April 30th, 2008 by Hoopleton

As we sag under the torrent of information overload – information that is neither useful nor comforting – the world continues to change in all sorts of ridiculous ways. Earthquakes in unlikely areas seem to offer foreboding of a planet ready to shake us all off at a moment’s notice. Stories of girls raped by their fathers in basement dungeons over twenty years remind us of our ever-present dark nature. Monsters from the ancient world melt out of the ice as to warn us that change is ever eternal and that our time of complacency is nearly at an end.

In everyone’s life there comes a time for major decisions to be made. There comes a time when one can’t sit idly by and hope that destiny intervenes. Our minds may know what we are about to do before we even think about doing it, but we as in our conscious minds in the present have little awareness of future events. I do believe in fate. I do believe that free will is probably an illusion. Everything that will happen has happened before and will happen again. So my gestures may be futile. I’m probably playing the hand I’ve been dealt exactly as I should play it, but life is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. So decisions, whether scripted or not, still need to be made. Stage direction must and will be followed.

The world is changing. Maybe as the Mayans said, we are coming to the end of this cycle of creation. But I can’t wait for that. I will not wait for that. I’m just behind the curtain about to hear my cue. What drives me to act my part is not my age, nor my compulsion for excitement, nor my desires to find my end. What drives me is curiosity about what comes next. Even in my darkest thoughts its this desire that keeps me breathing.

When talking to my dad the other day, he said that the reason that Europe was able to conquer the world was not due to gunpowder, or horses, or smallpox, but simply due to an overabundance of curiosity. Curiosity about what lay beyond the next horizon. Curiosity of what can be achieved. Its lack of curiosity that makes us settle. It’s the lack of curiosity that keeps us shut in.

I’m a teacher. I’m a writer. But more than anything else I’m a student of human nature. I’m a student of the condition we call life. I’m a student forever learning and exploring. We all are. At no other point in history, I feel, is finding true understanding more possible than at this very moment. In no other point in the last ten thousand years of recorded time have we been closer to grasping the true meaning of why we’re here. The information stream is nearly overwhelming and at every turn on the yet infant world wide web the signs are everywhere. We are at the cusp of change. We are the edge of apocalypse – not in the sense of rapture or biblical Armageddon – but in the form of an unraveling that only comes out true and naked deconstruction.

It’s in this environment that curiosity drives me. It’s in this fog of dreams and scripted nuances that I feel decisions must be made.

In the midst of the data stream I can be everything and nothing all at once and accept what destiny holds for me. And I can accept that the illusion of free will and the hand of fate do not have to be at opposing sides of the spectrum. I can still be curious about the coming days, the world around me, and also accept that my mind’s eye has already seen all of this unfold. In this I can find meaning. This to me makes sense. Because, after all, what is the point of a life not lived? What is the point of a life not examined? Maybe illusion is what we crave and what binds us to ourselves.

April 23rd, 2008 by Hoopleton

I take comfort in knowing that on this day in 1564, some 452 years ago, William Shakespeare was born in the hamlet of Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s nice to consider the correlation between our own birthdays and those of more famous people who came before us, especially someone so legendary as the man who went on to revolutionize not only the craft of writing, but the entire English language.

Yes, today is my birthday. Twenty-nine years ago in the Polish port city of Gdansk, formally the Prussian trade hub called Danzig, I came into a world of stark contrasts. My parents were members of the Solidarity movement, marching and writing against the Communist government first installed by Stalin at the close of the Second World War. My very first memory is of the government’s declaration of martial law in the wake of a burgeoning democratic revolution. I remember asking my dad why the morning cartoons had been replaced by a stern looking man in glasses reading a speech about the necessity to take strong measures in the wake of growing social unrest. I didn’t understand at the time the full weight of what was happening. Of course, how could I?

I don’t remember all twenty-nine of my birthdays. The first several are almost a complete blur. I recall only fragments from my youth. Cheap toys and heartfelt congratulations that will probably stay with me longer than any other memories. The birthdays of my adolescence tend to merge into one clichéd cacophony of balloons, cakes and presents. The birthdays of the last decade I think I remember most clearly. Dinner parties with friends. Late-night drinking binges. Reflections and regrets.

As I come within one year of three decades as a citizen of this world, I can’t say that I feel old. I can’t say that I feel grown up. As a friend and I discussed the other night, the only thing that ever makes me feel unaccomplished is when I consider the mundane expectations that many of my old acquaintances have already fully embraced. I don’t own property. I’m not married. I certainly don’t have any children to continue my wayward family line. Truth is, although I should be planning for the bare necessities of what we accept life to be, I have no desire for those things.

I’m not sure I’m the type of person who will ever have a wife. I’m not sure I’m the type of person who will ever know what they want to be when they grow up. All I know for certain is that I’m looking for purpose and meaning. A meaning that comes out of reflection. A meaning that probably comes at a price.

Our time is short. Our passage lonely. As I walked through a park today I glanced back at my footprints in the sand of a baseball diamond and wondered how long it would be till they disappeared. But again I took some solace in Shakespeare and the memories of the last twenty-nine years that form the basis for who I am and for whom I long to be. There’s something to be said for the passage of time even if it does bring us that much closer to becoming ourselves just a fading memory.

In the end what matters is what we do today. Not what we’re remembered for. Not for how people celebrate our names, but for who we are at this moment, at this time. What matters are memories as they form. Such is the sum of life. Such is the experience of being human.

April 22nd, 2008 by Hoopleton

Today is the Democratic Pennsylvania Primary and yet another opportunity for the party out of power to take one more step further away from Pennsylvania Avenue. Hillary Clinton, the prodigal daughter of the dynastic traditions of the American Presidency, hopes to come out of today’s contest with a sizable enough lead to drag on her war of attrition for yet another day.

She’s played the game well. At nearly every step she has pandered to the Democratic base, swapping shots with mine workers, quickly jabbing at the apparent elitism of her one major opponent and shedding the occasional tear when her callousness has been challenged. Despite the fact that many of her closest supporters have already taken up the banner of Barack Obama, and despite the fact that her nomination, as it stands, is a mathematical impossibility, she continues to dig in and lob grenades.

Even though Obama has proven himself over and over to be the more nuanced, intelligent, brave, consistent and overall presidential nominee, Hillary continues to hold the line. Her support comes partly through an authentic need for a woman president, but also partly thanks to her relentless tactic of scorched earth. Whether its members of her own party, or an opposition that still holds firm to just less than half of Congress, the Senator from New York is a master of playing Blue against Red and Left against Right, while also professing to hold true to the values of the very people she holds in such contempt.

In my mind, Hillary Clinton’s brutal last stand policy is just a final death rattle in the destructive force that has been the Clinton family legacy. During his tenure in office, Bill rode the wave of economic prosperity, while championing unrestricted free trade policy and fucking portly interns while a million people were being slaughtered in Rwanda. His entire two-term reign was a magnificent accomplishment in the annals of do-nothing presidencies, destined to go down in history among the likes of a dozen or so Presidents you’ve never heard of and most likely never will. I didn’t like Bill Clinton for the same reason the far Right never liked Bill Clinton, he usurped their ideologies and proved to be the better salesman.

In the end it was also Bill who’s mainly responsible for the ascension of another Bush to the White House. If the Clintons had actually bothered to do anything of substance in their time in office and if our President hadn’t been in such a hurry to make an ass out of himself then maybe the rigged election in Florida would never have mattered as Al Gore wouldn’t have had to play the game with one arm tied behind his back.

I do think that a woman should be president, but I also happen to think that a qualified woman should be president. I don’t object to Hillary being cold or calculating. Unfortunately such is the nature of politics. I object to families ruling democracies as they did monarchies. I object to a Clinton continuation, which I think will be just as good for America as the second helping of the Bush clan. I object to candidates running for public office who feel that they have been preordained by divine right to rule over us lowly peasants. I object to people who would rather destroy everything, then allow anyone else to win.

April 17th, 2008 by Hoopleton

Life is an adventure. You have to treat everyday that passes as though it could be the last you’ll have. Cliché, I know. Not easy to do when every single moment is regimented. It’s not easy to do when security is always on our minds. But one thing is for certain. Life can be an adventure if you let it be. Even the mundane can turn exciting under the right conditions, especially if you live in such interesting times.

For those of us living in the United States, even under the current clouds of war, societal collapse and massive incompetence of leadership, we are among the most blessed people in the world. We are caught in the groundswell of a new democratic movement. Thanks in part to new technologies and growing social networks, although we seem more isolated in our lives, we are awash in information, choice and opportunity. The vanguards of free market theory and dictated social policy are beginning to erode. For the first time in our history we are seeing a burgeoning consciousness of citizen and consumer, no longer satisfied with the natural order as established by corporations or nation-states; no longer a willing slave to marketing or sound-bite manipulation. The shock therapy of the Cold War is beginning to wear away. Age-old paradigms are becoming obsolete.

Revolutions of consciousness have often followed technological innovation. The printing press made it possible for the Protestant Reformation and the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The telegraph opened the world to the nationalistic and independence movements of the last hundred years.

Today as I skim the pages of hundreds of blogs and online articles that are slowly destroying print journalism, or play random youtube videos that are undermining network television, or download music that eradicates the need for record labels or distributors, I see that we live in the midst of a cultural transition. More and more we are moving away from old media and into the uncharted waters of the next age of human development. As we grow and change, we find ourselves continuously adapting and constantly shifting. Life seems exciting again.

We do have real problems. Global warming; the death throws of empires unwilling to accept their collapse; and the constant presence of old guard doctrines that refuse to die. But below the surface more of us are becoming connected to the stream. People from all walks of life are posting their stories, they’re exhibiting their art, and embracing the idea that we are all global citizens. For the first time in human history, despite the loud shrieks of extremists and fundamentalists who would elevate religion and nationalism above basic human rights, we, the toiling masses, are finally finding our voice. It’s a voice that speaks hundreds of languages and at times may make no sense, but make no mistake that it is one single voice.

Life is an adventure because today more than at any other point in the story that is humanity we are on the cusp of such immense possibility. We are at a turning point. All we need to do is to find our medium and tell our stories. If we all do just that much then the new world will look nothing like the one we’ve known till now.

See? I can have hope too.

April 15th, 2008 by Hoopleton

And what the fuck is wrong with you? Huh? I mean look at you! Just look at you! You have no concept of anything real do you? You just live in your own little bubble, and for what? What’s the point? Do you even know what’s going on out there? Look! For Christ’s sake look! Open your fucking eyes! Open them!

Yes you’re a great guy. Yes you’re fun to have a beer with. But just because you’re a fun guy doesn’t mean you’re right all the damn time. And no! No, you don’t have to explain everything to me! Believe it or not I’m not an idiot so I’d like it very much if you stopped treating me like one! I know global warming is bad. I get that war kills people. I am familiar with basic economics.

Yes, I know you didn’t mean any harm. I get that you’re really trying your best. I understand that you think you’re right. But you’re not. You do know that don’t you? You have figured out that you’re wrong almost all the time, haven’t you? I mean no one can be this dense. You do get that you’re wrong? Right?

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? No one can be this stupid. You can’t be this stupid. I just really don’t understand you. I really want to understand you. I’d really like to know how you think. You do think, don’t you? I mean we all think. You must think. I just don’t understand what you could possibly be thinking half the time.

No. NO! Don’t you even start! Just listen! For once, just listen! You’re a great guy, I’ve said that already. I get that you’re really trying to help. But for the love of God, just stop doing anything at all. Just stop. Stop! We’ll all be better off if you just stop! And please, please, just step out of that bubble for five seconds. Take in the air. Go for a walk. You might learn something.

Oh, and one last thing. Don’t dance when there are cameras around, you look like a fucking idiot.

April 14th, 2008 by Hoopleton

We’re very fragile. Our egos, our hopes, our emotions, our bodies, our souls – it takes very little to undo us. The smallest misstep is enough to bring us pain. Of course we’re drawn to risk like moths to a flame. It’s one of the absolute truths about being human. We will do anything for even the smallest taste of happiness, no matter how dangerous or stupid it may be.

The most basic risk we take is the pursuit of people who we think might give us the kind of joy we can’t possibly find ourselves. Emotions we can’t define take over us and we suddenly become complete and total idiots. Since history began human beings have tried to navigate personal feeling, the Romans going even as far as to try and legislate love. As though love was something they could control or inscribe in the neat script of their legal codes. Something so wild and unpredictable had to be tempered. The Greeks saw love as danger. They wrote about the destruction that love brings onto men and worshipped in fear a goddess of love who was married to war itself.

We’re racing, like we always have been, to find couplehood. Loneliness scares us and the opiate of love, despite its painful withdrawal, despite its terrible swings, is impossible to ever really resist. It just feels so fucking good.

We’re very fragile. We hold sacred the notion of stability. All we really want is happiness, peace and calm in our lives. So we bind ourselves to the instability of wild love and the continuity of networks we believe to be eternal. Social networks and imagined communities that throughout time have been anything but stable.

Here we are, on a thin line, one misstep away from collapse, one indiscretion from wrenching emotional pain, and we hold on. We hold on because we have to. We hold on because we don’t know how to do anything else. We hold on and fly closer and closer to the flame because maybe we all secretly enjoy the pain. Because the pain reminds us that we’re really alive. It paints in bright contrast just how happy we could be. Isn’t that what life is about? Isn’t life about really, really feeling?

We don’t want to be strong. We don’t want to resist. We want to be torn down and stripped naked and exposed for everything we are. That’s why we tell the truth when we should keep our mouths shut. That’s why we expose ourselves to the miniscule possibility that some stranger will take us in skeletons and all. That’s why we post videos on youtube and write long soul-searching tirades in our blogs. We want to be seen for just how fragile we can be. We want to be hated, and for that we want to be loved.

April 9th, 2008 by Hoopleton

In 1936 the Games of the XI Olympiad were held in the city of Berlin, Germany. Although the International Olympic Committee chose Berlin before the rise of National Socialism, the Nazi Party quickly seized on the international event to promote their ideologies and exhibit the power of the Reich. The games were to serve as a validation of the Aryan race’s supremacy in the world.

No penny was spared on making the Berlin Games the grandest that world had ever seen. The propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels went into overdrive as Nazi demonstrations of racism were toned down. Anti-Semitic signs were removed, anti-foreigner legislation suspended. Nazi banners of red and white flew everywhere, uniformed soldiers marched the streets, youth cheered wildly in the stadiums, muscular blonde and blue-eyed German athletes struck heroic poses, and all of it was filmed by Hitler’s favorite director, the infamous Leni Riefenstahl.

The Berlin Games of 1936 was the first international event in history ever to be televised. But more importantly, perhaps in light of recent events, the Nazi Games were the first time that the Olympic Flame was lit by a torch brought by relay from the ancient Greek city of Olympia. A Nazi addition, the running of the torch was an attempt to link German Aryanism with the glory of Ancient Greece. The path of the relay was carefully chosen to project Nazi power in countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia that Hitler hoped to bring into his empire. Countries that would soon be witness to invading German tanks.

As the Games of the XXIX Olympiad grow closer, the kind of protests that were largely absent in 1936, are now baring down on China’s desperate attempt at a propaganda coup. Already dubbed the Genocide Olympics by critics of Beijing’s policy toward the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the torch relay, which has already appeared in such notable countries as Taiwan, is becoming a focal point for protests against the occupation and repression of Tibet. Members of the Chinese Communist Party and those who don’t wish to offend the economic giant of the East, or those who are simply ignorant to history, are trying their hardest to portray protesters as anarchists who want only to disrupt a venerable Olympic tradition. Well yes, I’m sure the Nazis are very upset.

April 6th, 2008 by Hoopleton

What is the essence of us? Is it what we do in the time we exist? Is it what we leave behind? It seems likes there’s so little time for anything. We try to leave some lasting memory. We struggle to outlive life because we’re so terrified of death. The greatest mystery so comically simple to solve and yet so completely out of our reach. But how many of us, truly, would chose to live forever if we could?

Isn’t eighty years enough? Or seventy? The fact that we can make it even that long trumps the base biological achievements of most of the countless generations that came before us. Eighty years is enough to see the world change a few times over. It’s enough to experience love and tragedy, greatness and complete obscurity. It’s enough time to visit every country and visit every city on the globe if that was your prerogative. Wouldn’t you get tired of all the crap after eighty years? I guess maybe you’d want to live forever if you could elevate yourself above the meaningless politics of the everyday, but what kind of real human existence is it without the mundane?

Maybe that’s why immortality is reserved for gods. Only supreme beings could be so transcendent as to never let the garbage of human idiocy pull them away from their divine work. Gods don’t have nationalities, or cultures, or races, or genders, or political leanings, or moral codes, or any of the window dressing we use to complicate our lives. That’s not to say we haven’t tried to humanize every god since the first earth spirits, heaving onto them all of our failings, motives and desires. But I’m not talking about “real” gods, I guess I mean the ones that would exist if such things as gods do, or ever could exist.

Someone who could live forever would probably have to hide from the rest of us. He or she would live in constant fear that if we knew their secret then we’d rip them apart trying to stave of our own natural destruction. The greatest minds of the world would be called in on a new crusade of discovery where ethical lines blurred until they vanished altogether. We have religion to promise us eternal bliss after death and yet we’d murder one another without hesitation for just one sip from the fountain of youth. What does that say about us? What does that say about our relationship with death?

Eighty years is a long time. It’s the perfect amount of time if only because we all operate on the same clock. I think any real person who was faced with the prospect of never dying would start to envy the rest of us. I think that they’d begin to wonder what they were missing out on. I think someone immortal would spend everyday obsessing about mortality. After a while the cycles of history would seem absurdly meaningless. They could never have any real human relationships. They’d have to be always on the outside. Never belonging. Always recording. Far out of reach.

For someone who could never die the question of what it means to exist would be even more important than for those of us who waste the few decades we have. Their life would be meaningless because it wouldn’t end. With infinite time there would never be a need to do anything. No ambition. No desire. Just the passage of time. Day in and day out. Hiding.

So what’s the essence of us? Us as beings. Us as souls. Us as memories. We have eighty years, if we’re lucky. Maybe seventy. What is it that defines us in that short amount of time? Why do we breathe at all? And why are we so afraid of the moment when our breathing stops? The alternative is so much more frightening.

April 2nd, 2008 by Hoopleton

After a sampling of 17,000 people from across the globe, a World Service poll (yeah, I never heard of them either, but apparently they do this kind of thing a lot), has found that the image of the United States has slightly gone up over the previous year. As news agencies are reporting, the land of the free and the home of the brave is now only hated by some forty-seven percent of the people in the world. No, unfortunately that does not mean that the other fifty-six percent love America, but the number of positive mentions has increased into the mid-thirty range. In other words, one out of every three people on Earth will probably not detonate themselves in one of our federal buildings. Hurray!

What’s interesting about the poll is that the two nations with the most favorable image in the world are Germany at number one and Japan at number two. The two countries most directly responsible for some of the 20th century’s most heinous acts of murder, genocide, torture and biologically driven hatred, are, sixty years later, now the most admired on the entire planet. It does tell us a lot about redemption I suppose, or about the power of time to heal all wounds. It is true that both Japan and Germany have — for the most part — seemed to have learned from the past and seem to be teeming with good, honest people. But the most loved nations on Earth? Wow. Forgetting the Second World War you’d think German and Japanese tourists would be enough to knock both countries down the list.

After reading this poll I think the lesson for America is clear. If the United States wants to be cherished and respected again, it needs to try and kill absolutely everybody. Wholesale slaughter across the board. Think how liberating that would be? We wouldn’t have to pretend to care anymore. We could be evil and maniacal. We wouldn’t have to dress up our imperialistic intentions with “democracy building.” Hell, if we really wanted to assure our standing in the annals of history we could just let the nukes fly.

The course is clear. The shining examples of Germany and Japan should be our inspiration. We already have obnoxious tourists, now all we need to do is embrace our bloodlust (well, more than we have already). Sure, we’d have to lose in the end, but just think about the better cars we’d eventually drive. Personally I don’t think we have any other choice. Unless of course a sampling of 17,000 people is a ridiculously idiotic measure of the complex attitudes of multiple cultures and politics of a combined global population of nearly 7 billion. And it’s not like opinion polls are incredibly flawed or inherently culturally biased… right?

So, get to work America! Murder and conquest may seem easy, but it really does involve a lot of work, the sooner we get started the better. Or I should say, the sooner we get finished the better.

April 1st, 2008 by Hoopleton

Today is the beginning of April, traditionally, since Greek times, seen as the month of rebirth and joy. For eons this time of year has been associated with spring and flowering, for obvious reasons. There is some question about the origins of the name, but most historians will agree that it is in honor of Aphrodite, also known as Venus, the Greco-Roman goddess of love, lust and beauty. So it makes sense that April is also a month to celebrate fertility.

What’s really interesting about the goddess for whom this month is named, is that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was the twin of Aries, the god of war. I don’t think I need to go into the obvious symbolism of this link. Love and violence have always been two sides of the same coin. What’s fascinating, however, is that out of this family tree also came a son, Eros (later called by the better known, over-commercialized name, Cupid).

Eros, being the same as war and love, was traditionally seen as a god of lust and sex. In popular mass media the winged little urchin with a bow in his chubby little hands is a symbol of joy and couplehood, but to the Greeks and Romans, Eros had a much darker role to play. To get hit by one of Cupid’s arrows was to be enslaved to emotions that would overwrite all reason and almost certainly lead to misery and destruction. This boy-god was a prankster, a demon, a bad spirit who prayed on the weak will of men. His real joy and his driving force was to laugh at human misfortune.

So, it makes perfect sense that today is also April Fools day, a celebration of practical jokes. It’s a day to expose fools and trick the unsuspecting. It’s a day to make light of others, their follies and misfortunes. Obviously I’m not a big fan. Not because I don’t like jokes, more so that I don’t like days when every idiot feels compelled to get in on the act. Still there is something to be said about the chaos of a day like April Fools.

With all of that said, happy spring. May love and prosperity find you and keep you. I wish only the best for you. Then again it is April 1 st so this may just be a load of crap, I guess only Eros knows for sure.