800 Words: 30 Mini-Essays - 9. The American Carnival, 10. This IS The American Century

9. The American Carnival

“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”

- Juvenal, Satire X

"...migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings,
Placard "Removed" and "To Let' on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus, ...
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections
For you know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you."

- Walt Whitman, Song of the Exposition

I have no idea what it means to be the ‘Greatest Country on Earth.’ I know that I’ve written that about America before, and having lived in only three countries (the other two for not very long), I have no real expertise on the subject, so I very much regret writing that. But I do know what excitement is, and I feel pretty safe in saying that even if America is not the best country on Earth, it’s certainly the most exciting. It should never cease to amaze how wrongly we Americans do many things, but we provide easily the best bread and circus show in the world.

The older I get, the dimmer grow my fantasies of living some kind of obscenely cultured life of daily concerts, theater, galleries, and symposia with the learned of the European continent which would turn George Steiner green with envy. The Europe of my imagination, indeed the Europe of most educated Americans’ imagination, ceased to exist a century ago when the lamps went out all over that continent, and we have not seen them lit again. But what those lamps illuminated was nothing but the European bread and circus show - perhaps still the greatest show the Earth has ever known. The working class was foundering in terrible factory conditions, the rural population starved terribly, but it was a non-stop party for the educated of Europe with ever new delights. The world was an endless place of discovery; new foods, new books, new music and art, new science. Life for an educated European was an endless profusion of new things to talk about.

But the pleasures innate to Europe have not changed much for a hundred years. In its place, Europe has become ever more Americanized. The Marshall Plan was not only a second chance for Europe, it was a second chance for America as well to get right all those things which wise American statesmen learned about proper governance over the course of 175 years. As a result of The Marshall Plan’s generosity, Europe was able to grow the kind of social safety net which America still desperately needs, and most Western European countries possess systems of government which are far more functional than America’s endless gridlock. If the EU ever succeeds (and the last few years proved that it clearly hasn’t yet...), it will have officially beaten America at its own game. Europe doesn’t need lamps, they have solar power.

But if the EU is a better place to live than America, then it has correspondingly less need for a great bread and circus show. European entertainment is certainly very good, and

I should know because I’m an endless consumer of much of it. The BBC gave us wonderful comedians like John Cleese and the Python crew, Ricky Gervais, Rowan Atkinson, and Fry & Laurie - all comedians influenced by the work of American forerunners - and endless wonderful documentaries about past European achievements; British theater gave us the more intelligent theater of Stoppard and Frayn and Bennett and David Hare and Peter Shaffer, as often as not about old subjects from European history; I adore lots of postwar European movies by Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Polanski, Almodovar, Rohmer, Kieslowski and many others - usually either based on historical European subjects or heavily influenced by the work of American directors; I love cabaret Chaussoniers like Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, Charles Aznavour, and Ute Lemper, who learned much of their craft by listening to American jazz crooners; like the rest of the world I love lots of British bands, most of whom would have not even thought to start a band if they hadn’t heard records by American bands first….. It’s all wonderful stuff, but it is either grounded in the paradigms of Old Europe, or it borrows from the American model. Like the pre-WWII generations of American popular culture, it is almost impossible to speak of European popular culture without taking account of the models they borrowed from across the Ocean. Even the professional sports leagues of Europe are marketed on models they borrowed from America.

But the show in Europe simply can’t compare to the show in America. Life is very dull when you run little risk of failure, and for those of us too restless to ever know inner peace, we require simply a better, longer, more diverse show to take our minds off our all-too-real problems. America simply has a more diverse offering of entertainment - an endless twenty-four hour cycle of frivolity in which the brain is in constant stimulation and needn’t be troubled by anything too burdensome. Some of these diversions even have the added benefit of having an intelligence which even a European could admire!

The profusion of American offerings, both intelligent and not so, is almost literally infinite. The celebrity culture known so well to the rest of the world is only the surface layer of American entertainment. Unlike in Europe, the dream of a centralized, national media is something of a joke. PBS and NPR receive a small fraction of the funding which the BBC or Deutschlandradio get, and even if they received the same funding, dollar for pound/euro, they could not do nearly as good a job at promoting all the best in American entertainment, because there is so much more in America than there is in Europe. As a result, no truly great musician or writer or artist in America can or ever again will be promoted with the firepower which their equivalents in Europe can be marketed. But as a result, and nobody likes to hear this, the brutality of the competition makes American artists more hungry and battle-tested. They have more to say thanks to the struggles they underwent to make it. But even if that isn’t true, it remains startlingly clear that there are far more great entertainers and artists working in America than in any one European country - because America is not a country, it is its own continent. Every scene, however small, has its stars; every consumer, however ignorant, has his favorites whom no one she knows has yet heard. No matter what your aesthetic taste, no matter what the shade of your political leanings, no matter how high or low your level of intelligence, there will be an astoundingly large number of people across the country who share your ethos and cater to it.

But there is no way to experience the extraordinary depth and diversity of this carnival without living here. No one would know how to cue you into everything which happens. You could never assimilate even a sliver of it if you didn’t. The dreams of Old Europe are merely dreams. But every damn city in America has its own small version of Old Vienna and and Old Paris and all the attendant cities of the fin de siecle. The music, the art, the writing, may be completely unrecognizable from its European forerunners, but as America streams headlong into second half of middle-age, it's finally carved out a distinct identity of its own - with each city having its own distinct and utterly individual identity-within-the-identity. No two communities, no two scenes in a single community, could ever be mistaken for one another. THIS is the American Carnival. It goes twenty-four hours a day, it has more stations than any carnival the world has ever seen, it contains endless other people to talk with about everything you just saw with, and it’s not going to close any time soon.  

10. This IS The American Century!

Welcome to the American Century. What did you expect it to be?

The twentieth century was not The American Century, it was The American Comedy. It began in 1914 with the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand, and ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had the happiest possible ending: The Soviet Union fell, America was the unquestioned world superpower, prosperous beyond the dreams of any country in world history, and America learned precisely the wrong lessons from their victory. We are now an an overstretched neo-imperial power, which believes it can tax minimally and spend maximally without being called to account for its debts. We believed that Reagan’s military bluster is what caused the downfall of the Soviet Union, when it was Harry Truman’s slow, patient policy of containment which brought it down over a period of forty years. It was a comedy because it left the country of perfect fools at the top of food chain, and like all fools, we now stand ready to get our comeuppance.

It is only in the twenty-first century that America bestrides the world like a colossus. Every country, every politically and intellectually active person, can be measured by one question before every other: What do you think of America? The story of the twenty-first century is how other countries accomodated the overwhelming influence of America on world policy and culture.

In the eyes of the world, America now stands for a caricature of what it is. To the eyes of foreigners who only have experience dealing with America’s spoiled privileged class and the hicks they see on TV, America is an imperial oligarchy which deliberately keeps its citizens dumb. Well... there’s no sense in denying that America is precisely that, but it’s also so much more. The majority of us Americans don’t deserve the fall which is coming to us. But fortunately, we may not be alive to see it happen. It very well might be a problem for when our grandchildren are old and grey. For the meantime, most Americans live in mountains of debt which don’t have to be paid, and privileges they haven’t earned. But that could all end tomorrow, in which the world will be plunged into chaos, in which case The Twenty-First Century will be defined as The American-Made Disaster. But it’s more likely to be a gradual fall, in which other countries have vested interests in keeping this fat middle-aged country propped up and barely alive for another hundred years, their economies growing in relation to America until these countries feel no need to prop up their ‘parent’ any longer, at which point there could be an Oedipal war in which America is soundly defeated, now merely a de-facto colony of a greater world power the way Europe in so many ways still is to America.

Welcome to The American Century! Did you expect it to be fun?

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800 Words: 30 Mini-Essays (7. The Opportunism of Extremism, 8. The Baltimore/Washington Tragedy)

7. The Opportunism of Extremism

Conveniently held beliefs are a wonderful enabler of success. Living as I have for much of my life in such close proximity to the nation's capital, I don’t doubt that if I could have held my nose and embraced the more noxious elements of left-wing belief, I could have had as  active a social and sex life over the years as so many of my more personably or physically attractive intellectual compares who are a few degrees to my left, rather than being a tolerated dissenting voice. More importantly, I don’t doubt that had I been able to hold my nose and embrace the more disgusting elements of American right-wingdom (which comprises most of it...), I’d have had as wonderful and influential a career as seems to burgeon for so many right-wing intellectuals I know.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no reward for contrarianism except for a few minutes in the spotlight and the belief that you’re correct. Whether or not people admit or realize it, they will do anything within their power to avoid disagreement, and they will do everything they can to avoid contact with people who challenge their belief. All socializing is a club, in which friends do everything they can to validate one another - because if we didn’t have validation, our sense of self would collapse. We’d all either become depressed or insane...

In leftist circles, the only reward in America is a social life. Even the rewards of the one reliably prosperous leftist vocation, academia, are steadily decreasing as they have for the half-century since leftist thought conquered academia. Most American leftists of an intellectual bent are stuck with the inadequate rewards of fighting losing battles at teaching on lower levels, or realizing artistic vision, or working at non-profit organizations for their pet causes. It’s a cliche to say that there is no organized Left in America, which is of course bollocks. There are plenty of leftist organizations in America whose voices are heard with little trouble, they’re just not well-organized. And consequently have very little influence on American life as a whole, and as such the careers of most left-wingers languish in unfulfillment.

Right-wingers, on the other hand, have all the rewards one can possibly ask for. They can have as great a social life as their leftist equivalents, but only if they’re not too busy reaping the obscenely delightful rewards of their beliefs in remuneration and influence. There are no end of career opportunities for American right-wingers of intellectual ability, for whom the world is nothing more an orange to squeeze so that they may enjoy the juice. And all the while, they will think that they rose because of their innate gifts, and that others who did not rise with their alacrity were prevented from doing so because of their innate laziness, moral corruption, and an intellectual limitedness that prevents them from realizing the true way of the world.

In this way, today’s intellectual right-wingers are no different than the Politburo bureaucrats of half-a-century ago, who no doubt found it equally easy to convince themselves that they rose up because of the depth of their commitment to ‘the people’, and that those who didn’t rise with the same speed were simply lacking in compassion for the plight of the worker.

In a dysfunctional society, what is most needed to rise very quickly is to parrot the beliefs which are squawked at you. The bosses at the most influential jobs are looking not for talent, but for inferior minds which can be molded like playdough. The minds of such people aren’t necessarily intellectually inferior (though I guess there’s an argument to be made...), they are inferior in terms of fortitude. They possess so little sense of self that whatever sense of self they have is connected to their movement, which is their best source of money, influence, privilege, and friends. They think not with their brains (because their lives would be much worse if they did), but with their hearts. And as such their beliefs are skin-deep. The best way to argue with them is not to refute their points intellectually, but to provide a right-winger with a left-winger to fall in love with, or to offer a left-winger a well-paid, secure job at a bank. The brain-washing would reverse itself in the drop of a hat, and their previously ‘cherished’ beliefs would melt into their precise opposites. Over and over again, I’ve seen it happen for so many people. Because these people never held their beliefs because of what their brains told them, but only because of what more primal organs did.

And oh... if only I could be one of either.... I’d be a much happier person.

8. The Baltimore/Washington Tragedy:

“City and Province — the two basic ideas of every civilization — bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living through today with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity. In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end —what does it signify? France and England have already taken the step and Germany is beginning to do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these cities — of old Crete and Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North — to become "provinces." Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch came to battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious or dogmatic kind, and the battle was between the soil-genius of the countryman (noble, priest) and the "worldly " patrician genius of the famous old small towns of Doric or Gothic springtime. Of such a character were the conflicts over the Dionysus religion — as in the tyranny of Kleisthenes of Sikyon — and those of the Reformation in the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as these cities overcame the country-side (already it is a purely civic world-outlook that appears in even Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn the world-city overcame them. It is the common intellectual process of later periods such as the Ionic and the Baroque, and to-day — as in the Hellenistic age which at its outset saw the foundation of artificial, land-alien Alexandria — Culture-cities like Florence, Nurnberg, Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become provincial towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-cities. The worldcity means cosmopolitanism in place of "home” cold matter-of-fact in place of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, society in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. It was in the conception of money as an inorganic and abstract magnitude, entirely disconnected from the notion of the fruitful earth and the primitive values, that the Romans had the advantage of the Greeks. Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of money. Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus, the Roman stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income; and, unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the xoth, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires. To the world-city belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds — all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence — anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable.”

- Oswald Spengler “The Decline of the West”

I now know that I was a different person than I was four years ago when I drove through Washington DC and saw Sherman Avenue around Columbia Heights. Just four years ago, it was still a slum - dimly lit with boarded up townhouses. You did not walk there at night, and if you could help it, you wouldn’t drive there either. It’s now a pristine avenue of upper-middle class living, with streetlights so bright that it’s a twenty-four hour daytime. As I drove by, I blurted out ‘Are you shitting me?!?’

Every time I drive through Washington, there is another part of town that’s completely cleaned up. It’s barely even remarkable anymore. Neighborhoods I daren’t drive through when I was in college I now walk through without a second thought. At its current rate, the entire city will be upper-middle-class habitable by the time I’m forty, perhaps it all is already.

Rome was not built in a day, but Washington looks to be built in a matter of hours. The rest of the country grows ever more decrepit, more divided, more slummified. What we called The Great Recession may be the new Great Reality for the next hundred years in which jobs grow ever more scarce, student loans harder to pay off, the middle class gradually shrinks to nothing, and the gap between rich and poor becomes unbridgeable. But Washington is the one city in America which is recession proof. The bigger the government grows, the more lobbies and non-profits grow around it, the more educated people feel the need to move in, and the more vibrant DC’s economy grows. Washington is the city whose streets are paved with other people’s Gold.

What we seem to see in Washington DC is nothing less than the unstoppable construction of an imperium. It’s little different than the 19th century reconstruction of Berlin. No matter how important politically, and occasionally intellectually, Berlin was a sleepy, provincial town of little consequence to the development of mankind. When encountering the splendors of old Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, even Stockholm and Amsterdam, Berliners might as well have been country bumpkins. It was only when Berlin had other people’s money to grow itself that the city became the Bismark-era capital of the world, Earth’s most important city. When Prussia united Germany under the Second Reich, the other great German cities - each previously the capital of its own principality - grew ever more trival and poor. But Berlin became the shining economic, intellectual, and cultural light of the German-speaking world. So important was Berlin to Germany’s growth that by the 1920’s when the Weimar Republic gave Germany hyper-inflation such as the world had never seen, Berlin had finally reached the peak of its influence upon the world. Not even Vienna, Paris, or even New York could compare to Berlin’s cultural reach. And Berlin is the model for the new Washington, which is just beginning to stretch its wings into the most important American city and the nation’s true capital. In a half-century, its power over our nation could dwarf even New York’s. We can oppose it if we like, but what good is that against the tide of history?

In 1800, Baltimore was the second-largest city in America - a mercantile metropolis which housed perhaps the most important granaries in the New World, and a shipping center which imported and exported more food and sugar than any place in early America. Short of Philadelphia or Boston, and maybe Charleston, there is not a single city in America whose history goes further back into the roots of this nation. Early Washington DC was destroyed in the War of 1812, but it was in Baltimore that America repelled England’s efforts to subdue the new American nation and perhaps bring it back into the fold of the British Empire. And at that moment came the climax of Baltimore’s long history, initiating a decline in the city’s fortunes which is soon to enter its third century.

I used to hate Baltimore with a throbbing passion and swore I would never return. To me, Baltimore was all those things which are backward about America. Like an old-school Brooklynite to Manhattan, or an Oaklander to San Francisco, I looked at Washington DC as a shining beacon of progress against the stagnant regression I saw all around me. Washington DC may have been no better than Baltimore in terms of crime, drugs, and disease, but time was on Washington’s side. By the time I was in college, it was obviously the model of a vibrant, growing metropolis which Baltimore so clearly wasn’t. There were no end of outdoor restaurants, the city didn’t feel completely deserted after the end of the workday, there was an extraordinary profusion of gorgeous architecture, important thinkers of all fields were constantly lecturing around town, there was more theater, more art galleries, more concerts of nearly all genres, it was greener and more bike-friendly, and there was easier access to art-films. Most significantly, Washington DC had an industry! Until the sixties, Baltimore was a steel-manufacturing town, but it even lost its blue-collar reason for being. Baltimore was an ugly city with only the power of Johns Hopkins to sustain it, but Hopkins alone does not a vibrant city make. DC was a government town, and therefore has a constant influx of educated people. Even if the city was too transient and anonymous, it was always exciting. You felt that you were at one of the epicenters of the American Carnival, in one of the cities that makes America the most exciting place on Earth.

People who moved to Baltimore and see only a contemporary bastion of quirkiness for privileged white people can never understand what Baltimore was like when my generation was growing up. The Wire isn’t just a show, and the Baltimore of that era might as well be synonymous with downward mobility, hidebound conventionality, segregation at its most poisonous, gated community privilege, and utter distrust of progress. It had all of DC’s problems and none of its advantages. Even if things have improved, it’s still a lot like that today. And if there is a superficial gloss of ‘weirdness’ in which people feel so free to be ‘themselves’, it’s because the city around it hasn’t noticed: at its heart, Baltimore is as backwardly conventional a place as exists in America. As an adolescent, I viewed this city as a prison, and in some ways, I still do. Yes, Baltimore has all the identity which DC lacks, but that identity is a chain.

I may never return to live Washington DC, but I left an important part of myself in that city, perhaps the best part. But if the identity of Baltimore is a chain, then perhaps the identity of DC is an apparition. Only gadflies like me can make themselves at home in a city like DC, no one else can, because it’s an identity based upon skepticism. The things I love about DC, the dissatisfaction with a slow-moving life of simple pleasures, the constant spectacle of encounters with ‘celebrities’ (at least of a certain sort), the horror felt at the idea of living an inconsequential life, the cynical spurning of so long established institutions like families and rootedness and traditional morality (even as it's often so celebrated), the feeling that you are where important things happen, are precisely the reasons why DC cows any person with a healthy sense of self. Anyone who feels at home in DC is either a person of immensely little identity or immensely low expectations. I left DC because my low expectations were confirmed, and it was impossible to build a meaningful life in a place that valued my abilities so little.

If life were lived the way it should, it would be possible for these two opposite cities to coalesce into something truly livable. A place where belief and skepticism go hand in hand, a place of both dynamism and rootedness, a place with all the benefits of both provincial and cosmopolitan life. But unfortunately, my life, for a time, will remain an hour-long drive to capture those two sides of life, and of myself. But such a place does not exist in America. Does it exist anywhere else?

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800 Words: 30 Mini-Essays (4-6)

4. Reuniting with West Side Story - an epilogue: 

In the original post, I didn’t emphasize the difference in quality between the live show and the movie, you can’t overemphasize it. There simply is no equivalent on the silver screen to seeing the live dancing in person - during which these dancers threaten to spill out from the stage and beat the shit out of you in your seat. No Broadway stage show, before or since, offers a score with this daring in rhythm and harmony. No Broadway show is about such life-and-death issues, both dramatically and sociologically. Rodgers and Hammerstein gave Broadway a mould for how to construct a good stage show, Robbins, Bernstein, and Sondheim constructed a great stage show by breaking it. Much was made of those realistic shots of the New York streets, but why are there realistic New York streetscapes if the characters populating them are completely unrealistic (they dance for chrissake! What would happen to an actual gang in NYC which spontaneously broke out into a Mambo in front of another gang?)? Why are there so many closeups when the dubbing deadens the immediacy of the singing? Why doesn’t Tony speak with a New York accent? Why does Maria’s Puerto Rican accent go in and out? The movie could have been half the length, shot on a surreal streetscape, with charismatic Broadway unknowns who could sing their own parts as well as they could dance them, and it would have been one of the great movie-musicals. Yes, the stage show’s far from perfect, and there were things which improved on the transition from stage to screen, but there is simply no equivalence between the two. One is greatness with some flaws, one is badness with redeeming qualities.

5. The Secret of Abelard and Heloise - Conclusion

Great as they are, there is something more than a bit insufferable about these letters. From the vantage of 2013, it’s painful to read Abelard’s ceaseless lecturing to this woman who ‘tempted’ him to give herself up to God at the expense of her own happiness and talk about how much he hates what she made him do (sex) at the same time that he still loves her. It’s even more painful to read Heloise’s pathetic servility, taking joy in Abelard’s celebrity and accomplishment even though he caused her a life of ascetic misery. She idolizes this man as only a Stockholm Syndrome’d woman could. It’s a bit like the life which Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch might have envisioned for herself, and the misery which would have followed had she gotten what she wished. There’s a kind of delusionally grandiose masochism to the whole booklet. Abelard knows precisely how much suffering he engendered in Heloise’s life, and he constantly berates himself for it even as he entreats her to abide by a code of honor which is plainly... well... medieval. Abelard did not want an equal, he wanted a servile admirer. Heloise speaks like someone who’s only known servility her whole life and feels blessed to engender the attentions of a world-famous intellectual which aids her in getting out from the snare of her obviously brutal uncle, Fulbert. The suffering of this book is outsize, masochistic, and inflicted by grade-A narcissist. Yet it is genuine suffering, to be looked at with compassion because how could these people know any better?

Like it is for all of humanity, the love of Abelard and Heloise was completely absurd and neurotic, full of bad judgement, delusions, and recriminations delivered in the form of guilt trips. It is irrational and full of psychological illogic. But it lasts, oddly enough, because it is a love built on mutual suffering. The best moments in this exchange of letters, the moments which make these letters still worth reading, are the ones when they stop trying to guilt one another into believing the other the more misfortuned and honestly recount the pain of their lives. Here is Heloise in her most revealing moment:

Dear Abelard, pity my despair! Was ever any being so miserable? The higher you raised me above other women, who envied me your love, the more sensible am I now of the loss of your heart. I was exalted to the top of happiness only that I might have the more terrible fall. Nothing could be compared to my pleasures, and now nothing can equal my misery. My joys once raised the envy of my rivals, my present wretchedness calls forth the compassion of all that see me. My Fortune has been always in extremes; she has loaded me with the greatest favours and then heaped me with the greatest afflictions; ingenious in tormenting me, she has made the memory of the joys I have lost an inexhaustible spring of tears. Love, which being possest was her most delightful gift, on being taken away is an untold sorrow. In short, her malice has entirely succeeded, and I find my present afflictions proportionately bitter as the transports which charmed me were sweet.

Anyone who has felt an excess of emotional pain in their lifetimes will recognize this sentiment; the feeling of having, for whatever reason, felt as though life has blessed us, and then robbed us of everything which makes such blessings worthwhile. Life giveth, life taketh away. Blessed and accursed be life. We struggle as best we can to make sense of why life treats us the way it does, we tie our lives into knots of emotional baggage from which we will never be free, and along the way we cause suffering to those who most want to help us. All we human beings can do is to love one another for the dangers we have passed, and love one another that we do pity them. Or at least attempt to do that as best we can, but perhaps it’s precisely that effort which leads us to the greatest possible misfortune.

6. Depression

I am thirty-one years old, but I feel fairly comfortable in stating that my life has not been a happy one, and it would surprise me if the rest of my life knew any greater happiness than I’ve experienced thus far. From eight years old onward, I have experienced waves of massive depression followed by massive anxiety which are almost unremitting; a two-headed black dog whose infectious bite has silenced untold hundreds of millions - whether by suicide, or simply by a failure to live well - and I have an obligation to worry may yet one day definitively silence me. The great joys of my life have been few and far between, and the happy periods were merely less unhappy than the other periods. Life has been a fairly boring experience for me, when it wasn’t agonizing at least. Every new day brings new hopes, and these hopes seem to inevitably fall upon a new set of disappointments, with an occasional humiliation to lower the average emotional state still a little more. I watch friends, acquaintances, and irritants, who go about their lives with petty frustrations and disappointments. Less than a lifetime ago, the world described to me by my grandparents was consumed with a level of war and misery which seems to hardly register to anyone my age. Virtually everyone had more cause for depression than I have. Yet compared to me, virtually everybody I know in my own generation seems massively happy. Maybe I know the wrong (right?) people, but oh how I envy them for the fleetingness of their pains; would that I had theirs a while and they mine.

It certainly saddens me to admit this. I have never talked about it on this blog so bluntly. And I’ve learned through hard experience not to talk about it in detail except with family and my closest friends, and that will not change by my writing about it. It is, for the most part, something I place off limits as a conversation topic, and will remain so. And it has, generally speaking, become much easier to conceal the weight of the emotional darkness which follows me everywhere from others than it was when I was younger. But I can't in good conscience say that it has been less difficult in recent years than it ever was before.

Inevitably, there are many, many things which bring me back to delight in life - there are too many conversations to be had, too much music to listen to, too much food to eat, too many books and magazines to read, too many movies to watch. There are moments, many of them, when I'm truly at the peak of enjoyment and feel as though I love my life, and there is too much of life to understand - even if depression so often prevents active participation - to be depressed all the time. There are even moments when the fog has clearly lifted. I can breathe freely without dread or emotional pain, and a wave of relief comes upon me so intense that I wonder - is this pleasure? Is this happiness? But the truth is that I honestly don’t know. In order to find out, I require, I hunger for, I demand, many more of them - because there simply haven’t been enough to understand even what this feeling truly is. But every time one of those anticipated good experiences is disappointing, it makes me worry that the potential activities which give me the enjoyment I need to keep buggering on become fewer and fewer.

But to my shock, life has always continued. Another day comes around, and another new hope carries me through it. The longing to prove oneself not a slave to fate, to be greater than you’ve been, to show that the rest of your life needn’t be defined by what preceded it, to reinvent your life, to show that all this suffering was not in vain, becomes exponentially more intense. I don’t know how likely it is that depression may one day defeat me, and I know it’s possible.

But not yet.

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800 Words: 30 Mini Essays (1-3)

1. Evan Tucker’s Handy-Dandy Guide for How to Prematurely Age: The good news is that I’m the only person I know in my early 30’s who looks almost exactly as young as I did when I graduated college. The bad news is that I already looked at least 40. In my life, it was all too easy to age prematurely. When you combine a long dark history of depression and anxiety with far too large an appetite for food, and then add a college predilection for booze and cigarettes and a hatred of exercise, you’re already far older than most people your age. But when you add to this the verifiable fact that no child ever spent as much time in the company of the elderly as I, you have a kid who could easily be mistaken for the father of his college roommate. When I was a child, my father co-owned and ran a nursing home with his father, who was himself older than most of his patients, and I was there at least once a week. Half of every weekend would be spent at my grandparents house, with the other half often spent going to classical concerts with my Bubbie and her friends. Was there any child in my generation who had more occasion to copy the mannerisms, the habits, and the attitudes of my grandparents’ generation? It was with them that I developed my tastes for old music, old movies, old books, old languages, delicatessen, and elastic waists.

2. If Only We’d Have Listened to President Wilson Part 2 - In recent decades, it has been all too common to defecate all over the reputation of Woodrow Wilson. Yes, Wilson’s presidency must be counted a failure relative to what the world needed - but nevertheless, he was nothing less than a truly great president whose policies gave the world ten years of respite until the Great Depression and a Second World War, and the one sane leader in a world gone mad. Woodrow Wilson did the very best he could in an impossible situation. The age of Great Power Monarchy was over, and no one could put it back together without incurring what would then have been a second world war. Marxist Communism and liberal rule of law were clearly incompatible. The only alternatives left were military dictatorship and democratic self-determination. There were few things which Franklin Roosevelt enacted which Wilson had not first moved heaven and earth in an unsuccessful bid to achieve. Had Wilson not contracted fatal illness during the second term of his presidency, had he enough time to convince America to join the League of Nations, had he enough time to dismember the English and French military apparatus as he had the German, had a League of Nations stopped the Red Army, would the Twentieth Century have unfolded in the disastrous manner which it did? We will never know if Wilson was capable of all this, but fate ensured that we would never know. Because he tried endlessly to do the right thing when no status quo worked, many now look upon his presidency as the century's ultimate disaster when it was anything but.

Today, we have a President who could only give us a shell of a health care program we needed, massive (if still too small) stimulus money unpaid for because Republicans refuse to raise taxes upon the wealthy, a coming social security and medicare boom is likely to triple our financial burden, and perhaps the National Debt as well, yet Republicans were so unconcerned with the collapse of the debt ceiling (which used to be a matter so crucial that it was left unpartisan) that they got our nation’s credit lowered because they wanted concessions merely for allowing the ceiling to be raised. Like Wilson, Obama made inroad after inroad to his rivals, because he knew that peace in our time can only be achieved by cooperation. As a reward, his good sense is rebuffed by a party determined to lead this country to ruination unseen since the days of The Civil War. It is thanks to the religion of Republican intransigence, and ONLY to the religion of Republican intransigence, that in 2008 the world once again stood on the brink of a collapse so massive it dwarved even 1929, when many economists from both wings projected potential unemployment rates of 50% (!). The Obama financial team staved off the collapse, but how much longer can it be staved off before the crazies get their way? If only we’d listen to President Obama...

3. The Arab Winter? - Yet again, I got the Middle East wrong. I supported the Arab Spring. I supported it full-throatedly, knowing that it all might go horribly, terribly awry, but not wanting to stand in the way of the only true shot the Arab world might get to enact liberal reforms for generations. And then it went awry, just as pessimists, cynics, and anti-Arab bigots predicted it would. The Kissinger/Brezhnev-era dictatorships of Mubarak and Qaddafi were certainly bad, but in 40 years, even Qaddafi never committed 1/20th of the political murders which Hafez el-Assad committed in only two.  

What happens in Syria can all too easily happen all around the Middle East. It is, almost literally, the problem from Hell. Russia will block any chance to stop the democide from the UN, and counter any aide to the rebel forces with aide to Assad. Putin will not abide the loss of another Russian ally, and views any further toppling of Russia-friendly dictators as a point of Russian honor. Assad has killed approximately a hundred-thousand of his own people, and could easily kill a million before he decides he’s secure again, but nobody can stop him. If the United States were to get too involved in Syria, World War III could be more than a theoretical exercise. As with all things these days (and usually correctly), the temptation is to blame the Bush Administration. But the actions of the Bush Administration in the Middle East neither caused the Arab Spring nor the bleak Arab Winter which may follow it.  Nevertheless, thank God he was not president when all this happened...

Meanwhile, Libya, a Stasi-like informant state under Qaddafi, is now gripped by the chaos of unpatrolled streets and inter-tribal warfare. What remains of Qaddafi’s loyalists have transformed themselves into an underground terrorist organization, planting bombs all over the country. Tunisia is beset by unemployment and hyper-inflation, an Islamist government with many ministers who want to impose Islamic Law, and a left-wing opposition robbed of its most vocal leader, Chokri Belaid, in February by an assassination. Bahrain is still gripped by a low-level civil war, 3,000 people have been and still are detained without trial, and five have died in custody from torture wounds. The Bahrainian police continues to carry out midnight raids, checkpoint beatings, and instructs doctors to deny medical care to 'potential subversives.'

All of this would have been worthwhile if Egypt, the centerpiece of the Arab Spring which houses 2/5ths of the world’s entire Arab population, seemed in better shape than it is. Within four months of his election, President Mohammed Morsi issued a decree announcing that he would rule by fiat without accountability from the constituent assembly - a constitution-writing body which already conceded to Morsi nearly every power he wanted. The liberal leaders who believed they could mollify Islamic parties like Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood had long since walked out of the constituent assembly. Just as conservatives and realists warned, the post-Arab Spring Middle East may stand on the edge of something so disastrous that we haven’t seen its like since the genocides committed during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And we liberals let it happen without so much as a word of caution.

How could we be so blind that we didn’t see this coming? The Arab Spring happened without the economic means to support its citizens, without a proper rule of law in place, and with the military being the only strong element in each country. The chances of a functional democracy springing up were no less slim than democracy flowering in Iraq, and yet we jettisoned longtime allies like Mubarak which preserved order and stability - however corruptly and brutally, Mubarak was an authoritarian dictator, not a totalitarian. Liberals who decried the democratic project in Iraq were completely mum when it came to the equally unlikely prospects of democracy in Egypt and Syria. Obama has, wisely, stayed true to his word and interfered minimally in the events of the Arab world. But the fact that he did nothing to prevent Mubarak’s fall could (yet again, the liberal in me screams not to say this), eventually be revealed as the greatest sin of his presidency.

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