The New Dissidence

I am an American. Standing stout and proud with a fistful of dollars and a stomach full of lies, repose your trust in me: staring a sunken, sullied face in the eyes, I know the tens of thousands of Americans living below the poverty line belie the fact that America is the wealthiest nation on earth. In Iraq, the regular ruse of right-wing rhetoric was enough to ripen the Arab world for reconstruction: even my generation will now know the horror of war readied on false precepts.
Born an American and by presupposition destined to die one. Being born a citizen of the United States of America is a lot like winning the lottery. How many people seem to be making those fat stacks, living it up non-stop, chasing yachts, and sipping champagne on the night of the anniversary of that $126 million bomb drop? Capitalism and America, wealth and happiness, sex and money—all are mutually exclusive pairs in the minds of lottery winners or lottery-winning hopefuls. In reality, rags-to-riches stories like these are better left to the impetuous imaginations of the world’s avarice-ridden “rich and famous” recruits. For the love of money all will perish.
Yet for any individual impelled with a desire to lead an omnicultural existence, that is, living in respect and recognition of the myriad peoples and innumerable cultures that compose the very nature of our world, being born American is like having a terminal disease. As the founder and director of OSU, the Omnicultural Student Union, I feel that this sentiment runs with equal impetus amongst many of our student members.

In May of 2004, a student named Eliza came to me with a serious concern:
“You know, it’s just like every person I see is a goddamn zombie. Half of these students are walking around without a care in the fucking world, ready to banter on about who’s fucking who or bitch and moan about wanting to party, like—‘oh god I wish it was the freakin’ weekend’—this sort of insouciance drives me insane. I feel like my entire generation exists at a fundamentally primitive level: as long as there is food, water, shelter, social constituencies and a fuck to be had here and there, they’ll all die blissfully. It’s as if the whole of Western philosophy, which is a tradition that has brought about by some of the greatest minds our world has ever known—and the one thing I can confidently stomach from the occidental world and not expect to vomit, by the way—has been created in vain because of the hedonism and ignorance that runs rampant through the veins of my generation!”

Eliza was born to American parents in New York yet before age two was to accompany them as they faced interim teaching positions the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi. Her father and mother are both professors at prestigious American universities, and after living in Abu Dhabi, Calcutta, India and Beijing, China, they took their daughter home—their home, that is—to the United States. The first class education that Eliza received during the 14-year span of her multicultural upbringing has left her one of the most erudite, culturally conscientious and academically focused undergraduate students I’ve ever met. And despite the world of consternation that living in America has brought upon her, students like Eliza are prime examples of what the majority of Americans view as dysfunctional. Socially inept and often considered apt for psychological enquiry, many American-born adolescents brought up in foreign countries are often subjected to similar stereotypes. Assisting such individuals—giving them a place where they can feel wholly comfortable to come forward with anything that is on their mind—is only one of the reasons that the Omnicultural Student Union was created.

On a larger scale, OSU was established in September of 2000 as a manifestation of “the new dissidence.” All members of OSU know and accept this as a prerequisite to joining the union, yet an explanation of the term “dissidence” itself as used in modern discourse is pertinent here.

In centuries past, writing and literature in general thrived as the highest mode of expression amongst the public and in the realm of the intellectual. Only since the dawn of the modern era of high technology and global communication has literature lost its place in our world. Endless information on any fathomable subject is available via television or the internet. It’s a quick fix—with only a flick of the switch ephemeral knowledge is in the eye of the beholder. Thus, literature has been forgotten. It is no longer necessary to read books to become educated; simply regurgitating the same oblique, trite information and news that has been streamlined directly into every home in America is enough to be considered an upright, knowledgeable citizen. And yet the mass media cesspool manages to never run dry. Rather, filtering down through the denizens of its propagandized dominion, the runoff from such contemptible information has gathered into a never-ending reservoir in the mind of the public.

It is in retort to this intricate and infinite web of mass media which reaches out to the American population like the lustful, corpulent fingers of a temptress, in repulsion of the blatant violations of a self-effacing, constitutionally irreconcilable war initiated by the American government under the pretense of further spreading the seed of democracy, and in disgust towards a capitalist free-market society where profit equals power and the consumerist will to spend never ends—it is in response to matters such as these that dissidents are alive and functioning in American society today.

Considered pugnacious rebels amongst the meritocracy, many such intellectuals have been pushed to the margins of American society. Even many undergraduates whom I’ve worked with here at OSU have faced oppressive and demeaning treatment due to their views. The Omnicultural Student Union President, a young man named K, spoke to me recently in light of this fact:

“I think it’s definitely a shame that some of our members are on the receiving end of bellicose prompts leading to verbal standoffs and other forms of harsh treatment. But in the end, I view being in America as a temporary state of existence anyways, and I know that a lot of our other members do too.”

In America, anything considered “foreign” or out of the norm is often labeled as unsound and disreputable. Foreign. The word in itself implies more than just the unknown, the exotic. That which is deemed foreign is that which is considered unknown, and in turn, that which is unknown is often taken as vile, wrong, considered with nothing but stark hostility: “What are you, a fucking foreigner?” Such a crass, base, and hateful compliment has undoubtedly been stated innumerable times by members of K’s generation in reference to a friend who has done something judged stupid or out of the norm.

In reference to K’s reminiscences, becoming steadily more and more appalled at his generation’s overall lack of cultural consciousness and utter refusal of anything not inherent to their value systems or social expectations was only the beginning of his own yearning for dissidence as a native-born American.

“Studying abroad in Asia was the beginning—rather, the continuation, I should say—of a personal infatuation with and desire to know and understand the innumerable cultures, peoples and languages of this world. Upon return from my own experience in Japan, I realized that living outside of the countries of our inordinate births, not only for a year or two or six, but for an extended period of time, up until you’ve lived abroad as long as you’ve lived in your country of birth, is imperative for anyone striving for an omnicultural existence.”

Such statements were alarming even to my ears. K claimed that the countries of our births are irrelevant, that all world citizens are destined to live in harmony regardless of our racial, cultural or physical dispositions. It is only under K’s leadership and devotion towards the omnicultural cause that OSU has flourished and grown to where it stands today.

In light of potentially radical claims pertaining to the meaning of national identity and citizenship, the Omnicultural Student Union offers no caveat. We are a group of individuals gathered under a single indivisible assertion: to strive for world peace and the humanistic, just treatment of all peoples of our earth. Our aims are achievable only through the renunciation of an individualized cultural identity, the instrumentation of multiple-language training as an impervious method towards the facilitation of cultural understanding, and a willingness to eschew the modes of expression and evaluation that a native-born citizen of any country comes to know so well. Functioning with deep ties to the realm of cultural studies, it is our hope that through our efforts, the dissident’s intellectual vocation and the road to cultural understanding will be illuminated with brilliance unmatched by the whole of every star in the cosmos.

Obfuscation is in Order

Since childhood, I have been enraptured by the power of words. As a three year-old, my father used to read me an ABC primer before bed every night. The book was chock full of hairy primates who formed their bodies into the individual letters of the alphabet. As a child, I was infinitely amused by them and learned to love language through this book. Yet even then, I can remember being drawn to the structure of specific words given to represent each letter of the alphabet. X . . . Y . . . Z. Even though the end of the book spelled bedtime, this was always my favorite part. Xylophone. A fairly lengthy word, I could picture the elongated instrument being banged on brutishly by the alphabet monkeys. In a flash, the zebra from two pages down came crashing through the ensemble, the butted “Z” on his forehead smashing the lengthy xylophone into so many letters and pieces.

That was nearly twenty years ago, yet I frequently cite that book as my first distinct contact with the world of literature. As an undergraduate student immersed in a world of letters and words, tropes and metaphors, fictions and non-fictions, squandering but a few minutes to dwell on the imagistic qualities of a single word often seems unthinkable. But I still find myself enamored by individual manifestations of language when beholding a certain word.
Nonplussed: a fowl plucked of all feathers, stark and naked to the world.
Lugubrious: lug nuts and briars smeared like goobers all over the face.
Vexation: somebody’s got the hex on me and it’s become my vocation?
Similar examples have been teeming throughout my mind ever since I began to maintain a grasp of the English language, and I cherish the moments I was able to spend fixated on words and words alone. Many of the associations made between words are based on similarities in sound or spelling, prevalent in hex as a part of vexation. In other instances, an aleatory pattern found in the structure of the word causes an imagistic reaction to what I know to be the prescribed meaning, such as in lugubrious.

Having come this far in my desperate affair with the English language, I find the perpetual existence of new and obscure words prevalent within it a great joy. Indeed, when writing, I have often set out to formulate and entire sentence or paragraph solely for the sake of incorporating a single word. As English is to be eternally heralded for having the largest number of words amongst all world languages, I presume my fate to fornicate with it shall never end.

But what is the use of having a licentious love story if you can’t tell anyone? I find myself asking this question regularly as of late; for what is the purpose in intimately understanding the English language and its over two million words if one cannot feel free to utilize them at will? For instance, “I feel impelled with a virtuous desire to reinstate our former benevolent kinship in spite of my reprehensible actions,” is easy replaceable with, “Sorry dude!” in any given conversation amongst members of my generation. On an individual level, why does the word loquacious even exist when absolutely no one seems to fancy its use over the pitifully colloquial talkative? It’s not as if loquacious is a particularly difficult to pronounce word—it simply does not garner reputable usage in the English speaking world.

I am of the opinion that language is a progressive mode of mental apprehension. Through the passing of years and acquisition of education, one’s vocabulary level rises accordingly. However, in second grade, there is no conceivable use for the word superfluous. Yet as humans striving towards a linguistically and intellectually independent existence, through the years we work to accommodate the substance of our very own existence through the words we use. In high school, decentralization and onomatopoeia become common knowledge vocabulary; moving into so-called college level literariness, words such as invidious, epistemology, and rhizomatic all enter the playing field.
I feel like that for many members of my generation, somewhere along the line the desire and denoted necessity for a high vocabulary drops below disparaging levels. As if only a certain few words are required to express the infinite realm of human emotion or philosophical inquiry? Not one fleeting moment of concern is given to the necessity for linguistic independence and intellectual prowess by the majority of my generation.

Above all, I believe it is my generation’s utter refusal to embrace the intrinsic value of language that has led them down a steep spiral towards a chronically fecund existence. Inherent within is a painstakingly neglected corpus of vocabulary that is repeatedly trampled on and shored up as worthless, archaic language. In its stead, a lifeless and redundant wave of clichés and modernized aphorisms relegates the increasingly primitive existence of my generation. And they say that language is the only thing that separates animals from humans . . .