The Last Hitchhiker

The Last Hitchhiker

By Chris Trevett

“Hare-brained idea! You do know that nobody hitchhikes any more, right?”

Hugo Simonsen sat on his haunches inside of a dust-caked phone booth in Oakley, Kansas. It was late August, 1992. He was talking to his girlfriend Juanita, who hadn’t known him long enough to have ever imagined that Hugo would do something as compulsive as going on a cross-country hitchhiking trip.

 “This is one of the reasons why I didn’t tell you in person. I needed support, not mocking.”

“And what was another reason?”

A dog idled outside Hugo’s phone booth, finally raising its leg to pee on the filthy glass. Hugo stuck his hand out of where a panel once was and let the dog sniff and lick it as he tried to decide how to answer Juanita’s question.

“I wasn’t old enough to do it in the 70s. I’m not going to be denied the fun and adventure because you say nobody does it anymore!”

Juanita smiled faintly on her end. “You’ll have to do better than that. And besides, I would never try to prevent you from doing anything.”

“I want to be just like grandpappy back in ’33. Did I tell you he once rode in a boxcar from Oakley, Kansas to Denver?”

“I was there when your grandfather told the story.”

“Hee, hee – right! So then you’ll remember what happened when he got to Denver?”

Juanita swallowed her news so that she could play Hugo’s game, whatever it was this time.

“One of the first people he saw was his older brother – imagine that, all the way over in Denver – and his brother told him to get back in the boxcar and get his scrawny ass home.”

Hugo snorted. “You tell it as good as he does.”

“Well, Hugo, I took the test…if you’re interested…”

Hugo had wondered when she was going to work “test results” into the conversation. The original plan for the trip was for Hugo and his buddy Scooter to drive Scooter’s car across country, or at least as far as Cleveland, where Juanita’s cousin lived. Then, Hugo asked Scooter if he’d be willing to try hitchhiking as a method of transcontinental conveyance, and he reluctantly agreed. But after Juanita announced that she was going to take a pregnancy test, Hugo suddenly claimed poverty to his friend, asking to postpone the trip indefinitely. Really he just wanted to be alone with his thoughts when he received the news from Juanita.

“Your voice even sounds unlucky,” said Hugo. All at once he could feel a volume in the air; as if Juanita had turned one of those air horns on the phone; only this was a fear and anxiety horn.

“I assure you that luck has nothing to do with it. Just because I grew up in the Catholic church, doesn’t mean I have any faith in the rhythm method.”

“I pulled out – I always pull out! If we were using the rhythm method, it’s news to me.”

“It looks like you didn’t pull out soon enough.”

Putting some distance between himself and difficulties was not generally characteristic of Hugo. In his 26 years he had come to understand duty, loyalty and even sacrifice; where each should be liberally applied and where each should be measured or withheld. He had always thought of himself as a rescuer; the first to champion the cause of an underdog. Only this time the underdog might very well be any child born to Hugo the wayward man-child.

“Were my predecessors as diligent in birth control?”

‘’Tell me,” Juanita diverged, “how did you manage to make it all the way to Kansas already?”

“I’m glad you asked! It’s really a funny story…but let me drop a few more quarters into this phone.”

Hugo scrambled in his pocket overflowing with change. “Hang on, darlin’.” He had never been more grateful for a change of subject – or that he had a limited amount of coins.

“Try to picture this scene. My first hitch after getting off the train. I’m riding with a farmer in his 1960s truck – he’s on his way from Klamath Falls to Winnemucca. He was a little uptight at first, but I got him to laugh when we dum-dee-dummed the Bonanza theme at the top of our lungs. Anyway, there is nothing – I mean nothing – between Lakeview and Winnemucca. Except something called Denio Junction, Nevada. I’d be in denial too if I lived there. Must be at least 80 miles with no services on the Oregon stretch of that highway. Anyway, we’re about halfway between one outpost of civilization and another…40 miles of nothing in either direction…when we see this flagger person in the distance – you know, for construction. The farmer says he wants to stop and talk to her – he’s never seen anyone standing or walking on this stretch of road. Remember – no services, no exits, no rest areas, nothing. The farmer says, ‘Hello there! Construction up ahead?’ And the woman waves her “slow” sign at us and says ‘Hello gentlemen. Thank you for slowing down for safety’ – in an Australian accent! The farmer and I looked at each other like we had just seen a ghost. She said, ‘Have a nice day’ and waved us on, as if there was some danger of another vehicle approaching. The truck barely moved for a few seconds, as if the farmer was peddling it. We looked at each other again and I said ‘Jesus, man, how far did we go???’ We laughed and laughed for a good mile or more before we realized that there was no construction to be found. Is that hilarious or what?”

“Bullshit artist!”

“I swear on my philandering grandfather’s grave it’s true! Straight outta the Twilight Zone.”

“What was this farmer like? I’m curious to know what kind of person picks up hitchhikers these days.”

Evidently Juanita had forgotten her original question, the sort of thing that she often did when they engaged in serious discussion. Or was it that Hugo always tried to steer away from having to answer certain types of questions? It always got jumbled in his verbosity.

“He was a nice man who didn’t think I was too scary looking, apparently. Did you say before that you would never prevent me from doing anything? Even trying to commit suicide?”

Juanita decided to nibble around the edges of this bait. “I kinda hoped it would never come up.”

There was a prolonged silence, eventually pierced by the dog’s sudden barking. “Besides, you’re not the suicidal type.”

Hugo exhaled. “Well, you never know what those interior voices will do to you – QUIET, DOGGIE!”

“At least you won’t have to feed a pay phone to take those calls. Why on earth would you bring up suicide?”

“I don’t know, it seems like the one thing people always want to prevent other people from doing. I suppose I should be respectful and stay on the subject of your pregnancy, right?”

“You still haven’t told me how you got to Kansas in four days while hitching.”

They were both poker-faced about not using birth control. Neither would make the egregious mistake that the other was solely responsible; but there was a flaccid quality to any discussion of the matter; quite the opposite of their passionate discussions about politics or music or food – food being Juanita’s pet topic, perhaps unintentionally metaphorical. It made them both feel unintelligent to not be able to speak frankly on the subject of sex.

“I managed to find another ride from Winnemucca to Elko. Then I caught a huge break. I went to a truck stop and struck up a conversation with a driver running his portable parking lot on to Denver.”

“How do you do it?” said Juanita. “You don’t know anything about truck driving. You’re always telling me how you can’t stand rednecks. Now you’re speaking their language?”

“When in Rome, my dear – or in this case, the Roman Road…”

Juanita had wanted to wait a little longer before introducing Hugo to her parents. Six months together after seven years between appearances of Hugo was enough evidence of the prudence of Juanita’s approach to the issue. They had first met in 1985 at an under-21 nightclub where Juanita was celebrating her high school graduation with her sisters. It was all perfectly innocent then; Hugo soon departed for his Peace Corps post in Ecuador; they exchanged letters frequently; and Hugo became very popular with his male Corps-mates when Juanita shared candid photos of herself and her sisters. In anticipation of his imminent return from South America, her sisters interjected provocatively on the subject of Hugo from time to time; but by and large were rather docile about the whole thing. They mostly remembered the lovable goofball who watched Soul Train to hone his dance moves and didn’t really think their big sister needed to take him too seriously. Her parents, on the other hand, had no interest in re-acquainting themselves with the man-child who they felt had abandoned their daughter years before; and she had forgotten that they already knew him – she couldn’t recall their meeting – and it never occurred to her that anyone in the family would be wary. Her parents believed that their daughter had taken Hugo for a ride – he was somehow safe from responsibility in her unquestioning love.

All at once Juanita recalled a somewhat disturbing conversation with Hugo, taking place not long after their reuniting, and she shuddered at the memory. “Almost everyone I know” he said, “my family, friends, almost everybody – is comfortable. I don’t have to worry about them…if they have an illness, it’s materialism. They can get help for that – a shrink, a pill. But those people facing famine in Africa, they have real troubles. And there’s not a damn thing they can do. They’re suffering is more important to me than any single relationship I’ve ever had in my life. Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking about all the suffering. I suppose eventually I’ll have to choose…”

Juanita wondered if this declaration had anything to do with Hugo’s bringing up suicide. She also wondered why she found this principled stance troubling. Did she think it unfair to pit the love of family against the love of the entirety of humanity? Finally, she decided that she could respect Hugo’s fiery compassion while also taking it as a warning. These were the moments when she felt more like an abandoned parent than a jilted girlfriend.

How many times had Juanita wanted to congratulate herself for making it easy for Hugo? It both pained her and cheered her to think that the child they had made together could inherent Hugo’s characteristic way of flailing about in directionless mayhem. And what did he mean about “…eventually I’ll have to choose…”?

“How did Joyce put it, ‘I am big with an unborn child in my brain…’? Or something like that,” Hugo remarked, in a pitiful attempt at some sort of reverse psychology.

“I like how you’re not trying to wrap the subject up.”

“Well, okay, I’ll be happy to continue to regale you with my wild stories of the road!”

“It’s your dime.”

“Right. So, Denver, okay. Oh, the trucker takes me to a sporting goods store in Salt Lake City so I can pick up a better sleeping bag. This I use for camping. It would be a waste of a good sleeping bag if I get caught in it in a boxcar.”

“So you really did ride the rails?”

Hugo had thought soberly about the folly of it all – for about five minutes.

“A couple of hobos tried to warn me off…said the railroad security is tighter between Denver and Western Kansas…but you only get one chance to do something like that…”

Hugo was, in Juanita’s eyes, always a responsible lover. He was a marvelous creature of habit in that he always carried and used condoms; he was rather insistent about it, in fact. But when Juanita vaguely suggested that perhaps they should attempt a greater intimacy and forego protection, Hugo embraced the notion as one would an enjoyable but strictly temporary lifestyle change; a New Year’s resolution to be tried on and quickly discarded as frivolous or seen, with a harried glimpse into the future, as potentially difficult.

“I get to Oakley. It was all an alien scene…you wouldn’t believe how flat it is…”

“I think I have some idea…” Juanita was thinking about her immigrant parents and their work on the farms in California in the time of Cesar Chavez. During breaks in the work her mother would stand silently and stare into the majesty of the distant mountains. She told Juanita it seemed like another planet away. Juanita’s mother cried when she took her children camping in those mountains years later.

“I’m covered in grease and grime and I’m thirstier than I’ve ever been. Thirsty enough to drink a Budweiser. I go into this bar with no windows except a porthole in the door…”

“This place was a trip…a real throwback…they actually had tankards! I had it in mind to steal one. And one of those old cigarette machines! All the old brands, you know, Salem, Kent, Newport, even Kool – it was a scream!”

“I pounded that goddam Budweiser like it was the last bottle of beer on earth.”

Almost everybody Hugo knew back home thought that everyone in the Midwest was “country”, and he and his friends didn’t consider themselves country in the same way. Although he and his tribe were surrounded by farms and fields, the vast majority of them had never set foot in a barn or on a tractor. Their rural landscape had been transformed into an increasingly cookie-cutter “exurbs” – a new-fangled term that no one seemed to have any use for. When he was in high school the city kids called he and his friends “goat-ropers” when in fact there were very few goats grazing on the lawns of the exurbs. Now he was in “fly-over country” and there was no clear demarcation point – even between areas that seemed largely uninhabited and those that contained rusty old phone booths that appeared out of nowhere. This was a source of spiritual stimulation for Hugo; a truly wide-open space that could be defined by even the loneliest of hobos. He felt a strange kinship with the people who could withstand this harshly barren environment and shape it into something life-affirming. He reminded himself that in west coast schools the history of the conquering of the West was one that “passed through” this part of the world to find the gold bars and the gold coast; and all at once he felt impertinent, disrespectful.

This adventure demonstrated for Hugo something else that he found exhilarating; he was feeling and sensing like never before. It was as if one element of his personality could be found in one state; another in a completely different part of the country…the only hitch was making sure he found his way to the right places…he thought about how the winds might be different in Nebraska, more fierce with nothing to impede them and funky in their agricultural dustiness; just as he often thought about how clouds might have looked and behaved differently when he was four years old…you could always count on storm clouds letting a little light peak through…but all the while the clouds were a storm of guilt. “I’m free and Juanita’s not.”

The sleeping sky awakened and roused him as well…he lay in a fetid, creaky bed, watching two flies stuck between the window glass and the screen buzzing, irritated…the dispersed sounds of the town had died down convincingly…hard to believe someone could get away with charging real money for this room…dingy, threadbare curtains…post-coital graying of the sheets…an especially funky smell of sex. In a twisted sort of reverse irony, a fly-swatter was held in place above the bathroom door by strangely strong interlocking spider-webs. He had made it all the way to Ohio, by hitching and by boxcar.

It was all well and good, thought Hugo, to trade barbs with the flunkies and junkies in rest areas and railyards; but now it was time to rub elbows with some of those real salt-of-the-earth folks he’d heard so much about – at a baseball game!

Ned Skeldon Stadium, Toledo, Ohio. Real Americana!

There was a huge banner strung along the front of the unused ticket booths: “Pre-game Pie Eating Contest”.

Hugo thought, It wouldn’t do to get spanked by a Buckeye at a pie-eating contest – even if they did have the home-pie advantage.

“Let’s strap on the old feedbag…get a good mouthful!”

“You said that? You’re always looking for an excuse to trot out those silly old sayings. In fact, didn’t I hear ‘It’s a scream’ back there?”

“Evokes simpler times, my dear. Anyway, at the registration table an old codger looked me up and down and said, ‘By God I think we might have ourselves a ringer here!’ Of course I assumed he was just egging me on. I said to him, ‘What makes you think I’ve got what it takes?’ He spits tobacco juice into his coffee cup and says, ‘You’re wiry and you got a big mouth.’”

“The ladies sitting next to him start tittering. I said, ‘Beg your pardon?’”

“Don’t get your back up, kid. You ever see ‘Cool Hand Luke?’”

“Sure. One of my favorites. But the egg-eating scene didn’t have very much to do with eating eggs.”

He snorted and nudged the lady next to him. “I’m sure you can dissertate all day about how it’s allegorical and all. But I’m talkin’ real strategy here, kid. I can be George Kennedy to your Paul Newman. We can win this thing.”

Juanita felt compelled to chime in at this point. “And you weren’t at all skeptical about his proposal, right?”

“Not in the least. When in Rome, remember. ‘Trusting souls we are, out west,’ I told him.”

“So you’ve got some tips for me?”

“I got more than tips, kid. It’s pert’near noon now, game starts at 1:30. You eat anything yet.”

“Not much…handful of almonds and a half a piece of toast.”

“Alright, we got somethin’ to work with here. Usually I’d advise to drink only tea the day of a contest, so we’ll have to make some adjustments. Let’s make you a paying customer and get you signed up. Then we can start the trainin’.”

“Training?”

“What did ya think? Snap my fingers and you’re the pie-eating king? Now let’s discuss terms.”

“Terms?”

“What’s in it for me. The prize is fifty big ones. Let’s say my cut is ten.”

Hugo considered this briefly under the scrutiny of the ladies and a few bystanders drawn in by casual curiosity. “I can live with that.”

“Listen, kid. When you’re digging into that pie, you gotta be able to breathe. But you can’t be liftin’ up your head or you’ll fall behind in eatin’. Ever swim the breast-stroke?”

“Of course.”

“You move your head from side to side to catch a breath, just like the breast stroke. And another thing. You gotta eat a hole out of that crust at the bottom…makes the judges think you ate more than you did.”

Juanita was only mildly fascinated. “How’d you do?”

“Won the damn thing. They even put my name up on the scoreboard.”

“Whoopeee!”

“Right. So I decided to celebrate by taking myself to a strip-club.”

Juanita was audibly nonplussed. “I thought you didn’t like strip-clubs.”

“Yeah, well, you know my theory about them…”

“Refresh my memory.”

“You know, it’s from Ferris Bueller…Cameron describing his home, comparing it to a museum. I don’t like strip-clubs because they are like museums…everything is very beautiful and you can’t touch anything.”

“You shouldn’t be touching anything anyway!”

“Agreed. But that’s blowing a lot of money for a lot of pent-up sexual frustration.”

“Hugo, I have no helpful response to that.”

“So I ordered an Alabama Slammer and settled in right in front of the stage. I didn’t know you could sit right up next to it like that.”

“Even I knew that.”

“Right. So I’m really diggin’ on this mega-mini-skirted stripper…not the usual empty-eyed look…real classy outfit, what there is of it, anyway…and she seems to be diggin’ my vibe too.”

“She works for tips.”

“Right. I figured, what have I got to lose…maybe I’ll dance with her. So I jumped right up on stage and started moving with her.”

“Sounds exactly like trouble.”

“Sister, you have no idea! The lady didn’t seem to mind…but one of the other patrons called the manager over and the next thing I know, I’m in a police car.”

“What???”

“Oh, it gets better. It turns out the manager has a thing for this particular stripper…so really I just chose the wrong one.”

“And you think that’s your only problem?”

“That’s not all! I’m sitting there by myself in the squad car…and less than five minutes later, they throw her in with me!”

“No!”

“She starts talking about how it’s not good karma for me to just jump on the stage like that – or even metaphysically speaking. “I said to her, “Figures I’d get thrown in with the philosophical stripper” and she said, “Well, now I see why you might end up in here in the first place” and I said, “Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with being a stripper” and she said, “But there is something wrong with being an intelligent one?” She also said that my overwhelmingly plaid shirt was a northern nerd’s idea of a Hawaiian shirt…she’s from the south, I guess.”

“Did you actually end up in jail?” Juanita was now completely enraptured.

“Nah, Denise says he was just trying to scare me. She offered me a ride but I decided to walk back to the motel.”

“She didn’t lose her job, did she?”

“I doubt it. But I did get the impression that she was looking to get out…the manager guy is getting aggressive about her inattentions, or something like that.”

Hugo thought back to his two-mile walk to the motel. As a cooperative moon lent him the safety of shadows in the Toledo night, all at once he felt mightily alone and began to ponder the future with Juanita. From this, however, he was easily distracted. It all seemed too easy; why easy – he had no idea; and soon he was instead thinking of what he hadn’t done yet with his life…the travel, the dating, the work that he felt he needed to do to cope with being saddled with existential guilt that transcended marriage and children…he thought about all those solitary glances we steal in crowds, while we’re in pursuit of something that resembles our daydreams.

“I did all that in four days time, said Hugo. “It didn’t take me four days to reach Oakley…I’m back here after all that.”

“I would have held you back,” said Juanita, finally breaking an interminable silence between them. “You’re a miracle, you don’t know what you’re looking for or what you’re running from!”

“You’re right! You’ve opened the door a crack and I’m running through it! Come hell or high water!”

Hugo paused to listen for effect that wasn’t forthcoming. “Come on, Nita…” He felt a little out of breath. “By not talking about it properly, you are punishing me. The perfect should try to be merciful to the imperfect.”

Juanita drew in a considerate breath. “Now that’s allegorical. All things considered, I think I’m speaking as properly as I can…”

“When someone says, ‘All things considered’ you can be sure that they haven’t…”

 “You know I’m not keeping it because I’m pro-life, right?”

“I know.” Hugo wasn’t at all certain of this position.

“For all we know, I could be giving birth to another Hitler.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hugo sneered. “Besides, Hitler’s mother didn’t give birth to Hitler either.”

“Oh no?”

“She raised him.”

Juanita gave a near-to-crying-weighted laugh. “Very clever. Did you quit a psychology course too?”

She was referring to Hugo’s reaction to the Rodney King Riots, which so unnerved him that he watched the Los Angeles news off his father’s satellite dish for 36 hours straight; then promptly stopped attending classes at the local community college in preparation for moving south to “help with the recovery.” It was never clear to Juanita or Hugo what helping in this case would look like.

“It was cultural studies,” said Hugo indignantly. “Once you’ve watched thousands of bodies being bulldozed into mass graves, you’re never the same.”

“Maybe you really would do more good down in South Central.”

Hugo didn’t allow any silence to pass. “I’ll send money…no matter where I am.”

“Oh, be still my heart!”

She thought, “In lieu of phone calls?”

“And I’ll be back.”

“I won’t take you back.” Juanita expelled a determined breath. “Promise me you’ll give me up and devote yourself to helping raise your child.”

The recorded operator’s voice disconnected their call.

Juanita was grateful that he could not see her eyes swimming in tears under swollen lids. She was 

unnecessarily extending the conversation; as if hoping for Hugo’s rise into full maturity with just a few more 

quarters pumped into the pay phone. But a man’s life is not so easily changed…even with the promise of love.

Escapism is dead. Americans killed it.

The headline from the Toledo Blade read:

“After Las Vegas, Escapism is Gone”

The final paragraph purports to describe what many Americans are feeling after this latest gun-toting massacre:

“We mourn, also, our lost innocence and the impossibility of escaping foreign terror, domestic terror, or politics, even for an hour or two. There is no respite and no haven. There is no longer any place safe and apart where we can escape the cares and troubles of this world.”

Well, folks, if escapism is dead, Americans killed it.

And what are those troubles and cares that Americans wish to escape, anyway?

Maybe it’s that they work 50-60 hours a week or more; or are forced to work 2-3 jobs just to live; or the specter of being laid off from a job you’ve had for most of your adult life – and just before you planned to retire.

Maybe it’s the ridiculous cost of child care.

Maybe it’s the ridiculous cost of health care.

Maybe it’s that they still haven’t recovered from the financial meltdown of 2008, and wonder if their lives will ever be the same.

I suspect, however, that far too many Americans place the blame for their problems elsewhere.

They blame their problems on the powerless.

African-Americans represent 13 to 14 percent of the U.S. population. Yet somehow small groups of largely peaceful black protesters, who are simply asking that bad cops stop murdering innocent people in their communities, are a problem so big that we need militarized police.

The police are NOT judge, jury and executioner. The vast majority of African-Americans who have been murdered by bad cops in the last several years did not commit a crime at all, and even those who did (selling cigarettes on a street corner, for example) were unarmed. Yet Dylan Roof, a white man who murdered black people in a church in South Carolina, gets politely hauled away in handcuffs and taken to Burger King before going to jail.

In a recent conversation with the mother of one of my long-time friends, the first thing she mentioned as a solution to our “problems” was more policing. We cannot police our way out of extreme income inequality, homelessness and gun violence. And one of the reasons for that is that they are all connected. You only need look at the countries which are ranked as the happiest – and, ironically, the best for business – that are practically the opposite of the U.S. in how they approach policing to see that more and militarized policing is a recipe for disaster.

There are 3 million Muslims in the United States – a tiny 1 percent of the population. They are represented in the U.S. Congress in about the same number. They also represent the same percentage of the gun violence in this country. Yet somehow millions of Americans believe that Islamic terrorism is a huge problem in the U.S. and that Sharia Law will soon be imposed by 1 percent of the population.

Donald Trump tells us that Mexican “rapists and murderers” are streaming over our southern border. But according to Business Insider, Mexican immigrants contribute 4 percent to the GDP. Yet somehow the tiny percentage of illegal immigrants that commit crimes is a problem large enough to cripple the U.S. economy by making many in the Latino communities in the U.S. live in fear of deportation, regardless of their immigration status.

Donald Trump and the Congress want to cut programs for the poor such as Food Stamps. Meanwhile, in 2015 hedge funds lost money, but 25 hedge fund managers still took home 11.62 billion; and according to Forbes.com, 100 billion of the Federal budget goes to corporate subsidies. But when Food Stamps are cut, not only do individuals and families suffer, but the small businesses that they frequent suffer too.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the first entity that was secured in Baghdad was the Ministry of Oil; in a ravaged Baghdad in the aftermath, it remains untouched today. If the U.S. can’t own up to it, the rest of the world understands that the Iraq war is a war for oil. Yet according to the U.S. Department of Energy, America is now a net exporter of refined petroleum products. If one of your “troubles” is that your son or daughter is over in the Middle East as part of our military, maybe you need to ask yourself why that troubles you.

A country that projects violence all over the world can’t expect to escape the consequences. Of course, you can go on believing that somehow the United States, the richest country in the history of the world and possessed of the most powerful military ever known to mankind, is the victim; or that you are the victim of terrible circumstances brought on by your powerless fellow citizens. You’re welcome to, but don’t be surprised when absolutely nothing changes or improves; and you go on feeling insecure, anxious and unsafe. The easiest prediction I ever made was that Donald Trump could never make America great again; because he and his minions in Congress want you to believe that all your problems are caused by powerless people.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson was quoted as saying, after yet another mass shooting a few years ago: "Some people don't value life enough." True. But if that's the case, how is it that America has so many more of these people, far more per capita than any country we would want to be compared with?

Maybe the problem is that too many Americans think that these mass murderers are simply lone-wolves, and that all these problems are individual problems.

Maybe the problem is a country trying to escape problems of their own making, foreign and domestic.

Maybe it’s time you started fighting for a world where escapism isn’t necessary.

References

After Las Vegas, escapism is gone - The Blade. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.toledoblade.com/Editorials/2017/10/04/Escapism-is-gone.html

US Crude Oil Production Surpasses Net Imports | Department of Energy. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://energy.gov/maps/us-crude-oil-production-surpasses-net-imports

Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil - CNN. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html

Bandow, D. (2012, August 20). Where to cut the federal budget? Start by killing corporate welfare. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2012/08/20/where-to-cut-the-federal-budget-start-by-killing-corporate-welfare/#74cd771b6d7f

For Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers, a Difficult 2014 Still Paid Well - The New York Times. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/business/dealbook/top-25-hedge-fund-managers-took-bad-14-all-the-way-to-the-bank.html

"Agitprop" and Black Lives Matter

The police are not judge, jury and executioner. Peaceful protest is a Constitutionally-protected right. When Black Lives Matter protests the extrajudicial killing of black people, they are protesting the murder of someone who either did not commit a crime at all, or at most committed a misdemeanor certainly not punishable by death, which of course takes us back to the first part of the statement; the job of the police is to apprehend someone whom they “suspect” of committing a crime, and then if necessary it is up to a judge and or jury to decide if this is the case.

This is part of my response when someone asks for my opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Part of the Black Lives Matter “mission” is: “Rooted in the experiences of black people in this country who actively resist our de-humanization, Black Lives Matter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of black people by police and vigilantes” (blacklivesmatter.com). This sounds to me like a reasonable response to the violence committed against innocent black people in this country, and to the institutionalized racism that is at the root of the problem. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Black Lives Matter is portrayed in the media. Just this week a police chief in Wisconsin stated that Black Lives Matter was going to join with ISIS to take down America (Suen, 2015). Also recently, a Fox News Host compared Black Lives Matter to the Nazis (Suen, 2015).

These types of statements align with what Jacques Ellul called “Propaganda of Agitation” (Ellul, 1965), or what is now known as “agitprop.” Ellul pinpoints hate as the epicenter of agitprop; “Hate is generally its most profitable resource; hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one’s misfortunes  and sins to ‘another’; propaganda of agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery, provided they are not too powerful”(Ellul, 1965). It’s hard to imagine a less powerful group in society than one that represents just 13% of the population, have just 1/12^th the wealth of the majority white population (Luhby, 2015), and are descendants of slaves. In this seemingly endless election cycle we have seen Donald Trump engage in agitprop to successfully rally his “troops” by targeting Mexican, Latin American and Muslim immigrants as the source of so much White-American misery; again all comparatively powerless groups.

I have yet to see a positive portrayal of Black Lives Matter in the mainstream media. A comparison of response to Black Lives Matter peaceful protest to that of a riot at a nearly all-white college after a pumpkin festival (Lennard, 2014) tells us an awful lot about race relations, the treatment of black people in this country, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

References

Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The formation of men's attitudes. New York: Knopf.

Lennard, N. (2014, October 20). The great pumpkin riot is a white riot worth taking seriously. Retrieved from https://news.vice.com/article/the-great-pumpkin-riot-is-a-white-riot-worth-taking-seriously

Luhby, T. (2015, February 18). Whites have 12 times the wealth of blacks, 10 times that of Hispanics. Retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/18/news/economy/wealth-blacks-whites-hispanics/

Beauty and Ugliness

No matter how hard I have tried, for years I could never find myself in complete accord with the feeling of disgust Jean-Paul Sartre creates for his character Antoine Roquentin in his 1938 novel, Nausea. Simply reading the text left me underwhelmed; then some close-reading of portions of the work still didn’t resonant in the manner one would hope for. It was only after transcribing the entire book that I started to get a whiff of Roquentin’s condition; lamentations on his relationship with “Anny,” a long-lost love, were rife with remonstration, regret and finally, mutual rejection, and were potentially, for the susceptible at least, cause for the uncritical mind to view the attempts at reconciliation as repulsive. Not for me, however. And Roquentin’s final encounter with ‘the self-taught man,’ an uneasy acquaintance throughout, wherein the autodidact is caught making untoward advances at teenaged boys and is subsequently banished from his beloved library, had me riding along with the protagonist in a maelstrom of pity, compassion and revulsion. But I didn’t feel the need to reach for the Pepto-Bismol. I chalked it all up to the notion that I needed to experience the queasy existential moments ‘in-situation,’ as Sartre might put it.

Pretty much every day since Republicans were handed control of the entirety of congress has for me been like adding pieces to a Jenga stack of socio-political atrocities, each one worse than the last, and each one with the potential to bring the whole thing crashing down. Racist policing, climate change denial, obstruction of reproductive choice for woman; all of it and much more a toxic soup of incomprehensible dimension.  If the thought of imminent human extinction due to anthropogenic climate disruption isn’t disconcerting enough, reading about Fox News and their concoction of non-Muslim ‘no-go zones’ in Paris and Birmingham would surely send some of us over the edge. I pondered Sartre and Roquentin and their nausea.

Then I went to the movies…

My wife and I had wanted to see ‘Birdman’ mostly to witness the resurrection of Michael Keaton. Because we see very few ‘mainstream’ American films, we are largely unaccustomed to being subjected to gorge-crippling movie trailers. All three film previews paraded in front of us before the feature, including the empire propaganda tool ‘American Sniper,’ were likely the wet dream of many a gun-toting, blood-lusting, cadmium-blooded patriot; but to my eyes it was pure filth and a not at all subtle reminder of this nation’s precipitous decline. However, it was ‘Birdman’ itself that provided the cultural body-blow. In one of the most important scenes in the film, three of the main characters, for approximately 3 minutes of screen time, discuss what took place in a scene from the play they are rehearsing covered in fake blood from a gun shot blast to the head.

We discussed the picture on our walk home; mostly marveled at some of the performances, a few musings about potential Oscar nominations. Then we skirted around the ‘meaning’ of the film, until I finally blurted out, ‘I feel the director was holding a mirror up to our sick society with characters walking around covered in blood!’ The rest of the walk home I felt a profound uneasiness and, indeed, a bit of nausea.

Then I went on a car ride…

I don’t spend much time in cars; my wife and I don’t own one, so this was a bit of an event for us, occasioned primarily because we had left our hometown and were visiting family in a place where it is difficult to get around efficiently without a vehicle – the suburbs of Seattle. As we were chauffeured around I was reminded of a George Carlin quote: ‘Have you looked around at this country lately? It’s one big shopping mall!’ Amidst all this incredible natural beauty, and in and around Seattle there is a lot of it, our culture had managed to make it all ugly, with our cathedrals of material abundance. I was witnessing a terminal ugliness, I felt; there was no escape from it, and no end to it. Enormous signs and enormous putrid-looking buildings advertising our gluttony. We have traded beauty for ugliness, I thought. I felt even more sick than I had after the movie violence – and now I think I know why.

“…I understand absolutely why America is so violent. It’s because your wallpaper is so ugly.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“In a doubtful case, a nation decides, not without painful conflicts, how much it will sacrifice to its sentimental needs.” ~George Santayana

If we can agree that Santayana did not mean to trivialize the immortal quest for beauty as ‘sentimental needs,’ what sacrifices are we willing to make to reclaim the beauty that feeds our souls? To answer this query with requisite heft, perhaps we should examine the forces that put this ugliness in place. Some of my like-minded leftist friends continually decry the material abundance and consumptive practices that have poisoned our society. A few of them also are intrigued by or even promote the use of force to protect theirs and others’ property. Yet force protects the very ugliness they condemn! Our tax dollars fund the use of force to protect this way of life, this ugliness. One of the best recent examples of this is given in Jerry Mander’s 2012 book, The Capitalism Papers. Around that time the Chinese had proposed shrinking the exportation of rare earth minerals, a resource of which they possess approximately 90% of the world’s share. As Mander puts it, “The American government’s response was not to send the commerce secretary for diplomatic negotiations; it was instead to threaten military action, by way of the Defense secretary and the Sixth Fleet.” It was further revealed that this action was at the behest of corporations such as Apple Computer, which has a vested interest in the continuing cheap availability of rare earth minerals – and the cheap labor that happens to be located in the same country. Millions of Americans struggling to survive are subsidizing, through their tax dollars, the protection of the corporations’ ability to continue to exploit human and natural resources all over the world. Of course, many of those same Americans are complicit in this ongoing ecocide, by purchasing products at those ugly shopping malls and strip malls. Meanwhile, it is no coincidence that violence is increasing in our suburbs (McWhirter & Fields, 2012). I thought about my first trip to Paris; and the experience of seeing those majestic old apartment houses when I emerged from the Gare du Nord. Compared to that, how could anyone find any beauty in the American urban/suburban landscape?

“Beauty can be important in a person’s life. And people beguiled by the beautiful are less dangerous to others than those obsessed by the thought of supremacy.” ~Wallace Shawn

The cello is the dream. The gun and the person wielding it are the destroyers of the dream. Those who would deny us beauty, whether politicians, business leaders, or even religious leaders, are protected both by wielding force and their ability to convince people that there are no alternatives to this way of life. This ‘disimagination machine,’ as Henry Giroux aptly describes it, can be seen in every segment of society: the commodification and vocationalization of education; the destruction of labor unions; and the inculcated belief that consumption is one’s only civic duty; the glorification of sports and the sanctification of business gurus; all these have conspired to render entire generations completely lacking in imagination and critical thinking skills. Yet, those who can only chase money are fearful of those who are beguiled by beauty, because of our ability to tickle the minds of others. And, as any good leftist knows, there are alternatives; and there are signs that some of the most vulnerable in our society, and some who are not as vulnerable but are careening headlong into new socio-economic realities, are beginning to see through the ugliness and are searching in the darkness trying to reclaim beauty. The electrician who has had his hours at work drastically reduced finds that he has time to pursue one of his true passions: woodworking. The career computer engineer who can find only occasional contract work decides to make the sacrifices necessary to start a spiritual healing practice. When one considers that most of the jobs created in this so-called economic ‘recovery’ are low-wage with no benefits (Lowrey, 2014), more and more Americans are coming to the realization that under-employment and long-term unemployment is the new normal. Psychologists may find themselves with an increased workload because of this; but perhaps the creative communities should be filling that void as well. Still, millions of Americans must work two or three jobs just to survive, leaving them with no time or the wherewithal to pursue the beautiful. And of course that means if they are surrounded by the ugliness, they truly cannot escape it! What can give their lives meaning? Economic alternatives such as a universal living wage would be an excellent place to start. Another more radical alternative is what could be called ‘Reclaiming the Office Parks.’ When I was doing temporary work in the suburbs of Portland I noticed that the office park parking lots adjacent to my place of employment were ½ to 2/3 empty, no matter the time of day; that’s a lot of unused office space; something one would think would be a sign of capitalism’s collapse. Regardless, what better use of this land than to have thousands of Americans reclaim it as farmland; even one quarter of an acre would allow someone to truly pull themselves up by the bootstraps; and it just might return some of the beauty our souls cry out for.

In Greek myth, the titan Prometheus climbed Olympus to steal fire and bestow it upon man, because he loved humanity. During the Enlightenment, the English poet and playwright Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote ‘Prometheus Unbound.’ Shelley equated the ‘divine fire’ with knowledge, and that in the Enlightenment humanity chose to caste off the shackles of the church and seize the fire of knowledge, of learning, indeed of beauty. The elites in today’s world do not want us to have any sense of knowledge or beauty; this should be obvious in seeing the attacks on a well-rounded education and the onslaught of anti-science propaganda, as well as attempts at privatizing cultural entities, and of course convincing people that there only civic duty is consumption, specifically of what the elites have to peddle, which by and large has nothing to do with beauty. It is very easy to convince people to eschew beauty when you advertise plastic trinkets and baubles and addict people to them through the medium of television; beauty becomes even less attractive when it is commodified and made unaffordable. How else to explain that it is cheaper to purchase a chemical-laden McDonald’s hamburger than a single Washington apple? Ugliness is sold by the ugly, those who cannot create, or at least not well enough to make a killing at it. Beauty is the great equalizer; if you can experience it enough you will, literally or figuratively, lay down your arms to embrace it.

Sartre was primarily preoccupied with the absurdity of existence, the banal and the beautiful, particularly as it relates to how he perceived others and their navigation of the world around them; so perhaps he wouldn’t be doing the Technicolor yawn non-stop if he were around today. Santayana, on the other hand, inspires us to keep striving to beguile our fellow man with beauty, even if it’s just convincing them to have a wholesome stack of pancakes from a mom & pop diner instead of the non-food from the corporate chains. More cellos, fewer guns means less Pepto-Bismol for everyone!

References

Lowrey, A. (2014, April 14). Recovery Has Created Far More Low-Wage Jobs Than Better-Paid Ones. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-has-created-far-more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html?_r=0

McWhirter, C., & Fields, G. (2012, December 30). Crime Migrates to the Suburbs - WSJ. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323300404578206873179427496