The Dispossessed Vendetta Club

Right now I'm amped up on rebellious anarchy and dissatisfaction. Actually, I've been feeling this way for a few weeks now.

First I read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin.

The plot follows a guy named Shevek, but bounces between his younger and older self. The younger self lives in a sort of poor socialist commune. The older self is visiting a wealthy capitalist society. LeGuin's ability to present the excesses of Western society through the perspective of this naive outsider, Shevek, is impressive.

He was surrounded on all sides by the smiles of the rich. - Page 156

LeGuin doesn't indulge in simplistic utopian scolding. Both societies suffer from all the realistic failings inherent in human societies.

Then there are the breathtaking passages:

If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. - Page 153-154

... which segues neatly into the book I'm re-reading now, Fight Club, which, along with its many impressive credentials, could serve as a workshop for writers who need to write punchy short stories with gripping openers. It begins:

Tyler got me a job as a waiter, then Tyler is sticking a gun in my mouth and telling me that the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

Fucking phenomenal.

Between these two books I read the graphic novel V for Vendetta. My intellectual diet went:
1. The Dispossessed - class conflict, the nature of greed and authority, control, revolution.
2. V for Vendetta - Fascism, revolution, rage against complacency.
3. Fight Club - Rage, consumerism, transcendence through self-destruction (both personal and societal self-destruction).

I also read the New York Times headlines daily. Keeping up with the sins of our government and society could be a full time job:

And what do I do about it? Nothing. Because I'm comfortable and it's easy to do nothing.

I run to work occasionally to save a little gas, but I don't do it everyday, though I could. I have free time when I could be standing on street corners with a sign supporting a constitutional amendment banning rider legislation, but I don't.

Where is the breaking point? When will I, and you, and everybody else get serious about fixing our society? Well, if there was a draft today, there would be protests flooding the streets tomorrow, but Washington's not stupid enough to make that mistake again. No, they'd rather bribe us with economic stimulus packages, a few hundred bucks in your bank account. They'd rather repeal the gas tax for a few months even though we've got record debt. And the sad part is, they don't even need to do that. We're so passive. We've got so much to lose. We're comfortable. I'm comfortable and cowardly.

Addendum

Shortly after I posted the above, I read this article (Who will tell the people) by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. Friedman expresses my sentiments perfectly when he writes:

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, "no one can touch us."

Addendum 2

I had to add another addendum to link to this NY Times article about a family that is giving away all their possessions. I sympathize with how they feel, but our choices aren't everything or nothing, and not everyone can live the way they have chosen to. Their blog can be found at cagefreefamily.com.