78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Wait, I'm confused
2007-04-22   6:35 p.m.

I'm deeply entrenched in thinking about "America as Empire" versus "America as key player in a healthy exchange of relations and debates between independent states in a sort of anarchical arena". The difference is huge - one means we're bullies and the other means we play well with others. Well at least I'm on my deck in this near 80 degree weather thinking about this, as I write. Um, I have a deck. And it's attached to a house, if you can believe that one.

To make this appearance of pretension a bit more balanced: I just ran a three mile loop around my neighborhood, listening to the Ramones, Justin Timberlake, and Moni Love. Then, I did some yoga and watched Shear Genius. How I love Bravo's reality series. And finally, after procrastinating with all that (plus loading the dishwasher; huh huh huh, I have a dishwasher), I'm NOW working on my final for my ecological politics course, and I've chosen - doi - to write about developing nations' struggles with maintaining sustainable production practices. The "doi" there alludes to my experience having traveled through several developing nations and observing that delicate balance between Northern-state-pleasing, environmentally conscious lip-service rhetoric and violence inducing, local-people-need-to-eat reality. Sometimes I feel the need to justify the approximate 20K I must have spent in the last ten years traveling so much, and so far. So there: it was all for the sake of helping me write this final theory paper. But you know - ask me next week about a justification, and I'll say "life experience" or something sweet and philosophical about our global village. Which is equally as ridiculous.

So anyway, here I am - it’s sunny, I’ve finally shaken the day-sleepies I had from drinking and dancing with my friends until pretty late last night, I’m not letting anything distract me, and then I hear His Most Excellency Premier Bush on the radio – sound bite, CBS or something – praising the Supreme Court’s decision regarding a federal ban on abortion that gives NO EXCEPTION FOR THE HEALTH OF THE WOMAN. So it’s like this: “I see your uterus is going to explode and that your baby will be born with all of its organs outside of its body if this pregnancy continues. You will both die if you give birth. But I hate to tell you this, Mrs. Smith: a couple of wealthy white men a few years ago decided FOR you that you’ll have to carry anyway until we find an alternate solution. Oh, and they also decided TO CUT OFF YOUR MEDICAID, so we won’t be able to do that. Hey, why are you crying?” Dig?

But that’s not even the part that freaks me out – it’s that once again, the man’s timing is impeccable. Im-fucking-peccable. Why? He said this: “THE DECISION REPRESENTS A COMMITMENT TO BUILDING A CULTURE OF LIFE IN AMERICA” after a disillusioned, mentally-ill college student who had been cited for harassment and violence before through institutional channels walked into a gun store in Virginia, bought dozens of rapid-fire weapons, and executed over thirty people in college classrooms because it was his right to do so, apparently. So, like, I don’t know much about guns: are the kinds of guns he had normally used for hunting bunny rabbits? So was it just, like, an “unfortunate circumstance” that Cho used them for hunting German-language and Mechanisms in Engineering students?

Or how about the culture of life America is building in Iraq? Or don’t we have any info on that? I do, just in case we forgot:



I don't know about you, but I'd say that looks A LOT like protecting the sanctity of life. Right?


So anyway, I’m gonna get back to writing my paper and looking up occasionally at the forest behind my house and thinking about how we play nicely with others and give the poor little disenfranchised children of the world tons and tons of exposure to chemical waste and unfair compensation for our exploitation of their natural resources – oh, I meant faith-based love and support.