Hey Joe,
I have been reading your stuff online for a few years now and finally ordered a copy of your book. Imagine my surprise to see my high school get such a prominent mention. When you broke out the numbers on the New York lovely upstate village where I was raised, and compared them to your own hometown, I understood why I felt like I knew so many of the people you were talking about.
I may have had a stranger time of coming up in my part of the "global south" than you did. My Mom's side of the family were middle American types who were recovering from my definitely white trash grandparents. And I don't mean redneck. My Mom left this nest at age 13, spirited into the foster care system along with her sisters.
Through one of those insane coincidences that we would like to think happens to everybody who has been so traumatized and thrust out into our brutal social system with no support, she met my Dad when I was two. Obviously not my biological one. But he came from a family of upper middle class urban liberals, and they had much more to do with my upbringing than my Mom's far flung family. So I was caught between two worlds, and I didn't belong in either. Like you, I joined the Navy to escape a town that was far too small and reactionary for me, and like you I have all but returned, though I guess I'm 15 miles or so away, in a professional suburb of a small upstate city.
You used the story of John Phelps to display a case of liberal anti-gun hysteria gone wrong, and it certainly is that. But it is also part of a broader social trend that is one of the areas where liberals and conservatives seem to agree. As you are no doubt aware, sympathy for authoritarianism has increased dramatically in the last 30 years. I think it really started to take root when everything spiraled out of control for Jimmy Carter, and Ronnie and the Dems in the legislature road to the rescue with sentencing "reform," paramilitary SWAT teams, the DARE program, etc. Succeeding presidents have expanded these programs.
Columbine gave us the excuse to embed them into our schools, and 9/11 gave us the excuse to implement them everywhere. When I was a senior at Pine Bush High School in 1994, we didn't have cops in schools, metal detectors, drug searches with police officers and guard dogs, urinalysis testing of students, or cops patrolling the parking lot. Now these things have become so normalized that people don't even think twice about a kid being led out of study hall in handcuffs.
And let's stop kidding ourselves, please. I graduated with three practicing heroin addicts who got all their dope in school. We had one incident where a gang member from Newburgh brought a gun into our school to attack another student. We had keggers, fistfights, jumpings, and pretty much any drug we wanted easily available to us. Just like today. It was no different at all. But we handled those situations differently. The Newburgh kid was brought into the principal's office by two administrators where he was of course arrested.
All of my friends with habits managed to graduate, and they went on to clean themselves up with the help of rehab or just through sheer will to lead productive lives, which would have been impossible with a felony heroin conviction right out of the starting gate. All my friends on the Civil War club kept their reenactment gear, including the simulated rifles, in their cars and trucks. Hell, we used to have a tradition back then where they would camp out and guard the wood for the homecoming bonfire the night before. Kids raised some hell and we had a few fights, but no lasting harm came of it of the kind that happens when you put kids knee-jerk into our legal system every chance you get.
And that's what happened to Mr. Phelps. Every adult involved in this case failed miserably, from the conservative cop who made an arrest when there was no evidence of a crime, to the liberal school board who insisted that the legal system was the proper place to puzzle out the details, to the conservative DA who ran with a non-case and attempted to smear this B student with a lifelong felony. The thing is, even the people who realize how messed up this situation is think that it's something unusual, but this is how the system works. We now operate under the mantra "arrest 'em all, and let the courts sort 'em out," and most people in America tacitly or overtly support this until it happens to someone they know.
One thing I know is that my kids are never going to be subjected to a piss test to join the chess club, or sniffed by a cop's german shepherd as they are lined up against their lockers along with the rest of the student body. Nor will they attend a school used as a base for paramilitary terrorist drills, as recently happened to a local high school and middle school. No Joe, I'm gettin my kids the hell outta this country before they end up like Josh Phelps, completely at the mercy of a judge who can destroy their life forever, merely for engaging in some behavior a DA thinks he can make a case out of. We have created a monster in the name of keeping our "communities" "safe," and it's eating every one of us it can.
Thank you for your writing. Your work and the letters of contributors on your site has given me a laugh many times when I really needed it, and left me feeling sane again in a world gone mad. Your recollection of your first experience with LSD brought back some warm memories, and it did for a few old "trip buddies" I passed it along to as well. Sad thing is, I don't even think they make the stuff anymore. That's too bad. I don't know anybody that's tried it that grew up to be a self unaware authoritarian. Hell my closest friend through those crazy rides spent a decade as a fundamentalist Christian before the contradictions in the belief system just became too much for him. Same thing happened to me. Once you learn to question and gain awareness, I don't think it ever goes away no matter how much you fight it or how soothing the lies are.
Maybe one day when I've "done right by my kids," I can pay my ransom and escape the hologram as well. Your hardscrabble life down there in Belize sounds like exactly what I am looking for. Spending most of my time engaged in the struggle to survive and help others survive, and the rest riding my bike, listening to music, and contemplating. The rest is all mindless distractions I do not need or want. The Buddhists have it right, possessions and attachments lead only to suffering. Now that the distribution and marketing of those possessions is institutionalized on a global scale, the suffering is almost unimaginable. It leads to all kinds of pathologies, like authoritarianism.
Sorry to talk your ear off. This letter's been a long time comin. If you're ever in the Newburgh, New York area (crossroads of the northeast!) come on by for a few rounds on me at the Golden Rail Ale House. All the best, my brother from another time and place,
Mark
Newburgh, New York
------
Mark,
Clearly you have done at least as much thinking, if not more, on this as I have about these things. And come to the more or less same conclusions too. How individuals come to question authority is still a mystery to me. It seems each one arrives there by a different personal route. (Well, duh!) And when they get there, even though there are millions others like them, they find themselves in relative isolation, being dispersed so thinly over this nation of 300 million. Thus their voice is scarcely heard, except between one another.
Meanwhile, the ability of governments to manage the behavior of great masses of people in supposedly enlightened and advanced nations is greater than ever, thanks to technology. I used to think that because the nature and purpose of government of any kind is to control social behavior -- either for good or bad, social management of some sort is necessary for peace, order and general well being -- governments necessarily exert more and more control as society becomes more ever more complex, until they reach authoritarianism. And I still believe that.
But there is another factor, too, in that the people desire ever increasing control as the material, social and political complexities increase beyond their comprehension (due to lack of time or opportunity to think or study the larger order). The solution, if there is one, I believe rests in simplicity of point of view. Not simple mindedness, mind you, but reducing all things you see to their simplest genuine elements. Are people hungry? Are people sick? Does what we encounter in our individual experience with our fellow man imply social justness? Then take some small but very immediate action. In other words, being in the moment and negotiating the world from the standpoint of that very moment -- because that's the way life happens to us. And it is the tiniest momentary decisions, that, when added up, determine what our lives are. (For example, do I have to piss right now or can it wait until I finish this email to you?)
But as the culture becomes more complex it becomes more distracting. It finally reaches a point where the level of distraction becomes so high that few are capable of navigating it with enough intact, conscious inner self to question the nature of their environment. Especially political and economic environment. Mostly, Americans just like most of the rest of the planet, merely respond to the world as it presents itself each day. But ours comes through many layers of distorted filters, do as to be atomized, diffracted into incomprehensibility. You can't see even the simplest object through a kaleidoscope. In that we are a hardened mass of non-individuals, and are even more easily directed and managed.
I believe real change is not only possible, but inevitable, if for no other reason than due to building ecological catastrophe and population. But I shudder to think how governments, their militaries, corporations and other powers of authority will deal with those things when they reach critical mass. (Though we get a clue in the current petroleum resource wars in the Middle East, small water wars, and what are essentially food and living space wars in some parts of the world.)
So like you, all I can think of to do is question authority and the social justice of the present order of things, live as simply as possible, and do the next logical thing that feels like the right thing to do. Which to me feels like staying physically the hell out of the path of the American march toward authoritarian state. Which is difficult as hell. Right now I am in America again, and have been since spring working on the next book because to write about America, you gotta be there to sense it and see it. (Thankfully, this next one is the last book I'll ever write. After that, I'm gonna do a lot of porch sitting, guitar piddling, reading and cooking -- with some drinking thrown it where it best fits.)
Now, no offense, but I gotta go take that piss. It's the "right action" for the moment.
In art and labor,
Joe
