PAH! #178 April, 2005

Disillusioned…and loving it!

Maybe Wallace Stevens was right when he wrote, “Disillusion is the last illusion.”

Twenty years ago or so, when I was living in Youngstown, I heard that Nastassia Kinski was on location shooting a film in nearby rural Pennsylvania. I was about to hop in the car and go hang out on the set, fully thinking I had a shot at having a drink with her.

No fooling.

I was young, naïve, and filled with high-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes. Then a buddy came over with a case of Blatz. I never made it, but I the part of me that embraces pipe dreams thinks I had a shot.

Now, in the wake of John Kerry’s defeat, I have completed the full cycle of disillusion. My faith in organized religion has soured because of the many lying Neanderthal political operatives turned church into something to render unto Caesar. My faith in a satisfying career has withered after three layoffs in eight years. And I’ve been married for 17 years. Try it, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I’m disillusioned . . . and loving it! Here’s why:

Five years ago I told my doctor I was run down and depressed. She sent me home with Prozac samples. I felt like I was finally part of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Then I read the instructions. One possible side effect was diarrhea. I threw the pills away. Being treated for depression was hip. Crapping all the time wasn’t.

Now I eschew that depressing word, depression, and go for disillusion. Disillusion is just an updated version of cantankerous. Irascibility. It’s the neighborhood grouch with a college degree. And you don’t take anti-depressants. You drink a highball while reading the newspaper and instead of James Taylor, crank up the Fats Waller to get the goddam joint jumping! Jazz is integral to relishing a life of disillusion. Why? Jazz played well is brilliance. It is genius. And most of the world isn’t even interested. What kind of world is this? A world full of cruel tricks. A world where it is foolish not to be disillusioned.

Webster’s dictionary says disillusion is “to free from illusion or false ideas.” And all these years disillusion had a negative connotation. Now it sounds great! It frees you up from buying into pipe dreams, political or religious. It’s like taking off the beer goggles of life.

Great! Now I have NO illusions! Now I see things as they really are! Now I can base my decisions on facts! This is as good as it gets! I don’t have to glean the minutiae of the Bible to find guidelines for living. It’s too conflicting, confusing, and contradictory anyway. All I need is to hear Peggy Lee sing:

I love that song. Is that all there is? makes easier to take all the harsh bullshit life offers. And when something nice does come along . . .well, great!…a bonus I wasn’t expecting!

Being disillusioned is tough at first. You’ll feel like a real sourpuss, a spoilsport. People will be threatened that you’re not joining in on their sunny rapture.

IE, this past Christmas, some overzealous fundamentalists hassled retail managers whose clerks were saying, “Happy Holidays,” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Is the crass ground zero of the obscene commercialization of Christmas really the best place to insist upon liturgical language? WWJD? Why, even HE, if employed by Sears, would be using his gift of gab to get more people to open a store credit account, rendering unto Caesar…and if you think that example is a weird mixture of commerce and Christianity, just take a look at the White House, which occurs to me is a cross-section of the North Pole and Bethlehem.

A lot of Americans are turning God into the host of their own Nuremberg rally. Be careful of any zealots who consider your cynicism Satanic. Their beliefs are on such thin ice that they cannot bear to hear a contrary opinion. Anne Lamott writes, “You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.”

Disillusionment enables you to fully embrace the wonder of America. To illustrate this example, let us look at the life of a man who represents Americana, the late Charles Kuralt.

Kuralt was a broadcaster who made a nice career of traveling America’s byways and small towns to celebrate old fashioned idiosyncrasies and virtues. He embodied these virtues himself, slow-spoken, a regular Joe who looked like the town postmaster or the head of the Kiwanis. When he died, it was discovered that he had two families, a totally discreet and illicit second life. It was . . .a decadent Hollywood life with adultery, illicit sex, lies, deceit and hypocrisy. American hero and pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh did the same thing, with a couple of extra families sprinkled throughout Germany.

Which Charles Kuralt (or Lindbergh) represents America?

Well, I’ll be the first to admit that I love Norman Rockwell. I cherish the smalltown American saga. I grew up in a town akin to Mayberry. However, the town drunks in my hometown didn’t waddle into the police station and check into a cell They went home and beat their kids or turned into simpletons who died toothless and weathered as tree bark at 48. And our cops carried guns.

Today, Main Street America is an architectural concept, designed to make malls look like small towns. It is an amusement park attraction. It is a political agenda inspired by 1950s sitcoms and a so-called Christian nation that never existed. In truth, when you embrace disillusion, you laugh in the face of this hardcore capitalism that turns the small town ideal into a marketing ploy or a cartoon caricature that simplifies small town citizens into buffoons with jack-o-lantern smiles, and you guffaw at the Bible thumpers who try sliding past us -- and often succeed -- as a justification for snarling at people they don’t like. Many who sneer at Hollywood cast their votes for politicians whose agenda feeds the corporations who create the pop culture that enrages them.

Kuralt’s ability to keep a mistress and secret family for three decades tells us that America is complicated behind closed doors, and that to understand the complexity of our lives, we ought to shitcan the simplistic “morning in America” platitudes and look at who we really are. Only by being hard-bitten and honest can we see ourselves and the life around us for what it is, and then see all that we can accomplish as realistic people who need to be enlightened, without superstition, tolerant, and driven by an obligation to good citizenship.

5.) Disillusionment frees you from the burden of knowing it all! “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth, and truth rewarded me,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir. Being free from knowing-it-all leaves you a lot of spare time. What will you do with all this spare time? Keeping one’s piehole shut and ears open leads to listening. Listening to other human beings is a poor man’s mode of travel, for in deeply listening to other people’s stories, we become more worldly and wise. Disillusionment, then, leads to wisdom, which gives me hope after all.