Hello Joe,
Until the 2000 elections, I didn't even vote, and certainly was not "radicalized" yet. But, that election was stolen and the implications of that fact are -- well, too massive to go into here. What I couldn't understand is why nobody seemed that upset! The only riot I saw was a manufactured riot from the RNC. Then there was a little event titled 9/11. I was in Washington, DC when that plane hit the Pentagon. I could hear and smell it. These two events had a different effect on me than they did a lot of my friends. I was disgusted, hurt and intellectually, spiritually curious about what was unfolding. I wanted to get to the root causes quickly. So I started reading. And I am still reading.
I was only mildly educated so I just bought what I thought educated types would read. All the bullshit "liberal" books. The Al Frankin crap and the "Bush's Dynastic, Dyslexic Brain on the Couch" horse shit. They were, mostly, quite useless. But what were not useless were the quotes. The quotes were better than the books. So I developed a routine; I would look up every great quote giver. That's when I discovered: Chomsky, Zinn, Bakunin, Marx, Smith (I know), Debord, Ward Churchill, etc. -- and eventually you.
I am from a similar background as you. I know what well-water tastes like and I have seen a soon-to-be-eaten chicken run around without a head. However, by the time that we are talking about, I lived in Washington, DC, had been to Europe and had been known to enjoy iced lattes and something called indie-rock. What a journey. Back to the main subject.
So where am I now? Insane. But also sought out for advice. Like you. However, there is one other detail; my beloved wife. When I was on my little intellectual journey; she didn't come with, if you know what I mean. She is brilliant, moral and (I am not just saying this) superior to me. She does agree with me on all of my madness for the most part. However the sense of urgency is not there and there is massive and grinding tension as a result. For example, she, like me and you, enjoys a little "Law and Order" digital morphine after a long day at her evil corporate law firm. Well, I cannot seem to stop myself from deconstructing every episode for her. She doesn't seem to find this helpful! I am sure you can picture the scenario.
I want to give you an example of how I could respond to cocktail party chit-chat:
Person who agrees with me: "Yes, we should get the heck out of Iraq".
Evil Robert says: "What in the fuck do you mean WE! WE are here drinking wine and eating fucking brie, sitting on our asses. And WE aren't doing a fucking thing to stop this war ourselves. But the WE that is over there are a bunch of manipulated and exploited citizen mercenaries trained and indoctrinated to murder and steal for empire. Well trained pirates for our ruling elite."
Fun dinner conversation right? My SCREAMINGMAN has been escaping a lot lately too!
To summarize my situation, you could say that I have escaped Plato's cave and I am never fucking going back. I am like "Neo", just without any skills, answers or super-powers. I'm useless, but getting wise. The problem is, because this stuff is mostly new to me, I can't seem to shut the fuck up for two seconds to simply enjoy our lives together. From your writing it seems like you and your honey have developed a nice rhythm. I guess I just want to know how you find the balance.
Robert
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Dear Robert,
Oh, I cannot shut up at home either! Which is part of the reason I left the country. As to the marriage, mine is probably not much different from yours. So, yes, my wife and I have reached a certain level of understanding that we are free to make our choices in life. That is one of the nice things about being married after age fifty. You don't mind giving each other enough personal space in which to live.
Like your wife, she chooses to take her chances within the Empire and feels no particular urgency. And yes, we have reached certain agreements. But an agreement is much easier to make than to live up to when a nation and culture comes to ruin. Now that I have finally taken the step of simply walking away to a live in a poor Central American village, I must admit that I live in fear that my too-late-found ideals and acts will eventually be read by her as betrayal, as the extractive capitalist pressures now building in this country increase. We are all conditioned to see such moves toward real freedom, away from being a production unit and consumer, as betrayal.
It takes two incomes to be a respectable consumer household in America. The system increasingly demands money for those who stay inside it. Those who choose to stay inside it will suffer increasing extraction of value right down to their last breath in a gurney bed in an expensive care facility, and a person alone in this struggle will naturally feel rage and look for someone to blame, instead of evaluate their own choices. So my wife and I have allowed each other to make individual choices. But now that I have acted upon my choice, will my marriage come to the cheap and easy loathing we are taught to respond with when someone "runs out on us," or "turns his/her back on our life?" Or becomes "totally unrealistic?" No such thing is happening. I am not running. I am pointing to freedom from the gulag, and using myself, my physical body, as a marker of one option in one place, hopefully providing a living demonstration and some inner peace at the same time.
But since both of us are heavily drugged for profit by the super state, how free are either of us to execute our choices? She takes a pretty heavy mood drug to get by. The drug prevents her from naturally experiencing and thereby transcending her spiritual and intellectual problems, making her a good worker and consumer for the state. I take a skillion pills, mostly for the lung condition and high blood pressure, but also one to create the artificial energy (Provigil) that allowed me (drove me actually) to go to the workplace and get through the day looking alert and interested in the system around me, and to be productive for the state. Funny how that works out, isn't it? A small and driven life that is supposed to provide more safety and security.
A friend wrote me recently that most Americans live small lives in debt and oblivion because they believe it is safer. They believe the capitalist system will not come after their small assets when the time comes. They never seem to notice how much harder it is each year to stay even or that the system extracts wealth in small increments every hour of our lives. In the mean time they accept the goods and lifestyle that will allow them to participate in then consumer mimicry we call a society. Even down to the smallest level. Just as we cannot park a beater in the company lot, we cannot drink boxed wine. Anyway, they feel safe. Tasteful even. Hell, they do not even know the state is real, or that government is real, or that power is real, or that they are in control of nothing.
Of course the consumer society has convinced its members that marriage is also an economic act, that it takes two incomes, even as it teaches people to publicly deny that very fact. Usually it is the woman who makes the least, which creates a one-up, one-down situation, in which one person has the only kind of power that counts in a capitalist society -- economic power. This puts the female in an unacknowledged prostitutional situation, (or sometimes vice versa) as both partners pretend there is no power imbalance, no inequality going on.
Anyway, I believe many, many middle class people live this life and refuse to acknowledge it, having been granted the rationalization and television imagery by the state to offer plausible deniability. After a while, they are not living a life, but rather the state lives its life through them, as they are cultivated like flatworms in a drop of water in a petri dish, consuming, excreting, exhibiting the mobility from product to product and setting to setting, the movie theater, home, the mall, the Internet, all of which strikes them as being alive and even the meaning of life, given that they have experienced no other existence.
And those successful double income few who supposedly do not live this way, those who consider their lives above it all, have an even worse fate. For example, many couples have "vital careers" and both make "good money" and are "successful professionals". Which simply means that they are the administrative and cultural machinery that perpetuates the system. What they are is smugly delusional in their sanction by the state. Personally, I believe marriages are for growing strong together, not for mutual crippling or domination of one another and not simply as some sort of public display of one's notion of success, especially given that the state indoctrinates every one with the same shallow image of success.
If you've never been out of the cave, whether it be Manhattan or Winchester, Virginia, you don't know you've been kept in the dark. Tell ya what though, my friend. Most of them will never change and the sad truth is that are quite happy with the situation as it is now. We are not going to change them and indeed have no right to try. We can only do our best with those we love, and decide when or if we can no longer stomach watching delusion and folly among loved ones, or whether we choose to accept it. Usually though, I think they cut us loose first, delivering both mercy and revenge in one fell swoop.
Meanwhile, in homes like yours and mine, that "sense of urgency" you spoke if prevails, creating "massive tension," that remains in the air. Tens of thousands, maybe millions, of Americans are feeling it every day in their relationships. And so may of us "can't seem to shut the fuck up to simply enjoy our lives together."
I ask you this: How enjoyable can life be when a spectral truth rises up as the backdrop of every moment and both parties pretend it is not there? Of course, one party is pretty convinced it is not there, never having peeked outside the cave.
It has been my experience that, in the end, any important choice relating to eternal values is our own. And the cost is always everything. Every time. But in loss there is freedom. We shall see. I'd love to be wrong.
In brotherhood,
Joe
