I recently saw the updated version of Charlotte's Web on cable. Those of my age (38-ish) remember the animated version with Paul Lynn as the rat. This version was laid before us in the 70's and even into the 80's. The story was written in the 60's and I can honestly say that it shows. Those who had kids in the 90's may remember the movie Babe. It is "the other" pig movie. But not all pig movies are created equal. Let me give you the overview. In Charlotte's Web, Wilbur the pig learns about the hard realities of being a pig. He will end up as food unless he distinguishes himself among the farm animals. In a way, both movies are kind of Animal Farm-ish with a glaring exception. In Babe, the pig gains redemption from the socially procribed narrative of a pig's life (i.e. to end up as bacon or in toto as the Christmas feast of the human farmers. While Babe becomes aware of his default destiny, he is coached by the other animals, with varying degrees of helpfulness and relelvence, to become so useful to the farmer that he could not possibly butcher him for breakfast. He finds other uses for himself. He strives to join the ranks of the pig herding dogs. His unique approach turns out to be successful and the pig is spared from his usefulness as a main course and enters the world of the farmer in a dramatic fashion. The power of individual talent overcomes his destiny.
Charlotte's Wilbur gains redemption only by a series of interventions by an intelligent spider who feels it neccessary to take care of Wilbur. Now Babe was taken under the wing of "Ma" the dog also a child replacement as were the maternal instincts of Charlotte. But the two mother figures take different roads to their approach to their adopted child. "Ma" trains Babe to be a useful pig herder much to the dismay of the father figure who eventually comes around. Charlotte used tricks to convince the farmer to not eat the pig thus fulfilling his default destiny. I never understood how the farmer and the entire community could accept a supernatural specialness of Wilbur. Babe's specialness was denied by everyone accept the farmer who was the only one to see the potential of the little talented pig.
Everyone around Wilbur is essentially being convinced that he is "terrific", "some pig", "radiant" and "humble" because Charlotte says so. The message appears in the web and because of the implausibility of this act, it must be true. Everyone was so entranced by the medium of the message that no one ever questioned the premise that Wilbur was any of these things. He merely didn't want to die. He bemoans this fact endlessly until Charlotte, who knows how the laws of nature work, sets out to unsettle the natural order. It is because Charlotte could not stnad Wilbur's whining that she sets out on a mission of deception for essentially her own interests and amusement. Maybe she had a philosophical mission, but what of it? Wilbur is in fact no more useful at the end of the story but much more loved and doted upon. A good follow-up book would ask the question, then what? What becomes of Wilbur and his faux usefulness to the farmer. In Babe, the pig distinguishes himself with the talent for herding sheep like a dog. While some may attack this premise as just another attack on the natural order, look at the main differences between Babe and Wilbur. Babe learns skills to avoid his default destiny, Wilbur needs a creature to create his usefulness for him, and in the end it is all just smoke and mirrors while Babe becomes the famous sheep dog, "Pig".
Maybe I think too much? Your comments are welcome.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Radical Traditionalism
A friend asked me today why I haven't posted since April. I replied that I haven't been cursing the demise of American Culture, I've been trying to do something about it. In 2007, my wife and I went to Portugal for a week. We stayed in Lisbon and stayed a few days in Sintra, a town with a lot of history about 30 km outside of Lisbon. During this trip, I took my laptop which runs my music notation software. After a long period of compositional malaise, I was finally filled with inspiration to compose an extended piece of instrumental music. I decided on a string quartet because I absolutely love the sound of it. It also fit in with the urge to do something radical.
For those who aren't well versed in the history of Western music, the 20th century was marked with a radical departure from the traditions of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. Without getting into a deep discussion on "tonality" basically, the agenda of many of last century's composers was to distinguish themselves as "modern" by a completely rejecting the rules of tonal music. Who knew there were rules in music? There certainly are. That's why Bach doesn't sound like free-form-jazz (sorry, Coltrane). These rules are what give the music its sense of structure and momentum. Certain chords are usually followed by certain other chords for purposes of aesthetic consistency. A piece of music is centered around one of the twelve major keys (or their corresponding minor key) and a piece of music can change its key at any time and there were rules for where the best "turns" could be made. Where these basic rules provide guidelines, the composer is expected to use his creativity to bend certain rules for the purposes of pleasant surprize. From around 1700 to 1890, the pace of the rule bending was actually quite slow and were slow enough during this period as to be defined as what we call styles (Baroque, Classical and Romantic). While these labels don't tell us anything about what these styles sound like, let's not get too technical. Over time, the rules of tonality became practically non-existent. The sonic effect of this lack of tonal center is music a kind of weightlessness. It is hard to describe because talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Speaking of which, there are parallels in architecture that show a marked break with the past. Architecture of the 20th century is deliniated by a reject of the previous rules of style. The effect in some of this modern architecture is widely varied but you get the point. Composer after composer would try and stake a claim in the frontier of sonic chaos. The results were as varied as architectual styles.
This doesn't include the American popular song, blues, early jazz and rock music which never strayed too far from tonality. To these composers, they realized that after one leaves the grounding of tonal centers, you leave the earth and are writing music for space aliens. A vast majority of people still want their tonality. Alas, a good deal of composing went on in the sealed ivory towers of universities. Since they couldn't find patrons such as monarchs and churches to pay for music which didn't inspire anything useful, they had to find themselves tenure in universities which were filling up with other likeminded folks who railed against tradition. These were the same folks who beheaded monarchs and despised religion anyway. The problem was that the only people who wanted to hear this music were their fellow hermits in the ivory towers. They would marvel at the complex mathematics involved in the compositional process. They would talk endlessly about their music. I don't think there was any dancing about architecture though. Professors are not known for their dancing. I was one of these composers at the end of the last century. I ran out of ways to be clever.
So, here I was inspired to write music again. I have spent the past fifteen years playing tonal music in various situations. While I was in college for music I studied the progression of "serious music" and thought that there was nowhere to go except not playing anything at all. But a composer named John Cage had already done that. Had all the clever ideas been taken? There was minimalism, which is easy to write, rehearse and perform but also boring as whale shit. It seemed like a cop out. Then there was Integral Serialism which is the most difficult to write and rehearse but no one can stand listening to it being performed except the composer and his composer friends. It sounds random and wildly improvised. I wondered why I should bother when I can ask the performers to wildly improvise and get the same effect. That too was a cop out. I was always a big fan of Frank Zappa's rock music and his orchestral music. To this day, I haven't figured out his secret. How did he reject rules of traditional tonality and at the same time write music which still maintains a coherence. One of his favorite terms was "conceptual continuity." If I undertook a years long detailed analysis of his music I could probably come up with what makes Zappa sound like Zappa. But I want to write music not talk about it. And I don't want to sound like Zappa. It turns out he borrowed heavily from the styles of Stravinsky and Varese anyway.
Since I was going to Europe and we were going to explore 11th century castles and be neck deep in history, I decided that the most radical thing I could do is to not try and be clever. The most radical departure from the 20th century would be to stop intellectualizing the music exclusively and to get to the heart of the music, what sounds good. If I were going to write a melody, it would have to be more inspired than a string of randomly chosen notes strung together to make the math add up. At the end of piece, the composer is holding his slide rule and the audience is left holding the ticket stub wondering what the fuck just happened. It turns out that the more discerning I was on the materials I chose to use, the better the music sounded. I had to be "judgemental" (to poke fun at political correctness...another useless vestige from my college days) in my approach. It's not "all good." Some ideas simply suck and few are even good enough to be considered for use in a piece of music. To hell with self-confidence. A little self-loathing goes a long way in the creative process. Nobody every complained that a perfectionists work was too fastidious. The wife of a perfectionist may have more to gripe about but that is another post entirely. The process took a year but by then I had a four movement work which should run about 14 minutes total.
The first movement begins quite traditionaly and tonal and the treament of the melody follows an old tradition of theme and variations. I couldn't completely repress the urge to be clever however. There is a sytem of composition where notes are turned into numbers (again I won't get too technical) but our trip to Portugal was for my wife's birthday which is 04/25 so embedded this four note motive (0,4,2,5) a number of times within the first movement. Bach did this with his name (B = Bb and H = B natural) in at least one piece that I know and Shostakovich did something like this also(DSCH where S = Eb) so I wasn't being extremely creative and it isn't my name. The piece is dedicated to my wife anyway for her birthday. The second movement is a slow moving hymn which struggles between many tonal centers while the melody tries to accomodate. The third movement is playful and is played entirely pizzacato (plucked strings) which I come to enjoy watching the old Warner Brothers cartoons and the genius of Carl Stalling. The melody isn't explicity written is is arrived at by the highest notes played by all four players at different times. While not entirely tonal it is pleasant, fun and lighthearted. I wanted the fourth movement to be a tango. I had been listening to Astor Piazzola for a little while and felt inspired by the tango rhythm but I didn't want to sound like Piazzola. While Piazzola wrote "tango nuevo" I was writing "tango gringo" and felt no guilt about it. The main theme of the movement starts out in imitation of the first movement in that it begins like a theme and variations but then an extended development section begins before the music comes back around to the last few variations of the main theme thus rounding off the movement. Beethoven was big on development sections and I had been reaquainting myself with his music recently as well. Development can be described as taking a theme and breaking it up into fragments then repeating and varying those fragments to take the music into sometimes surprising places. In any event, I will update on the progress of the rehearsals and post the recording. Finally, some culture on this stupid blog.
For those who aren't well versed in the history of Western music, the 20th century was marked with a radical departure from the traditions of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. Without getting into a deep discussion on "tonality" basically, the agenda of many of last century's composers was to distinguish themselves as "modern" by a completely rejecting the rules of tonal music. Who knew there were rules in music? There certainly are. That's why Bach doesn't sound like free-form-jazz (sorry, Coltrane). These rules are what give the music its sense of structure and momentum. Certain chords are usually followed by certain other chords for purposes of aesthetic consistency. A piece of music is centered around one of the twelve major keys (or their corresponding minor key) and a piece of music can change its key at any time and there were rules for where the best "turns" could be made. Where these basic rules provide guidelines, the composer is expected to use his creativity to bend certain rules for the purposes of pleasant surprize. From around 1700 to 1890, the pace of the rule bending was actually quite slow and were slow enough during this period as to be defined as what we call styles (Baroque, Classical and Romantic). While these labels don't tell us anything about what these styles sound like, let's not get too technical. Over time, the rules of tonality became practically non-existent. The sonic effect of this lack of tonal center is music a kind of weightlessness. It is hard to describe because talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Speaking of which, there are parallels in architecture that show a marked break with the past. Architecture of the 20th century is deliniated by a reject of the previous rules of style. The effect in some of this modern architecture is widely varied but you get the point. Composer after composer would try and stake a claim in the frontier of sonic chaos. The results were as varied as architectual styles.
This doesn't include the American popular song, blues, early jazz and rock music which never strayed too far from tonality. To these composers, they realized that after one leaves the grounding of tonal centers, you leave the earth and are writing music for space aliens. A vast majority of people still want their tonality. Alas, a good deal of composing went on in the sealed ivory towers of universities. Since they couldn't find patrons such as monarchs and churches to pay for music which didn't inspire anything useful, they had to find themselves tenure in universities which were filling up with other likeminded folks who railed against tradition. These were the same folks who beheaded monarchs and despised religion anyway. The problem was that the only people who wanted to hear this music were their fellow hermits in the ivory towers. They would marvel at the complex mathematics involved in the compositional process. They would talk endlessly about their music. I don't think there was any dancing about architecture though. Professors are not known for their dancing. I was one of these composers at the end of the last century. I ran out of ways to be clever.
So, here I was inspired to write music again. I have spent the past fifteen years playing tonal music in various situations. While I was in college for music I studied the progression of "serious music" and thought that there was nowhere to go except not playing anything at all. But a composer named John Cage had already done that. Had all the clever ideas been taken? There was minimalism, which is easy to write, rehearse and perform but also boring as whale shit. It seemed like a cop out. Then there was Integral Serialism which is the most difficult to write and rehearse but no one can stand listening to it being performed except the composer and his composer friends. It sounds random and wildly improvised. I wondered why I should bother when I can ask the performers to wildly improvise and get the same effect. That too was a cop out. I was always a big fan of Frank Zappa's rock music and his orchestral music. To this day, I haven't figured out his secret. How did he reject rules of traditional tonality and at the same time write music which still maintains a coherence. One of his favorite terms was "conceptual continuity." If I undertook a years long detailed analysis of his music I could probably come up with what makes Zappa sound like Zappa. But I want to write music not talk about it. And I don't want to sound like Zappa. It turns out he borrowed heavily from the styles of Stravinsky and Varese anyway.
Since I was going to Europe and we were going to explore 11th century castles and be neck deep in history, I decided that the most radical thing I could do is to not try and be clever. The most radical departure from the 20th century would be to stop intellectualizing the music exclusively and to get to the heart of the music, what sounds good. If I were going to write a melody, it would have to be more inspired than a string of randomly chosen notes strung together to make the math add up. At the end of piece, the composer is holding his slide rule and the audience is left holding the ticket stub wondering what the fuck just happened. It turns out that the more discerning I was on the materials I chose to use, the better the music sounded. I had to be "judgemental" (to poke fun at political correctness...another useless vestige from my college days) in my approach. It's not "all good." Some ideas simply suck and few are even good enough to be considered for use in a piece of music. To hell with self-confidence. A little self-loathing goes a long way in the creative process. Nobody every complained that a perfectionists work was too fastidious. The wife of a perfectionist may have more to gripe about but that is another post entirely. The process took a year but by then I had a four movement work which should run about 14 minutes total.
The first movement begins quite traditionaly and tonal and the treament of the melody follows an old tradition of theme and variations. I couldn't completely repress the urge to be clever however. There is a sytem of composition where notes are turned into numbers (again I won't get too technical) but our trip to Portugal was for my wife's birthday which is 04/25 so embedded this four note motive (0,4,2,5) a number of times within the first movement. Bach did this with his name (B = Bb and H = B natural) in at least one piece that I know and Shostakovich did something like this also(DSCH where S = Eb) so I wasn't being extremely creative and it isn't my name. The piece is dedicated to my wife anyway for her birthday. The second movement is a slow moving hymn which struggles between many tonal centers while the melody tries to accomodate. The third movement is playful and is played entirely pizzacato (plucked strings) which I come to enjoy watching the old Warner Brothers cartoons and the genius of Carl Stalling. The melody isn't explicity written is is arrived at by the highest notes played by all four players at different times. While not entirely tonal it is pleasant, fun and lighthearted. I wanted the fourth movement to be a tango. I had been listening to Astor Piazzola for a little while and felt inspired by the tango rhythm but I didn't want to sound like Piazzola. While Piazzola wrote "tango nuevo" I was writing "tango gringo" and felt no guilt about it. The main theme of the movement starts out in imitation of the first movement in that it begins like a theme and variations but then an extended development section begins before the music comes back around to the last few variations of the main theme thus rounding off the movement. Beethoven was big on development sections and I had been reaquainting myself with his music recently as well. Development can be described as taking a theme and breaking it up into fragments then repeating and varying those fragments to take the music into sometimes surprising places. In any event, I will update on the progress of the rehearsals and post the recording. Finally, some culture on this stupid blog.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Live Action Role Playing Game Of Life
It's known as LARP (Live Action Role Playing).There is much to be said for dressing up like a wizard and tossing tennis balls at fellow players yelling "magic missile magic missile!". There is so much to be said about this. I meant to say "sad about this". Even nerds like myself and my friends who continue to play some form of role playing game every two weeks to keep our brains thinking creatively, have a few beers and a lot of laughs. These live action fellows however make us role our twenty sided eyes and sneer, "Dorks!" What? So now irony isn't funny anymore?
Isn't it all role playing? Some of us don't play any more and they now exclusively game in the elaborate Live Action Role Playing Game Call Of Suburbia? This innovative and dynamic game was designed by our exceptionally cruel elders and participation, while not mandatory, is highly encouraged unless taking the Vagabond Class. Let's take one of my friends as an example. He's a dual class 8th level Husband/5th level Father and his alignment is Chaotic Good. I'm only a 2nd level Husband. I lost levels in the divorce due to the Life Drain spell my ex-wife's lawyer/necromancer cast on me. But I'm a 17th level Father which gives me a plus +4 to save vs crying. That's key, except when there is no save. I like long walks in the park and consider myself solidly Chaotic Neutral.
A couple of evil young Orcs attacked a 6th level Starbucks Manager in a Philadelphia subway. Sadly, he failed his save vs heart-attack. I was shocked to hear that the city's keystone constables actually apprehended them. The towne criers and towne whiners babble on about how the orcs are such good students and that this is a travesty of justice and an accident. Those of us who make their save vs bullshit see this as Ye Olde Hate Crime. It's not just for whitey anymore! But the towne criers and whiners want to call it random. I try to stick to the countryside where the orc and troll population is less dense. There are troglodytes out here, nowhere is paradise for humans. There is always a danger somewhere. The troglodytes usually inhabit darkened corners of suburbia and can be recognized by their backwards baseball caps and unintelligible barking speech. They are relatively harmless except to themselves and their own kind. I don't visit the city much anymore. Having grown up there, I was smart enough to leave. The frequency of orc attacks keeps going up. I have concluded that the constables are only useful after a crime and I must find an alchemist to sell me a +3 Glock with Ammo Of Stopping Power. If I'm attacked by orcs, I will be the subject of the towne criers bleating. However, I will not be the deceased. Isn't about time we took the Firearms Skill?
Monday, March 24, 2008
Three Headed McClintobama Monster
Behold the three headed McClintobama monster. All three of them have their own creepy reverend guy to call their own. Obama's had the gaul to infer that our foreign policy actions may have had unintended consequences. The CIA calls this "blow back." Anyone with any kind of familiarity with the history of shady cloak and dagger operations knows this is a reality. We can't have that kind of reality infecting the electorate. Obama had to betray his spiritual pocket preacher and denounce him because we couldn't have him agreeing with someone who might say something truthful. The Rev, of course, mixed this reality in with a generous helping of "get whitey" which always makes for an energetic revival-style backdrop. There's nothing like the sound of abdicating personal responsibility. "Accountability" is so 19th century. Although the TV/Radio/Print news media is awfully quiet about Hillary's back-pocket-preacher. This guy molested a seven year old girl. At least he didn't say that she had it coming due to her foreign policy position. Then there are all those seedy folks still hanging around K Street in D.C. leftover from Bubba Clinton's reign. McCain has the most colorful piece of the collection, the always treasonous John Hagee. Rev Hagee couldn't be more pro-Israel if he personally picked up a sniper rifle and joined the IDF in blowing the heads off of Palestinian children. Not only that, Hagee is foaming at the mouth to send Amerikan citizens off to the Middle East for the next 100 Years War (which, with budget overruns, is expected to run 138 years). So much for spiritual leaders. No matter how you slice it, all of these candidates are dedicated to the empire. Now the electorate can get on the approved hamster wheels and we can play another game of red state-blue state as if there are any differences between these traitorous wretches. I, for one, don't get all choked up over Obama's hope or Clinton's steely gaze or McCain's snarl. I sat through an Obama TV commercial this morning while he lied about how he isn't getting any money from lobbyists or special interest groups. Silly Barak, tricks are for kids. Only one candidate could claim that and that's all I have to say about that.
They only stand to remind one of the political illiteracy that abounds in the Land Of The Home Loan, Free Of The Brave. Warfare, welfare and the supremacy of the state are the only allowable topics for discussion. There will be much water cooler discussion over the lesser evil and the nation will be schizophrenic until November, completely divided and easily conquerable. No matter how you slice it, all you have to do is follow the money. "Follow the money" and "cui bono" (who benefits?) are the first things a detective learns. Apparently, these candidates are immune to this logic. People STILL believe that their CNN and their Fox news programs are doing their duty. People STILL don't recognize that 90% of the media content they ingest everyday is a carefully prepared meal by the Elite top chefs. I guess people still have hope and faith. Those who question the steady pablum are publicly branded as cynics, malcontents, dissidents or (worse) domestic terrorists. Amerika's good little consumers regurgitate the bullet points from the night before and everyday more of my fellow citizens are convinced that I must be one step closer to a terrorist. I am reminded of John Adams' impatience with people who did not see things as he did. All I can do is stand up and make my case as best I can. Many will oppose, some will abstain and few will agree. It is the few that give me real hope.
I think that the reason many people vehemently oppose my "crazy" point of view is that they are upset that I am smudging the lenses on their rose-colored glasses. I'm just negative. I'm just an angry curmudgeon. I used to be an angry young man but I'm getting grey now and that label doesn't make much sense anymore. I'm sorry. When I was in school my self-esteem was not more important than the grasp of the subject matter. I wasn't brought up to believe that we create our own reality with positive affirmations. There are winners and losers. There are smart people and dumb people and most are somewhere in between. To steal from George Carlin's recent act, if everyone is special then the entire concepts loses all of its meaning. Even though I was lucky enough to be born with some smarts, I feel I should be doing more with them than whipping it out in public every Tuesday night for Quizzo at the local bar so I can feel superior to everyone else without having to do any real intellectual heavy lifting. In many respects I am a loser too and have sometimes not accepted my shortcomings with dignity and grace but this improves with age. There are probably many of my elders who could say that I've had it too easy and they're probably correct. But I feel it is my duty to try and arouse people from their hypnotized state. Having a black man or a white woman or yet another old sweaty white guy in an ill fitting suit as president will not suddenly make it all better by the fact alone. Not THESE clowns! What you see before you is a dog show. Correction, some of those dogs have more skills and behave better in public. The dog show contestants show more loyalty that's for damn sure. Feed these political mongrels your vote and watch them bite your hand as soon as they step into office.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
The 10% Rule
While reading about political parties in Germany, I found out that their system is quite interesting. Since Germany has a parliamentary system, it allows for more than two parties to take part in the process since it isn't reduced to an all-or-nothing choice as it is here in the U.S.S.A. But I did find an interesting similarity. Here in Amerika the political landscape is dominated by two wings. There are those who mistakenly call themselves "conservative" who believe in the supremacy of a strong central government inasmuch as it forwards their dream of a worldwide Amerikan Empire, endless government contracts for them and their buddies and a Christian theocracy (fascists), and those who mistakenly call themselves "liberal" and believe in the supremacy of the a strong central government inasmuch as it forwards their dream of a gun-free, smoke-free, fat-free, insult-free, inequity-free and mostly choice-free technocracy while never really doing anything substantive to stop the war-for-terror (communists). These are the choices that the media regularly force feeds the Amerikan people. Any other choice is ridiculed and marginalized. This is no conspiracy, I've personally witnessed and made note of this atrocity. Back to Germany and the 10%. It seems there are three major parties in Germany. There are "conservatives" and "socialists" and then there's the Free Democratic Party. These folks are essentially the Libertarians of Germany. After judging the results of the primaries here in the U.S.S.A. I've determined that only 10% of the voting population will ever really vote for Ron Paul (unless there is massive vote fraud and that is just unimaginable, right?). In Germany, the FDP only ever gets around 10% of the vote but in a parliamentary system, this is enough for attaining the seats necessary to act as a bulwark for either major party. The socialists can't be the ultra-nannies they'd like to be and the conservatives can't rape the entire land for the sake of the elite. The FDP stands for individual liberty and when either side of the ideological spectrum wishes to trounce upon liberty and freedom, they do their best to minimize the damage. We don't have that here. For the past 100 years, we've suffered through these mood swings to the point where there is essentially no difference between the two parties. They both covet the power of the state even though they are different flavors of tyrants, they both represent tyranny.
Am I saying we should emulate the parliamentary system here in the U.S.S.A. No, not at all. The people in this country are so easily manipulated by mass media that full fledged democracy would be the end of freedom and liberty once and for all here. We are a Republic. And in a Republic, the representatives are supposed to protect our rights and freedoms no matter what the tyranny of the majority says. But over time, these representatives have betrayed the people and the founders of this country. In theory, it is a good thing that the elected leaders disregard a populist outcry when it is detrimental to rights and liberty. However, they have perverted this concept. The people cry out for their rights, liberties and freedom and the elected officials do what their benefactors pay them to do. When told that over two-thirds of the country opposes the war, he says, "So?" Half of our income appropriated to pay for wars that pump up his Haliburton stock and are of NO BENEFIT to the people of this country and he says "So." I would gladly live in a Monarchy if the rulers could show their beneficence to their subjects not the utter contempt for their rights as human beings. There is a reason the king of France lost his head. But then again, they didn't have TV in the 18th century.
Given the shitty choices my fellow countrymen continue to make, I must therefore conclude that only 10% of any given population has the capacity to conceive of liberty and freedom. Only 10% of the population are truly individuals. The other 90% are slaves and they embrace and even enjoy their slavery for they would be lost if they had to take responsibility for their actions. Is this number shrinking over time? It sure has shrunken since 1776 that is for damn sure.
Pictures From Iceland
The Icelanders just adored the George Michael and Wham! dinner theatre review. So much for the macho Vikings.
Iceland Is Expensive
My wife is a travel consultant for one of the big Amerikan corporations and every year she must travel to one or more exotic destinations so that she can properly sell vacations to the leisure class. Without trying to sound bitter about the leisure class (I'm a recovering ex-Marxist...clean for 10 years now), I'm just jealous that my job doesn't send me on vacations multiple times per year. I've always wanted to visit Iceland and this year, my wife was going.Please see "Absurdity Of Hope" below for the earlier reference to Iceland. Being fed up with the current presidential primaries, I've been getting serious about being an ex-pat. Rather than do the standard whine about moving Canada ("And I mean it this time!") I figured abandoning the continent would be more dramatic. At the same time, I'm very practical and it takes an inordinate amount of deliberation before I make most decisions and act. The process usually works like this: Inner Voice provides "first instinct" intuition, then the idea is passed through mental contraptions where I weigh the pros and cons and possible outcomes, then precious time has passed and I realize I should have gone with my first instinct. If I can eliminate the mental contraptions, I'd eliminate a great deal of wasted time but such is life. That being said, I've spent many hours researching Iceland.
I had read that it was expensive, being an island and all I expected this, but my wife called me from Iceland and was standing at the checkout counter with a $20 bag of Doritos. This may have something to do with the falling dollar and that the Dorito-boat arrives infrequently but it did not bode well. Apparently, alcohol is so expensive in Iceland that the Icelanders drink at home (a bit cheaper at the store than the bar) before they go to the bars and clubs. There were other Amerikans at this conference and one made the mistake of buying round after round of shots for his table. When told that he could pay with US dollars he stopped swiping his credit card. The price of a round of shots? $75. He dropped a car payment on drinks. Live and learn I guess.
There is also a tendency for Icelanders to get "fall down" drunk. I enjoy a good drink, I may even enjoy quite a few drinks over a period of time and I may even get to the point where my body gives me subtle hints that it is time to lie prone until the alcohol works itself out of my system. This, I hear, is much too subtle for the Icelanders. These are descendants of Vikings. So, not only will we find it hard to buy food, I won't be able to keep up with them.
I'm a big fan of European history and when we travel we usually get to some sort of centuries-old architectural treasure. My wife tells me that all she could find was a pile of Viking stones from the year 800. There isn't much to see unless you are totally fulfilled by the sight of snowy mountains, which are beautiful but the effect starts to wear off after a day or so.
Then there is the highly regulated and heavily taxed aspect of European countries. Right now, I'm getting robbed of almost 50% of my income and getting almost nothing in return except wars without end and declining currency (thanks Republicans and Democrats! You both suck). In Europe, they've done the "empire thing" hundreds of years ago and they know how it eventually enriches the small group of parasites and leaves a country's people impoverished. They'll pass on 1 trillion a year in "defense" spending. But, I'm looking for the real "land of the free" where one isn't taxed at anywhere close to 50%. Still looking, I'll let you know if I find anything.
In short, it is an interesting place to visit for a weekend on the way to the rest of Europe. Many thanks to my lovely wife for keeping it real. That's why she's so good for me. What about Ireland? Wait, she will be going to Argentina in May. Beautiful Buenos Aires sounds like GREAT ex-pat destination. I've been relearning German but I could easily switch to Spanish. Wait, what about Germany?
Is There Anybody Out There?
I started this blog mainly as a creative outlet. My mistake was to use the Google analytics and obsessing over my lack of traffic. This led to spotty posts. After ignoring the blog for months, I looked at the analytics again and realized that I actually have had visitors. Not only that, I've had return visitors. I feel that I now have an obligation to make everyone's visits more interesting. When I'm surfing my favorite blogs, there's nothing worse than having nothing new to read.
Monday, January 14, 2008
The Absurdity Of Hope
With the first two primaries down the tubes and numerous accusations of vote fraud, can one blame me for losing what little hope I had for America? The deck is so stacked against Ron Paul that I almost have to laugh when I think of the audacity of having hope. Alas Barrack, your wimpy book's title was misunderstood.So, what's the plan? What's the next move? Where do we go from here? Maybe Iceland?
Since it is obvious now that the U.S.S.A. is firmly in hands of its elite owners and freedom and liberty are now vestiges of a long lost American past, I have yet to find a nation on this Earth that could be a light at the end of the tunnel. While I have such fondness for my European heritage, that continent fell to the enemies of liberty early in the 20th century and its peoples manipulated into either the "1984" model (for those nations with uppity citizens who still have some fight left in them) or the "Brave New World" model (for those nations with a more compliant populace). Think Britain or Hungary for 1984 and Brave New Denmark (or Sweden). Either way, increasingly meddlesome authority is the wave of the future.
For the entire 20th century, the world was given the choice (by the end of a gun) of fascism or communism. Russia stands a good chance to revive liberty but then again, that part of the world is not known known for their propensity for liberty and freedom. The "non-integrated gap", which is code for all lands that aren't completely controled by globalists, are in areas where a European-American is not exactly a welcome site even if he has tourist money is his hands. So what then?
You could look to some countries that don't have a central bank system that isn't tied to the cabal of international bankers that financed fascism AND communism at the same time (you know, Rothchild, Rockefeller, Warburg, Schiff, etc). Wait, that is a short list. North Korea, Cuba and Iran. Not exactly bastions of liberty are they now?
While Iceland is pretty much a socialist nanny state, they haven't invaded anyone in about 800 years. It is close enough to Europe to be European but isolated enough to not be in the European Union proper. Their population still has some fight in them. They are the descendants of Vikings, they had better have some. Who knows? My wife is going to Iceland in three weeks for work so I'll at least be able to get an inside look by proxy. Besides, if she hates it, I'll have a hard time trying to convince her to relocate there, right?
One can only, dare I say (dare...dare)... hope.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Thoughts On Globalization and Immigration
We are routinely told that that America's loss of manufacturing jobs to countries where their workers can be paid lower wages is a good thing for us. Now we don't have to be tied down to those depressing factory jobs. Now we can partake in the new "service economy." Well, what a boon for the people of America who have done their part and worked harder and longer hours to garner the highest productivity in the world only to be relegated to the status of busboy (nothing against busboys I did that job and other service jobs for years). Whereas before job-flight blue collar Americans could take pride in actually making something the country and/or rest of the world wanted thus making profits for the factory owners, now those former workers can park the cars and mow the lawns of those same factory owners who are significantly richer since they closed that domestic factory and rebuilt it where the labor costs pennies on the dollar to those pesky Americans. So long and thanks for all the productivity.
Now our former factory worker is left the service sector. But thanks to a lack of enforcement of immigration laws, the factory worker is competing with illegal immigrants for the jobs in the service sector. Now we are alas routinely told by news people, comedians, politicians, pundits, wonks and wankers that the immigrants take the jobs that Americans won't do. Well, aren't they taking the only jobs that are left due to job-flight? How does this make sense? How do you destroy the domestic manufacturing sector, grab the profits, replace the jobs with menial labor then allow illegal immigrants to stream into the country and take what few jobs are left? Now I understand that the illegal will work for less. Given this argument, the owners are double dipping in maximizing their profits by low balling labor domestically as well as globally.
Could it be that it is this series of events and not "racism" that is the impetus behind the immigration debate? How much more can the American middle class be dismantled? It had a good run until from around 1925 to 1965 when immigration was tighty controlled. Somehow, powers greater than the average worker won out substantially and the decline began.
The problem with the immigration debate is that tends to ignore many other parallel issues. The first is the Federal Reserve and the long decline of the purchasing power of the dollar which is mistakenly called price inflation. Prices haven't gone up, the value of the dollar has fallen. The problem lies with fractional reserve banking and the control of our fiat currency by the Fed which is a cabal of private banking families that is allowed to create money from nothing, loan it to the government and then charge interest on it. Mathematically, there is no chance of ever paying this back...ever...really. So what we have is a system that redistributed the wealth of the lower and middle classes as well as some of the rich who fail to see this and think they are the elite (sorry, you aren't in the top 1% so you are still "cattle") to the bankers. Basically, it is the cliche of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Now amount of taxation or governmental decree is going to ever turn the clock back. You can't just grab this wealth back from the top 1%. Good luck trying. Most don't even reside in America anyway. My theory is that if this is attempted, America will truly be made into a world threat (just like Nazi Germany was) by the mainstream media outlets of the world and the world will be manipulated into World War 3 or 4 or 5 (whatever) to "save us all" from America. Then we will be right back under the yoke. Bleak, I know.
Our only hope may be to scrap the entire economic system and completely decentralize (a not-so-united-states-of-america) with a constitutionally allowed system of currency controlled by the people, not bankers. This coupled with a loudly proclaimed non-aggressive foreign policy should keep the rest of the world from fearing the collapse of the American Empire. The only problem is the country's creditors. The federal government has, since 1913, been borrowing like mad to pay for world wars and pet public projects. When you and I borrow, we need collateral. The creation of federal parks and designated federal lands under the auspices of "preservation" coincide with the creation of the Federal Reserve and our large scale borrowing from the international bankers (known as the Fed). This country's vast mineral and natural resources are collateral for our national debt. If we scrap the system and default on "our" loans then what is to stop the "creditors" from amassing a "repo-army" if you will? Bleak, I know.
What I see is that the high productivity in America means that people are willing to work longer hours for less money. Real wages have fallen sharply over the years. The profit gains made by owners have not translated into higher wages but the hoarding of those gains. Consumer spending is around 70% of our economic activity. How can we sustain this, how can the owners continue to make profits if they do not "trickle down" some of these profits into higher wages (to match higher costs of living)? Henry Ford understood this when he radically raised his workers wages so that they could afford the products they manufactured. Even though the things workers purchase are now made overseas, we still have to cash the paycheck and go to the store. This seems to be counterproductive given the rules of the game of capitalism.
How can be our useless crap if our wages keep dropping? How can we keep the fire going with less and less fuel? What we seem to be moving towards is less and less like capitalism and more like feudalism. "Service sector" more resembles serfdom.
Can't we do better than that?
Now our former factory worker is left the service sector. But thanks to a lack of enforcement of immigration laws, the factory worker is competing with illegal immigrants for the jobs in the service sector. Now we are alas routinely told by news people, comedians, politicians, pundits, wonks and wankers that the immigrants take the jobs that Americans won't do. Well, aren't they taking the only jobs that are left due to job-flight? How does this make sense? How do you destroy the domestic manufacturing sector, grab the profits, replace the jobs with menial labor then allow illegal immigrants to stream into the country and take what few jobs are left? Now I understand that the illegal will work for less. Given this argument, the owners are double dipping in maximizing their profits by low balling labor domestically as well as globally.
Could it be that it is this series of events and not "racism" that is the impetus behind the immigration debate? How much more can the American middle class be dismantled? It had a good run until from around 1925 to 1965 when immigration was tighty controlled. Somehow, powers greater than the average worker won out substantially and the decline began.
The problem with the immigration debate is that tends to ignore many other parallel issues. The first is the Federal Reserve and the long decline of the purchasing power of the dollar which is mistakenly called price inflation. Prices haven't gone up, the value of the dollar has fallen. The problem lies with fractional reserve banking and the control of our fiat currency by the Fed which is a cabal of private banking families that is allowed to create money from nothing, loan it to the government and then charge interest on it. Mathematically, there is no chance of ever paying this back...ever...really. So what we have is a system that redistributed the wealth of the lower and middle classes as well as some of the rich who fail to see this and think they are the elite (sorry, you aren't in the top 1% so you are still "cattle") to the bankers. Basically, it is the cliche of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Now amount of taxation or governmental decree is going to ever turn the clock back. You can't just grab this wealth back from the top 1%. Good luck trying. Most don't even reside in America anyway. My theory is that if this is attempted, America will truly be made into a world threat (just like Nazi Germany was) by the mainstream media outlets of the world and the world will be manipulated into World War 3 or 4 or 5 (whatever) to "save us all" from America. Then we will be right back under the yoke. Bleak, I know.
Our only hope may be to scrap the entire economic system and completely decentralize (a not-so-united-states-of-america) with a constitutionally allowed system of currency controlled by the people, not bankers. This coupled with a loudly proclaimed non-aggressive foreign policy should keep the rest of the world from fearing the collapse of the American Empire. The only problem is the country's creditors. The federal government has, since 1913, been borrowing like mad to pay for world wars and pet public projects. When you and I borrow, we need collateral. The creation of federal parks and designated federal lands under the auspices of "preservation" coincide with the creation of the Federal Reserve and our large scale borrowing from the international bankers (known as the Fed). This country's vast mineral and natural resources are collateral for our national debt. If we scrap the system and default on "our" loans then what is to stop the "creditors" from amassing a "repo-army" if you will? Bleak, I know.
What I see is that the high productivity in America means that people are willing to work longer hours for less money. Real wages have fallen sharply over the years. The profit gains made by owners have not translated into higher wages but the hoarding of those gains. Consumer spending is around 70% of our economic activity. How can we sustain this, how can the owners continue to make profits if they do not "trickle down" some of these profits into higher wages (to match higher costs of living)? Henry Ford understood this when he radically raised his workers wages so that they could afford the products they manufactured. Even though the things workers purchase are now made overseas, we still have to cash the paycheck and go to the store. This seems to be counterproductive given the rules of the game of capitalism.
How can be our useless crap if our wages keep dropping? How can we keep the fire going with less and less fuel? What we seem to be moving towards is less and less like capitalism and more like feudalism. "Service sector" more resembles serfdom.
Can't we do better than that?
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Plastic People
THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE
How Modern Chemicals May Be Changing Human Biology
Leonard Sax, M.D.
In ancient times--by which I mean, before 1950--most scholars agreed that women were, as a rule, not quite equal to men. Women were charming but mildly defective. Many (male) writers viewed women as perpetual teenagers, stuck in an awkward place between childhood and adulthood. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, wrote that women are "childish, silly and short-sighted, really nothing more than overgrown children, all their life long. Women are a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man." 1
Psychologists in that bygone era devoted considerable time and energy to the question of why women couldn't outgrow their childish ways. The Freudians said it was because they were trapped in the pre-Oedipal stage, tortured by penis envy. Followers of Abraham Maslow claimed that women were fearful of self-actualization. Jungians insisted that women were born with a deficiency of imprinted archetypes. Back then, of course, almost all the psychologists were men.
Things are different now. Male psychologists today are so rare that Ilene Philipson--author of On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy--speaks of "the vanishing male therapist as a species soon to be extinct.2 the gender of the modal psychotherapist has changed from male to female, the standard of mental health has changed along with it. Today, Dr. Philipson observes, the badge of emotional maturity is no longer the ability to control or sublimate your feelings but rather the ability to express them. A mature adult nowadays is someone who is comfortable talking about her inner conflicts, someone who values personal relationships above abstract goals, someone who isn't afraid to cry. In other words: a mature adult is a woman.
It is now the men who are thought to be stuck halfway between childhood and adulthood, incapable of articulating their inner selves. Whereas psychologists fifty years ago amused themselves by cataloging women's (supposed) deficiencies, psychologists today devote themselves to demonstrating "the natural superiority of women."3 Psychologists report that women are better able to understand nonverbal communication and are more expressive of emotion.4 ,5Quantitative personality inventories reveal that the average woman is more trusting, nurturing, and outgoing than the average man.6 The average eighth-grade girl has a command of language and writing skills equal to that of the average eleventh-grade boy.7
As the influence of the new psychology permeates our culture, women have understandably begun to wonder whether men are really, well, human. "What if these women are right?" wonders one writer in an article for Marie Claire, a national woman's magazine. "What if it's true that some men don't possess, or at least can't express, nuanced emotions?"8 More than a few contemporary psychologists have come to regard the male of our species as a coarsened, more violent edition of the normal, female, human. Not surprisingly, they have begun to question whether having a man in the house is desirable or even safe.
Eleven years ago, scholar Sara Ruddick expressed her concern about "the extent and variety of the psychological, sexual, and physical battery suffered by women and children of all classes and social groups ... at the hands of fathers, their mothers' male lovers, or male relatives. If putative fathers are absent or perpetually disappearing and actual fathers are controlling or abusive, who needs a father? What mother would want to live with one or wish one on her children?"9 Nancy Polikoff, former counsel to the Women's Legal Defense Fund, said that "it is no tragedy, either on a national scale or in an individual family, for children to be raised without fathers."10
The feminization of psychology manifests itself in myriad ways. Consider child discipline. Seventy years ago, doctors agreed that the best way to discipline your child was to punish the little criminal. ("Spare the rod, spoil the child.") Today, spanking is considered child abuse.11 You're supposed to talk with your kid. Spanking sends all the wrong messages, we are told, and may have stupendously horrible consequences. Psychoanalyst Alice Miller confidently informed us, in her book For Your Own Good, that Adolf Hitler's evil can be traced to the spankings his father inflicted on him in childhood.12
THE NEW MEN'S MAGAZINES
It isn't only psychology that has undergone a process of feminization over the past fifty years, and it isn't only women whose attitudes have changed. Take a stroll to your neighborhood bookstore or newsstand. You'll find magazines such as Men's Health, MH-18, Men's Fitness, Gear, and others devoted to men's pursuit of a better body, a better self-image. None of them existed fifteen years ago. The paid circulation of Men's Health has risen from 250,000 to more than 1.5 million in less than ten years.13 Many of the articles in these magazines are reminiscent of those to be found in women's magazines such as Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Cosmopolitan: "The Ten Secrets of Better Sex," "The New Diet Pills--Can They Work For You?" or "Bigger Biceps in Five Minutes a Day." (The women's magazine equivalent might be something like "slimmer thighs in five minutes a day.")
Men didn't use to care so much about their appearance. Psychiatrists Harrison Pope and Katharine Phillips report that in American culture today, "Men of all ages, in unprecedented numbers, are preoccupied with the appearance of their bodies."14 They document that "men's dissatisfaction with body appearance has nearly tripled in less than thirty years--from 15 percent in 1972, to 34 percent in 1985, to 43 percent in 1997."15 Cosmetic plastic surgery, once marketed exclusively to women, has found a rapidly growing male clientele. The number of men undergoing liposuction, for instance, quadrupled between 1990 and 2000.16
THE FEMINIZATION OF ENTERTAINMENT AND POLITICS
This process of femininization manifests itself, though somewhat differently, when you turn on the TV or watch a movie. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, leading men were, as a rule, infallible: think of Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, Cary Grant in North by Northwest, or Fred McMurray in My Three Sons. But no longer. In family comedy, the father figure has metamorphosed from the all-knowing, all-wise Robert Young of Father Knows Best to the occasional bumbling of Bill Cosby and the consistent stupidity of Homer Simpson. Commercially successful movies now often feature women who are physically aggressive, who dominate or at least upstage the men. This description applies to movies as diverse as Charlie's Angels and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In today's cinema, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, all the leading women are strong and all the leading men are good-looking.
A transformation of comparable magnitude seems to be under way in the political arena. Military command used to be considered the best qualification for leadership--as it was with Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, and Dwight Eisenhower, to name only a few. Today, the best qualification for leadership may be the ability to listen. The feminine way of seeing the world and its problems is, arguably, becoming the mainstream way.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran against George Bush p?e for the presidency. Clinton was an acknowledged draft evader. Bush, the incumbent, was a World War II hero who had just led the United States to military success in Operation Desert Storm. Clinton won. In 1996, Clinton was challenged by Bob Dole, another decorated World War II veteran. Once again, the man who had evaded military service defeated the combat veteran. In 2000, Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain competed for the Republican presidential nomination.
McCain was a genuine war hero whose courageous actions as a prisoner of war in Vietnam had won him well-deserved honors and praise. Bush, on the other hand, was alleged to have used family influence to obtain a position in the Texas National Guard, in order to avoid service in Vietnam. Once again, the man who had never experienced combat defeated the military veteran. Moral of the story: It's all very well to be a war hero, but in our modern, feminized society, being a war hero won't get you elected president. Conversely, being a draft dodger isn't as bad as it used to be.
A number of authors have recognized the increasing feminization of American society. With few exceptions, most of those acknowledging this process have welcomed it.17 As Elinor Lenz and Barbara Myerhoff wrote in their 1985 book The Feminization of America, "The feminizing influence is moving [American society] away from many archaic ways of thinking and behaving, toward the promise of a saner and more humanistic future.... Feminine culture, with its commitment to creating and protecting life, is our best and brightest hope for overcoming the destructive, life-threatening forces of the nuclear age."18
I think we can all agree on one point: there have been fundamental changes in American culture over the past fifty years, changes that indicate a shift from a male-dominated culture to a feminine or at least an androgynous society. The question is, what's causing this shift? Some might argue that the changes I've described are simply a matter of better education, progressive laws, and two generations of consciousness-raising: an evolution from a patriarchal Dark Ages to a unisex, or feminine, Enlightenment. I'm willing to consider that hypothesis. But before we accept that conclusion, we should ask whether there are any other possibilities.
FEMINIZED WILDLIFE
We have to make a big jump now, a journey that will begin at the Columbia River in Washington, near the Oregon border. James Nagler, assistant professor of zoology at the University of Idaho, recently noticed something funny about the salmon he observed in the Columbia. Almost all of them were--or appeared to be--female. But when he caught a few and analyzed their DNA, he found that many of the "female" fish actually were male: their chromosomes were XY instead of XX.19
Nagler's findings echo a recent report from England, where government scientists have found some pretty bizarre fish. In two polluted rivers, half the fish are female, and the other half are ... something else. Not female but not male either. The English scientists call these bizarre fish "intersex": their gonads are not quite ovaries, not quite testicles, but some weird thing in between, making neither eggs nor sperm. In both rivers, the intersex fish are found downstream of sites where treated sewage is discharged into the river. Upstream from the sewer effluent, the incidence of intersex is dramatically lower. The relationship between the concentration of sewer effluent and the incidence of intersex is so close that "the proportion of intersex fish in any sample of fish could perhaps be predicted, using a linear equation, from the average concentration of effluent constituents in the river."20
It's something in the water. Something in the water is causing feminization of male fish.
And it's not just fish. In Lake Apopka, in central Florida, Dr. Louis Guillette and his associates have found male alligators with abnormally small penises; in the blood of these alligators, female hormone levels are abnormally high and male hormone levels abnormally low.21 Male Florida panthers have become infertile; the levels of male sex hormones in their blood are much lower (and the levels of female hormones higher) than those found in panthers in less-polluted environments.22
WHAT'S GOING ON?
Our modern society generates a number of chemicals that never existed before about fifty years ago. Many of these chemicals, it turns out, mimic the action of female sex hormones called estrogens. Plastics--including a plasticizer called phthalate, used in making flexible plastic for bottles of Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, Evian water, and so forth--are known to have estrogenic effects.23 Many commonly used pesticides have estrogenlike actions on human cells.24 Estrogenic chemicals ooze out of the synthetic lacquer that lines the inside of soup cans.25 These chemicals and others find their way into sewage and enter the rivers and lakes. Hence the effects on fish, alligators, and other wildlife.
EFFECTS ON HUMANS?
Modern chemicals may have a feminizing effect on wildlife. That's certainly cause for concern in its own right. But is there any evidence that a similar process of feminization is occurring in humans?
Answer: there may be. Just like the Florida panther, human males are experiencing a rapid decline in fertility and sperm count. The sperm count of the average American or European man has declined continuously over the past four decades, to the point where today it is less than 50 percent of what it was forty years ago.26 This downward trend is seen only in industrialized regions of North America and western Europe. Lower sperm counts are being reported in urban Denmark but not in rural Finland, for example.27 Of course, that's precisely the pattern one would expect, if the lower sperm counts are an effect of "modern" materials such as plastic water bottles.
Male infertility, one result of that lower count, is now the single most common cause of infertility in our species.28The rate of infertility itself has quadrupled in the past forty years, from 4 percent in 1965 to 10 percent in 1982 to at least 16 percent today.29
WHAT ABOUT GIRLS?
So far we've talked mainly about the effect of environmental estrogens on males. What about girls and women? What physiological effects might excess environmental estrogens have on them? Giving estrogens to young girls would, in theory, trigger the onset of puberty at an earlier than expected age. In fact, in the past few years doctors have noticed that girls are beginning puberty earlier than ever before. Just as the environmental-estrogen hypothesis would predict, this phenomenon is seen only in girls, not in boys. Dr. Marcia Herman-Giddens, studying over seventeen thousand American girls, found that this trend to earlier puberty is widespread. "Girls across the United States are developing pubertal characteristics at younger ages than currently used norms," she concluded.30
Rather than labeling all these pubescent eight-year-olds as "abnormal," Dr. Paul Kaplowitz and his associates recently recommended that the earliest age for "normal" onset of puberty simply be redefined as age seven in Caucasian girls and age six in African-American girls.31 Dr. Kaplowitz is trying, valiantly, to define this problem out
of existence. If you insist that normal puberty begins at age six or age seven, then all these eight-year-old girls with well-filled bras suddenly become "normal."
But saying so doesn't make it so. Last year, doctors in Puerto Rico reported that most young girls with premature breast development have toxic levels of phthalates in their blood; those phthalates appear to have seeped out of plastic food and beverage containers. The authors noted that Puerto Rico is a warm island. Plastic containers that become warm are more likely to ooze phthalate molecules into the food or beverages they contain.32 These authors, led by Dr. Ivelisse Col?, reported their findings in Environmental Health Perspectives, the official journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (a branch of the National Institutes of Health). On the cover of the issue in which the report appeared, the editors chose to feature the picture of a young woman drinking water from a plastic bottle.
Premature puberty in girls has become so widespread that it has begun to attract the attention of major media. This topic made the cover of Time magazine on October 30, 2000. Unfortunately, few of these high-profile articles show any understanding of the possible role of environmental estrogens. The Time article barely mentioned the Environmental Health Perspectives study, nor did it link the phenomenon of early puberty in girls with declining sperm counts, intersex fish, or tiny penises in alligators. Instead, it featured a picture of a short boy staring at a taller girl's breasts.
What effect might extra estrogen have on adult women? Many scientists have expressed concern that exposure to excessive environmental estrogens may lead to breast cancer. The rate of breast cancer has risen dramatically over the past fifty years. Today, one in every nine American women can expect to develop breast cancer at some point in her life. But this increase is seen only in industrialized countries,33 where plastics and other products of modern chemistry are widely used. Women born in Third World countries are at substantially lower risk. When they move from a Third World country to the United States, their risk soon increases to that seen in other women living here, clearly demonstrating that the increased risk is an environmental, not a genetic, factor.34
CONNECTION?
At this point, you may feel that you've been reading two completely disconnected essays: one about the feminization of American culture, and the second about the effects of environmental estrogens. Could there be any connection between the two?
There may be. If human physiology and endocrinology are being affected by environmental estrogens--as suggested by lower sperm counts, increasing infertility, earlier onset of puberty in girls, and rising rates of breast cancer--then there is no reason in principle why human psychology and sexuality should be exempt. If we accept the possibility that environmental estrogens are affecting human physiology and endocrinology, then we must also consider the possibility that the feminization of American culture may, conceivably, reflect the influence of environmental estrogens.
The phenomena we have considered show a remarkable synchrony. Many of the cultural trends discussed in the first half of the article began to take shape in the 1950s and '60s, just as plastics and other modern chemicals began to be widely introduced into American life. There are, of course, many difficulties in attempting to measure any correlation between an endocrine variable--such as a decline in sperm counts--and a cultural variable, such as cultural feminization. One of many problems is that no single quantitative variable accurately and reliably measures the degree to which a culture is becoming feminized. However, we can get some feeling for the synchrony of the cultural process with the endocrine process by considering the correlation of the decline in sperm counts with the decline in male college enrollment.
We've already mentioned how sperm counts have declined steadily and continuously in industrialized areas of North America and western Europe since about 1950. Let's use that decline as our endocrine variable. As the cultural variable, let's look at college graduation rates. Since 1950, the proportion of men among college graduates has been steadily declining. In 1950, 70 percent of college graduates were men; today, that number is about 43 percent and falling. Judy Mohraz, president of Goucher College, warned not long ago that if present trends continue, "the last man to graduate from college will receive his baccalaureate in the year 2067.... Daughters not only have leveled the playing field in most college classrooms, but they are exceeding their brothers in school success across the board."35
Plot these two phenomena on the same graph. Use no statistical tricks, no manipulation of the data--simply use best-fit trend lines, plotted on linear coordinates--and the two lines practically coincide. The graph of declining sperm density perfectly parallels the decline in male college graduation rates.
Of course, the correlation between these phenomena--one endocrine, one cultural--doesn't prove that they must derive from the same underlying source. But such a strong correlation certainly provides some evidence that the endocrine phenomenon of declining sperm counts may derive from the same source as the cultural phenomenon of declining male college enrollment (as a percentage of total enrollment).
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE MALE AMERICAN EMPIRE?
Many have suggested that the feminization of American culture and endocrine phenomena such as declining sperm counts are both manifestations of the effects of environmental estrogens. To the best of my knowledge, no other author has yet made such a suggestion. If this hypothesis is ultimately shown to be at least partly correct, it would not be the first time that items of daily household life contributed to the transformation of a mighty civilization. A number of scientists, most notably toxicologist Jerome Nriagu, have suggested that one factor leading to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was the lead glaze popular among the Roman aristocracy after about 36 Bowls and dishes were glazed with lead, which was also widely used in household plumbing. (Our word plumbing comes from the Latin plumbum, which means lead.) The neurological symptoms of lead toxicity--mania, difficulty concentrating, and mood swings--were not recognized as manifestations of poisoning. No Roman scientist conducted the necessary controlled experiment: a comparison of families that used lead-glazed pottery with families that did not. The scientific worldview necessary for such an experiment did not exist at the time. It is thought-provoking to consider that something as insignificant as pottery glazing may have brought down the Roman Empire.
Could anything of comparable magnitude be happening right now, in our own culture? Testing the hypothesis I have proposed will be difficult. It is probably not possible to randomize humans to a "modern, plasticized" environment versus a "primitive, no-plastics, no-cans, no-pesticide" environment--and even it were possible, it would not be ethical to do so. (It should be noted, however, that one careful study has already been published demonstrating that men who consumed only organic produce had higher sperm counts than men eating regular, pesticide-treated produce.37 Measures of the degree to which a culture is "feminized" would be controversial, and only seldom would such measures be objectively quantifiable.
Nevertheless, the world around us is changing in ways that have never occurred in the history of our species. It is possible that some of these changes in our culture may reflect the influence of environmental estrogens, an influence whose effects are subtle and incremental. To the extent that human dignity means being in control of one's destiny, we should explore the possibility that our minds and bodies are being affected by environmental estrogens in ways that we do not, as yet, fully understand.
No FKN News This Week
For some reason, Deek Jackson's FKN news did not come out this week. I did go into the archives a bit to look for something entertaining. Here is the FKN News from 7/3/07. It is based on a great movie I saw called Zeitgeist. You can watch the entire thing at http://zeitgeistmovie.com/.
This FKN news is one of the best I've seen yet. Really funny and really scary at the same time.
Enjoy.
WARNING! Explicit Language
This FKN news is one of the best I've seen yet. Really funny and really scary at the same time.
Enjoy.
WARNING! Explicit Language
Saturday, September 1, 2007
The Twilight of American Culture
by Morris Berman
Chapter One
COLLAPSE, OR
TRANSFORMATION?
Sallust's description of Rome in 80 B.C.—a government controlled by wealth, a ruling-class numb to the repetitions of political scandal, a public diverted by chariot races and gladiatorial shows—stands as a fair summary of some of our own circumstances....
—Lewis Lapham,
Waiting for the Barbarians
Before we can talk about the long road to cultural healing, then, we must begin by understanding the illness. But here we are confronted with a complicating factor, briefly alluded to in the Introduction: Decline comes inevitably to all civilizations. With the exception of hunter-gatherer societies that have not been interfered with by more complex ones (and there are no pristine hunter-gatherers left anymore, I fear), the pattern of birth, maturity, and decay would seem to be inescapable. Est ubi gloria nunc Babyloniae? Where is the glory of Babylonia now? Or that of ancient Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome? Gone, all gone—that is the historical record. Why, then, should America escape this fate? If decay is built into the civilizational process itself, then talk of healing might be a bit out of place. Indeed, from an analytical standpoint, the problem is not that states collapse—for that is the rule—but that some manage to last as long as they do. To what purpose, then, my attempt to give the reader a cultural roadmap, or to suggest a way out, a creative response? If the historical record is clear on this point, there is no way out. We might just as well fiddle while New York and Los Angeles burn.
This is, of course, a formidable objection, one not easily dismissed. Nor do I believe that America is somehow so privileged as to constitute a historical exception (which belief would be a typically American kind of hubris). But three things do jump out of the historical record that are worth mentioning. First, the process of decay may be inevitable, but it is rarely linear. In its three thousand years, for example, Egypt suffered periods of complete political disintegration and foreign domination that sometimes lasted more than a century, and it then bounced back. While its ultimate decline was inevitable, and it was eventually absorbed into the Greco-Roman Empire, three millennia is not exactly an unimpressive showing; and most of those years were "up" (in terms of political coherence), while some of them were "down." So it might conceivably be argued that the United States is going through a bad patch, from which it might recover, at least for a time.
Second, if the classical model of collapse of empire is that of ancient Rome, we have to remember that its fall was, in terms of the larger world system, as much a transformation as it was a decline. Indeed, it was from the ruins of the Roman Empire that medieval European civilization emerged. While the parallels between the Roman case and the American one are not exact, the analogy does suggest some transformative possibilities. If, for example, we are indeed slated for another dark age, it may not have to last six hundred years this time around. This is precisely a case in which something like the monastic option, and the deliberate work of cultural preservation, might come into play.
Third, there is the issue already mentioned in the Introduction, and which I shall discuss later on in this chapter, as well: This is a very lively kind of decline. In this sense, possible hubris notwithstanding, something unprecedented might be happening. Europe's Dark Ages were truly dark—"singularly monochromatic," as the historian Peter Brown put it. Our own transformation is confusing, because of the "invisibility" factor discussed above. For those seduced by noise, toys, and technology, the current transformation to a global economy is nothing less than cultural efflorescence. For those who place their values elsewhere, there is the paradox that the very success of McWorld, the very transformation that it represents, is a darkness that is ultimately every bit as dark as the early Middle Ages, no matter what the surface appearances might indicate. Whether this will make recovery easier or more difficult remains to be seen.
My point, in other words, is that even if decline is historically inevitable, it is still a process that contains unexpected twists and turns. The sine curve may be descending, but there are loopholes in it nonetheless. Furthermore, the precedent of the monastic option suggests that there might be ways of ensuring that what is of value in this civilization can be preserved and handed down in the hope of generating cultural renewal at some later point. As for the individual reader poring over these pages, he or she doesn't have to be a statistic; there are choices to be made that move in directions opposite to the general tide of events. Before we discuss all that, however, we need to have a closer look at the larger process of civilizational decline, and the factors that come into play when a culture enters its twilight phase and begins to implode.
The concept of decline often involves organic metaphors, notions of birth, maturity, and senescence. This way of viewing civilization goes back to the eighteenth century (Giambattista Vico), and perhaps even to the ancient Greeks; but it came into common currency in the nineteenth century through the writings of the German Idealist school of philosophy. Hegel, for example, saw history as a kind of spiritual journey, in which Geist ("spirit") moved around the globe, generating the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Florence, and sowing the seeds of decay when it subsequently departed. Oswald Spengler, as already noted, thought in similar terms, arguing that a civilization was organized around a central ideal, or some sort of Platonic Idea, and that the process of civilization involved a stage of aging, during which the Idea hardened into pure form. Writing in the early twentieth century, Spengler believed that this process of formalism, or "classicism," as he called it, was happening to the West during his lifetime, and that it would be on the Western agenda for the next few centuries.
There is, perhaps, something intellectually satisfying about the organic approach. After all, humans die, so why not civilizations? It is, however, not really necessary to rely on organic metaphors (or mystical forces) as sources of explanation. As Joseph Tainter points out in The Collapse of Complex Societies, civilizations are anomalies. The whole statist configuration of hierarchy, specialization, and bureaucracy emerged fairly recently—about six thousand years ago—and has to be constantly reinforced and legitimized. It also requires an expanding material base and a constant mobilization of resources, and the trend is always toward higher levels of complexity. There is the processing of greater quantities of information and energy, the formation of larger settlements, increasing class differentiation and stratification, and the development of more complex technology. Collapse, which involves a progressive weakening of the political and administrative center, is the reversal of all this, and a recurrent feature of human societies. As the center weakens, there is no longer an "umbrella" to guarantee safety. The strong savage the weak, and there is no higher goal than survival. Literacy may be lost entirely, or decline so dramatically that a dark age is inevitable.
Thus collapse is built into the process of civilization itself, but this can be understood in purely rational or economic terms. When stress—for example, resource shortage—emerges in hunter-gatherer societies, the members of the tribe have an easy option, one that worked for hundreds of millennia: They move. The solution, in short, is horizontal (dispersion). But if you are sedentary, committed to staying in one place and depending on that place for your livelihood, you must "go vertical," that is, generate another level of hierarchical control to solve your problems—a process that never ends. The whole thing is cumulative. Taxes rarely go down; information processing gets denser. Standing armies get larger, not smaller, and bureaucracies grow rather than shrink. Elites want—and get—more and more of the pie, and so forth. What is unleashed is an unending spiral of increasing complexity and correspondingly higher costs. Finally, says Tainter, "investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns." The "center of gravity" is too high; the benefits per unit of investment start to drop off. At this point—that of diminishing returns—collapse is not only inevitable; it actually becomes economical. Although the effects are not exactly pleasant, collapse finally becomes an economizing process, the best adaptation under the circumstances.
Tainter's argument, however, is not necessarily at odds with that the of German Idealists. For one thing, both he and Spengler agree that collapse is inherent to the process of civilization itself, and thus inevitable. But there is even deeper agreement than this, although it is implicit: Economic decline has an obvious "spiritual" component, which shows up as apathy and meaninglessness—what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called "anomie," and which is the reality lurking beneath the facade of Spengler's classicism. In the classicist phase, the culture no longer believes in itself, so it typically undertakes phony or misguided wars (Vietnam, or the Gulf War of 1991, for example), or promotes its symbols and slogans all the more. As the organizational costs rise, yielding increasingly smaller benefits, so does the formalism, the pomp and circumstance. Just as the jaded crowds of ancient Rome zoned out on bread and circuses, Hollywood makes Rocky-type films, rerunning tired old formulas, but nevertheless, these are box-office hits. And gladiatorial extravaganzas, as well as the "Rambification" of culture, are sure signs of spiritual death.
If we can pull together the threads of this discussion so far, it would seem that four factors are present when a civilization collapses:
(a) Accelerating social and economic inequality
(b) Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems
(c) Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness
(d) Spiritual death—that is, Spengler's classicism: the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas—kitsch, in short.
It is at this point that this scenario may strike the reader as hauntingly familiar, because these four conditions would seem to apply to the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What reader of these pages is not aware that the gap between rich and poor has increasingly widened since the 1970s? That entitlements such as Social Security are under threat, or that we incarcerate more people per capita (565 per 100,000) than any other country in the world? That millions of our high school graduates can barely read or write, and that common words are now often misspelled on public signs? That community life has been reduced to shopping malls, and that most Americans grow old in isolation, zoning out in front of TV screens, and/or on antidepressant drugs? This is the nitty-gritty, daily reality that belies the glitz and glamour of the so-called New World Order.
In order to understand the reality of our situation, it will be necessary to flesh these four factors out in some detail. But—to skip ahead for a moment—it is, once again, not a simple case of civilizational collapse, but a more complex one of cultural transformation. Viewed from a certain perspective—that of Wall Street, Beverly Hills, the region contained within the Capital Beltway, and Redmond, Washington (home of Microsoft)—the transformation to the global society of the twenty-first century is a great success. In terms of late-empire developments, with the Soviet Union now a vestige of the past, it may even be adaptive, at least for another fifty or one hundred years. After all, if there is nobody around to offer a different definition of success, then perhaps there really isn't a problem. The meaning of collapse is in the eye of the beholder, n'est-ce pas?
Let us take a closer look at what the American transformation consists of. ...America: Freedom to Fascism (01:49:00)
by Aaron Russo (1943-2007)
Freedom Fighter, Filmaker
Are you aware the Supreme Court has ruled that the government has no authority to impose a direct unapportioned tax on the labor of the American people, and the 16th Amendment does not give the government that power?
Determined to find the law that requires American citizens to pay income tax, producer Aaron Russo ("The Rose," "Trading Places") set out on a journey to find the evidence. This film which is neither left, nor right-wing is a startling examination of government. It exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America since 1913 when the Federal Reserve system was fraudulently created. Through interviews with U.S. Congressmen, a former IRS Commissioner, former IRS and FBI agents and tax attorneys and authors, Russo connects the dots between money creation, federal income tax, and the national identity card which becomes law in May 2008. This ID card will use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips which are essentially homing devices used to track people. This film shows in great detail and undeniable facts that America is moving headlong into a fascist police state.
Freedom Fighter, Filmaker
Are you aware the Supreme Court has ruled that the government has no authority to impose a direct unapportioned tax on the labor of the American people, and the 16th Amendment does not give the government that power?
Determined to find the law that requires American citizens to pay income tax, producer Aaron Russo ("The Rose," "Trading Places") set out on a journey to find the evidence. This film which is neither left, nor right-wing is a startling examination of government. It exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America since 1913 when the Federal Reserve system was fraudulently created. Through interviews with U.S. Congressmen, a former IRS Commissioner, former IRS and FBI agents and tax attorneys and authors, Russo connects the dots between money creation, federal income tax, and the national identity card which becomes law in May 2008. This ID card will use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips which are essentially homing devices used to track people. This film shows in great detail and undeniable facts that America is moving headlong into a fascist police state.
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