Making Sense of the Senseless
It can't be done.
I am lucky.
When my family gets together - now, grant you, it is not one of those huge extended families - if we have a heated discussion, it will be about what game are we going to play, what the rules are going to be, how much vodka goes in a Moscow Mule and how we’re going to keep so-and-so from winning every time. When it comes to politics, we all agree that a humorless hustler straining to be recognized as an autocrat in the making does not deserve to be within a hundred miles of the Resolute Desk and the nuclear ‘football’.
We spend our days trying to make sense out of the senselessness in the papers, in the news, in social media, in magazines. Notifications coming in hourly from iPads and iPhones and Apple Watches.
Things going on in the world.
Who are these people who don’t see the world even remotely similar as the way we see it? Who are the president’s most stalwart supporters and how do they not see him for what he is? Why does the popularity needle never drop below 30% or so?
We know he has the Flat Earthers. We know he has the anti-vaxxers and the anti-maskers. We know he has the make-believe militia and the Proud Boys whose fraternity initiation reminded me of when as little boys we use to hunt one another down in an effort to ‘rack’ one another in the testicles with our fist. A rite of passage of young males that’s rarely spoken of. It’s a wonder any of us, who were once young males, are capable of procreating at all.
How will our country recover if we ever get him to leave? And, will the country be able to recover because pulling something from the root does not necessarily preclude it from regrowing? The cancer of this populist movement will still be with us.
Will we only get the satisfaction of cutting one head off the multi-headed hydra? That, too, would be disappointing.
We spend our days asking one another, did you read about this right being trampled? That right being trampled? Did you hear about this edict or that edict? There are so many fronts, so many battles, so many little deaths, so little time. Asymmetrical information warfare at its most stultifying.
We don’t have a plan if he wins or if he refuses to leave if he loses or if he declares himself the winner no matter the result. We are just like most people in that regard. Like most Americans, we will hunker down and continue to resist in whatever way possible. But it’s an incredibly depressing thought.
We try to pinpoint the time or era when ‘things began to go south’. Was it the era when Reagan said, “the nine most terrifying words you’re ever going to hear are, ‘I’m from the government, I’m here to help’.” Or the era when Newt Gingrich led a shutdown of the government and said to the men and women across the aisle, “I'm happy to cooperate; I'm not willing to compromise. Compromise in Washington means ‘sell out’.”
Or was it earlier, when Goldwater selected the man who may as well have said those infamous words spoken by Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It reminds me of victory” as his vice presidential pick and running mate? He was a man who thought the way to win a war was to terrorize the citizenry with napalm - an incendiary made from gasoline laced with a highly flammable gel. ‘Jellied gasoline’ might be an easier way to think of it. He used napalm as a tactic in World War II, the Korean War and, most notably, the Vietnam War.
There’s no correct answer.
It’s the dark money. It’s the money equals free speech. It’s the corporation as a person. It’s the lobbyists who once were politicians, and the politicians who once were anti-government nut jobs. It’s the dismantling of unions. It’s the emptying of psychiatric hospitals. It’s the soft response to armed militia forcefully taking over public lands. It’s the violent response to Second Amendment enthusiasts. It’s identity politics. It’s systemic racism. It’s too much political correctness. It’s not enough political correctness. It’s the Proud Boys. It’s antifa.
It’s the culmination of fifty years of culture wars.
Our political discussions end by hanging in the air unresolved. We can only stare out into the distance, or at each other, in bewilderment until another notification pings one of the eleven devices the four of us have access to.
Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping!
BREAKING: The president and the first lady tested positive for coronavirus, throwing the nation’s leadership and his reelection campaign into uncertainty.
The wastrel has caught the hoax.
How did we come to this place?
And then, off we go again, each of us giving our own exegesis of how America arrived at these wildly unprecedented times. Like dogs chasing their tails. Confused when they catch them, and frustrated when they don’t.
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For you Seattle sports fans: The Seattle Storm WNBA basketball team start their fourth run for a WNBA title today against the Las Vegas Aces. I’ve been watching the playoffs via Facebook, YouTube and ESPN. Game starts at 4pm PST.
Also, AAR Shan Perera sent me this recent quote:
“...it’s Game 7 of the World Series, and all the umps are working for one of the teams. So it feels like you need to win by 20 runs....”
- Eddie Vedder (in describing the importance of the election)
In addition, under “the immigrants get things done” category, he wrote me this:
I’ve been writing letters to voters in Ohio (where I went to High School) via https://votefwd.org/, and Lucca (his son) is busy hand-crafting “I Voted” badges to go inside those envelopes. We’ve signed up at least a dozen families in my street for this. All hands on deck, as we DO need to win by at least 20 runs! They sent an update recently that Oct 17th is our mailing date with a revised voter outreach goal of 15M letters (as the volunteers crushed the 10M threshold).
That’s the sort of civics class I’m talking about. Go Lucca! Go Shan!
I apologize if none of the above made much sense. I’ve been off my schedule starting late and there may have been cocktails and, perhaps, a gummy bear involved.