Natives watched as a liberal stronghold quickly collapsed with a simple bait and switch. How did the conservatives do it? They just repeated everything Nathan Phillips said by placing his words into their context. So why did liberals collapse so quickly? There has been an ongoing issue within the liberal community, and conservatives make the criticism often: liberals are snowflakes.
I’ve said this before: If you don’t want to be villain in fiction then don’t be one in real life. The beautiful thing about graduating from two different writing programs are the connections made between creative writers and journalists. We tend to be tasked with a similar challenge. How to captivate an audience.
You’ve done the work. Wrote the story, painted the painting, soldered the jewelry, sculpted the clay, or weaved the basket. You’ve put in the hours at the workstation, lost yourself in the art, creating work unique and powerful and meant to contribute to a collective of voices echoing from generations past. Then you take the work into the world. Now it’s time to dance with the “crabs in the barrel” and the “fake In’dins.”
One of my favorite lines in The Crow is when Eric (Brandon Lee) has T-Bird (David Patrick Kelly) duct taped to the drivers seat of his car, as its filled with explosives and aimed at a pier leading toward a harbor. T-Bird can’t believe Eric has come back to life as The Crow and as he struggles through whimpers he says, “Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.”
So I’m walking through a bookstore in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico and I’m reading blurbs. I’m not going to blast any artists. That’s not what I’m about. We all come from a different set of experiences. But why are mainstream book publisher publishing the same narrative over and over and over and over? These blurbs seeming lay out different storylines, but when you look at the macro’s macro you start to see a pattern.
Sometimes I wonder about the critical thinking skills of our era. We are taught in school rote behavior. Regurgitate, bell rings, regurgitate, bell rings, regurgitate, bell rings. In that form of habitualization, we stop thinking for ourselves. You become even more aware of this tactic after you read “Social Class and School Knowledge” by Jean Anyon. Having had dropped out of school after the sixth grade I wonder how that impacted my ability to think critically about the world around me and its role in my nonconformity. I’m comfortable on the periphery. From this vantage point I find it odd how quickly our society went from hipster beards to tiki torches.
If you’ve ever watched a documentary on sharks then you’re familiar with the feeding frenzy. This is when a school of sharks start to feed on prey. It can be an attack on a single victim or a school of other fish, but once the feeding begins the energy multiplies over and over as the sharks feed. Soon the sharks are feeding in such a panic it’s as though they can’t stop themselves. Now I’m about to compare this activity to the way negative types make friends.
Do you think you watch the behavior of dark skinned males more closely than other people? Maybe you feel you don’t. Then you have to watch this video:
You were plugging away on the keyboard, doing your thing, writing your stories, singing the songs you want to sing, and then out of nowhere you get attacked by some overly competitive asshole. If you’re not competitive, then why would someone go out of their way to compete against you?
