Out of the Belly of Conservatism

To me, American Conservatism is an outmoded political philosophy, closely linked to Christianity, that espouses tradition, the safe and familiar, the expected—an ideology that belies a rapidly changing, diverse, and interdependent world. 

I haven’t always been a Liberal.

  

I thought I was a Democrat in my teen years because my mother was a Democrat but I had no idea what that meant other than fealty to family. I had no idea what politics meant and I didn’t care to know. Talk of it was boring and confusing. I had better things to do: Cruise town. Chase girls. Drink beer. School was incidental and college was out of reach both academically and financially. I did, however, manage to graduate, barely, and get myself drafted four months later. Even after having done a tour in Vietnam as an infantryman, I was still politically ambivalent. I was drafted under President Johnson and returned from Vietnam under President Nixon, who, just a few months later, faced Watergate. I wasn’t interested in that, either. Making it home from Vietnam alive and intact was enough. I wanted to be left alone and carve what I could out of the so-called “American Dream.” I went to work right away in a dust-choked plywood mill. Married my high school sweetheart, built a house, and had a baby girl—all just in time for the 1973-1975 Recession, which found me furloughed from work off and on, but mostly off, for two years. I took pay cuts, too. Taxes until then had seemed a matter of course but now brought paycheck deductions into sharp relief, and I imbibed the angst of my co-workers who attributed those deductions as money going to those who didn't work. Period. My family and I struggled immensely: We took small loans from family to make monthly ends meet, signed up for food stamps, and got a little unsolicited help from church members. (I was a recent Christian convert, which I’d hoped would soothe my napalm scorched spirit and which seemed an integral part of the American Dream ala God and Country). Although thankful for the help, I was embarrassed to take handouts because as an American I valued the independence that was supposed to come with “The Dream” that was crumbling before me—not to mention that I was reluctantly thrust into the line of those freeloaders. 

Although Nixon was largely responsible for the Recession, its full effects culminated under President Jimmy Carter, who was a Democrat, and he, of course, took the blame. Although I didn’t know the particulars of why he was blamed, I blindingly went along with the scuttlebutt from my rural, provincial community—my co-workers, my friends, my extended family, the local press, and, to my surprise, my church. The pastor preached Jesus alongside Ronald Reagan, which bedeviled me. President Carter was a devout Christian, too. There was, however, a small, discreet space in the back of my mind that pitied President Carter and, although I would never admit it because I wanted to “belong,” I couldn’t find anything about him that I disliked. I had always tried to resist disliking someone on the premise that others did. 

Despite my inklings, I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, the first time I had ever voted, and I felt good about it—about the voting, I mean. Becoming a card-carrying Conservative was as remarkable as breathing air. In my environs, it’s just what you did without question, like fish who don’t question the water they swim in. But how do you get out of the water, so to speak, to question your inherited and inculcated ideological and religious beliefs in order to investigate the world from another point-of-view, which requires time, patience, and the long-suffering that often accompanies the newfound pariah in one’s family, community, and, more crucially, in one’s own mind?

 

For me it was education. Although I didn’t feel like college material, I had a yearning to learn, to know more. There was an immense world out there that beckoned, but my ignorance kept it at bay and I felt stupid, an obviously awful feeling but one that motivated me to sign up for a math course at a local community college. On that first day of class, I sat in my car and watched students much younger than I rush to classes under a hard spring rain. I was terrified and wanted to leave. “This isn’t me,” I thought. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” But I mustered up the courage and went to the class—and that was it. I got hooked on learning. Over a ten-year period (I had to work, too) I earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English, a Master’s Degree in Education, and became a high school English teacher, which came with the added benefit of being a student, too. As the Roman philosopher, Seneca, said, “While we teach, we learn.” 

 

I didn’t see education as completing a menu of required subjects to reach a particular goal. I fell into English as a major because I loved to read and write, latent passions my mother had bequeathed me. I had no idea what I wanted to do after college. I simply went to learn and to widen my experience and worldview, to test what I had previously known by habit and endowment against a sea of previously unknown new and exciting ideas, which necessarily required learning the most vital of skills: critical thinking. Going for a better job seemed a sacrilege. I had a job. It paid the bills. I had enough stuff.

    

Traveling widely also brought me out of the Sargasso of ignorance. I went to teach abroad—in Poland, Kuwait, China, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and visited at least twenty other countries. I saw the Pyramids, Eiffel Tower, Coliseum, Sistine Chapel, Acropolis, Berlin Wall, Auschwitz, Taj Mahal, Great Wall, London Tower, Petra, and many other touristy sites. However, I did not consider myself a tourist as much as I did a student out to learn more about the world, lessons which came to me through numerous conversations with myriad people from different cultures—conversations in classrooms, on street corners, in pubs and restaurants, in airports, at historical sites, and anywhere the opportunity afforded. Despite the conservative angst of “Other,” I was astonished and enlightened when I discovered that people from different cultures (and different religions) were always kind, respectful, and just as eager to know me as I was to know them. During my travels, I was never once accosted or disparaged. I was only ever treated with kindness and respect—and the concepts of national borders, the Other, and “enemy” as I once interpreted them vanished by degrees from my mind.

 

As did my religion, which ebbed away when I learned to think critically, when I learned to evaluate information objectively and to question that information in the light of Reason. I suppose I was around eight years old when I questioned how a fat man loaded with a bag of toys, which seemed paltry little for all the world’s children, could squeeze down the narrow chimneys of myriad homes scattered across the world in the space of one night, or how the same fat man could stay aloft in a flimsy sleigh pulled by reindeer whose only means of propulsion seemed to be in their hooves. I remember wanting an elephant—a real elephant—one Christmas. Why didn’t I get it? After all, I was good enough to get a baseball mitt. Losing those childish myths wasn’t as difficult as losing my religion. Those myths were delightful and didn’t come with fear of eternal damnation or the exile of an unbeliever, as II Corinthians 6:14 commands, “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers.” 

 

The tribalism of Christianity, which seems to focus more on membership and money than on peace and love, has a strong primal pull—until maturity ushers in Reason and when Reason, by turns, resolves cognitive dissonance. I could no longer believe that the Universe was created six thousand years ago by a creator who did it in seven days when, in fact, the Universe is fourteen billion years old; I could no longer believe that a creator formed human beings from dust when, if fact, all life forms on Earth evolved from single-celled organisms that lived 3.5 billion years ago; I could no longer believe that Noah loaded a big boat with two of all the animals on Earth given that there were approximately eight million species of land animals at the time, not to mention that dinosaurs would have to have been in the mix. Preposterous stories like these persist in the New Testament: turning water into wine, raising people from the dead, casting demons into pigs, feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, healing the blind in an instant, walking on water, et al. 

I respect a person’s right to believe in whatever religion (all 4,300 of them) they choose so long as that relationship remains personal and out of the political arena, particularly Christianity which seems to congregate on the Right side. The union of religion and politics throughout history has resulted in at least one hundred twenty-six bloody wars, conquests, and genocides at a cost of approximately one hundred ninety-five million lives. How that needless slaughter of innocent people squares with Christianity defies Reason unless its adherents engage “willful ignorance,” and I think they must in order to ward off the legion of disturbing truths that violate their beliefs: Done enough, swatting away such pesky disturbances becomes less than annoying and eventually axiomatic. Belief remains unassailed or, for the neophyte, a new and strange kind of quixotic reality unfolds, like when reading a Harry Potter novel, which, oddly enough, became a kind of benign religion to many young people.   

Our Book

 

JK Rawlings created an entire universe in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Although there may be similarities, the Universe in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is self-contained: The people, objects, system, religion, and conceptual frameworks–science, mathematics, philosophy– are independent and complete in themselves and require no outside help or resources. The Universe in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has no idea that anything outside it “actually” exists in the same way that we have no idea that anything outside our Universe “actually” exists. Those who claim otherwise are charlatans, conspiracy theorists, and your garden variety nutballs. Our Universe, then, can also be described as fiction–as fantasy. Our Universe, “Us,” is a book of fiction. I say “Us” because the Universe is often interpreted as something “out there” as in “outer space.” There’s no “out there.” There’s only “in here” with you, me, planets, suns, galaxies, space, time, black holes, aliens, et. al., and a plethora of things, perhaps an infinite number of things, we are not yet aware of.

I suspect your first response is “Bullshit! Two plus two equals four is fact, not fiction” and “I’m here in the flesh.”

Who decided that? Where did two plus two equal four come from? It came from humans who developed language, counting systems and later formal mathematical systems to describe quantities. Problem is, humans and systems are both in Our Book and there’s nothing outside the book to confirm that two plus two equals four or that you exist. That can only be confirmed “subjectively” in Our Book which is a closed epistemic (to know or understand) system: When all justification comes from within the same framework, it’s like saying “I exist because I said I exist” or “I exist because my friend Bob said I exist.” These are examples of “dogmatism”: The rigid, arrogant assertion of opinions as absolute, unquestionable truths, often disregarding evidence or opposing viewpoints. It represents a closed-minded, stubborn, and inflexible mindset that resists change. Common in religious, political, or scientific contexts, this attitude stems from a desire for “certainty” but often leads to conflict, polarization, and poor decision-making. The only “certainty” is that there is no certainty. The only “absolute” is that there is no absolute.

In fact, quantum physics bears that out experimentally: There are limits to what can be known simultaneously; outcomes are probabilistic, not guaranteed; reality is not fully definite before measurement; and certainty exists only in probabilities — not in individual events. But there’s a problem with what quantum physics tells us. It’s a great paradox: Humans invented quantum physics in Our Book in the same way that we invented two plus two equals four, which, according to quantum physics, outcomes like “four” are not guaranteed–in Our Book.

Our Book is not unlike Plato’s Cave where prisoners are chained inside a cave and can only see their shadows cast on a wall from a fire built in front of the cave. They believe the shadows are reality. If one of the prisoners escapes, they’ll see the real world and realize all the shadows on the wall were illusions.

“Okay. I get it. Our Book is fiction and reality is an illusion but so what? We have to live in it.”

Yes, we do, like fish who never know their swimming in enclosed water (e.g. oceans, lakes, streams, ponds, aquariums). However, knowing that reality is subjective and illusory can keep those of us who are willing to look askance and question status quo from drifting into dogmatism. And there are a few who will never lose their childlike wonder, their obsessions and passions, or trade their social awkwardness for “normal” to give us glimpses of Truth and Beauty. You may have heard of them. They are visual, literary, architectural, and performing artists; inventors, entrepreneurs, philosophers, and theoretical physicists and, although generally maligned because they can be really weird, they pretty much drive civilization forward–in Our Book.
 

The Great Abyss

 

Anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and happiness are basic emotions. Anxiety, envy, frustration, guilt, and shame are complex emotions. Great is not on either list because great is not an emotion. It’s an abstract adjective that confers a superior, significant, prominent, celebrated, or large and vast quality on to someone or something–as in the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, and the Great and Powerful Oz. True, great can evoke powerful emotional responses from outsiders; it’s only natural for people to get starstruck or wonderstruck when they witness or experience something or someone they perceive as great. However, these emotional responses are the bailiwick of the observer, not the observed. The Pyramids, the Wall, Alexander, Catherine, and Oz can be great in terms of their significance to outsiders but not to themselves. Alexander the Great could no more feel great in the abstract than can the Great Pyramids of Egypt despite Alexander’s self-aggrandizement and claims of divinity, which were simply fronts to cover the abyss.

Great people, however, may feel a temporary, fleeting sensation of elation (as with many narcotics) when great and all its glory is conferred upon them by, say, adoring fans, but when the curtain falls, the applause silences, and the venue empties, what then? What happens in the absence of observers? The great blackface singer Al Jolson (circa early 1920s) was deeply affected when the curtain fell. He struggled with a fear of being alone, and the audience's attention was essential to his emotional stability. Jolson famously prolonged his shows, continuing to entertain the crowd even after the final curtain. In one instance, he continued to sing for an additional two hours to keep the audience from leaving the theater. The applause and adulation Jolson received on stage was missing off stage and the resulting conflict contributed to Jolson’s reputation as a philanderer, wife beater, compulsive gambler, intellectual property thief, and one filled with overweening pride and selfishness. Off stage, and unbeknownst to the audience, Jolson was an awful person. He was, in a word, a narcissist, a trait not uncommon to celebrities of all flavors–actors, singers, athletes, world leaders–who often resort to destructive and self-destructive behavior (alcohol, drugs), including suicide, in their neverending struggle to fill the great abyss. Anonymity is the bane of narcissists. Fame and infamy are pointless in a vacuum.

On the face of it, the antidote to the conflict between on-stage and off-stage, between adoring fans and empty seats, seems apparent: Never let the curtain fall. Keep the fans entertained and applauding ad infinitum at all costs, even at the expense of the celebrity’s well-being and sanity, which is tragic enough. However, the narcissist who inhabits a position of power is another animal altogether. Even though they may possess a modicum of humanity, it is likely fragmented, defensive, or filtered through a need for validation and protection from shame which, as history testifies, becomes a tragedy for humanity, often on immense scales, often brutally. One need not be a student of history to know the names of these notorious narcissistic megalomaniacs. They are etched into our collective subconscious and called to consciousness at the mere mention of despot, dictator, fascist, and authoritarian: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Paradoxically, history is always now. Time flows and stops for no one. Powerful narcissists abound today, and, given their penchant for the spotlight, we know who they are.      

Character cannot be cured. There is no corrective for narcissism, self-aggrandizement, megalomania–nor for the adoring, giddy, glassy-eyed fans who feed and sustain the Beasts they themselves create from their own collective identity in the same way man created mythological gods in man’s own image. There are no cures for tyrants and gods, only aftermath: wreckage, decay, and eventual oblivion. 

Or, as Percy Bysshe Shelley warns in “Ozymandias”:

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

 

 

 

Homage to a Breach

Again, the whale awakens me,
A monstrous blur boiling the
The depths beneath me.

And churns.

It sounds.

Down to sunless worlds,

Down gliding, down devouring

And waits.

Waits for my penance, heartbeats
Buffeting the edge of gull wings.
Breath clinging to grayness,
Foul and forever drifting,

And drifting.

The monster breaches now.
Violating the palimpsest,
Drowning the dissolute and the damned.

And stops.

Freeze-framed in froth interminable,
Suspended beneath a moon sliver.
And the dead eye beckons.

And beckons.

But I haven’t the courage. I am
A bloodless heart pumping colorless ink.
And I row on.

And on.

To join with humanness, my sameness,
On land lusterless and blear-witted.
But I will come again if
Only to pay homage.

If only.


- GB Sanford

 

 

RUSSO

Russo talks like his teeth hurt, a painful sucking in, every word a hiss that accents a lean efficient frame covered with taut grimy skin made swarthy and leathery by unquantified tours in these infernal climes. Serpentine: quiet, probing, fearless—venomous, a Professor Habilis of death. At home and ageless. He doesn’t hump his eighty pounds of killing gear like most Grunts, like me. He is artful, unfettered, and buoyant, a Chagall splashed on primordial jungle. And me: invalid and invalid, a scourge to those who know.

Know what?

I am new, a Newbie: An unblemished creamy white pubescene in crisp clean olive drab and an underbelly softness that belies my adolescent athleticism. Here, I rank a glee girl, naïve and terrified. Of what? Bullets, rockets, and bombs are distant pops, whoomphs, and thuds; ephemeral arcs of pale blue light and laser streaks writ against interminable heat haze, the gray wall of monsoon, the tenacious foreboding night. No more threatening than fizzy Fourth of July keeping—unless you’re unaccustomed, unwonted.

We stop. Russo, ensconced on a throne of rock, looks back at me, past the others. The slack-eyes of homo-cide, an examination without approval or disapproval, a dispassionate probing assessment, a knowing of reckoning.

It gets closer. The war? I don’t know. It. Something unnamed and ominous, a thick mute ground fog that slinks around the gnarled roots of ancient tamarind and banyan trees that nourish and harbor only what ought to be here by default. Not me! Not me! I want to say It gets closer in time but that’s not true. Time back in the world is marked by the familiar, the expected, the regular, the rhythms of life: systolic and diastolic, exhale and inhale, ingestion and digestion, coming and going, birth and death. It’s not like that here. It’s one big isolated cold stone. A dull thud. A kind of static mural where all things are at once, an “Is” that confines you to a singularity laced with the awful knowledge that you are in a vast sea of everything that is nothing: Corporeal-less. Pure existence.

It’s maddening, really, like a fish coming to the sudden realization that it’s in water only to be plagued by “Now what?” or “So what?” or “What to do?” The perturbation of knowing what it should not know: The principal substance of The Apple. The maniacal captain’s terrible white Leviathan. The one that got away? Impossible! It’s interminably here in all its dreadful whiteness—lurking just below the surface as still and silent as a crypt, the lifeless eye probing gray cold water for interlopers, those who dare not pare layers of glia to expose their reptilian core but take monumental pains to excoriate a pearl to fetch a dumb grain of sand. Highbrow thrives in illuminated halls and euphuistic art houses, not here where covert forked-tongued reptiles abound. Intellect here is a quick meal.

I want to know but I cannot formulate the question, construct an algorithm in the soft squish of my brain to collapse infinite probabilities to—arrive: To be the fish out of water croaking on a mudbank, gnawing at a rarefied substance that resists tiny Denovian teeth that will morph into the flesh tearing daggers of scaly brutes, the consummate savages of the Jurassic who will rot with arthropod and vegetable under the grimy skies of Wormwood—that hellish shard of heaven come to cede the slow crushing molars and the hissing vindictive incisors of Russo. Of us all.

No. No death here. The dead are afar, mythical permutations of being. Here, merely blood-greased gray-green heaps of laundry thrown down on fecund jungle floors; shadows slumbering on patchwork fields of new-green rice; pencil scribbles kneeling vacant and awry against altars of rock, tree, bamboo. To favor the dead is to flout life. To feel. They’ll have their revenge after all: Come as vapor that will infuse the mind to poison vitality. Pitch you into a hell impossible to sojourn when you stalked bipedal there. There, where attempts at clarity abet lunacy.

I want to ask Russo, force the moment to a crisis, not to ask why or how or where—but what and when. When will I know—It?

I look towards him only to see heat ghosts wavering above the dais. No matter—and no matter:

I cannot see my mother’s face, feel her gauzy cheeks against mine; hear her hands sighing against the leather of my Oxfords, her clinking and clanking kitchen aria that lays me down to sleep.

The klicks, the hamlets, the rice fields, the jungles, the destruction—the dead—do not pass. No ticks on a clock; no days, months, years; no waning and waxing moon; no rising and setting sun. Illusions all. Artful scabs on the brain that belie my affliction: Clarity.

I am become an absurd contagion, scuttling up and down main street all tattered tooth and claw—looking for home under a noxious rubble of tin and glass.

Sting and Boo: A Study in Draft Dodging

Once upon a time I met a Vietnam-era  draft dodger, a director of an overseas American school who was interviewing me for a teaching job. During the interview, I revealed that I was a Vietnam Veteran, which prompted the director, an affable and evenhanded man, to reveal his role during that war in as unpretentious way as possible. It was a hell of a face-saving effort. Damn courageous, I thought. Try as he might, however, his tale came out as an apologia, evinced by a profusion of inherent rhetorical features, the scrutinizing of which is the province and habit of old English teachers, like me. I felt sorry for the guy. He apparently assumed that I couldn’t cut through the pretense and, what was worse, that I cared an iota, or that I had ever given draft dodgers a second thought. I don’t. I haven’t (until now). They have their war. We have ours. And in momento courage (as opposed to the post facto courage we all have) if it came into play at all—played more in their court.

The guys who burned their draft cards and ran off to Canada to escape the draft and Vietnam were not cowards. Although I wouldn’t know, those acts must have been terrifying at that moment—like the hypersonic sting of a bullet flying very close by your head—the primal fear that resides in the nanoseconds of now, like when someone comes up behind you and goes “boo!” and you, saint or sinner, clutch your chest and holler “shit.” The difference is that “boo” demands an immediate unconscious reaction that quickly fades without qualification of bravery or cowardice until its re-telling, of course. On the other hand, dodging the draft was an extremely risky decision that had no basis in individual past experiences, experiences that wag their finger when you are on the precipice of repeat risky behavior, tales from memory that nudge you back from the cliff. Without those experiences, one consciously reacts with an informed decision against the hormonal chorus that says “stop!” To voluntarily step off the cliff is anything but cowardice.

The draft dodgers were not afraid of going to Vietnam. How could they have been? They had never been there—neither had I—and the networks’ sanitized two-dimensional black and white images of the war that flickered in our living rooms at six o’clock weekday evenings and narrated by the measured and mesmerizing voices of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley were seductive rather than repulsive to impressionable young boys—like the discount store toy aisle loaded with its farrago of plastic olive drab martial play things, cheesy icons of death and destruction—as were the braggadocio stories, an understandable defense mechanism, told by returning vets who were anything but terrified on the trip over in chartered DC-8s crammed with 250—one would have thought—partygoers. Paradoxically, the freedom bird home was as a tomb. In the meantime, we were no more like Billy Jack than, well, Billy Jack, nor did we evolve from an ability to jump up and kick your head off in a wink into a Rambo-type who could single-handedly take out, gorilla-style, a company of soldiers with a knife. We were hometown boys duped and dumped into a damn bad deal where fight or flight was our only chance. There was no time for parsing out morality—or honor. That job falls to Hollywood and The Hill.

Conclusively, the draft dodgers must have been brave boys, boys with solid conviction, who were no doubt dead afraid, who got the boo and sting when the edges of their draft card turned black, curled, and burst into flames, or at the very moment they crossed the border into Canada where, although they knew they could get a hot dog or slice of apple pie or watch a baseball game, they could never return to America and frolic with their families and friends. I can’t imagine it. Choice or not, that’s death!—not the mythical one way boat ride with Charon across Acheron. As one draft dodger put it who stayed put in Canada even after amnesty: “I speculate often on my Americanness. Even though I bitterly reject its politics, when I travel down south of the 49, I'm like a salmon. I know I'm in home water; I can taste it, feel it and smell it [. . .].”

And it was precisely the fear of familiar and familial death that kept us hopeful in Vietnam—perhaps alive— rather than that darky death from which no one has returned, although too many people confuse that death with the heaven and hell scam and live lives in pathological fear mitigated by proselytizing but mostly by the joy of shaking the dust off their self-anointed feet when others don’t buy. The draft dodgers weren’t buying the Uncle Sam scam (substitute heaven and hell with give me liberty or give me death) heavily backed by those of us who also chose, drafted or not, and faithfully fell into ranks behind that avuncular jingoist and marched off, leaving the draft dodgers under the shade of maple leaves in an exacted shame. Of course we weren’t afraid either. Until our boo and sting moments came under the dripping dark of triple canopy jungle—with an exacted shame all its own.