EXPERIENCE IN A BUBBLE

We are so unmoored because we have never experienced this before.  Experience is how the reality of the existing world outside of our skins gets through to the inside of our skins.  Experience is how we learn to deal with what happens, but what if it’s never happened before?  We say critically that someone lives “in a bubble” when their experience is so circumscribed that they can hardly understand what is happening in the larger world, even if it’s happening to them.

Experience means opening the senses to all the information that is new, some of it striking and immediate like getting burned and some of it subtle, almost imperceptible.  And there can be the brief experience that is death, which is not useful because it can’t be perceived or analyzed.  The person who experiences death takes the event with them so we puzzle and premise endlessly over what it’s like and what really happened to what we called that person.

This pandemic, this fire season, this climate realignment, and this president are outside our experience, so we don’t know what to actually do.  But in the case of President Trump, he was actually experienced and known by people in Manhattan or who worked with him.  People in Manhattan always knew him as Mafia, a thug, the guy who had the monopoly on concrete and therefore skyscraper construction.  Dozens of women were almost randomly assaulted by him.  Now we get reports from generals and the Trump family that they always knew what he was like: stupid, selfish, dominating, grandiose, too empty to ever be filled.  Why didn’t that come out at election?  

I talk about inskin/outskin because it is a prompt to escape from psychological narcissism, an emotional structure skin that prevents letting the world outside getting into people and making them realize their fantasies, but it is also a problem in terms of what is getting out to the world.  The criminal understructure of this country has the capacity to hide in its limitations via secrecy, its ability to control the media, and its appeal to those who don’t like the reality they are in, and think they might have an advantage if they cut corners.

There is a version of what’s happening to our country that is about the FBI pursuit of mafias which we now read are controlled by an uber-mafia in Russia where it is conflated with the government of the country, so that it has what it expects to be total control over what is known by the people inside and what information escapes to the larger world.  But the FBI has so much strategic reliance on the secrecy of what they know and are willing to let us know that Comey had to keep saying,  “I can’t tell you that.  It’s classified.  Too many important things rely on it.”  Trump was protected by the FBI strategy of not spooking the spooks on the other side.

Even Trump didn’t really know what was going on.  He didn’t expect to be elected and didn’t know what it meant or even what the job of President was.  He just knew it was important, the MOST in the WORLD we have ever KNOW and can hardly BELIEVE.  It’s all a HOAX, a RUSE, it will all GO AWAY like a MIRACLE.  He’s in a one-person bubble.

Putin is also in a bubble, a time bubble that won’t let him see that times have changed.  If he saw the real world, his bubble would pop.  The internet means that younger Russian people can see through the dogma-skin that keeps the people in place.  China has better luck.  But it’s as though the WWII use of Radio Free Europe to get people to see America has been put on steroids by the internet, even more than with television which is at least controlled by the skin of capitalism.  Once people realize through the internet that it is possible to base the world on other things than capitalism, merchandizing, laundered money, the only way to control them is violence.

Bubbles prevent variation and options.  For some people this is the point.  When I came back to Valier I noticed that people were always explaining things to me, though I didn’t agree.  It comes partly from farming and ranching where new employees need to be instructed about the management of the land and animals.  One dark night I walked out with a rancher to check his pregnant cows.  One had given birth and the calf’s umbilical cord was dangling.  The rancher went to a certain fence post.  At the foot of it was a bottle of iodine which he carried over to dab the end of the cord.  “Always keep the iodine at the foot of the same fencepost so you can find it in the dark,” he said, though I would never be his cowhand.

Older women would stop me as I walked to the post office and suggest how to dress better, so I’d look respectable.  They weren't being snarky -- they thought I didn't know but would want to fit in.  Since one of my economies was to just wear what I already had and since when I discovered that I had diabetes I lost forty pounds, they worried that I didn’t look “proper.”  Too baggy.  This might mean that I wouldn’t behave properly.  Prosperity and propriety go hand in hand for this small town, ideas arriving with the Belgian settler who stick together.  They thought success meant conformity to those who were succeeding already.  I was not about to tell them I didn’t have much money.  They didn't want poor people to stay.

Comprehending that Trump behaves as he does in spite of his vast fortune means believing that his television image is all fake.  He has no real money — it’s all debt — and has no sense of propriety or even an awareness of sin and murder.  We see it from the outside.  His bubble is very small and empty.  But people here believe that his bubble unaccountably exists.  Somewhere else.

Lately news people have become sensitive about offending viewers and warn us not to look at the people they show dying, children they show washed up drowned on beaches, and all the other things that blow our bubbles to shreds.  It would be dangerous to depart from reality this way except that it makes a lot of people just more anxious to know, to see, to figure it all out.  Other people are saying that politics is unaccountable, out of reach, corrupt, and none of their business.

Then the techies go the other way and edit and doctor everything to be far more extraordinary, too extreme for even the naive to believe, pitching escape from reality as the only alternative to suffering through it.  Exaggerating the exaggeration until they show Trump chanting “billions,billions,
billions,billions,billions” until the word loses its meaning.  Or, snarling, “China,China,China,China,China”  Don’t think, don’t know, get in a crowd and chant.  Maybe when the lemmings run over the cliffs into the sea, they chant “you’re fired!”

It’s laughter that gets through skins.  But sometimes it’s not funny at all.