Walter Mosley (4 page)

The rich live by a different set of rules than most of the rest of us. The law usually treats them differently. The culture aggrandizes them simply because almost everyone else wants to have what they have.

Most people believe that the rich are the top of the food chain in modern capitalism. They have millions in the bank and can afford the best of everything.

This is almost the truth, but not quite.

There's an excellent TV cartoon show called
Futurama
. Its conceit is that a slacker from our age gets frozen and wakes up a thousand years in the future. The show also features a recurring character named The Honorable Judge Whitey. Once, when a case was brought before the judge, the accused was blamed for stealing some money. The judge was baffled for a moment and then said,
Ah, yes, money—that's what poor people use to get what they need to live
. I have never heard a better critique of the organization of modern capitalism. If you can count your money you might be rich, but your fortune doesn't hold a candle to the truly wealthy.

Wealthy individuals and corporations own the earth itself. Their property extends from horizon to horizon. You can't put a dollar value on their holdings because they fix the value of the dollar. The truly wealthy do not have a fixed worth. Their value is the blood in your veins and the invisible cell-phone waves
rolling through the sky. They own, or control, the air we breathe and the water we drink. The wealthy own everything we need to survive.

 

This brings the definition of
class
full circle.

It is important for us to appreciate the structure of wealth in our world and to see ourselves, and others, in the places where we exist.

Some of the people reading this book belong to the upper classes. There might be one or two of the truly wealthy reading these words. But it's mostly working-class people who have this book in their hands—mostly because the vast majority of Americans are in the working class or lower.

In my opinion this truth should be self-evident. But the hidden truth is that many working-class people consider themselves middle class. This is a lie that has been foisted upon most Americans so that they will identify with the wealthy (masters) and not with the poor (wage slaves).

I'm middle class if I have a white collar and a burgundy tie. I'm middle class if I make over fifty thousand dollars a year. I'm middle class if my bank officer will loan me the money for a million-dollar house. I'm middle class if I read the
Wall Street Journal
. I'm middle class if all my friends say that's what they are.

What separates the working class from the middle class? A portfolio. If a middle-class person loses her job, her investment portfolio will pay her bills, her mortgage, her child's berth at Yale, her annual charities, and for her favorite restaurants and theater club season tickets for a year or a little more.

If a working-class person loses her job, her lifestyle will change drastically in two to four weeks. Debt will rise like a tsunami and all the frills that she bought on credit will wash away.

We have to be aware of these categories because that's the only way we can identify with each other and come together in political solidarity. The gates we run into are fencing us out, not protecting us. The politicians we vote for know our net worth better than we do. And net worth, the bottom line, is our most important political value.

Together
we
own the earth. Pretending that we are a part of the class above (or working toward being members of the class above) relinquishes our value to the powers that be.

By defining our class we can accurately see ourselves on the side where we exist without falling prey to the lies of bankers, politicians, and ad men. The wealthy control absolutely everything but We the People are the true custodians of Earth.

I
have been in psychotherapy for well over twenty years. I started when I was in my early thirties and thoroughly lost. I had made it through college and worked my way up as a computer programmer but still I had that nagging feeling that I was in the slow lane in a perpetual interstate traffic jam.

I got a good recommendation for a well-known master-therapist and spent a week thinking of what I would say to him. After all, what excuse did I, a mere worker, have for sitting before such a distinguished and important man?

I knew that I was unhappy but there was no hook to hang my melancholy from, no phrase that accurately defined my malaise. I didn't think I was depressed, obsessive, or neurotic. I wasn't a substance abuser as I had given up tobacco and alcohol a decade before. I didn't know why I felt so lost. Maybe there was something very wrong with me. Maybe I was teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown and didn't know it.

But
maybe
doesn't make a baby and
I don't know
doesn't tell you why you are here. So I sat me down and tried to come up with a picture that accurately defined who I was in the world, how I saw myself, and how I was slipping backward even while everyone else seemed to be moving ahead.

I came up with the following image:

I'm not sure how the head psychotherapist interpreted my explanation but he handed me over to one of his younger associates, with whom I have been working ever since.

This experience, this investigation of unconscious motivations for conscious acts, elated me. For the first time in my life, my life was the subject rather than how that life fit into the structures of a seemingly unreachable and capricious world.

Over time my relationship with the therapist has shifted. It started out with my trying to decipher emotional issues in an almost abstract vacuum. I saw myself and my world as I had been conditioned, and it took some time for me to understand about the untruths that I swallowed whole and swore by. But as the years have passed I have begun to use the time in therapy to figure out where I stand in my art, my personal relationships, my career, my political work, and in relation to the culture in general.

For me this experience has been invaluable.

Harking back to the step about truth-telling I am reminded that untruths come in all shapes and pretexts: We are lied to, we lie to ourselves, the truth is left unrevealed, we believe things that are obviously wrong, and, even worse, we want to believe what is obviously wrong.... This last form of lying is tricky and almost undetectable. I want to believe in my friends, workmates, the police, and our so-called leaders. When I am confused or in need I turn to these people for answers and help in figuring out my issues and problems.

Most of the time this is as it should be. My lawn is turning brown but Jack next door has the greenest grass I've ever seen. Of course I go over and ask him how he manages such an agricultural feat.

Someone breaks into my house and steals my TV and stereo equipment; the police are really the only option here.

I overlook the fact that Jack uses poisons to cultivate his grass and that the police spend their leisure hours profiling my friends and their children.

These barely hidden truths are the crumbling bedrock of our existence. The desire to ignore these truths is why most of us never try to climb out of the shambles of our lives.

What happens when you wake up one day and suspect that everything you do works against what you believe in—that the systems you turn to are actually predators in cops' clothing? What if you wonder whether you might serve your world and your moral beliefs better if you became a grassroots organizer on the other side of town, or a journalist/photographer in sub-Saharan Africa? Your father might ask how you will pay the rent. Your friends at the bank will not understand and tell you that it's just a phase. Your fiancé may ask,
How can we plan a future in the gated community when you work eighty hours a week for one-twenty-five an hour?
The profiling police department might even wonder if you have joined some kind of turban-wearing, bearded anti-American cell.

Very few people who have bought into the class system of the workaday world will support the changes in you. And even if some of your friends and acquaintances do seem to understand, this understanding will come on their own terms with their own agendas (consciously or unconsciously) attached. The director of the grassroots organization will support your impulse whether or not the move is good for you. The group looking for photographers may not warn you that you might be putting your life in jeopardy in a hostile
environment. Your own mother may love you and support you but still not understand a word you're saying; you may not understand yourself.

These problems arise because unexamined subjectivity rules the format of the vast majority of human actions and interactions. We are conditioned to have expectations in our jobs, our relationships, our aesthetics, even in death. We most often work against ourselves and try to keep each other in line doing the same thing. We do this to have a sense of security in our lives. We expect conformity so that we don't have to think about what we're doing and what our neighbors are doing behind closed doors.

 

Psychotherapy, for all its potential value, has many of the same problems. The use of prescription moodaltering drugs, anesthetizing exercises, and good oldfashioned phrases like
You're as normal as I am
often roll off the psychotherapist's desk and out of his mouth. Most people seek out therapy so that they might fit better in a bad marriage, under a tyrannical boss, in a world where their own government declares war on the poor and weak and innocent. They ask,
How can I live with this pain and this guilt?
But the real question that should be asked is
How can I live?

There are some therapists out there who try to attain a level of
objectivity
. Just the attempt to achieve impartiality is what we need more than anything to make decisions in a world where we are ripped off, bamboozled, and then blamed for our own condition.

I know this appears to be a simple counterinterrogative but it is really a revolutionary exchange. The therapist is not making a moral judgment on the patient, she is not trying to say that he should grin and bear it. If the questioner (patient) says that he feels guilty or that he is angry, or has any other response, the dialogue will go from there. The purpose is to examine the problem in relation to how you feel, to decipher the conundrum that flummoxes you. You do not arrive at a
you-should
kind of answer but at
you-are
or
you-want
. This is as close to objectivity as we're ever going to get. No one is ever truly objective but that really isn't necessary—all you have to do is try to allow the emotions to arise from the person experiencing
them. In this atmosphere the patient has the potential to find out what he really feels and what he really wants. Between feeling and want is the closest we'll ever come to understanding who we are and where we might go.

 

The road to revolution cannot be traveled alone. The movement will have its leaders and followers, its theorists and soldiers, its full adherents and its less committed—but all of these will have to work together in order to bring us out of the malaise and into something like a concrete idea. And objectivity is the unreachable standard that we must strive for. In an off-quote from the poet:
What is is, is the only way I can conceive of change.

The gesture toward objectivity (
is
), therapy (
is
), and unity (
is
) comes together in a way that is unique in our political history. In that trinity we might find some answers that go beyond patriotism toward a kind of necessary humanism.

 

One final note on the primary assumption of this step:

I refer to the person who goes to the therapist as a
patient
. There is serious intention behind this word. We, most of us in modern-day America, are sick. We suffer deep emotional displacement from the lies
we are told and the subsequent lies we tell ourselves. I'm fine, doing well. I'm safe. I'm part of a healthy, democratic polity. I am helping my children to become whole, healthy individuals.

None, or at least little of this, is true. Tens of thousands of our children die in foreign wars and prisons, from drug addiction and substance abuse. The great majority of our poor are children and their mothers. The elderly are systematically stripped of their wealth and dignity. Life itself is defined by alienated labor for the vast majority of our people, and truth is a rarer commodity than moon rocks.

Make no mistake—we are a society of ailing denizens. We need treatment for our infected souls.

T
he most important lesson I've learned as a writer is that practice of the art is something I must exercise every day. The reason for this constant training is that any idea worth discovering is bigger than my head. The twists and turns, story and plot, characters and character development of a novel cannot be held in a single thought or even in a train of thought. This novel takes up a lot of space and needs room to breathe and evolve.