"All of a novelist’s characters are himself." - someone

"Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight. Pynchon himself’s a good companion, full of real affection for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real. He spoils us with descriptive flights." - Jonathan Lethem

An anarcho-collectivist cadre makes documentary films about protests during the sixties. The group embeds at a university where a group of students have banned administrators and police from campus, creating a siege. One of the film-collective members is sleeping with both the leader of the radical group holed up on the college campus and with the federal prosecutor in charge of infiltrating and destroying the group. She is coerced by the prosecutor and helps set the student group leader up and participates in his assassination. 

A year later, protected by the government but on the run from her past, she meets a guitar player who is performing in a rock band. The two marry and have a child. Shortly thereafter the federal prosecutor discovers his ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts and sets her husband up on drug charges. As a deal cut with the prosecutor, the husband vows never to see the mother of his child again and takes the baby with him to Northern California and a town named Vineland, a place recommended to him by a DEA agent. His ex-wife goes into a witness protection program, remarries and has another kid. 

Flash forward to 1984 (note the year is also the title of a famous dystopian novel) and the War on Drugs. In Northern California, DEA agents threaten to show up at the home of the before mentioned father, Zoyd Wheeler, and his daughter, Prairie, who have been given foreknowledge and go into hiding. The federal prosecutor, Brock Vond, wants to get at the daughter (Prairie), who is now 14, of his ex-lover (Frenesi).  This is where Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, begins. 

To escape the escalating danger, Prairie goes to San Francisco where her boyfriend’s band, the Vomitones, will be playing at a mafia wedding. Through a string of coincidences, she meets a woman called DL at the wedding, her mother’s former partner from the days of the film collective, and the two head out to a female commune in the mountains above Monterey. There, Prairie is given access to the collective’s film archive, which includes footage her mother filmed. The women at the commune are ex-collective members, and they share anecdotes with Prairie about her mom.  The book ends with a large family reunion in Vinland where Brock Vond attempts to kidnap Prairie. 

The book is inhabited with what Pynchon calls Thanatoids, a seemingly zombie-like segment of the population that work menial jobs, watch a lot of TV and are not totally “alive," in fact some characters in the book die and reappear as Thanatoids. I’ve passed on a lot of detail, in part because the book mostly consists of dense flashbacks that strangely seem to go nowhere. Pynchon demands we remain awake while reading. Confused? There are no conventional plot twists in this life or any other. 

What is Pynchon doing with this book? Well, he’s explicitly looking at the upheaval on college campuses in the sixties. He is also writing about groups like the SLA and people like Patty Hearst, who famously developed Stockholm Syndrome and sided with her kidnappers. Other members of the SLA became fugitives who hid from the law under aliases and started families, had kids and careers. Most hippies, following the trend, at some point became yuppies. Vineland paints a picture of California in the sixties, seventies, and eighties in all its absurdity and un-reality. Mainly, though, I think Pynchon is commenting on the ways reality becomes dangerously warped by mediating forces, specifically television. It should be reiterated that the 'present moment' the book describes is 1984. 

Pynchon’s fame revolves around his anonymity. He has never given an interview or been photographed in public. He writes alternate histories (Vineland was published in the mid-1990's). When researchers dug into Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s National Book Award winning novel about wartime England and Germany, they discovered that much of what seemed implausible in the book was fact. American and British War profiteers colluded with German arms manufacturers; the theater of war was just that: theater created to divide and destroy. It has been said recently that Gravity's Rainbow would never be published in today's political media climate. The book would be deemed Q-Anon, Alt-Right, conspiracy theorist stuff. 

Jonathan Lethem does an excellent job of describing the oddball ex-hippy, and master, Thomas Pynchon. Here is Lethem writing for the New York Times about Pynchon’s 2013 book Bleeding Edge:

"Figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon. You’re never done with it. He’ll employ a string of citations to real and imaginary Bette Davis movies, say, or riffs on basketball, much as Pollock uses a color on a panoramic canvas or Coltrane a note in a solo: incessantly, arrestingly, yet seemingly without cumulative purpose. Instead, they’re threads for teasing at, or being teased by." 

Now zoom in a bit and look at Pynchon's style, which is absurd but comprehensive in its categorization, and dreamlike in its movement. At the book’s outset, Zoyd, our locally liked ex-hippy loser living in (the imaginary) Vineland, California, prepares to perform a televised stunt which will allow him to continue to receive his disability check from the State. Zoyd first buys an oversized dress at a thrift store and then a 'woman’s size' chainsaw (the size that fits into a purse). Next, going to the bar at which he assumes TV crews will be prepared to film him, we see him surrounded by gay yuppies at a bar off Highway 101 in Del Norte, California. He has ignored his answering machine's earlier warning telling him that the location the event would be filmed at this year is elsewhere.

He performs his jump annually. This year's jump takes place at the Cucumber Lounge. News trucks film him as he jumps through a plate glass window he discovers is also made of sugar; the film crews have staged this event and get images not just of the leap but then of a man wearing a dress holding a mini sized chainsaw munching on broken glass. 

The fact he initially goes to the wrong bar provides us with a few bits of information: Zoyd is a bit of a space cadet: even though he has been told this year his filmed act of 'mental illness' will take place at a new venue, he shows up at the one he worked previous; and, Zoyd is stuck in the past: he does not recognize that the lumberman’s bar has become a gay bar filled with yuppies, men dressed in boots that cost three figures and designer jeans. Finally, Zoyd seems to either lack self-awareness (he is not ashamed at all about the stunt he performs) or the fact of his lack of self-awareness about his stunt signals something important. Is Zoyd an idiot savant? Autistic? What does his inner life consist of? We do not know.

What is more pertinent than actual lived experience is the way it is experienced through the eyes of others; Pynchon gives us a man who lives up to those expectations by acting in an absurd manner and without dignity. This "otherness" points to the ways second order observation works. In this model, the individual does not matter,  because behavior is based on mimesis: we imitate based on some desire not our own. We look at something how it is observed by someone else, which is exactly the way TV and film, in general, operates. 

On one level, as I have stated, the novel's theme relates to what media, most specifically television, does to perception. On another, the characters and plot are a thinly veiled nod to the Weather Underground, the Manson family, and contemporary Humboldt and Mendocino Counties. Brock Vond represents not only C.A.M.P., the federal program to eradicate marijuana, but the fascism of Reagan America. The book is about the existent tensions between the ethos of the sixties and that of the eighties. Moreover the book details human biological impulses that go unchecked, unfettered and become warped and manipulated into authoritarianism.

What Pynchon does with the narrative relates to what John Gardner describes thusly:

"The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths."

We taste the sugar-glass Zoyd chews on when he does his stunt, and we experience the paranoia Frenesi and her group experience in their takeover of the college campus. Look at  this description of Thanatoids in Humboldt County waking up to a summer day on which a family reunion will occur, the conclusion to the book's action:

"Some had chosen to sleep inside their recreational vehicles, others lay out on mattresses in the beds of pickup trucks, a few had packed on further into the woods, and many had pitched tents in the meadows. Presently, as the light came up and birds started in, clock-radio alarms began to kick on in a thickening radio fugue of rock and roll till dawn, Bible interpretation, telephone voices still complaining about yesterday's news. Behind the mountains that climbed from here inland, morning-glory-blue light grew in the sky. Soon toasters and toaster ovens, wood fires, RV kitchen microwaves, gong-size skillets over propane flames, all working on bacon, links, eggs, flapjacks, waffles, hash browns, French toast, and hush puppies, were sending out branching invisible fractals of smell, reaching all over the place, fat smoke, charring spices, toasted bread, just-made coffee. People who'd slept overnight in the woods began to wander in. Blue jays appeared on foraging patrols, shrieking, bullying, scavenging, seagulls of the redwoods. Radio weather reports called for a real scorcher, even down in Vineland after the fog burned off. Younger cousins looked at the sky and into one another's backpacks. Fishermen set off along the creek bed to see what might be up and feeding, and golfers tried to scheme ways to slip off for a quick eighteen holes down at Las Sombras, a genuine links beside the fog-hung coast of Vineland. The marathon crazy eights game in a battered but shined-up Becker Airstream proceeded ageless as generation begetting generation, like a pot-au-feu of nickels, dimes, chips, greenbacks, and nuggets that might have been simmering continuously here since the times of the Little Gold Rush. Elsewhere in camp there were other games, poker, pinochle, dominoes, dice — but it was the Octomaniacs, as they thought of themselves, who as a crowd carried a more coherent look, as if they ought to be wearing matching T-shirts, while among the assortment of semi-strangers in and out of the other games, talent and judgment might vary by orders of magnitude, causing delays, astonishment, and episodes of consanguineous discombobulation."

This might describe an annual Rainbow Gathering, or Reggae on the River. It captures a time and place and that time and place is Humboldt County during the second half of the 20th century. Loggers have been replaced by hippies who are disappearing and being replaced by yuppies. The metamorphosis into a new and different type of 'space' is what Pynchon concerns himself with in Vineland. 

I read the book for about the third time and this time only began to recognize a plot. That might not be a resounding vote of confidence as a book review, but I like Pynchon's writing and I think he makes interesting points about the counterculture. Take, for example, this description of Brock Vond, the federal prosecutor infatuated with obtaining and controlling Frenesi:

"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop."

Or this tidbit, spoken by a member of the former film collective:

"Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it — dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity — 'I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.' If the President can act like that, why not Brock?"

The question to ask is, has the counterculture--the hippies, the communes, the intentional communities--merely replaced Nixon's moral majority? Sadly, I think in the age of Covid, Trump, the internet and smart phones, the answer is a resounding YES! Reagan has been replaced by Biden; and the Australian police sergeant in charge of maintaining a strict health quarantine, the high school principal in San Francisco watching students for masks slipping beneath their noses, the woman demanding that the unvaccinated stay away from her...these real life 'characters' display to one degree or another the inchoate characterizations that, if allowed to go unchecked, result in the kind of character that is Brock Vond: controlling, desperate and absolutely psychopathic. 

"All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force” – George Orwell

I do not know if it is my good fortune to have perceived in the Covid crisis primarily illusion and bullshit from the very outset but the fact is that pretty much as soon as I began to see the machinations of government grind into play I knew things were off.

First, I read a piece in March 2020 by the former Scottish diplomat turned whistleblower, Craig Murray, who proclaimed that what was being deemed a crisis had the hallmarks of a typical pandemic, two of which he lived through: first one in the nineteen-fifties and then another in the nineteen-sixties. 

I then noted a Facebook friend cautioning against giving up personal freedoms in the name of public health and I generally wanted to scream in the name of sanity at all those posters who disagreed with him. Clearly some people at the outset a) thought Covid was much more deadly than it would turn out to be (and still a lot of those people, I fear, think that it is a more deadly virus than the pandemic level flus of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s) and b) that the government would take care of everything: make sure money came in to people’s pockets when they were out of work, make sure students could continue to go to school from home, invent a speedy, safe and effective vaccine, and the like.

So, unwarranted fear and unreasonable naivety have brought us to the place we are, and it is here I’d like to begin to delve in a bit deeper to what has happened and where we go from here. 

To those gentle people (I can think of more than a few) who thought that vaccines would mean the end of the pandemic, sorry to say that was never going to be the case. You qualify as overly optimistic and naïve. The vaccines are a new technology, a technology developed originally to treat incurable cancers and never approved by the FDA. Going to the CDC website and looking at the three month long (or whatever they were) trials run on the drug, an equal number of placebo and vaccine recipients died. 

Further still, not many participants in the trials were older than 65, and we know, looking at the facts, that Covid-19, whatever that is, disproportionately affects people over 65. Because the trials were run over a shorter period of time than the FDA requires for approval, there was no real way to know the lasting efficacy of the “vaccines.” It is becoming clear from evidence seen in countries like Israel and in the UK that the vaccines lose effectiveness after two months and that the vaccines might even exacerbate Covid. A few months after the majority of a population has been vaxxed hospitalizations of vaccinated people starts to climb dramatically.

Dr. Michael Yeadon

This should shock anyone with half a brain: the CDC website’s VAERS reporting system shows over 600,000 adverse events related to the vaccine, and almost 12,000 deaths. These numbers are certainly well below the true actual numbers. It could easily be that what the “vaccine” does has further long term effects that kill and injure people in the years following their vaccination. No one knows for certain and doctors who have been ringing the alarm about blood clotting and what happens to the lungs and heart when tissue dies over time have been cast as crazy conspiracy theorists and shut down online. If this does not shock you, you are experiencing either severe denial or you simply have given up on human life. This is where we are. 

Since the vaccine rollout there has been an uptick in hospital admissions for myocarditis. 

Finally, the “vaccine” does not prevent infection or transmission. It was designed to lessen symptoms. Now we see in states like California that the goal has become “zero” Covid. This is patently absurd. The disease itself won’t go away (has AIDS, which at one time supposedly assured one of an untimely death, gone anywhere?) so we are facing a very long slog through more and more lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates (!) and vaccine boosters. If the vaccines and the subsequent boosters cause death and injury will the government ever acknowledge that? More than a few brilliant scientists claim that the vaccine program is in fact meant to cull the earth’s human population (former Pfizer VP Michael Yeadon made this claim in an interview on the website The Last American Vagabond).

Dr. Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR test, Nobel Prize winner.

Then there is the PCR test, which amplifies RNA fragments millions, billions, even trillions of times (depending on the cycle threshold at which they are run when diagnosing) to look for viral strands. According to the PCR test inventor, Kary Mullis, these tests were never meant to be used as a tool to determine viral infection. When the news reports a spike in cases what they really mean is that there has been a spike in positive PCR tests. But the PCR test merely shows that a fragment of RNA that looks like part of a full viral strand exists at some microscopic level in the person being tested. We carry all sorts of viral information in our bodies and many viruses cause absolutely no sickness whatsoever. In fact, we may have thousands, if not millions, of viruses in our blood at any given time. In China, one must test positive twice with the PCR test and then have evidence in the lungs of tissue damage using a CT scan to be considered a Covid case.

So, as you can see, from my point of view, almost everything about the so-called crisis has been manufactured, all along. The answer to how come relates, I intuit, to the reality of the CDC, the NIH, and the ways in which they function to achieve the goal of growing in power. They look for viral particles and exist to use the search to create pandemics. 

I do not have any problem wearing a mask. I do have a problem with the State mandating I wear something that serves solely to express my obedience to a fat whopping lie. I also respect that some people deeply fear death and are willing to go to any length to avoid facing that fear. But with life the way it is, with people seemingly begging and pleading for social restrictions on their own behavior (as if we are all toddlers in preschool), how can we really claim to be living?

Oh, and in this short rant I have not mentioned the idea of vaccine passports, which signal the end of representative democracy. 

Here is a link of an interview of Mike Yeadon conducted in June of 2021:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/C663vikc5fuP/

 2 Poems:

Mitla

Cortes’ nightmare and the Moorish dome 

stained cochineal: drunken duende-like 

fallen fruit, underworld gatekeepers

a church alongside a site named Mitla;

I came to see what Spain brought the New World

when it brought the pomegranate and the horse.

I came to explore its primacy

its flourish and fragrant past. Looking

upon a pomegranate beneath its tree

I saw a drunken man passed out at my feet

who muttered hola! as if I were a portent

I made my way around him, as if he were  

a portent, and walked past him onto that 

not too busy street on that July day

which was warmth mingled with dry breeze.

I’d crossed along a cactus fence

and cinder huts and loom filled halls

and a pomegranate tree, my

rucksack and lonely planet guide,

to ticket taker and temple ruins

to a site Zapotecs call place of death

where walls spread lines in geometric 

intricacy a variegate frieze

interlocking patterns of hewn stone

underworld duende-like.

Passed on empty streets a drunken man.

Town on blocks of tapestry wove 

Arabesque.  Sunlight willing it to speak.  

Abalone

It sits like an elephant’s ear

eavesdrops on everything my roll-top says

feels like the backside of a Grey Whale

embossed inside a batter of magic

its inner-sheen like oil-slicked 

bay-water that laps seawall stone.

It sits on my desk to remind me

an emblem of life.  

Crazy  saltwater sea-shell holding sweet grass– 

grey Mono sage– a planetary ridge 

the mottled care of rock-strewn ages.

Abalone button, abalone earring, 

trinket coin that travelled 

from Puget Sound to Eire Lake, 

down the Huron trail, up that Great Divide, 

carried by Aboriginal-Americans 

on Missouri River trade routes 

connecting culture: Crow, Shoshone, 

Assiniboine, Plains Apache, Lakota Sioux, 

Arapaho and Pawnee.

Abalone.  The ear shell, sea ear, muttonfish,

mutton-shell, ormen, sea snail.  

All of the mollusk family

an image of androgyny.

It’s iridescent inside surface 

bears a mantle cleft

impresses a groove, as in the red abalone, 

where a row of respiratory apertures for venting water 

also release egg and sperm.

Two poems, both published:

 

My Thoughts on the Vaccinated, and some comments on Books.

The other night at dinner a French-Canadian couple celebrating their 47th wedding anniversary informed me that they had each taken both shots of the vaccine. We had introduced ourselves and were chatting. I found the man to be a bore. He bragged about his discipline during the ‘pandemic’: “I went six months without playing golf!” His wife was borderline self-righteous. At one point, apropos of I have no idea what, she asked (directly to my face): “you aren’t one of those Trump supporters are you?”  

Alex's Pasta Bar, Ajijic

The more people pretend they are civilized the more the cracks begin to show. Trump is a symptom of this very thing. But it only occurred to me later that these two had bought into the Covid hysteria hook line and sinker and believe themselves to be superior to people (like the ones who voted Trump) who do not. Is that not a boring and unimaginative way to perceive reality? 

These types of conversations all feel about the same: we locate each other geographically, sexually, politically; we share relationship, work and or pension status; and we share our views on local culture and Mexican politics. Inevitably Trump comes up and sometimes, though I try hard to skirt the issue (mainly because it should never have been an issue to begin with), we discuss Covid-19. 

I have read a lot of stuff online and the more I read the more I am convinced that fear and panic caused a lot of the excess deaths last year. People placed on ventilators were also given fentanyl. The percent in NYC placed on ventilators who died? 90% is a conservative estimate. Remember how many people all around the planet were placed on ventilators in March and April of last year? Experts hold lockdowns responsible for one third of excess deaths (deaths not related to a respiratory virus...those that would not have happened had society remained open). 94% of Covid deaths had an average of 2.3 comorbidities. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say the Government's response, at least in California, has made matters worse.

The people who needed protection: those over sixty or seventy, and those with compromised immune systems, were hung out to dry. While young professionals in their thirties and forties stayed home working online and ordering their groceries delivered, my local CVS Pharmacy kept at least two employees over seventy on staff and these two worked throughout the year, interacting with the public. I won't get into the crime of keeping children (who are at greater risk from influenza than Covid) at home.  Priorities, at least where I live, were ass-backwards. It makes me think there has been an agenda afoot that has something to do with maneuvering life online. Why else would elementary school children be forced to sit in front of a screen for twelve months?

A brief comment about the mRNA vaccines: The vaccines could not legally have received Emergency Use Authorization if a treatment existed for the virus. But, we have known for over a year that both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin work in treating the virus. Fauci nixed those treatments. We also know that, as of May 18, "mRNA vaccines now account for more side effect reports to VAERS since December than EVERY OTHER VACCINE COMBINED in the last year" (Alex Berenson). 1 in 6000 men aged sixteen to thirty vaccinated in Israel have experienced myocarditis. Because of potential blood clots the vaccinated may not donate blood plasma. Airlines have even discussed banning the recently vaccinated from flying (for fear of deep vein thrombosis).

I think middle-class folk, like the couple next to me at dinner the other night—they were mostly polite and excited to talk—wear their masks and advertise the fact that they have taken the vaccine primarily as a means to assuage their guilt at not needing to get out of the comfort of their home to work, or deal with raising an income, during such trying times. 

While the poor suffer and as more and more work goes online or automates, we have groomed children for the restrictions on human liberty in the face of viruses, climate change and food shortages that will proliferate in the future; it will be those who can live comfortably working online or collecting a pension who will be in charge of keeping up the image that all the economic and cultural destruction wrought by the likes of Anthony Fauci (cut from the same cloth as Trump) necessitates such (cult like) behavior—Covidians behave the way they do out of guilt. 

Meanwhile, the human community seems threadbare. Things are fraying at the edges and threatening to fall apart; we are ready to break off into minor cults and warring tribes. I consider myself politically homeless. What on earth am I missing? It can feel so lonely at times. 

I began reading, for the first time, Peter Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus earlier this afternoon. It is such a dangerous book it sells for almost $700 at amazon.com. In other words, it is not in print and therefore not easy to find and those copies that exist sell for a high price. (I am reading it as a PDF, online).  

Duesberg’s research led him to conclude that the virus HIV has no connection to AIDS. I tend to find his research compelling. As in, hard to dispute. Instead of countering his claims, he has been entirely censored by the academic community. The same thing happened to David Irving, the one-time-heralded-historian of 20th century Germany who could not find evidence that Auschwitz was used primarily as an extermination camp and made the (absurd) claim that because Hitler is not on record as ordering what became known as the final solution to the Jewish question (i.e. transporting Jews to die or be killed in concentration camps) it should not be assumed he knew what happened. Irving is a Hitler apologist. What if, Irving hypothesizes, Churchill was to blame for WWII? Churchill, after all, was a racist and an anti-Semite. Churchill sought adoration, celebrity, and attention throughout the war. He was an all-day drinker and a Machiavellian grandstander. 

I am reading another book, which I am nearly finished with, called Fatherland, by Robert Harris, a writer of historical thrillers who Irving calls a friend and who calls Roman Polanski a friend (Harris has called David Irving a dangerous writer, and it is fact that Harris based his thriller, Pompeii, on Polanski’s “Chinatown.” Harris claims Irving gave him the idea for Fatherland.)

Fatherland imagines a victorious Germany in the year 1964. Germany has won WWII, the British Royal family—and even Winston Churchill—are in exile in Canada. Joseph Kennedy is President of the United States. Hitler is seventy-five. And the Ural Mountains (in Russia) are the location of ongoing guerrilla warfare between Russia and Germany. Ufa, near Siberia, is the capitol of Russia. I do not think Harris mentions Stalin.

Germany has taken a heavy beating fighting Russia. Berlin, where the story takes place, is a bit like East Germany before the fall of Communism except even worse because Nazi SS patrol the city and everyone lives in fear of being sent off to serve in the fight against the Russians. It is sort of an ingenious book, the crux of which relates to hidden evidence of "the Final Solution."

In Fatherland, German leadership has kept a lid on what happened in the concentration camps during the war and thirteen of fourteen high level officials in-the-know have been assassinated. The remaining one possesses documentation and wants to use it in exchange for his escape from the country. Since no one in Germany knows the truth—people have been told Jews were resettled in Eastern Europe—the discovery of “the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe” makes the novel one about a man (the investigator Xavier March) coming to a level of awareness that greatly outpaces his previous intuition. Truth is worse than fiction. 

Maybe, and this is my hope, someday my niece Elsa will read the truth about the Covid debacle. And hopefully my daughter will too. They need access to the truth. They need to be strong enough to question the lies. To stand for truth and justice. Fear is a flimsy way to mitigate human behavior. I write this for their generation. 

The Lake Chapala Society, with monthly and yearly membership fees and, "the largest English language library in Latin America" according to a docent. The monthly fee is on par with a latte and scone at your favorite cafe in the States, or perhaps a burrito from Gordo. Well worth it. I checked out four book from the library: The Crystal Frontier, by Carlos Fuentes, a Biography of Stephen Crane, written by John Berryman (of all people: look him up if you do not know the name), a Robert Harris historical thriller and a book by Don DeLillo. The librarian had taught in the UCSD Extension Writing Program so we had a thing or two in common. There are a few people here this day, and at least two of them are older women speaking passionately at lawyers about how to access money from a will or annuity, or something. Sad but also funny. The allure of life in the area is so great that I understand the desperation. The attachment. Life here is normal: it moves at a natural pace. Plus there are box stores and golf courses!

These guys played Beatles songs. Really mellow and a good rapport. 

(Note: I wrote this in the Fall of 2017)

“A society is only as free as its most inconvenient dissident.” – Caitlin Johnstone

M

M was in his late twenties; he was dumpy and bearded. He wore hiking boots, tan survival pants (the kind with many pockets up and down the leg and fabric that is made to dry quickly) and a blue parka. His backpack was enormous. He found me online, through a site set up to connect tutors and college students. It would be the only time I used the website. When I arrived to work with him—sight unseen—he sat in the side café—a Starbucks inside the larger chain bookstore, Barnes and Noble. M had a Norton Anthology of Medieval Literature and it was opened at “Lanval,” a long poem by Marie de France, a writer about whom I knew nothing. 

He looked perplexed—bewildered actually—and he would not make eye contact with me. In fact, his ball cap covered his eyes. He spoke as if he were from an imagined genteel class of conservatives from the New England area of another century. His speech was tonally flat: “I will need your help with my writing…it would be quite helpful if you could possibly meet this Saturday, if that is at all not too much to ask…I am sorry if you were angry at me today; I sometimes hold unconventional views in areas such as politics.” 

He certainly needed help. A victim of the Special Education program at a local high school, I would come to find he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (a label no longer used by professionals) and held strange resentments. He hated the Boy Scouts, “for what they did to me.” He loathed the academic salary class (i.e. his professors) who he considered lightweight goons carrying the pitchforks for multiculturalism, anti-hate and anti-racism. These ‘agendas’ he found stifling, shallow and vane. To him his teachers and fellow students were “Social Justice Warrior assholes.” His mom and dad he loathed because “they never asked me to do anything. They coddled me. To this day, I do not know how to do anything.” He was more than a little angry.  

M called them "Social Justice Warrior assholes."

Initially he needed help studying for a course titled "The Literature of Passion," something I was on short supply of lately, seeing as I had lost my little sister (a social justice teacher herself) months previous, was drinking too much, and I worried about my now motherless six-year old niece. I lacked clarity about what I needed and wanted for my own life. In short—and I know this is getting lengthy—I was adrift in a kind of hopelessness and despair unimaginable to me before I myself returned to school to attain my M.A.

I always used Barnes and Noble, when I was an undergraduate, to read my assigned books for free, in a setting that allowed me to sit in a comfortable chair without too much distraction (perhaps some muzak) and drink coffee, one of the few things I spent money on back then. 

M had no real investment in reading. He sat slouched over the table. He was so nervous he could barely look up from the table. At the outset of that first meeting I thought certainly there would be no way we could meet again. We had barely made eye contact. We were in completely separate realities, and I had no idea what his had anything to do with. The only connection I felt was the visceral shame, the embarrassment at mere being; the inability to look at the world eye to eye because he felt he did not belong. I could relate to those things.  

I looked over the writing prompts he had for “Lanval,” a verse translation of a morality laity (whatever that was) written in the twelfth-century by a noblewoman writing under a pseudonym, translating Latin to English, but actually French because this was during the centuries France controlled England, so the dialect she wrote in is called Anglo-Norman (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, in which Shakespeare and Milton wrote). 

These were basic moral stories, or fables, and in the specific case of Marie, they made love the focus for analysis of the individual’s relation to the whole. This, at least, was what the forward told me.  Here is a quote from “Lanval”: 

He to whom God has given knowledge 

And the gift of speaking eloquently,

Must not keep silent nor conceal the gift 

But he must willingly display it.

Within that kernel could bloom and blossom, if I were to put it on display, the entirety of my relationship with M, or lack thereof, which lasted two years. Therein exist ideas of charisma, courage, knowledge, ‘gifts,’ and obligation and responsibility, none of which would ever actually become the true fulcrum of our tutoring sessions, and this was because, as I noted above, M refused to read. 

In comparison, when I was an undergraduate English major in my year-long introduction to literature course, when it came time for my test on Chaucer, a random line by line translation, I joked with a friend that instead of studying the great poet I had been carousing the night before drinking Old English (a malt liquor). Fortunately for me, I think my Teaching Assistant liked me. In the middle of the test she slipped out of the room, seemingly to allow degenerates like myself to pull out translation guides and to not so subtly cheat. 

Up to that point it seemed I might fail the course. After that passing grade things got better. My T.A. liked the work I produced on “Henry the Fourth, Part 1,” Shakespeare’s play. I had fallen in love with the character of Falstaff and would write about his down-to-earth and worldly character traits in juxtaposition to the coddled and Machiavellian Prince Hal, who looked to the former as a father figure. I ended the year with a steady stream of B minuses. I learned to take notes. I learned to focus and my confidence grew. 

Falstaff

Things got easier in upper division courses and I grew to understand that what I was doing in college was learning to learn, for me an intuitive and performative task. I became enamored of Faulkner, not because I understood what his writing meant, but because it was so difficult to read, so carefully written; I thought reading him would somehow cast me into the echelon of people who understood big and important things. I read the other American modernists. I studied more Shakespeare. 

Faulkner

With M, these aspirations mattered not a whit. He wanted to be a writer but would not write on his computer because he was convinced that the Word program that he would be writing on had a ‘backdoor’ and therefore would be impossible to secure. He actually said that someone could crack into the computer, steal his writing, and publish it as his or her own. “Wouldn’t there be any satisfaction in the fact that your writing got published, even if by somebody else?” I asked. “I won’t be anybody’s cuck,” was what he would respond.

I was dumbfounded. What on earth did this guy see in the world as true? Why was I working with him?? 

After our first meeting—a meeting I was sure would be our last—I got up to dismiss myself, appalled at the guy’s inability to comprehend and contextualize literature, and as I was turning to head out of the bookstore, M said, his eyes turned to the ground, “so hopefully we can meet again at the beginning of next week?” This was a relief, as I was beginning to hate the kids I worked with in my ‘other job.’ 

M (actually, M’s parents) would pay my rent, I decided.

I did not think about M much after our first meeting. I figured working with him would be easy money. I thought that because he never did any preparation, I would never do any either. This approach worked. He wanted someone to hang out with. I met with him two, three, even four times some weeks for two-hour meetings at the Barnes and Noble café. Eventually we moved to a donut shop because he felt more comfortable there. The Barnes and Noble café was often crowded with shared seating. 

It was at about the end of our first semester working together that M told me about his Asperger’s diagnosis. It was also at this time that I started to become aware of the online world he inhabited. I learned about Pepe the Frog, the ‘Trump alt-right’ meme; I learned about PewDiePie, the online celebrity gamer best known for his provocative pushback against European speech laws; I realized that M was infatuated by Sargon of Akad, a Youtuber who hosted a regular podcast who considered himself, like many of these ‘new’ conservatives, a Classical Liberal. He told me about Tommy Robinson, a British Brexiter who had been taken to jail for teaching his bulldog the Nazi salute and posting a video of it doing so online.

Pepe the Frog

All of these people and names were new to me. Before meeting M I had happened upon a regular blog by an autistic writer who was also a self-labeled ‘Burkean Conservative’ (a follower of the English philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote a famous treatise critical of the French Revolution) and a Druid. This guy sometimes wrote about politics and, when he did, he had an uncanny way of clearly explaining the populism sweeping the western world. Unlike almost everyone I interacted with in my world—family, friends, colleagues—I had been exposed to, or at least I was beginning to feel drawn to a different understanding of the political landscape for the Trump era. I was fed up with holding out hope in the specific political paradigm of Corporate corruption and the all-out militarization of everything that had lead us up to the moment. I could no longer see the relevancy of liberalism. I always craved tradition, even though I was vehement in my ambivalence towards authority. I had become entrenched in my refusal to entertain political solutions that existed within the paradigm of Clinton-Bush-Obama (birthed, I suppose, by Reagan). I assumed the Occupy Movement would be coopted and destroyed from the inside, and it was. I now see the Occupy Movement as an odd normalization of the sad fact of homelessness in society. We are living in a post-political reality. 

M was turned on to politics with Occupy. He was outraged and noticed a shift in what took place amongst ordinary people because of the financial turmoil in 2008. I was astounded by that moment too. Unlike M I had already gone through the school system and because I went to school in a progressive, liberal town, the politics I learned to recite without thinking related to race and gender and class and sexuality and the importance of questioning the hierarchy. In other words, at the same time the economic reality created atomization: the internet, Neo Liberalism and then the war or terror, students were being told to think only of identity. It was bizarrely dystopian, and I saw it in the mid 1990’s. 

So just as the fellow elected to lead a progressive, social justice minded coalition took his first opportunity in office to do something about the ‘hierarchy’ and absolved the Corporate fat cats at the very tip top of the hierarchy of any wrongdoing and not only absolved them but rewarded them for their egregious behavior, he helped set things up so that they could mess everything up again. You see what I am saying about a shift. Obama was unprecedented in that what he represented as an individual—good or bad—and what he did to keep the paradigm of war and corruption and inequality afloat simply does not lead one to trust or even want to participate in the system at large.

In other words, M is not an idiot. He saw all this. What he turned to resulted in Trump. It was not Russian bots or Wiki Leaks that elected Donald Trump. It was people like M: disaffected, open to new ideas, disappointed and more than a little dissatisfied. What got Trump into the White House was the before mentioned hypocrisy in combination with a corrupt political establishment in combination with the Internet. Let me explain what I learned working with M. I learned that the more isolated we become and the more we are expected to be individuated with no concern about community in the local sense, the more we turn to these things elsewhere. The most convenient place to turn for community—a sense of belonging—happens to be the Internet. It is convenient. It is anonymous. It does not require a lot of responsibility nor does it require accountability. Thank god for Al Gore, right?

M was a gamer, another aspect of the online community that I knew nothing about. Yes, I played video games when I was a kid. Not online though. Today people play online and they also communicate via chat while they play. Furthermore, a whole breed of celebrity Youtubers has grown out of the gamer culture. These folk record themselves playing video games and their cultural commentary makes them their lifestyles. They are paid, as far as I can see, to play video games and say provocative things. The ethos that was the very fabric of America one hundred-fifty years ago when the French writer de Tocqueville traveled the country and recorded what he saw has completely disappeared. What de Tocqueville saw was that Americans operated in community. He saw that politics was diverse and that people formed coalitions in order to get things done. Americans were communitarians back then. 

Alexis de Tocqueville

M's lifestyle and opinions slipped out over time. Some things startled me about M. He had reported one of his professors to the Dean of Student Affairs on more than one occasion for what he called her oppressive politics. He secretly recorded in-class discussions he claimed were biased and anti-Trump. He claimed one of his professors said she would “kill him” on the day of the 2016 election if he argued against her pro-Social Justice Warrior stances. While I took her behavior to be familial playacting, M, because he is on the autism spectrum, could do nothing other than take her statements as a threat. 

To me it was all very ironic. Here was a kid who had been taught from day one in his educational experience to advocate for justice, equity and fairness; but he was being told his opinions did not count, that he did not matter if he did not hew to the particular line of argumentation going on in class. Critical Theory, to take just one example, is theory after all but is taught as scripture by some professors. More pointedly, if the right wing represents the vertical and the left represents the horizontal then the two are meant to balance each other. It sounded to me as though there was not much balance in the ideological perspective M attributed to his teachers. If a pro-Trump student can be derided as a fascist, why is it not ok to question a pro-Sanders student who claims to be a Communist? Which ideology has done more historic harm? That depends on who you ask. In all fairness, both have been egregious.  

This is not to say I support one or the other (Trump or Sanders). The latter seems far more in touch with the political realities of the past century, while the former might be more in tune with political dystopia  here today. It’s hard to say. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, compares the online video gaming community to the ‘Old Bowling League,’ or a Hollywood version of a Western Utopia that never was, whose “angry voices, properly directed, have lengthened political-power.” He claims that he knew early-on that the comment sections of the Gaming World, “could be weaponized at some point.” At least some of these are the people who voted in the populist surge that brought Donald Trump. 

I do not like the police state. I do not support politicians who take money from weapons makers. I do not support the expansion of the US military. In this respect, I do not see that there would be much difference between Trump and Sanders. Socially, they are different. As people, they are different. I would have a far easier time in relation to Sanders, I suspect. As leaders I cannot know who will get the ‘better’ results. It seems this kind of information is always controlled. History writes and rewrites itself. It is a mass of entanglement, of mis- and dis-information. What is and what has been cannot truly be untangled without the collective intent to include dissident voices.

In this sense, I knew M needed to be heard; and, over time, he became a dissident voice I listened to. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/covid-deaths-plummet-excess-mortality-falls-pre-pandemic-levels

San Antonio Tlayacapan, Bar 503

These two rolled a joint at the bar after asking if I had papers (I didn't) and disappeared into thin air. 

 

Kurt Vonnegut

The firebombing of Dresden took place between February 13th and 15th 1945. Initially the U.S. press gave the massacre no coverage. Initial German propaganda claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 deaths. The first serious history of the event claimed 135,000 innocents were killed over the two nights of sustained Allied bombing. Wikipedia places the number at 25,000, but as a poet friend of mine once told me when I expressed outrage at what I thought to be the numbers killed in the Second Iraq War, “it's relative! No one should have died in Iraq.” It is really hard to imagine anyone needing to die in Dresden either, but, for the sake of clarity, let's say between 25,000 and 100,000 did; and Kurt Vonnegut lived through the massacre, huddled with a group of prisoners of war in an old slaughterhouse beneath the city. Slaughterhouse Five reflects Vonnegut’s frustration and attempts at honestly depicting the horrors he experienced. 

Many of the victims of the bombing were refugees escaping the advance of the Soviet Army, which was moving swiftly towards Dresden from the east. At least some of the victims were displaced citizens from the agricultural regions to the east of Dresden. (Others were Allied soldiers, many were women and children). This is one reason for the discrepancy between various analyses of the event. There is simply no way to know how much of the city was populated by civilian residents and how many of the people there were refugees from places east of Dresden. The destructive nature of the event is perhaps best characterized by subsequent public ignorance. According to Vonnegut, the massacre made the Guinness Book of World Records. 

As Vonnegut tells it, after the bombing, his group was forced to go from building to building and to dig through the debris bringing out corpses, most of which were discovered in basements and cellars, to be burned in pyres. It is not a story of heroism or valor but rather one of absurdity, arbitrariness, trauma, and death. 

The story’s protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, and he is based on a real soldier Vonnegut met in  Dresden who died, literally, of shell shock. In the novel, Pilgrim is an overly passive man whose father was particularly hard on him, and who, after living through World War II and being institutionalized in a psychiatric ward where he read the books of a specific science-fiction writer, experiences—or imagines—being transported to another planet, called Tralfamadore. There, reality is understood differently. On Tralfamadore time does not exist. Everything happens at once. Free will does not exist. And, thus, it is easy to project onto Billy Pilgrim a deep trauma that he can only cope with by imagining a fantastical world and reality completely “other” than the one we understand as our own. Pilgrim re-experiences Dresden again and again, and yet again. 

The first section of the book describes Vonnegut, years after events, searching for the form within which to tell his story. He goes to the house of someone who lived through the bombing with him and there his buddy’s wife, a woman named Mary O’Hare, tells him disdainfully that she hopes he does not make the story a heroic one, with tough guys doing courageous things. After all, she says, it is a story of very young and naive people living the horrors of war. Inspired by O’Hare, and in a realistic style, Vonnegut begins his own story—his own search for answers to what the experience of surviving Dresden means to him—only to then tell the story of Billy Pilgrim, an ordinary guy raised in an ordinary town and then drafted into a war he has no ability to survive much less comprehend, who is so traumatized by life he imagines himself abducted and taken to another planet. 

Harold Bloom writes, in his analysis of the book, 

“Tralfamadore is uncovered as quite likely a fantasy creation of a shell-shocked soldier—something like a compensatory sexual fantasy—because Vonnegut has presented the story as told by a strong, credible narrator from Billy’s point of view, the Tralfamadore story is not so easy to explain away: it has taken hold of the reader’s imagination, and in a sense has become real. By leading readers to believe, even temporarily, that the imaginary can be real, Vonnegut strengthens the possibility that readers can be helped to see that the real can be the result of a particular variety of imagination, the result of the ways we think and daydream. Mary O’Hare, the moral spirit of the book, has asserted in chapter 1: “she thought that wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.” (11)

Harold Bloom 

Of course today the murder of civilians in 'acts of defense against terrorism' has become common. In Israel, just yesterday, the IDF, the most notorious and egregious actor in the ongoing flare ups in the Middle East, obliterated a fifteen story apartment building filled with families, children, grandparents etc. What happened in Dresden has become almost quotidian in places like Gaza, and I suppose Syria, over the last decade or so. What was Vonnegut’s answer to the ongoing trauma of war on the human psyche? I think Bloom sums it up well:

"By leading readers to believe, even temporarily, that the imaginary can be real, Vonnegut strengthens the possibility that readers can be helped to see that the real can be the result of a particular variety of imagination, the result of the ways we think and daydream.” 

As a final note of comparison: I think what I have witnessed this last year, with Covid, has been a massive experiment in belief, originally premised on a social contract which involved closing society for two weeks in order to save the health care system. Two weeks became permanent, at some level, and now the implicit imaginary holds us all individually responsible for the spread of respiratory viruses: the individual becomes, in our newly imagined scenario, a walking vector of danger and disease. I wonder what Vonnegut would make of my comparison.

Slaughterhouse Five, ultimately, is the story of a man, Billy Pilgrim, who takes his experience reading science fiction (we could substitute here the ways the media spreads fear of terrorism, or fear of a respiratory virus) and he makes that experience his reality. It is about the many ways, as Bloom puts it, “the imaginary can be real.”