ME AND JOHN BOEHNER

Boehner

John Boehner and I share a problem: we don’t fit our own demographic anymore.  The Pope told him to get out, or maybe it was more like setting him free in a way that served certain political interests.  They say that the Repubs who are intractable have tried to get rid of him for a long time.  No wonder he pulls a cry face.  I wish him well.  I think the Pope simply realized how miserable he was.   

As a result of the resignation, they say it’s more possible that the government won't shut down again and this time not even pay out Social Security.  (I noted that my bank seems to be bracing for that possibility.)  For me and a lot of other people around here, that would be a catastrophe, but for those who are already prosperous and thinking like the retro-Texans they really are, it will be considered a deserved punishment for people who refuse to admit what deadbeats they are: sick, homebound, useless old people.  What good are they?  They’re not OUR families.  Get rid of all outliers: they’re inefficient. 

Along with other “cost saving measures” as the CEO’s say, I personally have ended my posts at Medium.com, a platform for writers that is based in San Francisco.  Actually, I was just reposting what I’d already written for this blog (prairiemary.blogspot.com) but once in a while I’d do something a little more “edgy” and put it on Medium.

American Asian edgy: the Fifties return

The first truth from my point of view is that since it’s a “young” startup, it still had strange features that didn’t quite work.  The more serious problem was cultural: the focus was on the technicalities of the code.  Code was what they wrote, not narrative print.  The majority of them are coming from other cultures so that their dominant shared mode in this country is the tech world that accepts all code languages and, inevitably, code values.  They are the values of the factory:  reliable, uncomplaining, productive, cheerful, round-the-clock.  

I asked to be removed in early evening last night.  In spite of getting a message saying that I should not try to interact with them except 9 to 5, M to F, Pacific time, a techie responded at 1:30AM, evidently working from home on his own schedule.  He did not say he WOULD remove me, but only that he COULD.  I think he was afraid to make a decision until he consulted with his masters.  His only caveat was that I would lose all the writing I’d posted.  Right.  That’s why I print out anything I value, which is not necessarily very much.

The writers themselves are grouped by organizing into “domains” and by the practices of the techies, who supply the “tags” that “will let more people find you.”  Aside from dumb automated tags (every time I write about Indians they tag it “vacation” or “travel”) there are all sorts of other gizmos: the usual hearts, thumbs, and comments, but also provision for long responses (except that I can never figure out where they going to be put -- in my writing path or the other person’s writing) and for high-lighting the parts they like or differ from.  (One of mine really hit the spot with one reader -- he high-lighted the whole darn thing!  But no comments.  Was it objection or endorsement?)  

There’s a little two-step at the point of completion:  do you want it to be seen by only your friends (which is a dangerous idea in a world where everybody always sees everything eventually -- something politicians are slow to realize) or by the general public?  The second step is what rights you reserve, which indulges the fantasy that you can do such a thing, since everyone pirates everything.  But it does offer Creative Commons as a choice, which I think is a good idea, if ineffective.

After that, if your post is re-blogged or admired by someone, a little reminder goes out to the email of that someone’s “friends” who are really commenters and up-thumbers.  The idea that is encouraged is like-grouped-with-like,  a school of fish, “groupers.”  That is, mer-persons resembling shepherd dogs who want to gather and sort everything.  (“Let’s get this party organized!”)  

“We” want to be predictable.  No surprises.  We do not want to be rebuked; we are faultless.  And we are entitled, because we are techies and computers are no mystery to us -- therefore we understand the universe.  At least a gaming type universe with algorithms, Sim City.  We don’t do rural -- too messy.  Only peasants there.  It’s all very Seventh Grade, when adolescence begins, maybe because entering puberty is quite like entering a strange country with an uncertain culture.  Or coming from one, namely Suburbia.

The content is a different story.  Now anything goes -- “we’re not kids anymore” (But they still sounds like kids to me) so we can talk about our suicide attempts, our failures at gauging sexual hookups, and a lot of menacing mood pieces about emo weather.  What a great time for those people right now!  Everyone on pills, standing in the rain, staring at the window of the Beloved One.

There seems to be a fantasy that this platform is like an MFA class, basically Seinfeld.  That people will help each other develop by correcting their grammar and composition structure.  A few take this seriously, the same ones who write long letters of advice for their younger siblings.  "You must double-space," said one.  "Post a more cheerful photo," advised another.  One man in England who was organizing a “domain” invited me to join.  He admitted that I would probably be the one providing help, not the receiver.  I declined.  I’ve done that for years.  No more. 

The writers pursue the topics popular in magazines, but I do not see the loose and energetic prose of the zines.  Mixing it up with Manhattan Slid-Yiddish words, Black ghetto inventions of metaphor, Brit rhyming slang, captured sub-Spanish dialect, words truncated to type with thumbs, and -- hey, don’t the Chinese do slang?  No no no.  Proper English.

I joined Medium and Aeon (briefly) at about the same time and it was soon obvious how different they are.  Medium was for ambitious writers who valued conformity and didn’t quite have a grasp on the humanities.  Aeon was for snobs who could produce vids, but specifically for the ones who wanted to preserve what they took to be basic premises:  that there is a God, so it only remains to define Him; that such a thing as genius exists and ought to be given privilege; that deep science (once it’s translated into a charming video) is a proper subject for educated people.  (I agree with that last one.)

Earlier in my life -- I’m surprised to realize as long ago as twenty years (1995??!!) --  my denomination changed out from under me -- though it’s explicitly based on the inclusion of everyone.  Partly it was undone by political correctness, which assumes that if you use the right words no one will notice that you secretly despise some category of humans, and partly it was the assumption of entitlement on the part of the younger people: that there was no need for them to take a turn at the boring stuff (setting up chairs) and they were overqualified for things like making the budget sensible.  Luckily Blacks are taking up the slack.  They know where the power is.

But the more universal and penetrating problem has been that traditional assumptions about the nature of the real world have dispersed.   Nothing is solid now.  A human being is a flowing, transforming set of processes.  A planet has a mind of its own and can simply wipe us out.  If electricity (power) stopped existing tomorrow, all our fancy extensions of communication, travel and commerce would be dead.  We couldn't buy a cup of coffee or pump a gallon of gas.

And maybe most importantly, human beings “in the aggregate” have a kind of group mind that responds like a whole school of fish or flock of birds that can turn inside out, swerve sharply, or simply drop out of the sky.  Gone.  No reason we can think of.  What we do now might have some impact, but we’ve already had a big part in making this world intractable.  

LIKE, WHATEVER.

Kid rhetoric is meant to hide everything from adults while revealing everything to other kids.  Duh.

So what’s the strategy?

1.  Work from what you know, which adults might also know but maybe not.  Then find a code that lets you talk about it without them understanding your references.  It might be free-association, it might be abbreviations, it might be reversing (like saying something is the opposite of what the usual meaning of a word might be), and it’s often from advertising, because what else is there?

2.  Use song lyrics from music adults probably don’t know.  Even the ones that are just repetitions have meaning, like a baby babbles but you still know in general what it’s trying to say, especially if the baby is just expressing feelings.  (Felt concepts)

3.  Emotional content is important.  The second decade of human life is all about emotion, whether your style is all-emo all-the-time, or stone cold brutal resistance.  Emo is probably more important than rational deduction kinds of sense.  But try not to scare adults.

4.  Deliberately mis-use particles, like reverse gender (“she” for a guy), or adding “s” to something that usually doesn’t take an s to make a plural (peoples -- "peeps".).  What it does is sound a little like English is your second language, which is cool.  All the intellectuals like people other than white bread English teachers because it’s bullying to make people conform.  And international is IN -- it’s GLOBAL.

5.  Being ambiguous is making room for interpretation.  It’s respectful, it doesn’t reveal people who don’t want to be revealed.  A person who is inventing themselves or searching for themselves don’t want the facts of their lives splayed out there in public.  It’s no one’s business what’s under your bed -- or in it.  Adults say that all the time -- but then they want to know.  They always want the last word, the bottom line, and closure.

6.  There is nothing wrong with free association rather than  logical lists like this one.  “Free” is a value and so is “association,” so what’s the objection?  Shrinks want you to free associate to ink blots but not to your friends?  Which one can you really trust?  So you talk fast and hop around on different subjects.  That’s just life and not much of it is so precious or crucial that you can fail to “get” much of it.  You'll have forgotten or even have become a rather different person by tomorrow.

7.  “Loud” is because music is physical.

8.  Dark, tunnels, parcours, are because escape is physical and because it takes adrenaline to have the strength.  You get Super-A from danger.

9.  Using kid rhetoric is not about vocabulary lists the same as it’s not about Latin syllables used to make words.  It’s mostly about oral culture so HOW you speak it counts.  Sometimes that where the code thing comes in -- by adding sarcasm or groaning or by trailing off, the emo component is there.  Barely moving one’s lips and talking quickly can set up adult concentration and frustration -- very satisfying.

10.  The rhetoric that is useful is not that of political speaking to large groups on amplification but rather the way one would talk to a friend, which is why you NEED a friend.  At most a few others, because there will be many references to the immediate past -- not the academic past -- because of needing the evidence of the immediate just-past because farther back than that is not relevant, but the evidence of the just-past needs reflection to find meanings and plot the next move.  You might need a friend or two so you can compare notes, triangulate, and pick up info lost by one but not the other.  

11.  If there are no other people with whom you wish to be intimate, selfies will work.  In fact, you and a camera make two and if you add a mirror or a song, that makes three.  Dogs are good.

12.  Slang, cursing, sexism, extreme political correctness, are all part of the ways to say, “this is an in-group and our rules are different.”  They are rhetoric strategies, not supreme court decisions or restrictions from Leviticus. But an outsider can NOT use group pejoratives if not deeply included.  That means “nigger,” “blanket Indian,” “faggot,” “fucker,” must NOT be spoken lightly because they only say, “I am talking about myself and I am not afraid to say anything about it.”

13.  Don’t expect anyone to be interested in YOUR world.  And don’t instruct people about your life.  NO one cares.  

14.  Sometimes it is the duty and usefulness of a straight, virtuous, abstemious, vanilla, grown-up person to be just exactly that for the sake of having the reference point.  Sometimes to interface or intervene with authorities.

15.  Movies that only teens would watch make good reference points: the names of the characters, names (any nouns) made into verbs, and sci-fi sounding words which tend to have Z, W, Q or K in them or to be kinda African or Afghani are good, but also verbs may be invented, like mind-meld or groking, which means they are about things impossible in “real” life but which a person might yearn for when trying to talk about the difficulties of communication.

16.  There are HUGE differences between the two sexes at this point.  So far the effort to get people to change their ideas to fit a spectrum of types has not moved them away from their binary fixations.  Much of the prejudice that gets kids thrown out of their homes too early and too violently comes from this idea that there is a “right” way to be male or female and anything else is not just offensive but in fact an act against the integrity and function of the family which is based on the “Game of Thrones” obsession that “sons” must through military, sports, or business distinguish the name and bring in major money.

17.  Drug slang serves many of the same purposes as teen slang, the same as gang signs or tats.  Everyone likes to style as “gangsta” because it’s assumed to mean power.  

18.  Google and other search engines try to keep up with the definitions and inventions of language, but they often are out-of-date or have overtones you might not want to call out, like “wanksta.”  This is a good reason for trying experiments with people who will merely laugh and hit you, but not too hard -- as opposed to yanksta you to the principal’s office.

It’s really hard to pick one’s way between a world where some contingents are invested in experiment and energy while others value correctness, often in 19^th century terms, in order to demonstrate respectability, and all the time new words are being invented on the Internet, some of them necessary to know in order to say what you mean.  Beyond that, because our young are invested in drawing back the curtains that used to hide so much, things might be talked about which previously only had medical names.  Of course, I’m talking about the brain -- what did you think?  

ARCHIVING THE EDGES

In 1961 when I graduated from Northwestern, I could have stayed and taught in the high schools nearby.  I wanted adventure and so ended up in Browning, Montana.  But I carried with me all my notes from acting class as well as other classes.  There have always been boxes of papers under my bed.  Fifty years later, they are my compost.  But also, others are interested.  So at the Montana Historical Society, though they don’t much like my attitude, they do have a box with my name on it.  It’s at the end of a long row of boxes labeled “Robert MacFie Scriver” which contain his papers.  I’ve spent a couple of days in the past going through Bob’s files, finding things I never knew existed, and the old family photo albums I made myself.

The bossy young librarians, who clearly considered me an intruder, constantly gave me directions and watched me closely.  They were afraid my emotional attachment would convert to physical ownership by stealth.  My identity seemed bogus to them because Bob Scriver belongs to the ages, historically significant and part of the long ago.  I’m not in any of the photos (I took most of them) and Bob never mentioned me.   We had agreed that he would not because some customers only bought hoping to have an intimate relationship with him and because it diluted the idea that he was a genius who somehow drew bronzes out of a thundercloud.  Indians were okay because everyone knows they are sorcerer’s apprentices.  

But life goes on and the book about Bob, “Bronze Inside and Out,” was published by the University of Calgary in a cat whisker before publishing crashed.  No one made any money, but as an archive it exists -- not just a record of Bob’s work, but also of the times in Browning, Montana; the formation of the whole genre of Western Art including the beginnings of cowboy art auctions; and the Blackfeet reservation in its multiplicity on the land.

I did the same thing with my job at Multnomah County Animal Control in Portland, Oregon, collecting data (my boss had me keep graphs), doing research, taking notes, trying to figure out root causes and options for better ways to protect animals and people.  The same thing again at Meadville/Lombard Theological School and the University of Chicago Divinity School where the former is little more than an archive now that the building is sold but the latter is as rock solid as any institution can ever get.  

Now that I’ve been in Valier for a decade, attending most town councils, I have a file drawer of notes.  When I told the former mayor I would probably convert them into a book, she blanched, thinking that it would be an exposé, more destructive muck-raking to blame whatever target seemed most likely to sell books.  NOT.  Anyway, if you have a printer and know about blogs, you can print out a book about Valier today, simply by downloading the relevant posts from www.prairiemary.blogspot.com  and getting Kinko’s or Staples to bind them.  Books aren’t what they used to be, and yet they are -- at the same time.  Both/And.

I was in the Great Falls Barnes & Noble yesterday because it’s down the block from where I get my monthly groceries.  A woman was stocking the long magazine shelves and we got to talking.  She was a former English teacher and many of the zines she was putting up were Manga -- that is, graphic (drawn) stories, often with intensely romantic (and sexual), fantastic, sometimes subversive tales.  I googled and discovered that the genre is seen as a Japanese response to the post-WWII occupation by the US, whose soldiers packed around misnamed “comic” books.  They frame the destruction of the world and yet the determination of small heroes, even those sunk into “emo” culture.  (Depression, unworthiness, inability to frame the future.)  Very meaningful to elements of American culture where economic oppression has young people by the throat.  

Though she was doubtful about Manga, this woman saw the wall of magazines as evidence of culture, a good thing.  To refute that notion, I held up a series of them that were nothing but advertising: cooking, body-building, interior decoration, computer news.  Ways to keep oneself busy while the world crashes soundlessly around your ears.  Like restocking shelves in a chain bookstore on the edge of bankruptcy because it can’t seem to get ahead in the commodification of electronic print.

Driving to GF and back (it’s eighty miles away) is a happy task for me, because it means passing sensuously through the land: I have a small pickup and drive with the window open, elbow out.  Manning suggests that the prairie is so overpoweringly vast that it is dangerous, because it seems inexhaustible but it is not.  I pass missile silos, some empty, some armed.  I am passed by million-dollar RV’s with little cars worth more than my house attached by tow-bars to their backsides.  And am nearly knocked off the road by barreling 18-wheel trucks.  The railroad spur used for shipping grain runs parallel.  Huge irrigation wheels are at work.  Winter wheat is ready for the custom cutters working their way north.  Chemical fallow fields stretch over many acres: deliberately blasted so nothing will grow in order to get rid of weeds.  (Also pheasants -- too bad.)  The highway has four lanes and this time of year one is shunted from one side to the other because crews are doing the constant maintenance and rebuilding necessary to keep them passable.

And yet the land has archived seeds and climate forces that left the Mayan civilization smothered in jungle, that made the Middle East into barren arid land before we bombed it flat, eliminating traces of how all this got started.  The quick way to understand is the National Geographic video version of  “Guns, Germs and Steel.”  (Google it.)  “Park Avenue”  is a complementary documentary version of how the culture world has constricted to highly moneyed people in high-rise buildings in Manhattan.  We all understand that this eventually will be demolished by angry masses unless it falls of its own weight.

A manager of Northwestern University’s archiving program has contacted me to ask for permission to preserve my two blogs about Alvina Krause’s teaching of acting:  www.krausenotes.blogspot.com and www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com  Of course, I was happy, thrilled, in fact.  While universities go about commodifying the real purpose of study in order to erect [sic] edifices and fill in lakes, the scholars so often described with a sneer as “academics,” are quietly networking real lives.  It’s hard to commodify humanities but, like Manga, ideas and arts can’t be controlled.  By the time they’re commodified, the real action has slipped away to something out there on a farther edge.  The accumulation of small lives (emo) woven together create a fabric of new beginnings.

I see this time as one when boundaries we took for granted (gender, nations, and today’s TED talk for subscribers deconstructed “money”) are disappearing but new ones are forming.  Boundaries are exoskeletons -- they constrict growth.  I’d even skip over bone and go straight to hydrostats, like octopus tentacles  -- cultures as octopuses that can squeeze into a beer bottle or spread thin and flying as a parachute.  An archive may be an aquarium, but ideas are the creatures.  When they say, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” what they really mean is that ideas cannot be suppressed by force.