Slavoj Zizek Met The Buddha On The Road, But Didn’t Kill Him Because He Looked Like Slavoj Zizek

With First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Zizek is at the peak of his considerable critical powers. Zizek’s thesis here is that 9/11, at the beginning of this inauspicious decade, and the ongoing global financial crisis at its end, together signify the twin deaths of liberal democracy as hegemonic paradigm. Zizek maintains that 9/11 marked the death of liberal democracy’s political supremacy, with the financial crisis finishing off its claim to transcendence in the economic sphere. Zizek’s next, more problematic maneuver is a call for a return to a re-imagined communism in response to the failures of liberal democracy and the lurch in which these failures have left us all.

Zizek’s greatest strength is the critical eye he brings to bear on the current state of affairs. The first half of First As Tragedy, Then As Farce sings as Zizek shreds the pieties of liberal democracy’s “cultural capitalism”. Zizek nails precisely how capitalism has masked itself culturally, posing as the antidote for the poison to be found in its very own nature: “Consumption is supposed to sustain the quality of life, its time should be ‘quality time’ – not the time of alienation, of imitating models imposed by society, of the fear of not being able to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, but the time of the authentic fulfillment of my true Self, of the sensuous play of experience, and of caring for others, through becoming involved in charity or ecology, etc.”

Zizek’s key insight is that however you dress up consumption, in order for capitalism, “cultural” or otherwise, to function, consumption must continue apace. Zizek sees the pseudo-transformation of consumption on display in the Starbucks “It’s not just what you’re buying. It’s what you’re buying into.” ad campaign: “The ‘cultural surplus’ is here spelled out: the price is higher than elsewhere since what you are really buying is the ‘coffee ethic’ which includes care for the environment, social responsibility towards the producers, plus a place where you yourself can participate in communal life…. And if this is not enough, if your ethical needs are still unsatisfied and you continue to worry about Third World misery, then there are additional products you can buy.” Taking Zizek’s insight to heart, one is reminded of President Bush’s exhortation of Americans to fulfill their civic duty by continuing to keep shopping after 9/11, and of President Obama’s recent statements to the effect that if Americans will only keep shopping the end of the recession is surely in sight. The truth grasped by Zizek is that be it tragic horror (9/11), economic meltdown, or crippling guilt due to “Third World misery”, capitalism, again “cultural” or otherwise, has reduced us to one response: Keep Shopping!

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce climaxes just past its mid-point , when Zizek takes us where this is all headed (a place where our current leadership dare not gaze, as they remain duty bound in their loyalty to liberal democracy, that spouse of capitalism, the vehicle transporting us exactly where Zizek points). Zizek describes “an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives…. At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; ‘the end of times is near.’” One is forced to decide whether Zizek is yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater or whether he is simply a reasonable pessimist. I know what vibe I am getting.

Having walked up to the abyss and peaked over, Zizek spends the rest of First As Tragedy, Then As Farce in an impassioned plea for a return to a re-imagined communism for the 21st century. Given the track record of “really existing socialism” in the 20th century, it is almost impossible not to dismiss this portion of the text as a manual on How To Make A Very Bad Situation Even Worse. But if you give Zizek the benefit of the doubt that a constructive re-imagining of communism is even possible, then one of Zizek’s throwaway lines reveals the limitations of Zizek’s strict materialist imagination.

The passage in question, a familiar refrain from Zizek’s prior work, is his evaluation of what he terms “Western Buddhism”. Zizek’s stance on Buddhism as practiced in the west is that “it enables you to fully participate in the frantic capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless the whole spectacle is, since what really matters is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.” But one need only expose one’s self to such bestselling mainstream “Western Buddhist” authors as Pema Chodron to understand that the entire edifice of Buddhist dharma is intended to cultivate mindfulness, i.e. being fully present to the world and all its suffering. That Zizek’s caricature of “Western Buddhism” inverts the process of mindful awakening into a means of self-centered withdrawal, in effect accusing Buddhism of cultivating the very condition for which it is a cure, leaves Zizek’s painfully obvious reaction formation open to interpretation.

The bet here is that, on one level, Zizek is well aware of what the Buddhists are really on about; the Buddhists make no bones about their belief in the non-conceptual nature of being, that the utility of thinking has its limits, and that mindful awakening occurs only where thought intentionally leaves off. Zizek’s dust jackets proclaim that “he leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized”, equating Zizek with infinite theory. Oft referred to as the “rock star” of critical theory, it should come as no surprise that Zizek’s narcissistic equilibrium rests on the public recognition of the potency and unlimited nature of his theory, of his thought. Buddhism, with its emphasis on the limitations of thought, says to Zizek that there is a limit to how far his thinking can take us, and that the most important steps, even and especially for Slavoj Zizek, must be taken without Slavoj Zizek. The Buddha has thus left Zizek with a gaping narcissistic wound.

On another level, Zizek’s dismissal of “Western Buddhism” highlights the great, lasting flaw of Marxist materialism. The religiously atheist Marxist lineage, of which Zizek is the current standard bearer, bets the house that human social relations can be arranged such that peace and justice will reign. But Zizek, who is as indebted to Freud as he is to Marx, would be wise to revisit Freud’s remarks on communism in Civilization and Its Discontents: “the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influences which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property.” Never was uttered a more succinct explanation for the failure of “really existing socialism” in the 20th century. In whatever form Zizek re-imagines communism, he will have done nothing to alter the basic fact of human aggression, what Freud uncannily named our Death Instinct.

Only the world’s great religions, e.g. Buddhism, are equipped for the duel with the Death Instinct (Freud himself absented psychoanalysis from this epic duel with his belief that it’s utility was limited to tamping down neurosis into common every day misery; Freud’s atheism, shaping his disbelief in religion’s ability to pick up where psychoanalysis leaves off, marks him as one of history’s great pessimists). The frequent failures of religion are at their core no more than testimony to the power of the Death Instinct. It is the Death Instinct, not liberal democratic capitalism, that has brought this world to the brink of disaster. And it is only by connecting with something greater than the Death Instinct (something inside of us, outside of us, who anymore cares where this something resides?) that human civilization will outlast the century. If communism is indeed the answer, we will achieve that answer through (there is no other, less loaded word for it than) religion, including Buddhism. Zizek and his fellow travelers overlook the Buddha (and Christ, etc.) at everyone’s peril. Communism is fine just as it is, Mr. Zizek. Please help us re-imagine religion.

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

James’ Portrait of a Lady brilliantly and tragically speaks to the seductive powers of the narcissist, and the vulnerability of the young idealist to those dark arts. In astonishingly elegant prose, James walks us through a trap that is all too familiar in contemporary pop culture; our current obsession with the banal comings and goings of celebrities and pseudo-celebrities reveals us to be under the same spell as that cast over Portrait of a Lady’s heroine, Isabel. James deftly portrays the risk inherent to Isabel’s youthful ambition to do something great with her life, as it leaves her vulnerable to her seducer Osmond’s narcissistic stance of standing outside and above. Our entanglement with narcissism, while similarly disabling, has darker roots. We feed the cult of celebrity out of a collective failure of the imagination, and it is into this void that the celebrity slides. When the only accomplishment left is fame, the narcissist is king at last. Portrait of a Lady rests on what Isabel would choose, once she realizes she has fallen under the dominion of the narcissist. Would that we could choose, so deep is our own devotion. If Portrait of a Lady is “a novel about dreams that do not come true”, as the afterword to my edition, penned by Stephen Koch, asserts, then our cultural narrative is about not having any dreams, except to be famous. James’ prose remains poignantly relevant, speaking to the lasting accomplishment of his art, and to our need to reclaim a desire to do something great, whatever the risk. Especially if the risk is that no one might notice.

A Survivor’s Guide to Swine Flu

As the days shorten and I put my pajamas on even earlier than the standard 7 pm, signaling, respectively, autumn’s yielding to winter and my enthusiasm for shutting off contact with the outside world at a more reasonable hour, flu season remains undimmed. If 2007 was the Year of the Pig, per Chinese restaurant placemats, 2009 has been the Year of the Swine. If not quite a swine flu panic, 2009 has witnessed full blown swine flu paranoia. Symptoms of swine flu paranoia are evident in any public gathering place. Foremost among these is the ”sanitizing station”, where one receives in one’s hands some version of cleansing fluid, gel or foam in a fashion that is highly evocative of receiving bread at communion. The occasional surgical mask sighting or the placing of newspaper over an offensive subway train pole demarcates the boundaries of the protective sphere cast by the sanitizing station. As we swim in an ocean of hand sanitizer, we talk incessantly of the invisible threat around us: about the dangers of coming into contact with children, whose schools have been reduced to germ breeding grounds; or the risk of entering people’s homes – pity the Mary Kay lady who takes her life into her hands to make her living. Most of all, we are afraid that each person we encounter in our everyday travels is a danger to our health and well being.

It will be important to return to these fears, but a reality check is in order. The public health and medical communities have broadcast loud and clear that YOU WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT DIE FROM SWINE FLU. As names with the word Doctor in front of them are usually very reassuring in such matters, a quick web search should act as a tonic for swine flu paranoia. Dr. David Lipschitz, on creators.com, opines on swine flu thusly: “all the evidence suggests that swine flu is no more aggressive than any other seasonal influenza virus….it is also important to understand that only a very small percentage of people infected with this illness will develop life-threatening complications….we can all take a few simple steps to protect against the swine flu.” These simple steps basically amount to staying home if you’re sick and washing your hands regularly, with a little hand sanitizer thrown in for good measure (one could, of course, avoid touching one’s eyes, nose and mouth between hand washings, which is easy if you pee relatively frequently, so one could argue that drinking lots of your favorite beverage could replace the hand sanitizer, but hey, I’m not a doctor).

For a second opinion, Foxnews.com (yes, that Fox News) proffers Deborah Lehman, whose street cred practically drips from her title, Director of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Dr. Lehman provides the added perspective of comparing swine flu to what we’ve always simply called the flu: “At this point it looks like the seasonal flu will be responsible for more deaths than swine flu.” Dr. Lehman’s August forecast has held up. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition (there, that should get the taste of Fox News out of your mouth) reported this week (week of 12/7/09) that while the number of flu cases is up a bit, the number of flu deaths is only one third of its average rate. So, to sum up, swine flu is a bit easier to catch, but much less likely to kill you than good old fashioned flu. Everyone knows this by now; the bodies are simply not piling up at the morgue. But the hand sanitizer flows at a rate second only to the gushing of anxiety. The paranoid response to the reality of swine flu can only be described as irrational.

As irrational behaviors herald unconscious processes at work, if we are to understand swine flu paranoia we are tasked with interpretation. If that psychoanalytical giant Lacan is correct, and the unconscious is structured like a language, then words, signs, and symbols are the material in play. The beginning, then, is that honest name, swine flu. Too honest, in fact, for our times; swine flu was publicly sanitized into H1N1. But there is no such thing as H1N1 paranoia. What people fear is the “swine flu”, and in that pairing of nouns “flu” only relates to the fear in that it provides structure for how the fear manifests, because if we were really that afraid of the “flu”, we would have had sanitizing stations for the last one hundred years. Swine flu has opened the valves of anxiety because of the effect of the word “swine”.

That effect has nothing to do with our relationship to that class of animals which includes pigs, boars, hogs, razorbacks, etc. Swine flu paranoia is unrelated to the individual’s choice of whether or not to consume bacon (my wife tells me pigs are now considered smarter than dogs, which I take to mean that in fifty years when we’ve killed off most other species we’ll feel a little better about eating dogs, but I digress). Scroll down to the second definition of swine on the internet dictionary site that Google takes you to, and you will find “contemptible person”. Swine flu paranoia only takes on meaning in relationship to this secondary definition of the word swine. In short, swine flu paranoia is all about contempt.

We can begin to approach the link between swine flu and contempt by way of what some call, a bit melodramatically (our era majors in dishonesty with a minor in melodrama), the Conservative Media. Whatever else you say about the right, it’s populist radio talk show hosts are a reliable source of free-association levels of unconscious material, especially as relates to the aggressive drive (re. conservatives and the aggressive drive, I kid you not, I saw this bumper sticker last week: “Nuke Iran before Iran nukes us.”). So, according to MediaMatters.com (a lefty organization whose raison d’etre appears to be to reverse that tiresome cliché of “the liberal media” into its equally tiresome opposite) the Conservative Media (read: annoying radio hosts and Fox News) has been portraying the swine flu as the work of the devil, i.e. illegal immigrants. The right’s contempt for illegal immigrants appears to be one notch below that withheld for terrorists, although with swine flu’s help illegal immigrants might get to #1: MediaMatters.com reports that on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show a caller discussing the swine flu stated “each one of these people (illegal immigrants) is a biological weapon”, O’Reilly responded “You might be right.” If illegal immigrants can be considered terrorists, then there is no limit to the contempt in which one may hold them.

MediaMatters.com quotes a passage from talk show host Michael Savage that is even more telling regarding the link between swine flu paranoia and contempt. Discussing his strategy for remaining swine flu free, Savage remarks “How do you protect yourself? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, and I don’t give a damn if you don’t like what I’m going to say. I’m going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the restaurants. I will have no illegal alien workers around me. I will not have them in any of my properties, I will not have them anywhere.” (Savage was later heard stating “I do not like them with a fox, I will not eat them in a box, I will not eat them here or there, I will not eat them anywhere.”) Savage’s obvious deficiency in common sense aside (should Savage be able to somehow guarantee that no illegal immigrant crosses his path, I’m not sure how he will prevent himself from catching swine flu from a neighbor who has been infected by one of these walking biological weapons), his contempt for immigrants as would be carriers of swine flu is remarkable, absurdly comical, and frightening.

The Conservative Media’s irrational rage towards illegal immigrants as swine flu suicide bombers unmasks the interplay between contempt and swine flu paranoia. But if the Conservative Media is the crazy uncle who frequently ruins Thanksgiving, the rest of us remain garden variety neurotics, and it is to our swine flu paranoia that we now must turn. Just as the right wing talk show host’s swine flu rant expresses his contempt for illegal immigrants, our everyday acts of swine flu paranoia, the immersion in baths of hand sanitizer and the deluge of swine flu anxiety chatter (both external and internal), express our increasing perception of “the other” as a contemptible person. Swine flu paranoia is an expression of anxiety related to contact with the contemptible other, and a set of (neurotic) behaviors intended to inoculate one’s self from the dangers of contact with the object of one’s contempt. Each sanitization of one’s hands is an attempt to cleanse the contamination resulting from contact with the contemptible other.

The other is contemptible, of course. We are all contemptible. Each of us is a strange, fluid composite of the admirable and the contemptible. But swine flu paranoia reveals the degree to which we have collectively repressed those contemptible qualities which make up such a large, and necessary, portion of human character. This repression has been aided and abetted by what is best called the culture industry (a term coined, I believe, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer). The culture industry, via the interwoven means of media and commerce, has been, amidst mountains of stuff, selling us one idea. This is the idea that if the individual conforms by consuming ever increasing mass quantities appropriately, then he or she can transcend all that is contemptible in him or herself, thereby attaining to a version of the self that is exclusively admirable. We purchase this idea in every thoughtless act of consumption. And with each purchase, we repress another piece of the contemptible within us. Or it might be better said that we put our contemptible traits on lay-away, because swine flu paranoia is the return of the repressed. Those qualities that we have repressed, in our undying effort to resemble the perfect advertisement for ourselves, have returned. We now see them in everyone else, and for reminding us of what we have rejected in ourselves we hold them in contempt. It is the ultimate irony that the mechanism for so much of our repression, the variety of media, is the primary carrier for the spread of swine flu paranoia. As the culture industry consolidates its grip ever further, instances of mass neuroses are inevitable, i.e. you ain’t seen nothing yet.

For the skeptics who might doubt the leaps involved in meaningful interpretation of irrational behavior, trust that there is method to the madness. But to question how one gets from the repression of contemptible traits to standing in line at the hand sanitizing station is not unreasonable. The theory in play holds that the return of the repressed necessarily includes irrational behavior. Freud, in Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, describes the psychic distortion that leads to the return of the repressed in irrational and unrecognizable forms: “All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as ‘the return of the repressed’. Their distinguishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching distortion to which the returning material has been subjected as compared with the original.” (p. 127) In other words, we repress that which is unacceptable in the advertisement for ourselves, and the repressed, contemptible traits undergo a process of distortion. At the end of the process the repressed returns, as it must, only now it takes the form of the contemptible other, who has me running scared for the sanitizing station.

As this interpretation began with language, it is to language that we turn in closing. My wife saw a sign at our synagogue the other day which warned “Germs are everywhere”. We now know that this sign is warning us that contemptible persons are everywhere, so slather on the Purell. But if we wish to step back from irrational swine flu paranoia, and towards basic sanity, the etymology of the word “germs” provides a clue. Germ is first recorded in 1644, with an original meaning of “rudiments of a new organism in an existing one.” It had the sense of a sprout or a bud; think “wheat germ” or “germ of an idea”. But by 1805 germ came to mean “seed of a disease”, and by 1871 it came into the meaning it has in common usage today: “harmful microorganism”. Our increasingly pathological relationship to that which is contemptible within us mirrors the evolution of the meaning of the word germ. We increasingly relate to our contemptible traits as a harmful microorganism within us to be eradicated. But eradication is impossible, and repression, and its eventual return, the inevitable outcome.

But if we return to the original sense of germ, conceiving of our contemptible traits as rudiments of a new self in an existing one, we begin to get close to a truth that our spiritual traditions have known down through the ages. The way forward is through the flaws and the pain, through what is contemptible in each of us. It is the by the grace of God that the repressed must always return, even if that means scrubbing our hands raw at our local sanitizing station. For if the repressed did not return, if we could indeed eradicate the contemptible, we should have rid ourselves of the only way out of this great big mess. I’ll start by not trying to be a hybrid of Phillip Marlowe and John Boy from The Waltons, which I somehow decided long ago was the perfect advertisement for me.

Inherent Vice  by Thomas Pynchon

With Inherent Vice, Pynchon does an admirable job of tackling and integrating the realms of the hard boiled gumshoe and early 70's California hippie culture. He gets there by way of his protagonist, Doc, a constantly stoned P.I., who seems to just float through the novel, his altered state taking just enough of the edge off of every jam in which he finds himself. Pynchon in turn does just enough with the plot to keep the mystery interesting, but is at his best capturing the mood of the naivete that was both the hippie movement's charm and its undoing. The LAPD is, perhaps, the novel's true villain, and in a world where the cops are more noir than the criminals it comes as no surprise that peace and love faded away into the smog of 70's LA. Inherent Vice is at its core a lament for a dream that never really was, but one that is remembered fondly nevertheless.

Take out the papers and the trash (in the same trash bag)

Nothing assuages the guilt of consuming mass quantities like putting a heaping bin of recyclables out by the curb for pick up, secure in the knowledge that one’s assortment of Suave family-size shampoo bottles, Diet Mountain Dew two-liters, Prego jars (It’s in there!), and all the sundry paraphernalia of comfortable modern living are not headed to the landfill, and are, as such, surgically excised from one’s conscience. And this is exactly why, if you hope to save the Earth, you must stop recycling RIGHT NOW. Step away from the government-issued blue plastic recycling bin, and put the empty can of Manwich down (sidebar to my wife: how ’bout some sloppy joes, hon?).

Because recycling ultimately has nothing to do with saving the Earth, and everything to do with guilt. Recycling is, at its core, a response to the guilt accrued by those participating in the aggressiveness of industrialized, consumerist lifestyles. A few words from Freud will help us to grasp the link between recycling, guilt, and the human aggressive drive. As to aggression, Freud stipulated in his clearest philosophical work, Civilization and Its Discontents, that aggression is the gravest challenge facing humanity: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” (p. 154) Today this aggression most prominently manifests under the cover of everyday life, in the form of a consumerism that is entrenched and pathological. Unchecked, this consumerism threatens to transform us into the Uroboros; we will literally eat ourselves until we are gone. Of course, the Uroboros traditionally symbolizes the beginning of a new cycle, or re-creation. The risk we now take is that the re-creation will be an Earth without humans, or at least, without human civilization.

Fortunately for us humans, there is a psychic mechanism, guilt, which acts as a brake on the destructive bent of the aggressive drive: “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains a mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” (p.121) Or, perhaps, not so fortunately, as the nature of this mechanism, guilt, led Freud to remark: “What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (p.151) For Freud, the price we pay for civilization, this constant torment of guilt, constant in the sense that one is punished by the superego as much for one’s thoughts as one’s actions, is criminally high. But in lieu of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max lifestyle, I’ll keep my civilization and happily pay the guilt bill.

So, how to keep the civilization? We, meaning those of us in the industrialized west, must simply consume radically less. Of course, this message is already out there, and the statistics supporting it are easy to find on a variety of websites. Just one example among many, greenlivingtips.com reports that “12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption.” Put simply, no matter what else we do about climate change, population growth and other assorted dangers, it won’t matter a bit if industrialized, consumerist peoples do not radically reduce their rates of consumption. If we don’t consume very much less, we will die, or our children or their children will.

So we should all be recycling, right? Recycling means that less stuff gets consumed, which has to be a good thing if the path to salvation is by way of consuming less stuff. The catch is that recycling impacts our pathological urge to consume in the wrong direction, by “liberating” the aggressive drive from its natural keeper, guilt. Of late recycling has been linked in a triad formula of reduce-reuse-recycle, which begins to acknowledge the limitations of recycling alone. But those limitations are not the real problem with recycling, or reducing and reusing for that matter. Our way of life, and recycling’s true relationship to that way of life, are the real problem. That way of life depends upon constantly increasing consumption, and we have stepped up to the plate like Barry Bonds on steroids. One example plucked from many: from 1973 to 1993 per capita consumption in the United States rose 45%, according to John Cunniff in the Seattle Times on 9/19/93. Continuing the engorgement could not occur without recycling.

We know that we are killing the Earth by consuming it. Al Gore is here to make sure we know this. The dykes holding back aggressiveness have burst under a tidal wave of consumption. This onslaught of aggression in the guise of shopping and eating has triggered our natural response, guilt. The burst in recycling of recent years, according to treehugger.com only 23% of Americans now don’t recycle (a number they still find appallingly high), is representative of nothing else but a seismic shockwave of guilt. We are killing the planet and we know it, but instead of changing our way of life we deal with our guilt by putting our recycling on the curb. Recycling is but a ruse to fool the superego, thereby extinguishing the psychic pain of guilt. Of course, the price of fooling the superego is preventing it from doing its job, which, sans recycling, would be to ramp up the guilt until we changed our destructive ways. But by recycling, we have pulled the wool over the eyes of the superego in order to have our cake and eat it too. But when the cake is gone there will be nothing left for anyone to eat. (In recycling, we are remarkably like the teenage female who engages in anal sex to avoid the guilt of losing her “virginity”. She, like us, is simply trying to fool her superego, yet she has engaged in a sexual act unrivaled in heat and intimacy, with all of the attendant physical and emotional consequences. In fooling her superego she has dispensed with the most effective prophylactic of all: guilt as guarantor of abstinence, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.)

So enough with the recycling. If our way of life depends on consuming mass quantities, let’s figure out how to change our way of life. This kind of radical change won’t seem so radical in a few years when, to mix metaphors, it’s time to pay the environmental piper and the shit truly hits the fan. The sooner we start the less painful it will be, but there is going to be a great deal of pain, one way or the other. Let’s just hope that the pain is constructive, like anxiety from a guilty conscience. But I assure you I will feel no guilt tonight when I throw my can of Dr. Pepper in the regular trash bin.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

One of the best pieces of pessimistic cultural theory you are likely to ever encounter. The entire work seethes with revulsion at the black hole of late capitalism, which the authors portray as draining meaning out of every human life sucked into its vacuum. But Adorno and Horkheimer are at the absolute peak of "it's all going to hell" brilliance with their chapter on the culture industry. Riffing primarily on the effects of film and radio, which they diagnose as instruments of mass conformity, one can only imagine their response to the all-pervasive media of our 21st Century cum electronic womb. A clear forerunner to later important works, such as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is a must read for anyone with even just a shred of doubt as to where this is all going.

Against Homework: A Polemic

As a schoolboy I tirelessly resented the intrusion of homework. School had me seven hours a day, my body rigidly confined to a desk, my mind a captive audience to the vagaries of curriculum, the insistence upon behavioral compliance the grinding subtext of every school-bound moment. This strict compliance includes the body, witness my kindergarten teacher placing me in a chair in front of and facing my classmates as I waited for my mother to rescue me with clean clothes after my bladder had not complied. It also includes the social, as evidenced by the fourth grade teacher who enforced complete and total silence in my elementary school cafeteria during lunch, and who made us proud of our subjugation by afterwards congratulating us all over the intercom for our spectacular act of capitulation. But this was never enough. In order to fulfill its overarching mission of subjecting the pupil to the sufficient degree of domination necessary for casting the dye of a conforming worker, school required homework.

Homework accomplishes a necessary step in the molding of the agreeable worker. The assignment of homework, whether completed, ignored, or eaten by the dog, demolishes the barrier between the realm of labor, with school but a proto-workplace, and the private sphere of home and family. With homework, home is metamorphosized into the place where work goes and they have to take it in. After homework, the home becomes little more than a branch office with better office furnishings. Henry Ford famously stated that you could have his Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Homework says you can do anything you want to do in life, as long as it is a job.

The best pupils, those who please their teachers most, are inevitably those who spend the most time doing homework. By giving their lives over entirely to school they have received everything that prep school has to offer, a preparation for replicating their self-sacrifice on the altar of professional success. Amidst the absence of sturm und drang, the silence, as hallmark of a well-modulated, professionally aspirational student body, shouts one thing: you can only serve one master. Doing all of your homework is the first and foundational act of serving that master for the rest of your life. The master rewards such servitude the only way it can, with some cash and yet more work. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in their masterwork The Dialectic of Enlightenment, capture this succinctly: “The gradations in the standard of living correspond very precisely to the degree by which classes and individuals inwardly adhere to the system. Managers can be relied on.” The best early outward sign of this inwardly grounded reliability is doing your homework.

And I do mean early. A friend and, yes, co-worker of mine (my life is as dominated by work as the next guy; outside of my wife and family nearly the only people I interact with on any consistent basis are my co-workers) recently told me that her three-year-old daughter’s day care provider was assigning homework. My wife regales me with tales of published studies establishing the complete lack of any academic benefit to such early assignment of homework. But of course, any academic benefit of homework is always completely beside the point. By assigning homework at age three, the day care provider is passing on the only folk wisdom we have left, our societies’ master signifier, symbolically branded onto the forehead of every homeless vagrant cum economic deserter: Get A Job.

So when our childrens’ spines are literally bent by the weight of the homework they must tote home every night in their backpacks, a deforming of the body marking the self-sacrifice of their voyage to Harvard and beyond, a deforming, it goes without saying, preferable to those tattoos and piercings which might forever bar the door to observable managerial reliability, let us be reminded that these contrasting outward markings of, respectively, inauguration into or exclusion from professional status, are both symptoms of the soul-bending force of economic conscription. Let us remember this when we ask our daughters and sons if they have done their homework before they are allowed to go outside and play. But, of course, if they are staying inside to play another six consecutive hours on their Playstations anyway, perhaps the battle is already lost. They might just as well complete yet another pointless worksheet. Is it still too late to talk my wife into reconsidering homeschooling?

Gotta Get Back In Time

Socrates’ famous remark, “the only thing I know is that I know nothing”, is perhaps history’s most pithy commentary on the illusory nature of reality as it is lived. The magic that maintains the illusion, and the element which makes the illusion necessary, are one and the same. Sometimes dressed up as The Fourth Dimension, that which beguiles Socrates and all the rest of us hides in plain sight as the common coin of daily drudgery, time (see “time is money”).

Our collective complicity is necessary for the magic to work; we maintain the illusion by accepting the received wisdom that time marches ever forward in a linear fashion, and, even more importantly, that within this inevitable progression cause always and necessarily leads to effect. Cause and effect is the most fundamental given of our daily experience of reality, and as such shapes our encounter with time, thereby empowering time to delude us all into believing that reality is unassailably monolithic. To encounter reality instead as soft clay, one must first disenchant the spell cast by time, a spell that bewitches via the sorcery of cause and effect.

Time’s power, its ability to pen us into the present moment with its attendant horrors and without hope of escape, rests in our programmed experience of the present as impenetrably remote from the past, and untouched by a not-yet-existent future. In our belief in a bright line which separates past from present we are like a racehorse wearing blinders; seeing only that present moment right before us ,we rush forward, blind to the big picture that is our true reality. This big picture is captured best by William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” To that I would only add that the future is not even future.

What Faulkner understood, and what we like to ignore through our purchase of time’s snake oil, is that the past is right here in the room with us in the present. Psychoanalysis is nothing other than a system of healing founded on this, time’s dirty little secret. Those psychotherapists who insist upon attending exclusively to the here and now are trafficking primarily in illusion, as whatever help they offer leaves the patient still stranded on an island that does not exist. Psychoanalysis stakes its claim that speaking in the present is giving voice to the past. Everything we do and say in the “here and now” is always a reckoning with everything that has come before; the present moment is nothing other than an improvised encounter with the past. This is all well and good for as far as it takes us, but where Faulkner and Freud’s past leaves off we are still haunted by cause and effect. With a nod to Dickens, enter the Ghost of Christmas Future.

To repeat, the future is not even future. The radical step necessary to demystify the nature of time is the acknowledgment that “cause and effect” is joined by its equal partner in the realm of causality, “effect and cause”. Conditioned to believe that an effect can only follow a cause in the sequence of time, what we traditionally refer to as “cause and effect”, we have repressed our knowledge of the truth that effect can and does occur in the sequence of time prior to its cause, a phenomenon we might simply label “effect and cause”. Amidst our repression we give voice to our intuitive insight into “effect and cause” with that everyday cliché, “everything happens for a reason.” This cliché, commonly used as a verbal crutch when, as so often happens, there is a void in the place where we go to find meaning, is actually a trace of deep folk wisdom. This is the knowledge that if the reason or cause for an event cannot be found in the past, that the void is not an absence of meaning, but a sign pointing to the future genesis of that meaning, i.e. the cause of the effect is yet to come.

A popular Taoist legend, copied here from www.webtapestries.com, hints at the presence of the future in the “here and now”:

‘A chinese farmer's neighbors came over to offer him their sympathy after his horse ran away. "I'm not so sure it's a misfortune", said the farmer. The neighbors left, shaking their heads.
The next day, the farmer's horse returned, and three wild horses came home with him. The neighbors returned to congratulate the farmer on his good fortune. "I'm not certain that it is good fortune", replied the farmer. The neighbors left, more bemused than before.
Later that week, the farmer's son broke his leg trying to train one of the new horses, and the neighbors came by to offer condolences. "I'm not sure this is a misfortune", said the farmer again. The neighbors left, discussing the man's mental state among themselves.
The next day, the emperor came through, gathering up young men to be in his army. They bypassed the farmer's son, since he had a broken leg.’

The traditional interpretation of this legend is rather straightforward: since we can not see the future, we are unable to determine what is blessing and what is curse, so let us instead live detached from our mind’s storylines, peaceful and awake in the moment. Seen from another angle, however, the legend is subversive to the reification of the concept of cause and effect, clearing space for a liberating relationship with time. Understood thusly, the legend is an exemplar of a chain of “effect and cause”, with the horse’s escape “caused” by a temporally subsequent “effect”, the return of the horse with three additional wild horses. Continuing the chain, the return of the four horses is “caused” by the “effect” of the son’s broken leg, and, finally, the son’s broken leg is “caused” by the “effect” of the conscripting emperor.

With the radical move of establishing the reality of “effect and cause” accomplished, our understanding of the interplay of past, present, and future can be fine tuned. It is an oversimplification to oppose “cause and effect” against “effect and cause”, as if only one element, past or future, comes to bear on the present. It goes without saying that some degree of “cause and effect” will always be in play in the present; in the legend above it would be foolish to deny that a series of events, perhaps the farmer’s son having left the farm’s gate open, has played a role in the outcome of the horse’s departure from the farm. However, in every present moment “effect and cause” partners with “cause and effect” to shape the possible experiences of the present moment. In this example, the horse’s subsequent return with three additional horses is equal to the postulated left-open gate as a causative force in the horse’s escape. To be crystal clear, the events that occurred after the horse’s escape were just as important in causing the escape as the events that occurred prior to the escape. “Cause and effect” works in tandem with “effect and cause”, equal partners in crafting the potential present. The old saying “that horse has already left the barn”, commonly used to express the irretrievable quality of the past, may also be understood to say the future is now.

We may discard our notion of time as a linear flow from past, to present, to future in which each moment is sacrosanct in its isolation, and in which each inviolable moment lays a stranded human monad. In its place we might think of time as a thread with three strands woven together such that encountering the thread at any site along its length we come into contact with all three strands: past, present, and future. This thread is both the abstract notion of time and a lived human life, unending as time itself. Lest this understanding of time threaten with the specter of hard determinism, rest assured that all which is created by the past and the future in crafting the present is but a stage for the creative improvisation of the now. We always act in relationship to the past and future, but our actions within the scope of this stage are free and unlimited. As for time travel, there is really nowhere to go. The boundless landscape of past and future are right here in the infinite present.

The Importance of Being Richard

Decades of feminist toil notwithstanding, the framework of the relationship between the male and female of our species remains on display in the exchange between male John and female prostitute: women continue to be granted access to the means for economic survival only to the extent that their sexual wares remain for sale. The inviolability of this sexual paradigm in late twentieth century and post-millennial America is writ large in the Hollywood career of Richard Gere.

Gere first shot to fame via 1980’s American Gigolo, in which Gere flipped the sexual script in his portrayal of the male prostitute servicing a female clientele. The success of this film hinged on the erotic potency of the violation of taboo found in its illicit rearrangement of sexual typecasting (re. the box-office potential of taboo-busting, witness the aptly titled pornographic film Taboo, one of the highest grossing blue movies to date, in which a male in his late adolescence lusts after, and ultimately consummates a sexual relationship with, his mother). The success of American Gigolo simultaneously made and unmade Gere, as he had unquestionably ascended to star status, but on his way up became marked as persona non gratis, effectively emasculated by the viral femininity that had leeched into his Hollywood aura during his turn as prostitute, i.e. Woman.

It is crucial not to let the box-office success of Gere’s 1982 smash hit, An Officer and a Gentleman, muddy the waters. Understood correctly, An Officer and a Gentleman is the exception that proves the rule that when one swims against the tide of masculine domination, one swims at one’s own risk. Gere’s ability to temporarily transcend the stain from American Gigolo is secured in the famous final scene of An Officer and a Gentleman in which Gere, in full Marine dress blues, storms onto the factory floor and literally sweeps Debra Winger off of her feet and out of the factory, to the cheers of her female factory co-workers. Each element in this scene is crucial to Gere’s brief transcendence. The marine uniform as warrior’s cloth cloaks Gere’s sexual stain, obscuring it from the viewer’s gaze. Gere sweeps Winger off her feet in a factory, the archetypal site of involvement in the wage economy, symbolically removing Woman from the labor pool and placing her economic survival back in its rightful domain of sexual object-hood. Winger swoons in Gere’s masculine embrace, an embrace which clearly references Man’s purchased ownership of Woman’s sexuality via marriage as rendered in the traditional carrying of the newly betrothed bride over the threshold, which is always a precursor to laying the virgin down in the marriage bed and taking possession of her sex. This shot reverses the transgressive act of taking women back across the threshold into sexual freedom that Gere, by bedding them for pay, had symbolically accomplished in American Gigolo. Finally, the cheers of Winger’s female factory co-workers signal their complicity in the sexual status quo, as they long to be liberated from the oppressive workaday life of factory labor by their own knight in shining armor; a life of indentured sexual servitude seems a small price to pay at the end of an eight hour shift on the factory floor for peanut wages. These women’s cheers signal that the feminist’s victory has in fact been Pyrrhic in nature, as the fruits of liberation from masculine domination are revealed as but a subjugation of a higher order. The song of women’s liberation is lost in the throbbing beat of workingman’s blues.

Post- An Officer and a Gentleman, Gere’s career entered its wilderness period, as the stain of American Gigolo, temporarily undone in the narrative of Officer’s denouement , reasserted itself in a near-decade long series of box-office disappointments. The only heat Gere generated during this period came in the form of a perverse urban legend. Legend has it that Gere engaged in a radical form of bestiality, inserting a mouse encased in a condom inside his rectum, with the frantic scratching of the mouse intended to generate sexual stimulation. Gere almost certainly never actually engaged in any such sexual shenanigans, but the viral spread of this rumor, which became so commonplace as to be considered a matter of course, had nothing to do with whether Gere actually stuffed a mouse in his arse. The ubiquity of this urban legend was an expression of zeitgeist, a collective recognition of the stain attached to Gere as a result of his actions in American Gigolo. The urban legend was a reformulation of the cultural stigma attached to Gere’s transgressive sexual persona. It was the very success of American Gigolo, in which mass culture encountered its own unacceptable desire for non-traditional sex, which foundered Gere. Gere’s stain, translated to narrative form via the urban legend, was the accompanying equal and opposite reaction to our collective repression of unacceptable, libido-driven desire.

Gere’s salvation as Hollywood leading man came with 1990’s Pretty Woman, in which Gere permanently erased his stain by renouncing American Gigolo’s radical core. By portraying a man paying to have sex with a female prostitute, Gere is able to stuff the terrifying specter of our sexual unchaining back into Pandora’s Box. It all plays out like a failed psychoanalysis, in which Gere shares his dream/nightmare of being paid to provide sex to a woman, only to have the analyst misinterpret the potentially transformative content of the dream as a symptom of pathology, the only available treatment for which is a reversion to socially acceptable sexual norms, a real, yet cloaked, pathology invisible to the incompetent analyst; the failed analyst, of course, is you and I.

The erasure of the stain enacted by Gere’s performance in Pretty Woman is as comprehensive as it is pathological. Pretty Woman is Gere’s public recital of the requisite Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s, proscribed by that other analyst figure, the Priest (we are, of course, also Priest, in the church of public opin{repress}ion). One conjugal embrace with girl-next-door cum slut Julia Roberts later, and Gere’s sins are completely absolved. The absolution’s probation period ends with Gere’s installation as People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1999. Gere’s new status as Hollywood’s (un)enlightened uber mensch is then codified by his exalted gig as the Dalai Lama’s number one Hollywood henchmen. Namaste!

Gere’s talent as the reverse Harry Houdini, inexplicably capable of re-chaining himself to social sexual norms after the near symbolic-death experience of American Gigolo , is celebrated in 1993’s Somersby. Gere portrays a returning Civil War veteran who, while physically resembling himself as he was before the war, is somehow just plain different enough to raise the question of whether he really is himself after all. Jodie Foster, a real-life “glass closet” lesbian, here dressed in (patriarchal) period costume, perfectly representing the figure of unacceptable, repressed desire, says to the new Gere, in order to prove to him once and for all that he is not the man whom he once was, “I never loved him the way I love you.” Foster’s stated passion for the new Gere is the acceptable, sublimated version of a passion our society is clearly not ready to own: our unequivocal, secret and diabolical desire for our American gigolo.

To Believe or Not to Believe, That is the Question

Those who would reform American education must beware the difficulty in reforming a system which already performs its true function, maintenance of the socioeconomic hierarchical status quo, perfectly. Would be reformers of urban public education (UPE) might initially take great comfort in the need for their services apparent in bulbous dropout rates and other assorted commonplace city school maladies. But the UPE reformer consigns herself to irrelevance when she mistakes the chaotic malaise of UPE as a sign of dysfunction, when in fact the apparent dysfunction is a symptom of UPE’s true function, the cementing of class immobility. The yet-to-be-seen successful UPE reformer must first take the necessary leap of faith and truly believe that really existing UPE is, against all outward appearances, a smashing success, in that it covertly fulfills its sub rosa, sinister function. Only by recognizing UPE for what it is, an instrument in the never ending story of class struggle, and by letting go of what UPE pretends to be, a flawed but curable system for the delivery of education to the masses, can a would be UPE reformer even begin the daunting task of initiating meaningful transformation. As long as the aspiring UPE reformer clings to her belief in UPE as a charming fixer-upper she will remain an unwitting accomplice in the maintenance of UPE as the guarantor of class immobility, as she will inevitably fail in achieving the impossible task of fixing what ain’t broke.

No one is more important in maintaining our necessary collective belief in the fiction of UPE as fixer-upper than the exceptional UPE alumnus who exhibits class mobility. This individual is shot forth from the belly of the beast like a Heimlich-dislodged chunk of meat, a propulsion necessary for the survival of UPE as currently constituted. If we follow the script we should see in this exceptional individual what is truly possible if only we were all to believe in and support our public schools. Ironically, it is the fact that we all already believe in our public schools, a belief paradoxically strengthened by their constant teetering on the verge of collapse, thereby increasing the intensity of our need to sustain them via our belief, which allows them to continue to function as instrument of oppression for the students condemned to their halls. Is it just coincidence that UPE produces just enough “success stories” to keep us all believing that we are just a reform away from tapping the limitless potential of the millions of children in urban schools, a belief mysteriously resilient to the contradictory fact of life as it is lived on city streets?

As a clinical social worker in a major UPE school system, I show up for work each day in order to help one more child become the exception that proves the rule. In doing so I am effectively attempting to feed the machine with the exceptions necessary to maintain our collective belief in the “potential” of UPE, and by now we all know that in touting someone’s potential we are merely gift-wrapping the reality of his or her current shortcomings. Wrapped up inside the shiny silver packaging of UPE spin is the coal-black heart of economic violence. If I am going to be complicit, as we all are, let me be so from within where at least I can spring a few of the inmates.

So how might the "potentially” successful reformer, one who believes in the true truth of UPE as the eight hundred pound gorilla sitting not in the room but on the backs of UPE’s students, initiate meaningful transformation? First and foremost, she would have to be a good liar; in order to penetrate the inner sanctum of UPE she must cloak herself in a false but outwardly convincing belief in the party line of accelerating student achievement, which if enacted would of course only ever serve to mint a modicum of exceptional individuals. Once ensconced inside the machine she would have to achieve the fantastical outcome of radicalizing millions of currently colonized consciousnesses, an act which looms larger than moving mountains. But Gandhi got the British out of India. And, perhaps more to the point, Dr. King got Jim Crow out of the American south. Of course, they shot Dr. King as soon as he started preaching economic justice. Which, with untold thousands of Americans dying and killing in the global “war on terror”, leaves me wondering what you and I are willing to lay down our lives for? In the meantime, I’ve got some exceptional children who need my clini(radi)cal assistance.

Oh Merde

Nothing keeps our species honest like the smell of our own shit.  And nothing is consistently funnier or more universal than potty humor; already my 21 month old daughter gets a laugh every time she says “faht” (not sure where she gets the Boston accent).  We are never more vulnerable than when we sit down to take a crap, and even more so after the fact as our human stain lingers in the air for all to smell.  Potty humor works precisely because of this vulnerability inherent to the act of moving our bowels (my all time least favorite euphemism for shit was that used by my maternal grandmother: “B.M.”; those two initials somehow made every shit I ever took in her house approximately five thousand times stinkier).  Effective potty humor releases the tension we all feel regarding our excrement and the act of expelling it by universalizing the absurdity of the act.  Nothing levels the playing field more than the realization that even the Queen of England stinks up the W.C.  Potty humor is the ultimate “I’m OK, you’re OK” moment. 

It is no coincidence that the greatest Zen Masters take their regular turn in the rotation cleaning the monastery’s toilets.  There is no better reminder that each and every one of us has Buddha nature than the fact that each and every one of us shits.  The individual of whom it is said “he thinks his shit doesn’t stink” is in exile from his own Buddha nature and in denial of everyone else’s; taken to its logical extreme this insight reveals the toilet seat as the throne of the son of man.  If we all “love our own brand” it is not because it doesn’t stink but because in the smell of our own shit we smell our own basic humanity. 

The office workplace is revealed, then, as soul crushing antiseptic vacuum by the little can of Glade air freshener in the restroom.  It does not matter whether you spray the can of Glade after you have done your business or not, for the real purpose of the can of Glade is to announce to all who enter that here, in the office, your human stain on the air is unacceptable; i.e. it is your very humanity that intrudes on your purpose here in the office, which is not to have your excrement extracted from your bum into the toilet but to have the surplus value extracted from your labor to serve your employer. 

There is something bracing, invigorating even, about walking into a freshly shat in bathroom.  The stinky bathroom is, if nothing else, alive.  But this honest stench is transmuted when subsumed under the cloying sweetness of Glade. Paired together, Glade and human shit smell like the scent of the stink bug.  The living, breathing, shitting human being is reduced by the office and the can of Glade to the status of pest.  And the pest is nothing other than that which must be controlled.

 

This morning's painful life lesson: While two glazed strawberry Pop Tarts make a delightful dessert, they make a truly nausseating breakfast. Now I am faced with the difficult task of operationalizing this key insight....

Hug This

The emphasis on the man-made origins of global warming/climate change and the corollary insistence upon the greening of human behavior masks a deeper fear. As long as climate change remains our creation, it rests within our power to undo it. Even if we fail to do so, through a collective species shortcoming, we become the authors of our own group suicide, and as such remain the masters of our own universe.

Hidden behind this narrative of climate change in which human beings are cast in the starring role, is the fear that climate change is occurring without any human input whatsoever. It is one thing if, like Thelma & Louise, I choose to steer my car off a cliff; it is another thing altogether if an earthquake rips open the interstate beneath my Toyota Prius and I am gobbled up by the earth.

The prevailing human-centered narrative of climate change, with its clarion call for a green revolution, is nothing other than a re-boot of enlightenment’s central project, the human domination of nature. The vision of a green revolution that brings humanity and nature into harmony, restoring conditions that reliable sources confirm were enjoyed by American Indians before the arrival of El Gordo (aka The White Man), is the obscuring fantasy that allows the real project of dominating nature to continue right beneath our noses while we post pictures of the family trip to Yosemite on Facebook. If you doubt the depth of the need for climate change, and by extension nature itself, to be ours, just imagine yourself at a cocktail party engaged in a discussion with someone who doesn’t “believe in global warming”. If we are honest about the emotions this (in)human being would provoke, we might need to revive the word heretic.

So what do we do if every last one of us composts and it is still sixty degrees and sunny on Christmas Day in Wasilla, Alaska? We carry on with the really existing debate between the greens and the oil barons: how best to dominate nature? It is only by accepting that this is the debate to be won that the greens can cast off their tattered coat of tree hugging flakiness and attain to their true status as benevolent dominatrix. Clad in leather garb appropriate to the ferocity of this debate, the greens might actually win. And the stakes of this debate, given that homo sapiens (probably) are responsible for climate change, could not be higher. For if Bobby Knight was interviewed by Connie Chung again, this time around he might reformulate his infamous remarks thusly: "If global warming is inevitable, just sit back and enjoy it." There is no more dangerous enemy than he who thinks he is being funny when he is actually being creepy. I'll take a session with my friendly local dominatrix, thank you very much.

Hipster (a working definition):  One whose enjoyment is subservient to one’s perception of the acts essential to one’s self image.  

From a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the hipster is one with a rigid, perhaps fundamentalist, investment in the fiction of his or her ego, placing the hipster at a radical remove from the truth of his or her subject.

The geek, however, experiences no limitation in his or her enjoyment of the experience; in fact the geek has the opposite problem in getting carried away with his or her enjoyment, in other words going too far in the sense of alienating others. The geek, whether engaged in civil war reenactment or on-line World of Warcraft gaming does not know how to limit his or her enjoyment, allowing his or her excessive enjoyment to interfere with basic social functioning. To use a (possibly hip) Lacanian term, the geek has an over abundance of jouissance. On a personal level, I am a closet geek about tennis equipment, but I have enough of the hipster in me to keep this geek enthusiasm largely concealed.

The hipster’s enjoyment is restricted by a rigid self image, and the hipster’s perception of his or her own sexual attractiveness is a key element in the hipster’s calculus of acceptable acts. The hipster is limited at all times by the idea of how he or she will be perceived by others, unlike the geek who could care less about the opinions of those not engaged in e.g. medieval warcraft and costume gatherings. The hipster is the far more tragic of the two conditions, as he or she is, ironically, as socially and sexualy limited as the geek; just as geeks only get laid by geeks, hipsters end up only having sex with other hipsters. But while the geek must struggle with an excess of jouissance, the hipster, bound by his or her rigid ego, exiled from the truth of his or her subject, can only nibble at the life-giving buffet table of jouissance, while everyone else helps themselves to Cheesecake Factory portions. And the geeks go home with doggy bags.

Finally, the phenomenon of “geek chic” in which the hipster attempts to coopt the yearned for jouissance of the geek but only ever manages to shackle the geek’s excess freedom, reveals the truth of the hipster’s subject as a narrative of the geek in flight from himself, i.e. the hipster is nothing other than the necessary ego fiction accompanying the truth of the repression of the geek into the always obscured subject.  

Witness the author’s circa 1995 immersion into thrift store clothing, wine-colored hair, local Perth indie rock bands, and a subsequent ill-fated long distance love affair with an Australian hipster sheela.  After further romantic catastrophes amidst a prolonged hipster phase, my care of the self has consisted largely of a modulation of my hipster terndencies in an effort to give the truth of my own subject room to breathe, e.g. allowing myself to devote untold hours to staring at tennis racquets on internet tennis gear websites and, ahem, posting thoughts on the pro’s and cons of various racquets on chat room message boards; perhaps if I can let myself chat up the occasional stranger in an elevator about the reason I am considering a switch from Head to Dunlop I will have truly relented my investment in a hip facade.  All that said, the most important step in the journey towards my subject was wooing and marrying a decidedly unhip, but manifestly cool (as in the true meaning of cool in the sense of the real meaning of Christmas) Jewish chick.  L’chaim!

 

 

To Err Is Human, To Kvetch Divine

 

Driving my daughter Samara around the neighborhood for her mid-day nap earlier this week I encountered the following bumper sticker:  “The more you complain the longer God makes you live.”  On the surface the meaning and humor of this bumper sticker is fairly straight forward.  It depends on an image of God as One who is as annoyed by constant complaining as the next guy, perhaps even more so since the offending individual is complaining about the universe that God Himself created.  As punishment for the crime of complaint, God sentences the complainer to more of what makes her miserable in the first place, life itself.  In handing down the sentence of long life, this God is clearly telling the complainer “Shut up, already.”

 

This is a God with whom we are very familiar, a God who makes us quite comfortable in the claim that we were made in His image. With this God, The Holy Spirit is encountered in that rush of righteous indignation you feel when your neighbor complains about the quality of the snow during his recent Colorado ski vacation.  To get on with this God, the annoying complainer must enact a change in attitude, a change that would not only please God but would also make the complainer less offensive to those mortals who have had to put up with all of the bellyaching.  To please this God, the complainer must learn to let go of the complaints by growing in awareness of the infinite blessings in her life; blessings that, of course, flow freely from God’s never ending grace.   Most specifically, this is the God who would abolish all of our worries by pointing out how well tended are those lilies in the field.   Implicit in this instruction to the complainer is the deeper message of how delightful these silent lilies are to all of the passersby, which is exactly why all of those annoyed by the complainer worship this God. 

 

There is just one catch.  If we follow the mandate of the bumper sticker, ceasing our complaints and replacing them with humble gratitude for the bounty of our blessings, if we become the kind of person who, when asked what kind of day he is having, automatically replies “I’m blessed”, then by the logic of the bumper sticker we are to be rewarded with… a shorter life.  

 

As the logic of the bumper sticker collapses in on itself, this God, the God we are all so comfortable worshipping precisely to the degree that we are convinced that He will not so much vanquish our enemies as He will punish those who get on our nerves, dies. In encountering the God of this bumper sticker, Nietzsche, with his proclamation of God’s demise, has never seemed more prescient. 

 

But God is, like Steven Seagal in his seminal 1990 action flick, hard to kill. In place of the late, overly familiar God of quiet reverence arises an altogether alien God, a God as unnerving as the stranger within each of us.  For, if truth is stranger than fiction, and if God is the author of all that truly is, then God’s creation is something stranger than we can even begin to imagine, though we inhabit it every day.   This God speaks to us directly through the unconscious of the author of this humble bumper sticker.  The unconscious, that source of crazy wisdom undergirding each and every one of us, spills forth unintended meaning ceaselessly, both in our dreams and in cases of Freudian slips of the tongue, but also in our everyday routine discourse.  In this case, the bumper sticker author’s conscious intention of getting a laugh was the sheep’s clothing, which cloaked the wolf sent to us by the author’s unconscious in order to devour our timeworn, and self serving, popular spirituality.

 

The unconscious or “secret” message hidden within this bumper sticker is revealed by the simple act of screening out the consciously intended humor.  Read the bumper sticker again, but this time read it as if reading a set of instructions for putting together a piece of Ikea furniture (which, I’ve found, is one of life’s most humorless moments): “The more you complain, the longer God makes you live.”  There.  It could not be any simpler.  God isn’t annoyed by our complaints, instead they are music to His ears.  In fact, given their righteous nature, the signifier “complain” just isn’t up to the task of supporting the weight of the signified.  So, once more we turn to the Jews (I mean really, my wife, Jesus, Einstein, Freud, Sandy Koufax, etc.; what are these people not capable of?), from whose sublime Yiddish tongue comes kvetch, a word as beautiful as it is flexible (it is both noun and verb).  With kvetching, mere complaint attains to its sacred role as existential song.

 

So what does it tell us about God that He would have us kvetch?  Just asking this question throws our accustomed relationship with God off kilter, an effect necessary to disrupt our complacency in our (mis)conception of God.  On the original Batman TV series, whenever the villain’s lair was on-screen the camera angle was tilted noticeably, a cautionary cue that the viewer was encountering a separate, de-centered realm where everyday rules and expectations did not apply.  In fact, the reality which we inhabit every day, God’s creation, has this same quality; everything is always a bit askew, which inevitably leads to a great deal of kvetching.

 

This tilted nature of reality is best captured through the lens of psychoanalysis (from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis we are all like Batman’s villains, in the sense that the prevailing symbolic order would indefinitely banish those Joker or Catwoman elements within each of us to the unconscious).  In his discussion of the film “The Matrix”, Slavoj Zizek, psychoanalysis’ current Mother Ship, insightfully points out the film’s explicit rendering of reality’s bent nature.  Zizek highlights Agent Smith’s speech to Neo in which Agent Smith describes a virtual reality designed for humans without suffering; Agent Smith informs Neo that a life without suffering led to the death of the humans immersed in that virtual reality.  Zizek quotes Agent Smith:  “I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.”  With nothing to kvetch about, humans literally die, which is precisely the secret truth of the bumper sticker.  The requirement of suffering is illustrated in real life by the heroin addict, whose escape from suffering and misery through a needle is a slow fade out of reality.  Zizek encapsulates this truth succinctly: “(T)he experience of an insurmountable obstacle is the positive condition for us, as humans, to perceive something as reality.  Reality is ultimately that which resists.”  I would take this argument to its logical extreme, with a psychoanalytic reformulation of Descartes cogito: “I kvetch, therefore I am.”

 

Look up the word kvetch on Wikipedia and you will encounter the following enlightening passage from Glen David Gold’s novel, “Carter Beat the Devil” (to which I now owe a karmic debt and will have to check out from the library): “Make a commitment, Charlie.  Go with life or go with death, but quit the kvetching.  Don’t keep us all in suspense.”  But the human condition is exactly the inability to make such a choice, and faced with this eternal impasse the only sane response is to kvetch.  The crowning insight of Freud’s genius, what allows psychoanalysis to bring us in direct contact with the God who would have us kvetch, was his postulation of the death drive, the human drive towards the nothingness found only in death.   The death drive, placed in tension with the life force visible in Freud’s concepts of Eros and the pleasure principle, is the last necessary step in Freud’s unrivaled contribution to our understanding of the human condition.  The human subject is at last revealed as a clearing where the irreconcilable elements in Man (and in Woman) endlessly slip and slide past one another. 

 

Against the harmony of yin and yang, Freud gives us the (unavoidable) neurosis of life and death.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve met a lot of neurotics in my day, especially the one in the mirror, but the only Zen Master I’ve encountered is Hall of Fame basketball coach Phil Jackson, and that was on TV.  If nothing else, Freud has sheer numbers on his side; if a billion red Chinese can’t be wrong, then 6 billion neurotics would seem to close the book on the elusive goal of realizing basic goodness, as its called in Tibetan thought.  The kernel of truth in the eastern notion of non-attachment, as developed on the meditation cushion, is the ability to weaken the attachment to one’s neuroses; the notion of abolishing these neuroses altogether through the act of meditation, however, is fool’s gold.  In the kvetch, however, there exists an alternative path through one’s neuroses.  And it is only with the kvetch that we can laugh at the joke God has played on all of us.  As my wife often implores me, apparently afraid that the Joker within me will dissipate on my meditation cushion, go ahead and Google the list of great Buddhist humorists….

 

Lest we Christians feel that the heights of kvetching can only be reached by the Jews, we would do well to remember that Jesus’ last, and perhaps most important act before his death and resurrection, was his kvetch on the cross.  In his last moment clothed in mortal flesh, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”  With this kvetch, relying for the moment on the definition of kvetch as “to be urgent, or insistent; press; strain”, rather than the more common definition of “a nagging complaint”, Jesus demonstrated the fullness of his humanity in his complete acquiescence to the tragic human condition of being caught inescapably between life and death, symbolized perfectly in his last hours on the cross.  (That Jesus answered the tragedy of his fully human life and death with the fully Divine resurrection, whatever that was, and what he accomplished in doing so, is a conversation for another occasion).

 

Of course, the kvetch, as act, does not stand alone.  In clearing the ground of existence, kvetching opens up the space for its most important counterpart, the kvell:  “to be delighted; to be extraordinarily proud; rejoice”.  Without the counterbalancing effect of kvelling, kvetching, which at its best includes at least a grain of humor (or as in Jesus’ case, heartrending urgency), shrinks down to mere whining, in the process losing its life giving vitality.  That kvelling occurs most often in the context of pride in one’s children informs us that the necessary companion to kvetching is compassion for the other.  If God’s Kingdom ever does come, there will still be plenty of kvetching.  But there will be even more kvelling, by all of us for each and every one of us.

 

 

 

Falling Man: A Novel by Don DeLillo

Delillo explores the open wound left by the events of September 11. His prose is raw, stripped down to the bone. Reading "Falling Man", one is carried along on a slow drift through the ashes and the aftermath. On a personal level, I was pre-numbed by my father's terminal brain tumor when the events of September 11 occurred; in clinical terms I was already experiencing isolation of affect, and September 11 just became an echo of the suffering which my psyche was doing its best to keep at bay. "Falling Man" enabled me to at last engage with September 11 in a meaningful way. Delillo shows us how, after an event such as September 11, the strangest thing is the slow creep back to everyday routines and relationships, a strangeness that resembles a constant droning background noise that you can always almost hear.

On His Majesty’s Secret Service

Theories abound as to the reasons for Michael Jordan’s premature first retirement in 1993, at the peak of his powers.  When Jordan left basketball in 1993 it was as if Jesus had walked on water, delivered the sermon on the mount, but then decided to return to a life as a quiet carpenter rather than enter Jerusalem on his donkey and inaugurate the sequence of events that would lead to his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.   Indeed, after a young Jordan had torched Larry Bird’s Celtics for 63 points in a playoff game, Bird famously quipped “that was God disguised as Michael Jordan.”  By the 1993 NBA Finals Jordan was obviously so much better than everyone else that he was, essentially, temporarily immortal.  And, it seemed, the best was yet to come.  But by October of 1993, Jordan walked away from it all, voluntarily reentering this mortal coil.  Why?

           

            To solve this mystery it is necessary to dispose of the theories that have been making the rounds since 1993.  But first it is important to differentiate Jordan from Bjorn Borg, whose 11 major titles along with his seemingly inscrutable retirement from tennis while still at his physical peak at age 26, may at first glance tempt us to simply pair Michael Jordan circa 1993 with Borg; two rock star athletes who shone brightly and then faded fast.  But in reality the circumstances surrounding Jordan’s and Borg’s respective retirements are in stark contrast.  Borg’s retirement was astonishing only in the sense that Borg was astonished that he had been beaten.  Winning five consecutive Wimbledon’s and being branded a sex symbol in the process had bred in Borg a sense of entitlement.   Tennis was his.  When that brash young New Yorker McEnroe had dared to share tennis’ center stage with Borg, crafting a “rivalry”, Borg was suddenly at sea.  His retirement was nothing more than a case of the child who refuses to share his toys, and instead tromps off the playground and takes them home.  Michael Jordan had no McEnroe.  Basketball, in 1993, was his.

            Which brings us to the first possible theory for Michael Jordan’s early retirement:  he had become so good that it just wasn’t fun anymore, as there wasn’t enough of a challenge.  This argument ignores the central organizing feature of the competitive professional athlete’s psyche, i.e. “It’s good to be king.”  Don’t think for a minute that Jordan didn’t relish every minute of the butt whipping he put on Charles Barkley in the ’93 Finals.  Putatively the ’93 Finals pitted the Chicago Bulls against the Phoenix Suns.  But legendary players like Jordan, Bird, and Barkley literally ARE their teams, making the ’93 Finals effectively Jordan vs. Barkley. This provided Jordan with the opportunity to definitively assert his dominance over Barkley, a player so menacing and physically powerful that he manhandled other power forwards, despite generally giving up a half-foot or more in size (Barkley was generously listed at 6’6”).  Jordan played the best basketball of his career in the ’93 Finals, meaning the best basketball that has ever been played, and in the process crushed Barkley’s will.  Barkley is reported to have realized during the ’93 Finals that he would never be able to beat Jordan.  The 1993 NBA Finals were officially won by the Chicago Bulls; the real triumph was that a man with Barkley’s outsized ego and genius level physical gifts was completely subjugated by Jordan’s dominance.   If you think Jordan didn’t enjoy that then you don’t know the first thing about men.

            Jordan publicly stated at the press conference for his retirement in October of 1993 that he was leaving professional basketball in order to spend more time with his family.  This reason has been given at countless retirement press conferences by celebrities of all stripes, and is a socially acceptable way of stating that one does not wish to give the real reason for one’s retirement.  Like the vast majority of those who had offered this explanation before him, Jordan subsequently spent no more time with his family then he had before retirement.  Playing minor league baseball, Jordan’s retirement activity, required endless hours on buses between minor league burgs.  Jordan, no fool, spent a small portion of his millions on outfitting a charter-style bus with every available luxury, except, of course, a compartment for his family.  As always, the wife and kids stayed home while Jordan was interminably on the road.  Scratch “more time with the family” off the list.

            So did Jordan really quit basketball to pursue his lifelong dream of playing professional baseball?  Perhaps if Jordan had only half the talent at baseball that he did at basketball, which would have made him a heckuva big league player, this argument might hold water.  But Jordan was in over his head as a minor leaguer, and was never more than a novelty act.  Imagine Tiger Woods quitting golf tomorrow in order to pursue his dream of playing professional tennis.  Picture Tiger playing satellite tennis events in Toledo, a couple hundred bucks at stake as he struggles to lift his ranking from #1,047 to #983 in the world, and you can begin to get a sense of the absurdity in play here.  This, plumbing in Toledo instead of acting on Broadway, was effectively what Michael Jordan, Sports Illustrated’s Greatest North American Athlete of the Twentieth Century, was doing in the summer of 1994.  Something, much deeper than a boyhood dream of playing baseball, was at work.

            Which inevitably brings the conspiracy theorists into play.  The conspiracy theory goes as follows:  Jordan, an inveterate gambler, had wracked up seven figure gambling debts to seedy criminal types, attracting the attention of league commissioner David Stern.  An official NBA investigation was well underway during the 1993 offseason.  Per conspiracy theory, Jordan made a backroom deal with Stern, proffering a premature “retirement” in lieu of punishment for betting on sports.  Which makes perfect sense, if you’re talking about Pete Rose.  Like Rose, Jordan is, for whatever reason, drawn to the unseemly world of high stakes gambling.  Unlike Rose, Jordan is nobody’s idiot, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of dollars that Jordan made OFF the court as the greatest celebrity pitchman in history. 

Jordan gratified his gambling jones at casino tables and at the golf course, obtaining whatever satisfaction is to be derived from losing millions of dollars, and perhaps winning some of it back, in those settings.  But Jordan is simply too savvy, too cunning, to piss it all away by betting on sports.  Rose already has that pathetic angle covered.  Stern’s investigation into Jordan’s gambling quietly ended three days after Jordan’s retirement.  Stern undoubtedly learned that Jordan’s gambling habit brought Jordan into contact with what may politely be referred to as society’s less desirable element.  But there is nothing in the NBA collective bargaining agreement that says you can’t lose a million dollars on the golf course to a scum bag.  Say what you will about Stern, about whom conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen, but if he had learned in 1993 that Jordan had bet on NBA games there is absolutely no way Jordan is back in the league a year and a half later.  Stern, even more savvy and cunning than Jordan, knows more than a little about covering his own ass.

The most plausible of all the existent Jordan retirement theories is that he was overcome by grief at the senseless murder of his father, James Jordan, in July of 1993 at the hands of a pair of two-bit thieves.  Indeed, nothing signals to a man the finality of his own mortality more than the death of his father.  But at the time of his father’s death, Jordan had already ascended to temporary immortality; James Jordan’s death did nothing to diminish Jordan’s exalted status.  Had Jordan responded to his father’s death within the framework of basketball it would likely have been to dedicate his efforts on the court to the memory of his father.  Jordan’s premature exit from basketball was in response to a threat to his immortality, but this threat had nothing to do with his father’s death.  Jordan would have known that his own immortality was in no way dependent upon his father’s corporeal existence.  Since Jordan’s temporary immortality had been won on the basketball courts, it was only there that it could be lost.  Enter, stage left, John Starks.

We all have a role to play in fate, no less so John Starks.  Starks’ preordained collision with Jordan was prefigured by the circumstances of his employment by the New York Knicks.  While trying out for the Knicks in 1990, Starks, a tenacious competitor who worked his way into the NBA by way of bagging groceries and navigating a series of community colleges before landing at Oklahoma State, attempted to deliver a dunk in the face of the Knicks Goliath all-star center, Patrick Ewing.  Ewing, appropriately, was having none of it and tossed Starks to the hardwood.  Starks hurt his knee, and due to the severity and duration of the injury the Knicks were unable (under the collective bargaining agreement) to cut Starks; they ended up keeping him and Starks, inevitably, made the most of this shot. 

Fast forward to the 1993 NBA playoffs.  Starks, by now, is entrenched as the Knicks starting shooting guard.  The Knicks are at home in a preliminary round playoff game against Jordan’s Bulls.  In a tight game with 50 seconds remaining in regulation, Starks has the ball in his hands on the perimeter.  Starks, who has a great burst, accelerates easily past his defender and thrusts towards the basket.  In his way is the relatively accomplished Bulls power forward, Horace Grant, who at 6’10” has Starks by five inches.  But Starks demolishes Grant with one of the most explosive dunks in NBA history.  All well and good, and as fantastic as the dunk was, if that was all that had occurred it would have made for a nice ESPN highlight and been forgotten by the next morning’s coffee.  Watching video of the dunk it is clear that the facial is delivered to Grant.  But at the last moment, as Starks delivers the ball through the basket, Jordan enters the frame.  Like the well trained Tar Heel that he was, Jordan was attempting to bail Grant out by providing some much needed “help defense”.   By doing so, Jordan allowed himself to be caught in a still photograph as if he, not Grant, were receiving the facial from Starks. 

By the fall of 1993 this false image, that of Starks humiliating Jordan, had become a truth.  Nothing is more potent in the imagination of the adolescent male than the images found in the posters that adorn his bedroom wall.  Jordan’s temporary immortality lived in the collective imagination of adolescent boys everywhere, a reality illuminated by Jordan iconography hanging on millions of adolescent bedroom walls.  The poster of John Starks dunking over Michael Jordan, though trafficking in illusion, hung on enough walls that the cloud of adolescent adoration on which Air Jordan had ascended to heaven, had begun to noticeably dissipate.  In order to repair the (highly lucrative) symbolic order that governed professional basketball, a symbolic order dependent upon Jordan’s nonpareil status, Starks would have to be punished for a crime he did not commit. 

In order for the symbolic order to be reestablished, a number of remarkable events necessarily had to occur.  First and foremost among these was Jordan’s retirement.  Starks’ punishment would require that he take professional basketball’s biggest stage, the NBA Finals.  In order to get there, Starks’ Knicks would have to first defeat Jordan’s Bulls, which was, of course, impossible.  Jordan’s retirement is so mysterious precisely because it is dependent on an event that is to occur later, temporally.  The cause of Jordan’s retirement was the necessity, per the requirements of the symbolic order, of John Starks’ appearance in the NBA Finals some nine months later.  Jordan himself had no idea why he was retiring, as evidenced by his vapid explanations and lack of any alternative plans at his retirement press conference.  (Cause and effect were still operative in this sequence of events, but they were not bound by the illusion of the linear flow of time from past to present to future that so beguiles us humans.)

With Jordan removed from the scene during the 1993-94 NBA season, the Knicks quickly became the preeminent team in the NBA’s Eastern Conference Scottie Pippen, the Bulls new on-court “leader” in the absence of Jordan, knew better than to upset the symbolic order by leading the Bulls to a championship sans Jordan. In the 1994 Eastern Conference semifinals game 3 against the Knicks, Pippen famously refused to enter the game after a timeout with 1.8 seconds left in regulation.  Pippen was upset that Bulls head coach Phil Jackson had drawn up the last shot for Toni Kukoc rather than Pippen.  Jackson, the greatest coach in professional basketball history, knew that Pippen was the greatest sidekick in basketball history.  He also knew that sidekicks don’t shoot daggers at the end of regulation in the playoffs.  Kukoc calmly stepped onto the court and won the game, defeating the Knicks, but more importantly, effectively emasculating Pippen.  With their best player unmasked as a chump, the Bulls bowed out to the Knicks.  And while Pippen had been disgraced, he had remained true to his subordination to Jordan’s greatness.  No further punishment would be necessary, and Pippen was allowed to remain Jordan’s sidekick as they later cruised to three more championships.      

The Knicks, and Starks, marched into the NBA Finals in June of 1994 where they would face the Houston Rockets.  On the surface, the Finals were a clash between the NBA’s two best big men, Ewing and the Rockets’ Hakeem Olajuwon, who had previously clashed as college players for the NCAA championship.  But, just as in the collegiate final in 1984, this matchup would disappoint.  It’s just not exciting to watch two seven-footers grind against one another two feet from the hoop.  Of course, the real tension of this series was what fate held in store for John Starks.  In order to maximize Starks’ moment of judgment, the Finals went to a rare Game 7, guaranteeing the greatest possible audience for what was to come.  But along the way to that Game 7, a funny thing happened.  The NBC broadcast of Game 5 was hijacked by O.J. Simpson and his white Ford Bronco.  As O.J. and his hostage cruised slowly down the Los Angeles freeway, pursued by 13 police cars and several LAPD helicopters, the NBA Finals had been subsumed in what NBC commentator Bob Costas described as the “surreal”.  This surreal intrusion of primordial chaos in the person of O. J. Simpson foreshadowed the supporting role that Game 7 was to play for a subtler, more fascinating intrusion.   

In Game 7, the symbolic order would extract its pound of flesh from John Starks, who had performed admirably up to this point in the Finals.  With the NBA championship on the line, and with anyone in the world who gave a damn about the game of basketball watching, John Starks had not just the worst night of his career, he had one of the worst nights anyone has ever had on a basketball court, and it could not have come on a bigger stage.  The numbers, while miserable, Starks shot 2 of 18 from the field, and a “perfect” 0 for 11 from the three-point line, don’t even begin to tell the story of how badly things went for Starks.  Because, after he started missing threes, rather than adjust and drive to the hoop for an easy look or a pass to the open man, he just kept shooting, and missing, threes.  Every time it looked like the Knicks might catch up to the Rockets, Starks jacked, and missed, another three.  It was as if someone (or something) outside of Starks were controlling his body, which we now know to be true.

But Starks was not the only one under the control of outside forces that night in Houston.  Knicks Coach Pat Riley, who, along with Phil Jackson and Red Auerbach forms the Three Tenors, if you will, of professional basketball coaches, inexplicably kept Starks in the game.  While Riley’s bench was thin, at some point after another Starks brick in the fourth quarter any of the twenty thousand people in the building would have been an improvement over Starks.  Everyone on the planet watching Game 7 knew that Starks needed to be taken out of that game.  Everyone, that is, except Starks and Riley, who were complicit that night in their (unconscious) service of the symbolic order as they perpetrated the required symbolic death of John Starks.  Years later, in a candid moment during the 2006 NBA Finals, Riley called his handling of Starks in 1993’s Game 7 the biggest coaching mistake of his career, adding that he has never forgiven himself.  Riley has yet to comprehend that he had no choice in the matter.  For, just as Judas’ shortcomings were instrumental in Jesus’ journey towards crucifixion and resurrection, John Starks’ inability to hit the broad side of a barn in Game 7, with a big assist from Coach Riley, was the turning point that restored the symbolic order of the professional basketball universe, enabling the return of the king, his Airness, one short year later.

As a postscript to this story, it is important to note the sad case of Nick Anderson.  Anderson was one of the most promising young players in the NBA when his Orlando Magic faced the Chicago Bulls in the 1995 NBA playoffs, just days after Jordan’s return to basketball.  Trailing the Magic as regulation waned, the Bulls of course handed the ball over to Jordan, fresh off his almost two year exodus from basketball.  In a blink Anderson made his fatal mistake, stealing the ball with shocking ease right out of Jordan’s previously unassailable iron grip, and stealing the series in the process, as the young and talented Magic hurtled towards the NBA Finals.  The symbolic order had been violated, yet again.  Retribution would be swift.  In Game 1 of the NBA Finals, once again featuring those Houston Rockets, Anderson would have four opportunities in the game’s closing seconds to ice the game away at the foul line.  Anderson missed all four, and the Rockets won the game and, eventually, the championship (making the Rockets the ultimate paperweight, as their superstar Olajuwon was just good enough to keep the NBA from floating away during Jordan’s exile).  His own symbolic death accomplished, for all intents and purposes, Nick Anderson was never heard from again. 

There is a lesson in all of this, and it comes dangerously close to “know your place and stick to it”.  But I’d like to believe that John Starks was a modern day Icarus.  When he soared to the rim and dunked over Horace Grant in the vicinity of Michael Jordan, he just got a little too close to the sun.  And though you can’t look directly at the sun, you just might want to take a peak before liftoff.  Just ask John Starks’ ghost.