I Feel So Ray Bradbury

I feel so Ray Bradbury. I’m 44 years in the future from when I last felt normal, when I could go to bed without feeling precarious and vulnerable and threatened and strange. The changes were incremental, until 1989, when I moved into an apartment on Belmont on Capitol Hill, Seattle’s most libertine neighborhood, and rents began going up almost every month, because of the meteoric rise of Microsoft, the burgeoning growth of Apple in Silicon Valley, and the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange with its ensuing frenzy. So here I am. Here we are. Smack dab in the belly of a dystopian behemoth fattening itself on extortionate medical bills, constant surveillance, treacherous technofeudalist jobs, unfinished high-rise buildings with black mold and undependable healthcare insurance. Houses too expensive to buy and raise a family. A population of zombie consumers hunched over devices as they trudge or scooter down sidewalks at 20 mph scrolling clickbait videos with the attention span of toddlers in a candy store.

Grunge cushioned the blow. Groups like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Earth. Screaming Trees. Alice in Chains. Malfunkshun. Gruntruck. Love Battery. It celebrated chaos. It reinvented rock. It spit on consumerism. Broke guitar strings with complicated chords and screams of primal being. But grunge didn’t last very long. It lasted longer than the whole hippy thing in the Bay Area, which lasted about a year. 1966 and the first half of 1967, to quote Peter Fonda in The Limey. The whole ‘live for today,’ ‘seize the day,’ ‘go where you want to go do what you want do,’ like handsome Jack Kerouac challenging capitalist rigor with bop spontaneity, his mind slung open to Buddhism and his spirit supple and bright with Benzedrine and alcohol, went down easy with a lot of us but after a while poverty proves less and less La Boheme and more and more Les Misérables with unpaid bills and partners walking out on you and friends distancing themselves and getting jobs with big corporate salaries with the ostensible goal of changing things from the inside, which was bullshit. The system changed them. They became insufferably smug golfers with Ralph Lauren sweaters Bahama tans and 401Ks engorged with the honey of dissimulation. 

I had faith in art. Art has natural appeal. It stimulates the senses and rocks the mind with eccentric ideas. It gives people a sense of urgency. A real sense of excitement. But the technofascists don't like art. And for good reason. All those paintings of food, oysters and apples and peaches and fish, make us hunger for experiences outside tame convention. Any appeal to sensuality unfastens the mind from the digital and sublimates it into the ethereal. Art is quirky. It resists control. It’s full of detours, oddities, fevers, a lust for the ineffable. The smell of patchouli on a hot day. Sweat rolling down the back. That feeling some people get when their fingers wrap around a pork rib rubbed with brown sugar and paprika. Subtle threats of instability. That knife, for example, in Chardin’s Le Buffet under the tureen of oysters, its handle sticking out while a dog looks upward at the feast. Or language when it gets slippery and gives birth to shameless introspection. Thoughts perplexing to logic. The flaming clay of a methane swamp. The backbone of resistance. Charles Laughton swinging on a four-ton bell. Named Gabriel.

But art failed. Books failed. Conversation failed. Community failed. Everything failed.

They’re very sly, these venture capitalists, these vampiric elites, these propagandists and neocons. Here’s what they do: they turn art into politics. Writing into content. Drama into CGI. Healthcare into extortion. Actors into celebrities. Erotica into dick pics. Memes into psyops.

Oligarchs. Monarchs. Trademarks. Pockmarks. Tigersharks. Hierarchs. Patriarchs. Billionaires. Warfare. Malware. Spyware. Surveillance. Univalence. Interrogation. Castration. Privatization. Censorship. Pink slips. Internships. Container ships. Silicon chips. Proprietorship.

Illiteracy. Willful ignorance. Dumbing down. An infantilized public spoon-fed media pablum. People aren’t tricked by propaganda. They know the truth. It simmers below, in the unconscious, where it’s been shoved into darkness. Propaganda is there to muffle and soothe the naggings of the conscious mind, pull a blanket over the corpse of their critical faculty.

“Propaganda and torture are the direct means of bringing about disintegration; more destructive still are systematic degradation, identification with the cynical criminal, and forced complicity. The triumph of the man who kills or tortures is marred by only one shadow: he is unable to feel that he is innocent. Thus, he must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success.” - The Rebel, by Albert Camus  

This is where Ray Bradbury comes in. Many of his stories and novels such as Fahrenheit 451 predicted with uncanny premonition what we have now. When I see homeless encampments, I’m reminded of the encampment in François Truffaut’s cinematic treatment of Fahrenheit 451 for the lovers of books who’d memorized treasured works of literature. There are differences: there is far more despair and trauma and Fentanyl addiction among the homeless than enlightened reverence for the works of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or James Baldwin or Shakespeare. But the extreme marginalization of these people is similar to the marginalized people in Bradbury’s story. It’s also important to point out that the book burning in Fahrenheit 451 was redundant: people had lost all interest in reading or enriching the mind; they’d been completely captured by the vapid distractions of television, illustrated by the scene in which a group of people are entranced in stupefied enthrallment to a flat screen TV on the wall. 

I fantasize about having a time machine coupled with the supreme advantage of living in an actual dystopia, writing down all that I see and experience in the 21^st century and returning to the 1950s to submit it to publishers. Noting down the daily horrors, the genocide in Gaza sponsored by a president barely cognizant of who or where he is and incapable of constructing a coherent sentence. The inauguration of a president circled by grinning billionaires. Surveillance in the U.S. and Europe so omnivorous that devices pick up conversations held in the privacy of one’s home, and if one posts a perspective on social media that runs contrary to the narratives espoused by the state you can be arrested or have your home invaded by a squad of police in the middle of the night. Acute loneliness caused by an atomization of the community that extends as far as the grocery stores where people check their own groceries at computerized self-serve stations and are denied even a short exchange with a fellow human being. A health-care industry so rapacious, so merciless in their denials of insurance for critical, life-saving treatments and surgeries that people are often bankrupted and end up homeless. A public so infantilized that they themselves insist on censorship and demand a controlled, carefully monitored public speech so asphyxiating that media intellects atrophy into leprous, shopworn clichés and stale memes. Articles written by PhDs that read more like high school essays than maturely crafted expositions that have been properly researched and fully articulated. Stores forced to close due to chronic shoplifting. Stores robbed by flash mobs. Street takeovers that resemble something in a Mad Max movie in which the police sit idly by while hooligans do donuts around the police cars in mocking arrogance. Exchanges of gunfire between rivaling pimps near suburban neighborhoods where prostitution is conducted in broad daylight on Highway 99, a long arterial of used car lots, derelict motels, box stores, massage parlors, and boarded up restaurants. A store manager on social media complains that he’s had to dial 911 with increasing frequency following a freakout or robbery and the police never show up. Not once. While, on the other hand, a small man ostensibly writing graffiti on the walls of the Gates foundation is summarily thrust to the ground and handcuffed by cops arriving in eight or nine vehicles within minutes of the perp’s detection.   

And then there was the time I passed a kidney stone and writhed on the backseat of our car in intense, excruciating pain while my wife drove 15 miles to an urgent care facility which closed at 4:00 p.m. We arrived at 3:50 p.m. and they refused to let us in: too close to closing time. 

Or the seven hours we spent in an emergency room and left without a diagnosis or pain medication. The kidney stones were discovered, at last, by an MRI some days later. I was told to drink lots of water to get ride of the stones. It worked. I could’ve saved myself several weeks of unrelenting pain in my groin just by drinking water fortified with a concentrate of lemon juice. 

So yeah. I don’t feel so much like Joyce or Hemmingway or Kerouac these days. Or Viriginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein. More like Ray Bradbury writing Something Wicked This Way Comes. Or Albert Camus writing The Myth of Sisyphus. Or Franz Kafka writing The Hunger Artist: 

“During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one's own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought season tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred cage; even in the nighttime there were visiting hours, when the whole effect was heightened by torch flares; on fine days the cage was set out in the open air, and then it was the children's special treat to see the hunger artist; for their elders he was often just a joke that happened to be in fashion, but the children stood openmouthed, holding each other's hands for greater security, marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently, not even on a seat but down among straw on the ground, sometimes giving a courteous nod, answering questions with a constrained smile, or perhaps stretching an arm through the bars so that one might feel how thin it was, and then again withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage, but merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips.”