I haven’t written anything of substance in a month, but this is the short list of random musings tied up by an attempt to explain what it is that has me stymied.
First the random things.
The critter who lives in the attic is alive and well. Each night I make a peanut butter sandwich and we split it. I eat half and put the other half under the cold wood stove and in the morning it is gone. That’s all I know. Might be a squirrel. Might be a rat. For some months now, though, we have lived on these terms. Now that Spring has arrived we may have to renegotiate, because I am not prepared to foster a family of whatever he or she is. As a solo tenant, the arrangement is tolerable. Of course, from it’s point of view, I am the tenant who pays rent every evening; but I have a bigger brain, opposable thumbs, and access to hardware stores. If there is ever a debate regarding housing rights between the two of us, I will win. I hope he understands this.
*
There is an artistic trope called “memento mori”, a Latin phrase that means “remember you must die”. This motif manifests as skulls on the writing tables of philosophers, skulls and skeletons in architecture, and is reflected in every culture that has ever been. (“Alas poor Yorick. I knew him well, Horatio.”) For me, I find I am most often placed upon this train of thought by road kill. I drive very carefully, especially at night, with my attention on the curb ahead lest I bring about the untimely demise of a possum or raccoon. I’ve been driving for half of a century now, and I have driven a lot, so it has happened. I have hit animals. And each instance is tattooed upon my memory. I could show you, right now, in person or on a map, precisely where each animal died.
Today, as I drive, I note each dead squirrel or possum, and it hammers home my own mortality. The thinking goes something like this: That squirrel woke up this morning with no idea it was his last. In fact, he thought the universe was him, because that is all he knew. Then, in an instant, it was over. Around the world there are probably hundreds, thousands, of animals meeting their end in the same way. Yet here I am, driving past, on my way to something more important than whatever he was doing. He is gone, forgotten in my rear view, and my day will go on.
But, the memento mori reminds me, isn’t that everyone’s fate? About 109 billion people have lived on the planet and 7% of them are alive today. How many are remembered? How many are remembered at all, but more importantly, how many are remembered not as symbols, silhouettes of what they were, but as actual people? No one. Who knows anything about their great-great-great grandparents? Practically no one, and those who do know a name or a reputation, not what they were like, what they found funny, what they loved, who they were. Beyond a generation or two, not a single person. The truth is I do not matter much on the grand scale. I think I do. I pretend that I do. But I don’t.
We all sink into the tar pit of time.
And this is what makes today, now, this moment, so incredibly valuable.
*
Which brings me to the thinking that has me becalmed. Stuck. Frozen on an ocean of words like the Ancient Mariner.
“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
Here’s the topic that caught me as surely as sargasso: It takes good people to be free.
To be truly free, one must accept the limits of his individual power and influence, and allow everyone else the space to also be free. This is much harder to do than it sounds. We are flawed beings, a species prone to fence peeping and envy, and from the moment in infancy we cry to manipulate our parents, we test the limits of this control over everyone around us. That’s one hell of a hard habit to break. It takes concentration and a clear understanding of what freedom actually looks and feels like. I remember a day when this was openly discussed in our classrooms. Phrases like “civic responsibility” were regularly bandied about. That doesn’t seem to be as popular as it once was.
This is largely due, I suspect, to the utter failure of our authoritative, administrative class. It was one thing to mock authority (think of Mel Brooks as Governor William J. Le Petomane in Blazing Saddles), but it is quite another when our government officials appear to be genuinely ridiculous, dishonest, and corrupt.
I find myself wondering how many of the movers and shakers in the country are willing to maintain (or take) power and control by any means necessary. I have some patience with those citizens (and leaders) who are deluded and confused, but when I see people who know better telling lies they know to be lies, understanding that we also know that they are lies, I am disheartened. This happens each and every time some official who hates Trump claims that “No one is above the law.” This is absurd. Of course there are people who are above the law. I could list hundreds. Ray Epps, Hillary Clinton, and Fani Willis to name but three. Trump stands charged for a “crime” regarding the handling of documents Biden has admitted to. These individuals are illustrative because I can understand people who get their news on the fly not understanding how and why these people remain untouched, but those who know better—those in the media and the judicial system who know the facts—claiming that everything is on the up and up leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. It is disheartening.
Because, really, what are they struggling for? The clock ticks away on each of them just as it does on you and I. They, too, will be meaningless in a handful of generations, just a name on a marker somewhere. But it seems to have been decided high in the ranks that Trump is such a danger, such an existential threat to something they value, no standards need be maintained. If we have to burn everything to prevent another President Trump? So be it. Virtue be damned.
When I was a child it was popular to say, “Cheaters never prosper”. Oh, but in the short run they often do! Cheaters often prosper very well, and where does it leave those who refuse to cheat? It leaves us all, the cheater and the cheated, just a little less free. This is true in politics, but it is true in capitalism and personal relationships, too.
I don’t think it will serve us well to raise generations of self-absorbed little Machiavellians, but this seems to be the choice we have made and what we are doing.
Personally, I don’t think it matters much who wins an election or does better in a deal. What matters is how the election or the deal is conducted. If we teach our children that cheating is a-okay—it’s okay to feign gender to become a champion, to plagiarize to advance a career, to fake an injury to collect a pension, to lie about a political enemy, to commit perjury to obtain a conviction, to prosecute some and excuse others, to claim a racial advantage, to game an election—because cheaters do prosper, we’ve done nothing but make them, and everyone, less free than they would be as virtuous people.
And for what? For a moment of power, a blink of control, a brief moment in the sun in which some individuals can pretend they really matter and have moved the dial for goodness?
Such hooey. Such hubris. Such silly, short sighted and hollow ambitions.
It is not always easy to do the right thing. God knows I have failed many, many times. Being virtuous can hurt and excuses are easy and always at hand. But virtue, doing the right thing and taking the hit? That is the true price of freedom.
If no one is willing to pay that price? Freedom will be shelved until such a time that the citizens deserve it.
This has always been the case.
I’ll try to be deserving of freedom today. We all should.
Peace.
I often have wondered how they can accuse a past president from have documents he shouldn't have had. When a senator or sec of state had the same and nothing to see here. Of which neither should have had in their possession outside of the Whitehouse??
Very well said.I thought at first it was going to be a sleeper but as always you fucken nailed it.