– John Berger
John, it’s been
over a year since the election, over a year since Ash and I found out
we would have a child. It’s a few days until the anniversary of
your death. I still find myself waking in the witching hours,
thinking as though speaking to you.
I imagine what you
thought of our American election, the rise of nationalism across the
world. You would have been able to observe it before you died. Not
being American, and being a complex realist, you saw America clearly,
a vortex in the human sea, sucking in raw material both human and
non, drawing nations into its orbit. At its center, capitalists ready
to bully or kill anyone, in search of profit. Against them are
arrayed the poor of the world in their leaking boats, going about
their lives, defeated but not destroyed, despairing but continuing
on, children carrying stones.
Last year we lived
on a farm for a season. We went there seeking what you captured in
your writing: contact with the sustenance of life, a peasant
awareness and embeddedness, living from the body, from the gut. There
we met chickens pecking around the trailer where we lived, fields of
crops we planted and harvested, in a little valley with a river
running through, pines and firs on the ridges, the white of snow in
the high places. Hawks and vultures wheeling, a heron flapping home
from the smoking pond in the dawn.
We also met farm
owners who, it became increasingly apparent, were self-interested,
manipulative, narcissistic, profit-motivated. As the season wore on,
we saw more and more how they were willing (perhaps even compelled)
to tear anyone down for their own self-aggrandizement, and to use the
land as hard as possible, to treat their workers with as little
respect as possible, while extracting as much wealth from labor and
the land’s bounty as possible. All this behind the facade of doing
good by community and land by way of sustainable agriculture.
Ultimately, we left
that place of a sudden, packed our things and got out, unable to
sustain ourselves any longer, even forgoing the financial rewards we
were due. Not good capitalists, we chose freedom, a privilege not all
have, though not without its costs (we were just married, broke, all
our possessions packed in a rusty old pickup.)
In hindsight, I see
we were living by a different metric than those people, who operated
under a hierarchy of profit and power. It should not be so
surprising, in this period of human psychosis, to encounter these
types, who purport to do good and build their self-image around it,
while inside they are cancerous.
The mockery of the
election season coincided with our farm season and they were well
fit, I now see. Because in the candidates we had the avatars of that
psychosis. We were asked to choose between the id and the ego of
chauvinistic human consciousness.
On the one hand, a
left-leaning candidate who would say all the right things, support
the right humanitarian and progressive causes, and who would
certainly not have signed any right-wing tax plans or health care
repeals, but who was so clearly bought and paid for, by Monsanto
among all the others, who would see the world covered over by solar
panels and wind farms just to keep the progressive expansion of the
economy rolling, a meat puppet for the clicking mechanical artificial
intelligence that is the modern corporation.
On the other hand,
a florid example of self-interest and narcissism, superficiality and
cynicism, racism, sexism, xenophobia – a fearful con-man who
believes his own line.
Self-interest could
be defined in a broader view, that takes into account land and ocean,
sky and weather, non-human beings, human communities, in which we are
all inextricably enmeshed. True self-interest would promote health in
these things, and would come from the body, its basic needs, food,
shelter, clean water, connection, human touch, story and song. But in
our contemporary definition, self-interest is based in numbers and
abstractions and demonstrations of power; it is now synonymous with
solipsistic self-involvement. Having our needs met becomes having
them met opulently, a million times over, while others go lacking,
and having the difference seen and acknowledged. It means
demonstrating power over others, as through sexual harassment and
other demeaning abuses. It means spinning any encounter or slight to
your perceived advantage, life as a nasty game of checkers. It means
always making sure your numbers in your bank account are going up.
All this as a hedge against the howling void, within and without.
Trump is an empty shell of a person, constructed around nothing, a
vacuum that threatens to consume the fragile facade held together by
twisted logic and force of will and fear of dissolution.
We should not be
surprised, because this is the end result of a culture that sees the
world in this way: material to be used, the human consciousness all
that really matters, and a few more than the rest. For all our
reasonable head-shaking pundits and gestures toward freedom and
egalitarianism, as long as we see the world as an ever expanding
economy and measure its worth in dollars, we are on a continuum, and
Trump is our best example.
John, it is just
past the winter solstice, 6 AM and still black outside. The engines
moan on the highway. I write in the early morning, before the sun
comes again, while in the other room my wife and infant daughter are
sleeping. This is the hour when children sleep, and fathers wake to
worry over their future. All these thoughts come tumbling out of me
when I wake and give the baby her pacifier back and look at her
placid face, her quiet purple eyelids, her down of hair. I think you
might have agreed with some of my assessments while you were alive,
though I certainly wouldn’t have had to tell you. Now, you are
dispersed in the world. Proof to the likes of Trump and the rest of
us that there is nothing great to fear there, as better ones go their
way and dissolve, while their words and memories remain with us, bind
us to the past and the land and the dead, give us a gentle hope in
these witching hours.
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