“Don’t mean nothin’”
Someone once wrote, concerning King Solomon’s rant about how all is vanity, that it was an old man’s philosophic insight, a retrospective look, and while it may be true that all is vanity, it was not a point of view that could – or should – be accepted by a young person. In other words, a young person’s gotta just do it, as the Nike commercial says, even if it don’t mean nothin’.
I suppose that makes me an old man, because I’m looking back to the days of grass and acid, when it was all boys and girls together, change partners and dance, and thinking about what I was about, and what others I knew were about and how much was mere vanity.
To be honest, I was mostly clueless – quick, sort of clever, but clueless -- just wandering around, taking it in, pretending to have figured it all out, and trying to be supportive to people who were doing what I considered Good Work, people whose range of vision extended outward beyond personal gratification.
Of course a case can be made that even the good work is vanity, that the generalized epiphany of the Vietnam-era was accurate, that anything a person might do, whatever it was, “don’t mean nothing.” Existentialism in action. Finally! Husserl, Sartre and Camus were understood on the visceral level, and those who still insisted on actual meaning were either religious fanatics or academicians or self-aggrandizing pissants and factotums.
You know them. We’ve all encountered government types obviously buttressing up a sense of personal minisculity by wielding the badge of IMPORTANT WORK, by pointing to some Higher Authority as the source of their own. Or academicians who teach the works of some dead giant -- James Joyce or Thomas Jefferson or Mark Rothko -- and are so puffed up with their own importance they strut and fret as if they are as historically significant, perhaps even more so.
We get the sense that these are people compensating for believing they don’t have the juice to go it on their own, people terrified by learning that to be human is to be, in some senses, infinitesimal and insignificant. These people run screaming from that possibility and don’t hang around the corner of Thought and Courage long enough to notive that they may also be infinite and universal, so they make Fear Deals. They kneel at the cross or throw themselves into Kaballah studies or become cops with authority obsessions, or military lifers or presidential appointees or, as Leonard Cohen put it in Dress Rehearsal Rag: “Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians/They will give you back your hope,” or any combination of the above or more. What they all have in common is that they cover their terror by insisting that their very important authority sources actually affect the odor of their own fecal material. They keep their noses to the grindstone because they’re terrified that if they ever look up they’ll be forced to see how big it all is and how small each one of us are.
(And this is not to say there is anything wrong with kneeling at the cross or studying Kaballah or being a cop or a soldier – BUT: when you take action out of fear, you’re always going to be wrong, no matter how worthy the cause or how many people tell you it’s the right thing, whether it’s building a Star Wars system to prevent comets from hitting Earth or packing heat because the kids on the corner are a different color.
Aiyeeee is always off balance.)
So. These are people who don’t understand the value of their lives, and try to hide their fear by doing work which is supposed to make them important.
That’s an easy call. But what about the people who are feeding and medicating the poor or protecting the environment or standing up for the rights of Hindulusian orphans, or who are protecting people with unpopular ideas, or who are those people with unpopular ideas -- people who are subsuming their own egos and ignoring any sense of self-importance to do work they think is important.
They put themselves out there on the front lines, carrying their own weight without any stinking badges or hierarchical authority, and are scorned, attacked, injured, even killed.
Consider, for example, the 1936 seamen’s strike, demonstrating against the Matson Line on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. Matson’s response was to have his guards fire on them from their vantage point up in the tower. The goons fired down and shot some 600 would-be union folk, a couple dozen of them killed.
Those people were not limiting their actions to self-serving chickenshit – even if their efforts improved their own lots, they also improved life for many others. Admirable. I don’t begrudge any of them -- or any of us, for that matter -- from enjoying the occasional sense of “Wow, I’m a helluva person to do this wonderful work,” occasional psychic self-fondling.
It doesn’t negate the work he did to imagine that Albert Schweitzer found a certain personal satisfaction in having the lead role in “The Adventures of the Wonderful Benevolent White Christian in Africa,” providing medical care for anyone willing to sit through his organ recitals. It doesn’t matter if no one would have ever paid for a ticket if he were playing at Covent Garden. There were children in Africa who lived to become adults because he was there.
So I don’t mean to denigrate the commitment or the risks these people take. But whether sitting in a tree for a year or running through the WWI trenches, he or she may develop into Julia Butterfly Hill or into Adolf Hitler. Courage is admirable, but is no guarantee of benign or positive results. Oliver North displayed courage under fire in Vietnam and so did Ron Kovic and whether or not one parlays that moment of shining into becoming a monster or a person seems to be a matter of choice. Of the two examples above, one later betrayed his oath to uphold the Constitution and the other spoke out against about how he and his fellow soldiers were themselves betrayed.
Even with the noblest of choices, unintended consequences can happen. Blue-collar Giants like Harry Bridges and Walter Reuther and Cesar Chavez begat sleazes and crooks like Jimmy Hoffa and the endlessly corrupt officials of my long-ago working-my-way-through-school union: the Camden New Jersey Local of Hotel And Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International.
And what about those seamen who struck Matson Lines and were shot down? As soon as they won the struggle, they turned on the people who got them the prize.
“First thing we did, we kicked out the commies,” said one man who had been there.
By that he meant they bounced the Wobblies – the IWW -- the men and women who chained themselves to fences and water pipes, who spoke out and were killed, hanged under bridges and beaten to death in culverts in California. (So many of them were killed that to even use the phrase: “hanged under bridges” is a tired cliché. In other words, the first thing that union did was turn around and kiss the ass of management by expelling the most committed of their lot. A lot of other new unions mimicked their ingratitude. The bosses weren’t stupid, just venal. They knew the workers would be easier to control without the Wobblies.
So.
This morning, the person I had in mind was a lovely young woman who dedicated her life to protecting, maintaining, and restoring the functioning balance of life on Earth. It wasn’t an easy choice or an easy road. Today, people merely laugh at or mock environmentalists. In those days, they screamed and shouted and threw rocks and buried them in the forests they loved. She once called me on the phone, sounding as shell-shocked as anyone back from eleven months of walking patrol in Vietnam, and told me that she had just had an meeting with a major member of the Industrial Establishment, someone whose name was known to all of us.
She had laid out a detailed explanation of how the system of life on which we all depend was deteriorating rapidly, and how a portion of that loss was the result of what his industrial concerns were doing. And his response was to gesture out the window of his top-floor office at the miles of smokestacks and filth spewing into the air from them and say, “Some people call that pollution, but I call it progress.”
As far as I could tell, she was overwhelmed by the shrieking loop of feedback from the cognitive dissonance involved in realizing that someone presumably intelligent enough to manage a multi-national concern was unable to understand that when the planet dies, even his profits would dry up.
But she regained her balance and she and others chipped away at that attitude for decades, and it actually seemed that some improvement in understanding was happening.
And then the Texas Golem who fronts for some putative humans who whisper in his ear signed an executive order and instantly, another portion of the Earth is gone. George W Bush, the man who lost the election but gained the office in what history will call the Coup d’Fou, wrote his name on a piece of paper placed in front of him by one of the minions who keep track of who has contributed how much, and lumber companies no longer need to account for endangered plants or animals, but can just go right in and log the Old Growth forests as they please.
And I go screaming inside my head as I think of the various sneer-faced monsters who take turns playing with the Dubya puppet and who are saying to us: “You may call that Spotted Owl a canary in a coal mine, but I call it an obstacle to be rolled over.”
So, is it all just vanity? Is it just something to do until the Nova Mob finishes stripping our planet and moves on? Like playing Solitaire on Windows?
I was told by someone who knows more about it than I do that the Fundie Christian game of The Final Days is not just being without concern for any long-range future, or, as James Watt, the Dr. Mengele of forests, once said, “Jesus is coming back so we should use it all up.” It goes beyond that to harsh dogma that makes it a prime directive saying they must use it all up, that it would be an insult to God to leave any of his bounty still on our plates.
Unbelievable.
And there they go again --- “It’s not that I personally want destroy all that, but the Higher Authority told me to. It’s my duty.”
Bullies who are only following orders.
So, ok -- vanity it may be, but that’s no reason to stop caring or doing. To wax corny and poetic: “The flower grows without regard to whether or not it will be crushed under a boot.”
It IS a reason to walk on past the shallow political organizations like Sierra Club who love their institutions more than their original purposes, and who spend huge amounts of money asking the functionaries of the hierarchy to please please please don’t destroy everything, and hey, we can put together some political bribery for you if you will vote to throw us some crumbs.
Walk on past them. Go to your own conscience and find your vision and take responsibility for it. Take responsibility and do it yourself.
In other words, walk past the trap of getting someone else to promise to uphold your vision of what’s right. They’ll betray you every time, doing what THEY think is right, which usually means whatever gains them the most money for re-election.
No philosophy. No dogma. Just do your own thing. (Hey, that’s a snappy phrase – ‘Do your own thing.’. It suggests that your life is your own responsibility. What a concept!) Don’t worry about the rules. It’s not about morality. It’s about how the rules were made by people who do not want you to think you’re allowed to change things. It’s about how belief systems are traps.
If you feel a need to gather around the fire with others who are of similar outlook, go to the people who are uncompromising in the pursuit of their won visions. Earth First! Earth Liberation Front. Or go to the reborn IWW.
In the words of Hassan i Sabah, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” That means you’re on your own and have no one to ask but your own conscience. You say you don’t want to take the apocryphal word of an historic Arab assassin? How about a Frenchman like Voltaire?
“As long as men believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”
Oh, right, Monkey Boy has declared all Frenchmen to be bad guys. Ok, no Frenchies…
How about an American, a revolutionary war patriot -- Nathaniel Green, who said
“We fight, We Lose. We rise. We fight again.”
(We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? From “…we mutually pledge to each others our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to a rich kid shouting “Freedom Fries!”)
Once we each had a vision of our own. Now we have cable, and we surf the dial looking for something we don’t seem able to find. It may be time to think about what we really want and make some choices.
hjp
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