The Invisible Library

I had never heard of the Slow Food Movement until I read this Bruce Sterling piece (link via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing) but I love the idea:

The Cornish Pilchard. The Chilean Blue Egg Hen. The Cypriot Tsamarella and Bosnian Sack Cheese. You haven’t seen these foods at McDon­ald’s because they are strictly local rarities championed by Slow Food, the social movement founded to combat the proliferation of fast food. McDonald’s is a multinational corporation: it retails identical food products on the scale of billions, repeatedly, predictably, worldwide. Slow Food, the self-appointed anti-McDonald’s, is a “revolution” whose aim is a “new culture of food and life.”
Slow Food began as a jolly clique of leftist academics, entertainers, wine snobs, and pop stars, all friends of Ital­ian journalist and radio personality Carlo Petrini. Their galvanizing moment, which occurred in 1986, was an anti-McDonald’s demonstration at which Petrini and his dining buddies brandished pasta pans while folk-dancing in the streets of Rome. This prescient intervention predated Jose Bove’s violent wrecking of a French McDonald’s by some 13 years. While the anti-WTO crowd was politically harassing corporate globalizers, Slow Food was methodically building constructive alternatives. Today, Slow Food is well-nigh as “glo­­bal” as McDonald’s but networked rather than hierarchical. Year by methodical year the Slow Food network has stuck its fingers into a host of pies.
As a nonprofit heritage organization, the Slow Food empire retains a mere 150 full-time employees with a modest budget of $37 million a year. Yet Slow Food has invented the modern Italian food-heritage industry. Today it is a thriving ganglion of local chapters, called convivia, which number about 83,000 people in more than 100 countries. It’s also a publishing house specializing in tourist guidebooks, restaurant recipes, and heritage reprints.

The whole concept is just brilliant. You popularize things– not just food, but fashion, literature, art– all the totems of culture that, by their nature, can’t be scaled up to a global market and encourage other people in other areas to do the same with their favorite things. Using the Internet, you network, getting information out to the world, spreading the knowledge of the existence of these fun, unique concepts to other people who might like them or be inspired to do something similar. Viral marketing of the homespun, rather than the hyped marketing of the mass produced. A globally networked cottage industry. This is part of a larger Slow movement that seeks to curb the stress inducing speed traps of modern life without stifling pleasure, innovation and joy.

Here’s a Utopia for you: imagine a handcrafted, do-it-yourself world comprised of a loose network of neighborhood cultures, all sharing information and ideas, inspiring one another through cooperation rather than competition, making a living rather than a killing, chasing the Long Tail rather than the immediate profit, all for the love of being creative rather than the crass desire to make a quick buck at the expense of beauty and meaning. With windmills and solar power and free range livestock, backyard gardens, boutique couture, free municipal wifi. And no ponies. Maybe it’s a little over-optimistic or naive but we can dream.

This won’t save us in the short term from the worst excesses of Capitalism run amok, which we’ll be dealing with for years to come, as we rebuild our wrecked economy. But this could give the future a shape free of the cycle of boom and bust economic models that drive countries to war and depredation, just to enrich a few corporate shareholders and drive millions of people to an early grave from stress, depression and the general malaise of mental and emotional emptiness caused by the pursuit of ever more pointless mass produced stuff.

It starts with the basics: food. Then moves on to encompass the basic necessities of life: shelter, companionship and expression. All that which is at the core of what it means to be human. Expanding from there into the arts and infrastructure of the world is a bit more of a challenge but something that is worthwhile. People reclaiming not just the means of production but the meaning in producing.

All this navel gazing about economic models and do-it-yourself sustainability leads directly into the upcoming news about my book, The Machine of the World. Watch this space.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula linked to an article by Ricky Gervais about his Deconversion Story. It’s a fantastic read and highly recommended but it reminded me that for all the Atheism talk on the blog, I’ve never gotten around to telling my own Deconverson Story.
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Is it really any surprise that Ron Paul’s favorite superhero is Batman? Every politician thinks of themselves as a crusading billionaire, out to save the world by any means necessary. But it’s especially telling that Paul, no big fan of consensual reality, would picture himself as Batman, the dark brooding, disturbed and obsessive Shadow in a world full of lunatics with crazy plots and half baked schemes. That he picked specifically Paul Pope’s Berlin Batman is even more telling, as the plot revolves around the papers of Libertarian grand dingbat, Ludvig von Mises. I seem to remember a Zeppelin in that issue as well.

How do the other candidates match up to comic book characters?

While cataloging some issues of The New Teen Titans from the late eighties, I noticed that the back cover advert for a few issues was for Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. I chuckled, remembering when that came out and how it was universally panned as the installment when the series crossed the line from frightening to silly. Then I realized that since then, they’ve made three more films.

Then it struck me: the true nature of horror is banality that never ends. It’s not a boot stamping on your face forever. It’s not the unknown made manifest. It’s not even the lurking fear of the infinite creeping up on you in the cold gray four o’clock morning. It’s some dick in the attic, wearing a sheet as a shroud and rattling chains. Who Never stops. Ever. Even after you’ve gone to a gun shop, filled out the paperwork, waited the three days for the license to clear, bought a gun and some ammunition, practiced at the firing range until you’re a Navy Seal sniper-level marksman and then marched upstairs and shot the bastard between the yes. The moment you get back down to your bedroom and settle into bed, he’s at it again with the chains and the moaning and the clanking. Forever and ever. Amen.

Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist is soliciting tales of how we Atheists and agnostics lost our faith, so I thought I’d share mine with the class.

***

My parents, born and raised Catholic, became Lutherans when they were old enough to leave the house. I don’t blame them one bit. My first girlfriend was a neurotic mess and made so by her strict Catholic upbringing. She was afraid of saying I love you too often for fear it would make the sentiment less meaningful. I stopped saying it to her altogether and never looked back.

So I was raised with a Protestant sense of the spiritual. Which means I hardly had a sense at all. Religion was a social function. You went to church in order to see the neighbors dressed in their Wal-Mart finest, sat through Sunday school where they showed you cartoons of Jesus holding a lamb and petting kittens. I was in my early teens before I actually sat down and read the Bible and found out how my Sunday School teacher neglected to mention the passages where Jesus cursed all Gentiles (non-Hebrew) as swine and vipers and went on and on about how they were bound for hell, with glee in his eyes. And the Old Testament? I still find it hard to believe that Fundies want impressionable, school age children to read about Lot letting his daughters being raped by a mob (and praise dd forit afterwards), or all the various and sundry reasons given for why slavery and genocide are a good thing.

My childhood Sundays were all about the aafternoon wich was when Star Trek, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica came on. That’s what was meaningful to me, because it was time spent with my father, talking about science and robots and how spaceships fly. So, it’s no wonder I started having doubts and questions by the age of thirteen. After all, my parents are both teachers.

But for the most part, my disbelief in God was purely academic. I could see no evidence for an invisible, intangible, absentee divinity who was nowhere yet influenced everything, which is as close to a summation of Protestant Theology as I can recall. But neither could I see any evidence against such an inconspicuous God. My agnosticism was a philosophical decision, one made after years of study and introspection and exploration.

Ultimately, however, there comes a point where you realize that the horrors of history are not personal horrors. I was not there to witness the Crusades. I was not burned as a Witch. I did not see the Conquistadors Save a Heathen Soul by running women through with lances or trampling children with their horses. These things are centuries distant from us her in the twenty-first century. As distasteful as I found them, they were not personal horrors, merely philosophical objections. At least, I used to think so. I have since decided that the dark ages aren’t over yet and may only just beginning in some parts of the world.

Like many, I am now fully aware of just what sort of modern horrors God’s faithful can come up with. And while I was not in New York City that day and didn’t loose anyone in the collapse of the World Trade Center I, like millions could not escape seeing the virtual horror replayed over and over for the following weeks. And one fact, above all the others became crystal clear: This is what people with Faith can do.

Since then I have had a tangible dislike for Religion in general and the idea of God in particular. It turns my stomach to know that millions of otherwise intelligent people can shut off their critical thinking at will and do so on a weekly basis, that millions simply refer to three thousand year old sheep herder poetry when it comes time to make a decision. Religion is the reason why most people are content to be screwed by the more Machiavellian members of our society who hide behind religious rhetoric as they lie cheat and steel their way to fame and glory and above all money. Oh and sweet, sweet altar boy ass. because they’ve been taught since childhood that what happens here doesn’t matter (so long as you aren’t having any fun. Bu t touch yourself and suddenly God gets quite irate). This is a world of suffering. Except it doesn’t have to be. I learned early on that it wasn’t the faithful who discovered the vaccine for polio, or put men on the Moon. Every great achievement in history was made by someone who put aside the silly fairy tales of our ancestors and took a good long look around and said, “yeah, I think I an make this a better world.” And then worked their ass off to do just that. No clouds parted and handed them the instructions. No leprechauns appeared with the cure for the Plague and they didn’t hunt down Unicorns. They just read and studied and experiemented, got depressed, inspired and persevered for no other reason than they wanted to acomplish something.

When I was thirteen, my parents made me attend confirmation class. it was the one and only time my parents enforced any sort of religious education, and they did so more out of a desire to keep the aunts and uncles from talking about what a godless sort we were, than out of any real desire for me to have religion in my life. So I got confirmed, all right. Reading the Bible in an organized fashion, confirmed just what a stupendously bloody foundation religion was based on. And I wanted nothing to do with it. I spent the rest of my teenage years studying other religions, out of a desire to be fair. I found eventually that they all follow the same basic template: do what the rich and powerful* say, or suffer the consequences.When I was thirteen, I decided that I’d rather suffer the consequences, because it means I can read books and admire art and think for my self. And I’ve never been happier.