Sunday night last week I stayed up as late as I could to watch the Perseid meteor shower. I couldn’t really stay up as late as I wanted to, because it got cold out, and I was exhausted from traveling most of the day. But I stayed up as late as I could. The Earth passed through a cloud of loose debris. Bright streaks flashed, trailed briefly, and faded in the starry sky as the upper atmosphere was pelted with space gravel.
My brother, sister and I were on the beach on Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, just north of the 45th Parallel. Let me tell you, the American Dream actually happened to my family. My grandparents fled anti-Jewish violence in Belarus. They arrived in the US as children, my grandfather established himself first as a house painter, then as a contractor. My father went to college and became an architect, started his own company, and now we have a vacation house on Lake Michigan, on land purchased when I was around thirteen years old. I don’t think we ever complained as kids when we were brought to the unfinished house, with its floor of bare concrete, heated by a Franklin wood-burning stove.
Over the decades my parents have made it a masterpiece. Though it’s not as large as most houses in the area, with the extra accommodations of a camper trailer parked in the driveway, a few people sleeping in my mother’s art studio attached to the garage, and me sleeping in the enclosed gazebo on a wooded bluff overlooking the beach, we had the entire clan up there at the eponymous Barb and Sam’s House of Wine Drinking and Chipmunk Training: my parents, me, my brother and sister, my brother’s five kids, a wife of one of the kids and a girlfriend of another, plus my brother’s two dogs.
My existence has turned out to be relatively privileged thanks to friends and family, despite my best efforts, conscious and unconscious, to fail at life. I can’t help comparing my oddly fortunate outcome with that of my friend Michael, who recently died of pneumonia at 62 after some years suffering from aggressively progressing early-onset dementia.
In three chairs on the beach, my brother, sister, and I sat next to the dying fire in the firepit. The burning pebbles above at first appeared only grudgingly but soon acquiesced to our demands for a show. We swept our gazes across the sky like lazy satellite dishes, south to north, hooting happily when we saw a flash or a streak, cursing out the others and the heavens if one flared while we were looking elsewhere. We’d each seen over a dozen before we hit the cots.
The following night it stormed. In the gazebo, on an Aerobed® brand aerobed, in the adequate warmth of an unzipped sleeping bag (the zipper didn’t work), at midnight in gale-force winds with rain coming down, ghosts of Odawa Indians and Wendigo swirling about, I felt the presence or essence of Michael.
He had dropped out of high school and left home at sixteen due to friction with his father, which led to friction with the rest of his family. For a time he supported himself by card-counting and playing poker. He had a good head for statistics which developed into magnificent card-playing skills. I met him in Ann Arbor, where he’d moved from the East Coast to follow a woman. His friend Ken Jordan, son of Fred Jordan of Grove Press, introduced him to the crowd I now call “us.”
Most of us were in The Residential College or other schools within the University of Michigan. Michael never attended but was active in the cultural, intellectual, and card-playing life of the university. He appeared in and wrote plays, made music and literature. He participated in and initiated creatively disruptive protests. He dated the women. He played in the bands. He played tennis at “our” tennis tournament, Wimpleton. He fretted about ethics, including those around winning money from habitual Residential College gamblers. He told me that what he’d seen of developing-world poverty on a trip to the Dominican Republic led him to vow never to travel in such places again, so he was one of the few of us who spent no time in Asia, Africa, or Central and South America.
An athlete, he took fastidious care of himself to the point of obsession. At least that’s what I would call it. Of course, to me, an exercise regimen one strives not to depart from, or what to me qualifies as a barely subsistence-level intake of calories per day rigidly scheduled and adhered to, qualify as obsessive. I’m a fat lazy ape with few identifiable scruples. Michael and I were opposites, despite the similarity of at least part of our families’ ethnic origins. And our common interests in Truth, Justice, and the tortuous American Way.
We were friends and I found him to be sweet and brilliant and just a lovely man. And neurotic, so, maybe not entirely opposite. He had a blog of his remarkable writing, oblivio.com, where he explored his thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. He was fascinated and annoyed with America, as in the USA, as concept and wish and mild-to-severe disaster. And with love, beauty, and truth and their manifest expressions in life. On the Oblivio domain he very kindly and even enthusiastically hosted the Moment of Truth until This Is Hell! procured its current website.
You really had to be in the presence of Michael to get the full effect of his Michaelness, of course. His voice was calm. His consonants were tasted as much as enunciated. He did not lose his cool often, so when he did it was shocking and painful to see, because he was typically strong without effort, and then suddenly he was vulnerable and vexed. He wasn’t always reasonable, but when unreasonable he was aware of it. He made fun of himself – not in a self-deprecating way, like a self-hating comedian, but in a gentle way, as if he had the affection for himself one might for a misguided child. He stood up straight and was economical in his movements.
And then he lost his short-term memory and some of his cognitive ability. He tried to behave as if it weren’t happening, which was difficult for those around him, though he might have thought on some level that he was doing it to keep from upsetting them. Our great friends in Chicago, David and Mickle of Theater Oobleck, aided him at this time, along with an extraordinarily kind neighbor of his, and our sports journalist friend Dave Waldstein, to attain and maintain a living and health care situation in Brooklyn. He was well looked-after in his last years.
I’ve always associated him with a dark army green color of garment. Sweaters and toques and chinos. I’m not sure why. I guess he wore them a lot, but maybe I connect him somehow with Radar O’Reilly. He wasn’t much like Radar O’Reilly except in a vague way. The same way our friend Cindy always reminds me of cinnamon and the color Harvest Gold (Pantone 16-0948).
In the dark gazebo with the rain and wind and ghosts swirling and whipping around outside, I had an image of Michael in a transparent protective eggshell swept by currents amid the storm. Lightning couldn’t strike him as he rose through and above the storm clouds into the star-spangled space under the arch of the Milky Way. Space gravel couldn’t pelt him, stars couldn’t fall on him. Maybe he’ll meet the Perseids. Maybe he’ll become a Perseid. And people will say “there’s one” when he streaks across the sky or “dammit” when they’re looking the wrong way.
We will one day soon memorialize Michael in Brooklyn, where he lived what would be the too few latter decades of his life. And then maybe someone will tick off everything I got wrong here. But so much of Michael was always in my reveries, because I didn’t see him often, I can’t imagine there’ll be much to debate.
The two most canonical science fiction works when I started high school in the mid nineteen seventies were Dune, which around then was still a trilogy, and the Foundation series, also a trilogy. Dune was written by Frank Herbert, and Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Both authors were born in 1920. Herbert died in 1986, Asimov in 1992.
In both trilogies, humans have established themselves on planets all over the galaxy. In both trilogies, the organizing model of the galaxy is The Empire. Empire is, in fact, the name of the cloned multigenerational triumvirate ruler in Foundation. The head of the galactic empire in the Dune universe is The Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV of House Corrino.
I wonder how much those seminal science fiction trilogies – the Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia of science fiction – influenced the galactically imperial daydreams of today’s crop of eugenicist utilitarians calling themselves “long-termists.” I love the quotation from Vonnegut I keep seeing on social media that may or may not be a rebuttal to these would-be space edge-lord conquistadors: “To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot.”
“Why do you find it necessary to call them edge lords,” you might ask. I didn’t. I called them Space Edge Lords. Because all three of the highest profile examples of over-privileged jerks only went to the edge of space. Richard Branson is the third, in case you forgot. They’re lords of the edge of space. Space edge lords. Also, ultimately the edge lord’s signature activities eventually end in ejaculation. This alludes to my earlier labeling of Foundation and Dune as perhaps seminal influences on these space edge lords and their lusting after planetary colonization. It’s all conjecture at this point, though, I admit.
You might not know this, but Vonnegut wrote a humorous story on the subject of inseminating the Andromeda galaxy. He wrote it for an anthology Harlan Ellison, the bad boy of science fiction, was putting together called Again, Dangerous Visions, an appropriate title for a follow up to his first such anthology, Dangerous Visions. Vonnegut’s story was called “The Big Space Fuck.” Read it and then see “2001: A Space Odyssey.” I guarantee you’ll laugh when you first see the ship, Discovery One. Or just look at Bezos’s edge-lord rocket. There’s a visual joke for you.
In Vonnegut’s story, Earth is going to launch a rocket ship full of semen into space to spread the seed of humanity. The rocket is called The Arthur C. Clarke, named after the author of the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and the co-author with Kubrick of the screenplay. It’s very, very short. The Vonnegut story, not Arthur C. Clarke’s “rocket.”
Here’s the link: https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/big-space-fuck-kurt-vonnegut/
It's only fitting that our three paragons of space edge lordship should be supremely vain and neurotically worried about the way the public perceives them. They are the most obscenely obnoxious clown mascots of capitalist overreach. They represent everything wrong with the way our species is being piloted toward its destiny. They are drunk drivers of a third-millennium falcon squirting from their joysticks as they zap into hyperspace.
It's the utterly wrong thinking and behavior they themselves exemplify so comically that dooms us humans never to fulfill their asinine ambition. We’ll be lucky to survive to the end of the twenty-first century, let alone continue our turgid rush toward the unreachable limits of knowledge and endeavor.
I see us, assuming we survive, ten thousand years in the future. Our numbers have been whittled to maybe a dozen small tribes. We strive to maintain our languages, but it’s a losing effort. We as a species are on our way out. Whenever they can bring themselves to look upon our disgrace, the neighboring polar gorillas, who have mastered the art of making fire, eye us with pity.
But one or more of us happen to salvage copies of The Foundation Trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation; and Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune. We strain to read them to each other in the eternally cloudy dusk of the last temperate forests at the South Pole, but we are successful in spite of the waning of the light and of our intellectual powers.
Do we laugh at the hubris of imperial speculation? Do we snicker: how funny these people were to believe that their worst impulses would somehow lead them to spread themselves across the Milky Way where they would thrive, rather than drown in an ocean of their own filth on the tiny, parochial planet they barely strayed a few million miles from. Isn’t it rich?
Is that what we’ll cackle?
Or will we believe those books are ancient historical texts describing the once glorious history of our decayed species? Will we weep and rend our garments like the people of Israel by the rivers of Babylon remembering Zion? Will we flagellate ourselves in penance? Will we cry out in atonement for the failure of a once great galactic civilization, a failure of which we are the last, evaporating stains of evidence?
More fun than that, will we perhaps celebrate a holiday during which we revile the errors of old? Will we maybe invent three hundred sixty-five such holidays, one for every day of the year? We’ll sing songs about not going down that road of poisoning ourselves and the world this time, siblings. We’ll not allow lords to lord it over us. We’ll not merely exclude ambitious warriors from our peaceful societies, but anathematize their overweening desires for domination.
We will cut every egoist down in their prime by drumming into them their own humble humanity. Every winner will be taught they are not better than any loser. The value of every human, every animal, every plant, every mushroom, every slime mold, every river, every rock, every breath of air will be drummed into these wannabe Alexanders, Picassos, Genghises, Buckleys, Shakespeares, Edisons, Leonardos and Einsteins. Oh, what you create is beautiful, Picasso, and your equations sublimely elegant, Einstein, but look at the opalescent drool of the legless, brain-damaged twisted human born of fetal alcohol syndrome. Are you better than this?
Is your life worth more? No, we’ll admonish them, a thousand times No. The beauty you create is as the drool of human gargoyles, and their drool as sublime as your most treasured masterpiece.
And I know this sounds, superficially, like the story “Harrison Bergeron” from Vonnegut’s collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, but it’s not. Non-rights-depriving achievement contributing to the common good and joy will not be hindered, just put in its proper perspective.
And then we’ll end the year by burning in effigy the three space edge lords, and dance around the flames chanting, “Not this time. Not this time. Not this time you naked emperors of nothing!”
But why wait? Why oughtn’t we try this out right now, before the worship of overfed wealth-hording self-pleasuring chew-pizzles takes us all the way down to ignominy and ruin. Burn them in effigy. Although, as long as they’re contemporaneous with us, why waste effigy stuffing? The better future loves a good human sacrifice. The better future loves the smell of burning imperial flesh.
Do we dare dream of a better, non-imperial future? Let’s. Let’s dare.
There’s a vicious circle, or cycle, eating its own tail in the West. Here’s the mechanism: people protest, civilly disobey, subvert, argue, and generally struggle against a status quo that oppresses them. The status quo reacts, overcorrects to prevent not just the change but even the possibility to struggle for change. The resistance has to rebuild, refashion its tools, explore new options for struggle. By the time they’ve almost clawed their way back to their former visibility and power, the status quo has reiterated so many outrageous lies against the resistors’ counter-arguments that it forces them to reframe the discourse. But eventually even the reframing starts to suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
Meanwhile the status quo has pounded home the argument that “everyone’s sick of the resistance” and weaponizes whatever public opinion they can along those lines. This makes the resistance fight harder, resort to more rigidly doctrinaire arguments, harsher tactics, ad absurdum, which the status quo in its turn uses to further discredit them in the zeitgeist.
By this time, though, the status quo has divided into two sides: on one side blandly ineffectual representatives of the resistors, funded by the blandly ineffectual “reasonable” rich who water down the true resistance’s arguments, aims, and strategies; and on the other side, funded by openly undemocratic wealth hoarders and corporations, the ferocious and exciting cutting edge supercool badboy violent authoritarians who take discrediting of the resistance to utterly insane lengths. For the lulz. And money. They accuse their “enemies” of the most sexually perverse varieties of violence in order to justify the violence they themselves want to use to extinguish them.
Maybe the violence turns into a war. Or maybe it subsides for a time, though the root problems don’t get fixed, or get half-fixed at best, keeping hostilities kindled.
We’re at a moment where everybody’s just damn fed up with each other. Those in various groups on the left are fed up because they can’t believe they have to fight the same battles all over again. They shriek louder and fight harder because they want to make sure once and for all their grandchildren don’t also have to fight the same battles all over again.
Groups on the right are fed up because they’d thought they’d assassinated enough left leaders and slaughtered enough followers that the left was finally dead. They’ve had to pretend for decades that they were okay graciously refraining from a repeat of the assassination and slaughter. Interestingly, these days no new left leaders on the revolutionary end have stepped up to the pulpit. Evidently the assassinations were enough to warn away any would-be leaders. Possibly, though, the people have chosen not to sacrifice their best and bravest spokespeople to the spectacle this time around. So the violent right has no choice but to take out their hatred on innocent non-combatants they delusionally see as soldiers in an army the right itself has rendered leaderless.
The left’s anger at the police stems from their recognition that cops maintain the status quo by protecting the rulers from the aggrieved masses. The rulers are either corrupt and evil by choice or are situationally trapped, reluctantly acting out repetitive injustice in an unjust gilded hamster habitat.
These wealth hamsters, situationally trapped, strive to be generous and good and have grown annoyed at being called out for their privilege. They begin to repeat the right’s arguments about the left’s rhetorical and tactical overreach. The more vehement the left feels its arguments and strategies have to be in response, the more vituperatively these well-meaning situationally trapped wealthy souls argue to have their goodness recognized as distinct from, and mitigating of, the unjust roles they are sort of forced to play. And the more vehement the left’s arguments and strategies, the more the violent and conspiratorial right’s outrageous arguments are viewed as valid and acceptable by the well-meaning rich.
So we’re really spinning three vicious circles in the air right now:
1, the circle where the high-fallutin’ employ violence and threats of violence, using cops and vigilantes, against the hoi polloi, who must up their diatribes, threats, and demands in response;
2, the circle where high-fallutin’ academics, artists, philanthropists, and art and fashion consumers are engaged in a war of rhetoric against subversive intellectuals, underpaid creatives, the middle-to-lowbrow consumer, and investigative journalists, in a feedback loop of ever-crescendoing internecine bourgeois antagonisms; and
3, the circle where, in the middle, the people simply trying to survive and live pleasantly are pulled and pushed and battered and threatened by lies and – less frequently – uncomfortable truths from the extreme points of view they feel surround them, which feeds an increase in mainstream paranoia and corresponding violent outbursts.
Throw in guns and broadcast it to the rest of the world in a twenty-four-hour infotainment cycle, and you’ve got the three-ring circus known as the USA.
Back in the days when the Roman Empire was getting ready to fall, the populace was placated with what we call today, in English, bread and circuses. And it’s fair to posit that the more spectacularly violent and frequent the circuses were, the lower the quality and the less abundant the bread needed to be.
Think of the USA as a twenty-four-hour, worldwide, streaming-on-demand gladiatorial arena. The Colosseum of postmodernity, if you will. In social democracies in Europe – and the UK, which I guess isn’t Europe anymore, if it ever really was – the bread comprises popular rights and services, which are currently being chipped away, even as the USA becomes more performatively violent and nakedly insane. The bread diminishes in abundance and quality while the circus increases in thrills and kills.
We thought we were done with Henry Ford, the fascist führer ringmaster of industry, when his military flagship, the Third Reich, shot itself in the head in a Berlin bunker. But now has arisen Elmo Skum, the apartheid beneficiary of an emerald city, leaning into full neo-Nazi messaging; we have the megalomaniacal authoritarian crusher of thought, Peter Thiel; and assorted other astronomically wealthy Citizens Kane, dancing their buck-and-right-wing and hoof-in-mouth choreography in the spotlight.
And no one wants to work. Why? Because the only jobs left at the circus for the vast majority of us is cleaning up after the animals. Yes, for peanuts, thank you for that. You’re very witty. Following donkeys and elephants around with shovels is not an attractive option, even if it employment in the heart of the spectacle.
Or, alternatively, maybe we’ve all become Norm from Cheers.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
We are all Waco. The nefariousness and misplaced priorities of government actions have eroded the people’s trust to the extent that doomsday paranoia begins to make sense as a viable possibility.
When I say we are all Waco I really mean just me. And by Waco I mean the Branch Davidians specifically. Is it Branch Davidians or Banch Dravidians? It’s Davidians because of David Koresh, right? Or just because David? And it’s branch because … banch isn’t a word.
Koresh is supposed to be from Old Persian, meaning “forward-looking” or some such nonsense. Why Old Persian I wonder? Oh, because Cyrus in Old Persian was Koresh. Those Old Persians pronounced things in inebriated fashion. “What’s ‘at guy’s name, Cyrus, Kyrush, Koresh. He was a regular musheeyugh, for letting the people of Ishrael rebuild their besh ha migdash.”
When I say I’m like the Bench Dravidians, I don’t mean I’m a cult, following a charismatic leader who marries ten-year-old girls. And I don’t mean I’m amassing weapons in preparation for the final war of Holiness against Evil, Heaven against Hell.
What I think I mean is, the corporate, military, and government three-headed hellhound has set my teeth on edge. It seems to be fulfilling all my most paranoid doomsday fantasies. Sure, I may follow questionable lines of reasoning, pickle my own turnips, operate in a clandestine economy, and practice unsanctioned sex, but why would you come to me with war machines and enough ordnance to wipe out thirty My Lai villages unless you truly were the prophesied Beast of Destruction? Why massacre 82 children and other innocents and quasi-innocents unless you were hellbent on stamping out a godly message from godly people?
I know, the metaphor is still too blurred with my own identity to make sense. Let me see if I can compartmentalize. I mean, I really need to. I’m not an apocalyptic messianic Christian, though I sometimes like to pretend I am.
I inhale from a few different quarters of the information atmosphere lately the idea that the greater the power and wealth disparity between the few at the top and the vast majority in the relatively normal world, the greater the likelihood for paranoid conspiracies to develop among the people, or the greater the likelihood the people can be manipulated into pursuing paranoid conspiracies that foster destructive emotions. Destructive emotions that can lead to destructive behavior. Mass destructive behavior.
Seems like the rulers want the people to pursue destructive behavior. Or at least believe things that might lead them to behave destructively. Like, why would you conspire to murder a sensible socialist community leader like Fred Hampton but leave a slippery snake oil peddling conspiracy monger like Louis Farrakhan alive unless you wanted to instill for generations of Black people a suspicion of and hatred for the cops? And why would you conspire to fill law enforcement with white supremacists who keep lynching Black people under the cover of law unless you wanted to continue to confirm their suspicions far into the 21st Century?
Why would you torture, massacre, and burn villages and forests full of Southeast Asian civilians unless you wanted to confirm their conception of The West as a profane poison of the soul?
Why would you try to cover up your high crimes and make up obvious lies to justify invading Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, or Iraq if you didn’t want people to come up with idiotic theories about the moon landing being faked or the Earth being flat or Parkland being a false flag or Covid being a psy op? Why sneak Nazis out of Germany to work for the US government? Why allow Kissinger to reach the age of a century when you murder in their youth labor leaders, forest and water protectors, people marching for their rights, children playing with toys? Do you want me, fat little old me, to suspect that crime pays and nice folks get buried alive by those who own the dirt?
And why, if your contention was that there was no coming war of the government against them, would you descend on the Branch Davidians at their Mt. Carmel compound outside Waco, with all your choppers, military armor, tanks, guns, grenades, bombs, and gases, and ultimately burn them alive? You acted out their fantasy for them.
Now those sympathetic to the idea that the socialist multicultural woke government wants to kill sovereign Christians in an apocalyptic war feel confirmed in that belief. And you killed the barely-known niche charismatic David Koresh but left the very world-famous dangerous charismatic slippery snake oil peddling conspiracy monger Donald Trump alive, so he could go hold a rally at Waco and capitalize on your brutality by feeding the lunatic white supremacist sovereign citizen crowd exactly the elixir that will get them to try to overthrow the government for him.
Why would you do that unless you were arming fascists for a war against the people, as many of us have every reason to expect? Where’s that nice FBI negotiator played by Michael Shannon to talk them all down from their fear and rage? Hell, to talk me down from my fear and rage? Why don’t I have a deep-voiced, slightly lispy Frankenstein looking but nonetheless intensely captivating negotiator of reason to assure me and the other side that “this can all be resolved peacefully?”
Ask yourselves this, listeners: if this isn’t Hell, why are they making it look and feel like it is?
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
Everybody’s got their advice for living a good life. Some wisely keep it to themselves. Some, despite espousing tenets of the philosophy of Stoicism, simply cannot keep their mouths shut. Someone recently posted this from Marcus Aurelius:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today
will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like
this because they cannot tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good,
and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature
related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and
possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can
implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were
born to live and work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper
and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn
your back on him: these are obstructions.”
Those words pissed me off. Here’s what you should do when you wake up in the morning, Marcus: empty your bladder and move your bowels, that is how to start your day. Then, and only then, or maybe after a cup of coffee, you can prepare to meet all the benighted folks who don’t know the beauty and ugliness you have seen. Then you can vow you are in no way afraid of them and make your protestations that they are family to you, protestations that are undermined by your obvious sense of superiority.
The Stoic philosophers are an aggravating bunch. Their motto seems to be, “Never complain, never explain,” which I have joked is the passive/aggressive’s creed. Toxic masculinity is the lens through which they evaluate human behavior. To them, strength is the ability to withstand suffering. It is the code of the ox. It is the way of the beast of burden. Nothing wrong with being a perfect ox, if you value the values of an anthropomorphic ox mentality. But why would you assume others should value the same thing? How would a society of oxen be desirable?
“Know thyself” is a familiar motto, yet the Stoics don’t seem to know themselves to be judgmental, passive aggressive, and tacitly smug.
The same someone blind copied an email to all of us, I assume, couldn’t really say, being blind and all, that contained the advice of music critic and overachiever Ted Gioia on how one could be like him, or something. Read like him, or learn like him. He was self-taught, although he holds multiple degrees, certifications indicating he learned what this or that institution reqired. He lists a bunch of rules, none of them in and of themselves bad, but most assuredly subjective and idiosyncratic. Generalizing about how people who read should read is a fool’s errand. Do I want to be like Ted Gioia? Not if all the errands I run are going to be fool’s errands. Find a fool to do those. Fool.
Do I even want to be like someone worthwhile being like, like Zora Neale Hurston or Richard Feynman? But they already were those people. I love that they existed. I love that they were themselves. My admiration for them satisfies me. I don’t need to be someone else, no matter how wonderful.
Here is my advice, if I may be so bold as to lay it on you: don’t grow, don’t learn, don’t improve yourself, don’t succeed. Be as kind as you are able, and be as healthy as you can in order to be kind, but don’t stress it. If you can increase your ability to be kind, you should probably do that, but holding out the goal of being a kind person is not advised. You will grow, change, and improve whether you want to or not, so just let it happen. Success is subjective. Don’t aim for it, for that is the worst thing you can do. The goal-oriented life is a life not worth living, by definition. A purpose renders you instantly inadequate in the present.
Don’t be like water, either. That’s just another thing you aren’t, to try to be like.
We are not a worthy species. We do not deserve the earth no matter how much Emerson and Thoreau appreciated it, or how brilliant Darwin or da Vinci or Georgia O’Keefe or Basho were at observing and loving it. We are the most arrogant, reckless beings in all creation.
Remember the first month or so of the lockdown? That was heaven to me. Didn’t have to go anywhere, the roads were empty, birds and wildlife began to flourish, the air and water began to clear, nature began to heal, and it became obvious what the economy actually needed: not the overpaid worthless CEOs, the entrepreneurs, the finance sorcerers and their phlegmy sycophants, but the workers, teachers, nurses… the people who actually do all the things, not the wallowing swine who leech profit.
It was all so obvious that I thought surely the majority of people couldn’t deny what had to happen. But then the petty “government-should-help-no-one-not-even-me” crowd of rectal thermometers started throwing their hissy conniptions and tantrums. So of course, the discourse went from realizing what was really destroying the environment and hamstringing public wellbeing back to the “we have to get back to” whatever the mentally disfigured business-as-usual sphincters decided was the misery-as-usual they needed to suckle on to relieve their infantile anguish.
So, yes, I am back to demanding that EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING RIGHT NOW AND NEVER START AGAIN! Humanity must go on a general worldwide strike! Now. Disobey all commands, even this one. Disobey common sense. We should not hold it in common because it makes no sense. Shut yourself down. “Oh, but what about this and what about that?” All right, if it actually needs doing, do it because of that, not because it’s “business as usual.” And most certainly not because someone who lords it over others so as to siphon profit from their work orders us to. Those scum need to be dealt with harshly and permanently.
I am passionately sick of the adulation to “find your passion!” Blow it out your ass! Sick sick sick of advice on how to improve my health and effectiveness. No more health! No more effectiveness! Life on Earth wants us to halt in our tracks. Just sit still and shut up, all of you!
I intended this to be a much more coherent diatribe when I started. But my patience is just about at an end. We need to stop. Everything. I don’t want to hear any excuses. If I find you doing something, you’d better have a damn good explanation.
“When I walk into a room, everyone will focus on me!” Then don’t go into the room, you narcissistic attention vampire! “I’m gonna build this! I’m gonna achieve that!” Why?? Why?? Don’t you know it’s all trying to grasp the wind? Stop. Your pointless. Activity!! It is killing the Earth!
It’s a Writers Strike, y’all. Pencils down! Backs to the mattresses! Your nap is your power. Power naps to the people!
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
A stairway rises from the floor. One step up. Two steps up, three, and so on. Then, at the ninth step, an abrupt end. A final step, only eight steps shy of the second floor. The pedestrian stands on the inadequate final step, some five feet off the ground, neither fully on the first floor, yet unable to attain the second.
What manner of half-assed structure is this? the abortive pedestrian asks. Did the architect fail to calculate the number the steps in the flight of stairs correctly? Did the building contractor run out of lumber at this point? The unfinished stairway is just complete enough for a person to fall from, but insufficient to use for ascending entirely from one floor to another.
Picture it, the incomplete stairway, standing on its own in a museum gallery or a sculpture garden, for it is in fact a work of art. It is an avant-garde stairway, refusing to answer the pedestrian’s desire, not out of spite, but from the simple instinct to be itself. It owes you no explanation, no more than it owes you its utility. It owes you nothing. It exists in defiance of humanity’s petty needs.
Does it not remind us of the words of Texas politician, Tim Boyd, who resigned as mayor of Colorado City, Texas after the weeklong deadly power outage two years ago. In response to frustrated constituents complaining about freezing to death, Boyd wrote: “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” A government and a utility service defying the people’s calls for something in exchange for their tax dollars? That’s called avant-garde government. [You can hear or read about that fiasco in my essay from March 4, 2021, here: “The Quiet Part Out Loud.”]
Are these not the hallmarks of a new aesthetic in the official philosophy of problem solving? Another municipal analog was last week’s record storm and flooding in South Florida. Broward County, where Fort Lauderdale is located, got over two feet of rain. This could be due to the trend of global atmospheric warming. Warmer air can hold more moisture, a commonly understood cause for storms dumping unusually destructive amounts of rain.
Whatever the reason for the massive amounts of water, they’re doing something about it in Broward County. The most rainfall in a single day Fort Lauderdale’s streets are built to manage right now is three inches. 25 or so inches of rain, needless to say, is going to complicate things.
Not to worry, however. Fort Lauderdale is on track to improve their ability to move stormwater out of the streets of the city. At the end of this current run of design improvements, instead of a mere three inches of stormwater, their new system will be able to handle a whole seven inches! Then a twenty-five inch rain would put them at only eighteen inches below adequate. If you’re going to get your house flooded, better to do it in a city submerged a mere eighteen inches deep instead of twenty-two.
That is some avant-garde improvement.
Ever been on welfare? Good luck surviving on it. Food stamps? You get almost enough to inadequately feed your family. But maybe you’re one of those model citizens who has a job and even health insurance. You will often find leave and treatment for illness or accident suffered by you or a family member, or leave for pregnancy, to offer insufficient time or services to care for yourself or your loved ones. And of course public education, public libraries, and most public services are notoriously, sardonically underfunded.
Even the US military doesn’t offer its troops sufficient food. And during the recent wars in the Persian Gulf, private companies pocketed taxpayer dollars rather than supply troops with the vehicles and body armor, facilities and food they’d been contracted to provide. Not stepping up to the job is the model of behavior set by corporations and the government cash cow they own and which lays golden cow pies for them.
And then they complain that “no one wants to work anymore.” Look in the mirror, oligarchs. Government is getting the people it deserves.
Half measures as official policy are a fascinating behavior, a theatrical way for the stewards of a society, whether elected or self-appointed, to resign themselves to incompetence and defeat. We'll surely see many more such absurdist Pyrrhic gestures worldwide as coastlines submerge, forests burn, mass shootings escalate, famines and wars drive mass migrations of peoples, etc. The wildest thing to me is how much effort and expense goes into doing that which is less than meaningful.
Even the bread and circuses are half-assed. The iPhone is buggy and unwieldy, and it tortures and exploits those who make it. Products routinely fail to deliver what they promise, and that is exactly what’s expected of them. Instead of bread, we work and obey for bitter, undercooked dough. Where circuses are advertised we are greeted by rusted scaffolding from which hang moth-eaten mildewed shreds of canvas. Acrobats tumble from shoddily-made equipment but continue to go through the motions of performing on crutches, in bandages, bone-setting hardware, and prosthetic limbs. It humbles me, your socialist leisure correspondent. It puts my small efforts and non-efforts to shame.
The rulers are proving to be true masters of half-assery as a mode of operation. The rulers are the avant-garde. We artists are merely the shadow trailing after them.
The day had been a tough one for Larkin René Parquet de Parque. It had been full of disappointments. Though he lived in a timeline in which global warming had been reversed in a timely fashion through concerted effort among nations – which meant of course the weight of opinion of the greedy and their ability to manipulate the weak-minded had been countered by overwhelming passion for preserving all life now and in the future – no amount of good will on the part of others could guarantee that there wouldn’t be days when unforeseen difficulties would dominate the hours and thus defeat one’s inclination toward a good mood. Such a day was this.
Not even the ultimate defeat of the capitalist domination of economies could forestall the inevitability of such a day. The switch from plastics to various renewable configurations of carbon and glass was key to diminishing and ultimately eradicating the pollution of land, water, and air. One would think such a switch would somehow minimize the chance of having a bad day full of bad difficulties. And it may have, but minimizing a chance and preventing an inevitability are two entirely different things.
Larkin René Parquet de Parque did one thing and one thing only: he went from town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood, with a very large rock tumbler. He would send out notices a few days before his impending visit urging people to bring their empty glass bottles. Usually such bottles were recycled by the municipality. De Parque would arrive, not to supplant such services, but as a compliment to them. The bottles that were brought were shattered in a bin, tumbled in de Parque’s rock tumbler, and artificially turned into “beach glass” for use in people’s vases, landscaping, and terrariums. Sometimes he would stay more than one day if there was sufficiently high demand.
He had recently taken his rock tumbler in for a tune up, and the following day, in front of an entire neighborhood of beach glass enthusiasts who’d saved their prettiest-colored bottles for the entire year, the rock tumbler refused to tumble. Its motor was on the fritz. It turned out that the mechanic tuning it up had failed to replace an important washer. The mechanic had been too lazy to double-check her washer checklist. Don’t assume it was the absence of a profit incentive that caused it. The mechanic was part owner of that shop, as was the case with most businesses. Laziness occurs in humans for a variety of reasons. Even a compassionate economy can’t prevent it. And certainly an abusive, coercive one won’t.
So the day was a wash. The rock tumbler would have to go back to the shop, where the mechanic would discover her mistake and own up to it because there was no punishment for telling the truth except embarrassment, and she vowed to herself, her co-worker/owners, and de Parque that she would be more mindful. De Parque, for his part, decided to push his schedule back a month and take a month’s vacation starting the next day. Maybe he would join his three spouses, who were already on a camping trip. There would be no inconvenience to him nor those who relied on him to turn their bottles into beach glass, except for them having to shlep their bottles back home to await another day.
On his bullet train homeward he found the train people had decided to replace the popular Biscoff biscuits with a type of madeleine he wasn’t fond of. Lotus Bakery in Lembeke, Belgium had been continuously baking the things since the 1930s. His fellow passengers were unhappy with the replacement as well, and many a complaint was lodged. In the meantime he had little choice but to opt for a Michigan company’s version of the Dutch stroopwafel instead.
The last straw was when he went to the bar that evening and ordered a “Last Word” cocktail. He was told the bar was out of green Chartreuse, a key ingredient. The “Last Word” was made with equal parts gin, fresh lime juice, maraschino liqueur, and green Chartreuse, just as it is in our own timeline. It was the most popular craft cocktail in North America at the moment. Chartreuse was made according to a five-hundred-year-old secret recipe vouchsafed to the Carthusian order of monks. The monks at the French alpine Carthusian Monastery, however, had decided that catering to the North American thirst for green Chartreuse was a lower priority than their ecclesiastical studies and monastic rituals of devotion. The result was that the mixologist decided, with de Parque’s permission, to substitute Pernod. The result was inferior.
It was just that kind of day. De Parque’s wife, husband, and fluid third spouse were all off on a weeklong camping trip together, so before retiring to bed he read to the children of the neighborhood from a dystopian novel about an alternate timeline where fascism was rising all over the world, multiple wars were being fought to benefit arms makers and dealers, and a global climate crisis was looming with the world’s governments intransigent and their populations manipulated by for-profit propaganda corporations. A small class of über-wealthy oligarchs owned most of everything, including the legal system. Surveillance was wall-to-wall, day and night, one hundred percent continuous and ubiquitous. Slavery was a common form of labor arrangement, the seas were depleted of oxygen, the rivers were unswimmable, and resources and opportunities were kept in a state of artificial shortage, doled out parsimoniously to the great masses of people. Every attempt at social improvement was sabotaged by the infiltration of secret police.
The children found the book hilarious. Each new indignity, injustice, or instance of cruelty was greeted with the delirious uproar of childish laughter. It all seemed so outlandish and impossible.
And that’s the Moment of Truth. Good day!
Sitting at the seder table alongside three women: a movie star, a small business owner, and a landscape architect, I eavesdropped on their conversation as I ate my matzoh ball soup. And the businesswoman mentioned that some of her workers took time off when they had their periods. She could understand it in the case of one of them who had a medical condition that caused her immense pain and discomfort, but the practice had become habitual among workers she wasn’t sure required it.
All three women began chiming in about the virtues of pushing oneself past one’s perceived limitations when feeling unable or reluctant to expend the effort to accomplish something, particularly something athletic like waking up for a dance class at six ay em or dragging oneself to the bathroom after an insufficient night’s sleep or exercising past the point of pain or exhaustion.
They lost the thread of the workers wanting time for themselves, but implicit behind all this self-congratulation for being such tough, rigorous women was that millennials these days didn’t want to do that pushing-through-limitations thing. I was thinking, “How do you know that they’re not pushing themselves in some other arena of activity unrelated to their jobs?” Because being a waiter or bartender or member of a kitchen staff might not necessarily be their passion. That might lie elsewhere. And when they’re taking time for themselves, they may not just be groaning with cramp pain, but might be using the time for a purpose of which you are entirely unaware.
I didn’t say that, of course, because all three women were, by common standards, far more accomplished than I have ever been or ever will be. And it is well known that my political doctrine of non-excellence, non-participation, and non-achievement has put me in the precarious economic position where I now find myself. I did take the opportunity to praise napping, though. But it brought home how misunderstood my calls for a universal work stoppage was destined to remain.
It also brought to mind Gayatri Spivak, the Indian feminist literary critic, and the concept from Gramsci of the subaltern, about which I understand very little. The subaltern, as the notion has developed from Gramsci through Spivak and now through my misbegotten filter, is anyone or anything who is left out of the assumptions of a given discourse by virtue of their power inferiority. So much less are they than the selves discussing themselves that they don’t exist enough to speak or even to have what they might say, if they could, considered. Discussions of ethics and morals in dominant circles tend to be carried on as if the dominant circle were the only group that matters. Left out are the lesser people whose voices can be ignored simply because they don’t appear in the territory under consideration as its map has been constructed. The subaltern is an unacknowledged part of the landscape.
The workers under discussion, for example, are not thought to be doing something else valuable in the time they aren’t at work. They’re simply not at work, which means they don’t have a material existence on the map the boss is looking at. The map the three women were looking at was a geography of where they felt these people who weren’t living up to what they considered the noble or correct or fulfilling goal should unquestionably be. The goal in life is to be happy. One does what one needs to do with passion, and what needs to be done is what these three women had decided were the activities necessary to achieve fulfillment.
Spivak is a fan of Jacques Derrida, or has at least made expressions favorable to him and deconstruction, because he interrogated texts to understand how they undermined their own assumptions. The deconstruction of a text reveals what the makers of the text are hiding from themselves. That’s what I was doing to the discourse of these unwitting women conversing next to me. But I wasn’t just the deconstructor. By feeling it necessary to keep my discovery to myself, I was also the subaltern, the lesser, the not included being: invisible and unheard.
The thing about people is that they conjure the invisible into existence by ignoring it. There’s an empty space where a questioning voice should be. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature abhors me, inasmuch as a I am a vacuum. Therefore I am the voice that the void in a three-way self-congratulatory conversation is doomed to conjure. Whether I speak or not is irrelevant. Just the fact that my questions exist to fill the void in conversational awareness is enough. The questions take shape in the void whether the questions are spoken or left silent.
I don’t know how much you listeners know about Passover. Nested in the Passover expression of breaking the chains of slavery is an eschatological wish, expressed at the end of the seder. לשנה הבאה בירושלים L'shana haba'ah v'Yerushalayim: “Next year in Jerusalem” was what they used to say, back before Jerusalem became the capital of Israel, subject to ethnic cleansing to evict its Palestinian inhabitants. The Messiah, Mashiach, will come one day, announced by the prophet Elijah, so the rumor had it. The seder table used to have an empty chair with a place setting and a kiddish cup, a prayer cup, full of wine, designated for Elijah, should the time of Mashiach come during the seder and the prophet come stumbling in and need a nosh of chopped liver or gefilte fish, or even something more Sephardic like spicy lentils or whatever they eat.
It was the movie star’s first seder ever. Everyone else at the table was Jewish. At one point in the meal the movie star mentioned that her ex-boyfriend, very much ex, had texted her that day. It was a text asking a favor. She said, “I’m just going to ignore it.” We all agreed that such a response was appropriate. I had met the fellow a few times and was not particularly partial to him.
I said to her, “You know we have a seat reserved at the table for Elijah,” which bewildered her, because Elijah happened to be this ex-boyfriend’s name. We Jews at her end of the table laughed and immediately let her in on the humorous coincidence.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a seder that’s left a full-size place setting and an adult chair reserved for Elijah. Here it didn’t even come up except as a joke. Not only was Elijah absent, he didn’t even have a place ready if he decided to show up, although I’m sure we could have hastily arranged to accommodate him if he did.
Also absent, at a ritual meal to commemorate the Israelites rising up from slavery and Exodusing from Egypt, were the Palestinians, who had been the victims of settler violence, vandalism, and theft back in the territories in recent weeks, as well as mosque desecration, beatings, shootings, and gassing from the Magavnikim, the Israeli border police or more accurately the cruelty police, who didn’t police cruelty but used cruelty to police. This had been reported only the day before that first night of Passover.
Although they were acknowledged fleetingly during a blessing that night, their suffering and the injustice of their mistreatment was far from adequately described, conjured, let alone understood. They were the true subalterns, and I would like to say I was holding a place for them, that I at least made a gesture of doing so, but of course it was as if I had done nothing at all. After all, who am I to tell their story? I can only point in the direction of the breeze that whispers of the storm churning so far away, with breath almost depleted of force by the time we celebrants feel it on our well-fed cheeks.
The well-off went on congratulating themselves, I among them, ever confident in their self-definition as authors of their own destinies, while the voices of the subalterns, at least on a conscious level, blew past unheard.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
Sitting at the seder table alongside three women: a movie star, a small business owner, and a landscape architect, I eavesdropped on their conversation as I ate my matzoh ball soup. And the businesswoman mentioned that some of her workers took time off when they had their periods. She could understand it in the case of one of them who had a medical condition that caused her immense pain and discomfort, but the practice had become habitual among workers she wasn’t sure required it.
All three women began chiming in about the virtues of pushing oneself past one’s perceived limitations when feeling unable or reluctant to expend the effort to accomplish something, particularly something athletic like waking up for a dance class at six ay em or dragging oneself to the bathroom after an insufficient night’s sleep or exercising past the point of pain or exhaustion.
They lost the thread of the workers wanting time for themselves, but implicit behind all this self-congratulation for being such tough, rigorous women was that millennials these days didn’t want to do that pushing-through-limitations thing. I was thinking, “How do you know that they’re not pushing themselves in some other arena of activity unrelated to their jobs?” Because being a waiter or bartender or member of a kitchen staff might not necessarily be their passion. That might lie elsewhere. And when they’re taking time for themselves, they may not just be groaning with cramp pain, but might be using the time for a purpose of which you are entirely unaware.
I didn’t say that, of course, because all three women were, by common standards, far more accomplished than I have ever been or ever will be. And it is well known that my political doctrine of non-excellence, non-participation, and non-achievement has put me in the precarious economic position where I now find myself. I did take the opportunity to praise napping, though. But it brought home how misunderstood my calls for a universal work stoppage was destined to remain.
It also brought to mind Gayatri Spivak, the Indian feminist literary critic, and the concept from Gramsci of the subaltern, about which I understand very little. The subaltern, as the notion has developed from Gramsci through Spivak and now through my misbegotten filter, is anyone or anything who is left out of the assumptions of a given discourse by virtue of their power inferiority. So much less are they than the selves discussing themselves that they don’t exist enough to speak or even to have what they might say, if they could, considered. Discussions of ethics and morals in dominant circles tend to be carried on as if the dominant circle were the only group that matters. Left out are the lesser people whose voices can be ignored simply because they don’t appear in the territory under consideration as its map has been constructed. The subaltern is an unacknowledged part of the landscape.
The workers under discussion, for example, are not thought to be doing something else valuable in the time they aren’t at work. They’re simply not at work, which means they don’t have a material existence on the map the boss is looking at. The map the three women were looking at was a geography of where they felt these people who weren’t living up to what they considered the noble or correct or fulfilling goal should unquestionably be. The goal in life is to be happy. One does what one needs to do with passion, and what needs to be done is what these three women had decided were the activities necessary to achieve fulfillment.
Spivak is a fan of Jacques Derrida, or has at least made expressions favorable to him and deconstruction, because he interrogated texts to understand how they undermined their own assumptions. The deconstruction of a text reveals what the makers of the text are hiding from themselves. That’s what I was doing to the discourse of these unwitting women conversing next to me. But I wasn’t just the deconstructor. By feeling it necessary to keep my discovery to myself, I was also the subaltern, the lesser, the not included being: invisible and unheard.
The thing about people is that they conjure the invisible into existence by ignoring it. There’s an empty space where a questioning voice should be. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature abhors me, inasmuch as a I am a vacuum. Therefore I am the voice that the void in a three-way self-congratulatory conversation is doomed to conjure. Whether I speak or not is irrelevant. Just the fact that my questions exist to fill the void in conversational awareness is enough. The questions take shape in the void whether the questions are spoken or left silent.
I don’t know how much you listeners know about Passover. Nested in the Passover expression of breaking the chains of slavery is an eschatological wish, expressed at the end of the seder. לשנה הבאה בירושלים L'shana haba'ah v'Yerushalayim: “Next year in Jerusalem” was what they used to say, back before Jerusalem became the capital of Israel, subject to ethnic cleansing to evict its Palestinian inhabitants. The Messiah, Mashiach, will come one day, announced by the prophet Elijah, so the rumor had it. The seder table used to have an empty chair with a place setting and a kiddish cup, a prayer cup, full of wine, designated for Elijah, should the time of Mashiach come during the seder and the prophet come stumbling in and need a nosh of chopped liver or gefilte fish, or even something more Sephardic like spicy lentils or whatever they eat.
It was the movie star’s first seder ever. Everyone else at the table was Jewish. At one point in the meal the movie star mentioned that her ex-boyfriend, very much ex, had texted her that day. It was a text asking a favor. She said, “I’m just going to ignore it.” We all agreed that such a response was appropriate. I had met the fellow a few times and was not particularly partial to him.
I said to her, “You know we have a seat reserved at the table for Elijah,” which bewildered her, because Elijah happened to be this ex-boyfriend’s name. We Jews at her end of the table laughed and immediately let her in on the humorous coincidence.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a seder that’s left a full-size place setting and an adult chair reserved for Elijah. Here it didn’t even come up except as a joke. Not only was Elijah absent, he didn’t even have a place ready if he decided to show up, although I’m sure we could have hastily arranged to accommodate him if he did.
Also absent, at a ritual meal to commemorate the Israelites rising up from slavery and Exodusing from Egypt, were the Palestinians, who had been the victims of settler violence, vandalism, and theft back in the territories in recent weeks, as well as mosque desecration, beatings, shootings, and gassing from the Magavnikim, the Israeli border police or more accurately the cruelty police, who didn’t police cruelty but used cruelty to police. This had been reported only the day before that first night of Passover.
Although they were acknowledged fleetingly during a blessing that night, their suffering and the injustice of their mistreatment was far from adequately described, conjured, let alone understood. They were the true subalterns, and I would like to say I was holding a place for them, that I at least made a gesture of doing so, but of course it was as if I had done nothing at all. After all, who am I to tell their story? I can only point in the direction of the breeze that whispers of the storm churning so far away, with breath almost depleted of force by the time we celebrants feel it on our well-fed cheeks.
The well-off went on congratulating themselves, I among them, ever confident in their self-definition as authors of their own destinies, while the voices of the subalterns, at least on a conscious level, blew past unheard.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!