There are a few basic concepts we must start re-thinking in order to understand what they mean for us as citizens of our communities, our nation, and the world. One of these is the concept that is at the center of how we define ourselves as Americans: “DEMOCRACY.”

In this I have begun to search out those that are asking “What is the ‘meaning’ of democracy?” The best collection of the radical roots of American democracy is Timothy Patrick McCarthy’s and John McMillan’s edited collection, The Radical Reader (The New Press, 2003).

Another important contribution to the understanding of democracy in “action” is the recent collection, “We Are Everywhere: The Irresistable Rise of Global Anticapitalism” edited by Notes from Nowhere and published by Verso. It is described as “… a whirlwind collection of writings, images, and ideas from direct action by people in the frontlines of the global anticapitalist movement.” It’s a huge, inexpensive collection of activist statements/reports/pictures from around the world. It covers the years 1994-2003. The We Are Everywhere web site also includes excellent links, essays, and references to inspire any activist. Of course, if we are talking activism, let’s not forget the patron saint of contemporary community activism, Saul Alinsky, and his classic Rules for Radicals.

My favorite periodical that consistently questions, challenges, and (re)defines the democratic project is Orion magazine. Orion magazine inspires me because its definition of radical democracy rests upon the cultivation of open spaces and the recognition of the interconnectedness of our lives.

In the democratic spirit, we should ask the people what they think. Homeland, (Seven Stories Press, 2004) by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, is an important book that seeks to plumb the soul of everyday post-9/11 America, and documentary filmmaker Mark Wojahn in his latest film travels the nation to ask us “What America Needs?”.

Democracy Now is another important independent champion of democracy on the Internet. Its series of videos examines contemporary democracy in “action,” asking important questions, such as, what is the role of Independent Media in a Time of War?  Of course, an active, engaged citizenry, is necessary for any radical understanding of democracy. In recognition of this need, the Indy Media movement has spread across the world, supplying inexpensive means and the necessary skills for citizen-produced media.

I know all to well how difficult it is to cut through the noise of contemporary society; thankfully we have Propaganda Critics and Disinformation Experts to lend a hand in sifting through the voices of our world.

Now it’s your turn. I ask you: What is the “meaning” of democracy?  

thivai

Earlier in the year, I wrote a review of E.L. Doctorow’s millennial novel, City of God. Tonight, I watched a movie with the same title. It depicts a completely different place and time, but the story reverberates just as deeply as Doctorow’s depictions of the struggle for life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

The movie is Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002). It is a harrowing journey into the favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro. Take a look at the sensationalized trailer from Miramax that totally misrepresents the movie (well not totally — it has some of the elements, but completely misrepresents the narrative structure and style — that’s Hollywood folks!). The critics for once recognized a powerful piece of filmmaking, and even regular film viewers enjoy the film as can be seen by the reviews at Netflix and Amazon.  

The movie is beautifully filmed, and the story is both riveting and important — I highly recommend it. However, even more important, and sadly ignored, is a documentary, News From a Personal War, directed by Katia Lund (who is also credited as co-directing City of God), that is included on the DVD version. This is a searing look at the favelas now and the continuing cycle of violence and corruption involving police, dealers, dwellers, and increasingly, outsiders. It is powerful in that it is a glimpse into the corruption of state power, the desperation of crime/violence, and how violence breeds more violence. As an American, I kept thinking of our own situations in our own cities where the inner cities are run down, the citizens (dwellers) rightfully distrustful of an uncaring at best, more often willfully brutal or dishonest law enforcement system (go ahead, scoff — study the history of police brutality in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Chicago, San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, etc.), and disadvantaged poor youths choosing between menial jobs with little respect and the illusionary glamour of criminal activities. This is an extremely important documentary because Lund was (amazingly) able to follow and interview special forces police, their officers, favela residents, favela dealers, their young initiates, and incarcerated gang members.  Everyone speaks with a complete candor, absent in the US, about the social structure that has led to the desperate lives of the favela residents. A high-ranking police officer even gives an enlightening dissertation on what the true role of the police is in preserving the status quo for the elites and what role brutal violence plays in suppressing possible resistance from those who are being exploited/oppressed. Please watch this important documentary and show it to others!

thivai

I feel as if I am coming out of a long, long dream. My recent Ph.D. examinations strained me physically, mentally, and spiritually … It’s not that it was so difficult, for one could just learn the materials and repeat the accepted knowledge/traditions in a manner that would please the committee. It was more my frustration that there seems to be something wrong in the course of our society and I’m trying to see if there are other ways to learn, communicate and share knowledge. In particular, what can be learned from the past, what is healthy or dangerous in our present, and how can we encourage imaginative thinking about the future? As the coastal people of my homeland of San Diego know, it is draining and dangerous to swim against the currents of any ocean (be it physical or mental). I am a poor vessel for these serious meditations — I’ve spent my whole life being more of the trickster/jokester, making fun, taking apart rather than constructing, living in “the moment” … why have I changed?

How fortunate that the first book I picked up to read for “fun” after these examinations was James Welch’s novel Fools Crow (Penguin: 1986). It has a beautifully realized moral universe that helps one to rethink our current way of life. The writing is lyrical and it realizes the key elements of any great novel, bringing a sense of dramatic development of “identity” (Fools Crow, Fast Horse, Red Paint), “place” (territorial politics of Montana Territory in 1870), and “community” (the Lone Eaters, a Blackfeet tribe struggling to survive in a changing world). This book is beautiful in the sense that it quite literally took my breath away at the thought of the possibility of a different “way” of life. I was moved by the rituals and practices that fused individual desires/needs with collective knowledge/history and how it helped to fuse their individual lives into the collective group in a meaningful way. I cared deeply about these people and wanted to know more …

James Welch:
American Novelist, American Indian

We are stronger, wiser for having read Jim Welch

James Welch’s essay on Native American Literature written for a bookseller

Joy Harjo on James Welch

2003 Obituary

thivai

Greetings fellow traveler, I’m currently living with the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains, observing a praxis that may allow me to unlock the paradox of a philosophy centered around the mythical knowledge of sustainability.

For the first few months, manic giggling greeted me whenever I mentioned my desire for answers … the whispering behind my back almost broke my determination, but I hung in there until an elder Magi of the Clans began to take pity on this Lost Boy from the Western Lands. She claimed to have originally come from the City of the Red Night, where they teach their young that one cannnot seek “the” answer; instead they must expose themselves to the “multiplicity” of questions, for it is in the masking of “possible” questions that power rests upon, and the prying free of these nuggets from the earth’s moist grasp is the quest of the Clans of the Alphane Mountains.

The ancient Moonshine Magi cackled, swigged from her jug, and said, “This is where the neophytes can get in trouble.” She told me that when chasing these evasive questions the skillful seeker notices that the landscape shifts and reshapes each time a question is revealed. It seems that the Clans learned long ago that when one unearths a question revealing its essence, the disturbance of the surrounding landscape generally causes an accompanying re-veiling of surrounding questions. In fact, she warned that often eager groups of diggers, banded together for strength and safety, will bury smaller groups/individuals digging nearby. This is why the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains always stop and retrace their steps, reflecting on the pathway they are traveling, in order to re-cognize what disturbances their digging causes. The Magi seemed to derive much amusement from my comment that the Bushes that cover the western lands have long forbidden self-reflective contemplation in order to freeze traditional concepts and to fuel travel to the future-past.

I asked the Magi how the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains retain their reflective ability while unearthing large complex concepts and revealing troublesome questions. “How do they dream the impossible and imagine the unaskable?” The Magi leaned back and swigged from her jug and chuckled at my Western ignorance. She stared at me like an adder stares down a mouse and dared me to think upon it. After a long uncomfortable two days, I unkinked my frozen limbs. The emptying of my mind allowed me to recognize that the best way to build a hearty, enriching intellectual bouillabaise, is to blend it with (an)other body(ies) of knowledge. The Clans, following the wisdom of the Dispossessed, require all learners to travel to other realms (physical, spiritual, and mental) in order to experience different realities and to act as multi-conduit translators (within and without their clan)

It’s obvious that the Magi is still toying with me. Perhaps I still must quest for these answers on my own, perhaps I still must travel, perhaps I should look into the interstices of production for missing clues?

I screamed, “Please help me! What is a traveler to do when there is no map to guide me?” … The Magi just cackled, “Foolish Lost Boy of the western lands, when will you learn that the quest is the journey and that as soon as you pin down an answer, it only means that you have reveiled other healthy questions — questions that must be once again revealed.”

Shaking and confused, I picked up a large jug of Alphane moonshine and stumbled into the forest to look for questions …

thivai

Words/concepts are defined through the context of their usage and their relation to/interaction with other words/concepts.  According to H.L. Goodall in Writing the New Ethnography (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) our “textual positions,” the “language choices you make to represent what you see,” provide clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it (134). The selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs; the usage of humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors; and your level of emotional intensity are all signs of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not). This is the position that making meaning is always a dialogic process. Allan Irving and Ken Moffatt state that:

“Dialogue in Bakhtin’s view is more than just two people talking; the more a word is used in our speech the more contexts and nuances it gathers and the word’s meanings proliferate with each encounter. Our utterances (another of Bakhtin’s words) do not forget but rather carry fragments from all our previous speech acts as well as the significance from the current context and this includes even forms of intonation. All utterances are double-voiced, bringing meanings with them, perhaps trailing them, but spoken into the here and now into the ongoing dialogues of our lives. ‘Every word,’ Bakhtin wrote, ‘gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life.’”

Words/concepts go through a process of social accretion in which the more they are used, the more meanings attach themselves to our usage of these words/concepts. As these words become weighted down with multiple meanings, a paradoxical effect takes place that causes language-users to assume that these words are stable in their meaning, and these assumptions can easily lead to misunderstandings or manipulation. The poet Gary Snyder in “The Etiquette of Freedom” (The Practice of the Wild. North Point Press, 1990) reminds us that:

“Words are used as signs, as stand-ins, arbitrary and temporary, even as language reflects (and informs) the shifting values of the peoples whose minds it inhabits and glides through. We have faith in ‘meaning’ the way we might believe in wolverines — putting trust in the occasional reports of others or on the authority of once seeing a pelt. But it is sometimes worth tracking these tricksters back.” (8)

Of course, as we all know, a word like community, democracy, terrorist, home, love, place, freedom, identity, etc., does not have just ‘one’ meaning, and there are continuous struggles over what they do mean. It’s obvious, or is it … how can we sift through the noble lies?

Bill at Thoughts on the Eve of the Apocalypse points out a well-reasoned, passionate and reconstructive look at the language of the War on Terror:

It reminds me of the series of essays by the linguist George Lakoff at Alternet that looks at the metaphors of the War on Terror.

Dion Dennis over at CTheory has been similarly examining the imagistic language of the current regime.

Bill, after an earlier version of this musing, also suggested that the interested reader consult a pair of essays by Renana Brooks, PhD, who according to a Nation bio, is a “clinical psychologist practicing in Washington, D.C. She heads the Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion and is completing a book on the virtue myth and the conservative culture of domination.” The essays, The Character Myth and A Nation of Victims, examine the carefully constructed myth of George Bush as the “moral” hero and Bush’s mastery of “emotional language as a political tool.”

This gross manipulation of language and symbols for political ends has become so blatant that many staunch defenders of America have abandoned the Bush cause because they realize that this position only further radicalizes groups of people to oppose the U.S.

Maybe we need to become poets in order to understand the political play of language and images. In an earlier dialogue with my wife, Melissa, she reminded me of a poem by Julia Alvarez.  It was written after the Bushes canceled a post-9/11 poetry reading at the White House because the poets were ‘political’ … with Laura Bush, the supposedly model teacher, mumbling something about poetry and art not being political. Immediately when I heard Laura Bush’s dismissal of these poets, two artistic statements popped into my head:

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
— Bertolt Brecht

“I’m just looking for one divine hammer … I’ll bang it all day long.”
— Breeders, “Divine Hammer” (1993)

Then, still reflecting about Laura Bush’s own willfull ignorance, I returned to two major statements of meaning-making, the first reminding us about the the politics of writing and the second of reading:

“Writing is [or can be] a transgression of boundaries, an exploration of new territory. It involves making public the events of our lives, wriggling free of the constraints of purely private and individual experiences. From a state of modest insignificance we enter a space in which we can take ourselves seriously. As an alternative to accepting everyday events mindlessly, we recall them in writing.”
— Frigga Haug, “Memory Work as Social Science Writing” (1987)

“The disobedient reader as writer is no longer a shadow on the text, but rather makes the text a shadow of her own.”
— Nancy Walker The Disobedient Writer (1995)

Once again, I returned to the poem by Julia Alvarez … for me, it has become a resounding questioning of the Bushes’ own politics in ignoring poetic thinking while abusing language for political ends and knowing that all meaning- making is political:

The White House Has Disinvited the Poets by Julia Alvarez

thivai

I first came across Chris Offutt’s work when I was deciding whether to follow my lover Melissa to Lexington, Kentucky in the summer of 2001 (I moved there the following summer). As a Californian unfamiliar with the area, I wanted to read a Kentucky author. Browsing through Joseph Beth’s bookstore, I came across The Good Brother. The book caught my attention because I was planning a course on “gender and terror” at Illinois State University.  

I later included the novel in my course for the spring of 2002. The class, Interdisciplinary 128: Gender and Terror in Contemporary American Culture, had taken on an increased relevance because of the 9/11 attacks. My classroom was full and the students were eager to learn about terror. Offutt’s novel became the centerpiece of a unit (including Joseph Rodriguez’s photo-documentary East Side Stories, the film American History X, the Media Education Foundation’s documentary film Tough Guise, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and the contradictory narratives of the fictional Boys Don’t Cry and the documentary The Brandon Teena Story) that explored the terror resulting from the construction of a masculinity centered around violence as a solution to problems.

“The Good Brother” brought into play so many different contexts for understanding this problem. Through discussions of the novel, we brought up issues of gender, class, regional identity, militia politics, and societal pressures. What kept my Illinois students fascinated the most though was Virgil Caudill’s love of his Kentucky environment and his magical descriptions of his homeplace. The students developed a keen awareness of how fitting into a place and feeling comfortable in an environment (at many levels) was a key to human satisfaction.  

This insight also helped us to understand the later texts in this section: to confront the violence of gang members in “East Side Stories” and “American History X” without dismissing the experiences that led to their actions, to explore the alienation of Jack Gladney from his environment in “White Noise,” and to attempt to address the narrative differences of the two film versions of Brandon Teena’s murder. The issues of place, the problems of community, and the human desire to belong, once raised by Offutt, took on an extreme importance in the course and would not be denied. It still affects me in my teaching and research.

Now I’m at the University of Kentucky, where I’m teaching writing-courses centered around the concepts of Place, Identity, and Community. We have developed this new program as an attempt to bridge students’ everyday experiences and academic knowledge. We hope that through discussion and writing about our sense of self, place, and community, we can develop a new awareness of the possibilities of writing/thinking as a form of civic engagement and hopefully, in the process, provide a helping hand to at-risk students. Naive, perhaps, idealistic, definitely — but what else can I do — this is what matters to me!  

Offutt’s writing powerfully speaks to the experience of inhabiting a place, but even more importantly, what it means to lose or leave a beloved place. As a nomadic academic, I ache for the home I left and, perhaps, am fearful of possibly losing the connections to that community. At the same time, there is a feeling of guilt for leaving and a sense of loss for the place that I can never again experience (even when I return, because it is a fantasy of a nostalgic memory). Offutt’s experiences and writings speak to this reality, his words resonate with a more personal terror, the loss of “place.”

thivai

I’m writing this while listening to Air America Radio’s broadcast of Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission. I write and erase multiple attempts to confront this spectacle.  I feel a dis-ease deep down inside of me, yet I am unable to give voice to this nausea.  In despair, I wonder what I, as a concerned citizen, can say when Rice’s defense has already been over-covered and spun well before she spoke a word in defense of the Bush administration’s actions prior to 9/11.  The one bit of knowledge that I am confident about is that each side is already lining up, eager to gain capital from this media event. Frustrated at the attempt to pierce the veil of secrecy or misdirection or noise, I try to think about whether it is possible in an age of cynicism to retain trust in our public servants.

This is doubly distressing for me because, at the same time, I am developing a writing course designed to facilitate student engagement with the upcoming presidential elections.  How can I expect my students to make meaning out of the swirl of data when I am devoting large parts of my life to informing myself about current events without clear results? I lack certainty! I am often confused! I know my reflective doubt is supposed to be a good sign in that I am avoiding the dogmatic certainty that often leads to abuses, but can radical doubt be the foundation for critical engagement?  Academia has skillfully prepared me to question all texts and positions. Grasping my hammer tightly, I eagerly assault all sacred idols and social illusions, leaving the mess for others to clean up. Perhaps in this time of secrecy and lies it is time to think about a reconstructive ethics?

Still stumped, I have to return to the basics.  What is it I see as a problem in our society?  What plagues my own thoughts? What would I like my students to learn?  What ideas can frame the beginning questions that might allow the imagining of new possibilities?  This nausea that pervades my being initiates a radical need to return to the etymological roots (rad-) of the words that might jumpstart my stalled intellect.

A framing concern for me — personally and professionally — is ecology as the study of the interconnectedness of beings in environmental systems of all types.  The root “eco-” originates from the Greek word oikos, which referred to an understanding of home, household, or more fully, our habitus.  Ecology, then, is the study or understanding (take that apart — the foundations of the ground below us that support our current position) of the world which we inhabit and the attempt to derive new meanings from the interconnectedness and interrelationships of life. The need for ecological awareness seem obvious to me, but the word has unfortunately been paired in an oppositional relationship to another dominating term — “economics.” While ecology derives its conjunctive meaning from logos (knowledge), economics draws its conjunctive power from nomos (law).  We have then in contemporary society a dualistic division of the concerns of these two important and powerful words. The study, knowledge, and understanding of our environments vs. the control, regulation, and management of those environments.  

Might a reconstructive ethics start here in a rapprochement of these two essential concepts for understanding the increasingly interrelated and interconnected global system?  Would the breaking down of these artificial barriers between these two major concerns of life allow for a fuller understanding of how we might restore a sense of justice, rights, and responsibilites? No longer would it simply be an issue of ecology against economics, or the market before our environment, or a separation of the human from nature.  

Still, Rice drones on in the background as our public servants take turns grilling her. Glaringly absent from our current politics is any concern about rebuilding or restructuring our world.  Instead, it is always a matter of attacking, retributio,n or punishment. We must isolate, preempt, and sterilize. We must be on guard, vigilant, and controlling. When will we begin to think about the foundations of our thought and ask if, in our origins, there may be flaws that infect our questions and proposals, stalling our efforts before they start and distorting the results beforehand?

thivai

A Hypertextual Review of “City of God”

City of God (written by E.L. Doctorow, 2000) may have an experimental beginning that can be frustrating for some readers … don’t worry, though. As you travel into the narrative landscape, it slowly pulls together threads of meaning that create an evolving state of awareness; by page 50, you are recognizing clear patterns, and by pages 80-90, you have the names of the main characters down. Don’t let this frustrate you, this book is not a Bic Mac designed to be hastily gobbled down. Rather, it is a sumptuous feast for the senses and soul, a fulfilling meal designed to feed the spirit.  

It tackles the big issues of the 20th Century and creates a dazzling array of voices to bring this historical moment of the century’s end to dramatic life.  It is so searing when it hits on all engines; the descriptions of the city are very powerful, bringing a sense of the majestic aliveness of urban life and its chaotic sensory effect.  The portrayals of the past through a World War II Jewish ghetto and a young boy’s experiences are soul-shattering.  The relationship of the main characters in the New York present are vivid and real …

The last 100 pages are a powerful literary experience of the continuing importance of religion in our society, while also providing a no-holds-barred critique of the reactionary traditions that try to stop us from evolving as humans and as spiritual beings (in a very subtle storytelling manner).

If this sounds interesting, you might also be interested in Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt, Nothing Sacred by Douglas Rushkoff, The Concept of the Foreign by Rebecca Saunders, The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot, and The Cunning of History by Richard Rubenstein … I read these books near the time I was reading City of God, and they all speak to the need for new modes of interpersonal human relations or a new spirituality for a changing world.

thivai

If you have never seen Douglas Rushkoff’s documentary, The Merchants of Cool, check it out online.  It’s hosted by PBS and was first broadcast on their show, Frontline.  I’ve been using it regularly in my college writing courses to explore the media’s role in the production of identity. Part of the appeal of the documentary is Rushkoff’s balanced, self-reflective questioning of his position and insights.  He is an ethnographer seeking to understand youth culture, media appropriations of these youth cultures, and youth subcultures’ attempts to resist the pervasive influence of mainstream media cultures.  His genius is that always he lets the subjects “speak” for themselves and never simply dismisses them.  If they come off as hopeful, predatory, intelligent, foolish or cool, it is because of their own acts or thoughts.

For a more predatory group of ethnographers (used very loosely) that exploit young people’s desires to voice their opinion and get their cultural efforts noticed, stop by the Look-Look web site.  They are featured in The Merchants of Cool, but to get the full sense of what they are about, you need to read their statements at their web site.  It isn’t just that they are charging corporations big bucks to find out what the next youth trend will be, it’s that they couch it in a pose of helping young people achieve a voice in society and to let their concerns be noticed.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, in their “Temple of Confessions” diorama performances, deconstruct this modern ethnographic gaze in order to expose its predatory nature.  They critique the dominate culture’s power to classify and regulate, by turning stereotypes inside-out, exploding cultural myths and, most importantly, allowing their audiences to reveal their own place in the national narratives.  For a detailed analysis of their deconstructive performances, visit my review of the “Temple of Confessions” performances in Bowling Green, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan.  Cultural performers like Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes are restor(y)ing the modernist practice of ethnography in order to reconstruct 21st-century (auto)ethnographic poetics.  As Norm Denzin reminds us in his latest book, Performative Ethnography (Sage, 2003), we all perform culture and this is not an innocent practice.  With this realization, the critical thinker develops a clear and honest statement of his/her position as a writer-producer of knowledge and re-cognizes their role in the production of ethnographic knowledge.

Moving to the forefront of the development of 21st-century autoethnographic poetics are new web sites rich with stories by the people who live these stories.  These autoethnographic documents speak for themselves, so I’ll leave you with three of my current favorites:

Zone Zero: Exposiciones

Home Project

21st Century Neighborhoods

While the world is continuing to speed along in a confusing, chaotic manner, there are those that are taking the time to provide us with glimpses of their particular realities.  Won’t you do the same? The world benefits from the free exchange of ideas and open dialogue!

thivai