Who do you talk to when there’s no one in charge?
By Mason Fonder
A Traffic Jam of the Mind
Even when we survive the most thrilling events, those singular moments when we feel the tides of life and death at their most extreme, followed by the return to our unsatisfactory selves. The realization that we are still stuck in time. Emergency over. We have time to reflect. Of course, the world is much crazier and far more majestic than we can imagine. Yet we try. We try to sum up the value or time experienced, to weight it against the constancy of being. We ask. Quo Vadis. Where am I going. And we ask, perhaps more than we should, peering back through membranes of Time at ourselves: where have I been? Perhaps we are all still running from
(So at this juncture, it’s probably time to call a spade a bloody shovel, to nail things down a la Sam Spade. What happened to Bobby J? How did the Wizard fare as Comeuppance approached him? And what about Mandito, did he survive? And when last you saw me I was seriously wounded (seriously) and yet here I am talking to you through this article.)
It’s time to get the facts straight, to pen the Truth as some, virtually all, pundits in their wisdom, would have it—as if that were ever truly possible, especially on television or in the daily papers. Now, now. What is true? Hemingway famously said: It’s all true. I might, not so famously, add: it’s all—also—not true. You can call a spade a spade if you want to, but that still doesn’t change the fact that the thing called a “spade” really consists of a collection of infinitesimal and ceaselessly moving particles. That seemingly solid shovel is actually a chaotic mass of atomic stuff. And so are we. Not to mention point of view, perspective, perception. The first line of my book about Ho Chi Minh said: It’s all about perception. But that was at the end of the sixties, 1969 to be exact, when my series from Vietnam ran in The Devil’s Advocate, a once cutting edge organ, now like Jerry Garcia, defunct. The sixties. I can hear you sniggering. We seem to have learned so much since then, haven’t we?
Still a lot of people think things are going to hell in a handbasket. I don’t know. And I wouldn’t presume to. No one has done worse in the world than the cheap know-it-all preachers like our friend, Orson Hyde, also defunct like Buffalo Bill.
It’s mystifying. Electrons apparently suffering from ADD (prescribe some Ritalin for the hyper active buggers . . . maybe they are just bored) never stop moving—unless you look at them. Then they freeze. As soon as you look away they start moving again. Isn’t life in the wired, wired world somewhat like that? (Wired is just weird with the letters rearranged.) We’re in love with thrillers, twists and turns and pat conclusions. As the structure of the universe seems to propose ever further unutterable and comforting chaos—despite the beautiful equations of the physicists—we cling increasingly to simpler classic structures like an ostrich with his head buried in the sand-filled bottom of a leaking lifeboat. All our metaphors, our imaginings, are progressively mixing. Stand for a while on any street corner in any big city in Europe or America and eventually, it probably won’t take long, you will see every fashion in existence since the day in August 1945 when the smashed atoms of the atomic weapon named Fat Man, after the hardly deserving character opposing detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, obliterated the city of Nagasaki—40,000 people instantaneously incinerated. Perhaps we are all still suffering from a sort of lingering radiation sickness. Know thy enemy. At any rate, Hitler was an amateur compared to us. There is no killer like an American killer. Americans excel in all areas. Who was it who said cut a German in half and get two Limeys? Substitute Yanks for Limeys.
August. Always a lovely month for murder and mayhem. The first World War began in August. In August German tanks rolled toward Poland at the end of August 1939. The Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 led to the virtual eradication of the city in a house by house brick by brick demolition of the Polish capital by the Nazis. Charles Mason’s mania peaked in massacre in August 1969. August is weird. Maybe it’s the inner-child angst of going back to school, the end of utopian summer meanderings sending people mad at the end of the third season. Bobby J went gaga in August, segued into a forty-year globe trot.
He’s still out there running.
On the Beach: String Bikini Theory
Chaotic contradiction at the core of being, obvious to anyone on the marriage trip. To anyone who observes children. To anyone who thoughtfully reads the triad of self-serving an abominable scriptures. That constant gentle sound you sense but do not hear is the earth humming to itself. Row, Row, Row, Your Boat Gently Down the Stream (of consciousness). All the shit they fill your head with is wrong! No wonder so much resentment. The killer stalking the classroom, Quasimodo in the bell tower, the demon barber in the basement dissolving limbs in acid.
Mandito’s Twin Commandments
1. The first rule is that there are no rules.
2. The second rule is to eliminate the first.
I’ll use that intelligence as a directive, says the Wizard, plucking invisible strings.
1958: an agency of carnal-ized Fruits peeling themselves . . . the acid test summoning forth intolerable guilt.
Chaos and more chaos. Strange hypotheticals teach us who we are. A priori not empirical. Einstein chasing light beams.
Zat gottdamn quantum physics! shouts the Professor.
Now you see it und now you don’t.
Vat ze hell are you talking about, ja?
Zis cat is both alive und dead at zis’ame time.
Ja, ja. Bullshit!
Just when you thought you had everything figured out, you find yourself like Atlas shrugging over Gone With The Wind and all those biblical motifs.
The more you look, the more you see, the conspiracy buffs would say.
The whole damn universe is in league against us! Quick to the batmobile!
Dassein, refusing a glass of refrigerated water, now mocking Mandito’s accent: Pheezeeks. We don’t need no stinkin pheezeeks.
The Wizard affirms: Wanted Dead And Alive.
As for the dead Dassein—his ignorance contributed to his inspiration. No quarter like Santa Anna at the Alamo—US out of Palestine!—hollow slogan disguising arid greed.
Semper Fi! calls out a headless marine’s, combing jungle for brainbox (conscious beings are immortal according to
Check out my reality tunnel, says the giggly actress to the Bishop.
Heading south with his mouth the Bishop mumbles, Triangle x plus triangle p is greater than or equal to h (with a funny squiggle) over 2?
Ach de leiber! In zis quantum vorld ve live forever!
All right I get it, says Sam Spade. Miss Wonderly’s sister ran away from New York with a fellow named Floyd Thursby. They’re here in San Francisco. Miss Wonderley is seeing Thursby and has a date to meet him tonight. Maybe he’ll bring his sister with him. The chances are he won’t. Miss Wonderly wants us to find the sister, get her away from him and back home. . . If—after we’ve found her—she still doesn’t want to leave him, well, we have ways of managing that. . .
Zat is more complicated zen relativity, complains Einstein.
That’s why you’re a doc and I’m a dick, says Spade. And let’s keep it that way, Jack.
I suppose ve must get used to accepting craziness as normal? cracks the Professor.
*
And yet . . . and yet. . . Out of chaos comes order. Sometimes.
That’s what artists used to do, but they do it less and less it seems. They used to find a form to frame the chaos. That was why the Renaissance was important. The artists are supposed to show us how to live again. But people have to choose to want to live. Nowadays its debatable whether people know how or what to choose any more. Maybe they are fed up. Maybe too much has happened. Hard to say. We are up against some ultimate something or somethings. Maybe we don’t have the background any more to know how to survive. We traded choice for comfort. Now the comfort is being taken away bit by bit and stripping things down to the essential. We face running out of the things that we think make us comfortable. That’s the American thing. The Australian thing too. There was a sixties movie called On the Beach, in which the whole world is destroyed in a nuclear war and the last untouched region is Australia. Waiting for the cloud to drift over and descend and poison everything. It’s a mess all right. It’s hard to face. The potential end of life as we know it. Unless we choose to change. Quickly. The potential end of the promise of comfort. Which is what the American Dream promised. What it sold and sells still to the rest of the world. The competition got too intense. Maybe that’s the problem. And now, even though some physicists tell us that we are immortal because nothing ever really dies and all possible outcomes or any situation exist in other parallel universes. None of this parallel world stuff is particularly new. It’s been around since the fifties. But the time for understanding it on the common level is upon us. Maybe that’s OK for those that can live with that kind of abstractness, but it’s hard to explain to those who don’t get it. It’s hard to explain to them that we are running out of food and oil and maybe even climate. It’s hard to explain that the people who can make those long-term changes aren’t doing it fast enough because the changes are not in their short-term interest. But a change is coming. It’s probably already here and we just don’t know it.
People seem just to suffer through the consumption provided—it’s hardly ever devoutly wished. The news is just entertainment anymore. War goes unreported. A soldier who served in Afghanistan and is going back, a radio man just like Bobby J, told me a few years ago that he didn’t think reporters should be allowed into the war zone. I was a little bit surprised to hear that from a twenty-five year old sergeant. What could he mean? At first I thought he meant that the reporters got in the way. That’s why they shouldn’t be allowed. But that’s not what he meant. He wanted to say that he didn’t like reporters because they didn’t tell the truth about what was really going on. They just put out what the government wanted them to. This was a young man who had killed people for his country. And he was saying that the truth had been removed from the war and he didn’t know why and it was more honest not to have reporters than to have reporters telling lies.
The war runs itself, he said.
*
Sometimes it seems as if our whole understanding has shifted. You get simulations of reality piled on simulations instead of substance. Maybe it’s all just a big computer game, as some scientists say and this is just a cartoon world. Realer reality has shifted not to another plane but to another universe.
Science appears to leap ahead. Art lingers sucking its thumb. Philosophy beating its head against a wall in a blind alley. Capitalism devouring the corpse of Marxism cell by cell. Terrorism, state and renegade fills the void, weird hoodoo in our heads. Intuitive and positive leaps of imagination suggest 11 dimensions in a universe of invisible strings. The String Theory. Membrane universes. Parallel they float amorphous occasionally banging up against one another to create matter. Oafishly ogling almost invisible bikinis on a beach.
Posterior strings disappearing into a black hole.
Twin lusts.
Reality and Fantasy.
Flipsides of the same coin.
911.
The emergency phone number.
11.
Numbers side by side like towers.
11 dimensions of existence.
Parallel worlds.
Where is Nostradamus when you need him?
Omens.
Portents.
Faustian and Primordial.
*
Conversion on the Frontier of Reality:
Papers! You have no papers?
No.
You admit that do you?
Yes.
Aha! Your existence is cancelled. Step into Room 23, please. Next!
*
Control polls the latest election results. (The polls always lie).
That human comedy’s always good for a laugh, isn’t it?
Never a dull moment.
I’m sorry. Did I miss something?
You must have been out to supper when He checked in.
Put your nice soft ass back on the chair and pay attention.
*
Finite patterns wrapped in infinite lunacy. Constant helpings of panicky dross. All the hand-wringing might seem to beg certain questions: was the true secret to Ben Franklin’s long skirt-chasing, intellectually prodigious life really a result of the “low-carb” diet? If George Washington was agnostic and since he is the father of our country you might wonder why present day politicians push the “Isn’t Jesus Jolly” button so frantically? I mean, one could make the case that God—the bearded patriarchal Mr. Big with his finger pointing at us—has been lying low at least since WWI. An image of little boys blowing up helpless animals with firecrackers comes elegantly to mind, while their parents blithely attend to other business. Franklin, Jefferson and Washington wouldn’t stand for this fecal matter. They’d be plotting a new revolution.
And that’s the way that is.
Adrift in Dreamland. 120 years ago Nietzsche’s visions drove him mad. Again Lust: divine and carnal. Brain waves blitzed by spirochetes—a megatsunami of the mind undone by bacterial scum. The Ubermann wept when they whipped the horse’s eyes. Like the Beatles he was better God. Better than the noodle-headed Nostradamus. The German’s predictions came true. He clearly predicted the horrors of the 20th century. The Teutonic mind knew. They controlled the means of production. Nietzsche also said that the 21st century would result in “a total eclipse of all values.”
*
And what have we now? says the surgeon bending to scoop out the frontal lobe.
Do you have an identity different from the one you’re using? says the nurse inserting her forefinger gingerly into the surgeon’s sphincter.
Getting sidetracked—Where’d you say the memory bank is? moans the surgeon.
Suddenly a squad of heavy-armed interns breaks into the operating theater.
All you motherfuckers freeze! We’re heisting those memories!
Indeed.
But which memories? Eleven dimensions and infinite parallel worlds . . . what the scientists are talking about now is more like science fiction than science fiction itself. What does it all mean? It seems to mean that reality is a matter of perspective. So far so good. Is the planet using its immune system against us? Some suggest such.
Go out to the garage, honey, and fire up the spaceship.
Hyperactive
Everything’s moving too fast. We lost God in an instant somewhere, dropped him along the way on the roadside. The juggernaut sped on brutally. Nietzsche (ignorantly subsumed by the Nazis) predicted losing God would lead to horrible wars, and so we hobbled through the 20th century paying lip service (as we still do) to God but most often showing more sympathy for His counterpart. Heidegger (knowingly serving the Nazis) followed Nietzsche, proclaiming only God can save us. Today conservatives complain that people lose values when they think they are only animals without souls. Wow, wait a second because we must have a self because we are self-conscious. Science will turn on itself and devour itself according to FN. Brain is computer means its finite. Are we doomed? Its physics not brain science. Neuroscience. Physics is saving us by connecting us to eternity. Generally comfortable artists get paid a lot of money to make comfortable products for comfortable people. It’s the most vicious circle possible. Like it or not Warhol—everyone famous for fifteen minutes—was right. So was McCluhan—the global village. It’s a brilliant money-maker. Make everyone a potential celebrity, a potential artist. Then everyone becomes more fixated on celebrity than ever before because now they can be one too! Just like that. All you have to do is be on TV. All that stuff about having to be good at something is out the window. Even if you are bad at what you do, you are still good because you are on TV. Being famous is everything. Nothing else is as important. So almost everyone stays focused waiting for their moment on Big Brother, celebrity goal now—look at reality shows—is to make The flipside of this of course is boredom. Modern life is boring. The only thing most people find fascinating is themselves. Plus ca change . . . The art people most like is the solipsistic kind—not involved in knowledge or beauty or truth. Heaven forbid. It’s the old line: if you’re so good why aren’t you famous? Well you might turn it around and say if you’re so famous why aren’t you good? A prime example would be Madonna who is a wonderful businesswomen and a terrible artist, though perhaps she is a fairly good dancer. Her appeal is her very ordinariness and the sense that almost anyone could be her, talentless, yet chockfull of ambition. American Idol is the pristine example of manufactured instant fame. Imagine Jim Morrison or John Lennon or Bob Dylan getting through even a couple of rounds if they got picked at all. We are getting the art we deserve. That’s for sure. Just like we are getting the government and the oil prices and the mortgages and the education system and so forth and so on. We are getting little of what we deserve because we are so richly deserving of little.
We don’t know who we are. We’ve lost a sense of melody and consequently of harmony. The empire seems headed down the toilet. Nowhere is this more evident than in music, the greatest art of all. Drums and base used to be the foundation for harmony. Now the din is overwhelming like drums from the jungle portending something unutterable. That thumping vibrates through our being like a raging heartbeat suggesting a frantic uncontrollable racing pulse. But what has happened in music is similar to what has happened in art generally. For the first time in two thousand years the artists are silent. Considering the quality of much art and the personalities of plenty of artists, some will be glad. Artists are no longer in the vanguard. They no longer capture the spirit of the times. Why this should be so is hard to say, but the main culprit might be comfort, which since WWII has gradually become more important than beauty or truth. Artists not only create beauty but their job is to make us re-examine our pat notions, not reinforce our ignorance. Nowadays art is relabeled as entertainment— just another warm bath to slip into. It has little to do with beauty or truth.
Pulling Strings
I sell books. I go on TV but I don’t love it. Publicity is a whore as the PR man said. Ask Bobby J. Now Im famous but I had to work hard to be famous and often risk my life to do it. There’s little risk to any of these Zero generation types. They have not talent and they have nothing to say—Paris Hilton. A nation fascinated with a girl who grew up filthy rich, has little discernible talent, no education and modest looks (thought the myth of her Helen-like beauty is broadcast night and day by most media). It’s pitiful. Second rate crooners dominate the pop charts. Television’s biggest prime-time shows are amateur hours. Pockets of integrity and divine madness exist still but they are the exception. There may be a velvet underground, but there’s no one there to promote it anymore. Everyone wants the easy way out and yet and yet there is no easy way out—not out of this life.
Why is it that we tolerate the alienating effects of the most ordinary events—terrorists flying planes into skyscrapers, famine, genocide, suicide bombings, imminent conspiratorial attacks with terrible weapons of mass destruction, obsolete machines dictating disaster, egregious leaders, runaway greed, hollow celebrity, simulated art—and refuse to accept the everyday happenstance of other
Hey! Look at her waiting for me
Every day we will be different she said
Wow
When did they ask for more?
What the hell are you talking about
Se e what I mean? It wears you down
What are we really afraid of? Maybe we mostly fear the one true demonstrable and pervasive conspiracy, the one we all seem to be complicit in, the one against ourselves, the one firmly embedded in the systems we habitually create to humiliate, rather than to free ourselves.
Left vs. right means nothing. Give me liberty or give me death. Live free or die. Freedom. It’s all about freedom and that starts with food, water, shelter and free and excellent education. Frankly, and I hate to mention this, but unfortunately it’s not all about Britney Spears’ breasts, comely as they may be, as one prominent New York editor told me in November 2001. It’s not them against us. It’s us against us. Full stop. That said, we do make our separate peace, individually—as Bobby J Mann learned to do, speaking of whom . . .
*
Life is a series of educated guesses or else it’s a train wreck.
It’s a conspiracy of ironies, synchronistic beats. Take the case of FBI agent John O’Neill. He predicted Al-Qaeda’s imminent attacks, but he was up against the grinding gears of bureaucracy, the envy of faceless desk jockeys, who mocked his style, the fact that he had any at all amongst drudges. He stepped on toes. Had an Irish temper, they say. After trailing Osama from the Khobi Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia to the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, he built on dossier on Osama. He made Osama and his works his own special project. He was the man who knew more about Osama than anyone. He picked up intelligence of a Hiroshima-style attack on US soil. He, like Bobby J, felt the warnings all through the summer of 2001. His warnings ignored.
Bull-hockey, his counterparts said, eyeing O’Neill’s St. Bruno Magli shoes, natty pocket-square, tailored suit. Fuck him.
The living expert on Osama was more or less drummed out of the Bureau, nailed by keep-your-head-down-don’t-rock-the-boat bureaucracy where one’s position rates higher than one’s duty, which is after all in the eye of the beholder when it comes to schmucks. Those in the FBI who chastised O’Neill and ran him out of town have blood on their hands, those mooching, wing-tipped, button-downed closet queens of the criminal division. He knew. He said he knew. He was the expert. Yet, his warnings went unheeded. It’s an almost Biblical-style prophecy—like Jeremiah’s—as as if that mattered to those whose religion is the maintenance of their own career path. John O’Neill ended up running security at the World Trade Center on 911. He was on the second day of his job the day the Twin Towers fell. (I’m sure someone somewhere out there has done the symbolism comparing the forces aligned against each other on September 11th to the Tolkien thing.)
We’re due for something big, he said.
When?
Soon.
Meaning:
Any time from now.