Crazy in the Time of Cholera
We're losing our collective minds, continually, and heading for an end that's as sad as it is predictable.
René Girard was a hell of a philosopher.
In The Birth of Tragedy magazine interview he did with quantum mechanics genius Scott Walter, he made the side claim that the entirety of civilized development could be chalked up to our periodic interest in self-destruction. Usually precipitated by what he called a “sacrificial crisis”, he described social groupings working themselves into lathers that can and will be only be relieved by a bloodletting. Who, and how, we choose the vessel for this bloodletting is as occult as it is inevitable.
Once exercised, community tensions relieved, it’s business as usual. And usually that business is gearing up for the next one. History is replete with crisis vectors that make good on making this bloodletting as bad as it needs to be. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler and every other non-actor led activation of our murderous instincts has served this end. However, on the occasion of every suchlike end, we do the same thing, each and every time: we “act” surprised.
But we’ve seen this in micro. Or at least I have.
“Is it your desire that I strike you?”
In moments like this I have, with a surprising frequency, found myself much more polite than you’d expect given the circumstances. The listener was 6’2” about 200 pounds and Belgian, if that matters at all. And we’re headed for rough waters.
I walked up to his now laid out body to finish the job and I waved away his plaintive cry for “no violence” … the look on his face was one that I had seen before. It was a look of total surprise.
“Do what you got to do!” He announced with a smile and a glance around for those he expected he had amused.
I also smiled, and looked away. Like a grizzly does. Or like Jimmy the Gent did in Goodfellas right after Billy Batts tells Tommy DeVito to go home and get his shinebox. DeNiro as Gent delivers the closing line “OK” and anyone within earshot should have understood that this was anything but.
I had decided to slap The Belgian, as I had imagined this would be an easy read, but for a few things. First being that I slapped him with the hand that held the mic. Secondly being that a slap from a guy who knows how to punch is actually almost as damaging.
But I noted after Charlie Brown-ing this man into a feet in the air collapse, as I walked up to his now laid out body to finish the job and I waved away his plaintive cry for “no violence”, that the look on his face was one that I had seen before. It was a look of total surprise.
And it was this surprise that baffled me, as I had seen it before. Always on the occasion of me having struck someone who, more times than not, I had told I was going to do just that.
I’d be tempted to say this is an American affliction, this inability to see what’s staring us in the face, but this was Belgium and the man was Belgian and, moreover, I’ve been slapping people globally for the better part of 30 years and the looks of surprise never fail to surprise me.
[B]illionaire investor Ray Dalio…stated that there’s a 40 percent chance of another US civil war. While his financial recommendation was to suggest investment moves off shore, you’d not have been wrong to be more moved by his prognosis of our future prospects. In brief: we are collectively about to be punched in our very surprised faces.
But while it’s very hard, if not impossible to tickle yourself, masturbation seems to work just fine. And while no heterosexual man feels that masturbation is getting a handjob from a man, this is precisely what is happening. Happening because, usually, the mind is imagining something wholly different and it’s this ability that allows us to stumble from sacrificial crisis to sacrificial crisis that we’re not seeing that we’ve created, or even largely desire.
Three days ago though, or thereabouts, billionaire investor Ray Dalio in a Financial Times interview stated that there’s a 40 percent chance of another US civil war. While his financial recommendation was to suggest investment moves off shore, you’d not have been wrong to be more moved by his prognosis of our future prospects. In brief: we are collectively about to be punched in our very surprised faces.
During the first US Civil War, you’d also not have been surprised to learn that the French firmly believed that this would be the end of the American union. During the 1960s it wasn’t even just the French who believed this, the belief was global, this idea that America was so riddled with scissures that the center could not possibly hold. But every place was in the ‘60s. It was widely cultural. And endurable. Mostly because a center did still actually exist.
Welcome to 2024 though, a time of no center, and the craziness that abounds when there’s no reference point by which to judge your place in space. And it’s not just our algorithms feeding us stories that are like other stories that we’ve expressed an interest in. It’s that these are resonating with everything else that’s in our heads.
Ninety-one charges against former President Donald Trump? Sure (we’ll circle back to this). Celebrity rapists plying their rape-y trade for decades? Uh hunh. Big Pharma fentanyl spree killing? Right. The systematic denial of the reality of experience, specifically the 2024 presidential election? A-ok. Add in the Israel-Palestine imbroglio, the Ukrainian-Russian scuffle, and global university protests over the same and to quote former professional wrestler The Rock, “can you smell what The Rock is cooking?”
In fact our outsized reactions to undersized stimuli has became an earmark of life on the planet today. While some felt that Howard Unruh aggressively overreacted in responding to his neighbors stealing his gate by shooting them all, that might be a minority opinion in 2024.
We’re headed…for the resolution of the current sacrificial crisis, a resolution that will involve blood, and the disturbingly annoying aftermath where everyone sits around in rubble and wonders what happened…
And the source for all of this oversized agita, with the whole fish rotting from the head bit firmly in mind, would have to be the true and only Jason of politics now that Roy Cohn’s other student, Richard Nixon, has passed, is the aforementioned Trump.
Making the impossible, now possible, Trump is a true visionary. Mostly in seeing things that are not there. Whether he’s a cynical opportunist (yes) or a true believer (probably not), his willingness to say and do whatever the fuck has fueled a lack of accountability that has us seeing politicians threatening to kick each other’s asses as part of doing the business of the people whilst hurling grade school insults at each other.
He’s also imbued the aggrieved with a (false) sense of their indestructibility, the same sort of sense that gets people to do things like…bearing arms. And money, the usual crowbar that jimmies the Western mind into compliance, is not even working anymore because money has ceased to mean much when everyone is either a millionaire/billionaire or so far from being so that a gun seems an attractive option.
We are, in short, fucked.
But all is not lost!…Um…well…
…Yes. Yes it is. Because you see we’re headed, full speed a-headed, for the resolution of the current sacrificial crisis, a resolution that will involve blood, and the disturbingly annoying aftermath where everyone sits around in rubble and wonders what happened, how it happened, and how could we have ever been so foolish?
All of which are necessary to continue to act surprised. Or get a non-homosexual handjob.
One thing remains certain though: we will, in actual fact, all get exactly what we deserve.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 58 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps. Or so they tell me.
There is such a bewildering myriad of blatantly unsustainable aspects of modern life— we (America in this case, although stability around the globe is increasingly fragile) just needed someone brash enough to come in and lead the inane charge into full-on Idiocracy. The tip of the spear is orange…