Sometimes, no matter how big you are, you just curl up into a ball and tune everything out.
Obviously, we’ve been busy here. Falling into a new routine. My wife is gradually becoming nocturnal, sleeping much of the day and staying up most of the night, probably an inherent propensity. That’s my natural rhythm too, but I can’t follow her penchant because I have to feed the seven others in our household beginning at dawn. So we now visit for a few hours a day until one or the other, depending on the clock, dozes off. So be it. But my legs and energy are slowly getting stronger, and we will work through this.
But, also obviously, I’ve pretty much fallen out of the great electronic multiverse. No updates at the languishing other site. Not much here either. I haven’t even checked my email and text messages. No stomach for it. Getting used to isolation. The island writ supreme.
Perhaps that gives rise to paranoia, but when I check Drudge, as I still do from time to time, what I’m seeing now is a series of snapshots of collapse. In just five years, the United States has plunged into a state of ruin. The CIA can’t stop one renegade whistleblower from fleeing through five hostile countries. The government officials and officeholders can’t (or won’t) remember that the real outrage is what he revealed about the destruction of American privacy and liberty, which is supposedly what we were defending from the Islamist (who?) terror threat. They’d much prefer to scream for the whistleblower’s head. So called conservatives are ready, willing, and able to pass another gigantic pork laden bill without reading it, all for the purpose of placating their own funding sources and lobbyist cronies. The president is utterly and completely AWOL, jetting from one irrelevant place to another, silent as the tomb about everything important and maundering on about climate control while all the world’s most ambitious powers laugh in his face. Meanwhile the nation’s press is collectively cutting its own throat, and ours, by choosing to push the narrative that there are no real scandals — not NSA, not PRISM, not the IRS, not Benghazi, not HHS extortion, not even freedom of the press. David Gregory yesterday aligned NBC with the DOJ’s position that a reporter who receives a story objectionable to the government from a lawbreaking whistleblower is a co-conspirator subject to prosecution. Oh yeah. And the stock market is beginning to go south.
The constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s global power and influence are all in tatters.
It’s called collapse. But all of us are too busy to notice, right? We have our own schedules, appointments, and personal commitments to keep us diverted from the exponentially cascading end of the American Experiment. None of this is as important as what I’m doing today and tomorrow. (Uh, hardly.)
God help us all. But he’s got a very good reason by my lights to be too busy too.
What we deserve no doubt. Still horrifying and sickening to witness. Or have we all just stopped watching?
PS. Couldn’t resist this because it’s sooo symbolic. On the feminist front, MADD has agreed that illegal immigrants with two DUIs should still be eligible for amnesty. Even the most ostentatiously self-righteous humanistic causes aren’t about solving problems anymore. They’re about promoting ever bigger government by mindlessly endorsing all leftist policies. Can’t wait for the position of MADCAT (Mothers Against Dangerous Cell-phoning and Texting) with regard to middle eastern immigrants. Since every Indian and Pakistani and Arab in retail is on his cellphone 100 percent of the time, all day, every day, even if no mere paying customer can get their attention. Who cares if they’re buying pirated Bollywood films or pressure cookers? I’m sure MADCAT’s tolerance will be nearly infinite. Collapse.
I reached out via text, but I’ll apologize here as well: I’m sorry that I lashed out when we should have been supporting each other. I went into full Island Mode, and while I felt at the time that I needed to, it was both selfish and microscopically focused. Obama’s ridiculous diversion to the climate, the instance of several weak liberals turning on him for blowing off the scandals (better known as my parents), and this very post snapped me out of it.
I’m here if you find it in yourself to forgive me. No matter what, I wish you healing at home, for all of you. Thank you for fighting the good fight while having plenty of justifiable reasons for cutting loose to the island. I don’t want to be like the Germans that saw Hitler coming and sat on their hands.
A hard time for everyone. What’s important is remembering what’s important to everyone. You do. And, I expect, always will. To quote the irrepressible, indefatigable, invincible one, “Let not your heart be troubled.” 🙂
I stopped watching last November. Haven’t paid attention to much else aside from your posts and Mark Steyn columns that pop up in my Facebook feed. Didn’t matter that I had been right about everything I bitched at my liberal “friends” about regarding Obama back in ’08. They all voted for him again. None of them care about anything he’s doing right now. Boston was one dagger in the heart too many. The city full of braggarts who pride themselves on being “Massholes” brought to its knees by one limping, wounded mooslim teen, its citizens cowering inside their homes in the fetal position as the cops wander around for a couple of days. And the guy who noticed the kid was hiding in his back yard called 911 and returned to the fetal position as he waited. Am I the only one who would have loved to fuck that kid up before calling the cops? Can’t believe the city wasn’t boiling over with rage and full of volunteer packs armed with knives & baseball bats, if nothing else, looking for the perp. And then, once the po-po carted him off to safety, I mean, uh, prison, Bostonians got the go-ahead to come out and get shitfaced and party. You know: to honor the fallen & the maimed. And to keep voting Democrat.
The world was watching.
And late last week I just found out my 16 y/o cousin has lymphoma. There is little to nothing I can do for anyone I care about who is suffering right now and that makes it all worse. That being said, though, I admire you for your strength. Keep going and I wish a continued recovery for Lady Laird.
No feeling worse than in your face helplessness. Different from cultural hopelessness. The latter is existential, the former personal. Your cousin deserves to live, and if you and I all of us believe, he will. We have more power in these individual crises than we think. Don’t give up on his prospects. The collapse of America can wait.
Know you’ll all have different reactions. Some have been waiting for this and will be content to watch, bitterly. Some will want to fight, but where can the troops be massed? Nowhere. Why the Second Amendment was never able to save us.
But please talk. I can’t remember a time when I was so depressed about my country’s future. I could tell you, if you’d find it diverting, how and why I was raised to fight this fight. Which I have now, finally and utterly, lost. The bad news is that parts of the story are lyrical and touching and painful and doomed. The good news is that I finally understand my father, who saw all this coming long before I was born and built me to wage a war he knew he wouldn’t survive himself. My remaining hope is that, wherever he is, he knows I did my best. Including all the stuff he disapproved of along the way.
But we all have our vain hopes, don’t we?
Write a book. You’re good at it. You’re brilliant at it. Don’t stop blogging, but if you have to choose between blogging and writing another book, write another book. Just don’t write a book that satirizes the current administration, because that would be racist.
Dude, he already wrote a book that pretty much explains where we are now about as thoroughly as anyone possibly could.
Yep, I know. At least twice, and that’s not even including the blogging.
P.S. I know there’s an Amazon book of InstaPunk articles about the administration. Articles are great. But a longer treatment is in order. With regard to B.O. I can’t help thinking of Macbeth. He could have been someone almost anyone would admire.
Just brainstorming. I’ll shut up now.
In what timeframe should the book begin? I’m being.serious.
A Michelle’s-eye view of his career would be a compelling read, and probably a lot of fun to write. Then again, maybe she just spends most of her time thinking “Oh how I love that man of mine.” Who can say?
But I don’t presume to know what you should be doing with your time and talent. My guess is a book could be a tonic project for you. I could be wrong.