Troubled By Someone Else's Behavior? Just Gossip About It.

The local gossip mill here in one of the supposed cultural corners of Dallas, a city I call Big Duh, is sometimes infuriating, sometimes understandable, and most of the time, a case of a self-aggrandizing "repressive elite" of the third-rate variety.  

This famous quote from Jonathan Swift, oddly enough, comes to mind: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."  

Stigma and social incongruence may or may not have any damned thing to do with genius.  But I'm certain that people described as geniuses are often stigmatized and seen as incongruent by the supposed average people who find incongruent behavior a perfect opportunity to proclaim personal elite status.  

I've written here about what seems to me to be a great need among many to project some kind of power.  Why not judge the incongruent and then excise them from where one rules the roost?  Sometimes, one beset by "a repressive elite" could do well to sell tee shirts: 

VIVA MEDIOCRITY!

Hooray for that, eh?  

We get sentimental and teary-eyed over the likes of outcast Vincent van Gogh, or go all misty when someone brings up "the lonely genius".  Even genius, however, is relative in a way.  When mediocrity is particularly evident, those whose proverbial heads rise above all the other nails often get whacked first.  It's weird.  I've seen this happen many times. 

Who builds the curbs?  Why are the curbs so restrictive as to provide only one lane for all traffic?  Venture out of the middle of the road, and yup, yup, yup you bang your car alignment on a curb. 

Who built the curb?  Why did they make the road so goddamned narrow?  Why would asking some simple questions about the curbs provide either warrant or cause for "almost any brand of social coercion available to contemporary subhumans"?

Don't ask.  You're a thought criminal.  The mediocre will beat down anyone through disruption, ridicule, discredit, humiliation, ostracism, and offers of a life of isolation, recrimination and social snubs.  All of it outside the law which, ideally, helps to keep the curbs wide enough to keep the repressive away from gaining repressive power over others via social coercion, or worse, economic coercion.  

The laws that do protect those under the laser eye of prejudice, bigotry, stigma and even racism--these are being torn down because, apparently, they are too restrictive to those who can't wreak advantages for the mediocre. Mediocrity often leads to corruption, and corruption to autocracy.  

Why think at all?  Why not stay on automatic pilot and just gossip about those who are not?

Some of this acid reasoning of mine sometimes slips out of control.  I know this.  I'm probably wrong I'm all wrong I am always all wrong when I point out the obvious to the commandants of mediocrity.  But isn't that one important role of the artist, the novelist, the poet?  Or are we all condemned to being lap dogs for the wealthy and powerful or those more socially connected than we are?  I think of many Metaphysical poets from 16th Century Great Britain who were gruff, sparky, untoward, and sloppy dressers. Many died drunk in the streets, and this is where the idea of the dusty poet's garret: last haven from the mediocre.  Virginia Woolf, in "Orlando", poses some pretty crusty (but now famous, and even immortal) poets who were seen in their times to be social misfits.  What place do those who say it as they see it have in a restrictive, mediocre society hell bent on money, power, might-makes-right, and groups like "Moms For Liberty", that abrasive knot of ignorant malcontents who want to tell those far more knowledgeable than they what is acceptable and what isn't.  

The Zombie Apocalypse.  Is it upon us today?  Or have zombies been walking around in bars, galleries, museums, rock clubs, concert halls, theater centers and more? The zombies.  Have always been here. 

I've got old friends everywhere in the Big Duh who have been laughing at the Zombie Apocalypse since the early 1980s. Outlaw thought.  Outlaw those contrary to mediocrity.  Outlaw those who are apparently too outlaw for Outlaw Poetry.  This reminds me of a silly meme that features Rod Danzig, a heavy metal musician generally understood as of low intelligence, walking through a forest. He's pointing out trees, and all in black, keeps hollering, "THE FUCK IS THIS?  THE FUCK IS THAT?" 

Power way out deep in the woods.  I can only suppose that among many "culture phenoms" (self-described), the only way to power is to reject those with more of it than the power projector can bring to bear.  Why is that tendency to react against non-mediocre artists, poets and even actors so prominent in the guise of Dallas proclaiming itself "a literary city" just because a local bookstore happened to get really luck in that it managed to publish a book by a Norwegian writer who went on to win the Nobel Prize?  

The Big Duh is a commercial city rife with real estate developers who have manned the front lines in the drive to combat culture for years.  Its oil and gas industry headquarters embraces, literally espouses, denialism to the extent that those who point out the hypocrisy and the lies can literally be shown the exit.  Culture can only rise high enough to gain lapdog status among the social and moneyed elite here.  

But when a journalist friend of mine published and began promoting his new novel on Facebook also promoted this "literary city" cant as if it's for real.  It isn't.  I read all the adoring comments in the post's thread.  When I chimed in to suggest that a place cannot be a literary city without first having a fairly strong intellectual tenor to social culture.  When you go to Starbucks, I commented, what do you hear from others?  You hear about Rooms To Go, Target, the latest fashions, Real Housewives of Dallas, and weirder, and weirder.  

That's when people started labeling me "a snob".  Because I told the truth.  The lust for illusion is strong among the mediocre.  Just now, when I visited D Magazine, the city's mockery of Texas Monthly and the New Yorker, an article appeared honoring Dallas visionaries.  Who are those visionaries?  

You guessed it.  Real estate developers.  While D Magazine is ostensibly a magazine that celebrates Dallas, it's actual focus is of course on tourism, a big breadwinner in the style of bringing corporate conventions to the city.  Hence, today's breeze-through of D Magazine indicates that Dallas is now "the land of the cowboy".  

Wow, Big Duh.  Cowboying up, are we?  What are the voices in the wilderness here?  Probably wild chickens.  If you point out to the chickens that their chickens have come home to roost, you're a snob.  

Insofar as that weird trend in the Big Duh, I've long observed that moneyed wealth and its high muckety-muck socialite circles have been desperate to stamp out any form of organic cultural trends that tend to pop up and grow in other cities.  And to replace it with "Goat Roper Haute".  

Artificial culture, stand-in for the real thing.  Not that I have any desire to have a widespread reputation here as a "poetry phenom" or to be representative of false cultural mores. But standing outside that nuttiness, I can't help but see the sheer poverty of socialite envisionments of what is and what is not culture.  

Perhaps the tendency of the local poetry "scene" to gravitate to the status order of "repressive elitism"--is a reflection of what is being done to culture in the Big Duh in general.  Sure.  My observations may be out-of-touch.  I'm not that connected to local anything.  I laugh sometimes that, like dissidents in the USSR, I am "an internal emigre", someone who is physically in the Big Duh, but is spiritually or existentially not "in the circle".  Which is fine.  I've always preferred my own path.  I've gone it alone many times.  Besides, gnats.  The mediocre bug me.

An admission: I had a trauma dream last night.  Something I saw managed to trigger me into the PTSD that exploded when I had done nothing wrong but had experienced what in the olden times was called "a nervous breakdown.  Actually, a manic spike, 2014, three days of psychotic ideation.  The onrush of what Kurt Vonnegut in "Breakfast of Champions" calls "bad chemicals" overwhelmed my reasoning capacity--and for a few days I was insane, as in "not sane", not in control of my thinking, my words, my responses to the real world.  

Aside from a loss of a little sleep, I survived the flashback.  Which isn't the point here. The point is, nobody but my doctors and care workers even cared.  They rather found in the instant a perfect opportunity to gossip about me, about how bad it was to deliver a threat to a leading light of the area's poetry community.  And the very worst thing anyone can do to someone who has experienced that kind of trauma?  

Isolation.  

I've gotten used to that.  Sometimes I might find myself grinning at the tale of Robert Frost walking off the proverbial dock, and landing in the Virginia Swamps completely out of his mind and very very angry.  How'd he get there?  Was his "wander with the alligators" deliberate?  Who did he want to punish?  Probably none of that is even close to the truth.  The poor man had lost his wits for a while. 

I'm willing to bet Frost got the whipping post treatment from "the spectator classes", i.e. those who see the behavior--and then make judgements about incidents or situations or developments with no context at all.  In

my case, the gossip machine cranked up, and from what I hear, I am apparently now, at least in some of the more misinformed "minds" in the Dallas poetaster scene as maybe a character from Criminal Minds, that spectacularly sensationalistic crime show where the FBI Behavioral Unit tracks serial killers.  

Ain't it grand?  Cowboy up, Big Duh goat ropers.  

In situations like "Dallas", it's best to be invisible.  No talk about how I almost singlehandedly convinced the City of Dallas power structure to spend to build a non-religious homeless shelter to meet exploding demand.  No mention of the time I managed to find a mistake in my housing program's understanding that clients are only entitled to "five years" of treatment.  The truth is that the financial cycle for that program renews every five years.  I managed to protect something like 400 people with various forms of mental illness from being shipped to the Westmoreland Projects, one of the most dangerous areas in the DFW metroplex.  Nothing quite like a schizophrenic woman crying as she tells you she's afraid to go out of her apartment in the projects because so menacing people were malingering everywhere.  No bother with the fact that a two-year long stint of investigative reporting of mine revealed the City was in arrears with HUD itself.  Or that the soft machine was trying to desperately preserve the property slated for the development of The Bridge to make room for more condominiums right out side the Farmer's Market.  

But some words?  Outrageous.  Send in the gossip machine at full warp speed, Dr. Cowboy.  

The lip-flapping extravaganza surrounding my bout of irrationality has apparently been really widespread.  It amounts to people who feel powerless in a big world where some poets get all the attention, while they get none, trying to exercise power.  If anything, many of Dallas' now degenerating attempts to actually build a poetry community have been taken over by poseurs and amateurs.  The rest of us?  Vanquished.  Like the TV show "Branded"  In a way, that's hilarious to me.  

Dallas is not a literary city.  Not yet.  See it?  I have registered an opinion.  I've made a value judgement.  From what I see, whatever it is, I don't see literature at all.  I kind of doubt a true crime book at the grocery store checkout heralds the emergence of a Big Duh Dostoyevsky any time soon.  

How many flaps of the lips can cause these little sparks masquerading as poets not only fly upwards but also to the South?  Not for the winter.  Forever.  

I remember in the aftermath of that breakdown thinking of how it felt to be virtually ignored, left to recover from a horrific event, all alone.  Someone could have called a mental health outreach time to give me a welfare check.  Someone could have come to my apartment, not to fix me, but to comfort me and allow me the solace of knowing that I wasn't absolutely alone.  

The 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not care." 

IN 2017, when I ventured to the Half-Price Books to attend a poetry reading, the first thing out of one mediocrity was, LET'S HOPE YOU'VE GOT YOUR SHIT TOGETHER!" in a very loud voice.  Some other mediocrities lobbied to have me barred.  Others simply left.  Not one of them understood what had happened to me within the context of other contributing developments that could have given them the opportunity to rise above the level of spectator and gossiper and possibly become the stuff that poets are made of.  

Not a chance of that occurring any time soon.