C'mon Feel the Noize

When everything is played at full-volume all the time, it's hard to hear (or feel) anything.

Feeling kind of numb after another week of… this. Another week of lies, violence, mayhem. Another week of scandal. Distraction piled upon distraction. All of it in service to some nebulous project that would see the nation disassembled and sold off for scrap. As paranoid as I’ve been over the last decade as to the aims of this cabal, sometimes I think I haven’t been paranoid enough.

My fears about our incipient overlords are twofold and I’m not sure which is more worrying: the first, and lesser fear, is that they’ve thought all of this through and have sinister and grand designs for what happens once they’ve seen their project through. My second, and greater, fear is that they haven’t. I suspect the second fear is correct.

After their initial flurry of executive orders, now they’re just making it up as they go. The results, so far, have laid to rest any concerns that we’re dealing with a bunch of evil geniuses. Evil, sure. But genius?

One terrible discovery we’ve made watching these masters of the universe operate is that they’re just as dumb as we are. Which means their best-laid plans are usually badly conceived and disastrously executed. To take the most obvious example, they had four years to figure out how they were going to conduct their mass deportations. Four years to game it all out. And when they finally get their chance, we wind up with a bunch of goobers who couldn’t get hired at a Sheetz sticking their guns in the faces of everyday Americans outwitting them with whistles. When challenged in courts or on the streets, their only move is pugilism.

Their foreign policy is an incoherent shamble. Their domestic policy, anchored by haphazardly-implemented tariffs and gutter racism, is worse. It’s morons all the way up and all the way down.

Then we have the Pandora’s Box known as the Epstein Files. Open the box, out flies depravity. Out flies immorality, hubris, and human misery. Out flies the current President of the United States and his legion of apparatchiks armed with lies, lawsuits, and worse. At the bottom of the box are piles of female bodies.

This is government by goodfella. A snatch-and-grab presidency. Free planes. Worthless meme coins. Corrupt pardons. Pockets lined with Middle Eastern petro dollars. Geopolitical blackmail of the rankest sort. Everybody at the top gets a taste, everybody below gets an elbow to the face.

So yeah, I’m feeling kind of numb. Which is, perhaps, preferable to living atop a permafrost of cold rage. In the last year, I’ve learned to bifurcate. There is my day-to-day personal life, which is both purposeful and joyful (or at least this depressive’s version of “joyful”). That life is filled with family and work and watching the birds at the feeder every morning. That life feels increasingly precious.

Then there is the life of the world beyond my property line, a world which encroaches ever-closer as the weeks amass, accumulating into “Month 1,” then “Month 2” and now, “Year 1,” with less and less assurance that the numbers will reset after “Year 4.”

Time flows differently under the fascist. Democracy’s deliberative tempo has been replaced by the demands of a toddler who wants everything NOW NOW NOW! Until he changes his mind moments later. Or a court stays his tantrums. Or he forgets where he is. “In two weeks” means “never” but “never” might mean “never” or it might mean “soonl.” There’s no way to know because one of the tenets of the fascist is, as political philosopher Carl Cohen pointed out decades ago, “irrationalism.”

According to Cohen, irrationalism asserts that the will ought to take primacy over the intellect. It is the will of the Leader which supersedes namby-pamby laws. Action supplants debate. Raw power over logic, leading to what Cohen calls a “berserk politics” which replaces rational governance with a mindless – and ultimately self-destructive – expansionism. It maintains its grip on power through “disruption, instability, and terror.”

Sound familiar?

Numbness, then, would seem an appropriate reaction, just as injecting Novocaine into one’s gums would be an appropriate precaution against a dentist digging into your mouth.

Going numb, though, endangers the conscience. When we are able to view the abuses committed in our name with dispassion, we run the risk of coming to accept those abuses. It no longer shocks us when ICE officers haul American citizens from their cars. Federal officers tear gassing peaceful protestors is now a run-of-the-mill occurrence in many American cities. We hardly bat an eye at the President threatening and persecuting his political opponents on the flimsiest of pretexts. His wholesale corruption, impeachable in the Before Times, now merits hardly a tut-tut.

When everything is played at full volume, you can’t hear a goddamned thing, and these amps go to 11.

Today I offer nothing but my own numbness. I provide no answers, no hope, no expectation that things are looking up. Today I will do what I can do, which isn’t much. But I can write these words in the hopes that they’ll resonate with some of you. Maybe you’re feeling the same. Or maybe you can inspire me. The things I can do, I will do. I’m going to drive to work in an hour or so and make jokes about all of this is on TV. Before that, though, I’m going to put on my boots and walk outside. Get some cold clean air into my lungs. Refill the bird feeder. Provide some help to creatures in need of comfort.