Mark Morford Seeks the Hallowed Balm

Where Is Your Hallowed Balm?
Music? Yoga? Porn? These are the things that can defy the savage GOP gloat and give you hope
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, September 3, 2004

I am searching for a few good things.

Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is.

And you say to yourself, these things, these radiant gems that live outside the mass-media miasma, I need them because they provide some balm, soften the fact that the nation feels massively off track and blinded and war torn and jaded and polarized and fractured and dehumanized and frigid and drunk and pimp slapped and bipolar and schizophrenic and molested and more than a little lost.

And when you find a few of these cultural charms, you pull them in close, wrap them around you like a cloak, like a shield, like a personalized custom-built metal-studded force field that does to those feelings of despair and anxiety what a large bug zapper does to a screaming blood-sucking mosquito.

Do you look first, maybe, as I do, to popular culture? To artists? To music? To people trying to make some sort of unique mark outside the mainstream, thwarting convention and defying categorization and reinforcing the fact that you can still succeed on actual talent and vision and acumen and cool French accents and bizarre haircuts? I do.

Is it the brilliantly weird new Bjork CD? Smoldering smoky multilingual Lhasa? The ethereal birdlike croon of Keren Ann? These are brilliant voices of vision and quirk and beauty. Can they help melt that icy pain and dissolve that knot in your gut? Maybe, just maybe.

What about the word-of-mouth phenomenon of the brilliantly offbeat metaphysical indie flick "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" Hell, yes. Or maybe the grass-roots success of "Outfoxed" and" Super Size Me" and "The Hunting of the President," of "Hijacking Catastrophe" and "There's Something About W and the new expose of the most sinister and heartless figure in all of conservative politics, Karl Rove, in the new documentary "Bush's Brain"?

Is it John Sayles' brilliant new "Silver City," which has Chris Cooper playing a bumbling, slightly moronic, grammatically challenged son of a Colorado senator who stumbles into a murder mystery while campaigning for governor? Or what about the funky indie cred of ""? Are these all usable balms? Well, why not?

It comes in all shapes and sizes and colors and smells. And here's the thing: When you start to look, when you finally turn away from the news feeds and the embarrassing Fox News propaganda, and begin to re-notice the wide array of genuine voices of hope and progress and dissent in the country, all the creative types operating off the media grid and striving like calm dedicated Zen-like maniacs to make the world better and to carve out a slice of humanity amidst the clamor and the rabid postindustrial capitalistic cry, well, you begin to feel a little better. A little.

Because there is always magic. There is always the paranormal, the mystical, the vibrational. There is the old man who plants fresh flowers in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco every week because no one else is taking care of them. There is utterly brilliant Indian quantum physicist turned ecologist Vandana Shiva, and local organic farms, volunteer disaster clean-up crews and meditating monks who endlessly strive, in total silence, sans ego and self-consciousness, to up the vibe of the world.


Do you ever hear about these people? Of course not. Do they make a huge and immeasurable difference to the quality of human life overall? Absolutely.

I am not advocating hemp and dreadlocks and living on food stamps and stale Rice-a-Roni. This is not about some sort of moneyless vegan hemp-wearing New Age group-hug utopia. This is about nourishing the soul and treading as lightly as possible while still digging the living hell out of your Peets and your Pradas and your Powerbook all while laughing at the contradictions even as you live smack in the middle of them.

And there is media of a different sort, underground and alternative and groundbreaking, media that is flourishing just beneath the CNN/Fox/NYT prepackaging factories. Of course you know them. But they always, always bear repeating: AlterNet and TruthOut and DemocraticUnderground, N+1 magazine and Mother Jones and the McSweeney's comics issue, CommonDreams and BuzzFlash and CounterPunch, Molly Ivins and Paul Krugman and the utterly dry-as-ink genius of Maureen Dowd, alongside a whole brilliant litany of damning and best-selling anti-Bush exposés.

And there are, of course, dogs. Oh my God yes. And what of all the amazing and open-hearted people who run all those dog shelters and rescues, people so generous of spirit and kind of heart and who feel so disenfranchised that they've chosen, as so many are wont to do these days, to switch away from people entirely and focus on a breed that doesn't give a good goddamn how angry your God is and will love you no matter what your hair looks like or how painful that tumor of anxiety in your heart? Pure salvation, that is.

I find solace in intense sweaty yoga, in people attuning to their bones and wringing the gunk from their minds via a modernized and dance-like and equipment-free 5,000-year-old practice of movement and breath and refreshing the body and purging the toxins wrought by BushCo and SUVs and gunfire and the sneering cyclist who spit on your car because you were blocking the bike lane for 10 seconds.

Can you find that oasis of hope in your lover? In your mate? In your search for a mate, or in the mate you once had and the mate you will have in the future and the mate you dream above all dreams of having because you somehow understand deep deep down that you karmically deserve it? Of course you can.

Because if nowhere else, you can find it in the search for love. This is a solace in and of itself, if for no other reason than that the love quest is the singlemost universal truth we all share. Nothing, not religion, not porn, not the glorious enjoyment to be found in watching Olympics gymnastics while lying on the floor naked and stoned and covered in tiny candied sprinkles, nothing unifies us more than the fact that we want to have the hot ink of true love tattooed directly onto our eager souls.

And then it hits you all over again for the very first time: This stuff, love and alt-media and dogs and music, it is everywhere. When you look just a tiny bit deeper, just past the screaming rhetoric and the legalized homophobia and the ugly foreign policy and the mad incessant race for money and power, you begin to realize that all these seemingly small gems and tiny random oases of hope are, in fact, much larger, and more potent and more common than you realized. You just, you know, tend to forget.

You realize there are far, far too many people, and events, and movements and divine underground alternative superlative surreptitious energies already out there, right now, combating the rank dank demons of hate and homophobia and homeland security for you to possibly wallow in hopelessness or lame sitcoms or Bush's vacant, stupefied, sad little eyes.

You realize that, far from being a threadbare tattered fractured scattershot hodgepodge of diminishing hope and lost possibility, the resistance is actually alive and thriving and pulsing all around you, constantly, all the time, everlasting and unstoppable and eternally refreshed and well lubricated and smiling like the divine trickster. You just gotta know where to look.

And, perhaps more importantly, where not to.


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