Godheval

I’m writing this for the oh, I don’t know, 3.5 people who actually follow this blog (the point-five is a shout-out to all my spam bots out there!)

Godheval, obviously, is an alias.  But it’s not just a name, or a hat that I wear, it’s a state of mind.  One that is fueled by an intense amount of hyper-analysis, cynicism, and damn near misanthropy.  I am idealist, and as such I have all sorts of lofty ideas and dreams for the world and its possibilities.  Most of these are, and will remain mere dreams.  I spend a lot of time talking about racism – particularly whiteness and white supremacy – because those are things that I regard as major obstacles to not just the social and political well-being of “me and mine”, or even all people of color, but all people in the United States, and elsewhere in the world as well.  Yes, it’s that big of a deal.

It – the subjects, that is, not my talking about them – such a source of divisiveness, that it is enough to put at odds people who see eye to eye on just about every other political point.  The big “R”, the big elephant in the room, that only some people have the privilege to ignore.  But in a way, that is a privilege that I envy.  It would free up so much of my brain space if I didn’t have to think or talk about this shit, ever.  Trouble is…that would require it to go away, and since that’s not going to happen anytime soon, I need to free up my brain space on my own.

I talk about politics because, and in particular U.S. politics, for their ability to – quite literally – shape the world.  But the more I talk about it, the more I think about it, the more I recognize it for what it is: a game of social engineering, thought engineering, manipulation.  I don’t mean this in the woo-woo conspiracy sense, because it’s not as convoluted as all of that.  It’s really right there, on the surface, plain as day for anyone to observe if they choose to recognize it. Democrats, Republicans, whoever – they’re all cut from the same cloth.  That is, the cloth of the old, detached, financial and political elites that have run this country, if not the world, forever.  I’m not talking about any New or Old World Orders, but rather something more abstract, a vein of thinking and behaving that has driven perhaps every person who has ever desired power.  It’s what Machiavelli was talking about in The Prince – just the motions that one has to go through if they are to dominate others.

But these ideas – no, memes – are much older than Machiavelli.  Those of us who are actively interested and even involved in politics are critical of those who are apathetic, who don’t vote, because they “neglect their own power” or whatever such nonsense.  But the truth is, that whether they do it knowingly or not, the apathetic, the non-voters, have withdrawn themselves from the endless game – a game where the rest of us are mere pawns.  I envy their apathy.  And in burying my head in the sand of late, I have attempted to emulate it.  Problem for me is that I care – about people, about society, about more things than I have room in my head or my heart to contain all at once.  So the only way to fake apathy is to completely withdraw, to ignore everything that is happening around me.

While Godheval is an alias, and a state of mind as I say, it is also an integral part of who I am.  But it is not ALL that I am.  And the trouble is that Godheval is not too keen on sharing brain space.  He dominates.  When he takes the stage, it as the expense of my regular, more humble, and simpler self.  The self that likes to spend time with his family, or write less cynical things, or watch funny TV shows, or to, quite simply, just “be”.  Godheval is noise and rage and tension.  And for the past few months I have needed some peace and quiet – not around me, but inside of me.  Because Godheval is a part of who I am, it’s not like all that stuff goes away.  Of course I still care, and of course I still have bouts of righteous anger, but by not engaging “Godheval” fully, I am able to mitigate all that noise and rage and tension.

Because it’s just plain exhausting.

So I hope you can understand, you 3.5 people (I know there are more, I’m just being a self-deprecating jerk) who diligently read my words and actually (really?) give a damn about what I say here, and who allow me to think that maybe it’s not all for nothing.  I value you all more than you know, so I felt a need to explain to you this long-term hiatus of mine.  Truth be told, I don’t even know when it will end – if it will end.  It might be a situation where I occasionally tap into “him”, say my peace in a quick blast of noise and rage, then go back to my normal life, but only once ever three months.

I mean, the ideal would be to find some sort of happy medium – and I emphasize the word “happy” because ruminating on all this race and political shit also comes at the expense of happiness.  If I could find some balance, some way to effectively compartmentalize Godheval and my other “normal” self, then maybe the productivity of each would not have to be mutually exclusive.  I’m still trying to figure it out.  If this blog falls into even greater obscurity as a result, then that is the price I will have to pay for my personal peace of mind.

So that’s my story.  Thanks for reading it, and everything else, too.

Peace out for now.

I haven’t been blogging on a regular basis lately because just using the internet opens the floodgates to all sorts of infuriating things going on in the world.  So I’ve been playing video games, writing fiction, and watching various TV shows – to provide myself a temporary (always only temporary) respite from the burden of being “aware”.  Aware of what?  Well, the list below is of 20 things going on in the world that are pissing me off, making me sad, frustrated, or feeling hopeless.  A mere 20 reasons for escapism out of hundreds.  In no ranking order:

1. BP CEO saying that the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill is relatively tiny compared to the size of the ocean. By that logic, someone could argue that the over a million people killed in a war built on a false pretext is tiny compared to the 6 billion people in the world.  Oh, wait…
2. SB 1070 – more popularly known as the “Arizona Immigration bill”
3. Arizona banning ethnic studies
4. Texas conservatives working to revise history along Biblical/American exceptionalist/racist lines in textbooks
5. Corporations authorized to buy U.S. elections after the Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission case
6. The surge of people “tweeting” and “microblogging” about nonsense while remaining dormant on things that matter
7. People wasting their time talking about Jay-Z is a devil-worshiping Freemason.  Even if he is, who cares? There are bigger things to worry about.
8. Republicans and Democrats both screwing the public through bankrupt policy, while continuing to trick people into thinking there’s any substantive difference between them.
9. The fact that legally, BP may only be obligated to pay no more than $75 million in damages, which doesn’t even begin to cover it, and that they’re fighting even that.  You want to know what’s “tiny”?  $75 million compared to the hundreds of billions^PDF that BP makes every year
10. Open racism coming back in style
11. The mainstream media continuing to report on sensationalist bullshit, rather than covering the stuff that really matters – the corporate version of #6
12. Omar al-Bashir “winning” the election in Sudan, in spite of being convicted of war crimes and genocide by the U.N.
13. People chasing conspiracy theories, while doing nothing about evil acts being committed every day out in the open
14. How perfectly the “divide and conquer” social strategy is continuing to work
15. All this talk of Iran having nuclear weapons, while no one says anything to Israel
16. The betrayed promise of “change” from President Obama
17. How the people around me don’t know and don’t seem to care about what’s going on in the world
18. Facebook’s new privacy policy violations
19. Obama authorizing the targeted killing of a U.S. Citizen, setting a dangerous precedent
20. How people are pawns of their respective political parties, rather than thinking critically as individuals

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play some Torchlight, as an alternative to shooting myself in the head…

According to Al-Jazeera:

The Iranian president has warned that a new round of UN sanctions against his country over its disputed nuclear programme could permanently damage Tehran’s ties with the United States.

So much for all of Obama’s talk about reaching out to Iran, even going so far as to correctly acknowledge it as the Islamic Republic.  Remember his message, back in March, tactically delivered at Norwuz, the Persian New Year?  As if to symbolize a new dawn in Iranian-U.S. relations?

Obama’s message said the United States seeks engagement with Iran “that is honest and grounded in mutual respect,” but cautioned that the country cannot “take its rightful place in the community of nations . . . through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.

More hopeful rhetoric backed by zero substance or commitment.  Maybe Ahmadinejad doesn’t represent all Iranians, but most Iranians do want nuclear energy as a clean and efficient option.  So in the U.S. persistently denying Iran a right to that technology and threatening it with sanctions that further cripple the people economically, exactly how does that represent “mutual respect”?

For his part, Ahmadinejad could be more open to U.N. inspection of the Iranian nuclear program, but one can hardly fault his skepticism towards a body that has openly disregarded, ignored, and walked out on him in relaying the interests of his nation and his people.  Especially considering that all of the rhetoric coming out of the U.S. and the U.N. revolves around stopping Iran’s nuclear program, not merely making sure that it is exclusively for energy.

There is also the small matter of the double standard of the United States’ hard-line against nuclear proliferation, while completely ignoring Israel not being a signatory to the treaty.  Or the hypocrisy of the U.S. criticizing any country for nuclear ambitions when to date we are the only country to ever use nuclear weapons against anyone.  Not only that, but there’s also the recent affirmation that military action against Iran is “not off the table”.

All this, under the pretext of “mutual respect”?  Yeah, okay.

I posted this video without any lead-in, because I want the viewer to process it on their own, before I weigh in with my thoughts. However, I imagine that the mere title of this post prefaces the video and will make you see it in a different way. Just as the mere fact that it is Bristol Palin in the video – because of who her mother is – prefaced how I watched the video. Or how automatically any analysis of teen pregnancy in my brain necessarily intersects with my understanding of privilege.

Perspective is a funny thing.

Upon first watching the video, I felt all sorts of ill feelings. On the one hand, we have a woman talking about the importance of making good choices with regards to sex – to think before you act, more or less. There is no inherent fault in that argument, because thinking is always good.

On the other hand, the video is using class war to advocate celibacy. And class war automatically intersects with the discussion about race and privilege.  For example, when Bristol Palin’s pregnancy first became national news, there were many commentators who mentioned how there was a general demand for sensitivity towards Bristol’s pregnancy, but that the same demands would not have been made if she had been one of Obama’s daughters or any other teen mother of color.

When the mother is white, teen pregnancy becomes merely a regrettable mistake, one that must be handled with great sensitivity and care. But when the mother is a young woman of color, it becomes some sort of moral failure on her part, not only a bad decision but a symptom of the epidemic of poor decision-making by people of color in general.

Mind you, I am not saying that the video above is making any statement at all about race – at least not explicitly. But it does scream privilege loudly, if only the privilege of being wealthy over being poor. In that way it is waging class war, wherein being wealthy affords one a buffer  against the difficulties of raising a child in poverty, and suggesting that therefore only poor women need to think carefully before they risk pregnancy.