Category Archives: essay

Four (More) Reasons America Still Kicks Ass

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The Fourth of July falls on a Wednesday this year, which is kind of a bummer, because if you’re not taking the whole week off — or at least half the week — it doesn’t feel much like a holiday. But it is a holiday, so let’s celebrate the independence of our nation by blowing up a small part of it!

Here are four (more) reasons to light the fireworks this year:

One: The black guy versus the Mormon.
Only in America would you have two candidates who are so part of “the other” running for president. No matter what happens in November, we’ll have a president that is very different than the majority of the country and it feels like that just isn’t a big deal anymore. Look across the rest of the world and every country votes in what they know. Here in the USA we’ve turned a corner.

Two: Our awesome cuisine.
Sure, we’ve gotten soft over the years and we could all afford to lose a few pounds. But how could you not get a little round with all of this awesome food around? From locavores to paleos and everything in between, America has an awesome food culture. Where I live, I can eat at a diner that regionally sources all of its food, get an authentic kobeeda kabob with a bread cooked in a traditional brick oven pit thing and check out a vegetarian fried chicken.

And that doesn’t even account for all of the resources we have for learning to cook and making your own food. If you love to eat, America is the place to be.

Three: Baseball!
Maybe it’s because I live in the DC-metro area, where we’re enthralled by the seemingly-out-of-nowhere ascendency of the Nationals and the up-from-the-ashes Baltimore Orioles, but I feel like baseball is back. This is the closest thing to a sport America can claim as its own — something we invented nearly out of whole cloth (sorry tackle football, you’re a bastardization of Rugby) and its great to see it coming back from the steroids controversy and the resulting congressional follies and lawsuits.

Four: Our unwavering creative spirit.
Yeah, the economy’s not great. We’re finally pulling ourselves out of a recess-depression only to have a potential European collapse bring us down again, but by and large Americans aren’t getting down. Instead, we’re creating things — from Pinterest, to Spanx, to Kickstarter — we’re finding ways to solve problems, do what we love, and make a little bank. And with the power of the Internets, we’re creating more and more just for kicks. You don’t need a studio to be an artist anymore, you just need a laptop and an internet connection.

I don’t worry about America, because our creative spirit will never let us down. A bad economy, a government that doesn’t work anymore and a seemingly impossible and ever-growing political divide be damned — no matter what differences we have, our desire to build something new will always win out.

(Photo: America, by Thomas Hawk. Used under a Creative Commons license.)

the meme of outrage

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Like millions of others this past weekend, I watched the video of UC Davis Police Lieutenant John Pike and other officers hosing down protesters with pepper spray at close range with a horror, outrage and the repeating question in my mind, “What the fuck is going on in this country?” This was the latest, and perhaps most graphic example of police violence against protests during the amorphous Occupy Wall Street movement, but certainly not the first.

There was also a feeling last Sunday that this was a crystalizing moment for #OWS. That what we were seeing would become an iconic image that would truly focus the national conscience on the issues at the center of #OWS and the bizarre and violent reactions to the protests. And for one Sunday, that’s exactly what happened. The UC Davis incident dominated social media conversations and The Washington Post‘s Philip Kennicott wrote an interesting piece on what the spray-down may mean to our public conscience.

This, combined with the thousands of news stories, blog posts and video views of the incident gave me some hope that we’d finally be getting down to business and a serious discussion — pros and cons — of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But then this happened and the whole thing turned into another freaking Internet joke:

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The Officer Pike meme is at times silly, interesting and yes, poignant — but it is a distraction. What’s worse, it is a distraction that removes the emotional resonance of the incident and divorces Pike from the violence he inflicts. By providing us with sanitized and silly assets to pass around, this meme makes it OK for us to move on from what happened at UC Davis, and around the country, and trivialize these events through this new shared experience of the meme. It also gives the media a pass. It allows them to continue to punt on taking a serious look at the #OWS story and, instead, trivialize it by associating it with this “new, silly meme that sprung up on the internet overnight!” (That’s a generic media quote.)

I’m generally a fan of memes, whether they’re silly, or used to make a point. But when a meme serves as a distraction and gives us an easy out from facing hard truths, it’s not doing anyone any good.

All that said, I do think this one gets to the point:

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Images: First and second from Ranker.com. The third is from Boing Boing.

the albums of my life: r.e.m.’s murmur

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Note: This is part III of a series.

By my freshman year of high school, the bullying had ended. I thinned out, earned the grades I needed to be in better classes and had a growing sense of confidence about who I was and where my strengths lie — wit and humor rather than athletics. I was able to walk a thin line of the class clown that teachers actually appreciated and liked.

Still, despite the fact that I had found some semblance of stability in high school, I wanted nothing more than to be someone else — anyone else. I wanted to be anyone but a 15 year-old freshman at the ultra-generic Central York High School of York, Pennsylvania. But mostly, I wanted to be my brother. My brother was older, lived in Paris, had long hair and smoked cigarettes. He was cool in a way that could only be imagined. He listened to R.E.M.

I couldn’t move to Paris or grow my hair long (my hair grew out, not down). So instead, I listened to R.E.M. and smoked cigarettes. For whatever reason, the first album I purchased was “Fables of the Reconstruction” — a mid-catalog sleeper most notable for the classic (by early R.E.M. standards) Driver 8. I liked the album well enough, but I didn’t love it. Then, for my brother’s birthday, I bought him the first compact disc I’d ever purchased — “Murmur” — and dubbed a copy of it for myself on a cassette.

The newness of the technology, combined with the discovery of that music burned that moment in my mind forever. Taking off the cellophane wrapping; the smell of petroleum and plastic coming off the disc; setting up the stereo system to play the DVD and record it on the tape — feeling like I was was some sort of studio engineer — it was all magic. I put on a pair of puffy headphones my Dad used to listen to his classical CDs, laid down on the soft oriental rug of the living room with the lights out and hit play and record simultaneously.

When I heard the opening drums of “Radio Free Europe” followed by Mike Mills’ driving bass line and Micheal Stipe’s staccato irreconcilable lyrics, I was hooked. The track was completely foreign to my understanding of rock music at the time — it signaled that the sun did not rise on Guns ‘n Roses and set on Metallica, the bands that seemed to define Central York High School at the time. Yet, there was something in its simplicity — the idea that this really was just four slightly odd guys playing music together — that made me think, “I can do this.” After hearing the opening guitar riff to “Talk About the Passion,” I decided I needed to play the guitar.

I was barely passable as a guitar player — barely passable. I learned and was competent at playing the basic chords and could serve as your rhythm guitar player as long as you didn’t need me to play any bar chords, which basically meant I could not serve as your rhythm guitar player in any way. But I loved to play and spent hours in the basement playing and learning R.E.M. tunes. I took lessons from a classical guitar player which essentially boiled down to me bringing him R.E.M. cassettes, him listening to the songs, working out the chords of the song and teaching me how to play them. He also taught me the opening riff to “Talk About the Passion,” for which I am eternally grateful.

R.E.M., Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, 10,000 Maniacs — these were the bands that defined my early years of high school. They were still underground and between the cassettes on my Walkman and my guitar I established a solid reputation as an alt. kid. It was a comfortable and authentic fit and led me to my first girlfriend.

Lesley, was an alt. kid too. She loved the bands that I loved and she was a singer. She came over once or twice, I played and she sang. I showed her some songs I had written and she sang those as well, which thrilled me. We talked about forming a band, but we didn’t know a bassist or a drummer, or a place to play, and I was only a passable guitar player. These are the obstacles that don’t stop the truly dedicated but they kept us playing in my basement which, in the end, was just fine.

We kissed, we dated. She drove before I did and we went around in her beautiful old BMW listening to cassettes and smoking cigarettes. We kissed some more, at some point stopped playing music together and then inevitably broke up. We remained friends and then drifted apart.

Through that process I made a leap out of boyhood into something else. Certainly not adulthood, but a stage where relationships have deeper meaning, where the songs you hear have more import and the realization that what you do in life — not what you look like, or how you’re perceived — is what truly defines you.

I found a place where I could be comfortable in my own skin and it all started with the opening drums of “Radio Free Europe.”

america is fucked for “jobs,” get used to it

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Via The iPhone And US Unemployment – The Dish By Andrew Sullivan:

As China and India develop even faster, I see no way American skilled workers can truly compete without CEOs hurting their own shareholders. The prospect of a continued corporate profit boom, higher and higher economic and social inequality and persistently high unemployment is real and probably inevitable, absent brutal protectionism.

Andrew Sullivan offers a sobering look at where the US economy is headed based on two icons of gizmodatry: The iPhone and The Kindle. Both were invented here in the USA, but are manufactured in China. Sullivan notes that the iPhone could not be made in the USA without Apple losing 15 percent of its profit. And the technology to make the Kindle? It doesn’t even exist in the US. There’s literally now where else to make it.

However, I think Sullivan’s point above — that faster development in India and China will increase the skilled jobs drain to those countries needs to be fleshed out a bit more. As the US has developed we’ve shipped these jobs overseas so that technology is invented here and made somewhere else. As China and India develop, the same will happen there. Eventually, Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs will build the next must-have product, or disruptive social network. As they do, the jobs will continue to flow downhill to other developing economies — probably in Asia Pacific and Africa.

Perhaps, eventually the unemployment situation here will get so exacerbated that American workers will be forced to accept decreased wages and standards of living in order to have jobs. We bristle at the conditions at Chinese manufacturing giants like Foxconn, but is that where we need to go if we want manufacturing jobs? Probably yes, eventually.

The bald truth is that the world is experiencing a major economic shift that will likely be more disruptive to our economy, culture and environment than the industrial revolution.

Unfortunately, no one in power, or seeking power, has been honest with the American public about this fact. Nobody is leveling with the American people that we are fucked for “jobs” and there’s no going back. When politicians talk about “jobs” they’re generally talking about manufacturing and other blue collar jobs that pay enough to afford workers a middle class lifestyle and a chance to provide their children with a better shot at the future through education. This is the fundamental narrative the US economy and “the American Dream” are built on. Unfortunately, those days are over and they’re never coming back.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: The days of the noble blue collar worker are over, ok? They’re legend — captured in the time capsule of Bruce Springsteen songs. They are FUCKING OVER and they are never coming back.

No amount of stimulus or green jobs, or infrastructure revitalization, or whatever the hell else you want to trot out is going to change that. You’re talking bandaids on a shotgun wound. It’s over. The days when you could get a high school education and some job training, join the union and earn enough to be middle class and send your kids to college? FUCKING OVER. They’re not coming back.

Today, if you want to be middle class, you need a college degree, at the very least, and you probably need some kind of graduate degree. Which in turn means you need to go into hock to make a decent salary. It’s a trap that is going to mean our generation grows old with a lower standard of living then our parents. But, when we’re old and gray we can tell everyone how we were the first generation of the Technology Revolution and we built the new world order. We can be bigger and just as cloying as The Greatest Generation.

The question is what kind of world are we going to build? Are we going to build a world based on new technology, where American workers are knowledge workers and the “new middle class” are people who can run sysadmin on a bunch of servers, run a content management system, write advertising copy, run an efficient retail operation, or install a home energy production system? Are we going to create a world where homes and businesses are energy self-sufficient and provide abundant energy to our cars, appliances and gadgets without the need for a crappy grid or burning quickly-depleting, earth-killing fossil fuels? Are we going to build a future where not having a college degree (or some future equivalent) makes you a pariah in the same way that not having a high school degree does now? And, importantly, are we going to create a system that ensures everyone has a chance to earn that college degree (or future equivalent)? Are we going to create a future where our dwindling manufacturing plants seem as quaint and old-world as the old New England textile mills do today? Are we going to create a future where broadband access is considered a utility as ubiquitous and necessary as electricity and anyone can start a company from their kitchen table?

Or, are we going to try to hold onto our old way of life and limp along, polluting our planet and dealing with increasingly long power outages due to increasingly strong natural disasters? Are we going to simply accept an ever-increasing divide between the haves and have nots? Are we going to build Foxconn-style plants here in order to provide jobs — under any circumstances — to an increasingly irrelevant work force? Are we going to continue to let our education system slide into disarray and pretend everything is just fine because a teacher can get kids to memorize answers on a standardized test? Are we going to say it’s acceptable that some areas of the country will never get access to the Internet revolution?

To get the former, we need to be honest about the massive changes we are experiencing right now and be honest about the sacrifices we need to make now in order to prepare for a better future. To get the former, we need to invest in infrastructure, education and new energy production — not because it’s going to “create jobs” now, but because it’s going to mean avoiding a dystopian future.

To get the latter, we have to simply keep the blinders on, keep fooling ourselves into believing that we can turn this around with a little old-fashioned American elbow grease and stimulus. To get the latter, we should just keep telling ourselves nothing has changed when in reality, everything has changed.

(Photo: Abandoned marble factory (10) by Flickr user Joelk75. Used under a Creative Commons License.)

davidconnell’s dream house

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I have an unrealistic fantasy of living a house like this one. A Mid-Century modern all glass and metal looking out over a central courtyard with a glowing pool. It would be filled with Mid-Century modern furniture and we would sit poolside eating avocados and drinking strong cocktails. It would be sunny and seventy-two degrees every day and our children would be strong and happy. Our faces would be permanently ensconced in sunglasses.

To say this is my “dream house” is a bit of a misnomer. A dream house implies something attainable, something that, if you could have it, it would make your current life inextricably better. In particular, a dream house conjures up images of a place that you can grow old in — a place that can hold all of your memories, hopes and, well, dreams. A dream house is a place your children can look back on as a lost oasis against threat and fear — a place filled with magic and imagination.

This is not that house. This house can only hold the precise furniture that has been chosen for it and only in the precise manner in which it is displayed. Introduce children into this house and you have grape jam on the ivory carpet, a floating basketball net in the pool and smudges — oh, so many smudges — on all of that glass.

This house doesn’t make my current life better, it requires a wholly different life. And right now, I really love my life. This house isn’t for families that have hopes and dreams. This house is for couples of the moment who have already achieved everything they cold possibly imagine and have nothing left to go for. They show up at work, make big decisions, green-light things and then come home to their glimmering pool, avocados and mojitos. This isn’t a dream house — it’s a fantasy house.

It is certainly a fantasy house when compared to our current home — a three-bedroom early-80s townhouse that I suppose would be classified as “colonial,” but I might call it “utilitarian.” It’s brick, has adequate windows for all rooms and holds up to the weather. It is appointed in a style I can only describe as 21st Century comfortable. Our furniture has clean lines, it isn’t over-stuffed, but it’s comfortable — very comfortable — and purchased for that comfort. The furniture wasn’t conceived by a designer, but it’s well made and the pieces have been brought together mostly from a massive furniture retailer.  We have redone the kitchen to be very nice and modern.

Our home is not a fantasy house, it is not a dream house, but it is the right home for us right now. It is a home we can afford and that requires little to no yard maintenance (a blessing with two working parents). It is a home where a five year-old can chase a three-year old around the house without too much risk that anything or anyone is going to get broken. It is a home that allows us to congregate with our neighbors on front stoops while the kids tear up and down the sidewalks on big wheels and scooters. It is a home that can handle the muddy feet of a still-overly-active nine-year-old hunting dog. It is a home that allows children to be on one floor and parents to be on another. It is a home that can serve a good meal quickly to a hungry family, or host friends for a leisurely dinner party. It is a home where we can all pile into the basement under some blankets and watch a movie together. It is a home that fits our family.

Someday, when the kids are older and our careers have advanced a bit further there will be time for a dream house and someday after that, when the kids have moved out there may be time for a fantasy house. But right now, I am quite content with a practical home.

(Photo via: Take Sunset)

the albums of my life: public enemy’s it takes a nation of millions to hold us back

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Note: This is part II of a series.

Bass! How low can you go?
Death row. What a brother knows.
Once again, back is the incredible
the rhyme animal
the incredible D, Public Enemy Number One!

The lyrics cracked from my headphones and charged my brain, reflecting and amplifying my rage — trying to smother my shock — my guilt — and grief. I was sitting on a park bench under pair of a soft pine trees in front of a set of tennis courts and beside a well-manicured driving rage balling my eyes out. It was not a scene you would expect to be set to a Public Enemy soundtrack:

A chubby white boy sits on a park bench in the middle of a well-healed country club crying. It is morning, after swim practice and he is crying.

But Public Enemy was the group that got me through one of the toughest times of my life.

Minutes earlier, I had been in a screened-in porch next to the pool holding the door closed while Mike, one of the older neighborhood thugs, beat a chipmunk to death with a red Jansport book bag. I was holding the door closed so it wouldn’t escape. When I tried to let the animal out Mike punched me in the stomach. When I doubled over he cracked me in the spine with his fist sending me to the floor. So I held the door.

The chipmunk was racing around the floor of the porch, desperately trying to find a way out as Mike smacked it with his book bag in big wheelhouse swings. The bag would cover it for a split second and then the chipmunk would be off again. I could see the damage that was being inflicted. With every hit there was a broken leg, a crushed eye, a spot of blood coming from the chipmunk’s mouth. Mike was laughing as this happened. He had no empathy or feeling for what he was doing. It occurred to me then that there was something dangerously wrong with him and it occurs to me now that perhaps he is a psychopath.

The chipmunk was silent as it raced for its life. It didn’t scream out when it was hit or squeal as it searched for escape. It simply ran until Mike finally delivered the final blow and it lay there on its side, eyes crushed and glassy, with a small trickle of blood coming from its mouth.

I bent down and stared at that chipmunk for a few seconds. I told it I was sorry I let this happen, I told myself I was that chipmunk and then I walked down to the tennis courts. Put my Public Enemy cassette into the Walkman and started balling.

This was how I started the summer after my sixth-grade year — another bully, another thug, after a full school year of fear and intimidation.

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the albums of my life: michael jackson’s thriller

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The first two albums I purchased were “Picture This,” by Huey Lewis and The News and “Different Light,” by the Bangles. They were purchased on cassette at a time when albums were still king and cassettes simply shrunk down album covers and placed them above a color block onto the cassette cover. So there, sitting on my bed, as I listened to the cassettes on a knock-off Walkman, were tiny reproductions of the album covers that took up only half of the cassette’s available portrait layout. Susanna Hoffs, sadly, was unrecognizable.

I have no idea when I bought these albums — although it had to have been on or about 1986 when the Bangles released “Different Light.” More importantly I have no idea why I purchased these albums. I had, and still have, no real affinity for these artists. “Picture This” stands as the only Huey Lewis album I have ever (or will ever) own, and even in 1986 I could recognize Lewis as a cheap and cheezy knock off of Bruce Springsteen or a less talented version of schlock artist Billy Joel. The Bangles had a certain sex appeal that appeals to a ten year-old, but even then their music was too for me. Hoffs seemed a bit mysterious and somewhat deeper than the rest, but truth be told, the Bangles weren’t too far off from cartoon rockers Jem.

It’s likely that I bought these albums because they were safe and unlikely to offend my parents sensibilities.

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