Jay Fox - THE WALLS

The black ball plummets into the pocket. The chagrined kid is already pulling a handful of twenties from his pocket. The more-than-likely girlfriend can't believe her eyes. The old man winks to her, which causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention. Her entire limbic system probably goes numb.

The woman collecting money at the door to the stage is beautiful in the way an L.A. sunset is beautiful. It's a beauty that's biting, perhaps even raw. Her expression is an almost meditative despondency — not sad exactly, but gripping in a way that is more communicative than the gray, anti-depressant torpidity or picayune angst for which people under the age of twenty-five are so infamous. It's not just intelligence or cynicism, either. It's more a weary melancholy. Because she is clearly waiting for something, something far more substantive than a better job, a better apartment, or a (better) man — either the variety who arrives on a white stallion or the confidence man all-too-familiar with the shibboleths of game: of love, of passion, of phallic narcissism.

Her condition is familiar. It has been described as a certain discomfort — not the nausea of estrangement, which has been ubiquitous since the heyday of the Greatest Generation, and probably long before that — that envelops a person in an almost viscous languor. It's something different than what the previous generations have felt, not only in its severity, but in its very form. Instead of the rejection of Panglossian faith, and the consequent assumption of romantic forms of rebellion, we feel paralyzed by our fecklessness, our own insignificance, and yet unabashedly absorbed by it. We see an unjust God in the eyes of those tormented by famine, by war, by genocide, by the dynamics of power and violence that keep half of the world in the chains of superstition and poverty, and cannot help but feel nothing. Perhaps nothing is a bit strong. It's more of a hollow pity.

Even with the technological innovations that have made it impossible to take recourse in ignorance when one questions our lack of charity or even generosity, it doesn't have the affect it should. We know that it'd be nice to change the system, but the truth is that we do not want to fight for a revolution because we recognize that there is no longer an Objective. We worship the corpse of Dike. Because everything is corrupt. And if an institution hasn't been corrupted, then it's just a matter of time before it will be. And if this isn't the case, if the institution is somehow a paragon of virtue towering above a world consumed by vice, then it's probably not all that affective anyway — it's just some naïve hippie bullshit.

But this is just what we tell ourselves. The truth is that our apathy is grounded more in laziness and self-absorption than cynicism. The truth is that, even if we had the opportunity to participate in something that was pure, it wouldn't matter. Because we do not want revolution any longer. Our disposition contains within it something far more troubling — an alienation from reality, a certain numbness or sickness that one finds in most post-adolescent Americans who have recently come to maturity in the middle and upper-middle classes. I guess the rich kids far no differently.

In vacuo .

The genesis of our most important precepts does not begin with anything so great as the existential outrage over our eventual deaths, as well as the injustices that we will all have to face prior to that time. It begins with information, with constant information. We establish our concerns; we establish our beliefs. The problem is that we are too proud and too saturated with information to accept ignorance on any level, even if we don't really know anything. It's more than that familiar sense of indestructibility that has corrupted the judgment of ephebi since before Jason assembled the Argonauts; it's the belief that our own opinions and the opinions of those with whom we agree are sacrosanct, impervious. We are the progeny of a perverse philosophy of self-affirmation without self-reflection: Cogito, ergo sum rectus . The Colbert Nation. Homo Certô . But these are the early stages. Moving beyond the opinions we espouse, what could be called our personal tenets, we come upon the daunting intellectual landscape of the information age, a space in which there is no proof of a greater veracity in any one institution. Everything becomes bullshit, a lie propagated by some dietrologic force that has corrupted all media outlets, all sources of authority, and (why not?) even those random, polarizing counter-cultural demagogues, who show up in the news every once in a while for saying something racist, sexist, homophobic, unpatriotic, jingoistic, etc. There is always an available objection challenging what is putatively regarded as fact. There are institutions founded to contradict what other institutions posit and report. And there are institutions founded to contradict the skeptics, those skeptical of the skeptics, and so on, ad nauseum . One may be run out of an Arkansas basement, but the message has the potential to be as potent as a signal being transmitted from the antenna on the top of the Empire State Building. It's democratic, true, but it's democratic in the same way that anomie is democratic.

And we are left wondering: Which one is correct? Are some of them mistaken, or are they purposefully hiding the truth? Are some groups acting in collusion? Are they colluding with just the other voices, or are they colluding with some less innocent institution? Or are most of them merely under a delusion, a pandemic Mayan veil, which has enveloped the sanity of so much of the world? Is there a truth that has been overlooked now that physical phenomena are being replaced with digital phenomena (manipulated light, really)? Has something been lost in the translation, something that is, paradoxically enough, intangible?

And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. We experience a false nostalgia more severe than that pastoral longing that Proust and Ortega y Gasset and Fromm and Kerouac and Pynchon and DeLillo and Wallace vocalized prior to the complete digitalization of this world. And we ask ourselves, Has life become more artificial now — not surreal, but abreal? Is there some grand Truth hidden somewhere in the morass? Is Truth still relevant?

And herein lay the rub: there is no answer. Because the answer must come from an institution, and institutions cannot be trusted, especially after Watergate (at least that's what the Me Generation tells us).

And they may be right. Because it seems the most troubling problem of my generation is not just the profusion of information, but the absence of referential authority, the inability to award credence to anything that does not comply with our limited understanding of the world. We have either moved beyond or retreated away from the problem of the twentieth century, which essentially boiled down to the question of legitimacy. There is either total acquiescence to pre-Enlightenment Christianity or the belief that there is no anchor, no legitimacy, in any form. (And this is not just when it comes to the elusive, abysmal absence that has been meditated upon since the writing of the Eclogues ; this is in the realm of the every day, the quotidian. It is the world of facts.)

And with all of the knowledge of the material world both accessible and seemingly contradictory, we begin to turn into ourselves. The zealots have their own problems, but those of us without the ersatz faith of the Evangelicals, we find ourselves confronted with a void, a void in which authority is abundant, but credibility is nil. So authority loses the only quality it needs to retain its status as such. Everything becomes bullshit, subject to interpretation, a potential lie if we find out that the wrong people believe it. We have our beliefs and there is no further use arguing because there is no argument that can dissuade us, nor is there an argument that we can provide to dissuade others. Unless they agree with us to begin with. Because conversation is dead, joined the ranks of meditation, civility and earnest piety. We agree to disagree on matters that only a few years ago would not have been regarded as subject to debate because said subjects consist of facts, of phenomena that cannot be manipulated unless one entertains solipsism, the epistemological version of the lowest common denominator. And we do entertain this, not as idealists in the tradition of Berkeley or even Borges, but as idealists of the red and blue variety; we entertain it by engaging in a form of solipsism that is not only parochial, but moral and ideological, too. (“Oh, you read that in Harper's ? Well, then it can't be true.” “I wouldn't trust anything in the National Review . You know what their agenda is, don't you?”) In the end, the physical world is subjected to abridgment, redaction, and embellishment because it does not comply with what we want it to be.