So.
What would we be leading?
Or.
Who would we be following?

Or, or … if the answers to those questions are, and they are: leading Nothing at all, and following No One ever …

Then what exactly is it that we will be … getting the hell out of the way Of?

The answer is simple and complicated at the same time.

It’s the System, the Machine, that which the poet Alan Ginsberg personified as the capitalist god of child sacrifice, named Moloch–a name which Marx before him used simply as a synonym for money itself; a name cribbed from Leviticus, eighteen, verse twenty-one.

In raging political speech I have often called it The Empire, the ugly satanic thing that the noble Revolution of 1776 so quickly turned into.

***

Maybe call it the Avatar of Greed, of Overconsumption. Within the official borders of the Empire, “5% of the world’s population (are) consuming 30% of the world’s resources, and creating 30% of the world’s waste.” (cite).

There are a lot of ways to say the same thing:

World’s wealthiest 16 percent uses 80 percent of natural resources, 1999.

I don’t care too much which exact numbers we pick, or whether you want to focus on all The Wealthiest or just the five percent of us within the US. The point is that in the end, “we” care much more about exploiting-out way more than our fair share, and “we” will find a nice shiny way to justify killing anyone who objects, even if that involves literally sacrificing Iraqi children (for example) by the thousands to the Moloch “we” worship, and then killing Julian Assange for good measure, for making us see what we’ve done, like a prophet of old.

You can talk to me all day about spreading democracy, or helping some subset of the exploited to Fight For Their Liberty, or bestowing our precious freedoms upon the less fortunate from the barrel of a gun or a cash-filled briefcase. I’ll see your lips moving, with skill and talent and erudition, but to me, with regrets–it will always just look like you’re using them to expertly pull up foul seed from the ballsac of Moloch.

They’ve lied to us consistently from the time we were too young to know any better, but repeating the lies ourselves again now, telling them to our children, just perpetuates the tragedy and the trauma.

They’ve told us that staying on the straight and narrow, and being smart and working hard, means that we deserve to burn up 300 times more resources than a poor dumb fuck who God chose to fling into Ethiopia instead of Napa or Sonoma or Marin.

Our dedication to the Machine means that of course we are very much entitled to jump on a plane, or a cruise ship, a couple of times a year and spend a vacation among some other overconsuming elites, or maybe, for a change, among the ones our very way of life necessarily exploits, should we be partial to slumming it once in a while.

There’s more. That same nation of five percent also holds within its (increasingly for-profit) jail cells twenty-five percent of all the world’s prisoners. As the truths we hold self-evident become harder and harder to ignore, our own children go nuts and our old people commit suicide at unprecedented rates. Every other person you meet is on something to try to cope with the contradictions, be it a prescribed head medication, or a surreptitiously obtained illicit substance, or just a bottle of firewater pulled by the quart everyday from the shelf of a convenience store.

Half of your fellow Americans have given up on ‘democracy’ and don’t vote. Of the ones that still do, half of those hate everything you claim to stand for, even though in the eyes of the world you stand for exactly the same fucking thing.

Will you cluck disapprovingly at them all? Will you pity them? Will you take it upon yourself to educate them? Will you instruct them each to straighten up, and fly right, and improve their broken characters? Will you quietly and proudly feel yourself to be their betters?

Will you tell them all to pull themselves together? Will you lecture them about bootstraps?

Will you … lead them?

Will you follow?

Good luck, with all that.

***

But I can’t get on board with you, not for any of it.

I can’t lead them, down some false dreamy garden path. I’m not willing, probably not even able, anymore, to be a follower, of the sick religion of lies and hypocrisy that underlies the whole Enterprise.

I murmur to myself, like a drunkard, like a fool: “Get the hell out of the way … “, first in the harsh, alien, stentorian voice of a blimp Commander, and then repeating it, in something that sounds more and more like my own hushed, cracked whisper in the dark.

I wake, to sleep, and take my waking slow.

With a shiver I remember the words of some other greenish freak from forty years ago.

“You can’t throw it Away, vairtere. Because there is no such place, as ‘away’, you see.”

Well, that’s true. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

Another voice comes, singing:

They will tell you: You can’t sleep alone in a strange place. You will believe them.

Then they’ll tell you: You can’t sleep, with somebody else.

The contradictions and the lies will give you The Fear, a deep, gnawing spiritual fear, and no matter how pretty and perfect your dining room may be, it will never serve very effectively as an antidote.

You resolve the tension by vowing to sleep–In your own space. To make it all okay, To wake up. With yourself.

But where? is that space? and which master owns the land it sits on, and how will you serve him, in order to have the illusion of calling it your own?

Please, listen to me.

When I say. This question, that question, it isn’t cynicism. I mean it.

I understand all about what I must do. What I must do is: Get. The hell. Out of the way.

Even if I don’t, and I don’t, know how, or even where Out Of The Way even is, much less how to get there.

Here, anyway, is a miracle that happened.

Understanding what I must do, but not knowing how to do it, has given me a Purpose, a Work that is not a job.

The Work is figuring out where Away is. The Work is figuring out How. How to get. How to get the hell. How to get the hell

Out. Of the Way.

The Work warms me, on a cold and cloudy night in the mountains I have learned to love.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.