While working out at the local community gym thoughts began to coalesce about what I might write for this blog, associative threads formed and here it is. The most compelling is my dance to the death with the Arizona tax department and an audit. They are claiming, of course, I owe them money because I have not shown any profit in my writing. After five years I suppose I am to show a profit or I cannot claim on my return all the costs that come with writing. Consequently my writing is labeled more of a hobby than anything else. At first I almost caved, that is, pay them what I owed. On second thought I waited until I saw my accountant who advised that I challenge this because if I don’t they will come after me year after year for past monies and then the Feds will come in to put their grubby hands into my pockets as well. If need be, he would represent me. I had to advocate for myself, and I felt exhausted before I began.
So here I was having to defend that I am in writing to make a profit, that it was not a hobby, that I explain myself to the monolithic tax department, really a latent and manifest assault on my integrity, on my self. I am particularly peeved when I am asked to explain myself especially when I know I am innocent of the alleged lie, fault, crime, malfeasance or misdemeanor. I bit the bullet and did not become ironic nor sarcastic but simply in list form machined gunned out all the awards, 1099 Misc forms (royalties), books published, stories published to substantiate that I am an author seeking to make a profit. Of course, in this nation being an author without earning a profit or not thinking in this manner is viewed as simply ridiculous. Fuck you, America! I felt like the local Muslim who has to justify his existence, explain why other Muslims are malfeasant or not, all the rest of the McCarthy-like attributions Rep. King from New York is yapping about. Of course, he glosses smoothly over his advocacy of and connection with the Irish Republican Army years back. I almost feel like joining the Libyan rebel forces but seeing Jewish stars markered over posters of Hosni Mubarak’s face (Jew hatred to the nth degree) in the last revolt I will defer for now. (No reporter has commented on that.)
It was a quick step for me to consider how corporations rule this country, our two-percent of the population plutocrats who control congressmen (and this is not paranoia, reader), with their offshore tax shelters and teams of accountants who keep them free from taxes with financial murder year after year. I find it remarkable after all these years of living that the obvious basis for this country is still opaque to most of the masses, using that term appropriately here as they are herds. Long ago through lobbying and all the rest of the horseshit we lost this country. We do not have a Republican party, what we have is an ideological group who manifests a Social Darwinian drive. Allow me as a writer or therapist to share some felt-truths and reach some conclusions you may or may not appreciate.
Let us for a moment look at Governor Scott Walker. I don’t need to know about his family, how active he is as a church member, how he is loyal to his wife, how he never has masturbated. Let us just look at his face. Behind those eyes is death. Just his face reveals a coldness to the man, an inability to soften, to negotiate, to reflect. We have seen that face hundreds of times in all the old movies about the western cavalry and its Indian wars. Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld all have that death mask, an inability to really express empathy much less sympathy. I believe it is characterological of the American male in this country, right from our historical beginning. It was the face the black man saw, the Indian saw, women saw, unions saw, an unrelenting, blunt, cold, stone-walling mind set — callous, hard, cruel, stubborn, determinatively driven by causes and racist. Americans run from this assessment, although at one time for more than 100 years we had a caste, mind you, not a class system in this country as rigid as the untouchables in India. Read your An American Dilemma. In my fantasy Glenn beck would be an Indian agent handing out blankets saturated in small box in order to wipe out all the Progressives on the reservation.
It is also my sad contention that Anne Coulter, MIchelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Megan Kelly, all the in-house stable of Fox Views are the female versions of the American male, Gorgons all, featuring a stiletto wit, vicious bite-biting asides as crooked as Greta Von Susteren’s mouth, and just an overall toxic perfume issuing from their pretty, dolled-up faces. Very few of them give credit to the feminists who labored hard to set them free, ingrates all.
Given these tangents, I will share further thoughts I have. I recall that in the Thirties artists, writers, actors, quick-witted Jews all sensed the racist rot in Nazi Germany and emigrated to the States. I am contemplating becoming an ex-pat; I really believe we are in a dour decadent period that I want no part of it. I would not leave like a good American because it is cheaper to live in Belize, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. I would say fuck you to Medicare because in some of these countries the care is about third world as it is here in Henderson, Nevada which is a medically unsafe environment to get seriously ill in. This state is so blue-collar that they are gutting the university financially because education is really not important — that is right, it has never been important in this country. So I would leave the USA because it is no longer democratic, is controlled by a hegemonic few. The differing points of political points of view are now taking on a variation of class warfare and it is remarkably close to becoming a feudal country, with the few at the top of the pyramid and the rest pf us fighting like serfs among ourselves. Note: not one stock trader or CEO on Wall Street has had charges brought against him! Americans have the memory resource of a gnat. We get angry, we fight and quarrel but clear thinking is never an aspect of our consciousness.
Will it be better elsewhere? Of course, not. We all know that. The jolly in all this is that I will act upon a sound realization, an awakening of intelligence, if you will, that until i die I can at least choose, for the time being, to act, to opt out. I think watching America from abroad will be self-confirming as the internal tsunami of collective rot will cross the plains and mountains and cleanse both shores.
I Am Planning My Escape
While Michele Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, dance for the media and he practices “reparative psychotherapy” on gays which the American Psychiatric Association has declared disreputable and of no worth and indeed, might create confusion and conflict additionally on unwilling clients; while Marcus himself sends out latent homosexual vibes himself, one can only imagine why he has devoted something of his life to this nonsense, should I say projection, displacement and inner self-contempt; and one more “while” –In a famous letter (1920s) from a mother of a homosexual asking Freud what was she do for she was at a loss, Freud wrote back urging her to embrace her son, to love him dearly and to accept him as he was. Clearly Marcus Bachmann has not read the DSM IV or V in which homosexuality is not listed, if I am correct, as a neurosis, psychosis or anything such as a personality disorder. Marcus Bachman belongs in a Boschian painting, near the bottom, often where a pitchfork is shoved up a tortured creature’s ass. Finally, picking up a recent issue of National Geographic with ape-man pictures in it and a skull of a woman-like creature dating to 4 million years ago, I wondered how the Bachmanns deal with evolution. Sickening to hear or imagine their responses, for they are the trash we in this country feel competent to run for office. Shame on us!
If you love your country more than you love yourself, that is, you sustain an idol of the mind and you are conditioned beyond belief, stop reading now, for I am going to give the specific reasons why I am planning my escape. I first got turned off when McGovern ran against Nixon, and that foul creature won. I could not believe it. Having grown up under Eisenhower during the Fifties, I had a real good bead on that joweled-psychotic. A whole generation of non-readers had no idea what they were voting for. After that, I knew my masses well and didn’t vote for many years after. I could have predicted Watergate, character is destiny, the Greeks knew so well. The last decade or so has been abysmal politically. I never thought that a major TV station would become an ally of a political point of view, Fox News; when I first watched it I caught myself challenging almost everything said, for the news was not “fair and balanced,” that insane mantra, but biased, often subtly so. I grew up with Murrow, Sevaried, Brinkley and I was left to decide what to do with the news. And there is that evangelistic Glen Beck, crypto -racist, deranged human being, maudlin, stuffed with treacle, who pandered to America’s worst biases, stuffing his Mormon cheese into the collective olive.
And there is Palin, that grotesque, phantasmagoric entity spewed from the head of John McCain who is the idealized pinhead housewife of America, raising the dysfunctional family to greater heights, with her dull Ahab fisherman spouse and Bristol, who recently penned a book about her vagina monologues. Have you noticed at rallys with her special needs child beneath her left arm as if a ragamuffin child, an emblem of how adversity for her and her child can be overcome, how she can mother and be a politician and be split in so many ways and remain whole, the foisted American dream that some women think they have to live up to, is beyond parody. Screwed into the cortex of Bachmann and Palin is an unwavering spinal rigidity which comes from seeing life simplistically, without shades of gray or nuance, proof that a college education in this country is the equivalent of a junior high school degree. Hold on, I am enjoying this rant, for it is the basis of my considering leaving the States. I am prepared to go to any sinkhole outside of this country so that I can best see us for what we really are, although I have a good handle on it now. I will not bother to answer questions about this idea of mine, for they will be as conditioned by being an American more than by anything else. I am not an American, nor am I un-American, for these are not issues for me. I owe more to my heritage than I do to nationalism. American exceptionalism, to use the jargon, is defecating all over this globe. Have you noticed?
As I mentally spin the globe, Costa Rica came to mind, as well as Belize, Panama, Ecuador, and Roatan. Checking out some stats about each country, Costa Rica looms large. I could not have Medicare there but if you become a resident you can get health care; the doctors are just as good or bad as they are here. The government is reasonably democratic which is what ours is as well; there is no extant democracy in this world at this time that I can see. Perhaps Costa Rica in mind rests on my own personal and idiosyncratic contention that this culture has become unbearable for me. I don’t flee to Costa Rica for safety; I flee America for it disfigures and appalls my own personal sensibility of what a culture should be. I have an affinity for life. i do not have an affinity for this or that countrty. I live once. So do you, reader. Think on that. So when and if I get it all together, I will gear up and vamoose.
The bromides we have in this country to deal with disaffection are legendary. We have lost, if we ever had, the capacity or the willingness to look at ourselves in the mirror and to correct, remedy or change the lingering maladies we suffer from. The essential character trait of this nation, as I see it now, is a moral blindness to how we affect the world, other nations and the very planet itself. So wrapped in the stars and stripes are we, that we are blinded by our grandiosity. If a man or woman begs for change in the street, he is viewed as lacking character and the poor schnook probably believes this rap. In other words, poverty as in Dickens’ time, is a character fault. And the poor buy into it. And when things get really tough, the capitalistic slime comes out and offers workshops on how to market yourself. We are experts on marketing ourselves. Oh, yeah, what an achievement! In the fifties I would be called a pinko or commie. And what would you call me now? Un-American. Just a bromide. We are brilliant at making the disenfranchised despise themselves. Hoffer argued that the role of the undesirables in this country was essential for its greatness. That has long since passed.
We are a war-mongering country and as outlandish as that charge may be, if you pause and consider where we are in the name of “democracy,” you detect a glimmer of reason to this argument — we are stationed all over the planet; we are involved in two wars and our defense budget is the largest in the world. We are a bloated empire with a bloated ruling class which is now the classic cliche of the 2%. The fiscal crisis was the well-to-do, the ultra wealthy fucking this nation and being rewarded as a consequence. Tell me, who has been charged with crimes against the American people in the years since the crisis?
I am an exile in my own country, a stranger in a strange land, and America has become a very strange land. A writer, a decent writer, a serious person, has to have in some measure a sense of disaffection, of not belonging, of looking in from the outside. In short, an exile. I can spend my self-exile in Costa Rica because here, in America, I don’t belong any longer. And what does it matter except to me how I see my world. Judge me if you choose, and how American that is.
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Posted in Commentary, Politics
Tagged Brinkley, Costa Rica, DSM V, exile, Glenn Beck, homosexual, Michele and Marcus Bachmann, Murrow, Nixon, Palin, reparative therapy, Sevaried