The Search For Stark

First of all, do yourself a favor and watch this 2 minutes and 44 seconds of utter awesomeness above.

Then recall the ending of Iron Man 3. In fact, recall the entire 130 minutes of its insulting, technology guilt-laden self-hatred.

Or better yet, don’t do that.

If you’ve been here since 2010, you know that I have had a special place in my heart for the character I called “The First 21st Century Superhero.” Tony Stark — as  reimagined by Jon Favreau, and reincarnated by Robert Downey Jr. — and I have had an unexpectedly personal relationship these past 3 years. Ever since Favreau retweeted my post and it took on a life of its own and  became the most popular thing I’d ever written. From the intimacy of Tony Stark’s relationship with his gadgets, to his eschew of a secret identity in favor of that uniquely post-digital virtue of radical transparency, to his narcissism, Favreau’s Iron Man reflected a radical departure from the tropes that defined the 20th century superhero.

I could tell you about how Shane Black, who directed this third installment in the Iron Man franchise tried his best to undo all that. How deliberately he went after the things that not only made Tony Stark so brilliantly modern, but also lay at the very heart of his character. I could tell you about the relentless “techno fear” that ran like an electromagnetic current through the entire movie from start — on New Year’s Eve 1999, ground zero of the Y2k paranoia — to finish — with Stark throwing his arc reactor heart into the ocean like the he’s an old lady, letting go of a luminescent, blue burden at the end of fucking Titanic. Or some shit.

I could tell you how this conflicted, 20th century relationship to technology, wielded with all the subtlety of Catholic guilt, bashed all of us over the head like a blunt instrument the first time we saw Pepper and Tony on screen together — but wait! That’s not actually Tony. It’s a Siri-powered autonomous-driving Iron Man suit, and it’s just asked Pepper to, quote, “Kiss me on my mouth slit.”

(I seriously feel like I need to go wash my hands with soap now after typing those words.)

And yet, under Favreau’s direction, Pepper kissing Tony’s helmet in Iron Man 2 was most likely one of the sexiest moments Gwyneth Paltrow has ever had on film:

 

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I could tell you how Black drove Tony Stark into hiding (while Favreau celebrated his coming out) and stripped him of his suit and access to his technology, making him fight his battles in the flesh for most of the film. We’re to believe Stark built a more advanced suit while a POW in a cave in fucking Afghanistan than he could on his credit limit in Tennessee??

 

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I could tell you how the thing I was thinking about the most as I walked out of the theater — even more than that Black got thisclose to turning Pepper into a legitimate superhero in her own right, which would have been practically the only 21st-century compliant move he’d have made in the whole movie, but then, of course Tony had to “fix” her back to normal — was:

THANK GOD STEVE JOBS DID NOT LIVE TO SEE TONY STARK THROW HIS HEART INTO THE FUCKING OCEAN.

Do you remember the love that the first Iron Man movie, and the Tony Stark in it, had for his first suit? The one he made in captivity. The painstaking, terrifying labor that birthed this child of necessity? The metal manifestation of the power of ingenuity and creativity and talent that won him his freedom? Remember his second suit? The one he built once he got back home. The hotter, cooler, younger sibling of the scrap heap he’d left in the desert. The first real Iron Man suit. How much fun he had making it, tweaking it, perfecting it, and how much fun we had going along on the joyride? Tony Stark fought a custody battle against the American government for the suit in Iron Man 2. He said no one else could have it. He said the suit he created was a part of him, that he and it were one. And we all intimately understood exactly what he meant. Because  even if the rest of us don’t actually literally plug our gadgets into our chest cavities, 80% of us go t0 sleep with our phone by our bedside.

I could tell you how Shane Black changed all that for Tony, replaced his passion for innovation with a 20th century irreconcilability. His suits, once so precious the greatest military superpower in the world couldn’t force him to part with just one, have been rendered as meaningless as disposable cups. For Black’s Iron Man, technology still has friction. He can “disconnect,” can “unplug.” This feels like a “real” thing to do. As if there is still a world that isn’t part of the digital world. It’s not just an anachronistic, Gen X misunderstanding of the Millennial reality, it kills what makes Tony Stark, Tony Stark.

“We create our own demons” are the first words we hear as the movie begins. Stark is speaking in voiceover, and this becomes his ongoing refrain throughout the movie. We create our own demons. We create our own demons. By the end, when Stark destroys all of his dozens of indistinguishable suits — because they are “distractions” (the actual word he uses, twice), because we create our own demons and these are his creations, because (and this is the most fucked up part of all) he thinks this is what will make Pepper happy — it is the moment that Black destroys the soul of this character.

proof that tony stark has a heart

Imagine Steve Jobs throwing the iPhone prototype into the ocean and walking away.

Imagine Elon Musk, who Favreau modeled his interpretation of the modern-day tech genius inventor after, driving a fleet of Teslas off a cliff.

I could tell you how Shane Black imagined it.

Speaking to an audience at Standford in the wake of the Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg said, “The framing [of the movie] is that the whole reason for making Facebook is because I wanted to get girls, or wanted to get into clubs…. They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

This is why Tony Stark builds things. Because he likes building things. Technology is not a “distraction” from something realer, it is a part of what IS real.  The digital and the analog worlds aren’t binary. They are inextricably intertwined. Technology is as much a part of us now as it has always been for Tony Stark — corporeally and philosophically. And there is no going back. Texting is not a distraction from the “realness” of the telephone — itself, a completely unnatural, manufactured, awkward medium that we all learned to take communication through for granted. Electricity is not a distraction from the “realness” of candle-light. Driving a car is not a distraction from the “realness” of riding a horse.

Which brings us back to this impeccably clever Audi commercial.

Featuring the two actors who’ve played Spock, himself an embodiment of hybridity, in a battle that starts out via iPad chess, doubles down over the phone, escalates by car, and culminates with the finishing touch of  a Vulcan nerve pinch. It makes the depiction of the permeable membrane between the digital and the analog, of the seamless absorption of a “fictional” personality into the “real” self, and of unapologetic techno-joy look effortlessly cool.

This is the Audi ad Iron Man USED TO BE!

In 2010, I wrote:

The first 21st century superhero is a hedonistic, narcissistic, even nihilistic, adrenaline junkie, billionaire entrepreneur do-gooder. If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that “with great power comes great responsibility,” Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun.

You can’t get any more Gen Y than that.

Three Mays later, Tony Stark has changed. He’s entirely forgotten how to have fun. He doesn’t even get joy out of building things anymore — hell, he was having a better time when he had a terminal illness, back when Favreau was at the helm. Under Black’s direction, Stark doesn’t seem excited about anything. He’s on Xanax for his panic attacks — I’m assuming. Since there isn’t a single thing that fills him with anywhere near the kind of fascination Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto express as they watch  a self-driving Audi pull out of a golf club driveway. As Black sees it, to embrace the technological innovation that is in Tony Stark’s blood — both figuratively and literally — to create something that isn’t a demon, to want to build things because he likes building things, all of that would somehow make Stark less human.

But as the mixed-race Spock always knew — what makes us human can’t be measured in degrees.

Oh well.

thanks for keeping the seat warm gen x we'll take it from here sincerely gen y

 

After all….. It’s only logical.

    



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Charlie Sheen Is Not Crazy

Image: Culture Wins

Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, long time in the making. What’s been happening over the past few weeks is not Charlie Sheen going crazy. Although it’s certainly easy to get confused. No doubt, Charlie Sheen wants you to think he’s crazy. After all, the boring recovering-addict Charlie Sheen Show — or the boring functioning-addict Charlie Sheen Show, depending on your preference — is much less interesting to watch than the “Crazy” one. And we are still watching….

In the course of this production it’s hard not to think about the film I’m Still Here, the cinéma vérité chronicling of Joaquin Phoenix’s “retirement from acting.”


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For a year and a half, the twice Oscar-nominated Phoenix gained weight, stopped shaving, and tried to start a career as a rapper while his brother-in-law and fledgling filmmaker, Casey Affleck, came along for the ride to document this seeming descent into madness. Phoenix even famously came on Letterman in the course of I’m Still Here‘s production, disheveled and incoherent — an appearance that, by the end, prompted Letterman to say he owes an apology to Farrah Fawcett, til then considered his most disastrous guest of all time.

Of course, in the end it turned out this was not just another overindulged celebrity losing his mind. Nor, even after it was revealed that Phoenix’s “retirement” and subsequent actions weren’t exactly the plot of a straight “documentary,” was it all just simply a hoax. Back on the Late Show a year and a half later, now clean-shaven, and charming as usual, Phoenix explained:

We wanted to do a film that explored celebrity, and explored the relationship between the media and the consumers and the celebrities themselves. We wanted something that would feel really authentic. I’d started watching a lot of reality shows and I was amazed that people believed them; that they called them, like, ‘reality.’ I thought the only reason why is because it’s billed as being ‘real’ and the people use their real names. But the acting is terrible. I thought I could handle that. Because you don’t have to be very good. You just use your name, and people think that it’s real.

For a year and a half, Joaquin Phoenix lived the life of a character who shared his name and history and circumstances, both in private scenes and in the public eye. What then, truly, is the difference between what’s “real” and what isn’t? What does “hoax” even mean in the age of “reality TV?” I’m Still Here, along with the context around it, is a philosophical exploration of these questions.

It’s a very similar postmodern paradox that is at the heart of Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop:


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“The world’s first street art disaster movie” tells the story of Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French-born shop-keeper living in L.A. whose compulsive need to record every waking moment, and a cousin who happens to be the street artist Space Invader, combined to lead Guetta to become the de facto documentarian of the street art scene, tagging along on late-night art missions with its luminaries, including L.A.’s Shepard Fairey and, ultimately, the elusive reigning godfather of street art himself, Banksy. About two thirds of the way through the movie, Guetta, who had never previously edited any of the mountains of footage he’d been obsessively recording, goes to the U.K. to present a first draft of his “street art documentary” to Banksy for feedback. Deflecting his true opinion of the unwatchable film, Banksy suggests that perhaps Guetta should consider becoming a street artist himself and sends him back to L.A. with the idea of putting on a small show. Banksy also requests Guetta send him his raw video footage so that he can reedit it himself. And this is where the movie becomes something like an Andy Warhol adaptation of the Blair Witch Project.

A few months before Joaquin Phoenix would be announcing his acting “retirement,” Guetta’s artist persona, Mr. Brainwash, or MBW, had moved from plastering L.A. with his own likeness — an image of a guy holding a video camera — straight to mounting a massive “street art” show, called “Life Is Beautiful,” in a 15,000 square-foot venue. Seemingly overnight, Mr. Brainwash was being positioned as an up-and-comer with the oeuvre of a Shepard Fairey or a Banksy — by then both artists, as well as many other leading names in the street art world, had begun having their art on display inside galleries as opposed to on the exterior of walls — except unlike these artists with years, even decades of creative evolution and refinement, Guetta had no experience. He’d hired an army of sculptors and designers to manufacture the pieces for his show, ripped straight from bookmarks in art books — even the illustration of Guetta holding the camera had been created by someone else.

The day of the show the line to get in stretched for blocks. Four thousand people attended the opening. By the end of the day nearly a million dollars worth of Mr. Brainwash art had been sold.

The story, at face value, seems so preposterous that the question of whether it could truly be real has dogged the film, as well as created the suspense that’s made it even more of a phenomenon. Could an amateur who’d never actually made art himself succeed at pulling off a show that so blatantly counterfeited and so quickly eclipsed those of the art form’s recognized heavyweights? And would they really release a movie about it happening? Or is all of it — the movie, Life is Beautiful, Mr. Brainwash — simply Banksy’s greatest prank yet? Theories abound. The New York Times labeled it as a harbinger of a new cinematic subgenre: The Prankumentary. “The whole thing, it’s clear now,” Fast Company insisted, “Was an intricate prank being pulled on all of us by Banksy, who has never publicly revealed his identity, with Fairey as his accomplice.” Their conjecture about what really happened: “Banksy… convinced Guetta to pose as a budding graffiti artist wannabe so he and Fairey could ‘direct’ him in real life — manufacturing a brand new persona.” Yet when asked at the end of the film how he feels knowing that he is in part responsible for Mr. Brainwash, Shepard Fairey laughs ruefully, “I had the best intentions. But sometimes even when you have the best intentions things can go awry…. The phenomenon of Thierry becoming a street artist, and a lot of suckers buying into his show and him selling a lot of expensive art very quickly, anthropologically, sociologically, it’s a fascinating thing to observe. And maybe there’s some things to be learned from it.” For his part, Banksy, even as his voice is scrambled beyond recognition, conveys unmistakable melancholy as he says, “I used to encourage everyone I met to make art. I used to think that everyone should do it….. I don’t really do that so much anymore.”

This brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide” could just be an L.A. story simply too bizarre to have been made up, and just as easily, it could all be a fabricated fable about what happens to an artistic movement when it becomes commercialized. From “selling out” to “cashing in” the concept is so mundane it’s a cliché, but Exit Through The Gift Shop‘s treatment is primarily to emphasize the absurdity of the progression of events rather than to make any concrete statement about them. As Banksy’s art dealer says at the end of the film, “I think the joke is on… I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”

Which brings us back to Charlie Sheen. Not that what Sheen’s doing is any kind of joke or “prank.” This is all very much for real for him. And it is also a very deliberate performance. How did we get here? February 28, Charlie Sheen goes on Good Morning America, The Today Show, TMZ, Radar, Piers Morgan on CNN, 20/20 — basically, every celebrity interview news show he possibly can, and attracts a tsunami of flabbergasted attention for bein’ all ka-raaaazy. The next day he launches a social media empire.

Suddenly sounding not so crazy. Hell, as a digital strategist, I’d say it’s a pretty smart move. Within 25 hours and 17 minutes, Charlie Sheen had broken the world record for amassing 1 million Twitter followers faster than anyone else. Less than a week after his first tweet, he’d reached 2 million. “Another record shattered,” he tweeted, “We gobbled the soft target that was 2.0 mil, like a bag of troll-house zombie chow.” By then, he’d also launched a social media intern search:

which received over 74 THOUSAND! submissions in 5 days. Arguably no other celebrity has “gotten” the way social media works as fast. Even Conan had a slower uptake, though he’s undeniably provided a template for Sheen to work off of. (After getting canned from his TV job, Sheen did like MBW to Conan’s Banksy and announced he’s going on tour — the “Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not An Option” Tour — just like Conan’s Banned From Television Tour last year in the wake of his own network debacle.) And, obviously, Sheen’s not doing it all on his own.

In Sheen’s 11-minute livestream episode, titled, “Torpedeos of Truth Part 2,” recorded on March 7th, 2011 — a week after his “old media” blitzkrieg — a terribly lit, grossly contrasted video in which a curmudgeonly, borderline belligerent Sheen looks like he might not have showered for days prior then rolled out of bed that morning, turned on his lap top, and started recording through the built-in camera above the screen, at 6 minutes, 40 seconds, when he ducks “below the frame line,” the camera moves. This is a recording made to look like it’s being done through a shitty built-in computer camera, but when it moves to follow Sheen as he ducks it’s suddenly clear there may be a camera person involved. If there is someone behind the camera, there could just as easily have been a lighting guy, a makeup person, but No! “Make me look as crazy as possible,” was clearly the direction here. By episode four it’d been announced that Sheen had officially been fired from his sitcom. The ante was upped. Suddenly Sheen, well-lit, made-up, looking as healthy as a marathoner — if not for the chain-smoking — in his sweat-wicking Nike shirt, was performing a soliloquy sounding like some misplaced Hunter S. Thompson diatribe. Clearly some writing talent may have been called in — if it hadn’t been already: consider that basically everything coming out of Charlie Sheen’s mouth becomes a meme — it’s been impossible to escape hearing someone say #winning (a hashtag in Charlie Sheen’s very first tweet) for weeks; then there’s #tigerblood, which is so meme-able it can’t even be summarized properly:


Tiger Blood Energy Potion
found in a hotel lobby at SXSW Interactive. Photo: Danny Newman

Right now 4Chan, the primordial ooze that has spawned everything from lolcats to Rickrolling to SadKeanu to every other Internet meme you’ve ever heard of, is looking at Charlie Sheen like Woh. The last guy anywhere near this unstoppably memetastic was the Old Spice Guy–

and that guy was created by an AD AGENCY!

Something else you might notice — Charlie Sheen almost never swears. You have never heard him bleeped in any of the interviews he’s done on TV. There are no R-rated words on his Twitter stream. Every so often there’s some sprinkled in his livestreams, but for the most part The Charlie Sheen Show is all-ages. Where he could say “assholes” or “douchebags,” he says “silly fools” or “trolls.” These Playskool insults are unexpected, amusing, almost benign, yet nostalgically cruel. This is not the syntax of a man out of control.

“Where do these words come from, Charlie,” 20/20’s Andrea Canning asked.

“I don’t know,” he rolled his eyes, “They’re just words that sound cool together. Stuff just comes out and it’s entertaining and it’s fun and it sounds different from all the other garbage people are spewing, you know?”

Charlie Sheen doesn’t have Tourettes. He is deliberately saying these things to entertain and be funny and unique. And he’s good at it. Bret Easton Ellis — the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, as well as Lunar Park, a haunted house story in which the main character is a writer named Bret Easton Ellis who’s lived the same history as his eponymous creator (“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never ‘Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal’ … It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore — publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour.”) or is it, rather, the life he was expected to have been leading? (“What was I doing hanging out with gangbangers and diamond smugglers? What was I doing buying kilos? My apartment reeked of marijuana and freebase. One afternoon I woke up and realized I didn’t know how anything worked anymore. Which button turned the espresso machine on? Who was paying my mortgage? Where did the stars come from? After a while you learn that everything stops.“) — writing in an article titled, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” calls Sheen, “the most fascinating person wandering through the culture:”

You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs. Yeah, they play a part, but they aren’t at the core of what’s happening—or why this particular Sheen moment is so fascinating…. This privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted ridiculer. Sheen has embraced post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity now means. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. Rock and roll. Deal with it.

Post-Empire isn’t just about admitting doing “illicit” things publicly and coming clean—it’s a (for now) radical attitude that says the Empire lie doesn’t exist anymore, you friggin’ Empire trolls. For my younger friends, it’s no longer rare; it’s now the norm. To Empire gatekeepers, Charlie Sheen seems dangerous and in need of help because he’s destroying (and confirming) illusions about the nature of celebrity.

It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw and lucid and intense…. We’re not used to these kinds of interviews. It’s coming off almost as performance art and we’ve never seen anything like it—because he’s not apologizing. It’s an irresistible spectacle. We’ve never seen a celebrity more nakedly revealing.

It’s the contradiction we could never quite reconcile in I’m Still Here or Exit Through The Gift Shop; one we can accept in Lady Gaga because she’s not using her real name and we’re sort of OK with it when it’s just a “character.” Charlie Sheen is real and not real at once: a spectacle and a revelation. It’s meta-postmodernism. It’s existential performance art. Minutes before Charlie Sheen’s first livestream was set to start, the audio feed came on. You could hear Sheen rehearsing the rant he would perform that night, prompting the question: is this all an act? Of course it is! He’s an acTOR. From a family of actors, who’s spent his entire life performing. There’s no way he’d go on camera ever without rehearsing. Charlie Sheen’s whole life has been a performance, and this now is not so much different, just with a bigger audience and, as we say in the 21st century music business, cutting out the middleman. As far as Charlie Sheen knows, this is what real is. And as far a we know that’s what it is, too.

Ellis writes:

If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ (and humiliated by Harvey Levin, or Chelsea Handler—princess of post-Empire) while stumbling out of a club on Sunset Boulevard at 2 in the morning, then you should be a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game, and you’re a fool if you don’t play along. This is why Sheen seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians.

What does shame mean anymore? my friends in their 20s ask. Why in the hell did your boyfriend post a song called “Suck My Ballz” on Facebook last night? my mom asks. But nothing yet compares to the transparency that Sheen has unleashed in the past two weeks—contempt about celebrity, his profession, the old Empire world order.

Ellis’s “Empire” is a reference to Gore Vidal’s definition of global American hegemony, which Ellis dates from 1945 until 2005: the era that defined the 20th century. Post-Empire is where we are now. For Ellis, Empire is the lie, the having to hide who you really are, the keeping up appearances; post-Empire, on the other hand, is what Ellis calls, “aggressive transparency.” But his perspective has one flaw: for Ellis, both Empire and post-Empire are binary. It’s one or the other. It’s true or it’s a lie; it’s real or its counterfeit. The post-Empire reality, however, is not the end of the lie, it’s the end of the binary. Sure, “radical transparency” has become a 21st century marketing buzzword. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg believes that Privacy is Dead and has remade Facebook in that image. Sure, I wrote last year, what makes Iron Man the first 21st century superhero? His lack of alter ego; his unconflicted, absolute identity. But that all is only part of the Millennial story.

Social media researcher danah boyd writes:

There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways.

Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control.

I’d argue this is, in fact, true of all of us now in the post-Empire. Not just teens. “What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified,” writes Ellis, “Is the moment in the culture when not caring what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more (if not exactly CBS or the creator of the show that has made you so wealthy).” Except that Charlie Sheen still very much DOES care. And so do all the rest of us in the 21st century. It’s there in every Facebook photo you’ve untagged yourself from. You had your reasons. It’s there in every location you pulled out your phone to check in at, and then decided not to. It’s there every time you hovered over, and then didn’t click the “Like” button. As tech blogger, Robert Scoble, writes:

The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.

That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.

But then I started noticing that…. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.

See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?

Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.

I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.

This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.

Not only do we still care what other people think about us, we now curate it more obsessively. Trent Reznor calls it “A hyper-real version of yourself.”

This is the hyper-real version of Charlie Sheen. It is a role that Charlie Sheen is performing. And it is also who he actually is. Because how could he not be? Whatever Charlie Sheen does, that is who he is. This is the only way he has to take control over the flow of his information. For a celebrity in particular, as Ellis points out, that control is virtually non-existent. So how did Charlie Sheen wrest it back? By outdoing TMZ and the news shows and the magazines at their own game. He is no longer just a commodity of the tabloid industrial complex. He is the creator and star of his own show, the Crazy Charlie Sheen Show, and all the press is simply promotion.

Then again, it could be something much more simple. At Coachella 2008, Prince, headlining, kept demanding over and over, “Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella!” And like some epic call-and-response an ocean of 150,000 voices roared back: “Prince! Prince! Prince!” And I realized that if you’re Prince, there’s probably no way you can even get off anymore without 150,000 people screaming your name. Perhaps, if you’re Charlie Sheen, you can’t stay sober unless two million people are following your every move — just over two weeks after his first Tweet, it’s now closing in on 3 million.

“We’ve come a long way in the last two weeks,” Ellis concludes. “Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire.” Like I’m Still Here and Exit Through The Gift Shop, what Charlie Sheen is doing is part of a continuum exposing the now inherent unreliability of the markers we’d previously depended on to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. In some ways it’s as basic as the shift from the 20th century to the 21st; from analog to digital, from binary to exponential complexity. What, truly, does reality mean when it’s photoshopable? Or just another marketing campaign for some new movie? Not that reality doesn’t exist. Things are, out in the world; you can touch them. Earthquakes happen; nuclear reactors break; nations perch perilously on the verge of catastrophe. Reality exists, but it is no different from not reality. From the inscrutably contradictory government statements about radiation levels, from the fake Nuclear Fallout maps that spread like wildfire. Reality and not reality exist in the same plane now. It’s enough to make you go crazy. Unless you’re Charlie Sheen. In which case you’re not crazy. You simply are as your world is.

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The First 21st Century Vampires

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A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930’s, and in its place offered a vibrantly modern model for the character, reflecting the unique culture, ethos, and mores of the 21st century. True Blood, I’m realizing, is now doing the same for that other undying superhuman trope: the vampire.

Of course, the vampire has been undead for a lot longer. The earliest recorded vampire myth dates back to Babylonia, about 4,000 years ago, and over the millennia it has appeared in almost every culture. But lets cut to the chase: 1922 was year vampires broke ground in film (though, technically, they’d made a few cameos before then). It was the year F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” came out.

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Take a good look. That’s what a movie vampire used to be. A creature no teen girl, or anyone else for that matter, would want to see as a lead in a summer mystical romance franchise. In all the silent films that featured vampires there was always a clear and consistent view: here be monsters.

While this original archetype might have undergone a radical transformation over the past 80+ years of cinema — from grotesque monster to, ironically, heartthrob, a result of the only evolutionary force vampires are actually subject to: sexual selection, naturally — don’t be fooled. Just because Twilight’s Edward Cullen or the whatever-their-names-are characters of The Vampire Diaries happen to be getting panties in a twist at the moment, they are not in any way contemporary. Much has been made about the exceptionally “old-fashioned” gender roles in Twilight, but that analysis is basically missing the forest for one tree. Think about it: is there ANYTHING that happens in Twilight that could not have happened just as easily 50 years ago? You could turn Twilight into a 1950’s period piece and basically NOTHING about the major plot points, dialogue, personalities, relationships, or motivations — of either the vampires OR humans in this saga — would need to change. This does not a 21st century story make. In fact, if you’re curious about exactly why Twilight is so popular, the mechanics of this process are actually quite timeless:

Twilight’s preternatural hotties aren’t so much throwbacks as they are completely out of time. The story could be happening in any age; its characters’ capacity to reflect some kind of cultural context is irrelevant, probably detrimental.

The predominant Millennial quality that grounds Iron Man in the 21st century, I wrote, is transparency. In his total openness about everything from his deepest secret to his fleeting impulses he is as “post-privacy” as Facebook would have us all become. To suggest that True Blood’s vampires are uniquely modern because they too, like Tony Stark, have revealed their secret identity to the world, would be easy — it is, after all the premise that the entire show is based on — but it wouldn’t be accurate. For Stark, radical transparency is a way of life. You never have to wonder what Tony Stark is thinking because it’s usually exactly what’s coming out of his mouth at any given moment. The vampires on true blood are anything but transparent. Their secret truths and ulterior motives are consistently obscure. Tellingly, even Sookie Stackhouse, the show’s mind-reader, can’t penetrate their thoughts. Despite a superficial simulation, transparency is not really a quality that connects True Blood’s vampires to the modern age. But you know what does?

Recycling.

These vampires are environmentally conscious! Hey, it’s the  the 21st century, caring about the environment is hot! In fact, in the wake of the BP Oil Spill disaster which has affected all the Gulf states — chief among them, Louisiana, True Blood’s setting — there is a subtly startling undercurrent of environmentalism running through this season’s sublot. At one point, Russell Edgington, the 3,000-year old vampire King of Mississippi, a new character introduced this season, rhapsodizes, “I mean, do you remember how the air used to smell? How humans used to smell? How they used to taste?” Earlier, the vampire Queen of Louisiana describes a rare delicacy: “A Latvian boy. Has to be tasted to be believed. Not polluted like most humans. Tastes exactly the way they used to taste before the industrial revolution fucked everything to hell.” When Russell asks rhetorically, “What other creature actively destroys its own habitat,” one imagines these vampires didn’t need to see an Inconvenient Truth because they’ve lived it. They may be blood-sucking fiends but destroying the planet is below even their standards.

Nevertheless, consumer culture that they’ve lived to find themselves in, they’re not beyond shopping at the mall. (Looking good is, after all, a vampire priority.)

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No doubt, there’ll be some anecdote about a vampire shopping online eventually. Most likely Eric will get there before Bill, I’m assuming, based on this classic exchange from season 1:

Eric: “I sent you three texts, why didn’t you reply?”
Bill: “I hate using the number keys to type.”

In fact, while Bill might be True Blood’s most conservative vampire (how postmodern!) — his education on how to be a vampire for the 17-year old girl he’s just been forced to turn into one is about as awkward and evasive as the birds and the bees talk from a religious dad — Eric is, arguably, its most progressive. That is, he has no fear of progress. Eric might be 1,000 years old but he’s as naturally at ease with his tech gadgets as any “digital native.” So far, he’s the only vampire I’ve seen use a bluetooth device. Ever.

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As the proprietor of a popular vampire bar called Fangtasia, Eric clearly recognized “The Great Revelation” — as the vampires call their coming out to the world — as a great business opportunity. Entrepreneurship is an unexpected quality for a vampire in general — I mean, why bother with such pedestrian concerns when you’re immortal, right? On the other hand, what else would you do with an eternity of nights? Might as well launch a nightlife startup. According the Wall Street Journal, The Great Recession, which began in full force around the time True Blood first got on the air, is churning out ever more entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur.com reports, 8.7% of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in the second quarter of 2009, and they expect to see even more people starting their own businesses in 2010. So it’s no surprise that 21st century vampires would be business-minded. Upon visiting Fangtasia, Russell, himself a semi-silent owner of a werewolf bar in Mississippi called Lou Pines, even tells Eric, “We must talk of franchising.”

If being an entrepreneur isn’t your thing, there’s always the royal route: seizing assets from your subjects. In the vampire Queen’s case, that asset is vampire blood, which she then has other vampires move as black market narcotic. Since selling their blood is a high crime among vampires, it’s initially unclear why the Queen would be doing this. What inscrutable and ominous vampiric motives could she have? By season 3 it’s revealed that the Queen needs the money to pay off the IRS. For vampires in the 21st century, death might not be certain, but taxes are. Indeed, True Blood’s portrayal of vampire culture is more of a bureaucracy than any other cinematic depiction. After a religious fanatic suicide bomber self-detonates at a party in a vampire lair, killing a number of humans and vampires in attendance, there are, literally, forms that the lair’s owner has to fill out in this situation — a sequence that encapsulates the equally bizarre extremes of both the terrorism and banality of our age.

While just last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 initiative, which denies marriage rights to same-sex couples, was unconstitutional, on True Blood, same-sex couple Russell and Talbot have been married for 700 years. Homoerotica is by no means anything new in vampire lore, but gay marriage?? There’s a concept that barely existed in the public discourse before the 21st century. And Russell and Talbot’s relationship is exactly what you’d expect from a couple that’s been married for 7 centuries — anything but erotic. A particularly noticeable departure for the otherwise seriously agrosexual HBO series. Of course, the new phenomenon of marriage between vampire and human — which, though legal in the word of True Blood, is still highly controversial — has, from the show’s beginnings, served as a running metaphor for “marriage equality.” Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood, as well as Six Feet Under, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, is not only someone who clearly understands a thing or two about the modern existential condition, he is also an openly gay man. No surprise, then that True Blood’s very opening credits sequence weekly drives home a starkly unfantastical image that connects vampires to that other minority fighting religious opposition for equal rights in the 21st century.

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“Alternative lifestyle,” an often-used euphemism for homosexuality, is actually a perfect way to describe True Blood’s approach to vampirism. Even the show’s brilliantly integrated marketing campaigns have sought to bring True Blood’s fictional world off the screen and into reality by treating vampires as an increasingly visible minority with their own lifestyle brands and targeted advertising:

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True Blood’s vampires even blog. Well, technically, it’s only Jessica, with her http://babyvamp-jessica.com blog, but as a 17 year-old who just became undead last year she’s the only Gen-Y vampire on the show, so obviously she’d be the one blogging — check out the awesomely pointless first few entries — 1, 2, 3 — this directionless experimentation with a new “toy” is exactly how a teenager would start a blog. (Vampire diaries?? Who the hell keeps a “diary” anymore in the age of social media? Sheesh.)

Overall, there is a deep, underlying theme about progress coursing through True Blood. “It’s vampires like you, who’ve been holding the rest of us back for centuries,” sneers Russell before destroying a Spanish Inquisition-era vampire Magister. It’s the vampires that are most hung up on the past who are some of the show’s craziest messes. The psychotic vampire Queen, who’s stuck in some perpetual 1940’s costume drama, has just been stripped of power; Lorena, whose inability to get over her past with Bill becomes her destruction; Eric’s newly-revealed 1,000 year old revenge obsession for the murder of his father will no doubt promptly lead him into some kind of trouble this season. Godric, Eric’s maker, even destroyed himself in part because after 2,000 years he could no longer bear that vampires had not progressed; that he hadn’t. Unlike the atemporal caricatures of the other franchises, True Blood’s vampires offer a uniquely compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman, relationship to it. We are living in a time when change, whether we like it or not, is coming at us so fast and furious we can barely comprehend it — speaking on a panel at Techonomy last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said we now create 5 exabytes of data every two days, an amount equal to all the information created from the dawn of civilization through 2003. Who can really understand whatever the hell that even means?  True Blood’s vampires are at once representations of cultural change within the narrative of the show, and, likewise, must themselves confront a new millennium’s progress. Some adapt better than others. Some have more sinister interpretations of where progress should lead, but they, like the rest of us in the 21st century, either accept change, or deny it at their own peril.

    



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How To Stand In the Face of Powerlessness For A New Generation

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The ‘Source’ in the Distance

Last week, my friend Kris Krug flew down to the Gulf of Mexico on the TEDxOilSpill Expedition, a week-long project to document the crisis in the Gulf and bring a first hand report back to the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington, D.C. on June 28. Kris, a photographer, web strategist, and self-described “cyberpunk anti-hero from the future” (though, technically, from Vancouver) was there as part of the team of photographers, videographers, and writer traveling through Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana documenting the current situation in the coastal communities affected by the oil spill. (Kris’s shots from the expedition have also appeared in National Geographic photo essays: 1, 2, 3).

Talking with Kris — who has been one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of my writing here at Social-Creature (the header image on this site is one of his photos) — he suggested that while it’s not my usual ‘beat,’ if I felt so inspired, I should write some words about this situation.

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Early morning thunderstorm off the coast of Grand Isle, Louisiana.

The truth is that there is something in this endlessly tragic mire which I’ve kept thinking about over and over during the course of the now 69 days since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. And that recurring thought — beyond how devastating and heartbreaking this entire situation is — is how utterly foreign and disturbing it feels to be this completely powerless to do anything about it.

As a generation, mine has not known powerlessness. We have known no great war. No great depression. We were born a decade after the last U.S. draft ended. Our childhoods were filled with images like these:

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berlin wall coming down

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We were weaned on the sense that something could be done. A single person could stand up to a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. People could tear the Berlin wall down. People could undo the totalitarian Soviet regime. By the time we got to high school, the Internet had arrived, followed quickly by college and the birth of the social web. The digital revolution added an unprecedented amplification to this sense of our own personal agency. Just over the past few short years we have experienced how sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook have offered platforms for us to do something.

Last summer, the Washington Post called the aftermath of the Iran election a “A Twitter Revolution.” As police tried to suppress demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the declared results of the presidential elections in a place halfway around the planet, Twitter let the world know exactly what was going on, on the ground in Iran even as outside journalists were barred from the country. It was instantaneous, unfiltered, real, and it compelled our attention. The U.S. State Department even asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance on the site at the time in order avoid disrupting communications among tweeting Iranian citizens and the rest of the world. Ordinary voices of dissent had never had access to such mass media before, and just bearing witness, just knowing their struggle, just retweeting and communicating was an act of solidarity with those citizens of Iran who were protesting, and an act of defiance against the forces that would have them silenced. It was doing something.

Six months ago, after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti, a place of no real political or economic importance, these digital tools helped mobilize the aid and compassion of the entire world almost instantly. Within just a few hours a text-based donation service was set up for the American Red Cross’s relief efforts. In just 2 days of the earthquake the program had raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users. Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation, also running its own text donation drive, raised another $1 million. It was a watershed moment. Never had so much money been raised for relief so quickly after a disaster. The digital tools facilitated this, but what drove people to make those donations was the desire to do something even if it was just giving a few dollars to help alleviate suffering.

We humans have such a deep need to feel like we’ve got any sense of agency in our lives, we’ll happily trick ourselves into perceiving we’re in control — or at the very least, that control over chaos is attainable. This proclivity is a large part of why God exists — or rather, why we believe he does. In a 2007 New York Times article exploring possible answers from evolutionary biology as to how we have come to believe in God, Robin Marantz Henig wrote:

Our brains are primed for [belief in the supernatural], ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic.

We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.” The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.


Oil coming on shore.

As an alternative to these external supernatural forces it’s become increasingly popular to reclaim a sense of power in the face of chaos or tragedy by elevating control of our inner selves to this transcendent status of godliness. In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America Barbara Ehrenreich recounts, in a chapter titled, “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer,” how getting diagnosed with breast cancer led to her first introduction with the cult of “positive thinking.” The “Pink Ribbon Culture,” she writes, is defined by a mantra of “positive thinking” that is so extreme, at times it paints cancer as a “gift, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude:”

In the mainstream of breast cancer culture there is very little anger, no mention of possible environmental causes, and few comments about the fact that in all but the most advanced, metastasized cases, it is the “treatments,” not the disease, that cause the immediate illness and pain. In fact, the overall tone is almost universally upbeat. The Best Friends Web site, for example, featured a series of inspirational quotes: “Don’t cry over anything that can’t cry over you,” “I cant stop the birds of sorrow from circling my head, but I can stop them from building a nest in my hair,” “When life hands out lemons, squeeze out a smile,” “Don’t wait for your ship to come in… swim out to meet it,” and much more of that ilk.

The cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease. As “Mary” reports, on the Bosom Buds message board: “I really believe I am a much more sensitive and thoughtful person now. I was a real worrier before. Now I don’t want to waste my energy on worrying. I enjoy life so much more now and in a lot of aspects I am much happier now.” [Another] such testimony to the redemptive powers of the disease: “I can honestly say I am happier now than I have ever been in my life — even before the breast cancer.

One survivor turned author credits it with revelatory powers, writing in her book The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live. Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.”

The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer [from] an injustice or tragedy to rail against.

There was, I learned, an urgent medical reason to embrace cancer with a smile: a “positive attitude” is supposedly essential to recovery. It remains almost axiomatic, within the breast cancer culture, that survival hinges on “attitude”…. [the belief] that a positive attitude boosts the immune system, empowering it to battle cancer more effectively.

You’ve probably read that assertion so often, in one form or another, that it glides by without a moment’s thought about what the immune system is, how it might be affected by emotions, and what, if anything, it could do to fight cancer. The business of the immune system is to defend the body against foreign intruders, such as microbes, and it does so with a a huge onslaught of cells and whole cascades of different molecular weapons.

In 1970, the famed Australian medical researcher McFarlane Burnet had proposed that the immune system is engaged in constant “surveillance” for cancer cells, which, supposedly, it would destroy upon detection. Presumably, the immune system was engaged in busily destroying cancer cells — until the day came when it was too exhausted (for example, by stress) to eliminate the renegades. There was at least one a priori problem with this hypothesis: unlike microbes, cancer cells are not “foreign”; they are ordinary tissue cells that have mutated and are not necessarily recognizable as enemy cells. As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: “What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid our own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.”

More to the point, there is no consistent evidence that the immune system fights cancers, with the exception of those cancers caused by viruses, which may be more truly “foreign.” People whose immune systems have been depleted by HIV or animals rendered immunodeficient are not especially susceptible to cancers, as the “immune surveillance” theory would predict. Nor would it make much sense to treat cancer with chemotherapy, which suppresses the immune system, if the latter were truly crucial to fighting the disease. Furthermore, no one has found a way to cure cancer by boosting the immune system with chemical or biological agents.

But despite all the evidence to the contrary, you can see the appeal of believing in the power of “positive thinking” anyway, can’t you? Instead of waiting passively for the treatments to kick in, breast cancer patients can now “work on themselves;” monitor their moods and “psychic energies.” In other words, the idea of a link between subjective feelings and the disease, fabricated though it may be, gives cancer patient something to do.

And this applies far beyond cancer, to any kind of overpowering misfortune. “We’re always being told that looking on the bright side is good for us,” writes Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, in a review on the back cover of Bright-Sided, “But now we see that it’s a great way to brush off poverty, disease, and unemployment, to rationalize an order where all the rewards go to those on top. The people who are sick or jobless — why, they just aren’t thinking positively. They have no one to blame but themselves.”

It’s not that we’re assholes. It’s just that we desperately want to believe the world is a far more just place than it actually is. As David McRaney, journalist, and author of You Are Not So Smart, a blog about the workings of self-delusion, writes in a post about The Just World Fallacy, humans have “a tendency to react to horrible misfortune, like homelessness or drug addiction, by believing the people stuck in horrible situations must have done something to deserve it.” Here is the Just World fallacy in action:


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Oh, wait. Actually, THAT guy IS an asshole. As is Rhonda Byrne, creator of “The Secret,” who, in the wake of the 2006 tsunami, citing the law of attraction, announced that disasters like that can happen only to those who are “on the same frequency as the event.”


A flock of Brown Pelicans on some rocks in Alabama.

While, clearly, suggesting that the poor little pelicans (or anyone else) signed a deal with the devil or somehow attracted the oil spill upon themselves is just waaaay the fuck further out in looney-land than anyone who is not an asshole cares to travel, at their base, all these delusions are simply coping mechanisms. A way to synthesize a sense of being less powerless than you really are; a way to deal in the face of extreme evidence to the contrary. Because the reality is that feeling like we have NO control whatsoever, like our lives are simply dried up leaves in the autumn winds of chaos, like any choices we make are utterly meaningless and futile is actually terrible for our mental well-being and our health. Note: this is not the same as saying “thinking positive will cure your cancer,” it’s saying that extreme stress factors are, indeed, bad for you. Duh. “Torture a lab animal long enough,” Ehrenreich writes, “as the famous stress investigator Hans Selye did in the 1930s, and it becomes less healthy and resistant to disease.” In a post on Learned Helplessness — McRaney writes:

If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you learn over time there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act – you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.

Studies of the clinically depressed show that when they fail they often just give in to defeat and stop trying.

A study in 1976 by Langer and Rodin showed in nursing homes where conformity and passivity is encouraged and every whim is attended to, the health and wellbeing of the patients declines rapidly. If, instead, the people in these homes are given responsibilities and choices, they remain healthy and active.

This research was repeated in prisons. Sure enough, just letting prisoners move furniture and control the television kept them from developing health problems and staging revolts.

In homeless shelters where people can’t pick out their own beds or choose what to eat, the residents are less likely to try and get a job or find an apartment.


Perdido Beach, Alabama

The underlying thread here is always about control, or the loss of it. Chaos is unbelievably traumatizing — personally, and to us as a species. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have been studying the impact of the 9/11 attacks on male babies since 2005. Their just recently published findings reveal that in the aftermath of the 2001 tragedy pregnant women miscarried a disproportionate number of male fetuses. In September 2001, the death rate of male fetuses compared with female increased by 12 percent. That’s 120 extra losses in a single month. The theory behind this phenomenon is likely an evolutionary adaptation. Women have adapted to produce what, Tim Bruckner, the study’s lead author and a professor at UC Irvine, describes as “the alpha male.” Which could explain why male fetuses are more sensitive to their mothers’ stress hormones than female ones. When a pregnant woman experiences some sort of crisis — whether personal or not — her male baby is more vulnerable to be miscarried. In times of prosperity and security, male fetuses are more likely to be brought to term, because there’s a greater chance that they’ll be healthy and robust. During periods of scarcity, however, male miscarriages are much more common. Indeed, the phenomenon reported by Bruckner & Co. has been observed before — reduced male birth rates have been reported during other instances of national stress or suffering, like economic recessions or natural disasters.


Surface oil burns in the Gulf of Mexico as part of the oil spill clean-up.

Which brings us back to the Gulf of Mexico and the worst environmental disaster in US history; the cold, strange, numbing sense of a profound national powerlessness seeping in as we see sickening photos of helpless animals drowning in oil. Just thinking about how you can’t do anything about it for too long will make you want to check the fuck out of this whole story. I know. I want, as much as anyone else, to have something to be able to do to make all of this stop.

To a large extent this is completely new territory for my generation. Nationally, we have never been faced with something we couldn’t “do” something about. As the child of parents who lived through WWII, Refuseniks, no less — the 1 and a half million Russian Jews who were trapped in the Soviet Union, denied permission by the government to leave the country, in my parents’ case, for a decade — I know, personally, just how sheltered my generation’s childhood has been in contrast. It’s unprecedented for us. We’ve had so little practice at facing situations where we couldn’t just do something, at fighting them, at living through them. Not 9/11, not the financial crisis, not the wars in between, it’s this oil spill that is my generation’s unfortunate turn to figure out how to stand in the face of powerlessness.

In a Huffington Post piece a few weeks ago on why he “Co-opted BP’s Twitter Presence,” Leroy Stick, the alleged name behind the anonymous @BPGlobalPR twitter account, which posts ingeniously scathing commentary on BP with satire so black as to befit the disaster the company has wrought, wrote:

I started @BPGlobalPR because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing. That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them.  I started off just making jokes at their expense with a few friends, but now it has turned into something of a movement. As I write this, we have 100,000 followers and counting. [Currently, almost 179,000]. People are sharing billboards, music, graphic art, videos and most importantly information.

If you are angry, speak up.  Don’t let people forget what has happened here.  Don’t let the prolonged nature of this tragedy numb you to its severity. Re-branding doesn’t work if we don’t let it, so let’s hold BP’s feet to the fire.  Let’s make them own up to and fix their mistakes NOW and most importantly, let’s make sure we don’t let them do this again.

Right now, PR is all about brand protection. All I’m suggesting is that we use that energy to work on human progression.  Until then, I guess we’ve still got jokes.


A small quote of inspiration to the affected fishing community at a bait and tackle in Dauphin Island, Alabama

In the introduction to Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich writes:

Americans did not start out as positive thinkers…. In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers pledged to one another “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” They knew that they had no certainty of winning the war for independence and that they were taking a mortal risk. Just the act of signing the declaration made them all traitors to the crown, and treason was a crime punishable by execution. The point is, they fought anyway. There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

We must find that courage now. To keep paying attention. To not tune out the story of this tragedy. To not let futility or apathy or simple delusion take over. We must have the courage to see things as they really are, to bear witness to what’s happening in the gulf, and we must have the courage to fight for answers, to fight for institutional change in the policies that have lead to this disaster, and to work for new solutions. The TEDxOilSpill event I mentioned at the beginning of this post, which is bringing together researchers and leaders to explore new ideas for our energy future, and how we can mitigate the crisis in the Gulf, is a start. There are also currently 126 local Meetups happening in conjunction with the event in 30 countries around the globe. We have to have the courage to do what we can, until we can actually do what we must.

That courage is, literally, what America was founded on, and I hope my generation discovers we too possess a reserve of it.

    



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