If you are someone who has been reading my blog off and on over the past years (I’ve been writing here since 2004!), you may have noticed my extended absence. I have a long list of reasons why I haven’t popped up here since early this year.
But rather than list all those reasons, I’m invoking Herman Melville’s saddest character, the descending-into-catatonia Bartleby the Scrivener. Starting as a scribe in a law office doing the new flood of work for the employer that resulted from the employer’s position in the New York patronage system of the 1850s, Bartleby performs adequately, even admirably, for the first months of his job. But when he is asked to do a routine line-by-line check of a legal contract, he simply announces “I would prefer not to…” which flummoxes his employer. This simple refusal grows like a tumor, the employer tolerating it and trying to explain it to himself, but ultimately failing to understand or overcome the ever more intransigent Bartleby. By the end of the short story, Bartleby has been cast out and descends into a bizarre kind of silence and refusal to participate in any aspect of his own or anyone else’s life. But his simple refusal to comply with the expectations and demands of his employer have echoed down the decades as an oddly inspiring model in the face of the stupid venality of modern life.
Democracy Wall on Valencia Street, still going after all these years.
So when I get up in the morning these days, I no longer listen to the news. I’d prefer not to. I glance at various online sources, but rarely do I read anything in depth. I’d prefer not to. I’d rather read a book, frankly. I am offended by the firehose of bullshit washing over us, day in day out, a daily acid bath of cruelty, brutality, and pointless violence. Do I owe it to the world to vicariously consume the details of genocide, to absorb into my personal psyche the horrendous toll of civilian death in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Libya, Ukraine, Russia? I’d prefer not to.
To what end is my distant witnessing through organs of overt and extreme propaganda? I know the worst people imaginable, with the smallest and blackest hearts and minds, are having a field day at everyone else’s expense. I know the least empathic and most narcissistic people are stealing everything they can lay their hands on as fast as possible, in a kleptocratic frenzy never seen before. I know that as a global society, not only are we not beginning to slow down the burning of carbon to stop the boiling of the earth, but we are accelerating that burning. Our government is rapidly approving the release of dozens of new carcinogenic substances into the environment, in our medicines, in our foods. The same government is incentivizing the destruction of the few remaining habitats where the remnant populations of endangered species have been hanging on, ensuring the radical shrinking of biodiversity that international conventions have spent years trying to arrest. They’re even paying corporations to halt wind projects while doling out billions in subsidies to the moribund and wildly expensive and destructive nuclear power industry. Do I have to learn about each new depradation, each new species facing the brink, each new horror that will degrade our shared planet for decades and centuries to come? I’d prefer not to. Do I have to know the details of the insane increase in plastic production, where we are going to produce two or three times more plastic in the next few years than was produced in the entire history of plastic since WWII? I’d prefer not to.
Am I supposed to get all excited about politicians who promise to be less awful than the people running the show but can’t bring themselves to call fascism fascism? Am I supposed to care about the details of how this society manages its ongoing commitment to radical inequality, to the reign of property over life, to the untrammeled power of billionaires and corporations to buy the government, the law, the police and military? I’d prefer not to.
Am I supposed to believe any of the bullshit being shoved down our throats all day about space travel, about human longevity, about how synthetic text prediction machines are going to become ‘super-intelligent’? Come on! I not only prefer not to, I fuckin’ refuse!
Am I supposed to fear a government that is drawing up lists of people to arrest and lock away for decades because they’re anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-Christian? I’d prefer not to. (I’ve been all that all my life, and more, and so what?) Am I supposed to turn a blind eye to the hopeless efforts of the small-minded, ignorant fascists to rewrite history, to ignore decades of scholarship on slavery and racism, on misogyny and patriarchy, on genocide? I’d prefer not to.
Am I supposed to write thoughtful essays about the many books I’ve read, the insights I’ve gained, the travels I’ve made, the looming sense of mortality that tending to my 94-year-old father has induced in me, the incredible sadness I feel about the future my 9- and 6-year-old granddaughters are going to grow up into? I’d prefer not to.
I’ll probably be back at it before long. But for now… (you know the refrain)…
Here are some plaques I found in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico when I was visiting recently. More history that cannot be forgotten…
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