On Death

As the news of Ali's passing sits on my mind today, I think about the meaning of death to me. It feels so abstract, as if it were some philosophical concept to be thought about, deconstructed and articulated in some 'profound' analogy. Death, when it comes, is just the end of life (life in the secular sense: bodily life, terrestrial life), the end of the functioning of our bodies and, most likely, our minds.

But it is always abstract to me. I have never seen death of any kind. I have seen death only on TV, and thus I have never connected with death as a reality, as something that actually happens. I've never seen a dead body, been to a funeral, or experienced any of my pets die (except for one hamster that I didn't like much). So I feel strangely ambivalent about death. It has no face to me. I've been sad when people I know die, but I have never really understood what that means, on some elemental level, beyond the fact that I will never see them again.

I would like to think that I am not afraid to die, that I can see death as part of the cycle, and thus an extension of life. But how can I know? Life has never seemed fragile to me. Ali's death is no closer to me than the news of 58 protesters being killed in Guinea. Yet I knew and loved Ally personally. I will not be at her funeral, nor will I have contact with her family after today. Just like I won't attend the funeral of people I didn't know in Guinea.

But that is not to say I am not sad, or moved in anyway. It is simply that my feelings are confusing to me, rather than clearly 'sadness' or 'loss', because I don't know what that means beyond knowing I will never see her again.

But there is another element to death in the age of internet. I have now put her memory in cyberspace, which will exist so long as we generate electricity and have the ability to understand it. She also has a facebook page, which at the moment of posting, has yet to acknowledge her passing. Thus she is not dead in that space. Hmm, feels strange to write these words, almost as if it were a disrespect to her or her family. See, I am making her death into an academic thing, making weird arguments about facebook defining life and death.

Allison Wills was my 6th grade Social Studies teacher, and my 7th grade English teacher in Munich. She was a great person who was not confined to arbitrary boundaries of politeness in the class room. We were free to address topics that some thought inappropriate; she removed taboos for us hormone-saturated teenagers. She died of cancer. I knew for a year that she had it, but I never thought she would die.

Think and Write...

...with a nod to Bjelic and Baudrillard.

The issue of racism is one of perception. Orientalism, for example, is problematic because we in the west only understand the orient through the works of Western men who explored the lands during the colonial era. Thus, all knowledge created at this time of intellectual exploration, and all subsequent knowledge built off of the initial corpus, was written and interpreted from the hegemons perspective. This means that we only have a single, ideologically infused, perspective from which to analyze the data, to acquire and understand the information.

Reality is created through the relationship between the signifier and the signified: the signifier is the language that creates the object, the signified is our experiential understanding of the object (our understanding via interaction). In other words, we know it is coffee because we have language to define it (the signifier), we have our understanding of it through language (the signified), and the third component is its physical root / manifestation, the referent.

Hyper Reality is when reality becomes more real than reality itself. Said differently, this is when the signifier becomes the referent to its self. Reality in this context is totally detached from any actual physical reality. Mickey Mouse has no physical referent, rather it is real only because of its signifier: a drawing of a mouse. Yet, you can now go to Disney Land and chill with the Mouse, shake its hand etc. Hyper Reality occurs when the signifier tells us how to understand an image that has no referent.

We can watch a media image totally unconnected to the narrative, but assume it fits the narrative by virtue of its ‘representativeness’ of the the narrative, and through the language of the narration. In one news report the sniper is a Serb, but when the same image is recycled on another channel, the sniper becomes a Bosnian-Muslim. Thus our racism must also be only a flawed perception of this other. Our perception is not rooted in reality, particularly when our understanding of the other is created through portals of hyper reality such as mass media.

Soap box rant

All things considered, these are hard days. But then, in how many eras has that maxim been spoke? I cannot think the Trojans thought they were in for a good time when Achaeans landed on their shores. Same for the Egyptians when they saw the French and then the British sailing up the Nile. I say this only because I caught myself thinking today how things seem worse than ever in the World. But that is pretty foolish. I’m just having a Howard Beale kind of week:

Edward George Ruddy died and woe is us!

But, most likely, the world has always been a pressure cooker for ‘civilization’ with fantastic pressures through war and alienation. This was probably as true now as it was during the Peloponnesian War, it is why the Dao was written, and why we are in a constant state of war today. Maybe I am reading too many of the classics (The Odyssey, The Aneid, Trojan Women) but the news seems to be unusually brutal these days. Maybe it is this sad business with the Roma in Belgrade. I know the context is different, and the violence of a much lower magnitude, but is the destruction of Gazela not, as an action, similar to the destruction of Palestine? An unwelcome people in a prestigious location. It is all I can think of when I see that image on B92 of the Bulldozer.

I am alienated from the health care debate raging in this country. Really? Let us not get a national health service say the same people who also agree that the current system is busted. So they oppose a ‘universal’ system that would guarantee a basic coverage for all the un- and under-insured people, while everyone else can keep their private insurance. Its not even supposed to affect Medicare / Medicaide. Instead they would rather just keep moving towards privatization. Are they afraid of something? Maybe that people will drop the insurance companies? If we lose the health care struggle, then woe is us.

I have no Home

The news, the very tragic and disturbing news, of Gazela has come to me late. I want to be in Belgrade, if only because of a morbid, privileged type of curiosity. The same type of curiosity that came over me after I went to NYC some months after the destruction of the Twin Towers. The destruction of Gazela: is this a ground zero for Roma in Serbia? In the Balkans? What does the site look like now? I have only one picture, on B92, of a bulldozer crushing what used to be the home of a human. A human who has now been sent somewhere, possibly South Serbia, possibly a metal trailer with some furniture and plumbing. Is this really a replacement for what was once a home?

A Day of Service 11.09.2009

September 11th is Patriots day, a day of service in America. The connection to September 11th, 2001 is obvious I guess? No need to explain. In my new job I was ‘encouraged’ to take on a volunteer project for the day. As it turned out, we piggy-backed on another project, a park cleanup/city beautification event. I spent the day conflicted. Conflicted on many levels.

I like what I do for work. I like connecting communities, bringing people together, and being able to explore other identities through my job. So I have no problem with volunteerism, or even doing community service as a response / reflection to violence. But I don’t like tokenism. I’m also not a patriot of any nation: nationalism is a dangerous, violent and divisive emotion / ideology. The only time I get vaguely nationalistic is over soccer, but even so, I’ll never take to the streets in defense of a nation or national ethos. So the first conflict for me is that my job, by definition, is in service of a nation-state. But, I am not confronted with it on a daily basis, and I have enough freedom in my work, that I can bring my own ideas to the projects, ideas that are not Nationalistic in nature. I can work with critical multiculturalism in my mind as I approach something, etc...

But the larger conflict for me was /  is the token-istic nature of Patriot Day, and doing a beautification project on that day. I wandered round for over an hour picking up rubbish in the park and wondering why I was doing this? What does 11.9 mean to me? I wasn’t in this country when it happened, and I am repulsed by the Government response to the event. This response has caused the deaths of many more than were killed in the Towers. Is this a proportional response? Does it address the root cause of our conflict, the cause of the attacks? More over, how does my beautification of a city park have any reflection on the tragic events of 11.9 and those since? It doesn’t, is my conclusion. I have done nothing more than done the work of our Parks and Recreations Department for a few hours. We had no reflection on what this day means, 8 years later; there was no debate on appropriate responses; and there was little in the way of alternatives.

Perhaps this is partly my fault for not organizing the alternative, for encouraging a reflection, etc... But when I refused to write cards to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was given dirty looks. This is not a crowed, liberal though they are, that wants to debate the last 8 years, the meaning of Sept. 11, or the appropriate activities for today. No, we must clean, and not question. Certainly I wish America had just turned to its gardens, and to its own streets on Sept. 12, not to guns and credit cards; I wish the States had encouraged growth rather than death after the attacks, but they didn’t, and they, myself included, really need to talk about it.

I also don’t understand why do we need to set a day aside for this? If community service is a value we hold dearly, then why only do it once a year? The fact that we need to make a show out of this event, invite fancy people and small children, shows how shallow our regard for community work is. Hey, I’m not moralizing here, ‘cause I’m as lazy as the next guy. I only started doing community work because my jobs demanded it. It is like valentines day, if you love someone, you should treat them well and tell them how you feel everyday, not just on February 14th. The point here is just that we should be doing community work because we want to and think it is important, not just because 8 years ago some assholes flew planes into some of our buildings.

There is a further point, and that is one of perception, which is perhaps one of the most important elements. The city I live in has many problems, the least of which is the lack of rubbish bins in the park. So was a beautification activity really the best thing? How are the immigrant and refugee communities going to perceive this? We would rather clean a small park than spend a day with them? Many are here, after all, because we invaded their country... My points here are not meant to be Anti-American, though I understand that I cannot totally avoid it. I was glad to see people out on the streets today, people doing something together that didn’t involve national anthems and flag waving, I just wish we would do more of this, any and every day, not just as a memorial.