Blobs · from · Space
A good alternative to eye contact.
Links · * 999 Eyes Carnival of the Damned · * The Hobo Gobbelins · * The same shit you see here, but on MySpace · * Am I great? Tell me how, for science! · * A jerk, huh? Well, be more specific!
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I've been thinking again. This time I want to ask you a question, because thinking alone, while a useful short-term tool, often leads one to think in circles. The question is, what can you do without? We know our way of life is not sustainable in the long run, and is devastatingly corrupt even in the short run. (I'm speaking mostly to my American friends, but anyone reading this, by necessity, has access to modernity.) Our dependence on external energy sources (meaning, beyond the food-to-muscle-power energy exchange) has encouraged us to build a world in which our bodies are becoming obsolete husks, flabby objects of derision. The machines and social institutions we have constructed in the last 150-200 years are our masters, and we alter the world to serve them, even when it makes life more difficult and hazardous for us. This can not continue. First, the energy sources are finite, and we're burning through fossil fuels and other sources at astonishing rates. The people who argue otherwise do so largely out of either ignorance or crass profit motive. So at some point, many (if not most) of the conveniences of modern life which we take for granted will have to be given up. Secondly, our dependence on technological "progress" is rapidly making the world unsuitable for the human form. Much more of this and we will have to seriously consider permanently altering the human body to adapt to the technological environment. In some cases this is already happening, and I've written about this before. Keep in mind, humans thrived without such conveniences for hundreds of millenia without clothing, electricity, or roads, much less writing, laptops, or ICBMs. Much of the world lives with only certain aspects of what we consider normal technological aids, and if all human-made devices were to disappear tomorrow, humans would probably rediscover some of their old tricks. Even agriculture, now approximately 10,000 years old, is still a fairly recent invention. Ideally, this would be a voluntary, orderly, and conscious process, in which local, regional and (inter)national communities come to agreements and "gear down" to a more energetically realistic lifestyle. More likely, however, people will hold on to their "way of life" as tenaciously as they do to their national and religious identities, even if it means mayhem and death for others. As a matter of fact, that's why "our boys" are over there in Iraq right now. So, here's the question: If you had to pick some aspect of modern, post-industrial American life to give up, what could you do without? Some technological device, process, or institution that is part of modern life. Imagine it is simply gone, poof, as if it never existed, and you have to find a way to get by without it. Keep in mind that everything from tables to eyeglasses to corporations are all human-made. Feel free to list more than one, if you think you could get by without it. If you like you can pick a "technological package" from a particular time period (medieval, Stone Age, Bronze Age, etc), but you should remember that there have always been downsides to every age. How would you deal with those disadvantages? Do you think medieval technology would work without feudalism and witch trials, for example? How? And for extra credit, imagine what the world would be like without that technology or process. How would your behavior be different? How would people have to interact differently with each other and the world? Would you view the world differently? How? For those of you on MySpace, I've posted my question there as well, which is here.
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The Day (Part I) Dr. McKelvey: The grass is growing now The desert is a sea of nuclear glass There's a kind of creature now that sprays a poison mist It makes me wonder if anyone survived I know there'll come a day
The Network Emphasis on video projections. A sickly light upon the band, and little else. NARRATOR: (Light upon DR. MCKELVEY, fiddling madly on the MAIN STAGE with a row of scientific instruments, twiddling dials and looking quite frantic and insane) The Vision DR. MCKELVEY: How I hate the human race (McKelvey steps through/into the Time Machine. EXIT MCKELVEY) What is Happening to Me? (Hungry Maggots) ( A Bomb shelter, deep beneath the earth’s surface. We can see that only tattered relics of the former civilization remain. The SURVIVORS of HUMANITY sing, one person per verse, but together on the Chorus. They are pale, grey and sickly looking.) The fire rained down from the sky What is happening to me? I can't think of anything Jack (Underground bunker, a generation later. The Children, also pale and sickly looking, toil with hammers and pickaxes, then stop and sing, looking exhausted. It is dark all around them):
(The CHILDREN stay lit up. A new spotlight on JACK, who sings to the attentive children. They sing the last line of each stanza, seemingly hypnotized by his words and repeating them to each other.) JACK: The Light (CHILDREN begin walking to the surface. Some of them go up onto the rafters to be mutant zombies. Others die on stage next to JACK.) Living Flesh and Steel (During this song, JACK is hidden from view as zombie children mob him and tear his flesh, until his prosthesis is on or the last line of the second verse. As soon as this is done, ZOMBIES EXIT STAGE.) JACK: The children died & rose again Miriam's Lament (The UNDERGROUND. MIRIAM kneels sorrowfully at the hatch, pining for Jack. The MAYOR looks on disapprovingly, but with some sympathy. A couple of official-looking underlings/viziers stand behind him impassively.) MIRIAM: (MIRIAM opens up the hatch and a flood of ZOMBIES overwhelm her and turn her into a zombie. The remaining humans attempt to erect barricades to keep the other zombies away.) The Shadow (The MAYOR and the few other remaining humans attempt to defend themselves and flee, as the zombies slowly whittle away their numbers. By the second chorus the last human, the MAYOR should be devoured, even as he helpless watches MIRIAM singing at him. The other zombies join her on the choruses.) MIRIAM: If there’s a shadow over me like you say You’re making preparations, praying to your god Check out my shadow on the wall Check out my shadow on the wall Robot King of Zombies JACK: (JACK, standing near the NETWORK, slumps unconscious.) (At this point, the zombies are groaning in unison in time with the music. JACK appears to regain consciousness, as if woken by the zombies. After Jack sings “They will obey the Robot King of Zombies” the first time,, zombies begin singing “Weee Willl Obeyyyyyyyy” along with the music.) When I awakened I heard the sounds of living dead Garden of Eden (JACK and MIRIAM sing this together) It's kind of scary in the garden of Eden End of Time JACK: The DAY Part II
(The irradiated surface of the earth. DR MCKELVEY strolls about happily, his greatest wish fulfilled: to be the last man on earth. He is unaware of JACK or the zombies, led by MIRIAM, who devours him after his sings the last stanza.)
My watch runs backwards now As if it’s headed home It says today is Sunday The foundations of old malls were found just littered with old bones and cans of tuna Now that I’m all alone No one can argue when I scream that I’m a god The time machine is useless now But all those scientists weren’t kidding about the roaches They came and spoke to me Took me before their queen Clicked at me a while and sent me on my way.
I know there’ll come a day When you’re all blown away By what I’ve done and I’ll be smiling
(Further refrains are sung by JACK) Brainsbrainsbrains (DR MCKELVEY reanimates as a zombie and bursts merrily into song. EVERYBODY sings on the Chorus.): Take off your blue bonnet |
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Hello again, fellow minis mavens. It is I, Zombie Dan, once again bombarding your rods and cones with information about the Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures community here at Gamescape North! Those of you who missed last game, February’s Reach Out and Cleave Someone!, are surely gnashing your teeth with regret. It was a three-map, six-player team battle that rent space and time. Warbands jumped through warp portals that sent them hurtling randomly hither and yon, with results that were both tragic and hilarious. My own dimensional travels have come to an end for the time being, and not a moment too soon. I took a little vacation from the clutter and terror of Chateau du Zombie, hopping aboard a great ebon brimstone-powered steam-train for a bit of sightseeing in the Inner Planes. But adventures never proceed as planned, do they? After an embarrassing mixup with my ticket, I was thrown off the train in a desolate railyard near the Plane of Ooze. Do you have any idea how expensive dry-cleaning is there? The viscous muck, burbling all around in an infinite expanse, gets into everything! My travel spellbook makes squishing noises whenever I open it. Simply unacceptable! And I weep for the next time I have to reach into my bag of holding… So, caked with dried inner-planar goop, without a penny to my name, I decided to head for the Outer Planes. I hitched onto a freight train with some hobo goblins. From there my spring break took a turn for the festive. These lovable rapscallions showed me how to travel in style, playing homemade instruments and drinking jugs of pilfered elven wine. And oh, the shenanigans we got into! What happens in Arborea, they say, stays in Arborea… They keep odd hours, though, and even an ageless, wispy demi-lich like me needs his beauty sleep. So I was super-glad to finally bid them a fond farewell, and rest in my own crypt for a change. Still, it’s always nice to make friends on vacation. Speaking of friends, you’ll find out who yours really are this Saturday, April 5, when Gamescape North takes you back to the burning sands of Athas for bone-crunching gladiatorial matchups with your Pit Pals!: In the shade of the slave pens it was cool, at least compared to the relentless inferno just outside. Still, everywhere was the stink of sweat and fear, and the sounds of labored breathing from the doomed gladiators. Most had their heads down, conserving energy and moisture. Here and there the sobs and mumbles of prayers to forgotten gods of distant lands. The only deity in this land was the sorcerer-king, and the slave-warriors gathered in the pens knew better than to call upon him for aid. “He’s crazed, I tell you,” the dwarven battlerager said, with a contemptuous gesture to the mage, whose brightly-colored rags were now muted by the ashen soil he frolicked in. “It’s all his fault we ended up on this backward world anyway. He just had to pick up that stinking crystal, didn’t he? And now we’re supposed to fight each other for some ugly half-dragon tyrant who-” “Ssshhhh! He’ll hear you,” hissed a terrified-looking halfling slinger, albeit one clearly tougher than any the battlerager had encountered on his home world. “Death in the arena is the kindest fate you’ll get from the All-Dragon of Tyr. There are much worse fates than blood and dust.” The battlerager spat into the dust in contempt, drawing gasps from several gladiators. One desicated -looking human farmer dove with surprising quickness to lap up the wasted moisture before the desert heat could reclaim it. “Blood and dust may be my fate, but that doesn’t mean it has to happen just yet. Tell me, Halfling, how does one win one of these contests?” The Halfling gaped at the sturdy-looking dwarf for a moment and then thought. The grizzled warriors all around were listening in closely, eyes wide. “Well, at the end of the combat, the free citizens among the spectators cast a vote. Pampered weaklings, the lot of them. Each one votes for their favorite team. Usually they vote for the team whose pit is nearest their seats.” “I see. And how far away are these spectators?” The halfling’s eyes narrowed. “There’s a 15-foot wall of obsidian spikes all around the arena between us and them. This place was once an Imperial quarry. It’s so sharp, it cuts right through leather armor, even fancy armor like yours, outworlder.” “What would happen, I wonder,” the dwarf mused, “if there were nobody to vote for the opposing team?” Whispering and mumbling among the gladiators grew to sound at least to the dwarf’s ears, like a rising tide. To the natives of this world, who had never seen more than a barrel of water at a time, it sounded like an approaching silt storm. Outside, the distant roar of the crowd had become hoarse, frenzied. The sorcerer king’s entourage had arrived. The games would begin any moment. “I’m not afraid of bleeding a little, Halfling,” the dwarf said with a devious grin, showing a couple of toothless gaps. The slinger’s eyes widened in understanding. “If-if you mean to do this thing,” he said slowly,” you’ll want to aim for the far corner. There’s a small ledge there about 10 feet up. If we survive the climb up there, we’ll have a shot at the crowd before the sorcerer-king turns us to ash.” Special Rules: This Saturday, it’s a special tag-team gladiator match. Each player will build a 200-point team, but only two members of that team may be on the field outside of the starting area at any time! When a team member dies, it is replaced the following turn with a different team member. Commander effects will still apply if creatures on the field are under command of creatures in the starting area. Special items on the field will allow you to “tag out” injured players, heal wounds, cast spells and psionics, and all kinds of craziness! Each team will have 5 fans worth no more than 10 points each. Victory points can be scored by eliminating your opponents’ fans. The blood of heroes begins to fly at 1pm. Get there early to sign up, build warbands, shop till you drop, and discuss the upcoming release of Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures 4th Edition! I’ll be there at |
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And this is the final paper in my Anthro Seminar class, and it's all about cyborgs and stuff. Please, find its many flaws and expose them to the world. Does Pinnochio Dream of Wooden Sheep? Technology and the Changing Human Form Introduction We are all, with infinite but tiny variations, more or less the same. The human body's range of attributes and abilities has remained constant in the last 10,000 years. The differences that exist between human populations (with statistically insignificant phenotypic differences), even isolated populations, are learned adaptations to environmental conditions. In evolutionary terms, we are nowhere near any semblance of speciation (Leakey 1982; 241). But this may be changing. Homo sapiens sapiens is remarkable for its prolific development of devices to extend and amplify its physical and mental functions, and for its degree of reliance on those devices (Warwick 2004; 4). The spear, the automobile, and the corporation spring forth from the human mind, augmenting human power and altering the external world, creating, in essence, new environments and unleashing unseen consequences. Each new labor-saving device also comes with a free Pandora's Box, whose demons, more often than not, craftily beg a technological solution (Postman 1992; 72). Technology, then, could be said to be evolving in our stead. At the very least, its rate of change, now a dizzying inward spiral, far outstrips our own. In our species' relatively short tenure on Earth, we have transformed the planet's surface with human technologies, making our presence felt in every habitable corner of the globe (Leakey 1982; 7-8). The utter dependence of most humans on the technological fruits of modernity (and on the feedback loop of technological change itself) makes the structural homogeneity of the species an important, and often hidden, assumption. Human technologies, as extensions of our particular physical and mental capabilities, are uniquely suited to serve our interests. We certainly would not expect a planet populated by intelligent snails to have evolved technology that we could use, nor would we expect visiting extraterrestrial snails to be able to use a telephone or wear gloves. While it may seem flippant to bring up giant snails, the point is simply that the human body is a specific design arising out of particular evolutionary pressures (Leakey 1982; 35). If the human body were to change, old technologies would have to adapt to the human body's new form (Stelac, 1991). Thousands of years of accumulated knowledge would become obsolete. So it is with some measure of relief that designers of gloves, comfortable recliners and government build upon old designs, confident that the slow, snail-like pace of evolution keeps the human design stable. But what if technology changes the human body itself in form and in function? What if human inventions begin, not to augment human abilities, but replace them? What if the next phase of human evolution occurs, not over millennia, in random mitochondrial DNA sequences but in intentional sequences of binary code, and in the space of a generation? What would – or rather, what could the human body look like? What would be the consequences, on society, the self, and the planet? And what if it is already taking place? I intend to show that technological change is part of the human biological imperative, a collection of instincts I refer to as the tech impulse. We are hard-wired to adapt to new environments; each new technology creates a new environment which must be adapted to, and an ideology which treats the new technology as part of the human body. I will illustrate the far-reaching (and usually unforeseen) effects of some well-known technologies upon human behavior and thought. Keeping these examples in mind, I will explore emerging developments in prosthetics and other fields, with some of the potential consequences for the human body and the institutions based on its design. The Technological Creature The first technology, which sets us distinctly apart from other members of the animal kingdom, is our capability for language. The externalization of thought into symbols (primarily sounds) was the first technological revolution, and set the stage for every subsequent technological extension. Linguists, following Noam Chomsky's lead, have concluded that the human brain has evolved an innate capacity for language and grammar (Deacon 1997:103-104). That, combined with a highly developed social instinct (Leakey 1982:51-52), forms the biological foundation of all cultural endeavors. Essentially, the ability to communicate with other humans, along with the desire to do so, was the flint and steel of cultural development. Other social animals have recognizable calls, of course, but they are instinctual and fixed. Birds and even other apes have a fixed repository of sounds whose meanings ("danger", "food", etc.) are known from birth. Human language, by contrast, is a kind of "open call" system; there are innate tendencies toward certain grammatical patterns, but the only limits on the content of that speech are the physical capabilities of the human voice, and the human imagination. Our biological ability to adapt individually to new situations and share those adaptations, illustrated by the continual mutation of language, is our primary evolutionary advantage, and the reason that a tropical ape with no claws, fangs or fur now thrives in nearly every ecosystem on the planet. But language not only externalizes thought, it translates thought into, primarily, sound. This aural dimension of language intensifies the roles of the human voice and ear in human interaction. The particular nature of oral/aural communication lends itself to value group activity and cooperation (Postman 1992; 17), essentially making language an amplification of the social instinct. Technological Revolutions – shaping human behavior To gain an understanding of how technologies reshape humans' interactions with the world, it is perhaps helpful to examine a few technologies in use around the world. Indeed, the use of technologies account for how humans got around the world in the first place. So it is only fitting that a discussion of human achievements begins with Prometheus' original gift to mankind. The mastery of fire by early humans was a gigantic step. Fire was useful for a variety of purposes, expanding the ways in which humans could interact with their environment, most notably by expanding the human diet. The heat it provided was an invaluable augmentation of the digestive system, softening certain tough foods to make them more edible and helping to preserve meat (Goudsblom, 1994; 14, 35). Some archaeological evidence suggests that in many cases fire and smoke were useful for acquiring food as well; one cooperative hunting tactic involved lighting a fire, thus driving prey into nearby bogs or off cliffs (Goudsblom 1994; 27). In addition, fire's heat helped humans survive weather that would otherwise be uncomfortable or life-threatening, and discouraged would-be predators from approaching too closely. The life-preserving qualities of fire (as well as the potential for havoc) encouraged social organization, communication, and self-control (Goudsblom 1994; 18), and the light and heat of a nighttime campfire provided "a unique social focus" (Leakey 1982; 122) that reinforced group identity. In any case, several thousand generations of fire dependence have made us pyrophytes, at least in a metaphorical sense (Goudsblom 1994; 194). It is difficult to conceive of a human society that does not make use, and extensive use, of fire. Still, humans evolved as an equatorial creature, suited to specific climatic conditions of the African savanna. Fire or no, human habitat was limited to regions with appropriately warm conditions to sustain life without fur or feathers. Genetic studies of lice indicate that approximately 50,000 years ago, humans hit upon the ingenious notion of wearing other creatures' skins for warmth (Travis). This innovation allowed a massive expansion of the habitat range of humans (as well as that of lice, who subsequently divided into two species) by creating "micro-environments suitable to the survival of a tropical creature under widely varying conditions." (McNeill 1976; 24). Housing applies the same concept of heat control, but on a collective scale. Both technologies, by conserving the body's heat, free up energy for intensified social activity (McLuhan 1964; 126). They are so deeply woven into the collective fabric that those who lack (or eschew) either clothing or housing find themselves socially incomplete; ineligible to participate in many social activities, not to mention the targets of moral outrage. If one is naked in a 7-11 without shoes and shirt, what term describes the state of a pedestrian on the freeway? The automobile is another covering of the human body which substitutes feet for wheels, and places the soft human core in a climate-controlled steel cocoon while it races at speeds faster than any living creature, extending the human habitat to any place with roads. It has become such a fixture of modernity that it is arguably the dominant life form; the amount of space devoted solely for the use of automobiles long ago outpaced that reserved for automotively naked humans, and continues to erode the subhuman-seeming pedestrian as the focal point of urban areas (Horvath, 1974). In Part of the reason for this seemingly unstoppable march – or rather, drive – toward automotive catastrophe can be attributed to the American export of consumer culture, which places the car as the most important extension of individual identity, "without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound" (McLuhan 1964; 217). McLuhan also points out that for the American teen, getting a driver's license has long been a more vital rite of adulthood than voting. Sleeping industrial giants like Humanity: technology's prosthetic? The modern world, as Neil Postman has noted endlessly, is notable for its utter submission to the cycle of technological "progress", regardless of whether that change actually improves human life (1992; 60). The immediate benefits of a new technology may blind us to the social consequences of adopting it, at the expense of older ways of being (Malinowki 1964; 41). Those social consequences create new problems, problems which might easily be solved by simply getting rid of a technology. But incorporating a new technology into a society is vastly easier than getting rid of it, regardless of the social ills it may produce (Harvey 2005; 68-69). Instead, the solution usually proposed is a new technology, one with its own benefits and dangers. And so the cycle gradually gains speed, as innovation extends and accelerates human abilities, rendering meaningless even our conceptions of time, space, and selfhood. This pattern of change and unseen hazards should make us more wary of new gadgets, not less. But the entrenched structure of global capitalism, a technology that itself favors accelerated technological development would be difficult to halt or slow down, as long as a globally connected transportation and communication network exists (Bakan 2004; 21-22). Prosthetics, the technology which restores a human function with an artificial device, has long been a rather crude back alley of medicine. Archaeologists recently discovered a wooden big toe that may have restored a normal gait to an Egyptian amputee as early as 1000 B.C (Dell'Amore), and the Etruscans produced the first-known false teeth, though some suggest they may have been for decorative, rather than dietary purposes (Becker 1999). Still, social beings that we are, replacing such an important part of the body with an artificial proxy, even a less functional one, implies that a sense of bodily wholeness is important enough socially to use such devices to mimic wholeness through a kind of cybernetic fiction (O'Connor 1997). The limitations of technology kept prosthetics simple and generally single purpose until recently. War, which provides humanity with a steady supply of amputees, was a catalyst for developments in prosthetics (especially when 20th century anesthetics and antibiotics increased survival rates), although the rise of industrial production helped swell the ranks of the disfigured (O'Connor 1997). A stout stick could provide a crude leg substitute, and a hook could replace a missing hand for simple grasping. But the remaining stump of the former whole body part was transformed; its new purpose was to facilitate the use of its replacement, which often required extensive retraining of the limb. In other words, the biological was put to use serving the mechanical (O'Connor 1997). Wheelchairs replace the functions of the legs, sacrificing maneuverability for arm-powered (or electric) speed and some measure of mobility (Kamanetz 1972). While disabled people have long been stigmatized as somehow less than human when in the company of walking humans (Cahill and Egglston 1995), the wheelchair-bound population of the U.S., perhaps not quite so out of place in an automobile-bound society, has successfully organized politically since the 1960s, and many public and commercial spaces reserved for human traffic must now accommodate wheeled cyborgs, dependent on paved, continuous surfaces, as a matter of civil rights (Harvard Law Review 2003). They are human, after all. As technology advances, prosthetic devises are being perfected which are functionally equal the performance of their biological predecessors. Cochlear implants utilize digital processor technology to restore hearing to the completely deaf, in some cases even to those born without hearing. Some have argued, however, that for pre-lingually deaf children (children who are born deaf or deafened before they acquire normal oral skills), the introduction of a cochlear implant, and thus a sudden disruption of sensory ratios, may cause psychological harm that outweighs the lack of hearing (Crouch 1997). In the realm of athletics, some amputees, armed (or legged) with specialized prosthetics made of space-age materials are equaling or surpassing their "whole" counterparts. Warren McDonald, a mountain climber whose legs were crushed up to mid-thigh by a falling boulder, had tiny carbon-fiber legs constructed for him, specifically made for climbing (Powers 2006). Standing on those legs, which are equipped with a variety of cleats and spikes for climbing in ice and rock, McDonald stands at a height of 4'4", though he is the first amputee to climb both Another, more controversial cyborg achiever is Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter whose legs were amputated at 11 months of age. Pistorius had springy prosthetic legs specifically made for running (he wears different legs for walking around), and has been handily breaking records for disabled sprinters at the Paralympics, taking a gold medal at the 2004 Paralympics. His attempts to participate in the 2008 Olympics in "A sobering question was posed recently on the Web site of the Connecticut-based Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. 'Given the arms race nature of competition,' will technological advantages cause 'athletes to do something as seemingly radical as having their healthy natural limbs replaced by artificial ones?' wrote George Dvorsky, a member of the institute's board of directors. 'Is it self-mutilation when you're getting a better limb?'" In our rush to progress through technological wonders, we may have built a world for which the human body is no longer an appropriate form (Stelarc 1991). Roboticist and artist Stelarc explicitly called for an updated human form in the opening words of his posthumanist manifesto, Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies: "It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400-cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated. It is intimidated by the precision, speed and power of technology, and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment."
Luckily (or ominously, depending on one's position), new developments in prosthetics, genetics, and information technology are for the first time beginning to change the form and function of the human body, rather than simply adding a layer of technology. We are approaching a world in which we may choose our shape, and decide exactly what senses we want, thus choosing the kind of world we wish to interact with and how. In fact, people like Stelarc are actively working to strip the biological body of any more significance than a blank canvas: "It is no longer meaningful to see the body as a site for the psyche or the social but rather as a structure to be monitored and modified. The body not as a subject but as an object- NOT AS AN OBJECT OF DESIRE BUT AS AN OBJECT FOR DESIGNING." The potential ramifications of this are nothing short of revolutionary, when one considers, as Richard Leakey does, how humans construct the world from sensory information: "The ability to act intelligently in the real world depends totally on the perception of that world. Yet the picture of the outside world you carry in your head is totally artificial. It is created by the mechanics of your brain, the information-collecting systems: eyes, ears, fingers, skin, nose - and memory (1982:171)." Obviously, if we alter those information-gathering systems, we alter the artificial vision of the world we each accept as reality. But societies are bound together by, if nothing else, our common illusions. What happens when evolution stops and individuals, no longer bound by flesh, begin modifying themselves with custom parts to excel in their daily tasks? If Pistorius and McDonald can augment themselves for specialist success, why shouldn't a stock broker have a chip in his head with that instantly feeds him the latest prices? Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick, of the One of his explicit goals is to bypass the oldest technology, the spoken word, which he considers slow, prone to errors of interpretation, and ultimately obsolete in the Information Age. In addition, Genetic changes offer short term, slight modifications. However the step to Cyborgs offers humans a natural, technological upgrade in the technological world we have instigated. Yes I feel it will be the next evolutionary step. Indeed we will need to do it if we are to compete with intelligent machines. Other futurists wax philosophical about extending the human lifespan, which becomes more possible as human parts are discarded for replaceable machine parts (Stelarc 1991). It has been posited that mankind will need to go through a cyborg metamorphosis to withstand the rigors of extraterrestrial travel, with low gravity, decades-long commute times and entropic cold. The result will by all accounts be something very different from what we regard today as human, including the possibility of transferring one's consciousness to an immortal digital format that can be downloaded to any appropriate hardware. "The body must burst from its biological, cultural and planetary containment," Stelarc says, adding somewhat dramatically that "the first signs of an alien intelligence may well come from this planet."(1991) Last century's considerable increase in lifespan due to improved medicine and pest control had profound effects, breaking down old systems of marriage and kinship in industrialized societies (Pinsof 2002) and leading to a population boom around the world (McNeill 1976; 248) that is now reaching troubling proportions. The abolition or massive postponement of death could have implications at least as profound, although in theory population could be controlled if the biological imperative to reproduce were also tampered with. But if one is going to redesign the wheel, or the human body, small adjustments may not be enough. The tech impulse that has now seemingly turned its attention to improving the human body will only accelerate, and the whole system will need to be redesigned, until being a 'mere' biological human will seem as foolish and worthy of contempt as a pedestrian on the freeway. And if the human body becomes increasingly replaceable and obsolete, and lifespan stretches on limited only by access to parts, what will be the effect on society's vision of mortality, gender, religion and ethics? More to the point, when cyborg humans are untethered by current ranges of form, function, or ability, and may choose their form individually as they now choose cars or clothes, will there be such a thing as 'society'? Conclusion: The Posthuman world Human beings stand on the cusp of a potential revolution more profound than any since the slow emergence of language that set us apart from other creatures. Every part of the human life cycle stands to be affected. In a world where humans are spawned in factories and reshaped by bionic hardware inside and out, where digital disembodiment is just another way of being, what happens to all the ways of being that stem from the age-old condition of being trapped within the body? When reproduction is all artificial, does gender become obsolete? As du Preez notes, "If women and bodies have been perceived (and remain to be perceived) as inseparable categories, what is at stake for women specifically when bodies are dissolving into information networks?"(2002) What happens to the idea of observation or consensus, when everyone is capable of sensing different parts of the spectrum, or able to 'feel' other people's thoughts without interacting physically? Still, the whole jumble of ideas seems faraway, like a ludicrous science fiction novel. But the rate of technological saturation, especially for useful technologies, is somewhat disconcerting. Consider that cellular phones, first invented in 1973, have exploded into ubiquity in the last 15 years. The number of cell phones worldwide recently topped two billion, roughly one third of the human population (Farley 2007), revolutionizing warfare, interpersonal communications and our concepts of privacy. Clearly, technologies that seem farfetched now could be on shelves (or within your body) without warning. Science fiction writers like Warren Ellis, William Gibson, and the late Philip K. Dick imagine the environments that technologies create, and their social and ethical implications. Meanwhile, scientists like Kevin Warwick bring these technologies to fruition, brushing aside possible dangers with deterministic sloganeering about the inevitable march of progress. Not everyone will have access to enhancement technologies. It would hardly be in the interests of power for otherwise powerless people to suddenly be equal with physically or mentally enhanced elites. Most likely, technologies that make human functions obsolete will remain too expensive for any but the wealthy and powerful, thus helping solidify class distinctions. Meanwhile, the vary fact of enhancement may socially begin to create different kinds of class distinctions. How will the digitally disembodied stock broker interact with the cloned super-soldier on a social level? And what of the inevitable 'bio-Luddites' who refuse any enhancements or increased lifespan? Will they be respected as pure, or looked down upon as anachronistic threats to the new order? Each new technological device comes with a mixed bag of benefits and drawbacks, but they all bring change. A change to the body itself would likely bring with it social upheaval unlike any seen previously, as old social institutions, based on the old body, struggle to survive in a world that no longer needs them. We must carefully consider what parts of us we wish to keep, for we may soon be offered replacement parts. Citations Selecting a Wheelchair, by Herman L. Kamenetz Civil Rights - Americans with Disabilities Act - Ninth Circuit Holds That Movie Theaters Must Provide Comparable Viewing Angles for Patrons in Wheelchairs. - Heavy Traffic Ahead: Car Culture Accelerates. by Richard Dahl Warwick, Kevin. March of the Machines: The breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural Part Man, Part Computer: Researcher Tests the Limits, by Gretchen Vogel Farley, Tom. "The Cell-Phone Revolution" Invention and Technology. Winter 2007 Volume 22, Issue 3. Accessed at (http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/m |
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Here's the paper I wrote for my "Racism: Cross-Cultural Analysis" class. Any comments or criticism would be welcome. Black, white, & read all over: race and literacy in America Introduction For centuries, I chose this topic because I am fascinated with the ways that technologies shape human behaviors and attitudes. In particular, the development of writing technologies has had an enormous impact on those societies which adopted them, with reverberations that have touched every populated area on the planet. I think many of the characteristics traditionally thought of as "white" or "civilized" are actually the characteristics of societies whose primary medium has been the written word. That these characteristics were racialized in antebellum The oral tradition in a literate world In Meanwhile, in the Antebellum South, where one third of the population was held in bondage, it was forbidden by law to teach slaves to read (Roucek). Why? Clearly, there is a connection between America's institutionalized racism and the enforced illiteracy of African-American slaves. Certainly there are practical reasons why a plantation owner might not want his slaves reading or writing. Literacy is a powerful tool for transmitting and storing information (Diamond 1999; 215), one which could easily upset the power dynamic of a slave plantation. The gap between literate whites and large numbers of illiterate blacks remained a problematic power dynamic long past the Civil War, and was used by elites to keep blacks from voting in the segregated South; similarly, a literacy rate of less than 10 percent of black South Africans persisted well into the 1960s, and was undoubtedly a factor in that country's parallel apartheid politics (Roucek). But while the raw utility of the written word is certainly a factor in institutionalized racism, and in attaining political power, there is a deeper connection, one that lies between the hidden effects of literacy and white conceptions of themselves. The written word has existed in many forms in the last 6,000 years, but the full history of written communications media is beyond the scope of this paper. Phonetic literacy, which originated around 3,500 years ago as a vowel-free abjad in the Since white people, wherever they may be, are descended from these Europeans, we may compare the effects of literacy to the racial traits they later attributed to their success. What traits are characteristically thought of as "white"? David Shipler describes a list of stereotypes (both negative and positive) of white Americans: "assertive, cold, dishonest, evil, greedy, lacking athleticism, lacking rhythm…" Many of these, upon closer examination, correspond roughly with the common traits of highly literate populations. "Assertive" could easily be described as an inflated sense of individualism. "Cold" is a commonly-used term for emotional detachment, another literate trait. "Greed", while not an exclusive trait of Caucasians, is perhaps well-suited to the mindset that produced "The primitive man exchanges descriptive words. His terms are all close-fitting. Frequently the Negro, even with the detached words in his vocabulary – not evolved in him but planted on his tongue by contact – must add action to it to make it do. So we have "chop-axe", "sitting-chair", "cook-pot" and the like because the speaker has in his mind the picture of the object in use. Action. Everything illustrated. So we can say that the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics…"His very words are action words…Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized." Hurston is describing the mindset of oral cultures, for whom communication is a holistic experience involving all the senses. Objects in speech are associated with action and real-life function, a far cry from the literate man, for whom the disconnect between thought and action leaves him cold indeed. Compare Hurston's comments with those of McLuhan, discussing "tribal man": "Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is a uniform processing of a culture by a visual sense extended in space and time by the alphabet. In tribal cultures, experience is arranged by an auditory sense-life that represses visual values. The auditory sense, unlike the cool and neutral eye, is hyper-esthetic and delicate and all-inclusive. Oral cultures act and react at the same time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of western literary man." (McLuhan 1964; 86). African slaves, products of millennia of oral tradition, were brought directly to In this way the negative qualities of blackness were made 'real' by being put into print. They were made 'objective' and solidified in a way that allowed whites to poke fun at African Americans' speech without ever hearing one speak. By writing out an oral dialect, translating it to the disconnected visual biases of print, one exposed the variation from standard 'correct' English spoken by literate elites. It also divorced the dialect from the physical qualities and sonic character and cadence of black speech. I could read Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech aloud myself or print it in a newspaper, for example, but it would not have the resonance and emotional impact of one of the 20th century's finest orators, combining the accessibility of standard English with the rich cadences of an unmistakably black dialect. In any event, the decontextualized tribal characteristics of African slaves were amplified in the eyes of white elites. All those 'primitive' qualities devalued by the literate world were attributed to the slave population as whites grew increasingly desperate to appear distinct from their slaves, who were becoming lighter-skinned with each passing year (Smith 2006; 7). Mark Smith, in How Race is Made: Race, Slavery, Segregation and the Senses "Blacks are lazy, smelly, wild dressers, oversexed, have low morals and oversized genitalia…" (Mullen). Whether or not these traits applied to any particular individual was irrelevant. The qualities of literate civilization were the 'objective' standard, and therefore their absence would be the epitome of negative qualities. Laziness is generally assumed to signify a lack of self-discipline, contrasting with the stereotype of the hard-working Puritan uber-literate culture of colonial Conclusion The concept of race is a powerful one in While I realize that racial politics are the product of far more complex factors than the somewhat fuzzy binary between literate and oral societies, how we transmit our ideas has an effect on the nature of those ideas, one whose ideological implications often go unnoticed in contemporary studies. Literacy remains a powerful tool in the arsenal of liberation. While it has typically been employed to serve the interests of power, it can just as easily be used to fight that same power. Citations Diamond, Jared. Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies New York, W.W. Norton & Co. 1999 Mullen, Harryette. Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness. Diacritics © The Johns Hopkins University Press 1994 Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. McLuhan, Mark M. Smith. How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Review author: George M. Wilson Richman, Sheldon. Separating School and State: How to Liberate Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. Shipler, David K. A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in The Role of Literacy and Illiteracy in Social Change, by Joseph S. Roucek Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian. The Consequences of Literacy (in Literacy and Society) in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3. (Apr., 1963), pp. 304-345 "Demeaning Stereotypes: Ebony's List of the Most Influential Black Americans" Strausbaugh, John. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture |
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 Salutations, Marshals of the Miniature! Zombie Dan here once again with the latest news digest for the Gamescape D&D Minis community. First, a little shout out to our regular players: It's been a busy summer for many of us, and we're very pleased that you've taken a day out of each hectic month to help us build up Minis Game Day, considering that I'm not the most organized host sometimes, and I often - um, "experiment" with the rules. We've got a good thing going now, and as more people get involved, I promise to make the games weirder and more fun, stretching my fevered little brain (and your patience) to critical levels. Last month's four-player theme brawl was "The Great Escape", a fun little prison scenario that ended up with more than a little roleplaying. Best matchup: The Marut facing down the Pit Fiend at the prison gates. Needless to say, the forces of good were able to quell the brief prison rebellion, and are working with the Pit Fiend's gang to design a cafeteria menu they can all agree upon. On Saturday, Aug. 18, we're bringing out the big boys as we return to our series of games modeled on the great arcade games of the 80s. Dust off your giant monsters for a 500-point Epic metropolitan free-for-all: Rampage! It's been years since the giant monsters last came to visit Halfling Acres, and thank your lucky stars. They're terrible houseguests; they eat cattle like popcorn, devour damsels and children for breakfast, crush buildings when they walk, and never change their socks. When they snore, the ground shakes and cracks open. Their fleas, roughly the size of wolves, are a buzzing vampire plague that terrorizes the barony and lays giant eggs that block our doorways. We halflings run a tight ship. Do you have any idea how much soap it takes to get muddy Black Dragon claw prints off your roof? Ecch. It spoils our appetites, if you must know. We suspect the gnomes up in the hill for this latest disaster; it's just their kind of prank. We don't have proof, but somebody sent the monsters invitations to a wrestling match - in our town square! The winner, it is said, gets to eat our entire town. Does FEMA respond to this sort of disaster? Someone will have to pay for this. That is, if anyone is left... Saturday, Aug. 18, bring your Epic minis for a no-holds-barred 500-point brawl. Four-figurine maximum per warband. Several buildings will have hit points, and when destroyed they will give your warband victory points (and occasionally, food)! The carnage starts at 1pm, but try to be there no later than 12:30 to sign up, trade minis, and size up the competition. See you there! Gamescape North 1225 4th St San Rafael, CA 94901 (415) 457-8698
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Need a new hobby? Are you sexually frustrated? Are you, by chance, living in a racially homogenous, aging post-industrial society with a critical shortage of both militaristic machismo and of females? Well, then, try "air sex": Speaking of air art, I don't know what the judges were thinking last month when they passed over my boy Hot Lixx Hulahan for the SF air guitar crown. |
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Um, for some reason this wants to be my blog today. I must have written it and not posted it back when the freeway melted... ________________________________________ Spend a day with me, won't you? The view is wonderful, at least, from up in the Berkeley hills at Lawrence Livermore Lab. Just one day. It won't take long. Oh, and apparently the whole melted freeway thing in Oakland is part of a big conspiracy. These guys have what scoop there is to have. Nice of them to list the sites that are already parodying them.
I like this one on the left. It's a 9-11 truck stop eagle, lovingly remembering the beautiful times he had in rush hour traffic on that very freeway. The Weepin' Eagles. Now that's a patriotic-sounding sports team! Even if it is a conspiracy. So what? It looked all melty and cool, it pissed people off, and may boost enthusiasm for public transit. Plus nobody got hurt, except for the driver, which is weird. How fast was he running to escape the 8600 gallons of exploding fuel? Who cares, really? Then again, I don't have to use that part of the freeway much. Though the backup on I-80 West has expanded to Berkeley. But generally it's bike and BART for me. |
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We were pleasantly surprised by the, uh, positive reception we got at the Gilman reunion show of Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits last month. Thanks to all who came out. |
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Well, my first day as a D&D Miniatures Master was a riotous success. I picked up Shawn from BART and we headed to Gamescape in San Rafael. Darren runs the place; he's an old friend, a grown up weirdo who I could never peg as goth, Celtic history buff, or D&D geek, but has elements of all three. Great guy. Anyhow, only one player showed up, a 9-year-old with an impressive vocabulary and an even more impressive collection of D&D Minis. We played until his mom picked him up for soccer. After a lunch break, Shawn and I decided to do something different. We would do an actual adventure scenario, instead of the hack and slash combats we've been doing. I mean, it's still hack and slash, but there was some semblance of a plot. Before we could do that, though, Darren convinced us to play this new naval combat game, "Axis and Allies: The War at Sea". The name pretty much explains the premise. We played one round of it and I must say I was impressed. Smooth combat system, amazing looking figurines. Darren got us hooked through the bag, even gave us a starter set. The first one's always free... Anyhow, after that we did our big vampire-hunter scenario. Shawn MM'ed this one and designed all the levels after Castlevania. It was pretty sweet, even though a ghast ate one of my bat familiars and one of my vampire hunters got turned into a zombie. So much for homework... |
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I haven't been posting much original thought here lately, and I'm not going to start today. This comes from Maccabee over on Daily Kos. Go there and give Maccabee some props. I might ad to it that the first inkling I had that Bush was a nut job was when he appointed a cattle industry rep to head the Department of the Interior, which is great for any cattle baron who wanted to graze the shit out of federal land. It just warmed my cockles. Spelling and grammar mistakes, by the way, are not mine: How Bad Can it Get? When Bush pulled out of the Kyoto accords, I thought it wouldn’t get much worse. When reports emerged that the government’s claims that Al Quaeda and the 9/11 hijackers were in cahoots was a huge lie, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When the WMD lie was exposed, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq before the inspections were done, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When Bush started dismantling Social Security, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When outright bigotry and gay witch hunting became White House policy, I thought it couldn't get much worse. When pre-emptive war became US policy, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When Bush started bragging about attacking a country that did nothing to us and used focused grouped terms like Shock and Awe, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When actual journalists were replaced by self-loathing Bush loving Gay Republicans, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When Bush ordered that caskets coming back couldn’t be filmed, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When pictures of prisoners tortured at the hands of Americans came public, I was so ashamed, so ashamed and so angry at what the Republicans had brought this country to. I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When we found out that the FBI and CIA had actually warned of the 9/11 attack and Bush ignored it, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When the US started spying on US citizens, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When it became known that the injuries and deaths around Jessica Lynch and a football player named Tillman were played as lies, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When millions of US taxpayer dollars were funding outright propaganda, I thought it couldn't get much worse. When public domain records started disappearing without warning, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When competent governmental agency heads were replaced by inexperienced political operatives, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When Bush lied at every turn and wasn’t called on it by the press, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When $8 billion were not accounted for and no one cared, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When Bush’s drunken and AWOL youth was shielded from the public, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When "news" outlets could be owned and dictated to by GOP donors, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When Bush started cutting social programs, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When habeas corpus disappeared, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When it came to light that Republicans were scrubbing voters lists just because the voters were Black, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When the Army stopped reporting its awful accession rates, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. A year after Katrina hit when most of the victims were still unaided because they were Democrats, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When it became obvious that the press in America is useless and even dangerous, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When the dollar became the number two currency in the world, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When millions of US jobs headed overseas at an alarming rate, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When the 2004 election was hacked and manipulated, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When we discovered that US attorneys were fired for prosecuting Republicans, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When a drunken Cheney shot a man in the face was protected by the administration, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When we learned that Cheney called the shots in an emergency, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When a torture enabler became the Attorney General, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When three foreign trade blocks were formed without us, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When I was screamed at in Mexico City for being an American, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When NASA budgets had been cut, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When the poverty rate in America grew by tens of millions, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When laws were being written by industry insiders, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When 40,000 deserters were hardly being reported by the press, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When education spending dropped to 1% of GDP, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When weaponry and warfare raised to 42% of the GDP, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When evolutionary scientists, and AIDS researchers and global warming experts were muzzled, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When a US secret agent was exposed to protect a lie, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When US students score 24th out of the top 30 industrialized nations and college is harder than ever to get into, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. When my Mother had to start begging for her medicine, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. All I can ask is this- how much worse can this get? I fear that the worst is yet to come. I fear that we will never climb out of this hole that the Republicans dug for us. My fear is that the Democrats in power are not much better than the corrupt republicans (is that redundant ?) theya re replacing. I believe, as I have said before, that hen all the truth finally comes out, 2000- 2008 will be the Dark Ages of America, a Dark Age that will never probably see a renaissance. |
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I found this over at thismodernworld. I thought it summed up the situation fairly well. Pass it around, eh? Let's do right by the Internet so the rape of TV and radio won't have been in vain. |
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Whew! Done with school. Until next month, anyway. I'm so sleepy right now. I was up until 5:30 a.m. trying to pull together my final essay for my Anthropology Theory class, which is a reworking of this essay from my religion class last spring. I went about 5 pages longer than I was supposed to this time, and I still had to abruptly cut short my analysis at the origins of Islam, and I didn't even start on Christianity. Ugh. Anyhow, here is the final result. Thanks to those of you who offered constructive critiques at the last minute. Forgive the clunky structure; that's what the assignment called for. As always, comments and criticism are welcome (This is also cross posted at MySpace): Spiritual Technology and the Rise of Monotheism Part I: Abstract This paper explores the role of religion as it relates to media ecology, or the changes in perception and involvement initiated by technology. Specifically, it explores the emergence of monotheism as a reaction to writing systems, and the phonetic alphabet in particular. I've always been interested in how ancient peoples saw the world, and it made sense to trace the journey (I hesitate to call it a progression) to today's worldviews as a series of technological developments. In this paper I make use of Malinowski's functionalist Theory of Needs, as well as McLuhan's ideas about media environments and William McNeill's patterns of equilibria (which reference disease vectors but apply equally well to social systems). My stance is that religion arises out of a need to release social and psychic stress from the environment, and when new technologies disrupt environmental equilibrium, religion will reflect these new stresses. The linear, stratified pressures of the phonetic alphabet ushered in the concept of sterile monotheism, an infinite being paradoxically without form. Space does not permit a full accounting of monotheism's rise, but I feel I have laid out a convincing argument, not of causality, but of a dialectical relationship between writing technologies and the development of concepts of God in the Middle East. **************************************** "Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you." -Neil Gaiman, American Gods Spiritual Technology and the Rise of Monotheism Part II: Introduction Writing is the foundation of Western civilization. Indeed, the collection of institutions, attitudes and worldviews we think of as "civilized" are inseparable from the social and psychic changes our relationship with writing technologies have engendered. In nearly any context, "civilized" can be substituted for "literate", with particular preference towards phonetic literacy. It is telling that even Morgan, in a 19th century taxonomy of human societies, listed use of the phonetic alphabet as the only difference between barbarism and civilization (Morgan 2004:63). As a medium for the externalization and storage of thoughts, the written word is very useful, of course, and has allowed the literate West to preserve and exchange knowledge in ways not possible for nonliterate societies. The most profound effects of writing, however, have little to do with what is written; rather, the sensory changes which the written word exerts on human fields of perception are the true legacy of the Word. Richard Leakey explains the processes which human technologies augment and act upon: "The ability to act intelligently in the real world depends totally on the perception of that world. Yet the picture of the outside world you carry in your head is totally artificial. It is created by the mechanics of your brain, the information-collecting systems: eyes, ears, fingers, skin, nose - and memory (1982:171)." Each new technology is an extension of one or more human physical attributes or senses (Malinowski 1965:171). As a particular sense or faculty is amplified by technology, its information-gathering role is also magnified – in an environment which includes all previous technologies (McLuhan 1964:24). In effect this creates an entirely new environment, and human societies respond with new technologies in a kind of dialectical feedback loop. "Any extension, whether of skin, hand or foot, affects the whole psychic and social network", McLuhan says (1964:19), altering ratios of sensory involvement with our surroundings. Three thousand years of alphabet technology - a visual augmentation of the first technology, the spoken word (Leakey 1982:16, McLuhan 1964:83) - has deeply imbedded itself in our culture, giving the Western world a lopsided visual bias that must "see to believe". "As an amplification and extension of the visual function," McLuhan declares, "the phonetic alphabet diminishes the role of the other senses of sound and touch in any literate culture (1964:87)." Religion's role, meanwhile, is that of a reflection of the fears and hopes of both a society and its individual members. Joseph Campbell tells us that "dream is the personalized myth; myth the depersonalized dream (1972:19)." If that is so, the myths of a society will reflect the stresses of its particular technological amalgam. Religion, then, is a spiritual technology, a pressure valve through which we individually and collectively release the stress created by our changing sense ratios. I intend to show that monotheism, where it arose in the ancient world, reflects cultural reactions to the stresses of writing technology, and in particular the phonetic alphabet, as it was gradually adopted by previously oral and pictorial societies. In an attempt to tie together so many loose threads, I feel it may be most instructive to apply a functionalist perspective to Marshall McLuhan's concepts of media ecology. Malinowski's theory of needs overlaps McLuhan in key areas. Humanity's ability to respond to new environments is its greatest survival mechanism. Technology is both response and environment, and no cultural study is complete without an understanding of the dialectic between humans, their environment, and technological change. I have drawn on a wide range of fields to support my argument, from history and economics to epidemiology and archaeology. In addition, I believe the myths of the faiths themselves are instructive in understanding the significance of writing's impact on the thought processes of the oral peoples of the Middle East. Certain passages in the Bible, for example, seem to identify the written word directly with the idea of divinity. While I intend to focus on the form rather than the content of writing, myth and metaphor can be helpful in revealing the message buried within the medium. Part III: Theoretical Discussion & Literature Review The first human technology, and arguably the one which sets us most distinctly apart from other primates, is our highly-evolved capability for language. The externalization of thought into symbols (primarily sounds) was the first technological revolution, and set the stage for every subsequent technological extension. Linguists, following Noam Chomsky's lead, have concluded that the human brain has evolved an innate capacity for language and grammar (Deacon 1997:103-104). That, combined with a highly developed social instinct (Leakey 1982:51-52), forms the biological foundation of all cultural endeavors. Essentially, the ability to communicate with each other, along with the desire to do so, was the flint and steel of cultural development. Like any other life form, humans are biologically driven to extend their influence. We are able to extend the human form not only through genetic reproduction but through learned external media, to a degree unparalleled in the rest of the animal world. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the spear an extension of teeth, and so on. The second axiom in Malinowski's "theory of needs" appears to agree with this assessment:
This "enhancement" of our faculties also numbs our sensory involvement with the environment, creating psychic and social stress as the human body is removed by degrees from direct experience (McLuhan 1964:98). The introduction of each new medium into a social system upsets the ecological or cultural equilibrium, not dissimilar to the introduction of a micro- or macroparasite into a host, and "tends to provoke compensatory changes throughout the systems so as to minimize overall upheaval (McNeill 1976:7)." Malinowski, too, notes the profound cultural changes that result from struggle for equilibrium:
So those technologies which provide a survival advantage to a society eventually become part of the cultural fabric, imbued with social and psychic significance. This constitutes a kind of symbiosis, one which preserves and propagates both the technology and its users. The adoption of agriculture, for example, fundamentally altered human interaction with the environment. The surplus of food from agriculture initiated an explosion in the numbers of agriculturalists, and an acceleration of technologies in an effort to cope with the lifestyle changes this wrought. In humans, our survival instinct is complicated by contemplation of our own mortality. We watch our family members die, and as we grow up, we learn that we too, must grow old and die. Spirituality can be defined as an effort to dispel the stresses of the environment, of which inevitable death generally ranks high on the list. It is my view that spiritual technology comes out of a desire to communicate with, and thus curry favor with, the sources of environmental stresses. "Prayer," said 17th century poet George Herbert, "is reverse thunder." What counts as "thunder", then, is the particular mix of environmental stressors, which include climatic, biological, and social factors that populate the daily sensorium of a particular society. Each new technology soon becomes part of this pantheon of factors, reacting in a dialectical fashion to its environment and creating new stresses of its own. In this context, the community plays a vital role in prayer. The social instinct allows the individual to identify himself with the group, giving him a permanence he could never achieve alone (Campbell 1973:383). Group rituals reinforce this common identity, channeling the psychic stresses of the environment into an external force, one made in the image and likeness of the group. Campbell affirms the role of religion as a technology for collective stress release:
Nonliterate societies tend to have a holistic, all-encompassing worldview (Schlain 1993:150-151) which lends itself to animist religions, in which every part of the external world contains a life force with which the individual can interact (and thus, influence). A fluid, nonlinear view of time implies a flexible pantheon of deities or powers which may be added or dropped as needed (Goody & Watt 1963:310-311). The act of writing, Goody and Watt say, creates a fixed sense of time and imbues the environment (and by extension, supernatural forces) with a solidified permanence:
Writing is an extension of not only the spoken word but of memory. Thus it amplifies the significance of what is written as events worthy of social memory. All else can be forgotten. For literate cultures, the universe begins and ends with the Word. Discussion The first known writing systems appeared in the 4th millennium BC, among the nascent city-states of southern Mesopotamia (Leick 2001:5). The earliest versions of Sumerian writing consisted of simple wedge patterns on clay tablets, and arose out of a need to record the surpluses of animal and plant domestication (Innis 1950:30), a technology which was reshaping human behavior in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere. Surpluses of food meant permanent settlements, and walled city states built to defend the newfound wealth (McNeill 1976:32-33). Conflict arose as never before, and both work and war became realities. It is perhaps significant that Cain, a farmer, commits the Bible's first murder. Religious life reflected a utilitarian aim, as the priest-kings and their subordinates combined political, economic, and religious duties, as Innis shows:
Babylon's cuneiform marked the beginning of history, for it was the first attempt at a uniform written language. The tale of the Tower of Babel in Chapter 11 of Genesis regards such uniformity and control in secular hands with suspicion. No wonder then, that the jealous deity scattered the tower's builders with a lapse in communication. As the populations of the city states grew and specialization increased, pressure was exerted on cuneiform to express a broader range of ideas. Ideograms, such as wavy lines to represent water, began to be incorporated into a growing toolkit of symbols (Leick 2001:69). In Egypt as well, image-based writing slowly evolved from pure bookkeeping to express more complex spiritual concepts. This meant in many cases the gradual incorporation of signs that represented sounds (Innis 1950:26), though these were most likely mnemonic devices for oral learning (Leick 2001:69). Religion in the city-states was usually an admixture of agricultural polytheism and state-sponsored monolatry, with one god-king reigning supreme over both the people and the pantheon. According to Max Weber, strong centralized kingships in the Fertile Crescent, who wielded the concentrated power necessary for large-scale irrigation works in arid agricultural environments, contributed to the view of a unitary deity with similarly concentrated power (Kalberg 1994:567-568). However, the knowledge of writing was a closely guarded secret. It is telling that Thoth, the Egyptian god responsible for scribes and writing, came to be regarded as the god of magic by the 16th century B.C. (Innis 1950:22). The stratified nature of writing technology was inseparable from the stratified classes of bureaucrats in the Ancient world (Goody and Watt, 1963:314). It was preserved as a secret ritual, and was the key element in an incredibly conservative ruling class, which, like many of the writing styles of these ancient societies, remained virtually unchanged for centuries (Goody and Watt 1963:315). So at best, the elites of these pictorial societies were literate, while the masses beneath them retained their oral (and aural) sensibilities. The conservative nature of non-phonetic writing (for which symbols only exist which are thought important enough to symbolize), say Goody and Watt, makes it likely that phonetic literacy would have taken root outside the boundaries of the great non-phonetic kingdoms (1963:315). So it is not surprising that the Phoenicians, Semitic traders on the Western and Northern frontiers of the Babylonian and Egyptian empires, respectively, would develop and spread the world's first phonetic alphabet across the Mediterranean beginning around 1200 B.C. The Phoenician abjad (an alphabet lacking vowels) could be adapted to any language with minimal effort. And it was; Goody and Watt call the alphabet "the most extreme example of cultural diffusion; all existing or recorded alphabets derive from Semitic syllabaries developed during the second millennium (1963:316)." The Phoenicians' southern neighbors, the Hebrews, received the abjad as a promethean injunction and experienced a flowering of nascent nationalism, made possible in part by the decline of Egypt (Innis 1950:54), and perhaps by the unification of Yahweh(a storm god) and El (a solar deity) into one being. The key to this common identity, Weber says, was the shift to monotheism inspired by the gift of writing:
Weber claims that what set Hebrew religion apart was a "contractual relationship" between God and His clients, which "despite numerous analogues, is found nowhere else in such intensity (Kalberg 1994: 569)." Innis suggests that the Hebrew emphasis on the sacred nature of the word reflects a reaction against the Egyptian and Babylonian emphasis on architecture and sculpture. "The written letter replaced the image as an object of worship," Innis says (1950:53). In any case, stone and clay tablets imply a certain permanence, of moral lessons that were locked in from generation to generation, literally "carved in stone". It is no coincidence that the Jews are known as "the People of the Book". Ian Young notes how often God is depicted as a writer:
The mental exercise of abstraction present in the Middle Eastern religions, namely the conception of one infinite deity paradoxically without physical form, is a ritualization of the same process necessary for reading. Phonetic literacy involves the reduction of the physical world first to a series of sounds, which is to say spoken language. From there, the sounds are further abstracted into discrete visual symbols. Now completely divorced from the physical world, these are arranged in ways that, with the proper training, reconstruct symbols representing the physical world. The commandments against worshipping other gods and graven images imply an obsession with abstracting reality to the highest degree possible. Indeed, the Koran is another story about the power of words, even more so than the stories contained within. The basic premise of the Islamic holy book is that of a man chosen to be God's personal stenographer. Whereas the Bible is seen by Jews and Christians as a collection of stories about God, the Koran is considered by Muslims to be directly dictated by God. The words themselves become objects of worship. Many Muslims consider copies of the Koran sacred, and proscribe strict guidelines for how to treat the books. Since Muslims share the Jewish injunction against idolatry, pictorial representations of Koranic verses are forbidden. Thus, the verses themselves are often written in lavish calligraphy, seemingly fetishizing the symbolic words in the Koran beyond their literal meaning. The Arabic abjad is a descendant of the Aramaic script that was the lingua franca in the fading Assyrian Empire, a relic of the Arameans it conquered and scattered throughout its borders (Leick 2001:258-259). O. Hegyi explores the close dialectical relationship between Islam and Arabic, both of which were developed within a century of each other:
Hegyi takes pains to note that even in Islamic communities with radically different linguistic traditions, from Africa to Southeast Asia, the Arabic alphabet is considered an integral part of the faith (1979:266). Conclusion There is little doubt in my mind that technologies exert tremendous influence on human behavior, most of it unseen. What is unclear is the degree to which new and old technologies are shaping us (and our older technologies). In an age when the morning paper contains ancient history, the effects of media are tightening around our necks like iPod headphones. I must admit to a slight feeling of disappointment with the limitations of time and space as regard this paper. I feel as though I was just getting warmed up, when diarrhea of the word processor and a ticking clock foiled my carefully-laid plans for The Perfect Paper. In my historical discussion of the alphabet's relationship with monotheism, I soon realized with dismay that if I wanted to trace the Greek contributions to the alphabet (namely, vowels) and spiritual technology (the rise of pure logic, Euclidean geometry, and the changes to the Greek pantheon which literacy brought), I would need several more pages than would be polite to turn in. And that's not even mentioning the alphabet fetishization of the Christians ("In the beginning there was the Word and the Word was God…" and "I am the Alpha and the Omega; I am the beginning and the ending…."), complete with the fragmentation of the Church during the Reformation sparked by the printing press. And writing that much more wouldn't be fair to my fingers. Or my beleaguered professor. In the end, I may have picked too broad a topic, but I was wary of trying to take any particular religion out of the context of its historical and technological foundations. I just wanted to show monotheism as an accumulation of logical adaptations to the environment. This paper, like monotheism, seemed like a good idea at the time. Still, I think I have laid out a theoretical framework with which I may confidently approach a society, its technological toolkit, and its religious tradition with some amount of understanding. To review: Human technologies come from the fusion of two of our basic human instincts; the capacity for language and our social instinct. Technologies augment the human form and each other, while changing on every level how we interact with the world and creating an entirely new environment. The struggle to maintain equilibrium in the face of this constant change has given rise to religion, which we can perhaps classify as a counter-medium, but is really a "spiritual technology" for collective stress release. The problem with this theory of media ecology is that there are so many factors, so many technologies and fluid environmental variables, that it is difficult to conclusively prove anything. At a certain point you might as well be studying chaos theory. But some media, like the alphabet, exert such powerful effects that we can observe their distinct qualities in relief compared with non-alphabetic societies. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the theories of Professors McLuhan and Malinowski dovetailed to a degree that made this paper much easier to write. If nothing else, this indicates to me that media ecology is quite compatible with a utilitarian perspective. References Cited 1956 The Holy Bible (King James Version). New York: American Bible Society Campbell, Joseph Deacon, Terrence W. Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian Hegyi, O. Kalberg, Stephen Leakey, Richard E. Leick, Gwendolyn McLuhan, Marshall McNeill, William H. Morgan, Lewis Henry Schlain, Leonard Israelite Literacy: Interpreting the Evidence: Part I in Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 48, Fasc. 2. (Apr., 1998), pp. 239-253. |
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Hey all, I know I've been neglecting you for too long. Well, I'm a busy lil' necrojournalist. I just wanted to let y'all know I finally got off my ass and recorded some new tracks for my Day of the Zombie rock opera. You can hear some of them at www.myspace.com/dayofthezombie . For now, it's just me and a guitar, but my other tentacles are scattered to the winds for now. Go on, sign out of here and go check it out. I know, I know, MySpace sucks. So does the freeway, but I don't see you sticking to the surface streets. For those of you in Portland, some of you will be recieving CDs in the mail very soon. And it looks like the big stage production will be taking place at Noah's new space Someday, on Jan. 13, 2006. Yayyy!!! Thanks Noah. This is going to rock like friggin' basalt. Also, I checked wikipedia the other day and found that the entry I wrote for S.P.A.M. Records had been deleted, apparently for a lack of citations. I thought I had submitted enough references to change their minds, but the comments from the wiki lords made it clear that they were intent on deleting it. Several of them questioned whether the label had actually existed, though I felt like I was fairly thorough in providing links to web archives, band interviews, etc. For some reason I think another entry might recieve the same treatment. It's not easy to cite references for a group that was never the most technology savvy, and only had a web presence for the last year and a half of its existence. Especially when the whims of the wikistocracy are so fickle. Plus, why should I be on a personal crusade to inform people about a defunct label? The important things, the ways that S.P.A.M. affected people, were and are for the most part intangible. A few bands that still exist have S.P.A.M. as an early and slightly embarrassing notch on their belt, a smudge on their discography before they moved on to better things. Perhaps after I finish the Bobby Joe Ebola book someone can use that as a reference. (sigh) By the way, the wiki entry I wrote for Geekfest is also under citation scrutiny, and I fear the worst. But I'm also quite lazy. In addition, I have this nagging feeling that it would be a little unseemly if I were the only one to provide citations. After all, isn't wikipedia about the democratization of data? Maybe it's that as a journalist the concept of 'conflict of interest' is deeply ingrained within me. Yeah, that's it. The bong has nothing to do with it. |
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Hey all- I feel like I've been slacking off on my writing. I would like nothing more than to sit and write and link stuff to other stuff. Unfortunately, I've been distracted with school. I just wish they would assign me some writing in school. Instead, we're slogging through marxist-feminist critiques of structuralism. Which is fine, and very engaging, but for me, a normal-looking white male, my Foundations of Anthropological Theory class has become something of a verbal minefield. Like, how do you describe anthropology while avoiding use of the word "culture", which is apparently loaded with condescending colonialism? It's a fun exercise, but what about when you're reading the essays of, say, Susan Ortner, in whose 30-year-old theories I found a few problems. People look at me somewhat askance for questioning them, and I worry sometimes that to them, I am "that guy", the token white male reactionary. I'm just trying to be engaged in the class. This shit isn't cheap; the more I speak up, the more I get out of the class. Even if I'm proved wrong, that's great, I'm learning. We've been talking about how our frame of reference informs the kinds of conclusions we come to, and even the questions we ask (or don't ask). Anthropology, like journalism, is dealing with the growing pains that come with shedding the notion of pure objectivity as a possibility, or even as a desirable goal. We watched What the Bleep do We Know, which is basically saying quantum theory is proving everything is possible. And so forth. So based on the theoretical framework you're working with (marxist, feminist, functionalist, structuralist, etc.) you'll reach certain conclusions. Anyhow, one exchange went like this: Professor Ferreira: So, class, Miss Ortner writes that the subjugation of women is a human universal. That in every culture, women are considered inferior. So what does this tell us? (silence) Professor Ferreira: Anybody? Me: Um, Miss Ortner sees subjugation everwhere she looks? Professor Ferreira (covering mouth with folder): Ah, well, ahem- That's not exactly what I was looking for. ~~~ I won't go into precisely what problems I had with the essay, other than that Ortner was projecting not only her feminist leanings onto every culture she was looking at, she was projecting assumptions about human thought that I think reflect her Western literary bias. Whatever. Really what I wanted to write about today was my zombie rock opera, Day of the Zombie. I finally got the CD of a recent acoustic recording my friend Jon did of me. You can hear a few of the tracks on the MySpace thingy. Also, happy birthday weekend to me! Today some folks are coming over, hopefully not so many that I am distracted from a massive game of D&D miniatures. We're gonna, um, whip out our little guys and battle with them. |
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It's been too long, my children. Things have been extra busy here, and I've been extraordinarily lazy about writing lately, so let's cover just the highlights: Night of the Living Geekfest was a total success. Thanks to all the bands that played, old friends and new. It was slightly less uncomfortable than I remember the old shows being, but maybe as we get old we slip more and more easily into our comfort zones. And honestly, the bemused discomfort of organizing a chaotic show has perhaps become one of my comfort zones. I think the rest of the boys would agree. The only real discomfort I felt was just how damn cool it felt. I mean, for the most part we were delivering what people wanted; a bunch of bands people like, all together in one place for free. That's not really what Geekfest started about though. That part was kind of an afterthought. It was primarily a place for bands that had nowhere else to go. It was a pillow fort for kids playing Cowboys and Indians, or perhaps a pillow Lollapalooza for bands playing at rock stars. It wasn't that people started going to Geekfest to see a bunch of bands they liked. That came later. People showed up because they were in a band that was playing, and either they didn't have a way to leave or they had come so far that to leave would be to completely waste their day. So regardless of how little they had in common with the people and other bands around them, they stayed. To fill the time, they played on the swingset at Point Molate. They picked up foam swords. They took acid. Meanwhile people with as few social skills and as little cred took the no-stage and fiddled with their amps. I think feedback and technical difficulties accounted for a fifth of all Geekfest stage time. So discomfort, physical, social, and aural, was always one of the underlying tenets of what made a Geekfest. But somehow a bunch of us began to take refuge in that environment, like a lichen living on a windswept atoll where nothing else can survive. Good for us; it was here that we put our roots down for once, and with that toxic yet solid gound beneath us, we were able to grow into the kinds of people we always imagined we could be when nobody else saw it in us. We didn't know it at the time, but people we didn't know were taking comfort from what we were doing. Geekfest was a selfish, self-promoting act of stubborn childishness, a refusal to grow up even when it was easier to make 30K a year doing tech support than it was to get your band booked anywhere but the Berkeley Square. It's like George Bernard Shaw said: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." I suppose what I'm trying to saw is that Geekfest grew out of particular circumstances, a specific nexus of time, space, and personalities. The discomfort I felt at the Geekfest 10-year anniversary is perhaps a shade of my own mortality, because I know I don't need Geekfest like I once did. I know that shows like this helped some people. I know that there are still people out there who need Geekfest, or at least an updated version. I hope, as we once all hoped, that people who see the good that comes out of shows like that will take the initiative to do their own damn thing. Not because Geekfest isn't theirs; it is. But it's too easy to be passive, to consume a festival or art show the same way we consume TV. There's a need for something interactive, for people to feel like they get to be part of an event, as opposed to standing there watching a stage as though it were simply a giant screen. Imagine Geekfest not as a one-time event, but as a virus. It's not something that has been accomplished and completed, but a collection of unresolved feelings and sexual frustration that occasionally reaches critical mass. When that happens, you start seeing funny little flyers all over town... In other news, I've started classes at SF State. Due to some really irritating bureaucratic tangles, I wasn't able to register for classes until a week before they started. I had to sit in on a bunch of classes and turn on the ol' undead charm to be a "walk in". After several days of running up and down several flights of stairs in several buildings on campus, I am settled into three classes I can actually use. Too bad I had to drop "Late Antiquity". But the final result is that I'm a real live college student! The irony does not escape me, so don't even start. My typical commute involves a harrowing and hilly 25-minute bike ride through El Sobrante, Rickmond, and El Cerrito, followed by about an hour on BART and Muni. But am I complaining? No way, man. I love going to school. One more thing: I've begun collecting D&D minis. If you don't know what these are, they're like those old lead figurines that principled geeks spend endless hours painting. But these are pre-painted, and come with cards that have their battle statistics ready to go. They're collectible, like baseball cards or those little plastic Homies guys. And you can mix & match them to build little gangs for brutal geekery with less preparation than a game of RISK. I'm something of a latecomer to RPGs. In Boy Scouts I was denied the chance to play D&D with the older kids. I wasn't cool enough for AD&D, apparently. Looking back, I'm glad I had no idea how low on the social totem pole that put me. The first time I really got into D&D I was maybe 18 or 19. Shawn the Zombie Killah was the DM, and me, Dylan and John were on acid. It was sweet. It immediately made me wish I'd had RPG friends when I was 10 or 11. Most of my friends had gotten it out of their system, and the older you get, the harder it is to get a bunch of ugly adults together for dice-rolling. People have jobs, wives, kids, and other "better" things to do. So I've begun collecting minis, partly because it can be played with only 2 people (though it would be more fun with more people), and I'll take any kind of game-playing I can get at this late stage. However, for those of you interested in tabletop D&D, I've decided I will run another episode of my Dark Tower-inspired Darksun campaign. Let me know if you want to get in on it and we'll talk about the specifics. If you don't know what I'm talking about, scroll back to my blog from May or go here on tribe.net. That is all. Now I go jogging. Happy Birthday, 1ManBanjo! |
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I have come to realize something about Estrella and I got a late start, nursing our strength after our housewarming party the night before. We didn't leave until maybe I took the first driving shift, downing two Red Bulls at once and plodding up I-5, swerving dangerously at a safe speed. I made it as far as Grant's Pass before dawn, and then Estrella took us the rest of the way. We finally arrived in Ah yes, and Muddy's, on Probably this is because pretty much every day we were in A list of the books I have added to my library: *Strategy - B.H. Liddel Hart |
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Thank you, Shawn, for inviting ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kegpony and I to see the Minibosses last night at the Hemlock in S.F. Not only did I get my geek on listening to soaring metal versions of Nintendo themes, it was actually the first show in a long time where I was super-impressed by the bands. OK, so the first one was a mediocre kind of shoegazing emo with surf influences, but I'm thankful to them because they were likely the only reason to see the headliners.When we got there the room where the bands were was sold out. Slightly depressed, The next band after the unmentionable mediocrity was Less Pain Forever, who were also great. Two guys in white suits on guitar, and drum & keyboard, respectively. They reminded me of Bobby Joe in some ways, but also My friend Pukka Pangenitor and a little bit of Modest Mouse. Anyhow, the only lasting downer was that the BART machine ate my ticket, worth about $48, a parting gift from Cheers to a night of mirth, like an oasis in the desert. |
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The summer is slipping away. Now, they have all moved on, in radically different directions. It was pretty lonely for me for a long time, and I felt abandoned by friends with whom I’d trained and fought and learned. But I stuck with it; I’d become addicted to the feeling of being in tune with my body, with actually getting good at something. It helped keep me balanced when everything else in my life went absolutely chaos-apeshit. In all honesty I think my sensei helped fill a lot of the gaps in my life left from having no male role models to speak of. Sure, I had a drunk-ass dad and a smoldering feud with my stepfather. But nobody ever taught me anything; how to shave, how to drive, how to fix a car or shoot a gun. And those countless other little things that fathers teach their sons about the world, things I either never learned or had to learn by myself. And there’s a community in uechi-ryu. It’s a pretty diverse crowd; there’s a goofy brain surgeon from Seattle, In any case, I’m looking forward to the party after the belt test. And after that? Well, officially I could start my own school after 3rd degree black belt. But let’s not jump too far ahead. I've still got to get through this summer. |
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My grandmother showed me a scrapbook last night, one assembled by her father during the early days of America's involvement in World War II. It begins the day after Pearl Harbor, and continues to Dec. 23, 1941. I couldn't put it down, fascinated both as a journalist and as an American living during wartime. Historically, of course, this is a gem, for several reasons. It gives an interesting picture of how the attack was dealt with in the newspapers, and roughly where people's heads were at. Along with the main headlines describing the attack and its immediate military meanings, the scrapbook is peppered with smaller headlines and two- or three-paragraph stories: "Isolation Sentiment Fades in Capital" "Soldiers Urged to Learn Flying", "Pacific Coast Girds For War", "736 Japanese Nationals Arrested Throughout U.S." etc. There's a story about a Honolulu lawyer, Roy A. Vitousek, who was flying his private airplane (how rich did you have to be to have your own airplane in 1941?) when the Japanese first approached Pearl Harbor:
Lacking a scanner right now, I can't show you folks the faded photographs of the first victims of the attack, or of roadblocks set up in Oakland to guard the airport. There is a particularly haunting AP photo of a man looking over his shoulder at a roaring fire, holding a long stick. The caption: "A member of the staff of the Japanese Embassy in Washington is shown burning official papers on the embassy lawn a few minutes after first reports of the Japanese attack on the Pacific Islands. Similar scenes occurred at various Japanese consulates." This man can't have known about the attack beforehand. Did he suspect it was coming? What was he thinking? Was he afraid? Proud? Another striking aspect of these old clippings is just how detailed they are. An infograph compares the naval strength of both nations in the Pacific, detailing how many battleships, carriers, submarines, cruisers and submarines each nation possessed. This kind of detail would likely be considered treasonous if it were printed today. Of course, what struck me most were the parallels between the beginning of WWII and the first weeks following Sept. 11, 2001.
Yes, I see. How useful. Of course, Congress gave almost unanimous support for war in both cases. In both cases, the sole dissenting voice was that of a woman in the House of Representatives. In our time, it was Democrat Barbara Lee of Oakland, Ca. In 1941, it was Republican Jeanette Rankin of Montana (who had also voted against a war declaration in 1917).
Roosevelt's Talk:
FDR: "There is no such thing as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning. We have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immunes from attack - that we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map, any more."
But somehow, FDR comes across as being somewhat more sincere. Perhaps he had better speechwriters. Perhaps the threat in 1941 was, well, more real. But I don't take comfort when Bush tells us not to worry, because our military has it under control. Don't worry, Iraq will be a pushover. Of course, he's also imploring us to shit our pants with fear at both angry cave-dwelling fundamentalist bloggers and at the idea of maybe eating smaller portions and riding our bikes instead of stuffing our faces with the hormone-bloated meat of factory mutants from the comfort of our Ford Instigator. Anyhow, don't you wish Bush had stood on the rubble of Ground Zero and said something like this?: "We are now in this war. We are all in it all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking in our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories - the changing fortunes of war."
If FDR had been sitting in his wheelchair atop the still smoking ruins of the Twin Towers, he might have said these things, just as he did Dec. 8, 1941. He might also have announced that taxes would have to be levied, to pay for this monumental effort. And you know what? I'd be OK with that. A tax, to pay for a necessary war. If it's that vital, if it's a matter of survival, well gee, OK. If our boys are over there fighting and dying, if it's that important, OK, I can make this sacrifice. I'd consider it an investment in the dividends of lasting peace. But no. This...thing we're doing in Iraq, which, like every other war in history is a war over land and natural resources, is sold to us as something we can do from the comfort of our homes. A tax would only draw our attention en masse to the war; it would solidify that a sacrifice is being made for the common good. But the common good is a concept that the spoiled princes currently in power would like to erase from our memories, like a bad dream. They're betting that the thing we want most is not to be bothered; that we want our air conditioning and our instant communication and Hot Pockets and iPods to drown out the sounds of misery and desperation and hunger around us. That for the New America, freedom is a word for convenience; the freedom to choose between two identically corrupt white aristocrats to rule over us; the freedom to choose Large or Extra-Large everything; the freedom to choose between slavery and starvation; the freedom to exploit or be exploited. They are betting that it's not worth it to us to march on Washington, all of us, carrying pitchforks and torches and demanding the Beasts' heads on sticks. We have too much to lose, after all. Perhaps they are right. And by the time we don't have too much to lose, it will be too late. Not just for us, but for several billion people who have put up with more bullshit than us, and who will be, most likely, quite unsympathetic to our plight. The oil will be gone. The water will be concentrated in a few hands. The air won't be of much use to anyone. Damn it all, don't eat us. We're AMERICANS. One last thing before I go to bed, one last little snippet from Great-Grandpa Vernon's World War II scrapbook. You may think of it as an eyewitness account of heroism of the highest order. You may dismiss it as particularly ghoulish propaganda. It is an excerpt from an interview with a Navy chaplain who survived Pearl Harbor, printed in the Oakland Tribune, Dec. 8 or 9 1941:
" I was in the thickest of the attack," said Chaplain MacGuire. "Our 130,000,000 Americans would glow if they could have seen how our boys died. It was glorious. Nay a whimper! They manned their guns until the decks buckled with the heat." |
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