Two Places at One Time = Nowhere

Location: Campus Walk

I'm a big enemy of multitasking. When students do it and try to write, the work usually sucks.

When they walk across campus texting, a requisite part of their avatarian lives of constant ease and narcissism, they fail to notice how nicely we appoint everything to make campus pleasant. We should just pave everything so they don't trip.

I'm on this rant because lately, every third student has this "two thumbs on the keypad" walk and they often bump into others. I'm good at avoiding them. As for texting while driving: instant arrest, impounding and sale of vehicle, suspension of license for 5 years. But I don't see that (even though I love to rant on it) very often. I live and drive in town, where death would be a result of texting and driving, and fast. What those in America's suburban hells do rarely enters my life.

On a less lethal but equally moronic note, this "two places at once" phenomenon supports Sven Birkerts' observation from his brilliant The Gutenberg Elegies, where one outcome of networking constantly would be a "waning of the private self." As I've often said in my rants, perhaps the unmediated moment of self-reflection is simply too much to bear. Being alone with oneself might just reveal an inner emptiness that would make Camus and Satre shudder.

Another outcome of youthful, and for that matter, adult, multitasking is an inability to see chaos and disorder just beyond the membranes of our safety-bubbles. Our bubbles, distractions of consumerist bliss and networked companionship, can pop quickly. I'm going to close with Jim Kunstler, whose blog this week featured this Yeatsian moment:

"what happened to reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of vicious morons in a time of troubles?"

Well, lots of resolvable, rational, and educated young people are too busy checking in with their hive of friends to pay attention. And come November, we'll reap the whirlwind of their wavering attention spans, as the wrathful and ignorant gain influence in our government.

Kunstlerism of the Week + Biblical Loonies

Location: Between Resignation and Ennui

I changed my Google password to make it stronger. Christian apocalyptic fundamentalists, the American version of the Taliban who believe that gays, secularists, and anyone not like them are servants of the Evil One, somehow redirected this site's URLs to a hate-screed site with all sorts of idiocy about their twisted version of Christ's gentle message.

Try getting help from Google: this they have in common with Apple. You go to a forum. There's no way to report the haters, so I just changed my password.

Kunstler is right, friends. We are seeing the rise of rampant anti-science and illogic. It makes me almost brothers-in-arms of the Transhumanists I just critiqued. At least they understand that the earth is more than 6000 years old and that the scientific method can make the world smarter and more reasonable.

Amid this, I waltzed over to Kunstler's blog, as if that would help. But he puts a mere blogjacking into perspective in his article "Fierce Urgency":

The future attempts to regulate undersea oil drilling will send many companies to do their thing in other parts of the world where nobody gives a shit what you do offshore as long as you pony up the royalties to the grifters in charge onshore. America is going to lose a whole lot more of its own oil production. Smaller companies may shut down altogether from the cost of complying with new safety rules and an inability to get insurance. The oil from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico was how we hoped we would offset the ongoing depletions in Alaska. We're going to have to import even more oil than the two-thirds-plus we already depend on. One thing President Obama -- nor anyone else with an audience or a constituency -- will speak a word about is our massive, incessant purposeless motoring.

Pretty soon, the oil missing from the Gulf will leave a message at the 7-Eleven stops in Dallas and Chattanooga, and before the year is out the cardboard signs that say "Out Of Gas" may hang on the pumps. A great hue and cry will rise out of the Nascar ovals and righteous lady politicians with decoupaged hair-doos will invoke the New World Order and the Book of Revelation in their rise to power. Reasonable men with moderate views will dither on the sidelines, afraid to offend one faction or another.

It's not just the Linden layoffs making me grim in this long hot summer.

Kunstlerism of the Week: Health Care Summit

Location: Clusterfuck Nation Blog

Vintage JHK, this...and sadly, dead-on right from the experience of several friends without health insurance. One, who suffered a heart attack, is being actively chased by bill collectors now, though he's unemployed.

We are left, finally, with a so-called health care system so cruel and unjust that the Devil himself in consultation with the most demonic lobbyists, and perhaps a little input from historical politicians such as Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Heinrich Himmler, and Pol Pot could not construct a worse way of deploying the fruits of modern science.

My poor students, in their supposedly upwardly mobile world. I hope they never experience such things. Read the rest of "Winter Mind Games" here. Jim spares almost no one!

Kunstlerism of the Week: Doofus Smack Down

I bow before your snark, Mr. Kunstler. Virtual worlds never looked so good. I'm just going to stop calling these re-posts "Reality Checks" because that should be self-evident by now, even in the land of Doofus Americanus.

Read the rest at "Rehearsals for a Civil War":

The Tea Party appeals to the swelling numbers of the new former middle class angry at the sudden vanishing of their accustomed perqs and entitlements to a predictably comfortable suburban existence. They're mad at the government and hot for "liberty." But how do they propose to maintain the hyper-complexities of suburban life without taxes to pay for fixing the countless roads their lives depend on or to run the gold-plated central school districts that seem to exist solely to provide Friday night football? As for liberty, a handful of despotic corporations from McDonalds to WalMart have been granted the liberty to destroy the Tea-bagger's bodies and the economic fabric of their communities -- and they seem to want more of that kind of liberty, based on the recent decision of a "conservative" majority on the Supreme Court allowing corporations to buy elections. The Tea-baggers also apparently crave the liberty to push other people around, especially on questions of abortion and religion. That's an interesting kind of freedom.

Reality Check: Kunstlerism of the Week

Location: Clusterfuck Nation Blog

Jim's at it again, in some dizzying verbal pyrotechnics about the Greek economic crisis that has piled up worries larger than the Gyros in my favorite sandwich shop:

Europe is a sad case, really poignant, because it became such a darn nice corner of the world after the convulsions of the mid 20th century. Who, for instance, can spend two weeks walking the lovely ancient streets of Bruges or Orvieto, or Lisbon and not fall to their knees in overwhelming despair on return to the slum of Kennedy Airport? Europe rebuilt itself so beautifully after the war while America became a utopia of overfed clowns riding in clown cars around the plasticized cartoon outskirts of our ruined cities. Europe had wonderful public transit while America let its railroads rot away. European men went about their business in grown-up clothing while Americans men dressed like five-year-olds and got flames tattooed on their necks as though contemplating a barbarian invasion of Akron, Ohio.

As a Europhile who has often called Americans some variation of "blind, fat white people, racing toward the edge of an abyss in their SUVs," I agree. Should add "while chatting on their cell phones and watching action flicks on the car entertainment system."

Jim's only overstatements are as follows: 1) I happen to live in a nice, slowly reviving city, only hampered by a clownish city government and 2) Jim needs to go back to look at younger European men's clothing. Fashion crime has arrived, in the "I wear sports attire but don't play" variety we see in America, too, and baggy "doofus drawers" that threaten to fall down as soon as the cops begin foot pursuit of a thug.

That the Euro-zone is not immune to the stupidity and greed that led big finance to wreck the world economy, remains a profound disappointment to me. Maybe there exists no paradise beyond the warmth of family and friends in close community, the very localism that Kunstler champions and that will be the likely result of life after oil begins its terminal decline.

And for a while (here's the virtual world reference) we'll build fake paradises of code and pixels. Good luck with all that and may your power stay on.

Read the rest of "Euroland, The Horror Movie" here.