The "Singaporization" of the United States

Our common agreement as Americans is the Constitution. If we place anything before it, even a perception of our safety, we merely become one more tribe.
Have you ever spent time in Singapore?
On the surface it's a nice place.. and kind of a man's paradise. For Asia, it's quite modern, in fact, it's not kind of first world.. it is first world.. I have a bunch of friends who used to joke it was the Irvine of the East... referring to the town in Orange County which is corporately organized and is quite modern, almost pastoral, but not the kind of place you see people walking around, people are flying into buildings in fancy cars with parking lots underneath. The Irvine joke suggested a place where neither random life nor creativity seems to occur.. there is order, roads are clean and almost pastoral, in that kind of over-landscaped way (Mexicans in floppy hats working away), people are in cars, and everyone seems to have a place to be. The common description is 'Santized'. If you spend enough time in Singapore, you will find some grit, some character, and some history, it can be a bit of a mans club, but they are hell bent to destroy the old gritty street vibe all the same.. the heart of the country is basically a huge shopping mall, and to quote someone I once hung out with, you have one freedom there, freedom to shop!
You see, Singapore is the worlds most successful dictatorship.. it runs like a clock because of the will of one man, Minister Mentor Harry Lee Kuan Yew, who got some education abroad, and came back a bit embarrassed at the corruption and vices of the predominantly Chinese Singapore, Yew's family included. He took charge, and not heavy handily by world standards, but certainly by western standards, and he went about creating a nation that was so stable and orderly that oil companies would want to refine their oil there, and corporations would want to keep their Asian headquarters there. He traded off the tiny land area and population of his nation to make military service universal, and to endlessly imply that their neighbors Indonesia and Malaysia are unstable and dangerous places, which many if not most young Singaporeans believe, especially after training in their late teens, if at all able, to kill invaders from those two nations.  Picture a jungley Israel, without discourse.
So Singapore went about codifying this orderly very un-Chinese vision, outlawing so many things, from drugs to gum chewing, that a mental disability arose, called 'No U Turn Syndrome'. Singaporeans, after one or two generations were so removed from agency in their own lives by the burden of rules, that they have to be told when it is permissible to turn around or left, otherwise they wont, driving endlessly, and increasing the traffic load on this small but increasingly prosperous country. They do have a good filmmaker who mocks these tendencies, but they are real, and deeply ingrained. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_U-turn_syndrome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLAz_mia2HQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Neo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Follow_Law
What I am describing is a nation where the needs of the group, as interpreted by the leadership, are placed above the needs of the individual for freedom. Since decision making is considered by some to be the epitome of intelligence, the best use of the gift of our frontal lobes, those with the most freedom tend to stay the smartest one might simply argue. How deep does this run in Singapore.. well, put aside the endless surveillance and cameras found everywhere (you rarely ever see a policeman in Singapore until something goes wrong.. because they are either plain clothed or watching you from a camera), and consider this: you are guilty until proven innocent in Singapore, at least in corruption cases, and I am not sure how many other types. How do I know this? Because I was told this by none other than a spokeswoman for the National Supreme Court during the first ever open house of it's chambers. She then, in a kind of deluded brainwashed spokespersonley way that you see a lot in Asia, actually asked me where I was from after I laughed, and told me that of course my nation must have the same assumption, everyone who is rational must make the same assumptions as Singapore to so strongly trust government authority, and I, not knowing whether to laugh or cry at this point, calmly but firmly stated that my nation had in fact just the opposite assumption, based on our rejection of the dictatorship of the British Royalty.. she was stumped and the next few moments were indeed awkward for all in the crowd, like watching a crab back pedal... What I am getting at here is that Singapore has become a world model for the will of the top and the many over the one, and it is so unquestioned as to be entrenched, and now the country is suffering the fate it fears most, economic hardship, because of it's lack of innovative thinking and spontaneity, and is looking in part to a huge casino complex to jump start things.
So what is the point of this description from the other side of the earth? Well, most people who get wound up about the government tend to talk about the Nazi's a lot, raba raba raba the Nazi's! You've seen it, the pissy white guy born in the 50's....(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik) obsessed with the Nazi's and the Soviet Union. He is the guy Obama got in trouble for ad libbing about during that dinner in Pennsylvania that was recorded during his first campaign (he was somewhat sympathetic in his description, it should be said), and the mainstream considers this type of guy a joke because his buddies "didn't die face down in the muck so that.. " etc. etc.. Walter Sobchak types are seen to be dwelling in an angry alarmist nostalgia with no departure point from the present. Christians love to talk about how China denies religious freedom.  But these scenarios and the associated gripings have countries going off the rails and into serious foul territory within a few years of administrations taking power.. no one discusses what happens when you slowly sub-urbanize and the culture and social ties of a nation, kind of pit one against another economically through social fracturization, while slowly eroding civil liberties for the 'common good', without ever launching a pogrum, purge, holocaust, or cultural revolution..without ever truly going afoul of the mass of the population. What you end up with is Singapore.. Freedom to Shop, a banal nation of people who weave down a narrower and narrower set of options in life until they become in essence comfortable serfs of what we feared in fascism or communism, life becomes isolated, fear divides groups, but it never goes haywire, never goes off the rails.. it's like slow death to a boa constrictor, never dramatic enough for the mass of people to notice it, and it doesn't necessarily come from evil intent.. just the thousand cuts of well intentioned managers and lawmakers. In Singapore, the Malays hang with Malays, the Chinese with Chinese, people are treated with dignity, and you can go about daily life, unless you rock the boat.. it's subtle... it's like the movie Fatherland.. the dirty heavy lifting has been done.. a bit like Japan, no one wants to question a good thing as long as the good thing keeps rolling.. don't look under the hood.
What makes me think America is moving in this direction?
I just spent a bit of time in Tucson... Tucson is a pretty easy going place... not complaining too much about it.. it actually softens the blow of a lot of the self inflicted wounds of American living, but there was a controversy there while I was visiting that caught my eye... Tuscon is loaded with Red Light Cameras.. a subtle thing.. who could possibly be against saving lives, and supposedly, there are less traffic fatalities in Tucson now than there were before.. seems like a big win, right... well, it's also a big revenue generator, and it just makes Tucson, otherwise a nice place, feel 1984 creepy.. and what happens if I misjudge 'squeezing the lemon' on a late night trip back from the Loft movie theater on Tucson's breezy wide straight boulevards, maybe not thinking.. maybe I don't want to hit the brakes int he monsoon rains, no one gets hurt.. but maybe I get some automatic ticket for 300 bucks... Homo ex Machina.. Man Out of the Machine.. My judgement means nothing anymore, nor the judgement of even an officer, a judge, or my peers.. I crossed an arbitrary line, and now society can act through this instrument to take my money to teach me lessons. The arbitrary line was always there, perhaps credibly, but now it's a 'system' administered, I hate to say it, by a corporation, a defense contractor as a matter of fact in some instances, and although I might be fear mongering by using those descriptive terms to flesh this out, what I am really saying is that they don't have Societies best interests in mind, only their own, and their corporate interests are very narrow.
Here is a list of the actions that keep collectively and unconsciously moving us in that Singapore Direction:

• Red Light Cameras
• Address and ID presentation to check into Hotels
• Zip Code input to buy gas, but not with bank card
• ID check with credit card use
• Endless Security at Airports 
• Shoe Removal at Airports, for 10 years so far, based on one attempted attack.
• TSA now pushing people to Pay for Rre Screen, a rapid pass program, so you don't have to remove their shoes. so now they remove your dignity, and instead of working away from that with technology, make you pay to get it back. I had a TSA employee tell me when I made a comment about the absurdity or removing flip flops that I should pay for Pre Screen, like he was marketing it, so now TSA sees it's self as a business, with no free market alternatives.
• Voter ID and disenfranchisement games played by Republicans
• One set of mail attacks leads to endless mail scanning, and security infrastructure spending
• NSA Leaks disclosing endless loop-holing to monitor US Citizens Electronically
• Abuses of the Patriot Act
• Implications that filming police in Action or filming government buildings and installations is Illegal
• Automatic Licence plate scanning by vehicle and cameras in places like New York City
• Municipally Run Camera Surveillance Systems 
• Endless stop and frisk in NYC
• Florida Matrix System
• Checkpoints 50 miles away from US border with Mexico
• Drones
• Domestic use of drones
• Criminalization of Cash by Government, with moves to oblige banks to lower cash limits to 1000 USD from the previously acceptable 10k restrictions for reporting and withdrawals.
• The US Obsession with Terrorism as a Military and not Law Enforcement dilemma
• The Denial of Due Process to Guantanamo Detainees
• Extraordinary Rendition
• Formal or Informal Prohibitions against Smiling for Government ID photos
• The Obligation for foreign passengers to go through US immigration checks even if they are only transiting through the airport to another foreign country.
• The Endless fees imposed on people trying to obtain visa's of all sorts through the US Department of Immigration
• The endless holding of people in Immigration Holding Facilities
• Privatization of State Prisons and Prison Services
• The endless vague color coded Terrorist Threat Condition that has thankfully been retired
• Ag Gag Laws, restricting first amendment rights to protect industrial food practices
• The endless intervention of the Insurance Industry to legislate away potentially dangerous behavior
• civil forfeiture
• The Flood Insurance corporate fix

Each one of these acts or policies is completely justifiable within the logic of prevention of the administration that utilizes it. Collectively they spell a large step towards slowly encumbering and degrading the American way of life and it's Constitutional guarantees and intents. In other words, does this all add up to a death by a thousand cuts?

Observations on Marriage

A friend of mine once told me: Find a woman you hate, and give her half of everything you own, and then move on to the next stage of life... It was a lawyers cliche, the wisdom of the self appointed savvy white man, but the greater cliche is that the guy who told me this once is now married with I believe two children.
For him it was a kind of cost/benefit analysis, another part of his endless 'practical' wisdom... putting up with what it takes to have a modern American family was better than being alone. There was no discussion of a middle ground.. to him, you have to indulge her fantasy to get your better reality, maybe your fantasy of sorts.. it's kind of a math equation based in a weird resignation to Karma, finding things "rewarding" as a way to pass the time, and some notion of "how things work" that isn't purely existential. It's like doing easy time... working in the kitchen so you can smuggle food to your cell.. it's not the same as breaking out of Jail. It involves a lot more resignation..
I will go on to say I have never seen a marriage I wanted.. I have seen a lot of women I wanted, even women in marriages with other men, and women maybe I thought I could make happier than the marriage they were in, more honest, I know now marriages are not about honesty, they are a narcissistic fantasy, survival, and unconcious oedipal drives, loaded with denial, and somehow destined to go wrong eventually, with a snap.. the people I meet with happy marriages at present have an endless capacity to ignore the lack of emotional growth occurring to those around them in order to satisfy their primal needs, most notibly procreation. The most annoying married couples are together because they want their kid to look like someone they were sexually attracted to, and that person can afford to lvie the lifestyle they want after the kid pops out. The funny thing is that the more dedicated to procreation they are, the more blind they are to the animalism of it.. the less aware they are of their own emotional needs, or the ignored emotional needs occurring with their spouse, higher and lower,.. it's a shared denial based in biology, ethos takes a back seat, and they act like it's anything but primal, it's a divine charge, the right thing to do, a gift to the world, a religeous obligation ( I don't remember Jesus having kids.. in fact.. I think he treated things like that as a bit absurd, but most people don't read the whole book.. ).
There is a difference between lust and love.. and the more people confuse the two, the better their marriage tends to technically be...  wanting someone to grow, to transcend and free themselves from suffering, or to self actualize.. those things don't tend to go with successful child rearing, which is the point of those contracts.. those other lofty goals are the dreams of recovery boy/girl-friends, the single dreamers and idealists, and also-rans..
There was a time before marriage.. who knows when.. we started to settle down about 8000 years ago.. a friend of mine cited beer as the reason.. we wanted to raise wheat to make beer, so we fuckin gave up and stayed in the same place.. maybe the edge of the black sea before it flooded in, or the rift valley, or Ur, who knows, but we stopped in one place, and there certainly was sex and jealousy before then, maybe even monogamy for extended periods, but there sure as hell wasn't anything like a legally binding contract.. that came from people who weren't bold enough to vote with their feet, so they decided to keep things working to their liking by telling others how to live, and it became enshrined as a virture with all the garnishes..
 Here in America, if you get past the Disney fantasy side of it all, the validated princess, who is in such a narcissistic fervor on her wedding day I wonder at half the weddings I go to if the bride will even remember the grooms name at the Altar.. there is the whole legal side.. 50 states and a few territories who all independently decide, in one or two lgislative chambers packed with not necessarily the most questioning white men, and an office with a big cheese and maybe a few courtrooms, what shall constitute this weird pact between consenting persons who have made enough trips around the sun to sign this contract. It involves basically a bunch of rules you have to choose to enforce in most states, which are arbitrary areas drawn on a map for the most part, and more often than not where there is one of these units, a 'state', there was 'Fault' divorce.. a kind of sanctimonious notion that means that one person can be blamed and held financially liable, or worse yet, access to their kids held as a kind of tool of judgement and behavior modification method, if they don't live up to a societally enshrined notion of what makes that 'union' perfect.. however, it's self enforced, so there are get out of jail cards.. one or both have to pull the emergency break.. if you are swingers, well hell then, if you still want to go home together at the end of the party, no reason to get rid of the tax break, not that they are necessarily wanting to think of it that way, and if they are, it makes it all the more twisted and abnormally arbitrary... although now, there isn't fault divorce anymore.. the last state voted for no fault 3 years ago, New York, but the whole crazy notion lives on in our hearts, and in the perceptions of just about every 'ordely' society, and by orderly, I mean organized around the demands of successful reproduction, because who the hell but a lawyer knew that until I told you...
I guess I figure if you truly love someone, you will choose them every time.. our brains developed to live in societies of 50 to 150 people, that's about as many names and life histories as we can remember, so back in the day walking away from a spouse usually didn't mean you wouldn't see them again... it's a fantasy to want to be with the same person 'For Ever'. We have the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality, especially the more we separate our logic from our emotions... there is also something nice about reality once it catches up to us and we get past it's worst challenges... the less we have separated the two, the more we fall for these confusing binary notions of good and bad, where morality is paired with creating people who can bring in the harvest and follow orders properly...
Count me out... although I can't deny it seems better than nothing.. does it have to come with all the fucked up baggage.. people who aren't narcissistic, who know what truly caring for the person and not the body or the job or the reputation, usually come with enough baggage and miles on their own.. but those are the interesting ones I guess.. the funny thing is.. those ones, the ones who are above it all.. they are the ones I want to marry...
Catch 22..

New York Vs LA

I once was hanging out with a smart gentleman who came of age during the 60´s, and he told me this:
from his college graduating class, the ambitious ones went to Washington DC,
the smart and ambitious to New York,
but the exclusively smart went to San Francisco.
I chimed in that the hot ones went to LA before I realized the point he was really making.
To the Self-Appointed Cognoscenti, those for whom some quest bests any notions of homesickness, if such a notion of resisting the fledge ever occurred to them, there are only these 4 cities in America, the ones mentioned above. Seattle and Portland are places you go to eventually, and Charleston, Savannah, Austin, Asheville and New Orleans are places unimaginable, vacations, not lives, and Miami is only a place you visit out of idly curiosity, some sexual intrigue perhaps. You go to Boston for college, and only stick around if you are a genius content to not make much money, and money is the only reason you go to Chicago, if you are truly in the know.
The rest of the map might as well be bare, unless there is a ticket to be punched there on your way to better things (I'm not endorsing these views by the way.. I likes me a lot some fly over places..). Each of these places have a different lure, but by the time you boil that lure down, two cities stand, two very different places, and those two places, the Ali and Frazier of American Urbanity, are different indeed, They are New York and LA. Here are their differences:

Potato Potato, Tomato Tomato

New Yorkers wonder if someone might be better than them; Angelinos wonder if someone might figure out that they are not as good as they have you believing.

New Yorkers believe in Integrity; Angelinos would like to think they have outgrown Belief

New Yorkers believe that suffering will make them grow stronger; Angelinos believe they have outgrown suffering, or have a right to have outgrown it.

New Yorkers embrace hate; Angelinos hate hate.

New Yorkers feel shame. Angelinos feel ashamed at feeling no shame.

New Yorkers all understand that they have Ambition in common: Angelinos only commonality is being misunderstood, and somehow understanding that they are misunderstood, but having only a vague concept of whose fault that might be.

New Yorkers figure out what you need, give it to you, and try to get what they can from it. Angelinos give what they think they can give, whether you wanted it or not, and pretend they expect nothing in return.

New Yorkers want you to Disagree. Angelenos need you to Agree.

New Yorkers and Angelinos will both be constantly gauging who needs who more in an interaction.. in LA, the advantage will be seen as an opportunity to make their life easier and easier by lessening their responsibilities to you. In New York, they will maintain the responsibilities, but ratchet it up for more of whatever they feel you can give them in return.

New Yorkers appreciate the system. Angelinos believe in the system.

In LA, never date a local. In NY, never date a newcomer.

The Self Love Phase of Dog Ownership: Doggie Narcisism

Ever noticed how people often look just like their dogs, or their dog's seem to represent how their owners want to be seen... I have been noticing this for a few years now, and all over the world, not just in narcissism prone places like the US and Europe, although it seems to be a middle and upper class phenomenon, but maybe I am not quite seeing the love a mestizo might have for a mutt, or the projection a junk yard owner might be making with a junk yard dog. But I see it all the time in people who intentionally buy dogs at a phase in life I am going to call the self love phase, and I have seen it so many times I am past speculating that it is a trend..

 Basically, people buy these dogs at the beginning of self doubt. They tend to be people who are deferring having children, or just got out of a failed relationship where they considered having children, so this dog gets a lot of their attention, a heck of a lot.. for some reason I see this a lot in the sportier places in the world, places where people ski or surf, jog or mountain climb, and they are nursing some childhood trauma while pretending to be indifferent to the normal pace of life, but at some point, they feel empty, maybe it's a rejection, or something they will never talk about, but all the sudden they have this dog that looks a heck of a lot like them. Think of the shaved head guy with a goatee who buys a bull dog,  and who swings his arms oddly as if to accentuate how big his chest is..   he might even be trying to show that like his bulldog, he is kind of cuddly underneath, or the tough Latino guy with the pit bull,or the effete man with the poodle that has his same inquisitive yet regal and detached personality.. he isn't sure if he is gay, the dog is a poodle but male.. the similarities, the longer you look, go past being kind of funny to striking... it's the narcissistic phase of dog ownership..
I'm not a psychologist, so I won't try to explain it fundamentally, but it's always these kind of confident, often attractive yet somewhat odd people that go for it.. they tend to have talents, but be a bit hard to get to know.. maybe they don't even know themselves, and they seem to search for what they might have missed or be missing developmentally by trying to give it to a dog.. or any number of pets, but nothing quite like a dog to show it off publicly.. look at me, I can be a care giver.. thing's not hungry and doesn't have fleas...
Well,... good for you!

Sociology and Sports: Rugby Cultures, Soccer Cultures, and Baseball Cultures, and American Football Cultures, and...

I have started to form a theory about the sports a culture plays and how it organizes it'self.. in other words, how the culture, mostly the men of the culture, arrange themselves to tackle (or not tackle) challenges or even just daily organization as they arise in a place.
I think my first inkling that there might be something there came about in my observing the differences between latin places where they played only soccer, and where they played baseball as well. I think I had just traveled through Central America and noticed a difference in Panama, where you can actually drink the water through most of the areas close to the canal, and started to make some assumptions from my first world brain about productivity. Although at first this theory was about a notion of effectiveness and competence (how Northern European, how Rugby/American Football!) it seemed to offer insight beyond being a judge-mental outlet for my grumpy frustration with the Soccer worlds of bottled water only!
What I noticed was that in Soccer Culture's (I will say Football only once.. you must have by now figured out I am a yank...) there is rarely a developed perception of hierarchy or specialization.. kids playing soccer together are separated by skill, but rarely dominated in way that is quantified or physical.. it's all kind of light and non accusatory... and involvement is almost incidental.. moments of being completely responsible for the action are fleeting and seen more as opportunities than obligations.. a laissez faire attitude prevails, as well as a thinly spread perception of responsibility that is easily shrugged or passed off.. much effort is displayed, but the tides of the game mean that effort can be expended or wasted likely with not much notice by others until you reach higher levels, which only seem to exist as profit centers for those who come from more stratified portions of a culture that, in keeping with an all encompassing theory, likely valued other sports more originally. So you see soccer is the sport of the careless poor and middle class, living unstructured yet not necessarily unfulfilled lives.. but somewhat in a vacuum of the pressures that create quantifiable improvements to quality of life.. it's the game of the Flavellah and the cement sea of dirt roaded anywhere third world, a what me worry world of hand to mouth existence that doesn't really want to have a game plan...but living with passion nonetheless..
Enter baseball.. a group effort but with times of defined and calculable individual leadership and performance.. key decisions are made constantly with immediately measurable outcomes.. people are sidelined and even shamed for lack of performance which can be undeniably proven.. the players are at the mercy not of perception but of the weight of prior performance.. their personalities tend to be tempered to reveal nothing but what they want, ecstasy and agony traded for calculations on what and what not to reveal...the player tempering himself to not reveal his perceptions which could be exploited, but to reveal what might be an asset in an endless calculation that exists in a confrontation with defined rules, concentration and performance becoming a virtue over spontaneity with results and the cool application of precise force the virtues of these societies.. they seem to burgeon a middle class with more distinction, like a crew of team captains assigned one to every 9 or 12.. there is less chaos and more improvement, but somehow unexpected magic...less daily despair but more grid of the long season, the working class wholly enfranchised to the valuation of themselves by numbers and the most recent results instead of by status or perception of authority perhaps won long ago... it's almost the downside of too much honesty...in a culture that for an outsider is supposed to be a paragon of carelessness as we stumble south for Pina Coladas and beach bungalows..
Enter the Rugby culture to add a determination to so much calculation.. and to return some of the spontaneity of a fluid game but add the personal responsibility in an instant that demands both awareness and toughness, teamwork and individual performance balanced to create a somehow perfect balance of humility and pride, individual satisfaction and community success. Leadership and cohesion are on par with individual performance, the many become the one, and the society tackles problems aggressively but simply, with less calculation for self aggrandizement than the simple selfless solution to a problem... charmless perhaps on the surface, these cultures have a tidiness and a subtle tendency towards mutual humanization despite a tough front that leads to an unexpected respect, added to by the fact that aggressiveness is sublimated through a contest long enough to not leave one the luxury of departing the field of play with unspent emotions, so that problems are solved in one go, with a fresh start and a calm way consistent through the population but with the sheep dog potential for self defense while aggression is shunned. It might come as no surprise that this this might be the best culture to have accomplishments in on a day to day, but the lack of mercurialness can leave one wanting for controversy handled loudly and unprofessionally.. these are cultures of understood whispers and not savage incrimination, humor shared but nary the relish of one sacrificed for the entertainment of all... might not here enter the cultures of individual sports, the realm of the solitary with various manifestations for all, from the complexity of emotions that vent from ultimate fighting, boxing, or any other pugilism, to the weird worlds of insecurity, individuality, and effectiveness that come from Asian Martial Arts, to sports of technological precision like shooting, archery and the weird mix of bowling horseshoes and bachi realms, places where life becomes about individual tests...skiing, and other sports of gliding emphasize a n odd combination of gliding through life as an individual, appearing effortless and solitary yet with great effort to give such an effortless appearance, with ll the manifestations of leisure that seem so symbolized by that glide...
Now we arrive at American Football, a fine place to start before I expound on every sport that comes to mind as somehow exemplary of the aspirations and mindset of every valley and subculture that plays it. Football seems to dominate somehow a corner of any theory as it is so specialized and intricate that it all but requires a complex and dominating culture to spin off in every far flung direction from it looking for the satisfaction of the challenges it creates... It's complex.. completely complex.. it is the Land Air Battle of sports, the multi phase rules bound protected yet gladiatorial manifestation of a culture as ambitious for self preservation as it is for mental stimulation and glory... it creates it's own values, removed from the true vicissitudes of unprotected battle, but then through spectacle and calculation vaults it's complex modes of cooperation into dominance.. people specialize, they armour, they see themselves as a team and as a sub team, can take credit as a group or as an individual or as a team or special team as easily as they can shirk it or asses blame on another, blamelessly from the sidelines as their responsibility is rarely more than half the game. It creates complex nuance and the temptation to calculate for personal or group glory, and for both or for neither.. moments of true responsibility are there but often fade in the context of the whole effort if convenient.. and simple virtues carry only so far as the true complexity of the game requires more calculation than earnestness for eventual prevalence, no matter what is expected of the various sub groups who learn to fit within the hierarchy. And then there are the rules, the calculations to compromise entertainment and commerce, to turn commerce into entertainment and entertainment into commerce with an endless fiddling and halting to always guarantee fair play and to leave the game in the hands of the intellectuals instead of the savages while simultaneously rewarding the bottom dogs for their savagery and the top dogs for their thoughtfulness, but never letting the savages run away with the show, all at the expense of sublimation, so that you remain pent up dreaming for another day of it as often as not, but never straying from the group mentality to a fighting or rugby way of thinking.. to protect one so that true humility might never come and ones true value might never be known so long as the group as a whole moves forward.. what a culture this must be, the savages led by the sages to mutual benefit, the sages in turn controlled by the high priests and on and on.. so contrived as to almost appear as if it could never satisfy anyone except that the group acquiescence to the value of the game makes it a juggernaut of sorts... the world's smartest organism, able to identify any weakness if you give it enough time, predisposed to aggression and opportunism all under the guise of fair play... unifying all who should appear strong.. all kind of makes me think of that guy in Mad Max with shoulder pads, but before I keep going on into Chess and Indy Car Racing I will assume you have gotten the point.. sports and values are teammates in an endless human game..

2 Americas

The two Americas.. one of animal ferocity, but somehow in touch with it's civility, the other of docile playfulness, but somehow disconnected from it's wildness until it erupts...
One has skinned a deer and the other thinks it is savage to consider doing such a thing, but will still eat meat at the table. I wonder how many cultures have ever gotten so far into such a separation between food production and consumption.. it is a superlative of our culture, and sadly might be on our epitaph, but what evidence of how complex we have become, but at the expense of making generations of people squeamish like children when it comes to the reality of where food comes from. Butchering my first animal was for some reason a huge treat for me, like an anthropology class of the greatest value, and if you react to this you definitely are telling me which America you belong to. the other America, that of the raw side of our equation, would just wonder why I would make a big deal of it.. We enshrine them in films, like No Country for Old Men and The Grey, but most don't really want to be them.. the norm functions in the conventional wisdom of actuarial safety, protected by an OSHA for the mind, no matter how many people get blown up in Schwartzie's Commando ( I think this 80's B movie held the record for the most killings in a feature length film.. it must have been surpassed by now. Not to sell it short, it was Elissa Milano's debut as well. What a gift this film!).
If you learn about some of the villains of our time, like Kliebold and Harris, you can almost see that part of what drove them was a curiosity about the forbidden, which isn't that forbidden in any of the less economically blessed places in the world.
This reminds me of something I once saw in a remote high floor corner of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West in New York (for those of you from the squeamish America, your reference would be that it is one of the two museums represented in A Night at the Museum, that Ben Stiller movie that never grosses you out like some do, and it does have a statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front, riding a horse in all his proud glory...). It was a statement on an old display by a woman who had collected most of what was in that gallery. She had been working someplace in either Polynesia or South America with a famous anthropologist (which I believe she eventually became) who was training her, back in what must have been the 50's when National Geographic actually had differences in the World to write about, and he asked her if she had ever witnessed a death in her own country. She said she had not. He sent her home to witness one, then asked her to come back. He didn't want her perspective on death to come from a cultural vacuum.
So often ours in America does seem to come from a reflexive vacuum. I wonder how many Americans first experience with witnessing a real death was from Video on September 11th. It's a funny thing, what we have created.. so safe it's dangerous...

Central Tennessee

It's all of America's soul with none of it's brain, part ghetto, part gilded suburb, two streets of fun and two America's living side by side with mutual respect but not much interest in one another, like a couple married for 22 years that rarely talks but knows what the other is up to, one Oprah's past, the beaten down existence of a black man in a state that sets up just about everything in it's power to keep a man down, and the other Oprah's future, a shiny world of white smiles and and baptist values that deny there is a savage side until you step sideways and see a forked tongue sliver out of someones mouth... it's an amazing thing, the display of a Central Tennessean angry, so different from the caution of honkeys in Memphrica, kind of a wrath of God indignation that put's the S in Surly. And surly is the best way to describe so much of what goes on there.. mollycoddled southern women who are used to having things their way and live in a weird bubble, out of touch with just about anything extra-cultural (they got their own culture, see, ask Paula Dean!), and the surly men who are constantly out of patience tending to this world... saccharine sweet turns to surly lightening quick on those hot summer days, 93 with 100% humidity, when everyone is out pretending to be southern gentry or a country star, the basis of this fantasy usually being one trip in their life to the Rhyman, or an equivalent one days spent doing keg stands at The Steeplechase, as hollow a bar for status as a southern gentleman as can be imagined... Hey is that Faith Hill! I'm wearing the same boots as her! OMG
And on the peripheries the real Nashville.. Musicians with a nose full of blow and 20 bucks in their pocket but enough gigs on the schedule so as not to be bothered.. brothers doing their day job, eatin' garbage food down at the gas station and making sure the CMT offices downtown get mopped at midnight... maybe meat and three every once in a while, or the Bill Frists of the world, Nashville's outside of music hoity toity, motivated by some mean spirited fantasy of ego and greed, that they get theirs but they'll stop you from getting yours in a heartbeat, 10% sales tax for all and tell em it suits em, all with a disarming smile that says "what could possibly be wrong with me?", all chasing some absurd dream of this being better than the small town, while pretending it is a small town when it makes them feel important, or that the music makes it all worth while, or maybe chasin' nothing at all, just livin', like a rattlesnake wanting to be left alone. it don't have to tell you why it wants to be, just leave it be, cause this house is defended by Smith & Wesson...It ain't a place for progress...
Sure, Parnell was a good mayor, and every once in a while you are surprised by what people in Belmont or Green Hills or East Nasty come up with (pretty creative.. sigh.. for Nashville.), but outside of Pelatas, invented in Mexico, just smartly done here, the place is often a derivative pile of seething dung, delivered with a self entitled smile by some caddy pretentious idiot, and to talk to a cop in Nashville is often to be taken aback by how bad they actually are ( I once tried to report an assault there, by a guy who was very dangerous, dangerous on another scale from what people are used to in the US, and the two fat fucks who refused to get out of their vehicle said to me "they must deserve each other.." and drove off... I was stunned. We went to the courthouse to try to get a warrant for the guy, and the judge seemed more interested in berating the victim for wearing a hat as we talked to the judge through bullet proof glass like a cheap liquor store. It took a third cop and 24 hours to even approach what would be considered professional public service).
Sometimes the music delights, and you say 'goddamn, there's some talented people here', and you feel the soul on the dirty pavement of drifting players in an American drama, and you feel a bit of shame to want any more, because in it's most honest moments the 'Ville can be existential bliss, America baring it's melancholy soul, being honest for a change, being open and country strong, like your cranky dad telling you he loves you after all those years, until it hits you... the ass hole could have told me that 20 years ago and I wouldn't have ever had to harbor all this fucking anger that I am releasing now so bitter sweetly in the first place .. that's Nashville in a PBR pint cup! it's the USA challenging you to truly love it, unconditionally, as it blows by on three interstates in 6 directions with nary an explanation why.. your nose running from the smog, your brain wondering why you got such a taste for the unrequited love of such stunning narcissism.. but oh the moments of perfection... Ooh Nash-Vegas, it ain't no place for a poor boy like me..

Why I left New England..

It wasn't my original home, but somehow I developed a distaste for New England.. for people from where I was born and raised, New England was somehow a tasteful retreat, a place where you could bring something to the locals but you could respect them as well, somehow an amiable exchange from the perspective of the inflated self worth of an urban colonist. Elvis Presley once described Scientologists as being all head and no heart, and that thoughtful little piece of Mississippi insight would explain in some funny way what we liked about New Englanders after life in the Big City had subjected us to the worlds 40 flavors of passion, hatred, and insanity.. for as much as New York could be provincial in it's narcissistic insanity, New England offered somehow a cerebral distance from all that was a seething microcosm of the worlds problems. New Yorkers can't search for relief for too long, and you need look no further than that New Yorker Cartoon to know that we didn't expect to find our solutions within 2000 miles of the other side of the Hudson.. hell they came to us for what ails 'em...It also seemed to offer the solutions. All head, no heart.. the Californians would ride us, the only people who unnerve New Yorkers despite all their protestations otherwise, for our habits, somehow the solutions to the worlds problems seemed to be associated with imagery of a farm, and the closest farms we seemed to know existed where someone had once invited us to Christmas in New England.. they had a farm right down the road, imagine that, what a thing, a farm.. so.. elemental.. so Wow.. Cows.. the whole shooting match, and that farmer, he's so.. flinty.. so.. real! That's how the whole sad infatuation started, and after a bit you find yourself living the plot or a John O'Brien film, Fred Tuttle embarrasses you in all the ways you want to be embarrassed, you big city fool, while teaching you the way of hard work and self denial.. Gee Gosh Darn, who did I think I was.. life wraps up pretty well like a Green Acres Episode, I buy a house someplace quaint, raise left handed bees and name my kids Juniper and Sage...
It felt as if the place had been eaten over, that as much as it was recovering, reforesting, that it would never truly be wild again, at least in it's southern reaches, not without some highly processed three times public commented permission, some variant on the probate court orphans of the Yellowstone Wolves...
But after all this wore off, this fantasy of a tasteful providing of the worlds needs in a squeaky clean socially unassailable way that never really involved going down Conrad's dark river of savagery (well, you were expected to read about it, but doing it.. tisk tisk. so.. republican)..it felt like it had been eaten over, and once one realizes the true extent of the world's savagery, you realize New England's only remaining savagery was indifference, which is a particularly awkward form, cowardly as well...and it's virtues had been defined so long ago at some Congregationalist or even Puritan Pulpit that there was no room for redefinition.. sure it was kind of nice, keeps the hoi palloi at bay.. New England, the last bastion against the bougie fucks who are turning the rest of America into something from that Joni Mitchell Song (New Englanders love Joni Mitchell.. it doesn't mean you got all freaky and went off with the Dead to California.. it just means you make choices to keep things nice.. we like nice.. nice and cautious..), parking lots stopped by all that taciturn judgement, that thrifty farmer common sense.. but underneath that judgement it started to fester at me that that soundness, that judgement, was a combination of a control to keep things just the way the autistic old farmer likes it, where the world needs him, where the eldest brother gets to keep being in charge, but also it was based on a fear of true adventure, of riding down the river to the unknown (there's a dam on the river you wouldn't notice it unless you knew where to look, and by the way, the salmon haven't been past it in 100 years...).. it's the responsible one who won't ever realize he could go further, but if he could, why would he?.. it gets cold out there, we go places in the spring... and it's uncomfortable.. and the people out there, if I could slip past New York and out into the world.. they don't have the same self control.. what would they do to me.. what might I do to them.. what might I learn to like.. it's all too risky, and risk don't milk the cows.. so the New Englander stays up in his isolated little corner of organized paradise, in a willful ignorance of worldly pleasures that the biblical basis of America's oldest culture might abhor.., perhaps for the better for never having seen Tijuana's den's of sin and Nuku Hiva's soaring spires of jungled mystery, quietly contributing in the ways he feels fit, but what of you that never taken wild ride, George Bailey, will it irk you to the end, and who are you to raise the young with only second hand answers...is there not a pride in the mistakes you have made having been your own? As I write, all that pretentious clapboard sided order seems almost nice, crickets in the evening fog, moths buzzing about the front porch lamp. I wonder what I railed against, but do we seek our equals and stop the machinery of growth to avoid it's awkward stages, call it good and seal it up like old Sturbridge Village.. stay a precocious 12 for ever without tasting the forbidden fruit of 13, pine for a wood handled past instead of going through the ugly stages of the present for a perhaps broader future.. I guess they will never know as the fight the next windmill farm, and I might never either, for as much as I pine for it's domestic tranquility, I don't know what I would say in such environs, when I open my mouth about the wonders I have seen...

Vermont

Never have so many people worked so hard to preserve so many freedoms that they were so afraid to use...

What the F%^& happened to National Geographic?

Remember when George Bailey thought this magazine was the Cat's Meow? How it filled him with dreams of seeing the world... would that happen today to a young kid growing up in Wappengers Falls (check out the Capra film It's A Wonderful Life, if you have never lived through an event called Christmas in America)?
Hell no, the F-ing kid would end up a graphic designer, because all we get from National Geographic anymore is Graphics, as if there is nothing left to explore in the world without some robot or animated creature doing it for us.. what the F happened to you guys?
I used to work across the street from the Nat Geo foundation, and I should have realized back then what was going on. Somehow they have lost their principals.Instead of being a scholarly organization, contributing to depth, they have joined the jingoistic idiots society, contributed to the shortening of our attention span, and reveal less and less about the world if it can't be summed up in a graphic that a 5 year old would understand.. what happened to you guys? When I read it now, I resign myself to more idiocy about the latest in aerospace technology or the fight against Al Queda, the same shit they are chasing The History Channel down the tubes to do (Discovery, you're OK, somehow you never pretended to be much else,and your stuff is somehow pretty honest still), conspiracy theory bull shit and all the rest, when back int he day the thing was an extension of the Field Museum of Chicago or Natural History in New York, filled with anthropology and History and cool Archeology.. those of us who dream Indiana Jones style weren't disappointed.. now it's some combo of Tron and Air & Space. Maybe it's being stuck in DC.. like Smithsonian, they think everything has to have mass appeal, it has to be glitzy and some sad compromise that will never offend a Mormon in the Utah Valley, even if it tastes like white bread to anyone with a brain. America wants articles about cute kittens playing with Gorillas.. well hell, serve it up.. we'll find a way to make it pseudo scientific... the concerned housewives who have CNN in the background want to hear more about some pseudo scientific news topic.. here it is on a Yellow Platter, wrapped in 'you'll sound smart at dinner' conventional wisdom.
For a while you guys were loosing me because you were so stuck on global warming,and I ain't denying it, but it got old, and after a while, it felt like you were insulting my intelligence by telling the same story about guys on a glacier taking measurements again and again.. I got friends who do this work, quit making it exotic for the people in Sheboygan when there are still truly exotic things happening in the world. You are getting scooped by Discovery Magazine, where the intelligent but nomenclature illiterate can still go to actually learn about science, so how out some geography for a change, or how bout showing me a beautiful world it actually still takes balls to get to, not some place regurgitated from '1001 Places To Go Before Your Yuppie Boss Fires You'.. And I am not even taking on here what the heck happened to the weird conspiracy theory End of Mayan Calendar garbage that their TV channel put's out on more than occasionally.
I feel like this all started with Ballard, or maybe the board of directors got stuck in some Georgetown or Tacoma Park Chatterbox where they just like to hear how smart they are, but this isn't what the magazine was originally about. I feel like ever since they covered Titanic and Ballard (and incidentally swallowed a huge cover story, not that I am complaining about secretly recovering nuclear material) or maybe it was the Hologram Issue when I was a kid, somehow they fell for whiz bang when the resigned themselves to the fact that the world is getting smaller, but the world keeps changing,and in it's recesses as well there are some pretty cool things still growing in the cracks, that aren't endangered..maybe I am selling them short, maybe I don't know what it's like to be in their editorial meetings, but I feel like it must be like working for Lucas Films with the Chinese plush toy manufacturer on speed dial.. this was a Society, not a network.. get did of Nat Geo Travel and Kids, and all the stupid idiots who grew up obsessed with watch commercials trying to figure out how to spend their inherited millions, and are reliving the latest micro event on Everest, and show me the world again.. please.. so I have someplace to dream about going from Wappinger Falls again. Get some reporters with balls, like from Vice Magazine or that guy who danced all over the world, (Where the Hell is Matt? At least it was beautiful!) and get back to what made us dream, not just stroking our national pride in some mad chase of the latest editorial trend.. for God's sake, you guys were part of our national dignity, our intellectual purview of the world, and I feel like it just washed down the Mayan Calendar drain..

In Mexico...

I often times find myself pondering who knows more about life, virgin's or whores.
It feels as if the precipice from innocence to jadedness is most profound in this culture where currently all manner of vice and violence is as closely available as the corner store, Mexico. In America, we see Los Angeles this way, as a place you go to lose your innocence, but not only does it pale in comparison to mostly Urban Mexico in terms of cheaply decadent emotional wreckage, the new ploy in LA has been Kardashianized, 'The Virgin Whore'. Few Mexicans would endeavor to be both... the point of combining the two is lost on them (and on me to some degree...).. somehow women, and I guess men here as well, go from something childish and content to something desperate and in search of satisfaction in an instant in the barrios of the United States of Mexico, or perhaps it is two Mexico's living side by side ignoring each other's ploy.. one heading to school each day dreaming of braces, a new f-150, and a baptismal party for their children, complete with Pinata, and the other roams the streets at night searching for the next fix at any price, but somehow content in some way that it lives the more honest life of the two...
If I find anything compelling about Mexico it is that confidence. I have seen it from Tapachula to Tijuana, and it's proven to me that poverty isn't a dusty finca and a flea covered mule, it's this urban stuff that is the true lowest rung, and they know how to look you in the eye..
That willingness to toy with traditional life, but abandon it for true darkness at any price.. the confidence that comes from some odd notion that they are drinking the purest nectar of wisdom from the darkest bottom of the world's deepest barrel.
This notion has spread somewhat south through Central America but somehow been stopped by the Darien Gap, somewhat stopped in Nicaragua to be accurate.. Only in places will you find such consumptive desperation in South America, but it is rarely so individual.. that is why one has to go to Mexico to find the deepest wisdom of the whore, it appears.. for all else in Latin America the gig is some combination of innocence or indifference, although the mentality of the whore is spreading south as I said.. Buddha might say for better, the Pope would say for worse..
Perhaps therein lies the essential problem of a modern Latin America, the languor that settles in outside of these pits of Mexican depravity, for no role models exist for the post addictive lifestyle, only the two old options of indulgent ones drunk and singing on the doorstop at night, and the simplified myth of the self denial  of Christ. Unlike Asia where innocence is a myth deflated, and most seem to spend their time deciding what 'mistake' to make next, or Europe, where enlightenment has made such questions a point of mockery over glasses of wine, in Latin America, Argentina and Brazil perhaps excepted, no one validates the hungers and the lusts as a normal part of life except for those selling it, and there is no 'French Model' for trying a little and getting used to it... so the polarity of virgin whiteness and diving into the deep end persist, with it's life lessons coming fast, nowhere so fast as in Mexico...