Fake News in the Wild

With all the hyperbolic whining about “Fake News” from both conservative and liberal alike, I had the opportunity to witness a real-world example of Fake News and see just how pervasive it’s effect had on witless people.

               There was a post going around on twitter advocating pedophilia and the inclusion of pedophilia as a part of the protected status of the LGBTQ community that had gained the attention of a "Christian" personality on facebook. The later shared this post, therefore making it viral. Though it was not the post that I have below, it was something similar to it, or at least in the same spirit.

 

               When you do some digging on the original twitter poster however, the user had less than 5 followers, and only two or three posts. It was the solitary post that was picked up by this Christian blogger to be “exposed.” Subsequently the Christian poster garners the attention of the most dank memes on the internet, gaining thousands of shares and likes for this call to action.

               Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the initial twitter post and the poster’s account were fabricated. For one it seems odd that there would be an advocate for pedophilia on twitter with little notoriety or following suddenly being discovered. (Search engines use algorithms to find content based on relevancy, which includes the amount of times someone’s page has been accessed. This is why my twitter account of 150+ follower fame will be passed up when someone google searches “Author” when there are hundreds more with 10,000+ followers.). Also, the fact that the post was engineered to spark moral outrage was made so transparently clear, seems fitting for Christian advocacy groups everywhere, which constantly are mining information for the link between being gay and committing acts of sexual deviancy. And, lastly, Facebook can only share links and pictures. Facebook, as of yet, does not allow the embedding of twitter posts that you can interact with. So anyone can produce a screen shot of something like Twitter and have people take it as the genuine article, despite going through all the effort in my case to make the poster seem legitimate.

               The use of moral outrage to polarize and divide has become so commonplace that seeing this in action was almost banal. The fact of the matter is, however, that this “Christian Advocate” (who could be a fake account as well) successfully polarized both Christians and non-Christians, did not advance the gospel of Jesus Christ, and advanced a precedent that is not true of any LGBTQ community. While there is a historical period of Hellenism (a zeitgeist of Greek thought advanced by Alexander the Great prior to the rule of the Roman Empire) that practiced and advocated pedophilia and homosexuality as a virtue, advances in common sense across all cultures and countries have uniformly decried it and outlawed it, despite Roy Moore’s most recent attempts to make “Underage Sex Great Again.”

               What I think made my nose curl at this stench so intensely I can reiterate here. While I am a Christian, and while I think that Homosexuality is a sin (just like watching porn and being straight is a sin), I also believe that members of the LGBTQ community are human beings deserving of respect and dignity. And while I do not accept what they preach, their narratives should not be persecuted, if not singled out, simply because they conform to values different than ours. (I don’t ever recall a time when Hindus couldn’t be married because their values and ideals strayed from the Judeo-Christian norms.)

               Lastly, I think that it’s silly that we (especially Christians) are not more equipped to discern what is useful for building up and what is not. Given to how much we read, cite, and source, yet cannot do this outside of the bible with accuracy or conviction is confounding. Fake News is a real threat, and there is so much opportunity to be kind and loving to everyone affected by it. 

Happy Saturday Everyone!

Inventing Enemies

I realize that a writer’s blog should be memes and personable stuff, which I suck at. I really am a nice person. Promise! I’m just difficult to wrangle and coax out in person, let alone through the impersonal channels of the internet.

                But hey, I’m good at “being interesting.” This is what I’ve been told. So I’ve come up with a regurgitation of one of my recent reads that has really gotten be immersed in thinking.

                There’s an essay called “Inventing the Enemy” by Umberto Eco, a recent author in my collection that is occupying more and more of my time. Even now, in light of what is going on around the world, I thought the essay shows how anyone can create an “enemy.” An enemy doesn’t have to be someone were are at odds with in this scenario, just someone that we consider alien to us, or not of our kind, nationality, race, social standing, or otherwise. I wanted to give a birds eye view of Eco’s argument below. The essay is still  available in print and I highly recommend reading it, even if the language is stilted and archaic. (It was originally written in Italian and translated pieces can seem stale on the outside.)

•         Eco states that enemies are first geographically different than us. They come from the outside. He cites the barbarians invading Rome at the peak and decline of the Roman Empire as chief examples. In today’s terms someone can be an “enemy” of ours if they reside in another country. We may never have met these people, or have had any long distance contact (i.e. wireless communication, internet chatting, etc), but they are someone removed from us. And their distance makes them the easiest target for creating an enemy for us to fight/oppose.
•          Likewise, another degree of separation occurs with language. Eco cites the same example of the “barbarian” languages that invaded Rome, weakening the national identity of Rome. The word barbarian suggests a corruption of language (bar-bar-ian, like a stutter in speech). Those that we can’t understand, which requires us to have contact with them either personally or via audio message, we would reject as people we are against.
•        After language comes those that live inside the city walls. Those that are strange to us are most likely to be immigrants. The United States has a long history of targeting immigrants, either 1^st or 2^nd generation, that have come from foreign lands to be with us and are at the beginning, or in process, of assimilation into the parent culture. These are people that are ESL (English as a Second Language) or they work less desirable jobs or they are having trouble finding a footing in a strange and new environment. They are easy to pick out in a crowd, maybe because their clothing is different, or because they live in ghettos where other fellow immigrants reside. We often make enemies of these people because they are easy to blame for things that are seemingly outside of our control. Crime, population density, government spending, and education burdens can all be easily blamed on the “immigrant” by the interior culture.
•      Eco suggests, after his studying of Medieval history and philosophy, that those suffering from deformities would be the deepest layer where we could make our enemies. Assuming that the person on the outside has come in, learned our language, adopted our culture, and has demonstrably become essential to the community, those that are missing limbs, blind, mentally impaired, or suffering from congenital defects are seen as enemies because they lack on a fundamental level core abilities of other humans. This may not be as much an issue today as it was a thousand years ago, but an equivalent can be found in the homeless, who are dehumanized for their inability to care for themselves. They are seen as feral, unstable, and incomplete, therefore becoming an adequate enemy. Eco seems to have the most sympathy on this level of inhumanity simply because individuals of this strata are the easiest to blame and have few advocates.

I find the above really fascinating, and my synthesis of the arguments is limited by the amount of detail Eco lends to his argument. What is more sobering is his subsequent treatment, and potential explanation for the origins of antisemitism, not only because it is still fresh in our minds from the Holocaust but because of Arabs taking their place in the 21^st century due to the events of 9/11. Despite dominating fields of medicine, law, finance, science, physics, mathematics, and humanities, Arabs encounter daily opposition for their skin color and religion simply because they are externally different or foreign within the parent culture of the United States.

                All these ideas are potent for discussion, but I’ve discovered personally that even with lengthy discourse there is still a degree of separation between theory and practice. We can talk about something in depth, but we can never see that we too make our own enemies on a daily basis, even subconsciously, and not even care about it.

                They key point Eco makes, the final conclusion he makes in his essay that is chilling to say the least, is that having an enemy, or maintaining a diet of enemies to consume and present, creates positive growth. I will leave you with these. I hope they make you think about the weightiness of his conclusions.

The Enemy is Us

Here’s a thought:

Any view is defined from the opposing end of that view’s spectrum. The idea came to me, while I was entertaining guests at a birthday party for my daughter. I was able to “geek out” with a couple of guests, and in the pursuit of doing so I heard someone tell me that “most comics are left of center.” The context for the statement was that there was a particular group that was advocating “right-of-center” comics, but that they were met with fierce opposition from within the community. (I wasn’t aware of this, but I assume that all hell broke loose because of it.) I found the idea odd, that we need comics written “right-of-center.” No comic book writer/film critic/author writes content that establishes a worldview based on their enemy’s characterization of them—that is, I wouldn’t specifically write a book that was “liberal” because a critic of mine suggested that I was “liberal.” I would assume that they would write a story that reflected their own beliefs. I write stories that discuss things that interest me. I am not out to incite arguments. But I write what I write because I find that content interesting to me.

I find, that when someone (person B) characterizes your views (person A) as their opposite, what is happening behind the scenes is an instilling of existential competition, to validate beliefs of the original critic (person B) as valid, or more valid. I see this a lot in religion because I am a Christian and people are often insecure about their faith (myself included). I see instances where a layman witnesses same-sex marriage become validated by popular culture or reads about a scientific finding that sheds doubt on aspects of Christian orthodoxy, and their initial reaction is to characterize the supporters of those positions as being in opposition to his/her own. It’s therapeutic, ultimately, to be validated by creating an enemy. The stakes are higher now. And because enemies ultimately “lose,” we are invigorated when we read or hear something that sheds doubt on our opponent’s position.

The unintended effect is that we create our enemies as a toxic pursuit to escape our fears, rather than confront them and try to make sense of them.

What should we do, then, to avoid this?

Sorry, I have no idea. But I have thoughts.

See, going back to my opening point. If I write something that inadvertently challenges the worldview of another person, the onus is on that offended party to confront me and ask me in an understanding way why I have that position. Because I am not intentionally trying to offend someone. I’m, in most cases, just writing a story, or creating art, that resonates with me. The specter that we create of our enemies is a strawman that we sling mud upon rather than making an attempt to bridge the gap and attempt to understand any view different from our own.

Another interesting example: there was a time when I thought I was going to be a pastor of a Christian church. The unfortunate thing about this, was that I was very involved with the viewpoint of a certain pastor and I had purchased all his books and followed all his sermons. When I would confront a viewpoint that was different or, worst, in opposition to this pastor, I would write it off as poor scholarship on the opponent’s part. Then I was told an interesting anecdote as I was venting my frustrations our on my sponsoring mentor. If you read one author (his works in total), then you are a clone. If you read two authors, you’re confused. If you read three authors, you begin to develop an ecumenical understanding of knowledge pertinent to that topic.

This applies to everything: cooking, knitting, philosophy, politics, video games, religion, film, etc. What I don’t want you (reader) to take away from this is that your viewpoint is invalidated, or diminished, once you’ve reached this point of ecumenical understanding of your topic. What I desire you to take away is that people believe certain things because it’s personal to them, and there is a story behind that belief. When enough people are like-minded, they coalesce into a larger entity that takes core values (but not all of them) and synthesizes a new position that lacks the multifaceted explanations of certain beliefs.

In light of social media, I am convinced more and more that Facebook and other platforms are a cancer to our ecumenical understandings because they have condensed conversations and familiarity into statements and surface level understanding.

Chew on that for a bit.

Turning 30 This Year

I find that this year will be a highly thoughtful one as I approach 30 years old in July. While the 20s were an innocuous threshold wherein my youth was seemingly supplemented, the 30 year boundary is more foreboding and unknown. Considering that the largest event to befall me in my 20s was marriage, turning 30 is a different kind of strange, upon the cusp of which I experienced the death of my grandmother and the birth of my first child. This quality of “oldness” is amusing, if not revelatory, as I’m beginning to understand the apathy that comes with age. Apathy, I should clarify, not existential in nature, but a profound world-weariness. I spent much of 2017 embroiled in intense discussions of politics and culture, only to be rewarded with estrangement and utter fatigue. The stereotype that “old people” are out of touch with contemporary trends and movements is not rooted in their indifference, but the sheer exhaustion in keeping up, which to me is conceding defeat, though I empathize.

The boomers that were once so idyllic and now are complacent enablers confirm my theories. All this begrudged talk of millennials and their fickle sentimentality is just a cover for an aging generation embittered over their lack of contribution to American “greatness.” Their fathers and mothers advocated for the rights of African Americans and women, while they stood idle and fucked, smoked, drank, and embraced nuclear fatalism.

Though I admit I am being unfair, as the greatest generation was duplicitous and rank with hypocrisy, espousing a Judeo-Christian aspect while cavorting in the shadows. When it comes to progress I’m a utilitarian. At least they did something, anything.

I’m finding this all out now, of course. As an author I’m expected to be present and social, create tribes and foster communal growth. But, truth be told, I’m fucking tired. I work 40 hours a week. So my efforts, while lackluster, are genuine enough, just limited by diminished fortitude.

I should come back to my first point on age, for sympathy’s sake. Social and cultural fatigue does afflict me whether I admit it or not. I especially notice this in the kind of music I listen to at the gym. In high school, regular trips to the local record store would yield a bevy of new artists every week. Even though the albums were old, produced in the 80s and 90s, I felt connected to a movement, emboldened by the genres I listened to. Today, I can count on one hand the artists from which I still actively anticipate albums. My workout routine revolves around a heavy dose of thrash metal and Viking metal, and I don’t see it changing for the foreseeable future. With comics, it’s similar. I’ve purchased whatever I can find that is pleasant to read. All my heroes have stopped writing, and new up-and-comers to replace them are limited in supply.

The cynicism however, of old age, of change, or progress, is illusory and seductive. It requires effort to supplant complacency and look for new things. Becoming irrelevant is the thing we all fear most, and we unwittingly accept it because the alternative of keeping in contact with the rallying zeitgeist can often be tiresome and difficult. It is my strong belief that knowledge and scholarship (even if popular) can stem the tide of inefficacy. And so I must hold strong to the mast and resist the siren call of whatever-the-fuck being “old” is.

Shouting Into the Void

When publishing, it's easy to underestimate the extensive legwork required to get people to notice you. It's infuriating, because with 6 billion people on this planet everyone has an audience even if they're a piece of shit.

The last time I marketed my stuff I was at Comic Con back in 2014. I had a thousand cardstock mailers with a download link to my book via a Box.com link that I set up on my own. Everything was so touch and go, like having sex for the first time. Of the thousand, I was able to pass out almost 500. (Not bad for a first effort.) There were SDCC volunteers catching on to my schemes toward the end. I had to evade them like a cold war spy in Russia.

One thing they don't tell you is how to deal with rejection. I still remember to this day the feeling of passing out that first card, and someone declining, as if they wanted extra shit to cart around in an ever expanding grab-bag of toys, fliers, comic books, and so on. But still you take it personally. Today I kind of laugh about it, but back then I wanted to shrivel up and die. But to anyone passing out fliers just remember quantity is key. I estimated a 2-3% response rate (looking at the download metrics on Box). Of the 500 or so I passed out I got about 40 unique downloads. (A whopping eight percent!)

Marketing techniques have evolved over time, with Google AdSense and Facebook data mining to the infinitesimal, making advertisement the easiest in decades. The caveat to this is the saturation of ads. Just like Journalism, its easy for good content to get drowned out by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a blog. (And, yes, the irony is not lost on me.) So you may have noticed two pages appear on my blog: two personal thank you notes to prospective buyers of my two books (one available, the other's sale date TBA).

It feels apropos to do this. Sony never thanked me for buying their bluray players or Apple, their phones. If you click on to these pages, my sentiment is sincere. I know that I can be an anti-social, cynical asshole sometimes. But I care about the people who care about good art. They are the human beings that need to keep breeding. These two projects, and all my future ones are my best effort at contributing to the great body of Western Literature. (Though I'm not above writing pulp drabbles time to time.)

So, like all authors, I begin my journey, my trek into deep space, shouting into the void for alien life. To bridge cultures and opinions with tales on the human condition. I'll need help. I am many things: Husband, Father, Christian, Author, IT Consultant, Avid Reader, Player of Beep-Boops, and Anxiety Medicated Agoraphobic. But I'm not good at being all at once.

It takes a village to publish a book. And I'm thankful to everyone who fights along side me.

No Love For Wizardry

I hate Harry Potter because it’s a sham.

Like most children back in the late nineties, I was introduced to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It was immensely popular, and my grandmother was adamant about identifying a book that would get her grandchildren to read, pushing it on to us desperate and concerted. Truth be told, I was not an avid reader until I was out of college. Before all that, reading was a chore and something you did in school, not when you got home. I spent most of my time outside, turning rocks into spaceships and sticks into swords. Books never pulled me in like they do now. I was much more visual then. Converting and abstracting text into visual stimulus was only a recent development.

My vehement distaste for Harry Potter is inexplicable. Or was, until very recently.

I’ve never liked people pushing me into things, including hobbies. I’ve never liked musicals. (They want you to sing along, see?) I’ve never liked sports. (Competitive teamwork.) I’ve never liked fads. (Vapid, short-lived, things.) I’ve always been an insular, and supremely unlovable person. The idea that my cousin “Bucky,” the poster child of self-absorbed intellect, read it faster than my brother and I didn’t bother me either. What bothered me most was that I was expected to like it.

No. I don’t like Harry Potter because it’s too real to me. And I am not satisfied with the narrative that it pushes. (It’s about a young boy that discovers his parents were wizards, that he is a wizard, that they left him a fortune to allow him to board in an exclusive boarding school. His subsequent adventures are formulaic, and I wonder why his professors didn’t have a yearly meeting about the shit he was going to get into next.)

The origins of Harry Potter being raised by abusive relatives mirrors my experiences in subtle and substantive ways. While I have never been forced to live in a confined space underneath the stairs, I have a potently vivid memory of breaking my Dad’s VCR when I was maybe between 6-8 years old. I was so afraid that he would hit me that I told him from afar and hid in his orchard. And while he shouted vainly into the winds for me to come out, I stayed and waited. It eventually got dark but I was still hiding. I got into my Dad’s red Toyota pickup and slept in the cab overnight, and snuck into the house in the morning.

Another experience: We were at a local, independent grocer, one that I have scores of fond memories at their amazing deli and all the strange, foreign things they would buy and display at the front of their isles—food from Germany, Britain, Italy, etc. My brother had a quart of pasta salad that he was entrusted with, only to drop it on accident. My father flew into a rage and pushed him to the ground calling him “stupid” while he cried. There were people around us, aghast. Someone scolded my father, to which he replied, “mind your own business,” and we hurried out of there like cockroaches exposed to a bright, shining light.

And while, only by the Grace of God, I have forgiven my father of these things over the years of dealing with this—and there are many other incidents—I have no love for a series that depicts acts of abuse and mulls them over with discretionary wealth and elitism. I think my disproportionate response stems from my deep seated belief that the fairy-tale narrative archetype is a load of bullshit. Abuse never leaves you, it clings to you and stays with you. A moment of 1-5 minutes imprints upon your life a brand of shame and anger that never leaves, though over time the scar fades. I reject the Harry Potter narrative because in real life people that suffer that kind of emotional trauma, in many cases, never escape. And even if they do, they limp away and heal lame.

I recognize that now as much as I did back then. I stopped reading after the first book, not because I refused to continue reading the entirety of the series, but because I couldn’t accept its fantasy that seemed to ridicule my own suffering.

Fireside Eggnog Chats

I've started reading my bible again.

I'm reminded every once in a while that what I believe is technically crazy talk. Imagine a belief system that conquered the world, a singular faith founded on the teachings of a homeless Jew in Palestine roughly two thousand years ago. Now, imagine someone who is all in on that particular reality, and trying to make sense of it in the modern world. That's me.

Occasionally reading my bible brings new perspective to my life. Seeing through the eyes of a memoir, or a repetitive series of coined sayings recovered from oral tradition and framed to proclaim a gospel to a specific group of people. It's refreshing to go into it in what I call "easy difficulty," wherein the context and historicity of the scriptures gets completely thrown out, in favor of a layman's reading. I learn new things, like Jesus's cattiness or the urgency of those asking him for help. Jesus takes things slow, ramps up to the climax. It reminds me that our fears and worry are never as severe as they seem. Everything boils at 210 degrees, but our bullshit is lukewarm.

I've begun the process of putting together a second book in the interim, an anthology of works. I started writing them shortly after finishing my second novel draft, something to keep me active and fresh for when I got back my notes. The result was a meditation on Americana.What is the "frontier?" How has its disappearance changed the meaning of the "American Dream?" Is there even a dream worth pursuing anymore? Was there ever a "dream" to begin with? The novella includes 4 shorts and an epilogue. Currently, approximately, 82 pages. Included in the backmatter are a few shorts that I've written in the recent past that I will be revisiting. They all seem to originate on the eve of Trump's election, the catalyst of this whole period. I feel pretty good about the material and I'm hoping for a release early next year. Stay tuned...

That is how life is right now. It's tenuous, day-by-day, which is not all so bad considered the alternative. I like the flexibility and freedom to walk away from a project to bang out another. Its refreshing and constructive. I'll never be the person that "labors" over their masterpiece for a decade. We change too quickly. Our states of mind are too ephemeral to compose a consistent narrative. While the first draft is composed over a two-four year period, the second draft (the most important, also) is where the narrative coalesces. The hard days are coming, but I always find a way to get through them.

For Halloween I dressed up as our company mascot for a costume contest. Even though the prize was $100 and it cost me $200 to make, the admiration of my co-workers was payment enough. That's a bit of an overstatement, actually. But it was one of those moments in my life where I wanted to commit to a vision and see it through. Our swan song of present culture is one of defeat and taking the path of least resistance. In a way, the reality that my costume took third wasn't crushing at all. It was exhilarating that 11 people thought mine the one superior. (Not many actually vote--the winner had 14 votes.)

The "CIO Switch and Receiver Jr."

Better luck next year. 

Gum Chewing Racism

Chewing gum, occasionally I bite my lip on accident, feel my teeth sink in just a little bit. It hurts a lot but after a while the saliva in my mouth coagulates the ruptured skin and I’m back in business. This has been happening a lot lately, chewing gum. It helps me forget and relax, kicking in my monkey-amygdala brain.

I keep getting the best ideas in the worst possible places. When I try to remember them I feel like I’m wandering in a fog and trying to make out shapeless blobs of cohesive thought. I had an Idea about racism, seeing that that is the flavor of the week. Since Trump took office I’ve only been able to conceive of myself as an oppressor even though I’ve never seen someone as being lesser than myself. (A note. I have plenty of racist thoughts in my head that make me consider Jesus’s sermon on the mount, wherein he suggests that the act of being angry is equivalent to murder. Does that mean that because I’ve had a racist thought that I’ve also considered someone to be sub-human?)

The quintessential quality of a “white person”—at least what I assume to be, in the context of a American everyman raised in the “good part” of town with minimal hardship—is a very human one. The preservation of property. It’s easy to look at material possessions as a right, when in fact the ownership of property is merely by chance. Unless I suddenly won the lottery, the acquisitions of life, liberty, and happiness is a slow going affair. So slow, in fact, that by the end of it all the hard work and chance luck just blurs together into one concerted effort. I find myself harboring bitterness toward my neighbors as if I’ve built up a life for myself in a one bedroom apartment. In reality I’m paying a slumlord a pound of flesh while being angry at my neighbors for littering. I don’t own the streets, or the hedges, or the sidewalks. But I’m under the pretense that I own the space that I occupy. Maybe this is spurred on by the concept of social contract?

Social Contract, as I conceive of it, distilled to its essence is about fairness. (This is the zeitgeist of the 21st century, correct? That meaning is fluid and taylor-fit?) And what we perceive as "unfair" is in violation of the social contract. My psychiatrist tells me that this isn't a realistic way to live, and I agree. Holding people accountable to a contract they never signed with me is tantamount to giving someone a roofie and sociologically fucking them.

In other, less-introspective, news, I got notes back from Desmond on my second book. Reading them has become a bit of a past-time for me, a one man roast on my labors which, I find extremely funny. It's soothing, also, to know that your work is taken less seriously by others than yourself. It's a safety net, placed under your ego, so that when it all falls apart you have a place to land. Like most first drafts, everything is raw and disconnected. Ideas are inconsistently spread across the canvass and need to be thinned out to an even grade. I've done this before with my first book and it's a very frustrating process, though worth wile. And whats interesting is that I've tried to write a second book in between drafts, a shorter novella that I'm really happy with, a tangential work that helps me vent creative frustration. I'm finishing it this weekend and giving it out for another round of notes.

I'm really bad at ending my blogs.

So that's it.

Go back to work. 

A Concise Summary of My Recent Wit

This is not one of those blogs where I write something once or twice a week. It was... but look where that got me: depressed and stressed out. Today, I'm sitting in a dark room, lit only by a solitary LED desklamp in the far corner of the room, casting soft, unobtrusive light across the floor. Soft shapes decorate the room, stains of darkness on creme paint. The desk is cluttered, even after a thorough cleaning. Piles of to-dos and unfinished books vie for my affections, while a monitor stands erect, in defiance of taste, acting as a mirror.

I don't play video games anymore. Or I play them, but in secret, like a fat man binging in shame, squeezed into a 1999 Honda Accord, with mounds of cheese and animal flesh scattering his torso, under the tangerine hue of the dwindling twilight. Little by little do I understand the vampire-esque habits of my parents who dealt with me in the daylight only to flourish in the night. This is amusing to me, because I used to be a "night person," staying up late at night, watching Adult Swim and checking my Facebook for unexpected contact. Fleeting moments of relief in the endless screams.

I've been looking at my progress over the past few months and I am satisfied where I'm at. The balance struck between obligation and dedication is at the apex straddling commitment and poised to fall one way or the other. But with finesse and fortitude the armistice prevails. While I have been awaiting feedback from my second book, I've started a novella anthology featuring the primitive objects of my worship as a younger man: the tall tale men of Americana. Pacos Bill, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, and Johnny Appleseed are on the move, acting independently of one another in a collage of tales. It's actually not a bad start, and I've felt very satisfied with the end result. While not being as heady as my previous works, it is probably the most human work I've attempted, hoping to evoke the struggles of the American everyman, post-frontier.

My good friend, and fellow man-child, Desmond Write was able to return, at long last, the notes I sought from him for the aforementioned "second book." And while the chafing, yet witty, scathing, yet instructive, remarks of  my contemporary be, I've been able to get a good laugh out of my nascent work. Too many writers think of their tear stained lyric as the poetry of the Gods, yet can't see through their smeared eye liner how shit their prose is. Desmond is the kind of friend that shits on your book, then uses the excrement to stencil in a greater, more profound, foundation. Lesson learned, and always remember: a derisive commentary deciphers opportunity, but a flattering rhyme incites pride.

That's it.

It's Not About The Lemons

I had this very bizzare, very “Santa Barbara” experience at the farmers market today.

I was picking up the essentials (lettuce), as I am wont to do every Saturday morning. Usually there is a vendor selling Meyer lemons (great for salad dressing), so I found one quickly and went to pick out four of them (50 cents each) and fumbled with three of them, attempting to reach a fourth. This woman, who came after me, swooped in and started grabbing the ones I was going for. I made a comment that I was grabbing at least one more and she looked at me unapologetically, holding her $5 cup of coffee from the Handlebar, and just said, “sorry.” (What she meant to say was, “Fuck you and your lemons!”)

A phrase that I own and coin often is something akin to, “I’m a socialist. But it would never work in America.” There are variations of the same phrase that I often rehearse but the essence is there. I say this to my chagrin because I have been influenced in my life by events that make me pine for fairness. (Getting beat up at school, being viciously made fun of, and raised up under unremarkable circumstances. Also, my own parents have never even read my first book.) It has made me characteristically cutthroat and exploitative and I often wonder if there is an alternate timeline where things were better. At its core I’ve always felt enamored with a political and social mindset where people shared their resources to make the world a better place.

Facebook, among other outlets, sings the same familiar tune. (And when played backwards, you hear the Satanic inverse.) But I don’t think people practice what they preach. I’m a god damned positivist and I don’t practice what I preach. The socialist voice in America isn’t the same pitch and timbre of the places where this actually works, and I think for the most obvious reasons.

American nationalism peaked at the conclusion of the War of 1812. Subsequent spikes are the work of foreign wars and social upheaval, intermittent incidents in a long national history of eulogized selfishness. Even a Christian cult emerged, Mormonism, which nationalized religion and mythologized America’s origins, placing the United States at the origin of the universe. (The opposite was the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian cult emerging at the height of political corruption in the United States, which eschewed all appearances of nationalism.) At both of these peaks and valleys, American expression remained steady in its love of self-interested wealth. Our constitution is rooted in the Pursuit of Happiness, appended by the inferred, “And if you infringe upon mine, why I oughta’…”

The contrast that we see in Europe, the social milieu that makes socialism so viable, is their roots in tribalism that goes back thousands of years. There has always been infighting between states, but uncanny internal bonds. And while there has always been a sectarian conflict between ethnic groups within states, once these states matured past the frustrations of religious and class warfare, there has been a reasonably steady peace. War has also hardened these bonds on kinship. For instance, Russia has repeatedly attempted to invade Finland over the past thousand years, with the Fins rebuffing many, if not all of the assaults. The shadows of Empire have also strengthened national resolve, in the case of Norway being a property of Denmark for nearly 500 years. (They celebrate their “independence” every Seventeenth of May.)

In the United States where we are so blessed with an abundance of natural resources, acquired over the centuries through many shrewd dealings, our sordid gains have likely made us complacent. Combined with the mentality of Frontierism, prosperity through expansion and entrepreneurship, we have inherited a mindset from our forebears that is untenable in our exhausted real estate. We expect wealth and receive it from the least of our peers: migrant workers, wage slaves, immigrants, etc. Even myself, a proponent of ensuring we invest in our citizens through community programs and education, I have everything to gain from an economy that favors my willingness to exploit the labors of others.

All this came to a head, flashed before my mind, as I sarcastically, non-confrontationally, replied, “Wow, this IS Trump’s America.” It is very likely that I will not see this woman again, but given the demographics of Santa Barbara, she is statistically likely to be a Democrat, a social progressive, anti-corporation, pro-choice, drive a fuel-efficient vehicle, and pro-immigrant. Yet, at our core, we are a despicable people trained to look out for “number one,” and like a handful of Meyer lemons, we are more concerned about our welfare than that of others. Imagine the paradigm shift that I experienced when I saw this complete reversal in Norway when I was able to spend time there. I constantly compare my brief time there with my lifetime here. And while I’m sure that Norway has its own kind of culture shock due to its inherent bureaucracy and insistence on social conformance and enculturation of immigrants, the underlying spirit of their social contract is present and palpable.

Enough with myself bitching about lemons…

My second book is coming along with the first draft complete and being out for feedback among my inner circle for notes. I am hoping for another set of great comments from my brothers of other mothers Desmond and Bern. Soon I can start draft two and really dig deep into it.

My daughter Eowyn continues her external gestation. She’s doing good, and my wife also.

Stress, Work, Baby: Repeat

Usually people look at me when I’m having a panic attack and as me, “why are you nervous?” And, as I pause between labored breaths, I am drowning like a fish out of water. I hear that fucking question so many times that I makes me want to scream, but my collapsed lungs have no air to offer even a whisper.

This all started a few years ago in 2013. I was, before my first episode, a very productive person. My personality then was very outgoing, very active. I was a typical “go-getter.” But then the attacks started, and my period of work dwindled from hours a day to short bursts of maybe 30-45 minutes worth of real work.

Now I’m a dad. Between my new duty of raising my daughter and writing my books, I have little time now to pursue my original levels of productivity. Simply put: I don’t write as much, so you won’t be seeing me posting three times a week.

But the content is better. I find myself planning my projects with greater care, investing more time into making my plots flow better. At the risk of writing without a net (without any idea particular story in mind), I sit on my posts and shorts, hoping that subsequent attempts will yield a robust result. This works to a degree. There are stories that circulate over the web about laboring artists that will agonize over dozens of drafts, which I feel is a waste of time. My limit is three: first draft attempt, second draft re-write from notes, and the final third draft where I choose one aspect about my story and redo it. Taking the extra time to really rack my brain over a concept has solidified this style I’ve chosen for myself.

Now I’m a dad. It bears repeating. I’m still in shock over the transition. The presence of this, thing, in my living room that demands my life, my soul, I’ve never felt this before. My daughter Eowyn cries because she doesn’t understand the world that she now indwells. It’s not wet or dark, warm and tight. Everything is so open and vast, an echo chamber that she cries out against and hears nothing in return. It’s difficult to imagine what it’s like to be a blank slate.

Stress, work, baby: my new life, some tell me. There is a Mormon that I work with that insists that my life is over, only using colorful, inoffensive language extracted from a threadbare flannel board from the mid-80s. I already struggle with being pessimistic and incorrigible. Insisting that my life is going to change, bear baiting my dreams and hobbies with the burden of childrearing is downright nauseating. I knew what I was fucking getting in to when I decided with my wife that we wanted to have children. It’s not as if I was ignorant of the changes I was going to face. I welcome this brave new world I have entered, for better or worse. It’s high time I was forced to get over my depression and anxiety to serve another. It’s high time I saw myself through the eyes of another. To see myself carried in the arms of God, crying, lamenting at this hard life I endure every day. The perspective is awe inspiring. Like most prospective parents, I am eager to right all the wrongs of my childhood, to be a “cool” dad. Far more fascinating, in a grim sort of way, will be discovering my own pretensions that I will impose unfairly. Relying on my daughter to understand my own faults, that is the gift of parenting.

But one day at a time. Give me, this day, my daily bread. One day at a time.

I love you Eowyn, my Delightful Charger.

Writing For The Man

This page has been barren since my last opus—so apologies for that—due to my work for another master. There’s this cool website that I was turned on to called The Prose. I’ve been submitting challenges there over the last few weeks because, let face it, the traffic here is not as robust. You can view my profile here. Go nuts.

Work on my second book comes along at a steady pace. I’m completing about a chapter a week, in hopes that before my daughter is born the first draft can be completed. I struggle with the reality that this book is being written fairly quickly, whereas my first one was a far more painstaking process.

In my experience, the longevity of a work, as well as the time spent to complete it, does not correlate to the quality of the piece. I have fallen too quickly into the trap of boasting about the agonizing process of writing a book. In reality, I’ve come to discover that the process should be rather straightforward. Things should just flow. After that, it’s only your WPM that slows the process. So, kiddos, take a lesson from ol’ Uncle Stuart, don’t brag about how long your book was, or how long it will be, the time spent writing it, or how long it took you to name your main character: it’s all bullshit. Nobody cares.

Still, practice what you preach. I haven’t been the best at this this week. Earlier I told someone that they weren't a writer, when it turns out they were very prolific. I’m very passionate about what I do, and I like being in the company of other writing professionals, if not to bolster my own skills. That said, I heard this person say they were a writer and my immediate reaction was to say, “No, you’re not. Shitting out Harry Potter fan-fiction on your Deviant Art page doesn’t count.” Luckily, I have more tact than that. Later, on Friday, I was confronted to explain my criterion for being a “writer,” and so proceeded my throwing pearls to pigs, until I awkwardly broke off the conversation.

Maybe I’m just a shitty person? It would explain a lot of things, namely getting in unwelcome arguments about philosophically unverifiable designations. In my mind, since publishing my first book, I would say that I am an “author,” not a writer. 15-year-old Stuart was a “writer,” aping characters, concepts, plots, from my favorite TV shows and books, writing without abandon rote and cliché narratives. (Though, as I write this, the thought occurs to me that children will “play doctor” and someday grow up to eventually receive training and licensing to be one. So, perhaps I’m wrong to discount the future efforts of my soon-to-be daughter’s resuscitation of her stuffed Totoro after the triple-bypass goes horribly wrong?) I think being an author now, to me, is having the patience to hear critical feedback, while also striving after the impossible task of making your characters exist on their own merit. And so, being the black-and-white person that I am, I will accept nothing less than 100% of my efforts towards achieving this, as well as be prone to discrediting my contemporaries for not volunteering the same efforts. I’m a passionate and insecure person. It’s only in my books that I can be truly me.

Still I feel remorse for what I said. After all, I feel very hurt when I must justify myself to others needlessly. Far be it from me to dish out to others what I lament receiving. My languid pace to seek forgiveness from this person, is only impeded by also considering their presence unbearable. Have you ever known someone who, whether they are involved in a conversation or not, will just insert themselves into everything, uninvited, to claim being an authority of  the smallest, inconsequential things? It is infuriating being around people like these. It’s like I say, “So, I was at the store the other day…” and out of the ether materializes a lugubrious, squawking creature beating their breast, declaring “I’VE BEEN TO A THOUSAND STORES!!”

All this considered, in my brief time on this planet, I’ve learned the merits of letting go of festering feelings. I should just get over myself and proceed with caution.

XOX

SW

To the Co-Worker That Said I Believe In "Creepy-Christian-Shit"

At happy hour two months ago, you said something to me that I have thought about in the passing weeks and I have been burdened with it since. Not that what was said I found distasteful, or disagreeable, but that I felt excluded from something far deeper; a dialogue of trust and friendship.

Generally words like these have hidden in them a lifetime of experiences. Experiences warranting legitimacy. Who is anyone to tell us that what we believe, and how we came to believe it—short of being brainwashed, or impressed with another's knowledge—is wrong? We are, after all, the sum of our experiences, moments weaving a canvas patched with assumptions and conceptual gaps informed by the majority of the fibers. So when I hear you say “creepy-Christian-shit,” in reference to my beliefs, I can only assume that you were brought to that conclusion by legitimate means and that the defense of that truth is warranted.

                There are common assumptions made about one’s beliefs by the Other, that we succumb to naturally, if not due to some form of mechanic employed by social evolution, to preserve our identity in the presence of something we don’t understand. I do this all the time, usually in the presence of the marginalized and the poor, occasionally in the presence of those of a different faith. If introspection is worth anything, and it likely is despite what postmodernism has suggested, I would say that I am afraid of losing my identity in the presence of another, more convincing and powerful one. Warding off intellectual and spiritual fascism with definitive statements.  Without overstepping my bounds and assuming your prejudices, I would say that this is at least, in part, something that influences your beliefs about my beliefs.

                Likewise, in a current climate of relativism, not to be confused with pluralism, I will be bold enough to say that not all beliefs are as valuable as the rest. Prejudices, for instance, are not worth as much as truths, because they are innately defamatory and aim to devalue something else, person, institution, presupposition, etc. A belief that declares a value statement needs to be assessed and vetted to determine whether or not it is a prejudice. Being that you and I are cut from the same cloth, or that I aspire to be what you are, I hope you can appreciate the social obligation we have in a pluralist society, to establish a mutual dialogue that encourages a common understanding and a collaborative spirit.

Transparent Faith For a Transparent World 

                I admit that in your life you have crossed paths with undesirable permutations of Christianity. History subjectively describes movements and campaigns that highlight the forceful and dominant expressions, which I have struggled to reconcile. Those in a position of power leveraged their social and political influence to perpetrate acts out of self-interest that tainted the reputation and following of forgotten followers, their voices drowned out by the influence they did not have over the events they did not initiate. (The same is ever true today, with the rise of the “Moral Majority” and other caricatures promoted by fringe groups and leveraging fear of the the Other.) We are all familiar with the corruption of institutions and the choice we make to generalize that quality across the diverse spectrum of historical expressions. I have chosen to not do that in regards to secular humanism, to see the good that it has brought to society by questioning beliefs long held, and often proven untrue upon further reflection. I would not wish to make a straw man like administers of my faith have made, often to draw simple comparisons and conclusions for those without formal education, to create a digestible, conceptual framework; much to my chagrin as I know full well, the multiplicity of expressions. As I have had patience for those accepting simple explanations I ask you do so as well, understanding, with positive intentions, the intended effect.

                But there is a personal dimension to all this, for without it I would just be blustering elevated quips.  Rather than see you as the Other, I wish to traverse that gap as a confederate, a brother to you in attempt to achieve a common goal of understanding. Regardless of my points of view, informed by my personal theology, I would like to express my love for you as a person, with identity and worth. I see you as unique and capable of great things, as we all are the same at the core, acting out of self-interest on the small and large scale. I wish to express my intentions that I am committed to your well-being because of what I believe, and that I am committed to doing good for you, your family, your friends, regardless of their positions and beliefs. I believe that my truth is definitive to this reality, but that does not stop me from appreciating what you offer to the world, what I believe my maker has given you to advocate for those that cannot advocate for themselves, to seek equal opportunity and rights, for dignity in an undignified world. While it is true that I have given myself over to what others would declare an insane proposition, the belief in an entity unverifiable by empiricism and its tools, of a poor, homeless Jew embroiled in the socio-political conflicts of 1^st century Palestine, I have paradoxically employed tools of reason to do so, just as you have defended the antithesis. Without the guarantee that I would dully receive your blessing and acknowledgement of my beliefs, I would like to acknowledge yours are valid and legitimate and it is my deepest hope that we can foster a relationship of mutual empathy.

My Best to You for the Betterment of All,

Stuart J. Warren

Jared's Best Man Speech

In honor of my friend Jared getting married today, I wanted to say a few words on his behalf. The below is a transcript of what I will say at his reception: 

Thank you all for coming today. My name is Stuart, the Best Man, and I wanted to take some time to talk about Jared for a moment.

Some of you might know Jared through Julie, or know him as a friend, co-worker, son, or colleague. I know Jared as a friend. We lived together in college for about a year and I had no idea that I would still know him almost ten years later. I have many stories about Jared, but one of them stands out. I had just moved in with him and was still feeling out my roommates for their quirks and oddities. Jared was the guy that came home late with other women, not to sleep with them mind you, but to do far less raucous things like cuddle and play boardgames. But I sat Jared down and talked to him explaining that what we did at the apartment, which was a complex in Isla Vista leased to exclusively members of Campus Crusade, was sacred. We were out on display for the world to see and I wanted to hold him accountable. To my incredible surprise, Jared listened. He heard me out. And we built on that moment a mutual, sacred trust that has sharped us together, perhaps like iron on iron, or something like that…

We are all told that we are special. That we can do anything. I don’t really believe that now that I’m older, but Jared is one of those people to watch because he is destined for great things. His career as a writer and teacher are already in their infancy and he has distinguished himself as top of his class, par excellence, with his colleagues and fellow members of the Academy. Why? Because Jared is a magnate for discussion, someone that people naturally gather to because they see in him something wonderful and special. He challenges us by his example to question our beliefs and follow in the footsteps of Socratic liberal education, that we may think critically about the information that vies for our affections in a world of increasing ambiguity and obfuscation. And incredibly, as much as Jared challenges us and helps to mold us, the teacher that he is, there is Julie that has drawn Jared to herself. You see, if you knew Jared, you would know his aloof spirit as well as me. “Bear-bear” is always on the run, unmoored by his years of growing up across the oceans in the jungles of Indonesia and urban China. But he has finally, at long last, found someone to tie him down in the boudoir and write a new story about a man and a woman finding each other, seemingly from opposite ends of the world, and starting another generation of rootin-tooting, suspiciously hairy, crawdad catching, Whites.     

  

Being Naïve and the Consequences Thereof

 I am a very gullible person by nature. Chances are, if you have met me in person, you have told me something that I had willfully believed without question, or sarcastically made a comment that I mistook for truth. As I get older, the façade of how I perceived the world to be gradually falls away like rusty scales or a deteriorating shingles from a Victorian rooftop. The process, ongoing, brings mixed emotions, some of anger and disillusionment, others of genuine joy and gratitude for my aptitude to learn.

                That’s my most common pastime these days, learning. My wife and I like going to used bookstore and buying esoteric titles. The illusion that they are used and, therefore, inexpensive has set us back several hundred dollars, and produced only an overflowing bookshelf. (I should actually say, “myself.” I’m the one that buys all of them.) Learning is protection in a world of post-modern, post-truth, post-humanity. The act of filling up with knowledge gives me support, a feeling of protection from being exploited by those that are stronger than myself.

                As I said before, I’m naïve. It has caused me lots of grief in my life to be behind, to be told that I was stupid, that I was below average. While my contemporaries in grade school were being advanced through government funded programs for the gifted, I was a year older than all of them but considerably more dull, I was told. I tested twice to enter the GATE program, each time taking logic tests and solving puzzles to approximate my IQ. I somehow managed to keep up, in a system designed to disenfranchise me and others like me that didn’t excel at curriculums structured around boosting state testing scores.

                In AP courses, and parts of college, I did better. Marginally better. I held my own and passed with satisfactory marks, excelling at English. But I didn’t appreciate scholarship for what it was and what it was meant to be. That came after.

                I was in an internship for my church. I told myself that I wanted to be a pastor of the Reformed tradition. So I read, and read, and read. I was reading two books a month, sometimes three. During the fruitless process I learned to absorb knowledge in a way that I had never considered ever in my life. I was driven, and motivated, by a powerful inclination to understand every facet and argument as it applied to the Christian faith. When I became disinterested in becoming a pastor, receiving confirmation from both myself and others that I didn’t possess the proper gifting, my reading proficiency translated to my hobbies.

                But as I read, as I ran from my naiveté, I became unhappy. An aside: one of the prerequisites to being an author is being able to see whole worlds, see how they are made, what they are made of, what people populate them, what histories turn them. My own conception of reality, of the world at present, I breathed it in, and in my eyes began to see through the cracks of our humanity. I grew angry. I am angry that we would be so blind to the forces that press the world forward, and contend ourselves to glut on petty things.

                (Knowledge brings sadness and sobriety to a repugnant world filled with disappointment. Perhaps this is why the Apostle Paul once said “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” My vision is bleak, yes. But it is true and I have the courage to see it for what it is.)

                And yet learning, for what it is, has breathed life into every facet of society since man could reason. There are some admirably and qualitatively “good” things to arise out of education: public sanitation, for instance. A means to wipe and flush, washing ourselves of excrement. This, and many other technologies, distract ourselves from our true natures.

                But I digress. I am still naïve, despite what I’ve learned. It brings clarity to Socrates’ certainty of uncertainty, something that I can appreciate as I stave off my descending spiral into nihilism. Learning has made my life more rich and, myself, a better author, but at the cost of my ignorance, which I consider a worthy trade, despite the sadness it brings to me on occasion. I can scarcely describe the wonder I feel when I read about the exploits of the Romans or experience the mystery of existential comicbooks. The history of medieval Europe, the language of the Norsemen, their epics and traditions, expanded my understanding of what it means to be human. And, in all this, I am somehow a Christian, experiencing the already-but-not-yet Kingdom of Heaven.

                Being naïve has tainted my interactions with others. It’s difficult for me to feel comfortable and at home in a situation because I have been taken advantage of many times for my goodwill and belief in the inherent goodness of others. There are few people I can feel like being myself with, one of them being my good friend Desmond, a fellow scholar of erudite wisdom. When we talk, everything comes forth, like a dam bursting with thoughts and ideas. Our rank commentary, foul words, bring great joy to us, dethroning the world in absurdity like a Samuel Beckett play. My love for him transcends fraternal bonds.

                There is always hope. The washing and cleansing of disappointment helps. It’s good to get things out on “paper” and talk about what we struggle with. I do this occasionally, so forgive my rambling. Some of the books I purchased this weekend are as follows, in case you wondered:

Foucault’s Pendulum and Misreadings by Umberto Eco

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Odd and the Frost Giants and Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman (the latter illustrated by Dave Mckean)

Stay dry out there.

XOX

SJWs, Freedom of Speech, and The Revelation of St. John

Second attempt today writing. Here. We. Go!

My friend Trey pointed out earlier this week that my initials spell S.J.W. This is incidental because I also happened to rain on everyone’s parade growing up. I was at the epicenter of the phrase’s inception back in 2014, when I was at Sequart Organization. (At least it was brought to my attention / I noticed it, and others making a scene about it.) SJW stands for “social justice warrior,” a pejorative word that typically hyperbolizes a liberal minded person that takes a stand on a number of social issues, to the effect of making others very aware of systemic disenfranchisement of minorities and the LGTBQ community. My careful wording of this implies that, while I cringe at the small proportion of the general population that such a label applies to, I do not enjoy the term, its use, and practice. It’s very misleading. It supposes that someone who wants to be a part of something but is denied entry to that subculture / practice and voices their very reasonable concern for not gaining entry has sinister motives for doing so.

                As a white male I have yet to assess my privilege. (Many online surveys I have taken suggest it to be “Moderate to High”.) I have been told that it is “very good.” But the issue I have with SJWs is the impact they have on a very moderate population of women and minorities that are trying to be accepted into the fold of popular entertainment. In order to pave the way for change, an open dialogue has to be made with the opposing side. Empathy, to understand the impact that disenfranchisement has on the Other, is key. This is what was revealed in Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll experiments during the Civil Rights case, Brown Vs Board of Education. The arguments I’ve seen thus far are artificially divisive where each side regurgitates the company line like a 14 year old using their parent’s arguments for why abortion is right / wrong. I recall one article a colleague of mine wrote where he attempted to engage in dialogue with an Anita Sarkeesian harasser, to no avail. Note: there is no intelligent repartee between Marc and his specimen, just an oddly robotic dialogue.

                The controversy (still ongoing, last time I checked) generally positions one in the camp of Sarkeesian’s following, because who wants to side with misogynistic near-rapists? This is frustrating because there could be something intelligent to say on behalf of the often paranoid doomsayers. There is a real problem today with the creation of safe-spaces at universities, the unchecked postmodern deconstruction of institutions, and the growing sentiment of nihilism, which, in turn, produces similar soldiers that one could term “SJWs.” I was once told by Julian Darius that for every Ku Klux Klan parade held, there is a line of Jewish and Black lawyers willing to defend the KKK’s right to assembly and freedom of speech. To censure a hate group is still censure. America is great because people get to have an opinion, even if it is really fucking stupid, still many college professors have been incorrectly coined racists and bigots because of their failed attempts to explain this caveat to their students. Freedom of speech extends to all, including the multinational corporations that own the tights that Superman wears. People have every right to stop buying comics, organize protests, and initiate and dialogue between the other side. They do not have the right to harass and emotionally harm another person because they believe something different. It’s a two way street people!

                My milquetoast rallying cry to moderation could be extended to many dialogues, including our own recent presidential race. I don’t think for a moment that Trump has anything to offer America, or her people. He is Satan. (Owning most if not all of the biblical titles.) It’s possible that we could have avoided Trump by having these conversations on consensus, say, thirty years ago, but here we are. Now we have to make the best of 2017, which I have money on being an amped up iteration of the Apostle John’s Vision of Revelation.

                I’ve made it a goal to hear someone out this year and next, regardless of their position on life. This is my resolution for the new year. I hope it can be yours too.

XOX

Thoughts on Conservatism and Progressivism

I’ve been reading a new book called Does God Make a Difference? Taking Religion Seriously in our Schools and Universities. Though I’m only halfway through, the message is rather inspiring for the advancement of liberal free education. Initially when I started the book, I was confronted with reservations about Nord’s thesis that religion needs to be taught as live, viable options to cultivate a comprehensive understanding of worldviews around the world.  The book was spurred on by the secularization thesis, which was posited during the 60s, that eventually the idea of “God” would become marginalized to the point of irrelevance. Nord’s thesis contends that the secularization hypothesis has been thoroughly nullified due to the increase in spirituality around the world. You might have noticed my use of the word “liberal free” education. This is in reference to Nord’s distinguishing between two schools of thought that provide the backbone of western education: Liberal Arts education and Liberal Free education.  The two schools underscore the advancement of what we would recognize today as progressive and conservative arts education. Isocrates (I believe this is the man Nord references, though I have had some beers and the book is still at the office) understood the importance of classics and their value to education. This would be reflected in earlier schooling models when students would learn Greek and Latin, girding their education with the cornerstones of Western philosophy and epistemology.  (It would be akin to studying drama and emphasizing the importance of classical acting methodology, replete with Shakespeare and Greek classics over more modern, experimental acting models like method acting.) Liberal Free, the second of the two is emphasized by Socrates, who argued that uncertainty in self-knowledge compels the individual to continually learn and reform their education; hence the progressive tone.  

                All this talk in Nord’s book got me thinking about the difference in conservatism and progressivism.

                The US election this year is very chaotic. Much of the conflict has been poured out on the existential meaning of America. (As in the 50 territories that constitute the United States of America.) The two party system, a broken system in my opinion, has created a cultural divide across the US between two very unrealistic extremes: Conservatism and Progressivism. There are many touting the return to a greatness of America. This is vague and needs definition. What made America great exactly? America is the product of political experimentation. It is constantly changing, reforming to compliment the current state of affairs. The contrarian voice in this is that of Progressivism, which was the zeitgeist of the 1890’s to the 1910s. Teddy Roosevelt ran on a platform of social reform to improve the quality of American lives in the workplace and at home, and bolstered America’s presence on the world scale. (By invading Cuba and building the Panama Canal.) Progressivism works by momentum. (America was sick of the rampant political corruption of the post-Civil War period.) Consequently, it is paralyzed by inactivity and the quagmire of modern American politics. Progressivism only works so far as the freshness of its ideals. Progressivism and Conservatism both lack a full solution to social and political issues in the modern day.

                I covet my identity as a political moderate. I think that it helps me see with steady eyes. When the past is worshiped with such ferocity, impregnated with nostalgic pandering, we are waging a hopeless battle to live in the past and not be forward thinking and anticipatory. It is better to understand the past so that it will inform our future. There are great lessons to learn from classical literature. The foundation of Western Civilization is important and the specters of Classical Learning still haunt us. There is value in understanding where we come from. Humanity is static in its desires. We really haven’t changed much in the last 10,000 years. Men and Women to this day love and kill. They are proud and arrogant. They fight for what they love and appeal to others to join them on crusades against enemies real and ideological. There is still plenty to encounter there.

                My only issue with those that keep looking forward is that they unfairly caricature the past. Fresh ideas promise change but have no baseline to test against. There is also an assumption of positivism, that progressivism is fundamentally idealistic. Idealism lays the path for change, but it does not establish it. Establishing change requires brokering deals and compromise. Change also takes time and thoughtful execution. I am not surprised at all that Obama Care did not do what it intended. A government funded health plan works only so much as the people are willing to pay into it and our reticence to adopt a Northern European healthcare model underscores the painful reality that our economy thrives on selfishness. Consequently, we are also not Northern Europeans, or possess the requisite cultural beliefs that are unique to their Socialist States. Perhaps a slow, continual movement towards that ideology would bring more fruitful changes?

                I am not convinced that voting for Hilary Clinton will bring about the revolutionary Golden Age that we envision. Every hopeful presidency begins with the promise of some form of political activism or Executive strong-arming. But I am certain that voting for Trump will usher in a dangerous new era of politics that will not overthrow the free world, to the extent predicted by the Huffington Post-esque outlets, but initiate a steady erosion of our already waning power. The line between conservatism and progressivism is now thin and collapsing due to the decrease in election ethics of either side. That is what I’ve noticed. Now, each side is an extreme and their proponents, extremists. Our only hope is a return to the fold of reasonable discussion. I would encourage my readers to read the news of foreign nations to gain a holistic and outside perspective of our country’s shenanigans. Even if the news is churned out by propagandists, supposing that we as readers have the acumen for sorting out truth from fiction, it is all worthwhile to ingest, even if we have to hold our noses. Food for thought.  

                Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to read up what I’m going to vote on tomorrow.

XOX