Left of "Liberal": August 2006

Thursday, August 31, 2006

A Very Strange Dream

Last night, I dreamed I could fly over a generic city in a foot-pedal controlled hang glider. My mother sat beside me. Once we'd risen about 500 feet, we discovered chaise lounges in the sky where homeless people could sleep without police interference. The lounges were gorgeous-- lots of richly colored velvet. I woke up missing my mother worse than ever.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

My Right Foot

After struggling with some depression for about two years, it seemed wise to get some exercise. I attended an adult gymnastics class because, as a child, I did tumbling. An hour into the class, I landed sideways on my right foot. The next day, upon having X-rays, I learned it's torn ligaments. I was given crutches and an air cast. Too bad I live on the 4th floor of a walk-up.

Meanwhile, war rages.

Meanwhile, it's only 2006. McCain, pretending moderation (ala Clinton) may well be our next president. I have a 12 year old boy. What kind of world...?

Meanwhile, fundamentalism has become the new global ideology.

What the hell does my damned foot matter?

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

A Friendly Reminder...

This week, Mel Gibson's drunken ramblings excluded, I've heard more anti-Semitic comments than at any time I can remember. I worry that anti-Semitism will soon become culturally acceptable and even trendy, as it was before WW2. Israel is behaving murderously, and the US support of Israel continues to be a moral travesty. But why is there no reminder, in the public discourse, that being Jewish is NOT the same as being Zionist? It is possible to condemn Israel's actions against Lebanon without hating Jews, just as it is possible to condemn George W. Bush's actions against Iraq without hating Christians.

About Me

Name: Left of Liberal

Location: Washington, United States

Remember the heady fun of learning Deconstructive theory? I learned it in college, in the 1990s, and I delighted, then, in fathoming my locus as the "site of transgression" in various binarisms. The site of transgression used to be the locus of the good guys: Experimental writers and Marxists and queers and misfits of all stripes. But "degeneracy" doesn't feel quite so benign now that the "construct" of morality has brought us into a collapse of civil rights. I guess it could be argued that Bush is the "site of transgression" between morality and immorality, the thread to pull to deconstruct the construct. But, sadly, no one is pulling.

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Oprah and James Frey

Tim O'Brien's narrator in "How to Tell a True War Story" explains, "Someone tells a story, let's say, and, afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer." For millions of James Frey's readers, the answer mattered. By O'Brien's math, however, readers should have doubted the veracity of A Million Little Pieces from the start. Now readers from Oprah Winfrey to my students at the community college where I teach are crying foul. "Duped," they say. Meanwhile, others are trying to make sense of the grandscale public furor. Arguments range from the political to the ethical to the literary. Here are a few questions percolating to the tops of blogs, book reviews and news shows: Why are people outraged about this but not about more egregious lies with higher stakes? Why has the publishing industry sacrificed honesty in the service of sales? Why should we, in a nihilistic culture that values "perception" above "truth," be surprised by the fictive memoir as a new development? What does this new controversy signify about Oprah’s cultural clout? Even when jumping into the infinite regress of these unanswerable questions, I can’t find a satisfactory explanation why, Oprah’s wrath notwithstanding, so many people are so very angry at one small, shy man who wrote a book with tall tales and bad prose. Sure. No one likes to be fooled. But if it’s really about truth and lies, why aren’t people screaming in the streets every day about Diebold and Enron and WMDs? If it’s really about the mercenary nature of big publishing houses, why aren’t independent media outposts now the sudden beneficiaries of a windfall? The causal connection between nihilism and lying seems, at best, quaint. If we call for an end to the consciousness of perception and relativism, what are we asking for? Empiricism and essentialism? Haven’t decades, if not centuries, of critical thought exposed those views as even graver lies than any that could be constructed by a single human’s perception? And Oprah. Is it really about Oprah? I know that many of my students, for example, know more about Jennifer Aniston’s divorce than they do about our government, but no single item of celebrity gossip—not even Martha Stewart’s incarceration—has ever instigated their indignation to this extent. Indeed, this is only the second time in my eight years of teaching that students have brought up a current event for discussion before I could. The first time was 9/11. My best analysis is that the outrage isn’t about truth. It isn’t about politics or publishing or the nature of perception. Anyone who’s read even a page of Frey’s book knows it sure as hell isn’t about literature, either. It isn’t even about Oprah. James Frey’s lies garner widespread and widely publicized outrage because, in Frey’s lies, we recognize ourselves. His behavior reminds us of our own insecurities. Who among us has never tried to make ourselves look better than we are, even if we haven’t done so in "memoir" form? Maybe Frey lied for the same reasons many people do: because he didn’t believe that he was good enough or interesting enough as he was. Maybe even those of us who don’t lie use other questionable tactics to try and make people like or even love us. Maybe we do favors we don’t have time to do or give money that we don’t have to give. And maybe we want to loudly punish James Frey because he reminds us of something we’d like to forget: That we all make dubious ethical choices when compensating for our own feelings of inadequacy...

Left of "Liberal"