The Devil Never Sleeps

by Andrei Codrescu

  Obviously, humans don’t design these things any longer: machines design themselves. Humans used to be tool-users, but now tools are human-users. Life used to adapt to the natural environment, but now the technological environment adapts humans to its own purposes. The price for becoming functioning adaptations of a virtual environment is our humanity. Is that a big deal? Most of us have grown gradually used to being appendages of machines, so we barely notice it any more. But take these villagers in Alaska:

  An AP dispatch from Arctic Village, Alaska, details the disappearance of a whole way of caribou-hunting life beginning in January, 1980, the day a TV set landed in this village. From that day on, the Eskimos never stopped watching television, “learning what has been missing from their lives: Denim wear. Farberware. Tupperware. Four-wheelers. Touch-tone phones. Can openers. Canned peaches. Cabinets (for all the cans).” Outside, the snow is littered as far as you can see with “empty Chef Boyardee tins, bales of fiberglass insulation, Hills Bros. coffee cans, shotgun casings, plastic Pepsi bottles …” Gone are all the things Wal-Mart never carried, such as the local Eskimo language, beaded moccasins, caribou jerky, caribou-skin kayaks, caribou songs, and caribou dances.

  It took TV just a few years to move people out of the Arctic to the inside of Wal-Mart. The Arctic used to be spare, all classical lines, nothing wasted, the people arrow-sharp, adapted like whalebone harpoons to the elements. They were sharp and proud and now they are soft and captive and kitsched to the max.

  Now and then a crank tries to escape, like Sigurdur Hjartarson from Reykjavik, the founder of the Phallological Museum where he is going to exhibit at least one specimen of the penis of every mammal native to Iceland or its waters. Right now he’s got eighty-two of them, either dried on wall mounts or pickled in preserving jars, including those of fifteen whales. Hjartarson opened his museum in 1977, three years before the Eskimos in Arctic Village got their first TV. Some three thousand visitors have come so far, to see how nature used to design things. Marcel Duchamp might have gotten up from his nap to visit the Phallological Museum, but then he would have gone right back to sleeping at Wal-Mart. Objects reproduce more aesthetically.

  Mystery of the Market

  For many years now, I have kept a list of what I call Insoluble Mysteries. These are things I will never understand no matter how hard I exercise my limited abilities. On this list there are Grand Insoluble Mysteries, Middling Insolubles, and Petit Insolubles. God, for instance, is at the top of the Grand Insolubles. When I address the Divinity, I call it Your Mysteriousness, but mostly I don’t because such perfect obscurity renders me both humble and speechless. This is the proper stance before a Grand Insoluble, though people, being people, will talk anything to death, even God. There aren’t many Insolubles on this scale, but in the middling and petit categories there are hundreds: trigonometry, the world’s fascination with Elvis, the stock market, the stupidity of television, tourism, politicians, fried cheese, Muzak, North Korea. These little mysteries grow and shrink over time. One mystery lately growing in insolubility is the stock market. While I don’t think that it will ever reach the status of a Grand Insoluble, the market is nonetheless cause for major wonder. Why in the world does it fall every time there is good news? Aren’t stock marketeers Americans like the rest of us? Shouldn’t they be happy that unemployment is down, that people are working, making a living, maybe even getting a little extra to invest in the stock market? I can see why the North Koreans might be happy if we had unemployment and starvation over here, because then they could tell their people that capitalism is inhuman. Is the stock market North Korean? I’ve heard it said that what makes the market so anti-American is fear of inflation, because if people have more money they’ll spend it on the very products the market bets on and that will make the products more expensive and the money less valuable. But if nobody buys the products, where is the profit? I just don’t get it. The market will never be a Grand Insoluble because its weirdness has no grandeur. Most Middling and Petit Insolubles have this in common: Their mysteriousness is nauseating, not awesome.

  From Subversion to Whimsy

  The whole of the US of A is feeling so damn good these days you wonder where all the sick, poor, and malcontent are hiding. There is no unemployment, Wall Streeters’ pockets are bulging with dollars, Beverly Hillers are throwing hundred-thousand-dollar bar mitzvahs for their thirteen-year-olds, and first-class seats on airplanes are harder to find than Cuban cigars. In this forest of well-being and flushed cheeks, only the merest little whispers of dissent break the happy news. I would like to draw your attention to two of these, because of their good-natured character and nonthreatening nature.

  An outfit in Belgium launched a pie attack on Bill Gates as part of what they call “a pie war on all the unpleasant celebrities in every domain.” They have pied, among others, the French writer Marguerite Duras who, they say, “represents the empty novel.” They have a long list of these “empty” figures, but they admit that there are so many of them “there are not enough pies in all of Belgium” for all of them. While one cannot deny the satisfaction of seeing Bill Gates’s bland-boy mug with Belgian cream all over it, the pie-ing itself is such a benign Groucho-Marxist-anarchist activity that I, for one, don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The world has gone as flat as a pie on a television screen. Everything proceeds from the media, toward the media, and out of the media. If any critique of our way of happiness exists outside the media, you can be sure that we’ll never hear about it. “Imagine,” said Larry King, “You’re the pope, you’re Castro, and one day there is nobody there, they’ve all gone to see Monica Lewinsky. You get a phone call from God and one from Monica’s lawyer. Who would you choose? Monica, Monica.” And that’s the way it is. Not enough pies in Belgium.

  Another subversive outfit going by the name RTmark has declared April 6 World Phone-In-Sick Day. On that day, you’re supposed to call in sick in order to “encourage resistance.” I’m all for it. I hope I feel well on April 6 because I always call in sick when I feel good. What’s the point in going to work if you’re feeling well? And if everybody in the world feels well, according to the statistics, what’s the point of going to work? I suspect, however, that the opposite is true: Everybody in the world feels sick and it’s only Prozac, work, Bill Gates, and the media that keep us from realizing it. What is one to do with the recent report from Second Harvest that one in every ten Americans is going to seek help from a food bank this year? Where are all these starving people coming from? Eastern Europe? RTmark bills itself as a “sponsor of intelligent sabotage and subversion,” but those are big words in these days of capitalism-uber-alles. Sabotage is lemon meringue and subversion just a form of whimsy. Let’s face it. We live inside a programmed dream only God can wake us up from. But Monica’s lawyer is on the phone. Not enough pies in Belgium.

  Heat and the School for Crawling

  It’s summer in New Orleans, the season of heat and wetness that no civilian can imagine. But to us, veterans, it is the season of alligator-deep dreams, the hour of archetypal mud-shapes that crouch at the bottom of our groggy souls. To walk through this wet shimmer takes both grace and grimness. True natives, a lovely native told me, do not sweat, they glisten. We are going to open a school to teach the management of sweat: There will be classes in Glistening, in Single Sweat-Drop Control, in Walking for Ecstasy. Yes, you can walk for ecstasy if you know just how and where to direct those salty beads wrenched from your body by the heat.

  There is madness in heat, as the Indian subcontinent’s nuclear tests prove. It’s hot in India, as hot as it is in New Orleans, and when heat-madness strikes, the tendency is to create more heat, annihilating heat. The Indian and Pakistani atom bombs are the insane thoughts of the heat-driven. People in the tropics have quick tempers. The sun is an unending test site of nuclear explosions. There is an urgent need in such regions to constantly assert the self, which is constantly dwarfed by the sun and liquefied by the heat. Nationalism is a heat
disease, one of many, as humanity’s long, hot summers, and bright, short explosions strive to illustrate over and over.

  Our School for Sweat Management will teach more than the aesthetics of living covered in hot dew drops. We will have such classes as Tropical Temper Management, How to Deal with Heat under the Collar, What To Do Instead of Blowing Something up When You Feel That Only Blowing Something up Will Do. We will teach Coolness, Even Temper, the Practical Uses of a Refrigerated Cucumber, the Poetry of Arbian, the snow poet. You will graduate from this school with a degree in Pleasure & Diplomacy and will qualify for summer vacations in New Orleans.

  Did I forget anything? Yeah, my deodorant.

  Ice

  I saw an ice-covered pond in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It was awesome. I’d forgotten about ice. It’s this transparent, blue-gray surface with a network of intricate rippled cracks. I felt immensely nostalgic as a whole past life spent in wintery regions came back to me. I grew up in the mountains of Transylvania, where mothers still pull their children and their groceries in sleds on iced-over streets. I remembered walking across rivers that were deep and agitated in the summer but were perfectly still and confined for the winter months. I remembered skating and skidding across polished puddles on my way to school. I recalled the slight twinge of anxiety when, as a child, I walked past dagger-sharp ten-foot icicles hanging from the eaves of buildings, ready to plunge down and impale me. Only a few years ago, in Chicago, two men were pierced through the heart by ice daggers falling simultaneously from high-rises. It happens several times every winter in every northern city, but mostly in Chicago where the fancy architecture promotes and shelters the deadliest shivs. I lived for a time in Detroit, where the front door of your building freezes like a metal pond, and the only antidotes are sleeping for three months with a saucy mate and a large cat, a spigot of hot chocolate, and the early poetry of Leopold Senghor. I also lived in New York, where huge drifts of snow rendered the city as still as a mountain village and as dreamy as a pillow. In Bucharest in 1990, a few days after the revolution that toppled the communist regime, the streets turned to ice, and the terrorists still fighting for the old order froze in their underground tunnels and turned into statues. The people broke them up with hammers and slid home clutching a frozen chunk of terrorist to turn into mantelpiece art. Today, every household in Bucharest sports an ice-covered fragment of secret policeman in the living room and there is a general belief that the old order could be restored any coming winter if enough people put their chunks together. It’s a jigsaw puzzle no one wants to see executed.

  Here in the subtropics we use ice for entertainment. Blocks of ice covered in straw were delivered to homes in New Orleans until early in this century, while young damsels clad in ice-cream shifts chewed flirtatiously on slivers of ice in coffeehouses decorated with frescoes of Russian ice palaces. Ice was the acme of chic. One of the most famous passages in a novel is the opening of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s tropical saga, One Hundred Years of Solitude, where Colonel Buendia, about to be executed by a firing squad, remembers the day he discovered ice. Here, we cram our drinks with ice cubes, a habit that so horrifies Parisian waiters they refuse requests from Americans for “more ice,” because they believe, as do most winter people, that too many ice cubes in your drink cause pneumonia. It was an outlaw New Orleanian, Pierre Moudrais, who started calling diamonds “ice,” and it was another New Orleanian, Governor Claiborne, who first quipped about being “iced” in lieu of “buying the farm.” The Florida poet Alcee Perrot wrote, “Ice is hard and cold and hell’s horror / this is why it is our mirror.” Ms. Alcee Perrot had been born in Canada, where she had been made to dig holes in an icy lake by her father, a trapper and fisherman. After running away from home with a bohemian strongman for a small circus and settling in Tallahassee, she wrote home: “I’m not longing for darkness, thick fur, and windwept snow over frozen lakes, and I’m never coming home, Papa.” She became, as she put it in another of her mediocre sonnets, “a fleur of moisture and heat / an orchid perhaps or a squid.” She never wrote a Dostoyevskian novel, but then she lived a long life and helped end this column with a poetic snowflake.

  Hint of Fall

  Most of you, used to big fat red and yellow leaves and brisk winds smelling of apples, wouldn’t recognize it. But here in the deep deep South in the dreamy mud of the riverbend at New Orleans, we do know it. It’s only a change in the light, a knifeblade-thin change from bright white to reddish. It’s only a sweat drop’s difference in dryness, enough to bring glad news to skin resigned to endless discomfort. It’s only a sudden spurt of a playful breeze, coming in on top of a river wavelet all the way from Cairo, Illinois. It’s also those signs devised by humans to signal the turning of the year: the corner drugstore full of nice-smelling new school supplies and swarms of kids in crisp uniforms chattering at the bus stop. There is a surge of buoyancy, or maybe just a reflex, in the manner, if not the result, of somnolent bureaucrats in city offices. Elsewhere in the country, where the efficient Americans live, offices are crackling with energy. The phones are ringing, tans are admired, files fly. Here, we get only a degree of such admirable action. Still, it’s enough to know that autumn is here. Your cornucopia is our shadow of a smile. It is said that all of America’s work is done between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. It’s a wonder we are still such a productive country. Other places must be much like New Orleans, where we wallow in saints and feasts and festivals and are continually amazed by the steaming of the earth and the wild proliferation of life. We work only at recognizing the awesomeness of the universe, which is a job, too. People elsewhere produce. We exult, admire, celebrate, reproduce. And now is such a time, though it’s only a hint. In the subtle gradation of light, which to the coarse senses would seem no more than a flicker, we find a plethora of stunning revelations. Makes you want to dance. Or at least begin thinking of the autumn balls, and this year’s masque.

  Air Travel and the Advance of Demonism

  I flew on ValueJet from New Orleans to Atlanta the day the Atlantabound Valuejet from Florida crashed. I found no great difference between ValueJet’s service or Delta’s or American’s. In fact, I preferred the breezy style of the ValueJet staff to the cranky institutional style of American. The sad truth is that air travel has gotten worse in every respect in the last few years. Mechanical problems are a routine occurrence that causes endless delays for which no one apologizes anymore. My Delta flight from San Francisco to Dallas left an hour late for unexplained reasons, which made several of us miss our connection by a mere five minutes. In the old days, the connecting flight would have waited. But this isn’t the old days when there was some class to flying. Courtesy and concern are gone. So is food. There is nothing but lousy peanuts and pretzels for hours and even those are severely rationed as if the nation were at war. I saw a starving kid reach for some extra peanuts and the steward shot right on by like he was carrying the corporate caviar stash. Gone too is any semblance of comfort: The seats get smaller and smaller as American butts get bigger and bigger. Coach class now resembles steerage on the nineteenth-century ships that brought immigrants to America. Everybody’s jammed in like sardines and expected, doubtlessly, to break out in songs of gratitude for being ferried to Atlanta. I will have to be excused, though, from breaking out into a Delta hymn while an overfed salesman is mashing me with his hams. Gone too is cleanliness. Harried ground crews now give planes a quick going over in the minutes between flights. They are gone in a flash, leaving old sandwich wrappers and crumpled newspapers wedged in the seats. And you are lucky if that’s all you find wedged in there. I wear gloves when I fly now. Oh, by the way, ValueJet specialized in bad jokes. On our way to Atlanta we were asked to add up our birth month, date, and shoe size. The lowest and highest number would get prizes. The guy in front of me was born 12/31 and was shoe size 11. He won something in a plastic bag. That was, recognizably, a joke. On other airlines they don’t need to tell jokes. They are jokes.

  Note: The devil-autom
obile is responsible for what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls “autogeddon.” The devil-airplane is responsible for, among other things, cultural defilement (by taking certain people to places where they were never meant to be), loss of feeling for the true and awesome dimensions of the country, and angel impersonation.

  Berkeley

  A friend of mine invited me to his birthday party in a bar in the Republic of Berkeley. It was one of those fog-chilled California evenings when the cold knifes you for no good reason and you stand there shivering but certain that it could never get THIS cold in California. And then you comfort yourself with the thought that at least it doesn’t get any colder. And then it does. Anyway, I opened the door of the bar ignoring the homeless person who tried to sell me the homeless newspaper. I already had five of them and they were all about two months old: I guess time is slower when you’re homeless.

  The bar was well lit, cozy, crowded and warm. On stage, a gang of Che Guevaras, or five kids with Che berets, were wailing nostalgically something about “the revolution.” Which one, I wondered. I soon found out. I barely recognized my friends when I spotted them. I hadn’t seen them in about ten years and they had grown old. Old! Their hair was white, their noses were bigger, their flesh hung sadly about once-sturdy bones. I shouted out François Villon’s verse, “Old age, you fierce pig!” even as I hugged them. I was so rattled by this sight I lit a cigarette. All of a sudden, from every corner of the bar, young men and women who looked like younger versions of us, only with more hair and tauter flesh, started screaming at me: “There is no smoking here!” I understood now what “revolution” the Ches on stage were wailing about: It was the revolution of young conformists against the old nonconformists—us. I dragged my friends outside for a smoke and, although they didn’t smoke, they all lit a silent cigarette in solidarity against the righteous young. A ridiculous vehicle shaped like a brioche whooshed by with barely any sound, like a snake slithering off a rock. “What was THAT?” I exclaimed, frightened. My friends explained that it was an electric car. It was silent, it could be plugged in for a charge at the BART station, it was ecologically beneficial, and it could run you down like a bug even at its maximum speed of thirty-five miles per hour because you couldn’t hear it coming. And that was just like old age: natural, slow, and you can’t hear it coming. The “revolution,” I realized, consisted of just one boring, old refrain: “You are old and we are young. We are healthy and you’re sick.” I bought another paper from the homeless guy: ALL the news is old.