Obey Your Thirst

When I was in Africa a few years back I saw a billboard that reminded me why I need to carry my camera with me more often. It looked like your everyday Sprite advertisement--green bottle, slogan, all larger than life--but, underneath the green bottle wasn't a picture of Kobe Bryant, or Lebron James, just these words.

"Want to succeed in life? Drink Sprite." I didn't know if I should laugh, or borrow an axe and chop it to pieces. I didn't do either, in fact, I didn't do anything. Really, what can you do when marketing hijacks art?

"But a picture of a Sprite bottle is hardly art," I can hear you say to me. And you'd be right. It's not art. "Then why bring it up?" I hear you ask. I bring it up because revealed in that billboard is the essence of marketing. We have learned to have so much fun with marketing--as many of us watch the superbowl for commercials as to see the game--we forget that its essence is deceit. The slogan on the billboard had nothing to do with the product being sold. It was meant to take advantage of the anxiety we feel. Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad thing to obey your thirst, it will often lead you to meaning. But even when we buy their product, even if we drink it, we find it doesn't really satisfy. Not the way we wish it would.

So, what do we do with that anxiety? If we can't buy our way out of it, how do we exchange it for meaning? For starters, you can put down your remote, stop channel surfing and pick up your paintbrush, or camera, or microphone. Art has the power to save us from that anxiety, marketing only has the power to make us spend.

"You really think art has power?" I hear you ask. Well, art is a bottomless well, always has been. It has been there in every generation, in every period of history to help bring us back from the brink, to quench the deepest thirst. When we create, we reveal a divine playfulness that draws us toward something more deeply human. That is the power of art. It re-humanizes us, it reawakens meaning in our lives. And the beauty of art is that there is even more re-humanizing power when we share it.

Often when we think of art, it's as a painting or a poem, but art is so much more than just works of art. It's a way of life, a way of living. When we reawaken the parts of us that play and create, not only do we produce works of art, but our everyday, mundane existence becomes art--we become living works of art. Art has this power because the essence of art is the revealing of truth, and it is that revealing that gives art the power to save.

So, back to the earlier questions. What can we do when art is hijacked? And what do we do with the anxiety we feel? Same answer to both questions. Ultimately, I'm glad I didn't chop down that billboard. Since then I've learned that creating is a more powerful form of change than destroying. But, on to the answer. I've got just two words for you. Create. Share.

There's power in art, there's even more when we share it.

The Rise and Fall of the American Republic Part. 2

Habeas Corpus, just legal mumbo jumbo right? No reason to think about it, stress about its suspension, bother about translating it. You might also think there's no reason to be paranoid about the government tapping our phones, accessing our private records, right? Except that's already happened. It continues to happen .

There is no such thing as innocent until proven guilty as long as we are engaged in a war on terror. As if one can wage physcial wars on ideals. Didn't work so well for Nero, or Hitler, or Reagan. Wars tend to force people to hold on to ideals. But I'll come back to this. Right now we're talking about HC. I'll say again so that it will stick with you, "Habeas Corpus."

That short Latin phrase is the thin line that stands between us as citizens of America and the threat of crooked government judges, closed tribunals, international torture prisons; in short, HC assures us protection should our government turn authoritarian. Yes, I understand the irony there. An authoritarian government doesn't follow laws that protect its citizens, it doesn't have to, it's above the law. The scary thing is that rhetoric sounds all too familiar these days. Regardless, the fact remains, we are not yet suffering under authoritarian regime. I can still publish this blog, you can still read it, and we still have the power to do something about it. But the tide is shifting, and if we're not careful, it could take more than a bloodless revolution to regain our lost freedom. I hope it never comes to that. And it won't have to if we remember the worth of the rights we were born into, rights we are so willing to give up because we are afraid of terrorism. Yet an authoritarian America, with its military arsenal, its technology, its current neocon agenda is far more terrifying than Islamic jihad.

Again, I get ahead of myself. A little history of HC in America would be helpful. Now you may have already read the link at the top of page, but you may not. So here it is in short. Meet Abraham Lincoln, champion of slaves, stoic leader, and though I applaud him for ending slavery, must chasitse him. He was responsible, through his policies, for snagging that first thread that began to unravel this young republic. This young republic whose threads we are now responsible for weaving together into an altogether new tapestry of governing. It was the height of the Civil War, a war that though it was supposed to be about slavery, was more about control of the Southern States. That's the tricky thing about wars against ideas, they're almost never about what they're about. It was here that Lincoln first suspended HC, where he told the citezens who had elected him, that they no longer held the rights to their bodies, that in times of great crisis, the rights that we had held inalienable, were in fact, alienable.

The Supreme court declared his actions unconstitutional, but Lincoln had a nation to save; he ignored the court. At that point, the precedence was set, the balance in goverment shattered, the president, when he deemed necessary, was the governing authority.

That thin line has been broken once again by a Republican on a mission. When I first heard that Bush had suspended HC, I thought to myself, "he can't do that." But he can, and more importantly, he did. The line is broken. What do I mean when I say the line has been broken? It means that once again, we have no right to our body. They do. To put it into words that all the little internet pirates will understand, they may not own our bodies, but now, they own the rights to them.

Literally, Habeas Corpus means that we, "should have the body," that, as an accused, we have the right not to disappear into Git-mo, that we cannot be held without representation, or denied a trial by jury. What a concept. And yet, HC has become second nature to us. We don't know what it means to lose the rights to our bodies. I hope we never have to learn what it means to lose our inalienable rights. The truths, we are told, are self evident. But they have been forgotten by the people charged with remembering them; they have been cast down by the ones who have sworn to uphold them.

Though they have forgotten, let us not forget. This nation derives its identity from its people. Right now we afraid, and we have placed the power of many in the hands of
a few. They have wreaked havoc in the international community with that mandate, and they are undermining the very truths for which we came into existence as a sovreign nation. It is time to take that mandate back, to once again own the rights to our bodies, to tell our government who we are, instead of waiting to reflect the identity they spin for us.

The American public has untapped inertia. That inertia has largely been spent generating and sustaining our capitalist way of life: marketing, commerce, etc. But just as the tide is shifting in government, it is shifting in us as well. Where it shifts we decide. Unless of course, we would rather let the few decide who we are, what we believe, what we can say, who we can marry, who we can worship or not worship, what wars our nation declares, whether or not we treat our planet with respect.

So, I'm nearly off the soap box, but before I go, there are unanswered questions. Where do we go from here? Should the president, congress, anyone, have the right to suspend HC? If so, how can our rights be guaranteed? Will Bush and his neocon cronies give us our rights back like Lincoln did? If not, what do we do? What can we do? As this nation grows in population and diversity, how can we ensure the rights of the individual?

But these are questions for later date. Right now, it is important we remember that once we had the rights to our body, and now we don't. And that there remains a solution to this problem that encompasses more than just public inertia. We may be able to generate enough critical mass to overcome this suspension, that doesn't change the fact that they should never have the rights to our bodies in the first place. Amongst all the good, there is something terribly wrong in this country. We all know it. If we talk, and keep talking, and learn from our dialogue, and act on what we learn, there is hope for us yet. There is hope for this nation.