Tribune to a Genius: 7 Things I Learned from George Carlin

(An interview of George Carlin by Tim Russert in 2005)
Hello Fellow Seekers of Truth and Life,

I want to talk today about a figure who has influenced my creative life in a profound way. I remember the first time I heard George Carlin's material. I had just turned 18, and I found lots of points in the material. However, his material got very violent, which often disturbed me. I am the type of person who just hears about and sees horrible events happen in media and news, and it scares me, makes me mad or sad. It was almost as if listening to it too much would bring the catastrophes he was talking about into being. So I decided to give listening to Carlin's routines a rest.

Two weeks later, I was visiting my grandmother in Virginia. She had the TV on one Sunday morning, and the newscrawl underneath proclaimed that George Carlin was dead at 71 in Malibu. I remembered that was the same guy that I had been alternately amused, inspired and taken aback by just two weeks earlier. Although I didn't think much about it at the time, it turned out that this man's 50-year body of work would help give my ideas a framework, a means of expression that I hadn't known was possible.

First of all, the reason I am writing this is because we of the anniversary. Not only was this past Friday, the 22nd of June, the fourth anniversary of Carlin's death, but it would have been his 75th birthday. I meant to write this on Friday or Saturday, but it just got so hectic around here that I had no time until this afternoon to write. There are many passages I could write about the life and work of the late, great George Carlin. For simplicity's sake, though (or so I don't bore the hell out of you), I will make each of my main points in one of the following seven bullet points.
Here is my list of seven things I learned from George Carlin. To pay tribute to the common comedic form, I will present them from last to first.

7. Language is an amazing thing, have fun with it. Have you ever taken the time to take apart a word, and then wondered where it came from? The fact is, every word is an interesting and unique concept that came from somewhere. Language is something only humans can use and understand, it is the reason we don't spend all day grunting at each other.

Allow yourself to notice, and be amused by, the ways that words and concepts line up, contradict, make sense, don't make sense, sound similar, sound different, cover up and reveal things. Now if all this sounds too academic for you, remember that Carlin, the guy who took all of this language play into new territory, dropped out of school in 9th Grade. Clearly, you don't need to be an academic to do this.

To give an example, just yesterday, I was grocery shopping, and I picked up a bottle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This name baffled me. First of all, what does the term virgin even mean in this context? Is it uncured, unsaturated, not heated up? And second, have you ever come across a bottle of virgin olive oil, because I never have. Your only choices in the grocery store are olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, which leads to the third point. What does the extra virgin mean? I always thought that something could be either virgin, or not virgin. There aren't degrees of virginity, it's something you have or you don't, it's that simple. My grandfather first brought the term to my attention, but it is little phrases like this that George Carlin made we who listened notice.

6. It matters which word you use to describe an object or concept. Whatever you may believe, the words you use actually do matter. One of Carlin's running themes was his love of tearing down euphemistic language. When some idea or thought makes us uncomfortable, we try to soft-pedal description of it, so we don't experience the full brunt of what is happening. This is a natural human urge, we want to protect ourselves from the idea of harm. Often, we also want to ignore the idea that we could be wrong.

While this is a natural urge, it does us great harm. It is dishonest, and it hides us from dealing with life as it is, and often, it keeps us stuck in a place that may feel comfortable, but robs us of life force, insight and genuine compassion. For instance, we love to say "I'm getting older," rather than "I'm getting old," because we don't want to face the fact that we will grow old and die too. Such a thought shocks and frightens us at first, but it could also help us treat others with honesty and decency. After all, if we are going to die, too, that means everybody else will die at some point, so we share this "marked" fate, terror, and sadness with everybody else.

I'll give you a macro-example from the Carlin files. After World War I, soldiers would experience a condition of terror, anguish over past battles, regret, and a mental fraying over what they had seen and experienced. This was called "shell shock." A simple name, that told you what you needed to know, with vivid language that gave you the sensation. After World War II, the same state was referred to as "battle fatigue." That name seems to hurt less, like you just need a good night's sleep for it. Then after Korea, it was called "operational exhaustion," a highly mechanical term for a human condition. When soldiers were coming back from Vietnam, they got "post-traumatic stress disorder." This word dilutes the original meaning with several superfluous academic terms, when "shell shock" works just as well.

In fact, such a convoluted term hides a key reality of war from us. Even if you survive a war, it takes a toll on your psyche. I'll always remember one line of Carlin's: "I'll bet if they were still calling it shell shock, a lot of those Vietnam Veterans would have received the attention they needed." Think about the soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq now. What do they have? P-T-S-D. Now they don't even bother to come up with names anymore, they just give it a meaningless collection of letters. Since about the mid-1990's, our language has gone progressively more and more toward abbreviation. This is an example of how dangerous it can be.

5. Producing violent media doesn't make you coldhearted or cruel. As I mentioned above, I was initially turned off by Carlin's repeated wishes for people's deaths. As I grew, I also grew to dislike movies that were excessively gory or violent just for the sake of being excessively gory or violent. This made life tough when everyone around me was thriving on movies like 300 or Inglorious Basterds, and playing war-themed video games, while these were a big turn-off for me.

However, Carlin was different in that he didn't mind if carnage happened closer to him, where there was a chance he could be hurt or killed. I later saw this and understood the conscious nature of what he was saying, and the conscious nature of the audience's laughing in approval. While it still scared me that people could be so blaze about such material, I knew that the intent behind it was to call our attention to something. There was something inherently violent and ignorant in our human societies, particularly in the United States.


Remember this segment from Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine? This had to do with the scapegoating of violent media and video games in the wake of that tragedy. The reason I included it is this discussion of whether violent entertainment is really the boogeyman everybody claims it is. The fact is, there has always been some sort of violence and cruelty out there. Are supposed to just not  talk about it, and hope that'll make it go away? Carlin spoke of the dark urge to see someone hurt in people. If we don't address that, how will we ever move forward.

Whatever you may think of Manson or his music, listen to the last thing he says."I wouldn't have said one word to [the Columbine victims]. I would've listened to what they had to say, and that's what no one did." The people you hear on TV are constantly telling you how to think, and what to do. When you get hurt, in a small- or large-scale way, there is always someone there telling you what to think and do ("You need this product," or "Violence is rampant, and this group is to blame"). This is all to sell a neat narrative about the world, that you must always accept. Because of Carlin, and what Manson said above, I don't think the problem is violent songs, comedy routines, or movies themselves. I think the issue lies in intent. There is being shocking to pander and boost sales revenues, and then there is being shocking to prove a point, and offer insight, which I will talk about in the next point.
4. Take the things that piss you off, and convert them into creative insights about life. You may have noticed a lot of "angry rants" on this blog of late. Believe it or not, I think anger can be very productive for solving problems and helping people in pain. The problem is that people rarely deal with anger in a positive way. Most of the time, people deal with it in the most destructive way possible, by choosing scapegoats, rallying around "heroes" pinning all the bad in the world on the scapegoat, and then taking out their anger on them.
Unfortunately, people either handle anger this way, or cut themselves off from the anger entirely, trying to deny or destroy it. Another way would be to look at the anger, and keep asking "What is behind this?" You could explore what it is about the things that bug you or make you angry. Sometimes it might be insignificant, but other times, there might be something behind it. Carlin routinely talked about things that made him angry, exaggerating the anger for comedic energy, and it usually lead to some insight about life that you hadn't thought of before. Some people were threatened by this, but for many people, including me, this was the insight I needed to grow.
I've lately began making lists of things that bug me. One thing is people with earbuds in their ears all the time. Going to college, I see this all the time, people walking around with those blank looks on their faces, with the damned white headphones in, as if to say "I don't have to pay attention to anything." What bugs me the most is when I see people with headphones on skateboards and bikes. Focusing on this singular annoying thing led me to some creative insights. It led me to think about how people shut down reflexively, was there anything I did that was an easy way of shutting down, getting stuck in my own world. Here, an annoying occurence became an opportunity to reflect and grow. By the way, the things you complain about also apply to you, as I will discuss in a moment.

3. All people are hypocrites, and contradictions in people are a part of life. What was interesting to me is that George Carlin's career grew out of anger toward the Vietnam War, and the culture of Reagan, where it became good to do evil and evil to do good. However, Carlin was not kind toward the people in the government, the corporations. He hoped they were hurt-the same thing he attacked them for doing. As I watched his material later, I saw he was also lashing out at causes and groups usually defended vigorously by the Left of the 60's. Earlier in my life, I had believed that you had to support one set of ideas or another, but this changed my mindset. I realized that my own gut feelings mattered, and I shouldn't ignore them, or try to stuff them into a conventional wisdom box.
I had also assumed that because Carlin had this rough-edged, biting persona on stage, he must have been just bad to everyone he met. Not true. At least, not according to his memoir (which was transcribed by a friend of his after his death). In his memoir, he had only positive things to say about his fellow comedians at the time, and often worked with them anonymously to help their careers. He certainly said what he felt at a gut level, but some of it was brutal, some of it was very insightful. It was all very genuine. I also learned how to disagree. You don't have to accept or reject some point of view across the board. I used to believe that people had one persona about them, and that was what guided their life. I now know that what we say, and what we do, think and feel, often contradict each other. I have begun using this as a part of my life, rather than rejecting or trying to bury it.

2. Beneath race, gender, class, religion, nationality, et. al., there is a common experience we all share. You may have noticed that under labels, I will often include the phrase common experience. This is what  that refers to. I don't know a great way to describe it in words better than this: there are things in life we all have to go through, trials, joys, heartbreaks, and most importantly, those little awkward moments, and the little things you succeed at that make you go "Yes!" Let me let the late, great Mr. Carlin do the explaining.



Truer words have not been spoken.

1. Life isn't nearly as serious as it pretends to be. In life, there are many things, concepts, ideas, entities and processes that pretend to be so important, the most important thing in the world, in history, ever. They aren't. Part of Carlin's buzzsaw approach was exposing life, particularly human life, as a game. We really aren't as important, noble, or paramount as we make ourselves out to be. There will come a time when everything that is here now is dust, invisible particulate matter floating around somewhere. The room you are in, the laptop or phone you are reading this on, your house, your body, all of your possessions, all of that will disperse, and the same is true of me. It's a scary thing, isn't it? It often scares me.

However, our egos have become so inflated by the things of the world that we believe we are the only important thing. What can bring us up, can also tear us down, so the highs and lows of our lives lead to the same illusion of importance, permanence. What George Carlin did was to tear down this idea that human well-being is paramount. Ironically, this urge came from a deep, deep anger over the injustice faced by many people, and it led to many people, including myself, actually discovering something in life. George Carlin once said that each person, by him or herself, is an amazing thing, but once they start to form groups, that's when the bullshit starts. Beneath that statement lies lots of truth. There has never been, and will never be again, something that replicates you. It is imperative that you realize both that you are not as important as you believe, and that you can discover more than you ever thought possible.

This is why I wanted to pay tribute to the late, great George Carlin on what would have been his 75th birthday. Because he took comedy into a whole different dimension. He used to to make us realize things that you couldn't just tell a person. If you tried to tell them, it would end up a confusing mess. If you use humor, that opens people up, and that gives them an experience they can remember, and they can think back and realize, "I had never heard that before." This is what I hope to do with you, dear reader, of this blog, in my own small, humble way. If I can give you that, and you take that gift, open it, and are amazed by what is contained inside, then this blog is worth all the work I put into it.
I'll have more good stuff for you to sink your teeth into soon.

See ya, and don't forget to live!

Why I Didn't Celebrate the Death of Osama Bin Laden

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Hello Fellow Seekers of Truth and Life,

One year ago, we got some big news. I think you remember what happened. On Sunday night, May 1, 2011, we found out that Navy SEALs had raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (30 miles north of Islamabad, like the Pakistani version of Manassas, Virginia), and shot Osama Bin Laden dead. I found out about it from Facebook comments from people. I didn't believe it at first, because you hear all sorts of things on the internet, but then we turned on CBS, and there was Obama, delivering the following announcement.



When I heard this, I felt all sorts of conflicting, excited emotions. There was the amazing revelation that something I didn't think could ever happen, just happened. The main conflict was between two feelings, the first was a grim satisfaction that We got him. That was my main feeling, that I hate it when the criminals get away. I believe people need to pay for their crimes. I really wanted him to pay for what he did to all those people, all their families, all their friends, coworkers, and all the people who cared about them.

All of them had a huge, horrific whole ripped in their lives that Tuesday morning in the late Summer of 2001. At least all those terrified people who jumped out of the 87th Floor of that building to their deaths, or the people on the planes who made teary last calls to their families, or employees who burned to death in the Pentagon, will not be left behind as a "cold case."

On the other hand, though, I just cannot bring myself to celebrate death, in any way, shape, or form. You might think that's a sappy way to go, but, quite frankly, I am done giving a damn. I used to take a lot of pleasure in the thought of hitting back at someone who wronged me, even if it was only a wrong to me, but I could never stand the sight of someone suffering. It's something that seeps into my consciousness, and I feel this need to make it stop. Thus, when I was about 14 or 15, I decided that hatred was an addiction that I needed to swear off. Ever since, any celebration of death has bothered me deeply. Let me backtrack, though, and talk about how I got to where I am on this issue.

I remember the morning of that September 11 very clearly still. I remember having breakfast, I was having Lucky Charms, my favorite cereal, as an 11-year-old kid, and my Mom told me a plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I assumed it must have been an accident, it must have been cloudy. Mom told me it was a terrorist attack. She said it pretty straightforwardly, without much apparent surprise. When I went to school, I was still a little freaked out by my new setting. I had not been in middle school for a week, even, I had just started the previous Wednesday, and when everyone in class started talking about it, I realized what had gone on.

What I remember most, is hearing the teacher talking about the kind of planes that crashed into the towers. "These were big planes," she said. I found out later that these were not light propeller-driven planes, but huge passenger jets, 757-s and 767-s, both of which are massive. You have to understand that back then, I was a huge aviation geek. I loved machines that flew, and I was especially in awe of those passenger jets we often jump on and take for granted. I must have been one of the few people that got excited to get on a plane. It seemed like such a freeing thing to me.

An example of a drawing of jets that I often do. I have done so many of these it's not even funny.

It seemed bizarre to me that such beautiful, amazing machines could be used for such a terrible, destructive purpose. I spent the whole day not getting what went on, and wanting to get what it was that affected everybody that day. I remember getting scared about it that day when my new P.E. teacher was ostracizing us for talking too much. It was just a confusing day, all in all. After I got back from school, we were staring at the TV news ceaselessly, blankly trying to figure out what this was all about. My Dad finally turned it off and said "It's really easy to just veg out and watch TV, but let's not." Probably a good idea, in retrospect. However, in the dark days, weeks, months and the following year, TV coverage like this was something I saw regularly.



By the way, the point of the above segment was the speech from Donald Rumsfeld. His speech also included a line to the effect of "If anyone says this is an attack on the Afghan people, they're wrong." I remember being so thrilled about the speech, and that the US was bombing Afghanistan. After all, those guys had killed our people, we had to go get 'em. That gets to the central journey I have made, lo these 10-plus years since that day at the end of Summer.

I was a really patriotic kid back then, if only because of my goody-two-shoes nature. Still, I really wanted to get the people that did it. I was an 11-year-old boy, I wasn't about to take an attack from some foreigner lying down. I knew that the bad guys were a group called Al-qaeda (I heard it pronounced "Al Kita" which added another level of bizarreness to it), and the main villain was a guy in Afghanistan named Osama Bin Laden, who was the ringleader of another group called the Taliban. As unclear as I was on who these guys were and what their problem was, I knew we needed to take them out.

At the same time, when my Dad told me we were now at war, I got scared, because I got this image of old-school, nuclear war-type scenarios. Even then, I knew that war meant you could get hurt, you could be killed, and so could your whole family. I got anxious then, as I often did when unexpected things happened to me in my youth.

At about this time, I began to learn about a group of religious people called the Muslims. In the months after 9/11, I heard people talk about "Muslim-this," and "Islamic-that," but I had no idea what any of it referred to. In the 7th grade, our teacher took us through the world's religions. She told us that around 600 AD, a man named Muhammad (I've never figured out how to properly spell this name, forgive me) traveled through the desert in what is today Saudi Arabia, and found a bunch of guys worshipping false idols, and in general, acting quite badly.

Then one day, he went into a cave, and had a vision from God, whom they call Allah, and went forth to spread the word. Muhammad was only a prohpet, a messenger of God's vision. Today, that cave is a Holy Site to all Muslims. There are also five central demands in Islam, called the Five Pillars. They include prayer five times a day, facing the Holy City in Mecca, and at least one trip in believers' lives to said Holy City.

The ubiquitous image of the terrorist we are shown. I did this as a mock-up of a picture you would find on TV news about an international terrorist (hence the made-up foreign intel label in the bottom left). I assure you this was entirely fictionalized, but it does have truth to it, does it not?

I later found out that this religion had drawn a lot of suspicion from people here in the US, and later Europe. Because of religious customs in many Middle Eastern countries, people argue that the religion itself is wrong. I drew the above picture four years ago, to capture the familiar theme we find in the news, of the scary Muslim guy who tried to blow something up. Since the 80's, with the destruction of Flight 103, we've been seeing this picture of Middle Eastern guilt shown to us, over and over again.

This despite the fact that, as I mentioned in my post on terrorism on the 10th Anniversary of Daniel Pearl's death, that the majority of victims of Islamic terrorists are Muslims themselves, including about 2% of the 9/11 victims. All you get in our media is images and stories of the scary Muslims who are gonna blow you up or make your country adopt Sharia Law, and when everyone on the TV agrees on that, and all your friends and family believe in it, that becomes your reality.

The first time I realized it was after the Iraq War. In the early winter months of 2003, we began to hear talk of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and "WMD's" weapons of mass destruction. Our government were telling us that we needed to invade now, before the "smoking gun" became a "mushroom cloud." Yet I began to hear a bigger group of people saying that there weren't weapons, there were other ways of dealing with the problem, and we needed to have the UN verify this to be true. I came to find out later that none of this was allowed to happen.

So the orgiastic beginning of this war was dismaying to me, since I was just beginning to discover that war and hurting could be wrong. My country could be wrong. Our country can be responsible for the deaths of families, of children, of people who do not deserve to die. That's never an easy learning experience.

It is only in the months and years that followed September 11th, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Iraq War, that I have understood what those events truly mean. I have been just as angry at the terrorists from Al-qaeda and all the related networks as I have been at US Government officials, upon discovering their deceit, and callous disregard for people's very lives. Not only foreigners, these people don't give a damn about protecting us from anything. It is this kind of anger and despair about the world that has propelled me into meditation on this condition of getting shafted called the human condition.

For years, I felt a lot of anger about the world, about all the pain, unfairness, and loneliness I felt as if it were my own experience. I didn't even have the words to say what it was, accurately, much less the will to discuss it with anyone. As much anger as I felt, I felt it all because there was so little connection of people to each other. They were all in their own tunnel world, thinking about themselves, their cliques of friends, race, family, nation, economic status, and religion.

A dark voice inside me whispered, This is human nature, this is how it is, it is part of you, join it, give in. I was not going to give up, I was not going to be just another stooge to power, to nation, to religion, to Groupthink, as George Orwell termed it. I was going to defeat the dark part of my nature, while everyone else gave in to it in the form of supporting wars, killing in other countries, and all.

So why did I not celebrate the death of Osama Bin Laden? Well, because I just don't celebrate death, even if it is the death of a scumbag. Don't get me wrong, what Bin Laden did, not only on 9/11, but in running this collection of bad, bad people in Al-qaeda, and in his Holy War in the US, which included attacking our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and our ship in Yemen in 2000, personified what evil means. To me, evil is not about a person, it is about what they do, and how they do it. Bin Laden conducted the killing of human beings with cool, steely composure, and pleasure in his work, the terrible deaths of people.

Yet, what were we doing the night he was killed? Celebrating like rowdy fraternity brothers, celebrating death. Where does that leave us? Everybody I heard in the news expressed sheer delight that he had died. Even Elie Wiesel, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, said that the death was well-deserved. Rudy Giuliani implied that if you aren't feeling a little gleeful, you're in denial. All they tell you is that it's human nature to take glee in the enemy's death, as if that's all human nature is: barbarism and vengeance. Even Jon Stewart, whom I usually like and admire, joined in the antics.

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What is even worse than him ridiculing the notion that maybe we shouldn't be having an orgy over this event, that maybe it was ambivalent, is his phallic implication at the end, there. That boils down to what most international conflict is about. Listen to a bit of George Carlin's famous Jammin' in New York special from 1992, about the Gulf War that had played out much like this Iraq War did.



You might find this offensive, but I think the point needs to be made that war is about proving who is tougher, who has more might, power or virtue, in other words, whose masculinity is more potent(because, at the risk of making a feminist statement, it is mainly men who are part of wars, but I digress). That's why I believe wars, killing, and hatred are not only destructive, but ultimately futile. After all, sooner or later, you will no longer be able to win power struggles consistently.

Ultimately, these assassinations are more symbolic than anything else. To Al-qaeda, the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon were symbolic of America's power. That's the main reason the terrorists chose to crash planes into them, because they had been trying to attack civilian jet liners for a long time, and several members of Al-qaeda's planning team were showing interest in the Twin Towers as potential targets. To us, here in the US, Bin Laden became the big bad guy. He was the symbol for all that was evil in this world. So I get why people would celebrate the killing of this terrible mastermind.

However, seeing the huge spectacle of raucous celebrations at this raid made me, just, spiritually ill. You may remember the outrage surrounding the picture of Palestinians celebrating as the planes crashed into the buildings.

I saw a picture similar to this one in the LA Times the day after 9/11. Even at my young age, I was coolheaded enough to realize the paper was probably doing it because they wanted war. A war would be good for their news. Yet it made me boil in rage nonetheless. There is no reason to celebrate death. Period. That's what is so awful about these celebrations. It isn't just that we've learned nothing from the errors of the Middle East, it's also that we would spit in the face of anyone who would tell us different from what we want to hear. Remember the story of the girl who trashed the Martin Luther King quote from my post on MLK Day? That to me was the height of arrogance and a willful, malicious variety of ignorance that is so often our error as a culture.

Oh, and by the way, I feel like I should mention this. Not everybody in Palestine was celebrating that day. Below is a photo from a large group of Palestinian students who held a long, silent vigil for their fellow children lost 5,000 miles away. You can find the link to the story here.

You're not gonna see this in the news. It doesn't fit into the neat little narrative that "sells" in the west. Our news outlets like CNN and the New York Times would be terrified of appearing to be "liberal" or "politically correct." So ironically, in their urge to not be politically correct, they come to serve another type of political correctness.

This goes to show that you do not have to celebrate death. Now, there is a difference, I want to make it clear that I know this. I am not defending Osama Bin Laden, and I am certainly not defending anything he ever did or stood for. What he did was wrong and it was evil, there is no dispute about that here.

However, I find it interesting that no one would listen to what the demands of Al-qaeda and all kinds of people in the Middle East are. That doesn't mean we should grant all the demands, that would be unrealistic and would let them off the hook too much. We need to know what the demands are, so we can decide what to allow, and what to stand firm on. We haven't done any of that, though, we've just insisted "They hate us for our freedom!"

The death of Osama Bin Laden was, for me, more a grim relief than anything else. My thought process was "At least he won't be able to hurt anyone anymore." We could learn from this relief, though, rather than go into an orgy of nationalism and machissmo. We must understand that we cannot accept that our government plays power broker all over the world, and expect that it won't come back to haunt us. This does not mean that we are to blame, however, if we stay silent while our government carries out unethical, undemocratic activities, such as the Iranian Coup of 1953, we are implicitly accepting it as normal.

We need to understand that while we, as individuals, may hold certain ideals, when it comes to our culture, the only thing others see, and judge us on, is our actions. We can't expect to keep our governmental status quo going and get more equitable and just results. We also need to have compassion, both for ourselves, and for other national bodies, even as we hold responsible the appropriate power players, be they heads of state, military leaders, or militants acting outside any national authority. Bottom line, if you commit the crime, you do the time, as Robert DeNiro once said.

This grim justice is not a cause to party. It is a cause for a more reflective relief. I believe we should be glad that at the very least, these horrible crimes were answered for. This does not mean that all terrorism has ended. We like to believe that once we "get" the main bad guy, all is won, but remember, this is the "War on Terror," which, by the way, you can't permanently win.

What you can do is root out the desperation and sense of wrong that makes terrorism seem so necessary for the peasants of Afghanistan, Yemen, and so forth. It was rich Saudis that funded Al-qaeda, whom the Taliban gave safe haven. From that, all sorts of people along that barren stretch of land on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border supported the terrorist network. The good news is that Al-qaeda is now on the run, and they are having less and less credibility throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.

The even better news is that most of the people on Earth are not sociopaths at their core. We realize, on some level, that pain is bad. From that starting point, let us learn now that it will not work to simply pin all of the evil in the world onto one man or group, sacrifice them, and believe evil has been purged. This can just as easily pinned on the righteous as it can be on the wicked. Rather, we must realize that there is a part in all of us, from the best to the worst human beings, that urges us to destroy, and to take glee in that destruction.

Often, when we pin evil on someone, putting all that urge to destroy on them becomes more natural, more just. We must face that part of ourselves and say "I don't need that high. I don't need the glee in destruction, even in the truly wicked." After all, working on this projection of our destructive will toward the "evil ones" is what allowed Bin Laden and sociopaths like him to recruit, train, and facilitate real evil. We can step out of that cycle.

Well, I'm sorry this post ended up taking so long, but like I said, I had a lot of contradictory emotions going on when this happened a year ago. I wasn't quite sure how I was supposed to feel about it. Venting on my knowledge, and my experience over the years has really helped clarify my aim here. As I was typing, all sorts of memories were coming back that I felt I needed to share with you. I feel this perspective was underrepresented in this story, and needed to be shared. Anyway, if you have any thoughts, feelings, comments, or anything on this you would like to share, please feel free.

I included this post on this blog because I believe our artistic experience can help us see the world in ways we may not have before. I hope that discussion on this helps bring a creative, innovative energy out into the world. I'll have some more good stuff for you soon. Thanks for listening.

See ya!

North of the Border

Hi there,

Sorry I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks, folks. This semester has taken off right from the start, which is good, because all of my classes are really interesting and enjoyable. Unfortunately, this has left less time for me to blog. However, after this week, I have something for you that I have been working on for a long time. I envisioned this work expressly for the purpose of putting up on this blog.

Anyway, you're probably aware that Kim Jong-il, the authoritarian communist leader of North Korea, died recently. This happened two months ago, so now it's "old news," but I figured I'd talk about this nonetheless. I thought I would get this completed sooner, but you know how things go. Duties come up in your life, and tasks you want to get done end up getting pushed back. Thankfully, this work came together last Sunday afternoon, and here it is now for us to discuss. Anyway, there's a certain clarity to events that comes with examining them after the frenetic news coverage dies down.

Kim Jong-il became the de facto President of North Korea back in 1994. Kim promoted a policy of "military first" for the allocation of the country's financial resources. All the while, North Korea has been among the poorest countries in the world. For several years after Kim took power, North Korea had a terrible period of famine, lasting from 1994 to 1998. If you read the 1997 piece from The Economist I just linked to, you'll notice they point out that people had little knowledge of the famine for a few years. This is important. This is because virtually no news came out of North Korea. What we heard was what they wanted us to hear.




This was the initial announcement of Kim's passing. The newscaster's hammed-up crying was the common reaction throughout the country. North Korean citizens had to be as sad as possible about his death; this determined what place in society they would fit into. This was a test of their loyalty to the state.

The important part of this is that those people did accept that reality, the reality where Kim Jong Il was God. They believed that he always bowled a 300, or shot a 30 every time he played golf. This is the level of worship Kim Jong Il enjoyed. All these years, though, Kim was able to demand the most lavish amenities. He hired the finest chefs in the world, from Japan, and Italy, to cook just the simplest foods for him, according to the Telegraph of London. This was while that same famine was occurring, in which as much as 10% of the North Korean people may have starved to death.

However, Kim, according to what records exist, had very sophisticated hobbies. Apparently, he had thousands of cookbooks in his library. He was also a well-known film buff (he apparently had a thing for westerns). He had a collection of thousands of his own movies, and according to the video below, he had been an aspiring director himself.



What does all this say? Kim Jong Il definitely was a character. Now there are people that are characters, that they have very distinct, very out-of-the-ordinary, personal interests and behaviors. Some people have unusual personalities for the better, some for both better and worse, some definitely for the worse. Kim Jong Il was definitely that way for the worse. You hear this stuff about his keen interest in filmmaking, and you think (or I think) "What if he had ended up being a director?" You know, the way Hitler had failed to become a painter. So if he had somehow been able to become a director, who knows? You might have been watching one of his movies right now. Just a thought.

Why should I be talking about all of this, though? I mean this drawing has nothing to do with politics. It is just a representation of a small fishing village on the Yalu River, the North Korean border with China. I brought all of this up to get, and to give you, as the reader, just a small window into this faraway, distant, scary place. I had gotten the idea before to just do a landscape drawing, but this time it would be of someplace in North Korea. Then when Kim passed away, suddenly North Korea is front and center again, and I got the opportunity to do that project, and explore all of this with you, the reeders.

I was able to find a good representation of this area using Google Earth pictures, which was where I got the idea for the tugboat in the foreground. Therefore, it is very limited in its representation. I will own up to that right now. I do not claim that this drawing is the end-all, be-all of what we need to understand the situation in North Korea, or in any other distant country I might represent in my future works. Hopefully, though, it can be a good starting point. I wanted to find some part of it that was less political, and more recognizable. In landscapes, the manmade aspects of the scene are de-emphasized.

I got this image of a village, but mainly of a riverbank, with the mountains in the background, and a cold wind blowing. So I tried to evoke that image on the page here, using the visual, three-dimensional tools I had. I also found the writing on the red sign on the fence from Google Earth photographs of the area, so I don't know what it means. However, what the letters mean isn't the focus of this. Like a saying I first heard the other day goes, believe none of what you hear and half of what you can see. I really think that saying touches on something, that's why I shared it then. The point of mentioning it is that the spoken, written messages are being taken out of this encounter, and here, I wanted to get just a visual piece of this distant, abstract place. I hope you thought this was an informative post. I'll have some more intriguing material soon!

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!