Rod Amis - Unbound

PHOENIX, AZ, USA - 12 October, 2004: I realized last night, after finishing Clive Cussler's Inca Gold, one of a series of thrillers that Dragana sent me from Belgrade (Thanks, Luv!), that I should begin this week's journal entry this morning. My plan has been to move Your World's Magazine back into its weekly schedule, with Monday as launch day again, as we lurch toward the Holy Days. I knew and know that the transition shall not be an easy one for the venerable editor. I got used to a more relaxed schedule while rushing to put out the first book. I imagined, before this jaunt to Phoenix, that the second book would be easy. I believed I was beginning it in New Orleans, in fact. I was not. I have been unable to wrap my mind around a suitable beginning for the second part of the saga. I've got a wonderful chapter ten, though.

I believe that among of the problems with my tackling the work on the second book are the facts that

1. basic survival has been so distractingly difficult;
2. I continue in a constant state of job search (I certainly shan't make it on the part-time job at the real estate office;)
3. the on-going demands (both in terms of supporting the emotional lives of the writers and contributors here and keeping this publication relatively on schedule;) and
4. the very nature of the itinerancy of the past two and half months have kept me from carving out the physical and emotional safety zone one needs to complete a project demanding the kind of focus and direction that a book -- especially the second in a trilogy -- demands.

It's my own special prejudice that the second book in a trilogy acts as a kind of anchor. One has the most freedom with the first of a series, where the focus is seduction and freshness as much as anything else, and you are to convince the reader that it would will be worth it to commit continued attention. The second book has to be both solid enough to stand on its own and yet recommend the first and encourage toward the third. This belief made me reticent to break a tale, a vast reminiscence, into three parts. My feeling was that the very division might sap some of the motive force out of the endeavor and, further, that the challenges of bringing someone, that imaginary and potential reader, back to the well repeatedly might be beyond my estimable powers as wordsmith and storyteller.

The writers among you will understand these trepidations. Unlike a column, where repeated visits are expected, books seldom demand anything but a single commitment.

(I continue in a state of amazement at the loyalties to myself and certain other columnists here that have obtained over the years.)

15 October, 2003: I CAUGHT MYSELF in a trap of my own making this week. I was unhappy because I had fooled myself into believing that one should get fulfillment from his job. Most Americans know - particularly those at my end of the food chain -- that a paycheck is all you should expect to get from your job. Fulfillment, if it is to be had at all, you should derive from your friends, family and loved ones and those activities performed when you are not working. I had to remind myself of my favorite Linda Ellerby-ism, "Nobody ever lay on his deathbed saying, 'Darn! I wish I had spent more time at the office.'" How true.

I had to remind myself (again!) that work ,when connected with employment, is indeed a four-letter word and that my happiness must be found at home. Then I thought about my living situation: if I was to find happiness at home, I had better be prepared to do a lot of tidying up, get used to picking things up, attempting to keep some level of order in the chaos that is Doug World. I sighed.

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A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. Sustaining Patrons CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA DOUGLAS MC DANIEL, Phoenix, AZ, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: G21: The World's Magazine Attn: Rod Amis 2332 W. Glenrosa Avenue, #249 Phoenix, AZ 85015-7039 To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES. MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE ARCHIVES.

Here is a view of Rod's Personal World Clock (Another Clue to How I Think).

You're welcome.

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16 October, 2004: I've accompanied this entry with photos sent to me by my friend and mother-hen Cheryl in Vermont. They remind Desert Boy that the beauty of New England in the autumn can be breathtaking. I remember walking down one street in the autumn (I almost wrote "every autumn" because that is the way it seems in memory, romantic memory) with Cheryl's younger sister and marveling at the dazzling colors that nature threw across that thoroughfare every year, vibrant yellows, burnt-umber, firey reds. It was one of my favorite places to be in that little town during that season. In memory, that road most often smelled of passing skunks, that musky, warning odor of theirs.

The street I loved the best passed directly in front of a detention center for juvenile delinquents. I always imagined some poor kid trapped in that place, yearning for the freedom to walk that beautiful road as Lynda and I were doing. It made me cringe and reminded me how imprisoned I had felt in my own woodland home as an adolescent. Nobody can feel as trapped as a teenager. Nobody can be as melodramatic about their sense of imprisonment ...

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I'm running late in putting this edition together. I needed yesterday to shop for "needful things" like cleanser for the bathroom and more food. Storing my acorns for this week's part of the "winter." Planning for not having to make these kinds of investments out of the next paycheck so that the looming commitments can be met.

Trying to concentrate and finish this entry while dealing with the music emanating out at me that I'd rather not have in the background but must endure. I thought the magic word was "headphones." ...

NEWS TO ROD

ITEM ONE: The buzz among the "echo boomers" this weekend was Jon Stewart of Comedy Central channel's "The Daily Show" appearing on CNN's "Crossfire." Jon begs the hosts of that show to "Stop hurting America."

It's a great clip and I believe Jon shows a lot of character. My fellow geezers can find the clip here, at MediaMatters.org. [Broadband connection highly recommended.] Enjoy!


ITEM TWO: This Guardian (UK) article on an upcoming documentary posing some very heretical thoughts came across the transom from Texas. Many of the points the documentarian is trying to make support some of the contentions raised in this space over the last year. I think longtime Loyal Readers are familiar with my thoughts on governmental fear-mongering and the misguided "War on Terror." I shan't beat those dead-horses again.


ITEM THREE: ARIANNA HUFFINGTON had some meaningful things to say in her column this week about the Mouthpiece Media's (MM's) use of polls to drive their commentary. We're all getting used to these polls often being contradictory and not serving the search for truth. Drop over and take a look at what she had to say if you get a chance.


ITEM FOUR: Even the MM has become concerned with the narrowing of free speech that is evident under this Administration. I'm sure that I don't need to remind those here, Loves, that this President has given less press conferences than even Mr. Nixon. Frank Rich has this to say (in part) over at the New York Times :

... Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it. ...

You can read the full article here.


ITEM FIVE: 17 October, 2004: TIPPING POINTS - It happened this morning, as I labor to bring Your World's Magazine "to press." Under the headline "John Kerry for President" the national newspaper of record for the United States, the New York Times did what I did last October and have since recanted. The Times unambiguously endorsed Senator John Kerry for President of the United States. You can read that editorial here [Registration required.] Will this endorsement have an impact? We'll all know in a few weeks.

That's news to me this week.

LIFE OF ROD

I'VE BECOME DEPENDENT on Craig's List for my job search, if only because the minor successes I've had both here and back in New Orleans came from that source. (Okay, maybe it's also because I'm so geeky, Luv.) The local newspapers, in both towns, have been more a source of tooth-grinding, self-demeaning exercises and downright stultification.

Oddly, over the past few years, my eyes have adjusted to reading things on a monitor to such an extent that I find it increasingly difficult to read dead-tree media. I have so accomodated myself to this medium I love that my own experience is the exact opposite of most people. People who know m e in "meat space" have been aware of this aberration of mine for years now. There are magazines that are impossible to read and even certain paperback books are now taxing for these old eyes.

So I now even read novels on Victoria, my beloved and over-taxed Memory Machine (computer.) Thanks again, Dragana.

ABOUT YOUR WORLD'S MAGAZINE: I actually sent an Editorial Calendar out to the writers on the G-Crew this week, Darling! Firstly, you'll be happy (I hope) to know that we're going back to being a weekly publication. With the exception of the annual hiatus we take before our Holy Days special edition at the end of the Year (start working your grey matter for nominees for the "Top" and "Bottom" ten lists we do at year's end!) and before our New Year's edition, that is.

I'm also quite chuffed to say that we'll be offering you our 400TH edition on the WWW (World Wide Web) on 15 November. Please join us to celebrate this special milestone. I promise you now that edition will be a keeper.

I'm putting this HUNGER SITE button back on the "Glass House" page for a reason. Don't ignore it. It costs you nothing to help.

FEED THE HUNGRY. You can help someone else in this world and IT WON'T COST YOU A DIME. If you simply remember to drop by The Hunger Site every day that you surf and click a simple button ONE LESS PERSON WILL GO HUNGRY. The food is distributed by the United Nations World Food Programme and paid for through the sponsorship of companies that care. Do your part.

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G21 EDITORIAL: The Aftermath

In January, 2001, I was in Washington, D.C., attending the inaugural of George W. Bush as President of the United States. Those of you who read the description I wrote in these pages after returning from that event will recall how appalled I was by what I saw. There was a razor-wire topped fence put up along the parade route of this inaugural and you couldn't enter the area without going through a security check point. The average reader won't think these kind of precautions are unusual today but let me remind you that this took place in pre-9/11 America. This kind of Banana Republic demonstrated fear of the general populace was unheard of in America before this time. I could not believe I was still in my own country.

In fact, my level of fear and anxiety increased in subsequent days (justifiably, I now believe) and I decamped for Europe.

So, contentious and electric as the current election cycle in the United States has proven to be, like many people, my gravest concern is about the aftermath of this election.

No matter who wins on 2 November this year, America will be a virulently divided, angry nation. The roiling political anger that is evidenced by the unprecedented number of attack ads airing on television from both political parties and independent groups supporting them is at such a level, and so directed toward our emotions as a people, that I fear it is feeding something dangerous that even the most Augustan of leaders will find difficult to contain or control.

No matter who is elected the next President of the United States, half the popular of the country -- and perhaps more -- will be passionately unsatisfied and angry.

This is no small matter in a nation that is armed to the teeth.

But that is only the top level of my concern today.

My secondary concern, as I watch the hate-mongering around me, the way in which people are being played with the fiddles of fear and retribution, springs from a deeper source -- the prompt for my memories of the Bush inaugural.

This nation, through its educational system, spends twelve years -- more or less -- in inculcating its children, its citizenry, with the notion that their homeland came to be through an act of revolutionary violence that produced revolutionary justice as embodied in its Constitution. Most of us grew up being taught to more or less revere the notion that taxation without representation was tyranny, that the people have the right to seek redress of grievances from their government and that if the government was not responsive to the will of the people it should be replaced. These were revolutionary concepts then and could be conceived as being even more so today.

And these concepts are the meat and bread of American political thought. Reflect on that notion for just a moment. Take a deep breath.

As I did in that article about my first direct experience of the Administration of George W. Bush, nearly four years ago, let me remind you of the contrast between the razor-wire and checkpoints for U.S. citizens and a previous President walking the streets of Washington to the White House and openly embracing his people only a few years earlier. When Mr. Bush was first faced with the American people he had a special armed limousine ordered and raced through the streets of our nation's capital ... Again, this was before 9/11.

In the view of many, this first experience of this regime was merely a precursor of asking for lists of books you check out of your local library and transcripts of your e-mails and telephone calls, orange alerts and the push for a national identification card.

During my lifetime, I have not heard the notion of moving to Canada or some other country after an election come up in regular conversation so much as I have this year, not since the Vietnam war. This time the interlocutors are not only draft-age adolescents but men and women with homes, mortgages and businesses established in their communities, people with children still in college and even retirees.

So it is the aftermath of this election that I take most seriously today, my loves, and not the election itself.

The MM (Mouthpiece Media) has made much of the fact that this country has experienced the most massive voter registration drive in the last fifty years, at least, during this election cycle. By even conservative estimates, millions of people who have not voted before or who have discontinued voting are now on the active rolls and poised to make their voices heard during the next few weeks.

Any number of people who were turned off by politics or simply ignorant of the civic process are now fired up to make their voices heard in a participatory democracy. They are daily exhorted to have their concerns, their interests and their ideas put on the front burner of the national agenda.

What if these newly kindled desires are frustrated? Just asking.

Equally touted in the MM is the fact that a number of states, for example Colorado, almost certainly Florida (again), and places like Arizona where I now compose these thoughts are likely to face electoral challenges involving invalidated, miscounted or questionable poll results. In the case of Colorado, the election results may lead to litigation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. We already have experience of what to expect from a questionable vote in Florida.

So I can't but ask what type of environment, political, emotional and economic, will obtain in the aftermath of the overheated election cycle.

Shall we awaken on the morning of 3 November faced with the headlines announcing the putative victor in this Presidential campaign to popping champagne corks and dancing in the avenues of our cities or to barking accusations, political wrangling or -- worse yet -- protests, strikes and simmering anger?

I think that's a question worth asking today, right now, before the election.

It is inescapable that by bringing up these concerns, this editorial feeds into the anxiety level that already prevails. That must be acknowledged. But why, rather than focus on the "horse race", should we not focus on the implications of the outcome? I have always been a strong advocate for considering the consequences of our actions as well as the motivations for those actions. This issue of consequentiality should be on the minds of every politician, every political action committee and advocacy group fanning the flames of commitment (and those of discord and division) today.

In a responsible republic -- and I use that word advisedly these days when all the evidences of empire are so overwhelming -- reasonable people should be prepared to step back from the heat of the debate and see the light of those issues we must confront at its conclusion. The aftermath of this election, by that light, should be what we are concerned to confront.

No matter who prevails in this election, the level of discontent will be at a very high level. That pop-culty mantra of our times, "healing," will have to become extremely operative -- even more so than when Gerald Ford assumed the Presidency of a fractured nation decades ago. The level of the political crisis we now face in the aftermath of this election, from this view, is even higher.

THINGS I NEED THIS WEEK

1. A second job or a new Web design contract.

2. Local friends.

3. Yeah, a new girlfriend.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "

Love,
Rod

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Our Resident Philosopher is now looking for creative ways of re-inventing himself in the Valley of the Sun. He works during the day in a real estate office in downtown Phoenix and spends his nights dreaming of a better life. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod plans publication of the first Glass House book before the end of the year and is already working on the second, sequel, manuscript.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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© 2004, GENERATOR 21.

E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.