progress progress pleasant myth

One of the great perks of academic peonage is the ability to take free classes and keep the brain from atrophying, though what good it does for my cortices might be cancelled out by the blood pressure, released only by doing my best to not laugh or start talking too much.

I love that we have these discussions and I'm sure people wonder what planet I'm from too with some of the things I think and say but sometimes these perspectives are either so bizarre I can't even parse them out or they're so caricatureistic that I just kind of shake my head and wait until the end of class to vent with Randal about the Ayn Rand acolyte, the Che-obsessed undergrad who can't believe that Stalin would ever do anything bad, the older gentleman who still believes in some archaic concept of law and order and neoconnery, the other who believes that the world is getting better and someday we'll all hold hands and kumbayah and brings EVERYTHING back to the KKK.

As a country, yes, we're not as institutionally racist and that's a really good thing, but is it any better in the rest of the world? Sub-Saharan Africans in post-Gaddafi Libya are getting massacred, the Bhutanese who say they're the happiest country in the world are uprooting their Nepali kindred, the Bantu Somali were enslaved by the ethnic Somali up through the 1930s and still endure discrimination there, and when they immigrate elsewhere.

You really think it's better? Same shit, different place no matter what book you read or statistics you throw my way. How do you live this long and travel the world and be so educated and yet be so constrained by the narrowness of your personal experience? I just don't understand.

And I speak up and say we've all got dirty hands here, that all this talk of rights and universalities is semantics, and that no one treats everyone justly.



Classroom lessons World War Two
Atrocities against the Jews
Never again our solemn vow
That's why we all share Cambodia
Isn't it great how far we've come since then?

And I can't help but bow my head and cry
It took so long to finally realize
That all our hopes are based on such gross lies

Dialectic's shit
Evolution's crap
Time and time again the masquerade is
Shown for what it really is:
Progress, progress it's a pleasant myth
Progress, progress it's a pleasant myth

Progress, progress
Pleasant myth
That makes my life worthwhile

you know what? you know what?

I'd rather know that something is wrong and be told than to let it continue to go on to have the shit hit the fan now rather than later, but I feel my internal organs shudder when I get the impersonal communication devoid of context and enforcing a suffocating conformity to a norm that makes next to no sense outside of boardrooms and in motivational books.

I will smile and nod and say yes of course you're right, I laugh too much I smile too much, I'm too fucking human. I don't buy into this, but I'll pretend to because I need to eat.




But in reality I will say what I need to say, and not so much for cowardice as survival. I will try not to cry. I'm feeling resentful and not so much ashamed as understanding that the language that we speak is different than the language of those in power, that they will never understand us, and that we don't want to lose our souls to be them.

At least I have Kristin to cathartically rock out to in the car on the way home.

in which I will probably offend and be misunderstood by 85% of my not-so-devoted readers

So the first thing I heard on the radio this morning was CSNY's "Ohio," and I was a bit surprised not to hear any commentary from the Boomer Overlords about the anniversary day of the most significant event to happen at my alma mater.

There's a parking lot now where the shooting happened and every year lots of aging hippies crawl out of the woodwork to protest downtown, women with hair down to their knees and faded Oberlin College t-shirts, men with coolie hats and t-shirts with the Vietnam flag on them telling you "I was there, maaaan!" and all sorts of other types who show up for such things.

Because of my reputation as a "random force of chaos" and because despite my introverted tendencies I somehow get acquainted with a strange mix of people, I ended up hanging out with a crusty punk kid with feathers in his matted hair who called himself Cobalt who'd ridden on top of trains to get here for the big protest (this was in the heart of Dubya's second term). His clothes smelled so bad that the ARA girl he knew here had to hang them outside her dorm room window.

He joined our dinner table and watched the Black Keys with my crew of friends (who told me afterwards "we just all assumed that he was someone you knew"). We all went to the playground at midnight to go on the swings and hang out in the parking lot and then the next day me and him sat outside debating politics and religion while while eating out of a jar of ancient organic peanut butter with our fingers. He was "fighting capitalism" by stealing pens from campus offices so people couldn't write checks and coughing up blood every five minutes and I'm amazed I didn't get sick, but I did buy him food on my meal plan because I had a week of school left and a few hundred dollars to burn. I wonder where he is now.

We had a May 4th room in the library that was a popular destination for vacationing Freedom Rockers and a haunt for dirty old men as it had a computer and was dark, and every year the school has a big symposium where the likes of Bobby Seale and Jello Biafra speak, music by people like Country Joe, and a lot of general hagiography and accompanying mythology surrounding the event. It's like 9/11 for the Woodstockers and their acolytes more or less. "Tell me Father, did they aim?, and all that.

I asked my dad about it, since I grew up on his record collection full of Creedence, Neil Young, and Hendrix, and since he had neither money or grades for college and didn't want to Vietnam if he didn't have to (being skeptical of our reasons for being there), he was in the National Guard at the time, but stationed in Toledo (going off base to see the MC5 at Bowling Green and feeling like he looked like a spook) and he says that the 60's had a lot of great music but were hell to live through.

He doesn't have much patience for most of his generation and this probably explains a lot of my cynicism about suburban crackers who listened to Zeppelin and now dig smooth jazz, who wax poetic about "True Revolutionaries like Che Guevara" but drive new SUVs and live in the suburbs away from all "those people" but will tell you about that one black friend they had in college who had an Afro and was down with Malcolm X.

There were a lot of activist groups when I was there, and while there were some really great people who've no doubt gone on to try to save the world, there were also a lot of holier-than-thou types who believed that bathing was "fascist" and more than a few trust-fund socialists from Hudson who drove nice cars and wore Nautica chinos with their Che shirt and it was very hard for me to take them seriously when I was selling my books and CDs for grocery money, working 30 hours a week, and walking everywhere.



Certain members of my family blame my Kent State education for making me a flaming liberal but if anything, my time there soured me on both sides so completely as things like Abu Ghraib and the torture memos began to come out and the rank hypocrisy of those who claim to be more moral and Christian justified the unjustifiable but the left wasn't a friendly place to born-again pro-lifers like yours truly who are too skeptical about general human nature to believe that we can build a better tomorrow through greater bureaucracy and Kum-Ba-Yah.

no he ain't gonna die...

In honor of the early morning workplace arguments over whether Alex Chilton or Layne Staley is better, or, the eternal culture clash between the boomers and their spawn.