America Is Lucy

MODUS OPERANDI BLOGPOST2

Dr. Overbey, 27 January 2010

Since I’m not feeling well today and I am even more pissed off than I usually am all the time, I’m going to keep going.

America is Lucy.

What the hell am I talking about? You know damn well what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Lucy, the Peanuts character. There’s this on-going episode where Lucy is holding a football for Charlie Brown (I should write a short story about Charlie Brown trying to get a medical marijuana script in Los Angeles). And what does Lucy do right when Charlie Brown is about to kick the ball, his momentum irreversibly as his kicking foot flies upward? That’s right! She lifts the ball up so Charlie Brown is denied the satisfaction of completing his goal, and, to add injury to insult, loses his balance and falls on his ass.

Now, why does Lucy do this? Because she’s afraid?

No, because she gets off on it. She loves it!

It is simple sadistic joy that motivates Lucy to do this over and over (CB’s gullibility doesn’t make Lucy’s pathology any less pathetic). She loves it and cannot help herself. It is this same disposition that reflects the majority of Americans. I do not believe for a second that Americans behave as they do because of fear. Americans’ problem is not fear, but its Aristotelian opposite: foolhardiness. Americans are not afraid of what they should fear. You ought to be afraid of a totalitarian, corporate government that refuses to give its citizens health care and instead corrals the largest prison population in the history of civilization; but most Americans love it. You ought to be afraid of spending half your waking life in a four-ton piece of medal travelling upwards of 75 mph at close distance to 18 wheelers going even faster; but for most Americans, their love affair with the automobile is an American birthright more sacred than the First Amendment or even life itself (which is why so many Americans die in cars!).

And war. This idea that America has to always be at war because we’re so afraid is a joke. The only reason not to be in a war is that you are afraid. You fear the inevitable widespread death (often of young adults and children, which is especially a waste), relentless misery (but at least diverse, ranging from emotional anguish to malnutrition or even starvation), torture, mutilation, and destruction that comes with war, that is war. If these conditions do not inspire fear, there never has been or will be any justification for not being at war all the time (not that Americans need a justification for anything they do or don’t do; they are, after all, Americans). September 11 didn’t horrify people and turn them off of war and violence; it energized the entire nation and gave the whole country a machine-gun sized hard-on. “Navy seals rock!” exclaimed CBS journalist Katie Couric to the nation in the immediate aftermath, her vagina juice gushing with ovulating glee. Never in my life have I seen this country more motivated and galvanized than in the early Bush-Christ years following the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. Never will I or any living human see the day when efforts at improving health care or education remotely approach that level of focus and togetherness.

But the majority of Americans never seem to tire of war or the relentless fear that it ought to induce in a sane human being who was not raised by baboons. Instead, war is the power of pride, the fight for freedom, and other abstract nonsense. The last thing it is is the obliteration of the human body and soul. The last thing it is is what it really is, in other words.

Fools rush into situations that are obviously dangerous, pose great risk, and offer no meaningful reward should the fool be lucky and avoid the probable death or injury looming over them. Fools entrust greedy pigs who are complete strangers with their life savings—then continue to believe in the same people and the same system even after they have wrecked the economy and put the fool out of work. After all, there is always someone out there who has it even worse, and when times are tough, Americans can rub one out watching on TV while the next Charlie Brown gets fucked over. “Better you than me!”

Just as Americans don’t live in fear, they are also not stupid, at least in an epistemological sense. Most Americans have jobs (or they did until the collapse of 2008), know how to get what they want, make money, get their W2s filed, and conform in typical compliant American fashion. They know how to manipulate the media and sabotage anything or anyone they don’t like. What motivates Americans is not fear and their flaw is not ignorance but the puerile obsession of having to be better than the other person. And since intuitively most Americans know they are not going to make it rich, they are not going to live the American Dream (which is repugnant as much as it is illusory), but the one thing that can get them through the day is to see the other person punished, humiliated, and shut down. Night after night I see the reflection of blue lights on the walls of my apartment; yes—praise the Fox—another person is off to jail! Hallelujah!

It is also foolhardiness—not fear—that sustains Americans’ appetites for the utterly banal and quotidian—gossip about celebrities, sports games, what people wore to church last week, the latest bullshit digital gadgets that they can finger themselves with. Don’t we have it so great that in America we can just push the enter button after typing in the first three letters of the current month instead of having to spend all that time just typing out the date itself! Wow! Just when you thought life couldn’t get any better! So no one gathers in public space—only fools are not afraid of overlords who want to stamp out public space and make the infrastructure sterile and completely out of proportion to the human body—and makes the time to have an intelligent conversation with one’s neighbors and fellow citizens about the fact that war is a complete waste and an obvious sign of a nation in crisis that has deliberately destroyed its own imagination, that war is bankrupting the country, that our schools are a joke, that our whole way of life sucks. Instead the topic turns to how teachers don’t do real work, anyone can get rich if they work hard enough, liberals sympathize with terrorists, scientists hate America, the planet is bogging down our already-collapsed economy, and Tiger Woods is a fuckaholic . . . which is OK as long as he hits that golf ball good. Bottom line: the majority of Americans are assholes, and they can suck my cunt.

There. I still don’t feel better.

Until next time . . . remember, “nothing good is ever going to happen again.”