Tyranny of the Moderates

The link between narcissism and eschatology is one I've talked about a bit before, which makes sense seeing as it's one of the central tenets of the cobbled-together janky-ass episteme through which I understand the universe. It's almost impossible for a human mind--cursed with the double-whammy of self-awareness and the basic animal instinct to survive--to hold comfortably onto the ideas that their lives have meaning and that they will eventually be forever dead. The obvious outcome is to spend a whole lot of your precious life energy convincing yourself and others that, unlike those chumps whose names we all forget because they had the shortsightedness to cease to be, our lives are going to be Very Meaningful Indeed because we obviously live in the Most Important Time. You know, the one where the world ends. Most of the time misanthropic disdain is the closest I get to metaphysics.

It's important to keep a perspective on things, to remind yourself that the flesh that makes you and the brain that thinks your thinking and the skeleton that LEGO-snaps it all together aren't in any way superior to any of the billions of anonymous ones that came before you. Unless you're comparing yourself to one of those bitch-ass Neanderthals, those squat little fat-faced zeroes who took the fattest L in the history of genetic competition versus gracile, nimble, fast-thinking, fire-making Homo sapiens sapiens. You go right ahead and think of yourself as better than those losers. If they knew how to Human better, we wouldn't have to make a bunch of guesses about what they looked like or what they could do because we could just, you know, ask one. But they couldn't hang so they got erased. The only thing we know about them for sure is that they fucked. Respectable, sure, but definitely not impressive. I mean, birds do it. Bees do it, etc.

It's seems like a great time to despair for the republic, but I'm not going to. The catastrophic strain of human thinking is what's laying the pavers along the path to another global pandemic fad. We do it every half decade or so. Right now we get to learn how to say coronavirus, which has a bunch of vowels and is sort of fun to type, even though it has about a 2% mortality rate (mostly people already compromised) compared to the 10% rate for SARS and we remember how SARS wiped the planet clean of the human infestation.

So right now the Senate of the United States is taking the basic position that we can't fully admit into evidence all the facts in an obviously credible impeachment case against a sitting president because it would take an inconveniently long time. This, remember, is the Senate that sets its own calendar and schedule. Inept, corrupt or both, again, at my core I'm resisting the urge to rage about the end of decency and the erasure of democracy as an idea from the collective human memory. The almost irresolvable problem facing lefty people like myself is considering a post-impeachment world where That Guy is still the president.

But we already did it once where we had to consider a world after he got elected in the first place, back in '16. And look, democracy hasn't died. Sure, it got walking pneumonia, got all fucked up on prescription cough syrup and then beat up and robbed in an alley, but it isn't dead. And look, we made it almost all the way through the four years of his term, to the next election cycle where we can look forward to... OK, maybe not much because all the remaining Democratic candidates are flawed or compromised in some significant way. The point isn't the prospects ahead, it's the time passed. It didn't kill us. Well, not all of us.

And let's be fully real: we have to brace ourselves. This time next year we could be right back here in even worse shape, trying to figure out how we're going to get through 2024 with this same motherfucker in charge of shit. It's not going to be the end of the world, even though in that case a lot of us are going to wish it were. We did this stretch. We'll do the next one too.