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22 April 2010: To Sum It Up (for now)Too many people want me dead. So, before they succeed, I'd like to say what I've figured out, so that at least I can relax, knowing I've found some microscopic version of the Truth, knowing full well that whatever is really going on is way beyond all of our comprehension. Something must have preceded that particle of dust that gave birth to the Universe. Something like God.
Throughout history, we've studied dully that eras come and go. Ourselves, we've really pulled at the Enlightenment, the foundation of the country that is at last losing its power over the world, a holdover from that first Enlightenment, Fifth-Century Athens. Historians, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I don't get a chance to read your scholarly journals often if at all and, scholarly jargon being what it is, at least from my experience studying classical philology, I probably wouldn't know what you were writing about anyway.
Barack Obama is the perfect twentieth-first-century man, an amalgam of the old and the new, the Abrahamic with some amount of influences east and west of us. I know that lots of people think he's a crook. Who can become president without having some amount of crookedness? Harry Truman, the man who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Bar is holding up a wall that was built to block the force of the new, sort of like the levies in New Orleans that finally caved. He's the last vestige of the old, the two Enlightenments, that heritage built by dead white men, with enough comprehension of the new, the Sarah Palin-Wall Street amalgam that is ready to occupy central stage, with Noam Chomsky at the wings, ready to raise the velvet curtain: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Future!!!' "Taa-daah!!!"
In the 1970s, Supreme Court Justice Powell designed the blueprint that dumbed down America sufficiently to make way for this new, odd coalition, all on the right, strange bedfellows. Who is to say that we are better than they are? We know more Enlightenment facts and ideas than they ever will, but they are replacing intellectualism with their new reality. This is a tendency that resonates well with the majority of the rest of the world: the poor, be they African, Latino, or Asian, or other cultures being invented by scholarship that share coasts on the Atlantic Ocean or the South Pacific.
Oh, I am so wrong, you are shaking your heads in despair.
The new reality will suffer from a "strange bedfellow" they don't want to sleep with--the poor. Wall Street + Sarah Palin v. the huge majority of the rest of the world. Will money or numbers win out? Greed + (ignorance+physical beauty) will be forced to bond, all whites, against the surging masses who can converge on them en masse. SP + WS will have hired a mercenary military, composed of part of the third world, stuck between the two forces. Where will they go?
Enlightenment "ignorance" is recreating our culture. Chomsky hates academe, with good reason. But before he could hate it, he had to study what to hate, in academe. But he is smart enough to see beyond it: Novus ordo nascit.
Those dead white men who created the Western Order were not all good, or else we'd be much better than we are. Any classicist will tell you that Socrates taught us to "spin" reality like a lump of clay, to "frame" things to sell them to enough of the rest of us to really move things around the way we want to. He's a tough read in the original, but well worth it. He did way back then what Congress does to its "expert witnesses": squash them with common sense or particles of the truth. So that's why I have such contempt for revered icons like George Lakoff, trying to teach the Democrats to "frame" things as well as do their less well educated adversaries, to capture and manipulate the public, who have evolved away from Enlightenment values. And he has "framed" his wisdom in way to seduce us into thinking he's got something new. We've been twisting language since the days of wise old Socrates, ton hetton logon kreitton poion.
"Why didn't she study more?" the classicists will ask. "Why didn't she read more George Lakoff?" the white-collars will ask. "Why won't she realize how much fun sex is?" wonder the Latinos who keep my building clean.
Evidently I'm missing out on a lot; like Robert Graves, only not as smart or erudite, I live too much on my own island, loving the space and the silence I have now, which is teaching me so much more than all the noise, all the verbiage, all the greed, all the ill will, the massive glaciers of written words on paper or online, outside.
I'm just not equipped to step into the next world. I don't like people coming into my apartment and using it as a flophouse when I'm out of town and stealing the few possessions that I have, each one with a history and sentimental value and memories attached and the love that accompanies all of them. Am I a prisoner of my possessions? The New Order may tell me yes, but in this world, according to Western values, I, too, have civil rights--this space is mine and I pay through the nose for it each month.
The New World may be anarchic for a while, as the poor plunder the wealthy, a macrocosm of forces hitting me from the Old and the New. The Old want to steal my scholarship, the hours and days and years I slaved toward the Truth, and take credit for it, having kicked me around like a piece of garbage for this discipline and starvation to learn something despite them. One professor used to take up our classes complaining about the college administration. Others praise her for what she taught them and I am jealous, because my parents weren't struggling to pay all that tuition to listen to someone gripe and withhold those particles of the truth I craved, hard as it was for me to absorb it as a someone bordering on dyslexia. I fight every day to absorb what little knowledge I have, which I put together in ways that are sufficient to teach me particles of the truth. Every sentence I manage to add to my consciousness is incorporated into a structure that allows me to imagine the future and worry about it, without seeing the ultimate puppeteer. Those other civilizations out there that our stupid space ship with its Latin inscription searches for could swallow us in one gulp--how we crave massive destruction of everything we know. What an arsenal of weaponry we've spent trillions on to accomplish this ourselves. How curiosity might kill us.
Bar offered us hope. What he dreams of for us, more of the white domination, can't happen overnight--something the Progressives won't buy. They are such a minority. And they're just not that smart anymore, to my mind. But I crave the perfection that they do, the utopia, though I asked them what would happen if every government in this country turned Progressive. I don't know if they've answered me or not--I'm living on borrowed time--but what I envision is an immediate segregation into right, middle, and left--bipartisanship all over again, the same old same old. I'd be in the middle or even on the right, just to perpetrate the earth beneath my feet and the sky above me and wish everything wonderful about it for my daughter and all her friends and loved ones, all "educated." We're just not equipped for the day when the levee breaks. We have to help Bar keep it from breaking. He's just about the only person in the country, mixture of all we know, from poverty to wealth, from black to white and its perfect synthesis, someone who survived Harvard without its huge gaping jaws starved to digest the third world en masse and use what it vomits up for compost. He is smart and skilled and insightful. We need him.
Progs, if you enjoy a country you just won't leave to go to Cuba or anywhere else, we'd all better do everything we can to help, help delay the onset of the inevitable, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News (who gave <i>Sicko</i> a good review), and Wall Street. And the military, stuck in the middle. Which way will they go?
Liza, fight to keep my scholarship mine with all your strength, because it's real, reaching out beyond classicists to embrace others with different jargons: those in comparative literature, those who study individual foreign or English literature--and probably many others, influenced by those literatures in ways I can't specify. Their language is so obscure. Their feudal world forces them to vomit up words to keep their jobs, and they are hugely threatened by the creativity we share, because we won't have to struggle as much to publish. Ideas used to flow through me like wine. That's why Prince Charming announced the truth, not terribly convincingly even then, that I should have been working with wool or taking pictures instead of studying classics and discovering intoxicating realities. I'm delusional, he will want to say at my funeral that he craves. I'm insane. I'm a perpetual stranger--that's true enough--but hardly insane, just a "linguist un-at-home in culture's grammar," to twist a phrase of W. H. Auden's brilliance just a trifle.
So much travail has gone into my research. That's mine. As the third world pulls at my possessions, here's another strange couple sleeping together: they and academe. I don't want to know how much they've taken, but it's my fingernails bitten down to the nub, countless packs of cigarettes, a total rejection of sexual decadence in favor of the silence of the Magna Mater, the ultimate music. It's all online, most of it anyway. I've lost a bit. The lady who complained about the administration, withholding whatever she knew that earned her a red cap and gown, has one of them.
I want to "keyboard" the rest online because someday someone may learn from it and love it and without knowing who I was, never really understand it, no product of academe really, burt a very necessary integration of academe and art.
"Something's happening here," just as it was in the late sixties that we "liberals" allowed to die, though its remnants moved us forward a bit, and Bar is doing the best he can to take up where we left off. Get thee behind him if you like anything about our world, Progs. I'm as ill equipped as the rest of us to inhabit the inevitable new reality grabbing at my possessions, intellectual and material, the way the ultimate future is nibbling away at our borders.
I want to tell the sad, strong, lovely lady, my physical therapist, suffering from a crippling disease, that she is as likely to attend my funeral as I am hers. We're all dying, as is everything we know, the ground beneath us and the sky above, literally and figuratively.
<p align="left"> I hope that the New World Order will understand that they, too, must go green or perish themselves. Down we all spin into the Potomac or landfills that will eventually be all that's left, ultimately to sink into nothingness as well. What will arise to replace us? Only God knows.
Liza, I love you. God bless.
(C)
