The swampery of the made living is mephitic, pneumonular.
Have you noticed how nobody seems to be taking anything seriously anymore?
It’s not just the sad clown in the oval office, not just his cartoonish supporters in the media. It’s the other side too. They’ll go three minutes on pinning down the meaning of ‘rope-a-dope’ because one of the principals used that term.
I was pretty young when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon papers. When the dirty tricks squad broke into the Watergate. When Mayor Daley’s thugs busted heads at the Chicago convention in 1968, and when citizens a few years older than me were killing and dying in Vietnam. When Nixon was impeached, and resigned. When Walter Cronkite finally cried and when Cassius Clay became The Greatest.
Those things seemed serious as they were happening. Watching the news was a solemn and hushed affair, with something of religion in it.
The shit that happens now seems like a stupid play by actors who don’t take their own lines as having any grave meaning, and don’t expect the audience to either.
Did you see that phone video of Harvey Weinstein in the comedy club? What in the hell even was that? Satan sitting around having cocktails while women screamed at him and men screamed back at them, and no one on any side seeming to have a grounded emotion that seemed rational …
Did you listen when the Executive Fool expressed interest in laying down some cash for Greenland, and reacted poorly when the Danes so naturally assumed it was some kind of a joke?
How about when he said we were pulling out of northern Syria, and it lasted just long enough for the Kurds to get hashed, before he changed his mind and came right out and said there was oil there, turns out, and the US was going to stay after all, because of it?
Are you fucking kidding me, is this … what is this?
Animated walls and cages for real children.
I find myself hard-pressed to even watch the shallow anchors, even the decent ones, going through their motions–I wonder what they’re feeling and I am forced to conclude: not much, not really. It feels way too much like watching somebody play a video game on the channel next door on the Tubes.
Scott Carrier put out another audio piece the other day and it was about the worst thing I’ve ever heard him do. He went into a bar in Rifle, Colorado, to eat, and noticed that all the waitresses were carrying guns.
It ended with the woman owner clutching him and praying for him, and he said all he could think about as he stood there and took it was running back home to the sanctuary of the big city, his city. By which he meant Salt Lake.
He’s one of the very best chroniclers I know. Our so-called reality is weirding him out to the point where SLC is a sanctuary, and he bites off his story and rushes back onto the Interstate. He went out to do a story and it was just utterly overwhelming.
When Hunter Thompson was writing, in the Latter Days, not too far from there in Aspen, he was painting in lysergic colors with a hyperbolic brush, and it was entertaining because he was so over-the-top and absurdist about the whole thing. He exaggerated for effect.
Now the media reality is miles beyond that. Years past that. Everybody has a role and seriousness is lost on every side.
I don’t feel like I understand it. I don’t feel like anyone does.
I do feel like this is how it must feel before something essential just breaks irrevocably. Yeats, and the center cannot hold. Yellow-eyed tygers, burning bright …
What do?
Manifest. Witness. Sleep and wake and notice and keep trotting, three of you in a line, headed toward a singular purpose uncomprehended by any other living soul.