Halliburton

There are people in this world, I’m sure, who take issue with the way Chomsky and me paint a picture of good and evil, a black and white world where we all have a choice to make. We’re considered naïve by the vast majority of our population because we purport to be able to navigate the gray areas of the world which make it so complex and interesting.

But you and me and every rational person can agree that Halliburton is horrible. Everyone knows that they make their money best by making the world worse. While other corporations might just feed into the system that starts wars, Halliburton leads the pack in as many slimy ways as possible. Just check wikipedia.

This is a company who built with much gusto the fantastic Guantanamo Bay prison facility. This is a company who served expired food rations to soldiers in Iraq, then overcharged the Army for the contract. This is a company who will not rest until we have guzzled up all the oil on Earth.

So, knowing this, you can imagine how shocked I was when I saw a lil placard on campus saying that Halliburton itself was going to be recruiting at UT. I thought for sure a company like this wouldn’t just waltz into one of the more liberal institutions of the country and find more stooges to stock its cubicles. I thought for sure there’d at least be a few alt-looking types who would protest outside and get a nice lil article in the Daily Texan followed by a few fiery letters to the editor. And I definitely hoped there are very few if any UT students who want to work for Halliburton.

I guess I got caught up in some stuff I read for class. In a civil rights history class the previous week, I read about a time Dow Chemical, the company who manufactured Napalm for the Vietnam War, tried to recruit at San Jose State University in 1967. A riot of 2,000 students broke out on campus, and the police had to use tear gas. The recruiter, who had encountered demonstrations pretty much everywhere, said the students at San Jose State were like wild animals, screaming “murderer” and “fascist.” Look at me with a straight face and tell me you wouldn’t have liked to be there.

Now, I really wasn’t expecting all that from us in this day and age, but I had to go to the meeting posing as a bright-eyed b-schooler to at least see the minor uproar caused by Halliburton coming to UT. Wearing slacks for the first time since my last day at work this summer, I took a deep breath and walked right into the hostile environment.

There were no protests at all, of course, and there are several students who would love to make the world a worse place. They seemed really friendly, too. These sweet-looking Indian girls gave me as much Dominos pizza as I could eat and a huge cup of Sierra Mist. They were part of a group of engineering students interested in business, and they had purposely invited reps from Halliburton to come and speak to them.

These two reps, who were named Evonne and Carlos, were pretty young themselves. Evonne, who had hair as black as her business suit, gave a terrific talk about her boring job as an auditor at Halliburton. She had gone to UT and had worked two years for Arthur Anderson, but, she said, “You know how that turned out.” Carlos’s snappy speech showed pictures of him in countries all over the world. He literally said, “This is me in Rome. This is me in Egypt. And this is me in Iraq.” He also recalled a time when he was in Algeria for the company, but he couldn’t leave the hotel beach resort because it was too dangerous.

Their power point presentation boasted of how employment at Halliburton could give you “understanding of vast cultures” because Halliburton has operations in more than 100 countries. A slide showing an employee speaking to a classroom full of innocent children prompted Evonne to remark, “If civic involvement is your interest, we’re great for you.”

I looked around the room at this point to see if there were any fellow cynics around who picked up on that crude joke. There was not even a shred of enthusiasm in the room, let alone the capacity to pick up on a play on words like that. They may want to work at Halliburton, but at least they’re not passionate about it.

I guess it’s because Halliburton is a pretty damn comfortable place to work. Evonne said she only works forty-five or fifty hour-weeks at the office, where she had 100-hour weeks at Arthur Anderson. Carlos told the perspective interns that last years’ interns traveled to Australia, Paris, and Brazil.

It was obvious that nobody in the room really cared about Iraq or really any effect their actions would have on the world. Apparently an $18 billion contract in Iraq is the same as an $18 billion contract anywhere. I guess Evonne and Carlos and anyone who wants to work for a company like this simply wants to look down at the work on his desk and live as cushy a life as possible. I guess that’s their decision. But how can you blame me or you for making the opposite one?

Thanksgiving

Late last night, under the influence of a potent mixture of drugs, I got up off the sofa to go to sleep. I must have got up too quickly, though, because the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor being awaken by my roommates. I had fallen flat on my face, with my jaw taking most of the damage. My bottom lip was gashed completely open by my two front teeth, which suddenly felt as if they had been rigged with sharp thorns. I picked myself up as quickly as I could and did my best impression of sleep for the next seven hours or so.

When I did rise out of bed this morning, I couldn’t help but smile. I like to try to be like Laura Ingalls Wilder, who just had to crack a smile in pictures when it was fashionable to pose with a serious frown. She probably had no rational reason to grin, as everything I used to read by her chronicled an infuriatingly dull life in the nineteenth century frontier. Her books are all as annoying a chore as churning butter, but nobody could accuse her of not being happy.

In that same spirit, I refuse to let a damn toothache deter me from enjoying this Thanksgiving. It’s easily one of my favorite days of the year, for reasons other than the fact that it celebrates the genocide of the Native American. I really do like the tradition of going around the table and saying why you’re thankful. Instead of the video games we expect on Christmas, we here give each other verbal gifts that mean a lot more. I wanted to take the opportunity on Thanksgiving to tell you all what I’m thankful for in hopes that you’ll share the same with me.

I love the breeze. I like the way it whips my hair around, and it often moves me to walk or run with my arms stretched out like wings. Many people like to act as if someone wearing an iPod is cutting himself off from the world, but I think the damn thing actually brings me closer to the Earth. With my favorite music in my ears, I can notice little yellow butterflies, uniquely green leaves, and happy black labs with so much ease.

Speaking of music, I think those of us who really do enjoy it are constantly being inspired by what we listen to. Nothing gets me more in the mood to realize my ambitions than a Coldplay song. Nothing makes me more confident than a Roots rap giving me a thousand different wordpictures why I’m the shit. Nothing pricks me with the importance of details like Coltrane and Davis together on the same track. In the end, I too know that I have my books and my poetry to protect me.

I didn’t always feel this way about my books. I would sit in the library in high school, day after day, trying to figure out the curse that made me want to shut out my surroundings and pore over pages and pages of readings. I grew so tired of always being the one who raises his hand with the correct answer, but I couldn’t stop doing my homework for the life of me.

It took me so long to realize that my desperation to read comes not from a need to make grades or sound smart but a yearning to be shocked by new perspectives. Sitting in a chair and reading to me really is like exploring, and I’m glad of it no matter if I seem like a cheerful choir-boy for knowing the answers.

I’m also thankful for the moments that can make one feel so connected. The first time I laid naked and sweaty with another, I realized that life is too amazing to ever be sad about. Each of the times a friend and I experience something together confirms that we are not alone in the world. And emotions, whether they’re good or bad, are the only way we know we’re alive.

I can’t shake the feeling that I’d be even more alive if I had love, a fact I’ve known in my bones since I’ve been into girls. I know that the day will come soon because it’s inevitable, and I definitely think it could be tomorrow. Some people claim that women are too complex, but I really couldn’t be more thankful that the process doesn’t have objective criteria like a job interview or some shit. If finding someone were that simple, there’d be nothing fun about it.

A lot of people have very little of this type of fun in their lives because they are oppressed by the individualism of others. Someday we’ll all realize that we’re better off working together than in a dog-eat-dog society. I really believe the only thing we’ll have to lose is our chains.

And, lastly, I’m thankful that I split my lip so violently. It’s good to not feel rational, to be reminded of how unpredictable the world can be. I also think I deserved punishment for making my mother eat Thanksgiving dinner without me, so really it was probably karma. I hope everyone realizes how connected you and me and everyone else is this Thanksgiving.

The Homeless

Excuse me, but I’m the type of person who attends art fairs and charity benefits. Not only am I sophisticated enough to pay vast sums of money for any of the extremely new, hyper-contemporary paintings on the market, I am also a caring, paternalistic model for all you people that only care about yourselves.

If you could hold a candle to me in these areas, then you maybe would have known about the fourteenth annual “Art From the Streets” show at the Austin Homeless shelter last Saturday. It sort of tied together all the society types who excel in being patrons of the arts and the homeless.

Yet, it also illustrated in loud acrylics our experiences with homeless people, or bums, or drag rats or really whichever words you want to use for the people who are foreigners to our land of dreams and opportunity or whatever word you want to use for this cushy chair I’m sitting in right now. No matter how much food or money or anything you’ve handed a homeless person, you know you’re not giving he or she access to our world. But you just might see them every day on your way by to plow through a massive burrito that could probably feed one of them for days.

But, then, you and I really don’t have to worry about that guilt. We really do ignore them usually, either thinking that the stoop outside Jack in the Box is the place they want to be or just not wanting to make the type of eye contact that can confirm how goddamn easy we have it.

But my roommate and I didn’t have to worry about pulling off our blinders when we went to this homeless art show on Saturday. The Austin shelter is actually one of the most stylish buildings I’ve ever seen, and it was covered with vibrant, original paintings, apparently the work of homeless people. I say apparently because a guy whose painting I bought told us about a piece he had done of all the stereo equipment in his house.

No matter who the artists really were, the place had a lots and lots of art. They had walls and chain link fences covered with works of all sizes. I was up close to a fence to get a good look at one piece, when I was able to look through the fence to the alley between the shelter and the building next door. There were a handful of bums loitering out there, the same kind as the ones we passed on the way into the art show. I had to restrain a reflex to just give the money that I was going to use on art to them because I knew they weren’t going to draw me any pictures.

And why the hell would they? Feeling intense middle class guilt, I found a drinking fountain in the shelter and took a huge swig of water to demonstrate our common humanity. I’ve worked with homeless people before. My senior year of high school, I fulfilled the graduation requirement of sixty community service hours by helping kids who lived at a downtown shelter with their homework. I grew to know a few of the kids, and I think I did help them complete a lot of assignments, but I could never escape the feeling that I really wasn’t doing shit.

It was all too easy to have this same sensation at the festival. I didn’t really feel right taking the food HEB provided for the event from the mouths of people who needed it, and it was hard to focus on the art.

The pieces were really quite striking, though. Homeless people are entitled to the sharpest of voices because we turn a blind eye so much. You can say, wear, or do anything you want when other people will walk by you without look. In the absence of the surveillance of society, you could create whatever the hell you want without worrying about offending anyone.

That’s probably why I’ll never be able to cross the bridge we feel between ourselves and homeless people. Deep down, I’ll always know that if I was sitting on a stoop somewhere without anywhere to go, I would resent all the people who walk by in such straight and static lines. And I’m damn sure that I wouldn’t care whether or not the walls of buildings forbidden to me had pretty pictures on them.

Fortunately, these artists had no disdain to share, just their art. So I got an amazing painting of an island in the middle of an ocean sloping down like the curve of the Earth. You really should come see it sometime.

Election Day

Did anyone else watch the big game on Tuesday? It was like the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the Olympics all tied into one, and my team had to finally just win one. They just had to. I didn’t care that the commercials stretched the game to four hours, or that I had to stare passively at the television screen like a zombie. I was going to see to it that the Democrats took over Congress.

And they did! Can you imagine how wonderful our lives are going to be now that the Dems have control of both houses of Congress? We’ll get out of Iraq and Afghanistan! We’re going to have universal healthcare! I bet they even make pot legal!

Please don’t think that Democrats are actually going to do anything that impressive in these two years of power just because you and me voted for them. Beyond carrying out the important task of investigating all the crap that has happened in the past six years, you and know they will do very little. Remember, these are the same Democrats who lined up with the rest of us in favor of this war, the same ones who are in bed with corporations and lobbyists, and the same ones who believe in apple pie and Christmas sweaters and God.

Take, for example, one of the Dems we’re supposed to be excited about winning on Tuesday. Jim Webb of Virginia served in the Reagan administration, wrote a long-winded essay about why women shouldn’t be allowed in the Navy, and wasn’t even a Democrat until this election. I bet you won’t even hear about this guy the entire time he’s in the Senate.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m definitely glad they won. I voted for those goobers too after all. If you helped one of them get elected by working on a campaign, I admire your dedication, I really do. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to have faith in some deustchbag with a power tie and a politician’s hair-do.

I bet many people our age share these reservations about politicians. It’s hard not to when you have robots who look like they may have gone to college about ten years ago running all of our student governments. They do fantastic imitations of the people they’re going to be ten years from now.

Yet, can we expect the people running this country to act any differently than our student government tools? They have to get money from people who are even bigger shitheads than they are, appeal to a bunch of local yoohoos, and wear humongous grins for the cameras at all times. Right now, our system can’t possibly turn out anyone who is still a living, breathing person.

We should therefore agree that voting does not a democracy make. Until we have a media with beneficial coverage and free access, an educational system that gives everyone an equal opportunity to think clearly, and a health care system where money doesn’t influence your health, we’ll never be able to elect anyone who will really do anything.

Really, then, the voter apathy among college students is not caused by how stupid some of us are (although I’m sure anyone who’s taken a class with 500 people may disagree). It rather comes from a realization that we’ve collectively made about how useless our political system is right now. We realize that no politician could possibly change anything, so we don’t really care all that much about politics.

And, oh man, do we not care about politics. The Daily Texan ran a jubilant article on Election Day which declared enthusiastically that a whole third of us College Students were “definitely going to vote.” We even had a chance to approach the record-setting numbers of 1982, days of campus protest, chaos, and upheaval.

So what does that make those of us who cast our ballots this past Tuesday? It’s hard to tell, because we definitely don’t conform with the rest of our peers. We could be several different types of people. Voting makes me into a sociopath who would just as soon see all the people in line behind me wiped off the Earth without a trace; it also makes me into a geek who has enough spare time to watch the boring-ass news everyday; and it also makes me into a rebel with the determination necessary to pass through the gauntlet of meatheads to actually care about our world. I may even be a naïve schoolgirl who wholeheartedly believes in American democracy.

It’s going to be damn interesting to read history textbooks about this era in the future. Will we escape the suits, the money, and the trends of today, or are these days just the beginning of a fully virtual democracy a la any futuristic dystopia you want to quote? All in all, Tuesday probably won’t be remembered as the day that swung the balance in any particular direction.

Job Fair

Between the various types of Greek personalities, pseudo-intellectuals, and hulking athletes that you see loafing to classes around campus, there exists a special breed of people marked best by their formal dress: campus job fairgoers. These people, who think of themselves as having a leg up on you in the search for post-college employment, extend to all disciplines of education. They are the ones who prick their ears up at even the slightest mention of an internship or a job, and they are the principal patrons of the all-too-routine spectacle that is the campus job fair.

I decided to attend the Communication College Fall Job Fair just to get a nice look-see at these specimens in action. Sitting outside the fair in the Union, I quickly realized how underdressed I was in shorts and a t-shirt. Crowds of my fellow students walked by in khaki pants, long black skirts, dress shirts, and blazers designed to communicate that each of them is perfectly willing to submit to the authority of the office dress code.

The women, who far outnumbered the men, were really the first thing to cross my mental and physical line of vision. They were so mature-looking and business-like with their long straight hair and black-accentuated curves that you immediately wanted to approach these young women, these individuals who seem determined to take patriarchy by the balls. Yet, on second look, they seem the type who obsessively check Blackberrys and won’t sit still unless at an important meeting where not listening could directly cost them. Competing for the attention span of someone with money on his or her mind can cost one more mental dollars than it is worth.

I judged the males by their coverings as well. These guys have the same urge to seize the world as their female counterparts, but you root against them like the plague. With short, spiked hair and uninteresting conversation, they think of themselves as the next percentage point in the amount of Fortune 500 executives to graduate from your school. They only came to UT because of its high-ranking programs anyway, and they pompously refuse to identify with anything but the highest percentile of their narrow-minded criteria. Luckily, they probably have similarly generalized attitudes in mind when they think of me, so I don’t have to plan on crossing paths with them much in life.

Right on the inside of the fair, I noticed a cousin of mine who has some position or another at the local CBS affiliate. A great man, he let me stand aside for a second and watch as my peers desperately tried to woo him.

We look so strange when we cater to those who we think can serve as the gonnection to our desired life. With nervous smiles, we have to walk the continual tightrope between talking about our own greatness and that of whatever money-grubbing corporation has set up a booth at the fair.

The companies represented at the fair were, collectively, some of the organizations most adept at making our world worse. Clear Channel, which has helped turn the radio from a tool of democracy to a mindless trash machine, had a table. So did Phillip Morris, which has helped tobacco smoking become so much a national institution that the government won’t let us have any other type of fun. Even the police, who can make your life terrible at the snap of their fingers, were recruiting from our population.

Yet, there were some people there who gave me hope. Teach For America and Peace Corps, which may or may not have their own shortcomings, at least seek to ease the suffering or the world. And their tables had just as many visitors as any others.

Their popularity reflects a growingly-evident concern among some of our generation to have a direct positive effect on their worlds. Just from being involved in my class discussions, I know that there are people among our ranks who are aware of the state of the world. And I think we all just might do something, whether it is small or large in importance, to improve humanity.

This past weekend was another reason for a positive outlook. I just couldn’t get over the spirit that overtakes us during Halloween. All of a sudden, it’s not weird for two people who don’t know each other to communicate. Wearing costumes that show something about ourselves, we leap many bridges that we would not normally. It’s as if we all have something in common.

This means that we don’t all have to take admirable or prestigious jobs to make a difference in the world. If we all can only remember walking around West Campus and greeting each other jovially, our mere presence will open up so many windows that need opening. If we all realize that we share this world with someone else, we can take over Clear Channel and actually play good music. We could become sensitive policemen, and executives who give back to society. We don’t have to follow anyone’s lead to start the revolution, we only have to do what’s right to us in the here and now. Once we do that, I guarantee that nobody will have to get all bent out of shape about some stupid campus job fair.