March 31, 2014 Dreamed of a brilliant idea for a television show that would feature me playing games of basketball against teams of kindergarten students. Somehow this all seemed funny, especially because i’d conceived of the perfect name for the show. Waking in the middle of the night with this name in my head, after…
The Perils of Illuminism
Back in the days of Socrates, in the mind of Socrates, their lived what we might call a keen but highly dangerous and unpopular idea that people weren’t fit to govern themselves. More, and it seems strange, this lack of fitness relative to self-government was exactly paralleled by a mysterious prohibition Socrates had picked up…
Repeal & Replace the Articles of Confederation
Had a dream in which I realized I was not about to receive a great deal of money. I was walking in a building, heading for a bathroom, I think, when it struck me that I had been living inside an illusory notion that a million dollars was headed my way. As you might imagine,…
The Eugene Weekly Takes on Fake News
THE BITTER PILL #5 A fight to the death of journalism. I’m not at all surprised that Camilla Mortensen’s fake news buyer’s guide was a hodgepodge of vaguely related ideas and platitudes. On the other hand, the hectoring tone of her opening did come as a shock. Rather than a photo of NPR’s Elizabeth Jensen,…
A Sort of Blueprint
Megan Burbank’s note to readers suggests to me a sort of blueprint, though I’m having trouble quite summing up what for. This mysterious something is more than a meme but less than a manifesto. Perhaps I can awkwardly describe it as a Platform for Political Action, though that’s not really quite it. Anyway, maybe I…
Great Achievements in Social Engineering #1
Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants – Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept The transformation of opinion on ‘the Left’ as regards the National Security State over the past 15 years has been striking, if slow to unfold. Back when Bush was King, the revelation of warrantless wiretaps – which was just…
Just Another Day in the Age of Universal Deceit
This picture does a nice job summing up everything that’s wrong with people on the Internet. Well, ok, it doesn’t do all that. It does, though, demonstrate how complete and casual the disregard for truth is in the construction of clickbait. It’s not merely that this picture never happened, that there never was a tour…
Very Much Like a Newspaper
The Bitter Pill #4 I have to hand it to the Weekly: it looks just like a newspaper. They seem to have gotten a firm handle on the whole matter of arranging words according to the familiar pattern of Headline, Sub-Heading and body text. The illusion suckers me in most every time. Even though I’ve…
Wound Consciousness and the Flower of Enlightenment
I am approaching an idea about wound/wounded consciousness. In part, the dampening of awareness that serves as an anesthetic brings as a corresponding cost a loss of those cognitive skills that have the potential to transform, and even transmute, the experience. Reducing something to a dull ache numbs the pain, but at a cost of…
Errors in StereoScopic Thinking
HAMLET For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now…
Bounded in a Nutshell
Tom Perez elected DNC Chair Completely predictable outcome for a party gearing up to avoid any real change. The Dems will keep playing on the strength of Trump’s hideousness, while ignoring the populist revolt against the regime of financial, legal and industrial globalization that is sweeping the Western world. I was quite wrong in thinking…
Thou Shalt Not Ghost The Ghost
There are deeper parts to why this professor bugged the shit out of me, as we used to say. His final invocation of Hamlet was icing on the cake of my outrage, the pyramidion completing my pyramid of dissatisfaction. It was perfect, and I haven’t really spelled out the perfection. I want to connect his…
Hamlet and the Historical Sense
This essay came out of a futile Facebook exchange. I’m making a practice lately of not letting my interlocutors define what I think about… which is tricky, because I am always more animated by dialogue, and argument, than by just thinking of things on my own. Blending energy and clarity is tricky… perhaps even the…
I’m Psychedelically Gifted
In my dream this morning someone had invented a drug for marketing purposes that allowed the user to create realities for their audience to inhabit. It was more than virtual reality in that those dosed with the drug passionately leapt into these ideational spaces, completely enamored of the premises and their identities within them. I…
Don Kahle, Man of the Future
Whenever the stresses of the real world start to get me down, I feel comforted by the certain knowledge that Friday’s RG will provide another of Don Kahle’s inspiring flights outside the box of common sense. Whether he’s sucking up to a local official, implicitly identifying himself with the cultural elite, or just drawing an…
Pious Hypocrisy and the Lesser of Two Evils
You will all have noticed that your political opponents have no concern for truth. Or rather, they only have concern for and allegiance to truth when such truth is inconvenient for you. Have you noticed, though, that your side is essentially the same in this regard? This isn’t about whether your values or theirs are…
Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina
It’s fashionable to admire, in the abstract, the iconoclasts, the rebels, the kids in high school fighting to keep their minds alive in the face of a system designed, consciously or not, to reduce them to mental servitude. As that Apple ad made plain some years ago, these figures are the idols of our age….
Golden Showers For Everyone
It’s been interesting to watch Chris Hedges’ path from the heart of intellectual and moral dissent under the Bush Administration to the political Siberia of RT. This path saw him first fired from the NYTimes for expressing opposition to the invasion of Iraq too far in front of the curve, to his current exile beyond…
Man Walks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You’ll never guess what happens next.
You know how it is with us humans, always seeking after some answer, some new tool or toy. Behind it all, as the gurus tell us, is a feeling of insufficiency. The appropriate response to this information has become almost self-evident; and when you hear that phrase it helps to remember how far Thomas Jefferson’s…
Birthering Trump
I’ll give you this: the birther campaign to delegitimize Trump is vastly more sophisticated than the birther campaign Trump came to lead. It is, in any case, worth noting the parallel themes, as this is apparently the new norm of American politics. One group elects a president and the other group declares this person illegitimate…
The Art of Noise
Beyond Greenwald being highly cogent as usual, the BBC interviewer demonstrates the propagandistic bent of most media presenters. The essential skill of these presenters lies in distorting information in real time, to serve to an implied structure of authority. Propaganda is natural to the human mentality. It’s not, then, that media presenters and organizations are…
Welcome to the Ongoing, Irreversible, Fragmentation of Consensual Reality
In considering this image, which I fashioned myself using one of those online highway sign makers, I am reminded of John Stewart’s summary image of how a sane society ought to behave. It is an image that predictably came from a person raised in New Jersey, with aspirations of going somewhere. A sane society, as…
Bush, Hamlet, and the Age of Aquarius
An observation that’s been a long time coming: Real life is subtle. Real people are subtle. Real history is subtle. And so, from this we might conclude that Real Politics is subtle. Political narratives, on the other hand, are simplistic. They are stories. They are myths. As such, they are easily recognized as fiction by…
The Sermon of the Cell
Dreamed I was incarnated in some sort of game where I had to figure something out. This game was just like real life. I was out walking Earthbear, except he was wearing a sweater. For some reason, I had to kill someone in this game in order to extract their heart, as this might yield…
Disinterested Survivor
Dreamed I was on a Survivor-type dating show, except we were all dressed as Vedic deities. I was Hanuman. A few of the people were discussing the nature of disinterested action, and coming upon them I declared (authoritatively, as you might imagine) that the essence of disinterested action lay in not trying to be disinterested….
Say No to Kangaroo Courts
UO professor Michael Hames-Garcia is against official censure of unpopular speech and actions, solely because such censure has historically fallen disproportionately on “women, people of color and queer people.” In his mind, there is nothing intrinsically “chilling” about censuring controversial speech. Rather, he’s concerned that censure in the hands of an institution, like the University,…
Make Cosplay, Not War
The Bitter Pill #3 I’ve been on a real rollercoaster lately. After completing Bitter Pill #2, I started developing a gnawing feeling that maybe spending so much time thinking and writing about the Eugene Weekly was a form of mental illness, or at least a serious defect in character. A good friend, albeit of the…
Modern Miracle: The Election of Trump Proved Everyone Right
I’ve noticed something miraculous over the last couple days. The election of Donald Trump has proven just about everyone right. Not in terms of their predictions – obviously most people predicted the outcome of the election incorrectly – but in terms of their preconceptions. Miraculously, a host of varied preconceptions have all been verified by the…
Common Ground in America
I overheard something today that struck me as a perfect statement of what is perhaps one of the few unifying experiences among all politically-inclined Americans. It is our most salient cognitive Common Ground: “If you don’t understand why your way of thinking is fucked up, I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
Restless Venus: Lyrics and Notes
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/292619138″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] Here are the lyrics, with a few annotations (signified by ^, ^^ and ^^^) to dress them up a bit: [chorus] Restless Venus won’t you please settle down and just try staying with me in this town It’s hard to love you when you’re wandering around O, my…
Here’s a Happy Thought: Winning Solves Nothing
Here’s a happy thought: The worst part of this election is going to be after the votes are cast, given that the only source of hope for a large part of this country’s population is the thought that there’s a chance of stopping either: a massive criminal enterprise, possibly led by baby-killing demons…or the forces…
The Best Idea Whose Time Has Come
I appreciate all the Weekly has done this year to render its annual Best of issue as a farce. Opening with a profusion of randomly conceived Staff Picks goes a long way to exploding whatever illusions anyone might have that EW is in contact with some means of objectively, or essentially, determining what is “best”. However, in an age where an…
Pyrrhic Victory: A Political Prediction
It has always struck me as a delusional premise that progressives are going to help elect Hillary Clinton and then somehow pressure her into being the president they want. The Right is not going to go away. After progs are rallied behind Clinton to #StopTrump, they’ll be rallied, for example, to defend her from the…
Meru to Mordor: A Poetic Consideration of the Deep State
We stand before You, Great Mountain of the State – who breaks the clouds and causes rain to fall – wondering whether to call you Meru or Mordor, Olympus* or Doom Regarding Olympus, it is worth remembering that supposedly Greek innovation, whereby the divine beings were made more like humans, with the passions of individual…
The Coffee Chronicles #2
Well, we can cross The Barn Light off the list of potential spots to get coffee as it used to be, in the World Before April. I stopped in there last week on a walkabout through wild Downtown Eugene, the Greatest City in the World for Arts and the Outdoors. The barista was, she informed…
Imagine Jesus Christ Needed His Laptop Fixed
Dreamed of demonstrating my telekinetic abilities for a friend by levitating my laptop. As it floated past her, she reflexively reached out for it, as if to save it from dropping. This gesture communicated a sense of doubt to my pre-conscious mind and, spell broken, the laptop crashed down and broke into pieces. Fortunately, we…
Music and Magic
To tell the truth, I am working on a political post, but posting a favorite song may yet head me off at the pass. So here it is: a song that features a lot of chorus/tremolo synced with the beat. This may seem a superficial detail, but I think it’s part of the magic of the…
Don Kahle’s Pompous Idiocy Must End
An as yet unsuccessful proposal to Eugene’s Register Guard I might feel more forgiving toward Don Kahle’s failings as a writer if he weren’t such a pompous ass to boot. Every time I come across his work in Friday’s RG he is dropping some name or other, in the course of criticizing Eugene for being…
I Dream of Noam Chomsky as a Common Man
Dreamed Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker were in my band, though neither played an instrument or sang. Noam made sense to me, but I couldn’t understand why Pinker was there. What’s more, the two didn’t like each other. But, I was thrilled to be in a band with Chomsky, and he gave me a really…
Hungry Ghosts and the Real Meaning of Halloween
While considering a friend’s avoidance of trick or treaters I was struck by the essence of Halloween, which has been lost, though the form lives on. It used to be if you didn’t show up at the door with offerings the kids would vandalize your house, but we’re living in a soft age, with no real…
Suck it up, Bitches!
And by “Bitches” I mean white, heterosexual, men with dicks, and possibly beards, too You might have wondered how it is that the Eugene Weekly can derisively refer to some musicians as “white guys with beards and dicks”; how columnist Sally Sheklow can declare that straight men smile “like they have spinach in their teeth”;…
An Opening and Closing Comment on the Perfect Horror of it All
I can think of no more succinct statement of the ethical bankruptcy of the American political process than the fact that regardless of which major party candidate is declared winner of this election, come January 2017 a man accused of multiple sexual assaults will be living in the White House. Supporters of Hillary who object…
Trump’s Only Play
There’s no way Trump can walk back comments revealing his penchant for celebrity sexual assault. The only play he’s got is to go forward, following a path he’s already blazed in other areas. Just as Trump got in front of his donations to Democrats by saying he was only playing the corrupt political game, and…