People who react to experience not spontaneously, but rather by first considering how the reaction might “play” for them—or in the case of our crusading intellectuals, how they might use it in the prosecution of their pet sociocultural narratives—and what its corresponding value will be, worry the hell out of me because interposing anything that is arbitrary between reality and our awareness of reality, which is to say, preconditioning our consciousness, is an ego defense that makes me wonder what’s wrong with them that they don’t want revealed through inadequate, inappropriate or inept behavior. I put them in the psychodynamic category that contains socio- and psychopaths, junkies maddened by desperation and rabid ideologues of all denominations.
Archive for the ‘identity’ Category.
Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.
Depriving a teenager of idealism is like not charging the battery of a car before you turn the ignition key and step on the gas. The car can’t go anywhere, and you flood the engine.
Some people sabotage their own pretensions to individuality through the fear of being perceived as different. Collections of such people agree to be different together in meticulously codified ways.
It’s not how a Southerner speaks that distinguishes him, it’s what he says. A few years back I stood at an intersection in Atlanta’s legal and financial district. Beside me stood a trim erect gentleman with feather-cut silver hair wearing, I estimated, a $1200 blazer, a pair of $400 slacks, and $300 loafers. I might just as well have been in Wall Street. Before the light changed, the elegant gentleman turned to the man on the other side of him and said, “Bubba’s comin’ to Mama’s house Sunday.”
We were creatures of stimulus-and-response when trilobites were still a hundred million years in the future.
Providing yourself with an admirable self-image is only half the deal. You also have to match it in reality. The “true you” is not an icon.
Home is a memory and a dream, and a nexus of associations that motivates our most vital actions. Child psychiatrists say that the love a child receives in its first 5 years stays with it afterwards as a component of its personality all its life. Thus most of us “remember” that we came from a good place, one of ease, contentment, security, fun, warmth and well-being, which we left either because we grew up or—for the vast majority of the race—because we saw our homes destroyed, were violently uprooted from them, or looked on as their goodness vanished when adulthood led us to see the blight we hadn’t known about in our innocence. And then we spend the rest of our lives wanting to “go home again.”
Sic semper homo hominis: Our great prosperity leads us to believe we no longer need to discipline our behavior or our minds. But that very prosperity also brings about the corruption and inutility of our reinforcing institutions, with the result that our continued well-being depends on whether we have the courage to see and think clearly at the moment when we have lost the capability of even rationally buying groceries.
“This is who I am”:
“Who?”
“Are you an owl?
Our basic difficulty is that the reconfiguration of our culture through technology is taking place so rapidly that evolutionary adjustments to the new rate of change have not had time to grow into our makeup. Think of a New Guinea pygmy conscripted without a lick of warning to undertake the principal bassoon part in a presentation of La Traviata this afternoon, supervise the making of Pariser Schnitzel mit Bratkartoffeln und Rotkohl for seventeen tonight, then climb inside the cockpit of the Space Shuttle tomorrow as its flight commander.
During the Age of Aquarius the only time I was offered LSD, I said to my benefactor (without considering the answer first): “I don’t really think it’s possible for my consciousness to be any more expanded than it already is.”
I stopped dismissing teenage rebellion as “a normal phase” of human development several years ago, when I took a long look at things from their point of view. The conclusion I reached is that no norms inhere today to constitute “normal” and the kids, therefore, are not rebelling against their family’s values (which died of hypocrisy), seeking their own identities (only celebrities have these), giving the finger to society (with its laughable pretense that it’s not for sale), or testing their moves for the big sex game (they’ve already gone on to the majors). I hate to tell you this, friends, but they are fighting to save their sanity if not their lives.
Long Time Gone. I was a good-natured youth with promise during the early years of our marriage, and my young wife was adorably energetic and a boon companion. Recalling our “extended honeymoon,” and aware of how terribly I defiled it later on, I feel as though I’m a murderer going back to the locale of his misdeed to lament his guilt and seek to be absolved of it. Fearfully expectant, he creeps palpating through the lashing branches in the shadows to the picture window, where he hardly pauses before his heart constricts as he beholds his darlings there in the lighted room, still alive and hale as they linger tenderly over the dinner they were engaged in when he’d lurched inside the house that blighted night and plunged it into pitch-blackness. The killer is yearning more than he has ever yearned for anything to enter through the window and abase himself and crave forgiveness from the couple, but a power he can’t argue with warns that if he shatters the glass in the window the room will not be lighted any more nor gloriously suffused with the young couple’s melded spirits, that it will be as black and void as his own withering soul. It is easy to understand but hard to bear—the people we used to be are not accessible any more.
When God is making lawyers he lines the contenders up in pairs of internally identical twins (a category invented for God’s convenience). As each pair’s turn comes for allocation, the Deity drops a wrench between them. The one who doesn’t budge but only sneers at the Lord’s cheap ruse is destined to become enrolled in law school. The one who snatches up the wrench and tries to conceal it gets a tag labeled “Mechanic”.
Feeling personally empowered when your team wins a championship constitutes something more complicated and sick than exhilarated pride kicking into overdrive. I don’t recall the country’s astrogeologists and engineers pouring into the streets to overturn cars and beat each other to death with garbage-can lids because NASA successfully landed its probes on Mars.
The television show The Apprentice verified the dictum that mediocrity and superficiality are the hallmarks of clueless ambition, showing us again that the emptier a mind is, the more readily it lends itself to camouflage, in this case corporate shtick. Thompson’s Law of Jumped-Up Nonentities: The rate of speed required for the transformation of dorm lizard or Super Bowl groupie into well-tailored killer drone is inversely proportionate to their ability to define the term morality as something other than “Whatever I can get away with.”
If John Kerry were a spider he’d have eight hundred legs. According to news reports, in 1971, protesting the war in Vietnam, Kerry threw away: (1) another soldier’s ribbons and medals saying they were his medals; (2) just the other man’s ribbons saying they were his medals; (3) his own ribbons and medals; (4) his own ribbons saying they were his medals. If the Senator is elected in November [of 2004], the country will be treated to another chatty exponent of the Clinton School of Public Explanations. A few months after the ribbon and/or medal-throwing away event involving either some or all of either his own or the other guy’s awards, he deigned to clear the air of confusion by informing a TV interviewer: “Actually I threw away 6,7,8,9 medals.” That leaves us with a total of 16 versions of the truth to choose from, unless in some cases Kerry threw just his medals away, in other cases just his ribbons, in a number of cases both, or perhaps in some cases the other man’s medals, in still others the other man’s ribbons, or in certain cases the other man’s ribbons and medals. We could actually be dealing with hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of possibilities here.
Ted Turner looked in the mirror and said, “There was a time when I was not am. I was not being some that when. Imagine being sometime where you are not were. Can you be some one place time, and another sometime one when? Or do you always have to are more where another time were? Not only there was but is some when I am not other was is. Sometime there is a where one am was, and someplace there will be a now where I was are am. The person I is was are. Then am I where I now was is. Someplace time. One then some were when I am are was. If I some more eyes had would I other more have I’s? Time more me now were I where would will. Or I see more me when time were some eye am. Would eye place more me were I more eye are? I more time are when I more find eye time eye. Eye time more eye more time? Eye I eye I eye I. My eye was am some when I were are where. Turner Turner Turner. Eye O. Eye am eye O eye? Eye was Turn more some when er was other time will. Ner more were Tur eye when some I ner Tur are? Dead am eye are Ted when I more was some er Turn. Where Ted are was when He O some I were? Turn Ted Turd er. Ted Turd Ted Turd. Eye are Turd when Ted am some more were was. Turd some time other where O is Ted are. Some is more where er time place I Turn. But eye now are Turd.
If the world could only be what children think it is. When you bought something in the store and took it to the cash register, after you had your package they would give you some more money to spend at the next store. When your parents talked ugly to each other, that meant your Dad was about to go off and forget to punish you for anything so you could really enjoy the treat Mom gave you when she leaned over and said, “You love me, don’t you, pumpkin?” Women would leave you to yourself and alone with the guys because you hit them if they didn’t, and if you forgot to hit them they would do something twisting and pinching to your body that made their lips turn thin while they hurt you a lot more than you would ever hurt them. If your boss didn’t give you money to buy stuff when you asked him for it you would fall down kicking your feet up and down and pound your fists on the floor screaming that he wouldn’t be invited to your birthday party. When you felt sad and went outside to see the bugs, sometimes Mr. Blimp would slowly float past your shoulder doing his whirring sound and little people would be sitting in the package beneath his stomach and your heart would jump up inside of you and you would feel all better.
