Twitter has made us a nation of comedians.
And turned comedians into essayists.
Ops. Distractions. Memes and emojis. Blue check. Blue check Nazi.
Emoji salad. By the author.
We have gone from passing notes in class style communications to full on Punch and Judy show styled meltdown squeaking falsetto incomprehensible insanity of the Ye imitating Prime minster of Israel and videoed on a podcast and shown on multiple platforms. You will see it but not here.
As the documents from the G. Bush era are released and show no favorable light to Bush over his handling of 9/11 that moment is eclipsed by ‘fun stuff". What other news is being rolled over? Jack Smith as appointed by the DOJ to further litigate Donald J. Trump, loser of the last election, in his harboring of secret documents at Mar a Lago as well as Trumps hand in Jan 6 and his personal culpability is moving along. Inditement’s and sentencing are happening in the Jan 6 trials. Merrick Garland is making good on his appointment to take care of the legal matters obscured by and twisted by former Attorney General whom Garland replaced, William Barr.
Musk and Trump, two captains of industry have done nothing but harm to us (Musk as of late) and Musk is pushing at the worn threads of society as if to test them. His motives aren’t known to anyone but you don’t need to be a clairvoyant to understand that a tech guy pushes on things to make them fail. It’s part of the job. Musk is reintroducing the accounts that were permanently banned mostly because of hate speech. And Musk tweets so often he either stacked them up and puts them on a timer or that is simply his day: Posting garbage that one could consider “a joke”. Most of it’s about Nazi stuff. Lots of images too. Nothing too violent, nothing too upsetting except it is all bad. Lines have been drawn to these thoughts and images as similar to the first years of Hitler. Calling this Hitler Lite, is cute, funny and even accurate but diminishes once again the reality.
Uncharted territory is where we are. Millions waking up to the reality of who they see when they look at Trump today. A frightened old man who has through his own actions lost the support of family, any friends he may have had, his teams of advisors, all done. with him. He has followed every instinct and every thought to this place of abandonment and being sought by the law on so many fronts. He’s a drowning dead man. He knows it. What better moment to party. We however, can’t.
The abusive tide is not just in the United States. Authoritarianism is creeping around the world and we are not yet finished off or fallen into the abyss. We are demanding to keep our democracy and our message has always been to support democracy and encourage the system around the world. Putin all the while, impatient for his years of ‘operations’ through the NRA and now ‘in fighting’ to collapse us into a chaos making the authoritarian hand at the helm appealing has in his urgency put the gun to his own head. A kind of Russian roulette. Looks like for all the commitment, he is losing the hand he has overplayed. In our winning we are limping but still in a fight. It is not over, yet.
The most attractive quality of a mate, a friend or acquaintance, is a good sense of humor. That’s my take. Laughing is life! It’s fun. Laughing in face of a tough time is liberating and rejuvenating. Laughing is also sharing making light of a common ‘something’. It joins us and cements our relationship as being in tune with one another. Good. The ‘ops’ that are being served up for us, are not designed to unite for fun. Once again, they are for division. Some are provocative, cryptic, funny in a “sick joke” way, but really, they are not humorous.
Noel Casler’s “Daddy Issues” is a must read for a masculine take on the weak, damaged masculinity on parade these days and what we need to get a clear focus on if anything is to change.
The years we have been living under the shadow of Trump have been very hard in many ways. Not to enumerate them, however we may have crested the summit of ugly mountain.
There are many spiritual texts out there and one of the most mysterious and somewhat complicated, the I Ching, begins thusly: “Difficulty at the Beginning”. This forbidding beginning is the translation of the first hexagram I studied. It speaks to the ground one sows at the beginning of a new venture. The I Ching is mostly a cautionary text telling of the predisposition of nature upon our lives. as we are all part of nature, it influences everything. It instructs to proceed with the utmost presence of mind and alert for danger culling it from the beginning. What one plants, waters, nurtures will grow. We are there.