A Restoration of Nuance

There's a numbness in the air, giving these first few days after Black Tuesday a bleak, hollow feel, intensifying the eerie autumnal darkness that comes from setting back the clock. I'd love to see data on alcohol sales this week, and would bet there's an anomalous peak that rivals New Year's eve. Damn. I should have thought to daytrade Seagrams.

Maybe we'll never know if the election fraud was enough to pull this off, whether Kerry planned all along to take a dive for his fellow Skull 'n Bonesman, or if this is actually the will of a narrow majority. At least the exit polls were accurate in the places without electronic voting... and hey, if nothing else, I have another reason to be glad I left Ohio, the state that inspires long-distance travel.

So we move on; what else can we do? This brings to mind something I blogged while pedaling through Mendocino County in January, 1987 (yah, I know the term "blog" hadn't been coined yet, but whatever):

Contrary to popular news stories of the day, social change does not hinge on government overthrow. Those are just the warrings of competing ideologues, not incremental steps in the evolution of consciousness. Growth -- the recognition and elimination of ignorance -- happens on a human level, slowly, building over time like the gradual conversion of a successful anomaly into a whole new species. Governments and eco-trashers simply apply selection pressure, insuring their eventual deterioration.

In other words, folks, it's pointless and self-defeating to beat our heads against the unscalable walls of a system that owns not only the courts, but also the world's most powerful military, the law enforcement agencies, and mass media. Although it's a distasteful thought at the moment, we all, whatever side of the Great Cultural Divide we happen to be on, need to make up with those ex-friends and hopelessly uninformed family members who have been emailing us partisan screeds for the past year, and try to learn together. Increasing polarization will only set us up for more culture clashes, in which some wedge issue (gay marriage or the like) will be manufactured to frame the debate, distracting us from the important things while effectively reducing the level of discourse to Bible thumping on one side and liberal rage on the other.

An empire rules by eliminating nuance, and corporate media reflects this without really intending to (except perhaps Fox and the great wasteland of talk radio, neither of which could survive were there not a market for simple-minded polarization of every topic). Never in my life have I seen complex issues reduced so thoroughly to good-vs-evil, black-and-white cartoons... except perhaps in the comic books I read when I was about 8.

So how do we solve the problem? Get your Republican friends to turn off the bloody TV and think/read/learn! And we "liberals" (when did that become an epithet, anyway?) need to broaden our horizons as well... it's too easy to get all one's news from What Really Happened, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, and the always-excellent Smirking Chimp when they present such passionate (and eminently forwardable) writing. But WorldPress and Google News serve up international media... deepening the reader's perspective... and there are of course blogs from all over. While you're at it, get a shortwave radio and really listen to views from around the world as they pour through the static; there's an immediacy and color about it you can't find online. What may emerge from this is the realization that those currently in power are not really "conservatives" at all, and that the poles of the old two-party duopoly, however dated, are actually much closer to each other than they are to the neocon agenda that took us into Iraq. They're not acting on our behalf, not even that of the red states.

While we're all turning off the TV and learning, we need to get a better insight into what's really going on over there. Read Baghdad Year Zero to get a sense of the economics, and bone up on the Peak Oil concept to understand the driving force.

OK. Enough of this controlled rant; I've been quiet since the election, and my first attempt to post something fell too soon thereafter and was just angry. I decided that this blog is not the place for bitterness, and that the silver lining is that we now get to live with an object lesson in what happens when an uninformed populace gets split in half and pitted against each other.

As in engineering, clarity is beautiful but oversimplification has messy side effects. Let's stop confusing the two!

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In utterly unrelated news, I have finished the rodent-exclusion project in the lab, and am now starting the new suspended ceiling with integral fluorescent troffers (which are, according to Lithonia, actually insulation-contact rated; thanks, Eric, for the heads-up on what question to ask). I have posted a how-to article, with photos, about keeping mice out of a pole building.

We've also sold a couple of Technomadic Designs paddle bags in the past few days (to Novato, California and Renton, Washington), as well as a copy of Living Japanese Style for $5.75 to Rochester, New York.

In Microship news, I've been looking into the PDA platform for the waterproof wireless front-end tool, which is almost certainly the evolutionary pinnacle of a long succession of designs that began back in 1993 with a HyperCard front end driving a multidrop network of FORTH nodes. I'll do a whole piece on this very soon.

But now, on this rainy Saturday, I'm off to buy drop ceiling parts for my office. Do I know how to party, or what?