It has been quite a turn of events for me of late, watching the world turned upside down in this country. Values that I thought were imperishable are now dismissed or thrown away into the dustbin of history. The right to collective bargaining is one of these, yet it is cast aside by such merchants of death as the governor of Wisconsin, the state famous for the Progressive Movement. When I consider what is happening, I associate to the world of Dickens, the Industrial Revolution, the plight of the poor, and child labor (may I have another bowl of porridge, please); the consequences of capitalism run amuck. All systems contain within themselves the very end of the system itself. The rise of capitalism and religion are inextricably intertwined, for if you did good works (making a buck) as a Calvinist, let us say, you would go on to heaven. The moral equation was that making money made you elevated and part of the select. You and I are born into such systems. The real task as a human being as I see it is to free yourself of all these rings of the onion that encapsulate each one of us — religious, familial, economic, et al.
My next door neighbor praises capitalism as almost if not the equal of her Catholicism, both misfortunate miscomprehensions of the real world. After seeing Dances with Wolves, my wife was touched by the plight of the American Indian. Sharing that with her business-driven ex-father-in-law, he shared his bloated bromide that if the Indian was not smart enough to invent the locomotive then he had to face the consequences. Survival of the fittest — not ethically the best — was in his smug and smarmy response. This unadulterated belief in a system goes far in explaining the meanness of spirit in this country, at least. Our present day politics clearly is contaminated by this intransigence, this hard and harsh way of seeing the less fortunate, the poor, the very earth we trod as not fit for the “better” inhabitants. As of this date not one of the stock traders responsible for the 2008 market collapse is under indictment.The American mind is as dull as our sensitivities.
You cannot escape it. The human animal loves constructs, religious and economic ways of viewing the world and like a good lemming will follow it to and over the cliff. The spread of Islam, the Inquisition, the conquering of the Americas and the enslavement of the indigenous populations, the almost eradication of the Aborigines in Australia, the gruesome and destructive Leninist rule of Communism in Russia, the Great Famine in Ireland, all of these set forth from imperial, ideological and religious motivations. Ideology is the bane of mankind, for it allows for no compromise. The color gray is forever banned. Man is one of the lower animals a reasonable close reading of history will tell you. It goes a far way to explain the rise of a Father Coughlin and a Glenn Beck. The rejection of intelligence brings about the malicious malarkey of a Palin and Bachmann. Parties have now morphed into ideologies. The contamination of the free press or media is rife. Fox News becomes Fox Views, an arm of the conservative right, “fair and balanced” as its sleazy slogan. We are living in a period in which newer shibboleths are being created, newer fears, a period in which causes and ideas are accepted as superior to real human beings and their lives, a period in which social cruelty is viewed as necessarily pragmatic, to wit, cut classes in art as they are electives and not as rigorously required in an industralized society such as physics and mathematics. We view the human mind as a muscle which it is not and art and its varied expressions as superfluous. The Philistines now rule.
We are a society in decline, reminiscent so much of the attenutated last years of the Roman Empire, overextended in its provinces, inflation running rampant, social and sexual excess, the decay emanating from political and social rot. Answers, especially political ones, are offered up as if chiseled from stone; reflective thinking cast aside as effete; reasonableness has fled; and the very human ability of denial has taken front and center, for in this human defense mechanism the unemployed and the poor, the disenfranchised in this very affluent country can be dispensed with from mind which allows the dealing with abstractions and generalizations to hold sway. We reify capitalism as if it is deity.
The corruptive thing about human beings is that they abstract humanity itself and fall into ideas and causes as the “real” reality. We dispense with social justice for at this time it is not the kind of abstraction that counts — such as the budget, the debt ceiling, big government, abortion and the environment (or as O’Reilly recently and famously said, that we should leave it to god, not scientists, to take care of, only he can control or master it. Galileo wouldn’t stand a chance with this religious relic.) Here is the effect of his religious “education,” or shall we say conditioning. Project and blame it on outside forces, as the Greeks projected themselves on to the stars and constellations, giving their deities very real human flaws. The abyssmal tasteless “tastemaker,” Donald Trump, brings to bear his capitalistic bloated self and advocates birther rubbish about Obama’s birth, making him rise in the Republican polls as a possible candidate in 2012. It says so much about the system, the advocates of the system, its leaders (I don’t need a leader. Do you?) and the American people, in part, who swallow this nonsense and believe it to be right, correct, truly American. It also explains how Trump brings to the table all the attributes of a businessman, a man who is famous for making deals, and an absolute asshole. Decades ago before we completely deteriorated he would have been laughed off the stage; we only had Nixon and HUAC to deal with.
So what is to be done? I answer for myself. At this moment one of my fantasy options is to flee this country and settle in another corrupt society, for it will be no better; however, it will give me some succor to know that the hypocrisies of this democracy will be avoided. Nothing worse than the hypocrisy of a democracy, for it has the insufferable taste of self-righteousness. Even a hospital patient has the right to a change of linen. In the years left to me I want to view America as an ex-pat, for that makes the rot even sharper for an American expatriate. For me America is a wallowing dinosaur in a tar pit. Too heavy to get out, too trapped to do anything else but sink. If you say this is un-American, there you go again. I am me, born to this planet and not a sucker for any government or nation state. Spend your surplus capital defending that abstraction. I have a life to live.
Yelp
I am perplexed why I keep on writing.
I associate to Krishnamurti who was asked by a disciple, if you will, why he continued his teaching after so many decades, given that most people had heard his message and did not change. He answered that a rose has to give off its essence. I like that. I write because I write, no more, no less.
It may be that there is nothing else for me, or for me to do as I look about the world. I am not materiallyrewarded. I have no fans or fame to speak of. I see something of my intent in the great final words by Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known, ” an eloquent mixture of ennui, resignation and self-evaluation. And then off with his head!
I wonder as I look at my fellow creatures what it is that they do to sustain themselves in this world of the fascist Taliban, the BP spill, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the psychotic Michele Bachmann, the Jew hatred of the world at large — the same old eternal shit giving; the inability to depict cartoons of Mohammed, the stupidity of the Kaaba and the Vatican, priests ejaculating all over the place, a denying Pope, a President who dost think too much; Fox News (you should pardon the expression), a school that expels a child for wearing a cap with toy pistols on it, the morons of Scientology and Mormonism, and the true believers who follow, the damage being done to the environment, the Japanese who, kamikazi-like, still slaughter whales; the corporations that rule this world, the digitalization of almost everything — genomes, books, the workplace and the slavish esteem which we give gadgets rather than individuals, for all this is endless in a rather corruptive environment. I had someone say to me that hope and faith will get us through; besides restraining myself from throwing up, I felt like saying that ghouls, vampires, ghosts, miracles, Catholic relics, probably in some demented way make more sense than the idiocies of conditioned religious thinking. We are a doomed species — please hurry up with extinction.
We are all handicapped — pick your disability. From the barbecueing American dad with his bumper stickered SUV and his need for a “man cave,” to the aimless and drab lives of American housewives, to the ideologues — Anne Coulter, Laura Ingraham — she with the inch high and wide gold cross on her conditioned neck, to the inane and fat cat sensibility of a Jay Leno and the snide David Letterman; Wolf Blitzer boring us out of our minds as he drones out the news and Chris Wallace, he with the incised smirk in his face, to geriatric gym rats who try to stay alive longer but have nothing between their ears to make it meaningful, to Joan Rivers, slathered in plastic surgery, a living marionette, to the sycophantic writers who kiss ass to get published, to the writers who write fluff and attend dozens of critique courses in order to get their vanity published, to the fat little kids who don’t know what play is as they are absorbed into the digitalization of their world, to the parents who have no idea how to parent for they are bereft of an inner life and their own children simply extension cords of ignorance plugged into their collective assholes.
I am still curious how we defend not only against death from day one — “Mommy, are you going to die?” but how we manage our daily lives in order to give it meaning of some kind — football, soccer, the sport stations which are terminally boring,the players who are essentially moronic; the celebrities of stage and screen; the sleaze of the Madonnas and Lady GaGa and their ilk; the Roman games we abide in on a daily basis. The media who thrives on the decomposing bodies of the body politic, scavengers all. The reptilian politicians are a minor travesty given that we as a country are fast going down the tubes. So here I am scribbling stories to defend against the lunacies of my time, the culture I am immersed in.
Curious, is it not? that on one level the Tea Partyers represent a kind of psychological resistance to the state of affairs in our country and are oblivious to that except for the political aspect of it. Unfortunately, historically true, a good rebellion is usually twisted and perverted — I give you Robespierre, Lenin and Trotsky. The discrepancy between what is and what could be is vast and often our rebellion about it comes out skewed. I associate to The Great Awakening in the 19th Century in which religious leaders tapped into the ferment bubbling beneath the surface, but it got screwed up, essentially because it is religious in nature; belief systems savagely destroy anything alive and fresh.
The one telling piece of advice to give an attentive child moving into young adulthood is to encourage him or her to be in constant insurrection (!) against society and everything that may serve to conform and condition in that culture, including his or her parents. In fact, the task of parenthood, for me, is to help the child be free of his parents in a loving way if at all possible. Ultimately it may lead to isolation of a kind but I weigh that against the capacity to be free or to quote Kazantzakis’s, “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Life is an existential crisis and the sooner we understand that the sooner we may determine whatever meaning we can make of it, although I do not vest too much in meaning. There is no external meaning, for we make it, and we place it out there. I’ll take the crisp and cold solitude on the mountaintop, knowing I am indeterminate rather than the plush pomp of certainty in the lowlands of every culture and the Huxleyan Soma we imbibe each day.
I favor discontent, intellectual unruliness, disgruntlement rather than the KY gel we live in. The soporific platitudes we derive from religion and politics, from the general daily interactions we have with other human beings make me stand back and evaluate. It is essential, for me, not to become part of this society although I am stuck up to my ears in terms of its daily demands. I know I have chosen to write or to become a writer for it is in that task that I define who I am and make clear to myself what the matrix is. The artist, poet and writer must be in rebellion for his or her own sanity is at stake. History is an avalanche of human nonsense presenting itself as “progress,” whatever.
One never becomes completely free but sometimes it is excitingly emancipating to wipe one’s feet free of human shit.
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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Philosophy, Politics
Tagged A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens, Existentialism, Kaaba, Kazantzakis, Krishnamurti, Lenin, Michele Bachmann, Mohammed, Mormon, Scientology, Sidney Carton, Tea Partyers, The Great Awakening, Trotsky, Vatican