Getting Off the Subject: The Unaccommodated Human Being

Still, to write about contemporary politics is generally to waste time. I expect little from government--or from business. Wrapped up, as they are, in ideological fantasies, these institutions mainly exist to perpetuate themselves. Indeed, if corporations are people, then why can't they be elected to office?

For me, most importantly, it's fundamental to see past the surface--the tempting surface of our insane society. Can all this continue--indefinitely? In H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, the narrator, after the first, utterly unexpected Martian attack, finds himself unaccommodated (both literally and metaphorically): "It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless, unprotected, and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came--fear" (18). Is this not the modern condition? For thinking human beings, is this not how one must (or ought to) understand our world and our consciousness? "She would of been a good woman," the Misfit said, [in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"], "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (388). Without that threat, we sink into obliviousness. Only as we are unaccommodated can we understand ourselves.