There may come a time when your mind, worn tired by struggle, will sit and refuse to move forward, even an inch.
At such a time there is no harm to turning your attention away from the computer, and thoughts of inspired action, and clearing the chaos on your desk.
The young Thomas Jefferson, shortly after he married the widow of Bathurst Skelton, three years before becoming the Author of Liberty, increased his wealth threefold. He became the master of Bathurst’s 135 slaves [1] (Jefferson had inherited only 50 from his parents) and added 11,000 acres of property formerly held by Bathurst [2] to the 5,000 he had previously inherited. To say that young Thomas Jefferson was born booted and spurred to ride the backs of his saddled countrymen would not be entirely unfair. His marriage to the wealthy young widow added luster to both boot and spur.
With all this inherited wealth, and in spite of an eloquently expressed life long hatred of tyranny, which compelled him to risk being hanged as a revolutionary, and his deep moral opposition to slavery, the Author of Liberty should have had the luxury, more than fifty years later, of freeing his remaining 130 slaves in his will, as the Father of our Country had done. Sadly, that luxury was denied to him. John Adams, who comes down to us far less heroically than Washington and Jefferson, and not nearly the moral equal of either (in the simplistic popular imagination), never owned a slave. But that is another rant for someone else to go on about some other time.
Fictional, aspirational president Josiah Bartlet, of The West Wing TV series, is fond of learned quotes. He quoted Jefferson some time toward the end of season six. “A man’s management of his own purse speaks volumes about character,” he said. And it struck me anew: motherfucker!
The reason Jefferson could not free his slaves, as he heartbrokenly regretted he could not do toward the end of his life, is that in spite of his great inherited wealth, his management of his own purse was less than perfect. His love of luxury far exceeded his ability to pay for shipments of the most expensive French wine, the finest Italian furnishings, the clothes made for him by the greatest tailors in Europe, the magnificent horses he rode, the no expense spared constant remodeling of his gracious and beautiful home, Monticello.
He had racked up impressive debts over the years of his long, luxurious life as a philosopher king. If he had freed his slaves, instead of bequeathing them as property to his daughters, he would have left his progeny penniless. The shame of that outweighed any other qualms he might have had. Even leaving aside the several slave children he fathered with the illegitimate half-sister of his late wife, his long-time slave mistress Sally, (unacknowledged during his life and indignantly denied on his legacy’s behalf for a century and a half after his death) let us say, in unison: motherfucker. History is kinder to him, by far, than I am. No doubt.
My meditation on the man who bravely declared the self-evident truth of human equality leads me to wonder about my ongoing belief in the idealistic democracy he played such a large role in shaping. I continue to believe in the importance of our public institutions. Most large steps forward as a People were the product of principled government initiative in response to overwhelming events and popular agitation. Think about the use of the Interstate Commerce Clause and the courage and determination of both activists and jurists in the federal courts to end centuries of racism at law. (Much work remains to be done there, but that’s not the point. The laws needed to be changed, the government acted to change and, in some cases, even enforce the laws. A triumph of democracy.)
The importance of principled government action is confirmed for me over and over as I watch the ongoing failure of profit-driven business, our so-called Free Market, to solve any of the pressing problems of our society. Exponentially increasing the wealth of a few makes the country’s wealth look good on paper, but human lives, like baseball games, are not played on paper. Wall Street’s health in most cases has little to do with healthy lives on Main Street.
Without a pragmatic and honest government to unite and inspire us we have no hope of solving the biggest challenges we face as a nation, as a species, as a planet. I am probably even in the majority in this opinion, of those with the leisure to consider the question seriously, and who do not stand to lose wealth by taking this position. Not that it makes much difference, if my belief in democracy is a silly as other fond beliefs of childhood.
Leave aside the damning fact that our highest court has decided that, Constitutionally speaking, and as intended by the Framers, money is speech in a land where 97% of all political campaigns are won by the side that spends the most money speaking. Has there ever been anything like democracy for most of the history of this nation, the world’s first modern experiment in government of the People, by the People and for the People? At isolated moments, perhaps, the best aspirations and highest motives of our citizens have become enshrined in our laws. Sometimes these isolated moments are decades or centuries in the making.
Slavery and lynching, two practices long protected by American law, the former embedded, obscurely but robustly, in our Constitution, the latter winkingly left up to the states to, er … uh, regulate, are now universally reviled. Today nobody but the hybrid of a moral cretin and a talking jackass would make an argument in favor of slavery or lynching, though both were the law of the land for generations. Medicare, once unthinkably controversial, is now something even the Tea Baggers want the government to keep their hands off of. Social Security too, at one time renounced as part of a Socialist plot, has become something most retired people rely on, at least in part, and value as part of a decent society’s social safety net. Not long ago homosexuals were hunted down and locked up, today they legally marry in many states. Millions are in jail today for preferring marijuana to alcohol as their drug of choice. [OK, I know, an exaggeration, please see note… 3] Democracy does over time move forward, although more often than not only after excruciatingly long struggles against powerful, organized, determined, well-funded forces.
In light of all this, can I really be angry at a president who campaigned by appealing to the highest ideals and hopes of many of our citizens and continues to talk the talk, though often obliged to speak less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while ruling in slavish obedience to the corporate bottom line? Sure I can, but I don’t know how fair it is. He is not the only “sell-out” to find life much more complicated as the indebted to campaign donors leader of the free world than he may have wished it to be. Bill Clinton is often considered the greatest Republican president of the last fifty years, though he was relentlessly attacked as a liberal. Heck of a liberal Bill was, really.
If Jefferson could have freed his slaves, you just know he would have done the right thing, even as the management of his purse showed most of what we need to know about the actual content of his character.
It bears repeating, as was done a few times on The West Wing: we campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Call me strict, but I believe the Author of Liberty should be judged by his own formulation– ditto this well-spoken idealist we have in there now.
When someone who talks like a psychopath, or a slave holder, acts like one, I know how to react. I am mobilized, adrenaline flows. I’m angry, maybe, but not hurt. I certainly feel no surprise, no betrayal of principle or trust. When someone talks like a true and compassionate friend, and acts exactly like the guy who talks like a psychopath, and people around me act like he’s still our true friend — it robs me of hope. It crushes my soul just a little bit more. Makes me feel something I strongly resist believing: that my faith in democracy, in the power of the People to see the truth and walk toward the light, may be entirely foolish.
I don’t believe that, deep down, but, damn, these complicatedly nuanced idealist motherfuckers who eloquently speak our fondest hopes make it hård.
[1] These 135 slaves were inherited from Martha’s father John Wayles, not Bathurst Skelton, and in 1773. Among the slaves was Betty Hemings and her last daughter by John Wayles (she had six of his children), the baby Sally.
[2] He inherited the 11,000 acres from Wayles, too. I just like writing Bathurst Skelton and didn’t have my copy of Fawn M. Brodie’s excellent, groundbreaking 1974 Thomas Jefferson; An Intimate Biography at hand when I wrote the post earlier today. (see W.W. Norton softcover, pp. 80-87)
[3] Fine, not millions locked up for pot. But read these shameful statistics. Could a democracy spend the more than $51,000,000,000 annually that goes to the endless, senseless “War On Drugs” any more wisely? How about 10% of it to make sure no old Americans are ever forced to be cold, or homeless, or eat cat food?
Anger
that shit will
fuck you up
hold you down
make you do
what it wants
you to do
Fuck!
Are you fucking stupid?
Fuck him up!
The soft voice
that is almost always
wiser
is drowned in the roar
of Anger
foaming at the mouth
like Hitler.
Storms pass
birds start singing
everyone gets back
to work or siesta
but while Anger
whips the crowd
like a livid Klansman
it can be easy to forget,
pitchfork or torch
in hand,
that this popping veined,
spitting motherfucker
is a Ku Klux Klansman,
is Anger.
Needs to be calmed down
not followed
screaming
into the dark night.
“Do you realize how it will look if I have an executive from the second largest health insurance giant in the country write the new health care law?”
“It’s not as if the chairman of the committee who is tasked with crafting the law has clean hands either. Max Baucus took almost $5,000,000 in campaign money from that industry in the last five years, Mr. President. He’s a Democrat, that’s bona fide enough for your average supporter. He’s one of the good guys in this partisan knife fight, as far as they know.”
“But a staffer who was an executive at Wellpoint until a couple of weeks ago?” asks the president, “how will having her as the primary author of the law, the architect of Obamacare, look to my supporters?”
“Believe me, you’ll be as safe as an octopus in a cloud of ink on a dark night, sir,” says one of the president’s closest advisers. “Only a few Americans will ever even hear the name Elizabeth Fowler and, of that few, even less will care.”
“But the bill before me is plainly a gift to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. We get a concession on ‘pre-existing condition’ because we’re delivering potentially 40,000,000 new customers to them, mandating the purchase of insurance while agreeing to very gently regulate how much they can gouge patients. Increasing deductibles to almost $2,000 out of pocket for people 150% above the poverty line. Pay an insurance premium every month to a private company and then reach into your pocket to pay the first $2,000 of your medical bills before insurance kicks in? Is this the Hope and Change I campaigned on?”
“Whatever law you pass will be put up for repeal dozens of times, they’ll drag it through every court in the country, shut down the government over it. The opposition, you may have noticed, is truly rabid. You can pass Romneycare, or Nixon’s plan.. well, no, not Nixon’s plan, you’d look like a Socialist… but you can pass the Republicans’ own plan, Mr. President, and they’d come after you with torches and pitchforks. Your supporters will realize you were in no position not to compromise.”
“Even though we have the Senate and the House, I have to take the only plan that truly makes sense, a buy-in to Medicare, off the table right at the start, ensure that insurance company and pharmaceutical industry profits will be as robust as before, in fact, make purchase of private health care mandatory, in legislation that still leaves millions of Americans uninsured? Is that what you’re telling me, Phyllis?”
“Yes, sir,” she says.
“I realize I’m arguing with myself. I’m a charismatic campaigner, I’m accomplished, my ideals are beyond question. I was voted into office on a wave of hope. Is this really the best I can do as president of a country longing for real change, desperate for hope they can believe in?”
“At least you weren’t a governor, sir, when you were running. You were spared going back to your home state to execute a brain damaged murderer on the eve of the primary.”
“I suppose I’ll have to make do with that,” the president says, closing the folder on his desk. “What’s next?”
“I ran against the anti-democratic secrecy of Cheney and Addington. I promised, many times as a candidate, to run the most transparent administration in history. I promised I’d protect whistle blowers. The Bush administration classified literally everything, used sovereign immunity, state secrets, national security rationales, intimidation, the pressure of jailing, lawsuits and everything else, to keep crucial information from the People, from the electorate. Cheney had a safe in his office big enough to hold half a dozen detainees, for Christ’s sake.”
“That second Bush Administration dramatically shifted the public’s right to know to a need to know basis. They shifted the traditional burden on government of showing something needed to be secret to the burden on the public of proving it should not be secret. Tricky for the public to do that when they don’t even know there is a secret. Testimony by the President and Vice President at the 9/11 Commission was top secret, no recording, no transcript, no notes. Commission members sworn to secrecy. What the hell was up with that? Scandals and war crimes were reported in government reports, the reports were classified. The press was used as a megaphone to broadcast government policy. I vowed that my administration would reverse that anti-democratic crap. Now you’re telling me we should try this American journalist under the 1917 Espionage Act, like the guy is a spy during wartime for doing research for his story on CIA torture?”
“It would send a strong message, Mr. President. We are still obliged to work in the shadows, sir.”
A long pause. “Ah, hell with it. Tell Holder to use the stinking 1917 act. We can’t ask for the death penalty under it, can we?”
“No, Mr. President.”
“Wait until my supporters get a whiff of this…”
“Our country is so divided, and your opposition so virulent and irrational, Mr. President, that your supporters will defend you, no matter how foul the cologne you might be obliged to douse yourself in from time to time.”
“Get out of my sight….”
“You mean to tell me this American citizen has been locked up, without charges, in solitary confinement, for almost a year over there?” asks the president sharply.
“Yes, sir,” says a high ranking advisor, “at our request, sir. He’s articulate, and pissed off and self-righteous. He preaches in perfcct English and in native Arabic. He has a worldwide following of young jihadi types. He could be lethal winning hearts and minds for al Que’da.”
“Can’t we charge him with anything? He’s an American citizen, are we now detaining American citizens without charges, without habeas corpus, without any sort of judicial process? Has the Constitution been suspended for citizens who are too critical of our policies and I’m just the last to find out?”
“We really don’t have grounds to charge him with anything, sir, other than abusing the First Amendment. We need to hold him, though. He’s dangerous, charismatic, his internet sermons are inspiring fanatical youth around the world.”
“Can’t we shut down his website?”
“We did. The sermons circulate on DVD. It’s best to keep him locked up, sir.”
“Under the secret detention black site policies Dick Cheney and David Addington put into place when this country went to the dark side?”
Sometimes no answer is the best answer, the advisors hold their peace.
“Charge this guy and have him extradited or tell Yemen to cut him loose,” orders the president, turning to the next name on the list.
A year or so later, still not charged with any crime, the American cleric was released from prison.
A couple of years later his name appears on a kill list given to the president. The president is known for his eidetic memory.
“Isn’t this the guy who Yemen had in solitary without charges, the American citizen we finally told them to cut loose?”
“Yes, Mr. President. He’s still giving sermons, and his rhetoric is on fire. We need to silence him.”
“I ask you again, general, can we charge this motherfucker with a crime before we kill him? Any crime? At one time extra-judicial executions were frowned upon. We Americans always frowned upon them, publicly at least. Are we now killing even American citizens without feeling the need to even charge them with a crime? Doesn’t his father have a lawsuit in our courts to keep him off the kill list?”
“The law suit will be moot, sir, if we shoot.”
Moment of decision, where one would like to imagine a man of integrity drawing a principled line he will not cross. An American citizen cannot be killed without judicial review. Even if he is charged and tried in absentia, there is some legal process, some requirement to prove guilt of a crime serious enough to punish with execution, before we sentence one of our citizens to death. It’s just wrong, putting a name on a secret list and designating him for death, especially one of our own citizens and it sets a very dangerous precedent.
“Mr. President, he’s been eluding us for many months, for over a year. He’s becoming a hero in that wild tribal area in Yemen and a symbol of defiance. We know where he is tonight, we have a small window to act. We need to kill him now, sir.”
A long pause. “Fine,” the signature scrawled left-handed next to the American’s name, marked for death. “Just don’t come to me in a couple of weeks and tell me you also killed his teenaged son with the dreadlocks, or the kid’s friends listening to hiphop somewhere.”
“Will do, Mr. President, absolutely. Thank you, sir.”
I left an important detail out of the account I just posted.
The thing that left the whip marks on me was not recalling a difficult childhood and the sad details appurtenant to it. Many have had it much worse than I did, than my sister did, or my parents, though each of us had it bad enough. The siblings of three of my grandparents and their families, for example, thirteen years before I was born: I can’t think of a worse childhood than you and everyone you’ve ever known being massacred by organized gangs of drunken haters backed by a powerful occupying army whose commander is determined to wipe out every trace of your ancestors.
The whip marks I felt after yesterday’s session came a moment after I was asked if I had experienced any traumas. At first I answered no, then I put my finger on an ongoing one, with roots in my earliest life, the moment that has always stopped me in my tracks:
when an angry bully, usually with an arbitrary hierarchic advantage of some kind, steps up and tells me to put my eyes to the ground.
I recalled a few instances of this as an adult, how the rising feeling of unfairness, and powerless to do anything but fight, enflamed nerve endings seared repeatedly when I was a boy, how needy bullies have always had an easy time locating me in a crowded room. I’m not hard to find, I’m the one who hasn’t learned to put my eyes to the ground at the key moment so someone else can take the blows.
“Your therapist can work with you on that,” the grad student told me sympathetically.
During the first screening interview to get into the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy research study most of the yes/no questions seemed designed to rule out people with serious psychological handicaps. These people had larger problems than waking up exhausted every day and would be no more useful to the study than the study would be to them. Changing how they think about their life would not likely help them very much, if at all. Trying to reason their way to more productive pursuits would probably only take them so far.
“Do you sometimes hear celebrities on TV talking directly to you, acknowledging your secret connection?”
“Do you feel that, as soon as you leave a room, everyone heaves a sigh of relief and begins unloading about what a complete jerk you are?”
“Do the commands you get when wearing your tin foil hat seem more reasonable to you than the ones you get from the neighbor’s dog?”
“Do you believe that Dick Cheney would kill thousands of people to get what he wants?” (a few were trick questions, I noticed)
This interview was at times a little tedious, but there was nothing unpleasant or challenging about it. After the session I spent about 20 minutes filling out a written questionnaire with many of the same questions, or questions of their ilk.
“Do you believe a health insurance industry insider and lobbyist was deliberately placed in charge of drafting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to ensure that no violence would be done to the fabulous profitability of that industry by those with ‘noble’ ideals about human dignity?”
I was also given a longer form to take home and fill out with questions about people who had influenced me, family dynamics growing up, the death of loved ones, traumas I may have experienced, my happiest moments, most significant events at various times of my life, what my main goals in seeking treatment are.
The second interview was free-ranging and surprisingly enjoyable. It was like an interview on a talk show conducted by an open-minded host who was intent on showcasing what I could do. There were a few laughs along the way and the time felt very much like the time I spend writing here– following my thoughts where they go, retracing my steps to make a connection, clarifying something, adding an aside, noting that the aside was not strictly relevant perhaps, a laugh line, pause for ironic irony, back to a serious point, etc.
At the end of that interview I was asked to tell ten stories, five minutes or less each, about ten specific incidents in my life. In the end, probably because I had told so many little stories in the course of the previous hour, the interviewer was satisfied with five or so stories. Since all of these sessions are videotaped, I called afterwards to find out if I could have a copy of the interconnected stories. They seemed to put my life and moral progress in a certain nutshell.
The stories are being kindly transcribed for me now by an assistant who works at the research study. I was told by Conan they’d make the narrative skeleton of a novella with excellent bone structure. He told me so the other night, transmitting the thought directly to me from my neighbor’s TV.
I emerged from that second interview feeling like a wholly integrated person whose life made a certain organic sense. Having the good fortune to be able to dedicate myself to a worthwhile but unlikely plan that could potentially shine a little light into a dark and angry world, having designed it based on insights gained from the often painful events of my life, seemed like a great blessing, in spite of the difficulty of struggling alone to do the impossible. I’d work on reframing my daily struggles, get some help moving forward and, y’allah.
I had a call to say I was good to go for the therapy, they’d be charging me the low end of the sliding scale ($20 less than my co-pay for limited treatment under Obamacare, plus no $1,750 out-of-pocket), that the therapist would contact me (she did) and that the third interview would take place at such and such a time (yesterday at 3). This was all good news, since I’d been pursuing a study like this since early December and yesterday was March 4th.
Then, yesterday, the third interview. “How are you?” the young graduate student asked with a smile. I nodded and said “OK” with only the faintest note of cautiousness in my voice. I noticed, even then, that I didn’t do the polite thing and ask the same of her. What harm could the meaningless pleasantry have done? Asking how she was would have been a decent bit of human reciprocity requiring perhaps two seconds to do. I thought about that afterward, not sure if there was deeper meaning to assign to my failure to do the social thing. I decided it wasn’t worth thinking about too much, that I hadn’t been there for polite chat, after all.
Her pleasant greeting soon took on a different cast as she began to probe with the final set of questions. “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she might have said as she paused with the oversized needle only partially hidden. The questions seemed innocent enough, but they were boring down into the answers, each ten words or so filled in on small blanks (do not use extra paper), that I’d provided on the questionnaire I’d done at home after the first session. She was working from what looked like a typed and annotated transcript of my answers.
This is the beginning of the hard part, I realized at some point during that hour. These are not softball questions teed up to me while a buzzed studio audience laughs and enjoys the show. They’d set the speed on the pitching machine to ‘high’ and these pitches were being thrown with purpose. A few came in right under my chin. “Provide five adjectives to describe your relationship to your mother.” The fifth of these, I recall, was ‘complicated’. My arms were too tired to take a better hack at that fifth one.
Then I had to describe why I’d chosen each adjective. Complicated, and the thing that connected all the moving parts was the pain behind each adjective. My mother’s limitations, the sorrows she’d lived with, the humiliations she’d undergone, all overshadowing her talents, work ethic, great intelligence and sense of humor. My childhood had been lived on a battlefield, surrounded by mine fields and beyond them barbed wire and dark, muddy trenches, and my only escape was into the world of my imagination. That world held hope and terror in almost equal proportion. I felt by the end of the session as though I’d made almost no progress from that imagined world of hope and nightmare that was my foundation in life. It seemed to me I live there still, in that war zone. The insights I’d gained? Butterflies of the imagination losing color and substance as I tried to remember them.
We were done in exactly one hour, the shortest time the exercise could be done in. I told the young woman that I’d take 41 more seconds to show her something, she was agreeable. A moment before I left the room a shuddering nine year-old wondering why the world remained such an evil place I handed her the iPad and she watched this, which elicited a few chuckles from her as she watched. She asked if I’d seen the Lego movie, I hadn’t. I gave her a wehearyou.net Idea Book, which she accepted gracefully (she’d admired Sekhnet’s label at the end of the previous session when I’d made a note in my own worn Idea Book). I put my coat on as I thanked her and said goodbye over my shoulder turning toward the lobby while she went into the office in the opposite direction. I didn’t pause or turn to make final eye contact with her.
What’s up with that running out of there like a whipped dog, I thought a moment later, feeling a bit like a whipped dog. I continued feeling that way as I walked the streets near the original school where I’d gotten the program up and running. I was aware of a strong desire not to run into anyone I knew from that school. “How you doing?” they’d ask. “Good!” I’d say, wincing out a smile and turning slightly to avoid showing the whip marks on my dog back.
The hard part is why few people succeed at doing things that are hard. There are many things leading up to the hard part that most people can do well enough. Then comes the hard part and, as George Dubya Bush said, with visible peevishness, about good people in his administration who had botched the rescue of poverty-stricken hurricane victims (the wealthier ones did OK, thank God), the delivery of democracy to Iraq and anything else they touched, “it’s hard work!”
“Which of your parents were you closer to?” And, in spite of the complicatedness of the relationship, I had no hesitation choosing my mother. “My father was a total asshole,” I said by way of summary, like a petulant eight year-old, before clarifying, rephrasing, reminding us both that considering where he came from, the unimaginably painful abuse he’d suffered as a young kid, and all through his childhood, he deserved to have it clarified– yes, he was a verbally violent man, but, as I’ve described, it’s more complicated than that, and I don’t say asshole in a dismissively judgmental way.
I thought afterwards of my friend quickly walking back his understandable frustration with the demanding mother who was driving him crazy during his annual visit to her. He began talking about how manipulative she is, caught himself and began to talk about what a basically good person she is, how lonely she is, how much she loves him.
The hard work of that third interview left me feeling my wounds for the next couple of hours. I realized, walking away, that there would be no more getting-to-know-you sessions in the green room, no more canned laughs. If this therapy was going to help me move myself and this program forward, the hard work would be beginning toot sweet (comme un dit).
I thought of the Temptations, Cloud Nine – “The childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty, I was born and raised in the slums of the city.” My identification with those born and raised in the slums of the city is something I can’t shake. My disconnection from those who lead comfortable lives and accept the inevitability of slums, the viciousness of the cycles of inherited poverty and inherited wealth, the routinized murder of children the New York Times refers to as “collateral damage”, the ongoing evil of wars fought only to make the rich richer, a status quo that accepts as an externality of corporate wealth that the vast majority of the world, and the earth itself, will suffer whatever is necessary to maximize profits… all these things in the category of things I cannot change and that I ask an indifferent, or wholly absent, God to grant me the serenity to know I must simply bear…
“You’re getting yourself worked up, calm yourself. Why do you do this to yourself?”
Who the fuck are you? The hard part, in a word, is anger. We have a damned good right to it sometimes, yes. Now what are we going to do with it?
Hitting the “publish” button here completes the illusion of instant connection to everybody, and I can see from the world map on my wordpress stats page that someone in Taiwan read my latest post, two people in India clicked by, or one person there, twice. I can see when my friend in Poland has had a chance to visit and I nod, anticipating the intelligent comment my note will sometimes inspire. When I saw I’d had a visitor from Yemen a few weeks ago I involuntarily pictured the face of that little Yemeni girl, confronted by the camera, after the rest of her family was blown apart by an American missile launched from a menacing American robot plane. Hearts and minds, Brother O, way to go, sir. But if we look at this phenomenon of maintaining a blahg for what it actually is, what causes the fingers to tap and one of them to press “publish” at the end, it’s hard to say what it actually is.
Like everything in the world we have multiple explanations, theories, half-assed (or full-assed) opinions, proposed answers. Each of these illuminates the matter from a slightly different angle, each contains some bit of truth, each convinces us a bit more or a little less according to our tastes. In the case of why people post things to the internet, Occam’s Razor doesn’t quite cut it.
Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing: making oneself known to another, strikes me as a huge reason people post things they create on the internet. The impulse to connect with others in our increasingly connected, increasingly isolated culture is no doubt part of the heart of any complete explanation. Sharing information, trying to unite with others, giving a take on news that seems vital to understanding but does not seem to get reported, except by the brilliant author of a book that sells well, wins an award, ignites a small discussion that is quickly spun into oblivion as the news media churns the cycle. Celebrity culture and 24/7 media blaring and flashing in infinite forms makes almost everyone who partakes of it just a little bit thirsty for Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fabulousness. In our narcissistic age, why not tell everybody how that makes us feel? And we have the technology now, and talent or no talent is no longer such an important distinction, we say fuck the corporate gatekeepers. Everyone is a star, no? Or if not a star, everyone is someone with something to say. Or with nothing to say, but a cool place to say it and WTF, LOL, ROTFLMAO. My new boobs are nice, admit it.
I try to write well, and I write about things that get to me one way or another. That puts me in the same boat with millions of other bloggers. Democracy at work, yo. “What is it you want from people?” my sister once asked me pointedly during a calm period in an argument that would soon turn ugly. I told her I want a conversation, a back and forth where people speak openly about things they care about. Ideally it’s like a catch, throwing the thing gently back and forth. They listen carefully to each other, interrupt only for clarification and respond intelligently to what the other person is trying to communicate.
My sister and I grew up in a war zone and my answer wearied her considerably at the time. She and I have good talks these days, but back then my answer really annoyed her. It seemed so much to want, I think, like someone insisting on clean water to drink every time they are thirsty in a land where people are keeling over from dehydration all around. We had little experience of respectful conversation as kids, though both of our parents were otherwise quite intelligent. Being funny was something we were used to, and my sister has a quick wit, as did the rest of the war party around our dinner table.
“A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling,” said a dime store philosopher named Nietzsche. True dat, Fredrich, as was “without music, life would be a mistake”, which goes without saying, and really, except for its indisputable truth, has no place here.
I am not one to be coy about my feelings or opinions here, or anywhere, really, but this post is going to be a bit more personal than usual because it’s about how something made me feel about my own life today. I was surprised at how acutely I felt it, under my skin, in my blood and cells.
Which, by way of semi-amusing digression, calls to mind this email I had blind cc’d to me recently from a guy I was friends with years back, a great improviser on trumpet who really listened, as all great improvisers must, a brilliant photographer, a man of many talents:
Probably one of the most “in-depth” interviews I ever have given to anyone.
