Malcolm X – Under The Table

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2011)

“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” Malcolm X

One of my guilty pleasures is watching sports highlights on my computer, many of which are prefaced by thirty-second ads for shoes, cars, beer, and the Army. I have become adept at turning off the volume and relaxing for those thirty seconds before each highlight, but occasionally a new ad grabs me and I’ll watch and marvel at the senseless inventiveness of capitalism. The last Army recruitment ad I watched began with a video-game-animation of Caucasian American soldiers morphing into actual Caucasian American soldiers interdicting and arresting impoverished American black men, brutally and at gunpoint.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that twenty years ago such an ad would have caused a huge public outcry for its racist violence and for the implication that American armed forces are servants of a racist police state. But this ad, I have since been informed, has been running for several weeks through several mainstream media outlets, and no outcries are being reported (which, of course, doesn’t mean outcrying isn’t going on.)

“I think I’m an actor because I have a very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.” Susan Sarandon

As I was pondering this latest indication of the thorough conquest of our media by the corporate state, my brother sent me a link to an article about a large new study by the American Red Cross that reveals nearly sixty percent of American teenagers (both male and female) think brutal torture of suspected enemies is acceptable. And more than fifty percent of teenagers also approve of killing captured enemies on the spot in situations where the enemy is thought to have killed Americans. If that doesn’t creep you out, consider that forty-one percent of American teens thought it was fine for our enemies to torture Americans.

The study further reveals that a large majority of older Americans are opposed to torture under any circumstances. So what’s going on? We might simply blame television, but the parents of today’s teenagers watched as much television as their children, and they, the parents, do not largely approve of torture. So perhaps it is the nature of television and mass media today in contrast to how it was twenty years ago. Or we might blame the new generation of extremely realistic video games, most of which require the player to slaughter as many enemies as he or she can slaughter before they, the enemies, slaughter the player.

However, I think it is naïve to say that too much television and too many violent video games are the causes of our teenagers lacking empathy for others. For though television and video games certainly may influence our thinking and behavior, to a much larger degree television and video games reflect the larger social and political scenarios into which today’s teenagers were born. I think it is crucial to remember that virtually all of our individual prejudices and emotional inclinations are thoroughly hardwired by the end of the first four years of our lives, long before most kids make their first video kills.

What I and many others theorize is that the social fabrics woven of direct human connections and human interdependencies that have defined and supported people for millennia have been largely replaced by a technological fabric purporting to connect us, but that in reality keeps us terribly isolated and starving for emotional fulfillment. I view the cell phone/computer as close kin to the tracking devices affixed to convicted felons serving their sentences at home. Indeed, a growing number of people I know have become so neurotically attached to their mobile phones that their lives seem to be little more than extensions of that attachment.

“Touch has a memory.” John Keats

When I was a young man, an older man I knew and admired was convicted of statutory rape and sent to prison. I was so devastated by this wholly unexpected (by me) turn of events that I sought solace in reading everything I could get my hands on about rapists and criminals and prisons. And in almost every book and study I read, there were two points made again and again that struck me as most telling: that the vast majority of those who are sent to prison were deprived of loving touch as children, and rapists in particular were, for the most part, extremely unimaginative and had great difficulty satisfying themselves sexually through fantasy and autoeroticism.

Well, you probably see where I’m going with this. If instead of love and lots of physical and emotional interaction with us and other people, we give our children gadgets and videos that take the place of and inhibit the development of their imaginations, and we isolate them so they grow up socially and verbally inept, and we ourselves are hooked into our computers and phones, thus modeling for them what it is to be a human being, the scene is set for a collective criminality, if you will, criminality defined as a lack of empathy and compassion for others—a wholly self-serving mode of survival.

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.” Buckminster Fuller

This may seem like an unlikely segway, but have you noticed that the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan has suddenly vanished from the news? The same folks running recruitment ads using violent racism as bait for desperate teenagers without imaginations have decided that in-depth news about the multiple nuclear meltdowns might interfere with corporate profits both in the short and long term so…

But in Germany, as a result of the Fukushima disaster and ensuing public and electoral protests, the German government has announced they are going to phase out all their nuclear power plants as soon as possible and aim those billions of Euros instead at energy efficiency and the development of alternative energy sources. And I guarantee you that when their shift away from nuclear power proves to be wildly successful and surprisingly profitable, we won’t hear a word about that success on NPR or ABC, just as we don’t hear any words about the marvelous success of Single Payer healthcare in Canada and England and Europe.

Who are these people controlling what we get to hear and see? Weren’t they, too, sweet innocent babies in the beginning? How come they grew up so angry and disconnected and cruel?

“Either war is obsolete, or men are.” Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller suggests that there are two massive forces competing for supremacy on earth at this time in our human and planetary evolution. He called them the forces of Weaponry and Livingry. Bucky coined the word livingry, a word my computer’s dictionary does not recognize as legitimate, but what does it know? Only what it was told to know.

These forces of Weaponry and Livingry are fueled by the actions of people, and as events in Germany demonstrate, people can change a nation’s course in almost no time at all if they are permitted to express their collective will. This is the vision I am holding right now; that despite the sudden news blackout in America about what’s really going on in Japan regarding the Fukushima nuclear power plants and the irradiation of an entire nation (and to a lesser extent the entire world), the forces of Livingry have been given a great gift, and the forces of Weaponry are now more vulnerable than ever.

And the other vision I’m holding is that out of the ongoing economic devastation visited upon this country by the criminal overlords (criminal as in unloved sad lonely emotionally starved insatiably greedy) will come a revival of the ancient and natural way of living that requires no microwave cell towers, no nuclear power plants, and absolutely no torture. Bucky called this Livingry, but I’m confident we can come up with even more beautiful words for what he meant, along with dances and songs and ceremonies and celebrations.

Todd’s web site is Underthetablebooks.com

“Programming our intelligence with illusion and fantasy of there’s something wrong with us and enough isn’t enough and too much isn’t too much then turning us loose on ourselves and the world.” John Trudell

My folks are no longer alive, but the shame I feel for doing what I love still surfaces now and then to remind me of how terribly jealous my father was of his own children and how angry my mother was about having her creative ambitions so painfully thwarted. The famous quote by Carl Jung, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on children than the unlived life of the parent,” elucidates a big part of my mother’s influence on me, while Jennifer James sums up my father with, “Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that you do not have value.”

My parents were relentlessly verbally abusive of me, and on a few terrible occasions my alcoholic father resorted to physical violence that severely injured me. When I was eleven years old, he nearly killed me. I blocked all memory of this most vicious assault until my fortieth year when a vivid movie of the attack emerged from the archives of my memory. Watching that old footage sent me racing into therapy for the first time in my life.

Therapy saved me, and that does not overstate the case. My savior was a down-to-earth woman who could read in my facial expressions and physical mannerisms the unspoken text of my self-doubt, and she would bring my attention to these physical cues so I might become aware of them and explore the deeper feelings they were attached to.

Of the many discoveries I made in therapy, the most overwhelming one was that I was so entirely acclimated to being told I was worthless, I created most of my relationships to support my parents’ foundational message: no matter what you do, Todd, it isn’t good enough. Which meant I wasn’t good enough. For anything or anyone. So why go on living?

“If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success.” Malcolm X

Having known many struggling artists, I am well aware that my back-story (as they call the past in Hollywood) is hardly unique. Indeed, I have yet to meet an artist whose memoir could truthfully begin, “My parents lovingly supported me in all my artistic pursuits.” This is not to suggest that abuse and the resultant self-loathing are prerequisites to becoming an artist, though certainly such emotional history typifies the lives of many American and European artists, especially those artists creating things that don’t fit neatly into the stifling little boxes maintained by our corporate-sponsored academic/cultural mafia.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!  It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock  the meat it feeds on.  William Shakespeare

When I lived in Berkeley I was in the habit of listening to the radical pinko radio station KPFA. Shortly before the most recent American invasion of Iraq, in anticipation of a huge anti-war demonstration, one of the radio hosts invited two of the demonstration’s organizers onto his show to talk about the upcoming march. To my chagrin, though not to my surprise, these two fellows spent twenty minutes of the half-hour show arguing about which of them was the more authentic (for lack of a better word) radical. As I listened to these two “revolutionaries” demean each other and recite extensive proof of their radical pedigrees, I recalled an old friend saying, “The Right has nothing to fear from the Left because we would much rather fight amongst ourselves than actually unite in any substantive way.”

A related phenomenon is that of outsider artists and musicians (outside the mainstream) attacking and undermining each other rather than joining forces ala The Impressionists to collectively bring their creations to a larger audience. As a former devotee of open mike nights (vaudeville enacted in pubs by anyone wishing to perform), which I’m guessing grew out of the egalitarian poetry and folk music scenes of the 1960’s, I have experienced love fests wherein every performer of every imaginable level of talent was resoundingly applauded for simply having the courage to perform, and I have suffered through hateful competitions where the audience might as well have been a mob thirsting for blood, applause begrudged, the more talented the performer, the more openly despised she was.

My favorite thing to do at open mikes, in either scenario, was to interview my fellow performers, to learn their back-stories, and to ask them what they hoped to accomplish with their performances. And I was fascinated to discover that virtually everyone who came to these open mikes—old and young, hopeful amateur and fallen professional, men and women, talented and tone deaf, told tales kin to mine and containing the same essential elements.

1. Missing or disapproving parents

2. An abiding sense of being different, not fitting in

3. Finding solace in their art

4. Idolizing social and artistic renegades

5. Criticized and rejected for their art and lifestyle choices

6. Fierce determination to succeed and prove the naysayers wrong

7. Choosing poverty over giving up or compromising their art

8. Substance abuse to numb the pain of failure and rejection

9. Lousy relationships

10. The dream/belief they will be discovered by someone who makes of them a star

Based on my open mike experiences and interviews, I eventually wrote a screenplay for a musical comedy/tragedy entitled Open Mike, though #10 (see above) has yet to befall my opus.

“Depression is rage spread thin.” George Santayana

When I turned fifty I was at the lowest point in my career as a musician and writer, and I sank into the deepest and longest lasting depression of my life. After a tortuous year of living under what felt like the gravity of Jupiter, and desperate to understand what was happening to me, I came upon a book of essays by the psychiatrists Sylvano Arieti and Jules Bemporad with a title that minced no words: Severe and Mild Depression. One of the essays by Arieti presented a case study of a novelist with a life so like mine I gasped at every sentence.

Prior to his most severe depression, this novelist only exhibited mild symptoms of depression when he was between novels, at which times he would quickly launch himself into writing a new novel. Thus he, as I, managed to outrun and subsume his depression by pouring his energy and attention into his novels for thirty years until exhaustion and failure finally caught up to him. Furthermore, his sustaining fantasy, and mine, was that he would eventually write a novel so great and successful that he would be lifted out of his dreary life into a realm of exquisite happiness wherein his previously rejecting mother and/or father, as well as their embodiment in his wife or lover, would at long last love him.

Reading Arieti’s words, I had an epiphany. I must henceforth give up the unreasonable hope of winning the approval of people incapable of approving of me, for they will never approve of anyone, least of all themselves, and I must learn to accept myself for who and what I am here and now, and not for what I fantasize about becoming.

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Without question, the most hateful critics of my writing and music have been fellow artists. Before I got well, to the extent I have, I maintained relations with several angry and deeply bitter artists to whom I gave money I could ill afford to give, and praise, often false, I hoped would soothe them. Our rules of engagement were that I would support and encourage everything they did, and never dare offer suggestions about their music or art. In exchange, they would feel entitled to denigrate me, and to spit on any of my creations I was foolish enough to share with them. These relationships were such obvious re-enactments of my relationship with my father and mother it seems laughable I was unaware of the parallels, but before the veil is lifted we are blind.

After many years of working hard to reform my psychic operating system, I thought I had successfully exorcised the last of these destructive folk from my life, but a few days ago I was made aware of one such person I had overlooked. Having just released my first CD of solo piano music, 43 short Piano Improvisations, the culmination (so far) of forty-five years of piano practice and exploration, I received a letter that ranks among the most sickening and cruel attacks I have ever experienced. This letter was not a critique of my music, but reviled me for daring to make music at all, and as such recalled my mother’s rage and my father’s sense of worthlessness they both so diligently impressed upon me.

“Fortunately,” I wrote to my assailant, “I am finally well enough to trust my own judgment about what I wish to share with others, so that your most unkind words will not deter me.”

Todd’s CD 43 short Piano Improvisations is available from iTunes and UnderTheTableBooks.com

(This essay originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2010)