Stenches of Progress
Though I am frequently in the habit of crushing people’s dreams, it would be a lie to pretend Vila’s suggestion that I be in charge of a rabble-rousing, inflammatory, contrarian, and downright outrageous magazine didn’t cross my mind plenty of times. I carry romantic notions of being a scribe, before the obligatory candle-lit desk, scribbling and dispatching parcels of wisdom to living rooms across the world. Isn’t that why people blog? We get to be the editors, the reporters, and the researchers of our own lives for a theoretically infinite audience. Hell, my posting frequency of late is about the same as that of an editor, no? Once a month, always on schedule.
But I’m talking about serious work. The angry editor. Lewis Lapham, longtime editor of Harpers magazine, is the template here. His recent retirement brought an end to a good four years of outright vitriol in his Notebook column, during which the most outrageous nadirs of the Bush administration’s deceitful tenure sent him into shuddering paroxysms of highly literate rage. It was the first page I turned to in every issue, because I love rage. He was repetitive and prone to hyperbole, but dammit, if things need to be said, I don’t mind him saying them over and over in the angriest ways possible. If a man’s got fire in his gut I say let him breathe even if it all sounds the same. The conflagration is what matters.
Media, though, that’s what I have doubts about. Media pundits will tell you that in the marketplace of ideas, the most valuable ones are those which are heard by the many as opposed to the few. Without media, they say, we would all be shouting out windows at each other and having the town herald bark the news of the impending Bolshevik invasion through his little tin horn. If we accept as a fact that a good majority of the opinion-media shouts each other into irrelevance, left-and-right, O’Reilly and Franken, Post and Globe, like the cancelling of out-of-phase sound waves, those few potent voices left over have promise for real societal benefit, don’t they?
Let me drop a quote from my man Hank aka Henry Miller.
We (Americans) take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish—I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.
Good point, Hank. For example, I command my Canadian readers to take a good long look at the headlines trickling in on the CBC Canada Votes page (a very helpful page, I might add), and try to find the items which are not devoted to reporting a permutation of the aforementioned job solipsism lamented by Mr. Miller. Presently, there is a story about Gilles Duceppe telling the press that Paul Martin should ease up on his criticisms of the American government, and instead “take action” on issues such as softwood lumber, as if criticism and action are mutually exclusive. And, softwood lumber, you say? Well, funny that Gilly D would mention that, because Quebec happens to be one of the top provinces for producing said lumber, and several of the country’s most important pulp and paper operations are located here, and they haven’t been doing so well lately with the rising energy costs and uppity $CDN and all, and did I mention the Bloc Quebecois only cares about winning ridings in La Belle Province?
Scroll down for a piece on Paul Martin’s reluctance toward Senate reform, due to the obvious fact that the phrase “constitutional reform” brings back memories of Meech and Charlottetown, Levesque and Trudeau’s little whodunnit, and later, a little rally in Montreal. Martin might be a grey-haired charlatan in a cheap suit, but he’s no idiot. He has an election to win and a job to preserve, and would sooner eat a baby on live TV than open the Constitutional Question (and thus the National Questions of certain provinces) right now.
Okay, so it’s election time, and these are low-hanging fruit. They’ll be hucking their wares every chance they get. Politics is obviously the worst offender in the keep-your-job sweepstakes, but if politics is not your thing, feel free to peruse other, equally meaningless things, such as best-of-the-year lists and awards ceremonies (to “promote art” and, hey, boost sales), for no good reason at all, Mariah Carey.
The fundamental truth about media: it sells something. Always. Sometimes good things, but often bad. It sells issues, ads, tickets, and subscriptions. It peddles values, attitudes, images, and styles. It trafficks in political grandstanding, outrage, diplomacy, and progress. And smut, while I’m on a roll. These things are not bad or good, nor is their sale. Rather, they compose a totality of sensory data plugged into every emotion and thought that a human being could ever have, and the whole thing crashes down on the public every time they tune in. Processing it all with any nuance or comfort is like trying to discern individual droplets in a tidal wave. We live in the most fascinating and all-pervading culture the world has ever known, but the deeper you drill into it, the more a lot of it appears a surface-level phenomenon. Do you ever read old books, or historical anecdotes, and see fundamental patterns of human behaviour repeating themselves perfectly in the present day? Shakespearean tragedies acted out in real life? Doesn’t it feel like it’s all been done before? Where’s the wisdom? Where’s the universality in the deluge, and why isn’t the media more interested in talking about it? All I see are events and video clips scrolling by, and I don’t know how to proceed. Jean Baudrillard nails the feeling:
You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can’t disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.
So, is the media for me? I’m not sure. I suppose a few deadlines could be good for me. Writing is never bad, nor is people reading it. Anything more complicated than that begins to sound like “progress” again. Deadlines, funding, advertising, the “target market”, the messy, ugly things that inhibit and dilute all media. I am an insufferable purist, but also a realist. It’s easier to seethe than to act, and more fun too. I don’t know, I’m working these things out slowly, in the times between spasmodic reloads of news websites. Have to get back to you.
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It’s a Celebration, Bitches
Last night I had a dream that a baby was delivered to my doorstep, as if by stork. I don’t remember who delivered it but whoever it was handed it to me on a firm green pillow and walked away. I looked down at the little guy (though he was wearing a diaper I could sense the gender instantly), and he smiled, sitting upright on the pillow. He seemed smaller than a normal baby, a miniature, and with a mature-looking face. His smile was broad and reassuring. He didn’t giggle or cry but instead sat there, smiling. My first thought was that my life had changed permanently. Nothing prior to this moment was relevant any longer, and my life began today. I took the baby in my arm and started building my new life.
That made me feel good.
The last few weeks have been a haze for me, a a stew of passivity, a whirlwind of psychic torment, an amalgamation of idiosyncracy, a summit between neuroses, a rough time all around and not for any reason in particular. Days have slipped down the memory hole and I’ve got nothing to show for them. Let’s just forget these past few weeks.
Let’s talk about this Holiday business.
Am I the only one who finds calling it “The Holidays” under the guise of universal inclusion actually more offensive to minority groups than calling it “Christmas” and saying “Christmas is the holiday being celebrated”? Christmas is very obviously a Christian holiday, even if most people treat it as “ceremonial deism”. So to pretend that the rituals enjoyed by North American society at large during this time—rituals which include shopping, alcohol, propagation of virii, mortgages foreclosures, and buggery—are not Christian in nature, while at the same time calling it “The Holidays”, a term which invites anyone, regardless of creed, to take these Christian traditions as his or her own, in other words, allowing every religious group to take part in the rituals surrounding the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ while simultaneously declaring it a religiously neutral holiday, is a fucking abomination, is it not? I mean, are we pretending that the date December 25th has no significance, and that everyone gets that day off work because society just figured that was a good time for it? Can this particular veil be lifted, please? Fuck! Call it Christmas! People won’t mind!
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