Getting to know the USA, Part 1

33 miles from Katy, Texas. On our way to Houston. Anthony is driving, and I'm trying not to keep scanning the landscape for signs of life. 

This stretch of land is the bleak few days after doing methamphetamine or ecstasy. If that analogy doesn't work for you, imagine the day after Christmas when you were six. If that one doesn't work either, imagine the week after getting broken up with--when you tell people you're okay, but everyone knows you aren't. 

I know that there are people who live in this expanse and like it, I know the entire world isn’t totally beige with mediocrity, and yet, yet, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all just on the edge of despair. 

In Arizona and New Mexico, I giggled at the cacti and felt reverent about the mountains. The small towns were quaint and beautiful with clapboard shack bars and smiling people willing to drink with us, smoke with us, talk about their lives with us. At the El Patio Cantina in Mesilla New Mexico we met Andy, a sweet-smiling boy who told us he loved his home and got us high in his ’89 Bronco on medical grade weed. He showed us a video on his phone of the elderly people he works with, proud and laughing like a father might be showing a video of a child learning to ride a bike. 

In Texas, the stretches of nothing along the 10 Freeway really do feel like no-thing, a void, not a sprawling freedom like it did outside of Los Angeles. 

Exceptions: Comfort, TX, where we pulled off to find a place called the Cocky Rooster Bar, built of metal siding with no windows, where a dart tournement between four people was underway and we drank Lone Star beer with a wonderful man who said he’d seen us driving through town. (?) 

San Antonio, TX. Especially the Riverwalk. After the rocky bleakness of the road, the lush tropical Riverwalk helped me breathe again. Anthony and I drank Shiners, smoked cigars, and marveled at the secret world under the city. Our Motel 6 room was bright orange and Mod-looking, with hilarious round cubbies for towels.

I walked alone to the Alamo and spent a perplexing hour trying to read between the lines of popular history. These words, “heroes,” “liberty,” and “defense” all seem leaden, bloated, misshapen. Where were the Indians? Where were the women? There is a series of five-foot-high plaques with timelines and photos and details of the area, an attempt to address the incredibly complex interesction of Native American, Spanish, Mexican, American, and French historical forces...but in the end, the Alamo remains a "Shrine," and it is clear that it's a shrine to a very particular group of white male Texans who were seen as fighting for something like "independence" before the clash between Texas and the U.S. over soveriegnty had begun. That this "independence," this "freedom," was implicitly and obviously tied to the enslavement and/or murder of the peoples already living in the area is somehow elided from the pamphlets handed out by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Fascinating that it's still possible, in 2011, to tell a colonial story without including our own culpability.

But I'm seeing and feeling the air change--it's getting warmer, softer, and I know that once we're in Louisiana it'll be harder to get my hackles up since Anth and I will be drinking whiskey sours and eating hush pupppies and the jazz will make my body feel more at home. 

And finally, in Houston. We eat etouffee and gumbo at Calliope's, and chat with the server named Stephanie who wishes she was back in Colorado where her hair didn't curl so much. We go to Super Happy Fun Land. Check it out. We're sleeping on the couches here tonight! 

Bad News and Hope

Of course I expect a certain amount of violence in retaliation for my being the messenger, but I'd like to just remind everyone that I personally did not close the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. It was closed when I found it. 


And what would it mean, really, if one day we woke up and found that (1) all democracy had been controlled by one national center with its headquarters in downtown Los Angeles next to the Museum of Contemporary Art and (2) it had abruptly closed one Sunday?


Would "democracy" cease to have ever existed, if it turned out that it had been controlled in the modern world by one group of people, working out of one glass box in one American city? Wait a minute...


I feel very alienated these days by words like "democracy," "freedom," and "liberation," as they've been effectively repurposed by American media to mean "American style of secretive non-representational government," "American style of capitalism," and "Choice between new American-supported government or a state of abject poverty and war."


I watch Obama, who like all presidents has aged ten years in two, announce that we are engaging in a limited action in Libya, and I read what I can, and I realize, I know nothing. Obama says "We are acting in the interests of the United States and the world" and this statement is the foundation of my not-knowing. Simply put: the interests of the United States cannot be, and are not, the interests of the world. Therefore, I have no idea whose interests, or what interests exactly, "We" are acting in, anywhere.


This is not to say that our interests are necessarily diametrically opposed to everyone else's, although during George W's era, it certainly seemed that way. No, I'm addressing a particular piece of national rhetoric and public belief: that we act in the best interests of other countries. That is simply false, and it contributes to a bizarre and increasingly dangerous myth of our being the Big Benevolent Brother of...everyone else. 


I highly recommend Randall Williams' book Divided World: Human Rights and its Violence. Without spending three paragraphs explaining the argument or reviewing the text, I'll say that it is one of two books that I read in the last year that actually changed the way I think in a fundamental way. 


It goes like this. Human rights are obviously good. Therefore, any group or nation that promotes human rights must also be obviously good. Not so, says Williams. In fact, the post WWII project of defining and enforcing the International Declaration of Human Rights has become, in effect, a way to continue the U.S. cultural and military imperialist project. Very difficult to swallow. Very effectively argued by Williams, very bravely published by U Minn press, and very poignantly read and digested by me. For all the lives that have been saved, there have been large moves away from real freedom, independence, liberation. There are far more brilliant, trained minds working on the problems of imperialsm--but I want the concept to be clearer to people in my life, because it's happening all day long, all the time, in ways that are not always obvious to ostensibly free American brains. 


Last night I stood around a makeshift fire pit with three youngish men: two in their late twenties, one in his thirties. We talked about competitive sports, and what the culture of sports can or should do for children. When I mentioned a sociology study I read last year that showed high school football players had a much higher rate of talking about performing acts of date rape than other high school aged men, they fell silent. "What do you guys think it means?" I said. 
"It's the general act of conquering," said the most thoughtful of the three. "It's imperialism. Win the game, take the girl. You can't really win the whole game without taking the girl. Same story with the Spaniards. Same story with the Romans. Same story with any imperialist." The conversation that ensued was truly hope-filled, as it demonstrated the possibility for courageous self-awareness and cultural consciousness. I learned.


And this was, for me, a grand reopening of my own metaphorical Center for the Preservation of Democracy. A moment around a fire pit, with men who were willing to confront a deeply sad, uncomfortable reality in themselves, in me, and in our country. It made the Berkeley baby in my heart sing. 

It's Time To Kiss An Elephant

It's true what they say about graduate school. Whatever it is that they say. 


Anyway, six weeks later, all my great ambitions for being excellent at posting here at GC have been called out. 


HOWEVER! A dream of mine is underway, and it's called the Kiss an Elephant project. Here's an example by Kelsey, my sis who has already claimed space as one of the "stars" of the project. She is rapidly getting defeated by Lindsey! It's already very exciting.

Here's how it works: 


1) you go to visit www.kissanelephant.tumblr.com
2) you are inspired by all the pictures, and read the "Why Should I Kiss an Elephant?" page.
3) Maybe you also read a rad GC post on elephants.
4) You start looking out for elephants in your daily life.
5) You find one, you snap a photo on your phone of you kissing it, and
6) You send the photo to me, via the tumblr blog or all the many other easy ways of contacting/finding me, and
7) VOILA!!! We build an enormous collection of Kiss an Elephant photos, and the whole creative potential of the internet is once again realized! Baci baci baci!




I've already been told that this is a silly idea. I agree it's silly. I've been told it's dumb. Oh darlings, I beg to differ. In fact, I'm taking a totally irresponsible break from working on a seminar paper during finals week to tell you why it's so important to me.


It's not just that I love elephants, which I do. It's not just that I think elephants are important symbols to consider in literary-historical, art-historical, spiritual-historical, and global-community contexts, which I do. It's not just that I like the idea of collecting a lot of pictures, which I do. And it's not just that getting people to participate in community art projects makes me giddy with joy, which it does. IT'S ALL OF THESE THINGS AT ONCE. Every time someone sends me a new picture, it's a brand new moment of joy.


Maybe I'm addicted to joy. Send me pictures, because I'm not ready to quit.

I have a vision for this project that involves THOUSANDS of photos from all around the world, submitted by people I know and don't know. I have a vision for a pack of elephant-kissing-agents who send me pictures on a regular basis and develop their own little character arcs on the blog. I have a vision for a ridiculous amount of pleasure getting derived (by me, and by many others) from the hunt for new elephants to kiss, the occasional moment of kissing a REAL elephant, the hilarity of a volume of photos of people kissing elephants, which is a really weird thing to do.


As a person who does graduate study in many utterly un-whimsical things, I stand in valiant, prankish, eccentric and sensual pleasured delight at this project. 


I really, really hope you join me. I hope you facebook this, and tweet this, and make it your personal mission to find an elephant to kiss, to find people who want to find an elephant to kiss, and to contact me with your own moments of whimsical celebration of community embodied in your kissing of elephants.


Yes. I'm serious.