Class consciousness

I came across this interesting quote from Barack Obama:

“I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/07/070507fa_fact_macfarquhar#ixzz1U0tuCJYn

Perhaps I am less understanding than Obama; I fret about the extreme protectiveness of their short-term interests the very rich demonstrate around the world, their willingness to risk revolution, epidemics, even environmental catastrophe, through their unwillingness to invest in public goods such as sanitation, public infrastructure, social housing, decent food, drinkable water, clean air... the list goes on and on in places like Brazil, Pakistan, First Nations reserves in Canada (oh yes, even in the Great White North).

But what's even more dispiriting is the enduring false consciousness that makes possible the sanctimonious and self-righteous attitude the very rich in the Third World take towards beggars in the streets; perhaps not all that different than the glowering disregard in affluent countries for 'welfare queens', refugees, gypsies, the homeless. Maybe Marx and Gramsci were right and we really are imprisoned in our class consciousness, incapable of seeing people who don't go to the same country club as having the same rights as us, deserving of our precious tax dollars.

A friend who was caught up in the tsunami in Thailand a few years ago tells the story of a crowd waiting to be evacuated from the disaster zone, most bereft of passport, money, clothing, yet sharing sips of scarce water with each other.  The locals, he says, were especially generous. And then there were a few Westerners who wouldn't share the shirt off their back for someone with acute sunburn.

A rather scary metaphor as we burn together on this afflicted planet.

Rivers and fountains

As I re-publish Genghiz in Love this summer, I am flooded with gratitude for the writers who influenced me at the fertile time when I wrote that novel.

The other day, I wrote a recommendation for Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which was so strong an influence that I originally named my own novel Anastasia's Slave in allusive tribute to the earlier masterpiece. (Oddly, I first heard about Bulgakov from Salman Rushdie at a book reading for The Satanic Verses, weeks before he was forced to go into hiding.) Reading Bulgakov felt like listening to the subversive sound of triumphant trumpets in some dour government office block; his high-spirited and chivalric ode to the power of the imagination trills through the daily din of deadened words.

Proust was another major influence, I'll write more about that later. Alain de Botton is right, if rather obvious and didactic, in pointing out that reading Proust can change your life. For a period of about 18 months in Prague, I stopped reading anything else besides the Remembrances of Things Past. I'm not sure if I would recommend reading Proust as a cure for heartbreak, but it does work.

When I am immersed in the sheer scope of a great writer's oeuvre, I feel like Huck Finn floating on a raft in the middle of the Mississippi, a great inland sea whose pull is so strong that we mostly consider its vast surface, the distance between its banks, the length it traverses until it meanders into delta, estuary, ocean.

What we often ignore in our bird's eye view of the river's coiled flow is the magnitude of its depth, its murky tides, and at its bottom the porous bed through which its unique minerals and contaminants seep into the groundwater, the collective unconscious of our culture. Proust, Bulgakov, Twain have fed me and countless others, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Professor Woland, Tom Sawyer live and breathe cheerfully within me, giving life to new characters jostling yet to be born.

Hence the futility of the quest for fame, as if a spring could architect itself into a fountain.

Seeing the obvious

I try to see the obvious. Things that are so present in our reality that we can't even see them anymore... which is close to the best definition I've ever seen of the 'unconscious'.

This is not an esoteric insight, necessarily. Here's an example. At lunch today my therapist friend Erin mentioned that almost all of her clients are women. I asked why. She seemed puzzled. The conventional wisdom seems to be that women just are more likely to ask for help, look for support, reach out in times of need. That's just how the gender works - isn't it obvious?

I suggested there might be another explanation - maybe women need more therapy and support because they are actually more in need of therapy and support. In a world where women are disproportionately the target of violence, rape, abuse and systematic discrimination, it makes sense they might actually need help more than men.

Want evidence? Check out the "Trafficking in Persons Report 2011" released by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today. You can find it at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2011/index.htm

As a man, I'm spending some time these days facing uncomfortable truths about the extent to which I am complicit in a world that is unsafe for my mother, sister, partner, and friends who happen to be women. When I ogle or stare at an attractive stranger, I am turning her into a piece of meat, ripe for re-packaging into a plastic coated dismembered doll - all legs, breasts, and dolled-up face, ready for the soft-porn fashion industry, hard-core online pornography sites, and potentially even for physical slavery and murder. It's a rather obvious feminist insight that we've done our best to ignore as a culture for at least two generations now.

Sadly, the obvious isn't always pretty.

Guernica / Memoir Manifesto

Guernica / Memoir Manifesto