Dear diary,
If you read more books, you’ll have more to rap about, right? That’s what I thought. I first started reading books to improve the content of my raps. My first love was rap music. I noticed that rappers usually rapped about the same few topics, and I wanted to be different. Yes, it was a sure-to-lose idea.
Actually, my first love was not rap but literature; I only gave the honor to rap above because I forgot about my earliest childhood: now I remember my grandmother reading to me storybooks about a lumberjack who contested an automatic woodcutting machine. And also The Little Engine That Could, which taught me bad habits like “don’t give up.”
Stick·to·it·ive·ness is just another word for obsessive compulsion.
What if you have a family, a spouse and children, and you go to work early in the morning and slave away all day to “put food on the table.” I hate that cliché. What are you hoping to get from this grind? Your children will eventually grow up and get spouses and have children of their own, and then THEY will have to slave away all day. I can’t get over the worthlessness of this cycle. Unless you love the present moment, you’re lost – this is why I try to stay centered in “Song of Myself”: it’s my only hope. But everywhere I look, there’s family men hating every minute that ticks by, for the sake of love. And our empire perpetuates war in the name of peace. It would be too risky to end all wars, for then the great Unheimlich might arise. It all seems so predictable. If you like killing bombing injury and death, then just admit it and proudly tout your warrior bent. And if you judge yourself to be a worthless failure but you’re hoping against all odds that one of the children you’ve produced might strike it lucky and have a somewhat human life...
I guess what I’m saying is that too many people are dishonest with themselves: the amount of self-deceivers in existence at the moment is unmanageable. A manageable amount would hover around 20%, meaning that two out of every ten people would be chronically self-deceptive, but currently it’s upwards of 98%: that’s drearily high. (These figures are baptized in science, because I envisioned myself wearing a lab smock while dreaming them up.) And because I see so many examples of this—it’s everywhere I look; I can’t escape it—I worry that I might be guilty of the same type of self-deception.
Let me test this fear: If it’s valid, then what am I deceiving myself about? I say, nothing; because I readily admit that I hate everything, and for this reason I refuse to DO anything. I only stay taut at the end of my chain and growl. So where’s my dishonesty? I think I’m in the clear. Yes, I am one of the only persons in the world who is proper and good.
(This entry was scatterbrained because I’m preoccupied with fears about a moisture-damaged wall that I have to repair, and I’m writing only to escape from this responsibility; whereas normally I write to prove points and confuse the devil. The rest of the post consists of quotes from, and reactions to, a novel by Gore Vidal; so if you’re against the unfun of misreading, simply press the “Eject” button now and parachute to safety.)
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I finished Gore Vidal’s Empire last night. I’ll copy a couple of the parts that I liked, from near the end.
In this first excerpt, all references to the railroad might be modernized by swapping that term with whatever new technology has lured wealthy opportunists to act like spoiled babies. From what I can gather, the railroad was (un)improving that age the way the Internet is (un)improving our own. Also note how campaign donors have long been a problem.
The regulation of railroad rates was, somehow, at the center of the national psyche. The progressive saw it as a necessary means of controlling the buccaneer railroad operators, while the conservative courts and Senate saw it as the first fine cutting edge of socialism, the one thing that all Americans were taught from birth to abhor. Characteristically, Roosevelt was vacillating. When he had needed money for his presidential campaign he had asked the railway magnate E. H. Harriman to dinner at the White House; no one knew what promises were exchanged. Yet Caroline had taken heed of one of Adams’s truisms which was so true as to be ungraspable by minds shaped from birth by an American education: “He who can make prices for necessaries commands the whole wealth of all the nation, precisely as he who can tax.” That said it all.
I’m fascinated with how effective the U.S. propaganda against socialism has been. My own parents were walking tributes to... Never mind, I don’t want to talk about my parents; it’s bad enough that I had to live through their political wrongheadedness. I just want to record another small comment on that dreaded ‘s’-word; what Vidal writes is nothing new, but I think it’s worth repeating until the notion is so solved and forgotten that it is no longer intelligible.
But first I should note a couple things. One of the characters in Vidal’s novel is named for and based on the historical figure William Randolph Hearst. Wikipedia’s entry on him introduces Hearst as “an American businessman, politician, and newspaper publisher who built the nation’s largest newspaper chain and media company Hearst Communications and whose flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation’s popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories.” And since the term is also used in the quote below, here’s a quote from the entry on yellow journalism: “a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism.”
Incidentally, nowadays isn’t almost ALL journalism yellow?
Now here’s the passage from Empire, which begins by mentioning a natural disaster, obviously different from the present hurricane Harvey, but since all such tragedies share a general blank, it’s hard not to compare Hearst’s actions to current U.S. president Trump’s – also now having mentioned Mr. T., I recall an interview that he underwent with director Errol Morris, where Trump equivocated about his purportedly favorite movie Citizen Kane (1941), whose story and lead character, as everyone knows, were “inspired by” Hearst’s life story—so there’s a web of comparisons between Hearst and Trump which transfixes me like a cat with a really good toy.
When, in April, San Francisco had been levelled by earthquake and fire, Hearst had taken over the rescue work; had fed people; sent out relief trains; raised money through Congress and his newspapers. Had anyone but Hearst been so awesomely the good managing angel, he would have been a national hero and the next president. As it was, he was forever associated not only with yellow journalism, to which most people were indifferent, but with socialism (he favored an eight-hour work day), the nemesis of all good Americans, eager to maintain their masters in luxury and themselves in the hope of someday winning a lottery.
The very end of Empire is my favorite part: Vidal dares to imagine for us the words exchanged at the clash of the (tiny) titans; his own note explains “While the final meeting between Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst did take place within the context of the Archbold letters, no one knows what was actually said. I like to think that my dialogue captures, if nothing else, what each felt about the other.” By the way, I call these titans tiny not only because the concept strikes me as humorously oxymoronic but because I always think of true titans as “The ancient Poets” who, Blake says, in his Marriage of Heaven & Hell, “animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of ...whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.” Enlarged and numerous senses—that’s the key; that’s what’s lacked by these powerful businessmen and politicians—as it is written (Blake again): “For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Now having disparaged these fools sufficiently to temper their awesomeness, I can give the quotations...
But first one thought: While reading of Hearst, as I said, I like to compare him to Trump, AND contrast the two—for sometimes they look to be luging down parallel doom-chutes, each in his own epoch, and other times they seem even to be at odds: opposites—yet whether they match or not, I remain interested. Trump won the Republican nomination and then the presidency; that’s what I ponder when, after Hearst says “You understand nothing, Mr. Roosevelt,” Teddy replies:
“I understand this much. You, the owner—no, no, the father of the country, couldn’t get the Democrats to nominate you for president even in a year when there was no chance of their winning. How do you explain that?”
What follows is the paragraph I really wanted to get to (again, I keep wondering: Trump or no?):
Hearst’s pale close-set eyes were now directed straight at Roosevelt; the effect was cyclopean, intimidating. “First, I’d say it makes no difference at all who sits in that chair of yours. The country is run by the trusts, as you like to remind us. They’ve bought everything and everyone, including you. They can’t buy me. I’m rich. So I’m free to do as I please, and you’re not. In general, I go along with them, simply to keep the people docile, for now. I do that through the press. Now you’re just an office-holder. Soon you’ll move out of here, and that’s the end of you. But I go on and on, describing the world we live in, which then becomes what I say it is. Long after no one knows the difference between you and Chester A. Arthur, I’ll still be here.” Hearst’s smile was frosty. “But if they do remember who you are, it’ll be because I’ve decided to remind them, by telling them, maybe, how I made you up in the first place, in Cuba.”
It sounds initially like an exaggeration, but then I think: yes, without the press, how would we know anything about the world beyond our garden? And I think of the politicians who’re being invented presently, for the next election; and which players shall benefit from what these pieces do?
I skip ahead to this other paragraph that intrigued me; this is still amid the face-off with Teddy the prez:
Hearst sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. Eyes on the ceiling fan. “When I saw what my invention could do, I decided to get elected, too. I wanted to show how I could take on the people who own the country that I—yes, that I helped invent—and win. Well, I was obliged to pay the inventor’s price. I was—I am—resented and feared by the rich, who love you. I could never get money out of Standard Oil the way you could. So in the long—no, short—run it’s who pays the most who wins these silly elections. But you and your sort won’t hold on forever. The future’s with the common man, and there are a whole lot more of him than there are of you...”
I can imagine Trump “deciding to get elected” in this way; I can imagine him wanting to “take on the people who own the country”; but I wonder: could Trump declare, with Hearst, that he is “resented and feared by the rich”? I can conjure reasons for yes as well as for no. And if Hearst is right that he lost the election solely because Teddy could summon funds from donors who all disliked Hearst, then did Trump find a way to win over these types of donors, did Trump learn from Hearst’s mistakes? or are we living in the “common man’s future” where the requisite votes can at last be corralled by a Hearstian figure? ...Or am I off-base in every way? Yes, let’s go with that; it rings the truest: I am off-base in every way.
One more lengthy passage, the very conclusion of the novel, I’ll copy here because I’m attracted to the perversity of using the same high notes to end this low blog. (Doesn’t Nietzsche’s Zarathustra say somewhere that it is better to steal outright than to accept charity?) Again, the name “Bryan” below refers to congressman William Jennings Bryan; his surname is my forename—this is just a frivolous reflection, but everyone’s always teased me for having two Christian names and no patronymic: Bryan Ray; yet now I realize that it’s even worse, that my first name is a last name and the last shall be first. So here is another too-base-to-mention construal that I insist on mentioning: I like to imagine that Hearst is talking about Yours Truly when he says below “I’ll hire you to write for me, the way Bryan does.” And I love that Roosevelt considers my writer’s life as beneath even a hypocrite’s and equates such an existence with being “a scoundrel.” But what I love most is the volleying about history that follows this opening salvo. I never tire of repeating Emerson’s famous line from his essay on the subject: “...there is properly no history; only biography.” Now here’s Vidal’s finale:
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