Homeward Bound

AND FINALLY, after 12 days or so, I am just about done with the conventions and with flying and with huge political extravaganzas and with taxing my credit card and with blogging for Kenneth Cole Productions and with mixing my brain up with wildly fluctuating sleep schedules. Honestly, I have stretched my perception and comfort levels and environment to such a degree and for such a stretch of days that I nearly feel completely displaced from my own persona and identity. Nothing has remained reliable or constant: not time, not place, not people, not things, not activities. This has not been strange or disturbing as I am not so tightly wed to my “self” that I don’t know how to let these things go, should a moment present that might require it. I’ve done so before many times and I know how to roll, to shift, to adjust, to change, or just to unlock and let the gears turn until they find purchase again. If anything, though, it has been tiring. I will be glad to rest a little bit. As well as to use a full size keyboard. I am typing this entry, as I did the last one, on my iPhone.

I only regret that I couldn’t meet up with more people who extended invitations but when you both have schedules to get around and you don’t have a vehicle and are not staying downtown, these things are hard to arrange.

The two conventions had distinctly different flavors and themes (regarding my personal experience) but I won’t go into that too much here because I think I may expand on that for my last Kenneth Cole Blog (awearnessblog.com). I will say, though, that St. Paul basically felt like a land that was foreign to my experience. Not that I haven’t seen police get nasty, ugly, or violent before. It wasn’t that, it was the sheer numbers, the gas masks, the full body armor, the bikes, horses, strange military vehicles, huge formations, blockaded streets and National Guard units and camo uniforms. It must have come with an astronomical price tag and I don’t see what the point was, nor how citizens today so eagerly justify military and paramilitary presence in their streets. All of it gives me a very unsettling feeling in my gut. It seems most of the population is docile, wanting to be controlled, too comfortable, and alien to my understanding. Pathetic is another word I’d use. This subservience and rationalization that people are so happy to adopt is on the same continuum as the upper middle class bourgouise bloggers who now eschew protest, radical action, or assembling physically in large numbers to confront the system and it’s agents directly–and yet pat each other on the modem and agree they are crashing gates, shaking things up, or more laughably, “revolutionary.”

Reminds me of my last “citizen journalism” gig, for VIACOM/MTV. We were operating under the guise and brand of Citizen Journalism and yet we needed to secure more release forms than actual news units, were given constantly fluctuating rules, and last I heard (I resigned from the gig a while ago but am very much in touch with the friends and coworkers I made there) the supervisors were giving explicit and specific instructions on where to go and what to shoot, down to the shot, the content of the shot, the lighting of the shot, and told “the idea is to create a feeling that people are watching these [convention] speeches all around the country.” Levered on top of this was the very real threat that if the specific shots were not delivered, the “citizen journalist” is not to be paid a cent. Yeah. So much for citizen journalism (the essence of same) and up with Citizen Journalism(TM) the symbol.

Reminds me of The Huffington Post meeting with Pelosi, and Arianna Huffington polling her readers on what question we most wanted asked of Ms. Pelosi. Resoundingly, the consensus was IMPEACHMENT. (My administrative assistant tallied about 15 pages of comments and I have the data if Stoller or Bowers or any other geekboys want a pie chart.) Arianna substituted a different question, tried to gloss over it until readers began trippin out, at which point she offered a line about her own preferences and reasoning…which really made the idea of polling about as sensible as citizen journalism being directed and controlled by a massive corporation. I commented that HuffPost had abdicated its duties as a blog, was now in league with the MSM (which blogs supposedly exist to replace and counter) and corrupt warmongering politicians, and all that was left for The People (in the sense of trustworthy dialogue and information dissemination) were the smaller blogs–and true to form, my comment was deleted.

Corporate goodies, comfort, and personal glory and power are too tempting for most of us. I’ve seen friends I never would have guessed fall into this. I dont judge them too harshly or very long because I often need to feel my way también. Perhaps they will taste ash in their mouth and spit out the fake steak. I hold out hope. We need as many as we can gather en la lucha. Too many forces conspire to trick us, to drain us, to weaken us, to deceive us, to use us.

It is good to turn this way and that. It is fine to be unsure for a time. Or often. It is good to come home. It is better to realize you carried it with you all the while.