Thought That Came Unbidden

I have reality fatigue.

I’m tired of trying to figure out who is lying on any given issue (hint: the Democrats do it just as much as the Republicans do it; they just aren’t as good at it). I’m tired of the pretense that journalism is “objective.” We’ve known for a long time that merely observing an event changes the character of the event. No where is this more true than in the reality television age, in the age of MTV’s Jackass and car commercials that require a “do not attempt. professional driver – closed course” disclaimer for 30 seconds of quick cut beauty shots of an automobile that’s too expensive for anyone to reasonably buy anyway.

I’m tired of being aware, of knowing that my government is not here to help me, that side effects may occur, that every choice I make (were these tennis shoes made by a company with fair labor practices? does this company really use post-consumer recycled materials, or is that just PR? what are the environmental effects of the chemicals in this cleaner and is there a better option? should I not buy Minute Maid lemonade because Coca Cola has been accused of horrific human rights violations? are Target’s labor practices really any better than Wal-Mart’s?) has, I am told, an impact on the lives of others (well, perhaps not my single choice, but the accreted choices of hundreds of thousands of people).

Until recently the media were making a big deal of the fact that Bush is now saying he would fire someone in his administration who was found to have committed a crime in connection with the Valerie Plame leak (google news 1,550 related articles).

I could swear that last week they showed me footage of a press conference from 2003 or 2004 when Bush said exactly the same thing. I’ll be damned, though, in the vastness of the internet, if I can find one news story or one link to said footage. And I know I didn’t imagine it; my hallucinations are usually better than that (think nubile young things in not very much clothing bearing fruity drinks and tasty snacks). But now I have to spend the energy to reconcile what I know and the information that is actually available to me.

The other day at lunch my aunt was talking about this pair of shoes she loves that she’s had for 25 or so years. They need knew heels and soles, she says, do I know if the cobbler (yes, we still have a cobbler in our neighborhood) is any good? He did the same thing for me last summer and did a nice job, I told her. She mentioned casually how it was a shame that skills like that were dying out. Well, why wouldn’t skills like cobbler and tailor (and, increasingly, plumber, electrician, and carpenter) die out when we can just go to fill-in-discount-store-name and get another pair for the everyday, low, roll-back price of $13.97? The truth is that Americans live in a disposable culture and we have shitty taste and low expectations: we’ll take what we can get even if it’s badly made as long as it’s cheap and we can be made to think we’re getting a deal.

Reality fatigue doesn’t set in over a period of weeks or even months: it takes years. My psyche is stretched thin, showing strain marks like a piece of steel bearing too much weight from all the cognitive dissonance of awareness. And as I look around lately I wonder to myself, what’s wrong with being blissfully unaware? What’s wrong with living life based on the things that are easiest for you, most pleasurable? Would I go back into the Matrix if I could?
[Read more…] about But what if I’d like the wool over my eyes?

There’s just something blissfully ironic about coming home to a house with no electricity and stepping on your electricity bill on the mat in the front hall. With DC firmly in the grip of summer weather, I expect this will become a regular event.

Despite Friday resembling the steam bath that people pay hundreds of dollars a year to have access to at a health club, the evening wasn’t a total write off without electricity. Many of my neighbors were out on their porches, what with it being pretty airless inside the house without even a fan. It was nice to catch up with people I live near but see infrequently.

What was nicer, though, was the pace. With no internet access, computer, or TV to distract me I got a chance to read without guilt. Nothing to do but sit and read, and listen to the birds slowly resume their chattering after a thunderstorm that sat right over the neighborhood for at least 20 minutes and pounded us with rain for nearly an hour as it moved on. The only downside to my throw-back evening was the loss of light.

As the evening wore on it became harder and harder to see the type on the page. By the time the power came on nearly 5 hours after it went off, I’d all but finished a collection of short stories I’d checked out of the library last weekend and I had a greater appreciation of alternating current and all of the amenities it provides.

The doyennes of manners will tell you that if you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all. In the age of “comment on this article” and citizen-publishers creating a blogsphere, that prescription for good behavior has pretty much fallen by the wayside.

I shot my mouth off over at blogactive.com a couple of weeks ago and Michael liked my comment so much he elevated me to the front page.

Go figure.

It’s amazing how, when strung together, ten words that are innocuous on their own can form such a terrifying phrase. No, not that one; that one is only eight (and mind out of the gutter, you!). The phrase I’m talking about is a classic that is probably as old as human civilization: I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.

About two weeks ago we got a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services addressed to “Resident” and given the problems we’ve been having in DC with elevated lead levels in drinking water I opened it. According to the enclosed form letter our address was “randomly selected” for participation in a rolling survey done by RTI for HHS asking about

• tobacco, alcohol, and drug use or non-use
• knowledge and attitudes about drugs
• mental health, and
• other health issues

An interviewer would be around, the letter said, in about a week to determine if anyone in the household qualified for the survey and, if so, back a week after that to administer the questions which would only take an hour and for which each participant would be paid $30 in cash. Participation was strictly voluntary and any survey answers would be kept strictly confidential as the interviewer would never ask a participant’s name.

I was, unfortunately, not the person who answered the door when the interviewer came around to do the initial assessment.

Yes, you heard that correctly: The Girlfriend volunteered us, not just herself but us, for an “anonymous” government sponsored survey about illegal activities and mental status.

The survey questions themselves were about what you’d expect from a government survey on illegal drug use: what have you taken ever in these given categories, in the past year from today, in the last 30 days? How often have you missed work because of fill-in-the-blank use? How often have you suffered from fill-in-the-blank with condition currently advertised by BigPharma as easily curable? And on, and on, and on.

So I answered the questions and got my $30 in cash and then came the catch: the follow-up assessment form. Mostly this form is a check on the interviewer to make sure that the person is, in fact, giving out the money and not keeping it for herself, but this form wants my phone number and my address.

It also has my interview number on it.

I asked the interviewer, pray tell, how I was to be assured that my answers would stay confidential if my case number was associated with my phone number which is linked to my name and address as a matter of public record. I got a standard response about this just being a quality check.

Later, when I asked The Girlfriend, who is more than passing bright, the same question she said “Why would they bother to do that?”

Perhaps I’m paranoid but in this day and age, where a government agency as been specifically forbidden by Congress from collecting personal data on airline passengers, and has publicly said it would not and then goes around and collects that data anyway, don’t I have a right to be paranoid? I mean, have these people not heard of Bigfoot.com, or Dogpile.com? Have these people not heard of databases and brokers, and of hackers?

I suppose I could have lied, but why spend the time then? I guess it just boils down to whether or not you trust the government. And I don’t.

The last time I had a chance to look the BBC was reporting a death toll of 37 with more than 700 wounded from today’s bombings. They also reported:

US President George Bush told reporters at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles that “the war on terror goes on.”

– London bombings toll rises to 37

Is it possible that Dubya is that insensitive? That he’d go hawkish immediately? I couldn’t believe it when I read it, and then I heard his statement on NPR. Possibly they edited it, but I doubt it. He needs to spend more time in the UK so he can learn the difference between posturing and stubborn determination, like the London cabby they interviewed who said, essentially, that the only change he could see was that he’d be more observant and that London would survive this and people would come out stronger.

Don’t you just love the Brits?

And my mother e-mailed me an interesting question today: How is giving Metro Transit Police automatic weapons going to stop a bombing in the subway [in DC]?

It’s not. It’s the illusion of security, and like all good illusions (the guardrail on the side of the road, the annual checkup, Christian charity) it only holds up for so long.

Today as I walk home I’ll wish for a more peaceful world where everyone can just live their lives doing no harm to others. Maybe if I wish hard enough it’ll come true.