One text to the next

Dear diary,

I said I would quote no more from Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums after giving those last couple passages, but I just finished reading the novel yesterday, and there’s one extra snippet that I want to share — it occurs near the end, in chapter 29; it’s part of a dialogue, which gives the remark a particular significance, but I shall wrench it from its context and let it stand alone:

. . . while guys like us are all excited about being real Orientals and wearing robes, actual Orientals over there are reading surrealism and Charles Darwin and mad about Wetern business suits.

This is the point I’m always trying to make, because all my fellow United Statesians are fad-obsessed with what they take to be Eastern stuff. Kerouac’s novel was published in 1958, so this phenomenon has been kicking for at least a couple years. The thing that irks me about it is not that I prefer one culture to another; I’m just against following and imitating: I dislike taking things at second hand. Instead of seeking for the roots of “genuine” Buddhism, Christianity or whatever, I wish that each soul would filter all things for herself. Invent new religions with new names; let the future emulate us, while we urge it not to.

But I do enjoy the concept of copying and imitating, and I regret that I spoke against it directly above. Since copying is impossible, it’s good to attempt it. Your own deviations from your source, your so-called imperfections with regard to any so-called original, can be seen as that source’s imperfections and deviations from you yourself — it all depends on one’s perspective; and that’s a great game of persuasion. My point is that copying can summon more originality than X, if X stands for any activity other than copying.

So, having finished Kerouac’s text, I proceeded to the next one in my to-do heap.

Now I’m reading this book by a former Wall-Street employee who ended up traveling to all the most economically distressed places in the United States to talk with and photograph the inmates of these Infernos. (I say “inmates” instead of “inhabitants” because the places are so hard to escape they might as well be prisons.) The concept is both attractive and repulsive: What attracts me is the meeting of new people; I hunger and thirst for the stories of others; so I love that these souls who would never have been heard otherwise are given a voice. But what repulses me is the same thing that always has vext me about missionaries: there’s something smug about visiting a realm that you consider to be in need of salvation and exclaiming “Ooh look at these interesting specimens and how they live!” — even if your intention is to help. (And not only because such help is often indistinguishable from harm.) I have a similar problem with charity as it is practiced within the U.S. economic system: anything that doesn’t make poverty absolutely impossible is part of the problem. You go to the poor and give them a little aid, and then they’re forced to ask for more aid later. No one ever gives away ALL HIS MONEY. And when a self-styled philanthropist is asked why he holds back from bequeathing his entire fortune to humanity, he answers:

“Well if I give away EVERYTHING then I’ll just become another soul living in poverty.”

And this is correct, as far as I can tell. But I just wish that someone would do it anyway, for the sake of absurdity. And then another rich man should give everything away, and another and another, until all the poor people are rich and the rich are poor. Then we could finally see if the Ruling Class is correct when it argues:

“If you elevate our slaves to the position of masters, while demoting us masters down to the level of slaves, our ex-slaves will only treat us as badly then as we’re treating them now. Therefore we are justified in our tyranny.”

I personally disbelieve this hogwash. In the present system, at least here in the U.S. of 2019, the finest souls are kept down precisely because they are compassionate and imaginative, while the selfish fearful cowardly and sadistic among us all rise to the top; so if these latter, who are currently the richest of the rich, were to give up their wealth to the multitudes living in poverty, those multitudes would turn around and share their inheritance with all, because the type of behavior required to keep and increase this inherited wealth (ruthless cunning; miserly abstinence; war) is abhorrent to these people — that’s precisely why this system left them destitute in the first place — so this ubiquitous and indiscriminate spreading-of-the-wealth would render the impoverished rich folk wealthy again, thus disproving their theory that all of humankind is as narrow-minded as them.

But this new book (I’m purposely not mentioning its title cuz I only just began it, and I’m not sure that it deserves to be remembered for all of time with the rest of my ramblings — as you know, this diary of mine is the only writing that shall survive when mankind goes extinct, so the beings that survive us will know nothing about our world beyond what I’ve bothered to include in my pages here… & that reminds me: I should go back and redact all the references to Kerouac and his book, cuz altho it is meet for vampires, there are titles more deserving of our mortal successors’ attention, like, as I said before, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, also Joyce’s Ulysses, or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) . . .

But this new book is interesting because it makes me think that everyone is either on heroin and homeless, or on crack and engaged reluctantly in sex work, or both plus more. That’s the life of the average impoverished United Statesian. And all these people are Christians who attend church regularly and devoutly believe in God.

I’m just repeating what is reported in the book: apparently, all the souls who live these dire lifestyles happen to be intensely devoted to religion. (Or maybe I should call it spirituality, since that term has a less pejorative connotation.) Its author, the ex-WallStreeter, calls himself an atheist, and he confesses that this tendency toward Godbelief among the down-and-out surprised him and left him flummoxed. But it didn’t surprise me, Bryan, when I read about these things — it matched perfectly with what I know already, and I saw an immediate analogy between domestic and foreign: between the U.S. poor and the U.S. Forever Wars:

For my first thot was about how United Statesians like my bio-dad assume that the Muslim countries that the U.S. continues to torment actually deserve this treatment because their people are fanatic fundamentalists, not reasonable and level-headed fundamentalists like suburban Christians. But, contra my bio-dad, this militant U.S. behavior was not a reaction to but rather THE CAUSE of these people becoming fundamentalist and fanatical; for the clandestine torment from U.S. “intelligence” agencies preceded and then incited the more overt torments of warfare. Take a happy, healthy, secular country; treat it barbarically, and the people will revert to religion. Treat it more severely barbarically and they’ll revert to fanatical, tribal, fundamental religion. So it shouldn’t surprise us when desperate, tormented people turn to God in a time of need.

But there are also rich people who believe that their wealth is proof that God has blessed them, that God favors them. So this is another reason to believe in religion. Yet it seems a little different from the above example of desperate people clutching to faith for comfort.

And then there are also manipulative leaders, the powermongers of the Ruling Class, who use religion as a tool to control the populace. We shouldn’t wonder why President So-and-So would claim to believe in Christianity, even tho his lifestyle and history and manner of speaking and day-to-day actions all contradict that system’s most central teachings — it’s far easier to get, say, my mom to vote for a representative whose policies are offensive, if that representative claims to “have Jesus in his heart”. But this is so obvious that it’s futile to point it out. Everyone knows this, except for those who need to know this.

So, yeah, religion is cool with me. It’s useful and neat. I like how certain belief systems have books associated with them; and then you can read these books whether you adhere to the religion or not. Some of the religious books have poetry in them; some have stories. The boringest part of any so-called holy scripture is its law code. However, some statutes are almost amusing to read.

If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

This is the same book that many partisans cite as the basis of their stance against homosexuality and other talents, so it has a certain weight to its decrees.

I like that there is a clear price for premarital lovemaking: 500 bucks (I did a web search for “How much is fifty silver shekels converted to U.S. dollars?”), plus you gotta tie the knot, in other words: get hitched. And the money goes to the father of the bride, as if he just made a sale (“you break it, you buy it”). And divorce is prohibited (“he may not put her away all his days”)! HOWEVER, these repercussions take effect only if the culprits are discovered in the act (“and they be found”). So the moral is: Go ahead and enjoy premarital fornication, just don’t get caught; otherwise you’ll have to pawn your Super Nintendo, transfer the proceeds to Mr. Polonius & suffer a lifelong holy sacrament.

I just took the above legal passage at random, but now that I’ve read onward from it, I realize that the next few laws are pretty good too. Here’s the next verse (30) from the same book and chapter:

A man shall not take his father’s wife, nor discover his father’s skirt.

No remuneration or punishment is listed for this. But I wouldn’t try it; the consequences are sure to be kinky.

I’ll give just one more . . . or, no, rather two more: the next two verses, which begin the next chapter (23:1-2) — here the word “stones” is obviously a euphemism for “(male) ovaries”:

He that is wounded in the stones, or has his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.

A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD.

I regret to stop on this note, but I’m tired and hungry; so I’ll say goodbye now. I hope you have a nice day.