Who are you and why in the fuck is a Republican in my house? Then he did the slight head shake and the half-laugh that means Raman’s actually perturbed about something.

Which is funny ’cause Raman, dread locked and neo-hippified, comes off as one of the friendliest guys you could meet. He’s, like, got such a great energy people are always telling me after they meet him. Of course, then they get to know him … but my point is, you don’t shake this guys hand and think, ‘what an asshole.’

Though I’m sure our Republican friend was thinking exactly that. I don’t even know who the guy was … a friend of a friend probably. He was definitely surprised by Raman’s hostility. I think we all were.

So why did Raman, mister no worries himself, flip out because someone said they were voting for Bush?

I’ve got my theory. I think it has to do with religion and our lack of it. If you stick around long enough, I’ll explain myself.

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If this were solely my own blog, I’d probably rename it, Buscando una Siesta ’cause that pretty much sums it up these past few weeks. Just a lil’ shut-eye, just a 30-minute doze … something more than the five hours a night I’ve been getting since …

Ok. so Friday morning was more of the same. I went to bed around 1 a.m. since for whatever reason, it’s physically impossible for me to sleep before midnight. Then up at 5:45, con el aire fresco, the sun just starting to turn the sky silver and track number three of Sea Change playing.

Most people hate their alarms. In fact, after ex’s and parking tickets, it’s probably the third most hated item on the planet. Not me. I love my alarm clock. Good god - fuck that. Not anymore. It’s actually not mine, but my mother’s and I had absolutely no idea that the damn thing costs $500. Five hundred fucking dollars for an alarm clock? What, because it “reproduces one-half octave lower musical notes and delivers even greater clarity and definition.”

Give me a break. Do you know how many god damned gummi bears that’ll buy you?

OK, so the alarm clock that I used to love and now resent woke me up gently like it does every morning since I get to choose the CD and the track and the volume and the time and duration that it goes off.

I was at the bus stop by 6:05 and the morning light started to color the trees green. All the way up to Cardiff I sat by a campesino Oaxaqueño who first tried to convince me to marry his youngest daughter and then sign me up for this service that delivers all of my necessities straight to my house.

I asked him if they’d deliver his youngest daughter also. A lo mejor sí he said and we both chuckled.

I went to the gym after work and then just missed the Southbound bus. By the time I got home it was 4:30. I wanted to sleep right away, but I still wasn’t sleepy so I went for a long run down to Wind and Sea thinking it would make me tired. Besides, I should be training for the Triathlon Dave and I are doing next Sunday anyway.

Get back home, take a shower, shave, check my email, write some emails, some people call, my sister comes home. This is what happens. The hours go by. They go by without me ever knowing it. I mean, it was four fucking thirty just a little bit ago and now this piece of shit $500 alarm clock is trying to tell me it’s already 8:30 and why the hell do I even have an alarm clock if I never get to sleep anyway?

So mi hermanita and I rap a bit about her week, about her plans for the weekend and then I splash some water on my face, grab some beers from the fridge and head down to PB to say what’s up to my boys Raman and Eli.

Dave comes down around 9:30. There’s six of us out on the deck all sitting around the keg talking about how the tap is broken. It feels like college again and Dave and I bounce to the Casbah to check out Rock the Walk put on by local blogger Joelle to raise money for today’s AIDSwalk.

A couple friends were there, the turn-out was ok, the bands were great, but those missing hours of shut-eye all of a sudden started catching up to me. I felt bad ’cause there were all these local bloggers like Joelle, Joe, Mikey, and Leah - blogs I’ve been reading for a good while now - but I just didn’t have the motivation to go up and introduce myself. Oh well, next time.

We took off around 12:30 and headed back to PB where the keg was mostly empty and as always: “dude, there were like 30 girls here who just took off.” Then Dave, Raman, and I walk over to Longboards for one last beer of the night. I convince a UCSD freshman Indian girl that I speak Gujarati after having lived in India for six months. “Wow, that quick?” she asked. “Yeah, well, I already spoke Hindi and Punjabi so it was pretty easy to pick up.”

She totally bought it. And they say these UCSD kids are bright.

Finally, it was last call and time for a California Burrito at Roberto’s before heading home and calling it a night. Well, that’s what I thought but then, there was the young white Republican awaiting us at the house.

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Republican: Why am I voting for Bush? Because, seriously, can you trust anything that John Kerry says? … Oh hey, what’s up man, my name’s …
Raman: Who are you and why the fuck is a Republican in my house?
Eli: rolling his eyes Oh my god Raman …
Raman: the head shake and half laugh No seriously, why are you here if you’re voting for Bush?
Republican: Because man, I really don’t believe anything that Kerry says …
Eli: Raman man, I mean … I mean … like … how … like, how do you even know dude. Dude, you don’t know exactly what’s going on over there. None of us do. That’s the thing. I mean, I know dude. I know Bush is a fucking joke, but it’s like, it’s like this kid doesn’t know, you know, he’s just like …
Raman: Dude, you know what it is. We’re two types of people. That’s what it is. Republicans and Democrats are two different types of people. Seriously.

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It had been so long since I’d been at the PB house, since I was in one of these 2 a.m., everyone’s holding a bottle, political arguments and I was totally getting off on it. Not ’cause anyone was making sense or that we were solving anything, but just outta straight nostalgia ’cause this used to be my life for at least a year. Staying up late, trying to keep the buzz going, trying to keep a positive ambience and then finally getting bored with that and starting to argue about politics. Even if you agreed, you can still find something to argue about, some nonsensical nuance, the slightest theoretical difference.

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I’ve been reading this book. Well, not the whole book. But a chapter of it. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Living Faiths, edited by R.C. Zaehner was published in 1959 and is a collection of essays about the world’s major religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Shinto, Confuciansim, Taoism, Sikhism, and Dialectical Materialism.

Yeah, Dialectical Materialism; it stood out to me too. Which is why I bought the book to begin with. The philosophy of Marx and Engels seems out of place in an enclopedia of relgion. I mean, wasn’t it Marx who called relgion the opium of the people?

Yes, but most people haven’t read the entire passage that quote comes from :

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the deamnd to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo, the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is relgion.

Zaehner’s argument is that Marx did not intend to abolish religion as much as transform it. Here he compares Dialectical Materialism with Buddhism:

Thus, the ‘materialist’ premisses from which Buddhism starts can be seen to be identical with the Marxian interpretation of existence. Both agree that matter is of its very nature impermanent and therefore a source of constant distress and anxiety, but their solutions of the problem are radically different; for whereas the Buddha declares that a state of being exists which transcends and ‘negates’ the world of matter, and therefore makes liberation from matter and all that is conditioned by matter, such as mind and what we call soul, the goal of human existence, Marx accepts the world of matter as the sole existent reality and sees ’salvation’ in terms of an eschatological fulfilment which will appear ‘in the last days.’

What does this all have to do with Raman talking shit to the Republican kid?

Well, Zaehner’s 1958 article (4 years before the Cuban Missile Crisis), argued that Marxism would one day transcend differences in world religions because it satisfied the same three ingredients that attract all ‘believers’ to relgion, regardless of which one:

1. Faith
2. Desire to ‘belong’
3. A Desire for ‘escape’

He argues (remember, in 1958) that post-Christian Europe now has a new relgion to beleive in and that is Marxism.

Loss of faith in a given relgion does not by any means imply the eradication of the religious instinct. It merely means that that instinct, temporarily repressed, will seek an object elsewhere.

Milan Kundera has also argued that the appeal of Communism in the 50’s throughout Europe was mostly psychological: a way for a generation to at once rebel against its parents, to feel a sense of belonging, and to regain a sense of faith in a time of nihilism.

So where does that leave us today with the Berlin wall being sold on Ebay, Moscow and Prague capitalist super centers, and China leaning more and more towards the market?

Where does that leave 10 California twenty-somethings all with beer bottles in their hands, but no faith, no religion, no Marxism? Where to we invest our “religious instinct?”

In either the Democratic or Republican party. Each one offers what Zaehner calls the three ingredients of relgious instinct: faith that the party will take us to a better future, a sense of belonging with other people who believe as we do, and - although more subtle - a sense of escape as well.

Both Democrats and Republicans see themselves as counter-revolutionaries. Democrats because Republicans are in control and Republicans because they feel popular culture is in control of the Democrats.

But just like world religions are constantly at war with each other, so are the two parties. Even without looking at what they have in common. Most religions are so similar - a belief in the eternal, a belief in an absolute truth and morality. You’d think their real enemy would be nihilistic cynics like the three of us, but we don’t bother them at all compared to someone who believes the same things but by different names and through different rituals.

Well, the same is often true of Democrats and Republicans. We often (but not always) want the same thing - more equality, more jobs, more opportunity, less war, more security, less beauracracy. And yet we don’t talk about the individual issues because we’re so busy name calling.

Last week Elena asked how a Latino could possibly be conservative and pointed to Hispanic Pundit as an example. The guy is clearly way to the right, but when you look at his concerns - poverty, immigration, health care - they’re the same as hers. They only differ in their solutions.

So that’s it, that’s the whole point of this whole post. That it’s time we stop hating each other based on how we identify ourselves and time we start discussing the issues.

Never wanting to be the hypocrite, my next post is going to be about California’s Prop 72.

Word.