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I Have Seen The Light
"Pick me. I’m your daisy."
Doc Holiday
from Tombstone
There are many advantages to being completely out of touch with reality, out
of one’s mind, cartwheeling through space and time by means of a warped
imagination. One is that my dreams are far more vivid and striking than a
normal person’s – so vivid and striking as to inspire within me the belief at
times that I have been granted the gift of prophecy or some such. Of course,
this belief is delusional, but at times I still wonder.
Take the other night: I’d stayed up too late after spending another shiftless
day eating government cheese and sponging off of your tax money, using my food
stamps to buy Delmonico steaks and several nice bottles of MD 20/20 to wash it
all down with. I think I’d watched a New Star Trek marathon on the Sci-Fi
channel and was contemplating shaving my head so I’d look like Patrick
Stewart(sp) as, to my mind, his character on that show is second only to
Tartuffe in terms of fictional personages I aim to emulate.
But the capper, I think, was the fact I’d just finished flipping through
Voltaire’s Candide backwards.
Anyway, I fell into a deep slumber and during that slumber I felt a strange
sensation, akin to someone removing bandages from my eyes; and then, all at
once, I saw The Truth. The Truth, it turned out, wasn’t something terribly
complex, not hidden at all – in fact, I’d been hiding from myself in my long
search for it. And The Truth was: I am wrong about everything I suspected
about the world just as most people have always told me.
I found myself standing on a high mountain looking out over the bright and
shining world and could see, for the first time in my life, absolutely nothing
was wrong in that world with the way things are. My so-called "utopianism" was
suddenly reduced to ashes in the burning light of Reality that is, evidently,
already utopian. I had just stubbornly refused to see it for 40 years.
I saw, in the streets of the cities and towns, poor people working 18 hours a
day for very little money and no benefits and no vacations, and something
became apparent – they were happy with that; no, more: they should be happy
with that. That is fair and just. They and everyone else thought it right for
them to labor from dawn to dawn; they did not feel that they needed healthcare
or that their employers or the community had any responsibility for such
things. They were proud of the fact that they were working like slaves and
paid barely enough to live in virtual poverty.
They were proud that, in the State of Georgia as of this year, 1 of every 5
children lives in poverty and, probably, few of them will ever escape it. I
realized that these children enjoy the fact that their parents, since both
parents must work to even survive, are rarely home and, when home, are tired
and often irritable, being under the financial, physical, and mental stresses
they actually revel in.
I realized that it is okay for us to say we value families so long as we don’t
actually do anything to make it possible for families to live in a manner they
can have their priorities straight. Because, in Truth, it was my priorities
that were wrong in the first place: I thought the first tasks of a family were
to love one another, raise the children, spend time teaching them how to do
things and how to tell right from wrong.
No, in this perfect world, the main job of a family is to serve its role in
the economy, make money at all costs for investors and, maybe, enough for the
people working to get by. The second job of a family is to raise warm bodies
to replace the parents when those workers become old and can’t function
anymore. Any other responsibilities and expectations probably come just after
buying a new X-Box and making certain the satellite dish bill is paid.
I saw all at once that poverty was not the evil I’d grown to think it might
be. No – it builds character; it narrows one’s attention; it brings one closer
to God and country. If anyone in this perfect world is burdened, it is the
wealthy: they have so many terrible decisions to make and so much genuine work
to do, deciding how best to create jobs for the poor and how best to take care
of the less fortunate. From my vantage point atop the high mountain of my
dream I could see for the first time all the rich had always, from the
beginnings of the world, spent many a long hour of their lives completely lost
in the service of others. And they did it so quietly, no one noticed! My idea
they ought to be taxed to insure the public good suddenly seemed punishing and
wicked.
No, the poor are only doing themselves a great favor by making profits for the
wealthy while receiving little in return. By allowing the owners to take a
significant part of what they make, their lives become much simpler and easy
to manage, especially when they do not receive raises to keep up with the
rising price of fuel and goods and education and healthcare. Cars cost a lot
to manage – if the poor can’t make enough to maintain them, they can walk 20
or 30 miles to work each day here in rural areas. And that improves health, so
who needs healthcare? And since poor working people can afford fewer groceries
as prices rise and wages remain flat, they will all start living off tomatoes
grown in flower pots or home gardens, and that, I realized, is pure health
food.
As for education, well, how much does one need to mop a floor or do service
jobs? "Hi, may I help you?" is easier and cheaper to teach than differential
calculus. Reading and writing – after mom and dad teach you how to read Cat
in the Hat and sign your name (sort of), what more does one want or need?
In fact, it is dangerous to teach the young (or old) to read anything beyond
"See Spot run" because, inevitably they’re going to wind up trying to read the
classics or Cerevantes or Swift or Voltaire or the Founding Fathers or
histories or philosophers or Faulkner or Orwell. God forbid, they may read The
Beats or Hunter Thompson, too.
Their pure minds will become polluted. They will ask too many questions, they
may even move on from signing their name to expressing their own thoughts in
words, and just look at the damage that causes. People that write and draw and
whatever, when they aren’t aiming to only make a few bucks, have a nasty habit
of saying or showing things good people would rather left unsaid and covered
over.
After all, why do you think Plato didn’t want the poets hanging out in his
perfect city depicted in The Republic? He says they lie; maybe it’s
more like they don’t sing the official version of the news. And in our perfect
world, the official news is the only real news, and you find it on the Fox
Channel.
And I saw, from that wonderful peak, that there were no people in authority
who did not deserve to occupy the fine offices they sit in. Didn’t the Bible
say, according to some interpreters (the only correct ones), that those in
authority are chosen to be there by God Himself? Who am I to question God,
then? From King Herod to Attila the Hun, from Richard M. Nixon to George W.
Bush, a leader is a leader and is supposed to be there, no matter how they
came to power or what they do with it.
A person at any level of authority can do no wrong in this best of all
possible worlds, whether that person is a parent, a boss, a high school
assistant principal, a principal, a school superintendent, a cop, a county
commissioner, a legislator, a judge, a governor, a vice president or
president. By definition, they are always right, otherwise they would not hold
their office as given to them by God; they are right even when they are wrong.
And the more wrong they are, the more I learned in my dream I am supposed to
scream they are right.
Why, the world might fall apart if we acknowledged authorities can be in error
or may have no business in their offices. We’d have to rethink a lot of
things, beginning with this belief God gives the thumbs up to all leaders and
supports all or any of their decisions. To do that, we’d have to question the
interpreters of scripture who gave us this story; and to do that, we’d have to
believe that some people who claim to speak on behalf of the Almighty might
really just be speaking on behalf of some worldly power they happen to like or
want something from. But, in this perfect world, to think such a thing is so
cynical and bitter that I realized it was one of the sources of my problems in
the waking world that kept me blindfolded and unaware of The Truth.
I saw that, in the dungeons of our nation, that what we were doing with war
prisoners wasn’t really torture. In the perfect world, when the leaders hire
lawyers to redefine things, the things themselves really change, too. (After
all, we redefined ketchup to be a vegetable in school lunchrooms and, lo, it
became a vegetable -- but only in lunchrooms.)
I saw that letting loose attack dogs on prisoners, rape, beatings with metal
flashlights, kicking people’s ribs in, playing metal music on loudspeakers 24
hours a day while leaving the lights on in a cell for the same time for weeks,
drowning, even killing – once upon a time, for centuries, we’d have called
that torture. Now it’s called "lawful interrogation techniques" even though
the purpose of an interrogation is to elicit intelligence and it has been
proven one gets little trustworthy intelligence by means of such techniques.
But again, that is not the right attitude. My so very wrong inclination is to
see in these things, not interrogation, but vengeance, out of control anger,
sadism, dehumanization of captor and captive. But all of that is foolishness
on my part, as I realized in my dream.
I saw that abduction isn’t abduction if we call it "extreme rendition." I saw
a P.O.W. isn’t a P.O.W. if we call him an "Enemy Combatant." They aren’t even
people if we call them "Enemy Combatant." I saw we like the Geneva Conventions
when they apply to everyone except us and, when the Supreme Court discovers
they actually do apply to us, I saw that we can fix that by changing the law
and changing definitions.
I saw that the Constitution can be suspended by the will of the president and
we can be spied on without anyone overseeing the administrative branch, all
with just a few words from a lawyer. I learned, in the space of one night to
see how amazingly magical an Ivy League lawyer is, changing everything from
ketchup to the Constitution with a little memo. This world, the perfect world
I have denied and fought so long, is better than a Harry Potter novel.
And it was revealed to me that, since everything is just as it should be and
must be, there’s no more reason to vote or even pay attention to my
representatives – God is evidently moving them all around so they don’t need
my interference in the process. They don’t need the prying eyes of the press,
either, whether the paper be a large one or small. In the best of all possible
worlds, this one, our world, the role of a newspaper is to try to act as
cheerleader to businesses, attract tourism, print the police blotter, have
some sports reporting, run ads and sales papers, maybe a column about how
somebody’s Southern grandmammy cooked taters and beans in grease while putting
on mascara and how men like to whittle while lyin’, and that’s about it.
In a perfect local newspaper: a bad play never happens within reporting
distance and poor acting does not occur; no one ever sings off key in a
musical; there are never too many musicals in one year; the art that gets
reported on is mainly folk art or faux impressionism (anything with country
themes or flowers), and it’s all good stuff, on the level of Michaelangelo
(though you can’t show HIS pornography in the paper – he created nude figures
and put them in churches of all places).
There is no boring music in the local scene and all venues are affordable, no
matter how high the price. There are no expensive places to eat that really
aren’t all that enjoyable, such that one might find oneself much more
comfortable eating a sundae at the Dairy Queen with all that cash left over
had one decided not to go. Newspapers aren’t supposed to say anything critical
of anything. They’re just one long advertisement.
What we absolutely don’t want in the perfect world are complainers.
Complainers about politics, ethics, culture – people with a different point of
view from the majority. Everyone ought to be in the majority – or pretend they
are by smiling and remaining silent. That’s what helps keep the best of all
worlds perfect; that bit of The Truth stood out starkly as I dreamed.
I heard a voice behind me, turned and saw a large crack in the ground with
stairs going down, so I followed them to see more of the perfect paradise I
really live in. Down, down I went into the gloom, but soon I realized the air
was filled with smoke and moans and firelight flickered luridly on the dark
walls. "Kid, down here," came the voice. I looked down to see an old, pudgy
man with a balding head and pug nose – he could’ve been Socrates or my first
philosophy professor, Dr. Severins, I’m not certain.
He was sitting back against a rock drinking wine from a big cup and he seemed
tired.
"Take my advice and don’t ask any questions." His voice was slurred. "The
world is like it is; it’s always been like it is; it’ll always be like it is.
I tried to ask questions and look where it got me: Hades. You’re just wasting
your time with all of this writing and philosophy crap. Where’s it getting you
or anyone else? Why don’t you write something for the paper about how your
Southern grandmammy cooked beans and taters in grease while applying mascara?
I bet you’d make a fortune. And, son, that’s what it’s all about – m-o-n-e-y."
"Oh no!" I said. "This can’t be real! It’s a nightmare!"
And sure enough, it was. So I woke up and wrote it all down, just because I am
foolish and don’t seem to be able to shake the habit. Plus my grandmammies
didn’t wear mascara.
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Richard Van Ingram
Copyright © 2007, All Rights
Reserved