Sons of Anarchy - Enough Already (Season 7: Episode 5)

anyone else tired of watching Jax Teller play the white Messiah? Of getting out of deadly scrapes with his Odysseus-level cunning and brilliant strategies? Of smirking his way through death and betrayal and psychopathic behavior? of always making excuses for his own murderous, black heart?

there, I got that out of my system...

but, seriously, at what point in his wheeling and dealing with every notorious gang leader and Fed in California, yet somehow always mastering them all, just start to seem unrealistic? Sure, i got the first three seasons. Jax is searching -- for answers, for direction, for a father. the club's retribution against corrupt cops and Feds seemed justified. we could buy that the club would be one step ahead, but that's because they had the support of a community, of decent people who just wanted to live their own lives. They had reason on their side; it made for a powerful motivation. Ever since that crazy shit in Ireland and Jax's sinking into the darkest parts of his heritage: gun trading, prostitution and betrayal.

it's interesting in season 7 to watch Jax (disingenuously) beg for his life in front of the Asian gang leaders. they should have their fucking heads examined, even listening to this guy. what interesting about it is the parallel with the scene where his mother begs for her life later in the episode. the two of them are so similar. it's obvious that Jax has not gone the way of his father, questioning himself, doubting and searching. He has become like his mother: doing whatever he needs to do to come out on top. Whether it's betraying long-time friends, hiding the truth from his club brothers or orchestrating any number of murders to feed his own revenge fantasy -- this guy seriously needs a wake up call. take a look in the mirror, brother. you have become what you hated.

maybe it's teh point of Kurt Sutter's epic to watch the young, swaggering and hopeful Jax become such a hardened and duplicitous creature. how can any of his "brothers" trust him at this point? isn't it obvious that he holds no one dear, no one is safe, save maybe his children?

all of this is to build up to the final confrontation with his mother, the dark witch of Charming, CA. the only other player on this stage who is on his level (forget the machinations of gangsters and entire departments of the federal government, they can't even compete). she is the only one who can take him down, or vice versa. It should be interesting.

On Football and Men

This is an interesting time for American Football. The various NFL players who have been accused or indicted on charges of violent crimes seems to have given birth to a national dialogue on such important issues as domestic violence, child abuse and rape. The faces of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson are everywhere in the media now, and a dialogue has ensued about whether or not they should even be allowed to play football. Underneath that mundane dialogue is another, far more interesting, one about what kind of behavior we as a society are willing to accept from men.

Thanks to my daughter’s tutelage, I started learning how to use Twitter over the weekend. I had never had an account before, or at least one I used. I started by following some of my favorite funny people like Steve Colbert and Seth Meyers. Pretty soon, I got caught up in the two big football controversies currently raging. It was interesting to see people’s reactions and arguments and how they escalated. A lot of folks come from a place of outrage over these issues and I get that: a man knocking out his fiancee with a punch is disgusting. looking at the bloody welts on a 4 year old boy’s legs is certainly no fun, especially knowing they were put there intentionally by his father.

Trying to understand the motivations of Adrian Peterson isn’t really that hard. Looking at pictures of him on the internet, you can see that he’s a disciplined and committed athlete. He’s also, apparently, a religious man, who quotes Bible verses and has even started a charity. It appears he beat his son with a switch (a branch from a young tree for those of you not from the South). While he admits he may have overdone it a bit in a text to the boy’s mother, the reason had to do with the boy being disrespectful to a sibling and maybe stubborn about apologizing. He states in the text that the mother should be proud, because the boy “didn’t cry. He’s tough as nails.”

It’s fairly obvious why being “tough as nails” would be important to an NFL running back, whose game routine is to take hits from 200-300 pound men while attempting a touchdown. It’s obvious that we as a society value that kind of toughness, on and off the field. Is our tendency to react so strongly to such cases because we don’t want to face our own involvement in the cult of the athlete and other “tough guys”?

We want men who are tough as nails, nearly invulnerable on the field and in the boardroom, maybe even in the bedroom. We want gladiators who risk injury or worse for our entertainment. And we want role models who value right and wrong, God and country. We want this, yet we haven't really had the conversation about what effect it might have on our boys. About whether there's a downside to how we view masculinity. As we change the way in which we expect men to relate to women and children, we may have to change some of the other values associated with sports stars. And we may have to look within ourselves as well as at our celebrities. 

While it’s great that we’re talking about these sensitive issues, let’s dig a little deeper than we have. Let’s look at our own history: the way we raise children, our religious traditions of “spare the rod, spoil the child”, of sending young men (boys, really) off to war at the age of 18, of valuing strength over sensitivity when it comes to men. Let’s forgo the backlash and talk about how we can help a man like Adrian Peterson learn how to discipline his children without violence.

What Ever Happened to Common Sense?

Where did it go? Why did it leave? And can it please, please come back?

Simple concepts like working at something to get better at it. the idea that a person is responsible for their own actions. That the adults should be in charge of things, not the children.

Please don't think this is some call to go back to the "good old days". It's no such thing. There never were any good old days. But while society has evolved (at least in America) to be more tolerant, I feel like we have thrown the baby out with the bath water.

The culture I live in is heavily politicized and dissected. Everything is broken down into its parts. Getting from A to B has been replaced by the study of getting from A to B. When confronted with a challenge, people tend to think: am I allowed to do this? what kind of degree is required?

Engaging in the world directly and with a sense of accomplishment has been lost for many of us. And we are hurting for it. We lack that sense of getting things done, of figuring things out for ourselves. Instead we ask permission. We think, shouldn't the government be taking care of this?

But so much of the joy of accomplishment is getting through the tough parts, learning the ropes, as they say.

I see it everyday at work. Teachers in a public school will sit at their computers waiting for me to come and show them how to do a simple task, or fix some "problem" that usually they could have fixed for themselves, had they had the will, or more patience, or greater curiosity. the computer is seen as a machine that does certain things for them, not as an extension of themselves and their own exploration of the world. instead, they see it as a "press this button, get this result" kind of thing. Hence, their frustration when the machine doesn't function the same way every time. I guess this is a product of a consumer culture based on the precepts of the industrial age.

The idea of doing something and getting a certain result unfailingly is a kind of post-industrial dream. Of course, what is needed is people who are not afraid to experiment and fail as they learn. Failing and trying again are essential parts of learning. Anyone who has successfully achieved mastery of a skill will tell you that. You simply can't be afraid all the time, whether it's fixing your brakes or doing your own taxes. You have to be able to dust yourself off and start over again.

The difference between book learning and knowledge based on experience should be obvious, but it isn't always. I work in IT and I deal with network admins all the time. Most of them have information systems degrees and that tends to make them feel they have the answers, but sometimes a problem is simple and a simple mental troubleshooting list will have it cleared up in no time. When you approach a challenge by thinking about how it should look, you often fail to see how it actually looks in real time.

I give these examples to illustrate the problems with the way we are thinking about problems. Here's a breakdown:

1. We tend to ask ourselves if we have permission to be working with this problem instead of having the confidence to face things head on.

2. we dissect and attempt to fit the problem into a preconceived model instead of starting from the problem ( the inside) and then working our way out.

3. we misread the problem based on bias.

more to come...

Star Trek: The Next Generation series review

Herein lies my effort to rewatch and blog about one of  the greatest science fiction series of all time: Star Treck: The Next Generation.



No doubt the show was, for me, my first intellectual stimulant. True, mine was a particularly  dry environment, but I think I speak for a lot of people when I say TNG was at times pretty mind-blowing. Entities existing outside of our three-dimensional reality, questions about alien societies that made us think about our own, time travel and that awesome holodeck... Oh, the holodeck!

Another One Bites the Dust

"We hope Qhadafhi will be killed or captured soon so that you don't have to fear him anymore." -- Hillary Clinton

When talking about the "new" style of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt said, "...terror is no longer used as a means to frighten and exterminate opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient."

What we see happening in Libya now is the end of the old style of totalitarianism, where one man rises through the ranks to rule with an iron fist and an example of the new kind of global totalitarianism, where powerful Western nations police the "third world" and make political choices for the weaker nations, while keeping their own people subjugated through terror. The neo-Cons most blatantly did this with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. They did it with orange threat levels read over the radio daily, along with the weather and UV index. We saw it when our troops found the once dangerous Saddam Hussein (we helped it become dangerous) buried up to his neck in a ditch in back of his family home. And in his televised hanging. And today we saw it recorded on a cell phone, as the bloody body of the leader of Libya for over 40 years, Muammar Gaddafi, was beaten and possibly shot in the head. The UN is investigating.

Okay, Gaddafi was a bad guy, one of the worst. He oppressed masses of his own people. He may have used chemical weapons on them (I'm still researching). Like Hussein, he was a glorified gangster who killed people routinely. He was also almost certainly very nasty to women and fathered this douchebag (hey, what's he doing talking to Hillary Clinton, huh?).

He financed all of this by selling oil to Saudi Arabia, not really know for their strong history of civil rights. Of course Saudi Arabia sells oil to, uh, well if I'm not mistaken, US the United States of America. So, I guess that means oil taken from Libya (sold by an oppressive regime run by a sociopath, then sold to the Saudi gang, then sold to us) ends up in our cars. That means we've been involved, however peripherally, in Gaddafi's oppression.

Certainly, our government and industries have been involved in the Middle East for decades. For better or worse. We pay the consequences of that involvement. One interesting fact is knowing where Gaddafi's guns and bombs and tear gas came from. In this case, the answer is: Europe. Private companies in Italy, France and the UK sold lots of weapons to Gaddafi over the years. Ah, the never-ending intricacies of the Military Industrial Complex.

To paraphrase Charlie Chaplin, death to dictators and all those who make themselves strong at the expense of others.

New York City

[note: I wrote this a few months back in my notebook. I was no doubt responding to some of the pressures that we now see taking center stage in downtown Manhattan.]

New York City has lied to us all.

Early on a Monday morning, as I walk to work, I feel her creaking and groaning beneath my feet, the machinery slowly clicking into gear. When you are on the streets, you feel the rumble under your feet, the buzz in the air. New York City is happening. All day, every day, wave after wave of people going about their routines. From the Guatemalan immigrant who is on his way to work for two dollars an hour in the back of a deli to the self-possessed Wall Street type with his pin stripes and fuck-you grin, NY has it's own morning feel.

However pleasant or unpleasant, grey or sun-filled the day might be. And whether I am filled with purpose or ambling confusedly in search of caffeine, the beginning of each city day fills me with the same dread and wonder -- as if anything could happen, from the dangerous to the banal.

In my country-bred mind, I think of NYC as "a failed experiment." Maybe I'm just jealous of all the people with more money and connections, the beautiful shiny-faced couples, the VIPs. Or maybe it's just that I see the goings on from a different perspective than those raised here. But to my mind, it's an endlessly exploitative loop that illustrates exactly how liberal, Western capitalism has failed to protect its laborers. To my ears, it sounds like the death bell of American democracy. Oh sure, all the appearances are in place: gung-ho cops and firemen who will bravely lay down their lives for their fellow Americans, patriotic Union members with "Never Forget" sewn into their uniforms. The language too gets it just right. Bloomberg talks endlessly about how immigrants make us strong, about how inclusive NYC is, and the ability of anyone to make it here, the American Dream, yada-yada.

But to me, it feels empty. The appearances manufactured. The rhetoric recycled from "what worked before" and cheesy movies. The face of New York has changed much in 100 years, but the underlying structure is the same: the rich few (aka the 1%) exploit the poor many (the 99%). How they do this is so intrinsic to New York culture as to be invisible to those outside. While it may be said that Los Angeles is the city of empty appearances, NYC, the city of Madison Avenue and television, has its own smoke and mirrors in place. Its own mythology.

One of the things I would like to explore on this blog is this mythology of New York City (and by extension, America) and how it is being challenged by economic recession and angry masses of people without jobs. It seems the once fresh and attractive face of NY (as portrayed in movies and television) has a few wrinkles now, the makeup needs a touching up -- and, are those bags under her eyes?

I believe the experience of working hard and "making it" in NYC offers very little for most of us. Except for the experience of working and belonging to this city, and, more beneficially, to each other. That in itself is the reward offered. The ability to say to outsiders, "I'm a New Yorker. I'm tough and resilient. I can make it there! Even after the 9/11 attacks, I'm still here." There is some spiritual camaraderie in that, I suppose. What gives New York its power, its essence, is not the culture industry or the fashion industry or the endless production of money and beauty for others to consume -- rather, it is the human experience that has imprinted itself on this city. All of us living, working and dying in the City have given it its soul.

Not what is made here. (What real thing is made here?) Not the ephemeral "culture" we export throughout the world. That seems meaningless to me, it withers and dies and more grows up to replace it. It serves for a while to be bought and sold -- and then forgotten. In this culture that reproduces and devalues its own cultural products, what is left for the human soul?

The only meaningful answer, I feel, is to be found in the struggle itself. The fight for the human soul rages on, whether political or personal -- or both. While we may have been devalued, made into interchangeable parts by the crushing force of the market, the struggle for humanity remains the only truly worthwhile struggle left to us.

The trick will be to reclaim public spaces for us -- all of us. To reclaim NY for New Yorkers. It will take a sea change in the way we think about ourselves and our city. It will take a peaceful revolution.

A Rockefeller Square where, instead of Atlas, we see the immigrants who truly hold this city on their shoulders. If they shrug, all of this edifice will come tumbling down. And even Mayor Bloomberg and all his cops and cronies, will not be able to put it together again.

The March is On!!!

Archimedes once said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, “I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose.” We have leased these “places to stand” to private corporations.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

I support the protesters in Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Why? Because they are right? Yes, but more importantly because they are there. Because they have demanded the right to take a stand for what they believe in. The words they use are important.

"Money for Jobs"

"We are the 99%"

"No More Wall $treet Greed", etc.

But the actions are far more important. The right to assemble is being demanded. The right to free speech is being used, actively, with strength and compassion. Old Hippies and angry, Guy Fawkes mask wearing kids are joining in the streets of NYC to protest the fact that while 1% of us worry about profit margins, the other 99% are scared of not being able to feed our families, of living in a world where the near future could very well look like "RoboCop." A world where a few corporations run the world, a lucky few have jobs, and the government exists to facilitate smooth functioning of business models. A place where cops beat people with sticks, spray them with pepper spray and arrest grandmothers. Think I'm exaggerating? Well, I got two words for you. Open your fucking eyes! And then maybe take a look at yesterday's NY Times.

McLuhan spoke about "private corporations" taking over our "places to stand." In a city as corrupt of New York, where we are ruled, I mean, governed, by one of the Oldboys himself, where the name Bloomberg is itself synonymous with Trading and the Trading Floor technology (see the "Bloomberg Keyboard") where the mayor is someone who made his money serving Wall Street and now maintains his power by sucking up to Wall Street -- in this city, the home of Wall Street, is the escalating police violence really a surprise? The private corporations have taken the city over to the point where the only public space safe for the protesters, Zuccotti Park, is not owned by the city at all, but by the relatively small, Canadian company Brookfield Office Properties. Can you imagine these people camping overnight in Washington Square or Central Park? I can't. Bloomberg would have had them out of there so fast, it would have made our heads spin.

Zuccotti Park has become the Tiananman Square for a movement that is all about American greed, but, also, all about the core American values of Free Speech, Free Assembly and Free Press (the last one pointed out by its absence). The Owners are in control of the Press. A few private corporations have swallowed up an appalling majority of American news outlets. I don't have the figures in front of me, but I will add them when I have the time. I am going to write in the coming days about how the Mass Media is handling this event, now that it has become too big to contain and cover up.