Aldous Huxley

In a Retro-Futuristic Tawdry Sort of Way

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You know how some literates, English majors and their ilk, just for the sake of argument joust about whether we’re living in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984?  

Well, this afternoon Chico Feo is giving off some heavy Huxley vibes. Workers off-the-clock loll in full self-expression, tattoos mapping their life histories in hieroglyphic fashion. A 21st Century version of a Pre-Raphaelite model, wan with auburn ringlets, sits across the bar from me hitting on her vape every now and then, vacant eyed but sort of beautiful in a retro-futuristic tawdry sort of way. I think she is what Aldous had in mind. Across the street at Berts you can buy blunts stuffed with Delta 8 and toke on them in public.

Oh, brave new world, indeed.

Meanwhile, a few billionaires (like the Fords) command a ridiculously disproportionate portion of global wealth, but few of them cotton to giving up not even a sliver of it, especially through taxation. These powerful people – the opposite of folk – possess the means to “dope [us] with religion and sex and [the internet”], to update John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.”  TGIF is the rallying cry of drudges content to go with the status quo. It’s so ingrained that even though I’m retired, I still look forward to Fridays.

Huxley prophesized pleasure, drugs, sex, and swing music, which morphed into rock-n-roll, disco, hip-hop, and all the jazz. All of it literally at my fingertips as I key “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” into Spotify.

But that’s in the USA.

Iran, Russia are North Korea are bigtime Orwellian. Not many dropping Soma In Pyongyang. skinny dipping in Tehran, or thumbing their noses at Big Brother in St. Petersburg.

But let’s face it, the US is also Orwellian, but in more subtle ways. It’s not so much Big Brother is spying on us, but that we’re spying on ourselves, paying AT&T, Verizon, and Apple to track our every move, tallying the number steps we’re taking as surveillance cameras video us from storefronts. Computer-equipped automobiles clock our speed as we bounce down dirt roads up to no good. Alex Murdaugh can attest to that.

The good news – and it’s very good news – is that we have freedom of speech. I can burn a Chinese made American flag and not be dragged off to a Gulag while wearing a vulgar tee shirt mocking the President, the Pope, and/or the Dalai Lama. I might get punched in the face or shot by a fellow citizen, but the government will not be coming after me.

So cheers!

22 November 1963

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[Credit: marcocau.nl.]

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the death of Aldous Huxley.

Midmorning on that day as a fifth grader, I sensed something amiss.  Miss McCue’s eyes were red, and she sniffled as we hunched over our worksheets, but for whatever reason, she decided not inform us that the author of Point Counterpoint had checked out of this earthly Motel 6 of woe for quieter lodgings in that permanent vacation destination known as death.

I guess she figured the news would bewilder us or that it would be better coming from our parents.

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I found out on the school bus from a sixth grader, Steve Ripley, who seemed delighted at the prospect of Huxley’s not producing any more novels that might be assigned as book reports.

I, on the other hand, was devastated by Huxley’s passing because his novel Brave New World had given me reason to hope that the 21st century was going to be a blast – an endless hallucinogenic phantasmagoria that included indiscriminate sex with a variety of partners.

What a miserable weekend with football games cancelled and regular programming preempted.  What’s an early late empire tween to do but stare at the short bio on his dog-eared copy of Chrome Yellow and think Huxley was alive when the book was bought.

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Sandwiched between the passing of eminent composer Cecil Forsyth on 7 December 1941 and American author Alice Stewart Trillin on 11 September 2001, Huxley’s death was especially eerie given that a very famous someone also expired on that day.

That’s right.  CS Lewis also died on 22 November 1963, a day that will live in infamy.

But let’s end on a positive note.  Those sixty years have come and gone, and many of Huxley’s prophecies have come true – we live in a hedonistic age to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”  As days pour at increasingly swift rates through our lives’ hourglasses, what can we do but embrace Richard Wilbur’s sage advice:

It’s almost noon, you say? If so,
Time flies, and I need not rehearse
The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.

If you must go,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
And bring us up some chilled white wine,
And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine
Ruddy-skinned pears

                                        “A Late Aubade”