Two Hundred and Twenty

As soon as the 2016 election was won and lost, everyone began campaigning for the 2020 election, without a pause.  Government used to pause while elections were held.  Now elections are endless because there is no government.  

When the USSR collapsed, I knew the USA would be next.  Now all that seemed solid melts into air, all that seemed holy is profaned, and Man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his own kind.

The cities are crumbling, the planet's dying and all our elected representatives do is plunder the body politic.  Our elected representatives never did represent us, but now they don't even bother to pretend they govern, much less that they govern in our name and represent our interests.  

The rich reign, but do not rule.  There are no rulers any more, and no rules.   Why has it come to this?

It was always going to come to this.  We’ve always been a destructive and self-destructive species because we never knew what we wanted.  We never knew ourselves well enough to know what we wanted.

Two Hundred and Nineteen

Gaze long enough into the abyss, said Nietzsche, and the abyss will gaze back into you.  What is this abyss, and why would someone gaze into it? What do they hope, or fear, they’ll see? 

The abyss is the world.  We know we’re a part of the world, so we gaze into it, expecting to see ourselves there—a microcosm in that macrocosm—hoping to know ourselves, and our place in it.

But it’s not a mirror that shows us who we are.  The abyss gazes back at us, eyes without a face, because we are its face.

One Hundred and Eighteen

Watching Billy Idol sing Eyes Without A Face made me think of someone, but I didn't know who. 

Then YouTube recommended another music video for me—one in which a young Billy, looking like a choir boy who's hoping he'll be interfered with, sings Kiss Me, Deadly.  Apparently he's always been a cinephile, and began as a fan of American films, as most Brits do.  I was a fan of Brit films when I was around the same age as Kiss Me, Deadly Billy.  I learned English mostly from watching Brit films when I was a boy.

Remembering those days made me realize who it was that Billy Idol made me think of: Gene ‘Buddy’ Whitney.  But why?  The young Billy who sang Kiss Me, Deadly looked to be the same age that ‘Buddy’ and I were when we knew each other, but Billy Idol didn’t look anything like ‘Buddy’ Whitney. 

‘Buddy’ was a working-class boy—something punk rockers like Billy Idol only pretended to be.  I never saw ‘Buddy’ wear anything but a black leather jacket and pants, because he couldn’t afford a change of clothes, so he always looked intimidating; but he was the nicest boy in school, hence his nickname.  All the middle-class girls shunned him, of course; but we boys all adored him (Except for those boys who adored middle-class ‘Dickie’ Bell). 

'Buddy’ and Bertha.  I always had a boyfriend and a girlfriend at the same time.  Surely every boy is 'gender fluid'—or what Freud called polymorphous perverse—at that age, and every girl.  I can’t believe my generation was unique in that respect. But perhaps we were.  We did grow up to become free-loving hippies.  At least some of us did.  But our ‘summer of love’ ended badly.

I was spending the weekend in Bonnie’s bed when the riots broke out on Sunday morning.  I got dressed and went home, and we didn’t see each other again for weeks.  When we finally did, she told me she was engaged to marry someone else.

She said she didn’t love him, so nothing had to change between us; we could go on just as before.  But I couldn’t.  I had to change.  I wasn’t a boy any more.    

The last time I went in for a checkup, the doctor asked me what color my hair had been before it turned white.  She said she thought it must have been blond.  I told her it had been platinum blond when I was a boy, but it grew dark as I grew older.  Billy the handsome sailor, whose beauty strikes Claggart dead, became 'Buddy' as I grew older.  My hair had turned reddish brown by the time I went to college and met David.  

I was wearing black leather, too, by then, and no doubt looked as intimidating as 'Buddy' had.  David was a middle-class boy with platinum blond hair, a choir boy who hoped he'd be interfered with; but I was no Claggart.  I’m still a choir boy without a choir.

Two Hundred and Seventeen

I've been staying indoors and watching music videos on YouTube.  I can’t listen to serious music any more, so I’m watching only popular music videos instead.

Not today’s popular music, but the popular music of my childhood—what other children listened to while I was listening to Bach and Haydn.  It doesn’t seem quite as bad as the popular music of today, perhaps because it reminds me of my childhood.  There was no way of escaping it when I was young, and now I welcome anything that reminds me of my childhood.

But I think the popular music of my childhood really was better than today’s popular music, because it reflected reality more than today’s popular music does.  It was a child’s view of reality, but still reality. 

Back in those days, most popular singers came from poverty, especially black and country singers—Loretta Lynn really was a coal miners’ daughter—and found they could escape poverty by singing about it; at first with honesty, but gradually they marketed their suffering as sentimental self-pitying nostalgia.  Like Loretta Lynn, they performed poverty long after they became rich.

I've found I can enjoy that kind of music when I’m feeling sorry for myself.  The singers really had suffered, and earned the right to make a living performing their suffering for the entertainment of others.  But it is perverse.

Since the days of the Roman coliseum, and no doubt earlier, most popular entertainment has been perverse—a way for the people to forget their suffering, and join their masters in watching others suffer.

Mulvey was wrong about the male gaze.  Hollywood movies don’t empower their supposedly male audience by exposing the actress to their gaze.  On the contrary, they feminize the audience, making them passive and impotent voyeurs who spy on beautiful people they’ll never know having exciting adventures they’ll never have.    

The audience is masochistic, but they have their revenge.  The beautiful people they watch having exciting adventures onscreen pay for it by suffering failed marriages and addictions offscreen. 

If the audience’s gaze is male, as Mulvey claimed, it’s both homoerotic and pædophiliac.  Movie heroes used to be strong men who rescued damsels in distress.  Now they're boyish and vulnerable, fighting strong and powerful men who would have been heroes a generation ago.

Male fans of 'action' films are aware of their homoerotic subtext, and joke about it.  Like most secrets, this one stays a secret because everyone knows it, and keeps it.

The homoerotic male gaze is most obvious in music videos.  Earlier today I watched a YouTube music video of '80s pop star Billy Idol singing Eyes Without A Face.

Idol was absurdly beautiful, yet he dyed his hair platinum blond, making his natural beauty artificial.  He played a punk, and that, too, was artificial. He was actually middle class.  Most revealing of all, the song was about a French cult film.

Or was it?  The only thing the video shows is Idol's face against a black background.  That famous face is the object of Mulvey's supposedly male gaze, watched by Idol's anonymous and faceless audience.  And he's not suffering.

Two Hundred and Sixteen

All that we know, we knew in the beginning; and the longer we live, the more we forget.

In the beginning, our wise men said our bodies inspire us with desires that prevent us from seeing things as they are.  We can try to ignore those desires, but only when we leave our bodies will we see things clearly. 

Philosophy, said Socrates, is training for dying.  It purges the soul of those bodily desires that tempt us to see things as we wish and/or fear they are, and prepares us to see them as they really are.  This has been our greatest illusion.

In the beginning, every child knows it’s not immortal.  It had a beginning, and will therefore have an end.  But usually the longer it lives, the more reluctant it becomes to give up living; and the more it’s tempted to forget what it knows, and believe those who say death is not the end.

There is no beginning, and no end.  All is one, say the mystics who our wise men scorn.  We see reality as divided into things only because we are things.  Our bodies and our souls are equally illusory, such stuff as dreams are made on.

Two Hundred and Fifteen

This long disease, my life, is nearly over
And I’ve learned nothing
that I wasn’t born knowing
Because there’s nothing more to know
There’s nothing to know
There’s nothing

Two Hundred and Fourteen

I was running out of food, but all the free food pantries are inside churches, and all the churches are closed now, so I went online to look for other places where free food was being distributed.  

The only place I found was a middle school about twenty miles away.  All the schools are closed, too, but they were distributing food in this school's parking lot.

I arrived at the school half an hour before the time scheduled for distribution, but there was already a line of cars waiting.  It was two or perhaps three miles long, doubled back and forth, back and forth between rows of orange traffic cones set up in the school’s parking lot. 

The school is in a middle class neighborhood, and all the cars were SUVs, the favorite ride of middle class suburbanites.  Each was big, shiny and obviously new, looking as though it had just been driven out of the showroom.  These are the new poor.  I looked out of place in line, an old man in an old hatchback. 

The unemployment rate is higher now than it was at the height of the Great Depression, but no one is calling this a depression, much less the Greater Depression.  It's greater because Trump is president.  

Some people compare Trump to Hoover, because they claim Hoover did nothing when the economy collapsed back in 1929.  But some historians claim Hoover's actions actually began the economic recovery which FDR then built on and extended.  Hoover just didn't do enough, and quickly enough.

And far from doing nothing, Trump is using this depression to enrich himself, as a capitalist should.  

If Trump is no Hoover, Sanders is no FDR.  

FDR wasn't elected because he promised change, as Obama did and Sanders does.  He was a member of the American aristocracy, and became a reformer only after he was elected and saw how close the USA was to collapse.  FDR later boasted that his reforms saved capitalism. 

Sanders the social democrat could be a better president than FDR the capitalist, but we'll never know, because Sanders isn't an aristocrat, someone our rulers can trust will serve their interests as president, as they trusted FDR (He did serve their interests, but they're too stupid to realise it).  That's why the Democratic Party's bosses prefer to lose the presidential election to Trump the capitalist rather than win with Sanders the social democrat.  That's why this is already the Greater Depression, even though it's just beginning.