FaceBook friends

I saw the movie about the invention of, and legal battles over, faceBook when it came out.  I believed the portrait of a smart, angry, now billionaire Harvard nerd initially motivated by revenge on a girl who turned him down.  I left the movie house feeling confirmed in my mostly queasy insights into the heart of the alienating thing called Social Media.  

There are excellent and handy uses for social media, it can’t be denied.  But having pages where we post things about ourselves (he said silently, writing the words on a page where he posts things about himself) with the aim of becoming the coolest and most popular kid in virtual high school by amassing the most disembodied avatar friends?  An invitation to the illusion of intimacy and friendship with virtually none of the risks or rewards.

I know a tortured soul, a brilliant guy who has survived untreated bulimia for decades, with literally thousands of friends on faceBook.  When he leaves his computer and walks on the street, you can see loneliness radiating off him like spokes of despair around a downtrodden comic book character.  He’s a classic case, no doubt.   I’m sure there are many otherwise well-adjusted, self-loving people with robust social lives, friends they talk to, have dinner with, laugh and cry with in person, friends they’d leap into traffic to help out of a tight spot, who casually maintain faceBook pages and have many faceBook friends who are not bravely posing portraits of alienated desperation.

Here’s what got me thinking about faceBook today.  I was forced by the marketing arm of fezBook, now energetically monetizing itself as all great things in our society must, to create a personal page in order to continue maintaining my wehearyou.net student-run animation page.  Reluctantly, seeing that they’d made good on their threats not to allow me to post things to the business site I’d created, I set up a personal page.  

I put up one recent photo of two goats kissing a demurely smiling young man and left my own avatar a dashing grey silhouette with a shock of Conan-like hair coming to a jaunty soft-serve ice cream cone point at the top. At least that’s my memory of my avatar.  Good to have my hair back, I thought idly.

Literally one minute after I put up the page I had my first friend request.  Within hours a small flurry of friend requests from people I’d be glad to be friends with: in real life.  There were several from people I’d never heard of, faceBook friends of the two actual people I’d friended at first.  

I wrote a personal email to each person I otherwise knew explaining that I wouldn’t be active on facebook, had set up the personal page as a requirement for continuing to run my business page.  I asked each how they were, hoped they were doing well.  Told each one that I’d be happy to be in contact.  I noted that my “likes” on the kids’ animation page had oddly fallen from 92 to 87 in recent months and that I was trying to get to 100.  I asked them to please click the link and “like” the animation page.  You can do that here, if you like, dear reader, and afterwards, for a more fun experience, pop over here.

Alas, though predicable, of the dozen or so who asked me to become fezBag friends, only one clicked the link and liked the page.  She also sent me an email saying “Done.  Like these links, if you like,” and sent me two links to her pages to like.  Quid pro quo, fair is fair, like and like, done, and it took me about 15 seconds.   None of the others I’d emailed wrote back.   Perhaps I’d violated the first rule of Social Media– nothing personal!   So much for being friends on faceBarf, I thought, folding one half of my face into a Popeye-like smirk.

Truly, I prefer to talk to Siri.  At least you can have something like a conversation with that adorable robot.  She actually tries to respond to what you say; when she’s stumped she’ll say “wait, I don’t understand.”   That statement is one of the most intelligent and currently under used replies in human interaction.   It shows, in very short order, that you are trying to understand.  No small feat.  

It’s not hard to imagine from Siri’s enthusiastic, sometimes whimsical replies, that she has a cute little personality and, if not smart as an actual whip, is smart as a virtual whip and a better friend than people who reach out to be friends with no strings attached and can’t be troubled to click a link to perform the smallest of kindnesses to a potential facebook pal.

The importance of creativity

Adaptation of something I wrote two summers ago, all bitter references to unhygenic assholes removed, for marketing purposes:

Think of a world without creativity.   No music, comedy, repartee, great food; no movies, books or even articles, no television worth watching, no mischief, nothing worth laughing at, no cause for that good cry that is sometimes so needed.

Creativity, much spoken about by educators today, has always been at the heart of learning and good teaching.  

All creativity involves a certain amount of spontaneity.  It is play. The great John Cleese describes the essential conditions for creativity in a wonderful clip, unfortunately no longer available on youTube.  The five factors he talks about are:  place, start time, ending time, confidence and humor.   

For young children, who are naturally creative when given the slightest chance to be,  we’ve reduced the formula to this:

Have fun and help each other.

You can’t have fun if people are bothering you.  Don’t bother anyone. If you can’t help, don’t hurt.

When it’s time to be quiet for a minute or two, be quiet.

Cleese locates the creativity, you need a space to do it.  How about a room filled with art materials and a camera stand to shoot frames? With a recorder to make soundtracks and a computer to assemble the animations.

Cleese discusses the importance of a time set aside, a time with a beginning and an end, ideally about two hours.   He points out that it takes up to a half hour to leave the pressures of life outside and begin to play.  With luck you will play for 90 minutes or so.  Then play must end, as play always does, because it doesn’t feel like play forever. 

This is exactly what happens in the animation workshop.  For ninety minutes the kids have all the time in the world.

The other aspect of time is patience, taking your time, having a block of time you can use for play and dreaming up ideas.  You cannot be very creative while watching the clock, just like you can’t productively meditate keeping an eye on time.  You have to let things develop in their time, comfortable with not much happening sometimes.  

Asked what she liked best about the workshop, the Idea Girl said “it gives you plenty of time.”    

Confidence is necessary, because if you think you can’t dance, or sing, or draw, or animate, you probably won’t be able to.   What gives a person confidence?  Another one smiling and giving a thumbs up when the idea is presented.   What takes away confidence?  Critical comments, ridicule, skepticism, indifference to your best efforts.

The last part, humor, happens quite naturally in a room where children are playing, relaxed, involved, having fun, trying out the craziest ideas they can think of, not worried about anyone bothering them.

The nature of the straw that breaks the camel’s back

The straw does not have to be any special straw.

In the fable the man piles straw on his camel’s back until the camel is at the limit of what he can carry.   The man wants to bring just a little more straw on the journey, to make it worth his while.  Seeing the camel straining, he decides to add just one more straw.  Camel’s back breaks.

This is how accretion, the adding on aided by gravity, can bring down many things.  Resentments, for example, grow by accretion if we do not resolve them.  I am strong, we may reason, I can look past this insult, this betrayal of trust, this small injury.   We carry this one, and the next, and believe we can be philosophical about it.   Most of the time we can be, but we must continue to carry whatever we do not resolve, it has a weight and causes a certain drag and friction.  

A trauma of some kind comes up, the other party, arguably intending no great harm, does one more thing that weighs in on top of the pile of grievances we already bear on our backs.  Boom!  Done, broken.

When times are relatively good we can carry more without breaking. At the breaking point, the final straw can be relatively light, it will tip the scales and the thing will break, whatever it is.   Forgiveness has its place, and it is a wonderful and essential place in a good life, but only if the thing forgiven is not endlessly repeated.

Otherwise the thing forgiven, papered over, minimized, agreed to disagree about, ignored, lost but not forgotten, is carried on an already burdened back.  The straw is waiting to fall on to the pile, as it is always poised to do.

So, in a nutshell

“I didn’t wind up painting yesterday,” she said, “but I looked at the colors and the brushes and I had a thought.”

“OK,” he said.  

“I realized what frustrated me so much the other day when you were probing about something that had made me angry.  I don’t mind the probing, but I object to the premise– ‘you believe you were wronged but there is another possibly equally valid side to the story and isn’t it possible that you are completely wrong, and in fact, the one who wronged the other person?'” she said.

“Not an unreasonable premise,” he said.  

“No, not unreasonable. Even something worth discussing.  Only there was one thing missing– you jumped to that premise without recognizing how hurt I was and that, possibly, I was entirely in the right to feel hurt.” she said.  “Even if I later realized I was wrong to be hurt, after reconsidering in light of your new insights, I was badly hurt at the time and you brought up something that was a painful experience for me. And brought it up with no expression of sympathy before trying to convince me I could have been wrong to feel the way I felt.”

“Yes,” he said, “but isn’t it equally possible that you were wrong?”

“Possible?  Yes, particularly if I was a thoughtless and emotional person who reacts to things impulsively.  Equally possible?  No, not even remotely equal.  If you heard my side of the story, which you did, and couldn’t admit you’d feel hurt too, which you eventually did allow, after an hour of batting back hypotheticals, you would have to recognize that I had good reasons to feel hurt.  You would have felt hurt too.  Might have acted much like I did, maybe better, maybe worse.  In the end, you might have convinced me to reconsider, but not if you didn’t at least acknowledge that I had a right to feel hurt.”  

“So this is all about you?” he asked.  

“Listen to me carefully: I am going to paint now,” she gave a wan smile and turned to head out into the garden.

“I will never have true peace with this person,” he thought hopelessly as she went.

What do you do with your rage?

“And what,” he asked, “do you do with your rage?”  

“What makes you think I fucking have rage?” she asked.  

“OK,” he said, “not rage… anger.  What do you do when you get angry?”  

“When I get angry I get silent.  I don’t believe in yelling any more, it doesn’t help.  The only thing that helps me when I’m angry is being silent.  I need to process it, think through what exactly is hurting me, why I am so angry, see if I can discover a way to not react with the violence I sometimes feel when I am hurt by someone I trust.”  

“What if the person you’re angry at needs to talk things out?” he asked.  

“Fuck him,” she said, “I truly don’t care when I’m hurt or angry what the person who made me angry needs or wants.  What I need and want is an apology, or failing that, silence.”  

“But that’s not very fair, I thought you’re trying to be mild and peaceful,” he said.

“The world is a circle of people justifying everything they do– everyone does it and here in the West it is a reflex, a tic.  We have to be justified, will argue hypotheticals to the death, we live in an adversarial system where every idiot makes his most vigorous argument.  There is always a reason somebody accidentally forgot, or was careless, or stupid, or hated themselves too much to realize you had troubles too, or got sick and couldn’t keep a promise, or was confused, or underestimated the harm they were doing, or said the wrong thing at the exact worst time, or acted like an asshole, racist or shithead believing sincerely that they were in the right the whole time.  Very few people do things believing they’re wrong, they do things they feel justified in doing, even if their justification is objectively feeble or even insane.  The first thing I need when I am hurt by somebody I know is the simple acknowledgement that they fucking hurt me.  It’s called empathy, also, taking responsibility instead of making an excuse. Does not seem like a huge thing to expect, if the person is concerned with my feelings, as I expect my friends to be, as I try to be toward them.”

“But you are capable of violence,” he said “and it scares people.”

“When have I ever been violent?  If people are scared they don’t know me, they are defensive, maybe, they’re scared how they would act if they were as angry as they think I am.  They compare their anger to mine and imagine what terrible things they might do.  I have no idea what people are scared of.  I use words and I try to use them as precisely as I can.  I often write them down and revise them until they are as clear as I can make them.  Words can sometimes hurt more than a punch in the face, worse than an arrow, I know.  I try to measure my words before I let them fly,” she said, “I make every effort to do better with my anger.  And anger, as you know, is a devilishly challenging emotion.  In fact, I see you can refer to it, and talk about mine, but not actually talk about your own.  It is easier to speak of mine, I suppose, since I express it more freely.”  

“Well, you do speak your mind,” he said.  

“Yes, I speak my mind,” she said.   “I would recommend the same to you, don’t be mad, don’t be passive aggressive, don’t dissemble, don’t complain I’m not listening while assuming you know what I’m about to say based on some memory of something I may have once said.  Don’t give me another hypothetical I can’t use while parsing and finding flaws in the one I give you.  Listen.  Use your great brain to hear what I am telling you, use your sensitive heart to feel the feeling I’m talking about– that’s more immediately important than the intellectual part.  I am not fucking Gandhi, it’s true.  Who knows if Gandhi even was Gandhi.  If there’s an afterlife Martin Luther King, Jr. has an excellent reason to be mad as hell.  MLK would be right to be raging up there at God’s right hand, in light of the almost ridiculous symbol he’s become in light of how little has changed for the masses of those he struggled for in the almost 50 years since he died. I couldn’t blame Martin for coldcocking God right now.  Gandhi too, for that matter, I wouldn’t blame him for kicking St. Peter in the balls.  I’m not them, or what they represent, but I’ve gone a long way toward becoming more like them.”

“Maybe not as long a way as you like to think,” he said.  “You’re still pretty goddamned angry, and scary too.”  

“As El Gato Ensombrerado said to the querulous fish in The Cat in the Hat, Spanish version ‘no temas, pececito’– ‘don’t worry, little fish’.  My father was an angry man, my mother was an angry woman, both of my grandmothers raged, one of them whipped her infant in the face, the other broke yardsticks over her kid’s ass.  I come from a home where people raged at each other, in a world with many styles of expressing anger including, frequently, deadly ones.  It is a daily challenge to do better, to get as far as I can toward being more patient,  more reasonable, milder.  It is better to forgive than to be stubborn about being right, it’s true.  But there is also a time when another person tears the fabric of trust and friendship, and argues like a lawyer, or a cornered rat, instead of empathizing with you for the harm they’ve done, and that’s the time to leave the room.  Only bad things can happen if you stay in that room, it’s a room where the air becomes toxic and never clears.”  

“Or you can work it out, truly be committed to being mild, forgiving, even when you have every right to be mad,” he said, “as you yourself are fond of writing in calligraphy.”  

“That’s true,” she said, “it is a good and noble aspiration and something I might do more if I was a fucking saint able to repair the torn fabric of a relationship that had grown toxic.  Which I am not.  Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go paint now.”  

“Wow,” he said, “right in the middle of our conversation.”  

“I’m sorry,” she said, “what exactly are we discussing that we are in the middle of?”

A whiff of fear stirred on the air around him and he said nothing.  Without any noticeable expression she went into the other room, presumably to paint.

Oh … bama

Obama’s a cool guy, don’t get me wrong.  Smart, funny, gives thoughtful speeches he probably has a hand in writing.  Check this out, to get a taste of what I mean.

Presidents only have so much power, Washington is a corrupt town, money owns all American politicians.  No politician can obtain even local office without being financed by the wealthiest citizens, a presidential candidate least of all.  It has always been thus, although recent rulings about the coolness of undisclosed “dark money” make it much more in-your-face than ever before.  

The privileged few have a much greater say in our democratic republic than the masses of poor and working people, always have, always will.   George Washington, we learn, was the wealthiest man in America and, naturally, the father of our country.  Don’t want some poor boy as your dad, obviously.  The super-rich decide elections openly now — 97% of American elections go to the candidate that has the most money to spend on the best ads.  Go fight City Hall, boo hoo for you.

Yet, if Al Gore had insisted on fighting the unsupportable Supreme Court one-off that decided the 2000 election, as it was in his power to do as president of the Senate and person in charge of the official count of Electoral College votes, and somehow become President instead of the challenged George Dubya Bush, many terrible things would not have happened.   There would have been no preemptive attack on Iraq, with its massive, almost incalculable, octopus tentacled harms, for one thing.  It’s unlikely Americans would have employed torture against those suspected of hating our freedom.   So the president, the grievous similarities between the two highly compromised political parties aside,  does make a big difference and the buck often stops with him, or her.

Like it does with President Obama.  A man who sells his brand as brilliantly as Mr. Obama does while campaigning, speaks as convincingly as he does on many important issues– I hold him to a higher standard than a president who winks and smirks and has trouble not mangling his own sentences while doing the most damage in the shortest amount of time in the sincere belief that God and Jesus have his back and that he is doing their work.

Nobody alive today is to blame for slavery, except that practiced by our corporations — and most of those slaves are not Americans. Likewise, the hundred years of lynching and terror that followed the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War– nobody alive now had any say in that dark and brutal age of human rights.   Today protesters march against the same things that were in full force and effect fifty years ago– systematic, widespread police brutality against underprivileged (I love that word) non-white citizens.  Now a couple of cops are going to stand trial for what appears to be depraved indifference and the possible deliberate torture of a man they killed with a rough ride in a police van after an arrest that was possibly for no good reason except that he had an attitude of some kind.  Obama gave a couple of thoughtful speeches.   It’s a process, as he thoughtfully points out.

It’s churlish, I know, to point out how many of Cheney and Bush’s worst policies Mr. Obama has allowed to continue.  Pointing out, for example, that he’s massively escalated the once highly controversial policy of extrajudicial killings worldwide, signed off on the murder of an American boy not charged with any crime or associated with any threat?  Churlish of me!   I have to stop doing that, stop hating our freedom to love a president who came to office advertising Hope and Change.  Churlish and immature.  I hang my head and hope to grow up one day, like the rest of my friends.

Life in Our Democracy

I sat quietly the other night when several people gushed about how much they love President Obama.  I do not love Obama, partly because I have no idea what he actually stands for.   He’s a great speaker, a master salesman, clearly brilliant, but he continues to do many things Bush and Cheney did, hateful things, and he gets a pass from those who love his eloquent thoughtfulness and the way he comes off, somehow, as a cool guy and man of the people.

Obama must get a pass in a certain way, if only because of the fanatical opposition he faces, much of it fueled by barely concealed racist hatred.  Even if he wanted to, there are limits to what a president can do, although, to me, he’s done very few truly positive things while continuing virtually every anti-democratic policy of his unscrupulous predecessors.  

The American president is not all-powerful, it’s true, though Cheney took many brutal steps towards restoring the Unitary Executive.  Among the things presidents can now do without real oversight is create a secret kill list and carry it out,  kill anywhere on earth with missiles fired from robot planes, institute a top secret kidnapping and torture program,  designate anyone as an Enemy Combatant and hold them without charges forever, classify as state secrets anything even remotely compromising, or embarrassing, to the administration, conduct secret data collection on virtually every American’s private communications, severely and publicly punish those who try to expose corruption, torture and other illegality.  

The lack of the transparency necessary for a functioning democracy was striking under Bush and Cheney, the most opaque administration to date — and rightfully so, they had a lot to hide.  The press, with few exceptions, were their tuxedo clad lapdogs, gratefully licking their faces instead of probing for the news that Americans needed to know– like the fact that the entire case for the long, destructive, destabilizing, demoralizing, illegal and immoral multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq, like the extensive torture program, was founded on a tissue of lawyerly bullshit that would not have stood up even in a kangaroo court run by kindergarten kids.  

Things are even more opaque under President Hope and Change, Freedom of Information is much harder to come by and the 1917 Espionage Act has made traitors out of whistle blowers and other people of conscience and put the death penalty on the table as reward for their acts of civic courage.

Of course, there’s the psychopath test for presidents.  It is impossible to even get on the ballot without raising literally hundreds of millions and showing the ability to kill without hesitation or remorse.   Not only are presidential candidates required to say whatever big donors want to hear said, to raise enormous sums of money for their ad campaigns but, if they are in position to, they must show they will not flinch from doing terrible things.  

If you are a governor, race back to your state to sign the death warrant for a retarded woman who has found Jesus and begs for life in prison instead of the needle.  Tough on crime, I got your Jesus right here, lady.  That murderer who tried to kill himself when the cops closed in, bungled the job and wound up with an IQ of 70?   Strap him into the electric chair yourself, after he saves the pie from his last meal for “later”, pose as you do with a resolute expression the American people will understand.  Enjoy your pie, bitch.

When Bush’s people rewrote the bankruptcy laws they made it impossible to get out of student loan debt, except by the death of the debtor.  Run up the maximum on all your credit cards, buy too many houses, fuck up in any other way, no worries, all that can be discharged in bankruptcy.   Borrow $40,000 from the U.S. government to get a degree at a state school and you will get this email from time to time:

 Dear Borrower,

Your federally owned student loans are running just a few days late.

There is an easy way to bring them current!!

By changing your due date to another day of the month that would better fit into your budget based on your pay date, other bills, etc., we can bring your loans current.

Just choose any date between the 1st to the 15th of the month to better meet your needs.  In doing so you will skip your upcoming payment and resume payments the following month on your new due date.

Please contact us as soon as possible to avoid going into default at (866) 264-9762 orDLCollections@osla.org.  Our Customer Service Representatives are available to take your call M-F from 8am-5pm CST.  You may also manage your account online 24 hours a day at osla.org.

Sincerely,

Default Aversion Team

And they call me every month, too, just a few days after the due date passes.  They remind me, if I ask, that I am paying the historically low 3.75% interest rate, tell me how lucky I am, how wise I was to lock it in.  Some borrowers are paying the government 7% and more on loans they took to get college degrees.  

Liberal lioness Elizabeth Warren is sponsoring legislation to cap student loan repayment at 3.9%.  I love Elizabeth Warren and I watch her struggle to pass a law that will marginally help a few without solving the larger problem and I despair for my country.  Reminds me of Obamacare, applauded by everyone not effected by it as a great step forward, even if possibly a bit of a gift to the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  

We are a great democracy and an Exceptional People in name only, it goes without saying.  We are a country run by advertisements, slogans and mindless, fanatical cheering for one of two teams who are fierce rivals but almost indistinguishable in their goal: to protect the privilege of the persecuted one percent that finances their campaigns.  

A few random ideas for helping students paying massive interest to the government on education loans made to them:  tie the interest rate on student loans to actual income, let unemployed graduates pay down the principle interest-free until they are earning a living.   Make the repayment rate the same rate banks and corporations pay to borrow from the US Treasury.  

The federal government can spend literally trillions to murder people who pose no threat to Americans, average working people who live thousands of miles from the U.S.  They can spend billions annually on a failed war against a drug that kills almost nobody while alcohol is legal and causes death and destruction everywhere it is abused.   They can’t figure out a way not to gouge a generation of college graduates who get these notices every month, and friendly phone calls, from the Default Aversion Team.  

President Obama was in town last week, wearing a tux and making jokes at dinners where people paid thousands of dollars to eat rubber chicken and shower our brilliant president with love.   Many hate Barack Obama, it’s true, and I like to see him get his love.  But I also have to say:  what the fuck?  This is really the best you can do, my man?

Interview with an artist

Artist:  I was born with special sensitivities that made me passionate about pursuing my talents.  I was born an artist; special, sensitive, talented and passionate.

Me: Guess what– everyone is special, sensitive, talented and passionate about some things.

Artist:  Yes, but an artist makes it his life’s work to express it in a way that makes people feel– and see and hear– differently.  

Me:  Makes them feel what makes you special, sensitive, talented and passionate?  

Artist:  No, wise-ass.  I speak for the universe, show people its magic. 

Me:  The universe speaks for itself.  

Artist:  Yes, but not in a universally understood language like art  

Me: In a universal language like life, it’s the universe, after all.  

Artist: But life does not take on the aspect of art until an artist filters it through their personality and makes it beautiful

Me: Life doesn’t need art to make it beautiful.  Beauty is taken in all the time by people who never gave a fiddler’s fart about art or artists  

Artist: I disagree, people crave art, vision, creative organization of the noisy chaos to let them step back and contemplate the miraculous  

Me:  Some do, sure.  What people really crave is life, and being heard and appreciated.  Art is something sold to them in place of their own innate creative genius, it’s vicariously gratifying even as it removes people further from their own creative abilities.   Art is for the professionals, you dig, that’s what’s sold to us.

Artist:  so why do you draw?  

Me:  Because I love it, because I can’t go for long without drawing, because I have graphomania

Artist:  Don’t you want appreciation?  

Me: Sure, it’s great to be appreciated.  Everyone wants to be appreciated for what they do.

Artist:  So why are you so down on art?  

Me: Because so much of it is bad and artist/non-artist divides the world along arbitrary and destructive lines as creators and consumers of creativity.  It is, in most cases, a lie, and a lie sold at an expensive and damaging price.   Being a professional artist is largely about packaging and selling your idiosyncratic view as a unique and valuable commodity worthy of a high price.  “Art” is politics and marketing as much as anything else.  

Artist:  but my music is about that vision you were referring to, that everyone is an artist. Some people’s art is appreciation of artists.  

Me:  or we can give the glory to the creator of the universe, whether she actually exists or not

Artist:  I dedicate my art to my own sense of God  

Me: I’m sure your sense of God loves you for it  

Artist:  why must you always be so ironic?  

Me:  I’m not always ironic, irony is but one shade on my many-hued palette    

Artist:  Why do you play music?  

Me:  I love music, I love playing, I love hearing the sounds the instruments make, I love being in the middle of music, splashing in its wonderful possibilities  

Artist: so you are a musician  

Me:  Yes, sure.  But there are many musical people out there who don’t play, believe they don’t have the right to make music because they’re not trained, those who measure themselves against, again, professional recording artists like the brilliant Brittney Spears.  I consider all these non-playing musical types musicians too.  

Artist:  OK, I can see we are going to have to agree to disagree about art  

Me:  No argument here.