Blogging from the Belly of the Beast

Originally Published September 25, 2009.

 

So I’m standing here in front of a gigantic sexy non-recyclable imac sipping Caribou coffee through a plastic lid that excretes dangerous levels of estrogen into my bloodstream. (#6 baby, still legal! At least its cheap to produce, right my conservative amigos?) Rhea and I had to go down to the mega mall, because her Ipod is broken. We’re sitting inside the Apple store, (where Mac does classes… only in America do education and consumerism go so firmly hand in hand) waiting for service. 

It’s been a while since I’ve been to the mega mall. This is the first time I’ve been back since coming back from Cuba, and it’s kind of freaking me out. For example, the amount of advertising in this one building is terrifying. We had to walk around the mall to find the apple store, and in three straight-aways of mall, I’d guess I saw at least 35 gigantic smiling faces staring at us out of posters and ads in store fronts. It’s noisy too, the sound level of piped in shit music is annoying. Apparently, John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change” is the theme song for fixing the consumer economy. Apparently change means buying a new pair of shoes, a brand new coffee mug, and a “Brett Favre, we will never forgive you Love Wisconsin” t-shirt.

Even worse is how my mind reacts to this environment. A lot of the advertisements have no effect on me whatsoever. I can walk right by Steve Madden and not give a shit. But the Bose store? F**k. Those big shiny posters make me immediately go into a fantasy land where I’m sitting in a tuned room in front of Bose brand speakers, with a Mac branded computer, working on a Digidesign branded console with my Fender branded bass making American branded music. It happened to Rhea too. As we held hands walking through the mall, both of us had to pull each other away from various stores that have been hitting us with advertisements since we barely had the comprehension to speak. Neither of us are particular fans of consumer culture, and neither of us like the mega mall, but we’re still here in a gigantic complex with no clocks, contemplating how a new Burton snowboard might fill that void in our American souls.

I’m turning the clocks back in my mind to the first moments I spent in Cuba. We went 10 miles (thats right people) driving from the Airport to the hotel without a single advertisement. Billboards, few and far between, commemorated the Anniversary of the Revolution. Malls barely existed. But overall, an interesting dynamic arose in WHERE people hang out.

Down by the sea wall, people would gather and relax after work with friends. I would say I saw as many people gathered around the sea wall on any given night as you would see gathered at a mall cafeteria. You don’t see that type of socializing in America anymore. We’re off of work, and we’re either home, or at a store. In fact, try to come up with a social situation you’ve been in in the past few months where you haven’t bought something. American social life revolves around consumption. We don’t ask girls on dates, we ask them out for coffee. Long walks on the beach? We all seem to love them, but we take our loved ones to the movies instead.

But the thing that really gets me, is I can remember the looks on people’s faces. In Cuba, people on the street look straight ahead, conscious of where they are and where they are going. They wave at friends, look at their surroundings, and smile while walking down the street.

Here, in the consumer complex that is the mega mall, People do not look at each other. The general stance is to look at a forty five degree angle downward, unless an advertisement or a store catches one’s attention. Then, people will look to the sides of the walkways, wandering aimlessly between stores with a slightly confused empty expression as if to say, “Maybe these shoes will do the trick,” or “Perhaps a new Victoria’s Secret thong will fix my marriage.”

I miss Havana. I miss Cuba. I miss my people down there. But most of all, it frustrates me to be here, in a seemingly uphill battle with the culture of consumption. And its not just the posters around me, the rat race mall that surrounds me, or the job that gives me just enough money to contribute to the whole shit storm. It’s the feeling I get when I pass that ad for Pumas, and for a split second, I think… “I could be HAPPY if I only had those.”

The ads cut deeper than we think.

Do You Know the Enemy?

This was originally posted October 14th from a temp job at a college bookstore.  Enjoy.

 

So I’m sitting here at a college bookstore killing time at my temp job. (Random shout outs to the folks at Adecco, I’m eating fancy tonight thanks to a temp job!) The job has had a bit of down time, so it’s been fun getting to know the people I’m working with. I’ve also gotten a chance to catch up on the news via my new iPhone (I’m accepting name ideas, hit me up) and found out that due to the receding economy and rising unemployment (in spite of the increasingly pointless Dow Jones figures, top down economics fixes the top while leaving us all unemployed, go figure…) the military has officially reached quota for new recruits for the first time in quite a while. Army is at 103% capacity, and National Guard stands at a healthy 104%.

Alison, a woman I work with, is married to a National Guardsman. He’s been called to active duty recently, and soon will be shipped off overseas. Behind, he leaves his wife, twin girls, and a son. Alison, by the way, is liberal.

Alison complained my first day about a recent showdown she had with a gas station clerk. She said she was wearing one of her “I’m married to a National Guardsman” T-shirts, and the gas station clerk attacked her for being a “flag-waving war mongerer.” The man attacked her personally for being a supporter of war because her husband serves.

I know I’m gonna piss off a good amount of folks on this one, but what is this foolishness? I’ve seen it happen endlessly. I will be the first to say that I do not support war. I do not support our military action in Iraq, and I do not support our military action in Afghanistan. I do not support CIA training of terrorists in South America. But I support the troops, and I respect their families.

Alison herself would agree that she does not believe in the war in Iraq, and she does not agree with the war in Afghanistan. We both know many people in the service that do not agree with these wars. 

But still, these men and women enlist and are required to go. These soldiers do not have a choice if they want to serve in a war they believe in, they serve in the war that their country sends them to fight. There is no military tribunal in charge of asking soldiers if they believe in the war. They are called, they go, end of story.

Individuals attacking military families that have no choice in the matter simply piss me off. Since Vietnam, the vast majority of our military serves voluntarily because they desire to get out of the economic class that they are in. The military offers a good paycheck in hard economic times, (see today’s New York Times) a way to pay for college, and a light at the end of the tunnel for families stuck in wage slavery. Although there are the folks that do it for the love of fighting, most sign up to give their families a way out of the poverty that has been inflicted by the very same system that made war their only option.

Attacking people that are serving their country voluntarily is wrong, and it’s the wrong way of attacking an amoral war. We live in a country where we have been provided with freedom of speech as well as venues with which we as individuals can participate in our government. We live in a place where we have access to our Republic, and we can organize in order to make a difference in what our government does. 

To me, attacking an individual for the sins of a country is lazy. It denies citizen responsibility. It denies that there are proper venues for change. It denies that we have been given any rights by leaving them unused and forgotten. If we forget our rights and take our frustration out on individuals, we give up our right to check and balance our own system and replace it with silly name calling and fruitless bickering.

Plus, ostricizing the soliders makes for serious issues when these soldiers come home and become veterans. People who have served need our love and respect, not a hard shoulder from our collective moral compass. Looking down on soldiers who have served only guaruntees that we will relive the sins of our fathers by ignoring the wisdom that comes back from the trenches. And it leaves people who have given up a large portion of their lives for our freedoms left in the cold, alone when they need others the most.

Chris Hedges talks of the obsession that we have with war in his book “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.” He does an amazing job of expressing how in times of war, both sides of an ideological difference are negated by making violence out of ideology. The ideology is forgotten as war drags on, and all that remains is the propaganda from both sides making the other side of the war out to be the enemy. As both parties and news outlets move further away from each other on the political spectrum, this ideological battle is starting to rage on between people on the homefront.

And it’s dumb. Save the fight for your senators. Save the fight for your representatives. Save the fight for the protests. Save the fight for your blog. Save the fight and endite George Bush for war crimes. Save the fight to stop the next war and keep our troops at home with their families before there is even a need to send them away.

But don’t attack the soldiers soon to be veterans. And please don’t attack the families who will (God willing) accept their loved ones back into their homes soon. It just shows you have nothing better to do, and are too lazy to fight the real enemy. If we channel our collective rage into the inboxes of our senators, the streets of our cities, and the steps of our capitols, we might just get our troops to come home. And let’s do it soon, there are families waiting.

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