About This Blog

It was November 17, 2005 and I sat watching the news about the debate in the U.S. Congress over torture in a state of shock. I always knew the American government trained others to torture at the School of the Americas, and that the CIA had secret prisons all over the world. I knew, as Naomi Klein says in her book, The Shock Doctrine, “Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain ‘indicator species’ of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.” But the fact that there was a public discussion on national network news about whether the CIA should be exempt from the Geneva Convention rules of prohibition was more than I could process.

After I cried awhile, I went over to lower the curtains and discovered, on our tomato plant sunning in the south window, a perfect tomato: round, bright red, barely soft to the touch, the repository of everything we deem beautiful and “good” in our universe. The dialectic of this tomato’s relationship to torture expresses the dilemma of our daily lives. How does one live in the world we have created that embodies water boarding and the wonder and potential of a perfect tomato?

Suddenly, at 55, I found myself unable to navigate this terrain. While I am, by nature (the nature/nurture argument will be explored in due time), endowed with a personality that has kept me relatively calm and grounded over the course of my life—a life, like that of anyone else, filled with doses of success, disappointment, struggle, and happiness—I have previously suffered depression. In my early-twenties, after dropping out of college and moving to a funky airstream trailer in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was ready to admit defeat and buy a ticket to oblivion. I gained weight, I drank too much beer and tequila, and I brought home strangers from Okies, Albuquerque’s hippie/student bar, to try to assuage my loneliness. I wasn’t on the course I’d set for myself as a believer in achievement, both personal and political, and therefore I, and the sixties revolution of consciousness, had no future.

Over the course of the next 30 years I of course learned that there is no penultimate achievement where we do or we don’t arrive, personally or politically. But there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. Personally, I built an entire house from scratch and made another livable. I bore two children who gave me enormous pleasure and a modicum of pain. I sustained a relationship with a life partner for 30 years, also with enormous pleasure and, I have to admit, more than a modicum of pain. Politically, I have been as true as I know how to be in disengaging from consumer culture and engaging in community efforts to smash the power elite. We knew the elite were vulnerable when the Cuban revolutionaries threw out Batista and embarked on a journey that revealed its own fits and starts, successes and failures.

But now, try as I might to not measure, I continually lose ground and I lose faith. The enormity of what is wrong in the world becomes the enormity of my daily life. Because I’m a writer, I find myself making copious lists of everything that has brought me to this impasse, with the idea of dissecting it, revealing it, indicting it, for some undefined audience that might actually listen and ultimately be moved by me. What that possibly can do to help me lift the daily burden is beside the point. Like the thousands of bloggers who have found voice on the Internet, I need the process of venting and the real or imaginary solidarity it elicits.

The list (begun in 2005 and continuing today) is in no particular order other than the assault of a particular day. It is sometimes local in specificity but always global in application. It comes via all my senses: my eyes that read it on the computer screen or see it on TV; my ears that hear it on the radio and in many conversations I have with friends and acquaintances; and my gut, where everything gets churned up and viscerally spit out. It is all within the framework that Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, sees as “the process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of never-ending accumulation of capital.” I started this list before I read J. M. Coetzee’s book, Diary of a Bad Year, but when I saw the explanation he gives for writing his great complaint, I knew I had mine: “An opportunity to grumble in public, an opportunity to take magic revenge on the world for declining to conform to my fantasies: how could I refuse?”

My younger son told me no one would read this book (or whatever it is), with its list of depressing evils, unless I offer some sort of solution (he calls me a hopeless communist). Of course, there is no fundamental solution other than smashing the system – and by system I mean the economic, political, and cultural one that denies our humanity – but I have added as a last sentence to some of the blogs, something that might be done to perhaps move us along towards that goal. The rest of them just have to remain as is.