Giving It Up

I

I've neglected this blog long enough. Time to dust it off and start again. My intentions were to use it as a sounding board for ideas separate from the more overtly political and economic ones I'd write about at the Stink Tank. I wanted to focus more on literature and philosophy here, using The Closing of the American Mind as a starting point. It's such a good starting point, and I started, but then "You Decide 2008" happened, and I diverted almost all of my attention to the bright, flashy paraphernalia brandished by the political class to exorcise the proletariat's flabby demons long enough to get them to vote. The Closing is such a good starting point too. It’s another one of those books that make you feel bad if you read it: you feel bad because at first you don’t understand it, and then when you start to understand it, you feel worse because you realize there is so much you don’t know. You realize there are so many overlapping and interconnected layers to the crusty cocoon you’ve been wrapped in your entire life, and a strong sense of the futility of cutting through them pervades you once you put the book down. What could motivate one enough to start cutting through the calcified strata of pop culture and ignorance?

I very much doubt the creators of the Matrix Trilogy read The Closing, but there is a distinct connection between the two works. The Matrix offers up a Buddhist-Christian-Cartesian Demon scenario in which reality is merely a distraction concocted by vampiric robots feeding on human metabolic energy. To produce this energy, the humans are kept in giant goo-filled seed pods in a fetal, vegetative state; a version of reality circa the late 1990s is fed directly into their cerebella while they digest pabulum made from puréed human flesh, every bodily system monitored and regulated. They occupy cocoons, albeit K-Y jelly filled rather than crusty baklava cocoons, completely oblivious to their real circumstances, distracted to contentment by their cybernetic slave masters’ fiction. They are ignorant of the true nature of things. Very few have the power to overcome this evil lullaby; the movie leads us to believe it is society’s malcontents and misfits who are most likely to see the cracks and inconsistencies of “reality.”

This scenario isn’t so different from the one in which the contemporary American Mind finds itself, the scenario Bloom describes in The Closing. Pop-culture is no longer ascendant, as it was in the Baby Boomer’s youth. It has assumed a place of primacy in the American mind, insulating us from the realities of life and living. Pop culture is no longer a diversion from the rough and tumble debate and approximate consensus that is reality; it is debate itself. Pop culture is no longer a pleasing, ephemeral antidote to staid conservative reality; it is reality. Conversations among family members and friends are no longer about what should be done, how life should be lived, but about how closely life resembles the funny sitcom or witty comebacks and cynical plot manipulations of television and movies. We live within popular culture; it has ascended from the lowly status of a mere tool used to cope with the stinging barbs of subsistence and starvation, to the ambrosia of life itself. We live inside the sexual norms of pop stars and rock bands now; we surf atop waves of rock and roll emotion within a spectrum of color defined by Peter Max at one end and Starbucks’ earth tones at the other. It is everything to us, just as jelly-filled cocoons and artificial cortex stimulation are everything to the human batteries of the Matrix. Admitting to any ignorance of pop culture’s force and value invites scorn or ostracism. The classics are old and wrong, bleached of color. The now is vibrant, unrelenting, fresh, and constantly updated to provide maximum distraction from the task of living well.

Barack Obama’s election is as much proof of this primacy as anything else; his campaign depended heavily on the perception of him generated by media entities such as Oprah and the tabloid magazine Us Weekly and its televised counterparts, Entertainment Tonight and Extra! Pop culture shaped the electorate’s perception of Obama, and he deftly manipulated pop-cultural cues and symbols, taking advantage of a public entranced by the fonts and warmth of Starbucks advertising. He even crafted a Matrix-style play book: Obama campaigned as a Seer, as the only One capable of piercing the oppressive shell of the Bush years, the lonely fringe savior fighting the good fight, wanting to free us all.

The ends of trilogy and election intersect, too. The trilogy ends with the superman most capable of perceiving and manipulating the cracks in reality (and thus best equipped to fight and destroy the robot oppressors) offering himself up to maintain the status quo, becoming one with the oppressors and infecting their circuitry. Instead of a savior leading humanity to a new life, oppressors and oppressed enter into a bargain: the sham reality is maintained, but with upgrades and tweaks introduced by the savior. Obama met a similar end. His electoral victory was built upon promises starkly different from political reality: ending the Iraq War, creating an accomodationist foreign policy, raising taxes to fund an expanded government mandate. His cabinet selections thus far have disappointed his ardent supporters and those believing him capable of radical change and governance. His approach to the transition period resembles in no way the outline he presented to a gathering of community activists. He has glided past the timetable for troop removal agreed upon by the Iraqi government that extends our commitment to them by three years. His globe-straddling stature has been overshadowed by the financial crisis and the crowd of tin-cup wielding CEOs gathered on Capitol Hill. The narrative of the One that began by forecasting conquest of oppressive neo-conservative reality has culminated in a draw: the realities of geopolitics and global finance have eclipsed the One and forced him to make deals with opponents and members of the economic establishment.


II

Reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations creates friction between one’s psyche and the pop-culture cocoon. Modern rock and roll life is not conducive to appreciating commandments like this:

“Waste not the remainder of your life in thoughts about others, except when you are concerned with some unselfish purpose. For you are losing an opportunity to do something else, when you have such thoughts as: 'What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he contriving?'…”

How can the same mind be amenable to instruction like this while giving over to the obsessions of rock music? If anything, rock and roll teaches us to be concerned with what other people think, say, and do. Those other people are usually unfaithful women, domineering parents and teachers, power mad police, the oppressive establishment. Rock is all about other people, and the rash their deeds and words give the rebel cortex. Rock and pop culture are fashion; they are mating dance peacockery.

I found myself confronted with this fact when driving home. Lacking an audio book, I began to listen to a Judas Priest compilation. But it didn’t work; it didn’t distract me and lift me up out of the boredom of the work world—the music’s sheen was gone, worn away by Aurelius. Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor, reminds himself to live wisely, and not be swayed by the gaudy artifice of human politics; to act with purpose, to live in wonder and appreciation of the nature of all things. Aurelius’ is a philosophy of action and achievement tempered by philosophy and humility:

“In a word, everything which belongs to the body is a flowing stream, and what belongs to the soul a dream and a vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and future fame is oblivion. What then is there which can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. Now this consists in keeping the divinity within us free from violence and unharmed, superior to pain and pleasure, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man’s doing or not doing something…

“Hasten then to the goal which you have before you. Throw away vain hopes and come to your own aid, while yet you may, if you care at all for yourself…

“Short then is the time which any man lives; and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this is handed on by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves much less one who died long ago.”

How can pop culture withstand this? It can’t-- but it doesn’t have to. It ignores the existence of Aurelius completely; it sneers at Judeo-Christian anything.

Against Aurelius, the overdriven guitars of Judas Priest don’t stand a chance, and as I was listening, with some of the Meditations still fresh in my mind, I imagined the mighty band on stage, gyrating and swaying amidst laser beams and dry ice fog, without amplification of any kind. I imagined the driving rhythms of the electric guitars and bass emasculated of their electric potency and the shattering solo guitar melodies reduced to barely audible rodent scratchings; I heard Rob Halford’s scream devoid of metallic reverb, and echo as weakly as a child’s voice through empty stadium corridors (if you lack amplification, you will lose the crowd). I imagined the drums, overpowering the tiny insect-like strumming of the guitars, but barely loud enough to reach across the infield. The rapid breathing of the musicians was loud enough to compete with the guitars. They moved and perspired to the shadow of a nothing, their creation robbed of its power to attract attention.

The pop culture atmosphere cannot compete with the bareness, the rawness of life. There is no way it could: sequins and amplifiers and prosthetic breasts cannot reckon with reality; they are physical manifestations of the real and psychic disposable income generated by progress; they represent how much humanity can afford to ignore nature. Aurelius and the Stoics dealt directly with nature and the mastery of it that comes from knowing oneself and one's place within it.

Aurelius and Priest are mutually exclusive.