OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: You Know... The "Radical Activist" Librarian... The One Who Looks like a Cop, Wears a Stetson, Likes Cold Beer & Tom Waits...

"Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking."

- Bhagat Singh (1907-1931),
Freedom Fighter & Indian Independence leader

LOCAL U. (ZP) -- The crowded, cavernous dining area of the local student union building swallowed all of the outside world, and there I sat, waiting on a college student at seven in the morning and sipping horrible coffee.

Jesus Christ, I told myself, what the hell kind of advice can I offer a student who thinks I'm THE local radical?

I'm not, for the record, a radical - at least from my standpoint. A minimalist, an anti-consumer, sure. Well-read and thoughtful, too. And I do have certain political and social views quite askew from the norm for a generally ultraconservative college town. But most of my fundamental political philosophy is based on, well, ideals that have been fostered organically, are rather undogmatic and, well, more Whitman and Emerson than Che or Trotsky.

I'm not some half-petrified New Left yuppie stuck in nostalgic dogma wrapped in "Activism," not the stereotypical, media-construct Virginia-raised Good Ol' Boy conservative in a cowboy hat, either.

* * * *

Ever since I outed myself as something more, well, philosophically libertarian and collectivist than your average Democrat or Republican, I've been overwhelmed by the number of responses from younger folks concerning the exact nature of my politics. What is a "left-libertarian?" How does one become one, what does one read, study, believe?

And I don't look like the stereotype of someone with such views. The more one digs online into left-libertarianism and socialist libertarianism and anarchism, the more one finds images of mostly upper middle-class white kids sporting hemp-suits and dreads, bandito-style bandannas and quirky protest signs at rallies.

Ain't too many of us who, well, get mistaken for cops and Marines and frat boys more than hippies or stoned granola-heads, guys who hate hacky-sack and the over-commercialization of reggae, or who really believe that mass protest is less important than conversations between friends at bars...

* * * *

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Russian novelist, Christian Anarchist,
Founder of the modern non-violence movement

Swallowed within a writhing body of unwashed students and building maintenance guys, faculty and vending machine delivery guys and cooks and custodians, I wait patiently, face buried in the day's Cincinnati Enquirer.

What the fuck am I going to tell this young woman? Worse, what does she want to ask about me, and what am I going to ask about her?

What about my personal philosophy does she find so damned fascinating?

The conversation I am to have involves yet another young woman from a rather conservative, unpolitical background... likes some group called the Jonas Bros., shoes, and sundresses... DVRs Lost and House and Gossip Girl... belongs to a sorority... mother's really religious... reads, duh, blogs in her boring gen-ed classes...

Yeah, what the hell is a chick like this doing seeking MY advice? I'm quite the fuck-up...

Fuck, I'm the librarian who used to date an adult entertainers and once worked as a bouncer at a friggin' strip club... watch Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica... have to be told by friends to watch "cheese" TV once and a while... and, yeah, I BLOG in my spare time...

I have no clue what my querent looks like, other than brunette. She's an online chat buddy, an electronic phantom. I told her I'd have a paper and my Stetson; she said she'd find me.

And she did, indeed, plop down at my table, a few minutes late, dressed in pink sweatpants and a printed white tee, purple bra strap twisted like a pretzel and poking out through a hole in the cotton. Beautiful young woman, looking quite stereotypical and so non-political, not even scenester hip but, well, everyday normal, un-radical American.

"Wow, you're really here."

"Yup. Kinda weird, huh?"

She paused, nodded, looked around.

"Don't sweat it. It's kinda, ya know, normal around these parts."

Haven't heard a girl with that sort of snicker-laugh in a while.

Sad but true... these days, I'm a lot less worried about my "public image" than I am about the privacy of my subjects...

* * * *

"So you're fascinated by my... politics? Why?"

And that was all it took to get a rather intriguing conversation going.

Despite her coming from a die-hard Republican family and having identified herself as a moderate conservative for most of her life, she'd been going through a crisis of political identity since she started college.

She can't relate to the Republicans anymore - too religious in all the wrong ways, too profit-driven at the expense of working-classes, not compassionate and no longer conservative. No way in hell could she side with the Democrats. She tried a campus Libertarian meeting during the last presidential election and, well, no go, either.

"I dunno, I just started Googling some of those guys you quote sometimes and said, 'Hey, these were some cool people... why don't we make cool people like that anymore?'"

"Really?"

"Yeah. Weird but I actually asked this professor last semester about that Zapata guy and the whole land and liberty thing..."

"What happened?"

"Ohmygod, she freaked out! Like, it had nothing to do with the class but she thought it was, like, weird coming from..."

... From someone in a sorority who likes the Jonas Bros. and shoes and sun dresses, who prays regularly and who tans almost as frequently.

I spent two hours chatting with a college girl about such things, over shitty coffee and a couple of pastries charged to her meal plan. About drug legalization (agree), legalized gambling (agree), over-politicization of the most absurd things (agree), and the tendency of academicians to bias their curricular material without knowing it (agree)...

* * * *

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

American poet, essayist, and orator,
from the poem "The Rhodora"

Amazing what a young woman who looks like a preppy collar-popper and a librarian who looks like a cop can talk about in two hours.

For the record, yes, I have the most attractive college-aged readers of any online writer in Ohio.

Brilliant, well-spoken, and fascinating.

And in that mass of people, of professors and custodians and students and food service folks, all of us wallowing in the cavernous belly of a rather ugly student union, I wonder what the casual passerby thought of the pair of us.

Dollars to those shitty pastries they thought, if anything, we were talking about Jesus and beer pong. Or, well, maybe they thought we were discussing a late-night hook-up, or a new prayer group, or a crush party.

Revolutions, you know, have this nasty tendency to start not with protests but with conversations.

- # # # -

HOMINUS EX MACHINA: The Somnambulist Worlds Man Hath Built for Caligari's Hard-Wired Children

"The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are."

- Philip K. Dick (1928-1982),
from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Somewhere in time, on some drunken night of mayhem, he'd shattered his iPhone against a brick wall.

Chunks of ancient red dust from some unknown facade filled the crevices in the broken screen. The machine's guts dangled from the back of the white casing like intestines from a disemboweled medieval criminal.

And in the living room, a laptop notebook, state-of-the-art and sleek and monstrous, streamed digital music via some hidden wireless router somewhere, some Internet radio station broadcasting cyborg binary compression waves that the notebook's software deciphered into something that resembled heavy metal.

The large flatscreen television was on and flickering the splash page of some video game, one of those escapist first-person shooters where the user is allowed to recreate their normal real-world self into something heroic and futuristic and noble. Three different game consoles were wired into the television, as was a DVR and a DVD/Blu-Ray player, a stereo system, too.

Scores of movies, crammed together and yet without any semblance of organization, lined the shelves of the entertainment center. Bookshelves, too, had been conscripted to house the media collection. No books were to be found anywhere, save for the odd textbook or course-required novel.

The walls are lined with various posters - not of anything interesting but of posters of bikini-clad women, creative advertising for liquor companies and bands - and one portrait of his roommate's girlfriend, a laser-printed image on stock paper, yellows in a frame on the dinette that doubles as a beer-pong table on weekends.

Such a bland life it must be, to be consumed by a living room of electronic things and to be without anything of human civilization beyond that which can be digitized.

Alas, a side effect of the balm of the Information Age. Instead of liberating ourselves through our advanced technology, we simply cocoon ourselves inside cathedrals built for the gods in our machines and call that creation "life."

Why should man ever travel to Mars or actually dedicate ourselves to exploring the universe? I tell myself as I stare at the television screen, When it's simply easier to let an artificially-created virtual android like Master Chief fight other illusionary space monsters on our television screens?

Does Master Chief dream electric dreams of real people, when the game's paused or the plug pulled?

Or has the virtual world merely taken control of reality, with a hardware upgrade here and a software patch there?

- # # # -

ONE WOMAN'S SPRING BREAK IS ANOTHER'S BACK RENT: The Differences Between Working Class Women and Female Undergrads as Measured in Dollars...

- PROLOGUE -

"Can you fucking believe that?" the undergrad said, crushing her cigarette out beneath the heel of her Uggs. "Not only do I have to FIND a job but NO SPRING BREAK!"

"Well, maybe your folks are having a tough time... getting a job's not--"

She put her hand in my face, almost burnt her hand on my cigarette.

"Please! This is [the Local U]. And I'm a girl. You don't understand - they're supposed to pay for Cancun... "

"Twenty-five hundred's a lot of money, chica."

The undergrad stares through me for a brief second, a look I'm accustomed to around these parts.

"Not for them. Mom spends that on shoes, like, easily."

Now I'm the one staring through the undergrad. I don't think, over the course of my entire life, I've even owned $2,500 worth of shoes. And, hell, I never expected my mother and father to send me anywhere on Spring Break when I was in college...

For a second, well, I guess I forgot that for a large segment of the Public Ivy Local U's student population, feeling poor - even middle-class - is as completely foreign to them as the idea of a $2,500 week trip to Mexico in the middle of March is to me...

* * * *

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- Her child is the only thing that matters.

Her child and survival. The most important of all maternal instincts.

She lights an off-brand menthol, tugs her shirt down as it rolls up over her stretch marks. Her daughter sucks on a dirty thumb in the car seat. The growl of the young mother's voice crackles with the remnants of childhood as she speaks through the driver's window.

No job possibilities. Child's father nowhere to be found, possibly in jail. Government assistance barely covering the bills, a few missed rent payments away from homelessness.

But fuck it all. Fuck her run-down rusty primer gray sedan, fuck her parents, her best friends, her boyfriend. Fuck the Congress, presidents, governors, and bankers.

Her child, she says, is the only thing that matters. And she'd kill for her daughter - rob, trick, sling meth, burn down the world to keep her. Damn whatever Social Services says about her being a bad parent, her grandmother for calling her a whore...

She asked for a light as I climbed out of my pickup. My act of kindness, well, instigated her confession.

I listened contently because it's pretty self-evident that nobody in America really pays much attention to teenage mothers in parking lots.

She didn't mention money, didn't panhandle or beg. I just gave her the forty bucks in my wallet, made her take it under the threat of wounding my honor, my manhood.

Yup, gave a total stranger my grocery money. And I ate a shitload of celery and peanut butter all that next week.

Hell, I had plenty of celery. But that kid didn't have diapers or formula. No sense in letting a single mom go to jail for shoplifting...

* * * *

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- They cut off her gas back in December, the water in January.

And she's been living off a wood stove and bottled water ever since.

Throughout one of the worst winters in recent memory, she had all the water she needed - God, Mother Earth, or whatever, had dropped enough snow into her yard to at times flush the toilets, to boil and to cook with. And the wood for the stove her family had brought her, green and smoky as it was, still kept the single-digit weather at bay.

As we sat at her kitchen table, smoking and talking, a dog lay under the table, chewing on a three-eighth inch socket from her wrench set.

The dog, she says, keeps her sane when she's alone. and she was glad I stopped by to talk, too...

- EPILOGUE -

"Well, uh, good luck with looking for a job," I said to the undergrad, putting out my own cigarette. "Need to get back across the street and back to work..."

The undergrad didn't want to end the conversation. I wasn't trying to be rude, but the conversation had become circular, a trap, one where she was looking more for affirmation of righteousness in regards to her plight and not for any actual understanding.

It's not her fault, really.

"But you're, like, good a giving students like me advice. You know, just everyday girls..." her voice dropped to a whisper, as if the people passing by were spying, "... like on the blog?"

"Honey, 'Good luck looking for a job' is my advice..."

- # # # -