Another Day Wondering
I was out for a walk. I do that on weekends. I was passing the local Christ Chapel and I noticed 3 or 4 attractive women going in, on a Saturday afternoon. I was tempted to follow, but the noise coming out of the place was daunting. It was a large party of some sort and they were all dressed to impress. I was sweaty in my tee shirt and shorts and decided to keep on walking. Perhaps that is where all the women are I mused. But these were all white girls and I like women of color or at least some interesting character.
My personal life sucks. I am in an ongoing debate with my seemingly ex girlfriend about what happens next. Is she coming back? Am I going to be perpetually alone again. Last time I went 8 years between relationships. If she and I don’t get back together I will probably hang the whole relationship business up and retire to a monastery or something. Problem is I don’t much care for organized religion. I do like ritual, and my life has a series of definite routines that I go through. It helps keep me out of trouble and from falling into despair. But I don’t exactly believe in anything other than the eventual evolution of mankind into some kind of space being or devolution into some sort of ape man. Other than that I go in for radical socialism with an anarchist streak, and an occasional gnostic insight into the deeper reality beneath the curtain of day to day existence, but mostly it is going to work and doing chores.
My first Jewish girlfriend said I reminded her of Woody Allen and thought I was a great lover. My second Jewish girlfriend had her dad call the DA on me and he told me to go back to her or I would face the consequences. I chose the consequences and they towed away my last VW Bug. I still have her black Lotus cup. My revenge I guess. I had to choose between a rich Jewish girl from Beverly Hills adjacent who believed the world portrayed on TV was real and a crazy French Hare Krishna girl who wanted me to help her get her daughters back from her evil Hare Krishna husband. I was in love with a third woman, a Filipino Punk rock Anarchist girl who ran the local Food Not Bombs, but she was not interested in me. But that was when I first moved to LA and was still a San Francisco romantic type of guy. Before the LA working and commuting grind had worn me down. I would get up at 6am and drive from Venice Beach to work in Santa Fe Springs, stop in downtown LA on the way home, then visit my Beverly Hills adjacent girlfreind, and finaly go home to my French girlfriend in Venice around 11 pm, five days a week.
I chose the French girl and ended up in India talking to her evil husband at the center of Krishna-land in Vrindaban. He asked me what sex with his wife was like. I thought that this was in bad taste and I changed the subject. Among the Krishnas adultery is considered to be a heinous crime, almost as bad as having sex period. But as a modern guy I didn’t even know about all the prohibitions until it was too late. I was damned for sure unless I drank the water of the Yamuna. That is the name of the river where Krishna bathed. It is supposed to wash away 10,000 years of bad karma. I drank. I got sick. There was cow feces in the water that I noticed after I had taken my sip. I grew up on a farm so I know about such things. Cow shit and horse shit are totaly different. Cows make large flat round things called cow paddies. Horses make round balls like meatballs that pile up in mini pyramids. As a kid I stepped in plenty of both.
The trip to India was taken to see if I could find the guru I needed to make my life right. My French girlfriend had just had a baby by another boyfriend and he was moving in. I switched from my French girlfreind back to my former hooker girlfriend from Oakland. Her mother was a Pentecostal and spoke in tongues. This girl was my favorite girlfriend but she could not stay away from the streets. She would come in at 3 am wake me up, we would make love or do drugs then she would go back out in the street and I wouldn’t know if she was coming back or not. I was in San Francisco then. I had moved back after a couple years in LA. Then I went to India and then I went back to LA. I left all those girls behind after my trip to India. I wanted to do the right thing. I was determined to live right.
In India I had met people who lived a life that was not based on making money. The value system was older, pre capitalist in many ways. I was impressed. People I met in the airport and on the trains would tell me they liked western technology but not western culture. They didn’t like all the drugs and sexual confusion and the decadence in general. After what I had just been through, I was wondering about the west myself. In the last couple of decades I had been through half a dozen serious relationships. I had a son by a woman who hated me and two women had had abortions. I had been through several religions and political scenes and although I still had a reasonably good self image, probably due to my mother telling me I was descended from the Pharaohs of Egypt, but I was shaken by the lack of any real constancy in my life. I had had a dozen jobs. None of them lasting more than a couple of years and watched two major corporations I worked for go out of business one after the other. Almost everyone I knew was taking serious drugs, or involved with heavy religious cults or both. Where was our world headed?
In India I had met quite a few gurus and even participated in a battle of the gurus when devotees of one guru stole devotees of ISKON and initiated them in to the other gurus group. This was one of the Gaudia Vaishnavite god brothers of ISKON founder Prabhupada. The Indian fellow believers in Krishna as the supreme Godhead were not allowed to initiate the followers of ISKON. There was a tension and rivalry between the groups. Wealthy westerners were in ISKON. ISKON is the name for the Hare Krishnas in the the world founded by Prabhupada who had gone to the west to preach in the 1960’s. I remember the first time I had met them in the streets of NYC when I was 14 and was on my first solo trip to the big apple. There they were a small group at that time. But by the time I went to India in 1993 they were a large international body with tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of members from mostly wealthy and middle class backgrounds.
The Krisna religion originated in India and Prabhupada was a member of the Gaudia Vaishnavite tendency that traced its roots to Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in the 15th century. He revitalized the existing Krishna cult and created the Hare Krishna chant. He is considered to be the most recent incarnation of Lord Krishna by the believers. There are millions of Indian Krishnas of various stripes and most of them are not rich westerners. That is where the conflict comes in. The Indian groups want some of the western money. ISKON temples are beautiful. Non ISKON temples often are run down. Some of them have been taken over by monkeys and you need guides to go with you to beat them off or they will steal your watches and jewelry. No joke monkeys like shiny stuff. They trade it for food.
In a historical context the time of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was when Muslim religionists were ruling most of northern India and attempting to replace the Hindu gods with the universal faith of Islam. The Krishna movement with its emphasis on devotional service. chanting, and a reform of the caste system saying that all devotees would become Brahmin’s or upper caste upon initiation was a responce to the universal appeal and simplicity of Islam. The temptation to convert to Islam was a path out of the social constraints that had evolved with the rigid caste system that had developed over the centuries in Vedic Indian society. The Krisna religion offered another path out of the constraints of caste but within a more traditional Indian frame of reference. People would still have the rich culture of the Hindu religion with a focus on Krisna as the chief deity. This would offer an answer to Islam which insisted on dropping much of the culture of India by the converts in favor of Arabic rooted traditions. By choosing Krisna there would still be the traditional culture and reform of the caste system thus escaping the social bottleneck Caste created in Indian society.
Anyway when I went to India I was impressed with the ruins of a culture that had extended for centuries. The country was just then switching from its pro socialist, pro Russian orientation to one more open to western capitalism. But at the time India was still a country in which philosophy prevailed over money and people asked you what you thought not what kind of work you did. I liked that. I was also impressed with how the country was not overly sexualized like the west had become. In the west the culture had at least since the 1950’s been focused on youth and the hard and fast sex drive of adolescents. Sexual imagery prevails in the west. It is used to sell products in an off hand manner that simply did not exist in India at that time. Women were covered in saris, the sexes were segregated and boys held hands. It was not because they were gay but because the culture said it was ok for you to show public affection for members of your own sex but not for the opposite sex.
In some ways women were repressed in India but in others they were respected in ways that no longer existed in the west. The culture was much more traditional as in upholding the values as propounded by religious leaders. The west in contrast is modern, secular and our religious values are often a reaction to secularism instead of a reflection of tradition. At the time religion was traditional there. What has emerged since then, Hindu, Muslim and Christian fundamentalism are all reactions to modernism.
Some say fundamentalism is an extreme example of modernism. I say it is an extreme reaction to it. It is not traditional. Traditional culture is one that respects others and has developed over centuries as part of the slow moving currents of civilization. Modernism, the cultural attribute of industrialism that emerged in the last 3 centuries is something different. It is new in the world and represents a break from traditional culture. We are still thrashing out the consequences of modernism and its side effects. Perhaps that is what is meant by calling fundamentalism an extreme example if modernism. It is a consequence of it. Just as car bombs and aerial assaults and computers. These are all the consequences of modernism. The cultural confusion. breakdown of social relations such as marriage and such is a consequence of modernism. Some of it is not so bad, all of it is confusing and some of it is very destructive to the health of children and adults. We mostly see the negative consequences among the poor, young, sick and elderly. Because capitalism places emphasis on greed and greed is for the strong. Others suffer, the strong survive. It is a social system that breeds strong individuals and crushes the rest. It ultimately eats its children and forces its elderly to commit suicide.
Capitalist children to succeed are under pressure almost from birth to succeed. A successful capitalist child is surrounded by educators and specialists. It is only for the wealthy and it is a daunting system that leads to an extremely low birth rate because of the extreme cost of producing viable offspring. We can see that the countries that have most accepted capitalist relations have low birth rates even below reproduction having to import people from the non capitalist world to sustain the economic development. But this is a symptom of advanced capitalism. Primitive capitalism with its needs for many hands produces massive population explosions as what happened all around the world over the last three centuries.
The question there is can the world sustain much more primitive captialist growth? I don’t think so. The environment is thrown so far out of whack that another couple of billion people might do us in. I have been told there are only 8 billion individual souls for this planet. It will be interesting to see if that turns out to be true.
I have rambled quite far from my original tale of walking by a church on a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps my girlfreind and I will get back together, perhaps not. I started to say I went 8 years without anyone. It was not when I immediately returned from India. Back then I went back to San Francisco got that French girlfreind back and took her to France where I tried to live but could not get along with her. I came back here. She followed me and we had a son. We broke up again. I determined I would not get involved with anyone again. I tried to be a long distance dad. But eight years later I had a surgery and realized if I wanted to find love in this world I had better do it before it was too late. Maybe it is. But that is another story for another day.
Today I end up musing on the nature of culture in late capitalist America. We have been living through a period where the culture is driven by the technology where as the late Marshall McLuhan said “The Medium Is The Message”. In other words we are driven to wrap our cultural lives around a technology that is created by system that promulgates the new creations of industrial capitalism regardless of its effect. The majority of the world has been taken over by the capitalists and their agenda. New is good. Old is bad. But it is not even that. It is more like who cares about social relations as long as the rich get richer and the rest fend for themselves as best they can with the trickle down effect.
Ancient Rome when presented with labor saving technology refused it. The emperor at the time said what will I do with all these people if we throw them out of work? He was only speaking of the Roman populace. What about our world where as it stands 20% of the labor force is redundant. Growth might kill us all if it is done with nuclear power and is not green. We need to start thinking smaller, narrow our vision to what do we need to live as well as taking in the big picture. We can continue wreaking the worlds cultures in the name of modernism, capitalism and so called progress until the reaction becomes so strong that the fundamentalists blow us all up or take it over and place us in a new dark age. It could easily happen. Every day I meet angry people who simply want the pain to end. People that upset don’t want enlightenment, they want dictatorship. A new national socialism is not far from the surface. If we don’t come up with an enlightened solution we will get one from the well springs of hate and pain. We don’t have much time.
I am no member of the ruling class. But I grew up in the suburbs of New York, near where the masters of the universe lived. As children we were told we were going to take our place in the Corporations of New York. It didn’t happen for me, but I have that cultural background. I understand what they wanted us to do. I refused. I wanted a better way. I still do. What about you? Any ideas?
Tags: Capitalism, Modernism & Traditional Society. Relationships &