2010 – Voices In My Head

Sarah Palin

When I consider Sarah Palin (and the Tea Party she exemplifies) in a way she might even favor politically, I hear myself saying “It’s OK, dude.  A majority of Americans can’t or won’t contend with complexity on every level simultaneously.  That modernity well succeeds day to day is itself a kind of proof for a White God.  So go with it!  Play along, but play to win.  It’s the American Way – as long as you’re so much richer than the guy next door, no pox can ever befall your house!”

It’s a game I imagine many “Sarah, Barracuda” types playing in full throat without a hint of humility, apology or guilt.  Only there’s a fundamental resource problem inherent in a “Greed Is Good” world view, as wars and crises begin to outstrip its successes and expose its delusions.

My final thought about Sarah Palin is that her attractive and arguably charming persona, like Reagan before her, evokes the tired (and on some level uniquely White/Christian) cliché that one’s perceived virtue is correlated to the number of people that might enjoy fucking you.  The “success” of Sarah Palin explains why a too-white, now morbidly obese nation of former lifeguards (and wannabe’s) is getting its capitalist clock cleaned by nations of engineers like China and Germany.

K’NAAN

Adele Stan of Alternet wrote “When the going gets tough, the tough make art.”  That’s what I think when I listen to K’NAAN sing or speak about his/Somalia/Africa’s daily life.  K’NAAN’s is the voice of a continent (maybe a planet) once abandoned after throwing off the colonial yoke of whites that raped it nightly yet made the trains run on time the next day.  It’s a song for tomorrow, germinated in the tears of lingering losses.

David Grossman

Learning to live with yourself can’t be easy if you’re a “leftist” Israeli.  But hearing and reading Grossman’s prose in its context of inconsolable personal and historical loss,  is refuge for rationalists in a world insane – at least by Einstein’s definition of repeating mistakes while magically expecting different results.  Grossman makes it impossible to ignore that love not politics or economics remains the greatest human evolutionary force.

 

In summary, congratulations, we’re one year older!  This is definitely not the Age of Aquarius.  Blame no one but yourself.  If you want to be a better person, get a dog, watch and learn.  Helena’s Giant remains Sleeping at the edge of the valley outside my window.  And I remain weird, but more defensive about it than ever.