“Who am I if I am no longer this?” and the Endless Nameless

Last week, for the first time in nine years, the University’s fall term began—and I was at home.  Not at home as in “Oh, as an Academic Tutor, I don’t start until next week” at home, nor the “Ha HA! Tuesday-Thursday schedule! Extra day of prep and syllabi tweaking” at home. 

No. I was at home because I didn’t have to be anywhere at home. At home in the “No Job” sense.  An intense sense of existential dread had been haunting me in waves since I had turned in my badge and keys, taught one final, very surreal evening class (complete with student penned libertarian protest music),  limped home and spent a long, dark night of the soul staring into the yawning maw of a professional abyss that was to be my new reality. 

The reasons are exhaustive and exhausting as to why this came to pass, but they can be reduced to “Elections Have Consequences”: Collegiate Restructuring.  Politicians, who belong as far away from education and its institutions as is humanly possible, decide to “fix” something, and, without considering its moral, intellectual or logistical implications, make it so and those of us who either do the educating or the learning are left holding the bag.  For the poor and working class students in the state of Ohio, as well as many of us who taught those students, the bag turned out, especially in Cincinnati, to be the only consolation prize. The venn diagram between the community college and the university was a chasm of the “fix” assumptions about participation of the parties, problems of accreditation, left those students out.    I, too, found myself on the outside looking in, a victim of restructuring, a shit economy, budget cuts and too few years in the profession

Ten years ago, I made the decision to go to graduate school. After few years of shit jobs, ranging from construction laborer to house painter to the library job I wrote about previously in “Tuesday’s Gone”, I found my priorities re-ordered on that terrible day.  Sure, I liked this job, but when death comes ripping, as it did, I felt as though it was time to get on with it.  I mean, this wasn’t ever meant to be permanent.   I needed to move. So I applied to, took a lousy GRE, and was accepted to graduate school.

Graduate School was, of course, a hazing ritual that gave me a way to think about the discipline, but also the academy itself, so I haven’t really been surprised what has transpired over these years, and, unlike many of my colleagues from my time in graduate school, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and find myself in a full time teaching position at the University less than a year after receiving my M.A. in English.

What transpired between that first class and the last one is sublimely edifying, though too long a tale for this post; my three readers will have to wait for an re-telling of that particular tale.  My desire to educate within the university was kindled as an undergraduate, watching the solar brilliance of the professors, their socratic elegance, the torrent of words and ideas, the humanity in the humanities. It was rekindled with equal brilliance in those graduate seminars and classes where the substance of the discipline, rather than the politics of the Ivory Tower, was stressed, where I learned to think about that “solar brilliance” and the certitude of knowing that, in a life where a sense of belonging was either tenuous, met with suspicion or non-existent, that I had maybe found a home.  I belonged with these people; I was one of them.  For my father, a UAW man of forty three years, the first in his family to graduate from High School, the idea that I was a university  professor was proof of the transcendence of the American Dream, that working hard, doing the right things, pays dividends. 

He still does, as he is adamant about reminding me with our weekly chicken and beer long lunches, where all manner of of things are discussed and world problems solved.  I am not sure: “Who am I if I am no longer this?”

I feel very much a drift, a person who, in passing his  bookcase, will thumb through a 1947 Viking Press Finnegans Wake, only to return to his couch, empty handed, to an Xbox or the loving torpor of cable news, numb: “WTF happened?”

This week, the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana’s epochal Nevermind was released, and while I have yet to purchase it, I am certainly contemplating a certain wry-rony in purchasing this with part of an unemployment check.  When it was first released, I was seventeen years old, making it possible to embrace “not belonging” for millions of kids like me.  But those were different times, as Uncle Lou would say, for while they seemed desperate, and we who were so moved by that music looked to a future beyond Reaganomics, beyond the war, beyond George H.W. Bush (and soon enough repudiate his Brahman entitlement with a saxophone wailing rake from a place called Hope), the truth is that we had no idea how bad things would get.  There was still a dream to pursue, though it seemed a bit further off.  But concert tickets were cheap, the music coming out was challenging and righteous, and whatever, and however, it was manufactured for consumption by the emerging merchants of cool, the pre-packaging of Punk (as if the Pistols were as put together as the Monkees) for the masses, it doesn’t make it any less valid, or life changing. Unless, of course, you were (or are) one of these punker-than-thou dicks (and Christ, there is a version of these people in every generation; see Don’t Look Back if you doubt me) who only listened to bands that had just formed in a garage an hour ago because, man, they ain’t sold out.

Well, my imagined caricature of the smug pricks of Christmas past, how sold out do you feel now?  It seems that neither Nirvana, or Bad Religion, made much difference: Clinton tacked right, sold out organized labor.  The millennium came, and while we were worried about banking software, the Republicans rolled back financial reforms dating to the Depression.  Then, in a 5-4 decision, we got stuck with the ne’er-do-well son of the Bush we had just gotten rid of. Things went down hill from there.

The music has aged well, and while there is, perhaps, a nostalgia for a time when things looked like they might be starting to go in the right direction, it also spoke—and speaks—to the uncertain future, displacement, and finding beauty in despair.  I…WE…are sorely in need of such objects d’art right now.

The answer to  “Who am I if I am no longer this?” is currently being formulated as the endless nameless.

Tuesday’s Gone: September 11th Ten Years On.

[Note: My loathing for Lynyrd Skynyrd is legendary, but something about this song always made me feel nostalgic, the pain of an old wound. It wasn’t exactly clear what that pain was, though I had, up until ten years or so ago, thought of the end of high school, and the scene in Dazed and Confused where, after the intellectual Mike Newhouse (Adam Goldberg) gets his ass kicked by tough rocker Clint Bruno (Nicky Katt).  As the combatants are separated, and a tearful Mike Newhouse declares that he’ll kill Clint before be helped away, Linklater rolls this song, indicating not only that the party is over, but that something else in the world of the characters, is over as well. Paradise lost, perhaps.

After that Tuesday, the song took on another significance, and I give them the band their due for this great and poignant song. After all, the sun has to shine on dog’s ass once in a while.]

Dripping wet, grumbling about working the circulation counter after a long weekend, I switched on the TV and began looking for my Camels, making coffee. Drying my hair, I looked at the television.  Something was going terribly, terribly wrong.  New York…was being hit with planes?

What would emerge in the endless, eternal minutes bleeding together were fiery visions of burning sky scrapers, people running everywhere, office works leaping from the fireball, police and fire fighters leaping into the fireball.  I sat, in my father’s kitchen, dumbstruck, asking aloud “What the fuck is happening?” My shift began at noon at the small city library I worked at in Indiana, and for the next two or so hours, full of existential dread, smoking in the sunny morning, lighting cigarette after cigarette, drinking only one coffee

The drive into work only increased my dread; certainly, we know libraries as a community center, an information repository, but what would that mean today, when this terrible thing has happened?   How can I possibly help anyone find answers when I can’t even fathom the questions?  Surely, most people will stay home, watching the news like I wish I could, and try to come to terms: “What the fuck is happening?”

Apparently, we are under attack?  Under attack?  Terrorists, they say?  Arabs or something?  Details were sketchy…

The library was a strange murmuring tomb, the kind of whispering that occurs during a funeral service by people unable to stifle their narcissistic desire to comment on everything. My co-workers took turns on a radio in the office, listening to news.   One of our circulation stations, equipped with the internet, was a comfort for the reasonably updated news and information it provided.  The information, was not:  Maybe 10000 dead they say?  “What the fuck is happening?”

As the afternoon wore on, Sartre’s admonition that hell is other people became agonizingly real; patrons trickled in, agitated, wanting to copies of the Bible, Prophesies of Nostradamus, books on survivalism.   Rumors, terrible rumors: the Indian pediatrician in town had been jumped, an Israeli had been beaten in Covington, where I had been partying the previous weekend, there was an invasion through Mexico.  Gas Stations price gouging, fuel shortages, Kroger’s a madhouse.  Casually vicious racist pronouncements.  Calls for Nuke strikes in Central Asia. Families checking out every mother fucking copy of the Left Behind series, with one patron informing me that I should have taken her advice and read these, because she was cramming for the rapture, and she wouldn’t see me later.  “Christ…who needs a drink?”, I gravely muttered, wondering what this all meant.

At nine-or a little before, to confess my sins, we closed the library, exhausted. We all needed a drink, but nobody felt like going out after work, just home.   And home I went, where I walked in, and there was my Dad, drinking a Diet Coke, smoking, watching horror—and heroism, on TV.  My dad listened to my litany, grabbed a Samuel Adams from the fridge, handed it to me and said “It’ll be ok. The sun will rise tomorrow, and so will we.”  He bid me goodnight.

And for fleeting minute, he was right.  The nation was unified.  The president didn’t seem like such a doofus, and his calls to end the anti-Muslim animus were applauded (this would be the last time, unfortunately, I would applaud him), gave a rousing speech at Ground Zero.  The world was with us, keening for the dead, and I had hoped that, through dialogue, a new world would emerge. This was a heady time, in which everything edifying in the human spirit was on display as a reaction to this horror. Humanity seemed to be winning the day…

                                                         ******************************************************************************************

Ten years on, humanity seems to be losing the day, and everything edifying in the human spirit has given way to the Sartre’s Hell of Other People I experienced on that day; led by the doofus in chief, the reaction and reality of the nauseatingly accurate “post-9/11 world” would be some variation of the patrons who trickled in that terrible afternoon and evening ten years, and the rumors they traded in.  Endless War, in which my loved ones were in harms’ way endlessly, is the reality. People have been beaten, humiliated, imprisoned, dehumanized  and killed as a matter of policy.  Immigrants are again fodder for paranoid speculation and racist reaction. There had been price gouging, the root of which is opportunism and greed, has come to define the decade as much as foreign adventurism, and both eventually crashed the country.   The casual, vicious, racist pronouncements became campaign slogans, the fear became reactionary politics.  Presidential hopefuls are still cramming for the rapture.

I am reminded that, while it is hasn’t been all bad since that day, there isn’t much good this day; ten years older, I am constantly affected by this singular event and it’s fallout.  That night, ten years ago, I decided it was time to continue my education; going to Xavier, getting my Masters in English, becoming faculty at UC, and separating from UC after a bitterly protracted attempt to keep my position in a political climate in which the reaction of that day has manifested in a limp economy, foreclosures, deficit spending, right wing nut-jobs running states, budget cuts to state institutions and the apartheid of higher education.  

I have many good memories of these years; teaching, my colleagues, my friends and family, my love, but they continue to be viewed through this sad lens.  The “post-9/11 world” , for most of us, is not a less safe future, but a dimmer one. For those of us who have lost loved ones, this is tragically obvious.   But we have all lost something, and we lost it when we surrendered to what is worst in us, not what is best.  We lost something when we allowed fear to rule the day. We lost something when we re-elected My Pet Goat…

As I sit here, uncertain of the future as I was that day, wondering what became of the hope of Obama, mired in the fear and baseness of that terrible day, wondering what would happen, I find myself afraid that the reality of the world since that day isn’t constant threat but a low level dread and ennui, humming in the background like white noise, a music which sings of lost futures and diminished expectations.

Hold Music for the Unemployment Office

Last week, like millions of Americans, I became unemployed, the sad saga of with I will not go into detail here, but plan to in a future post once the bitter hangover of a failed American dreamer subsides—then, I will be able to sing the whole sordid business in the clear and rational tones I am not famous for.

At any rate, I received my paperwork from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, and while glumly perusing the boxes, graphs and words looking for a number to budget my life around, I saw that my employer (a research one university) had submitted the payroll records of my time there. They were only off by five years. So I called, and was put on hold.

At that point, I began the kind of weird fantasizing that one does on hold, or in line at the DMV, or any bureaucracy that chips away at one’s mortal coil in exchange for confused looks, indifferent grunts, or worse—the need for more paperwork.  But my fantasy wasn’t a violent revenge fantasy, or anything like that: these people are just trying to get by, too, do they job, and avoid being a poor workless schmuck like me.

No, my fantasy is about hold music. What kind of tunes would play if hold music reflected the kind of work done at that office or business, e.g., the Unemployment Office?

Something like this:

1.       Gang of Four “Paralyzed”

2.       Captain Beefheart “Dropout Boogie”

3.       Bruce Springsteen “Johnny 99”

4.       Johnny Paycheck “Take This Job and Shove It”

5.       Alex Chilton  “Lost My Job”

I suppose anything from Cibo Matto would work for the grocery store check-out line, but what about the Post Office? Maybe this?

Now... Where were we..?

01 January 2009

Going, Going, Gone: The 20th Century

somewhere on UC's campus, two days after the election.

 

 

It's three days after Christmas, and, while it is 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? It is where it always is-on my hard drive. I've reinstalled and, same thing. Now it’s 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-a Sansa which holds a max of 4G's of tunes. Serious tunes, but not comprehensive. 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 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 suicidal a species as the previous history has warned us, but because 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, 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 "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 individual 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 revelatory that 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. Sprayed 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 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, and the constant noise that movement, any movement, forward will lead to an utter disaster.

The disaster, chicken little, is not really in a global sense, or even in a local sense, though you wouldn't know that by the howling of the blood beasts on AM radio; 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, after all, 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 41^st 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, because 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 imagined. Intellectualize the fact that, while you were living and breathing, this happened to you, to us, and figures 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 was attacked, and we turned, 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 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 protest, because that, by definition, was one who slavishly clung to tradition, 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 Neo-Conservative Whore. The guy who edited Rampart…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-though I would suspect he'd go looking for H and a chili dog instead.

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 crypto-fascist 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 name. Nirvana, and the peculiar genius of Kurt Cobain, confronted that storm, and won. Cobain, never comfortable with his victory, was unable to learn the essential survival trip of Bowie, became insufferable on stage as he was off stage, and since he was never able to separate Cobain the star from Cobain the human being, and was killed in the process. His death, in a way, was the catalyst for our torpor. “See, that hadn't worked. You can’t change anything. Nirvana didn't turn out to be our Beatles.”

So, we are back to “fuck it”.  It’s an easy pose for those without interest in maintaining humanity, only the mimesis; 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 eighties 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. 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? Whose 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 I 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 are 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…

Taylor, the misanthropic hero in the original film 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.

To my seven readers:

"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.

 

Posted by JettieSatellite, The Wizard of Covington at 12:34 PM 8 comments Links to this post