Editor’s Note: As this astonishing year continues to roll out, renowned contributor Marlow has formulated guidance for our Scribbling Stable of author’s to be acceptable to the new order. Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss and mathematics are out of favor. We have removed all “classical” tomes from the Socotra library in light of changing standards that deem them patriarchal, racialist and otherwise unacceptable to revealed truth. Marlow has commenced a studious effort to adhere to new realities, of which this is second installment. The Editorial Staff feels it is appropriate to share these tips in order to maintain our Transparency Standards in accordance with new Federal guidelines.

– Socotra House Editorial Staff

Author’s Note: Vic, as annus horribilis 2020 was about the turn I began penning what turned into a series of brief missives addressed to your house scribblers. Here is the second one.

– Marlow
——

Vic et al,

Here’s Take II:

The country-wide uncivil war we see unfolding is being fought on unstable ground where short audios and visuals intrude and run roughshod over our old world of direct perceptions, structuralism submerges us into the dark murky depths of willful blindness, and selective content rules over any and all context.

As opposed to my last cheeky piece, here are some specific thoughts in a more direct and serious fashion . . .

We obscure diagnosticians of America’s decadence in the aftermath of the west’s Cold World victory IMO were surprised to see further real conflagrations engulf us in the Middle East during the succeeding 10 years only to enter blindly into Cold War Part Deux in Asia at the same time. Some of us often have referred to these doings as a ride, but I’m starting to appreciate them as a series of devolutionary metamorphoses.

As chineurs of a sort, we comb through our country’s going-out-of-business idea stalls, the policy remnants store bins on the Potomac, and America’s second-hand infoshops in search of alternate explanations, out of favor thoughts, and other oddity items that do not reside on Wikipedia. Our sole “pay” is determined by our meager audience’s perception of the value of whatever treasures we manage to unearth and share. Our passion for the digital and analogue printed word makes us take great pride that we never “work” (in the pedestrian sense of the word) at anything else as we enter the age of permanent suspender wearing.

Our infrequent scribblings relate background details of Americans’ lesser-known struggles and their journeys along the familiar old blue highways as well as through the new, strange objects of the 21st century. One and all we strive for a truthful manner.

Maybe we’re just bookworms with highspeed internet connections possessed by a secret enthusiasm for pop culture and avant garde rebelliousness. Together we exult in the simple pleasures of living in post Cold War America, frequenting its cafés, wine bars, restaurants, and our stock account webpages’ updates.

What we seem to be observing assembled before us is profoundly disturbing. Yes, some of our unease may be due to “our most assured sense of ourselves” status. We detect a weary malaise spreading broadly as America tires of its crumbling individualism and embraces a not-so-delicate framework of negation while it eventually generates new forms from the ferment.

It was not just socialist Europe or Asia which landed in America as the 21st century began, as we did several times over in those two over-theres during the 20th to save them from destruction. It was the world which is still invading us with all its presents and its pasts, its heaps of offerings of form, its agitations, and its dead endings repackaged as new and improved.

Some see this troubled drama as the beginning of a slow, silent annihilation of the last bastion of Western canon and democratic values.

Now enter the would-be conquerors and the fermentation of this Part II prerevolutionary America, with its internecine struggles between so-called nationalists and crypto Communists, and the occasional complications wrought by the machinations of domestic terrorists, anarchists, and the ideologically uncommitted.

Despite what they say, the forging of a more equitable society is not what motivates these invaders. They are essentially yet unknowingly Manichaean — mankind has only two races, the poor and the others. The attainment of their specific political objectives is fuzzy at best. They come off as Commie Gandhis with a dash of self-aggrandizement.

Nowadays we SH writers’ obsessions with cette guerre nouvelle master us again and again. It is at once an absurd, inevitable, pessimistic, and meaningless thing like death. But like the old war horses we were and are, we will never acquiesce or passively accept this as America’s lot.

In our current season, we act via our writing. We no longer want to leave our mark upon some map — just some words behind to the wiser young’uns who now carry the torch on our behalf. They like those before them reject fatalism and embrace the power of individual will. If they’re resolute and possess a bit of luck, they might rediscover and popularize America’s true divinities and mysteries.

Still alive and well, we should take comfort in how well we parented and mentored them.

Peace, brothers.

-Marlow

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