Category Archives: Politics

Inwardly I have noticed, rather, I have known that at this time in my life I feel like a farmer’s silo burdened with the riches of harvest; however, there is no market for what lies within, the heavy volume of months of growth and ripeness. It is as if there is no market for the wheat that can turn into flour and bread. I have scanned sites for volunteers here in Henderson to no avail. The work is unappealing to me or simply does not make my bones knit enough to go out and apply. Picking out what to volunteer for is like applying for the right job. I’m not into working in hospices, ladling soup, or faxing flyers. It has to have some meaning for me. I check out the suspicious ads on Craigslist for jobs in education which are mostly tutorial which I find as dull as I ever did when I was teaching. I scan writing/editing jobs only to find the ridiculous sums they pay for “writers” or those who think they are writers or those who make it difficult for other writers by selling their souls for measly amounts. And so it goes for other categories — non-profit organizations, etc.

It may be me but my sense of Henderson and its environs here in Nevada is that it is exclusionary. One apparently has to join a group or organization, strive to know everyone and when that has occurred you may then be able to break into another group and so on. It is not a welcoming situation and goes far to explain what I feel is a spaced out “community” whose major task is creating anomie. “The Lonely Crowd” reigns here.The Strip is not Las Vegas; Henderson and other communities are really towns  one might pass through on the great Plains, a gas station, the Elks lodge, the John Deere outlet and Sears. It is a blue collar state with all the associations, good and bad, one may have of that — I am underwhelmed personally. I associate to the class warfare between Richard Dreyfus, scientist, and Robert Shaw, fisherman in “Jaws.” The values are so different. I had the dubious distinction of being in a local gym and asking to change Beck on Fox News to CNN and greeted with dissent, for here was the evangelical demigod spewing his anti-Semitic and apochryphal shit across the airwaves. I would die emotionally, psychologically, mentally if I had to teach students in Iowa. Yet, Henderson , one of the better sexurbs of Vegas, is not all that bad, but nauseating enough. My next door neighbor, a nice guy, love that term, can only speak of his ambitious needs to better himself at work and nothing much more than that — books, no, future pension yes, ideas no, income next year and so on. I can only listen and mentally remove myself from his chatter.

Imagine poor Todd Palin sleeping next to lithe, cheery and gushing Sarah late at night and one may get a taste of what I consider hell on earth.

I am retired, but not retired, if you get my drift, for that is a conditioning given to us by an aimless society bereft of sanity and sense.  I am still trying to make my way in a crazed world amid a crazed culture, seeking, perhaps that is the right word, to make some shape or configure some form that will give me something to do, to be, to become aware as I move to the cliff of despond. In me dwells an amorphous feeling, mostly realized in mind,  of wanting to give of what I have learned all these years. With Jane I give all I can academically, therapeutically, psychologically, lovingly to someone who is accepting and receptive to my ravings sane and scholarly if that. As Jane knows so well, if you are unsuccessful in this society it causes shame, one feels less, a calvinistic cloud of diminishment enshrouds you. The rugged individualism of capitalism presses you down as a thumbtack driven into cork for your “failure” to amount to anything. You are considered so little, so less if you do not brandish yourself as a product, a thing, if you don’t market yourself, just another tendril of a Dickens-like industrialization. The striving and striven aspect of capitalism  is like an immense state augur just boring into your skull all the time, enforcing that you are guilty for your state of being, that you are poor because you are poor of spirit. Systems driving systems driving systems and very few of us are awake or aware of this constant pounding. Watch “The Elephant Man” and listen to the soundtrack that rumbles and roars throughout the film, the unceasing pounding and beating which is the very sound of the industrial revolution, that endlessly horrific event.

So I struggle, little gnat that I am, on this speck of nothingness in orbit about a third-rate star, a total irrelevancy trying give myself some meaning existentially, for there is none otherwise. To believe in religion is to run from the facts, like denying the moon is not in the night sky. To face one’s own irrelevancy is to face the denial of death, our daily bread. I seek to volunteer to help me, not solely the other. To give is a selfish act that hurts no one, for it brings one into awareness, the only thing that really matters for this dumb, brutish species.

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.

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over: thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard. — KATHA UPANISHAD

Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge was turned into a movie I saw decades ago, starring Gene Tierney, Ann Baxter, Tyrone Power and Herbert Marshall. It was not a memorable nor near great movie but it did have things in it that I remember. It’s the story of Larry Darrell, a man in search, experiencing a spiritual quest, much as Capra’sThe Lost Horizon reeked of a spiritual Shangra-La. I have not seen the Bill Murray version of The Razor’s Edge probably because I like the performances in the old version. I bring all this into the open because a spiritual adventure or a spiritual quest I find intriguing, pleasing to my sensibilities. I would find it more than admirable if each one of us went on such a journey, and I do not mean that cliche variant spoken of by Oprah.The closest I ever came to that was several years of reading Krishnamurti, learning from this great spiritual teacher on my own, and wrestling with him so that ultimately I began to see in a different way.

In a serendipitous way I acquired Maugham’s book and read it quickly, for it is well written. It came down to a few last pages and the question posed throughout the book is finally “answered.” What is “success?” Americans are skewered and praised by Maugham as to their value systems, one subtle comment is that Americans do not value money in itself but as a symbol of what you can do with it, a different slant on materialism. Maugham plays himself in the book, as observer, as writer, as shrewd reader of personalities. Of all the characters in the book Darrell is the most “successful” in that he has chosen what it is he wants and does not want to do in life and with his life. In short, he is a free man. If I were a young adult I would be stirred by the ending and this character. One might have the same response after reading Walden Pond. The conditioned narcolepsy we live in, in all our cultures, prevents, deters, or persuades us not to question nor to see. Fortunate is the human being who breaks his head through the ice above and sees the newer terrain all about. More fortunate is the individual who crawls across the ice to the other side and the newer experiences. Think of The Matrix, what is seen and unseen, what is reality and is not reality.

I believe that the human being who asks the right questions without seeking answers, who senses somewhere in his molecular makeup that there is more than the heralded and advertised slogans of this culture, will become master of his fate. As a measure consider this: Palin may be “religious,” whatever that folly is, but she is blind to any other sense of the spirtual self. And how do I know this? Ah, there’s the rub. If you believe that Mother Teresa is a saint and a spiritual self you haven’t read much about her (see Christopher Hitchens’ book). In this culture we are sold a bill of goods about what is spiritual and what is not, in addition to other cultural nonsenses — the American dream, the pursuit of happiness (Yes, we do chase that; clearly the opposite of what the spiritual self does.) I believe we abhor the search, the quest, because it offers no reward that we esteem of worth.

Here I want to speak about writing and what Maugham writes about Darrell who has been reading over the years and decides to write a book and self-publish it, and this, in the novel’s chronology, is in the thirties and Maugham’s book came out in the forties.

“But you can’t expect a book brought out like that to have any sale abnd you won’t get any reviews,” Maugham advises Darrell.

“I don’t care if it’s reviewed and I don’t expect it to sell. I’m only printing enough copies to send to my friends in India and the few people I know in France who might be interested in it. It’s of no particular im-portance. I’m only writing it to get all that material out of the way, and I’m publishing it because I think you can only tell what a thing’s like when you see it in print.”

Of course, this resonates with me and the work I do. For a considerable group of people today would think this is outright nonsense and reading this in the forties must have been over the top, for it challenges what we do in life and what we think is valuable and not. The revolution in publishing will and is bringing us to the day when publishers may be a fraction of what they are today and agents may have to drive taxis. Within the context of the novel, however, it expresses Darrell’s perspective on life; that it is not to ber hawked and merchandised; that writing is expression and not business; that spiritual happiness is not obtained by reading Wayne Dyer’s Emersonian sallies. It is not for the frail of heart, the weak, the materially obsessed.

At the close of the novel Maugham reflects:  “He [Darrell] iis without ambition and hehas no desire for fame; to become anything of a public figure would be deeply distasteful to him; and so it may be that he is satisfied to lead his chosen life and be no more than just himself. He is too modest to set himself up as an example to others; but it may be he thinks that a few uncertain souls, drawn to him like moths to a candle, will be brought in time to share his own glowing belief that ultimate satisfaction can only be found in the life of the spirit, and that by himself following with selflessness and renunciation the path of perfection he will serve as well as if he wrote books or addressed multitudes.”

One sure thing stands out. This country is diametrically opposed to this; it is a threat. The question is: are you opposed to this as an individual? After all, tempus fugit.