The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain:
There are souls more sick of pleasure, than you are sick of pain.

There is a stir of unquiet in the air. We have, at last, gotten through an election that is in political terms perhaps the least interesting and impactful of my lifetime--but, in symbolic reality, and, therefore, in real world effects on the psyches and emotional selves and actions of people, among the most extreme. We are living in the greatest Empire the world has ever known; an Empire currently embroiled in two astonishingly bloody proxy wars, wars that our government seems to have little or no interest in controlling or containing or bringing to any kind of conclusion, wars that at this writing continue and escalate and spiral ever downwards, killing thousands of innocents, with no end in sight.

In such a night, what do we dream of? And what troubles our dreams?

I am not going to write, today, about either wars or elections. The suffering and death of the innocent are with God; but if we are to stop the killing, and even the psychological mass-media damage caused by a profoundly silly election, we need to ask ourselves more fundamental questions. We need to ask ourselves, first and foremost, why we are doing what we are doing. For only when we know what we are doing, and why, can we choose to stop doing it.

As I have argued, in recent months, I have seen a vision of the failure of America: a failure born merely of the mainstream, of mass media, of fantasy untethered from reality. The most horrifying thing about present moment is neither Trump nor Kamala's alleged wicked plans to destroy America, but rather their utter lack of any kind of political plans at all; not any particular American hatred or greed or racism or conquest or cowardice manifested in Gaza or Ukraine or Lebanon, but rather our seeming inability to feel anything at all about the wars we pay for and enable, to take any action at all and not contradict it, to take any responsibility at all for the people we have killed and the deeds we ourselves have done: to decide if we are at war with Russia or not, if we want Ukraine to invade Russia or surrender or negotiate or advance or retreat, if we want the government of Israel to keep fighting or stop fighting or expand or retreat, to decide if we want the people of Gaza to live or die or be occupied or be ruled or merely to cease to exist: to have any relationship at all to those who, at least, fight or suffer or hate or fear or die and have some idea why. 

The most troubling thing about the present American moment for me has nothing really to do with the election or our limited choice among media figures; it is simply the inability of our rulers and would-be rulers, of all parties and all groupings and all colors, to do anything, say anything, decided on anything for good or ill. A profound paralysis in fact grips our most powerful men, a profound indecision, an inability to grasp reality, an incapacity to evaluate it on any terms whatsoever: a existential vagueness about law, morality, governance, and life itself.

Anyway, all that is to say that today's post will be about two works of art about bored unhappy wealthy attractive white women living in New York City in the past.

The 2024 Election

THE 2024 ELECTION

I went to the polls this past Wednesday to vote in the 2024 Election. 

I think we can all, regardless of our political beliefs, agree that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, perhaps in the entire history of our nation, even of the human race. Hence, I wanted to make sure to participate fully in the event by voting early.

The week before, I had received in the mail a missive from the pro-turnout Super-PAC "Democracy in Action." The ad featured a grainy photograph of me, taken apparently from across the street near my house, and pinned to an ordinary piece of lined paper. Above the photograph, scrawled in black marker, was the message: "IF YOU DO NOT VOTE WE WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY." 

Since the Pandemic, the roads I would ordinarily take to get to the polling site have been "Closed for Repair," blocked off with yellow tape and barbed wire and barricades and medical checkpoints. To get there now means a dangerous journey down the River; and as I lacked the requisite funds to hire the well-armored personnel transports that serve most voters in my generally upscale neighborhood, I had to make do with one of the "General Admission" voting ferries sponsored by Bain Capital, LP as part of a get-out-the-vote effort ultimately masterminded (according to Internet rumor) by Kamala Harris' husband's aunt's former accountant, now the CEO of an Albanian arms company with ties to the UAE. 

I set out just before dawn so as to arrive at the jetty in time for the scheduled 7:15 AM departure time; but as it turned out, the ferry was nearly three hours late, arriving just after 10 AM. When I first arrived at the jetty, there were only a few elderly women there, apparently Kamala Harris campaign volunteers, dressed in oversized, lime-green t-shirts worn down to their ankles, clustered around a large pot of stew stirring and adding herbs from fanny packs around their waists. One of them offered me a cup of soup, but as I had already eaten breakfast I refused. 

After about half an hour, a few apparent voters arrived, one an old man dressed in rags, barefoot, with a long grizzled beard, wearing a MAGA hat on his head; the other a tall, thin young woman bundled up to her eyes in blue-tinted furs, who (after eagerly accepting a cup of soup) eyed me suspiciously and sat crosslegged on the ground at the far end of the jetty. The morning was cool and dim, and fog shrouded the banks all around the jetty. From time to time, I pulled out and checked the sample ballot in my pocket, or sat and watched the huge, dark shapes moving in the water below. 

When the boat had still not arrived at 9:30, I found myself hungry once again, and belatedly approached the old women, who eyed me eagerly, licking their lips "C-could I have some soup please?" I stammered. 

The tallest of the old women, with rank, black hair that might have been dyed, dipped a cup of the soup out of the cast-iron pot, began handing it to me, then stopped, her eyes going dark, and hissing out of suddenly pressed lips: "Which side are you on?" I said nothing, and after another moment she smiled again and handed me the cup of soup. There was no spoon.

The soup had been cooking on an open flame for hours, and by this time had something of the consistency of glue--but its pungent flavors of sage and rosemary reminded me irresistibly of long summer evenings on the patio at Luigi's Pizza, and I wolfed down the whole cup in a matter of minutes. 

A few minutes after 10 o'clock, the jetty was abruptly flooded with passengers, all, male and female, clad in the loose brown tunics and smocks typical of peasants in the lowlands, many with campaign buttons pinned onto the smocks, and all bearing pilgrim's staves and large rucksacks. A few had led mules or donkeys, but all pointedly refused the old women's offer of soup. Some wandered sociably around the jetty from end to end, while others sat with their feet swinging off the end and throwing stones or pieces of bread from their rucksack into the water for the monsters below; but all talked loudly with each other about the election, the journey, and the latest poll forecasts and modeling from FiveThirtyEight. 

The young woman, meanwhile, had gotten up and fled to the old women, who spoke to her and stroked her hair comfortingly while (almost imperceptibly) pulling off small pieces of it to add to their pot. 

A few minutes later, when the ferry at last came into sight, the assembled passengers broke into raucous applause, cheering and throwing their rucksacks or bits of bread into the air. The day was cool, dark, and misty, so at first the yellow light streaming from the ferry was so overwhelming that I had to shield my face with my hand.

Story: The Hotel

The Hotel

The elevator doors opened, the mirrored image of his own face parting in two and departing to be replaced by a long, carpeted hallway. He glanced at the small, pixelated number in the display screen above the control panel–the 23rd floor–and gingerly stepped over the threshold.

With a piercing chime and an almost inaudible whir the doors began to close. He turned his head just in time to see his image come together again, with only a small seam in the middle: a tall, stooped man in black, cleanshaven, with a scarred lip and a rather worried expression. He smiled, as if to himself–and looked, to himself, all the stranger.

With no warning, a scream sounded behind him–muffled and almost indistinguishable from the background hum of the air-conditioner, but loud enough that he spun around at once. 

The hallway stretched in front of him, with no one in sight.

He stood there for a minute, studying the scene, as if waiting for something or someone to emerge. 

The carpet was gray but patterned with odd bars of brown and tan, scattered in a strict but haphazard-looking pattern, all pointing in the same direction. The walls were papered in gray with similar patterns of bronze bars, but connected and at right angles, forming odd, swastika-like formations in and around the white featureless doors, set in patterns of three and two on alternating sides of the corridor, each with its own bronze and black number plate. The ceiling was large white panels patterned with small flecks like birdseed; small, compact lights, bulbs enclosed in four-cornered black metal cages filled in with panes of clouded glass, were positioned every ten feet along it, each one casting a faint pool of light onto the floor below. 

After more than a minute, the scream had not been repeated; and he began walking, slowly at first, tentatively, his stride lengthening, growing firmer with each step. He did not look either to the right or the left until he came to a crossroads of sorts, where one path branched out from the main hallway to the left at a perpendicular angle. After a momentary hesitation, he took the path, passing around a squared bend as he did so; fifty feet more, and he reached a T in the corridor, the blank wall ahead of him looming over a single table, green formica, on which was set an angular bronze lamp with a subtly patterned tan hood set over it. The lamp was off.

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election (Or Any Other Election)

I recently posted an essay declaring (somewhat exaggeratively) that there are no politics anymore in 2024. I did this by taking a rather harsh look at the current events and activities of mainstream, mass-media based politics, as exemplified by the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties. 

But of course, there is a lot more to politics in 2024 than Trump and Kamala. There is even more to national electoral politics than Trump and Kamala: personally, I plan to vote for Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party for President this November. Neither Trump or Kamala, though, has actually done any governing in the last four years, in a nation with massive ongoing social and economic crises and a world with numerous ongoing, extremely bloody wars. These ongoing crises and wars are still in the care of Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, and (more hopefully) numerous governors, mayors, city councilors, and local school board members throughout the world. When we think of politics in 2024, we should think, first and foremost, of these people: and, speaking ideally, not think of Trump and Kamala at all.

Still, as I argued in the preceding essay, there is certainly less to politics in 2024 America than there has ever been before, as polling and television and the Internet alike all show very clearly: more people than there have ever been before paying rapt attention to only the latest news on the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties, and otherwise not engaging with any political issue or candidate or official at any level at all. And of course, the two trends are nearly correlatives, since the more the mass media is full of stories about Trump and Kamala, the less room there is for anything else: even discussion of the actual laws and officials doing most of the governing for most Americans.

Still, when all is said and done, I feel the need to justify myself from the charge of merely being a political opportunist declaring a plague on both the two largest houses while ignoring the rest of the village entirely--or worse, a centrist. Someone might well say to me what a critic said of Chesterton's Heretics when it was published, that he will defend his own beliefs when he has seen me defend mine. Chesterton responded to this challenge by writing probably the most widely read work of Christian apologetics in the 20th century, Orthodoxy. I can only respond by writing this blog post. 

At the outset I should say that this will not be an attempt to defend the broader, theoretical bases of my own approach to politics. I have done some of that otherwise in this blog, on many occasions and in tedious length and yet without giving what most would regard as a proper exposition of what I think and why. Perhaps I will get to that theoretical exposition one day.

Instead, this essay/blog post/manifesto will be something closer to what I would, ideally, like to see from political candidates in the 2024 election: a list of issues and broad programmes to address them that could actually be implemented politically in America today. As I declared not too long ago, I think that in a democracy political candidates ought to largely be engaged in acknowledging the pressing problems of the citizenry at large and trying to fix them. I firmly believe that all of the below issues are real, pressing issues in American life which ought to be dealt with politically--and which could in fact be meaningfully addressed by the actual American political system in 2024--and which, furthermore, are not issues that are constructed according to the symbolic binaries that presently define American political life, or which would necessarily and intrinsically appeal to only one side of the American political spectrum and alienate the other. Of course, if and when these issues became mainstream political issues, they could and would no doubt be processed in these terms, for basic structural reasons if nothing else.

Please note that the below proposals do not really cover foreign policy, which is not only arguably the most important impact America has on the world, but also is the issue that is most determined by actual Presidential elections. Foreign policy, though, is one of the issues least addressable via democratic means, which is why, even in America, it is run on a basically monarchical model; and, in any case, I have covered the basic issues of present-day American foreign policy elsewhere in this space. The below proposals also do not directly cover immigration policy, which, at least as currently debated, most boils down to more fundamental debates and structural issues with American foreign policy and economic policy. To deal with its complexities fully would take an essay of its own, however.

My own politics are radical enough that the below proposals--though far more radical than anything a major American party has proposed since the New Deal--are actually far less radical than I would ideally aim to achieve if there were no constraints at all on my decision-making (which is of course absurd). I do, however, genuinely want to implement all of the below proposals; and so might you.

Take what you can get; and what you can get here, from me, should not be taken for more than it is worth.

Three Prayers

 [These are three prayers of my own composition that I pray daily. Perhaps others might find them helpful as well.] 

Prayer For Divine Correction

English:

Receive, beloved God,
all my words, deeds, and intentions of this day:
complete them, correct them, if necessary replace them entirely with your own: 
so that your words may be heard, your deeds done, your intentions fulfilled, for the good of those whom you love.
Amen.

Latin:

Recipe, amate Deus, 
omnia mea verba, facta, intentionesque huius diei:
ea perfice, corrige, si oportet muta pro tuis:
ut audiantur verba tua, faciantur facta tua, compleantur intentiones tuae, ad bonum eorum quos amas.
Amen.

Prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Healing

English:

True and loving Mother of God,|
Mary,
Take me into your arms, embrace me, caress me, and kiss me,
And remove from my midst all those lies which the Devil has inscribed in my flesh,
in my body, heart, mind, and soul, in order to hinder the work of God.
Heal me and save me, most sweet mother.
Amen.

Latin:

Vera et amans Dei Mater,
Maria,
Recipe me in brachias tuas, me complectere, me mulce, me basia,
Et omnia mendacia quae diabolus ut operi Dei impediat
inscripsit in meam carnem, in corpus et cor et mentem et animam meam,
a medio me remove.
Me sana et salvum fac, dulcissima mater.
Amen.

Prayer to the Blessed Virgin Before Sleep

English:

Mother,

I entrust into your hands all my own affairs:

property, duties, cares, souls.

Guard them while I sleep,

and do for them all the good which I cannot:

find what is lost,

fix what is broken,

attend to what is forgotten,

heal what is wounded.

Oh most blessed Mother of God, I beseech you,

make my life whole, and lead everything to God.

I have hoped in you, Mary;

let me never be put to shame.

Amen.

Latin:

Mater,

commendo in manus tuas omnes meas res: 

propria, officia, curas, animas.

Dum dormio, eas custodi:

fac eis omne bonum quod non possum ego:

erratam inveni;

fractam repara;

ad oblitam attende;

vulneratam sana.

O beatissima Mater Dei, te quaeso:

fac meam vitam integram, et duc totam ad Deum.

Speravi in te, Maria;

non confundar in aeternum.

Amen.

Column 09/07/2024: The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream & the Decline of the American Empire

The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream and The Decline of the American Empire 

Here's a "personality quiz" of sorts for you:

(1) Which film released in 2010 did you enjoy more: (1) Unstoppable or (2) Alice in Wonderland? Or if you didn't see either, which do you think (based on Wikipedia descriptions and posters) you would enjoy more?

(2) Which song released in 2023 did you enjoy more: (1) Last Night by Morgan Wallern or (2) anti-hero by Taylor Swift?  

(3) Which television show released in 2015 did you enjoy more: (1) The Big Bang Theory or (2) NCIS? 

(4) Knowing nothing more, you are asked to choose between watching either (1) a new Adam Sandler film, or (2) a new Lin-Manual Miranda musical. Which do you pick?

(5) You can choose between watching two shows tonight, (1) a Law & Order series featuring a tough-as-nails black woman as lead prosecutor, or (2) an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice. Which would you enjoy more?

Congratulations: if you can answer these questions, you now know whether you should vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Column 09/03/2024: Testament of Belief

Testament of Belief

[I apologize for doing so little writing on here, as I have been both rather busy and also my creative energies have been directed towards (1) fiction, and (2) academic writing, neither of which is yet polished enough to post here. I have several pieces in various stages of construction, however, which should be appearing on here soon enough. This is not really any of those pieces, but an impromptu decision to say something about my belief and its bases, inspired mostly by my thoughts as I was going to bed and written in about an hour and posted in honor of Pope St. Gregory the Great on his feast-day. His writings are much more worth reading than mine.]

Every one, I suppose, has their own function when it comes to the Church and the life of grace; which is another way of saying their own testament, a thing to which they are able to witness. One of mine, I suppose, is to give the lie to the basic idea that faith is essentially a form of wish-fulfillment, that it is bound up with thoughts and emotions and beliefs and doubts and moral hypocrisies, in short something entirely other and opposed to reality in the sense believed in by scientists and engineers and so-called practical mean. 

To that, I can only say, for better or worse, that my belief, in its foundation and inceptions, has nothing really to do with the former, and everything to do with the latter. 

I sometimes envy people with what I would call a natural belief, or even a natural disbelief: people who find it difficult, if not impossible, to see where their own minds end and the reality to which all these things refer begins. Belief is natural to human beings: it is a necessary corollary of having a mind. Believing, and disbelieving, are simply things that people do, all the time, without much in the way of thought or even necessarily interest; and these acts of believing and disbelieving are naturally intertwined with all the other operations of people's minds, emotions and hopes and desires and fears and traumas and loves and hates. Among these beliefs, and disbeliefs, are mental states referring to God, or Christianity, or the Catholic Church--beliefs which may be important, but are not fundamentally different from any other similar mental state. Hence, even the most honest believer or disbeliever may, and should, ask themselves: am I sure that my beliefs (or disbeliefs) are accurate, that they refer to reality, that they are not unduly influenced by my own emotions? After all, it is so tied in with me that it may turn out to be all me after all. 

Alas, this is not how I relate, or have ever related, to God or the Catholic Faith. My relationship with God is in this sense based more on experience than belief: and it is not an experience, even, of having an idea confirmed by observation, or a hypothesis advanced by testing, or even a desire fulfilled by fruition. To the extent the experience may be analogized to other types of experience, it may be compared to any sudden, unanticipated physical reality: the step you miss while walking and thinking of other things, the car you collide with while listening to music, the pain you feel suddenly from the beam you did not see. It simply and undeniably asserts its reality precisely by its utter heedlessness, its utter lack of relation, to everything in your head and your heart. 

There was, and is, simply no proportion, no real relation, between my ideas and beliefs and hopes and fears and desires about God, and the experience of God I came to in and through my entrance into the Catholic Church. I did not anticipate it; I did not in any straightforward sense seek it out or ask for it or desire it. It was simply there. 

To the extent beliefs about God or Catholicism emerged from this experience, they are in no sense, really, beliefs about me. I do not believe that I believe in God; I do not believe that I experience God. I believe in God. God is; and the interesting (psychological) truth is that since that time period I have not really been capable of doubting the existence of God. That God exists is simply not something that is in any sense dependent on me, and so it is not something I have any straightforward capacity to challenge or occlude or disbelieve. 

Of course, to say this is not to make any particular claim about my own positive virtue or fidelity or indestructibility. Psychologically and physically speaking, I am certainly capable of denying that God exists, or even coming in some sense to believe it; as I am capable of being lobotomized, or decapitated, or losing all my memories, or coming through some strange series of freakish accidents to believe that I am a shoe. But as I said, this is not really something that has anything in particular to do with the fact of God's existence or my belief in it.

Or rather, if I am being completely honest, the truth is that not only does my belief in God, or in the Catholic Faith, not have anything in particular to do with any belief in my own intelligence or virtue or correctness; it is positively correlated with the opposite, which is to say, with my stupidity and sinfulness and incorrectnesss and lack of existence. This is, I suppose, something in the same sense in which the strength of a hammer striking my skull is positively correlated with the weakness of my skull, or the strength of gravity and a gravel road is positively correlated with the weakness of the small hay wagon out of which I was flung when I was ten years old, and of the skin of my leg as it was dragged across said gravel at high velocity. I have generally become aware of God's reality precisely through my own lack of reality, so closely that they could be said to be nearly one and the same reality.

All this may well seem extremely negative, if not cold and unfeeling. I cannot help that, I suppose. Yet it is worth saying that by no means was my experience of God solely or primarily an experience of divine wrath or power or judgment or any of those things--that it was, emphatically and overwhelming and in its totality an experience of divine mercy, benevolence, and indeed love. 

Yet if it is true that our lack and nothingness may be demonstrated to us by something opposing or overpowering us, it is no less true that our lack and nothingness can equally be demonstrated to us by something giving to and loving us. Perhaps a metaphor would help here. The more water is poured into a cup, the higher the proportion of the cup that is filled, the more the cup's prior emptiness is necessitated and demonstrated. The more that is given, the less that there could have been before the gift.

There were in fact dimensions in which my experience of God was one of my own will, my own self, being checked and overruled from without. Yet the more fundamental experience even in these instances was of something giving to me, giving to me so much of my self that it necessitated and demonstrated that before that gift I could not have had a self at all. I experienced being given everything that I was and had and have and will have--will, thoughts, desires, fears, emotions, losses, victories, defeats, doubts, acceptance, resistance, sins, life, death, moment to moment existence--and even more; much more; infinitely more. This was at one and the same time and for the same reason and in the same degree an experience of divine love and of my own nonexistence.

For this reason, I find it impossible, generally speaking, to doubt not only that God exists, but also that he loves me. After all, my own moment-to-moment experience of my own existence is, quite simply, the experience of divine love. Yet as with God's existence, so too with God's love; my belief is not really, for better or worse, a belief about me. For whatever it may mean, there is a real sense in which I find it habitually easier to doubt and deny my own existence than to doubt that God loves me; or at least that God loves.

Before I close this odd rambling, I should also add, briefly, what all this has to do, for me, with the question of belief in the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church as opposed to other religious bodies or beliefs Christian and non-Christian, a question that preoccupied me a great deal when I was younger. I am, or have become, very familiar with the bases for intellectual belief in all the above, and do my best to communicate them and live them out. 

Yet the simple truth is that my belief in Catholicism, and my entrance into the Faith, is not ultimately based on any of those things, but again on an experience of what appeared to me, and appears to me still, simply as reality: indeed, precisely that same heedless, overpowering, proportionless reality spoken of above. My experiences of the Catholic Church have, without exception, been simply experiences of God. Hence, in the most immediate sense, my experience and principal belief about the Catholic Church is simply that it is God; or rather, to weaken and perhaps make comprehensible the claim, that the experience of God I discussed above came and comes entirely and solely in and through and with reference to the Catholic Church, her words and deeds and saints and clergy and monks and laypeople and liturgy and Sacraments. The latter statement, though, is a rationalization of my actual experience: which is, as I said, simply that God and the Catholic Church are one and the same thing. 

(I may also say parenthetically that in about the same way, my experience is that God and the poor and suffering people are one and the same thing.)

I have now spent many years of my life reading and writing theology in an attempt to work out what I believe that experience reflects; which is, put in correct theological language, the mystery of the Incarnation, of God become man, tangible and material and natural and historical, and of his union with the Church his inseparable Body and Bride, and his consequent presence and activity in the authority of the clergy and the Sacraments and above all the Eucharist. This theological thinking-out is much more mixed with my own thoughts, has proceeded much more naturally, by hypothesis, thought, trial and error; and I consequently believe it in a different sense from the above. But that God is in the Church, in the Eucharist, in Catholic words and deeds and saints and doctrines, I believe not for these reasons, but because I have experienced it--like a blow to the head.

I am quite conscious that all this may well seem insane, incomprehensible, fanatical, or what is worse, fundamentally unappealing and even frightening to people. As I said, I cannot really help that; at least without dishonesty. From this basic set of experiences, I have striven very hard to understand and to integrate the various aspects and dimensions of earthly faith, including personal piety and religious emotion and social and communal life and institutional functioning and historical tradition and all the complex and amusing byplay of belief and doubt, proof and evidence and argument, thought and claim and counterclaim, so necessary for the life of the human beings and the Church on earth: and I have come to love and appreciate them all. 

Yet for all that, I have no choice but to finally acknowledge that the fundamental thing that is the basis of my faith, the fundamental thing that I have, I suppose, to testify to, is different from all this. 

This is my (very poor) attempt to express a little of that.