Things Have Been OK For Me, Except That I'm A Zombie Now...

There are a couple of reasons I cling, with steady progression along the J-curve of desperation, to this outmoded form of internet communications the young people know quaintly as "blogging." First of all, firmly ensconced in my mid-late-thirties, it's an excellent time in one's life to try out what it feels like to be old. The unthoughtful automatic rejection of anything developed after you turned 27 is horribly liberating. All the fury of the race to relevance is never in the prospect of winning but in the eventual futility of keeping up. Old people are tired less because of the natural atrophy built into the biological cycle of birth-vigor-decline-death but because they spent all their energy when they were young learning to dance the Froog and trying to procure pomade in unreasonable volume. Or whatever. What I'm trying to say is Twitter looks like too much goddamned work.


Secondly, I keep floating around the blogosphere because of a few personal connections I've made with people I genuinely enjoy reading for their wit, their candor, their intelligence, their insight and their tendency to effectively agree with me on just about anything. It's quite a thing to be surrounded by people--smart people, funny people, gifted people--who echo back the things in your head without having first to express them. One must be careful, obviously, lest one accidentally fall into what Andrew Sullivan calls "epistemic closure" or what I call "Scientology," but the humanist/rationalist crowd I tend to fall in with seems inherently skeptical enough to self-police. We'll have some trouble getting to the point of imprisoning a girl in a hotel room until she dies a horrible death from dehydration, but I like to think we have that kind of organizational potential.


So when my blog-friends and I have differences of perception, it's cause not really for alarm (because alarm is soooo earnest and unironic and therefore Republican), but definitely worth noting.


I read my blog-pal Vikki's latest with my usual relish,* anticipating and getting the usual depth of insight, humor and high-quality sentence construction. But I finished it with a little concern over something I didn't share and can't quite wrap my head around: genuine despair. Nobody's dying** but, as vividly portrayed by someone with her easy rhetorical skills, something is quite amiss. I found out in the comment section and on her own blog, arguably my bestest blog-pal SJ (whose post I can't link because it's password protected, for all the right reasons) shares in the sentiment. If I can summarize, in my own imitable style, the problem goes like this: the Tea Party circle jerk is getting very noisy at it approaches it inevitable climax and it seems like all Obama can (or, if you ask SJ specifically, is inclined to) do is ask anyone if they need more lube.


Their positions are probably slightly more nuanced than that, but if you can't fully make an argument your own, win it with imagery, I always say.


The problem is just that: instead of the automatic head-nod these capable women should usually expect from me, all I can manage to do is furrow the ole brow and wonder. For some reason, I just haven't been able to gin up the outrage and frustration and gloom infecting my fellow terrorist-lovers. In a bid to help and seizing an excuse to become one with my own navel, I've spent some time examining why I haven't been able to share the political doom-and-gloom and here's my best advice:

1) Never watch the news. I'm not going to use the cliche "ignorance is bliss" because it annoys me greatly, but then I think: how greatly would it annoy me if I'd never heard it before? And it's got me, the bastard. I will say that the ignorance policy only applies to politics in the 24-hour media cycle. In most other ways, it's a recipe for a kitchen explosion or possibly chlamydia. It's helpful to take some information on board. Just none of it as it pertains to political television or internet media and the current paradigm of "equal time." Tea Party Fever means any right-leaning rebuttal to any political point is going to be all racist code-words, petty intransigence and a totally unironic misreading of some or all of the Constitution. Remember: these are just the people who get on TV. It's exactly the same level of accomplishment as this guy and just as helpful.

 

2) Masturbate 8 to 11 times daily. The health and mood-elevating benefits are obvious. So if it's good once, many, many times must be better. That's just logic. And kind of math. The hitch in this policy is the frequency prescribed, I will grant you that. The issue is primarily logistical as it can be quite difficult to keep up, say, at work, in public dining establishments or if you find yourself invited to a child's birthday party. But hey, if we're engaging our creative brains, we're not worried about entitlement reform quite so much, are we? And I find a little chafing is worth a brain swimming in a puddle of self-released endorphins.

3) Hey man, things could always be worse. Lots worse. Grab on to what French historians of a certain wide-view bent call the longue durée. Every time someone tells you "it's never been this bad, this uncivil," you can tell them about Oklahoma City or Kent State or that time we all tried to kill each other at the same time. I get a lot of "no way, it's different this time, man," but... really, Inquisitive Hippie? Is it? And qualitatively? It looks like a lot of reasonable people get shouted down by the mob, the digital street, the ochlocrats, if I may. But they have to have more votes to get what they want. And every time one of them ascends the pedestal, the backlight shows us all their underclothes and they burst into flame. Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, now Rick Perry... This is really the crux of it for me: how outnumbered are we really? How hopeless is it really? It's not that I have faith in people (I voted in 2000 and 2004, I remember), but the trendlines haven't really seemed to match the tenor of the conventional wisdom.


So I feel OK just waiting. Every time they throw another one up there, even within their closed caucus, the ones most closely identified with the microphoned fringe ignite, and like all things combustible, have been quickly consumed. As this is all we really have to go on until a vote is cast to see where people actually stand, I've decided to take these smoldering embers as the dimmest of lights to mark the path forward.










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*a spicy mango-ginger relish, because we're liberals and therefore effete food snobs. Ketchup is for Klansmen.


**OK, almost nobody.