Let’s get real for a moment – our country is seriously screwed up. It’s been screwed up for a long time and appears to be getting more screwed up by the day. I’m not just speaking about the obvious economic, infrastructural and international issues, but something deeper in our psyches that those problems are symptoms of.

The feeling has been growing inside me like a cancer for a while. As a child of the ‘60s born to a Vietnam War protesting family who believed in the aspirations of LBJ’s Great Society, I think my anxiety started in earnest during the Reagan years, which, of course, was the apotheosis of the tide of inchoate xenophobic, angry-white male rebellion led by Howard Jarvis that ushered in Southern California’s disastrous Proposition 13. Proposition 13, and the zero-sum impulses behind it, infected our nation during Reagan’s tenure and have since brought California, and it’s dream, to its knees. The same impulses are working their black magic on our country. But that’s another story.

As far as this one goes, I suppose I was hoping the hole in our hearts and minds manifested in such things as torture, domestic spying, illegitimate and ill-conceived wars, massive tax cuts for the wealthiest and the biggest era of corporate welfare in history, etc., etc., during the Bush years was an aberration, a psychosis brought on by 9/11 and the craven manipulators who exploited it to take everything (huge chunks of the Constitution, the middle class, and your sons and daughters) they could take. But then I read Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Chris Hedges. It’s a devastating account of our culture’s devolution towards willful ignorance, an embrace of illusion over reality/fiction over fact and our meek surrender of the commonwealth to corporate bloodsuckers (and I’m being literal, here). It’s a must read for anyone who yearns to live as an adult in an increasingly infantile culture.

Unfortunately, it had the effect of confirming my suspicion that despite the hopeful election of Obama, what happened during the Bush years wasn’t a temporary psychosis. Rather, it’s what we’ve become. Idiot America. Rome in the time of Nero.

For evidence look at the health-care debate – a debate in name only though, thanks to the ginned up fear-mongering by the insurance companies who might lose some of the gross profits they make off the unhealthiest developed country in the world (no coincidence that our for-profit health care is the worst in the world at maintaining health) if there’s a public option. It’s not a debate, it’s a spectacle. It’s an exercise in the sort of cultural and civic illiteracy that has kept us shooting ourselves in the foot since Ronald Reagan. And it’s reached a grotesque climax with these health-care town halls.

What can you call it when something sane, rational and necessary such as proposed health care reform (and the health care reform being proposed is not nearly as sane or rational as the commie healthcare that’s been keeping Steven Hawking alive and brilliant for the past 40 years) provokes the kind of insane, hysterical and dangerously irrational convulsions we’ve been witnessing? When people try to bring guns and knives to stop the communist takeover that health care reform supposedly represents? When they hang congressmen in effigy and make death threats against others? If you’re sane, you call it insanity. The dangerous sort that makes you wonder how far we will go in our insanity and if we will ever come out of this morass.

These are the thoughts that cloud my brain when I go to see Tony, my barber. Tony is a throwback, an old-school barber who will still give you a straightedge shave. He came here from Mexico 55 years ago from a border town near Laredo, Texas. His shop is the kind that attracts regulars, and not because he’s so deft with the scissors. I often leave his shop thinking I’ll need another cut to fix the one I just got. But I keep going back, because of Tony. I love the guy.

He plays classical music and has old-fashioned barber chairs. He’s steady, even if at his advanced age his liver-spotted hands aren’t so much anymore. When the financial crisis was reaching its peak, I remember going in to see him, more for a dose of his steady calm than for a stylish cut. He told me he has never played the stocks, bonds, CDs, mortgage refinancing or any of the other crap that got people in over their heads. He deals strictly in cash for everything. He’s seen craziness before and he reassures me that craziness comes and craziness goes. Sometimes he says crazy has to happen for sanity to regain its footing. I realize that he’s part of the community fabric here that offers a rare peace, a sense of calm continuity in a crazy world. He’s always there, always reliable. He calms me down and reminds me of the pleasures of living in such a diverse community full of people with a wealth of different experiences. He’s an immigrant with an immigrant’s optimism, and exceedingly civil man, with a sense of decorum in uncivilized, indecorous times. This current craziness, he tells me, will pass. I want to believe him.

Then, he tells me, he’s selling his shop and moving to Whittier to be closer to his daughter and grandkids. I didn’t betray the disappointment I felt that he would soon no longer be a part of my life. I’m not sure he’d understand. After all, I’m sort of an outsider, the odd gringo among his Latino regulars and the truth is, we barely know each other. But I know enough to know I’ll miss him and I wonder who will take his place. Not just in the barbershop, but in my life. I wished him well and felt another strange sense of loss.

To Be Continued…. Editor’s Note: Joe Donnelly will be blogging in an ongoing series of “Gringo in the Midst” posts on Latino Landscape. His next posts will be from Costa Rica.

***********************************

Joe Donnelly is the former deputy editor of the LA Weekly. He has written for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and numerous other publications. Donnelly lives in Los Angeles, CA.