somewhere on UC's campus, two days after the election.
It's three days after Christmas, and, while its my ass on the line, I've found it difficult to work in any meaningful way my RPT document. In fact, I've found it difficult to do much of anything aside from making the rounds, consuming the rounds, and getting my head around what's transpired.
Part of this trouble, in an immediate sense, is the continued fuckery of my i-tunes player. It's claiming Cheap Trick has been moved, and would I like to locate it, which, of course, it is where it always is-on my hard drive. I've reinstalled and, same thing. Now its telling me Bob Dylan and XTC have "! [Would I like to locate it? Boy would I and I can. However, I have 175GB of music on here, and I really need to spend my time better. I could get cd, hook up a cd player, and play the mother fuckers in the time its take me to go through Dylan-again]".
Serious reflection requires access to serious tunes, but, as I fitfully get to the point, I am chastened by the meager horde on my MP3 player- Plus, I am uneasy with the claustrophobia of headphones, preferring the roominess of speakers, when I am trying to write-so I have selected to confront the year with Bob Dylan Live At The Budokan.
My posting has been light because I have been trying to sort out some things about what has happened this year.
I spent the bulk of this year in a state of anxious, political shpilkes, dreading the future because of the past, wanting to imagine that a future could be the evolution from the past rather than the Xerox repeat that has been the last eight years.
Something I've said before and I'll say it again, now, because I assert this as a deadly true fucking fact folks: I'm looking at 35 years on this planet in a few weeks, and, somehow, I had six years of the 70's, six years of the 90's, and everything else has been the goddamned '80's. Clothes. Politics. The humping hips of crass consumerism. Materialism not as a recognition of the human condition as it pertains to needs, but the totality of materialism as wants. Terrible visions of skinny jeans and stupid haircuts, the utter mediocrity of what passes for popular music of all "genres", which all are infected with the malignant rot of a complacent, third rate new wave affectations. The irony of ironies: Pastiche of a pastiche, like copying Bowie copying Duran Duran copying Bowie.
Here's the deal, once and for all: This has been done. Irony is the refuge of the spoiled neoconservative brats, rubbing their board little genitalia, dreaming of a day when maybe, just maybe, they'll go to a bar as cool as St.Elmo's.
That's it. That's the truth of the whole sordid mess. Millenialism was about the apocalypse, afterall. Not in the end times, as such, but in a more absurd, sinister way: History ends not because there is a war in heaven, or that we are as, in fact, suicidal a species as the previous history has warned us, but we prefer nostalgia to the future. We would rather relive previous decades in some kind of act of infantile denial of the responsibility of human beings to evolve and push forward, preferring a mediated sense of reality: We would rather attempt, in some way, to participate in manufactured mediated memories of popular culture, rather than attempt to take those forms forward to another evolution.
By way of example, I will attempt to clarify, which will no doubt be obfuscation: TS Eliot wrote in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that poetry is quotation from other poetry, and the irreducible fact is that poets exist only in relation to other, better poets, who are all white, rich, and dead. The past was always better, not unlike Matthew Arnold, who's own "Empedocles on Etna" is the his own Romantic prestidigitation, and, seeing that it would be too scary to try and invent a future, preferred to keep his apple cart upright, the dogs and cats, separate, his God, white and Christian, and tradition, monolithic and eternal.
Because. Just. Because.
Just because Arnold, like Eliot (or Eliot, just like Arnold, in keeping with my sense of tradition and whatever talent I may possess) are simpering reactionaries whose visions are not democratic vistas but intellectual oligarchies, and by intellectual, we really mean sycophantic about the pronouncements of the past and their relevance to the future. Arnold and Eliot aren't stupid, by any stretch. They are lazy thinkers. Their dreams were bound to be "memories" of some perceived "golden age" rather than visions by the utter fear they felt toward an unknown future.
Living on memories, of course, is the torpor of all poetry, and for societies, the pungent reminder of the quickening decline.
It is not entirely coincidental, then, as the eighties redux dawned anew in the mid to late nineties; afterall, the new century loomed, the new millennium loomed, the new age loomed, and Americans, like the spineless Arnold, decided that they weren't ready for the future, and stuck their heads straight up the asshole of nostalgia.
Unlike Arnold, or Eliot, for that matter, instead of a glorified past which included symmetry, Plato and Ovid, we went for Ronald Reagan and REO Speedwagon. Contras singing "Sister Christian". Al Haig and Whitesnake. Cocaine and the Moral Majority. Bangs and synthesizers.
See, while I assert that Arnold and Eliot are lazy thinkers, they are at least lazy thinkers with a sense of context, of history, even as they deny it; Their reaction was at least the false reading of a golden age, a distant past, a quasi Edenic sense of order.
The Self Referential is burned into the national character by various right wing readings of the Constitution as "individualism" and so, you have a nation of people for whom "individualism" is expressed through talk radio, or some perceived implication of progress that will lead to an utter disaster.
The disaster, chicken little, is not really a global sense, or even of a local sense, though you wouldn't know that by the howling of the blood beasts on AM radio, but it would be a disaster of the self referential, a Randian failure. We must never let anything objective encroach upon our subjectivity, for that subjectivity is solipsistic, and therefore ideological. The failure of the ideological is not only a failure of understanding, but a failure of America and possibly, monotheism. It is preposterous and heretical to suggest otherwise. Inertia, afterall, is bliss. It's in the bible somewhere.
Petulantly, then, did we proceed with a fully formed world view straight outta "It's Morning in American", replete with ruthless Greedhead Gekkos, Jerry Falwells, Empty Headed Presidents, Dumb Mythic Good vs. Evil Battles, a decadent and selfish good time populace, and an inevitable epoch shift, and, in true late stage capitalist form, we procrastinated, deferring the future conceptually, and deciding that, despite early nineties, we'd just go ahead, call that mulligan, and return to the somnambulistic eighties. After all, Cowboy Ronnie made us feel better about things, and, isn't that what is important?
So, willfully ignorant, did we allow for the war criminals to seize power, content to be jackoffed by new gizmos, reality TV, and the desire, ultimately, to have someone just like us in the White House.
And we succeeded: Despite the fact that Bush was the son of 41st President, went to Harvard and Yale, lost millions of dollars, owned a baseball team, he was like us in that he was self referential, willfully ignorant, easily manipulated by entrenched power structures and, frankly, just fucking stupid. You elect a guy because he tells you he's a "regular guy", and you believe him, and then, a little later, you walk out to your SUV, past your Bush/Cheney sticker on the left side of the bumper, and you drive to your job, and find it has vanished, along with your pension. What could have happened?
Think about that funny dude down at the bar, the jagerbomb guy. You've talked about music and sports. You've bought beers for each other. He's down there every time. What a great guy.
Why don't you let him hang on to your Debit card. Better still, let him house sit for you. He's just like you.
Oh wait. All your money's gone. All of it. All that saving for the future spent because a guy who could have given a fuck-all about the future spent it. In his reality, the future is where Jesus comes back.
Except that Jesus isn't coming back, and I say this with the utmost reverence, and if he was, he wouldn't come back for a fuckin spoiled brat like George Goddamned Bush. No. Fucking. Way.
Understand, then, what has transpired in the last eight years. Understand that your country slipped away farther than you could have imagine. Intellectualize the fact that, while you were living and breathing, this happened to you, to us, and figure out what to do.
The death's head marched, on and on, in the 2000's. Did you weep for the future. Did you cry that the stars and stripes became the swastika? Did you moan as the bible became The Art of War.
There was a popular country song by Alan Jackson called "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" which pretty well establishes where we are now: America attacked, and we turn, like the bloated, meth'd, coke'd, paranoid drunk of a teenage nation we are, and start swinging on the skinniest kid in school, afraid to confront the truth of the matter, afraid listen to our poets, their poets, or poetry in general, and fulfilled the Whitmanic prophesy.
America. The Fabled Damned of Nations.
Yet, the light had not entirely gone out, and somehow, after eight goddamned years, America never ceases to astonish, and as the champagne of another new year breathes in the morning light, I cannot be anything aside from incredulous about the last three months of this cursed age.
I, drunkenly of course, because the psychic toll has been too high to be anything but-I mean, how do you confront the iron boot when it is disguised as an Ugg? worked for the future, and was told by the state of Kentucky that they would never vote for a "nigger". I wasn't campaigning for a "nigger", I would protes, because that, by definition, was one who slavishly clung to the past, to Bush, with such desperation and reactionary violence.
I worked for the future.
I wrote for the future.
I backed my testimonial.
So we didn't win Kentucky. But we won. We fucking won.
Over the last eight years, I have tried to assuage the guilt of my late nineties disengagement. I had decided, at some point, that I would be poetic and not focus on politics. Clinton had failed me. "Don't Ask"…please. Somalia…please. The failure of Health Care…please…I was pissed and disgusted.
It became clear, however, that as low as the bar was set, Clinton was a kind of Edenic, Ur-existence, for my generation, who were, as it turns out, still longing to invent the future.
The tyranny of the Baby Boomers is not cultural-we'll take Bob Dylan-but cynically political, the sense that their failures are inevitable for all, that they didn't end the war, that they didn't end racism, meant that it would never end is a preposterous, evil notion of a brain lazy complacent populace. The boomers had snowed us so far into thinking that, since they had given the world the fucking Beatles, that the whole kit and caboodle of boomerism was as much as we could expect…
Yeah. Go to Woodstock. Be groovy for a minute on pot and LSD. Go to work at Dad's Bank, get an SUV, trade up for Coke or anti-depressants. Buy Styx records. Dance to disco, decide that the "pragmatic" thing is to be a selfish fuck. Like Jerry Rubin hocking motivational tapes, or David Horowitz becoming a NeoConservative Whore. The guy who edited Ramparts…No wonder irony is dead.
"I didn't sell out…I bought in". FFFFFFFUUUUUUUCKKKKKKK YYYYYYYYYOUUOOOUOUUUU. Take your Bachman Turner Overdrive, and shove it up your khaki'd ass, you worthless fuck.
Shit, even the Dead dress like they are playing 18 holes. Fuck you too. Jerry Garcia can suck the big one, from the grave.
At the end of the day, as a very misogynistic Prof of English at Xavier used to say (or was it apropos of my jouissance, but whatever) Kurt Cobain was it. Ice T was it. The voice you needed. Maybe you listened, maybe you didn't. John Lennon didn't die in 1980, but lived in the voices of others. These boomer fuckers didn't own it like they said they did, and even when they did, they didn't own it. Joe Strummer is, of course, exempted here.
I remember how many people, when I decided that Obama was the man, and I would do what it took to make sure he was the future for my nephews, for my Goldwater Dad, for my apolitical Brother, that I had a responsibility to do something. We would not survive another term of cryptofascist policies. So many said it could not happen.
This was the logical outgrowth of why I decided, with Covington Jim, to start this thing in the first place: To bear witness to this evil. I wanted to testify to history the horrors that I watched being perpetuated in the name of my good neighbors, my family, me. Covington Jim bowed out in 2006, and I felt, honestly, that he left too soon, but I understand now, as the year rolls again toward a brighter, better one, out of darkness and into the light, that describing such an evil as the last eight years is a necessary, but soul crushing experience. He handed me the torch, and I took it over the finish line. I finished his testimony, the best I could, with this blog, because it was my testimony, too. If anything, it was Jim that made me re-engage the material world, because it needed testimonials, and so, I came back. Jim, this one is for you, too.
Poetry suffered, writing suffered, as I saw my work increasingly in these terms: I became a Professor of Composition, and my work took on not a literary, but an ideological context: Language, at its core, is reality, and who controls language, the discourse, the debate, defines what is "real" and what "is not real". This had happened already. They built a museum dedicated to a "Flintstones" theology, with humans and dinosaurs co-existing, for fuck's sake. Is this a weird American roadside oddity, like the world's largest ball of twine? No. It is considered legit.
So, as I look upon the rolling year from the vantage point of a semi intoxicated 2009, already over 11 hours old, I look upon 2008 the end of the Twentieth Century. I read somewhere where it takes 3-5 years for a decade to end, so that, for example, the sixties really began with SGT. Pepper or Highway 61 Revisited, and ended with Aerosmith Toys in the Attic or Kiss Alive. Fine with me.
The eighties, of course, officially ended when Nirvana destroyed Guns N Roses, who had, by then, became exactly what they said they wouldn't be: A bloated, self indulgent "Rock" band. Less Stooges and more post Goat's Head Stones. A brand name rather than a band, a gang. Nirvana, and the peculiar genius of Kurt Cobain, confronted that storm, and won. Cobain, unfortunately, unable to learn the essential survival trip of Bowie, became insufferably on stage as he was off stage, and since he was never able to separate himself, was killed in the process.
His death, in a way, was the flood gate for our torpor. See, that hadn't worked. Nirvana didn't turn out to be our Beatles (I'm not entirely convinced...) and so, fuck it, let's groove back into the pastiches of the past, synthesizers and shit. We'll get high on Irony and Nostalgia. Thus, you go to any bar in any college town, and you find a whole generation of kids being the way their parents wished they were, all St. Elmo's Fire. They snort baby aspirin disguised as cocaine, desperately feeding into that whole 80's decadence trip. They play four Def Leppard songs in a row on the juke box, not because they love Def Leppard, but because, well, it's the 80's thing to do. They flip their swoopy Flock of Seagulls bangs, hitch up their skinny jeans, and roll around in their own complacent sense of the irony of it all. Wow, isn't this great. We recreate a representation of life, rather than living it. We can be in the John Hughes movie.
There is horror in watching this whole sad scene, because the artifice is not edifying, but stultifying. They cling to fantasies which are scenes from bad movies...
Laugh at these kids, but they have an excuse: They are young, and searching for themselves. However, what the fuck are they doing in their parent's closet, aping the empty headed yuppie bullshit of their parents? Who's fault is this? Who, in this dynamic, knows better?
What about the rest of us? What excuse do we have? What excuse do I have, as a preferred the mad dreams and infantile notions of metaphysics? I, as much as the fucking asshole with the Bush Cheney sticker stubbornly, delusionally, refusing to believe his/her own "lying" eyes, bear responsibility for these years. I might have well voted for them.
Yet, now, as I reflect on the severely quixotic Obama campaign in KY, in which I discovered the stupid, hard heart of a typical political machine (in the bag for Hillary Clinton, by the way, until the bitter end. I watched Obama accept the nomination, drunk, while creepy fat fuck "Democrat" from the local machine tell homophobic jokes about Bob Barr, and told, to our faces, the Obama volunteers, that we had "fucked up" and got the wrong candidate.)
Yeah, fuck you, man.
Yet, I also discovered purpose and meaning in history. I situated myself in it, to see if I could have a say in the future, and while I didn't change a fucking thing in Northern KY, I did change my country. In twenty days from now, we begin the road back. Naturally, because this is America, and we have proud tradition of willful ignoramuses, there are those who, despite the proof of the utter failure and the decline this first decade of the new millennium have represented, will want to continue to replicate this horrible experience, ad nauseum-just as long as they don't get any on them.
This is the central logic to the conservative philosophy, as it is constituted now: Deniability. Irresponsibility. People, you have been governed by people who don't believe in government. This is like being treated by a doctor who doesn't believe in medicine.
As for me, my days as a chronicler of these strange events is drawing to a close. I need to find another way to confront these politics, to understand politics in new way: In short, I need to focus on writing politically, though not necessarily about politics. I will pay attention but not focus…solely…
As Charlton Heston's character in the Planet of the Apes so eloquently stated "I leave the 2Oth Century with no regrets". I look forward to a new dawn, the renewed sight of democratic vistas in the morning sun.
"I've just reached a place
Where the willow don't bend.
There's not much more to be said
It's the top of the end.
I'm going,
I'm going,
I'm gone.
I'm closin' the book
On the pages and the text
And I don't really care
What happens next.
I'm just going,
I'm going,
I'm gone."
To everybody else: Listen to more Iggy Pop.
