Day of the Dead
November 2, in Brazil, is Dia dos Mortos, day of the dead. Some had been whispering that it also meant a day of transformation, of going over threshholds. But no, it was really about the dead, the dead walking the earth, taking away from the living.
I have no doubt that each of us felt inside a pure pit of blackness and despair. The sickness unto death. Nowhere to go from here. A friend writes:
I have always considered myself a small "d" democrat, one small soul who was naive enough to dedicate himself tostudying and thinking about and teaching about andtalking about and being a part of the many strugglesfor justice in this country, one who saw himself asprofoundly AMERICAN and in a progressive, moraltradition that strove to push our nation to live up toits best, most lofty ideals, a person with the sillyidea that my efforts might make some small difference,that it might contribute - with others - to somethinggood and decent and humane... but who now findshimself increasingly, utterly and harshly out of stepwith an imperial rightward march of inequality,intolerance, arrogance, selfishness, greed, andpower... a conservative movement dedicated to destroying everything I feel most deeply about...
I am embarrassed for my country... I am wondering how I get back up again from this, and even if I rise, I have no idea where I fit any more. I am lost and irrelevant in my own country.
That sounds about right. For me, well, you know when Bill tells the bride that he's not being sadistic, he's actually at his most masochistic, then shoots her? That's sort of how I felt, as I pumped a shotgun shell into the head of some dreamy, flashbacky notion of America that I had been, up till that moment, carrying around inside. I really thought that when the chips were down she would see what a terrible mistake she was making, she would look into herself and know, with crystal clarity, that the path she was aiming herself down was a dead-end, that the man she was about to get hitched to was worse than a mullet-wearing know-nothing hic: that he was a drunk and a wife-beater who would lock her up and cut her down and violate her when the mood struck him and after a few short years she would be no more the beautiful bride she'd been but a tattered, scarred, broken, bitter old woman. I thought she'd see through him. But the dumb bitch just went ahead and tied and the knot.
But for me, the darkness spread beyond America, to the very heart of democracy and society. The task before us just seems so Sisyphean, man by his very nature so base. Not so much individually, but collectively. Left to their own devices, these corrupt, scheming, hate-mongering elements inevitably take over, and things sink to such a disgustinly brutish level that mankind might as well not even exist. So you fight and you organize and you debate and you convince until little by little you restrain man's darker urges and build a society with some little bit of fairness and equality. You establish, after centuries, the idea of democracy, of universal sufferage, of constitutional law, of civil rights, only to find that the powers of greed and hypocrisy have managed to game the system entirely. Then the tide comes in and sweeps away your baluartes, and forcefully tugs you and the whole nation back to the primieval sea of the rabid right.
(It's not only in the States: look at Italy, or Spain under the PP: the far right, the right that offers itself as a protection against some imagined leftist threat, the right that once relied on brownshirts and cinematic rallies, has discovered that it doesn't need the trappings of fascism, it just needs to control the media.)
So great, we take solace in the fact that this kind of thing has happened before: there was McCarthy and McKinley, and if we built social security from scratch in the 30s we can rebuild it again in the 10s. Things got pretty dark in the world in the 30s and 40s, but we all pulled through. We'll get through this, I suppose. But why must it be like this? What is wrong with us humans, with us citizens of democracy, with us human beings, that we cannot take two steps forward without a devastating, terrifying step and half back into the muck?
I have no doubt that each of us felt inside a pure pit of blackness and despair. The sickness unto death. Nowhere to go from here. A friend writes:
I have always considered myself a small "d" democrat, one small soul who was naive enough to dedicate himself tostudying and thinking about and teaching about andtalking about and being a part of the many strugglesfor justice in this country, one who saw himself asprofoundly AMERICAN and in a progressive, moraltradition that strove to push our nation to live up toits best, most lofty ideals, a person with the sillyidea that my efforts might make some small difference,that it might contribute - with others - to somethinggood and decent and humane... but who now findshimself increasingly, utterly and harshly out of stepwith an imperial rightward march of inequality,intolerance, arrogance, selfishness, greed, andpower... a conservative movement dedicated to destroying everything I feel most deeply about...
I am embarrassed for my country... I am wondering how I get back up again from this, and even if I rise, I have no idea where I fit any more. I am lost and irrelevant in my own country.
That sounds about right. For me, well, you know when Bill tells the bride that he's not being sadistic, he's actually at his most masochistic, then shoots her? That's sort of how I felt, as I pumped a shotgun shell into the head of some dreamy, flashbacky notion of America that I had been, up till that moment, carrying around inside. I really thought that when the chips were down she would see what a terrible mistake she was making, she would look into herself and know, with crystal clarity, that the path she was aiming herself down was a dead-end, that the man she was about to get hitched to was worse than a mullet-wearing know-nothing hic: that he was a drunk and a wife-beater who would lock her up and cut her down and violate her when the mood struck him and after a few short years she would be no more the beautiful bride she'd been but a tattered, scarred, broken, bitter old woman. I thought she'd see through him. But the dumb bitch just went ahead and tied and the knot.
But for me, the darkness spread beyond America, to the very heart of democracy and society. The task before us just seems so Sisyphean, man by his very nature so base. Not so much individually, but collectively. Left to their own devices, these corrupt, scheming, hate-mongering elements inevitably take over, and things sink to such a disgustinly brutish level that mankind might as well not even exist. So you fight and you organize and you debate and you convince until little by little you restrain man's darker urges and build a society with some little bit of fairness and equality. You establish, after centuries, the idea of democracy, of universal sufferage, of constitutional law, of civil rights, only to find that the powers of greed and hypocrisy have managed to game the system entirely. Then the tide comes in and sweeps away your baluartes, and forcefully tugs you and the whole nation back to the primieval sea of the rabid right.
(It's not only in the States: look at Italy, or Spain under the PP: the far right, the right that offers itself as a protection against some imagined leftist threat, the right that once relied on brownshirts and cinematic rallies, has discovered that it doesn't need the trappings of fascism, it just needs to control the media.)
So great, we take solace in the fact that this kind of thing has happened before: there was McCarthy and McKinley, and if we built social security from scratch in the 30s we can rebuild it again in the 10s. Things got pretty dark in the world in the 30s and 40s, but we all pulled through. We'll get through this, I suppose. But why must it be like this? What is wrong with us humans, with us citizens of democracy, with us human beings, that we cannot take two steps forward without a devastating, terrifying step and half back into the muck?
posted by Benjamin Lessing at 1:44 AM
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