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It’s true. Punk lyrics regard paranoia and lonely iconoclasty. They’re talking about cutting through the cloud of lies that surrounds us and seeing truth and being frustrated by a system seemingly insurmountable to change. I don’t know how else to put it, but they’re our youth movement’s lifeline to transcending humanism. Our children really are our future.

ADDENDUM
ALL art is transhuman, only punk is transitionally centristically transhuman; more immediately available to the to the public at large who haven’t delved into prefer it to the aspects of transhumanist musicians who operate in a more cerebral state, and are by definition therefore, less accessible.

This new wave of parenting, armed with the power to spy on their kids through social networking sites, as evidenced in this discussion, is symptomatic of our out-of-touch culture. Our parent's generation is self righteous because we've lied to them (I know I lied to mine), so they became arrogant in their self-righteousness, and we learned it from watching EACHOTHER. It's the lie that we're all autonomous in our boxes on the hillside, that we don't need our neighbors, and that our friends mustn't know about our struggles. We're all fine! Except when we're not. Our society is crumbling and all we can muster is an inward fight with our families and our selves.

Our leaders are self-righteously arrogant. So we think that's what it takes to become leaders. But we're human and we make mistakes. But such mistakes would blow the cover off our “perfect” lives! Lie! Cheat! And, failing that, self-medicate! Buy! Sell! Inject! Implant!

STOP!

Look at us! We're fucked up! And if you, specifically, think you're not: fine. Stay strong. But admit there's a problem, alone in the act of pretending you're not part of it.

I had dinner with my parents the other week. I let it all out: I'm not an alcoholic anymore. “Why?”. Because Obama became president. My parents voted emphatically for Bush both times. “Why?!” Because I have hope now. And a tear came to my Dad's eye.

I'm a patriot. “Of course you are! We've always believed you are!”. But I was led to believe I wasn't. “Why?!” Because I don't believe in war. And my mom wept.

Mom and Dad: come join me on Facebook.

Look at this article and realize that we can no longer rest on our elitist, academic laurels as designers. Stop belly-aching the old adage that someone is a “poser” or a threat just because they haven't had the privilege to afford, financially or socially, a design education and are self-taught. True, some of them may not have the eye for detail that takes a publication from bad to good, or from good to great; but let's not underestimate the power of an individual, coupled with the power of the internet, to learn those things, and probably exceed the work from those of us who, hogtied by what may turn out to have been a narrow design worldview, lack the fresh eyes a “novice” could possess. Let's stop “owning” the design field and start being open to a more cooperative discussion on design. We have the opportunity with these new peers to stand on the progressive side of history when our art transcends mediocrity.

I knew I'd catch your attention with that headline. And that proves the whole point of this post: we're all doing it, we're all interested in it, but our public discussions about it aren't pervasive enough to underline those facts. And when we finally DO discuss it, the language serves to suppress sex-positive attitudes, highlighting instead what our culture deems are sex offenses. When I discuss it, and I often do, some brave souls join in. Most deem me “untouchable” for it.

I hid my previous blog specifically because, although it served the, albeit vengeful, purpose of rebutting the Republican offensive against Bill Clinton by listing at length all known Republican sex offenders, it was a disservice to my cause of helping improve our dialog about sex in a positive way. I am no better than Ken Starr if I'm publicizing sex offenses as he did with Clinton (who's “offense” was arguably not).

Sex-positivity, as I've personally defined it, is really just an acknowledgement of sex's existence, it's nature, and it's positive possibilities. I recently challenged one anti-gay-marriage man by very simply positing that our legal framework today understands the age of consent to be 18. Consenting adults, therefore, should be allowed to enter into contracts of their choosing, regardless of gender or how many people want to enter said contract. Yes, I'm talking about polygamy there. Explain to me, oh nay-sayers, how this legal framework would degrade to condone bestiality or worse, as so many anti-gay people have hypothesized?

Our system functions currently, regarding as an example, child pornography laws, to charge even underage individuals when they send suggestive images of themselves from their cellphones, a practice colloquially called sexting. Such individuals, if found guilty, must register as sex offenders and therefore face public scrutiny for the rest of their lives.

We have made the decision, culturally and by way of age of consent laws, that child pornography is unacceptable. And we've sensationalized it enough that we decided sex offenders should register such that their names, addresses, and other information are public domain, presumably for everyone's protection. Unfortunately, the teenager who sends a cheeky photo of him/herself must now forever face difficulties in housing, employment, or just plain being “normal”, as a consequence of RSO disclosure laws.

We might benefit by calling everyone a victim of our sex-negative media (The old dogs have got a new trick: It's called criminalize the symptoms while we spread the disease.—Ani Difranco). We have a choice: to either slide down the slippery slope of rounding up and banishing sex offenders, or to improve our dialog about sex such that teenagers aren't convinced a sexy photo is their best shot at getting noticed.

What WILL we do with all this great stuff available for us to behold these days? I'm referring to everything: bad and good. Good for obvious reasons, Bad so we can have a hierarchical context from which to judge what's good.

There is so much art, music, information, STUFF! How will we take it all in? Can we? It seems a shame not to try, mortal as we are. But we only have so many hours in a day. Will the future accommodate more and more people making that very attempt?

I'm thinking microchip implants. I just can't fathom any other way.

Let this new year be one of hope.

We've tried everything else.

Amen.

Ha! When I was grade-school-age, that word’s stepchild, antidisestablishmentarianism, was the boasting tool for anyone wanting to prove their spelling prowess. I, being apparently antiestablishmental from a very young age, argued that in fact the longest word was something else; a word which now escapes me. Not unfortunately, because it turns out even that word, whatever it was, wasn’t the longest in the English language. The longest word, technically, is some chemical term for a lung disease or something. In any event, I oughtta wrap up this introductory paragraph with a statement that ties this childhood narrative into a thesis on antiestablishmentarian propensity in contemporary history, and I thought of a premise tonight whilst watching "Burn After Reading", so there we go.

My impression on the first viewing was not only that the movie is friggin’ awesomely hilarious, but that it was a convoluted epic tale that took unrelated individuals and knocked them together in a tragi-comedic particle collider for no apparent reason (hence the tragedy). I realized tonight, however, that the tumult in "Burn After Reading" arises from the proverbial butterfly effect catalyzed in the opening scene.

*spoiler alert*

In the beginning, a man is fired, or more specifically, told he is being "moved out" of his position at the C.I.A.. Instead of letting them fire him, Cox (the man referenced above), preemptively quits. We can glean from his interactions that he’s an antiestablishment-type that muckraked, perhaps a little too much. We’re not sure that’s what got him "fired". In fact, the reason given at the exit interview is his drinking problem, to which he replied, "you’re a Mormon! Next to you, we ALL have a drinking problem!" Gotta love Mormons at the C.I.A..

You wanna see a drinking problem?! Cox’ll show you DRINKING PROBLEM. And so, his cheating wife now has real ammunition to divorce him, the proceedings for which she burns his financials and, tertiarily, his in-progress memoirs to disc, gives them to her lawyer’s receptionist who, in dropping the disc at her gym inadvertently lands the data in the hands of a personal trainer who is mislead by her hapless Hardbody accomplice to perceive the "highly classified shit" as a bargaining chip to pay the high cost of the cosmetic surgery she’s desperate to undergo and which she temporarily forgot about upon falling for the man who was initially having an affair with Cox’s wife. People die. People are literally murdered in this circus of events because of a string of misunderstandings arising from Cox’s bad fortune. I just went to the script to count the number of times he mutters, or yells, "what the fuck?". It was only 4, apparently. But this phrase seems to sum up the overarching theme in the movie.

I think the film serves as a warning to any establishment that would attempt to silence those who speak truth to power. If you think about it, each character suffers their fate directly or indirectly as a result of the C.I.A.’s firing move. "Burn After Reading" ends with the department head closing the case, saying "I’m fucked if I know what we did (to contribute to the case)". And there’s the irony: those at the tippy-top these days seem not to realize, or believe, or even care, that their decisions have serious consequences on the world.

WTF?!

They Called us Generation X. The common wisdom being that we stood for nothing. We were angry "for no good reason". And, "What IS that god-awful noise?!"

Remember the Battle in Seattle (November, 1999)? The media had us believing these "disorganized" "miscreants" were simply violent and misdirected. Today we realize they were just way ahead of the curve on this whole globalization thingy we’re only now figuring out how to damage-control. They were protesting the very world corporate practices that brought us to this economic reckoning.

The WTO now looks like a freaky fraternal circle-jerk that we let get out of control. THEY were the miscreants; they just had entourages, off-shore bank accounts, security details, harems, paid-politicians, private jets, and country clubs to cover their tracks; indeed they had their own mini-kingdom within the United States. Most of us thought nothing of it, and the media was tasked with making sure we all understood there was "nothing to see here". But our generation represented the knowledge of that unknown variable, x, that things were not as they seemed, and we felt a compulsion to bring true reality to consciousness, through art, music, and protest.

We, Generation X, knew in our gut then what everyone sees now. We didn’t take any of the glossed-over pseudo-reality (that was really just a pathetic holdover from the nuclear/cold war era) for granted. Nothing in that world made sense to us. Our parents failed in their attempt to overthrow the system, so they naturally patronized any attempt from their children to do the same. They were in charge of the media that patted the WTO protest and other grungy gatherings on the head: awww, kids these days.

But who were the ones that traited Liberal for conservative? Who moved from city to suburb? Who gave up pot in favor of alcohol? Who threw their support behind Reagan instead of Labor? Who was titilatingly DISGUSTED with Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affair? It was our ex-hippy parents. But the Seattle protesters weren’t all youngsters. They included labor unions; those true patriots that refused to sell their souls for the white collar.

It’s time for the next "greatest generation". We might not realize it until it’s history is written, but it shall be written. And let it be written that it started in Seattle.

Why are so many of us depressed? Could it be that the problem is less individual and more communal? Is it global? And, if so, what has kept some individuals/countries immune?

A couple of weeks ago, my company, Young Living, hosted an International Marketing summit. Young Living is growing moderately in the United States, but more dramatically in our International markets: Europe, Japan, and Australia. So, the purpose of the summit, or so we Americans thought, was to provide US brand communication standards to these world offices for implementation. We put together our presentations, wrote our mission statements, bound our style guide, and we put it all out there with what turned out to be a naive sense of pride.

It turns out we were kind of late to the game. In the void that was our marketing effort, the International offices had taken it upon themselves to innovate on their own. Still dependent on us for superior photography, they stayed solidary to the US corporate office; but in matters of product marketing, each market presented deceptively small and effective ideas that humbled us. Why didn’t WE think of that?!

I think I know why: We were arrogant. More importantly; we were depressed. Even our leadership, on every level in this country, was arrogant and depressed. As someone who has experienced depression and it’s associated side-effects, I can attest to the isolated, defensive arrogance it can breed. In some ways, it’s narcissism.

Without going too much into narcissism (I assume everyone reading this has google, or similar), the problem with everyone being at least somewhat narcissistic (and, indeed, our leaders more acutely so), is the precarious nature of the race to the top of the corporate ladder. We had become less concerned with what we could do for our company and more concerned with what the company could do for us. And failing that sought-after vindication, we left old companies for new ones in search of some other route to the "top". We sulked in our cubicles, convinced that our individual corporate struggles were unfair to us alone. We didn’t bother to look across the hallway and notice our like-minded peers. Or, if we did, our discussions were disempowered discourse as to the unfair nature of our departmental microcosmos or even microcosmical companies/corporations.

Anyone who wasn’t depressed was simply arrogantly leading us off a cliff. Alas, maybe they, too, were depressed. In any event, we blindly and sheepishly followed, convinced there was no other way to make it "in this world". The film, Office Space, spoke to us for reasons we couldn’t describe beyond the "that’s so true!" conviction. I wonder how far back this depression dates.

The depressive arrogance is evident in every corner of our society, from the Hubris that has been the United States’ borrowed pride, to disparate religious institutions, to the "me me me" attitudes in our marketplace, advertising, and our families. It’s contagious. We see others "having it all" and intuitively strive for the same. I’m not a parent, but I do wonder, should we be surprised when our children act in kind? Won’t it do us all some good to lead with humility?

I guess I could segway into the argument for centrist politics, but I’ve been officially labeled insane by my close peers for suggesting that this radical centrism could be our awakening. I’ll reserve my rant for the series, "This Wasn’t Just Any Election" such that it’s title alone can serve to warn those nay-sayers against reading it. Is that a narcissistic rant?

When I reach out and touch Facebook recently, I’m attempting to touch and be touched by everyone at this time of hope and unity. I’m fully aware that I’m perceived among some to be touching people inappropriately, but it can’t hurt to attempt communicating that my intentions are pure:

Right now I’m realizing the potential of Facebook to connect people, and not just in a “hi, how’ve you been?!” kind of way, either. It’s not lost on me that many of you have already realized this, and so I hope none of you take this note as anything more than my compulsive drive to merge these thoughts onto y’all’s information freeway.

Most of us live in Suburbia. We drive home to our bubbles inside of our bubbles after punching out of bubbles. From low orbit, these behaviors resemble insect commerce. Even though we do these things in unison, we’re isolated; in mind, body, and spirit.

Ani Di-friggin-Franco wrote this of her home city, Buffalo, NY:

“White people are so scared of black people.
They bulldoze out to the country, and put up houses on little loop-d-loop streets.
And while America gets its heart cut right out of its chest
the Berlin wall still runs down main street separating east side from west.
And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse, in the boarded up stores
and the broken down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
just to prove they got no manners, no mercy, and no sense.
And I wonder then what it will take for my city to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
The ghosts of old buildings are haunting parking lots
in the city of good neighbors that history forgot.
I remember the first time I saw someone lying on the cold street
I thought, “I can’t just walk past you, this can’t just be true.”
But I learned by example to just keep moving my feet.
It’s amazing the things that we all learn to do.
So we’re led by denial like lambs to the slaughter
serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water
And the old farmroad’s a four-lane
that leads to the mall and my dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall
And I wonder then what it will take for my country to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
‘til nation’s last taker succumbs to one last dumb decision
And America the beautiful is just one big subdivision.”

I used these lyrics as an inspiration for one of my senior projects at the U. At the time I was torn, since I couldn’t seem to put to paper, graphically or otherwise, just why her sentiment trumped all other causes I might have alternatively dissertated. While I trembled to quote the passages, I shamed myself at what inadvertently seemed trivial to escape my lips in class discussions (they should have sent a poet—Sagan). I realize now I was touching a nerve within myself that runs to the very heart of what drives me creatively: my desire to connect to my species.

I watched a good part of Brokeback Mountain tonight, realizing the messages in it for me are the root of all that is wrong with the world as we know it: we’re all guilty of shirking love in favor of hatred, war, corruption, and isolationism. The film celebrates a few things about humanity that I’ve been able to pinpoint (Brokeback lovers, feel free to add to my list):

1. The beauty of men.

People who don’t take the time to know me might think I simply fetishize men. What I’ve come to know personally is that real, beautiful men find themselves mentally and physically neutered by a system that attempts to entwine male worth with social and economic power. People who don’t know me might also think my statement here somehow diminishes my feminist beliefs. I believe strongly that the two ideas are not only intimately connected, but are positively essential to each other if we humans are ever to achieve true equality.

In the film we see two men falling in love on a secluded mountain, painfully hesitant, but in their best moments without regard for what culturally suppresses their desires. So, that is, without the system that would quash that very union, but even more innovatively, without women. Again, I’m not diminishing women (I reiterate, as a former Women’s Studies student, I am and always will be a feminist–nay, a humanist). There may be some earlier examples of cinema, possibly French, that illustrate this, but I speak to this point as an American, and like many fellow Americans I was witness to the cultural attempt to brand this film “controversial”. It is to me, partly, a celebration of male beauty. Because the men I love are not the “yes men” I see in the marketplace, beating a capitalist drum, suppressing creativity, brown-nosing other men in a sad attempt to get in on some imagined ego fraternity. Mine (I say “mine” less as an attempt at ownership, and more in the sense of pride that I feel to have known them better and, in some cases, longer than most) are unapologetically themselves. Unapologetically creative.

2. The unfortunate predicament of the nuclear family.

Betty Friedan called it “The Problem Without a Name”, wherein isolated individuals—in Friedan’s case they were women, or more specifically, housewives—denied of social or sexual expression. The idea behind the problem is that as Americans flee cities in favor of suburbs; communities in favor of domestic microcosms, we’re doing so in concert with the rise of a capitalistic system whose very existence depends on us losing touch with one another. The extreme conclusion of these situations ensures the crumbling of not only the American family, but of entire communities. In Brokeback Mountain, both men feel compelled by this system to enter into these hetero-monogamous social contracts, at the demise not only of their own love affair, but of the non-sexual but true love for their wives, let alone families/children. No one wins in that scenario.

3. Lies.

We need to realize now just how much our daily lives are governed by lies: of a “free market”, of the anglo-christian notion of family, of an un-winnable war on drugs, of un-winnable wars, period, of the economy that places the worth of things above the worth of humans, ummmm…I could go on. But as this point relates to Brokeback Mountain: because of the shame we as individuals feel when we throw off the chains of these lies (i.e. engage in sex, drugs, and rock and roll), we lie to each other in order not to disturb the perceived “order” and “stability” this web of lies provides us. The characters in the film lie to their wives, who, in turn, lie to their families and their social networks. Lies spread and there you have it: corruption as is evident in every corner of our society. We accept the lies because we believe very deeply that they are necessary evils if we are to carry on living a lie.

I feel strongly now that, as I write this internetty bloggedy blog, I am humbly participating, however miniscule-like, in the revolutionary rise of a Knowledge Society. According to Wikipedia, “Knowledge Society refers to any society where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour.” This new thing is unprecedented on this global level as we are witnessing with social networks such as Facebook, and I’m realizing, as are many others, the potential in said networks to give rise to this revolution. It’s in blogs, shared articles and ideas, shared art and music. Shared EVERYTHING. I, therefore, refuse to censor my ideas, not out of some flippant sentiment, but more broadly out of a civic duty to add my voice to the people’s chorus such that this Knowledge bubble can rise from the masses and above the lies in the populist manner in which it is destined to come to pass.

Anyhoo. Bottom line: Brokeback Mountain is hawtt, and therefore Ang Lee is hawtt. Ani Difranco is hawtt. Hell, Karl Marx is hawtt (though I regret I’m slow at reading him). Oh, and Christian informed me tonight that Rosa Luxemburg is über-hawtt. I feel privileged to have walked the earth among such Greats.