It’s a good thing to acknowledge on a frequent basis those occasions where you have well and truly put your foot ankle deep in something wet and squelching. It’s better that than to pretend said foot is squeaky clean while proceeding to plant it firmly in your piehole. Like most things, matters of degree make all the difference.
Take for example a recent assertion I made regarding the likelihood of health care being rolled back to the good old days of blatant profiteering and people shuffling off their mortal coil for lack of the price of tea and a slice (if I may be permitted the conjoining of Shakespeare and Pink Floyd) – I poorly and cynically underestimated the strength of the public response. I like to think this was the proximate reason for the GOP’s failure to repeal it, rather than the grandstanding of McCain as his career, and perhaps his life, begins to set like the sun over the Arizona desert he represents.
More so, I remain wrong over my fear that our National Embarrassment will burn down what passes for civilization in a pique of cable news induced humiliation and paranoia. Or maybe just because he’s bored and wants to change the nature of the conversation. Either way, I remain as wrong as Ptolemy’s astronomy.
And I’m glad to be wrong! It was a year ago today that I reluctantly got out of bed and seriously doubted that in a year hence I would be sitting here writing my thoughts on a computer rather than with scavenged paper and crayons in some smoking apocalyptic hellhole. While things continue to stagger along, hope has kept up like a straggling camp follower, eager to proselytize to the weary legionaire that the end of the campaign is in sight.
I weary of dystopian visions and violent eschatologies. Things are indeed grim but there has never been a time when they were not. Like most things, matters of degree make the difference. What we choose to focus on as important seems to widen as history advances, which only makes sense given our increasing ability to manipulate nature, now on more than a global scale. We burned up one of the most sophisticated tools humanity has ever built rather than risk the possibility of contaminating a world that might have life. I think this fact speaks to both our ability to achieve and our growing awareness as the stewards of life, no matter where we may find or create it.
As ever, we as a nation and humanity as a whole remain in a race between invention and innovation versus ignorance and catastrophe. So far, we as a nation and humanity as a whole have managed to put a few laps on ignorance and catastrophe. But like the hare in the childhood story, we’ve dicked off for almost too long now and that hard shelled bastard can smell the finish the line. We’re a nimble people though, we humans in general and if I may be allowed a moment of patriotism, we Americans in particular. Like the hare, we’re victims of our own success, dazzled by the sparkle of our own eyes. We’re fast, we’re clever, and we’re cute. Which matters not at all to the coyote.
I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again. I’ve been wrong in detail and I’ve been wrong in concept. I’ve been humiliatingly wrong and wrong in the privacy of my own mind. It was a wonderfully liberating experience to realize in my twenties that being wrong is a gift. Or rather, to understand that you’re wrong is the essential realization necessary to step on the path towards, for lack of a better word, enlightenment. I use this word primarily in the sense of the 18th century philosophical movement but I do not rule out the Buddhist interpretation.
I have to resist the impulse to quote the opening line to Dickens’ A Tale of two Cities. Not that Dickens’ famous opening line is too on the nose, indeed, it only serves to support my contention that the sentiment it so perfectly encapsulates would find as many nodding heads in ancient Athens as it would this afternoon in New York City. No one gets out alive. So far. As I said, matters of degree make all the difference. While Dickens remarked that it really was the best of times, he didn’t just read that scientists for the first time ever have grown and transplanted almost an entire body’s amount of skin in order to save a boy’s life. Another doctor is soon going to attempt to transplant a man’s head onto a completely different body. Matters of degree.
I hope to continue to be wrong. I hope the world doesn’t slide into a new dark age serving the masters of a ubiquitously surveilled society. I hope theocratic states don’t flourish and thrive, with pogroms and jihad the new patriotism. I hope we haven’t already punched too many holes in the web of life to support anything more complicated than insects.
I also thought Kevin Spacey was pretty cool.
Wrong again.