Tag Archive | truth is obvious

Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 12: In Fitts About God

Aug1

God and Gravity

God and Gravity


The theologization of our thinking in US society is fast becoming intolerable. Catherine Austin Fitts’ latest Youtube missive ends with a profound, “if we can’t face it, God can’t fix it.”
??
We’re going to wait for God to come fix us?
I appreciate the importance of communicating important information to all people and connecting with them where they live. A great many people do harbor some notion of a cloud being to whom they can surrender all worries, perhaps even all responsibilities, but we can no longer allow this circumstance to go unaddressed. Addressing our religious mania is a critical aspect of our present crises and a key component to the social inertia involved in getting people into the streets where they should have been two decades ago. If we are going to be relying in any way on a higher power to dictate our thinking and behavior to us, we need to become absolutely clear what it is we are talking about and how such a relationship serves a practical purpose.
Religion and spirituality are touchy subjects with people, and for good reason. Communities of shared values and rituals are how humans bridge the gap between throwing a bunch of ambiguous-sounding air at one another, and actually communicating shared meaning. Without the transfer of meaning from one person to another, human beings cannot relate to each other effectively, nor can we be expected to trust that the words leaving one person’s mouth can be taken at face, or generally accepted, value. I am reminded of the old 1950’s sci-fi B-movies that addressed this issue by positing that all aliens were assumed to be hostile. This assumption spoke more about the dominant social paradigm in place with respect to differences of opinion and values in 1950’s America than it did about an interaction with a genuinely extraterrestrial culture.
The dominant social paradigm in place in 2009 has swung even more radically towards complete mutual distrust and miscommunication than during the 1950’s. In the 1950’s, we witnessed the spectacle of a single US Senator, Joseph McCarthy, electrifying and galvanizing an entire country, filibustering it and holding it hostage, as the interpretative frame switched from concerns over Nazis and fascists in our midst, to complete paranoia over a growing monolithic communist threat. Today, in 2009, we are witness to all three branches of our once great nation being taken hostage by a monolithic threat from radical Muslim extremists who are characterized as magically able to use box cutters and prayers to bring down the security corridor of the entire northeastern United States. Not only must our limited human nervous systems accept this pabulum as fact, we also are expected to surrender, without question or critical investigation, to the notion that two modern 110-story buildings were able to fail and collapse into nearly their own footprints in less than 15 seconds without the use of prepositioned explosives. The lunacy that passes for acceptable fact in our mainstream media is mind numbing, crazy making and panic inducing. Not only can citizens no longer trust their elected officials and their government, they can no longer trust each other.
To suggest that all of this chaos and confusion occurred by accident strains credulity to the breaking point. The facts are that the United States is the only nation on the face of planet Earth that has ever exploded a nuclear device over a civilian population, the only nation to have both opposed and yet financed the Nazi war machine during WWII, the only nation responsible for the projection of the powerful financial tentacles of the Federal Reserve banking system into all but two autonomous States and the only nation left on the planet that relies on the threat of assassination to control the behavior of its key elected officials. To suggest that such a nation-state, through pure happenstance, fell into a condition of interpersonal panic and distrust without the approval and sanction of an overbearing, ruling cartel outside of public accountability is to believe in the reality of the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the possibility of the physical resurrection of dead human tissue.
In fact, it is has been precisely the work of organized religion to ensure that enough members of a nation’s citizenry believe in “magic” to allow for the control of key minorities of its population through intimidation and brute force. Intellectuals, the scientifically-minded, atheists, agnostics and geniuses are all held in check, politically and rhetorically, through the use of the belief in magic that organized religion provides, as well as the intimidation and brute force that the State provides through employing “true” religious believers within its law enforcement ranks.
So who is this “god” that organized religion claims to provide ordinary citizens access to, and is this god the same god Catherine Austin Fitts claims can’t fix what we choose to deny exists?
We can stop with the endless muttering and chanting about a God who is going to save us from ourselves right…about…now. To suggest that any God, or truth, of the ultimate variety cares whether we live or die is ridiculous. Truly, we are better off dead as far as ultimate reality is concerned since the existence of imperfection anywhere is a threat to the existence of a perfect God everywhere and at any time. Stop with the useless blathering on of “it’s a mystery” and “we can’t know what God is thinking,” and grow up. Are you hearing yourselves? Do you actually believe a God of ultimate reality would make Itself impossibly difficult to establish contact with? Only rocket scientists and priests could begin to grasp the immense holiness of the one true God? Have you completely lost your minds? Creation always knows Itself and could never be alien to Itself: no one puts an apple pie in the oven and expects a chicken to pop out in an hour … unless … they … are … completely … bonkers.
It is incredibly simple to know God. So simple, in fact, that we need not be concerned about it. If such a relationship with God was to exist, and I believe that it does, we couldn’t possibly put the nature of our relationship into words and successfully communicate it verbally because it is, by definition, non-conceptualizable. That means that if we could have created a method for communicating the knowledge of the existence of God, we would have done so by, say, twenty years ago. We’ve been at it for some time now, don’t you think? God is beyond words, in other words. No point in discussing it any further, in still more words. So shut up about it, already. Focus. At the bunny. This one is for keeps.
People of great wealth and power have systematically and cynically lied to us, as a civilization, for well over 2,000 years. Think that I am lying? Explain to me how an all too common story of the execution of a champion of the poor by champions of the rich and powerful was summarily distorted to become a tale of those dirty, nasty Jews? Who do you think could afford the printing presses and scribes necessary to spin these tales of so-called ultimate truth – do you think that in between dodging plagues, famines and bouts with undrinkable water, the poor were able to scrape together enough money to buy a publishing concern? Where in their King’s Keep would they have placed such a device?
The problem was not that the Jews killed Jesus, the problem was, is and always will be, that the rich kill the poor; the have’s murder the children of the have not’s; the powerful exploit the powerless. Insert the label for the ethnic identity of any group that challenges the authority of any other group and you have your answer. The “Jews” could have been the Egyptians. Or the Syrians. Or the Persians. All that was required to fill in that particular role was an ethnicity that was actually taking steps to improve its lot, not unlike what Black Americans are doing in the United States today. Notice how “friendly” and “receptive” white Americans have been to the rising star of Black America – now multiply this most recent slice of humanity times 2,000 years and you have your next designated scapegoat for the downfall of yet another empire. And add the queers at the end to keep the ancient storyline consistent.
I am so over laying the responsibility and accountability for the despotism and reptilian monophonic thought of human beings at the feet of the baby Jesus; either as an expression of “hopium” or as a request for clemency. Our biggest problem today is not justice – for it has become “just-us” in the blink of an eye – our problem, your’s and mine, is a problem of mercy.
How much longer are we going to pretend that the lives that these scoundrels are leaving us with will truly be worth living this time next year? Do you really want to live to see your grandchildren expire from hunger, disease and grinding poverty? Do ya’ really? What about your children? Do you like the idea of feeling them die in your arms while you’re standing in a bread line, dying of thirst? Do you like this worldview? I hope you do because it is coming to a city or town quite near to you every day you sit on your fat, corpulent ass and let the powers that be take from you what was once your birthrite.
Enough with the hopium! Enough with the God talk! The most powerful prayers available to us are our actions. Use them wisely. Organize yourselves, now, or be herded into cattle cars, subgroup by subgroup. Do not wait for a god on a white horse to come save your sorry behind; this is your clarion call.

The Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 11: What Narcissism Means to Me

Jul27

 

Waddling Through Hell

Waddling Through Hell

Why would anyone want to live in this heat?  Why do I?  No wonder everyone in the State of Texas wears their hair as short as possible.

I have become convinced, based on the discrepancy between my car’s thermometer and the public ones installed by the Chamber of Commerce on every major thoroughfare in San Antonio, that the public thermometers are often five degrees cooler than reality.  I think that’s so no one who lives, and tries to work, here realizes where they actually are.

People in Hell don’t want ice water; actually, they prefer iced tea.  With extra sugar.

Comedian Mark Schiff used to live here.  His wife’s family is from here.  He came from Los Angeles to try to raise his family in and around the Jewish community that exists in and among the Baptists who pound their lecterns and foreswear the sins that, by the evening, they will have committed at least once.  Several times if they’re younger.   Mark lasted two years in heat nothing like this year’s heat.  He told me that it was the size of San Antonio’s Jewish community that sent him and his family back to Los Angeles.  I think the truth was that the Baptists had infiltrated the two or three synagogues we have here in town to make certain that there were none of those stealthy Muslims trying to hide their powerfully pious behavior from public view.   But a Baptist is a Baptist: they refuse to make love while standing up – it looks too much like they’re dancing.  So if you want to find out if the newcomer to your San Antonio church is actually a stealth Baptist, sponsor a few dances and see if they show up.  Then sponsor a tent revival replete with snake handlers and chanters who speak in tongues…maybe a couple used car salesmen.  Identities will be confirmed.

Only a successful comic could afford to move back to California after living in San Antonio for two years.  Within two years of my move here I’d gained forty of my now seventy pounds of purely Texas heft, and was no longer the 11 second 100-yarder that I once was growing up in the cold of the central California coast.  I’ve since become a very committed waddler, however.

I waddled past something the other day I’d never seen before: a mother hawk teaching her chick to fly.  I was stunned.  This was the middle of civilization, for pete’s sake.  I grew up very close to the “sticks” as a kid and they were filled with red-tail and sparrow hawks – I never saw anything like what was right there in the middle of a heavily populated, well-traveled metropolitan community.  What would a mother hawk be doing training a chick to fly on someone’s front lawn for?

For me, obviously. 

Not that I’m narcissistic, or anything pathological, I just don’t believe in coincidences any longer.  The stuff I see is the stuff I am supposed to see when I am supposed to see it.  And since none of this experience fits neatly within the subtext of a monologue on Texas heat or Jewish comedians, I am offering it up to you, gentle reader, because maybe you can figure this out.  Marty Stoufer I am not.  Has this clan of hawks gone deaf?  Have they not heard that the grackles have taken over most of San Antonio?  How in the hell was I even lucky enough to have caught this slice of heaven amidst the raging fires of hell this past week?

I had no idea at the time, so I did my part and shooed off a couple house cats that had taken notice of the mother and her chick.  And then I watched and watched as the mother pounced on her baby, prompting it to open its wings or otherwise try to defend itself.  The chick was clearly confused as the provider of its nourishment and care was now engaged in the very serious business of killing it with her beak and talons.  How cruel is nature, I mused to myself.

In the past I’d seen a starling killing one of its chicks, holding it in place while repeatedly thrusting its beak into the neck of the chick.  Perhaps I had misinterpreted that ritual as I was misunderstanding this one.  As an observer of my own personal “flock” of birds here in my home, I’ve noticed that some of these pseudo-dinosaurs can inflict ruthless quality control practices on each other.  I’m clearly a mammalian-kinda-fella because I want nothing of this reptilian nonsense in my reality.  And yet, there it was and here it is/was, once again.

The odd leaping and dancing over and around this confused, befuddled chick went on and on as minutes took on the experience of hours.  The mother hawk had allowed me in close enough to observe this ritual and I certainly wasn’t going to let it go to waste.  I was, however, losing patience, as I knew that if I ran up on the chick, grabbed it, and threw it up into the air, it would have to fly.  There could be no doubt that something with wings, when faced with an opportunity to glide or crash, would choose gliding most of the time.  But then I thought, no.  This is not something that humans should become a part of.  Even if I would rather not be directly associated with most of the humans I come across in the heat of this hellish place, such distinctions matter little to a predator like the hawk.  If hawks ever got in the business of becoming domesticated, they would cease being hawks.  They would become pets and a pet with a powerful beak and talons that could squeeze the life out of most rodentia wouldn’t be the lover of gerbils and hamsters that I feel much more akin to. 

As the Sun set and dusk was fast approaching, the mother finally surrendered to the special needs of her less than studious progeny, picked him up in her talons, and flew off up the hill, presumably to her nest.  I’m sure junior didn’t appreciate having his wings and body clenched by dear ol’ Mom, but such is the life of a reptile whose job it will be to kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.  It is an angry, brutal existence, but my wishing that it were not so cannot impact a constellation as vast as the one we have built on this planet over hundreds of millions of years.

Of course the fact that mother hawk could just as easily released junior in mid-flight as I could have picked him up and tossed him did not occur to me until just this moment, until just this reflection.  Nor did it occur to me to consider the possibility that the chick was possibly gendered female, instead of male, or that the hawk could have been the father and not the mother: the characterizations of this moment in time were all mine and not necessarily real.  My issues and experiences with my own mother were getting projected even on this seemingly unrelated moment in time between a hawk and its chick.

We see who and what we are projected onto the world around us in various ways no matter how hard we try to depersonalize or otherwise objectify our human experience.  What we believe we see in the world around us in the present moment tells others volumes about whom we are and the content of our pasts.

So why, during the last decade or so, all the clamor and flap about the End of the World and the return of a mighty messiah or sage to judge us all, separating wheat from chaff?  What of the presaging of His coming by his opposite, the Antichrist?  Why do so many see that this reality is so, and why do so many clamor, selfishly, to turn what little remains and could be heaven into the fires of hottest Hades?  What are they seeing within themselves that reflects what they believe is taking place without?

Without realizing it, Mr. Schiff provided me with the tie-in for this week’s coiff at the ‘diaries, even after I’d already gotten started on this journal entry and before I went to check out what he’s been up to viz. his Facebook account.  Mark said, on Friday at 4pm,

“One more day without is one more day within.”

When nothing effectively awakened transpires within a person, they have no choice but to see everything as happening outside and “to” them.  Taken to some of the extremes we observe in the fires of hottest Texas, the crazy-making experience of seeing everything within projected out onto the world around us drives many of us to excess: sex, drugs, exercise, perfectionism, food, control – obsessions and compulsions of all kinds.  Perhaps even Country music (opening up a vein at the thought).  One more day without our obsessions and compulsions is one more day we get to experience as being within ourselves, as being engaged in the pursuit of wholeness, or holiness – if you must – and of taking our place in the field of life, rather than as passive spectators watching from the grandstands or the cheap seats.

What an order.

We get to be responsible adults, in other words, and we get to stop behaving like little children whose disembodied, perhaps long-dead, parents set us up for all this shame, misery and confusion. 

We can project our past onto our present – ad nauseum – until the world we think we are seeing confirms every resentment we covet within ourselves.  The evidence that this has taken place, rather than that we have been maliciously victimized and wrongly maligned, will be in the number of friendships we manage to acquire and maintain, our willingness to give back to our communities and in our openness to the type of change that comes through personal growth.  I have never in my lifetime met anyone wrongly victimized who did not manage to continue to procure and maintain friendships, who did not manage to continue to give their time and effort to the benefit of others, nor did such individuals fail to grow their lives to become larger than their perceived difficulties.  This process of the undoing of victimization may take decades, but it is the presence of this process in the lives of those who have been victimized that separates the adults from the children.

What the religiously zealous must be seeing in their ever-darkening worldview is a failure of their beliefs on a grand a scale.  It could not be that any of these individuals were mistaken in their beliefs about the world, or were victimized by the drive of others to exploit them for their own ends.  What the religiously zealous have been condemned by their own guilt to see is nothing less than the end of their world and, by extension, our’s as well.

We feel such extreme, if sublimated, guilt over our collective inability to get our “shit” together that we lapse into our childhood, if childish, bag of tricks that will allow us to project both accountability and responsibility for our individual and collective failures onto someone or something else.  We take a problem, perhaps initially solvable, and render it solutionless because our guilt demands that we see the solution and the problem as totally unrelated, completely separate, entities. 

 “We declare ourselves innocent of the charges made by the obvious evidence of the problem, your honor.”

And so we agree to conclude, “the butler did it.”  Perhaps the butler is a closeted gay, despised by gay and straight alike, so he’ll do in a pinch.

It does not matter if the butler did it, nor if Colonel Mustard did it with a lead pipe in the foyer, the game is “Clue” and we claim we don’t have one.  We do seem to know, however, a remarkable amount about a game we claim to have never owned.                       

Flagrant dishonesty with ourselves and others – hell, it has even become a Sunday morning cottage industry – is certainly a clue that we are refusing to confront the problem of our inadequate beliefs and, instead, are choosing our stubborn insistence on complete innocence well past our due date with our maker.  However, if you are breathing, eating and digesting on the planet in this moment, you are in immutable exchange with both the problems of this world and with their potential solutions.  We share atoms and ideas with those we perceive as either problem or solution, correctly identified or otherwise.  We deny reality at our own peril.  Were we to commit an outright lie about the nature of what we perceive and its relationship to our established ability to project, we cross a line from simple denier to source of the problem.  We might hold our breath until we are blue in the face, yet we are still here and are still, therefore, part of both problem and solution.  To believe otherwise is flagrantly dishonest, even if the prevalence of such a belief seems ubiquitous.

The way out of this monumental mess, of course, is to begin to the tell the truth to each other and to stop lying to ourselves and to others about what it is we believe we are seeing.  Accusing Texans of being demons sent from Hell, while it has become a hobby of mine here at the ‘diaries, is a tad premature since not everyone living in Texas was born and raised here,

and not every good-hearted Texan has been able to be heard and understood by those Texans who simply live and breathe the exploitation of labor regardless of its point of origin.  

The simple truth is that Texas was long ago taken over by a minority of old-school Germans who believed Hitler got a bum wrap, that Jews really were the killers of Jesus of Nazareth and that children were chattel to be mercilessly exploited by their parents.  And now this flawed and diseased perspective has infected all three branches of our government and destroyed what was left of the United States after this same cabal of Germans dispatched a duly elected President in November 1963.

The truth is it does not matter what corner of hell one lives in; sometimes the temperature makes your location obvious and easy to determine.  Other locations require some additional effort before the obviousness of one’s predicament generates heat all on its own. 

The choice to remain in hell for a chance to reign may be enticing for some.  But I have found that trying to be of service in heaven has been a far more rewarding use of my time.  And it’s tended to save me some grief and some money sitting in the barber’s chair, too.

Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 6: Cat Stevens, Meet the Muslim State

Jun26
Two More, Please!!

Two More, Please!!

A quality of light passes through the tall eucalyptus of my childhood, a broken light made whole to my memory by a familiar aroma of camphor diffused and transformed to a spicy scent with which I could eat the morning sky.  Childhood could have been a fog of wounding sadness, but the boundless energy of youth erased misery after misery to give life a second chance each and every day.  As disappointments grew intense and sunk in ever deeper towards a singularity someone had placed near my heart, the Sun still always rose the next day with a promise of spice and light to hold a thirst for meaning in abeyance for another time, another day and another place.

As my body ceased its relentless growth and adulthood loomed, the time came to be known as now, the day of import, today, and the place of moment chosen far and away from the healing eucalyptus and camphor that once gave an overtaxed nervous system pause for reasons not held in conscious keep.

Many haircuts spread unevenly and made of varying length taught me the power of an electric buzz to deafen the ears to both silence and sound.  I would take my seat disheveled, presumed dissembling and unclean, only to arise a score of minutes later renewed to a world outside the buzz that continued its echo beneath the skin of my childhood.

I promised last week to stop looking for import where none was possible; to cease seeking for inspiration among things intentionally left common and profane.  I would, instead, seek for my oracle in the abject innocence, or goofiness, of a seven-year old grandchild named, “Caleb.”

I think I’ve again made a terrible mistake.

“K-L-E-B…wind-up radioooooooooooo….all talk, all-the-time.”  It is non-stop with this kid.  The channels in his head switch so fast he ends up, most often, stuck between channels of thought and making no sense whatsoever.  Stephanie Miller he is not.  Not yet, anyway.  But he is my chosen oracle for the week.  He will be my source for the power to see all things obvious.  My a-feared headline reads, “Captain Obvious accidentally eats kryptonite in the form of a kid with a developing mood and/or neurological disorder and is left, once again, trying to establish a meaning for it all.”

I could go to DIGG and seek for inspiration at the human gum-wall of complete nonsense.  About the only thing this week that makes any sense to me are the two submissions about the online video of the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan which has become the rallying cry for a huge number of Iranians dissatisfied with their stolen election results.  Mahmoud “Imadinnajacket,” a man who, like George W. Bush, bankrupted and destroyed his country’s infrastructure in record time, has been roundly criticized for years by the Iranian people.  Those people, particularly women, showed up in record numbers to try to throw the bum out, but he’s had other plans.  So have the theocrats who actually run the country that is Iran – those who fancy themselves philosopher-kings even while they preside over the murder of teens for the crime of being raped by a 51-year old male. 

To date no one really knows what’s actually going on inside of Iran, but the shocking and traumatic video of Neda’s shooting and subsequent death have caused a full spectrum of responses to rise up around the globe, from the utterly dysfunctional to the appropriately horrified.  Something odious is brewing within Iran’s borders, something with the face of an angel but the vacuous core of the amoral.  The obvious conclusion: we no longer trust what comes in through our eyes…the more intense or sublime the dissonance between life, death and reproduction, the more jaded we seem to be to the simple beauty of ordinary things.  The truth we all run from stares us plainly in our face and we doubt its veracity not because it isn’t true, but because our habit of denial has become so incredibly fierce it can impose itself on our conscious minds even seemingly at random.

The obvious fact of the matter is that my observation of your life makes your life a part of mine: your pain, your joy, your life, your death – become feelings that dwell within me for a time.  The more powerful those emotions and their dissonance with mine become, the faster my drawbridge between truth and my conscious acceptance of truth goes up.  I stay within my battlements and boundaries and believe that I am safe from you and the truth of our obvious unity, until something assaults from both within and without to set those battlements ablaze.  My anger rises from frustration and guilt as I must, once again, erect those walls of neurological safety between us that time and truth can only wear away.  So acute can those feelings of guilt and frustration become that I feel compelled to project them onto you so as to hold you accountable and responsible for emotions that are plainly and entirely my own.  You forced me to feel what I didn’t want to feel or was not prepared to experience and I blame you for using the shock of my own ignorance to awaken me to the simple fact of our conjoint existence.  And so the obvious becomes camouflaged and buried beneath layer after layer of self-serving conclusion, dishonest inquiry and a projection of misplaced guilt.

I run from this truth every day, as do you.  And I resent you every time you attempt to bring the obvious to my attention.  I am not at peace being a part of your experience, and yet I crave the very thing I am at war with.  When I pull the lacings of my most profound skin to give you the access you crave, you run away in shock and horrible surprise as my beauty pulls at you with the gentle force of gravity, yet the static charge of my imperfections throws you back across the room.  We want to be true to only one force in a multiverse of several; we want truth and beauty even though our individual nervous systems can tolerate but little before a heat wave of confusion makes an entire horizon profane and a void of meaning that mere words cannot describe.

And so Neda’s very public death by murder in Iran becomes a hoax for which I require no real evidence to believe simply because I so thoroughly do not want to feel the burn of a bullet to my chest that pierces my heart and shatters my spinal cord such that, even in my final moments, I cannot reach out and touch those most dear to me before I drown helplessly in my own blood.  And I resent you for making me feel this and the horror of a father whose beautiful baby girl has just evaporated into a lifeless heap before his eyes shocking him into the madness of a nervous system driven into overload. 

These are but few of the emotions I must carry in my conscious mind while my unconscious mind knows that a little girl or little boy who would be so completely incapable of processing the emotion of stepping across streams of blood in the street, must in fact do so by the dozen in the searing heat that is Iran in the Summer of 2009.  And so crippled by this experience would such children be that it will be decades of self-inflicted traumatic terror before they would even draw close to a recollection of why red blood on the ground, or the odor of rust in the air, causes them to feel nauseous or fly into a terrifying rage that they will blame on those around them as if they had just murdered someone before their eyes…because they have.  There were seemingly different individuals involved in an apparently different time and place, but the feelings are just as if their heart had never left the place of its original violation, the habit of ripping up the drawbridge from its natural place of rest becoming owned as their habit, rather than the reflected compulsion of the man whose self-righteous bullet targeted a woman unchaste enough to show her face in a public place.

So while the United States may have had no actual accountable involvement in Neda’s murder for which they could be brought to trial and jailed, it was their man in Tehran, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had succeeded in driving an otherwise habitual pattern of revolution into the relative safety of Islamic mosques where it became rancid and infectious.  When the cystic infection of politicized religious self-righteousness finally burst in 1979, religion powered the coup that swept the Shah from his throne and generated a tidal wave of Islamic rage throughout the Middle East.  It is from among these fundamentalist zealots that Neda’s deadly bullet apparently hailed.  So, in what some on this planet would say is an indirect sense – but everything intelligent in the cosmos looking down on us from afar would agree is anything but indirect – the US played a big role in Neda’s murder.  And we all live with this sad fact because our fierce friend – denial – helps us to forget the unforgettable even when remembering fully might serve us all best.

Before this week became too much for me, I took Caleb to the park to feed the ducks.  We got to hold a baby gosling and even managed to do so without getting pecked to death by a mother goose.  She had her job to do and we had our’s: fighting crimes against the Obvious One.  Even modern superheroes need to take time out to mingle with the reasons anyone ever does anything at all on this planet.

A familiar buzz awakens me…this time it is my alarm clock…and it reminds me that what was yesterday is forever gone, what is tomorrow does not promise my further existence and what exists right here and right now is my eternal choice between sharing heaven or competing for leadership in hell.

If you cannot imagine my choice, imagine the going rate for haircuts in hell.

The Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 5: Captain Obvious, The World’s Only Necessary Superhero

Jun19

 

Capn Obvious nCaleb

Cap'n Obvious n'Caleb

I thought that when I started this whole, “examine Digg for subconscious insight into America’s nervous breakdown,” that there might actually be some valuable information in the weekly popular choices of web content that are made.  While I see some evidence in support of my original thesis, I want to believe that there is some “non-random” manipulation in the Digg rankings because the only “insight” that pervades these weekly coiffs has been the compulsive drive to escape from the meaning of it all.  In decades of schooling, what the “intellectuals” had always insisted on telling me, repeatedly, was something akin to Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning.  And why would they not promote this particular perspective?  It so clearly clashes with the evidence, requiring an even deeper rationalization of the facts and ever more soaring rhetoric to justify the expense of their field of study.  In short, a total scam – a confidence game.  Amway with a track team, as Richard Jeni once opined.  In five weeks of looking I have seen no evidence of a uniform thirst for meaning in the web’s popular culture.  What I have seen, and suspect will see, have been the machinations of a popular culture driven to distraction and committed to distraction’s search.  To suggest otherwise would be disingenuous on my part and yet another veiled attempt by an alleged intellectual to establish hegemony for wit — hegemony for the sheer numbers having long since been decided.

Of course I do not include us in my gross generalization, gentle reader; that you have endured these weekly trips to Life’s barbershop for a trim suggests an intelligence well above average, and a fastidious attention to detail.  And yet we must still find a way to reconcile our place in a world where we are outnumbered and overwhelmed on almost every front by the Kafkaesque, if not the moronic.

I call your kind attention to last week’s number one Digg submission, five days old, informing the world that a cartoon called, “Futurama,” is coming back to television network “Comedy Central,” per producer Twentieth Century Fox.  At some point.  We know not when.  But the question from Captain Obvious is, “who gives a shit?”

Futurama fans, of course, who represent a tiny little niche struggling for hegemony and notoriety in a rolling sea of Fox Studios’ effluent.  Fox and its “Videodrome” infected staffers produce mental junk food best complimented with purple Indica and bowl after bowl of Fruit Loops, preferably soaked in Skim Milk.  I’ve watched in horror over the years as Fox has turned our brains – individually and collectively – into a mush that would make Hannibal Lecter drool.  If it’s not the blathering bad mouth Bill O’Reilly hocking his anti-persona persona and polluting the public’s airwaves, we have the addictive and unbelievably cunning machinations of Vic Mackey on, “The Shield.”   Or, we can watch Dennis Leary as a firefighter, rather than just a comedian, traumatized by the 9/11 WTC attacks in, “Rescue Me.”  If Futurama is anywhere as well constructed and focus-group-tested as, “Rescue Me,” or, “The Shield,” viewers can just relax into the future foretold by the movie, “Wall-E.”  Your consumption is all that will be required.

Frankly, I’ve mainlined enough “Rescue Me” and “The Shield” episodes to know that I can’t afford another trip to rehab and detox.  I’ll take the word of Futurama fans from the TV Squad website, they’re hooked and it’s pretty hopeless.  Admitting you’re powerlessness, Dear John, is the essence of the first step in recovery.  That would be before, or long after, you have put away the Puerto Rican rum and all that it means to you.

“Pathetic,” were the first words out of my mouth when I clicked on this week’s number two contribution from website Flickr.com.  Apparently, Facebook user “Jared,” found out that his mother, Facebook user, “Janice,” was getting divorced from Jared’s father via said mother’s Facebook status update.  I know that people get busy – forget to write, forget to call – but the deterioration of modern relationships could never be made more clear than in this uncommented vignette between a mother and her son viz. Web 2.0’s Facebook.

“Tragic” would be another word that comes to mind. 

I could analyze this one to death – but, no.  Let this entry soak in past the profound skin that heralds the separation between each of us.  Sometimes silence does a better job of educating and informing than all the words ever written on a subject in all the libraries of the world.

Now that I have doused the buzzed heads of a few cocktail satellites in a bucketful of ice water, we can now turn our attention to this week’s third cut to the back of the nation’s lathered neck, its age of five days meaning the cold steel blade will leave the flesh raw and tender.  A good barber would never do such a thing, unless he cared more for freeing his chair of an unwelcome client than he did for protocol or duty.

Perhaps if this week’s number three had fallen elsewhere in the rankings I could see keeping it as wonderfully mundane as the commenters from Flickr wanted to see it.  But sometimes the tension in the barbershop comes not from any one patron, save the toxic chemistry of their combination.

So why Darth Vader?  Why light sabers?  What motivated an obvious wife captivated by the effect “Dad” had on her son’s birthday party to snap this picture and then seek to promote it?  Why is it that women always get a free pass on Oprah when it comes time to fix blame on one gender over another in the “who’s the most violent, disruptive gender,” sweepstakes?  It’s simply not fair – not in light of this week’s number two entry.

Scraping the skin with a not-too-sharp razor can leave a nasty wound, a wound hard to clean even after the patron’s blood clots and all those waiting in line for their turn have finished studying a barber’s every move with an anxious gravity.  Mistakes can happen even in the best of barbershops; but when it happens to a specific patron that everyone gathered knows does not belong, one has to wonder why they still sit quietly reading their portion of the daily paper as the bloodletting continues unabated.  If everyone gathered for the day continues in their stoic reticence, the patron may well be filleted alive before he has a chance to pay for the cut he had intended to receive.

And so it is with this week’s number four.

On the very day this number four submission made it to the hallowed cyber halls of Digg, Officer Stephen T. “Big John” Johns was gunned down by James von Brunn – an 88-year-old white supremacist with an appetite for child pornography – at the Washington, D.C. Holocaust Museum.  Johns was an employee of Wackenhut and a man whose union had tried to negotiate for the provision of bulletproof vests for all of its officers at the museum to no avail in the prior contract period.  Johns was hit in the upper left torso by a .22 caliber Long Rifle slug.  That slug likely went right through Johns and could have easily killed others at the museum that day.  Thanks for the clip, Wackenhut.

The part that bothers me most about this “action” shot of our President, Barak Obama, is that while millions have been laid off or otherwise unemployed during the first 100 days of this President’s tenure, he has found it necessary to bail out his Wall Street bankster friends for an amount of money so obscene that he could have just as easily given every middle-class taxpayer in the United States one million dollars in cash.  Each.  Think about what such largesse might have done for our economy versus what has transpired: it is as if we had poured tens of trillions of dollars into a very cold, very dark place never to be seen again.  And yet this sun-tanned version of “Slick Willy” finds the time to engage a group of very casually dressed staff in a very casual, almost subordinate, manner the very day an armed lunatic ran amok inside this President’s keep.

To be fair, Michael Moore’s capture and rebroadcast of our former “El Presidente” giving a disturbingly flip answer to a reporter’s sincere question right before he ended the interview with, “now, watch this drive,” was a similar affront to sensibility.  That Barbara Bushes’ beloved son swatted his golf ball down the fairway and away from all those gnat-like questioners behind the security perimeter was just a side benefit.  I suppose the key difference between these two Presidents might be that one of them is still amused by the candor of his remarks, while the other is now becoming keenly aware that he is being set-up to be taken down – politically, of course — south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Someone needs to remind our current President about the importance of being a good patron in a well-chosen barbershop.  The razors can be sharp wherever one chooses to go.  Care and prudence in choosing one’s surroundings guarantees a good cut made by a steady hand.

I’ve been thinking about this past week’s number five submission, but I can’t seem to work it into the mix.  In the first place, the submitter of the entry has submitted top 5 entries to Digg on multiple occasions.  In the second, we began our fixation with the American way of hair-care using only the top four Digg entries.  So symmetry might well demand that we end this phase of our journey using only this week’s top four.  And so it shall be.

 But where might we go from here?  What conclusions might be drawn useful to a further search? 

As Anthony Giddens might suggest, per Structuration Theory, we need to look at the creases in society, at those places where tangible structures or tried-and-true rules collide with differing beliefs and values producing contradiction, dissonance and confusion.  Once there, we might look at the forces pulling individuals in one direction versus the forces pulling individuals in a different direction.  In any case, it will be in these creases, Giddens suggests, that we will see the future of our world unfolding before our very eyes.

If these five weeks together have taught us nothing, they have taught me that overlooking the obvious results in missed opportunity and misinterpretation.  If the past few days of having a seven year-old grandchild scampering about teaches this adult anything, it teaches me the absolute authority of complete innocence in the discovery of things obvious and taken for granted.  What seems to me hackneyed and worn, jumps out as shiny and bright to the eyes of a child.  So either I am old and wise or this kid is living in a perpetual mushroom fry.  Or both.  In any event, in the next several weeks I will adopt the assistance of an oracle, a Captain Obvious, if you will, who has been speaking to me through this grandchild and directing me to rediscover and reinterpret my old beliefs and values.