Israel

  Just a word about U.S.-Israeli relations before all the hubbub dies down. Here in California we are a bit innoculated, I think, from the noise in Washington, but nonetheless it's an issue not to be ignored, if only because every national representative in this country has a (the same) view on it, and much of our foreign policy in the Middle East must be conducted with respect to Israel.

  This might be enough to say, actually, but I'd like to add one nuance before I sign out. And that is, if Benjamin Netanyahu was dressed up in a Barack Obama costume, he would have been booed in his speech to Congress yesterday. As it was, sans costume, he was cheered loudly by our elected officials for saying the exact same thing as Obama. The difference was who it came from.

Obama       
 

    Does anyone remember the year 2008? If you have faulted Obama for some hiccup since then, some slight, that is on you. I’ll tell you what we saw that August, beginning in Denver and leading up to the November election, and beyond. We saw a man who believed in himself and believed in this country. We saw a man who had come from the island state adrift in the Pacific and come to our shores to tell us a story of ourselves we had not heard in a while. We saw a man devoted to his family, one grounded in love.

     As the 2012 election approaches, the stakes are high. On the right, what do we find? Bickering and politics-of-old, and the insidious trickery of words used to dupe an inattentive electorate. What do have in the Oval Office? What have we had in that office since the beginning of 2009? Honesty and integrity, confidence and transparency, and love. Gulp. President Obama has been governing with love in his heart… In short we have an antidote to all the craziness, all the confusion which swirls around Congress and the geopolitical sphere.

        

   We would do well to look at the accomplishments of Obama over the last two and a half years, and compare that to Mr. W. Bush’s eight. Maybe we would find something to be proud about.

And Now, Musical 'DNA'...

        There is really only one thing missing from 2011. A lightbulb that makes the world glow, because that is what it’s doing. Crisscrossing streams of information are circling the globe in nanoseconds, and there is no place to hide from surveillance. Bin Laden’s neighbor tweeted the raid? One simply could not have predicted a future like the one we’re inhabiting. 

But among the myriad benefits there are potential pitfalls. We are swept up periodically in the newest gadget, our concentration gets fractured, and we are scarcely able remember what (and where) we came from. The present is always taken for granted. Its particular sheen seems expected after no more than a moment’s reflection.  But there is always art, the artists, always showing us what we are, what we really look like. 

Thanks to them, we have recorded our history. Historians get to choose their words too, and while textbooks might not exactly be poetry, they tell a story. But now look at what we have here: the internet. A globally accessible, instantaneous recording device. Immediately following an event, certain words are chosen to describe it, and connections between other stories are formed by virtue of those particular chosen words.

So, if you don’t mind using your imagination for a moment: the bowl of stories we have told about ourselves over the years, the milliennia, is filling up, and we are noticing the extent to which we share common threads. It is a beautiful thing. Messy, but beautiful. Sports are especially scrutinized. In fact, nothing is missed. Every play broken down into its smaller parts, fractions of seconds added and subtracted like time were some precious metal, replays shown countlessly for maximum viewing pleasure, and exposure.  

                

          Are not our eyes full up? Are we not approaching some vanishing point where the present slips through the cracks just as it happens? Are we getting so good at dissecting reality that our building block skills have suffered? Are we succumbing to entropy? Surely not. Luckily, this field of webworking drones (that would be us) are using the instant reflecting machine to learn about themselves. 

         But yet we have no endgame. We are struggling to locate the meta-narrative that shall at long last weave together the disparate strands of humanity. What is this? What is our abiding, connecting story? Why should we be searching for it separately? Why should we be searching for it at all? What should we be doing to search for it? 

       My short answer is read a Wikipedia article daily. Focus on stories of people, not just facts and information. My long answer is I think religions are growing tired of being forced to distinguish themselves, old symbols are losing their meaning, new visually-based languages are cropping up every day, and it is increasingly easy to see oneself in the other.

              

        Japan? Those weren’t Japanese people; they were people. Tucson (have we forgotten about Gaby Giffords, or what?) taught us an important lesson, and the President certainly shone, urging us to rise above our divides once and for all… But didn’t we see a little divisiveness sneak out of Donald Trump a few months later and get covered ad nauseum by the media?

        And maybe Bin Laden’s death will once and for all silence the whispers about Obama’s legitimacy, but who’s to say? What, exactly, is at the root of the brutal partisan bickering? Is it our need to vanquish an opponent (Charlie Sheen has synopsized a cultural infatuation with one simple word)? Or is it more primal, more psychologically elusive, more, gulp… biblical? What if it is just fear of realizing how closely connected we are?

        Of course I am being coy, this is precisely what it is. We are all humans, and we can’t stand it. How can we all be so the damn same? Has not the Creator left some secret codes to unlock an independent existence, that we all must figure separately? Well I believe he has and Apple makes a revolutionary product to hold and store and play them. I am talking about songs; I am talking about music.  

       What if we all picked our favorite songs? A list of our favorite songs that together told our own unique story? That would be beautiful, wouldn’t it? We all can’t be musicians (recording artists, I mean), so why not choose our ‘musical DNA’ based on memories, history, and community, and start seeing where we overlap, where we share, where we unite? Seems a small but important step toward furthering our understanding of this ever-expanding marketplace of opinions.

        Maybe then we’d see the glow in our flesh and not our machines.

Critique on Culture

    As I have been mending from a severe bout of mental illness, I have been occupying my brain with the theater that is politics, and culture at large, as presented to me by apparently happy souls on the television. I have decided that the news is no more than a series of questions and answers which produce narratives.

                

   We see this most visibly on the local and national news, but big stories that consume us for a time get better ratings so a narrative yarn must be actively spun. Jon Stewart remains the most astute when it comes to pointing this out, (and thank goodness for him, beacon of sanity that he is.) Colbert will get there; he is still a little raw for my taste…

   On the one hand I am grateful to my television culture which gives me something to think about, but I would not be a very good liberal if I were not at least a little embarrassed by it. Judging by our own very real complicity, however, it persists, and we are responsible, each of us, for changing it. 

 
   There was a guy who promised us change not too long ago, and I for one am encouraged. People are very interested in seeing the results, but government is less a machine than a service. Service is a normal thing to expect, but for some reason we get unhappy when change is not delivered to our doorstep in a bow.

  The economy, I understand, is very difficult to wait around on, but the man works out of Washington, not Vegas. To this point he has inherited a financial crisis and kept us afloat. Nothing more can be done except watch the numbers. This leaves us to consider his words.

  The adage reminds us that words do not speak as loud as karate chops, or something, but in this internet age aren't words a kind of currency? 

  The man Obama has laid down some seemingly fundamental laws of decency (transparency, conciliation, non-aggression) which, it must be said, differ drastically from the previous administration's hubris; my daring use of that word is not a battle cry, just a fact. 

"Of Course"

  In the wake of this global terror boogeyman being silenced, of the central figurehead of mass chaos being extinguished, we all have the right, and duty, as Americans, to breathe.

  Exhaling is our next step. Mired as we have been in deeply uncertain times, and as a result massively insecure about our relative safety, all the while idly wondering how to better protect ourselves, with the last administration's ineptitude fresh in our minds, we should take a deep breath in and out. We nearly bankrupted our nation of plenty chasing after him, and now he is gone. Rejoice.

  Osama bin Laden. Deceased. If you don't like celebrating the loss of a life, please do join in the feeling of unity and accomplishment this action affords us as a nation. We have lived in pain, and we have lived in fear because Barack Obama's predecessor decided to shrug off the duty of capturing this man, urging us instead to shop.

  My angle here is to celebrate Obama. He has led us through 2 and a half difficult years, often imploring us to come together against our instincts to dismiss one another. His is a lofty ideal, undoubtedly, but can we now acknowledge the potency, the proficiency of his attention and resolve? This is not "resolve" like we saw on an aircraft carrier showing us a sign which proclaimed "Mission Accomplished," this is a corpse, at sea.

  I am happy bin Laden is dead, unlike some who cringe because the idea of death is so repugnant to them. This man was bad to us. Justice was served, and we do not need moral loopholes to keep our consciences clean. While we marinate in my silly, amateur morality lesson let us now turn our gaze to President Obama, the oft-doubted leader who is earning his stripes.   

 
"Moth to Flame"


By jove, the turning compartments of living and spacing one’s being in time --
a claustrophobic attachment of alphabets to the flaming, freeing light of sun.

Around and on petals arduously flowering, a rowdy snowflake of possibility
assembling upon your nose -- a cushion to endure the torrential stream of
    human blows...

An open wind, a dusting, a dirty centerpiece and living room in disarray,
a phony sound to the microwave and industry abuzz near kitchenware,
    feeling anything...

    May I kindly confuse you?

Following nothing and listening in between, we know when to beware
and when to be there, a slow hollowing, a fighting desperate claim on
    the orange flame.  

"The Hills"

The best poetry is little, really,
a gentle buzzing behind the mind,
a silent showing of minor unknowing.