"And Jesus said unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head."
-Luke 9: 58
Pondering on an article in the NYT the other day profiling James Carville, now 79 and as full of piss and vinegar as when he ran Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992.
Carville can't stomach MAGA, but he's a man without a country as he rails against the self-destructive, out-of-touch wokeness of his own party. People make decisions with their gut or their heart as much as with their minds, and talking down to folks from the faculty lounge and telling them what to think is no way to win a popular election.
Which dovetails nicely with one of the key takeaways from the book I'm reading this week, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt. His profile in the Times the other day led me to buy the book.
Haidt uses the metaphor of the rider on the elephant to illustrate how, from a neuropsychological standpoint, we make decisions. The rider is reason, while the elephant is the far older autonomous nervous system and web of hormones and subconscious thought that sort of has a mind of their own. The rider may think he's making the decisions for the team, but it only works if he can train the elephant not to wander hither and yon in search of gratification. The Buddhists and the Stoics have known this for a long time (in fact, I think he cribbed the elephant thing from Buddhist tradition).
Where am I going with all of this? Good question.
What's on our minds lately is our status, P and me, as strangers in a strange land, wherever we go. The politics of the moment has consumed everyone around us, and the election year is barely started.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
So observed Yeats in the aftermath of the Great War and the beginning of the Irish War for Independence. Some things never change. My neighbors in this reddest of red places aren't trying to steer the elephant at all.
Here, poor Peg stands in an operating room where it's okay to excoriate anyone not on the Trump Train. She's had it suggested she should have a brain transplant or some such, when I can tell you she's almost certainly the smartest person in that operating room. And the underlings join in the scourging, voicing support for a man and a party that have done zilch for any of them. It's just demoralizing, and tends to be the topic of conversation on our walks after work.
Meanwhile at our refuge in TayCo, the paper informs that in the recent Republican primary the local population turned out in far greater numbers than in most Florida counties, and registered a whopping 93% of their votes for the Cheeto Messiah. Twenty-seven people voted for Haley. And the Reagan Dinner is coming soon at the Elks Lodge, our Elks Lodge, featuring a senator who was involved in the greatest heist of public funds ever recorded while running HCA, and a congressman whose patrician worldview reserves for the fawning but provincial crowd nothing but contempt. Our neighbors are going to vote straight down the R ticket anyway. Sometimes they try to explain why at the Elks Lodge, when we can't avoid the topic. Most of their explanations are factually flawed, as in there are no supporting facts at all. It's discouraging.
But our beloved Steuben County, New York, voted 72% for DJT in the last election, Corning being a tiny bastion of sanity in the midst of it all. Well, sort of sane. I squirm a little at some of the Pride Week excesses, I have to admit. One's sexuality is one's own business, but it's hard to see how one bases a culture on all that.
California? Hell, they're crazy too. The other day I heard a piece on Morning Edition about the controversy in San Francisco over the art community's over-the-top support for Hamas in the recent troubles in Gaza.
This strikes me as ridiculous, a complete failure to acknowledge that all the death going on there right now lies directly at the feet of that terrorist organization, men (always men) who are willing to sacrifice their helpless neighbors as human shields to score publicity points. But liberal orthodoxy is as inflexible as anything coming from the pulpits of the Southern Baptist Convention these days, and of course the "oppressed" are always the good guys even when they bring it on themselves.
So, P and I find ourselves with no political affiliation, which maybe isn't such a bad thing. But we also find ourselves without a home, a tribe, a place where we don't get a daily fork in the eye from our neighbors who are atop their elephants, full of passionate intensity.
What to do? Just wind the clock, I guess. Nothing needs to happen right away.
Commentaires