Entertainment, like any other art, succeeds or fails according to the artist’s ability to communicate through his artistic medium what his audience is feeling.  For a simple, singular piece of artwork like a painting or a sculpture, the audience either likes it or doesn’t like it according to whether or not they can identify with it somehow.  An art connoisseur might be able to identify with a painting just because he adores the brush strokes or the artist’s use of space or whatever other technical detail that no one else in the world might notice, while someone who doesn’t give a f*ck about paintings at all might not be able to identify with a painting unless it was a painting of his favorite football player, or a painting of a monster truck, or a painting of a naked chick with big tits.  But however the audience views the artwork, the artist’s success or failure depends on his ability to capture something that his audience cares about in his artwork.

There you find the basis for Dr. Pinker’s evolutionary origins of art:  Heroic looking men, fertile looking women, wide open landscapes, and distinctive landmarks are all things that people everywhere care about.  Some people care about other things more, or even a lot more, but everyone cares about all of those things simply because those things have been critical to the survival of our species for millions of years.  So if you’re an artist and you want to create something that a lot of people are pretty well guaranteed to care about, paint pictures of healthy people and picturesque landscapes, and you’re pretty well set.

If you prefer to be more post modern/ avante garde in your artwork, you can always combine images that your audience cares about in an unexpected way, to make them feel something they weren’t expecting, like my friend who photographed the punk chick pissing on the floor of the supermarket.  He sold that photo because he found someone who cared about its contents for some reason.  Presumably, that person wasn’t a collector of photos of punk chicks pissing on the floors of supermarkets, because I’ve never heard of a punk-chicks-pissing-on-the-floors-of-supermarkets art movement.  So presumably, the buyer of that photo cared about its contents because my friend figured out how to capture imagery in his photo that the buyer cared about and figured out how to combine the images in a way that the buyer cared about.

Movies, plays, graphic novels, and story telling work the same way.  Each one of these words I’m typing right now represents an idea that you already understand, and you’re still reading them because I figure out how to arrange these word-ideas into combinations to create new ideas that you understand and continue to care about.   (Or at least, I hope so…)

As you will notice, nowhere in this discussion of the success of art depending on its audience caring about it have I said anything about the ability for the subject of the art to exist in physical reality.  M.C. Escher is an excellent example of an artist whose art subjects could never exist in physical reality.  He painted pictures of optical illusions, like a flight of stairs that wrapped around on itself with no bottom and no top, called The Ever Descending Staircase, complete with people walking down them who could’ve walked down the stairs for the rest of their lives and never reached the end.   You can paint a picture of such a thing and make it look realistic because each part of the picture looked like something you could see in real life, but when you connect all the pieces together, it becomes a thing that’s impossible to build in three-dimensional space.  If you stand back and look at the whole picture at once, you can unravel the illusion, but until you do it just looks like a picture that seems like it should make sense but for some reason doesn’t.  Still, it’s a picture that captures imagery of things that people care about, which combines them in unexpected ways that creates a new idea that people care about.

Now that Christian fundamentalists have done so much to supposedly disprove evolution, by undermining the public’s trust in it, they’ve created a new idea that people care about—namely, that evolution didn’t really happen.  (Okay, so that’s not exactly a new idea, but it is a re-emerging idea, at least.)  That means that in addition to undermining public support for evolution, the Christian fundamentalists have also created new market for artwork—namely, artwork that contradicts evolution.  (Okay, so that’s not exactly a new artistic market, but… you know what I mean.)

Artwork helps create cultural values, by communicating people’s collective feelings through a visible or audible medium.  That’s exactly what Sir Francis Scott Key did during the War of 1812 when he wrote the words,

“Oh, say can  you see,
By the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed,
At the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming.
And the rockets’ red glare,
And the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that Star Spangled
Banner yet wave…
O’er the land of the free
And the home of the brave?”

And that’s also what John Lennon did almost 200 years later when he wrote the words,

“All we are saying
Is give peace a chance…”

The art creates a cultural value by communicating a lot of people’s collective feelings through a tangible medium (in this case, music) and thereby showing the audience that not only does the artist understand each person’s feelings, but also that each person in the audience feels the same way.  The art creates cultural values by helping people express their feelings and by bringing people together who share the same feelings.  That’s exactly what I’m doing with these books, by putting into words what a lot of people have been trying to say.

When you bring together a group of people who feel the same way about something, you create an emotional tribe.  If that group of people works together toward their mutual interests, they become a functional tribe.  If they work together toward a mutual interest that won’t work in physical reality, that’s a problem…

Education depends on building upon what a person already understands to lead him to some new type of understanding—whether it’s new information, a new skill, a new level of awareness about something, or whatever.  Unfortunately, if your student’s current level of understanding is based on something that doesn’t work in physical reality, that’s a problem.  If you try to build on whatever your student already understands about the world to try to teach him something that works perfectly in physical reality but that he refuses to believe works in physical reality, again that’s a problem.  And of course, if the teacher’s understanding of the subject doesn’t actually work in physical reality, that’s a serious problem.  Then you end up like my flight instructor saying, “I don’t know what that picture’s supposed to mean, but look at my shirt, look at my shirt!”

Business professionalism depends on the business professional not threatening the people he deals with, and doing all he can to have a positive emotional effect on them.  In a business professionalism setting, that necessarily means making statistical predictions about what will bring about a positive emotional effect on people.  The more positive effect you have on people, the more Glorious Money they’ll be willing to pay you.  From there it’s a short step of logic to see that the way to make as much Glorious Money as possible is to have the best possible emotional effects on the largest number of people.  That necessarily means using statistics to make predictions about what you can do to bring about the best possible emotional effects on the largest number of people.  If 90% of people are willing to believe that you know what you’re talking about because you’re wearing a clean shirt with a company logo on it, and only 10% of people are more concerned with you actually telling them accurate information, so you devote all your time to washing and ironing your shirts and none of your time to learning a functional understanding of aerodynamics, then you make as much money as possible out of the deal because 90% of your students get what they want even though the other 10% are f*cked.

Now let’s put some pieces together here.  Under a capitalist economic system, you make money by selling things that people want.  That includes art, anything that has to do with business professionalism, and private education.  That means that if some group of people convinces the public to believe in something that isn’t actually physically possible, then art, education, and business professionalism will all support it.

How much will they support it?  Art, education, and business professionalism are not just ideas that people use like tools over the course of their lives, they all create cultural values.  They all teach people to make positive and negative emotional attachments to ideas, and if learned early enough in life, those emotional attachments stay with the people for the rest of their lives.
So how much of an affect can cultural values have on people’s perceptions of the world?  Let’s use business professionalism for an example, and I think it will be pretty obvious how cultural values affect a lot of other people too.  Now just smoke a little more weeeeed here or whatever it is that you do, and let’s pretend once again that I’m very perceptive about people.  Suppose I was to go back to flight school and all my former instructors were still there, and I was to say, “Hey, check out this cool new movement in human evolutionary science that I’ve been helping to pioneer, and see how much better it explains human behavior than the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook.  Here, just read this book I’ve written about it, and it’ll tell you everything you need to know.”  What do you think everyone would say?

A couple of my instructors would say, “Oh, well, I don’t know anything about that, so I’m just going to teach the way I’ve always taught, because that’s what the FAA wants me to do.”
One of my instructors would tell me that he agreed that the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook wasn’t very good, but that he had to follow the FAA approved format for training, whether he wanted to or not.  He was my best instructor by far.

The owner of the school would tell me that he realized that some teaching methods worked better for some people than for other people, but he and his instructors couldn’t afford to be experts on all of them, so they focused on the ones that worked the best for the most people, and do the best they could to adapt to people who had other learning styles.  He did have to compete in business against everyone else who was doing the exact same thing, after all.

A couple of instructors I can think of would tell me that this is how I thought human behavior worked, based on my interpretation of what the scientists were saying.  Then they’d say something about how the FAA puts a lot of research into their books, that’s conducted by qualified professionals.  Then they’d probably say something about how evolution was a really controversial topic and nobody really understood how it worked.

All of these people would be doing the same thing, but the last group would be doing it more noticeably than anyone else.  In the last case, the instructors were giving such high priority to their business professionalism appearance that they wouldn’t accept anything that was based on evolution, just because it’s such a controversial topic and would offend such a large number of their students.  Since they’d learned to feel so strongly that offending their students was wrong, they would feel it was wrong to make use of anything that came from a controversial field.  In other words, they would be trying so hard to maintain their business professionalism image that they would actually prevent themselves from learning ways to conduct their business more effectively.

The other instructors, in their various ways, had learned to feel that doing things the way they were told was the right way to do them, and as soon as they were told to do them a different way they would do that.  They would still be preventing themselves from learning ways to conduct their business more effectively by leaving the decision up to someone else who they mistakenly assumed knew what he was doing.  Of course, since the decision would be so controversial, no one would ever make it, so these instructors would never feel they were supposed to learn anything new.

Business professionalism is an easy example of how people selling status quo cultural values back to their customers is a lot easier than solving the problems the cultural values are causing in the first place.  For an example of a more abstract way this happens, let’s look at an entertainment example:

A friend once let me borrow some DVDs, which included the first season of the TV show Farscape, and the third season of the show Babylon 5—or as I would come to refer to them, Australian Muppet Anarchists in Space and Science Fiction for Republicans.

Farscape was created in Australia by some of Jim Henson’s descendants (hence the Australian Muppets part of my alternate title for it).  It starts with an astronaut from modern-day Earth conducting an experiment in space when his craft is sucked through a wormhole to a distant part of the universe.  There, his craft is pulled aboard a much larger ship, where he meets five aliens of different races.  All six characters on the ship have been separated from their homes in one way or another.  None of them agreed to join the others, they’ve all been thrown together by chance.  None of them recognize any of the others as a leader, but all of them need the help of the others to survive.  The human can’t return home because he doesn’t even know where the Earth is or how to get back.  Three of the characters are escaped criminals who hijacked the ship.  They’re all still criminals back on their home worlds, and none of them know where their home worlds are either.  One of the characters’ home is the ship, but the ship itself is also alive, and it also had been captured by the same race of aliens that was holding the others prisoner.   The sixth character is one of the race of aliens that was holding the others prisoner, and after she was captured by the others, her extremely militant race accuses her of being a traitor, for which the penalty is death. So the first four characters are trying to figure out a way to go home, while the other two want to keep running because they have no homes to go back to.  It takes all six of them working together to operate the ship, and none of them want to go to any of the others’ homes.  That means that none of them can go home, because none of them will agree to take any of the others home first and strand themselves on someone else’s world. Since all storytelling depends on conflict and the inherent conflict in this story is woven so tightly into its premise, for the entire first season at least there was never any shortage of conflict—or story—taking place on screen.

To create the aliens’ alienesque behavior, the creators of the show used the same trick that was used on Star Trek:  The human has an interesting personality by middle-class White guy standards.  He’s also very intelligent—he’s literally a rocket scientist—which gives him his special ability that makes him vital to the others.  The other characters each have very extreme personalities compared to him—one is a bad-ass brute-force type of warrior, one is a bad-ass highly technologically advanced type of warrior from a race that’s the enemies of the brute-force warrior race, one is a New-Age type priestess, one is a pompous and conniving deposed monarch, and the other is so technical he barely seems to have a personality at all.  Since each of these characters is the only one of their race that you see show after show, it implies that each of these individuals is representative of their race, although clearly that can’t be true, because each of them is only one member of their species.  Even when the main characters meet up with other members of their races, those other members act basically like the main characters of their race, but not quite as much, and that does virtually nothing to dispel the illusion. You see so much more of the main characters than you do any other members of their species that you take the main characters’ behavior for granted and see it supported by the similarities in the other characters’ behavior.  The funniest part about the creators of the show using these techniques to create entire alien species by duping their audience members into making these stereotypes is that throughout the show the other five characters keep talking about stereotypes directly, saying to the human things like, “Geez, and somewhere in the universe there’s a whole planet full of people like you?” and it still does nothing to dispel the illusion.

I don’t mean this as a lecture on how easy it is to stereotype people—although there’s clearly a lesson to be learned about that here.  Theatre is full of illusions like this, where artists use your own perceptions in creating their art to create things that look much larger than they really are.  Theatre is not merely the art of creating what the audience sees; it is the art of creating what the audience thinks they see.

If you follow the artists’ intents to their logical conclusion, then obviously the show is just another version of Sesame Street or The Muppet Show, because it’s a story of how people who look and act a lot different from each other can work together and be equally important to each other.   The show is perfectly balanced among six characters who have virtually nothing in common with each other.

In all, I spent 22 hours sitting here at my computer watching everything I said about interpersonal interaction in the Tribalism and Emotions chapters play out right before my very eyes.  But, I was pleased to see, by the last episode in the season, the characters finally made it to the Post-Emotional-Ritual-Tribalism chapter, because they finally trusted each other and were working together.

The creators of Babylon 5 also tried to tell a story about diverse people overcoming their differences and working together, but they only succeeded on a much more limited scale.  (I should mention that they did succeed at other equally important themes on a large scale, which I’ll talk about later.)  Babylon 5 is the story of a space station that’s basically the United Nations of the interstellar community of the 23rd century.  (The parallels to the modern world are unmistakable.)    In this interstellar community, there are five races that are the major powers of the community, and a bunch of other races that form smaller political units of their own—in the same general way that the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China make up the five permanent members of the United Nations security council.

The show’s downfall in portraying five races of aliens is that while the humans are all stereotypical middle class people with interesting personalities and the aliens are all different from them, the representatives of the other four races are all interesting in ways that stereotypical middle class American audiences can easily relate to.  The show’s creators are obviously trying to cast the same illusion as the creators of Farscape cast so well.  The main character of one of the alien races has a French-sounding accent and the main character of another race has a Russian-sounding accent, even though other characters of those same races have American accents.  (And in case you’re wondering, things like this don’t happen by coincidence in Hollywood, any more than it was a coincidence that all of the actors who were cast as members of Bill Cosby’s family on The Cosby Show were Black.)

So while Babylon 5’s creators did successfully weave the illusion that the members of different races spoke with different accents, they didn’t successfully weave the illusion that aliens whose cultural values were terribly far removed from conservative American cultural values could be capable of building a civilization that would be a dominant power of the galaxy.  If I was to characterize the other four alien races, I would have to call them the Liberal French People, the Old-Fashioned Russian People, the Oppressed Banana-Slug-Looking People, and the Really Weird and Mysterious People Who We Just Can’t Understand.  None of the first three races seemed to represent any cultural values that you don’t see every day in America, and the fourth race seemed to represent people who meant well and played their part but whose cultural values were completely beyond anyone’s comprehension.

If you follow the artists’ intention to their logical conclusion in this show, it seems to be, “most people who are capable of building a major power must be pretty much like us, and even though a few people might not be, there are some things in life that you can never understand.”  In other words, they’re reinforcing the American stereotype that I talked about so much in the last book—that the fact that America is the dominant power of the world must prove that we’re better than everyone else, that anyone who is equal to us must be just like us, and anyone who isn’t just like us must be inferior (with the exception of a few token weird people nobody can understand).

But in its favor, the third season of the show was a story of a handful of people serving aboard a space station way the hell out in the galaxy somewhere who uncover a plot that some business man is conspiring with an ancient mysterious race of aliens who are way more powerful than any of the five major powers to overthrow the Earth’s government and replace it with a Fascist dictatorship.  Those few conservative humans have to figure out a way to stop it, and despite all their conservativeness they end up declaring the space station’s independence from the Earth government and joining in a civil war against the new government.  So despite the limitations of their collective character development as individuals and as species, the characters on the show displayed no shortage of independent thought and heroism.  Hey, my friend didn’t go out and buy the entire third season on DVD for no reason, you know!

Now having shown you all these examples of how our political and economic systems support the reinforcement of what people want to believe regardless of why people want to believe those things and whether those things are true or not, you can just imagine the effects that even more abstract, more pervasive sets of cultural values could have on people, like a set of “believe that faith in ancient religious myths is all you need to help save the world,” cultural values, or a set of “believe the battle of Armageddon is the key to the eternal salvation for your soul” cultural values.  If you sell people what they want to believe, you can win elections and make lots of money.

There’s nothing built into our political or economic systems to counteract that directly, because democracy and capitalism both revolve around offering people what they want, regardless of whether or not it’s actually physically possible for those things to exist.   Does anybody see a problem here?

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
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My grandmother once happened across an obituary she was so awestruck by that she cut it out and put it in her wallet.  It was still there when she lost her wallet 20 years later.  It wasn’t even for anyone she knew.

In the midst of a bunch of obituaries for other people that went on and on about, “So-and-so will be dearly missed because he was a great man who was president of this and director of that and head honcho of this and big cheese of that,” somebody posted an obituary for John Somebody (I don’t remember his name), where it listed his surviving relatives, and then all it said was, “A decent man.”

Years later, when my grandfather died, my grandmother had his memorial service programs printed with the title, “Clifford Francis Niesen, A Descent Man.”  She realized (not quite consciously, but in her own way) that all of a person’s life accomplishments don’t really say anything about who the person was.  As other people have said, “Life isn’t a question of what you take with you when you leave, but of what you leave behind.”  And in the end, all the official distinctions in the world don’t mean a thing.

At my grandfather’s memorial service, my grandmother, my dad, and all my aunts and uncles (my grandfather’s wife and children, in other words) got up to say things about him.  I can’t remember what everyone said exactly, but went something like this:

The family lived 20 miles out of town, and to make ends meet, he had to work two jobs—by day as an architect, and in the evenings as a clerk at a hobby and crafts shop.  Then he had to drive 20 miles home, go to bed, get up, and drive 20 miles back to work.  When my eldest aunt was in high school, she wanted to take ballet lessons.  Ballet lessons cost money.  But he squoze water out of rocks somehow, and came up with the money.   The high school was in the town where my grandfather worked—indeed, it was the only town in the entire county—so after her ballet lessons in the evenings, they drove home together.  Where did my grandfather find the money for her ballet lessons?  My aunt wasn’t exactly sure, but it involved them spending a lot of time sitting on the beach together eating bologna sandwiches for supper.

My dad said my grandfather figured out how to do just about everything for himself, from building his own house to fixing his own cars to growing his own garden to building his own model airplanes, boats, and trains.  He never taught my dad anything about how to do those things specifically, but he probably taught him the most important lesson of all in the process of doing those things—that a person could do anything he put his mind to, if he was patient about it and took the time to figure out how to do it.  Now my dad does just about everything for himself too, and now he realizes just how valuable an ability that is, because so many people don’t do things for themselves anymore.  A lot of people just go to work, do their job, earn their paycheck, and then pay other people to do everything else for them.  A lot of adults don’t even know how to cook for themselves anymore, because they—or, so they feel they have to—eat out all the time, or eat instant meals, or hire personal chefs.  If everyone goes through life with this “why bother?” attitude and teaches it to their children, they’re confining themselves to making use of whatever skills they can convince other people to use on their behalf.  If nobody dares to, or bothers to, try to do anything they don’t already know how to do, what happens when people need to do something that nobody knows how to do?  (My dad didn’t say all that at my grandfather’s memorial, but I did hear him talking about it ahead of time, and it’s proved very relevant to this book—if you recall from the Generation of Heroes chapter, the ability to take direct action to solve your own problems is the most fundamental definition of heroism.)

One of my uncles talked about my grandfather combing his hair as well as it needed to be combed, and it never staying combed for very long.  He’d get so wrapped up in whatever he was doing, and would stay so busy doing so many things, that he spent most of his life with messy hair.  That’s how most people knew him, that’s how most people would remember him, and that said a lot about his life.

My dad also told a story of borrowing one of my grandfather’s gliders without his permission one day, and taking it outside to fly around.  My dad didn’t realize what he was doing, though, and tossing it around outside the house—as opposed to tossing it around in a wide-open field, which is what my grandfather always did—he crashed it into a rock and battered one of the wings.  He knew he was in trouble, because my grandfather put a lot of work into anything he ever built, and now he’d just broken something my grandfather built, without even asking if he could use it.  So when my grandfather came home, my dad told him about it, fearing what my grandfather would say, but knowing that if he didn’t tell him it would be even worse.  I probably ought to mention that my grandfather’s father was a German.  When my dad told my grandfather that he’d damaged his glider, my grandfather’s exact words to him were:  “Aaach.”  In English, that’s basically a sound you make with your mouth when you don’t care about something.  In German, it translates literally as, “Oh.”  My dad said he learned a good lesson in leniency and resilience that day.

Something else my dad said was that my grandfather almost never said anything negative about anybody.  The most negative thing my dad could remember ever having heard him say about someone was, “I don’t think he knows very much about what he’s doing,” or something like that.  My dad didn’t realize that until much later, but said it was yet another good example my grandfather set for him.

(I try to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps too, but the 1920s and ‘30s was a long time ago.  My grandfather didn’t grow up in a world run by thieves and liars, where politicians would sell out their own people for a fast buck.  Sure, politicians sold out plenty of other people for a fast buck back then, but at least they didn’t make it their life’s ambition to be worthless scum and hope everyone else will just be too stupid to notice.  I produce successful art the same way anyone does, by turning other people’s feelings into art, and a lot of people are feeling a lot of negative things right now.  So I have to make the choice between following my grandfather’s example of not saying anything terribly negative about people, or following his example of figuring out how to use my abilities to solve problems in the world.  At least I can diffuse a lot of negativity by addressing it in a good-natured manner.  And for anybody who thinks they can get away with committing crimes against humanity if they do it politely while wearing a tie, well, I’m here to make sure you get what you have coming to you, you son of a bitch.  Anyway…)

Another of my uncles is a musician. When he was in high school, he started growing his hair “long”—meaning partway down his neck.  He would stop in to see my grandfather after school some afternoons, while he was out roaming the streets, waiting for his ride home.  Some of the architects my grandfather worked with asked him why would let his kid grow his hair long.  “Well,” said my grandfather, “He doesn’t get into any trouble, so I think he’s growing up just fine.”

My uncle got into playing the string bass in band in high school.  A string bass is about seven feet tall; it’s the largest relative of the violin-viola-cello family, and the largest stringed instrument in a symphony orchestra.  They’re also expensive as hell, which is why a lot of string bass players buy two tickets any time they take a plane anywhere—one seat for themselves, and the other for their bass.  Anyway, the town where my grandfather worked and my uncle went to high school was a small town, and it had one hardware store and one music store, and they were right next door to each other.  Sometimes my grandfather would be out surveying in the afternoon and would have to stop by the hardware store to pick something up.  A lot of times, he’d see my uncle over next door, staring at the string bass in the window of the music shop.  As my uncle said, a lot of people at my grandfather’s memorial had already called him a husband, a father, an engineer, and a model-maker, but one thing nobody had called him yet was a magician.  Because one day, my uncle came home and found that string bass in his bedroom.  He had no idea how my grandfather had gotten it there, but personally, I’m willing to bet it had something to do with the family eating a lot of oatmeal, bologna sandwiches, and baked beans.

My middle aunt talked about how my grandparents were always together.  They went together like peanut butter and jelly.  Not because they felt they had to or were supposed to, but because they liked being together that much.  She said that by her count, in the entire 67 years they were married, not counting time either of them spent in the hospital, the number of nights they didn’t sleep in the same bed was something like 5.

My youngest aunt said she never knew my grandfather very well when she was growing up, because by the time she came along, he already had six other kids to provide for.  (Which was a big reason he barely even had time to comb his hair anymore!)  But, she said, they made their peace by the end.

My other uncle isn’t very much for words, but he didn’t need very many.  All he had to add was that no matter how mad my grandfather got at anyone, you never had any doubt that he still loved you.

Every single person chooses the effect they will try to have on the world in their life.  You are the effect you have on the world.  You get three words to describe yourself.  The first word is “A” (or “An”), and the last word is “Person”.  The middle word is the one you get to pick.  That’s the word that the world will remember you for.  When you die, all your life’s accomplishments are going to be forgotten, and the only thing the world is going to remember you by is that middle word.

What’s your word?

But it’s not quite that simple.  Over the course of your life, expect to meet 10,000 people.  These 10,000 people don’t know you, and have no preconceived ideas of who you are or who you should be.  These 10,000 people don’t require your presence, but they aren’t opposed to it either.  In other words, these 10,000 people will know as much or as little about you as you want them to, and they will base their opinion of you on your actions, and on nothing else.

When you die, these people are going to bury you under a headstone.  On that headstone they are going to carve your name and three words.  The first word is “A” (or “An”), and the last word is “Person”.

The trick here is that these 10,000 people aren’t going to pick out the word they think you want for yourself, they’re going to pick out the word that they think best describes you.  They are doing this because they are keeping a record of all the people they’ve known, and they will remember who you were by reading your name and your three words on your headstone, so they can tell other people about you.  They’re going to pick your middle word according to the greatest affect that you had on them as a whole.

What’s the word they’re going to pick?

That’s the word you’re picking for yourself.

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
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A lot of hipsters put straight edgers down for not drinking or doing drugs, saying—or at least thinking—that they’re a bunch of wimps or that they’re so conservative in their thinking that their minds just aren’t open to new experiences, blah, blah, blah.  Straight edgers aren’t supposed to swear or have sex either.  Taken all together, the straight edge movement sounds like a counter-rebellion of kids practicing Christian values in a secular fashion… or maybe not even in a secular fashion… and being so rebellious that they rebel against the rebels and lead people back to the mainstream.  But then, if the real rebels are getting so caught up in rebelling that when the mainstream people actually come up with good ideas the rebels come up with bad ideas just to prove they can think for themselves, well then, maybe rebelling against the rebels isn’t such a bad idea after all.  Or maybe some straight edgers are a lot like me, and just do their own thing and rebel against everyone who gets in their way.

Personally, my brains give me my best abilities in life, so f*cking up my brain for recreation has never appealed to me.  The way I see it, if you tune a $100,000 Steinway piano almost to perfection and then bash it with a sledge hammer, odds are you’re going to make it sound worse, you’re not going to make it sound better.

There are four main arguments I’ve heard for why people drink and do drugs, and none of them have ever appealed to me.  First, it makes life more interesting.  Second, people like who they are better when they’re drunk.  Third, it helps people to escape their problems.  And fourth, it’s a mind-altering experience that gives you new perspective on life.

If your life isn’t interesting, figure out why it isn’t interesting and figure out what would make it interesting.  Then do that.  Change your life and make it actually interesting, don’t just make it seem interesting temporarily.

If you like who you are so much better when you’re drunk, then figure out what it is you like about yourself so much more when you’re drunk and then choose to do that.  Be who you want to be.  Choose to be that person.  Once again, why bother depending on something else to change your situation temporarily when you can change it all by yourself permanently?

If you drink to escape your problems in life, once again, figure out what your problems are, what’s causing them, and what it would take to solve them.  Then do that.  If you can solve your problems permanently on your own, why waste your time depending on something else to solve them temporarily?

Looking for a new perspective on life is the one I can’t easily dismiss.  Of course, everyone has their own way of doing that.  But there are two things I can say about it.  First, the people I’ve known who I consider my peers when it comes to creativity and who’ve experimented with drugs all tell me the same thing:  They’re a complete disappointment, because they didn’t make anything happen in their brains that they couldn’t’ve made happen themselves.  Whatever weird thoughts or feelings they had are ones they could’ve thought of or felt anyway.  And the second follows close on the heels of the first:  All the time you spend in your life altering your perspective on life with drugs is time you aren’t spending altering your perception some other way.  These books are the product of my ongoing search for new ways to alter my perspective on life, and drugs didn’t have a goddamned thing to do with it, so I really can’t say that fourth argument impresses me personally.
When I was in high school, I read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe.  Talk about altering your perspective on the world!  Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters basically invented the rave back in the ‘60s, when they’d travel all over the country, throwing huge parties in warehouses with lots of psychedelic music, light shows, costumes, and of course, drugs.

But Ken Kesey wasn’t doing all this for the sake of doing lots of drugs; he was doing it for the sake of pushing people’s perspectives on life ever further outward.  Early in the book he talks about how when you’re young, everything in the world is new to you, so you see everything for the first time.  But then people grow up, get so complacent and accustomed to everything, get so set in their routines, and take everything for granted, that all they see anymore is what they expect to see.  LSD really shook people’s perspectives up and made people see the world in new and unexpected ways again.

At first his psychedelic parties did just that, because by creating psychedelic environments and giving people psychedelic drugs, he could shake up a lot of people’s perspectives on the world.  But then, as usual, his great new visionary movement attracted a lot of people who weren’t in it for the vision but for the tangible results that were being generated by other people pursuing the vision—namely, new music, new shortcuts to altered states of consciousness, and new ways to f*ck.  So his proto-rave psychedelic-party-as-a-vehicle-for-expanding-horizons movement started getting bogged down once it attracted so many people who wanted to keep the (so-called) “movement” right where it was instead of keeping it moving.  So toward the end of the book he sat all of his followers down and told them they had to move on to the next level and learn how to create new life experiences on their own.

Oh, there is one other argument I’ve heard for doing drugs:  Really hardcore drugs make you feel like you can fly.  But then, having been through flight school, I always feel like I can fly now, and I have the opportunity to get people to pay me lots of money to fly, instead of my having to pay other people to make me feel like I can fly.  So how hard-core is that, hmm?

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
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This is an essay I found in an online group by someone who called him- or herself Underground Panther in the Sky.  He or she didn’t specify his or her gender in his or her group profile.  He or she even had a photo included on his or her profile, and I still couldn’t tell if he or she was a he or she.  But I think that was intentional, because in the photo he or she was dressed all in rainbow colors and marching in a gay pride parade.  So if this underground person in the sky who writes about paradoxes isn’t particularly attached to one gender or the other, well good for him or her.  Since men don’t depend on their upper body strength very much anymore and women having lots of children is the greatest threat to the future of our species now, gender roles are pretty much just an obsolete aesthetic preference anymore.  Usually I refer to hypothetical people as “he” just because it’s a convention of speech and a lot less awkward than “he or she”, but if Underground Panther in the Sky specifically wants to remain gender unidentified, then that’s his or her choice, and I’ll call him or her anything he or she wants.

Anyway…

This looks like the result of a bunch of research he or she did, and he or she included references at the end of his or her essay, but that’s not really the point.  It’s not my goal just to pull any old crap off the internet and tell it you about it and claim it proves anything.  Quite the contrary, this is so well written that if even if it didn’t have any references and I just told everyone about it without telling you any references, a lot of people would go look for some references, and a lot of people would start thinking about this, and a lot of people would learn something from it, instead of just remembering what I or someone else said.  And that’s been the real point of my telling you all this stuff all along.

When I say it’s “well written”, I mean that Underground Panther in the Sky communicates his or her ideas to his or her audience effectively.  However, he or she is communicating ideas to his or her audience, and I’m communicating ideas to my audience.  Based on everything I’ve already told you, I could tell you his or her story in a lot fewer words than he or she could tell it to his or her own audience.

So rather than reprint the entire article here, I’ll give you a slightly condensed version that I think adequately tells the story Underground Panther in the Sky was trying to tell.  I did consider paraphrasing his or her story in my own words, but that would just be too easy.
Some of this essay might sound like it contradicts other things I’ve said in these books.  That’s because Underground Panther in the Sky doesn’t know as much about human behavior as I do, so he or she has made a few oversights.

The biggest one I can tell you about up front.  One reason people like privacy from each other so much is because our social instincts evolved in communities of roughly 100 people each.  When 100 people live and work together for their mutual survival, everybody knows everybody else, so everybody can trust each other fairly well.  When you start building communities bigger than 100 people, now you have too many people in the group for everyone to know everyone else personally.  People perceive strangers to be a threat in a way they don’t perceive people they know personally to be a threat.  So then the group needs to start imposing artificial barriers like laws and cultural values to keep people safe from each other.

Another oversight is his or her assumption that people aren’t naturally racist and xenophobic, and that if you put any two strangers together in a neighborhood they’ll automatically get along with each other unless someone else teaches them not to.

So the real story of what happened isn’t quite such the one-sided conspiracy Underground Panther in the Sky makes it out to be.  But when you consider who’s involved in this story, how many resources they had to devote to making the story end in their favor, and how much they gained by making the story turn out the way it did, it’s probably still 85% a conspiracy and 15% unintentional, or something like that.

Consider this a free advertizement for Underground Panther in the Sky’s blog, which you can find if you Google search for it.  As I’ve said, the Bible is a story of the world, but for decades, various people all over the world have been trying to help write a new story of the world.  All the pieces were already out there somewhere; it just took someone with a good background in all those areas (namely, me) to put them all together.  But a new story of the world wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t show everyone how to help write it.  One good way to do that is to show how other people are already helping to write it.

So here it is…

The Paradox of Privacy

by Underground Panther in the Sky

Why do we desire to have separate houses, separate rooms? Separate tables when we go to restaurants, separate cars?

This desire for a wall of separation between other people is a recent innovation. It is a thing created to manage people and discourage solidarity…

Our culture’s need for privacy is manufactured. A social control experiment gone awry. It is the result of a long trend of state sponsored social conditioning.

Private institutions and courts in the late nineteenth century and federal agencies in the twentieth took a particular form of family autonomy and privacy, present only in a minority of the population, and worked to spread it among the rest of the population. These agencies were unwilling to accept diversity in family or community life.

Early proponents of properness, privacy and domesticity turned to state power to create public and private coercion to induce family and community conformity. They intruded upon people’s home life and privacy to enforce their own vision of what ‘proper’ home life and social divisions must be. And this intrusion into privacy, in the name of privacy, went beyond obvious examples like the enforced segregation of Blacks and Whites in the south. Families were torn apart literally, if they were poor, different, or had children that were not properly submissive to authority, or prim enough in their manners. The more courts and officials institutionalized their ‘ideal’ of childhood and parental responsibility, the more inclined they were to literally institutionalize people and stigmatize functions that did not fit into their idealized nuclear family models.

If a family failed to create ‘adequate’ personal privacy between each other, failed to achieve economic independence, or didn’t obey ‘proper’ gender roles, state institutions took over the household. Children were sent to “reform schools” or foster care if their mother didn’t look “normal” enough for the state’s extreme puritanical definitions of a “fit” mother.

Around the Civil War era, these proponents of “privacy” and Victorian mores had two main goals of social policy. They were to “free the nuclear family from its formal entanglements with kin and neighbors” and to make diverse communities uniform. This was a program designed to slowly undo the trusted kin and friendship connections of people to others in their own communities and to end communal childrearing.

The subjugation of families to public authority did not stem from a collectivist or socialist agenda but from an attempt to build individualistic definitions of private responsibility. State institutions fostered a form of personal responsibility that was geared to a competitive and structurally unequal economic order. For example, schools taught children “helping your friends is cheating.” This had the effect of making people struggle harder to hold their own, and to glorify and mystify notions of independence. And it introduced more stress, isolation, exhaustion, and loneliness.
This kind of manipulation served the business people and church crowd that ran the state back then very well.

This grand design for social separation was the brainchild of tweaking Victorian churchmen and greedy insecure businessmen who found close-knit communities and solidarity of people who were less than wealthy or not too prim, who were socializing in urban tenements or the street, upsetting and threatening. To the upper crusties the people out on the street, particularly the poor and immigrants talking to each other, were too much for their paranoid constitutions to bear.
The Victorian marms and control freaks set about making laws to isolate people and turn them into symbols of social deviance. Even the US Commissioner of Labor, Charles Neill, declared in 1905: “There must be a separate house and as far as possible separate rooms, so that in an early period of life the ideas of rights to property, the right to things, to privacy may be instilled.”
Soon after that came the loitering laws, limits on where people could gather, limits on how many people could gather, and what they could or could not do together. Zoning laws and building codes arose to reinforce people’s separation from kin and community. Stores, churches and institutions gobbled up living space.  Suburban sprawl came to be a formidable force to separate people from contact with each other and communal social spaces even more. Soon the demands of time, housekeeping, and hobbies began to segregate people’s lives into compartments just like the suburban landscape and the commute to go anywhere reflected many lonely rooms in their homes…

We turned into a nation of strangers communicating to each other via church- or state-created identities in the media.

When the state butts in to separate us, divide us, to manipulate us with divisive labels, it creates more reaction and hostility between people. When the media, politicians, and community leaders use divisive labels and divisive issues to undermine solidarity and community cooperation, people seek identification and group loyalty to fill the empty hole left by the systematic erosion of our natural human solidarity and sense of relatedness to diversity that is part of every community. The identities offered in the social sphere, often tend to separate us from each other and ourselves all the more.

And the intervention of the state to enforce religious legislation, or to pass overly restrictive or unnecessary laws, becomes a poor intrusive substitute for better solutions that truly can correct the damage done by previous state, church, or corporate intrusion into our privacy.

Also, consider the ambiguity towards privacy within the religious right, today. In the past, Victorians enforced separation, isolation, and the undermining of community and solidarity especially among the lower classes and immigrants. They violated privacy to enforce their view of privacy. In comparison, modern religious conservatives are concerned about the state intervening to stop them from beating their kids.

James Dobson and Jerry Regier, Jeb Bush’s appointee to the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), for example, are suspicious of any state regulation against child abuse. They want the right to beat their children or spank them. Regier wrote back in 1988, “The Bible is not at all uncertain about the value of discipline, ‘Although you smite him with the rod, he will not die. Smite him with the rod… save the soul. ‘” At that time Regier was a member of the Christian

Fundamentalist group Coalition on Revival. That group endorsed spanking children even if it caused bruises and welts. They wanted to make premarital sex and masturbation illegal. They believed that Christians shouldn’t marry non-Christians and that married women should not have careers. Regier previously worked for George Bush, Sr., as head of the National Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Dobson, Regier, and others imply some notion of privacy within the home to allow them to potentially harm children, masked under the banner of religious freedom. Yet they both are very much opposed to the right to privacy as defined by the Supreme Court.

The right to privacy was used in the Griswold decision, to overturn a Connecticut law against married couples obtaining contraceptives in 1965. The right was extended to protect a woman’s expectation of privacy with regard to her own body and decision with her doctor to have an abortion in the first trimester, and then throughout the pregnancy. The right to privacy may also be invoked to overturn the current Texas Sodomy law, which was used recently to prosecute two gay men who were having consensual sex in the privacy of their own home.

Such conservative Christians would support their right to privacy within the home to provide cover for potential child abuse, but would throw away any principle of a right to privacy that would prevent state intrusion into the private bedrooms of consenting adults.

Compare that to the common sense view that the right to privacy does not grant immunity from reasonable search and seizure, or hinder due process and investigation to enforce legitimate laws against child abuse, incest, abuse of power, fair contracts, etc., but prevents the state from being over-intrusive in private affairs, for example, where no one is beaten, threatened, coerced, conned, etc. Reactionaries want the state in our bedrooms, and everyone else wants to prevent the state from intruding needlessly and dominating our private lives.

We all love the idea of the state butting out of our private lives… But when private life becomes a danger to life and limb for those living within those walls, we wish for state, family, or neighborly intervention. A tyrant in the home requires those whom he tyrannizes to maintain an illusion that the brutality that goes on in private isn’t really happening. Families become enablers and secret keepers.

Because of a household tyrant’s need for suppression and for privacy to abuse people, privacy and securing it is of overblown importance to him.

Domestic abuse is a dire problem in our country, when those who report child abuse are as follows: Professionals (including teachers), law enforcement officers, social services workers, and physicians, make more than half (56%) of the reports. Others, including family members, neighbors, and other members of the community, made the remaining 44 percent of referrals regarding abuse.

It’s tragic when only 44% of our own kin and home communities dare to get involved in confronting domestic abuse, and prefer instead to let the state handle it. And 56% of those reports only happened because the state was stepping in where kin and neighbors failed to. Where was the community’s concern and empathy? Where were friends and neighbors? Were they all inside their private homes, too oblivious to notice, in their own rooms, sitting alone with the TV on or a video game going on to drown out the sounds of real violence with fake violence?

Which would you rather have? Some kin, neighbor, or friend we know or are aquatinted with step in to chill out an abuser that’s abusing a kid, and then alert the whole neighborhood to watch out for the kid’s safety, ready to provide a place for the kids to go when the shit hits the fan as the cops are called? Or would you rather have some state-regulated over-worked social worker with a huge caseload to tell him to stop hurting people, on the way to the police station before he’s released on bail to keep on abusing people? All while no one else outside admits they might know about it, or when they do know they still refuse to help?

Kids die this way, folks, even at the hands of their own parents. This inspires a public outcry from the bothered for church and state to step in as parents. People die at the hands of normal looking, quiet, all-too-private sociopaths who nobody interfered with or even suspected was a problem individual. Assuming the best, ignoring the suspicions, keeping to themselves until the stench of dead bodies under the crawlspace is unbearable and the state is called to fix it.

I myself would trust myself and my own neighbors to investigate violence they overhear in our neighborhood. This simple act of human concern for a fellow human being may save many lives in abusive homes, because it ruins the secrecy games enablers enact to protect themselves from harm. It destroys any delusions of lordship through privacy that a household tyrant craves so he can keep abusing people.

People are less likely to intervene in domestic violence nowadays because we do not socialize as freely with each other any more, in the streets and neighborhoods of America. And because we move from place to place chasing jobs, we never get to stay in a neighborhood long enough to put down roots and participate in neighborhood or civic life.

So if I don’t know my neighbors, the state and its impersonal intervention looks safer to me because it’s regulated by others, somewhat (usually by citizen-elected “officials” or citizen-created advocacy groups).

Isn’t this ironic? We want state intervention when other’s privacy is abused, and we want that state power for intervention supervised by people who are citizens to keep it respectful of our privacy rights, but these are uninvolved people who have no clue who we are, personally. We hate having our own privacy violated, yet we are eager to invade others’ privacy through the apparatus of the state, to make sure there isn’t any consensual homosexual sex or gay adoptions going on.
The state has taken the place of familiar human community supports. It is impersonal, the way the state controls social interactions and puts an end to solidarity in community. TV, computers, video games are usurping our free time, and the media’s constant harping on tragedies and crimes of the unknown person in the neighborhood has helped this social isolative process along psychologically. The loitering laws, chronic suburban sprawl, the necessity of cars to get anywhere, air conditioning, and other various actions and inventions of business and the passivity or unawareness of unions all contributes to this malaise.

Look, if neighbors all across this country knew each other and didn’t fear neighborly diversity, because we knew our diverse neighbors personally, it might make people less stuck on believing bigoted rhetoric, less gullible to manipulation, and less prone to get reactionary over other people’s ways of life. We would not need the state to intervene to tell us to get along, if we didn’t forget how to relate and get along together.

When it’s someone you know well and respect who’s in trouble, it feels different because there is a relation there. The impersonal state and other institutions of this society have no authority to lord their self-serving social models and agendas over you, when they appeal to things like empathy, ethics, and other values that are inherent in living beings. When the state does this type of appeal to the better parts of humanity, it is coercive, intrusive, or impersonal. When the state appeals to empathy or the needs for ethical behavior from someone, it calls in another intrusive profession or social institution, like psychiatry or the church to tell you how.

In isolation we feel more vulnerable to symbols and we feel more powerless when we think we have no allies who understand us socially. So when the state gets ugly or a company screws us to the wall we are more likely submit to it because we fear abandonment, homelessness.

We behave today, to some extent, as we were planned to behave by state lawmakers in the nineteen hundreds. We often act like the wealthy hysterical Victorian legislators and churchmen living in the late nineteen hundreds, as we fret over “those undesirable strangers entering our antiseptic segregated suburban “paradise.” We gossip so arrogantly and ignorantly about those “other people,” those “criminals on the street corners,” those “rowdy youth,” those “bums.” We admonish people who are not like us, people we don’t relate to. Because we have overvalued our own privacy, we think we don’t have to learn how to get along with others. We can go on endlessly about “those other people” doing nasty unChristian things in private, or doing things we wouldn’t ourselves do in public as we do the same damn thing in the sanctity of our home.

This kind of blazing bullshit hypocrisy is only possible where people refuse to relate to one another on human terms beyond their familiar cliques, and instead choose to abbreviate real people into symbols and have nightmares about “them.” It’s much easier to dehumanize someone you’ve never talked to.

How vivid the human imagination becomes when it is isolated from human-to-human community relationships. How malleable and controllable we all get when we’re atomized into our separate houses, separate rooms, separate cars, in a town full of strangers shut up in their own domiciles lording over it, possessing all these things … but are secretly suffering for want of a true friend and somewhere to go on a Saturday night besides getting drunk out of your skull.

A community relationship is the only way to dull the loneliness and boredom of your life. You cannot have your privacy cake and eat your neighbor’s privacy too.

But we have become so timid, over-polite, passive, and socially awkward. We can’t just walk up to a guy on the street and ask him to coffee; we are all too busy, too awkward. We assume they don’t want to be bothered with friendship, and so our social conditioning is never challenged.
How convenient this is, to those who fear community and solidarity. How tyrannical we become when we think we are powerless, because we are by all observable evidence alone… abandoned by everyone, to fend for ourselves, alone against the whims of a dog-eat-dog world. How vulnerable we feel when we have painful pasts where no one heard us or stepped in to help.

Fearful privacy and misuse of personal power becomes a refuge from fear of the “other,” and a refuge from corporate/state control and time management. Privacy, while it feels safe, is also a haven for creating even more fear and reaction of the “other,” who is dehumanized into a symbol. This kind of privacy invites more state intervention and control.

We need community relationships to temper our tendency to react or to be tempted by extremism. Absolute privacy and state intervention as a substitute for a neighborhood… it is a tragic and profitable paradox of symbols in this modern civilized life.
~ : ~

Excerpts in the article are from The Way We Never Were, by Stephanie Coontz.
So:  Once upon a time, there were a whole bunch of people living in America who had all kinds of different ideas about how families and neighbors should interact with each other.  A certain group of people was more politically powerful than all the others, so they used the apparatus of the government to enforce their own cultural values on everyone else.

Idealizing independence and training everyone to agree on the “right” concept of privacy had the added benefit of dividing all the people out there who might’ve been able to present some sort of opposition to the people in power if only they’d remained united.

If everyone is taught to believe that everyone else believes that asking someone for help is a sign of weakness, then nobody will ask anybody else for help.  If nobody dares to ask anybody else for help, then they aren’t a community; they’re a bunch of individuals living in the same neighborhood all trying to fend for themselves.

Then if everybody is so busy trying to fend for themselves and thinking nobody else wants their help, people won’t have time to get to know each other.  If people don’t get to know each other, they won’t trust each other.

Don’t forget that those people who controlled the government way back in the beginning still control the government today.  Back in the beginning they used all their governmental apparatus to get into everyone’s private lives and make sure everyone was conducting their private lives correctly.

Now when things start going wrong with people’s private lives, their neighbors won’t help them, so if they want help, they have to turn to who else?  The government.

And if someone notices something going wrong in someone else’s private life and wants to help, they can’t very well intervene directly, because they don’t know the other person well enough.  So who do they have to turn to?  The government.

What happens when you divide people?  Well, as one famous saying goes, “United we stand, divided we fall.”  And as another famous saying goes, “Divide and conquer.”

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
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I woke up that morning after an uncomfortable night on the floor, and realized I was in Oregon.

Oregon, where it’s not safe for you to pump your own gas, even though the pumps work exactly the same as they do in Idaho, one mile to the east on the other side of a line some White people drew on a map once upon a time, and at every other gas station in North America…
I’m very sensitive to the availability of gasoline. Some previous summer, riding into Nevada and past that sign saying Next  Gasoline  110  Miles, I didn’t think twice about the ability of my quarter-tank to get me there—provided I slowed down to 45 miles an hour for the whole trip, to cruise at the bottom end of my highest gear and stretch the go-juice as far as possible. I didn’t even think once about the fact that I was down to four ounces of drinking water.  Then when it was gone twenty minutes later, speeding up to get to water sooner would’ve meant getting to gasoline never—and not water, either, as a result.  But finally, dehydrated, riding into Tonopah on fumes two-and-a-half hours later, what did I fill up on first?

Bree and Salt Lake City hadn’t worked out after all.  It wasn’t exactly the happeningest place, job-wise or otherwise, and Bree turned out to be a dyke.  Not just a lesbian, but a dyke—and she’d tell you that herself.  She said she wanted to get a T-shirt with the word dyke  written in Braille across her D-sized tits, that’s how much of a dyke she was.  So I figured if I skipped town right away, I could make Portland with almost a hundred bucks left, without even 45-crawling the whole way there.

So somewhere out on Route 30, blowing by a Day Labor Wanted sign by a farmhouse, I cursed myself for a long time afterward for passing up on an opportunity for money to be made, new adventures to be had, and possibly a disillusioned farmer’s daughter to corrupt.  But for some reason, turning back hadn’t set right with my trusty adventurer-instincts at the time…
And so it was, that half-an-hour later, coming upon a collection of buildings that called themselves a town, and which were flying red and blue balloons today, I realized that the townsfolk lining each side of the road were waiting for a parade.  I passed up a parade back in New York in May, and then I missed my grandmother riding her trike for the last time in the Independence-day parade in California. I couldn’t skip another parade!

So I pulled into the post-office, just barely, because the other three spaces were full.  And no sooner had I opened my door than some lady had to ask the inevitable questions:  Had I really driven all the way from Maine?  What was I doing in Unity, Oregon?  Eventually, I learned I would finally get my parade in half an hour, so I wrote a postcard to Boon, since I left Maine without getting his address, and back in Iowa, Paul and Pak said they were moving to Thailand so he could meet her family, which meant I’d have the chance to go visit all three of them then…

I dug out my empty drywall compound bucket from the cargo hold, and took it across the street to sit in the shade, and found myself right next to the same lady and three or four relatives of hers, and had to have the same conversation all over again:  Yes I drove all the way from Maine/ yes, it’s a long way away/ took me three months to get here/ Yes, that’s where the original Portland is/ Because I saw you were getting ready to have a parade…   But they did invite me to their community picnic afterwards.

The parade turned out to be a fun little thing, for a small farming town out in the middle of nowhere, almost with more people in the parade than watching it.  There was a police car and a fire truck; 4-H kids riding horses and walking dogs and goats; four bikers— in their own opinions, anyway—on three motorcycles, who’d just ridden into town a couple minutes behind me; a couple trucks towing flatbed trailers carrying school bands and old people waving to the crowd and throwing candy; the Women of America—dressed up like a colonial wife, a pioneer, a cow girl, a construction worker, one painted up like an Native American, and one farmer’s wife pretending she was a hippie, even  though she looked like she was already over thirty back then, and probably over forty as well; a few cars of travelers who hadn’t realized they were pulling into the middle of a parade but all waved as they drove by anyway;  and political campaigns of some guy running for Sheriff, and some lady running for Representative of something…

And there she was.

One end of the banner was being held up by that rebellious farmer’s daughter from thirty miles back, wearing a Stars & Stripes scarf on her head, but otherwise dressed all in black, like me, and not walking like she wanted to be there.

But she was somewhere in the middle of the parade, and people were still throwing candy at me faster than I could eat it.  And then it was over, so I followed some people to the barbecue by the lake…

Just a few people were starting to set up all around, so I took a stroll down by the water in the meantime, being short on food myself and shorter on any I’d bother offering anyone else, and, well-meaning though they’d be, wanting a break from hearing myself say Yes, it’s a long drive/ I left on May 24th… until they could start feeding me in return.  But it was only an artificial lake, so there wasn’t much to look at, and I didn’t stay there long.

The townspeople had parked another flatbed trailer on the picnic ground, where they were sporadically setting up speakers and microphones, so wondering if they needed my help, I asked one kid who was probably eight or ten what they were going to have, but his only answer was to turn and run away.  So I sat down by myself at a table in the middle of things, to watch the goings on; and although all the tables in the shade were taken up, the late-summer sun in the Oregon desert was nothing compared to what it had been in Nevada and southern Utah…

And there she was again.  Standing under a tree across the yard— by herself.  And alternately helping girls and old women carry things from vehicles to tables, albeit impassively.  I had to chuckle at how easy this was looking, not to mention much more fun than day labor on a farm, even if it was such a formulaic plot of the mysterious drifter riding out of the desert and stealing the heart of the local town-girl with her dreams of running away…

Then she turned and went down the steps to the beach.

To avoid arousing suspicion on the part of the wholesome townspeople whose food I was still waiting to eat, I waited a few minutes before heading down to the shore, and used a different set of stairs.  She was sitting at the bottom of her own stairs, talking to a local-looking chick, so I wandered by, pretending not to notice, and around the bend into the cove with the boat-ramp…

When I came back, she was gone.

I walked up the stairs and found her helping an old lady arrange things on a card table, and noticed the fading patterns drawn on her chest and neck with Sharpie markers as I walked—

“Name?”  said she.

“What?”  I asked.

“What’s your name?”

“Oh.  Ezra,” I said.  Even easier than I thought…

“Edith,” said she, and shook my hand.  Without giving me any of the five stock responses to my statement— Are you Jewish?; are you LDS? (in Utah); were your parents religious?; you mean like the poet?; you mean like the band?  So I didn’t have to give her any of my five stock answers:  No; hell no; no way; yes; Better than Ezra is the stupidest name for a band I’ve heard.

She asked the lady, her grandmother, if she needed any more help, and upon learning she didn’t, announced that she was going swimming and that I was welcome to join her.

“Are you from around here?”

I took a look around at the cowboys and farmers and their respective families we were walking among, and back at her.  And laughed and had to give her all of my first three stock responses to the questions my name usually aroused—“No, hell no, no way.”

“That’s good,” she said, “You didn’t look it.”

We went down to the boat ramp, where I seemed to recall having seen a sign saying “No Swimming In This Area”, and where no one else was swimming, and she kicked off her shoes, pulled off her black leather pants, and waded into the water in her black halter top and tights.  I told her I’d join her, but I don’t swim.  She got in up to her waist, yelped like a puppy, turned around and said it was quite alright that I wasn’t joining her, and waded right back out, adding that now she understood why nobody else was swimming.

“So what are you doing here?”

“Just saw you were having a parade…” I echoed, “…Moving to Portland.”

“Well I hope you like rain.”

It turned out she wasn’t from there either, she was just visiting her grandmother, and she was taking the bus back to Vancouver— Washington—the next day.  Which was right across the river from Portland, so I told her I could give her a ride, instead.  While I was signing the guest book on her grandmother’s card table, she asked if it was alright, and her grandmother phrased her not a chance in hell very politely, saying that the arrangements   had already been made.

But her grandmother did give me a paper plate, and Edith was gone, somewhere into the crowd suddenly swarmed around the opened potluck-buffet, and by the time I made it to the barbecued beef, the first item in line, she was back, with a plate of fruit salad, a slice of watermelon, and a piece of cantaloupe, saying that being a vegan didn’t leave her much choice of a diet here in cowboy country.

We sat down under a tree, and I ran back to the van for a fork.  By the time I returned, ready to start eating, she was already finished and writing in her poetry book.

“So what kind of vegan are you if you’re wearing leather pants?”  I asked.

“They’re not leather, they’re synthetic,” she said.  “Favorite movie.”  Didn’t even bother to phrase it as a question.

“The Road Warrior,” I said readily.

“The Rogue Warrior?”  she asked.

“No, The Road Warrior,” I repeated.

“Never heard of it,” said she. “Plot-line.”

She had to be young.  So I explained how a world war dragged on until civilization collapsed when the fuel ran out.  Max is a desolate man, a burned-out  shell of a man, who’s lost everything (namely his wife and kid); he now wanders the Australian outback, where bandits and barbarians fight over what’s left of the gasoline, because only with gasoline can people get to enough food and water to be able to survive.  He happens into the middle of an unexpected adventure— helping a group of refugees to escape a horde of bandits, ending in a legendary chase-scene— and is left all alone out in the desert afterwards, the way all the Mad Max movies end.

“Music.”

“I hate this question.  You go first.”

“Well, I appreciate a wide variety of musical genres, because I find it helps me to keep an open mind to diverse artistic styles…”  Which was no help, because it was exactly what I would have said, although in much fewer words.  She certainly had a lot to say when talking about something important.  Just like me.  “But my personal favorites are electronica—techno and industrial.”
Better and better, although it wasn’t exactly a surprise.  The high-desert wind was chilling her sitting in the shade under the tree, so we moved over to a picnic table in the sun—and distinctly away from the others.

She liked science fiction— better all the time—so I had to impress her with my own, although as yet very limited, contributions to the field.  She liked The City of Lost Children, so I had to ask if she’d ever seen Delicatessen, by the same director, another post-apocalypse movie, but in this case revolving around a food pestilence.  Bags of beans and lentils were the new gold standard of the world, to trade or mix with the snails and cockroaches that had become everyday staples.  And cannibalism was rampant.

What I do to pay my bills—Construction, I told her, although having learned all I need to know to be able to build my own house, I’ve recently moved on to automotives as the other skill critical to my survival.  Because what good is all this money people kill themselves to earn, if they have to just turn around and pay it to other people to build their houses and fix their cars?

“And if civilization did collapse, you’d know how to survive.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Cuz people’ll always need houses to live in and some kind of machinery to use, but if all the money in the world was suddenly worthless, all the people who’d devoted their lives to earning it would be helpless.  And depending on which movie we’re in, they’ll either starve to death out in the wasteland, or the rest of us will eat ‘em for lunch.”

“Well most people are dead already.  They just don’t know it yet.”

Profound of her, if crude.  I think my former fiancée the wealthy heiress convicted felon said it best when they first loaded her up on lithium:  “This is how ordinary people feel?  Well that explains everything.” I much prefer to see life as an extreme sport.  Lots of people love to say nothing ventured, nothing  gained, but then beat themselves to death trying to eliminate all forms of risk from their life, until everything’s peaceful and calm and smooth and predictable and as flat as I-70 across Kansas…

Or the heartbeat monitor of someone who’s clinically dead.

I got out the Sharpies I use to trace my journeys on my map of the country for her to draw some temporary artwork around a friend’s mom’s tattoo. Somebody’s husband brought up the inevitable argument of how can you be sure you’ll want a tattoo for the rest of your life?  Quite simply, I didn’t bother telling him, all you have to do is to be comfortable enough with your own identity and personality to be able to come up with one or more artistic images that reflect some element of your being…  Edith could’ve reeled all that off in one breath right then and there, but I sure couldn’t’ve.

The dance, to benefit the volunteer fire department, didn’t start ‘til eight, so we had about three hours to kill.  Her grandmother invited me to follow them back to her farm to wait—where I could help move chunks of the old foundation of the cabin over to stuff under the smokehouse to try keeping the rodents out.

Then Edith had to go walk the dog, and told me to come with her.  At the end of the road, she told me about the burned-out ruins on the neighbor’s farm, as she was climbing over the No Trespassing sign on their gate.  But they knew who she was…

The “ruins” turned out to be a hole in the ground with a concrete floor.  Where she loved to search for trinkets—knobs of bureau drawers and pieces of water faucets.  We weren’t there long before we short-cutted back through her grandmother’s cow pasture— and across the creek to scavenge bones.  She didn’t want any ribs today, or the piece of a pelvis I found, just vertebrate.  I got to carry the metal things.

We got back in just enough time for me to take a shower—it wasn’t her week, I think she said, but not that I could tell—and jumped in the van.

As soon as we were out of sight of the house, she starts pulling all her dancing-gear out of the backpack she brought—touching up her Sharpie make-up in the rear-view mirror, putting on deodorant, changing clothes… Her backpack sure didn’t look that big from the outside.  And finally she wound a red and frilly boa around her neck, and put on her trademark wig—and suddenly looked like Raggedy Ann with dreadlocks, or Medusa with a mortal head-wound.

Not to be outdone, when we got to the town hall, I found a clean White Zombie T-shirt in my duffel bag, dug out my special-occasion necklaces and decided on my alligator foot to add to my everyday jewelry, and pulled on my motorcycle jacket with the spikes and all the other ornaments I’ve collected around the country.

It was eight o’clock, but they were still setting up inside.  So we went across the street to a place called The Ditch for some coffee, and had fun scaring the bejeezus out of a couple firefighters down from the fire near John Day, sitting over at the next table, just by engaging them in normal ordinary, everyday conversation.

When we went back to the van, I realized what I was forgetting.  My horns!  My new satyr horns I picked up at the Renaissance festival in Colorado. Once I put them on, we were finally a perfect match.

Then we drove over to her friend’s trailer, and her mom was there and some other friends, sisters, boyfriends, something like that.  I was surprised how they actually seemed to admire us—they still thought we were weird, but in a good way.  Her friend’s little sister just couldn’t get enough of us.  She went in her room and brought out her wig from the previous Halloween, and insisted on riding to the dance with us.

So I went outside a little ahead of my now two wigged companions, because driving over one dirt road or another that day, the duct-tape had come loose on my taillight plug.  The wire was broken inside the insulation.  I had to find exactly the right place to splint it and at what tension, to hold the broken conductor ends together to keep my taillights lit.  I’d have to fix it one of these days when I got the chance, but for the moment, patching it back together temporarily every now and then was working just fine.  That is, until a spastic eight-year old in a wig climbed up on my back bumper and start jumping up and down not five seconds after I got them working, and they went out again right before my eyes…

There were a lot of townsfolk in baseball caps and cowboy hats outside the town hall by the time we got back, and of course we attracted stares walking up the steps among them and paying our admission.  Neither one of us would’ve gone by ourselves, and I don’t think either of us were expecting to want to stay very long—especially not her.  But we walked into the main hall and found the band set up on the far end of the… basketball court.   Our time had come…

The band was pretty good.  They played lots of covers of songs that would’ve gotten played on the radio there, but they did it very well.  And we danced somewhere in the back until we got warmed up and some space cleared out up in front in between songs.

And then we cut up the floor with our dancing boots— which was the whole reason we were there.  I always laugh and applaud louder for performance artists than most other people do—so does every performance artist, I’m sure.  And as we, the devil in his cycle-hide and Medusa with a severe head-injury, danced harder-faster-longer than anyone else at the cowboy/farmer dance, and had a better time than anyone else, right up there in front for all to see, naturally, we were a hit with the band.  They didn’t know Born To Be Wild, unfortunately, or Who Do You Love?, but they finally came through with Jonny B. Goode, and then they dedicated a song to us that I didn’t recognize, but I liked it.  And then when they started playing a country set, we went out to the van and got out my stereo and some Prodigy, White Zombie, and Front 242, and danced in the parking lot.  When we went back in and her asthma started acting up, we stepped outside and slow-danced on the porch.  And when I’d finally worn her out after three-and-a-half hours, we went outside and I let her into the back of my van so she could take a nap on my bunk while I went back in and danced around the floor and asked my growing fan-club to dance, one by one—which most of them did, either because they really were fans, or maybe because they were afraid what might happen if they said no.  One guy in a baseball cap just stared at me intimidatingly—or thought he did, anyway—when I came dancing around his group of ladies…

Then at 12:30 or so, I went out to drag Edith back inside.  She was feeling better, and once again, we danced like we were trying to summon a hurricane.  Or a flood.  Or an earthquake.  Or demons.  Or maybe the end of the world.

And finally, it was over.  We were exhausted, but it had been well worth it.  And we’d out-lasted a lot of the crowd of town-folk patrons for whom the dance was intended.  The band made yet another special-thanks salute to Raggedy Ann dancing with the Devil, and started packing up their gear.

We eased out the front door and down the steps.  The parking lot was already half-empty of pickup trucks, and full of about eight-and-a-half cases of empty beer cans.  And the craziest and most memorable couple there that night by far hadn’t touched a drop of it.

The kid who’d tried staring me down earlier seemed to giving it another shot while he and his friends worked their way through the end of the ninth case, and Edith stopped to talk to some old friends of hers.  But no, not him, not tonight.  He couldn’t be more than about nineteen, if he was lucky, and nobody I’d ever worry about, even if he could’ve walked a straight line.  He’d probably just love an excuse get it on with some weirdo tourist—at least at first, anyway.  But I could beat him even better than that in seconds flat, just by meeting his blank, blood-shot glare…

“You have a good time?”  I asked.

“Yeah—Shhure did…” and just like that, we were friends.  It’s just borderland territoriality—I’ve lived among people like this all my life.

Then back to her friend’s trailer, where everyone else had returned to get drunk some time before.  Edith didn’t have to be back until two, so she promptly poured herself four or five shots of straight vodka in the bottom of a party cup, and knocked it all down in one belt before we sat down and started watching Leaving Las Vegas.  Having lived in Las Vegas, the title alone made it one of my favorite movies. And somewhere in the beginning, responding to some female nudity shot, Edith announced:

“The nude female body is so much more appealing than the male.”

Well goddamn it, that was the one thing we weren’t supposed to agree on.  But it didn’t matter, because a few minutes after that the topic of people’s ages came up—seventeen, twenty, nineteen…  And it came out.  She was sixteen.  Which explained a lot…

Then her five shots of vodka caught up with her.  Somewhere in between trips to the sink to throw up, she called her grandmother and got permission to stay ‘til four, and came back to collapse on the couch with her head on my lap.

“It’s alright,” she assured me. “It’s perfectly alright, Ezra.  The human body knows, it knows, when it must purge itself of harmful toxins…”  Her verbosity only increased with her blood-alcohol level.

And around four, following another detour to the sink, she called again and got another extension ’til five—but she had to leave to get on the bus at five-thirty. She went in her friend’s bedroom and collapsed on the bed.  I followed her, to make sure she was alright…

“Ezra…” she groaned from out of the darkness, “you can come lie down here and try to keep me warm… if you promise not to try to fuck me…”

What the hell?  It was four o’clock in the morning, and she was in no shape to travel.  We had an hour left to wait, and nothing left to do.  Plus, having thrown up four or five times by now, she was about to pass out on her back, which was how Angus Young ended up lead singer of AC/DC—when Bon Scott likewise drank himself to death in the most unglamorous way imaginable.

I drifted off a few times, but instantly awoke every time she started to cough, and finally got her rolled over on her side.  Just before five, I woke again when the phone rang.  I woke her up just as her friend’s mother came looking for her to tell her her grandmother was on the phone…

We got up and out the door, and back to Edith’s grandmother’s, to get her stuff loaded up as the darkness began giving way to the gray light of the pre-dawn.  And by five-thirty they were ready to ride. So after a day and a night of horrifying conservative townsfolk with our mere presence, my Rastafarian Raggedy Ann raver drunk teenage jail bait lesbian dancing partner rode off into the gathering dawn, leaving me standing there in the desert on edge of the highway at the end of another completely unexpected adventure, all by myself.

Just like The Road Warrior.

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This chapter has been a collection of stories of ways in which people have tried to do things and in the process have affected other people.  Sometimes the people who’ve tried to do the things have realized the effects the pursuit of their intentions would have on other people, and sometimes they haven’t.  Sometimes the people who were affected benefited, and sometimes they were harmed, and sometimes they thought they were going to benefit but ended up being harmed in the long run.

Any time you do anything, you’re basically throwing stones in a pond.  Your actions will have affects on other people and the rest of the world.  The more you know about the world, and about people in general, and especially the people who will be affected most directly by your actions, the more control over your life you have.

If other people perceive that the effects of your actions benefit them, and their perceptions turn out to be right, they usually react favorably.  If other people perceive that your actions harm them, or they perceive at first that your actions benefit them only later to realize they were mistaken, they don’t usually react favorably.  So don’t be surprised by it.

Any time you set out to do anything, don’t be surprised if you succeed.  The trick is, figuring out what exactly it is you’re doing that you’re going to succeed at.

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There’s just one hitch in my evil master plan for world domination through world unification and the elevation of human consciousness.  Sam Harris talks about it in his book The End of Faith. He doesn’t talk about human consciousness in terms of information packages or evolutionary psychology, but I assume you can connect the dots for yourself.

Once you accept a certain piece of information as true, it affects your perception on the world and your decision-making. If you believed that your best friend was plotting to murder you, or that a diamond the size of a station wagon was buried in your sister’s back yard, or that aliens had abducted you and imbued you with superpowers, any of those beliefs would alter your perception of the world and lead you to make decisions that you wouldn’t make if you didn’t believe those things were true.

Now suppose that you believe that global mass destruction is the path the eternal salvation of your soul.  How is that going to change your perception of the world and the decisions you make?

There’s one of two reactions I usually get when I ask that question.  Either, “But that’s the person’s religious belief—you can’t tell people what religion to believe in,” or, “But it’s the person’s First Amendment right to believe in any religion they want—you can’t outlaw their religion.”

So this is a many-faceted problem.  On the one side, you have people who have been taught to perceive that—literally—global mass suicide is the most effective means conceivable  of preserving the survival of their DNA.  Religious leaders don’t talk about salvation in terms of the survival of your DNA, but what else would eternal salvation mean besides the eternal preservation of your DNA?   You want to live, and they’re offering you a way to live forever.  Since you wanted to live to preserve the survival of your DNA, what do you think living forever would mean?
It doesn’t matter whether any of it is real or not.  As long as people perceive that a certain course of action will lead to their eternal salvation, they perceive  that the course of action will result in the eternal preservation of their DNA.   It doesn’t even matter if that course of action is committing global mass suicide, as long as they perceive that course of action to offer them the eternal preservation of their DNA, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.

Charles Manson’s followers believed this, Jim Jones’ followers believed this, and David Koresh’s followers believed this.  And so do President Bush’s most loyal followers.  It doesn’t matter if they make up 30% of the population of the United States, that’s just a number.  If David Koresh had 100 followers who equated mass suicide with eternal salvation, and President Bush has 100,000,000 followers who equate mass suicide with eternal salvation, that doesn’t prove that President Bush’s followers aren’t a suicide cult, all that proves is that his suicide cult is a million times bigger than David Koresh’s, and is big enough to stand a chance of electing a U.S. president.

And on the other side are a bunch of other people who, for a variety of reasons, either won’t acknowledge this problem, or else believe they can’t or shouldn’t do anything about it.

Well like I’ve said, when a voting majority of people believe that a sensory illusion must be true because they feel it to be true, it turns your entire political system into a graveyard spiral.

It’s easy for us to look back on the Cold War and think, “What a bunch of f*cking idiots those people must’ve been.  They all got caught up in a giant sensory illusion and felt they should all keep on building more and more nuclear weapons just because they all thought everyone else felt like it was a good idea.  They could’ve just faced the facts and said, ‘Hey, this is f*cking stupid, let’s think of something else,’ but instead they brought the world to the brink of destruction.  Why didn’t anyone dare to try to do anything about it?”

Well what are you waiting for?  Now’s your chance!

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
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