Lev Davidovitch

Don't read history to find heroes. Any good history (or biography) is going to show feet of clay... We are all only human, filled with spite and self-justification and blind spots. Gandhi didn't get on with his children and Martin Luther King, Jr., slept around. In my continued reading about the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union, I know I will get round to Trotsky soon. I already know enough to say that he is no hero. He may have had fewer people killed than Lenin (although I don't know how we'd count the victims fo the Red Army) and certainly fewer than Stalin ("Uncle Joe" had long years in power, besides being much more of a son-of-a-bitch) but his hands are still red. (Pun not intended but accepted?) And when I consider that he jumped from the Mencheviks to the Bolzoviks in 1917, and already by 1920 and the end of the Civil War was being marginalized by Lenin, I want to ask if the moral association with that group of thugs was worth those brief years. But he jumped because he wanted power. And the Bolshoviks where the ones who were going to get it, because they were a group of thugs, because they were willing to do whatever it took in the way of murder and betrayal to get power. But I feel a little wistful for my imagined image of Trotsky. The firey orator, the thinker, the writer, the slut, the fighter for truth and justice... So, there's a list of some of my values. Never a bad thing to have. But no shelter from what I know to be the truth, when I start learning about his life, I will learn of repugnant things. And the reason why I prefer him over Lenin and Stalin... Lenin got his name from his writing. He moved from psuedonym to pseudonym, re-arranging the letters in his last name to create new names at need. Lenin is the one that stuck, or that made him famous. Stalin, ah yes, literally the man of steel. So telling. Trotsky? He took the name from the warden of a prison he escaped. That's a nice bit of surrealistic play.

What Glues Us Together

So, Tribe.net went down again. And a month's worth of stuff has been lost.
People are bitching. A lot. Including some of the usual suspects. I won't name names, because I want to be able to forget their very existence in a few weeks' time. And some of the rest of us are coming back at it, telling them to shut up.
Adversity can build community. The complainers (and let's not forget that I've been amoung them at least once) get scapegoated by the rest of us for neigh-saying. We beat up on them for their doubts. But even aside from that, we do come together in the wake of the problems. In some really weird way, we are getting a much more authentic experience than we would from facebook or myspace. I understand that yes, this is unacceptable. It's unacceptable in this age of computer born perfections. But all our systems are flawed, it's just that at Tribe.net the flaws are closer to the surface. Look at the recent economic break-down. That system was flawed. Does Tribe make us stronger? or is it simply that at the end of the world, we like a little company?

Nobodies

Recently read Nobodies

http://www.amazon.com/Nobodies-Modern-American-Global-Economy/dp/0812971841/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223610386&sr=8-1
Interesting. Of course it's not really a surprise that we have slavery going on in this country, although it is a shock. It's a little disturbing that $50 a year to the family food budget of all american families would get the laborers a decent wage. But then, the poverty level, which was pretty much made up by one woman arbitrarily round about WWII who decided for the sake of having some number that it would be three times the price of food for a year. No one's ever wanted to go back and make a change, but someone has estimated that it's now four times the price of food. But part of that is the move away from real food.
Anyway, the slavery is petty in some way, petty from us and petty from the behavior of the slavers. Actually, I've come by the back way to something that I was going to work my way towards.
Bowe goes through the idea that in the old south that the plantation owners didn't actually profit from the ownership. I find that hard to believe. Maybe in a strict sense, as they were leveraged up to their eyeballs, but even if the planters didn't make money, the country as a whole DID profit from slavery. I'm digressing again. He then asks why did people commit slavery. (Maybe that's not a good phrase, I don't know.) His answer: We like having power over other human beings.

I can't refute that. There well may be other factors, but I think that's a big one, and it's been a huge mover of history.
In some way, I"m an optomist, and I believe that knowing what we are capable, makes it easier for us to avoid those sins. And I do believe that "sin" is the appropriate term. That there is a wrongness to some behavoir despite the non-existance of dwag. but my guess is that we have to rediscover that wrongness anew with every generation. That's based on the lack-luster teaching of the "holocaust" and american chattel slavery in my childhood schooling. Of course, it is hard to discuss the evil in men's souls with children, but I distrust the impulse that makes it something "they" do. Rather than something that we are all capable of. I hope I never am faced with the opportunity to commit evil on that scale.
Can I still call annoying people Hippies?

Aggravation

Before Burningman I was in a local sports clothing store. While moving through the aisles a bikini bottom got caught in my handlebars and I inadvertantly stole it.

For the past whatever weeks, my mother and I have been doing a dance with it. I take it out of my room and put it someplace where I will see it. She takes it backs in my room and puts it (without meaning to, I'm sure) in some place where I don't see it for days or weeks. So it never gets back to where it belongs, in the Rockridge shopping district storefront.

I fucking hate it. It's like she doesn't fucking trust me to knwo what I'm doing, and she has to correct me.

Okay, I'm really pissed. Maybe I'm pissed about being in a chair. Or pissed at being second guessed, like I'm not a grown up who can make her own decisions. Or maybe it's fucking pms and all you guys, if you say a fucking thing about that I get to claw your eyes out.

I used to hope I was going through early menopause, because of shock. I think I have to give that up. Sure, I lost half my hair and it's growing back in much greyer, but I don't released from that fucking curse. (And I hate calling it "the curse" which showsyou how fucking angry I am.)

Here I Am

I'd like to continue the other blog, the one about my hospitalization. But I've forgotten my log in. It's been a year or more since I posted.