When Joe Bageant wrote Lost On The Fearless Plain in May, 2010, subtitled Big Brother's got that ju-ju, Gaia's got the blues, — hologram, carry me home, he only had about 10 months to live. Joe died on March 26, 2011. The other day the question why get out of bed? arose, for if all the news is as bad as I document here on DOTE everyday, there seems little point to doing anything.
Here in the United States we live in the Age of Decay. The glory days of the Empire in the decades after World War II are over. That much is clear to most of those who do not benefit directly from the Empire's decline, with only the most delusional of optimists clinging to the hope that those glory days can return.
Joe Bageant was living in Ajijic, Mexico when he wrote Lost On The Fearless Plain. His health was deteriorating and he must of have known the end was near. Joe had no illusions about the world he was leaving. Most of the essay discusses what he called "the (media) hologram" which creates an alternate universe where none of the world's problems exist. I urge you to read the entire essay, but here's a sample in which Joe talks about the hologram.
I've spent most of this week watching American television and movies. I leave the TV on all night long. I toss and turn with my bad back, and bad lungs, catch a rerun episode of Two and a Half Men, or CSI, and conk out again. Then I awaken to the U.S. morning talk shows. It's a grueling regimen, only for the strong. Or the lonely. For periodic relief, I switch to Mexican television (be patient, I really am going somewhere with this). Mexican TV is not one iota better than US television, but is veeerrry heavy on the booty. More than heavy. Astronomical...
Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.
This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it...
There's a lot more where that came from. Joe provides a clear-eyed view of the American world he was leaving behind. You can read it yourself. Joe's "answer" to the question why get out of bed? can be found in this text near the end of Lost.
Again, what will be left after the big collapse? Perhaps after a period of terror, violence and chaos, when the undeniable on-the-ground truth becomes apparent, through ecological disaster, war and other events, a more positive national cathexis will occur. If it does, it probably will not resemble anything we can conceive of in these times. If we can get past the terror involved from our present apprehensive vantage point, it is easy to see why positive national, even global cathexis may be unavoidable.
Cause for well-reasoned optimism exists. Its way the fuck out there, but it's there. Not that it is something to cling to, or even pursue. Clinging and desire are the cause of all suffering in the first place. Doing so only prolongs suffering, personal, national or planetary. The Buddhists are right about that one. So are the Baptists when they say "The world gets right when the people get right."
The big problem at the moment though, for us as sentient beings, is:
What to do when I get out of bed each day? Give money to the Democrats? Move out of the country? Stay and fight the bastards?
Throwing money at frauds and fools doesn't work. Moving to Mexico or Canada takes money in a time when money and jobs are scarce everywhere. As for staying and fighting, really fighting, there is not one person reading this who is going to go strangle the sleazy fucks having martinis on Wall Street with their pet Senator. Nobody reading this is going to instill genuine physical fear, which is the only thing such lizards might respond to. We are left to work within the system, as per the hologram's directive. Their system. Ha!
The answer, to me at least, is to do the most obvious thing first. And I do mean obvious in the most mundane sense. Like fixing breakfast with all the contemplative awareness possible. Seriously. The tiniest right action, the action in complete unself-conscious natural awareness, connects to all the rightness in the universe. And the universe is always right. Because it owns all of our asses, plus black holes, and those teensy pinholes in time that physicist say make you an immediate neighbor of Shakespeare and mastodons -- only you don't know it. It owns the molecules of the ages. Everything.
This proposition is unappealing to Americans and just about everyone else in the western world. To be perfectly honest, a big screen TV, the Internet, and tickets to a Rams game are more accessible and immediately gratifying. Right action in the moment does not light up your neural pleasure centers like cheap sex or jalapeno Doritos. However, I am trying to do it anyway, at least until the opportunity for cheap sex presents itself. When it does, it will most likely be the right action for that moment. Funny how things work.
In any case, by the mundane right action of breakfast, I mean fixing breakfast to locate one's heart in that particular day. Then proceeding toward the least harm one can discern to do, with full knowledge that we always do harm, whether we intend to or not (the world is full of subtle unintended violence). Eliminate whatever suffering in sentient beings one encounters, whether it be in bums, dogs, kids, plants, or the rich fucker next door moaning over his enormous tax bill. To him that is suffering. There's no sliding scale about this shit. I once worked for a guy who bawled when some kid keyed his Porsche. Misery is relative. Compassion is sublime...
Bageant's answer may not be your answer. It's not even my answer, although I share much in common with him (living alone, being lonely, a lack of opportunities for cheap sex, not having much money, though my health is OK so far.) We also shared in common that writing was the best, most appropriate response to a world this fucked-up. But I will never be a Buddhist, although I occasionally have Buddhist-like tendencies, like making my breakfast or playing music mindfully. Compassion may be sublime as Joe says but its not my strong suit, at least most of the time. Somewhere along the way I lost patience with people who don't get what I'm up to, what I'm telling them, and I sometimes tell them to get lost in overly strong terms or banish them. Mea culpa.
Oh, by the way, that reminds me of something. A person criticized me the other day, saying "it's all Dave, all the time" on DOTE. That's funny, it is my blog, is it not? What does he think? That DOTE is a Democracy? Where every vote counts? Ha!
The greater point is that for every person, there is a way through the darkness. It may not be Joe's way, it may not be my way, but it's your way. (I may break into song here, Frank Sinatra comes to my mind.) You don't have to be a Buddhist or a Liberal Democrat or anything else. Or maybe that's your way. Who knows?
So that's what Joe Bageant would do, and did do, near the end of his life. You're probably a lot better off than Joe or me. Speaking for myself, you may have—well, I hope you do—a healthy loving relationship, or children who love you, or close friends who don't live a million miles away, or some money and the freedom of choice it buys, or something else that keeps you going. Writing this blog, and composing, arranging and playing music keep me going (and let's not forget the occasional self-medication, aka. drinking, which is also essential for the lonely guy).
Don't despair when I tell you how bad this world has become, which I'm going to keep doing. That's not the point of being alive. Not at all. Figuring out what's real and what's not, a problem I'm trying to help you with, and Joe was trying to help you with, and George Carlin was trying to help you with, is merely the gateway to something else.
This is it. Your Big Moment. Everything's riding on the choices you make. This is not the Scholastic Aptitude Test. You don't get to take this test over again in the future if you fuck it up the first time. The future is now. There are no "right" answers although I can assure you that there are wrong ones.
What would you do in a world as fucked-up as this one?
Again, this is not a test, this is as real as it gets. Good luck.
Bonus Video — Philip Glass, Truman Sleeps
Ok, this was a brilliant post!
thanks for writing it and posting it.
I miss Joe too.
Posted by: pamela | 01/27/2012 at 09:51 AM