In Washington it has become especially difficult. Lately, I have sometimes found myself just sitting silently as the gossalalia rolls past me. I am tired of being the duty apostate, depressed by the sophistry, weary of the denial, frightened by the mindless incantations, annoyed by the imputations of Puritanism for simply honoring the law, stunned by the entropy of the soul, and tired of trying to outline it all one more time -- finally just e-mailing a critic, "I'm sorry. If I could have explained it better, I would have."

If you speak of honor in this city you are a prude. If you offer facts you are trading in counterfeit currency. If you see fault in obvious evil you are paranoid. And so I walk around with secrets that few want to hear and, like a dissident in some locked-down land, wait for a word or a sign that others also understand. And all because we remember a time when those in power were still subject to the law and when it was your friends who helped to make it so.

I have spent much of my life in two places of strikingly different cultural values: urban Washington and rural Maine. I can perhaps best describe the difference this way: I once bought a used car for my eldest son sight unseen over the phone from R&D Automotive in Freeport, Maine. I figured I would do far better that way then I would in any used car lot in the Washington metropolitan area. The car made four and two-thirds round trips across the United States and was still worth enough that when it finally gave out in Moab, Utah, the proceeds of its sale paid for the bus and train tickets my second son needed to get to San Francisco.

I did not make this decision on religious or moral grounds; rather it was -- as subsequent events indicated -- highly pragmatic. I simply took advantage of one of the places left in America where a person's word is still considered worthy bond.

Washington, in my time at least, has never been such a place. One of the most unpleasant aspects of living here has been dealing with people incapable of relationships without intrigue, hidden agendas, and exploitation. The Clinton affair represents these defects at their worst.

It is not a matter of moral details but of moral consciousness. For example, a study done of Quaker boarding schools and military academies found several things in common. There was in each a clear moral tradition. There were specific virtues: such as equality in one case and loyalty in the other. And finally, there was an argumentative climate in which these issues were discussed daily

Such a pragmatic, regularly debated morality -- quite different from the immutable absolutes of the right
and the shifting ethical sands of the modern liberal would make this nation a much healthier and happier
place.

But such a living, ever examined ethic will not be born in this capital of power and propaganda. It will not come from a city that nightly offers as moral guides corporate lawyers, politicians, pollsters, consultants and commentators so shallow they seemed likely at any moment to walk over to a large map and predict three inches of snow on the Senate floor.

It must come instead from those who are small and weak in every dimension save their hearts. Those who refuse the twin assignments of barren consumption and bullied compliance our leaders have given us. Those who know the power of good seed.

But there is a problem. The system that envelopes us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs called a biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing it."

The unwitting dead -- universities, newspapers, publishing house, institutes, councils, foundations, churches, political parties -- reach out from the past to rule us with fetid paradigms of the bloodiest and most ecologically destructive century of human existence. What should be merely portraits on the wall of our memories run our lives still, like parents who even in their passing retain hegemony over the souls of their children.

Yet even as we complain about and denounce the entropic culture in which we find ourselves, we are unable bury it. We speak of a new age but make endless accommodations with the old. We are overpowered and afraid.

We find ourselves condoning things simply because not to do so means we would then have to -- at
great risk -- truly change them.

To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for the real, the growing culture of impunity among the powerful and the drift towards zero tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us. We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an overwhelming sense of surrender; far easier to just keep dancing and hope someone else fixes it all.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve it and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.

How precisely one does this can vary markedly, but I fear that one of the bad habits we have acquired from the bullies who now run the place is undue reliance on traditional political, legal and rhetorical tools. Politically active Americans been taught that even at the risk of losing our planet and our democracy, we must go about it all in a rational manner and never raising our voice, let alone screaming for help.

We have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our tormentors. Today America stands in as much danger as at any time in its history, yet we fight without a counter-culture, without the spirit of a new way, without the songs, the parody, the great circuses that are almost a sine qua non of meaningful change.

We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The strategy of Gandhi and King Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple dinners.

Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.

Copyright 1999 The Progressive Review