that Christianity is the American religion, that America is a Christian Nation. Are Jews less American than everyone else? Are Buddhists? Muslims? Atheists? And a common culture? Don't get me started. I experience culture shock in different parts of my state.

When I was watching Barack speak, I have spent the last four years feeling abandoned. It was mostly because of dad's passing, but part of it was politics. It was the republicans. It was conservatism. It was Bush. The way they talked, the way he talked, about America? It wasn't my America. It wasn't the America I had learned about it school. It wasn't the America that I had taught that I was a part of. It was something narrow and set, Judeo-Christian and conservative. That's what it was to be a real American, and I didn't belong. And as I didn't belong, I kept on learning about the ways that the America I had been taught about in school, that America that I had been told I was living in, had never existed, how it had always been flawed, and had never lived up to it's promise, not even now, and with these people in power, they would try their hardest to make sure it never would.

But Barack Obama, standing up there on that stage, with all those people cheering, hanging on his word, words that he himself had written, going out on television all over the country, he was describing my America. He was telling me that there were other people out there that felt the same way, enough to make it allowable for him to get up and describe it too us. And if we all saw that that America could be there, than it could be there, we could make it be there, even if it wasn't now. And I felt connected to all those people that felt like me. that were cheering, or sitting next to me on a couch. It wasn't so much that Barack Obama created that America, it's that he presented it to us.

And I took it. And I was proud to be a part of it. And I felt grateful to him, for giving me the chance to have it.

As soon as that speech was done, the commenter on TV was talking about people were not just talking "Senator Obama" but "President Obama." Which elated me, because I had already arrived at that conclusion. I didn't want him to be in the Senate. I wanted him to be President now. Because shouldn't the president be the person who makes you feel like that?

And so ever since, I have had an emotional connection to Barack Obama, rooted in gratefulness for the way he made me feel about my country.

This was, I recognized, a big problem.

To be continued.