August 2003

Walking with my sister along the Willamette River last night in Eugene, comfortable summer evening. Saw a beaver dragging a small log toward the river. After 21 years – a long time gone – everything seems vaguely familiar and also strange, as if I were just visiting. But now I live here. Again.

A dream, something about import/export, and how you get addicted to the nearest city.

Since I moved down here from Portland, only six days ago, I’ve been in such a state of shock that I’ve felt I had nothing to write. Everything is up for grabs.

I’ve been out walking almost every day, thinking that I must move my body so it doesn’t freeze up, and that if I get my feet on the ground maybe the mind will follow.

Something very scary about trying to go back to the past.

Some of us require change to keep alive.

… by some estimates, public relations, i.e., the deliberate manufacturing of slanted information, accounts for up to 70 percent of what passes for news and information in our society. – The Unreality Industry, Ian Mitroff & Warren Bennis, 1989

Since I moved I’ve been thinking, what am I doing here?  The larger question is, what am I doing anywhere?

Richard Schickel has observed wisely that an appreciation for complexity has always been regarded as a sign of weakness by the masses who have no taste whatsoever for it. – Mitroff & Bennis

A little too self-congratulatory, but yeah. Even intelligent people don’t want to think much about how society works. Instead we invent simple, opposing ideologies. We find complexity “boring.”

Once, after some early failures at growing pot, I told my mother that I must have been born banging my head against a brick wall. “Well no,” she said, “you weren’t born that way.”

Whenever I find someone in opposition to me, my main feeling is that they’re wasting my time.

A deep sense of mystery has always been an important ingredient of real art. A true piece of art is never fully explainable. This is one of the reasons why we are continually drawn to it again and again.

… All art and artists constantly flirt on the borderline between heightening mystery and reducing it. – Mitroff & Bennis

Privacy is a way of protecting the self. By not exposing who we really are to most people, we prevent them from getting their hooks into us, attacking, distorting. I wonder though if privacy, presenting a false self to most of the world, doesn’t also make us less real.

One of the symptoms of depression is a feeling of unreality. Or perhaps depression, that subdued flat numbness, and unreality are both ways of distancing ourselves from a very corrosive reality. Anything to just get away.

… unreality has become a substitute for what we lack. – Mitroff & Bennis

As a rule, people are nice when they’re getting what they want, nasty when they’re not. So if you get tired of giving someone what they want, prepare for a shock.

We define people as “nice” if they’re giving us what we want. How nice of them.

The primary lesson of the much-vaunted human potential movement was that we have far more potential for antisocial behavior than anyone had heretofore imagined. – Mitroff & Bennis

Well it’s funny, but not entirely accurate. The idealists of the 60s remain idealists. We just got outnumbered by those who wanted, above all, to be comfortable.

In the first decade of this century [1900s], as both business and government got bigger, they began to get in each other’s way. The bureaucrats imposed rules and regulations on big business. Corporate managers countered by flooding Washington with lobbyists, and a new era began: America of, by and for special interests.

Johnson, Nixon and Carter were … haunted men, shaped far more by their early deprivations than by their later successes.

But as dreamless sleep is death, a dreamless society is meaningless. – Mitroff & Bennis

I recommend that whatever you have, you hang onto it.

… any parent without blinders knows that kids have their own natures and personalities, and that many of their tendencies are present at birth. Some babies are fussy and irritable, some calm, some inquisitive.

Studies report that our genes account for anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of the variation in personality among us. This includes our level of extroversion and self-involvement, our emotional stability and reaction to stress, our conformity and dependability, our friendliness and likeableness, and our general openness and curiosity. Even whether a person says that religion is important in his or her life is about 50 percent heritable. – Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, 2002

There are two ways to define “working class”:

1. The most significant is how much money you make. One definition I've read is that a household is working-class if its yearly gross income is below $30,000. Obviously income has a tremendous influence on how you live and the quality of your life. Working- class people make so little money that they can't save much and have no security. Middle-class people may, and often do, choose not to save money, but they could if they wanted to. Working-class people have an income so low that they always have to worry about money, and cannot afford what most Americans consider a reasonable lifestyle. Working-class people make less than a "living" wage, a wage on which you can support a family. They are being exploited by the middle and upper classes, who use working class people to do their shit work, to produce cheap goods and services so the middle and upper classes can keep their lifestyle.

2. A less significant but important definition is based on the kind of work you do. Working-class people do work that is routine, boring and does not require advanced training or much thought. They are supervised by a middle-class person and have very little control over their work, and therefore high stress. They have no job security and are frequently laid off. They are less likely than middle-class workers to have health insurance. As they get older they tend to wear out sooner and find it increasingly difficult to stay employed, because employers don't want them. Working-class people are expendable.

There is nothing mysterious about either definition, and people who don't get the distinction don't want to, because they benefit from middle-class privilege and understanding class differences would make them uncomfortable.

My main problem with Clinton was that he sounded good and said a lot of the right things and made all of the liberals feel nice and warm and fuzzy and then went and gutted the social safety net and pushed through trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. His actions often belied his words.

… the Clinton healthcare plan … was widely smeared as socialized medicine when in fact it was the furthest thing from socialized medicine. The perception was that he was going up against the insurance industry when in fact he had written it with the five largest insurers ...  – Tom Tomorrow, Salon.com

Federal sentencing guidelines prescribing mandatory minimums for drug sales and possession “are widely credited with the four-fold increase in the federal prison population since 1987.” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2003

… the men on [TV] Soaps generally display a far greater degree of interpersonal competency and intimacy than most men are capable of. Soaps thus fulfill the important function of providing women in particular with the illusion of intimacy, an intimacy that they generally cannot obtain from their spouses because it is missing basically from their emotional repertoire. – Mitroff & Bennis

I read in a novel about men walking “the way soldiers walk,” as if they will be walking all day, steadily putting one foot in front of the other. The key to walking is to do it slowly. An easy, unhurried rhythm. I wish I could live that way.

I’m always looking for something to calm me down.

Walking is the best way to get to know the world.

… an important factor in the rise of homeless families has been the “reform” of the welfare system. Destitution is the next stop for people who can’t find jobs and can’t get welfare. – Bob Herbert, The Register-Guard, Aug. 15, 2003

That would be the welfare “reform” bill that Clinton signed in 1996. Which prompted me to vote for Ralph Nader.

I notice that women in their 50s and 60s are proud of their sexuality.