Last Man Standing


My last piece ended with Gene Hackman playing his saxaphone in his wrecked apartment, searching for bugging devices. With cameras and audio bugs now so miniaturized, nobody has any private life if there is will to abridge it. The only solution to the problem of collecting evidence on everybody is to make hypocrisy a felony, and jail the poseurs.

Last night Linda said, "It must come as a shock to some of the fundamentalists to learn that the infrastructure of the Republican party is gay."

Maybe. I hope it doesn't come as too much of a shock to them that there is no intention to actually build a big fence between the United States and Mexico. Congress passed legislation because they thought people would respond positively to being in a gigantic prison. Now we can put big walls around the country just like the Great Wall of China. Or we could set up electric fields under the ground which would work like bug zappers on unsuspecting intruders.



Mine fields work, but you get a lot of kids without feet and hands, blind, deaf, etc.

Yesterday I was driving, and I heard Michael Krasny interviewing Swanee Hunt, whose mother was, arguably, the matriarch of the contemporary evangelical movement. Her dad, a Texas oil magnate who once almost cornered the silver market, was one of the eight richest men in America.

Mrs. Hunt is a close friend of Hillary Clinton's, and is trying to help increase the number of women in government, not just in America, but in countries around the world. She explained that men tend to think in terms of boundary lines, and women tend to think in terms of the safety of the children.

So instead of pissing on a fence, women will build relationships and community with other people.

When I was out of range of good radio I shifted to the cd player, and what I had in was "Last Man Standing," by Jerry Lee Lewis.

Jerry Lee said,

"Never gave it a second thought
Never crossed my mind
What's right and what's not
I'm not the judgin' kind."

His mansion, in Mississippi, is called, "Disgraceland," in contrast to Elvis Presley's mansion in Memphis. Colonel Parker carefully marketed Presley to fit the bill of the American ego. Jerry Lee was the American shadow. Elvis got fat and addictive and dropped dead. The killer is still the berserker.

There's always energy in the shadow. If it isn't acknowledged, and honored, then it can be awfully destructive. Every Elvis Presley in his Graceland is counterbalanced by the killer in Disgraceland.

As I was driving across the Mohave Desert, I was thinking about how no matter what you do, it has it's ups and its downs. For example, Jerry Lee sang about the "Lost Highway," but then he sang, "Just Bumming Around." It's the same road, just different days. Sometimes you're on top and sometimes you can't buy a thrill.

There isn't really any way to live your life that precludes regrets, because no matter what road you take, there is always the road not taken. You can be a perfect representative of the collective ego, championing legislation to protect the children from sexual predators, and get busted as a predator, a la Mark Foley. No matter how you slice it, you have your own darkness and keeping an eye on it will keep you so busy you won't have time to worry about it in other people.

This is something the European intellectuals realized after WWI, when existential thought began to replace essentialism (which postulates that who you are "supposed to be" already exists, and you have to conform to this pre-existing image). In Existentialism, this was discarded in favor of the proposition that you are free to create yourself, and determine your own essence.

This is at the heart of the power struggle between authoritarians and advocates of personal liberty.

The problem with essentialism is that no matter how hard you strive to match the perfect image of a man or woman which you are saddled with, you can't do it. The shadow is always there, so you always fail, even if it's a private, hidden failure. Mark Foley is not different from other people. He just thought he could overcome his shadow by resisting it, letting it go unconscious, and projecting it on other people "out there."

The problem with existentialism is that without a pattern, one has entirely too much freedom for making decisions. When you have all paths open before you, then personal responsibility becomes necessary. You have to have chains of your own making. They might be bothersome, but not as bothersome as chains placed on you by somebody else.

William Burroughs wrote that "nothing is true, therefore everything is permitted," is not an invitation to undisciplined and self-destructive behavior. "That is a temporary phase which will soon pass."

As the cameras move in like lice, and there is no private life, people are going to be forced to exist in a state of denial or they are going to have to outlaw hypocrisy, and stop wanting to be better than they are. In the words of Charlie Daniels:

"It's my life. God was the one who give it. Ain't nobody gonna tell me how to live it. It's my song, right or wrong, you can play along, but you ain't gonna change my life."

Posted: Thu - November 16, 2006 at 06:44 PM