Keep On Dancing, Right As the Curtain Is Closing

I wrote this listening to the new Felix Culpa record, available January 24th (also my birthday) from Youth Conspiracy Records. It's pretty long (out of the 66 minutes, they could have cut anywhere from seven to 10 minutes), but it's all an intense ride. I suggest you buy it.

The title comes from the Bane song End With An Ellipsis, a song about the vocalist seeing the end coming for his band, but not wanting to go sadly. Anyway, the meat of this is about S.W.O.R.D., an ongoing from Marvel that just this week made its way to the "buy me" pile, got cancelled. At least it's in good company, though, with Doctor Voodoo, Captain Britain and MI:13 and the Immortal Iron Fist.

S.W.O.R.D. got cancelled at issue #5 (cover left) due to poor sales, which everyone with a functioning brain saw coming. Everyone on the series saw that coming and it was even written as if it would end at issue #5, according to writer Kieron Gillen, (lover of obscure British pop) known also for Phonogram, a comic I enjoy quite a bit.

It's a shame, because it's a neat little spinoff comic focusing on different characters in the Marvel Universe with a tangential relation to established franchises (X-Men). I picked up issue #3 last week and while I found Beast a little bit too whip-smart and it took getting used seeing Beast look more like a horse, I warmed up to it quickly.

Gillen posits two explanations:

1. New ongoings in a shitty economy are extremely risky. (true)

2. The first two issues are ordered before anyone has read the first one so the new series might be on grounds to be cancelled before anyone has the opportunity to buy a single issue. A crazy systemic problem with comics. (true)

Quoted by CBR's Robot 6, Gillen said "It was already on unsteady ground before anyone had even read the thing."

And as soon as I read that, my mind goes to another recent launch: Batwoman. Both are spinoffs of established series (S.W.O.R.D. has X-Men and Batwoman has Batman) but their launches couldn't be more different.

Consider: Batwoman's stories have appeared in Detective Comics, 52 and Final Crisis (52 and Final Crisis being DC events) and the talk only now is coming to her own ongoing. S.W.O.R.D. (created by Joss Whedon during his Astonishing X-Men run in 2004) was thrown into its own ongoing with no lead up or introduction to the characters outside of Secret Invasion, an event from two years ago before the launch of S.W.O.R.D.

The artist on Batwoman is the stupid talented J.H. Williams III, narrowly losing to the guy drawing Blackest Night (46% to 54%) as the artist of the year in a Newsarama poll, but winning the cover of the year with his work on Detective 855 (see right). J.H. also did Promethea with Alan Moore, which also had amazing layouts. Also! Take a look at those colors. Dave Stewart (the colorist) deserves some serious kudos. Suffice to say the art team on S.W.O.R.D. doesn't have that pedigree.

I'm not sure Gillen is in the same league as Rucka, but I buy Gillen's books more frequently than I do Rucka's, so the kangaroo court of my mind has a sizable pro-Gillen bias.

The connection to the X-Men is Beast, which could have been reinforced a little bit more. What's Nightcrawler doing these days? He would fit note-perfect in an ongoing about aliens, earth and alienation. It's Beast, Abagail Brand and "everyone's favorite paper pusher" as the front and center players from the Marvel Universe.

The short version of all this is: based on this criteria, my guess is S.W.O.R.D. just didn't have the editorial backing that Batwoman did. If you want people to buy another new book, then you have to have Things Happen in the book, but also, you have to put your top-tier people on it. The new book needs to be a must-read. S.W.O.R.D. wasn't positioned as a book that's must-read. It's cool if it is read.

I want to come back to Gillen McKelvie's quote: "It was on unsteady ground before anyone had even read the thing." Marvel, I think, didn't take enough steps to compensate for the unsteadiness of the new ground and combine that with the viciousness of a market that's already hurting from an economic collapse and S.W.O.R.D.'s numbers were limited, in this case, from the start.

Of course, that's not to say S.W.O.R.D. was boring. Far from it. The first issue I picked up, ,#3, had a spectacular visual for a cover (see below), Beast being an incorrigible badass, a firebreathing dragon and xenophobia.

You've got a tiny dragon pointing guns with three barrels at you and not just that, but a shotgun and an assault rifle strapped to his back. Awwwww! S.W.O.R.D. will be missed for that reason, for its ability to blend being cute and intelligent. But hey. It's fun and it's got two issues left.

Like Conan, S.W.O.R.D. got screwed, but at least there's a trade in the future. That said, there's a fun feeling to buying the remaining issues of a cult-classic series that's walking dead. You were in before people realized it was so cool, so even if it's gonna end, pick up the issues.

Like many of Mr. Gillen's favorite artists, his work was under-appreciated the first time around and would gain significance only after the band's finished. For his first unique Marvel ongoing, it seems appropriate S.W.O.R.D. ends the same way.

You Lie, I Lie

Let's talk about the outburst and around the speech. I haven't seen the speech. I haven't read a transcript, so I don't know how I feel about it. I hear from Democratic congresspeople, by and large that it was a "gamechanger" and I hear from Republican congresspeople by and large it was more empty campaign rhetoric.

So, I know what the middle ground is, but I don't know if that's a truthful or accurate barometer of the speech. I have heard, fourth hand that in a Congressional bill (it's unclear who'se and if its even been voted on) somewhere there is a provision that limits doctors pay to $60,000 a year. That seems unlikely, but I think it's something that's indicative of what the American public knows about the process, which is not terribly much.

It sounds like there's wild speculation going on and honestly, trying to read any one of those things puts me to sleep and I'm used to reading dense, hard to penetrate documents. If you want accurate information on the process of health care reform, well, that's why you have a representative for your district (however gerrymandered it may be), spend some time, find their number, call up their office and don't settle until you have someone who tells you they are your congressperson.

Ask them specific questions and my guess is they'll be able to help you. In fact, avoid phrases like "socialism", "radical right" and so on. You'll get farther that way.

(At this juncture, it's important to note that a statesman is a public official who does things you like and a politician is a public official who does things you don't.)

Let's go to the outburst. Joe Wilson, a representative from the *ahem* great state of South Carolina yelled out "You lie!" when Obama said that the health care plan would not cover illegal immigrants. Mr. Wilson's outburst was based on the fact that illegal immigrants do slip through the cracks of American bureaucracy and acquire social services based on the mistaken belief that they're American citizens.

I'll indulge in a tangent about that soon.

But. Wilson is likely right and Barack Obama is likely wrong. That said, it seems unlikely that the President of the United States is going to be loose with benefits beyond stabilization at hospitals and a drivers license to those undocumented aliens. That's the obvious part. The less obvious part comes next.

One of the important things in politics, aside from a thick skin is an incredibly robust selective memory and there are a lot of left-leaning pundits that engaged it when they called the "You lie!" outburst an outrage. In 2005, Democrats booed and heckled President's George W. Bush's State of the Union address and my guess is those same pundits didn't call it an outrage then. I'm not going to commend Joe Wilson for yelling the President was a liar in front of a well-televised speech. I think it was embarrassing and unflattering, but no more outrageous than heckling at the State of the Union four years ago.





P.S. I don't endorse any of the sites that put up the youtube videos I'm linking to, I haven't heard of either, but figured I should say something just in case.

And there were very high-ranking members of the Democratic Party (read: Harry Reid) who called Bush a liar when he went overseas. I happen to agree with Mr. Reid. It wasn't outrageous then, so it shouldn't be outrageous now, even if it does feel, somehow, more obnoxious at the time.

It's worth taking a closer look at what inaccuracies were being verbalized.

Bush was promoting a falsehood about the safety of Iraq, which had deadly consequences daily for its citizens and Obama said something he had to know was technically incorrect, which if enacted, will have consequences that don't end up in civilians getting killed by roadside bombs or becoming victims of collateral damage. In short, I don't believe these lies are equivocal, but there are parallels that must be acknowledged if we're going to be intellectually honest with ourselves and possibly have a worthwhile conversation.

Remember the earlier comment I made about the tangent? Here it comes.

What's maddening to me is that there is so called "principled" objections to the Democratic bills because the system might get scammed by illegal Mexican immigrants fleeing poverty and a civil war based on cartel allegiance. (Before I begin, I'd like to note that stabilization for patients in critical care is a different thing than having health insurance.) Let's be clear: the argument, so far as I understand it, goes like this:

"I work hard for my money and I don't want said hard-earned money being taken from me by the government to deliver lower-cost medical services to people who aren't citizens of this country."

Okay, these people don't want their money being spent on a wasteful bureaucracy. Fair enough. My response is simple.

"I work hard for my money and I don't want said hard-earned money being taken from me by the government to be distributed to war profiteers to spend on extravagant vacations, private jets and lobbyist junkets."

See also: I had the same problem with the War in Iraq and almost everything the Bush administration touched, but I paid my federal taxes when I disagreed. Now it's your turn. Too bad.

Now, here's where my affectation comes in. I believe, in the grand scheme of things, that it is better to have government largess benefit people who aren't its citizens getting medical attention than to have that same largess continue to employ the services of KBR, Haliburton and Blackwater (now Xe) during wartime at cost plus.

Yes, the money is not going to be used for what it is supposed to. That's going to happen no matter who is in charge and what their perspective is. I'd rather that money go to "waste" healing people (who odds are, don't have access to much back home and aren't related to the vilified Reagan "welfare queens" ) than paying for the help of Xe, Haliburton and KBR to fight our wars. If we are going to fight those wars, I'd rather we pay the Army to do it.

The principle at play here appears to be "until the bill is written to absolutely forbid (and mandate heavy penalties if violated) anyone who might be an illegal alien from scamming the system, I'm going to withhold my support, while acknowledging that Americans from coast to coast are being bankrupted right now by the current system." This principle does not impress me.

If I've learned anything from this (what, maybe 28 hours removed from the outburst) it's how important thoughtful commentary from a distance of at least one sleep cycle is. The point is to go beyond the news and try to place current events in a context that is truthful and paint a full picture of the events and the people making them. The point is not to be spending hours finding the best ammunition for a partisan hackjob.

Sadly, that's all we're getting.

This Blog Is About Waterboarding (And My Guilt)

On the heels of the news that Strike Anywhere was signing to Bridge Nine and was moving away from Dead FM as a sound, I've come to listen to Dead FM nearly nonstop and realize that it is, categorically, Strike Anywhere's best record for its combination of enthusiasm, solidarity and joy.

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised then, that while writing this blog about anger, spite and torture I listened to the record five six times, straight through. Consider purchasing a copy.

Also, it's Memorial Day. There's a lot of patriotic sentiment going around today about supporting the troops, so, in a slightly different vein, here's a link to the United State's Veteran's Affairs website about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When soldiers (of all stripes and nations) get back, some of them can't leave their time in combat on the battlefield and it's them I want you to remember, especially.




I take it back.

I've said, loudly and irregularly, that members of ex-President Bush's cabinet ought to face waterboarding as some kind of a penance and poetic justice for their crimes inside and outside of the inland territories of the United States. After watching an occurrence of waterboarding, I take it back.

A local shock jock I dislike got waterboarded recently and there's a youtube clip up if you care to look. I'm not mentioning their name or even gender, because I don't want this person to get more attention or pageviews. Suffice to say I find their entire program to be racist, sexist, homophobic and unimaginative. I viewed this person as exactly the opposite of what I wanted to grow up like. I view this on-air personality, at a minimum, as repugnant and chauvinistic.

This personality lost a bet, is what I remember and the consequence is enduring a form of torture known as waterboarding. It's pretty much simulated drowning, but you know this already. I found embedded video on Facebook and my face lit up. I hit the play button and the scene unfolded in front of me.

There's EMTs standing by and at least two video cameras, along with another DJ (the show must go on!) and a photographer. So, when I see a black rag being put over their nose and eyes and I see the Marine overseeing the entire enterprise preparing the gallon of water, I was ready. I knew what to do. Reptile brain, get ready for the overload of comeuppance and pleasure in seeing a person I despise drown. The initial repetition of "the normal person can only stand 14 seconds" struck me of the same infantile traditional fratboy dominance games that masquerade as generic male bonding, but whatever. Motherfucker's getting waterboarded! It's about time!

The intensity was ratcheted up. Feet were tied so as restrain the subject, and the other announcer kept asking his friend if they were ready. Sure as ever that the coming waterfall was nothing to worry, the subject instructed the Marine to get on with it. Out comes the clear gallon of water. I wanted to feel sorry for the water that it was being used to go into the nose and mouth of a person who spent their day disenfranchising minorities and women, calling it all good in the name of entertainment and comedy.

Down came the water. I got a little bit of joy when I saw the water leave the container, the promise that what would come next would please me even more, when the simulated drowning would really take effect.

It didn't come.

Water stopped being poured after seven seconds, the personality saying it was enough and it was horrific. But aside from the visible, but minuscule vindication of my ethical standpoint, I feel worse, demonstrably, for having watched that. Certainly, one, I am contributing, virally, to the the continued success of the DJ, but more that waterboarding is torture on anyone, even those I loathe and it's not fun for me to watch, regardless of who it is being practiced on.

I thought I would get a sick pleasure in seeing the person in pain, but I felt, for the most part, disgusted. I let my own petty, ingrained hate override my beliefs. What does it say about me that I thought I would get some kicks out of watching an overgrown child getting tortured and I went through with it? I chose to click that youtube link. I chose to hit start on that video. What does it say about me that I got caught up in bad blood that frankly, I should have grown up and moved on from years ago?

I don't want to say something as stark as torture is torture, but watching a person think they're drowning is harrowing enough, even a computer screen or two removed from the incident. Still, take another look at the second paragraph above this one. The phrase "It's not fun for me to watch" sticks out. Looking back on that just makes me think, "Dude, what were you thinking? Of course it's not going to be fun. It's torture."

But more to the point, why did I let myself get into a judgment where I might have to weigh the potential pleasure to see a corrosive personality get waterboarded versus my distaste for the practice? It's obvious. I was blinded by spite and chose to indulge voyerism.

There's an obvious parallel here. Important portions of the United States government were blinded and made choices, too. They had go through labyrinthine means and some pretty bizzare memos to legalize the use of torture and even then, something still felt wrong. I suppose, after seeing it used, myself, on someone willing, I'm no longer willing to run my mouth about forcing 60 or 70 year old men to experience it themselves, despite the fact that they ordered it.

I'm technically well aware of just how much damage what those Cabinet members ordered and signed off on has done to this country, both in terms of what this opens up for our enemies, but also in terms of the United States' international credibility. They ought to pay a high price for their crimes, but I'm not sure torture is the right punishment. In this case, I'm not sure the crime they legalized fits the crime they committed.

I just want for torture not to be used, period. But, failing that, I just don't want it to be used in my name. For all the times that has happened (and especially on Memorial Day), I'm sorry. I can't take back the pain. But, after watching it happen, to someone who thought they could handle it, I can make a promise to speak out even louder against it when I see evidence it is being used, in the hope that when it is used again, it isn't by hands of this country, whether it's our agents performing the procedure or our agents pulling the strings from overseas.

Too many have died already around the world this year. Too many more will next year and the year after that, too. I'm going to thank that DJ for bringing a bit of the war (and the realization of horror that comes with it) home to me for Memorial Day. Tomorrow, that personality will be back on air, spewing their garbage and poisonous rhetoric, but that's for tomorrow.

Today is Memorial Day.

We've Gotta Stay Positive

A friend of mine once said she didn't like Woody Allen's stuff because it felt like he was using the movie as his psychiatrist. I wonder if I'm guilty of the same thing here. As is standard operating procedure when one of my posts don't have a demos tag, it's about intensely personal stuff (read: girls), goes up and down like a roller coaster and then hopefully finds a happy ending that feels natural and not put on.


Yesterday, on the strong urging of a friend of Eleven Names, I went to my college's Counseling Center, to talk about a girl. I have spoken about her before. I spoke about how I feel it's her social group I've inherited or been promoted in and I wonder if she believes me to be enough of an emotional liability to keep tabs on me by well-meaning friends.

We used to date and, well, go to the above link and read it. I'll be here when you get back.

...

...

...

I told the very nice woman that I probably wouldn't be in her physical presence until commencement, so now was probably a safe time to come up with some coping mechanisms and strategies.I left armed the office with a little pamphlet and the feeling that I've got a little bit of time.

Two hours later I see her taking out money from the campus' ATM right in front of me. She sees me, smiles and says the following:

I'm just a figment of your imagination.

She was only stopping by for a half hour at most on her way back from the north side of the state, needed to be back in her hometown in two hours.

I could only sigh.

I get out of talking to the counseling center about her and she shows up (even for a moment) not two hours later? Seriously. Does she plan it? Because one of the big ideas I tried to explain to the very nice woman listening to me was that she just can has a way of knowing what's going on and showing up with an impeccable sense of timing.

I, very carefully, try to explain that it's not like a spider at the center of a web or like a puppeteer looking down on their pieces, because that's too sinister, but, she shows up again, after I put all my anxieties on being paranoid (and even believing it!). I was getting ready to believe it. She's the Metal Gear Solid 2 of my life, because, after playing that game, for six months afterwards, I would peek around corners, expecting a armed patrol of terrorist gangs. Now, I peer down corridors of conversation and expect to hear the thump thump of her mental mercenaries approaching on the minimap of my mind.

It's an extended metaphor, but the surveillance I worry about is real in my mind. Her communicative dexterity is greater than my distaste for social games and well, I'm sick of feeling like I'm an emotional liability. She has the talent and the desire, occasionally, to do good things, which as I've learned from Eric Burns, is the way to really screw things up.

I'm just a figment of your imagination, she says.

She's right. All of my anxiety (well, most of it) about her is manufactured by me. I'm like America in the 80s, the troops and cities I'm afraid of are all Potemkin in construction. There's nothing to them. My imagination, I think, has a military-industrial complex.

It's what my imagination knows how to do, so I guess I can't technically begurdge it, but I have to move forward. The beat will go on, no matter what I do. Forward motion is hard, especially when I can see that the last four years have taken a toll on me, noticed these ways over the last six days, tops.

You look like shit.
You sound like you're going through a break-up.
You look worse than I feel.

This is what the college does to me. I'm not tired. I'm exhausted. I need to get the hell out of Meadville, on foot if I have to. But, I've done that already. Time for something new. Time for something far more awesome and positive. And that is where the title (stolen from the Hold Steady) comes from.

That title might seem now, like a cruel reminder of just how fucked I am, that the phrase no matter how earnestly meant, might feel sarcastic or disingenuous, but, its what I'm keeping inside my head. No matter how many times I think my life sucks, the only way it's going to get better is if I stay positive.

It is hard more often than not, but the road I've taken is not easy or clear. Reminders are tough. They come and they go and depression sticks around, like a black cloud, forever on the periphery of my horizon. My favorite lyricist, Aaron Bedard, tends to find the light at the end of tunnel, in his band, Bane and I try to draw strength from his words. In that vein, I think, the more I hear about Kurt Vonnegut, the more I'd like his books. He, so I hear, finds the humor and the joy in life that seems to elude a lot of other authors.

And sometimes (but only sometimes) the light is real and it is the end of the tunnel. Even less often, I find it, but for now, I think I'm going to finish the post and move toward that light.

Said Vonnegut's uncle, appropriated for A Man Without A Country: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I am alive. I have ingested coffee and that will keep me going until my group's formal, in which case I ought to sail on based off little more than adrenaline and pure joy for a) having gotten this far, b) being a part of a group that is not Greek that has a large formal and c) being a part of a formal that is silly and may involve lolcats. Lots of lolcats, and if those three things, put together, aren't nice, I don't know what is.

For Meadville, From Addiction

The title is from Thoughts of Ionesco's final record, For Detroit, From Addiction, which is a monster of a disc. When I say I doubt you'd like it, I am dead serious. The band, a hardcore punk/free jazz trio, is something of an acquired taste, but if you like it, means you can see twenty or thirty years in the musical future or there is something very wrong with you.

When listening to the record, I get impulses to lick the dirty side of a broken mirror.

When writing something with that title and feeling in my mind, it needs to be something real. It needs to be something incredibly personal. But it also needs to be something wrong. Twisted. To do justice to the title, it needs to lay me bare. It's not enough to have my heart on my sleeve. It needs to open up my chest cavity and show you how my heart beats and how the emotional drugs I take to stave off my fears, anxieties and demons affect that pulsing, throbbing organ and coalesce with my bloodstream.

I want you to see a tourniquet. I want to you to feel the back of my throat, rubbed raw by screaming these mad dogs of glory at a multi-hundred thousand dollar baseball field in six inches of snow in the dead of 12:45 a.m. Monday because I can't won't call up a girl and tell her how I feel. I want you to see the vomit in black and white as I did on the way back to my apartment.

I want you to taste the disdain and love in my mouth when I sit at the group table in the Campus Center listening to people I don't think understand what they're talking about talk about politics. I love these kids, but I think they're incorrect.

God, I'm an asshole when I haven't eaten.

But now that I've eaten, I feel better.

It's 3 a.m. Wednesday and I'm not sure what to write. My emotional state doesn't so much cycle out of control as spasm and I roll with it. 4 a.m. now. Read about comic books on wikipedia. I can't do homework like this and I have a 6 page paper on medical ethics, as well as an oral presentation tomorrow. February is cruel, as always. (It is a month with long, barbed knives.) I can do it (it being vaguely described as homework or survive, but for the purposes of this sentence, it's homework), but the motivation does not exist to push it through. And in all this, I like a girl, but I am intimately aware that I have little to offer her, currently.

Let us review my current mental state: Neurotic, emotionally unstable, insecure. Oh, I feel like a winner. Throw in the fact that I am beginning to distrust, hugely, one of my best friends over the last three years ("What am I to you?" ringing in my head and "I do not consent" written all over my left arm, with bloody underlines) and I'm about ready to call in sick for a week just to get my brain back in order. But, if I know anything it's that I don't really work as a lone knower, so meditating on my problems only goes so far.

Hello, readers. I promise I am not crazy. I am brilliant, so I hear. But, I cannot be trusted. I am in front of you, currently, at my most depressed, fearful and dark. Literally, there are not lights on in my room except for the computer screen right now. Even Zach has long since gone offline, meaning that he's either playing videogames or sleeping. I should get on that second part.

I am looking for physical contact in the wrong places and I am coming dangerously close to pushing away a good friend in my intense desire for a hug from a girl who is single. This has lead me to huge, huge emotional trouble in the past. Speaking of which.

It is now Thursday evening/Friday morning. Putting this on the internet makes me anxious, as does just about everything else in my life. I am scared. This fear is capitalized on by the reminders of my own failures and just how brittle I am. I have been taken advantage of by people I have trusted emotionally to the point where it just seems to be a sad fact of my romantic life. I will stand up for the rights of the less fashionable populations in college but I wouldn't stand up for myself until late 2008 in a romantic relationship. Twenty one years, I've been letting things happen to me.

Last Saturday, I finally did something that didn't feel like I was being used.

Let me start at the climax.

I kissed a boy and meant it. It had nothing, repeat, nothing to do with making girls around either of us excited. I did it in secret. I put my hands on his chest and waist and held him close to me while we kissed. It felt like finally acknowledging and claiming the feelings that had been festering inside me for a good decade.

Thoughts I had nearly decade ago riding along, going east, looking out the window of my car, were welcomed back with open arms. I was scared then. I probably thought about it for that entire weekend. Now, it just is.

It was a relief and a rush of positive reinforcement all at the same time. I wanted to inaugurate these feelings. The group that I'm a part of and spoke about on Valentines Day, makes a lot of homosexual innuendo but is, by and large, very straight. Going beyond that comfort level is a stretch. It's scary, and this is an accepting group. I used to date a girl from that group. She used to mention, often, loudly, about how "if another one of her ex-boyfriends goes gay, she's giving up". I am very cognizant of being "another" ex-boyfriend of a girl that's deviated from being straight, but in those series of kisses, those thoughts were banished from my head.

Hours later, I would walk down an adjacent hallway and begin to be scared about being banished to hell for what I did, even though everyone's clothes stayed on, but in those moments between kissing a boy and walking back into Left 4 Dead or Elysium, I felt as though something, finally, had been lifted from my shoulders and I could begin to relax in my own skin.

These feelings are mine. These feelings are native to me. I do not have to worry about whether these thoughts and emotions are drummed up by a bunch of people for whom I am another mental or sexual conquest, being discarded and picked up again for my emotional utility or for my big head and soft body. My trust is like everyone else's, hard to gain and very easily lost. Strangely, I have a lot of faith in people, but I think that is a product of my inborn cynicism. (My faith in God is more of joke, in which His existence or mine is the grim punchline.)

After acknowledging my own feelings, what's left? I've kissed a boy. How hard can calling a girl be? I am more confident in all this, but I am still frightened. Presuming I can even get her to talk with me late at night in person, what happens when or if she finds this? What if anything, really. I'm left with the four sentences below, and trying to deconstruct and interpret them in something that resembles an answer.

I am going to hell.
I am straight up crazy and also brilliant.
I am scared.
I am all of this and more.




Let me end where I was Thursday night/Friday morning.

I am still in my room. The lights are on, and I am talking to the girl I want to call. It is about Latin American history and the revolutions therein. I am making her laugh (when in doubt, say the CIA did it) and that is enough for tonight. My copies of Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights have arrived today and I might install them before I go to bed tonight.

Saturday:
I still have not installed those games. Perhaps I will tonight between a homemade Indian dinner and videogames. In terms of odd things to end on, after feeling like I was going to vomit in the bathroom stall yesterday, a group of drunk kids came in and just partied down and I...just listened and laughed. What else could be done? We talked and laughed, at once separated by a barrier, but united in the acknowledgment that they were in fact, drunk.

After that, I no longer needed to vomit. It's those moments that keep me going. The social absurdities which remind me, sometimes, I can only laugh and recognize how strangely invigorating the humor is. I could use a little more of it.

I would put a grander title here, but I'm not too confident in my writing on this.

Let's talk about democracy, shall we? There's been some discussion of it here, mostly in relation to the Democratic primaries, and how most of us are fairly apprehensive about the whole process, knowing what we know, and believing what we believe.

The Democratic primary finally wrapped up, and the DNC made the official decision on what people already knew: Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States. 

Ah, but you see, there's a catch. The catch is a figure in Illinois politics called Tony Rezko, who was recently convicted on 16 of 24 counts of wrongdoing, which boil down to handing out dirty money to Illinois politicians. There is supposedly, sealed testimony in the Rezko case that is damaging to Obama that the judge didn't let out.

Obama has yet to accused to wrongdoing, but it doesn't sound good for his campaign that the guy that helped the nominee buy his dream home committed the ultimate sin in Chicago politics, getting caught, and lends credence to his now vanquished opponent's thesis that there's an October Surprise that could be a game changer in the general election.

Cynically, this means that I have a choice this year, between a charismatic young politician who has zero experience running anything large scale and John McCain (whom I apparently must prefix any comment about my beliefs of his policies with "I respect his service but...") whose conservative views frighten me, and his economic plans make no sense. I want another Conservative Christian in the Oval Office like I want a cerebral hemorrhage. 

One could say prospects for the country do not look good, and that's not even mentioning the crippling national debt and loss of goodwill the current President has left us with. And this is what democracy has brought us, I hear liberals across the internet say.

Here is the contrast:

I was recently in South Africa, and yes, the xenophobia was on everyone's lips, it was the topic of conversation. The xenophobia, of course has roots in the current democratic system. To get elected, the current president of the country (Thabo Mbeki) made a lot of promises to low income, rural citizens who didn't live near Cape Town that if they moved into portions of Cape Town that had yet to be built, but were somehow eligible for voting, that if they voted for him, he'd give them jobs and homes.

Well, he hasn't.

The people who moved, then, instead of moving back to their old homes and face a certain amount of disappointment and chagrin, made their own homes in portions of the city that have sporadic running water and power. I have seen these slums, and they stretch for miles as far as the eye can see. If you are lucky in there, your house's roof is made of more than one large piece of metal or wood, and houses less than eight people in a glorified studio apartment.

As you can imagine, resentment builds.

So. These residents begin to see the success of immigrants from other countries around South Africa and become envious, who live far more comfortably than they do. Some are immigrants from Zimbabwe who came to South Africa to avoid persecution at the hands of their fellow citizens. The city government of Cape Town, having to come up with something, begins to build small brick houses with access to water, and an electricity scheme to help those same disadvantaged residents to supply electricity for themselves and the people around them. In some cases, I don't know how many, these small houses are turned around and sold by the residents, who then claim the government does nothing for them.

Before we continue this story, I ought to mention the sizable gap between the rich and the poor. Within a 15 minute walk of the docks, where there is a sign saying it has been six days since a risk of a debilitating injury, there is an Aston Martin dealership, a truly world class shopping center with two movie theaters and a five star hotel.  Too much too quickly?

But. Grievances stack up, and so something finally snapped in Johannesburg. Immigrants homes and businesses were broken into and torn apart. (Some enterprising business owners took the opportunity to deface the property of their business rivals who were not South African natives. You go xenophobia and capitalism!) What makes this so heartbreaking for some South African citizens is because those same countries from which the immigrants are from helped South Africa defeat apartheid, so natives violently ejecting immigrants is particularly cruel.

Xenophobia spread and Thabo Mbeki was conveniently out of the country, while South African residents were left with the clothes on their backs as the city police had to bring in riot police to stop the violence and intimidation, while also trying to bus the immigrants away from the danger. Why mention that? Because Mbeki and Mugabe, the strongman in charge of Zimbabwe are friends.

A decade or so on in democracy in South Africa, the common refrain is "we've come a long way", and by and large, they have. But, what they're starting to learn is that democracy once they get it, is not a pannaccea that fixes problems the minute we move to the form of representation and social organization. It's something that must be actively engaged by the population to continue its good operation. Democracy, then, is not something passive or robust. It is, in fact, quite fragile. It must be worked at.

We have seen what happens when the current electorate is not informed. It leads to abuses, and the world has suffered for it. I'm not going to list the ways for fear I've missed an important one, the list is that long. Democracy, this little thing of ours, (typed with not a little bit of frivolity) despite the large, expensive buildings that exist to serve justice do not serve their purpose if the people filling them and paying for their upkeep don't also believe and work towards democracy.

This isn't to say that "look, we could be South Africa, and by comparison, isn't America or democracy great?", but instead that this kind of representative system is something that is tied to, and will become more and less responsive to the people it is supposed to serve based on how much feedback it gets and how much the people interact with the offices of the state. South Africa, then, is learning about how dangerous representative government can be, and I think that some people ought to be reminded that just because you dislike the two major candidates is not proof that the system doesn't work, but instead that American voters made a choice, even if that choice was, in some people's minds from a small palate of options.

It means something to me that the palate is there.

Theme Week: Responsibility and Pokemones (UPDATES)

Teenagers in Chile calling themselves Pokemones are having oral-sex orgies in public parks.

I'll wait for the "Herpes, I Choose You!" jokes to die down.

...

Whenever you're ready.

Okay?

Good to hear. Since this is responsibility week, it would be fairly simple to say that "the kids ought to know better", and they should. But that's not the entire story. They're experimenting teens who are just starting to have monetary freedom in a world where the Cat-hol-ic (as Tom would put it) Church is an omnipresent force in their lives, a very conservative omnipresent force, I hasten to add.

Let's not forget that this has certain parallels to American History, both socially and economically.

And so, it does not take a psychic to tell you that the Church is going to use this as an opportunity to say "look, I told you so, and the kids are craaaaaaazy these days". If the Church is going to present itself as the upright moral members of society, which I will bet they will, they ought to direct the kids to a STD center where they can get tested and learn about what, precisely they may have and how to deal with it later on in their lives.

Being the moral center of the country means that the Church will sometimes have to lead the sheep, calm them down and tell their charges it's okay. I don't see the (Holy Mother, as my mother might say) Church doing that. I don't think they will*. If they do, it will be against a comfortable precedent. I hope the Church gets uncomfortable.

I hope, far more fervently, that not too many STDs and horrible consequences befall the teenagers. We all were once like that, and I just want them to learn and be given a pass, but I know, to my great Dismay, that it just won't happen.

*This is of course, not to say that the Catholic Church is evil. I see a precedent. I see young, impressionable, and soon to be scared kids. This is not ideal. I hope for many good things for these teenagers, whom, in another life, I suspect, I would be fairly close to. I write this listening to Lagwagon's Automatic, a song about the habits we fall into in a life, off of a disc that was spawned and written from when a good friend of the band committed suicide. It's an interesting juxtaposition.

**There is at least one person on Kotaku who says that Newsweek is full of crap, and has terrible sources, so in keeping with the current era of the internet, I point you to that link to continue your education on the sensual expressions of Chilean teenagers. 

I'd say I'll keep you updated on the matter, but frankly, I don't want it to become a theme.

Secret Cartography: Please Don't Shoot Me.

There are some rules you can obey. They can help you get around. They may keep you safe.
Pay attention to your surroundings. Square your shoulders; don't look like a victim. Don't show off money or expensive toys, like iPods. Look alert, don't appear nervous. Try to fit in. Stay away from small, poorly lit streets.

All the advice I've ever gotten means the same thing, at the end of the day: there is nothing you can do. None of these rules work. Nothing can keep you safe.

I live in arguably the most dangerous city in America. About two years ago, the murder rate spiked dramatically and hasn't abated yet. This is not inner city violence, segregated to "bad neighborhoods" and late nights. Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods: Queen Village is another world from Kensington and neither are like Strawberry Mansion. And when something awful happened in a poor neighborhood, a dangerous neighborhood, it was okay. Not great, of course. But easily ignored. And it was easy to get around. Stay to the nice neighborhoods, with nice people, and you will be safe. Only the foolish, the suicidally naive and the badly intentioned ventured beyond such invisible and subtle boundaries, but now children and police officers have been shot in broad daylight. The unrest in the city is bold and shameless, never showing respect for the leylines that are class and privilege running in the streets.

When I was in second grade, a boy was beaten to death on the steps of my parish church, because some other kids felt like hurting someone badly.

My cousin was murdered when he was 21. He hadn't been a cop for a year.

For those of you with good memories: There was a shooting outside the house, my Fort, eight months ago. Zach and I were sitting on the same couch I'm posting from when we heard it.

There is no rule to follow. There's no direction to take. There never was any place safe.
I live in fear. Everyone does, I think, and I won't deny my own. Any place and time could be the wrong one. I make myself sick sometimes. I've lived here as long as I've been alive.
I am not making some tiny plea to stop the violence. I haven't nearly such an idealistic spirit. I'm just telling you, I feel lost now. I can't comfort myself with behavior rules and made-up boundaries. I can't map my movement by time or street. There's nothing to do, no secret cartography. Nowhere to go.

Hola!

Hello, Cathleen Kennedy here, the newest contributor to this often humorous, frequently political (when James is writing), sometimes existential, and always serious forum we call elevennames.

When Thomas mentioned that he, Zach, and James had a blog, and that they were looking for other people to write every now and again my first thought was “well why not? Its not like I have lots to do this semester . . . . besides my senior project”. (which is sort of a big deal at our school) So now I am using this incredibly reputable blog as a tool for procrastination, by once a week subjecting you people out there in internet land to my opinions, ideas, and random digressions of thought.

What else is there to say? I like history, but nothing more recent than about 200 years ago. I often times work on plays both at school and in community theaters, usually in some kind of sewing or costuming capacity. I know three other languages besides English, and am in general very academically focused. And I enjoy nerdery of all varieties.

Oh, and I have no idea who I am voting for this coming election, because while I care about the future of our country, I know I will probably end up voting for the democratic candidate, no matter who they are. *sigh*

Now I am frantically casting around for a ghost story so I can be cool like the other kids and fit in for theme week . . . . I am actually incredibly interested in that sort of stuff, but am not sure if I should come up with some kind of vague, but real story like Zach, or just retell one of my favorites.

This is a semi true incident that combines something that actually happened with a ghost story I was told in Scotland and a conclusion that was provided by a friend to whom I was retelling the story:

In 1348 the Black Death or Bubonic Plague as it is called now, had reached Scotland. By this time the disease had been moving northward through Europe for a year and a half. In the capital, Edinburgh, people heard reports of the huge death toll in other cities. In Paris there were reports of over 400 people dying every day, not to mention the fact that it was said that entire villages could die over night. There seemed to be no way of stopping the horrible, painful death that came to everyone who caught this plague.

Then the disease somehow managed to breach the city’s walls. The first person infected was only a peasant, but the rest of the population, both rich and poor knew that with in days they too could be part of the epidemic that had swept across Europe. So the next night the city officials paid the brick layers to seal up the street on which the infected person lived. The inhabitance of the unlucky street woke up to find 12 foot tall brick walls had been erected at either end of their road shutting in both in the infected inhabitant and several families of healthy people.

Over the subsequent weeks the people in the surrounding area could hear the screams and the pleas of the people trapped with in the walls, as more and more of them became infected and others simply died of starvation. It is said that the residence of Edinburgh invented ear muffs, so they wouldn’t have to be consistently tortured by the horrible sound of their neighbors dying. Of course, there was no way of dealing with the stench. The bodies of the dead began to pile up because there was no way to dispose of them, and soon even those outside the walls could not ignore the horrible smell of rotting corpses that wafted from the walled up street.

Eventually the people inside the walls grew silent, and after about two months, the city officials decided that if everyone who lived there was dead (and they surely were by this time), then they could clean out the houses and resell them. There was only one man brave enough to enter the corpse infested street, a butcher. He brought his knives and a wheelbarrow and went systematically through the houses chopping the dead into manageable pieces and then disposing of the body parts. It took him three weeks of hard work, but in the end the houses were ready to be resold.

However, everyone who lived in one who has lived in those house between the 14th century and now has reported seeing dismembered body parts lying around their homes at some point or another accompanied by a horrible smell and sometimes ghostly screaming.

And now you know the horrible truth about earmuffs.

For another fun ghost story listen to this

Theme Week: Ghostly Tales!

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
and in strange aeons even death may die." -H.P. Lovecraft

Which is to say that theme weeks aren't dead, they've only been sleeping. This week, the shambling beasts from outside time return as spectral adversaries to haunt our minds and send shivers through our imagination. This week's theme is, as the title has probably told you, ghost stories. So, without further ado:

The Adventure of the Haunted Trainyard
A true ghost story retold (but one of several ways) by Zach Marx, with much credit owed to his companions

Once upon a time, in a land of gray woods and rolling hills, a band of friends set out on an adventure.

They left their grey woods behind them, and found themselves in a strange postindustrial wasteland, populated by exceptionally hopeless suburbanites and home to strange, depressing sports outlets. Over a tangled cluster of old warehouses, auto-body workshops and ratty macadam courtyards, the foreboding single tooth of an industrial keep, big enough to build a mech in, loomed menacing but silent, its many antennae serving no visible purpose. The keep seemed close by, but could be reached by no direct approach, defended on all sides by outlying low buildings of uncertain purpose.

Skirting the outskirts of the postindustrial complex, our heroes happened upon a line of decaying train engines, embodiments of the same ideals that had once animated the complex, living engines of industry as it was, not the spectre of neo-colonial hypercapitalism that stalks the world today.

They adventured into the hearts and souls of those old trains, and brought back an echo of what it was when they had purpose and life. And when the old stories and old battles were over, they sat and studied the industrikeep.



They longed to know what secrets it housed, what diabolical plots or engines of despair it might conceal, but as they sat on the train-roof, they felt the sadness of the years rust soak into their bones, and knew that whatever truths it would contain were too much for them then.



Another day, perhaps, they would enter the tomb and discover the truth for themselves. For now, there was a sunset to watch, and another land to return to before the dark grew too deep, for at night the unquiet spirits of the closed-down factories would rise up from the grubby sidewalks of the unvisited storefronts, and rattle the windows with their fury.

Wishing to avoid this, the friends went home for cake.

Not So Fast, Mr. Ellis.

Fuckup 2008, Mr. Ellis says.

He's entitled to his opinion, certainly. He makes a living off of his opinion and his rambling output, which is far greater and far more lucrative than mine. So his opinion is worth something.

Quite how much, only Mr. Ellis knows. But. I'm here to talk politics, (as per usual) and that brings in a whole other can of worms. Because, you see, for Mr. Gravel (or any other candidate who is failling by the wayside now) to be important, he needed people to pay attention to him early, and build a grassroots network. In other words, get the good word out.

This is where the American populus comes in. I was introduced to Mr. Gravel by Zach only a couple days ago. I hear after Iowa, he has since dropped out. Depending on who you ask, this is a failure or a success of the internet. On the one hand, I would not have heard of Mr. Gravel without Zach, but on the other one, the information comes too late to be of use.

If you want to make a difference in presidential elections, you have to get involved early. YOU have to go out, and tell your friends about this candidate, and get the word out. I am reminded of the savage quote from the West Wing, where someone (inevitably striding...) says "If you skip jury duty, you can't complain about the OJ verdict," which is a nice way of saying, this is a participatory democracy, if you don't participate, your perfect candidate does not have to appear.

Iowa, as we need to be reminded, is a strange place. If you want to meet a candidate and speak to him or her, while they are in Iowa, you can look up where they are going to an event near you, and you can ask them a question or two there. Hell, at least two candidates moved their families to Iowa 4 years ago. The time to know and get the word out about Mr. Gravel was about nineteen months ago, when there was time for his supporters to accumulate and coalesce.

But now, and this month is far, far too late. The Obama nation has swept up most of Iowa's Democrats, and the rest went to Hillary or Edwards. Don't get me wrong. I like Obama, and it is not just because his house is the physically closest to my parents'. It is because he promises change, and there's a praticular little thing about his past that I like. He graduated the first black editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review. This is prestigious, and it is hard to oversell it's importance.

He could have made five million dollars a year in New York City law firm doing nothing but shaking people's hands when he left Harvard (fight fiercely...). Read that sentence again. I'll wait.

Mr. Obama went to the South Side of Chicago to do political organizing instead. The only reason why he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago is because they're a group of people who are contrary, haughty and insufferably intelligent. Had he gone anywhere else in the city, he could have been a tenured faculty member before he stepped foot on campus, if not the chair of the department.

That's not to say he's clean, or he's perfect, or that he appeals to me completely. There is the money he took from large drug companies and HMO's to fund his campaign, his "present" votes on some major issues, and his vote yes on the Patriot Act.

But. He promises change, and right now, we need it. By we, I mean America, but then I think of America's effect on the rest of the world, and then I realize, the world, too, needs a change from Mr. Bush. So I can be more inclusive, and perhaps should be.

Oh, to hell with it. I support Obama. And by that, I don't mean a "I hate everyone else, and I hate him less." I mean, Edwards leaves a slime trail, Hillary Clinton smiles like she's trying to hide her fangs, and I'd rather vote for Obama than those two. I will affirmatively for someone, rather than against another candidate.

I don't care if I look stupid. If I show that I am invested in this, it's because I believe everything American above 3 should be. I care. I'll even trust Obama's gut, and I've got faith that he'll pick good people to surround himself with for the job.

I'll bring this back to Mr. Ellis. He calls it a fuck up, likely, because the American people will pick a candidate that moves toward the center, and because little progress would be made on how the United States extracts blood and oil from the rest of the world regardless of who is elected.

I don't know if Obama can or will want to bring Nike or Pepsi or Nestle to heel. But I believe that he's a candidate that will do what he thinks is best in stressful situations, has the mental capacity to interpret crisis-es with subtlety and accuracy. I believe he'll undo or at least try to repair the damage to America's international image and the Patriot Act.

I'll take it. I'll take it (as Refused put it) hook, line and sinker.

Bhutto, a follow up.

My heart sang when I saw Tom had written about the assasination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.

Suffice to say I see enough substantive discussion amongst people I hang out with over things that aren't remotely as important, the fact that someone was inspired to put fingers to keyboard for this makes me excited.


There is already some discussion on the fact that the police did not request an autopsy of how she died, which could mean a number of things, most of them nebulous and worrisome for Pakistan, women who want political capital in the Middle East and the War on Terror the United States is having.


The debate (how quickly it begins, and how rapidly the New York Times goes into detail about it is astonishing) centers around two actors. One is a security detail (lapsed, we are assured) provided to Bhutto by General Musharraf, and the suicide bomber from an unknown actor (Al-Qeada is presumed).


This does not help General Musharraf, as his government has been on the safe end of a crackdown of rights in the country, and has much to gain from a gagged Bhutto. Most damning of all is that an autopsy was not requested, and might not ever be released. This is important, because it leaves a lot of evidence up in the air. Were the bullets she was shot with from guns that the security detail would use? Of what make were the bullets and do they corrolate to what the Pakistani armed forces use?


According to the New York Times, Bhutto was shot in the head or neck as she was waving to the crowd of supporters from an open sunroof and moments aferwards a suicide bomber attacked a car in her motorcade, killing 20 and injuring 50.


What it boils down to, is was the Pakistani government compliant with suicide bombings, Ie, was this a state job? I doubt it for the following reasons. (It goes without saying I am not an expert.)

1) Pakistan is already under incredible scrutiny from the West. It has little to gain from an assasination of the opposition leader. There is already an assumption that the government there is not on the up and up, so to speak, and so if something goes wrong, the first people you'd look at are the General and his thugs. I suspect the General would prefer to have less media attention on his back and the assassination of Bhutto does not achieve that.


2) Al-Qaeda is an organization which grows and learns from previous terror attacks. A sniper, while not the usual m.o. of the organization, is something which is not out of the realm of possibility, one assumes Al-Qeada not to use conventional forms of assassination, and thus the group might use it. Al-Qaeda could also have colluded with other terror organizations that are less reliant on suicide bombings as a strategy, but that seems less unlikely. Perhaps a collusion with another state actor.


3) Usually, when popular political figures are assassinated, riots occur. I suspect General Musharraf wants a riot like he wants a second rectum.


4) Al-Qeada has already taken credit for the attack, they don't get along with Pakistan, and Bhutto's homecoming parade was crashed twice by Al-Qeada suicide bombers, leaving 150 of her supporters dead.

As interesting and important as all of this is, we can sort out later who did it, though. What remains most important in all of this is that a woman of tremendous resolve and backbone was murdered to make a point. Let us hope the country comes together and condemns this attack universally. The good die young. It is my hope that she's with Gandhi now.

She's missed.

My Too Long and Not Interesting Return.

I return from my month of accidentally self-imposed exile. Let us never speak of this again.

I am mere moments away from attempting to hook up Verizon high-speed DSL onto the family computer, a task similar to stealing fire away from the Gods, or trying to walk on clouds, or something else that is very hard to do and technically impossible. I am honestly considering assembling a mighty crew of heroes, so that I at least have someone to feed to the cyclops, but I think that such a thing borders technically very close to a euphamism for gay seksing, which is something that is very far away indeed from hooking up internets, so I think I'll just give it a by.

In reflection, I don't even know why I want faster internets. All the online games I play anymore are either annoying flash games or nothing - even City of Villains lost it's allure to me. Perhaps because my connection to it was so slow. The important thing, I suppose, is that it presents me with a sort of precipice, that I am standing on a metaphorical edge of participating more fully with a world that I kind of hate. I realize that by being at least ostensibly Catholic (and more accurately, a kind of sarcastic nihilist) I should focus on removing myself from the world, and focusing more on the values that Are Very Important. So why is that so hard to do? It can't be that hard to live a celibate, drug-free life, wherein I am kind to others and lack the ambition to pollute myself with the ways of the world. I could give up eating meat today, get a haircut, join the Red Cross, and become a good person.

But therein lies the trouble. How good a person is that? Wouldn't it just be denying my personal impulses? The sermon at mass (TWO WEEKS AGO LOL) was detailing the importance of the sacrament of confession in the Catholic faith - how normal prayer and being a good person is enough to remove minor-league sin, but mortal sin can only be removed via confession. So honestly, Catholic Church, what is a mortal sin? Just about everything. Even thinking about committing a sin is apparently just as damning as actually committing one. Becoming Catholic can often seem like you're signing up for some kind of crooked deal, wherein there are a lot more restrictions than what you thought you'd be getting. And conveniently, the only way to remove these things is by going back to the very organization that is telling you that you're doing wrong.

I'd have a lot more blind faith if the Church hadn't been such an unholy terror in the past.

The point is, one must consider their interaction with the world, and how they're going to reconcile the crossovers between their public and private lives. I'm all for self-expression, but I acknowledge, very often, that there are some things which need to be withheld. Locke even stated something akin to this, that the rule of law must be paramount in a given society, so too must there be a kind of decorum for public interaction. I think that my two comrades at Elevennames can back me up when I say that the recent trend of the word "rape" being bandied about by videogame enthusiasts is, to say the least, distressing.

So here I am, left at the desk, staring at the DSL hookup box. Installing it (it's already paid for) will send me careening into a world that I'm not sure I want. Perhaps this is overmoralizing - to take the inevitable advancement of technology and assign to it moral undertones does seem a bit fallacious in the logic to me, a self-aggrandizing version of Gun Control. Guns don't kill people, after all, and computers don't create kiddie porn. In the end, one must participate in the world, and make ever escalating decisions that are inherent when the world is trusting you not to completely fuck something up because you're a perverted dumbass.

And really, shouldn't that be the Elevennames mission statement?

Participation in the world is obligatory anymore - to be seen as holding back is so baffling that it's almost uncategorized. Who doesn't have a cell phone in this day and age? In a few years, who won't have an iPhone, or it's cheaper equivalent? Personal accessories are a necessity to anyone who wants to communicate anymore. I'd worry more about corporatizing of personal communication if I wasn't certain that humanity is, if nothing else, too cheap to not pirate the things that it wants. It isn't a moral decision so much as it is a continuance of a series of moral trials, to remain a good person despite the temptation to be a bad one. I once heard from a very old Jesuit that the only real sin in this world is selfishness, and in the face of fast-as-DSL internets, the temptation to become a being concerned solely with his own entertainment is tempting indeed.