Letter to a special friend

Hi,

I'm on the way to meet my old friend and former bassist for the Zambo Flirts, Dave Stammer, in Austin to see and hear Jeff Beck and ZZ Top.  The protagonist of my little novel, who is of course really me, refers to  JB as "the god-like Jeff Beck." No one I know of makes the guitar sing like he does and there's no other living artist I would go to this kind of trouble to hear. I pretty much hate concert crowds but sometimes it works out and this is worth taking a chance on. I bought VIP tickets for myself and Dave and he's paying for our hotel rooms, all done somewhat impulsively during my recent visit to Dallas. I'm certain Jeff will join the guys with long beards on stage at some point and it should be memorable. Outside of Jeff, Billy Gibbons is as good as or better than anyone else on electric guitar.

So, I managed to miss my boarding call and am delayed here for 3 hours. I'll arrive in Austin at 630pm CST if I don't manage to miss the next flight. Annoying as it is to do something that stupid, I'm actually glad to have time to sit here in obscurity where no one can bother me. I saw your Facebook post about Greek and athletics and I wanted to respond only not in a Facebook thread (for reasons you understand). You do a great job of raising awareness on critical problems of oppression and exploitation. I'm passionately against the same things you are and I greatly admire your passion and courage in speaking up for the dispossessed and oppressed. Yet I grew up on college sports and have seriously considered whether it's healthy for me to maintain that emotional involvement given the negative things I'm sure the film addresses. It looks like a very important work by a proven investigative filmmaker and I plan to watch it sometime soon if it's available to me. We all should watch his other films, too.

The problems of athletics are embedded in cultural issues and practices that are deep and complicated. Athletics have been a part of worldwide cultures since prehistoric times and I believe they are an expression of the aggressive and competitive dimension of humanity. If we are in fact genetically wired to be aggressive and competitive for survival reasons, the question becomes how can we channel this into something constructive? Athletics can be such a channel and there are many cases where successful athletes have made positive contributions. Here's just one shining example.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/footballrebels/2013/03/201336105035488821.html

For people like me who enjoy sports, the skill and competition, the artistry of athletics is a powerful draw. Competition is intrinsic to personal growth as for example in sibling rivalry where the need to establish one's value in the family motivates children to develop their gifts. Ideally, one outgrows the narcissism we all start out with and realizes (among other things) everyone has unique value and each of us is really competing against our own individual potential. Of course, that's the exception rather than the rule in human psychology. But we have to develop understanding over the course of life even though our culture opposes the effort and it's hard to know whose opinion to trust.

The culture of sexual exploitation and violence against women is not intrinsic to sports itself. It's intrinsic to cultures who inject it into sports. I've always been worried about my daughters being at risk for rape and violence and I've done my best to inform and encourage them to make safe choices. Whether the Greek system can be rehabilitated is a question I can't answer. I don't really know much about the system as a national institution. I do know it has been riddled with pathology and cultural dysfunction but I don't have a perspective on it. Perhaps the film can give me one or at least a start. Intelligent and concerned people need to be aware of exploitation, abuse and oppression wherever they exist and this is in everyone's backyard. I look around and ask myself what can be done to bring people to an enlightened understanding (which I realize is an arrogant thought). But I do think I see things more clearly than most and I want to find ways to offer that understanding outside the small circle of my social and professional lives. I hope we can discuss this at length one of these days.

So this brings me to "How are you doing?"  Probably about the same I would guess but I hope there are some rays of hope shining into the dark cloud of your recent struggles. I don't wish to be repetitive in pointing out reasons for hope you already know about so I will just say we must never give up and concede life to the forces we despise. You and I and everyone who fights the fight have times when things are extremely discouraging and we wonder if we can hang on with the vague hope that things can get better. But we do hang on and sooner or later they do get better. Or else we get old and die or aliens abduct us and we get to escape from the maddening paradoxical world of human life, so creatively brilliant and so deeply fucked up. We're limited by time and our bodies and what our minds can comprehend and yet we manage to do some beautiful and noble things at times. I'm always hopeful for you and I'll always believe in you. Stay in the fight.

Love,

Owen

Repetition doesn’t work (The Futurian case)

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The benefit of things being static has limits. Failure to adapt to changing circumstances typically spells doom for both organic and inorganic processes. Given our relentless cycles of feeding and needing, we are continually frustrated to varying degrees. The opposite numbers of people who are temperamentally conservative are those who are oriented toward change, the Bobby Kennedy’s of the world who “see how things could be and ask, why not?” Every way of doing things has weaknesses and some ways are fatally flawed. Persons of a progressive temperament find the flaws and want to fix them.

Repetition works (The Smithsonian case)

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Civilization hinges upon people engaging in repetitive patterns of behavior. The predictability of people allows society to function. Once a person establishes an adaptive pattern the tendency is to keep doing it until forced to stop and do something different. There is great benefit in things staying the same so that if you do a thing and get a result, the next time you do it the result will be the same. How many daily activities does this apply to? Think about it. Persons of a conservative temperament value things staying the same. People with power and resources are particularly invested in ‘stay the same.’ For some, either by convenience or conviction, keeping things the same becomes sacred and change is viewed as evil.

Dawning of the New Age? Nope.

The dream depicted a Hegelian dialectical process of the sort found in Jungian psychology (Ego vs Shadow). Today, conservatives and progressives, capitalists and socialists, Shiites and Sunnis, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, Protestants and Catholics to name a few fight it out for power and control acting as if the side they belong to is Good and their opposite numbers are Evil. Marx, for example, believed that class warfare would result in the underdog winning out culminating in the emergence of a utopian Workers Paradise. Instead we got Stalin and Mao. Jung was among the first to point out that in every such case, one is projecting ones own darkness onto the hated enemy.

Smithsonians and Futurians

From an early age, my mind has wondered what on Earth people think they’re doing and grappled with making sense of what appeared to be lunacy. How could we be so brilliantly successful and creative and yet be so dysfunctional at the same time? Many years ago I had a vivid and elaborate dream that pointed toward an answer and made a lasting impact. When I awoke, I wrote it down in a narrative I’ve still got. The crux of the dream was an authoritative voice explaining to me how the human race is divided into two groups of people who are engaged in an endless struggle for dominance neither one can win. The Smithsonians value tradition and wish to preserve the old way of doing things and prevent them from being tampered with. Futurians, believing things are in need of improvement, envision a world where the problems have been solved and we can live in peace and harmony. The voice went on to say Jesus of Nazareth was both a Smithsonian (the Son of Smith) and a radical Futurian (the Kingdom of Heaven is near).