A Kind Of Jeremiah

As I type this I'm watching a DVR-ed match of Australian-rules football that was live a day or two ago.* Seeing "new" sports is really distracting, so this sentence and a half has taken about 14 minutes so far. It's harder to look away because of the pumped-in fake crowd noise and the pockets of the stands filled with cardboard cut-outs of supporters and the occasional cutaways to ACTUAL supporters shrieking through their shitty laptop microphones as they watch together alone in quarantine. Just with the number of people involved besides even the players it seems like a risky proposition to restart already, but it's possible Australia has just done what everyone else does and assumed them and New Zealand are basically the same place.

Sports as a distraction don't really offer much relief or solace. Everything remains more or less horrible. Besides the idea of sports here seems pretty inconceivable even as just about all the leagues make plans to spin back up this month or in July latest, despite all evidence that not only is the pandemic still being persistently a malingering dick, it's moving back out if its "ambient but still virulent endemic" phase and back into the "very specific fuck-your-public-transportation" phase, if such a phase can exist in Arizona. Sure, not a lot of crowded trains in Arizona, fair enough, but the average age there is "Pre-existing Underlying Condition." A crisis is a crisis.

Protests and organizing continues, which is the only sort of spark of hope in all this haze and fume. I guess the good news is the Chaotic Evil sectors of representative democracy keep giving us excellent and clear examples of exactly the sorts of things that need to be addressed with resistance. If nothing else, we can appreciate their willingness to keep monologuing their plans like the Bond villains they are.

Normally I'm pretty sure all this energy and momentum will come to nothing as we get back to our routines of work and the palliative, somnambulant dedication to the hypnotists's watch of our daily rhythms only interrupted by the occasional binge watches.**

Maybe the pandemic is sort of the answer here, though. What happens if there's no regular pressure--or worse, familiar comfort--of the tick-tick-tick of predictable responsibility to declaw and defang. I imagine an argument could be made that the greatest fear of every right wing politician since at least Reagan who though if you give anyone free money, they won't work and it will be A N A R C H Y ! ! ! ! !

Except it's possible most people aren't even getting their "free money," so maybe these protesters are just earnest and serious about the things they're asking for?! Worst case scenario, they're going to stop just chanting stuff and actually start taking direct action without waiting for permission.

Entrenchment and retrenchment of course remain and there's a long way to go, especially with the center of the federal government making definite moves in the fascist direction, like the cheeky rapscallions they are. It's one thing to see a rash of firings across corporate spaces (at least in companies with a public-facing component) as so many are forced to reckon with cultures or patterns of exclusion, erasure, exploitation. But I would be lying if I said I felt anything positive about the upcoming election. There's an obscuring cloud of doubt there where I actually have no idea how it plays out or what will happen, even if Biden trounces like he's trouncing now.

So I have anxiety. Right now the only thing that really helps are voices of people smarter than me. I've gone down a James Baldwin rabbit hole on YouTube the last few days. I don't know that I'd call the man "hopeful" but there's something about undeniable intellectual weight, rhetorical mastery and clarity of thought that I find comforting, even if it's telling me a) I'm not imagining the darkness underlying all of American political and sociological life and b) the shit we were dealing with in 1965 hasn't really been addressed directly, even if some things have improved. Watch him debate William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge, answering a loaded question that plays definitely in his favor, yes, but if you watch the whole thing, see how Buckley--a bright man known to express himself as well--devolves into a fatuous, condescending, toothless poseur outclassed and ground to pulp before he'd had a chance to open his mouth. And surrounded by actual English people, which makes his bullshit accent sound even more bullshit.

Or listen to Stacey Abrams like I did on Marc Maron's podcast speak about hope but with wide-open eyes, attempting to drag civilization forward (all on her own if she has to) despite resistance at literally every level of power to her radical idea that people should be allowed to vote.

It's all exhausting, but there's no level of exhaustion I'm going to feel that is going to compare to anyone actually forced to deal with all of this on a non-theoretical level, as I am not. The best thing I can do is to continue to try to educate my kids the best I can, most specifically by not showing them The Help.

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*It's hard to say exactly as time is relative and also Australia is on what I call the "complicated math" side of the International Date Line. Also it's possible one or both of us is traveling slightly closer to the speed of light than the other? I'm not sure how physics works. Or Australia.

**Just started "Succession" on HBO. Sorry, on HBO Max. See, it's like HBO Now except... uh... I'll get back to you.