Captive Audience, pt.1

Roy's heart hammered against the bars of his chest like a rowdy prisoner. Although he'd pulled this gig off before, he could still feel flop-sweat sticking his hair to his forehead and running down his palms to his fingers. he cursed himself for his nervousness. Brock handed him a rag to dab with. The silence beyond the curtain pounded in his eardrums.
Brock snatched the handle of scotch from the counter under the mirror. "Liquid courage, boss?"
Roy nodded, hefting the bottle gingerly. "Over the lips and past the gums," he muttered. The bubbles against the glass parroted him gump, gump, gump.
The green room door slammed too loudly for the force Roy thought he put into closing it. It covered up the sound of the crashing bottle. Roy shook his head, exhaling exasperatedly, then set off down the hallway to the main stage. The hallway from the green room grew longer with every step, but Roy forced his leaden feet to make the distance faster. With his hand on the knob, he breathed in three times, as slowly as he could manage. He wished he hadn't smashed that bottle before he entered the studio.
The audience welcomed him with he expected deafening applause, but he could feel their discomfort; he had taken far too long to get to the main stage. But the applause cut itself short. The hush was tangible on dead air.
"Good morning, America!" Roy beamed at the audience. At the cameras and their operators. At the armed men standing behind them, pistols pressed in the dark at the backs of skulls. "Harry and June couldn't make the shooting today. I'll play the part of host. I invite you all to consider yourself hostages; the doors are all locked and my men are all armed."

Free will?pt.1

What is man's preoccupation with free will? Titles such as The Adjustment Bureau and The Matrix deal with questions regarding an individual's free will and the actual impact of the choices he makes. What does all this say about the condition of the individual, of his psyche? In the investigation of this issue  I will utilize popular culture as my tool and my evidence; I believe that popular culture, the trends produced by broadly separated individuals simultaneously (relatively), acts as a mirror held up to the subconscious of an era-- for example, the number of works based on persecution produced in the States during McCarthy's rampage.
I'd like to restrict the scope of my answers to the modern age; it would be fun to try to investigate the effects of the modern age on man, that maybe it's this time period that's making him fret. But I can't. Plato's The Cave, Homer's Odyssey, and countless other works from antiquity onward also pit themselves against this question.
What makes free will such a desirable goal? Or rather, what makes the lack of free will such a dystopian concept? In The Adjustment Bureau, for example-- as it was the most recent movie I saw-- Matt Damon's character is leading his life just fine, regarding the circumstances surrounding his rise to political success as lucky breaks and personal triumph, never suspecting that he's a part of a grand scheme carried out behind an invisible curtain. IT seems that one of the most common nightmares plaguing us is this backstage concept, in which the puppeteers pull the strings of our lives. What is it about this idea that's so disturbing? Maybe it's that we all want to be men and when we are cogs in a wheel we are reduced to dogs following the orders of some giant plan we can't conceive of, much less control. This makes me ask, is it the issue of control that drives someone to freedom? To control his environment was man's basest goal-- to  manipulate the unforgiving elements for survival-- but in the modern era we shouldn't have to worry about manipulation for survival. Perhaps we, as a species, still cling to these vestigial impulses-- it's easy to see that we still do in many other ways. However, free will does not immediately call to mind the drive to control one's surroundings, or other people--- free will seems to be the ability to control one's own actions. Perhaps free will is self-control (this line train of thought rides on Jung's tracks pretty well). But we must continue on the main branch as long as possible. The main characters of The Matrix, The Adjustment Bureau, and the Republic could all have spent the rest of their lives unaware of the truth behind their existence (here we see another oddly basic human drive: truth. count it next to freedom. truth, I think, is less animal) so this existence is not less real, is it? If it's the only truth the we have known, can it be untrue? if we have lived it, it can't be a lie-- just a story being told. It's order in the chaos. so what makes these stories like a prison we must break out of? It calls to mind the image of a wolf in a trap, only this trap is for the mind. Perhaps the mind dies if trapped for too long. Maybe this is why prison is such a nightmare as well, or why the unimaginable distance of the stars is so daunting. but prisons is a subject for another train of thought.
   

Numb

I remember feeling numb in the back seat of a car. I remember everybody hurrying, everybody with something to do. I remember being confused. Really the biggest emotions I remember feeling were the confusion and this static, this stuffy ringing in between my ears and behind my eyes. My hands tingled, but not like when they’re just waking up, covered in tiny knives—just more of this static, all the way down underneath my fingernails. The suit they had on me was too big, the shiny black shoes I could see my face in were new and the leather bit into my heel, it was hot, hot even for Memphis, and humid and stuffy in that back seat. Nobody would look at me, or listen, or pick me up and tell me it was okay. Nobody would even tell me what was happening.  I know that I had to have been outside sometime that day, or inside some chilly reception with a modest little table covered with a quaint little cloth cover and topped with a stack of unassuming plastic cups and a demure jug of water wet with condensation and a couple of timid little drops like tears, as if the water knew my late Grandma and had come to offer us a little comfort in our time of need. I don’t remember any of that.

 I don’t remember the parade of sagging faces, the nursing home queue all peering over the lid of the coffin, arthritic hands like vulture’s claws, perching on railings and walkers and shoulders and contemplating mostly who was going to be next. The faded saccharine stench of perfume and potpourri, the tang of Bengay or the earthy dirt-smell of vitamins and cup-a-soup. Leather palms, gathering life from the young and youthful, raspy and cold. Shuffling on respectfully selected carpet under feet too heavy now to lift up, oversized shoes that would send little boys like me into fits of giggles and a stern stare, all deafening in the hush that falls over a Protestant funeral out of Respect for the Dead.

I don’t remember standing in sunlight and humidity so thick you have to swim through it, so hot and bright you feel it coating your skin and making the top of your head itch but you can’t move. The Respect is paralyzing. There’s no place for swooning and pleading and ostentatious sorrow. Maybe if it wasn’t Grandma had died, if it was an accident or maybe if we weren’t Proud Protestants there’d be room for that, but not here. Where the black wool jackets scratch at our necks and long, appropriate black ties choke what little air we can gulp down out of us, where there’s not even muffled sobs to drown out the pastor droning about salvation and the Mortal Coil. I don’t remember when my leather shoes hurt so bad that I had to rock from the left foot to the right, squinting from the light gleaming off someone’s broach, or staring off at two squirrels fighting under a tree.

All I remember is the back seat of this big car with my family, everyone looking forward or down at their hands, this deafening static from my ears to my soaked socks, undershirt clinging to my arms and nobody looking at me nobody telling me what’s going on.