A swan dive off the highboard of democracy

Joe,

Like a lot of people seem to be doing, I have been spending more and more time on your site. I'm trying not to get fixated about it. I've looked at the pictures you've posted of your home town, your vacation to the French Riviera, you trip to Belize. I've read the recent letters of people who tell you that they question their own sanity because of the pain they feel as a result of their wanting to do something to stop the evil that our country has become. They think they might be crazy for feeling this way about America. I feel this same way they do. But I know I'm not crazy. Famous last words. Maybe it's not about whether or not you're crazy. Maybe it's about whether or not you are socialized enough to look at the minute by minute insanity that streams across the TV and Internet without running screaming out of the house and into the street.

That's what I think. I think the majority of Americans are successfully conditioned to look at all this stuff: bombs and brutality and torture and death and sickness and starvation like we're watching reality TV, complete with commercial breaks every five minutes. We don't fight it. We embrace it. We're easily conditioned to it because, especially in our society, the media is better than reality in the ways that matter most. Reality will sometimes make you get up off your ass. Media never makes you get up off your ass, especially since the invention of remote control. Besides, it's all entertainment anyway.

The commercials provide a dual benefit. No only do they entertain us, but they provide us the opportunity to go to the bathroom, or use the phone, or run to the kitchen to grab something to eat without seriously interrupting the flow of the great river of life as entertainment. That's the real product differentiator, the one thing that keeps media first in line. No matter how bad things get, you can just sit there and watch. You don't have to actually do anything. The worst TV watcher in the world doesn't actually kill anybody. They're just watching TV.

Even when it becomes undeniable, no matter how often we change the channel, that as a society we have leaped in a perfect swan dive off the highboard of democracy into an ocean of shit, piss, suffering and blood, even then, the "best" among us will say, "Oh, this is terrible. I'm not going to vote for him again." What we don't say is, "Why don't we just IMPEACH that lunatic! No, better yet, why don't we put him in PRISON as an example to the world that NOBODY gets to act that way, not even US! I'm going to write my congressional representatives and tell them to impeach that guy and the VP, especially the VP, and quit screwing around and do it right now, before we or somebody else nukes somebody and it's too late! If it's fubar now, what'll it be, then?! Global winter?! WHAT THE FUCK?!!" And then we think, "I hope my phone's not tapped. I hope my e-mail's not tapped. I hope my library card's not tapped. I hope talking this way doesn't put me on some terrorist watch list. I hope ... I don't have a heart attack from being so angry all the time, because I sure as hell don't have the insurance."

I'm convinced that anyone who felt just a pinprick of the world's suffering, just one single fingertip drop of blood of it (even sucked up as it is for lab and marketing analysis into that little glass tube we call TV), would have their heart shattered from the pain of it. But you couldn't just say that it hurt. You would have to actually feel it hurt. You would have to know, beyond the reach of any denial or rationalization, that there are billions of people out there who are suffering day in and day out in large part because of the greedy, fearful, crazy-assed shit that people in the "post-industrial, late capitalist, civilized nations" are doing or letting others do in their name.

People in this country love to think that empathy and compassion (the real words and definition for spirituality) are the result of some great conversion, that being saved is having your heart torn in half by some ex-football player turned televangelist, your big, thick New York or Los Angeles city telephone book of a heart, full of names and places and numbers. It's stupid to think that. It's even more stupid to go around making bar bets that this person or that person is the one person big and strong enough to do it. It's not about some bigger than life, somebody or other, president or prophet or talk-show host showing you the truth by tearing your heart in half. It's about something else entirely. It's about having your radar on, listening for the smallest echoes, those barely audible (through the media) sounds of suffering, the whimper and whine of a burned or beaten or shot or bombed or hungry or sick child, hearing it and multiplying it a billion times until it reaches a frequency that shatters every piece of glass in the house, or church or timeshare or whatever other type of ownership society real estate populates your sleeping dreams. It's not enough to tear your delusions in half with a grunt and a groan. They have to be shattered like glass, with no way to put them back together. It's that kind of thing that forces us to make the one real choice we all have to make sooner or later -- to love or hate the world, the people in it, our selves.

I don't pray for world peace, for some one person to rise up and save everybody. I never believed in it. I've seen too much to believe in it. My childhood saved me from believing in it. My prayers are much simpler. Like the baker in Raymond Carver's story, I'm looking for one small good thing. That's my prayer. "Please let me do just one small good thing today. Just one." It's the one surefire way I have of not hating the world. The other is my children. For their sake, I can't hate the world or wish it harm. They're going to have to live in it after I'm gone.

I wish you well, Joe. I could not be more grateful for what you are doing.

Michael

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Well my friend, to me, you are the perfect example of the America that currently has no voice and probably will not have until things are a lot worse. The thing that amazes me most is that there are million s of us, yet little indication of our presence except on the Internet.

I have given up on ever seeing the best Americans effecting a major sea change in American politics and the American consciousness through politics. The people are now too conditioned by the state for that. However, the mechanisms that create the conditioning can and will eventually fail, simply because they are unsustainable.

In that, I find hope for our children and grandchildren. They will need to be strong enough for the struggle that will surely face them. I think the best thing we can do right now is be a good example.

Your friend,

Joe