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.

Two Hundred and Thirteen

None of this seems real.  Why is that?

But it's never seemed real.  My entire life has been as predictable as a play—and not a well-written play, something by Shakespeare.  Why is that? 

Surely I'm not the only one who feels this.  Surely this feeling is the reason why so many philosophers say we live in a world of illusion, so many mystics say we are ourselves illusions—the reason why scientists used to say we're a swirl of atoms in empty space, and now say we're holograms.  Whatever reality is, surely it isn't anything like this.  If this really were all there is, we'd welcome death.

But we do.  We're destroying our world and ourselves because we created a world of illusion, and believed it's real.  Now we know better.  But this new hell's no more real than the hells and heavens in which we used to believe.

I wish I could live—really live—once before I die.

Two Hundred and Twelve

I’m having dreams again.  Strange dreams.  Not like the ones I used to have, more real than waking life.

They’re about her, of course.

In these new dreams I am who I am, for a change, living as I live.  But I live with a beast, some monster out of Lovecraft.  It looks hideous, but I love it because I know that beneath that hideous exterior it’s her.

She was the world to me.  Now she’s dead, and the world is hideous.  Perhaps it always was, but not to me because of her.  Now it is, but I still love it because of her.

Two Hundred and Eleven

I had an appointment this morning to have my income taxes done; but when I arrived at city hall the building was closed, so I drove back home and telephoned AARP. 

The woman who answered said all their offices are closed because of the pandemic, and told me to call the IRS.  I did, and the woman who answered said there’s only one office in the county still open and doing free income tax preparation for senior citizens, so I went there. 

I drove for a couple of hours, passing few cars along the way; so few that their drivers were ignoring traffic signals and driving through red lights.  It reminded me of the empty streets during the race riots. 

I finally found the place, a big multistoried office building standing alone in a rural wilderness.  After parking in its nearly empty lot, I entered the building and wandered through its empty halls until I finally found someone.  There seemed to be no more than four or five people in this building which, judging from its size, probably holds well over a thousand office workers on an ordinary day.

Rain had been falling all morning, but it had stopped by the time I left.  Only then did it occur to me to wonder why I’d gone out on a day like this, when most people are heeding the warnings to stay indoors.  Damp and windy air is the perfect vehicle for a virus, and I—an old man in poor health—am its perfect target.  But although I live in fear—or would, if I allowed myself to feel anything—it’s not death I fear.

When I got back home, I was surprised to find the latest issue of the NYRB had been delivered.  So many places are closed that I didn’t think the post office was still open.

Instead of an article about the pandemic, as I expected, this issue contains an article about the resurgence of fascism.  I seldom go anywhere or see anyone, so I have little cause to fear I’ll be infected with the virus; but spending most of my time on the internet makes me acutely aware that fascism’s spreading through the body politic like a virus.

Our masters are responsible for both pandemics.  By destroying the natural world, they released a parasite from the animal host in whom it’s lived for millennia, and it’s now infected us.  By destroying the social world—those myths and customs that enabled us to live together without killing each other—they released our fear of each other.

Every human society, whether it still calls itself a monarchy or a republic, as many now do, is divided into masters and slaves.  Myths that disguise and/or justify that division enable us to live together without killing each other; but they don’t change the fact that a divided society is weak, and always on the brink of collapse.   

Those who seek someone or something to blame for our present collapse sometimes name capitalism, because a system that values private property more than the public welfare is obviously unhealthy; but they don’t seem able to imagine an alternative system, much less create it.  Jameson said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, because capitalism is our world.  We live in it, and accept it without thinking about it, as fish are said not to think about the water in which they swim.

Most people are so blind to the nature of the world in which we live that they even imagine a capitalist economic system is not just compatible with a democratic political system, but necessary to it.  Capitalism is, on the contrary, not only compatible with slavery, but its product. 

Capital is the surplus profit that a property owner obtains beyond whatever it costs him to make his property produce enough to satisfy his needs. 

The first human societies were extended families of nomadic hunter/foragers who owned no property other than what little they carried, and whose needs were simple enough to be satisfied with little effort.  They hunted as a group for wild plants and animals, and shared what they found and/or caught with other members of their group.

The limited size of these first societies was probably due less to the limit on how much can be got through hunting/foraging than to the fact that it was done by an extended family.  People will co-operate more readily with family members than they will with strangers. The invention of agriculture, which Diamond called the worst mistake in human history, made it possible to feed more people, so most societies now consisted of several families.

Some of these larger societies consisted of sedentary farmers who spent most of their time and effort cultivating land and domesticating plants, making both more productive; but their society no longer consisted of one extended family, and they were less willing to share the land and/or its produce with others.  They invented private property, and probably slavery as well when some farmers' crops failed, and they became landless tenant farmers working for their more fortunate neighbors. 

The domestication of animals made life easier for all farmers.  It made life easier for hunter/foragers as well, most of whom became herders of animals.  It made life easiest for herders of horses.

To hunter/foragers, the earth was mother of all living things, plants and animals.  To farmers, god was a divine landowner who created the earth, and then created humans to farm it for him, as slaves farm the land for its owners. To herders, god was a shepherd and humans his sheep.  But nomads on horseback were hunters, and to them everyone else was an animal to hunted.

The conquest of sedentary farmers by nomadic hunters on horseback gave rise to writing, and history.  The conquerors needed scribes to keep records of their property, both human and nonhuman.  But masters and slaves belonged to different ethnic groups and/or races, spoke different languages and worshipped different gods, so the masters regarded their slaves as less than human.

The first form that property took was land, but the second was slaves, human and nonhuman.  Big landowners needed slaves to farm land they and their families couldn’t farm themselves.  Today’s factory owners still need slaves to operate their machines for them.  We pretend slavery’s been abolished because today’s masters rent workers instead of owning them.       

Our masters pretend they govern us, and we pretend to trust them, because we think living in a society, even as a slave, is better than living alone.  But the truth that they’re parasites and we’re their hosts always lies just beneath the skin of the body politic, ready to inflame it, as it’s doing now.

Fascism is a product of slavery, but a late one—a disease common to decadent societies like ours, as cancer is common to old bodies like mine.  And the USA is a decadent society, having gone—like our president—from childhood directly to senility, bypassing maturity.

Trump is both a womanizer and a misogynist.  He’s obsessed not just with women, but with prostitutes, because he can buy them without having to pretend he loves them.  But prostitutes are traditionally carriers of venereal disease, and Trump’s a notorious germphobe.  Perhaps that’s because his mental deterioration is due to neurosyphilis, but I doubt his misogyny or his germophobia are so easily explained.  Neither is his homophobia.

One of our society’s myths is that homophobes are really repressed homosexuals, and womanizers like Trump are overcompensating.  But there’s nothing real about Trump, or charlatans like him. 

Of course he’s no ordinary charlatan.  The ordinary charlatan fears “real” homosexuals as much as he does “real” women and/or “real” men, because he thinks they could unmask him as a fake.  But “real” homosexuals are just as mythical as “real” men and “real” women.  We’re all actors playing roles that aren’t entirely false, nor entirely true.  Trump knows this.  He’s fearless because he can’t be unmasked as a charlatan.  He doesn’t pretend to be anything else. 

Xenophobia, the fear of strangers, has infected a society that, already divided and weak, has now become terminally ill.  It usually lead to fascism, but Trump is no demagogue, although he obviously enjoys playing one.  His grandiose boasts of the wonderful things he’s accomplished as president are so absurd that he’s obviously mocking traditional presidents.  Not even his supporters take him seriously.  They adore him precisely because he’s a charlatan who doesn’t pretend to be anything else, unlike the charlatans who pretend they govern us.

Participating in ritual displays of patriotism used to be enough to allay our fears about our divided society’s weakness.  Just as a virus that kills its host either dies with that host or mutates into a milder form that only sickens it, and may even prevent it from being infected by stronger pathogens, so has our xenophobia mutated over the generations into a patriotism that’s only mildly sickening, and even helps us survive as a society.  But our society’s weakness is now so obvious that our fears can no longer be allayed, and the patriotism that once united us has now become a xenophobia that divides us.  It’s no longer only strangers whom we fear, but people who look like us and live with us but don't think as we do, and therefore aren’t really members of our 'tribe'. 

In a capitalist society, the “real” man is one who owns property; and his most valuable property is other people—women, and men without property.

A prudent man takes good care of his property, making sure it doesn’t lose its market value.  Neither does he allow its value to him personally lead him to overestimate its market value.  He knows that women, and men without property, even if they’re his own wife and sons, don’t have the same value to society that men of property like himself do. 

In times of crisis, when people become aware of just how weak the society to which they belong, and on which they depend, really is, they lose faith in the myths of that society, including the myth that real men own property while women and men without property are property.  It’s then that women seek equality, and men of property become misogynists.  It’s then that "real" men become homophobes, because the bonds that unite men of property against men without property also unite them against homosexuals, aka men without women.

In times of crisis, when even a real man may lose the property that makes him real, his natural pursuit of power over others can become an obsession. When possessing property is the greatest virtue, pursuing property to the exclusion of everything else is the greatest temptation.

But men can save themselves from this sin as saints do, by renouncing what they most desire.  Men can prove themselves real men by purging themselves of all weakness, including the love of women and other men, and use people without loving them. 

Our world is diseased and dying, but everything that lives must die eventually.  When people deny this, and seek to purge themselves of whatever disease they seem to have contracted—to purify themselves and the body politic of all that’s foreign—they become fascists.   

Let us die, then, as fascists do.  Sweet and good it is to die for our country, especially when that country doesn’t love us as we think it should.  Let us die as heroes, for a world that doesn’t deserve to have us live in it.

Two Hundred and Ten

If it’s wrong to live for others, what’s right?

We’re social animals, after all.  It’s our instinct to live in communities.  At least that’s what we used to tell ourselves.  But we also used to tell ourselves that we alone among all the animals have left instinct behind, and live by reason. 

Both are myths.  We haven’t left instinct behind, no matter how much we try.  Nor do we live by reason, no matter how much we try.  We live by myths.

We tell ourselves other animals live by instinct, and are no more than Descartes’ meat machines, so we can kill and eat them with a clear conscience.  We tell ourselves other people are only animals, and we alone are human, so we can enslave them with a clear conscience.  But we’ve always known these are myths.    

Every living being knows, if it knows anything, that it lives at the expense of other living beings.  Yet most animals still seek the company of their own kind.  Even the most solitary organism is a community of cells.  But at the cellular level, solitary individuals vastly outnumber communities.  So why do communities exist at any level?

Because there's safety in numbers, but only for the community.  The weakest individuals fall victim to predators, but the strong survive, leaving the community stronger.  Individual cells die, but the multicelled organism survives.

We neither know nor care about the fate of our bodies’ individual cells, yet we used to imagine that the body of which we’re cells, and sometimes called god, cares about us. Now we know our love for it is not returned.

If the cells of our bodies were as sentient as we are, they would think as we now do.  They would value their own individual needs and wants more than those of the community to which they belong, as we now do.

If the cells of our bodies were as sentient as we are, they would begin their lives as we do.  Their world would seem to lie before them like a land of dreams, beautiful and new.  But soon they’d learn, as we do, that it has no love for them, nor help for their pain.

We all live in pain because whatever we think we want isn't what we really want.  We seek what we think we want in this world of illusions, and are disappointed if and when we find it.

We begin our lives wanting to love and be loved, but sooner or later we’re disappointed, and end up wanting power instead; the power to take from the world what it won't give us.

I know they’re as disappointed as I am, even more than I am.  But I no longer care.

Two Hundred and Nine

I went to a different free food pantry yesterday, because its website said it was the largest pantry in the county.  

It was inside a magnificent modern church, large enough to hold a televangelist’s flock.  Beggars who’d arrived before me stood outside, talking to each other while we waited for its doors to open; but they spoke so rapidly I couldn't understand them.  Apparently it was obvious that I was trying to, because one man asked me, in English, “Do you know what language we are speaking?”

“Arabic”, I said.

“Iraqi,” he said, and we began to talk; but in English.

They were all friendly, and wanted to talk with me, the newcomer.  I tried to bring up the situation in Iraq, which I’ve been following on the internet, but none of them wanted to talk about that.  Ordinary people don’t usually pay much attention to politics—or rather, the competition between rival gangs to plunder the dying commonwealth, which is what nowadays passes for politics—because they know whoever wins, they’ll lose. 

The doors finally opened, and the man handing out food told us he would pray with anyone who was in need of prayer.  The beggar standing beside me said he didn’t need prayer.  Thinking it unwise to offend our benefactor, I told him Muslims and Christians worship the same god.  He said he didn’t believe in any gods.

Most ordinary people aren’t ignorant and gullible, as their supposed betters believe, or claim to believe.  They’re ignorant, as are we all, but not gullible.  They do what they must in order to survive, as do we all, and that includes learning to believe—or rather, suspending their disbelief—in the dogmas of their society.  But they don’t believe, or suspend their disbelief, in those dogmas because experience has taught them they’re true.  They do it because their parents, teachers and bosses—all the people who have power over them—tell them they’re true. 

In order to join adult society, children must learn to speak its language, to say what adults say, even when—especially when—experience teaches them it’s not true.  But most ordinary people know they’ll never join adult society.  They’ll always be children, ruled by people more powerful than they are.  Ordinary people therefore say and do what they’re supposed to, but only as long as it’s useful for them to do so.  And when society—or rather, its rulers—no longer have any use for them, ordinary people no longer have any use for it and its dogmas. 

But I don’t often talk with ordinary people nowadays.  I talk instead with people on the internet.  They’re ignorant, as we all are, but not ordinary.  Although they’re becoming so.  Or rather, ordinary people are becoming more like people on the internet. 

Most of them are alone, as I am, and paranoid, which I probably am not because I don’t believe, as most of them do, or claim they do, that I know the truth, and anyone who doesn’t believe what I believe is either deluded, or lying. 

I go on the internet seeking conversation, and/or to learn.  They go on it seeking to educate the deluded and/or unmask the liars—the people who believe, or claim to believe, the lies we’re all taught—that climate change is real, the theory of evolution is true, and the earth is a sphere. 

No educated person, religious or not, believes the earth is flat.  But most people on the internet, whether or not they’re religious, claim it’s a religious dogma that the earth is flat, which shows they’re as ignorant of religion as they are of science.  But unlike ordinary people, they refuse to admit they’re ignorant.

They’re often knowledgeable, but never wise enough to know our knowledge has limits because we ourselves have limits.  Or rather, they believe that although they don’t know everything, they know everything worth knowing.  But even the wisest of us can never be certain that what we believe today won’t be changed by what we learn tomorrow.  Or rather, they’re certain—as certain as we can be of anything - that it will be changed. 

The internet is replacing television for most people, especially people who watch television instead of reading (People who still read usually do it passively, accepting or rejecting what they read without thinking; but people who watch are even more passive).  These people are the audience for televangelists, and the internet enables them to become something like televangelists themselves.

Why am I writing this? I no longer care about any of them.

I used to love other people more than I loved myself, and I lived for them.  But no longer.

I don’t know everything about them, but I know enough now to know they disgust me, and I want to die.

Two Hundred and Eight

I’ve been going on interviews. 

Interviewing is an art in itself.  And like most arts, it comes easily to me.  

At my first interview, there were several other people in the room with me. We were all applying for jobs as substitute teachers, and there were several job openings.  But as the interview progressed, the interviewer focused her attention more and more on me, until it became a conversation between the two of us while the other applicants sat silent.  It reminded me of when I was in school, and the teacher ignored the rest of the class.

I looked around at the other applicants.  They probably had spouses and children to support.  I had no one, and didn’t care whether I got the job or not.  I didn’t have to earn a living because I didn’t want to live.   

After the interview was over, and we all left, the interviewer followed me out to the parking lot.  We stood and talked until I told her to go back inside because it was freezing. 

She telephoned me a week later, and asked if I still wanted the job.  I told her I’d changed my mind.