Some of my Facebook friends think it’s fun to hijack my liberal posts with neo-con dogma. Let’s see how they like having their ugly nonsense shared with everyone:

Earlier this week, I shared a political Facebook meme from Americans Against The Republican Party.

It showed photos of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marc Rubio, and Lindsay Graham with a caption underneath them all reading:

“Every single Republican Senator running for president in 2016

just voted against paid sick leave.

Oh, and they’re hoping you’ll forget

by next year. Share if you won’t.”

The following Facebook comments from my ‘friends’ are cut-and-pasted verbatim:

Gerry_A:   _ Did you happen to notice 50 percent are Cuban American. There are 3 Hispanic Senators when you add melendez whose a democrat from New Jersey and all 3 are Cuban American and represent Texas, Florida and New Jersey. Isn’t America great!!! I am friends with all 3.

Xper Dunn:   _ I’m sure they’re lovely people, Gerry. But I disapprove of wealthy white men who oppose social service proposals. They have zero understanding of how ugly that makes them look. And, I’m sorry, but it reflects on their character, as well.

Gerry_A:   _ It is naive to think politics are run by evil men who do not have logical analyzed arguments for their opinions. Educated people all seek justice and the best for mankind. You can disagree with a conclusion, but you should never use wide brushstrokes in labelling their character. I recall your comment about your tax dollars concerning the military. I chose not to respond to you then, but found your comment completely inaccurate. Only 3 percent of income taxes pay all military salaries and of that only a small share are combat troops. I doubt you finance even a hundreth of one of their salaries, while their sacrifice protects your right to say whatever pleases you. Even if you are wrong.

Back to my Cuban American friends, it is interesting you are now delineating between race in judging hispanics. We do not. Ted Cruz is a Princeton alumni like you. Perhaps you should further divide out that niche group. We Princeton Cubans are even a smaller niche!

Xper Dunn:   _ I was referring to all of them–anyone who can become a conservative senator is as white as they need to be, whether they have Cuban heritage or whatever. I got nothing but love for hispanics, rich or poor. And I think the naivety is in thinking there are no evil men in politics. Reasoned arguments can be made about lots of stuff, but that doesn’t help a single working parent much—neither does it bring America any closer to the standards enjoyed in the rest of the developed world, vis-a-vis workplace conditions and benefits. As far as military spending goes—I wish their salaries WERE the lion’s share of the cost—I think you’ll find that Equipment Expenditures are the real budget-killers…but that’s another debate.

Xper Dunn:   _ But I do dislike it when people throw the military in my face when it comes to my sometimes liberal use of our freedom of speech. I respect the military plenty—but they don’t protect my rights, they protect our country. It’s up to me to decide whether I risk being confronted by others when I open my mouth. I sometimes say things that I’m well aware may attract violence from some crazy person–they might decide that people like me need killing–I say it anyway because freedom only exists if one is willing to die for it. There’s no military cordon around my house, last time I looked–it’s my ass on the line.

Gerry_A:   _ Chris , I am sorry I mixed a response to another friend with yours. The military reference was for him and something he wrote

Xper Dunn:   _ Ah. Nevermind.

Gerry_A:   _ The political response was for you!!! Sorry we do not always agree. Those like me who came here are thankful for the priviledge and tend to be very protective of the USA. I understand that to keep it special sometimes criticism and change are necessary.

Jerry_J:   _ The way the bill is currently written, I have to agree with them. I fully support sick leave but in some business’ the current system won’t work. I hire well over a hundred people a year – some of them may only work for us once. The way the bill is written; someone who works for me once will receive the same benefits from me as someone who works all year for me. The same thing happens in unemployment. The way the unemployment law is written, here in Florida folks who work for me once are able to collect unemployment (after just four hours of work).

Xper Dunn:   _ This isn’t a wealthy country anymore–it’s a country with a lot of wealthy people in it. When people can earn better wages and work less hours here than elsewhere, then we’ll be the richest country again. Now we are just fetishizing ownership over humanity–it may be American, but it isn’t very sensible. I don’t see how anyone can watch a news program and NOT think that criticism and change are called for. And Jerry_J:   _–all entrepreneurs and business owners take risks–let SOME of those risks be on the part of the people who you depend on to make your business work.

Gerry_A:   _ Jeryl, you are clear and concise with your argument. I agree with you and cannot understand how any educated intelligent person would not agree. It is the blind criticism that makes me disregard people where I would otherwise try to listen and analyze  their position. Unfortunately politics is deteriorating into sound bite mass opinion making. I built a 3000 employee media company from scratch and confronted the shananigans and theories of 2 unions which represented the lion’s share of my employees. Without entrepreneurs they would not have a job and yet the next day after getting the job of their dreams, many spend their efforts trying to demand the most compensation for the least amount of work. I no longer have union employees and would rather close businesses than deal with their counterproductive demands and disheartening blind theories. The bill you and these politicians challenge is absurd, yet they were labelled negatively for not allowing it to cause job losses.

Xper Dunn:   _ People are SO unreasonable when they’re not in charge, aren’t they?

Xper Dunn:   _ Gerry, you invite yourself to my Post, spouting your ‘money is everything–unions are evil’ nonsense–and then you have the nerve to say you don’t bother to ‘listen to or analyze’ people who disagree with you. Gee, I wish I was that smart.

Gerry_A:   _ The problem with your politics Chris is that you think only those not in power are reasonable! When you build a company you sacrifice alot. It is alot easier to let others work long hours, sacrifice their sleep, health and diet and then turn around and demand unjust compensation just because the owner has more. You act as if the owners abuse their employees when the truth is the reverse. Owners sacrifice their lives and suffer much more than a regular paycheck provides. Centuries ago unjust labor practices were anialated in the US. Our court system has become a redistribution center. Juries and often judges vote contrary to the laws in order to reallocate resources from a company to a litigant. You preach as if justice is unilateral. It should not be! Right now it discriminates against the business owner. Longterm it is terrible for the winners as a whole as businesses close, cut jobs, or relocate to friendlier markets. You are your own worst enemy! You will end up with what you are complaining about- more jobs disappearing, lousy work product and inflated prices. Try to deal with that environment. The hardworking studious entrepreneurs will continue to excell without you elsewhere! I love the USA and am sad to see it torn apart by those unwilling to make an effort

Jerry_J:   _ I love you, Xper Dunn:   _ – I so hope you will be at the Reservation this year for the reunion – do you think we should get podiums so we can debate or maybe just make do with both sides of a random picnic table, stone or tree?

Xper Dunn:   _ I don’t enjoy debates, Jeryl, I just can’t keep still when people champion Capitalism over community. We are all responsible for each other.

Jerry_J:   _ One must debate and be able and willing to back up ones opinion with action if they want to teach change.

Xper Dunn:   _ Jeryl—as a business owner, your actions speak for themselves. I don’t think of what I do as ‘teaching change’, I think of it as ‘advocating decency’.

Gerry_A:   _ I listen when they state analysis not blind rhetoric! I never spoke about money! You asked me to the party when you asked me to accept your friend request. You analyse our discussion the same as you do politics. Now you claim I invited myself when it was you who asked. If you do not want me to comment thats fine. It is your call. No hard feelings.

Xper Dunn:   _ Okay, Gerry—that last comment was just crazy. Business owners make all the sacrifices and the workers are the lazy, greedy bastards? Have you had your head checked recently? I think you might have suffered a blow.

Xper Dunn:   _ Stop all this defensive rationalizing–you’ve got a lot of money–isn’t that enough? Do you have to crap on those who work for you?

[At this point, things devolved into name-calling and other emotional responses having little to do with the subject at hand.]

Saturday, May 09, 2015                                           12:52 PM

In the last thirty days I’ve typed 81 pages, approximately 24,000 words. You’d think I had something important or entertaining to say. But I have, unfortunately, reached a point where I’m able to capture some of my stream of consciousness and hold it steady long enough to type two or three pages of (mostly) coherent commentary on whatever subject is drifting through my mind at any given time. There’s a difference between just writing, and writing about something. Having recently begun an attempt to write something specific about a single subject, I’m made aware that stream-of-consciousness writing is not actually writing. Actual writing requires the writer to take a step outside of one’s stream of consciousness and write with intent—far more arduous and demanding than simply jotting down thoughts as they cross one’s mind.

So, as with many things (music, art, lifestyle…) I am not learning to write—I’m trying to unlearn bad habits in writing. Well, perhaps ‘trying’ is an exaggeration—I’m writing stream of consciousness right here and now! But I’m just taking a break from the effort of writing something other than the obvious. Question: Is it wrong to do something the wrong way as a respite from the hard work of doing it properly—or can I do both? We’ll see, I guess.

I went through my blog yesterday—I wrote a post about drinking tea and half-way through I started to get a bad feeling that I was repeating something I had written before. So I went through my blog to check the other posts related to tea. It turned out that I hadn’t actually repeated myself—I only thought I was because I was in the same stream of consciousness from which I’d written the other posts. My comments and observations were unique, but they all related to the frame of mind in which I contemplate the ancient cultural art of tea—the growing, the buying, the brewing, the methods, the taste, the varieties, et.al.

But tea accounts for but a handful of my posts. Many posts are political, philosophical, or music-related—and over several years of blogging, the probability of repeating myself is far greater than with, say, tea. Then there’s the drawback of simply talking about the same subject all the time—my son once complained that he didn’t want to read any more of my blog posts concerning the evils of Republicanism and Capitalism. He wasn’t complaining that I was unoriginal in any specific way, or that he didn’t like my writing—he was just sick of that subject—and who can blame him?

Thus, I try to avoid politics in my new posts—aside from tiring my readers, I feel that evil is something we should avoid obsessing about, no matter how excited we get about specific evils. It’s the same reasoning that made me stop watching crime procedurals on TV, like “Law & Order” or “Criminal Minds”—I figure it can’t be good for my mental health to watch shows based on murder and other violence. The shows make heroes out of crime-fighters, and that’s all well and good, but the overall subject matter is murder—and I don’t want a lot of that floating around in my brain. And since I don’t want to be an audience for evil, it makes little sense to be a propagator of such.

On the other hand, there’s a reason for all the murder shows. Conflict in drama—in storytelling in general—is a sine qua non. You can’t have a good story without a struggle. You can’t tell of a glorious victory unless it is also a narrow escape from disaster. Two people who fall in love and live happily ever after isn’t a story, it’s a sentence. And while modern entertainment has some pretty simpleminded premises and plotlines, even Hollywood needs more than a single sentence.

I have no idea why social media has suddenly gone dark for me. At first, MySpace and Blogger seemed delightful toys. The re-connecting with long-lost acquaintances, the connecting with new people of shared interests—both presented as technical marvels, bringing everyone closer and giving everyone a voice. Increased bandwidth made uploading every little essay, artwork, graphic image, audio or video recording a matter of moments—I have uploaded my share—hundreds and hundreds of them.

People read them, saw them, listened to them—they liked them, shared them, and commented on them—a dream I didn’t know I had, came true: an audience inside a box on my desk. In the world in which I grew up, a sickly, un-talented artist could only annoy his or her immediate family—now, people like me can annoy the entire globe. But I loved it. To date, I’ve uploaded 1,673 YouTube videos, with 70,335 views and 60 subscribers since 2009. My blog on WordPress has 576 posts and 80 followers since 2012. It wasn’t until now, in 2015, that a sense a futility has crept in and tainted the ‘innocence’ of my uploading ‘spirit’.

The only trouble is: my writings appear now on the same screens as Shakespeare and Poe; my drawings appear on the same screen as Da Vinci and Escher; my piano-playing is side-by-side with Horowitz and Glenn Gould. I could get more followers and increase my Klout score if I simply posted links to Shakespeare, Poe, Da Vinci, Escher, Horowitz, and Glenn Gould.

But when did I switch from “sharing my interests” by uploading my own junk, to worrying over the reactions, the interest, the attraction of my posts over someone else’s? In a way, uploading original content makes me a performer—and as I became conscious of having an audience, I naturally fell into the mindset of one who performs. It’s the old Heisenberg Principle—the act of observing a thing changes the state of the thing. My awareness of being observed changed the way I felt about what I uploaded.

It wasn’t only my awareness of an ‘audience’ that changed my view—I also became aware of the ‘competition’, if you will. The above-mentioned ‘great artists’ are a tiny sample of the enormity of culture online. I didn’t even mention the hundreds of pop artists, the thousands of comics and graphic novels, the many museums with images of their entire collection available online. Symphony orchestras by the score, performing uncounted classical masterpieces are, even so, outdone by the Guttenburg Experiment, a free online source for every English-language book in the public domain. Every book. Every. Book.

So, yeah, my perspective was altered by my growing awareness that sharing online isn’t just a personal act—it is also a small addition to the entirety of Western Culture, most of which has found its way onto the Internet. That stuff wasn’t there before—my stuff didn’t suffer so by comparison. Now it does.

Beyond the use of the Internet as an audience, there is the social aspect. My social awkwardness was greatly reassured by the distancing effect of social media. But even a couple of prisoners, communicating by tapping Morse Code on the walls, will eventually grow familiar and get personal—social media only starts out as distancing—it ends up as the same collection of repressions, politenesses, sensitivities, obligations, and awkwardnesses that comprise real socializing. Arguments are had, illnesses are discussed—even deaths in the family come fast and furious when you have hundreds of Facebook friends. Being obligated to wish someone happy birthday every day will start to make it seem like a chore. And with all that agita, all those people are still miles away, in different states, different countries—even different continents. There’s no touching.

I’m still drawn to my PC, hoping for distraction, looking for attention, or just conversation—but when I sit down and take the mouse, I don’t know where to click anymore.

Recently, I let myself be convinced that I might write something in the professional sense—a bit of fiction—and my editor’s prime directive was, “But you can’t share it all over the Internet, like you do everything else!” So I can’t tell you anything about it, Mr.-and-Mrs.-Nobody-Reads-My-Blog. And here I experience a strange phenomenon—my blog posts are casual ramblings wherein I ‘share’ with the universe—they make me feel less isolated. But writing something I can’t share with anyone (except one person who’s going to be judgmental about whatever I share) makes me feel more isolated.

In school we are often told to ‘show our work’. In the world of grown-ups, you never show your work—a professional never shows the public anything but a finished product—otherwise, it ‘ruins the magic’. To prove the rule, there will sometimes be an exhibit of say, Michelangelo’s sketches—or a book of T. S. Eliot’s unpublished poems—but such exceptions can only exist after the artists in question have established their greatness. Once a person’s name becomes more than an identification, that name’s ‘brand’ can be stamped on anything, tee shirts included, and marketing will take care of itself.

Taming the wild elephant, Anonymous, c. 1725 – c. 1745 Source Graphic courtesy of : The Rijksmuseum Website

Portrait of a Lady, Anonymous, c. 1635 – c. 1645
Source Graphic courtesy of : The Rijksmuseum Website