Wordplay Puts You in Your Place

Due to technical difficulties (a power outage lasting several days), Wordplay was unable to post last week and apologizes to anyone who may have been waiting on pins and needles to hear from us (and by us, I mean I). My neighborhood was not among the first in town to get our power back, but we were far from the last; a customer in the store today told me that he had just gotten his power back after 10 days. That makes my ordeal relatively minor in the scheme of things. I tried to use it as an opportunity to think about what I’d need to do if a longer-lasting disaster ever strikes, so it might not be altogether bad that it happened. We depend on our modern conveniences so much but take them for granted until suddenly they’re not there anymore.

Having said that, I guess it’s time once again to make the Wordplay disclaimer about what you can and cannot expect from the blog (and from me, as a person). This is not something I do because I don’t have a topic—rather, it’s a topic in itself and one I feel the need to revisit periodically. This is important because although I think my message on this has been consistent, I somehow keep getting challenged on it. At least, that is my sense of it.

In my quest to bring mythology and archetypal psychology to bear on everyday and cultural life, I’ve sometimes delved into current events and politics. I feel that a depth psychology lens is useful in making sense of these things. I’ve also used this lens (along with creative writing) to try to make sense of a number of bewildering things that have happened to me. There were times when I felt I was writing as fast as I could to save my life. If you think that’s an exaggeration, you haven’t really been listening. 

For a long time, I was desperate to get people to pay attention when I tried to say “something is really wrong here.” It seemed no matter what I said, no one reacted in what I considered an appropriate way, which was very odd. So I just kept writing. Someone said to me that she thought I needed to get some clarity on the situation. I’m not sure what she actually knew about any of it, but that was a helpful thing that she said. Once I started putting things into narrative form, I started to see connections between personal events that I hadn’t thought about before. Things began coming into focus, although I was a long way from total clarity (something that I still don’t have, although I’ve gotten the general outline).

When my writing became more revelatory, things changed. It was as if everything flipped upside down. People went from not taking me seriously enough to taking me too seriously in the wrong way. It was as if people thought I know things that I don’t know, unless I’ve figured them out just by thinking things through. Believe me, when your world turns upside down almost in a single day, you’ll understand the incentive a person has to make sense of previously inconceivable experiences. Your focus takes on a laserlike intensity because the survival instinct kicks in. Far from trying to save the world, I was trying to save myself, although if I inadvertently helped someone else in the process, I’m quite glad, of course.

What I’m saying is, I do not have any state secrets. I don’t (and never will) work for the CIA, the FBI, or any investigative agency, domestic or foreign. I’m not an undercover police officer or a private detective. I’m not an investigative journalist. I’m a writer, and I sell appliances at Home Depot to help pay the bills.

I wish I could tell you the number of times people have come into the store acting as if they thought I had some information to share with them. They’re so transparent sometimes. Everyone who does it acts as if they’re the first to come into my place of employment speaking in code and trying to insinuate that I owe them some information or that I’m not doing some job that I don’t even have. (The opposite is true: I feel that I am constantly being spied on and certainly harassed.) My best advice to them is that if they really are working in either espionage or some kind of investigative capacity, they are barking so far up the wrong tree that they’ve probably compromised themselves. If they’re just "citizen spies," as I get the impression some of them are, they’re not doing themselves (and certainly not me) any favors. If you haven’t actually gone to FBI school and completed the rigorous screening and training that I’m sure they go through, I don’t believe they would appreciate you setting yourself up as one of them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you hear from them on this at some point, because it is in fact a crime to impersonate an agent.

Sometimes, this is all very amusing, but mostly it’s just an endless hassle. I’m surprised sometimes that I’m actually sane, but I put that down to native stubbornness. The sad thing is, even though I think I’m an honest person (and usually perceived that way by others), I can’t seem to get people to accept that I’m really not anything other than what I appear to be. Yes, I’m a pretty smart person, with many skills and capabilities, but I’m also the person who couldn’t even get a job with the L.A. County Public Libraries, a large, understaffed urban library system with few frills and perks on offer other than what I really needed, which was simply a job in my field. If I’m so special, why couldn’t I even get an entry level job? (I’d probably still be in L.A. if I had gotten a job, though that would mean I’d never have met the people I work with at Home Depot. On the whole, I would very much have regretted missing that, though no thanks to the hiring geniuses of Los Angeles, thank you very much.)

People in general seem to have a much different sense of what has been going on with me over the last 14 years or so than I do. I can tell you that I wasn’t born yesterday and would never have agreed to go through what I have gone through if I had had any way of avoiding it. I’ve certainly become a lot more wary of people’s motives and less “starry-eyed” than I used to be. When I was fairly new at Pacifica, I had an opportunity to apply for a scholarship from some vaguely defined leadership organization but decided against it because there was something just too nebulous about them. Now I will barely even fill out a survey from a company I’ve done business with for fear of inadvertently signing my life away.

If you came to the blog this week for some exciting take on what’s out there in the culture, I’m sorry: this is 10 minutes of your life you can never get back. You may be asking yourself, “Why do I even read this blog; it’s not what I was expecting at all.” Well, I don’t know—why do you read this blog?

Mythologizing the Election

Well, it's October in Kentucky, which may not be quite the same thing as Morning in America, but it's pleasant enough weather-wise. I could wax poetic about the golden afternoons, the bluebird I saw on my walk tonight, how pretty the sumacs are, or any of a number of other things, but it's also election season, with thoughts turning not just to this year's contest but to next year's presidential race. The debate season is now underway for both major parties, and the jockeying for attention will only get more intense as time goes on.

So what's a mythologist to do? My feeling that politics is a strange business remains undiminished and actually increases the more I see. It seems to me that there's a lot of "mythologizing" going on, which has probably always been the case but is something I'm more attuned to now. I wish these mythic plays were for the benefit and edification of all but it really seems to be just another way of manipulating perceptions. We were told, when I was in grad school, that politicians and other officials use mythologists and archetypal psychologists to help craft their messages, and even if I didn't know that, I'd suspect it. The one about it being time for the Great Mother to assume the reins of power has been getting especially heavy play.

I'm not a journalist (unless I'm an occasional mytho-journalist, which I guess could be a thing), and this isn't a place where you're likely to find political endorsements. I have more ideas on who shouldn't be elected than on who should be and am more convinced than ever that things are rarely what they seem in politics, where a lot of sleight of hand takes place. I watched the rise of Bernie Sanders this summer with interest, reading as much as I could to try to assess him, his background, and his policies. The word out among many of his followers was that he wasn't being treated by the media with the same seriousness as Hillary Clinton, and it's true that I would sometimes go straight from reading an article about a huge crowd he'd attracted to yet another headline talking about how unelectable he was.

It did seem that some of the coverage was slanted against Senator Sanders, though it got to such a point of ridiculousness after a while that I wondered if it wasn't actually helping him in some quarters by making him a more sympathetic candidate (and could that even have been the intention?). I know that sounds Machiavellian in the extreme, but if I were a novelist, I'd have no trouble coming up with a plot in which a political party hedges its bets by manipulating voter perceptions so that they believe they have a real choice when in fact all the flavors are actually vanilla. They just look different in the freezer.

I applaud most of Senator Sanders' political views, and I think he's absolutely right about the need for people to become more involved in their government. If he's elected, he won't be able to bring about the kind of changes he talks about without strong support from the electorate and the cooperation of other officials. I've been through the bread and roses talk of promising candidates before and have seen it come to nothing, though I do give him credit for consistency in his views. He has been saying the same things for a long time. And I was surprised at all of the criticism directed against him over the Black Lives Matter activists this summer, which seemed to me rather peculiar. Bernie Sanders, clueless on race? That seems like a stretcher. I honestly think if you're looking for someone who would work hard against institutional racism, it would be Sanders. When Mrs. Clinton met with BLM activists this summer, she came across as tense and almost hostile in the encounter but somehow received less criticism on this score than Mr. Sanders. Strange.

I am concerned about the admiration Senator Sanders expresses for not only President Obama but also Vice President Biden and Mrs. Clinton. I see all of them as mainstream, establishment politicians cut from the same cloth, part and parcel of some of the very problems Mr. Sanders wants to fix. I'm not running for president, and he is, and I suppose it's not politically savvy for someone who's only recently joined the Democratic Party to express anything but respect for its major players (aside from the fact that Sanders has said repeatedly that he doesn't want to run a negative campaign). I think sticking to the issues is commendable, but I hope it doesn't extend to a partisan "circling of the wagons" in the event, for example, that negative information does come to light from the Benghazi committee or some other source.

Many people are talking about the "people are tired of your damn emails" comment from Senator Sanders to Mrs. Clinton on the debate stage Tuesday night. Perhaps Mr. Sanders thinks it's better to steer clear of the topic until (and if) there's more "there" there, but I question his assertion that people "are tired" of the emails. Rather, it seems to me that people are actually concerned about some of Mrs. Clinton's practices as Secretary of State and that this has been reflected in the polls. While there has been some political theater around the Benghazi committee, I think the fact that Clinton's email practices became common knowledge in the course of its inquiries suggests that perhaps the prior investigations missed some things.

Senator Sanders qualified his comment after the debate by saying that he felt the investigative process needed to play itself out, which to me is different than saying it's not an important issue. I would have liked it better if he'd made this comment during the debate rather than afterwards and hope that neither Senator Sanders or anyone else will object if negative information comes out about the Obama administration or any other entity. Truth shouldn't be a partisan perception, as I think Mr. Sanders would agree, if he's the politician many people hope he is.

Well, to paraphrase Bette Davis in All About Eve, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride"--as always, when it comes to politics. And I haven't even talked about the Republicans.