Our Kafkaesque Nightmare

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Still Tuesday
Still November 21, 2006
Still Voltaire's Birthday
Still Our Kafkaesque Nightmare

Dear Jaromir (& Magda),

Or do I mention Kafka and GARUDA IN TOYLAND simply because our conversations, both the one at Governor Stumpy's and the one at your house the Sunday before, brought warm waves of memory washing over me, resonances from my imagination's string quartets of yesteryear? Something tells me that our nation's founding fathers intuited much of what Kafka painted of what human life on this earth is truly made of and how it functions and fails to function. I believe that they were a relatively mythoklastic bunch, our founding fathers, the framers of our constitution.

Let me put it a little less delicately: I sense that Kafka and the Founders probably had more in common with you and me and the more mythoklastic members of our intersecting social circles than they had with any real or imaginary majority of American voters. Life is essentially tragic, and the Founders realized that. But it seems to me that the vast majority of our fellow Midwesterners, fellow Americans, or fellow Earthlings tend instead toward being like the Toylanders in GARUDA IN TOYLAND -- i.e. sleepwalkers.

In our conversations, we seem to have reached agreement that no quarter of modern American society is safe from the predations of the theocrats and the oligarchic neo-feudalists they're shilling for. They've assumed hegemonic control of America's public and private schools (Pre -- 12) and universities, of its business and commercial sector, of its public sector, including the civil service and the military, of the clinical/medical community and the so-called "helper" professions, etc., etc. To repeat the theme: McCarthyism didn't disappear; it simply took over and became the norm. ("If treason prosper, none dare call it treason." Who said that? Adams? Jefferson? Paine?)

Surely you're familiar with either the blk & wht or updated color versions of such films as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Night of the Living Dead." My thinly-veiled doppelganger who served as the protagonist in GARUDA IN TOYLAND was certainly familiar with both -- and felt that he was hopelessly, hellishly, nightmarishly trapped inside a similar movie. Do you ever get that feeling?

Of course, we have each other. But one of the cruel ironies of life is that those of us who would help the vulnerable and innocent among us inevitably turn out to be the most powerless themselves. In general, those who would help can't, and those can help won't.

One reason that the majority of Americans are the way they are is that America was never invaded and occupied by the Nazis or the Soviets the way you're native Czechoslovakia was. But now I'm starting to lapse into cliche, aren't I. Still, some cliches become cliches from serving as useful tools over long periods of time. Which may be as good a place as any to stop for this evening.

As I keep saying, though perhaps not quite saying: listening to your point of view, your complaints and frustrations, etc., lends valuable perspective to my own thought-world, both as a writer and as a frail mortal animal. So I'm looking forward with zest and intellectual hunger to visiting with you again soon and to receiving any e-mails you have time and energy to send.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing. Thanks again for the tea and cake.

Secular Humanist Blessings,

Galen


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