The New Year.
2007 was an ignorant bastard of a year. I think we can all pretty much agree on that point, whether you’re a Bush or a Bhutto. Where the rub lies, dear friends, is what we do with this next year, which coincidentally they’re calling “2008.” I haven’t written many blog entries recently, as my apparent audience had waned and my mortal despondency about a job situation had not yet subsided. However as this is no longer the case, I will hopefully be communicating my vexations and victories with more vivacity, if that alliteration can be believed.
The trend of the year, and what I hope becomes of it: Something is rotten in the heart of America, something vital to us all: we live in a state of technological unconsciousness. We are electronically comatose. Our technology bombards us with more technology, like when a television show pushes the latest gizmo. This is not just geekery of a high order: it’s technocracy. It’s not just that we’re ruled by machines, it’s that we’ve learned to be unable to function without our machines. That’s a crucial delineation between ours and most previous generations. And the big fallacy of this hyper-digitized environment is that any of us is freer or more aware or more conscious as a result.
Mechanical devices do not inherently make our lives richer. This is a strange proclamation to be making on a site derived from (and operating on) computers, but it was my human thought that brought these words to be - just as it was human thought that brought this and most websites into existence. The beauty of the Internet and other machines (hard or soft or otherwise) is that it reflects the input of its user. But this does not mean that your life is enriched by uploading pictures of you and your drunk friends. Joining Obama’s Facebook group doesn’t make you politically active, any more than jacking off to Internet porn makes you a slut. The realms of opinionation and support on the Internet, sadly, have not rendered fat in the fryer of the real world and people’s participation in its processes and parades.
It is ultimately what you do with the machine or the medium that counts, not your mere continued presence on it. It’s easy for thoughts like these to be sifted through the pile and discarded at the last minute in a fit of editorial frenzy, but I think it’s important to be mindful of this at a time in American life where it’s easier to not enrich your life, easier to move along cattle-like into that shining white light barely concealing an air gun. Uploading your cat farting on YouTube is not filmmaking. 2 Girls, 1 Cup is not art. (Though it could be considered performance art, sure.)
What I truly tire of is not that people are afraid to push envelopes or buttons or other metaphors in pursuit of shock, awe, and delicious schadenfreude. These things I thrive upon, all writers and storytellers do. What truly hurts is how little I see being expressed in all that noise - how few attempts at positivity or honest inquiry there are, and how quickly those are thwarted by crude trolling or a lack of participation and awareness. Is it any surprise, though? It’s far easier to use the Internet to watch “2 Girls, 1 Cup” than it is to cogitate a solution to our silly foreign entanglements. It’s far easier to make a mash-up, or a YouTube video where you and your fat friend lip-synch to a song that was probably never sung by a human in the first place. It is far more difficult to employ the technology in a fashion that brings it in line with musical instruments, which is where computers truly belong: the realm of expression.
From their inauspicious (albeit somewhat apocryphal) roots as tabulation devices for Nazis to catalog incoming Jews at concentration camps, to primitive electronic typewriters and crude word processors and the Atari, to the open-source nerd circle-jerk that is Linux, computers have grown from machines that functioned operations designed to punish and control into machines designed to liberate, inform, and entertain. I just hope to see computers pushed further and further to liberate and inform, rather than simply replay the same poop jokes ad infinitum. I love that the trend has been the opening and widening and geysering of all this energy and entertainment out into the world, but I’d like to see a trend of focusing. And I’d like to see a world where the editors of TMZ are shot into space wearing nothing but suits made of crispy bacon and no flight companions but half-starved tigers in their mating cycle. Don’t say I never dreamed big.
My resolution for 2008 is as follows: consciousness. That’s one word - one big, gigantic, loaded word. I will be more conscious of myself, my body, my heart, my words. I will examine exactly what it is about me that could effect change in this ludicrous world. Following from Daniel Pinchbeck’s horrifically relevant 2012, I will appropriately extend my boundaries infinitely outward, point all sails toward all horizons, and hope for a fresh gust of wind. In a way this quest to be conscious is a quest for hope - or at least to recognize reasons to be hopeful when they arrive. I’ve always found it resoundingly simple to resign myself to moping, sadness, or fear. This is a very simple human response to adversity, and I also think that this cloud of negativity has blanketed most of my generation in one form or another.
And I think in my generation’s case this negativity is socialized, programmed and inherited and sold to us one commercial, terror attack, or diet pill at a time. When we become conscious of the apparatus telling us to act, it becomes much simpler to tell the apparatus “no.” That’s one word I think we need to start saying a whole hell of a lot more. NO, security does not demand we relinquish all freedom. NO, taking off my shoes at an airport does not make anyone safer. NO, Diet Dr. Pepper does not taste more like regular Dr. Pepper. And so on. It only becomes a simple matter to reject something when you realize the method and operator pulling the strings.
A blatant exhortation to anyone reading this: There is, in case you didn’t know, a Presidential election near the end of this year. If you do not vote, I will no longer know you. I’m serious about this. The stakes are too high, the mountains too high to climb for us few seriously depraved politics junkies to go it alone. And for fuck’s sake, why would you vote Republican? Reagan wouldn’t piss on the GOP candidates lined up this year. Fishermen would throw them back into the sea, because as fish go they’re too smelly to fry and too ugly to make decent mermaids. Not to mention that Giuliani was probably drinking his mistress’ urine in hotel rooms paid for by taxpayers, in some bizarre sadomasochistic sex ritual. Nothing like subsidized watersports to get a good Presidential campaign running. Egads, and Giuliani’s the one who said in 1994 that “freedom is about authority” - about giving up personal freedoms to “lawful authorities.” This is not a man to take to bed, because he’s the only one allowed to get off.
If you must vote, AND YOU MUST VOTE, vote for one of those pitiful pussies in the Democratic Party. You know, one of the spineless shitbags currently defecating their way through our nation’s capital one ham-handed corporate sellout foot at a time? The good money’s on Hillary or Obama. I prefer Obama in terms of sheer message, and the rather-conservative Clinton matriarch horrifies me. Sadly statistics are not in my favor, and you don’t bet based on your feelings - you bet based on who you think will win.
I shouldn’t let myself dwell on politics, rippling doubt across whatever safe haven I’ve shored up tonight. It’s too late in foggy New Orleans for fear and loathing, and the fireworks have finally died down in the neighborhood. In the French Quarter I saw a very young black boy sitting atop a tall port-a-potty, waving a flag and yelling “Happy New Year!” With a commandment like that, it shall be done. I’m not saying “it can’t help but be better” or even “it couldn’t be any worse.” I’m saying: it’s going to be better. And I want you, whoever you are, to be there with me when it does. Mahalo.