Really White Dude Saves World (Almost)

Hello lovely people.

I promised more blogging action, so here we are!  Buckle up!

Some of you may recognize this:

A PR poster for the "Kony 2012" movement.

Forgive me for disagreeing.

If you don't recognize this, you can familiarize yourself with this Wikipedia article, or you can watch the "Kony 2012" video, which went viral not too long ago and got about 4000 billion majillion views in the first ten days of its appearance on the web. 

Briefly, Kony 2012 is an awkward video produced by a non-profit-ish organization called "Invisible Children."  The director of the video is one Jason Russell.  

Peace lover and self-proclaimed "good guy" Jason Russell,

being quintessentially American, appears here as the

right-most heavily armed white guy.

In the video, we are presented with a barrage of slick video effects and countless images which purport to accurately portray the problem with a man named Joseph Kony, the leader of the "Lord's Resistance Army," a militant group operating around the central region of Africa.  The LRA is a murderous crew who generally pillage and kill and rape and steal.  

I won't dispute that this guy has some severely

dickish modes of living...

One of the LRA's tactics, probably the one they are best known for, is kidnapping young children, while simultaneously forcing them to commit terrible acts, such as killing their own parents.  Forcing young kids to kill their parents assures that the children have little motivation to escape from the LRA, and also puts them in a psychologically brittle state, allowing the LRA to turn the young men into child soldiers.  Kidnapped girls and women are, from what can be discerned, normally turned into sex slaves.

The Kony video takes advantage of, in a very intelligent way, just about every possible aspect of viral internet marketing.  The video is aimed at children.  It plays off emotion with heartbreaking interviews of people affected by the LRA, and attempts to pull at the heart strings even more when Russell presents information about Kony to his very young son.  The child is too young to understand geopolitics, war, child-militancy, rape, slavery or revenge.  But the child agrees that Kony is a bad guy and that his father is the good guy that fights bad guys.

Here are a couple of other self-proclaimed American "good guys"

whose job (they decided) was to get revenge on "bad guys."

This image provided as a "self-proclaimed good guy" reference point.

The video was also marketed directly to influential public figures, including key political policy makers and several icons of pop culture who hold significant sway with their (again, very young) fan-base.  They even targeted my beloved Lady Gaga.

I saw this video just before it went viral.  I was somewhat unimpressed, but knew that it would "blow up," as they say.  I was awed by how perfectly the campaign had been put together, and I had to give it to Russell: he had done his homework.  As planned, the video exploded and was all over the news.  As with anything these days, there was almost immediately a loud dissenting voice in the media against the video.  

Then, a couple of weeks later, Russell appeared to have a mental breakdown of sorts in San Diego where he lives.  Here's a man with an accent giving the bullet points of that situation.  He was running around his neighborhood in his undies screaming and holding up traffic.  At some point he was on the ground banging his fists against the concrete.  I don't mean to be a dick-hole, but I wasn't completely surprised at this event.  The video he had made, while tactically brilliant, had portrayed its director as narcissistic in a creepy way that I couldn't quite verbalize. 

The crux of this issue doesn't have much to do with Russell's mental health, though.  To be sure, I've been arrested under similar circumstances before, so no judgment on the public nudity or apparent insanity.  I've been there.  Let's move on.

I won't get into the various ways the Kony 2012 video glossed over details or otherwise failed to give the full story of the LRA.  You can read about that at any number of news sites online by searching Google.

My point is this:

This video was absolutely being sold to a young and impressionable audience.  I don't mean to say that kids are necessarily dumb.  In fact, I believe that children today are by and large more full of knowledge than any other young generation before them (thank you, Wikipedia.)  But the fact is that Invisible Children, at the end of the day, is advocating for US and world policy makers to send armed troops into the heart of Africa to exact justice (read: vengeance) in a violent way against the LRA (many of whom are the very same children kidnapped and forced into militancy through a myriad of bizarre mind-control mechanisms.)  The video is very ambiguous about the kinds of operations that would be required in order to hunt down and kill Joseph Kony.  I say "kill" deliberately, as my bets are he wouldn't go peacefully in such an event.  

Despite the strategic fuzziness of the Invisible Children's ideal end-game, the video is not ambiguous about the fact that wearing a "Kony 2012 Bracelet" (pictured below) is super cool.

The Kony 2012 BFF Super Awesome Fun Club Bracelet with 

Super Secret Fun Club Serial Number.

Compare to these wicked animal rubber-band bracelets,

which were equally as hip:

Further, the video is not at all ambiguous when it portrays the situation as "black and white" (no racial pun intended.)  They unequivocally share the message that members of Invisible Children are absolutely "good" and that the LRA is absolutely "bad."  This was elucidated, again, by Russell's child.

The video is not ambiguous about the fact that everyone will be Konying, including your favorite movie actors, your favorite singers, some politicians you may know, and all of your cool friends.  It's going to be the hottest thing since The Hunger Games, and if you wanna have friends then you better get the fuck on board!

Peer pressure is a bitch when you're a kid and viral videos pop up on your screen offering bracelets and moral indemnity.

My other main issue with the whole thing is a broader look at what this campaign indicates about the western world.  The video kinda says it all here.  It shows a (presumably) wealthy white man (Russell) using very expensive technology from his presumably expensive home to make a video about a situation on a continent where some 250 million or more struggle to get enough food to even sustain their bodies on a daily basis.  I'm not saying Russell is wrong for being concerned about his friends in Uganda (well, not in Uganda now, but that doesn't matter, right?)  I'm saying, as per usual, that wealthy do-gooders have missed the mark.  

But, then again, the affluent and self-righteous

have a knack for missing the mark, eh?

Net worth: $160 million.

The issue of Kony pales in comparison to the issues of both world hunger and western military imperialism.  To appeal to the US government to take action, which would necessarily be military in nature, against anyone, is an insane thing to me.  

The world consistently produces more calories than it would take to feed the entire world, and yet 250 million in Africa want for food, 100,000+ civilians in Iraq die for no just cause, and the world reaches a fever pitch with America unwilling to reign in the state of Israel for its illegal and brutal actions in the West Bank area, bringing us ever closer to the yawning fiery chasm of nuclear annihilation.

If we send in choppers and men with guns to mow down Kony and his close friends, or, alternatively, arrest him and allow Uganda to execute him, all the folks who watched the Kony video will get a warm fuzzy feeling for a minute, thinking: "I really helped when I 'liked' that video."  But American consumer capitalism will continue to infect the globe, and the wealthy guys running Invisible Children will continue to live their wealthy lifestyles, which is the very reason the whole world is so jacked up in the first place.

Consumerism continues to blame the ailing human race on anything that isn't consumerism.  Kony is somehow the number one problem, not the simple minded hedonism of millions of Americans hypnotized to the point of drooling by their $2,000 flat panel televisions.  The worst part, for me, is that I am a knowing participant in this madness!

Rrrr... sorry.  Can you sense my frustration?

In review, I give the Kony video one half of a "Charles Head."  Recall that here we rate things on a scale of five Charles Heads (five is the best.)  For those ready to rip into me, note that I suggested Jason Russell was narcissistic, yet I use my own ugly face as a rating system for all things.  Bash me. 

I'm only giving the video the half-head (as opposed to zero heads) because I really admire the way they were able to get 40 mazillion babillion video views in .4 hours.  That deserves some recognition no matter what the video was about.

I'm interested in your opinion about the Kony issue.  Does anyone think that there are more peaceful or effective ways to go about helping Africa?  And, please, don't tell me "organic farming."  My head (or rather my five Charles Heads) will explode if you tell me non-industrial farming is going to feed that continent.

On a wildly different note, I'd also like to rate this movie:

Drive starring super sexy Ryan Gosling.

This movie gets five drawn Charles Heads.  

(Drawn ones are arbitrarily better than photographed ones.)

The movie gets five heads because it was better than any movie I've seen in a long time, and because Ryan Gosling gives me a phantom clit-boner.  I can't explain how good the acting, cinematography and soundtrack were.  You just have to see it.  Trust me on this.  I distrust Hollywood and loathe most of the rolled up balls of shit that come out of it, so it takes a lot for me to love a Hollywood film like I loved this one.

And that about wraps it up for today.  I don't know what else to say except that peace and personal austerity is the answer to the ills of the world.  We have a collective spirit or will that can only be uncovered when the trappings of advertisement and conspicuous consumption have been removed.  Kony would have a hard time doing what he does if Africa were fed and set upright, and Africa would be fed and set upright if I didn't spend money seeing movies like Drive, but rather dedicated my resources to more loving and spiritual matters.  (BTW, I didn't pay to see Drive.  *wink wink*.)

Hope I didn't bum you all out.  I'll write something happier in the next installment.  Remember: comment, link and share to help me go more viral than Joseph "dickwad" Kony himself!

Love.

Back Again and Still Crazy

Hello wonderful humans.

I've been away again.  I'm consistently the least consistent blogger in the world, I think.  My blog continues to get hits everyday, usually for my post about man nipples.  But I've been away from all things online and social recently.  I've been through a dark couple of months.

I'm not sure what to do now.  I'm going to do what seems to be the next most sensible thing: start blogging again, and perhaps a little more seriously than I have in the past.  I feel confident in my blogging skills, and, I think, with a little extra effort on my part, I might be able to leverage my limited skill and my readership into something bigger.  I feel confident in little else.

I'm in school this semester.  Again.  I made the decision to go back to school based on a lot of factors, but the biggest of those factors was a financial one.  In retrospect, I wish I would have made a different decision.  I'm looking for some gainful employment in the town I'm living in, and have given up on school in general.  There's a possibility of me returning to the halls of academe some day, but I think that it's a slim possibility.

Summer is coming.  I'm glad about that.  I've gotten to walk barefoot outside again for the first time in several months.  The first couple of times I took it easy.  Then one day I walked all the way to school at a good clip, which is about a 45 minute walk.  This yielded some gargantuan nasty-ass blisters on my feet.  The blisters forced me to stop walking barefoot for a couple of days, but now the blisters have popped, hardened, and sloughed off, leaving new, leathery skin to walk on.  Actually, I popped the blisters myself.  I put a pin hole in each blister and then squeezed them.  The puss shot out like water out of a Super Soaker, which really appealed to the little kid in me.  My mother thinks I am crazy, I guess, and rolls her eyes or sighs audibly when I tell her that I'm going for a walk.  "He should be doing other things," I suppose is what she is thinking.  I'm happy less often today than I was six months ago, though.  I have not wept tears of joy spontaneously in a long time, and walking barefoot in the sun listening to some Indigo Girls or some dirty dirty dub-step is one of the only things that brings me any closer to that place of joy today.

I've read a lot during my absence from the internets.  I read some Noam Chomsky (he's the best), some Alan Watts, some Emma Goldman, Gandhi's interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, several writings by Leo Tolstoy, a short book that was sort of an instruction manual on how to implement an anarchist social revolution in France, The Hunger Games, some ancient Chinese philosophy, some Tim Leary, some Terrence McKenna and even the Gospels of Matt, Mark, Luke and John.  

Here's how this happened.  I was reading about various peaceful folks online.  I found myself reading the Wikipedia article on Gandhi.  I was surprised to see, in several places, Gandhi described as an anarcho-pacifist.  That is to say, he believed ultimately in the abolition of the state apparatus through peaceful means, and, further, he believed the state to be the source of a bulk of the world's violence. I was elated by this.  I consider myself some sort of anarcho-pacifist.  

Further reading showed that Gandhi had had correspondence with Leo Tolstoy, the writer of War and Peace and other novels.  The information they had shared had been in relation to peace, austerity, and anarchism.  This prompted my research into Tolstoy.  I had known little about him before, aside from the fact that he had wrote War and Peace and that, while a classic, it was a ridiculously long book.

I came to discover that Tolstoy, in his old age, had found his life of decadence and wealth (afforded him both by inheritance and by a lucrative writing career) to be the source of his spiritual pain and the source of the literal pain of the poor peasants in Russian during the latter portion of the 1800's.  Reading on, I was amazed to discover that he had become so dissatisfied with his wealth and the wealth of those around him that he had given all of his estate to his wife and children and taken to working in the field with peasants chopping wood and learning how to make boots.  I had never known anything about this man, but as I started reading some of his later works, I was moved in a tremendous way.  Much of his thinking paralleled my thinking in the moment, and I felt as though I had found some kindred spirit through the pages he had left behind.

After reading the Bhagavad Gita as interpreted by Gandhi (which I was absolutely blown away by, and which also paralleled a lot of my current ideals) and subsequently having read the stuff by Tolstoy (specifically What Then Must We Do? and A Confession) I became compelled to read the Gospel of Christ.  My immediate compulsion, in fact, was to read the entire New Testament.  I have yet to do so, but I did read the four Gospels.  Interestingly, although having been raised Catholic, I never read the Bible.  I find this to be common among Christians and former Christians.  This is a fascinating anomaly to me, as it seems counterintuitive that so many people can profess faith in a man's divinity without having ever even read the closest thing we have to an account of his life.

My interest in the Gospel came primarily from Tolstoy's fascination with the "Sermon on the Mount," which is the main teaching that Christ was supposed to have given to his followers.  Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church for his writings and views on Christianity, as his interpretation of the Gospel led him to believe that Christ himself was something of an anarcho-pacifist. Reading the synoptic Gospels affirmed to me Tolstoy's belief about Christ's message.  To clarify, the synoptic Gospels are the first three, Matt, Mark, and Luke, and are the most relevant, as their narratives are very parallel and they were most likely written before the Gospel of John was.  The Gospel of John seemed, to me, wildly different, and much of it seemed as though it were written as a response to various questions people would have had about the relation of Jewish law to the new Christian theology at the time.  John seemed like a weird sales pitch, to me.

I don't have any beliefs that I would call religious, and my interest in the words of Christ is a philosophical interest.  I find that lifestyle the prescribed by Christ in the first three Gospels is indeed one of complete pacifism, extreme physical austerity, and overwhelming love and forgiveness.  It was funny to be reading all of this during the Republican primary race, in which a big group of Christian men seemed bound and determined to do everything they could to violate pretty much everything Christ ever said.  I wonder if those gentlemen have read the Gospels?  Are they reading a special Gospel I haven't heard about?  Or perhaps dyslexia is to blame for their gross misinterpretation...?

I digress.  

While reading the Gospels, for a couple of reasons, I decided to start going to mass on Sundays with my mom (and sometimes dad).  The biggest reason I decided to do this was that I wanted to be able to share a spiritual, meditative time with my family, and it seemed like the easiest way to do that was to go with them to their place of worship.  The second reason was that I had become so enamored with the philosophical prescription of Christ, which was almost precisely the philosophical prescription of Tolstoy, which was almost exactly the philosophical prescription of the Bhagavad Gita, which was almost the exact philosophical prescription of an ancient Chinese thinker named Zuangzi, that I wanted to go hear someone explore the Gospel orally in real time.  I left all of my prejudice behind, put on some nice clothes, and dove in.  I've really enjoyed it.  Sometimes the sermon the priest gives is spot on and completely in synch with the things I had been reading and learning.  Occasionally, the sermons veer off into weird territory about homosexuality's sinfulness and the like.  I take the palatable with the not so palatable, and enjoy the art and ceremony of the Mass.  I don't think that my parents expect anything from me in this regard, and I believe that they are happy to share their spirituality with me in any way, even if it is on an academic and philosophical level.  This has been a positive experience for me.

Along these same lines, I decided to give something up for Lent, which is a general Catholic tradition.  My parents almost never eat meat on a Friday.  Not just special Fridays, but on all Fridays.  Since I had been experimenting with fasting and trying to reduce my meat intake anyhow, I figured it would be interesting to get in on the Lent thing by giving up meat all together for 40 days.  When I was a kid, I would half-heartedly give up something like candy for Lent.  Giving up meat has proven a hell of a lot harder.  I had one meat relapse a couple of weeks ago, a moment of weakness involving some hamburger.  But otherwise, I haven't eaten meat since the Lenten season began.  I like to consider the story of Christ wandering the desert in his ascetic meditation for 40 days and 40 nights.  If that really happened, that would have been a lot harder than 40 days with no meat.

All of this reading and thinking, coupled with some of the revelations I made about life last summer and autumn, have led me to a great interest in asceticism and even in monasticism.  I have read a lot about various monastic traditions, from the Desert Fathers (possibly the very first Christian monks, a group of men and women who wandered around in the deserts of Egypt with next to no possessions, praying and meditating and pushing their bodies to the limits of physical need) to modern Buddhist monasteries that exist here in America.  I frequently think that, if I didn't have so much circumstantial chaos in my life right now, I would be happy to give myself to a monastic life, where celibacy, silence, meditation, prayer, reading and writing would be the most important things in my life.  But, alas, I'm no good at celibacy, my circumstantial life is a true mess, and I think most monks have to profess a faith in some specific kind of religion, which I cannot.

I'm apprehensive about the future.  Where I once recently had overwhelming confidence that everything would work out, I now feel increasingly pessimistic.  I have been beating myself up badly over the decision to return to school.  Various bills become late, then past due, then severely past due, as the student loan money dwindles away.  I feel like a pathetic shell of myself when I worry about money.  One of the loudest voices inside me tells me that I ought to just declare bankruptcy and start fresh, because the hole I dug for myself with my previous way of living seems too deep to crawl out of.  Considering this, and considering the general nature of the world and of my consciousness, my mind has ventured on occasion in the last few months toward self-destruction, namely in the form of the complete surrender of suicide.  Obviously, this is not an appealing option.  I had a brief discussion with a friend about the moral quality of suicide.  He told me that suicide is selfish.  I don't believe that there is a universal objective moral quality to selfishness, but I suppose for me personally selfishness is not something I want in my life (anymore).  I am a person who has been entertaining fanciful thoughts of killing myself since I was very young.  I also feel that, outside of the realm of severe alcohol abuse, I have never even came close to actually wanting to die, and have never made even a half-hearted attempt at ending my own life definitively.  It's a little awkward mentioning all of this here, but I just wanted to let any interested party know what's been going on with me.  No need for alarm, I'm not a danger to myself.

Soooo....

All sadness/depression and spiritual philosophizing aside, I'd like to take a moment to re-assert myself.  

I'm Charles.  I believe in peace and pacifism both as philosophy and as literal prescription for personal behavior.  

I believe that love can change the world, and that without rapidly changing its course to a path of complete love and forgiveness, the human race is destined to live a little longer here on this planet, discovering new and more efficient methods of separating and killing one another, and that at the end of that period we will experience complete annihilation at our own hands.  

I believe in intellectual and spiritual (or psycho-social) plenty, and I believe that physical austerity is probably the most efficient means by which to attain inner-plenty.  

I believe that I am surrounded with other human beings who love me and care about my well-being and are willing to go to great lengths to see me happy and successful in my endeavors.  I believe in romantic love, although I believe that human culture has gone to great lengths to prohibit and pervert the ideal of romantic love, which I believe is healing.  

I believe that I can change the world for the better, but that it is my choice to do so or not, as opposed to some sort of fateful imperative.  

I believe that when I judge people, I sacrifice my ability to love, and that when I hold grudges and sacrifice my ability to love, I sacrifice the most meaningful or perhaps the only meaningful thing in life, which is my ability to be content in the moment.  

I believe that objective morality does not actually exist, no matter how many philosophers, both religious and secular, want to try to say that it does.  In place of morality, I try to see things as either constructive to the human race or destructive to the human race.  Good and evil are subjective constructs used to separate humans from one another, whereas love and forgiveness seem to bind people together in a constructive manner.  I may call things "good" or "bad" on occasion, but what I mean is that things seem either, in the case of the word "good," optimized for human longevity, or, in the case of the word "bad," optimized for an early end to the human race.  

I believe that through technological advancements, some of the people alive today may be able to live indefinitely.  My belief is that through other technological advancements, the veil of judgement and misunderstanding can be lifted from the human race, that we might know one another more fully, which would lead inevitably to lasting peace.  

I believe that governments are the primary source of violence in the world, and that the human race can exist easily without the dark shadow of government cast upon its face.  

I believe that to live in modern times, particularly in the Western world, is to be at constant battle with one's will, or conversely, to completely succumb to the forces of consumerism and hedonistic, pathological greed.  

I believe that I am supposed to write, and I hope that somehow I can be granted a reprieve both from the state and from my overwhelming debt so that I might someday soon be free to wander in the sun, to write what I think is important to write, and to love.  

I've also come to believe in labor of the body, and look forward to being employed to that end.  I believe that to labor with one's body is a form of austerity that brings about inner-peace, and I hope to never again find myself in a place where I am completely free from expending my body in order to sustain myself and those close to me.

I believe that the world requires immediate change if humanity is to survive itself.

Through all of this, I have retained this thing that I discovered last summer: I feel best when the word "peace" is on my lips and the word "love" is right behind it.  I feel best when I am helping someone else.  I feel best when I am giving something away.  I love all human beings, and seek to reduce my judgment of any of them.

I'll write again soon.  I don't know what I'll be writing, but I will just keep writing.  I'll talk more specifically about what I've gotten out of some of the stuff I've been reading, and I suppose I'll talk about the news.  I will attempt to harness my sense of humor in digesting what I see around me, but I should be clear in telling you that it has been a lot harder for me to be "funny" as of late because I feel that so much of my sense of humor comes through the harsh judgement of others, and the use of harsh language, which seem taxing to me.  I'll still probably say shit like "cock-ass-butt-salad sandwich" and I will still probably say stuff like "Obama is a warmongering criminal who assists in coercing a nation of beautiful people into participating in the murder of children," but I don't want my use of harsh language or my stinging indictment of political or public figures to come across as absolute judgment.  I feel bad for Obama, and my senses and knowledge tell me that he must be a long way from psycho-social contentment or non-transient happiness.  Despite his distasteful prior action, I would love to meet the guy and tell him that I love him as a human.  

If you are down with the stuff I've been talking about, I'm open to any help you can offer me.  Link to my blog, let me write a guest blog for you, tweet my URL, or anything else.  I'm interested in taking this blog thing a little more seriously now than I ever have in the past, so any advice would be appreciated.  You can check out my tumblr here where the bulk of my online writing and thinking has been for the last several months.  Talk to me on Twitter, if we've never been acquainted.  I want to meet you and know what you think about the universe.  

Oh, and as a reward for anyone who actually took the time out of their day to read this long meandering post, here's a little cartoon I drew and put up on my tumblr a while back.  I suck at drawing, but I quite liked this one anyway.  Leave me a comment if you think I should keep writing.

(click image to enlarge)

I love you all. :-)