In our post-modern world progress is a given; we expect new inventions, products and lifestyles almost weekly. Of course, post-modern life is also full of irony. In this context we need to wonder when progress is no longer progress? When does are all consuming quest of the new become counter-productive?

There are some obvious examples: global-warming and habitat depletion must be considered a step backward, not forward. The upcoming demographic time-bomb also suggests another instance where moving forward may cause a step back. Emotional alienation, so common today, along with the transience that comes with abilty to regulary travel over distances our ancestors could not even dream shows more evidence of how technological advances come at a price. And yes, though the Internet connects us in ways yet to be imagined, it also puts in a position where a comfortable life requires constant connection to the network. Along those lines, the constant threat of pedophiles, indentity thiefs and other electronically based lurkers and ne’er-do-wells shows another area where something on which we have come to depend also threatens us to some degree. On a broader level, the temptation of governments to track every keystroke, phone call and transaction leaves us all in a position where freedom may fall prey to technology. Amazingly, this list is far from complete. A reread of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and The Third Wave would help more make sense of this topic.

A little history of progess is in order. Until the Renaissance no one expected progress of any type. Innovation and experimentation were shunned since precious resources could not be sacrificed. Also, only members of religious orders and the courts had the leisure time to spare for developing new methods and technologies. Most innovation came in the field and changes were guarded with extreme secrecy. With the Renaissance a sense of the new started to creep into consciousness, but stay limited to a few of the elite. Only after the Industrial Revolution did progress begin to seem possible to all classes, but this feeling pretty much remain limited to European based societies. In short, a sense of progress, the feeling that the next few years will be different from the next is new to us, so new that as whole, societies around the globe have not adapted to it.

So do we or can we stop progress? Obviously not. We have come to far to start living as we once did. Instead, we need to become more aware of our impact. The progress we take for granted takes its toll on less fortunate societies, our entire ecosystem and the cohesiveness of our social fabric. We could do better by not assuming that progress is something that should triumph over other areas of our life. We should be thankful for what we have and make more of an effort to spread the wealth over a broader spectrum. Certainly, we should not continue with the attitude that moving forward is more valuable than protecting the environment, an attitude that assuredly threatens everything we have built until now.

Yes, this is a recurring theme for me, but not one I invented. Karen Armstrong, for one, constantly brings it up through her mythos vs. logos illustrations. In fact the theme goes back to the Romantic Era wherein its propenents naively called for a return to nature. Nor do I suspect will the issue go away for quite some time. In all cases, we are better off accepting the reality rather than denying its existence.

Esphyr Slobodkina (Rus. 1908-2002) Levitator 1950 oil on masonite 25″ x 35″

Actually, most of Esphyr Slobodkina’s paintings make me swoon. For mid-century abstracts, her paintings are geometric while still being loose and free. If you think of other geometric abstracts, say Mondrian’s boxes, there is rigidity that cannot be loosened every by the addition of bright colors. Slobodkina’s paintings feel more organic because of the use of muted colors and her creation of depth by layering shapes and colors is fantastic.

I love this particular piece for the strong diagonal lines. She uses an interesting trick here. T shapes usually imply stability, diagonals imply movement. Slobodkina takes a T shape and twists it into a diagonal so you have movement to each corner of the painting with a firmly anchored center.

Ruthzilla (who likes to get me drunk and make me a rock star groupie) sent me this little bit of happy.

So earlier this week we had “Organic Sex” (otherwise known and the oh holly fuck please let my period come sex topped with a layer of crunchy granola in a yogurt vat of sperm).

Then I ran across this annoying bit- The Crunchy Con Manifesto. The funny thing is, except for a few things this guy sounds like a progressive. Let’s have some fun and tear it to shreds.

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream;
therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

Huhm- I’m gonna beg to differ on that one. Let’s wait till the end and come back to it.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the
accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our
individual and social character.

Conservatism has always been based on the continued accumulation of wealth and power- that’s the nature of conservatism. To be conservative is to approve of the power structure as it stands and to keep it that way in the future. Character is a ridiculous word thrown out by people who cannot speak to their own good acts and so use a fuzzy, non-descript word like character or morals. Everyone has character, except maybe those in a coma.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

Uhm- PROGRESSIVE- duh. We don’t trust big government either, but as long as we have free and fair elections at least we can fire government when it screws up. You can’t fire big business.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

Culture is only more important than politics and economics when everyone has equal access to political and economic foundations. Culture becomes really unimportant when you can’t feed your family.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good
stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

Progressive- progressiveprogressiveve. Good stewardship of the natural world iparticularlyry and fundamentally progressive.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global,
New, and Abstract.

How are you applying these terms? Small houses, local produce, recyled materials=Progressive McMansions, slave-labor foreign produce, new disposable Walmart products= Conservative.

Though you could look at it this way: Small-minded, local corruption, old boys club = Conservative. Big tent, global respect, netechnologieses= Progressive.

I’ve got to wonder about the inclusion of particular and abstract. I smell a little bit otoilette water. It means not making grand abstract statements like “All men are created equal”, and instead judging wich particular men are your equal, or better, or worse.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

Dude, the stupid generalizations are getting silly. I need an efficient toothbrush, I could care less about how it looks if it works. I need beautiful music, I could care less about how efficiently it was produced.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to
authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

Couldn’t agree with you more. So fund more arts programs, libraries, music programs- Progressive progressive progressive.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to
conserve is the family.”

There are 2 ways of looking at this one, depending on how you use conserve. Now progressives would agree if conserve means to protect from loss or harm. Progressives think that harm is done to families by poverty, forced pregnancy, and refusal to grant legal status to families because they do not meet “traditional” standards.

Now if conserve means to limit, then family must not be as esential an institution as you say it is. If you want to limit families, then their value to society must be small while their cost to society is great. Why elese would you want to conserve them, they aren’t an endangered species.

10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives

Culture is the collection of beliefs, ideas and practices of a society. It is always changing to accomodate the politics and economics of the time. Culture is not, nor has it ever been, a stagnant set of rules and mores. By conserving these “Permanent Things” you are trying to put the cart before the horse. Culture follows politics and economics.

Because I got a little giddy seeing this headline:

Plane Registered to Pat Robertson Crashes

instead of sitting here is trying to deal with the jungle that has become my yard.

It’s just a postage stamp of a yard, maybe 10′ by 20′. When I first moved in a few years ago there were plans to grow things. But I have a black thumb. Since I managed to find one of the few apartments with a private yard in the city, yardless friends volunteered to grow things for me. Promises, promises.

Last year I spent a week cutting back the blackberries and morning glories that has taken over. It was kind of a battle to the death for the two invasive plants. Each one had staked out territory on opposite ends of the fence and it was a race to see which would become the dominant bush. By the time I started hacking away, a small oak tree in the middle had become the first casualty in the plant wars.

Today I was going to go start the de-greening process. The grass is almost waist high and the blackberries seem to be winning this year. But it started to pour rain. I guess my diplomatic pruning skills will have to wait.

On the Right, Bustah Blackberry coming in at 5 feet tall and 7 feet wide.

On the Left, the scrappy, scraggly Morning Glory goes for the divide and conquer defense by sending shoots off to both the left and right. At the far right of the picture is the body of the dead little oak tree- now covered in vines.

In one of my typical alice-following-the-rabbit web-wanderings, i came across a list of notable figures “speculated to have been autistic”

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always
contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other
human beings and human communities. I am truly a lone traveler and have never
belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with
my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of
distance and a need for solitude…”

WrongPlanet.net

Blogger is acting up. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one day free of computer related problems?

In the mean time:
1) The White Stripes-I Just Don’t Know What To Do WIth Myself
2) THe Sundays: I Feel
3) Giant Sand: Mountain of Love
4) They Might Be Giants: Chess Piece Face
5) Le Tigre: Punker Plus
6) James Brown: Cold Sweat
7) Stevie Wonder: You and I
8) The Spinanes: Entire
9) The New Pornographers: MAss ROmantic
10) Death Cab for Cutie: Death of an Interior Decorator

Every day the Bush Administration brings a mind-boggling litany of insanities to the fore.
One of today’s absurdities creating a pile of anger here on the East Coast is the big reduction in federal Homeland Security funds being parceled out to New York. The city’s share of the law enforcement funds was cut to $124.5 million, from $207.7 million last year. Reason? The feds determined that there are “no national monuments or icons” in the city, according to a story in The New York Times.
That’s right, the federal government doesn’t know there are important things in the most important city in the world, which for some odd reason is repeatedly the location of actual terrorist attacks.
In the plane of reality in which the Bush administration presides, terrorists are salivating at the catastrophic national panic they could create blowing up a mall in Topeka or Tacoma as opposed to something unobtrusive like, oh, I don’t know, Rockefeller Center or the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building or the World Financial Center or Times Square or Madison Square Garden or ….

As one who has never been a fan of the Dixie Chicks and probably never will be, I nonetheless have to give them a standing ovation for the way they have not buckled in to the pressure surrounding lead singer Natalie Maines’ 2003 criticisms of our Dear Leader, er, I mean George W. Bush. Watching their grace in interviews and refusal to give in to their graceless critics, one can only wish that leading Democrats like Joe Biden and Dick Durbin had as much balls as the Chicks.

Beyond the personal dignity of the ladies in the band, the brouhaha is Exhibit 14,251 in the argument that there is no liberal media. The Chicks’ records — even the non-political songs, which is the majority of their work — have been banned from most country stations, despite their popularity. That means stations are acting against their economic interest to carry on a ridiculous grudge.

Plus, Maines has been and will continue to be excoriated for years. Not just by unhinged fans, but her right to speak her mind will be the main issue in her media interviews for years to come. The fact is, the vast majority of fans either agree or don’t care what she said about Bush, but the media will focus on this as if it were something critical. Sort of like the marriage of a certain political couple.

And the most infuriating part of all this, of course, is that no public figure gets hounded for praising Bush. Or more on point, for criticizing Democrats. No accusation is wild enough or inaccurate enough or just plain despicable enough to warrant more than a mild rebuke, if that. Right-wing authors routinely accuse Democrats — in specific and general — of being all sorts of things, including murderers.