(Don’t worry, I’m not going to go THERE…)
Over this past week, I saw a tweet of a memo (circulated as a rumor) to the extent that the President was inviting historians to advise him on the proper way to express the concept of “class warfare” in the present political climate. Class warfare is such a polarizing idea that most savvy politicos passed it off as a plant from the opposing side. Perhaps there is something to the thought that it was a plant because nothing of that ilk appeared in the President’s many speeches this week. Hopefully it never will and that argument will remain under its current heavy rock.
If I were given an article to read, as part of a test, with the question, “Is this article fact or fiction?”, I would skip reading the article and read the conclusion first. If it has a “happy ending” it is definitively fiction-though a unhappy ending is non-conclusive. The best case scenario for non-fiction is a consensus around a topic and the marginalization of dissent.
It probably seems shocking that it’s that simple because we’ve been conditioned by our culture to believe in beginnings and endings, especially unhappy beginnings and happy endings, from literature, movies and television. Culturally, good triumphs, evil is vanquished, everyone believes the outcome is just, the issue is set aside as resolved, we leave the theater hopeful that the world is fair and the universe always bends towards justice-whatever any of those concepts ultimately mean. Hope is the crucible of fiction: it separates dreams from the fires of reality, keeping dreams from destruction but giving them the semisolid, amorphous quality that makes them eternal, yet indistinct.
If you’re paying any attention at all, ya’ll’re probably getting pretty depressed by now, how I’m not letting you off the hook to retreat into that comforting, cultural surreality and all. Not only are things not going to work out, I’m saying they never have: THAT is the fundamental nature of reality.
And if ya’ll’ve read any of any of my work, there should be a morbid fascination starting to form around the morbid tone of this article. This isn’t what you’ve come to expect from the ole Tomcat-what with me being unrelentingly sunshiney or, at the very least, partly cloudy with rainbows…
“What the hell, TVA: ya’d run out of lithium?”
Let me remind you, I’m not a rich man and could never afford THAT MUCH lithium.
I wrote an article (in “The Erin Burnett Letters” blog) entitled Dale Junior, Jr. in which I jokingly refer to my time as a nihilist, which really, actually happened. That’s why the post is so damn funny: the truest things are still said in jest, mainly because the truth is just so damn depressing, otherwise. If I wanted to be depressing, I’d be a news reporter. Just sayin’.
(Not you, Doll, you actually cheer me up…)
I’m not saying that reporters mean to be depressing, they mean to be factual (hopefully) and the facts are like the weather in Hell: always bad. It’s a crap job and I don’t know why otherwise attractive people do it. The suspicion occurs that they may be nihilists and privately wonder why we keep tuning in night after night.
Well, it’s that whole happy ending thing. Every time we tune in to that same bad news channel for the same bad news, we EXPECT a surprise. “IT’S IN ALL THE MOVIES FOR KRISSAKES: DON’T YOU PEOPLE GO TO THE MOVIES?” I think that expectation is why the media ranks down there with Congress-and that guy at the tire store who keeps trying to sell me a whole new braking system when I have my tires rotated: you think I’m not going to check that before I bust out $1500? Do people actually do that?
(I told him, “At that price, it’s actually cheaper for me to wreck the car and pay my deductible…” but I did go home and check them myself. They were fine and are fine.) That was my happy ending there, checking into it myself.
Brakes are important, and all that, but that experience is hardly the big picture: checking into the facts yourself is largely unlikely to change them to any great extent and will only reveal the political spin put on the facts by the disseminator. The news remains the news and the facts remain the facts and what are the news and facts, people? That’s right, they’re bad, now you’re getting it.
Now that I’ve made you believers, here’s the good news: there is no “news”, only issues floating in and out of focus in the current time and the shifting circumstances that surround the issues. This realization is important to stave off nihilism and depression: if you ACCEPT your circumstances, and live in the moment with no hope for the future, you also accept that your future will never change because you pussed-out and accepted it as it currently is. There has been, and only will be, the struggle to make the world better and NOT the expectation that it will ever come to fruition. That’s the dream that Hollywood sells us: the idea that concerns begin and end, end happily, not that concerns are eternal and need to be battled constantly. This Tinsel-town fantasy leads people to believe that things were, at some point, better and retreating into the past will bring resolution to our current problems: if we only returned to the Nation our forefathers created, all our current problems would be over. Well, our forefathers lived to an average age of 30 years, how does that sound? Is that your utopia? IT’S A GOOD THING THEY DIDN’T ACCEPT THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES, HUH?
We live in the best possible world our progenitors could create and in order to honor them we must fall into the line of those who’ve struggled before us. The consolation should be that this is the eternal nature of life, always has been, and we have forever been united in common cause-even now when it seems we are so divided. The divisions have always been there, history merely blinds us to that fact, and still they progressed because they didn’t accept those divisions as end-points to history. We struggle in order to honor those before us, and to give faith to those after us, that the present creates a better future. Life becomes meaningless and we may well despair without that struggle and hope.
That is the elusive happy ending, a meaningful life, and we should be as lucky as they were...
Over this past week, I saw a tweet of a memo (circulated as a rumor) to the extent that the President was inviting historians to advise him on the proper way to express the concept of “class warfare” in the present political climate. Class warfare is such a polarizing idea that most savvy politicos passed it off as a plant from the opposing side. Perhaps there is something to the thought that it was a plant because nothing of that ilk appeared in the President’s many speeches this week. Hopefully it never will and that argument will remain under its current heavy rock.
If I were given an article to read, as part of a test, with the question, “Is this article fact or fiction?”, I would skip reading the article and read the conclusion first. If it has a “happy ending” it is definitively fiction-though a unhappy ending is non-conclusive. The best case scenario for non-fiction is a consensus around a topic and the marginalization of dissent.
It probably seems shocking that it’s that simple because we’ve been conditioned by our culture to believe in beginnings and endings, especially unhappy beginnings and happy endings, from literature, movies and television. Culturally, good triumphs, evil is vanquished, everyone believes the outcome is just, the issue is set aside as resolved, we leave the theater hopeful that the world is fair and the universe always bends towards justice-whatever any of those concepts ultimately mean. Hope is the crucible of fiction: it separates dreams from the fires of reality, keeping dreams from destruction but giving them the semisolid, amorphous quality that makes them eternal, yet indistinct.
If you’re paying any attention at all, ya’ll’re probably getting pretty depressed by now, how I’m not letting you off the hook to retreat into that comforting, cultural surreality and all. Not only are things not going to work out, I’m saying they never have: THAT is the fundamental nature of reality.
And if ya’ll’ve read any of any of my work, there should be a morbid fascination starting to form around the morbid tone of this article. This isn’t what you’ve come to expect from the ole Tomcat-what with me being unrelentingly sunshiney or, at the very least, partly cloudy with rainbows…
“What the hell, TVA: ya’d run out of lithium?”
Let me remind you, I’m not a rich man and could never afford THAT MUCH lithium.
I wrote an article (in “The Erin Burnett Letters” blog) entitled Dale Junior, Jr. in which I jokingly refer to my time as a nihilist, which really, actually happened. That’s why the post is so damn funny: the truest things are still said in jest, mainly because the truth is just so damn depressing, otherwise. If I wanted to be depressing, I’d be a news reporter. Just sayin’.
(Not you, Doll, you actually cheer me up…)
I’m not saying that reporters mean to be depressing, they mean to be factual (hopefully) and the facts are like the weather in Hell: always bad. It’s a crap job and I don’t know why otherwise attractive people do it. The suspicion occurs that they may be nihilists and privately wonder why we keep tuning in night after night.
Well, it’s that whole happy ending thing. Every time we tune in to that same bad news channel for the same bad news, we EXPECT a surprise. “IT’S IN ALL THE MOVIES FOR KRISSAKES: DON’T YOU PEOPLE GO TO THE MOVIES?” I think that expectation is why the media ranks down there with Congress-and that guy at the tire store who keeps trying to sell me a whole new braking system when I have my tires rotated: you think I’m not going to check that before I bust out $1500? Do people actually do that?
(I told him, “At that price, it’s actually cheaper for me to wreck the car and pay my deductible…” but I did go home and check them myself. They were fine and are fine.) That was my happy ending there, checking into it myself.
Brakes are important, and all that, but that experience is hardly the big picture: checking into the facts yourself is largely unlikely to change them to any great extent and will only reveal the political spin put on the facts by the disseminator. The news remains the news and the facts remain the facts and what are the news and facts, people? That’s right, they’re bad, now you’re getting it.
Now that I’ve made you believers, here’s the good news: there is no “news”, only issues floating in and out of focus in the current time and the shifting circumstances that surround the issues. This realization is important to stave off nihilism and depression: if you ACCEPT your circumstances, and live in the moment with no hope for the future, you also accept that your future will never change because you pussed-out and accepted it as it currently is. There has been, and only will be, the struggle to make the world better and NOT the expectation that it will ever come to fruition. That’s the dream that Hollywood sells us: the idea that concerns begin and end, end happily, not that concerns are eternal and need to be battled constantly. This Tinsel-town fantasy leads people to believe that things were, at some point, better and retreating into the past will bring resolution to our current problems: if we only returned to the Nation our forefathers created, all our current problems would be over. Well, our forefathers lived to an average age of 30 years, how does that sound? Is that your utopia? IT’S A GOOD THING THEY DIDN’T ACCEPT THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES, HUH?
We live in the best possible world our progenitors could create and in order to honor them we must fall into the line of those who’ve struggled before us. The consolation should be that this is the eternal nature of life, always has been, and we have forever been united in common cause-even now when it seems we are so divided. The divisions have always been there, history merely blinds us to that fact, and still they progressed because they didn’t accept those divisions as end-points to history. We struggle in order to honor those before us, and to give faith to those after us, that the present creates a better future. Life becomes meaningless and we may well despair without that struggle and hope.
That is the elusive happy ending, a meaningful life, and we should be as lucky as they were...
