November 2003

A program on the history channel about Kennedy, on the 40th anniversary of his death. He was always fighting boredom, they say. He wanted to be president because it was the most exciting job. A physical wreck, pretending to be healthy, taking amphetamines, then legal, to keep going. Reckless in his personal life but a gambler's cool as president, narrowly missing nuclear war. If he had lived, they say, Vietnam would still have happened. It would have been Kennedy's war instead of Johnson's war. A witty, charming man. All our presidents since have been charmless, even Clinton.

They're machines.

Of course Kennedy was a cold warrior who came from money and continued the dictatorship of the rich. He was pushed into doing something about the South by the civil rights movement.

It was Lyndon Johnson, the man of no style, crude as a barn door, who got Kennedy's civil rights legislation passed, launched the War on Poverty, started  Medicare. Johnson who made his cabinet members talk to him while he was on the toilet. Who said he had Hubert Humphrey's balls in his pocket. Who said to his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, on his deathbed, "The kids were right, I blew it." (Those kids are now in their 50s.)

Because of Vietnam, Johnson became one of the most hated presidents, when he could have been one of the greatest. In the late 60s he was reduced to speaking on military bases, to get away from protesters. I remember a cartoon in a Los Angeles "underground" newspaper. It showed Johnson at a podium, surrounded by a sea of police helmets, saying "My fellow Americans...."

Kennedy's reluctant civil rights policies began the divorce of the South from the Democratic party, although southern conservative Democrats, like Carter, Clinton and Gore, are still a drag on the party and help keep it from making any overall sense.

The TV program mostly focused on Kennedy's duel with Nikita Khruschev and civil rights. It didn't say what else he was trying to accomplish, to my disappointment.

I was 23 when he died, in the lunchroom at General Dynamics, which made the brains for guided missiles, in Pomona, California, where I worked as an electronics inspector. Someone said Kennedy had been shot. I thought it was a joke and asked, "Well, was he killed?" Then the news came on the lunchroom TV sets and I felt like crying.

Republicans and southern Democrats prevented expansion of welfare programs and kept benefits low, so workers looked to employers for benefits. “In turn, a government that did less was less likely to generate confidence or affection. And a party [Democrat] that did less was also less likely to hold the allegiance of its constituency over time.” – Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The Breaking of the American Social Compact, 1995

[In the 1970s] … American business leaders set about developing a political program to shore up profits by slashing taxes and business regulation, lowering wages and welfare state spending, and building up American military power abroad. – P&C

Someone needs to write a cold-blooded objective analysis of the Clinton years.

About 724,000 people were arrested in the United States for violating marijuana laws during 2001 – more than were arrested for heroin or cocaine. Almost 90 percent of the marijuana arrests were for simple possession….

The number of marijuana arrests more than doubled during the Clinton years, reaching the highest level in American history.

More prisons were built during Clinton’s two terms in office than during any other American presidency.

The number of drug offenders imprisoned in America today – more than 330,000 – is much larger than the number of people imprisoned for all crimes in 1970. – Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness

Trying to read Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years, published in 1937. Noticing how quickly everything evaporates. It’s as if Woolf just wants to watch them all pass by.

Woolf’s characters remind me of someone I know who never ends up where she’s going. Seems familiar. Is there a whole school of literature in which the characters never get where they were going?

People in Woolf’s world, like ours, do not listen to each other. They are always thinking about something else.

It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous. [1914]

A very cold winter’s night, so silent that the air seemed frozen, and, since there was no moon, congealed to the stillness of glass spread over England.

Spring was sad always, she thought; it brought back memories. All passes, all changes.

“Yes, yes,” she said, as if to assure him that his words were right. “Whereas now,” he drew himself together; put his feet together; he looked like an old lady who is afraid of mice – “this is how we live, screwed up into one hard little, tight little – knot?”

He was always finding himself now outside the doors of strange houses. He had a feeling that he was no one and nowhere in particular.

Hard to keep track of the characters, but the writing grows on me. Like me, she writes in flashes.

Woolf seems a modern writer in her sense of discontinuity. Not seeing everything as being connected into a meaningful whole, but often absurd.

Almost to the end of the book, I finally remember who some of the characters are. As Sara says:

Renny always says “what rot!”

Maggie doesn’t say anything.

Or was there always, he thought, as he too rose and looked for his hat, something that came to the surface, inappropriately, unexpectedly, from the depths of people, and made ordinary actions, ordinary words, expressive of the whole being….

Woolf is intelligent, unpredictable, remote. She seems to be sitting in the audience watching her characters. I don’t know these people. They may be real offstage. Onstage they’re like an engine with some of the spark plug wires disconnected.

“How nice it is,” she said, “not to be young! How nice not to mind what people think! Now one can live as one likes,” she added, “… now that one’s seventy.”

Silence and solitude, he thought to himself … that’s the only element in which the mind is free now.

Perhaps what Woolf has is restraint, and that’s why her characters don’t finish their sentences, don’t go on to say the obvious thing. She’s saying that we’re all unfinished.

Peggy must be a stand-in for Woolf, tormented by her inability to enjoy anything, to stop analyzing.

I think what Woolf sees, uncomfortably, uncompromisingly, is that humans are such jerky machines, like an antique movie projector, unconnected from one moment to the next. We desperately need oiling. Thus alcohol, pot and writing. But the underlying problem doesn’t go away.

Woolf, I gather from the movie The Hours, was schizophrenic. Perhaps that had something to do with the feeling of disconnection. She committed suicide. But don’t we all feel it? The disconnect between one moment and the next.

Yes, it was over; it was destroyed, she felt. Directly something got together it broke. She had a feeling of desolation.

Why does it surprise me that all this was going on a few years before I was born? They have not been real to me, my parents’ generation.

Someone wrote that about The Matrix, I, II, III, that it was hard to care about the characters. The Matrix, like most movie and TV science fiction, suffered from elephantiasis. Overwhelming spectacle. I would prefer something more subtle, personal. Someone wrestling with the temptations of really good virtual reality. Like my problem with reading: how could real life compete?

The Matrix movies captured the feeling of comic books very well, but I liked American Splendor, as a comic book movie, better, the way it went back and forth between comic book and the “real” world.

I loved comic books when I was a kid, but have read very few since. A few graphic novels. Robert Crumb.

Someone who read Drift said that I’m very “parsimonious” about myself. Well, I’m not really the point.

A man in downtown Eugene today with a cardboard sign: “Free hugs.”

Driving back from my hotel that night, I thought about the people of Orange County [California], one of the richest counties in the nation – big on family values, yet bankrupt from financial speculation, unwilling to raise taxes to pay for their own children’s education, whining about the injustice of it all, and blaming all their problems on illegal immigrants. – Schlosser

I lived in Orange County for four years, a long time ago. I also visited friends there a couple of years back. I don’t know, it may be “one of the richest counties in the nation,” but a lot of the people there are not rich, including my friends. It’s not that they’re “unwilling to pay off their debts,” they can’t.

The rest of what he says is not only true of Orange County. Except for blaming immigrants, it could describe Oregon.

No deity that men have ever worshiped is more ruthless and hollow than the free market unchecked…. Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a workforce that is hungry, desperate and cheap – a workforce that is anything but free. – Schlosser

From 1985 to 2001, according to Schlosser, U.S. hardcore video rentals per year rose from 79 million to 759 million. “There are hardcore videos for senior citizens….” The mind boggles. I should check it out. I’ve worn out my fantasies and memories.

What does it all mean? That we are finding it difficult to get inspired? Somehow our world has become less erotic? Maybe we’re just so tired from working all the time that it takes more to stimulate us. Maybe the chronic friction between men and women has soured us on real sex.

Sometimes the price of freedom is what freedom brings. – Schlosser

Government regulation of business has declined, resulting in a crime wave among the rich. In other respects – the military, law enforcement, corporate welfare – government has grown, resulting in a tax shift downward to the middle and working classes, enormous deficits and a great increase in the national debt.

Right.

So let’s see, what’s on TV tonight….

The sort of black market [immigrant] labor once narrowly confined to California agriculture is now widespread in meatpacking, construction, and garment manufacturing. The growth of the underground has lowered wages, eliminated benefits, and reduced job security in these industries.

Important sectors of the American economy are starting to resemble those of lesser developed countries.

The passage and enforcement of strict labor laws could do more to solve the problems caused by illegal immigration than any crackdown on the border between Mexico and the United States. – Schlosser

Schlosser says that the U.S. minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, “has declined by about 37 percent since 1968.”

The period of America’s greatest economic supremacy – from the early 1950s until the late 1960s – was marked by high income taxes, vigorous antitrust enforcement, and unprecedented levels of union membership. – Schlosser

The novel Bee Season, which I admired, is being made into a movie.

I make up theories about life as needed. Always hoping that whatever I’m doing lately has some virtue in it. Mostly we do what we do because that is what we happen to be doing.

A little pause, a timeout, before I do the next thing.

So, are there any questions?

I insist, it was all an accident.

It’s 3:03 in the morning. I just realized I didn’t take any Benedryl, so sleep may be optional.

All I want to do is read all night. What else do we need?

Rain on the roof.

The Republicans are complaining that we hate Bush. It’s not just him we hate, but his whole rightwing, predatory, parasitic class. We hate you one and all.

Strange, Hope thought, how things trail us place to place, more loyal than organic friends, who desert us by dying. – John Updike, Seek My Face

Or, in my case, moving. Sorry. I was pushed.

Be quiet, Hope tells herself. This has ever been her fault, talking, giving, flirting, trying too hard to please, endeavoring to seduce.

How one remembers slowly replaces what really was. Like fossils.

… mystery, that indeterminacy that gives art life.

The hardened paint carried a glimpse forward into a radiant forever … small defiant victories over time, creating things to keep.

There is so much perversity on the American left, and I’m not talking about our sex lives. We may be left, but we’re also Americans, and have that individualism that drives us against our own self-interests. Poor and working-class people who are against government safety net programs, who believe that poor women should not have babies. Who think we must all fall in line behind Howard Dean, who insist on voting Democrat no matter how many times the Democrats have shit on them. People who can’t think analytically, who operate from the gut, mostly from fear.

That’s one thing I agreed with Dean about, in regard to the Confederate flag flap, that southern working-class whites vote Republican against their own self-interests. But I also doubt that Dean would do anything for them. Dean’s only virtue, compared to most of the other Democratic presidential candidates, is that he can read the handwriting on the wall. Or, as one reporter wrote, Dean knows how to “position” himself. Better than nothing, I guess.

The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity….

… terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right.

Oddity, introversion and the love of privacy are the big enemies…. – Paul Fussell, Class, 1983

Fussell says about 80 percent of Americans think they’re middle-class. Many, of course are not.

The lower middle class, he says, was wiped out by inflation in the 60s and 70s, and now head the lower, “proletarian” class – “identifiable as people things are done to.” Freedom, determined by the amount of job supervision, is a main class indicator.

One of the saddest social groups today consists of that 30 percent that during the 1950s and 1960s struggled to “go to college” and thought they’d done that, only to find their prolehood still unredeemed.

He says those of us who went to bad colleges – most of them – received “no income advantage at all.” Well, that clears that up. Wasn’t just my problem. You could reverse this, however: those who went to the “good” colleges were the well-off, who used their connections after college to get better jobs. Not that many who went to the “good” colleges learned anything that related to their future employment.

College seems like a racket to me. Kids are piling up huge debts to get a degree, and a lot of them will be sorry.

Where the more fortunately educated read to be surprised, the middle class reads to have its notions confirmed….

I read mostly out of a desperate need for entertainment – tell me a story – but also for interesting ideas. I try every now and then to read something difficult, so I don’t get too lazy and shallow.

The prole must register his existence and his presence in public. Thus the conversations designed to be overheard and admired in public conveyances….

While middle-class people, and their neighborhoods, are so quiet. They don’t want to be noticed.

Fussel says there are people in every class who feel they don’t belong there and escape, not by rising or falling but by stepping outside class altogether. I would like to leave the working-class poor. Chuck that whole state of constant anxiety. Just read and write, without caring much about publishing. It seems to me that we are always straining, trying to be something, controlled by ambition. It’s got to stop somewhere, hopefully short of death. If not now, when?

It’s a middle-class thing to feel like you always have to be producing.

… the further down socially you proceed the more likely that they’ll [TV sets] be on all the time.

Fussell is making fun of all of us, and perhaps rightly so. The rich, he says, have no use for ideas. How nice to have a basis for looking down on the rich!

On the other hand, I would be kinder about all the stuff we fill our houses and lives with, if all that provides people with some small consolation for being human. Alas, doesn’t work for me. I’m always leaving it behind. After a few weeks I don’t see it anymore. I prefer books and movies.

Fussel says we’re trying, through our possessions, to claim identity and status. Which are especially problematic for the lower classes who are treated like nobodies, and the insecure middle class.

He thinks this attempt to find ourselves through our possessions is rather pathetic. My feeling, since I get so little pleasure from things, is that it’s more efficient, and even cheaper, to use intoxicating chemicals.

What exactly is the point of cable TV, if there’s no pornography?

I had a feeling I could be someone. – Tracy Chapman

According to a newspaper article about half of us retire early at 62, even though Social Security benefits are lower. People get tired. Yet politicians want to increase the age of retirement with full benefits. They’re not tired.

The prophecy “is just another level of control.” – Matrix II

Much more important than what we believe – mostly a lot of unprovable theories – is how we treat other people.

Someone wrote that a lot of people now prefer work to home, because home has become so contentious, abrasive, draining.

Home is where we disappoint each other.

I suggested to a woman friend that women would get along better with men if they would sometimes drop an argument for a while, give the man some time to recover, to let his nerves settle. Never, she said. Any quarrel must be settled immediately, there could be no silence, no waiting. She is divorced and single.

Of course the man would also not appreciate it if, after a period of silence, the woman brought the issue up again. We hate being nagged. Basically we just don’t want to be bothered.

Women bring up the same issue over and over again because they think the man didn’t hear them. If he had, they think, he would give them what they want. No, he heard the first time. He just doesn’t want to do it. He hopes it will all blow over.

My sister says women’s appetites increase after menopause, starting in their early 50s, so they gain weight. Hard for me to get used to the transformation, the radical change in appearance.

There is another radical change, for both men and women, in our late 50s, as our faces change shape and we start to look “old.” Hard to get used to that too.

Humans mostly dislike change. Keeping things the same gives us greater control.

Of course we also get bored to death.

It puzzles me how feminism somehow got reduced to abortion. Meanwhile, I see college educated women in their 50s, divorced or never married, who don’t have enough money to live on.

My sister and I talk about finances. She says she thinks medium and lives small. I say I think small and live tiny.

Still looking for an apartment. Talk to a man on the phone about a studio. He says it’s so small “you’d just about have to go outside to change your mind.” Decide to pass. I can’t get that tiny.

Waiting for the bus in Springfield to go into Eugene to look at an apartment, I talk to a worn looking man, hard to guess his age, 40s or 50s. He asks if I think we should be in Iraq. I say no. He launches into a speech about how much he hates the war and Bush. He has a step nephew in Iraq, who has no idea why he’s there. The man thinks Bush has no chance of reelection. His church is Salvation Army, and he says the people who attend the church have no use for Bush.

I want to live in Eugene. I’ve lived in Springfield twice, a long time ago, and both times I felt like I was in exile. Springfield is a nondescript, working-class suburb of Eugene.

The trick of aging is to stay in the present and not mourn the past. Growing older is like being a snake: you keep shedding your skin, leaving things behind. I try to simplify.

Things also drop away of their own weight. It’s hard to hold on to anything, anyone. You end up with photos, long distance phone calls. You’re forced to move on.