Deerhounds live for maybe eight years. I’ve lived maybe seven times that. Care to tell me what I don’t know?
Yeah. I know. You’re sick of everything. Withdrawing. I feel the same way. The mass media are all liars and shills. The new media are almost as bad, their message being, “The mass media are all liars and shills, which we’ll inform you about with passionate conviction while we continue to build our own careers and incomes.” Which would ring truer if they could write well, or even grammatically. Or with words correctly spelled.
Which leaves you where I am. Talking to myself. What do I talk to myself about? Everything.
I talk to myself about the nation. It’s not what I thought it was. I thought it would be proof against a temporary setback like we experienced in 2001. It isn’t. I thought we would always remember who we were, how we were founded, and where we might go. I was wrong.
I talk to myself about people. I had always believed that people were more good than bad. I don’t believe that anymore. Give them an excuse to give up and they will. Give them a title on the door and they will shove others into the dirt. Give them a cause and they will destroy everyone and everything in their path. Including themselves and everything they come from.
I talk to myself about right and wrong. Which can only be discerned by relying on the wisdom of history and the illuminated minds of our past, who have consistently humbled themselves before God. But in an age of no education, there is no history, which makes it possible for there to be no God, just one book or one band or one icon we’re willing to trade our own consciousness for.
I talk to myself about myself. I tell myself I should be nicer, but I can’t be. I tell myself I should be more accommodating, forgiving, tolerant, civil. But I can’t be. When almost everyone you know is steaming full speed ahead over a cliff — with a momentum that will probably take you with them — what are you supposed to do?
I talk to myself. Sometimes out loud. Everything I’ve ever believed in is still true, but it’s being poisoned by morons I actually went to school with. There’s almost no one left who can appreciate the monumental irony of how much good has been recast as evil, how much evil has been recast as progressive correctness.
Am I obsolete? Am I the guy the smart ones are waiting for to die? Yes. I’m obsolete because the terms in which I view things are no longer comprehensible to the illiterate poseurs who now control the public discussion. And, yes, they are waiting for me and my kind to die. Because we are an embarrassment. We know more, have always known more, and aren’t fooled by their platitudes.
But… But… But… I’m not done yet. They’ll have to come and kill me. With what I understand about ObamaCare and the NSA, the IRS, and the DOJ generally, they may. It won’t be because I stop fighting, though. I’m the old thing that doesn’t fade away. Is something that leaps at your throat obsolete? Uh, no. It’s a clear and present danger.
Just talking to myself.
So. However much you withdraw, I’ll still be here, equally withdrawn perhaps but spitting nails. Whether you show up or not. There’s always a new warrior willing to pick up the weapon you dropped in flight.
The ill-begot and stupified masses you seek to drown out are the very ones you must depend on to ressurect the tired notions of Life, Liberty and Justice for All. Whether with tits or Titus, we must motivate the mentally damaged into recognizing what has been stolen or withheld from them.
You would use poetry in an age of slogans; we need oh-so-desperately more qualified poets.
But first, Leaders.
Can’t tell whether you regard me as qualified or not. Please advise.
Of course you are qualified!
You’re qualified, RL. Both as poet and leader. Me, I’m too damn old to lead. So I scribble stuff that doesn’t rhyme but looks sort of like poetry.
Ovid And Chaos Theory
Behold the citizen of Rome, in his toga,
taking a cup of coffee in a cafe by the Tiber,
reading a newspaper, in Latin,
about how things are going in the Empire:
Senate in session, talking about taxes again;
another popular singer dies, drugs are suspected;
trouble in Germania with the barbarians;
trouble in Palestine with the Jews.
A catnap: the citizen gets to dreaming about
how things change, from one thing to another,
just as the Tiber flows, fractally, from one place
to another, from Rome to the sea.
Stones become people.
A girl becomes an olive tree.
Rome becomes Europe, which becomes
America, Chicago, the movies.
(Even the citizen will eventually
become something else, an exile
among Celts on the rim of the Empire
where he’ll watch it all fall apart.)
Awakened by a rude waiter the citizen scribbles
a note to himself for the epic poem he is writing.
Chaos, rudis indigestaque moles
Chaos, a rough and unordered mass.
A wind from the east, from the future,
ruffles the hairs on his thick Roman neck.
Something being hatched in the land of the Jews,
some plot or perturbation, tomorrow’s worry.
Clouds swim turbulently overhead.
The citizen signals for the check,
thinking about the party at Virgil’s tonight,
the new dance step, what to wear.
Chaos, in the year of our lord, zero.
You’re not talking to yourself. I’m listening, just not often talking back right now. Busy coming back from 15 months of withdrawing. Long story.
Whew…I usually loathe when someone gets inside my head but that was so f-ing spot on, I honestly feel school-girl giddy.
Can’t add one thing except to say that I, too, will continue to fight. It is alleged by family members that we have a fair bit of the Scot in us. Not so sure but I know I’m a mean mofo when push comes to shove and I’m not taking this supposed gentle glide into darkness lightly.
Thanks for the lift.