[MD] Rightwing Radio Confirms Pirsig

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

Today on the Glenn Beck show, which I listen to occasionally when in auto, the
pundit was discussing a new study that shows "Americans have a third fewer
close friends and confidants than just two decades ago — a sign that people may
be living lonelier, more isolated lives than in the past."

USA Today's article on this is here,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-22-friendship_x.htm

In lamenting this, Beck, a "right-winger" to be sure, said "you know, this is
why I've always liked the midwest". This brought to mind immediately the
following passage from Pirsig from ZMM.

"Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat
and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the
redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look
at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new
face...that searching look...then it’s gone.

We see much more of this loneliness now. It’s paradoxical that where people are
the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the
loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western
Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you’d think the loneliness would
have been greater, but we didn’t see it so much.

The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has
nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho
the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are
small, and here it’s reversed."

In LILA, Pirsig continues with this observation, expanding on it as it pertains
to "frontier" versus "Victorian" values.

"Out West among the Indians it's a standing joke that the chief is the poorest
man in the tribe. Every time somebody needs something he's the one they go to,
and by the Indian code, "the generosity of the frontier," he has to help them.
Phaedrus didn't think you'd see much of that along this river. He could just
imagine some strange riverboat man pulling up at Astor's mansion and saying, "I
just saw a light on and thought I'd stop in and say 'hello.' " He wouldn't get
past the butler. They'd be horrified at his impertinence. Yet in the West
they'd probably feel obliged to invite him in."

Pirsig goes on, "Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating
and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it,
descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility
had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian "virtue"
ever was." ... "They had lost some of their realness. They were living in some
kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that
had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE -> PARADISE -> PARADISE
but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life
itself-and from each other."

Back in ZMM, Pirsig had also commented on this "electromechanical machine".

"The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes the
antithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form
and substance. Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in
the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, of auto
parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals that once grazed the
prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is the soul of this place.
Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by the light of fire flaring upward in
the night from the blast furnaces in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper
and denser into the neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and
meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into other
straight streets forever.

...

Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything
through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are
grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince
themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour
vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of
substance. He thinks of them at night alone with their advertised glamorous
shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring through the sooty windows at
the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth
creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is
nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick."

The USA Today article goes on to ask, "Why people have fewer close friends is
unclear, Putnam says. "This is a mystery like Murder on the Orient Express, in
which there are multiple culprits." The chief suspects: More people live in the
suburbs and spend more time at work, Putnam says, leaving less time to
socialize or join groups."

TIME Magazine columnist Po Bronson recently examined the net drop in use of
vacation time
(http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1205369,00.html), reporting
that "only 14% of Americans will take a vacation two weeks or longer this
summer". (Ant and others who have read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
will recognize the workers' aim to "get back some of our own" in this passage.
"We might even prefer these brief snippets of "stolen time" to the long
stretches of authorized vacation. We find it more fun--and more satisfying--to
goof off when we're supposed to be working or running errands. It's our way of
getting even.")

At any rate, its good to see not only right-wing radio acknowledging the
detioration Pirsig wrote of so long ago, but also the "frontier" and
"Victorian" schism where this problem is manifest. "That's why I've always
liked the midwest", Beck said. Now if he'd read Pirsig, he'd have a language
with which to better understand what he's noticed here.