Burning Violin: July 2009 Archives

"I woke up in between

a memory and a dream"

-Tom Petty

 

Nations are collective dreams, born when a critical mass of people believe in them, dying when that belief dissipates. In the late nineteenth century, Germany manufactured a thousand year national identity virtually overnight. For most of history, the story of the Germanic peoples of central Europe was one of indomitable unconquerability, swallowing the armies of would be overlords whole, ungovernable even by fellow Germans. Principalities allied in confederations, but retained sovereignty. They'd fight invaders, but also fight each other in endless confused wars. That was the story of Germany until Bismarck, and it was a story the rest of Europe was happy to hear, because a unified Germany was as powerful as the rest of Europe combined. Balance of power politics didn't work if a single state could counter the weight of everyone else.

 

The new story forged Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Hanseatics into Germans. It was a story told so well, so convincingly, that ten million Germans would give their lives for it in the following seventy years. It was so persistent that even forty years of occupation and partition did not dim the concept of a German nation among Germans. They were neither Eastern nor Western, but Germans all, these men whose grandfathers did not call their sons German.

 

Africa is a continent where the dreams do not match the landscape. Lines wander across the map, doodled two centuries previously by Europeans playing at emperor. Dozens of states stand as hollow shells, nothing but political entities, bodies without souls. The pattern repeats in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe. Broken little states without identities, civil wars and border massacres rage for decades with breathers when the peacemakers come for a few years to allay their consciences. People don't follow laws, they follow stories. When there is no story, when a state is just a state, mere anarchy is loosed and blood runs in the streets. Only a murderous will can maintain control and order in the face of utter chaos, that's why these democracies disintegrate even with perfect constitutions and the promise of a better life. The cycle of blood is never broken with institutions or foreign armies, it will churn forever until a leader comes who can tell the people who they are.

 

Rome lasted a thousand years after its state was gone, carried as a spark in the back of every western mind. The dreams of Rome live in every western capital, every fluted column and marble façade ripped straight from the Capitaline. We build Rome again and again because we still dream the same dream, tell and retell the same story of republic and empire.

 

America has its own myths and stories. Declarations, tea parties, cowboys and Indians. The Depression, defender of Democracy, vanguard of the Free World. We walked on the moon, played baseball, beat the commies and the Nazis. None of it's particularly accurate, but all of it is true. We are what we believe we are. Our dreams and myths define what we try to be, but they also mask the errors of our past. The belief in exceptionalism makes us exceptional, but it also enables our sins.

 

We don't like to remember that Jefferson owned slaves, that we had to be dragged against our wishes into the crusade for democracy, that JFK screwed everything with a skirt and got us closer to Armageddon than we've ever been, or that at one point or another we've invaded just about every country in the western hemisphere. We make the same mistakes over and over again because we really believe that we're doing it for the first time, that every evil is the exception to the rule. The myth of history is that we would do it differently if we got a chance, but the truth is that we do get the chance every day, and we rarely change a thing.

 

If Americans, or the citizens of any nation, ever saw their history in a perfect mirror, the intertwined horrors and heroism, the dream of the country would die. It might be replaced by something different, more honest, but it might just leave a void. Changing the dream without waking is a tricky proposition.

 

The greatest danger is that the dream fractures, especially along easy geographic lines, as it did once before. The problem does not arise when people disagree over what the country should be; that's the essence of politics. The danger lurks when people disagree over what the country was and is. When half the country believes in one story and dream, and the other half believes a mutually exclusive story and dream, the country as a whole is in grave danger.

 

"Real Americans", "godless liberals", "ignorant rednecks", "ivory tower intellectuals", "left coast", "socialist elites", "Jesus freaks". On the surface, it's just name calling, but underneath it's the opening salvos of a civil war, urged on by cable television. The story is falling apart, the people are awaking from their collective dream. A nation cannot survive as a schizophrenic, any more than a mind can dream two dreams at the same time.

 

"A house divided against itself cannot stand ... I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -  I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." -Abraham Lincoln

Micro-stories are tiny tid bits of stories that tell a tale in an absurdly small number of words. They're found in occasional contests and postings on writer's message boards in the dim corners of the internet. There are no set definitions: sometimes fifty words, sometimes a hundred. For this posting, I wrote twenty micro stories that lean towards horror. The twist? The last few words of each become the first few words of the next micro story. The final story ends with the first few words of the set to bring it full circle. The parameters are completely arbitrary, but then so are most rules. Enjoy.

I.                     A blood soaked bandage covered his right eye socket. He gave it for a glimpse of wisdom. It now sees the truth behind all things but will never stop bleeding. The blood has mystical properties.

II.                    The blood has mystical properties. It flows from his fingertips as they bash against the keyboard, never resting. If he stops typing, he will die.

III.                  He will die. The judge and jury have had their say and only the executioner remains. A million volts of justice, but when he steps through the final doorway, he is alone on an empty world.

IV.                  He is alone on an empty world, its sky purple and its flowers red. A dull bluish-orange sun beats down through his faceplate. The suit carries enough automated nutrients to keep him alive for a month. The wreckage is the punch line.

V.                   The punch line of any joke is sadistic. If there's no victim, there's no joke. The world itself may be a punch line, but in a cosmic oversight, we were not informed.

VI.                  "We were not informed," the words echo. Handcuffs click closed, police smirk and lead the way. Magic words, those. Knowledge was power and so withholding it deprived the state of power. Silence was treason.

VII.                Silence was treason on the low slung trireme. The ship's listener could read intent with a song. Every sailor, from cabin boy to shift commander, knelt before their captain with offered song. Those that refused were drowned in casks of sea water.

VIII.               Casks of sea water lined the museum walls, a thick-boarded barrel for each of the twelve seas. A thirteenth barrel sat empty at the center of the room, accorded a place adorned with candles and mystic herbs. "The Lost" was carved into the metal supporting bands, runes symbolizing the lost sea of the immortals. Once it had been full, but over the centuries every king stole a little until superstitious monarchs stooped to pricking themselves with the cask's splinters in vain hope of a few extra years.

IX.                  Hope of a few extra years drove Ruby across the Nevada desert to a broken town of retirees and gas station attendants. A place of magic hid there according to an old story on the internet.

X.                   An old story on the internet showed Roger how to raise the dead. The soul moved on though, and the body is just so much meat. That meat is base, a low source of animal instinct. Without the soul to temper it, the body is an animal. Roger saw his mistake its eyes. No zombie this, for intelligence is part of the meat.

XI.                  Part of the meat always clings to the bone, or so his grandmother always said. Towards the end, she lost her mind, but something remained behind to claw at those who cared for her. She cackled that phrase, up until the day she was found dead on her bathroom floor. Some say the day after she was found helpless on her bathroom floor. Her presence nagged him for the rest of his life, half seen glimpses in the mirror, half heard snippets of conversation never muttered by mortal lips.

XII.                Mortal lips whisper for help. She does not. Her check rejected, her ATM card lost, I offer to pay, and must do it over her objections. I carry dense groceries for her daughter's dinners. We step through automatic doors into an unimagined world.

XIII.               An unimagined world stretches around every child. Their imagined worlds are for more beautiful and terrible. One by one, the architecture of dreams falls into the disrepair and chaos of the mundane and knowable. We all keep a nugget of our old dreams.

XIV.              Old dreams drink at their own bar on the far side of Nowhere. They sip stall lagers and bitter scotch not aged quite right. Some dreams you would recognize. "I want to be President" sits in one corner, a bottle of whiskey in hand. Campaign buttons hang on his sleeves from a hundred never entered elections. All their words run, like ink in a tear-splattered notebook. A ballerina with smeared mascara slides in across from him and asks about the wound through his heart. "That," he says, "is the mark of those for whom I am no longer just a dream."

XV.                No longer just a dream, Jack's Coffee Heaven stood tall with a glistening sign, crystal windows, and a spreading aroma of roasted beans. The first customer entered the shop and whispered to Jack. The store closed at noon forever.

XVI.              Forever was her promise, but now I hear her night and day despite her death. Whispers, shouts, sweet tickles in my ear. I know not how she remains, but she haunts me still.

XVII.             She haunts me still, the woman from the store. Slender, tight, luxuriant. Her look draws me on, her brown eyes beckoning. Her knife slides across my neck.

XVIII.           My neck aches from the stiff drive and stiffer company. In the trunk is the most irritating of them. I drive for the docks and stroke the knife in the passenger seat.

XIX.              The passenger seat of his Nissan was filled with a clutter of reference books about space and mechanical engineering. He mutters, "I may have stumbled on the secret."

XX.                The secret door looked like part of the wall. Only Charlie could see the silvering of light through cracks on the edge. Dust motes scattered away from the light as if it was a stiff breeze. Whispers came from the door except when Charlie looked right at it. The knob would not budge until the day he tried it with a wounded hand, wrapped in a blood soaked bandage.

What you have to understand about laws is that they were never intended to protect anyone. Laws provide order, a structure that organizes how people interact. They are a set of guidelines and instructions intended to program human behavior. The notion that laws protect us, that they exist to outlaw harmful behavior from hurting all of us citizens is a quaint one. But that notion is the article of faith upon which civil society survives. Murder is not outlawed because it is wrong but because those who would murder are not deemed useful citizens.

Any behavior that is useful, regardless of harm, is perfectly legal. Just ask any CEO who has destroyed a thousand lives at a stroke. Ask his victims. The equation of morality with legality is one of the great myths of the modern world.

Victimless crimes are the most obvious hole in the belief that laws are there for protection rather than order. Prostitution, substance abuse, and the entire gamut of crimes not against individuals but against Puritanism cannot exist to protect people since such crimes by definition do not hurt anyone. Why are there victimless crimes at all then?

There are many victimless crimes that are strictly structural in nature. Most civil laws fall into this category: parking laws, traffic laws, noise ordinances. These laws exist in order to grease the wheels of society and keep the entire engine moving. They are not conceptually nefarious, except in so far as every bureaucracy is its own form of malice.

Structural laws are distinct though from criminal laws that punish individuals for actions that do not affect other people. Smoking pot in your home does not just not infringe on the rights of anyone else (the supposed basis of law, the protection of other citizens' rights), but does not affect anyone else in any way whatsoever. The criminalization of private behavior, whether in the realms of sexuality or substance, is in stark contradiction to the assumed basis of laws. If a joint is smoked in a forest and no one smells it, was a crime still committed? How can an action that sends no ripples out to the rest of society be deemed harmful, illegal, wrong?

To understand why certain private behaviors are outlawed, we must approach the problem obliquely. Who are such laws designed to ensnare? Drug use laws primarily trip up young people who disdain following rules for the sake of the rules themselves. The laws that don't make sense exist specifically to catch individuals who are willing to break laws that don't make sense. They are tripwires set up by society to criminalize the individuals unwilling to accept arbitrary government authority.

The individuals most likely to break the laws that really matter to power brokers are the exact same individuals who are likely to break stupid laws when they are young. And in doing so, they are demonized and removed from the political process for the rest of their lives. Stalin's secret police could not have dreamed of creating so perfect a snare for those most likely to resist the government. Society itself condemns the very individuals most likely to be willing to fight the government on behalf of the people.

America has perfected this system, imprisoning over one percent of its adult population. One out of every thirty American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation. Over half those convicts were convicted of nonviolent victimless crime. If there was no victim, if there was no violence, what exactly could the crime have been?

Marijuana, we are told, is a gateway drug, it leads to criminal behavior. Alcohol though is perfectly kosher. A six pack of Coors never led to anything but good times. The reason alcohol doesn't lead to a criminal future is that being caught with three ounces of it doesn't sacrifice your freedom, your education and your right to vote. Make any arbitrary behavior criminal and it will beget further criminal behavior. Criminalize cracking your knuckles and knuckle cracking will become a gateway behavior, guaranteed to lead to a lifetime of shitty jobs and dead-end opportunities to nowhere. And a significant portion of our potential future leaders will be caught up in the dragnet. Leaders buck authority. They tear down arbitrary rules. If we criminalize the arbitrary, we criminalize the best of who we are. We outlaw the very children upon whom the future depends.

It's a circular logic. Item A is illegal. Illegality's punishment is to destroy your life and brand you as a criminal. Therefore anyone who touches item A is a criminal with a destroyed life. The knot pulls tight for any value of item A. Marijuana, knuckle cracking, cola, burritos, homosexuality. Insert absolutely any behavior or substance for A and you get the same result. That is not a judgment of item A, it is the beautiful design of a mechanism for destroying individuality.

More to the point, it is a system designed to break and discredit at a young age any individual willing to openly challenge authority.

I'm a little too young to have been much affected by Michael Jackson's music. To my fourth grade ears, Weird Al's renditions of Fat and Eat It were immensely more entertaining than the source of their parody. Of course, for some reason I thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person until I was twelve, so my childhood reflections upon popular culture are probably entirely lacking a relationship with reality. The main impact Michael Jackson had on me was a realization of the clusterfuck of American copyright law.

In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased for $48 million the rights to the ATV Music catalog, which included most of the Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. McCartney hoped to win the rights to the catalog himself with a little help from his friend (Yoko, oh the irony), but was outbid by the King of Pop. The incident did not exactly have a beneficial impact on the friendship of the pair. The story is legendary at this point and is often retold with one of two underlying messages: look what a dick Michael Jackson was, or look how out of touch Michael Jackson is with reality that he'll drop fifty million dollars on a lark to fuck over a friend as a joke.

The conclusion I drew was far simpler: how can Paul McCartney not own the rights to his own songs? How is it rational that Paul McCartney owes Michael Jackson money every time he sings "Hey Jude" or "I am the Walrus"? Well you see, someone else owned the rights, and then sold those rights to someone else, who bundled them into an attractive package and sold all those rights to all those songs as a lump legal entity. It's quite simple if you can think like a lawyer instead of a human being.

Stop for a second and think about theft. There are two components to stealing: you take something and the person you took it from no longer has it. When you take a picture of someone, it is not stealing. You made a copy of them, but they still exist, nothing (well except their soul if you're of certain stone aged religions) is missing that was there before. Copying does not meet the common sense definition of theft. I cannot have stolen something from you, if you still have it after the supposed theft.

Consider copying a song instead of photographing a person. You copy the song onto your computer from a friend's iPod. Your friend still has the song, but now you also have it. Nothing has been stolen. Ah, but you see, you just cost the record company the value of that song, so you stole from them. Does the record company still have a copy of the song? Well, yes. Then how was anything stolen from them? Well it's not really the song that was stolen per se, it was the money. What money? The money you would have paid them for the song. So if I had no intent to purchase the song, then I didn't actually steal anything? Or put in another way, if Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead in that box, then he owes $1.9 million to the RIAA.

Enough dancing straw men, they enflame my allergies anyway. The root of the problem with copyright logic is that it only makes sense within a certain framework of legal assumptions that do not exist outside the minds of attorneys. Any file on your computer is just a big long list of zeroes and ones that when read in the right way become a picture of breasts, or a pop song, or a shopping list, or this article that you're reading right now, or a picture of bigger breasts. Saying that it is illegal to copy a song is the technical equivalent of outlawing a number.

In any case the lesson is, every time you download a Beatles song without paying for it, you're stealing money. From Michael Jackson's children. And won't someone think of the children?

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.  What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." -Adrian Rogers

The inherent flaw in that quote is that it assumes a system that is just, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be and the rich are rich because they deserve to be. It assumes that an individual's wealth is directly proportional to his earning of that wealth. But the free market system, like any system, rewards neither superior ethics, nor superior effort, nor superior merit. Like all systems, it simply and blindly rewards those that play the game the best.

No economic system in human history has produced the raw creativity, output and progress of free market capitalism, but it is easy to forget why America championed free markets in the first place: because they are more just, more right than any other economic system. Sometime during the Cold War, we lost sight of that original motivation and our means became our ends as our economies created unimaginable wealth and prosperity. We defended free markets because they worked the best instead of because the nature of their freeness made them the ethically superior system. In forgetting those ethical grounds, we have lost the ability to intervene in the market when ethically necessary. If the reason for the market is its superior performance, then intervention on ethical grounds that affect performance is against everything the market stands for. If the reason for the market is its ethically superior outcome, then intervention on ethical grounds helps the market achieve its purpose.

The best education money can buy. The best medical care money can buy. The best car money can buy.

There are things that it is simply ethically wrong to have determined by the availability of money. There are certainly things that should be. Better house, better car, better TV, a bigger stack of DVDs, eating tenderloin instead of pork chops. These are things that can be determined by money, that working hard and earning money should allow you to upgrade. There are certain categories of expense that should not ethically be determined by money. Money should not be able to buy you better medical care or a better education or better legal representation.

This isn't an unrealistic utopian impulse. It's something that can and should be designed and legislated. Being able to cut checks for $50,000 per year should not get your child a prestigious education at a private liberal arts school. Access to education should not be a financial decision, it should be a strictly merit based decision. The best students should go to the best schools, and on down the line, regardless of their financial status. Likewise, the mediocre students should go to the mediocre schools, regardless of their ability to pay for an exclusive private school. Medical care should be determined by need not by money. The Mayo clinic should be where the most severe and hopeless cases are sent, not simply the ones with incredible insurance.

The bottom line is that there will always be differences in quality, whether it is education, medical care, or simply the type of car that you drive. But it is utterly unethical to have some of those differentials determined by money.

What society can do is make decisions on which resources should be allocated by free market supply and demand, and which should be allocated on the basis of different criteria. In an ethical society, the first decision should not be what is possible, it should be a determination of what should be. The question of how it must be limited or compromised is a fundamentally different question than what the world should be like. We can say outright, without a financial commitment, that we think that all citizens should have health insurance and free access to medical care. It is entirely possible that this ideal is not within the reach of our resources, that no matter what we do at present, there simply isn't enough money, doctors or hospitals to achieve the ideal. The question then is how to decide who gets access to those resources. Simply saying that we only have the resources to give 80% of Americans health care and determining that therefore the poorest 20% will be the ones that miss out is the most unethical way imaginable for determining access to resources. Even a lottery would fundamentally be more ethical, at least then we are not pretending that the hourly rate you bill out at is an appropriate measure of how much you deserve medical care.

Decide on the world you want, and if it is not feasible, decide on how to compromise without compromising the integrity of the ideal. The poor will always be with us, but we have the power to decide what poverty means in our society.

The end of a nation does not come when it cares about the poor. Indeed, the strength of character of any nation is best measured by the lots of the least within it. When the richest society in human history decides that it is a perfectly just and deserved outcome for CEOs to make a thousand times what their employees earn and that 10 million children deserve to not have health insurance, then we are not far removed from the only place that sustained injustice ever leads: blood and fire in the streets.