Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn't much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government--divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.
In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it--Social Darwinism--every man or woman for him or herself. It's a tempting idea, because it doesn't require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford--tough luck...It let's us say to the child who was born into poverty--pull yourself up by your bootstraps...
But there is a problem. It won't work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it's been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It's been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity.
¿So what do you think? ¿Do you disagree? ¿If so, how do you think government should work? & if you do agree—well maybe you should spread the word...
¡The Word Pimp Reads at Barnes & Noble!
Current mood: catalyzed
Category: Writing and Poetry
Hosted By: CityLit When: Saturday May 17, 2008 at 3:00 PM Where: Barnes & Noble Power Plant 601 E. Pratt Street Baltimore, Maryland 21202 United States Description: Fernando Quijano III reads
Check out this event: The Word Pimp is Getting Locked Up
Hosted By: Muscular Dystrophy Association When: Thursday May 01, 2008 at 12:00 PM Where: Tremont Grand Hotel 225 N. Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland|21 21201 United States Description: Muscular Dystrophy Association
Click Here To View Event OR... You can donate by visiting my personal MDA webpage. ANYONE WHO DONATES $100 or more (and sends me an email request) will receive a free signed copy of Freshly Squeezed, the recently released anthology containing an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, Forever, Lilith.
Exploding Judases in San Miguel: Poem + Video
Current mood: accomplished
Category: Writing and Poetry
Executing Traitors
Easter Sunday—San Miguel morning watching locals exploding Judases near the square. The air is thick with brimstone & black powder, and the joyous shouts of children as the newest Judas detonates. The children run about in squealing glee, snatching limbs from the sky—the biggest purse the traitor's head, of course.
A young brown boy glows as the gueros encourage him to pose for them—head held aloft or playfully placed in front of his own face— as if he understands that we are all capable of betrayal.
& then the whizzing starts anew, and attention shifts to the newest Judas spinning for his sins—ready to be obliterated in all his papier-mâché guts & ingloriousness.
A Boricua in Mexico
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Travel and Places
Well, Camille & I have finally arrived in San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico, and I must say it is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the the pics I’ve taken so far, and judge for yourself. (Okay, no matter what I do, my pics link won’t work. Just go to my pics from my profile and link fom there. Sorry. ¡Blame MySpace!) The place certainly has the old world charm of other places I love like Ponce & Old San Juan in Puerto Rico, Venice and other towns I visited in Italy this past summer. I had no idea it was an artists’ town. The art (pics to come) is incredible, obviously inspired by reknowned Mexican artists like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros, as well as Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Anyhow, I’ve been here less than 24 hours (¡The trip took a total of 14 hours--seven by plane plus one five hour bus trip followed by another two hour bus trip! ¿What can I say? It was worth the bargain.), so there will be a lot more to say & see soon. Remember however that I’m here to finish editing my novel, Forever, Lilith, so you probably won’t be hearing from me until I get back to the states. Until then, ciao. BTW, I just realized it’s been two years TO THE DAY since I first posted the first chapter on MySpace. Considering the other creepy stuff that’s happened as I’ve worked on this novel, I can’t say I’m surprised.
My Poem Protesting the Iraq Invasion
Current mood: bitchy
Category: Writing and Poetry
Today is the 5th anniversary of George W. Bush’s fruitless invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. I feel it’s about time to repost a poem I wrote on September 12, 2002—six monthsbefore the invasion. It seemed, back then, that I was one of the few opposed to the idea. Aside from showing off my uncanny prescience, it serves as a reminder of what Hillary Clinton was voting for while Barack Obama (like me) was advising against it.
lullaby
Rock a Bye baby on the tree top
Sleep tight America— slumbering giant—9-1-1 was no emergency. Rest assured that our government has our best interests at heart, like when daddy used Afghanistan to slay the big bad red bear then left it in a lurch, lost in poverty, lost in discord, little land lost with nothing but its rock & sand & guns & poppy fields. ¡But father knows best!
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
Night night America—rest right knowing the son, the puppet president, has it all under control, the bees buzz buzz buzzing in his ear, telling him where to steer the bombs to leave the corpses of our bastard brothers, bloodied & belittled because they would not be ignored. The sins of our children directly reflect our fathers at their worst.
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Let’s fight America—hold your flags up high as you send your children off to die to keep those Iraqi pipelines flow flow flowing with that pitch black blood pumping up our SUV fetishes while we let the red black & green blood flow in the riverbeds of the Congo—so long as those niggers keep mining what we need to power our laptops, our cellphones & our playstation(squared)s. Who the fuck cares which nigger owns the those mines… No, its mine! BANG! NO! It’s mine! BANG! NO! IT’S MINE! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! All while daddy stands idly by.
Down will come baby cradle & ALL
Peace is in sight America- Ginsberg was wrong, Ferlinghetti was wrong, there is no need to howl & scream, those dead & beat beats didn’t know we could dream while our country watches over us, profiling us in our sleep, the land of the free to be afraid. So just keep sitting tight America ready to fight flexing your might ignoring the light shortening your sights abandoning your rights just so you can sleep through the night. Hush little babies don’t say a word, I’m just some insomniac mockingbird crying the call of down will come baby cradle & all.
Anyway, considering not much has changed, the poem is still relevant. I mean, you can change Congo to Darfur, but other than that... ¡& don’t think that because Darfur is getting the spotlight right now, that all is well in the Congo!
Peace
Currently
listening
:
War Without End
By
Warbringer
Release date: 05 February, 2008
The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Life
I would be remiss if I did not offer a few words about E. Gary Gygax. Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the Godfather of Role Playing Games(RPGs), and just plain God to many a geek, left this plane on March 4, 2008.
Way back in Junior High, my Drama teacher had recommended I join the D&D Club as a way to experiment with improvisation. For my part, not only did it expand my ability to improvise, but it also made me a better writer. If you've played role-playing games for an extended period of time, you eventually realize that there are narrative structures that work, and those that don't. I eventually gave up on acting, but I owe a debt of gratitude for the role RPGs played in helping me to expand my skills as a fiction writer.
But geeks everywhere owe Gygax an even bigger debt. You see if you are/were a geek, you likely had a bit of trouble socializing. You were rejected, if not outright tormented by the cooler kids. Even amongst your own, making friends was a scary proposition. Friends for geeks (Remember, I'm speaking from experience here.) usually came by default. We aggregated together in small pockets of mutually assured self-protection.
Of course, there were always options: academic clubs, etc. However, academic clubs wouldn't appeal to every geek, and did not necessarily lead to socialization for a group that always found it difficult to socialize. Granted, in my case, life was a bit easier. I was a tough-talking, heavy-drinking geek, making me mascot material for certain groups of cool kids (see my short essay: A Little Puerto Rican.) However, having become an RPG addict, I got the opportunity to play games with a vast cross-section of geeks from all over the country; and I gleaned at least one truth: E. Gary Gygax is either directly or indirectly responsible for the rise of geek culture today.
Role Playing Games like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire the Masquerade, Paranoia, etc., not only allowed geeks a venue for socializing with each other, they also helped us develop the confidence we needed to be able interact with the rest of the world. I think the biggest fear for a typical geek was not so much that he (we're dealing with mostly males at this point, as it seems girls socialization dynamics were different back then) would get his ass beat by the jocks. It was a fear that our obvious awkwardness would lead us to say or do things whereby we would embarrass ourselves, make ourselves even more of a social pariah than we already were. If the average geek was afraid of anything, it was being wrong.
Games like Dungeons & Dragons taught us that there was no such thing as absolute right & wrong. D&D, for those who played long enough, was all about nuance. Sure, your party could gang up and slay that dragon, but perhaps if you found a way to trap it instead, you could extract from it information about its hidden treasure trove—simplistic, yet important. When our borderline Asperger personalities learned about nuance, we had the weapons we needed to take on the rest of the world. This newfound confidence even made it easier (NOT easy) to draw females into the gaming groups.
Where are we now? Well, it's no longer "uncool" to be a geek. Not only did they inspire the plethora of video games played by geeks and non-geeks alike, but D&D and RPGs inspired a whole generation of creative types who've placed their own imprint on popular culture.
And it's not just the techies that bring us much of the technology, particularly socializing technology, that makes all our lives easier than we ever needed, much less imagined. (After all, isn't your MySpace/Gather/Social-network-of-choice avatar really just an extension of who you truly are—a character of yourself.) There are plenty in the entertainment industry that owe a part of their creativity to the genre: Vin Diesel, Mike Meyers, Robin Williams, Stephen Colbert, Judd Apatow (creator/producer of Freaks & Geeks, Knocked Up, etc.) And those are just the ones who will admit it.
Add to all this the undeniable popularity of all things Geek, from movies like Revenge of the Nerds to television series like Beauty & the Geek, and it's difficult to deny that E. Gary Gygax deserves credit not just for a bunch of kids getting together to toss funny looking dice around, but for the current state of popular culture today. Rest in peace Gary.
Seven score and eight years ago another seemingly inexperienced politician from Illinois was chosen to represent his party as a catalyst for change. He too had risen through the ranks of the Illinois State legislature, followed by a brief stint in Congress. He too recognized the need to change the way politics operated in Washington. He too was nominated by his party on the basis of his grand oratory and the hope he offered of uniting the nation. Of course, most of you recognize this inexperienced yet eloquent politician as one of our greatest American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln.
Perhaps it is too soon to draw comparisons between Obama and Lincoln. After all, as of this writing, it is still not a given that Barack Obama will capture the Democratic nomination, much less the Presidency. However, the connections between the two are unmistakable, and if Obama does indeed win election to the highest office in the land, I believe it will be the ultimate fulfillment of everything Lincoln fought for.
Before I get pounced on by the history buffs, I do understand that Lincoln did not, at first, set out with the purpose of freeing slaves. If anything, his campaign was a rejection of the status quo—continual compromises with slave owners that threatened to eventually expand slavery nationally—as not just ineffective, but dangerous.
It was the general feeling in the South that every state should be able to choose whether or not to allow slavery, and their hope was that they could expand slavery into territories extending all the way to the Pacific. Meanwhile, pro-slavery forces flooded not-quite-a-state-yet Kansas with slaveholder settlements from the slave state of Missouri and elsewhere.
When the time came to create a constitution, a requirement prior to statehood, slavery proponents imported thugs from outside of Kansas to stuff ballot boxes to assure that Kansas would in fact be admitted as a slave state. The delicate balance between North & South was in jeopardy. Lincoln simply wanted to maintain that balance and hold the Union together.
Of course, things worked out a bit differently than expected. Southern states began seceding almost as soon as election results were announced, and soon after his inauguration, Lincoln and the country were thrust into a war no one really wanted. It was during the Civil War that Lincoln's beliefs evolved. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. While not abolishing slavery outright, it did lay the groundwork for what would ultimately become the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Not bad for someone whose political experience amounted to eight years in the Illinois State Legislature followed by two in Congress.
By this point, I'm sure you can see where I'm going. As a matter of fact, some might dismiss this essay as just another in a line of those I've written to support my candidate. This line of thinking is not entirely off base. However, regardless of whom you support, you can't deny that the parallels between Lincoln and Obama are fascinating. This is not to say that I believe we are a nation on the brink of internal war. Nor am I guaranteeing that Obama, should he ultimately be elected, will be as great a president as Lincoln. I do however believe in Destiny.
It feels a bit like Destiny when the first African American to have a viable shot at the Presidency can virtually tie up his nomination on the anniversary of Lincoln's Inauguration (March 4, 1861 & 1865). It also feels like destiny that 148 years later, another presumably inexperienced, yet eloquent politician rising to prominence after a tenure in the Illinois State Legislature, followed by a short stint in Congress may soon be the one who will finally fulfill Lincoln's Legacy.
Currently
reading
:
The Gettysburg Address
By
Abraham Lincoln
Release date: 02 February, 1998
amused
enlightened
I pulled this off 
catalyzed
accomplished
adventurous
bitchy
I 
awake
Seven score and eight years ago another seemingly inexperienced politician from Illinois was chosen to represent his party as a catalyst for change. He too had risen through the ranks of the Illinois State legislature, followed by a brief stint in Congress. He too recognized the need to change the way politics operated in Washington. He too was nominated by his party on the basis of his grand oratory and the hope he offered of uniting the nation. Of course, most of you recognize this inexperienced yet eloquent politician as one of our greatest American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln.
