A Dangerous Place


Today I heard the President of the United States say that what is going on at the highest levels of government is a basic disagreement in how to view the world. Mr. Bush says, "I view the world as a dangerous place." And every person in the room knows that he speaks the truth. Every person knows that danger and disaster and grief and unspeakable horror is in the world. And every person knows that love and understanding and empathy and transcendent kindness is in the world. One is a good mother and the other is a mother fucker.

So what exactly is the role Mr. Bush wishes to play? He says his job is to protect us from the dark side, the evil side, of human nature. That evil out there in the world is simply people going around and taking up collections of the energy given off at the moment of personal insult. It's like keeping bees to be a religious leader seduced by the dark side. You just work the hives where insult is converted into hatred.

People feel personally insulted in the Arab world by the introduction into Palestine of a separate state created for the Jews. They feel insulted by the way the Palestinians have been treated and by the way Lebanon has been treated. It's like a forced wedding. She shows up with her brothers, who are armed to the teeth, and says, "I'm pregnant. Boil some water."

And to the consternation of the neighbors, she behaves as if she has a divine right instead of a share of the spoils of war. The foreign policy of the United States becomes the right of Israel to exist, and the foreign policy of our enemies becomes that Israel has no right to exist, which is interpreted in the media as that they are saying they want to kill the people and take the land. We say Cuba has no right to exist, and have turned it into a sixties movie set for the Fonz.

Maybe they are just saying her existence was something that hit them like a meteor or a lawsuit, and they don't agree that it was legitimate. And maybe we have been trying to do on a macro level what on a micro level is the forced confession. "We have to do this legally, so you will sign or ... well, we do know who your family is." I wouldn't think like that if I wasn't seeing the secrets coming to the surface. like Freudian slips seeping to the surface from repressed memory.

We want to use force on people to make them tell us the truth? Or do we want to use whatever torturous force and humiliation we have to use to make them say what we need to hear? Are we forcing people to conspire with us under the mass illusion that that there is a conspiracy against us? Are we doing what every evangelical regime does? Which is to reshape history to what we need it to be to justify what we want to do?

It's not my place to say. But what I do know is that in the same way I didn't bomb civilians in Japan, I didn't decide to create a Jewish state in Palestine and I didn't decide to back Hussein or the Shah or anybody else. If I was the one running things I would behave the same way I always behave when I am in foreign territory. I would pay close attention to the customs and manners so as not to insult everybody, to begin with. And I wouldn't get involved in other people's family business.

That's another place where the same tendency is showing up on the larger level and the smaller level. We are governed by people who want to get more and more involved in our personal lives, and for the most part they are way up above their animal nature, so far above it that they have a totally unrealistic view of sexuality itself. They want it to conform to a Disney storyboard. When you cut off sexuality you don't mean to cut off other things, but they get caught in the net. Your other natural instincts get split between an outward image and an inner repression. All this shit starts coming out. It bursts through the outer image like a clown through paper scenery and that's when the world is a dangerous place.

There is a relationship between a tolerant attitude toward sexuality and sociability, just as there is a relationship between repressed and shamed sexual attitudes and aggression. When I look the news and read about Representative Mark Foley, that he was writing explicit emails to young boys, I don't think about that as something that was an accident. This guy was the guy who was guarding the children from predators, just like Bush is guarding you from danger.

You better sit facing the door with your gun in your hand if he helps you much more.

This is the problem with morality. You can pass all the laws in the world, but they won't change the fact that some nice kid who's about fifteen or so is living inside Mr. Foley. And he can't do much either. It looks like he tried to protect the kid but then there was this other side, this split off side. It was hidden to him because it was the face of something split off in the priest. And he was a priest because he was trying to stop this evil thing from coming up.



"Seven and a half pounds."

And there's this other side to Bush, this split off side, and the same people who can't see it are the same people who can't see that Foley's piety and concern for the safety of children is a story with deeper levels, or even that all our stories are stories with deeper levels, and we are ruled by people who divide them into two levels, good and evil. The surface of law rides on top of flesh and blood, soil and rain, longings for perfection and hidden desires. That's just how it is, and when I'm told somebody wants to protect me from the dangerous world which is coming after me, I think, "Please find me a table far away from that party, waiter. And not by the holy father child molester in the other corner, either. How about a table for one, facing the door?"

And it seems like we're going to prefer the world going up in flames to solving the question of Israel's right to exist. I wish Solomon would come back from the Spirit World. "Okay, one encore and that' s all. What do you want?"

So the entire problem is explained to him and then he's asked the underlying question which is destroying the stability of the world: "Does Israel have a right to exist?" What would he say?

"Forty-two."

Personally I don't have a side in the whole thing and am just watching through my window, wondering how long it will take before this argument expands and takes over the whole goddamned world, mostly populated by people like me, who just want to go on with their daily lives, raise their children, travel some, go shopping and try to get along with the neighbors.

What causes the argument to go on is the dangerous view we have of the world, and that should be obvious to anybody who has been lost in a bad neighborhood. I have been, many times, but I never knew it because I wasn't in the United States.

In Japan, or Italy, or Spain, or Greece, or other countries, I walked through what must have been really bad neighborhoods. I didn't think about it at the time but now I look back, and it's like realizing that when I was eighteen and in the Navy, I used to be perfectly comfortable in the Tenderloin District, and thought the hookers and hustlers were all just interesting people. Now I avoid even driving through there. As I have changed, so has it changed. I'm too respectable now, in my own self-image, to go there. I want nothing at all to do with what Paul Simon called, "The poorer quarters where the ragged people go ... the places only they would know ..."

Once in Tokyo I was in a Sushi cafe somewhere. Sometimes I would hang out in the bars in the districts catering to the military, but sometimes I would walk far away from there, out where there were no other Americans. It never occurred to me that these people might bear a grudge for having a couple of cities consumed hellishly in what to them must have been the mother fucker of all terrorist attacks in history. That didn't seem to have anything to do with me. I didn't even have to deal with it, because other people were dealing with that. I just did what I was told.

So I was in this cafe and a Japanese guy left a group and came up to me. I guess they had been watching me, wondering what I wanted there, or why I had come there. "We don't like Americans here," he said, "but we like you."

To this day that might remain the most sincere compliment I've been given in my life. I knew exactly what he meant, because I suddenly got a flash of myself as being safe because I assumed that Japanese people were good and even loving people, and I treated them with respect.

To re-spect is to divide your attention equally between your own point of view, and that of the other person. It makes them feel safe and that makes you feel safe.

I can remember Joseph Henderson telling me that if you are afraid of somebody, reassure them that you aren't going to hurt them. Reduce the fear level in them and you reduce the level of threat to yourself. But he was a highly conscious man.

The people who see the world as a dangerous place are right. Usually they are far right but they have been forcing their way into the center with aggression and a total disrespect for others.

Nobody knows for sure what's going on, all they know is, it wasn't to do with some valid reason for invading and occupying Iraq. What it looks like is the work of bullies, who just picked out what was an easy target, because they had already disarmed them, strangled the economy, and demonized the leadership, which had earlier gotten a pass because "the customer is always right."

On the surface it looked like the problem was just the Hussein family. If only they weren't there the evil would dissipate and we could all ride around Amsterdam on stolen bicycles and smoke pot. But then it became the Sunni family, which was larger and more complicated. So we took all their shit and give it to the other families in the neighborhood, and began to point out what vicious bastards they really are when insulted and debased.

And of course the neighbors were in no more position to rule the country than the Russian peasants were when they were boiled down to some iconic poster of the working man in a different kind of propaganda power play. Stupid people are never in any position to run the country, any more that I was in a position to take on responsibility for the atomic bomb. I didn't drop the damned thing.

Those people didn't do it, either. They were just going on with their lives in a difficult time, because they were ruled by people who know the world is a dangerous place, and so they keep preparing for war. It's like if your neighbor started wearing a gun on his hip, and when you went out for the paper, he'd glare at you and spit tobacco juice in your direction.

"Did I do something to offend you?" you ask, adjusting your glasses nervously under his insolent gaze.

"Maybe you did. Maybe you didn't." His eyes stay on you even though his head turns to the side and a stream of brown juice squirts suspiciously close to your shoe.

Anybody can start trouble, and if you go out looking for a fight, you're gonna find one.

For me, I'd be very pleased to have a leader who sees the world more or less like Monty Python depicted it in "The Meaning of Life." They chose a combination motif of a Hawaiian Luau and a Medieval Dungeon. And when the British waiter asked the American couple if they wanted to start with some conversation, some philosophy, they didn't understand. He tried to explain the purpose of philosophy:

"Have you ever wondered what life is all about?"

And the man, pleased with his vacuous good nature, answers, "Nope."

Posted: Wed - October 4, 2006 at 09:38 AM