Author’s Note: As my 95-year-old dementia-afflicted Aunt readies herself for her next birthday later this month, news of QE II’s death arrived. What a heck of a reign during the most turbulent, violent, and existentially scary times of the Post Enlightenment period. She was truly a monarch for, of, and by her peoples. They deeply embraced her whole long life in return.
Her Majesty always delivered for them all and took no percentage off the top for her service.
Would that we all have leaders like her at least once during our lifetimes.
God save the King.
There, I, an avowed Irishman rebel to the crown, said it.
-Marlow
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As I hopefully age towards my 9th decade of life, a dyspepsia inside me now and then arises spontaneously uncommanded at moments when members/alums of my former profession or my alma mater bring shame to us others. (See the 50 American intelligence community luminaires stating for the record in late 2020 that the info on the laptop of PresBid’s son was Russian disinformation.) These moments pivot on a single primal scream line, “That profession (or school ) is also mine!”
There we have it.
Our lives are not autonomous, our acts, our sins, are not isolated incidents. They reverberate through time and community, as represented by the generations in these moments. In the Jewish community there is a very powerful sense of communal shame that we all should well emulate. The word is shanda. It reflects the ties that bind us, one to the other, ties lost in our atomized, individualized, commodified, socially mediated age.
(An admission up front in the interest of total honesty: The American democracy damn possibly breaking interests me less than the damn itself. All of our institutions may claim to serve a particular creed – the Catholic and mainline Protestant Churches, Hollywood entertainment elite, Wall Street, the news media, colleges, universities, the FBI, the DOJ – but, in reality, their core function is to protect themselves, i.e., the members of the “inner ring.” One would do well to read CS Lewis’s essay on “the inner ring.” The necessity and benefits of patriotism as a product of an organic community bound by common language/beliefs/customs/location seems just so passé. Patriotism is by its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism — not so much due to its underlying drive/call for more power.)
Americam officials’ current public choices to scream out semi-fascists or fascists, like shouting “Republicans” in a crowded movie theaters, at perceived opponents who comprise about half the American electorate are about as much the product of expectations and rational or devotional fact-based decision-making, as is drunkenly singing along with a Guns-n-Roses tribute band melodies of the original band members’ greatest hits.
You might understand this WW II era cartoon screen grab after reading further below
Maybe, just maybe, we/they should tone down our blood-thirsty condemnations of our political opponents and avoid going from zero to murderous in a f@cking heartbeat.
Now bear with me — this snark might make sense after a bit. After all, it’s sorta like the caricatured violence of the old Warner Brothers cartoons was never entirely aimed at purely innocent young members in the audience. Buggs never took a hammer to a cute little puppy. Elmer Fudd was trying to kill Buggs! Road Runner never dropped an anvil on a cute little kitten. Wile E. Coyote was trying to kill him! Hence, there was justice in those laughs and cartoonish violence to satisfy those primal needs of the young and innocent audience members who thirst for the bad guys to get it in the end. Yet, we wicked adults in the audience wisely should know better and discuss our differences calmly, politely and, if no compromise is possible, just agree to disagree and meet again for further talks. We must all remember that these bad cartoon characters continued to live to fight endlessly another day in another scene.
Alas, the secular left and right do not teach that lesson to adherents instead of the resentment that is their stock in trade, as its 24/7 media flacks show and snow us daily. Too bad no one sees how messed up things are, since there’s nothing wrong with not proving the worthiness of your argument’s sides with facts, all the facts. Let’s be honest, one or the other may have the better theoretical arguments, but, when others point out the manifold examples of abject historical failures of their positions, they, like Christians have for millennia to non-believers, when they can’t explain their stands, relegate their positions’ Truth to righteous “mystery” and leaps of “faith.” What a cop-out (do people still say that?). Yet the hard left and hard right still wonder why what they espouse is hardly persuasive to many of us in the middle or on the sidelines.
Lastly and quite sadly, I must admit in not believing in epiphanies, if I ever did during my youth, in these matters. I no longer believe in transformative political moments outside of war, as transformation is harder and more demanding than a mere moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is.
POSTSCRIPT: They’re playing on our “learned helplessness,” as in when a person believes, as many do these days, that the voting choices we make have no real or lasting effect on the outcomes in our lives. Perhaps for this election we should vote and follow up on the winners’ campaign promises with learned willfulness. Make ’em and hold ’em ruthlessly accountable. Make ’em pay to play.
Autonomous? Not.
Copyright 2022 From My Aisle Seat
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