Holiday in America

Having just completed a trip from Chicago to Texas, stopping in my Upstate home, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, and passing through a huge chunk of the country, in the meantime, I've had a while to look at my country. As the ceaseless rank of highwayside billboards turned from advertising material to spiritual satiety, from the word over which some limp-wristed adman agonized to make you jump up and pull the car over, to the Word Made Flesh ('You know that thing about loving your neighbor ... I meant that. - God'), and the clustered skycrapers standing side-by-side with old buildings, the sky-priced bars teeming with identical yuppie hordes, all suddenly transmutated into boundless and flag-riddled strip malls dotted with national chains through which the scattered fast food families stumbled in clumps, I considered America's character.

I shopped at the mall in the Pentagon, downed whisky in an NYC bar modelled on A Clockwork Orange, searched vainly for something noticeably better than McDonald's in the shadow of the interstate, was waited upon by the kind of charming and solicitous Southern waitress that seems some screenwriter's fantasy of a South he's never visited until she serves you pecan pie with hundreds of 'hon's; I visited more bars than monuments in D.C., ogled sunbathers on the Columbia quad, had 1/2-priced sushi in Jersey with a dozen Russians, saw a Canadian death metal band in a Philly church, evaded highway cops while speeding for days on end; I drank many of the country's best regional beers, flirted with a surprising variety of the country's women, pissed publicly where I could, privately when I had to, argued with a bisexual composer about the relative merits of Shostakovich as driving music, fought the urge to knock in the teeth of a boorish movie patron and jab my keys into his friend's jugular. A boring, brief week.

Is enjoying what it has to offer loving one's country? Is being frustrated, as much as enraged, by its various idiocies? Is it possible to love America responsibly, without blindness?

I'd like to think so. There's a lot to love about the country and its people, and, while I'd sometimes like to, I can't lose sight of that - can't chisel and chuck everything in response the slipping leprosy sores of the major fucking misdeeds to which all are a party. But I don't think that what I feel for my country - and love's as good a name as any for it - can be called patriotism. I love my country like I love an ex whose flaws I know too well to continue forgiving or a childhood friend whose recent endless streak of unforgivable behavior haven't killed off, for me, the kid I knew. And, just as I can severe all ties to both my ex and my childhood friend, I can exile myself permanently - a self-exile much like Joyce's, in which the America I love and find worthwhile exists only in my memory; the only America I love is mine.

This is why I am not a patriot: a patriot loves a commoditized homeland, the type that can be advertized on billboards, that he can string around his neck and thump with his fist when a probing ball-scratch reveals the difference in size between his actual and imagined cock. It's cheap pride packaged uniformly in gaudy, nauseous tri-colors to useful idiots requiring nothing more than these empty confections, with over a quart of soda on the side, to be sated.

Patriotism (calling it 'nationalism' as though there's a difference is verbalism as hollow as the phenomenon it describes) is a variation on straight racism, built on the principle that, somehow (by magic?), the place or race to which one is born automatically transfers its positive qualities (it has no negative ones) to him. It has nothing to do with love - love is not that first flush in which the couple imagine each other as ideal and ignore the disquieting realities of the other's character, but rather when the purblindness has passed and the flaws are seen with wide eyes, and accepted - but rather with an easily 'earned' sense of 'accomplishment.'

Patriotism isn't love for one's country but for one's imagined self, and positive qualities aren't transitive. Those who believe differently are fools; those who don't, but say so, devils. So now I'm travelling my country, and will continue to do so until I leave, so that it might exist in some worthwhile way when I have.

“A Flagon of National Pride Please, Barman”

Six weeks ago, every car, truck and motorbike was flying the cross of Saint George. A disarmingly large proportion of houses, flats and shop fronts were adorned with the same emblem. Folk of all ages, sex and creed ventured to the local corner shop in the red and white of England while pubs heaved with revellers draped in England flags and sporting those ridiculous fluffy top hats (you can get one in any colour so long as it’s red and white). The nation acted as one gestalt entity and cared not for the opinions of those looking in from the outside. “We are England” the realm proudly stated, in between sips of Pimm’s No. 1.

It was wonderful until England limped out of the World Cup, owing to one part rubbish coach and one part cheating Portuguese bastards – a malignant mélange if ever there was. The world rejoiced, but England returned to its dull, grey norm. The flags went down quicker than Cristiano Ronaldo having a dust up with a mild summer breeze and the patriotic attire was consigned to the abyssal depths of the nation’s wardrobes yet again. Or at least for two years until the European Championships begin in earnest, although where “Earnest” is I don’t know.

For six weeks it felt like we were all in the fray together – a band of brothers fighting off the menacing enemy at the white cliffs of Dover and eliminating the subversive threat of sceptics – tennis fans – within. We overcame it, if not for a short while, but the streets inevitably became a drab affair once again and the normal humdrum of everyday life had well and truly infiltrated back into the mindset of the fifty or so million inhabitants of England. The togetherness that eleven English lions and one incompetent Swede had engendered was now extinct and we could recommence with clubbing each other with the vigour of men catching up for lost time.

The expression of national patriotism had subdued the urge to rape and pillage amongst the ne’er-do-wells and turned them into an almost humanoid form. When national pride takes hold on such a grand scale nothing else matters. Thugs suddenly help people to their feet when they stumble, hooligans will help an old age pensioner across the road (so long as it’s on the way to the pub) and ruffians become the standard bearer that leads the charge of a nation.

But Brand England, for all its positives, coerces the obtuse aspect of society from under its stone. The British National Party (BNP) – a collection of racist simpletons and Nazi sympathisers – jump on the bandwagon of such an emotional tidal wave and claim it a jingoistic victory for “real” Englanders against the nasty immigrants. The fact that you’ve got more chance of winning the national lottery (six from forty-nine, you do the maths) than finding an Englishman who can’t trace his ancestry back to the Vikings, Saxons or the Celts seemingly escapes them.

It’s not just left to the vile scrotum folds in the BNP to spout moronic nonsense. In fact it also comes from the polar opposite – the politically correct brigade; the forty-something Women’s Institute member, the tree-shagging hippy student living on lentils – you know the sort.

They claim that the national flag is an affront to multiculturalism, an inciter to racial hatred against non-whites. Can the reader imagine this happening in the United States? No, nor can I. But here in England we meekly take the flag down amid sincere apologies. My suggestion is that if somebody doesn’t like the flag of England, up sticks to Libya – they’ll be begging for the beauty of red and white after three months of swearing allegiance to Gadaffi’s green sick bucket of an ensign.

And that’s what annoys me: we allow ourselves to be subjugated by the killjoys with their preposterous paradigm of what constitutes a perfect society. A society devoid of expression as a collective, a society of androids dreaming of electric sheep, a society so inoffensive such that everybody agrees with each other and discursive discussion and debate is obsolete.

I want my country to be doused in national pride. I want my country to look to the flag of Saint George and feel their chest expand with the passion that only a country can garner. I’ll take my love for the flag and fly it in the face of the racists and the politically correct, for if we curtail our patriotism, the imbecilic minority win.

"Rally round the fag, men!"

Waiting for PhD confirmation. Can't sleep, must War. 750 words exactly.

****

Within any academic field, there are always a myriad of ends and pursuits, convection currents of thought which branch off in different directions. Some of them are truly excellent, based on solid evidence and exciting discoveries. Some are stagnant backwaters of stupidity, neuroses left over in the heads of academics who for one reason or another refuse to die and let their ideas go with them.

But best of all, some of them are strange. They straddle boundaries, refuse easy identification and run around jabbing sharpened sticks into everyone else demanding attention. These are the ones that either (uncommonly) bear heavy fruit or (usually) fail spectacularly but in an interesting kind of way.

Evolutionary psychology is one of these. Maddening, arrogant, and ridiculously unscientific, but also curious and provocative. Useless but with great explanative power. Often hated and fascinating. It's not far-fetched, it's not stupid, it's not Deleuze-incomprehensible or pomo-crazy. It simply asserts that many human actions and institutions may have an evolutionary basis, and attempts to match them up. It allows curious behaviours to be explained by showing how the instinctual basis to them might have survival value.

Of course, this is about as scientific as crystal power and chakra balancing. Evo psych 'facts' can only ever be peripherally supported and never confirmed - they all concern quantifying impulse, for Cunt's sake. But goddamn it to screaming bloody hell if it isn't a fun basis for the construction of collective behaviours. Certainly it has a lot more utility than many areas of traditional psychoanalysis, and it has a lot of fine authors who use its precepts. If only they wouldn't insist on calling it science...

(As is often the case with these things, the problem could be largely resolved with a simple categorisation. If they called it evolutionary sociopsychology, the pissing match about whether or not it constitutes science would stop. We could admit that it is just a big, meandering thought experiment and get on with enjoying it. But as per usual, I digress...)

So, let's meander with it... What is nationalism, Mr. Evolutionary Psychologist?

...Dr. C is twitching inside of me. My fingers are barely resisting the temptation to blast the whole exercise as a well-painted exercise in collective stupidity, an ersatz religion enacted by morons and manipulated by the cynical, and to use the words 'fuck', 'cunt' and 'bastard' in 8-to-a-loaf-sized slices...

But I must admit this must go further than simply swearing at proles.

Nationalism feels like tribalism grown massive. A bizarrely innate need to identify around a standard against a common enemy, to protect an internal system, to hackle up against an infidel, an outsider. To set the Minutemen on patrol around our local gene pool. The way we enact it today is a petty toy dirigible of the real thing, of course...

But have you ever felt the brutal coursing of what it might do if let loose?

At some gloriously petty occasion, a rugby match, view of a press conference or speech or news report, some encounter with a foreigner... something inconsequential where you suddenly feel the wet pressing weight of the cultural baggage that the world has thrown against you?

Suddenly you are every convict ever thrown callously to a burning hellhole by whoreson Redcoats (sorry, Cumboy), or some righteously indignant member of the only sane white race left on the planet with no choice but to hate the abominably arrogant and moronic members of the craziest (sorry, Dick), or a proud upright citizen of the only Australian state where sheep aren't frequently sodomised before teatime (sorry, Nixon). Then when the liquor wears off and your head snaps back into its socket, you think "Dear sweet Zombie Jesus... so THAT'S how you oppress the planet."

Imagine what that feeling might do to the truly ignorant. Imagine that corrosive wellspring of power turned into empires, before such constructs as human rights, decency, static national borders, private property and dignity started to do their rounds.

Sport is meaningless, the act of sport itself does nothing. It is a mere codification of the natural human desire for conflict and the establishment of hierarchy, and in most forms it is as boring as a glass of water. The realisation that it may provoke any real feelings at all is the realisation that we are a cigarette-leaf's thickness above our clubbin' and rapin' ancestors and that some impulse we have to punch the bloody English will never, ever die.

Fuck knows it should.

But it won't.

Topic, Due 28/7/06 - Love for the Flag

With the passing of the Football World Cup it's been hard not to notice the outpourings of national pride by every man and his dog and an overwhelming sense of patriotism washing over entire nations. Except for America which remianed steadfast in its admiration of glorified rounders.

Patriotism, national pride, partisanship or just an excuse for beer-bellied skinheads to air their swastika tattoos. Discuss.

Again, another short one: 750 words so make each bullet count. Due date 28 July 2006.

Live as a pod, die as a pod. Live as a monster, die as a god.

Individuality is overrated. In return for the impression of freedom of action we accept a kind of historical isolation. Each of us stands alone in history – we are self-contained entities, measured and weighed up in isolation from the moment of conception the our final breaths. This is perfectly acceptable if you believe in an afterlife of some kind. You will be judged and allotted your eternal fate accordingly. But religion has lost its grip on us. Providence recedes even before the faithful, and we all carry out our mandates to accumulate stuff, knowing well in advance that it can’t be carried for all eternity. All of it needs to be left behind, and bereft of these things we have no idea who we are. The life we are born and bred to waddle through is senselessly individualistic: it erodes the ties of family and tradition. You live as a pod, you die as a pod. Your stuff –the very essence and net product of your existence- will be dismembered between a pack of squalling relatives who you barely know and you will rot in a hole in the ground throughout the blackness of eternity. Death is therefore terrifying. For an individualist – even a gloriously weak one! -, to cease to exist is a mind-buggering inconceivability.

For such an inconceivability, death occurs surprisingly frequently. It happens to everyone at some point, and all of us will sooner or later find ourselves up against the black wall. The fear of this finality crops up prominently in many lives. The clearest example of this is the amusing spectacle of the midlife crisis, wherein the fellow with the balding pate realises half his allotted span is behind him and he hasn’t actually done anything. Can he face the grave like this? Inevitably, he can. He buys a sports-car, sexually harasses a high-school girl, gets yelled at by his wife and comes to terms with the fact that he’s not going to get much done, goes back to work then at some point he dies.

This apparent meanness of existence had me in a funk for a while, until I realised that individuality may not be the normal way things are done. It may, in fact, be a seriously unhealthy sales pitch masquerading as a lifestyle. People are social animals, and this applies even to the most reclusive and inhospitable types such as my good brother Tristan and the esteemed Dr. C. We have historically been found in posses of various kinds – families, feudal bonds, armies, churches and so on, each owed varying but clearly hierarchical levels of loyalty : for instance, family first, then king, then church. At no point can our lives and achievements be considered outside the context of the posse. To take the family as the example, a father’s individual achievements count for nothing if he fails to provide for his wife and the inheritance of his children. He therefore takes his place in a chain of humanity, his every action being loaded with the significance of the work of past generations and resonating on future and existing ones. The manner of death is no exception. It was formerly possible to die well. Even death could bring honour and glory to the family and add to the achievements of the posse as a whole. Death could be preferable to living if in living one damaged the future aspirations of the family.

So, when it comes to death, my attitude is as follows. I will die bearing my shield and emblem bravely, and in such a terrifying manner that when my progeny and assorted goons take to the field and my enemies behold not one but five or fifteen such emblems, they will shit their pants in terror and flee rather than risk fighting such a horror. Above all, I will attempt to preserve the ability to choose the circumstances in which I will die. In this way I will not surmount death, but I will overcome life.

Death of a Taxman

Benjamin Franklin once remarked in a letter that, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

And, such is the manner of hackneyed clichés, the ringing inevitability holds true for each and every day we draw nearer to the former. Well, unless you’re the Queen of England, in which case you would be exempt from taxation. Who would’ve thought that good ol’ Blighty would become a tax haven for Germans, eh?

Now, I’ve had to study the intricacies of the UK tax system and the combination of allowances, tax bands, marginal relief, capital gains, life time transfers and numerous other onerous concepts almost makes one wish that one’s demise would befall in ghastly certainty a great deal sooner.

The point, though, is that death becomes us all. Even Keith Richards will one day pop his clogs, much to the chagrin of those in belief of his legendary invulnerability. Even the might of a Caribbean palm tree could not finish the leathery old fucker off. Still, one day it’ll hit him, and it’ll hit him with fiery fists of unrelenting fury right between the eyes.

However, despite this menacing sword of Damocles hanging over our heads for our entire life, it’s surprisingly hard to imagine that it’s there at all. I mean, we all think we’re invincible until our atria finally give up the ghost or our liver limply waves a Guinness-stained white flag (just let me have one more drink, you selfish bastard). I know I’m going to die, but I’ve never entertained the thought. Maybe I’m too young to realise my mortality or maybe my life has never been placed in peril such that I’m lead to ponder becoming a rather tasty banquet for our earthworm friends.

That leads me to another facet of death: somebody or something will always benefit out of the death of others. When we die, our putrefying corpses will contribute to the Nitrogen cycle and help ease the planet’s burgeoning population problem. When my parents die, they’ll contribute to my bank balance (although the downside will be the bastard of all taxes, inheritance tax). When Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson dies, he’ll contribute to my interminable joyous delight and inject new verve in my rejoicing of life, safe in the knowledge that an arrogant, pompous cunt of a man no longer resides of this earth.

So what have we established? Well, that death is assured and that when one does eventually breathe one’s last, some good arises in one form or another. These two axioms arise logically, but what is not governed by such reason is the prospect of what happens to us once we have departed this mortal coil. Nevertheless, a third axiom can be stated: the living are incapable of ever knowing what happens in the afterlife – if indeed one actually exists at all, and I’m inclined to think that it does not. It’s rather like falling into a black hole; until one actually ventures past the event horizon and undergoes the experience, one cannot know for sure what will occur beyond that point of no return. However, once the experience has been endured and the most highly sought understanding in physics proliferates, there is no way of going back to tell anybody of one’s new found knowledge.

So basically, it’s pointless to consider death and all it entails while one remains alive: live life the way you want to and, in the words of Blue Öyster Cult, (don’t fear) the reaper.

For he, like the taxman, is a cunt.

A heart monitor fugue

relatives

gathered, clustered

flies around a decaying

carcass, not trying to lay eggs

and breed into the corporeal new year

but rather each trying to out-

comfort the others with

their own pips and

squeaks as the

machines

that help him

say what little

he has left

do the

same

there is something solid in this querelous bleep.

the machine keeps what little snippet of time that

the dance has left to run, running through a last few

thespian twists, a final word or phrase now the

therapy is officially over and all

the drugs have been removed from the lines and his quacks

they shake their heads and mutter the platitudes that

they say every time a man with dementia has

the temerity to die on their watch and ruin

their quotas

beep

beep

fucking bloody bastard beep

i am millimeters away from putting my foot through that fucking machine

medical science and dignity are so completely incompatible sometimes

it’s a wonder we bury anyone at all

i didn't cry when we packed you off

into the home and i didn't cry when

i came to see you and we talked as

men and i don't cry now i see you sit

like a deflated gunny sack that waits

for the reaper's fist but goddamn it

when i saw it take you for the first

time and you pulled the sheet up over

your head like a child and hid from

the world in shame or fear (i really

couldn't tell which) i felt that after i

left that i should have cried and still

i didn’t, you didn’t teach me to cry

and you were right.

‘save your tears for those who truly need them’

ninety four years old

built out of rawhide leather

and piss and vinegar, as tough

as men ever fucking came, you beat

the great depression through pure sweat

and bloody minded drudgery and unyielding

force of will because you had a young family to feed

and now it kills me to see you lying on sheets

with watermarks on them just in case some

low-life bastard tries to run off with the

linen, cast down into ignominy and

shattered and sad and going

nowhere but a lift ride

down into the

basement

i hope you've made your peace

old man there's precious little else

you can make now you are a broken doll

and have the bladder of a drunkard and the

mind of a moron and machines make sure

you'll see tomorrow - that is, at

least until we turn the

bastards off.

which we are here to do.

watching as your

scriverner’s

palsy

and

broken

brain

and

miserable

corpus

betray

you

.

.

.

Because I could not stop for Death -- He kindly stopped for me

Writing on death is staring into the Abyss; we must therefore proceed with caution.

Death is not merely a natural, but a necessary part of life. The merely natural does not require value; it, simply, is and nothing more. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s, and one need not have an opinion about this. Something that is necessary makes a greater demand – it must be valued. Indifference hides under covers and does not respond when called upon; the necessary must be loved for doing what needs to be done. Death makes life possible, and the fanfare for the latter should include the former. The living must love death as they do their lives, and for the same reason.

This is easy enough in the abstract; however, in reality, ‘the living’ is a body made up by individual living beings, few of which see existence, if they can at all, in terms this broad. For the individual, existence is in each case ‘mine’ – rightly so. But insofar as this ‘mine’ implies ownership it implies that it is invariably temporary – the owned object is eventually either destroyed or passed along. This ‘object’ being life, it would be incoherent to destroy it to avoid passing it along. Homicide is limited; genocide never works; suicide is passing life along to others.

Some years back I read Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of America, in which she notes that death creates the space in which new life grows. There is a reason why new, stronger, and deadlier diseases proliferate as science disposes of those that had plagued us. There is something nicer than symmetry or irony to the fact that one contracts AIDS by fucking, botulism by eating and Ebola by breathing. It has to be this way; it is best this way. If solutions were found to world hunger, war, and the existing fatal diseases, death would find a new avenue to come ripping down. Death follows the ultimate agile business model, to our benefit.

But it’s hard for the individual, who like Beckett’s Hamm commits a synecdochal fallacy, conflating his own existence and existence as a whole, to see this, and to swallow it once seen. ‘What does it matter that the world endures if I don’t?’ No individual wants to see his ineluctable death as a means to the lives of others. No worldview is less sympathetic to the individual’s self-importance than one that sees him as a means to some group’s end-less continuance. This cuts man down to an intolerably small size. Yet this is the way the world bobs in Darwin’s wake; man is seen in context, and though he once seemed the Titanic, even that is small to the ocean. Not smaller than before, but having lost the semblance of largeness through contextualization.

How is this to be reconciled with one’s belief in one’s own importance? How can one consign oneself to a soldier’s or a martyr’s death in the absence of such extraordinary circumstances? How can he live knowing his ultimate purpose to be the endless perpetuation of the ordinary? Is it surprising that we flee headlong from death, trading hysterical stories of an eternal life safely tucked away beyond the confines of observation?

The answer is simple: As you will die in order for the lives of others to become possible, so too have others died for you. This is a gift that, for as long as possible, must be taken advantage of to the fullest. You can’t keep it forever, however you try, but you do have it now. Say ‘yes’ to life.