John Wise

I could tell you how many days we’ve been in self-isolation, but by now, I should stop counting the days and let you know that this is on the verge of becoming a lifestyle. I’m not going to share an update about the number of infected and those who’ve died, as the absurd numbers are numbing and rapidly becoming meaningless while the disease spreads like a California wildfire. If I lament our lack of political leadership, I’m singing a song that long ago played out as its earworm nature rarely leaves my mind. Sickness and decay are our new normal.

Talking about COVID-19 starts to feel like telling you that if you visit the Phoenix, Arizona, area in August, it’ll be hot. I live in the desert southwest, where it is hot without fail every summer. I live in a country where we get sick and die every day. Should death and illness ever become worthy of influence, America will be a world leader, and a great many people will emulate your amazing success story of leading people to an early grave or at least a host of potentially life-crippling issues.

Instead, I’ll share that we are finally ready to go somewhere and spend a couple of nights away from home. We’ll be staying at a small hotel that is otherwise closed but is making an exception for us as they enjoyed our company during our visit back in January. Our plan has us bringing an ice chest to help minimize our need to find food while out in some very rural areas, though we’ll certainly be stopping at both Guayo’s El Rey in Miami and La Paloma in Solomon, Arizona for some to-go Mexican food. On the way, the plan is to finally visit Mt. Graham, which is one of the few places in Arizona we’ve never visited, and the day after that; we’ll drive over to Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. It’s been 17 years since we last visited these cliff dwellings, and our memories suggest that the drive is a beautiful one, though a long and twisting path will be ahead of us. Once we get out for this first big adventure, I’ll be sure to share our impressions along the way.

In trying to plan this outing, I was considering heading north to Mexican Hat, Utah, but our favorite under-the-stars joint in the shadow of Valley of the Gods that played home to the swinging steak has ceased their cooking, the grill has gone cold, and will not be returning. While the lodge is still in business they were counting on fully 85% of their customers coming from Europe as Americans no longer have any interest in the Old West, so they are hanging on by a shoestring. I’ve got to admit that the steaks were not the best in so many ways, but on the other hand, they were the best steaks ever because sitting under the Milky Way looking out at the silhouettes of Valley of the Gods and Monument Valley just beyond that while someone played guitar and sang folk songs made everything perfect. While I’m happy that we have solid memories from our many visits, I’m also struck by the tragedy of seeing such an iconic little business fade into the background.

We’re quickly approaching the end of summer, and last night saw our second monsoon blow in, only our second one! We’ve broken some records for consecutive hot days, while over in Death Valley, a record was achieved for the hottest day ever; well, at least for as long as we’ve been keeping records of such things. America learned what a derecho is, which Wikipedia describes as “A widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system and potentially rivaling hurricanic and tornadic forces.” California is once again on fire and doesn’t have enough electricity to keep people’s air-conditioners and refrigerators on. The U.S. Postal Service is flirting with failure, and our universities and various schools are realizing they likely have to remain closed to in-person learning.

We know that Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, and with some amount of anticipation, I tuned in for the Democratic Convention and found myself disappointed that things were banal and non-committal in so many ways to my ears. It was as though they were offering a thinly veiled “Make America Great Again” message. We needed to hear about solutions, aspirations, and ambitions to create the future, not drag us back to some mythical place where we were supposedly better. We need a Chaplin/Lincoln/Roosevelt/Kennedy-esque kind of leader who can inspire, heal, lead, and help reinvent a broken America. Of course, if you are stupidly wealthy, we are in the greatest of times, and everything would be relatively perfect if it weren’t for the radical leftists. We are an unfolding tragedy.

There is no silver lining on the horizon, but I shouldn’t have much to complain about as we are healthy, relatively happy, well-fed, entertained, often inspired, and certainly busy. I’ve never been one to be mindless about the future, and I can’t turn off my concern now, so instead of finding solace in turning off the outside world, it only makes its dismal self larger than ever. I want some air of optimism that this country I was born in will not forget the lesson that we’ve always had to venture out to find and create a better future.

My internalized and externalized violence is a reflection of not having my father’s love. I feared my father’s abuse, his neglect, and his wrath. I didn’t know his tenderness or his need for it, yet in retrospect, it screamed out. His idolization of strong male figures, from Elvis Presley’s crooning Love Me Tender to Frank Sinatra with his tough-guy songs of love, should have let me know there was a soft, passionate side to my father, but I was too young to understand that. The pathos of James Dean and Marlon Brando was a mirror to that generation,  picturing the man inside who was howling out to be someone and to be accountable for his inner turmoil.

My generation looked to the broken relationship between Luke and Darth Vader, the son trying to be strong and to remain faithful to himself while his father is overwhelmed by rage and violence tearing through his heart. What Luke must learn is that the Force is love. Luke taps into the love that courses through the universe as he tries to defeat the dark father who occupies a corner in the shadows of Luke’s soul. It starts to become obvious that this anguish is a condition of men across the generations.

We rely on the allegories found in religion that we must look to God for love; God is the Force. The neglect from our fathers doesn’t allow us to function fully, and so we lash out, ensuring others know our anguish. Reaching for a holy spiritual being, we are asking, begging, for acceptance and guidance, but often, the damage done is already so ingrained in our fabric that getting over ourselves and trusting the other is a gulf too wide to overcome without a time of healing in which others invest that trust and love in us that was missing in our childhood.

Our fascination with the strong man gives us the father hero missing from our youth. We search for the example of the man who could have loved us and yet had a steady patience and hand. In politics, we found Barack Obama a caring, nurturing father whom an intolerant faction of our society needed to emasculate and hate for showing them care when their hatred was already too deeply ingrained. With Donald Trump, we have a father who is condoning the anger of men to lash out at the perceived crimes against their happiness. Trump’s flippant lack of concern and demonstrations of belligerent hostility are the salve that legitimizes other men’s desire to continue the cycle of hurt.

We equate love with the feminine and hate with the male. While we can try to live with this, we often turn to acts of self-defeat by physically harming others, using them, and abusing ourselves with drugs, alcohol, and other means to avoid seeing ourselves for who we are. With love equated with the feminine and a perception of weakness, we subsequently bare our fangs against homosexuality as that takes the male love we subconsciously seek a step too far. Instead, some opt for a deep, loving relationship with a deity we cannot physically show or be seen to be in love with.

Our ideas of what love is have been broken and reduced to the carnal. Only when we possess the other and command them under our grip do we start to believe they might be there for us. We are afraid to let go of love once we own it, as our hearts don’t believe we can survive another act of neglect against our souls. On the other hand, women know that within their community, they can turn to one another for empathy; through their hugs, they find comfort and relief. Their strength must come from within and from those in their social circle, as they do not typically have the physical means to enter combat with men. They are always learning to endure their own hardship of having been born a woman.

A man must face his isolation as a solitary combatant in his world of rage; he must also accept the need to battle his fellow man so that love will not be found there either. His only solace is to find someone who loves him deeply or to look to God to share the hug of compassion. But man often cannot accept the trust to be found in love when he intuitively knows that the person he strikes emotionally or physically may always harbor resentment that chips away at the trust required for love to grow.

So he is forced to go it alone. Without a community and alone outside the tribe, we shiver and resent our weakness. Should we survive many cold nights alone among our fellow beasts we will congratulate ourselves with the narcissistic self-love that can only appeal to those who have known deep societal rejection.

When the fabric of society is torn asunder, and the egoistic means of elevating one’s self becomes the ultimate demonstration of strength, we’ve likely pushed the anti-mensch onto a pedestal that our species must topple if we are to survive our worst tendencies. Think Hitler, Nero, Attila the Hun, and Stalin.

This then raises the question: How do we decouple love from weakness and show men how to be fathers and husbands instead of monsters?

What about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus? Did this monster, the artificial son of man and distant progeny of woman, recognize a need for love only to inherently and early on know he’d been kicked out of the nest as a kind of living abortion? Is this allegory a reflection of an eternal recurrence afflicting humanity across the ages? Are we creating our own monsters every time we bring one more neglected child into being?

Then what of the hypocrisy of feigning concern for the unborn child while making the living child’s life unbearable? Maybe we can delude ourselves into a myth that this child, that will have never existed, might have been the perfect one, that we tossed the weaker one from the nest before we knew the strengths of the two? We instinctively know that both children are doomed due to the broken and malicious world where man fails to find love, and so what we do not kill in the womb, we are willing to sacrifice to the machine of war, and when that beast is not present, we create the mechanism of violence within our culture to eliminate the child that should have been aborted too.

Our guilt for being remorseless is manifested in our bowing before God while confessing our sins, though simultaneously deriving power from our ruthlessness. The more we amass, the better we can explain our sociopathic tendencies as our stuff confirms our wisdom of having made the right decisions; hence, our narcissism takes root, validating our callousness. Wealth ends up being the greatest violence perpetrated against our species as men try to resolve their sense of not being loved nor being willing to be loved after a lifetime of internal violence. This is our Amor fati.

Again, what of women in this tumultuous world? They are the real strength as they go on with the task of creating life and opportunity while enduring the agony of male domination, suppression, and an unwieldy biological form in constant revolt. It is their modicum of unrelenting love that has survived evolution and continues to give hope that we may yet overcome our base natures as wild beasts. Their tender caresses and hugs, when they pull us close to feel a moment of calm, might be the real superpower that James Dean was referring to when he said, “Only the gentle are ever really strong.”

I often forget to use the word discernment while lamenting much of popular culture, which irks me. Maybe that makes me appear arrogant that with blanket statements I lay out my screed against so many things that entertain the masses. But I can’t help but see a correlation between what the average person consumes and the general malaise that afflicts our country. We cannot consume a diet of pure junk food and simultaneously have a fit body. We cannot listen to and learn English exclusively and claim we understand Chinese. If we never drive a car, ride a bike, or transport ourselves in any manner besides walking, we cannot put ourselves in the seat of a jet and claim we know how to fly. But this is effectively exactly what we do when we voice our opinions about complex subjects.

One does not learn from the Sons of Anarchy, Call of Duty, Lord of the Rings, or Sean Hannity without a healthy portion of discernment gleaned from vast reading and conversation about a breadth of subjects. While we may be very well entertained and even have our imaginations finding inspiration, these pablums are not the keys to enlightenment or even rudimentary knowledge.

When I was a child, I watched the Marx Brothers and especially loved the Harpo character. His extreme silliness was balanced with the most tender and passionate harp playing, showing me a sophisticated skill. Likewise, his brother Chico who played a kind of doltish fool and Harpo’s keeper, relied on his skill to “Get one over,” and then, in an instant, he’d sit down at the piano and demonstrate mad skills. A few years later, I’d be watching the Six Million Dollar Man and its formulaic nonsense where in addition to getting the bad guys, our hero would also do some small act of kindness for someone less fortunate, showing the audience that this half-man half-machine has some deep-seated humanity that inspired him to do good.

As the 1980s rolled around, characters became much more one-sided and simple; good guys were always good, and bad guys were really bad. I had to turn away from the medium, which was easy as books were bringing me into seeing a side of thought and reason I’d never seen in mass media. From Antonin Artaud, Kierkegaard, and Camus to Lautremont, Bukowski, and Schopenhauer, I stumbled into an unseen universe of potentiality that was non-existent in the well-spelled-out worlds of solid conclusions portrayed on TV, in the movies, and videogames. Initially, I didn’t find the archaic forms of electronic media to be dated or offensive; I was simply discerning between platforms as I sought out knowledge. The more I thought I was learning, the more I wondered why so many others felt the unrelenting need for mindless entertainment. As time went on and people like Stephen Hawking, Terrence McKenna, and David Deutsch stretched my ability to comprehend reality, I began resenting the damage I felt popular media was inflicting on our population at large.

I’ve heard more times than I can remember how the burden of existence affords the masses the justification to turn off their brains. It’s as though having children, getting married, owning a pet, and developing a career are forms of torture that the unwitting victim didn’t understand would be such a heavy responsibility to carry. So armed with a beer and the remote control or game controller, people retreat to a quiet corner to witness decay and misfortune as the media sorts the winners and losers.

Meanwhile, I have choices to make that allow me to discern what kinds of books I’ll read, what hobbies I’ll invest in, and where I’d like to travel for the sake of exploration. This human responsibility should NOT be taken lightly as we are the only species on earth that have the option to study things from the infinitesimally small ones found in quarks to trying to comprehend the universe and the things that exist between them. Angst hammers at my frontal lobe when I confront the reality that, otherwise, reasonable people cannot set aside 30 minutes a day for contemplation of self or the study of things outside their normal purview. I’d like to insist that my curiosity is normal and need to learn is a necessity, but the America I’ve grown up in cannot discern the difference between a healthy amount of desire for education and the celebration of the cessation of all things intellectual.