by Mike Bendzela
“. . . I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.” —Thomas Hardy
Cultural phenomena such as sports, pop/rock music, movies, television/mass media, politics, and religion/holidays have little hold on me anymore. Over time, I’ve eschewed these largely social activities. Call it adaptation; I’m not fit for them nor they for me, so seclusion has become my niche, and a fruitful one at that. Sometimes it is like I do not speak the native language — I awaken, a foreigner on my own continent, with no guide along as translator. Contemporaries will thank you for not singing along if you cannot sing in tune. This may make me culturally illiterate, but some illiterates are truly functional.
Becoming totally unsheathed from culture is to attempt the impossible: You run hard away from it, but it can run harder, having multitudes for legs. Like particulate matter in the air you breathe on your remote mountaintop, culture is ubiquitous.
Sometimes an anecdote illustrates my break with these social customs. Such episodes become signifiers and watersheds only in retrospect; at the times they occur, they seem more like puzzling anomalies or personal eccentricities. Only later do they hint towards a greater disillusionment.
Sports
This is one loss I rue a little, for I can see that fans are having fun. The noise, the team configurations, the mascots, the bands, the spectacle — all are impressive. And I can recognize the phenomenal abilities athletes have, placing them among the prodigies of our species. But the niceties of the games themselves bore me to tears, and my early associations with them were universally awful: When I went out for baseball as a kid, fly balls always thumped in the grass behind me in left field before I could even spot them. I tried out for football as a high school freshman, and the first day I heard those helmets cracking against each other I left the field and never returned, my first and last brush with physical violence. Perhaps wrestling would be more my style, less public and featuring far less velocity; but during my first match, I was so awestruck by the physique of my opponent that I ended up being pinned to the mat within sixty seconds.
Few spectators of sports actually play them, of course. My spectator experience never got much beyond high school, and one anecdote stays with me. During the last game I attended, the senior year homecoming game, our team was down by several points. We had the ball, the clock was running out. The fans in the stands were heated, hungry for a score. A play would be launched to cheers, only to finish with a crashing Awww! as our team failed to gain yards. The din was incredible. I turned to look up at the crowd in the bleachers behind me. People stood on their seats and shouted when a play started, then plopped back down, despondent. A few girls were even crying. I realized this was an emotional debacle as well as an athletic rout. A puzzling thought occurred to me at that moment of wonderment, and only years later did actual words come to me to describe what it was I was thinking:
What the hell is wrong with these people?
Pop/Rock Music
It’s probably an axiom somewhere that the older one gets the sillier popular music sounds. In my case this is retroactive. When I first heard songs from the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Doors on the radio when I was twelve, they simultaneously amazed me and scared the bejesus out of me. But viewing archival concert footage of such bands over fifty years later is like witnessing episodes of mass delusion. Just what exactly were they singing so loudly about to make their fans become so unhinged? It’s a testament to the power of electricity that it can transform ordinary, randy blokes into deities.
To stay enamored of the music one grew up with is to long for a planet that stands still. I’ve spent dreadful moments in dentists’ offices and supermarkets cringing when I hear “Lola, L-O-L-A Lola!” coming over the sound system. That this musical period provides endless backfill to bury the duller moments of the consumer experience is no surprise: The 1960s and 70s was a memorable period of exuberance and efflorescence in music, but by the 1980s and 90s, music had become overly derivative. In the first quarter of the new century, everything sounds like that which has already been done to death. Pop music is one record on endless replay.
With contemporary pop music seeming but a long funeral procession that commenced sometime around fifty years ago, it makes sense to go way back to find solace in folk, jazz, and classical. After all, between them there are centuries of music to learn about. I only tune to classical and jazz on the radio now, and it should come as no surprise to learn that for twenty-five years I have been playing old time American mountain music on acoustic instruments in the privacy of friends’ homes.
Movies
This one just fell away from me, like a carapace. In college and graduate school, as a young writer wannabe, I was always into film. I had a private top twenty list that I continually revised. And then one day in middle age, after undergoing many changes in life, including taking care of a spouse who suffered a stroke, I asked myself: When was the last time you went out to see a movie? and I really had to think about it. I remembered that a friend had taken me to a theater in the next town over, and the movie was either about the writer Christopher Isherwood or based on one of his books. Researching it, I found it had to have been the adaptation of his novel, A Single Man–from 2009, almost sixteen years ago.
This came after a long period of barely-considered disappointments in movies. A film would be touted by friends or by the “media” until I felt I had to see it, and I would go see it and leave the theater miffed. Seldom did movies live up to expectations. Like sports, movies are public spectacles, especially when seen in theaters, and there is always some “playing to the crowd” aspect to them that bugs me. I would frequently feel I was being hectored at, or pandered to, or even secretly flattered in my presumed superior beliefs. Agendas could be gawked at through the lousy attempts to veil them. Seeing a movie felt to me like being pitched a membership in some kind of elite club. I couldn’t help feeling I was being awarded points for public exchange, redeemable as cultural cachet. It’s no wonder cinema is the prime venue of propaganda; it’s the commodification of vanity.
This disillusionment is far weirder than I can express. Suffice it to say, once the carapace had fallen away, I didn’t want it back. A cicada has no use for the shell from its last molt. I care less for movies now, even less so for their stars and directors (which makes listening to public radio interviews an ordeal sometimes).
Television/Mass Media
The date of the fracture between me and TV would be August of 1983, when I left my parents’ home for graduate school and began living in Spartan quarters. TV wasn’t an option, though it was still omnipresent around me, in every bar and home I entered. By the time I moved in with my partner in Maine — a traditional carpenter and cabinetmaker who, like me, abhors popular culture — television was completely out of the picture, as it were. Unlike radio which has a hands-free element to it — you can go about your business, cooking dinner or whatever, and tune it out at will — TV’s modus operandi is to immobilize you.
Just recently I came across a television at a service center where I was waiting to have my oil changed. (What customer would not want to watch a daytime game show while awaiting a lube job?) In the narrow hallway, chairs were lined up against the wall with a flat screen aimed at them: I could see a woman running back and forth slapping big knobs and setting off all kinds of alarms and buzzers. Garish, multicolored lights flashed each time she made a winning slap. The audience cheered her on. She won a weekend stay in a hotel in Canada! The same inanity I remember from decades ago, living a normal American childhood in front of the tube.
But such vacuity is not TV’s major horror. Its real sin is making people think they know things. An adult with an ounce of wit knows that most issues are bafflingly complex: When they contemplate a problem long enough, mature adults will see complications propagating outward at the speed of light until they recognize their own smallness and paucity of knowledge. Coming to an informed conclusion is nigh impossible, so it is probably best to remain humble and mute for the time being. This is why people have to spend whole lives becoming experts at certain disciplines.
But when you’ve got a TV, you get opinions! In the time slots between commercials, TV delivers opinions to you like a Pez dispenser, so that you can march into the voting booth “informed” and redeem your opinions for the fruitcake of your choice.
On some level, everyone must suspect the dirty secret that TV is just another capitalist gambit (actually, I wouldn’t count on many people even thinking about this): There are buyers, sellers, and products. The buyers in this case are the corporations who fork over the big bucks for advertising. The sellers are the media conglomerates who offer the corporations a sublime product, which they euphemize as “airtime.” What is that product in plain words? You, baby. Your eyes and your ears. (And your wallet.) And it behooves the media to deliver as many eyes and ears to the corporations as possible, preferably en masse, to placate their real customers.
But what if that means the media giants have to continually court spectacle to keep folks inert in front of the tube swilling the advertising? So be it! The terrible genius of television is that it pinions you by the eyes in order to better pour its poison into your ear.
Politics
I have exactly one experience of being actively engaged in politicking. That was enough.
Back in the mid-1990s, a group called Concerned Maine Families collected enough signatures to put on the fall ballot a measure that would preempt gay rights laws in the state. There was no statewide gay rights law at the time, and this referendum sought to make sure there would never be one.
At the time we had neighbors (which in this town means “lives within a two-mile radius”), a female couple, whose appearance signalled LESBIAN ACTIVISTS from a block away: They eschewed all signals of traditional femininity, which is not to say they presented as “masculine,” though. They both still presented as women — crew-cut, sweatshirt-and-dungaree-wearing, mustachioed women. They sunk their teeth into defeating this referendum with relish, even managing to get me involved.
I attended meetings, put out signs, walked door-to-door — in my little rural town — distributing to neighbors (not all of whom knew me) a newspaper describing why defeating Question One was important. I hated intruding into peoples’ dooryards and driveways, most of them strangers: I thought of how my hackles always rose whenever Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up on our doorstep with their pamphlets. I wanted to hang them up by their ties . . .
I joined a speakers bureau that paraded normal homosexuals in front of Lions Clubs, Rotarians, and local churches. Sometimes it was a hoot, always it was stressful, though I barely perceived it at the time. No one attacked me . . . outside the speaker’s bureau, that is. The attacks came from within, from other members of the group who thought I was coloring a little too far outside the lines. I wasn’t the correct kind of public homosexual, apparently, so I got the fuck out of there.
In the end, the referendum was defeated — an empty triumph which left gay people exactly as they were before voting day, without a state gay rights law. I only felt exhausted afterward. It all seemed a little too Kafkaesque. And this was thirty years ago, before politics really went into the shitter.
I’ve already described how I believe Reagan’s reelection in 1984 sealed our fate ecologically, how my suspicions were confirmed last year, how utterly bereft I think contemporary politics is. Now it’s just a matter of wondering if Trump will deliver a coup de grâce quickly enough.
Religion/Holidays
Religion fell away from me like a carapace as well. Perhaps a better analogy would be a boat that wasn’t tied securely to its mooring: I looked up one day and found myself far out to sea. Suddenly, a new continent appears, and instead of trying to get back to the old one, I just drifted ashore at the new one and got off the boat.
My new attitude about religion is simply to ignore it. I don’t care to argue with theists or atheists. The problem is that, in the US, anyway (an incipient theocracy if ever there was one in the West), you aren’t permitted to ignore religion. In fact, you cannot get away from religion in the US. The reason: The Holidays.
Anyone from away wanting to know what an American theocracy will look like should book a flight to the States on Halloween (October 31) and fly home on Groundhog Day (February 2, Candlemas). You’ll arrive just in time to see the plastic skeletons, mountains of bagged candy bars, and non-flammable witch costumes swept off supermarket shelves to be replaced by pumpkin pie flavored beers, red-and-green frou-frou, and snowflake-shaped placemats. These are the first intimations of The Holidays, commencing with Thanksgiving, a time of wall-to-wall religiosity, freely sprinkled with carols and baked hams for weeks on end. By the time you leave on Groundhog Day, the last dessicated fir trees will have been hauled off to the dump, while scraps of tinsel may still be glimpsed underfoot. What lies in between is the long and ever-elongating behemoth and consumer juggernaut called “The Season To Be Jolly.” That is, Baby Jesus, 24/7.
The first strains of “Jingle Bells” I detect in the supermarket after Halloween make me want to shout, “Didn’t they just play this?” The classical music station in our area has at least learned to separate holiday music into a separate stream; yet a few weeks before Christmas even they begin larding holiday music onto the regular stream. It’s torment. (Yet, if I were tied to a chair and beaten with a hose, I would confess to liking the haunting “Veni, Veni Emmanuel.”)
I keep dreading that the clerics-in-waiting hovering around Trump will grasp the implications of the gradual bleeding of Thanksgiving into Christmas Eve and the Anschluss of Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve (and even beyond), and whisper into Trump’s ear that he should declare next year The Year of Christmas. After all, it’s not that much of a stretch to have New Year’s Eve annex the jubilation of Mardi Gras, which sits cheek-by-jowl with Ash Wednesday, which is just a short march to Good Friday and Easter, so that the nation may openly sing praises to Jesus fully half the year long. And why not just fold in “Christmas in July,” which is a thing?
I’ve long dreaded that these seasonal manias are dry runs for the main event — an injection of mandatory Christian worship everywhere in public life. A few swigs of holiday cheer are all it takes for media tongues to loosen and ecclesiastical babble to enter all the airwaves (another good reason not to have a television around).
I’ve learned The Holidays can be dealt with if I just shut up about it. Absence is a simple yet effective answer. And I have a banjo I can turn to.
I don’t know how I would fare, though, if an actual theocracy were to transpire.
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Image
“Theropod Circumambulates.” Photo by the author.
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