America the Beautiful

 

 

March 1st,  Natchez, Mississippi

 

“Well let me tell you something about America” –Tori Amos

 

The hill town of Prescott, Arizona has a considerable population of conservative old cowboys.  In Prescott, my sister Jordana is a professor at the local university, a hotbed of liberalism.  Her husband Dan is Unitarian Minister.  Jordy made Lasagna and Birthday Cake for me and our sister Katherine, and inevitably the conversation turned to politics and religion.  Jordana is very outspoken about the dangers of Intolerant Liberalism;  She thinks defensive democrats have a tendency to further polarize the political parties - by demonizing the republicans, rather than seeking to understand them.

She mentioned one of her students - the only openly gay student at the college - who also happens to be a republican.  This young man has the great luck to be at the end of both swords - a liberal college in a conservative town.  This reminded me of something Kerry said after the election - that America was wounded, and needs to heal.

The next day Katherine caught a plane back to Pasadena, and I climbed into my van, alone, and began burrowing toward the heart of the Red States. 

In an age of Nazi-esque flag waving, I had some hope to understand "America" - through the physical (and energetic) lay of the land, through the eyes and the hearts of the peoples who thrived here a thousand years before, through the Republicans who have of late seemed so numerous, and so threatening.  Part of me was terrified to leave the progressive and prosperous Golden State – but Arizona is so breathtakingly beautiful, I knew immediately I’d made the right choice in venturing forth.  I stopped in Sedona on my way to the Grand Canyon - this was the place (I was told in my youth) where my mother's "far out" friends were making contact with Aliens.  I wanted to see these dimensional vortexes for myself!  The red Rocks of Sedona glow like blood against the grey-green sheen of the earth, rising out of it like the opposite of a wound.  I climbed Bell Rock and meditated in the rain.  The "New Age" centers at Sedona have become as much an industry as any other tourist attraction - but I think that coming to Sedona without at least temporarily believing in energy vortexes is like going to see a film in a foreign language without subtitles.

On the road to Flagstaff (an absolutely charming little city)  it began to rain.  Driving alone through the dark I became increasingly unnerved by the fact that the rain seemed to be falling not down, but rather coming in at an angle, flying directly toward my car.  This surreality continued for several minutes before it finally occurred to me that this child of California was witnessing his first snowfall in over a decade.  I got out of the car and stood in the headlights, watching the cold come down.

As it turned out, this dramatic reaction was completely unnecessary, as it snowed on and off for the next two days at the Grand Canyon (and well into New Mexico).  I had the strong initial impression that the grand Canyon looked like a photograph, and quickly retreated to the gift shop.  There, in an uncharacteristic fit of morbidity, I proceeded to spend an hour reading "Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon"   - which certainly added both depth and gritty realism to the 10-mile-wide rocky abyss.  In fact I think the Grand Canyon is so big that no cursory view can capture (much less comprehend) it - so I gave myself two days, moving east and west along the south rim, taking long pauses to meditate and contemplate the expanse amidst fickle weather - huge cloud formations moved in to swallow the canyon entirely only to evaporate unexpectedly in a manner of minutes into a burst of sunshine which would give way, ten minutes later, to hail.  I think this is a holy place.  (and incidentally, my theory about the Canyon's 2-dimensional quality is this:  So many tourists have come here for the cursory glance, so many have thought the canyon could be captured in a photo, that as the years go by and the masses click their cameras, as a consequence of quantum physics (whereby the act of observing an object effects that object) - a sort of collective photographic consciousness has come to blanket the canyon, literally flattening it out in the mind's eye.)  I was sorry to leave it.

The Navajo nation is huge, encompassing the northeast corner of Arizona and spreading into Utah and New Mexico.  Following the 600 foot deep cut of the Little Colorado River into the north-eastern plains, I passed into the Reservation through the Painted Desert at sunset.

The Native Peoples are not dead.  Under the first glance of prosperous casinos and run-down trailer towns, the old ways are quietly alive, in guarded places behind the eyes of the gas station attendants, who wouldn’t necessarily conjure images of “Native America” if you saw them on the street in any American city.  I have no wish to expose them, or even to expose my own experiences on their lands.  I will say that Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley are among the most beautiful sights I’ve seen in all my travels – the latter so much so that I actually began to comprehend how the Mormons could believe Utah to be the promised land. 

And, I think visiting the Native Lands without at least temporarily believing in Nature Forces and the Spirit World is like spending the day at Disneyland wearing a blindfold and earplugs.

Prior to the arrival of our “advanced” culture, the Americas remained among the last holdouts of the Garden of Eden on Earth.

 

 

 

March 7th  Midland, Texas

 

 

I was ejected on the far side of reservation and remembered with dread the political motivations of this journey - I was now 2 red states from home.

 

But Albuquerque and Santa Fe charmed me – New Mexico calls itself “the land of enchantment” and I shan’t quibble with that definition.  The soil is pink against turquoise tones of greenery and a crisp blue sky.  I unexpectedly found myself driving west from Santa Fe to Los Alamos, birthplace of the Atomic Bomb.

 

With the help of the University of California, a small boy’s school was vacated in the hills of Los Alamos in 1943, the heat of WW2, and the Manhattan Project was hatched under the auspices of thin and brilliant man named Dr. Oppenheimer.    In present day Los Alamos, the entire story is told with no shortage of pride; the letter written by Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt - stating that the power of the Atom might be harnessed, and that the Nazi’s were already mining Uranium, and that the US must not hesitate in developing nuclear weaponry - sits under glass plates at the Bradbury Science Museum, with an office of the University of California at Berkeley stationed placidly nearby.  I stared dubiously at the motto of my alma mater “Let there be Light” before venturing within the museum walls.

 

The entire world was on the brink of disintegration, the museum argues.  If not for the courage of the scientists who congregated at Los Alamos, we might not have world left to live in.  It was “the greatest sunrise the world had ever seen” the day the first WMD was detonated at the Trinity Site in New Mexico.  Hitler had spread like a cancer across Europe leaving death camps in his wake, and the Japanese (I learned last year in Singapore) had done little better in East Asia.  I personally consider the detonation of the Atom Bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be among the greatest evils of mankind – but even so, I could not help being swept away in the rhetoric of a desperate world in need of a glorious weapon.

 

The Weapon which, in a few short years, would threaten to tear the planet apart and end humanity, irrevocably.

 

But the film at the Bradbury Museum paints a different picture – a community arose at Los Alamos – a group of brilliant minds, and their families, who had left their own lives behind in order to Save the World.  Amidst the endless days of scientific labor and cold and poorly constructed barracks – the people of Los Alamos celebrated with dances by night, and a secret hope that the world would not fall.

 

But Hitler had fallen to the Allies, early in the summer, in May 1945… and the bomb was not successfully tested until July.  The Bomb was not dropped on Japan for the original purpose of combating the Nazi’s – a fact which the Museum forgets to explore.  The Bomb was dropped on Japan in August – President Truman announced to the American public that anything but Nuclear Weaponry would cost a quarter million US millitary casualties.  So instead a quarter million innocents were irradiated from the earth – civilians, women and children and artists and elders – no different from you or I, comfortable in our American houses and Apartments – exterminated for the Sin of not overthrowing their “Evil Emperor”.

 

Of course, of course, because you have it, you spent the money on it – you certainly have to use it, don’t you?  The 20th century already has its official villain, there can be no bigger “bad guy” than Hitler – there can be no evil in bringing this war to an end, there can be no  blame cast on America at this point – America is Heroic.  I looked across the photographs of the Nuclear “tests” conducted in the years since – each mushroom cloud different in size, shape and color, beautiful in its own way – and I wondered, what were these detonation but warnings – that we have harnessed the power of God, and we have used it.

 

Elsewhere in the Museum I took in exhibits about the mapping of the human genome, the ever-complexifying operations of the human brain, an electronic retina which can successfully deliver crude visual images to the mind of a blind man.  I was once again blown away by the accomplishments of Science in the last 60 years, since the dawning of the Atomic Age – ever accelerating, ever crossing the line into the heretofore impossible.  It seemed immanently clear to me, at that time, that as surely as the Atomic Age had descended upon mankind in the Summer of 1945 – already the Quantum Age is dawning upon us, with consequences that even our most brilliant minds can only guess.

 

15 miles West of Los Alamos rest the Bandalier ruins – a preserved site of ancient Native Pueblos within a rocky valley.  They were a simple society that thrived long before the White Man.  I walked about the stony cliff-side with walls built in caves and babbling stream, trying to find a balance in what I had seen.  The juxtaposed visions of humanity clashed – the humanity who lived in harmony with nature, the humanity who built a fire-bomb that could wipe out entire cities.   It seemed to me now more than ever that this old way of life was perfect – left nothing to be desired – and yet, nevertheless, the time came and we moved beyond it, “civilization” springing up in Mesopotamia (these days we call it Iraq) – we ventured onward into an unknown progression – following which dream we know not what – and came, relatively quickly, upon a time when the Fate of the World rests in our Atomic Hands.

 

And the audible chilled tremor in Oppenheimer’s voice - recalling his thoughts in witnessing the first Atomic Detonation at the White Sands Trinity Site - quoting the Sanskrit of the Bagavad Gita, -

 

“I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”

 

 

 

March 9th, Roswell New Mexico

 

 

One of the reasons I had ventured East was to see if I couldn’t catch a glimpse of the fabled “Middle America Monster” – A hundred miles west of Dallas, the beast approached.

 

I had been listening to “The Secret Wars of the CIA” on Tape, which chronicles the “proactive” international strategies if Director of Central Intelligence Casey during the Reagan era – Casey cast webs of espionage agents like nets across the globe, each programmed not only to collect intelligence, but also to take insurgent action when necessary.  So -  I was already feeling a twinge of paranoia on this sunny Texan afternoon, when I noticed that a Highway Patrolman had pulled up behind me.  Crap, I thought, already nervous.  I was driving at the speed limit, 70 MPH, but everyone else seemed to be zooming along closer to 80.  In a slightly panicked moment of mental abstraction, I hit the gas.

 

Red and Blue lights blazed to life behind me.  Oh well, I thought, at least now I’ll get to see if my stereotypes about the Texas Police are true. 

 

The officer who approached the passenger side window looked exactly like the picture I had drawn in my mind: portly, wide-brimmed hat, tight mouth, silver sun-glasses obscuring the windows to his soul.  He informed me that he had pulled me over because I was going a little fast, and because my license plate was covered with mud (I had gotten stuck in a foolhardy exploration near Canyon De Chelly, and escaped only by the good graces and hard pushing of some passing Navajo).  I nodded and stared at him, wondering what he was going to do next.  He eyed the interior of my car, books, cds and clothes strewn about haphazardly.  “You heading back to California?”  I tried to explain that I was driving to the Mississippi and back.

 

Five minutes later we were standing outside, behind my car.  I stood awkwardly, having been instructed not to put my hands in my pockets (it made him “more comfortable”).  I was painfully aware of the shape of my body, my long blond hair and scruffy red beard, the Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on the muddy bumper of my car.  He asked me again why I was traveling out to New Orleans.  “I just wanted to see America,” I said.

 

This seemed to confuse him.  I couldn’t see the distrust in his eyes because of his silver sun-glasses.  “You got any drugs in that car?” he asked me.  “No sir” I said.  “No marijuana?”  :”No sir.”  “No Cocaine?” “No sir”  “No Illegal Substances”  “No sir.”  “No large sums of money?”  “No sir.”  “No weapons?” – the idea of Jonathan Whittle-Utter trafficking weapons through Texas was so Hilariously Surreal that I couldn’t help a bright eyed grin spreading out across my face.  “NO sir!”

 

It was the grin that did it – now he knew something was wrong!  “Do you want to see?” I said, reaching over and pulling open the back, revealing the mattress and disheveled bedding.  In fact, he did want to see.  He opened the side door and began systematically rifling through my belongings.  Thus far I had managed to keep my fear off to the side – I had heard stories about Southern Cops – the ones from Texas especially – and part of me was sure that he was just fucking with me because of my bumper sticker and Educated-in-Berkeley persona.  He of course had a gun and the power of the law behind him, whereas I was far from home with some big ideas that he would find offensive – he could do whatever he wanted, and how did I know what he would do?  Then the second cop pulled up.

 

This second fella was clean-cut and dark haired, with dark sun-glasses to match – and for some reason felt a surprised relief that he was good-looking.  “How’s it going?” he asked.  “It’s going alright” I replied, trying to convey with my tone that his compatriot was behaving inappropriately.  Then there were two cops going through my car.  “Do you mind if I sit?” I asked, as they denigrated my disheveled mobile home into total chaos.

 

It occurred to me that these men might feed off of fear, and that they might stop bothering me if I fed them a little bit.  The clean-cut fella came to stand over me and give me the third degree.  I appreciated that in his intimidating stance above me I had a perfect view of his unclipped nostril hair.  I explained again that I was an actor taking a road trip across the country before settling down to my career.  He asked me again about weapons and drugs, wanted to know why I had so much incense in my briefcase.  “You been smoking some doobies?” he drawled.  “No.”  “You don’t smoke Marijuana?”  “No.”

 

“Never!?”

 

I raised my face to meet him, and drew my lips firm.  “I went to school at Berkeley; there’s a lot of that stuff going around up there, I experimented a little, yes.”

 

My pride in this statement left him speechless and confused.  He stood up and looked away, muttering something about how graduating from Berkeley was a great accomplishment.  “Thank you” I said, while the part of my brain that thinks it’s psychic absently babbled that this man was probably a latent or closeted homosexual.  He seemed genuinely confused as to what I was “afraid of” and I explained to him that I had never had my car searched before and I was a little nervous.

 

The two cops conferred quietly, their heads stuck inside my car like ostriches.  Jesus Christ, I thought, as a third cop pulled up in a police truck.  But just then, clean-cut cop walked past me, told me to “have a good one”.  Below his waist, he had extended his hand into a down-turned peace sign.

 

The evil-looking cop had me sign my “warning.”  He looked as though he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing, and a little guilty.  I told him to have a nice day.

 

} ^ {

 

 

On the remainder of the drive to Dallas, I thought about Authority and all of its mis-uses.  That insofar as I had just felt helpless against a power that could do whatever It wanted in the name of something It thought was good – I had just touched upon the centuries of witch burnings, lynchings, inquisitions, mass-executions, churches, governments, and academies out of which we have apparently built this recent relative stability.  People who do terrible things very often think they are doing the right thing.  I wondered if those men actually thought I was a drug dealer or a terrorist – they would only be employing the same mentality of fear and paranoia which justified the first Pre-emptive military strike in the history of American Democracy (well, some would say we do it every ten years…).  And I wondered how much pain and sadness and oppression those men had experienced in their lifetimes, that they clutched this darkness so closely to their hearts.

 

And - for some of it is surely - how much of the darkness I see in middle-America is in reality my own darkness, projected outward?

 

}^{

 

But Dallas was wonderful, that night, after a short nap.  It was big and beautiful, intimidating, a thriving metropolis where I least expected to find one.  I stopped into “Adair’s Saloon” in Deep Ellum, and made my way through cowboys and graffiti-scrawled walls, thinking, “just act natural.”  The bartender was scruffy and long haired, seemed thrilled to see me, asked me where I was from, and deposited the money for my beer into a cash register that bore the bumper sticker “Viva La Bush!”  I narrowed my eyes and tried to understand how this free spirit, in Texas, could also be a republican.  Texas was, albeit briefly, an independent nation, the Lone Star; the Alamo was lost, but was lost with intense bravery; 11 men survived, while the other 179, including Davy Crocket, “King of the Wild Frontier” gave their lives.  It is a glorious story – anyone who has ever fought for their freedom will recognize it.  If George Bush can invoke the romance of that kind of heroism – then shame on us for not paying more attention to Mythology.

 

I sat in the back writing poetry.  A woman named Nancy started talking to me – she was raised in Marin County, California.  But she had lived for thirty years in Texas, and her son had died last year.  She told me that Adair’s Saloon was a cliché, that that I should go to Austin to see the “real” Texas, that when I got to Austin, I wouldn’t want to leave.  And she told me that there were a lot of red-necks in Texas, and a lot of racism.  But we’ve all heard that last bit, haven’t we? – I had come here to see what else was true.  I watched the men, young and old, in their cowboy boots and cowboy hats, strutting across the room.  It struck me that being a cowboy was a performance, with everyone trying to embody the archetype, and some much better at it than others.  In any case, everyone was working at it, as surely as the actors in Berkeley worked on their character development, recited their lines.  Those men who were very awkward cowboys tugged at my heartstrings, while those who had mastered their craft were honestly admirable.  I understood these men, I felt love for them.  I remembered a bit of wisdom from my childhood - that cowboys could be good or evil.  While over the loudspeaker, after the live music had ended, a Texan voice crooned “East is East, and West is West/ And Being First, is Always Best/ But I Believe in Love/ I believe in Babies/ I Believe in Magic/ and I Believe in You…”  I left the saloon that night in high spirits.

 

But early that morning I awoke from a vision; - an ancient Apache woman appeared to me, glowing white light.  She showed me that there was a great darkness over the land.  I lay awake in the darkness, with a dryness in my mouth, and thought about all the terrible things human beings had done to one another in the dark.  In the irrationality of solitude and darkness, I lingered on the fact that if those cops wanted to find me again, they had the computer network to do it.

 

The vision colored the rest of my stay in Dallas.  I spent the morning walking about the downtown, trying to understand the faces of the suits I saw in passing.  The central Library was gorgeous and played classical music over the plaza outside its front doors, where homeless African Americans congregated (it reminded me of Berkeley that way) – outside of City hall was a massive politico-artistic war protest, displaying all the shoes of the American’s who have lost their lives in Iraq, and a small fraction of the Iraqis (we don’t think about that number much, do we?) who have also died, while a young woman read the names of the deceased.  Attending the protest were anti-protest protesters, carrying signs that read “Anti-War protests hurt soldiers morale” and “War never solved anything … except Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Terrorism!” and “Saddam Hussein only killed his own people, it was none of our business!” – (this last one I found particularly irritating – it’s not okay for Saddam to kill his own people when he deems it for the Good of the Nation, but it is okay for America to kill its own people during The Civil War, for the Good of the Nation, and it is even more okay for America to kill thousands and thousands of  Saddam’s people Now.  Only America may kill without conscience, is that it?)  But the car parked in front of me at the Library had a bumper sticker that read “half of my heart is in Iraq” – meaning that her child was stationed there.  And I ask you liberals – are you so heartless that you could look such a woman in the eyes and tell her that her son had died for nothing?

 

I felt depressed.  Dallas was the city where JFK was assassinated, and I had wanted to go and meditate on the Grassy Knoll.  Instead, I climbed into my car and headed for the Mississippi.

 

America is a covert, black-gloved, down-turned hand, making a peace symbol.

 

 

 

March 20th, Harlem, New York

 

 

{For a little All American Context, I returned from my six months in Asia in January 2004, and jet-lagged by a full 16 hours, proceeded to Berkeley in time for the Spring Semester, where I Lived in My Car for 6 weeks.  I had been given sufficient notice by my parents that I was being cut off - but I had a second academic major to finish.  I also had a completely romanticized picture of what living out of a van would be like.  And it was romantic, for the first two weeks}

 

{It was like fasting … when you begin to realize the value and meaning of a thing only when you no longer have it … waking up in the morning during that third week with nowhere to wash my hands and face, and stepping outside was stepping onto a public street.  My skin began to break out for the first time in years.  I had no choice but the use the restroom at People’s Park – after three years of living across the street from the homeless capital of Berkeley, I had finally joined their ranks.  I studied the graffiti on the public bathroom of the park, rich with secret messages, untold stories, symbols of the illuminati – and was well aware of my good fortune in having a student pass to Zellerbach Hall, which contained showers for the touring dancers.  For this fact I was able to shower every day – perhaps the single factor which prevented my alienation from mainstream society from being complete.}

 

{It was the alienation which was most disturbing, most damaging.  Living out of a car is, in and of itself, no great difficulty (I know this now, as during this most recent journey across the country, I have lived out of the car for days at a time, and found again the romance I lost during those dark days at Berkeley) – but living out of a car within a city absolutely is a great difficulty.  For all the “liberal” sentiments of the Berkeley student body, I was utterly alone to find anybody who understood the physical conditions under which I was subsisting.  Most of my “friends”, so functional in their upward mobility, at best tolerated my circumstances, but drew their lines quite firmly at knowing too much.  As I had drawn my lines when mobbed by the beggars in India, and in the end, what can even we Americans say but, “to each his own Karma?”  In one week’s time I went from being a White Prince in India to being a homeless man in America … it was my own personal way of working through the great devastation (and secret hope) that I had seen in the Third World.}

 

{Of all places to find respite and salvation, I was finally hired at Gymboree Play and Music – to be a teacher and sales associate.  I had in fact taken a nap in my now smelly van between meeting the owner in the morning and my “audition” for their teaching position later that afternoon.  That was my own personal moment of choice – when I had had enough of the one reality, and was ready to move on to the next – and I will not make any claims as to the ability of others in such a state to make a similar choice – but for the next nine months I was a teacher to small children ages 5 and younger – I had met Indian beggars this young – and I was grateful for the healing presence of children in my life.}

 

And after Texas came Mississippi, which was my goal.  I had felt the river call to me, and so I had followed that call (in fact, a psychic had at one point told me that I had lived a past life as a boy from a wealthy family on the banks of the Mississippi - and if being told of a past life could help me get as far as India, it could certainly get me as far as Mississippi – even if none of that psychic stuff is true, the image resonates).

 

But what Mississippi had to tell me, primarily, was that the Civil War had really only just happened.  Just across the river from Louisiana is Vicksburg, which houses a massive park dedicated to the great battle which took place there between the Confederate Americans and the Union Americans, 150 years before.  And driving along the numerous monuments, erected individually state-by-state, it hit me all at once that this battle was only yesterday, that this rift was far from mended.  150 years is only six times my own short life-time, less than three times that of my father, less then twice that of my Grandfather.  For half as long as America has existed, it existed on the foundation of Slavery.  And our “great nation” nearly cleaved itself into two “great nations” for this very reason. .

 

So in arriving at the capital of Mississippi, Jackson, famous primarily for its civil rights controversy in the 1960s, I thought I understood the South in context.  The state of Mississippi is incredibly poor, boasting the highest poverty rate in the nation, and the city of Jackson at best looks like a large town, hardly a city, where five minutes drive from City Hall sit abandoned houses built on stilts, and the glaring eyes of an African American population far outnumbering the whites.  The history texts I consulted suggest that the state of Mississippi has never recovered from the loss of Slavery, which was its primary source of wealth.  I found myself thinking, how apt would it be, if in the century to come, the descendants of the slaves mobilized, and took the South as their own.  It was in Mississippi, in the state-of-the-art internet facilities at the Jackson public library, that I finally purchased my ticket to New York.

 

Along the Natchez Trace Parkway (which I believe was initially a Tribal Path) I stopped along a proclaimed “ghost town” which had thrived before the civil war.  Now it was little more than a littering of placards along a wooded trail, and two eroded cisterns.  Nothing else remained.  It takes 20 years to create an adult human, and 100 years for nature to completely reclaim an adult human village.  It was foolish to come to Mississippi in the winter, with the Spanish Moss hanging limp and gray from the trees, so I promised myself that some year, I would return in the Spring.

 

 

“Too long been American Dreaming and I think we’ve all lost the way”

              --American Dreaming, Dead Can Dance

 

[The following passage was written six months before Katrina]

 

I have since heard varied reports about New Orleans – that it is entirely commercial, superficial, a place for frat boys and post-frat boys trying to reclaim their youth, dangerous after dark, dark in and of itself.

 

But I was so thrilled, and so relieved, to find a Multicultural Epicenter in the heart of South.  New Orleans, generally speaking, is a metropolis rising above an enormous coastal swamp.  The warnings not to venture out alone in the dark of night are accompanied not only of tales of criminals, but with vampires, ghosts, voodoo, and a downtown French Quarter which is never absent of people, and never sleeps.  In New Orleans, the Darkness Dances.  The area was owned by the Spanish, the French, and after the Louisiana Purchase, the Americans, and here the descendant of Africa speak with pride of the Voudon (The Spirit of Creation), and blend their reality-systems with Christian saints and local myths.  The “Cajun” culture is alive and unique in America, no matter how commercialized New Orleans becomes – and many miles west in the city of Lafayette, I stumbled one night upon gathering of locals thriving to a Cajun-Zydeco Band in a backyard, and saw the Spirit of the South was Alive and Pure.  The Music in Southern Louisiana is in a class by itself, and the culture rests only partially within middle-American pretensions.  30 minutes South of New Orleans I went for a walk through the swamps, into the marshes, and saw many wild Alligators, and a solitary Armadillo who amazed me.

 

But - I had to catch a flight to New York out of LAX.  So I turned about and prepared to make a second pass through Texas.

 

 

“I am piecing a potion to combat your poison/ She is Risen”

-- Barons of Suburbia, Tori Amos

 

I was determined to find a way to love Texas, so in Houston I went only to Museums.  The Menil Collection is an intriguing gathering of surrealism, contemporary art, and tribal artifacts.  A short walk from the central collection is the Rothko Chapel, a dim spacious bit of architecture dedicated to open-minded inter-religious practice.  Downtown, the magnificent Natural History museum was thronged with families, and the exhibits were sufficiently mind-blowing (this is spite of the fact that I personally find “Hard Science” just as irritating as Fundamentalist Religion).  The woman who sold me my ticket was raised in California and told me in hushed tones that even in vibrant Houston (which I loved) overt racism was not exactly taboo.

 

But in Austin, the state Capital, at last I was able to embrace Texas with love in my heart.  I had spent the night previous in Cameron Texas, visiting my friend Erica Rangel, who had recently fled Mexico when the Mexican Government forcefully shut down her drug rehab center on allegations of torture.  The idea of Erica Rangel torturing teenage drug abusers in Mexico is even more ridiculous than the idea of Jonathan Whittle-Utter trafficking weapons in Texas.  Nevertheless, Erica fled Mexico and is now helping to start a new rehab center in Texas with her boyfriend, Jeff (she was an actor at Berkeley).  She made a tasty Eggplant Parmesan and the conversation inevitably turned to politics.  I expressed irritation at the fact that the Republicans had basically laid claim to Religion – they get to say what “God” wants – while meanwhile the liberals, welded to secularism, secretly slander Christianity. (It’s all a battle over what “reality” “is”, isn’t it? Although very few put it that way.).  It seems to me that we have collectively allowed them full use of the idea of “God” rather than taking that concept for ourselves.  I personally do not find the idea of a higher creative force or benevolent intelligence inherently preposterous – although I do completely object to the appropriation of this creative intelligence to the Republican Agenda.  If “God” doesn’t want us to vote for Kerry, then I can see why we didn’t.  But who let who say that God said that?

 

Austin, Texas, is the “live music capital of the world” and a liberal enclave to boot.  The peoples of Austin are so many and varied in their savvy post-cowboy-outgrowths that I can only hail them as being impossible to pin-down – on par with the zeitgeists of Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York.  Music bleeds off the streets in Austin with untold generosity, and one night an attractive woman pulled up next to me in a sports car on  6th Avenue and handed me money to give to the Saxophone player (best I’ve ever heard) who was playing on the corner.  In Austin I met my friend Kate (whom I had gone to middle-school with in Pasadena) and she treated me to an afternoon of the deeper, richer cultures of Austin, including the best Mediterranean tacos I’ve ever tasted.  I meditated on the lawn of the state Capital and wondered why, for that matter, we have allowed the conservatives to own our idea of “Texas”` - which, for all of its rugged masculine independence, could still be a Blue State and lose nothing, none of its power, none of its mythos, none of its beauty.  I suspect my sister Jordana is right – by encouraging the polarization between conservative and liberal, we have widened the rift in America and strengthened the solidarity of the Republican Agenda.  We have made a gift to the conservatives with our pre-packaged understandings of Middle America, The South, and Texas – even Morality, even God Itself. 

 

I think:  Texas has enough darkness to fight off already without being the carrier of every negative thought of every liberal in the country (if I were a mystic I might claim that such a torrent of dark thoughts will only feed the Demon).  Rather I would like to suggest that Texas is, for each of us, what we choose to make of it.

 

I can imagine how George W Bush found the Savvy to sway a nation in understanding how he managed to be a Governor in a City like Austin.  He couldn’t have thrived here without learning to play both sides.  “21st century warfare is all about adopting the standpoint of your opponent” says Grant Morrison – a strategy that should be more resonant among the “open-minded” liberals, but which helped to win the 2004 election for the Republicans nonetheless.  Bush’s campaign was silver-tongued and eerily charismatic.   Yes, his agenda was backed by multi-national corporations, but outside of total electoral fraud (?), it still required the participation of the poor conservative masses – which, I will tell you from my own personal observations – are just like you and me, trying to protect their own unique way of life, unaware of apples in a world full of oranges.  At the Texas Capitol building, I happened to arrive in time to hear a choir of children singing about the glory of America.  The cynical among us can scoff that these children have merely been programmed.  But it is my own hope that these children have within them a vision of something that is very real – and when they reach my age, I hope that they will find for themselves an actual, living America which is even more beautiful than the one I have discovered.  I do not believe that the American Government is any true representative of liberty, or to be trusted – but I do believe that the American Spirit is alive and well – in the secret hearts of the tribal peoples and in the secret hearts of the MTV generation – waiting to be honored and awakened.

 

True, the American Spirit may be terrible weapon in the wrong hands.  But if as liberators the best we can do is to analyze and lay waste to all of our Spirit, and all of our Myth – then in the aftermath of our Great Work we shall have left to inherit only an empty shell, a machine world, in which to celebrate our freedom.

 

If I have succeeded in opening any minds to Texas, then I will consider this particular semantic endeavor a success.  There isn’t much left to tell after that – there is the beauty of the natural parks of the Southwest, independent and resilient even if we do eventually wipe out our own species.  The White Sands in New Mexico are like a snowfall of Earth, beautiful and peaceful in spite of the fact that the Trinity Site is only a short distance south.  The Carlsbad Caverns join the Grand Canyon (in my opinion) as being among the great wonders of America – over 2 miles of paved road winding 750 feet below the surface of the Earth, into expanses of light-in-the-dark that must be seen to be believed.  The UFO museum at Roswell is alarmingly unbiased in its overwhelming presentation of bizarre facts, while Biosphere 2 in Arizona is a completely enclosed micro-environment separated from Biosphere 1 (planet Earth) actively used to study environmental systems.

 

300 miles West of the blistering heat in Phoneix, Joshua Tree National Park in California is lush with wildflowers in March.

 

I share the view with many others that our species got it right the first time – that the tribal model for human society is in fact the best model (certainly the least destructive and most just) that we have yet constructed.  But  - I also share the view that we departed from that perfection for a reason – that this is all actually going somewhere, although our generations, still living in the Dark Ages, have yet to catch a proper view.  That we as a species have now come to grapple with the very real possibility of total self-annihilation -may in fact be the best indicator that we are really only just getting started – only just waking up.

 

 

“Real research is always a collective activity, and its results can make a large contribution to changing consciousness, increasing insight and understanding, and leading to constructive action”

- Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants

 

In spite of the raging, over-populated streets of India, and the 40,000 strong student body of Berkeley, it was in New York that, for the first time in my life, I had the feeling of being lost in a crowd.  The population across this expanse of steel and concrete is delightfully multi-everything; multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-economic, multi-ideological.  Back in Austin Texas, Kate had attempted described New York (she worked here as a model for two years), “The vibe is almost supernatural.  You’ll feel it as soon as you land.”  This city positively throbs and pulses with energy (multi-energies) – and in my deeper senses, amidst the cold gray streets and gnarled trees of winter, I find the city to be almost flooded with dark – not quite the overbearing “darkness” of Texas - dark like a dream, mysterious, like the Native American Void.  I baffled my Berkeley-come-New-Yorker friends in remarking that New York reminded me of India more than anywhere else on Earth – the onslaught of energy and sensory information left me spending whole mornings hiding indoors, curled on a couch.  The main difference being, of course there’s a lot more money in New York.

 

I found myself reading Noam Chomsky, for the first time, on the long lonely subway to the World Trade Center.

 

 

 

April 5th, New York, New York

 

 

Insofar as I have to admit that Noam Chomsky is a bit fanatic, I also have to admit that there is a great deal of truth in his writing.  If even half of his claims are true, America rivals Nazi Germany as the greatest source of Terror the world has ever known (England loses only because they had less advanced weapons at the height of their empire).  Looking through his eyes, New York looms as an Energetic Citadel, an empire of affluence built upon the broken backs of the innocent poor; America as a parasite slowly sucking the life-blood of the third world, while within our borders, our ignorance of world affairs and apathetic prosperity drive the death-machine.  Viewed as such, I can almost agree with the viewpoint of one brilliant friend of mine, who commented that the downing of the World Trade Center was not much different from Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star.

 

Almost.  Luke Skywalker and the Death Star are Myth, and although we are also made of myth, we are not exclusively so.  The lives of civillians are very much flesh and blood - innocent Americans working in a downed skyscraper, innocent Iraqis buying milk and toilet paper in an open market. 

 

I went for a walk in Central Park today to see if it was true – if Spring was actually on its way – if this barren concrete wasteland of gnarled trees and cold soil was actually going to produce life.  Sure enough, where it snowed only a week before, green shoots are on cue pressing upward, purple, white, yellow wild flowers blooming as though synchronized, and tiny buds swelling in hundreds and thousands on the fingers of trees.  Having adopted Chomsky’s perspective for a while, I’ve recently set it aside and tried on Positive Energy by Judith Orloff instead.  There at least, no matter how greatly we deviate from the paradise of what we could create on earth – we are all still bathed in an unceasing life force, growing ever stronger, ever more self aware.  Flying over Manhattan on my way in, over the bright white light of Times Square and surrounding expanse in shades of Gold, it seemed for a moment that I was passing over Atlantis.  A Cosmopolis in the Making.  America has a beauty to rival its ugliness, and a complexity that will bear rewards to careful exploration, by Liberal and Conservative alike.

 

The night before visiting the World Trade Center, I visited a small apartment on the upper west side and signed a rental agreement.  I’ve come to New York in winter, to watch for the spring.

 

Om Shanti

 

Jonathan.

 

 

 

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