Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2010

Civilized people

Please read Two Civilized Men Among the Barbarians by Glen Ford and Peter Gamble as soon as possible. It’s in AlterNet and originally appeared in The Black Commentator. It’s brilliant. The authors argue that Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton are the only two Democratic presidential candidates willing to talk like civilized people. Two excerpts:

Rev. Sharpton also opposes NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. “I disagreed with NAFTA when Clinton was in, and I think that we have come to see that that disagreement was correct,” said Sharpton, following up on Kucinich’s broadside. “I think that we cannot have trade policy that overlooks labor, overlooks workers’ rights, overlooks environmental concerns. We can’t act like just because something is trade, that also that makes it right. African-Americans are here on a bad trade policy.”

Now that’s breaking it down in civilized language. The slave trade was fantastically lucrative, a centuries-long commerce that shaped every society in the Americas south of Canada and allowed Europe to assume its unnatural position of dominance in the world. “I’m here on a bad trade policy,” said Rev. Al. “So just because it’s trade, doesn’t mean that it is good and it is something that we should support.”

A little further down, this:

Americans think they are guardians of civilization. In reality, they don’t even live there. The proof is plain for all to see in the statistics on wealth and public service disparities, infant mortality rates and, most damning, incarceration levels that certify the U.S. as the world’s gulag (25 percent of the planet’s prisoners). This is barbarism writ large, since these conditions exist as the direct result of public policy, rather than as a consequence of general deprivation or factors external to the nation.

Read the whole article now, it’s worth it.

For Not-Columbus day

Chris Locke recently posted a report about his participation at BloggerCon:

I was concurrently delivering a short, succinct lecture about how the indigenous peoples of Mexico welcomed the Spanish Conquistadors, and saying this was a pretty fair metaphor, I thought, for how the entire thrust of BloggerCon — which was celebrating its own success in the Great Hall from which Frank Paynter and I had briefly escaped — was to welcome with open arms those same old rigid credential-oriented semantic straightjackets from which blogging had, for a few historical moments, liberated us.

Let’s assume for a start, despite objections to the contrary, that there are conquistadors ready to pounce. (Yes, Virginia, there are always conquistadors, actually.) I asked my history-buff son what he thought of the comparison. Leave aside the “rigid credential-oriented semantic straightjackets,” which are just the guns and catechisms of the conquistador and his helper-priests, let’s think instead about what the conquistadors wanted, for their desire affected what the Aztecs had.

My son said that Cortes came looking for gold, and Moctezuma, deluded by prophecy, mistook the Spaniard for a god. Welcoming the conquistadors was the beginning of the end. But one thing is clear in the historical scenario which is not at all clear in the contemporary example. It was about gold in the first instance.

So I asked the kids, “where’s the gold in this case?” Son and daughter were quite certain that there’s no gold in blogging, but they wondered whether there’s some transmutable quality that might be gold-like. The one thing they came up with was speed. My daughter pointed out that unlike her webpages, which she has to edit manually to update, her blog (sadly neglected, as is my son’s, ahem) requires no template editing. She can speedily insert new material, no hassle: the format is there, and content changes are done at the speed of keystrokes.

We decided that it’s not just about the ideas spilling out willy-nilly in blogland. It’s the speed itself that’s the gold.

Sure, the voice, the ideas are gold-ish, but it’s the speed that’s the conquistador’s jackpot. And if that’s the case — if that’s the ephemeral quality that might be bankable after all — then that’s how blogging will be co-opted. I mean this: just as the conquistadors of old were blinded by gold at any cost, we’re blinded by speed.

Cortes, Pizarro, the criminal lot of them, melted down the beautiful golden artefacts of the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, and turned them into ingots. They had no interest in the ideas — the art — that these 100% gold artefacts represented. The things themselves were useless, they were blinded by gold. Today’s conquistadors want speed in that same blind way. In their regime, ideas (especially ones that trade on slow exchange) will simply be elided (melted down) in favour of speed, the new gold. In that sense, what we have — voice, ideas — will be changed by what they want.

Fast food, fast life, fast consumption, fast shit (verbal diarrhea, Moctezuma’s Revenge), fast blogging, fast updating.

I can see the counter movement now, not a minute too soon: “slow blogging”.