Training Ground

I am reading Living Islam Out Loud, edited by Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur and composed of real life stories by Muslim American women. Asra Nomani starts her piece by describing her childhood conception of “leadership” as something outside herself, possible by others, meant for others, never to be embodied and embraced by herself. Something about that description made me put the book down and think, “hmm.” And from “hmm” came the urge to muse a little bit, for a little while, in the ways of the Peanut Gallery. So here I am.

Nomani’s struggle to embody leadership hits home…and hard. A couple months ago, I began to figure out that I have an internal roadblock, a voice telling me incessantly I can’t achieve my out-of-the-box dreams because I don’t know enough, I’m not good enough, I don’t know the right people or the right steps and everything takes too long and is too complicated. Being married to an entrepreneur who is constantly cooking up something fresh, I am often inspired. But unlike the calm practicality with which he takes steps to convert his epiphanies into cool inventions (he calls it “execution”), I tend to get perplexed and give up on my ideas almost as soon as I begin to conceptualize the steps it’ll take to bring them to life. Something about the reality part of creativity throws me for a loop.

Nomani states, “[l]eadership often emerges at times of crisis when we are faced with critical and fateful choices.” For her, that moment came when she was treated as second-class at her local mosque and realized that most Muslim women were treated similarly at mosques across the nation. Her leadership emerged in response to that crisis. What is my crisis? What will jolt me out of my inability to believe myself capable of applying my intellect and determination to the creation of cool new books and businesses and other crazy, beautiful stuff?

In some ways, I have already been jolted. Shocked, shaken, thrown into the middle of leadership. Not in the form of literary projects I envision – not yet, anyway. So far it has manifested in the form of taking control of my mother’s financial future and resolving a number of pending business and investment matters in the wake of my father’s death. Yes, it’s been a year and a half since he passed away. A year and a half since I’ve been doled these responsibilities. A year and a half that I have felt overwhelmed. But I have been imbued with a new sense of leadership, fostered by the urgency of crisis.

If I can make it through that mess, with money and real estate and insurance companies and all that boring-but-scary practical stuff, then maybe it won’t seem so foreboding when I apply it to my dreams. I shall consider it lessons learned in execution.

Spirals

Here's something I jotted down a year and a half ago, when I was sitting in my father's bedroom during his final days. As he slept, I sat deluged in the glow of the computer screen.

I can't figure out Time. As a concept of limitedness, it has always inspired my activism, but as a marker of our mortality, it takes on an entirely different hue. Even activism doesn't seem like enough. My dad is very sick and Time seems to be both standing still and moving much too quickly. I am suspended somewhere between this stillness and this panic, and am trying to glean God's lesson in it without letting fear overcome the desire to learn and to appreciate the complexity of it all.

******

In Einstein's Dreams, a book about Einstein's theories of Time and its relation to beauty, ambition, love, dreams, and realizations, Time is described as linear, circular, moving backward, forward, stuck in the past, the future, and, for the lucky few, in the present. I have spent much of my life in many of these various modes and think, perhaps, that the present is beckoning me to yet another concept of Time.

******

When you live your life in constant interaction with God's Signs, nothing is trivial and everything is beautiful. It makes an imperfect present a perfect stepping stone to a greater future. Time, for me, has thus always been both the tunnel and the light at the end. I have experienced life, and have lived to experience it.

******

Time is both the circle and the line. I work on my present, knowing it'll one day be my past, and I have learned that our past always somehow interferes with our future. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do with Time what you would want Time to do with you. When I think about my present as if it were also my past and my future, I know better what to do.

******

If Time is moving backward, forward, in circles and lines, in squares, triangles, spirals--if it is telescopic and scattered--then perhaps the best way for me to deal with Time now is to put aside my ideas of past and future and somehow let myself be caught in Time's motion and shape. In spirals there are recurrent beginnings and ends, and I think that I can find comfort in that…at least for now.

Killing Time

I haven't written for about a week now, and contrary to what I had told myself about posting structured blog entries only, I have succumbed to the pressures of work, fatigue, and lack of time and am writing free-style now.

So I'll take a moment to contemplate fun. I think my previous entries may have painted me, as the Peanut Gallery, as a most un-fun entity. I rail against frivolity, mindlessness, conformity, news as entertainment, and even poor Khadra's moral confusion. But I am not against fun, and these days, having fun is the main thing on my mind.

I think my preoccupation with fun has to do with this frustration that my husband and I always work so hard at our careers and lives, amass wealth and success, but when we finally try to apply some of that wealth to having some fun, our plans are often foiled. Either because we're too tired, or some weird happening of nature screws up our day, we end up attending lavish dinners and grand stage productions but, in the end, just feel like going home, pulling on our PJs, and eating pizza in front of the tube. The more we plan "fun", the more it ends up being totally not so.

And, of course, in the ways of the Peanut Gallery, I can't help but generalize this foiled fun to some larger concept. Like the purpose of life. Since my father's passing, I have been faced - and sometimes accosted - with the question of mortality and I've often answered it with total complacency. We work, eat, sleep, spend time with the family, attempt to grow spiritually, and then we die. 'Tis life in all its glory. Sure, there's beauty and intrinsic worth in the family and spirituality part of it, and maybe even in the education and career part of it. But ultimately, it seems like we all follow a formula, or struggle to find a pattern in our lives. Unless we can transcend that struggle long enough to glimpse what lies beyond, it seems like life, and all that we do, can end up being a constant attempt at killing time. We work to kill time. We play to kill time. We just kill time .. until time is up.

Ok, I think I've managed to ruin the fun again.

The Age of the Internet

The Peanut Gallery is part and parcel of the larger trend of culture watchers, those who analyze trends in society and comment upon their long term effects. One such culture watcher is Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In Amusing Ourselves, published in 1985, Postman argues that while other countries may need to heed the warnings of Orwell’s 1984, in America we should be more afraid of Aldous Huxley’s prediction in A Brave New World that society will become controllable by essentially becoming frivolized. (Note: Just to be clear, neither Postman nor I are against entertainment. Postman is saying that TV is best when it's pure fun; only when TV purports to relay serious messages as entertainment does it become problematic.)

Postman’s thesis is premised on the rise of the television and the effects that such mode of communication has on how we, as a society, think, interact, conceptualize. That is, if the primary mode of communication is one that is focused on quick sound bytes, imagery, and simplified messages, then society itself will learn to think in this manner and tune out information that is more thoughtful – information that, ultimately, is not entertainment.

To give you a clearer picture of what Postman is talking about, consider the following excerpts. The first one describes the way news is delivered through the television medium:

“‘Now…this’ is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and not to be taken seriously.” (99)

Not only does the “now…this” format separate different news stories so that they fail to form one unified message, but they trivialize our perception of public information more generally:

“I do not mean that the trivialization of public information is all accomplished on television. I mean that television is the paradigm for our conception of public information. As the printing press did in an earlier time, television has achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it. In presenting news to us packaged as vaudeville, television induces other media to do the same, so that the total information environment begins to mirror television.” (111)

If news stories, delivered through the televised medium, can become entertainment, so can topics of more transcendent value, like religion. More than public discourse is at risk; the very nature of our introspection is compromised. No longer are we encouraged to contemplate abstractions; the focus instead is on TV personalities:

“Both the history and the ever-present possibilities of the television screen work against the idea that introspection or spiritual transcendence is desirable in its presence. The television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always available for your amusement and pleasure.” (120)

Postman’s work is a couple decades old and almost entirely focused on the television; his book thus seems a bit outdated given that much of modern-day discourse occurs through or in connection with the internet. The internet, with news sites, online magazines, and a plethora of blogs, many of which offer meaningful discussion on matters of public concern, is the direct opposite of the TV. That is, the internet seems to encourage reading and people can stay informed about world events with a frequency and depth that before wasn’t as easily possible. The focus seems to be back on words, and not just images. Unlike TV, the internet appears to encourage readers to not only connect the dots but also read beyond a single news story to get a fuller picture and a variety of viewpoints on any given issue or event. Democracy itself is furthered and encapsulated by the internet, which fosters not only access to information but also allows readers to participate in debates. Readers from across the world can debates news and social commentary.

Although the internet appears to ameliorate concerns that American society will turn away from public discourse in favor of pure entertainment, it seems to me that the answer can’t be that simple. The TV continues to play a major role in American society – so how does the news-as-entertainment aspect of TV and the serious, democratic discourse of the internet work together? Is the internet stopping or even slowing down the TV-induced frivolization of public discourse? How does the rise of YouTube and other forms of TV-on-the-Internet affect this relationship and the seriousness of public discourse more generally?

The right answer may (or may not) be that TV has been replaced as the primary means by which people receive information and is merely an accessory to the internet, where people get their real news and engage in real discourse. Maybe the TV points people to the issues they should read about and research on the internet. Or maybe TV does more than that, initially shaping the debate which ultimately gets played out online.