Barnett Weekly

Death often arrives unannounced, of course, and at my age more frequently. This past year has brought the passing of family and most recently my dearest friend of 41 years, Kurt von Meier. Kurt was unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Even as he grew older, he never stopped being a surprise. Brilliant, unpredictable, outrageous, generous; all these words refer to Kurt. Let me explain.

I first met Kurt in 1970 when he and two others opened a restaurant in Noe Valley in San Francisco. Located around the corner from 24th Street on Diamond, two blocks from my apartment, The Diamond Sutra Restaurant billed itself as serving “Tantric Cuisine,” offered a daily menu of one or two items, and was an immediate hit. Its tiny open kitchen provided a full view of chef Jean LaRue and partner Tom Genelli at work, and its eclectic ethnic food was often so spicy as to defy description.

I was only 22 at the time. My hair was long, my pant bottoms were belled, and the folks running the Diamond Sutra looked like my kind of people. Kurt was teaching Art History at Sacramento State University, but would come to S.F. from time to time and hang around the restaurant. He was a baffling mystery to me. I could barely follow his thoughts for more than a sentence or two before I was lost in a fog of unknown cultural references and vocabulary. Kurt was magnetic and incredibly entertaining. I didn’t know at the time that he was a polymath with a photographic memory; a walking, talking human encyclopedia of world-wide cross-cultural references spanning global history.

Over time I learned to go with Kurt’s flow, and though he was 14 years older than I, we became friends. One evening in 1971 he dropped by the apartment I shared with my girlfriend, and we decided it would be fun to go out to dinner at an elegant restaurant. I called L’Orangerie, at the time one of S.F.’s finest, to make a reservation. “Do you have a dress code?” I inquired; I’d used my ties for belts and had chucked my fancy clothes. “Of course, Monsieur, jackets and ties for the gentlemen and evening dress for the ladies.” I tuned to Kurt…”  They say jackets and ties!” I whispered. “Ask them about holy men in native garb,” he grinned. “How about holy men in native garb,” I asked. “Hold on, please,” was the reply. “Yes,” said the voice on the phone, “holy men in native garb is acceptable.” I made the reservation.

We threw together the most insane collection of wraps, shawls, robes, and beads we could muster and headed downtown. Entering the restaurant we approached the Maitre d’ and said we had a reservation. He looked us up and down, in wide-eyed disbelief. I expected to be thrown out, but he grinned and shook his head. “Ah yes, the holy men in native garb! This way please,” he said politely and escorted us to a private dining room where we were waited upon by a full staff. An epicurean world-traveler, Kurt ordered for us in French and paid the bill.

I miss Kurt terribly; I loved him like a brother. I visited him often, and over 41 years we became so close that I could actually understand what he was saying.

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So here’s my prediction: during the next decade there will be a huge crackdown on marijuana users. Evolving technology for drug testing, criminal law and political opportunism will converge, creating the perfect conditions for a crack-down more severe than any before.

Now you may think things are going in the opposite direction, and this does appear to be the case. States have passed medical marijuana laws, penalties for possession have been drastically reduced, and dispensaries have popped up all over the state. People register as users, get doctor prescriptions and carry marijuana user cards; what could get more legal than that?

But let’s look at the recent behavior of our Democrat administration in the White House and how quickly things can change when it comes to law enforcement and marijuana. Having executed a full 180-degree turn, this administration is now pursuing an aggressively anti-medical marijuana agenda, threatening even the property owners who have leased buildings to dispensaries. This is old-school “law and order” stuff, and seeing it play out in this administration gives us a glimpse of how draconian things might be if the right-wing controls the White House and both houses of congress.

Virtually everyone can agree that marijuana is part of mainstream American life. It’s found in every city, every county and every state. It’s used by a broad spectrum of individuals: teachers, students, professionals, working stiffs, rich and poor…you name it. This does not make it good for you, or necessarily positive; it just means that, like alcohol, people like it and like how it makes them feel. I’ll leave it to others to debate the moral, societal or personal issues, I simply point out that marijuana is a fact of life.

That being the case, why do I predict a crack-down? For that answer, we need to look past marijuana itself and consider the larger systemic issue, namely power. Marijuana policy is, and long has been, one of the most effective tools of the powerful, and its ubiquitous presence makes it so. In the 1930s, Harry J. Anslinger, the nation’s first drug use enforcer, waged a campaign largely based on the fact that marijuana grew in abundance along roadways and railroad tracks. Targeted as an evil weed, marijuana helped justify the growth of anti-drug law enforcement and the expansion of nationwide and federally controlled law enforcement, in general. It is this apparatus that remains, has grown and supports one of the most successful economic engines of our modern capitalist society: law enforcement and all the power and fortune that accompanies it.

Law enforcement demonstrates access to raw power; you can see it in the behavior of some cops who use violence against peaceful protest gatherings. It has the power to inflict physical pain, detain, arrest and confine. Behind this sits a huge economic apparatus of cops, lawyers, courts, prisons and prison guards, now increasingly being privatized for the benefit of corporations and their shareholders. The combination of privatization (driven by shrunken government starved of funds) and fundamentalist capitalist theology that ignores citizens while exploiting labor, will again use marijuana to assert and retain power and control. Logic and culture will not be relevant in the coming marijuana madness; all that shall matter is that even more money and resources will accrue to the benefit of the most powerful in society.

Sorry to bring you down.

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In the beginning, there was The Word, and not too long thereafter, The Book. The first books were all about The Word, and other genres remained well in the future. Books were simply books, and their content represented the wisdom of the world.

By the 15th century, the first novels were born, and with them the designation of Fiction. Human imagination has no limits and, over time, books of fiction – imagination run wild – became wildly popular. Life, it appears, is much more interesting when it’s made up, and fiction allows an author to mold events and characters without the inconvenience of chance or accident. Thus tales of fiction scribe an unencumbered narrative arc wherein the story teller weaves a moral tale of love, adventure, crime or teenage acne. By tale’s end, reality often seems awfully pale by comparison.

Fiction is so popular that all other books are classified in relation to it, namely Non-Fiction. Into the non-fiction category are lumped books of history, biography, religion, science, gardening, cooking, child-rearing, biology, chemistry, cooking and so forth. This begs the questions: Why does fiction get top billing? Why is non-fiction dependent upon fiction for its designation?

Such is the modern tyranny of fiction, and like any tyranny it should be overthrown. The alternative to fiction deserves its own designation. Thus from here on I will not say non-fiction; I shall call non-fiction Faction!

Now, there are many who will say faction is a misleading designation, arguing that facts are not absolute but relative. History, it’s said for example, is written by the victor, and thus reflects the victor’s point of view. Or they’ll say consider science; science is often theory or speculation, not fact. Of course, this is accurate, but all besides the point, for fiction and faction both require what TV’s Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness;” without truthiness neither fiction nor faction can succeed.

Fiction leans heavily to the side of invented tales while faction leans towards a faithful narrative of events; this distinction underlies our current taxonomy of literary nomenclature. I don’t propose that such distinctions not be made, for we must organize books somehow, afterall. Rather, I propose books no longer be classified in contrast to fiction. It’s as if we had absurdly decided to designate colors as either “blue” or “non-blue,” lumping yellow, red and green together in the non-blue category.

As a reader, I hold fiction in the highest regard, although I’ll admit to currently reading little. Fiction can inform and inspire, display the prodigious skills and inventiveness of writers and even change the course of history. In this way, fiction can indeed presage faction, and science fiction, for example, often has. But the alternatives to fiction deserve more than simply being designated through nomenclature as fiction’s poor step-child. Non-fiction indeed!

“Facts,” said Ronald Reagan (or his speechwriter Pat Buchanan), “are troublesome things,” a remark reflecting that we live in an age of great cynicism and widespread doubt. Faith in facts is in short supply. Accordingly, designating a wide genre of books “Faction” will undoubtedly run into some objections. Alas, we have become an irritable and argumentative people, and today most believe that everything they hear and read is fiction. There is, to credit Colbert, “truthiness” in this, but let’s not allow such lack of faith to doom faction!

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Orwell wrote “Who controls the present controls the past” and in light of the current state of politics in America, Orwell proclaimed truth. I’m referring of course to George Orwell, English writer of the dystopian “1984”, his eerily prescient vision of the contemporary world. In its “book within a book,” the supposedly “underground” text exposing the truth of society and how it is controlled, we discover a detailed description of power entirely relevant today.

While space limits a full discussion of his remarkable work, one element demands examination, namely the ways in which those seeking and holding present power so successfully reinvent the past that they themselves come to believe their own invention. In “1984” this is the implementation of “doublethink,” retraining the mind to consciously replace facts of the past with new facts tailored to the needs of the present, and to do so thoroughly, completely and without any lingering doubt.

It is within this context, for example, that the present crowd of Republican presidential aspirants elevate Ronald Reagan to the exalted pantheon of “tax cuts, small government and balanced budgets” despite Reagan’s factual history to the contrary. Repeated incessantly, dependent upon the intentionally cultivated ignorance and intellectual laziness of ordinary citizens and driven by the imperatives of gaining and retaining power, this reconstruction of the past into a narrative that better suits the present could not have been more successfully created by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Thus we witness statements delivered with pure conviction, unblemished confidence and absolute belief despite the speaker’s simultaneous knowledge that everything they are saying is false. To quote Orwell: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.”

In this spirit, declarations about the failure of banking regulation, the natural virtue of free markets, how massive military spending produces peace, that poverty is created by government, global warming is a hoax, consumer protection costs jobs, and that the 1% are responsible for the success of our economy are all supported by newly minted facts about the past, despite decades of documented history that indicate otherwise. Again, Orwell maps out the prerogatives of power: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary….If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.”

That such techniques would support a totalitarian society lacks surprise; that they work effectively in our so-called democracy seems remarkable, but is not. I say “so-called democracy” because though elections take place, America effectively displays all the political characteristics of oligarchy, a system in which power and wealth accrues to a tiny fraction of people and institutions (the 1%) and remains tightly within their grasp despite the trappings of time, political parties, elections, economic upheavals, armed conflict, unending war preparation and natural disasters. This requires that the 99% remain confused, misled, fearful, at heightened states of anxiety and economically vulnerable.

It may be 2012, but it feels like 1984 to me.

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All things change; what is born grows older and dies. Sometimes such change is quick, sometimes slow, unexpected or anticipated, dramatic or subtle. Moment to moment, we are changing; our thoughts literally alter the physical framework of our brain, our actions alter the components of the body, and these alterations affect the ways in which we change the world. Impermanence is another word for change.

Accepting impermanence on an intellectual level is not terribly hard, but accepting it on an emotional level is more difficult, particularly when impermanence affects something we desire. As human beings we constantly desire, and even before one desire is satisfied another arises. We shift quickly from desire to desire, attaching ourselves to hopes and outcomes, oscillating between satisfaction and suffering, rarely finding restful equanimity. Our busy minds of desire jump from one topic to another, one activity to another, one object to another, all in a ceaseless but fruitless effort to control or avoid impermanence.

This very process, the alternation of craving and satisfaction, simultaneously keeps us going and wears us out. Curiosity and disinterest, excitement and boredom, initiative and laziness all relate to this oscillation of desire. Attention deficit disorder is a souped-up version of our ordinary experience, desire on steroids, if you will. Similarly, stimulants such as cigarettes, caffeine, refined sugar and chocolate all amplify our sensations of desire which accounts for their widespread popularity.

Impermanence is the fuel of desire and all that follows from it. Though the various manifestations of desire and its designated objects are incalculable, the ever-present force of impermanence feeds it ceaselessly. Impermanence is not a “thing,” but instead a quality of things. It has no color, size or dimension, no smell, shape, sound or feel. Impermanence pervades all and everything but impermanence itself cannot be isolated. Like time, impermanence both exists and does not exist; it is a point of nowness of no duration, an instantaneous but incessant changing in which its speed and location, like quantum particles, cannot be simultaneously determined. The only thing that never changes is impermanence.

Despite its ineffable and immutable nature, the great curiosity is that through the oscillations of desire impermanence can be experienced and realized. Desire keeps us chasing the moment that can never come, that moment of permanent satisfaction, and thus we experience impermanence tugging on our hearts. It is between love and loss we encounter the vivid reality of impermanence; it pervades all things, and so bestows meaning to life itself. How different life would be without love.

Most adults are repeatedly shocked by impermanence, try to bury or avoid emotions of disappointment and ignore the knowledge that desire can never be fully satisfied. Our illusion of control is enormously powerful and habit-forming; we truly imagine we can have it all and scurry around like squirrels frantically collecting nuts. We are deluded, but we are simultaneously the living expression of impermanence, each of us born embodying its basic wisdom deeply within us.

So it was I was chatting with our three-and-a-half year old granddaughter Isabelle the other day while driving. “Do you want to drive past your old house?” I asked, she and her family having recently moved across town. “Sure,” she said, then added, “I live in a new house, but now it’s old. Isn’t it funny how a new house gets old?”

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