Currently, I'm reading a book entitled, "Why We Hate Us" by Dick Meyer, a former CBS Newsman, and aside from having a very bold cover design that gets lots of inquiries and attention from strangers who spy me reading it, this book has in the first 19 pages, managed to articulate a frustration I've had for years. What a comfort. And so, in the great modern tradition of confiding in the computer with the hope that someone else will see one's thoughts and uncover some understanding in them, I will include a passage that I find particularly poignant. Perhaps, dear reader, it will offer you something as well.

"...We have now discovered that for all too many grown Aquarians and their children, liberation degenerated into narcissism. What matters most is Me: the sacred, discovered, reinvented center of the universe-Me. It is selfism.
It didn't start that way. In 1968, Theodore Roszak coined the term "counterculture", calling it "the effort to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the bourgeois, and the Protestant work ethic." But getting rid of the old proved easier than creating the new. Hungry capitalism wrought as much or more social disruption as liberation movements. The culture didn't just toss out the destructive and oppressive customs. Useful social mores and ties suffered, too, especially when it came to that uptight bourgeois word "moral". Many "have tos" began disappearing: Men didn't have to hold the door for women. Companies didn't have to consider the welfare of workers on par with stockholders. Couples didn't have to be in committed relationships to have sex or be married to have children. Children didn't have to care for elderly parents. There were a million "have tos" to argue about. But the cumulative effect was an erosion of socially shared ways of treating others respectfully, the ties that make community possible. A new selfism trumped everyday moral impulses. But without community, it didn't make selves any happier." ...

the book goes on to discuss the relationship we have to modern culture and it's effect on our own mental and social states, and in the words of one reviewer, "...diagnoses the self-loathing, moral confusion and ennui that infect supersized America without hectoring and badgering us and without tiresome self-righteousness or smugness."
If you're an Anthropology dork like me, it's shaping up to be a fantastic read.

Now, if you'll excuse me - the cat has decided I'm done typing for the night and planted herself firmly atop the keyboard.

soir

There are so many powerful sentiments in this essay, but as an Ode to Joy, this one ends with a bang. "The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to,-for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well,- is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellowmen. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet seen."

..."This also explains, in part -- or gestures at such an explanation -- something about what Godard is suggesting about desire and love and hate, the way that desire is triangulated by love, or perhaps more to the point by hate, or perhaps more to the point by hate which is actually just an attempt to evade love, or love which is in fact just an attempt to evade hate. I have loved certain young, beautiful, economically-powerful women, I am convinced, precisely because I thought that by possessing them, I would prove to those I hated -- people to whom such young, beautiful, economically-powerful women were destined -- that I could be them, and therefore did not hate them simply out of insufficiency, because my only other choice was to try and fail to be them; proving, in other words, that I didn’t just, in my hatred, desperately want to be them.

Except, of course, that I did.

Which isn’t to say that none of these young, beautiful women -- there have been, let’s see, at least two -- wasn’t worthy of being loved in her own right, but simply that I did not love them in their own right. I loved them because of the right that the person -- the mythical person, the kind of person, the imagined person, my rival -- I hated had to them, or something like that."

- excerpt taken from Eli S. Evans’ essay,
Archie and the Gang: A Politics of Desire part 2

I'm not sure why we have organizations and committees set up filled with suits who go home to comfortable houses and 5* meals and whom we praise for being wonderful humanitarians, while things like THIS are still happening. When the Secretary General of the UN travels to the Sudan region and is shocked at the violence and devastation that is occuring, what are we doing wrong?


Hollywood is starting to eclipse our public servants and news sources in their awareness of and reporting on current events... Did Hotel Rwanda not expose the genocide to mass audiences years ago? And if so, how did that escape Mr. Ki-moon? There are more ways than ever to communicate and people seem to know less every day.


We need to take ownership of our world. To protect it. To be of it and not on it. I want to see different headlines in the morning... State dinners don't solve problems. Elbow grease and a will to end injustice do.