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.
Waiting for Messages from the Unconscious
I am sitting here, waiting, registering myself, thinking, wondering what will ooze forth. Lately I’ve been having the uncomfortable sense that many of my stories sent to online literary editors, probably from ages 25 to 45, may not relate to the kind of stories I write. It is a false fear, I know, because the bones of a good story cross over generations. I have come to that remarkable point in my life in which I am seemingly superannuated.
Here I am with all kinds of skills and talents which are “worthless” in this society, grounded in capitalism and the values thereof. Jane’s ex made millions providing the edgings that go around tables, really ridiculous, and yet this provider of laminates, whatever, is part of the mighty course of this country’s business. I cannot fathom — nor could he fathom me — what the production of that requisite societal shit does to one’s mind, “soul” or spirit. The effort put into some kinds of business just fatigues me, the very thought of it creates a moral nausea. The concept, the idea of equity is a mental quicksilver and has no place in this writing, for fairness, justice, et al is as random as the the whirl of planets in their voids. It simply is what is, but I can comment on that because as a writer that is my task, my laminate “business.”
If you are awake or aware and you are retired as we know it in this country, a cultural artifact of significance, what do you do with your time, or your time left? It is a question that should be asked when first consciousness dawned in your noggin ( recall the Wagnerian sounds in “Space Odyssey: 2001”) I have more time than ever to cogitate over this day and the day after, of how best to “use” the time or the time left to me, as I live in this temporary husk — on loan, by the way — that has been and is being ravished by wear and tear. After all, how long can one’s innards endure stress, digestion, arterial plaque, the accruing deposits of bad cholesterol, the heart pumping for year after year, etc. It is and has always been this needling question for me, at least for as long as I can remember, of what to do with existence, for that is what I am asking. The only man who I have learned about and who I have read who apparently wrestled with this in a rational way for decades and spoke to all the issues that beset me and you was Krishnamurti. I cannot describe or assess him other than say one must read what he has to say and yet that is not enough for me. I will die in my own little Venetian glass bottle thrown upon the sands of time.
With issues like this in mind or with concerns I take seriously, I moved early into writing which is just a mere expression of my character. You can see why business in itself entirely bores me. I am figured to work out my life in other ways. That genetic reptilian part of my brain is soused in consciousness, reminding me how a good and decent tomato or cucumber can easily be soured in brine to make something else. I feel that awareness or consciousness is much like taking a pickle from a jar, soaking wet, dripping and how one must shake it a bit to get at the total savoriness of it all. No matter how we are aware we still reek of the reptile, all instinct and aimless instinctual discharge.
Here I am with perhaps 10 years or so to live, or to die, besotted with the same questions that have pickled me in brine for decades. I believe we flower, wither and die without any sense of who we are, much like the flower in the field. Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are throwaway existences who see so far and yet so little and aimlessly live but that is their choice if they are cognizant of realistic choice rather than the rush of drugs. Humorously society now tells me to “live,” to enjoy retirement which is appalling for society is nothing more than another abstraction or “idea” concocted by this culture at this time; entire companies and medical plans are obsessed with this concept. Capitalism in no way is concerned and never was concerned about the moral welfare of human beings, for it is rooted in the abstraction of money, its making, its use, its entrepreneurial aspects. After all these years, I would like to proclaim a national day of rest which means a day of rest from ideas and any conceptualizing at all, for ideas gave us religion, systems, castes, slavery, anti-semitism, conditioning, cultural anomalies and monstrosities such as the Inquisition and colonialism. Ideas have spawned Beck, Palin, Bachman, Hannity, O’Reilly, Cavuto, Laura Ingraham, the cultural pus of our present day America. Everything ever written or said about masturbation is the ejaculation that comes from ideas about it. Americans love the mind/body split.
And so like the little mouse with his very little piece of cheese I struggle to nibble away at my existence in ways that go beyond mere survival or struggle. I have not been successful. My failures are in all my writings. It is the task I willingly self-assign myself, and I will go to my grave nibbling at whatever intention I can find for myself. It may be as wasteful as designing another laminate for the kitchen island.
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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Politics
Tagged Bachman, Beck, capitalism, Cavuto, Hannity, Ingraham, Krishnamurti, Lindsay Lohan, masturbation, O'Reilly, Palin, Paris Hilton, retirement