vandana

This is the full trailer for a fundraising campaign to help save independently-owned movie theatres in the Adirondack North Country.  I co-directed and edited this trailer along with Aaron Woolf, the man behind “King Corn” (who is also, I kid you not, the writer of the Phish song “Wilson, Can You Still Have Fun?”) To make a donation to one of the ten movie theatres in this campaign, click here.

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PRODUCTION CREDITS

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Explosions.  Chemical fertilizer plants, bombs in the streets.  Gas lines blowing up and water spigots spouting fire.  Mass shootings at movie theaters and schools.  Media-hyped madmen and un-avenged departed children.  Man-made earthquakes.  Giant cruise ships tugging along thousands of people infected with sickness.  People traveling helter-skelter, toting gastroenteritis in their guts, passing it on to all others.   Doctors performing late-term abortions with horrific consequences.  Millions on food stamps and disability and medical assistance programs and baby boomers closing in on social security.  Massive bank bailouts and endless scandals with thieving CEOs, corrupt politicians and sex-crazed leaders.  A corporate oligarchy behind the veil.  An increasingly polarized country with the left urging ever father left and the right to the right.

These phrases sound like the makings of a Hollywood apocalypse movie.  Instead, they portray daily realities.

Have these problems always been with us?  Are things worse?  Are we headed to some sort of catastrophic showdown?

Here’s what I think.  There are too many of us.  We have too many “things.”  Our lives are too busy and complicated.  We travel too much.  We have lost sight of what we ought to be doing in a race to grab what we feel we are entitled to — which has become virtually anything and everything.

We’re in love with our own progress.  We revel in self-satisfaction at what we can achieve and then immediately take it for granted and infuse it with our sense of personal rights.  The police have a saying:  “Driving (an automobile) is not a right, it’s a privilege.”

We feel it is our right to have abundant, variegated foods just a short trip away from the grocery store.  Yet our top soil is devoid of any nutrients, and is just a junkie for the chemical, petroleum-based fertilizers we feed it in order for big agribusiness to grow crops.  Then, BOOM, a fertilizer plant blows up.

We start to worry that we’re running out of oil.  But rather than change the way we live, we search for another abundant source of energy so that we don’t have to adapt.  We blast a toxic stew of chemicals into the ground, literally creating earthquakes in order to bring up the natural gas (just another incarnation of our old friend, oil).  Then as we clear more land and excavate more ground to build more tract housing, BOOM, a gas line inadvertently struck explodes.  Or, the homes built over the fractured earth have flammable water coming from their kitchen sinks, poisoned by seeping gas.

We feel we’re entitled to a vacation.  So we take a cruise on a ship that chugs a gallon of gas for every six inches it travels.  And BOOM somebody has a bad moment in the bathroom and everyone starts getting sick all over one another.

We swap viruses in the airport.  We clog the highways and bi-ways in our personal vehicles, with one passenger per car still 80% of the time.  We fly everywhere, filling the sky with 60,000 planes over the U.S. at any given minute, tearing through tons of jet fuel in an endless cycle of travel and transplantation.  And BOOM, BOOM we wreck our cars on the highway and the planes come dropping out of the sky.

We stockpile munitions in anticipation of some societal collapse.  But when the predator drones come, BOOM, there will be no defending ourselves with rifles and handguns.  Instead we’ll just continue to shoot each other.  (And canned food stored in a root cellar is not going to cut the mustard for long.)

It’s in our collective psyche.  It’s in our DNA.  We have dreams of this; visions.  The Road tells the story of a post-apocalyptic wasteland as do hundreds of other books and movies.  The story is almost always the same:  We did it to ourselves.

Technology and innovation are good things, and have expanded our reach.  Yet a directly proportional sense of responsibility needs to accompany every advance and achievement.  Again, it’s in all of our stories, expressing our deep, unconscious knowing.  In Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.”  From Jurassic Park: “But instead of thinking whether or not they could they should have stopped and asked if they should.”

Things have happened so quickly since, say, the 1950s.  Back then we held a limitless sense of possibility and felt assured of interminable growth.  Since then the population on the earth has tripled, after being stable for thousands of years.  Our advances in medicine have cured many diseases, protracting longevity and decreasing infant mortality.  Yet these major boons have had massive impacts.

We’re just now making sense of all that has happened.  We’re coming to understand the impossibility of limitless growth.  We feel the burden of an astronomical population.  We get road rage.  We lock ourselves inside.  We delve into cybernetic personas online.  We kill virtual versions of one another in games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.  We spend more and more time sticking our faces in the tiny devices with transport us into an alternate version of our world we can control and manipulate.

These devices, at the same time, bring us ever deeper into an anti-mnemonic realm where nothing lasts long past the 48 hour news cycle.  One devastation quickly gets replaced by another in the media.  We condition ourselves to forget, and it becomes easy to downplay the current social and psychic climate on the planet because we piecemeal our reality in tweets and posts and video clips.  There is no longer any semblance of a sensuous, steady stream of reality, one held by an immersion into the moment.  Instead, we juggernaut forward through a fractious reality in a distracted fashion.  Short-term memory becomes lost.

In the meantime, we argue about everything.  In our effort to preserve our false sense of security and the myths of immortality we cling to, many of us adhere to the dominant group in our culture and fear the outsider.  The rest of us are pushing against the status quo in order to find a place in the world along with everybody else.  Each group just wants to feel secure.  We fight incessantly about God, drawing on literal interpretations and waging academic debates over them, or digging our heels into radical fundamentalist values and waging war.  In our daily lives we reward entertainment-value and ignore legitimacy, understandably too tired to hear about another cause, or problem, or concern in the world.

Like this one.

Just another doom-and-gloom report from the front lines of a dying world.

Does it have to be this way?

No.  We can turn over a new leaf.  I can start with myself.

Before I wrote this I was taking a shower and imagining writing something that spoke to the recent rash of tragedies.  I thought there was value in taking a look at these things not just in a newsy, one-at-a-time manner, but all together.  (Of course, I’ve barely scratched the surface with my mostly generalized list at the start of this essay.)

But then I thought, here I’ve been preaching doom-and-gloom for going on fifteen years.  I’ve spent much of my life on the fringes, looking in at the world through squinted eyes, badmouthing cars and companies and oil and sports and pop culture and any other bandwagon.  Do I really need to write yet another dark epistle about how horrible everything is?

Well, obviously I have.  The thing is, I think it’s going to be my last.  To quote from another movie, a documentary called Collapse: “I’m not going to debate anymore.”

I’ve done enough tugging on the pantleg of the world and trying to convince it that it is sick, that a reckoning is coming.  I’m tired of feeling bitter, and that what I think or do won’t change anything.  I’m tired of viewing the world as, generally, this mass of clueless people who are just going to keep on doing what they’re doing until we’re all fucked.

And we are, sorry for speaking French here, fucked.

At least, we’ve done inestimable damage, and we’re just starting to see the repercussions, both “natural” and “man-made.”

And it’s going to get worse.

But, you won’t need me to tell you.

Instead, what I solemnly pledge to myself and any of you who have actually made it to the bottom of this essay is that my new mission is to contribute something positive.  Where I would have ordinarily delivered more bleak reportage about the failing of the world, I will instead cite subjects of hope.

I’m not talking about dewy-eyed, naive idealism that electric cars are going to save the planet or small farms will be able to feed the exploding populations of India, China, Russian, and nations in Africa.  I’m not saying I’m going describe whole foods recipes and wear hemp and figure everything will be o.k.

Because brother, let me tell you, there is nothing we can do right now that will act as a panacea for our myriad troubles.  Things are going to get far worse before they get better.

It’s what we do during that time that will make the difference.  It’s how we will weather the storm.  How we will raise our children during these times, how we will change who we are and what we think we deserve in this life.  That is the only way through this and into a possibly brighter (or at least stable) future – we have to chop ourselves down, each one of us.  We have to stop bullshitting ourselves about what we take and what we feel we give back.  We need to relearn what it means to be equitable, and what reciprocity truly is.

(Hint: It’s not just recycling your cans and bottles.)

Finally, to paraphrase from one of the Zeitgeist movies:  Reality is emergent.  That means it is changing and developing all of the time, since we are changing and developing all of the time.  Our perception of reality and what actually “is” are inextricable from one another.

And reality is symbiotic.  Everything affects everything else.  Everything is interrelated.

This is not just hippie mumbo jumbo.  It is not “new age” thinking.

This is the oldest thinking that there is.  This is the ancient wisdom.  We respond to it in the same way we express our unconscious understanding through our storytelling.

And now it is time to manifest that understanding in our everyday lives, bit by bit, one day at a time.

I must move forward with a positive goal.  We are each of us Atlas, and we carry the world.

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Dude.  More published stuff.  I am a happy writer these days.

Story: Professor Jonas Comes to Visit

Genre:  I dunno.  Maybe Kafkaesque?  Is that a genre?

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Many thanks to Geoff Pierce for his help de-worming the dog.

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The inner is foundation of the outer

The still is master of the restless

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The Sage travels all day

*****yet never leaves his inner treasure

Though the views are captivating and beg attention

*****he remains calm and uninvolved

Tell me, does the lord of a great empire

*****go out begging for rice?

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One who seeks his treasure in the outer world

*****is cut off from his own roots

Without roots, he becomes restless

Being restless, his mind is weak

And with a mind such as this

*****he loses all command below Heaven

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Once you’ve read about Ernest Becker’s quest for immortality theory, you can’t un-read it.  It’s like that picture that was circulating on the internet for a while with the little girl eating a giant tarantula.  Once you’ve seen it, you can never un-see it.  These things resonate in a deep place within us.  The quest for immorality makes a lot of sense.  It’s why you went out night after night in your twenties and endured the torture of dating.  It’s why you want to accomplish something great, and leave your name behind.  Our repression of the fear of mortality is tied into the sports we play, the adventures we seek, our children, our life’s work, the way we dress, the food we eat, and everything else about our lives.

Putting my son on the bus in the morning each school day for the past four years has never lost its emotion, or its sweetness.  I’ve repressed the emotion, to some extent.  Seeing his little face in the window as he gets carted off to the distant world of school has always sent an arrow through my heart.  Even now, when he is a big boy in third grade, it still strikes me that it’s such a precious thing, this child’s life.  I smile and wave and slip back inside and get busy with other things.  In this case, “other things” is often taking care of my second child, an eleven month-old daughter.

This particular morning I found myself thinking of some other people in my life.  I thought about one man in particular, father to one of my oldest friends, who has led a fine and very interesting life.  I imagined writing a biography about him.  Or making a documentary that tells his story.  I realized there are so many people whose stories I would like to tell, if I had all the time in the world.  I want to make us all immortal.   For now, though, I’m just working on my own immortality.

I’m sure that why I write, or do anything creative, has something to do with my fear of death.  This isn’t to put a negative spin on it; creativity is a gift and it’s not just about chasing away the shadows.  We don’t know where creativity comes from, or why some people are haunted by the need to make up stories or paint pictures more than someone else, but chances are that repression of mortality is in there somewhere.  It may be genetic, it may be environmental, it may be both.  Why are some people depressed and others not so much?  Are some people more aware of their mortality than others?  Certainly some people seem to have learned to cope better.  The Dalai Lama appears to have a good handle on things.

It’s a mysterious thing, the quest for immortality.  It is more often cleverly concealed than readily apparent.  Not only does our ego fear the idea of its non-existence, but it also has convincing wiles and stratagems to camouflage its attempts at life everlasting.   Some methods of coping with mortality are rather obvious.  Religions depicting a wondrous afterlife are tied into our deepest fears of dying.  Competitions, like in team sports, are all about a winner – and even when a team wins there is a Most Valuable Player.  Team Sports are about males competing with each other for genetic superiority and procreative rights.  The winning males have proven that they can “score” more often by being physically superior – faster, and stronger.  They evade their competitors like eluding predators, and they score goals and touchdowns and baskets with little objects that are very much like seeds, or sperm.

Less obvious, maybe, is the quest for immortality found in war.  Or, more specifically, in a soldier’s idea of “serving his country” or, most pointedly, “dying with honor.”  There is a degree of anonymity in being a soldier, and nobility in serving a cause one believes in.  I’m not coming down on anyone willing to give their life to what they believe in, but observing that it is this very cause, be it patriotic or otherwise, that lends the immortality to their lives.  They fight and possibly die for something “bigger than themselves.”  Their names may be inscribed on a monument.  They will be “remembered” for their service.  More than anything, most people just want to be remembered.

When someone observes “your baby looks just like you,” we may beam with pride.  We are living on through our child.  We may create a legacy of children, or we may set out to amass a great fortune.  Of course, the saying is, “you can’t take it with you,” but we still proceed as if we could, as if our children, our wealth, our fame were enough to keep us from that inevitable door.

Greed, or hoarding, is a perversion of a basic instinct to acquire survival skills and items to protect us against the elements, or enemies.  Fundamentalism is another perversion of a natural instinct – the instinct to affiliate oneself with a larger group for protection and comfort.  This “herd instinct” is a part of our social make-up.  We see it when we observe someone wearing a jacket with their favorite sports team, or expressing their allegiance to a particular cultural affectation, like a band, or a style of clothing.  It is certainly part of our sense of nationalism.  We “in-group” ourselves and “out-group” all those not in our immediate herd.  We compete with that other herd for resources in order to survive.  That herd may be formed by religious dogma, by the borders of a country, the color of skin, or the location of a sports team.  We then create an inferior persona for those in the out-group.  We de-humanize them so that we can feel other from them in order to kill them, subjugate them, or simply not consider them struggling for the same immortality we are.  There is only so much room on the path to heaven, we may jealously think in our subconscious.  We are relentlessly pursing that which gives us identity and assuages our fear of mortality, and often this means by excluding others, and taking all we can get for ourselves.

It’s a bit out of control.  It used to be, and still is, in certain cultures, a part of the experience of living to discuss the prospect of dying and to cope with it.  That is, in a direct way; not in the sneaky, indirect ways of greed, war, and all forms of competition.

In some ways, yes, we are up front about it.  We say capitalism is about “survival of the fittest.”  But do we really understand the gravity of that? When someone is talking about survival of the fittest in regards to capitalism, on the surface they are talking about someone who isn’t as adept at getting his ideas into the market place than other, or maybe one person who is better with investing their money. The person with the greater skill – or maybe even luck – gets ahead, and the other person does not.  Law of the jungle in an economic sense.

Beneath this, though, is what each individual involved is really experiencing.  That job he gets and the other guy doesn’t, that’s his key to survival.  And not surviving just until he dies – none of us in Western Civilization think about having what we need just until we pass away and screw the rest.  No.  We have life insurance policies.  We plan to leave our spouse, or our children, or others what we aggregated during our lives.  It’s tied in to living on beyond our mortal selves, getting that job.  The guy who doesn’t, his immortality had been threatened.   This kind of survival of the fittest in capitalism is no different at its core than the kind of fear people experience when their religious beliefs are threatened.  Fundamentalism occurs after significant threats to a spiritual outlook have occurred.  Greed or abject poverty occur after significant threats to a person’s fiscal stability have occurred.  We react in extreme ways because these things are tied into such a deep fear we have, repressed since childhood, in most cases, about dying.

And this repression and the reactions to threats on the ways we have gone about our lives in this repressed state, these accrue to form the world we experience around us.  The world is composed of individuals.  Altogether, giving certain communicable tendencies like the repression of fear, this accumulates into corporate greed, into war, into poverty, into religious infighting and fundamentalism.

At the heart of all of our worldly, modern problems, is the individual’s struggle to come to terms with his own demise.  If we were to live with a greater awareness of this primer in our lives, perhaps some of the false “reality” would be removed from the illusory world, and we could move towards greater enlightenment and peace.

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Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about an impending police state or martial law, about “the socialists” and what they’ve got planned, and so on.  And it made me think of something.

You know those toy cards, the ones where you can look at it one way and see something, like Spider-man doing a kick, and then turn it slightly and look at it the other way and he’s in a different pose? That’s what all this stuff about gun control made me think of.

The gun control issue has deep roots in the age-long battle between the so-called right and left.  And since it involves the Constitution, many people dig their heels in deep.  There’s no real good argument as to why assault rifles are necessary, or even guns are necessary – a hand gun in the home is 12 times more likely to kill a friend or family member than an intruder.  And there’s no real good reason to make it a “the government can’t tell me what to do” issue, because nobody really balks at there being a speed limit, or that heroin is illegal, or that you can’t marry more than one person legally.  These we feel are reasonable restrictions on our lives.  But when it comes to guns, it becomes a power struggle.  It’s a chance to start talking about the evil empire trying to overtake and enslave us.

But I turn the card, just ever so slightly, and that’s what I already see.  I see socialism in the elite hegemony which controls the government through the banking industry.  I see a herd of automatons going to Wal-Mart, a country homogenized by Ford dealerships, strip malls and McDonalds.  I don’t see this mythical system of free-thinking people working the free-enterprise system for the benefit of all.  I see wage slaves throwing their crumbs into the mouth of the ever-inflating deficit beast.

The thing is, once you really start to think through an issue, the partisanship disappears.  An ultimate corporatocracy of bankers and private industry juggernauts are the results of capitalism run amok, and yet their existence resembles fascism, an oligarchy, or even a polygarchy.  Our economic system produces more traits in common with communism – the vast and growing global middle class acting as wage-slaves for the deficit looks like something from out of I, Robot, or what Ayn Rand was railing against in Anthem.

We all want to preserve the independent spirit of mankind, and maintain our freedoms.  But, for most of us, our use of freedom, whether we know it or not, is little more than an attempt to be comfortable and buy what we want, go where we want, and be left alone.

Real freedom, freedom from commercialism, from advertising, from debt, from the banks, from essentially economic enslavement, that’s different.  That requires a whole new paradigm to examine and to dismantle.  And I think people feel this – everyone feels something is pulling at them, and we react in this polarized fashion, with the pro-gun people gloming together over here, and the no-gun people globbing up over there.   We’re all feeling the same thing, but for whatever reason these people over here turn the 3D card just so and say it’s Obama and the “socialists” and the other group says it’s Republican rednecks and big business to blame.

It’s not either side.  It’s not about sides.  We are not a capitalist society or a socialist society. They crisscross and interweave.  Both “sides” have lost sight of essential truths, or wisdom, and instead more and more radicalism is growing so that people can feel heard in the din.  And in the midst of it, we lose logic and common sense.

Missing from the debate over gun control is whether or not the average person even really has a sense of what it is to own a gun and use it on another human being.  Lost in the argument is the simple and obvious truth that the majority of us have no real idea and are not emotionally or physically prepared to handle such a scenario.  Probably only the men and women who have been in the military understand the gravity of it.  And then you have Prince Harry, who was recently reported as comparing flying an Apache helicopter and firing on live targets with playing his Xbox back home.  You have a kid in New Mexico who just shot up his entire family (using a .22) who was said to spend an exorbitant amount of time playing Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

We have these video games and these movies where we have become completely desensitized to what it actually means to shoot someone.  And the reality of shooting someone or getting involved in a shooting is far different than we may imagine. (The one person in recent history who tried to stave off a mass murderer by returning fire was shot five times.)

I’m not saying we don’t defend ourselves.  I have a family and will do anything to protect them.  But I don’t own a gun.  Who would I be shooting?  Some storm trooper who comes to my house to take my family away from me and send them off to internment camps?  I’d probably end up shooting someone by mistake.  In a world of guns, I’m more worried about my trigger-happy neighbor mistaking me for an intruder while I’m out having a smoke one night then some government police coming to my house to take me away.

But these G-Men – they DO sometimes come, don’t they?  Don’t men in Bowler hats or Fedoras wearing trenchcoats sometimes come and take people away?

They do.  But guess what.  They work for Monsanto.  Or Halliburton.  And they come because you threaten their profit margin.  You’re trying to do something on your own, be who you are, and they don’t like it.

Doesn’t that sound like the Gestapo?  It does to me.  It sounds like a powerful, private corporation.  It sounds like the government.  Thing is, they are virtually one in the same.  So it’s not a matter of a bloviated government fixating on reducing civil liberties just for kicks.  And it’s not about big business just being the bad guy because they have a gimmick that won the game for them and made them rich.  It’s the two in collusion. It’s when the government is completely controlled by the corporations who are controlled by money. That’s the nightmare scenario.

That’s what’s happening.  All of this stringent debate over gun control is gas on the fire.  It’s making the people prone to keeping guns and worrying about the impending martial law even more paranoid.  And it’s making the people who don’t have guns tend to be more concerned than ever, worrying that these shootings and murders are only going to get worse.

Let’s stop worrying each other so much about guns, and start coming together about the things we can work on.

I recently sat down in my son’s room with a book called “How Things Work.” It was a fascinating read, about how electricity works, magnetism, car engines, generators, and all sorts of stuff.  He and I started talking about the flow of electrons through conductors and how batteries work with zinc on one side and copper on the other.  My baby daughter played around us as we talked, babbling and grabbing at things.  These two people are the future.

I want them to grow up in a world where what we’re talking about is becoming energy independent and sustainable so we don’t have bloated companies fabricating scarcity and product obsolescence in order to get us to keep buying, keep buying.  Our discourse should be about shifting our personal focuses towards resource conservation and away from the acquiring of money and power.

Once again, the issue of the day is symptomatic of a more systemic, underlying disease.  Let there be no mistake – the NRA takes in a ton of money.  It’s all about money.  We’re easily fooled by the rhetoric about rights and the Constitution because we want to badly to have something to believe in, something that protects what is our misguided sense of freedom.  We deserve to be free.  We deserve to have rights.  We deserve to form democratic groups and use our innovations to make life good, make life fun.  But once again we are rallying around an issue that obscures the real problem.  Our system is broken.  We don’t answer that by either disarming everyone or stockpiling guns in our basement.

One final word:  There’s a lot of religion-bashing going on lately, too.  Yet the biggest belief-system in an invisible god that exists on our planet is the faith in the money-market scheme.  Any human being alive who believes that the way our economy operates and the way we are exporting that system to nearly every other country on Earth is a participant in the hugest religion on the planet.  The myths of capitalism, free enterprise – they’re all just beliefs.  And today we live in a time where the man behind the curtain has been exposed, for those brave enough to look.

We don’t need to shoot that man in order to change.

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