inauguration
a nice inquiry into the process, the word, the aesthetic of this exciting national moment here:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Tim-Girvin/644114347#/profile.php?id=644114347&v=app_2347471856&viewas=521683943
so we’ll start where he left off. the word comes from a long tradition of sage-divination, called augury, from augur, “to divine.” it commonly involved an observation of the patterns of bird movement, and sometimes an examination of the entrails of birds and other animals. not totally unlike the reading of fortunes in Turkish coffee grounds.
here: the Vaux swifts coming to roost in the Chapman elementary school chimney, an astounding occurrence every autumn in Portland, OR, where tens of thousands of these petite birds ALL come to roost in this brick stack.
so what is the portent, what the reading? what’s at hand in auspices of this inauguration? what auspicious, what ill-portended? i predicted during the election of 2004 (being totally unsatisfied with the presentation of Kerry) that the coming years of titanic error, war, and unconstitutional leadership would present the country with the first great leader in decades. some of those that heard this prediction have called me and commented on the… well, let’s just use it here… the augury of that reading four years ago. not that i’m an augurist. it’s not an office that i would deign to hold any time soon. Tiresias, one of the more prominent actors in the ancient opus of tragedies and myth, a blind seer, and likewise blessed with ability to read into the patterns of birds, would call out all kinds of omens in the ancient world, including the curse of Oedipus. you might remember that this news was violently received: in other words, that the king was not amenable to founding an empire on a patricide and maternal incest, not necessarily good omens for leadership. this and these kinds of readings came out of augury, an interpretation of the gods’ will in the flight of birds; the inauguration being the ceremony of connecting the leaders with the omens. so I have some ideas about how to explore these connections in the modern world, and we’ll see if we can’t make steps to learning what going on these days with a modern version of the ceremony.
I do not mean to intend that something ill is at hand at this inauguration, one of the most attended ceremonies in THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD,
but to listen-in to some of the deeper currents of what’s taking place in our nation, on our little blue marble…
this inauguration brings with it the weight of past decisions: poorly built financial instruments, poorly run wars in two different countries, not that we don’t bless those fighting them, a network of terrorists and terrorism that seems to disseminate more powerfully the more we try to attack and kill them, a heightened escalation in violence between Israel and Hamas, a now accepted pattern of global climate change and, interestingly, a totally interconnected globe in terms of economic, and now social designs. and with the weight of these poorly made decisions (which WE ARE ALL responsible for) comes this guy,
nicely balancing the vacuum of leadership in the past eight years. he has been compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt not a little in this inauguration for the similar history he inherits: a legacy of errors, an economic collapse, and gross unemployment. at the time FDR took office, unemployment was at 25%… while another 25% of the nation was only minimally employed. he insightfully began the famous stimuli of fireside talks with the nation, over the radio (similar to obama’s youtube casts, etc.), telling Americans to keep their money in banks and have faith that their work is important and will reap fruits, meanwhile beginning the famous public works programs, and The New Deal. this led nicely to WWII, which we know was a tremendous stimulus to the nation’s “economy.” and that incredible stimulus package led to large steel American automobiles, uninsulated houses, coal stacks, concrete dams, McDonalds and the insight that Brazil is incredible for grazing cows, burgeoning global trade and dependence on foreign resources like oil, and more and more, a dependence on goods made overseas, like almost all technologies: designed here, made elsewhere. and here’s what our debt does:
noticing that second diminishing line, keep in mind that GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports - imports)
that last piece being the clincher, exports-imports leaves us tremendously negative, consumption is in general of goods produced over seas, which investment follows… and government spending is in the form of debt to china and directed towards national security and financing extreme long term wars.
i’m starting to get a little neg here and want to rewind a little to my real question. it is: what happened?
i don’t want to argue that FDR did something bad in so ingeniously “stimulating” the economy, but by all intents and measures, that stimulous seems to have initiated Americans down a great path towards debt and lack of control over their consumption. it appears to me that we’ve gone into debt for crap. we’ve charged crap. and lost value. so the second part of the question is: what are we doing? i mean by that, what are we DOING? (following the great Latin expression, age quod ages) as in, how do we bleed, sweat, cry, fight, and love to stay alive? what are we doing to make ends meet? how are we trading value with others? since the public works, we’ve “re-built” the nation, but lost all native industry to china, thailand, india, south america, etc., importing EVERYTHING, making next to NOTHING. so if we haven’t been making stuff for the world, what have we been doing? we made the internet. people like that. we make movies, people like those. (California is the seventh largest economy on earth.) i do not intend to reprimand or bewail America and U.S. citizens, but simply want to open up a discussion about VALUE. where is it, what do we do to regain it? we know how to work, so how do we begin to work for others, to provide the services THEY need, to give them our tremendous native creativity and industry, and trade real value, trade with them what can only be generated here, and receive from them what can only be generated there, by which we do not mean a cell phone.
value. what’re your thoughts?
playing for change
A film by this title recently came out, directed by Mark Johnson, a New York film producer who, traveling the subway early one morning was arrested by the beauty of two monks performing, singing, and stopping the foot traffic in the subway. His realization that music is a force. A force that can find commonality among humans rather than exploit difference. He conceived of this film at that moment, a film which features songs “Stand by Me” and “One Love.” He spent ten years making it, and chose 100 artists from around the world and brought them together with satellite patches and audio technology to make a song, happening around the world at once.
Here’s the link to Bill Moyer’s interview with Mark Johnson:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12052008/watch3.html
and the words to “Stand by Me”:
(by Ben E. King)
When the night has come
And the land is dark,
And the moon is the only light we’ll see.
No I won’t be afraid,
Oh I won’t be afraid,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
So darlin’ darlin’ stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Oh stand, stand by me, stand by me.
If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall,
Or the mountain should crumble to the sea.
I won’t cry, I won’t cry,
No I won’t shed a tear,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.
And darlin’ darlin’ stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Whoa stand now, stand by me, stand by me.
Darlin’ darlin’ stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Oh stand now, stand by me, stand by me.
Whenever you’re in trouble just stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Whoa stand now, oh stand, stand by me.
It’s hard to watch this piece and not be moved… as the performers sing, “I won’t cry, no, I won’t shed a tear.”
I.O.U.
We’re online. So; so.
(Thanks to all of you who’ve helped to guide Principium into place!)
It’s a very exciting time to be initiating this project, this experiment. Not just because no one has any money, we’re on the edge of a great depression, and climate change is at a tipping point… but because we now have a very clear set of indicies about how design, behavior, consumption and political organization have extremely palpable effects, and because we ARE able to change that organization, change our legacy, our story…
The financial crisis is a great springboard for a discussion of leadership. It is also a relatively small crisis in the scope of what we’re about to face as a global community in terms of the aforementioned organization: energy, carbon footprints, international trading patterns, ecological distress, etc. Yet here we are, with this elegantly placed situation: the greatest trauma to the U.S.A. maybe since the time of Lincoln, a very exciting transition in top government leadership, incredible crises in the transportation sector (Big 3 auto companies going down), as well as new questions about top corporate leadership, benefits, etc… and we get to examine the specific behaviors that have led us to this place. The history is history, but the behaviors are INTACT. So how do we begin to transform? By changing behavior. How? By changing the way we make decisions. Again, how? That is the beginning of a long discussion, one that we are committed to entertaining over the coming years.
So why is a financial crisis such a powerful harbinger for a greater scope of leadership problems, and social organization? There is some mystery here, but there is also a clear relationship between money and what we do, how we do it. How we travel, where we live, what we eat and where, and what we do to make a living. What we do is the most obvious sticking post of our identity, our membership in society. When money represents how we trade value with others, how we give and receive, and when that value becomes harshly compromised, it forces the question, what exactly are we doing? What happened to blacksmiths and cobblers, bakers and carpenters? Now we are more brokers, bankers and borrowers. Craft has been lost somewhere and we have gotten caught up in a fight to be able to borrow more and more, against a value base that continues to diminish. So a crisis of this nature is exciting, because it indicates a natural order in the market: an order that indicates that perhaps real value MUST be the underlament of our market activities, which means that we must work harder than ever to re-discover that native sense of making, of creative intelligence.
From Webster’s Dictionary:
crisis |?kr?sis|
noun ( pl. -ses |-?s?z|)
a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger : the current economic crisis | a family in crisis | a crisis of semiliteracy among high school graduates.
• a time when a difficult or important decision must be made : [as adj. ] a crisis point of history.
• the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death.
• the point in a play or story when a crucial conflict takes place, determining the outcome of the plot.
ORIGIN late Middle English (denoting the turning point of a disease): medical Latin, from Greek krisis ‘decision,’ from krinein ‘decide.’ The general sense [decisive point] dates from the early 17th cent.
TO DECIDE.
Isn’t it telling that our culture has inverted the meaning of the word, to imply something pejorative and unwanted?
Saw this film some weeks back:
Available through Netflix. It is a potent reminder that what we’re beginning to struggle with now in terms of financial ideology and global trade is a mere fraction of the actual outstanding debt obligations we have as a country. And that is of course a reflection of how we behave as individuals, directing this society.
In coming posts and research we shall examine some of the steps necessary to bring about a revaluation of values from the foundation. What is the real context of the behavioral shift necessary to transform this pattern of creating future liability to one of legacy creation?
What’re your thoughts?