“I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” Groucho Marx
Last night, I was seriously thinking about how I would cope if the fellow, who won the last election he lost, was to actually win this time. I am not kidding. Then, it got me thinking that the whole world is crazier than I can ever remember. I am talking nuts. Just twenty-four hours ago, I was actually getting worried about how the hell I could deal with it.
Well, it didn’t take me long. This morning, this had to be our next story. The title, the quote and the photo took about five minutes to grab. I figured I was good to go. Now, of course, there is the writing the story part and I have a plan. I am going to spend the week putting this together and this time, I won’t make a big deal about when I am writing. So, for the rest of this little ditty, I am just going to start slapping together paragraphs.
Before I turn off this page for now, I just want to say that nowhere in this story am I going to blame technology as the cause. I think I have used it before, because it is so easy to blame the newest player to the game of life on earth for changing the rules. It is us and not it.
This entire week, I have been copying and cutting out stories to help make my case. The first one I was going to use was from the Voice of America. Afghanistan’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, burned 21,000 musical instruments that they said were associated with anti-Islamic practices. Women can’t go to school. They can’t even leave their house unescorted. This is God’s work?
Then, I found an Oxfam report, estimating that war-fueled hunger is likely killing as many 21,000 people per day in dozens of countries as parties to global conflicts, weaponizing starvation against children and other vulnerable people in Gaza, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia and elsewhere. The weapon is the hand of man.
I have a table top filled with pieces of paper, recounting the lunacy and brutality being carried out all over the world. There are dictators refusing to give up power, some of whom have been choking on their gluttony for decades.
Many countries are tilting to the far right, pissed off at immigration and the outrageous inequality between the ultra rich the rest of their population. Political parties opposed to those in power are being outlawed and their leaders jailed.
I looked at all those papers and crumpled them up and threw them out, because that’s not what I do or why I do it. I tell stories, which means I wonder why and how shit happens, but even the slightest hint of expertise is creative blasphemy for me.
Regurgitating a nauseating menu of specifics is best left for people, who think they know what they’re talking about, while I much prefer doing a breaststroke in my pool of ignorance. Facts are not the water wings that will keep me from drowning.
Keeping the water theme going, I think we have been surfing a tidal wave for thousands and thousands of years. The dictionary says it is caused by the gravitational interaction between the sun, the moon and the earth. A stoned out hippie in a tie dye shirt would say something like, “It is cosmic, man.” While it pains me to say it, the dude is right.
Let me throw in a quick dose of the Buddha, when he talked about the interconnectedness of absolutely everything and cosmology is right in there. This man made wave of consequences floods everything, everywhere, including the invisible.
Cartoons are wonderful exaggerations. Right now, we have a living, breathing, universal human cartoon of the forces behind this tidal wave. He personifies how we have gotten so far from the best of humanity, by no means the cause, but an odometer of how far we have fallen over the millennia. Make no mistake, he is not alone, any more than Hitler was a maniacal, solo act. The difference between a tidal wave and a ripple is the energy and in a pure social context, it is about the millions of people, costars to the comets of crazy, who just swim along.
The founding of this country has been hopelessly romanticized, the perfection of democracy. There is this imperfection, like a barely visible flaw in an otherwise magical diamond. George Mason, a delegate from Virginia, charged with drafting the Constitution, said that allowing voters to pick the president would be akin to “referring a trial of colours to a blind man.”
I do wonder when it all began, this problem we have with each other. I know we are called Homo Sapiens and there were Neanderthals, pretty similar and lived sort of around the same time. Regardless of name, they seemed to stay together and didn’t really wander all that far. Personally, I don’t really care why our team won and the others lost. It is the tribal thing that lies at the root cause of any species success or failure. With every other species, it was more of a visceral thing, like flocks and herds. With us, it was and is the abdication of our own power, to those who prey on our mistrust, fostering societal impotence.
I think our eventual unraveling had and has to do with trust. George Mason wasn’t even close to that, something incredibly basic in our make up. If you really don’t know who the fuck you are, how in God’s name are you going to trust anyone, ever? We have always harbored this suspicion of motive. The exercise of power came in early into this human kerfuffle, this crisis of conviction.
It is easy to prey on this flaw. Your power gets pickpocketed by those, who pretend to know what is best for you. At any time, at any point, I can guarantee you, there has always been consensus of what people want for themselves. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is not some horseshit, political rhetoric manufactured by the pretenders. It is every human beings’ fucken entitlement and its been stolen by those cartoons, year after year after century after millennia.
In some convoluted way, each one of us is responsible for energizing that tidal wave, which will consume the future as we know it. We have each relinquished so much of the power we are born with that our landscape is going to be unrecognizable going forward.
Now, the fact that I wholeheartedly believe everything I have written, doesn’t help me at all to cope with that wave. I consider my voice an inaudible whisper. Where is the chorus? The human cartoons have been bullying us for far too long. The United Nations is an impotent joke. The International Court of Justice is nothing but the consensus of court jesters.
Everyone seems to think life is some kind of board game. You just keep shuffling the dice and move yourself along the board of reckoning, which is not a circle, sorry to say. Time and consequence are a straight line and eventually the tidal wave will crush the shore of blind certitude we have been swimming in.
The idea that so many people in the most powerful country in the world, believe that a cartoon is a real solution to our problems, birthed by a direct result of our mistrust of ourselves, is fucked.
So, how am I going to cope? I am coping right now.
LISTEN TO THE STORY HERE:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/15953335-one-flew-into-the-cuckoo-s-nest