Ok, I haven’t been writing alot, but for once, it’s not because I’m a slacker. Not really – I’ve just been preoccupied with writing in other places. Letters – so I figure I’ll reprint a couple of bits (edited) for thy perusal – just cause, they’re decently coherent thoughts…
The Politics of an Ex-Young Ex-Artist (part 1)
“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan , then we take Berlin”
– Leonard Cohen “First We Take Manhattan”
The induction of change is almost exclusively wrought from the interior, I think. It can be affected by the exterior, but only effected from the interior. The idea of changing the American government, of a democracy in Iran or Iraq – even the concept of inducing change in business models or our economic system and in schools and in religions – a hugely complex action boiling down to some very simple concepts: Seeing, wanting what is seen, and effecting change through time. I don’t believe in revolutions, violent or otherwise. They are simply shifts in power from one model to another, and though the head of a construct may be exchanged for another, the entire body and infrastructure is still in place, and can even remain completely unaffected. However, slowly things can shift deep on the inside, and slowly those shifts boil out towards every limb and skin and mind and the head looks down and realizes the body’s been changed beneath it. The head can fight, can try and squelch these unwanted cancerous growths of new ideas, and the head can even abandon body and try and control something else, but eventually those changes, for better or for worse, become the new old guard.
I’m not political, and I’m not an activist – but I believe that most problems in the world, from poverty to war to street crime to the rife proliferation of the shoplifting of gum comes down to the dehumanization of our species. An oxymoron perhaps, but what I mean is that the average person can only harm something purposefully when they don’t relate to it. I know all the harms that I’ve visited on other people, careless or purposeful, have come from some level of contempt – a trait I try to downplay in myself, often unsuccessfully. I think that through communication, through that slow boiling of ideas from mind to mind that comes from exposure to differences, that that is how prejudice and greed and most things can be solved. The institutionalized homophobia of our culture, for example, may be written everywhere from state constitutions to the the Boyscout handbook to the Bible, but as today’s kids become more and more familiar, and more and more comfortable with homosexuality, or Muslims, or paganism or blacks or whatever else that’s supposed to be marginalized or actively eliminated – then it doesn’t matter what the institution says – those kids will grow up knowing what feels wrong, and eventually that institution will be rewritten.
I hope.
The efforts of people inside the systems that are willing to push those boundaries are, if not the real revolutionaries, then some other word for one who brings change that actually works .
It’s why I want to go back to teaching eventually – knowing that short of parents, teachers have the greatest opportunity for getting into a child’s head and elevating them from the social norms that are popularized today. When I was in college in Baltimore, the average (AVERAGE!) age for a black male in the city to lose his virginity was nine. That is an unimaginable statistic to me. I was offered my first semi-automatic weapon in 10th grade for $25, and I’m sure they are far easier to come by now a decade later in the far more urban environment of Charm City. Gripping a kid’s mind and tearing it away from the hate and closed-mindedness of MTV, hip hop culture, of the way women are treated, of the way they treat themselves – I find it horrifying. I find it all the more horrifying that I can see the edges of it in myself.
I’m possibly sounding really. antiquated right now? Originally the idea of going on the road had a lot to do with communication, there were networking projects that I wanted to put into place, big dreams. I hadn’t expected it to turn into the fight for survival that it became. It was a little naïve that I could introduce people in bars to any concept more high-minded than a rhythm. Sneaking any sort of message or communication or bonding in has been a slow and insidious process that leaves me tired, but has something to do with the fact that I hope we’ll always have more friends than we have fans. That’s idealistic and impossible, but it means that I hope to always have the time and inclination and energy to make sure my audiences know that I know that they are every bit as human as I am.
On the good days.
On the bad days I’m close to fascist in my leanings with strong faith in strong controls and a eugenics policy that keeps us from devolving as a species.
But that’s only on the bad days.
The Politics of an Ex-Young Ex-Artist (part 2)
“Revolutions always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.”
-Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
So where does my rambling take me? Unfortunately, I don’t have that much more to say on the subject of politics. Most of my friends are very left-wing Democrat. I have leanings towards both sides (the light and the dark) and hate the way we don’t get to choose a little from each. Unfortunately, a two-party system seems to be all that our often-ignorant populace can stand, and the only solution is education. Not the rote installation of knowledge, but the forcible installation of curious and capable of minds – something that is taught in the schools and encouraged in the homes. An ignorant or apathetic population is exactly the kind that NEEDS the sort of governing that we’re getting.
“The merest accident of microgeography meant that the first man to hear the voice of [God] was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent and need to be led.”
-Terry Pratchett (again), Small Gods
And the Christian mythos goes forth to drive us to do things, inscribed, described and proscribed, our actions are set in stone but humans are evolutionary creatures, no matter how we fight it. The boiling forth of ideas happens constantly. After we had time and space and imagination and hope for messiahs and magic, we change our own holy writ under the concept of “reinterpretation”. Unfortunately, we’re falling back into a time of literalism. Perhaps people are frightened of where we are today, and they’re looking for something concrete, black and white – they’re looking to be driven and to be told what to do. It’s so much easier and we’ve become, at heart, a very lazy people. We LIKE to be told what to do.
An essential part of our travels, “the Trip”, is the idea that we’re out there doing something, surviving in a way that we’re often told we can’t. As a society, we’ve been given a model, and because we so often appreciate being given a clear and easy path, we follow the route laid out. We’ve played all across the country and I’m often encountering 30 year-olds and 40 year-olds and 50 year-olds who look at us and say “I wish I’d done that”. Some of them we give hope to – there have been almost a dozen individuals who’ve picked up their guitars, dusted them off, and played themselves back into practice. We reminded them / revealed that there ARE opportunities, and just because they’re lawyers, doctors and sanitation workers, this hardly means they can’t go out and be a rockstar a couple of nights a week. Just because you’re out of college doesn’t mean you HAVE to settle down and buy a house – there are other options, and bloody well take advantage of them while you can.
Too many waste their opportunities because they missed something right in front of them, or because they were told something wasn’t an option. Parents, Loving though they are, are the chief perpetrators of this scandal. We’re no longer a population of dreamers and all too often, the dreams that DO exist are being squelched. The opposing forces of mundanity grow every day, and with global communication and the homogenization of society, even the pursuit of being “special” is being mainstreamed (or has been co-opted as an insult). True originality is an oddity quickly collected, reproduced, and marginalized.
And if something hasn’t been done, it can’t be.
What a way to think! How can people survive without heroes, without aspirations, without dreams?
And so I feel like one of my jobs is to inspire. To let people know that I’m Living a very hard Life, but there’s a reason for it, and that it CAN be done. But too often, people are bitter. People are angry because they HAVEN’T done it. They are angry because somehow freedom was stolen from them. Through their own actions and / or inactions they’ve cornered themselves with responsibilities, with debts, with a mortgage and a maxed out credit limit – inescapable things that weigh them down and truly become too great a burden to bear. Again, I see the edges of this in myself, the anger that Life is too short, that I’ve started too late, that I won’t get it all done.
I see it all too often in the bars we visit, where men have eyes the colour of whatever they’re drinking and spend more time staring at Heather’s low-cut shirts than listening to anything we say. I won’t even get into drug abuse and the accepted escapism of that culture.
“The Lovers, the dreamers, and me. all of us under it’s spell.”
Yes, I know it’s really some writer somewhere, but let my inner rob attribute this quote to the one-and-only Kermit the Frog
My point is that nothing will change if new ideas aren’t circulating, if people aren’t dreaming. If we’re all satisfied to accept the status quo, we can’t boil or even pass thoughts through osmosis. Right now I feel we’ve got a conservative majority (and I didn’t realize how major that majority was till I started traveling extensively) and a frightened one… People are selfish creatures and don’t really care about the world at large if they can’t feel the change at home. We get used to anything, and can get used to anything else. We’re adaptable, and it will be our undoing. Right now George Bush could come out and say “yup, attacked Iraq on a whim, Tom Clancy is suing me for stealing that whole plane crash thing I used for 9/11 and my brother Jeb is actually my gay Lover” as long as he lowered the price of gas by a dollar a gallon the same day.
I don’t think it’s the end of the world. Not by far. The world changes, shifts, and revolves. Bush will leave office and someone will replace him who’s equally indebted to people for placing him in office. People will be sent unjustly to jail, but IN GENERAL the system works. Taxes will be unfair and the government will be fiscally irresponsible – but in general that system works too. I don’t believe in huge changes.
Marching on the Mall and yelling into the faces of camera lenses and the salivating press gets us nowhere. In a shock culture, we’re unshockable – and in a culture of anger, communication can’t happen. Communication sprouts from conversation springs from exposure which comes from circulation. QED. I actually think that the best thing we could ever do is to force the kids in our school system to be members of things like the Boy Scouts, or even a JROTC-based school. Something that forcibly takes them out of their own environment and throws them into something alien and something team-oriented. Hell, make them Live with a different family every year, but keep them coming back to the same social group in school. Radical things like that can’t ever happen without my previously mentioned fascism, but it would be an interesting experiment. Making people work together is going to be increasingly difficult in this increasingly isolated culture, ironically in a time when technology makes it easier and easier to keep in touch.
