The Systematic Denial of the Reality of Experience
Or, how, and why, you must be absolutely certain of the devil.
The sound announced itself as exactly what it was. Quiet, then the crack and shower of breaking glass on both the concrete outside and below and the wooden floor inside. Then a pause, and then again. There didn’t seem to be any special urgency to the sounds but I quickened my pace to the source.
See, I was a lifeguard at a kids’ camp and it was summer and ostensibly I was a staffer and as such was duty bound to go all Scooby Doo on The Mystery of the Breaking Glass. Turning a corner I found a kid, about 12-years-old. His shirt is couching a clutch of rocks, and standing there with one in his hand he looks over at me. And smiles.
“HEY!” His demeanor doesn’t markedly change. He doesn’t ask “what?” but his look suggests just that. “QUIT BREAKING THOSE WINDOWS,” I say, not angry really, just…shocked.
The windows were in what looked to be a converted barn. Windows ranged all along the top and four were broken. Maybe four out of 20.
Then this, from him: “I’m not breaking any windows.” And so there we stood. There was no anger or defiance in his report. It was…factual. At the exact moment we spoke he was not, in fact, breaking any windows. Forget for a second that the preponderance of the evidence was stacked up against him, in answer to my original charge he was neither cowed nor deterred but what he was, was Clarence Darrow.
On this, you see, the zeitgeist is perfectly clear: no one ever in the history of rocks and windows ever used one of those rocks to break any of those windows.
Unspoken but hanging right there were other questions: did you see me break the windows? Were the windows broken before I got there? And, while I know it looks bad, have you ever considered that the person breaking the windows, whoever they might be, might actually be inside the building throwing the rocks outside and I am gathering up evidence now, or would be, if not for your untimely intervention?
We stared at each other for what felt like a long time but was probably about 30 seconds. He had me. I’ve always buckled under this kind of withering philosophizing. So I walked off, tapped out, and went my way with much additional knowledge.
Knowledge that I would later employ to great effect in similar circumstances. I don’t know if it was significant that this happened in New York but it always felt to me like a particularly New York moment.
Which the rest of the world has now gotten a taste of in light and in view of the continuing Trump theatrics around…well, just about everything but specifically now his negotiations this past week around The Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, as well as the entirety of everything else he’s ever done. Bleeding over into everything now, including crucial elements of our public discourse on the entire media-focused world from Depp v Heard to the Washington Post dust up, we are now mired in the mix of a zeitgeist permanently enshrined under the words, PROVE IT.
However, the only way to win this game is to not play, especially since every other way has you losing. Sucked into a tar baby-esque entanglement of “what ifs” and “says who’s?” that will undercut your undercutting even as it undercuts the very mainstays of whatever consensus reality you happen to be participating in. And Trump, in particular, will do this until he dies.
But what’s “this”? “This” is what happened in an old Marvel comic book where a villain called Thanos cast off the so-called Cosmic Cube that had been providing him with G-d-like powers. Left it floating off in space somewhere. The heroes, Captain Marvel et al, fought what, by all measure, seemed to be a losing battle into the deeper reaches of space with Thanos. All until Captain Marvel, now gifted with universal consciousness, remembered the Cube.
You see there was so much other stuff being thrown at them by Thanos they had believed the Cube itself was no longer significant. When Captain Marvel took off after it Thanos recast Marvel’s actions as cowardice but Thanos doubled back to protect the Cube, at which point the battle shifted as the heroes refocused on the original source of power which, they subsequently destroyed, then imprisoning Thanos. Again.
I might have some of the finer points wrong, lost in the mists of time, but this I do not have wrong: stop breaking the windows.
[W]e are now mired in the mix of a zeitgeist permanently enshrined under the words, PROVE IT.
Our job is not necessarily about figuring out who is breaking the windows at this point. Our job is to figure out how to stop the breaking of windows. However, breaking windows is as American as apple pie. Try telling someone that the country itself was stolen from the people who lived here before Europeans showed up and see what happens.
In fact try to advance any grievance at all if you’re not part of the dominant paradigm, and you’ll be met with a counter grievance, a flood of what-about-me’ism that’s as ironclad as the promise that, inevitably, the good will get vanquished, the bad will prosper and the evil will remain unpunished. So the Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez grills a coworker for retweeting a shitty tweet and gets canned for not keeping the party polite? Surprising? Not in the slightest.
And then Depp v. Heard. The “wounded” cancel warriors. The woke anti-woke folks. All with axes to grind that are grinding against the prospect of having to stand in the grievance line because in the end, even if Depp “wins”, Louis CK walks off with a Grammy, and Joe Rogan is making more money than G-d, them voicing the take of the aggrieved amongst the aggrieved is OK, just as long as they can go first.
So Felicia Sonmez gets fired by Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, while David Weigel, the cat that actuated her grievance with his out-of-pocket tweet, still has a job. Because: of course he does.
Depp drops almost $60,000 dollars, post-trial, in an Indian restaurant to? To celebrate his legal victory over Amber Heard. Because: of course he could.
And Trump turns on his daughter because of her testimony regarding the January 6th attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. Because: there was no attempt to overthrow the government and whosoever says there was is a g-ddamned liar.
On this, you see, the zeitgeist is perfectly clear: no one ever in the history of rocks and windows ever used one of those rocks to break any of those windows.
How can you not see that?
Dear GAWD, what a 'welcome back' to the land of regular interwebs!!! I spent the last 3+ weeks caring for my mother, a crabby old lady who ultimately told me that my sleeping on her lumpy sofa for 3 weeks was not because I cared for her, but because I have an "overdeveloped sense of duty." My next oldest sister told me that I "allowed" myself to be cornered into taking care of the old lady because I was a sucker. All of that to say that... yeah... "Systematic Denial of the Reality of Experience." Been there, recently, done that, and should have at LEAST gotten a freakin' t-shirt.