July – September, 2001I’m sitting on my front porch in southeast Portland
on a beautiful July evening. A little boy walks by and asks, “Did you know you
have a squirrel who climbs up that tree and his name is Butter?” “I’m tormented unnecessarily by myself, as if
presenting my work to the public is an act more demeaning than taking a crap in
the street.” – Rosalyn Drexler, Art Does (Not!) Exist I’ve moved a lot, growing up and as an adult,
different states, cities. I’ve wondered
where my “home” is. I guess any place I’ve lived for very long is one of my
homes. Now that religion, politics, love and consumption
have all failed us, about the only thing left is beer. Okay, beer is a form of
consumption. Sexy Beast – ugly movie with thick incomprehensible
working-class British accents. Forget
it. A.I. – needs a few changes. First, lose the kid. Pinochio,
Data, it’s been done. Jack Kerouac had theories about writing, but I don’t
think he had any theories about society, about how people should live. I don’t
think he was rebellious. In the American way, I think he just saw himself as
unable to live the same way as everyone else. A man with an obsessive,
low-paying job. Someone asked him how to be a writer. He said, “Live like a bum
and work like a dog.” I wonder what he would think about all the books and
articles that have been written about him. Kerouac as cultural symbol – of
freedom, I guess. America is poor in alternatives. Is this all there
is? I’m slowing down. Slowing down. Doing the old people slowdown. Soon I’ll be slow enough to see things. My father used to say, “I don’t have to do
anything but die and pay taxes.” My writing theory: it’s about knowing when to quit. Are we there yet? Okay, writing is not conversation. You can’t
do this in conversation. When I was in jail, briefly, for growing marijuana,
a methamphetamine dealer said I was a pair of big eyes. Depression is the gap between what is and what
should be. Kicking people off welfare, forcing everyone to
work, what does that accomplish? If there is such a great need for our labor, how
come it’s so hard to find a job? Why do we have to compete with so many people
for each job? Why are so many people unemployed or working part-time? Why do
working-class jobs pay so little? All this policy of making everyone work does, is
keep wages low for all of us. There’s something disgusting about obedience. Rational people avoid pain and seek pleasure.
Therefore it seems quite reasonable to me that people don’t want to work, since
it gives most of us pain and no pleasure. Here’s a new conservative policy: isn’t it about time
we put the unborn to work? It’s easy to condemn working-class violence, but how
else do we get any respect? I knew a man who used to be a computer programmer.
The company he worked for wouldn’t give him time off to go to a funeral, so he
quit. American business loses good people, and gets less
value from those it keeps, because of its feudal, authoritarian attitude. And those of us without other options become slaves,
our nervous systems gradually worn down and our souls degraded every day we go
to work. I’ve wondered if the so-called “midlife crises,”
mostly a male thing, is a reaction to years of work. I hate to say it, but women, with their greater
security needs, make good slaves. Women express their need for freedom by
leaving their domineering husbands. As you get older, you find out where the hospitals
are located. Small blessings Green trees against a blue sky “All that is solid melts into air.” – Communist
Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, quoted by Michael Elliott,
Time, July 23, 2001 I don’t think all acting is wrong. A lot of it is
just trying to be better than we are. Sign in real estate office window: “Sales person
wanted. Must look honest.” The thing about tired old Democratic liberals is,
they’re quite deaf in the left ear. There’s something magical about watching a
helium-filled balloon float up into the sky, as if it’s on a journey to another
world. People forgave Bill Clinton, even though he’s an asshole,
because he seems human. Gore, on the other hand, could only pretend to be
human. “Control in modern times requires more than force,
more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities
and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that
all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular
literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign
of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to
climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary
luck.” – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States “I say you been had, you been bamboozled!” – Malcom X Revenge is so important. The best way to get revenge
on the Mean Society is not to buy their crap. If enough of us don’t buy, their
house of cards will come tumbling down. Isn’t the purpose of all “serious” writing to
explain tragedy? Growing old is the process of becoming a ghost. After seeing the awful damage smoking does to people
in their old age, I’m rethinking my position on prohibition. Cigarettes are the
only mind-altering drug for which prohibition might actually work, because
addicts have to light up so frequently. If it were illegal, the only place they
could smoke would be at home. Someone should tell teenagers that if they smoke
they will greatly reduce their marriage prospects. Most adults don’t smoke, and
they don’t want to be around those who do. I keep thinking of something Woody Allen said in one
of his movies: “They say everything in the universe is in constant motion. No
wonder I’m nauseous.” No wonder people
are going crazy. “The history of those years [1930s] seems to support
the argument of Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, in their book Poor
People’s Movements, that labor won most during its spontaneous uprisings,
before the unions were recognized or well organized: ‘Factory workers had their
greatest influence, and were able to exact their most substantial concessions
from government, during the Great Depression, in the years before they were
organized into unions. Their power during the Depression was not rooted in
organization, but in disruption.’” – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the
United States Organization tends to take over as an end in itself.
Organizers tend to be middle-class professionals who like to run things and go
to meetings. They tend to shy away from confrontations in the streets. The
struggle becomes invisible to most people, because it’s not out where they can
see it. The labor press, 150 years ago, “condemned the
‘degradation and subordination’ of the newly emerging industrial system, which
compelled people to rent themselves to survive. … Wage labor was considered not
very different from chattel slavery at that time, not only by the workers in
the mills, but right through much of the mainstream: for example, Abraham
Lincoln, or the Republican Party, or even editorials in the New York Times….”
– Noam Chomsky, Rogue States U.S., 1998: “In the past 25 years … wages have
stagnated or declined for the majority of the workforce, for nonsupervisory
workers, and working hours have increased very sharply – they’ve become the
highest in the industrial world.” – Chomsky I want to find a happy person and just sit and watch
them for awhile. Although I know what makes people happy: denial. We are dying from the sickness of too many rules. Women don’t see men for who we really are. They’re
always seeing us through the lens of who they need us to be – the provider. This
is true even if they can support themselves, because it’s hardwired into their
brains from millions of years of evolution. The female definition of “man” is “provider.” The male definition of
“woman” is someone who turns us on sexually. So in old age, when retirement cuts the man’s income
in half and women look like grandmothers, we can finally just be friends. But
it isn’t very exciting, is it? Drift – a journal for those who are tired of pretending
that everything is alright. How America drives people crazy: it takes something
which most of us need to live, a job, and makes it difficult to get or hold
onto. Don’t work Don’t buy Be free Andrew Jackson and “Jacksonian Democracy” – “It was
the new politics of ambiguity – speaking for the lower and middle classes to
get their support in times of rapid growth and turmoil. To give people a choice
between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to
choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control.” –
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States And it still works. Zinn writes of the “very practical silence of
working people.” Remember Nixon’s “silent majority?” They were silent because
they knew they had no power. That was the
way Nixon, and the rest of the power structure, wanted most of us to be. Women want more control over men’s behavior, but men
don’t like being told what to do. We already get way too much of that on the job. A friend and I are both dealing with serious medical
problems, in my case chemotherapy for a form of leukemia, a cancer of the white
blood cells. And we both have other serious problems to deal with, mainly
financial. She said that we both need to give ourselves some
time off to rebuild what stress is tearing down. I said at times like this I
always feel like I have to redouble my efforts and work harder to overcome my
problems. It seems like disaster is coming down the road, for
myself and for someone close to me, and I’m not doing enough to prevent it. No one can call themselves educated who has not read
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It’s
the antidote to all the lies they told you in school. Most histories are told from the point of view
of the ruling class. This is
the opposite. “Eleuthero [Siberian ginseng] appears to strongly
enhance the immune system. A 1977 study was done on 1000 citizens of the former
Soviet Union who held stressful jobs, such as merchant sailors, deep sea
divers, telegraph operators, rescue workers, airplane pilots and proofreaders.”
– Harold Bloomfield, Healing Anxiety With Herbs Yes, proofreaders. Office workers in general,
because there are high performance demands – low staffing – and we have little
or no control over our work. “Making peace with your dark side, what Mother
Teresa caller her inner Hitler, is an imperative on the spiritual path.” –
Bloomfield In my case the desire to carry a gun and kill the
next asshole who messes with me. I dream a lot about bad jobs. Telling the truth should not be a personal attack,
but I believe it’s constructive to truth attack institutions, culture, society.
I believe we make ourselves sick in our culture by covering things up. A quotation from Emily Dickenson I’ve read: “Tell
the truth, but tell it slant.” Sometimes I like to tell it slant. Sometimes I
prefer the plainest language I can find. It just blows my mind how much debt people consider
acceptable. People who pile up debts they can
never pay off. I feel like I’m watching some form of mass insanity. Or mass myth. We used to be known as the “affluent
society.” Human beings, most of us, are incapable of
functioning at this level. Everything has gotten too complicated. I can’t do
it. Maybe if I could focus on one thing at a time. But
I’ve got unemployment, chemotherapy and my sister going crazy, plus some side
issues, all competing for my attention. Go away and leave me alone. I wonder if psychiatrists ever say to their
patients, “Well, to put it in layman’s terms, you’re crazy.” When you get help, you get what other people think
you need, not what you want. “In the early 1960s black people rose in rebellion
all over the South. And in the late 1960s they were engaging in wild
insurrection in a hundred northern cities.” – Zinn Love that “wild insurrection.” Mostly what bothers me about the past is that it’s
dead. “The future,” Mr. Chin said, “is not pretty. But you
have to admit, it’s much better looking than the past.” – Alexander Besher, Chi Our basic plot: adrift in a hostile universe, trying
to find something good to read. “The primary task of the [nation] states … is
essentially to socialize risk and cost, and to privatize power and profit.” –
Noam Chomsky, Rogue States Pharmaceutical research, for example, is heavily
subsidized from our taxes. Then the resultant medicines are sold at sky high
rates by the pharmaceutical companies. So the risk – research might not pan out
– and the cost is socialized, billed to us. The life-or-death power and the
profit is privatized, reserved for the corporations. Chomsky says one percent of U.S. households own half
the stocks, and 10 percent own most of the rest. U.S. labor costs are the lowest, second to England,
in the industrial world. As of 1998, “for two-thirds of workers, average
incomes are below the late 1970s.” – Chomsky Democrats, the Kennedy-Johnson administration,
lowered the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 70 percent. The Reagan administration, with help from the
Democrats in Congress, lowered the top rate to 50 percent, and later to 28
percent. – Zinn Which increases the tax burden on the rest of us. Oregon’s lawmakers are busily introducing bills to
attack the initiative system, which bypasses them on both the left and right.
The legislature, dominated by redneck Republicans, is rigid, unproductive, and
held in low esteem by Oregonians. Oregonians are using the initiative to move on
issues the legislature won’t deal with. The legislature is losing the battle, I
believe, because it can’t or won’t respond to the public’s felt needs. Government is not just about making the rules. It’s
a service business. I don’t think most Oregonians feel like they’re getting any
service from state government. Fight Club – now there’s a movie! Expresses the rage of
working-class men at being reduced to peasants, with lots of very black humor
stirred in. Working-class guys pounding the shit out of each other so they can
feel like men. Because modern science has proven it’s impossible to feel like a
man while spending eight hours a day taking orders from an asshole. I saw the author of the book, Chuck Palahniuk, read
from his second book, Choke, at Powell’s bookstore recently. Palahniuk
lives in Portland. He doesn’t look or act like you would imagine after seeing Fight
Club. He’s tall, bright, dresses so casually he might have bought his
clothes at a thrift store, clearly enjoys a good joke. When he points to
someone with their hand raised to ask a question, he says “please.” Probably
early 30s, excited about the way his career is taking off, clearly having a
very good time. If he’s full of working-class rage, it sure doesn’t show on the
surface. He’s a writer. I wonder how drinking became associated with
masculinity. Is it because alcohol allows men to temporarily override some of
their social conditioning, their domestication? “Like her mother, Charity could not bear randomness
or lack of purpose.” – Wallace Stegner, Crossing To Safety But I believe randomness and lack of purpose are
essential. Without them there are no surprises. I’m really more of a reader than anything else. All
the rest is just trying to look busy. Sex changes as you get older. When I was young men
were sternly instructed, in sex manuals, by the media, by college professors,
that it was our job to turn women on. We probably went at it like a job too. As
in, it’s a tough job but someone has to do it. Isn’t that what being a man is
about, doing a job? I remember one male professor telling us that women
need about 20 minutes of foreplay to get turned on, but only get about five
minutes. There was a serious foreplay deficit. As we age the shoe is on the other foot. Men’s
hormone levels decline in their 50s and it gets harder to turn us on. Having a
naked woman lying there waiting to be administered unto, is probably not going
to do it. I wonder if older women are ready for this? Perhaps the dividing line between crazy and normal
is being able to stand back, look at your thoughts and say, that’s crazy.
Reality check. The crazy person doesn’t know their thoughts are
crazy. They believe their thoughts make perfect sense, and get angry if you
question them. Well of course my hostile neighbor is following me
around town with evil intent. See, that’s his car! Yeah, or one like it. I have long lists of book and authors I mean to look
up, but it seems I prefer to find my books by accident. Life should be the
same. I imagine being old as a role one plays: serious,
solemn. Can’t seem to get the hang of it, even when I worry. The world I live
in is just too ridiculous, absurd. What is it we think we’re doing? During the Nixon administration Kurt Vonnegut wrote
that he had reached the age where the people he went to high school with were
running the country. I’ve reached the age, 61, where my favorite authors are
younger than I am. One thing about being single, you get to concentrate
on yourself. No, I don’t mean improve yourself. How could you possibly
be improved? “The shelf life of a self depends on whether you can
keep moving, sell yourself to others. There are many selves fighting for the
space you occupy. Some of these selves have better representation than you
have: influential people who back them up, exaggerate their capabilities, lend
them money, answer urgent messages.” – Rosalyn Drexler, Art Does (Not!)
Exist America is like a stage set. Our lives require all
these expensive props. If you haven’t got the money you’re performing on a bare
stage. Better hope the audience has a good imagination. I hate the 4th of July. What goes on in
the minds of assholes who are shooting off fireworks at 11:00 at night? Also I
don’t get fireworks. Seems to me when you’ve heard one bang you’ve heard them
all. What kind of statement are these people making: I make noise therefore I
am? Am what? The ultimate test of literacy: can you read during
the commercials? I read recently that nine out of ten movies have
smoking in them. I’m sure they get paid for it. I would like to see movies
rated as S or NS – smoking or nonsmoking. That might slow down the assholes. What does it say about our culture that
antidepressants are advertised on TV? Life is a drama in which we play ourselves. Making
it difficult to find truth. With some people you can see that their story has
taken over, and somewhere under it their real self is lost. Originally we make up the story to account for
ourselves, define ourselves, make some coherent sense of our lives, who we are.
And then the story takes over. I miss the 1900s. When I think about what defines America, at the
beginning of the 21st century, what comes to mind is television ads
for antidepressants and Viagra. When Walt Whitman said he was going to live by the
side of the road and be a friend to man, I’m sure he had no idea how noisy cars
would be. I feel like I’m grinding it out, the time between
now and then. One reason to look forward to retirement is that I
will no longer be subject to urine testing. There will be no way anyone can
stop me. Aging: some of it is real, the physical part, and a
lot of it is just role-playing. We believe we’re supposed to act a certain way
at a certain age, so we do. The real part is mostly being tired and not wanting
to put up with any more bullshit. When we get old we should live in balloons, floating
over the countryside, calmly observing it all from a safe distance. Those clever questions that middle-class supervisors
ask in job interviews, all they test is acting ability. And isn’t that what
being middle-class is all about? Except they call it “attitude.” A lot of married people seem to be alone. They keep
the mate around like an old habit. American Beauty: A middle-class man wakes up to find his life
is a materialistic nightmare. An old idea in American movies. We’ve
always been asking ourselves if it’s worth it. But the alternative also
grinds you down. The guy quits his job and goes to work at a fast food
joint. I wonder how long he’ll be happy with that? We haven’t been able
to come up with a reasonable alternative. Trapped. A reasonable alternative, in my mind, would be to
put everyone who wants to quit the ratrace on unemployment, and leave them
alone. Let my people go. Dream: At C’s home. Other family there, friends of C’s,
lots of activity, smoking dope. I’m trying to fix the basement up to grow dope,
fix light at top of stairs, but realizing it wouldn’t be safe, too many people
coming and going. The place seems like a continuous disaster. I give a
speech to C about coolness and control as a way of avoiding disaster, realizing
as I say it that she can’t do that. And neither can I. Bulworth: More outfront radical politics than I’ve ever seen
in a movie. Too bad Warren Beatty didn’t run for president. Maybe next time. Work: I don’t want to be anyone’s nigger. “In the future I’ve got to remember not to make life
or death decisions when I’m feeling suicidal.” – Bulworth I’ve been getting long emails from this crazy woman.
All the same. It’s like her mind has become a tape loop. So uncreative. In Portland the police keep shooting crazy people.
The final solution to the mental illness problem. We don’t want to know that our identity, our self,
depends on an organ, the brain, at least as subject to malfunction as any other
organ in our body. Somewhere, a while back, I read that most people
retire with Social Security and $2,000 in the bank. I think the baby boomers
will retire with Social Security and $5,000 in credit card debt. Democrats may in fact represent the self-interest of
the middle class better than Republicans. The sole political objective of the
middle class appears to be keeping things from getting worse. But I see no reason for working-class people like
myself to vote for Democrats, who are doing nothing for us. Promoting
middle-class interests is not on my list of things to do. “Just trying to prove, that your conclusions, should
be more drastic.” – Bob Dylan Sometimes when the worst thing that could happen
happens, it’s a relief. Okay we’ve got that out of the way. I think there is a
hard core of fatalism at the heart of human nature. Strange if there weren’t,
considering how fragile we are and how precarious our position on earth. We have to be prepared to let go. Perhaps, in purely animal terms, humans are
over-designed. The only real difference between Clinton and Gore is
that Clinton is an actor, and Gore doesn’t know how to do that. One reason that natural disasters are so
invigorating is that we can stop pretending that everything is normal and we’re
having a good time. While opposites attract, so do people who are alike.
So people often end up with mates who have similar problems. “These were the residences of the region’s highest
demographic segment, affluent stockholding suburbanites, as a left-leaning
demographer labeled them. The ASS class” – Floyd Kemske, Labor Day This is a good novel about a duel between two men,
one trying to unionize the headquarters of another union, the other trying to
stop it. A funny, unsettling, knowing look at work and the power struggle
between management and employees, and all the bullshit that goes with it. Some
useful history of unions and how the “corporates” squelched them. How we became
complacent slaves. Someone I knew said that no one exploits workers
more than nonprofits. They’re so sure they’re the good guys, and so short of
money, that they can feel just fine acting like corporations. When I worked for
a nonprofit it seemed like working for any other business, except that the
people – social workers – were more interesting. Here’s the bottom line: if you’re an employee, no
matter who you work for, you’re screwed. You can’t depend on anyone’s
dictatorial benevolence. The distinction between fact and fiction is fairly
arbitrary. They shade into each other. Just watch us playing our roles. My leukemia is back. I dreamed of wasps…. Life isn’t supposed to make sense. Sense is a shaky
superstructure invented by humans so we don’t have to know we’re in the middle
of chaos. Chaos in the form of leukemia, chemotherapy and
throwing up. I’m not sure which is more obnoxious, a colon or a
semicolon. NYPD: Now they can say “asshole” on TV. I’m interested in the boundary between dreams and
life. I think it’s like the boundary between life and death. I’m unemployed, being treated for a life-threatening
illness, and my sister is going crazy. I’m looking for the eye of the storm. The central sickness of America is that we’ve substituted,
those that could, affluence for being who we really are. Those of us who
couldn’t be affluent have substituted unhappiness for being who we really are. I’ve read that depressed people have a more accurate
perception of reality than the nondepressed. How to unclutter your life: put everything in
drawers. Someone wrote that in America, unlike Europe, it is
impossible to be decently poor. Employers, the business people, have the rest of us
on a very short leash, our choices much more tightly circumscribed than in the
past. The amazing thing is that, as the noose tightened, there has been so
little complaint. Americans are not rebels. Some points of reality are real. Don’t go out and
run up thousands of dollars of credit card debt. You will be sorry. Some points of reality are subjective. Hair color for
example. Who is to say what my real hair color is? If I choose
a color, isn’t that a real choice? Or to pose a closely related question, what is my real
age? Do you suppose employers, with their piggy X-ray
vision, can tell? Sometimes when someone dies it’s sudden. But most of
the time it’s a long slow grinding process where the tension keeps increasing
and you almost want it over with but not really, because when they die they
cross an invisible line and you never ever get to see or speak to them again. Should I get a pet? I’m renting a room in a house,
so no dog or cat. Perhaps a hamster in a cage. Or would that be too symbolic? A while back one of the advice twins, Abby or Ann,
took a survey of her female readers and discovered that most preferred cuddling
to sex. A man responded, “Yeah, well no one asked the men if they wouldn’t
rather go bowling.” During the Reagan years, “Democrats often joined
Republicans in denouncing welfare programs. Both parties had strong connections
to wealthy corporations. Kevin Phillips, a Republican analyst of national
politics, wrote in 1990 that the Democratic party was ‘history’s second-most
enthusiastic capitalist party’” – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the
United States Zinn writes that “surveys since the early seventies
show 70 to 80 percent of Americans distrustful of government, business, the
military.” Distrust, he says, has spread to the middle class,
which “is increasingly insecure economically.” “The threat of unemployment,
always inside the homes of the poor, has spread to white-collar workers,
professionals. A college education is no longer a guarantee against
joblessness….” Yeah, ask me if I care. The middle-class are
overseers of working-class people. Zinn calls them the “guards,” as in prison
guards. If they get dragged down to our level it’s fine with me. And I think it will happen, as the baby boomers get
older and less employable. Retirement, I’ve read, cuts income about in half.
Middle-class boomers can’t live on credit cards when their only income is
Social Security, although I’m sure many will try. Liberal Democrats were spayed and neutered a long
time ago. I refuse to join them. Liberal Democrats have this little bag of issues: abortion,
the environment, capital punishment, gun control, “diversity”. I’m a 61 year-old white working-class male
and guess what, I don’t need an abortion. My top issues are all economic, but
liberals don’t seem to want to deal with economics. They are missing the
central issue of the last 30 years: the economic decline of working-class
people. Zinn on the presidential election of 1992: “Clinton had been backed strongly by the Democratic
Leadership Council, which wanted to move the Democratic party closer to the
center. Its plan was to promise enough for blacks, women and working people to
keep their support, but to appeal to white conservative voters with a program
of toughness on crime and a strong military.” Promises that were never kept. One of Clinton’s
promises that made me vote for him was for a program to provide free job
training. So, for example, I could learn new computer skills without spending
hundreds of dollars for classes. Never happened. Too expensive. Instead Clinton, scared by Ross Perot’s almost 20
percent of the vote, joined the Republicans in reducing the deficit and the
national debt, in part by cutting all the safety net programs which had already
been chopped under Regan-Bush – food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare.
Welfare was abolished as an entitlement and time limits were put on it. In 1996, sick of Clinton, I voted for Ralph Nader.
Did so again in 2000. Plan to keep doing so. After the Cold War ended there was brief talk of a
“peace dividend” from lowering the U.S. military budget. Never happened. Zinn
says Clinton was willing to “reduce the Bush military budget by only 5
percent,” maintaining it at $262 billion. Zinn quotes Randall Forsberg to the effect that a
$60 billion defense budget would be adequate for the post-Cold War period, with
no major enemy in sight, saving $200 billion a year. But that would deprive major U.S. corporations of
lucrative defense contracts. A long time ago President Eisenhower warned us about
the “military-industrial complex.” Now it has a death grip on our national
budget. Our government has been good at creating enemies to
justify the defense budget. “When he got home, he would sit on the steps and
enjoy a few minutes of centered breathing while reciting his mantra, which was
Calm Down Calm Down….” – George Saunders, Pastoralia Somehow I always imagine, when I finish a book, that
I’ve accomplished something. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled – painful. Feb. 2000: “… the median income (half above, half
below) for families has gotten back now to what it was in 1989, which is below
what it was in the 1970s.” – Noam Chomsky, Rogue States Sept. 2001, the attack on New York: The U.S. has
always had an aggressive, predatory foreign policy, mostly ignored by the news
media and the 50 percent of the adult population that bothers to vote. We
shouldn’t be surprised that our government’s sins have finally come back home. I’m sure Bush will find someone to bomb. It won’t do
any good. You can’t bomb a network. If you smash your computer the Internet
doesn’t go down. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. The American empire
is now in decline. The American ruling class will never feel safe again. My attitude is very personal: I don’t have a job, so
what do I care? Working-class people in this country are under attack every day
of the year, but you won’t see it on TV. When I walked down the street today and saw all the
flags it seemed weird. Patriotism has struck me that way ever since the 60s.
Seems like a form of blindness. When people on TV talk about how “we” were
attacked I think of the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto being
surrounded by hostile Indians. The Lone Ranger says, “Tonto, we’re surrounded!”
Tonto says, “What do you mean ‘we’ paleface?” Our next Vietnam is gestating in Columbia. An article in The Oregonian says 1999 figures
show 23.5 percent of adults smoke, with “big gaps along financial and
educational lines. About 33 percent of
people below the poverty line smoke, compared with 23 percent of those at or
above the poverty line.” “And just 13 percent of people with an undergraduate
degree smoke cigarettes, compared with nearly 40 percent of those who went only
through early high school.” “Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe things just happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints the future as a repetition of itself; tomorrow is just another name for today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we have no choice but to accept.” – Eduardo Galeano, “Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World,” quoted in Salon.com "Every year poverty kills more people than the entire Second
World War….” – Galeano Judgment is different from sanity. Those of us who are sane don’t
necessarily always understand reality well enough to have good judgment. Wildness is the enemy of judgment. People with good judgment are
well domesticated, so they make the kind of decisions that allow them to fit
in. Don’t make a wolf do a man’s job. Wolf Lake:
It seems kind of by-the-numbers. Doesn’t have the engaging quirkiness of Twin Peaks. Except for the Indian,
the characters aren’t interesting. Not much good writing. Too dark – literally.
I like the wolf. Boring. I don’t think aggression is the essence of wolf. It’s the wild mind. I wonder if hunters feel freer? When I heard about the World Trade towers collapsing in New York,
I immediately thought of the ending of the movie Fight Club, with the
crumbling skyscrapers. The coming war over New York (Sept., 2001): It’s like watching a
teenager about to do something stupid, knowing that nothing you can say will
change their mind. Americans have always put their faith in force and money. Work is the curse of the thinking class. It’s a mystery why people do things they should know will get them
in trouble. Like smoking, piling up debt, growing dope, screwing the wrong
person, quitting a job. I think the answer is that playing it safe makes us
dead, like most of the middle class. Turned off, not taking any risks, living
routines, safe, dead. I begin to see the upside of risk. Risk is okay, slavery is not.
Risk something you can afford to lose, like money. Not freedom. That’s what gambling is about, isn’t it? Getting a charge by
playing with risk. Yes, I’m highly ambivalent about risk. Too much of it is forced on me, rather than chosen. But please, let’s not call it an addiction, our society’s all purpose explanation of anything it disapproves of. The need for risk is built into us. We are predators. We were not designed to be barnyard animals. Paradoxically, more social support encourages risk-taking. You’re
more likely to do it if you don’t have so far to fall. We want risk-taking in business. But large scale capitalism, as
developed in the late 1800s, was dangerously unstable. So large corporations
rigged the game to be more stable, giving them advantages. (See Howard Zinn, A
People’s History of the United States, and Noam Chomsky, Rogue States.) Stability for the large corporations means insecurity for the rest
of us. Highly dependent on the corporations to keep us employed and off the
streets, we become conservative, risk-adverse. Too much to lose. We become
slaves. Start my own business? I don’t think so. Don’t want to sleep in doorways. If constructive risk-taking were more possible, maybe we wouldn’t
have so much of the destructive kind. We need more possibilities. There’s not much point in being loved by someone who doesn’t
really know you. Age discrimination in hiring is real, and entirely logical.
Business feels a need for speed, and younger people are faster. So for your
60s, try to make other plans. Leftists have their own lies, the main one being that famous quote
from Margaret Mead about small groups changing history. Only if you can get a large group to move. Crazy people’s minds go around in tight little paranoid circles.
They’ve become so preoccupied with themselves that they can’t see beyond that.
As the social pressure increases, more of us get that way. “Mark had learned and practiced the shaman’s Four D’s of ecstatic
technique: Drumming, Dancing, Dreaming, Drugging.” – Howard V. Hendrix, Empty
Cities of the Full Moon. “The great thing about being a pariah is that the kind of people I
don’t want to talk to don’t want to talk to me.” – Hendrix My world of affiliation is small: friends and family. On a more
abstract level, progressives, working class. I don’t identify with the country.
It has always seemed hostile to me, like it didn’t want me to be here. The United States is too large to care about. There is no privacy in dreams. I suspect we all die before we’re finished, before we become our
best selves. With my working-class frustrations, it’s hard not to see the
attack on New York as rich people removal. I do feel sorry for the secretaries. I guess that’s what our
rulers would call collateral damage. “Survival is not only about preservation. It’s about change. About
adapting, changing yourself in response to changes in your environment.” –
Hendrix I didn’t finish this book, by the way. Like so much science
fiction, too theoretical and talky, not enough story, unreadable. One thing I keep seeing about writing is how hard it is to say
anything real. Age: This is not happening. This is, as we used to say in my
family, a fig newton of my imagination. On the encounter between 71 year-old Henry Miller (Tropic of
Cancer) with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and her sister Mimi in 1962: “Miller
didn’t know anything about Dylan or who he was or anything. If anything, he was
only interested in Joanie and Mimi – in fact, he went after them both.” –
Richard Farina, quoted by David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street. Art requires a little sand in your shoe. End of Sept. 2001: I’m waiting for enlightened self interest to
reassert itself. No one I know wants to die for New York. |