Ever get the feeling you've
been cheated?
From The Left
by Joseph Waldman
17 April 2002
Ah, when I was young and twenty-one and stupid. This was written at an exceedingly nasty time in my life. Everyone's got their faults, though, don't they? At any rate, I posit this as a proto-Gonzo work of sorts. Bad times were ahead, but the sun would come out tomorrow, dontcha know. So here I stand; I can do no other.
-- JW, Wednesday 5 August 2009That last moment on stage in San Francisco was the truth. I had felt cheated. I felt that my life had been stolen from me by lesser beings. Our inabilities ruined something truly excellent. I'm sure history will bear me out on that. Right now it's still too close to the bone for people to judge it accurately because there are still too many vested interests floating about.
And I'm no saint. I'm as wrong as everyone else and as right as most.
Wrong in that I was young, stupid and rash. I didn't have the perceptions I should have had. I ran away from problems rather than hitting them head on: the very thing I accuse other people of doing all the time. Yet I know there's a certain aspect in my character where I actually enjoy things falling apart, where the chaos becomes far more enjoyable than the commitment. It will always be there, my impetuosity.
So I am not without guilt.
I could have helped Sid more. If only I hadn't been lazy and washed my hands of him like Pontius Pilate. That's something I'l have to carry to the grave with me. I don't know what I could have done, but I know I sould have done something. There are always ways. You must never be lazy when it comes to your friends.
Believe it or not, I have no animosity toward Malcolm. The last time we talked was when Bernie Rhodes was trying to set up a nightclub in New York in 1985. He wanted Malcolm and me to talk it out. He said we were two great minds who needed to get together and stop all this. Okay. I sat there, and Malcolm had attitude all fucking night. He just couldn't get off it. After a couple of double brandies, he was spouting and talking like a politician. I got up and said I was leaving. Bernie stopped me and asked me to stay. It was nice Bernie to try to do that. But was it really? Then Bernie left the table.
I leaned over to Malcolm and said, "Look, Malcolm, Bernie's gone to the toilet now. You know you're going to talk rubbish all night, and you know I ain't listening. Why don't we just go home?"
We shook hands, and he went one way and I went the other. We left Bernie in the toilet with the bill.
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
-- John Lydon: "Rotten: No Irish - No Blacks - No Dogs" ################################################################Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
- Lester Bangs, April 1980 **************************************************************and here begins the original work
I'm not one for superstitions, but I think it's a little telling that this, my thirteenth column, is also my last. Yes, it's true, kiddies. It's all over, and now it's time for Papa Joe to depart, back to Detroit, from whence he came. To twice paraphrase the Dictators, I don't know what I'm going to do even though, in two weeks, I'm going to be twenty-two. For now I've still got a whole column's worth of forum at my disposal, and so, per From the Left tradition, it's time to do a final analysis of politics in our little banana republic.
It's pitiful. However you want to define its parameters, the left at Ohio Wesleyan is in terrible shape. When I arrived here in 1998, it was thriving. Anybody remember Jon Morgan? Andrew Lievense? Nicole Dailey? They were legends. There was genuine, substantive political discourse, and (unlikely as it may seem today) WCSA actually mattered.
In part, I think, this was due to outside factors, to the partisan turmoil of the time--remember the impeachment follies? Since that time we've seen a Constitutional crisis almost as great as impeachment; and then -- call me crazy -- I think World War III trumps everything else in terms of both immediate and historical importance, but the reactions of the majority of the "left" at Ohio Wesleyan to the turmoil in the outside world has been wrong, damned wrong. The last two years have witnessed one of the most dangerous phenomena imaginable: a horde of quasi-fascist, pseudo-radical, rich-kid hucksters and faddists.
There used to be a line that conservatives would use against liberals they didn't like, something along the lines of "taking marching orders from the Kremlin." Well, I don't want to give credence to resuscitated McCarthyism in any form, but these Bloomfield guerrillas are taking marching orders, too. The professional rabble-rousers at the top, in their comfortable D.C. offices, shout the week's given cause célebrè straight on down the hierarchy (oops, I thought you guys were against top-down organizations...); through the prancing, preening egotists, who are in it 90 percent to look cool and get girls; and all the way down to the bugs at the bottom.
Listen up, you Green muthas: fashionable fascism never works. You've engaged yourself in demagoguery and self-denial, and those always fail in the end. The pseudo-left at Ohio Wesleyan is convinced that it's fighting for good and noble causes, but the only thing they've ever done is lever George W. Bush into the White House, then whine about the environment they helped to create. It's a sham. It'll regress on you; and nothing good ever has, or ever can, come out of it.
Hence, there's no one on this campus I'd want to succeed me at From the Left. I'm sure the editors will find someone--they always do, and there won't be a lapse. I, however, endorse no one, and would in fact fight tooth and nail to prevent a couple of suspected possibilities from taking over. I don't care what the Pasta Majority thinks; I'm right and I'll be proven right, but it's not my decision to make, so I'll keep my mouth shut.
I probably won't be reading it, at any rate. When I depart this cursed burg on 13 May (spitting on the stop sign just before the ramp to northbound US 23 as my final act of mayhem), I don't plan to return--ever. Not for reunions, not even if they finally decide to democratize or demolish Welch Hall. Never.
"Class solidarity" in any of its manifestations is a lie, especially when it applies to the god-awful forced jollity of the four-year academic program. I have no kind words for the class of 2002 collectively, and the same for about 97 percent of its individual members.
Even beyond that, I've got no generational loyalty. This whole wretched school -- its infrastructure and its experience--has been an unmitigated disaster. From day one, I was on the outs, both in terms of the peers I had to deal with and the garbage I had to study in class. This is, to put it plainly, a white-bread institution, and I am not white-bread at all. I'm a half-breed Jew from Detroit with a bitterly divorced family. From all that you learn early on the value of cynicism and always being one step ahead, and it just doesn't jibe with these healthy, "normal" white kids from all over Ohio. I've actually had people, on a number of different occasions, rave to me about how fabulously diverse the ethnic composition of Ohio Wesleyan was. Sixteen hundred honkies out of 1900 students total. Uh-huh. Right.
Do any of you know what it's like to go through your freshman year literally without more than three people engaging you in friendly conversation? Did any of you come straight from your grandmother's funeral to college the day before classes started, shattered and depressed beyond all words, only to be chased out of your assigned room by your already-established übermenschen suitemates? Do you know what it's like to spend the rest of the academic year sitting alone in the dark, trying to think of creative ways to hang yourself? And the three years since being stabbed repeatedly by those around you?
Life almost never gives you what you expect or what you want, and most of the time this is a good thing, because otherwise we'd all wallow in decadence, but I wouldn't have minded a little more from this place. I sought a wider worldview -- and found the intellectual atmosphere stifling. I thought I would emerge with a greater appreciation for humanity -- and now people disgust me more than ever before. I hoped Ohio Wesleyan would be a place on which I could look back fondly as I got closer to graduating. I was wrong. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?