*From a line in Jackson Browne’s song Downhill From Everywhere. The muse is as strong as ever in him.
A year and five months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, is there anyone left in the United States who hasn’t at least begun to realize just how quickly even the most stable-seeming institutions can implode, how we can wake up one morning in a world where it takes a wheelbarrowload, a truckload of familiar certainties to trade for a dozen eggs or a gallon of gasoline?
Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. We’re still on the brink of all sorts of revelations that have yet to reach the cretinous in their red hats, or the earnest in their fantasies of how all this could have been avoided if only Joe Biden had been just a little less sleepy, or Kamala Harris had been just a little more astute. The exceptions of American Exceptionalism are, it should now be clear to all but the most persistently deluded, as vulnerable to entropic processes as the divinity of the Pharoahs, the steadfastness of Roman virtus, or the persistence of sunlight on the British Empire.
Even though your question was rhetorical…
We are parked in a campsite near at least one individual whom, I’m guessing, thinks things are more than fine. They are simultaneously flying the Stars and Stripes, the Blue Lives Matter flag, the Gadsden flag, and one more that is hidden behind a picnic shelter that I cannot see without being really obvious (but hopeful it’s not the Stars and Bars, though I’m not sure why I have that hope). I sent a pic to Pendinska captioned:
Proud? Insecure? Or, proudly insecure?
This seems to be my song lyrics day, but how about this from John Lennon: …He say, “One and one and one is three” · Got to be good-lookin’, ’cause he’s so hard to see…,
That’s it, I think—it’s peacocking pure and simple—the only way these guys (and it’s a guy thing even when the MAGA women do it) can be sure that they’re a person of significance, that they’re even there at all, is by doing whatever it takes to force other people to look at them. I suspect the same principle is driving the fact that these days, with the detumescence of our Pax Americana increasingly visible to all, no U.S. politician dares make a public statement without standing in from of a wall of at least a dozen shingled American flags, with a cute little enameled version pinned where the cameras will be sure to spot it. Only the actual, original, German-speaking Nazis needed more flags than Trump’s misfits do to feel important….
Ha! Peacocking. Gonna hold on to that one. But, ya know?
This:
“…the only way these guys … can be sure … that they’re even there at all, is by doing whatever it takes to force other people to look at them.
Is really sad stuff.
Agreed. Since we’re all God’s children, it behooves us to make sure that every one of us is seen. I like the personal motto of Michael Connelly’s LAPD detective character Harry Bosch, who repeats it a number of times in Connelly’s popular series of police procedurals: “Everybody counts, or nobody counts.” Given our stubbornly stratified societies, and the equally stubborn diversity of human outcomes in those societies, it’s hard to keep our eyes on that particular prize, but it’s just about the only thing that’s really worth aspiring to, at least in a moral sense.
To which, the only reasonable reply is, Amen.
Hieronymus Bosch is a great character. I think I read every one of those books years ago.
The form of peacocking Bystander ran across is also readily found on the beaches of NC. I make sure I’m busy perusing for seashells whenever I walk past.
AZ also, and with guns on top. As for Hieronymus, I think it’s my turn to say Amen! 🙂