Occupy America: Let's all join the Conversation

There's a movement afoot who's time has come. The protests and rallies that started with Occupy Wall Street are gaining traction and, at last, media coverage. The media has slammed the movement from the beginning as being flippant and unorganized, but it's only because a sound-byte media machine is unprepared to handle a sprawling and thorough conversation like this one.

You can't sum up the demands of the protestors with catchphrases. Media attempts to categorize the protestors have only shown the heartless reflection of a news machine ready to write-off protestors as out of work hipster dropouts and not what they are--the over educated and underpaid millions of Americans. Americans who value those things that are being marginalized by the collective work of mainstream media, corporate co-opted capitalism, and their self-inflicted economic crisis.

What do they value? Creativity, education, innovation, shared responsibilities, honest work, freedom of expression, the right to the pursuit of happiness, and other things that we are told our country holds dear.

This isn't about left or right. Republicans and Democrats are all part of the same dog and pony show. It's slight of hand--we look at them fighting in Congress to convince ourselves that our values lie on one side or the other. But they don't. Both sides are representing the corporate side. They all represent money. Look at what they've done to your neighborhood school. Look at how they undervalue the role of arts and culture. Look at the kids they've sent off to a wars of occupation, spending money that could have paid off your student loans and your credit card bills combined.

We live in a post-capitalistic society. We live in a world where the push for "small government" is really a push for "big corporate involvement" in our lives. The Tea Party movement--which is a sweetheart of the media--was founded by billionaire business holders who want to diminish the role of government in limiting the power of the corporate agenda. Your brethren who are out there occupying Wall Street, Portland, LA, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Dallas, Wichita, and every other major metropolitan area are demanding that the government drop the veil that protects the corporations.

The banking bailout proved one thing for certain: if "they" can't get our money one way, they'll take it another. This has been going on for ages. This is the fuel of companies like McDonald's, who take government grants and tax-breaks for hiring untrained workers then make working conditions so poor that the average "career" lasts less than 90 days--opening room for another government kick-back. Companies like Wal Mart, who hire workers at 39.5 hours so that they never get healthcare covered, but that are paid so little that they qualify for medicaid, letting the taxpayer pay their share of their worker's costs. And for god's sake, don't get me started on the corn lobby, taking taxpayer's money to produce an obesity problem that takes more taxpayer's money to deal with!

They fight against predatory lending. This nation's economy is built on it. It is the wheel in which we gerbils run. It is modern day serfdom, plain and simple. I make money so that I can pay for a Wells Fargo executive to send his kids to college. I make money so that I can pay for a Visa executive to show his family the world. I get my paycheck to keep afloat the financial institutions that would just take it out of my taxes if I were to stop paying them.

I live in a small town in Michigan. What can I do to help? Where can I start to join this conversation? Someone point me in the right direction. Let's get in this together and finally start to build a country that we want to be a part of and make this a world that we want to be a part of.

"Glee" just Keeps Sucking More and More

I guess it's time I officially stopped watching that show. For a while, I liked watching Glee because it was a novelty to see an hour musical every week. Then, as things got worse, I kept watching it out of hopes that it might find its footing and recover. Then, as the descent continued, I kept watching because it was fun to watch a show that was so damned bad. I liked watching the show, making fun of it, then reading blogs about how much that episode sucked the next day.

But it's all over now. I labored through this last episode of Glee without illusion. It was painful. It was downright embarrassing. I don't know that I've ever seen a worse episode of a show in my entire life.

The episode I'm talking about was the "Sexy" episode. This show actually postulates that it's the role of each and every educator to teach their class about sex, no matter what the context of the class is. It also suggests that the average teenager knows nothing about sex other than what they are explicitly told by their parents and their teachers. To top it all off, the show wasn't funny, wasn't interesting, and the songs sucked. Plus, Gwyneth Paltrow reprised her totally shitty role as some kind of substitute teacher that acts half her age and has nothing to offer anyone and yet is intrinsically involved in everyone's life for some godawful and unknown reason.

Story Arch

TV shows these days are pretty much expected to have a strong story arch throughout each season. There should be relationships that grow, relationships that fall apart, big goals trying to be accomplished--something to keep us watching from episode to episode. Glee doesn't do this. Yes, there is always a competition on the horizon somewhere--sectionals, regionals--but they only really come into play during the episode that addresses those competitions. Other than that, they are only mentioned.

Instead, it's these theme episodes that rule the show's structure. The Alcohol episode, the Sex episode, the Fat episode, the Confidence episode, the Madonna episode, the Madonna episode 2: Lady Gaga, etc. These very thematic episodes exist in their own vacuums,with behaviors and consequences isolated to that episode alone. This means that you can count on almost no interconnection in story lines and therefore nothing to really look forward to episode to episode.

Worse than that, they are increasingly preachy episodes. They are actually worse--each and every one of them--than any after school special from my childhood.

Preaching

Glee has taken on the role of a moralistic preacher. This all started with their first ever "gay education" episode, where the quirky musical comedy show took on the role of a tolerance coordinator for the nation. It wasn't an overpoweringly annoying episode and it made some pretty good points about the misguided use of the word "faggot," it started a disturbing trend. Now every single episode tells us in no uncertain terms exactly how we should feel about every issue that teenagers are faced. And not only that, but after it preaches about these issues, the action in the show goes directly against the lesson that it is trying to teach us.

For example, there was the alcohol episode. Now, let's forget that we never see an example of booze mixing with high school ever except in this episode. Let's forget how cheap it feels when a show insults us by doing this. But on several occasions, the characters all but looked into the camera and said, "Hey, this is how you should feel about alcohol and this is how teens should feel and this is the middle ground that you should come to." Then, just to contradict the preaching that we were given, we see terrible example after terrible example of teen alcohol use and yet everything turns out better for everyone as a result of these examples.

We covered in the last "Glee Sucks" post how despite the verbal messages about gay awareness, the show perpetuates negative stereotypes about homosexuality. But this trend just keeps going on with everything.

Look at the issue of obesity. The message the show communicates is clear: being fat is funny. A fat person is a bit less than human, constantly ruled by their need for tater tots, we may laugh at their condition. After spending weeks dehumanizing the Fat Girl (whose name is not memorable enough for me to remember) they attempt at making her a real character by having Puck fall in love with her. And yet, they continue the dehumanization of the obese by making it just plain funny that Puck is into her. She never does anything buy fumble around asking for food in exchange for sexual favors. Good work, Glee. That's just how fat people are.

Lame

This show has gotten lame. Just plain lame and sorry. When I was little, I really liked shows like "Different Strokes" until that show started having "very special" episodes about racism, epilepsy, and getting locked inside old refrigerators. What happens when a show starts to do this is the erosion of character. Instead of Willis being Willis, or Kurt being Kurt, the characters are forced into the role of the "everyman," be it the Black Everyman, the Gay Everyman, or the Fat Everyman, the character is burdened with relatability. We're supposed to look at the character and see a mirror of our lives in as blanket a way as possible. We're not supposed to make an investment in the writing or the story, but in the way that we can learn about our world through them.

It's shit, I tell you, shit.

A Good Teen Drama

Since Glee has turned more into drama (and bad drama at that), I think it relevant to mention a good teen drama. Friday Night Lights is maybe my favorite show of the last 10 years. Not only does that show address many issues that teens face, it does it through amazing stories, wonderful character development, and very exciting and tense dramatic situations. I have very few complaints about Friday Night Lights, and I think that more people ought to turn that on and turn off garbage like Glee.

I will not spend my money or time on this show any more. I welcome your comments and would love to be updated on the overall garbage of the show, but I will no longer be paying 99 cents an episode on iTunes to watch it.

Review: Valentine's Day

Yuck.

The day after Christmas, the stores start trying to capitalize on our buying mania. We've been shopping for months, seeing everything through the tidy lens of acquisition, and they want to keep the good times rolling. So they slather the shelves of our stores with fancy funtime hearts, boxes of heart candy, and stuffed bears holding...wait for it...hearts.

This is because we love each other, they tell us. This is to show your affection, the tell us.

And just what the hell was Christmas about then?

I don't mind V-Day as a distraction for kids. It gives them a day to fill out tiny cards (which have gotten crapier and crapier until they are nothing but little advertisements) for their classmates. It gives them a much-needed excuse to eat candy. It gives them practice in the ways of understanding our rituals of courtship, if even on the basest levels. So whatever, let kids get all excited about it. It's better than a standardized test, right?

I see Valentine's Day as a lose-lose in the romantic quadrant.

Forever now, Valentine's Day is supposed to be a quantification of love. A day where you don't just show someone you love them, but how much you love them. This is dangerous territory. If you're not rich or aren't willing to throw down with an engagement every year, then you are on terribly thin ice.

(I used to teach English to a bunch of students from the sun-drenched country of Angola in the southern part of Africa. They were great guys and they hailed from a totally different world than I did. In their world, the average male lived to be 30. This average is taken from the few of them who live to be a normal age and the most of them who die as teenagers in civil war [things have since cleared up...mostly]. But this left their country with a lopsided population. 8 girls to every guy. Wow.

So what do they do? They date several girls. They can't leave all these girls out of the game. But it's not the Morman-revivalist dreamscape that you may have imagined just now. While the women know and understand that the men date multiple women, they merely tolerate it. They don't all shack up like one big happy family. The kids grow up knowing that their dad has another family a few streets over and another one down the way, but they don't really know those families. The women have no interest in each other. Only the super-important and super-rich get married.

My Angolan students hated Valentines day. Why? "It's a trap" one of them told me. "It's a time for the women to go, 'Hmmm. Does he like me best?'" It was a season of romance and of hurt feelings. [Which I guess also sums up my highschool years when those stupid secret-admirer balloons would be sent from classroom to classroom, with my myriad of admirers always neglecting to send me my heart-shaped balloon bouquet.])

So getting a gift for your girl is a loss. Even if you give the best gift you'll ever give her, that just means all other years will pale in comparison. What's wrong? Do you love her less this year?

But not getting the girl something? That's sort of a loss, too, isn't it? You tell her you don't need one day to tell you to express your love. Then where are the other 364 days of gifts? You tell her it's a Hallmark Holiday. Where is your sense of romance?

I don't do much for Charlotte during this holiday. No, I don't. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't deserve it. It just means that I'd rather pick another time. Arbitrary though another day might be, I will often pick out a day near the actual Valentine's Day to celebrate "Junior Love Day." (I'm not sure where the "Junior" part came from, but it stuck). It might involve a mix-CD or a dinner out. But that dinner out is in an uncrowded restaurant with a regular menu and that mix-CD pads the pockets of no greeting card company. There may even be other Junior Love Days sprinkled throughout the year. You can never tell.

Other holidays I will honor and hold. But Valentine's Day, for me, is a pressure, an obligation, that has little to do with actual self-expression. Self-expression should come from the heart, come from free will, and most often be spontaneous, not be a calculated and contrived gift on a moneymaking holiday.

Valentine's Day Grade: C-
Junior Love Day: B+

Review: Toys in the 80s

I have kids. Being a parent is a strange thing. It's like getting to live your life over again, but as your dad. And in a different time. I constantly hear myself saying things that my dad said, but this time, they all make sense.

One of the great things about being a parent of young kids is the renewed excitement about the holidays. This past Christmas season was one of the most exciting since I was little and got Castle Greyskull for Christmas. Or Soundwave. Or a BB gun. Or my Nintendo.

The only thing that was lacking in all of that excitement, honestly, was the quality of presents that my kids got. I don't think I'm any worse off than my family was or anything, or that girl's toys are inherently worse than boy's toys. It's that 80s toys were the very best toys in the history of all of man.

Yes, they were. I'll not hear otherwise.

When my brother and I got He-Man toys, or Transformers, or--God help us--G.I. Joe figures, the world shined with excitement. On the same holidays, my sisters were getting Rainbow Bright toys (back when they were cool, with the Sprites and all of that), Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Kids, and boardgames that didn't have electronic parts. This was a golden age of toys for boys and for girls.

I can still conjure in my mind the excitement that I felt the first time we fired up our Nintendo and played Super Mario Bros. in 1986. You cannot convince me that kids these days feel as much excitement when getting an iPod touch, Xbox, or any other device that they may wish for. They play with these toys at their friends' houses, they see them at school, they are knowns.

Getting the Nintendo back then was a total unknown. My brother and I had played with a Nintendo and a Sega in the basement floor of the local Macy's(!) for weeks, trying to decide which one we wanted. We discussed graphics, mostly, and the controller differences. We finally decided on asking for (begging for, actually) the Nintendo because that Mario Brothers game seemed pretty compelling. But my point is that we really had no idea what we were getting into. We had had an Atari and that was reasonably fun, but the new post-Atari generation of games was an extraordinary journey. No one knew which way things would go. It was just awesome.

While there were G.I. Joe and He-Man TV shows, toys in general were not nearly as bound by licensing and marketing. The TV shows we watched were cartoons that came on once a week on Saturday mornings, they weren't ubiquitous commercials masquerading as shows airing around the clock on cable shows. Our toys had to rely more on quality. The lines of toys that weren't quality sank at the stores and disappeared. These days, toys aren't found just at toy stores and there are what? two toy companies still standing? Maybe three? They don't need quality, they have licensing. They have ads, cereal boxes, McDonald's toys, and entire channels dedicated to selling kids whatever toys are around.

I miss those toys. I miss the thrill I got from wanting and occasionally getting those toys. I don't know where those toys are. My brother and I have conversations from time to time about where we think they went, where they ended up. If I knew where they were, and if they were anywhere near me, I would totally be playing with them right now.

Final grade: 80's Toys A+

Review: The Kindle 3

I have wanted a Kindle for a long time. Not when it first came out, but probably around the time the second generation did. I finally got one when the massive price drop happened with the Kindle 3-wifi release. I have it now, with about 52 books on it, and I have to say that it not only meets my expectations, but far surpasses them. I know lots of people who do not want to make the jump to electronic books, and I understand their reasons. But I would like to outline why it is so worth it.

There are some obvious ones, right off. I own a lot of books. Every time I move--which is a lot (over 30 times in my life)--I am burdened by packing, lifting, moving, and finding space for all of my books. They vary from the beautiful, the signed, the rare, to the junky, the used, the falling apart, and the inappropriate. I, like many of you, love the feel of a book in my hand. I love the smell of a new book. I love the smell of an old book even more. I love the color of good paper, the texture of good covers, the art, the fonts, and the weight of them. Most of them.

I was reading East of Eden last year. If you haven't read East of Eden, you are missing out on one of the great pleasures of life. It is unreal, folks, unreal. It is also inconvenient. I sneak in reading whenever I can. I carry my book with me to work, to class, to the store, to the DMV, to watch my kids at the playground. I can only read when my life allows me to, and this means having a book with me at all times. And the novel is a real paperweight. Huge, cumbersome, hard to hold with one hand.

Then I started reading Atlas Shrugged. You may as well carry around a shot put. You may as well read two bricks. I knew there had to be a better way.

You see, if you read a lot, an ereader gives you more than convenience, it gives you functionality. It gives you possibility. It gives you more chances to read. Since buying my Kindle, I have read many, many more books a month. I can work in reading more often (I read faster, as well, for a reason that I cannot decipher).

If you like books as objects, that's great. But what are you? A librarian? A collector? A steward? If you're a reader, then an ereader makes more sense then hauling around books. Plain and simple.

I love the tactile nature of books, but it cannot compare to the content. The content is made by authors, not by printing presses. Content is content. Ask anyone who is into audiobooks and they can tell you that the experience may be different, but it is still the content that they love. People may have been angry when stories started being written down instead of sung or recited. People may have been angry when we changed to binding instead of scrolls. Hell, we lost a real element of beauty when the printing press came along. But the content remained, and it's the author created content that matters.

Yes, the reading experience matters, too. I can't stand reading a book on a computer. I've tried. I've read my own books on computer and my eyes have suffered. But a Kindle is not like a computer. I can't imagine why anyone would want to read on a tablet or an iPad, because you would suffer the same eye strain. Looking at a Kindle page is like looking at a sheet of paper. You need light--the more the better--just like with a page. You can read in the sun. You can read by a lamp. You can read with a small booklight. Just like a book. With an iPad (or on your phone), you need relative darkness. This puts extra strain on the eyes (and, research shows, can negatively affect the quality of sleep you get later on).

The Kindle 3 has the best resolution on the market. I'm not anti-Nook or anti-Sony or anti-Kobo, so far as I know, but I do know that the best of those have a resolution equal to that of the Kindle 2. The crisp black and white display, with adjustable font size, is very easy on the eyes. And, like I said earlier, I actually find myself reading faster with a Kindle.

Books aren't necessarily cheaper. There are thousands of free titles, but other than that, you're paying regular trade-paper prices. You don't save a ton on books written within the last 75 years. But dudes, authors need to make a living. Remember, it's the content, not the product, that matters.

As far as tactile experience goes, my wife has given me a gift that has severly enhanced it. She bought me a custom kindle cover from Oberon. Not only has it enhanced the beauty, but the feeling of holding the soft leather cover has given it a much more book-like feel.

There's one more thing. You don't have to make a choice. You don't have to suffer from the either/or mentality. With the lower price that the Kindle and its like now wear, you don't have to make up your mind. You can still buy paper books whenever it suits you. I do. There are some books that don't lend themselves to electronic format. Childrens' books, coffee table books, art books, and many other kinds just don't come across in an ereader--color or otherwise. But for most novels and nonfiction books that I read, it doesn't matter what format you ingest them, so long as they are ingested.

Magazines, I've found, to be more enjoyable in electronic format. No ads! Folks, no ads! My subscription to The New Yorker is better than it ever was in paper. Plus, there is a growing number of literary journals available on Kindle, such as Electric Literature, One Story, and *ahem* Prick of the Spindle. Literary magazines are some of the best reading around and they are severely limited by distribution.

So, there you have it. My argument on why the Kindle 3 is the best thing to happen to my reading since the compound word.

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