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| Irregular Musings
Campain 2008: no, it's not a misspelling. When we turn on the television this year and next, we're going to be subjected to shovels full of bullshit next to a few spoonfuls of sincerity and a dropperful of insight. Let's talk honestly about all the hooplah that's headed our way.
Politics is an audacious enterprise. It takes some audacity to claim so strong a grip on the truth as to pass a law stripping away Americans' freedom, or requiring Americans to behave in a certain way, or subjecting non-Americans to the might of a fearful superpower. Policymaking has become unhinged from empirical reality and divorced from active deliberation and debate. When politics becomes opaque, shenanigans of all sorts will surely follow. It's time to rake out all the muck and let the sunshine in.
Mike Gravel put it well in his recent speech to the DNC Winter Conference: "Since the end of the Second World War, various political leaders have fostered fear in the American people: fear of Communism, fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants, fear of people based on race and religion, fear of Gays and Lesbian in love who just want to get married, and fear of people who are somehow different. It is fear that allows political leaders to manipulate us all and distort our national priorities. Fear has allowed our political leaders to spend more on military armaments than is spent collectively by all the other nations in the world. Who are we afraid of? Are we that paranoid?"
It's a pity that so many Americans have forgotten the lessons of history that our nation's first leaders knew so well. It's a shame that so many Americans feel that they cannot tolerate the existence of people who do not agree with their particular religious beliefs. It's absurd that so many Americans want to use the power of government to enforce an oath of allegiance to God when they can't even agree about what God is. And it's dangerous that so many Americans arrive at conclusions about the nature of reality based on what feels right rather than what makes sense. We could use a little less faith in this country these days. We could use a little less credulity. We could use a lot more skepticism.
Gardening - when one hears the word one thinks of retired couples with nothing else to do or rich matriarchs showing off prized bulbs as if they were overbred dogs. As with so many other traditional domestic activities, the act of gardening can feel out of date, a holdover from a past of little relevance to the electronic, simulated, placeless world of today. Too many American gardens might as well be experienced on a computer monitor, and sometimes they are. Our over-managed gardens are separated from the environment around them and so they give us no surprises. They are to nature what the Epcot Center is to culture. We reject the idea of gardens as sterile museums. Gardening has the potential to instead become a subversive art. We reject the focus upon gardening in a limited boundary of property. Irregular Growth seeks to bridge the gap between our poodle-shaped hedges and our global garden, the Earth itself.
Utter nonsense shouted loudly is still utter nonsense. The misplacement of books on Eastern Religions may seem fairly mild. The rise of the Panopticon is most clearly evident in the case of computer communication technology. Sticks, stones, clubs and daggers bash; words alone do not. Do these statements seem ill at east placed next to one another? Get used to it: we have entered the age of Splintered Speech.
It divides the classes. It triggers divorces. It buys legislators. It sells Product Q. It's Funny Money, that stuff that you see passing around but that never hits your fingers. If you ever get some of it, don't just throw money at our problems. Hurl it.
Some pieces are shaped oddly. Others have been stretched thin. Instead of Wandering Aimlessly, visit the Irregular Bin and get rid of that splinter in your mind that drives you mad.
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