Peace On Earth

If you say the words "peace on earth," and really mean them, and intend to manifest and evoke them, then consider that you are contradicting yourself if you immediately turn around and post snarky, insulting. rude, or partisan posts all over social media. It's incongruous, and quite undercuts the message.

The message that comes through when I encounter snark and ironic posturing, is that the person posting feels superior to all around them. That usually resolves to ego inflating itself because on some level it feels uncertain or insecure. Consider that your own self-worth doesn't need to be reinforced by tearing others down.

"Peace on earth" requires one to be open and vulnerable, rather than lofty and superior. We must meet as equally damaged, equally vulnerable, to find what we have in common, and build on it.

What Offends Me Most in the Public Arena is Sloppy Thinking

What follows below began as a reply to a comment elsewhere. I expand it here, because there's a point to be made. During the next year, when political and social discourse is only going to get more and more heated, and stupid, and partisan, and uncivil, do think hard about what you're going to say, before you open your mouth and prove yourself to be an idiot. NONE of my friends are idiots; and occasionally some of them do look that way. Why? Read on. (I won't be offended if you don't; however, next time we disagree on something, I might not take you very seriously.)

•

Lots of folks get offended very easily these days. The interwebs are full of outrage, and manufactured outrage, and partisan political discourse, and angry rhetoric, and name-calling ad hominem attacks, and friends yelling at each other because of some political opinion. Its ridiculous. As if people cannot bear to be disagreed with, ever, for any reason. But the echo-chamber of complete agreement does not serve us in the public intellectual arena: you cannot go deeper into your own beliefs and understanding if they are never questioned.

I don't say I never get offended; I do. However, what I find offensive is rarely about the content of your argument, but rather about the consistency and logic of your argument. I get along perfectly well with people I disagree with on many issues; I get along poorly with people who throw half-baked aphorisms at me and expect to nod my head in instant agreement. Even if I otherwise agree with them on many points, I don't give their half-baked opinions a free pass just because I mostly agree. This does offend people, yes. Such friends do get upset with me when I point out the gigantic holes in their arguments; they need to get used to that, because that's not going to change. I think for myself, do my own research, and rarely take things at face value.

Because what offends me most is not the contents of peoples' opinions, no matter how bizarre, but the logical inconsistencies and contradictions that they present.

The main thing that ever strongly offends me is blatant hypocrisy. Inconsistent logic comes a close second, though. (Hypocrisy itself is logically inconsistent, of course, which is one reason it's so heinous.) Most of the comments I make in socio-political discussions are to point out where rhetoric and logic aren't being used correctly, or at all. Which does offend some folk who prefer that their prejudices not be questioned or exposed to the light of logic. Typically, ad hominem personal attacks come from those who fear that their argument doesn't have a logical leg to stand on.

Sadly, this is true for atheists just as much as it is for religious believers. It is as true for progressives as it is for conservatives—although experience teaches that progressives generally tend to do their research more thoroughly than do conservatives. Again, the point is logical consistency, not the contents of your argument. For example, if people claim to be driven by reason rather than prejudice or superstition, they must consistently apply reason to their own arguments, and expose their underlying assumptions to the light of reason. No pre-judgment and no underlying assumption gets a free pass.

No one should be tolerant of prejudice or unreason, not even their own. No one gets a free pass.

I am not required to tolerate intolerance, prejudice, stupidity, or poorly-informed opinion. In fact, as followers and fans of Mark Twain, it is a public service to skewer faulty reason and prejudicial thinking wherever one encounters it. Even, yes, amongst one's erstwhile allies.

For example, while it is perfectly possible to hate that abortions happen and still be pro-choice—i.e. in favor of women having the right to manage their own bodies and their own health, while also wishing that every child was a wanted child—you cannot pretend to be logically consistent if you want to defund Planned Parenthood and still claim to be pro-women's rights: those two positions are oxymoronic when placed side by side, and yes you do look misogynistic when you attempt to do so.

For example, you cannot use the inflamed rhetoric of your antagonist without looking like a mirror image of your antagonist. You cannot call your interlocutor an idiot without opening yourself to the same charge. You cannot insist that your opponent's argument be subjected to rigorous logic and scientific experiment without exposing your own arguments to the same requirement. No double standards are allowable, ever. Period.

What also offends me is when people repeat a meme without fact-checking it; especially if that meme came from certain sources. Always Consider The Source (CTS). For example, Planned Parenthood receives Federal funding, yes, but none of that Federal funding goes to support abortion services; furthermore, Planned Parenthood provides many services such as birth control—which prevents unwanted pregnancies, and therefore reduces the incidence of abortions as well—and the abortion services they provide are only a fraction of their services. If you believe otherwise, you have bought into the disinformation smear campaign of the political right wing, and you need to check your facts. For example, if you believe that right wing charities and ethically and morally superior to charities that are either political neutral or sponsored by generally progressive religious groups such as the Methodists, you again need to check you facts, and not assume that every piece of disinformation you read is accurate or authentic.

Data overrules half-baked opinion, every time. Fact overrules political prejudice, every time. Period. Know your facts before you open your mouth, or you can expect to be challenged.

People, you look really stupid and uninformed if you repeat a meme because it agrees with your prejudices, or your well-considered opinions, but is provable disinformation or lies. (CTS)

People seem to get offended whenever I present a nuanced opinion rather than total agreement with whatever their current bumper-sticker opinion is. People also get offended when I point out the holes in their arguments. Oh well.

Finally, we all can be wrong. I can be wrong, you can be wrong, people you admire and respect can be wrong. The history of politics as well as the history of science is littered with strongly held beliefs proven to be wrong at a later date.

But here's the problem with being wrong: If you never admit you're wrong, or apologize for making a mistake, you have no credibility. By admitting when you're wrong, and moving on, you both grow as a person, and your group grows in wisdom. If you are completely unable to admit you are wrong, as people of fixed prejudices are unable to admit the light of reason into their opinions, you are a hypocrite, and logically inconsistent, and everything wrong that I've been talking about here. When you discover you're wrong, admit it, and move on. There is honor is honesty. There is no honor is face-saving lies.

If someone disagrees with you, you TALK to them about it. You find out if in fact you substantially disagree, or if it's mostly semantic. Coexistence requires communication. And that requires getting outside the comfort zone of your dearly-held opinions. It requires you to let them be challenged, so that you can hone them, or change them if required.

States of Disunion

I have started three or four different new essays on various topics this past week, but have been unable to finish any of them. I wrote a single poem a week or so ago, but am sure if it's any good. It felt scattered, unfocused, raw.

I have a lot on my mind, a lot of worries about my future, my health, my finances, my personal state of being. I am continuously angry and resentful, day in, day out, and have no outlet for it. I'm feeling stuck, on multiple levels. Right now, unless I finish a piece of writing in one sitting, it gets set aside unfinished, and not returned to. Maybe I'll be able to come back to those other essays soon—they are on topics important to me—but not today.

I am mentally at odds with life, and don't find art-making soothing enough right now to be either curative or distracting enough. I have rarely felt this stuck in my life, and it bothers me more now than it ever has before. I can feel my shoulder and neck muscles aching more and more as I sit and type this. Will I even finish this, which is likely to be a rant that no one wants to hear? No guesses either way.

Everything that has been going on that's been good and fun has been overshadowed in recent weeks, and it's been hard to "think positive." (Actually, I'm going to slap the next person who gives that advice to me.) There have been good and fun moments, yet the overall baseline has been unhappy, frustrated, discontent, irritable, resentful, angry. Circumstances have prevented me from venting this backlog easily, yet I need to. So consider this a rant, if you wish, if I finish it, if you're reading it. If you don't want to read it, kindly soar off.

I don't actually enjoy feeling angry and resentful all the time. I don't take pleasure in it. It's just there, like the weather. It would be a lie to deny it, a lie to try to conceal it or dismiss it as unimportant. A lot of friends have lately been telling me how well they think I'm doing, how good I look—compared to how I used to look when I was dying, I surmise—and I listen, but I feel like I'm lying if I pretend that I feel as good as they think I do, or should.

Sometimes in more cynical moments I am convinced that the main reason people want you to be doing well is so that it doesn't upset them. In my more cynical moments, I am quite sure that the reason we medicate people out of their mental difficulties is not for their own benefit, but for our ours: because we find them disturbing. I suppose that's a step up from institutionalizing them in a mental hospital, in Bedlam, but it's still a kind of prison. I feel like I've been lying to people who feel I'm doing well, albeit it's mostly lies of omission: I just haven't been saying what I'm thinking and feeling to most people. There's a disconnect, a disunity, between what I feel and what people seem to want me to be feeling. It can be impossible to reconcile.

All of this is exacerbated by the current social environment, the ridiculously fouled political climate of rhetoric going on around me as my nation continues to fragment rather than cohere. I guess these are after all the end times: the end-of-something-or-other times. Kali Yuga, or the last days of extreme, violent turbulence, before the Sixth World begins. I do my best to avoid most political horsecrap, but if one is going to be an engaged, active citizen-participant in the civil contract, in the social fabric of one's own country, one cannot avoid everything. Some toxins slip through.

I haven't been in a good place mentally for several weeks. Some days I'd like nothing more than to get in the truck and disappear on another roadtrip for awhile, but you can't really run away from your problems. You can only avoid them for so long. Wherever you go, you take your troubles with you. You might be able to ignore them for awhile, in a new setting, but they'll eventually re-emerge.

I'm experiencing a lot of delayed grief, a lot of PTSD, a lot of strong emotion right now. Much of it is from the very invasive surgery performed on my flesh last summer, a lot of feelings I didn't have time to deal with back then. So some old stuff is coming home to roost. This is all made worse by the fact that a big part of my daily life is spent focusing on preparing for the next, even more violating surgery, which becomes existential angst because I still can't get any clear answers about a timeline, or about what's expected of me. "Lose weight and exercise" is all I'm given. It makes me furious, because it keeps me in emotional limbo for the convenience of others. I'm about to explode at whichever medical professional next tries to condescend to me, or keep me in the dark, or whatever. What they think is supportive isn't. I'm on the verge of firing all of them. Even the one or two who are not totally clueless have pissed me off one too many times.

This isn't even about my own impatience anymore. This is about the frustration I am having to deal with on a continuous basis, because no one will give me the straight story. I know that life has no guarantees, I don't need to be told that. I'm at the point where I need at least partial guarantees, not prevarication. Is it so hard to say what you mean and keep your word to me? I have weight-loss goals to achieve, yet no one seems willing to help me get there. I'm completely on my own, with a proven track record of not being able to do this on my own. I ask for help, and I get evasiveness. I ask for answers, and I get none. I do not feel listened to.

Of course I'm hardly the first patient to feel this way. But it's a new feeling for me, because never before have I needed and asked for this much assistance, with no response. Of course I must do it all on my own: the veiled implication being, if you don't succeed it's your own fault. Yes, let's blame the victim. Let's put all the pressure on the patient and not provide any resources to lighten the burden. Yes, let's do that.

When this all began, I was sold a medical narrative of surgery to cure my chronic illness, of wounding and recovery and healing, that has yet to be delivered. I just want the story I was originally told. I want what I was told would happen to actually happen. I want the story I was told to be the story for real, without these endless avoidances, delays, and misdirections. I feel lied to, when the narrative that was originally promised me for various reasons seems to be infinitely put off. Was I sold a bill of goods? Was I lied to? At the moment, I certainly feel that way. Meanwhile I am left in limbo, with this ostomy bag that makes my life pretty much a living hell.

The truth is, I'm still in the midst of this medical journey. I'm not "all better now." I have a long way to go.

I may in some ways be physically stronger and healthier than I have been in years, but that's only half the story. The other half is that I'm not done yet, it's not going to be over and done with till the next surgery and recovery. The single advantage that I have going into the second surgery is that I'm stronger and healthier overall, now, since the first surgery, than I have been a very long time. So I'm going in with better chances than I had with the first surgery. But that doesn't mean it will be easy, or simple, or a quick recovery. There are no guarantees, not even many promises. I'm nowhere near finished with any of this. Any idea that I'm "all better now" exists in contradiction to and denial of the actual facts. Lots of people nonetheless want to cling to that idea about me; I suppose it's less upsetting to them to believe that I'm all better now rather than that I still have a very long way to go. I understand that; nonetheless it doesn't help me get through, it doesn't help me at all.

So be it.

I'm pissed off enough right now that it might be getting in my way at times, but my rage also fuels my determination. Despite everything, despite everyone who claims to be on my side but isn't, at least not in any helpful way, I intend to survive, to get through, to move on with my life. Somehow. I don't know how.

I am well aware, however, that determination and intention are not enough. There has to be more. There has to be real, genuine, pragmatic support. If I'm supposed to lose weight, fine, help me with that. Don't just brush me off with a command to do better.

•

So this is what I did today: I went looking for a fight. I found a few. I went looking, mind on fire, for stupidity, judgmentalism, and the like, and I found them in spades. They're actually very easy to find, since even smart people often trip over their own blind spots. As Frank Zappa once said, Stupidity is actually most prevalent element in the universe, since stupidity is more prevalent than hydrogen. I spent a big part of my day commenting on threads on two or three websites wherein I thought people were using incredibly sloppy logic to bolster their arguments (usually ending up undermining them), and I pointed that out.

I got into an argument with a smart yet occasionally reactionary academic about how hate speech is something real and tangible, not merely a semantic trope that needs to stop being used—but maybe you had to be there. I stand by my point that calling people on their hate and on their bullying isn't hating in return, it's shedding a light in dark places. Changing the rhetoric alone isn't enough to cancel out the hate. Calling bullies on their bullying isn't "hating back," it's turning over rocks to air out the slime underneath.

I got into a couple of discussions regarding gays (equal rights) vs. the Bible (as quoted by the religious right), pointing out quite rationally and calmly how most anti-gay sentiments expressed by the religious right use verses from the Bible that are known mistranslations and misreadings. Even Biblical scholars who don't like gays will agree that the King James Version of the Bible is one of the most inaccurate translations ever made, and the source of many misinterpretations.

I got into a long argument about people being judgmental of other people being judgmental of other people, at the end of which I pointed out that, yes, I too was being judgmental of those who being judgmental, etc., to make a point by example: where do you stop? At the end of the day, no one looked particularly good in that discussion. Everybody judged everybody else, and only one person had the guts to step back, look at his own rushes to judgment, think better of them, and apologize.

Yes, I was occasionally as insulting and judgmental in reply to those I saw being judgmental and insulting to me and to others. Yes, I was occasionally quite withering in my contempt.

And at the end of the day, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I'm tired, but I'm more cheerful than I've felt in days.

Now, I can hear a voice at the back of the auditorium already saying things like, "Aren't you supposed to be better than that? Was that the enlightened path to take?" Well, perhaps it was some sort of sin to take out my anger on others. In my defense, on those rare occasions that I indulge in this, I pick my targets very carefully. I harness my anger to do my best to make the world a finer place, by calling bullies what they are, by speaking truth to power, by doing my best to find light in the darkness. Just because I fight on the side of the light doesn't mean I don't contain darkness as well. You do too, don't pretend otherwise. It may not he the most enlightened thing to vent my anger and frustration on others—I agree—but what would you have me do? Suppress it, swallow it, till I make myself sick with it? No, better to get it out my of my body, for my own health and peace of mind. Better to harness anger to be used as fuel for other kinds of enlightenment. To wake up.

You see, that's Tantra in action: harnessing the power of "negative" or "corrosive" emotions, turning them into fuel for enlightenment. I try to at least do it consciously, using skillful means. I am by nature the Dragon, at core the Warrior, and I have more affinity for the Wrathful Deities than the peaceful ones. Perhaps that is a failing. Then again, I never claimed to have achieved enlightenment in this lifetime, or even to be likely to. I am as flawed as anyone else. My biggest vice is impatience, my biggest flaw is anger and judgmentalism. I recognize other people being judgmental because I don't like that tendency in myself. Nonetheless I will use judgment as a tool of discernment, if it serves to make the world a finer place. I struggle along, imperfect, failing often—the same as you, as everyone else.

Today I went looking for a fight, to get myself unstuck, and I found one, and I feel no need to apologize. I don't do this often, because in fact I don't really value it highly. I know very well that is an indulgence in raw negativity. At least i attempt to do it using skillful means, to do it consciously. Today I did it for reasons essentially of mental health, for medical reasons. Today I did it because the steam release valve needed to be uncocked. Tonight I am more energized and and clear-headed than I have felt in several days. I may not sleep any better than before, but I may be more rested nonetheless.

So mote it be.

The Sweet Despair of End-Culture Snark

Finally having found and skimmed a copy of David Denby's book Snark, it has crystallized some things I've been thinking about for many months. Here, in no particular order, are some observations, not intended to be snarky themselves, but also not intended to pull any punches. Not that anyone cares, or ought to.

I am not a political commentator, and I don't intend to start. That is not my purpose here. I am going to make some general comments here about political discourse itself, but these are comments about style, about argument, about rhetoric, and are not linked to any given political position or ideology. Although one does feel it necessary to point out that the very values held by the progressive end of the political spectrum prevents most progressives from using the rhetorical tactics employed by some on the extreme right, and in some cases prevents effective rhetorical responses; this differing viewpoint can skew political discourse from the outset, purely on the grounds of style and values.

It's taken me a long time to work up the personal momentum to say all this that I have written here, and now it's done. For my own sake, just to get it off my chest. These are things I've been wanting to articulate for some time now, and now I have.

What truly concerns me here is how the corrosion of public discourse hastens the entropic collapse of the general cultural climate—this collapse itself being something I strongly believe ought to be resisted in every possible way.

•

1. First, I must disclose that I didn't do more than skim Denby's book before shelving it. Although I admire him as a writer, and have heard him interviewed on NPR with pleasure, and read other interviews with him with equal pleasure, the topic of this book is itself a seeping black hole of internet-cultural negativity. It's not something I intend to go wading in. I dip my toe into the edge of the event horizon, but I don't intend to let myself get sucked in. (The gods know I have had enough personal bad craziness in my life this past year and more, not excluding medical near-death experiences, that I feel permanently cured of going looking for snark and drama elsewhere.) The topic intrigues me; dwelling on the negativity of human affairs does not. The topic intrigues me because it is symptomatic of so many other related cultural phenomena.

Another, perhaps deeper book on this topic, Deborah Tannen's The Argument Culture, which I also finally found a copy of, and will also dip only my toe in for the moment, is a more general look at the erosion of civility in public discourse that has been developed in the public arena in the past decade or so. This has happened, specifically, because of the rise of new media, which makes it easier for everyone to get their views in front of the microphone, or on their blog. Including the internet, but also including talk radio as a format, in which opinionated argument based on neither fact nor evidence has taken over public political discourse, this growth of general-citizen media access has created a parallel universe in which people are content to repeat lies as facts, repeating and repeating them until they take on the weight of authoritative truth simply by sheer force of volume. more and more fringe elements step up to the microphone. The shouting ever increases in volume, while listening to opposing viewpoints, much less factual corrections, has not only been lost as an art, but in some quarters is actually viewed as traitorous. As Tannen shows in her book, this pattern of polarized argumentative opposition has infected every form of discourse in our culture, including academic study and classroom debate.

It's no wonder political action itself has become gridlocked. It's no surprise that compromise has become labeled as ideologically traitorous, when uncompromising ideologues control the discourse. The vast majority of observers, especially those who own values require them to be honest about all matters, are disheartened, despairing, and dismayed, unable to find a way out of the gridlock. As Tannen writes:

Staging everything in terms of polarized opposition limits the information we get rather than broadening it. For one thing, when a certain kind of interaction is the norm, those who feel comfortable with that type of interaction are drawn to participate, and those who do not feel comfortable with it recoil and go elsewhere. If public discourse included a broad range of types, we would be making room for individuals with different temperaments. But when opposition and fights overwhelmingly predominate, only those who enjoy verbal sparring are likely to take part. Those who cannot comfortably take part in oppositional discourse—or choose not to—are likely to opt out.

In other words, those for whom heated argument is not their default mode of communication often go unheard in public discourse nowadays, precisely because heated argument is not their default mode. I place myself in this category: while I am able to speak truth to power, when power is being abused or waylaid by disinformation, I am not a competitive soul. I am not a natural arguer. I don't enjoy it. I find myself unable to keep silence mostly when I run across something that is so blatantly misinformed that someone, anyone, needs to speak up to correct the facts. Most of the time the result of such speaking out is personal attack, ranging in type from verbal bullying to ostracism. When it becomes clear that no good deed goes unpunished, in venue after venue, one learns not to make the effort anymore; no one is listening, so why bother. Of course, this means that those who like to shout down all opposition win in the end. At least in the short term.

2. "Bread and circuses while Rome burns."

Most of the things I see people arguing about with the apparent full force of their fierce convictions are, bluntly, distractions. None of it will matter in a 100 years. Most of it won't matter in a month. Most of what people defend as political or literary Absolute Truth is easily shown to be provincial, personal taste, local and subjective and defended so vociferously mainly because the heat of argument is supposed to get one to overlook its hollowness.

This is just as true in literary-critical circles as it is in the political arena. A poet friend who is now a former poet friend—former because he had a paranoid meltdown precisely along these lines of discourse, ending up by un-friending me—used to be fond of pointing out that the reason poetry criticism can be so very vicious is precisely because there's so very little at stake. It does indeed seem to be a general trend that argumentative viciousness is inversely proportional to its necessity for living. Argumentative public discourse is in some ways a sign of a decadent culture, but its also a sign of a culture of leisure, in which an entire class of people have the free time to argue, rather than attend to more basic needs.

So-called "reality TV" is blatant bread and circuses. Not to mention that it's not very real, since programs are edited to create maximum drama, maximum conflict, even when there wasn't much really. Most of TV is bread and circuses, for that matter, entertainment designed to keep us from thinking too hard or too long about the real problems faced by the world. 500 channels and nothing on.

But what sweet distraction it all is. How honey-rich to avoid having to think about what frightens us. How sweet to feel helpless rather than empowered.

People will go a long way towards avoiding solving the problems facing the world. Sometimes bread and circuses is what people turn to when they feel overwhelmed by the real problems. It is escapism, it seems soothing in the short term. although it is in fact entropic in the long.

Denial is rampant. Denialism is particularly unforgivable when it's in the face of observed and recorded scientific data; at that point it becomes ideological denial, not experimental or procedural dissent. People don't want to hear what they don't want to believe.

3. One must indeed stand up for a good cause when one finds one. There is always good reason to speak out against injustice and hatred, including hate speech; to speak out against bullying; to speak out against those who cite inaccuracies, factual distortions, and outright lies to make arguments, to call them on their shit. As rabbi and mystic Abraham Heschel once said, A prophet interferes with injustice, often by speaking out against it when all others seem afraid to. Talking back to the bullies is sometimes unavoidable because keeping mum is worse.

However, not every encounter requires anger and an aggressive response. You don't have to turn every statement you make into militancy. There is room, in critical discourse and in general human relationship, for conviviality and cohesion, for compromise and agreement. It doesn't all have to be disagreement for disagreement's sake, and it doesn't always have to be stated aggressively from the very start. Civil disagreement is one of the first casualties of the climate of snark in public discourse: being able to say "I disagree, and here's why," and know you'll be listened to rather than vilified merely for your disagreement.

The culture of snark is frankly, blatantly manipulative. It preys upon, and relies upon, emotional reaction in preference to reasoned, nuanced discussion. Shouting down the other guy is considered good form, and ad hominem personal attacks are just tactical. If you can't knock down the other guy's logic, knock down his personal integrity. Go quickly for the jugular, avoiding even the pretense of rational rebuttal.

4. This entire problem in public discourse is deeply symptomatic of late-culture decadence. The old culture is dying: postmodernism is really Late High Modernism, not a new cultural movement but the end of the High Modernism cultural movement, its death throes. This is reflected by how the arts have become mannerist rather than genuinely original.

Reactionary conservatism, no matter what topics it chooses to be reactionary about, is always symptomatic of the dinosaurs fighting to stay alive even when they know they're about to become extinct. They fight all the more fiercely when they know it's too late. They try to turn the tide of change back, stridently proclaiming ideologies both regressive and oppressive. These are the death-throes of the old, not harbingers of the new. The lessons they have to teach us about going forward into the Unknown are, paradoxically, lessons about fearlessness: about how you can't grasp the future with a tightly-closed fist.

5. I have little respect for (post-)apocalyptic fiction, in novels and movies—what my friend Frank Wilson defined as "the pornography of despair," an incredibly rich and useful coinage—which has become so commonplace and popular now that people don't even realize it's a symptom of cultural decline. Movie after movie, novel after novel, year after year, the stories are all the same: the end of the world approaches, and the protagonists struggle to survive, to overcome, to stay human while everything falls apart around them. Most apocalyptic fiction is predictable in both plot and outcome. Most of these stories are familiar tropes, recycled again and again.

I began reading science fiction at age 13. There has always been a sub-genre within science fiction of apocalyptic fiction, of post-apocalyptic fiction. The current run of mainstream fiction and movies that are on apocalyptic themes seem manifestly unoriginal and repetitive to me, having read the originals many years ago. Most post-apocalyptic movies and novels these days are original only in their details, not in their grand themes. The classic post-apocalyptic satire novel is Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Cormac McCarthy's much-over-praised novel The Road was nothing but a rehash. (Both Roger Zelazny and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, for example, wrote better-written precursors. And Gordon Dickson wrote more than one novel that serves as antidote, his stories ending not in nihilistic despair but in hope.)

I had a realization in 1973, when in the news yet another small cult had gone up to a mountaintop to await being evacuated by the flying saucers. I remember distinctly sitting in 7th Grade civics class. It was a sunny spring day in Ann Arbor. We were sitting in class, discussing the latest cult going to the mountaintop that had made the news. I suddenly had a brainstorm, a vision, a realization, whatever you want to call it, everything suddenly falling into place and becoming clear to me.

I knew with utter certainty that this latest cultish event was only the ramping-up to the Millennium. It would be followed by more and more similar events, culminating in mass hysteria around the term of the Millennium, and take another 25 or 30 years to taper off and fade away. I gave this overall trend, a few days after having this realization, the general name Millennial Fevre. (Yes, I made that phrase up myself; I've since heard others use similar phrases to describe their similar insights; although I must add that most of the discourse of any clarity on this topic has come from science fiction writers and the so-called futurists, social scientists engaged in speculation about large historical trends.) (By the way, I don't give a fig if anyone disbelieves this narrative of realization. It's in my civics class notes and journals from that time. So I know it to be accurate and factual, but if anyone wants to disbelieve it, feel free.)

The many little millennial and apocalyptic cults and small-time cultural crazy fads going on in the early 1970s were the first slope up the peak of a curved hill, a perfectly curved Gaussion-distribution hill, centered on its peak at the turn of the Millennium, and would take just as long to fade out on the other side. Millennial craziness was going to get worse before it got better. And it would take a long time to fade away.

I do not claim to be a prophet (although Rabbi Heschel's quote has become deeply meaningful to my personal life as an anti-bullying activist) but I was right on every point: things have gotten a lot worse, even though there are already signs that they will get better. We are already on the other slope of the Gaussian distribution—we just have to get through a few more manufactured and overheated Millennial predictions and events. The changeover of the Mayan calendar from the Fifth World to the Sixth World in 2012 is just the next in the Millennial Fevre sequence, following on the heels of the apocalypses predicted for Y2K, etc., none of which actually were the end of the world. There's already been a disaster movie blatantly titled 2012 made to titillate the masses with more pornography of despair, so that they remain entertained while Rome burns.

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean collaborated on a brilliant graphic novel in the 1990s titled Signal:to:Noise. This is one of the better novels of its decade. Gaiman and McKean dealt directly with the coming Millennial Fevre in this graphic novel, which depicts a film director dying of cancer, who begins to write his last movie script about the end of the world that was predicted for the year 1000. The lead character says at one point in the novel, and this is a quote worth inscribing permanently in your memory: "There is no big apocalypse. There is only an endless succession of little ones." Every personal death is a personal apocalypse. Gaiman managed to write here, in my opinion, a potent antidote to the pornography of despair: there is no big apocalypse, only an endless series of little, personal ones. That's serious food for thought. It is an empowering thought, because it frees us from fear of the end of all things by helping us realize that everyone faces the same end, in their own time.

This graphic novel introduced me to the concept, and the word, apokatastasis, which has become central to my own personal cosmology and spiritual belief system. Apokatastasis is the opposite of apocalypse: it is the realization that there is nothing, not one thing, that cannot be redeemed, given enough time. It is redemption, at the end of all things, not destruction.

There is an entire literature of apokatastasis, which serves as an antidote to the pornography of despair. This is a profoundly anentropic literature, rejecting both despair and hopelessness as erroneous choices.

J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings is not an apocalyptic story, as it has often been misunderstood; it is in fact a story of apokatastasis. 20th century novelist, mystic, existentialist, poet and playwright Nikos Kazantzakis wrote a manifesto of apokatastasis in his short poetic book The Saviors of God, and also in his play Buddha. Fantasy and science fiction author Diane Duane's entire cosmology, represented in many novels ranging from her Young Wizards series of young adult fantasy novels, to her lyrical and uplifting Star Trek novel The Wounded Sky, to her adult fantasy series that began with the novel The Door Into Fire, is explicitly and openly a cosmology of apokatastasis.

So, you see, indulging in the pornography of despair is a choice for entropy, for death and dismal hopelessness. It is a luxury that we can't really afford. The pornography of despair is explicitly and implicitly bread and circuses, because its message is that all we can do is stand by helplessly while Rome burns and the world winds down. It encourages us to do nothing. The message is: Don't form a bucket brigade to put out the fire. Bliss out on your daily dose of distraction, of soma (as in Aldous Huxley's dystopian satire Brave New World). Don't try to fix things, because all the problems are insoluble, and too huge to be solved anyway.

And this entropic lassitude, this encouragement to do nothing, to stand by and watch the world die, is why the pornography of despair is, to be blunt, a force for evil.

6. One excuse that is often trotted out for snarky public discourse is that we live in the Age of Irony, that public access to the revelations of the processes of political and social power, thanks to 24-hour media reporting on it, has made us all cynical. But cynicism is an excuse, not only in the artistic arena, but even more corrosively in the political arena. Cynicism is not a default state of being, it is a choice. Cynicism is entropic because it's easy: it's easier to be cynical than optimistic, because cynicism is like sliding downhill, following the pull of gravity, while optimism requires you to keep walking uphill.

Ben Lewis writes in his important article on contemporary artistic mannerism, "The dustbin of history":

Contemporary artists and their curators and theorists concede many of these [mannerist] faults [in postmodern art], but invoke in their defence a critical attitude towards their material. Yes, [Jeff] Koons’s shiny balloon dog is kitsch—but it thereby subverts hierarchies of taste in art. Yes, [Damien] Hirst’s gold-plated cabinets containing grids of industrial diamonds are glossily vacuous, but they are a critique of the society that admires them. Other artists have made works about their own shortcomings. One of Maurizio Cattelan’s brilliant early works, in 1993, was the installation of a live donkey and a chandelier in a New York gallery, to thematise his inability to come up with a good idea. The German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-97) spent much of his (now acclaimed) career making art that described his frustrating quest to make important works of art. A surprisingly honest sense of failure, hopelessness and a bankruptcy of ideas are fundamental components of this end-phase of modernism.

This is despair presented as process. It is cynical in its self-recursive presentation of meaninglessness: art is meaningless, so we're going to mock you for knowing that by presenting meaningless works of out. Postmodern vacuity. Despair about not having any point to art-making—as Yeats wrote in his great early-Modern poem The Second Coming, "Things call apart, the center cannot hold. . . ."—leads to cynicism about the entire art-making project. We have nothing to say, therefore we'll pretend that everything we make is about not having anything to say.

It's not hard to analogize this mannerism from contemporary art history to contemporary political and social discourse. A sense of failure, of hopelessness—and of high expectations that generate more despair and anger when promises of hope are not instantaneously gratified. Never mind that change takes hard work, and can take some time: we as Americans are addicted to instant gratification, and this is fueled by the media.

We get impatient and surly when our politicians make promises that take time to enact: we retaliate by "getting rid of the bums," voting in a whole new crop of new bums who can do no better, and may know even less about governance. Impatience with the political process breeds amateurism—which is not necessarily good for the body politic in the long run. Amateurs ignorant of the process may be quick to resort to ideology rather than negotiation, because it's all they know, and all they are familiar with.

7. I used to be an activist for LGBT rights. I co-founded an organization in Madison, WI, in the late 1980s, titled Madison Bisexuals & Friends. We gathered in part because of the very first Pride event, a march and public gathering, that was organized in Madison. (The history of Madison Pride events is checkered. I've become involved again in the past two years, but Pride events themselves were sparse in the intervening years.) I was active for some years. Eventually, about the same time I moved West from Madison, I changed my activism to be more artistic than political; following the model of certain other queer poets, artists, and musicians, I made social justice and social change priorities in my artistic life. i joined the gay men's chorus of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and later the famed, original chorus in San Francisco; moving back to Wisconsin a few years later, I eventually joined the gay men's chorus in Madison.

Now I find myself becoming an activist again, specifically on the topic of bullying, hate crimes, and the suicides of young men and women who have been bullied and attacked forced into suicide simply for being different. Young people committing suicide because they have been bullied for being different is something that raises my ire. I take it very personally, because I was bullied for many years, myself, when I was young. I am getting involved with anti-bullying and anti-suicide organizations and movements as time permits. (I am still coping with a serious chronic illness, so my energy has limits. I do more by writing than by marching, therefore, at the moment.)

This is necessary activism.

Not only because kids are committing suicide, but because the cultural environment promotes tacit support for those who hate them. The cultural climate of snark in public discourse is a default state of bullying. Think about it: public discourse based on yelling at each other promotes, guess what, more yelling at each other. So those who feel empowered by the argument culture to publicly voice their every prejudice, bigoted opinion, and hateful speech will feel no constraints. Idiotic televangelist Pat Robertson, who has a long track record of hate speech and parallel-universe illogic, has managed to blame in his own mind the post-Christmas blizzard that crippled the East Coast in 2010 on gays and lesbians traveling to have decadent holidays in Florida. People of like mind feel empowered by such examples to not only verbally harass others merely suspected of being gay or lesbian, but also to physically bully them. if you can blame a blizzard on gays and lesbians, it's only a small step towards stringing them up on a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming.

The verbal bullying of public discourse that hates and fears the Other creates a climate in which the Other is attacked, just for being Other. The psychotic fringe is always empowered by such rhetoric. Timothy McVey was no Islamic terrorist, the new boogeyman of those who need an Enemy to fear: McVey was home-grown, and his rhetoric closely paralleled the rhetoric of the current politically ascendant Tea Party. Think about what that means.

So anti-bullying activism is more necessary than ever.

8. Now, notice that the rhetoric of cultural bullying is symptomatic of end-times panic. Notice that artistic mannerism is closely parallel in its tropes and patterns to political despair. Notice that literary reactionary conservatism and verbal bullying share the same rhetorical language.

All these topics I have raised in this essay are not disparate, they are in fact all linked at root level. That's because they are all based on the same emotion: fear.

Fear. Pure and simple.

Fear of the future. Fear of the past. Fear of personal responsibility for the outcomes of our actions.

Fear of change, fear of what the future might bring, fear of having to be held accountable in the future for one's current selfish choices and actions—these lie alike at the root of reactionary conservatism, of the denial of global climate change, and of the pornography of despair as expressed in apocalyptic fantasies.

Xenophobia, the fear of people who are not like us, fear of the Other, fear of people who are different—these lie alike at the root of hate-crimes, of bullying people who are different from the cultural stereotypes of what is represented as "normal," and of political ideologies that promote conformity and intolernace at the expense of liberty and diversity.

Xenophobia and the fear of the implications of liberty together combine to ignite fascism. That which threatens must be repressed. That which exhibits manifest otherness must be made to conform.

Fear of one's own helplessness, fear of being ineffectual, fear that is really overwhelm—these lie alike at the root of the pornography of despair, of bread and circuses (and Emperor Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns), and of the choice to avoid addressing both social justice issues and environmental issues.

These are all the same at root.

And they are all a choice.

A choice which can be rejected. Even if the Universe must eventually wind down to nothing, finding a deadly entropic equilibrium, we are not required to be complicit. We have the choice to resist entropy, to choose to bring more life into the Universe rather than let what life there is drain away to nothing.

We don't have to let that happen. Living with fearlessness is possible. It takes some courage, certainly. But mostly it takes the stubborn refusal to let the hateful, fearmongering, anti-everything, anti-life bastards have the last word. Speak up. Life needs you.