The Monkey In The Mirror

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation And Empire, a genetic freak known only as The Mule seems to arise from out of nowhere and manages to take control over the better part of the galaxy. Similarly, a man who I’ll refer to as The Monkey has managed in the last year to capture the Republican nomination for President despite having been dismissed by the prognosticators of the media. Whether he too is a genetic freak is an issue I shall leave to others to decide.

But like The Mule, no one seems to be able to account for the trajectory of The Monkey, nobody can explain how someone so seemingly lacking in positive human attributes has been able to have the success he has enjoyed. Everyone has their pet theories as to how The Monkey has managed to achieve the nearly impossible while breaking all the rules, but none of the explanations seem convincing. More often when people attempt to exposit a theory it is merely a matter of finger pointing.

In Foundation And Empire, it turns out The Mule has the ability to control the minds of others, and perhaps that might help explain The Monkey. Somehow when The Monkey’s minions look at him they don’t see the obnoxious, hateful, bloviating simian, they see what The Monkey wants them to see. Well, actually, even his minions have to admit that he’s an unlikeable character, and yet they are able to see past the gruff exterior to the warm, caring individual that the rest of society does not see. Like a lonely woman who wants to feel loved, the supporters of The Monkey ignore all the warnings their friends raise and prefer instead to see the knight in shining armor their hearts cry out for. True love, after all, is a matter of the heart, not the head.

What then accounts for the unprecedented success had by The Monkey? The truth might be quite obvious and yet so unpleasant that we would rather not admit to it. The liberals want to blame the conservatives and the conservatives want to blame the liberals. Indeed, everyone’s pointing their fingers at someone else. But nobody seems to want to take a hard look in the mirror. Maybe The Monkey isn’t some random occurrence or the cause of some other party. Perhaps we, individually and collectively, are to blame for the ascendance of The Monkey. Perhaps we have somehow allowed ourselves to slide down somewhat on the evolutionary family tree.

What would make a narcissistic capitalist monkey popular? Perhaps it is due to the fact that we have been permitting narcissistic capitalist monkeys to tell our stories for us for the last thirty years, beginning around the time of Alex P. Keaton. Perhaps it is because we have been told over and over again if you are good you will become rich and if you are rich you must be smart. Perhaps the values of free market media have finally overtaken the values humanity has lived with up until the time television took over as the voice of authority in every home.

Maybe we have become a nation of narcissistic monkeys ourselves, whose only purpose in life is to get more for ourselves and not worry about the results of our actions. After all, are we not always being urged to satisfy our gluttonous cravings for anything advertisers are selling? Isn’t it our patriotic duty to be selfish and arrogant?

Perhaps the Republican Party is the natural home to the narcissistic capitalist, but the opposition is merely a kinder, gentler, more hypocritical breed of monkey. Those who claim they have been the alternative to the narcissistic capitalists have not been averse to eating from their hands whenever it is outstretched to them. We are all of us living in our own little jungle, not willing to contemplate the larger world outside.

For a couple of generations now, we’ve been living a sort of delusion, a mindset sold to us by advertising executives. It’s a delusion that tells us we don’t have to think hard or grow old. We try to live this lie by doing the only thing that is in our control, refusing to grow up. Growing up means accepting that we as adults have certain societal norms we should live up to and sometimes apologizing for our behavior when we have failed. It means taking responsibility for our own actions. Growing up means grappling with difficult questions and finding solutions. But we have become a society that will no longer admit that we are ever wrong or responsible for anything we’ve done.

The Monkey will never admit wrongdoing. That’s part of the narcissistic package. Or perhaps that’s sociopathy, I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist. The point is, we live in a world nowadays where nobody feels responsible for anything and nobody feels like they have to set the good example. Everybody is worried about their rights and nobody about their responsibilities. It’s no wonder why we can convince ourselves that a monkey is worthy of leading our country nowadays. It’s no wonder we can overlook his many and pronounced flaws.

A society of monkeys doesn’t have to worry about the long-term implications of their behavior, after all, we’re just monkeys. To monkeys, the Middle East exists for no other reason than to be a holding tank for the oil that will eventually be consumed by our vehicles. Central America is there as a place for us to vacation or as factory labor to make our clothing.

If we’re monkeys, all we have to do is select an alpha-monkey to subject our will and our decision-making abilities to. Of course, if you know anything about primate behavior, you’ll know there are some rather unpleasant aspects to subjecting yourself to a dominate ape, but being monkeys we really don’t care to speculate on such matters. Monkeys aren’t known for their dignity or self-respect.

We can pretend if we like that The Monkey is an aberration, sprung upon us by random chance. We can believe that we only have to defeat The Monkey in his attempt to win the presidency and disaster will be averted, that we will have confronted and won the important battle of our age. But if The Monkey is not some fluke, if The Monkey is merely a symptom of the monkey within all of us, a symptom of a monkey virus that has been spreading in our society for thirty or more years, then the defeat of one monkey, even if he be the alpha monkey, will do little to change the path we are on.

There is a voice inside us that says we merely have to turn out in November and cast our vote for the lesser of two evils, that everything else we attempt to do is not merely wrong but will end up helping The Monkey. It is a tempting voice, a voice for the status quo. It tells us that we are basically fine and all we have to do is overcome the enemy that sprang from nowhere and can be cast back into the abyss by following the accepted wisdom. This voice speaks to our laziness of thought, our unwillingness to take a hard look at ourselves or the position we now find ourselves in. It speaks to the monkey within us all. But before you decide, take a look at The Monkey, and ask yourself if that is really what you want to be.

War Or Peace

You cannot make war on war, you can only make peace on war. You cannot profess to fight for peace, only work for it. War and peace are alternative paths we can take, different kinds of behavior. They are opposite paths. It is a choice we must make, war or peace.

Once you commit to peace you must leave behind the weapons of war, the mindsets that permit you to see the other as the enemy. You must beat the swords into plows and start tilling the earth, plant seeds rather than attempt to burn the crops of your neighbor.

To believe in peace you must help your neighbor rather than withholding your help for fear of him using your vulnerability to harm you.

Make no mistake, when you choose war you have chosen war. You do not choose war in order to achieve peace. When you choose war you have abandoned peace. When you choose war you abandon the very ideas that make peace possible.

When you choose war you choose “me” over “us”. You choose fear over hope.

Even when war leads to victory it plants the seeds of future wars. No vanquished nation or people ever forgets their defeat. The wounds of war never heal. They fester, for years, decades, centuries, until the time for vengeance arrives. And that vengeance is but another justification for their enemy in times to come.

Peace is the planting of seeds for the future, an optimism. War is a succumbing to the immediate fear. A commitment to peace requires faith while war is a surrendering to the fear that is the basest instinct of our animal nature. It is the fallback, the final position when all else has failed, just as an ill-adjusted adult falls back to infantile patterns of behavior when confronted with a situation he cannot control. As one of Isaac Asimov fictional characters was fond of saying, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

The thing is, it may work for some…for a while. And from that, others deduce that it is a valuable tool or perhaps a necessary one, an ever-present threat to be held against others in order to entice them to the bargaining table. But show me the nation that has risen by war that has not fallen in the same manner. What works for the individual does not work for a nation. What works for the life-span of a human will devour a country in the span of several human lifetimes. And beyond that, what works for the individual is toxic for the whole. Humanity has endured through war not because it is an inevitability but because its scope has so far been limited. But larger and more destructive tools of mass-destruction have been filtering into more and more hands. With the greater proliferation of such weapons will come the increased desire to use war as a means of protection against such weapons. At some point the desire for individuals and nations to protect themselves will mean the end of us all.

There is no peace that war provides. Even those who believe in war have no ultimate answer as to how we can forever forestall nuclear war. They provide no vision of a nuclear-free future, no security. They offer only immediate actions to stave off whatever the most pressing problems might be. But the road they propose we take has only one endpoint. War leads to war, not peace. Choose now the path you wish to take.

The Things That Once Were

Editing is a good thing, undoubtedly. But there is nothing like the feeling of actually creating something without worrying too much about what one is creating. To be in the flow without the critical side of you constantly seeking to slow things down is akin to skiing down a mountain for the first time. And so with that thought in mind, I am giving you a blog post I have written completely free of any kind of censure. Take it for what it is:

I spent the day cleaning my basement as a way of avoiding writing. I haven’t written a thing all month, nor have I made a sale. It’s not that I’m despairing of writing, it’s just that I lack aim. Desire roils within me but every direction I take soon seems to be the wrong one. So I dig through the pieces of my past in order to find the man I am supposed to be.

I have gone through my books; so many of them have accumulated through the years. The 18 years since I graduated seem to me to have been one big long push. I’ve bought books intending to read them when time permits but it never has. I realize now that no matter what I do in life I will have only scratched the surface of what there is to know, to discover.

There is a bookmark on page 74 of The Blood of Abraham, by Jimmy Carter, a book dealing with the Middle East. I bought and began to read it when I was 20 in 1986, and that’s as far as I ever got. I also began Dostoyevski’s The Idiot about that time, but somehow managed to finish that one. I’ve found my highlighted copy of Erich Fromm’s Sane Society which I feared I had lent out and would never see again. I bought another copy, but there’s something priceless about a book you’ve taken the time to highlight the truly essential parts.

And there’s something special about the actual copy of a special book you’ve read when you were younger. I still keep the Lord Of The Rings boxed set I got for a Christmas present from my brother Rick when I was around the age of 10. The books, especially The Fellowship of the Ring, are no longer in one piece. But there is a picture on the top of the box of the fellowship as they walk away towards their great adventure. It is defining in my memory. You can only see the backs of the nine, but the memories the picture conjures up are still vivid. And so I hang on to that set even though I have another brand new one awaiting the time when I shall once again explore Middle Earth.

I also have 2 sets of The Foundation trilogy. Again, I cannot bear to get rid of the ones in which I first discovered the Trantorian universe. But I managed to pick up a set with the cover art done by Darrell K. Sweet. Perhaps it is wrong to judge a book by its cover, but the cover should try to live up to what lies inside.

Darrell K. Sweet’s work is what originally interested me in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I was too young to afford the books when I first saw them, but I eagerly pounced on each as they would arrive at the local bookstore I’d frequent to by a comic book, something which at 25 cents a pop, was well in my price range. A while later, while helping my brother Bob move, I couldn’t help notice the three box set of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant in one of his drawers, still in shrinkwrap. They ended up being my Christmas present that year. To this day, I have no idea if they had been intended as a gift or if I made such a fuss over them that he felt compelled to give them to me.

It seems that 15 years in my basement has put some age on these dear friends of mine. There is a certain mustiness to them, a degree of dust that has accumulated, and some mold that I cannot dust off the tops. The dust cover of Jean Dutourd’s Pluche is barely hanging on, yet I cannot bare to part with it.

I cannot believe I have allowed the things I have held so dear to endure the ravages of time and neglect in this way. For all my good intentions, life somehow managed to separate me from them. But I have lived long enough now to realize that it is the way of all things. Things get pushed to the side, forgotten about, and sometimes replaced. We can only carry those we love so far before we are exhausted by the burden. I seemed to have been born with a sense of nostalgia, always desiring to preserve what came before me. But I am beginning to feel that I too am but part of the great caravan marching towards dust and nothingness.

It may sound as if I am despairing, but I’m not. I’m merely trying to make sense of it all. I’m simply trying to understand what it is I was put here for and what I can do with the time allotted me. I realize that in order to hold on to what you have you have to let go of what you once had. I do not wish to let go of my past. I’ve always felt that my principle aim in life was to remain true to the child I once was and the ideals he held deal. But I realize that life moves on, that sometimes what you are holding on to is merely a shell of what it once was. And so I search amongst the things of my past, hoping to grasp the essence of what once was so important to me.