'Tis the Voice of the Asshole

Some asshole gets hold of the intercom:   

Two South Jersey Wal-Mart customers who heard a racist message broadcast over the store's public address system say the whole ordeal is no laughing matter.

Sheila Ellington and Virginia Tinsley were shopping inside the Washington Township Wal-Mart along Rt. 42 in Turnersville, N.J. just before 5 p.m. on Sunday when they say a man came over the PA system and said: "Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now."

"It was a disgusting comment," Ellington said. "Once I heard that, I was absolutely shocked and appalled."

Why do we listen to assholes?

Statistically speaking, we are less likely to be overrun by Mongolian hordes, Roman legions, conquistadors, or renegade cowboys than in the vast majority of human history.  In most countries, rape and kidnapping are frowned upon as a means of obtaining wives.  Brute force is no longer the final word in most social interactions. 

At no other time in history have we had quite the luxury of shrugging off the perspectives of assholes, in the way we do now.

And yet our bruised psyches do not believe it's true.  Thousands of years of brutality have left their mark; we still behave as though the Voice of the Asshole will inevitably be followed up by an unanswerable blow to the head.

As a result, the psychic power of assholes is magnified beyond their natural scope.  Thus I propose a mantra: call it the Mantra of Emerging Civilization. 

The next time you hear some asshole broadcasting his assholery to all and sundry, say to yourself, "Dude, you're an asshole."  Then mentally flip the switch.  Turn off the Glenn Beck in your head. Consign Rush Limbaugh to the trash heap of history.  Open your mind to a new era of freedom.

Pain and Ignorance

The more I learn about chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, the more it is clear to me that medicine is still in its infancy.  From the New York Times:

The cause of this disorder is unknown. Physical or emotional trauma may play a role in development of the syndrome. Some evidence suggests that fibromyalgia patients have abnormal pain transmission responses.

It has been suggested that sleep disturbances, which are common in fibromyalgia patients, may actually cause the condition. Another theory suggests that the disorder may be associated with changes in skeletal muscle metabolism, possibly caused by decreased blood flow, which could cause chronic fatigue and weakness.

Others have suggested that an infectious microbe, such as a virus, triggers the illness. At this point, no such virus or microbe has been identified.

Pilot studies have shown a possible inherited tendency toward the disease, though evidence is very preliminary.

Could this be any more vague and tentative?  We're only about a decade away from dismissing the whole thing as 'crazy woman syndrome.' 

Fibromyalgia is one of the reasons I became a bodyworker.  I saw people close to me suffering from it, and I saw the medical establishment making their suffering worse through ignorance, indifference and judgement. I may not be able to cure people's pain, but at least I can do someone the honor of taking it seriously. 

People with chronic pain, for the most part, cope with it by coping.  That's not a tautology.  Coping is a fluid process, different for every person and at every time.  Exercise may help, or not.  Pain medication, ditto.  Massage, sometimes.  Acupuncture, heat therapy, yoga may work, then stop working.  It never ends.

One thing I have observed, in over a decade of giving and receiving bodywork, is that there seems to be a powerful and complex relationship between fascia and the nervous system.  I have noticed that often the subtlest forms of bodywork can have the most profound affects.  I don't pretend to understand the mechanism behind it, but there are a couple of areas where I'd like to see some research done.

One is network spinal analysis.  The theory behind it is that by stimulating the spinal cord in areas where it attaches to the spine, you enable the body to release spinal tension and adjust itself.  After one treatment by an NSA chiropractor, I found my hips releasing the turn-out stress of twelve years of ballet training, and re-aligning in their natural forward-facing stance.  This chiropractor reported that many of her clients saw significant improvement from conditions as serious as MS, from treatment over time. 

The other is the M.E.L.T Method, a simple self-care technique that uses balls and rollers to rebalance and hydrate connective tissue.  It is now primarily used by athletes and personal trainers, but the results I've seen have been so dramatic that I'd like to see more research into its effectiveness on fibromyalgia and other chronic pain syndromes.

The more bodywork I do, the more it seems to me that the mind/body dichotomy is meaningless.  I'd describe it as a mind/body continuum.  At the very least there is a constant feedback loop going in both directions, both consciously and unconsciously.  An adjustment at any point in the loop can have wide-reaching effects; my interest is in finding the most efficient points of intervention.

Satan Unmasked

Jerry Seinfeld was always abhorrent. It is simply that it took most people a couple of decades to notice:

The one star who appeared to be immune from the curse was Jerry Seinfeld who enjoyed relative success in stand-up comedy despite ill-conceived endeavors such as Bee Movie. But now with his new near-universally loathed show The Marriage Ref his legacy seems more threatened than ever.

'Seinfeld' was not a brilliant sitcom.  It was evil and vile.  It was wilfully and self-righteously shallow, trivial and vain.  It was not funny.  It was vicious in its banality.

I may have watched an episode of 'Seinfeld' in its entirety once or twice, but I never managed to do so without feeling that I had been spiritually spat upon.  Most of the time I did not last for more than two or three minutes.  Even now I feel my stomach seize up if someone tunes to a rerun in my vicinity.

The fact that Jerry Seinfeld's new show is being universally panned merely demonstrates that our collective consciousness is catching up with reality.  Smarmy, facile spite is not only destructive of the fabric of society, it is not even good for a chuckle.  

Spiritual Necessity

It's about freakin' time.

What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.

It's sad, really, how over the top was the reaction to Roberta's editorial. Jerry Saltz's Facebook page exploded with expressions of gratitude from hundreds of artists.  The Brooklyn Rail posted a remarkably militant expression of solidarity:

We would go a step further and state unequivocally that many of these individuals have not only shirked their public responsibility, they have turned the museums into playgrounds for an elitist group of trustees and globetrotting art fair devotees, stocking their exhibitions primarily from “powerful galleries.”

Parallels to the financial institution debacle did not go unnoticed:

Sometimes the art world actually lags behind society, and the bursting of its preachy-self-indulgence bubble follows rather than leads the collapse of the economy's credit bubble by a couple of years. In the money world, anybody could borrow any amount for practically anything. In art, anyone could claim to be addressing any social issue with just about any work, and curators believed it.

So the question remains, why should we care? 

In my opinion, Roberta's much-quoted phrase 'intense personal necessity' does not go far enough.  It conjures up a vision of the obsessive, solipsistic artist working alone in the studio, churning out quirky, useless objects for purchase by wealthy people.  Given the dire economic conditions in which we find ourselves, fighting a battle to bring more painting into museums seems a little quixotic, and I say this as a painter myself.

Artists, as a whole, are pretty good at dealing with poverty.  We have to be. To look at the 'art' in museums, you'd never know that artists today have meaningful responses to real-world problems; you'd think we were a bunch of useless, smarmy man-children.

What is truly disgusting about the museum playgrounds is the way in which they siphon energy, resources and attention from artists who are working not only out of personal necessity, but out of spiritual necessity--responding to the world in ways that expand our ideas of what is possible.  Artists like the members of Urban Farm Syndicate:

Our goal is to turn Central Brooklyn’s biggest problem into its greatest resource by working with landowners instead of against them. 13% of the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, is vacant land. This vacant land creates opportunities for crime, vermin and dumping, and drives down property values. We believe this land also has the capacity to give rise to the very things that grow a community: dignified living wage jobs; a thriving local economy based on delicious, healthy food and an enduring educational resource for local schoolchildren and academia alike.

Or artists doing what we always do, going into neighborhoods that might as well be war zones and revitalizing them:

Artists are being pushed out left and right, publications folding, galleries closing, all while more and more MFAs continue to be churned out than can possibly be hired on by Manhattan’s service industry. Space is at a premium. Do we continue to go even further east into the cramped, treeless, concrete, PCB infested jungle of Bushwick, eventually reaching East New York’s hour-long commute for valuable studio and exhibition space? Or do we begin to explore other venues west of the Hudson? In the wide-open (*gasp*) NEW JERSEY!? In our case, we're going with Jersey.

Contrary to the apparent beliefs of the curatorial set, 'meaning' does not reside in facile, arcane references within a pile of visual koans.  It does not reside in unintelligible wall text.  It most certainly does not reside in the cynical manipulation of political and economic systems to grab a share of money and attention that is totally disproportionate to the quality of one's contributions.

Spiritual necessity is about a lot more than making objects.  It is about allowing the world to change us, as much as we change the world.  Most artists don't plan to become community organizers, entrepreneurs, healers or activists; it's what happens to us when we the irresistable force of our creativity meets the immovable object of the physical world.

How Not to Be a Terrorist

Glenn Greenwald describes Joe Stack's manifesto as 'perfectly cogent.'  Except for his conclusion that 'violence is the only answer,' I tend to agree.  Partisan ideologues are running in circles, each trying to blame his act of terrorism on the Other Side, but if you bother to read what he wrote, it's clear that it's not that simple.

Contrary to the various labels that the pundits are flinging around, Joe Stack was not a populist.  Neither was he a Communist, a Tea Bagger, or a liberal.  He was a smart, creative guy who empirically discovered that Big Systems in this country are designed to drain him dry--specifically, the smart, the creative, the independent and the non-conformist.  They drain everyone else too, but they work much faster and more viciously on people like Joe.

Item: The Labor Department estimates that up to 30 percent of companies misclassify employees as 'independent contractors' in order to avoid paying Social Security, unemployment, health insurance or worker's compensation.  Among the most often misclassified workers are truck drivers, construction workers, home health aides and high-tech engineers.

Item: The United States has the highest documented incarcaration rate in the world.  Over half are imprisoned for non-violent offenses.  

Item: A homeless man get a 15-year sentence for stealing $100 and returning it, while corporate officers who steal billions from taxpayers, investors and their own employees keep the money and write the laws.

Item: The average debt of a medical student who graduated in 2009 is $156,456.  

Item: The Catholic Church.  

I could go on, but as Joe Stack has clearly demonstrated, that way lies madness.

So how do we cope with the fact that institutions which supposedly exist to sustain and connect us--schools, corporations, churches, and government--have turned into parasitic monsters which extract ever more and give ever less, using our finest characteristics--honesty, intelligence, compassion, creativity, discipline--as levers to enslave us?

The reason terrorism does not work, as an instrument of change, is that fear paralyzes the mind.  The best weapon against institutional thuggery is not violence; it is the freedom of thought and action which emanates from a mind at peace with itself.  This is why institutional thugs bring out their most vicious tricks when confronted with a decent person who thinks for herself. 

This is also why we cannot look to institutional leaders to get us out of this mess.  They created it; they have a vested interest in sustaining it.

So I have a few suggestions.

Learn to care for yourself--really.  Learn to eat well, exercise well, meditate well.  Learn to live on less, even if you still have a job.  Revel in joys that are free. 

Quit looking upward.  Quit looking for someone to hire you, fire you, take charge, change the rules, enforce the rules.  Quit waiting for the grant, the donor, the collector, the award, the promotion.  Stop buying lottery tickets.  Consider long and hard before you pay for another degree.

Connect laterally.  The person you see as your competitor is potentially your ally.  That guy who might take your job, could be your business partner.  Collaborate, encourage, experiment and assist. 

Nurture love and meaning wherever you find it.

 I suspect that before much longer, systems and ways of living we took for granted will vanish, or undergo a radical transformation.  We can either give way to panic, violence, rage and despair, or we can take the opportunity to heal ourselves, our society and our planet.  It's up to every one of us to decide.

Backlash

Way back in the Dark Ages, I used to be a College Republican. Not only that, I was a Young Conservative. Of Texas. I spent more hours than I care to remember, actually going door-to-door to get out the vote for some of the most--well. Let's just say that my disgust with the conservative movement was an organic process, derived from direct personal experience of the hypocrisy, chauvinism, bigotry and overt, shameless greed of those who espoused it.

One of the salient characteristics of College Republicans was their knee-jerk submission to authority. I was one of the few true believers--manning the table on the West Mall, attending meetings, debating liberals and making friends with them. Most College Republicans were members of fraternities and sororities, who joined solely in order to boost their resumes. But when the order came down, they went to the polls and voted for the approved candidate, whether they knew jack about the issues or, overwhelmingly, not.

When I eventually defected to the Young Democrats and associated ilk, I found the opposite problem. They were constantly getting side-tracked by trivial issues and splitting into factions. In any group of ten, you'd find fifteen irreconcilable opinions. This may have provided infinite opportunities for personal growth and self-expression, but it was hell on getting things done.

Which brings me to the current moment.

People with financial and political power don't get their power by accident. They know how to seize it and they know how to keep it. Since power is their priority, they don't take their eye off the ball, and they don't give it up for petty concerns like a landslide popular vote, a ruined economy, forty million uninsured, skyrocketing medical bankruptcies or a destroyed city. They're only in it for themselves, and they don't care what happens to you.

Nevertheless, we and Obama have to reckon with them, because they've got 1) tons of money; 2) a huge propaganda machine; 3) the SCOTUS tilting the balance in their favor. Acting as if they'll just go away because they lost an election is naive and foolish.

Progressives, quit your bitching. Quit whining about how Obama has betrayed you, how he didn't fix the economy in 30 seconds, how 60% of the population wants a public option, how this healthcare bill sucks and we should just junk it and start over. What are you, twelve? Did you really think that the Presidency was a magic wand that Obama could wave and recreate the system? Did you think that the stupid, the greedy, the spiteful, the easily manipulated and the sociopathic power-mongers would just go away?

Look, this isn't a joke. This recession isn't going away any time soon, and by the time it does, our lives will be radically different. We have the choice to come together and rebuild our nation into something approaching a decent place to live, or we can keep crying for the moon while the forces of evil quietly suck us dry, separately and alone. There is no place for ego, grandstanding or apathy in this crisis. If the country goes down, we all go with it.

The healthcare bill in Congress isn't perfect, but it makes a start at stopping the most egregious abuses of the current system, while putting pilot programs in place to start improving it, slowly. That's huge. Get on the horn to your representatives and threaten them with disembowelment if they don't pass it.

The Diet-Free Life

My new job, at The Balance Health Center in Philadelphia, has invited me to do a series of workshops. I'm planning for a weight loss through wellness seminar, tentatively entitled 'The Diet-Free Life." Since I can never be content with a few words when several hundred thousand will do, I have started a Diet-Free Life blog, complete with Facebook fan page.

Most of my friends don't need to read such things, of course, but some of you might get a kick out of watching me trying to write in a pithy, concise manner.

Empty Houses

Like so many others, this recession hit us really hard. Both Joe and I are self-employed, so when the work dried up, we didn't even have unemployment benefits to tide us over. Recently the unthinkable became our best option--we sublet our Brooklyn apartment and moved in with extended family.

And do you know what? It's kind of fun. Olivia's G-ma is great to live with and has plenty of space to share. Aunts and uncles and cousins drop by, bring breakfast, loan us their baby furniture, recommend yoga studios. Joe fixes their electrical wiring, I share recipes. There's always someone to talk to.

All around the country, people are losing their houses--their big, big, empty houses. They're filling dumpsters with the stuff they bought to fill those houses up. I wonder how many of them bought houses to fulfill some vague dream of 'home,' derived from movies and children's books, full of laughter and games and roaring fireplaces? And I wonder how many people rattle around in them, wondering when the fun is going to start?

I think too many Americans have used their wealth to isolate themselves. They put up gates around their communities, shop online, live in suburbs and drive alone in SUVs built for eight. The more money you have, the more you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to deal with. And ultimately, even your friends are too busy and far away to visit.

A number of years ago, I leased out my house, put my stuff in storage and floated around the world for a few years. I got good at being a houseguest. I kept my possessions to a minimum, cooked for people, listened, gave massages, and moved on when it was time to go. Since I am relatively introverted and like to control my own space, this was a challenge. But I was fine, my friends were happy to have me, and sorry to see me go. (They're still my friends, so I'm pretty sure they were telling the truth.)

This recession was a long time in the making, and our culture as a whole has a lot of hard lessons to learn. One of those lessons might be that relationships take more effort than possessions, but they give you more in return.

Personal Update

Mandala calendars have sold out! Thanks to all you lovely people who made my first commercial venture a success. If you sent in an order and have not received yours, please let me know ASAP--all orders were shipped.

Our family is living in Philadelphia for the time being. The NYC economy just wasn't working for us. (We weren't working for it, either.) We may be back in a few months, but we don't know. Meanwhile we can be contacted at the same phone numbers, email addresses etc.

Order your Mandala Calendar

Calendars are being printed and shipped this week; they will be 9"x 9", on 100# paper with a glossy cover. The price of $18 includes tax and shipping. When you click the button you will be prompted to enter the number of calendars you want, and your shipping address.

The original drawings and watercolors will be available for sale as well; please contact Stephanie for prices. Happy holidays!

Rape and Parenthood

One of the top priorities on my parenthood to-do list, in addition to paying the rent next month, is to raise my daughter so that things like this don't happen to her. Forget all the horse/barn door advice; I'm going with Franklin's recommendation, and signing her up for kung fu classes as soon as she's walking steadily. Not only will some physical confidence stand her in good stead, but apparently, guys really dig kung fu chicks.

Because I don't want to raise my daughter to be afraid of men. I want to raise her with a little bit of common sense. And that includes giving her a few basic facts about life--for instance, "Guys are going to want to f*ck you."

Lord knows, my life would have been easier if someone had been willing to lay things out like that. I was raised by parents who believed that ignorance = innocence = virtue, and that they could protect me from all the bad things in life by sending me to the right schools. They implicitly believed that if you follow all the rules, you'll be okay, even if you have no idea why you're following them.

There are a number of flaws in this logic. One of them is that it's a terrible idea to teach people to be unquestioningly obedient to authority; that's how you get Guantanamo, the Holocaust and corporate America. Another is that however much you try to shelter someone, they're bound to meet people eventually who don't know the same rules.

So it was that I was sent out into the world by my clueless parents with this view of sex: Men would ask me out on dates. Any man who asked me on a date would 1) not be dating any other women, and 2) would want to be my boyfriend. After we'd been dating for several months, this boyfriend would try to talk me into having sex with him.

And I had my pretty, confident, non-judgmental little speech all ready for him.

Twenty-odd years of mayhem and miscommunication later, I don't know exactly what I'm going to tell my daughter when she's old enough to parse my sentences, but in some way it will include the information, "Guys are going to want to f*ck you. Some of them will be decent guys, and some of them will be predators. Many of them will assume you want to f*ck them, too, regardless of what you say about it.

"So it's a good idea to get to know guys pretty well before you go off into dark, secluded corners with any of them. Don't assume that a man believes everything you say, or that he's even listening; a dude in the grip of raging hormones is just watching your lips move while he maps the fastest route to your panties. Predatory men will get you drunk, tell lies, and use any kind of social or physical pressure they can think of in order to get laid. They'll also use all kinds of rationalizations to avoid the consequences of their actions, physical and emotional.

"That doesn't mean that all guys are jerks. It does mean that you have to keep your wits about you. And when you decide to go into a dark, secluded corner on purpose, with a decent guy, please take a condom with you."

Twelve Months of Meditation

As a first tiptoe into entrepreneurship, I am designing a 2010 mandala calendar. It is a 12" x 12" wall calendar, with high-resolution scans of mandalas that I've drawn from 2006 to 2009.

While working on the files I notice that the images do what they're intended to do--they calm me down. The fact that they're hand-drawn, and thus slightly imperfect, has a lot to do with it. Each line, each texture, is a record of an actual experience. They took a lot of time to draw, and you can spend time with them--a whole month, in fact--without, hopefully, getting bored.

The first print run will be small, and I'm hoping to keep the price down to around $20. I'll have a Paypal button for ordering, as soon as the proofs are proofed; if you would like to pre-order, please leave a note in the comments. If I get enough pre-orders I'll be able to do a larger print run. They will ship in time for Christmas.

UPDATE: It's going to be 9" x 9". Apparently, only Big Capitalists can print 12" x 12", because this requires an offset printer, and the upfront costs of offset printing are upwards of three grand. I have no illusions that my fan base is sufficient to purchase 500-1000 calendars, so a small digital run it is.

The Art World is Dead. Long Live Art.

By now, anyone who cares is well versed in the Tragedy of Becky Smith's Bellwether.

Once sales dried up by the fall of 2008, Becky called three of her largest collectors, pleading for some business — “I tried playing it cool, and then I tried playing it direct,” she said. She recounted a typical conversation: “I need to sell you something to continue to be here,” she would tell a collector.

“I’m just not buying,” was the reply.

“Did you hear me? I have this artist you collect who will have to get another job. If I can’t sell you something right now, I’ll have to close,” Becky would say, but the response was the same. “I felt forsaken,” she recalled. “All these collectors who supported me and my artists, they just disappeared. They didn’t care.”

Although I was not the kind of person who ever registered on Becky Smith's radar, I feel about as sorry for her as Chris does. She was something of an idealist; even as she careened into a business that, at its peak, cost her $75,000 a month in overhead--more than most artists earn in two or three years--she thought that it was at least partly about the art. About ideas, creation, passion, beauty, humanity, exploration, the pursuit of excellence, originality and insight. That stuff.

I guess we all do.

I can count on one hand the number of Chelsea art dealers who have ever been polite to me. Polite, as in acknowledging my existence when I say "Hi, I'm Stephanie. You are..?" instead of blankly looking through me for a second before speaking to the person next to me. Polite, as in offering me a glass of champagne and allowing me to accept it, instead of moving it past my outstretched hand to the couple ten feet behind me. Polite, as in saying, "that would be lovely!" when I offer to show them my portfolio after visiting their gallery regularly for a year and a half, instead of "It's a waste of time for me to look at your work."

(Actually, not a single one has ever said "that would be lovely," even though that's my usual response to other artists. As far as I know, there's not a single Chelsea dealer who has any idea what my art looks like, let alone an opinion about it.)

That hasn't stopped them from sending me press releases, once the 'art criticism' business imploded and the art blogosphere took off. Talk about wasted effort. Dudes, get a clue: once you have been egregiously, offensively, unnecessarily rude to me in person, you can inundate me with hype and schmoozing for fifty years and I won't come back. I won't come back to interview you, have a glass of wine, or sneeze on the art. I will ignore you. You are a waste of my time.

But what I realized, after the Fall of Bellwether, was that some part of me still believed that there was some reason to respect these people. That no matter how idiotic, banal, frivolous and inane was the majority of the 'art' I saw in their galleries, nevertheless the New York Art World stood for some sort of quality. Some kind of allegiance to the life of the mind and the exploration of the spirit.

Then I thought, "$75,000 a month in overhead?" That's not art, that's fashion. Fashion, corruption, and excess.

Because a business that generates a $75K monthly overhead for a white room filled with arcane, useless objects can only be sustained by the kinds of people who happily pay themselves multimillion dollar bonuses in taxpayer money after their personal actions torch the global economy. It can only be sustained by the kinds of people who are driven to accumulate infinitely more than everybody else, no matter how many others go sick, hungry or unemployed. It can only be sustained, in other words, by sociopaths.

It's no mystery that I and the New York Art World don't get along. My interests lie in the direction of timelessness and balance.

'Twisted lotus mandala' (study), Stephanie Lee Jackson, 2009

Thus, I have realized that if I am to maintain my integrity as an artist, I have to forget about galleries. Instead I will seek to hang my work in wellness centers, yoga studios, doctor's offices, spas, churches, and any other place that exists to heal and nurture the human spirit, not crush and deride it.

I'm pretty sure this is the right direction to take, because immediately after coming to this conclusion, I started working steadily, despite being blocked for over a year, despite being broke and stressed and taking care of an infant all day.

Does that make me a kitsch artist? Well, it could, except that I'm not going to change into someone else. If people think my art is kitschy, they're not looking very closely. And if there's one thing I've discovered about New York art dealers, it's that very few of them actually know what they're looking at.

One More Thing...

One Hundred Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part I)

46. Never acknowledge any one guest over and above any other. All guests are equal.

Particularly, never sit down at a table with three ladies who have gathered for lunch, next to the one you find most attractive, and monopolize the conversation for an hour and a half, by describing your job, your last four jobs, the personalities of the restaurant owners, and the stinginess of the diners regarding tips. Additionally, do not fail to bring any change when the ladies put down an amount of cash equal to twice the amount of the bill, until one of the ladies (not the one you are blatantly hitting on) says, "Could we have some change? We're not leaving you a 100% tip."

Thank you.

Blaming the Individual

for institutional excess:

never have so many members of the nation’s younger generations been so dependent on their parents and grandparents. Should parents set limits, or is this transfer of wealth a social and economic necessity in the long jobless recession? How has this growing dependence changed the country?

Although the various answers to this question are interesting, it's the wrong question. The QUESTION is, 'how has the country's economy created this growing dependence?'

To anyone who entered the job market during a recession, the answer ought to be obvious--while the costs of education, healthcare and housing have skyrocketed since our parents graduated from college, the number of living-wage jobs has plummeted. There is no longer any sane ratio between the price of a college degree and the salary that degree earns you; ditto between the price of a house and the average wage. And I don't even need to talk about health insurance.

The other thing that rarely gets mentioned is that the economy itself is changing so fast that it is impossible to plan a 'career trajectory' that will still make sense five years from now, let alone through 'retirement' (which, for most of our generation, is a fiscal impossibility anyway.) No sooner do you learn one technology, skill or profession than 1) the technology becomes obsolete, 2) your job is outsourced to India, or 3) the industry collapses. Thus, any successful 'career' in this millennium requires an enormous amount of adaptability.

Fostering adaptability is, in itself, not a bad thing (we could all take a lesson from rural China in that respect), but in our certification-happy society, all of us end up further in debt while financing our own retraining. Insecurity generates predation, in the form of absurdly expensive, worthless community college degrees, MFA programs, and arcane graduate degrees. By the time we've attained our certification in holistic health counseling, or DreamWeaver, or Windows OS, the world has moved on to Linux and hypnotherapy.

The fact is, that education, healthcare and real estate are no longer subject to rational market pressures. All three industries have become so enormous, pervasive and mythologized that they are draining us dry, with few 'opt-out' possibilities.

So, New York Times editorial board, give 'dependent' 20- and 30- and 40-somethings a break. We've been sold a bunch of bills of goods, and we have little choice but to sell more bills ourselves, or to curl into a fetal position and give up.

Base Paranoia

Cheers everybody! It's been yonks. Of course I have had opinions unlimited on the healthcare debate, most of which I cannot now recall. But today's Ross Douthat editorial yanked me out of my haze:

It’s the eventual endgame that liberals pushing a “public option” are aiming for: a federal takeover of the health-insurance sector, paid for by rising tax rates, in which the government guarantees universal access while using its monopoly power to hold down costs.

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the fact that the 'radical solution' that Mr. Douthat propounds is nearly identical to the one that I have been touting for years. I want to point out that the rhetoric he employs above indicates why it it is all but impossible to have a coherent discussion about healthcare these days.

Look: at the 'liberals' 'pushing' 'a federal takeover' with 'rising tax rates' to create 'monopoly power.' For Mr. Douthat, and thousands like him, there is no middle ground. Democracy is not a debate; it's a death struggle between opposing forces of freedom and totalitarianism. Any 'solution' is necessarily 'radical' because it involves the total defeat of one extremist point of view or another.

Granted, there are many progressives out there who think that universal single-payer healthcare is the way to go. On alternate Thursdays, I'm one of them. That doesn't mean that I'm incapable of 1) compromise, 2) seeing other points of view; or 3) seeking out alternate solutions which might be a creative hybrid of existing systems. It is perfectly possible to support a public option without simultaneously sending lawyers, guns and money to the secret Communist Liberation Army that is waiting outside the gates of every U.S. hospital.

Let me remind Mr. Douthat, as well as a few of my 'conservative' friends, of one thing--last time I checked, THIS IS STILL A DEMOCRACY. No 'liberal' is going to 'push' a radical solution down the throats of hundreds of thousands of entrenched and well-heeled interests without a great deal of trouble. The term 'public option' includes the term 'option' for a REASON. IT'S ONE OPTION. AMONG MANY.

On Vacation

I apologize for my long silence; I've had a lot to say, but literally no time to say it. I'm working nearly full time and parenting the rest of the time, while trying to negotiate a mountain of unpaid bills without the resources to pay them.

But once I get my brain decompressed with a visit to extended family in Maine, I will once again be Posting like a Fiend. I promise.