APDA Summer 2011: Semifinals from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

This was the case Dave & Kyle were going to run in Nats Finals had they gotten there. Instead, Dave & I had fun with the sisters Sanders in this round that is not precisely an exemplar of full decorum. Enjoy:

APDA Summer 2011: Round 1 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

Debate: “Would You Get Rid of Religion?” from David on Vimeo.

APDA Summer 2011: Round 2 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

APDA Summer 2011: Round 3 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

In any case, on this particular planet, I’m staring down an epic roadtrip in less than a fortnight that’s got some event changes possible at the front-end that I’ll update as soon as I know what those are. In the meantime, I wanted to share a tour video from another roadtripper, the herein over-discussed Allison Weiss, who just released a recording of one of the new songs as she played it at the Princeton show I attended! This song, like so many of hers, captures exactly how I’m feeling, but this day in particular. And it’s a rerun of something I already saw. The world is like that all the time, kids. Just open your eyes and your mind.

“Today, I take you into my arms and into my heart and promise to hold you there forever. Through whatever we encounter, I promise you my unfailing love and my unflinching honesty. I know that my life can never be the same without you. It can never be complete without your love, your understanding, and your support. I love you in a way that I’ve never loved another person and I never will be able to again. You are my soulmate. This is why today is the happiest day of my life, as I stand here before you, and our family, and our friends, and all of God’s creation and I commit myself to you and to our lives together. I love you.”
-Emily Garin, as she became Emily Clayton, 13 July 2003

We naively thought for a while that we would hit some sort of cap or be in for some sort of record, but a tiny bit of quick research proved both of those notions were absurd – there’s apparently a Facebook post with over 305,000 comments and counting out there. Never question the ability of humanity to push an envelope. It was in that spirit, and the spiraling reflection of what a strange, somewhat magical, and overall confounding phenomenon this post was, that I wrote this stream-of-consciousness evaluation, in what ultimately proved to be two comments with a Postscript, this morning. I present it here unedited, typos and all, as it was written:

One thousand, six-hundred, and seventy-two comments. Why is it standard procedure to put hyphens before “hundred” and the last two numbers of a large number, but not thousand or more? That seems odd. I am also breaking the longest silence in this thread’s history, of about 3 hours. It looks like the longest gap prior to this was about 15 minutes or so, but it may have been less. It’s strange that Facebook conceals precise times for things until over a day after they’ve happened. It seems strangely revisionist, even though it’s clear that their reason for approximating things in proximity to the current time is to make things seem somehow more “live” and exciting. Not that this phenomenon could possibly have anything to do with spawning threads of over 1600 comments in 7 hours. Of course, we also have to recognize that while Facebook may not have anticipated this usage of comment-threads, they certainly seem to deem it a form of “working as intended,” since they’ve done nothing to stop or alter it. And some of the publicity around the 305,000+ thread must indeed make them pretty pleased with themselves. As though an entity like Facebook could have a monolithic opinion like that. Perhaps they have endless boardroom debates about whether or not they should cap the number of comments. Which raises another interesting question I’ve always wondered about, which is why there is no limit on comment length when there’s a rather draconian limit on status lengths, one that I routinely (about 1/5 times I try to post a status) trip over. And then they prompt you to write a note, which basically, formatted the way they are in Facebook, has a big sign on it that says “Irrelevant!”. In any event, it seems bizarre that they would cap that and pretty much nothing else. Do they fear some massive escalation prompted by 850-word status updates that prolongs everything else. But why wouldn’t they want that? Of course, I don’t know for a fact there’s no cap on comment characters, though I’m likely to find out at this rate. It could be that what I’m writing right now is not actually being published and has to be broken into a (heaven forbid!) second comment. It’s like a Schrodinger’s cat problem (oh God, I mentioned cats in this thread), whether the cat’s in the box or not. Is this sentence in the original comment as intended or not? I won’t know until I press enter. But I guess you could say “I’m doing it wrong” with this comment, if the point is to extend the number of comments to our ultimate, if dubious, glory. Of course it’s tremendously silly to start doing things like Adam did last night, posting one letter at a time, but mostly because that limits or eliminates discourse altogether. Which prompts the ultimate question, the one that most of you must be asking yourself right now (as though you’ve actually read this mono-paragraph all the way through, though I suppose you might have, and I maybe suggest you copy/paste into Word and insert line-breaks at sentences for added clarity, because this is a lousy way to read), which is, of course, what was it about this post and this series of early comments last night that was able to produce the maelstrom when most of these threads die out after a (relatively!) merciful 30-50 comments? There was a thread about Waffle House a few weeks ago that crossed triple-digits and I recall thinking a comment-thread about WikiLeaks on Reid’s wall hitting 65 comments or so was a sign of great discourse, but of course that actually had predominantly meaningful commentary and debate. It occurs to me at this point that I will be surprised if it actually accepts a comment this long. Insert sexual joke here. Ditto. But seriously. Also, naming Adam and Reid and getting the brief suggestion of tagging them from Facebook reminds me that there is a limit on number of tags in a comment or post. Which makes me wonder how they arrived at the number 6. Five seems so obvious, but 6 actually more convenient (and not just for the trivial reason that it’s +1). It makes me wonder how many things are done in pairs besides debate teams, because that’s what I find it most useful to call out, for example when Rutgers broke 3 teams at UVa. Not that I’m just gratuitously bringing that up. Or am I? In any event, I’m now torn between maxing out my six tags or leaving this as an untagged monument to “doing it wrong” in this thread. Although of course part of the magic of this thread is its lack of gratuity (hear me out) because, unlike just posting single letters repeatedly or even starting to read out of a random Dickens book like some bloated filibuster, the mysterious alchemy that can spawn a 1600+-post thread derives from its ability to entertain a large number of people for a long period of time. Which I would probably levy as a response to any people coming to harshly critique the alleged gratuity of this endeavor. After all, can you really say this thread is less valuable than time spent watching a TV show or, indeed (to reference my own activity last night), a baseball game? Certainly it’s interactive and lively. There was a palpable excitement in most, if not all, participants. A small injection of a sense of wonder. A spawning of micro-communities as people discussed entirely different things but, while they faced periodic criticism, no one was excluded from one main thread. Making it very different than forums or chatrooms designated for specific purposes to the exclusion of others. It almost gave me renewed hope for some sort of small utopian socialist community someday. At the same time, I realize that in analyzing it this deeply, one starts to kill part of the magic, as in overexplaining why a joke is funny. If people fully understood why this thread was so enthralling, it would detract from the magical nature of finding it so and thus take the sheen off the entire experience, to the extent that there is one. I recognize that some people are merely truly pained or annoyed by this, and at least a few people liked particular comments but wisely (?) restrained themselves from actually posting, lest they be besieged by notifications. It also occurs to me to wonder what the relative word-count of this comment is (gee, I sure hope they let it be just one comment and that it loads properly and stuff) to the entire thread before it. Even I, on a morning where I eventually have to go to work, don’t aspire to write a piece longer than the original work which I am appending, though it would be an incredibly commentary to do so. I will have to settle for merely having at least one word for every comment made prior, although I have no idea where I am relative to such a goal. This comment now takes up over six full lines when pasted into Notepad, which forces line-breaks after only a very long time. I know this because I have dealt with computers frequently and pasting into Notepad and periodically saving is a necessary adaptation (take note, kids!) to a world where certain web applications can crash at any moment and working this long on something to find it go up in smoke is one of the most heartbreaking experiences one can have short of, y’know, real heartbreak. Although there is something similar in each, of course, in the idea of working so hard on something or spending so much time with something/someone, only to have it come to nothing in the end, only to have loss. In both cases, there is memory, but the memory of how great something was only serves to enhance the pain of the loss. Wow, this is really similar. And I’m painting myself into a sad, sad corner. And at the beginning of the day too. I went a really long time without doing that in this comment. Although, frankly, and you can probably tell, this actually hasn’t taken that much time to write, which ought be a lesson to all of you paper-writers out there, that something of length doesn’t necessarily take much time to write as long as you feel really comfortable with your material. Although most debaters know that, I would suspect, since debating makes you a faster writer by making you think on your feet in complete and persuasive sentences. Microsoft Word has me at 1,439 words prior to the beginning of this sentence here, which actually surprises me as being a little shorter than I would’ve expected, but so it goes. Guys, I had dreams about this comment thread last night and awoke to think they were more surreal than most of the dreams I have about things which are not actually things. At this point, my computer is really laboring through the process of processing this comment and I’ve probably said most of what I want to say, but I’ve pretty much set an explicit bar for myself of exceeding the number of comments prior with words herein, so it’s pretty much you and me and my recognition that I have to get there at this point, if you are still reading, which I would have doubted prior to the comment thread which inspired this post here, but of course the rules seem somehow changed by this whole thing and in the context of this whole thing. Which says something, at the least, about human adaptability. I almost feel as though I could challenge someone to do anything or virtually anything in this comment thread and people would pool resources and unite in order to rise to the occasion. Possibly ironic use of the word “rise” there, though it calls to mind pole-vaulting or similar, wherein even if what you’re doing is sort of needless and silly, it still has meteoric value as a testament to human endeavor and triumph. I mean, what skill could pole vaulting possibly demonstrate other than sheer human ability to do mind-boggling stuff? And do you ever think about what we recognize as tremendous and what we don’t have a way of recognizing and how trivial the differences are between those things? I know this is going to bother those of you still clinging to capitalism and arguments that the market solve, but there really is no correlation (or little, I would definitely posit) between work and reward, between impressiveness of a feat and structures to recognize that feat. How someone out there is the most talented person at a sport not yet invented (let’s say Calvinball for the sake of argument/illustration), but they will never get to rise above janitor or truck-driver (no offense, Ashley) because no structures are in place to acknowledge their skill, and so they will struggle their whole life with drugs and depression and loneliness because society has arbitrarily deemed them to be unsuccessful. Whereas, on the other hand, a great success in football or basketball in baseball can thrive in a sport invented and earn almost unfathomable amounts of money, power, prestige, and notoriety, living as a veritable modern king in our society. Yes, a certain athletic prowess is certainly translatable from one sport to another, but let me at least tell you a story about this to illustrate my argument. I used to live in Oregon and they are quite big on their recycling there and were a forerunner of recycling/deposit incentives and one day I went with my Dad to a recycling center in a grocery store and we had bags and bags of cans and bottles and jumbled recyclables and we handed them over for our deposit and the kid there (he was maybe 17 or 19 or something) took the bag and sorted it like some dervishing Hindu god, just all arms flying and spinning and never placing a can or bottle or green bottle or plastic bottle wrong, boom, boom, boom, boom, the whole thing was over in a matter of seconds and I was floored by the sheer talent this kid had for seamlessly, efficiently, instantly sorting recyclable items. And then something occurred to me almost immediately, it being obvious in front of me, and I said to my Dad that this was an impressive skill which our society was not in any way designed to appropriately recognize or compensate. For, almost paradoxically, if it were, this kid could not be here in a lowly rural part of Oregon sorting 5-cent recyclables. So walk not from this comment thinking that we are at the terminal point of our understanding of anything, be it radiation and cell-phones or how to structure a society. Or, indeed, how to prolong a Facebook thread. There is much to be learned in the future and I am excited to see what happens next with all of you alongside.

Postscript: Apparently the cap is 8,000 characters for a comment. Where they came up with that, I have no idea, but I doubt they expected someone to test it that often. It does also renew my wonder at the fact that they haven’t capped threads themselves, but that discussion remains for another time (or perhaps for all-time).

The pattern clearly being expressed of late is that lousy methods of power-generation are going to kill us. No, really, they are. And probably a good bit faster than the relatively glacial pace of the alleged global warming/climate change/neo ice-age/buy fluorescent bulbs movement. I’ve long considered the above to be sort of a noble lie, a bit of a fudging of things in order to get us to move away from patterns of global organization and behavior that are clearly problematic for other reasons. Basically, if Al Gore’s theology is the only reason you’re going to cut down on your waste and lobby for better energy sources, it’s better than not taking those steps at all. Except, you know, when you believe that individuals instead of corporations move the bar on these things, or when you believe that buying new things to replace old functional things is somehow the solution. But hey.

Getting back to the point. Oil will kill us. Nuclear power will kill us. Coal will kill us. Not slowly, not over time, but quickly and fiercely and with the power of a dark, choking asphyxiation. And you can sit there and say “Gee, isn’t it funny that we went through a massive phase where coal-mining cave-ins were the biggest news story on the planet, and that was almost immediately followed by a massive phase where the biggest, most devastating oil spill was the biggest news story on the planet, and that was almost immediately followed by the emerging reality of sequential nuclear meltdowns triggered by a highly predictable and common event being the biggest news story on the planet – wow that must be random.” You can say that to yourself if you want to. But if you do, with that conclusion, then, respectfully, you are an idiot. And you should think about what is making you an idiot and how you can fix that.

I’ve posted a bit (mostly on Facebook, which is starting, even for me, to steal time away from this page) about Zeitgeist lately and the accompanying movement and the three movies and all that. And while I find their dismissiveness about deeper meaning and accompanying faith in science to be in line with what I criticize above, I do at least value the movement’s general sense of urgency about the problems facing our planet and the obvious unacceptability of what so many people unthinkingly put up with on a daily basis. One of the most frustrating things about being alive on Earth at this stage of history is having to feel crazy all the time for finding the problems apparent in almost every aspect of human structures to be so obvious while everyone else thinks they’re more or less fine (or at least intractable). I’m not saying it would be easy to create Utopia tomorrow, but it does seem clear that major steps we could take in that direction are relatively simple and apparent. And they all just require that internal recognition of what’s distracting us and how to get away from it.

Of course, I can also see the extreme effectiveness of capitalism as a general system in distracting us from what’s important. Surely capitalism isn’t the only structure in place keeping us from realizing the potential we really have to improve our lot and our planet’s lot, but it’s by far the biggest and most effective at present. Discussion of creating actually sustainable forms of power that lack the ability to go awry and destroy ecosystems or small swaths of civilization (or perhaps the entire planet’s ecosystem and civilization) is waved down by the shrugging declaration that the market will somehow solve for calamity, that the invisible hand is smart enough to anticipate short- and long-term consequences that don’t involve money. It’s relatively obvious to the thoughtful that corporations will not start investing with any seriousness in sustainable forms of energy until unsustainable ones have become unprofitable. And it should be relatively obvious now that the risks associated with those more traditional forms of energy are overriding any profit gained from their use. Unfortunately, the profit motive has no slot for accounting for human welfare.

When a government is found to be oppressive, people are lauded and cheered for rebelling against that system. Why not with an economic mode of oppression as well? Here is a clear and stark demonstration of the fact that corporations, capitalism, and the system that keeps them in place as the dominant ways of conducting human affairs are going to kill us. Quickly and painfully. They will kill our animals, they will kill our people, they will kill our way of life. You know, all those things terrorists are allegedly about to do because they “hate” us. Except that capitalists are indifferent to such things, something that can prove far more devastating than hate. Hate at least acknowledges the need for value structures, emotions, prioritization of values. Indifference is lethal, is swift in its disregard. Yeah, that’s right. I said it. I fear capitalists far more than terrorists. The capitalists are actually killing us in high volume numbers, and with far less self-awareness.

So what’s the prescription? What’s the answer to watching every form of popular energy generation go haywire and cause increasing levels of disaster? What’s the answer to watching economic riots generate massive instability and upheaval that also offers the opportunity for change? It’s to embrace the change, to push it further, to take advantage of the power of examination that comes from things being difficult, to start advocating stringently and ardently for an end to the status quo. For something, anything, to replace the currently accepted standards of resource distribution and the currently accepted resources themselves. For the process by which we change these things and which we ultimately decide on to account for things like human meaning and the importance of human values and lives, not merely faith in that system itself. Devoted faith in any system, be it the scientific method, the invisible hand, the concept of randomness, or even the concept of democracy, can blind us to the flaws and failings of such systems. And as we are seeing all over the world, this yields disastrous consequences.

I pray for the people of Japan, just as I did for those on the Gulf Coast and those trapped in mines and will continue to for all the victims of our idiocy. It is not kind that this world requires death as the only antidote to stupidity, that until people start keeling over in large numbers, no one pays attention. It is perhaps the natural consequence of an overpopulated planet in a rudimentary stage of development. It will not always need to be so. But I do hope that these people and those like them can be spared to the greatest extent possible, while we still manage to learn from their suffering.

Which reminds me, before I close, about one of the last major earthquakes in Japan and what hypocrisy and myopia that one reminded me of. Since nothing really became of this poem I wrote in 1995, I might as well attach it here as another addendum about the nature of humanity and how the answers should be clear, or at least clearer. This was written on January 21, 1995, four days after the major Kobe earthquake of that year, amidst Japan initially refusing aid from the West and getting massive criticism for this decision.

SHAKEN EARTH
by Storey Clayton

but all Tied to the World.