The D-words So I'm driving out of San Antonio, faced with the long stretch of arrow-straight I-10 across Texas. One of those gigantic food-and-gas car stops looms on the pancake-flat horizon. (What kind of insane business plan do the megacorps use to justify these $10-million installations? I figure they have to be fronts for laundering dot-com money. I mean, how are you going to get payback on that kind of investment in Nowhere, Texas?). Browse, browse, browse. Take four-day-old po-boy and drink to counter where three young clerks are deep in a discussion of the intricacies of the touch keypads on their registers. Put sandwich and drink on counter in front of one clerk. No eye contact. She continues her discussion but her peripheral vision has picked up my presence. Her hand goes out, moves my sandwich and drink past the scanner. Price lights up on the display. Still no eye contact. To her fellow clerks: "You make a mistake, you gotta hit clear--$4.97--twice, then enter your code and amount of the mistake..." I put a five and two pennies on the counter. She continues the discussion as her hand sweeps up the money, manipulates her pad and puts a nickel in front of me. "You hit enter without your code and you're in deep shit cause the fucking amount--bag?--done gone in the computer..." "No, thanks," I say, take my food and leave, again foolishly troubled by the lack of acknowledgment of my existence as something other than a hand that puts stuff and money on the counter. <> A familiar encounter. Happens to us all, sometimes several times a day. Human beings in demeaning, underpaid, oversupervised jobs, which they have to keep, efficiently go through the motions of customer-interaction with an almost perfect absence of human contact. As I walk out, I find myself thinking up a string of d-words: disjunctive, disengaged, diverted, disenchanted, denial, disinterested, disintegrated, disaffected, defeated... Then, trying to dilute (another d-word) the ridiculous small pain I'm feeling, I start generalizing. Of course I know I'm doing the same thing that they're doing: de-personalizing an intolerable situation. I think: Maybe it's time to dig out the old copies of Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and brush up on alienation, that once-hot buzzword of the mid-20th century. Maybe it's even time to resuscitate ol' Karl M. himself. Sighing, I'm quickly far down that old political path, happily immersed in antique (but no less wrong, for that, right?) peregrinations re co-optation, repression, surplus value, and ownership. Generalizing and abstracting like crazy, I hardly notice my automatic actions as I start the car, turn on the A.C., start a tape, and begin to unwrap my sandwich. Out the windshield, my eye lights on what seems the only tree within a million miles, which ExxonMobil has seen fit to plant next to its ten acres of spiffy new asphalt parking lot. And the tree, in the maddening manner of trees if you pay attention to them, becomes a mirror. And the meaning of all those d-words move up a notch on the old scale of being. Up quite a few notches, in fact. Like this: With our almost perfect immersion in the demeaning, underpaid, oversupervised world of culture that we all inhabit almost all the time, how are we, with our resulting almost perfect alienation from ourselves and the world (Dammit, tree, you're just a fucking tree! Get outta my face!), any different from those three clerks? We have more money, but otherwise? Miserable, unappreciated, tense, obsessive, habituated, insatiable (Where did all the d-words go?), we (and I mean not just you and me, I mean all 5 billion of us right now and all the billions that came before us) go through our particular versions of life-in-culture with just about the same peeved, put-out, petulant (Uh-oh, here come the p-words!) demeanor that I had just observed in three unhappy ExxonMobil clerks. Sure, many of us get bigger rewards than they do, more "satisfaction" (read: better toys), and even some "recognition" (read: promotions, "fame", "power," even). But does our petulance stop, or even lessen? I don't think so. It seems only to increase. We are angry at ourselves because deep down we know we are mostly ruled by stupidity (the content of our dreams is proof enough of that). We are stupidly angry at the world (or what we think is the world) because it goes right on placidly allowing us to be ruled by our own stupidity. The problem perhaps is two-fold. 1. Recognize the d-word trap that we're in. 2. Take the "d" out of the d-words, replace it with an "r" and figure out a way to become re-engaged, re-interested, re-integrated, re-enchanted. After all, clues, like trees, abound. END |
