Blackout

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Auld Lang/Sign

As I sit in the Cock and Bull Public House (otherwise known as the English Livingroom) pondering the past year and what it means or meant, I am brought back to words and the meaning of words, as a means of reflection. 


Words always contain their opposition in the definition--or rather, our understanding of that definition.  This year was a year of contrasts, and I cannot help but appreciate the play within those contrasts, because the nuance between the oppositions containna truth all their own. 


Certainly, the contrast between Assistant Professor and unemployed educator is a stark, devastating reality, but even within that opposition is the very meaning of the play within a word as we understand it:  though employed, it was not secure, thus the promise of employment, vis a vis, security, was not really present nor a presence for any number of reasons.  Its opposite, unemployment, where insecurity is almost by definition, and. certainly presence, was not as fraught with despair and loathing as I had imagined.  These last months have seen joy, laughter and, to my shock, survival.   The world did not end.


The reality of words grabbed me by the back of the head, and forced me to look at its end;  life, as I had know it with a dear friend and colleague flowed too easily into its opposition, and a loved one, a fellow traveler and inspiration, slipped away in the hostile angst of a summer where the world was too present, and its cold truths, brutally vivid.


Yet, other words, ideas, have experienced this play as well: the world has seen fundamental change as people reassert humanity in governments and society in hopes of reclaiming their future.  The opposition between the " past" and " the future" becomes a false dichotomy as both co-mingle in the dynamic present once again.  No longer are either an institutional oppression but a positive vehicle to the new.


If there is a fine point on this, its how stark oppositions are tethered to the thing they reference.  Last year, things seemed hopeless, crumbling facades of sanity, self, and society were everywhere.  Plainly...life fucking sucked.  Now, a year on, the worst has come to pass, yet the things that tell me what life is worth remain as rocks.   What was barren a year ago is now a garden of delight.  Where death haunted summer, life and renewed purpose illuminate the winter--and they are not mutually exclusive, but inextricably bound: Our final descents, as Joyce notes, falls faintly in the universe, upon "all the living and the dead".  We must all shine on.


"Shining on" are the words of Love. Love is always the biggest, boldest, baddest, most vexing word.  Its meaning is the panoply which defines our natures. 


Here's to it:  It's actually all you need.

The Owl (Update 03 December 2011)

BLEED FOR ME You’ve been hanging ‘round / With an enemy of the state / Come with me to the building / That no one stops to watch / Chorus: C’mon bleed / C’mon bleed / C’mon bleed / Bleed for me / We’ll strap you to a pipe / Electrodes on your balls / C’mon scream / C’mon writhe / Face down in a pool of piss / (Chorus) / In the name of world peace / In the name of world profits / America pumps up our secret police / America wants fuel / To get it, it needs puppets / So what’s ten million dead / If it’s keeping out the Russians / We’re well trained by the CIA / With yankee tax money in Ft. Bragg / The Peace Corps builds US labor camps / When they think they’re building schools / Ha Ha / When cowboy Ronnie comes to town / Forks out his tongue at human rights / Sit down, enjoy our ethnic meal / Dine on some charbroiled nuns / Try a medal on / Smile at the mirror as the cameras click / And make big business happy - / Anytime / Anywhere / Maybe you’ll just disappear / (Chorus)

I AM THE OWL I am your plumber / No I never went away / I still bug your bedrooms / And pick up everything you say / It can be a boring job / To monitor all day your excess talk / I hear when you’re drinking / And cheating on your lonely wife / I play tape recordings / Of you to my friends at night / We’ve got a girl in bed with you / You’re on candid camera / We just un-elected you / Chorus: I am the owl / I seek out the foul / Wipe ’em away / Keep America free / For clean livin’ folks like me / If you demonstrate / Against somebody we like / I’ll slip on my wig / And see if I can start a riot / Transform you to an angry mob / All your leaders go to jail for my job / But we ain’t the Russians / Political trials are taboo / We’ve got our secret / Ways of getting rid of you / Fill you full of LSD / Turn you loose on a freeway / (Chorus) / Send you spinning / Send you spinning / Send you spinning all over the freeway / Spinning on the crowded freeway / Spinning on the freeway / Spinning on the freeway / Spin / Spin / Spin - lookout! / The press, they never even cared / Why a youth leader walked into a speeding car / In ten years we’ll leak the truth / By then it’s only so much paper / You know, Watergate hurt / But nothing really ever changed / A teeny bit quieter / But we still play our little games / We still play our little games / (repeat) / I am the owl From The Dead Kennedys Plastic Surgery Disasters.

Plastic Surgery Disasters is one of my favorite albums. Ever.

And for my money, it represents not only the ethos of the band most powerfully, it has the most powerfully coherent words Jello Biafra has committed to either page or tape, his take on America post-Vietnam American politics vividly rendered in all its snarky left wing funhouse glory.

I have always thought of “Bleed for Me” and “I am the Owl” as constituting a kind of suite; thematically, both are about the withering of democracy in these United States, though the former tackles foreign policy, and the latter, domestic spying and the silencing of dissent. Biafra was, and is, always acutely aware of the inextricable nature of foreign and domestic policy, seeing that these things are manifestations of the powerful corporate interests which these prongs of the government are designed to propagate.   Bob Dylan once observed that “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” and while Biafra is more likely a Phil Ochs fan (he covered “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” after all), he’d agree, and add “Not only does it swear, it threatens with a butcher knife” Or a gun. Or a bomb. Or a plurality thereof.

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The other day, I was driving to Devou Park to run around the park for a while, and while waiting on the light on KY 8 to turn left and head into the park, I saw a white SUV from the Department of Homeland Security a car or so ahead of me.  This wasn’t the first time  I’ve seen DHS vehicle; that was a couple of months ago in Cincinnati, but I’ve seen more lately. I mused, or rather was amused, as the SUV headed west on 8 and I turned on Crescent Avenue, that perhaps some terrorist plot was hatching out of the Bromley Yacht Club and they were on the case?  Maybe an invasion of drunken Mount St. Joseph students via the Anderson Ferry needed to be thwarted?  Chuckling, I entered the park, fired up my MP3 player, put on my Adidas Kanadia TR3’s, and made my way around the park.

Yet, I couldn’t seem to shake an increasing feeling of dread: “Why do we need more Federal Policing? Isn’t that what the FBI does?  The Secret Service? The NSA? The ATF? The DEA? And why are they driving around Covington?”

The answer is obviously 09/11, silly.  Remember? Everything Changed, right?

Right…

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DHS was created by President George W. Bush to protect us from the evil-doers, and folded, under one Department, everything from FEMA to the Coast Guard. The goal was more effective communication between disparate department, as this was the excuse du jour as to why Al Qaeda incinerated over three thousand people that September morning( of course, the two bickering agencies whose intelligence should have been shared in order to prevent the attack, the FBI and the CIA, are not in the DHS trust tree, so there you go. Then there’s the issue of a certain memo, obscurely titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US”, that was ignored by the Bush Administration-- but hey, why dredge up ancient history?).  Add a little Congressional negligence in the form of the USAPATRIOT Act (summary here;  full text here), and its reauthorizations, we are perhaps safer in the bodily sense from terrorists. 

However, the rights guaranteed to us, are undermined in unprecedented ways by DHS, with an assist from the USAPATRIOT Act, and now, we are seeing just how.  Let’s start with the DHS mission statement:             

The Department's mission is to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards. Our efforts are supported by an ever-expanding set of partners. Every day, the more than 230,000 men and women of the Department contribute their skills and experiences to this important mission. Our duties are wide-ranging, but our goal is clear: a safer, more secure America.

Like many Americans, I wanted to give the government the benefit of the doubt after 9/11 that some paradigm shift was necessary, but when it became clear that government was seeking sweeping powers, I became alarmed, despite official noise about being an “alarmist” and that they were just catching the bad guys.  Nine years later, it’s becoming clear who the bad guys are:

…the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

So…wait a sec:  Peaceful dissent is now the realm of “bad guys”?  How in the hell are teachers, librarians, pipe fitters, fire fighters and students, seeking redress of the cronyism between corporate power and government, fall under the heading of “terrorism”? How is this crackdown contributing to a “safer, more secure America”?

The answer may lay in either the words “other hazards” or in the tension we can apply to “a safer, more secure America.” It seems that Occupations are about the insecurity of most Americans, the loss of New Deal safety nets, and the stratification of our society into rich and poor.  Who is becoming more secure?  :

For the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens…

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised [sic] Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

Apparently, the only America worth making “safer, more secure” is the America of business, corporations, banks and their abettors in government.  The institution of government, which was designed to be of and for the people, guaranteeing rights and arbitrating, even advocating, for the people rather than for other institutions, i.e., corporations is now an ideological construction, existing subjectively while it objectifies we who it once contained and protected it.  The Government, rather than the people it serves, evidentally needs the protecting.  America, now just another ideological construction rather than a reality to most of us, is the gated community for the corporate-fiduciary plutarchy.  The rest of us serfs can wait on the drippings from the lords table, or wait on his wrath.

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May 2008: During the heat of the Democratic Primaries, as a full throated Obama supporter, I articulated on the old blog why I could not support Clinton:

When Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, I was filled with dread, because, with the Imperial Presidency of Bush, which has expanded executive powers beyond anything imagined at the founding of this Republic, it would be of the utmost importance that our next President roll those back, and re-establish the balance. In other words, avoid the awesome temptation to try and do some good with this power, because there is no good that can come of this unbalance. When I thought of Hillary Clinton, I thought about the Nineties, and I realized there was no goddamned way she would restore balance to the force. Case closed.

I do not have buyer’s remorse so much as I am feeling resigned to the facticity of our corporatist plutarchy; I have watched President Obama, for all his promise and rhetoric, the dream of something not Bush, not Clinton, not Reagan, but new, ignore or contradict the spirit of his campaign.  Three years on, and it is clear that the new boss seems the same as the old boss, as it were. And, for all ire among liberals, progressives, Democrats toward the Bush Administration for the war, DHS, the USA Patriot Act and the like, the deafening quiet about Obama’s failure to redress and re-establish the rule of law not only speaks to the administration’s priorities, but the stupid mascot mania of the party of the people, and its willingness to sacrifice principle for power:

Telling the story of Obama's first term without including any of it is a shocking failure of liberalism. It's akin to conservatism's unforgivable myopia and apologia during the Bush Administration. Are liberals really more discontented with Obama's failure to reverse the Bush tax cuts than the citizen death warrants he is signing? Is his ham-handed handling of the debt-ceiling really more worthy of mention than the illegal war he waged? Is his willingness to sign deficit reduction that cuts entitlement spending more objectionable than the fact that he outsourced drone strikes to a CIA that often didn't even know the names of the people it was killing?

Why would anybody  feel that they can take the tools of despotism and turn them to freedom?  Using evil to do good?  I am at a loss as to recall a time when this has ever been accomplished? The cognitive dissonance is so stark as to throttle all sense of logic.

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While Jello Biafra and The Dead Kennedys are certainly leftist in political persuasion, it would stupidly reductive to think of them in terms of “Democrat” and “Republican” or “Liberal” and “Conservative”. Their 1979 single (and signature tune) “California Ubër Alles”, before it was recast as a Reagan warning, was a scathing critique of the quintessential liberal California politician, then Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown.  Biafra wrote of the dire consequences of the ideological institution, the cult of personality that sits as its titular head, and the forces which wield power in our country.  Don’t be fooled by “liberals”; they are just as capable of horror as anybody else, particularly when the people are robbed of their subjectivity, and instead are reduced to tools of political expediency, sacrificed to save the institution they supposedly serve those people, or historical ambition.  Obama the liberal, like candidate Clinton, like President Clinton, could not resist exploiting the holes poked in the Constitution by their predecessors to further their own goals.  Whatever the wrong headed motivation, however much good these people think they are doing or whether it is just a cynical power grab, one thing is abundantly clear: our collective welfare is only a concern insofar as our ability to enrich and further entrench the few. Our sacrifices in service are things to exploit, our voices are to be ignored or silenced through propaganda or violence.  Either cheer for the way it is, or shut the fuck up. 

I am tired of being told to shut the fuck up…
 

UPDATE:  AlterNet's Josh Holland thinks that Ms. Wolf may be connecting unconnected dots:

…if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.”

But there has not been a single report offered by any media outlet suggesting that anyone – federal officials or police organizations – is directing or in any way exerting pressure on cities to crack down on their occupations. Instead, there have been a lot of dark ruminations that such an effort is underway…

I really hope Mr. Holland is correct and Ms. Wolf is darkly ruminating; however, with the Defense Authorization Act seemingly suspending Habeas Corpus for Americans on American soil, I am, sadly, not so sure.

  

Yuengling Blues: Institutional Hubris and its Avatars (UPDATE 12 Nov. 2011)

The Deacon, my friend of nearly twenty years, called me yesterday to see if I wanted to go to lunch at Wild Mike’s, and, since I was was willing to be distracted from more mundane chores like grocery shopping, buying toilet paper, and the like, I readily agreed.   I finished up the pedagogical work I had commenced a few hours before (again, willing to be distracted from what feels alternately like preparation/ praxis and windmill tilting), showered, shaved, and hit the road, listening to a mix that included Bob Marley, Hank Williams III, Johnny Cash, The Delfonics and Erykah Badu, devoutly praying that the recently unleashed in Ohio, Pennsylvania’s finest Lager  Yuengling would be awaiting as the frosty accompaniment to the Stupid Hot Garlic and Hot Mike’s Mix I would be consuming.   I was glad I had skipped Breakfast.

As I rolled in to The Deacon’s driveway, I found him in his garage, smoking a cigarette, listening to Dan Patrick on ESPN radio.  We caught up for a minute on our lives, since I had just seen The Deacon two weeks before as we watch the surprisingly mighty Cincinnati Bengals freight train the hapless Seattle Seahawks, but it was impossible to ignore the harrowing conversation on the radio: Penn State. Coach Sandusky. Forcible Sodomy on a child.  Joe Paterno. Who knew what?  When?

The Deacon, taking a draw from his cigarette, blurted “Somebody needs to shoot that motherfucker.”

“How do you not stop that if you walk in on it?” I replied, wanting to seem reasonable but enraged by gross predation “I’d kick his ass, puke, and then call the cops. Prison is full of people who can trace where it went horribly wrong to a guy like Sandusky.”

After a mutual silence, punctuated by the horrible droning of soul killing details, almost without any other recourse, I broke: “Hey, I’m starving! Let’s eat!” feeling ashamed that my own horror wanted to badly change the subject…

Except the subject can’t be changed; the failure here is institutional and epically immoral, constituting, in my mind, a clear criminal conspiracy going all the way to the president’s office. Paterno fired? He’s lucky he’s not under indictment. 

Lucky to not be under indictment? Not lucky so much as institutionalized, judging by the student body’s reaction…

There is a hubris in being institutionalized to the degree that someone like Joe Paterno is, and to question, let alone, fire someone like Paterno is akin to attacking the institution itself.  These students, rather than flip cars or gather in the coach’s yard demanding answers as to why he protected a child rapist, rather than holding a vigil for the victims—poor kids—these children of privilege exploded in anger at the media. How dare these people question Coach? How dare this hard-core reality invade ridiculous torpor of my undergraduate partying?  And like the institution, with all its hubris, the students, in all the hubris in being young, dumb and spoiled, want it all to go away.   Why didn’t they just shut the fuck up?

Look, I’m not going to make hay out of the wrecked lives of these kids, now young adults, to further a metaphor, but I couldn’t help but think about how people will blame the victims of predation to protect avatars of various institutions. Certainly, watching the GOP debates have been exercises in  victim-blaming; from the cheering of hypothetical death of uninsured patients, to the booing of real LGBT soldiers to last night’s audience  toddler tantrum of Maria Bartiromo for having the temerity to ask Fred Thompson o’ the Month Herman Cain about a pattern of sexual imposition and his moral fitness to serve, all demonstrate an institutional hubris.   How dare you question Herman Cain; as a business man, he loves capitalism. You question Herman Cain, you question America!

The equation goes like this:

A  person entrenched within an Institution, and exhibiting the ostensible best virtues of that institute (such as bringing in mounds of cash, keeping the alumni happy, or being a good company person) will exist symbiotically with that institution, so that each become a priori unimpeachable (whether ideologically, historically, power and/or money wise).

 e.g. 1: Joe Paterno= Penn State.  Joe Paterno=Unimpeachable character, therefore Penn State=Unimpeachable character.

It’s not difficult to see how people get upset when this proposition proves disastrously wrong, but blame the paradigm, not the victims of the paradigm.

e.g.2: Businessman (say, Herman Cain)=Capitalism.  Capitalism=unimpeachably good, therefore Business=unimpeachable good.

Which, of course, is predicated upon the following:

e.g. 3:  America=Capitalism.  America=No need to Apologize for anything, therefore Capitalism=No need to Apologize for anything.

I realize these are not tight, koan-like Wittgensteinian propositions, but they express what seems to be the logic which informs this kind of institutionalization (and yes, before anybody throws the tu quoque card…yeah, this applies to Obama, too, for crissakes).  It was inconceivable under Paterno that such a thing could have happened, because he was (ostensibly) such an upright, moral human being.  Similarly, as evidenced by the contempt the current crop of GOP candidates and their sycophants have for the Occupations, the unemployed, the homeless and the foreclosed upon, that the institution of capitalism could have failed, because that means that America failed. You saying America ain’t no good, buddy?

So what’s left?  We have the shattered lives of these young people.  We have the people of this country watching their lives slip from their control, our manifest destinies manifesting corporate serfdom, and the privileged few flipping cars because of the audacity to question the unquestionable.  One wonders what could be accomplished if these students used that energy positively, and for the protection of the vulnerable how different things would be. As it is, they seem to be only worried about the justifiable ribbing they will take for their made in Guatemala Penn State Sweat shirt, and how their Saturday is ruined.

Update: Penn State alumni and friend of the blog Susan Bernstein’s, with her husband Steven Cormany’s, letter to the Trustees. Thomas Day sees a generational facet to institutional hubris.

Solemn Hope

I had planned on posting something on Occupy Cincinnati today; however, this is huge. It was Iraq that helped reactivate, for better or worse, The_Wizard politically, got me into this blogging game.  While I have my grave concerns about the President's commitment to the poor, working and middle class, I am not blind to the contrasts between this president and his predecessor.

It is not lost on most of us that this president has been hired to clean up the previous president's gigantic, horrendous fuck-ups, a thankless job. If there is anything to be gleaned from the two videos, it’s the humility on President Obama's part. He didn't parachute onto an aircraft carrier or anything so ostentatious. No, he solemnly, delivered the news we've been waiting for these nine years, resigned to reality of what we have lost on this fool's errand.  There's no party here; the broken hearts of tens of thousands mean that no champagne should be popped. You cannot celebrate this as a victory, because we have won nothing. You can hug a veteran, and buy that person a beer. That is the least we can do.  We didn't win anything.

Contrasting this to the PR hand job Bush foisted upon us all, and the cruel cynicism of that administration is laid bare once again, like a festering wound who's scab will not stay put.  We did this for no good reason. And he threw a party eight years ago to celebrate, with all the self-aggrandizing of an idiot Caesar. He was that stupid; his people thought we were, too.

And this seems to have been the millennial narrative written by the cold warriors hell bent on keeping the future at bay, and continue in that capacity as they demonize our slow collective realization that we are entitled to a better today, and tomorrow, than these greedy, evil motherfuckers think we are, and today, as with the past few months with the Occupations, we may yet get there.

A popular talking point with those who fear tomorrow belies the tenacity of yesterday: Quit Blaming Bush. Obama is President, and what’s he done? 

Rather than list accomplishments in an attempt to persuade the persuadable or anything like that, I would remind people that Bush really fucked things up. REALLY. FUCKED. THINGS. UP.  And while Obama, as I wrote at the outset, often gives me pause, I cannot, in all fairness, forget the nightmare of incompetence, old paradigms, cronyism and paranoia that came before, nor can I pretend that many of the same actors, or their facsimiles, would love nothing more than to bring back the “good old days”.   However much of a shit sandwich it maybe for me and my politics, I will be compelled to vote against such backsliding in 2012.

Meditations on Unemployment, Politics and the Summer of Despair

For the past couple years, as the Ohio Collegiate restructuring unfolded, the angst and dread over my future, both as an academic and a rent payer,  have sought long distance, off peak, and sometimes beer fueled (on my end) conversations with my dear friend, colleague (is it weird to still have colleagues when one no longer has an institution?) and mentor Susan Naomi Bernstein. I have always found her counsel wise, her optimism heartening, and the integrity of not only her pedagogy but the world view from which it sprang to be both a comfort and a battle cry: Tikkun Olam. Heal the World.

This hasn’t always been easy, and I’ve found myself of late reflecting her moral authority back, her counsel. Like many Americans, including this one writing, she has found herself on the outside looking in, between positions…euphemisms aside, she, like me, and like the over 9 percent of Americans (this, of course, does not include those who are no longer eligible for assistance) are on their asses and without work. And like many Americans, it is difficult to maintain any sense of optimism and not giving in to despair when the news is almost invariably shitty. 

This summer has been particularly difficult for both of us; both of us have been engaged in exhausting—and disappointing—job searches and interview processes.  I have been teaching, finishing a thirty credit hour graduate certificate, for five years (autumn, winter, spring, summer, rinse, repeat) knowing that my department would likely be dissolved, and for the last year, knowing that my contract would not be renewed, and I would teach my last class the night before I was officially separated.  On top of this, we both lost a friend, colleague, inspiration and beer buddy, Adam Vine, to the lightless void of suicide.

Through on top of that the ridiculous Rochambeau of our politics, the overheated rhetoric of the Dick Armey’s 2010 useful congressional idiots, the spineless pandering of the President, who we had invested so much into and seemed to be just another spokes model for the crypto-Reagonomics of the Clinton- era “Neo”Liberalism (or, when the New Left decided to work at Dad’s bank and go to Dead shows on the weekend), things seemed bleak. Depression and hopelessness set in: exhausted, and it seemed that the bad guys would win.  The America that had the promise to change things, to continue toward that more perfect union, that could build things and create living wages, the America that if you worked hard, found your niche, had a place for you…vamos.  If Richard III saw that “Now is the winter of our discontent…”, this was surely the Summer of our Despair.  Or, to quote Jim Lahey “the winds of shit” seemed to be swirling, and nobody has a jacket.

“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.