WE CANNOT HOLD THE WATER!

WE CANNOT HOLD THE WATER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 11, 2009

“Everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess of the four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

David Foster Wallace, “This is Water” (2009)

* * *

Wallace committed suicide last year at the age of 46. Life apparently ate him alive. Sad. He was best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” and was included on Time magazines All-Time 100 Greatest Novels covering the period of 1923 – 2006. In an odd way, he refuted everything there was about his baby boomer generation, the worship of money and beauty, and mindlessly seeking more self-gratification.

Yet our pumped up society, which is drunk on technology, is like a porous sieve that cannot hold its water. Indeed, it cannot explain why this young man chose death to life when he was so highly talented and esteemed for his work.

As my readers know, I am unimpressed with our rapid technological expansion, especially in view to the blatant fact of its apparent dulling of our sensitivities to be outraged. We can go to the moon and sends probes to Mars, but we cannot explain a suicide such as author Wallace’s.

Nor can we explain why a teenage father, Richard Anthony McTear, Jr., throws his girlfriend’s four-month-old infant son from a moving automobile, which causes the child’s death.

We cannot explain why four flag-team football players, Randall John Moye, 14, Raymond A. Price-Murray, 14, Lee Louis Myers, 14, and Diemante I. Roberts, 15, raped and brutally beat a thirteen-year-old teammate.

We cannot explain why an upscale neighborhood on Treasure Island in Pinellas County, Florida was used to imprison young girls as sex slaves and transport them across the Tampa Bay area to high rolling clients for sex. It would surprise few if these clients turned out to be leading citizens of the community living shadow lives.

We cannot explain why such men would resort to such behavior other than rhetorically.

Every single day of the year there are senseless murders, sometimes of entire families, that are covered on the local network television news, and we cannot explain this either.

Something is wrong with this picture when we know so much more about things but so much less about ourselves and why we behave so poorly.

I studied chemistry and engineering in college and went back year’s later, and studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, and I learned the respective theories, paradigms, and algorithms of these disciplines sufficiently well to earn my Ph.D.

For those not familiar, graduate school leading to a dissertation and Ph.D. is more an endurance contest than learning experience. Members of the faculty have no power other than the grade and the issuing of degrees.

In the corporation, the essential role of the manager is not to lead but to keep order and records, and conduct performance appraisals. The performance appraisals represent management’s only power, and it is consistent with the power of professors and the giving of grades. Managers pass out miniscule increases called “merit increases” and this keeps workers in line. It is the equivalent of issuing academic grades, which is further evidence of the factory model of society.

My point is that we have become amalgamated into a collective soup in which identity, ethnicity, race, religion, and culture have been stirred into a common brew, leading to the disappearance of cultural distinction. That might explain why people otherwise with better sense are painting their bodies with tattoos: looking in the mirror they can at least recognize themselves.

And we call this progress.

We are a society that has everything ass backwards. We applaud science and the genius of man who has created weapons of mass destruction that could lead to our extinction to match that of the dinosaurs. And why do we have these weapons? Because man has never found a cure for paranoia. You see, the science of man is centuries behind the science of things, yet things are inanimate and man is becomingly increasingly crowded on this small planet.

An epidemiology said the other day that swine flu and HIV in animals such as monkeys have been present for centuries but they are impacted man now because "the reduced green" between man and the animal kingdom. This is another warning sign to pay more attention to man and his behavior as a species and less to things.

Should man's insanity lead to his extinction it will not be a natural disaster, not a meteor storm like with the dinosaurs, but systematically, cognitively, and selectively in a compulsive-impulsive manner over time.

People write and ask me, “All right, smart guy, what is the answer?”

I don’t have the answer. I have decided the only way to change things is one person at a time. I live what I write and I write what I live. I don’t buy into all the bullshit that comes out of the mouths of the most respected of society’s movers and shakers. Nor do I buy into all the bullshit about positive energy and optimism and going with the flow.

If anyone is paying attention, we are becoming increasingly insensitive to the horrors of the times, escaping into all our electronic wonders which have become the equivalent of burying our heads under the covers.

Most of our information comes through our eyes not our ears, and those we see on television and on our computer screens are trained to be a presence, which means to neutralize their negative aspects and promote their positive aspects.

It has become an art form to look good and speak well. I know. I wrote a book on effective presentations, and taught people how to appear on video or before groups. Every public figure in every discipline knows about effective presentation.

Now, because of technology, you can fool people not some of the time but all of the time with your aplomb, diction, rhetoric and your mock sensibilities.

Remember those cigarette company executives before Congress several years ago? They lied through their teeth about cigarettes not being dangerous to your health when every one of them had ample research in their operations proving just how dangerous cigarette smoking in fact was. These executives were insensitive to the dangers because they were bent on protecting their stockholders and stakeholders, and their own positions.

That is why I mourn the loss of someone like author David Foster Wallace, someone who could help us get well. I wonder if he chose to leave life finding the duplicity too unbearable to continue. He wrote novels, short stories, essays, and was a college professor, but it was not enough apparently to endure the pain that he was so sensitive to while those around him were not.

We are all hard-wired into the default setting of self-indulgence, which, paradoxically, makes us less self-aware.

People reading this may wonder, “Why did he have to say ‘bullshit’ to express himself? He must be a real hick!” Why, is pretty obvious. I am not a polite guy. That said a better question to ask is why do we as a people over intellectualize and over rationalize and over play everything in our lives, instead of paying attention to what is happening right under our noses? Could it be we don’t because we are too busy sending and receiving text messages?

* * *