THE CHILD AT RISK

The phrase “children at risk.” involves complex layers of taboo and stigma that come from forces the child has no control over, but must accept the punishment for.  Every culture handles the duality in a different way.  Contemporary culture with its deeply potent confusion of sex, violence and commodification (money) offers little help, so individuals -- who themselves may have been corroded by bad childhoods -- just wing it, sometimes happily and other times with destructive injustice that they are motivated to keep secret.

1.  Deep philosophical assumptions about children are opposite to each other:  on the one hand they are considered “pure,” innocent, close to God who cherishes them, and angelic in a toy-like sentimental way.  On the other hand they are considered little animals, uncivilized, dirty, disobedient, and deserving regular punishment.  This doubleness is irreconcilable.

2.  A child’s value is determined by family.  Having no family or a rejecting family or an exploiting family means that that child suffers and is crippled because the culturome -- the “memes” that connect it to other people -- are not “built” in an orderly line of development.  The cues they give others, the meanings they take away, just don’t fit.  To survive and because no child can help it, he or she simply seizes on whatever can be grasped without help, seriously distorting potential, leaving out basics and grafting on harmful habits and assumptions.

3.  “Bad children” are stigmatized to the point that movies are made about “demon children” or “possessed children” and the ordinary resentment of kids towards authority figures is exaggerated beyond reality, criminalized.  The power of children is feared, resented, and punished.  The real paradox between powerless innocence and emotional potency shapes culture-wide reactions in mythology, like the representation of the Christ as both a newborn and as a fully mature man.

4.  Dirt and disease are feared in several ways.  Children have to be taught NOT to put everything into their mouths for fear of contamination and poisoning and yet that’s their basic instinct and way of interfacing with the world. In the days before habitual use of soap and water, sewering away of excrement and garbage, and antibiotics, children with their undeveloped immunities were subject to what are called “childhood diseases”:  measles, chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, tonsillitis, colds and flu.  

More exotic diseases exist in tropical countries full of insect vectors.   A high percentage of the children die at a young age.  And yet starving women in Africa carry their dead babies a hundred miles, unable to put them down.  One of the most recurrent images in Third World documentaries is the mother outside with a small child in a basin, gently washing it.  Victorians who had the resources dressed dead babies elaborately and photographed them.

Children as vectors are not much discussed, though they may have carried HIV since before birth, their diapers may be dangerous (polio transmission after immunization was a concern when live but attenuated virus was administered), and children who are used sexually carry all the usual transmissible germs.  People who work with small children are notoriously prone to catch colds and flu.  Polio, called “infantile paralysis,” was a virus that targeted children in much the same way that HIV originally targeted gays.

5.  A child’s appeal and the normal impulse to fondle, cuddle and kiss can become sexual, but then if there is guilt or a wish to dominate and control, that can turn petting to harm and abuse.  Our culture and others consider children to be property of parents, “owned,”  therefore authorizing whatever is done with them, even starvation, caging, perversion and the withholding of life-saving medical care.  The category “child” tends to overlap with the categories of pet and toy, to be marginally inanimate.

The American Humane Society strives to protect both children and animals.  One of the earliest cases of child abuse prosecution is famously a little girl who was orphaned and abused.  Her rescuer wrapped her in a horse blanket and set her up high on the judge’s bench, asking, “Is this not a little animal who deserves our care and protection?”

6.  Children arrive so uncontrollably and abundantly, in spite of the provisions for contraception and abortion, that they exceed the capacity to care for them, particularly when the adults are themselves damaged.  Morality -- left over from the times when babies died and whole groups could thin and disappear unless fertility outstripped mortality -- prevents any sensible limits on giving birth.  Everyone wants to control everyone else’s bodies.  Poor people are told they cannot afford babies, but that they must have them, and yet there’s no help for raising them.  This is considered moral.

The desperate necessity of simply selling children, in part to save the lives of those kept in the family, can be overwhelming.  Jonathan Swift’s idea that the babies of Irish poor people be sold in butcher shops, considered a delicacy properly roasted for elaborate meals on the tables of the rich was only a more direct -- and some would say more humane -- strategy than letting them die by inches because of political policies that left them starving homeless.

On the other hand, children are constantly stolen as valued objects for trafficking, needed replacements because children “age out” of being attractive, or get sick, or just die.  With the ubiquitousness of HIV infection, children meant for sexual use may simply be killed -- certainly not treated, which is very expensive.  If they are simply thrown out, they become vectors.

7.  Society treats children as livestock: gathering, incarcerating, maintaining at minimum standards, and occasionally using violence or adult strategies (solitary confinement, lack of food, restraints, electric shocks) to keep them under control with a minimum of employees.  Therapy, medical treatment, contact with former intimates, education are all either skimped or omitted.  The public is not allowed to know any of this.

8.  Maybe children have always known about toxic substances but in modern times things that fume and poison are everywhere from glue to prescription drugs and the search for unconsciousness as bliss is constantly promoted -- miserable lives are certainly motivation enough.  Drugs are continuous with suicide, making the transition easy.

The previous considerations have applied to infants, toddlers, and children in what is called “latency” though the pre-adolescent years of 6 to 11 or so, when a child seems to be self-sufficient and in some cultures begins to work.  They are actually the most important identity-creating years of a person.  This is the period when a child becomes smarter than Lassie, more thoughtful than a chimp, more personally unique than any other human, more able to grasp ethnicity and religion.  Damage in these years is indelible and yet these are the years of exploration and voluntary risk as a child becomes more self-determining.  They are also years when a child is useful for labor, able to master something like rug weaving and keep at it day after day.  Toddlers are commercially useful only as sexual objects.

It is in adolescence that the “wickedness” of the pre-adult not-quite-children, is always suspected and often enacted.  A boy may be as big and strong as an adult;  a girl can produce a baby.  Sexuality is demonized by some and exploited by others.  A blurry boundary between non-consensual and the age of adult responsibility means confusion for the law.  The culture raises the desirability of the bodies of these ages above all others.  Even haute couture models are commonly teenagers.

Management of the trafficked teen must be harsher, more psychological, more drug-based in order to compensate for the near-adult ability of this person to rebel.  Sexual use can be expanded if the near-adult can begin to participate actively, to interact emotionally, to become attached to the “owners” or even devoted.  In addition, even pimps and tricks “fall in love,” meaning they become obsessed and will not release their possessed humans, like Jefferson refusing to free his quarter-black children and half-black second wife.

At adolescence people begin to pair off, a natural impulse that creates generative marriage commitment to support children or same-sex partnerships useful in war and hunting.  If the near-adult attaches to an exploiter, he or she becomes vulnerable emotionally.  Lives can become a desperate plummet from infancy to death.

But also, as a growing person becomes self-aware and able to think beyond immediate circumstances, they can change, even heal, rather miraculously help others who want the same.  It's called "free will."  Even if the body is trapped.

BRANDISHING THE PENCIL

Naturally, the print freak in me is intrigued by a new word:  gapencillitin, a word from the Garifima people, an African-descended minority group quoted by Dwight Conquergood in an essay about Performance Studies called “Interventions and Radical Research.”  Gapencillitin are the folks who always go around writing everything down.  My father was a good example with his little pocket-notebooks and mechanical pencil (which doubled as an earwax excavator) noting what photos he took, the names of the people (sometimes misspelled), engineering and geological facts, and so on.  It was a diary and an expense account.  He rubberbanded the notebooks into chronological groups and stored them in a trunk.  When he died, they all went straight to the dump.   

Print, in its administrative and industrial aspect, is supposed to be separated from “literature” which is seen as an investigation of the soul, an invocation of the creative, a way of recording the wisdom of the ages and the heroism of the past.  All very intransigent, ineffable, and transcendent.  But distinctions and groupings are still the essence of the academic management of knowledge, and it’s usually rather late in life that the educated finally realize that they’ve been kept on a reservation.  That there other bodies of knowledge recorded in human bodies, sung and told and painted.  Now, of course, there are “metric” languages in computers that only a very few understand.  And again still other bodies of knowledge that -- because they are taboo -- are far more powerful and life-controlling than any print, even the ones still intercepted at the borders of the country as obscene.  

What do we do with all this stuff?  I’m lucky that I’m investigating among professors who are absorbed in starting up the new academic year because they don’t have time to do much more than send me articles and I can’t absorb the contents very quickly in spite of having a background curiously appropriate for this kind of thinking.  (Religion, anthropology, theatre.)  It is a kind of thinking few are aware of -- sort of meta-thinking -- and (alas) I discover that if I try to explain to some people, they get angry. But I don’t intend to bundle it and store it for later discard.

It’s got to be woven into stories.  My core story this time around is the life of Alvina Krause, but what it’s backing me into is heartbreak (broken love affairs), madness, struggle, post-modern thought (oh, cripes), forbidden territory, and other swamps and couloirs.  I meet wannabes and has-beens, but all the time I want to get back to my own “bone chalice” -- meaning the deep meanings in my own skull.  (“Performance art is liturgy for the unchurched.”)  Yes, brain theory is one of my dependable guides, but it turns out that the whole body is the brain.  All these years I ought to have been walking.  Or dancing.  It would have made me more intelligent.  (Don’t say, “I told you so!”)

My yearning has always been to see things freshly, ambush them by strategy, throw back the curtain and see the core.  I HAVE witnessed someone’s heart stilled for surgery.  I HAVE seen Maria Tallchief, Cherokee, dance the Russian Firebird.  So -- what about it?  What do I do with that stuff?

The ministry training forces me to think about the state of the world and whether there is anything to be said about it, done about it.  Most of the info we get is gathered by people born about 1980 or later.  They know nothing, they are paid nothing, they have no crap detectors except their own suspicion, which is highly erratic.  They are assigned, disciplined, and simply rewritten by editors who haven’t left their desks and their narrow lives since 1980.  In no case is this more clear than that of the American Indian, but the complaint applies to just about everything.  We NEVER get a balanced account of anything.  And everyone who comes to the rez for the raw experience insists on seeing what they expect.

Now let’s look at the famous “middle-class” -- a mythical population of people said to be honest, hard-working, comfortable, family-valuing, gun-carrying, TV watching, tax-paying, regularly voting, doctor-obeying  . . .  We’re told this group of people is based on manufacturing incomes.  Oh, and small family businesses like stores and farms.  Maybe.  Or maybe it’s just a sit-com.  Or maybe they were always doomed as soon as manufacturing changed.  In nature the evolution of organisms is controlled by two things:  drastic over-population putting pressure on those not well-equipped to survive so causing them to disappear,  and constant shifts in the mega-conditions of survival, such as the economy, climate, disease, war, migration (kind of a domino effect when people try to survive).  But we pretend that we don’t let the poor people and the marginal just die.

One way to survive is to form another layer of interconnectedness, in the way that the forbidding of alcohol consumption created an entire underworld that supported this illegal but desired substance.  Once that network existed, it has gone on to support all sorts of illegal activity in “good-paying jobs.”  Earlier it was the need to escape slavery that created an underground railroad.  Something parallel happened to the money community: the need to hoard.  One way to combat overpopulation in stricken countries is for them to sell the children, who are expendable anyway.  The network for transporting, credentialing, concealing -- they’ve always been there since the days of slavery and picture-book wives.

The temptation is always to try to “engineer” the survival of those we consider desirable and deserving.  “The War on Poverty” and all that.  (We lost.)  Or the creation of Israel.  Scholarships for the deserving poor.  We do this out of “compassion” we say, but college sophomores would say that we do it to make ourselves feel good.  (Self-interest is almost always discovered about that age.)

It was in my self-interest and over the objections of my mother and my advisor that I took courses from Alvina Krause.  Here I am again, though there’s supposed to be a division between what she was teaching and the present state of “Performing Arts” which is where I seem to be working.  Actually, I think I’m standing next to a permeable membrane with one arm sticking through it.  The one holding my pencil as though it were a torch.  I think of Cocteau, Orpheus.

PROMISCUOUS TELEOLOGY

Often one hears a complaint that someone feels their life has no meaning. They say they are drifting, can’t figure out what they want, aren’t connected to anything. I’ve been saving little scraps of clues. “Promiscuous teleology” is a fav of mine. It has nothing to do with sex or God. Sorry. It’s about wanting to know what the end will be, but jumping around in one’s opinion of what to expect, being credulous. “Telos” is Greek for “end”, “pro-miscuous comes from a Latin word meaning assorted, mixed, messy, unrelated to each other. The following quotes are from this website: http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2007/11/19/explaining_a_preference_for_teleological

“According to a recent study, there is "evidence for a basic human preference to understand the world in terms of purpose. When faced with an object that supports a plausible function, humans make an immediate but defeasible [not likely] inference to design, and assume a teleological explanation is warranted."

“The authors advance a model of human cognition that starts with "promiscuous teleology" in children, develops with the retreat of teleology resulting from ‘causal beliefs typically acquired through formal education’, but sometimes advancing again with the onset of senility and the impairment of the causal belief system. Thus, teleological explanations are presented as ‘compelling and pervasive because they reflect an explanatory default.’"

In plain English, children and old folks like the simple story. Just gimme an explanation without a lot of facts. “God” made people. Okay. The task of the “Interpreter” part of the brain in the adult is to keep evidence evaluated, organized and useful, but when the Interpreter doesn’t have enough evidence, the “Confabulator” takes over and both children and Alzheimer’s patients begin to fill in the blanks with whatever comes to hand. The result is often “cute” or “pious.” Art Linkletter stuff.

The difference between science and religion is that science says straightforwardly, “This is my best guess at the moment and the best evidence we have.” Religion says, “This is the truth, absolutely. Believe me.” Some people get very impatient if they have to concentrate on mysterious technological stuff, let alone quantum mechanics that explain a lot to those who’ve mastered that evidence, but very little to the rest of us. Some clever religious people imitate science with a lot of confabulated teleologies which they call THEOlogy. (Theos means God.)

Science is fairly agnostic about teleology, not quite promiscuous though there area always several possibilities about how things will turn out. The evidence so far leads us to believe that we are very small in a vast existence and that everything we know and love will be obliterated either by the end of our own consciousness of it when we die or by the end of the solar system when the Sun dies. Religion offers versions of what we have experienced already, drawing a line out to a desired end. Heaven is thought to be like the best of whatever we’ve known or imagined.

Lately our culture has emphasized individual performance and achievement. People have left the countries where their families put down roots. People have gone through fierce economic hardships that make them value security. Everything for some people depends upon making a better tomorrow, especially for kids. But technology has changed the rules for family, children, disability. We are living in the midst of chaos: globalization, regime change, increasing environmental pressure, economic crisis. It’s every “man” for himself and many single people -- even children -- are drifting everywhere, looking for work, looking for relationships, or maybe just searching for anodynes. Some try to get back to formerly known control and try to force it on others. We consider this “conservative” or maybe “reactionary.” It is a confabulation. Time’s arrow does not point over your shoulder.

But suppose one is progressive, tolerant of differences, open to many possibilities in the future, promiscuously teleological? Where is the unification? How does one keep one’s balance? Especially when what once seemed like the ideal solution might turn out to have a dark and tragic side. Doesn’t it seem obvious that promiscuous THEOlogy, mixed and unstable gods, leads to trouble? But MONOtheology trying to control everything to make it go to the preferred telos (which may be good for you, but not others) doesn’t seem to be the answer either.

This world has two certainties: change and interrelatedness. There is no way to escape change except by leaving this “world” for some other that may or may not exist. In short, death. If you do not change, the changes that are interrelated to you will eliminate you. There is no way to escape relatedness with everything else except by leaving this world. If you have left this world, you are essentially dead to it.

The forward-arrow forces of this world are ecology and evolution, one being change and the other being response to change, and therefore these must be our strategies. The evidence we have so far tells us nothing about an ultimate beginning or any ultimate end -- just pushes them out farther. What we have is evidence that is only evidence, process that is only process. What we make of them has to depend to some degree on confabulation -- guessing, piecing the evidence together as best we can. We try to understand that to which we are related, whether it is the composition of air or the arrangement of the furniture in our house, and we try to reach an accommodation to it by guessing, trying things out, testing, theorizing. Sometimes we change ourselves a bit and sometimes we just move the furniture. Sometimes we guess right and other times not. Sometimes the situation comes to meet us, to wrap itself around us in some lucky way that lifts us to new heights of understanding.

That’s when the meaning comes, when we achieve fittingness and full participation. It’s not a matter of approving or disapproving, being right or wrong, good or evil. It’s a matter of getting involved, coming up against everything else in the world. Life is a contact sport. In any end at all, no matter what happens, each of us is entirely immortal in the sense of occupying this space/time, changing everything else with our influence, our simple being-here. That can never be removed. It is each of our gift to the universe, our imprint on the future, and we do it -- every one of us -- without having to be famous geniuses at all. Not that there’s anything promiscuously teleological about that.

DECODING PROPAGANDA

When I taught high school English in the Sixties, the “English” textbooks included a section on propaganda, which was a list of errors in logic that are often used to persuade people. Like “glittering generalities” that try to skip over the smaller facts that undercut a statement. For instance, all that raving about the pipeline that some people thought would provide jobs is ALREADY BUILT! It’s merely too small and the last part from Oklahoma to Houston was never built, so -- small or not -- it ends in a tank farm -- hundreds of them -- where years of too much oil has been stored waiting for refineries, which is where the real bottleneck is. So where’s the roadblock? Not in Canada or Montana or the Dakotas, etc. etc. but in the pro-oil state of TEXAS. Are they building new refineries? No, they are closing the old ones down. And (I'm guessing) trying to force relaxation of regulations or maybe subsidies.

Another lapse of logic often came up at seminary. It was “misplaced concreteness.” Elaine Pagels has a fascinating book out at the moment that’s an analysis of the Book of Revelation. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/february-24-2012/elaine-pagels-on-the-book-of-revelation/10372/

Not only is she able to distinguish among the several “Johns” (John of this and John of that), she is able to decode the whole book in terms of the politics when it was written and the actual events being described were happening. The exploding mountain was simply Vesuvius and “666” is the numerology code for Nero. You can read her book to find out the rest. As she says, this is not an intellectual New Testament book, but an emotional one. (I’m prompted to think of getting a dragon tattoo -- a small red one with one head. Seven head with horns seem excessive, but a crown might be a nice touch.)

Another major thinking error is called from “is” to “ought.” This is going to be a tough one through the approach to the presidential election because the wrestling between keeping everything the same (to the advantage of some people) and changing everything (to the advantage of a different set of people) is already ferocious and will get more so. Everyone is always wary of change. (Better the known enemy than the unknown good -- which might turn out to be even worse.)

More than that, what is familiar -- whether a lifestyle or a phenomenon -- always seems “right” while everything else strikes us as out of whack. I once read a brilliant essay about this in terms of environment. One always wants the landscape to be the way it was when first sighted. So to someone from elsewhere who came here when the spotted knapweed was in bloom might find the huge mists of purple very beautiful and worth preserving, not knowing about the plants this invasive weed has managed to strangle out, plants that were good food for animals, which spotted knapweed is not. (Goats might like it, but you know about goats -- they’ll eat the laundry off the clothesline and used to be pictured eating tin cans!)

Most propaganda against Obama is plainly straw man stuff, attacking him for being someone he’s factually not at all. They claim he’s not American, that he’s Islamic, that he’s a robot, and on and on and on. Every characteristic that would be seen as praiseworthy in any context -- patience, reflectiveness, poise, and intelligence -- are construed as either an evil plot of a character defect.

But I hardly know what to call the phenomenon among the Repub candidates where some exhibit behavior that is marginally criminal and certainly immoral but it just doesn’t stick. The phrase “the Teflon president” is not really about propaganda but about a willfulness on the part of the people listening. How is it that a man who abandons dying wives, lies about his sources of income, changes his position on political matters to the point of being erratic, and has a wife/former mistress (with hair no one likes) can come out of all that being considered brilliant and fit to run the United States?

I googled to look for lists of propaganda techniques and found them easily, but it surprised me that they were rather clearly from conservative, right-wing, “from is to ought” sources. All the examples of over-promising things that couldn’t be delivered, forcing issues into black and white polarities instead of leaving them the tangle of gray most real life is, urging people to stay with the crowd (get on the band wagon), changing policy to fit what will get a candidate elected and so on were examples from liberal ideas.

One of my little truth tests is reversal, turning the accusation back to test it against the accuser, because people’s ideas of what is painful and wicked are created by their own experience without any awareness that the same thing might not hurt their victim -- in fact, might not even come across as an attack. So old fat mean and vindictive people will accuse me of being old fat mean and vindictive because to THEM those are terrible offenses. They pride themselves on being young, thin, kind and forgiving -- or so they think.

There is a whole series of quips based on this reversal thing. Legend has it that a statement on the wall of a biffy at Reed College in Portland (notoriously brainy but unruly and liberal): “God is dead, signed Nietzsche.” Under it someone wrote “Nietzsche is dead, signed God.” And under that was a whole series of bold assertions turned on their heads: “Religion is the opiate of the people, signed Marx.” “Marxism is the opiate of the people, signed ?” (I forget who. Surely not the Pope, though he’s a bold Capitalist.) Particularly vulnerable are all the hoary bearded prophets of the Victorian era that produced so many patriarchs. (Some would like to have them back -- the return of Daddy.)

We are in a time of tumultuous change, which is not so unusual, but we can see it all day every day, even photograph it ourselves on our smart phones and send the snap to the media where it might or might not be presented out of context. Politicians trim their sails to suit the wind but then the media plays tape of them doing the opposite days earlier. And the greatest thinking error of all is that money counts. That money can save us. That the source of our troubles is not enough money. That money is any kind of indicator of value or virtue.

A recent study asserts that rich people are more greedy than poor people, suggesting that having a lot makes you want more. It seems obvious to me that the way some rich people get rich in the first place is by being greedy. It's a circle. We could call it the 666 effect.

ADULT OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER

This is some quick brain-storming about ADULT “oppositional defiance disorder,” which doesn’t show up on Google lists. ODD in adults: short fuse: impatience, rage, frustration, fear, confusion, contradiction. BUT sometimes visionary, idealistic, willing to sacrifice for a higher goal. Outlier in terms of emotion: too sensitive or overloads easily. Pain: thrashing to escape.

I’ve been throwing around the phrase “oppositional defiance disorder” too much and thought I’d better stop long enough to reflect about what I mean and why it’s coming to mind. When I google, all I find is stuff about children and promotions for “magic cures,” discipline “systems” to make all resistance to parental control go away. How to make your child a zombie.

Not far from this town was a private “school” for such children that was closed down because the magic wand was a stock prod. You see? That’s my attitude right there -- braced against authority figures, assuming that they will resort to punishment, even torture.

I remember being in faculty meetings where the principal was reading his latest list of edicts -- the same ones he had already handed out to us earlier in the day in printed form -- with me sighing, rolling my eyes, and kicking the chair in front of me. I was fired, of course. The students had the same attitude with ME being the stupid authority figure. But I couldn’t fire them, strike them, or even criticize them, One of those “magic system” teams came in to give us a lecture on how to set up detention, time-delays, elaborate systems of record-keeping that took up teaching energy and time and became an absorbing game for some kids.

Most of us know the developmental phase that all children go through when they oppose everything. “Would you like some ice cream?” NOOOOOO. It appears to be a kind of brain growth stage when some little processing station is either not quite online or is not properly connected up yet. The cooperation bump. It is frustrating for the parent -- and sometimes legitimately dangerous for the child. (“Look out for that car!” NOOOOO. Thump.) I wouldn’t be surprised to see that unaccounted-for child death stats spike at that age. A few children never get past that stage, especially if trauma is the suppressor the parent chooses to use to resolve the conflict. Intimidation is paralyzing.

Sometimes, I believe, the child, the teen, and the grown-up have this so-called “disorder” thrust upon them by the situation. Something is wrong -- anything from molestation to broad social injustice. The incorrigible kid, the freaked-out shooter, and the self-immolating nun seem different when considered from their own points of view, which is not the point of view of the authority figure or even society as a whole. These miracle discipline systems the snake oil salesmen invent are to sell to the authorities, not to those who defy them. Authorities have resources, like money. Oppositionally defiant individuals usually have nothing but their own minds, bodies and emotions.

In my own mental and emotional life, I see that my defiance of authorities is usually fueled by contempt at their incompetence, frustration that they can’t seem to understand what appears obvious to me, and indignation that they refuse to even talk about problems. This same dense principal was forcing us to write new curricula for the school and he wanted it in grade stair-steps. I wanted to write mine in strands: a reading sequence, a writing sequence, a listening sequence and so on. This was because kids who flunked English ended up taking three grades at once so I wanted to run a sort of one-room schoolhouse strategy. He couldn’t understand the concept so he opposed it. I don’t just mean he opposed the idea -- he could not understand that learning is not necessarily chunked up into grades.

When something like health or income is involved, I escalate, sometimes beyond reason. I mean, the first diagnosis of my marginal diabetes was made by a woman doctor who seemed to think she was entitled to dominate me like a popular high school girl looking for acolytes. I told her off before going to a different doctor, which is risky. After all, a doc can write things in your chart that contaminate how you are seen for many years. “Unstable, non-cooperative.” It can affect one’s access to care and cost a lot of money when the doc orders tests or writes prescriptions.

Clearly, a key issue is trust when one cannot have control. There’s little wonder that we have such a political trust crisis on our hands when so much of our compliance is based on force instead of willing consent. When there is a twenty dollar penalty for not having enough money to pay a bill, the temptation to play “uproar” is hard to resist. Surely there are better ways.

When I forget to cover my reactions and obviously bristle, some people come in closer and reach for control. Those fearful of sharing my punishment back away. Solidarity is threatened, which is hard on visionaries and idealists trying to force change. Did I say “force”?

By isolating myself in a small village where population density is thin, I can be far more of an outlier, a nonconforming person who is supersensitive about some things, easily overloaded by obligation and guilt. I have time to ponder and tease out the threads of something like oppositional defiance disorder. One thing I see is how easily an ODD person is controlled by their own automatic reactions. If you want them to go left, tell them to go right. The more subtle and alert will realize they are being controlled. But then they will tell even sympathetic persons the opposite of what they mean. They say they are fine when they are not and become enraged if you can’t tell they are NOT fine. It’s the confusion and automaticity of the strategy that keeps it from working better.

In the end the opposition and the defiance can either become exhausted disengagement or a thrashing desperation to escape the trap, to force someone else to take hold and resolve an intolerable and unjust torture. The best of all outcomes might be when the global situation shifts enough to open the jaws of the trap. That might mean a medical breakthrough, an economic reframing, or a social revolution. I have heard of schools or nursing homes where a team of concerned persons convene with the suffering “acting out” individual to evaluate and redesign terms. Isn’t that like a family? Sometimes they include family.

I don’t get into fist fights, but I’m hypervigilant, a compressed spring, tenacious, and waiting. Taking notes. Always writing as a way of getting at the truth. Stubborn.

"TIGHT OR LOOSE"? HOW DOES THIS WORK, ANYWAY?

Not long ago I watched a video about “tight” societies versus “loose” societies that didn’t just describe them but tried to explain why they were that way.  The spokesperson was female in this presentation.   http://www.outlookseries.com/A0996/Science/3989_Michele_Gelfand_University_Maryland_Understanding_Tight_Versus_Loose_Cultures_Critical_Interdependent_World_Michele_Gelfand.htm
The concept is that various forces interact to create the general norming of nations, with those under threat or recovering from disasters or struggling with shortages, etc., tending to be the most tight, that is, most conservative and intolerant of deviation.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/05/loose-vs-tight-societies/  This is Razib at Gene Expression making some observations.  I’ve been reading this guy for years and he’s pretty sharp.  Specifically, he’s good at analyzing research studies.

The unspoken assumption is that looseness is good and the US is very loose and that’s a reflection of our virtue, but that we need to understand “tight” countries so we can deal with them.  There’s a little hint of “well, we must be patient because they’ve had hard times.” 

One of the relevant variables considered was population density, about which the researchers were a little conflicted.  They feel that the denser the population, the more there are niches and bubbles, which amount to looseness, but Iceland has very low density and a loose population, so maybe the less space competition, the less one has to conform?  But strangely, the population density of a country in 1500 was highly relevant to their attitudes now. 

Is the relative tightness of Asian countries due to their population density or something cultural or even something genetic?  Are religions that are focused on conformity the result or the cause of the tightness of a country?  There doesn’t seem to be much attention paid to the influence of the environment -- some places are tougher to live in and require more group cooperation.  There was mention of ag-based lives versus industrial or corporate or bureaucratic -- however you define it.  Urban.  They took no account of undercultures, particularly criminals which can be stabilizing to the point of paralysis or totally destabilizing in a situation like drug cartel Mexico.

I also think about enclaves of people who prefer looseness but live in a tight society, like Unitarians in the Bible Belt.  In my experience, they like looseness only in certain dimensions and require conformity to the norms of the in-group.  As an individual who is a free-thinker and a free-styler in personal habits, I’m happy to live in a relatively “tight” town because the things they want conformity to are things I already do anyway: don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t drive around fast, sleep around, etc.  The only problem is they want my house and yard to be nicer than I can afford, but they understand poverty and old age.

It’s harder to understand enclaves of people who prefer tightness in a loose society.  Convents, I suppose, but also cults and -- to some degree -- schools.  The real reason I’m reading this stuff is to try to solve the on-going struggles in Heart Butte where what seems to be a loose society demands tightness from their school, but not really.

Last night on “All Things Considered,” the latest college athletics scandal was discussed and once again it was proposed that education and sports competition should be separated.  It strikes me that sports goals are best pursued as “tight” communities, indeed, filtered for skill and determination.   But education goals can be developed either as “tight” (meeting all those Bushy testing goals) or as “loose,” supporting every student in his or her style and interests.  But only a private school can be “tight” in the way an athletic team is, discarding anyone who doesn’t fit.  And “loose” can become aimless wandering.  Or just disruptive.

Today’s NYTimes has an article about the distress of “loose” teachers (specifically,loose-lipped on Facebook) trying to enforce tight standards, though they don’t set up the discussion that way.  The precipitating incidents were teachers complaining about how much they despised their students.  I sympathize.  Students who dislike their teachers, who hear their parents mocking and berating them, who hate being regimented in any way, can be monsters of balking, sabotaging, attacking. 

They always make me remember a movie from the Fifties in which Annie Oakley was substituting in a frontier one-room school house.  The “big boys” smarted off.  She pulled her six-gun, forced them to put their inkpots on their heads and then shot the inkpots so they ended up with ink running down their smart aleck faces.

A contrasting incident is when I was briefly teaching in an adjacent town and had a class that had deliberately run off their previous teacher, a young man.  They did what they pleased throughout the school and it was fairly transgressive, though not as much as they thought.  They were unhappy, mostly, because they were skilled athletes and being exploited for the prestige of the coaches and administration.  They sort-of knew it, but couldn’t get outside the conformity of small-town team adulation.  I was shaking my head over them when I went to eat my lunch sandwich and sat down with some veteran teachers.  “What would you do with these boys?”  I asked.  The answer was immediate:  “Kill them.”  And they meant it.  Annie Oakley, aiming low.

The irony was that some of these boys will kill themselves, one way or another.

The people doing the study were particularly concerned with immigration, where persons of one style move into another society with quite a different set of unspoken “rules.”  Such people understandably express much isolation and bafflement.  Sometimes they throw themselves into being “more American than Americans” and other times they define themselves as outliers and stay in a tight little defensive band like buffalo facing wolves. 

A school that has teachers from “outside” as Heart Butte did in the two years I was there is going to have trouble.  The grade school teachers had over the years assimilated to the village or maybe had come from the local scene anyway.  But high school teachers came from outside -- sometimes quite different places.  They were a shock and since they came as a group, they reinforced each other.

Structural considerations, matters of style, nearly unconscious standards and definitions, are all on the table these days -- partly because of our internal differences which have grown to the level of legislative gridlock and partly because of the difficulty in resolving international problems without simply bombing hell out of them with predator drones.  Bin Laden managed to seriously dislocate our assumptions, justifying a LOT of tightening.  Whether we can find looseness that isn’t simply, well, “floppy,” will be a long task, maybe more than the economic crash.  Anyway, how much does the commodification of everything promote “tightness” (gotta have a certain lifetyle) or “looseness” (deregulation in order to make money).

It’s interesting that bin Laden’s prestige and power were not much affected by demonizing him.  In fact, that possibly made him more powerful.  What has deflated him in a commodified world was discovering that he lived so “poorly” in a “bare room” with “old furniture” and a blanket over his shoulders, watching vids on a monitor that wasn’t even flat screen.

"FIVE PERCENT" SOLUTIONS

“The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts” by Peter T. Coleman lives up to its title.  Don’t confuse it with other “Five Percent” books -- there are several.  Don’t confuse it with the 20/80 rule, which is about business:  twenty per cent of the effort/product should produce eighty percent of the profit.  And so on.  This not-very-long, not-very-hard-to-understand book is about the way the universe works, either in the micro or macro senses.  It is about how complexification gives rise to life by forming nodes or nexuses, little knots of forces, which are sometimes good and sometimes bad -- at least from the viewpoint of humans.

Take war for instance.  Please.  In fact, the driving force behind the book is the International Project on Conflict and Complexity.
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=Theory+and+Research&Info=International+Project+on+Conflict+and+Complexity

“ICCCR’s International Project on Conflict and Complexity (IPCC) is an interdisciplinary consortium of peace and conflict scholars and practitioners from anthropology, psychology, international relations, physics, and complexity science, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, working to generate new insights and methods for addressing difficult, unresolved issues in the areas of violence prevention, conflict resolution, and sustainable peace. It supports a variety of innovative, inter-disciplinary, scholar-practitioner activities.”
A lot of people produce this kind of statement -- all of them nicely sitting around the table being proudly credentialed.  What qualifies me for being any sort of expert or thinking I can judge what works or doesn’t?   Battle scars, that’s what. 

Beyond that, in 1957 when I took my first “Language and Thought” class from Dean Barnlund, a gentle man who tried to teach us discussion skills in spite of loud students who protested they were being confused on purpose, I thought I’d found the key to the universe.  Northwestern University School of Speech (now renamed and reorganized) was the first place where I ran into the contrast between those who MUST have simple rules in life (whether they are liberal or conservative, progressive or reactionary, black or white) and those who are always looking for the edges, the interactions, the gray areas -- maybe in order to find a force for potential growth.  Ecosystems are balanced and integrated.  One must go to the edge of the forest, where it abuts onto a meadow to find a place for creativity, where a living being can control its environment by ducking in and out of the shadows.

Originally I ordered this book because I want to rewrite my own manuscript that I call “Heartbreak Butte,” which is about the little hamlet upstream from Valier where I taught for two years (1989-91).  It’s a place that gets stuck in violence, prejudice, and intimidation.  Not many can survive there, but some do.  Even thrive.  That’s not necessarily a good thing, because they often want to prevent change. 

Not many will admit that one reason reservations have a hard time is because too many people (often white) are making big-time money off the vectors that prevent growth:  for instance, supplying alcohol and drugs.  The FBI secretly likes the romance of being the only real Big Time force for good on a frontier: THEY decide who gets prosecuted or even investigated for rape or murder.  But they are not part of the community, so formal retribution is always administered from outside.  Informal retribution lines up ancient schisms and current family wars in exactly the way this book identifies as paralyzing change.

My key motivator is an incident a few years ago when one of my former students was beaten to death by her drug cohort.  Everyone in town heard her screaming, everyone knew what was happening, and no one could think what to do about it -- so they decided she deserved it.  She herself thought that.

I sat down and made a list of what I would do.  It was highly relevant because I was in Portland where the FAS little girl next door to my mother had beaten her new puppy to death.  It began on the front porch as I was walking by and I tried to intervene, but the girl took her screaming pup into the house.  My mother begged me not to call the police or animal control (where I had worked) because the girl’s mother was so frighteningly violent. Even if she didn’t dare do anything to my aged mother (who was in her eighties) the woman would attack her own parents, also helplessly elderly.  My mother was afraid of her car being trashed, of her house being burned.  These were realistic concerns.  My list of what to do to intervene for the girl being beaten in Heart Butte was similarly drastic:  ram the house with a pickup, set the house on fire and call the fire department which would undoubtedly claim that the truck wouldn’t start for some mysterious reason.  I rejected guns out of hand.

So why didn’t I do something for this girl while she was in my class?  Why didn’t I teach her something that would change her idea of who she was?  Her grandfather, with whom she lived, had been described by his real name in a book as a drunk and troublemaker.   Just writing this much here will cause people to recognize whom I mean.

There are at least a hundred factors holding the status quo in place.  One of them this year may be a repeat of the flood that wiped out the hamlet in 1964.  Another may be the growth in population, the housing projects which were built where powerful people would benefit from them -- on flood plains.  Reservation construction does not have to meet state construction standards.

But other factors push for change: a functioning store, a medical clinic, strong churches who bring in outsiders every summer.  The schools are up high, out of the flood plain, big enough to be shelters.

When I became a minister (1982), it was in large part because I’d been to Leadership School where a big component was organizational design.   The kind of Div School education I had was very much focused on complex systems, which is what distinguishes a university from a small Bible college where one is taught The True Way -- no argument.  People sort themselves out when they attend such institutions or join denominations or even buy homes where jobs are.  Small towns are congenial for people who want stability and rule-based living.  Cities appeal to those who can adapt, transform, move through the interstices. 

Make no mistake -- I’m “with” the latter.  I just choose to live here.  But the prairie only seems to be a simple place.  Where it is untouched the sod is complex with interwoven beings.  That cannot be said for the zillion square miles of monoculture grain in straight rows.  Nor for the white whirring pillars of the windfarms.  We don’t know what the consequences of that will be.

BUT, this book illustrates, simplicity may be a force for good, may SAVE complexities.  Just so we keep the flow moving and the flood gates working.

SERIOUS PLEASURES

One of my great pleasures is raggedy old paperback textbooks in arcane fields like Cultural Anthropology.  It used to be that people told stories about other people without dragging a lot of analysis and politics into it.  They just laid out the givens of the ecology, some history, and then gave you vignettes.  “Other Fields, Other Grasshoppers” (1977) is edited by L. L. Langness, a retired professor married to another anthro prof and living just over the Rockies a ways.  I think I had to shell out a little more money than usual.  I mostly spend a dollar for a book plus four dollars for postage.

There are familiar people here:  Colin Turnbull, Peter Freuchen, Peter Nabokov, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Carlos Castenada, Oscar Lewis.  One grows to know the anthros as well as their chosen cultures.  The best ones are not all that objective, but take positions that are at least implied.  Castenada is almost proselytizing.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas turned her observations to animals -- with good results.  Peter Freuchen married one of his subjects.  Colin Turnbull made everyone angry by showing the Ik as a dreadful people, distorted by starvation.  People are not nice once they get deprived enough, as holocaust survivors will testify.   Sympathetic inquirers understand that until the persons concerned get angry at the inquirers.

An interesting example was on “All Things Considered” this morning.  A female Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, went to Kabul, entered a bookstore wearing a burka which allowed her to pretend to be local, and became close enough friends with the bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais, owner of the bookshop at the Intercontinental Hotel and another near the Mustafa Hotel, to invite her to live with the family for a few months.  She “novelized” the best-selling book, published as “The Bookseller of Kabul.”  But Rais said he was identifiable anyway, that she misinterpreted everything -- which caused him grief -- and sued Seierstad in Norway.  He won.  He also wrote his own version called, “Once upon a time there was a bookseller in Kabul.”   Not a best-seller.  The crux of the problem is that Rais sees himself as liberal and progressive but Seierstad portrayed his treatment of his two wives, one teenaged, as anything but.  Seierstad did not expect that Rais would be sophisticated enough to hire a lawyer to sue her and use the ensuing furor to apply for asylum in Scandinavia.  Neither of them seemed to have predicted that the first book would be bootleg-translated into Persian and a source of local foment.

It appears that Seierstad needed a little more training as a social anthropologist.  (She is noted as a war correspondent.)  One of the first things to figure out is how people see themselves.  “Truthiness” (to use Oprah’s concept) has to do with whether the reporting fits the preconceptions of the reader -- probably also the agent, the editor and the publisher, to say nothing of reviewers and interviewers.  “The Bookseller of Kabul” fits the hyper-feminist culture of Norway when it says that Rais is a tyrant in his household.  It fits Seierstad’s opponent-based world-view.  It does NOT fit Rais’ self-image as a savvy, educated, in-touch-with-the-world urban merchant.

How do we ever get a true notion of each other?  So many assumptions, so little communication.  I’ve seen perfectly ordinary Native American men slip into stereotypes, either far more ignorant and primitive or far more “spiritual” and generous than they are.  I remember when Cosmopolitan magazine sent a writer to Browning to see what NA women thought about NA men.  She disguised “Peaches” as “Cherry.”  Of course, we all knew who she was.

The anthropologists in this text who impressed me most were the ones who were with their people more than weeks or even months.  Rena Gazaway http://wotantue.us/GGU/Duddie lived with the people of a tiny isolated Appalachian community for years.  Her book “The Longest Mile” (1969) portrays lives worse than those of people living on the streets, because the community was locked together in mutual ignorance.  She slept in urine-soaked beds with huddles of their children, ate their abominable food (US commodities, which become dumping grounds for outdated and surplus food of low quality) and recorded their ideas.  They had little concept of what she was doing -- just took her at face value and appreciated it when she intervened in small ways.  (She had been trained as a public nurse.)

The moral dilemmas of people crossing cultures, whether by travel or by walking up the street to visit a Section 8 house, are huge.  Normally we manage our decisions by consensus within a group that has more or less settled on a “way” to do things, with beliefs that support them.  Usually the “way” is defended enough and works well enough for the “ecology” to continue itself over time and become beloved, part of the identity of the people.  (Rena took a fourteen-year boy home with her to the comfortable city.  He hated it and went back home.)

But then the economy changes -- something comes, like the Internet, or something leaves, like Anaconda Copper Refinery -- and the whole system falls apart into misery and confusion.  How can outsiders help when the strongest wish of the people involved is simply to restore what they know?

The impact of television and the internet on this problem has been mixed.  On the one hand, people are aware that there is an outside world and that one can successfully go out there.  On the other hand, they get the idea that there is only one “other” world: the one in sit coms.  Gotta have a sofa like that.  Gotta dress like that.  What do those people do for work?  People in sit coms go out to eat.

There are still American people living in hovels, lucky to have a working radio.  Have you read about the snowbanks melting in New York City, revealing abandoned sofas full of rats?  Did the rats move with the sofa or come there at the curb?  I’m talking the USA.  If you want to talk “third world,” that’s a situation of such different dimensions that it’s a different kind.

Or is it?  “Forcing” people to buy health insurance is laughable to someone living in a cardboard box, waiting to die of AIDS and TB and malnutrition but still proud enough to fight off attempts to grab them and reform them against their will.  Sooner or later the do-gooders just can’t stand it anymore.  

What ever happened to Rena Gazaway?  What happened to those stunted children and near-medieval adults?  There’s an interesting discussion at  http://wotantue.us/EvPsy/Comm.Week3    They say Rena was herself raised in what might be called a hillbilly hollow, though not one as catastrophically pathological as Duddie's Branch. She left the hollow behind and became Rena Gazaway, R.N., M.A., Ph.D.

So I don’t want to read any more about the “hollow.”  I want to read a book about Rena Gazaway and how she made her getaway.   What’s even more interesting is how she found the courage to go back.  Most of the escapees from poverty I know are terrified of slipping back into that trap.  They try to ignore all that -- even deny it.

OVERWHELMING MESSIAH

This blog post is more like a true web-log, drawn mostly from the links on Arts Journal’s blog called “Life’s a Pitch,” a review of the music world.  http://www.artsjournal.com/lifesapitch/

The Sacramento Choral Society was holding what police called a "well-publicized" event to sing the "Hallelujah Chorus" in the mall's food court, scheduled for 7:30 p.m.
But less than an hour beforehand, too many people had crowded into the mall.  The police had to evacuate them.
 http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/12/21/california.mall.evacuation/?hpt=T2.   Turns out, the free performance was a bit too well-publicized.

A comment by Maren Montalbano gives background.  "The Hallelujah chorus flash mob idea started in Philadelphia, when the Opera Company of Philadelphia produced a "Random Act of Culture" at Macy's on October 30. Ever since then, there have been dozens of groups pulling off similar things all over the continent, which is incredibly exciting! It's just too bad that things in Sacramento got so crazy."

The Opera Company of Philadelphia video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU

What Philadelphia understood and Sacramento did not was that the idea of a “flash mob” is for the people who are in on the deal to keep it a secret, using cell phone technology to suddenly appear somewhere at the same time for some purpose.  When you see the Phillie tape, you understand how astounded everyone not "in the know" was -- the astonishment was part of the performance.  Self-promotion was not the deal.

Go to “Life’s a Pitch” for the rest of the links.

Of course, if the event could publicize the singing group, PR folks were quick to understand that it could just as easily publicize the location and Nordstrom leapt right to it.  Seattle is Microsoft country, a kind of flash mob for the last decade, all seeking commodification, so  Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz joined forces with Nordstrom to present a version of the Hallelujah Chorus themselves. The performance involved the Seattle Symphony Chorale and over 500 local singers. There's a video linked at “Life’s a Pitch.”

Almost immediately a sit com picked up the "flash mob" idea (this time it's dance and a gay theme is woven in): Modern Family is the sit com.  Linked at "Life's a Pitch."

Then inevitably Messiah became a Nordstrom franchise and there were performances in Santa Anita, California with the LA Master Chorale, and in Dallas, Texas with the Dallas Bach Society. Who knew Nordstrom was such a supporter of random acts of song?  Santa Anita and Dallas are linked from “Life’s a Pitch.”  You CAN go direct to YouTube which has enough versions and discussions to crowd a shopping mall.

The best comments were appended by readers to “Life’s a Pitch.”

By carol:
Whatever brings music into the public domain is a big plus. Audiences for classical music and opera have become almost uniformly gray-haired. Exposure like this is bound to enlighten people and build appreciation for the glories of Western civ.

By Zachary:
I can't help but be reminded of The Messiah, a film by French photographer Willy Ronis. In the film he juxtaposes a production of Haendel's work with images from prisons, Vegas, poverty, Wall Street, and the text of the work which takes on entirely new meanings...America's hypocrisies and suffering against one of the cornerstones of Western creation. How is it that such a wonderful composition now finds its audience, AND performers in...a shopping mall at Christmas? Perhaps I'm playing the role of Scrooge here but I am far less charmed by these events than others may be in terms of potential cultural behavior and "consummation."

So there are your issues:  is the ultimate consideration raising consciousness about the glories of music like this  or should the music be celebrated in the context of social action, the enormous shortfall between what we pretend we are doing and what we are actually achieving -- or even trying to achieve.  NPR, always conscientious, tries to do both and has been pointing out how much of our Christmas silliness is rooted in 19th century bourgeois commodification that wiped out the Puritan idea of Christmas as a time of repentance and fasting, a dark turn of the year when we beg for forgiveness instead of trying to “commodify” the lives of those who don’t have enough the rest of the year.

Here are some wiki facts for you to drop into the conversation at Christmas parties.

"Messiah is an English-language oratorio composed by George Frideric Handel, and is one of the most popular works in the Western choral literature. The libretto by Charles Jennens is drawn entirely from the King James and Great Bibles, and interprets the Christian doctrine of the Messiah. Messiah (often but incorrectly called The Messiah) is one of Handel's most famous works. The Messiah sing-alongs now common at Christmas usually consist of only the first of the oratorio's three parts, with Hallelujah (originally concluding the second part) replacing His Yoke is Easy in the first part.

"Composed in London during the summer of 1741 and premiered in Dublin, Ireland on 13 April 1742, it was repeatedly revised by Handel, reaching its most familiar version in the performance to benefit the Foundling Hospital in 1754. In 1789 Mozart orchestrated a German version of the work; his added woodwind parts, and the edition by Ebenezer Prout, were commonly heard until the mid-20th century and the rise of historically informed performance."
So, the music has been entwined from the beginning with benefits for the poor.  What could be wrong with that?  Oh, I suppose the biggest problem is that it’s a celebration of white male Euro stuff, on which axis much of Victorian middle class life turned, conveniently dropping out the Irish.  The Unitarian Universalist churches that I served loved the Messiah -- they ignored the dogma in the lyrics which are from the King James Bible.  You could do the same.

Slightly abridged alternative Messiah lyrics (not for NPR)  from  http://www.elyrics.net/read/d/dead-celebrity-status-lyrics/messiah-lyrics.html

Move out the way when I'm passin' through
I got heads to the front an' the back of you
I got the world in my hands, you can have it too
I got two middle fingers an' they're pointin' at you

I'm the Messiah, I'm anti-celebrity
I'm anti-war like John Lennon in the seventies
Dead Celebs are movin', you're the students
It's time to change the world, kids, here's the blueprint

Somethin' 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
Like Kurt Cobain's ghost came back an' wrote these lyrics
An' forced America to listen
With a million angry Misfits screamin', "Fuck The System”

I'm the pain in Axle Rose's diary
That's why an 'Appetite For Destruction' lives inside of me
I'm not your typical lyricist
Strippin' naked an' sellin' on appearances

This is for those who came to tackle giants
This is the anthem, 'David versus Goliath'
I'm so sick of bein' caught up in your sideshow
I'm the anti-American Teen Idol

I spread peace through a pen like Bob Dylan
An' crash the set of Popstars while it's filmin'
Expose foes for lies an' propaganda
Like dirty cops swingin' batons on camera

Let's march up these steps an' face the fire
Scratch a match an' burn this empire down
So let the games begin
You either turn with the world or you watch it spin

An' if your dreams were stolen by a liar
Then steal it back with your name as Winona Ryder
Don't be afraid, be stronger divide an' conquer
Come out swingin' like Ozzfest concerts

Time's up, I'm callin' you to rise up
No more walkin' blind with your eyes shut
Find the message hidden in these chapters
Like Black Sabbath records playing backwards

I wait for this like it's a violent game
A cross between Grand Theft Auto an' Max Payne
I'm the magic in the hands of David Blaine
Turnin' back time to the days when [Incomprehensible]

Along came a spider spinning webs of hatred
Welcome to the wonderful world of entertainment
Where stars are born an' celebrities tell lies
The revolution will now be televised
I haven’t tried to sing this with Handel's music.  I mostly just sing “hallelujah.”  Because, indeed, new things are born all the time whether or not they’re bought and sold.