Modern Guilt

“don’t know what I’ve done but I feel ashamed.” –Beck

Machu Pichu, February 2009?

“Where did you buy this? This is a good product,” Moses said of the insect repellent that rolled onto my dorm-room bed as I looked for something else. “It’s made it Israel.”
“It is? No...” Sure enough, at the bottom of the label his assertion was confirmed. “I shouldn’t have bought it,” I said with a grin, confronting his political heritage and the limits of his humor. Like me, Moses was a backpacker. And like many of his backpacking compatriots, Moses had just finished his three years of service in the regular Israeli Armed Forces

“Why not?” he asked seriously.


“Because I believe I should support financial disinvestment from your country.”


“Why is that?”


“I think you could probably figure that out without me going into too much detail.”


“Ah, but who is starting these troubles?...”


“Not just yet, my friend. We will have time for that, but right now we should get something to eat.”
I should get a real job. You should go on a diet. I should enjoy my visit Machu Pichu. You should take care of your loved ones.

This word “should” has almost as many confusing meanings as the words “love” and “freedom.”

I am a moralist. The strongest roots of my character urge me to reconstruct the world into certain eternally desired forms, asked for by God, by nature, and by greater social and material efficiency. I grew up with a strong sense of the difference between a good person and a bad person. I knew who the baddies and the goodies were, and though I knew I had to pretend that I was a goodie, in private I was a mess of self-criticism and self-praise.

When I learned of the historical tendency of Irish families to encourage the youngest son to enter the priesthood, my psychological history made more sense to me…not that they always encouraged me consciously.

For the plank in my eye, I give you the courtesy of self-focus, chancing the criticism of being egotistical:

My dualistic morality broke down when I began to contemplate the varieties of human perception during high school. My grey-bearded God disappeared, and replaced herself with mystery. The parables of Jesus gradually came into focus as being more intentionally blurry than I had originally understood. Especially those about judgment.

People should lessen their anger.
My Uncle Mike and my father should learn how to learn from each other.
Americans should be more aware of the world outside of their borders.
People shouldn’t hate each other.
I should not have so many shoulds; this is the one that finally stumped me.
Therefore,
Turn on the television.
Have another beer.
Leave the country.

I went for a horseback ride into Ecuadorian mountains with two American women and our pony tailed, mestizo-skinned guide. My horse, “Apache,” wanted to do nothing but run, and when I released him during open spaces for a full gallop, I knew nothing but equine urge and repeated momentary flight.

But the “should” returned, and since the most recent war on Gaza, it returns with more frequency. But this is absurd! What does Gaza have to do with going horseback riding in Ecuador?

Much, though if I don’t speak of the connections attractively, I’ll lose you, along with my own good humor.

“Joey, you’ve got to clam down, stop questioning everything. If you had kids, you’d give yourself a heart attack,” my bro Matt said to me as I analyzed the Republican National Convention this past September. He and many of my closest friends, however, have learned to be patient with my anti-party nature, what they call Debbie Downer, Cynical Sue, and Sad Sally. (What’s with the misogyny here, guys?”) I think they understand what I’m after, and will often even accompany me into the woods.

In Ecuador’s Bolivar Province, in the central highlands, I toured up to a small village named Solinas to learn about their unique cooperative enterprise system. From there, I wanted to go to Echandia for my research on Lugo. My map showed roads between these two towns, but the locals said they were little more than walking paths until the in-between town of Chazo Juan. “Muuy lejos,” very far to travel on foot. “I think you will like the truck ride the long way around. It is very beautiful,” a local tour guide advised me.

So of course I ignored him and walked uphill for an hour before turning down what looked like could have been the path.

The books on Spanish and Liberation Theology in my backpack screamed their absurdity at me, reasoning that as an academic I should turn around and take the more sensible, gasoline enabled route through the mountains. But each time that I came upon locals who asked me where I was going, before responding “oooo, muy lejos!” my masochistic, approval-seeking, adventurous urges drove me further.

The rain was continually variable. I came to a small village after three hours of walking downhill on a decent road of gravel. The locals pointed me in the right direction. “Isn’t it more dangerous heading down this path while its raining?” I asked. “Yes, but its more direct.” The path was a muddy slip-and-slide made more exciting by the effects of the donkeys who had helped create it.


I found two sticks for my hands, in order to assist my historically painful knees. One snapped after an hour of use. I cursed it and threw the remaining bit aside. I found a stiff bamboo pole to compliment the longer and springier deciduous stick, which I would switch to whichever arm was on the downhill side. But the slope, combined with the behind-center weight of my pack, also demanded that my bottom be of assistance in the decent.

The pain in my knees brought me back to my high school football days; I had earned that pain many years before during cornerback drills with Marc Pessetti. I wonder what J.P. Bauman and Kevin Hirzel are doing these days?

I got a little lost. In a misty high-Andean meadow the trail disappeared amidst a wide grass-stream. I approached a stick-shack-house, but kept my distance when I noticed an old woman inside grab her shotgun posted against the doorframe.
“Forgive me, mam, but I’m a little lost. Could you tell me where the trail is to the next town?” I asked.
“Arriba!” she answered. Up.
“But I want to go to the town down in the valley.”
“Abajo.” Down.
“Muchas Gracias, Señora.”

Eventually I found the trail, winding forever back and forth and downwards, me comparing my height for hours to the impossibly tall waterfall across the valley.
I wasn’t going to make it to Chazo Juan before nightfall.

Two thirds to the bottom, another shack. No one home. Very musty, and contained some interesting putrefying contents which I threw out, but the shack added a bit more shelter from the rain for my tenting hammock. After changing into dry clothes for the night, I ate dinner: a can of sardines I had purchased back in Panamá, mixed with a bit of raw oatmeal. You’re probably cringing up in the Great White North at the thought of such a meal, but you have no idea how good that combination nourished and satisfied me after a full day of trekking.

I woke at dawn, always around 6 a.m. for equatorial dwellers, and pulled my soaked mud-jeans back on. There was a tiny cockroach in my backpack, which I had left open to allow some air drying. I looked deeper, and found that hundreds of them had set up a transport colony at the very bottom, so I went through the eviction process.

After several hours crossing streams and walking through jungle, I met an old farmer man heading in the opposite direction. We chatted for a bit, and before we went our separate ways, he patted me gently on the back, smiling knowingly about my difficult hike down the mountain. I will never know his life, but he told me with his touch that for that instant, we were not much different from the other.

When I finally walked into Chazo Juan, there was a bus about to leave for Echeandia half an hour away. Such a ride was surreal with ease in the state of mind I was in at the time.

I bought three rolls of wheat bread for 30 cents. Sublime taste and texture. Quite a few of the locals were staring at me: old men lounging in storefronts, young girls being dragged to the other side of town by their mothers. I was muddy from my slip and slide the day before, though by this time it was crusted dry onto my clothing.

The stares felt good.
My cousin Ben asked for more pictures and more stories, for his own selfish interests, because he gets “mega-enjoyment” from them. I am truly flattered, Ben. But there are many other bloggers out here like me. Descriptions and millions of photographs of their daily lives in South America or Elsewhere are within easy google-reach. So why are you here reading my particular words and looking at my particular photographs? Why does the likely fact that you know me make my words and photos more worthy to consider?


I have my small stage with you here. The exotic draw of a 30,000 mile journey gives me some leverage to ask people to consider my reflections: (The most dramatic difference I have noticed between Peru and Ecuador is the Peruvian use of three-wheeled motorized taxis. They are everywhere, buzzing around the cities like in Mad Max. I’m curious which delivers superior air quality: thousands of tiny two strokes, or hundreds of gigantic diesels?)

So enjoy with me. But also, please join me in an even thicker woods:

As I type this, I should be watching the scenery passing by that I will never pass again. As I watch the scenery, I am missing the chance for a conversation with the young man sitting next to me whom I will never meet again. As I talk to the young man, I should have studied more of my Spanish vocabulary yesterday. As I study my vocab, I should be finishing a blog post. As I finish the blog, I should be watching the scenery passing by which will never pass again.

My older brother Danny asked me a while back, “How do you decide when to move to a new place?” Like the Vatican Catechism, I can’t pin it down...though when it’s sufficiently enjoyable, I will have fun trying to do so.

I apologize for my over-analization, my seriousness, my “present thoughts and future endeavors to clear my name,” in the words of Sage Francis. But not really. You know I’m only trying to impress you. I am only looking out for my own best interests, and as a good friend once rebuked me at one of my more blatant pretenses towards self-sacrifice: “Bogus altruism. Spare me your Catholic Guilt Trip. At best this is a mutually beneficial situation wherein you get what you desire and it has a proportional corollary effect on me!”

Even this sentence is attempting to rise above, to be better, to be self-deprecating for the purpose of trying to escape ultimate deprecation, and for convincing you that despite my publicly over-introspective nature, I really do have it together and you really should admire me. I am no less biting my own tail than the institutions I implicated several months ago in my writings about co-creation.

Do you see the tail-biting, disguised as other-biting? Do you see the layers of self-awareness and self-declaration, which both deceive and reveal at the same time? Do you see the descending spiral-like form of action-killing rationality? Do you ever see it in yourselves as well as in me? Because that’s what I am really after, as I’m sure you can tell without me even saying so.

Certainly my characterization of double-bind, arrogant-if-we-do, lazy-if we-don’t choices and attitudes is at first glance cynical and unsolvable. Many have urged me not to consider such things, or at least to only look to Lincoln’s “better angels,” to not be so rude in publicly speaking about our flirtations with the Dark Side of the Force.

“Where were you stationed?” I began. I was no longer talking to Moses, I was talking to his training.

“In Gaza.”

After their 18th birthday, all Israelis serve in the regular army: two years for females, three for males. Until they are 43 years of age, all Israeli men are reservists, meaning they have regular training and can be called into active duty at any time.

They are trained to defend their country, with weapons and with words.

As some of you already know, I volunteered in the West Bank of Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement back in 2003. I also traveled through Israel proper, particularly in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the Galilee and Golan Heights regions along the borders with Lebanon and Syria. The majority of my volunteer time was spent accompanying Palestinian olive pickers, protecting them with my passport (funny little pack of paper…what does it mean?!?), when their olive groves were in “closed military zones,” or were too proximate to potentially violent illegal settler populations.

The time I spent there has certainly colored, but also sharpened, my understanding of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.

Moses and I talked for over an hour before getting out of bed that morning…different beds, mind you, of the dorm room we were sharing.

We discussed the definitions of “civilian,” “militant,” and “terrorist,” the number of checkpoints in the West Bank, the attitudes and policies of the Egyptians, the Israel lobby in the U.S., the relative wealth of the Palestinians compared to poorer countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and the use of “human shields” by both Hamas and the IDF, among other things.

I despise the term IDF, “Israeli Defense Force,” the official name of the Israeli military forces, because I view it as an unfair euphemism that hides the true nature of the organization. This is just one example of the limits of my objectivity, and knowing those limits, and given that I cannot precisely quote our conversation, I am not here going to characterize in too much detail Moses’s perceptions.

But I will say that in this particular conversation with the IDF, I found that we kept coming back to the ambiguous trinity of wrong vs. right vs. “interests.”


It is in Israel’s interests to be morally right. As another Israeli tried to persuade me three weeks ago, “It is good that we [soldiers] are brainwashed in humanitarianism.”

But Israel has other interests as well.
How is a person to know when other interests are trumping moral interests, and when the reverse is true? Even more personal, how is a person to know when their own interests are trumping moral interests, and when the reverse is true?

The term “interest” has often been used as a code word for oil, and for wealth, in the game of geopolitics. But there is another translation for “interests” in the game of human relationships that is even more taboo for us Catholics, the one that could get me into the greatest amount of social and psychological trouble.

Interesting that Obi Wan said Darth Vader was “seduced” by the Dark Side.

Hector, holding his young daughter, stopped me on the corner in Echandea last week. We chatted about this and that, and I eventually met his gorgeous wife, whom he later told me he could not marry in the Church because it was too expensive. Hector deposited his daughter into his wife’s arms for the evening, and we strolled to the local karaoke bar for a few songs. He and his also-married cousin took me to the disco later that evening.

Hector had no trouble finding dancing partners, and using his shirt as a lasso around one young woman’s waist. My friends kept pointing out girls that I should ask to dance, or pushed them in front of me. My body felt rigid compared to their young gyrations. I asked a few, but they wagged their fingers in front of my nose, a non-insulting Latin American way of saying "no," to which I more often than not feel insulted.

My righteous beard and scraggly hair distanced me, unkempt by corporate razors whose daily use is supposed to dictate the difference between interest and indifference. My genetic/analytically-overheated male-pattern-baldness also helped to keep my image and attitude away from that of young-and-desirable.From two days before I left the States:“You two are brothers?”
“Yeah”
“Which one of you is older? Matt is? By seven years?!? Joey, stop fighting it. Let it go, man, just shave it off.”
“Let it go? I’m trying to let it go by not shaving.” I’m bald: my hair grows on the sides, but not the top. Whats wrong with that?”
“I get a complex if I don’t shave my head clean, if it gets even a little bit long. I mean, I know I’m married, but I still want women to find me attractive.”
“I get a complex, too. I’m workin on it. But it definitely changes one’s chances.”

I protect myself from the moral-interest ambiguity of sexual attraction by constructing insurmountable peaks of spiritual and cultural righteousness. Sexual attraction demonstrates the most common, and the most intense human engagement of the ambiguity between morality and interest. I do not often join this conversation. My default attitude in relating to women is on the side of non-provocativeness, always suppressing my desires in case they are more about sexual interest than about what is right and wrong (which they usually are, especially down here with the Latin American comfort of prodigious skin and cleavage exposure). The positive benefit is that no one gets hurt. But always acting holy is a denial of human nature that ends up being even more disrespectful than if I would just learn to dance along.

The world’s celebates, however, are certainly involved with difficult work that should not be ignored simply because it is unappealing to the popular mind. Celebates are the social and psychological control group to the coupling world’s prodigious sensory experimentations, isolating and mitigating the particularly strong variable of sexual attraction that has so often blinded the rest of the world to right and wrong.

The Catholic Church lost its moral authority over war centuries ago when it was supplanted by material “interest” authorities after the industrial revolution. But it still wields great power over our collective sexual consciousness with its psychosocial network of shoulds. The Church and her religious allies should be neither dismissed nor ridiculed for the conservative pull on the reigns of our mid-brain sexual instincts; we have been quite prosperous with the form of the nuclear family that they have attempted to guard through the ages.

But remember your Newtonian physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sexual rebellion, often marketed for profit, has become the most direct competitor with the Church. Both of these antagonists have moral codes that stretch to the furthest reaches of the globe, battling especially fiercely in the minds and habits of the world’s adolescents.

It is this type of reconciliation of ambiguity that needs the most care and the most patience.

But not always: The Israeli army has no right to treat the Palestinians the way it does. And given the American involvement in the whole mess, you should try and stop them, even if that means just a change in your understanding.

“What about Hamas?” you might object. “Shouldn’t we tell them to stop, too? The environment is failing, and I really ought to get Jonny a birthday present, but I really shouldn’t go into any more debt, and I really ought to live up to my financial obligations and make sure my family is provided for, and those poor kids on the television in Africa! All they need is just 3 cents a day, and I really shouldn’t ignore them but I really ought to take a break from all these shoulds and go for a walk in the park where I should just enjoy myself.”

Nice spiral. Don’t take more than you can handle, but don’t be afraid to look deeply when you find the strength. The injustice being done to Palestine is particularly egregious. I have the responsibility to try to convince you that this is so, at this point even if that means risking your negative feelings of a guilt trip. This ambiguity I am ready to face now, even if the others must wait until I return to the States.



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The evolutionary spiral of our rationality, our history and politics, our relationships and sexuality, our choices, either descend or ascend depending on perspective. The deepest in hell could make the greatest of contributions to humankind. With a tilt of imagination, downward turns upward if it is offered for the benefit of others.

So what should I do?

Should I go to Machu Pichu for its reputable vista, the surrealism of its international renown, the echo of the ancients (even though the “experts,” i.e. what Lonely Planet says, are unsure of the purpose and age of its construction, saying it was possibly a vacation home for the rich and powerful), the ability to recall with authority its future textbook images and the right to claim that “I was there”?

Or should I shun this archeological Disneyland, this overpriced Gringo hangout, which receives 1000s of mostly-foreign visitors each day, for a vane “I’m-wiser-than-you-are” elevation that would get me higher than it’s 3000 meters?

I am not ready to say that I do not get caught up in the downward-spiral shoulds of modern guilt, or its social cousin modern shame; that lie would only thicken the neurotic goo through which I wade. But with this public psycho-scan, this understanding that my own plank is the same thing as your speck, I no longer feel guilty about feeling guilty.
Colorado, July 2008!
You should turn off your computer, now.