News from Patriot States of America—1
“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”—Proust
In a way, by not standing out, Grady stood out, though that was certainly not his intent. If he could, he would have been invisible at his job—and maybe it was that desire to make no ripple in the spacetime of the lunchmeat aisle that made you notice him. Well, that and his appearance. In a world of mostly moderate, nondescript people—honestly, you couldn’t always tell one from another—he looked like a character from a fantasy novel—a sturdy-sized man, wrapped in a white apron, hair in a ponytail, a feral beard exploding around an n95 mask, latex gloves. He rarely spoke—over the years the co-workers had come and gone, most of whom had done their time without ever having heard his voice. He wasn’t rude—the occasional customer who asked him where something was would be silently escorted there, and left. In the mornings, he appeared; at quitting time, he disappeared. He had been working at that grocery store so long only the most ancient of veterans could remember a time before him. Way back, before the Partition.
He could have moved to the Blue States, but the idea of uprooting, re-rooting, any change of his physical circumstances, filled him with dread. Plus, why bother?—how different would his life really have been? Moralpolizei here, Cultural Enforcers there. Denying real problems here, absolving personal complicity in them by referring to them in terms pleasing to preposterous academics there. In both, an us/them mentality that colored most of what they thought said or did. And for Grady, both presenting a constant challenge to resist control: shut out the propaganda, not sign up for anything, not join anything, not call attention to himself. He had been mostly successful in the latter; though people noticed him—how could they not?—no one really saw him. He became part of the scenery, like the big oak tree you drove blindly past every day. Maybe the occasional curious soul did wonder about his life away from work, where he lived, whether he lived alone, what he did. They might have suspected from his methodical work routine, his constant hand washing and glove changing, something of his advanced neurotic habits at home. They would have concluded easily enough that he was an odd bird—but they never would have guessed that he was the oddest of all odd birds—one of the last people in the PSA with a free mind.
A criminal offense.
No media—no nothing? If he ever had to answer for that, it wouldn’t go well for him. But he had a cable subscription and played the “news” channel all day in a back closet, sound off, and that kept the goons away. But, without any information, how did he know what was going on? Of all Grady’s rare qualities, this was the rarest: he was a consummate observer and listener. He heard every nuance, every inflection of every conversation going on around him—maybe sometimes hearing a voice when he couldn’t definitively say one had actually created sound waves—and from these ordinary interactions he gleaned the ingredients of his own conception of the status quo.
And, as it turns out, when you turn off all the propaganda, there are actually still a number of things you can think about. Who knew?
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In younger days Grady had been religious—he had even called himself a Christian—but for him the meaning of that word had leached away.
In the PSA God was a rich angry old white man who didn’t have much taste for anything but rich angry old white men—but if you couldn’t meet all those requirements, white would get you by. God didn’t like poor people, mud people, whiny people, feeble-minded people, degenerates, and suffered women only to a point—and since He had created them He must have stopped more than once to say—to Himself—“What was I thinking?” And He didn’t like solar panels because they stole sunlight from His plants.
Everything had changed since the publication of the re—“translated” New Patriot Bible—“more in line with God’s intention”—and the burning of all the heretical earlier versions—shortly after the Partition. No more meek, no more humble, no more “resist not evil,” no more “God is Love,” no more turning the other cheek unless you were inviting some weenie Blue-head to kiss your ass—along with a complete re-tooling of the Beatitudes. They retained the term “Christian” to differentiate themselves from political enemies in other parts of the world, but the central prophet had been promoted from a wandering mendicant rabbi with a major epiphany in his past, to an Aryan warrior with an AK-47 in his hand. God hadn’t created testosterone just for laughs.
Grady spent a lot of time thinking about God, disbelieving it could be a thing or a being—more like the essence, the source and destiny, of everything. As in, everything—septic tanks and rainbows. The love and compassion—but also the tragedy, the misery, the grief, the loneliness. All of it. But the PSA preachers would tell you God hadn’t done or made anything bad, and that everything bad is because of us. Human beings!—the least equipped player in this game given full responsibility for all evil! But God gave man a choice, they said. Yeah, he put the tree of knowledge—and what could be worse than knowledge?—in the garden like a kid doing a card trick, saying “pick any card,” and poking one of them above the others, and when the inevitable happened going “What did I do?”
The church, mirroring, as churches always do, the political and economic paradigm of the power structure, set out the world-view they preferred, then forced God to conform to it. They told their minions what to think, which did away with the anxiety that comes with thinking for yourself—and you’re welcome. Call him crazy, but Grady tried to see things as they were—like that was easy—and then understand how to conform himself to that reality. Tried to find the right things to believe—knowing the right things to believe always, sooner or later, ask you to die for them. Unlike rotating bologna and stocking wieners, it was an arduous job.
Sort of like trying to lay low in a world run by humorless men who cared nothing for people as people—only feared them as threats to their privilege—or needed them as means to their ends. Men who promised to return the world “to its pure source in the light of God’s word”—bring it back here in their twilight to what they imagined it to have been in their dawn. Men who demanded conformity and total control—who thought, rightly, that the most dangerous thing in the world is a free mind.
Above the door to their temple: Mediocrity Demands Conformity
For Grady, a tiring fight. Exhilarating and tiring. And lonely. Very very lonely. A loneliness as old as time itself, as old as God Himself, who laid it in the foundations of the earth.
Declare, if thou hast understanding.
The human race needs the ideas of its neurotics. Crazy or not, they’re the only way anything can change.
September 11, 2023