Our culture is marketing, this is what we do, and what is marketing? Trying to get people to do what you want them to. It’s what drives our consumer culture, it’s what drives our politics, it’s what drives our art. Music, movies, books, fine arts, it’s part of every research grant proposal. I don’t want to participate. I don’t want to tell you how to sell a screenplay or tell you how to write a hit, or tell you how to fit into the existing system. I want to tell you that I have a hope that there’s another way to be in this world, and that I believe with courage, vulnerability and honesty that the stuff we put into the world can serve a better purpose.

The way movies work now, and I’m talking about mainstream industry, the only goal is to get you to buy a product. The only goal. THE only goal. The ONLY goal. THE ONLY GOAL. And this intention creates the movies that we sit through, and the movies that we sit through create us. In government we’ve been reduced to the same game, through trickery, obfuscation, bullying, fear mongering. The goal of marketing a candidate is achieved. I don’t understand many things, I don’t know as much as I’d like about anything, but I’m a human being and I won’t be in competition for the right to be treated decently.

I won’t play that game. Nor should anybody have to. And in turn I will try not to use whatever access I have to the public sphere to sell things, including myself. The world is very scary now. It always has been. But something grotesque and specific to our time is blanketing us. We need to see that it is not reality, it is a choice we are making or allowing other people to make for us.