mass culture Posts

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an article on Julie's traditionalist Catholic church this week and even produced a video that gives you a feel of the worship. Because of the two little ones we try to alternate between her church and Friends meeting on First Day mornings (though my crazy work schedule over the past few months have precluded even this). I'm in no danger of becoming the "Catholic Ranter" anytime soon (sorry Julie!) but I do appreciate the reverence and sense of purpose which Mater Ecclessians bring to worship and even I have culture shock when I go to a norvus ordo mass these days. Commentary on the Inquirer piece courtesy Father Zuhlsdorf. That blog and the Closed Cafeteria are favorites around here. Here's a few pictures of us at the church following baptisms.

PS: I wish the Catholic Church as a whole were more open-minded when it comes to LGBT issues. That said, the sermons on the issue I've heard at Mater Ecclesiae have gone out of their way to emphasize charity. That said, I've occasionally heard some under the breath comments by parishioners that weren't so charitable. Yet another reason to stay the Quaker Ranter.

PPS: And please, no comments on why the Catholic church is wrong, why Julie left Friends, why the Tridentine Mass is a step backwards, yada yada yada. I'm posting these links to share something of our lives. Thanks.

It's hard to know what to say about yesterday's horrific massacre at Virginia Tech, where a gunman killed 32 people (at latest count) in two separate incidents. Is this an indictment of an American culture of violence? Virginia Tech has a strong military tradition, so is our war mentality to blame? Guns?, can we blame guns? Or how about the alienation of so many young people in our society?

Any answer seems glib and besides the point. This isn't the time to be a pundit. People snap for all sorts of reasons and usually for multiple reasons that can never really be untangled.

Like all humans, I'm shocked and saddened. I've spent time on the campus and the students and faculty I met were always warm and hospitable, gracious and open. What must they be going through? Think of the fear of the trapped students, the fear of parents turning on the news, the fear of survivors who will have to live with the memories of this nightmare for the rest of their lives. I add my humble words to the millions of prayers that have been murmured these last twenty-four hours. May God comfort the victims alive and dead, including the shooter, who must certainly be a victim of something himself.

How do we stop the violence? How do we show our youth that violence is not the way? And how do we get these damned guns out of their hands?

Read a fabulous article last night and this morning by Diana Boyd, a PhD student at UC-Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She's writing about the interactions of culture and technology and it speaks a lot to some of the online and offline conversations I've been having lately.

Here's the link: G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide. And here are some snippets to entice you to follow it:

On culture:

When mass media began, people assumed that we would all converge upon one global culture. While the media has had an effect, complete homogenization has not occurred. And it will not. While some values spread and are adopted en-masse, cultures form within the mass culture to differentiate smaller groups of people. Style-driven subcultures are the most visible form of this, but it occurs in companies and in other social gatherings.

Techies will like her take on "embedded observers":

While the creators have visions of what they think would be cool, they do not construct unmovable roadmaps well into the future. They are constantly reacting to what's going on, adding new features as needed. The code on these sites changes constantly, not just once a quarter. The designers try out features and watch how they get used. If no one is interested, that's fine - they'll just make something new. They are all deeply in touch with what people are actually doing, why and how it manifests itself on the site.

On online communities:

Digital community participants sometimes find that they "accidentally" meet someone. People collide on Flickr because they took similar photos; the find wonderful blogs through search. These ad-hoc interactions typically occur because people are producing material that can be stumbled across, either through search or browsing. They may not intend for the material to be consumed beyond the intended audience, but they also don't see a reason to prevent it. In essence, they are inviting moments of synchronicity. And synchronicity is energizing.

It seems that every day brings new revelations from mainstream media about governmental spying on Americans.

MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pentagon had a database of protesters including the Raging Grannies and a dozen or so Quakers in Florida. This must have prompted the New York Times to publish a story they had been sitting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret National Security Agency to start evesdropping on Americans following the 9/11 terror attacks. It's revelation was an FBI agent's email complaining about radical militant librarians [who] kick us around. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Department of Homeland Security was hard at work monitoring the Massachusett's inter-library loan system [UPDATE: this has been revealed to be a hoax by the student]. Trying to outdo the DHS in ridiculous, we learned on the 20th that the FBI has been infiltrating vegan potlucks. Today it turns out the New York City Police Department has been doing its own extensive investigations into protesters. They even apparently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite violence (their contribution to the self-parody has been to send officers undercover on bicycle protests).

Are we surprised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of paranoia in the ranks of spydom. Nonviolence.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Service when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill President Bush (well, actually we're pretty certain it was a acne-faced fourteen year old procrastinating on his geometry homework). When I shot shot photos of a scuffle at a Biodemocracy protest a few months ago a Philadelphia police detective was in my office an hour later wanting to see it (the "melee" was harmless except for a policeman with heart conditions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some monitoring and prudence is indeed necessary, what ties together the string of stories this week is the randomness of the targets. It's as if the agencies had lost all sense of judgement. Anyone critical of the war (or even mainstream culture: witness the vegans) was considered a threat. All leads were investigated, no matter how silly.

While invading American's privacy is upsetting and unwarranted, the greatest danger is the sheer mass of irrelevant information that's been collected. What's an agency to do with reams of data on bicycle riders and Quakers? Who's watching the flight schools and fertilizer depots while Agent Nincompoop is trading hummus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?

Rick Jahnkow argues in May's Nonviolent Activist that there's a Decreased Likelihood of Draft. There are many aging pacifists that have become obsessed lately with the idea that compulsory military service might be returning to the United States. For example, I've watched the leader of one annual anti-draft workshop predict the draft's imminent return year after year, in ever more excited terms and wondered what evidence this organizer has seen that I haven't.

Jahnkow watches this issue as much as anyone in his work for the San Diego-based Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft and he's been watching the hype build as he's become more skeptical:

Warnings about an impending draft have been circulating on the Internet for months now. Some are tying a possible draft to the election and predicting with bold certainty that conscription will be introduced in 2005... The energy that�s been generated on this topic has been both amazing and, I have to confess, somewhat seductive to anti-draft organizations like the one for which I work.

Most of the people I've seen get excited by a possible return of the draft were in their teens back in the Vietnam War era. Their organizing sometimes seems almost nostalgic for the issues of their youth. They're trying to save the current generation from having to go through the same trauma. But the older activists' anti-draft work is often patronistic and self-congratulatory, for it doesn't take into account the fact that younger Americans don't need saving.

The bottom line truth is that the Pentagon simply couldn't reinstate the draft. Jahnkow cites a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that found that 88 percent of people 18-29 oppose a return of the draft. There would be mass mayhem if the draft returned. While some young men would surely obey, a huge percentage would actively defy it. Even if only 10% dramatically refused, the system would break down. This is a generation raised in a post-punk culture and many of its members aggressively question authority. They were raised by parents who lived through the sixties and saw widespread lies and abuse of power, including the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The media mythology around sixties-era radicalism has kept us from realizing that there's a baseline of everyday radicalism today that far overshadows much of what was going on thirty years ago. The Pentagon knows this better than the peace movement does.

It's not the only nostalgic protesting this generation is engaging in these days and I've compared revived organizing around phone war tax resistance to "recycling dead horses." I agree with Rick that today's teens and twenty-somethings have real issues which we need to address. He says it so well:

The latter point leads me to the second reason why I have some negative feelings about the current concern over the draft: Much of the anxiety is coming from people who are ignoring the more pressing problem of aggressive military recruiting, which, among other things, disproportionately affects non-affluent youths and people of color. In essence, there has been a draft for these individuals�a poverty draft�and yet it has drawn relatively little attention from antiwar activists. There is a race and class bias reflected in this that needs to be seriously considered and addressed by the general peace movement.

Here's the link to his article again

Related:

• Last November we published a provocative article by pacifist Johann Christoph Arnold arguing that A Military Draft Would be Good for Us and a personal response piece I wrote about how the pressures of a military draft can force an eighteen year old to really think hard about issues of war and peace.
• Nonviolence.org has guide to issues of military conscription and conscientious objection. We also watch issues of the peace movement, and tend to highlight generational issues a lot.
• The Urban Legend debunkers at Snopes.com have tracked and researched the draft fear emails going around. They don't think a draft is coming back and any time soon, citing many sources.

How did Liberal Friends get to the place where many of our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they'd want to spend a week at a Quaker event playing Indian when they could be diving deeper into their own faith tradition.

As we got onto the campus of UMass Amherst to help set up for this year's FGC Gathering, Julie & I realized that this is the first time we've been to this venue since we started plain dressing (last year we stayed home since Julie was very pregnant). FGC Friends tend to turn to the Lands End catalog for sartorial inspiration. Hippie culture is another font, both directly as tie-die shirts and in muted form as the tasteful fair-trade clothes that many older Friends prefer. Because the Gathering takes place in July and in sporadically air-conditioned buildings, people also dress for summer camp--khaki shorts & once colorful faded t-shirts are the de facto Gathering uniform. In this setting, just wearing long pants is cause for comment ("aren't you hot like that?!") Try broadfalls and a long-sleeve collarless shirt, or a long dress!