Rage Against the Man
by Tzvi Gluckin
I was recently driving around Boston. The song on the radio was Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”.
“Comfortably Numb” was the FM hit from Pink Floyd’s 1979 classic album “The Wall.” The symbol of high school angst and alienation, “The Wall” articulated every grand adolescent illusion of power and fame, mistrust and glory. In my youth, “walled” up in my bedroom, I would connect to Pink Floyd’s message of rage against the MAN, the machine, the Establishment; school, parents, teachers, rules, everything that bothered the middleclass, middle-American teenager.
“Album sales for ‘The Wall’ have topped the twenty-eight million mark,” the DJ casually mentioned as the song slowly faded off in the background.
“What?”
I did the math in my head. When I was a kid “The Wall” was a two-record set that sold for about sixteen bucks. Twenty-eight million copies meant that over the years “The Wall” had literally grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.
Pink Floyd was big business and my anti-Establishment statement was in effect the ultimate Establishment swindle: The industry was marketing rebellion.
For me, rebellion was a part of my identity, distaste for corporate America played a major role in how I saw the world. I listened to bands signed to independent labels. I looked for obscure authors in underground publications. I was careful to buy products from companies conscious of the environment and toyed with the idea of becoming a vegetarian. I looked into Third World cultures and societies; musics and peoples, spiritual systems different from my own, political alternatives to America’s oppressive “democracy.” I read and believed the opinions in The Nation, The Village Voice and other similar publications and I was unquestioning and uncritical, except when it came to the establishment and industry. I hated oil and big money, and George H. W. Bush wasn’t going to lay his dirty hands on me.
I was not alone in my views either. In hip urban centers and on college campuses one could find an almost universal condemnation of anything “corporate.”
(As an aside, it seems to me that the distaste for corporate America is still very much in vogue. Starbuck’s is a particular sore spot. Traditionally, the coffee house was always the hotbed of revolution. A place for pretentious prattle in the aural context of ancient jazz, late 50’s surf music or whatever happened to strike the fancy of the young and eclectic wait staff. The communists and radicals were regulars, tucked away in their corner - deep in thought or heated discussion - the lure of the spoiled elite. Starbuck’s stole the image, cloned it and marketed it to the masses: A corporate culture from the very symbol of the counter-culture. No self-respecting self-styled radical can tolerate the establishment’s invasion of his domain.)
As I grew older I began searching for my heroes. I traveled extensively. In Europe, I found the streets and old haunts of Hemingway and Picasso, Henry Miller’s Parisian back allies - these men had all made their statement; they drank coffee, smoked cheap cigarettes, stayed up all night, slept all day and played the game against the machine. They are the establishment now but the fight had been glorious - they broke all the rules in the creation of new ones.
I moved across continents and explored different philosophies and ideas. I eventually ended up in Israel and began to seriously investigate Judaism. I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that there might be something worth looking into, but I was bothered by Judaism’s insistence on the need for an organized religious system.
Why couldn’t I find God on my own?
It seemed to me that the authoritative discipline of the Torah was an extravagant burden in the face of a more personal, unstructured spiritual path.
When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate MTV telling me what music to listen to and I didn’t need a Madison Avenue executive to know what was cool. Now that I was contemplating Judaism, I felt I was independent and creative enough to find my own cultural nitch. I had more than enough life experience to develop an aesthetic bond with my roots and I certainly didn’t need an ancient Jewish system to connect me to God.
But I was wrong.
While I believed that the corporate world was an affront to my individuality, that their goal was to tie me to an identity I didn’t create or feel a kinship to, because I wanted to create myself, be my own man, make myself in my own image on my terms and in my way - independently. In reality, my life was just an open rejection of any authority that claimed to know better: I simply did not want to be told what to do.
It was time to grow up. I couldn’t hate the symbols of authority just because they were the Authority. If Judaism was worth taking seriously, then I had to accept that not every “system” is evil; maybe it was possible to be original, creative and even independent without also having to rebel. It says in the Talmud that “the one who does as he’s told is greater than the one who acts on his own.” Perhaps the most difficult thing about becoming an adult is learning that there are rules. At times it may even be necessary to play by them.
As the years have passed, I’ve matured, and I think my life is much different now. My wife and I recently decided that Starbuck’s coffee really does taste better than the “lesser known” brand we’d been using. I voted Republican in the last election. Best of all, I no longer blindly reject authority and I don’t mind being told what to do. As a matter of fact, I don’t do anything around the house on my own; I wait until my wife asks me.