Chuck Hatt's Open Salon Blog

Brave New Social Network

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:03:46 -0400

I’ve been thinking about this public social space known as Facebook a lot this week. Last Sunday I read an essay in the NY Times Sunday magazine in which the author reflected about the way she constructed her adult identity through a series of lonely excursions into the larger world.

She went away to college and was lonely until she made friends and found connections. Then she went away for a career and did the same thing. Now she is entering the Facebook environment and is connecting with various social contexts from her past.

Her social self is built from the identities that she has established along the way and she wonders about the identities that younger people who use Facebook are creating. When they go away to college or move away to start that new job they stay in constant touch with the old friends in ways that might circumvent what she feels is a necessary loneliness.

We all need, sooner rather than later, to outgrow our high school friends in order to achieve personal and professional potentials. How will the safe womb of Facebook affect this process?

Twice this week I have committed social indiscretions on FB. I am now in touch with people from my past who live in a very different social context. I am a blue state, uber-liberal educator who lives a college town sort of lifestyle. My casual face to face conversations reinforce a particular set of values. Some of my Facebook community are red state, conservative Christians. Of course these simplistic labels do not come close to defining the complexity and humanity of the people involved but the are indicative of a set of language norms, assumptions and beliefs.

When I’m having a conversation in this public space it’s easy to forget that over 100 people are potentially involved and that when I throw out my little semantic tics and catch-phrases I’m putting a set of assumptions, beliefs, and values out there too. And sometimes I offend.

Imagine going to a wedding or to your public library and setting up a soapbox in order to articulate your religious and political beliefs. I know, some people do but it’s an intentional act most commonly done by people who are in the throes of psychosis. It’s very easy to forget that these minute by minute comments are highly public and we are all redefining social interaction in an evolving and emerging context.

I heard a curious bit of information from my brother the other day. He has a friend who is a captain in the Michigan State Police and she says that baby-boomer involvement with Facebook is creating a tsunami-like disruption in public order. As boomers and x-ers connect with their former social contexts, ie., high school lovers, they are abandoning social norms and boundaries and creating all kinds of the predictable chaos and destruction that infidelity brings but on a very large and viral scale. I’ll be watching for more news about that........

My Favorite Boss

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:02:17 -0500

As I watched Bruce Springsteen play the Super Bowl this year I was struck by how much he is the quintessential American singer and songwriter. Bob Dylan was Woody Guthrie’s heir when history called upon him in the 1960’s and I believe that Bruce has worn that mantle for some time now.

His songs are full of the yearnings and hope of the American everyman. I remember in the ’80’s that the Reagan campaign used one of his songs. Born in the USA was intended as a statement about the shameful way our government was neglecting Vietnam era vets. (Some things never change!) Reagan was using it as a jingoistic call to patriotism. Perhaps this is why Bruce has made himself available to Democratic and progressive causes. He understands that there is no such thing as being apolitical.

Bruce is one of the few artists who can articulate us as east coast jersey boys (and girls) and also as Americans who would say, “I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me”. Springsteen has a broad and evolving understanding of the American story, a story that includes people within and beyond the borders of the US of A.

I have been catching up on the album Dust and Devils. I can’t listen to Matamoras Banks without being brought to the verge of tears. We lived in Houston for close to a decade in the east end. A neighbors were most often undocumented workers and economic refugees. It was the food, tennis shoes, and schooling for their children that brought them and after working for what seemed to be at least 60 to 70 hours a week they would celebrate with friends, bar-b-que, and beer.

Sometimes I would join them. Our conversations might go something like this:

Arturo: In my country Madonna is very, very good singer.
Chuck: La cerveza Chihuahua is my buena!

Our children would be together, all of them of toddler age and mostly engaging in parallel play. Every once in awhile they might have a conversation that went like this:

Chipper: Yes!
Jaime: No!
Chipper: Yes!
Jaime: No!
Chipper: Yes!
Jaime: No!

Then they would figure out how to share. Would that the rest of us could catch up.

I will post the lyrics to Matamoras Banks with you along with Bruce’s preface.

"Matamoras Banks"

(Each year many die crossing the deserts,
mountains and rivers of our southern border
in search of a better life. Here I follow the
journey backwards, from the body at the
river bottom, to the man walking across
the desert towards the banks of the Rio Grande.)

For two days the river keeps you down
Then you rise to the light without a sound
Past the playgrounds and empty switching yards
The turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars

Your clothes give way to the current and river stone
'Till every trace of who you ever were is gone
And the things of the earth they make their claim
That the things of heaven may do the same

Goodbye, my darling, for your love I give God thanks,
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

Over rivers of stone and ancient ocean beds
I walk on sandals of twine and tire tread
My pockets full of dust, my mouth filled with cool stone
The pale moon opens the earth to its bones
I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
The touch of your loving fingertips
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

Your sweet memory comes on the evenin' wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again
The lights of Brownsville, across the river shine
A shout rings out and into the silty red river I dive
I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
A touch of your loving fingertips
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

One World

Sun, 8 Feb 2009 10:02:59 -0500

I’m listening to a synthesis of Indian and western music this morning and wondering if the future will unfold with a new age of enlightenment and cross-cultural fertilization. Thinking back to George Harrison in the ’60’s I remember the time when Brian Jones, George, or Ravi Shankar playing the sitar was a novelty.

We listen now to music that’s been informed by a broad range of culture, religion and history. World music has become a part of popular culture.

At the same time ancient religious hatred threatens to obliterate the human race. You can go to a website and watch a beheading in “the name of god, the merciful”. Are we running out of time?

I think of the universe, “the planets in their courses and this fragile Earth, our island home”, the stars and the galaxies, as some 19th century pocket watch winding down to the end.

Are the peoples of Asia, the Americas, and Africa just bit players in the ongoing family drama of the middle eastern and Abrahamic religions? Are our stories and lives some sort of subtext and shadow of Jerusalem and Mecca

There are artists and thinkers, both young and old in which people have formed new tribes and new ways of thinking, new hybrids of expression and spirituality. But participation in these communities depends on affluence and education.

Will the west give up its prerogatives of of power and affluence and bend its technology and resources to positive ends such as education and the elimination of hunger and disease?

If not we will be trapped in the cycles of ancient religious hatred and our eschatology will become self-fulfilling prophecy.