When You Just Don't Feel Like Talking (click me)

There is a certain expression that runs like the oozing sores of the sewage system drubbing peacefully away below the belly of the metropolis. Like the blue veins on tired legs of those whose skin is slowly losing grip over the flesh that once piped out 'buxom.' It's like a word in your throat before the air passes your tongue (it's coming, it's coming...but it's silent, hidden, hot).

Sometimes I just don't feel like talking. Politics suck and bite, crumble me up into a delirious ice fiend, skipping about in the postmodern playgrounds of arbitrary symbolism. Laughing with dilated pupils, taking notes from degradated profegandistos. Instead of ants crawling on my skin, I'll give you "Gnaaawww-rabh-harmanah-ramanah-haghaghagha-Applebees!" And that's meant to convey the point...ultimately.

Sometimes it seems that the more you say the less you know and the only form of expression that carries any weight is helping a shivering child up out of a snow bank (even those banks are soon to be built and maintained by the government). It's like it extracts from me some sort of deep seated loathing that is entirely disinterested if you'll forgive the contradiction until I have a moment to explain: in the same way one might be able to envision the results of a long awaited decision, one that's been years in the making, and imagining: if it's good news, damn will it feel good to celebrate. If it's bad news, damn will it feel good to rage against the wooden walls in a fury of desperate loathing.

Sometimes the materialism of reality can only be taken in synethesiac bursts of static with gunfire and its careful its careful taking turns at turning the massive ISA machine with burned out washed up drunken bloated corpsefigurine bared tooth bafflement.
That is to say, it might not necessarily be about the humanity involve, or the picture it cuts. There's something cloyingly relative about all of that. You know? It's a spiral turn through a barrel while fascists and flag-burners fight over property rights. (...nothin to kill or die for...) Yes, an easy slide down ignorance lane makes us all backpeddle a bit and try truly hard to remember what it is we stand for. What's that saying, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything?" See, inherent in a statement like that are a whole greycloudfull of axiomatic assumptions. It's an ideology like every other turn of phrase we knock off into the appropriate receptacle of cultural signifiance - we work and we move onward, we pick our battles and then (with a little luck) proceed to fight them, but I'm wondering, how often is it that we, honestly and truly, take that golden moment to evaluate, what it is we're fighting for, what motivates it, and if that really is as sacred as it's convenient to assume.

I recommend anyone reading this to click on the link above...it's from The Daily Show, a full episode, but I just want to point out the first 10 minutes. Though very funny, there's something heart-wrenchingly powerful about them. It's the first time I've ever seen Jon Steward begin to shake with emotion. You can tell he's absolutely furious just beneath the surface. And he should be. Watch the clip (in which Palin talks about the pro-America parts of the country, and about the soldiers fighting in Iraq to defend our country who she seems to imply only come from small towns) and notice how unbearably offensive this mentality that has infected the conservative base of America really is: McCain Palin rallies with shouts of 'terrorist' 'kill Obama' a raging fury of bigotry, nationalism...what it seems to me amounts more and more to fascism. If you watch the footage of those rallies, you see a cookie-cutter cross-section of 'Leave It To Beaver' America: those who hate everything that's different and outside of a very select model of what's acceptable - a bloodthirsty rage for a very specific standardization that, honestly, strikes me as the glowing image of fascism.

But see, that's the problem with nationalism period: with it comes this malignant conception of the exceptionalism and infallibility of self. This idea that patriotism is by definition a virtue (as is faith), with no thought being given to what exactly that patriotism and faith are in defense of.
Damn, I was about to go on, but it's nearly 5 in the morning and I'm exhausted.

Anyway, watch the clip. The part filmed in Wassilla is wonderful. It illustrates this point so well: you have these small town self-congratulators claiming that the best proof of the superiority of the small town mentality came on 9/11 when true acts of kindness and true AMERICAN spirit were displayed int he small towns across America. When the reporter reminds the Alaskan that 9/11 happened in New York, as in, that's where all the deaths took place, he lamely tries to argue that it was nevertheless in the small towns that they actually felt the suffering. Then we see a tattoo-covered guy (a self-proclaimed church-goer) explaining the significance of all his tattoos being his ex-wife, the girl he cheated on her with, the other one he did this or that with...you get the point. Which brings me back to nationalism. 9/11 is the perfect example. 9/11 was a tragedy. That's all it was. For New Yorkers, there was a lot of crying, missing their dead family members, suffering the trauma, and trying to cope. For Palin's 'real'-Americans, it was a slight against our pride. It was like the school bully who gets suckerpunched by some weak kid. It doesn't hurt him physically in the least...it just hurts his pride. That's when all the flags unfurled and the gun-toters began screaming for blood. Their beautiful America was insulted and they wanted heads to role. For New Yorkers, the only ones who actually experienced that day in it's real significance: crying and coming together. For the real Americans: blood.

And that's essentially what this campaign seems to be coming down to in my eyes. Is it the uneducated who hear McCain call Obama a socialist and, knowing nothing about socialism except that it's evil and unAmerican, and scream about how upset they are and shake their tiny little fists at the left, and at Europe, and at the Middle East, and at Muslims and atheists, and at gays, and at everyone else who doesn't fit into their tiny paradigm of 'what's acceptable'...or is it the people who see how sick the world is right now, see how civilization is stumbling around blinded with pain and understand that what we need is a calm and collected direction that isn't about guns and yelling, but about diplomacy and talking, it's about recognizing that a life in a Cold War is no life at all and being "the best" is also no life at all, it's about swallowing our pride, so big it could choke a bald eagle, and reaching out to all the exploited over the world saying 'we're ready to start again, we're ready to work together, we're ready to change our priorities and focus our time, money and energy where it really matters - not petty power struggles with the maturity of a middle school popularity contest or a high school arm wrestling contest - but it making this world livable, sustainable, getting the extremely poor to the bottom of the ladder so they can finally begin to climb, creating a new moral ideology that doesn't rely on God to punish the sinners and the exploiters, and allow, for the first time, the formerly powerful to answer to jury of their peers: the rest of the human race - because we live in a democratic country, not a theocratic one. This election seems so absurdly black and white to me (no pun intended): do we vote for a politics of continued fear, hatred and resentment, or do we vote for cooperation and understanding? This is not a question of economic policies or healthcare, it's a question of an ideological approach to what the world consists of. Are we going to let history continue as the history of wars and killing and underhanded usury to allow a fraction of 1 percent to benefit while the billions continue to be Fanon's Wretch of the Earth, or are we going to exercise our own volitions, our own free wills and make a stand, change our course, take a sharp left turn, and embrace the new millennium. We are in the age of the Internet, instant communication and, for the first time, real prospects of a true democracy of culture - we need a politics, a global politics that is fit for it. I just can't get over the irony that in 2000, we elected a Nobel Peace Prize winner and somehow managed to end up with a war-mongering evangelical. Who Would Jesus Bomb? indeed. In deed. That's the question. What deeds will mark the formation of our new world order, one that's already begun in telecommunications, transportation, and supra-international organizations (like the EU)? Do we go with the man who's still fighting the Vietnam war or the man who's spent his entire adult life as a community organizer and an advocate for the exploited?

Knowing when to stop you can avoid all dangers.

I'll stop now.