You're simply not white enough. Get out.

Do not long for the night / to drag people away from their homes.
Beware of turning to evil / which you seem to prefer to your own discomfort - Job 36:20

Several years ago, I was on the phone with someone in the office of the United States Council on Energy Awareness, and I was lying my head off. I was trying to get on their mailing list.

The fellow on the other end of the phone was, by turns, suspicious, cagey, confrontational and interrogating. He wanted to know why I wanted to be on the list of this above-board, obviously grass-roots coalition of concerned citizens, rallying around a cause I think we can all get behind: the fact that there simply are not enough nuclear power plants in America.

So I was telling him that I was a high school physics teacher, and I wanted USCEA's excellent materials to share with my classes. None of this was true, of course. But then again, I wasn't the only one on the phone who was lying.

At the time, the USCEA was a well-funded and very sub rosa arm of the marketing departments of some key power companies, and they were enacting what can only be termed a sort of jiu-jitsu on the level of America's environmental memes. The USCEA was tasked with getting the message out, on the local and national levels, that the cleanest and brightest alternative to our energy "needs" was increased (and increasingly subsidised) nuclear power. Clean and green was the angle, natch.

I was successful in my ruse, and was the recipient for a few years of their materials, until the political climate changed in the Clinton years and the organization-formerly-known-as-USCEA changed its look and name and became something else with a different name but likely a similar agenda.

The main thing I was aware of (and this was the main reason I wanted on their list) was that the USCEA was slick. They sent media alerts. They put ads in magazines. They encouraged you to write your representatives, and they sent you the addresses of your senators and congress persons based upon your mailing zip code. They told you the words to say in your letter, and who to say it to. And by doing this, they made it look like writing your representative was your idea, and that their words were your words.

Like I said, slick.

My lie was a noble one. I got on their list and used their materials to contact my congress persons and senators about developments in the nuclear industry I was made aware of by USCEA's media alerts. Then, I detoured from the USCEA agenda, and instead of advocating for these inanities, I would urge my representatives to reject them, like any rational and sane member of the human species would. But during my time on that list, I also received a passive education in the big business of looking small - the power of grass root manipulation of public policies.

I was put in mind of all this just now, when I happened upon a full-page ad in the latest issue of Harper's. It's on page 11, if you have a copy handy and want to turn to it, or you can download a pdf of it here.

The top of the ad is a picture of a gridlocked highway, with the caption underneath reading, "One of America's Most Popular Pastimes." The ad copy underneath that begins the wind-up to the pitch by grousing about something everyone can agree to hate: traffic congestion. "For many people," the ad copy intones, "commutes to school and work and daycare can take up to three hours a day."

Now, I used to live in Atlanta, a city which, at the time, boasted the longest commutes in the nation - both in terms of average distance and average time per day. Getting across town could be Hell (forgive the pun) on wheels, and so I take this problem raised by the quotation above seriously. Commuting is no joke.

The answer in Atlanta, of course, was the same as it would be anywhere: more public transportation, live closer to where you work, buy a bike, telecommute, learn to live on less disposed income so you can downsize your car and your job, or, you know, walk once in a while. (My particular borough of Decatur enacted some of these sensible ideas as civic policy, making streets narrower and sidewalks wider, and focusing on the development of a planned town center with equal emphases on a central shopping district and the MARTA train station. Sensible. And it worked.)

This ad, however, sees the problem - and the solution- quite differently. The solution is not sensible downsizing of extravagance, but elimination from the streets of certain demographic groups. To paraphrase: white folks can't drive where they want to as fast as they want to because there are too many brown people in the way.

That's right. It turns out this ad is not about traffic congestion at all, really. It is about immigration, and the encouragement of a buggered and reactionary immigration policy that pumps hatred and fans hysteria (their tagline at the bottom of the ad is, "300 million people today. 600 million people tomorrow. Think about it.") while doggedly asserting that the real problem isn't our binge-and-sprawl approach to civic planning or our own over-bloated addiction to car culture. It's Pablo and Enrique, the men who just bussed your table and made sure your toilet seat was clean (or - why stop at day labor? - who prepared your taxes, taught your chemistry course, or anchored your local news. Money may make the "darkies" and the "brownies" more tolerable for a while, but when push comes to shove in the fast lane, they all look the same to us, don't they?)

Where I come from, this is called race-baiting, and it's of a species with the old arguments that say, "we can't let schools be integrated because those [fill in the insulting name for African-American men] can't be trusted around our women." It is an argument from fictional consequences, perpetuating comfortable bigotries and trafficking in stereotypes.

But the ad tell us, "Together we can do something about it." We. Who? Concerned White Folks, that's who. Jane Q. Citizen, soccer mom and den mother, blameless in her SUV, uniting with other lilly-white Janes across the nation to do something about it.

Sound familiar? Spend a few minutes on the websites listed (Californians for Population Stabilization, Americans Immigration Control Foundation, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform among them) and you will discover the same modus operandi that I encountered years back with the USCEA alive and well in the immigration wars. From the websites, you can download podcasts to share with your friends, print posters to put up, and - naturally - obtain media alerts and addresses for representatives to write. After all you, Jane Q. Citizen, carry a lot more weight and persuasive power than some evil lobbyist.

It is, in sum, fodder to help the bigots get organized, without drawing attention to the bigotry.

I don't know when Americans became such a cowardly people. Afraid of terrorists after 9/11? I can understand that, of course - even if ultimately we figure out that we trained and financed a lot of those terrorists back in the day with our wonderful covert military-industrial foresight. Afraid of our daughters and sons dying in an interminable war? Again, I find that a reasonable danger to be afraid of.

But afraid of traffic jams?

And worse - we seem not afraid enough to actually change our way-too-comfortable lives of excess and sprawl as we grasp madly for a solution, but rather afraid just enough to pass the blame off on those "others" (pick your ethnicity) who are somehow ruining "our" dolce vita.

This is pernicious rot, and it speaks ill of us (I'm talking to you, white folks). This ad campaign is a shill, and the "concerned citizens' organizations" behind them are a hissing and an abomination; well-oiled propaganda machines designed to get the Ruling and the Comfortable terrified of potential (not even actual) discomfort, and then equip them with choice pieces of the wrong data to parrot.

Like the old Who song says, It's a put on. Don't forget you're hiding.

My recommendation? If you're really worried about gridlock, sell your car. Change your life and your lifestyle. Stop blaming some fnorded "other" for problems we bring on ourselves and perpetuate.

Or... if you really want to get some karmic traction, join the mailing lists of these bozos and use their lobbying infrastructure against them - by advocating something sensible, decent and moral to our representatives - for a change.

Meta- Update

So Kira and I traveled from May 12 - 23, heading to the southwestern Netherlands, with a weekend detour in Köln, Germany. I had toyed with the idea of blogging about our adventures while we were there, but computer time was limited - and besides, we were having too much fun adventuring and exploring for me to duff away for an hour each day blogging about it.

The result? A set of superb memories, and roughly 2,500 pictures of ruins, cathedrals, canals, people, weird stuff and windmills. We had a fantastic holiday.

Now home, and back to the business of the non-sublime. So my hope is to distract myself from the everyday over the next couple weeks with a few posts highlighting some experiences we had and photos we took. More to come.

Thanks always for reading.

Dd.

Say hi to your mother.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Fashion is fleeting

(How's this for a shameless plug?)

As an experiment a few months back, I opened a CafePress shop and put some of my original artwork on some T-shirts, to see what would come of it.

It was a good experiment, but it has not generated the kind of interest to make it worth the expense of keeping the online shop open.

So, if you have simply been waiting for the right time to buy, this is it. As of May 5th, 2008, the Dault T-Shirts shop will be closed and the site pulled down.

And, of course, if t-shirts aren't your thing, feel free to click some other links here on the blog. I am sure you will find something interesting...

And as always, thank you for reading. See you soon, Dd.

Twilighting (a poem)

Birds, she
said, are crazy, little
machines of precision
amok in tandem
flightpaths of
bewilderment
and grace.

Parkour!

My friend Anson emailed me about a series of five webisodes he has recently directed for Dank and Nank (them being, as near as I can tell, a dadaist version of the Odd Couple)

I am not sure I understand it, but I enjoyed it. Hence, I am publicizing it. Dig:

A ribcage full of songbirds

Back in 1996, my Ground Hog's Day was interrupted. I was a passenger in a head-on car collision that, thankfully, everyone lived through. The event did, however, have some dire consequences. The driver went to the hospital with fractured vertebrae, and I cracked two of my left-side ribs. About three weeks after the accident, a guy I worked with said something that made me laugh, and one of the ribs broke all the way through. As I hit the ground, screaming, I remember thinking, "How can there be so much pain in me right now?"

Cleaning out some old boxes today, I ran across this, which I wrote a couple months after the accident, looking back at it. I've been dead-dog sick with the 'flu these past five days, and this seemed somehow fitting - so I thought I would share it. We are fragile things. That is what makes the preciousness of all these breaths so monstrously beautiful.

2.2.96: Invitation to the last dance. The life flashes later. All that hung in the air at that moment was clarity. Transparency. Lichtung. Giving over the body to limp buoyancy. Life collapses.

What we held, what we thought we held: these were not the same. No matter. There are certain points of inevitable closure. Boom.

At that point I was limp trusting; no other description is adequate. Later, in the hospital, fearful over Kay, the driver, I watched it on the news. It wasn't the same as being there. It never is.

Decode this, then. A haunting of memory acid-etched into the body. So many choices have passed with no consequence before this, inevitable and unchangeable. How un-American it feels to be burdened: to carry a moment, one moment, for the rest of your life.

Every medium of conduction has its own factor of resistance. Circumscribe with mathematics, enlist physics, demand a clarity mere words cannot provide. But when such a pure transparency is achieved, what is seen? How clean the glass before it shatters?

So, left with moments incestuously entwined with-us, to re-learn the language of breaking points, tolerances. So. leaving the clean, broken glass, but carrying the breaking with us. For we, like glass, are dust put to purposes and pressures; liquid, brittle, revealing. We yearn ourselves to transparency. We hope, at last, to see through this; even this.

Death of a Sneer

As of this writing, it is just under 24 hours since I have heard of the passing of one of the 'elder statesmen' of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley. I am not sad.

Though, I will admit, unlike the death of Reagan (an event I marked with gleeful toasting, and curses on his memory for all those sleepless nights in the '80's I spent, worried that the sonafabitch was going to Drop the Bomb, and not in a Gap Band way. Oh, and for many other reasons) I am not joyful at Buckley's passing. Just notably not sad.

Strange as it may sound, when I was a child, watching Firing Line was a bonding point between my mom and me. My mother esteemed Buckley - his erudition, his star power, his von Misean lust for free-market lebensraum. Me, I didn't know any better. Blame it on my youth.

In the years since the days of those halcyon Libertarian wet-dreams, however, I have learned many things about Buckley. His friendship and early championing of Reagan is not a selling point for me. The fact that he claimed Catholicism, yet sneered at everything that the Book of Acts and the Sermon on the Mount would imply about how humans should order their economic lives, reviles me. And, like the cherry on the white, oh-so-white whipped cream, there is this:

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. . . . It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

—William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957

I'm sorry, but that is (if you will excuse the expression) beyond the pale.

Now I realize that many will say that Buckley repudiated his racism later in life. Frankly, I don't care. Someone with his intelligence, and particularly his religious background, should never have been a racist at all. It is inexcusable, even if he simply held these opinions in private. The fact that he used his magazine as a national bully-pulpit to trumpet these opinions is, I am afraid, damnable.

These are harsh words for a theologian to use, I realize (though perhaps no harsher than Buckley's in 1957), and so I should couch them theologically. Within Catholic understandings (a worldview in which, apparently, Buckley saw himself), such actions are damnable if they are not confessed. And perhaps he did, at some point, confess them to his priest.

But if absolution is going to forestall condemnation, it requires genuine repentance. Repentance, moreover, requires a making of amends to those wronged. I cannot speak for William F. Buckley, so I do not know if he undertook these weightier matters of the soul in private. It does not appear so, from his public actions.

But we can still hope, at some level, that his heart was changed; that he truly repented of the very un-charitable, un-loving positions he espoused. We can hope.

But in my hoping, I am still not sad. God help him, yes. God help us all, in the wake of his legacy.

Open Letter to the Space Dudes

Dear NASA,

Remember that time y'all went to the Moon?

That was way rad.

Peace,

D.

Diverting away from the narrative

So I have been meaning to get back to this topic of music videos for a while.

Months ago, I was reading an analysis of an Aphex Twin video written by Tom Gersic. His essay was the original impetus for the commentary on Ganxtaville I did a while back. For what follows here. I want to trace some common themes and interesting connections between a series of music videos that come from disparate periods and genres. I think that there is an aesthetic that can be outlined. So here we go.

One of my favorite videos of all time is Peter Gabriel's Shock the Monkey. One of the things I like best about it is how the images and the "narrative" of the song don't quite sync up. Gabriel "performs" the song, singing along with the music, but this is not a performance video. Instead, the song lyrics are woven into a disorienting set of images that menace the viewer (and Gabriel himself) both through their content and their disconnectedness:



Now, getting from here to Aphex Twin might take some work, but I see a line that can be drawn between them. At first it might seem like these are apples and oranges. However, I think Gabriel's video is a precursor in some key ways. It sets the stage, but there are some other elements as well to consider.

First of all, I recommend watching the following short clip from John Carpenter's late-model horror classic, The Prince of Darkness, as it gives a good example of another aspect of this aesthetic that I will define in a moment:




What we see above is a style with some identifiable features: 1) disturbing, unexplained images 2) shot in handheld video, with 3) diegetic but sub-audible or garbled voices speaking. It's freakin' creepy. I remember the first time I saw this film in the theater in high school with all my crazy pals. We laughed at a lot of it (it's pretty laughable) - but this part was disturbing.

Another example is the handheld footage incorporated into M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, when we first get a glimpse of one of the aliens. The combination of documentary-style with the uncanny is effectively disorienting (I don't have a clip to show, but the DVD is readily available). Both of these movie moments created a very particular feeling in me.

So that's one piece. Then, one night a couple years ago, I was traveling for my job with Outward Bound, and was staying the night at a hotel in Chattanooga. I couldn't sleep, and turned on the TV, and was flipping channels when I ran across the beginning of Paul Hunter's video for Marilyn Manson's The Dope Show:



As you can see, there is a resemblance to the aesthetic in Prince of Darkness I described above. But even more, there was a resemblance in the creepy feeling I had watching it. Needless to say, I did not sleep well in that motel room that night.

One last piece I want to add to the mix is the old David Bowie video for Ashes to Ashes. I think the similarities to the Manson video will be immediately obvious. The blown-out colors in Bowie's version are due to early video effects pushed into hot overdrive, but you can easily see how it influenced what's going on in the Manson video. Plus, note the strange chorus/entourage in black here that parallel the weirdos in Manson's limo. Also, this video is contemporaneous to Shock the Monkey, and offers a similar style of non-performance-performance and disturbing disconnectedness:



So now several pieces are in place. 1) In Gabriel's video, we have the "little people," attacking and biting Gabriel and menacing him inexplicably, and inexplicable interactions with presences who are not really "there," but move from film/video presence into "reality" with the "true" characters. 2) We have the documentary-style menace of John Carpenter - slanted handheld video and diegetic sub-audible voices, 3) we have the androgynous skinny-creepy creature of the Manson video, who seems alternately menaced and menacing in the "narrative," and 4) we have, in Bowie's video, the character of the "old woman," who in the Bowie video walks beside him on the "shoreline." We can see all of these elements resurfacing in the Aphex Twin clip.

Keeping these elements in mind, take a look now at the Aphex Twin video for Come to Daddy:



This is not, of course, to imply that Chris Cunningham's work here is not original and striking. On the contrary, it is a synthesis of the highest order, drawing all such elements together and bringing them forward in astonishing ways.

I don't have any grand conclusions to draw from all this. I just think these sorts of close readings are cool. A sort of genealogy, if you will, of these twenty-five years or so of visual music.

Hope you enjoyed them like I have. Thanks for watching.

Its Fall in Nashville, and I'm feelin' artsy

Fall Break in Memphis

"This is the Remix"

(The following post contains some explicit language and such)

One of my favorite moments from Kill Bill 2 (and trust me, this was a film wherein I had a lot of favorite moments) was the monologue in the final act where David Carradine's character, Bill, compares our protaganista, Beatrix Kiddo, to Superman:



"Clark Kent is how Superman sees us." This is the point I want to linger on for a moment here. I want to linger over it in the context of a music video. (I think I'm going to spend several posts talking about music videos. It makes for a good distraction from the screaming agony that is dissertation rewriting.) The video in question is one I first encountered several years ago, when I was living in Berlin. It was played on German MTV all the time the summer I was there.

The video is DJ Tomekk's "Ganxtaville Part III" (again, there is some explicit material here):



Now. let's take a look at this a moment, in light of this insight from "Kill Bill" mentioned above. What, in other words, does this video indicate to us about how American culture is seen from the outside world? What can America learn about itself from this "alter ego" shown to us by this northern European gaggle of hip-hop wannabes?

1. The Mob is multicultural - The early scene, seen in reprise throughout the video, in which the cast is dressed in 1930's gangster drag, recalls James Cagney and the G-Men, or Kevin Costner and "The Untouchables." In "Ganxtaville," apparently, organized crime has no racial tensions. Sort of a nice thought, actually.

2. Doing the "We're driving the car" motion and the "We're bouncing the car and/or we're patting the ass" motion is cool, and makes you look tough and gangsta - They don't, of course. But in this alternative vision of America, everybody thinks they do. These motions look ludicrous, and if you walked into Bed-Stuy or Watts and did these motions you would be shot and mugged, your hubcaps would be stolen, and you would be shot again. But here, in "Ganxtaville," they are a rite of passage into macho-manhood, apparently.

To their credit, they do get the authentic "We're raising the roof" motion into the video, as well. Yes, in America, we actually do that motion, and yes, it looks as ridiculous as it does here in "Ganxtaville."

3. Aluminum baseball bats are cool, and make great fashion accessories - Don't ask me. But they're all over the damn place in "Ganxtaville."

4. Women in bikinis like to writhe near, and suck on popsicles around, dumpy looking white guys like DJ Tomekk and MC Murda Weapon (The skinny guy in the glasses and the pudgy guy in the jogging suit) and will wash their cars gladly - In the real America, they don't. Unless you pay them hell of money. So maybe this is true in both America and "Ganxtaville." That might explain a lot about how, and why, these incongruous writhing women came to be in the video. Yes. They are, in fact, European porn stars. Hence doing such things with dumpy guys (and worse) is sort of de rigeur for them.

5. A brief excursus about this guy, MC Murda Weapon - He's pudgy. He's dumpy. When he does the "we're driving the car" motion, he looks especially silly. Yet he has chosen this incredibly "tough" moniker. I mean, Murda Weapon? That implies tough. So he's definitely making the attempt to be "hard" and "street." The difficulty arises, though, in the fact that he's German. His handle, which sounds tough and hard in English, is a translation of the German name "Tätwaffe" - which to untrained American ears is virtually indistinguishable from the phrase "tit waffle." And I'm sorry, but that is not tough at all. Painful, yes. Tough? No.

6. Note at 1:17 - The inexplicable, mirror shaded, uniformed officer of the law. He seems to be watching all this, unaffected by its implications. It's clearly an intentional shot in the video. I just have no idea what it means.

7. The Mexicans - Ditto these guys. In "Ganxtaville," the Latinos and the hip-hop crowd intermingle in a way that simply doesn't occur here in America. I mean, sure, there's some good Mexican gangsta rap, like Control Machete and such, but you don't really see Snoop Dog and L'il John hanging with them hombres. I mean, there's Dirty South, and then there's Really South. ¡Ándale!

But, anyway, there they are. Bouncing cars. Gang signs. Rap video. Only in "Ganxtaville."

So here is America, as seen through the eyes of crazy insane Danish DJ's and German Gangstas. I honestly do not think this is a caricature; I believe it is an homage. I'm just not sure to what. But, as they say in "Ganxtaville," kein Stress. Peace.

Plus, in real life, Kiefer totally put the smackdown on a Christmas tree.

So on Friday night Kira and I and some friends went and saw the opening-night showing of The Bourne Ultimatum (a film for which, all through the anticipatory months, the proper title eluded me. Consistency is so vital to my subconscious that I only ever remembered it as The Bourne Ubiquity. So it goes). Let me say, front and center, that I really, really enjoyed the movie. I am a fan of the Bourne franchise and I think they managed to maintain the smart action and intrigue of the first two very well. I recommend them all. They hold up to multiple viewings and are worth your time.

But as we left the theater, a question started to form in my mind, and it has kept me a little preoccupied in the days since. So I offer my quandary to the Universe:

Who is more of an absolute badass: Jason Bourne, or Jack Bauer of 24?

This is not as simple as it might seem at first gloss. Yes, of course, Jason Bourne is a mentally-reprogrammed human killing machine, a $30 million rogue assassin with reflexes honed to a keen razor edge. Yes, Jason Bourne can slip effortlessly in and out of identities and countries and has the smarts to completely befuddle the American intelligence establishment.

But, at the beginning of Season Two, Jack Bauer cut a man's head off with a hack saw.

Now, don't get me wrong. On screen we see Jason Bourne accomplish some amazing things with simple household objects. He stabs a man with a pen, knife-fights with a rolled-up magazine, blows a house to smithereens with a toaster, and in this most recent movie he hands a man his ass using a coffee table book and a hand towel. You get the feeling he could invade a small country single-handed armed only with the most recent issue of Martha Stewart's Living. Clearly, Jason Bourne brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "domestic violence."

However, Jack Bauer cut a man's head off. With a hack saw.

Jason Bourne was a government killer. He speaks seemingly uncountable numbers of languages. He has more fake identification than an entire high school graduating class. He can take on an entire room full of armed men and survive.

Nevertheless, Jack Bauer removed a man's head with a hack saw, put the head in a bag like a bowling ball, and handed the bag to somebody after driving across town with it in his car. On network television.

I heard a story once. It goes like this. While Bruce Lee was still alive and teaching kung fu in Hollywood, there was only one student of whom he admitted being afraid. He feared Steve McQueen. He was afraid of Steve McQueen, it is reported, because, in Lee's words, McQueen "simply would never, ever stop." Knock him down, he gets up. Unrelenting. It was unsettling.

To admit this, of course, does not in any sense diminish the total badassness of Bruce Lee. It simply highlights a little-known but universal state of affairs: no matter how bad you are, there is one thing you will come across in your career as a badass that might, just might, give you the freakin' willies.

And so, as I said above, mad props to Jason Bourne, or whatever his real name is. He is certainly bad.

But, at the end of the day, I still think I'll put my money on the hacksaw.












Categories: film, television

Business as Usual

So I was listening to NPR yesterday morning and heard the hue and the cry being issued over at the Dow Jones corporation like shares of common stock over the takeover bid being hoisted up the flagpole by rogue pirate Rupert Murdoch. He might take over The Wall Street Journal.

The fear is great. Editorial standards may be compromised. The independence of this flagship of journalism may be steered instead to serve the biased business interests of Murdoch's vast financial empire. And, most clearly, there is a fear that whoever might mount a successful takeover bid - be it Murdoch, Mordor or Moloch - will in the end slash the company and leave it in tatters and ruins, a shell of its former glory. NPR's David Folkenflik can be heard probing the gravitas of the situation, asking after the concerns of the Bancroft family, Dow's major shareholders, and wondering aloud if this "exemplar of American journalism" will be sullied.

Give me, as they say, a break.

To blanch at such possibilities is, to my lights, simply to confuse a corporate mouthpiece like the Wall Street Journal with something of actual value to the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness in the day-to-day existence of the majority of American citizens. You know, things like drinkable water, clean air, secure jobs, and affordable health care. The folks at NPR's business desk seem unable to think of this newspaper in terms other than that which one, in days gone by, would have considered reserved for national resources (which can - but should not be - strip mined) or national ideals (which can - but should not be - compromised).

But this takeover is not of that class of debacles. It is precisely the sort of thing the "independent" editorship of the Journal has been championing since...well, there's never been a time they haven't championed it, actually. Leveraged buyouts making the way for tyrant CEO's to radically gut once-proud and -prosperous companies leaving mountains of pink slips, decimated communities and worthless pension funds in their wake is the very gut and gristle of what the Journal lauds on its pages. Simply look at Flint, Michigan or listen to glib economists gush about sneaky corporateering to the likes of Tony Robbins or on financial websites: the business of this country is business, and this is what savvy businessmen do.

So, as for me and my house, there will be no tears shed for a lost Eden of journalistic independence unstained by the apple juice of Murdoch's business interests. Murdoch, for my money, is just the most recent and the most visible of the snake-oil salesmen who have been running this country since the Boston Tea Party: a bunch of Anglos who are thinking with their pocketbooks, disguised in native drag to make us all buy the ruse that they actually belong here, dumping our Life, Liberty, etc. over the side of the ship in the name of their representation and happiness.

Let the Wall Street Journal hang, say I. And may its readership - who so often seem beyond the touch of conscience or consequence - tremble in the shadow of its swaying. Now that would be an exemplar to American journalism. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Folkenflik?

A helpful reminder from Unknown Hinson

Riding with the Driver

So I was walking through Hillsboro Village yesterday morning - it was early and my car was being fixed at the local repair shop - and I was walking out of the art gallery at the end of the street when I was the recipient of some free-wheeling evangelism.

I say "free-wheeling" because said evangelizer was in motion, leaning out of a car window as it went through the heart of the Village block there. Also free-wheeling because it was sort of "gamble" evangelism, guerrilla evangelism. Shot-in-the-dark evangelism.

Here's how it went down.

I own a lot of t-shirts, and (as many of you know) a goodly percentage of these are Superman t-shirts. So I had one on yesterday, and its hard to miss - big red "S" and all. And as I walked out of the gallery this dude leaned out of the car window and shouted - near as I can tell - "Hey, bud, even Superman needs Jesus!"

As is my wont, I reacted as I usually do. I raised my fist triumphantly and shouted back, "Amen."

But then I was given to ponder, as his car continued to slowly pass me by. I noticed the "Got Jesus?" bumper sticker on the back of the car, and noted as well his goatee and the foreign make of his sedan. Who was I dealing with, exactly? A born-again Emerger? A backsliding Baptist who feels guilty he got drunk last Friday and is trying to do penance? What assumptions was he making about me, anyway? What assumptions did I make about him?

I wonder sometimes what sort of image I present to the world. What does the casual observer see when their eyes behold me. I honestly have no idea. In my life I have run a curious gamut: atheist, to eastern-spiritualist, to christo-pacifist, to evangelical protestant, to somewhat-traditional-somewhat-crypto-somewhat-militant-catholic. No matter where I've been, or thought, and no matter where I've landed, I guarantee you there's always somebody somewhere still thinks my ass needs to be saved.

Not that I mind that. Somebody somewhere is likely right, at any given moment.

But what about this moment, yesterday? This drive-by proselytizer, this missionary in a Mazda? The interaction was so brief, I still don't know exactly what was happening. Was it merely an affirmation of the lordship of Christ, even over cartoon characters? I can get behind that (just please let's don't sing about it, please). Was it some sort of Isaiah gig, denying the reality of the false powers and the idols of the world (as represented by that trademarked and TIME/Warner besmirched "S" I was sporting on my pecks)? I can get behind that, too.

Was it a gesture, an assumption, that I was lost? Needed to hear the Good News? Perhaps. But how effective is such a shouted, probably mis-heard soundbite over traffic noise and a million other distractions? Wouldn't it have been more classy to stop the car, in a sort of reverse-Eunuch-on-the-road deal, and actually get to know me for a minute, find out where the scripture was sticking in my craw, if at all?

I think of the old story the radio evangelist Bob George tells, about how he would grill his young son after school, whenever the boy mentioned a new friend. "Did you tell him about Jesus?" George relates this story to illustrate the danger of evangelism-by-the-numbers, of when "spreading the good news" feels more like the point-spread in a football bet. (He doesn't ask his boy that question anymore.)

I guess what I'm saying, both to that long-gone guy in the car and now to all of you, is this: Yes, when the time comes, even the stones will shout. The cars will shout, too, of their own Accord (sorry), and proclaim the real Order of the world and who is in charge. Everything will. Every tongue confessing, every knee bowing.

But we don't live in that time, yet. Here and now, it is not enough to shout a platitude. Here and now, the way forward is the same as its been for the last two-thousand years: the conversation on Mars Hill, the feet dusty from the road (not the accelerator), one cloak, no pouch. Slow time and needy interactions - mutually needy. Not the kind of "I've got the answer you've got the need" jazz that so often gets passed off as compassionate Christian "being in the world but not of it."

I hope, when my moments come - to witness, to "spread the Good News," to even (God forbid) join the ranks of the martyrs - I hope I'm moving slow, and doing a lot of listening, and hearing where this soul is coming from before I start trying to act all high and mighty about where its going. I hope.

And I read somewhere that hope might not be in vain - so maybe there's hope for me. And for the guy in the car.

That'd be super.

Of the Six Things That I Love, Here are Five.

1. The San Antonio Spurs

2. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies

3. Liz Phair's mouth (see left)

4. Bartlett Pears

5. Pope John Paul II


Thank you very much. You're on your own. Goodnight.

Unfortunately, you can't exorcise Maxwell's Demon

So, its a curious thing about ovens. Have you ever noticed?

Let's say you want to heat up a nice tasty batch of chocolate chip cookies. Mmmm mmmm good. So you preheat the oven to 350 degrees, drop the dollops of dough on the non-greased cookie sheet, and pop them in for 10 (gooey) to 12 (crunchy) minutes.

Now, the yumminess before us likely distracts us - at this point - from paying much attention to this matter that I now want to foreground, but let's tarry a moment and ask the question as the cookies cool:

What's going on with the oven?

The oven is cooling too, you see. 350 degrees is hot (that's why you own "oven mitts"), and it takes a while to cool down. In fact, I bet if you went back a half-hour later the inside of the oven would still be at least a little warm to the touch. The heat is dissipating, going elsewhere, but it takes time.

This is thermodynamics in a nutshell.

Here, on the Earth, we are basically moving a more-or-less static amount of heat around. In daily life, it looks like this: You turn on an air conditioner, and the heat in your home is transferred outside. You eat the cookies, and your body chemically burns them to nourish you. When you feel the wind or watch a rainstorm, you are seeing the effects of these temperature differentials at work on a slightly larger scale. On an even larger scale, as the Earth passes through the cold void of space, we lose some of the heat held in the envelope of our atmosphere - an amount that is more or less equivalent to the heat we collect from the thermonuclear reactions of the Sun burning some 93 million miles away. The amount of heat stays pretty much the same, it just moves from place to place, so some areas are temporarily hotter than others.

So our planet is a pretty efficient heat-exchanger, both on the macro scale (we lose heat at about the same amount as the Sun gives us heat) and the micro (Honey, turn on the AC, please).

I watch television so rarely that I am always amazed (agog? apoplectic? anguished?) when I am in a situation when I can spend a few minutes channel surfing. That happened today (I'm staying in a hotel for a work conference) and I happened across a show called Sunset Tan.

Now, on a lot of levels, this show is a study in thermodynamics. It is, if you will, all about moving heat from one place to another. In just the few minutes I watched it, this much was clear.

I was particularly struck by the nine year old girl, brought in by her mother in order to be perfectly tanned for school pictures (the young lady, by the way, got the "cocktail" package - both the bed and the spray - the same one that Britney had gotten earlier that day. "You want the same as Lindsay Lohan, don't you, honey?" asks the mother. Enthusiastic nodding). "This is L.A.," the bronzed twink ex-busboy manager opines, "You've gotta have the darkest tan."

Later the show dissolves into the sort of interpersonal acrimony so resplendent these days in reality TV (the regional manager who bitches out the store managers for not being available "24 hours, seven days a week" even though none of the managers can get the regional manager to return their text messages or phone calls was an especial treat). I have no idea if these people are real, or if this is just subtle parody - but I guess in L.A. there is no way to tell. I mean, in a land of that much sunshine, the fact that one would go to a tanning salon at all sort of begs the question, doesn't it?

The fact that reality TV shows like like American Idol have managed to turn the cold shoulder of rejection and failure into a hot career opportunity is itself a fine illustration of a key thermodynamic principle. In any closed system, unless external energy is added, differences and extremes will eventually equalize and become indistinguishable. Like the Earth upon which American "culture" happens, a state of stability is reached.

This is a roundabout way of admitting that - even though I really want to - I don't think I can, in good conscience, blame American popular culture (as reflected in L.A.-based reality TV) for the problem of global warming. And it breaks my heart that I cannot. But I can't. Reality TV simply moves the heat around. It does not significantly increase our atmospheric temperatures - no more than the hot air in Washington, at any rate.

Instead, I offer this explanation for the current climactic crisis. Not a popular one - in fact, I have not heard it ventured or discussed elsewhere. So it may simply be my kookiness. That being said, however, the theory does attend to these matters of thermodynamics that have preoccupied this little meditation.

Let's return for a moment to that oven with which we started all this, and the time it takes to cool. Like the atmosphere of the Earth, the lining of the oven is a relatively efficient insulator. Left to its own devices, the oven hovers at just-about room temperature. However, when you add a great deal of heat to it, it holds it for a long period of time. When energy is added, the heat dissipates relatively slowly. When you bake the cookies, it takes time for that 350 degrees to go elsewhere.

Now imagine what would happen if you heated that oven to 700 degrees. Then 1400 degrees. Then 2800, and then... you get the idea.

It would take a bit of time for that heat to go somewhere, wouldn't it? And while the temperature difference between the inside and the outside of the oven was equalizing, the room would heat up, and then, from the room, to the outside, and so on. Eventually, you wouldn't notice the heat differences because they would seem relatively equal. We are, after all, dealing with relative temperature extremities. Even 2800 degrees is a somewhat reasonable temperature for the Earth, and so we are, at the end of the day, still only moving heat around a bit, not significantly adding to it within the system.

But what would happen if the temperature in that oven was heated to, say, a couple of million degrees?

Now suddenly we are dealing with a different order of magnitude. This is not a natural temperature for the insulated envelope of atmosphere around the Earth - in fact, the only natural object anywhere near us that generates that kind of heat is the Sun, and it is not actually near us (except in cosmic terms). If you put that kind of energy into your oven, and then opened it, I guarantee you it would really heat your kitchen when you opened the oven door, and likely the whole neighborhood and town, to a temperature that would make things like molten steel seem as innocuous and gentle as, say, a tanning bed.

And because the Earth is, like your oven, a pretty good insulator, the heat you released from you kitchen would linger around a while, heating a greater and greater area as the enthalpic and entropic forces of thermodynamics equalized across the system. The difference being that a couple million degrees goes a lot farther in its effect once equilibrium is again reached.

What I want to point out - and what I haven't heard mentioned in any of the discussions of global warming so far - is that during the middle part of the last century our country (and several others) did exactly what I have just imagined here, with our oven, in the form of nuclear testing in the atmosphere and, later, underground. Not just once or twice, but literally thousands of times.

Though each of the blasts had their own characteristics and differences, one common feature to most, if not all, of them is this: the initial burst of prompt and thermal radiation coming from the fissile core is, at its coolest, about twice the temperature of the surface of the Sun (for some fission bombs it goes as high as three times the Sun).

The United States alone has detonated over a thousand fission devices of various types, not to mention the fissile cores of commercial and military nuclear reactors across the planet. Each of these is generating a glowing spark of new heat into the relatively efficient insulation envelope of the Earth. Not, in other words, simply moving heat around, but creating new heat - vast and unimaginable amounts of it - in isolated but iterated and reiterated instants for almost forty years.

Where on Earth do we foolish mortals (who now wield the hammers of the gods) expect all that heat to go? We have equilibrium with one (one!) comparable heat source that balances the loss of heat in our atmosphere and its over ninety million miles away.

It has always seemed strange to me, having survived the paranoia of the Eighties, that we were so afraid of the effects of nuclear war when we had been, for an entire generation, effectively having one right here in our own country - in Nevada, in New Mexico, in the South Pacific, and high in the stratosphere.

That last one I mentioned - a test called Starfish-Prime - had a measurable effect on the Van Allen radiation belts that interact with the Earth's magnetic poles, in addition to crippling human-made satellites and disrupting communications and electronic equipment across the northern hemisphere. The forces created in nuclear blasts - the electromagnetic and ionizing - are well-known to linger and bounce through the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic fields for years after a blast. Why should we expect the thermal effects to be any different?

They aren't any different. The great actuarial table of thermodynamics is against us. In a closed system (like the relatively efficient insulator of the Earth's atmosphere) heat stays around, becoming general and ubiquitous, until it bleeds away. Slowly. And if you add insane amounts of heat to such a system - even if it doesn't seem to heat everything at once (because these things take time) it will. Don't just trust me: I am merely quoting the experts.

At the turn of the century James Clerk Maxwell asked what would happen to an imaginary closed system if you could put a demon into it - one that would be able to sort out the high-energy molecules of a gas from the low energy ones. The demon would be able to sort out energy problems without creating more energy problems - would be able, in other words, to deal with heat without creating more heat. A wonderful, if wholly imaginary, solution (and one that would make those in the present administration, perhaps, blush with hope): salvation without sacrifice; an instantaneous reversal of our slow and dedicated penchant for destruction (self- and otherwise).

In times such as these, such a creature might be useful. Some might argue we should find such a demon and make a deal with it. Others might observe that it may well have been such a deal that got us in the present mess in the first place.

Perhaps it is already too late for those sorts of eleventh-hour bargains. Too late, at any rate, for a "quick fix" that doesn't involve some very, very hard sacrifices. It's a devilish reality, even compared to the treacheries of an L.A. tanning salon.

So that's my theory. You can disagree with my conclusions, and I am happy to debate it over a plate of chocolate chip cookies (I prefer gooey). Though I rather think, from here forward, we might be wise to eschew debate in favor of something more effective. Like prayer.