I Don't Want to Buy What You Are Selling

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 31, 2005)

You’ve got to reach a state of mind in which you don’t want it or need it. – William S. Burroughs II, beat writer and heroin addict, in a 1965 interview with Conrad Knickerbocker for the Paris Review

Burroughs, writer and addict, once attributed his longevity to his “rebirth” every time he kicked a habit. Each “cure” was a rejuvenation of mind and body, he said, even though he always relapsed and was on methadone when he died at the age of 83 in 1997. Burroughs knew way more about addiction than I ever will, but I know enough to have experienced the addict’s rebirth.

I’ve recently stopped smoking, or nearly so. I’ll smoke the last cigarette of my last pack when I’ve finished this column. It’s been a 20-year habit. Other smokers will know how hard it is to quit. It’s easy to give up everything except the cigarette with morning coffee, the happy hour smokes after work, the drag that assists a good bowel movement. At first, I was going to smoke only to keep alert during long hours working in the oil field in my 20s. Then I was going to quit at 30, next at 40. What finally worked was having a son and not wanting him growing up with a father puffing cancer sticks and later wheezing on oxygen tanks.

During the process of quitting, the similarity of all addictions -- cigarettes, booze, drugs, love, gadgetry, religion – struck me again. “There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved,” Burroughs told Knickerbocker in 1965.

Any addiction, any habit overdone, is a way of turning off the world, tuning it out, so that pain can’t get in. The habit is just something that replaces thinking and feeling, even if it doesn’t actually cause numbness in itself. When the habit is gone, the ignored and evaded sensations come rushing back on newly awakened nerves. And it doesn’t really matter if it was a heroin addiction or an unhealthy, consuming obsession with exercise.

Addicts, in the best cases, harm only themselves. But there is almost always some form of “secondhand smoke” that threatens the non-addicted as well. Burroughs’s example was “policemen … addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk I call it – rightness; they’re right, right, right – and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms.”

(That last quote is more or less a gift to anyone who will enjoy seeing parallels between President Bush’s administration and Burroughs’s cops.)

The secondhand irritant I have in mind are people who call me on the phone, knock on my gate, or stop me in the street, to try and sell some product or philosophy that promises to solve all my problems. Some salespeople are just salespeople; others are true believers out to convert the heathen to a therapy, religion, or multi-level marketing program offering unending wealth and unlimited happiness. And it is the promise of unending happiness – at least in this world -- that I reject. Material goods cannot bring it; God, gods, or mantras cannot bestow it; other people -- no matter how loving or giving they might be -- cannot provide it. These things may be able to bring momentary happiness or enjoyment; they cannot guarantee it forever and always.

The first cigarette of the day can be enjoyable, but the 20th tastes of the bottom of the ashtray, especially if it’s been preceded by 20 years of 20-cigarette days. And that first “cigarette” can be almost anything – some chemical high, a religious experience, an initial flush of physical and mental attraction. The danger is in the emotional investment that the experience can always be repeated with the same result. The hunger for the initial high always increases, the payout always decreases. And it’s difficult to break away, because one loses what’s already been put in, like a gambler who can’t stop feeding quarters into a slot machine hoping for the jackpot that will recoup all losses. It’s difficult to admit that one has been a fool for so long, that the payout is never coming, that unending bliss and peace are only the smoke dreams of con artists, advertising executives, and faux gurus.

Let’s make a deal: I’ll quit smoking and no longer subject you to my secondhand smoke; you no longer subject me to the blowback from your own obsessions. Whatever you are selling – a better mousetrap, a new religion, a new political party, a new life – don’t call me on the phone, don’t knock on my gate, don’t stop me in the street. I don’t want it. I don’t need it.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Bali, Oklahoma, and the Sweet Scent of Cows

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 17, 2005)

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain
And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
- Rodgers and Hammerstein

A few columns ago I wrote about people screwing up their faces when I tell them I lived in Singapore for nine years. They react the same way when they learn I’m from Oklahoma. It’s like they are examining me for clinging remnants of manure. Is it behind his ears? On the flip-flops that have replaced boots in concession to tropical climate? It must be somewhere on his person or attire, they seem to think. They assume I choose to live overseas to escape my birthplace, that I grew up with the desire to get out fast and forever.

Well, no. I was born in Oklahoma, and I’m proud of it. It’s where my people are buried; where my mother’s father worked his first job making leather harnesses for mule-drawn plow teams; where my father’s father traveled the state as a hardware company sales rep during the 1930s; where great aunts and great uncles farmed, horse traded, and carpentered to give their children a chance at something other than muscle labor and survival by country boy wits.

But I’m not writing just to defend pride of home and family. Most people have a place to which they are connected, even if only tenuously. New Yorkers and San Franciscans love their old city neighborhoods. Chicagoans love the windy city and the Cubs. Even residents of Cincinnati and Detroit must love something about their hometowns. People tend to love what they know, what is familiar. A woman I knew in Singapore was ecstatic at the opening of a Taco Bell outlet there. It reminded her of her favorite lunch place when she was in high school in California. I couldn’t understand her being nostalgic for a cookie-cutter fast food joint, but then she didn’t understand my love of truck stop diners and chicken-fried steaks the size of a plate.

I do understand the dislike of Singapore as the quintessential modern nanny state, where the citizens, it is thought, are only concerned with getting a Visa Gold Card, a white Mercedes, and the latest, smallest hand phone. I am perplexed, though, by people who’ve chosen the Bali expatriate lifestyle reacting to Oklahoma and Middle America with smirks and snide remarks. It’s as if agrarian society can be valued only when it is Asian and exotic, as if traditional culture is important only when the musical scale is dissonant to Western ears. Why should the pageantry of a temple procession be any more valued than the pageantry of small town rodeo? Or participation in the young people’s association of the village banjar be anymore important than membership in the Future Farmer’s of America?

Except for no ocean, lower rainfall, and a surplus of guns, a lot of America’s Midwest is similar to Bali. Oklahomans and others in American ‘fly-over’ country still have parades down Main Street. Most everyone goes to church on holy days. Everyone knows if it’s rained enough for the wheat and if the price of cattle is up or down. People help out family and friends; they try to maintain culture and tradition against encroachment by the modern world; they have a fondness for cows.

When people talk about the “wonderful world” of Balinese tradition and ceremony, I wonder if they recognize that same kind of beauty in the faded traditions and ceremony of their own home place. Maybe they feel that the village sense of connectedness and place has been lost in their own cultures, that their own places moved past redemption many Wal-marts, Starbucks, and mega-malls ago. Maybe this sense of loss is what sparks a desire in some people to protect and preserve Bali. It’s a laudable desire, although I’m not sure if efforts to “preserve” a culture at any point of its development can be anything but misguided. Culture doesn’t so much fade as it just becomes something new based on whatever preceded.

Several years ago in Oklahoma I went to a small town rodeo and was shocked when it was announced that the Girls’ Palomino Club was to do a precision horse riding routine to a Michael Jackson song. It just didn’t seem right. Jacko, even in one of his less whacko incarnations, didn’t seem to fit the atmosphere of bull riders, bronco busters, and barrel racers. But as the small town girls went through their riding routine, I could sense their pride at having found a way to connect what they knew to the larger national culture. Maybe they also thought they were being a bit scandalous and daring. It was Oklahoma, so they probably were.

Sitting in the stands, I tried to hide my enjoyment of the incongruity of it all. On reflection since then, I’ve realized that girls who can make horses moonwalk to “Beat It” don’t need much help from me. Now, when I visit my wife’s village, I see in the young people the same restless country kids I knew in Oklahoma. I can almost pick out who will be seduced by bright lights and big city and who will stay on the farm. I’d like to tell them all to stay within sight of paddy fields and the scent range of cows, but it wouldn’t do anymore good than telling Oklahoma teens never to leave Strang or Bowlegs. Country folk, anyway, in Bali, Oklahoma, or anywhere else, are capable of finding their own way. They don’t need help so much as they need to be respected and valued -- on both isle and prairie.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

The Moral of the Donut and Coffee Cup

(First published in Bali Advertise, August 3, 2005)

Topologically, a donut is equivalent to a coffee cup. – A mathematician’s observation

Normal people never confuse a morning donut with a cup of java. Mathematicians are not normal. They are seldom seen in the light of day before they are 30. They do funny things with numbers and squiggly lines. They are boring at parties and have bad haircuts. People don’t understand them and think only that mathematicians must be good at long division and their checkbooks must always balance when they remember to do them.

Topologists, a particularly odd species of mathematician, don’t bother with shape or distance. Their interest lies in sets of objects and the relationships between the objects and the objects of other sets. The only thing a topologist cares about a donut and a coffee cup (when thinking mathematically, not when having breakfast) is that they are solid and have holes through them – the donut hole and the hole in the coffee cup’s handle. It doesn’t matter that they don’t look anything alike; topologically, they can be considered an equivalent collection of “points” making up the solid part around a hole.

The mathematical assumptions of topology make it possible to treat a donut and a cup as the same thing. A change in the “standard” assumptions can also alter familiar rules. Mathematical assumptions can make a difference whether 2+2=4 or 2+2=0, for instance. It is only a matter of choosing the best system for a specific situation. Two plus two equals four is true in the system most often used, the agreed system of banks, accountants, and traffic cops.

If, however, I needed a mathematical system restricted to describing a flywheel moving in quarter turns, then I would choose the less familiar. Two quarter turns and the wheel has gone half way around; another two quarter turns and the wheel is back at the starting point. Thus, 2+2=0 models the flywheel’s movement, and nothing more complex is needed. As strange as the equation looks, it isn’t an abstract mathematical game – just don’t use it when figuring your bank balance.

Many mathematical systems would be less comprehensible. We don’t experience life as nuclear particles, for which the mathematics of quantum physics applies. Assumptions – mathematical, philosophical, and cultural -- make the difference in what is seen as odd and what is considered normal. This truth is often overlooked. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when people confront something that doesn’t add up.

“He sees a coffee cup and a donut as the same thing? What are his assumptions?” isn’t the usual response. “Let me have some of what he’s smoking,” is more like it.

Differing assumptions are behind the culture shock all travelers and foreign residents have to deal with at one time or another. A bigger problem occurs when people who once shared a set of assumptions find that some members of the group have forsaken some of the assumptions or taken up others. It is an inevitable occurrence for a tribe or nation formed by the circumstances of a particular time and place. For a few generations, the original assumptions hold the grouping together. But as the descendants of the original group meet new challenges and face new dangers, the assumptions change. Some are dropped, others are added, and the subtractions and additions aren’t always accepted universally by the whole. Eventually, every intra-group conflict can be reduced to an argument over what the basic assumptions should be.

That’s America now, with people unable to agree on society’s fundamental axioms and every major news story, from the death of Terri Schiavo to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the nominations of Supreme Court judges, sending the American press and people into paroxysms of shrillness. Ostensibly, the debates are about a specific “crisis.” They are in reality another battle over the fundamental principles that are supposed to hold America together. And the problem isn’t restricted to America alone: within America, and between America and the countries of Western Europe, too, the assumptions have become so diffuse that they can support no coherent intellectual agreement. No one is getting the same answer for 2+2 anymore.

Some form of cultural topology could be the solution. A less rigid set of principles would allow some people to see an ideological donut and some a doctrinal coffee cup amid general acceptance that they are much the same thing. The only other eventual option is to start nuking any bastards – friends, enemies, countrymen, or foreigners -- who get any answer besides our four for our two plus two.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi