I've heard people in America often say such things as, "We all have
problems, just some do a better job of hiding them."

My response: "Wrong ethnic group."

It is a veritable tradition in WASP culture for people to hide their
problems. The obvious result is that wrong does not get redressed, but
rather hides in families and communities, under a false pretext of
decency. A man puts on a smile and charms everybody around him, then
goes home to brutally beat his wife and do worse things still to his
children. The pain and frequently horror that many people deal with
becomes a guilty and shameful secret; something for which they are
blamed rather than the person who commits injury against them. The
wrong, not being expressed, does not get redressed. And a community
marketing itself and deriving its legitimacy from claiming to make
people happy survives through brutality, cruelty, and dishonesty; and a
smilie face drawn over an abyss of evil entraps the residents while
making the world think, not only that it is OK, but that it is in fact
morally superior.

I am reminded of Muammar Quaddafi saying that Lybians live in paradise.
Do Lybians live in paradise? The question is absurd; but we see the
same hypocrisy and deception practiced by America's Southern and
Midwestern communities - the communities that furthermore have
appointed themselves as arbiter of America's culture and its moral
conscience. They claim to be righteous, happy and provident. They are
neither of the preceding. They are swamps of cruelty and deception; and
those who have lived there experience these things for themselves.

As a corollary of that WASP attitude - of hiding problems even at the
price of life and sanity - is utter contempt for people's emotions.
Apparently they see emotional response as a liability. IN so doing of
course they greatly diminish human experience; and the so-called "60s
generation," as it has been maligned by gen-X morons who want to blame
their parents for everything wrong in America, did precisely the right
thing of rebelling against such impoverishing, strangulating, deceptive
social codes and bringing the human in human being alive - as it well
ought to be.

My purpose in having emotions is double: To experience life to the
fullest, and to write poetry. I find that emotional understanding and
emotional experiecnce further provides insight into human condition
(and individual people) far more than does any code or psychology. And
being able to have such perspective activates the insightful within the
person - the insight that inavoidably leads to see the social
arrangement in its entirety and understand fully the wrong that in it
exists.

So this is my verdict on WASP culture. It is a culture of cruelty and
hypocrisy. Given its attitudes, both are inevitable; and for as long as
it retains such qualities and "values" then both will continue to exist
inside it, from generation to generation in perpetuity. And the people
who get the worst of it will always be the best: Sensitive artistic
souls who refuse to shut down their emotional core and inner
sensibility. WHich, for as long as the WASP culture will continue
doing, will always require someone like me - or Ginsberg, or Sinclair
Lewis - to address.

Ilya Shambat.



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