Episteme

This is a fitful time for me. I can't say whether it's because of the war in Iraq, the impending environmental crisis, Alberto Gonzales, but I just get this feeling from time to time like I'm doomed. Joan Didion in "The Year of Magical Thinking" wrote that people who are going to die know it; they some get notification of their death and are aware that something will happen. I haven't had that feeling but I'm feeling like the time separating me between death is a big black blob. Time does that stuff, you know, speed up or slow down depending on something in theoretical physics that says when it feels like time is going slow, it actually is. I used to console myself by thinking that no matter how awful a day was going, it's still the same 24 hours as all those really great days I'd spend strolling along the canals in Utrecht or having a beer(s) in San Francisco.

But that's a lie I told myself. Those good days go by fast because time is actually moving faster. I used to also think that all the madness in the world would be solved by progress. Wrong again! Read this and you still what I'm talking about. It's like there is something about human beings that just make it impossible to stop murdering each other over God, land, resources, honor. The movies have let me down. I always thought there was hope for humankind through cinema. Or literature. Sometimes I wish this blog would write itself.

Am I being overly pessimistic? I can't say that because these seem more truths than the truths I'd tell myself if I was being optimistic. That's a cop out I know it. What did Oscar Wilde say, The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. That pretty much sums it for me. But maybe it's bad dreams, general ignorance, temptation or just that humble feeling one gets when one decides to do something meaningful with one's life. I used to believe in relativism and I don't mean the kind Einstein spent a lot of time thinking about. I mean the stuff the Pope is decrying in book after book, speech after speech, about how the West has to stand up for it values in the face of fundamentalism. That's my interpretation of it, though I know he means more than that and he's talking about Catholicism being the only true religion, blah, blah, and the guy is really fundamental himself (in some ways), so see I am back where I started. A fight over religion.

But I am just one person, poorly equipped to understand this stuff, and not very well suited to declare an end history or proclaim 9/11 marked the decline of the West and liberal democratic values. I just think about how much I hate money and its corrupting affect on American society and wish that people didn't get so caught up in their identity politics.

Thanks. This feels better. Now I am confused all over the Internet. Any advice? Much obliged.

Posted by Dawn at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week I made progress on two completely different books, Secrets of a Fire King, a book of stories by Kim Edwards, and Nemesis, a political manifesto on empire by Chalmers Johnson. Aside from needing a little brain food, both in the form of lovely fiction and in-your-face airing of political dirty laundry, I needed to digest some anti-American venting that people are usually tactful enough to spare me.

I'm no dummy - I mean, I know people don't like the US right now. But I realized that they don't even remember the good parts about us anymore, like how we are supposedly one of the cradles of modern democracy, how we have this great constitution with checks and balances, the civil rights movement, women's rights before people in other countries even admitted women had brains...

All that nice stuff doesn't seem to matter anymore -- the antics of the Bush Administation have pushed it all into ancient history. Great fun for those of us living abroad, of course! (Read on for a case in point.)

On a trip I took for work about a week ago, I was trying to make conversation with a bunch of journalists, so I said hey, did anyone see that story today about Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu getting kicked out of a Cancun hotel because she wears traditional indigenous clothing and they thought she was a street vendor? Some of them had heard of it. They laughed a little, said things like "Oh my god, this country is so racist," and made sort of wrinkled, embarrassed faces. Then somebody started talking about the US. Being a Boston/NYC/Cali tribrid, I of course said, "I feel like there is less racism there." Bad move.

Actually I really do think so, but anyway.

To start, this guy across from me laughed, and then the environmental reporter to my right started going ballistic on me about everything from slavery to Iraq to the response to Hurricane Katrina. As if that weren't enough, she said that what we don’t do domestically, we take care of internationally with our multinationals and penchant for unnecessary warfare.

She was right, absolutely right, and I knew it. I was still mad at her for assuming that I was pro-war and had never read Noam Chomsky, but I didn't contradict her because it would have been too hard and I probably would have been wrong anyway. And I didn't touch immigration because I always come off as right wing on that, which would mislead them about the general thrust of my views. I mean, I'd just met these people, and this girl was practically about to kill me with the acid radiation of her Chomsky-fueled enviro-rage.

But I also realized that the US I grew up in and learned about in school is light years away from what people in other countries now perceive. All our society's beauty and nobility has been clouded over by fifty years of imperialist warmongering, with the last years bringing it to an impressively idiotic and murderous peak. I felt sad that, while I see that last eight years as a sort of insane anomaly to what our country really should be doing, that's all that most young people in the world see in us.

I am also not wild about being the token American who gets forced into the uncomfortable and impossible position of defending a society that engages in unnecessary racism and murder, just because I love the fundamental values of my country. Talk about fun on a road trip.

Posted by Kim at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)