RYNSA: WORDS

This evening I ventured down to the St. Kilda Night Market at O’Donell Gardens very near St. Kilda beach.  I was accompanied by Xu Yan, our mutual friend Li Haizheng (English name Ellen), her parents on vacation from Changsha, China, and the unbearable slow death of the Melbourne summer heat.  The purpose of our trip was ostensibly to introduce Ellen to another good friend of mine, Michelle, and one of the co-coordinators of the market itself.  But I think also we all wanted to get out of the house and into the well-known cool night air, the same air we’ve read so much about in numerous passages of verdant fiction.

This was my last Thursday in Melbourne for a long while.  In a few days, Yan and I will leave out for Sydney and then, with my father, who has not yet arrived, on to Adelaide and Perth and many a hiking trail and camping site in between.  So this final trip to St. Kilda was somewhat sentimental for me, as I honestly do not know when I will be able to witness that particular warm, beach-front, hippie spectacle again.  For that matter, I just don’t know when I’ll get the chance to come back to Australia.  My time here is quickly slipping away, and theoretically forever.

Yes, it appears that Yan and I will be making yet another move overseas; a transition of material possessions, currency, and hopes and dreams.  While we both fervently look forward to our new (in my case re-newed) life in Tucson, Arizona, there is more than just a little sorrow that we will be leaving a city and a people that have generally been very good to both of us.  The sadness of this reality would be difficult, to say the least, if I wasn’t already deeply familiar with the tiring process of packing up and starting all over again in a totally different place.  For me, and to a certain extent for Yan as well, this is old hat.  We’ve become accidental experts at not having a place to call home.

Quite frankly, I am thoroughly unsure as to whether or not this move from Australia back to the United States is really a good one for either Yan or myself.  It feels very much like a crap-shoot, a roll of the dice, and this after months and months of careful consideration and earnest conversation wherein we weigh the pros and cons of each culture, the ups and downs of the global economy, the value (or not) of my academic training, including this new Master’s degree, the pull or repulsion of a given natural environment, and the potential — especially the potential, blessed and heavy as it is — for both of us to accomplish the things we want to accomplish in this or that city, state, country, or in our lives as a whole.  It was not an easy choice, coming home, and I still hold many legitimate doubts as to the wisdom of our final decision.

I must say, mainly because the story is conspicuously present in the global media these days and I would be foolish not to address it, that I do take some heart from the recent election of Barack Obama to the office of US president.  While I have not bought in to the messiah-like status many of my fellow countrymen and women have ascribed to this man, I do feel that he at least appreciates the importance (and stress) of a needed change in direction.  The rhetoric is redundant in this regard, and sometimes quite tiresome, but it’s also, I think, especially pertinent to our collective circumstances in these complicated times.

In trying to correct the severe mistakes (I’m being very generous to leave it at that, actually) of the previous eight years, Mr. Obama is of course working on a macro level that extends out into the whole of the human species (I don’t think I’m exaggerating here).  My microscopic, individual little experience is certainly no match for this monumental task, but I do feel a certain resonance and camaraderie and empathy with Obama’s message of ‘change.’  It seems a significant change is coming in myself as well as in my country.  It’s probable that I am not alone here.  A change is coming… for us all.  It’s coming for Michelle and Ellen and her family.  It’s coming for Yan and for me.  It’s coming, and I accept it, even despite my sleepy heart.

This is my prayer:

May I meet the challenges of this and every change with the courage of my forbearers, the bloody razor’s precision of now, and the grace of an unimagined, ungrounded tomorrow… and may I have a little bit of fun in the process.

This so-called ‘economic meltdown’ in my own beloved United States is, in my opinion, nothing more than a carefully-crafted misnomer designed to camouflage the much more comprehensive villainy of American capitalism. You can’t ‘meltdown’ a global system that has been gradually tearing away at economic sustainability for years! Everything that we’re experiencing now is the entirely predictable outcome of numerous erosive, bipartisan, neoliberal policy decisions dating back to the 1980s; policy decisions that privileged unregulated money markets and corporate interests over the needs of the state and its people.

Honestly, this was inevitable. We could see it coming from a long way off. Sunset, if you will, has finally fallen on Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’.

For details on we how got here I refer you to the writing of journalist David Sirota, author of The Uprising, who has recently provided us with a summary bibliography of key texts, and in only one sentence. From the Huffington Post, he says:

“As I note, this week we will see Thomas Frank’s wrecking crew using Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine to justify a bigger free lunch than David Cay Johnston ever imagined.”

For the life of me, I simply cannot understand how anyone could continue to espouse, or even attempt to justify, the philosophies of ‘free-market’ neoliberalism. The great, green capitalist machine has not righted itself, and now we’re expected to burn 700 billion US dollars (OMFG!!!) to cushion the fall of those who passionately claimed the market would save us. Ultimately, this massive and unprecedented bailout of the financial sector amounts to a soft landing for the least deserving and most hypocritical among us.

Politically, both the republicans and the democrats have apparently converged to reform the fascist party, an orgy of wealth, exclusivity, and corruption. With rare exception (thank you Mr. Kucinich), there is no dissent, no opposition in Washington. There’s the money, and then there’s us. The US is officially a capitalist wasteland where gains are privatized and losses socialized, and the working poor always, always foot the bill.

If ever the phrase ‘the emperor has no clothes’ was relevant to our national discourse, it would be now. And like many of my countrymen and women, I’m just sick of it. Disgust prods me awake at night, like a wiry, old finger jabbing me in the ribcage. I can’t get that ethereal Dorthea Lange photograph out of my head: a furrowed brow and three kids, the world in black-n-white, to have and to have not.

In all probability it won’t be as bad as my night frights suggest. And I hate that fear can grip me so. But then again, what do I know? I’m not a money-man… I’m just one of the millions who have to pay for it when the money-men fuck up!

Argh!!!

On the August 12th episode of Filmschool — an excellent podcast/radio show out of the University of California at Irvine (KUCI 88.9 FM) — hosts Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar interviewed author and filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman about her new cinematic project, Stealing America: Vote By Vote. This feature length documentary explores voting fraud and the overall integrity of American democracy vis-a-vis the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004.

Beyond simply calling into question the legitimacy of the final tally, Fadiman and company (including usual leftist suspect Peter Coyote as narrator) call for widespread reform of the national democratic system. On the website for the film viewers are encouraged to “become part of the solution” and “…get active in the fight for our democracy” by registering to vote, writing letters to persons of interest, making phone calls, wearing stickers and/or buttons, and a whole slew of other tasks. In other words, exactly what you might expect from a director that recently published a book entitled, Producing with Passion: Making Films that Make a Difference.

In that I haven’t yet seen this film (or read Fadiman’s book) I won’t comment on the strength of its message. I suspect that in my case, irregardless of craft, it will be just another case of preaching to the choir. I mean, is this really still in doubt? Aren’t we already aware of the problem? And, more importantly, will placing a microscope over the many flaws of the electoral system be enough to elicit a response from what appears to be a fairly disaffected American citizenry?

God, I sure hope so…