It's old news, I guess, but I just found out about it.
The author of the Anarchist Cookbook has had a change of heart and wishes that the book wasn't in print anymore. He wrote it when he was 19, in 1969 (Got my first real 6-string....), in the heat of the Vietnam Era. Now he's a parent and Christian and doesn't think that his contribution to society is a good one, at least not as far as his book goes.
The question is did his passion burn out and did he lose sight of the ideals that burned in his young and passionate mind or did he come to his senses and wisdom is prevailing over the fallacious impulsiveness of youth? Or is he just embarrassed that the Anarchists' Cookbook is really a bunch of shit that doesn't work (tennis ball bombs are functional but not really explosive. Go with dry ice, I say) and is actually more dangerous to would be anarchists than any target they may conjure.
It is probably old news to those living in the U.S., but I just learned that it isn't necessarily verboten to say "fuck" on broadcast tv these days. I guess it started with Bono accepting an award and saying something like "this is really fucking great," a comment the FCC ruled doesn't have the sexual connotation that For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge is famously banned for.
Of course, the close minded conservative (and coincidentally religious) crowd is up in arms, chicken littling about a future where fuck is in every song and talk show on the radio and on every sitcom and drama on broadcast tv. While this is hyperbole, if it gets them to shut off the tv and quit listening to the radio, I'm happier.
This is a great decision by the FCC though. It isn't because I want to hear people say "fuck" all the time (although it does allow for more realistic dialog). It's important to recognize that language isn't static and evolves, changes, fluctuates and morphs. If there is a word you don't like, redefine its usage. We've seen this with how gays adopted "fag" and blacks use "nigger". Even the word gay itself initially wasn't used in reference to homosexuality.
"Fuck" is a such a versatile word, a characteristic of it I didn't realize in its full extent until we were trying to help some Japanese students understand Pulp Fiction. "Fuck" is used in pretty much every way possible in that movie which made it harrowing to explain and understand. So many curses have become commodities as of late. "Damn," "piss," and "tits" aren't quite as vulgar as they once were (especially if you hang around Aussies, Limeys and Kiwis, where "taking the piss out of someone" is second nature). So while it may overstimulate our sensitivities at first, this move has the potential to gut "fuck" of the power derived entirely from its extreme taboo status.
This in turn highlights another phenomenon of cultural life. It is a natural reaction to try to impose restrictions on taboo and undesirable elements, but that often enhances the power and allure of the banned activity. The best solution at times is the counterintuitive one of ignoring and refusing to aid the strength of the taboo by validating it. This is also kind of the issue behind the Open Source Software movement. It seems counterintuitive that making software free to download and alter would be beneficial to the software or business, but we've seen how that isn't the case. It works with information (making information more freely available is better than locking it all up to prevent "bad" uses) and computer security (keeping vulnerabilities secret makes networks less secure than publishing them) and a host of other areas.
Protesting the FCC ruling that recognizes the adjectival form of "fuck" as acceptable only draws attention to the word and ends up with more people thinking and talking about it, which is just the opposite of what you are fighting for. Best to recognize that "fuck" is a widely used and fundamental element of our speech and just preach around it.
Good fucking luck.
2003 was a good year for me, the best I've have since I was dealing LSD in college. I finished my dissertation, got a permanent teaching job, and had a daughter. It's hard to imagine having another year this substantial actually. Maybe another kid in the near future, but the milestones of a first child, finally finishing school and getting a teaching job with an office are pretty hard to top. I hope that everyone else had good years as well, and thinking off the top of my head, I think most of my close friends (those from Idaho as well as those I've met online) all did pretty well too. May we all continue making lives as good as we've done so far.
The rest of the world didn't seem to have such a great year, nominally due to the "leadership" of the current U.S. administration. I'm too tired to mount a worthy attack on the failure of the President and his advisors (well, they didn't fail to convincingly lie to the American taxpayer to wage an illegal war against a sovereign state and funnel billions of tax dollars away from domestic programs and into the coffers of the well-connected business of the great USA, but I digress), but hopefully we can all agree that a brighter future wouldn't have a lot of the milestones we saw this year. I'm working real hard to develop my realism (good pun, eh?) as a productive expression of my optimism and idealism and as a counter to my pessimism, but at the change of the Gregorian calendar, I'll indulge in a bit of pure hippism and hope for peace, love, and lots of free drugs in the next year.
To get things off on the right foot, I'll close out this post with a nod to Bartleby.com, an incredible site full of reference books and other really useful information, if you're into that sort of thing. Or maybe you're more the Gutenberg type? Lastly, but in now way the least, I've recently discovered that Rotten isn't just the soft, white underbelly of the internet, but it also has a a pretty durned cool library that is worth a gander if you're bored.
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I finally saw Bowling for Columbine (got the SpecialEdition DVD for my birthday). It was pretty good, as if the rest of the world hasn't said it enough. I found myself in the spotlight when he and the author of Culture of Fear were walking around in South Central Los Angeles and showing firsthand how our media inspired conceptions of the danger in that region are vastly overblown. Exposes my recent entry about ghetto tours as unenlightened bullshit (as if everything else I write isn't).
I'm aware of how the media, especially TV affects. Hell, everything we do, eat, think, breathe, see, ponder, oogle, touch, lick, smell, imagine, and covet affects us. The problem with media isn't that it affects us, its that it is a passive paternalist authority that we willingly cede command and control to. With most everything else, be it the people we associate with, the newspapers we read, or the internet sites we browse, we at least make choices about what kind of exposure we endure and thus have at least some contribution, if not control, over the kinds of stimuli that affect us.
But not with television media. We just lap it up, and its getting worse with the continued blurring of the lines between news and entertainment and reality. It's all becoming one big entertainment morass that, while entertaining, seductively shapes our perceptions of the world. The whole point Moore tried to make with Bowling for Columbine was that our television media instills irrational fear and paranoia in the citizens of the USA which leads us to do the most fucked up things, like kill over 11,000 of our friends, relatives, and neighbors with guns every year. Even as crime has gone down over the last decade and more, fear and insecurity have risen, even without 9/11.
Everyone needs to work together to combat this psychological reprogramming we suffer as a nation. It isn't much, but I try to do my part with this blog. But we need to engage each other on these issues too. Get your friends and family and co-workers to look at the news (instead of watching it for content, look at what it is doing) and try to point out the lines on the page, then get them to step outside.
We are failing as a species and as people. We have so much power and potential and we are doing nothing but racing to the bottom as fast as we can. The only options are to stand around and think about how bad it is and hope that someone else grabs the reins first or get out there and start tackling the problems with local engagement. We all know how community bonds have fractured and disintegrated; reestablish them!
And stop watching TV.
Serial killer or Computer Language inventor?
I got 7/10, same as dougal, so I don't feel so bad.