Lonesome Yanks
Postcards from the End of America
By Linh Dinh
January 14, 2015 "ICH"
- I was sitting in the Friendly
Lounge, one block from my Philly apartment.
Next to me was a 59-year-old man,
Robert. Seeing my wedding band, he
confided, “You’re lucky to have somebody to
go home to. I always had a lover, a
boyfriend, but I haven’t had anybody in ten
years. And it’s not the,” and he suddenly
dipped his head down near my crotch, “but
the support, you know. I can’t just go home
and say to somebody, ‘Bitch, I love you!’”
I was getting buzzed in Dirty Frank’s,
downtown Philly’s second cheapest bar, when
an old friend proposed, “You should come
over some time. I’ll make you dinner.” She
knew I was married. On another occasion,
this lovely woman moaned, “I just want
somebody to love.” On a third, she called me
after 2AM, “Motherfucker, where are you?!”
Sitting home, I received an email from a
Vietnamese poet who lives in a sunshiny
state. Though I’ve known this unhappily
married 40-year-old for more than a decade,
we’ve never met face-to-face. In Vietnamese,
she wrote, “Crazy teacher, please help me to
translate: I’m aroused. I’m horny. I’m a
whore. I’m an aroused whore. I’m an
extremely horny whore. Thank you very much.”
I cite these handy examples not to embarrass
anybody or to, God forbid, present my
splotchy carcass as somehow in demand, but
simply to point out the loneliness that
afflicts this society is so appallingly
pervasive and, I suspect, unprecedented. Our
infants are immediately removed from their
moms, our toddlers are parked in front of
blathering televisions when not
institutionalized, our dating millennials
stare at separate iPads, our married couples
hide their sexting and porn habits from each
other, our old people blunder down a dark
hallway or endless sidewalk alone. Else,
they lie unvisited, waiting for death, and
when kaput, may not be discovered for a
week, as happened to my friend Lee Goldston.
Yo, Lee!
In 1970, only 17% American households had
but a single person, but it’s up to 27.5%
now. Moreover, many of those who live with
others may be sharing a dwelling with
annoying strangers, or curled up in their
parents’ basement. Take Robert’s situation.
In a house with four other people, he has a
room “the size of a napkin.” Each time he
uses the bathroom, he’s “afraid to step on
the floor. The ceiling tiles are falling
down. The wall tiles are falling out. It’s
gross in there!” And Robert never uses the
kitchen because that’s filthy too. No one
ever washes the dishes. In short, it’s not a
home, but then most Americans don’t really
have one anyway.
For many, it’s merely a spot to lie down
after the long commute. For others, it’s a
nest that can be blown away after the next
missed rent or mortgage check. Made of
sheetrocks, marathon loan payments and
always rising taxes, an American home is
about as permanent as a bad sitcom. To have
no true home is to be constantly anxious, if
not panic stricken, and since many of us are
also isolated, physically and
psychologically, what you have, then, is a
society of frustrated, angry, ashamed and
nervous wrecks. No wonder we take more drugs
than anybody else!
One man who still has his family home is my
acquaintance, Bill. For a decade, Bill made
beaucoup bucks as a computer technician but,
at age 44, had to switch career to become a
transit policeman. (He even applied to
Homeland Security, but wasn’t hired.)
Assigned to a shopping mall, Bill had to
occasionally arrest shoplifters or break up
fights among unruly teens, but mostly he
just strolled around to flirt with selected
cashiers. Fresh from Lindenwold, New Jersey,
18-year-old Chelsea with her bleached blonde
hair and rose and vine tattoo climbing up
one pale arm was particularly enticing. For
a few seconds, Bill fantasized about
rescuing her from Starbucks. A playa, in
short, he doesn’t mind living alone in his
eight-bedroom, inherited house, though his
winter heating bills are a real bitch.
Though a teenager at heart, Bill has also
just turned 50, so most nights find him
eating turkey, his favorite, while watching
Netflix next a huge dalmatian, Myer. Unlike
humans, dogs don’t experience drawn out
illnesses that may last decades. Bill likes
it that way.
Thanks to a large inheritance, Jim also has
his own house and, unlike Bill, doesn’t even
have to work. A typical day finds him
listening to Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra and
Abbey Lincoln while browsing Rolling Stone
and CounterPunch. After a leisurely porn
pause, he might check in on National Public
Radio. At 53-years-old, Jim has never had to
take care of anyone save a series of
tabbies, and his biggest exertion in life,
his greatest achievement ever, was his
escape from a decade-long crack habit.
Further, Jim considers himself a
“revolutionary,” though the only people he’s
ever fought were his neighbors. With a
shovel, Jim shattered a bar window, then hit
a homeless man with a rebar, but it wasn’t
until he threatened someone with a grass
trimmer that he ended up in a psychiatric
ward for three days. Out, Jim’s back to his
half-listening, half-reading and
half-masturbating routine, and he’ll
maintain this progressive regiment until
social justice is tightly entwined in a 69,
yin yang fashion, with equitable wealth
distribution. Actually, forget the second
part, for there’s no way Jim will share one
square inch of his two-story house with
anything larger than a slim cat. Jim likes
it that way.
In downtown
Camden, I heard a
street preacher holler, “We are a
relational people!” and he certainly got
that right. Further, I ardently believe that
human bodies are really one continuum that
has been tragically yet mercifully broken
up. If you’re cut, I should feel pain, and
vice versa, and when we’re at our best,
that’s exactly what happens. Too often,
though, people derive an orgasmic pleasure
from watching someone being blown up.
Excited, they cheer.
Elias Canetti talks about how instinctively
humans laugh at seeing a person falling, and
he traces this to our days as flesh hunters.
Since a fallen body represents meat, we
laugh out of joy. Beside this atavistic
impulse, however, we also rush to help the
fallen because we recognize the body in
distress as our own. Our entertainment
industry, though, is relentless in pushing
the fantasy of the super predator, somebody
who’s capable of destroying countless bodies
“of the bad guys.” With its mesmerizing war
and “action” films, Hollywood has amplified,
to an insane degree, all of our worst
sadistic tendencies. Sex, too, has become a
matter of body count, but this is perfectly
in line with our obsession with numbers.
Ain’t that right, Bill? How many have you
scored?
The American porch shrank, then disappeared.
Sidewalks emptied or became overgrown with
weeds. Behind closed doors, an unending
cacophony of disembodied voices
hyperventilate over nothing or sing the same
old songs. Making duck faces or pulling
their pants down, a little lower, yeah, like
that, Americans snap selfies compulsively to
make sure nothing of their noisily desperate
lives is lost to eternity. We’ve all become
famous to ourselves, and that’s good enough,
somehow.
Say, what are the political ramifications of
having a nation of inattentive, narcissistic
jerk offs? Well, me, myself and I think it’s
way beyond divide and conquer, for what it
is is rule by fragmentation into 320,159,176
pieces, and counting. Yes, we have this,
that and that camp but each takes its cues
from the right or left hand of our ruling
apparatus. To know what to do, say or even
dress, we look towards Midtown Manhattan,
Hollywood and Northwest DC. Talk about a
disastrous recipe! Unwilling or unable to
deal with each other in the flesh, we must
plug in to even squeak a dissident note, so
it’s no surprise our feeble rebellion
remains virtual.
While the internet allows many fringe voices
to find their miniscule audiences, its
dominant aim is to tease, tickle and
titillate the mind into numbness. With
multiple windows and everything flickering
by, nothing matters. Skimming over bullshit
and insights alike, we forget a minute later
what we’ve just glimpsed. Swarming with
words, the internet desensitizes us to
language.
After that last paragraph, my phone rang, so
I picked it up to hear Casey, someone I
hadn’t heard from for over two years. After
the briefest of chit chat, middle-aged Casey
spilled that her wife had left her, “I was
crazy, she was crazy, but she was even
crazier than I was!” Later, her upstairs
neighbor, a crackhead, punched Casey so
hard, “my brain moved to the other side!
After I maced the bitch, I was dragged to
court, can you believe it?!” Concluding,
Casey said I should come over soon to catch
up. “I always have beer in the fridge.”
“How are you making money these days?” I
asked.
“Oh, I do freelance art works,” Casey
answered rather defensively, “and I get food
stamps.”
For a while, the smirking mainstream media
celebrated social media as a tool for
rebellions or even revolutions, but let’s
get real here. If that shit’s effective, the
people of Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, etc.,
wouldn’t have had their countries wrecked by
this empire. FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr,
Instagram and the rest are no more than
means for the masses to report themselves,
minutely and in real time, to the
authorities.
Faced with an ultra violent enemy with its
kill lists, bombs, missiles, bullets, black
sites and torture, we bark abstractions or
demand nothing as our demand, such is our
feebleness and nihilism. Giving up on
reality, we claim a speck sized corner of
the internet as our free speech zone.
Impotent, we wave virtual fists in the
direction of Wall Street or 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue.
To make more concrete statements, true
rebels won’t be so vaguely semaphoric.
Whether lone wolves or in roving bands,
they’ll have to dodge the best technology
ruthlessness can buy, however. No pixelated
posers, they won’t telegraph their moves in
advance but simply act, and though their
successes will likely be merely symbolic, at
least they won’t be surfing on fantasies.
Linh
Dinh
http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com
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