The utter madness of our daily national politics caused me to pause during the month just past to consider the local crazy in which I live and that I enjoy. Late last week I heard a Bob Dylan song on a cable TV music channel that lead me in a different direction.
Fifty four summers ago, I sat in a mid-Ohio, neighborhood pizza parlor singing along with Bob’s juke-boxed voice about the “Times they are a-changing” craziness that was descending upon America. The 1999 Dylan song that came from my TV last week said times had changed.
“People are crazy
and times are strange,
I’m locked in tight
I’m out of range,
I used to care
but things have changed.”
― Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed”
Present tense had become past tense. Oh, crap . . . the song line went like this in Dylan’s 1965 Times tune: “don’t criticize What you can’t understand, Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command. Your old road is Rapidly agin’.” I wondered whether I had become what Bob was singing about in 1965? Or have things remained mostly the same and I am the one who has changed?
Regardless, I have this creeping insanity feeling that the beltway has its collective neck in a noose and that it is waiting for, if not rushing towards, all hell to break loose. W and I choose to drink champagne, not bothering to dress up DC-style or buy a ticket for the last “go back/down home” train.
I used to email my Northern Virginia friends now and then that DC was doing them no good and that the fake reality was better out in Hollywood. At least one of them to my knowledge, who knows better, occasionally resides out close to West Virginia’s backwoods.
DC’s politicians preach love but practice sex — two very different paths. Love involves ideals, hope, devotion, sacrifice, and fidelity, which when taken to the extremes may lead to madness. Sex is always about comfort, pleasure and power. Social media helps them traverse these two and makes us voters focus on the sex and its promised insta-comfort of something new, shinier, refreshing and, well, just better, doggone-it.
They are blotting out the world’s actual human realities. Their fantasy worlds have become ideological realities. Yet ours is an age that is much softer and more cowardly than any preceding age. These opposing denizens cry out with the least provocation that they are being suffocated in waves when someone triggers them or brings up an ignored “fact” or past wrong. They then thrust themselves or their memes upon their opposition’s barbed wire. Yet in reaction to real human tragedies unfolding blocks or thousands of miles away, they show zero revulsion, charity or humanitarianism. Oh, some may raise/appropriate and donate money, but that requires work. They’d rather be woke. Work is active, woke is passive.
Orwell was right: “If human equality is to be forever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.” We are indeed living in the year 1984. It is our own daily creation.
As to DC: it’s full of worried folk with worried minds. Despite how edgy they’re feeling, no one’s in front of ‘em and there’s nothing behind. So, they hug someone they love and drink some fine wine. Things may be bad, but time is fast passing them by, so they get those they care about regularly on the line (online?).
So, please, dear readers, don’t gaze at the televised newscasting vipers and their unblinking assassin eyes. Just enjoy looking up into the summer’s sapphire-tinted skies. Lot of water has passed under our bridges, lots of other stuff too. Don’t fret about the small stuff, grab onto the important — we’re quickly passing through.
It seems that America’s just done forty miles of bad road; and, if the Bible is right, the world’s gonna explode. I’ve been trying for a long time to get as far away from that DC crazy — as far as I can. These new things look just too hot to touch. I think we’re beyond the crazy point — the human mind can stand only so much.
CNN, FOX and the papers take daily cannon ball leaps into DC’s fiery, sulfurous lake. We watchers and readers should not be that eager to make the same mistake. It’s Ted Bundy/OJ Simpson trial-watching gonzo.
Copyright © 1999 Bob Dylan and © 2019 From My Isle Seat
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