Outsiders Looking In, Sarkocrats, Russian Arks, and my Ark

         I can't help wondering sometimes where I would be now if I actually had done the asylum thing in the right order, doing as I intended, and applying in France in 2003 (as I said before, when I believed it was possible to be granted or I never would have went) before going back to school. I might possibly would have been (more) French by now, (at least I would be able to speak French now) though not a citizen, nor necessarily wanting to become one (though no one anywhere in the world could argue with the value of a Euro-"Green" Card) and Tahiti might eventually have had to become for me a poor substitute for Maui.

        If that were the case, I would be more troubled now, no doubt, by Sarkozy's remarks recently, ("I am appealing to all French people to help France secure a majority ... You have only two weeks remaining to make a choice, two weeks for putting final touches to the revolution you won on April 22 and May 6. You have only two weeks to make a decision on whether, or not, to renew your confidence in me,") sounding as autocratic as ever. By French standard's I would be a right-winger as he (as most Americans would be right-of-center by European political spectrums), and probably would agree with a lot of his policies as being right for France, as I think many of Putin's policies are right for Russia, but it is their personalities though, the power grabbing, even when done in the right direction or for good reasons, they are and should be worrisome.

         Being in France might actually have made writing Humanity as Seen from an Outside Comparative Species Perspective possible (at least my version of it if that title has already been used) because pretty much immediately at the start of first thinking about it, I figured it would have been written (by me) in France in 2009. Not that I am bound by that pattern, bits and pieces of imagined or ideal futures remembered, but just as I would only have written The Power and the Mana on Haleakala, once I get it into my head of connecting what I write to a certain place and time (and sometimes external events) in the future, I either stick to it or don't bother.

         Anyone who has ever taken art seriously would know that if you can't make what you envision the way you imagine it should be, or at least close enough to how it is in your head, you wouldn't want to bother starting. And that makes sense as an artist. If your “vision” cannot be realized, it would not be your creation.

         But life is in the compromises of working with what you have. Sometimes everything not going according to plan is actually better than what you set out to do, but if you are a true artist, or a pig-head, you still would be pissed off. My walls (in my painting phase) were splattered with paint because when I would get frustrated at having made a mistake which could not be touched up, a good release was to throw the brush as hard as I could at the walls.

         The frustration came not from having made a mistake, nor from a lack of being perfect, but simply because I did not have enough money if I messed one painting up to retry it all over again, and even if I did get the money later, I would not wish to repeat it and would prefer to move on to something else, no matter how good the concept was. Life for me is a series of one-offs. Do-overs, the concept of it, it is better to put out of your head unless it is something critically important.

         And sometimes I would take a second look at my “mistakes” and see something salvageable in them, and when I cared to admit it, something better than I set out to do originally. I know the best route is interacting with what you don't expect, can't imagine initially, and combining with it to create new uncharted roads you had not originally intended on taking, but reach the same destinations in new and often better ways. That is growth, life as performance art, jazz, improvisational skits, embracing the unknown not to conquer it but to learn from it.

         The world is changing constantly. What it means to be a member of any political party, ideology, citizen, is constantly in flux because the environment that it is in is changing. I like many Americans consider myself neither left nor right, Republican nor Democrat, but have ideas and opinions which don't fit into a bottle, and where the parties themselves seem to be heading annoys not only people like me, not liking such labels, but away from their “bases”: toward blatant authoritarianism (unitary executives and brown shirts) on the right, and Democratic Leadership Council, "we do chicken (and Resource Wars) right" on the left. Letting themselves be defined by the Conservatives' arguments and language was not enough for the Democrats or “Liberals,” they have become so larva-like, they need new synonyms to be added to the political language for the term "weak."

         Tens of millions on both sides, left and right, Republicans and Democrats, have rightly felt abandoned and disenfranchised. And if you think only 2 parties is enough to represent the will and potentially all ideologies of over 300 million people, you might think that is a bad thing. Or it could be the beginning of not only expecting more, but finally demanding more. If you don't demand anything of your government, your government, even a good one, will always tell you f... off.

         Expatriates are in strange categories. They are more free to criticize their own intolerable to internal dissent governments from a distance, providing that their new host country allows it, and their “origin” state cannot “reach out and touch someone” as the old ad used to say, more aptly perhaps “smack down” WWF style than being touched, but sometimes have to walk on thin ice about talking about the politics of their new homes.

        They are the outsiders looking in, even when they live within. Their perspectives may be valuable, but their opinions are certainly not always valued, no matter their objective worth. They are that of the other, outsiders, sometimes even after you have been living there a long long time. No moral I mean to make there, just an interesting perspective to have when embodied in your circumstances, when someone is put in such a position. I was not, but can understand it.

         Polsci.com was born of some cross currents of this. It was to be political, it was to push things as far as I thought wise to take them at the time, things I would not have dared to write from within the US, but that would take shape according to circumstances. And it was shaped by my home, how I remembered it, how I thought it should be or is when it is doing things as it should. The first “Hawaiian Lyric of the Month” pretty much summed up my whole attitude toward everything at that point. ("I am staying, though I am leaving, I'm just hanging on. I found a reason for staying, I found the beauty is saying, this is my, my home." Jerry Santos, Olomana, "Home")

        I still was. What that meant had to be redefined continuously, constantly, and sometimes exponentially. That is actually what life is when you don't think you know what life is. It is then that you know it more than those who think they do. You know its potential, they know its actual. The actual must give way to the potential. The actual is fleeting. The potential is forever.

         Polsci.com, in addition to the above, and as mentioned in RCP2, was to be my ark. I had lost my name as a domain, decided to take most of what I had written before, combine it with the new things still unformed and forming, notably 2D 3D 4D 5D Thinking Made Simple and its Notes, with of course as the name suggests, things about politics. I had no illusions that the road I was embarking on was of any particular long duration, so every "issue" was to always be a capstone, if not a headstone. Finishing it off for now, and as always maybe for always, in Hawaii was far further along than I had intended when I began it, but it was sweet.

         When I first thought about writing this post, it was when I saw the movie Russian Ark a few months ago, because it was then I realized that the term “ark” best described it. I wanted to combine something similar to what I wrote above with a review of that movie, which was an astonishingly good film, if boring. I missed my chance to see the Hermitage, and probably will never get to go there, but wanted to for a long time, so seeing it in the movie was something I looked forward to as well.

         Though I did see Moscow, which was as I said before familiar to me, and another large part of why I went, to understand that better, all I saw of St. Petersburg was its lights in the distance. It was not really looking back much to see, but it was new, different, and novel. The first Russian cars I saw were junks scattered along the railroad tracks at night. “Wow,” I thought wide-eyed in amazement and straining to see them from my sleeper car, “that's a Lada! Ooh.” Strange and weird as that sounds/is/was, but it is nice to see things through new eyes, and from a safe distance, and preferably in opaque lighting, when for the first time. Once known, or thought to be known, and in light of day, they can seem to be just as rusty junk.

         But finally, to the movie review. It is hard to to do without mentioning the ending, which would spoil it if anyone were to read this (odd enough as that would be), and then to see the movie for the first time after that, (even more improbable) but still I would hate to spoil it for anyone. As I mentioned above, it is a pretty boring movie, even for someone as interested in the museum as I, though anyone can marvel at the technological achievement of it. But it is strange in a good way, and builds to an ending that is brilliantly conceived and well-executed.

        So even if it were not for the novelty of the movie (being shot with hundreds or thousands of actors in a single take), and despite its subject matter being essentially paintings and Russian history, it is ultimately a movie about life from an outsiders perspective, and so well done to almost be poetic. At least in the dim light of a movie theater, that is how it can come across, and show you life from a new perspective. In a harsh light of day, yes, it is a boring movie about paintings and history. So if you do see it, see it at night, when you have time, an open mind, and an unhurried quiet atmosphere around you to appreciate the mystery that is life, strange and new, when seen from a distance through an opaque window.