http://www.nuval.com/

We need to talk about modern capitalism in order to understand why Americans are the most obese people not just in the world today but in all of human history. The main thing produced by capitalism at this stage is the desire to consume (Galbraith, 1998). This desire to consume is created and maintained through a system of propaganda that permeates every aspect of modern life. It is called advertising. This propaganda does not exist to keep Americans well-informed or to encourage them to make decisions that are in their own best interest. This propaganda is skillfully designed, at great expense, by professionals as well versed in the arts of persuasion as anyone you would find at the best universities teaching Rhetoric, Mass Communication, Psychology or any other disciple that could contribute to persuading the consumer to consume.  

Go into any supermarket and look around. You will see relatively few raw foods in relation to the number of prepackaged or pre-prepared potential taste-treats.  These taste-threats are designed not to nourish but to satisfy a desire to consume created by advertising.  These taste-treats may be advertised as “healthy” or “nutritious” or otherwise marketed by appeal to their supposed value as food. It is important to keep in mind, however, that they are designed not to provide nourishment but to satisfy a desire to consume created by advertising. A product that provides little or no nutritional value but satisfies this demand will become a supermarket staple. Good food that does not will disappear. What is readily and easily available to consumers at this time is largely determined by this principle of natural selection as applied to supermarket shelf space. Survival of the fittest, in this context, has nothing to do with nutritional value and everything to do with satisfying a desire to consume that is created through propaganda.

The web-site that I would like to talk about is http://www.nuval.com/ . Many consumers who want to lose weight or lower their cholesterol buy products that claim to help them do so which in fact do not. These products continue to sell and to cheat the good intentions of consumers because most of the information about “nutrition” available to consumers is propaganda of the type discussed above. The problem basically is that lies and mis-information will be prominently displayed in “sponsored results” online and in advertising that is embedded in the public’s favorite TV shows like hooks hidden by the bait. Google and CBS are in the same business. They sell the ears and eye-balls of viewers who are also consumers. Their paying customers are corporations who want to convince all those viewers to desire and consume what these corporations produce.

The Nuval web-site is an attempt to counter this. They are a Consumer Reports for food. Capitalists are not evil but only greedy. They will gladly supply good, nutritious food to consumers who know enough to demand it and are willing and able to pay. Nuval exists to cater to such consumers and increase their numbers by making it easier to be such a consumer. This is the best way to increase the demand for good food. Capitalists are equally good at supplying demand whether they create it or consumers create it by doing the necessary work to educate themselves about what they ought to demand given what is really good for them. Nuval makes that necessary work a lot easier.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Recurring Dreams

Some of my dreams recur. This recurrence is not random but linked to events in my life at a given period of time. I will not have a particular dream for years and then this dream will recur. The recurrence is not always exact but individual iterations are always close enough to all the others that it makes sense to me to see them as versions of the same dream. They differ in exactly the way that one’s impression of a film might differ if one watched it again a significant period of time after the initial viewing. One of my dreams this week was a recurrence.

I earned an MA in English at the university of Alabama-Birmingham in the early 1980s. The degree was actually in creative writing and my specialty within the program was in poetry. During that time, I lived in an efficiency apartment so close to the UAB building where all of my classes where held that I could see that building from my tiny apartment. I worked at the time selling office supplies nation-wide over the phone for a company called West Brothers. The phone room I called from was also within walking distance of my apartment, as was everything else I needed. I called from a list of established customers to ask them which supplies they had used up since last I called. Describing what I did as “selling” was actually a bit of an over-statement. Turn-over was high because many people found the job painfully boring. I never did. 30 hours a week was considered full-time for this kind of work at the time. I fit two three hour shifts M-F into my life without stress. I read, wrote poetry and made enough during those 30 hours to pay my very low rent, buy food and have everything I really needed. I’m describing the least stressful time in my life and the happiest. I did something not unpleasant for 30 hours a week so that I could live a life built around reading and writing. I was a poet and I was not starving.

Later, when my life had become very stressful and very full of uncertainty and anxiety, I started having a dream about being in my old apartment in Birmingham. Nothing happens in the dream. I am just there floating disembodied through an apartment that is still empty of furniture, as if waiting for me to come back to a place and a life that I wondered away from in search of things I never needed, as if it were easy and logical to go back, after a wild goose chase lasting years or even decades, to the place that felt more like my place than anyplace ever had before or has since. I am so easily able to link these recurring dreams to issues that become highly salient in my life for a time and then recede that one of the many theories of the psychological function served by dreams put forward by psychology feels obvious and true in relation to these recurring dreams at least, though I am not sure that this explanation fits all my dreams.

These dreams recur when a pattern I can recognize from my past repeats as an episode or set of circumstances in the present. The recurrence probably serves to fit current experience into the thematic filing system (memory) created by previous experience while, at the same time, altering this thematic filing system in subtle ways necessary to the accommodation of unique aspects of my current reality. This would mean that these recurring dreams are triggered when a current experience or life-situation fits into a thematic pattern created by earlier experiences but not exactly, as when a current life situation can best be interpreted in light of these previous experiences but also presents the opportunity to learn something new that alters one’s basic orientation to experiences of this kind. The recurrent aspects of the dream are the past as context. The dream recurs when something new is learned that calls for the editing and revision of the thematic pattern itself as an interpretive context determining the felt significance of a current episode or situation that fits the pattern. This process deconstructs and reconstructs the remembered past in light of insights newly gained through current experience in ways that will alter the way future experiences of this type are felt when current and when remembered after the fact.

The surface content of the dream is what recurs. The latent content or felt significance of the dream changes with each recurrence. I would almost want to say that the dream recurs when the latent content or felt significance needs to shift to accommodate something current that drives a revision of past episodes which fit that pattern. The recurrence of this dream at this time in my life surprised me at first. The feel and texture of my life at present is as close to what it felt like to be living the life I enjoyed in that apartment as anything I’ve experienced since. This dream typically recurs not when one profoundly negative event occurs but when the routine stress of one ordinary day after another after another adds up to enough stress to make just another day like any other distressful enough that I have to numb out a little to keep plodding along. That is anything but my situation at present. I miss deadlines only because I am involved in too many projects all at once because I want to be and can’t bear to give anything up.

I think I understand why this dream needed to recur now in terms of a shift in the felt significance of the dream. The dream feels more peaceful now and less haunted by nostalgic longing. When I lived in that apartment, I was always preparing myself for something that was not yet, getting ready for things that would happen later and hoping to look back at where I was and who I was then as a humble beginning. I could never have imagined that I would ever want to go no further than back to that humble beginning where I had very little, only everything I ever really needed. I am at home again, and I know it this time. I never grew up or even decided for keeps what I wanted to be when I grew up. I only realized that today recurs like a dream until one day it does not, and that someday never comes.  

The Job of Thinking people

This statement is profound because the victims change but the process of scapegoating which makes the holocaust possible is always the same. I've never regretted the considerable amount of time I spent learning as much as I could about Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Popular Enlightenment, and the role Goebbels played in bringing Hitler to power and making the holocaust possible by carefully crafting the public opinion that demanded the final solution. I can’t recommend The War That Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign by Robert E. Herzstein too highly. If you want to understand FOX, Karl Rove, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell or the Southern Baptist Convention, this is the book to read.

I lived this. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Convention family and attended Ashford Academy, a religious school where the curriculum was hate and we prayed to a vengeful monster every morning that everyone who was not a Southern Baptist would burn in hell forever. To this day, I am as impressed by ordination through the Southern Baptist Convention as I am by the gaudy robes of the Klu Klux Klan, and impressed in exactly the same way. 

Muslim terrorists learn to worship this same vengeful monster in their Madrasa and go forth to serve god by blowing up buildings and shooting young girls who seek an education that teaches something other than how to serve a vengeful monster. The products of Christian Madrasas all over the south go forth filed with all the same hatred and with the same fervor for atrocity. We called our vengeful monster Jesus and they call theirs Allah. The name does not matter. Both worship a thing that would better deserve to be called a devil if it existed at all and both are transformed into devils through their worship. 

I attended a meeting of the Lake County, Florida School Board last Monday. It was not a Klan rally or a Nazi rally only because two hundred or so decent people were so offended by the hatefulness of a change in policy to be voted on by the board that we felt the need to come forth and make our disgust known. Many in the crowd were Christians, real Christians, decent people who do not think that children should be bullied to death or excluded from anything because they are different, because they are the wrong color or the wrong anything else according to the bigots who are always among us, spewing their venom and attacking their scapegoat of the moment. We were there in support of a very brave young lady named Bayli Silberstein. Bayli is 14, openly bisexual and wished to start a club called the GSA (Gay-Straight-Alliance) at Carver Middle School in Leesburg. This club would be a resource for GLBT students, a safe space for them to gather and to receive help and information from organizations like PFLAG and GLTSN. These organizations are made up of the parents of GLBT students and of educators who have come together to try to do something a little more constructive than attending the funerals of children who have been bullied right into the grave by hateful bigots.

Some of these hateful bigots are still children themselves. Others are adults like the principal who turned down Bayli’s original request based on the idea that having a club for GLBT children who were being bullied would just focus more attention on the victims and make the bullying worse. What is a woman who thinks that children should keep quiet about bullying in order not to be bullied even more doing in charge of a public school, a school supposedly open to everyone and supported by taxes under the assumption that it is a place where children will be treated with kindness and respect and learn to be good citizens and decent people who treat others with kindness and respect? Children are dying not because of the hateful bigotry of other children, but because of the callow indifference of adults like this principal. If she could not bring herself to look the other way but felt compelled to act, those of us who are too decent to stand by and do nothing would not come together at endless funerals asking ourselves why and asking ourselves what we can do to save the next child from the adult bigots who target children they would never admit to hating themselves for abuse. They do so by looking the other way while other children, the children they probably think of as the good kids, act out the values of the adults in charge. The children who are bullied to death are the children that the adults in charge can’t see as being worthy of respect or protection. Then the people who love them come together at one more funeral and ask why again and wonder as they pray over their dead what kind of god the kind of person who could just look the other way and do nothing could possibly worship. 

The Equal Access Act of federal law exists to assure that public schools provide open forum access to a broad spectrum of ideas and facilitate the expression of all points of view prevalent in the community served by the school. It is the provision that prevents a principal from allowing a Young Republican’s club to organize and meet on campus but not the Young Democrats or a Southern Heritage club helped along by the Daughters of the Confederacy but no Black History club. The Lake County Board has now realized that they are in violation of federal law. They cannot discriminate against students who want to form clubs based on their own prejudices and preferences but they are in refusing Bayli’s request to form a GSA. I don’t know if the board collectively is not bright enough to figure out that they also face civil liability the next time there is a funeral or if they are in collective denial or just don’t care how much they cost the taxpayer. Originally, all five board members publicly supported eliminating all non-academic clubs; this would keep at-risk GLBT students from getting access to the resources they need to survive bullying at the expense of killing all the other extracurricular activities enjoyed by students; it is a measure of the hateful bigotry of the current school board that it seems reasonable to them to deny all students the benefit of extracurricular activities as the price to be paid for seeing to it that one group of children who are being viciously abused in the schools they control continue to be viciously abused without access to the resources that might make this abuse less damaging. 

I find this sickening. I find it sickening as a person and, as a teacher, can’t see how anyone who does not find it sickening belongs in the classroom or on a school board. I showed up on Monday not sure what I would find there or what exactly I was going there to do or say. When I arrived, I found a huge crowd standing outside the meeting place waiting to be let in. Most of them were wearing red shirts. Most of them were there to say that bigotry was wrong, that god did not hate any child and that no child should ever be told not to speak up about bullying or learn not to expect help from the adults who are supposedly there to nurture and support them if they are bullied. I did not know about the red shirts when I walked up. I did not know that I was going there that day to join anything bigger or more substantial than my own deep sense that those who are being hurt should be helped and that calling yourself a teacher ought to mean calling ignorance hateful enough to kill a child the devil’s work.

I have a red shirt now. The good people, the decent people, gave me that to wear the way some people wear a cross or Star of David. I know who my people are and I know hateful lies when I hear them. I know the words intended to justify murder or sitting quietly in your room until the screaming stops. I know the simple truth that it is not Bill Mathias and the other bigots on the Lake County School Board who are being bullied by the ACLU but Mathias and his hateful kind who are allowing punk kids to do their dirty work in the schools they control. The good people, including the ACLU, are trying to stop this. If this feels like bullying to a simpering sissy like Bill Mathias, then that just shows again what everyone knows; bullies are cowards. Bullies will always try to change the subject when they are called on being the odious little vermin that they are by anyone who is more than half their size. Real adults, like the ACLU, like the people in the red shirts, have to protect children and anyone else who is vulnerable for whatever reason from deviants like Bill Mathias.

As I said before, I’ve lived this. I got called a nigger-lover by the good Christians back at the segregation academy because I did not use the word nigger to describe anyone at all. More of the people who graduated with me went to prison than went to college. More guys graduated than girls because so many of the girls got knocked-up and dropped out. I went to school with the son of the local Klan leader and the president of the Ambassadors; that’s the main Baptist youth group for those of you who are lucky enough not to be Baptist by background. I started believing in a just god with a sense of humor when both of them turned out to be Gay. The desegregation of the public schools in the south had an unintended benefit that is not commonly recognized but ought to be more widely appreciated. It got the hard-core bigots out of the public school. This left the public school system to those of either race who cared more about learning to read than calling anyone a nigger or praying every morning that most of the world fry in hell. What can we do to get the hard-core bigots out of the public schools in Lake County, Florida? What can we do to get the hard-core bigots off the school board in Lake County, Florida?

Time Management

I find it hard to even think in terms of good time management skills as opposed to bad time management skills. It seems to me that we all have our own stable way of being in a world structured by time. Some people’s worlds are time-structured in ways that are very similar to the way mine is structured whereas other people experience time very differently. I can’t reduce this to having a better or worse sense of time or capacity to manage time because whether my style or anyone else’s is better or worse all depends on the specific demands of the particular task at hand. 

For example, I do things quickly but I can only do one thing at a time. I cannot multi-task at all. When I am forced to try, the result is extreme disorientation leading to an anxiety state so pronounce as to qualify as a variety of panic attack. I am very easily distracted because do not filter background input well enough to, for example, stay focused on a conversation I am having if there is a TV on at the same time. Yet, I can isolate myself in a quiet place and stay intensely focused on a very demanding task for several hours at a time. Under ideal conditions, my span of attention is freakishly long and my capacity to follow and further develop a very complex chain of abstract thought is so far above average that it is not an exaggeration to say that I can do things most people would find impossible. My way of experiencing time and paying attention, including the conditions I need to stay focused at all, is either a crippling disability or a rare gift just depending on what exactly I am being asked to do. 

 

There are so many tasks that are either easy or impossible depending on how exactly one naturally experiences time and focuses attention that I can’t think in terms of good time management skills or the lack of good time management skills but only of a goodness of fit between how time is experienced and the task at hand that makes that task easy or a lack of fit that makes the task feel about the way being forced to try to sing must feel to a pig.

And If You Go Chasing Rabbits”””””””””””

Ashford, Alabama was still a small town in the rural south when my mom and I moved there when I was four. It was a place where farmers and their families came to buy groceries, clothing and anything else they needed. My mom worked at a cotton gin that also sold pesticide and fertilizer. My grandfather owned a machine shop that existed to repair farm equipment and build peanut trailers and such other things as farmers needed. Every business in town was kept in business by the farmers. These farmers were self-employed. They had to be jack of all trades and worked doing what needed to be done without regard to 9 to 5 schedules or any schedule more exact than getting it all done. They were always busy doing things that had to get done but seldom had appointments to keep at an exact time. 

Everyone else sold something or provided some service to the farmers and needed to be at their place of business ready to do business when the farmers needed something and dropped by to get it. For example, I worked for my grandfather every summer at the machine shop. I never saw hours posted. We were typically there by 9 am and where almost always there by ten but there were exceptions.  We were all on farmer time, which is not 9 to 5 or tightly scheduled by exact time appointments but is more about being there to do your business so many more times than not when the farmer drops by that the farmer feels safe just dropping by and will be surprised and disappointed not to find you there. The occasional surprise is expected and accepted as long as you are there so routinely that not being there is a real surprise and so unusual that the farmer will still expect you to be there the next time he drops by.

I always walked fast enough in relation to other people during my adolescent years to amuse others with my obvious frustration at the way almost everyone else ambled and eased along. I could never stay with the flow of traffic, either in the halls at school or anywhere else and constantly felt that everyone else was in my way. It was not that I was in a hurry to get anyplace. I knew where I wanted to go but almost never had an appointment to keep or even any strong sense of what time it was according to the clock. It just felt to me as if everyone else just naturally oozed through the day at a pace that was totally unnatural to me. 

Later, when my life changed and I had appointments with various people at definite times, I would, at first, often simply forget to show up. I was never aware of the ticking of the clock even as I was intensely aware of how much more slowly most of the people around me moved than the pace that felt natural to me. I later learned to compensate by wearing a wrist watch and looking at it often as a symptom of my low-level frustration at being out of synch with most of the people who flowed through their own lives around me as I moved through my own at a frustrated crawl from my perspective but break-neck speed from theirs. I always remind myself of the white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s work and often describe myself that way to others as a form of self-depreciating humor intended to signal my awareness of looking silly and my lack of offense at the amusement others find in my constant, mad dash to wherever it is I happen to be going at any given time.