Our Descent Into Madness

A few weeks ago, I read Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Wolf extensively and dauntingly documents what she calls current U.S. government’s “echoes” of past fascist shifts around the globe. Suffice it to say that the book presents the tireless factual groundwork from which to draw innumerable parallels between this most recent U.S. administration’s move toward a closed society (promulgated by the utilization of ten steps, which Naomi Wolf defines and titles her chapters as: Invoke an external and internal Threat, establish secret prisons, develop a paramilitary force, surveil ordinary citizens, infiltrate citizens’ groups, arbitrarily detain and release citizens, target key individuals, restrict the press, cast criticism as “espionage” and dissent as “treason”, and subvert the rule of law) and the successful closure of societies past.

While I can’t say I was utterly shocked by the premise that, hmm, the U.S. lately has been looking a little like, well, certain fascist dictatorships of latter centuries, it was still somewhat surprising just to hold so many pages positively littered with evidence with which to support such an observation. And also surprising that, well, the fascist shift now taking place in the U.S. is not at all veiled, really. Not only are the tactics now being used “echoes” of ones used before in Germany and/or Italy, etc., in many cases they are actually just the same ones, right down to the carefully chosen words used by the decider and his cohorts to rationalize them. And the utilization is overt and known. Which brings us to the book’s most important lesson.

The fascist shift will be reported on. We will continue to read about wiretapping, about waterboarding, about Blackwater. But this is not a sign that democracy stands inevitable and impenetrable in defense of its purveyors. This is a part of the shift itself, and is calculated. Knowledge of the shift is not uncensored because the powers that be would have us well informed and intellectually able to engage the reality of our situation, but because we cannot be intimidated if we do not know what’s going on, and fascist shift requires citizen intimidation. We’ll read about all of it in the papers, in the magazines, and hear about it on the radio. But nothing will seem that different in the majority of our daily lives. Until it all does.

And now, the moral of the story manifested in action. On a more concrete and personal level.

I’m an anxious traveler. The night before I was to fly home to my family and friends from the Big City for the holidays, I finished the chapter called “Arbitrarily Detain and Release Citizens”, set primarily in airports. I finished reading about “the list”–yes, there really is a list– of outspoken and dissenting political activists and academics kept by the TSA and, on the internet, the cruelties suffered by one Icelandic traveler Erla at JFK airport because of a three week visa overstay in the U.S. a decade ago.

And so I awoke frazzled, grasping for my photo ID and ticket information, and faced with a dilemma I had never been inspired to acknowledge before. I had packed a ton of books, mostly purchased for last semester’s political resistance class, into my suitcase and was planning to finish The End of America aboard my next flight. When I realized: they will see what I’ve been reading. They will know what information I have been ingesting about this, what I’m likely to say about that. They will know. “They” might track my e-mails, access my medical records, infiltrate any community group they think I might join. And have thus been successful enough in their endeavors that at 7:00 a.m. on the morn of my departure from school and long awaited return home, this is what I’m worried about. I am not only stressed and paranoid: this is what I am supposed to fear.

So, of course, I left all my packed books in their places and continued on my way with Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot in my carry-on. I had to. I paid both time and money to learn something in that political resistance class, after all. I didn’t get strip-searched when I went through security. Or even a second glance. I am completely low-profile, after all (but don’t most of us believe we are? It could be anyone…)

And when I took my seat aboard the aircraft, unabashedly opened my book and flashed the cover, I saw that the guy across the aisle from me was…dun dun dun…reading the same one. We gave each other a knowing nod, he said “crazy” a few times, and I made it home safely. Presumably, so did he.

But, given the systems recently put in place, it’s just as logical that it was by chance. Or that he didn’t. Or that we will simply think we know until we don’t. And in the name of defending democracy, we must reclaim the ordinary, every day patriot’s task of defending it, for it may only defend us until it no longer does.

Just got back from the desert (we had a wonderful time); I’ve jumped into my feed aggregator head first. And what should find me first but this post at Pharyngula. The post is about this incident, in which a kid in a high school English class decided to incorporate tearing pages out of a Bible into his class presentation, causing great distress for at least one religious student. He prefaced his shenanigan with the statement, “I’m going to do this because I can. I’m going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren’t going to be able to comprehend.”

Pharyngula blogger PZ Myers’ reaction:

Ripping up a copy of your own book is perfectly legal. Freaking out because somebody tore pages out of a book is silly — while I can’t approve of destroying any books on general principles, the kids at that school learned a valuable lesson: nothing is sacred.

Which is a fair enough, I suppose, but, I think, pretty inadequate.

Sure, it’s legal to ruin any inanimate object that one owns. As it should be. But the destruction of books, while not criminal, isn’t analogous to smashing a dinner plate.

Books are boxes of information. They are cultural currency. They are time-capsules. All books, even false or stupid or bigoted books, are worthy of preservation. They are, in a word, sacred.

Fascists and and religious zealots destroy books. It is part of the quest to destroy freedom, to destroy intellectualism, to destroy history. And it’s fundamentally wrong. Anybody who values knowledge, science, progress — ahem, atheists and secular people — should be opposed to destroying books.

And students shouldn’t destroy books — any books — in school. That’s just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Destroying a book is so obviously antithetical to learning that there is no reason it should ever be permitted in a classroom. Under any circumstances.

Now add to that the fact that this kid was being a bit of an asshole and clearly pulling a melodramatic stunt for attention, and this is a pretty condemnable action. Indignation is not silly, it’s necessary. Destroying a copy of a work of literature of immeasurable historic significance is ignorant, unnecessary, and unhelpful.

From Bloggernista, it’s true that this video is beautiful and heartening…

…Until you remember that for all the talk or courage, justice, and equality, Mr. Obama lacks the courage to come out in favor or full equality for queer such as myself. He also lacks the courage to admit as much.

If he’s going to claim to support equality, he should support full equality. If he’s not going to that — and he doesn’t seem about to — I’d like him to at least have the guts to look someone like me in the face and admit that when he talks about justice and equality, he is only partially including me.

I’m voting for Mike Gravel in the primary.

Again from Boing Boing, I present you with another set of remarkable images of human orifices, this time focusing on the eyes instead of the mouth. It’s a gorgeous project called Eyescapes, a series of close-ups of human irises freed of their aqueous humor. They’re the work of one Rankin, whose other work I don’t appreciate half as much, particularly his disturbingly unsexy high fashion erotica.

Please do browse the gallery. Those thumbnails pale in comparison.

Edited to add: Upon further exploration, I like this project of his quite a lot: Snog.

It’s really pretty strange how similar our various openings are. The vagina and mouth are compared pretty constantly, from decidedly vulvaphobic vagina dentata myths to the fact that the labia are called labia. And now, from Boing Boing, this. Photoshopped pictures of cultural icons who’ve undergone virtual surgery, replacing their eyes with twin clones of their mouths. They’re both revolting and magnetic. Mostly revolting.

Any other Sandman fans will surely be sharing my flashbacks to the Corinthian.

Isabel sent me a link to an interesting NYT article about shopdropping. Shopdropping is the opposite of shop-lifting, though sort of in the same spirit; instead of stealing an item, artists and activists carefully leave them behind. Sometimes this is in the name of self-promotion, like leaving copies of one’s self-published book or CD, or slipping one’s card between the pages of books and magazines.* Other times the intentions are more overtly political.

This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”

“Our point is to put a message, not a price tag, on them,” said Aaron Gach, 33, a spokesman for the group.

So awesome.

And this swings both ways, of course. There have also been instances of Christianists putting flyers in LGBT and science sections of bookstores.

This sort of activism is definitely something I would like to more of, and more aggressively than we have before. We’ll surely blog it if we do, unless it’s something so incredibly hardcore that blogging about it would be unwise.

* Emily and I have done this! it was a lot of fun, though I have no idea how successful.

Sorry things have been so dead around here. I’ve been staying with my girlfriend at the house she’s sitting, where we only today discovered internet. I’m hoping to be entertaining today, but tomorrow I’m joining Emily in the desert for the weekend. I’m looking forward to Dionysian days of sin and self-indulgence, in which we manage to forget the difference between night and day.

After that I think we’re both coming back for a few days, and then both leaving again, with several of our friends and lovers in tow. So things will probably be patchy for the duration of our luxuriously long winter break (i.e. until the middle of January).

Happy Gregorian New Year, everybody! May we all have a year filled with fancy and good fruit, whether we consider it 2008, 5768, negative 4, or something else altogether.

If anybody feels moved to share their New Years Eve plans, or what they did for the holidays (or lack thereof), or a link you think we’d enjoy, or anything else really, feel free to do so here. And if not, that’s fine, too.

I’ve been distracted from blogging today by a fun project. To make it up to any other not-Christmas-celebrating people bored with the everything being closed today, I’m going to blog about my project. That way you all can do it too, probably better than I have.

So there are a bunch of way to make pins (and pendants, and earrings) out of old metal bottle caps. This is the chronicle of how I happened to make mine today, which you could read as a DIY guide, if you wanted.

For this project, you will need bottle caps, pin backings (or safety pins), clear casting resin (and catalyst), super glue, and some images you like. I recommend images of your favorite dead people, whoever they may be; black and white faces look ghostly and wonderful sunk into polymer, and I for one prefer specters to slogans. But to each her own.

First, cut your images to the size of the interior space of your caps. Push them inside. You don’t need to glue them or anything, as long as they’re wedged in there.

Next comes the fun part: toxic chemicals. Do this part outside, far away from animals and children. Wear plastic gloves.

The resin you buy will come with instructions. Basically though, you pour out the amount you’ll need — just a small spoonful per cap — into a jar you won’t be using for any other purpose again, mix in the correct amount of catalyst, and then put a dollop in each bottle top. Then you’ll want to leave them somewhere to harden, like your garage or basement. Mine took about twenty-four hours. Don’t be afraid to poke them gently with a stick to see if they’re done yet; if they’re still wet, your poke-mark will disappear. I wouldn’t recommend touching them, though.

Once they’ve hardened, it’s time to attach the pin backings or safety pins. I used pin backings; safety pins would definitely work, but might take a little more fiddling.

If they harden on an incline, you’ll get an interesting wave effect, which I rather like:

Anyway. You just superglue the pin element to the back of the caps and let it dry, and you’re all set. Before we get to the fun pictures of the finished pins, I want to talk briefly about the green factor of this project. Like everything, there are good parts and bad. Some pros and cons:

+ it’s handmade/DIY
+ uses recycled caps
+ uses family/CC/public domain images (mine did, anyway; I recommend doing the same), making a personalized, anti-commercial product

- uses toxic chemicals: resin and glue (anyone have an idea for getting around this?)
- uses some new products, i.e. resin and, in my case, pin backings

So a truly ideal project would figure a way to get around buying anything, like by using old safety pins instead of new backings, and attaching them in some imaginative way that doesn’t use glue. I can’t think of an eco-friendlier way to do the resin, besides maybe getting old or rejected resin from a business somehow, instead of buying it new.

Anyway. The following two pins are ones I made for myself, of my grandfather and great-grandparents respectively, in pre-War Poland.

And here’s one I made for Emily of Emma Goldman (shh, she doesn’t know about it yet):

I also made two more, one of Beethoven for our piano friend the Brendenator, and one of a hot air balloon. Lastly, a picture of the balloon pin in action.

I’m heading up to my family’s ranch in a remote desert location without internet access for a few days, and will be back and forth between there and Santa Fe for the next few weeks. Which means that my fingers will be just aching to blog upon my various returns. Daisy may accompany me on my short, dusty travels for a while in the near future…but until furthur notice, she’ll be just a click away from the blogosphere and will likely keep you all regularly entertained and thinking as usual.

Have a lovely few weeks, and more.

~Emily

I sound like I’m talking to and about Jews here, because I’m Jewish. But I hope anyone who reads this post will construe it as applying equally to themselves — yourselves — and to your histories, to the fullest extent possible. Certainly these ideas apply broadly to the US-American middle class experience.

I’m a high school senior, technically. Due to a critical combination of good grades, anger, and my school running out of classes for me, I get to spend this year taking all my courses at an artsy local college.

The arrangement is really perfect for this year. Next year, however, is the subject of a lot of discussion, anxiety, and crying, as I’ve kind of blogged before.

Here is the problem. From early childhood, I’ve been on track to get excellent financial aid at the ritzy private school of my choosing. I’ve been groomed for a very particular script: ace high school, move to the other side of the country away from everything I know and love (love meaning hate, presumably), and earn a badge from an institution of good repute, complete with all the elitist, capitalist, racist, bullshit baggage that kind of thing carries.

So. I’ve got my GPA and my SAT scores, and my applications should be soaring out to the Ivy Leaguers within the next few weeks.

But. But, but, but.

I’m good at writing papers. I’m good at getting good grades. But I would be a liar if I said that was what I wanted to do with my life for the next four years.

I would be a liar if I said I wanted to go off by myself to get plunked in with a bunch of strangers, try to reinvent myself when I already know who I am. I’ve already made the best friends anyone could hope to. And I’m extremely skeptical of the value of a $100,000 “education” when I already know I learn exponentially more everyday reading and talking to people than I ever have in a classroom.

Add to that the facts that I don’t know what kind of major could mesh with my interests, I don’t feel pulled toward any particular school, and frankly I want to stay in Santa Fe with my girlfriend, and there you have it.

On to the real point of this post.

At my last-ever meeting with my special ed case manager, we had a really interesting conversation about all of this. My case manager (an alum of the college I’m at this year, weirdly enough) was talking about how my high school does a shit job of offering college counseling to many of its students. Paraphrasing:

“A lot of the old New Mexican families get really frustrated with [the principal] telling their kid they need to go to the other side of the country. They have their whole family here, their whole network, and it’s just not the right path for them — they want to go to in-state schools and stay connected with their support system, and it’s unfair that other college paths get privileged over that. But, I know you’re not from that.”

My mother: “Well, we are from that — we were. In Europe.”

In Europe. Translation: before the Nazis destroyed those communities.

So what then? That’s it? We just give up on community now?

From now on we will send each of our children as far away as possible, to set up a different camp in some distant land. Our children will want nothing to do with us.

Why? Why on earth would we do this? In the name assimilation? In the name of surrender? In name of spreading out so they can’t get us this time?

Fuck. That. Shit.

Community didn’t end in with the war in 1945. Love did not end. Family did not end. Real victory does not come from defeating the enemy; real victory will happen only when we have supplanted their destruction with creation.

The existence of Israel is not a reason to accept Diaspora and disconnect for everyone else. The fact that our communities have been decimated is not — is never — a reason not to rebuild them. If there is anything to be learned from Jewish history, it is the value, the beauty, the necessity of overcoming oppression. Overcoming devastation. Again and again and again.

I believe we need community like we need water. We need real community. We don’t need relatives we hate who we see once a year because we have to. We don’t need our friends and comrades to berate us, to inflict social standards upon us, to encourage us to bow to cultural expectations and in doing so ignore our own abilities and talents and needs.

We don’t need to leave our friends and families and become new people. We don’t need to get elitist educations that will shuttle us into money-making, world-ruining jobs.

We need love. We need friends, we need siblings, we need comrades. We need the relentless daily experience of our fellows giving and working for us, of giving and working for them. We need sharing. We need understanding.

We need to gather everyone we know in our bedrooms, our attics, our backyards and basements to spend time, days and weeks and precious hours, seeing one another. Sharing ourselves.

My friends and I do this by playing songs for each other. We draw pictures and paint paintings together. We cry and scream and laugh and hug and drink and smoke and kiss and make stuff. We make everything we can. We say everything we can. We sing even when we can’t. This thing, this self-revealing, this love-in-motion, is the hardest, bravest thing in the world. And it is the reason I am alive and happy and writing this today. This is the reason I am snowed in at my best friend’s house with some of my absolute favorite people around me. They are playing Guitar Hero as I write and eat the salad my girlfriend made us, which I soaked with dressing made after my mother’s recipe. A recipe for balsamic vinaigrette that came, presumably, with my grandmothers from the Old Country.

The work of community building is the most important work in the world. It is life-saving, love-making work. And this is why I don’t give a shit about where I go to college, as long as I can do it with my comrades beside me.