Dear Joe,
Your exchange with Robert regarding marriage ("The tension between love and awareness") hit a nerve. Since I discovered your site a month or so ago ("Somewhere a banker smiles") I keep saying, "If only Brian were here to read this . . ." He would have dug it. Or maybe not. (He hated practically everybody.) Anyway, like Robert and his wife, like you and your wife, he and I agreed on the basic stuff about the decline and fall of any idealistic notions we ever had about the U.S., the accelerating corruption of our politics and our psyches, the horror of the Bush administration, late capitalism, the World Bank, etc., etc., etc. He was the SCREAMINGMAN. I screamed only on occasion but mostly tried to be the voice of sweet reason saying, "Honey, you can't live there all the time." And indeed he couldn't. He died in August 2005, of an apparent heart attack, at the age of 46.
Unlike you, Brian didn't take meds for the high blood pressure he almost certainly had. (Wouldn't catch him darkening a doctor's door.) Sometimes I suspect he preferred to check out, because he was frequently on a tear about the coming destruction of everything (climate change, peak oil, genetic engineering, world-wide depression, etc.); he lamented the misfortune that I have children, and even a grandchild, to inherit this mess. He wouldn't have gone to Belize. We should have. But no, he wouldn't have left this place that he both despised and was stubbornly loyal to. We're a couple hundred miles down I-81 from you, in East Tennessee. He was born here. I'm a transplant who's lived here most of my adult life. I'm not as firmly attached to the place, and maybe that's why I tolerate it a little better.
At any rate, I've been telling myself that he was one more victim of the neocons and the peevish fratboy, and I sort of mean it. If his anger was part of what killed him, then the cause of his anger is a big part of the part. Here's the question: If you accept the bumper-sticker wisdom (and I do), "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention," then what do you do with the outrage -- and the rage? Go stand in front of a bulldozer in Gaza? Meditate on the OM and bring your blood pressure down because none of it matters on the plane of ultimate reality anyway? Sorry, I can't do either one. Nor could Brian. He just read blogs compulsively, wrote brilliantly intemperate letters to websites and congressmen, cussed ingeniously, and hassled the tar out of me with conspiracy theories I thought were beside the point. He lived in that rage and died in it; my heart is broken, and his dogs are bored with only me to take care of them.
He had pretty thoroughly dropped out. Very smart guy, artist, autodidact, hardware-salesman, small-engine repairman, who had been in harness for 20 years but stepped out of it. We lived in my paid-for house, on the proceeds of my insignificant job, money we both had in the bank, and the frugality of his ability to fix just about anything. He knew crap when he saw it -- one piece of crap, for instance, being my job processing undergraduates on their way to middle-class nirvana (though I do get to make them read a Ward Churchill essay along the way.) I can't bring myself to drop out as far as he did. In fact, since his death I'm farther in -- like going into debt for a heat pump since I can't handle the wood-chopping he used to do. A month ago I told myself if Bush went for the "surge" I'd buy a shotgun, because an escalation of the war would mean the end of democracy and we'd all better be prepared to live like militiamen. Well, I haven't done it. I screamed for a moment and then got quiet again. Hell, as if I didn't know we have long since passed the end of democracy anyway.
I suppose there is a point here somewhere. It was a marriage. We were pretty much the same in our "awareness." But we fought and gave each other hell about how to handle that awareness. Lord, his frustration with me probably didn't help the hypertension any. Maybe the lesson is that getting consumed by rage is a character flaw (is it?). Maybe the lesson is that women in general lean toward conventionality (I hope not). Maybe the lesson is not to dismiss the benefits of modern medicine (even if you don't have health insurance). I'm venting and just trying to make contact, because I don't think he ever read your stuff, but I do think, after all, that he would have liked it. He would have liked to drink with you too.
Patty
East Tennessee
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Dear Patty,
Your letter tore my heart out. I am convinced I was headed for the same end as your husband. My rage was poisonous to my health and constituted endless agony. Not that I am the picture of bliss now, but the rage American government no longer dominates my days. Oh, it is there, (SCREAMING MAN LIVES AND HE JUST ABOUT JUMPED OUT AT SOME SHITBRAINED TOURIST YESTERDAY) but not so often. This morning I lay in bed and listened to the tropical birds and the breeze swishing the palms and the sounds of small children arising to their day in a loving family. I go a couple of days at a time without getting on the Internet or checking email. I've quit taking all of my medications but two for blood pressure and when I lose 40 pounds I'll quit them. I am looking at it all as recovery.
Nearly every one of my closest friends experiences the same rage of which you speak. Fortunately, for their health at least, most of them do not experience it as such a deeply seated part of themselves. They seem to be able to inellectualize it enough that it does not drive them to flee the country or do anything too drastic. I cannot seem to do that. It took a couple of years, but if I had not had the promise of escape before me, well, ... I was privately beginning to embrace violence and secretly learning everything I could about armed resistance, despite that I know America is no longer capable of forceful resistance, which is the only kind our keepers understand. The clamp is now down and extractive late stage capitalism won.
Those few still capable of resistance automatically are neatly covered under our terrorism laws and the prison industry's sprawling network of facilities awaits them. Anyway, when I began to consider violence as the only solution, I knew I was at a crossroad. Not that I am anti-violence necessarily. Revolution, even in the face of futility, is a real and noble thing. I'm just too old to pull it off. Forceful resistance is a young man's game and I suspect we will see more Ruby Ridges, Timothy McVeighs, Unibombers and Branch Dividians popping up. The media will convince the plump consumers on their couches that these people are evil terrorists, but whatever one thinks, they were all resisting the same vast, unnameable thing, even though they all described it differently to themselves.
Regarding: "What do you do with the outrage -- and the rage? Go stand in front of a bulldozer in Gaza? Meditate on the OM and bring your blood pressure down because none of it matters on the plane of ultimate reality anyway?"
Well, both of those sound like worthwhile activities to me.
As to "none of it matters on the plane of ultimate reality anyway?" This IS the ultimate reality. There is only one reality, to my mind at least. You get out of bed every morning and there it is. Again.
And like you told your late husband about his rage, "You can't live there all the time."
So true.
Which is why I live here in Belize now.
I would have liked to had a drink with your husband too. Right now I am looking out at the Caribbean Ocean from a thatched roof Internet cafe/bar in a tiny village in Belize. And when I finish this, I am going to have a drink with him in spirit. Really. Because I know that shouting and pointing at the horrible countenance of the totalist state will not only drive a man mad, but also kill him by degrees, as surely as if our oppressors had been there to supervise it themselves.
Barkeep, vodka and tonic please, and one for my friend Brian here too.
In solidarity,
Joe
