Handshaking

I know a singer-songwriter who thinks handshakes are stupid and refuses to do them.

I’ve never thought they were stupid, necessarily, but I’ve noticed that, in the music world, handshakes are done very often (and very creatively), and it’s taking some getting used to.

When I was in the high-tech marketing world, handshakes were done upon initial meeting and not again. Men and women would use handshakes when introducing themselves or getting introduced. Of course, it was the standard, bland, square, “white” handshake– nobody dared do anything fancier or “hipper”.

I also noticed that engineers and technical people were a lot less enthusiastic about handshakes and tended to want to get them out of the way, and salespeople a lot more enthusiastic about them and seemed to consider them a lot more important. Being part of the “nerd” tribe myself, I’ve never been much for handshakes, but found them useful as a tool to help remember someone’s name when meeting them. I got used to that, and it seemed comfortable.

Then I spent 7 years almost exclusively in the world of stay-at-home moms. I noticed that full-time moms don’t shake hands, even when meeting for the first time. The few (and proud!) of my fellow stay-at-home dads followed the mom’s convention; I don’t think I shook anyone’s hand for years unless it was someone’s husband I was meeting for the first time– following the business convention. So I’d gotten unaccustomed to shaking hands, and also formed the opinion that it was a “guy thing” that remained in the business world as a result of it having been male-dominated for so much of its history.

Then I got involved briefly in politics, and it was back to the business convention: handshakes when you meet someone, and men and women used them. And they tended to be executed with the “salesperson” level of enthusiasm, but again, only on meeting someone.

And, now that I’ve gotten back into the music world, it’s a lot more touchy-feely. Everyone shakes hands, and hugs, at the beginning and end of each rehearsal or gig, upon each casual meeting, even if you’ve just been working together the night before, and often in creative ways– hand slaps, soul handshakes, bumping knuckles, and sometimes combinations thereof.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s because– unlike much of the business world which is more gender balanced– music remains largely a boy’s club. Maybe musicians are just more physical, warmer, and emotive. Maybe it’s because music is a lot more like sales or politics: it’s a people thing. Maybe it’s due to the strong influence of African-American culture in the music world. I have noticed that my use of the square, businesslike “white” handshake seems out of place and even gets odd looks occasionally, so I’m trying to loosen up and get used to the other variations. It’s definitely a different way of doing things, and that songwriter who dislikes handshakes is really swimming against the tide.

We are the New Bulgaria

A friend here in the Bay Area bought a house in Bulgaria as an investment a few years ago, knowing that they were about to be admitted into the EU and the price of property would go up dramatically. He was right; it did. He’s considering selling it to pay off his Bay Area house with the profits.

Why would he stay here? Why not move to Bulgaria when the shit hits the fan here?

He said, when the shit hits the fan, this will BE Bulgaria. No need to move, there will be tons of work here, more than there will be there.

Huh?

What he meant was, cheap wages are kind of like strange loop. If your country falls apart, and your currency devalues, then you are more attractive as an employee for global corporate capital, because you’re working cheaper.

Living here, he reckons, with tons of work that Euro-based corporations are eager to pay for with worth-less-than-toilet-paper dollars, while living in a paid-off house, will be a better deal than living in Bulgaria, which will be much more affluent by comparison, and with fewer jobs available.

Ahead of their time

One of the nice side-effects of the world moving so fast, is that if you’re the kind of person who tends to be way ahead of their time, a fast-moving world presents the chance that your “time” may come while you are still alive, and even young enough to enjoy it and benefit from it.

The useless dick

Men are useless in modern, Western society.

I’ve been thinking about this for many years. Gentlemen, we’ve worked ourselves out of a job over the last hundred years or so.

We’ve designed machines that do almost all of the heavy lifting and dangerous work. Our food is grown, caught, harvested, slaughtered, processed, and shipped around, by machines. We’ve built social structures based on law, and discussion, and technology, that eliminate danger and risk. Even our wars are fought by machines and computers. We’ve built consumer, convenience economies based on complex and convenient exchanges of blips and mental constructs, on partnerships and alliances and cunning and intelligence and social interchange which are female strengths, not on brutality and fighting and might and assumption of risk and other traditional male strengths. Of course this is a tremendous boon– the essence of civilization. And I’ve never had much talent for– or patience for– macho bullshit anyway. But my point is: women can do civilization better than we can.

Men have become useless; masculinity has become more of an unseemly vestige from a vanished era.

I find that this might explain a lot of things.

I think Michael Moore nailed it: the right-wingers are so virulent and vicious and loud, because it’s their last gasp. They’ve become irrelevant, and they are very, very pissed off about it. The Neanderthals in the fundamentalist Christian churches, in the fundamentalist Islamic madrassas, in the Military-Industrial complex, in the “traditional” patriarchal cultures, are history. They’re howling with indignation at the fact that there is no place for them anymore in this world. George W. Bush is a blustering, idiotic, cartoon-cowboy asshole, because that’s all that remains of masculinity; he (and his few remaining followers like Bill O’Lielly, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.) are holding on to it for dear life. And they look so ridiculous doing it.

The book and movie “Fight Club” says it most plainly: we are a generation of men raised in a world dominated by women. Some are OK with that, some are lost, and some strike out against it in silly and pathetic ways. But it won’t help– this is a woman’s world.

Intensely interconnected, complex social environments, like beehives and ant colonies, are dominated by females. Nature keeps only a few males around for mating. That’s it, and the boys don’t do much else. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s certainly not any kind of position of power or influence. Everything else is run by the girls, because they do a better job of it.

That’s how the ants and bees do it, anyway. If this project of civilization continues for another thousand years or so, I predict that you’ll see a similar gender distribution– and division of labor– among homo sapiens as well.

Wow. Just wow.

5: Let’s Explore The Possibility of an Open Source Monetary System.
6: Let’s End Corporate Personhood and Other Rules that Unfairly Advantage Corporations.

Wow. Just wow. Someone with actual readership is now saying these things I’ve been saying for almost 7 years now.

I’m thrilled!

I have to disagree with R.U. Serius’s proposed solution: starting a third party. No, I think these ideas need to be pushed into the party of the people, the Democratic party, through grassroots effort. I personally believe we have to reclaim our party from big-money corporate lobbyists, first, before there’s any hope of reclaiming the country from them.

But I will support those two efforts– overturning corproate personhood and creating open-source money systems– with everything I’ve got.

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”.

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.