Rhinocrisy

I dropped a friend of mine off at Esalen in Big Sur last weekend; when I stepped out of the car I was greeted by the sound of African drums pounding out a tribalesque rhythm. At once my lip began to curl, and my skin crawled like a seething carpet of bees. Hippies.

I only caught a glimpse of one, maybe in his sixties, paunchy, shifting and repositioning his limbs in some kind of ritualistic imitation of dance. Fortunately I did not have to speak to any one of them, and was thus spared the effort of controlling my tongue, preventing it from twisting and spilling forth a litany of contempt.

I’m not precisely sure what my problem is, or why I should feel such an acute dislike for hippies. I can certainly name two qualities which I associate with them, and which might speed my distaste: cultural appropriation and inauthenticity.

An anecdote I have repeated to illustrate this point: a coffee shop I used to sit in for long hours was also frequented by a young gentleman of the hip persuasion. He had all the essential trappings of his kind: unkempt facial hair, dreadlocks, rough, organic cotton clothing. I overheard him conversing with a young woman, chatting her up, as smooth as a polished buckeye. He roved over a number of eco-tastic and spiritual subjects, finally landing on his devotion to Amma, Amritanandamayi Devi, speaking seriously of her environmentalist ethics. “You know, Amma says you should plant at least one tree every year,” he propounded.

“Do you do it?” his subject returned.

He hid his confusion behind a laugh. “No, I don’t do it,” he admitted. Which was not at all unexpected. He fairly stank of his inauthenticity, which is why he tried so hard to cover it up with the correct physical forms.

I’m convinced that at bottom what motivates most hippies to don the hemp pajamas is white post-colonial guilt. It’s hard to be a white kid in the modern day and age, constantly reminded that your privilege is built on centuries of oppression of people of color. The institutions of your culture have been dissected and identified as racist and patriarchal, run through with all sorts of demonic tendencies and compromised by their ceaseless perpetuation of horrific levels of violence. And on top of all that, you’re not cool, either. What’s a poor white kid to do?

Rather than live with the guilt, I think many try to give up their privilege by running as far from their roots as they are able. They study Third World and First Nations cultures, replace their own discredited institutions with bits and pieces taken from other world-views. They affect appearances of poverty and marginalization.

Why does this irk me so much? First, because I don’t think any of them manage to eradicate their privilege to the extent that they believe they do. Second, even if they did achieve this difficult goal, I’m not sure that their success would be laudable. I’d much rather someone retain their privilege and employ their position to setting the world to right, rather than focus on the more self-indulgent project of removing the source of their guilt.

This is a poor position to take, since I’m certainly not in a position to pass judgment on anyone else, and, furthermore, most of these people are my fellow travelers, and, at the very least, possess the basic desire for promoting social justice. Alas, bigotry grows from stereotyping. Encounter enough of a type and you may reify it enough to form attachments and dislikes.

I’ve been listening to a lot of 80s pop music lately, via Pandora. I know; it’s embarrassing. But what can I do? I like to dance, and I like being reminded that I like to dance. My favorite new discovery is this one:

Today I received my first really striking demonstration of San Francisco’s famed microclimates. I live on 24th street in the Mission. Right now we have our own personal raincloud, small, but dense and extremely fierce. It is pouring rain down on our block with a vicious determination to soak. If I ride my bike a few blocks north to 19th street, the rain gives way to an ancillary spray of cool mist, blue skies and sunbeams. Fantastic.

No doubt you’ve seen this already, but this guy is a hero and deserves to be lauded many times, so I’m posting it, too. A great farewell to a really shitty man. Hopefully Muntadar al-Zaidi will be okay.

Yes, it’s true. I’ve thought about it, and after doing some math, I decided that we should bail out the auto industry. This is the math:

700/35 = 20

I’m not a big fan of Detroit. They make big, badly-engineered cars designed to fall apart quickly. They had a program of selling larger and larger cars to the American market over the past fifteen years.^* But they do actually MAKE things.

Remember how, in the 1990s, economists told us there was a “new economy”, and from now on we would make our bread from lines of code, “intellectual property” and cunning manipulations of people’s psychological states? Remember how they slowly implemented a program of shifting our “old economy”, based on building stuff with our hands, to other countries? And remember how that turned out to be a load of hooey, and it all fell apart a few years later? Well, now it’s time to shore up the sagging remnants of our manufacturing sector and get back to using our hands again.

It’s somewhat mysterious why there’s so much nervous dry-washing and fidgeting over this prospective bailout. It can’t be the money – we spend the same quantity in Iraq in three months, and we’re giving away twenty times that amount to the financial industry, which hasn’t exactly proved itself capable of handling money correctly. But of course in that case, we’re providing liquidity, the all-important hydraulic fluid which keeps this fabulous capitalist golem moving and flailing. Never mind that the valves and flanges have all burst, and there’s really nowhere for that precious fluid to go except to drain onto the ground. There’s very little point disbursing funds when you don’t have a clue what to invest them in, because all the pieces of the economy that actually produce goods and services – rather than uselessly moving money around – are in tatters. The act of bailing out the financial sector is comparable to a desperate Rabbi Loew operating his golem by standing behind it and repositioning the limbs as necessary. The illusion is gone – it’s not a glorious automaton, it’s not a magical engine driven by the spark of the divine word. It’s just a dead piece of clay. We’re better off coming out from behind the machine and doing the work ourselves – fix what we broke. Let the golem return to dust.

I have little faith that the Big Three will make good use of the money. And perhaps it would be wisdom to let them be dashed to pieces against the rocks of their own failed vision. But I’m more inclined to say that right now we should be focusing on keeping our heads above water. We posted half a million jobs lost in November. And as a great man once said^†, people have got to put food on their families.

^* Culminating in the opening of a Truck-a-saurus dealership down the street from me a few years ago – the flames kept me awake at night and the fumes gave me black lung.

^† Probably right before he fell off a Segway.

While trying to find out about Elton John’s album “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy”, I came across this important piece of news:

In February, a judge in New Zealand made a young girl a ward of court so she could change her name from Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.

While deriving a sense of fiendish pleasure from cataclysm and horror is a relatively normal, albeit contemptible, form of behavior, still, one should maintain a measure of good sense in one’s ghoulish delights. That is to say, it is best to cackle gleefully a safe distance from the burning house, and not when you are still standing amidst the flames, and the beams are coming down around you. But, alas, I have to confess to this level of imprudence.

I was in India when the financial markets first began to melt down, and I noted with some dismay that my initial reaction was NOT alarm, or concern, or brooding, or even a detached calculation, but real satisfaction that the whole mess was at last unraveling. I’ve been waiting for this.

The reasons I felt this way are straightforward: aside from my experiencing the normal thrill that any serious gravitational gyration produces, high finance is the keenest and clearest distillation of a doctrine that I’ve ideologically opposed for a long time. And, to be clear, my opposition is wholly ideological: while I had some expectation this was coming, my expectation was born out of faith rather than theory. It’s the same satisfaction the chosen will feel, as they’re being whisked away in the Rapture, when they look down to see the earth crack open, and a wave of demons riding on a tide of magma pours forth to engulf billions of pitiful, wailing human beings in their fiery, merciless clutches: “My God! I was right the whole time!”

But there is another reason. There’s also the germ of hope: after ruin comes rebuilding. I have great plans for this human race! I believe that we can be so much more than we have been, that we can aspire to greater things. Now that this dazzling, glamorous fog has been blown away by a rather ill wind, we should turn our heads up and look again at the stars. These are the moments, on the brink, at twilight, when the veneer is thinnest, for us to examine ourselves and our surroundings and find a new way. This is the right time to dream.

Dream loudly.

Some of you may be wondering, “Why does saurabh maintain a blog and never write on it?” And the answers to that, which, in fact, do exist, are manifold, and could be readily presented. To whit, as it were, ter woo, the provision of, at the very least, the escape tunnel, the emergency exit, the pressure release gasket, ejection seat lever or Monopoly Get Out of Jail Free card. Any time I wish, I may express my opinion herein, and there it is, expressed! Which cannot be undone, just like spilling milk into the carpet: that milk is in there, buddy, and you better just throw out the carpet. You might be able to cover it up with odor eaters, but you’ll know, lying in your bed late at night, that particles of milk still lie hiding beneath the curled nylon fibers and layers of dog hair down there in your living room. Similarly this blog, taking “the carpet” to mean the incorporeal ether, the fabric of society, the zeitgeist. At any moment, any insight of mine can be put “out there”, from the very mundane to the utterly trivial. That satisfaction is enough justification to maintain any blog. Blog about the weather. Blog about my pants. Blog about why Adrian Brody’s nose just isn’t straight, goddamnit.

All of which might be as much as to say, as you are likely doing right now, “Well, you obviously haven’t got anything worth saying anyway.” But that’s neither here, nor is it there. That simple fact has not prevented a long parade of insufferable dullards from foisting their worm-eaten wit on an aghast humanity, and never let it be said that I am too proud to aspire to the company of dullards. I insist on my impressing my logorrhea on an unwilling audience.

Some corners of the incorporeal ether have, in recent days, heard speculation that the “blogosphere” is at an end, made morsel of by the Gargantua of our time, the “M-S-M”. To those mongers of rumor I say, toddle pit, and other such nonsensical utterings, since really that’s the only response that sort of ridiculous prattle deserves. Can we imagine an end to the human desire to vent, to carp, to blow hard? Will there ever be a day when our mothers would not call up our best friend Kenny’s mothers, who they are also friends with, and tell them about what they overheard about the president of the local Lions Club while standing in line at the bank? Heck, no! And so long as this fundamental desire, as basic as our need to sleep and fuck, exists, why, now that we’ve got the bits in our teeth, we’ll shake the reins and let our words stream out across the wind. I proudly declaim the motto of the blogger: “I have nothing to say, and you’re going to have to hear it!”

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I’m off to India tomorrow! See you in two months.

I got a copy of the Saga of the Volsungs, the Norse epic which Wagner based his “Ring” cycle on. Like its later medieval counterpart, the Nibelungenleid, it’s a bit strange to modern sensibilities, as exemplified by this early version of the Dozens, played between Sinfjotli, the progeny of the Volsung twins Sigmund and Signy, and Granmar, a rival king.

Sinfjotli stood up, his helmet shining like glass on his head, his coat of mail white as snow, his spear in his hand adorned with a magnificent banner, and his shield rimmed with gold before him. This man knew how to speak with kings.

“When you have fed your pigs and hounds and you meet your wife, say that the Volsungs have come and King Helgi can be found here in the army, if Hodbrodd wants to meet him. And it is Helgi’s pleasure to fight with distinction while you kiss your bondwomen by the fire.”

Granmar answered: “You are not able to say much of worth or speak of ancient lore, since you lie about noble men. More likely it is that you long nourished yourself on the food of wolves out in the forest and killed your brothers. And it is strange that you dare to come in an army with good men, you who have sucked the blood of many cold corpses.”

Sinfjotli replied: “You probably do not remember clearly now when you were the witch on Varinsey and said that you wanted to marry a man and you chose me for the role of husand. And afterward you were a valkyrie in Asgard and all were on the verge of fighting for your sake. I sired nine wolves on you at Laganess, and I was the father of them all.” [Oh, snap! - ed]

Granmar responded: “You are a great liar. I do not think you could sire anyone because you were gelded by the giant’s daughters on Thrasness. You are the stepson of King Siggeir and you lay in the woods with wolves, and all misfortunes came to you one on top of the other. You killed your brothers and made for yourself an evil reputation.”

Sinfjotli answered: “Do you remember when you were a mare with the stallion Grani and I rode you at full speed on Bravoll? Afterward you were the goatherd of the giant Golnir.”

Granmar said: “I would rather feed the birds on your corpse than quarrel with you any longer.”

The strangest part of this exchange is that Granmar never manages to pull out the obvious, “Your momma is also your aunty!”