Hey all you creeps and cretins. This is the Kingfisher Lab Report #002, broadcast to a worldwide computer network from America’s Second City on the Third Coast.
The Moon Is Dead, Long Live The Moon
According to some ancient myths, a monster devours the full moon as it wanes. Upon its complete consumption, it is reborn, in an endless cycle of death and regeneration. New moons are a time for beginnings.
I’m going to be starting a new job soon, one that I’ve been working toward for the last five years when I decided to go back to school. It struck me the other day that this is the first job I’m actually looking forward to. (We can start the clock on how fast that new job smell wears off.) Every job is subject to the uncomfortable and inconvenient and outright shitty realities of life. People you don’t like, or who don’t like you, tasks that suck but have to be done, the eventual monotony when the day-to-day becomes rote. I’ve already been running into the realities of working within a massive bureaucratic system, as my start date has been repeatedly pushed back due to the glacial slowness of the HR department. Every human I’ve dealt with has been perfectly lovely, but we humans tend to design large, clunky, impersonal systems that grind us beneath their wheels without even noticing. But, like I said, I’m looking forward to it.
In Which I Give A Rambling, Vague Leftist Manifesto
And that’s a new thing for me. I think most jobs are shit. Do you like your job? I’m betting most of you would answer no, and if you did answer yes, ask yourself if you really enjoy what you do or if you just like the people you work with and realize that there are more disagreeable ways you could be making ends meet? That’s been my experience, at least. The best jobs I’ve had ultimately came down to liking my fellow workers and not hating the work too much. Those of us who have truly found something they enjoy to do, a calling or a passion that also pays the bills, are the lucky few.
So you have to ask, is it necessary to have so many people working at jobs they hate? The lack of access to life’s basic needs drives a lot of that. You need to work to eat, have a roof over your head, get access to medical care. Society as a whole needs people to work for things to function. Someone has to flip the burgers and clean the carpets and shoot the raccoons in your attic, right? Maybe. I’ve always been drawn to leftist political ideologies — socialism, communism, anarchism. You get told a lot when you’re a kid (or when you’re in your twenties or thirties or whenever) that when you grow up and/or “start living in the real world” you’ll become more conservative. Because the Left is seen as idealistic, but what’s wrong with that? Why is idealism something that should be abandoned just because you get a job and start paying bills?
Conservative ideology is, at best, interested in maintaining the status quo. I think most conservatives want that because they fear their lot in life could become worse. And that is absolutely a fear that the ruling classes use to generate support. But anyone’s life can nosedive into the gutter at any time for any number of reasons. Using that as an excuse to not try to do something to help others is simply cowardly.
There is a value in idealism, in trying to figure out a better way that society can function and working toward that end. Our reach should exceed our grasp, it’s the only way we improve as individuals and as communities. Maybe we don’t achieve our wildest dreams, but we will often find ourselves somewhere that is better than when we started. People tend to keep a very limited historical perspective in their minds. This can make the current system of global capitalism seem like the only way to do things. But its primacy does not grant it status as the best economic model. Humans have organized society in a myriad of different ways, and to think that right now we’ve got the best one is ludicrous.
We should absolutely be analyzing how capitalism fails us as individuals, as communities, as a species, and how we might be able to organize society to better serve the needs of us all. Because if you think there’s no value in idealism, then you’re saying that Jeff Bezos deserves to have $156 billion dollars and 3.1 million children deserve to die of hunger every year so that you can get a 24-pack of tube socks for $5 dollar with same-day delivery.
Total global wealth is estimated at $280 trillion. That’s about $36,000 per person for all 7.6 billion of us. Now, I know that’s a gross oversimplification of things, but if you look at that, and the fact that 1% of the population holds half of the total wealth, you’ve got to at least agree that we could be doing better. Let’s start there, and work together to build a better future for us all.
P.S. That better future doesn’t involve anyone in fucking cages.
Brainfeed
All right, it was far too easy to rattle off all of that, so I’ll keep the rest of this short.
Did anyone catch that super racist Republican promo last weekend? They’re not using a dogwhistle as much a blowhorn these days. Sure, it’s been pulled off the air, but it still got prime time play during Sunday Night Football and was shown on most of the major TV networks, so they all got to have their fake liberal outrage cake and eat their advertising dollars, too. I’m encouraged by the increased voter turnout for the mid-terms this year (seriously, I’ve never seen so much enthusiasm for a mid-term election!), but the right is obviously still getting their old, racist, white base out in solid numbers, and they’ve got more practice at it. So take some time off, but get back in the fight soon, cause this shit isn’t going to be beaten at the ballot box alone.
What shit, you ask? Why, America’s frightening slide into becoming a corporate fascist state, that’s what shit! Just take a look…
Okay, okay, I said I’d keep it short, I’ll save that for later.
—Fiction
I’ve been reading Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. There was a lot of buzz around this when it came out earlier this year, and for good reason. It’s a solid hard SF adventure story set about 100 years in the future. It’s biopunk in the way that early William Gibson was cyberpunk. Newitz’s future is full of unleashed biotech — think body mods, ubiquitous socially acceptable drug use (especially if they’re productivity drugs), disposable biodegradable tech that melts back into the environment after use. There’s also robots and AI, too. Speaking of imagining alternate social systems, Newitz envisions a global society that has grown out of our present capitalist nation-state paradigm into something new which relies on debt slavery (indentured servitude is how they refer to it in the novel) to form the base labor for the economy. There’s a lot of ideas here, maybe too many for any of them to get as much depth as I’d like, but I’m only halfway done with it, so we’ll see how well it sticks the landing. Definitely worth a read.
—Music
http://loveandpainmusic.bandcamp.com/track/we-ride – I can’t find much about this band, but this EP they released this year is moody and dreamlike and I love it.
—Podcast
Desert Oracle Radio – Weird, haunting dispatches from the deserts of the American Southwest.
All The Leaves Dropped At The First Sign Of Frost
While everyone else is doing NaNoWriMo this month, I’m going in the opposite direction. I’m doing a flash fiction project for November: four flash pieces released on Fridays. The first one went up yesterday, and you can read it here. The second one is already on course to be well above flash fiction length, as I am a wordy bastard, but it remains to be seen if I’ll have time to edit it down to size. I’m going to publish what I’ve got each Friday, complete or not, warts and all. Think of it as a stress test. And it’ll also keep me writing during the first weeks of my new job so I can establish a writing routine around going back to full-time work.
Wish me luck, weirdos.
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