Behold the Side Show: Paradoxxx
boiling hot topic'd take: Can more than one (different) thing be true at once?
The best time in my life thus far might have been when I was living in the back room of my soul parents’ West Village apartment. The Westbeth is an old Artist Co-op that has housed endless prolific movers and mind/body shakers. I lived there while I was going through a breakup. I would wake up and roommate #1 Debra who was in her early 70s at the time and I would do some buck naked fire breathing in the kitchen in a very matter of fact way prior to drinking our Trader Joe’s drip coffee. We are both totality freaks who seem woo woo but really are just existentialist Jewesses who love humanity and are down ass bitches. She is famously adorned in hats she makes out of toilet paper rolls. Her partner who she has since married is also my friend and he once told me that we can classify good people as those who are conscious - he would refer to people as being ‘awake’ or asleep.
Fast forward to the 2024 apex of the third eye open, the ‘Woke’ Left. A different type of awakening. (Speaking of awake, remember the quintessential stoner film from college ‘Waking Life?’ What a fucking rotoscope banger.) Anyways - the ‘woke’ attitude that the left themselves loathe -I should say - ourselves- since I am very much a leftist - and the awakeness that is deplored with seething venom foam upon their lattes for us by the 'far right’ is a hilariously useless and distinctly Western conundrum. I was in my 900th DEI meeting of my life last week with the board of a non profit I work at and it was right after the election. One of our board members sighed in the way you release a moan when you get into a (clean) hot tub or bath and you get a head rush that erases your brain. It is orgasmic. She felt orgasmic that maybe now that Trump had unanimously and democratically been elected the president that we can, as an organization, drop the bullseye bullshit of DEI and stop force feeding her and others on the board workshops and learning around their white supremacy.
I also hung out with a very cancelled friend the other day. A friend who has been accused publicly of having been a part of neo nazi groups in the 80s and 90s. I have other friends who have pasts that are gnarled with deplorability. I know men who have been in gangs and were forced to kill people. I also teach at a prison and somehow reach into the pockets of my imagination to find empathy for men and trans women who have done such impossibly horrible shit I cannot make my mouth say them aloud and I definitely cannot type them here.
The ‘left,’ out loud, believes in Restorative Justice. This idea that humans can make mistakes, be accountable, that with care victims and families can be heard and that Prison Reform is good. All of this to say - I wonder about the song Patience by Confucius GnR. Have people with these collective ideals built in the space for people to do said work and attain forgiveness? I ask this because I have found that the veneer liberals, especially in San Francisco where I live, are hiding behind the language and have no actual spaciousness to allow for people to reform and to be welcomed back into society. I have heard the term ‘Called-in’ rather than ‘called out’ and have seen the word FolX in a lot of emails but I have not seen the casted away, cancelled humans be restored in the cases where it may be deserved. I have seen Liberals turn Nimby-ism to Yimby-ism and have it be quite the same thing with a different color bow tying it neatly. I know that belonging to a set of ideas and tribes is most grounding. I love to know that there is a set of faces and nose turning up I can do to match my peers’. The Police sucks!!!! The Band and the original Slave Patrol. Incels and people who think Birds are not real are the dregs of the internet zombie apocalypse. But something that has happened to me recently is I have started to be ultra confused about what the fuck is real? I am such an asshole with such crooked decrepit ideals in the eyes of even my closest family members? Who is right? Who is wrong?
Us Leftist folxxx can be gentrifying and elitist. For some - it feels like you need a number of PhDs to understand its language and fit into its meme culture. I once thought the word mimetic is what originated the concept of memes.But it does not. We do mime memes, though. And we mine memes. Anyhoo- being ‘awake’ can somehow now feel masturbatory and ultra self-congratulatory and places like the well-funded private school I taught at for 7 years in the Mission in San Francisco live on the cuttingest edge of knowing and employing the correct language to talk about and teach the rich Liberals about the grotesquerie that is systemic racism. The head of the school aptly addressed us as FolX before folx even was a thing!And drove one of the first teslas to hit the mean streets. And made nearly $600,000 per year! Shit is crazy.
Paradox. More than one thing can be true at once. Nuance. A lot of people have been ringing the sirens on this as they write about and share discourse on the US/Israeli Genocide in Palestine upon the invisible beast that is social media. A lot of Westerners share sentiments about how there is no gray area. About how nothing about the war is complex. That has been spoken a lot. This is NOT complicated. I agree and I disagree. I have a paradox. I think that Geopolitics are fucking insanely complicated. The refugees that live in Israel add a level of complexity. The histories of those lands and those peoples. It is whoa. Is whether or not murdering innocent people and destroying their land and having an occupation evil a complicated question? No. It is not. It is evil. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche says: “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” So maybe we are only crazy on the internet. But because we now are the internet - we are goners.
It is wild how vulnerable to being judged I feel writing this rather than if I were to write a salacious Samantha from Sex in the City toned piece about bussy business. How you may be reading these very words and find your gut turning into an oven of hot judgement. That you might feel I am wrong and you are right. I actually know I am wrong and do not know a lot and am open to changing my mind and heart all of the time.
I have been reading On Violence by Hannah Arendt a lot in small jaunts all year and in the end of the little book she talks about Dialectics (how apropos!) and talks about how violence and power are indeed opposites. Not anything to do with each other. This quote struck me and has since left ripples reverberating in my body“No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers.”
All of these swirling ideas are not new. Not-a-one. Have I simply horseshoed into the far right this week and that is why I am thinking this way? Did Luigi push me to my limits the way he pushed so many horny people and pearl cum necklace clutchers?
Jim Jarmusch told us artists to steal from everywhere so it is kosher than no one’s thoughts are original. He said, “steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows.”
I guess this whole blog posticle is devoted to heroes. To our mentors who teach us and we look up proudly. My Debra and Stan in the West Village. My CA Conrad. My Ted Purves. My Ajahn Santacitto. My Rabbi Eisenstein. Thank you teachers!
~ Over and out ~
Jackie
I enjoyed this.