No Future

I began studying Russian as the result of an oversight in the registrar’s office of two colleges, my own at the time and that of the neighboring private school that would, as a result of this mistake, become my alma mater a few years later. There had been in place a course share program wherein students of my large state school could take Russian at the neighboring private university. In exchange, students of that university could study Latin at my large state school. This program had been discontinued, however no change was made to the dial-up phone tree registration system we had, a psychedelic mixed-voice tape collage of steam-and-pulley automation worthy of a Negativland album. I was therefore, after pulling the appropriate ropes, exercising the bellows, and depressing the requisite buttons on the touch-tone phone pad, allowed to register for my first Russian language classes in, I believe, 1997. It was well into the ‘90s, the Cold War was over, the people of the former Soviet Union were suffering through the greatest peacetime loss of life in recorded history resulting from the sudden retraction of their state, the wars of Yugoslav succession and sanctions regimes were still ruining the lives of another set of people suddenly deprived of socialism across the Balkans, but I, one ignorant hayseed from the cornfields of Mordor, was suddenly given an outlet to the world.

For context, I grew up poor in a rust belt city that was already some kind of settlement by the time the French set up fort there on the wide and muddy, distinctly Danubian river criss-crossed by the the titanic steel spans of gilded age and world-war era engineering. It was a real city. We have some famous natives, largely beloved for the particular ways in which their desperation taught them to be insane. No company men, only souls writhing like a river cutting through the silt in the middle of nowhere for dollars and applause.

The large downtown was already dying in the late seventies when I burst, Caesarean, onto this side of the veil. Sonic booms and cigar-shaped lights were reported up and down our river valley, cartoons on a Saturday morning would end abruptly with serious reporting of men in camouflage killing and being killed in some place I couldn’t even conceive of as a toddler. The late seventies smelled of a kind of paranoid decay draped in polyester olives, browns, and oranges. My parents were unprepared. Their parents were shaped by their own generational paranoia. I like to think that my grandmother had been forced to develop her zero-sum transactional worldview out of fear of not passing as white. My other grandparents were living a mixed immigrant experience (not the good kind of immigrant), with religion and poverty thrown in. This country has never loved its people.

Catholic school was my first encounter with authoritarianism. Ours was a provincial parish (now, mercifully, closed) intended to teach workers to aspire no further than to work in the local factories. But the factories were closing. When I was born, striking union members were dropping cinder blocks off of overpasses. I learned what a caltrop was and how to make them from the local news. Unions still meant business back then. Reagan hadn’t yet fully relieved them of the dignity of building tractors for depriving the former occupants of leveled occupied villages in West Asia of their dignity. What I’m trying to say is that the ju-ju was bad, and intimations of the inescapable generational guilt tied to the fruits of the local industry’s output that made their way back on our supernatural radios made everyone… a little defensive. A little boy filled with love didn’t stand a chance. The nuns tried to break my spirit while the church and the news all told me that the Soviet Union was a monolithic bastion of BAD PEOPLE. All I could wonder is how they could possibly be worse than the casual racists, bullies, and religion-addled adults keeping me in detention every night in a society that imposed a poverty that kept my parents suspended in hysterics? Their authority on the matter was suspect.

But then the Cold War was over, and I suddenly had access to a world that everyone around me had been kept ignorant of my entire life. While the vultures of industry were still circling the liquefying carcass of the once-great industrial mass of the Soviet Union, and while the beautiful dream of brotherhood and unity was being induced to devour itself in Yugoslavia, a person like me, from no particular noble stock, could truly immerse himself in the understanding of others, and by association of himself.

The Cold War has been resurrected, lazily, from whole cloth, and there is a concerted effort to make our worlds small again. This country, who on this day in 1945 committed the great evil of dropping the second atomic bomb, this one plutonium, on the sleepy Christian port city of Nagasaki in Japan, a country that had been attempting to surrender already for weeks, once again drives its own populace into genocidal jingoism under the warmed-over pretenses of a bygone century.

Everything is more expensive, people’s lives are worse, but the rich have decided to wrap their rigor mortis fingers finally around their privilege, building out data centers and policing apparatuses to relieve us of any onboard thought and outlast any remnant democracy. There is no future here. There is no society worth reproducing. Just conflict and othering on a planet that could sustain us all.

So I feel a certain enervation, a malaise, a lack of hope that saps me of the will to work, the ability to sit still enough to read, and especially so when the end of summer is visible on the calendar’s horizon. This kingdom of theft wants to steal something very important from me, and from all of us. It wants to steal the wider world from us, the world opened up after the end of the “Cold War.” It intends to imprison us well and truly, legally and spiritually, in the business of us versus them, of simplifying ourselves to fit only that market. What else is there to know other than that which is already known? Other than that which they would have you know? Maybe Stanislaw Lem and Andrei Tarkovsky could say something about that.

The Yugoslav post-punk band La Strada, brainchild of avant-garde author and poet Slobodan Tišma, has a song entitled Okean (Ocean) that is in some part about learning something about yourself and the reality in which you live.

It goes:

This song was recently made famous as a protest song by the ultimately ineffectual and even counterproductive student demonstrators in Serbia. It translates as:

Beyond the mention of youth and bravery, I don’t understand what recommends it as a protest song, as the rest of the song is concerned with the hubris of self-knowledge. There is much beneath the surface that we don’t know about ourselves or our reality. But I think that this is something that the Substacker lily357 was alluding to in this recent post.

One of the deceptions we are susceptible to is that freedom is the exercise of mere liberty. But under this definition, freedom becomes an injunction to act. A duty. This is the executive bias of neoliberal society. One is always compelled to Do Something, even, as Kurt Cobain sang, we “don’t know what it means.” But life is not always, or even usually, apparent. Freedom manifests in the blind spot of the neoliberal injunction to act. Freedom comes in the ability to act ethically without compulsion. In reality, sometimes one shouldn’t act at all. Under the threat model of us vs. them, under the threat model of poverty, under the threat models offered on the vast and obligatory menu of societal coercion it impossible for many people to consider making themselves more vulnerable by acting in the primary interest of others.

But acting freely in this way is the only hope for our humanity. It is the only freedom that matters. It requires knowing others, but also knowing oneself. What is so draining about returning to Mordor is that the conditions are expressly and ever more tightly arranged against individuals coming to the realization that, in order to be free, what we need is this kind of love. It’s not all we need, not like the Beatles sang (but with a brass laugh track to give the joke away), but it is the end goal: To act against our own direct interest in favor of others, to enter a second childhood so we can fight for our own humanity.

Which reminds me of the title of the last Bernays Propaganda album, Vtora mladost, treta svetska vojna (Second Youth, Third World War). They also have some choice words for the Imperial order during the course of that record.

There is no hope here. There is no future. Not until we can become little boys and girls filled with love. But that’s not what they have in store here in Mordor, not when rhetoric such as that unleashed by a reporter at a recent press conference in Serbia is everywhere more prevalent, and not when we have two parties and two elections that refuse(d) to heed the will of the people on whether or not we’d like to see global bloodbaths continue. The beatings will continue. Morale will not improve.

I do have the feeling that I’ve been cheated.