Ranting and Raving

An excellent cautionary tale of the democratic process.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/24/13213/0710

ekevu reminded me of the Peanut Butter Jelly Time meme, which I thought I had successfully repressed.

You know, I've known about this meme for three years. It's always bugged me in a way that was way out of proportion to what it is. I mean, the Badger meme is every bit as annoying, yet I find it cute. But this one has always made me seethe.

I think I know why. It's because the phrase "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" means to me that at some arbitrary time, known as "Peanut Butter Jelly Time," all things that have nothing to do with peanut butter and jelly must cease, while peanut butter and jelly is forced upon me whether I want them or not. It ties into the notion that nothing, not even peanut butter and jelly, can escape having a particular time assigned to it. And that all our time is programmed by forces outside ourselves, right down to the level of when "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" shall be.

I mean, why should anyone decide for me when "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" shall be, or for that matter whether there shall be such a thing as "Peanut Butter Jelly Time?" And all-in-all, I rather think I would prefer to have that singing banana sliced upon my peanut butter than any jelly at all.

And yes, in case you were wondering, this does in all likelihood have something to do with my mother.

Yep, morgan1 and I went to the Lord of the Rings yesterday. It was a long, engaging film and an all out assault on the American bladder. ( my thoughts are behind the the curtain )
And then I stood up to let people out and the effect of gravity on my bladder negated my plan to watch the credits roll. Morgan learned that Viggo Mortenson did his own singing.

There is a new strip mall opening across the street from my workplace. The bright side of this is that, for the first time since 1999, I can go out to eat without having to use the car. On the other hand, this strip mall is exemplary of the cultural ennui that is Minnesota in general and Eden Prairie in particular.

I took my lunch at a place called Bear Rock Cafe. I was greeted with a standard greeting of "Welcome to Bear Rock Cafe, may I take your order please." It was parroted to perfection by an order taker who had very clearly had it impressed upon him that the inclusion of the words "Bear Rock Cafe" was an essential component of the corporate branding strategy. I placed my order for a passable Roast Beef on Foccaccia sandwich quaintly named "The Rockslide," picked it up and took it to a booth to eat.

The decor of the place is something I have come to think of as Jack London Modern, designed to evoke the image of the Great White North, of lumberjacks and trappers in heavy woolen flannels coming in from a hard days work for a hearty meal and a swapping of tall tales around the fire. Under the true ceiling of flat-black painted duct work and girders, was an open ceiling of knotty pine. Knotty pine logs engineered to look as if they had been hewn and set there by some Daniel Boone served also as railings, room dividers, and support struts for the open ceiling. At the center of the room, some comfy chairs were arranged around a simulacral fireplace in which gas flames pretended to burn stone wood. Over the fireplace a color photo of a Grizzly Bear seizing a salmon from some Alaskan river hung. Elsewhere, Ansel Adams prints did their best to evoke feelings of Wild Places. And completing the feel was an array of antler chandeliers, whose perfect symmetry and occasional seam betrayed their origins in an injection mold.

The illusion found its way onto the menu as well, where, in addition to the quaint names for specialty sandwiches, the word "Grub" replaced the word "Food" at every instance, and children's meals were called "Cub Kits."

As I took it all in, I wondered where this was all based. Were they a local company (where I live, Red Lobster and Olive Garden are, strictly speaking, local businesses), or were they, like Starbuck's, an emanation from the Pacific Northwest? Well, the ultimate insult came from the potato chips which were "manufactured exclusively for Bear Rock Foods, Raleigh, NC."

Now call me provincial if you must, but people who close their schools when rumors of a snowflake are heard two counties over have no business trying to create the North Woods Experience in a Minnesota strip mall. If I want a simulacrum of a trappers lodge, I'll go to Caribou Coffee, where they at least have the good humor to mount the head of a Caribou Plushie over their imitation fireplace. And, of course, a drive up Highway 169 to Ely, MN gets me the real thing - cabins hewn from the very wood that was cleared for their construction.

I was just reading an article of Molly Ivins' in which she spent the bulk of her words upbraiding herself for feeling sorry for Rush. She was also going on a bit about how right-wing pundits were easily forgiving him for something for which they would pound Al Franken or Michael Moore. She apparently feels inadequate because she cannot deliver the invective she imagines the other side would deliver if the roles were reversed. But she's overlooking a few important things.

The first is that "drug addict" does not mean a wealthy white man scoring US made pharmaceuticals off his maid. It means a youth of whichever minority is hated by contemporary community standards buying a drug produced in Colombia or Afghanistan with money obtained by mugging an old lady for her social security check.

The second is that, as long as your addiction does not conform to the description in the preceding paragraph, it is a "respectable" addiction. Like Valium in the '50s. The trailhead of Rush's path to addiction was the clinical setting of a doctor, a hospital, a surgery. Not some guy on a street corner rasping "Hey kid, lookin' for some fun?"

The third is the "there but for the Grace of God" factor. Whether we like or hate Rush, to those of us who share his skin color and native language, we recognize that he is sufficiently similar to us in most ways that what has befallen him could befall any of us. It's called empathy folks, and it is the selfish motivation behind noble feelings like mercy and compassion. This is why Conservatives forgive him and Liberals are merely sniggering rather than creating an organized campaign to put him away for life. This is why Ivins' feels pity for him.

What this all means, of course, is that the "War on Drugs," is not a war on drugs at all, but a war against the Other. Drug addiction is somehow more forgivable if:

A) The addict is generally acceptable to the dominant regime,
B) The drug money goes back to nice Pharmaceutical companies rather than evil Coca overlords in Latin America or Afghanistan,
C) The path to addiction was "inadvertent." and
D) We can see how we might end up like that.

In short, more than anything, this exposes the race, class, and cultural biases that constitute the underlying narrative of our so called "war on drugs" for the simple hatred that they are. Something for which Conservatives and Liberals share culpability.

So, while Molly should perhaps forgive herself for her unwillingness to upbraid Rush, she should perhaps explore how her condescending patholigization of drug use is every bit as nasty in its way as Rush's edict that drug addicts all be "sent up the river."

The following letter appeared in todays New York Times:


To the Editor:

Re "Hummers to Harleys," by David Brooks (column, Oct. 4):

I wonder if it occurs to Mr. Brooks, Arnold Schwarzenegger or even President Bush that this macho, military, Mack Truck response to 9/11, based entirely on anger and fear-mongering, is turning out to be more foolish than manly.

Rather than buying Hummers, Americans should become experts on the Bill of Rights, help those who've been out of work for a year or two, and register people to vote.

Rather than dropping bombs on the Arabs, we should bombard them with cultural emissaries who could help them understand that we hold our freedoms dearer than McDonald's, Disney and Coca-Cola. Rather than cutting taxes on rich individuals and corporations and creating record deficits, our leaders should have the courage to separate money from politics.

It's clear to me that we've learned the wrong lesson from 9/11.

JUDY LEVINE
Kingston, N.Y., Oct. 4, 2003


I must say that in the past decade, I've seen precious little evidence that Americans do, in fact, "hold our freedoms dearer than McDonald's, Disney and Coca-Cola."

Indeed, the fact that these are the symbols of America to the world is a testament to just how highly we prize them. Indeed, when our schools form alliances with these entities, when licensed merchandise figures in a child's life from perhaps as early as birth, when one can walk into sears and find a Disney Licensed Television, complete with DVD Player and remote control all ready for the Kids' room, we imbued them with more power than the constitution.

the_gneech raised some interesting questions the other day regarding the paradigmatic shifts between the world of Star Trek, The Original Series and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and their more contemporary successors like ST:TNG and SW:Attack of the Clones. The question boiled down to why are we no longer offered Scifi in which Good triumphs over Evil, and we can get closure.

The answer to this question, I believe, lies in understanding the changes that have taken place in our moral universe in the time between these offerings. ST:TNG came out at a time when we were beginning to deconstruct our moral universe. It was the age of Glasnost; the cold war was winding down, and would, indeed, end in the life of that series. Understanding that is key to understanding the moral uncertainty that seems to dominate ST:TNG as compared with ST:TOS and SW:ANH.

The Moral assumptions of TOS and ANH are as follows:

1) Good and Evil are both absolute and self evident.
2) Good will always triumph over evil.
3) Human history is a linear progression toward a time when Good permanently vanquishes Evil, freeing us to do Great Things.

This is basically a mythology that looks forward to a messianic age, and even the humanistic, rationalistic world of Gene Roddenberry participates in this messianic vision. This vision was also an essential element of the times both TNG and ANH were produced. The cold war gave us an enemy that was manifestly bad, and the belief that once we would conquer that enemy, all would be well with the world. And so the Klingons of TOS and the Empire of ANH could serve us as proxies for the Soviet Union. While that may not have necessarily been authorial intent in either case, it was the effect because the same mythology that was driving the cold war, drove the portrayals of good and evil in these works.

As Communism began to fall apart, and we emerged victors in the cold war, by the simple virtue of not having run out of money first, we saw that the post-communist world was far from utopian, and the messianic model of Morality began to fall apart. And thus, it came to be that ST:TNG, the first great adventure in Sack Cloth Sci-Fi was launched, with the crew of the Enterprise being placed on trial for "The Crimes of Humanity." The Messianic model of morality was dissected, taken apart, its various and sundry assumptions laid before us in bewildering array. A different, and very tentative morality was laid before us, with very different assumptions:

1) Good and Evil are determined within a cultural context, which must be respected above all.
2) Because Good and Evil are relative, compromise and enlightened self interest are the paths to peace.
3) Human history is and endless cycle of triumphs and defeats, the goal of which should be to minimize the damage as much as possible.

This is a morality completely devoid of the unbridled optimism that characterized TOS and ANH, and is thus incapable of delivering the sort of mythically satisfying narrative that those older series offered. It is also devoid of a satisfactory definition of good and evil. Thus it becomes possible to transform the Klingon nemesis of yesteryear into a noble savage, now adequately civilized to assume his place in starfleet and to transform the Evil Incarnate that was Darth Vader from villain to anti-hero.

So, having deconstructed a binary morality that looks forward to a time when evil disappears, and replaced it with a moral code that seems determined to refuse to define good and evil, what is our next step?

The Five year series Babylon 5 traces our path to our current positions. At the outset of the series we knew that Vorlons were good, and that Shadows were bad, and that we were heading toward an apocalyptic battle between the two. We knew that good people would side with the Vorlons and bad people would side with the Shadows. But then, as we moved closer to that battle it became more and more apparent that human wars based on the messianic model of morality were, in essence, a cold war between these two uber-races. Ultimately the battle culminated in these tradidtional symbols of good and evil being evicted from the universe. In the wake of their departure, however, villains do not suddenly become heroes, and the problem of Good and Evil remains to be played out in the individual soul. Redemption is possible for villains, but such redemption is no guarantee of freedom. Londo Mollari, though he has repented, lives with the consequences of his actions until his death.

The task is clear -- there are rules that define morality that are independent of cultural norms. The task is to discover them and live by them.

This proposes a new morality:

1) Good and Evil are universal forces which can be measured by their ultimate effect on self and other.
2) Good and Evil are not intrinsic characteristics of races or even individuals, but rather the effects of choices made.
3) The consequences of evil choices may outlive even the redemption of those who make those choices. Salvation does not come from outside to rescue us, but rather from within, to redeem us.

The effect of this is to introduce the notion of personal responsibility for good and evil. Morality is no longer what we say it is, nor is it a set of rules that say X is Good, Y is Evil, but rather it remains an absolute for us to discover. And we discover it by making imperfect choices and learning from their effects, hopefully before those effects spin out of our control.

I've been mulling over a post in rain_luong's journal, that struck closer to home for me than I suspected its like still could:

"I wonder if I am in the wrong field. Or the wrong place. Of course, I always second-guess anything I happen to be doing at the time. It's just, having had to argue with a prof who apparently believes 2+2=4 only because humans arbitrarily invented the idea (and a friend who thinks the same, although we were both sort of drunk), and had to listen repeatedly to words like "paradigm," "post-positivist," and "semiotic" being spoken seriously by very somber people, I kind of think I will get through grad school only by focusing and not taking anything all that seriously."

First, my heart goes out to rain, I've been there, done that, and got the rag to hang on my wall.

One of the major shortcomings of contemporary philosophy, which is driving both literary criticism and, apparently, communications theory, is that it dismisses reality as irrelevant, or worse yet, an invention. The way this is achieved is by granting primacy to the signifier while dismissing the signified out of hand. Or put another way "Image is Reality." This trend has completely and utterly destroyed American culture. It has robbed us of the ability to see that there is no sense in phrases like "Black is the new White," or "War is the new Peace." Indeed, it has turned reality into something so thoroughly malleable that it ceased to matter.

This leads to a morally bankrupt society. Now what do I mean by morally bankrupt? I mean a society so distanced from reality that it is incapable of making choices with reference to reality. Morality is not, as some would have us believe, adherence to an established set of norms. Morality is the ability to make ones choices based on an understanding of real harms and real goods. When the relationship between signifier and signified shatters, two things occur:

1) The emperor has no clothes.
2) The clothes have no emperor.

In this case the emperor represents reality, and the clothing represents language. The purpose of language is to couch reality in comprehensible terms, just as it is the purpose of clothing to let us know that the emperor is, in fact the emperor. But these days we worship the empty robes. This serves people who try to sell us things and ideas very well. But when we look for value, we are at a loss.

Deconstructing the tools we use to represent reality can be a useful exercise, but it is not an end in itself. The task that follows deconstruction is reconstruction. And I have yet to see anyone who is interested in taking up that particular yoke. After all deconstruction is the simple task of knocking something down. It's fun, its easy, and we can then point and laugh about how weak the structure was. But until we build a new structure, we are homeless.

And that is where we are right now. We have a president who became president by deconstructing the electoral process and dismissing the reality of the popular vote, who calls tyranny patriotism, and who happily destroys other nations and runs away when someone says "fix that." And what we call "Reality" these days is a genre of TV Programs based on sick power fantasies of superficial competition. Our obsession with signifiers is a type of idolatry. And when signifiers are all we pay attention to, fascism finds fertile ground.

As a final note to rain, who does not watch my journal, and is therefore probably going to find this post in his inbox, you are in the right field. You are in the field where a David Craig Simpson is most necessary. Grad school is not something to enjoy. It is a rite of passage, a hazing ritual, and vocational training all rolled up in one. Do not assume you are there to learn anything. You are there to survive long enough to pick up the qualifications to join the profession. If you should happen to learn anything along the way, that is an unintended consequence. But once you are through it, you have the capacity to put your own theories out there, to contribute to the field. And what the field needs, more than anything else, is scholarship that is willing to reassert the link between signifier and signified, to heal the disconnects, to demonstrate, by counting on your fingers, that 2+2=4, and that to argue otherwise is to cripple our intellectual faculties by denying them the tools with which to describe reality.

After reading an article on the conflict between "Child Free" and "Child Burdened" people in America, I must say that I find both sides of the conflict appalling. I, myself, am childfree and live in a neighborhood with plenty of kids. I don't hate them or anything. In fact, sometimes their play is fun to watch. I don't mind paying property taxes to support our schools because I want my neighbor's kids to grow into the sort of young men and women I will want to live among when I am older. Heck, if Saint Paul ever puts a school referendum on the ballot that isn't semantically equivalent to "we, um, need money for, um, stuff," I might even vote for it. Of course, living in such a neighborhood means I have to enforce boundaries. It means that when I see a kid drop something on my lawn I want that kid's respect when I tell him to pick it up. But kids have less and less reason to respect adults today. And that is the primary beef that many Child Free have with parents.

My father had scars on his shin. One day I asked him how this happened. The story goes something like this. He and some buddies had clambered over a fence and was stealing melons and the farmer came out and shot at them with a pellet gun. My father let the druggist tend his wounds (his mother cringed at the sight of blood) and didn't dare complain to his parents because they would have asked why the farmer had shot at him and upon learning the truth would have subjected him to further discipline. If this scenario were to play out today, the farmer would be facing a lawsuit and jail time.

Now I'm not saying I want the right to shoot at the neighbor's kids if they get into the vegetable patch, but I also want to know that I can expect backup from the kids' parents if I find them in the vegetable patch. Too often children are told that the authority of other adults, especially childfree adults, is irrelevant. Children are going to stray, and not always under their parents' gaze. Children need to know that when an adult speaks, it is with authority. Parents who undermine that authority by, say, suing a school that suspends their kidlings for subjecting their underclassmen to physical abuse, become hated by those of us who are child free. To us, that is emblematic of the problem with parents today.

As for work inequities, yes, those of us who are child free may have to pick up the slack if a working parent needs to attend to a kid. I have dealt with this by keeping mental note of this and calling in favors when I need them. For example, when my mate and I moved into our new house from our apartment, we were exhausted and had the truck only half loaded. My co-worker who had recently become a single parent (by divorcing an absolute loser of a woman), and for whom I had provided much coverage, lent me his teenage son. That boy moved more stuff in 30 minutes than we had in 3 hours. Of course his father was the sort who ensured that his kids grew up with notions of accountability, responsibility, and community service.

The other major area of contention is around entertainment. Young children in expensive restaurants or at events not targeted at children irritates us for a number of reasons. The first and foremost is that adults, even parents, need kid-free time and space so that they can talk about adult things without needing to censor themselves. This could be anything from politics to philosophy. Parents who do not understand this are failing to acknowledge their boundaries, their kids' boundaries, and the boundaries of other adults as well. These are the same parents who will raise children who are either extremely dependent or sociopathic because the children were raised with no sense of boundaries. And it can't be fun for the kids to have to wait forever for a meal that, in all likelihood, is not going to be to their tastes. If you can't get a sitter, Red Lobster will be a more enjoyable experience for the family than La Mingotiere, and the kid would certainly rather see "Harry Potter" than "The Piano" (heck, so would I). So ultimately, even in the entertainment venue, I think that parents who truly respect their kids, will take them on outings that are age-appropriate, and leave them with a sitter when they want to do something that is not appropriate for the kids. My parents understood this concept, why don't today's parents understand it?

And that is it in a nutshell. Too many of today's parents think that parenting means that they get to live the same life they had pre-kid, just with the kid in tow. And that is why we who are childfree feel justified in accusing them of selfishness. Because they want their kids, but they do not want to give up any of the bits of the childfree lifestyle that their parents gave up to raise them. And the result is that the kids get dragged into venues where the kid is unhappy and, as kids will, shares the joy.