12/14/03: Well, I know this update has been quite delayed. I won't even bother starting in on the old, tired "I've been so busy" apology because I'm sick of giving it and everyone's sick of getting it. But it strikes me that this very delay on my part is a good example of some of what is wrong with society. Everyone is just too busy to devote themselves to the things that are truly important. I could jabber on and on about how I've been starting a new job, and applying to graduate school, and holiday shopping, but all these things have also been a way to keep myself distracted from taking action on the greater issues that in the long run mean far more. The problem goes beyond apathy. It's that self-centered, stressed-out, all-important, haven't-got-enough-hours-in-the-day, taking-care-of-priorities attitude that allows people to spend their days commuting to work and worrying about deadlines and spending their paycheck at the mall and basically keeping themselves distracted from everything going on in this world right under their noses.
But enough of me. I get sick of my own voice sometimes. This time around I'm lucky enough to have some brilliant submissions from thoughtful, perceptive, rebellious people who are far better at fighting distraction than I am. They've waited too long to see them up here.
12/19/03: I've just added to the following two submissions a short piece by my sister Courtney, an associate NoZine editor. Like me, she has a tendency to committ mental ramblings to paper, but in a far more coherent manner than myself.
Jaime
NoZine Editor
BY EIREANN KILEY
It’s a juicy question, riddled with guilt, hot denials, and lengthy discussion: are we, the American middle class, rich? This is a subject that I have faced bravely on three different continents, but I have never been able to come up with an answer that allows me to put the matter safely to rest.
I know full well what the answer is: of course we’re rich. We have shoes on our feet (and several styles to choose from), food in a working refrigerator, and a roof that doesn’t blow off in the spring rains. I don’t care how hard your life is, if you are middle class and American, you enjoy heat in the winter and electric fans in the summer (this is ignoring those who actually have air conditioners). You probably have a car; I for one do. Every American I know has a television (or three), most have computers, and every single person can pay for the electricity to run all these gadgets.
So why does the obvious answer stick in my throat when someone asks, “Are you rich?”
“Well,” I always find myself mumbling, “it’s complicated.”
* * *
The first time I heard this question was in a club in Serbia. I was distracted, keeping my eye on a Gypsy sitting up at the bar. He was sure keeping his eye on me.
The Gypsy—or Roma, as they call themselves—was around six years old. Off his lip hung an unfiltered cigarette, which he expertly handled between sips of what appeared to be straight whiskey. He had noticed me the minute I walked in, staring in an unquestioning but nonthreatening way. My friend Aleksandra whispered in my ear, “he knows you’re American.”
One of the men in our group pulled my attention away by telling me his great dream to open a shop. “I will travel the world,” Pedrag said, “and buy beautiful things to sell in this shop. It will have everything: clothes, shoes, jewelry, cigarettes, trinkets.” I nodded, thinking about the hundreds of similar shops in Novi Sad, all of which consisted of a single, small room filled with all kinds of worldly junk. All of which displayed dust in every corner, even in the fine wrinkles in the shopkeeper’s face.
Pedrag was in his mid-thirties and lived with his parents. He had no job and no degree. Only one year later, NATO would drop bombs on the city, taking out the bridges the hospital, and the schools.
Every spring, it seemed, Serbia would go through unrest: war, demonstrations, heated elections, protests. This upheaval left Yugoslavia drained: young people had no jobs, and college was out of the question as the dinar spiraled down in value. Those younger than 35 lived nocturnal lives, wandering from club to club, bragging about their dreams.
Hearing Pedrag’s dream deflated me. Perhaps it depressed him, too, as he began to interrogate me about American cars: How big are they? How much do they cost? Is it true that all Americans have two cars? Where do they put them? How do they decide which one to drive?
“I’d love one of those big pickup trucks,” he announced. The Yugos were cute, I offered. “No, no, no,” he said, “a big, blue Ford, one that takes up the whole road.”
Then it came: the Big Question.
“Are you rich?” he asked.
“No,” I said with a straight face. I tried to ignore the small Roma child, drowning his sorrows 10 meters away. “No, I’m not rich.”
* * *
I think I explained it better the next time I had this conversation, three years later. It was a beautiful day, and I felt satisfyingly achy as I wound up for another concrete pitch. Splat! I heard the moist concrete hit its mark.
I was lining the walls of a new house in a small Tanzanian village at the foot of the Lushoto Mountains. My right shoulder was throbbing in a pleasant way after hurling concrete as precisely as I could for several days. Mr. Mapagiano, the site manager, entered the one-room dwelling to inspect my work.
Mr. Mapagiano was a very pleasant and handsome man who looked to be around the age of forty. His easy-going manner and enthusiasm helped make the Habitat for Humanity build a success. I felt good as he praised my even cementing, adjusting his Chicago Bulls cap as he spoke.
I had talked to him briefly on several occasions, and was impressed with his skillful English. Though he had a moderate East African accent, he was very easy to understand and had excellent vocabulary. I was interested to learn more about him, and the urge was mutual.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked after we had exchanged a series of other questions. I was not put off in the slightest; I myself was curious to know if he was married and what his relationship was like. I answered truthfully, saying I didn’t have a boyfriend.
His eyes twinkled as he said that we should get married.
Honestly, I thought he was kidding. He didn’t know the slightest thing about me. He looked like he was joking.
He wasn’t.
The very next day we left the region and traveled several hundred kilometers north. I was dressing for dinner when there was a knock at the door.
Mr. Mapagiano had somehow found me. He was all smiles as he introduced his brother. He apologized that he couldn’t bring his mother to meet me. He then did something very unlike a proper Muslim man: he kissed me. Muslim men do not kiss women in public; though no one was around except his brother, we were in a public area. Probably the American movies had taught him that move.
I pushed him away very firmly. We had to have The Talk.
Apparently he was all prepared to marry me and live with my family in America. Of course, I would need to pay his airfare, as he did not have the money. He was looking forward to living in the land where no one has to work and everyone has many gold necklaces.
I told him that I didn’t have a million dollars stashed away somewhere. I had to work for a living. Sure, I had a car, but I had no choice, really. The nearest supermarket was 5 miles away; I couldn’t walk and carry all those bags. And I had to get to work somehow.
I could tell he didn’t understand. Suddenly I grasped the power that American films had over the world. It was no wonder he thought we didn’t work; if you see the movie Wall Street, it’s about a bunch of guys who wear nice suits and talk on the phone. In Dar es Salaam, on the other hand, I had seen a hundred men loading ships, their backs bending under the weight of their burdens.
If Mr. Mapagiano wore a Chicago Bulls cap, he probably was a Michael Jordan fan. Maybe he thought we were all as rich as the superstar athlete. I know that Jordan probably throws more money around in a day than I will in ten years.
I tried to explain, I really tried. It probably wasn’t a good time to do it, though. Mr. Mapagiano was upset. He had already told his mother that he was going to marry an American girl with red hair.
* * *
Everyone had gone to dinner except for me. I was still recovering from a round I had gone (and lost) against some undercooked Mongolian mushrooms, and was bundled against the northern Chinese cold. Hearing my fellow American tourists pronounce the name of the town—Shijiazhuang—was good for a chuckle, but otherwise I wasn’t amused by the place. The university we were staying at had been so kind to turn on the heat for us, but apparently it didn’t work. I was huddled in bed, trying to ignore the hairs and specks of dirt on my pillow, wrapped in all my clothes and my winter coat.
Someone knocked on the door.
I admit I was nervous. My whole group had left about 15 minutes earlier, and my husband had the key to the room and wouldn’t need to knock. As I shuffled to the door, I imagined Chinese cops or even Chinese soldiers standing outside my room, ready to search me for capitalist propaganda.
Two cautiously smiling women stood outside my door. One said in halting English, “We wish to speak with you, to hear the tones of native speaker of English.” I was definitely amenable to this; it beat the boredom, and maybe I could practice my lousy Chinese with them. I invited them in.
We exchanged names and chatted for a little while. I told them how to say “What’s up?” instead of the more formal greeting, “Hello.” They understood, and taught me their casual greeting, which was “Chi le ma?” This means, “Have you eaten?” Like “What’s up?” it’s not a question that needs answering.
It wasn’t long before they asked me, “Are you rich?”
I launched into the explanation. Sure, we Americans have cars and many outfits, but you need both if you want a job. And the houses are expensive, and you’re expected to have a television and stereo.
I got the same blank looks as I did in Serbia and Tanzania.
They asked me how much I make in one year.
I decided to be forthright.
I didn’t have a job at the time because I was a student, but this was irrelevant. I pulled out a sheet of paper to write down the salary I had made at my last job. I wanted to write it in case they didn’t understand the English words for the higher numbers. I wanted to be honest.
I wrote: $38,000.
They looked at me silently.
I scratched out the math on the side of the sheet to convert the dollars into yuan. This came out to ¥304,000. There it was, taking up way too much room on the paper. I had visited a house earlier that day that we were told cost ¥30,000, or $3,600.
As they looked at me, I looked longingly at the eraser at the tip of my pencil, wishing I could undo the distance the numbers created.
* * *
Once I got a tiny glimpse from the other side of the fence in the McDonald’s on the corner of 56th and Broadway in Manhattan. I was waiting in line to buy the Number Two (North Carolina price: $2.02; New York price: $4.59) when I spotted a Saudi ordering a Big Mac. His pulled his wallet out, and it was just stuffed with twenties, fifties, and hundreds.
I was guilty of doing similar scenes in Tanzania and China. As a tourist, I exchanged all of my money at once, and therefore went around with my wallet crammed with the local equivalent of $200. It was also difficult to get used to the exchange rate, so I never really got a feel for how much money I was flashing around.
The Saudi was no different; he was on vacation (or maybe business) in New York, and cashed in however many rials make a couple thousand dollars, resulting in a bulging wallet with currency that was more like monopoly money to him than anything.
Still, the comparison is not quite valid. There was a difference between him and me, but it was only a matter of degree. I was able to travel the world; he was able to do it in a private jet. I was able to eat all I wished; he was able to eat it off of china and out of crystal (and probably with a belly-dancer to boot).
I do hope that there might be a difference of awareness between us, though. I can’t single-handedly change the circumstances of my foreign friends, but I strive to avoid callousness and achieve understanding. Ideally, I want to have a world where the distance between the Chinese teachers and me is only a matter of miles. For now, though, the Question remains.
With the recent elections, the Wilber-related discussion on i_witness and stuff I see in my daily life, a picture of a certain issue that's been a source of philosophical grief to me for a while now began to coalesce in my mind over the last few days. After I realized how to articulate it, I asked my roommate, "How would you define materialism?
"Well, I'd basically say it is the strong desire for an excess of external/material things in one's life." Okay, that's paraphrasing a bit, but I don't remember his exact words. Anyway, that's basically the textbook definition, or at least what everyone else seems to go by.
I suggest a new definition (though perhaps it should be assigned a new term).
Materialism: An obsession with external/material things.
What's the difference?
The difference is that this includes not only those who want to hoard materials, but all those who place too much importance on materials.
So many people are sick of the two-party system we have, but it really isn't all that due to conspiracies against other parties. It's because most of the population is for one side of this materialism or the other. The typical glib observation of Republicans compared to Democrats is "Republicans want to hoard all the money, Democrats want to give it all away." It's not even so much about these parties though, there are so many degrees of "right-wing" and "left-wing." People point fingers at each other so often based on "what such-and-such party stands for," but where is the underlying division between left and right? All they ever seem to argue about (with the exception of religious fundamentalist beliefs--and even many of those seem to just be "morals for dictating what is done with materials") is how materials should be allocated and who should get to allocate them.
One side argues that it should get to collect lots of money and spend it on whatever benefits "us," the other seems to argue that it should NOT get to collect lots of money yet should somehow be allowed to allocate it to benefit "everyone but us." Granted, these are two extremes and there are so many variations in between, but is there nothing beyond this tired view that materials determine and define everything and everyone? Or even the most important aspects, not simply the most fundamental.
And what of that fundamental consideration? Yes, we all need to eat to survive. But with nothing beyond this materialism, there can be nowhere to stand outside of it and see the whole of it and what should be done. People who are of the mind that materials dictate the universe discover that they are unable to find solutions to material problems. They have ideas that take from here, give to there, always trying to delicately balance what is over here with what is over there in a world that overtly admits only things. But cells cannot organize other cells, only the integrating tissue or organ can do that.
Materialism cannot solve problems of materialism. Those who are beyond materialism in perspective can see the whole, and thus can organize everything through materials but not as materialists. There is a difference. Just as my mind organizes my body through cells but not as cells, materialism cannot resolve itself. To quote Einstein, "No problem can be solved from the same level that created it." Or something like that.
Of course, those who claim to be above materialism also claim to be able to solve the problems of materialism. But what kind of materialism are they above? Generally they are above wanting to hoard materials, but they are not above the view that materials dictate all of creation. As Ken Wilber said in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, we became a society obsessed with sex--with either having it or repressing it. It's like conformity and non-conformity. You can be obsessed with either, but you will still give the same weight of importance to the whole issue of conformity. What about the middle way of being yourself and not worrying at any given moment if that puts you in a perceived group or outside of it?
But it is not simply a middle way. It is a balanced way--the balance of being outside of the circle and therefore seeing how it may be balanced, or how it already is such. When you see the whole, you can balance both sides. You can see all of the whole with all its extremeties, and you can balance them out at will. That is why it is called the middle way--that's where the center of gravity is (in the center). It isn't finding "just the right balance" of materialism, it is discovering how to focus, shape, and direct materials from a perspective beyond both,
Businesses, political parties, individuals, husbands, wives, schools, charities, they all try somehow to find this balance from a perspective within materialism itself. Anyone who stands outside of these perspectives having passed through them (those beyond such perspectives, not simply beneath them) sees policies that are self-defeating, plans that are doomed to failure, relationships that will burn themselves out, materials that will go to waste. How do you find the center of something if you cannot see it as whole? And how can you see something as whole if you are not beyond it? And how can you go beyond it without realizing that there is more to the universe than that? You cannot.
This apparent directionless manipulation of materials is a tell-tale sign of materialism of the kind I have outlined. It is a blatant eye-sore to the vision of integral perspectives. "Maybe if we try to stack marbles on a smooth floor this way, it will work."
I was speaking recently with my roommate about certain instances in which I saw such attitudes, and he mentioned a description in one of Heinlein's books. Apparently, in this story, there was brief mention of a cat that had gotten outside once in summer and was forever trying to get back there. All winter long, any time a door would open, the cat would race to it and realize that there was no summer through that door. So it would try all of the other doors, always looking for the "Door to Summer."
Politics, relationships, businesses, money...watching how people move these things about, rearranging them in new and inventive ways hoping that they will someday find the one combination that will render more than just these materials from just these materials--trying to squeeze all the shadows together to get light, to quote Wilber--is like watching everyone trying to find the Door to Quality while trapped in a world that has only Quantity.
BY COURTNEY WEIDA
Most of my life: 1981-
Like probably every fool on earth, I was obsessed with the notion of being understood: of having some deep-seeing individual I could keep forever.
I repeated and ruminated on this idea until the very feel of it in my mind or on my lips was like the soiled paper underfoot in the urban wreckage. Otherwise I was lost in the elusive fantasies of my thoughts…
Julyish
Renting the apartment, I wonder about all this:
If I worked all week I could afford the kind of place I’d love to have, come weekends. Otherwise I’ll clean up the mice shit and somebody else’s pubic hair in the shower, coughing up the hair from a piece of shit kind of dog.
And yes, I am lucky to even have the mice shitty, pubic hairy, dog hair-balling place.
Or I could live in a beautiful-wildflower- growing-like-a-miracle-out-of-cracked-sidewalk kind of house with stained glass windows at risk of being scattered down to a kaleidoscopic symphony by the drive-bys. You wonder why an elementary school art teacher would complain about the lack of money. It’s not like I didn’t realize I wouldn’t even have enough money for food, rent, and a new outfit every couple of months…Oh wait, that is exactly what it’s like...
College Thinking
Do you ever feel like even the road less traveled, the dark places, the hard decisions, and the meaningful quests are also emptiness?
I once thought that the strange music, the darkly bright paintings, the tear-stained poetry of aching violet was enough to sustain. Beneath the skin do we really ache for pop music, beer, blind sex, bubble gum, and cellular phones ringing the silence of every forest? Eliot and Poe are nowhere to be found and pretty preppy girls in small skirts tell me they too think “The Waste Land” is “pretty, like, cool”
And it is pretty damn cool!
But I would almost rather they never knew the realm existed, because I have dwelt there alone and at least my misery should be solely mine. But what I need is to see someone else wandering these dark streets with eyes like something archaic and yet alienly new. Or at least a window to pass by, dimly lit by a violet candle where I cannot quite make out the canvases hat abound and are insufficient to quench the yearning voice of her brush. Where are these people? Have they settled for meetings at Man Ray and some quiet talk of revolution, of longing? Have I done the same with my dreams of sculptures and poems that fall papery in my mind as I watch South Park?
12/15/03: As I write this, I have just read online that Saddam Hussein has been captured. Is this a victory? I believe he was promoting terrorism and oppressing the Iraqi people. However, does the US have the right to bring our "justice" to the rest of the world, whether they want it or not? From the continued conflicts in Iraq I would think it fairly obvious that not all Iraqis support US military action and Saddam's removal from power. How can we possibly be the judge of morality for a culture so different than ours? Only by integrating and "Westernizing" other cultures are we then qualified to apply our values and morals to them. Is there a path to globalization that does not involve homogenization?
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