the diary of antoine roquentin

I’m not writing much, but I justify it in that I’m getting my A.A., which takes precedent. This is probably one of the least productive months ever in terms of my writing.

Actually, that’s not true. I have been writing endless video reviews and essay questions related to my human geography class. I have to say before this class I had inklings about what the world was really like, but in this class my lens through which I view the world has been sharpened to crystal clarity.

I just read the most incredible novel (on which I have to write a paper tomorrow), called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

I picked it up and about 10 p.m. tonight. It’s 3:30 a.m. I couldn’t put it down.

I feel like I’m the only one that knows the secret of our culture and I’m afraid I’m going to die tomorrow and have no one to talk to about it.

Read it.

My finals will probably be on December 9, the first Tuesday of finals week. Until then, I will be inundated with homework. I’m not saying I won’t write anything, but I’m not going to be terribly prolific until then. You know what? I should post my homework assignments because they are basically just first-person reactions to a video that we saw.

I’m kind of a teacher’s pet now… my geography professor devoted 10 minutes of the beginning of the class to talk about Albert Camus, since I had indicated that I read some of his stuff on this questionnaire that we had filled up the first day of class. It asked what the most interesting thing about you was and I couldn’t think of something without running aground on the shore of being unable to define originality, so I wrote: “being unable to answer simple questions without turning them into an existential quandary on the nature of originality.” He comically asked the class what that meant.

And then he read nearly my entire video review (he reads snippets of our reviews that he thinks are interesting to the class).

The video was about Remote Area Medical, this group that used to provide medical in developing countries but due to the worsening healthcare situation in America does free medical intervention. It was a 60 Minutes story.

My first reaction to this video was to go to the organization’s website and see if they were going to have one of these anywhere near California. Unfortunately, they seem to stick to the Midwest.

And here we come to one of the central ironies of our culture. We are supposed to care for the other members of our society and help them if they need help, but to give medicine to your fellow citizens? That’s socialism.

I know that there are people that game the system, but I’ve worked my whole life and I go to school… I think I would consider myself a productive member of society. However, I haven’t had the money to see a doctor in six years. How much would it really cost to just have one yearly checkup for every person in America? But, of course, we can spend trillions bailing out Wall Street and fighting wars, but making sure our neighbors aren’t sick or dying is just not an option.

I think it really cements the point that our government has ceased to be a democracy (or, to be more precise, a Republic). America is an oligarchy run by the top 1%. If we really had control of our government, the bailout bill wouldn’t have been passed. The vast majority of people opposed it, yet it happened anyway.

And the more I continue this diatribe, the more I sound like the hippie talking heads ridiculed in the mainstream media during superficial coverage of the World Trade Organization protests. There’s nothing the poor can do to challenge the rich. That seems to be the central lesson of the 21st Century.

After he read it, he asked us what the poor people of Afghanistan had done to rebel against the rich. Hello, 9/11.