Therapeutic Poetry and the Death of John Lennon

I live with pain, depression, and poverty. I worry what affect that has on my son. I am reminded of one of my favorite poets, Phillip Larkin, who has advice for young people on this score:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

The coastal shelf is pretty deep these days, sinking into the crust like an ocean liner in the north Atlantic. The whole damn planet is rushing toward catastrophe faster than anyone can possibly imagine (except, perhaps, for Dimitri). All the deniers of the impending doom, funded by the deep pockets of the oil and defense industries, seem very happy with the well-furnished sandy hole into which they've buried their heads, and are proudly proclaiming that this awesome vessel called humanity is unsinkable, so they're burning the life boats.

When I was younger, Imagine was a wonderful thought exercise John Lennon gave us. It was full of hope for a more just, reasonable, caring world. Now, imagining just leads to despair, grief, uncertainty, and anger. John Lennon is gone 29 years today, a victim of a reality that is so random, so uncaring, and so dark that his immortal song has become a kind of joke to me, a Medusa I dare not look directly at, lest it kill me. Imagining the world the way he did just fills me with more remorse and grief over the direction the world has actually gone.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a passage known as The Wave Speech:

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

That high-water mark for me, being a generation behind Thompson, was Lennon's Imagine. It's been all downhill from there. On this sad anniversary of the death of a man who just had to let his ride on the merry-go-round go, I find myself going back to poems that my favorite teacher, Jim Whitehead, loved, like Aubade, by Phillip Larkin, which I read now and see as a metaphor for the whole human race, especially this bit:

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

This dysfunctional family known as homo sapiens have burned enough fuel that we've raced right up close to that "small, unfocused blur" and it's a little clearer now. People like John Lennon and Martin Luther King are murdered, and Dick Cheney is still promoting torture. Deniers of global warming are given the same credibility in the media as the careful scientists who have spent their lives proving that we're screwing this planet up beyond repair.

And I sit and watch the snow and imagine that it could have been different, if it weren't for all the assholes that I hope can't ice skate, because my moat is frozen.

What do I think of that?

That being an interesting email to a friend, forwarded to me, that used the health care debate to demonstrate--surprise, surprise--that corporate America will once again get it's way, to everyone's detriment. My forwarding friend asked me what I think...

Hmmm... Well, let's see. I'm so fucking broke that I'm down to my last cherished possessions to sell to make the rent. I'm sitting here slowly panicking, with no TV, cell phones long gone, basic phone about to go, two months behind on my car, one behind on my daughter's car, in default on about 30,000 worth of credit card debt, a landlord that will kick us out in 30 days if we're late on the rent, 500 a month in food stamps that barely covers our food every month, and I've got government health care because my income is less than 12,500 per year--meaning we're officially poor.

I'd get a job, if there were any for someone who can't lift over 20 lbs. I have found some burger flipping jobs so far away that half my day working would barely cover the gas to get there.

So what do I think of some health care bullshit that would take me hours to find out if it's true, which it probably isn't because everyone's got their fucking agenda, while most of the people in this fucking country have lost their retirement, are barely getting by, and, according to the latest gun and ammo sales records, heavily armed?

What do I think?

I think whoever wrote it is onto something. But it's old news. I have two blogs you should subscribe to. I suggest you send them to your friend who wrote this.

Club Orlov. Note, especially, this post on American Swine from Kollapsnik.

And Global Guirillas, by John Robb, who recently testified before congress. He's a military expert who analyzes everything with a very clear POV.

I voted for Dennis Kucinich too, but we smart people don't run this country. The rich people do. Sometimes they're smart, but most of the time they're stupid greedy dumbasses with the power to make us feel a whole lot of pain. Their bad decisions have WAY more ramifications than ours ever will. Resilient communities, as Robb calls them, will be the new society: localized, sustainable, and resilient. Globalization will not stand.

And, all you philosophers out there will note that it wasn't Nostradamus who predicted this (voodoo bullshit, that). It was Karl Marx. Maybe if corporate America hadn't been getting rich demonizing him for the last, oh, few decades, we'd have learned something from him: That unregulated greed will be the death of capitalism, at least on the large scale. I'd say we're headed back to mercantilism.

There.

Whiskey Fire In Binghamton

I've been reading the Whiskey Fire blog for quite a while now. Great snark. Plenty of insight. Always good wing-nut fun making. When a shooter killed 14 people in Binghamton last week, I was surprised to hear that this fun little blog I'd been reading is being written by folks just down the road from me. I felt a little tinge of memory from past tragedies that make us all feel closer together. In this case, we were pretty close already.

I was anxious this morning to see what they had to say about the tragedy, now that it's had some time to really sink in. The post is from Jake T. Snake: Why is the mine still open when the canaries keep expiring? It's a powerful post, and I recommend reading the whole thing, now, because I'm going to quote the end, which is where Robin and I wound up when we talked about this yesterday. Why, if this guy was pissed at people who fired him, or the rednecks (Binghamton is a city of 43,000, of which 80% are white) who made fun of his bad English, did he go shoot other immigrants like himself?

Finally, I think it is instructive that the shooter picked as his victims, not someone powerful like the people who had laid him off, but a group of the powerless like himself. This is the other dynamic that repeats itself over and over, don't attack those in power that are the root of the problem, but rather find someone weaker to victimize and perpetuate the cycle. This also explains the disdain people have for social workers. We help the weak and disenfranchised and in the united states that is a sign of weakness the unforgivable sin.

All the pitchforks and torches talk is a bunch of hot air fueled by psuedo-populists who will pat the back of the next CEO to donate to their election campaign. When the really angry people lash out with their firearms and satchels of ammo hanging around their necks, they don't go after the powerful. They go after the weak, the easy targets, those least able to protect themselves or fight back. Their self-loathing is exposed through their choice of targets.

Take the case of the Pittsburgh cop killer who was so certain that we were going to take his guns that he, whipped into a frenzy by the riot inciters in the GOP and Fox news, decided to take it out on some middle class, under paid cops who were just doing their job trying to keep their community safe from the likes of Wing Nuts like him. Maybe those cops were conservative 2nd amendment types too. He didn't know. He just started shooting at the first easy target to walk up to his house. He used an assault rifle. The cops were sitting ducks. Easy targets.

We're going to see a lot more of this. As Bushvilles sprout up all over the country, as the welfare roles and the unemployment lines get longer, as wages continue to fall, real income collapses, health care is lost, mental illness goes undiagnosed, we're going to see some very angry, heavily armed people lose it. And they won't lash out at Phil Gramm, George Bush, or Dick Cheney. In one of the final, ironic twists of the Bush era, they will take it out on the people who least deserve it.

UPDATED: Safe Havens in End-of-Your-Rope-istan

Expect to see a lot more of this (well armed people attacking and killing groups of people, like in Binghamton, NY yesterday). While we're trying to stop a safe haven for terrorists in AfPak, we're letting them re-develop in militia-stan, crazy-stan, and at-the-end-of-your-rope-istan (think Michigan).

We have increasing numbers of frustrated people. These are especially frustrating times. We have easy access to guns and ammo, rampant undiagnosed mental health problems, loss of access to health care and medication, rising unemployment, homelessness and Bushvilles, higher rates of poverty, violent gangs, mafias, narco-terrorists, layoffs of cops and public safety officials, rapidly declining tax revenues at the state and local level. Add desperation to the mix, and people will react in very angry and violent ways.

Odd that John Robb of Global Guerrillas gave testimony to the House Armed Services Committee (pdf) Thursday in which he said:

"With the failure or weakening of nation-states across the board and the lack of ideological alternatives, people will shift their primary loyalties to any group that can provide them security and the basics of survival. These groups will span the gamut of gangs, tribes, criminal syndicates, militias, religious sects, etc. Many, if not most of these groups, will maintain and expand the interests both vigorously and violently. The worst version of this trend line would be the expansion of the criminal insurgency in Mexico into the US (through expansion of the criminal ecosystem more than anything due to ethnic identity)."

While not exactly on point, the example in your backyard is more proof of societal collapse, and is to be expected in the pressure cooker of 21st century America: armed and more dangerous than ever.

UPDATE: Three police officers dead in Pittsburg, shooter feared Obama Gun ban.

And after we Mad Max the place...

I stumbled upon a speech, Social Collapse Best Practices, posted at the blog ClubOrlov, written by Dmitry Orlov, aka kollapsnik. He predicts what my wife and I call the Mad Maxing of America, or the collapse of the US government. Having seen the collapse of the Soviet Union first hand, Orlov is not some nut on speaker's corner. I'm sure most people will want to dismiss his reasoned thesis as survivalist rantings. I suggest you give this speech a read, keep an open mind, and think.

In a big way, what's been happening to me is a kind of microcosm of what's going to happen to us all, eventually. I was a cog in the entertainment industry, riding big ladders and scissor lifts, hoisting big lights and scenery to create a world of make-believe, calling it art, and selling it for big bucks. Well, the "owners" got big bucks. I got decent bucks, and even though I was never much more than a daily hire, I had a good career at free-lance stagehand work for 20 years.

Well, this cog wore its gears out, and has been tossed aside. My pension, if I ever see it at all, is shrinking. Social Security Disability will deny that you're disabled for years, while your doctor tells you not to dare lift anything over 20 lbs. The house I'd invested in turned out to be worthless when I couldn't afford to pay for it anymore. My skills as a hard laborer who understood stagecraft are now useless. My writing skills still scrape up some cash, in the internet marketing world, but that's internet dependent.

In the social collapse scenario, though, I do have one skill that will make me a valuable person. I'm a skilled organic gardener. And in the world of collapsing social order and government control, the farmer will be king.