Sewing up the Christan empire

I don't think I mentioned, but I have more than one resolution going at the moment. Awhile ago I decided that since my office is casual and since I'd managed to find a pair of jeans that won't give me a yeast infection and since I had quite a large collection of socks and had learnt how to darn them in case of need, I would try to go for a full year without buying clothes. Instead, making anything I needed, in a sort of crash course in sewing. Three motives:

1. I'm cheap, and hordeing money like a troll these days

2. I hate clothes shopping. About nine years ago I lost a tonne of weight and suddenly everything fit, which turned shopping from an exercise in humiliation into an exercise in looking in mirrors and geeking on how cute I was. So for a few years shopping was a pleasure, an amusement, just about my favourite thing to do in an afternoon . . . but I'd say over the last three or four years - since I had that job in advertising and got convinced of the inescapable patsyness of Western consumers - almost all the charm has leaked away. I resent shopping now. I resent the processes by which the clothes were made, transported, and then marketed to me. I resent being the victim of the market-driven vagaries of fashion (witness the fucking calvary* I had to go through to get a fucking pair of jeans with no fucking spandex in them). Clothes shopping sucks.

3. There's no other way I'm going to learn to sew unless I go this sort of sink-or-swim route. I've looked for dressmaking classes here and while it's not been completely goose-egg they're all too far away for me to honestly believe I'll take the trouble to go out for lessons once a week. I can hardly drag my sorry ass up to the prison every Wednesday for our tai chi sessions and that's a three-minute walk.

Last weekend was FINALLY the diapers for some peeps in Canada who are fit to erupt their babies (in the mail, Lamie). This weekend I'll be starting on underwear. Underwear for the F-word first - he has a hankering for some silk boxers and I figure he deserves no less. And then another pair of pants and a shoulder bag for a friend who's visiting at the end of the month, whose Tuesday birthday I have forgotten until this very moment. Shit. Why are so many people born in the fucking springtime? A different pants pattern than the ones I've used so far. The F-word needs some walking-around pants and the patterns I've hitherto used are definitely pyjama pants.

*You know what's neat about Calvary, Golgotha, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that Constantine built on top of it? It's a reclaimed temple to Aphrodite, supposedly ferreted out as both Jesus's death and burial place by Constantine's mum, Helena, despite not being anywhere close to where Jesus could have died and been buried according to the Bible. Constantine, remember, is the Roman emperor under whose rule Christianity really kicked off its transformation from a revolutionary lifestyle religion to a political weapon in the struggle to maintain an oppressive and lucrative status quo, and his mum Helena, remember, was his fucking mum; you're not going to get a more useful saint than that when you're trying to establish a new state religion. It was only 10 emperors and 50 years later that Theodosius went wholesale on the suppression of the temples and their replacement with churches. We saw a rather transparently hilarious example of Theodosius's work on our vacation in Syracuse this Christmas - the city's cathedral, seemingly hastily vomited up all over the temple of Minerva:


I sometimes hear of the Christianization of the temples and sacred sites described as some sort of evidence against Christianity (Jeebus never existed! He's a rehabilitated Mithras! etc.) - a very silly, non-apropos argument against a faith-based religion wherein it really doesn't matter if there's no proof of the man's existence and no proof of where he was born, alive, and expiring; the perfectly legitimate Christian retort to arguments like that is it really doesn't matter; I have faith. I think this is what makes the recent noisy dialogues between the faithful and vocal atheists so fucking annoying: to one group faith is great and to another faith isn't anything, so they're arguing with completely seperate rationalities, from different emotional bases, with the end result that each looks like a blithering, incomprehensible idiot to the other.

But what I do feel the Christianization of the temples indicates is that the same standard of people who were willing to wield disproportionate influence over pagan behaviour and profit from it in a very visible and material sense were (and are) also willing to control and profit from Christians - in a way that has very little to do with Christian morality, as the original writings set it out. Christians should be more careful. There are disgusting atrocities, grotesque power structures leaching off their love of God - gargoyles that they would probably find themselves too full of Christian love to support if they had a good grasp of the situation.

In which I give vent to my subscription to the "Dumb Belgian" stereotype

1. So remember when I stumbled into a hipster apartment full of hipsters who reminded me of hipsters back home?

2. And remember how I feel quite strongly about the humanity of great apes?

Well,

1. In retrospect, it was not a nice thing to say about the hipsters back home, and

2. Living in Belgium is helping me address the opposite side of the coin: that if I say great apes are a kind of human, I am being inaccurate; instead I must say humans are a kind of great ape.

We'll still be pushing on with the organic food collective, because the F-word feels strongly about eating organic, and I feel strongly about food being more delicious when it's been grown close to the point of consumption. But after the last meeting, I've decided I'm going to have to take a zoological approach to the collective if I'm not going to lose my shit. I've never seen so much ham-fisted, half-witted idiocy cluttering a room as that collection of 25 Belgians talking at once, but I manage to see them as overdecorated chimpanzees it'll be funny instead of infuriating.

I've never attended a meeting involving so many repetitions of key points that had already been adequately and repetitively explained in detail (and remember my French is far from perfect) and never seen so many faces remaining vacant and slack-jawed in incomprehension for so long, or at least not since we studied Heidegger in undergrad at the end of fourth year when everybody's brain had already packed up and moved on to how they were going to pay off their student loans armed with nothing but a humanities degree and a drug habit.

It's hard to pick out a gem for you from the collection of sparkling intellectual turds mined during the meeting, but here's the one that still seems to be striking me the most. There are two kinds of organic buying collective operating in Belgium. One kind: you pay upfront at the beginning of the year and get a mystery box delivered to you every fortnight containing whatever's in season from your farmers, or whatever looked good at the organic wholesaler's that week. Let's call it a contract arrangement. The other kind: you get a list every fortnight of what's available, choose what you want, submit it, and pay for what you've chosen when you pick it up a few days later. A pay-as-you-go arrangement. Are you with me so far? Are you managing to follow the fucking complexities of two of the fucking simplest concepts in the motherfucking economic firmament?

The most recent meeting of our collective was the third. From the first, it's been clear that with the supplier we've chosen we'll be using the pay-as-you-go concept. Halfway through the meeting, when the chairwoman (re)explained the fortnightly rotating task of repacking bulk deliveries from the farmer into bins containing each family's order, it finally dawned on one of the attendees - who had attended the two previous meetings, which had included exhaustive descriptions of how the pay-as-you-go collective worked, including a two-hour presentation from one of the men who had set up the first such pay-as-you-go collective in the city - that we were going to use the pay-as-you-go method.

She wasn't happy about it. She had managed to spend, by my calculations, eight hours of discussions of the pay-as-you-go collective, including the 90 minutes immediately preceding her realization, convinced that she was participating in the birth of a contract collective. And once she realized her error, we had to hear about it. The entire meeting had to stop for a few minutes while this woman expounded on why she wanted to be in a contract collective, and not a pay-as-you-go collective, but oh well, she guessed the would participate in our pay-as-you-go collective anyways, having already committed the time. It was awesome.

The meeting was full of incidents like that, incidents of egregious stupidity that could only be ascribed to mental deficiencies or a very real effort by many of the participants to actively tune out what was being said and what had been said, in detail and at length, over many hours. It was really remarkable. After two hours they were still going strong but the F-word and I had to leave because he was getting pissed off - he works in a Belgian school, and he said it was the same shit-headedness he saw at his staff meetings every month - and I was going a little bit red in the face because it was so fucking hilarious. When we got out of the building and a safe distance down the street I let loose with a serious case of the giggles, that lasted 10, 15 minutes.

Anyways. You know how it's all funny and retarded when Americans get upset about anything that looks like socialism, and are all, like, "it's horrible, we're turning into Sweden," when it should be obvious to the meanest of intelligences that they should be so fucking lucky as to turn into Sweden, where the tax rate is quite reasonable by developed-world standards, the political system accountable, and the social services first-class? It is funny and retarded. I even suspect that once you add up federal and state and local and sales taxes, the Swedish taxation burden doesn't really massively outstrip the Yankee taxation burden, but still the Swedes manage to have a functioning and supportive state instead of an inefficient, free-for-all, insecure fandango that couldn't function without the presence of an unregulated labouring underclass.

But I think I understand why so many of them are able to retain such a funny and retarded belief now. I suspect that at some point in the post-WWII period, some poor Yankee assholes were forced to spend a big block of time in Belgium trying to have productive meetings with Belgians, and made a not-unreasonable connection between the utter intellectual helplessness and incompetence of their interlocutors and the Belgian welfare state. They went home and they spread the frightening word: the Belgian welfare state enables uninterruptedly baffled people to live uninstitutionalized lives. Which since then, through a game of right-wing media Chinese whispers, has turned into socialism is like zombies. Fair enough. Bigger misunderstandings have been innocent.

Chavs: the scurvy of the limeys

You know what I love? Celebrity gossip. Years ago I wrote about three entries in a blog that would examine celebrity gossip. Almost right away, once I started spending half an hour a day reading celebrity gossip, it made me want to sick. Not because of the celebrities, but because of the obsessively bourgeois preoccupations and yardsticks of the celebrity gossipers. Icky - icky in a way beyond, say, Jade Goody expiring of cancer in front of the camera, which honestly I didn’t think was all that icky; it’s not how I’d choose to expire of cancer, but I was never deprived of anything good as a child and our needs were certainly different . . . but icky in the sense of how celebrity gossipers so uniformly seemed to see the people they were gossiping about as subhuman in a very snobby, iper-pudique way.

That’s not why I dropped the blog (there was just no time for it); that prudery was so complicated and so fascinating that however much it made me want to sick, I still could have spent months looking it over and trying to pull it apart to understand it, because it was so mixed up with a sort of guiltless class-consciousness, capitalist envy, and unconscious but plainly visible feelings of inferiority from the gossipers, all at the same time.

Especially the English gossip. Its tension is different from American gossip’s, more overtly class-based. I have no idea who the people the poms are gossiping about are, because usually they’ve done much less in a professionally artistic sense than American gossip objects have – lots of Page 3 girls and footballer’s wives and reality television stars, whereas in America you usually have to be a singer or actor or something for people to care about you. Fantasy is still important in America - the fantasy that the aging Ciccone bint is Madonna, that sad old sack Terry Bollea is the Hulk, that fat dead narc Elvis, like Jeebus, fucking lives. There's something grimmer, more cynical in England - I'd say more realistic, but sometimes fantasy is more honest than decontextualized reality. Reality television has taken off in a different way there than in America, in a way that some commentators describe as a celebration of mediocrity (a bit rich coming from Paul McCartney, considering his seminal contributions to pop music over the past 30 years, but I'm shooting at clay pigeons with no Wings here so I'll stop.) I’m not trying to be cruel when I say that if their gossip is anything to go by, that's because the English have an obsession with useless people.

I believe this is because of their monarchy and aristocracy – the remnants of a bunch of gluttonous, arriviste armed thugs who burst in from Scandinavia, and then France, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and then Germany, and monumentally enriched themselves at everyone else’s expense over more than a millenium now. And over the last few hundred years, serving absolutely no function for good or for ill except for being the sort of figureheads who help reinforce the status quo – which is a purpose I find profoundly useless when the status quo has been such shit. There's no real fantasy associated with monarchy or aristocracy, just a decontextualized reality - you don't think, I wish I was a princess because then I'd be a great singer or dancer or football player or actress or politician and I'd be so great everybody would love me - no. People wish they were princesses so that they would be princesses. For the same reasons English people wish they were reality stars - to be rich and famous and influential beyond their talents or intelligence. The difference being that the monarchy and aristocracy managed to enrich themselves and impoverish the other classes so entirely that they became the arbiters of taste instead of its challengers.

And the present breed of gluttonous English arrivistes, while managing to accrue multi-million pound fortunes, haven’t taken over to the degree that they can be the arbiters of taste; they’re very much a fucking taste challenge. They're 'chavs'. Chavs. What a word. You’re not allowed to say proles anymore because we're supposed to be living in some sort of post-Marxist world, and anyways they’ve got too much disposable income, even in that impoverished iniquitous shithole of a pseudo-European nation, to be proles in the way the bourgeois were educated to regard proles. So the bourgeois rename them chavs and don’t have to ask themselves hard questions about their place in the class conflict. They're just celebrity gossiping. About rich chavs. Not proles. No biggie. And all the while this profound fear and disgust and jealousy at the thought of yet more idle, useless barbarians taking over . . .

Death, flu, and zombies

Last week Yankee HR sent us two or three messages about how we should wash our hands and not come to work if we were feeling ill. Fine with me! I didn't make an effort when I woke up yesterday to parse a headache and an iffy throat (stress? dehydration? allergies? cholera?) and instead wrote my manager to explain I'd be working from home, for fear of infecting my office with my zombie pig germs. And then she mentioned that she'd be the one with the zombie germs because she'd just been in an aeroplane from Asia and God knows that's where every illness comes from. Even the Mexican ones that are actually from feedlots in the States. And oh, how we laughed.

Anyways, I got an awful lot of work done. I get tonnes done when there's no office around me reminding me I'm an office worker. Not just work things either, but washing our embarassingly filthy kitchen floor, and making a fucking lovely wild rice casserole, and listening to a bunch of ABC podcasts. One very interesting one about the big influenza, the 1918-1919 one that killed all those millions of people around the world so quickly. I do reccommend it, it's quite good - Rear Vision is a nice series generally. But for me the most striking part of it was its discussion of the WWI front as the flu vector - that the virus may have started elsewhere, but the front was what gave it a chance to evolve into a killer - spreading in a very, very, very concentrated stew of all those fit, distressed young men in the trenches. A mutation that thrived in such hosts outsurvived the others - and then spread across the world like wildfire, even through the strongest members of the population.

Even more of a mindfuck was the mention of the idea that mustard gas may have contributed to the spread, as low concentrations of mustard gas actually seem to encourage the growth of simple organisms (like viruses, possibly) - with the implication being that the life cycle can be accelerated or the virus's reproduction sped up, increasing the opportunities for the genesis of a successful, super-virulent mutant strain . . . But a nice mindcigarette was the poor progress of the flu in Japan by Asian standards, where the doctors told everybody who got ill to fuck off to bed and drink lots of green tea, replacing the liquids and avoiding the dehydration that's the big killer when things get complicated. Dehydration, and drowning in your own fluids. Ugh. Death is gross. And the depressing thing is that drowning in your own liquids or swollen lungs or something is the way so many of us go. I expect I'll cling to life with undignified alacrity myself when my time comes, but reflecting that drowning in your own liquids is the way so many of us go makes me convinced the right to choose your time of death should be enshrined in law.

Speaking of death, and zombies, this weekend the F-word made me watch a Japanese rock-and-roll/zombie flick called Wild Zero which was easily the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. I don't know what the hell it is with boys and zombies and young Japanese men screaming 'Lock an Lolllllllllll!' It wasn't bad, but fuck me, am I missing the reefer.

Here's the trailer:

Orangutans are smarter than me

I hate to admit it but I have no idea how to short out hot wires. If you stuck me in a cage with an electrified boundary, I'd probably figure out how to get out eventually. But we're talking really fucking eventually here. For me the most remarkable part of that article is the last sentence. "She has shorted hot wires before, but just to get food." And then she used that food-getting skill to short them during some sort of emotional crisis that drove her out of her enclosure, and then she immediately had a crisis of confidence, and wanted to go back in. Holy shit. Resourceful and neurotic. How eerily human.

Not the first orangutan experimental electrician when it comes to that:


I hope they're enjoying themselves. It's awful to look at great apes in zoos because we're a great ape. Eww. Orangutans are in big trouble in the wild, though. Two culprits: forest clearing in southeast Asia for 1) palm tree cultivation and 2) pulp and paper industry. What to do as a private citizen? Be aware that any time you eat something with 'vegetable oil' on the ingredient list, it's almost definitely palm oil, and the palm oil industry is a merrily deforesting one. Go for olive oil. It'll force you to cook more for yourself, and that's better for your health. And the parts of Europe where they grow olives are already so environmentally degraded it won't make a damn bit of difference. As far as the pulp and paper industry goes, the WWF has a Paper Toolbox they're working on, to help with buying choices; it's more geared to corporate buyers but it's something.

I suspect it's also important to monetize or commoditize (or whatever the appropriate ugly word is) conservation efforts. I think most sensible people would like to find a way to ensure that people living in environmentally sensitive areas don't go the European route and absolutely ruin local biodiversity by hacking every last fucking tree down except for estates where the royal fucking inbred incestuous families can play caveman and chase foxes like fucking five-year-old morons. But then not that many people actually spring for the sort of holiday that gets money in local people's pockets for showing off the nature. Well, why would they. I'd rather watch David Attenborough, myself. Fewer mosquitoes. And generally people like a bit of luxury on their holidays. What a fucking world it is, anyways.

Speaking of the Attenborough, he's come out more than once explaining human overpopulation is the main driver of long term environmental degradation - that we're just too much of a burden on the planet. And I don't think he's wrong. What annoys me sometimes, though, is a sort of general unconsciousness of the fact that the people having tonnes of children in the developing world have a good reason for having tonnes of children: infant mortality rates are so high, or have recently been so high, that (in the words of E.P. Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class I'm really enjoying) they 'made a mockery of family planning.' You can't ask a woman to only have one or two children if there's a healthy chance the children won't survive for a couple of years. You can't just educate people about how not to have children when the general health conditions and social security structures are so visibly bad they've got a real understanding of the fact they stand a good chance of growing old alone and unsupported if they limit their families. It's inhuman, and what's more, it's impractical. So damn sticky. There needs to be an improvement of six or seven things at once to do anything about overpopulation.