Overwhelmed

Feeling a bit overwhelmed of late. There’s just too much happening, all of it’s confusing, and nothing feels resolved. Top of mind for everybody, I imagine, is the war-that-isn’t-a-war. We’re now ten weeks into a brainless military adventure whose resolution is either moments away or has no end in sight depending on which official is speaking/tweeting, and at what time of day.

Both the war’s aims and its raison d’être also change by the hour. Because we receive so many conflicting domestic messages, I find myself trusting Iranian reports more than those emanating from my own government. Not a good feeling, but one made necessary by the symphony of lies conducted by our current president, the Leonard Bernstein of bullshit. According to him, we’ve already won this thing ten times over.

So why is the Strait still closed?

At the same time, the worst-case scenarios of economic shock predicted at the start of the war have, so far, failed to materialize. Yes, fuel prices have climbed and inflation for other goods is also up. Global GDP is expected to shrink. But we haven’t seen the “$200 barrels of oil” some analysts warned about at the war’s outset. Nor have we yet seen the predicted food crises, although it’s still early days.

From the movie poster for “Deep Impact,” which I saw in the theaters because there was a time when the end of the world just felt like fun escapism instead of a daily threat.

It now seems like the war will only be resolved when enough players feel enough economic pain to force its cessation. Whoever blinks first loses. But I have to say, it’s hard for me to imagine the country that’s been a pariah state for 47 years is going to be the first to wave the white flag.

Meanwhile, another war has entered its fifth year, with Ukraine now appearing to hold at least a small edge in its conflict with Russia. Putin’s military is now depleted, his economy a shambles, the nation on a communications lockdown, his personal safety less-than-guaranteed. What happens should Putin, as so often happens in Russia, fall out of a window?

Closer to home, I remain overwhelmed by the breathtaking corruption infecting my government. I don’t just mean the flagrant financial self-dealing at the top, which runs into the billions. This corruption also takes the form of constitutional abdication, which we’ve seen from Republican Congresspeople. Then there’s the endemic corruption-by-obeisance occurring at every level of our federal government, in which lackeys are only too happy to ignore their department’s charters and their own oaths of office to satisfy the whims of a man who does not know the difference between the words “incursion” and “excursion.”

On top of everything else, RFK is over there playing with raccoon dicks.

In the background of all of this remain the Epstein Files, which exposed a rather-large cabal of influential men trading children. The extent of this network, and whether Epstein was its central player or just a node in a larger web, remains unclear because that same guy whose face, for some reason, will now be on our passports, has done everything in his considerable power to prevent Americans from learning more.

It’s probably hard for readers even a decade or two younger than myself to imagine, but there used to be a time in this nation when people could go weeks at a time without paying much attention to politics at all. Presidents, Democratic or Republican, would get the gig and then govern without posting to social media or insulting late night comics or arresting journalists. We may not have liked the guy in the Oval Office but most of us trusted that its occupant generally had the best interests of the nation at heart. And maybe I’m betraying my own continued naivety here, but I think we were right to believe that. Until our current president, every single one has said something along the lines of “The office humbles you.”

Now, though, he has humbled the office.

Actually, “humbled” might not be the right word. Humiliated?

Worse, this sense of being overwhelmed doesn’t end with world affairs. Every aspect of human culture feels equally unsettled. Science, the arts, philosophy. Dig into any of it and you find the same confusion. The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered galaxies that should not exist. AI is capable of generating entire books in a moment. AI music floods streaming services. Full-length AI movies aren’t far behind. What will all of this do to human creativity? As for philosophy, they can’t even decide on what constitutes consciousness.

If I’ve found respite anywhere, it’s sports. People throwing a ball through a hoop remains blissfully easy to understand. Guys racing big dumb cars around a track. Or hitting each other in the face. I understand that stuff. What I don’t understand is everything else.

Every institution now feels provisional. Every truth comes with an asterisk. Every breakthrough arrives with some new species of dread. Maybe this is what it feels like when one era is ending and another is beginning. If so, let’s hurry it along. If I have hope, it’s that whatever follows this awful episode of As the World Burns will be better than what we left behind.