Goodbye to All That

So, I finally left Facebook.  "Leave" is a good word, because it doesn't necessarily mean you're gone for good.  "I'm leaving for the mental health clinic at 2, and I should be back by 5."  On the other hand, when Wilma "leaves" Fred, you assume that it's probably for good.  Me, I'm not making any big plans either way.  I'm in kind of a live-in-the-moment moment.  Right now I don't want Facebook in my life.  What happens later is anybody's guess.  I'm a fuckin' bodhisattva.

To get rid of Facebook -- because you can't actually delete your account -- you need to unfriend all your "friends," which is probably why most people don't do it -- it seems like kind of a harsh step.  But if that's what's necessary, I can get with it.  It means I won't hear about all their shit, and they won't hear about mine.

I used to have like 300 names on my list; then I had 22.  I put the whole thing on a diet.  Now, though I've kept the people on it I most wanted, it's time to step away.

Facebook has always been a guilty pleasure with me, as I guess it must be for a lot of people.  I go there to avoid doing other stuff.  It's a cheap form of camaraderie, a simulacrum of community.  And sometimes more than a simulacrum.  But usually just a simulacrum.  It's the closest you can get to not being alone without having to actually be in the same room with someone.  But it's kind of like the Ring of Power in The Hobbit.  It's cool, but you pay a price.  And for me, the price is wasted time, avoidance of real life, encounters with people that are limited and virtual where nothing much grows, it's just kind of like a CD on autorepeat.  

Anyway, that's the way it is for me, so as the Poet says, hasta la vista, baby.  I leave you with this passage -- and you will know its author in a trice -- certainly germaine to our so-called political discourse of today.  And it is more true to the spirit of a "commonplace book" than most of my other entries:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.