Of Human Bondage and Addiction

Hola mi Gente,

This might sound like a strange thing to express, but I am more interested in responses when we are challenged to move out of our collective zones, than opinions hurled from within our cocoons of social conditioning.

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Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie in The Hunger

The Hunger

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

-- C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter 12 (1963)

The other day I was reading a short story, The Bound Man, by the German author Ilse Aichinger. It is a beautiful piece in the existentialist tradition: A man awakens one morning to find himself inexplicably bound by rope. The story takes a strange turn because instead of removing the rope at his first opportunity, as you would expect him to do, he decides to remain bound and become a circus attraction, turning his strange and accidental bondage into his trademark work. 

Strange, huh?

You might ask why would a person happily accept such bondage? It is a question similar to the one posed by Franz Kafka in The Hunger Artist, in which a man who also chooses to become a circus attraction starves himself to death because he cannot find food that interests him. 

These two authors are asking a variation of the same question: “Why would people carelessly, inexplicably, and even happily do things that bring them so much harm and suffering”?

Addiction is the same kind of bondage. Addicts cling to their addictions, and nothing you do or say will pry them away from their alcohol, cocaine, tobacco, internet surfing, video-game playing, overeating, shopping, or sexual escapades. It doesn’t matter if you tell them they are dying. It doesn’t matter if you tell them that they’re wasting half their life in front of a computer screen or in the aisles of department stores. Point out to them that they cannot have real love or a real life if they use sex as a drug, it doesn’t matter. Show them that their liver is already not functioning, that their nasal lining is already perforated, or that their lungs are black, and still it won’t matter. What you experience when you talk to an addict is that he or she is unable to understand or is completely indifferent to your reasoning.

I know, because I was an active addict for a substantial part of my adult life. And it is not an issue of will power or lack thereof. At the worst part of my addiction, I used to wake up penniless and at the end of the day manage to spend $300 feeding my addiction. I would submit that took a lot of will.

I operate from the assumption that we live in an addictive society -- it is how we are all conditioned. We live in a consumer-based society in which the wanting and getting is the be-all and end-all of our existence. We are all would-be addicts, given the right circumstances of biology, psychology, and social setting. Some of us, because we are more at risk (such as myself), become full-blown addicts, and cross over into that downward spiral of obsession morphing into compulsion and suffering.

Even if we don’t succumb to addiction, we sometimes feel a significant loss of control in some area of our life and experience difficulty maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding hours of internet surfing, quieting our anxious thoughts, or staying on track with our goals. In order to deal with these challenges, we need to recover: that is, we need to embrace a way of being that recognizes and addresses our addictive nature and our potential problems.

If you don’t, you just might wake up one morning bound head to foot with rope and say to yourself, “How interesting! I think I’ll become a circus attraction!”

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Wealthfare

¡Hola! Everybody...
Today? Welfare Queens!

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-=[ Corporate Welfare Queens ]=-

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.”

-- Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign

And she was black... he should have added, since studies show that the perceived face of poverty is black and female. Reagan never named a particular woman because the woman never existed. contrary to the conservative spin, there never was an army of young, amoral, crack-addicted black mothers driving Cadillacs while giving birth to litters to super-predator cop killers.

Reagan specialized in the use of the outrageous anecdotes that were usually false. Yet the media so sensationalized his stories that these falsehoods were used to frame any public debate about poverty. Make no mistake: the new and improved racism is couched in the conservative language of individualism and boot-strapping. Because his “examples” of welfare queens relied on existing stereotypes of welfare cheats and resonated with news stories about welfare fraud, they did indeed gain real footing within the public discourse on poverty.

However, the real story should have been about a different kind of welfare queen. A Welfare Queen that actually existed, most likely drove higher end gas-guzzlers and wore three-piece suits: the Corporate Welfare Queen.

Even at its height, “welfare” as perceived by the public was probably about 1% of the federal budget. Corporate Welfare, government programs that provide special benefits to specific industries or corporations, have always been far more generous than anything ever given to the poor. Poverty, in case you haven’t received the memo, is a sin in these times of KKKorporate KKKristianity. If you’re poor, it’s because you lack morals, drive, intelligence, or any kind of civic responsibility. KKKorporate KKKristianity postulates you’re poor because you’re not a real KKKristian. After all, didn’t rich people pull themselves out of the muck?

Well, maybe we should rethink that last part. Many of the largest companies have been on the welfare dole, including Wal-Mart, General Motors, Boeing, Archer Daniels Midland, and the notorious Enron. And all this was before the latest capitalist collapse -- I mean! -- “economic downturn” that has resulted in $ trillions being given away to failed CEOs.

The ultra conservative Cato Institute estimated that the federal government spent a total of $96.6 billion on corporate welfare in the fiscal year 2002. State and local governments also hand out money to businesses. Here in New York City, for example, we have a stadium built with $100 of billions of taxpayer money in which the citizens cannot afford to buy a seat. While subsidies for stadiums are popular, studies show that they do little to promote local economic improvement and never pay for themselves. The primary beneficiaries are the wealthy team owners who then go on to sell their teams at a huge profit.

Large businesses often bargain with (or more correctly extort) communities, demanding major tax breaks, free or reduced-price land, or infrastructure assistance in return for the promise of creating jobs. One recent study showed that Wal-Mart has received more than $1 billion in subsidies. Yet Wal-Mart often destroys almost as many jobs as it creates, driving smaller, more community-based retailers out of business.

However, the bulk of the real welfare money is distributed through entities that usually have the word “complex” as a descriptor. By far, the largest welfare program for rich people is known as defense spending, or the military/ industrial complex. As a nation, we spend more on defense than the next ten nations combined. I can’t tell you know how much we give away, because much of this money isn’t reported; but if we take just one program as an example, The Star Wars program, we can get a sense of how easily we give away our hard-earned money. Initially an idea that sprouted out of Reagan’s diseased-damaged brain, The Star Wars program has spent $100 of billions for an anti-missile program that has yet to hit a target! Yes, you heard that right: decades and $100 of billions for a program that cannot hit a target.

Not once...

::blank stare::

In addition, let’s not forget the $100 hammers and screwdrivers or the fact that I haven’t even addressed the latest round of welfare for the rich, otherwise known as “bailout.”

Which brings me to the second half of my post: a particularly vicious welfare program known as the prison/ industrial complex. Note that our government finds it fit to help to rich people. However, when it comes to the middle class, poor, and working poor, you’re on your own.

In our Amerikkka, the rich get welfare and the poor get to go to prison. I would argue that the sources of crime are well known (e.g. poverty, prisons, guns, drugs) but, in contrast to our approach to the rich, little is done to reduce the causes. In fact, I would submit the criminal justice system has a stake in its own failures (The Pyrrhic Defeat Theory). The Incarceration Nation has replaced the vision of a Great society. Plus, it’s an extremely profitable business traded on the stock market.

In 1996, Rand published a study that highlighted what works to reduce crime: preventing child abuse/neglect, enhancing children’s intellectual and social development, providing support guidance to vulnerable adolescents, and working extensively with formerly incarcerated youths. As it stands, we incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. South Africa's incarceration rates, at the height of apartheid, paled in comparison to ours today.

And yet, we lead the free world in addiction, crime, and violence. Furthermore, sociologists have confirmed that incarceration as a social policy reaches a threshold where it actually begins to increases crime and makes vulnerable communities less safe.

We need to ask some important questions: Who defines crime? How is the public image of crime created? How is crime not defined? What is the image we have of criminals? Why do white collar crooks get so little in comparison to the damage they do to society, and why is white collar crime rarely reported?

Blacks make up no more than 13% of all drug abusers but 74% of those in prison for drugs. There’s no way you can do the math and justify that number. Discrimination occurs at all phases of the criminal justice system from arrest to imprisonment. The race of the victim and the race of the defendant are significantly related to use of the death penalty.

I will state that people who cannot see a better way to curb crime, other than to lockup millions, lack more than imagination -- they lack intelligence. Crime and disorder, which flow from hopeless poverty, unloved children, and drug abuse, can’t be solved by building prisons, mandatory sentencing minimums, or hiring more police.

From an empirical standpoint, what will work has been known for decades. It’s not the knowledge that’s lacking, it’s the civic will. We know what works:

• End poverty
• Letting the punishment fit the criminal harm
• Legalize or decriminalize drugs
• Create correctional programs that promote responsibility and prepare human beings to reenter society
• Gun control
• Limit discretion of police, prosecutors, and judges
• Implement the right to equal counsel.
• Explore a vision of a society with a more just distribution of wealth.

We ignore this at our own risk. This affects you, whether you know it or not, because where do you think they get the money to build and maintain prisons? From your child’s school.

The issue here is equally simple: do we want to create a society based on teaching our children, or locking some of them up?

Paz,

Eddie

The Hunger

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m coming right out and saying it:

I don’t give a flying fuck about your opinion.

I know, I know, it’s a strange way of opening up a blog I obviously hope some people will read. But the fact is I have no interest in opinions. Rather, I’m interested in what happens when you put away your preconceived notions in the service of exploring new worlds and new perspectives. Otherwise, it gets really boring, really quick. I mean: who really gives a fuk about what was very likely instilled in you at a very early age and is totally narcissistic and narrow-minded? Your friends might not tell you, but I will: your opinions suck...

So, along with the word “drama,” opinions are hereby banished from here for all of eternity!

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-=[ The Hunger ]=-

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.”

-- C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter 12 (1963)

I like to describe the arc of my life as one of redemption. For today and tomorrow, I will share a part of this journey with you...

The other day I was reading a short story, “The Bound Man,” by the German author Ilse Aichinger. It’s a beautiful piece in the existentialist tradition: A man awakens one morning to find himself inexplicably bound by rope. The story takes a strange turn because instead of removing the rope at his first opportunity, as you would expect him to do, he decides to remain bound and become a circus attraction, turning his strange and accidental bondage into his trademark work.

Strange, huh?

Why would a person happily accept such bondage?!! It’s a question similar to the one posed by Franz Kafka in the “Hunger Artist, in which a man who also chooses to become a circus attraction starves himself to death because he can’t find food that interests him.

[Note: I know you’re forming a bullshit opinion right now --stop it!]

These two authors are asking a variation of the same question: “Why would people carelessly, inexplicably, and even happily do things that bring them so much harm and suffering”?

Addiction is the same kind of bondage. Addicts cling to their addictions, and nothing you do or say will pry them away from their alcohol, cocaine, tobacco, internet surfing, video-game playing, overeating, shopping, or sexual escapades. It doesn’t matter if you tell them they are dying. It doesn’t matter if you tell them that they’re wasting half their life in front of a computer screen or in the aisles of department stores. Point out to them that they can’t have real love or a real life if they use sex as a drug, it doesn’t matter. Show them that their liver is already not functioning, that their nasal lining is already perforated, or that their lungs are black, and still it won’t matter. What you experience when you talk to an addict is that he or she is unable to understand or is completely indifferent to your reasoning.

I know, because I was an active addict for most of my adult life. And it’s not an issue of will power or lack thereof. At the worst part of my addiction, I used to wake up penniless and at the end of the day manage to spend $300 feeding my addiction. I would submit that took a lot of will.

I operate from the assumption that we live in an addictive society -- it’s how we are all conditioned. We live in a consumer-based society in which the wanting and getting is the be-all and end-all of our existence. We are all would-be addicts, given the right circumstances of biology, psychology, and social setting. Some of us, because we are more at risk (such as myself), become full-blown addicts, and cross over into that downward spiral of obsession morphing into compulsion and suffering.

Even if we don’t succumb to addiction, we sometimes feel a significant loss of control in some area of our life and experience difficulty maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding hours of internet surfing, quieting our anxious thoughts, or staying on track with our goals. In order to deal with these challenges, we need to recover: that is, we need to embrace a way of being that recognizes and addresses our addictive nature and our potential problems.

If you don’t, you just might wake up one morning bound head to foot with rope and say to yourself, “How interesting! I think I’ll become a circus attraction!”

Love,

Eddie

The Friday Sex Blog [Childhood and Sexuality Myths]

¡Hola! Everybody...
This weekend I should be all moved in to my new apartment. It feels strange. Yesterday, I was buying house stuff (dishes, shower curtains, towels, etc.) and it felt good but strange too. The fact is that I’ll be living in a home built in 1893 easily worth $2 million. My neighborhood is completely gentrified and I have as neighbors a venture capitalist on one side and a civil rights lawyer on the other. Shit, they were playing opera at the local diner while I was having grits and eggs!

How the fuck?!! Opera in a diner?!! LMAO!

The thing is I have to work all day Saturday and still manage to get this move done and over with...

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-=[ Childhood and Sexuality ]=-

Truth, Fictions, and Myths

We do great harm to children when we withhold sexual information from them. Today, thanks to Neanderthal conservative voices, sexual education is a joke. Sex Ed, under the new Victorian era, has been reduced to reading from a two-line script: “Don’t do it. Get married.”

This is a crime...

Freud saw childhood sexuality as a relentless quest for knowledge. The desire for information didn’t play as a substitute for physical pleasure, it balanced it. From the very beginning, sexuality seeks a language to explain itself. Freud was treated as an outcast for daring to endorse providing children with that language -- with information about their body parts and how they worked, about how babies are made and born.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, as AIDS still threatens and kids need information most, the pendulum has swung toward telling them less. A strategy of censorship has emerged and it wears a particularly scary disguise: advice to parents to speak more, to embrace their responsibility as children’s primary sexual teachers. This is a “family value” that the conservatives can get behind and very few can disagree with. However, a seemingly harmless parent-friendly idea can have a less than child-friendly effect.

I expect the sexual prudes who rally against school-based sexuality education are aware of what would happen if the task of sexual enlightenment would be left entirely to parents: almost nobody would do it.

And the studies bear out my suspicions. Parents do talk the talk: most agree that sex education is their job. However, when it comes to talking the sex talk, few can bring themselves to do it. One survey by the national Communication Association showed that parents identified sex as the subject they were least comfortable talking about. Similar research with kids shows that they rate their parents’ efforts less generously than their fathers and mothers. The first pattern that stands out is the difference between the perception of parents and teens, one study showed. When interviewing both generations of the same families, the kids consistently remembered talking about fewer topics than their parents did. One longitudinal study found that more than half of teens believed their parents understood them pretty well. The bad news was that almost half thought mom and dad got it somewhat or hardly at all.

Even someone such as myself, "Mr. Sexual Freedom" himself, didn’t have a problem-free sex pass. I remember once entering my son’s room full of 12-13 year-old males and bringing up the subject of masturbation. My son never forgave me for that one! LOL! Which leads me to state that while teens might tell researchers that they wish their parents would discuss sexuality more, I believe given the choice, they would rather talk to a different confidante (an “aunt” or other trusted adult, for example). I chalk it up to the incest taboo: children don’t want to know about their parents’ sex lives (or masturbatory tendencies LOL!) and, from the minute they might conceivably have a sex life, they usually don’t want their parents (ewwww!) to know about theirs.

What’s interesting is there is little talk about the dynamic of how trusted adults become substitute sex education teachers for children. I know that if I hadn't been able to get through my son I would’ve welcomed a trusted friend or family member to step into that role. In fact, sex education teachers are the professionalized version of trusted adults.

Children absorb their attitudes toward love, their bodies, authority, and equality from their families. They are trained in tolerance and kindness or their opposite. Few live in families comfortable enough to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex. And when we (we meaning all of us -- society) don’t teach our children, guess who they learn it from? They learn it from others who are themselves ignorant (i.e., thier peers) or those who may not have their best interests at heart.

So, if parents aren’t talking and federally funded sex educators aren’t being allowed to talk, to whom will our children turn? I’ll tell you where, on the internet. And most of the information on the internet is geared toward selling sex. In other words, sex on the internet is mostly treated as it is elsewhere in our society: as something to use to buy and sell -- a commodity

Then you guys bitch and moan about the supposed lack of moral character our children?

Pfffft!

The myth that exposing children to sexual before they are ready is detrimental to them was exploded when I took the time to actually listen to and talk with kids. People? They get it. Some of them get it better than you, believe it or not (sarcasm on). Kids get the wide range of emotions embedded in concepts such as jealousy and desire, for example. Why not prepare them?

What consequences do we suffer as a society when we choose to leave the most important discussion about the most powerful force known to humankind to random chance?

Love,

Eddie