Tag: Oslo

Last summer day

The academic calendar starts just about now.

A different season. Different drum beat.

Formula and conjugation.

Grades and test scores.

Cafeteria and classroom.

Principal and peers.

Pranks and punishment.

Same starting point, different finish lines.

Education is democratic in nature.

I admire people in wheel chairs, still being wheeled their way around the library, trying to reach up to the latest titles (Tillman or Unbroken).

I wish we could apply Moore’s Law to our cognitive development.

As it turns out, our brain capacity can process much more information, forming knowledge stream, and turning them into usable grains of wisdom (emotional and social intelligence).

The end of all learning should be to form a capacity for empathy, to see others in their historical and social context, from their frame of reference.

This is the underlining assumption of many art forms such as cinema and work of fiction.

In fact, we need escapism. During the Great Depression, Hollywood did quite well.

This time around, cinema still manages to stay afloat (without McCarthyism).

We also enjoy the news as presented live and downstream much faster thanks to broadband connection. Newsbreak has been more interesting than fiction (The Social Network, Arab Spring and London Summer – which BTW, an antithesis to the fairytale version of the Royal Wedding , same version as earlier centennials’).

This summer has been a summer of disasters, from environmental (drought) to economic *(drought), from political blunder to criminal assaults (Oslo).

But our kids are back to school. It’s a blessing in disguise. It brings back normalcy.

Or something like it. It reminds us that we have been there,and are still here years later.

Had we known then, what we know now.

That vantage point could only be viewed from hindsight.

It’s called exposure and experience. It’s called empathy. It’s called optimism, because the last summer day, actually signifies the beginning of a beautiful Fall, with foliage and cool fronts. In Vermont and Maine, Fall actually is the most beautiful and livable time.

Hopefully, it’s a start of a new fiscal year and fiscally restrained calendar for leaders around the world. Remember, they once started this season like everyone else: in an elementary classroom. Same starting point, different finishing lines.

Certain summer

For young people, it’s a time for recreation, renewal and reviewing school materials.

For politicians, it’s time to pay the bills from Cold Wars, Star Wars, and Gulf Wars ….

For us, consumers, it’s a time to conserve fuel and energy, or just to stay cool.

One quote sticks, uttered by a friend of those who were killed in Oslo “Think of so much hate in one man, and how much more love in all of us together”.

Darkness and light. In each of us. Grant us the serenity.

There is fortunately a certain summer in all the seasons.

I like mature voices (like Terry Jacks or Gordon Lightfoot) who sang about lost innocence.

They lamented about a time that had slipped away undetected. Call it romanticism. Call it naivete. But we need leaders who can rouse the dreams.

We know what reality is like. And since we don’t like it, we invent an alternate one (..like an old-time movie)  with the help of our “high priests”: singers, entertainers, preachers and politicians, all masters and  manipulators of symbols.

Stephen King made this point clear: to write is to create another world. Once he took us inside a vacated hotel in the thick of winter (the Shinning) and moved us through the degenerative process of a defunct writer.

With Earth 7 billion, we’ve got sustainability issues.

Living in an age of de-leveraging.

Summer time in Greece and not in Grease.

“Skinned our heads and skinned our knees”.

I am finishing up “How the West was Lost” which depicts current reality in hard numbers. (as of this edit, Stockman releases his the Great Deformation volume).

Who is ultimately responsible? Fannie Mae? Greenspan? Clinton?

The rich-poor gap is so widened that the only people who feel stinky rich are the nouveau  rich in China mainland,

(rich people in the US dress down quite deliberately to blend in as “the millionaire next door”) with their Bentley’s and Gucci’s.

Summer traveling, with French waiters and Chinese tourists.

New world order.

Modern historians will be chronicling about Chinese in Paris.

(BTW, they are the ones who can afford “classical” music and high arts).

Meanwhile, the latest Economist issue features Westerners as the new Japanese (lost decades).

This summer in Oslo is also a turning point for the once Nordic Paradise.

To find Seasons in the Sun, one has to go further than Somalia, Sarasota or Singapore.

Maybe it’s a Lonely Planet after all. It’s the summer in our selective memory while reality is that of a declining  West. We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun… Mature voices, innocent times. If you can read my mind…, it’s like an old-time movie.

Disco distraction

That’s what we need. Late 70’s, we also got gas price hike.

We got “a crisis of confidence”. And we got Middle East hostage situation that drove Nightline ratings over the top.  But we also got disco. It helped.

Distraction did not solve any problem. It just got our minds off the situation at hand. For however long the studio, most famous of all, 54, still opened.

Shiny shirts, bell-bottom pants, and yes, the disco ball.

Travolta, the Soul Train and the Bee Gees.

Everybody boogied.

Everybody heard of or listened to “Le Freak“.

Actually, it’s not the kind of music to be listened to, like “Air on the G-string“.

It’s dance music.

And for 15 minutes (Andy Warhol was there at studio 54) of fame, the disco era was gone.

For good.

Dancing Queen (no longer seventeen) and the Abba, all gone.

The hostage rescue effort failed. The Star Wars shield was dreamed up then took the Wall down along with it.

The Challenger went up in flame while the Concord got canned.

Now, NASA has to hitch a ride, and the Chinese bullet train hit its target (another train going on the opposite track). Everybody outspent their allotted 15 minutes of fame. Middle Eastern and Western terrorists also got their air time and equal time (Fort Hood in uniform vs Oslo, also in uniform).

I know now why we need a disco distraction: it arrived at the time when race, gender and class were all blended on the dance floor, under the ball. As long as you can afford some tight clothes, hitch a ride across the Brooklyn Bridge, then you are in.

Take your turn in the middle of the circle, and take some steam off (Saturday Night Fever).

Everybody got his/her turn in that tribal circle and the DJ was our Priest.

We melted from one disco song to another and the beat carried us through the night. Distraction? yes. Destruction? no.

Fast forward to 2011, everybody forms into “circles” (we used to call it cliques).

And with google’s SEO, google’s Plus etc…we only hear and see what we most want to “search” ( selective revelation and association). To stand out, we must pay attention to personal branding and (first) page-ranking.

No wonder the Oslo’s terrorist planned ahead not only his exit, but also his defense, his manifesto, and his image (preppy crusader and defender of an imperial past), all well crafted to maximize his allotted 15 minutes of fame. And we (and the cable news media) ate it up.

Without disco distraction, we have to face gas price, debt talk, and death toll with nowhere to turn to, except online, his planned pulpit for hate and intolerance. Disco, a distraction? Yes. The Oslo terrorist, a destruction? Yes. Now we know who is “Le Freak”.