What if Gaia were Red State?

It occurred to me the other day listening to Darkness Radio and some nice woman was prattling on about essential oils, Tibetan chants, UFOs and something called the Holy Grail Vortex Invocation, that New Agers assume Gaia is a leftie and they are in tune with "her." What an interesting assumption! It's not unlike the claims the left ridicules when the right wingers claim god is on "our" side. I picture that god as a kind of wrathful Jehovah-Zeus, a tribal god who takes sides in petty human disputes over land and philosophies. Fast forward to the modern concept of Gaia. She's a hippie, like people only if they act more like primitives (sustainable farming et al) but dislikes the whole notion of advanced civilization. By taking hallucinogenic drugs "she" provides (see the whole 2012 disaster school) "we" can see her intentions (basically treating us like a virus except maybe the really really cool ones) and get in tune with them. This New Age Gaia can clearly be wrathful like the gods of old (many natural disasters are attributed to the Revenge of Gaia), targeting primarily Western Man's hubris to use her resources to create a virtual Tower of Babel (G-20 + Internet). Western "man" should be punished.
That's when it occurred to me what if god were Red State? The easy answer would be "he" would be Jehovah or Zeus as mentioned above. But it's also possible he's more a prankster or loki, someone who doesn't care so much about the OUTCOME (quasi-sustainable hobbit-like communities as in Zardoz) as in making sure he's entertained in the process. If Red State Gaia was a local tribal god, it would make sense that there were many competing tribal gods fighting up there in the ethers. Not impossible. But if he were a 'god of earth' then he'd have to rise above partisanship (doing a better job of it than the hippie-loving Gaia), but what would he be about? What would be his theme?
EXCERPT FROM CORMAC MCCARTHY'S BLOOD MERIDIAN:
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. ...My trade? Certainly. What is my trade? War. War is your trade. Is it not? And it ain't yours? Mine too. Very much so. What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff? All other trades are contained in that of war. Is that why war endures? No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not. That's your notion. The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game ..."
To the Judge (main character of Blood Meridian) God is war, god loves war, god loves bloodshed. God is not about "morals" or goodness, but blood. Blood shedding, blood giving life.
I can see why someone would hope that the New Age goddess is Gaia. This other one is too fucking scary!

Creative Parents Love their Kids to Death

I met these people tonight. Upscale, creative, living in exurbia. Love their kids. To death. They sent their two girls to an arts high school, then the older one to an expensive art school. She graduated last year. I saw her art online. It's not bad. Whatever that means. Can't find any work (duh) and moved home. Works as a waitress now. Thinking about moving to Brooklyn or Santa Fe. I had the strangest feeling, watching her parents. They seemed stunned. Why? That their willingness to spend on education and "creativity" yielded nothing for their daughter? We (creative parents) like to think we are doing the best thing we can for our kids when we encourage "creativity." We encourage them to write and paint and make music, we accept how little influence they get from their teachers that there is a world "out there" that doesn't have "openings" for creative young people. Not that creativity isn't important. It's needed everyone. Business needs it, even government needs it. But there are not "jobs" for artists and writers and filmmakers. Even when they get "practical" (web design, illustration) they are positioning themselves for nothing. Why is this so?
One thought is that it's a by-product of the decline in religion. We have substituted creativity for religion (the best that is in all of us, honed as it exits). That's part of it. But here's the awful thought. If we really loved our children as passionately as we THINK we love our children, why would we do this to them? Why wouldn't we prepare them better for "the world out there"? Is it our own delusion that they can break through the odds? Or is it a kind of (yes, boomer) selfishness. We like the idea of being parents that encourage creativity. Teaching kids the world is hard is no fun. And thankless. When we delude ourselves by spending all this money (you see we care, we spend money!) aren't we really setting them up for disappointment? The big crash. Sure we can blame it on the economy (recession), whatever. But it's been true before the recession; the recession just makes it more visible because the crap jobs they can get are worse than the ones they could get before. Entry level positions in firms they don't want to work for but will end up working for. Benefits, et al.
It's sad really to wonder if we really love our children as much as we think we do. Maybe we're lazier and more self indulgent than we want to see.
Ouch.

What's Wrong with Facebook

I never wanted to be one of those "I hate Facebook" people. I mean there are just too many of them. It's too easy (especially with Boomers) to think this makes you special or sophisticated in any way. So, like many commercially minded Boomers, I joined and try to keep up, though my son says Boomers have like 50 friends and his generation averages more like 500. That's beyond me. So for the longest time I have tried to stuff it, smile and get on with it.
But it's tough. It reminds me of why I don't like television. It's not anything exactly I can put my finger on, but it's partly the barrage of ads (though true many are better than the shows), it certainly isn't sex and violence ( though interrupting sex and violence by salespeople is irritating) and it's not even the superficial assumptions of TV news (like how I need to be kept up to date on that hostage crisis in the Knoxville Walmart). It's more of a Marshall McLuhan thing. There's a "buzz" I associate with television and I'll try to explain that. There's an insidious assumption behind most of it (news, ads, shows) that "out here in viewing land" exists a large population of more or less like-minded people, people who want the newest shampoo, who care about hostage crises and who really need their plots neatly resolved in either thirty or forty-five minute bites. I find this tremendously irritating, annoying, intrusive. Not that they're so wrong. They're casting a wide net; I get that. But on the personal level of my own home and more personally MY OWN BRAIN, I find it radically invasive.
What I find similar about television and Facebook is this: there is an assumption on Facebook that you live one life, more or less openly, that you are uninhibited about sharing that (normal) life, that people accept you for who you are (even your politics), and that you are more or less a "mini celebrity". I know this isn't original and I'm sure others have said it better, but I need to say it for myself. Facebook is television. There, I said it. It's pretending you are on television. No, it's being on a tiny tiny television that your distracted "friends" (whether 50 or 500) watch or maybe don't watch while most likely they're doing something else. The great Distracta.
I will continue to post, to smile, to show up in the town square because I don't want to be like those crabby Boomers who don't like television and force their children to play with wooden toys because that's what Maria Montessori or Mr Waldorf advocate. They are even less my people than the mindless masses who care about the hostage crisis at the Walmart. So, oddly, in a world that is supposed to be shrinking (the global village) it's actually homogenizing in a superficial way. A way that destroys creativity? The furious juries are out on that one, but certainly in a way that undermines the concept of a private life, private thoughts, and quiet time to think. Alone.

Uncle Rico and the Ghost of Fame

Fame is such a funny thing and relative thing. What percent of the "kick" is that people around you (in your small town or large town) see you in the paper, see what you have done, think you're successful and famous. Of course, "insiders" who are generally NOT FRIENDS know the truth, know the painful limitations of local modest fame. But how much do they matter? And we're not talking dollars (yet).
Dollars would be nice, would be a completely different way the world says Hello. But short of dollars (we're talking trophies and medals and ribbons and nice writeups in the local paper)... what is "fame"? Very odd, I can tell you that. Stories of the (small-time) famous washing up, remembering their moment of glory. Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite... reliving his moment of glory from high school football over and over ad nauseum. That is all of us, that one moment, I coulda been a contender.
In a pagan world we'd be interacting with a rich pantheon of gods. We're talking garden gods, forest gods, neighborhood gods, maybe even city gods. There are beyond that the gods of the mountain, and some vague dieties that created heaven and earth . Lucky for us they're preoccupied with their own petty squabbles. That's it. That's fame. Before writing, there wasn't much beyond the kings who could force us to build their damn pyramids. Maybe that's partly why the pyramids fascinate us so. The ego on display, the massive folly of self-invented importance combined with the mundanity of thier dessicated remains, as pathetic a corpse as any (despite mummification which I admit was something).
So here we are.
I often think about that scene in Minority Report, where Cruise's character wanders through the video simulation salon, everyone hooked up to virtual reality machines that made them a pope or a Hugh Hefner, or a Micheal Jordan equivalent. What would that do to our ambition? I'm not going to work on that (hopeless) novel, I'm gonna go over to the virtual salon and pretend I'm Salman Rushdie for a while, darting through the streets of London escaping Iranian assassins, clutching the only copy of my next bestseller to my breast.