I’m Not
From Despair.com, the people that brought you the motivational satire posters, there is now DIY Despair, which allows you to accompany your favourite images with bold, forthright, depressing statements. Make Your Own motivational posters are not a new concept. The Star Trek ones have made the rounds, and many are quite amusing, regardless of whether you have a passing familiarity with Trek and its ilk.
But while it’s not a new idea, it is a handy and a timely one. Scant hours before parents arrived at school for “Back to School Night” — a quaint and fearsome colloquialism for Parent/Teacher Night that has few virtues aside from the fact that it avoids looking like the title for some truly unfortunate slashfic — a liberal dose of posters extolling the virtues of individuality and ethnic diversity were plastered over the walls. The actual ethnic makeup of the school lacks spectra, and the posters were more the highlighting of an intellectual ideal than they were a reflection of population or tolerance, and this was made more clear by the Motivational Style formatting of the posters, as if black borders and bold white typesetting would somehow inspire us to discover untold phenotypes within ourselves. The obvious clash between the actual students and the happy rainbow of model-bright smiles they were walking past inspired me to conceptualize another diversity poster for the walls.
And now the online toolset of Despair.com has made it happen. Thanks Despair.com!
Divide and Crush
There is a blogging divide between original content and zeitgeist participation. Some people write on blogs — and I recognize that this is a gross generalization, but there are two types of people in the world: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t, and I tend to fall into the former category — are attempting to record a particular perspective, a written oral history, if you will. Not as entitled in concept as a vanity press, but with a solid belief that the observations of the common-and-garden individual have merit and resonance. These people speak their minds, sometimes in order to order their thoughts, and sometimes to clarify a personal position, and sometimes simply to record the now. The other side of the blogging spectrum consists of popular affirmation, the participation in linkmanship. One states an opinion or a point of view by linking to a similar opinion or a contrary opinion, basing one’s contributions upon the preponderance of available opinion. This is then codified by the comments and trackbacks and linktos that given evidence that the opinionist is not alone, but part of a swarm of thought on the matter of the moment.
As a self-declared iconoclast, as someone who will compromise by saying that, well, at least we are all part of an archipelago and so I am too an island, I find little use for the latter technique. So I was immediately wary of my instinct to blog about Saddam Hussein’s comments last week that he would “crush the heads” of his enemies. The obvious parallel to the somewhat annoying Kids in the Hall catch-phrase leapt to mind… as did the awareness that sure the blogosphere would be rife with the reference. How surprising to find that a Google Blog search produced a scant twenty-five results and a BlogDigger search only fourteen. But still, my initial impulse was quelled by the feeling that it was too obvious, too ordinary to put to pixel.
Not so with this second news piece. Less of a lark and more of a piece of personal… something. Statementship. This item surpassed a need for communal temperature-taking and became more about me! Therefore: excellent blog fodder.
Back in March, I found myself interning at a public high school in western Massachusetts and was shocked to realize just how long it had been since I had uttered the Pledge of Allegiance. With all the recent hoopla over the “under God” portion of the Pledge and the fervent opinions about whether it belonged (depending upon whether one considers the act of adding the phrase to the Pledge to be more political and temporal than pure, or whether one believes that the United States is a Christian nation), I fixed my opinion about the issue based upon my own desire to continue to enforce the required separation of Church and State. But I had forgotten the chilly ring of a couple of dozen voices, chanting together, dully reciting without thinking about the words they intoned. A sudden realization that “the Lord’s prayer” was a declaration that I desired God’s will to be done on Earth had driven me from even again attending church services. I felt really uncomfortable standing in a room of students unthinkingly swearing fealty to the vicissitudes of State. I had attended a high school where the Pledge was not recited, and I was suddenly awash with a feeling of relief that I hadn’t been asked to participate in such mass programming.
So when I read that a school in North Carolina had quietly, perhaps intentionally, stopped requiring the recitation of the Pledge, I was highly intrigued, especially now that the state has joined “37 [others to] require schools to include the pledge in their daily schedules”. Which is in and of itself a sticky wicket, considering that the Supreme Court has ruled that requiring the Pledge “violate[s] the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of due process and the First Amendment’s requirements of religious freedom and free speech upon the state.” In fact, a school policy that required a student to simply stand quietly during the Pledge but otherwise not participate was changed in 1998 when faced with a lawsuit by the ACLU.
However, it’s no longer 1998. It’s now “after 9/11”. Which means that according to the previous link, Nebraska law has reinstated a 1949 “patriotism law” that requires, among other things, that students be instructed as to the “dangers of Communism”. It is generally considered that the words “under God” were added to raise an upright middle finger to the Godless Communists. And now that we have a new enemy, also considered to be “Godless” by our nation of fatuous Christmas-and-Easter Christians, such blatant line-in-the-sand allegiance is once again required. I tend to find myself agreeing with Dan Bern: we can’t move on, socially or politically, until the children of the Cold War and their engineered minds wither and die.
Compendiantics
I feel like it’s too soon to have another compendium post, despite the fact that the last one was in June, and was therefore some time ago. However, despite a plethora of incentive to ruminate, I have little of substance and only little substances to commit to writing. I have an unfortunate pattern of behaviour that when I am in transition, I cut off all of my friends and acquaintances. I shut down all communication until I have reduced the complexity and instability of my life back to a coherent and manageable ambiguity.
It’s my version of Douglas Adams’ Improbability Drive, using isolation and time to reduce the incomprehensibly large number of factors and possibilities down to a handful of threads that can be comfortably cats cradled. All of which is why I have been quite of late, on this front, over on Jehanne, and at the Brothel, as I’ve been attempting to once again find the pitch and yaw of normalcy, or what passes for it. I’m not expecting total stability, just the ordinary level of stuff I have to cope with.
Anyway, compendiantics:
+ I am once again in digital transition, trying to balance a lack of high-speed internet at home with the labyrinth of inaccessible sites at work. As of Friday, there is the possibility that DSL will once again make life easy, and I look forward to that. Although it will certainly mean that my flatmate and I will suddenly have even less of a reason to actually converse and interact with each other as we hunch over our respective monitors, sluicing data from the stream. We’ve been talking about getting accounts on World of Warcraft, and even if it means we’ll be interacting virtually, through avatars, in adjacent rooms, well… at least we’ll be carving out time to spend together.
+ My brother Peter is my flatmate, as he treads his way through a year of stressless retail activity before he plunges back into the self-rigors of higher academia. Neither of our diets are built around an exquisite palate, mine because I prefer bland repetition and his because he has S.A.D.-related hunger issues. All of which renders our refrigerator a large, electricity-sucking, magnetic joke. There are no vegetables and hardly any meat in the fridge, which is dominated by various sweetened beverages and bread products. In a snacking mood during the first week, we stared into our snack-less fridge, and Peter hit upon the idea of making a Bread Sandwich: a piece of oat bran bread sandwiched between two pieces of white. A week later he pioneered the French Toast Sandwich: a cooked and egged piece of honey oat bread slapped between two slices of oat bran. We’ve also seen a lasagne sandwich, just to include a different starch-between-starches concept. I’m beginning to see the makings of a running gag.
+ I’ve been getting up at 5:45am in order to be out the door by 6:30am in order to be at work by 7:00am, so this whole bread thing may seem far, far funnier to my deteriorating consciousness than it does to the outside world. I’m just sayin’.
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