On Unmanufacturing Consent

So my old friend from Philly Adam Fieled has asked me to "come out of literary retirement" and read at a poetry reading he is organizing of DC poets on August 8. Despite the fact that this would require me to write poetry again, which I haven't for years, I said yes, and now I have to think about what to write.

There is something a bit angelic about Adam himself - his Facebook picture has been the same for years: pallid and underfed, wearing too many layers of sweaters, as if he found the world to be something one had to bundle up against at all times.

In general, I’ve been thinking for a while that I have to find my language again. That campaign business just strangles it out of you. Control and endless testoterone and wretched egomania and bad food and a masochistic learned fear of creativity and the weird ‘fucking up your neighbors’ primary game in Philly – it’s like being a rock doomed to a life of endlessly banging into other rocks.

I think sometimes I should sit down and write down what I learned from it all, except then the thought of reliving it is distasteful. (Anne Dicker is somewhere barbequing right now, doubtlessly thinking the same thing). Sometimes in DC I talk to people who have also just arrived here, and they say things like, “oh, yeah, I got the campaign bug too!” and give me a grin, and I kind of grimace and make them go away.

I know we are all organizers, but there is a big difference between asking a Democrat to vote for Barack Obama, and asking a worker to stand for unionization when it might cost them their job. If just a few of these little puddings could get sidetracked by OFA into something else memorable (like the Dean campaign did quite admirably), then I would feel better about the future of the American left.

But then again, I’m in Washington, so I have absolutely no connection to the American left other than my brother’s feel-good earthy Palo Alto employer restarting Republic Doors and Windows, the factory where the workers had taken over after a shut down– a weird blend of 1930s communism and 2000s California ethical-business principles-cum-marketing-ploy. (For their trouble, they were mentioned in a speech by the president.) I suppose ethical business is the natural response to the historical singularity of consumer capitalism, and so it’s just another iteration.

There was hail in June today, coming down on 18th and L streets; I worried. I had had this terrible dream the night that Air France plane went down, that I was standing on the middle row of a plane in a horrible electric storm, full of terrified passengers, with lighting all around, and telling everyone to be calm, that it was going to be alright. At the time it was so real, so I feared it was foreboding of something, but then I came into work and heard on WAMU about the crash.

Resulting thoughts included a) Is it possible to hear echoes from others, in your dreams? and b) if I am clairvoyant then what the fuck am I doing in political advocacy?

Answers:
a) Yes, with the right drugs, and
b) Since I am doing communications work, it’s probably appropriate. Someday we will be able to get information directly through our skin by touching a metal pad or something. It’s gonna happen. Might as well get spooky and get ready for the future.

“Breakfast of Champions”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about a science fiction writer, has 50 (at least) topics for science fiction books that Vonnegut himself thinks of but doesn’t bother to write.

THINKTANK RANT #1 (of many to come): One of the most amazing things I’ve seen since coming to Washington is the existence of an entire “future-projection industry”, which runs endless numbers and makes endless prognostications in order to determine what is going to happen over the next 100 years so those in power can make “informed decisions.” Water. Climate change. Oil. Agriculture. The military strength of Mongolia.

The trend became apparent to me precisely because it is in the filed of technology alone that chaos is assumed, and valued. The hilarity really ensues when you get to things like foreign policy, which covers the ‘behavior’ of ‘nation-states,’ which if I remember correctly are large clumps of really chaotic people mostly completely uncontrolled. The journals go on and on: which nation-state is eating too much or too little? Which nation-state is sick, or too religious? Which nation-state is in trouble and needs an ‘intervention’?

As a former sociology student, I don’t dispute the innate demographic needs of human beings to count and tabulate, but what’s so weird watching this vast machinery of think tanks and publications and press conferences, is that it seems so bizarrely solipsistic – so, we have written a paper on how you are running the world, and this is what’s going to happen later on after you continue to run the world a little more, and here how you can continue to get your grubby little hands on the resources you need, because if you have this projection you can point to it in a hearing and then be absolved of responsibility for your decisions. As bizarre as it is, I suppose it is an improvement on a court priesthood or consigliere.

And then again sometimes it’s worse when people ignore it.











I started reading Leaves of Grass this weekend. I decided that if I were going to write and read a poem in DC I was going to do a little riff off Whitman, since he wrote the great song of democracy, and that’s my bag.

I started reading it and I realized how much love he had for America, for every scrap of it. The whole book is just an unbelievable work of love. Our country has changed so much since then, just the fiber of it, and I don’t know what song we would sing now – or if we even have a song in us. We play video games, everything is mushy, we have soft butts in soft car seats, we don’t look out for our neighbors. Sometimes I love everybody on the whole damn miserable train platform so much I can barely look at them, which is the essential starting point of Leaves of Grass, except that how do you start writing about all of that at once?

Do you just start writing about your friends?

Maybe your friends.

Fuck.

That's Spoon River Anthology.

I hate Spoon River Anthology!