The Day I Met Gargs

For Kate

Last night Kate and I talked for a couple of hours.  I did a lot of the talking but she directed the conversation, drawing me out, forcing me to cogently form my ideas.  She required not only clarity but connectivity and for a while I was transformed, re-planted in another time.  I knew, for a moment, who I was and what I wanted.  It had come back to me, delivered by this strange and beautiful courier and as quickly as she had come she was gone.  I remained buoyant for a short time but fell again too soon.  

Afghan Warlord Takes Anderson Cooper As 43rd Wife

Yesterday Josh posted this 'news' story from The Onion.  It's almost two years old now but it still gets laughs.  It got me thinking.  Last week I wrote here about the propensity of the media to embellish 'news' to promote consumption and that topic got a lot of play at a house party a few nights later.  I think my earlier entry was a little glib but I was making an effort to keep it loose so as not to bore anyone.  I thought maybe I should revisit these ideas.  Especially when my Canadian friend Suzy wrote and sent a link to the Chronicle Herald out of Halifax that discusses the recent rant among conservative sources regarding President Obama's preference for Dijon mustard.  

Apparently Fox's Sean Hannity has been stirring up the controversy along with conservative blogger and Cornell Law School professor William Jacobsen.  The problem it seems is that it's too snooty, elitist and yet another example of Obama's pandering to our enemies.  Has he forgotten 'freedom fries'?  At issue, beyond his predilection for haute cuisine, are attempts by his staffers to cover the whole thing up.  Below the link Suzy plaintively asked "please tell me this is a hoax"?  Well the Anderson Cooper story is a hoax but 'Dijongate' is the real thing.  The problem is the veracity of the one is as improbable as the other and silly as it all seems it calls into question the credibility of 'news' altogether.  

Josh, that day, had also posted a quote from Abe Lincoln (I think) saying, "We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read".   Today, as then, news headlines are one nightmare after another.  One day the recession is taking the world to hell in a handbasket, the next day the signs of recovery are pointing to a hopeful future.  The swine pandemic will put us all in an early grave on Monday but by Wednesday things are back to normal.  In the midst of this roller coaster of reportage comes Dijongate.  So long as our attentiveness to serious issues is destabilized we will lack the tools to form consensus.   Without consensus there is tyranny.

Trust me, I'm not picking sides.  I don't care if you're a liberal or conservative.  I don't wholly buy in to either ideology.  The implications have more to do with economics than partisanship.  Just to cut to the chase here, my ham-handed interpretation of this situation is this:  Capitalism preserves its control through hegemonic culture.  Hegemony is achieved by consensus.  By determining the means of production of social institutions like the media, the ruling class’s ideology can be propagated to the working class so they may adopt as their own, a “common sense” view of the world as it is and should be.  I don't really see that dynamic as a problem since, given the data, people can make the decision to buy in or not.  Cultural hegemony is negotiable.   Of course it is a problem when you have a bunch of boneheads negotiating but that's a topic for another entry.

So, the ruling class who own the media outlets influence the way the 'news' is disseminated.  The 'look' of the newsroom sets, the characteristics of the talking heads, the music, the advertising and every detail of the presentation is carefully designed to make palpable the product.  The more alluring the product, the more advertising revenues.  McLuhan pointed out that the medium has the potential to affect society as much as the content it delivers.  What we have here these days is a failure to communicate.  Content is subordinated by the medium.  What takes precedence over the message is it's style of delivery.  The spectacle, the disaster, the scandal, or the polemic are genres that operate in news broadcasts as in feature films.  The actual content is unimportant.  You can remove Leonardo and the boat from Titanic and plug in Nicole, some kangaroos and call it Australia.  News seems to operate in the same manner these days.  Soap must be sold.

The problem is, the content lacks substance and order.   Major world news events get short shrift when Britney crashes her car or the president has a hotdog.  We can't under those circumstances form any kind of consensus or pose any viable negotiation for hegemony.   Obama said it best "What’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial,".  

Podhi

Podhi attached herself to us as soon as we entered the park.  In the two and a half hours it took to walk around the historic Botanical Gardens on the Howra side of the Hughli river she never once left our side.  The park, now more than three hundred years old is a sprawling collection of exotic plants from around the world and is the legacy of Calcutta's earliest British colonists who sought to gentrify the primitive landscape and lend to it the familiarity and structure of England's finest gardens.  Once elegant, stately, and perfectly maintained it is now a ghost of its former self, gone to seed and ruled by those species best able to survive the oppressive climate of eastern India without the intervention of men and their care.  Similarly, once the exclusive domain of colonial gentry, it is now the workplace of the beggar class working their wiles on the tourists and well to do visitors from the city across the river.  

Podhi was enchanting, a soft spoken waif in a tattered dress.  She had little to say and it was obvious she was truly amazed we allowed her to walk along with us, likely having been shooed away by most people she approached.  Shellie was with me, back from Nepal, and we took the day to sightsee.  I'd gathered my 'crew' of local friends Niyaz and Dinesh to come along and run interference and they treated Podhi with the same disdain they reserved for more aggressive con men and beggars.  But Shellie and I were so taken with Podhi we made it clear we wanted her to hang out and so as the walk progressed we learned a lot about her.

She was from Kalighat on the other side of the river and made the one hour trip over by bus daily.  This was her turf, the area her family had staked out long ago.  Her elder siblings had moved on to other grounds where the prospects were better.  This was a training ground and there was no expectation of results beyond learning the tricks of the trade.  The refund on the two water bottles we gave her would cover the one way bus fare and anything else she managed to gather that day would get her home.  If there was net profit it would go into the household finances to support her parents and siblings.  

But today she took a day off, she asked for nothing and she enjoyed her time with us, just walking through the deteriorating gardens making small talk and holding our hands.  She seemed blissfully happy.  Shellie and I seemed instinctively to fall into a biologically inscribed fantasy of procreated fulfillment.  Rough as it had become this place still had a magical energy about it.  Several miles from the city's core, the absence of crowds and the oppressive noise make these gardens an oasis.  As we walked with Podhi we, like her, shed the burden of our socio-economic differences and along with them the harsh realities we were all too soon to rediscover.

When we came to the river Dinesh and Niyaz arranged a boat to take us back to the Calcutta side.  There was much negotiating and flailing of arms before a deal was reached with the oarsmen.  Four dollars would cover the two hour trip back up-river against the tide.  As we climbed aboard the boat and sat on the open deck Dinesh took the hopeful Podhi by the hand and led her back to the shore.  Shellie and I simultaneously protested but Niyaz calmly explained the folly of taking responsibility for her.  She had a family and a life and while that scenario may not have met our standards it would have been cruel and irresponsible to interfere.  I knew instantly he was right, the notion that we could help her, is the flawed foundation on which the colonial project built its ethical justifications.  Podhi, Shellie and I shared a dream but nothing more.  As the boat pulled away and she stood watching us go I snapped a picture.  

Marriage?????

Note:  Above is an ad for a t-shirt with a message I endorse but I don't sell them.  If you want one try the web site noted in the top left corner.  

A letter in my local newspaper's editorial section began with the all too familiar yet pedantic message that indicated the writer was in favor of same sex unions and all the attendant rights and privileges under the law.  But at the end, things got nasty and he threateningly decried calling these couplings marriage.  That, it seems, is an exclusive right of the heterosexual community.  So if I'm getting it right, this newest wrinkle in the issue sets up lines of battle around a word.  

Ok we know that language is power.  That's been demonstrated by specific marginalized groups and modulations of language have been effectively employed to negotiate relations of power.  Blacks reclaimed the word nigger to remove it's derogatory associations and it now serves as a term of endearment.  Women have similarly commanded the term bitch and the homosexual community have proudly embraced queer.   So, what's up with married heterosexuals?  Is there, amongst them, a fear that same sex marriage will create a societal dynamic that will marginalize them from power?  Would being 'married' suddenly relegate them to the back of the bus?  I'm not sure I get the argument.

I have a real problem with the whole idea of marriage anyway.  I've been legally married twice and legally divorced four times.  You don't actually need to be married to be forced into a financial settlement with an ex.  So, I have to wonder why anybody would do it in the first place.  I mean, geeze, be careful what you wish for.  I get, that for the gay community, marriage is a site of negotiations of power.  I would like to see as much as anyone that we, as a society, get beyond this shameful history of discrimination.   But man, marriage, that seems like a step backward.  I thought we were becoming too sophisticated for such antiquated institutions as marriage.  I would hope for voices, among the gay community, to speak for a brave new world that eschews the parochial and limited contract of marriage for a more forward thinking and elaborately constructed couple.

Baby steps I suppose.  Let's get these basic prejudices dealt with first and move on to the next level.  At the very least let's get over the 'word' marriage.  

Pigs in a Blanket

Ok if this is what I have to do to survive guess what my choice is going to be.  I'm ok with the mask thing, I've made my dog wear one of those but fuck me if you think I'm wearing anything with Winnie the Pooh on it.  Notice the other shirt's got Pepe la Pu!  There appears to be a lot of poo associated with the swine flu.  Let's face it this whole pandemic is a smear campaign orchestrated by the beef industry.  

But this entry is not about the swine flu per se.  I'm more interested in the way these current events are disseminated.  There is a French cultural theorist named Guy Debord who wrote a book called 'Society of the Spectacle'.  When I was writing my masterpiece, er sorry, masters thesis, in university I used his work to help make some arguments.  Now so as not to offend those who actually read Debord I should say that I treated his work much the same as any other I used.  Read the introduction, poach some relevant footnotes, and dazzle some undergrad babe at the student union bar by pretending I read the thing.   That said, Debord's general idea was that after events like the world wars and the nuclear bomb, society became so desensitized to occurrences of lesser magnitude that it became necessary to dramatize news to get people to consume it.  That trend is more apparent and endemic than ever.  

The swine flu is poised to annihilate the free world.  Whatever.  Laura pointed out to me today that after thwarting the devastating invasion of South American killer bees the world faced an even more sinister imminent destruction.  The resultant lack of pollen exchange for which those same devil bees were responsible, would fall by the way and plant life as we know it was to disappear forever from the face of the earth.  

You tell me, do we really need for every event to spell disaster before we can pay attention or are these prophecies of armageddon necessary to deflect our scrutiny of more important issues?  Fuck I don't give a shit about the swine flu where's my Brittany update?

Premature Articulation

Ok, I'm a shitty blogger.  First of all I seldom post anything and even then I'm too long winded.  Worse, I started this thing without considering the ethics of blogging and I want to apologize to those who've supported me even without my reciprocation.  

  In my defense I have been too busy with golf, new motorcycles and beverage-laden nights out.  I'm going to be more conscientious, more attentive, less verbose and more relevant.  I'm getting my head out of the clouds and putting my nose to the grindstone.  I'm going to stop now before this sounds anymore like Jerry Maquire's mission statement.