My brother sits almost catatonic in the living room, sitting in the dark, bathed in the light of the TV. That's an archetypal image I get in my head for the enslaved American. A subject of the corporate state, sitting narced out in front of the TV. Being fed images that tell him the opposite of what he sees daily. Being told that money is power and he gets some if he puts in a day of honest work. But what he doesn't know is all that honest work is being put in for dishonest masters. They're stealing the honey.
My brother was never employed though. Still, it's dawned on him like many Americans that this sprawling consumerist life awaiting him is empty. He's watching a baseball game and probably sourly contemplating the DMV's rejection of his application for another licence, a rejection that can be traced to the consequences of his alcoholism (or the chemical replacement for the religion that was eaten away by consumerism).
See that's what we are really trying to create in the chaos of this digital mosaic: a new religion. All this rationality is wonderful, but it floats with impotence in a sour, bottomless postmodern soup, commenting on itself on and on until the infinite mirrors disappear over the horizon.
Religion is thrust. It is direction. We need convictions as long as they take us somewhere. And I'm not talking about Christianity. Christianity should have been obsolete at least 300 years ago. Maybe more. I'm not talking about Capitalism either, the religion of the salesman. That one will be around for a while, but should have been replaced 70 years ago. We sure are slow to replace our convictions. That seems to be the moving part with the most inertia, perhaps because of its power. Fools can cling to it long after it has been disproven and it still works. So long as everyone else agrees (or is forced for that matter) to play by the rules. And now that is starting to die.
Rationality, that rationality moves quick. Its flexible. If only our convictions moved that fast. We'd have solved a lot of problems by now.
Back to reality. No use masturbating over what could have been. The fact is we are this strange, contradictory, inefficient, destructive organism. But this is what we are.
At least we know how bankrupt pure individualism is now. That's one binary choice we can skip. That error sticks out, glowing like a filled-in sudoku number. We fizz and bubble, burning through ideas and reacting accordingly, forming according to blueprint skeletons that are etched out within cultures in crisis. Power collects and disperses in cycles, maybe aided by the rise of the same bad ideas that the powerful cling to in order to control and exploit others. Are we doomed to an endless cycle of explosions and contractions? Melting and cooling? Is this the experience of a natural process?
My mom smiles and is always cheerful. I admit it is hard to tell sometimes whether she worries or forgets. Though here and there she betrays the possibility that she doubts. She's saintly really, but human of course.
And I'll never forget, when my supervisor sat there listening to talk radio and he sighed and asked me with a hint of exasperation and candid vulnerability, "What's happening to us, man?" And it broke my heart because I had to tell him that I didn't know. He listened to right wing talk radio and the answer would only insult him. Or maybe he smelled lies and he really would have listened. I don't know.
He looks sort of like a human chihuahua with a goatee. Occasionally there is fear in his eyes, but also a kindness. He humbly holds the company together through his IT work, even as frogman rumbles in and drawls on and on about how much his robotically-controlled stock trades are yielding, and my supervisor sits there acting like he's happy for the guy, and then cracks a few jokes about how he can barely pay the rent. As much as the human in me loathes the frogman, I know that he is innocent in his own way, biologically inclined to be oblivious of others' struggles. It is those that really lack empathy that can collect the bigger fortunes in the business world, if they lack vision anyways. And most of them do now, because those that have the vision are horrified at the state of things.
Every evening when I walk out of the building I gaze down the street with this feeling of utter desolation. I'm trying to listen to the new religion that speaks through noise in my head. But I have lapses.
I can see now how it felt in the 60's. How they too felt that it was the end in the face of right wing madness and nuclear proliferation. Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" makes my heart ache with identification. And I'm pretty sure I haven't even seen what he saw then. I suppose I will though. I suppose many of us will. Many of us are now.
But that radical revolutionary spirit is poking its head up again. Through the despair, pockets of excitement. Something that was thought to be extinguished is re-igniting, beginning to smolder again. But I hope this is it. I couldn't take another period of repression. I fear the plastic face of Reagan. I fear the spirit of the 80's. I don't know how the hippies did it.
Anyways. I could ramble on and on if I let myself. Time for bed. Time to prepare for another day of utter soullessness. Time passes liquidly now. Perhaps because it is erased in memory. There is nothing to remember of the 8 hour workday.
Until the big change. If there will be one. I feel the momentum slowly pick up. A wave that was deep under is rearing its crest.
