Mmmmmm...Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. What more is there to say?

(For those of you who managed to miss the 'napoli' Googlebomb, here's your vocabulary lesson for the day: Bill Napoli)

Over on Seth's blog, he asks if there is a qualitative difference between doing something for love and doing it equally well for money.

How much do you care about authenticity?

[snip]

When David Chase built the Sopranos, he wanted to tell a great story first, and get rich second. It was authentic in its first goal, and he accomplished his second. But when you eat at the fifth or sixth restaurant opened by a celebrity mega-chef, it's pretty clear that the goals are reversed. Does that make the meal worse?

My view is that anything done with a clear view as to intent, regardless of what that intent is - to make money, get famous or scratch a passionate itch - is to be considered authentic. Is the goal of dying rich by creating great works of art any less valid than the goal of creating great works of art regardless of money made? Is either effort any less authentic than the other if they both unambiguously succeed? Is a commercially successful genre novel written with the intention of being a commercially successful genre novel, then, any less authentic than a novel written for any other reason? Of course not.

What is authenticity anyway? Etymologically speaking, the word authenticity comes from the same root as author, and means 'genuine, real or original.'

Genuine is as genuine does. Dolly Parton is the queen of kitsch and there isn't a molecule on her that isn't pumped, plumped, painted, bedazzled or bleached. And yet is there one person out there, upon seeing and hearing her perform, who would dare label her as "inauthentic?" I think not. Because Dolly is absofrakkinglutely true to who she is and what she wants to do. And that is to dress like a Barbie, sing like an angel and have a ball doing it. That being so, to tone herself down into looking and acting like a "real" or "natural" person rather than the fun-loving and joy-bringing caricature she is would be the true fakery.

Authenticity is about the intent and follow-through of the act, not about the focus of the act. Authentic forgeries, done well and labeled as such, are as real as authentic originals. Authentic crap, created with that end in mind, is as authentic as lovingly handcrafted art and more so than haphazardly done work fobbed of as the real thing.

Authenticity is intent. Everything else is just description.

In the wake of all the SmartFilter furor - most notably the blocking of BoingBoing as a "nudity" site by many oppressive countries and corporate servers, when over 95% of their stuff demonstrably isn't nudity - comes proof of what a creative, loving community who isn't afraid to act on their own nifty ideas will do for you:

Introducing: Distributed BoingBoing. This is a bit of fan-written code that anyone can run on their server that effectively mirrors BoingBoing, rerouting it links-n-all through proxy servers, thus handily clearing the SmartFilter net o' totalitarianism.

With so many vastly trafficked commercial sites (CNN, Microsoft, iTunes, etc) this sort of thing could never happen because the helpful coder who dared such a thing would be shunted off to some shadowy corporate Guantanamo for copyright infringement or some other nonsense.

The fact that BoingBoing loudly stands for community sharing, creative commons and user-generated growth has resulted in a live demonstration of the lengths that the company doesn't have to go to to get stuff done. Show your community enough love and they will literally move heaven and earth for you without asking (in this case, creating ways to allow literally whole continents of oppressed people once again access a wrongly-blocked site), often in creative, cool and cheap ways you never would have thought of or had the time/money/energy/priority to develop yourself.

Okay, I'm convinced. Creative Commons mentality r000ls. Where do I go to surrender to our new open-source overlords?

Heh. Check out the victory post over on Smart Bitches blog. The number one Google result for Bill Napoli is now the SB napoli definition page.

Wow. The birth of a new word - and uh, aborting that birth just might be a problem for dear old Bill Napoli. Especially if he has to get permission from all the parents. Bummer, dude.

Hey, look...a new word! Like Santorum. Only uglier.

Bill Napoli.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. - Anne Lamott, writer

Oh, snap!

Seriously, though, I think this is why Christianity and other religions have failed to produce a congregation of peaceful, loving and compassionate sheep and have instead become the milieu of dangerously powerful and hate-mongering shepherds. It's simply far easier to envision God as a larger reflection of your own psyche than it is to rise up to the challenge of loving all those people who violate your own personal sensibilities.

But annoyingly enough, the Bible, the Koran and many other texts quite literally saturate their pages, repeatedly and consistantly, with message that God's overall orders are to love, regardless of who, what, when, where, why or how. So these leaders have to latch onto some obscure, one-time example of violence or hatred that God let slip by without (visible) punishment, and then keep shouting that one bit of isolated text so loudly that no one can hear the rest of the entire book disagreeing with you.

I don't know how it is where you are, but around here a big controversy is a group of "Christians" who are picketing and protesting the funerals of slain soldiers, going so far as to harass the family members as they drag themselves to the graveside of their son or daughter, brother or sister, mother or father for the final goodbyes. The thing is, these protesters aren't protesting the war. Their convoluted spiel is that God is killing our soldiers because America has become to immoral (no doubt the spectres of gay marriage and whatnot play a big role in the weekly meetings). And somehow they've decided that protesting in the face of grieving family members is supposed to get that message across.

Huh?

So let me get this straight. You're going to protest the immorality of America by harrassing a grieving family who are burying someone that probably died doing what they thought was right, moral and good for this country? *insert Louis Black seizure here*

Pot, I'd like you to meet kettle. Kettle, pot.

It's sickening, really. All in the name of God. No wonder religion is having as hard a time as the military is in finding new recruits.

The most sickening thing to me is that now I have to go out and try to love these people, because I don't have the handy God-as-Soni's-evil-twin doll. And to me, that's the true nature of evil - that whatever vision you have of evil incarnate doesn't waste time with penny-ante immorality, which really only affects a small radius of people, but goes for the gusto by convincing people to behave in such dispicable ways, all in the name of God, that even hard core God freaks can't stomach following God's mandate to love them and end up abandoning association with Godly organizations and labels altogether rather than risk being associated with such vile creatures.

"Action is thy duty, reward not thy concern." -- the Bhagavad Gita

Too many of us shy away from work that fulfills us and that gives our lives meaning because we don't get the concept expressed in the quote above. We worry too much about being too insignificant, about not having the "platform" or the celebrity to reach millions of people, about no one caring about what we do or what we have to say.

Some of it is just plain fear and some of it is a side effect of today's celebrity society, where common consensus tells us that if you can't be the voice at the top of the mountain, then it's pointless to open your mouth at all. And that's a shame because, as the quote above suggests, it's not the fruit of the work that provides fulfillment, but rather the work itself.

In fact, several religious and spiritual texts and teachings exhort their followers to do what God wills and to use their gifts and abilities to do good work, regardless of the perceived results, and let God worry about the rest of it.

As a society, we have turned this around 180 degrees - we no longer give much thought to what we do, only what we can get out of it. Status, money, prestige, fame, recognition, approval - all of these are our focus, and the type and nature of work that is actually done to achieve them is secondary at best. While I absolutely accept the need to make a living and provide for ourselves and our family, I cannot accept that doing so should be the main consideration in the work we do.

For one thing, our purpose in this life isn't to make it through the game with the highest score. It's to contribute, to love, to give joy, to grow and help others grow as well. It's to join in the process of working toward a higher state of being, as a group rather than as individuals. And in order to do that, we all need to pitch in and do our share by doing the work we were designed for and sent here to do, to pull our weight toward the completion of that Divine plan.

And to do this with a clear conscience and a firm commitment, we have to relinquish our claim to the results and just concentrate on the work itself. Like a Zen archer, the point is not to hit the bulls-eye, but to mindfully engage oneself in the process of raising, aiming and releasing the arrow. Hitting the target is a bonus, not a requirement.

For another thing, a disturbingly large percentage of us, in the first world anyway, spend most of our income on stuff we don't actually need to live comfortably: cable television, new cars, status-laden clothes and accessories, iPods, Starbucks, cell phone and so on. However, we invest these lifestyle habits with the status of "needs" and then spend the rest of our lives scrambling around frantically trying to make sure we can meet them.

Ironically, anybody who has ever spent time away at a retreat, gone camping or even lived through a few days snowed in during a power outage can recognize the guilty pleasure of playing hookie from the pressure of day-to-day concerns, and the inevitable, quickly-supressed feeling of regret we experience when it's time to return to our "every day" lives of email, television, alarm clocks, jobs, expectations and facades.

If we were really honest with ourselves, we would realize that we could do work that actually provided us with meaning and joy (not to mention making the world around us a better place) and still get by just fine, although to do so we might have to give up some or all those modern "needs" that we somehow don't miss when we get the chance to step away from them for a few days.

And the argument that these are the things that make life worth living supports, rather than undermines, my argument. If you are relying on things (rather than what you do with your life) to provide your life with meaning, then you are paying far more than the full retail price of those goods for your fulfillment. OTOH, if something or some activity really is such a meaningful part of your life that giving it up would be a gut-wrenching blow, then that's a clue - you should be building a life around that instead of simply making it a small part of the options package of your main vehicle of life-energy exchange.

So what are you giving up on or failing to do because you are focusing too hard on the result, rather than the work itself? How would it change your life if the results were irrelevant, that you would be "graded," as it were, on the work you did rather than the targets you hit? If you were free to do what gave you the most joy, provided the best use of your skills and abilities and allowed you to pursue the things that brought you closer to the Divine?

Now imagine what this world would be like if we all did that.

In solidarity with others in the blogosphere, I am posting this fine example of egregiously tasteful, classical nudity to protest the ironically named Smartfilter web-rating software.

See, Smartfilter is used by many corporations and oppressive governments (the two being not entirely unalike) to filter web pages that the company or country deems inappropriate. In reality, the Smartfilter program is so unsmart that 95.5 percent of the pages it tagged as "containing nudity" on the popular blog BoingBoing had no nudity whatsoever David and photos of Abu Ghraib in with pornographic images. It also filters out the Bible, the Declaration of Independence and many health sites, like the CDC diabetes site (WTF?) Additionally,,.while lumping such images as the aforementioned statue of apparently the program doesn't block out all offensive sites, and is apparently so easy to work around that even your average cubicle slave can do it.

None the less, despite the fact that it is cripplingly bad at doing what is was bought  to do, and cotton-candy easy to get around, many countries and companies continue to treat their citizens and workers as children who are incapable ofcontrolling their own media diet by banning them from perfectly harmless sites (unless, of course, you view the free exchange of information harmful...) while blindly leaving the internet pipeline relatively open to other, as-yet-unblocked offenders.

Ergo, the protest. So you can go to Boing Boing to get your "guide to eveading the Smartfilter censorware" or just keep up with the story as it unfolds and get your own protest image kit. In the meantime, enjoy the classic art while you can. There's a good chance this blog will be banned by Smartfilter as soon as it finds out I'm flogging such porno on the open market.