Greek Fire

A little fixated this week.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/2008_greek_riots.html

I can’t stop going back to these images. They aren’t the greatest photos ever taken. Some are pretty damn good, but it is content over composition, connection over color that devastates me. I just keep going back. I keep shaking my head and finding myself at a loss for words. I scroll down to the mannequins on fire, or the yelling-man’s face, or the boy offering the flower to the cop, or the fist dripping blood, and I wonder how big a sin it is to sit on the couch and listen to the ticking of the clock.

When I first saw these pictures, my immediate impulse was to quit my job. I wanted to sell everything that I own except my camera and laptop and get over there now. Go to Greece. Be there. Experience it, and capture it. This is real life. This is one of those moments that defines history.

Because, in a way Greece’s history defined riot and rebellion.

Where else in ancient times were argument and dissent glorified rather than squelched? Who first applied democracy on a grand scale? Greece: where science and reason replaced religious authority as the foundation of knowledge. And even before that—before Percales and Socrates—Greece was the place where you go to war for ten years over one woman, where you are admired more for your craftiness than your virtue, where the gods were noted more for their faults than their feats, where Prometheus would rather push a boulder up a hill until the end of time than tell Zeus he was sorry.

Later a Macedonian named Alexander would take this attitude to the rest of the known world, and Rome would establish Greek culture as the West’s most foundational influence for the next 2000 years.

No, it wouldn’t be the first time Greece made history with a good fight.

Writers and historians love to trace social disturbances, be they riots, revolutions, or world wars, back to some single act of violence: a lone bullet, the spark that set off the powder keg. The Boston Massacre, catalyst of the American Revolution, started when a British Soldier struck a boy on the side of the head with his musket. World War One was triggered by a gunshot assassination. A single drunk driving arrest sparked the Watts riots. These are the shots heard round the world. Tiny butterfly wing things unmasking society’s towering jenga-like structure. When the right lynchpins are yanked, down she comes.

In Greece, December 6th’s lynchpin was 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, shot dead by police officers in a ghetto-esque district of Athens. It has not been determined whether or not the killing was intentional. Defense attorneys claim that the officer fired warning shots, one of which ricocheted into the boy’s heart. Early forensics reports seemed to agree, but the latest analysis suggests that the bullet entered his body directly.

Murder or accident, the angry demonstrations began within minutes of the shooting, resulting in violent confrontations with police. By Sunday many of the demonstrations had turned to riots. Two weeks later the outbreak continues, resulting in dozens of protests throughout Greece, while demonstrations of solidarity spread across the continent from Spain to Moscow. And yet all this energy is not really about Alexandros Grigoropoulos. He was only the trigger to a chain of explosives set by high unemployment rates, a Greek economy in Catch-22, and the weakness of a corrupt government desperately clinging to power. It is a familiar feeling to hear people speak of the majority of Greece’s wealth in the hands of a tiny minority. Is this the economic fate of all democracy—hidden oligarchies?

I was not surprised to discover that Greece’s recent past has been shaped in part by student uprising. Post-WWII. Like so many other small nations Greece was caught up in the Cold War between the US and the USSR. In 1974 the US-backed Junta was overthrown, due in part to the aggressive protests of students. The rebellious student activity took place in the Polytechnic University in Athens, and though military tanks and soldiers eventually put down the rebellion, the students’ impact on the social consciousness dealt a crippling blow to the Junta. Since then protests and activism have been placed in a position of high political esteem. It is now conventional for the police to stay out of the Polytechnic campus, allowing students the luxury to plot their demonstrations, and to regroup and rearm. In short, protest is all part of the process in Greece. I don’t know about you, but this makes me a little jealous, living in a country that is supposed to be grounded in dissent, but too often reclines to disillusion.

For the record, I never grew up around riots of any kind. I didn’t go to the WTO protests in Seattle. I didn’t even make it to the tense arrival of the Hells Angels in Missoula, an event that brought out cops in riot gear, possibly for the first time in Montana history. I’ve never been beaten or tear gassed or arrested. So I have no experience, and I’m a little self-conscious writing about it, for fear that in my ignorance I will over-glorify something that doesn’t deserve the glory. But something about my American heritage has given me a permanent hard-on for revolutions, uprisings, and people coming together to get shit done. I know all about the tyranny of the masses and the irrationality of mob mentality. I know that most police are out there because they love their community and want to keep it safe. Both sides are doing what they feel is right, and if there’s any real enemy he is probably cowering behind locked gates. Like wars, riots and revolutions are often leverage mechanisms for a power-hungry few. But when an uprising is spontaneous (and it’s hard to know when it is), for good or ill, it is the realest of the real. If we could figure out how to extract the passion from the violence, we’d be better off. Until then I can’t help feeling that fighting back is always better than lying down and taking it.

For weeks the fires of Greece have merely simmered on the horizon of America’s consciousness. In the shadow of world economic tremors, the Mumbai attacks, and the first black President, maybe the flames of Athens aren’t very interesting. Or maybe nobody feels like wondering aloud whether these riots are a harbinger of things to come. We get occasional headlines, and images like these, but most of us have no idea what civil unrest is really all about. We’re a far cry from the protests of the 1960’s and the rebellions of the 1760’s. Wherever Greece ends up in the next few months may greatly impact what the rest of the world feels capable of. There is an awareness of the need for some sort of revolution, peaceful or otherwise. There is a general consensus that these economic problems are a result of a deficiency in the system, and that system needs a rapid overhaul. I’m not saying the consensus is entirely conscious, but when you have the President of the United States saying things like: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system”, you can see how the cracks are starting to show.

I try to imagine what an uprising would look like in this country. Some days it feels like we’ve outgrown them; other days they feel a hair’s breadth away. I see hundreds of houses mashed together, apartments filled with humans and all their weird-ass stories and vibrating emotions. What social configuration might set the stage for the flinging open of these doors in the middle of the night? What lynchpin would pour strangers into the streets to release their pent up frustrations, to get out and burn, tear down, and destroy—to decide today is the day to do something about it.

Often the catalyst is an abuse of authority. The police bullying instead of protecting, a government corrupt and self-serving. When it goes on unchecked, what else do you expect to happen? Over the past couple months my own neighborhood has seen several incidents of police violence against homeless youth. In Golden Gate Park, a kid named Ashtray was sitting down playing guitar, perpetrating what he called “Random Acts of Music”, when cops started beating the shit out of him. What became of this abuse? A printed story, words passed around the streets, percolating emotions—but not enough to spark an uprising. Maybe our society is no longer configured to shudder and strike when our lynchpins are pulled.

I don’t know what’s needed. I won’t even pretend to have a clue. What I do know is that the pictures of the Greece riots have grabbed me by the balls. There is something going on over there that is lacking here. Maybe it’s just that passion and a willingness to take big risks for what we believe in. Maybe it really is a bit of broken glass and bloody fists. When the looming threats are as unwieldy as global economic collapse and climate change, perhaps it takes some old school anger to get things done.

The difference between riot and revolution lies mainly in the outcome. In a revolution the mob wins; but riots don’t have enough power to hold out against authority. Revolutions put down tyranny; riots are themselves eventually put down. Revolutions are an intoxicating shift in power; riots are more like a power hangover. But take a look at how many riots and rebellions broke out across the colonies before the “real” American Revolution started. Riots are unorganized outbursts of raw passion that can pave the way to real change, and that’s part of the beauty of this particular series of pictures. The riot itself may be ugly, but the passion can still be beautiful. The passion I see in these images is not just raw violence. It is desperate to make a place in which desperation is no longer the norm. And it is exploding out of the very rocks upon which the Western world was built. The roots revolt against the tree. Maybe all that passion will be squandered, maybe it’s counter productive and stupid and wrong, but at least it tells the world that something troubling is lurking in the shadows, and that there’s more that you can do about it than sitting on the couch and wishing things were different.

love is a Virus that

by Jacques Fiennes the Cynic

Love is a virus that you spread by breaking up with people. There is no first cause, but you think you are in love. You get wrapped up and go down deep until you find out it wasn’t the same on the other side. Shell-shocked and stumbly you head for the door, looking for someone to make the pain go away. Looking for Mr. or Miss Methadone. When you find her you latch on for dear life because the shakes are uncontrollable. It doesn’t matter how strong a person you are, how independent, those first few days are hell even for the ruggedest individual.

But while you strap in for the treatment, he or she is so enticed by the combination of passion and pain and detachment that they feel free to fall for you. In turn. The shoe has changed foots.

Love is a virus that you spread by breaking up with people. The broken-up-with becomes a wild crawling thing, an addict. The dumpee is dumpsterdiving for hope, and once they’re on their own two feet again, once they can stand and see things clearly, they no longer need Mr. or Miss Methadone, now do they? In harsh or gentle fashion they turn and walk away leaving the former injection of affection to be the new addict in the sequence.

And on and on it goes.

Like any clever virus, this one latches on symbiotically, leaving traces of itself to flare up again. Once the drained is refueled, he or she is ready again to take the strain from the next dazed and stumbling charmer.

It’s in the eyes, the shiny diamond glow of the sickly betrayed. Seductive, sensual, brimming with new loss. Fresh magnets, newly dissected with plenty of free floating electrons screaming out in radiant photon desire. These are the symptoms of the fresh addict, the ready-to-infect, and having tasted it once, our skin crawls like a bungling blindman until we can get it again.

Love is a virus, but it also has a built-in backup plan. At some point, a baby or two might emerge from all of this back and forth. Because love realizes that people grow old and dry up and stop caring so much—that they become, in a way, immune—babies are plan B to replenish Love’s stock of hosts.

How many babies are we responsible for? Think nine layers down the tree, from breaker-uper to ninth-generation break-up-ee. How many apples do you reckon bloomed along the way? How many offspring of exes and exes-of-exes (and so on) could trace a thread back to your latest bounce-back wind-em-up propagation of this love, this virus, that you spread by breaking up with people?

Maybe this is the key to a just economy. A computer traces all affairs of the heart, assigns values to connecting lines and layers of separation, weighs the fallout and the fact that some poor sods might need five or six Mr. or Miss Methadones to get by, and redistributes a fractional monthly fee for each fractional infant that everyone is fractionally responsible for. They say it takes a village to raise a child; I say it takes a village to make one. That the uberfertile, the unlucky and the stupid should shoulder all the blame seems unfair.

How many slices of baby do I have floating around out there? At least one that I can think of, but the line goes deep and the chain links long. Could be dozens. Hundreds.

Rhythm, Romance, and Jerks

I believe I have figured out the secret to one of life's most impenetrable questions: Why do chicks dig Jerks?

After reading and discussing a whole slew of theories for this phenomenon, none of them left me wholly satisfied, particularly since the digging of jerks tends to be universal, at least through certain periods of every modern woman's life.

I boldly step into this arena, being an ignorant man, and welcome the dissent and abuse that is likely to follow.

Here's a related question: Why is music so entwined with love? This is a bountiful zone of speculation. Music resonates with biorhythms, with our psychological memory of sexual rhythms. Music links our rational minds to our intuitive selves in incomprehensible ways, and often concerns other subjects that do the same, primarily our passions. Specifically love.

And what is it about love that we love? Is it not this very sense of harmony between these rival aspects of our souls? Is not love a microcosm for the rhythms and season of all life? For it encapsulates so many of these rhythms within itself: sexuality, which is still tethered to an ancient seasonal swell; family, whose stages trace most great patterns and roles of social life; reciprocation, in its ultimate form, the giving and receiving of ourselves with others.

Music illuminates and focuses these elements within us; elements often too broad to encompass five minutes of thought, are stripped to their essence in music--that bittersweet pill of temporally experiencing the eternal (or close enough to eternal, in the recurring significance of these elements through human history).

Uh-huh, you say, so what exactly does all this flowery shit have to do with jerks? Obviously it is not that jerks are in tune with these romantic ideas. Well, probably not, but women generally are, and it is in the jerk that a woman is best able to experience these things--at least on the surface.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Josh. Are you just talking about drama? The drama of being with a jerk? Kind of, but I think the real answer is far more subtle.

It all comes down to a theory I have about emotions in general. Anyone who has ever been a teenager probably remembers a time that they were depressed for no damned good reason. And love itself, sometimes, seems to strike for no damn good reason either. Usually the two (depression and love) are entwined, but my question is: are they entwined with each other like a pair of dancers, or are they entwined with some third element--like two planets orbiting the same sun?

To be depressed about nothing is a horrible experience. It may be the most horrible experience there is. The mind has nothing upon which to hang the depression, nothing to blame as its source, and therefore no direction to go about fixing it. But what if all depression were truly this way? What if every time you got depressed you were really depressed about nothing at all? What if depression were just something that happens to you because you are human. If it were merely an experience of the world that comes and goes with the tide of your brain chemistry?

But wait, we're often depressed about things and we know exactly what those things are. Do we really? Or has our rational brain merely trained itself to cope with these rhythms through reason? Maybe the rational brain is just a control freak who even wants to lord it over our emotive and intuitive side (yes, rational brain, don't deny it). Okay. Imagine yourself as a child, developing patterns of needs, and the denial or fulfillment of those needs. As you get older this behavior develops into a more sophisticated form of meeting needs--desires are born. Don't get these two terms confused. Desires are the ordering principle that regulates (and often disguises) our needs. Desire stacks on top of need in such a complex way that I'd have to hire a psychologist to describe it, but I think you all know what I mean. Through desire, needs eventually becomes psychological entities rather than biological ones. Needs spread out and becomes multifaceted, and eventually Desire comes in to represent, for example, maybe a sort of storing-up for future needs. It may do so wildly and neurotically, or it might do so in a fairly healthy fashion. "I need sex. I know I'm going to need sex in the future--wouldn't it be more efficient to have a long-term girlfriend?" But you'd kind of look like a chump if you said you NEEDED a girlfriend. This is an example of a desire generalizing a complex of needs over time.

And you guys thought I wasn't a romantic!

Anyway, the point is, most of our emotions express to us this complexity of needs through the conduit of desire. Desire is the pipeline from emotion to biological need, and further to the biological rhythm that those needs bear out. The rhythm that was once based on a physical craving has become a psychological craving, and a psychological rhythm. The rhythm may or may not connect with any particular circumstance. We could just have an emotion slap us in the face one day, out of the blue, like a stray memory. And because the emotion is a complexity of desires which are a complexity of needs, we might not be able to draw any rational connection between what we're feeling and what our self really has to have.

Buddhist's speak of the wheel of suffering. I'm going to steal this image for my own ends. Imagine a cycle of suffering that comes and goes in your life. Imagine it driving your emotions in a complex pattern. For simplicity's sake, let's pretend the wheel turns in a very simple way: every winter you will be depressed. Thus spake the Wheel of Suffering! So winter comes along and you start to get depressed, fine, and being no longer a teenager, you start to wonder why you're depressed and you start to look for the cause. (I imagine this first phase happening at a very subconscious level, but again, for simplicity, we'll pretend this is all going on in your inner monologue). So you say, what could be the matter, and most likely something in your life is not going as planned. Well maybe that's it! And you assign that problem to your depression. You do this because you are no longer as in touch with your unconscious as you were when you were younger, and your brain, that has developed its tidy system of wants and needs, requires--no, demands!--some source for the depression, in order that it can run that source through its desire-satiating system, and do (or believe that it is doing) something about it.

This theory may or may not have any validity. I've often thought about it mostly for fun, but the tendrils certainly grab onto obvious truths. Rhythms are important and are a part of our emotions. They are psychological requirements, and even if they are not the all-powerful source of our emotions, they are at the very least strong influences, and deeply entwined.

Just like this apparently wild digression is deeply entwined with our topic: the jerk.

Imagine a woman in love. This is a tremendous place for her to be in. This is the crystallized expression of all of her emotional needs and how she intends to deal with them.

BUT! Ahhh... something is amiss. Relationship expresses our conjoined rhythms just as feelings express those rhythms (and by "express" I mean a form of inner communication, say, from subconscious to conscious--"feel that? yeah, that's hunger. eat something.") Similarly, the relationship rhythm, extending from the individual biorhythms, might indicate that something is wrong with the relationship.

Or it might just indicate that life is a series of epicycles, of swells and release, of motions and emotions. But what is the rational brain to do with all that?

What if you're dating an absolute prince? What if he is fulfilling all your needs with the utmost loyalty? Sounds good on paper, right? But most women will admit a certain anxiety arising from this situation. Suppose that anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between experiencing an ebb in relationship, and having no rational explanation. Nothing to DO about it! "I feel lonely, but he's right here attending to my needs. The fucker!"

The loneliness comes with the tide, as does feelings of inadequacy, fear, anger, and countless others that we still don't really have names for.

But with the nice guy there is no tangible way to confront it. With the jerk? Ahhh... now there's another story.

The jerk undoubtedly will have any number of recent neglectful behaviors that the rational mind can assign to the emotion. And whether or not they are connected is not the point. What matters is that they are there to be confronted. "I feel like hell. Why? I don't know, but he stood me up the other night, so maybe that's part of it."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not slamming women. This is just as much a guy-thing, and anyway, I'm exaggerating a point. In fact, I'm convinced that women are generally the only ones who eventually figure this shit out and come up with more creative ways to deal with it. Which is why the older women get (hopefully) the more they start to stray from the jerk-attraction.

In the meantime, you have your emotion, and you have your jerk, and now you have the recipe for living out the great... yes, here comes the word... the great drama of life's rhythms. You can express your frustration, and you can do it in a way he understands. You did this to me, you fucker. And if he's a crafty jerk, he will finally relent and apologize, and the cycle of reconciliation will be complete.

This cycle is expressive of who we are. I'm not dogging on it. It is a powerful and pervasive force. The "nice guy" leaves no room for reconciliation. He allows no rift and so there is none to repair. There is no great movement of emotions (which, recall, are an expression of our deepest rhythms), in which the woman and her man can participate. And without that, what's the point?

(Is life not really, as Shakespeare said, a great play? And whether we drive or are driven by these little psychic cogs and wheels through the movements of time--of course what we really want is our counterpart to play their part.)

Am I saying guys should be jerks? Not really. I guess if I were to give advice I'd just saying be your damn self. There's a little jerk in there somewhere, I guarantee it. But dating a super-jerk for a long time is probably a little psychotic, and way on the other extreme. For all of this to work, the subject must be a normal jerk-faced jerk. He must be able eventually to come around and do this dance with the girl. If he doesn't, he'll be just as unfulfilling as the purely nice-guy. Women don't want "jerks" per-say, but they want the expression of the natural rhythms, the ups and downs that are life. And they want someone to share those rhythms with, to participate in the conflict-resolution experience.

Or maybe it's just that women have to be right all the time, and the jerk offers them the best opportunity to do so. *ducks*