You Americans

In online discussions with Europeans, occasionally the topic turns to “you Americans” and some observation or complaint– ranging anywhere from polite and benign to angry and confrontational– about our character (or lack thereof), etc etc.

I always find this amusing coming from Europeans, because, what is an American, really? “You Americans” certainly doesn’t mean actual, genetic Native Americans, who barely remain anywhere north of the Rio Grande; their numbers have been decimated by a genocide perpetrated wholly by– Europeans.

So who are “we” Americans, anyway? I’m of 50% Italian and 50% Sicilian blood. Genetically, I “am” 100% European (maybe a bit of North African and Middle Eastener, too, based on the history of Sicily).

I look at the ruling class of this country, and they’re nearly all of European origin– mostly British, German, Scotch, and Irish. “Bush” is an English surname, “Clinton” and “Rodham” certainly likewise. If Obama makes it through the primary and to the presidency, I suspect he’d be the first significantly non-European ever to serve in that office.

“We” Americans aren’t a people or a nation in any traditional sense of the word. Most of us are Europeans by blood. A growing number of us have a bit more “American” in us, descended from “los Indios” of Mexico and Central/South America. The remainder come from every other nation on the planet. We’ve generally been the people from Europe who were too rebellious or ambitious or greedy to be content with our “station”, or had religious or political beliefs too bizarre or heretical or threatening. I guess “we” still are, if anything, still that, so there are some differences.

But, dear Europeans, at the root of it, “we” are “you”.

SPAM insanity

This morning I cleaned out my catch-all SPAM folder– the stuff that SpamAssassin throws away. In Linux I can kill the whole folder with a one-line command, without even having to read any of it.

This evening I checked again and it had 94 new messages in it. Almost all of it porn and “stock tips”. Not even a full day.

I also started cleaning out 5 years’ worth of political SPAM too, all of it procmail filtered into folders. Thousands of messages, almost all of them “urgent actions” that were probably urgent at the time but are totally useless now. I think I’m going to /dev/null them instead.

SPAM is becoming the currency of politics. Seems like every “petition” or “action” is just a way to glean your email address, to send you more “urgent actions” and pleas for money.

I’m not using a real email address for those anymore.

Python kicks ass

One-liner to sum up a list of times in the format MM:SS

sum([m* 60 + s for m,s in [[int(j) for j in z.split(':')] for z in [i.strip() for i in sys.stdin.readlines()]]])

The Crazy People

The crazy people are often correct.

In some fields– business, investments, invention, the arts–, this is accepted as an obvious truth. “Crazy people” are likely often enough to become billionaires and have their faces appear on the cover of Forbes Magazine.

I think it needs to become a more widely-accepted truth in the world of politics, because it is as true there as in any other field of human endeavour. The “crazy people” are also just as likely to get a Nobel Peace Prize too.

“Crazy people”– extremists and activists– are a society’s early warning system. They are almost always identifying a legitimate problem that needs to be taken seriously. Often they get the solutions wrong– or the tactics– but I think that the political “fringe” is always telling us something important about what’s wrong with our world, and which needs to be addressed urgently.

The global warming people were right. The people I marched alongside in October 2002, protesting this idiotic Iraq war before it even started, were right. The activists fighting for the preservation of biodiversity and against habitat destruction are right. The people marching in Seattle in 1999 were right. The people who have been shouting about evil conspiracies lurking within the Bush Administration have been proven right. No, I don’t think Bush planned 9/11, but he has almost certainly done worse; Conyers hasn’t even scratched the surface yet of uncovering the criminal conduct of Bush, Rove, Cheney, and their cronies.

But I’m not just crowing. Even the activists I don’t agree with, I’d still advocate taking seriously. For example, I abhor fundamentalist religious fanatics– particularly the Christian fundamentalists here in the USA, as well as the Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East. I consider them dangerous, and the Christian ones more immediately so. But they are identifying a very serious and legitimate problem: today’s corporate “globalized” consumer culture is morally and spiritually bankrupt, and ultimately unhealthy for humans. Their solution– theocracy– is nonsense; I will fight tooth and nail to avoid ever having to live in a theocracy. But I think they’ve been correct in identifying a legitimate problem: commerce is amoral, and something is seriously wrong with a society based entirely upon it.

Oh, and warmest congratulations to Al Gore.

A liberal

“A liberal is a conservative who got mugged by a corporation.”

– Me

A future that fits

For quite a few years, I’ve been railing about the evils of “consumer plantation” society, how foolish and immoral it is, the waste and pollution, the idiocy, the march of corporate feudalism, and the terrible problems all of the above will present for individuals and for society as a whole, etc.

But nowadays I’m a lot more serene. First of all, many more people are losing their naivete, and finally waking up to what is going on. Secondly, there’s little need to rail against the system, because it’s coming down on its own. All I have to do, is sit here, and wait. Global corporate “free-market” capitalism is creaky, corrupt, disconnected from the people. It is broken, and it is about to go away. As best as I can reckon, the future is coming to me, and it will fit me and my anarchist-socialist-hippie-treehugger-D.I.Y. kind, like a glove.

It will be, as it’s been said, “human-scale”.

Americans will no longer be consuming cheap plastic shit like drunken sailors on leave, and throwing away perfectly good and usable things just because they’re not “upscale” enough. The global economy will not be a giant game of Lotto or a huge Vegas table, riggged by the casino. Corporations will not buy and sell Congressmen, Senators, and Presidents like so many baseball cards. People will live close to the land and to each other. We will produce more than we consume, and do both of those locally.

Actually, it’s been said better:

“In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.

You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life.

You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.

And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn; laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

Actually, I’m not convinced that civilization will collapse as completely as Tyler Durden predicted. I don’t think that’d be either possible or beneficial. Momentum counts for a lot, as does human nature and human desires. We’ll always have technology, specialization, cities, and complex social structures. But all of the above will be smaller, more distributed, more “people-powered”… more “human-scale”. That’s a positive thing.

Civilization is in for a long-overdue (and probably very dramatic) “correction”. At the end of it, the world will be the kind of place in which I, personally, will feel much more comfortable.

While somewhat more serene, I’m not yet optimistic, because I’m not at all convinced that the transition will be peaceful. Things could get very ugly before they get any better. But, then again, maybe not. Either way, I think we’ll survive it

At least, I can hope so, and try to do my part, and that’s all.

Vegetables

For almost a year, I’ve been gradually removing meat from my diet, and eating vegetarian.

I noticed something amazing: after snacking on a bunch of raw green vegetables (peas, green beans, broccoli, whatever), I’m not hungry anymore. I feel completely full. This surprised me. I always thought that meat was the only “real” food that could fill me up and make me feel like I’ve eaten, and I’m notorious for being able to gorge on carbs (bread! huge plates of pasta! crackers! bread!!). But after only a little bit of peas/beans/etc, I’m done, I’ve eaten.

Another nice thing is that I don’t have to cook much anymore. Unlike meat or grains or fish, vegetables don’t actually have to be prepared in order for humans to digest them. They are safe to eat raw. So I do. This saves a lot of time.

Finally, I still love wild-caught fish, and whenever I buy, cook, and eat it, I do so enthuiastically. And when I get the rare opportunity to have a burger or some chicken or steak, I take it. Pizza with pepperoni is goood. So I’m not a purist by any stretch. But for the first time in my life, I can actually imagine living off of lentils, rice, and green veggies.