Getting to the Great Frozen, Or What Happens When You Hit Outrage OD
No more frown-y faces, exploding heads, or passionate expressions of indignation, we are slowly, but surely, becoming inured to the insane. And that might be just fine.
The whole Jesus-Easter thing is…confusing. But, just for a second, let’s examine on its merits. Jesus is never very forthright about his parentage, if you do your research. Somewhere between copping to being his “father’s son”, which just about any man could make, and us all being children of G-d, He doesn’t explicitly state that He was any more or less “divine” than the rest of us.
But people are going to think whatever they want to and so it went that he was caught, tried and ultimately executed for being a pain in the ass. Judaism denied his divinity for the simplest of reasons: a messiah is supposed to set His people free, and, as far as they knew, they were not.
Unless you wanted to stand on the claim that through his sacrifice he granted us eternal life. But did he? Did he himself exhibit any version of “eternal” after his crucifixion? Who saw him during the Ascension? Who moved the rock in front of His death cave? How come no matter how you try you can’t find three days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday?
Questions, questions and through it all, we don’t contemporize it anywhere close to how we’d feel for example, if the Substack reading public were to be told that Eugene S. Robinson was sent by G-d to give them eternal life. But there’s a reason why in 2025 that’s a harder pill to swallow than way back when.
The language reveals all. Everything is a “disgrace” or an “outrage” and it correctly disgusts and outrages us. I’m not saying these are not real events….
We’re so awash in bullshit these days that our bullshit detectors are constantly and forever screaming. Like the subway rumbling by The Blue Brothers apartment where they were told it came through so often that you’ll grow to “never even noticing it”, that’s where we are.
There is no outrage too outrageous to not find someone, or dozens, to pick up the mantle. So familiar are we with the two-step that if at the end of this sentence I was to proclaim “gray” there’s a healthy contingent of you who might say, or think, “fuck THAT! It’s NOT gray!”
Well, just now, off of tour with BUNUEL I have some answers. It’s common to think that sex, drugs and rock and roll are all part of the menu when we’re talking rock and roll music but I’ve been touring since 1982. That makes 43 years of getting in vans to get on stages to get off for some wholly undeclared but deeply felt love for the aesthetics of music, if not music itself.
During the process now what’s happened during those long drives from hither to yon is…nothing. No sex, no drugs, rock and roll, sure, but in those vans and long roads there’s little left but thought, and being in a quiet place alone with said thought. Thought and from the long, thin gray stretch of eternity spreading out between peak experience after peak experience, a vantage point.
Usually via books but this tour was book-less as it is when I am gearing up for another book (in this case LOVE? LOVE!, my next novel. If you haven’t read my last one, you should). So it was the news cycle and thought, and viewing the American experience from the vantage point of 6000 miles away.
And something magical happened: I stopped caring.
It reminds me for all the world like a scene from Enter the Dragon, with Bruce Lee. In the scene, at about 3:26, he finds himself trapped. After having fought dozens of men for 10 minutes he weighs all in the balance and does the only thing that makes sense. He sits, crosses his legs, meditates, and waits for whatever fortune has in store for him.
“Winning and losing what makes you human is no kind of win,” she told me. “And it’s why it makes more sense to feel sorry for them than it does to feel sorry for me.” — Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor and Josef Mengele test subject
“Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to his life?” Someone or other said in both the books of Matthew and Luke. No one, seems to be the answer, in the face of the Trump outrage factory, as well as the generative function of this very social media that brings me to you, and you to me.
The language reveals all. Everything is a “disgrace” or an “outrage” and it correctly disgusts and outrages us. I’m not saying these are not real events. I am saying that when everything disgraces and outrages, that it most behooves us to step back from the precipice of disgrace and outrage and take stock of actually what is happening.
And what is happening is that there are places still left on earth where real people are living real lives that have nothing at all to do with your fucking news cycle but everything to do with the existential concerns of trying to live outside of the squall. Also, there’s one other thing and it’s equally magical and it has everything to do with adaptability.
The best/worst thing that undergirds human development has been the quality of being able to adapt to just about anything. One of the last interviews I had done with the expectation of publishing it in the now-defunct OZY Media, was an interview with Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor. Not just a Holocaust survivor, Kor had been experimented on by Josef Mengele.
Her attitude, toward the end of her life where I found her, could only be described as “sunny”. “Winning and losing what makes you human is no kind of win,” she told me. “And it’s why it makes more sense to feel sorry for them than it does to feel sorry for me.”
I interviewed her over two days in 2019, a few hours on tape, to be capped with a July meeting at Auschwitz where she had planned to take her forgiveness project. She died right before this, but I had continued on for what would be my second visit to Auschwitz.
In the heat of a July day Auschwitz hits a little bit differently than it did in the winter I had been there a few years earlier. In the winter I had broken down and couldn’t continue beyond the administration buildings. The summer of 2019 I could and did, and walking across the great expanse of loss and misery I saw, not deliverance, but something more useful: endurance.
Anything as shitty as the 12 years of the Third Reich could not have possibly lasted. It was born from instability, profited deeply from that instability, and passed into the dark night of that which is equally unstable. Resistance was desirable and necessary but what rescued us from its clutches was that its promises weren’t kept and its premise, in the end, was just…unbelievable.
And what endured? The still-denied truth of its wrongness. Whether or not Jesus was divine? Much less important than that as I sit on my porch writing this I still see kids trundling off to remember the occasion of Jesus’ passing.
So save your head exploding emojis, and your frothy postings from the toilet bowl of the modern world because there’s no reality to any of this. And sitting in a Fiat van on tour (the first Italian vehicle I’ve ever toured in. Usually it’s a Mercedes) three days ago as I watched the night sweep by I realized that ownership of our lives must be claimed by those that live those lives.
Don’t rent them out to these agents of chaos. Resist as you must but the reality is unless you have clocks at home that run backward, you’re watching that pass which you’ll never see again. So see something worthwhile, free of encumbrance, and watch it being what it really is and what it’s meant to be.
A much, much easier pill to swallow.
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
When Jesus sees his shadow on Easter that means there are six more weeks of winter