I am hard put to explain Ann Coulter’s race hatred as recently expressed to a Muslim woman student in Canada in which she suggested if the student could not get a cab she should take a camel. (Of course, in a recent column by her Coulter wraps herself in the issue of free speech but does not mention her own vile words — Ann as victim.) The venom in this skanky woman is volatile and vituperative and she revels in it. To grossly generalize, I’ve observed on Fox News (Views?) a steady stream of very good-looking women who are often attorneys expressing the most conservative views imaginable; it is as if they feel their personal beauty can cover up their ridiculous positions. And it works. Is this something I need to learn about women and their sense of beauty and what it does and does not allow them to get away with? Is this a kind of entitlement? Is it to assume that only ugly thoughts come from ugly-looking people? How shallow of me.
I am hard put to comprehend Bill O’Reilly; he is smug, condescending, the classic high school history teacher who is insufferable, narrow and basically rude and who feels that riding roughshod with people is to “challenge” their positions. He tried his repertoire with Congressman Anthony Weiner from New York City, and it failed. Weiner maintained his composure, kept repeating that Billy-Poo had his facts wrong and then went on to give him a corrective with hard core facts and details; O’Reilly was annoyed and continued to interrupt him until Weiner pulled a classic response. He became dead silent, turned his face at an angle as if he were looking faraway and waited until O’Reilly finished fulminating. On the next day’s show O’Reilly in response to a viewer’s question about the Weiner go-to put a spin on it in his no spin zone, as he calls it, saying that if he was any harder in his questioning he would have been taken into custody. He is a blind human being. Reality is in the eyes of the beholder and Weiner treated him as the insolent little pup he was, yet O’Reilly wraps himself up in the flag and marches on. He is very much the street bully. Proof once again that education does not deter one from being a putz. In fact, it often strengthens the very rigidity it strives to liberalize.
It sustains my belief to always question authority, and not to be impressed with wealth, things, college degrees. et al. As a therapist I have met men and women brighter than myself, wealthier, shrewder, extremely gifted and essentially fucked up. So what good is it all? At a recent meeting with fellow writers one woman introduced herself and then told us that she was a college professor and I don’t know why but in her giving that data to me I felt at some level something I can’t articulate here, but it sounded to me intuitively as if she was blowing her own horn. I said, imp that I am, “Sorry to hear that.” I associate to another instance in which a PhD asked me what college I went to and what degrees I had. I told her I would not tell and that she evaluate me on the basis of what she experiences about me — on a vacation in Spain. I never took Dale Carnegie’s course — Americana 101.
Glen Beck who runs around in sneakers on his show, using a chalkboard to present his “ideas” and “associations” to his “ideas” is a highly conditioned autodidact who lives his life between exclamation points. He is the classic example of the individual who is only as good as the last book he read or the last quotation that tickled his fancy. I associate to a high school principal I invited into my class, alas, to speak on any subject of his choosing. What was sadly startling was his observation that on his nightstand he had a compendium of famous quotations. (His practice was to read one or two before bed. Oy!) He went on to share his favorites with the class. I thought to myself about the dire emptiness of the man — how about reading a book by Twain or Voltaire who amused your sensibilities, banal as they are?. In retrospect I was dealing with a male Sarah Palin
Beck opined that he chose to be a Mormon because one of his children felt comfortable in the church. Need I write more? He is amazingly conditioned by his rearing, his emptinesses, his opinions, so utterly outer-directed that his pose to the world is that he is a deep and reflective thinker which he is not by any means. In fact he does not think. What he does is digest data, reassembles data, avoids metabolizing data into coherence and then spews it out. Perversely, outlandishly, he is the master of the half-truth. The dust has to settle before one realizes it is all televised bullshit. He is the face in the crowd, the man who nestles beneath Hilter’s outstretched Nazi salute. He portrays himself as a feeling, selfless human being, a patriot, warning his fellow Americans about socialism and how we are slowly losing our freedoms. His greatest fear, I believe, is that Darwin is right on. He cannot accept that he is the end result of evolution. I don’t blame him. Apparently if evolution gives us this, what next?
I am also hard put by the “antics” of Sean Hannity who introduces Obama as the “annointed one.” I once saw Hannity give a priest (I’ve seen more priests on his show over the months than I’ve seen in a conclave) a difficult time because the priest was advocating the denial of communion over some issue. Hannity challenged the priest. In short he was asking beneath the words that if I am a good Christian, which he most likely is, that the priest had a lot of nerve to deny him communion (see Freud’s Totem and Taboo to discover what that’s about) if he disagreed with him. Hearing this, I felt for the moment that Hannity was capable of free-thinking. I was wrong. Immensely indoctrinated and conditioned by his church, dogma and doctrine, essentially there is generally a judgmental taste to his political opinions which smack of Christian or Catholic values. Reeking of Aquinas, Paul, John, and the others, he cannot put away his theodicy and see clearly, but that is exactly what theology does — it blinds.
I once asked a friend if he believed in werewolves, vampires, ghouls, pre-destination, voodoo and all the rest. Laughingly, he dismissed all that and asked me what I was getting at. I then asked him if he believed in ghosts. He said no. Did he believe in life after death? He doubted that. I asked if he believed in resurrection and he froze. At this point there was no reasoning. It was an act of faith. To this atheistic Jew, religion is ridiculous, a monumental fairy tale told by mankind to delude mankind. Freud argued in a famous sentence or two that until a man or woman gave up this neurotic wish there was no freedom at all; that the mature human being puts away the exalted father as an illusion.
As I keep stepping back further and further from humanity, as I keep observing it, I fear I may trip and simply fall off the ends of the earth.
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.
Leave a comment
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