Life After Osama

Just some ramblings about week two after almost 10 years. 

Osama was killed.  He was a vile, evil man.  I cannot be as sad as my truly leftist friends would have me be.  This whole experience has reinforced what I know to be true about my political beliefs.  I am a progressive.  I want peace.  And yet,  inside myself, I am glad that the man who loved to kill and dreamed of death is dead.  Yes, I can understand that people have a right to be very upset by the actions of the U.S. in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, South and Central America.  The U.S. is not the American people.  Rarely are governments good reflections of the people for whom they act or the principles for which they stand. 

I have to say that while I am not at all happy with how President Obama has snuggled up to the pharmaceutical, insurance, mortgage and banking industries, he has managed to reflect America more powerfully and more accurately than I remember anyone ever doing.  We are our ideals.  He manifests the ideals I was taught to strive toward as a school kid.   I detest war.  I do not condone violating international borders and national sovereignty, but I appreciate that he took responsibility for doing what he ordered.  It seems a lot more honorable than Iran Contra, shadow governments, CIA drug wars, and a host of other things that I have seen my government do and in which they refuse to admit culpability, responsibility, and in many cases instigation. The current administration is carrying on far too many of the repressive, reactionary, anti-democratic programs and practices initiated by the Bush Administration, and I doubt that I will ever be able to keep my mouth shut about those things.  I do not however have the energy to work with negative topics all the time.  I drew from the positive, jester-like boldness of the early organization that was CODEPINK.  We spoke in a way that was difficult to ignore and eventually we seeped into the consciousness of a nation.  I was there in D.C.  when the Illinois delegation of CODEPINKers met with Senator Barack Obama. 

My life as a peace activist of sorts and the death of the man who ultimately was responsible for my becoming a peace activist by creating the coordinated attacks on New York City and our nation's Capitol that created one domino leading to another where I moved across country, met like minded women, and worked to understand that peace has to be worked toward with more furious love than the furious hate that leads us to war.  I will hold that within me until the moment I die.  When I die I will have been no more than a wake on the water.  But I changed the reflection of the world for a moment.  And perhaps someone seeing a bit of a different world in that wake will make more changes.  That is all any of us can do.  I believe in the power of individual and collective action. 

I am tired.  I don't like thinking about war and politics all the time.  I have trouble finding the positive, head over heels, positive and life affirming, and powerful iconography of the early CODEPINK in the bitter rhetoric of the anti-war community today.  Anti- stances are so different from pro- positions.  There is an energetic difference, a qualitative difference, between the differing approaches.  I revel in and marvel at the power of creation, the power of the feminine, the power of affirmation. 

I can't keep myself from noticing the impact of these things;  that is just how I am.   BUT I can moderate the duration and intensity of my actions and reactions to them.   This is what I have come up with in the last many days of reflection since that Sunday night, not quite two weeks ago, and its special announcement from our president:  I need to continue the writing path that I was unfurling before me, some would say making it up as I went along, that I was working on at at my desk when the first plane hit.  Of course the path I'm now walking isn't the same path I would have walked had the towers stood. 

I was working on increasing awareness of a distinct cohort, the last half of Baby Boom Generation, the Late Boomers,  as well as a working on a collection of poetry and a biography of  Gene Stratton-Porter when everything changed.  I contributed regularly to a feminist comedy site focused on the glamour of old Hollywood.   I need to get back to my research and writing that lies beyond the 20th and 21st Century political realm.  A new research area has also developed in the last few years;  I'm working in  the area of Munchausen by Proxy Child Abuse, an ill-named area of factitious medical child abuse. 

And there is a new constellation of events that calls to me in the middle of the night these days.  My eldest daughter, my step-daughter, has given the world and a neighborhood far away from Tucson a beautiful set of twins, my grand-daughters.  My youngest daughter, my biological daughter, has decided she is in love and, come December and graduation from university, will move across the country far from the neighborhood in which she grew up and in which she still resides, to pursue a graduate education and live with her honey, hiking partner, and soul-mate.  From my roof deck in central Tucson at night in the moonlight  I can hear the Goddess speak, "Get your shit together girl, you still have work to do for me.   Now get going and write those books, finish the house remodeling, build the back yard labyrinth and grotto where you can rest in your old age while you compose poetry, watch flowers grow, and receive visitors.  Time's a wasting!"

My time and life are of my own conscious creation.   I will not allow my life to be choreographed by external forces. 

Capitalist Hippies of the World Unite!

Went to see Moonalice at The Hut on 4th Avenue Saturday Night.  Damn good musicians, damn fine crowd and damn the torpedos, full speed ahead  social marketing experiment! Okay, to read much further you will have to acknowledge that not all baby boomers are evil nor are they all they all socio-tech illiterates.  Unlike the Saturday Night Live overview of a week ago insinuated, these boomers do not need anyone to tell them what iTunes is.  And speaking of SNL, a former/occasional/whatever Moonalice member was a the SNL bandleader for quite a while. These boomers have been turning on amps, tuning in their audiences, and dropping out tunes with the likes of Jefferson Starship, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia.... and on the way were investing in Google and Facebook early on, and are most generously gifting Wikipedia on a grand scale.

The power of the boomers (who are currently peaking at age 54 - height of the baby boom was 1957) may well only now be coming into season as the Late Boomers, roughly those born 1956 to 1964, who were the neglected largest half of the boom, we are talking temporal halves here, ok?   But this same group was also the subject of a book called Generation X. So the age group, cohort so to speak, are likely to be major players who are only now coming into second careers or early retirement.

Here I'm reminded of The Who's, Won't Get Fooled Again. The late boomers came of age and entered adulthood as rock shattered into plethora of proto-genres, as they began trying to find a foothold in an economy that  thwarted them at every turn.  The yuppies of the "me" generation were not so much greedy as simply far more aware of what the purveyors and power brokers of the last days of the 20th Century's "bigger is better" mindset does to individuals.  Heck and gosh, they'd been living with it all their lives: never enough desks in the classroom for them, marketing targeted at them from the cradle on, eco-disasters as a part of life, wars up close and personal on the teevee every night ... all these and much, much more created the mindset of the last half of the baby boom.  Pardon them for being a bit cynically and skeptically in your face about it.

The hippie ideology of the first half of the baby boom, leading edge boomers, is melding with the tactical knowledge of the late boomers. Age allows the collapsing of these distinct cohorts into a generation for the first time in their lives though the rest of the World has referred to them as a unified group since at least the late 1970s when the term "Baby Boomers" began to be used.

All this was realignment of cultural semiotics was made "perfectly clear," to borrow a "Tricky Dick" phrase, last evening when I watched, listened, and danced to the music of Moonalice [each member  listed with one of their more famous gigs;  Roger McNamee (T. Rowe Price,) Ann McNamee (Flying Other Brothers), Pete Sears (Jefferson Starship,) Barry Sless (David Nelson Band,) John Molo (Bruce Hornsby and the Range)] and the last couple days of research didn't hurt either.  Blogging note:  Research is good.  Action note: The revolution can be finished and podcasted, if not televised if the late boomers and early boomers combine forces for the good of human kind.  Rock, all sizes and shapes of it,  is our soundtrack! Okay back to the intriguing business aspects of Moonalice.

Roger McNamee is creating a different (as in "and now for something completely different") model of music making, performing, recording and playing that is a far more cooperative venture than anything the music industry would have ever tolerated.  This is good.  New types of organization require resources and advocates with influence.  McNamee is commenting on the corporate system itself, and, since he is an acknowledged master of at least some components of that system, and in the end this is one of the reasons I am intrigued by Moonalice.  While the musical ability of all the members will bowl you over whether or not you've had a bowl, the core of a revolution is contained within the marketing and relationship of all the participants to the ideology.  This new music model is build on relationship -- and that is more than just buying a ticket to watch or listen at some huge arena.