Antebellum

Antebellum

I remember when I first heard Pink Floyd sing “I’ve always been mad” and it struck a chord with me. Pink Floyd’s Wish you Were Here is the first album I ever bought. Some kid played it in music class and I just had to have it. I’ve always been fascinated by songs that point to the same sense of confusion and anger that I feel. From the same period, Jethro Tull’s Thick as a brick, and Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day. “And the wise men don’t know how it feels, to be thick as a brick.” That line still resounds within me. From later period, from the anger of my late youth, the Pistols, Pretty Vacant and from my late twenties, Nirvana’s Smell’ Like Teen Spirit. All posing the great philosophical question, “why the fuck am I here.” Or in the words of John Lydon, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?” Who’s responsible for this pain I feel every day? What answers are there when God seems like a foolish fantasy? How do I make this pain stop? Like many angry young men I turned to substance abuse, alcohol, to stop the ache, to dull the roar of human stupidity that I see around me every day. That didn’t work, which is not to say that I don’t still go there. Like many, I also saw love as the answer and threw myself into sad, mad and bad relationships. If love was just the touch of skin on skin, of holding someone close, then it would probably work, but it is all the other stuff, whose friends you’re going to hang out with, what colour doona cover to buy, where to spend Christmas, and the lies, and petty machinations that make it part of the problem.

At least when you are in pain from love it dulls the pain of life. Not much else does. Sunshine. The smile of a dying father or a loving daughter. A cat’s purr. Much else is just dross. And in this modern age, with my tastes, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the noise, the braying of asses that constantly bombard you. For example, an ad for a dietary supplement recommended that you should take it a month before getting pregnant. Only for clairvoyants, obviously. The words “planning to” might have helped. And on a beat up on a Current Affair or a similarly dubious program, talking about food terrorism, an equally beat up concern of so called terrorism experts, the voice over talked about Mad Cow Disease, as if this were a thing you could inject into food, when instead of terrorism, it is the result of modern factory processes and allowing cows to eat shit and other cows. Who needs terrorists when you got scientists?

A right wing commentator recently provided a list of people who don’t get terrorism, and included comedians and humanities academics. I could my write my own list of those that don’t get terrorism and would almost certainly include right wing commentators. A leaked report suggested the Iraq war has fermented terrorist feelings. Der. The whole invasion was based on a tissue of lies that any man and his dog (with the exception of Johnny and Alexander) could see through. The people who don’t get terrorism were not fooled by talk of Weapons of Mass Destruction, or Israel’s pretense for invading Lebanon. And who gets proved right? But more importantly, who suffers. Lots of people. I do. It is as if can feel every death of a child in Lebanon, young girl’s rape in Darfur, the pain of women burning when a bomb explodes while they are queuing for cooking oil, the death of children in a Russian school, or Chechneyan children, whose fathers don’t come home. Who justifies the pain of such innocents? Surely not the church anymore? Does the great Hebrew Yahweh condone the blowing up of ambulances? The murder of children? Does Allah suggest that killing women in their domestic routine is the way to heaven? Do these killers, and apologists for such things not feel their pain? Everything tries to stay alive. Which is why I can no longer eat many things. And in that dying I’m sure a little ripple is passed into the world. Why is it that I am like a beach onto which this pain falls as waves. And I’m not a speciest about this, the death of a magpie on the highway chills me the same as seven people stabbed to death in a Japanese street. The mosquito that I crush beneath my hand hurts me as well. And no, I’m not concerned by the millions of bacteria I kill all the time. But I’m sure they strive to stay alive just as hard as I do.

People ask me why I get depressed. They worry that I might be suicidal. They don’t see the blackness that lives in my head. They don’t feel the anger and the pain. Dying would not achieve anything. I would just be shuffled off into the great nothingness earlier than needed. And I have no wish to do that, at least not yet. I lie awake in bed in the dark and think about dying. I can feel the void. Our society does not cope with the void and certainly in Australia, courtesy of the media monopolies, it is getting worse. We had Irwin and Brocky die, both doing stupid things, what they do, one trying to make money by getting too close to animals and one speeding. How many people do you think have slammed into trees because of the culture of speed that Brocky represents? More than just him. The whole ford/holden rivalry has killed many mother’s sons. You see the pathetic little tributes to them on the sides of the road. More evidence of our lack of cultural understanding of death. I’ll put up a sign that says my son why so stupid he could not avoid this tree. People laying floral wreaths for Irwin and Brocky, people who never met them, who knew nothing of them that did not come from the tube. How is this an understanding of death? We all die. We usually don’t know when it’s coming, and it is no sin to take matters into your own hands.

I’ve been reading a very powerful book, Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), in which a lot of what formed the characters is discussed, what made Merry the Bomber angry, what made Dawn crazy, what made the Swede placid, and Leroy angry. When could you pinpoint it in their lives? I think back on mine. There is no point that I can remember where something happened that changed me. I had a loving mother and father, and though I’m sure my father belting me had something to do with my anti-authoritarian streak, there is nothing there that I can see that should have made me so angry, so sensitive to the bullshit people circulate, so pained. Nothing I consciously remember points to it. And the depression, the great black tide that washes over me at seemingly random times, where did that come from? Growing up as a fat kid, my lack of success (in my mind) with women, the rejections, my lack of money, fame, future? Why the black dog? God knows, in the scheme of things I am better off than many others. And when I’m depressed I don’t think, if I had some more money I’d be happy, no I think, how can people act like this, how can they not see, how can they not care. How can they live their lives when so many people in the world die, how can they drive those big 4WDs when they know Tuvalu will go under water and displace hundreds of thousands, how can they advertise products that they know will kill, and maim, and rob children of their parents? Zoom Zoom. How do people not feel the pain that I do? When they lie, are they being stupid, or malicious, or do they have some esoteric rationalization of the ends justifying the means. If that is the case, if the ends justifies the means, what cannot be justified. If I kill 200 school children in a school is that ok if one day my nation gets independence, even though it is virtually impossible to show any causal linkage. Is it OK to kill, and torture, and incarcerate people without trial, if that defeats the terrorists? Again, where is the causal link? All the evidence is to the contrary. If you take away people’s rights then they will fight more to retain those rights, for themselves and for others. Leaving the foolish gods out of the equations, how many people do you have to kill to bring about the change you want? All of them? I call this humanistic despair. If humans are capable of rational thought, and can work out the right thing to do, given time, why do so many chose the wrong thing? Is this the best humanity is capable of? Sure, you say, look at Einstein. But there are 6 billion people on the planet at the moment, that’s more people than have ever lived throughout history. How many Einsteins have we made? The joke is that a million monkeys with a million typewriters couldn’t produce one Shakespeare, which is clearly silly. A million monkeys did produce Shakespeare. Dumb apes.

When people ask ‘why are you depressed’ I think, why aren’t you? Is it true that I have a chemical imbalance, and enlarged hyperthalamus or something? Why does a chemical imbalance make me capable of seeing the truth? I know that I am being arrogant here, but I did know, along with many who also must have a chemical imbalance, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that there were no children thrown overboard, that the AWB lied. Australian values. I would have thought not lying was one of them. And if you give me a pill to fix my imbalance, have you fixed my problem, or merely fixed yours. Removed my thorny disposition from the world. Why is the truth such a problem?

Do not go gently, Thomas said, rage against the dying of the light, and I agree, avoid the void if at all possible, but rage against the removal of the truth. I won’t let them cure me with their little pills. They tried that once. When I was young (and maybe this is something I can point to) they gave me Ritalin to slow me down. Mum was funny. She said one day that no, it wasn’t Ritalin they gave you, it was a drug beginning with F. For the life of me I could not think of a drug that started with F. And then she rang me up, said she remembered the drug. Ephedrine she said. I laughed.

I often laugh. As Burton wrote of Democritus, it is only the laughter that keeps us sane. Not that I necessarily think I’m sane. To quote Harvey Danger - Flagpole Sitta, “I’m not sick, but I’m not well.” There is much to laugh about. There are many joyous moments to life, with family and friends, and lovers. On rock. And there is so much that is ludicrous that you have to laugh. If you didn’t laugh then, like Grendel, the monster of pain would rip from my chest and rampage through the world.

I wish I could just avoid the world, turn of the TV, unplug the broadband, not stand in the Coles queue and look at the stupid magazines that adorn the shelves. That must be a great job, working for those magazines, sit around each weekend and compete with each other for the most bizarre headline, but within the realm of the world view of the readers. I’d have a go at that.

And the so called serious newspapers are not much better. Their pretense that they report objective truth and that only the Left wing have ideologies? All silly. All manipulative. All deceptive. All to make money. I’d love to leave that world, but what would I do. Sit in the bush and eat potatoes I grow. I’d rather kill myself. Same effect. You must rage against the human, surely. Like a dying man (which of course we all are) clutch the straws of hope that are offered. A lot of people do a lot of good things. You need to applaud them, and criticize the evil and mendacious.

So I watch the TV and read the newspapers and go about my insignificant life, angry. I wait for the next war. There always sees to be one. Antebellum. Always between the wars. Though currently we’re in a couple. We’re, and I speak as an Australian here, at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the larger global ideological conflict. In an age where there are national boundaries are merely arbitrary, where capital and rich people, what Bauman calls tourists, move around at will, is this conflict not a civil war. And like what, due to the American media, is possibly the most famous civil war, there is an injustice that needs to be ameliorated. The slaves now are the poor nation states of the world, working in the Nike plantations, out in the Coca Cola fields. How do you think America would feel if some one said that the Muslim extremists were the equivalent of the Yankees, and Osama Bin Laden good old honest Abe.

Antebellum. Before the war. As people keep breeding and the population grows, the demand on finite resources such as water and land are going to be exacerbated. The demand for energy resources intensified. No one wants to be cold, or too hot. No one wants to go hungry, to die of thirst. What can the rich countries do? Stop the poor at the borders? Kill them? Allow them to die of aids, disease, pollution, neglect. The famines of the twentieth century are a small indication of what is to come. And as arms manufacturers feel the right to contribute to the free market, then people will rise up against governments, against other states and there will be many deaths, but never enough to stop it happening, never enough to ease the tension of over-population. And with every death the black tide in my head swirls around. The ache in my heart, and my distrust of the monkeys grows, until it is unbearable.