Author: White Whale

Listen.
As if your life depends on it

Because it does.

Fear is an unpleasant but necessary emotion. To claim otherwise is to claim there are no grizzly bears, rapists, bank runs, natural disasters, unfaithful lovers, or a host of other also unpleasant things which plainly DO exist.

The problem is excessive, ambient, continual fear. This is a terrible problem for, perhaps most notably, Borderline Personslity Disorder types who, I have argued, are becoming more and more common.

How to deal?

Two steps: 1) find a scapegoat, upon whom can be hung all the sins of the world, like men, white mom, of heyerosexual white men.

2) Hate them, but do so through the illusion of righteous anger. Anger is the flip side of fear, and hate might be seen as an artist mixing fear, shame and anger on their palette in roughly equal measures.

Fear becomes anger, and chronic fear becomes chronic anger which, by being rationalized, becomes an antidote to shame.

It’s s trifecta. Everyone wins but truth, and all the genuinely decent human beings who are then attacked with no scruples by these compulsive lunatics.

This is very, very close to the core truth not just of our age but many ages.

I think most Leftists fear greatly that true Liberals are right in stating that there is evil in the world.  They fear this possibility, and so it becomes emotionally easier for them to fear, through hatred and violence, true Liberals.  They prefer attacking the messenger to evaluating the message.

With respect to war, it is clearly sometimes necessary.  At the same time, there has been an unchecked gathering of power by a military-industrial complex, which has gained unwarranted influence.  Just look at Syria.  Some conglomeration of forces put forth the word that Syria IS a national security interest, and our actual, physical border into our actual, physical nation, is NOT a national security interest.

That be some fucked up shit, y’all (if I might sardonically reference my previous post.)

I watched a play about how single black mothers struggle to keep their sons safe, and it occurred to me there are really two perils in single motherhood.  The first, of course, is being so emotionally overwhelmed that they are emotionally absent, or at least inconsistent, which might actually be worse.

The second, more subtle, is that they become OVERLY involved in their childrens lives, such that the child feels little space to develop as a person.  There is a breed of narcissism latent in the mothers overidentification with the child, with her conflating her emotional needs with his emotional needs.

And it occurs to me that white “liberals”, seen socially, cross this rough line as well.  We read in recent days that, according to actual study, white “liberals” dumb down their language when talking with blacks (whereas conservatives do not, presumably because we are not trying to be “hip”, and see individual blacks as individual blacks).  Obama was notorious for this.  He would always drop his “g’s” when talkin’ and relatin’ wit black folk.  Nome sayin’?

I think even putting black people on a pedestal, as white “liberals” like to do, is a disservice.  It is the opposite of integration, and hard to process emotionally.  Attention, even excess attention, always feels good up to a point, but there comes a time when it becomes creepy and uncomfortable, and at that point–at least in my own iteration of this experience–it becomes easier to disengage and/or shut down emotionally.

If the  Democrats has set it as a matter of conscious policy to leave urban poverty substantially untouched over the last 50 or so years, from 1968 until now, what would they have done DIFFERENTLY than what they in fact did? 

What would be the sine qua non?  Making sure blacks don’t fix their own problems themselves.  This would be absolutely essential.  How do you do that?  You take  two pronged approach: 1) you say their situation is not their fault; and 2) you say you will fix it for them.

With respect to number one, this is simple: if a problem is not your fault, then the solution is not in your power.  If you can’t create a situation, then you can’t solve it.  You are helpless.

You frame all black poverty and underachievement as the result of racism.  Racism, being universal and insuperable by the sole efforts of individual blacks, makes progress impossible.

Secondly, you promise that THIS TIME, this election, you will fix everything.  You do this every two years or so for fifty years, some 25 times at minimum.  You also make sure that everyone understands that the Republicans are massive villains, out to stop this whole process of the rescue of blacks.

And of course you understand that smart blacks will see through this scam, so what do you also do?  You make damn sure that no effective school reform ideas are introduced, and that black communities are rendered really, really ignorant, because even though schooling is offered to them, the teaching is poor, and the expectations low.  It would not hurt, either, to teach them to value ignorance, by conflating it with “being real”.  Because, you know, brilliant, accomplished people are not real, and people standing on the corner selling drugs ARE real.  Obviously.

It is a source of amazement to me, in all honesty, that ordinary, rank and file Democrats were so fucking stupid that by and large they failed to complain when the Party as a whole opposed charter schools, which are the ONLY innovation in education shown to improve outcomes among poor blacks.

So I would ask: what would the Democrats do differently?  They established low expectations, promised money from the sky, validated every excuse they ever heard, opposed every effort to make the schools better, and in a great many cases the streets safer, and overall did their best to play the role of codependent Sugar Daddies.

I don’t think they would have done ANYTHING differently.  With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I would argue that the Democrats replaced the KKK somewhere between 1970 and 1975 as the single worst enemy ordinary blacks face.

To the extent I personally am racist, it is in response to this blindness.  It is unfathomable to me.

I had a vision in a meditation this morning of Xi yelling at Hillary for failing to keep her end of a bargain.  I have decided that the force behind the demonization of Russia is almost certainly the Chinese and their sundry willing and accidental agents in the United States.  This includes large segments of our intelligence apparatus which, far from protecting us, seems to be selling us out.

Did they want to see Russia expelled from the Middle East?  A war between the US and Russia?  Perhaps either/or.

And I will say that calling China to account for its restrictive trade practices MAY be one of the most important things Trump has done in his first term.

People call this a trade war.  If so, it amounts to a counter-offensive.  The markets were not open, so the opening assaults originated in China long ago.

China WANTED to keep dumping goods on America, having an elite and the government pocket most of the money, and use that money to continue their quest to become a superpower. I don’t think this is working very well now. 

And I have said for years that Bill Clinton’s real crime was most likely facilitating both the leaks of highly classified military information, and the sale of dual use technology to the Chinese, most likely in exchange for compensation in multiple forms.  Kenneth Starr may have been actually intended to cover up the real crimes, just as Hillary used Russia to distract from her Chinese connections.

China is not a superpower yet, and it remains a wildly unpopular government.  They do not have “The Way”.  They are an old school fascistic government, of the sort China has unfortunately seen off and on for several millenia.  It is ruled by and for the elites, who try and use propaganda, some carrots, and some well hidden whips, to keep the populace in line enough to do the work they can use, as the “rentiers” and Capitalists they are, to profit their own families and further their ambitions for power.  China has kings and it has a tyrant.  Nothing is new, except, perhaps, the rationalization.  But even there, “Historical Necessity” probably still plays the role of The Will of Heaven.

Nothing has changed.  Nothing, except that the death tolls were much higher than they have ever been.

Reading all these memoirs–I just read Ken Kesey’s fictionalized but likely true-ish account of how he heard of Neal Cassady’s death (btw, at least one commentator said Neal was the inspiration for Randle McMurphy)–and what I am struck by is the profound instability of everything in the lives of these people. 

Nobody stays put.  Nobody feels strong loyalty to anything but an abstract “cause” which consists in the main of telling everyone not like themselves to go fuck themselves.  This was the great virtue of the Vietnam War, and roughly the role played today by Global Warming, which is that it gives nihilists, unable and unwilling to commit to moving forward and growing what has been, a reason to push back against all that is, together, and to be unified in this effort, at least for some period of time.

But everyone is fucking nuts.  They are flying around like shattered debris in a tornado.

Psychologically, the stability that matters is not rigidity.  Rigidity is in fact defined as unhealthy, and flexibility as healthy.

What needs to be stable for any sort of social or individual flourishing to happen is the sense of self and sense of purpose. 

You need to be able to say “I am this sort of person, this is what I value, these are the people and causes to which I feel loyalty, and this is my place.”

I am not saying as a conservative, much less the reactionary some unhinged souls (unhinged, a door no longer tied to a doorway) might want to claim me to be.  I am saying this because it is TRUE.  It is true even if it is inconvenient.  It is true even if it fails to serve some specific political agendas.

You can rebel against the rules of life, but in the end, you accomplish nothing but your own destruction.

William R. Burroughs son only made it to 33, before more or less literally committing suicide by alcoholism.  He had a new liver, but he fucked that one up too.

He writes of his father not being a father at all, and of the time he went to Tangiers when he was 14 and was sexually propositioned by several of the male lovers his father had at the house, and also of nearly continual drug use the whole time he was there.  His father did absolutely nothing to protect him.  He hardly talked to him.  He spent all his time getting high and writing.

Where does such a child turn?  Where is the sanity?  Where the love?

To live, he would have had to turn his back on all this, to reject the value of literature concocted from such a place, from such degraded souls.  He would have needed to find Jesus, or a Buddhist Temple, or a faithful yoga practice, or something along those lines, far from the fuckups, and far from the rationalizations for the fuckups.

As I have said before, the hippies were not the burgeoning of love, but a more or less generalized cry FOR it, which they could no longer find in a world without drugs.  They were a weak counter-shadow to the Machine, but completely unable to counter it in any meaningful way.  A large number of them BECAME the Machine in Silicon Valley.  Steve Jobs certainly did. There is nothing magical or mystical about digital technology.  And they know this.  The same people created Burning Man, not as an alternative, but as a break.

Talk with any Deadhead.  They will have positive memories from when they were stoned with their friends.  They will also tell you all the times they got dicked over by de facto amoral psychopaths and thieves who are very thick in that population.

The generation before him, artistically, was the Lost Generation.  His generation was the defeated generation, the beat generation.

I was reading an account of the moment he realized “On the Road” was going to be a hit, and that his life was going to change.  His then girlfriend or wife wrote this:

“Jack kept shaking his head.  He didn’t look happy, exactly, but strangely puzzled, as if he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was.”

Then the next day his publisher comes by with a case of champagne, he gets drunk, and he’s excited, the way he ought to have been the night before. 

Would it be so hard to infer from that that he was destined to die of alcoholism? 

Myself, I would ponder where or not what was going through his head was something like “how in the world did we get to a world where the underdog is the hero, not for surmounting the odds, but for BEING the underdog.  I live in this world, but I don’t understand it.”

I take that quote from the “Portable Beat Reader”.  Another set of quotes concerns his daughter he did not want to claim, and around whom he behaved very sketchy, as they say.

I am going to quote this at length, because this is the story of many abandoned children.  I don’t think people who come and leave women and their babies realize the extent of the psychic damage they wreak, the hopes and fears and private terrors they engender.

Toward late fall my mother was going to court all the time to try and get child support from our fathers.  She must have gotten fed up with waitressing.  The day was nearing when I was to meet my father for the first time.  I remember a certain gullible part of my young mind thinking that nine and a half must be the age when one is grown up enough to meet one’s father for the first time. It meant I was maturing–a big girl now.  Feeling more independent than usual, I went to the pizza parlor all the way up on Fourteenth Street.  I had had my hair curled for the occasion, and as I watched the guy twirl the dough, I kept looking in the mirror at my new hair, not at all sure I liked it and worrying what my father would think of me. 

In Brooklyn the next day, after a long subway ride, my mother and I met Jack and his lawyer at the appointed place and went strolling down the street together.  I couldn’t take my eyes off my father, he looked so much like me.  I loved the way he shuffled along with his lower lip stuck out. 

The lawyer nervously suggested we go somewhere for lunch and was about to walk into a restaurant when Jack saw a place he liked better, and steered us to a bar across the street, in spite of the lawyer’s feeble protests.  I thought it was a great idea, wanting, as I did, to be in accord with this naughty bummish fellow.  We sat down in a booth, my mother and I facing the two of them, and a hamburger was ordered for me.  It was the day the first astronaut went up in space, and the TV up in the corner by the ceiling was showing him up in his capsule all bundled up in glaring black and white.
My mother and father seemed to be getting along just fine, and were talking about old times. 

“Yeah,” he was saying into his beer, “you always used to burn the bacon,” jokingly accusing her.  I could see why she had been attracted to him.  He was so handsome with his deep blue eyes and dark hair hanging in a few fine wisps on his forehead.  I like hearing them talk about the things they used to do. It made me feel whole, confirmed the suspicions I’d had all along that I was an official bona fide human being with TWO parents. [emphasis mine]

After that, we had to go get the blood tests.  Jack and I, to determine if he really was my father.  I felt like we were special somehow, as if our blood was some precious substance the laboratory needed, and we were the only two people in the world that had it..  Then we went back to my neighborhood, bringing Jack with us.
As soon as we got to the apartment, he wanted to know where the nearest liquor store was, so I took him by the hand to the one on Tenth Street., proudly walking him past kids I knew as if to say, “See–I have one too” [emphasis mine] 

In the liquor store, he bought a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry.  That name is indelibly etched in my memory.  As we walked back, he talked to me but seemed shy, like a boy on his first date.  I was nervous too, afraid I’d say something stupid.
Upstairs, he sat down at the kitchen table and peeled off the black plastic around the top of the bottle, as my sisters gathered around him curiously.  He pointed at each little black peel and furrowing his brow, said, “Shee im? Shs’ Russian–shhhs’ no good”!  He kept doing this, to their delight, and telling my mother, “This one has laughing eyes and this one has melting eyes”. 

I was a little jealous that he was paying them so much attention, but I figured he didn’t want to be serious, and me being older, maybe he was afraid we’d have to talk about something he didn’t want to think about.  So I watched the antics and smiled whenever he looked at me. 

To my sisters, he was just another funny guy that came over to visit and entertain them, like Ray Gordon or Pete Rivera.  But to me he was something special, he was my very OWN funny man out of all the others–like their father, Don Olly, was to them.

Kerouc drinks his booze, then heads out the door.  He says he will be back in January, and the next and only time she sees him again is 6 years later.

There, he is “upending a fifth of whiskey”–which she later calls a “baby bottle”–and watching the Beverly Hillbillies.  He has moved in with his mother, and married a third time.  Jan percipiently remarks: “Now that his mother could no longer take care of him [she had had a stroke], Jack had married another mother to take care of them both.”

Thus was the last scene she had of him.  He died two years later, shortly after Neal Cassady reached the end of what he had always known was a one way ride, that would end far too soon.

This is how the great Jack Kerouac lived and died, from the perspective of someone whose heart he broke.

Three guesses how Jan fared later in life, although one should suffice.  Her book details long term drug abuse, loveless liasons with heartless men, pregnancy at 15, and overall a whole lot of fuckup and hurt.

Can you not see this coming from these pathetic, sad lines?  She was dead at 44.  Her dad at 47.

Core lesson: as a society, we cannot side with the fuckups.  We can feel them, we can help them, we can include them, but we CANNOT make them the heroes.  They are not the heroes.  Aim up, not down.  Aim for better, not worse.  You can be a visionary without being an amoral, drug addled thrill junkie and opportunist.

Even now, to take an apparently pedestrian example, who are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer siding with in this Wall non-debate?  The “Not-Us’s”.  The Outside as against the Inside.  The people who do not belong here, the people whose lives are not working where they are from.  The people plagued by poverty, ignorance, crime and no small measure of laziness, who want to bring all these traits into our country by ignoring our process for legal immigration, and who in so doing want to jump in from of line relative to all the people we DO want, who are willing to do the work to do the thing correctly.

Remembering the millennia, and embracing each day.