| Introduction: I cannot remember reading an essay that at the same time, defines me and teaches me more about myself than Christy Rodgers' The View From Bohemia. I think I can say the same about my co-editor, Paul Richard Harris as I've come to know him over the years we've worked together. In fact, her essay, beautifully written, elegant and poetic, could also serve as a backdrop for the spirit and philosophy of Axis of Logic, nearing it's 12th birthday. Rodgers tells with aplomb the story of the sterile worklife environment in Silicon Valley's office boxes and the alienation of the surrounding San Jose suburbs and contrasts this with the lives of ethnic Latinos and the wealth of family, community and spirit that holds them together with love and meaning. We introduce Christy Rodgers' essay with images of Silicon Valley and the shuttered houses of the suburbs followed by other photos from Middlefield Road in Redwood City and the story of a family devastated by the anti-culture of Silicon Valley.
Middlefield Road, Redwood City
Silicon Valley vs. the Castro Family
by CHRISTY RODGERS
For most of my adult life I have lived in bohemia, that once-vital filament of US culture wedged in the cracks between the sterile, necrotic suburbs, the bunkered mansions of the urban rich, and the trash-blown decay of the ghetto. It exists, as it ever has, only in our larger cities, and perhaps no longer all of those. It is at risk of extinction in San Francisco, once its Mecca. Its inhabitants in these times are not the sexual pioneers, eccentric artists, and non-conformists of yore, but a grimmer group: night-dwellers with bruised, dark-ringed eyes, crusty old radicals with rent control stolidly refusing to assimilate, and children (some now well into middle-age) with drug and alcohol “problems.” I’ve found no real community here, nothing but the most tenuous web of human relationships. My only day-to-day community is my longtime companion, both of us pretty marginal even on the margins; it’s us against the world. But tonight as our ancient room heater whistles and clanks, and traffic roars outside the cracked and rattling window of our basement flat, I raise a glass of cheap red wine and toast my dark bohemia. I am grateful for the contrarian traits, the aimlessness and alienation that have led me here. I am grateful even for my poverty relative to others of my birth class. These are the things that have kept me recognizable to myself. Perhaps I mean they have kept me human. Tonight I’m remembering how, by accident, years ago, I stumbled upon the life-scape that might have been mine, if I hadn’t twisted off the path somewhere. I was driving north on Route 101, which follows colonialism’s first trail of tears in California: the old Spanish “Royal Road” that linked the Catholic missions from San Diego to San Francisco. Taking a wrong turn off the walled highway, from which, through extensive work over the previous several years, all landmarks had thoughtfully been concealed, I discovered the sanitized strip of North First Street in sprawling, silicon-powered San Jose. I knew about Silicon Valley, of course, who doesn’t? But I lived right next door, and I’d never been at its epicenter, immersed in the built world it makes and is, in turn, made by. Along North First Street, mile after mile of Lego-like office parks squatted on paved-over orchard land, the lovely, irrelevant mountains far away on either side. No humans could be seen behind the endless ranks of tinted windows or outside in the dead lakes of their windswept parking lots. Meaningless logos: UNISYS, INFORMIX, 3COM – glowed like neon eyes from empty concrete faces. It was all new, clean, quiet, freshly painted, expensively landscaped. But the rows of young trees, stuck in the manicured earth as ornament, looked more like famished prisoners lined up to be shot. Like the glass-box buildings, they seemed as untouched by life and movement as an architect’s scale model. Even the brilliant sunshine didn’t make it all look real. A single refrain was repeated in the parking lot signs: This Area Is Monitored by Video Surveillance at All Times. In its regimentation, if not its ostentation, North First Street ironically called to mind the old Socialist bloc, except if you recall that the ugly architecture there was mostly built to house people. (No people actually lived anywhere near these buildings; they lived miles away, in suburban tracts.) Even the eternal spying generated by our fallen Cold War foes was a perverse form of employment, performed by actual human beings instead of these neutral, unresistant machines. What I saw that day was just the rising of the millennial tidal wave. Silicon Valley, cresting two global market crashes since, has remained a zone of expansion, not Soviet-style collapse. The almost matterless digital world has transformed the world of mere matter ever more radically since then. There is so much money here, and more is always pouring in, like cement into a mold, to shape the future. At the northern end of this long, silent no-place, atop lead-gray bunkers, the white radar disks of Lockheed rose from behind a straggling line of brush, their blank dish-faces turned toward the bright, generous California sky, looking for death. Escaping, heading farther north, seeking food, which in the office park was scarce, and not, obviously, something intended for enjoyment, I turned off the highway again. Along Middlefield Road in Redwood City there were no more fields, nor any redwoods. Instead there was the barrio. Unlandscaped, paint peeling, dotted with windblown trash, it still looked alive. There were men on the street corners talking, sounds and smells, children. It was not a slum. The commercial strip was taquerías, carnicerías, and bars – food and drink, the basics. La Mixteca, La Oaxaqueña, La Tampiqueña: everything spoke of place, identity, the living air of poor Mexico. If you asked, “Who are you?” North First Street had no answer for you. Forget that; it makes no difference to our bottom line, said the coldly glowing logos. But in the barrio, the storefronts told you proudly: I am the one from Tampico, from Michoacán. I do not forget. It is in these multiform places of odds and ends, not the lifeless horror imagined and constructed by the corporate mind, where we have discovered, or have always known, what it is to be fully human. The landscape and activity reflect this understanding. It is messy, uneven, tender, violent. It is playful, improvised, disorderly, hopeful, angry, foolish, vivid, rhythmic yet unpredictable. There is never very much money but no one goes hungry, and pleasure and pain are still mostly genuine and unsynthesized, deriving from the company of other people. It is an urban re-creation of the lost village, our human home for untold thousands of years. The techno-industrial empire absorbing the old orchards had no use for the village or the barrio, or any place where we could be ourselves in this way. The suburban cul de sac, the office park, the shopping mall and the financial district (downtown) were all it knew, all it could imagine. And perhaps the remotely located theme park for weekends and holidays. Not the carnival, the street party, the intricate warren of open markets that are de rigueur in poorer lands. Those are crude, unhygienic, full of dangerous elements. Anyone has access to them. And the barrio calls people to one another instead of to things to buy. Meanwhile, in the midst of all this untold wealth, these resources that have re-configured landscapes and lives, what is it most people would say they want? An affordable home in a stable community of friends, good health, a good education for their children. Yet for millions in California these things remain as elusive to this day as they might in the most remote and “backward” village elsewhere. What has been offered instead? Work that drains the spirit. Money that no matter what the quantity cannot purchase community, or a sense of purpose. What does the money buy? High priced, shiny distractions—big stereos, TVs, digital devices: grownup toys that whir, beep and cry in mechanical voices. Flickering images of unattainable sex and power. Fake danger for thrills, after your money has bought you a car and house with alarm systems, your community is gated and your workplace is monitored by video surveillance. Miraculously, none of it fulfills. The more you eat the more you want. The more you watch, the hungrier and lonelier you are. The more information they throw at you, the less you understand. More and more extravagant diversion is required to keep you from looking for the Man behind the Curtain. Silicon Valley is the freedom we have been sold. The life we have been taught to believe we own. The way of life that we were told was non-negotiable, for which so many living hearts have since been torn out, real bodies crucified. And which is now, in basely literal form, costing the earth. Is it a conspiracy, some monstrous plot to keep people from freedom in the most sophisticated way possible, by gradually substituting an imitation life for the real one, while destroying or marginalizing everything of actual value? Advertising is as omnipresent a backdrop in our lives as Big Brother’s far cruder casualty and productivity statistics. Under its incessant shaping, coaxing, cajoling, bombarding, berating, our virtual prison became the best of all possible worlds. Now the little streets you said you loved are empty, and the highways you hate are full. Your house is barred and shuttered; the fear of others is etched into your face. Who are those people down the street? Terrorists? Strangers, all. Ever wilder weather rages outside the shoddy facades. And if you look around for alternatives… the TV anchorman smirks at strikes and sit-ins, shrugs his tailored shoulders at co-ops, land trusts, permaculture. Alternatives? There are no alternatives. Conspiracy! For the millions of souls that such an extravagant system cannot bring into the fold and still be profitable, well, doesn’t it all fit together: smack, meth, cops and prisons, sweatshops in Asia, endless war? But while sectarian Leftists, cultural nationalists, racists and reactionaries impotently scream at the designated leaders of the cabal – White People! Blacks and Jews! Islam! The Government! The UN! The CIA! – from the safety of a webpage Silicon Valley built for them, and end up turning their own guts inside out looking for collaborators and traitors, those who have the money and resources, whoever and wherever they are, are simply, busily, with escalating speed, using them to acquire more. In many older societies, Mexico, for example, only the timeless, cast-iron bonds of family have continued to hold, though greatly attenuated, under the modern onslaught. Like a narrow, swaying bridge over a chasm, the family continues to provide a way to define oneself in relation to other people rather than in relation to things. Where the family survives, the freefall into starvation, murderous violence, or despair can sometimes be forestalled. That’s all right. After decades seeking freedom from the stifling embrace of family, after buying into the dream of generations of US Americans to leave the past, all of it behind – only to find the sought-after future a nightmare of someone else’s devising – I am reconciled to the family. Against the sociopathy of the corporation, Marx has not withstood, nor Lenin, Mao, or even Che. The lie of the beneficent state could not retain mass allegiance as well as the lie of the Fast Car. Around the world, the barrio is shrinking; the slums are growing. The guerrillas – Kurds, Zapatistas – are isolated in lonely spots; they can’t come down from the mountains; most people can’t live their way, knowing they will never march into the capital in triumph. Or the insurgents have become fearful reactionaries wielding only the power of nightmares against the empire that created them. But the family, battered by social upheaval, its boundaries stretched over countries, over seas, stretched to the breaking point, does not break, does not disappear. It holds, it clings, it commands: I am what you are. Not a nation, not money, not Unisys or Telecom, but me. If you forget me you are nothing, you are the walking dead. In this respect however, the USA, so advanced in pursuing the corporate future, has been in freefall for a while now. The Family is a reactionary joke here, rather like the Small Town. Like the oak trees slaughtered to carve out Oakland, it is something never honored except in its absence. I make a pact with the family, like Pound with Walt Whitman, because I see that we need each other. But I have opted out of the aptly named nuclear family as core of my emotional life. And this village I said we all came from: the gossip, the boredom, the superstitions, the betrayals, the withering resentments, the inevitable rivalries, the same people every day—would I go back there even if I could? Not a chance. Well, then, what is this bohemia of mine? I have said what it is not. It used to be a place for non-conformism, and perhaps it used to be quite clear what that was. Now that non-conformism has become another marketing strategy, and the rich are re-colonizing the inner city, bohemia clings to life; it is like a fading photograph, and the image of the people gathered in the frame is too blurred to decipher. They might be the aging audience at an ill-attended open mic of marginal poets in some windy, liminal space that won’t be there next month, who shrug their shoulders resignedly when you ask about the book that was never published, the film that was never finished, the revolution that never came. Nevertheless. There is still life here at the margins, as there must always be. Those of us who come and stay have no choice but to do so; it is who we are. In the slender realms between the vastnesses of the suburb, the gated city, and the slums – not tweeted about, not posted or published anywhere – some hang on by their fingernails to craft, traditions, and family (the village, the barrio), others to art, intellect, eccentricity (bohemia). Every empire will always have ragged edges where its hold is incomplete, as well as a few stalwart non-conformists living deep inside its borders. Like tidal creatures we persist in the niches no one else wants, at best ignored by the shapers of the great future. Negamos a morir, they say in the barrio. We refuse to die. Dystopia rises, continuing to bludgeon our imaginations with each new atrocity, to attack our ability to dream with each new nightmare. But if you are looking for real resistance, you will still find it, not just (and sometimes not even) in mobilizations, placards and protests. It could be in a hand-painted car, a newsletter, a shrine, a song, a terraced garden. Anything undertaken with care and intention, with respect and compassion, with an awareness of the true nature of the structures that overarch our lives, is resistance. Any thought that touches a deeper, living truth through layers of artifice and habit is resistance. While the corporation mythologizes individualism in order to drive the populace herd-like into its deadly stable, the only place real individualism – isolated, distracted, picking its way among the broken souls on the shivering or sweltering streets – can really survive, is the ragged fringe of bohemia. It is a ledge, not a path. It is not whole, not enough, like the barrio. It has few children – ever fewer, it would seem. It does not build; it cannot shape the future. Perhaps, though, it offers a place from which to see. Christy Rodgers lives in San Francisco, where all that is solid melts into air. Her essays and reviews have appeared in CounterPunch Alternet, Upside Down World, Truthout, Dark Mountain Project, and Left Curve Magazine and now in Axis of Logic. Please visit her blog, What If? Tales, Transformations, Possibilities. SOURCE Biography, Essays and Poetry by Les Blough © Copyright 2015 by AxisofLogic.com This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article in its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of Logic as the original source including a "live link" to the article. Thank you! |
