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.

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:

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 interest, 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 gladly trick ourselves into perceiving we’re in control — or at the very least, that control over chaos is attainable — even when it’s not true. 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. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”

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:

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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Aaaaaaanyway, here it is, the best advertising commentary you have ever read…..

taquito enlightenment:

Two nights ago I decided I wanted to get really, really, horribly, hungover-so-bad-that-you-seriously-question-everything-you’ve-ever-done-because-it-led-you-to-this wasted. And, somehow, I failed. Couldn’t get anyone on board, somehow. Ended up watching No Country for Old Men and turning in early. So yesterday I decided I was going to get wasted no matter what and I started drinking early and my memory is spotty at best after, say, 8pm, and thank god my wife doesn’t mind watching after me (or driving).

I’ve had worser hangovers, sure. That’s not the point. The point is that on the way to the French toastery, Simone stopped into a 7-11 to buy her wobbling, whining husband some Advil. I stayed outside. I couldn’t deal with fluorescent lighting, and the cold weather felt good. While Simone was inside, I saw this:

And my mind broke. I thought I was hallucinating, or that the world had gone crazy. There are so many things wrong with this ad that your mind basically won’t let you look at it for long enough to comprehend how intrinsically wrong the ad is. It’s too big for comprehension. You just scan it, think “Hey, taquitos!” and get on with your life. I must have looked hilarious, barely able to stand, in the cold, and engrossed in a shitty taquito ad.

Lets go over it, though, because holy shit.

• First of all, seriously what the fuck could Sherlock Holmes and taquitos possibly have to do with one another? There is exactly zero common ground. I promise you that there will not be a scene in the Sherlock Holmes flick where Downey turns to Jude Law and says, “Watson! Quickly! Hand me that taquito!” Maybe, maybe this would work for like coffee or something. But taquitos?
• Also, the tagline. “Get a clue.” A taquito clue? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN. What should I be clued into? That taquitos cost $.99? Is that a sale price? Is it a good deal? I’ve never, as far as I can remember, bought a taquito, but I can’t imagine paying more than a dollar for one. Maybe if it was a bad pun: “Get a taqueCLUE.” Maybe then it would have some direction.
• Holy god are those things filled with smegma? They are straight up coming out of darkness and are full of spoiled cottage cheese or something. They are foreboding taquitos. They are frightening, and maybe even evil. They are not meant to be consumed. And yet their name is written in wacky font, which is in such sharp contrast to the somber feeling from the rest of the poster that it makes the whole thing feel psychotic. This juxtaposition is why serial killers dressed as clowns is infinitely more frightening than serial killers not dressed as clowns.
• Robert Downey Jr. is not just a smug asshole in the photo, he is a preternaturally smug asshole. This makes me question his motivation in selling me these taquitos. What is his ulterior motive? And where is the other half of Watson’s golf club?

This poster is like a zen koan. The longer you concentrate on it, the more likely you are to realize that there is no correct answer. There is no sense to be made. The flag flapping in the wind is as much my mind as my mind is a flag in the wind. There is no spoon. And standing there, sick, dehydrated, and weak-minded in the cold, drizzly, hungover morning, I came as close as I ever have to breaking through the doors of perception — and what I saw was Robert Downey Jr., looking like the supreme dickhole emperor of douche, trying to get me to eat smeggy, fried, 7-11 food. And I am afraid.

More Jason, if you can handle it, here.

Maybe this is a good idea if you’re deliberately trying to speak to that coveted douchebag demographic, but otherwise, this just comes off sounding like the advertising equivalent of thinking that knocking the popular kid will somehow earn you friends at school. You just end up sounding like a jerk.

Who Okay-ed this? If you don’t look closely you’d think this was an ad FOR Lexus. Comparing yourself to the competition (including reiterating their own messaging in your advertising) is NOT a branding strategy. Get your own identity, Buick.

Makes you want to sit at Lexus’s table at lunch just out of annoyance.

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I have, and it kinda looked a little bit like this…

That’s a still from the latest ads developed by Crispin Porter & Bogusky in Microsoft’s new campaign to–essentially–regain control of their identity, and it’s a pretty accurate depiction of how I’ve seen that PC-in-a-room-full-of-Macs situation play out. (Clearly, it must not be an isolated incident). In the ad, when the diver flips the white board over, the other side reads, “And I’m Kinda Scared.”

Now, I’m a Mac now, but the computer I had before this one was a PC. I’m just as comfortable using either, and I’ve got Microsoft programs running on this computer right now. I could even get a Mac that comes with the option of running Windows, anyway, if I want, so even though I’m a Mac user, I clearly don’t see my identification with the brand in terms like this–

But many clearly do. And perhaps nothing has helped to articulate the contemporary Mac superiority complex quite like those Mac Vs. PC ads. In the iconic spots created by TBWA/Media Arts Lab, which began in 2006 and new iterations are still being developed now, a casually-dressed, attractive, 20-something guy introduces himself as “Hello, I’m a Mac…” while an older, slightly overweight guy, wearing glasses and a cheap lookin’ suit-and-tie combo introduces himself as “… And I’m a PC.” The two then act out little vignettes against a stark white background in which the capabilities and attributes of “Mac” and “PC” are compared. Often the spots end up presenting various legitimate PC shortcomings in an entertaining, glib way, but just as often the focus is on the two machine-characters’ personalities, and the feature comparison ends up being almost beside the point. Mac is always self-assured and easy-going. PC is resentful and awkward. The great success of these ads, especially when considered as a series, has been not in positioning the Mac vs. the PC, but in defining Mac vs. PC users.

The subtext of these ads, which has also become the subtext of the Mac user community, is that this isn’t just a tool for enabling a certain kind of lifestyle, it’s a badge of it. A Mac isn’t just about helping you BE creative, it MEANS you are creative. A PC, on the other hand, means you are a stiff, unimaginative, frustrated tool, overly concerned with work, and incapable of doing anything interesting. At least not as good as a Mac can. Oh, and furthermore, if you’re  a PC user, then you may as well know that this is what other people are thinking about you, too.

Personally, I’ve always been completely impressed that Mac has been able to brand a conformist white box into a symbol of creative and individual expression. But the idea is that your white box gives you entry into a whole network of other creative individuals, (just like you), and it’s that community association that bestows identity. A good friend of mine, who is a fashion designer, belly-dancer, serial entrepreneur, and has more tattoos and crazy hairstyles than the majority of the creative class, is a dedicated PC, and one of the major reasons for her choice is that she finds the idea inherent in a Mac–that you need this thing in order to express that you’re “hip”–to be a huge turnoff. A Mac doesn’t just bestow hipness to its users, it kind of subsumes it from them too. Perhaps she’s wary of this kind of  accessory watering down or co-opting her own particular kind of hip. Either way, she says she feels like no one else has this line of thinking. It’s a turnoff  “Only only to me,” She says, “I think PCs are just fine, and a lot more bang for your buck,” but everyone else she knows seems to have no problem with this aspect of their Macs.

It’s to let people like her know that there’s more of their kind out there, and to establish that their computers can, in fact, represent their creative, dynamic, interesting identities, that CPB took the direction they did with the new Microsoft ads.

Here’s one. You should watch it before reading further:

I think what’s really interesting here is that the ads say NOTHING about the product, or the features, or anything technical whatsoever. The sole purpose of the ad is to explore the diversity of PC users. I’m trying to think of another example of an entity trying to redefine its own identity by working to undo the stereotype of its “fans,” and I can’t think of one. (Anyone got one?) It’s pretty intense.

In a post titled, “Huh. Those Mac Ads Aren’t As Funny Any More,” Michael Arrington wrote:

Those Microsoft commercials aren’t particularly engaging, and they don’t make me want to go out and buy a copy of Vista. But what they do is show lots of fascinating people saying that they use PCs. They highlight the fact that many people may be somewhat offended by the idea that they can’t be interesting or cool if they don’t use a Mac.

Suddenly, Apple looks a little elitist. I mean, they were elitist before, but in a way that made you want to be a part of the club. Now, they just seem a little snobby.

If that’s what Microsoft and their pushing clients to the edge advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky were aiming for, it’s brilliant.

According to the New York Times, CPB “Relishes efforts to transform perceived negatives into positives.” (See also announcing the onset of an “SUV Backlash” to help promote the US launch of the Mini Cooper–before any such backlash had yet begun at all, positioning the Mini’s uber-compactness as an alternative to the gas-guzzling hegemony.)

More from the New York Times:

Apple executives have been “using a lot of their money to de-position our brand and tell people what we stand for,” said David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.

“They’ve made a caricature out of the PC,” he added, which was unacceptable because “you always want to own your own story.”

The campaign illustrates “a strong desire” among Microsoft managers “to take back that narrative,” Mr. Webster said, and “have a conversation about the real PC.”

The celebration of PC users is intended to show them “connected to this community,” added [Rob Reilly, partner and co-executive creative director at Crispin Porter], “of people who are creative, who are passionate.”

Every single person featured in this ad is somehow compelling and enigmatic. Perhaps it’s because they’re all so different. You have no idea who is coming next. They challenge not only the expectations of who a PC is, but the assumption that you’re supposed know everything about who someone is just based on the kind of computer brand they use. (Talk about “Think Different,” huh?) If the Mac community is “alternative,” the one depicted in the Microsoft ad is global. If the Mac community is elitist, this one is accepting. Beyond “creative and passionate,” this community has a real sense humanity. It’s worldly and smart and open-minded and profoundly diverse. It’s approachable and philosophical. A community that’s out to change the world, and enjoy the world; a community that’s what the world might look like if everyone in it got along. And regardless of whether you’re a Mac or a PC…what kind of progressive human being (not a human doing, or a human thinking) wouldn’t want to be a part of a community like that?

The next time I need a new computer, maybe it’ll be a Mac, and maybe it’ll be a PC, but either way, I find it comforting and heartening to know that this is the kind of community a company like Microsoft sees–and wants the rest of us to see–as its own ideal.

Purity rings, or chastity rings/promise rings originated in the U.S. in the 1990s among Christian affiliated sexual abstinence groups. The rings are sold to adolescents, or to parents so that the rings may be given to their adolescent children as gifts.

It is intended that wearing a purity ring is accompanied by a religious vow to practice celibacy until marriage. The ring is usually worn on the left ring finger with the implication that the wearer will remain abstinent until it is replaced with a wedding ring. Although the ring is worn on the hand, where others can see, its main purpose is to serve as a constant reminder to the wearer of their commitment between themselves and God to remain pure until marriage. There is no particular style for purity rings; however, many worn by Christians have a cross in their design. Some rings contain a diamond chip or other gemstone and/or “True Love Waits”, “One Life, One Love”, or another similar saying embossed somewhere on the ring.

“It’s a little bit ungrateful,” joked Brand, “Because they could literally have sex with any woman that they want, and they’re just not gonna do it. They’re like Superman deciding not to fly, and just going everyhwere on a bus.” The joke became a running theme throughout the night, and at one point Brand even pretended he’d stolen a Jonas Brother’s virginity, holding up a ring in his hand. This, I should mention, got people more riled up than Brand calling George Bush a “retarded cowboy” after pleading, as a citizen of the world, for the US to elect Barack Obama. Eventually, however, he was compelled to apologize. “I’ve gotta say sorry because I said those things about promise rings; that was bad of me. I didn’t mean to take it lightly. I love Jonas Brothers, I think it’s (purity) really good. I don’t want to piss off teenage fans… Promise rings, I’m well up for it, well done everyone…It’s just, a bit of sex occasionally never hurt anybody.”

Coming from Europe, Brand clearly underestimated the dire seriousness with which Americans take their sex. Sure, comedians are supposed to poke fun at people, that’s what they do, but Brand’s delivery had seemed to imply, “Well, surely everyone else must agree this whole purity ring business is silly, right? After all, this is MTV. We’re all groovy Rock ‘n Rollers here, are we not?”

Before Brand issued his apology, American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, herself flossing some finger jewelry, deviated from the telepromptered script at the live telecast declaring, “I just want to say, it’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody–guy or girl–wants to be a slut.” And for an 18 year-old, Sparks nevertheless managed to articulate the American perception of teenage sexuality with an astuteness that I would say is beyond her years: Either you’re a virgin or a slut. There is nothing in between.

Under the influence of the Bush administration’s Abstinence-Only approach to sex education, it’s not particularly surprising that there would be such a drastically reduced understanding of sexuality. Even the idea inherent in the whole Purity Ring concept implies that sex is a contamination, exposure to which makes you unpure. In this kind of oversimplified paradigm there’s obviously no room for complex ideas like being sexually responsible, or emotionally prepared, for instance. Of course, it’s not like rockstars have ever been society’s role models for moderation either, but in the past they’ve generally tended to err on the side of hedonism. So what’s happened that the newest generation of pop sensations is suddenly bringing non-sexy back?

Britney Spears was probably the turning point. Not that it’s exactly her fault that 16 years ago New Kid on the Block, Marky Mark was all about letting Kate Moss come between him and his Calvins while pimping underwear, and in 2008 teen stars are sporting accessories for vows of chastity, but she marked the crossroads. Back when she and Christina Aguilera were vying for individual identities to distinguish themselves (”Hit me baby, one ore time,” vs. “I’m a genie in a bottle, you gotta rub me the right way,” anyone?) and Christina went all Dirrty, Britney’s positioning strategy became about branding the singer as virginal as nebulously possible. (And look which one ended up the nutcase!) Even now, as L.A. Times pop music critic Ann Powers writes, Britney’s “still dealing with questions about exactly when she lost her innocence, even after bearing two children.” Before Britney was singing ballads like, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman,” I think the last time anyone would have really cared this much about the status of a pop star’s virginity was back when you couldn’t show Elvis below the waist on TV. Even if there were still any expectations about the issue, you’d figure it would have gotten cleared up, once and for all, by Madonna. But a couple of things have changed in the two and a half decades since Like a Virgin (”That’s like a virgin. Not actually a virgin,” as Brand pointed out at the VMAs) came out.

Alan Ball–who’s no stranger to commentary on contemporary American sexuality, having written American Beauty, and the just-released Towelhead–explained in a recent NPR interview, “In our culture now everything is saturated with sex. Just watching mainstream TV, or going to the movies, or turning on your computer and looking at the images that are on your welcome page, it’s just sex, sex, sex….I think it’s much more in the faces of children now than it was when I was a kid.”  And it doesn’t stop at mainstream entertainment. A 2007 study conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that more than 40% of kids have come across porn online. Two thirds of them weren’t even trying to look for it. By contrast, in a similar study conducted 8 years ago, just 25 percent of all kids interviewed said they’d had unwanted exposure to online pornography.

Meanwhile, in the era of Katy Perry ditties like “I kissed a girl and I liked it. (Hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.)” and “Ur so gay and you don’t even like boys,” teenagers are now also faced with an unprecedented array of options for how to define their sexual identities. In a New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

This past September [2005], when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories. It doesn’t take a Stuyvesant education to see what this means: More girls are experimenting with each other, and they’re starting younger. And this is a conservative estimate, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of human development at Cornell who has been conducting research on same-sex-attracted adolescents for over twenty years. Depending on how you phrase the questions and how you define sex between women, he believes that “it’s possible to get up to 20 percent of teenage girls.”

Of course, what can’t be expressed in statistical terms is how teenagers think about their same-sex interactions. Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

So if all the options for defining your sexual identity are left open, but taking advantage of any of them makes you–as Sparks schooled us–a slut, and at the same time the pervasive sexualization of mainstream  entertainment, and contemporary culture in general, has made sluttiness a pretty much expected default–dude, how the hell are the latest crop of teen pop stars supposed to rebel?

From Details’ The Total Awesomeness of Being the Jonas Brothers:

On a quiet Friday morning in a dressing room at Madison Square Garden, the Jonas Brothers hold out their hands to show off their purity rings. Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas—the teen-pop trio who stand, at this very moment, on the brink of hugeness—wear the metal bands on their fingers to symbolize, as Joe puts it, “promises to ourselves and to God that we’ll stay pure till marriage.” Joe is 18. His ring is silver and adorned with a cross. “It actually ripped apart a little bit, just on the bottom, here, but I didn’t want to get a new one, because this one means so much to me,” he says. Nick, who is 15, says, “I got mine made at Disney World. It’s pretty awesome.” Kevin, at 20, is the oldest of the three, and while a punk-rock purity ring from Tiffany might represent the ultimate oxymoron, that’s exactly what he’s going for. His silver vow of abstinence is covered with studs. “It’s pretty rock and roll,” Kevin says. “It’s getting banged up a little bit because of the guitar.”

For any parent reading this, suddenly getting wildly excited about getting their teenager bling from god, this would probably be a good time to mention that virginity pledges are basically as much a sham as Brand assumed everyone would figure they are. A recent review of a number of independent American studies concluded that abstinence programs “show little evidence of sustained impact on attitudes and intentions,” and furthermore “show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse” Which is how Sarah Palin’s 17-year old daughter ended up 7 months pregnant, and how yours might too if the republicans have anything to say about it.

All this stuff we’re leaving kids to figure out on their own can be pretty damn charged and confusing and overwhelming. In an environment where the policy on sex ed exemplifies “don’t ask don’t tell,” where 40% of kids are being “educated” about sex through porn–whether they’re looking to be or not, and where the process of defining your sexuality is like a whole new kind of multiple choice exam, it’s actually not all that surprising that some kids might find the concept of a virginity pledge appealing. (At least in theory, if not 100% in practice). In the absence of information or substantive guideance to help them better understand what they’re dealing with, a purity ring offers teenagers a way to simply sublimate the insecurity and pressure that it’s completely normal–basically mandatory–to feel about sex at that age, with a token of self-righteousnessconfidence for simply avoiding it.

Denny Pattyn, an evangelical Christian youth minister, and founder of Silver Ring Thing, which runs more than 70 programs a year for teens, spreading a message of abstinence until marriage, and offering a ring to those who complete the course, appeared on the Today show following the VMAs, and according to MTV News:

Pattyn said he’s been getting quite a few requests from media organizations in the United States and England to discuss the issue. But more important, he ran into John McCain’s daughter Meghan backstage at the show, and the two had a talk that he hopes will soon connect him to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. “We had a long talk about Sarah Palin and her daughter’s pregnancy and them maybe getting more involved when they come to Pennsylvania where I live,” Pattyn said.

“This is a big, big to-do,” Pattyn said of the flap in his community over the Jonas Brothers/ Brand issue. “It’s fantastic for an organization like ours, and we think this will open up some major things.” Pattyn said he gave Meghan McCain one of his group’s rings to give to Governor Palin for her daughter “to let her know we’re supporting her and praying for her.”

I don’t know which is more suspect, that just two years after the ACLU settlement with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a case challenging federal funding of more than $1 million for Silver Ring Thing (which seeing as it is a subsidiary of an Evangelical Church, giving it govt. funding did kinda constitute a major violation of that whole separation of church and state thing) Pattyn’s back innit again as if that never happened, or what exactly this guy was doing hangin’ backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in the first place?

(Hey, Trojan, have you considered maybe getting involved with the VMA’s for 2009? Might be a good time to think about that.)

Kinsey is probably rolling over in his grave, and so are a bunch of musicians. As Powers writes, “Nobody seems to remember when rockers were supposed to rattle the jewelry of the folks who attend glittery galas. But then, MTV has long trafficked in turning rebelliousness into a commodity. Brand, saying uncontainable things, upset the apple cart. That made him the most old-fashioned presence in a program full of young, aggressively commercial self-packagers, for whom any statement — political or otherwise — is best judged by the number of units sold.”

First i’m trying to recover from a week in the forest. As part of the decompression process, yesterday involved a trip to the hair salon, which meant I actually had time to do nothing but sit around and read for the first time in quite a while.

“It’s the Adultery, Stupid,” An article in the current Vanity Fair, suggests that, “Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.”

Which is pretty fascinating if you view this idea through the lens of identity. Same as we buy the brands and products that we feel express aspects of who we are, we support the political candidates who do the same. In this particular race, the touch-points for identification are no longer simply about party affiliations, policy views, or even age, but now extend to gender, race, and, as the Vanity Fair piece suggests, sex life too:

We want to know. That’s a big part of Bill Clinton’s legacy: there’s always a sexual explanation. We’re savvy. Sex completes the picture—it explains so much. Tim Russert and other Sunday-talk-show hosts might maintain the illusion that politics is, or should be, a formal dialogue about impersonal issues, with sex only a topic of surprise, scandal, and shocked-shockedness, but in real life everybody is constantly and openly speculating on the sexual nature and needs and eccentricities of every rising and demanding political personality.

It’s a point of identification and differentiation. We vote for or against sex lives.

The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one…. So what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.

John McCain, with his burden of being the would-be oldest president, is helped not just by having his mother on the campaign trail but also by having a much younger wife. He is evidently still vital (that old euphemism). Even the suggestion, by The New York Times, that he might still be compulsively vital has not yet hurt him—quite possibly he gets a break because he’s an old guy. A randy codger seems harmless and amusing.

Fred Thompson, meanwhile, so vividly middle-aged—a whale of middle age—was out of the running almost as soon as his big-bosomed wife, 24 years younger than Fred, came into view and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested she could be a pole dancer. And if that didn’t do it, seeing the weary way he looked at his young children certainly did—here was a middle-aged man who had sexually overreached. Rudy Giuliani offered the most gutsy sexual Rorschach test. His view seemed to be that the problem with sex is that it suggests weakness—the lowest attribute for a politician. But if you approached your sexual weakness with brazenness and bullying, you’d get credit for being tough (implicit, too, was Rudy’s assumption that there was a viable constituency of guys’ guys who had something on the side). Mitt Romney’s problem was that he appeared asexual—1950s-television-style asexual, which seemed like its own sort of fetish. All this, with a digression into Eliot Spitzer’s activities, has been the real background and narrative of the campaign.

It’s helped make Barack Obama possible.

There is next to no speculation about Barack Obama’s sexual secrets. This is a seismic shift in racial subtext. The white men are the sexual reprobates and loose cannons (while Mitt and Hillary are just strange birds) and the black man the figure of robust middle-class family warmth.

Against these middle-aged people, he’s the naturalist, the credible and hopeful figure of a man who actually might be having sex with his smiling, energetic, and oomphy wife…. He’s the only one in the entire field who doesn’t suggest sexual desperation. He represents our ideal of what a good liberal’s sex life ought to be.

The article offers that sex has become a political metaphor, and in a presidential race of unprecedented diversity, the whole election could be like some kind of subconscious cultural Kinsey survey.

We may be in trouble.