“Do you have the time to listen to me whine, about nothing and everything about it”? So begins Billie Joe Armstrong’s song, “Basket Case” of the ever popular and mainstream band, Green Day. That should appropriately set the tone for this entire blog. Whilst changing the oil of a 2009 Mercedez with the license plate, “UCSB Almuni”, this song came on. I wasn’t irritated so much by the fact that the owner of this car was sitting in the waiting room watching “Maury Povich” while I, also a UC graduate, was changing her car’s oil; I was irritated that the socio-political-economical structure within which I live and work has pre-determined, for the most part, who “succeeds” (whatever that means) and who does not. (Except, that is, for those pathological cases which sacrifice almost everything to become “successful). My beef isn’t simply with this structure, however; this structure, and its apologetics, is/are far too superficial: it is merely the symptom of a deeper sickness. What that sickness is exactly though, I can’t accurately characterize yet. Take, for example, the common greeting, “how are you doing”? Now, aside from the fact that 99% of the time people don’t want to hear the honest answer; why has this, and not other greetings, become one of the most appropriate greetings to use? Why are we walking around like a bunch of existential thermometers? Of course one can say that to be human is to experience, among other things, suffering. But in our particular case, the suffering is especially acute. One can cite dozens of examples from popular culture exemplifying the spontaneous expression of existential dissatisfaction e.g. Billie Joe Armstrong. The lower classes, the 9-5ers, the upper-middle classes share the superficial, vacuous promise of consumer driven capitalism: material goods and wealth will feed your visceral hunger for a deep, legitimate, meaningful purpose. What are we to do? What can I do? A mere brick in the wall, a tooth of a cog in the machine of profit driven, greed impelled capitalist over-production, over-consumption, de-humanization? What am I to do when everywhere I look, almost every person I know is hopelessly stricken to the core by the cut-throat values imparted on us by father culture? (I call culture, “father culture” as a reference to Daniel Quinn’s works. Instead of “mother culture”, as he calls it, I prefer “father culture”, given the prevalent “you just need to work harder” message). I don’t have an answer to these questions yet. I’d like to reconcile the desire for an answer to these questions with the desire to live a relatively nice life. Time, however, is of the essence. I’m alive once, or so it seems. This is the one time I will be alive. What ultimate reason do I have to put up with the cultural niceties that make me sick? What ultimate reason do I have to bend to the will of father culture? I don’t want to eat meat. I don’t want to buy things made by people in other countries being paid a fraction of what they need to survive on. I don’t want to buy a house. I don’t want to bring kids into this world (I don’t want to have kids). I don’t want to have a good FICO score. I don’t want to vote for this semi-asshole instead of that asshole. I don’t want to buy a new car. I don’t want credit cards. I don’t want to jail myself in debt. I don’t want spend all of my money on shit I don’t need. I don’t want to support a poltical/economic system that celebrates the exploitation of innocent peoples. I don’t want to be an environment killing consumer. I don’t want to use things on my body that give me cancer. I don’t want to consume things that give me cancer. I don’t want to support imperialism. I don’t want to support anti-intellectualism. I don’t want to be a speciesist, sexist, racist, xenophobic bigot. I don’t want to be part of the circus show anymore.
