I SELF-IDENTIFY AS A TOOL

  I’m a left-winger.

  I have a friend who makes a living because he understands the ways Americans think about politics. Every once in a while, I sit with him at an oyster bar and he tells me about how this stuff works. He says what I’m doing here is called “self-identifying.” 

  This means it feels important to me to say out loud that I’m a leftist. And that’s true, it does. 

  But while I am a leftist, or at least I self-identify as one, that doesn’t mean I’m a rube. By which, I don’t think that I’m right and the other side is wrong. 

  My political thoughts and feelings are important to me, but they are nothing compared to the rest of me. 

  I’m a writer (songs, prose, fiction, lists of crap to pack for a trip, whatever I have time for), and I’m also a child of addiction, a fan of Dylan and Lou Reed and William Burroughs, and a lot more besides.  

  This all means that I’m fascinated by the way people think. It started out with me mostly hating people for it. Then- over time- it grew into a grudging admiration, and infatuation, and now love. 

  I was once in a car with Eugene Chadbourne for eight straight hours without stopping. At the end of the eight hours, I glanced casually at the gas gauge and I saw that red dot that pops up for people too stupid to take the “E” seriously. There was no more gas in this car at all. We were rolling downhill, luckily, and I steered the car into a gas station and it died right next to a tank. Another win!

  At one point during this ride, Eugene had told me that sometimes people hate an album so much they become obsessed with it, and eventually they turn into fans. He knows a lot about this, because he makes very weird music, the kind that causes people to literally throw an album across the room in disgust. But some of these music-lobbers find themselves creeping over in silence and picking the album up a while later, and then entering a brave new world the one right way. No phrasebook or map, maybe, but with something much better- curiosity. And that, if you don’t know, is the key to being a human being of worth. 

  I’m reading a book by James Ellroy, where he lays out the facts of his long descent into perversion, crime, addiction, and eventually,  writing. I see a lot of myself in this book. I’m not quite the “self-starter” Ellroy was in his youth, so I’ve never broken into any houses and sniffed suburban underwear, but these are just cosmetic differences. I get it. He loves people. And there’s a fine line between this kind of sick, obsessive and perverse kind of love, and empathy. 

  The mix of self-loathing, and self-awareness, and perversion, and empathy, and obsessive reading/listening/viewing habits is familiar. A neighbor of mine, one of the select few who isn’t a dumbass, popped over once to borrow something, and he was looking at my giant bookshelves, and I saw him focusing on one of the many shelves where I keep the crap. I told him, don’t get the wrong idea from all those used Stephen King paperbacks; I have a whole bunch of Henry James over here on this smart shelf. He just laughed. I guess he knew the score, the bastard. 

  If you’re a writer, if you’re worth any salt at all, sooner or later you will notice that you are full of shit. Here’s what I mean: it is very much not in the interest of a writer to pretend his or her opinions are based on some sort of wisdom. We feel things. Maybe we also read, and think things through, and talk and talk in late night sessions after the sane people have gone to bed, but the truth is that’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Our politics comes from our feelings, and that’s as true for Abbie Hoffman as it is for William F. Buckley. It’s the thing that links Archie Bunker and Meathead. 

  That doesn’t mean your feelings are wrong, or that your opinions are wrong. Maybe they are correct, and unassailably logical. Everybody thinks this about themselves, so I suppose a few of us must be correct. But you should never stop questioning your views. I don’t. 

  Here’s an example.  

  I believe affirmative action is the right call. I don’t see the huge hardship for the occasional white kid who doesn’t get the gig, because some black kid got it. I got mine, already, so why should I care if some white kid gets cheated out of his dream because some black kid had a dream too? I very much like the idea that a few more ethnic minority people might get a chance to show what they can do. 

  But that’s just the way I feel about it. Is there evidence that this kind of policy is making the world better for minorities? How the fuck should I know? I don’t have time to research stuff like that. If someone wants to direct me to an article, or book, that proves affirmative action actually does work, or actually doesn’t, I might read it. Or I might not. I have work to do, damn it! 

  It’s the same deal with immigration, incarceration, lubrication, and all the other issues Americans all think they already know enough about. 

  Sure, I understand why liberals think some guy or gal who lives in some podunk library-less town and is never going to read a newspaper article about crime statistics is a rube. But I’d like to see that liberal, happily dispensing the “rube” tag on Facebook all day long, take a minute to wonder why he gives himself a free pass even though he didn’t read the article either. Sure, he meant to, but there was a paywall or something. 

  The point is, both liberals and conservatives, of all economic and cultural strata, don’t read the article. And when an article doesn’t get read, the liberal who doesn’t read it sees the headline and figures, yeah, looks like a good article, but I already know that. I don’t need to read it. And the conservative who doesn’t read it sees the headline and says, yeah, looks like more of the usual bullshit from liberals. I don’t need to read it. 

  And this same circuit happens if it’s an article from the other perspective. 

  If you look long and hard, you find a person or two who does read the articles. They probably read the ones that look like they’ll agree with them. Reading things because you agree with them is like getting a booster shot for your dubious opinion that you are one of the smart ones. 

  Then, there’s the very worst group. I told Lisa this morning that I’m a Guy Who Gets Everything, and there was an acronym for people like me. Yeah, I know, she said, you’re an SOB. I was thinking more along the lines of GWGE, or “gewgie,” but what am I, the king of acronyms? I’ll leave these things to the PWKTSAA, or the People Who Know Their Shit About Acronyms.  What I’m trying to say is that the very worst group is people like me, who read the articles on both sides. And then puff their chests up even more. Gaze upon me, rubes (if we’re liberal), or gaze upon me, “east coast” elites (if we’re conservative). We read the article! 

  At least, I used to be one of these guys. I’m in a slump right now as far as article reading goes. I was in Australia for almost a month without the Washington Post, and it felt pretty good. I came back to the USA and started seeing Facebook posts from my younger friends, alleging that people who say they “stay out of politics these days” are the worst people of all. I’m always just about to comment on a post like that, and then I realize— it doesn’t make sense for me to lecture people about any of this. Some of them are young, and they need to vent and bloviate like they need to get fresh air. They still think they can change the world. And some of them are old, and they’re super upset about what this country has turned into. They can’t stop handwringing about this whole mess. How could any human being still support that guy, after everything terrible that he’s said and done? 

  Here’s my breakdown. Some people self identify on the left. That means they don’t believe poor people and minorities (a little redundant, there) are responsible for everything that’s fucked. They also believe that our institutions, which are all totally corrupt and rotten, can be turned around and rebuilt so that they work for all of us. It’s quite a colorful fantasy, and I wish us well with it. The other side believes that poor people (if they’re wealthy) OR minorities (if they’re white) are responsible for everything that’s fucked. People on this side are generally favorably disposed toward the wealthy, unless we’re talking about wealthy Jews. That’s different, for some reason. And on the subject of institutions, these people like ‘em. They don’t want to change them, unless it’s to change them back into what they used to be, before minorities, gays, hippies, or commies, ruined them. The scapegoat changes, but there’s always some species of scapegoat, who’s snuck into our country and corrupted it. Made it less white, less straight, less male, less American, etc. Sometimes the scapegoat sneaking in is a metaphor, although these days, metaphors are seen as too thinky, and the scapegoats are people (or animals, if you prefer) who are literally physically sneaking in. Some of the scapegoats sneaking in are babies, which seems odd to me because I’ve never seen a baby that was any good at sneaking. If you lose track of what a baby is up to, it’s generally because you fell asleep, or were reading an article. 

  Do I know how we got here, and how we can get out if it? I feel that I do. But I find that the other feelers out there get mad when I talk about it, unless they already agree with me. 

  So, I’ll keep writing, which means basically that I’ll keep churning out more drivel, and I’ll try to salt the mine with the occasional good line. I hope you’ll stick around for some of it. It’s mostly for me, but it’s for you a little bit too.