As faithful readers of this space (and this is Post # 100--raise your hand if you've read them all, then send in the attached postcard for your fabulous gift!) know, I find it hard to cope with the madness that is our world. I want daisies and puppies and banks of snowy white clouds in all sorts of cute animal shapes, and Love and Happiness everywhere, for Everyone. Instead I get the Koch Brothers, the NRA and gun crazies (74 school shootings and counting since Newtown), sectarian conflict and violence in nearly every country of the world, the resurgence of neo-Nazis and the far right the world around, and Fox Noise and its relentless disinformation and indoctrination campaign in the U.S. What's a poor aging (naw, let's be honest: "old") boy to do?
Well, I guess, go with the flow. Throughout human history, there have been three or four or five primary drives, depending upon whose thinking one follows: food, shelter, clothing, procreation, and altered consciousness. Right now, I wanna focus on the consciousness part, although praps in a slightly different form, like maybe unconsciousness.
Michael Pollan, in The Botany Of Desire, put forth the proposition that all societies have looked for means of coping with, as Robert Frost put it "our place among the infinities." As Pollan has it,
In every society except the Inuit, whose climate is too
harsh for vegetation, people have sought to change the
way they experience the world by using a variety of mind-
altering plants. Some of them, such as coca, poppy, and
cannabis, are considered intoxicating because they can
cause profound changes to our consciousness. Other plants
that yield psychoactive products ... like coffee, tobacco and
tea, affect our thoughts and perceptions in subtler ways.
The relationships between these various plants and the people
who use them have evolved over time, both influencing and
reflecting the values of the societies in which they are used.
And all of these plants contain molecules that cause changes
to the biochemical processes that go on deep inside our brains.
Now I know that I'm not the first to suggest this, nor, by far, the smartest or most knowledgeable, even in my own home, never mind the world at large, but doesn't the above
paragraph also describe societal experience of god, or at least religion, over the millenia? We're all looking for ways to cope, to, as John Lennon put it, "get...through the night." It seems to me that we've all always been choosing various means of putting a distance between us and what we, alone, as a species, as far as we know, know to to be our inevitable fate: "the wages of sin is death" and, while there may be "no such thing as an original sin," as Elvis Costello sang it, regardless of how death came into being, it came, and it comes for us all, and we know that, and that's a huge burden to bear.
So we--and in that "we" is absolutely, incontrovertibly, a huge, neon "I"-- look to psychotropic drugs, alcohol, sex, sports, religion--something, anything--to act as a buffer between, and passage through, the exploding plastic inevitable, and whatever awaits us on the other side. Knowledge, indeed, as the story of Adam and Eve teaches us, can be a terrible thing.
What I'm about here, then, while nothing new (c.f. Marx and "opiate of the masses," which is why I'm choosing religion and drugs as the polarities of example here) is simply to suggest that we make our choice of buffer between us and our ultimate fate, follow the path that seems most appealing at the time (and is eminently changeable), and that all choices are, when you boil them down, the same: a way to explain, to ease, to enable us to get through the life thrust upon us. No one way is correct, or better than another; they are all just means to get us to our ends, and they all have their benefits and drawbacks. The problem is that, as with all things humans touch, some of us are excessive with each, and so find a way to fuck it up: drug and alcohol abuse and addiction, sexual addiction or perversion (whatever that means to you), sports fanaticism at the expense of attention to real life's duties, religious extremism, the belief that any one religion is better than another, is "the one true religion," leading to, ultimately, the sectarian-violence-cum-civil-war we're seeing happening in Iraq right now, thanks in no small part to our meddling there.
Here's a bunch of songs that (I think) address this whole mess:
Choose Drugs Juliana Hatfield
Jen Is Bringin' The Drugs Margo & The Nuclear So And So's
Let's Take Some Drugs And Drive Around The Silos
Electricity (Drugs) Talking Heads
Drugs (Electricity) Talking Heads
Summer Of Drugs Victoria Williams
Handshake Drugs Wilco
Rainy Day Women #s 12 & 35 Dylan
Let's Go Get Stoned Joe Cocker
And It Stoned Me Van Morrison
How Long Have You Been Stoned Ohio
Acid Tongue Jenny Lewis
The Acid Song Loudon Wainwright III
Ball Of Confusion The Temptations
Whatever Gets You Through The Night John Lennon
Losing My Religion R.E.M.
No Religion Van Morrison
Dirty Little Religion Warren Zevon
Oh God (Prayer) Annie Lennox
God Song Beth Orton
God's Great Banana Skin Chris Rea
God Shuffled His Feet Crash Test Dummies
God Said No Dan Bern
The walk to the god house Dan Reeder
Little Tin God Don Henley
In God's Waiting Room Garland Jeffreys
Good For God Harry Nilsson
My God Jethro Tull
Go With God (Topless Shoeshine) Joe Henry
God John Lennon
God Ain't No Stained Glass Window Mark Germino
Only God Can Save Us Now Over The Rhine
If There's A God Ry Cooder
God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind) Randy Newman
He Gives Us All His Love Randy Newman
Beneath The Vast Indifference Of Heaven David Lindley
This'll be happening, as usual, on Tuesday, starting at noon. There're way more songs here than'll fit into a two hour show, so it'll end when it's done, the radio gods willing. WOOL FM, 91.5, WOOL.FM on the webs. See you then, I hope.
And remember: in all things, moderation.
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