Perhaps one reason why they thrash about so violently and murderously and ruinously is because that somewhere deep inside they sense how petty and empty and meaningless their power-grubbing is. They are trying to build up their primitive, infantile obsession with sh*t -- with the toxic sludge of power and politics -- into some kind of grand design, something of world-historical importance.
But if you give yourself over to the uttermost despair -- the longing for self-obliteration -- because of their actions, because of their primitive, witless obsession with sh*t, then what a pointless waste you will make of your own, your only life. You will have thrown away the whole universe -- and for what? Because you have allowed your view of life to be circumscribed by the machinations of a bunch of third-rate goobers. You have let them -- these sinister, jabbering, blabbering fools -- convince you that their crimes and atrocities are all there is to life, that nothing worthwhile exists outside the narrow, blinkered inferno that they have made.
"What is there for us?" you ask. I'll tell what there is for us: the whole wide universe. And yes, it contains oceans of toxic political sh*t. And yes, it contains degrees of complicity, compromise, and moral failures for all of us, even the best of us, at every turn. But it contains so much more than this, so much more that we ourselves can bring into being by becoming aware of it. Each individual creates the entire universe -- creates all of the universe that he or she will ever know -- by what they bring into consciousness, both directly, with active reason, and indirectly, in the deeper, more diffuse and holistic intimations of meaning that an active, questing consciousness can begin to comprehend.
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Now about this business of "Floyd's views" being "literally disabling." As I said, I find this deeply disturbing. It plays into some very profound questions I have long had about the blog myself. Because the blog is, by design, set up to deal almost exclusively with the sewage of politics, I sometime wonder if it is not in danger of becoming too imbued with the very waste it is trying to manage. Is it part of the problem? Does it contribute to the idea -- the false, poisonous idea -- that politics and the machinations of power-grubbers are of supreme importance? That money, violence and power are the only things that matter? This is certainly not my intention; quite the opposite. But is this the actual message the blog conveys, regardless of my intentions?
And by entering into the political debate -- even if your intention is not to push one faction or another but to "inoculate the world with disillusionment," as Henry Miller put it -- do you end up fighting on power's turf, speaking its language, having the argument defined in its terms? I don't know. These are questions I now grapple with on a daily basis. I generally end up believing that disillusion is a worthy goal and that waste management of this sort is a necessary task. But I also feel more strongly all the time that there must be a better way to break out of the sinister dynamic of politics, to reach people -- to alter consciousnesses -- in some more effective, profound manner, rather than simply adding another howl to the echo chamber.
In any case, if my views are "literally disabling," if utter despair is what my writing induces, then this blog has been an even greater, more egregious failure than I thought. I've always believed that disillusionment was bracing, invigorating, liberating, not a cause for suicidal despair. But at the risk of being tedious to regular readers, I'm going to repeat below a passage from the closest thing to a statement of purpose this blog has ever had.
I wrote part of it years ago, at the request of an editor at the St Petersburg Times (the one in Russia, not the Florida paper of the same name), who kept getting letters about my column asking, "Where is Floyd coming from with all his criticism of American policy?" (This was back in the high and palmy days of empire, just weeks after the "Mission Accomplished" moment in Iraq, when seldom was heard a discouraging word about the noble Defenders of Freedom in the White House -- and there I was writing about war crimes and war profiteers and torture and rendition and presidential death squads and what all. Most unseemly.)
Later, for the blog, I put this piece together with one I'd written much earlier. You can read the original St Petersburg piece here; the later combination piece can be found here. This is an excerpt from the latter:
....Is it not time to be done with lies at last? Especially the chief lie now running through the world like a plague, putrescent and vile: that we kill each other and hate each other and drive each other into desperation and fear for any other reason but that we are animals, forms of apes, driven by blind impulses to project our dominance, to strut and bellow and hoard the best goods for ourselves. Or else to lash back at the dominant beast in convulsions of humiliated rage. Or else cravenly to serve the dominant ones, to scurry about them like slaves, picking fleas from their fur, in hopes of procuring a few crumbs for ourselves.
That's the world of power -- the "real world," as its flea-picking slaves and strutting dominants like to call it. It's the ape-world, driven by hormonal secretions and chemical mechanics, the endless replication of protein reactions, the unsifted agitations of nerve tissue, issuing their ignorant commands. There's no sense or reason or higher order of thought in it -- except for that perversion of consciousness called justification, self-righteousness, which gussies up the breast-beating ape with fine words and grand abstractions.
...Beyond the thunder and spectacle of this ape-roaring world is another state of reality, emerging from the murk of our baser functions. There is power here, too, but not the heavy, blood-sodden bulk of dominance. Instead, it's a power of radiance, of awareness, connection, breaking through in snaps of heightened perception, moments of encounter and illumination that lift us from the slime.
It takes ten million forms, could be in anything -- a rustle of leaves, the tang of salt, a bending blues note, the sweep of shadows on a tin roof, the catch in a voice, the touch of a hand, a line from Sappho or John Clare. Any particular, specific combination of ever-shifting elements, always unrepeatable in its exact effect and always momentary. Because that's all there is, that's all we have -- the moments.
The moments, and their momentary power -- a power without the power of resistance, defenseless, provisional, unarmed, imperfect, bold. The ape-world's cycle of war and retribution stands as the image of the world of power; what can serve as the emblem of this other reality? A kiss, perhaps: given to a lover, offered to a friend, bestowed on an enemy -- or pressed to the brow of a murdered child.
Both worlds are within us, of course, like two quantum states of reality, awaiting our choice to determine which will be actuated, which will define the very nature of being -- individually and in the aggregate, moment by moment. This is our constant task, for as long as the universe exists in the electrics of our brains: to redeem each moment or let it fall. Some moments will be won, many more lost; there is no final victory. There is only the task.
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