I really miss having a library nearby, not only for accessing books and other reference material that I’d prefer not to buy, but also to have a place to work with Internet access without going to a coffee shop (they do have coffee shops here, but not so many of them). The Internet makes a lot of information easily accessible at the click of the button, but most books are still unavailable online without some kind of purchase, and that content almost always comes with DRM protection.

So it really made me sad to hear that the library in my hometown of Troy, Michigan, will be shutting down in May 2011. As the Oakland Press reports : “Following Oakland County’s example, the Troy City Council approved a three-year budget…cutting more than $4 million in services this year from last year’s budget level.”

In addition to closing the library, the city is also closing the community center, museum, and nature center. However, the city is allocating “$1.1 million for Civic Center improvements.” The Civic Center was built about ten years ago, in the spot where the original Troy High School stood. It’s a slick structure that probably cost millions of dollars to build. But it’s mostly used for the gym and pool facilities, and as a senior gathering center.

This is a city, after all, that was rated #22 out of 100 of the “best places to live” by CNN Money in 2008. What kind of “best place to live” doesn’t have one of the most basic features of so-called “modern” civilization???

Apparently this all stems from four failed library millage proposals in 2010, as stated on the Troy Public Library website. According to a comment from Ronald R. Lambert, this was not the decision of the public alone. Someone ran commercials telling voters to turn down the proposals (which were already confusing in themselves). And the very idea may have arisen because the Troy City Council had other priorities.

As Lambert writes, “One of the great features of Library Millage Proposal 1 was that it provided for the library to be administered by an independent board, taking it out of the hands of City Council.” Millage Proposal 1 needed only 338 more “yes” votes to pass (15061 yes, 15736 no).

I used to spend a lot of time at the Troy Public Library as a kid, listening to stories, playing computer games (this was the early ’90s, before we had a personal computer at home), and checking out books and music with my library card. It’s kind of heartbreaking to think that kids in Troy will no longer be able to do that. All this gets blamed on the “economy,” but really it says something about our priorities as a society.

Throughout the ’90s I had to watch Troy fill up every single open space with condos, mega-churches, and shopping centers. Any place that endorses that sort of civic development, but cuts out the means for citizens to educate and inform themselves, is a place setting itself up for disaster.

You can find more info on Troy Public Library’s post “Frequently Asked Questions About the Library Closing.”

I suddenly find myself wrapped up in a project that could very well become a book. I can’t say too much about it yet, but it’s an exploration the spot where I think we’re stuck as a civilization. The basic idea came to me on July 2, and since then I’ve been working like a mad man, researching and taking notes.

It’s exciting, to say the least! I never thought I would get to this point. Apparently self-publishing the collection of early works, Seeking the Upward Spiral, helped me move to the next level. It must have provided adequate closure to a very dark four-year period in my life.

So now, onward and upward! You may see an occasional post from me, if I have some news to share. And who knows, maybe I’ll post updates on my progress. In the interim, please keep an eye on Supraterranean. We really need submissions! Also, did you see the new Thumpme blog? If not, have a lookie!

About a month ago I was preparing a streaming video player for an event at work. During downtime, the player streams old content from Michigan Television (public TV at U of M that has now been closed). In a pleasant coincidence, I happened to see an interview with Thylias Moss, an English professor at U-M who teaches a class on “Limited Fork Theory” in the School of Art and Design.

I figure you’re asking, “But what’s ‘Limited Fork Theory’?” It starts as a class about digital composition, but then goes way past the limits of traditional college education. As the course synopsis explains,

The approach is thematic rather than monolithic allowing students to draw information from any and all areas of their experience toward investigations of their own devising within a thematic context, this semester: framing systems. Limited Fork Theory is the study of interacting language systems: any/all visual, sonic, olfactory, tactile systems/subsystems on any/all scales for some duration of time.

Then Moss’ website 4orked.com says it

is also a Theory of Everything that not only includes, but also appreciates: imagination, the fruitfulness of dead ends, the possibilities of error, the usefulness of failure, the beauty of the many configurations of the box the limited fork comes out of and goes into, forking, reconfiguring, shaping, folding, unfolding, and bifurcating all the way.

Many paths to many worlds: one limited fork.

I’m impressed that this development has come about at a public institution. Moss was an awarded poet before developing this theory and corresponding practice. But it seems she risked more than her reputation as a writer in pursuing her passion. She was already an English professor when it began, and as she says in the video below, she interrupted the schedule of a semester course to take this new direction!

As she relates, “When I went to class on Monday, I had my students throw out everything. I said to them, ‘I don’t believe what I said when class has started. I cannot continue.’”

Moss posts online under the pseudonym Forker Girl, which she calls “the embodiment of Limited Fork Theory.” I find it especially interesting that she’s not keeping it a secret, like most professionals did with their pseudonymous work in the past. However, I think Forker Girl might be more of an alternate personality than a pen name.

Moss implies that Forker Girl is more free to express “herself,” which brings to mind the way Tyler Durden empowered the narrator in Fight Club. It seems this transition will happen more frequently in the future, as people stop allowing themselves to be limited to one professional role, trying to adhere to an imaginary idea of what’s “normal” for adults.

From Moss’ viewpoint, anyone can partake in this sort of exercise. “Certainly in imagination if no other way, you can allow these things to converge – allow something to happen. And then the role of a person who would be a practitioner of Limited Fork Theory would be to somehow document what happens.”

In a second video Moss demonstrates how even taking an abstract photograph can fuel her inspiration. “…there is no rule to the orientation of [the photo.] You see, as we turn it, we get other ideas. Other possibilities emerge. From this we get to experience and understand and analyze those perspectives denied to us based upon the limits of human perception.”

There’s a synchronicity in this story as well. I discovered Limited Fork Theory about the same time I was reading Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, a survey of tools used to induce visionary experience throughout human history — everything from precious gems to religious fasting to mescalin. To Huxley, what makes an experience visionary is the extent to which it transports a person beyond those “limits of human perception” that Moss mentioned.

Just as nicotinic acid can stop the visions caused by lysergic acid or mescalin, according to Huxley, “another inhibitor of visionary experience is ordinary, everyday, perceptual experience.” (p. 87) A person’s visionary power is defined by his or her awareness of the experience, voluntary control over it, and ability to express it to others. “For most of us most of the time, the world of everyday experience seems rather dim and drab. But for a few people often, and for a fair number occasionally, some of the brightness of visionary experience spills over, as it were, into common seeing, and the everyday universe is transfigured.” (p. 93)

Huxley makes it pretty clear that psychedelic drugs are only one way of activating the visionary mind, and a very temporary and undependable way at that. It seems that an increasing number of people today are looking for a way into the mental netherworld without having to depend on chemicals. Or stated another way (by fellow blogger Kaliptus), drugs can guide and educate us, but they are misused if the only purpose is “to get fucked up.”

The underlying goal, as Huxley puts it, is to “become capable of experiencing consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us.” (p. 106) And it should be noted that, while some people are more inclined towards visionary perception, the potential exists in the psychological make-up of all human beings. “At the antipodes of every mind lay the Other World of preternatural light and preternatural color, of ideal gems and visionary gold.” (pp. 114-115)

There’s still an air of impossibility when discussing this topic in the Western world, partly because, as Huxley points out, “familiarity breeds indifference.” We live in a flashy, distracting world, and what lies outside of physical perception is almost totally omitted from popular education (whether in school or at home). That’s why it’s so exciting to see someone like Moss at a public university. The students in the video seem absolutely enthralled by the class. I’m hoping this points to a coming trend.

LINKS:
4orked.com
4orkology.com
A Limited Forker Girl’s Tines
English 414 at U of M

The most interesting news I’ve heard lately on the topic of custom publishing came last month from Mashable.com. As Jolie O’Dell reports, you can now create and print a custom book using content from Wikipedia. Just click “Create a book” in Wikipedia’s left sidebar (under “print/export”), and then click “Start book creator.”

The video below explains the whole process, but it’s actually really simple. And I learned a lot about navigating Wikipedia that I didn’t know before. Once you’ve started adding pages to your book, there’s even a suggestion engine that recommends more relevant content for your project. Books are printed by PediaPress and the cost is based on number of pages. In the example, the book of 212 pages will cost $12.48, and they’ll ship in the U.S. for about $3. Not bad!

Honestly this is an amazing tool and I can’t wait to use it myself. One question left unanswered by the demo video is whether you can create an e-book with the same Book Creator, and whether or not that would cost money.

Actually I just tried out the process myself and realized that there is a Download box on the Manage Your Book page. That gives you the option of downloading either a PDF or TXT file… FOR FREE! It took about 30 seconds to compile and download, and the finished product is quite impressive! My test e-book is called “Sex Ed 402: Advanced Techniques.” Hope you enjoy! (NOTE: for mature readers only.)

Now for a little discussion. This is a fascinating development from Wikipedia, the site that hopes to create a compendium of all human knowledge that is openly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This makes the information even more accessible, since these custom books and e-books can be used offline at the reader’s convenience. I’m SO GLAD that they offer the free e-book option, since tablet computers and e-readers are booming right now. And the file even comes loaded with a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license!

The demo shows someone making a book for a Caribbean sailing trip. But think how quick and easy it would be to create a book about a recent news topic. Wikipedia is increasingly becoming a source for in-depth coverage of complicated news developments. I could easily make a custom book about the BP oil spill, for example, and include the entire story plus background on British Petroleum, the oil industry, off-shore drilling, clean-up efforts, previous disasters, etc. Then I could distribute that book on my independent news website with a Creative Commons license. Many people would prefer that to endless Google News searches or waiting for a preferred news outlet to present a more complete story — instead of just watching the webcam of oil spilling into the water ad infinitum.

One thing to think about is that PediaPress lets you put your name as editor and a photo from Wikipedia on the cover of the book. That custom book is also stored in their system in case you want to print the same book again. The e-book download, on the other hand, only let’s you put a title and subtitle on the cover. And once you disable the Wikipedia’s book creator, your project is deleted.

Try it out yourself and see how it feels to be a publisher!

We are a locally focused initiative, facilitated by EcoZoic L3C, working to catalyze paths towards community empowerment, sustainability, and resilience in the city of Detroit. We are building and expanding mutually enhancing relationships among the community of life.

“Our own special role, which we will hand on to our children, is that of managing the arduous transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic Era, the period when humans will be present to the planet as participating members of the comprehensive Earth community.” -Thomas Berry

To fill the gaps still present in my understanding, I searched the Web for these terms. The Wikipedia page for “Cenozoic” says it’s the most recent of three geologic periods, describing the last 65.5 million years, after the Cretaceous period ended. The same search for “Ecozoic” re-directs to the page about Michael Dowd, who’s described as “an American evangelist minister, evolutionary theologian and religious naturalism advocate.”

“Oh fuck,” I thought. “The Detroit spore is run by undercover evangelicals.” Luckily that premature conclusion wasn’t very accurate.

I watched an ABC interview on the website for Dowd’s book Thank God For Evolution and, though I remain somewhat skeptical, many of my fears were reduced. To clarify, my fears are based on the use of religious language to describe evolution or the progress of mankind. The language used in monotheistic religions is extremely vulnerable to misinterpretation, due to the inherently conservative nature of those religions. The goal is (and has to be, in a mass creed) to maintain tradition, beliefs, hierarchy, etc.

I can’t embed that ABC interview here, but I did find a similar one on YouTube from WREG-TV in Memphis (embedded below). I have to say, I was really impressed by this guy. Personally I have a problem with the fact that most scientists today don’t feel a conflict between their professional work and their religious beliefs, despite the enormous conflict that is usually present between the two. I figured Dowd would walk the same territory — or if not, he was probably trying to take the steering wheel from modern science and swerve the vehicle into a brick wall.

Instead of inspiring fear or hatred in me, Dowd convinced me that he may actually be capable of bringing Christianity up to speed. He and his wife (an atheist) drive around the country, sleeping in their van and working in people’s spare bedrooms. They’re trying to spread the message that there is no essential conflict between the language of science and religion. In his view, talking about the development of the universe after the big bang is no different than talking about the divine work of God. He seems to be expressing the idea that religious language was the best way to explain the universe at the time. Now we have other ways to explain it, ways that are more relevant at this time.

The point is that this marks a potential shift away from the concept of an omniscient, personified god who promises access to eternal life after death in heaven (and so on), to a new concept — one that is much more relevant, less vulnerable to manipulation, but (obviously) more difficult to explain and understand (especially for anyone who does believe in a personified god — or worse, those who believe that Jesus is still coming back to “save” them).

I haven’t read Dowd’s book yet, but I’m definitely interested in hearing more of what he has to say. Maybe this sort of movement will strengthen both science (which tends to reduce or devalue the individual in today’s post-industrial world) and religion (which was always supposed to be an individual journey of spirituality and higher meaning, not a subscription to a creed).

This is particularly exciting because, as I’ve learned from reading about Jungian archetypes, Christian symbolism is still very valid in human psychology. If we toss off all the arbitrary bullshit, then maybe we can reinvigorate the true purpose of the Christian myths, to the benefit of Western civilization as a whole. Yet now that I’ve watched the video below, I see that even Dowd is still pressing the idea of a personified god (it’s the use of He, with a capital “H,” that gets me) — so it can’t be that much of a jump forward.

Now that I’ve emerged from my symbolic journey through the desert that took place over the last few months, I need to start cracking away at a variety of topics that have sparked my interest lately. The timeliest of those topics is WikiLeaks, a site that I heard about a few weeks ago via an NPR column. Now that I Google search for it, I see it was actually a partner article (from a group called Foreign Policy), and they made it sound like it was already old news on April 8.

In other words, a video of an American helicopter shooting down a group of non-militant people in a suburb of Baghdad accrued more than two million views on YouTube within five days of being posted online (that happened on 4/3/10). It now has more than six million views. This is the way that information will be distributed in the future, and the distribution itself is almost more interesting than what we see in the video. After all, put in a different context, this could be a scene from a popular Hollywood war movie.

But this is “real life.” This is a group of American marines murdering innocent Iraqis who were “suspected” to be looking for trouble in the streets. Two of them were professional journalists (Reuters photographers) carrying large cameras under their arms, which by a far stretch could be made out to be automatic weapons. If there had actually be a battle going on (and if more than two were carrying large black objects), one might be able to argue that it was an honest mistake — collateral damage in the “fight for justice” while we “bring freedom to the world.”

However, these people were walking casually down the street. There was no warfare in sight. The helicopter requested permission to shoot down these “targets” quite simply because they were out looking for targets. As many have likely already commented, the scariest thing is how absolutely ordinary these events seem to the marines in the helicopter.

The ghost of Bill Hicks is chuckling on my shoulder right now. “I told you fuckers! What do you expect when you give a bunch of emotionally stunted and overly aggressive Americans access to the most expensive toys in the world?! They’re gonna do exactly what those war video games and movies brainwashed them to do: kill everything in site with a grin on their face.”

Yes, Bill. Thanks, and we miss you… very dearly.

It turns out that WikiLeaks is actually based in Sweden and run by a group called the Sunshine Press — a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public” (Wikipedia has much more information about them). And they have a separate site for this specific video: collateralmurder.com. Essentially they published this video after Reuters used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain it.

Personally I think this will be one of the most important stories of the year. This is the inevitable path of technological advance. Truth will demand to be acknowledged. I think that’s why Obama is pressing for universal access to high-speed Internet, even though he bowed to the bail-out demands from banks and auto companies. He knows there’s a hypocrisy to his actions, but he also knows that the intelligence capabilities of the general public are reaching a point where they will become superior to any one secret agency.

Of course, information will never come without a price — even if it’s free of cost to the public. From journalists on the war front (139 were killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, according to the Collateral Murder page), to a group like the Sunshine Press (who, according to information on their Wikipedia page, have already been the target of censorship, surveillance and/or attacks in various countries worldwide), this type of service is going to take a lot of courage, cooperation and hard work.

Currently their biggest problem might be fundraising. As it says on their site:

We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.

So if you’re a fan of truth — not just “fact-based journalism” coming from mainstream media (which, because of near-universal corporate affiliation, is weakened by conflicts of interest), but the kind of truth that is going to reverse the downward spiral of civilization — and you have some money to spare, consider sending it their way.

Of course, many would argue that Wikipedia or some other resource really marked the beginning of what I’ve deemed the “first-ever golden age of journalism.” But I’m not so sure. Wikipedia is great for that purpose, but you really have to know what you’re looking for. I think we’re going to see a very rapid growth of specialized reporting sites like WikiLeaks that have a specific focus or unique way of gathering and distributing content — content that is vital to the interests of the American public, rather than to the interests of the American oligarchy. Either way, we have a lot to look forward to in this area.

In case you haven’t yet seen “Collateral Murder,” here’s the clip from YouTube.

Things are getting very exciting in here (by “here,” I mean on Supraterranean). But things are looking up out here, in the real world, as well. I’ve been journaling like mad! You’d think notebook writing was a form of sustainable energy! It feels good! It feels like I found the new sound! I think only “Howard Moon and Vince Noir” can explain what I mean.

“We have searched all over this world, Spider, to find a new sound,” said Rudy. “But there is one place we forgot to look.”

“Oh yeah? Where?” asked Spider.

“Inside our own minds!” replied Rudy.

Ah, yes. “Use your door! Open your mind!” Are we finally figuring out that all the running around the world — all the “rape, murder and pillage” — was in vain? The true adventure is inward, as are the true demons that must be slain, and the true rewards to be reaped.

In search of those rewards, we just went pretty flippin’ far down a completely wrong path. Now we have to “rewind the Betamax,” so to speak. (It’ll make sense in a moment.)

But it is late on what the status quoticians like to call a weeknight, so I cede to the comedy.

I feel like everything I’ve been working on is suddenly coming together with a new clarity. On March 18 NPR ran an excellent interview with Tom Burrell, who worked in the advertising industry for 40 years and just published a book called Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority.

I find Burrell’s story to be so interesting because he worked much of his adult life on the other side of the smoke screen, without even realizing the harm his industry inflicts on society. The other reason I want to read the book is that it seems to be parallel with The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s landmark 1963 book in the modern feminist quest. What I mean is that the brainwashing of and about African Americans is likely very similar to the brainwashing that contributed (or still contributes, depending on your opinion) to the feminine mystique.

Burrell explains that, in our materialistic society — especially to those who are struggling financially — the only apparent path to status and recognition is to buy stuff. This phenomena is worsened by the way popular culture depicts wealthy African Americans only as MTV stars and professional athletes. It sounds stereotypical to suggest that an ethnic group could share a common desire for Escalades and mansions — but that’s the intent of the ones doing the brainwashing, so it must be addressed. As one caller says, her son assumed that their dentist would be white, because “if he was going to be black he’d be a rapper or basketball player.”

You can listen to the interview with this embedded player. My post continues below.

Later, in response to a caller, Burrell says “what that brainwashing does is gets you to a point of being so insensitive — or desensitized, that you become unconscious of what is going into your head, what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing. You also become a party to the brainwashing, or black people become a party to the brainwashing. But that’s the nature of brainwashing. You join in and become your own victimizer.”

Neal Conan points out that the Cosby Show was a notable example of black people being portrayed in a positive light — which is exactly what I was thinking as I listened. I used to love the Cosby Show, partly because the Huxtables seemed to be a healthier, more balanced, and more well-rounded family than most that I knew in suburban Detroit (most of whom were white). Just the fact that the dad was a doctor and the mom was a lawyer seemed cool to me. That kind of thing was so uncommon, for any ethnicity. But Bill Cosby was in charge of that show’s production, and he clearly had his priorities straight.

Probably my favorite part of the interview is when Burrell discusses the way black people have taken ownership of the “n word.” He claims that using the word gives black people a false sense of empowerment, since they’re actually contributing to the problem. Every time the word is uttered by anyone, it furthers the desensitization.

Burrell says we have to “turn those images around” in mass media, and Brainwashed reportedly describes ways that can be accomplished. One idea relates to creating your own media using a personal computer, which is pretty much equivalent to one suggestion in my essay “Indecision Over Michigan“! Of course, I was talking about the broader effects of TV addiction, not just racial brainwashing.

The website for Burrell’s book, stopthebrainwash.com, features an interesting intro video as well as updates on his work. There’s also an excerpt from Brainwashed on NPR.org.

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine published on February 11, an article by Russel Shorto called “How Christian Were the Founders?” looked into recent efforts by the Texas school board to inject into history and civics curriculum the idea that America was founded officially as a Christian nation. Their other aim is to wipe out the idea of separation of church and state, since it wasn’t stated in the founding documents of the United States.

Because Texas buys more textbooks than most (or all other) states in the country, publishers shape their textbooks based on guidelines chosen in the Lone Star State. The logic is simple: they don’t want their books to go unsold. But this has a toxic effect on the rest of the country, because only one textbook version is produced at a time — regardless of what other states want.

Remember in 2008 when we heard all that fuss about whether Creationism should be taught in schools alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection? That fight was spearheaded by the Texas school board, which at the time was led by Dr. Don McLeroy — a dentist with no background whatsoever in education, history, civics, or economics. According to Shorto, textbook publishers let McLeroy run through their book drafts to make adjustments as he sees fit!

That Creationism effort was a failure for the Republican majority in the Texas school board. It also led to McLeroy being removed from his position as chairman of the board, because of the conflict presented by his extreme religious views. But a New York Times article from March 12 informs us that, this time around, they actually won.

I shouldn’t imply that it comes as a surprise. The conservative/Republican/Christians (take your pick of title) on the board vote as a block, so currently they can do almost whatever they want. Not only that, but their aims are extremely specific. “As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, ‘The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.’”

To state my reaction briefly, this scares the shit out of me. This is different than the disorganized rabble chirped back and forth on cable news programs. This is organized crime… in the public school system!!! It would be one thing if they were arguing on the basis that students are getting an inadequate education, but they admit that their aims are solely political. (The ironic part is that these conservative Christians probably send their own kids to Christian schools. They shouldn’t even get a say in the matter of public education.)

I normally don’t discuss politics in length on this blog, but the topic of education has been dominating my mind lately. The school system may be under attack by these troglodytes, but I would argue that it was already broken. Or I should say, there is no proper system in place to ensure that people are encouraged and have enough opportunity to educate themselves to the level required by modern society.

I just got a copy of R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and the first subject he brings up is that modern “society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success” (p 12). He claims that this is the product of the most powerful men throughout history, organizing society in a way that suited their needs. He still has to prove that to me; I think it might be more appropriately viewed as the result of us not being prepared for the complications of consciousness. Regardless, today the specialization is the result of the ridiculous level of power held by corporations and the government, and — on the other end — the cause of the alienation and frustration experienced by the individual trying to fulfill his right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

What I’m saying here is that the education system we assume to be fully-functioning is actually producing a society of individuals in arrested development (yes, I do intend to build on that concept by discussing the popular Fox TV show from the mid 2000s). We’re brought to a point where we can get an hourly wage job or, if we get a college degree, an institutionalized office job — but it stops at that point because, from the view of those in power, too much education is dangerous for the status quo. That system is collapsing from within, since a world full of uneducated people is a world doomed to fail — hence, the Great Recession, global warming, bank and auto bailouts, etc.

Fuller extends the idea of specialization to all our cultural categorizations (which is why I’m boycotting the Census!!!) like race, religion, nationality, and so on. As he writes, “By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions (of intellectual specialization) are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth” (p. 19, I added the parenthetical info).

But before Fuller hijacks this post, let me return to the point. This fight isn’t a move to improve the American public school system; it’s a deliberate move to make it worse. The school board conservatives are basing their argument on one fact: that a concept so ingrained in American life that we take it for granted — the separation of church and state — is not found in any of our country’s founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. In fact it was first seen in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, in reply to a representative of a smaller church who felt his denomination was being persecuted by more powerful churches.

To make matters worse, the Declaration of Independence does use language implying that our nation was founded “under God” and that Americans have “certain inalienable rights” bestowed upon them by that God. So although there is no religion-speak in the Constitution, one tactic used by the school board was to bind the Declaration and the Constitution in history texts — as if they were actually the same thing. Therefore, it can be deduced that the Constitution contains Christian language, and America was founded as a Christian nation.

Of course the founders of the United States were religious people. They had fled their native lands because of religious persecution. They understood more than the founders of any country on earth that church and state must be separate, for the alternative unavoidably leads to tyranny. To me it’s pure nonsense to suggest that the founders had actually intended us to be a Christian nation — just as much as it was nonsense how Bush tried to pitch his fundamentalist creed on us from ’01 to ’09. But then I already knew that our society is defined more by absurdity than any kind of sense.

Trying to juggle all this nonsense hurts my brain, so I suggest you read Shorto’s incredible (but really, really long) article to comprehend the issue better. My intention here was to illustrate that our school system is beyond broken, but — like in many other areas of society — we probably can’t expect that the system will ever improve. It’s too institutionalized. I’m not arguing for home schooling, but we’ll have to brainstorm alternatives to this secretive ideological brainwashing going on in our K-12 schools.

Talk about fighting a 12-headed monster. For their widespread idiocy, Christians are really well organized in their efforts at manifesting hell on Earth. I wish I could laugh when they go on about the “liberal establishment” — I can’t even figure out what that refers to. “Liberals” don’t have an establishment, any force as binding as religion that guides their efforts at progress, politically or otherwise.

Liberals do have great literature though. Sometimes I feel like all great writers have been unequivocally liberal in that they worked solely to push mankind forward. Orwell was prominent in that camp, and whenever I hear about these insane ongoings my mind instantly recalls his warning in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

We have to fight all efforts to control and manipulate the past, or else our future — and the future of our progeny — will be jeopardized beyond repair.

I have a feeling that when I’m older and reflecting on my experience as a young man, there will be a vital point in the story when I exclaim, “And then I found The Feminine Mystique!” It’s bewildering to consider that the work — which launched the modern feminist movement almost 20 years before I was born — could relate in any significant way to my own life. In fact it’s more than just significant; the application to and explanation of my own life is monumental. But I’m not alone there. I think Friedan’s work applies to our entire society. My new theory is that many of the forces affecting women in the ’50s and ’60s now affect both genders equally.

I’m only halfway through the book, so I can’t summarize the entire thing yet. I’m trying to get in the habit of posting little bits as I read, instead of trying to cover the whole whopper once I’m done. (That’s been difficult since I’ve realized I’m kind of like an Ent — those tree-like creatures from Lord of the Rings. Treebeard’s saying went something like, “It takes us a really long time to say anything at all, so we don’t say anything unless it’s worth taking a really long time to say.”)

My statement about the book’s ongoing validity relates to Friedan’s thesis:

“It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity… Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role” (p. 77).

I don’t know if it’s pure coincidence or if my reading habits are starting to converge towards a single subject, but this statement was a perfect follow-up to a book I just finished reading: The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung. In that short book the famous psychologist seemed to be inviting someone to tackle the subject of feminism by taking the individuality angle. As Jung wrote:

“The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses” (p. 12).

In the natural progression of my independent studying, I’ve noticed a shift from fiction and philosophy to nonfiction and psychology, with the dividing time period being the 1950s. Both of these books fall in the second category, and I’m sort of surprised by Jung’s near-total absence from The Feminine Mystique. Jung’s book was published in 1957 and Friedan’s in 1963, so maybe there wasn’t enough lag time between the two.

Like I said, I still have a large chunk of it to read, but while Jung’s name has only been mentioned once so far, an entire chapter was dedicated to Sigmund Freud. In a way I’m glad about that, though, since it’s now obvious that I had a very skewed idea of Freud’s work. What I mean is, I only knew about the beneficial (or potentially beneficial) nature of his theories of the subconscious mind. I had no idea that he was sexist, or even hated or feared women. And I took a class in college called “Freud and Psychoanalysis”!

Apparently Freud was “a prisoner of his own culture,” by which Friedan means Victorian Europe at the dawn of the 20th century.

“In Freud’s time, evidently, cultural hypocrisy forced the repression of sex. [...] He then developed his theory by describing all the stages of growth as sexual… Something that could be described in physiological terms, linked to an origin of anatomy, seemed more comfortable, solid, real, scientific, as he moved into the unexplored country of the unconscious mind” (pp. 106-107).

Friedan explains that, while psychoanalysis was helpful in the therapy setting, its interpretation by mainstream culture was very damaging. Almost all the freedoms that women fought for from the mid-1800s (including the right to vote, which wasn’t granted to females until 1920 — though I didn’t know that!) until the end of WWII had reportedly vanished by the early 1960s.

“What happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face. The American spirit fell into a strange sleep; …the whole nation stopped growing up. All of us went back into the warm brightness of home…

“It was easier, safer, to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb. It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas, and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs” (pp. 186-187).

But as she goes on to say, “the individual” couldn’t solely be blamed for what happened in our culture. Psychologists, anthropologists, guidance counselors, professors and magazine editors all began taking Freud’s “lead,” telling women that self-fulfillment came from staying in the home, serving their husbands and children in their biological role. Once that caught on, highly paid marketers and advertisers took it to a new level of absurdity, manipulating the fear and guilt of women, knowing that these newly created housewives were responsible for 75 percent of spending in the home. (By the way, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis is the only person I’ve found today who seems to care about this topic. His documentary The Trap explores the ways that Edward Bernays, Freud’s own nephew, became rich by applying Freud’s theories to propaganda and brainwashing efforts in post-war America. Although, Friedan doesn’t seem aware of this either. Edward’s mother is mentioned in passing as a “strong” woman from Freud’s life — but Edward himself is totally omitted.)

So ladies and gentleman, we enter a new phase of the mystical creative journey. From not on there won’t be so many muddled, abstract philosophical explorations. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus marked the end of that painful phase for me. Now I set out to explain the real world and what might be the most bizarre mystery of the universe: PEOPLE!