Alienated and Alone

 

"Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone."

               --D.H. Lawrence, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

Till Human voices wake us and we drown.

                 --T.S. Eliot, Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Yesterday, it rained and snowed in mid April. Apart from walks through the town, Mad Dog, spent the day mostly alone. There was a brief visit to a post surgical neighbor, but mostly he was alone with his dog, who never says much. 

The neighbor had the TV going. Mad Dog has been struck, when phoning people in the middle of the day, how often he can hear the sound of the TV in the background.

Often the TV is playing FOX News.

Mad Dog spent most of the day reading, doing household chores. He did not play music, although he has tons in various formats. He was okay with silence and the snoring of his dog.

For one hour, he listened to "The PBS News Hour," where old friends, Judy Woodruff, David Brooks, and the same crew which has been on for years spoke their one way conversations to him.

He has become disappointed with Ms. Woodruff, who, as she has aged, has drifted into drippy maudlin reflexes, often following a story with, "How heartbreaking" or "We are so sorry about that," or some other expression of sympathy or regret at the news of the violent, tumultuous world she finds so regrettable.

She has also stopped challenging people about things Mad Dog wants her to challenge. David Brooks said Americans should not leave Afghanistan because when they did, the Taliban would take over and deny schools to girls and return women to the 13th century, forbid music and generally be nasty and violent. Ms. Woodruff clucked in sympathy, but never asked, "But why should American men and women die or spend years in that God forsaken place to protect Afghan women? If Afghanistan, why not Saudi Arabia, or all those parts of Africa where Boco Haram frequently attacks schools and carts off girls?"

The day before, Mad Dog had signed in to a zoom call among Democrats where a fired up Democrat mentioned a Republican bill in the state legislature which would require all New Hampshire university students to pass the same citizenship test which immigrants have to pass. This struck Mad Dog as an interesting idea, and he had just sparred with the Twitter crowd about the idea that new immigrants had to pass a test about the U.S. Constitution and other features of the United States government which some nameless bureaucrats had deemed essential knowledge for anyone who wants to call himself or herself a U.S. Citizen. Mad Dog had noted that test is waved if you are born in the U.S. with the consequence that some voters have no clue there are three branches to the government or what they do.

When Mad Dog challenged his fellow Democrat asking why she objected to such an educational standard she was clearly surprised to be challenged but she responded that there are lots of foreign students at UNH for whom a requirement to know the workings of the U.S. system are irrelevant. Okay, Mad Dog agreed, then exempt them.

But why not require such a test for all New Hampshire high school graduates? New York and Massachusetts require passing a test to graduate high school, although who knows what questions are on those tests? Likely Mad Dog would be appalled to learn what those questions which pose the hurdle to the rest of life would be. But for Mad Dog, any American high school graduate should know there are three branches of government on the federal level and should have some vague idea what those three branches do differently and what "checks and balances" means and why they exist. And, oh, yes, that there is a Constitution and a Bill of Rights and why and what these are.

The master of ceremonies interjected to calm the shocked woman who had inveighed against this Republican bill, who may have seen the bill as something akin to those Jim Crow travesties of "citizenship tests" which only Black voters had to pass, and nobody Black was ever allowed to pass, so their right to vote was denied in a cynical charade of only allowing "qualified" voters to vote. We have to say she "may have seen" because she never raised that objection. The master of ceremonies (stage manager) of our town Dem meeting assured the woman, "Oh, Mad Dog does that to people. Don't take it personally."

So there we have it, people who play well with others and the other type of person, the Mad Dog type, who is best left to silent solitude to contemplate whether interaction with people is a blessing or a curse. He does that to people. He challenges them, which in a fraternity, is not what is expected. We are all friends here, which means agreeing all the time, not arguing. 

One of Mad Dog's most important experiences as an eight year old was reading Robinson Crusoe, which got him imagining life alone on an island. The wonderful Tom Hanks movie, "Cast Away" addressed the same problem. Are people not social creatures, pack animals?

For Hanks, the solution was to create a person surrogate, which he fashioned using a coconut for a head. Anything, any image that looked halfway human helped with the sense of isolation.

Lady Chatterley, who found English society, at least the niche she occupied, so oppressive yearned for solitude, for isolation from the people who surrounded her. She felt isolated in the presence of people, something we call now "alienation."  For Sartre, "hell is other people" and Lady Chatterley would agree. But for the cast away, the absence of other people is hell.

Mad Dog concludes, tentatively, the solution is other people are necessary, but it may be necessary to limit their expression. For those folks who Mad Dog speaks with on the phone, those FOX News listeners, the images on a screen serve the same purpose as Hanks' coconut headed surrogate. It is after all "FOX and friends." Those people in the bright colors and bright smiles are surrogate friends, doesn't matter what they are saying, really, as long as they resemble something human. Human voices wake us. And in the case of FOX listeners, drown.

And maybe that's the real charm and utility of TV friends. They do not really interact with you; they are just filling a void.