My Contribution To A Meme

I find the various remixes of Kanye's interruption at the VMAs to be absolutely hilarious:









So I decided to make my own:

My Dinner with Ari Fleischer

Tonight Ari Fleischer, President Bush's first press secretary, was on campus to give a talk. I had the good fortune of being one of about fifteen students who had dinner with Fleischer, a Middlebury alum, before his talk.

Fleischer is certainly a kind man, and I appreciated the honest way he spoke to us students. At the dinner he made an effort to inspire us to pursue a career in politics. This at first caught me off balance. I was more interested in having a substantive conversation about the future of media and his explanation for the Iraq war than having someone try to inspire me with what I should do with my life. This man is part of one of the most important political decisions of my lifetime; I don't want inspiration from him.

To some extent, however, I got over my skepticism of Fleischer and thought it was pretty cool to see a former midd-kid who had climbed the ladder the way he did.

The conversation generally started out being pretty uncontroversial. We talked about the state of the media and a few other issues in a straight forward manner. Towards the end of our time, however, some of my friends from College Democrats and I started getting Fleischer to talk about the buildup to the Iraq war.

To summarize, Fleischer's explanation was basically that the intelligence (in America and in other countries) got the weapons of mass destruction thing wrong. Bush thus made the right decision with the information he given to him. I tried to challenge him a little on this idea that there was a consensus in intelligence, but I'm obviously not prepared to argue with a former White House Press Secretary on facts.

Despite this, Fleischer's description of Bush really resonated with me. I asked him about how 9/11 changed Bush's perspective. He answered by saying that Bush's perspective was in fact changed by 9/11 and how this was a good thing. No one wants America to be attacked on their watch, right? He then told a story about how Bush met with Ellie Weisel during the lead up to the Iraq war. Weisel, with his holocaust symbolizing power, recommended going into Iraq in order to save lives.

The critique of Bush's character is easy. He lost his sense of perspective after 9/11 (if he ever had any) and was consumed by the idea of protecting the country. This explains torture, his general rhetoric, and Iraq.

But beyond the man himself, hearing about Bush from the inside brought home just how scary politics is. Big-time politicians almost inherently have to ascribe to great man theory. Why give up your personal life for politics if you didn't think you could achieve greatness and influence history? In the case of more thoughtful politicians (Obama?), they may be more intellectually conservative (in a Burkean sense), but on a more personal level, I think we'd be hard-pressed to find a major politician who doesn't have a greatness complex.

I often get annoyed by the West Wing and movies like W. They make politics and all these processes so personal, moving away from policy debates. But there's truth in their overall message. These decisions aren't made by an amorphous and rational entity, the government. People (who are often former frat boys with great man complexes) make these decisions.

Obviously Bush is an extreme example, and it's realistic to hope for better decision-makers with more of a sense of perspective. But can we hope for what we really need in a leader: an understanding of the limits of what that leader can accomplish? My fear is that the political process inherently gives us philosophically arrogant leaders--people like John McCain who boasts about making quick decisions and not looking back on them.

I'm certainly grateful we have Obama. He seems to be cautious, to try to make rational choices. But he still wields the power to make ridiculously important decisions. Let's hope this doesn't get to his head.

An attempt at flânerie in San Francisco: Part I, The Idea

I started the day restless and angsty: I made the mistake of going online first thing in the morning. My house in San Francisco now has wifi, so I did the standard online circuit of email, Facebook, newspaper sites and blogs before even getting out of bed.

For a variety of reasons, this left me feeling like shit. Facebook made me feel like a low-grade stalker, the news was about the death of Ted Kennedy and election fraud in Afghanistan, and email added to the list of things I have to do.

After eating breakfast I was even more frustrated. I have about 50 pages left in the book I’m reading, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, but I couldn’t decide whether I felt like reading them or if I felt like trying to relax by doing something lighter. Meta-stress about being stressed out was setting in when I had an idea. I would embark on a bit of a project: I wanted to go on a stroll in San Francisco. Like really go on a stroll. Walk through San Francisco, the city of multiculturalism, natural beauty, and tourism; a past of earthquakes, jazz, the beats, and the hippies; and now home to a new generation of hipsters, yuppies, immigrants and going green. I would engage in 21^st century flânerie.

Allow me to explain.

I first became interested in flânerie on my plane flight to Paris for my time abroad. On the plane, I read a book my aunt had given me, Edmund White’s The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. The book was mostly a historical and personal account, but the parts that stuck with the most are White’s allusions to the philosophical concept of flânerie.

Flâner (the verb form of flânerie) can be loosely translated from French to “to stroll.” Edmund White's book didn’t go into depth about the philosophy of flânerie, but he would occasionally provide teasers into this concept such as, “Why must we always imagine the flâneur as sad?”

Over the course of my time in Paris, I would learn more about flânerie. To begin with, I lived a few blocks from some of the most well-known passages in Paris. Built in the 1830’s, the passages (translated into “arcades”) are covered walkways lined with shops. They are at the heart of the idea of flânerie, a notion first developed by the poet Baudelaire and reexamined by many including the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. The idea is more or less to lose oneself in walking in a city.

So my idea is to try to do some Baudelairian flânerie in San Francisco sometime in the next week. But I want to really do it right, so there’s a lot of theory on flânerie I want to read up on.

We’ll see how this project turns out. This idea sprung out of a desire to not feel stressed out and conflicted, so hopefully I won’t end up feeling out of place on my walk. But even if I do, I think this will still say something about me, flânerie and maybe even our time.

I think San Francisco will provide an excellent backdrop for my experiment. For Benjamin in his analysis of Baudelaire, the social and historical context of flânerie in 19^th century Paris is key. I’m thinking of doing the walk in Chinatown or the Mission.

Anyway, stay tuned, and here is a picture I took of one of the passages near where I lived in Paris:

Detritus

Last weekend, I drove to Charleston, Oregon, a small town on Coos Bay. I was visiting my friend who is studying marine biology there. The drive was four hours long, and I did it without stopping.



On route 42, I passed through a large-scale plywood processing plant. It was complete with 18-wheelers coming and going, smokestacks, railroad tracks, and a large mysterious area where mist was being produced by sprinklers.



Also on route 42, I drove behind a pickup truck with eight middle-aged, barely-clothed Latina women sitting in the back.

In Charleston, my marine biology friend, Liz, was studying across from a smelly shrimp processing facility. She showed me the experiments she was doing on clams and other mollusks, testing how they responded to light stimuli. The experiment was being conducted in a white basin, which was raised to sink level and had about four inches of seawater in it.

Liz told me about the mollusks of her experiment and the various other life forms in the basin. I picked up a large brown starfish. We also looked at crabs, kelp, sea sponges, slugs and snails.

I kept wondering what these crazy life forms ate. Liz told me that a lot of them, especially the smallest ones, simply feed off detritus. Detritus. I had heard the word before; it certainly had a nice sound to it, but what did it mean?

Detritus is the microscopic organic material that is in seawater, Liz explained.

I liked this word. The fancy sounding Latin suffix. The idea of microscopic richness floating around.

For the next few days, “detritus” became our little catchphrase. I used it when I spilt on my shorts, and kept trying to slip it in whenever Liz would tell me about marine biology.

Before I left Coos Bay, Liz and I went to the beach. We walked out to tide pools and saw urchins, starfish and barnacles.



As we walked back along the beach, my thoughts began to associate freely and I found myself thinking about how hard it is to maintain the chemistry of the pool at the camp I worked at last month. Despite good management and a battery of chemicals, algae keeps growing.

I looked out to the waves breaking unevenly, the way they do at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. I was feeling pretty relaxed, being on the beach and all, so I was saying what I was thinking, pretty much unfiltered.



“Life started in the ocean,” I said, “and it’s sort of like someone forgot to chlorinate a pool and then all this crazy, dirty shit started growing.”

We laughed.

As I drove back to Ashland, through forests, past the plywood factory again, and up hills the 18-wheelers were struggling on, I drank guava juice I had bought in a convenience store. The juice wasn’t very good—it probably had too much high fructose corn syrup in it. My mind drifted back to detritus.

I had stuck my finger in a sea anemone earlier that day. I knew you could never touch detritus, it is composed of microscopic particles, but still when I felt the anemone’s waterlogged stickiness, I felt this must be detritus’ texture.

There is definitely something to the word detritus. In the way it sounds sophisticatedly dirty. In what it means: if you leave out water for long enough, just letting it react with the oxygen, and the minerals, and the heat, you get microscopic organisms. When these die, you get detritus and eventually the detritus allows for weird things with slimy membranes that grow and if you waited billions of years you get…us.

I finished my guava juice, speeding down a hill on I-5. I thought back to the beach and the uneven waves and the ocean, the spawning ground of detritus large and small, an unchlorinated pool.

I was sitting, writing an essay I wasn’t excited about on the history of Oregon’s Native Peoples. It had been over a hundred degrees earlier in the day. I craved beer.

I read about Barack Obama and Joe Biden having a beer with a Harvard Professor and a cop. This didn’t help. The only alcohol I had had in the past two weeks were a few glasses of wine. It was a hot night; it was time.

I got my wallet (complete with my California Driver’s License), put on sandals and found my keys. To Seven Eleven. Soulful music was in order for the short downhill journey—Amos Lee.

I bought two beers and a slice of pepperoni pizza. Back to my room with the two cans in a brown paper bag. Amos Lee was still playing on my iPod.

Now you need to understand: I love the sound of opening something that is sealed. Whether it be a can of tennis balls, or… a can of beer.

The carbonation on my tongue mixed with the slight spiciness of the pepperoni…and I swallowed.

Rare are the times in my life that expectations have corresponded to actuality. I pushed my eyelids together and exhaled. Expectations were surpassed.

A little wisdom for the end of the semester

To my loyal readers and/or RSS subscribers:

I haven’t substantively posted in months—I’ve been living life experientially in Paris. As the initial joys of arriving in Paris wore off, posts just didn’t materialized and I don’t want to write for the sake of writing, or have turn this into a travel blog. Anyway, here are some thoughts I put together for middblog:

I’m studying abroad in Paris this semester, so I have the comfort of being outside of the crunch that is the last two weeks of a semester at Middlebury. When I have been in Vermont during this time of year, I have found that for me at least, the intensity of the end of a semester has been surprisingly emotional and thought provoking. Spending so much time concentrating intensely on work, having to say goodbye to friends and not sleeping enough really gets the juices flowing. It’s a bit of a liberal arts crescendo, if you will.

Anyway, a friend of mine pointed me to this article by a recently retired Yale Professor, William Deresiewicz. The article criticizes elite education most notably at Yale, but I find his analysis corresponds in large measure to Middlebury. Deresiezicz's point that resonates with me the most is the idea that the current system of elite higher education ironically hinders the development of true intellectualism. Money quote: “Only a small minority [of students] have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul.”

To relate this back to Middlebury, I find that these last two weeks of a semester can be a little revelatory, and just in the way Deresiewicz would want them to be. With the buildup of emotions and work, I have found myself thinking about why I am at Middlebury.

If you have a few moments to spare over the next few weeks, I recommend reading Deresiewicz’s article. It may offer a perspective on what’s really important: growing during your formative years and learning to think like an intellectual. At the very least, it is comforting to hear a Professor agree with the sentiment of the late-night conversations that make the College experience what it is—the times when you examine why you are in College and how learning to think is what really matters.

Kos agrees

Kos is the latest to agree with what I've talked about for a long time: California needs a new Constitution.

Quick Thought

Watching my new facebook homepage pop up with updates on my friends not liking the new facebook, I find it more than a little ironic that the area in which facebook has been most successful in enabling activism is... in activism against facebook. More here.

Poitiers

I went to Poitiers, France this weekend to see a friend. Poitiers is a university city of 100,000 in Western France. Getting out of the big city was refreshing, and I absolutely love the decor of non-Parisian France. Here are some photos:

The financial crisis and a new American ethos?

Thomas Friedman is the latest person to suggest that the financial crisis could mean a change in the "American Way of Life," saying this period of history could be called "The Great Disruption" (you gotta love Friedman inventing yet another catchphrase).

I've heard other people, especially here in France, talking about how the financial crisis means the end of an American ethos; perhaps even a transformation out of the "Consumer Republic."

I don't think this will happen easily--to me, mainstream American culture seems to be too entrenched in consumerism to change without either a shock of grand proportions or change over a very long period of time.

From what I've read about the economy, both the huge shock and the extended period of time seem all-together possible. But I'm no economist, and obviously there's no way to predict how long this will last.

What I do know is that the seeds for constructive cultural change in America exist: there is a large current in American cultural history rejecting consumerism and striving for an agrarian, communitarian and at times downright Utopian society. Even the Puritans were agrarian anti-consumers. During revolutionary America, Crèvecoeur wrote about an idealized society of farmers. The 19th century is rich with the Hudson River School, Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir and countless others.

In the 20th century, there is obviously the counter cultural movement of the 60's that turned Vermont into the progressive bastion we know it to be today, as well as the Beats of the 50's.

Now, in this century, there is the slow food movement and a collection of broader movements centered on local food and community.

As I've been reading Michael Pollan and Jack Kerouac recently, I am coming around to a conception of a way of living outside of consumerism. Kerouac provides the personal (or perhaps even spiritual) impetus for this and Pollan complements this with political and environmental justification.

But can a financial crisis really bring about this cultural change?

Kerouac idealized the vagabonds of the Great Depression roaming around America, free from the social ills brought on by consumerism. Granted, this is an ideal, but it seems that this constructive ethos that was created during the Depression and moved through the beats was largely ruined by the Cold War. Anyone who didn't like the "American Way Of Life" was not a patriot, and perhaps even a communist.

Hearing Obama say during his Inaugural Address that Americans don't need to apologize for their way of life could be seen indicative of a neo-Cold War era rhetoric, this time in the context of the "War On Terror." A serious threat to constructive change in our culture is mindless flag waving, whether from the Republican Party or the political culture it rides on, or from Obama.

Nevertheless, although I think Friedman is being Friedman to go ahead and name the "Great Disruption," I think and hope that he is on to something.

For many different reasons, it is time for a new "Rucksack Revolution," to quote Kerouac. And this wouldn't be at all "un-American."