So Now We Get Some Answers

So now we have some answers. I watched a report on CBS news a story about a warehouse that was raided in New York city. The warehouse contained an incalculable amount of raw materials for the production of Spice.    The 100 pound bags piled high to the ceiling will probably contain the organic material that the chemicals contained in the 55 gallon cans will be sprayed upon. That is how the so called potpourri is made. We know the truth, this is the Synthetic Marijuana that is flooding our nation. In the CBS report, it is stated that the chemicals come from China. I can just imagine a container ship loaded to the brim with this dangerous chemical. In today’s world we demonize the user, but Nation States are never chastised when they send untold amounts of this poison to our shores. That is the way of the world today. Our so called leaders attend their high classed functions and pay lip service to the public they are supposed to represent, while the drug trade goes on. We will see how they feel when a family member dies after they consumed Spice at some frat party in college.

Here we see the Police all wearing oxygen tanks when they storm the warehouse, that is how deadly this drug is. So the chemicals are shipped from China in bulk, then it is sprayed on some organic material that resembles and smokes as if it were Marijuana.

Here is the pile of Synthetic Marijuana ready to be loaded into the packaging that will have printed on it not for human consumption. Surely this pile of Spice is enough to kill a thousand people.

So there you have it, this is how it is done. The politicians clamber for more fighter jets and billion dollar weapons systems to enrich the Carlyle Group and the Military Industrial Complex, to supposedly protect our Nation. Meanwhile they sit back and do nothing while China ships untold quantities of the chemical used in the production of Synthetic Marijuana into our ports unimpeded. Now is the time to call your elected representatives in Washington and beseech them to do something about this Abomination.

Ernest Ramey President of Veterans Theater

History of Addiction and the Concept of Prohibition and Profit from Addiction

Man has suffered from the affliction of addiction for Millinia. I propose that addiction is a relative thing that only exists as it is defined. Man is not alone in the world of addiction. Nonhuman species also indulge in the consumption of mind altering substances and can suffer from the dependecy of addiction. I am adding and referencing online articles that you can search and read, I strongly sugest that you read them and do your own research. Here are some examples.

Locoweed refers to any plant that produces the chemical swainsonine. It is thought that horses are initially attracted to these plants because they remain green longer than other plants once winter comes around. However, they begin to seek it out for its intoxicating effects, increasing their use over time. Farmers do their best to eliminate locoweed from their properties, as its frequent consumption is damaging to the animal’s health. A study published in the Journal of Animal Science in 2003 found that horses that ate the weed for two weeks developed significant weight loss and signs of depression. Swainsonine interferes with a metabolic enzyme, resulting in the buildup of the simple sugar mannose in neural cells. If severe, this buildup can lead to heart problems, reproductive difficulties, and neurological damage to the horses.

Tasmania is a leading producer of opium poppies for the pharmaceutical industry, supplying the morphine necessary for the production of painkillers. There’s only one problem: wallabies love the poppies. They’ll raid a field, gorge themselves on poppies, and crush the plantations in the process. As reported by BBC in 2009, the issue of stoned wallabies was even discussed at a parliamentary hearing on the security of opium crops in Tasmania, with the country’s attorney general stating that wallabies were “entering poppy fields, getting high as a kite, and going around in circles.”

Although Man is not alone in his struggle with addiction, Humans are the only Species on the planet that seeks to Profit from addiction. Profit is a fractal thing that can take many forms. Profit can simply be a monetary thing, the act of buying a product cheaply and selling it for more. Profit can also be defined as domination, such as in Law Enforcement, where the Police subjegate a population through the introduction of an intoxicating banned Substance. Bureaucratic totalitarian governments can enslave whole populations by both introducing and banning substances at the same time. Or as in the case of the British, a contralled substance can be used to fund an Empire.

In America today drug use is rampant. Mexico is renown for flooding the United States with drugs that have become ever cheaper. In the 1970’s Cocaine was considered a rich mans drug. Presently it can be had cheaply and is mostly delivered straight to your door, very much like pizza. After more than a decade of War with Afganistan, Heroine use is reaching epedemic levels on American streets. It is rumored that American troops guard poppie fields in Afganistan.

So now we see what it is all about. It is a historical fact that the CIA introduced large quantities of Cocaine into the predominately African American populations of California. Now the CIA is controlling the Heroine trade in Afganistan, all the way to distribution on American soil. Heroine use is epedemic in every state in America. The true players in this game are never held accountable, while the people who have been enslaved risk encarceration every time that they are in possesion of the drug.

Now there is a new drug, a derivatve of an old drug. Synthetic Marijuana began as a way to study the medicinal properties of Marijuana. One of the brightest minds in america created more than 450 synthetic canabanoids to use on unsuspecting human test subjects. John W Huffman then later published an article in a scientific journal that had every bit of information nescessary to produce this potently dangerous drug, all in the name of science and the furthering of his demonic carer. I refer to John W Huffman as the Spice Devil.

So now this abomination is not only killing people in your town, it has reframed the meaning of a word famous unto the history of the world. Spices were once more valuable than gold. The spice of life once referred to all the good things in this world, now the word is immediately associated with addiction and death.

Veterans theater recently published a Youtube video in which Dr. David Boje and myself set out to purchase Spice. There had recently been a raid by the local police and the DEA. The raid was characterized in the newspaper as having dealt a huge blow to the smoke shops that sale the Spice. Dr. Boje wanted to see for himself if Spice was still readily available. We consulted with James Sassak on where to buy it and what code words to use when we made our attempt. I had known of this deadly drug for some time, but had never consumed or purchased it. We spent considerable time planning our ‘ Sting ‘ and we were uncertain if we would succeed. We had it in our minds that We would be rejected as to clean cut, or not looking like a Spice addict. When the time came we pulled up to the Smoke Shop that we had been told was selling it, we found that all of our planning and conniving was totally unnecessary, it was all to easy to buy the Spice. A smiling courteous young man quickly sold us this deadly drug. The package had the brand name of Enchanted Forest, for ten dollars we got enough to roll twenty spice joints. We quickly destroyed the contents of the packadge. The Smoke Shop where we made our attempt, is within easy walking distance from the local Homeless shelter that has been the epicenter of many Spice poisonings.

The street level spice dealers will buy these same packadges and then roll the tiny ciggerretes that are known as spice joints. Not only to maximize profits, but due to the fact that spice is so potent and deadly that a large inhalation will put you in a coma. The dealers will then sell each one for two dollars apeice. Two dollars is not much to scrape up if you want to get high, be careful or after having consumed your tiny spice joint the EMT’s will be scraping you up.

That very same day a long time friend of James Sassak smoked one of those same tiny Spice joints. Gilbert Marquez lingered three days in a coma and just yesterday was removed from life support. He now lies in a vegative state, brain dead waiting to expire. He was well known in Las Cruces New Mexico and will be sorely missed.

It is all to easy to dismiss the homeless population as hopeless drug addicts that will do anything to get high, often risking their very lives. I believe that homeless populations can through the transparent lives that they live serve as a barameter of the health of the cities that they live in. a survey found that eleven percent of high school age children have experimented with Spice. If they survive long enough they will probably be found amongst the homeless some day. Their young lives will have been destroyed before they even enter adulthood.

Who is producing and flooding our cities with this dangerous drug? Why are the Smoke Shops that already profit greatly from the addiction of tobacco so willing to sell it? Why is our Omnipotent government so impotent to stop this epedemic? Why was it ever created?

I will end here and leave You to answer these questions in the comments that I hope you will make. We must for the sake of our society and the lives of our children answer these questions and keep the conversation going. Inaction is also an action and while you sit thinking that this is not your problem, your child could be experimenting with synthetic marijuana.

Ernest Ramey President of Veterans Theater

.The Rise of the Opium Trade | The History of Prohibition …

HYPERLINK “http://www.google.com/url?“<9 Animal Species That Use Psychoactive Substances In The …

HYPERLINK “http://www.sacu.org/opium.html“<How China got rid of opium

US military admits to guarding, assisting lucrative opium trade

The Surprising Origins of Synthetic Marijuana – Leaf Science

Happy slice: Pizzeria owner arrested after lacing cops’ meal …

Spice Synthetic Marijuana Sends Hundreds To Hospitals …

Stop the Spice Trade: A Veterans Theater Live Street Performance and Intervention – blog by David M. Boje, Ph.D. Sep 12 2015

Stop the Spice Trade: A Veterans Theater Live Street Performance and Intervention

YouTube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWtF3t1Bgqs

On September 11, 2015, Ernest Ramey (President of Veterans Theater) and myself (Storytelling Researcher) decided to investigate the Spice Trade, here in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  I put on beat up cap, someone had donated to the homeless veterans of America, and set out to buy some Spice from a local business establishment.  This business had been raided just 2 days ago by the Las Cruces Police Department, who is cracking down on the spice trade.

There is no back alley drag exchange in the Spice-Fractal-Epidemic, rather, you just pull up your pickup truck at the drive through window of a business called a smoke shop, and issue the secret code word of the day, which, September 11th, was ‘Blue.’ When you smoke Spice, all bets are off, you have no idea what some Breaking-Bad-Lab mixed into the new designer drug.

Our Veterans Theater street theater, is something known far and wide as Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. We engage in street theater, as two Army veterans, bringing awareness of the extent of the Spice epidemic.

But, what is the antenarrative here, the BEFORE, and the BET on the Future, yet to be realized?

What is the BEFORE, the strange history of SPICE? In this age of madness, in 1984 the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Clemson University, turned down Professor John William Huffman, now professor emeritus of organic chemistry, to study the effects of actual marijuana on undergrads, in-order-to research multiple sclerosis, and HIV/AIDS.  So he invented Spice (aka K2),  the first synthesized cannabinoid compounds, resubmitted his IRB proposal, and it was approved by the committee.

“In the late 2000s, two of Huffman’s cannabinoid compounds began being sold in Germany as marijuana alternatives known as K2 and Spice” (Wikipedia).  In an interview Professor Huffman, said the spread of his Spice recipe was inevitable.

The recipes got blind reviewed, then published in a tier-one journal: The Journal of Organic Chemistry. See Huffman, J. W., Zhang, X., Wu, M. J., & Joyner, H. H. (1989). Regioselective synthesis of (.+-.)-11-Nor-9-carboxy-. DELTA. 9-THC. The Journal of Organic Chemistry, 54(20), 4741-4743.

The 1989 article reports that Professor Huffman and his research team had a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, and a Robert A. Welsch Foundation grant to fund their university research.

The Spice (Synthetic Approaches to Cannabinoids) constitute a fractal. Like coastlines, snowflakes, sunflowers, or our very own Milkey Way Galaxy, a fractal is a recurring, self-similar pattern at progressively smaller or larger scales.

Benoit Mandelbrot, in 1975, invented the term, ‘fractal’ (based on the Latin word frāctus, meaning broken or fractured). 

The recurring spread of the Spice-Fractal, from its inception in a ‘Breaking Bad’ Heisenberg professor’s university lab, complete with NSF funding, and IRB approval, its spread to Germany to imitate the recipe to produce, distribute, and sell synthetic cannabinoid compounds, had replicated to a global scale, a global business, with vast profits.

What is Spice? “Synthetic marijuana is a designer drug in which herbs, incense or other leafy materials are sprayed with lab-synthesized liquid chemicals to mimic the effect of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in the naturally grown marijuana plant (cannabis sativa)” (drugs.com).

What is the Spice-Fractal? Spice-Fractal is a recurring, self-sameness at higher and lower scales, as the business of producing, distributing, and selling Spice (K2) to consumer-users takes class, in the everydayness business practices in a small city like Las Cruces, or in every major global city on Earth.

Spice, invented in a university by Professor Huffman in 1984, spread to a business lab in Germany in2000, and “‘Spice’ or ‘K2’ first became available in the U.S. in 2008” (IBID.). And Ernest and I purchased Spice on Valley Boulevard, Las Cruces, New Mexico on September 11, 2015. Professor Huffman built an entire publish or perish career on Spice (source), but keep in mind he was helped every stp of the way bye the IRB, NSF, and the whole game of academic publishing.

Spice-fractal has spread globally, and is apparently unstoppable. “Spice or K2 became increasingly popular with high school students and young adults because it was legally obtainable from convenience stores, smoke shops, and online – until July 2012 when a national ban was enacted against the sale of synthetic cannabinoids in the U.S.“(drugs.com).

Extent of Spice-Fractal Spread 

In the 2011 ‘Monitoring the Future’ survey of adolescent use of Spice by 11% of high school seniors, it was second only to actual marijuana-use among 36% high school seniors. The Spice-Fractal spread is now to even younger students, and to the college market (Johnston, O’Malley, Bachman, & Schulenberg, (2013).

Across the street from the main campus of New Mexico State University, is a pipe shop, where like the Valley location smoke shop, the business, stopped selling actual spice.

Recently, “The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has designated many active chemicals most frequently found in synthetic marijuana as Schedule I controlled substances, making it illegal to sell, buy, or possess them. Manufacturers of synthetic marijuana products attempt to evade these legal restrictions by substituting different chemicals in their mixtures, while the DEA continues to monitor the situation and evaluate the need for updating the list of banned cannabinoid derivatives”(drugs.com).

Spice-fractal, its spread, is Big Business! Spice is an $8 billion dollar industry (http://2themax.org/?p=349).  The business of the Spice-fractal-industry is the manufacture, distribution, marketing, and sale of Spice.

“Across the country, agents seized more than five million packets of finished designer synthetic drugs, including substances marketed as bath salts, spice, incense, K-2 and plant food, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration” (Spice News).

SPICE-FRACTAL AND TEMPORALITy

The spice-fractal must spred for business to prosper, for customers to obtain the product from distributors, for new Breaking-Bad-Labs to corp up to come up with new recipes to keep Spice legal, avoid DEA entanglements, and keep an $8 billion dollar global industry growing.

By Veterans Theater working on the Spice-Fractal case, tracing the history of Spice-fractal from its IRB application, its spread to Germany, then USA, its growth into a global industry, we have to account for the falling of so many veterans into the abyss of seizure, dishonorable discharge, and even suicide.

On April 30th, 2015 on the NMSU campus, and August 4th, 2015 at the Good Samaritan, Veterans Theater did scenes about the Spice-Fractal, the Spice Epidemic, for sold out audiences. On that stage, each time, we invited the parents of 8 year Navy man, Adam Hernandez, who was 28 years old, stationed in Hawaii, and hooked on Spice, then committed suicide.  His mother Ruth Rivas started doing awareness campaigns in El Paso Texas. http://spiceisnotnice.com  Trying spice was his deadly mistake. He began playing Russian Roulette with his life.

“Each branch of the military has a record of punishing service members who have been found guilty of using this drug. Penalties can include prison time, confinement, loss of rank, and dishonorable discharge” (comilitary).

“In the Army, the use of noncontrolled intoxicants – to include natural substances – is prohibited under Army Regulation 600-85 (Army Substance Abuse Program). The Army has taken a proactive stance on addressing the dangers of Spice. A violation can lead to disciplinary action, which may range from a reprimand to a dishonorable discharge.
A Spice user may have no idea what he or she is being exposed to, due to the high quantity of other synthetic materials contained in the drug.
It is known to be between 100 to 800 times more powerful than marijuana” (Army.mil)

Veterans Theater is tracing the constitution of the global enterprise, the spread of the Spice-Fractal, from the lab to the rush that is anticipated, and falling down into the abyss of death, if your number comes up.

This is radical street theater, not the safe environs of a Center for Performing Arts. The Being of this Spice-Fractal, its spread qua business profits-in-suicides per capita, takes care of the business life, the fore-having of Spice recipe changes in a lab, the fore-sight to ante (the bet) on the future of addicted souls, the between fore-structure of global distribution, the fore-conception of the lab study concepts from the very onset of this industry, to the becoming of the business’ care for its product, to keep one step ahead of DEA enforcement. That is what the Spice-Fractal is, and what it is all about.

I am a business professor, and write about the ethics of business practices.  When the business of business is death, do we not as business professors, have a moral and ethical answerability, a responsibility to do Street Theater, to bring awareness about the business of this man-made epidemic.

If you got this email, what would you do?

“We had a big problem with Spice these past few days. Another death, one that police and hospital trying to locate family he is brain dead and in one day we had seven people fall out and taken to the hospital because of smoking Spice. That very same day the mission had six and in the city they counted over 21 carried to hospital for smoking spice. This was Thursday evening and it almost seemed like a terrorist act was committed because it was none stop all over the city. Friday we had three and Saturday we had two. The police are saying it was a very deadly batch and the same yellow ole pickup that I have been watching for months for dealing is involved. Police are following up leads and I even took pictures to show what this guy has been doing. It has been a very long and stressful week and I believe that this is only the beginning” (email from Iraq War homeless veteran received June 14 2015).

A fractal is the iterating pattern of self-sameness across micro to macro scale, and vice versa. The Spice-Fractal must flow globally and locally along the jagged-fractal-coastlines, distributing the faux Marijuana to unsuspecting users, who think they can get a high on the cheap. Its use and market share is growing.

Figure 1 – Comparison of Spice (Synthetic Marijuana) to other drug use  http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/k2spice-synthetic-marijuana

German Duarte (2014: xiii) argues that since Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry of the 1970s, the ‘fractal narrative’ has become popular in films, novels, and visual graphics of storytelling. “Fractal narrative” is defined as “a narrative that finds its best accomplished form in the Web” in hyperlink networks (Duarte, 2014: 284). He observed that since Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry, the fractal narrative took root in film and novels, and even in recent Disney movie songs about fractals (see also Palumbo, 2002).  Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar, Dune, etc. have fractal narrative iterations of self-sameness across scalabilities. They are monologic plots, the heroic characters on the Romantic Adventure (chronotope, as Bakhtin call this spacetime).

There are much more radical fractal story assemblage, the most famous if Jeff Noon’s (1993) Vurt novel.  In the Vurt, one puts various kinds of feather into the mouth, and this sends one on a journey of fractal iterations into successive recursions of self-similarity.  The meeting is Manchester UK, and the Vurt-heads are in search of a feather, Curious Yellow, that will release a comrade from the Vurt-realm (a bid trip). Beware of the Tapeworm feather, it is a really bad trip into complexity fractal structures. There is a fractal Vurt-feather, as addictive as the Spice (synthetic weed) in New Mexico

The Spice-Fractal is the spreading spiral pattern, across an $8 billion dollar global business, turned epidemic. Swallow this Vurt, and you are on a bad trip, to addiction, perhaps to your own death.  The spreading fractal pattern is through the Situational Hermeneutics of a professor fore-having, the fore-conception of synthetic language, the recipe that became a fore-structure of industry, and the fore-sight of that industry to sell addictive products to users, while labeling them ‘not for human consumption’ and the entire becoming of care for the sustainability of the Spice global industry in the face of DEA pursuit.

To counter a Spiral-Fractal with Veterans Theater street theatricality, is to make space for veterans stories, stories of the business of Spice, gone Global.

References:

Boje, D. M. (2015). Change Solutions to the Norms and Standards Overwhelming Organizations. Organizational Change and Global Standardization: Solutions to Standards and Norms Overwhelming Organizations.

Boje, D. M., & Henderson, T. L. (Eds.). (2014). Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Boje, D. M., Svane, M., Henderson, T., Solutions, G., Hank, L. L. C., & Strevel, B. Critical Corporate Social Responsibility in Tamara-Land: The Role of Tetranormalizing Fractals. Online at http://davidboje.com/vita/paper_pdfs/CSR%20Chapter_16_March_2015.pdf

Duarte, G. A. (2014). Fractal Narrative: About the Relationship Between Geometries and Technology and Its Impact on Narrative Spaces (Vol. 12). transcript Verlag.

Henderson, T., & Boje, D. M. (2015). Organizational Development and Change Theory: Managing Fractal Organizing Processes. London/NY: Routledge.

Huffman, J. W., Zhang, X., Wu, M. J., & Joyner, H. H. (1989). Regioselective synthesis of (.+-.)-11-Nor-9-carboxy-. DELTA. 9-THC. The Journal of Organic Chemistry, 54(20), 4741-4743.

Mandelbrot, Benoit B. “Comments on:” A Subordinated Stochastic Process Model with Finite Variance for Speculative Prices,” by Peter K. Clark.”Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society (1973): 157-159.

Noon, J. (1993). Vurt, Littleborough.

LINKS TO ARTICLES

DrugFacts: Spice (Synthetic Marijuana). National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA): Updated May 2012. Accessed Dec 7, 2012. Available at: http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/spice-synthetic-marijuana

Understanding the ‘Spice’ Phenomenon. European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Accessed Dec 7, 2012. Available at: http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/attachements.cfm/att_80086_EN_Spice%20Thematic%20paper%20—%20final%20version.pdf

Drugs.com. Kids Using Synthetic Pot a Growing Public Health Concern; Posted March 2012. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012. Available at: http://www.drugs.com/news/kids-using-synthetic-pot-growing-public-health-concern-37058.html

Cohen, J., Morrison, S., Greenberg, J., & Saidinejad, M. (2012). Clinical Presentation of Intoxication Due to Synthetic Cannabinoids. Pediatrics, 129(4), e1064-e1067.

Haiken M. “Spice” and “K2” vs. “Bath Salts”: The Other Designer Drug Scare. Forbes 6/13/2012. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2012/06/13/spice-vs-bath-salts-the-other-designer-drug-scare/2/

Johnston, L. D., O’Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., & Schulenberg, J. E. (December 18, 2013). “American teens more cautious about using synthetic drugs.” University of Michigan News Service: Ann Arbor, MI. Retrieved MM/DD/YYYY from http://www.monitoringthefuture.org

The Quest of the Veteran to find their Authentic Self – Blog post David M. Boje, Ph.D. Sep 10 2015

The Quest of the Veteran to find their Authentic Self

Growing up, I learned to conform to a fictional self, the expected roles my family and friends expected of me. When my dad deserted my mom, and four kids, leaving me as the eldest child, I got to experience welfare in Spokane Washington.  The welfare caseworker would come to our home, look through my chester drawers. I recall when I was 15, she found a ‘transistor radio’ worth about $5 in my drawer, and said, ‘this will have to be reported, and deducted from your welfare payment!’ By age 17, I had moved out, and gone on my own, changing tires at Montgomery Wards, working for a few dollars an hour, but paying for my own car and apartment. I wanted to get out from under the ‘fictional self’ of welfare kid. I did not like lining up to get the industrial cheese, the tubs of lard, but did like making those cheese sandwiches on the stove.

By the time I graduated high school I had a rep (reputation) as a bad boy, as someone apt to get into trouble. With the legal age for ‘beer’ set at 21, there was plenty of opportunity for trouble to find me. And this to is a kind of ‘fictional self.’ In my high school (Shadle Park), none of us were expected to go to the major universities, like Gonzaga, that was for people who went to Prep Schools. Rather, we were expected to be a mechanic, or go to community college, and drop out after a semester.

It was the time of the draft, and they drafted kids who were not in college, or the bad boys, and I was guilty on both counts.

In the Army, in Basic Training, I learned a fictional self, as the drill sergeants had me yell ‘kill, kill, kill!’ as I stabbed a bayonet into a straw dummy, crawled on my belly beneath the barbed wire, and the machine gun bullets. I was conflicted, trying to play the bad boy role, and having the Army try to shape me into the soldier role. I finally surrendered, began blousing my trousers, pressing my fatigues, showing up on time, etc. I was made a supply clerk, then a company clerk, and promoted to E5 (Spec 5, a sort of Sergeant). I was kind of like the character Radar in the movie Mash.

As a Veteran I was encouraged to adopt a ‘fictional self’ and this made it more difficult after deployment to Vietnam to find my authentic Self.  I really had no idea what my ‘authentic Self’ was, and my quest is to find it.

I like (Heidegger, 1963) Being and Time. It is all about the search to find the authentic Self by throwing off the many fictional selves that a society, military, school, family, and friends lay on you.

Sabine Trafimow taught us, the Qualitative Methods seminar last Tuesday, three German words in Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) writing to get at the relation of inauthentic and authentic Self:

1. Das Man, the ‘they-self’ inauthentic man
2. Man Selbst, ‘one-self’ or the who is not ‘oneself’ it is the ‘they’
3. Eigentlichen Selbst, your ‘authentic Self’ (uneigentlichen is inauthentic).

The ‘they-self’ (Das Man) is unspecific, so general in scope, it has no specific answerability, we just are expected to conform to the ‘they.’

Before entering the military, our peers, our culture, our family, and our education expects us to conform to ‘the-they’ and we are lost in ‘the-they’ and have not even a glimpse of authentic Self (Eigentlichen Selbst). The movie ‘Breakfast Club‘ is about teenagers in high school, lost in the ‘the-they’ the jocks, gangsters,  the cheer leaders, the grunge, and other cliques.  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a movie about shaking off the ‘they-self’ of parents and school

 “Proximally and for the most part the Self is lost in the ‘they'” (Heidegger, 1963, # 383). “The ‘who’ is the neuter, the ‘they’ [das Man]” (Heidegger, 1963, # 127).

“If everything ‘good’ is a heritage, and the character of ‘goodness’ lies in making authentic existence possible, then the handing down of a heritage constitutes itself in resoluteness”(Heidegger, 1963, # 384).

This anticipatory resoluteness to shake of the fictional selves, and find one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being-authentic-Self is something I am still working on.

Yesterday I wrote about the ways American Psychological Association in its DSM manuals tries to develop a fictional self, called PTSD.

“PTSD diagnostic status is determent by first dichotomizing each symptom as “present” or “absent,” then following the DSM-5 diagnostic rule. A symptom is considered present only if the corresponding item severity score is rated 2 (“moderate/threshold”) or higher.The DSM-5 PTSD diagnostic rule requires” (source):

• At least one Criterion B symptom -Presence of one (or more) of the following intrusion symptoms associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning after the event(s) occurred:

  1.Recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic event(s)

  2.Recurrent distressing dreams in which the content and/or affect of the dream are related to the traumatic event.

  3.Dissociative reactions (e.g., flashbacks) in which the individual feels or acts as if the event(s) were recurring. (Such reactions may occur on a continuum, with the most extreme expression being a complete loss of awareness of present surroundings.)

  4.Intense or prolonged psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event(s).

  5.Marked physiological reaction to external or internal cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event(s).

• At least one Criterion C symptom -Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning after the traumatic event(s) occurred, as evidenced by one or both of the following:

  1.Avoidance of or efforts to avoid distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings about or closely associated with the traumatic event(s).

  2.Avoidance of or efforts to avoid external reminders (people, places, conversations, activities, objects, situations) that arouse distressing, memories, thoughts, or feelings about or closely associated with the traumatic event(s).

• At least two Criterion D symptoms -Negative alterations in cognitions and mood associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning or worsening after the event(s) occurred, as evidenced by two or more of the following:

  1.Inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic event(s) (typically due to dissociative amnesia and not to other factors such as head injury, alcohol or drugs).

  2.Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world (e.g., “I am bad,” “No one can be trusted,” “The world is completely dangerous,” “My whole nervous system is permanently ruined”).

  3.Persistent, distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic event(s) that leads the individual to blame himself/herself or others.

  4.Persistent negative emotional state (e.g., fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame).

  5.Marked diminished interest or participation in significant activities.

  6.Feelings of detachment or estrangement from others

  7.Persistent inability to experience positive emotions (e.g., happiness, satisfaction, or loving feelings).

• At least two Criterion E symptoms -Marked alterations in arousal and reactivity associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning or worsening after the traumatic event(s) occurred, as evidenced by two or more of the following:

  1.Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people or objects.

  2.Reckless or self-destructive behavior.

  3.Hypervigilance.

  4.Exaggerated startle response.

  5.Problems with concentration.

  6.Sleep disturbance (e.g. problems falling or staying asleep or restless sleep).

• Criterion F is met (disturbance has lasted one month) –
• Criterion G is met (disturbance causes either clinically significant distress or functional impairment)

You can play this PowerPoint which will explain the Criterion and give examples.

Here is civilian version of DSM-V PTSD test:

Keep in mind, that you can have a high score on the DSM-V PTSD instrument, and be totally denied any and all VA claims and benefits.

The VA rating specialist will ask you for  your DD-214, and see if you were awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB), Combat Action Ribbon, Medal of Honor, Purple Heart, or some other validating medal, in–order-to determine you were in an encounter with enemy fire, and you behaved as the military expected. You can also do a 201 Claims File: “plane crashes, ship sinkings, explosions, rapes or assaults, duty on a burn ward or graves registration unit, and acceptable POW status” (source).

This means if you were in a combat zone, and cannot verify a specific engagement with enemy or with rapes/assaults, then you do not qualify for care. For me,

“The Vietnam Service Medal is not among those decorations considered conclusive proof of the stressor” (IBID.).

The quest for the veteran to find their authentic self is not something the VA rating specialist can help with. You won’t find it at the VA office. When I served in Vietnam, earned the Vietnam Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Campaign Medial, 2 OS Bars, Marksman M16, Sharpshooter M14 — the medals do not translate into anything substantive.

Yet there are repeated stressful dreams, a sudden reaction to a movement behind me, a feeling I need to get out of a crowded restaurant, feeling irritable, easily startled, and so on. This is the PTSD anxiety, an attunement to Being-in-the-world that comes from a fictional self that keeps overshadowing my authentic Self.

PTSD is the ultimate ‘they-self- (Das Man), its so unspecific, there is no answerability in it. It covers up the authentic Self.  The authentic Self is grounded in existence, in a heart-of-care kind of Being-in-the-world.

#antenarrative, #authentic-self, #fictional-self, #storytelling

What is Storytelling Relational Processes of Veterans Situation in the USA? Blog post by David M. Boje, Ph.D. Sep 9 2015

What is Storytelling Relational Processes of Veterans Situation in the USA?

Storytelling is the total of all involvements in the spacetimemattering of a context, in this post, the veterans of the USA. Here we focused on the system of health care veterans receive and the storytelling relational process that constitutes the ‘meaning of care’ for veterans Being-in-VA-Health-care.

According to the report ‘Fixing Veterans Health Care” from Converned Veterans for America,  (http://taskforce.cv4a.org/):

“One of the principal problems with the delivery of health care in the United States is its uncoordinated nature. In particular, patients with multiple chronic conditions may be seeing multiple physicians who do not talk to each other, leading to overlapping prescriptions and in some cases, dangerous mistakes. ‘Badly coordinated care, duplicated efforts, bungled handoffs, and failures to follow up result in too much care for some patients, too little care for others, and the wrong care for many’ observed Katherine Baiker and Hellen Levy in 2013” (see p.age 50 of the report).

For every narrative about the successful delivery of quality care to veterans, there are counternarratives about the bungled handoffs, failure to follow up and the thousands of veterans that died waiting for an appointment to get care.

Besides the narratives and counternarratives about the generalized picture of veterans health care in the USA, there are the actual lived experiences of individual veterans their ‘living stories’ of places, times, and mattering of health care delivery.

Finally, there are the antenarrative threads out of which the dominant (grand) narratives (& counternarratives) of veterans’ healthcare, and the living story web of the veterans experience — are constituted.  Antenarratives are the ‘what’ of narratives and living stories, the lies before, beneath, between, the bets on the future, and the becoming of care that is ‘not yet.’ For more on antenarrative, please consult the Antenarrative Blog.

Our focus here is on the complexity dynamics of the entire storytelling patterns, the interplay of narratives, stories, and antenarrative threads. We call this ‘Quantum Storytelling’ dynamics.

And we are doing an annual conference, this year in Los Angeles in December http://bigstoryconference.com.

Examples of Dominant Narratives and Counternarratives of Healthcare for Veterans

“The Veterans Health Administration is America’s largest integrated health care system with over 1,700 sites of care, serving 8.76 million Veterans each year” (http://www.va.gov/health/). The narrative continues with VHA’s accomplishments in Suicide Prevention: “VA is collaborating with community organizations throughout the month, with specially trained suicide prevention coordinators in VA medical centers across the nation spreading the word at local events, sponsoring health fairs, and working with the Department of Defense to help Veterans and Service members get the support they deserve. In addition, VA is coordinating with local and regional groups — including community partners, Veterans Service Organizations, health care providers and prominent Veteran supporters — to spread the word about VA’s mental health resources.” – See more at: http://www.va.gov/HEALTH/NewsFeatures/2015/September/One-Powerful-Number-Could-Save-a-Life.asp#sthash.YSg0Eiy1.dpuf

But, the counternarratives, question: are veterans really getting the healthcare they deserve?

VA IG Confirms Worst Fears: 300,000 Vets Really Did Die While Waiting For Healthcare

“Allegations of mismanagement at the Veterans Health Administration’s Health Eligibility Center led to an investigation by the VA office of the inspector general, which turned up some astounding discoveries. Exactly 867,000 veterans still have their healthcare applications listed as pending in the database.”  Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/03/va-ig-confirms-worst-fears-300000-vets-really-did-die-while-waiting-for-healthcare/#ixzz3lGFbx9uH

El Paso has longest wait for VA mental health appointments in U.S.

Staff shortages key cause of long waits, VA says

By Lindsey Anderson / El Paso Times / Follow @L_M_Anderson

POSTED:   07/18/2015 11:27:42 PM MDT

“Veterans in the El Paso area have to wait longer for mental health appointments at Veterans Affairs facilities than veterans anywhere else in the country, according to VA statistics.”

“El Paso veterans are waiting nearly 17 days on average for a mental health appointment — more than double the wait of veterans in nearly all other areas of Texas, according to VA data on pending appointments as of July 1.”

Next, we leave the narratives and counternarratives and look at the living stories.

LIVING STORY EXAMPLES

A living story has its place, time, and mattering in spacetimemattering.

I am a Vietnam-veteran.I came home with PTSD, but there was no such diagnostic category, until 1980. Half the homeless US veterans are Vietnam era. APA changed the DSM manual for our generation, not admitting PTSD until the 1980 edition.

My own living story is coming home from a year’s deployment in Vietnam war, on 29 July 1970, I was cautioned to take off my uniform, put on civilian clothes, and toss the uniform into the trash, lest I be mobbed by protesters. So I arrived in Oakland, on a TWA flight, and did as instructed. We were not given a welcome by the nation, nor did airlines ask us to board first, or thank us for our service to the country.  No, the nation saw the nightly news, the ways the war was not going well, and so on.

I was assigned to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I served out my remaining time in the Army until 28 January 1971. I got an early out to attend college, the first in my family tree to do so. I enrolled at Burlington County College (now Burlington County University), moved the family into a Princess 60 foot mobile home, in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

Table is from http://davidboje.com/Warwick/ which has more on history of DSM.

The point is when I came home from Vietnam, with what is now PTSD, the psychologists had written out stress from trauma, from their manual. DSM IV expanded PTSD to just about everything, and now, PTSD in DSM-V is only for a particular battle, that meets certain criteria (see http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/PTSD-overview/dsm5_criteria_ptsd.asp).

To make a long story short, I am home addicted to alcohol, and full of stress I did not know what to do with, except to channel it into work. So two addictions, alcohol and work were my way of dealing with it.

Like most veterans I did not go near the VA except to get education or mortgage loan money. And in fact, never did use VA treatment. Instead I got into self-improvement seminars, and got some marriage counseling.

I was a A student all the way through college, graduated tops in my class at Burlington University’ two year program, and again at Rider University’s 4 year program. This got me a fellowship to University of Illinois, a pass into the MBA, then acceleration into their Ph.D. program, and UCLA was my first assistant professor job. I drank a six pack every day and two on weekend days, from 1970s through to about 1994. I always drank after doing my work.

21 years ago, I stopped drinking, and went through divorce, and bankruptcy, since in Las Angeles, could not afford one household, and when the X took off to New York with the kids, and bought a new car, all I could do was go into the downward spiral of divorce and bankruptcy. I decided to quit the booze, and that turned things around.

One time I took the MMPI and a psychologist told me he could cure my workaholism, but it would mean I would not be a prolific a publisher. I said ‘no way’ and never went back.

So my living story of my struggle with stress, how it got hold of me, in Vietnam, and let it run its course as a marriage of 25 years destructed, and I learned the ‘true’ mean of deconstruction, and reconstruction.

In my new marriage, horses came with the package, along with the requirement I get some real counseling, which I did in 1995, and since.  Now I have a small ranch, loving marriage, and meditate and try to tame the workaholic monster.

ANTENARRATIVE 

The antenarratives are threads of intention that constitute the narratives and living stories, and are what constitutes all the involvements of storytelling in a context of spacetimemattering. 

How is antenarrative a relational process of organizations and their participants’ storytelling?

In last several books we have take a ‘quantum’ storytelling relational process standpoint. This means we are working on the dynamic  complexity patterns of antenarrative, especially what we are calling ‘quantum storytelling.’

Quantum storytelling is an ontologic analysis of ongoing patterns of the storytelling, including the a of antenarrative: the cycles, spirals, and rhizomatics of those patterns.

 I have participated in 3 books on the topic:

Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative 2014 BOOK edited by David M. Boje and Tonya Wakefield Available from Amazon or Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd is registered in England. Reg. No: 4333775; VAT No: 108280727

Organizational Change and Global Standardization: Solutions to Standards and Norms Overwhelming Organizations by David M. Boje (Editor)  2015) (Routledge Studies in Organizational Change & Development)Hardcover – Available now.

Organizational Development and Change Theory: Managing Fractal Organizing Processes by Tonya Henderson (Author),David M. Boje (Author)Available August 1st 2015 – available Routledge.

In sum,Storytelling is the total of all involvements in the spacetimemattering of a context, the interplay of narratives (counternarratives), people’s living stories, and the antenarrative threads between-beneath-before-bets and the becoming of care. For care to take a different shape for veterans in the USA, we need to understand not only the base, but the future, the potentiality-for-Being of the becoming-of-care in authentic ways for our veterans.

See you at bigStory Conference http://bigstoryconference.com

How does Wealth of War Corporations and the Super-rich relate to Madness, Homelessness, to Veterans Issues? – Blog by David M. Boje, Ph.D. Sep 7 2015

How does Wealth of War Corporations and the Super-rich relate to Madness, Homelessness, to Veterans Issues?

The super-wealthy live alongside homelessness. The War Corporations need humans to become ‘Mad Warriors’ and to supply them with equipment. The War Corporations feed on madness and produce madness.

“There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is men who constitute madness in the attachment he bears for himself and by the illusions he entertains” (Michel Foucault, 1980, Madness and Civilization, p. 26).

There is madness across the USA. “In Silicon Valley, abundant wealth commonly lives alongside absolute squalor. The same county that houses Yahoo!, Google, and scores of other digital money mines is mired in a costly ongoing failure to address rampant homelessness” (ThinkProgress).

In California, “Santa Clara County spent nearly $200 million per year on justice system costs involving homeless people. The vast majority was spent jailing people with nowhere to live” (IBID.). They had 33 separate laws on the books criminalizing homelessness, including a law against sleeping in cars.

How Madness of War Corporations is related to Madness of USA

The forces of madness are not confined to the Asylum, the Hospital, or the Ship of Fools. Rather, madness is now everywhere, and there are great profits to be made from madness. No where are those profits higher from madness, than in the War Corporations.

First, there is the profits of corporations that feed on wars. For example, the Corporations Profiting form the Afghanistan and the Iraq Wars:

 Source – These Corporations are Profiteers from the Unending Wars

Source

Wars spread madness. Wars need warriors, to do the work of corporations.  Let’s deconstruct (take apart) the trope of madness, in-order-to, better understand its meaning for ‘real life’ of war. War is rife with conflict, death, and destruction, yet many corporations are profiting. The corporations lose money without war. The nation pays for its warriors for four to six decades, meanwhile Congress allocates more money for weapons of war, but cuts the budget for the warriors wounded in war, needing care for many decades.

Corporations profit from the the madness of poverty. Corporate America profits from poor people. Wealth accumulates to the .001% of the population, while almost 50% of the world lives on less than $2 a day. Income inequality between the super-wealthy and the super-poor, is want makes for extreme differences in health, nutrition, infant mortality, sanitation, and other aspects of human well being. The richest 1% own more wealth than the remaining 99% of the population.

“The super rich can view the lower classes as subhuman. It is very hard to justify your huge wealth unless you see people beneath you as less deserving. Once the wealth gaps become very large, it is easier to get through the day if you see them as less able, less special” (Guardian).

In the last 15 years, inequality has spiralled, as the gap of super wealthy and rest of us continues to widen

and

Concentration of wealth at the top is unsustainable, because it leads to More Madness

The gap between super rich and the rest of us needs legitimating beliefs:

1. MYTH: Poor people deserve to be poor since they are lazy, and really do not want to work. REALITY: A growing share of the world’s poor, work full time, over 60 hours a week, and half the world’s population lives on $2 a day, not even minimum wage
2. MYTH: Wealthy corporations believe they deserve the wealth, since they work harder than the poor. REALITY: “In reality, a large and growing portion of the super-rich have never broken a sweat. Their wealth has been handed to them” (Salon).
3. MYTH: Work, hard and you can be part of the American Dream. REALITY: USA is becoming two groups, the working poor, and the non-working super-rich, who assume they are paid their worth in gold (Salon).

Who are the SUPER-WEALTHY?

You guessed it, the CEOs of the corporations profiting from the Iraq and Afghanistan ware are the top .01%, and make the rules of the game.

“There’s the top 1% of wealthy Americans (bankers, oil tycoons, hedge fund managers) and there’s the top 0.01% of wealthy Americans: the military contractor CEOs” (Huffington Post).

e.g. Military Contractor CEO Pay in 2010

• Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush: $22.84 million.

• Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens: $21.89 million.

• Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.

“More than a third of the world’s super-rich live in the U.S., with roughly 27% in Japan, 6% in the U.K., and 5% in France. The world’s richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet’s total assets, while the bottom half of the population – more than 3 billion people – owned less than 1% of the world’s wealth” (Alternet).

Here is an idea: Let the Super-Rich War Corporations pay for Solutions to the Problems of Veterans Health Care, and the Homeless across the USA.

One Solution: The pathway from HOMELESS to HOMED –>Above homeless in London are SPIKED to keep sleeping rough, in camps across America there are tents but ‘Oh so cold in winter’ and in tent 130 degrees in summer sun, so why not build some Tiny Homes, and transition all the way to economic sustainability, off-the-grid electric, on wheels to move to great locations.

There is a source of poverty, the profiteers of war, and they could pay for the cabins.

The cost of providing cabins, is actually lower overall than spikes for homeless.

For example, In Silicon Valley: “The richest valley in the nation, if not in many parts of the world, with the fifth-highest rate of homelessness and the number-one rate of unsheltered homeless in the country.”

“A new report commissioned by Loving’s group and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors details how the valley has failed in its fight against homelessness, and at what cost. All told, county communities spent more than half a billion dollars per year hospitalizing, jailing, and providing social services to about 104,000 individuals who were homeless for some portion of the six-year period of the study. Health care spending ($312 million per year) was the bulk of the cost, with justice system spending second.

“The extensive analysis by Economic Roundtable researchers who cross-referenced 25 million separate records offers a clearer understanding of why the county’s costs were so high – and how policymakers could create a financial windfall by giving homeless people houses and direct support services. About 60 percent of all county spending went to just 10 percent of the homeless population, fewer than 3,000 of whom were identified as chronically homeless and in need of more intensive and targeted aid.

“Providing permanent housing with supportive services attached for those most-expensive persistently homeless individuals would have saved about $42,700 a head compared to the cost of leaving them to their own devices. That means that even if Santa Clara communities ignored the types of homelessness that afflicted the other 101,000 people in the study and concentrated solely on the persistently homeless, it could have saved $120 million a year. But Destination: Home’s recommendations based on the report go beyond such narrowly-targeted permanent housing work” (ThinkProgress.org).

We have gone from War on Nations to War on Drugs to War on Poverty and the War against Homelessness.

The War on Drugs has turned into War on Poverty: With 5% of the world’s population, USA has 20% of the prison population. Some two million people live behind bars in the USA. 37% of black high-school dropouts are incarcerated. These are the people that cannot afford bail, not  able to leave jail and conduct defense investigations.

“While only 8 percent of federal prisoners were sentenced for violent crimes in 2011, almost half of federal inmates – 48 percent – were in prison for drug crimes, according to Department of Justice statistics.Jan 2, 2013″ (ThinkProgress). 

Are America’s jails used to punish poor people? (CBS News)

“We are punishing people for their poverty,” Nick Turner, executive director of the Vera Institute, told CBS MoneyWatch. “When we looked at the data, we found 75 percent of the population of people in jail are awaiting trail and are there for nonviolent offenses. That is mind-boggling when you think the country spends $22 billion on jail populations.” (IBID). “jails admit 11.7 million people annually, almost 19 times the 631,000 who go to state and federal prisons every year” (IBID.).

The U.S. Is Locking People Up For Being Poor

Posted: 02/12/2014 (Huffington Post).

“In addition, those behind bars are staying longer. Some 62 percent of them have not yet been convicted of a crime, and three-quarters of those jailed now are brought in for nonviolent offenses. The report also finds that a disproportionate number of those in jail suffer from mental illness” (PBS).

Many people look at the homeless as the madness, but what if the wars produce the madness?  The wars cost money. It takes less money to get at the root causes of the madness, than it does to put poor people in prison, in day shelter, and blame them for all the madness, most of which is done to increase the wealth of the .001% who are not paying their fair share for the long-term costs of war.

What about Veterans and Prison?

VA AND DEFENSE CHIEFS CONFRONT REALITY OF 700,000 INCARCERATED VETERANS (source).

“More Iraq War Veterans are Landing in Jail but Most Counties Don’t Track Soldier Inmates“. 

It takes a Heart-of-Madness to create profit from poverty. It takes a Heart-of-Care to come up with solutions to the madness.

Thank you.

Madness, Veterans, Homeless, and Institutions of Care for the Mad Warriors – blog by David M. Boje, Ph.D. Sep 5 2015

Madness, Veterans, Homeless, and Institutions of Care for the Mad Warriors

Poverty and madness are necessary to wealth. Why else would almost half the 7.3 billion people on this planet make less than $2 a day?  Poverty is necessary to wealth, but how is madness related?

Being overwhelmed in a fight, the madman gets in touch with animality, like the mythic Wolverine, Hulk, and of course, Thor. Thor, the Asgardian God of Thunder, son of Odin and the Elder Earth-Goddess Gaea. Thor, armed with his enchanted hammer (Mjolnir) is arguably the greatest and mightiest mad warrior. Or get the Marvel Titan Hero Series 6 Pack with Armored Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Wolverine (Marvel 6 Pack).

Left to Right are Thor-Wolverine-Hulk-Spiderman-Captain America-Iron Man

These are the icons of military warrior, turned to help USA in the sea of madness.

Mad warriors in the USA are understood through the archetypes of Thor-Wolverine-Hulk-Spiderman-Captain America-Iron Man and have become a fractal-narrative.  “Fractal narrative” is defined as “a narrative that finds its best accomplished form in the Web” in hyperlink networks (Duarte, 2014, p. 284; as cited in Boje, 2015: xxvi, emphasis mine).Thor-Wolverine-Hulk-Spiderman-Captain America-Iron Man have entered the hyperlink networks, the film and comic book genres. The berserker warriors of old, the Viking Mad Warriors, the Warriors of Apocalypse Now, and Deer Hunter, from the Vietnam War era.

Definition of Fractal-Narrative: “A fractal narrative has heroes in recurring patterns of adventure with their sidekicks” (Boje, 2015: xxvi).  On their hero’s journey, the find helpers, get defeated, bounce back, bring home that boon to save the day.

Definition of Fractal-Story: On the other hand, “A ‘fractal story’ is defined here as a web of of fluid ‘living story; interrelationships between urban chaos and fractal-cyberorder that is centrifugal, veering away from order toward anarchism, discontinuity and erratic, violent urbanism” Boje, 2015: xxvi).

Definition of Fractal-Antenarrative: The fractal antenarrative is different than these other fractals,. The Fractal-Antenarrative is the before-bets-beneath-between-becoming patterning, what Jeff Noon (1996) the “randomologist” calls the Vurt, sometimes in pattern of ‘downward fractal-spiral’ (XXiX), e.g. the downward fractal-spiral of the eco-system with loss of more and more species, extinct by unintelligent action as John Dewey calls it (Boje, 2015: xxxii).  Thor-Wolverine-Hulk-Spiderman-Captain America-Iron Man are characters in futuristic dystopia of  our own 21st century. 

The solicitude of prisons, police, shelters, missions, and so on, await the Mad Warriors, returning from war, into peacetime. The authenticity of Being-Mad-Warrior has no place in civilized USA.

to be continued after lunch

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How Veterans Theater is Emerging by Anticipations – blog by David M. Boje, Ph.D. Sep 4th 2015ere

How Veterans Theater is Emerging by Anticipations –  by David M. Boje, Ph.D.

The overall objective is for Veterans Theater to publicize basic knowledge on homelessness, and other concerning issues among veterans

How you can help: Click on GoFundMe – thank you!

http://www.gofundme.com/mol1wc

Our Foundation is Called the “Antenarrative Foundation.” Antenarrative is a term I invented (Boje,1991) that has grabbed hold, and taken root in the social science literature. Antenarrative is a five-fold meaning of the word ‘ante’ in relation to ‘narratives’ that have formed in the public sphere. Ante means (1) before, (2) bet, (3) beneath, (4) between) in (5) becoming of care.”Care” is defined as “ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in (the world) as Being-alongside entities which we encounter (within-the-world)” (Heidegger, # 250). We call it simply, the ‘heart-of-care’.

We have a whole totality of involvements that took place over the past 18 months, and more are taking place today, plus what involvements are still to come, and are outstanding.  For more on the meaning of Antenarrative, please see ANTENARRATIVE BLOG. Here I will focus on how Veterans Theater is one of the programs of Antenarrative Foundation.

Mission Statement of Antenarrative Foundation: ‘Making Space for Veterans Stories’

Yesterday I had lunch with Mrs. Sam Muir. She offered some good advice, and a possibility for Veterans Theater. And I met with officers of Phi Alpha Kappa Omega at NMSU. We had a great time brainstorming ideas for National Association of Social Work – New Mexico (NASW-NM) conference.  

Left to Right are three students from NMSU working with three Army veterans: me (Boje), John, and Ernest (who is also President of Veterans Theater program). The two ladies are Phi Alpha Kappa Omega students, and the gentleman is an MBA student, Aaron Stoddard. John, Ernest and I worked together developing formerly homeless veterans stories,

Phi Alpha Kappa Omega at NMSU has proposed to bring Veterans Theater to the next National Association of Social Workers annual conference, which will take place in Albuquerque, NM on February 24, 2016.  The overall objective is for Veterans Theater to publicize basic knowledge on homelessness, and other concerning issues among veterans at the conference.  We hope to educate the social work practice on barriers veterans encounter through the Veterans Administration, and engage them in real-life stories theatrically performed by homeless veterans.  We anticipate this to be an innovative way to demonstrate what a Veteran may experience in different scenarios through theatrical enactment as a mode of storytelling.

We also would like to follow Sam Muir’s advice, and hold a ‘backers audition’. Backer’s Audition is something that happens in the commercial theater when you are trying to raise money to bring a project on to the stage.

Backer’s Audition for Veterans Theater

1. Producing a Veterans Theater show for an audience is a small business and entrepreneurship venture. As a program of the Antenarrative Foundation, the venture must conform to the laws and regulations of our 501 (c) 3, in making charitable donations. This enables us to raise capital without the backers (investors) in the show taking undue risk. Antenarrative Foundation is properly organized to insure that its non-profit status has integrity.
2. We are now recruiting charitable investors to become co-producers through a series of backer’s auditions, in New Mexico, in California, and elsewhere. We want events that are intimate, in a rehearsal hall, where there is very little distance between the actors and backers. We want a stage manager to plan and facilitate the backer’s audition, leaving the Veterans Theater actors, to do their acting. We would like also to have it catered, and to have two video screens, so we can cut between Veterans Theater actors telling their stories, and trained seasoned actors, acting on the stage in live performances.
3. This means rehearsals, and having a cast of Veterans Theater actors who had the experience, and the cast of professional actors to interpret it, as well as participation of the sound, lighting, and video crew.  Professional actors need to be paid according to union rules and governing pay and working conditions.
4. We then invite potential backers to the audition. We are soliciting investors in the venture of developing a fully scripted play, putting it on the road, and/or in digital rendering. In our case, the money invested, is for charity, by those who care to participate in the venture.
5. Finally we sign up interested and eligible investors to make their investments, all at once or over some time period.

For the Phi Alpha Kappa Omega at NMSU plan to have Veterans Theater to the next National Association of Social Workers annual conference, we have an innovative plan to raise money and awareness.

In November, we are scheduling a Camp-in, in Tents, at NMSU, where members of Phi Alpha Kappa Omega and Veterans Theater, will camp out, on campus.  this money will help us fund a van, its insurance, meals, lodging to go to the National Association of Social Workers annual conference. We would also like to host a Backer’s Audition there, to develop the show, put it on the road, at your location.

Organization Chart

Our Bylaws provide for four programs:

1. Veterans and Theater (http://veteranstheater.com ) is the first program of Antenarrative Foundation. This is education and outreach by the veterans and/or homeless to the community, using theater skits to showcase the ‘Living Story Web’ of veterans and/or homeless own lived experience here and now, in relation to ‘Dominant Narratives’ (& counternarratives) that stereotype or stigmatize them, along with the ‘Antenarrative processes’ that connect them.
2. Legacy Ranch (http://davidboje.com/eagle ) is the second program of Antenarrative Storytelling Foundation. Legacy Ranch has Equine-Assisted-Growth-Learning-Events (EAGLE) activities as well as spaces for veterans and family members to decompress after employment. It is initially one, and in the long-term several ranches dedicated to services and ongoing research that help veterans (& their family members) make the transition after deployment to sustainable- economics, living, health, and community participation. One of the activities is equine-assisted care for veterans (and family members) using groundwork. Veterans and family members stay in cabins for weekend, week-long, or month-long decompression activities. Decompression means being in nature, being with animals, and being with family and friends to decompress after combat or post-combat military experiences. The purpose is to help veterans and family members who experience the stress of deployment to reintegrate. Another activity is ’embodied restory process’ that is part of ‘material storytelling’. Material storytelling uses sandtray events, and can include equine-arena work, where material objects are places in a space, by facilitators and/or by veterans (& family members) to depict their past, present, and future. Other activities include working with nature, with ranch animals, and having counselors available for confidential help with veteran and family issues.   We also anticipate acreage to do homeless retreats. It is initially one, and in the long-term several ranches dedicate to services and ongoing research that helps homeless make their transition to sustainable socioeconomic living and community participation. Activities include ’embodied restorying process’ of ‘Material storytelling’ using sandtray, and/or arena work. Homelessness does not end when a homeless person gets a tent, a cabin, an apartment, a trailer, or a home. Homelessness ends when the person enters a sustainable economic, health, living, and societal relationship.
3. Tent City Solutions – A third program includes writing of books based on our involvements with and do consulting that brings about Tent City Solutions (http://tentcitysolutions.co ), and also helping other veterans and homeless to write books focused on antenarratives of their experiences, that are beneath or covered over by the official or public narratives of a city or its agencies. Our focus is on the people not going into shelters, missions, or other transitional programs.
4. Big Story Conference (http://bigstoryconference.com ) is the academic and practitioner-scholar program of the Antenarrative Foundation. It is an annual conference that connects academic scholars with something to say about ‘antenarrative’ research, theory, and method to corporate applications of ‘antenarrative’. Those applications include the field of ‘organization storytelling,’ ‘storytelling organizations’, ‘Material story’, ‘Material storytelling,’ ‘quantum storytelling,’ ‘fractal change management,’ and related topics. Big Story Conference is the 2015 iteration of Quantum Storytelling Conference, now in its fifth year. The Antenarrative Foundation, through Big Story Conference, and other activities described next, raises money to support Antenarrative Foundation programs.

The heart-of-care for veterans and homeless of a city, its many organizations is happening in the city and county I call ‘home’ as a Vietnam Veteran, as president of the fledgling Antenarrative Foundation. Care is being constructed in many different ways by the network of organizations, of which we are very much, on the margins, not even on the periphery of the network of longstanding interorganizational relationships.

 

It takes a village to care for the veterans returned from war, and that same village to care for the homeless in a form of global capitalism where almost half of 7.3 billion people on the planet make less than $2 a day (source).

A homeless woman dies of exposure, a veteran comes back to the States and commits suicide. Veterans are dying hourly (1 every 65 minutes) in the USA.

Homeless are dying at an even higher hourly rate. And that brings me to the point of this post.

The problem of establishing Veterans Theater is grounded in our care for veterans stories, for homeless stories, for homeless veterans stories. Are those stories authentic. “but inauthenticity is base on the possibility of authenticity” (Heidegger, # 259). Inauthenticity outstrips its own existential actuality and its ownmost possibility-for-Being-while-in-the-world. The very meaning of authentic Being must remain hidden from the many Other possibilities, the many Other ways of constructing, in our case, Veterans Theater.

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Hello world!

This Blog is for Veterans and homeless. We work with storytelling to get at the antenarratives. Antenarrative is not anti-narrative. Antenarrative is defined as ‘the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet, a proper narrative can be constituted’ (Boje, 2001: 1).

The homeless and veterans storytelling is constituted by antenarratives: fragmented lives, non-linear tales, incoherent accounts, collective ways of telling, unplotted futures, lots of pre-narratives, and a good deal of speculative bets on the future. — David Boje, Ph.D. Vietnam Veteran and play director of veterans theater

Veterans and Theater (http://veteranstheater.com ) is the first program of Antenarrative Foundation. This is education and outreach by the veterans and/or homeless to the community, using theater skits to showcase the ‘Living Story Web’ of veterans and/or homeless own lived experience here and now, in relation to ‘Dominant Narratives’ (& counternarratives) that stereotype or stigmatize them, along with the ‘Antenarrative processes’ that connect them.

one free cap when you Donate $100 to Veterans Theater GoFundMe

Happy blogging!