The Next Market Crash

I think the market downturn I talked about a few months ago is finally underway. And while I won’t get into the technical reasons for it (uh…stocks have been priced too high?) I think this crash might be exacerbated by the new investment vehicles that have been made available over the past few years, like ETF’s and other more highly leveraged funds that can create great momentum in or out of a market.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the see-saw stock market we’ve seen over the past few years was really something of a “stealth” bear market, and that increasing home loan interest rates, bad loans in China, poor corporate earnings and the glimmer of hope that the poor might get employed (which markets hate) are combining to make dark things happen to investment psychology.

For that’s all it is, remember: psychology. There’s no such thing as fundamentals, anymore. The speculative economy dwarfs anything that might be considered a “real” economy. Hundreds of times more money is invested in, say, the soap industry than is ever spent on soap. Corporations are names on debt – and these names attract more debt as long as faith remains high.

But there’s only so much caffiene, nicotine, and dexedrine our investment community can consume to fuel their frenzied fantasies. Like I said before, faith really can become an illness – whether applied to God or to finance.

American Idol: Both of them suck

There’s a phenomenon with which I became familiar back when I was directing high school musicals, where performers who aren’t really any good begin to seem better if for no other reason than we’re watching them every day. A marginally talented girl in a production of Grease or Godspell sings her song a bit better on week 6 of rehearsal than week 3, leading us to believe she’s not simply better than before, but “good” on some absolute scale.

Then we’re surprised when an audience who doesn’t know her comes in and thinks she’s terrible.

I believe American Idol suffers from this same effect. Having managed to avoid everything about this season’s show until last night, I tuned in for the final showdown between the contest’s two finalists – a brunette girl and a guy whose silver hair has gotten him the nickname “silver fox.”

And as an objective viewer with significant experience directing musical theater performed by people in these contestants’ age group, I can assure you: they’re not very good.

The girl can carry a tune, and the guy can do a good lightweight if nasal Joe Cocker imitation. They seem like nice, normal people, and I mean them no harm. They’re not bad, and any community summer theater would be well served by their talents. He’d be a passable Harold Hill and she could do the girl in Finian’s Rainbow, no problem. Not on Broadway, but for their friends.

But they’re not particularly good. Any kid off the TV cast of Fame or in the movie Camp could sing them off the stage. And their efforts at becoming idol-worthy appears to have twisted them into even more perverse caricatures of the stars they’re aping – or of themselves – than is probably healthy.

I’ve got no problem with real people singing and having a good time. And I know of many “professional” musicians who are outrageously bad (Coldplay’s pathetic imitation of Radiohead is just one sad example). And I wouldn’t normally pick on happy amateurs doing their thing.

But these aren’t happy amateurs. These are amateurs in the way that amateur porn performers are amateurs. And they’re being sold to America as idols through the process of sheer saturation. I assure you, most viewers who look at these two as talented didn’t see them the same way back during those first audition programs. The audience as been conditioned to accept this inanity the same way radio audiences are conditioned through ClearChannel programming and TV viewers learn to like the evening primetime schedule.

Consuming bad media degrades our ability to perceive.

Guest appearances

I’m doing some guest blogging for the next couple of days over at my friend Larry Smith’s new magazine site, Smith, so I might not be doing as much here at home until the end of the week.

Since Smith is all about personal narrative (their motto is something like “everyone has a story,” what I say there will be a little more personal than what I do over here. (I know – it’s all personal.) But, against my better judgment, I’ll be giving them some more overtly personal stories and thoughts than I usually share over here, as my personal taste is against doing anything that sounds like memoir. I think the stuff I come with is more interesting than me, especially since I’m not a college hooker strung out on crystal meth.

Meanwhile, I’m brimming with pride and excitement about the next issue of Testament. Guest-inked by Gary Erskine, it starts the whole series over again for those who haven’t been keeping up, and it represents the first issue where I feel I’ve really hit my stride as comics writer.

I’m also doing a little conversation with my good friend Rabbi Andy Bachman over at Jewcy (I’ll link once it’s up) – about how relevant “God” is to Judaism today. Should be an interesting follow-up to the recent flurry over here about my faith=illness tirade.

More very soon – and even more over at Smith.

Art and Freedom

The best and perhaps saddest thing I learned during the conversations that followed my last two posts is that speaking one’s truth in the market-driven cultural landscape is now considered an “act of courage.” That is to say, if the things someone says are unpopular in one way or another, it can cost them money!

Gay actors closet themselves (and find big cults to procure them fake wives) for fear of what disclosure would do to their box office draw. Singers who challenge the Bush regime’s interventionist Iraq policies get harassed by angry conservatives. All this translates into an environment where the risk for political, religious, or artistic freedom is calculated mostly in dollars. “What will it do to my career?”

I received many emails of encouragement over the past two weeks. The most common concern they was how speaking honestly and openly about the global crises caused by belief in obsolete religious myths could endanger my book sales or speaking opportunities at schools. And while I’m honored by the concern, I’m saddened we live in a world where such concerns are considered real. Even the reviewers of my last book were surprised I “dared” to speak honestly about the corporations I was covering! Of course, that’s because they thought it would cost me money in the form of lost speeches or whatever. (I get, now: successful speakers only tell businesses the things they want to hear! Too late for me, I guess.)

All this is my introduction to a couple of inspirational paragraphs an ITP student of mine, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg wrote in her final paper, which took the form of a manifesto on Art and Freedom. It’s both a terrific condensation of many of the ideas about renaissance and immediacy that I’ve been pushing for a decade, now, as well as an entirely original articulation of the need to be creative – as well as to be loud, critical, and aggressive about it.

“We have to get over the last thirty years of disillusionment and realize that it is time to get back to work; it is time for action. We have been programmed to be passive, to believe attempts at societal change are futile, to feel consumed in the infinite layers of meaning and implications of our every gesture. We are so consumed by the implications of our actions we fail to make them. It is time to move on. It is time to refuse to be pushed into positions of infinite regress; time to refuse the art market, refuse artificial distinctions between disciplines and genres, refuse to be classified, packaged, advertised, bought and sold. It is time to be overtly critical, time to be loud and angry and aggressive. It is time to bring our work into the open. The end product is of no importance. It is the creative process and the fact of sharing this process with everyone else, destroying its mysteriousness, destroying its capitalist value that is vital.

“Creation is simply a mode of existence. Human beings are essentially creative but our creativity is stifled by the false authority of education and media that tell us how to think, tell us our impulses are incorrect or invalid or futile. We must approach creativity as a collaborative process of mutual exploration. There is no end goal, no ideas of progress or success or failure. There is only motion, interaction, curiosity and play. The idea is not to “change the world” ; the world is in a constant state of change. The idea is to direct this change in a way that allows human beings to recognize the reality of their freedom, creativity, and collaboration in the whole process.”

The Testament, My Testament

Of the several hundred (mostly congratulatory!) emails I’ve received since my post on Faith=Illness, below, about 40 of them so far come from people who call themselves religious, asking for “evidence” of my seemingly outrageous claims about the Bible. The most vexing of my assertions is that the Bible has two creation stories.

The fact that the Bible has two versions of creation should not be a surprise to anyone who takes the time to read the first page or two of any standard Bible text. This is not some convoluted DaVinci Code fictional deconstruction of non-existent material. I’m talking normal, look-at-the-words-and-glean-their-most-basic-meaning stuff, here.

Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 27, says that God created Man and Woman together, after making all the animals.
Genesis, Chapter 2, verse 7, has God creating Man before the plants and the animals. Adam walks around a while, lonely. Then Woman is created out of Adam’s rib in verse 22.

That’s right: two different creation stories. If you want some simple explanation of this from a mainstream, completely accepted and uncontroversial source, here’s HarperCollins Bible Dictionary on the subject:

“The first half of the Garden story (Gen. 2) presents another, probably older, view of creation. The order of creation is here reversed: man appears first (2:7), plants and animals later (19-20). Woman is created separately (2:22), instead of simultaneously with the male as in 1:26-27. Whereas 1:26-28 places humans as rulers over earthly creation (cf. Ps. 8:5-9), 2:15-17 makes man a cloistered servant of divinity, assigned menial labors and token responsibilities—though the underlying story is probably one of royal investiture.”

This very basic reading of Bible text is challenging – sacriligious – to those I’ve been calling “True Believers,” because they need Bible mythology to conform to actual history. They need to believe on a literal level – that same literal level that allows their ministers to convince them that doomsday is around the corner so we don’t need to worry about the economy or the oil shortage. The Bible doesn’t support them in this effort, so they can’t actual read it. And don’t.

From an aesthetic and spiritual perspective, the sad part is that they miss out on the Bible’s power as myth and literature. It’s these seeming gaps in logic or sequence where the best part of the stories rests. While Harper’s explains the contradiction as the incomplete reconciliation of two different creation stories, we can also look at the two versions as utterly intentional: as the authors speaking to an audience who already knew both competing mythological traditions. Maybe one is replacing the other – the same way goddess worship is to be replaced by a patriarchy? And that’s just one of hundreds of possible readings.

In my comic book Testament (now in a first collected edition!), I look at the same passages as a first and second draft of creation. My “god” characters try it one way, don’t like how it turns out, and then start over. I’m hoping by re-introducing readers to the Bible as it was actually written and understood at the time (to the best of my ability) while showing how its stories apply to our current military, technological and economic fiascos, I can bring its power to a new generation. All while dispelling the hardened belief sets of True Believers. I’m going to show how the Bible was intended not to give people religion, but to get people over their obsessions with religion and the fictional character, God. (Obviously, the Bible hasn’t worked out as planned. At least not yet.)

Some of you have asked, “Why take people’s God away from them?” These confirmed atheists and agnostics wonder if it’s not better to let childlike people enjoy a childlike relationship to their mythology. What harm does it do?

Way too much. People manipulated by stories in this way are more susceptible to misinformation through narrative trickery. Just as 92% of Americans believe in God and 71% believe in the devil, 90% of American soldiers serving in Iraq think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9-11 (Zogby). They can’t distinguish between metaphor and reality. Bush speaks to the Republican Convention from behind a podium with a big cross on it, designed to look like a minister’s lecturn. He is a minister. He jumps onto an aircraft carrier in an airforce jumpsuit. He is a military hero.

No, like I said below, it’s time to get tough with the people who have been seduced into believing in ideas and stories that were never meant to function as a factual basis for reality. It’s time to stop even entertaining the notion that Creationism be taught in school as anything but a foundation mythology. It’s time to accept the fact that there’s nobody out there to save us from ourselves – we really do have to take care of one another. It’s time to realize that there’s no parent in the sky named God – least of all one rooting for one side or the other – in our war against Iraq, or terror, or those who stand in the way of our oil.

It’s just too dangerous an era to allow people to maintain an infantile approach to what’s going on around them. A functioning democracy requires its citizens to have some connection to reality.