Moments of Truth

Jeff Dorchen Truth Moment

I'm in my 30s and Jeff Dorchen is in his 50s. Guess which one of us had to look up how to spell pinochle. In this new Moment of Truth, the old Jeff Dorchen travels backwards in time (demographically,) runs from Mad Men, dresses down grandparents, critiques the state of modern assassination, and offers up absolutely no wisdom to pass to the next generation.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. He’s also an amateur scholar of Judaic, Hindu and Japanese spiritual lore. His many unfinished novels are still unfinished.

Old-ass Jeff Dorchen optimistically announces the end of youth culture.

Everything Elliot Rodger did and said last month has already been wrung through the Internet think-piece machine as fast as possible, but for all the hashtagging and forum-scanning, a lot of big, simple, complicated questions have been left unasked. Are normalized (albeit shitty) social values to blame in the actions of an abnormal human? What makes misogyny a unique hatred? Why isn't everyone oppressed killing everyone who oppresses them?  Jeff Dorchen has some answers, but mostly more questions.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.

Jeff Dorchen wonders whether outcasts are bound by the social contract.

He might have read the article last week. Or maybe next week. Anyway it got Jeff Dorchen so confused he lost track of when it is - past, present or future. Does it matter? Is this what the future looks like? Would you have thought so in the past?

Jeff Dorchen looks forward to looking back to the future of the present day.

SPOILER WARNING: Jeff Dorchen is going to spoil whatever the screenwriters of the new Planet of the Apes movie didn't already. In the future, monkeys give everyone the cold, people are still making poor gun-shooting decisions, apes stand in for Israelis / Palestinians / Atreides / Indians / Colonialists / Nazis / Jews / vampires / whatevers. Jeff blows it all to hell.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. His many unfinished novels are still unfinished.

Jeff Dorchen trades his monkey suit for scrubs and vivisects Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

This is the one of the rare Moments of Truth that is funny in absolutely no way. What can you say that is funny after you read an essay titled "I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me"? What can you say after you get past the reality of that title and read the actual words of an essay titled "I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me"? 

Jeff Dorchen spends the first installment of a multi-part monologue examining how realities of American life breed the kinds of powerful, violent narcissism we see unleashed on the streets of Ferguson. If you're a violent, narcissistic cop and you don't want to get hurt, don't read this challenge.

 According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. His many unfinished novels are still unfinished.

Jeff Dorchen looks in the mirror and reflects on the narcissism of violence.

Jeff Dorchen isn't going to convince you that torture is wrong. Jeff Dorchen isn't going to convince Dick Cheney that torture is wrong. So you, or Dick Cheney, need to get used to living in Jeff's America, where dissent and consent walk hand-in-hand, justice and injustice don't, and nothing gets put up anyone's anus without them being okay with it.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.

Jeff Dorchen and Dick Cheney torture further the already tortured logic of torture.

All Jeff Dorchen wants to do on Facebook is post photos of himself dressed as a giant baby, but now he has to spend all his time arguing with some Facebook rando about whether an image of a woman could possibly symbolize anything other than a woman.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.

A semiotician's guide to arguing with Facebook randos about cartoons of Muslim women.

Live from Hyderabad, Jeff Dorchen wanders the city, encountering  ancient boulders, 10-year old Cool Hand Lukes, Gandhi's promise, threats of mutilation, typos, schemes, deep history and a single, public toilet.

Jeff reports from India, where he’s filming scenes for the movie Basmati Blues.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.

Roaming Hyderabad, in search of a room of one's own, to poop.

Inspired by David Graeber's audio series on debt, Jeff Dorchen dusts off Human Credit from the good ideas pile, and makes the case for valuing humans for their innate humanity, not how much money they don't have.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.

Against owing: Re-introducing the radical notion of the Human Credit.

Jeff Dorchen returns from his trip to India with baggage. And a comprehensive definition of tourism, and fermented mare's milk, and an appreciation of cafe culture, and travel-sized Zen, and the limits of travel.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.

A travel guide to the farthest regions of one's own self-identity.

Jeff Dorchen figures out something about identity and society amidst the melting pot of smarmage, the politics of bafflement, Thrumonding, racial drag, patricide, one dropping, interesting person screwing, genotypecasting, and personal curation.

According to his contacts on LinkedIn, Jeff Dorchen can do just about anything. He’s a visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.

How to pass as not-racist in these baffling, fluid, racial times.

In a forward-looking Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen beholds the inequalites of the past, present, and he's pretty sure future, and finds them looking suspiciously similar, despite the assurances otherwise from today's crowd of billionaire tech/finance creeps at their billionaire tech/finance creep festival.

Future creep: On economy, society and our shiny new barbarism.

In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen mounts the world's priority pendulum, stuck firmly in the "greed" half of its arc between communalism and self-interest since the Reagan/Thatcher years, and warns that mounting debt for the poor and bailouts for the rich, and shrieking bats for CNBC and riots and corruption and naked greed only last so long before the violence swings back around.

And the people explode: On capitalism, pressure and rage.

Jeff Dorchen commiserates with perhaps the least powerful American of all - Barack Obama, bound by the natural laws of incrementalism and retrograde progress, and missing that magic wand that allowed past presidents to bomb and negotiate their will across history, now limited to sitting in a fogbank and making small tweaks to a machine that may or may not be plugged in.

The President is not a wizard, what magic do you expect from him?

In a Moment of Truth gang agley, Jeff Dorchen considers the monkeywrenches throw into the works of both political parties this election year, and finds the Bernie shaped one more interesting (and silly) as it challenges the inevitability setting of the Clinton machine, infuriating pre-diminished expectations and true believers alike.

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous Bernie: The election's best laid plans.

In a time-sensitive Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen considers the few billion of years worth of pasta-flinging that lead to our current present right now, and wonders if there's some larger, subconcious, species specific goal humanity has in mind - to be found in a future somewhere between Buddhas and monsters, heroes and villains, equanimity and whatever the opposite of equanimity is.

Jeff Dorchen wonders whether outcasts are bound by the social contract.

This Is Hell!