"Mere distance from fact is no argument against an ethical maxim or a mystical hope"
-- Joseph Schumpeter, hard-nosed economist
-- "Huh?"
********************
At the time, I wondered if the world wasn't standing at "The End of History".
The pall of imminent change in the breathtaking blue space, and incredibly I was part of it as I gazed around in wonder. Under an approaching unknown, the old certainties seemed to wane and melt into nothingness-- to totter and reel like a flickering illusion-- and I thought we were virtually morphing "into a new species" under a black-hole sun's inverted rays of open-ended expansion of consciousness in the national zeitgeist. A new level, a new order, a new beginning.
Or at least that was the image played out on MTV in an era of extreme media rising out of the ashes of something hazy and naive from a previous time. The era of "comfort food" on television was over, hardening like sand fused into black glass in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the recession and the fall of the U.S.S.R and then breaking up into a million pieces like a bunch of squiggling worms as the nations turned to democracy, the power went to the people, the free markets set up shop, and corruption set in. For every set of chains a society busts, another pair sneaks up to entangle you link-by-link that are even harder to break.
In an explosion of hip, multi-ethnic advertising color, they told you "to do your own thing" while sipping their cola like alternative princes, a dreadlocked buddy in a jumping-jack pose as "the magical black man" on to the secret of soul that evaded young, bored, impressionable, white suburbanites. The apparent attitude was "total non-judgment", an air of socially-conscious tolerance, but this was just the friendly salesman's face to lead you over to "the show-room" of expensive lifestyle accessories. Presumably, if you bought the whole line of music, clothing, athletic shoes, video games, and book-bags, you would be just as cool and beautiful as they were-- a soft-focus magazine spread of the casual and carefree in a "Tommy Hilfigure" ad that suggested easy money and frictionless solutions to life's bottomless conundrums.
Whatever the air of "tolerance", this world still came with a caste system. For instance-- the rich, the beautiful, and the famous. Or at least the kind of models who lent that impression, while the rest of us struggled in the mud-- staring at the advertisement with a twinge of yearning, knowing only that their lives looked nothing like that golden moment plastered across the magazines.
And one knew not what to feel about the ennui, the exhaustion of the times that varied between "where do we go from here?" heaviness and the worst kind of material crassness that you could imagine. A pale, sickly wind seemed to blow and the world was just about flat out of ideas.
If the 1995 Academy Awards happened on t.v, it made you think "who cared?". The familiar faces of prestige and good looks were there but ultimately the culture felt like nothing more than "a hollow shell", like the sloughed off remains of a scarab beetle in the desert. Meager and dried-out, like a thin piece of steak cooked in a pan over my Dad's grubby stove.
There was no "Porterhouse" or "Filet Mignon" this time out, so we settled for "this" and supposed, with weary resignation, that it was "good enough" as Clint Eastwood in the audience got on in the years, smiling tiredly and reluctantly like a slice of mule-jerky "that dubbed thee Unforgiven" like a rattler sinking its teeth into your boot before it's head was crushed.
Much like another one of those endless line of bad
Winona Ryder movies that took itself way too seriously "with no room
to breathe", such withered sacredness was quickly losing ground
as the right-wing crowd of militias, home-school advocates, strict
constitutionalists, and libertarians off on the internet, publishing treatises on "small government" in the crappy stink of what felt like a
small-minded "dead-end", wheezing on like a cancer-stricken rancher
who had fallen upon "hard times" in these days of bitter drought
that would not soon be lifted.
But "the big, fat middle" was too invested in the system, and would just as soon invest in bison meat which was supposed to be "the wave of the future" but went bust like putting your money in gold or voting for Lyndon LaRouche or betting that the UFO's were going to show up any day now in some screwy idea of sci-fi deliverance.
Or believing in "the flying car" which was supposed to come out "just around the corner", like "in the next five years" or even some dim-witted character down in the Florida swampland who called into a paranormal radio program claiming to have captured "a dinosaur" and wondering how he could sell it before the government stepped in and confiscated it like "The King's Men" muttering on walkie-talkies. All along, it turned out to be a South American lizard that had slowly migrated north by irresponsible pet owners.
"The Descent of Talk Radio"
You couldn't sell that to the Hollywood, fashion, or
artistic community-- let alone the well-to-do material of
A whole world was forced onto the nation, blown up on
the pages of "TIME" & "Newsweek" magazine,
what the bicoastal liberals and blue-state dots of the cities in-between
feared
most-- the angry Scotch-Irish white male. The backbone of the south and
rural wastelands, the warrior elite in our military, the scowling,
small-minded cynic who didn't necessarily respond to liberalism and big
government's flowery overtures of submission and reward. He was the clenched fist, the
knife-thrower launching a piece at the head of "Big Bird" on "Sesame Street"--
an explosion of feathers making this faggy-voiced irritation instantly silent
and sending the little kids running away screaming. Yes, "the one who just
wouldn't go along".
And that
scared the piss out of people who wondered why everyone just wouldn't
"give in to comfort and be sensible" while others were
willing to die in order "to prove a point".
But looking around, when a lonely, unattached man with
literal-minded proclivities falls into computers, or Star Trek, or ideas
about small government & "we the people" with the
click of a loaded handgun, that existence can get "pretty stark" when
you don't have anything else "to fall back upon" except the simmering
tar pit of negativity. It was the world of stilted speech, lack of confidence,
and mail-order brides as a bewildered feller tried to carve out an existence with
everything creeping, subterranean, and impure. And how the world refused to understand. . . . . and
even laugh at them as they lived it up like royalty. If it wasn't someone like John Kerry snowboarding in an
$800 snow-suit, it was "The New York Times"/goat cheese set and their
young, brain-dead hanger-on's who looked like the models out of those
"Tommy Hilfigre" cologne ads in "Rolling Stone" magazine. Too rich, too blessed, too silky, too
good-looking, to ever know about down-in-the-dirt struggle. If they had
problems, it was drugs because they simply had no problems and were
vacant and bored.
Maudlin feeling came into play, like weeping for starving children in a third world land or conscientious vegetarianism or Eastern religions or fragile mortality-- some time, 50 years from now, sobbing over a once-handsome, arrogant movie star like Ethan Hawke when he has turned into a hunched-over, sour old man snarlin' like an old cat. Yes, like the dropping of petunia petals into the crying wind over a lake. Better kill the pain. . . . . with more drugs.
-- "Huh?"
It was the romanticism of the 1960's leading into even-worse '70s, those who took their stand against the system like petty thieves carpet-bagging from the false ruins of "good citizenship". The sins of "the counterculture" could be forgiven against that of "the establishment", which in the liberal narrative was portrayed as some kind of all-black, grasping "octopus" of corruption, lies, and "pure evil". Taking license was "all relative" next to what you were against, but by this time "idealism" had changed into reveling in "the twisted blindness of the universe" as if it was some kind of answer, flirting with destruction in some kind of "slow, postmodern death-fuck" that jumped into the void of nothingness like a transcending answer.
Yes, the caste system of sophistication
. . . . . the bold, the beautiful, the confident, the casual, the socially-skilled. "Monkey see, Monkey do".
There I paced outside, wondering if I could ever
insinuate my way in. To somehow "break the code", or "sing in the right key" like Ali Baba watching "The 40 Thieves" utter "OPEN SESAME" and enter their cave of untold loot and pleasure and riches and "truth".And there I was "in my Jedi knight cave", brooding on all of this--
I wanted, one supposes, what every
teenager wants-- to be a winner. All with not having to put in a whole
lot of effort, though struggling with deep-seated "attitude slumps" that
couldn't be "cleaned up" with the "quick-fix" shoestring of positive
thinking or dime-store Zen, shopping around like an anxious consumer
loading up on pseudo-profundities in a modern-day shopping cart as if the mess can
be cleaned up with "Bounty" paper towels, "the quicker-picker-upper"
of 1950's corporate jingles where all problems could be "squared away"
with the right application of force and wouldn't blow up in your face
like a can of squiggling worms as the machine of rationalism powered up
"to win the war".
Perhaps, I followed the magazines and media a little too avidly, trying to fit it into a grand narrative, wanting to believe that "all this blindness had a higher meaning".
What seemed to sell was the aquarium-like expression of the emotionally-featureless. The drifter, the sociopath, the gambler, the drug user, the edgy actor with "the attitude" who could be set down anywhere in America and you wouldn't be quite sure if he'd draw a horde of screaming girls or be fencing somebody's hubcaps. Johnny Depp. . . . . River Phoenix. . . . . Christian Slater. . . . . idols of youth, "bad-boy lite".What seemed to mark their movies and attitudes was a strange, incongruous weirdness, darkness, and vulgarity that was completely inexplicable to the outsider not in tune to that hip culture, looking on puzzled like a corn-fed Midwesterner. Just how that seemed "revolutionary" without being "revolting", I could not say-- but the public gathered around them and hailed their genius because it was "the smart thing" to worship. . . . . like pseudo-sophisticates in black turtle-necks gathering around the work of Basquiat, which to me, looked like vomit, and writing all sorts of send-up's that praised his "genius".
I figured that knowledge and self-awareness had expanded, breaking us out of the box and into new frontiers as the bounds of our world widened. You could say that I was one to believe in the transcendence of consciousness-expansion, of what a record or book or movie could do for the human race-- taking them to higher and higher levels of rapture, that we were entering "a new plane of existence" like the millennial rhetoric about "the end of history".
There was a scene I remembered from "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" when Johnny Depp's character sits down impassively and listens on as a free-spirited trailer urchin he's building a relationship with mentions that the praying mantis female bite the heads off the suitor in the mating act then devour their bodies. What blindness, what horror, what truth. as he widens his lizard-like, insectoid eyes with significance as if "he's next".
When I had long hair and was wearing flannel shirts at the age of 13 or 14, my Dad remarked that I looked a little bit like Johnny Depp in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" from the side and back when this young man ambled around the rural property like "a friend of the earth". I wondered, with this compliment, if I didn't look a little bit like that standard Johnny Depp trope if I could not BECOME Johnny Depp and be "a real winner".
Why, with long hair I would become a lone guitar bard. . . . . camping out on the floor of his loft, practicing for weeks, never looking up. Yes, where circus posters hang up of weeping clowns and bearded women raising their skirts.
I would be a coffee house philosopher, laying out a revolver on the table in a game of "Russian Roulette" to prove a point to his dignified, solemn brethren. See him reaching down for a revolver, and cocking it like a nihilistic revolutionary in a room full of artists, nihilists, and poets. . . . . if not a homeless drifter who looks like Tom Waits.
Find him brushing snow from muscular shoulders as he entered the gym at daybreak, a rider in the snow. . . . . and the most romantic of Native Americans.
At the time, "a spiritual call" washed over me, seeking "a test"-- wondering if my moment had truly arrived. You sit there brooding in your room, waiting for confirmation from the above like the Jedi Knight deep in concentration and feel a slight sizzle rising from the back of your scalp. Was this "the sign"? "The Miracle"? Your brush with God? You supposed it was because there was nothing better to believe in, . . . . and one did not want to be overly "shut" to the mysteries of the universe.
"To embrace the blindness", "to crack the code", "to burst through to the other side", you would do something very daring. To be a revolutionary in sympathy with Basquiat & Johnny Depp and the authenticity of the lone guitar bard, and free-soul drifter wandering down that lonely highway like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and Allan Ginsburg. . . . . to unite the past, present, and future from the 1930's "New Deal" farmer to the astronauts in the 1960's "Space Race", and "back-to-the-land" protest politics and modern art and "Star Trek" and "the occult underground" and in the name of "everlasting life", I took to not showering when I got home from the gym.
It made perfect sense up in my head-- playing into the cosmic divinity-- but whatever I was trying to do, "my act stunk". No one knew my intentions, nor wanted to understand, and I had no idea how to explain my motivations even if they did care.
Yet I could not believe my eyes, the fact that people were not accepting me, and I held on even more fervently to my long-brooded calculations. The whole crux of my alternative liberal arts education was "think different", and there I was trying to reinvent the wheel, thinking I was Gallieo up against "the ignorance of his time", nailed up to the church door as "a martyr for truth". This was "tolerance" & "diversity" taken to its logical conclusion, right? So what gives?
I had an image of myself up on the Vaudville Stage, a sniveling long-haired poet going out there to read his atrocious verses. The crowd starts roaring in disapproval and then begins throwing rotten vegetables as the sophisticate calls them "backward simpletons" and keeps reading, then a hook is reached out there to try to drag him back, but he avoids it-- "not taking the hint". . . . . Eventually a squash knocks him in the face and he goes down with a crash, his papers flying everywhere.
Needless to say, a google-eyed "Cookie Monster" of a girl named "Lady-Bug" wouldn't go out with me. In fact, asking her out started the riot. . . . . the disturbance. . . . . the blood on the slab of 1990's Paleolithic cruelty as the howler monkeys of the grade went "ape-shit". He was abominable! He was hideous! In the script of consensus he was little more than a "stage villain"!
And how the merry audience calls out encouragement to the maiden picking flowers in a sunbonnet, warning her as cruel Hades arrives in his chariot to abduct her with a crack of his reins off to his underworld of dirt!
What I had to figure out is that in the marketplace, if you have 10,000 people all selling apples and you're selling bananas it will definitely put you at an advantage, but no one will buy them if they are black and rotten and are drawing flies. There is simply no market-clearing price for your goods, and you're left with the stench of rotten fruit. Some might think that equality and fairness stand for exactly the same thing, but no matter how much you fudge around with the definitions you yet do not alter reality no matter how much you follow the refusing customer around, trying to sell them something neither they nor anybody would want.
"Who are you to say?", is the cheap quip of moral relativism out by the smoking wall amongst the goths and stoners but people still gravitate toward what is better-- and crack down on what is disruptive or threatening. Whatever the convention, amped up 10,000% in these lost, wicked times when there is "no incentive to be heroic"-- no one leaves the classic fault-lines of negative human psychology, whatever the presumptions of a progressive creed, when you find pockets of evil and corruption within the "us vs. them" narrative which is made all the more rotten because this was a society of outcasts who secretly loathed themselves with their dead, cruel eyes.
But at least I could dream, while so many others wouldn't or couldn't. No man can comprehend more than what his imagination and courage of his heart can grasp, and most weren't dealing on a very high level. Here was the creed-- loud and shrill, like a big spoon rattled around in a swill bucket where the winners are those who can blat their glottal stops over and over the longest and loudest-- never use stereotypes about anybody. Especially the racist, sexist, and homophobic kind or any sort of prejudgment about goths, stoners, or furrowed Pearl Jam fans hopping around with hackey-sacks. Or slackers who pretended to be "workaholics", or even those who wrote pseudo-sophisticated punk rock manifestos that didn't bother to run "spell-check".
But so long as you shook your finger at America's ways and cut down the accomplishments of mainstream civilization, pointing out the positive quirks of other world cultures throughout history and saying we should be more like someone else-- at best, socialist Europe of tanned soccer players in an iconic flash-bulb moment, and at it's worst, the snow-blue helmets of a United Nations peace-keeping force waving Styrofoam "wiggly sticks" in order to quell roiling ethnic violence-- then you were with the "politically-correct" tide of opinion.
Perhaps this alternative "people's narrative" might have had more credibility, if not for the cruddy, New-Left utopian of a teacher continuing to lecture on the toilet with the door open while she pee'ed, farted, and condemned the divorce court, if not ex-husbands in general in a "Ms. Magazine" feminist rant. But all the anger was directed against "evil white men", the same evil corporate entities who sold them their cigarettes, designer-label clothing, and vulgar MTV lifestyles like brainless lemmings who were little more than a bunch of animals who responded to a batch of conditioned reflexes in our sinking society.
Whatever it was, it came down to a bunch of empty signage-- a bunch of radical talk that influences how people gestured and dressed but it wasn't like they were going to follow through and do anything. When "tearing down" was easier than "building up", when everyone carried on like a bunch of iguanas sunning themselves on a rock, those Zen-like depths of laziness to which one could possibly aspire-- the law of entropy, the eventual heat-death of the universe that swallowed all endeavor. Yes, consciousness and free will maintained by jolts of Mountain Dew, a jangled flow of alternative music running like gouts of yellow pus, and staring fixed in front of one's computer playing endless rounds of first-person shooter games like some kind of melded "Cyborg" interface.
What concerned me were the culture magazines, and their fixations--how they represented the thermostat of our society that was festering with irony. Everything was a joke about "blow-jobs" and worshipping the director, Quinton Tarintino who looked like a clicking insectivore with his slick, amoral movies that worshiped style over substance with ugly, brutal violence which came down to "what you could get away with" instead of what was right.
And above it all, was the religion of egalitarianism-- that no man was inherently better than another even though I acutely felt "the downward drag of the crowd" as they nipped at the heels of anyone who tried to do better and disturb the status-quo in a way that was not immediately rewarding to their egotistic self-interest.
Put not your faith in governments, for they will under-serve you. Put your faith not in socialism, because there you have the rats feeding on the hoarded grain-- waving their tails.
Put not your faith in a doddering committee full of self-serving idiots, because the filters through which they see the world are blurry and scummed-over with opiated waking dreams.
And always know. . . . . that "The Swedish Blitzkrieg" will always tear the gizzard out of "The Mighty Ducks" like a blond-haired, blue-eyed "Panzerfaust" of concentrated discipline plowing into a half-assed rabble of google-eyed "Sesame Street" characters who will only know "Eternal Winter" as their block is plowed into rubble by "stronger will".
If some "lucky skunk" like Johnny Depp ever had "a mystique" around him, it was because by "saying less" the audience thinks "there's more". If you strike an iconic pose, "keep it vague", and let others "fill in the blanks", then anyone can come across as far more brilliant then they really suppose themselves to be. But the audience does not dare question the icon, because the bigger the crowd, then the more credibility someone has. Maybe they only "half-believe" in what they stand for like magicians, while the "true believers" of either/or thinking sink like a stone. And death goes to the hesitators who get nothing. In the Bible, Daniel went into "the lion's den" as an act of faith but God has no comment on those who would yank on the big cat's tale, going "KITTY!, KITTY!".
But evidently I hadn't figured this out yet--
I became a focal point for students' and teachers' abuse who didn't understand, a handy dumpster of anxieties for everything no one wanted to be and was verbally slapped around like a Mongoloid idiot. As the Civil Rights movement as my witness, "I would overcome" like the march in Selma.
But there I was, gunned down in the road like the lone protestor, John Merrideth and screaming for aid, which in my case did not come.
In desperation, crucified like "Piss Christ", I clung to "the romance of victimhood" like Edward Scissorhands in the 1990 Tim Burton movie starring none other than Johnny Depp. But there seemed to be a couple of few, key differences between myself and that pathetic, flop-haired anti-hero who almost seems to revel in his suffering:
1) You never get the girl
2) You have no special talents
3) You may be a tortured freak, but you're not beautiful
4) The angry mob will always burn you in the end on a flaming pyre
My mother, concerned with my declining emotional state, took me to see "Powder". . . . . a movie about an albino young man in a hick, southern small town who turned out to have brilliant special powers and was eventually tortured to death by an ignorant mob that hated him because he was different. . . . but in a liberating metamorphosis, proving he was too good for this world, he turned into pure energy and transcended up into the clouds.
Later, I read in a magazine that the artist who wrote, directed, and produced it turned out to be a gay pedophile who secretly molested little boys on film sets. Oh, well. . . . that's liberal Hollywood for you. I think with that knee-jerk realization, spinning around uncertainly for a little bit, I finally dropped everything and became a right-wing conservative. . . . . because no matter how strong-willed, no matter how self-indulgent, we cannot tolerate the intolerable.
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2009 by Insufferable Industries
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