1. Democracy (yes, but we’re really not a democracy…)

2. Representative democracy (that’s better)

3. Of the people…

4. Free market (hate to break it to you folks, but that’s not a form of government…)

5. Two party system

Let’s focus on number five. America doesn’t have a two party system. A two party anomaly, two party problem, two party rule, any of those are a better way of putting it. But don’t refer to our governmental process as a two party system. There’s nothing inherently two party about our constitution, culture, or way of life.

Trouble is, when we think of ourselves as ‘two party’ it’s easy to believe that partisanship is a problem. It’s almost impossible to listen to the news today without hearing pundits or politicians complaining about partisanship. If the talking heads are to be believed, partisanship is the cause of every congressional deadlock, economic downturn, military death, etc… Politics has become a game where the players keep saying “they are doing it wrong, so let us do it.”

What’s wrong with this picture? If voters fall into this trap, we allow anti-incumbancy to become the modus operandi of our government. And anti-incumbancy is not a useful dialectic. It’s not a dialectic at all. It’s akin to that childish effort to shove that square in the round hole, and then the circle in the square hole. Otherwise known as the that-didn’t-work-so-let’s-try-the-other-way approach. Let me suggest something different. Let’s try finding all the pieces to that puzzle, and put them in their corresponding holes. In this way, partisanship isn’t the problem; rather, partisanship becomes the solution.

When was the last time you had a conversation with a pure Democrat? Or a pure Republican? There’s no such thing any more. We’ve had to shift our language to try to keep up with the disconnect between the people and those who represent them. We talk about leftists, and progressives, centrists, neocons, the Christian right, tea partiers, etc. Yet, we still go through the motions of voting along party lines that are not represented in our culture. What’s wrong with this picture? It has stripped out the ‘of’, ‘by’, and ‘for’, leaving its ‘people’ naked.

What we need is a more radical partisanship. One that allows for the many voices present in our culture to find a representative voice. Americans can’t be broken up into the categories of Democrat and Republican. Should our government?

See, in two weeks I’ll graduate from my master’s degree program, which has taken longer, and cost more than I would have imagined when I started in the fall of 2007. This degree was supposed to be a stepping stone to a PhD, and then a cushy–albeit discursive–ride into tenure at a university. Not surprisingly, that seems to be the same plan that millions of other 30 somethings had in about a five-year span. The market is flooded with over-qualified, scrappy, somewhat desperate, and really bored folks who are currently working part time jobs as their “in-the-mean-time” extends into a career of fragmented attempts to pay the bills.

Having just received rejections from the two law schools I applied to (yes, I only applied to two…no I wasn’t willing to move to go to law school), I’m plotting my next move. But what sort of metric do I use to plot this kind of course?

I find myself torn between all the non-sense, platitudinal advice that presents itself in our multivocal culture. Here are some common phrases (in no particular order):

-Uber-practical: Starbucks (they offer medical insurance…plus, with your experience you could work your way up to manager)

-Practical: Technical/para-Medical school (the market according to jobs available on craigslist)

-Professional: Apply to a Phd (you just need to find your niche)

-Connections: Whatever you’ve heard about through friends or family (It’s who you know…)

-Disney: Follow your dreams (in other words, if you do what you love long enough, someone will pay you to do it…)

-Paycheck: Research the highest paying jobs and head that way (it’s just common sense, dummy)

Trouble is, as much as I love advice, I’m not good at taking it. After all, my Natural Cures app told me that drinking coffee only makes you more anxious. It recommends switching to green tea (green tea makes me sick to my stomach), which brings me to my final question. How does one choose between a series of cliches? Or, to say it another way, if coffee makes you anxious and green tea makes you sick, what on earth do you drink?

Now, she has to win the nomination before she can face him, but with 50 million to spend on the campaign, there’s about as much left to chance in the primaries as there is in the WWE. The way this story is shaping up, I’m not sure if I need to tune in to CNN or Pay-per-View to keep up on the antics.

In the blue corner we have the draft dodging Blumenthal, in the red, we have the tough as nails McMahon who’s just about as likely to filibuster as kick you in the gonads. She is the same spokesperson who claimed that wrestling was “one of America’s greatest exports.” After everything we’ve heard in recent years about exporting democracy, it’s almost a relief to hear someone cut through the finer points of misdirection and tell it like it is. That a fan-base can forget that they’re participating in a satire of a satire.That in America rarefied irony is not only entertainment, it’s a commodity.

What does it say about the state of American politics that a career in the WWE has become a stepping stone to the United States Senate? Is it that we’re comfortable with the poor production? The cheesy outfits? The paper-thin story lines? Is it that we’re too squeamish to see actual conflict in politics?

Whatever the case, it’s getting harder to know if I should head to the voter’s booth to cast my vote, or to the bookie to place a bet.

First off, I found myself responding to the film in ways I didn’t expect. Avatar wasn’t a story about how amazing it is to switch consciousness between bodies. If it had been, I’d have been bored for 3+ hours. Instead, I found myself getting drawn into a world that still had some “green” left in it.

This was a compelling story line, not because it reawakened some smoldering environmentalism in me, but because it invited me into another possibility of world.

I couldn’t help but read the film through the lens of Heidegger’s language of Enframing. In a Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger suggests that the posture of human being has been taken over by technology. We don’t see the world anymore when we look at it, we can’t. Rather, in the place of trees we see lumber. Rivers become hydroelectric power. Animals become meat, etc.

This Enframing extends even to human being: as we grow accustomed to ordering the world (into what he calls a “standing reserve”) we begin to re-order ourselves as well. If we’re not careful, we become resources too.

According to Heidegger, this is our destiny. Cameron challenges this outcome, not by disagreeing with Heidegger, but by offering a vision of a different world. This vision serves as an interruption to our frame. It creates the space for us to shift our posture toward the world.

The question remains: what frame do we choose for our world?

Maybe it’s the fact that I just turned thirty, or became a father. I’m not sure, but something has got me thinking a lot lately about what I’m worth. And I’m not just talking about the life insurance policy that I keep putting off.

Everywhere I look, it seems that I’m quantizing things. Twenty cents for the hummus I just washed down the drain. Two dollars for letting the bananas rot in the fruit bowl. Fifteen dollars, one cubit foot of waste, thirty-two minutes, forty wipes, and 1/8 tube of cream for a box full of diaper changes.

It doesn’t stop there. Units of time, Interactions, relationships, they feel more and more like sortable data.

So I can’t help but wonder, am I a quantity? Is that what my life has been reduced to? Fifity years and their corresponding earning power?

That’s what I wonder when I should be sleeping.

And now that his top-secrety-international-copyright-treaty is leaking like the titanic all over the internet (maybe that’s why he wants to kill it), he’s putting himself in the position as the man who might kill the internet.

This is perhaps the most egregious sin that I could imagine a president committing. The world wide web is perhaps the single greatest achievement of the human race to date. Wow, did I just say that?

Hyperbole aside, if this treaty passes, I see three options, all of them with big lose potential.

1. In three months time it will show itself to be completely and utterly unenforceable.
2. It gets overturned in a year by the supreme court for violating almost every intention of the bill of rights and the constitution.
3. It succeeds, and the internet as we know it dies a cruel and unusual death.

Stop the insanity folks. Pirated movies and music, DRM, and other anachronistic copyright fears are not worth the possibility of losing the single greatest platform for the freedom of speech and information, for the dissemination of knowledge network known to human being since the history of human being. Oh, and did I mention the fact that its also a nearly instant and global network for communication and business and entertainment?

Hands off folks. There are other ways to get your inner Big Brother off. ‘Nuff said.

Here’s a list of links to sites that talk about it in more detail. Please peruse before the bill is passed and all links go dead…

An open letter to the EU

Michael Geist Blog

Boing Boing

Kiwi Blog: A New Zealand perspective

Senator Bayh Responds on ACTA: From Electronic Frontier Foundation

If you have any other interesting links, or care to share feedback, feel free to respond.

After scarfing a bowl of Corn Flakes there are two states of being that can arise: regret and curiosity. Both hit me like a speedball of high fructose corn syrup straight to the pancreas.

As my stomach churned through what it thought was food, I couldn’t help but wonder about the larger socio-political ramifications of Corn Flakes. After all, what I had just eaten was satisfying/unsatisfying in some sort of undefinable way. I was fuller than I had been, but also more hungry.

Just as the regret was wearing thin, the curiosity swung into full effect. What was it that I’d just eaten? I left the baby in the magic vibrating chair, and stumbled to the kitchen in a mixed state of rapture and disgust over what I’d just incorporated into my body.

But curiosity just bred more regret. Corn meal. High Fructose Corn Syrup. I ignored the rest and scanned further up the side of the box to the list of fortifications. A vast field of vitamins and minerals were arrayed before me. All of this in just one bowl of Corn Flakes? I was overwhelmed.

Then the thought came: “I”ll never need to eat anything but Corn Flakes ever again.”

My head swam as my heart sank. No longer will I have to go to the trouble of shopping for ingredients for balanced meals. No more of the hassle of fresh fruits and vegetables that go bad in like an hour. A box of Corn Flakes has a half-life of at least 2 years, right? No more cooking. No more group meals, which means never having to waste time talking with people while I eat.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, each in three minutes flat. I would never have to worry about wasting time enjoying a meal ever again.

Who knew the possibilities that a simple box of Corn Flakes could open up? Who knew that post-industrial food engineers could so completely satisfy the maintenance needs of this flesh machine? Who knew that Corn Flakes would give me the life that I never thought I could have?

I’m no longer Rekonstruct. Now I’m fortified with essential vitamins and minerals. Now I’m saving time as I save money.

Who knew it was so easy to live the dream? Who knew it came prepackaged? With coupons?!? Fortified and preserved and ready to save me from the inefficiencies of food. Thank you Corn Flakes. Thank you.

The ad went a little something like this. “Buy more of our stuff because we can save the average family three-thousand dollars a year.” I hope to keep this short and sweet, but there is a little back story necessary.

A couple of years ago I got into a minor argument with my Republican (closet Libertarian) uncle about capitalism. His point was that true capitalism (capitalism unencumbered by the institution of a real free-market economy), through competition, can theoretically drive the cost of a product down to zero. In essence, free-range capitalism is tasty because, once enveloped by the principle of free market, living doesn’t cost anything anymore.

This is not the only lie of capitalism, but it is a potent one. American capitalism is still stuck in the hyperreality of the early 20th century, where Enlightenment optimism, empirical ideals, and the hope of industrialization and nuclear power created a desert of economy where the history of a product was lost in conception of its circulation.

In short, America forgot that life cost something. Forget the existential crises of the 20th century, WW I and II, Hiroshima, the cold war, for the zeitgeist of economics had not yet fallen prey to the anxiety of the gap between the attempt to extend the model of the new real (the hyperreal) into the old one. Religion, philosophy, geo-politics, art, all seemed to grasp something that capitalism ignored: the ontological insubstantia of every model extended, superimposed, embossed upon the real.

Walmart is perpetrating this notion that living doesn’t cost (or to be true to their own wording, living costs less). In this sense, Walmart must be like heaven then, a place where thieves cannot break in and steal, because why would thieves steal something that didn’t have value. What we’re left with then, is the practical fallout of the capitalist nightmare. That capitalism does drive the cost down toward nothing, but not through some alchemical form of circulation.

But how? This is where we discover the lie. Walmart is cutting the cost of living for you by exacting that same cost from those who produce and sell their goods. They work hard so you don’t have to. They give up homes so that you can perpetuate the ongoing lie of the middle class. They go hungry so that you can put the excess in a landfill.

In this way, American capitalism is just feudalism writ large. The one with the biggest standing army, the one with the most impregnable castle can exact more than they need from those who actually produce it.

Not enough room left for Corn Flakes, or the cost of living. Stay tuned.

Swine flu is here, make no mistake. The H1N1 strain of influenza has swooped down on Seattle like Clay Bennet and his band of Oklahoma cowboys. Don’t worry, it won’t rip out your heart and feed it to a bunch of Oklahoma City vandals, but it just might kill you.

I don’t know quite what to make of the all the press surrounding this second round of H1N1. Is it the next great plague? Or, will it fizzle like the 1976 outbreak as Ron Paul suggests? Is it a genetically engineered monster built by Dr. Evil and disseminated by the Knights Templar to control population? Or, (for you conspiracy buffs) is it really the flu at all? Of course, there are some more reasoned voices on the web like Steven Novella. But then, voices of reason also thought that Thalidomide was a great idea too.

Simply put, lots of folks are getting sick, and even more are getting scared. Public Health officials have gone on record saying that there’s a vaccine that can help protect those most at risk. And according to an interview on KJR Seattle Seahawks team doctors told reporters (in a conversation I’m certain they wish they could take back) that the team has received the H1N1 vaccine.

Paul, I know your team has been injury plagued over the last few years, but using up vaccine on professional athletes when there is a national shortage is just in poor taste.

So, when your (and my) Seahawks go and and get pummeled this Sunday by the Cowboys, it certainly won’t be because they have the flu. It might be their offensive line, or their complete lack of a running attack, an aging quarterback, it might even be a GM who insists on building a team around undersized, injury prone, “character” guys… Our one hope is that the Cowboys won’t have the Seahawks secret weapon, flu vaccine. The thing is, (and this is the more important part) you probably won’t either.

First, this is what natural selection is all about, isn’t it? Living organisms battle for supremecy; and as far as we can tell, that battle balances out into nice (albeit violent) symbiotic systems.

Second, it hit me that these “crazy ants” don’t belong on Christmas island. They’re an import–a result of our globalized infrastructure. There’s nothing natural about the way these six-legged invaders swooped down the chimney bearing the gift of ecological homogeneity.

With those two poles firmly established, my mind then turned to abstraction. Marx left us with the Hegelian notion of a dialectic iterating between infrastructure and superstructure. Culturally these should create balancing (if violent) antitheses, theses, and syntheses. But does this sort of iteration begin to break down if the globalization of culture creates the possibility of invasive memes that even the strangely prescient Marx couldn’t foresee?

Isn’t it possible that globalism has resulted in invasive cultural memes that operate outside the normally corrective feedback loops of infrastructure and superstructure? If this is possible, could it mean that our systems of thought, some of which are superior in quality to invasive memes, could nonetheless be out competed by invasive species? It certainly feels that way some days. I can’t help but wonder if invasive memes could begin the implosion of a historical dialectic. Or perhaps history, by nature, can only implode, and we are just now reaching that event horizon.