Facebook and the Rhetoric of the Handgun; or, What? You can’t socially network your way to democracy?

[Written fitfully (and, it turns out, rather inaccurately in all respects), one year ago:]

They told me back in grad school that reality is constructed, that community is paramount, and that technological capabilities are burgeoning forth unfound possibilities. Indeed, they (de)claimed, the internetworked generation has dispersed social clout along horizontal nodes in ways democracy could have only dreamed of, fundamentally altering the dynamics of political and social norms and power.

But I have been watching Libyan rebels and their cell phones, and I am not so sure that Zuckerberg is the new sixty billion dollar savior that they all thought he was. For those who are anti-Muammar, unlike in Egypt, Facebook wrought only impending doom, a Benghazi bloodbath, until Ms. Clinton nee Rodham pulled the about-face that launched two hundred Tomahawks and a barely-stifled Dukakis scream.

So now I am imagining a new brilliant screenplay for a movie, wherein a passel of puerile and privileged Harvard legacies concoct a dazzling scheme to copycat Napster, except that the product that you commodify is your friends instead of your music. Unfortunately, in a tragically Hobbesian and melodramatic move, one of the young bloods undercuts the others, patents the web algorithms, and escapes to California, where drooling Wall Street consorts slap down greenbacks in return for first dibs on shares in the now-hyper-inflated Company That Sells Nothing (Except Your Personal Information to Its Advertisers). The thwarted, wronged, victimized cohorts retire to sip margaritas in Cape Cod and plan their lawsuits and revenge. Eventually, in the climactic scene, a diminutive representative of the jilted parties confronts the Hobbesian antihero, holding up a laptop displaying a webpage on which the signatures of millions demand that justice be championed and liberty defended. Just as the curtain begins to drop on the villain, however, he pulls a Smith & Wesson from his pocket and puts sixteen rounds through the laptop’s Ethernet card. The final scenes show the villain driving from the hugely lucrative initial public offering to several of his private chateaus in France as the soundtrack from Slumdog Millionaire swells through a semi-psychedelic scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey (which was ten years ago) and the millions of signatures swirl through the atmosphere before forming into the shape of a Tomahawk missile …

Don't Hate. Love, Canada.

If you're a hater, and you're in that land
of drifting sagebrush and empty sand,
go ahead and get your hate on.
But not up here; not in this nation,
where the Mounties always get their man.

"Bring it, hate-boys," these toqued folks say.
"Talk your hate talk, and let come what may.
Good old Trudeau--he has made it
so that Mom's soap can stay where she laid it:
the CHRC will make you rue the day."

Oh, indeed, that fine Commission!
Parsing hate speech and omissions!
Didn't mean it? Still a hater!
Spoke the truth? Talk to us later.
Guess why we've got 100% convictions!

This Northern justice, it requires
only that you spoke; nothing higher.
If someone else might take offense,you are stripped of every defense,
even when the plaintiff is a liar.

I'd say some more of this except
that this is published on the Internet.
You know, of course, what this would mean:
it comes within Section 13!
So I'll stop. But I'm not finished yet.

Feeding Time

Ooh! He is chomping
It's like a dinosaur stomping
upon some smaller lizards--
because, until the great blizzards
that ended the tyrannosaur
and made way for more
temperate beings, they seemed
the greatest things ever weaned.

So now as he empties the syringe
that feeds him in his milky binge
he's working within peerless esteem
His parents, blind to fault, just gleam
when he performs the simple task
of swallowing. Because at last,
though often it goes so slow,
they get to sit and watch the future grow.

Crash-Tanked, Burning

Like the Exxon Valdez, the soil spreads--
over the roiling waters, it spreads!
Blackening bystanders and nature itself
with the ill-gotten ruins of mis-gotten wealth.

Ah, mortality! Meet thou American International Group!
(What an oxymoronic name, anyway).

Oh... and about Eternities...

Been thinking about time lately. Oops. Time to go to bed.

First Forever

If A swings an iron bar at B, who is asleep, but misses and hits a negligently-manufactured table leg instead, knocking the leg and table asunder and flinging the pieces across the room and out of the window where they bounce off a passing car and graze C's fingernail, is A liable to C for C's unforeseen allergic reaction to the anaesthetic used by the doctor to repair his fingernail?

All this, and more, can be solved in a mere single semester at a Law School of your choice! It's tedious; it's odd; it's expensive; it's slightly macabre! But it's not conducive to blog writing.

They look like flying lobsters

There's nothing wrong with cockroaches, except their existence. When they first came crawling down our ceilings with their antennae waving like outer-spacemen with laser guns, it seemed that the only feasible way of retaining the physical integrity of our bodies was to simply show them the quickest way to the sugary treasures of our pantry.

They've been around for a few days now, usually demanding access to the booty at about 10 pm. We typically acquiesce.

But just last night I decided to watch "Where Eagles Dare," in which a young and distressingly Keanu Reeves-ish Clint Eastwood single-handedly slays half of the Nazi SS corps with only a jackknife and a portable stereo. So when the roaches came back for another onslaught in the evening, my wife made several diversionary maneuvers involving a Tupperware container and the Saran wrap, and I headed for my Estwing.

Never before in my life had I seen a Saran-wrapped cockroach lying in a Tupperware after being repeatedly assaulted with all 18 ounces of a construction-grade hammer. Take that, weird antenna flailers! Don't make me bring out the portable radio!

Meditation in one-dimension

Archimedes' latest devil sits torqued into my wall, its one-dimensioned brilliance clutching the plaster with all the friction necessary to grant my copy of Claude Monet the appearance of levitation. A brilliant Greek! that man, who, with force and turn and tourniquet wrenched a solid blade of steel into a single-sided screw.

They say he saved a sieged city, back then, by festering his brain until it created (ex nihilo, perhaps) some megolithic mechanism that (who knows?) blew oily flames all over Spartan invaders or catapulted dogs with ringworm into the enemy's tents until they had to go back home to resupply their stock of Preparation H.

Like Archimedes, Ben Folds has a fascination with Preparation H, which can only mean that he, too, is beginning to experience the toils of middle age, where the insides and outsides want to exchange relative positions. That sort of evisceration (people tell me that this isn't the real cause of the typical haemorrhoid, but what does WebMD know, anyway?) is unnatural, but is also to be expected, leaving us in the pickly spot of a "natural unnaturality."

This is an observation which will probably give us some "cognitive dissonance" at first (a term that teachers use when they want to justify the explosion of their students' worldviews), but, unfortunately, this is pretty much the condition of reality. After all, all of us expect to be surprised at some point in our lives, and even though this mindset is paradoxical at root, not too many people are altogether flummoxed by the logic-garbling fact that they're expecting the unexpected.

Chesterton (the real one, not that quibbling politician in the 1830s) has said something somewhere (Orthodoxy, to be precise) to the effect that people should really be utterly pessimistic and wildly optimistic simultaneously. For him, it's a functional paradox that we should do our utmost in the belief that Right will prevail, even while recognizing that everything we humans do will fall short, in the final analysis. The "natural unnaturality" here is that badness is not only unnatural, but entirely a matter of course.

Archimedes again to the rescue (we, too, are Greeks in a battered polis). Though wrapped round a hollow steel barrel, the screw itself has only one side. With each turn of the socket wrench or Phillips-head, the single-side cuts a single groove and slides itself inside it, slashing to support instead of cutting to destroy, and eventually ends ensconced and useful by virtue of the very thing that resisted its forward movement.

Moreover, this gnarl of steel driven into toughness belies my sense that a diasporic adventure-life brings color and vivacity. The logic of one-dimension means not that the screw remains flat and motionless, but instead that it progresses deeper and deeper without ending, its head forced ever closer and closer to its final home.

The only worry is that it finds a stud, so that sudden weight won't rip it from the plaster.

Feels Like I've Had a Stroke (of Genius!)

Half face-frozen,
as if I've chosen
to be shot up like this.

They said they aimed
with the Novacaine,
but I'm pretty sure they missed.

So when they drilled,
making my tooth filled,
it rather raised my ire.

But my tongue's so heavy
that I cannot levy
the lawsuit I desire.

A Husband's Duty

When the exo-skeleton splinters
in the space beneath my fingernails
and the entrails seep through the Kleenex to my palm--

When I chase the spider, writhing,
and crush legs off with each frantic blow
(five, three, two maimed stumps, and finally a denuded, clutching torso)--

Then I say, dear wife, that my duty is performed,
and I have fulfilled your urge to murder.

Chemical Dependencies

So there's this organic farmer who walks up to a regular farmer (discernible by his common sense and sturdy practicality), and he says, "Hey, man, didn't Nancy Reagan ever tell you not to fix your problems with a chemical solution?"

Paranoia

I'm also thinking about a book again. Seems to me that most of life is pretty much ringed with fear-- fashioned with fear, even. The welfare state comes to mind, as does the fact that I wear clothes. Moreover, the critical/skeptical epistemological mode seems to me as also a product of fear: Descartes' project, after all, is rooted in a test of his faculties so that he can be sure that no supremely bad devil dude is tricking him out. The fact that modern philosophy won't settle for anything less than 100% certainty is symptomatic of its paranoia--a grim, settled fear that post-modernity wafts out of like a rat from a garbage can.

That's all a rabbit trail, of course, but it dovetails nicely with the whole seatbelt/insurance/retirement/government/metal detector thing that keeps us all freaked out enough to sacrifice liberty for a comfortable death.

My proposal? An aesthetic of trust. Believe me; it's beautiful.

Even though rats don't waft.

Civilities

Visited Gettysburg last week and started reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" this morning. Tragic works, both. Actually, I'm shocked at how compassionate UTC is to the South and slaveholders. Much less so to the institution of slavery itself and the laws put into place to protect it. Guess she's practicing the old adage: hate the sin, love the sinner.

I'm sure there's a modern moral, here, but I'm not sure at what small crossroads town it'll all explode at.

I'll take "Revolution," for $500

Ever been to Monticello? Yeah, Jefferson was really hurting from that Stamp Tax. I guess it's the principle of the thing, though, eh? Which is why, for Jefferson, that the right of representation extends to everyone except that slave he got to shovel away the hill that was obstructing the view in front of his study.

Nirvana Achieved

I've felt, over the past few weeks, that reading the stark black-white contrast that formerly graced this blog was rather like enduring repeated mosquito bites to the right cornea. Hence the lotus-like transformation. My only hesitation now is whether the Bhagavad-Gita would approve.

Oh, who cares. No one, that's who. That's why I don't even have a question mark there. Do any humans really live by the Hindu holy text like some people pore over the Bible? Even Gandhi drew all his inspiration from the Bible and the poet Shelley (No, really! It's true! See? See?). As far as I can remember, the Gita talks a lot about some dude in a chariot who's battling for his family. Oh, and he has some sort of caste on.

Idlewild

Here's the thing: jails are just the worst idea ever. What says "recitivism" like "let's put a bunch of one-time burglars in a cage with murderers and bigamists and outright paltroons"? (Bigamists being, of course, the single greatest threat to civilized society since Joseph Smith's golden eyeglasses.)

I was talking to my wife about this while doing dishes with her after dinner (an effective antidote, in every manner, to bigamy). She pointed out that the view that everyone just needs some peace and love and grace is a trifle too idyllic for the real world. I know that sounds terrible, but I guess you need to teach high school to really realize that grace isn't grace if people take advantage of it time and time again.

So here's my idea: Maybe we should amend Teddy's famous dictum to "Speak lovingly, and carry a big stick." But even if you keep a big stick somewhere in the justice system (I guess that's what it's supposed to do, anyway--stick it to ya, sucker!), jail sentences are way too overplayed. In other words, the justice system is too monochromatic--it's both too easy and too hard at the same time. Whether you murder someone or steal their lunch money, it's the slammer, all the same. Sure, you get different lengths of sentence, but life in a cage is pretty dehumanizing no matter how long it lasts. I think. So I've been told. It's like a one-size fits all approach to punishment.

And it also seems like it's the worst possible way to combat recitivism and to rehabilitate a "criminal" (gotta love that branding that comes with a criminal record) back into tango with social norms. That's where Colson's "restorative justice" bit comes in. If we can reconnect victims and crime (in certain instances--certainly not all), we might actually be able to treat criminals as human beings. If an errant accountant at Arthur Andersen is forced to pay back all the money he stole from stockholders, it might not only put a human face on the effects of his deeds, but also provide him a meaningful way of paying for his crime in a way that injects him back into community, producing something useful and violable from within society in order to get back on track.

I dunno. Seems like it may be sometimes a lot more effective to get people back into society and making them accountable to it by actually making them work within it to recover their place, instead of just putting them in a box somewhere on Alcatraz and hoping that 20 years' consorting with like-positioned aliens altogether apart from society will make them better able to live within it.

Isn't community the thing we all need, anyway? Why give "criminals" a lousy one on purpose, when we could be injecting them into something so much more human--so constrictive as to be free?

Guess I need a real job

I read most of Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" this afternoon, after a healthy morning of pancakes and packing. It told me that Douglas Miller was right when he said, "Writers don't make anything. We make about a dollar."

Later this afternoon, as I pondered this wisdom, I tried to explode a balloon merely by continuing to inflate it with my lungpower (as opposed to introducing to its latex epidermis the business end of any foreign, sharp object). I didn't think I would succeed, but it turns out that my lungs are, in fact, less likely to explode than is a bulb of elastic. My wife made this discovery at the same time that I did, but, alas! I had failed to inform her about my project, and the very moment that the balloon exploded like Hiroshima and flapped fragments in a welt across my throat, she jumped out of her skin onto the ceiling and clung there to the lamp fixture as the sausages she had been cooking bounced greasily across the kitchen floor.

The upshot of our resulting conflagration was that I probably need to get a real job. Right now, I'm creeping around the living room, looking for shards of bright elastic.

From Sea to Shining Cathode: "Turtles Can Fly"

I'm not exactly sure that our TV still uses cathode ray tube technology, but then again, I don't really care. I've decided, instead of cogitating too deeply on the "black box" nature of the black box in front of me, to kayak all day long, everyday, without cease, ad infinitum.

But first, I'm going to give a live-action play-by-play, work-by-work analysis and response of and to a movie I am watching at this very moment. With my eyeballs and ears and various other sensating bodily orifices. Too numerous to count.

The movie is also too numerous to count, although it is only one (1) discrete artifact. This is a ponderous and pondering observation, surely, but hold tight. Let me explain. No, wait--you'll maybe get it by the end of this spiel.

Okay. The title screen flashes. It's an FBI warning and an animated "Don't steal this copyrighted information, or you'll go to the slammer, like this unshaven punk." That's nice. I'm distracted at this point by the infamous thought-experiment entitled, "What would happen if the first track on every CD was a robotically-intoned 'If you're burning this right now, we'll be burning you in eternity.'"

Ooh. There's a rating. PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, and mature thematic. Not sure what "mature thematic" is. Probably something from Hollywo. Unsurprisingly, this is a foreign-language film.

Is there a title here or not? All I see is a bunch of Arabic script on the screen. Something about Kurdistan. Wish I knew more about the rest of the world.

First image: young girl with wind-swept hair. Scary music! Will she jump off the cliff? Into the water? Who is the scary guy? Ominous clouds. Jumps. Ah!

Cut to title: Turtles can fly. Hope that girl was a turtle. I sense this is the optimism that the movie maker wanted me to see. Well, I can see through their gag, so I'm going to go ahead and believe the worst. Turtles can only fly if they don't have a shell, you know.

Iraq. No televisions.

Wait. There's the beautiful girl again. Must be a flashback. I assume, at least, from her wind-sweptness, that she is "the beautiful girl" touted on the back of the DVD.

Ah. The hero, to foil the heroine. A teenage satellite-installer. To bring the Iraqi villages into
touch with the 21st century, the news, the tales of the war.

Bad subtitles on this thing. It only translates the gist of what they're saying. Right now, for instance, they've all been talking and laughing for five minutes, and the only thing on the bottom of the screen is "Let's go." Pretty distilled, I think.

Back to the girl. Her brother (?) just picked up a landmine with his mouth. I think he's armless. Guess that's what he does these days. Collect mines.

Satellite boy is back. Looks like he's in charge of the landmine-collectors, and looks like he's a meany. Hey. The armless boy just beat him up. Not bad.

Liz says it looks they're kind of angry. I'd concur.

Now Satellite-boy set up a satellite so the village can watch the war. Problem is, they only get Fox and no one speaks English. Even if they could, who knows how much they'd learn? I've got a feeling that pretty much the entire populace is manipulated by politicians. Like putty. Sometimes I wonder what they say about things behind closed doors, into the clouds of their cigar smoke, but then I realize that it's not really worth knowing. Profound, eh?

Wow. All these kids wounded, broken. One blind. One without arms. One lame. One a jerk.

Where the heck are these people living? What's with all the random armored junk around here?

Liz says the DVD back says all these kids are orphans. Sure. But where are they?

Ah. the armless guy is some kind of seer, who can make predictions about the future.

Okay, the Wind-swept Wonder seems to have some depression problems. I think what everyone else calls her "brother" is actually her son. Maybe. Every once in a while there's a montage of her jumping off a cliff thrown into the mix, so I'm curious about the subtle foreshadowing there. I'm gonna go ahead and say she dies by her own hand. Will I, too, be a seer?

Okay, so this is the deal: a bunch of orphan kids are hanging around in a refugee camp, right next to a bunch of minefields. So they're plucking 'em from the dirt and selling them to some middlemen in order to get money to survive.

Awkward. Wind-swept W. just tried to burn herself alive. Doused in kerosene and everything. I think that baby is kind of getting to her guilt complex. Come to think of it, she does carry it around her neck like an albatross. Stands to reason: guess her family was killed, she was raped, and the child is the result. Hard.

Armless boy leaves sister, W-W, on Satellilte boy's bike. He warns everybody that the war will start; the population moves out of the way. Like sheep without a shepherd.

Okay. Leaflet bombs. Wish they'd do that with my blog. Bomb it. Or distribute it wildly. Isn't that the same thing? Every dissemination is a bit of an explosion, rending things apart.

Hey, she didn't jump. Just sat on the edge of the cliff for a while. Who'd have thought? Tied her kid to a tree in the middle of a minefield, though. Satellite, trying to rescue him, loses a leg. Time for redemption through sacrifice? Is that in the Koran somewhere?

Nope. She does. And drowns her son, too. What a wretched movie. Inasmuch as it is inconceivably sad.

Well, this has been a less than enjoyable experience. Probably a terrible movie to comment on "live" like this, since it's too tragic to in any manner mock. This, I suppose, is real life for some--how many? What an eye-opener. See it, if you want to be wounded.

A Squirt Gun to Cleanse My Soul

This morning, when I was deaf, I had no idea that the hollow-bodied medical debris which has been lying in my desk drawer for the past four years would be the door, as it were, of my perceptions, the key to forever transcending my physical limitations. But life has its surprises; and I, thanks to today’s momentous circumstances, now have my squirt gun syringe.

The occasion of my momentous discovery of this powerful tool was my sudden, total, and seemingly irremediable deafness; the time, this morning.

I haven’t always been deaf, you know. Just today. Apparently, I slept on the left side of my head last night, and all the brain juices that were trying to ooze out my ear got stuck inside it like an endangered species in the Hoover Dam. I’ve managed to avoid this happening in the past, because I usually alternate the side I sleep on every couple of hours so that I don’t grow a kidney-stone. One of my friends had a kidney-stone in college, and after that, I’m almost cheery about setting an alarm in the middle of the night to remind me to turn over. But yesterday, I suffered minor abrasions to my right heel when I tried to ride a brakeless bicycle down a flight of stairs, so last night I drank extra cranberry juice, stuck to the left side, and suffered the consequences.

All in all, it was probably a good thing that the expulsions of my ear canal didn’t make it onto the pillowcase. My wife is sort of anal about sheets and pillow-dressings, and the wax probably would have ruined her iron. It was hard for me to take this dispassionate view at the beginning, of course, since it sounded like I had woken up with my head in a coffin. And it was hard to get used to my four-sensed state. Since external sources of sound were cut off from my reposing left ear drum, when I brushed my teeth after breakfast, I thought for a second that someone had turned on a tablesaw in my mouth.

I was all right for most of the morning, since I usually just sit around on the internet all day and clip my toenails, but when I started relying on my tongue to tell me if the toast had popped up yet, I realized I needed to reclaim my hearing, post-haste. Q-tips only compacted the obstruction, tamping it down against my ear-drum like a ramrod in a cannon. A damp Kleenex twisted into a sharp, moist point merely made my neck soggy. I was dismantling a package of ball point pens in order to construct a mouth-operated vacuum tube when I suddenly remembered the syringe tucked away softly in my desk drawer.

See, this secretion problem thing must be genetic, because my mom sometimes has the same problem. Even though it’s been a while since I took her advice, I remembered vaguely her stories about doctors jetting warm water into her ears in order to soak out the auditory impasses lodged within.

She seemed to think it was a good idea, so I tried it on myself, armed with only my three-cent syringe and the modern miracle of running water. Innumerable squirts and a bathroom sink later, consummation and delight! Only ten minutes and a wet orifice in exchange for high-definition surround sound!

My hearing is now hyper-sensitive, and getting more so all the time. At three o’clock, I heard my wife thinking that her iron was getting dirty, and at four, I heard Rudolf Hess chewing a peppermint at the Nuremberg trials. By this evening, I’ll probably be able to hear a blind caveman seeing.

And it’s all because of my syringe. I strongly suggest that you purchase one of your own, and several for your car trunk, in case of a terrorist attack. With such obvious healing powers at its disposal, who knows what a syringe can’t do?

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to strap mine to my kidneys tonight while I’m asleep.

Aha!

Alert reader Jim has pointed out that I say below exactly what I do not mean. It's a clever rhetorical trick of mine, but rather subtle. So, by "everyone" I do, in fact, mean "no one." Barack Obama has a one-liner about that: "No one wants abortion." It's amazing how he can be so slick and simultaneously fuzzily unclear. Study him now, folks. This is your next president speaking, for better or for worse.

Alert woman Liz also pointed out that adoption does no good to solve the 9 months' problem of carrying a kid in your belly. Maybe we should advocate free emigration into test tubes?

Drowsy writer Steve points out that he has a problem with ear wax and will take as much advice as possible about cleaning out his left ear.