from Tao Te Ching, verse 65
When they think that they know the answers,
people are difficult to guide.
When they know that they don’t know,
people can find their own way.If you want to learn how to govern,
avoid being clever or rich.
We heard the sounds of “Heat Wave” coming from the bar band at Bunny’s.
“What movie uses that song?” I asked Lee as we toyed with our bean dinner salads.
“Scorpio Rising,” she replied, without a beat. Only she would know that. This is why we are together.
“Let’s watch it,” I said, going upstairs to find the DVD of Kenneth Anger’s compiled 1960s underground shorts.
Still disturbing, the motorcycle-leather-rebel film is reflective of a time when there actually was an underground, when an anti-establishment stance was still possible. Probably 1970s punk rock was the last authentic gasp of rebellion, before almost immediately being coopted by commercialism.
Last October, when I decided to drop out from writing “Chuang-tse Meets Jesus” for a while, it was an expression of my life-long inability to fit into any social organization. I wanted to take some time off from spouting opinions to the community.
Due in some part to a vigorous religious sectarian upbringing, I have grown to feel most comfortable as an outsider. Just a few years ago I looked into the possibility of becoming a Mexican citizen, where I could live permanently as an alien.
I couldn’t legally become Mexican. The run-around from embassies and officials was endless. The best I could hope for was to be come Mexicanish. The people who used to shout “love it or leave it” at protesters during the awful war years never tried it themselves and I don’t understand why the Tea Party protesters today don’t follow their own advice during these health care years and flee. But unless you are extremely rich or marry someone, you are likely to bear the responsibilities of being an American for the rest of your life, love it or not.
When I retreated from view last October, I thought I might try to update Allen Ginsberg’s great 1956 Beat poem, “Howl,” the one that begins with the best opening line since “Call me Ishmael”:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…,” followed by “Moloch! Moloch! Moloch” and footnoted with “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
You know the poem, right? Or, maybe not.
Anyway, after several attempts and awkward iterations to evoke our present day counterculturelessness, my hommage to “Howl” collapsed. It just couldn’t be done. Rebellion seems to have run its course.
The best we have today that vaguely resembles opposition to the status quo are argument and clever sarcasm. Those arguments feed upon the trolled response and provoke more arguments. No one is convincing anyone of anything. Even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert mostly provide insanely clever positioning that fuels the fires of a rock solid cultural dichotomy. The Tea Party movement is aptly named, fitting in as it does to the Alice in Wonderland reality we’ve all been living for decades.
The howl has become a toothless growl, followed by a yawn. We have circled this ideological yin-yang with wagons of surrealism.
During my retreat, I heard vague rumblings about Champaign’s Mayor Jerry Schweighart’s offhand comments at a Tea Party rally. Apparently, he believes University Avenue actually runs north and south. This went viral on YouTube and soon even the publisher of the News-Gazette was issuing editorials defending the mayor and his right to express direction. And then letters came pouring in demanding that the mayor be allowed his own opinion on the subject.
But what about the street signs?, some asked. Those can be altered. And the phone book? Bribes fixed that.
The 65th verse of Tao Te Ching advises against being clever or rich, for those who would have influence in the world. As for myself, the burden of being rich was taken care of long ago. Strong believers in gentle poverty, Lee and I live in solidarity with the better developing nations. Or, at least, that’s our excuse.
Cleverness is a different problem. For a columnist, it’s a fine line to tread. One can avoid being clever at all and end up sounding like a petrified tree (George Will). Or one can be much too clever by half and come across as crazy, which Garrison Keillor frequently achieves. In the clever department, I figure I’m too much so, but I know that not writing at all helps restrain the temptation to be cute. Go back a few paragraphs. Maybe that was clever about the mayor. Maybe it was just stupid.
In the middle of my self-imposed monastic silence, I received a phone call from the U.S. Census Bureau. A woman read from a script, her voice sounding like the Kindle voice, asking me questions about my availability, my willingness to work, and my loyalty to the Constitution. I answered I was free, relatively speaking, and she soon said, again reading from her script, “Welcome to the Census. You are now a part of the U.S. Census Bureau.”
I showed up for duty the following Monday. After swearing allegiance and being fingerprinted multiple times, I was handed several four-inch thick volumes of training manuals and regulations. “Read these over the next couple of days,” another officious woman told me. “You are in charge of a new operation, the Questionnaire Assistant Centers, also knows as QACs, pronounced ‘quacks.'”
She added, “You’re the man.”
The heads of six clerks at the tables bobbed up, looking to me for their next moves. I was the man. I was sure someone was going to start sticking it to me at any minute. I was the FOS, pronounced ‘foss,’ the Field Operations Supervisor, in charge of the QACs.
We filled out D-308s, D-399s, 505As, 505AAs, and distributed D-10s. Every day someone came into the office having unearthed some new paragraph that upended the previous day’s procedures. There were safety rules about which pocket we were to use for our wallets. There were rules about avoiding moose on the road. I am so not kidding about that. We counted everything over and over again. Before actual census forms were mailed, a notice that the form was coming was mailed out to the masses. After the census forms were mailed, a reminder was mailed that the census form had been mailed. The actual enumerators, who went door-to-door to gather the information, were part of the Non-Response Follow-up operation, or NRFU, pronounced “nerfoo,” These were followed by follow-up enumerators in the Non-Response Follow-up Reinterview operation, or NRFU RI, pronounced “nerfoo are I.”
As the man, I had no time to be clever or even check to see if cleverness was allowed in the regulations. I was responsible for training and upkeep of some 80 different quacks, covering an area south of Charleston to north of Kankakee, west of Bloomington to the Indiana border.
Acting completely at odds with what I thought was my anti-establishment essence, I was unnerved to discover that the experience was exhilarating. I had unearthed my inner bureaucrat.
There came, of course, the inevitable downside. My cleverness had been shelved for nitpicky regulatory exactness, but Lee and I had slipped into the illusion that we were rich. We hired contractors to fix the big hole in the roof of our 19th century house. I no longer had to crawl into the attic to disperse urine to keep out the squirrels. (Do not ask.) I fixed the car. I was even tempted to buy a dishwasher. Lee bought a salad spinner and we went out for Blizzards.
Then, the job ended. Working on “Howl Part Two” no longer seemed possible. We were poor again and I had sacrificed being clever for the brief thrill of becoming a byzantine bureaucratic cog.
Recently, I thought I might return to the religious source of my ancestors to find their original alienation. Those things are hard to shake. Jack Kerouac remained Catholic to the end, despite his sometimes brilliant Buddhist efforts.
I would become Amish. On both my mother’s and father’s family trees, the Amish roots extend back hundreds of years.
But even the pacifist Amish and Mennonites in modern day America have succumbed in many ways to the Moloch of American capitalist nationalism. At the Mennonite Goshen College, they have begun playing the national anthem at sporting events (albeit, not without great controversy and dissent). And the Amish often become quite wealthy in their industriousness.
You can’t just drop out of America and become Amish anyway. It’s probably easier to become Mexican.
Still, deep in my genes and, as Patti Smith sang, in my temperament to live “outside of society,” I am sure there is some ineluctable essence of the Amish in me, no matter how hard I try either to assimilate or alienate myself in or from the culture of today’s madness.
Call me Amishish.