Save the Earth, do this!

"Green" has been popular recently. The new American, the upper middle class city-dwelling American (funny how we only ever talk about the upper middle class), is all about green. Especially the young people, the youth, "our generation," this generation which somehow thinks it is the first rebellious generation or the most important. They shop at Whole Foods and eat at restaurants that have fair-trade and locally grown food. They wear flip flops made of recycled tires. They have compact fluorescent bulbs in their outlets, and are willing to suffer through their two second charge up time for the greater good. They ride fixed-gear bikes and scooters or even a Prius. And they're saving the world, aren't they? All these little bits add up, don't they? I mean if we all switched to CF bulbs we'd take half a million cars off the road! If everyone just unplugged their cellphone chargers when they were turned off, it'd save enough electricity to power 16 million homes a year! And if one in three Americans used a reusable water bottle instead of disposable ones it'd be like taking 1 million cars off the road a year!

These are both examples from a presentation I saw at school today aimed at "cool teens like me" about global warming. It had a nice presentation animated in Adobe Flash with some cool graphs and a little character that was supposed to be you the viewer flying through these various scenarios and ideas it demonstrated. It took subtle design cues from Anime and hipster fashion. It laid out the danger of global warming, and how afraid we should really be of it, and how many people will die soon because of it, with surprising honesty (although the fullest and most startling ramifications of what it stated were neatly avoided). There was a slideshow of images of destruction, of graphs of the 10 hottest years on record happening in the past 20 years, of people drowning in the Katrina storms and in other disasters around the world that were certainly serious enough. But then came the part about what "you" can do to help. And then it strayed seriously and irresponsibly from reality, even if it was directed at us cool teens. What it did was a beautiful example of the central flaw of this new green ideology.

It said that global warming could be easily stopped by us each creating simple and easy changes in our daily lives.

This is wrong.

Global warming, firstly, cannot be stopped. People will die because of past greenhouse gas emissions. Millions of us.

But secondly, curbing greenhouse emissions so as to at least avoid our own extinction will not be easy. It will not involve anything like biking to work instead of driving or unplugging power strips or recycling your shoes. These things are very bad at saving the environment. That's a fact. All of these estimates are astronomical, even if we COULD all stop eating at McDonalds or driving to work (which of course, many Americans cannot). The math here is obvious, as the vast majority of pollution comes from China and India anyway. What these simple things are good at is eliminating guilt. And the elimination of guilt is a very easy thing to sell. To box, to advertise, and to market. And that's exactly what's happening. Nothing is being re-evaluated. Our motives, our ideas, our values, and the ways we live our lives are not changing. Green is just a new product. Like rock'n'roll was in the 50's. Like free love was in the 60's and 70's. Like human rights were in the 80's. Like punk, like hip-hop, like rap, like tattoos, like electric guitars. All of it, all the counterculture, all the "new" ways of doing things, all of the "young" people's rebellious ideas, just more products to be marketed and sold, and green is no exception.

So if we can't change the world by posting videos on YouTube and inventing yet another genre of music, what can we do? Well, if you're thinking protest politically then you're still wrong. The American government cannot exist in its current form in a world without global warming because the only way to sustain a national lifestyle anything like this is to build it on the shoulders of millions of brown-skinned slaves thousands of miles away and pollute their air instead of ours. No, traditional political protest is just that- traditional. It fits within the system as a pressure release valve so that people think the government works for them. Real political protest does get some things done, sometimes. It improved race relations in America in 1964, and, well, maybe sort of ended the Vietnam war, and did nothing about all the other wars, but still, sometimes it works sort of. Our government was designed 300 years ago and it would take a while for me to learn what they were thinking then but the bottom line is it doesn't work at all like we want it to and lobbying the government to make what are ultimately small aesthetic changes to our nation's workings is only a bit more useful than turning off our lights when we leave a room.

Now you're thinking, our government is controlling the media, forcing us to bend to their will, making the real decisions behind closed doors! We must use our second amendment rights and overthrow it VIOLENTLY!!! That would be so easy, wouldn't it? War is one of the most terrible and destructive human experiences and nobody walks out of it the same, but walking in to it, it looks pretty badass. It'll be like CoD4! And it is easy in that you don't have to think, or rethink, or reevaluate. You just have to destroy. Violent government overthrow may be physically impossible but it's mentally, spiritually, and intellectually very easy. And very ineffective. What will we have to replace our government? I'd draw on a historical example, but I can't think of one really, but I'm still pretty sure I'm right about this. The most recent semi-violent people's revolution was in Egypt, and that was overthrowing a REAL dictator, who tortured and murdered his political enemies. It was led by a bunch of YouTubing twenty-somethings with no real plan for their nation. And for this reason I predict chaos in Egypt. Overthrowing the government without something to replace it will make things worse.

So what do we do? How do we save the Earth? How do we save ourselves? Well, I think I have part of an answer, but it involves writing these long boring things called books and having these kind of big involved thoughts that can't fit in a seven minute youtube video or an already extremely long blog post. It's really pretty boring, this answer, and pretty dry and dull and complicated. I'm not sure if I can make a powerpoint on it or  a cute flash animation. So you, being the modern American, probably won't be interested. In order to figure out how to say what I want to say and what it really is I'm going to have to do boring things like read long books by some stuffy old white people and also some disturbing things like investigate the world's largest landfill in Brazil and the people who work there who are treated like human trash, or research the untouchables in India who work and live in human feces in order to uphold the social structure that gives us our free tech support hotlines. I'd love to tell you but I don't exactly know yet. Feel free to email me if you want to know the answer to the actual question heading this blog post, but there's no room or time to post something that long or complicated or interesting or rewarding here.

Because the answer can't be marketed or boxed or coded in to HTML and it can never, ever be sold.

We have the right

I believe that we as humans have two kinds of rights from two different sources. The first kind is those of natural rights. These rights are given to us the moment we are born. They are a part of our birth and are given to us through the same mysterious and fundamentally unrequited process by which we are given life. These rights include the rights that a lone Human has upon standing on the earth, and can only be infringed by other humans. They have to do with a Human's solitary existence and control of the path of their life, and must be declared when the Human first comes in to contact with others. This lone human, I believe, has the right not to be imprisoned, killed, or silenced by other humans. This human has the right to the fundamental equality stemming from human plurality, in that any single human can be no better or worse than any other. A constitution of these natural rights might look something like this:

1. The Human has the right to equality with all other humans.

2. The Human has the right not to have their voice silenced and to express their own voice as much or as little as they wish. The Human has the right to be heard (but not necessarily listened to).

3. The Human has the right to all of the gifts of life they were given at birth. 

    3a. The physical gifts of mobility, health, and life shall not be infringed by any other human.

    3b. The mental and spiritual gifts of freedom of belief and freedom of control of the Human's own life   

          shall not be infringed by any other human.

4. The Human has the right to take from nature what they will and to claim any piece of their own human fabrication as  their personal property. (The Human does not have the right to claim the land itself.)

The other kind of right is communitarian rights- the rights which are not fundamental to our existence but which we give ourselves (and, necessarily, eachother, lest we defy the first natural right) once we form any kind of group with other humans. In an ideal community, all of these rights will be decided upon by the entire group. Unanimous consensus is not exactly necessary but some form of unanimity is almost always possible and ideal- as long as the right of the Human to leave the group is not infringed, however, their disagreement can be consensually overridden by the majority (as per the right to be heard but not to be listened to). 

TBC i have to go to chipawtle

I know this means something.

Weird title. And over a month late. Whatevs.

I've said this a lot. I've encountered a lot of things in my life and said, I know this means something.

Like looking around on the internet for dubstep that doesn't suck, and then finding one glittering perfect track amidst a bunch of stupidly bad youtube videos and comments such as "dirtier than my bongwater." Hearing this song, hearing how perfectly it moves and how you can see action happening in it, to it, around it, how you can visualize yourself walking on the moon with this playing in your ears. And it has to mean something.

Or sitting on the train, overwrought, trying to figure out how to create a truly democratic society, imagining a group of peers sitting in a perfect circle. And you think to yourself, I really don't feel like laughing right now. Like there's got to be nothing that could make me laugh right now. Because stuff is really only funny when it's happening, in context, because of who you're with. It's not like anything's objectively funny. So what could possibly happen to make me laugh, right now? And suddenly some weird voice of some guy singing comes in off the platform through the open doors of the train and everyone on the train cracks up. Even you. That has to mean something.

My life has to mean something. There's a bookshelf somewhere in my mind that has these ancient books in it, tomes, otherworldly, in a language no one speaks. And I don't speak it. It looks like nothing to me, lines of black ink symbols that I can't even fathom. But I know they say something, that information was encoded in the relative positions of these dark pigment molecules on this sheet of cellulose. I think I wrote them. We wrote them. I know it means something.

The fifty tabs open in my browser. The way I keep bookmarking webpages and forgetting to check any of them out. The wires in my computer. The transistors and the speakers and the cathode ray tubes. The books around me and the trash in my room and the garbage on my floor and my guitars. The abilities I was born with and my expanding mind. Circles. Lines. Forms. Geometry.

The moon and its perfect three to eleven ratio with the earth. The thirty three years Jesus lived. The thirty three years it takes for the sun to set in exactly the same place twice. The way the moon perfectly eclipses the sun. The tides and the rhythms of the earth.

And the way I cry. And the darkness. How much I hate myself sometimes and how much I can't take it anymore. The way it feels to be measured. Like an object. The way it feels to be expected to do something and then not be able to do it. The way it feels to fail. Expecting something of yourself that you don't have and were never taught. Procrastinating. Or just not doing the things you don't want to do. And never being able to find things you want to do.

And not being able to keep going.

I know this means something.

Album Review- The Brothers of Chico Dusty

One of my friends posted a link to a dubstep remix of the bed intruder song, and after watching and lol'ing apropriately I followed the link back to its artist, a DJ called Wick-It the Instigator. Apparently, in addition to making pretty terrible dubstep, he does this completely weird thing that completely baffled me: he mixes entire albums together. It seems like he isolates all the different vocal and instrumental tracks in two completely different songs and overlays them in a way that I can only describe as masterful. His newest such venture, The Brothers of Chico Dusty, is a "mash-up" of "Brothers" by the black keys, a modern bluesy-rock band, and "The Son of Chico Dusty," a hip-hop/rap album by the rapper big boi, who is apparently friends with Wick-it.

The album itself was really cool and enjoyable. I don't really like the black keys's vocals and in my opinion most hip-hop backing tracks suck so this was a very apropriate combination. Each sound reinforced the other's message and impact. Also, the production quality was amazing; every track sounded like all of it was recorded in a studio at the same time, while in reality the artists may have never met eachother.

But what's really amazing are the implications of such a style of musical producition. This album combines two relatively expensive productions, both of which probably made tons of cash for their record companies, in to an original album that's apparently public domain. I have no idea whether or not he got the rights to either album, but at this point suing him will not stop the production of this album. In fact, at this point, I'm just as qualified and able to distribute Wick-it's album as he is.

The idea of producing music like this is actually very subversive of modern American capitalism (which is suprising because music has only actually been anti-capitalist, like, once.) If every track changes from, say, "Song A" by Artist 1 to "Song A/B mashup" by Artist 1 vs. Artist 2 ft. lil wayne and gucci mayne Wick-it remix, then what do we do about paying them? When everyone with a computer can get pretty close to the top of production values, who do we worship as our pop icons? Even the most "subversive" punk rock has had exactly the same power structure as any modern musical genre- there are a few "stars" who produce music that's definitively "theirs," and it's literally illegal to change their music and redistribute it, even if you paid for the data that comprises their song. This mash-up style represents a very real change in the way music is produced. And I think that decentralized, free music will be very interesting indeed.

Winter poem!!

Walking home it's dark
Drop the gate key in the snow
Cold, wet it becomes

Ice coating sidewalk
Deceptively clear and thin
Slip and scrape my palms

Walk to taco truck
Bad Mexican food for lunch
They don't pay taxes

Heater on all night
Wake up sweating but peaceful
Move sheets, feel safe, sleep

Sky growing lighter
The earth rounds its circled orb
Seasons never still

King still the King?

Martin Luther King is possibly the most unanimously celebrated figure in American history. This is because his words and his philosophy- that we should love all of mankind despite any physical or even cultural barriers- are pretty palatable to everyone, including people with a lot of power. It's pretty much required that you absolutely agree with everything he said. But there's a serious blind spot in America's concept of King, and it lies in the fact that people don't actually believe what he said at all. It's really easy to go along with King-worship when you can just talk about love and universality, when you can reference his speeches from Capitol Hill or quote him to your class, when you can profess to believe in what he said without actually delineating a plan or a policy to move closer to his ideals. People repeat what he said without talking about what he actually meant. It's as if his preacherly southern drawl is what we remember and not the words he spoke with it.

The idea of universal human love is actually very radical. Practicing universal human love would involve a fundamental change in the way America governs itself. We would have to love the Iraqi people. We would have to love the Taliban. We would have to love Al Qaeda. We would even have to love Osama bin Laden, and to understand that even he is our same species. A lot of people would call this a total perversion of King's ideas and say that these people are standing in the way of equality and prosperity and therefore must be stopped, but that's simply not what Martin Luther King thought. He, like Ghandi, believed that loving the group that oppresses you is the only way to break their stranglehold and the only way to move forward. What I said is simply the logical extention of his I Have a Dream speech, simply an update of King's statements. And that is absolutely unacceptable for the American power structure. So we turn his birthday into a day off and talk about how great he was without discussing any real context for his words, while every day in the Middle East we violate his dream in ways more violent and oppressive than even those used against King himself.