Back To Work

Vacation-time (the first half of it) is drawing to a close, and apart from a lurch here and there, I'm rather pleased with how it went. I was able, for several days in a row, to relax and read trash fiction and not fret over how I wasn't doing any real work and should therefore feel like a guilt-ridden slacker. (That was nice, as was my discovery during this period of the work of Christopher Moore, who reminds me of a comment a friend of mine once made on a similar subject: "He writes the kind of stuff that you would write, if only you wrote." Thanks, V., I still carry that one with me...)

And I actually got some work done--Adorno is slowly being whittled away, and I'm actually understanding much of what the abstruse son-of-a-b*tch has to say--and I finished revising and polishing an article that, when run by a former mentor who is renowned for hating everything he reads (and whose work I openly disagreed with on the first page--what was I thinking???), produced a response of "It's incredibly good, and I've already called the editor of [Prestigious Literary Journal] to tell her to keep an eye out for it, so send it to her right away." So, you know, I think I at least managed to hit par with that one. More publications are not only good, they're necessary, as I will have to go out on the job market (argh) again this fall, since my current employers may decide they want to hire me permanently, but they're keeping their options open, which means I have to do the same. Oh joy, more mass mailings, sleepless nights, and rejection, oh, so much rejection. I hate this so much...

But alas, the halcyon days of f*ck-offery are waning--I gotta go back to the Midwest, and back to work--Summer School beckons, and with it, all the miseries involved in trying to cram fifteen weeks worth of teaching and grading into a six week period. (The "10 pounds of you-know-what in a 5 pound bag analogy" should come to mind.) So I'll be busy, which is good and bad, and I'll be back in relative solitude, which likewise is good and bad. Mostly bad, though. I have to start being social. Problem is, I've no talent for this--and I think I'm not alone, here. I think that many people--possibly most--become friends within and as a result of structure. Work, school, church, neighborhood--we tend to bond with people with whom we are artificially conjoined. Naturally enough--if you've got to face the same g*ddamned mugs every day, it's only self-defense of the psyche to try to find some way of liking 'em--or enjoying hating them. But absent those structures, we've got very little to go on--physically attractive people can hit on other physically attractive people, of course--though even there, it requires a degree of security and courage that not all of us have. The obvious answer to this problem, naturally, is "Boo-hoo, you f*cking whiner--nut up, and say 'hi.'" But the problem there is--most people have the capacity to be interesting. I honestly believe this. But very few people have the capacity to be interesting right away. For most people, the 'interesting' only comes with honesty and vulnerability--two things which casual meetings do not encourage--all first dates are lies, and we know it. So the problem isn't initiating contact--it's finding some reason to continue it. So much of our lives are spent on being carefully inoffensive that we instinctively shut off any other 'vibe' upon first contact. 'Dull' is dull, but it's also polite. 'Tepid' is tepid, but it's also friendly. But if dull meets tepid and tepid meets dull, why the hell would either of them want to call the other the next day, I ask you?

So my question is--how do we make ourselves immediately interesting without making ourselves obnoxious? (Hot women need not bother to respond--we know how you folks make yourselves interesting, which is why guys rarely bother to look you in the eyes, if you know what I mean...)

I Am, It Would Appear, Gay

All signs point in this direction, with the minor exception of a desire to f*** or become enamored of members of the same sex. With that slight caveat, I appear to show all the signs. I'm a snob, an off-and-on creative writer, an ex-actor, I know film and theater to an eerie degree, I have most modern musicals memorized to the point of quietly humming along to their toe-tapping strains whilst going about my hum-drum day (I also use words like "whilst" and "hum-drum"), I care about my wardrobe, I don't like beer or any form of organized sports, and now...and this really would appear to be the nail in the coffin of my putative heterosexuality, I've voluntarily sat through the movie Center Stage.

And liked it.

For those of you who are straight and have forgotten this piece of cinematic marzipan (it's been seven years, after all), go ahead and refresh your memories; I'll wait:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210616/

(I understand from One Who Would Know that the bulk of the movie is available on youtube, for those of you who really want to pursue this thing with more thoroughness than it, perhaps, deserves.)

Now then. A movie about ballet dancers discovering simultaneously that A. dancing contains in its ecstatic gyrations all that is essential to achieving complete and total self-fulfillment, and B. there's more to life than dancing. Often within the same scene. Tough enough to pull that off, but when you've got your leads played by actual ballet dancers (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, say, professional actors), well, you, my friends, are in for a whole heapin' mess of giggle-inducing silliness. And oh, there is puh-huh-lenty of such silliness to be found therein--mostly from our terminally 'cute' heroine, who looks about 14 years old, giving the scene of her deflowering at the hands of the academy's 'bad boy' rebel choreographer a truly creepy Lolita-esque-ness. And the 'groundbreaking' dance routine at the climax is highly enjoyable, if one is able to push from one's mind the stubborn awareness that it's not actually ballet, it's jazz, and would properly be hooted off the stage by the exquisitely bitchy audience of the former artform. Plus, they've chosen to tart up our heroine in a dance costume/'look' that makes her look frighteningly similar to Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls, leading one to wonder if at some point in the performance, she and her costar will do a naked pas de deux under a swimming pool's waterfall. (Again, she looks horribly young, so this is not as appealing as it sounds. At all.)

So, what with this, and the 'young black dancer with at-ti-tud-uh who learns self-respect through understanding that discipline is the key to true greatness' and the 'pushed into the life by her stage mother bulimic who learns self-respect with the aid of a cute pre-med student from Columbia who shows her that she can choose her own path' and whatnot, there's just so g*ddamned much that should be staggeringly awful about this film. And is. And yet...

And yet...

Oh, f*** it--and yet, somehow, Some How, the f*cking movie works. It has a lot to do with the dancing--these people do know what they're doing once they're on point, and the pas de deux we see from Romeo and Juliet is utterly revelatory--I got the balcony scene in a way that I've never achieved watching Shakespeare's version--but there's also the weird, sad, moving earnestness of these people. The fact is, they're most of them playing themselves, and that kinda helps, but I think the movie works because, well--the stories that play out in the movie are silly and corny and hackneyed not because the writing's bad (though it is) or the acting's lame (we'll say no more about that), but because that's what being young and in that world is about.

Being young and a performer is a weird, dizzying, wonderfuly and horribly self-destructive, exhilarating time--a time when you do run out at 2:00 a.m. for impromptu sieges of the local dance-club, when you have the energy to push yourself all day and night and be fed from that effort, rather than exhausted. We make the stupid mistakes like drinking too much or throwing up because we think we're fat, or sleeping with the wrong person when the right person is right there beside us, we hug each other incessantly because we're so much in our own skins--there's no objectivity, everything is immediate and unfiltered and real in a way that it will never be again. The f*cking movie works because what it's telling us is fundamentally true. For all of its silliness and badness and clunkiness, it's a completely honest film, and I recognized far too much of myself in it not to have loved it.

So there, I said it: I loved it. And I know that this means that I have to wear a shocking-pink 'G' pinned to my breast for the rest of my life, but so be it. You may now proceed to cast the first of many, many stones.

I Quit

I'm blogging now from not-so-sunny Southern California--the June Gloom has arrived a little early this year--and I had planned on using the three weeks of vacation to briefly de-stress--do some 'beach reading', take some marina-side walks while looking for the seal lions who like to roll up to the surface and catch a little sun, etc., then set about working on a number of back-burner projects: the novel, some hard-core reading (Adorno's Negative Dialectics--not for the faint of heart), and two separate scholarly articles for (I had hoped) publication in a prestigious journal or two. That was the plan.

But today ABC announced that, as part of its fall schedule, it would be including a sitcom based on those g*ddamned Geico commercials and their perennially dissed cavemen. I quote freely from the press release, justified by the "I Could Not Make This S*** Up" rule of jeremiadish composition:

Cavemen is a unique buddy comedy that offers a clever twist on stereotypes and turns race relations on their head. Inspired by the popular Geico Insurance commercials, the series looks at life through the eyes of the ultimate outsiders - three modern cavemen - as they struggle to find their place in the world. Joel, his cynical best friend, Nick, and easy-going little brother, Jamie, are contemporary cavemen who live in the suburban south and simply want to be treated like ordinary thirty-something guys. Despite their attempts at assimilation, Nick doesn't believe mainstream society will ever completely accept them, Jamie seems to take it all in stride and Joel straddles the middle, torn between his friends, his more traditional values and his loving fiance.

So, this is happening, and nothing short of the apocalypse can stop it. Men and women in positions of great responsibility have decided that this is a good idea--and they have done so on the basis of focus groups and polling that have told them that, yes, this is what the average TV viewer wants to see. Which is to say, this cannot be forestalled by the apocalypse because this is the apocalypse. And frankly, wasting my time on producing work designed to contribute to the intellectual compendium of human knowledge is now revealed to me as pure folly, as we are clearly devolving as a species, and will soon be marking our work-spaces by urinating on them, settling arguments by throwing feces, and trying dimly to remember how to make fire. The rollercoaster has hit the apex, folks, and the track at the bottom is warped, buckled, and metal-fatigued. We're gonna have a nice, fun, degenerate fall, and then we're off the rails, our bodies liquified as we hit the asphalt at roughly the speed of sound.

So, I'm done. I'm out. I'm going to spend the next three weeks drinking myself blind, hitting on toothless bar-sluts at the local dive, and discovering whether or not this 'meth' stuff is all cracked up to be. Because there's no future in thinking and walking upright, anymore. It's no longer a growth industry. I'm just gonna steer into the skid and hope that I hit the abutment at enough speed that I don't experience any pain before I skip merrily into the white light.

So, who's with me?

God Is in The Midst of a Tough Call

Seriously. If the Almighty exists in a form and psyche that even remotely approaches his various representations in world religions, then, assuming the existence of an afterlife, the nature of which is determined by our thoughts and deeds on Earth, God must really be scratching His head over what to do about the very recently late Jerry Falwell.

On the one hand, Falwell devoted his life to the Word, as he understood it, and appears to have succumbed to none of the lurid degeneracy that claimed so many of his peers in the Bible-thumping brigade. (Unless one counts Gluttony as one of the Seven Deadlies, in which case, the oinker's in trouble with the Head Honcho.) His life argues that he believed, and believed sincerely, in a fairly conventional Judeo-Christian ideology, and he spent his life attempting to spread the means by which, according to his lights, we have our one-and-only shot at avoiding eternal hellfire and achieving perfect unity with the loving absolute. So, that's the plus.

The minus? Oh, my. Where to begin? I'd be here all day, listing them all. Because of course the man enjoyed nothing so much as a good old-fashioned verbal stoning of those he deemed unrighteous, and showed an alarming tendency to render unto Caesar what was God's, and vice versa. Behind the perpetual grin on his face lurked the mind of a man who clearly envied Torquemada his freedom to Get Down To Business when it came to bringing a vision of Holy Order to the world. He embraced with unseemly fervor the Pauline vision of anti-feminism, while ignoring the (admittedly contradictory) Pauline vision of the Big Tent approach to Christianity. And don't get me started on his views on gays. And let's not forget that, days after the attacks of September 11, he forcefully proclaimed that we'd brought it on ourselves, as if God had decided to kill a random sampling of citizens, including children and other innocents, in order to make the point. Oh, and the levees broke in New Orleans because of Mardis Gras, apparently. He reeked, in short, of all that is wrong with fundamentalism--that is, the certainty that within his own mortal mind was the perfect knowledge of God's will. He thought and said and did horrible, horrible things, and offered a vision of God that was mean-spiritedly simplistic and made his followers feel good about hating others, and the world was a worse place for his having been in it.

And yet...he was, in his own way, a true believer. Does God judge us for our effect, or for our intent? (And do we just break down and extend this logic to wackos like Hitler, who by most accounts really did think he was saving the world?)

Self-doubt is a little-praised virtue. Self-examination, self-questioning--the occasional "do I really know what the f*** I'm talking about?" One wonders whether truly great men and women--the Kings, the Ghandis, the Anthonys--do they have such moments, or are they too driven solely by absolutism? I go back to Paul--grudgingly, because I mostly do not like that guy--Romans 7:14-23 (it's tricky to follow, so read it out loud): For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

Even Paul, that lunatic, loses faith in himself here and there, and cops to it. And what about Augustine, mocking himself by describing his true prayer to God: "Give me chastity and continence...but not yet." And Luther spent the better part of his life in a state of self-torment, horrified at the thought that he was making a horrible mistake, but convinced that--often against his will--he had to do it because Catholicism was hurting those it claimed to help. Faith unleavened by doubt isn't faith--it's a mindless rejection of the greatest gift God (if He exists) has given us, reason and its attendant humility, and humility's attendant charity towards others. And only faith unleavened by doubt allows us to condemn others to hell, usurping God's dibs on that duty.

So I'm going to forgo deciding whether Falwell's roasting on a spit right now--I suspect that he is--let's face it, the guy was a complete prick--but...I'd be committing the very thing that made him a prick in doing so. Alas. It would be so much fun...but, I think the best thing for all of us to do is just heave him upwards, give a collective yell of "He's all yours, Big Guy," and then go about our lives thinking kindly of each other with quiet pragmatism. And then forget him. That much, he deserves.

Blahs

End of semester, and my usual bout of moody unhappiness--I'm genuinely tired--this has been my first year teaching full-time, and it's been as exhausting as I've been warned about--and while I wouldn't go so far as to say "I deserve a vacation," I have, so far as my employers are concerned, earned one. (At least until June, when I teach summer school--Daddy's got credit card debt to pay down.)

And yet, tired as I am, I still feel...guilty? Useless? Blah? Yes, "Blah" sums it up. I can sleep in late, but I've nowhere to go, really, once I get up. I can stay up late, but I've no one to stay up late with. It's lonely, being gainfully unemployed. And I don't deal with 'aimless' as a state of mind/life.

I know what I should do, of course--I should go for long walks, and work on my writing--snap my mind back into some sort of shape with challenging reading, fuelling my thoughts--I should think about the future and what I can do to get there in one relatively happy piece. I should go to the zoo. And the movies. And coffee shops, where I can make eyes at women far too young and attractive for me. I should, in short, take a vacation. And, with nagging from the right people, I'll try. But for right now: Blah.

(Oh, and grading massive numbers of identical take-home exams sucks.)

Romantic Musings

The Beatles once insisted, in one of their catchier moments, that "All you need is love." (And for those of you who wondered if the reverse was true, they settled that matter immediately: "Love is all you need.") Paul would later expand on this by noting that "In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." (Is it just me, or is the White Album overrated? I've always been an Abbey Road man, myself, with Sgt. Pepper's and Revolver following in Second and Third place.) Now, far be it from me to question the authority of the Fab Four--those who know me well know that I'm inclined to view them much as others do the I Ching--the answers lie in there somewhere. (Or if not in there, then in The Simpsons.) But on this point, I may have to dissent. Heresy, I know, but as Luther said, "Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me." So, that.

Is love all we need? Perhaps in the grand sense epitomized by, say, the Golden Rule, but it seems pretty clear that by "love"--that many-splendored thing that makes the world go 'round--most of us mean what has colloquially, if inaccurately been termed "romantic love." (If you've studied the Romantics at all, you know damn well that they'd be furious to know that they've been demeaned to becoming short-hand for person-to-person bow-chicka-wicka-wicka-bow passion--though, frankly, I'm convinced that that's exactly what they were all actually into, and just tried to pretend otherwise by writing about skylarks and daffodils. Except for Coleridge, but that was just because he was tripping balls most of the time.) And do we need romantic love?

Well, the popular consensus seems to be 'yes.' A quick glance around at our culture will tell us that it seems to be viewed as the ultimate 'goal' in life--an indispensible element of happiness, and indeed, possibly 'all we need' to be truly happy. Not that there aren't dissenters. Cynics and the more kill-joyish breed of scientists will tell us that such love is a delusion created by both society and synapse to encourage us to do nothing more than propogate the species and create stable 'protective' environments to ensure physical safety for the off-spring. But these people tend to be single and dateless, leading one to the powerful suspicion that they're achieving this opinion courtesy of the sour-grapes instinct. Plus, they're the minority by a wide margin.

One cannot sell that which people do not desire to buy, and we love love. Popular music, for instance, would not exist without it. Except for rap, and frankly, I think rap is only popular because it's a bitter palate-cleanser to the cloying pablum offered by the Top 40 crowd. But without that Top 40 crowd, would vicious anger and degrading sex have such a large market? Well...maybe, but they'd have to start harmonizing, that's for sure. And notice that the lyrics of rap cannot be sung--that's significant. One cannot sing about the subjects of rap--one can only sing about, well, things like love. The Greeks would have noticed that fact right quick--song, like dance, is the body finding a way to harmonize with the natural order--the flow of notes and limbs becoming part of the rhythm and pulse and current of Life, Capital-L. And it's no coincidence, then, that when we sing, we sing about love about 99% of the time. (Unless we're in an opera, in which case we can sing about the fate of the universe arising from man's Nietzschean assertion of his superiority over the gods--though it's significant that all the events of the Ring Cycle--including the fall of the heavens--occur because one being has renounced love forever. So--)

Are we, then, hard-wired for love?

Yes, I think. And no. The species doesn't need any help propogating, and one suspects that whatever natural drive moves us to couple-up may be slowing down. Or taking an alternate course--personally, I think that the move towards 'main-streaming' homosexuality is just a sign that nature is telling us that we've reproduced well beyond necessity, and should now hook up in ways that don't toss one more squalling mass of neediness into the world. (Take that, you people who call it 'unnatural'--it's plenty natural! In fact, naturally speaking, it's hip and new and funky fresh! Breeding?! That is soooooo last millenium. Now shut up and let them marry and adopt.)

So we don't have to love, whatever Hallmark and DeBeers tell us. We certainly won't stop as a race--love is too much of a source of fun and comfort and self-important drama for all of us to give it up. So that's not gonna happen. But the necessity for it is gone. Romantic love is now a luxury, not a need. And this raises the big question:

Is it in need of a revision? The last century has given us plenty of changes--women are now supposed to be equals, gays and lesbians are now defined by emotions and the capacity for equal commitment, men are supposed to cry (good luck with that one, folks--men don't cry when they're undergoing testicular electrocution, so a little nagging is not gonna make it happen.) But what seemingly hasn't changed is the idea that people are supposed to 'pair up'--sooner or later. The idea that 'dying alone' is a dreadful fate still lingers. Henry Higgins tells us that he is "a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so"--but only as a set-up to the inevitable romance with Eliza. (If we're reading My Fair Lady and not the relatively radical original, Pygmalion, whose author was himself unmarried, and remained so. Though even he wasn't immune to love, as his letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell reveal.) We still have the idea of a partner as some kind of necessity--something without which life is incomplete.

But is it? I think not. I myself am certainly someone who needs love, despite my inability to give it with any kind of charitable consistency. (Effort and Patience are neither of them strong suits of mine.) But are there those who don't--and who are, despite this, perfectly kind and friendly and decent people, capable of a life both rich and full and no emptier for this fact?

The question seems rhetorical. Of course there are. And yet the weight of civilization is upon them--they seem, to the rest of us, to be cold, or egotistically aloof, not able or not willing to muck down here in the turgid mess of love--what, are they too good for it? Again, rhetorical. Of course not.

Romantic love is both a taste and a talent--something some people want, and something some people are good at. (God help you if, like me, you have the taste but not the talent. It's like being a parapalegic who wants to be a tap-dancer.) But if you don't have the taste--if you look at it with calm eyes and weigh the costs and the benefits and decide that other things give you more fulfillment and excitement and life, well--well, you'll still seem weird to us. We'll assume that you're gay and closeted. Or sociopathic. Or afraid. Mostly, we'll assume that you're afraid. That you've been hurt, and just can't get over it and get back out there.

And, to be fair, that may be true for many who've given up. But fear of a thing doesn't obligate one to go back and learn to like it. Look, I'm scared of rollercoasters. Always have been. And from time to time I conquer my fear and I get on them, and I come out the other end just fine. But I don't particularly enjoy them. Even if I were to lose all fear of them, I still wouldn't go on them, because--well, why bother, if I don't like it? People who've been hurt by love retreat--but in retreat they may realize that while they were still involved...it really wasn't for them. That they hadn't the taste or the talent. Such people aren't to be pitied. On the contrary--if people who've no taste or talent for love would just stay out of the game, it'd keep them out of miserable relationships and clear the way for the rest of us.

So--love? Not a need. A choice. And 'choice' means the option to decline. Sorry, you wacky Liverpudlians, but I think that, more and more, love isn't all we need--and for some of us, it isn't what we need at all.

(God, I wish I were one of those people.)

Orwellian

A word that has become so very important--that has always been important--and which is in danger of being forgotten. A fact that, in itself, is somewhat Orwellian. Because if one forgets the word, one tends to forget the idea behind the word. And that may happen all too soon.

None of my students in any of my classes has read 1984. Not one. That's 0 out of over 75 college students, and a quick glance at the curriculum ahead of them suggests that this situation will not be formally remedied by the school.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing--I don't think the book should be read in high school, because frankly, you're not up to it at that age. Just as you're not up to Heart of Darkness or King Lear or Lolita. Some books require maturity to be read appropriately--to be read with understanding and resonance. 1984 is one of those books. But so few of us read voluntarily--hell, I've been known to drop the habit for long stretches--that I worry that they'll never crack the cover and read that opening that with a small, brilliant detail of dissonance, immediately sets your teeth on edge: "It was a cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

A confession: I listen to books on CD. This has struck many of my colleagues as some sort of heresy, though I can't fathom why. I never listen to anything other than unabridged versions of texts, and listening forces me to experience every single word at a measured pace, so that nothing is missed or skimmed. I've discovered things about Austen, Dickens, Cervantes, and, yes, Orwell in listening to them that I would not have done in rereading them.

On the heels of discovering that my students hadn't read it (many of them had read Animal Farm, which is the book of his they should read in high school), I purchased a CD copy and have been listening to it for the past week or so. (I don't drive much, and I only listen when I drive, so these books tend to last awhile.) It's probably not a wise decision for me to be listening to this book, given my predisposition for depression, and my recent bout thereof, but there it is. And one can derive pleasure, even from the bleakest of texts, when the author of said text can capital-W Write. Orwell can Write. Clean, precise language--mastery of the declarative sentence--a complete lack of sentiment that gives his observations a quality of scientific proof in their persuasive force. He can Write.

And in listening to the book, I've had something of a revelation: 1984 is one of the most important books ever written. Ever. "Ever?" Ever.

I want to be careful about this--I don't want to be like that jackass in the New York Times Book Review, who many years ago claimed that One Hundred Years of Solitude was "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race." I don't know who that delusional idiot was, but both s/he and the editor who allowed that statement to pass into print need to be loaded into a cannon and fired into a field of cactus and alligators. I want to be measured, rational, in my justification for this claim.

Aristotle famously (well, 'famously' if you're an effete snob, which, if you're reading this, you know I am, and probably are a bit of a one yourself) declared that "Man is a political animal," comparing us to other species, like ants and bees, that instinctively form communities. (Presumably if he'd had more exposure to apes, he'd've used them too.) Political animals, and so we are. Freud may be right, of course--that there's also something atavistically (effete snob, remember) independent within us as well--something that bangs against the cage of society, but it's a comparatively lesser impulse for most people, I think. We prefer, almost always, to belong. Aristotle was right.

But what kind of political animals are we? To what kind of politics do we tend?

The problem is, we don't 'tend'. We're wildly inconsistent. For every period in which the whole movement of world seems to be in a Hegelian rush to achieve liberal democracy, there's a period in which we swing wildly back towards some sort of primal autocracy based on hero-worship. But the danger in this erratic thoughtlessness is that it leads us towards the irrevocable--the situation in which one trend leads us so far into the pendular swing that we can't go back. And that is the warning that this book represents.

Because of course, the whole point of 1984 is that it is the portrait of a perfect dystopia. The system is flawless, because it has tapped into one of the most grim aspects of human nature: our essential passivity in the face of risk or effort, our willingness to accept misery either as a perverse virtue or as an unalterable state of affairs. That's where our doom lies, if it lies anywhere--that we have within us the ability--indeed, the tendency--to follow a path of least resistance, even into soul-death, because the alternative never even occurs to us as a possibility.

I'd forgotten things about the book--for instance, the fact that the political changes that produced Oceania (which, by the way, is an obscure joke, since a 17th century liberal political philosopher named Harrington wrote a utopian book about a wholly democratic state by that name) happened quite suddenly--in the wake of a nuclear war. (Alan Moore completely and utterly stole everything from Orwell, save the pleasant illusion of a heroic savior, which is why V for Vendetta is a comic book, and not literature.) The revolution happens quickly--and what's brilliant about the Inner Party is that they tap into the inherent decency of the English by appealing to them to give up their creature comforts in order to achieve victory in an ongoing war (which may or may not exist, of course.) Hence, the Outer Party members make due with Victory Chocolate, Victory Coffee, Victory Gin, Victory Cigarettes, etc.--all of which are foul and wretched imitations of the real thing--but rather than causing resentment, these wretched things produce a sense either of proud self-sacrifice or silent resignation. Anything for Our Boys In The Front. (Whether or not they exist.)

And so it goes. What kills us, in the end, is the ability to accommodate ourselves to anything. (Speaking of "So it goes," RIP Mr. Vonnegut, and in this discussion, we might do worse than remember the old man in the train-car carrying the POWs cross-country in Slaughterhouse Five, who keeps repeating, semi-cheerfully, "This ain't bad. I've seen bad. I can sleep anywhere." He does not survive the journey.) Our ability to settle, to relent in the face of trivial demands, however irrational. And our ability, in the wake of shock--nukes will tend to do that to you--to make wildly irrational judgments that actually worsen the situation and endanger us further. And if you think I'm thinking of the Patriot Act and secret torture and the prosecution of an unnecessary war to maintain political authority, oh, you'd better f***ing believe I am. But what's worse than all these things is the people's--nevermind the media's--complete indifference to them. Which is Orwell's coldest, cruellest bit of truth. What terrifies us about 1984 is not the fact that, sooner or later, the Thought Police are going to come for everyone--but that everyone knows it, and doesn't really much care. The perfection of the government in Orwell is not that it has managed to make people content with misery--they're not, none of them--but to be unable to imagine living any other way, and thus accepting of it as the Way Things Irrevocably Are. People believe that misery--subservience to a government that kills them slowly, then quickly--is life. They have completely internalized it past the point of resistance, must less rebellion. Oh, sometimes it takes extraordinary measures to achieve this--the last third of the novel is the torture-enhanced brainwashing of one of the last few hold-outs--but as Winston Smith realizes, he is only able to resist, feebly, because he can remember, dimly, the time before the bomb. The new generation will know no other way. And after that, the game is over.

It is, in short, one of the great misanthropic books of world literature--far sharper than the supposed monarch of such texts, Gulliver's Travels--Swift was a piker compared to Orwell in his despair over man's character--a book that reminds us of something dark and small and weak within all of us. The book does not uplift, or enliven. It does, however, warn. Orwell believed very much in happiness as an essential human right. The brilliance of the novel is that it shows that if you take away "the pursuit of happiness"--which is the 'inalienable right' we're most likely to surrender--then people will resign both life and liberty without much of a struggle, because neither means very much anymore. (Of course, one could argue that Huxley's counterpoint in Brave New World is that you can simply glut people on artificial happiness, on 'feelies' and soma, and they'll do whatever you want. But no reader of the two novels would hesitate for a second as to which dystopia they'd rather live in. Huxley couldn't conceive that people could be systematically robbed of pleasure, and have that be the thing that stabilizes the government, rather than undermining it.)

So that's my lesson for the day--don't let them take your chocolate away. Don't let them take your coffee. If they take away your pursuit of happiness--then when they decide to install the telescreen in your room, you won't much care--and the bullet in the head in the basement of the Ministry of Love will come as a relief.

Sex. Coffee. Good booze. The things that make us remember that life is worth living. Don't let them come for those things. Because when they do, you've lost. Man's soul lies in his ability to feel pleasure--and to pursue it in whatever way he chooses. But we are too easily persuaded--by church and state--that we must set these things aside for A Greater Good. That...is the great lie. And it is one we too easily believe, to the cost of everything. The noise of party slogans, church doctrine, talking heads who tell us that we must give up our happiness for the safety of others--it's so easy to listen to those voices. We tend to listen. And that's our doom.

As I say, one of the most important books ever written, because nobody had said it quite so clearly and fully. And because in a world that continues to be dominated by those who know full well that the best way to control people is to follow the Inner Party's game plan, we g*oddamned well better remember it.

Footnote: "Orwellian," by the way, when it is used, is usually mis-used. Idiot talking heads (usually on the left, since "Orwellian," like "Nazi," is a slur hurled from left to right, just as "treasonous" and "Godless" are thrown in the opposite direction; "commie" and "pinko" seem to have gone the way of Joe McCarthy, despite Ann Coulter's attempts to revive them. Sorry, Ann--just stick with accusing people of "siding with the terrorists"--trust me, that's always red meat to the fans) usually say "Orwellian" when they mean to say "grotesquely false, an inversion of the actual meaning of the words used." Hence, when the Bush administration's "Clean Air Act" actually enables polluters to dump more filth into the air, the Act is called "Orwellian," and everyone on the left nods solemnly. But that is not the nature of language in 1984. "Orwellian" language--that is, the language designed by the Inner Party--Newspeak--is never an inversion of the truth. It is instead a loss of meaning--of thought--altogether. The purpose of Newspeak is not to deceive, but to slowly breed out people's ability to think independently. As the poor doomed Syme--one of the architects of the language--explains it (with horrifying enthusiasm): "The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the rage of thought...In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." It is not an inversion of meaning--it is a loss of meaning, and of the thoughts that meaning enables. Quite a different thing, and as it is more complicated than the tiny minds of the talking heads can accomodate, they use it to mean something simpler, dumber, less thoughtful. In using "Orwellian", they are being Orwellian. Life is still quite comic.

A Good Thing to Read

For those who claim (with some fairness, really) that the Onion has gone stale, I offer this:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/middle_east_conflict_intensifies

The point at which we have to be terrified is when we cannot distinguish between parody/satire and the real thing...

No, No--I'm Still Here!

The latest complaint from "Anonymous" wishes to know if I've checked out for the summer. I haven't, but end-of-semester grading has me largely brain-fried, and I've not got much to say. I'm working on an entry on 1984, which I'm in the process of re-reading (so to speak--it's on CD) and which has proved something of a revelation to me in revisiting it after roughly 20 years--how much I've remembered and how much I've forgotten. (Completely forgot that Winston Smith is married, for instance.) Old books that we think we know are worth rereading. When I taught Huckleberry Finn last year, it was a revelation to me--like H.L. Mencken, I realized just how g*ddamned great that book is, how it is the work of a genius, and the first book since, probably, Don Quixote--or at least since Tom Jones--to capture the essence of human decency so completely and unsentimentally. Great book, that. As summer approaches, might I recommend picking up something from your youth, and rediscovering it? Sounds very "And now, a special message from the Superfriends"-ish (remember when ABC decided that all their Saturday morning programming had to be 'improving', but that next to the brilliance of Schoolhouse Rock, it all came off as lamer than hell?), but still--try it. And let me know how it goes...