Immersion in the shit storm of talk radio

Hello Joe:

When I was a boy the last item of the day for us kids was to kneel at our bedside and pray to an angry god, hoping against hope that he would spare us from his wrath and the destruction to come. It took a good chunk of my 51 years to finally realize I was talking to thin air and that there would be plenty of wrath and destruction to come from the misguided words and deeds of ordinary men and women bent on trying to be god and play god and get the "big" god to be on their side.

I mention this only as a point of contrast to the far more comforting and enlightening bedtime ritual I've adopted of late, courtesy of your spot-on, no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners writing. I prop up on a pillow, laptop on, navigate to your site and console my very troubled of late soul by reading what you have to say about a once great country that is going down very fast.

I can't help but envy those who die today a perfectly natural death of old age having lived and prospered through the best times this nation will ever see. I'm going to live long enough to see it fall off a cliff and there's not a whole damn lot I can do about it for my children, much less for the wife and me. After reading your "Audacity of Depression" essay, I felt for the first time I had connected just a bit with what has been gnawing at my insides the last few years, witnessing the impoverishment of the working class majority and the absolutely criminal self-enrichment of the political/corporate elite minority. Were there only a big man with a big stick somewhere up there, I'd go back to the bedtime prayers of my youth and ask him to whack the shit out of George W. Bush and his corporate minions who have done more damage to this country in eight years than any thinking intelligent person could have imagined.

You wouldn't guess this from a former conservative who will never forgive himself for voting Bush into office two times. Only in the last couple of years has the ether finally started to wear off and I now see how it really is and how perfectly you've nailed it in your book Deer Hunting with Jesus, where you correctly observe how our ilk have consistently selected to leadership those who have the greatest capacity and willingness to bend us over and screw us the hardest without mercy or regret.

So why the about face? In short, it was a fortuitous immersion in the very bullshit conservative media shit storm of talk radio that finally convinced me that I was very much on the wrong track. For many years now, I've spent three hours a day in my car commuting to and from work. A long while back I tired of books-on-tape and "Learn Spanish in Your Car" and the crap that passes for music on most top-40 stations. I listened to talk radio. Hour after hour, day after day, months into years. That kind of tiresome, repetitive exposure to "The Right" should long ago have solidly entrenched me on their side.

But something very different happened. The more I heard them talk, the more I realized what a disconnect I was observing between their lying bullshit and what I was observing around me. I was witnessing the general deterioration of the lives of hard-working people around me, simultaneously coming to see and know just how corrupt and evil are those we vote and depend on for leadership and security. Everything the talking heads on the right warned us about liberals and progressives never materialized. Most everything they promised would happen to our country in the honest capable hands of good conservative leadership never happened either. All that political capital that GWB boasted about after his second win was squandered through ignorance and sheer crookedness.

Not in my lifetime have I seen such a foreboding confluence of political, economic and world events. Never have I seen such a consolidation of economic and political power in the hands of so few. I am truly frightened and disheartened by what I see unfolding in this country. And so I will lay my head down tonight, turn on the laptop and let you share with me again why I can be depressed and still have the motivation to keep on keeping on.

Jim
Houston, Texas

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Jim,

For aware Americans in this age, the combination of age and insight certainly yields a sorrowful landscape, both inner and outer. As you so aptly described it, "a gnawing at one's insides ... witnessing the impoverishment of the working class majority and the absolutely criminal self-enrichment of the political/corporate elite minority."

To my mind, it is the somewhat logical result of being raised in an optimistic material atmosphere of plenitude, massive and unnatural overabundance really, for two hundred plus years.

As to your conservative political history, well, ultimately I am about as conservative as you can get, according to two ex-wives. Just not politically conservative. I spend inordinate amounts of time folding socks, avoiding the neighbors these days (since the book, I've become more the book than a person to my old friends, which I deeply regret here in my own hometown) and fearful at times about security.

These days it is not security fear of a material nature, but rather fearfulness of the next major change in the world in the unswerving belief that most political and material changes are not for the better, generally speaking. Being Southern does that to you. Makes for a wry caution.

But every coin has two sides. And the other side of the coin is that we who grew up and exalted in the most materialistic culture that ever existed have the best chance of coming out the other side first with some real answers to these existential questions and elimination of a sort of pain much of the world has yet to encounter. Material goods have turned out to be meaningless, except to those who grapple for power over them, and therefore over us and our consumption of them.

As you pointed out, neither of us will live to see the outcome of all this. But then again, never has such an opportunity been available to grasp what is meaningful in life personally, given that all of human life is lived at the personal level, and is now available to us as individuals.

As to our children and their inheritance of the world, they will have to deal with it on the terms its presents itself to them in their own times. At some level, I am happy that the shallow materialism that kept us so numb is ending. Yet, quite naturally, at this point they are succumbing to it as we did. But it's unsustainable, regardless of what the powerful and rich of the earth may think. Hubris is the most common element of power. When the game is up, the game is up.

Meanwhile, we stand here at the edge of a new age, aware of what comes next. An undetermined period of horror. Still, there is a certain liberation in that if we apply ourselves we can understand what those before us could never have hoped to realize -- Liberation not as a species or a select group, but as individuals who pass through this veil as anonymously as did billions before us.

Truth be known, I'd rather be here at the crest of the tectonic shift in humanity than in the numb age in which I was led to such illusion as has plagued Americans and the Western World for the past hundred years or so.

And the despots and the liars? I suspect we will have to suffer them for some time to come, but collapse has no favorites. It falls upon us all equally as a species. Somehow, in that there is sort of a cosmic justice. You may not like such a term as cosmic, I dunno. But it's the only term I can think of that alludes to the scale of change we are about to encounter as an insignificant smear of biology hurtling through the interstellar void.

Disillusionment is not everything, and it is the rightful inheritance of the privileged. And in looking at the Third World half the year as I do (and by no means the worst conditions of the Third World) I hopefully grasp that we are far, far beyond privileged. We are princes of the earth and rightfully have fallen, or soon will have. To have seen a specter is not everything (to quote Neal Cassady). And yes, there are skulls piled clear to heaven. But the purpose at hand, in as much as there ever was any purpose for you and me, is to savor realization, not mourn it.

Sorry to lapse into something bordering on the spiritual, but the spiritual (not the religious, for fuck sake) seems to be the increasing theme of my days.

In art and labor,

Joe