Hopeful Romantics

By now anyone with a heartbeat knows that J.D. Salinger passed on, last week.   The death of the controversial author of “Catcher in the Rye” was certainly a news event, bringing out the deferential and the snarky.   There were reviews and reminiscences, lengthy and brief accountings of his place in literature and his place in American and even world culture.   It was in one spontaneous moment a reminder that even the pop minded, celebrity inundated  America sometimes remembers its true artists and its literary lions.   A nice touch for a country with a memory of its history that is equivalent to a dog.

Salinger only published four books.  The first is “The Catcher” in the Rye, published in 1951.  He also published “Nine Stores,”  “Franny and Zooey,” and “Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenter.”   This is a modest literary output but significant on so many levels.   To read Salinger is in some way to follow the trajectory of the American family and with it American Culture.  At once it is intensely personal.   We derive an intimate knowledge of the fictional Glass family, fashioned after Salinger’s own Irish-American Heritage.   But we also derive a sense of the dissolution and reformation of the American family.

In Salinger’s intimacy, we find a universal world, a changing sequence of family life that has left us somewhat bewildered in the 21st century.    We see how in “Catcher,” the questioning of the system. the realization that even the more exalted visions of success and supremacy are artificial, or “phony,” as protagonist Holden Caulfield, pronounces throughout the book.  We see in the complete published work the splintering of the family, with its doubts and second thoughts, idiosyncrasies,  and its conflicting impulses to survive or destroy itself as the characters hang on for dear life or take leave of themselves.

This was America of the fifties and sixties.  Holden Caulfield is maybe dated now to some extent.  He, like the protest movements that grew out of the fifties and sixties,  is maybe a an inglorious monument to a slice of modern history.     He is quaint  in his evaluations of society, as the system he faces has in its ongoing metamorphosis  worked to co-opt us all.   His cause, which was personal cause, aimless and misdirected rebellion,  may now be seen as no cause at all.  In a world where mood elevators, the Prozacs and  Zolofts relieve us  from actually realizing the dreadful impact of meaningless and often nonsensical social behavior,  we tend to bury our inner Holden Caulfied’s.  We bury them where they can’t rise up, ask questions.   Start trouble.

Nevertheless, Caulfield lives on.  For Salinger, like Bob Dylan and a number of others cannot merely be judged by their artistic creations.    They must also be regarded for the impact they had on society itself.   Millions have read “The Catcher in the Rye.”   We know it is not a story rife with sex and celebrity, gratuitous violence, and all the other elements that drive the train of pop consciousness these days.   It is a story of perceptions and idea, told with with and humor.

Yet  “The Catcher in the Rye,” was banned from schools and libraries around the countries.  The usual reactionary pundits held up this slim fictional volume as emblematic of the moral and social decay.   It was, after all, an attack against artifice and shallow values.  It was a perception of society that gave vision to ourselves in a way we were horrified to recognize.   Rather than examine its point of view, like all things different, it was judged subversive and shouted down.

But millions of us read it.  And millions of us found our heads turned and our thinking changed.   We no longer put as much faith in our institutions.  We no longer accepted our society and its social mores without question.   What was fed to us and to be accepted on face value was questioned, criticized, and ultimately rebelled against.   “The Catcher in the Rye” was the seed, the first implant that rewired the nation.   From that seed, there came social disruption.   Society though still manacled to lockstep ideology and systems not of our making, had still felt the impact of changes in its sexual values, civil rights, and our outlook to those that hired us, those who governed us, and the wars they committed to on our behalf.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” was more than a book.   It was a de facto instruction manual for how to see things outside the institutional perspective.   I should add here that there are good stories and then there is good literature.   While good stories, the big, sweeping blockbusters, must by their nature be story driven, this is not necessarily the case with good literature.   With a good blockbuster, you must start at the beginning and finish at the end.  A page turner.  The same may hold true for good literature.   But there is a difference.

With good literature, or I should say a test of good literature, is to be able to start anywhere in the book and moving forward or backward glean insights and understanding from what is written on the pages.   You can turn to the middle and not care, really, how the book was started and how it will end.   In good literature, wherever you start, you can read something that will move you in some way, that will turn your head around.    This is the case with Salinger’s works.  Start anywhere and there is something to gain.

As for Salinger himself, he stands in vivid defiance of our modern, celebrity saturated times.   He at first may have wanted his fame and attention, but soon tired of it to retreat to his ninety-odd acres in New Hampshire.  He was famous for being a recluse, which while not altogether new is remarkably edifying in a world where the desperate want to be publicly vaunted for some insipid act.    It may be fleeting fame, but it is fame.   Having eight kids and once and you are the OctoMom, gracing the tabloids and the six o’ clock news.   Make some outrageous claim in defiance of all things scientific, and your are considered Presidential material.   Have sex with the right person, and you get to tell your story and write a book.

Yet here was Salinger who backed away from it all.  The presumption was that he had stopped writing.  This apparently is not the case.   While he may have engaged in what we call eccentric behavior, Jerry Salinger, still lived a long and fulfilling life.   He was able to explore metaphysics, homeopathy, and other pursuits that would have given cause to deem him an oddity, had he been under the social microscope.  He came and went, had people for dinner, had sex with people of his choosing, mostly out of the public view.   He engaged in his intellectual pursuits outside the public eye, so people couldn’t judge him or hash out their half baked theories on what he was up  to.   Although, even when they lacked a clue as to what he was up to, theories bubbled like farts to the media surface every now and then.

Salinger was a living example, melding as best he could his real life with his written word.   Maybe we will see more of those words in time as some of the alleged books and stories he had been writing all these years emerge in the public light.  If they do, a lot of people will have a lot to say.   And we will be forced to listen to theories, conjecture from the pompous and mindless to fill up the air time.  To be fair, more knowledgeable souls will chime in with their thoughts, and from them their may be nuggets worth pocketing.  Or not.

But all of it in the end means little or nothing, compared what the author has ultimately put on paper.   As for Jerry Salinger, whatever he had to say about this human condition, we can be grateful, he has said it already.

The Author and Book Event Center has recently showcased Gordon Basichis and his new novel, “The Guys Who Spied for China.”  Basichis is featured in the this week’s author spotlight section.

Author and Book Event Center posts information about authors, writing, and new books.  Included in it postings are book reviews, video interviews, chat forums and member information.

“The Guys Who Spied for China,” is a roman a clef based on the author’s true experiences uncovering Chinese Espionage Networks in California and the United States, during the eighties and nineties.

The Bodhi Tree has been a Los Angeles institution since I can remember.  Located in West Hollywood, on Melrose Avenue, the Bodhi Tree was one of the first bookstores of its kind.    It was a metaphysical bookstore, redolent with incense burning in its labyrinthine rooms.    Just walking through the door made you feel like you were in a different place and time.

The store  stocked books from every religion and every metaphysical pursuit.    There were 35,000 books in all.  No genre bestsellers here.   The Bodhi Tree was for reading and thinking, meditation and contemplation, things we don’t seem to do so much of anymore.   Who has the time?    The Bodhi Tree was founded by two men,  Stan Madson and Phil Thompson, who in the Angeleno hippie days of 1970 first bought one bungalow and, later, its adjacent twin.   It was name for the place where Buddha found enlightenment.

You could visit the Bodhi Tree in pursuit of metaphysics.  People did.  In fact, they came from all over the world.  Or your could visit the Bodhi Tree in pursuit of the datable guys and gals who were seeking a love partner to accessorize their spiritual enlightenment.   Yes, it was open seven days a week and late enough into the evening that singles found other singles with whom they hoped they shared a common bond.   Probably the reason that so many of their offspring have such arcane names.   In the decades where spirituality was the thing, what could be better come on lines than opening gambits pertaining to astrology, nutrition, auras, and Zen.

The Bodhi Tree was offering books on the Kaballah before the faddists had a clue about it.  There were books on herbs, and books on Yoga.     The place gave off its own special church-like aura, a much deeper sensory presence than, say, a Christian Science Reading Room.   You felt that maybe you were onto something in your search for the spiritual, even if you weren’t.  One one hand the Bodhi Tree was contained in a respectful if not reverential silence.   But there were also discussions  among the bookshelves and along the benches where customers sipped the different types of herb tea the owners put out gratis.  Some of the discussion were complex and heady, while others bordered on the obnoxious.

Celebrities, Hollywood people, cane and went, mixing it up and were part of the usual clientele.   There was no valet parking or special VIP sections.   Los Angeles people are pretty blase about celebrity sightings anyway, although there was at least a smidgen of curiosity about what the actor or rock star was actually reading.

Here at the Bodhi Tree, you could buy your talismans and amulets.  Incense, of course, was big seller, as were the crystals and figurines the stones of a mystical quality.   There were crystals to buy and even antique Chinese Coins for throwing the I-Ching.  I still have some stored away and a couple I knew reminded me recently that we had given them coins for their wedding present.   They had stumbled on them, recently.  In their garage.  I guess the oracle of  the I-Ching wasn’t high on their priorities.

Now the Bodhi Tree is closing.  It will be gone soon.  And with it goes a piece of Los Angeles History.   Like a good many products, the metaphysical offerings of the Bodhi Tree have not gone to the heavens so much as the Internet.  Spirituality has gone mainstream, and like most things mainstream, it has been dumbed down somewhat.   The more comprehensive volumes, and the antique works you could find at the Bodhi Tree have little demand in a world that takes complexity and nuance and renders them into easy to remember jargon.    Chain stores can now sell the bestsellers and a few others at deep discounts, just a  few shelves away from their celebrity volumes.

Like a mangled  Zen proverb, the intellectual quality of  many spiritual pursuits has been reduced to a simple tattoo or claim that even a crackpot theory can align you as one with the universe.   To further alter the Zen Proverb, common thinking is such that if you didn’t see it on Dr. Phil, then it probably doesn’t exist.

So long to the Bodhi Tree and with it a piece of history and part of my youth.   And say hello to the Starbucks or corporate chain store that will probably takes its place.  As the mystics claim, nothing lasts forever.

People are pissed off.   This in itself is no real news as the public disgust with the news media, politicians and Wall Street has been on the increase every year.   But now they are really pissed off.   People are so angry that not even their Prozac and Zoloft, and the other mood enhancers, can fend off the seething desire to retaliate against the charlatans they believe have done them wrong.

People want justice.   They have lost their savings, and they have lost their jobs.    They have seen their pensions cut in half.   Their houses, if not foreclosed upon are underwater.   What equity they had is gone.   They have been lied to, bamboozled, and moved around by the sound byte media and the sound bitten politicians.    The had put their faith in their civil and social leaders, their financial advisers, and they  have  been led  astray.   The economy has become a fiasco and the state of the nation is regarded as but one more news event to be commented on by the spurious and insipid who through media magic have been qualified  as experts.   A reinvigorated Wall Streets continues its efforts to make a buck off the public’s ignorance and apathy.

But people are pissed off.   Certainly, some of the responsibility for this national debacle must fall upon their shoulders.   For it is the public that overbought and extended itself.  It is the semi-literate public who disregarded the large print, yet alone the fine print, on its mortgage contracts, never bothering to ask why am I paying so little for a house that is worth so much?    Instead, they bought into the snake oil sales pitch that they should overlook the balloon payment due in a few years, as they will always be able to get another mortgage.   And the real estate con artists most used phrase, ” housing prices will always go up,” resonated with millions, much like we take comfort in our being watched over by angels, or global warming will be corrected by forces other than ourselves.

We are a nation that doesn’t read too well.   Forget about the languages of other nations.  Approximately half of us our functionally illiterate with our own language, and that’s when we bother to read.   Much of our more significant  correspondence has been truncated down to pithy little phrases that hinder the scope of any detailed thought or definition.    We utter sound bytes that are fed to us and believe wholeheartedly that this is original thought.   Anything more than a few sentences to a paragraph forces us to give up what little element of concentration we still possess.   And critical thinking, true critical thinking, is far too demanding to warrant our attention.

So, in short, our ignorance and laziness can turn us into victims.  We are easily bamboozled.   We take lies as truth on face value, as long as those lies come from our own segment of social and political belief.   We give more credence to our celebrities and are suspicious of our scientists.   A crackpot with a theory gets more attention than the knowledgeable with the facts.   Especially if the fact is bad news.

We believe for some reason that we have the inherent right to be safe and free of any slights or contrary opinions or perspectives that would make us uncomfortable.    We think of our children of geniuses in the making and believe they will prevail and prosper by virtue of their American heritage and their legacy of a  two car garage.   We believe we can buy anything and pay for it later.   We take out home equity loans on our houses with inflated values and then use that money for trinkets and beads and other crap we don’t really need.    We buy boats and overpriced designer clothing.   We buy gourmet foods for our pets and dress our four-year-old’s in $300.00 blue jeans.

Instead of being a producer nation, we are a consumer nation.  Two-thirds of our economy is based in consumerism.  It is a hell of a lifestyle, and to support it we borrow money from foreign countries, borrow against our house, our credit cards, and, lately, we melt down our own crappy old jewelry and sell it off for its weight in gold.   We do this for one of two reasons.   We are either in love with ourselves; we are special people who absolutely deserve to garner all the material offerings that the world can provide.   Or we hate ourselves, have the kind of esteem issues that compel us to buy these baubles and trinkets so that we can feel better about ourselves.  Feel that we measure up to the people next door.

In short, we have set ourselves up as suckers.  We are ripe for the plucking.  We are semi-literate, prescription drug indulged individuals who worship celebrity while eschewing any kind of critical or cognitive thinking in favor of our own distorted view of the world.   We are the perfect mark for any group of slippery sliders wishing to sell us a bill of goods.  And that they did.   Our government gave Wall Street a license to steal.  And that is what they did.

First came the panic.  We were on the verge of  a depression.  Enter the federal government as those surviving companies, paragons of what is loosely labeled free enterprise and free market conditions,  took bailout money by the trillions to shore up their companies.   Those those that took the bailout money, or stimulus money, were supposed to use it wisely.  Stimulate the economy.  Pass it from Wall Street to Main Street.  It didn’t happen.  Instead the money was used for consolidation, for shoring up financial institutes and for buying companies that should have been left to die.   A trillion bucks later, and unemployment remains high, businesses are closing,  and there are millions of foreclosures.

There is constant talk that America is in the economic downturn from which it may never recover..  We have stopped our buying, most of us anyway.  Suddenly, we realize we really don’t need those extra trinkets and beads and that Fluffy the Cat doesn’t need gourmet food that children in a developing nation would kill for.   Little Child can make do in a $50   pair of Levi’s, in fact it is chic again, and the two luxury  vehicles in the driveway, the $20 thousand dollar vacation, the caviar and custom made $500 shirts,  the  ski mobiles and snow mobiles and the RV that drags them to places where we can overrun the landscape may not have the cachet they once did.

Then came the anger.  We are trying to save our money.  We are watching every buck.  We are eating in and ordering movies with a couple of pizzas for our rich and robust entertainment on a Saturday night.  We have no credit left, so cash is king.   We try to make the best of a bad situation, knowing that we were left stranded by political and financial chicanery and that the vaunted promise of change is like other campaign promises, fading in the light of a harsh reality.   We are tightening our belts and punching new holes in the leather, because we can’t afford to buy another belt.

And we are very pissed off.   In response to our anger we have voiced our concern by claiming we are lapsing into Socialism though few really know much about that economic system and what it really means.   We make noises about a free market, but corporate welfare leaves the rest of us struggling.   We become tea baggers and in tepid attempt to express ourselves conduct insipid reenactments of the more stalwart at the Boston Tea Party by flinging our Lipton’s into the rivers and lakes.   We are angry and it is vented in misguided ways with little direction that will promise little results.

We are frustrated and we have few channels for its expression.  In the past couple of decades we have been indoctrinated with the belief that anger and frustration are by their nature bad things and shouldn’t be expressed in polite society.   As colonialists in our nascent stages and in quest of our independence we dragged our scalawags into the streets where they were summarily tarred and feathered.  Now we just whine at them.   We are admonished that we shouldn’t act out,  that we shouldn’t raise our voices, that we shouldn’t complain.  So when we do act out and raise our voices, we do so with meaningless displays.  We wear our guns to a healthcare meeting and consider this a show of resistance.

We immerse ourselves in nonsense.  We conduct meaningless debates that are exploited by the media and the interest groups who manipulate our deeper  emotions.   We are turned against each other over petty discord, and we   allow our prejudices to condemn us to the kind of narrow thinking that obfuscates the real demons among us.   It is in the best interests of the special interests that we continue this nonsensical rancor, allowing time for the real criminals to continue to rob us blind.

Our anger is very real, but misdirected.   The feeling is righteous enough, but its expression lacks currency.   The angrier we get, either the more we try to hide it, or the more confused we become.   We don’t know which way to turn and any moral or ethical compass that is supposed to give us direction has been co-opted by corporate sponsor and their political toadies that direct us to their own best interests and not our own.

We are a nation that believes in justice.  We are a nation that believes in accountability.   At least we used to.  We believe someone should be responsible for transgressions against society.  We went to war and fought the Nazis, then conducted the Nuremberg Trials to show that leaders must be accountable for their actions.   At Nuremberg, we listened to one Nazi after the next claim they were only following orders.   And then we hanged the bastards.  We hanged them high.

But no more.  Our leaders are anything but accountable.  They screw up and get promoted.   They run their companies into the ground and they get bonuses for their efforts.    They break the law and rob and steal, and receive bail out money from the government, which is best described as public money misused and misdirected.   We bail them out and absorb the disaster, and they pat themselves on the back.   The New York Times just announced that Wall Street is preparing to give itself even more bonuses, after taking government money for bailing out of a debacle they created and then leaving us in the lurch.  Who could be more deserving of a hefty reward than a collective bunch of failures?

There has been predatory mortgage lending, falsification of documents, and the fraudulent act of according toxic financial packages mythical value.     There was insider trading and the illegal shuffling of money.   There were crimes committed.   And yet the government in its implacable wisdom has deemed it fit not to investigate or prosecute any financial wrongdoings.    While it has been broadly acknowledged that a fair portion of the financial dealings were indeed criminal acts the government while wrangling over partisan politics can not be bothered bring these white collar criminals to justice.  Sure, they brought Bernard Madoff to justice, ad a few others, but their few billions in stolen funds are mere drops in the bigger bucket, compared to the trillions stolen by others.

We are not accountable.  We do not suffer consequence for our actions.  We  allow criminals who screw up royally and drive this country into the ground to walk off with the the spoils of their ill gotten gains.   We endure one of our few remaining industries were the media discusses the crimes ad nauseum, and books are written.   But no one stands accountable and no one goes to jail.   Remarkable.

I realize that out of the thousands of people in the financial sector, Wall Street, if you prefer, only a portion committed criminal acts.   The rest merely climbed in on a rare opportunity, universal deregulation,  perpetrated for the past twenty years by idiots in government who failed to see the catastrophe the  end game would bring.   But then, among the high paid toadies there are the criminals, the ones who robbed this country blind.   These are people with no conscience that raided pension funds and pillaged the economy worse than any group of gangsters.   While we arrest a couple of grocery store robbing fools and put them in jail with vapid pronouncements that we are fighting crime, we allow the true criminals, the ones that took our retirement money and the futures of the children to live in luxury.

This is what we are pissed off about.  Underneath the spurious nonsense about Socialism and the loss of our old America, we are seething that everything we believed in has been delivered as one big lie.   We are enraged that all those Western Movies, Cop Movies, where the good guys defy the odds to bring the bad guys to justice is just a lot of crap.   Because we have not just been robbed of our money.  We have been robbed of our culture and our sense of justice and fair play for all.

Had either this administration, the past one possessed half the insight it claims it has, then they would prosecute these white collar criminals.   They would bring them to justice.   We would take back the money they stole and give them long and harsh prison sentences.   We would make examples of them by making it more costly to commit the crime than to endure the moderate penalty that, if ever, are now being handed out.  We would hang them high.

Making white collar criminals accountable would promote the true healing of this country.   Here is where at least partisan populist cultures can converge in rare mutual agreement.   This would ease the anger and the pain.   This would give us justice.   And justice is what we deserve.