Epistemological violence in America

I fell asleep with the afterimage of neon burned in my vision and awoke with the call of the common slot machine in my ears. The air conditioner/heater could only blow hot or cold air; there was no way to turn it off. A good half of the thirty or so stations on the hotel television showed horse racing. A sign hung above the toilet informing me that tons of detergent and millions of gallons of water are wasted daily to wash towels unnecessarily.
Las Vegas is an interesting place to be on so called Earth Day. By interesting, I mean largely baffling and somewhat frightening. And endlessly entertaining, but more anthropologically than hedonistically. The observation of humans in action often makes for the best pastime.
Excess defines Las Vegas. It’s entirely founded on and sustained by surplus wealth and consumption. The mob, looking for a place to hide their cash, began opening casinos and hotels in the 1940s. Today, most jobs are in services, particularly restaurants, hotels, casinos and other things related to tourism, but there is a growing number of folks in the financial services as well. Either way, other peoples’ cash drives the entire operation. The city caters to surplus cash, or at least cash temporarily stripped of necessity. It’s all about leisure dissolving into vice, overindulgence, and spectacle.

As I walked along the Strip, passing through parties on sidewalks and plazas, deflecting offered glossy cardboard ads for escort girls from Mexican men wearing orange t-shirts (all of which men have a habit of sort of snapping the cards against their palm to get your attention) I realized that, unlike short-term festivals such as Taste of Chicago or Mardi Gras, Las Vegas never really ends. There are peaks and valley, of course, high and low seasons, but the movement of people looking to fill their every desire and compulsive need does not come to an end.
I witnessed loads of bachelorette/bachelor/wedding parties, and an endless stream of three- and four-dude platoons cruising for action. Packs of business casual conference goers and foreign tourists. Kids too young to drink legally and old folks too haggard to stand, let alone chain smoke and gamble for hours on end. The point is that in Las Vegas, someone, somewhere, at all times, is looking to party.
Back to that sign hanging over the toilet, which reminds me of the one thing that will bring the party to a cruel, abrupt halt: the seemingly inevitable day when the city’s taps run dry. Most of the water comes from Lake Mead (home of Hoover Dam), which some believe may run dry as early as 2021. We drove to Red Rock Canyon, some 20 miles from the strip, and saw a beautiful set of sandstone mountains where wild burros roam and Californians hike with their muscular dogs.
Along the way we passed by solid sprawl, subdivisions in the sand sporting countless Spanish tiles and square feet of blacktop. Luckily, I hear that the city government is acting aggressively to promote conservation, for instance by encouraging homeowners to ditch the lawn of imported grasses that requires tons of water and lay down nice rocks and native plants.

Here's what looks to be a golf course in the middle of the gods damned desert.

At the Fremont Street Experience, a serious assault on the senses combining the lights and noise of casinos with a street festival including multiple, simultaneous musical acts, all of which occurs beneath a vaulted LCD display/ceiling that shows a or video performance every hour on the hour. I happened to catch one highlighting the sounds and fashion of Queen, which affords families from Any Town, USA the opportunity to watch Freddie Mercury trot around in a leatherman outfit.

Finally, on Earth Day, I was not only in Las Vegas but I also flew the approximately 1,500 miles back to Chicago in a plane that spewed out carbon all the way. This website estimates my personal contribution to climate change at 590 pounds for the flight. This probably tarnishes my environmentalist credentials.

It appears as though a Radiohead song is being featured in an NBA commercial. One that airs on ABC, no less. Can an ad for dandruff shampoo (No Alarms, No Surprises) be too far away? Prepare the Adbusters spoof!!

On Saturday morning, I lay on the floor and waited for the ambulance to arrive. I had been out drinking the night before with my friend Susan (who was in town doing research and visiting), had downed probably ten beers, smoked maybe eight cigarettes. As usual, I couldn’t sleep, so as Susan passed out, I pretended to read and surfed the web. I slept shittily and only briefly. Then we woke up and went to breakfast at IHOP. I ate French toast and one egg, drank a glass of orange juice and a few glasses of unsweetened iced tea; Susan had a Southwestern omelet and stuck to water. Then we came back to my apartment, she packed her things, and we said goodbye.

I came back up to my apartment and dilly-dallied around for a bit. The hangover wasn’t aching, but I knew better than to make any major plans for the day. I envisioned doing a little reading, jotting a few notes, and probably taking a nap. My chest felt a little funny, like my heart was fluttering, so I put on my heart rate monitor, which I use for aerobic exercise, just to see what was up. My pulse was a bit arrhythmic, but it didn’t seem to be a big deal. I looked some things up on the web and was unconcerned. Suddenly, a very strange feeling came over me. I felt like my heart was racing in my chest, but I was sitting perfectly still, not exercising. I looked down at my monitor and within three seconds my pulse was at 190.

I basically fell over at that point. I didn’t really know what to do. I don’t have a car here in College Park, and I don’t know anyone in the building. I didn’t know how serious the whole thing might be. At first, I thought, this might be a panic attack, but I’ve many of them, and they never felt like this. In my experience, my heart rate during panic attacks is more like 140. So I called 911, and I tried to pull on my shoes because I figured I would need them if I was going to the hospital. And then I lay on the floor and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

The strangest thing next to the weirdness going on in my chest was laying on the floor, hearing the siren approaching, and feeling like a douche bag because it was my ambulance that was making all of the racket. My heart had slowed at this point, though it was in the 140s, way above my normal resting heart rate. It was still flopping around a bit, but even that was calming. I heard voices out in the hall. “717?” someone asked. “Yeah, 717,” another replied. They knocked, and I told them to come in. They asked me questions for a few minutes, took my pulse and blood pressure, and eventually took an EKG. By the time they got around to it, all was normal. They told me that I should go to the doctor, and that they would be happy to transport me to a hospital if I wanted. I told them I’d pass. I didn’t want to pay a few thousand dollars for a nice drive across town.

I haven’t written on this blog for two weeks. At that time, I had begun drafting a post about what I considered to be a difficult topic. In fact, the post was about how difficult I found it to talk about the topic with my closest friends. I guess it was such a difficult topic that I eventually began avoiding it, and the beginning of a draft of the post has sat on my desk for ten days. The post was to go like this: not only has so much physical distance emerged between my friends and I that I am joyful just to receive a text message from them, but I also wonder if the distance hasn’t made it hard to discuss difficult things with them. My difficult thing presently is the fact that for the last two years I have been occasionally attending church and reconsidering my relationship with religion. It’s difficult to talk about first of all because, given my decade-long rabid atheism, I now look like a flip-flopper or, worse, a hypocrite, but more importantly because I fear that my friends will fear that I will now start evangelizing to them or will become a Republican, and even if I tell them that I am about as interested in Christian apologetics, like C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, as I am in the grade school sophism of Dawkins and Dennett or that I view Christ as a pacifistic Trotskyite, still, a new, more heinous distance will grow between us. These concerns now seem silly, as do many others.

The mind is made to forget. We should give thanks for this. People with photographic memories often describe it as oppressive; they are constantly overwhelmed by the past. Forgetting allows us to move on, to live. But sometimes we wish we could hold onto moments and allow some past awful things to remain presently awful. My moment on the floor is fading from me. I haven’t forgotten about enough to not make a doctor’s appointment this morning or to not take the nurse who made my appointment seriously when she said that if this happens again I should not only call 911 but actually go to the hospital. But it seems less real, distant, almost gone. My mind has rationalized the thing. After some research, I believe that it might have been a bout of so-called “Holiday Heart,” a case of post booze-induced arrhythmia. It doesn’t seem as dangerous now. I may have to give up the bottle, but I wonder if the event will remain real enough to me that I won’t lift the next glass of beer. Mostly, I wish I could remember staring at the ceiling with the carpet against my skin as the siren approached so that these useless worries would all fall away.

Self-care seems to be in the ether. Is it because we’re almost 30? I remember being 21 and commenting to a friend how the late 20s had to be the worst—I’d pointed to the group of them in the corner of the disco. “They’re trying to be 22, but they can’t.” Now suddenly I’m in limbo, a point in which the antics of my youth aren’t so charming anymore, while there’s still time for nonsense.
The compromise had been exercise.
I’ve chosen swimming at the municipal pool and the only reason I mention it is the novelty of the required swimming cap everyone must wear. An aqua aerobics class has been running during my pass two visits, so an instructor barks orders to bouncing middle-aged women, all wearing caps, and suddenly I’m at the cinema, not the movies, with the frank, euro-acceptance of the body, the world of spas and subtitles and porcelain baths—comfortable flab beneath swimsuits and caps.
I had a scare as I opened the steam room to find four fifty-year-old-swim-suited women already chatting in the cramped space. I quickly shut the door like Bill Murray slamming the refrigerator shut in Ghostbusters after finding Zuul inside.
So far, so good. By joining the local gym, my life in Spain has moved closer to the mundane. But it feels good, my heart is pumping, and I’m striving for a healthy routine. Is this the adulthood that’s been waiting for me all along? Is there a right way to be fitter, happier, more productive? Will my swim-cap heal my 20-something angst before it’s too late?
The answer, as far as I can see, is in the water. I’ll plead no-contest and go for swim.

A while back, a friend in Pittsburgh confided in me that he had been using a workout video series, called P90X. I don't really know how to describe this guy adequately to tell you how funny this was. He's a fairly masculine Irish guy who has spent his summers during the last decade planting trees in Northern Canada. This is rough work. He was in punk bands up there, he knows how to drink, and for as long as I've known him, he has made fun of people that do yoga. Lo and behold, P90X has a yoga video, and he has had to eat humble pie.
Anyway, his description of the thing peaked my interest. The series is like sweating to the oldies for alpha males, in other words everything I'm not. I've been working out a lot here in College Park, but I thought it might be nice to have an outside structure placed on my routine, so I asked to borrow it when he was done.
I haven't been disappointed. Not only is it a good work out, but it is also hilarious in an over the top, overly serious kind of way. Imagine if Steve Carrel got in shape and then made a work out video where he barks orders at you and makes fun of your sad physique the whole time. Awesome.
I basically agree with the leftist critique of today's cult of fitness: it revolves around an Enlightenment belief in self mastery, it turns our society's health problems into moral issues of personal responsibility, it is parasitic on our vanity, and it drives a giant industry of sports supplies, exercise videos, nutritional supplements, and health clubs. But this line of reasoning has its limits as well. Even if you wanted to dedicate your life totally to the revolution or to serving others or whatever, you aren't going be of much use if you are an out of shape, overweight, alcoholic sad-sack, like I am. So a bit of self-care makes sense.
Here's a promotional video for the series. For those that know me, just imagine me in the crowd. I like to picture myself as a pallid guy in the back of the video, who begins panting and moaning two minutes into the routine and keels over at minute twenty, knocking the weight rack and all of the dumbbells to the floor.

All this Zamfirmania has got me thinking about the complex and dicey relationship between Romania and its neighbor to the northwest, Hungary. When I was in Budapest in 2002, the Hungarian faculty bombarded me with their version of history. Romania, I was told, is nothing but a nation of charlatans who stole Hungary's rightful land through some shifty political maneuvering after both World War I and II.
On a trip to Cluj, a medium size city in Transylvania, the Hungarians took us to a Roman ruin site that (or so they told us) Romania fabricated in order to establish their claim to the region, which does include a sizable number of ethnic Hungarians. (These folks live like serfs in sad little villages with dirt roads and more livestock than cars. I'm pretty sure this is where Borat's footage of "Kazakhstan" was actually filmed.)


Why, you might be asking, would Roman ruins prove that Transylvania rightfully belonged to Romania? Well, as the name might imply, Romanians claim to be the true descendants of the Rome, as in the republic and empire. They allegedly get around any historical inaccuracies by essentially saying, "Oh, we were hiding in these here mountains for centuries after the fall of Rome. You just weren't looking hard enough."



This of course smacks of bullshit to the unbiased observer. The main problem I've come to realize is that what the Hungarians presented as historical fact was in reality greatly distorted by their own nationalist fervor and inadequacy issues. I suppose anybody would do the same after their country was occupied or ruled by everyone in the region going back centuries, including the Ottomans, Hapsburgs, Nazis and Soviets, then lost two-thirds of its territory after finding itself on the wrong side of both world wars, and now serves as the European Union's backwater and the world's porn factory.

Anyway, Google yields little data about fake Roman ruins in Cluj. Likewise, there's not much information available to verify the claim that the "real" Romanians were in exile during the Middle Ages. Fact is, the Romans were in what is now Romania until about 275 AD, at which various nomadic peoples invaded...including the Huns! This means that Hungary's beef with Romania goes back well over 17 centuries. Needless to say, this will not be resolved anytime soon.

Have you ever thought about how really disturbingly weird Zamfir is?

The other day I heard that, while American staffers were typing away in a makeshift office space at the NATO summit, Zamfir came and played some mystical mountain music for them on the pan flute. Zamfir, made famous in the US by a string CNN commercials, is (apparently) one of Romania's national treasures. He has run a pan flute school there and published some instructional books on the topic.

I have to admit that, upon hearing about this event, my first thought was, "Why couldn't I have remembered this guy during college?" It would have been so hot to pull out a Zamfir CD during some house party. My well-honed irony would have overwhelmed nearly everyone. They may have even fainted from the heights of it all. But alas...

Now, the Balkans fall famously outside of American and Western European conceptions of what Europeanness is. We "orientalize" them, or whatever. An important book in Balkan studies is titled The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe, if that gives you any idea. Many wise and prestigious scholars have weighed in on this issue, why Romania and other Balkan states are so different. Well, I've got got my theory: it's called Zamfir!

Listen and watch carefully and experience the lusty divinity of the Danube and Romania's sacred mountain passes.

Is it unethical to check someone out? How about doing so repeatedly over a long train ride or if you are stuck in a waiting room with the person? I think most of my friends, perhaps most other people more generally, would say, "No." But why then do we look away from a person when they return our look or devise clever schemes to scope the person without their becoming aware of the fact?
Here's one such scheme that someone I know created: As you are walking into a room, you notice someone attractive. You continue walking to the place in which you are ostensibly going to stand, such as a bar. Then you slowly do a full 360 degree turn looking over the entire room, turning slow enough that you can ogle the attractive person but continuing on your arc, not stopping, so that the person believes you are merely scanning the room.
Now, I imagine my friends might believe that slack-jawed rubbernecking isn't wrong per se; you just look like a creep if you get caught doing it. But what I don't know or understand yet is how one would separate creepiness from wrongness, or why one would need to create schemes if the action wasn't questionable. That is, can we create definitions of these two ideas that don't overlap somewhere? Or, isn't part of saying that something is wrong a way of saying that someone shouldn't do it? And isn't saying that someone is creepy or sleazy a way of saying that he or she does something that he or she shouldn't do?
I've been thinking about how most people have to form some relationship to their desire to ogle during their life. This is probably also true of being gawked at, especially but not exclusively for women. Perhaps, as we grow to accept these urges as biologically driven, we flatly place them in an amoral space. Girl- or boy-watching isn't wrong and isn't right. It just is. But this falls prey to the is-ought fallacy, the idea that just because something is or "naturally" is that makes it OK. Yet, even if something is biologically determined, we still have to determine our ethical relationship to it, even if that means fighting undefeatable feelings.
Probably, the need to question gape-induced slavering becomes more acute when it comes to "locker room talk." Some guys feel the need to completely describe a woman's assets down to last detail, marking T&A with imaginary dimensions (e.g., "shelf like a fucking tank"), and just panting and drooling and saying "Oh, Man" at each other, like a pack of boobs. Other dudes are contented with a remark that a woman is beautiful, pretty, or cute. Still others pass the whole affair over in silence, or just cluck or giggle nervously when others try to force the speech. Prolific locker room talkers might argue Freud-style that repression builds nothing good, and you just gotta like let it out, man, or the shit builds up. I don't know if we have much evidence for this. Perhaps, just the opposite is true: that the talking encourages the looking, and the looking, the talking. But in the end, we are always left alone, flying through urban transport systems and malls and doctor's offices and gyms, gripping our seats or putting sweaty palms in our pockets, left with something that our mind tells us is begging for our stare.

I’ve decided to put the internet to work for me, all in one week, as I make my first blog and as I joined Facebook last Friday. I remember the days of Telnet my freshman year of college and the extensive correspondence I shared with all sorts of people. Then, as time passed and my friends and I spread to various corners of the country and globe, what counted as keeping in touch became more and more sporadic—a text message counted for a whole lot.
I live far away (although I’m moving home in July(more details to come)) and lately I’ve felt the need to do more to stay connected. The blog, I guess, satisfies the need to put my voice out there, but I’m hoping the blog-habit will run parallel to healthier expression all around. Facebook, then, is visual. I can see people and they can see me.
I’ve got the world on my lap. It’s time to be more pro-active. Everyone I know seems to be everywhere and anywhere at the same time, with plans changing and alternating destinations. Me too. The internet is global, but it’s also right here in front of us. Sweetly, it’s where we are to each other as well. Let’s talk more often.

I came across this very interesting article on The Oil Drum, which is maybe the best Peak Oil website around. The basic idea put forth by the two Canadian authors is that nothing short of a revolution in the way we power our transportation networks will suffice as the use of fossil fuels becomes increasingly expensive and untenable. Only the most deluded politicians and oil men still believe that oil production will increase in the coming decades. Those in the know will tell you global oil production will peak and begin to decline by 2012, if it hasn't already done so. Needless to say, the end of the fossil fuel era will coincide with the end of the Americans-enjoying-Chilean peaches-in-December era.

I have no problem going without summer fruits in winter. In fact, knowing that my breakfast hasn't traveled thousands of miles and produced heinous amounts of carbon emissions will make it that much more enjoyable. The problem is that the most pessimistic (hopefully not also the most realistic) Peak Oil advocates claim there's no way that renewable energy sources (whether solar, wind, fuel cells, etc.) can possibly allow the global economy to function in the way that oil has done for the past 100+ years. In this alarming interview, Matthew Simmons, energy consultant to the global elite, says that the impact of global warming will pale in comparison to the situation we'll find ourselves in if we don't adequately plan for the day when the oil wells run dry. I disagree with his assessment that solar power schemes are unrealistic, but his ideas for harnessing the power of waves and currents are very interesting. And he had this to say about the urgency of the matter: "I’m purely driven by the sense that if we don’t create a solution to the enormous potential gap between our inherent demand for energy and the availability of energy, we will have the nastiest and last war we’ll ever fight. I mean a literal war."

I'll talk more about solar power another time. For now, while we're discussing societal collapse and indifference, here's the video for Talking Heads (Nothing But) Flowers, from which the title of this post is taken.

Labels: collapse, matthew simmons, peak oil

Following his speech to the United Nations general assembly, Ted Turner, the nation's largest single private landowner, appeared on Charlie Rose to share his worldview and his ideas for solving the world's biggest issues. In his speech before the UN Turner announced his alliance with Lutherans and Methodists in eradicating malaria, and apologized for calling Christianity a "religion for losers". While such heavy-handed language is, if nothing else, highly unproductive, allow me to digress in agreeing with him when he says "I find it really hard to believe I'm going to hell".
And but so, Ted and Charlie talked for an hour about the environment, war and immigration, among other things. I had always been largely ambivalent toward Turner, though I do remember cheering his decision to give $1 billion to the UN in 1997, but I must admit the man has made a fan of me. Turner has been criticized for something like faux environmentalism, in particular for his poisoning of countless fish and possibly trying to control ever-dwindling water resources in the Great Plains, but he seems genuinely passionate about preserving the planet and the future of humanity. To that end he listed the four main problems facing humanity today: nuclear proliferation, climate change, rising population and pollution. Turner believes nothing less than a full-on mobilization of World War II proportions, not just in the United States but across the globe, is necessary to stave off the end of civilization. He said that war is no longer an effective method for accomplishing anything and that human rights, while worth fighting for, don't matter much if society has crumbled from drought and food shortages resulting from environmental degradation. He even went so far as to paint a picture in which the vast majority of humans have died from starvation or some other calamity and the survivors resort to cannibalism.

As an aside, this scenario is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's masterful novel The Road, which book has inspired in my head on several occasions dreams wherein I am rummaging through abandoned houses looking for food or supplies.

Anyway, I haven't yet come across footage of the UN speech but I did find his updated version of the Ten Commandments. I challenge anyone to disagree with any of these principles. I challenge myself to live up to them.

Labels: Charlie Rose, global warming, Ted Turner

It has been so long since I posted anything here (15 months or so) that I completely forgot I had even started this blog. Self-publishing, I am telling myself, only works when you actually write and publish yourself. Few things are more lame than a unused blog, not to mention a would-be writer who doesn't write.

Anyway, I've developed yet another new url, title and headline. Perhaps these will stick and I'll stop being so lazy.

Note to future self: Please please please actually write with some regularity this time around.