Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Dating

There, I said it. I'm going there. Because Friedrich Nietzsche said we should face that which we fear and loathe the most, so I am going shout into the oceanic noise of the internet about dating.

Because my Aunt noted recently that people seem to be marrying older, which is true but odd because most people I know don't seem to be happy with that, which naturally begs the question of why this phenomenon that nobody wants exists in the first place.

When I first moved to Utah 2 years ago, my two non-LDS roommates were baffled to see freshmen with wedding rings-out east where they came from, people held off till 30, or at least till they were financially secure, to marry (in Victorian England, actually, Tennyson didn't marry his fiance till middle-age, when he was finally financially secure). So maybe there's an actual outside influence upon the bubble of Mormondom in postponing commitment, but that doesn't seem to get to the heart of it, especially since the bubble seems so impervious to so many other outside trends.

Dallin H. Oaks gave his now-famous "Don't Hang Out-Date" talk to the Church's YSA 5 years ago, and while I agree with his prognosis, I don't think it is reducible down to mere "too much hanging out" either--hanging out feels the symptom, not the root.

The influence of romantic-comedies and pornography in warping our sense of healthy relationships? Maybe, but again those feel like a symptom, an outgrowth, a self-feeding recursive cycle, rather than a point of origin.

Fall-out from the 60s and counter-culture free love and aversion to monogamy and responsibility and familial commitments? Certainly we are still dealing with the fall-out of the 60s in yet another self-feeding recursive loop, but again I hold that the 60s were a result, a reaction against, rather than a cause.

The loss of proper rituals of courtship? Sure, they may have felt overly formalized, but at least their was a structure, a scaffolding, within which to situate ourselves when dating, a frame which we have lost. But why did we discard it? Again, just saying "the 60s" doesn't explain why the 60s happened.

More dead-beat guys and/or intimidating professional women? My rule of thumb is if a dating trend like this is purported by a major news outlet and the entertainment industry, be even more suspicious than claims of WMDs in oil-rich countries.

Psychological damage from the increased rates of divorce and children of broken homes? That feels just a tad too reductive for my tastes.

A friend of mine who just graduated in psychology hypothesizes that perhaps the problem is we have too much choice--through out most of human history, our romantic options have been exceedingly limited to the people in our village, tribe, or aristocratic circle, and that when the marriages haven't been arranged (as they still are in many places today). He cites research (which I have not seen) stating that arranged marriages, in say, India, tend to be happier, because both parties are more committed to ensuring the relationship functions. He points to the easy example of In-n-Out Burger, with it's severely limited menu, because people are actually happier when they don't have as much choice.

Simple analogy could be drawn to democracy itself--there's plenty of valid complaint about how U.S. Congress never seems to get anything done; but as more than one commentator has pointed out, we never get things done precisely because we disagree. We are a politically diverse society where dissenting voices are acknowledged. Widespread disagreement is a sign of a healthy democracy; sure, the govt. could get more done if we lived under a dictator (that in fact was the real appeal of fascism 80 years ago), but I think most Americans would rather live under a clumsy democracy than an efficient tyrant. As Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst possible system of govt., except when compared to all the others."

It's the price we pay for freedom; and in this modern era of wide-spread romantic freedom, paralysis and indecision and greater anxiety in our relationships are the price we pay as well. Such in fact was Alexis de Tocqueville's specific critique of America, that our greater mobility (social, geographic, economic, romantic, etc) and freedom of choice causes us greater anxiety from the "what ifs" in our lives (it was an American, after all, who wrote "The Road Less Traveled"), leading to greater despair and madness among us than among the oppressed peasants of old.

And especially in this era of easy world travel, globalization, and the internet, we have as about a diverse and wide pool of romantic possibilities to choose from as history has ever seen. The amount of choice we have now is, according to my friend's thesis, paralyzing.

But that's just what he thinks. I've been mulling this over and all I've come to conclude thus far is that we are all somehow collectively skirting the issue, and we're not even quite sure what the issue is. What do you, my non-existent audience, think?

Monday, July 26, 2010

Suspenders

I am tempted to wear suspenders more often, but I worry that I'm not quite cool enough to pull them off. It takes, I maintain, a Marty McFly or Ferris Beuler to pull of suspenders, and these are two figures who transcend space time--in Marty's case, both literally and figuratively.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Ben Folds

I have come to realize as of last that I do indeed have some non-sexual man-crushes; being an English major, my main man-crushes tend to be TS Eliot and James Joyce. I mean, by contrast, I respect Brad Pitt as an actor, and even defend Tom Cruise (as a thesbian, not as a human being) for Jerry Maguire, Mission Impossible, and War of the Worlds, but I go just ga-ga for The Waste Land and Dubliners. I'm positively giddy to re-read Ulysses later this summer. Given how nerdy my man-crushes are, it's only fitting that Ben Folds would also figure into one of my man-crushes.

I saw him perform the other night at Deer Valley Outdoor Amphitheater up in Park City; he performed with the Utah Symphony, and I can say it was easily the highlight of the week, more than made up for losing a Paul McCartney ticket to a coin-toss, and I'm almost afraid my summer has no where to go but down now.

It got off to a rick-rollicking start with Zac and Sara; he would lean heavily on his solo stuff (though Narcolepsy was the grand finale, before the naturaly encore of The Luckiest, the closest he's gotten to another bona fide hit, and with good reason) (I could also have used more Reinhold Meissner in his set, but that is but one quibbling complaint of a gorgeous show), and even gutsily debuted a couple new songs he'd been working on (including a hilarious Levi Johnson Blues) at an orchestral concert that one would have expected to be an over-view of his classic work. Vintage Ben Folds, only he could have gotten away with it.

Brick is of course his one big hit, though it quickly grew repetitive and annoying; it does not have great replay value, and if it weren't for the fact that Brick is an aberration to his oeuvre, I never would have gotten into him. But given it's his one legit "main-stream" radio hit (whatever that's worth), I just braced myself for its inevitable performance. But I must say that the dissonant violins from the Utah symphony redeemed the song, and made me enjoy it again.

Ben Folds is famous for inviting audience participation, but I was curious as to how he could pull that off with a symphony orchestra and a large out-door venue. I shouldst not hath lacked faith; he had all thousand-odd of us "ah"-ing the three-part harmonys to "Not the Same," a song I love to death to begin with (I have mission memories of it!), which easily was the highlight of the night for me! Folds was clearly enjoying himself to.

Best stage banter: "I see some folks in the condos are watching from their porches. We'll wrap things up here so that you crank back up the Jimmy Buffet."

And all this not to mention that the temperature was perfect, the view of the rolling hills breath-taking, and the symphony dazzling. Please excuse my total Ben Folds geek-out!

Bonnie and Clyde

Recently saw the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway; one thing I noticed about this production was how much cameras, photography, newspapers, even Bonnie's written poem about their legend, all figure into the story. Every where one looks, someone is representing one's self either in photos or in print. Everyone seems to be obsessed with committing themselves to a representation. The complication comes from the fact that the representations appear to both conceal and reveal them, frankly admitting that we cannot perceive either the world or ourselves without representation.

At least in Clyde's case, some of that may be psychosexual; Clyde appears to struggle with E.D. and sexual anxiety throughout most of the film, allowing for a very easy Freudian reading that he is projecting his own sexual inadequacies onto phallic symbols such as firearms, and into such exciting tensions as bank robberies. But staying with the Freudian speculation, death drive also appears to be a propelling motivation, for by embracing potentially deadly situations they hope to control death itself. This preoccupation with death drive is apparent not only in Bonnies desire for the orgasmic "le petit more" with Clyde, but also when she demands that they drop Gene Wilder out of the car once she learns he's an undertaker.

The desire to control the death drive may also be behind their relentless quest for representation, for once someone is preserved in the by-definition lifeless representation (photos, print, etc, are all inorganic by nature), then they have imprinted their existence onto death, the one force that never dies, ironically ensuring their immortality.

Bonnie and Clyde finally having sex near the end can, in that sense, do nothing else but presage their own death, for Clyde no longer has to project onto a representation something he has enacted in vivo. Now that he's engaged in a life-creating and life-affirming act, he no longer needs to imprint onto lifeless representation; he can dispense with symbols, as can symbols now dispense with him. Likewise, Bonnie's publishing of a poem about their adventures ensures that they will now live forever as legends; there is no longer any need for them to remain alive. Both the two lover and representation itself can dispense with each other.

They die in short order.

A More Honest Debate

False binaries make everything nice and neat; it's either/or, makes everything tidy black and white, this or that, line in the sand and such and we all do it. I understand the appeal, I understand we all fall into their trap, and we aren't going to quit making them any time soon.

That having been said, the current false binary that appears to be dominating American political discourse (among many), is capitalism vs socialism, as in which type of nation do we want to be. As usual, both terms are utilized as though the meaning of both were clear to everyone, when of course they are obvious to no one. One side fears we are leaning too precariously close to nefarious socialism, and to a lesser extent another side fears we lean too far toward the other (there are more than 2 sides of course, but again, false binaries, neat and tidy and useful for rhetorical purposes though still dishonest).

I'm going to just go ahead and assume for the purposes of this inconsequential blog-post that socialism refers to govt-owned and tax-payer funded, while capitalism refers to private-owned and customer-revenue funded. Without getting into a debate about flip-sides-of-same-coin and such, I can say right off the bat that the United States of America is already heavily socialist just by virtue of having a govt-run, tax-payer-funded military, police force, fire depts, highway system, and that's even if we magically eliminated public education, welfare, national parks, and "Obama-care" (whatever that is). And on the other end, even nominally-communist China has a booming free-market economy, tyrannical North Korea has regular dealings with Japanese and South Korean business-men, and thoroughly socialist Sweden is home to corporate juggernaut IKEA (from whom I bought a cheap, crappy bed once that I had to put together myself).

My round-about point is that the much more honest debate America should be having isn't capitalism vs socialism, but rather how much capitalism and how much socialism should be the right balance? I doubt even the most fervent libertarian would wish to dispense with such socialist services as national defense; I doubt the most out-and-out socialist would wish to surrender his/her radical co-op's control to govt. control. We already have a mix of socialism and capitalism, and the real question is how we're going to mix balance them against each other. That's a much more difficult question, but also a much more honest (and relevant) one.

Again, I'm not expecting this debate to actually occur on a national level anytime soon, but it would be a more honest debate.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Reified Whiteness

Three times have I been an ethnic minority--or so I flatter myself: As an LDS missionary in Puerto Rico, as an English teacher in China, and as a reporter in Mexico.

In the first, I did indeed have to learn Spanish, Hispanic discourse patterns, and overall adapt into the native culture. Yet all the while Puerto Rico remained a subordinated colony to my home country; my "white" identity was never truly threatened.

In the second, I was in the midst of a rising superpower, and had to learn not only Chinese but also Chinese discourse patterns; in many ways I had to relearn how to speak and do everything. Yet my purpose there was to teach English, to continue to reify my native tongue as the global dominant discourse.

And in the third, though by then I was thoroughly familiar with Hispanic culture, I was still in a nation that, while not a colony like Puerto Rico, was still in a subjugated relationship to my home country. Also, I was there writing for an English-language newspaper serving American expatriots who demanded the news in their native tongue while they took advantage of Mexico's favorable exchange rate.

The overall effect has been that though I have experienced being an ethnic minority multiple times, I have never actually had an experience analogous to that of most minorities living in these United States. For that to happen, I would need to, say, immigrate to some African Union superpower that had undercut America's economy with its own ruthless practices, enjoyed unchallenged military superiority, and had made Swahili the international lingua franca.

I bring all this up only because 1) I was recently exposed to an article about how white power codes are reified in the classroom, even in classes that ostensibly are all about examining "whiteness," because white people have this irritating habit of drawing false analogies between the travails of minorities to their own experiences, and 2) once my night-manager at the BYUI locker-room said strait-faced that "there is no group more oppressed now a-days than white men," and it took me a minute to realized he wasn't making a joke.

I know what it's like to learn a new language, and I know what it's like to adapt to a new culture, which gives me experience and empathy I'm glad I have; but though I've doubtless slipped up unconsciously, I am wary of drawing patronizing corollaries between my experiences and those of ethnic minorities.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

War and Peace

Just finished Tolstoy's War and Peace; it comes off like a 1,300+ page treatise about how historians criminally over-simplify historical causation and how free will is an illusion. Not that I'm smarter than Tolstoy or anything, but though I agree with him on how countless interdependent causes-economic, religious, political, personal-go into every historical event and most histories are vastly oversimplified, I have to differ with him on his free will conclusion. The same countless and contradictory forces that go into every event are also present within every individual, and each individual must navigate these forces within themselves. We cannot obey all these forces at once, so we pick and choose the ones we can as we can.

If by lack of free will Tolstoy means that we can't just disobey physical law and fly off into the sky a la Neo at the end of The Matrix, then no, of course we don't have free will; but I don't think that's what anyone means by it, either. Personally I found the whole debate rather silly; just trying to convince me they have no free will in itself suggests free will, because you are asking me to privilege certain rationale-causations within my psyche over others, and my only response is: what else did you think free will is? I never get a cogent response.

But all that aside, what I found most intriguing about War and Peace is that the only characters who experience any sort of true happiness--Andrey staring at the sky while on his back on the battlefield, Pierre with Karatayev in the POW camp, even Kutuzov holding back his troops against the retreating French--are those who see the world, life, history, humanity, etc, not as a means to an end, not for personal aggrandizement or for some noble cause or what have you, but as an end unto itself, something beautiful because it is beautiful, an intrinsic value, that defines rather than is defined, a good of first intent, something that is its own reason for being. They seek not to bend the world to their will like some reckless Napoleon (in contrast to Hugo whom I just finished, Tolstoy is clearly not a fan), but rather seek to join it. Those indeed were the most moving parts of this gargantuan novel for me, and the most rewarding, and the moments of happiness that I agree with Tolstoy are the most genuine.

This novel by the end actually reminded me of Homer's Iliad, in that a great number of people are being swept away in events beyond their control, waging a war that both sides explicitly admit is unjust, yet for them the question is not whether or not they can escape, but whether or not they will still be noble in spite of all around them, in spite of history, in spite of the gods themselves.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Alternative Histories

A couple friends and I were discussing yesterday the genre of alternative histories. While fun thought experiments, we found that most alternative histories only conceive of how the world would be worst if some major historical event had gone otherwise. While it was easy to consider what might have happened if Hitler had won WWII or if Napoleon had successfully invaded Russia or if America had lost the Revolutionary War or the North the Civil War, it was more difficult to conceive of an alternative history that might have resulted in a better world than we currently have.

Was this simply a failure of imagination on our parts? Are we simply incapable of conceiving of a better possible world? Do we feel so trapped in history that we don't know how to mess with it to make it better? Are we just too euro-centric to consider alternative time-lines that aren't so euro-centric? Is this the best world we could plausibly build given all confluences of historical events preceding us? That seems depressing.

The closest we came up with for alternative histories that would have resulted in a better present are: 1) If Africa had developed a Enlightenment technologies and philosophies at or before the same time as the Europeans (thus preventing them from easy exploitation by the European colonizing powers), and 2) if Fossil Fuels had never been discovered, forcing a reliance on water and wind technologies early in the development of electricity, and thus negating any reliance on Mid-East oil (and the ensuing wars) later on.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Fireworks

I found myself wondering this last weekend why the 13 colonies rebelled, all things considered. I mean, the English, I have learned, do indeed have a long history of rebelling against their monarchs: the Magna Charta in 1215, the Peasant Revolt of 1387, the War of the Roses in the 1400s, the Civil War of 1688 (beheading Kings a full century before the French Revolution), rendering 1776 but one rebellion by Englishman among many. Maybe the American Revolution was but the realization of all the English revolts that had preceded it.

But then the fireworks launch, and I must perforce live in the moment, for the fireworks exist only in the moment, as our lives explode for this one glorious moment under the heavens, and my head clears and my thoughts drift away...

Les Miserables

Just finished all 1500-odd unabridged pages of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." He was clearly a fan of the French Revolution; in fact, so long were Hugo's historical digressions as he rhapsodized on anything and everything even remotely connected to the French Revolution and the forward progress of mankind into the light that I often found myself having to switch modes, from novel reading to extended-essay reading, while I waited for Hugo to reward me with the suspenseful, page-turning parts of the narrative. A friend of mine recently proffered the theory (which I'm still out with the jury on) that most novels are in fact "boring," or at least that most of each novel is boring, for the novelist must necessarily right boring description in order to immerse the reader into this new world and thus make the action parts have more impact; "Les Miserables" might just be exhibit A for that one.

Nonetheless, all reading-theory aside, the accumulative impact of "Les Mis" is powerful and haunting, and oh, oh to have a conscience like unto Jean Valjean...

On the Ontological Quandraries of Baby Photos

Just got back from a family reunion out at Long Beach (Washington, that is), and for one of the activities my Dad constructed a poster board with baby photos of everyone in the room and we had to guess whose was whose. For the life of me I couldn't match a single one to anybody's, including my own baby photo. The people who did guess right were mostly just remembering baby photos they'd already seen. When did we become adults? And how do we make it stop?