The Sleep of the Self-Righteous

It's taken me a few years to figure out a hard truth: that even if I don't pay that much attention to national politics, they continue to happen anyway. It's been quite a blow to my basic default stance of optimistic solipsism as a governing principle when a lot of the stuff that I have very explicitly decided is not important at the moment keeps right on affecting people's lives in ways both petty and profound. I don't appreciate the incursion, frankly. I long ago stopped watching cable news or doomscrolling at bedtime. These are the prescriptions for a happier, more productive life, I was assured. A prescription for an existence, if not liberating, at least not soul-crushing. Soul-bruising, at best, maybe?

But it turns out things built purely on hope are, unsurprisingly, too much to hope for. It's a curious place to be, especially here, as ineffectually bitching about politics was a driving force for a lot of my blog existence. It was never difficult to do with the anti-human villains (from my point of view) on the right and the plodding, dopey, ineffectual, jobbing self-immolators on my preferred left. There isn't any safe or comfortable space in a corporatized false-binary binary of a true two-party system, unique in the world where literally every other country at least presents some kind of viable minor party/parties to provide mostly symbolic refuge and succor to the politically impractical, as I sometimes am. And who knows, every once in a while, like the Liberal Democrats in the UK, you benefit from an even national split amongst the big boy parties and you get to be patted on the head in public to participate in a "coalition government" as a silent junior partner with no real say or representation in the executive. But you get to make a speech people will actually listen to for once on election day, which is not nothing!

But even not-nothing is not available here in early 21st century U.S. politics, which again, is great for media like cable news or people writing blogs. In an anxious, uneasy ecosystem of ideas and information, people are never hungrier for a clear point of view forcefully expressed, no matter how cynical in intent or spurious in content, to validate opinions they can be convinced they probably had all along. Even with my audience ranging from vanishing to vanished, I've felt the pull of Saying A Thing that really puts the screws to the fat cats and crumb bums on the other side. And then when your side wins something (as happens about 50% of the time), you get to pretend you helped. And if you lose something, well, that's so much more grist for the content mill. Look, it's the defining feature of post-2020 Republican politics. Maybe to the detriment of everything, eventually! 

What I'm saying is I still didn't watch the Biden press conference yesterday, even though it was expansive and long and touched on some monumental stuff, like voting rights, infrastructure, upcoming midterms... I hear the trailer for the imminent conflict with Russia, Crimean War II: Thick Blue Line, also dropped in there somewhere, I think during halftime.

It's not that I don't care. That's never going to be the case. But 15 years of active engagement in a way that amounted to almost nothing is a strong deterrent to fully embracing the process and its vagaries in the same level ever again. Maybe it's a sign of aging and wisdom. Maybe it's just the effect of deterrence, like the mice who learn not to touch the lever that delivers the shock and no food pellet. But there aren't any food pellets.* There are levers, but we don't get to see where they are or understand what they do, let alone touch them. I make the exact same amount of impact if I just let that all be and remember to vote. As many times as possible. Just me and all my dead neighbors. In a totally rigged system that somehow manages to elect Republicans half the time...?

See, this is why I stopped trying to figure it out.

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*Sometimes not even at the supermarkets, at the moment.