David Weiss is a Los Angeles-based freelancer who grew up in Oak Park. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the LA Herald Examiner and Men's Journal and co-founded the band Was (Not Was). His father, the late Rube Weiss, was Santa Claus in the Hudson's Thanksgiving Parade.
By David Weiss
“Heaven is five degrees cooler than Hell/ Not fit for beast nor man/ It’s Hell with an electric fan.”
The words above are from a festering pile of a thousand unfinished songs and miscellaneous doggerel that have littered my life for decades now. This unhummable ditty – Five Degrees Cooler Than Hell -- followed hard on the heels of a slight exposure to the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in college. I was no scholar of German idealism, but had stumbled upon his dialectical “thesis-antithesis-synthesis" soft-shoe, like every cursory student of Marx and Engels.
G.W.F. Hegel (Wikicommons)
I did briefly try to crack the man’s super-tome, The Phenomenology of Spirit, which resulted in the sheerest frustration – like trying to scale Everest in bedroom slippers. You gots to know your Plato to get your Hegel, so count me out there as well. I was a bigger fan of the Three Scrooges -- Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles – the unacknowledged OG’s whose lifestyles of the rich and matricidal were twice as incendiary as punk and hip-hop put together. My main man Friedrich Nietzsche preferred Greek tragedy to Greek philosophy, which was good enough for me.
But here’s what a simple-minded amateur like yours truly was able to glean from a glancing brush with German idealism: according to Plato and his faithful disciple Georgie Hegel, nothing in this world exists in its pure or “ideal” state. Down here on this accursed yet beautiful planet, there is no democracy per se, only varying degrees of un-democracy. Same with love – the only reason such a roseate concept exists is by butting heads with un-love in all of its soul-shredding power.
Plug in the ideal concept of your choice! Happiness is no such thing, not among beasts but recently graduated from chest-pounding aggression and the law of the jungle. Considered in such a reductive light, it’s little wonder the world is ever-riven by conflict and bloodshed. Peace too is an absolute we only understand by its relative absence. There has never been, nor will there be, a perfect peace – unless that fearsome A.I. Guy in the Sky teams up with some beneficent aliens to cure us of our ills, fulfill all our dreams and material desires. I’d like to live to see the day but ain’t holding my breath.
As for the competing patriarchal deities that have been the handmaiden to so much division and death for two millennia, even old God His Damn Self is but an abstract concept. Again, we see so much ungodly behavior in this WWF match we call life on earth, we concocted a mythological Perfect Guy to hang our dreams on and allay our perennial suffering. Instead of just swallowing the fact that life is brief, brutish and signifies nothing, our ancestors invented an Eye-In-The-Sky savior promising succor and salvation. Whew, and I thought we were alone in a vast and senseless cosmos! I feel so much better now...
But living without hope of a glorious final act doesn’t daunt me one bit. In fact, it’s by having no expectation of perfection in this cozy corner of the solar system that gives me comfort whilst others are rending their robes. Remember, I’m a proud Platonist/Hegelian negativist. Knowing beforehand that 100% pure democracy or communism don’t actually exist, I am perfectly “happy” (okay, not technically) living in an age of dark shadows and dashed ideals. Nowadays, everyone is all-of-a-sudden concerned about our precious, disappearing democracy, and for good reason -- it’s been eroding steadily here in America the Beautiful for half-a-century or more in plain sight (not to mention a little hiccup called slavery that spoils the whole fairy tale from the get-go).
President Bush and VP Cheney (Government photo)
Another senseless segue, if you please! According to one astute economist critical of the Bush-Cheney “nation-building” era, you can’t just transplant democracy into, say, Iraq prior to the establishment of a robust middle class, which is far harder to import given our perennial support of thieving and murderous tyrants in the resources-rich third world. Judged by similar standards, the eroding middle class in this age of financial chicanery and widening income disparity is the agent that initiated democracy’s decay in the good old USA. We too need the rich soil of a fat middle class to make sure we don’t go down in insurrectionary flames. Money is the root of all good as well as evil -- who knew?
Capital-D Democracy my ass, let’s just make sure going forward that dollars and donuts aren’t scarcer than diamonds for the average working Jane and Joe. Good luck with that when corporate CEO’s are surreally compensated, while their workers paw packages of ten-buck chicken legs that used to go for five. Say, wasn’t Joltin’ Joe Biden going to chase down the Covid-era supermarket magnates and the food industry for price-gouging us into near-starvation, or being forced to ingest cheaper but more toxic processed foods (a kind of passive, slo-mo genocide when you think of it)? Not to mention the rapacious oil companies. Record profits for fat cats, cat food for the rest of us.
Donald Trump in Detroit (Deadline Detroit file photo)
Mind you, my comfort with imperfection in this non-paradise we inhabit does not go quietly in the face of another four years of P.T. Trumpum, the poster-child for entropy and decay in our once proud system. But don’t blame the dimwitted messenger alone! Donald is what I like to call a stand-up tragedian, a man of limited principle but unbridled power, and the perfectly obedient plaything of cynical and crooked oligarchs and their paid-for chattel in the legislature and the Supreme Court. All owe their existence to cold-hearted capital, not the will or well-being of the people. Citizens United made sure of that, and its mega-rich authors were first in line when the manipulable Slumlord Billionaire was nominated and then elected. A match made in heaven/hell, to milk the metaphor.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh
Unindicted tax thief Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah joined armchair tyrant Steve Bannon and obsequious footmen like Stephen Miller and William Barr, who was part of George W. Bush’s legal brain-trust along with future Justices Kavanagh and Alito. That was the trout-pond that began to hatch the noxious notion of the Imperial Presidency, and then they were lucky enough to find a psychopathic cipher/game show host willing to front their self-interested, right-wing shell game.
Riddle the system with unbridled money (thanks again, Citizens United) and then find a charismatic, amoral buffoon to sell their cynical goods, blaming immigrants and “others” for the end of America-as-we-knew-it.
Do I digress? That assumes I had a point to begin with, wherefrom I diverged. I began by quoting myself about living with diminished expectations. Heaven and hell, or so my facile argument goes, are neither as habitable nor horrible as they are cracked up to be.
Heaven isn’t all angels and ambrosia, and Hell – while hot as you-know-what – isn’t a sulfurous torture-chamber for unredeemed souls. And we poor mortals live in the perfect, Euclidean midpoint between the two – life has its moments of grace, dignity and beauty, and at the same time is home to slaughter, genocide and techno-tyranny, which I suppose is what you might call hell on earth if you’re in a disagreeable mood.
Hades don’t scare me none after what this po’boy has seen on terra firma! Sign me up for an eternal visit, single-occupancy, with a view of the River Styx if available. Like I say, I’m real easy to please...
