Bubble in the Torrent

As everyone not actually in a coma knows, this week has been a thing. How big a thing, exactly, remains to be seen, but out on the terrace last Monday I found myself thinking about the fact that my little postage stamp of earth now has a war to the east and another, potentially larger one, to the south-east. The latter may metastasize.

Life these days is an exercise in dissonance, a clash between what I see and what I know.

What I see around me is spring, which comes early here: snowflowers in the parks, sun that feels like sun on my face. What I see are ordinary people going about their daily lives. There’s the guy who looks like a dissipated Clark Kent who’s always reading and having a ciggy. There’s the crowd of people in their 20’s and 30’s who line up for take-out at the place across the way. Earlier this week a woman wearing velvety black walked through the park wearing a dark red coat and leading a velvety black dog on a dark red leash. This morning I saw her again but the red coat, like a puzzle piece, was missing.

This, I tell myself, is the world at peace, except it’s not – it’s a bubble in a torrent - and I know it, and that knowing is like a toothache if a toothache were capable of enraging you as I am enraged today.

How do we bear witness to these times? Grotesquerie replaces grotesquerie, lies pile lies, and the mad carnival rolls on, aided and defended by those charged with our defense. And people die. Looksmaxxers pose and strut, senators brutalize retired Marines, dog-killers are replaced by ex-plumber/MMA fighters who testify to “the smell of war” despite never having served, and people die. The incompetence is maddening; the cruelty, infinitely worse.

How do we process the fact that fallen soldiers are returning home as the President parties in Mar A-Lago?

How do we get our heads around the fact that intentionally torpedoing an unarmed ship participating in exercises 2,000 miles from the conflict zone, then leaving the men on board to drown in deliberate contravention of the Geneva Conventions, is a Nazi-level atrocity?

How do we, even for a moment, forget what’s happening, un-know what we know?

My tentative answer is, we don’t. We can’t. But neither should we forget what exists outside the carnival’s bloody tent. Justice is as real as ever, and we have to cling to it with dog-like tenacity not only because it’s right, but because it’s the only way out.

Which is easier said than done, as one of my readers recently observed in a slightly different context.

Still.

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More and more these days I’ve been feeling the tug of nostalgia – not for some Golden Age that never existed, or existed only for those lucky enough to have been born in the right time and place, in the right hue and gender – but for a world that felt recognizable. Intelligible. Perhaps even fixable. I miss that pre-lapsarian age, before our Fall into whatever it is we’ve fallen into, when Republicans who weren’t actually principled had the decency to feign outrage, when they still aspired to deniability, when their hypocrisy came with a fig leaf, not a smirk.

Lately I’ve been wrestling with that smirk, trying to find the word that captures the attitude it conveys. Yesterday I found it, hiding in plain sight: Disdain.

Disdain for pretty-much everything worthy of respect. For truth, for loyalty, for accomplishment.

Disdain for anything like the idea of honor. For justice.

Disdain for reality, substance, worth. You don’t actually have to be anything, know anything, you just have to have your buccal fat removed so you look like someone who people might think looks like someone who might know something.

And, lately, an increasingly obvious disdain for us, the People. For our endorsement, our approval. Just look at their actions: their shrugs over disappearing jobs and rising prices, their shrugs over American casualties both at home and abroad. Just look at their lies, which they’re not even bothering to make plausible any more. They trip over each other, contradict themselves, claim high is low and North is South and Trump is an ironman savant and possibly the savior . . . and smile. A retraction? What would they retract? They know we know they’re lying, and they don’t care. They know many of their followers know they’re lying, and that they not only don’t care, but find it entertaining.

What gets lost in this miasma of cruelty and lies are ordinary people not unlike skinny Clark Kent with his paperback and his cigarette, the twenty-somethings flirting in line at the take-out, the woman in the red coat. It’s been ever thus, whenever a government maneuvered itself into a position where it could treat the will of the people with disdain - or an iron fist. Soon they and millions like them – like the citizens of Israel or Iran today who abhor their governments, who just want to sit in their respective square or park and read their book or walk their dog or show off their new coat – find themselves eclipsed. Their opinion means nothing. The show rolls on without them, as it’s currently rolling on without us.

Which is why it will have to be stopped, as our President might say, “one way or the other.” Which is why we have a duty to remember that the truths we found self-evident yesterday are no less true today, and keep a clear eye on true north no matter how the world may spin.

So on we go, day by day, week by week. Engage, recover.

For the next few days we’ll be in the country and I’ll do what I can to balance knowing with seeing, doing. I’ll start a new woodpile by the cellar wall, fix the blackberry trellis, maybe start cutting up the huge acasias we had to take down in the upper pasture. I’ll wear myself down to a stupefied, contented nub. I’ll eat my oatmeal in the cold. Our neighbor, Mrs. K, who’s got the world figured out, will come over and advise me on where to plant the new apple tree and where to find horseradish root (and what to do with it when I find it), and for a while the world will seem as it should.

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I promised a while back that if I came across something that offered a bit of peace, I’d mention it, so bearing in mind that peace is personal (some find it by working themselves stupid), I’d like to suggest a short, absolutely lovely novel called Jim, the Boy, by Tony Earley. It takes its time, it’s beautifully paced, and though it hearkens back to an earlier America it does so without indulging in the kind of simple-minded nostalgia that can quickly grow irritating. Alternatively, for those looking to disappear into a longer, more fantastical but also exquisitely-written novel, look up David Mason’s North Woods.

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