On a clear day one can see forever. This lyrical snippet comes to mind. Given the collective melt-down in Japan, the aerial incursion into Libya, the weekly Jeremiads by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin meeting with the Israelis to strengthen her bona fides, Ms. Angle running for office once more in Nevada, the moral detritus of the republic oozes into our consciousness and reminds me of how fragile is the human condition, how like a pie crust we are the seething cauldron beneath, all unconscious abroil, and how flimsy is our conscious awareness. The mind-numbing decadence of this age is everywhere, like shit on the pavement, there but unseen until stepped into. All is unrest and clear thinking is rare. Leave it to Jon Stewart and Lewis Black to harpoon the whales. Humor always lances the abscess.
Malignancies such as Palin have metastasized. Brave new world! The yahoos are in charge. Candidates denying that they are witches, Anne Coulter writing columns on how radioactivity is not that threatening (I’d like to give her a year’s worth of isotopes to test it out), the appalling conflations and confabulations of Glenn Beck, tele-evangelist and scam artist, the metamorphizing of the Republican Party into a stalwart ideology, the fulminating hatred of Fox News which has morphed into the arm of the Republican party, the dark humor of Donald Trump, now a “birther,” feeling he is presidential timber, and President Obama presiding over all this, revealing his charactertological flaws, his flight into safety, his unwillingness to emancipate himself from his flight suit.
The center doesn’t hold. The recurrent nonsense on the media makes we wonder how parents deal with all this lunacy, how they make their way when questioned, and rightfully so, by their children about adult behaviors they cannot quite comprehend or metabolize. If I were still teaching, I’d have my sophomore class watch Beck for five straight days in class. When they return on Monday, I’d ask this question: What fears, if any, are you experiencing? If you cannot grasp this question or it eludes you, answer this one: What, do you feel, is the state of civilization at this time? Finally, if you are stymied, try this question: What is it about your own adulthood that you are worried about?
I would put this up on the blackboard in a few days:
All generations are failed by the ones that come before.
I have contributed to the general state of ignorance, somehow and in someway.
Sadly, I must say that you need to start all over again for you have been marinaded in ignorance.
That you must shut down the idiocies, ignorances, conditioning, fear-mongerering, racism, plutocracies you wade in much like the Japanese had to shut down their reactors. Unfortunately, life is triage whether or not you are aware of it.
Finally, in capped letters, you need to be free of me and this school, all teachers, all schools. What does one do when the world has failed you? Think on these things.
The world I knew is no more. The world I thought I knew is no more. The world is in desperate disarray. That which I thought civil apparently no longer holds; new rules of behavior are in place, a different self-conduct rides this land like one of the four horses of the Apocalypse. I have to personally make choices about my existence at this time. I live in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas, Nevada, which is a hapless, hopeless, crime-imbued sin city, where education is the last recourse, where blue-collar values ride supreme, where coherent thinking succumbs to nether impulses.
I have found myself unemployable as a human being in this city and in this country.
What is to be done as I sip from the waters of anomie? I say grandiloquently. I opt out. What shape or form this takes is unclear. It is not a clear day for me to see forever. But one goal is to leave this country for democracies are appallingly insufferable, such as the USA, when they more than wander off from their principles, which are often myths as well. I can handle an honorable myth but not the myth we are telling ourselves and the world at large. The United States Senate, to wit, is owned by major corporations and the dumbfucked — and mindfucked — American people cannot see this at all. Time to leave. At least let me go to some banana republic that admits to being owned by corporations and does not delude itself that it is honest. In America the hypocrisy is that we are free — we are not, that we are honorable — we are not, that we care for people — we definitely do not. Give me the honest hypocrite, for I spurn the democratic one.
What an interesting turn of phrase it is to say that one wants to live out his days. If it implies that living is more meaningful than the usual humdrum daily existence, then I want to live out my days — but elsewhere. The thickened cholesterol artery that is America at this time is much too much for me. You know, there is an eternal literary debate over Thoreau. Some argue that he left civilization without engaging it, without trying to improve its lot, that he copped out; that he wasn’t into causes; the other side of the argument says that he needed to “live deliberately,” that he wanted to work from the internal to the external. Judgments are made on his endeavor to improve his interior self. I argue that the societal world now, and very much so for Thoreau then, is so corrupt, banal, and corrosive that for mental well being I need to nourish my “soul” elsewhere. I am at the point of throwing up all that inward fetid mess in my mouth from living in this land. The only respite I have is the eternal given — nature…my wife, my Jane… Jordan, my son. Dawn, dusk, a breeze, the smell of grass, the spring birds, et al. give me respite. The rest is human folly. I am not depressed, on the contrary, I can now see forever. Grab an infant’s neck and inhale the sweet smell of it and that’s about all that is humanly good.
Consider That One May Tire of Society
On a clear day one can see forever. This lyrical snippet comes to mind. Given the collective melt-down in Japan, the aerial incursion into Libya, the weekly Jeremiads by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin meeting with the Israelis to strengthen her bona fides, Ms. Angle running for office once more in Nevada, the moral detritus of the republic oozes into our consciousness and reminds me of how fragile is the human condition, how like a pie crust we are the seething cauldron beneath, all unconscious abroil, and how flimsy is our conscious awareness. The mind-numbing decadence of this age is everywhere, like shit on the pavement, there but unseen until stepped into. All is unrest and clear thinking is rare. Leave it to Jon Stewart and Lewis Black to harpoon the whales. Humor always lances the abscess.
Malignancies such as Palin have metastasized. Brave new world! The yahoos are in charge. Candidates denying that they are witches, Anne Coulter writing columns on how radioactivity is not that threatening (I’d like to give her a year’s worth of isotopes to test it out), the appalling conflations and confabulations of Glenn Beck, tele-evangelist and scam artist, the metamorphizing of the Republican Party into a stalwart ideology, the fulminating hatred of Fox News which has morphed into the arm of the Republican party, the dark humor of Donald Trump, now a “birther,” feeling he is presidential timber, and President Obama presiding over all this, revealing his charactertological flaws, his flight into safety, his unwillingness to emancipate himself from his flight suit.
The center doesn’t hold. The recurrent nonsense on the media makes we wonder how parents deal with all this lunacy, how they make their way when questioned, and rightfully so, by their children about adult behaviors they cannot quite comprehend or metabolize. If I were still teaching, I’d have my sophomore class watch Beck for five straight days in class. When they return on Monday, I’d ask this question: What fears, if any, are you experiencing? If you cannot grasp this question or it eludes you, answer this one: What, do you feel, is the state of civilization at this time? Finally, if you are stymied, try this question: What is it about your own adulthood that you are worried about?
I would put this up on the blackboard in a few days:
All generations are failed by the ones that come before.
I have contributed to the general state of ignorance, somehow and in someway.
Sadly, I must say that you need to start all over again for you have been marinaded in ignorance.
That you must shut down the idiocies, ignorances, conditioning, fear-mongerering, racism, plutocracies you wade in much like the Japanese had to shut down their reactors. Unfortunately, life is triage whether or not you are aware of it.
Finally, in capped letters, you need to be free of me and this school, all teachers, all schools. What does one do when the world has failed you? Think on these things.
The world I knew is no more. The world I thought I knew is no more. The world is in desperate disarray. That which I thought civil apparently no longer holds; new rules of behavior are in place, a different self-conduct rides this land like one of the four horses of the Apocalypse. I have to personally make choices about my existence at this time. I live in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas, Nevada, which is a hapless, hopeless, crime-imbued sin city, where education is the last recourse, where blue-collar values ride supreme, where coherent thinking succumbs to nether impulses.
I have found myself unemployable as a human being in this city and in this country.
What is to be done as I sip from the waters of anomie? I say grandiloquently. I opt out. What shape or form this takes is unclear. It is not a clear day for me to see forever. But one goal is to leave this country for democracies are appallingly insufferable, such as the USA, when they more than wander off from their principles, which are often myths as well. I can handle an honorable myth but not the myth we are telling ourselves and the world at large. The United States Senate, to wit, is owned by major corporations and the dumbfucked — and mindfucked — American people cannot see this at all. Time to leave. At least let me go to some banana republic that admits to being owned by corporations and does not delude itself that it is honest. In America the hypocrisy is that we are free — we are not, that we are honorable — we are not, that we care for people — we definitely do not. Give me the honest hypocrite, for I spurn the democratic one.
What an interesting turn of phrase it is to say that one wants to live out his days. If it implies that living is more meaningful than the usual humdrum daily existence, then I want to live out my days — but elsewhere. The thickened cholesterol artery that is America at this time is much too much for me. You know, there is an eternal literary debate over Thoreau. Some argue that he left civilization without engaging it, without trying to improve its lot, that he copped out; that he wasn’t into causes; the other side of the argument says that he needed to “live deliberately,” that he wanted to work from the internal to the external. Judgments are made on his endeavor to improve his interior self. I argue that the societal world now, and very much so for Thoreau then, is so corrupt, banal, and corrosive that for mental well being I need to nourish my “soul” elsewhere. I am at the point of throwing up all that inward fetid mess in my mouth from living in this land. The only respite I have is the eternal given — nature…my wife, my Jane… Jordan, my son. Dawn, dusk, a breeze, the smell of grass, the spring birds, et al. give me respite. The rest is human folly. I am not depressed, on the contrary, I can now see forever. Grab an infant’s neck and inhale the sweet smell of it and that’s about all that is humanly good.