On Groundhog Day, on Groundhog Day
The occasion of Groundhog Day seemed a fortuitous moment to finally sit down and do a little write up of an all-time favorite film, Groundhog Day. Like the best Big Lesson films, its presentation is unassuming. So unassuming, in fact, that it took cultural critics and religious zealots almost a decade to begin trumpeting its genius in numbers loud enough to be audible. Likewise, it took me a good dozen viewings over almost 20 years to arrive at the revelation that there is a veritable wealth of postmodern thought packed into this film.
Groundhog Day is invariably relegated to the romantic comedies genre in video stores. Its movie poster features the brow-beaten visage of Bill Murray peering, bewildered, from behind the smooth glass face of an alarm clock. And it is rescreened ceaselessly on cable movie channels, often late at night.
It was precisely during one of these nocturnal screenings a few months back that the idea for this essay came to me. There in the darkened living room of my sister’s house, bathed in the ethereal, flickering glow of the television screen, my creative license bolstered outrageously by the ingestion of a few chemical products, I saw the light. This movie was pure genius! And postmodern, through and through.
My enthusiasm was dampened somewhat when I set out to do some research and discovered that a small army of bona-fide philosophers and religious types had already churned out an abundance of mealy-mouthed tomes on this very subject. And, to my surprise, many argued that the film summarily rejected the central premises of postmodernism. It was an allegory, they said. A religious trope, or perhaps a modernization of Nietsche’s doctrine of eternal returns. But postmodern? Hardly.
I’d like to disagree. But, first, let’s work backward a minute.
Groundhog Day, for the three of you who haven’t seen it, tells the tale of Phil Conner, a rumpled, road-weary meteorologist who is brought, against his will, to Punxsutawney, PA, to film a cutesy news segment. He grumbles and snarls his way through the trip, sneering at the exuberant locals and throwing a man-sized hissy fit when a blizzard traps him in Punxsutawney overnight. Then, time hiccups, and Phil awakens the next morning to find that he is trapped in the past—doomed inexplicably to relive the exact same day over and over.
Predictably, antics ensue. Phil becomes drunk with his own power and decides to use his unique knowledge of the day’s events to play out a host of dark fantasies: he hops into bed with a bevy of local gals, he steals, he lies, he uses his knowledge of the townsfolk to trick them into seeing him as a deity. When this gets dull, he grows terrified by the concept of his own immortality and attempts a multitude of suicides: he electrocutes himself, he drives off a cliff, he sets himself on fire. When these attempts fail, he resigns himself to performing good deeds and developing his latent intellectual abilities. Unknowable eternities pass in clipped montage. Eventually, Phil’s fancy alights on Rita, his producer, and the only being who seems immune to his manipulations. And, well, you can guess the ending: Phil decides to use his powers for good, not evil, he gets the girl, and the spell breaks. He is free.
What does all this have to do with an obscure critical theory, right? Well. Writ broadly, postmodernism can be understood as a genre of literature, art, architecture and general thought that rejects a fundamental premise of modernism—that the world can be explained by all-encompassing truths.
Postmodernism asserts that we are incapable of understanding the nature of reality. On its own, this is a depressing notion. But, and here’s the cool part, because reality cannot truly be understood, we as individuals are freed up to draw from a variety of narratives (Christianity, Buddhism, Democracy, Science, Hollywood, Greek Mythology, etc.) as we construct our own individual pictures of what reality is. And as more and more people construct these unique pictures of what constitutes the human experience, society is destined to fragment into a noisy sea of narratives.
Further, in a postmodern world:
• Objectivity is seen as impossible to achieve • The part is seen as more interesting and more important than the whole • Emotion trumps reason as a guiding social and personal force for decision-making • Linearity in all forms is questioned or outright rejected • There exist no originals; only copies
Postmodern societies are earmarked by several aesthetics: pastiche, collage, juxtaposition, simulations, reflections and copies, and nonsense in any form. Las Vegas, the band Radiohead, and wax museums are a few commonly referenced expressions of postmodern thought.
If you ask me, postmodernism gets an unfair rap. It is often dismissed as a mere parlour riddle, some piece of philosophical fluff scratched out for the singular pleasure of cabbage-faced academicians and pompous cultural critics, or worse.
If postmodernism stopped with the assertion that our lives are colored by meaninglessness, if it wiped its hands and left it at that, then yes, we could interpret its assertions as essentially nihilistic or existentialist. And we could, by extension, reasonably assume that Groundhog Day is arguing noisily against the primacy of the postmodern framework of understanding, and is promoting in its stead any one of a variety of philosophies that see all things as infused with deep and tangible meaning. Because, really, take your pick: the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, the Christian premises of purgatory and redemption, the Jewish belief in salvation through good deeds. That’s the beauty of this film: they’re all in there.
But there is a bigger lesson at play, here. One that spans the longer story of our civilization’s emotional and mental development.
“What if tomorrow never comes,” Phil moans at one point in the film. “It didn’t come today!”
Keep this line in mind as you consider this: Phil’s understanding of himself, and of his nonsensical plight, evolves as the film progresses. He starts out as an insufferable prick who hates his life. When he falls down the rabbit hole, he is shepherded through a series of transformations. First, he is giddy with his newfound power. Then, he grows desperate to rid himself of it. And, eventually, he merely resigns himself to it.
Keep in mind, also, that postmodernism has never asserted that life is meaningless, and anyone who tells you it does has failed to understand it properly. Quite the opposite is true.
Postmodernism asserts that humans have failed to grasp life’s true meaning, yes. And postmodernism also asserts that said true meaning is, at our current point of individual and collective development, incomprehensible. There is simply too much data in our store of collective knowledge to sort out. There are too many possible interpretations, and too many possible interpretations of those interpretations. In short, as we make life decisions, we are picking our way through a mess of code, a jumbled welter of sensory data that we lack the time or the art to detangle. We are all of us grouping in the dark, every day of our lives.
But. Postmodernism rejects the notion that it or any framework of understanding can ever be the endgame of cultural, social and moral progress. Instead, it merely describes a stage of understanding humans find themselves passing through in this present moment, as they move beyond the modern.
I’d like to argue that this film uses the subtext of postmodernism to work out the potentialities tied up in the concept of infinite possibility: What would happen if we could do and have whatever we wanted, without consequence? And what if we were given an infinite amount of time with which to decide just what it was we really, really wanted? And, finally, what if we were permitted the luxury of changing our minds about what it was we really, really wanted, over and over?
In short: what would we choose for ourselves if we knew that all choices were reversible?
Groundhog Day essentially amends postmodernism by theorizing that, in the post-postmodern world, meaning will be restored. But it asks us to ponder what might happen when that curtain is yanked suddenly back? What will we find there?
A whole heap of trouble, if Phil Conner’s misadventure is any indication.
When we eventually come face to face with the troubling concepts of infinite power and possibility, when we finally navigate the leap beyond the postmodern, we may well be forced abide more power than we know how to handle. Like Phil, we’ll be forced to take account of all eventualities. And we’ll have to make a choice, or perhaps a thousand choices, over and over, until we’ve exhausted all those possibilities and settled on just one. And at that point, the postmodern experiment will be finished.
With knowledge comes power. And with power comes, well, a lot of power. Whether we asked for it or not.
Happy Groundhog Day.
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After the flood: social connectivity in the credulous age
Last September, I attended my 10-year high school reunion. I’d felt a powerful and unexpected surge of icy dread in the weeks leading up to that inveterate ritual of passage into mid-life. The whole thing seemed so painfully overblown, so likely to disappoint.
I was secretly desperate to skip it entirely, but a handful of best friends propped up my courage with a few strong drinks. Arm in arm, we strolled giddily into a flashy and very grown-up-looking event hall at the designated hour. We donned nametags boasting our senior pictures and we screwed our collective courage and we headed for the bar.
And you know what? It was actually fun. We all stood around a crudités table, drinking whiskey-cokes and giggling into our shirtsleeves as we compared the battle scars of our first decade of adulthood; dog tags from tours of duty in Iraq, ill-advised yin-yang tattoos, tarnished wedding bands. Out in a courtyard attached to the building, the guys shed their jackets and passed around cigarettes, while the girls took off their shoes and danced with each other.
Someone lit a joint. And as I gazed around me, I was suddenly struck by an overpowering sense of semantic disorientiation.
Was it the monumental ordinariness of the event? Sure, we were the lot of us merely only slightly fatter and (sometimes) wealthier versions of our eighteen-year-old selves. And, yeah, it felt like playing at grown-up, somehow. But that wasn’t the thing that so shook me.
It wasn’t the company, either; people were clever and engaging and boisteriously enthusiastic about re-encountering each other.
It was only that I found myself rendered speechless by the dawning of an odd and ignoble truth: I hadn’t spoken to the bulk of these people in 10 years, but I knew them intimately; their jobs, their political inclinations, their relationships statuses. We were Facebook buddies, after all.
Knowing that, and, further, knowing that they knew it, too, made it feel unbearably disingenuous to flash a toothy grin and toss out some overfed line:
“So. What have you been up to?” (Because I already know about your frat-tastic college boyfriend, your honeymoon in Vietnam and your quick-and-dirty divorce.)
“Oh! You have kids?” (Because I have already noted the color of their eyes and how they celebrated their first birthday, which seems completely normal when I’m sitting at home on the Internet, but somehow feels creepy to admit to your face.)
What could I possibly say?
* * * In the heady early days of Myspace and Facebook, everything was different. Nobody had 800 friends. Potential employers didn’t dress you up or down based on your virtual comportment. Instead, logging in was really just like being transported to a seedy, raucous bar containing 100 of your closest acquaintances. People cursed and spat, freely posting photo evidence of their indecorous weekend exploits. They bitched about their jobs with total impunity. And they needled each other endlessly without care for who might see. Because, way back in the dark ages of 2006, the answer was almost nobody. At least, nobody you cared about caring.
After that, the flood. Parents joined. Teachers joined. Your entire fourth-grade class joined. And they all found you and wanted to know how the heck you’d been.
During grad school, a favorite professor who’d recently set up a Facebook account described the experience this way: “It’s like going to heaven—everybody’s there!”
He’s right, you know. Suddenly, Everybody was there. And this posed some problematic and very interesting implications. It became impolite to tell anyone “No” when they frisbeed a Friend Request your way. Even if you never talked during whatever brief period your non-virtual lives intersected. Even if you found them sort of grating. That virtual bar suddenly began to feel a bit stuffy and overcrowded. The bouncer had been trampled into a heap at the front door. And things were about to get much, much louder.
* * * As a kid, or even as a departing high school senior, the concept of a direct line to every single person I’d ever met was inconceivable. Goodbye was goodbye. We donned our red gowns, hugged each other hard, and got on with the general business of living. We pursued relationships and college degrees, we had adventures or retired to the leafy suburbs, and we bookshelved that era of our lives. We banked on staying close to our best friends, sure, but we were happy to settle for infrequent and short-lived run-ins with everybody else. The world was as it should be.
Cut to the high school reunion. Ten long years later, all of us gritting teeth beneath a vapor of pot smoke and half-conceded commonality.
And (!) the lot of us practically neighbors. We’d shacked up in a noisy and querulous virtual neighborhood whose fences never seemed quite high enough to contain the secret messiness of our lives, a fact that both fascinated us and filled us with mutual terror.
Cause nowdays, gossip travels at the speed of sound. And the ends and beginnings of our relationships are things of public record.
Dana is engaged.
Erin is now single.
There were simply just… no words.
We are, in short, a generation incapable of surprise. But social decorum hasn’t caught up with the velocity at which we now access information about each other, and so it asks us to feign surprise never the less. We still feel somehow obliged to interact with each other in the old fangled ways, to perpetuate the ruse.
In the absence of precedent, I’ve had only my gut and my guilt to guide me. And so far, those two have proven rather questionable barometers when it comes to navigating the tricky, argumentative terrain of social-networking.
Exhibit A: My Friend Request folder is littered with a mess of potential “friends” that I don’t want, but feel, for various reasons, too guilty to turn down: acquaintances of my parents, elderly relatives, grade school classmates who’d slighted me some way or another. But saying “No” feels too direct, too harsh. So I just never look in the folder.
Exhibit B: I have an ex-boyfriend. His profile is private. His new girlfriend’s profile, however, is not. She appears to be unemployed, and she is what social-media researchers would call a “high-volume user.” And she is, to put it charitably, not exactly an intellectual. I know that cruising her wall in search of inanity and spelling mistakes is inappropriate, and pointless, and slightly pathetic. But I can’t resist! Somehow, I crave the affirmation.
Which begs the question of whether the aforementioned direct line will ever be used for good and not for evil. I know where I’m placing my bets.
I have a (real-life) friend who regularly creates and deletes social-networking profiles. The endeavors always start out well: she uploads a cute, quirky picture, she sends out requests, she updates her status. But always, within a matter of days, she finds herself stalking the pages of old rivals, of new love interests, of anyone, really, that she wouldn’t be granted intimate access to in the Real World. Things dovetail predictably from there. She feels crushed and furious when friend requests are denied. In fits of pique, she compulsively deletes people. And eventually, she trashes her profile altogether.
“I get too freaked out,” she told me after a recent deletion. “I just can’t handle it. I feel like these people aren’t really my friends, even the ones that really are my friends.”
And that word… Anymore, “friend” comes prepackaged with a sizeable cache of contradictory meanings. It’s even a verb, now. So what does it mean when Friendship is no longer a passive, gradual endeavor, a seed you water and watch grow? What does it mean when Friending becomes, instead, something you do to someone else. Like in the same way you would hit someone or hug someone or hang someone, you friend them. It’s active and direct, but the weird part is that it often signifies little more than passive curiosity.
Further, what does it mean when who you aren’t friends with begins to explain more about you than who you are friends with? My whole life, I’ve chosen friends on the basis of shared interests. Now I need a reason not to be someone’s friend. This makes it hard to tell anybody apart, to pick out who my real tribe is among the mess of People-I-Only-Kind-Of-Know-Or-Care-About.
Navigating the shift from late adolescence the grown-up world has never been easy. But the Facebook Era has made early adulthood feel uncomfortably much like some sort of virtual tribunal. Everybody’s judging. Or, at least, everybody’s watching.
And in the semantic bubble of my high school reunion, I finally figured that out.
We’re all of us up for execution every single day of the rest of our lives.
Of course, there is a way out. It involves deleting your profile and resigning yourself to the cold comfort of the analogue world, where little has probably changed, where your friends are the only ones within shouting distance, where your secrets are safe.
But making a break for it also requires that you resign from your station on the firing squad.
Be honest. Do you really want that?
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On hate letters and the immutability of time
“If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.”
-T.S. Eliot, Four Quarters
These last days, in a rash of mental housecleaning, I’ve been getting rid of all kinds of stuff.
Dozens of old love letters, old photos, abandoned threads of defunct electronic correspondences. In some ways, it was a depressing exercise. I came across a painful cross-section of long (and perhaps best) forgotten correspondences with former loves. I thought. I remembered. I considered. And I decided that it all has to go.
But before I relegate the tangled strings of all those failed love affairs to obsolescence, I thought I’d share a few of the most memorable. I’ve deleted the names of the senders, but otherwise, I’ve kept them as-is. I’ve gotta warn you, this might be painful. To whit, a quick cross-section from My First 10 Years of Dating.
Some of it was sad:
(7/12/2002) hey- i haven’t checked my mail in awhile..i wasn’t trying to avoid your communications. i guess i just fell apart emotionally when i read that letter… everything in it was sorta familiar, yet with you by my side as i read it mad it super difficult to bear… i don’t want us to drift apart, as you have said before… you are so special to me, i just want you to be happy and live a long, happy, prosperous life. please write back whenever you feel the need…. iwillalwaysloveyou, X
Some of it seemed sad at the time but now seems sort of hilarious:
(10/23/03) Bonjour Erin ! you must be so suprise to hear from me, With wath i did to you i’ll not be suprise if you don’t want to hear from me. Ijust want to tell you that my return in Quebec one year ago was very hard and i’ve never respond to anyone that i met during my year in London, you includ. So i’m not gonna write a huge message to you now because maybe you don’t even want to hear from me, but i’ll be very please to tell all my year pass in Quebec for the last year, if, of course, you write me back to tell me that you can forgive me for my non-responding year. I’ll understand if you don’T want, but i just want to tell you that i had very nice time in Paris with and i rememeber you as a very nice and special person, but i feel sorry for the mood wich i was when we met. I hope you are happy and once more time sorry for my mistake. X
(7/19/08) Dear Erin, It wasn’t an “idea” I loved it was you as a person. Furthermore, what I said on the phone about being wasted 80% of our relationship still rings true. Thats not healthy for myself or for my partner. I still drink one night on the weekend but thats it. I took beer out of my diet and switched to gin and tonics. But I am gonna cut that out and just stick with red wine… You can choose to look back on us and find whatever faults you want to before the whole cheating and after. I can choose to disagree but that does not mean I am dismissing your feelings. I just feel your focusing all your attention on a few negatives rather than looking at the whole picture. But you have every right to do so since I betrayed you and am basically a shitty person. love, X
Some of it was pretty fucking harsh:
(12/5/03) Hey- Well, I wasn’t going to write you, but after carefull contemplation I decided there are things I need to say. When I wrote you that email a few days back I thought I was going to be ok with everything, not happy, but ok. Well, I’m not.
I’m sorry you don’t want to date me anymore. I, at least, thought we had a great thing going that wasn’t worth throwing away over a 2 month trip. Apperently I was wrong. I’m going to move on but there is no way I can stay in contact with you. Its hard enough as it is for me go through my daily routines without punching the shitout of someone. Well, have fun partying in thailand(hmmm… whatever happened to monastaries and secluded beaches?). Good by, X
Some of it was pompous:
(8/23/04) Erin- I understand what you want and will respect that. Watch the world around you, the only teacher you will ever need. Take care of your life, live towards love and compassion.Until the road brings us to each other. X
(10/19/2004) well well well, you were right, i definitly didn’t expect to hear from you. but i must say that i’m glad i did. i’ve thought many times about what happened and it’s been so long that i can’t really even remember the bad. only the fun parts remain in my memory. i had a lot of gulit about the way things went wrong, and i was also going through a growing experience. at the time it left me in a total mental, and emotional confusion, but in the end i came out much more of an adult than I could even realize. however confusing all this babbling is just know that what i’m trying to say is im sorry for all of my wrongs. X
Some of it was creepy:
(10/5/08) what the hell information are you talking about? What would you think I want with your credit cards? I dont understand a bit of any of this E, you have these assumptions and things that convince you all I do is lye and do bad shit, etc. I dont understand. Perhaps you would like to enlighten me on what it is this information is about?
By the way, with all due respect, calling the cops on me is a very cowardly action, you know I would never harm you. To even mention those dullards with their badges to help them cope with mommy and daddy issues disgusts me.
Why are you acting like this to me? What are you refering to about infotmation and these medical books I “so love to steal”? So far as the lay diagnosis of NPD, one must fit 5/9 criteria, according to the DSM… I would, if looked at in such a differential only fit 3 of them, therefore no diagnosis can be assumed. Please E, do tell me what this so facinating information is.
I hope this finds you well. All my love, X
Some of it is still insanely difficult to even read at all:
(5/6/06) Erin – I want to hold you and push you away, I want to cry in your arms, I want to fall off the edge of the earth.. I do love you erin, I think that I will always love you. if it’s true that we are supposed to be together, I will not rule out that we can be someday because I have never wanted anything more.. can I say just not now.. I don’t know if my heart can say it. It’s obviously too much for me.. I still want you every minute of the day and still love you and feel the same way, I can never -not- love you. X
Why had I been holding onto them all these many years? I had my reasons. And those reasons were unique, as unique as each of those people I’d once cared about. And somehow, they still feel intensely private. That might seem odd for me to say, considering that I just outed almost every serious boyfriend I’ve ever had in the fragments above. But, man. The ends of relationships are such dismal affairs, aren’t they? Hard feelings seem to endure an incredibly long time, at least for me. Perhaps that is why we all have a tendency to oscillate wildly between the desire to forget completely and the temptation to let our greatest disappointments come to define who we are as people.
All said, I do believe it’s probably better to forget in the end. If every single person, and every single relationship, is unique, why carry the past with you?
So it’s all going. In a fit of pique a few weeks back, I marched out of my apartment and down to the Columbia River docks and tossed one particularly sad batch of love letters into the water. I’ve thrown out heaps of old tarnished necklaces and crumbling handmade gifts. And I’ve cleaned out the virtual coffers of three separate email accounts. It is sort of terrifying. And also sort of exhilirating.
I’ve hung onto a few select items: an ivory necklace picked up for me in the Congo by an old lover when desire still bloomed inside of us like some great exotic flower; three lettres d’amour penned by a French boy I met in Paris on my 16th birthday; a funny breakup note from my junior high boyfriend, with whom I am still friends. And the bits of letters shared above.
That’s it. The rest is gone.
Deciding to fall in love requires, each time, a suspension of disbelief. Voltaire once likened the choice to a leap into the abyss. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve leapt. Perhaps such a decision is more easily made, though, when you finally let go of the hope than any of the past could have been different.
The past is infinite. The past is erasable. All time is unredeemable. Indeed.
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Why the Buddha drinks Fanta
Me and Krsjna in Northern Thailand, shortly before disaster struck.
I used to go nuts for Fanta. When I was a kid, it was my default drink. Birthday parties, fast food joints, wherever, I always went straight for the orange stuff. There was just something about its impossibly fizzy, zingy flavor. The Japanese talk about a “fifth taste” they call umame. The word has no direct translation but means, roughly that a thing tastes just how it should. That it is a perfect exemplar of flavor. Normally, it’s a word used to describe savory, meaty fare, but, for me, Fanta had always had a perfect umame. Somehow, it even tasted more like oranges than an actual orange. I couldn’t get enough.
And when I got older and began to clock time in strange foreign lands, Fanta became, for me, became a bastion of familiarity. You can pick up a can of Fanta in most of the 186 countries currently in existence, although the recipe is always a little different. At last count, there were more than 90 flavors on offer, ranging from the exotic (lemon and elderflower in Romania) to the quirky (Toffee in Taiwan) to the downright bizarre (Banana Fermented Milk, anyone?).
Fanta traces its origins to scarcity. After a trade ban enacted by the allied forces during World War II prevented German Coca-Cola plants from importing a syrup essential to the production of soda, Max Keith, the Man in Charge, resolved to concoct a new soft drink, one that could be easily and cheaply made from whatever was lying around. In went pomace— the skin, seed and other assorted effluvia that catches in the filter when fruit is put through a press. In went whey—a smelly byproduct of the cheese manufacturing process. Keith once called it a soda wrought from the “leftovers of leftovers.” Junk, all of it, stuff nobody else saw any value in.
Rumor has it that the Nazi party took note of Fanta’s rising sales and entered into a series of clandestine business deals with Coca-Cola. At one point, Fanta cases even displayed gory tableaux of lions tearing apart Jewish men and women.
I’m 28 now. And I, too, can trace certain tangled threads of my core identity back to scarcity. To Not Enough, and the big, bad trouble it causes. Incidentally, I’ve pretty much lost my taste for Fanta soda. In fact, I find it noxious. Unsettling. And with a hint of metallic bitterness my 10-year-old palate was far too immature to detect.
I taste it now. Definitely.
The trouble started in Southeast Asia at just about the end of 2003. I was a stupid and self-assured 22, and I’d fallen in with Krisjna, a Belgian hippie. We’d hit it off over peanuts and warm whiskey in a guest house lounge in Northern Thailand. He grinned my way from beneath a corona of blond dreadlocks, banana leaf joint in hand, and I was done for. We’d been on the road together for more than a month by then, the rough equivalent of a two-year relationship in backpacker years. On Christmas Eve, we found ourselves in the tiny town of Muong Ngio, deep in the jungles of Northern Laos, where we’d rented out a bungalow from a guy named Sengdala for four bucks a night. Ours was among a handful of teak huts scattered across a patch of hardscrabble earth at the edge of the Mekong River.
I’d been hamstrung by e.Coli poisoning after an ill-advised swim in a filthy swimming pool several weeks previous and so I could no longer stomach alcohol, or much solid food for that matter. But I drank Fanta voraciously during that time. It was the only thing that settled my queasy belly and it became a panacea for my many fevers and dizzy spells.
Krisjna and I had decided to spend Christmas Eve in the town’s only bar, and as I sat on the dirt floor chasing Advils and Metronidazoles with a sweating can of that oranger-than-orange drink, we were approached by a small, dark-eyed boy who identified himself as Jai. He was 12, and Sengdala’s nephew. He spoke excellent English, and he shared my passion for sugary soda. The three of us sat up past midnight, slurping sodas and telling jokes, snapping photos with my camera.
Looking back, it’s hard to point to any clear indication that Krisjna and I were in trouble. Just one single moment stands out, after we’d said goodnight to Jai and were squatting before a smoldering campfire at the side of the road near our hut. I sensed, for just a moment, that we were being watched. Somewhere out past the flickering glow of the tiny fire, something was waiting.
There exists a kind of darkness in this world that Westerners simply cannot conceive of. An inky black that is only possible in the poorest corners of the earth, where electricity is scarce and the moon gets swallowed up by the jungle well before dawn. It was that kind of darkness I peered out into, trying to source my sudden and inexplicable discomfort. I saw nothing. So we stood up and headed off to bed, clutching hands.
We awoke some eight hours later on a cloudy Christmas morning to find that all of our things had been stolen while we slept. I’d lost my medicine. My passport. My money. My plane ticket. My camera. My journal. Ad infinitum.
In shock, we wandered into the center of town, where I crumbled theatrically into a heap in the middle of the dirt road, my head and belly aching. Krisjna yanked me up and dragged me, sniffling pathetically, to the tiny Buddhist temple at the north end of town. Inside the temple sat a large, roughhewn altar. We stared at each other and hit our knees. What else was left to do?
Before us rested a gaudy likeness of Budhha. A can of Fanta had been set on the altar before him, just to the left of a modest dish of white rice. It had been popped open and a tiny pink straw was jutting out from the hole. I sniffled some more, feeling gloriously downtrodden and pathetic. Krisjna reached out to squeeze my hand, and we groped in the cloudy half-light of that Christmas Morning, beyond words.
After a few minutes, a small boy in monk’s garb passed in from a back room. We disentangled ourselves and he bent down next to us, chattering away in Lao. Then he picked up an old coffee can from the ground next to the altar and rattled it. A few coins clinked noisily. I reached into my pocket. My hands closed around a Thai coin. It was the equivalent of 50 cents, and it was now all the money I had left in the world. I fingered it, even toyed with the idea of tossing it into that can, but then where would we be? In my darkest moments I might be known to kneel down and mutter out a quick and earnest prayer, but I’d certainly never had that kind of faith. The boy rattled the can some more. We shook our heads miserably. He grew frustrated and left us to our hopeless supplications. We departed, embarrassed.
* * *
That was a long, hungry Christmas. I spent most of it sulking in the hammock strung up outside our hut, staring blank-eyed out into the jungle, where there were no paths back, where land mines from the Vietnam War still waited, untripped, where everything suddenly seemed so much bigger and more sinister.
We didn’t talk much. Krisjna padded barefoot up and down the length of the single dirt road that ran through town. The nearest phone, by generous estimates, was a four-hour boat ride away. Already, my belly was growling. We had no cigarettes. We had no friends. I’d lost my medicine. What The Fuck were we supposed to do now? And, more importantly, why the fuck had this happened at all? Why had such a punishment been visited upon us? I slipped into a dark reverie.
I grew up Catholic. I’d always been taught that good works would be repaid in kind. But that day in the hammock, some belief I used to have about the deep good in this world died, got stubbed out into an old soda can with the soggy, rotten butt of another crappy jungle cigarette. I came to sense in those bitter moments that karma was nothing more than an old and mostly useless saw. I’d invariably returned wallets, taken the hands of small children separated from their mothers in large crowds.
Yeah, I’d stolen stuff sometimes. But it was usually out of some hyper-rationalized sense of entitlement: trolling the internet for free mp3s cause everyone knew that record companies were pure anathema. Palming grapes in the produce aisle cause, where I came from, a million pounds of fruit and veg were wasted every day anyway. These tiny rebellions seemed patriotic, somehow, justifiably vitriolic responses to greed and wastefulness. Like most Americans, I considered myself a mostly good person. And this was my repayment? What The Fuck?
* * *
It didn’t take long to sort out the culprits. The door to our hut had been constructed from a single plank of flexible wood. Thing was, if you pulled on it from the bottom, it bent. Not too far, but definitely far enough to allow a body passage through. It would have to be a small body, though. Say, that of a youngish boy, probably no bigger than about twelve. Jai.
The town’s police chief, an eighty-five-year-old man in a sunbaked blue track suit, showed up in the afternoon to take our report. He chewed on a frayed, nasty cigar, consulted closely with Sengdala and a decision was made. There would be no police report, Sengdala announced.
“It’s just too weird,” he said. “We can’t make a report.”
“But what are we supposed to do?” I asked, my hysteria rising again. He had done this. I knew he had.
“You drink too much. Lose your bags at the bar,” he said, smiling carefully.
“No!” I shouted, my body tensing up like some dumb, trapped animal.
Krisjna raked fingers through his mop of dreadlocks– a compulsive gesture of frustration I’d see many times in the days to follow– then pressed his balled fists into his closed eyes and said simply: “We’re hungry.”
The police chief was busy scratching notes onto a water-stained pad, squinting periodically off at the muddy Mekong, kicking the earth with a sandaled foot, avoiding our eyes.
Clucking his tongue, Sengdala led us to his restaurant across the street. He exchanged terse words with his wife in a kitchen doorway and an hour later, we were served two tiny saucersfull of curried vegetables. No rice. No water.
After eating, we scored a pack of smokes off a sympathetic British guy and returned to our hammocks. But we must have cut pretty pathetic pictures in our filthy traveler rags, chain smoking and staring forlornly out at a pack of kayakers whooping and shouting in the water down below, cause Sengdala returned at dusk to invite us to dine with him and a few of his brothers.
We supped on raw buffalo stomach cured in mint, scooped up with glutinous palmfulls of sticky rice. I didn’t like the idea of sharing a table with Sengdala and his ilk, considering that the food had no doubt been procured with the spoils from our overstuffed daypacks. I knew I should stop. This meat was the rough equivalent of blood money. And it would probably make me violently ill besides. But I hadn’t eaten in 24 hours, except for the disgusting curry stuff, and my appetite was insatiable. I swallowed great mouthfuls of the buffalo.
We talked little, watched the sky beyond the village bleed into a blackish blue as the sun dropped behind a jagged spit of mountain. Sengdala told us the growing swarm of backpackers who came up to his village by way of Ngong Kiao, of his lengthy preparations for a party to celebrate his daughter’s marriage to the police chief’s son in three day’s time. (Yeah, I know.) We nodded and shoved more meat into our faces. But there was no room for pretty fantasies. His post facto kindness indicated nothing, and we all knew it.
* * *
I think it’s like this: Anymore, Western culture is spreading fast. It’s rattling at the gates of Everywhere, rolling inevitably in with its big-bellied sails, belching colorful detritus. Krisjna and I were, I suppose, unwitting ambassadors from the fabled shores of that 365-day-a-year party, a place where orange soda rivers ran through crystalline cities paved in solid gold.
Before our three lives intersected, Sengdala had—whether through means or luck—come to assume the post of Richest Man in Town. And yet he lived in a house where we’d scarcely have been caught dead, in a village we only deigned to visit, where no one had ever had a hot shower, where a nightly hour of programming on a flickering console television hooked up to the town generator was an untenable luxury to which the entire village looked forward all day. He knew it. We knew it. And that fact made our simple presence humiliating. And that, in turn, made us targets. We came bearing backpacksful fancy gadgets and thick, smelly wads of foreign currency, lambs to the slaughter. And, just like that buffalo on which I gorged myself so insatiably, this wasn’t personal. Not really.
What happened between Sengdala and us was simply about the awful, awful shit that can go down when you reduce the world around you into its true configurations and come to realize that the calculus adds up only to Not Enough.
None of it was fair. But in the end, I was essentially as powerless as Sengdala was to change any of it. And when I came to recognize my own powerlessness, I began, also, to understand why I could, on occasion, steal from others with so little guilt or fear of reprisal.
In the end, accepting my own hypocrisy also meant conceding the hypocrisy of a twelve-year-old kid who could smile into my face, drink a can of soda on my coin some Christmas Eve in the jungle, and then make off into the night with everything I own; the hypocrisy of a grown man who would orchestrate such an act and then invite me to Christmas dinner. It’s why Fanta comes in all those disgusting, alien flavors. It’s complicated, but in another way, it’s the most logical thing in the world. It was never supposed to make sense! It was never, never supposed to be fair.
My jungle story goes on, and it gets worse. It involves weeks in diplomatic hell, bribes passed through slots in glass windows, getting ripped off on a bag of weed by a monk and a near-fire in a hotel room in the Lao capital city and countless packs of 30-cent cigarettes. Fights and teardrops and Western Union money transfers that I’d spend a year paying my frantic parents back for.
I got home, eventually, a little gaunt and bleary-eyed, yeah, but I got there. The e.Coli cleared up after a few tooth-jarring months and life moved forward.
Krisjna and I still write each other. Not often, but we do still write. We don’t talk much about the fights, or Sengdala, or the way I had to pawn my watch to pay for a hotel room. We’ve forgiven the universe most of that, and we are friends. As for Fanta, well, it’s been harder to get past, somehow. I slugged down a can of the grape variety in El Salvador a few months back and the taste of it made me wretch. It tasted like metal, like blood. Perhaps, though, it’s the smack of atonement that still rings so bitter on my tongue after all these many years.
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Undescribable unthings: Franz Kafka and Tiger Woods get a dressing down
“Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers. This is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.” – Franz Kafka
This quote has been bouncing around my head ever since the Tiger Woods scandal reached its thundering crescendo a few weeks back. At first, though, I wasn’t sure why this mini-parable — coming as it does from such a different age — so resonated with the way I was beginning to understand the flashpoint event that sealed the demise of a longtime American hero.
Let’s start with the general. Kafka’s parable seems to offer commentary on the way Men deal with Dissent and Difference. We’re groping at two key truths about humans, here: one, that we are inclined to favor the predictable, the orderly. Two, that we place our bets, consistently, on unstable entities.
And, Kafka suggests, this fundamental paradox leads us to act in some rather odd ways, to create all sorts of bizarre archetypes.
It doesn’t take a sour-face academician to pin down Tiger Woods as a Fallen Hero. In fact it’s so obvious, it’s been vastly underanalyzed, ask me. Let’s review for a second.
If human history can tell us anything, it’s that those we idolize and deify are bound to disappoint us. It is a tale as old as time itself: we hold humans imbued with certain Magical Qualities up for deification. We give them power. Lots of power. More, it seems, than they often have the maturity to handle. And then wait for them to betray us.
That waiting is a way of neutralizing unorthodoxy, I’d wager, by integrating threats to our social structures into the fabric of traditions. But it seems sort of unfair, because, working forward from this assertion, Tiger Woods begins to read less as a glad-handed slimeball and more as a victim of an oblique but inveterate social ritual of deification and divestment.
Here, the ritual entails three principal transformations: first, the transformation from human to superhuman (See: Tiger Woods Playing Golf at Age 2). Second, the ceremonial divesting (See: Tiger Woods Apology Speech) Last, the symbolic restoration (On the way, in short order, I’d guess: in his apology, Woods cryptically promises a return to golf “one day,” then slightly less cryptically adds that it may well be “this year.”)
At first blush, Tiger Woods and Franz Kafka couldn’t seem more different: One is a contemporary sports star who’d notched billions in endorsements before a series of figurative and literal car wrecks sent him tumbling into disrepute. The other was a nineteenth century writer and European Jew who died of Tuberculosis young, virtually unknown, and begging his friends to burn everything he’d ever authored.
One would live to see a man of similarly diverse ethnic background assume his country’s highest office; the other would die shortly before all three of his sisters perished in World War II concentration camps.
But. Using the Aryan nightmare of the Holocaust as a dividing line from which racial hatred and racial obsolescence snaked outward in opposite directions, one man, Kafka, can be seen as pre-racial, and the other, Woods, as post-racial. And I’d argue that the differences between the two men belie an equally broad swath of similarities, as it is with two sides of a coin, as it is with so many other things.
Let’s consider a few examples:
Both were caught in culturo-ethnic netherworlds: Kafka was born in the Prague of the late 1800s, yet an enclave of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His upbringing was wrought in a mess of tongues; Yiddish at home, Czech in polite society, German for all matters bureaucratic. And he was Jewish in a time when Judaism was associated with filthiness, weakness, when centuries of anti-Semitic thought were heating to a rolling boil.
Woods, too, is something of a neither-nor: one-quarter each of Chinese, Thai and African-American, plus one-eighth each of Native American and Dutch. So variegated is Woods’ ethnic makeup that he coined his own word for it: “Cablinasian,” a synthesis of Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian.
(At the risk of mixing metaphors, it is also interesting to note that the protagonist of Kafka’s most famous work, The Metamorphosis, collapses under the weight of a jumbled identify; traveling salesman Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to discover that he has been transformed from a human into an “ungeheuren ungezlefer,” which translates roughly as an “undescribable unthing.” It is usually vernacularized into “insect” in English translation of the novel, but this isn’t quite what Kafka meant.)
Both had daddy issues: Kafka never married, fearing above all else the potentiality of becoming his father; a harsh, exacting man who’d pulled himself up by bootstrap and sheer stubbornness into the ranks of respectable society. He expected his children to follow unarguing suit, but the younger Kafka had other ideas, and his works consistently portray authority figures as cold, illogical and unreasonable.
Papa Woods, too, was larger-than-life. He was driven. He was exacting. He had big plans for his offspring. And, like his son after him, he was unfaithful to his wife, a revelation which is said to have horrified the adolescent Woods, who had idolized his father.
Both had weird sexual hangups: Kafka pursued parallel sexual lives: he had a documented taste for whores, but consistently maintained relationships with respectable women. Likewise, The Metamorphosis is often read as an allegory about being torn between the powerful social urge to please those around us and the equally powerful primitive urge to satisfy our own, darker desires.
Woods married a nice girl and started a family. But he also cultivated a (purportedly insatiable) taste for women of the evening; two porn stars and a Playboy model are named among the running tally of his conquests, and some even claim he also pursued sexual relationships with other men.
Both put on extensive airs: Kafka maintained a demeanor of charm and cultivaton that made him popular with everyone, especially women. Deep down, though, he was irrationally terrified that he’d be unmasked for what he truly saw himself as: a filthy, sickly Jew.
Woods was famous for his reticence and quorum when it came to interacting with the public; He wore “power colors; his answers during press conferences were clipped and consistently glib, his handlers rarely allowed him to interact casually with fans or other golfers.
* * *
Similarities aside, the fates of the two men also read as the flipsides of a single coin; One did not see success in his life, the other did— seemingly more than he could easily abide. one was terrified of rejection and failure, the other came to believe he was immune to such things. And both battled mightily against the revelation of an inner ugliness, of the soul’s darkness bleeding outward into physical form: early on, Kafka had peered into his own heart and hated what he found there. Likewise, we peered into Tiger Woods’ heart and recoiled in disgust.
One man died before he had the chance to join a million of his brethren in martyrdom; the other seemed immortal, and thus required our assistance in his own destruction.
Before his death, Kafka penned a lengthy and damning missive to his father. In the last paragraph of this letter, he wrote:
“Naturally things cannot in reality fit together the way the evidence does in my letter; life is more than a Chinese puzzle. But with the correction made by this rejoinder—a correction I neither can nor will elaborate in detail—in my opinion something has been achieved which so closely approximates the truth that it might reassure us both a little and make our living and our dying easier.”
If you really stop and think about it, the concept of any confession being an approximation of the truth, and not the truth itself is sort of mind-blowing. Indeed, in the end, Kafka and Woods were each forced to concede that the truth is never simple, no matter how smart you were, now matter who your dad said you were—or weren’t.
In the end, it’s a coin toss: some people become martyrs, others become heroes. But either way, there’s a penance to be paid. It’s history’s vow made good. It’s the critical and exacting eye turned selfward, then outward, then selfward again, over and over. It sees only weakness. And it demands in recompense nothing short of total destruction.
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How I Learned 견디다
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds — and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language […] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.
-Benjamin Whorf
견디다.
It was a word I’d come to abhor intensely before the end of my 16 months teaching English in South Korea. Gyon-di-da. I’ve never known the precise translation, but it corresponds roughly to the English verb “endure,” and seems to suggest perseverance in the face of suffering, approaching life’s twists and turns with a martyr’s grace.
Working where I worked demanded gyon-di-da in spades. I quickly discovered that I had none. In spite of the fact that they were running 10 after-school English programs, neither of my bosses spoke English. Mr. Kim and Mr. Khang were also bankrupt and laboring under massive gambling debts. There was never enough money, enough supplies. Things went askew, constantly. I’d lose patience, and inevitably, someone would try to placate me with that word. The boss has decided that you will now be working on national holidays for no extra pay? Gyon-di-da, came the soothing refrain. A child has vomited in your classroom and the janitor refuses to clean it because you “don’t count” as part of the elementary school? Gyon-di-da. You’ve been standing in the detergent aisle for 10 minutes and still can’t figure out which one is the laundry soap? Gyon-di-da.
I quickly came to hate the sound of the word, and all I understood it to symbolize. In some ways, I suppose I blamed everything that didn’t make sense about my new life, all the little failures and miniscule tragedies, on it. I couldn’t tell a taxi driver my own address. I couldn’t control my first graders. I couldn’t find any shoes that fit. I felt muted, tired.
I’d never realized how full of pleasantly mindless chatter life is, how, “Mostly, we just talk” (Johnson 112). We chirp and twitter incessantly at each other, passing on and picking up vital information, aware of the fact that “There are more things to be spoken of than there are words with which to speak them” (Johnson, 115), but determined nevertheless to have our say. Language gives us comfort. It lets us learn from each other, allows us to feel important, and heard.
We chart our territories in imperfect ways, yes, but when you venture outside of your linguistic bubble, when you fall off the map entirely and all your pretty talk becomes meaningless, when the comfort of mindless chatter disappears, how can you possibly be expected to endure?
The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis suggests that language shapes culture, that we are only capable of understanding those things for which we have words. In Korea, I came to see reality as a social construction, a club you get to join only when you consent to its collective agreement to call this sort-of-ugly bunch of leaves and blooms a weed, and this much prettier one a rose. It exists because we’ve imagined it into being. We construct it, and reconstruct it, daily: “We do not merely discover facts; in some degree we fashion them” (Johnson, 96). It is necessarily exclusive, and tailored to the needs of its creators. You have to take reality on its own terms. And you’ll never get past the bouncer until you learn what in the heck those terms even are.
Me, I got to Korea, and I had no words any more. Or perhaps I had far too many, and none of the right ones. I was lost amid an alphabet soup of symbols and sounds that had no correspondents in my personal reality. Streets lined with twisting mazes of fluorescent gibberish, unintelligible newspapers, impatient shouts of Odi-ga on the bus, all of it was nonsensical and hard. Coherence left me, and with it went my identity. I thought constantly of the way my mother used to coax me from my shyness by cooing, “Use your words.” But my words were getting stuck, reversing themselves. I was choking, and all they could say was gyon-di-da. I didn’t want to gyon-di-da! I wanted to scream. I felt muted, powerless. There was no backdoor in to understanding, and so I’d stand around instead like a big, dumb beast, waiting for meaning to reveal itself in some lesser way, cause, really, what else could I possibly do?
And the strangest part was, it was language that had brought me there in the first place. In Korea, as in so many parts of the earth, the ability to speak English is a source of great power and prestige. By being born in the United States, I’d acquired, without effort, a valuable blueprint for modernity, for success. Each day, I stood in front of rows and rows of uniformed schoolchildren and tossed out my precious words. Get, got, gotten. I watched my students go scrambling after them, snatching them up. Myself, yourself, herself, himself. They spilled out from inside of me, like little gold coins rattling across the floor, rolling into the corners. From the doorway, the mothers clapped or frowned, and life moved forward.
Months passed, filled with mishaps and small victories, my fumbling attempts to master Hangul. I bought a poster of the Korean alphabet and worked on the sounds with a clumsy tongue, scratched out the symbols onto pieces of paper, over and over. One day, a Korean friend looked over my work and commented that I wrote like a six-year-old. I was flattered enormously. I’d become intelligible. Maybe only just barely, but still.
And then, too quick, it was all over, time to go back home. My last night in Korea, I wandered alone down my street and thought of that first, strange night when my boss had picked me up at the airport and dropped me off there, at my tiny little apartment. Jet-lagged and in a vague state of shock, I’d snuck out for a cigarette. My heart racing, I’d ventured down the alley behind my building, staring up at the rows of glittering signs, mapping out a fluorescent trail of breadcrumbs in my head. Straight past the pile of garlic bulbs, left at the neon chicken. I made it 300 feet, and then scampered back to my apartment in fear. I was afraid to go any farther. I had no coordinates to map, no map at all, in fact, and was forced to rely solely on fleeting visual referents. If I lost my way, how could I ever get back?
By that final night, I couldn’t even count the hundreds of times I’d trudged up and down my street. I could read every sign, knew where to find chicken, or beer, or ginseng tea. And it seemed almost inconceivable to me by then that I’d worried so desperately about finding my way back that first night, to the place where I’d started. It had taken me16 months to realize that you can’t go back, ever.
“Use your words.” It seemed like such a simple idea. From my time in Korea, I learned that sometimes there are no words, no trail of breadcrumbs to lead you back to a meaning you can rest your head on. Truth is, sometimes you just have to keep moving through the void, keep waiting for the next corner of the puzzle to reveal itself to you. Because it will, most of the time, if you can stand the wait.
Using language is a graceless dance, equal parts waltz and stumble, and “under the spigots of cultural evolution the old categories bulge, spill over, and collapse” (Johnson, 119). But living as we do in an “infinite-valued reality” (Johnson, 117), we must learn nevertheless to position ourselves within the overlap, shared language or none. We must have grace with each other, and ourselves. We must be patient.
견디다. We must endure.
-EjB
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Gulf War Joe
You couldn’t really have called us friends, me and Joe. Mostly, we met when we met. It was always in the same little cantina, garish and neon, with framed photos of Pancho Villa on the walls and a storefull of butt-ugly souvenirs in the back. Usually, it was in the evening time, when I got off work and came to watch the bar filled up with the drunk, stupid tourists whose ships docked for five-hour stretches on our little tear-drop-shaped island.
Mostly, were mean to each other, me and Joe. Mostly, we argued back and forth across the barstool that sat empty, always, between us. It was like a demilitarized zone, keeping us just far enough apart to prevent any real violence.
And mostly, Joe was exceedingly unpleasant to be around. He was a terrible listener. He sweated too much and he spat when he spoke. He asked questions and interrupted before you could finish answering. All of the things that make you want to get away from someone as quickly as possible.
But there was something about him that I found hilariously, tragically irresistible. At one point, certainly, he must have been quite handsome: he had dirty blonde hair and an angular jaw and a lean, muscled frame. By the time I met him, he was pushing a rough-hewn 40 and his eyes were as cloudy as two sea agates. He owned two outfits and one pair of sports sandals. His only distinguishing features were the cheap Casio calculator watch he always wore and a rigid, skittish demeanor that persisted even in belligerent drunkenness, a stubborn hangover from his days in the military.
We laughed once in awhile. I liked watching him hit on drunk guys’ wives, right in front of them. It was just so outrageous. And I was fascinated by his stories. They were nearly painful to listen to. He’d been almost completely undone by a couple of tours in the Persian-Gulf War. His mother had died young, his wife had hung herself. I never sorted out how he’d ended up on that little Mexican island, but I’m sure the rest of the story wasn’t any happier.
I went to that bar most evenings. I liked the bartender, Joaquin. He was kind and shy and let me practice my Spanish. And Joe, from what I could tell, spent all day there, every day. By the time I’d arrive, he was usually three sheets to the wind and getting mean with the tourists.
Joaquin, the bartender, would lean over the bar and whisper, “He drink 14 beers today.”
If he were feeling particularly ornery, Joe would launch into long, spittle-laced rants about the American government and the way the army had destroyed his life. The words were like little rubber bullets pumping out of his mouth.
Joe on American currency: “Get rid of it! All of it!”
Joe on his dishonorable discharge from the military: “ Pieces of shit! I coulda been somebody!”
He actually said stuff like that. The kinds of things you think are only from the movies. It was almost too much to believe.
Somehow, I felt compelled to share Joe with others. He was a like a poorly behaved pet that you might teach to fart or nudge at with the toe of your shoe until it lost patience and tried to gnaw your foot off. And at the end you’d laugh an indulgent chuckle and revel in your superiority.
“Hey Joe,” I’d say, after chatting another free beer off whichever drunk cruisegoers happened to be in the bar that night. “Tell us about Santa Rosa.”
The mere mention of Santa Rosa, his commander in the Persian Gulf, was sure to set him off.
“He disgusts me,” Joe would scream. “Do you know what it’s like to live in a barracks? To smell another man’s stink? That bastard left me there! Disgusting!”
Sometimes, if the crowd was particularly lucky, tears would roll down his face as he gestured spastically. People would usually giggle or just look uncomfortable and try to get away from us. But I always loved the show, the eyes of the tourists hesitating between fear and a strange sense of awe that he managed to remain upright on the barstool at all. He had a way of swaying back and forth and sort of jerking his head around that made him look like one of those windup soldier toys, all mechanical and too slow.
All of this might make me sound like a terrible person, but that’s just how it was with us. We weren’t friends so much as receptacles for each other’s misdirected rage and loneliness. We’d plow through packs of cigarettes and buy each other Coronas, trading insults. We spent literally dozens of evenings this way.
And besides, he was mean, too. Joe constantly berated me for being out of shape, for smoking cheap Mexican cigarettes, for moving to a country where I didn’t know the language and trying to learn Spanish from a book, although he didn’t speak a lick of Spanish himself as far as I could tell and was, in fact, trying to teach himself German by the same methods.
He took every possible opportunity to remind me of my ordinariness. I’d sit at the bar with my teach-yourself Spanish paperback, scanning lists of vocabulary. And the insults would begin.
“You’ll never learn that way,” he snarled at me once. “Might as well just quit.”
I ignored him.
“My mom was a teacher,” he muttered. “I know.”
I ignored him more.
“I’m telling you…”
“Shut the fuck up, loser!” I shouted. “No one cares about your opinion!”
A Russian cruiseboat captain who had been trying to chat me up edged quietly away, I remember, looking shocked. I didn’t care.
Although my attempts to teach myself Spanish were the source of extensive ridicule, Joe constantly bragged about how hard it was to learn German.
He needed to learn it, he said, because the CIA was grooming him for covert operations in Europe.
There is no fucking way, I remember thinking.
“If this works out, I could really be back on top,” he’d say, holding up his tatty old German workbook.
And I’d picture Joe at a biergarten, wearing a seersucker suit and sunglasses that shot darts out the sides. Chatting up a busty barmaid and eyeballing some big Bavarian gangsters over the rim of his beerstein.
“Any day, I’ll get my orders,” he’d say.
I’d see Joe shimmying up the side of a building, thick wads of foreign currencies stuffed down his underpants and a panopoly of State secrets captured on a secret camera lodged inside his Casio calculator watch.
But the real truth about Joe was probably that he’d come to Mexico to drink himself to death, and that probably he’d succeed. I think we both knew that.
In the end, our friendship, if you could even call it that, wasn’t terminated so much as quietly abandoned. We didn’t declare our undying hatred of each other after a particularly vitriolic battle of words and storm off to opposite ends of the island. We didn’t high five each other goodbye and mutter no bad blood and pose for a photo. One day perhaps five months after we’d first met, I showed up at the bar at the usual time and he just wasn’t there anymore. Or the next day, or the next.
Joaquin didn’t know where he’d gone and there was no one else I could think to ask. I was fairly sure I was his only friend on the island, or maybe anywhere.
Joaquin and I cooked up a few soft theories on his whereabouts. Joe deported by the government. Joe in a stiff blue polo shirt selling timeshares at one of the resorts on the east side of the island. Joe hopping the ferry to Cancun, that swollen, filthy orifice through which so many lost souls will themselves to disappear forever.
“Maybe he’s in Germany,” I snorted.
We both had a laugh and I pulled out my pack of Montanas. I was suddenly free to smoke my shitty, dusty cigarettes without fear of scorn or ridicule. Free to study my Spanish book and nurse my guacamole gut.
Joaquin lit my cigarette, then hurried off to greet a pack of fat, sunburned tourists stumbling into the bar. I smoked furiously, listening to the silence, trying hard not to look at the empty barstools next to me as the sky beyond the cantina darkened into full-blown night.
-EjB
Filed under Uncategorized
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Down and Out in Meanest Heraklion
The shower water is cold. And it stinks.
I stand underneath, cringing, and examine my body for wounds. Just above my right elbow is the imprint of a man’s hand. Four blue smudges evoke the memory of fingers, an angry crescent moon of dried blood rising where a thumbnail broke the skin. My knees are skinned, and the long, flat bone above my heart throbs when I run the soap over it.
Assault. I turn the word over in my mind as I scrub my blackened heels. It seems so clinical, so far removed from the warm, sticky reality of what I feel inside, standing in this shower in a filthy hotel room in the Grecian isles. Trying to figure out what exactly happened last night. I press against the spot on my chest and wince. It will become a compulsive ritual in the days that follow, pushing my flattened palm against my sternum, searching for the tender spot, checking mirrors hourly, waiting for the bruise to rise.
At breakfast, Ashley and Meggan are quiet, subdued. We push food around our plates, stare at nothing. We’re not ready to talk yet. When I complain about my chest, though, Meggan’s mouth drops.
“You don’t remember?”
“What?”
Her eyes fill up. “You fell. They were kicking you.”
A hazy tableau switches on. Me, curled on the pavement. Far above, three large silhouettes. An Italian loafer comes at my head. I buck, and a kick in the chest leaves me gasping. Meggan’s face is white and terrified as she breaks into the pack and yanks my limp body upwards.
Ashley stabs at a tomato. “I wanna leave,” she whispers.
So we hightail it out of Heraklion in a rental car, heading west. I’m at the wheel. We’re still not talking, but last night hangs thick in the air, like the smell of something burnt. Megan chain-smokes. Ashley puts on her big black sunglasses. I square my jaw, ride the pedal hard. Ocean and sky bleed into a white mirage as I steer us along the winding road to Hania. I’m trying to puzzle it out.
Ok, I think. Ok.
So, we left the club sometime after three. They’d probably followed us awhile, these guys, two drunken locals. One threw his arm around Ashley. She cursed and shoved him away, then it started, right? He backhanded her, I know. Hard enough to send her flying into a wall. I remember how she crumpled to the ground, the rage in Meggan’s eyes as she came at them, her beer bottle shattering against the fat one’s chest. Me, jumping into the scuffle, clawing and kicking. Men running from the shadows and joining in.
Here, my memory breaks into disordered chunks. So little remains distinct: flashes of ragged breath and sharp pain, the tangle of flailing bodies, smashing glass, the crowd of men growing. Someone shouting, Run! My lungs screaming as we tore through a gray maze of alleyways, the gang close behind. Someone losing a shoe.
The memories come at me fast and senseless as I steer us away, Meggan silent and Ashley sleeping. Soon, the guardrails disappear, the edge of the road dropping straight off into the blue, interminable Aegean. My hand’s against my chest. My mind hurts.
They had our keys. Right? We stopped running. I turned. The fat one was standing under a streetlamp jingling them, laughing. He looked so ugly. I was exploding. I could hear my own heartbeat, and a high voice shrieking, “You bastard! I’ll fucking kill you!”
That voice was probably mine, because I ran at them again. Stupid with rage, kicking at their testicles. Feeling so furious and tiny. Then, we were running again, up a hill towards the safety of a taxi queue, falling into the taxi, damp with sweat and tears, Ashley’s small body quaking next to mine. Her whispering, “My nose hurts.” Me whispering back, “Let’s not tell mom.” Stumbling into the hotel, no water, no cigarettes, no food. Sinking into clammy sleep.
I’m driving way too fast. Beyond the windshield, the world is smearing together. How could this have happened? What on earth had convinced us we could fight a gang of full-grown men?
Once upon a time, girls were told to be nice, to defer. But by the time I hit puberty, the rules had changed, and I was programmed instead to fight tirelessly back. So I did.
By 26, I knew all the tricks. I could turn my keys into impromptu brass knuckles, I had a red belt in tae kwon do, I’d tossed beers in faces, thrown angry punches, stomped and raged until my fear of violence had short-circuited into some muffled whisper I no longer even heard.
In some masochistic way, I wanted the bad guys to come after me. But it was about respect, not vengeance. Because everyone promised me that it was mine, if I demanded it loud enough.
Yeah, right. I’d fought back, and all it’d gotten me was an Italian loafer in the chest. Cornered with the pack closing in, I’d lunged like a rat. It was instinctual, irresistible. And it got me precisely nowhere. But how could that be?
In the rear seat, Ashley is stirring. Meggan turns the radio on, and the plainative chords of an old Greek love song fill the car. The opened windows are swallowing the noise up, though, so she’s making it louder and louder, until everything else is drowned out, disappears. Until there’s nothing but the salt wind, the sound of a stranger’s heart breaking. And all of the questions.
As I watch meanest Heraklion fade to gray in the rearview mirror, my chest aching mightily, I begin to wonder if perhaps it’s all so much simpler and stranger than I’d been prepared to imagine. In a world so postmodern, the big truths are liable to reverse themselves without warning, the escape hatch and the blind alley becoming indistinguishable. Sometimes the sheep wears the wolf’s clothing. Sometimes the clock ticks backwards. And sometimes, you’d better just shut up and run.
-Ejb
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The Unfinished Project of Aggregated Intelligence
“The most merciful thing in the world…I think…is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity….and it was not meant that we should voyage far…The sciences…each straining in its own direction….have hitherto harmed us little….but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality….and of our frightful position therein…that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
-H.P. Lovecraft; Call of Cthulhu
The systems which drive and define humans as a species have been engaged since time immemorial in a process of adaptation and increasing sophistication known in its sum as evolution. Moving either backward or forward from the individual as a single unit, one marvels at the complexities of our organic systems. At the cellular level, an intricate ecology of networks comprises the human body. An old Buddhist koan reads, “In every speck of dust are Buddhas without number,” and indeed, the blueprints mapped onto each of our cells contain universes within universes.
Likewise, at the collective level, humans have learned to organize themselves into efficient and complex systems of “social cohesion” (Hall, 30). We call them cultures, and although they mimic the growth and complexification of the biological systems, they differ in one crucial aspect: while our organic systems favor variety, our cultural systems favor homogeneity. They function as large systematic units of aggregated intelligence aimed at pooling physical and mental resources, and they are inefficient unless they succeed in expressing and enforcing norms. Such uniformity is achieved easily enough within a single system, but humans have struggled mightily to achieve, or reconcile, any sort of intra-cultural homogeneity.
The aggregation and correlation of knowledge, which is informed and reinforced by an awareness of passing time, is the conspicuous earmark of modern civilization. As the biological components of organisms adapt and change over passing time, so do cultural systems evolve. This evolution has sped up exponentially during the last million years. Perhaps one of the most fascinating manifestations of our increasing sophistication has been the emergence of complex language systems, which began as systems of verbal communication and have developed into elaborate systems of gesture, speech and writing which “arose at the same time as tool-making, sometime between 500,000 and 2,000,000 years ago” (Hall, 56).
The catalytic pairing of tools and words has “made possible the storing of knowledge” (Hall, 57), and has nurtured the aggregation of a sizeable collective knowledge, especially during the last 10,000 years. Armed with the intelligence to “symbolically store their learning against future needs” (46), humans have become obsessed with creating a record which can be accessed and utilized by future generations.
But why the obsession with manipulating future environments? It seems that our increasing sophistication has forced upon us some troubling revelations. The construct of rational time forces each human being to concede to mortality on individual and special levels. Intelligence demands an acknowledgement of the chronology of existence, and if time is understood as a commodity of limited proportions, the recognition of mortality becomes inevitable. In short, intelligence led us to the construction of time, and time and death are directly linked.
Perhaps this revelation is what drove and continues to drive us to make a record, to carve our names into rocks, and to copy the words of great prophets into precious holy books, and to build amphitheaters that will stand long enough to contain our great grandchildren’s great grandchildren’s great grandchildren. We seem obsessed with the question of what will we leave behind us when we go, both as individuals and as a species. Humans have made immense efforts to scratch out a lasting record, something more true and definite than a yellowed pile of bones and teeth gathering dust in a cave. Something that will survive us, something we can leave behind that will say, definitively, we were.
Armed finally with intellectual complexity and fast heading in the direction of a universally intelligible linguistic and numerical system with which to construct and correlate this record, the various tribes of humanity now face the Herculean task of a larger aggregation of understanding. Our cultural systems spent the bulk of their history evolving in isolation, separated by mountains and oceans that were, for most of human history, impassable, uncrossable, impenetrable. Perhaps the most astounding consequence of our advanced ability to manipulate our environments has been the uneasy joining together of these discrete cultures, for humankind’s highly developed capacity for self-awareness nurtured an overwhelming curiosity to know what lay on the other side of the far mountains, beyond the edge of the sea. When these disparate cultures met, lines of evolution came face to face, and their disparate systems of intelligence could be pooled together.
The best consequence of these meetings has been a more coherent and complete understanding of how our environment functions, a wide-scale pooling of physical and intellectual resources that allows for ever-greater efficiency. Russians may now eat pineapples in the dead of January. Americans can power their big, noisy automobiles with oily black goo from the hot high deserts of a land most of them will never even see. Mathematical equations scratched out on tiny slips of paper in a laboratory in Delhi can be passed on instantaneously to scientists in Sweden, where those intelligible marks might be turned into a Tupperware container, or an atomic bomb, or a cure for cancer.
However, there has been scant little agreement as to how we as humans should forge that record, and these sometimes graceless meetings between tribes have often sparked in us an impulse to recoil at the “shock of contrast and difference” (Hall, 30). When human cultures meet, it seems, the best and worst instincts of our species engage.
But why is it so hard? Why are human cultures so threatened by the appearance of opposing truth systems? Hall explains that our cultural systems guide our behavior and shape our values in ways that we often don’t understand: “Culture controls behavior in deep and persisting ways, many of which are outside of awareness and therefore beyond conscious control of the individual” (Hall, 25). Cultures can be understood as providing human tribes with coherence and security, and when a culture is faced with a competing or irreconcilable version of the truth, it is often interpreted as a threat to that culture’s understanding of how it came to be, and why.
Such dissonance was once easier to ignore, but our shrinking world demands more and more insistently that we acknowledge, and react to, that which is foreign to us, that we find a way to place it within our own cultural contexts. Sometimes an opposing truth claim can be integrated, or absorbed, or tolerated, and sometimes it is seen as simply too dangerous, and then it must be destroyed, symbolically or physically. For the non-dominant cultural system, these deaths can be enormously painful to abide. Those who cried when the library at Alexandria burned were mourning far more than the sooty bits of papyrus floating in the air like gray snowflakes. They mourned the death of history, the destruction of a precious record of who they were.
All of this compulsive and sometimes violent aggregation is, at core, an expression of humankind’s deep longing for perspective. Sadly, for all of our extensional wizardry, we are at the end of the day forced to concede the disarming fact that we still have absolutely no idea what it all means. We have a cursory understanding of how our species came to be, but the question of why is as yet unanswerable, and immeasurably troubling. We long for true perspective and we cannot, for all of our compulsive aggregating and correlating, correlate our way to a deeper understanding of who we are. In our quest to alleviate this uncertainty, we’ve developed within our cultural systems elaborate religious constructs and political ideologies; we’ve funneled our money into government-funded space exploration programs. We battle and rage over whose truth is the truest. Then the winners colonize the losers, who subsequently drink themselves to death on parcels of crappy, unarable land until they die out or are simply absorbed into the dominant cultural system. The books burn, and the temples collapse, and the process of aggregation becomes a process of elimination.
Humans seem to lack the perspective to approach aggregation in a more humane way, but perhaps there is hope. Piers Sellers, a Space Shuttle astronaut who has been to outer-space twice, called the experience of viewing the earth from on high “mind shattering,” an experience that overloaded his senses and completely altered his understanding of himself, and the planet he was born on. In a sense, what he achieved was that fabled, long-sought, “perspective from a hill.” Likewise, many credit the visual revelations brought back from the Apollo 8 mission in the 1960s with sparking the global conservation movement. We’d invented microscopes with which to view the miniscule complexity of our organic components, we’d clawed and scratched our way to the top of Mount Everest and to the salty, pressurized depths of the Mariana Trench, but there had before that moment been no hill high enough from which to gain a true perspective of our collective makeup, no mirror which could reveal to us a true reflection of who, and what, we were in the process of becoming. The picture was astonishing.
We go deep and we go high, and we return with snapshots of the things we found, precious bits of knowledge to share and aggregate. The questions of how this knowledge will be divided and with whom it will be shared, whom it belongs to, cause us enormous unrest. And yet the impulse to set out across the dark ocean, to meet up face to face with those other lines of evolution, to find out what they know and tell them what we know, is irresistible, and now, unavoidable.
The Bible tells the story of a time when humans shared a single culture and language, after the Great Flood had washed away the tainted beginnings of civilization and the remaining humans congregated in the city of Babel, where they lived as a united people with a shared tongue. The Babylonians longed to create something larger and lasting, longed to know God more directly. “Let us make a name for ourselves,” they told each other, “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” And so they set about building a great tower, whose top, they hoped, might graze the heavens. But when God spied the mighty obelisk reaching up into the clouds, he grew angry and destroyed their tower, scattered the citizens of Babel across the earth, confusing their languages and condemning them to live apart, disunited, without the benefit of a collective intelligence or the drive of a collective longing. According to the big bang theory, the universe began as a smoldering, densely-packed dot, infinitesimally smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Then, some unnamable force set the boundaries of that dot expanding, and expanding, and expanding, and all of that compressed matter scattered with it in a process of galactic diffusion that continues to this day. Some scientists theorize that this process of dispersal will continue indefinitely, until the components of our universe are hopelessly diluted, all the little bits drifting off into obscurity, becoming unrecognizable, too big even to retain a notable shape.
Either way you slice it, the history of humankind, of cultural systems, is writ as a protracted struggle of aggregation and correlation, a frenzied and sometimes violent attempt to get to the truth and to wrest it into something lasting, to trace the pattern backward to its source, and forward to its ultimate completion, to reach a hill high enough that it might grant us some kind of meaningful perspective, from where all of what we are will lay spread out before us like some giant patchwork, from where the true shape of things might emerge, finally. We have not yet succeeded.
-Ejb
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Toward a Narrative Ethics of Journalism
For decades, the relationship between news gathering and news consumption has been described in metaphors of direct transmission, in terms of acts done by those who create news to those who use news. As with an injection, journalists distill the influx of daily information into a neat, concentrated dose and shoot it into the bulging vein of a passive populace. As with a bank transaction, journalists gather up the golden coins of meaning and deposit them into the heads of the masses. Plink. Everyone’s wiser, happier.
However, such metaphors belie the reality of reporting within and about a complex world. They fail to see news transmission as an active rather than passive endeavor, one that is informed perhaps as much by recipients as by deliverers. They fail to take into account the complexity and imprecision of the language acts that shape journalistic products. And, worst of all, they fail to empower news consumers.
Certainly, the ability to construct and decipher complex spoken or written codes is what sets the homo sapien sapien— the double-knowing human— apart from the rest of the beasts. However, problems arise when those codes are seen as precision systems, when words spoken about a thing are mistaken for the thing itself, for the map is not and can never be the territory it represents (Korzybski, 1933, p. 747). This is even truer in contemporary society, which has grown increasingly “super charged with information” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 122) and “fragmented by linguistic games” (p. 122). To see journalism produced in such an environment as simply “the deposit of truth into the minds of listeners by learned authorities” (p. 104), or to see journalists laboring in such an environment as mere conduits through which transmission occurs is to grossly oversimplify the situation, and to risk seeing news consumers as passive data receptacles.
The post-postmodern age calls for a more nuanced, more empowering and more reciprocal approach to doing journalism; one that acknowledges the complexities and limitations of language-as-a-conduit and works to cultivate conversation, to grow knowledge. This can be accomplished by pushing an agenda of narrative ethics. Such an agenda eschews metaphors of direct transmission and focuses instead on journalism as an interactive endeavor. And as it’s “less moved to persuade than to understand” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 104), it aims to create of dialogue, not transmit monologue.
An emphasis on narrative ethics in journalism empowers the public in several crucial ways. First, as it acknowledges complexity, it provides a useful framework for understanding a dynamic reality. Second, as it invites conversation, it promotes higher levels of mass critical consciousness. Third, as it values input, it encourages communities to develop critical languages with which to interpret their worlds.
If narratives can be understood as “linguistic forms through which we think, argue, persuade, display convictions, and establish our identity” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 114), then narrative ethics, by extension, is concerned with developing codes that move those linguistic forms forward. It demands that journalists ask the question,“‘[w]hat norms or institutions would the members of an ideal or real communication community agree to as representing their common interests after engaging in a special kind of argumentation or conversation?’” (p. 116). Implied here is the crucial importance of argument and dialogue. Assumed here is the fact that such conversations don’t happen nearly as often as they should.
Such a view aligns itself with the broader theory of communitarian journalism, a model which sees news as “a narrative construct that enable cultural beings to fulfill their civic tasks” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 14). Communitarian journalism emphasizes “the dialogic self, community commitment, civic transformation, and mutuality in organizational culture” (p. 13) and expects journalists to create news that encourages such world views and catalyzes such events. The emphasis here is on the proper functioning of the whole and not the discrete operations of the individuals within the whole, and on the view of that whole as an organic, shifting entity that must be re-correlated and re-understood constantly, by journalists and by the community at large.
By acknowledging dynamism at the individual and societal levels, narrative ethics provides a useful framework for interpreting events. It takes on as a goal conversation, not consensus, and acknowledges the metaphor of journalist-as-translator, not the antiquated metaphor of journalist-as-transmitter out of the belief that, inevitably, “in composing their reading of events, the news media selectively form a coherent translation” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 120). At core, narrative ethics recognizes that knowledge takes on the shape of the conduit it passes through, much as water expands to fill the contours of the vessel it is poured into. The contents may retain their essential elements, but they are bound by external forces to recorrelate those elements endlessly.
Certainly, acknowledging such complexity piles a heavier burden of responsibility onto the journalist, for when he begins to see communities as “woven together by narratives that mediate their common understanding of good and evil” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 115), his task of describing and interpreting the world takes on great significance. Thus, “communitarian ethics challenges those storytellers whom we call reporters to specialize in truthful narratives about justice, covenant, and empowerment” (p. 116). A complex world demands explanation, for it is only through “recomposing events into narrative ensures that humans can comprehend a reality at all” (p. 117).
However, the task of meaning-making isn’t left to the journalist alone, for the emphasis narrative ethics places on empowerment encourages the development of a critical mass consciousness. The journalist who views stories as symbolic frameworks that shape the human experience (Christians et al., 1993, p. 114) is compelled to write stories that raise community consciousness. And raised consciousness leads to mass engagement, which in turn allows humanity to prosper enormously (p. 107). Thus, “[n]arration gives order to social life by inducing others to participate with us in its meaning” (p. 114).
Because narrative ethics focuses on the revelation of complexity as an essential step in the journalistic process of meaning creation, it is summarily suspicious of the language of false binaries. While it acknowledges that the asking and answering of questions about good and evil or right and wrong is central to the project of communal meaning construction, it also pushes journalists to question this-or-that dichotomies, to mine the seams of a neglected middle in search of more nuanced perspectives. No longer must citizens searching for meaning drink to the dregs the watery stews of a two-valued orientation. Instead, they’re encouraged to think more critically, to abandon default binary thinking and address the gray territories of their public and private lives.
But critical consciousness remains little more than a dogma until it is tethered to a concrete means of application. Thus, a journalism based in narrative ethics, recognizing that language shapes reality and that “to label the world is to transform it” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 105), also focuses on helping communities develop the critical language skills that will allow them construct a more precise alphabet of meaning.
As a starting point, narrative ethics recognizes the limitations of language by acknowledging its imprecision. Because “language abstracts, just as a map does” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 117), and the sounds and symbols humans use to describe the ideas and objects they come up against in daily life are by nature inadequate to describe experience completely, journalists must work to avoid high-level abstractions. They must aim instead to force the particulars of a story down the ladder of abstraction and into the realm of the concrete whenever possible.
Further, they must insist on precision, and aim for the inclusion of a variety of perspectives. Citizens, for their part, are encouraged not only to participate in the construction of new frameworks, but also to question the validity of existing frameworks, to ask questions of journalists and of each other. This is empowering, for “through literacy and social activism, the oppressed learn to name their world” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 105).
In a many-dimensioned world, the old direct transmission metaphors of journalism read as flat, simplistic. Conversely, a brand of journalism emphasizing narrative ethics advocates a process of doing and consuming journalism that is more mutual, more dialogic. Perhaps our maps will never become precise, perhaps language will always hide more than it reveals, but if nothing else, communities empowered to participate in that imperfect science of plotting coordinates, in that difficult process of attaching words to experiences, are far better equipped to navigate the difficult terrain of human experience.
-Ejb
References
Christians, C. G., & Fackler, P. M., & Ferre, J. P. (1993). Good news: social ethics and the press. New York: Oxford University Press.
Korzybski, A. (1933). Science and sanity. Lancaster: The Science Press.
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A Random Social Experiment in Four-Point-Five Parts
Part One.
So I got this e-mail awhile back…
FROM MR. BROWN TO ME:
My name is Wilson Brown.
And I am married to Lilian. We are from
Portugal, working and residing in Nigeria on contract for (SHELL).
My wife and Children are not really good when it comes to speaking English hence we require an ESL Teacher to come and spend One year with us. You
would teach my wife and my two kids how to speak English and
some writing too. This is very important to me hence I would be
offering to pay you $4500 every month.
You would have a Private Live-Out or Live-In Accomdation depending on
your preference with Private Bathroom, SittingRoom and Bedroom. Your room
would also be furnished with a TelevisionSet, an Internet Ready
Computer System and a Fixed Landline telephone. If you can drive,We can make arrengment for that too.
You would take them in English Classes every evening. You would also
have the weekends off .Weekends with us is very fun as we visit fun
spots, go sightseeing and amusement parks. Do not worry about your travel
arrangements as we would assist you in that regards when the time comes.
I have attached our family picture for you.
Please write me on my personal e mail address
Wilsonx.family@gmail.com
I hope to hear from you in earnest.
We’ve all seen these circulating around. Sometimes the specs change and it’s a French family. Or the job is in Ethiopia. Or it is some convoluted nonsense about bank accounts and disgraced statesmen and large wads of foreign currencies waiting at the Western Union. I’d always kind of wondered about the people sending these out. I mean, it must work, or they’d stop doing it. But how do they go about convincing these poor suckers? I wanted to find out what the alleged Mr. Brown would do if I went along for awhile. So I wrote back.
Part Two.
FROM ME TO MR. BROWN:
Kind Sir–
I received your job offer and would like to express my keen interest in moving to Nigeria to teach English to your uneducated wife and illiterate children. It must be fate that you wrote me about a position in Nigeria, actually, because I’ve always dreamed of moving to Mexico. I just love the Mexican people, with their sombreros and their little mustaches… I can just picture myself now, teaching reading, writing and ‘rithmetic to your dear little ones as we sit outside the cabana, eating tamarindos and sunning ourselves… Do you happen to live near any tamale stands?
I do have several questions:
1. Am I allowed to bring my pet liger? He has separation anxiety something terrible and I couldn’t bear to leave him here with my mom. She hates animals and has threatened to send him to the glue factory. He is small and doesn’t smell too bad, and I promise that I’d keep him in the closet.
2. I only have one eye. Would this be a problem? It has not affected my teaching in the past and I can assure you that people with one eye can do everything that normal people can do. Maybe even more! I just wanted to warn you, because my glass eyeball falls out occasionally and this tends to frighten small children. I would be willing to tape my lid shut in to avoid any such mishaps during my stay with your family.
Well, that’s all I can think of for now. Let me reiterate my enthusiastic interest in the position you have available.
Please advise me of what I need to do next to secure this enticing position.
Most Very Sincerely,
Georgie G. Pompigiorgio
Part Three.
So he wrote me back in a day or so and offered me the “teaching position.” Yay!
FROM MR. BROWN TO ME:
Dear Erin Bernard,
Thanks for your mail with details
I and my wife have gone through your mail and we have concluded to consider giving you the chance of being our Esl teacher and i thing we can cope with your unfortunate inabilities, beliving you will do better while staying with us. we will like you to send us your Refferences, job or working experinces for our study so we can procceed with other arrengments.
Looking forward to hearing from you soonest
Sincerely
Wilson Brown
So I wrote him back again.
Part Four.
FROM ME TO MR. BROWN:
Dear Kind Sir,
When I received your letter, I leapt from my chair in a fit of uncontrollable celebration. My teeth chattered and my hands shook, and a small trickle of urine escaped from my bladder. Just imagine… of all the qualified applicants that must surely be clamoring to take you up on your fine, fine offer, it’s ME you want! Me! Mere words simply cannot convey the storm of emotions inside of me. I, too, am confident that a sojourn in Peru with you are your wee little derliects will prove an emollient salve for my many troubles. My unrestrained joy and enthusiasm are tempered, however, by a few further concerns that I have with regards to the fine position you are offering.
First off, I was recently diagnosed with a mild case of rage epilepsy, and I am worried about how a sudden onset of an episode of RE might affect your little children if it were to occur during one of my teaching lessons. Rage epilepsy is characterized by sudden bursts of violence including but not limited to fits of cursing and physical violence in the form of slapping, kicking, spitting and uncontrollable flailing of the limbs. Such an attack can come on without warning. I had an episode this morning, for example, in which I am told I bitch-slapped my poor, sweet Grannie Pompigiorgio and called her names too terrible to repeat in mixed company. Oh, the shame! If you wish to learn more about my condition, the malady of rage epilepsy was addressed with profound compassion and insight on the television show “Melrose Place” in episodes 54-59. See, this one lady hated her husband and wanted to divorce him in order to marry her new lover, but she wanted to get a lot of money from said husband first, so she and her boyfriend, Michael, who happened to be a doctor, decided to start slipping drugs into her husband Peter’s drinks. Then he’d black out and Michael would beat up the girlfriend and then they’d pretend that Peter had done it and when he woke up he’d feel really horrible and give her money and things. Anyways, that is my confession. Do you think my condition will get better if I come stay with your family?
I will gather the requested references. I am currently working at a prosthetic limb manufacturing plant and can provide the email of my foreman as a reference if you want.
I look forward to hearing back from you most soonly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Georgie G. PompigiorgioAnd he wrote me back again.Part Five.
Regards
wilson BrownAND THEN… That’s the end. Sorry. I got bored of the experiment.
-Ejb.
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Trial Run: Death By Pop Rocks and Coke?
The Premise It’s an infamous urban myth: chase a bag of Pop Rocks candy with a can of Coca-Cola and you’ll explode. The purported science? Both products contain the element carbon: it gives Coke its trademark fizz, while Pop Rocks pop due to pressurized carbon dioxide. Ingest both at once, the carbon builds up, and, boom!
The History According to the official Pop Rocks website, this urban myth has been traced to Seattle-area playgrounds, circa 1979. Around that time, a rumor also surfaced that little Mikey of Life cereal commercials fame had died after ingesting the gassy combo. Parents panicked, the FDA set up a Pop Rocks helpline, and General Foods went on damage control, writing letters to 50,000 US principals, advertising in 45 major publications, and sending the candy’s inventor on a cross-country myth-debunking tour. But all for naught. Sales dropped precipitously, and the product was pulled in 1983.
The Trial Pop Rocks resurfaced in 1985, however, and they’ve been on shelves ever since. For my experiment, I picked up a pack of the Strawberry variety and a 20-oz Coke at a local convenience store. “That could kill you,” the cashier warned me, warily eyeing the twosome. I laughed dangerously, but my stomach fluttered. Could it really? Standing in my kitchen 2 hours later, heart quivering, I tore open the package and poured its fluorescent contents into my mouth, chasing it quickly with the Coke. A semi-pleasant crackling sensation began in my mouth and throat as the candy popped and the soda fizzed. I kept drinking. And drinking. I felt my belly expand as I gulped, and the crackling became markedly unpleasant as the carbon ballooned my belly to seismic proportions. In 2 minutes, I’d stomached the entire concoction and was burping copiously. Bloated, sticky and exhausted, I collapsed onto the couch to await my fate.
The Verdict Relegate this urban myth to the nonsense pile, along with the microwaved poodles and the headless KFC chickens. An hour after the fact, the potent brew is still fizzing in my stomach, but aside from some monster belches and a nasty sugar hangover, I am fully intact and feel just fine. Well… sort of.
(First published in the Weekend Missourian)
-Ejb.
Sources:
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When we came upon Ms. Breeze, she began to kick and whinny, shouting a string of obscenities and violently resisting our attempts to photograph the scene and brush out her flowing mane, now covered in burrs and dead leaves.Thankfully, her 3-inch stature prevented any real damage from being inflicted. She had apparently been subsisting on worms and cigarette butts and was unable to explain how she’d gotten there. At one point, Ms. Breeze flung herself over the edge of a nearby precipice in what was apparently an attempt at suicide.
After photographing Ms. Breeze and attempting to calm her down,
we decided against freeing the miniature horse, on fear that if given the opportunity, she might kill again. So, Ms. Breeze will remain at said corner until such a time as the local Portland authorities are able to come to a consensus as to the proper manner of capture and incarceration. In the meantime, rumor has it that several other miniature horses have been spotted, chained to horse ties around the Portland area in a similar fashion. Several derelicts from a local gang of Clydesdale pimps are under suspicion. However, at the time of publication, no leads had yet panned out.
Ms. Breeze should be considered a violent and dangerous animal, and passers by are warned to exercise extreme caution in approaching her. Ms. Breeze’s sister, Twirlerina, who still resides at Crystal Rainbow Castle, was quoted as saying, “Sweet Breeze was always a half-breed cheap flooze. Her birth father was part donkey, you know… I hope a cat eats her.” The rest of the family could not be reached for comment.
-EjB
