no supper tonight

junk food junk jobs junk drinks junk movies online pawnshops and shiny little cars backed by the brave new guarantee: if you lose your income in the next year, return it to us with no impact on your credit; commercials demanding that … the audience vote for their favorite commercial. Middlebrow AOR hits from the 1980s performed–no: staged–in front of a choreographed crowd. “Jet fighters and helicopters, tactical weapons teams, mobile bomb labs and robots, high-tech X-ray machines and sensors, intelligence databases and hundreds of uniformed police officers.”

Hmmm. A trailer for a dystopic movie, something in the vein of Blade Runner, V for Vendetta, The Matrix, Mission: Impossible?

Nah. All this unreality was real enough. This was the Super Bowl. And it was watched by 97  million of us.

  

Now that’s a pretty sizeable sample.  About as sizeable and representative a sample of The American People as you’re ever going to get. Go to the mirror, then, boy, and tell me what you see in the glass held up by the ad execs who understand so well and so deeply the national psyche, who know how to redesign our wants, and to soothe our fears, to incite our desire and to make the bad dreams go away.  What does the magickal  wall-mounted liquid plasma flat panel looking glass reveal? A population fending off advancing age by mainlining nostalgia, imminently unemployed, pawning off  great-grandma’s engagement ring in exchange for a down payment on a car they figure on returning within the year, grazing voraciously on sodium drenched crackers and make-believe tacos washed down with a watery cereal grain-based beverage preposterously labeled “beer,” and dulling their fears of Mullah Omar with a creepy combination of half-dressed lingerie NASCAR drivers and DreamWorks cartoon characters.

And these are the adults.

…BUT who—let’s look on the bright side!–also understand that better minds than theirs are working round the clock to bring us a greener, happier earth. Thanks, GE!: because of whom all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Whew! 

 Of course most ads for the most mainstream of audiences are going to push generic junk. The grand American culture, as Twain or Mencken would have told you, is built historically on two ideals: getting your hands on as much money as you can (whether via Cash4Gold or eTrade, the Super Bowl dangled gold).

 

 

and finding all manner of unwholesome and unnecessary crap upon which to  to spend it on (all the other ads). But the extremes of ultra-real grimness and wild fantasy we witnessed this year speak to an unhealthy bifurcation of spirit. The more desperate the sense of the Real, the more desperate the search for its opposite. Hence the 2008 Presidential campaign. The Weapons of Mass Destuction. The Coalition of the Willing.  Bud Lime. The GoDaddy Girl. Monsters vs. Aliens.

  

2. And we all shine on

 

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:

shine, perishing republic…..

 

Robinson Jeffers’ “Shine, Perishing Republic.” Previous editions of  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, the gold standard in university-level literature courses, and the first place I encountered him back in the 70s, included seven poems by Robinson Jeffers. The latest edition omits him entirely.

 
3. Signs o’ the times here in Stoughton

We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth.—Barack Obama, First Inaugural Address

A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.—William Blake, “London”

 

… I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit

 3. Signs of the Times Everywhere Damn Else: And February Made Me Shiver / With Every Paper…

 

…and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;

And, well, damn but if it all the papers just didn’t seem to be saying the same thing over the past few weeks. You don’t have to read too closely:

 

Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don’t know anyone who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for has reached the end of the line (James Howard Kunstler’s blog; see also “Wake Up, America. We’re Driving Toward Disaster,” Washington Post, 2/9).

The economic crisis has trumped bullets and bombs in the intelligence agencies’ latest assessment of threats to the United States….. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told a Senate panel Thursday that if the crisis lasts more than two years, it could cause some nations’ governments to collapse… Blair said already the financial meltdown, which started in the United States and quickly infected other countries, has eroded confidence in American economic leadership and belief in free markets. (AP: “Official: U.S. seeing new threat in economic crisis,” Feb. 12)

What we are now seeing is the beginning of an inevitable downward adjustment in American living standards to conform with our actual place in the world. As a nation of consumers, and not producers, with little to offer to the rest of the world except raw materials, food crops, military hardware and bad films (none of which industries employ many people), we are headed to a recovery that will not feel like a recovery at all (Dave Lindorff, “The Ugly Truth,” Counterpunch 2/7).

France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe. It’s a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. Europe’s time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air. (Ian Traynor, “Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets,” The Guardian 1/31/09)

With consumers shutting their wallets and corporate revenues plunging, the business landscape may start to resemble a graveyard in 2009. Household names like Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things have already perished. And chances are, those bankruptcies were just an early warning sign of a much broader epidemic.(Rick Newman, “15 Companies That Might Not Survive 2009,” US News & World Report 2/11)

Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago. (Walden Bello, “Asia: The Coming Fury,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 2/9/09)

Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.… Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out. (Chris Hedges, “It’s Not Going to be OK,” rpt CommonDreams 2/2)

[The Argentinians] shouted, “¡Que se vayan todos!” (“All of them must go!”) and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina’s 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn’t directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model–this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism. It’s taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment. (Naomi Klein, “All of them Must Go,” naomiklein.com)

The people we trust with our money turn out to be thieves of a magnitude not known to history. Our president lies us into war, ruins damned near every institution of our government with political folly, and then retires safe from the law in the western sun. You can’t even ask the question “What the hell’s wrong with us?” because the answer requires decades of explanation. An increasing number of Americans wonder if our country will even survive and a scary proportion of those have asked the troubling follow up question as to whether we deserve to survive and have entered our final decline. (James Moore, “The End Times Chronicles,” Huffington Post, 2/11)

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement on the ongoing foreclosure crisis: “According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Moody’s economy.com claims that nearly five million families could lose their homes to foreclosure between 2009 and 2011.( Dennis Kucinich, Press release 2/11)

 

…Matters seem especially acute of late, with the entire American anthill in turmoil as its common god, the almighty economy, waves bye-bye while being noisily sucked down the global gurgler… despite the joys of Facebook, iPod, and the consumption of some 25 million pounds of hot wings on Superbowl Sunday. A place where “normal” life includes Viagra, all the fried chicken you can stuff, round the clock televised crotch shots and HDTV as national mandate…. For Americans though, it’s an explosive issue. Because if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country… Given the economic and societal breakdown now underway and accelerating toward completion, Obama or no Obama (What is this thing of ours, this national obsession with saviors, elected or otherwise?), it’s bound to be interesting to see if they can indoctrinate, dope, counsel, and lock up or medicate the dissidence, and perhaps outright resistance that will occur. Whether the final American collapse takes four years or forty years is anybody’s guess. But it’s gonna take a passel of behavioral management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows. (Joe Bageant, “A Commodity Called Misery,” Counterpunch 2/10)

 

Concrete Blonde cover Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.” I’ve been haunted by this version for months now, can’t shake it.  Always loved Johnette, who doesn’t even begin to show what she can she do till 2:56.

 

 
 5. Oh, We’ve Met the Enemy, All Right

A year ago—six months, even—and you would have rolled your eyes at all this gloom-‘n-doom. Now, hmm, maybe you’re not so sure?  Fluctuating gasoline prices that simply do not make any sense. All those banks: scenes right of A Wonderful Life, except instead of Jimmy Stewart paying out of his own pocket it’s Bernie Madoff springing out the back door with the loot. Layoffs so deep that state unemployment claims agencies’ phone systems are going down. E-coli on a bun, salmonella in the salted nuts, spinach—spinach for goddsake!—crawling with both.  For goddsake, we don’t need Dreamworks. The monsters are here; the aliens are among us.

And so are the nagging questions. The kind you hoped you wouldn’t lie awake asking yourself. Could it be that all this–it  wasn’t all Dick Cheney’s fault?

Those questions that you put on the backburner during those lazy hazy crazy days of summer, The Summer  of Hope, The Summer of Change:  And that no gaggle of technocrats is going to huddle at Camp David and make it all better?

The questions that mean that, yep, the fundamental rules do still apply: That these apocalyptic visions come to life– and the lifestyle being sold us over the course of the Super Bowl–are yin and yang, hatched from the same Ledean egg?

The questions we don’t wanna hear, don’t wanna ask, but that are grown so momentous now as to begin to block out the light,  the ones lemme tell you the weed and the beer and poetry, and the pawnshop and the godaddy girl can only banish for so long: Could it be that the problems are so fundamental, so systemic, that nothing less than “The Revolution of Everyday Life” is called for and that, golly, renouncing Satan, and all of his works, and all his pomps, just … might … mean … renouncing Doritos and Bud Light? And that this time, there’s really not choice in the matter?

Not according to our new president, who has made it clear that all we need to do to succeed in this endeavor is to develop news ways of doing old things. Only the tactics need tweaking: “We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.”

Oh.

“Our Way of Life.”  junk food junk jobs junk drinks junk movies online pawnshops 80s pop helicopters, tactical weapons teams, mobile bomb labs and robots “If you lose your income in the next year”….

Our Way of Life.

 

 

To his credit, Obama also quoted St Paul in that same address and suggested that “we put away the things of childhood.”  Americans, being who they are, responded by slipping on one of the 125 million pairs of 3D goggles distributed free at Pepsi/SoBe Life Water and and watching the ad for “Monsters vs Aliens.”

 

Me, yeah, I’m pretty sure that Pogo was right. No, I’m convinced of it. It’s a hackneyed line and image by now, but it raises a troubling question. Probably the most troubling question you can ask yourself.

 

6. The Center Cannot Hold

Jeffers’ poem continues and concludes:

…But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say –

God, when he walked on earth.

 

 

7. And where do we go from here / Which is the way that’s clear…?

 

An exceptionally grouchy cultural commentator by the name of Curtis White has written, among a great many other splendid things, a thin but essential tirade called The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and Total Work (PoliPoint, 2006). In which he says:

For Thoreau, when the time was out of joint, when the state had failed its own idea of itself, he felt a necessity to remove himself from it, to refuse its social order, in spite of the personal price he would have to pay for the gesture. What’s striking in the example that Thoreau offers us is how familiar his enormous and tragic sense of betrayal is. For us, too, things seem out of joint. America is not America. When the Bush-Cheney administration orchestrated a war in Iraq, many of us said, and continue to say, “not in my name.” This is the equivalent of saying “Your society is not one that I have willingly joined. You may not proceed as if I were one with you.”

This gesture of self-alienation is the first moment of disobedience. But we should see that it is not a “revolutionary” disobedience. Thoreau’s disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won’t live in your world. I will live as though your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it (106).

(Another gentleman expressed a similar sentiment in these words: “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service….  These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” [John16:2; 33])

I myself am tempted, here and there, to give Prof. White a call: “All that refusal, Curtis, how’s that workin’ out for you?”  Because to be honest it isn’t working that great for me. It’s a lot of work, all this “self-alienation,” and let’s just say that it doesn’t get ya invited to a whole lotta parties. Understandably so.

On the plus side, though, the resistance-’n-refusal part part is still a far cry from open rebellion and revolt with its attendant consequences: sitting home alone on Saturday nights still beats sitting in the county jail. It really isn’t that hard. It’s just constant. You stand at the fish counter, you note that the “salmon” was “farm raised,” that it’s been injected with chemical dye to make, it, uh, salmon-colored–they have to post this kind of information now, at least in Massachusetts–and you say: “That is not `fish.’ I will not eat that shit.”  (Then, of course, you wander over to the meat case, where even greater horrors await you).

You eat something else. It doesn’t actually make you feel very smug because frankly with a nice fresh ginger, garlic and red pepper tamari marinade, that corn-fed salmon wouldn’t taste half bad, and you wanted fish. But you know that these days, it isn’t about being virtuous. It’s a matter of survival. You don’t eat the salmon of woe, you don’t bank at Bank of America, you don’t feed your kids Ritalin–not  to feel good about yourself, but because you know that what you are refusing is participation in the  inexorable environmental, political, and spiritual suicide of the republic, and god knows if you’re anything like me you have enough on your conscience as it is, you don’t need that on top it all. 

But like I said the hard part isn’t the hundreds of small daily acts of refusal. No, the hard part is learning what requires resistance.  But you’ve been around the block, you’re considered a bit of a shrewd cookie–you have a nose for what’s genuine.  And if you don’t, if you think that what  Bruce did at halftime had anything to do with rock-and-roll then for goddsake get to YouTube and look at some old clips of Patti Smith, and if you think that shocking-pink slab in the fish case has anything to do with real fish then for goddsake get yourself a rod and reel and go catch a real live bass, if you think Taco Bell has any connection to Mexican food then  get the hell out of honkyhood for an evening, and if you think the godaddy girl has anything to do with, well, anything remotely real, you best start by getting the hell off the Net and staying off it, and killing your tv and burning down your library even because you’ve been living waaay too mediated a life.  What ultimately requires resistance is, of course,  evil–but there’s nothing wrong with starting by refusing whatever is fake. That’ll keep us busy.

Then we can move on to batmanesque escapades combatting evil. At which point–because it gets lonely out there in refusal-land–you take the advice playwright Tony Kushner gave the grads at Smith back in the evil days of 2002, in the culmination to a hysterically funny commencement address that I still re-read for inspiration:

It’s time to stop talking. Oh it always goes like this, I start out not knowing what to say and before I know it I can’t shut up. So commence already! A million billion mazels to you and your parents and your teachers and Vassar for having done so self-evidently magnificent a job. I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry, now now now, damn the critics and the bad reviews: the world is waiting for you! Organize. Speak the truth.

“Speak the truth” and “organize.” That sounds about right. Along with, maybe, eat the truth, watch the truth, read the truth. Not sure what the truth is? Me neither. But we all know what’s false, what’s second rate, what’s merely spectacle, what we don’t need, what’s crap.  What’s a lie. What’s in-authentic. And, really, who wants to keep on wallowing at that trough?

Post Script:

 …look around you, all around you,
Riding on a copper wave.
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?