Bill Talen is a writer and performer who for over two decades now has been performing as Reverend Billy. Here from his website is a description of the current incarnation of his church, The Church of Earthalujah:

They are wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters, earth loving urban activists who have worked with communities on 4 continents defending land, life and imagination from reckless development and the extractive imperatives of global capital. They employ multiple tactics and creative strategies, including cash register exorcisms, retail interventions, cell phone operas combined with grass roots organizing and media activism. They are entertainers and artists, performing regularly throughout The US and Europe.

What that doesn’t say is that they, and he, are also a great show. Good music, good laughs, good thoughts. He’s something else. I got turned on to him by a professor up here and have now been to church, so to speak, three times.

So tonight he was giving a reading at a BK bookstore (an independent one, of course), so I headed out in the cold to make the 5:22 train into the city. I was running late and not sure I would make it when a woman pointed at me. A black, heavyset, middle-aged woman. I don’t remember how she hailed me, as I had my iPod earbuds in, maybe it was “Excuse me young man,” and then she said, “Can you help me get something to eat?”

Here is why I did.

-We were right outside of McDonald’s, which made me believe that she really was going to spend the money on food. Not that I particularly care about that.

-I had previously been hailed outside of this McDonald’s one night, coming home. I’d just had some drinks with friends in the city, on my gold card, and a black man came up to me. I must have seemed skittish – I am on the streets a bit since the mugging – because he held up his hands and said something like, “No trouble, no trouble. I’m just trying to feed these kids. I’ve got these kids in the car there and anything you can give me would be a blessing.”

I said, “I don’t have any cash.”

It was true.

He said, without any irony, “That’s okay. God bless you.”

I felt AWFUL. I felt SO BAD. I walked halfway up the block and turned around. I wanted to take out my gold card and walk with the man into the McDonald’s and buy him everything on the menu. But I couldn’t see him anymore. I felt terrible. I don’t care if there were kids, but if there were, oh boy.

-She singled me out. This is the 911 effect, right? If you’re at the scene of some event, and you say, as a cry to the heavens, “Somebody call 911!” it’s possible that nobody will. So your elementary school teachers (or whoever taught me this) train you to pick out one person in the crowd and say, “Call 911!” Because then that person will be like, oh shit! Me! I have to do this!

Of course I was taught this back before cellphones, when I suppose you would have had to run to a payphone or something. But you get the idea.

-She was a woman.

I mean we can’t lie and say that the physical features of the person panhandling don’t have an effect on us. This is why lately I’ve been toying with the idea that Sarah Lawrence or NYU actors ought to put some hours on the streets. They can have their little piece of cardboard, and they can be dressed to the nines, with their bright-eyed predominantly white faces, and they can smile and hold up a sign that says “Give me money and I will give it to poor people FOR you.” And every twenty minutes they can sing a song from Thoroughly Modern Millie or do a monologue from How I Learned to Drive or whatever damn thing they learned to do in school.

I’m not kidding. I think this is a great idea and it just needs some legitimacy to get going.

-I knew I had some cash.

I didn’t know how much, but I knew I had some because I’d used it to buy tea on campus today. (Relax, I used my own mug; no paper products.) So my standby, “I don’t have any cash,” would have been a LIE.

Here’s a secret. I’ve used that line many times, and it’s often a lie anyway. And so today I had to come to terms with the fact that when I say

I don’t have any cash

What I at least part of the time mean is

I don’t have any real desire to help you personally

In this way I either have to shape up or change my definition of cash.

I know all the arguments for not giving money to individuals, sure. I don’t really have a problem with people who say “I donate to charity, not to people.” On the other hand, this woman asks me if I can help her buy a meal, and I have disposable income right in my pocket here, what is the alternative?

“Oh, no, ma’am, I have no money for you. BUT, I am about to go spend $17 roundtrip for train tickets to and from Brooklyn, and $20 on a book to get it signed, so that I can be inspired by another man’s art and activism to maybe devote part of my $30,000 tuition to writing and producing a play about people LIKE YOU which won’t be seen by or (it’s a good bet) help in any concrete way anyone LIKE YOU.”

It’s a bit absurd, no?

Today, coincidentally, in class I was shown an interview with Augusto Boal, the man behind Theater of the Oppressed. A Brazilian once imprisoned and tortured for his desire to help people, Boal envisioned a kind of theater that could truly empower people. One thing that shoved him in this radical new direction was a production he did early on in which he and some other actors played peasants. They dressed up like peasants and wore peasant make-up to look dirty and did their peasant act. It went over well with the peasants who watched. They approached the actors and said, “We are going to go get our justice! Come with us and bring your rifles!”

The actors had to explain that they only had prop rifles.

The peasants said, no matter! We have enough rifles for everyone! Come with us!

The actors had to explain that they were only artists and not really revolutionaries.

Oof. Boal started to wonder about what his real role was as an artist.

Cut to me telling my new ladyfriend, “I don’t know how much cash I have.”

She said, “Whatever you can do.”

I opened my wallet. Shit. All I have is a $5 bill. We all know that’s a pretty big tip for your average panhandler. So there was 1 full second, feel it, right now, as you read, when I hesitated, wallet open, and thought about closing it. Also absurd. There it is, we both see it, the green bill.

GIVE THE FUCKING FIVE DOLLARS ALREADY.

I did, and she blessed me, as they do, you know. I take those blessings seriously. The blessings of the poor? Shit. Collect those like box tops.

In my post on Jesus I mentioned Dorothy Day’s memoir The Long Loneliness. There’s a line in there that has stuck in my craw: “Nothing is too good for the poor.” Here’s a little context:

What a delightful thing it is to be boldly profligate, to ignore the price of coffee and go on serving the long line of destitute men who come to us, good coffee and the finest of bread.

“Nothing is too good for the poor,” our editor Tom Sullivan says…

When I think of all the good things I have on a regular basis – that good tea I bought, for example, or the good warm house I’m writing this from – I have a hard time arguing with that. And five bucks doesn’t even get you a value meal these days, remember.

Okay.

You may ask, what if you had only had a $20? Would you have given it to her?

I’ll tell you when that happens. I don’t know yet.

You may also ask, did you just do this so you could blog about it and rack up some kind of favor with your thousands of readers?

I wasn’t thinking about you all at the time, no, but even if I had, I refer you to the Peter Singer entry I wrote, in which I argue, as he does, that your motivation behind a charitable act in no way changes the act itself. The woman had $5 whether I was a selfless monk or a glory hound. Furthermore, think of Steve Jobs (and more on him in a minute too). When he died, one of the biggest criticisms is that there is no public record of his philanthropy. We have really no idea if he donated any of his money to anything. It’s true that he may have donated anonymously, but why not be like Gates and Zuckerberg and lead by example? It would have meant something to some people to see Steve Jobs donate to causes, just like it means something to people that we have no reason to believe he did. Ya dig?

I also mentioned in that Jesus entry how my friend’s dad used to carry quarters around so he always had something to give. Not much, but something. Tonight I was reminded that another friend of mine gave advice to always carry cash. “Mugger money,” he calls it.

Why not carry beggar money too?

The final push for this entry came once I made it to the Reverend Billy event. Sadly, it was mostly just a few of his friends, four undergrad types, me, and a couple of passersby. But Billy and his wife read a great chapter on American Idol, and then they had a brief Q&A. Well, a friend of his talked about reading that chapter previously and how she had stopped in the middle to look up youtube clips of the episode they referenced. I used my iPhone, she said, “I hate to admit it.”

I hate to admit it. Those words rang in my ears.

Because we all have this bullshit mea culpa don’t we? I mean we have dozens of them. All the time. But our reliance on Apple is one of the classics. I mean here we are in this independent bookstore, we’re listening to these activists talk about anti-consumerism, and we’re all Apple junkies. Or some kind of junky junky.

Because what’s the absurd argument there? “Okay, I know about Apple’s labor abuses, I know about the workers who committed suicide, the poor pay, the bad conditions, I know about the resources used to make these products, I know all of that, but…having an iPad is really convenient, and it’s helping me do the research for this play I’m writing about the Chinese workers…”

OH MY GOD.

But what makes the Apple case the most pernicious is we don’t know how to get out of it. Unplug yourself from the grid? Donate to…Chinese Apple worker charities? We’re stuck. We don’t want to like Apple, or Starbucks, or Walmart, but we do, so then we flagellate about it. I’m so bad I’m so bad I’m so bad. And then we plug back into our Apples. And it’s terrible, and it makes us all feel impotent.

Okay maybe just me. But I bet it makes you feel queasy for at least a few seconds at a time.

So I thought, I will break the cycle of impotence! I am going to take a hammer to my iPad right in the quad of Sarah Lawrence!

Because, a note on why I have one in the first place. For my 24th birthday, I asked for nothing. I asked for my family to make donations to charity in my name. This did not fly with my family. My sister was a good sport and bought me some fair trade soap, but my family does not deal well with a dearth of physical presents, and so I had to scramble and invent some more bullshit books and DVDs I could shove in a basement somewhere.

Christmas rolled around and it was the same thing. I didn’t want anything. Pressure. Finally I said give me an iPad. It’s the budget I know you allot for this stuff. Let’s just get this over with. So now I have one.

And, as I remembered after I made my mental hammer pledge, it brings me some joy in life.

Consider. Just this morning I was doing my morning routine while my temporary roommate ate my waffles in the kitchen. I brought my iPad into the room and played various Aretha Franklin songs on youtube. It was nice. You know? I could have fired up the laptop and played some (from iTunes), but time is precious, right?

Or a few nights ago, when this roomie and I were watching the Golden Globes, and using the iPad to settle really pressing matters, like “Is Juanita a common name for black women?” and “Didn’t Charlize Theron’s mom kill her dad?” I mean we could have gotten up from the futon (I always cuddle with my roommates) and fired up the laptop, but…

The iPad has been a little tool in the bringing of HAPPINESS, see? And happiness is a kind of capital? I’m not going to write any plays or give out any fivers if I’m so depressed I can’t get out of bed, or if I kill myself. Happiness helps me do good.

(Unless, of course, I’m wrong. Because I have to keep in mind that after a few days with this roommate, I checked my email and saw all kinds of action alerts about SOPA. And I thought, what’s SOPA? And deleted them. Because the beginnings of a new roommate relationship can be all-consuming as we all know.)

But, all things considered, I am hesitant to smash the iPad just yet. But then I came up with an alternative.

You see, I have two iPods. Oh God. I know. Take me out back and end it.

Here’s why. On another Christmas, blah blah, no ideas blah blah, get me an iPod touch. Fine. This fine apparatus was involved in my mugging, if you recall. Then, I was home over the holidays, and my mother received a new iPod nano (like the ultimate new generation, or whatever), in the mail. Apparently something can go wrong with your iPod nano if you microwave it and then stick it in your mouth, or something, so Apple, rather than face a class-action lawsuit, decided to MAIL NEW ONES TO EVERYONE WHO OWNED ONE.

Please think about this when you think about the Chinese workers.

Now, my mother owns an iPod nano but generally doesn’t nuke it and suck on it, so she has no real need for the new one, and she offered it to me. I was like, no! I have principles! But she was like, you can clip it to your belt when you run.

This hit me in a weakspot, because I’ve been running a lot to look fit for the new roommate.

And she said, also, it gets radio.

Damn.

Now, wouldn’t you know it, this morning I thought I lost the stupid thing. I got to campus early and went to the cushy couch place and read some Stuart Little (it’s a roommate thing), and had my iPod out. And then later, as I was going to walk to my car, I couldn’t find it. Noooooo! I left it out and one of these privileged students has taken it by now for sure!

And you know, I had this thought. I thought,

Oh, I hope someone did. I hope someone did take it.

I’m not sure exactly why, but it was like when I had to give my apartment key to my landlord the day before I left for break, and so left my apartment wide open a couple of times when I had to go out. I thought, each time I left, oh, I hope someone goes in and steals all my stuff.

I don’t know. Maybe it will divorce me from this life of things I lead. It will do what I don’t have the courage to do myself.

It’s like when Spalding Gray, in Swimming to Cambodia, right before he gets to his perfect moment, describes how he worried over where to hide his money on the beach, and then said, You know what Spalding, let them have it, put it where anyone can take it.

But, hurrah, I had the stupid thing in my pocket the whole time.

Finally, and you’re so patient for making it this far, I realized on the train home what the first step is. I am going to sell this iPod. I am going to sell it to the best offer I get, even if it’s $1, and I am going to donate that $1 to the Geneseo Migrant Center Scholarship Fund. The Geneseo Migrant Center is a 501c3 that does great work for migrant workers. I’ve been in touch with them due to a project I’m working on. I believe we need justice for the people who bring food to our tables, and this agency does good work.

So. Let me sell you on the iPod a little.

It has magical powers. Really. A few days after I got it, I went to Chicago on a pilgrimage in search of true love. I loaded the thing up with music that I thought would summon the powers of true love. I listened to it on the plane and during sleepless nights in the hotel room I shared with my lightly snoring friend. And I did in fact find true love. So. Yeah.

It’s only been used for a few weeks.

I’ll include a playlist of the greatest songs ever, which you can either revel in or delete at will. Buddy Guy will be involved.

If you want to bid, silent auction style, leave a comment with the amount. If you want to bid privately, email me. If you don’t have my email address, leave a comment explaining your predicament.

I’ll take bids for a week (this gives you time to mull), and at at 11:30 pm on Jan. 25, the highest bidder wins and I will even pay the shipping if you’re out of state.

And if you don’t think I’m really gonna donate, you’re cynical, but I’ll show you the receipt or something. Geez.

And if no one bids, I’m just going to leave it on the ground out by that McDonald’s. I swear to Meryl Streep, I will.

This may not be much, but it’s something.

GIVE THE FUCKING FIVE DOLLARS ALREADY.

If you’re at permanent theater camp, like I am, you see a lot of bad art. Or at least you see a lot of art that you really don’t like. Sometimes you hate it. Sometimes it makes you want to tear your hair out and run out the door and scream WHY DO I DO THEATER I HATE IT SO at all the little nineteen-year-olds who have a “dream roles” bucket list that they keep under their pillows.

But you sit and wait for the piece to end, and then the teacher says, “Let’s give feedback,” and you stab yourself in the thigh with your ballpoint pen and say, “It was really interesting.”

“What I found interesting…”

“What interested me…”

“The most interesting choice…”

And then you go home and take a shower and scrub yourself like Meryl in Silkwood, trying to get the euphemism residue out of your nooks and crannies.

In Silkwood, Meryl works at an unsafe nuclear power plant, guys. Get on it. It’s a true, sad story. You might find it interesting.

Anyway, you may not be at permanent theater camp, but I’m sure the interesting bug bites you somewhere. Documentaries are almost always interesting. So are news articles, at least the ones that aren’t “terrible.” “Did you read about – ? “I did, I did. Just terrible.” “Yeah. Just terrible.” Of course, terrible turns interesting if you give it enough time.

“Interesting” helps when your friend reads his poetry to you. Or tells you his thoughts about Herman Cain.

“Interesting condition” was a euphemism for “pregnant” in the 18th century. Because the baby is growing at a measurable rate, perhaps? Imagine the 18th century locker rooms: “I’d like to compound her interest.”

But that’s all wrong. Let’s chuck the euphemism and be honest. First of all, our use of the word is wrong in an etymological sense. Etymonline.com tells us that interest’s economic definition is older than its more emotional sense. When you have an interest in something, you have a “legal claim or right; concern.”

If something interests you, it should be as though you then hold a stake in it. Waiting for Superman interested you if it made you get up off your ass and do something about the state of education – even if it was just a small thing. If it did not do that, you were not interested.

The word comes from combining “inter” and “est,” so it literally means “between-being.” That just feels active to me. It’s pushing you into a between place. It’s pushing you off the couch, out of the movie theater seat and out the door into the world. Where you end up depends on you. It’s no coincidence that the phrase is “to excite interest.” Excite! Activate! Something of interest “is of importance,” and “makes a difference.”

Secondly, it’s wrong in a moral sense. I was spurred to write this entry by reading Leo Tolstoy’s What to Do? He describes the taking of the Moscow census, and how it will produce all these data about living conditions: it will show many poor people there are, how many diseased, what conditions they live in, etc. And Tolstoy goes crazy because he knows everyone is going to read the results and say, “Oh, how interesting,” and go on their way. Finding something interesting lets us off the hook from really delivering judgment, or really initiating change.

Here it comes, once and for all:

I hate his writing. I would never buy it. He should stop doing it.

Also, I only went to that movie because my girlfriend made me. It made me sad but I have other things to worry about.

Because who doesn’t have other things to worry about? We all do. We all only have so much interest to give. I understand that. You have to figure out what’s really interesting to you, what really causes you to be-between, to get up and get in the middle of things. Maybe it’s not education. Maybe it’s finding out that Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire because he was tired of the abuse he took from the cops. Maybe it’s reading Nicholas Kristof’s piece about sexworker children chained to their beds. There’s bound to be something that INTERESTS you, truly, that makes you look around and say, “why are all of these people not ripping off their clothes and running down the street screaming STOP STOP STOP drop everything until we fix this!”

I mean maybe it’s fantasy baseball. Make that work for you, too.

Occupy Your Interest! Set up pup tents and live democratically with it. Share the interest. Be moved by the interest of others. And if you can’t figure out how to make your interest active, if you can’t figure out how to change the world in one fell swoop, start with the man in the mirror, as Michael would have you do. And if you get antsy, find an interest that you can work on in your own backyard.

And when you hear someone else abusing the word, ask them, “Really? What did it make you be between?” This will make you all kinds of friends.

I laughed and said, No.

He then claimed family ties with all the white men on the train, and proceeded to grind on one of the subway poles in honor of his white niece. “I’m working the pole for you!” he said, and she blushed and laughed.

He continued his act all the way to Grand Central. He preached tolerance for gays, even though he doesn’t “eat what they eat.” He said he loves dating elderly women, because they get five checks a month, and you never know when that sixth – life insurance – might kick in. He made us all laugh, and I wish I’d had money to give him. But he didn’t take plastic. Once again, I cursed myself for not being like my friend’s dad, who carried rolls of quarters in his pockets so he always had something to give away.

I had been composing this entry in my head as I walked to the train station. And as I descended the stairs I had been reminded of a quote from Our Town. Now, I have a textbook love/hate relationship with this play, but a few days ago I watched OT, a documentary about a bunch of high school students in Compton who put on a production of the play. It’s on Netflix, and it’s worth seeing. And the filmmakers did a great job of highlighting the great parts of the play, including a quote I had completely forgotten about:

“Every child born into this world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being.”

This stuck out because it’s the kind of thing I recoil from when I see it on pro-life advertising, but when I sit with it and let it stew in my head, I find it cannot be so easily dismissed.

And if you walk around thinking this, rather than thinking nasty thoughts about eugenics and birth control (you know who you are), then you will be a happier person. And that is what this blog entry is about.

Jesus means “salvation.” And the fuzziness of Jesus’s definition has not to do, for me, with whether he existed, or whether he was the son of God, or whether Western artists over-Anglicize his features. Although as for the latter, they certainly do, and I certainly do think that’s an error, and an irresponsibility. I think depicting Jesus as the Mid-Eastern Jew he was would be a great blow for empathy, but that’s another story.

For me the issue is who gets to be called Jesus. Or who we see as Jesus.

I am not a Christian. But Jesus was beyond doubt a hell of a teacher. He was beyond doubt an example worth striving for. He was also beyond doubt a socialist, and he would beyond doubt be Occupying Wall Street, but then he’d also be with the cops, with the bankers.

Okay, let’s not get silly. Reminder: I love Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. It’s a weirdly secular religious book, or religious secular book, and without revealing too much, the climax of the book comes when one character tells another that EVERYONE, even the most grotesque person we can think of, even the person who drives up the wall with arrogance and ignorance, EVERYONE is Jesus.

So imagine me, please, in my bedroom, a high school senior, reading this, and having my little mind blown. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but you can be blown without having all the details worked out. Trust me. Yes I see the naughtiness there. Still applies.

We see this idea over and over. Really, it’s the same thing that draws me to that David Foster Wallace commencement address. The one where he says that we can choose how we live our lives. We can choose how we see the woman who yells at her kid in the grocery store checkout line. We can choose to create a story for her in which we can sympathize, empathize (and also help the kid out, presumably). We can choose, in short, to have mercy and love in our hearts for the people around us.

And just this morning I was reading Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness. Day was a Catholic, and a mighty activist for the poor. The book was sent to me by my good friend, who is waiting for me to become a Franciscan friar. In the book, Day recounts the philosophy of Peter Maurin, her friend and colleague:

“…it was seeing Christ in others, loving the Christ you saw in others. Greater than this, it was having faith in the Christ in others without being able to see Him. Blessed is he that believes without seeing.”

Now, for a while I thought that these people had it all wrong. I mean, why should we see everyone as Christ? He had his shit together. Shouldn’t we see them as one of the lepers he cured, or the blind he made see – I mean shouldn’t we see “the least of these” that he identified with, rather than this man who was brilliant and wise and always in control, even in the sacrifice of his own life?

But recently I’ve realized I was wrong. Everyone is Jesus, because everyone is the teacher. Everyone has wisdom. And Jesus is not just a charity case. He is a man that you have to drop your fishing nets for and stick with. Seeing him in others is a full-time job. It demands action.

Okay, so why does this speak to the atheist in me? After all, let me tell you, what these people are talking about – Salinger, Day, Wallace – is very hard work, with or without religion. People annoy me and disgust me and bore me so easily. No question. I mean, I’m in grad school. For theater. You want to talk to me about egoists and assholes and BORES? It can be a long hard climb sometimes to see out of the eyes of the people around me, to see the beautiful in them, to see how they are nature’s attempt at perfection.

And I was chatting with a very intelligent young lady the other night, and she is a big DFWallace fan, but she told me her criticism of his speech. She felt that he puts too much pressure on us. By implying that we have the power to see the world in the way we want to see it, by telling us that it’s on us to turn every person we brush elbows with into a potential saint, we can be set up to fall, and fall hard.

I think she has a point. I mean, Wallace killed himself. It’s not like his speech at Kenyon gave him some permanent get out of jail free card.

But I also see how good and healthy this kind of thinking can be. It used to be every month I’d get a call or an email from a different friend saying how I’d hurt his feelings, or that she didn’t know why I hated her (when in fact I was quite fond of her). One day a guy told me that someday I was gonna get punched for the shit I said, and a few short months later, I almost did. So I’m working. Humility. Interest in people. Happiness in the accomplishments of others. I’m working. I only get a call about hurt feelings every few months now.

Being a teacher has helped. I may have written this before, but it’s worth repeating. Before I graduated, I was talking to a professor of mine, and I asked her how she dealt with the idiots in class. I mean we had some USDA prime idiots in that class. And she said, when you’re a teacher, it’s different. You love them all.

I found out that that is true. And I found out that my NYU education, as much as I love the critical thinking and the curiosity and the resources it gave me, also poisoned me. NYU taught me to be a good liberal, a good atheist, but – and they’ll take away my lib card for this – while the Left operates under the guise of tolerance, many of its people love to feel superior to Republicans and to Christians. And many of its people are often just as guilty as anyone else for shutting down honest discourse in this world.

Tonight I went to see a brilliant company, The Civilians, present interviews and songs from Occupy Wall Street. They went down and spoke to the people, and represented them – warts and all – beautifully onstage. I just wish they’d interviewed the cops. Maybe the cops wouldn’t let them. They did mention one thing, that there is no more money to pay cops for overtime in New York, so they are working overtime for regular wages, but that was it, really. And that crowd was just licking their chops to hate on the cops, I think. And I have such a distaste for that kind of art now. I still believe in right and wrong, but I no longer endorse art or journalism that takes cheap shots, that alienates the unbaptized by preaching to the converted.

But rant aside, The Civilians are about giving voice to well, civilians, and since theater is an elitist form that too often creates gods and monsters for us to easily digest, it is refreshing to be given glimpses of the Christ in all of us, the wisdom of the stranger. It is a blessing to be made to sit still and listen and learn from someone completely new, completely different, completely perfect, so much as any of us is.

It’s hard work, but you don’t have to believe in Hell to find it a salvation from darkness.

Currently I am working on Soulographie, a play cycle by Erik Ehn examining America through its genocides. Erik came to talk to our cast and recommended we read Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” So I did.

Weil wrote the essay in 1940, just after France fell to the Nazis. To her, The Iliad is one long meditation on how force turns people into objects. If I have power over you, I am able to see you as only a thing; I do not have to consider you as a person, let alone an equal.

Troy Davis and all other death row inmates sprang to mind; when we lock up men and women with the intention of putting them to death, or of having them die in prison, we are revoking their humanity; we turn them into so many garbage bags that need to be tossed, so many lights that can easily be switched off.

Not only does this use of force blind us to what these de-peoples were, are, and could still be, and not only does it become internalized in the minds of many the powerless, turning them into puppets, but it will eventually destroy us as well.

“Such is the nature of force,” writes Weil. “To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone.”

You don’t have to look hard to find testimonials from former prison employees who say they carried out executions and are still haunted by them. You don’t have to know much about the Zimbardo experiment to be aware that the experience was traumatic for the “prisoners” and “guards” alike.

And it isn’t just prison, of course. Weil argues that force allows one to “walk through a non-resistant element,” believing that the world is his oyster and nothing can stop him (sounds like the quintessential American). And this lack of resistance means we do not pause between impulse and action; we do not allow a moment of reflection. But we need that moment. In “that halt, that interval of hesitation…lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity,” all our sense of justice and prudence. Without it, we rely too much on force, overextend ourselves (think land wars in Asia), and end up destroyed.

Granted, Weil’s interval of hesitation can be a real pain in the ass. We see the starving Somalians and think, “Now why is that life not as valuable as mine, exactly? Why are these people pebbles, while I am flesh and blood?” But if we press this issue too far we stay in bed and see no point in doing our homework, so we reserve it for special occasions.

After decades of discussion of the objectification of women, and of desensitization to violence, this idea of force being the Medusa head to turn us all into stone is no longer a novel one. But if you walk around with it for a while, you may find interesting results.

For instance, I was walking around Bronxville the other day and I started noticing who I was noticing. There was an old woman waiting for the bus; I looked at her and instantly forgot her. Is it because she had no potential force over me? I can tell you that three minutes later, when I had to walk past her going the other way, I noticed her more, because she had the power then to notice I had gone the wrong way, and so she had the power to make me embarrassed.

These days especially I am very sensitive to all men of color who are on the street with me. I pay them much attention. I fear their force.

I notice attractive women much more than plain ones. I think it has as much to do with me wanting to make a thing of them as it does with me knowing they could likely make a thing of me; hot women have power. This made me think of Dustin Hoffman, who said Tootsie wasn’t a comedy for him because, by playing an unattractive woman, he was made aware of how many women he had never taken the time to notice, to know, to see at all, really.

The list goes on and on. The bankers looking out of their windows onto Liberty Plaza do not see a force powerful enough to grab them by the throat, and so I think they probably do not really see these people. Well, most of us don’t – we see them as puny, inconsequential, a little foolish. The cops see them as obstacles.

I don’t know much else to tell you about this. I think justice-thinking is better than force-thinking, even though it can turn you into a bit of a killjoy. I think awareness helps, and I think it’s a good thing that many of us resist the Texas cowboy attitude to the rest of the world, and I think trying to find out if the ugly girl in your Monday morning class has anything interesting to say will make you a better person, but I also think that this affliction of force, this paralysis of violence, which has been clearly recorded for us throughout the entirety of the Western canon, and which has only rarely ever been successfully resisted throughout that same period of time, points to a fundamental rottenness underlying the human condition.

If a bunch of smelly post-grad would-be Bolsheviks and their friends think they can wash that away in a park in downtown Manhattan, or even if they are only able to carve a space away from it for a brief time, for a small population, then I say more power to them.

So I wanted to come back on a funny note, but that wasn’t easy. I thought I’d do an entry on the word Joke itself. I saw a documentary over the summer which dealt with the infamous McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit of the 90s. Easy target, right? Lady burns self with coffee – what did you expect it to be? Cold? Seinfeld made fun of it, everybody made fun of it. Well the documentary tells a different story, and for one thing shows you some really nasty photos of the burns this woman suffered – I mean really really gross – and so that case ceases to be a joke, right?

The more and more we experience, it sometimes seems, the fewer things are funny. True, sometimes the stuff is still funny, we just don’t let ourselves laugh. But I also know there are plenty of things, many involving violence or race, which I would have laughed at as a kid and now just don’t find amusing at all.

Also, the more we experience the same kind of joke, the less funny that type becomes. Knock knock jokes, for sure, but also look at the recent trends in sitcoms: you’ve got lots of cutaway gags (Family Guy and 30 Rock are tireless in beating this setup to death), and lots of clocking to the camera (The Office, Parks and Rec, Modern Family) and so while I used to think all of those shows were hilarious, they’ve all petered out for me. I can’t stand them anymore. That’s sad. The form has swallowed the content. The zenith of this has to be The New Girl, which was so conscious of its hilarity that it turned my stomach. They actually repeat their punchlines – “Did you just say (insert ridiculous thing here)?”

Bloggers are not immune to falling into their own funny traps, and so all of this unfunniness (not the least of which is most of the news, which I find distinctly depressing) contributed to me not writing.

My other idea was to write an entry on Socialism, because that word is being tossed around enough to make your head spin these days. I used to think I knew what it meant, but after seeing it used in a NYT article about why it doesn’t matter if we recycle (depressing), I am no longer sure. Defining Socialism would be in line with the original intent of this blog – to try and highlight the abuses of language by media folks and deluded Tea Partyers (or deluded Occupy Wall Streeters, as the case may be), but I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough to do the research and figure it out and compress it and digest it and find funny pictures for it. Should any of you want to write that entry, or any other entry, I will gladly post it. If it doesn’t suck.

But otherwise, I think the void has won for a while. Except I’m not completely silent. I am helping some friends of mine with a project of theirs. If you’d like to check it out: www.johnandgladys.com.

Right now I just think they make more sense out of the world than I do.