The headlines read "These are the worst of times"
I do believe it's true
I feel so helpless like a boat against the tide
I wish the summer winds could bring back paradise
-Dennis Deyoung
That's great, it starts with an earthquake. . .
-REM
Or maybe with a Category Five hurricane.
Of course, at least it's not 536, when volcanic ash blotted out the sun, crops failed, and plague killed a third of the population of Eurasia. So there's that.
Scanning the political headlines leaves one dizzy and slightly nauseous, feeling as if we are living some sort of national eschaton.
Minneapolis is on fire, yet again.
Meanwhile the former Speaker of the House, hawking a book he's written, calls out the lunacy of the modern Republican Party, a condition he and his tribe helped to stoke and enable over the last three decades.
And the WaPo tells us something we should have already realized--that the insurrectionist mob who stormed and defecated all over the People's House weren't a bunch of economically disenfranchised, blue collar white guys, but rather included a plurality of educated white males from areas where people of color had moved to town and threatened their privilege:
If you've ever stood in the dark at White Western or the Econfina Club and listened to the conversations around you, among clusters of paunchy white guys in plaid shirts and khakis, this should come as no surprise. It's always been about race. And, sickeningly, it's probably worst among or nation's most entitled welfare takers, the hordes of white, male military retirees bemoaning the giving of freebies to "those people" while driving from the subsidized commissary to their subsidized doctor's appointment then home to their 4/2 rancher financed with a subsidized mortgage. Come live in my world and try to make payroll every Thursday in the middle of a pandemic, you big sissy.
Ah, I digress. Maybe I'll edit that last paragraph out of existence. Or not.
And it's not all military retirees, no more so than all white males above a certain age are part of the madness of the moment. It's just that the vast majority of veterans who quietly go about their business and try to lead honorable lives don't make headlines. No use getting tangled in my own net of generality.
Meanwhile, in a development that reminds us of the challenge presented to satire in a political moment that seems straight out of Idiocracy (if you haven't seen it, you really should, before its hyperbolic humor is overtaken by events), an ex-professional wrestler ponders calls for him to run for president and bring the country together.
Move over, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. He even has the same first name. And yes, that's a row of tequila bottles lined up behind him as he discusses his political future. We've arrived at that point.
And so I find myself wondering, along with that great political philosopher Merle Haggard,
Are we rolling down hill
Like a snowball headed for Hell?
With no kind of chance
For the Flag or the Liberty Bell
Wish a Ford and a Chevy
Could still last ten years, like they should
Is the best of the free life behind us now?
Are the good times really over for good?
Actually, there's a hint of spring in those words. Unlike when Merle wrote this song nearly five decades ago, these days you really can expect to get a decade out of a Ford, or a Chevy, or even a Dodge. Things get better even as they get worse, like a whirling cluster of Fortuna's Wheels, some heading up, some heading down, defying our human notion of events flowing in one direction like a river rolling toward some cosmic estuary of oblivion.
I first ran into Fortuna when I read Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy back during my religious days. Boethius was a Roman politician who'd experienced a meteoric rise to the heights of power, followed by his arrest for treason after finding himself on the wrong side of a now-forgotten political struggle. Sitting in his cell awaiting execution, he wrote the Consolation as a dialogue with Fortuna, the goddess on whose wheel we all ride through transitory phases of triumph and tragedy.
Of course, it's not our nature to take that trip to the bottom with stoic grace.
“The greatest misery in adverse fortune is once to have been happy.”
But we must always remember that hard times pass as surely as the good.
“Balance out the good things and the bad that have happened in your life and you will have to acknowledge that you are still way ahead. You are unhappy because you have lost those things in which you took pleasure? But you can also take comfort in the likelihood that what is now making you miserable will also pass away.”
Of course, it's not that simple. We get sick and don't always get better, and those health challenges accumulate with the years. Humanity may be okay, but I and the people I love won't make it out of this ride alive. And Boethius ended his life being garroted until his eyes popped out of the sockets. The wheel turns up and down, through fortune and loss, as the barge of each individual life on which the wheel rides flows toward a death sh*t and a toe tag. Jim Morrison was right--no one here gets out alive.
So what to do with that, Donk? Fatalism or nihilism seem like a profane response to the gift of these years, just as much as hedonism or that mawkish, Hallmark-esque happiness for the sake of happiness that I've never quite been able to feel.
Perhaps the experience of last night sheds some light on what a life well-lived should feel like. I finished a day of doing my work well, another strong brick in the old wall o' justice. Then I poured a cocktail and stood in the kitchen reviewing the day's events with P as she whipped together a gourmet supper, that McGyver of the kitchen, while John Prine sang Storm Windows on the little Bose speaker. We said grace over our little meal and dug in while laughing at a Monty Python documentary, then curled up together in bed and fell dead asleep. There's been so much pain and doubt and struggle lately, and this small space and moment felt precious, a refuge from the storms all around us. A Fortuna's wheel within the wheel, riding briefly up even as the larger wheel seems to sink with age, an evening appreciated with the knowledge of how it all ends.
Then there is the philosophy of Dean the Cat, whose trusting drape across my hand has made typing a challenge this morning. We all should have the faith of Dean, who seems simply to take it as a given that things are pretty okay, mostly because he can't comprehend the concept of wondering if things are going to be okay. He's living a blissful present.
So should we all. Selah.
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