What I Saw In and Out of the Trenches
by Jody Allen Gomez
As the author of our current poll, which asked what philosophical skeletons we have in our closets, I thought it only proper that I weigh in with my own story. The poll, more than anything, is about our individual journeys and the wars (cultural and otherwise) we had to fight to get here. As with Ed Thompson in his most recent article, what I had originally begun as a post to the thread soon became, in my mind, an article submission. Funny what a couple of glasses of a good Crianza can do for one's perception. So here are my unadulterated thoughts from that initial post ... my reminiscences of the past, and the vision that the poll itself elicited.
When I was perhaps nine or ten and growing up in a Southern Baptist family, I began to suspect that something was amiss. I surveyed the religious surroundings and I watched the people I loved most sing about how grace had “saved a wretch like me.” Despite my having disobeyed my mother the day before, I knew I was no wretch, and I had the ten-year-old equivalent of the epiphany, “Oh shit.” I did not believe the song, the pastor, or the Bible I held in my lap, but yet I did believe. I found myself caught in a state that would make quantum physics proud; I knew that I did not believe what those around me believed, but at the same time, I believed I would be banished to hell for doing so! To believe or not to believe was a question that my young mind could not grasp, so the result was fear and a state of metaphysical and epistemological indeterminacy. I was sure I was going to hell, precisely because I did not believe in hell.
A couple of years passed, and in a fit of intellect that would make all good ARIans proud, I decided that quantum (or, in my case, religious) indeterminacy was bullshit, and I finally admitted that I did indeed believe that the position and direction of my life could be measured with precision, and that I was an atheist.
As it was, I went about my life in a small Southern town. I will not insult SOLOists by spelling out the details of that life, but suffice it to say, I was in desperate need of a kindred spirit. I found one, and his name was Friedrich Nietzsche. I devoured him, and by focusing only on his anti-Christian leanings, I inadvertently did justice to his belief that philosophy should not seek to be an all-encompassing system. His philosophy, however, was a complete system, and whether justified or not, it led me to others. These ‘others’ I picked up by seeing them lumped together with Nietzsche under the title of “existentialism.” As a result, my developing mind encountered the likes of Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, etc. I do not need to spell out what such philosophical poison can do to a young mind.
I began lamenting that life was without meaning. I had no heaven to look forward to, and what I failed to see at the time was that the reason for my reflective despair was that my life was heaven. I was an existentialist who enjoyed the hell out of life, and unfortunately I spent my time despairing its end, rather than celebrating its reality and its joys. By virtue of joy, I was melancholy.
All the while, my youth played itself out during the Reagan years. I remember the crime of a great man shot down by an evil thug. I remember seeing the Challenger tragedy and getting a sense from Reagan that, instead of giving up our mission to the stars, we should rather reach beyond the stars, and it would take a hero’s sense of value and achievement to do so. I remember the rising anger in Reagan as he listened to the loudspeakers in East Berlin try to drown out his message, and I remember the culmination of that anger as he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear! down! this! wall!” I remember a lone man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square. These are are the things I remember. I can hardly remember the plot of Nausea, The Stranger, or Fear and Trembling. What was destructive to my spirit was ephemeral; what was significant, I still remember. My philosophy had been hijacked, but fortunately, my spirit had not ... and though it would take a few more years, in the end I tore down that wall.
For a while I lived my life as a libertarian, but without the philosophical underpinnings to moor my philosophy to something concrete, with no contradictions. At the age of 29 I discovered Ayn Rand and a novel called Atlas Shrugged. At the age of 29 I discovered that contradictions existed only by virtue of faulty premises. At the age of 29, I discovered what could be and what ought to be. At my present age of 33, I try each day to live my life as a glass raised to what man is capable of, rather than as a downward glance cast at the false premise of futility.
I would now shudder at the thought of spending my time in a Parisian coffeehouse with Sartre. Give me Galt's Gulch (though perhaps on a tropical island with bikini-clad beauties). So it is with this reminiscence that I hope you all will be glad that you did not have the opportunity to shoot, if not my commie ass, at least my putrid-philosophical ass.
As I make a toast to those of you who made it through the mire, and to those of you who never had to endure it, I come to the vision part of this article. I had been busily planning my next ... ahem ... witty poll, and in doing so I was reflecting upon this poll and what came from it. As I look back over your responses, the one thing that is conspicuously missing is the one thing that is present in all the other discussions I have been a part of since joining: divisive and bitter disputes.
Does that mean that KASS is missing? No, though some were a bit timid in describing their war stories, there was KASS in each triumph and each feat of endurance. Even amongst ourselves, there will always be wars to be waged, because this is not a closed philosophy. New contexts will always arise, and there will always be some who fall by the wayside, but the dead stink up the place, so let’s remove them. There should also always be times when we celebrate our common victories and raise a glass to the defeat of common enemies.
So I have to say I am pleased with the results of this poll, because we celebrated our victorious journeys along the path to life as it is meant to be lived. That being said, in the immortal words of Monty Python’s dismembered knight -- “Have at you!”
KASS!
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