The Breaking Time

Intermission

A Nanga Sadhu, or naked Hindu holy man with his face smeared with holy ash exhales smoke after puffing marijuana at a transit camp on the way to Gangasagar, in Calcutta, India, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2010. Photo by Bikas Das. Via riotclitshave. See this photo in its full majesty here

I'm going to leave you dear readers in the care of this kindly old mystic, as I'll most likely be gone from this space for the next few days. I have to travel out of town to help a friend, and combined with the amount of work facing me when I return, it will leave precious little time for blogging, and I'll probably be mostly gone from Twitter too. Plenty to come upon my return and keep leaving questions, I'm loving 'em.

Take care, everyone.

Poems for Friday Saturday: Man in the Moon

Yesterday I was beset by a ton of work, much general busy-ness and the first migraine I've had in 5-6 years. Thus beleaguered, I asked you, dear readers, to suggest a poem for The Breaking Time's Friday tradition.

And you didn't let me down. I got a lot of good suggestions, many of which I'll use in weeks to come. Thank you all. One in particular, however, seemed just right, and I regret that I wasn't able to get it up until today.

So my special thanks to the wonderful, poetic and talented Vivacious G, who suggested this perfect piece from Billy Collins.

He used to frighten me in the nights 


of childhood,


the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft


I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness


But tonight as I drive home over 


these hilly roads 


I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees


And rising again to show his familiar face 


And when he comes into full view 


over open fields


he looks like a young man who has fallen in love


with the dark earth


a pale bachelor, well-groomed and 


full of melancholy


his round mouth open


as if he had just broken into song.

Wild in the Streets! Psychedelic youth seize America!

Believe it or not, at one point rock n' roll and young people were apparently terrifying creatures preoccupied with consuming strange drugs and shaking society to its foundations.

That, combined with the then-controversial debate over lowering the voting age to 18 and, fueled the exploitation film Wild in the Streets, which happened to hit during the riot year of 1968. As one might imagine, it's a little high on the scenery chewing. Observe the trailer:

Yeah, it's like that. Rock n' roll kingpin/LSD manufacturer Max Frost rises from a fucked-up middle class upbringing to become President by leading mobs of The Youth. It doesn't go well for the old. For all the camp, Wild In the Streets is a surprising amount of fun, and worth a watch if just for the scene of a heavily acid-dosed Congress. If you've got a spare hour and a half and Veoh, watch the whole thing.

The movie turned out to be a sleeper hit, and "The Shape of Things to Come," by Frost's fictional band, actually made the Billboard charts. It's largely forgotten now, and it does seem almost quaint in retrospect, that the youth of America were ever viewed, even satirically, as this kind of threat, or LSD as a wonder drug.

Wild in the Streets also marked one of the last moments that youth subcultures were implicitly associated with radical political change, with their very presence perceived as a threat. That's changed, partly for demographic reasons and partly because alt cultures, except for the occasional ritual protests, aren't really associated with political activism except of a defensive nature.

Nonetheless, Wild in the Streets remains an interesting over-the-top romp. I have to wonder, if a similar fantasia were made today, what would it look like?

D&D killers meme returns (and must be stopped)

Why does this all sound so terribly familiar?

Last Friday, Amy Bishop, a faculty member of the University of Alabama, (allegedly, technically) opened fire on her colleagues, killing three and putting two others in critical condition. It was a senseless, stupid tragedy, especially for those who have just lost their mentors and loved ones.

That, I figured, was about the end of it, other than hoping that Bishop never again sees the light of day. I didn't really feel the need to comment. I've written here, at length, about my strong feelings on the hysterical need to turn every lone nut shooting into a symptom of some larger social ill. Bishop was an upper-class professional, not part of a controversial minority, so it seemed like this case might be hard for the worst parts of the media to transform into any of their favorite bogeymen. The news outlets, I hoped, would report on the event, get the stories it needed to and then move on.

How wrong I was. From today's Boston Herald:

Accused campus killer Amy Bishop was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons - just like Michael “Mucko” McDermott, the lone gunman behind the devastating workplace killings at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000.

Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.

“They even acted this crap out,” the source said.

When questioned about it yesterday, Anderson, 45, a research scientist in Huntsville, Ala., dismissed the egghead escape as “a passing interest. It was a social thing more than anything else. It’s not the crazy group people think they are.”

McDermott studied engineering at Northeastern in the late 1980s, but Anderson said he never met him. Police seized two Dungeons & Dragons books from McDermott’s Haverhill apartment after he shot seven co-workers to death on Dec. 26, 2000.

The popular fantasy role-playing game has a long history of controversy, with objections raised to its demonic and violent elements. Some experts have cited the D&D backgrounds of people who were later involved in violent crimes, while others say it just a game. A federal appeals court recently upheld a prison ban on the game in Wisconsin, where prison officials reportedly testified they were afraid the game could promote “hostility, violence and escape behavior.”

What the fuck is this? 1984 (the literal year, not the Orwell novel)? This is, from the first paragraph on, idiotic, hack journalism at its worst. An editor let the "egghead escape" description fly? Really?

I bet if I wade through the last decade's worth of shootings, I can find somebody who happened to drink milk or watch football. Perhaps I could then string together some vague innuendos, ignore the overwhelming cases of people who did the activity in question and didn't go batshit, and then put out an article claiming to have discovered some important fact that the public needs to be warned of. 

Bullshit.

This is not the work of anyone who could ever, in a million years, call themselves a journalist.

A good reaction to this is to start by letting the Boston Herald clearly know your displeasure. Be calm, be polite, but firmly let them know that this is unacceptable. Believe it or no, most papers are acutely aware of their public image, especially in this business climate. Herald Editor-in-Chief Kevin Convey can be reached at 617-619-6403 or at kconvey@bostonherald.com. Sweet can be reached directly at 617-426-3000, x7610 or at lsweet@bostonherald.com.

A President's Day Offering

It is on this day that we pause to honor the founder of our country with this classic paean. Tremble, for truly he was more god than man.

Textbook coups

Don McLeroy, ultra-conservative member of the Texas State Board of Education. Photo from the Washington Monthly.

If you haven't already, Mariah Blake's Washington Monthly story on the attempts of the Texas State Board of Education's ultra-right faction to rewrite the nation's textbooks is a must-read.

This would seem to be a state or local matter. It's not:

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

It gets worse. Much worse. At the very end, McLeroy, though he's encountered some setbacks, is bragging that "sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have."

This is, of course, an outrage. While I'm not particularly fond of the textbook style of learning, when trying to insure some basic level of free education for huge numbers of people, they're probably a necessity. If written well, they can provide a useful summary so students can pursue their own researches into more specific works, experiments and primary sources (sadly that's rarely how education works, but that's a rant for another day).

One interesting thing this illustrates is a fact of power that the far-right has grasped, but that their opponents generally have not. We wrongly associate power with high offices, big wins. Witness, for example, how third parties have disproportionately concentrated on quixotic runs for the Presidency instead of more useful organizing (imagine how their fortunes might have changed if the US' Green Party had, beginning in the '80s, concentrated first on securing the Northwest and Northeast at the local and state levels).

While the high posts are important, we live in a society vast and complex enough that there are all sorts of hidden pressure points such as, for example, the Texas State Board of Education. While Texas is generally a conservative state, the article makes it clear that the ultra-right faction has plenty of opposition, including from other conservatives, but got entrenched because they followed one of the oldest rules of conflict: attack where your opponent isn't.

So if you support science, sanity and the critical thinking necessary to a free society, the productive reaction isn't "It's an outrage that right-wing extremists control the country's textbooks!" but "why don't we?"

Valentine

Photo by Brian Orion

I have a Valentine's Day tradition, whatever blog I'm writing on, to post up a piece of mine that I dedicated to this particular holiday four years ago. I'll get to that in a moment. 

For those of us who often felt awkward, weird or just unusual, Valentine's holds a special place in the Hate pantheon. For myself, and for many I know, it was almost a rite of passage to write a "fuck Valentine's" piece at some point.

It's easy to see why. Love and sex are hard things to figure out, after all, full of pain, strange corners and unpredictable rules. A holiday that, in popular imagination, is devoted to hammering the most traditional version of those already thorny areas home is going to attract a lot of deserved ire. It's a difficult damn time to be on the wrong side of.

Of course, there's nothing set in stone about the current holiday. By all indications, Valentine's began as a saints' feast tacked over a Roman fertility day, mutated into a celebration of love by Chaucer and eventually hammered its current incarnation by industry and need. Culture's a funny thing, but in the end this day, as any other, is what we make it.

What follows is my take, something I don't feel the need to update or change because it says what I need to say.

—

Here's to love. Period. Here's to every family who have held each other together. Here's to every friendship that's survived against the odds. Here's to everyone out there who has found their soulmate. 

Here's to sappy poetry that needed to be written, the perfect gift that was just right and to the song that means more than it really should.

Here's also to everyone who has ever loved without return. Here's to everyone that loved when it couldn't possibly work out or when it was forbidden or when they were laughed at. Here's to every breakup, every awkward silence, every lesson learned and everyone who dried their eyes and went on with their lives. Here's to every memory of what might have been and every dream of what may yet come. Here's to all the ones we loved taken from us by time or distance or who no longer walk with us in this life.

So here's to love in all its infinite diversity, infuriating confusion and dizzying glory. It drives us mad and rends us asunder, yet we never give it up. Why? Because the world with it is infinitely richer than one without. Happy Valentine's Day.

~Amor est vitae essentia~

Poems for Friday: Hooray say the roses

Boy with a pipe, Pablo Picasso, 1905

Today is Friday, just before Valentine's. I think we need some Charles Bukowski. We do.

hooray say the roses, today is blamesday

and we are red as blood.

hooray say the roses, today is Wednesday

and we bloom where soldiers fell

and lovers too,

and the snake at the word.

hooray say the roses, darkness comes

all at once, like lights gone out,

the sun leaves dark continents

and rows of stone.

hooray say the roses, cannons and spires,

birds, bees, bombers, today is Friday

the hand holding a medal out the window,

a moth going by, half a mile an hour,

hooray hooray

hooray say the roses

we have empires on our stems,

the sun moves the mouth:

hooray hooray hooray

and that is why you like us.

Question Time at The Breaking Time

Go ahead. Ask me anything.

I like questions. I adore questions. Questions and I have flirted, romanced and downed shots of tequila before waking up on the floor together in a barely sunlit haze. My incessant tendencies in this direction have led to much new knowledge, some close scrapes and a career in journalism ("No way, you're paying me to ask people about tough topics? Sweet!")

On a more serious note, I continue to believe that questions — and the willingness to consider difficult answers — are one of the best scalpel blades we have to cut away the layers of reality until we are wiser than we began.

But as much as I like asking questions, I also like answering them, or having a good one dance around in the brain for awhile until it triggers all sorts of new ideas. Back when I actively wrote on livejournal, I would periodically invite my circle of readers to ask me any question on their minds. It remains, to this day, one of the more fulfilling things I've done online.

Fortunately, formspring allows me to do exactly that in a sleekier, fancier fashion. Why I'm putting this up here, readers, is that while I welcome questions about my personal life or grand topics, I also want to take this opportunity to ask for your input about The Breaking Time.

I've written here for over a year now, and a lot has happened in that time. All the slick "how to" guides for blogs advise the writer to pick a specific niche, become an expert and not stray too far outside those lines.

Fuck that.

I believe in eclecticism. I believe that everything ties together enough that political dogfights, government reforms, grand ideas, bloody history, soul-searing art, personal stories and forgotten literature all have their place, along with any other topic that jumps out of the wordwork and demands our attention. I chose "There is no They" as this site's motto for a very specific reason, but I might also add Terence's perfect thought: "I am human; nothing human is alien to me." That's what I shoot for, however haphazardly.

I plan to continue writing here for a long time to come, but I also want to change, be it a redesign, some better features or honing my writing style (or all of the above). At the end of the day, I'm just one brain and one set of eyes; I screw up plenty, miss even more. 

So let me know, here or over at the convenient question box. What do you want to see? What do I need to improve? What should I leave well enough alone?

Rant, rave, quietly suggest, but let me know. I've been stunned by the intelligence of the readership here on more than one occasion. I appreciate the hell out of all of you, and here's to the next steps down the road.

A brief mental health break, with Rahm Emanuel

Maybe it's my ongoing appreciation for a well-phrased vicious political rant or just that Andy Samberg's impression of Rahm Emanuel always gets me laughing, but this seemed to hit just the right chord for Monday.