I Used to Be Smart.

They stood on the corner with their signs. Poster board and permanent marker. They had gone to no particular effort to make their statement. However, what they were after couldn’t be missed. They proclaimed in capitals, “IMPEACH CHENEY.” They seemed happy enough, standing in the rain, hoods pulled tightly around their faces, proclaiming their gospel on a busy corner.

I can’t say that I understood the point. They were in no center of power — not Washington, DC, not New York, not even Los Angeles. They were on a corner in Lexington, Kentucky, begging us to indict a politician who lives and works thousands of miles away. I wondered what they hoped to accomplish. Did they believe that they would ignite a grassroots campaign that would result in the impeachment of a vice president? Did they believe that they would somehow bolster the courage of the faithful and that their solidarity would cause them to rise up and seize the reins of power from the current administration? Did they hope to change the hearts and minds of all of those in the state who had, without doubt, voted in support of the current executive?

I can’t say that I ever figured it out. I would’ve like to stop my car and ask them, but it was raining, and I am terribly lazy. Instead, I did something that I don’t do nearly enough — I started to think. (I hate to use the name “Wendell Berry” like some sort of sledgehammer, but all of this is directly influenced by him, and I would feel terrible if I didn’t give the man credit.) I started to wonder about the notion of place, and I thought about displaced these hooded protesters must have been. They believed that the source of their problems was in Washington, and that in Lexington, they could somehow have an impact on what was happening in Washington, and they could have that effect simply by screaming really loudly. Not only were they misplaced, but they were woefully misguided.

Who knows why they were so upset with Dick Cheney? Foreign policy, domestic policy, energy policy, wasteful spending, bad aim? It could have been anything. Whatever it was, they were convinced, as I often am, that change happens from the top down. Change at the top of pile, they though, must roll downhill, and change has they power to achieve whatever objectives they are seeking.

The problem with such thinking is that it is dependent. While thoughtful citizens might work hard to have their voices hard, achieving their desires is essentially dependent upon someone else’s decisions. No matter what happens, my hooded friends are held at someone else’s behest. The names may change through the years, but the game remains the same.

What we need is to be independent. In our current system, we depend on forces outside of our control for any number of things. The way we consume ensures that we are dependent. If the structures on which we depend break down, we are unable to subsist. We do not gather food on our own. We do not secure shelter, warmth, or water on our own. We do not dispose of our own wastes. We may do one of those things for someone else, but rarely do we do them for ourselves. We have lost the ability to subsist independently.
That inability for independent subsistence has alienated us. It has alienated us from each other. It has alienated from the places from which we have come and the places in which we live. This alienation from places alienates from the consequences of our actions. Because we are placeless people, we are completely unaware of the consequences of our decisions on these places and on the people that inhabit those places.

We are unaware of how our food is produced. (Though, thankfully, that awareness is increasing.) We are unaware what sorts of lives our cheeseburgers lead before we devour them. We are unaware what it looks like to make that cheeseburger become our ninety-nine cent dinner. We have no idea how a cow smells, what it takes to make a cow fat enough to eat, what the cows do to the land on which they live. Our dependency has made us ignorant. This is true of any number of issues. We are completely alienated from the processes and the impact of our consumption. (Sidenote: this is why I love “Dirty Jobs.” Whether it’s the goal or not, it often brings to light some of the things of which we’re completely unaware.)

The solution is to arrive at some sort of independence. That does not mean that everyone should be a subsistence farmer. (It does mean that more people should be subsistence farmers) It means that those who are not subsistence farmers should be acutely aware of their place, and how they affect that place. They should be aware that local farms are good. They should know that subsistence farms are essential because they ensure the future of the land. A subsistence farmer is dependent upon his or her land, and he must maintain the good health of that land to live and thrive. That is, without a doubt, a good thing.

We must become independent of national and global systems and become parts of local systems, able to subsist by work and cooperation inside of the communities where we live. Only by such a connection to a specific places will properly care for the place.

There is no doubt that places need to be cared for. The way that we consumed absolutely cannot be sustained by the world around us. If we will not change the patterns of consumption voluntarily, we will be forced to changed them by crisis. By the time that crisis occurs, our situation may be too dire for our own salvation.

The question of how to become more connected to a place is as broad as are its answers. Some are simple enough — consume less, and consume locally. Buy used things from local people. Work close to where you live. Those are all helpful solutions. However, on their own, they will fail. The only way to become more connected to a place is to become genuinely invested in that place. The analogy of investment may be entirely too weak. Wendell Berry uses marriage as more appropriate metaphor. For Berry, it works well. He has an understanding of marriage (rooted in his own marriage) that allows the metaphor to work. The metaphor of marriage is one of absolute commitment, the inextricable tying of one’s future to some particular thing, be that person, place, or idea.

That binding is the only way that we can possibly find our proper relation to a place. When our fate is utterly tied to the fate in which we live, we will practice a proper kind of husbandry (to use Mr. Berry’s word). When our fate is tied to the fate of the land, we will treat the land as it should be treated. However, more than land, the marriage will change the way we treat the people around us. We will be aware that all the work we must do cannot be done by ourselves, and that we are tied to the people around us as much as we are tied to the land on which we’re living. It is the most appropriate, tangible living out of Jesus’ command to love our neighbors like our own selves. If we marry ourselves to some place, we will not be able to help it. The future of our self and the future of neighbors will be so tied that we will be unable to understand ourselves apart from the place and the people that we have married ourselves to. The cultivation of those relationships will be essential to our future.

To do this is a decided step away from the way that we are told that life should be done. It is a deliberate step to radically alter our consumption. It is a step to fight the seductive forces of advertising that beguile us and convince us of our unworthiness to ensure that the patterns of our consumption continues. It is a step that will subject itself to ridicule. It is difficult. It seems to be without reward. It is the slow work rather than the quick solution. It is radically countercultural. It requires imagination to even know where to begin. It requires creativity to live inside a system and counter its goals, aims, and methods. It requires the support from the community in which we have chosen to invest ourselves. It is an ongoing conversation that we have only just begun.

Question of the day:

If there is a real, systemic problem with the way we do life in American consumer-culture, what does life outside that culture look like?

I’m not sure what to think of him.

I can’t decide if he’s a villain from some sci-fi B-movie or if he’s some sort of Wes Andersen manchild.

To be honest, words fail at an accurate description. A picture might get the job done, but mostly, I think you’d just have to see him.

He’s always dressed all in black. It’s a rule. The last time I saw him, it was quite an ensemble. A suit coat over a black turtleneck that was tucked into black jeans, which tapered down and tucked in to the shiniest black cowboy boots. He had some sort of back slung across his back like a bandolier. Perhaps it’s a bag filled with evil devices with which he plots world domination. Perhaps it’s a more discreetly stowed fanny pack. I never see him without his portable cd player on his hip. The silver headphones, bulky and over his entire ears are the only thing he wears that aren’t black. To describe his glasses as “coke bottle” would not be an inaccurate cliche.

(I don’t know. Just wanted to attempt a description.)

Writing is hard.

Sure, writing the symbols that represent the English language isn’t that hard. I could do it all day, without much effort.

But writing as an art (skill?)? That’s tough. What I’ve decided is that it requires a willingness to be silly. I don’t mean silly like Bozo the Clown silly. It’s something closer to ridiculous, or maybe absurd. A writer has to willing to be vulnerable enough to say things that could be ridiculed, because there’s no other way to say things that are True. Sure, she could write a list of “facts” — but nobody wants that kind of catalog. While they may all be true, that kind of cold reason reveals little about the human condition. It reveals little about what is most True about the world, and it has incredibly little power to move anyone.

I know that the things I’ve written lately have been — bad. I think maybe that’s why. I think maybe, because of several different things that have happened, I’ve shut down some capacity to be silly, ridiculous, absurd, vulnerable — especially in writing, which is a completely different kind of vulnerability. Of course, I could be wrong, I may have just lost any bit of skill that I ever had. Writing papers for school is starting to make me think that’s true, that’s for sure.

I’d love to make a promise that I’m going to try to write like I used — to attempt to vulnerable and have the same ridiculous idealism that I used to have — but I don’t know if that’s possible. It seems like something has…broken. I can’t really say if it’s broken, or just different, but something’s different than it used to be. I know that’s, to a large extent, life, but I would love for the writing to change with me, not to get left behind somewhere. But, between working 12 hour shifts of selling people what they don’t need, trying to please unpleasable managers, and reading impossibly difficult medieval poetry the time to be vulnerable and to find Truth just really doesn’t seem to be there like it used to be. I might just be done. I might have grown up and left all of that behind.

You know the great thing, though, is that change can be so constant you don’t even feel the difference until there is one. It can be so slow that you don’t even notice that your life is better or worse, until it is. Or it can just blow you away, make you something different in an instant. It happened to me.

How do people walk around with music in their ears and look completely unmoved?

Are they just listening to really, really bad music?

I can’t walk around like that. If I walk around (like on campus) with my iPod on, it seriously takes a massive amount of effort not to sing or to do some stupid little dance while I’m listening to music. Am I the weird one? I mean, isn’t that the point of music? Isn’t it supposed to move us? To make us feel something? If you just want noise to let you hide from people, you might as well listen to static. It’s better than some of the shit marketed as music!

Maybe they think they same thing to me, and maybe they’re all walking around fighting it just like I am. Maybe I just have amazing taste (I do.) and I just listen to much better music.

I don’t know. I’ve got no point. It just bugs me.

I know that my English professor doesn’t read my blog, but if he did, he would probably be proud that our reading of some crazy 14th century poem could inspire me to think about my actual life.

I know that if you’re reading my blog, you’re probably already disappointed that I’m going to talk about some crazy 14th century poem. Sorry.

The debate in the poem is simple enough. There is a character called “Meed.” Meed and mead are two different things. Meed is something like (though not entirely) profit-motive. Mead is something like (though not entirely) beer. So, this lady, Meed, is in the midst of an argument. Various other characters are attempting to usurp a marriage between Meed and Truth, and give Meed over to be married to False. Before you tune all of that out — there is an argument over whether profit should correctly be tied to truth (which, for the 14th century British folks would’ve been the truth as expressed by Christianity) or to falsehood. To frame the debate differently — who deserves to prosper? Those who do good, or those who do evil?

In the middle of the debate, a character named Conscience intervenes. In no uncertain terms, he utterly decries Meed. She is no bride for Truth, and her fickleness and manipulation mean that Truth should end his pursuit of her. (Which makes my head hurt. Was a character called Truth wrong?)

That’s a debate that has been around for as long as people could debate. On some level, it’s the “nice guys finish last” discussion. Don’t those who do good deserve to be rewarded? On another level, it’s the issue of whether true altruism exists. Does anyone do anything because it’s right? Or because it’s good? Or do people simply do things because there is, no matter how esoteric, profit?

(At this point, I connect a 14th century British poem with a 20th century British songwriter and with several hundred years of church history. What skill.)

Even Christianity has co-opted this view. The dominant Christian worldview for hundreds of years is a story that is familiar to many of us (and I know that I am oversimplifying this) — do the right things on Earth so that you may have great rewards after Earth. It is, simply enough, profit motive. The profit is not money, or anything temporal. It is far removed and a bit — ethereal, but it exists, nonetheless.

So, with John Lennon, I will, “Imagine there’s no Heaven.”

What if profit motive is utterly removed from the conversation? What if God were to intervene today and tell us that there is absolutely no Heaven, and then when we die, we just die?

What if God were to then say that everything that Jesus told us about the way we live is still true, and that God still fully expects us to live that way?

How would we react to that. It’s sort of the reverse of Plato’s Ring of Gyges story (if you could do evil without the threat of punishment, would you?). If you were expected to do good selflessly without the possibility of reward, would you? Would I? Would anyone?

That’s an EXTREMELY fascinating question. Sometimes questions reveal more than the answers, but I’m not sure what this one reveals. Is it a flaw inherent in the system? Is it a flaw with human nature? Are we so weak that we must be constantly tempted by carrots dangled on strings? Is it just a means to an end because we’re all idiots that need shiny things to make us do any good? Does that reduce faith to ridiculousness? Some well-designed method of control to get people to act as they should act?

What if Lennon is right? What if there were no heaven? How would people act? Would we basically be good? Would we protect each other and the Earth because we know that this is the only shot we have? Or would we be greedy bastards who would take down the whole ship?

If the promise of Heaven is enough to make people act better than they would act without such a promise, is it justified? Do the ends justify the means?

How would I act? Would I be basically good? Would I care for other people and the Earth, or would I be one of the selfish bastards?

Who knows?

(And who said an English degree was useless?)