Revolution (19 page)

The reason this event was spectacular in the crowded marketplace of televised benefits was because of the sheer density of stars. It was obscene. Like fame porn. As I nervously shuttled through security, like a first-day intern into the CBS studios, I was so overwhelmed by the frequency of famous faces in an enclosed space that I almost exploded. If I had’ve done it would have dramatically reconfigured the firmament of popular entertainment and been so newsworthy that it would’ve dwarfed the earthquake we were nominally there to redress. What is this tenuous equation between fame and tragedy?

What celestial matchmaker has slung together these mismatched phenomena? Fame to treat famine; fame to treat poverty; fame to take the boredom away. An implausible coupling that advances the benefactor more than the beneficiary. A panacea for a sickness that we feed as we claim to treat it. A snake-oil cure for a reptilian nation. Still, I went anyway; as I say, it was a good opportunity.

I’m glad I went too, it was like Madame Tussauds after a visit from a wizard. I was instructed that under no circumstances was I to be late—this was a compassion party for the glitterati, and lateness was not an option. At no point in the administrative process that preceded my attendance was there a whiff, hint, or mention of the people of Haiti. It appalls me to confess that I don’t recall having any actual connection with the reality of the situation, that a natural disaster had sent a nation spiraling into chaos, disarray, and tragedy. In my head it was kind of like I was a last-minute replacement for the best man at George Clooney’s wedding and had to get to the venue on time at all costs. Which sounds a bit like the plot of a film he’d be in.

I’m not pointing the finger at anyone else, by the way; they may
all have been there with the noblest intent. I can’t imagine that Robert De Niro was there to hobnob and network. I’m prepared to accept sole responsibility for this hollowness and duplicity; perhaps it was just me that had no visceral human connection to the suffering. Actually, though, isn’t that what these telethons are for? Not to actualize the disaster, to make it real, feel it, process it, and resolve it, but to remove it, package it, give it a framework that is manageable somehow.

Yes, the tectonic plates are colliding and humanity is tumbling into the magma at the earth’s core, but don’t worry, we’ve got Leonardo DiCaprio on line 1.

If you’re lucky, you get Leo or De Niro or Pacino or Daniel Day-Lewis or J-Lo or Brangelina.

In one little sweep of my eye across a distance of about twelve yards I was able to assemble the above constellation in some ghoulish, grafted menagerie of fame, the lot of them stacked up in phone banks like really well-groomed battery hens. It made me feel a bit sick and nervous and then laugh and do a bit of wee. But the density, the density of stars, too many to be a constellation, in such numbers they became more gas than solid, like the nebula of collapsing gas that incites the stellar inception. Like an episode of
Celebrity Squares
held at Diana’s funeral.

Too much. Just too much, and as William Blake has always said, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. The wisdom reached by excess of this nature is that it’s all fucking bollocks, the celebrity equivalent of making a kid you catch smoking a fag do the whole packet. “So it’s fame you like, is it? Well, how about all the famous people in the world jammed into one chilled, airless, glass box? Hahahahahahaha!”

Not everyone who called in by phone to pledge their donation was lucky enough to get George or Bob or Al. Some of ’em got me and after about the third person indignantly inquired, “Who?” and I had tired of explaining
Sarah Marshall
and Sachsgate, I just started saying, “Yeah, it’s Spider-Man here; how can I help you?” and hoping that Tobey Maguire couldn’t hear me.

In my haste to arrive on time for this glistening festival of opulent
first-aid, me and my mates had driven like loonies, the wrong way, up the hard shoulder of a freeway. It’s the only time I ever felt free on Route 1.

I know George Clooney is probably a decent geezer an’ all that and I’m no more condemning him for the vacuity of celebrity-driven humanitarianism than I am David Cameron for capitalism. I’m just saying, how long can you inhabit this sparkling candy palace without wanting to kick down the walls? If you’re not on the inside trying to get out, are you outside trying to get in? Or are you indifferent to the whole charade? Were you never taken in?

Under what circumstances is continuing to live like this the best option? Only if you have no belief that any alternative is possible. Only then.

The celebrities feel better for taking part. The callers feel better for donating. The Haitians get a bit of aid that they should rightly have been given under the covenant of brotherhood that exists between us all, and we all just smile and pretend there’s no alternative.

There is another way. There is the way. To live in accordance with truth, to accept we are on a planet that has resources and people on it. We have to respect the planet so we can use the resources to nourish the people. Somehow this simple equation has been allowed to become extremely confusing.

If I, so close to the peak, could glean no joy from that rarefied air, the air I was told, as soon as I’d acquired language, would absolve me, if in fact all I gleaned was the view from that peak, the vista true, that the whole climb had been a spellbound clamber up an edifice of foolishness, then what possible salvation can there be for those at the foothills or dying on the slopes or those for whom the climb is not even an option? What is their solution? Well, it’s the same solution that’s available to me, the only solution that will make any of us free. To detach the harness and fall within.

Now that’s what I call an extended metaphor.

In Fairfield, Iowa, then, there could be the solution. But none of us want a boring solution. The Revolution cannot be boring.

D
O WE AS HUMAN BEINGS ALIVE NOW, US, THE SUM TOTAL OF
humanity (I assume everyone is reading this book), do we have a vision? A shared vision towards which we can move in synchronicity?

As a man in recovery I must remain in serenity, clean and serene; I’ve spent enough time jazzed, wired, buzzing, and gouching. Serenity is the first thing people with addiction issues are instructed to request:

Junkies and alkies and bulimics and gamblers and sex addicts and love addicts and people who can’t stop shopping, smoking, loving, fighting—whatever it is, there’s someone out there who’s doing too much of it—and for those people there’s a solution and sanctuary, and in those places of sanctuary, this prayer is recited.

The first thing is serenity. The agitation has to end. The itchy irritability, the restlessness, the wanting. So do the lows, the self-loathing, wretched, heavy-hearted, lead-gutted, teary-eyed, dry-mouthed misery. The pain. So do the highs. The wide-eyed, bilious highs, the cheek-chewing, trouble-brewing highs, the never-stopping-till-I-touch-the-sky
highs, the up-at-dawn hitting-the-pipe highs, chasing, defacing, heart-racing highs, gagging, shagging, blagging highs. All the things we do to change the way we feel, the way the world looks and tastes: It’s all got to go.

So courage is necessary. Courage to change yourself, the one thing you can change. Your attitude and actions. Neither the serenity nor the courage are available to you on your own; if they were, you would’ve found them by now—you’ve been pretty fastidious in your research.

God, however you conceptualize him, will have to grant them to you. And whatever you conceptualize God as, with your human mind, your individual brain, made up of instinctive responses, training, and memories, however you conceptualize a power that’s beyond you and the decisions you’ve made so far, your conception will be extremely limited. Likely as limited as my cat’s conception of the Internet.

The invisible network of interconnected portals that communicate data are beyond my cat’s comprehension. My cat’s inability to comprehend does not impede the Internet. The World Wide Web (which is incidentally quicker to say than “double-you, double-you, double-you-dot”) will continue to exist, regardless of my cat’s awareness.

Pray, then, for wisdom, wisdom to know the difference between things we can change and things we can’t. Likely this will be a lifetime’s work, undertaken one day at a time. Which, for humans, is the way time happens. I don’t have to live the 25th of May 2022 yet. I might never have to. I only have to live in this moment. That’s why meditation comes in handy, and practicing it as a community has benefits too. How are we to achieve real change, conditions in which practices that lead to a different type of consciousness can plausibly be pursued?

I spoke to my friend Dave DeGraw, a seasoned and let’s say grizzled activist and member of the Occupy movement. Dave knows loads about global politics, protest, economics, and so on, and uses words like “metrics” and “paradigm.” He also speaks a bit like a
beatnik and seems forever on the verge of using antiquated Kerouacian slang like “Cool it, Daddy-o.” I wrote to him electronically and asked him how to change the world.

“If you’re expecting political legislation to solve any of our problems, you’re barking up the wrong dead ole tree. No matter what issue you care about most, no real lasting change will come from a rigged and corrupt system.”

I’d say his opening gambit there is a pretty good example of what I was saying. “Dead ole tree” sounds like the way that Allen Ginsberg would describe a Republican’s penis.

Dave’s first observation is that to bring about real change we have to act outside the current political system, which chimes with what Naomi Klein said about advance on environmental issues: Real change will not be delivered within the machinery of the current system—it’s against their interests.

“Unless we get money out of politics—campaign finance, lobbying, and the revolving door between governments and the most powerful global corporations—we are not going to create change within those old obsolete and decaying governmental systems.

“Princeton University recently did a study revealing what those of us paying attention already know all too well: The United States is, in
scientifically proven fact, not a democracy
. They concluded that the U.S. is controlled by economic elites.”

This is a prominent idea that is becoming popular. The structural reason that voting is redundant is that through the funding of political parties, lobbying, and cronyism, corporations are able to ensure that their interests are prioritized above the needs of the electorate and that ideas that contravene their agenda don’t even make it into the sphere of public debate. Whoever you vote for, you’ll be voting for a party that represents a big-business agenda, not the will of the people.

“Here in the U.S., and in many countries around the world, these governments were created in a bygone era, in the time of the horse and wagon. It took days to get one handwritten message across state lines. You needed representatives for the government to function. Now, here we are, in 2014, with instantaneous worldwide communication.
Now we have access to unlimited information. A kid with a cell phone has access to more information than the president of the United States had only 25 years ago.”

Twenty-five years ago, the president was Ronald Reagan, it’s probably for the best. He didn’t seem like he’d be that at ease with technology. I was quite anxious that he had the power to launch nuclear missiles, and rightly so, as we now know he was already suffering from dementia. It says a lot for our expectations of politicians that no one really noticed.

“The need to have a handful of ‘representatives’ deciding our collective fate, to just have two or three dominant political parties in this age of mass communication, is a sick and perverted joke.”

Dave is getting into his stride now, he’s really moving into beatnik mode—he’s probably on the precipice of taking a mighty puff on his “doobie” and giving the bongos a real wallop.

“Once every two, four, or six years we get to vote for Puppet A or Puppet B, oh, please. Tommy Jefferson was an enlightened cat; he had a lot of brilliantly insightful riffs.”

Yep, thought so, he’s called revered statesman Thomas Jefferson “Tommy,” referred to him as “an enlightened cat,” and called his oratorical pronouncements “riffs.” I bet he wrote this with no shoes and socks on, wearing them little round John Lennon sunglasses. He continues with a Jefferson quote:

“ ‘Every generation needs a new revolution.’ He said that over 200 years ago; not one revolution in this nation since then.”

It’s good to know that a respectable, bewigged statesman like Jefferson knew that to prevent an incremental drift towards hegemony and corruption each generation would need to reassert a demand for fairness. One of the ways the current power structures are protected is through tradition. “You can’t meddle with the constitution, the economy, the monarchy—it’s one of our proudest traditions,” Dave wrote. A tradition is just an old idea, only of value if it remains relevant.

To remain relevant it must resonate with timeless principles, principles of unity and fairness. These institutions and statutes are riddled with language that fetishizes unity and oneness: “one nation
under God,” “the monarch’s duty to preserve peace.” When it comes to crunch time, the only time that’s real, the only maxims these ideas protect are elitist and hegemonic.

Dave DeGraw is right: Traditions that do not help us are as valuable as excess fingernail and should be dispensed with in the same manner. I deplore those long brown curly fingernail folk. I don’t even especially like people who have one long thumbnail for guitar. My mate Karl has one, and it scratched me the other day. I was sickened.

H
OW CAN MODERN TECHNOLOGY AID DEMOCRACY?