bowling alone in my hummer

Okay, I'll admit it: I'm depressed.

The state of things is absolutely overwhelming: climate change, massive extinctions, overpopulation, food scarcity, increasing inequity, war, etc. Every day seems to reveal some new way humanity is fouling its nest. Behind it is the pervasive ideology of 'got mine...and yours...to rest there's nothing.'  It's enough to consider the alternative to life.

When Anitra and Janice described the sense of aloneness experienced through homelessness, it really resonated with me. Perhaps it has to do with being an artist--pursuing these lonely visions in my studio, then placing them in the world as orphans.  Might be, but I think the sense of recognition was shared by many others that night. 

In his book 'Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community', Robert Putnam describes many of the ways we've squandered our 'social capital' through the structures of daily life that we mindlessly accept as givens: work relations, suburban life, gender conditioning, technology, etc.  So many centrifugal forces at work, keeping us apart.  Then the endless individuation that is marketed back to us as a means to replace this void. 

Where this leads is a place 20th century thinkers like Walter Benjamin knew so painfully well. It is the force of fascism, internalized and perfected as a form of self-realization. What makes it so elusive to middle class American consciousness is the way it is packaged. The Italian film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini described fascism's triumph as embodied in the consumer society. Perhaps the Chilean writer, Ariel Dorfman summed it up best by describing how citizens knew things had changed under Pinochet when pedestrians no longer had the right of way on city streets dominated by Humvees.