Answering For A Friend

A friend, asking for a friend, recently wondered what you should do when you crave other peoples’ approval, but you find that it always feels hollow whenever you actually receive it.

Most people who responded suggested therapy.

Ahhh, these fancy, lucky people with their “ability to afford therapy” and their “ability to believe they’re worth helping!”

I have generally lacked these luxuries – but, on reflection, I’ve asked – I mean, my OWN totally unrelated friend; you don’t know her; she doesn’t go here – has asked similar questions, and more or less somewhat managed to improve things in that regard in some ways. A bit.

So, why not answer them, or at least emit a long series of words in which there might be one or two useful nubbins of help.

Let’s say therapy’s not an option. Or let’s say you want it to be an option, but you don’t even know if you deserve it. Since we may not be so fancy or lucky, let’s bring it back down into the hole where we actually are. Maybe we can still figure out what’s going on.

For me – I mean, my friend – I mean, theoretically… seeking approval isn’t exactly about being bolstered by the praise you get for doing things well; it’s about seeking safety: reassurance that people will stand by you when you don’t do well.

Maybe you grew up getting yelled at a lot for even minor mistakes, because they reflect poorly on your skills or your work ethic or your parents themselves. Maybe you only got praise when you earned it: your grade was good enough, your score was high enough, your efforts were fruitful enough. Your intentions never mattered, only your outcomes. Love and support weren’t unconditional – they were transactional.

So maybe you feel like you have to earn others’ praise, approval, or sheer acceptance of your existence. You cannot simply exist as a person, do person-things, have experiences and relationships and learn and grow and change: you need to justify your existence. Every day.

And you know that nothing you ever do could ever actually be enough to do that.

Besides, within your own head, you know the heights of your ambitions. (Okay, depending on where you’re at, exactly, “ambitions” might sound like absolute hubris. Let’s tone it down to “your desire for things to be other than they currently are, in a way that might potentially be more beneficial to others and maybe even yourself, based on your admittedly-limited information in the present circumstances.” Mental states like this can feel like an endless series of parentheses and asterisks and footnotes and qualifications. After all, we’re not allowed to be wrong or make mistakes – that’s the whole point.)

Anyway. You had some kind of ambition or aspiration or ideal, and you see the gulf between those outcomes and that ideal. You see the mistakes others don’t notice. You know the choices you made, and you second-guess them. You are uniquely positioned to compare what it is to what it could and probably should have been. Even if what you’ve done is technically proficient, technically flawless somehow, you may feel it could and should have been more.

This is kinda like a corruption of the Fundamental Attribution Error, only instead of granting yourself the benefit of the doubt and attributing your flaws to situational factors while you blame others’ flaws on their character and their being A Bad Person, you might see yourself as having a fundamentally flawed personality / character AND as making poor choices or executing your choices poorly. It’s not just that you think you’re A Bad Person by nature, but that you’re also choosing to do things worse than you could if you just tried hard enough, managed your time better, or set more noble priorities to help overcome that nature.

This is where the strife comes in: How can you ethically accept approval or praise when you know that what you did could’ve been better if you’d made different choices, tried harder, or… just been somebody else?

To resolve this, you might really go into overkill on some things – toil away at the smallest minutiae, trying to get it Just Right, because if you can at least do SOME small thing well, just one thing… maybe that’d be proof that you’re useful, that you’re worthwhile, that you’re okay.

Or you might flub that, too, and realize that you can’t do even those small things the way you know you should. And you might just kinda give up and try LESS – because if you can’t even be good enough at trivialities, how can you be okay at anything that matters? If people don’t expect too much, maybe they won’t get mad.

Even when you succeed, when you do well, and you feel good about it, and others do praise you for it, and it feels okay at the moment… it curdles after a little while. Because you know you’re always supposed to improve. Today’s great success proves you can do it, and now it’s tomorrow’s bare minimum. Do it well once, and you can never do it even a little wrong ever again. You’ve proven your capabilities, and now you need to uphold that, or better, every day, forever, or the approval might go away.

If you could just figure out how to do things well enough, maybe you could be okay. Okay enough for others to acknowledge you, support you, maybe even love you.

Or just okay enough that they won’t shame or punish or hurt you.

And that’s the crux of it.

Again, seeking approval isn’t really about seeking approval – not for your successes, not despite your failures, and not even regarding a general acceptance of your existence.

It’s about seeking safety. An enduring stability. It’s about trying to prevent and avoid harm.

This might also make you feel bad. You KNOW, intellectually, that the people who love you are not trying to harm you. They are not trying to trick you. They praise you and approve of you because they like YOU – for who you are as a person AND for what you do in the world: your character and your works. They see more than you know, and their compassion is deep, and they are not lying. They’re not going to point to a hidden camera and reveal this has all been a big livestreamed Truman-Show-style prank to see if they could make you believe you were worth love. They mean it. Your family, your friends, even acquaintances you’ve influenced in some way – they love you. They love YOU. They mean it.

But even if you accept that they mean it, even if you don’t talk yourself out of it and say that they shouldn’t… something that gnaws at the hindbrain reminds you: they love you TODAY. They love you because you’ve been good enough so far. You cannot be perfect forever, and they cannot be forever forgiving, so you know the time must be coming. The next mistake could be the last one. The straw that breaks the camel’s back.

So who is it you’re afraid of there? Is it actually them? Or is it yourself? Is it your own capacity for failure, disappointment, and inadvertent cruelty? Are you afraid that you might do something so terrible, or so minor but so the-last-straw, that you MAKE them give up on you? Afraid that you’ll hurt them the way you were hurt? Afraid that you’re ruining them, at least a little bit, just by being who you are? Afraid that you’ve somehow tricked them into loving you?

Sometimes we – I mean, my friend – I mean, theoretically… are seeking safety for others as well as ourselves. We’re afraid of hurting them, ruining them. When we fear they’ll rescind their love and support if we make that one last mistake, or if they finally realize all the bad we’ve been all along… we’re not really afraid of them. We’re afraid of us. That we made them HAVE to be terrible to us. We can endure a lack of love; we can even endure others’ hate. We’ve been there. We have that gnawing knowing that we should still be there. But to poison others’ patience, corrupt their kindness, exhaust them of all their forgiveness? How could THAT be endured?

But that is not how it works.

That is not how it works.

If other people care about us, that is not us tricking them. If other people are cruel to us, that is not us forcing them to be terrible. We are responsible for ourselves. That doesn’t mean we’re infallible, or that we don’t accept the consequences of our actions. It just means that we are ourselves. We have our own knowledge and experiences, we make our own choices.

Other people make their own choices, too. And if others have chosen to hurt us in the past, that can be hard to accept. Isn’t it easier to think there was something about us that made them have to do it? That we could have prevented it? Especially if it was done by someone we loved, doesn’t it feel cruel to think that they, themselves, CHOSE to be that way?

We are our own people. And we’re allowed to be. We’re allowed to try things even when we’re not sure we’ll be perfect at it. We’re allowed to make mistakes. Even though we might be having a really hard time doing our normal things well enough, we ARE allowed to try new things, or to try to do the same things differently, or to pick old things back up.

Like, say, writing blog posts.

Ahem.

So. That’s a whole big boatload of context. And that’s cute. But what do you actually DO? How do you get there from here? What is the right thing to do, and how do you do that right thing rightly?

Again, that’s also not how it works. It’s not about picking the exact right option. It’s about identifying what makes you feel valuable in and of yourself – not necessarily what others want, or what makes you useful, or what makes you money, but what makes you feel like a person – and acknowledging that you are allowed to pursue that. “Success,” however you may define it, is not guaranteed. But you are permitted, even encouraged, to pursue your own ennoblement. To draw together your own dignity.

Things that have helped me – I mean, my friend – I mean, theoretically… are things like making some kind of creative something. Anything. Writing (blog posts or stories or non-fiction,) drawing, singing, graphic design, playing an instrument, cooking, anything. Not doing so to make some kind of great art. Not to express something perfectly. Not necessarily to express anything at all. Just to put something new into the world that did not exist before, and would never have existed if we didn’t put it there.

It can particularly help when it’s something physical and tangible. There are actual materials and molecules in the actual world that have been brought adjacent to each other, and they are THERE now. This thing EXISTS. It undeniably, tangibly, palpably exists. Go ahead! Tange and/or palp it!

It can also help to try other new things in general. New foods, new hobbies, new habits.

Yeah, I know that sounds absurd: “I’m having this much trouble existing and doing the basic, fundamental, familiar things, and you’re saying I should introduce brand-new variables?!” …Er, well, yeah, actually. I know! Everything in you says NO – UNSAFE – THREAT – OUT OF BOUNDS – BAD. But the problem is, in part, that the out-of-bounds range is reeeeally confining, and that things are getting classified as threats when they’re not, and that we’re actually probably more durable against more kinds of hazards than we were when this threat-detection system was originally set up. The distress and anxiety about approval IS a self-defense mechanism gone awry, after all; your system is probably a bit hair-trigger. (It probably had to be, once. It’s sorta like having a panic room, then getting yourself locked inside it.)

In trying these new things or picking up these new habits, you will probably make mistakes with them, or do them too much or too little. And here’s where I utter the other heresy: you’re allowed to make mistakes. You really, honestly are. That’s a trite thing that people say a lot, but they neglect to also reinforce the most important thing: that you’re allowed to keep trying after you make those mistakes. This isn’t a tournament; failing once doesn’t kick you out of the roster, and you don’t even have to hope for redemption rounds. You can just keep doing the thing, even a thing you are bad at, because you damn well want to do that it and you are allowed to want things.

If you cannot justify this in yourself yet: I allow you. You have my permission to pursue the things that make you feel whole, feel beautiful, and feel strong.

Because even if your skill at doing that thing doesn’t improve, something else will: your resilience. And resilience makes such a tremendous goddamn difference. It may be the most important skill of all. I don’t think most people think it’s a skill in the first place. Maybe normal people just want things, then pursue things, then falter, but keep pursuing them anyway because they feel confident that they deserve it. Maybe they’re less afraid of incurring some personal or cosmic wrath for their hubris. I don’t really get it. But I do know that, even when I’ve extended myself beyond my tiny little comfort zone, and even when it’s gone poorly… that boundary feels a bit more flexible. I set precedent, yes – but it can be a precedent of effort, not of outcome. Just by trying, just by continuing to try, that is strengthening you.

Previous experience might tell you it’s not safe to make mistakes, not safe to do things imperfectly or to insist on doing things that aren’t useful enough to others. Previous experience may not be representative of what current and future experiences might be, though. In fact, previous experience can, at times, absolutely bite me. We carry that experience with us, and it helped to shape us, but that doesn’t mean we have to confine ourselves to it today. There are whole-ass grown adults who did not even exist at the time those previous experiences happened. They certainly grew and changed, all the way from a cluster of cells to an actual sapient person capable of introspection – and we think we’re locked in to the way we were shaped some twenty years ago? Bah. Feh. Fui. Harumph.

Also, the way certain others reacted to your efforts before may not be the way your current present others react to it now – and, again, those others are responsible for their own choices and behaviors, like how they treat you.

You’re also allowed to talk to people. That’s made a tremendous difference to me: hearing from other people with other experiences to share, instead of just blogging into the void. I mean, yeah, therapy is probably good if you can get it? If not, maybe you’ve got a spiritual leader you can speak with. Or a trusted person in your family or elsewhere. But you have friends – clearly; you’re asking for one, after all – and while it may be optimal to get the help of a trained professional, it can also help to admit your concerns to friends. They’re not going to be able to unpack a life’s worth of trauma for you, but a lot of good can come from the sheer honesty of saying “I’m having a rough day today, thinking a lot about [blah] – could we [talk about that] / [play a game together] / [make something together] / [just decompress and watch a movie] / [go for a walk] / [work out together] / [set something on fire]?”

…Okay, maybe not that last one.

Hell, actually, MAYBE that last one: creating something representative and symbolically destroying it can be surprisingly freeing. We are meaning-making creatures, after all.

And it can help to create new habits that may well become traditions or rituals, new stories that may well become legends or our own private mythology. We can seek out the ways we interrelate with the world, the ways we reflect our environment – and seek out those environments, those people, that somehow reflect ourselves back to us. Maybe that’s a church. Maybe that’s a tree. Maybe that’s investing a lot of raw and otherwise ill-directed emotion into something that you then set the fuck on fire. (Legally and safely.)

All of this is going around in circles, yes. Trying to find the right phrasing, the right formulation, the right thing to do to make things better for a person I care about, because old habits do die hard.

But maybe it’s better for some of these encouragements to circle, perhaps countering the doomspiral of other thoughts.

The difficulty is always this: we do not like how things are, and we do not like how we are, and we think that we are so bad at doing things that we inherently cannot change how we are or how things are, and therefore we are stuck. Stuck until some kind of circumstance changes us, or others change us. But you see how we can’t even believe others when they praise us, even though that’s what we think we want? You see how we tend to stay true to form, hold tight to the familiar, when external circumstances put pressure on us?

Yeah. We kinda have to do the changing. Even though we don’t think we can. It might feel like a leap of faith, but it’s sincerely more like walking to the bathroom without turning the lights on. The bathroom’s there, the floor is there, the door is there, our feet are there, and it really is possible – and even if we bark our shins on the furniture or stub our toe on the doorframe on the way there, that doesn’t mean we can’t ever get where we’re going. Yes, you might trip and fall and break your skull open and die. You can do that with the lights on, too, y’know.

So how do we change? What do we do?

Look, I’m not doing great at any of this, either. I still have profound doubts. I still fuck it all the way up. A LOT. But… here are a few general things I try to do.

Let yourself try things.
Let yourself want things.
If one of those seems to require the other, do those things in whichever order makes more sense to you.
If they both require each other and you can’t figure out how to start, try doing a thing first. With experience, you might be able to tell whether you have wants about it one way or the other.
Do things that don’t make sense, but that appeal to you anyway.
Extend compassion to others: try to do a thing that makes somebody happy.
Extend compassion to yourself: try to do a thing that makes nobody happy but you.
Make something exist that never existed before and would never have existed if not for you.
Make something stop existing (in a safe and legal way, for preference.)
Talk to someone: a therapist, a spiritual guide, an elder, a child, an animal.
Sit quietly, perhaps amid nature, and see if you can let the thoughts come and go.
Stand up and shout a few swears.
Listen to your body. Eat food; drink water; stretch; sleep.
Seek out the things that resonate with you.
If nothing resonates anymore, seek out the things that give a twinge of curiosity.
If nothing makes you curious anymore, seek out something arbitrary – fiction or non-fiction, a genre of music or a style of art – and dig deeply.
Seek artistic empathy with the self-expressions of others. Especially if you cannot permit yourself to generate your own experiences and emotions, this may be able to jump-start you.
Avoid assuming responsibility for the choices or actions of others.
Take full responsibility for your own choices and their consequences.
If and when you become capable, allow yourself to love.
Do these things in moderation, including the moderation, excepting the love.

Good luck.

The End of Opportunity

The Mars rover Opportunity failed to respond to its final call, and the mission is now over.  There’s a NY Times obituary and everything: the rover is dead.

I find this surprisingly saddening.

Yes, it was a mission only meant for 90 Martian days, and it went on for 5,111. It was only a matter of time, especially considering that dust storm last summer that scuppered it. The dust was on the solar arrays, and the writing was on the wall.

Still, though.

 

I remember tuning in to the Opportunity landing from my dorm room – still marveling at being able to watch such a thing with a proper broadband connection, having so recently been back home and on dial-up. Everything felt possible, felt exciting, felt… future.  Both for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and for, in some way, myself.

And when they just kept on going, days then weeks then months then years after they’d been expected to expire… well, it was encouraging. Especially as I felt barely more than a programmed device, myself – just a thing that was tasked to go to certain places at certain times and perform certain actions and analyze data, and to continue doing this until I was no longer capable of doing so.  And there was something anthropomorphically charming about the idea of these rovers that just… weren’t satisfied.  They weren’t done yet.  There was science to do.

There were discoveries of hematite “blueberries,” of jarosite and gypsum, of clouds – increasing evidence that there had been water on Mars before, that the ice we saw was water ice, that not all Martian water was always frozen – and that somewhere, some of it might still be liquid.

To me, this was amazing. At the time, Earth was the only known world that had ever had liquid water – or, I think, water in any form: the Gas Giants’ clouds were all methane, the Martian ice caps were thought to be frozen CO2, and I’m not sure if there was even any agreement that a comet’s ice was water ice at all – it’d be another year until Deep Impact took a test chunk out of Tempel 1.

It was interesting to exist contemporaneously with things that seemed so futuristic.  To lurch my way around campus knowing that, that very moment, a couple little robots were wheeling over the surface of another world.

But nobody else seemed as excited, or even interested.  Opportunity found evidence of ancient Martian seas – and Long John Silver’s gave out free shrimp.

The analogy still seemed to parse: of expectations somehow simultaneously exceeded and completely unmet.

For myself, I didn’t really have plans – oh, the hubris of a plan – or even sincere expectations.  The present was unnavigable enough, much less a future.  But I had curiosity.  Curiosity about what the world could be, and what I could be, in some amount of time.  Assuming a continuation beyond the expected parameters.  It was hard to articulate things like “wanting” at the time, or even “I,” but I probably could’ve said something to the effect of “It would be interesting to see where the rovers end up and what they find.”

As I do with any sort of ending, and particularly of something I had some affinity for, I sort of can’t help but compare: Where was I when this started, and where am I now? What of my own weird trajectory?  Perhaps I was only meant to be a 90-day mission, and I’m really pushing it now, myself.

I think of futures past. Public and personal, large and local. Of the things that seemed to be… becoming, then.  Of things pushed to the limits of ability and probability. Of the baffling potential of exploration.  Of the bleeding edge. As with most space exploration things I’ve watched, I came away from the video of the landing feeling as if humanity could do incredible things – and that, maybe, so could individual humans. That there was still a place in the world for awe and wonder – and for forging out into the wilderness to find more things to gawp at wide-eyed and poke at with a stick.

Some wag more sardonic than I has probably already said that Spirit died a few years ago, and now we can’t even pretend we still have Opportunity.

But, well, there’s part of me that relates to that metaphor, too:  Small machines were launched into space, landed against all odds, drove along the skin of a distant world, and brought back information to give insight on that world’s past – and maybe our own – and took over a decade to die.  And I look at my own trajectory, writ small and mere on the mappa mundi.  And I look at the paths taken and not taken, the turns and jags. The places I could’ve gone, but didn’t.  The places I went, but shouldn’t have.  The places that looked promising but weren’t. And those things that I did do – that I had set out to do, been programmed to do, succeeded in doing – still aren’t enough to satisfy or even interest most people, even those who’d been invested in the endeavor.

Still.  Science is a process.  Everything is a series of steps, observations, theories, tests, and revisions.  Nothing just matters objectively; value and significance are largely contextual.  Even the various developers of radio and of electromagnetism didn’t think there was much to the effort, but that they were interesting novelties.  So if Opportunity seems dead and its successes seem hollow… it could always be a matter of context and perspective.

Yes, part of me is surprisingly sad that both Spirit and Opportunity are roving no more.  That thing that was future once is now past, and that’s uncomfortable.

So I think on the things I’ve seen since then: the Curiosity landing, Huygens landing on Titan, Rosetta and Philae on 67P, New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto and all the amazing images, the recent glance at Ultima Thule, the entirety of SpaceX and AN ELECTRIC SPORTS CAR BEING LAUNCHED INTO SPACE. WITH A DAVID BOWIE SONG PLAYING. AND A MANNEQUIN IN A SPACESUIT IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT. AND A COPY OF THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY IN THE GLOVE BOX, AND “DON’T PANIC” ON THE DIGITAL DASH.

And that’s just the stuff specific to space exploration!  To say nothing of all the other scientific and technological development: of CRISPR and optogenetics and metamaterials and quantum machines and gravitational waves and exoplanets and microbiomes and Watson and Deep Dream and electric cars and self-driving cars and drones and even my mom has a smartphone, and… yeah.  (Also the polar ice is thinning alarmingly and Antarctica is calving more than a cattle farm and people are putting “smart” features in friggin’ appliances but not giving a single wet fart about security and the goddamn measles is coming back because people trust Facebook mom groups more than an actual doctor and expertise is dead and corruption is rampant and democracy is backsliding and everything is ruined forever.)

But, good and bad and hopeful and awful all at once… there’s more out there.  There’s always more.  One endeavor might end – but there’s always something else planned.  And something completely unplanned, but that might be discovered by pure accident at any time.  And something old and seemingly useless that’s just waiting to be applied in a groundbreaking new way.

I can only hope that holds true of myself, as well.

So goodnight, Opportunity.  Thank you for the science.  And thank you for the reminder that even a distant machine on a cold, dead world can still do more than anyone ever expected.

Opportunity Traverse Map, Sol 4997

Your Daily Rage: Just About Everything For Months Now And Charlottesville In Particular

By the time I can try to get enough words together to say anything substantial, accurate, and well-reasoned about any current event, it’s always too late. It’s old news. There’s something else posing a more immediate problem. So I never quite get the chance to make sense of anything, or to say anything that might be remotely valuable. (Not that I actually have the skills, knowledge, or experience to say anything valuable about most news, anyway; even if I try, can it really be anything more than virtue signaling?) But the problem seems endemic: In the time it takes anyone to assemble substantial and accurate and well-reasoned words in response to any statement or event, uncountable volleys of insubstantial, inaccurate, insensible, reactionary bullshit can make the rounds. So it feels like the news is an overwhelming deluge of thoughtless, meaningless, heartless, spineless, reckless bullshit.

Particularly lately.

This weekend – yes, always, but more overtly this weekend – white supremacist bullshit is in the news. White guys gathering to advocate some “ideal” future where only white guys have power and influence. A future where everyone else gets to exist only at the white guys’ magnanimous indulgence, and only within the parameters the white guys have set. Because these white guys want a future that protects their children and their culture – by making sure that other children and other cultures hold no power in it.

You know, a future that’s a lot like a lot of the past.

I don’t know that there’s any thoughtful, meaningful thing that could be said to these people that would “change their minds.” It’s not a rational argument in the first place; they’re operating on irrational fear. And that’s hard as hell to stop. The very nature of fear means it’s seen as a self-protection system: they think they’re trying to protect themselves from annihilation. And nobody can overcome that fear for them. Nobody can make them cultivate empathy or insight. It’s something they’d have to work toward – but they’re not going to try. The very nature of their fear means that they’re not going to try – no more than someone would try to walk off a cliff. Nevermind that there’s not actually a cliff there at all, nevermind that they’re deluded, nevermind that they’re not just making life awful for other people but also for their own precious selves. Between fear, selfishness, and pride, they’re not even going to try.

Any pushback they get reinforces their sense of isolation and me-against-the-world, back-against-the-cliff-edge fear. If they’re ostracized, it’s not as if they suffer silently in sober contemplation. They can find other people who share their beliefs, and they can all end up reinforcing each other. They’ll form social bonds with those guys, instead, and apply their toxic heroism to them. Those will be the people they’re trying to defend, and theirs will be the methods used to defend them.

(Yeah, I think the idea of toxic masculinity is a big factor, too; the most ‘valid’ way for men to express the strength of their emotions or convictions seems to be in terms of how much they’ll hurt other people – or how willing they are to sacrifice themselves – in defending those ideals.)

So what can even be done? All these “alt-right” assholes didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re not video game bad guy Nazis who spawned offscreen. They didn’t congeal in some cesspit and slither into a polo and khakis. They weren’t born with it; they became it. They’re people, and they may be people we know. Something in their lives and in their minds made white supremacy seem like a valid stance to them, and how the hell does that happen? And how the hell do we change that? Is that even possible? (I sure as hell don’t know; I’m no historian, I’m no sociologist, and I don’t really have any experience to bring to bear; I’m just venting.) Are they just going to always be there, on the extreme end of the bell curve, no matter what?

Maybe there’s only so much we can do, but ignoring it doesn’t do anything.

I mean, sure, it’d be peachy if we could just dismiss white supremacists as being stupid, sniveling, superstitious whiners whose ideals and endeavors don’t pose a threat to anyone, and who are going to just fade into nonexistence in another generation or two. If you’re not an obvious target to them, as is often the situation if you’re a white guy yourself, then that might seem like a good option. After all, they’re not trying to subjugate YOU.

Obviously, if you DO challenge them, they’re not going to change their minds in some wonderful sudden epiphany. Maybe they’ll decide you’re a “race traitor” and part of the “problem” after all. Maybe they become a threat to you.

But, the thing is, when bigots are NOT challenged by their fellow white guys, it helps them keep thinking that they’re some sort of brave defenders of “whiteness,” whatever their arbitrary bullshit definition of that may be.

When you don’t call them out, they’re probably going to keep thinking that you’d appreciate what they’re doing for you.

This is especially true if you have a higher social or political standing than they do.

AHEM.

So, yeah. Call out white supremacist and bigoted bullshit. Listen to the marginalized and the oppressed. And take care of each other out there.

Small Words

Last year came the cloud. The cloud of small bots that we breathed, that sat – and sit – in brain and nerve. The small bots that took our words.

Not all words. Just the grand words – those of more than one sound. To say or think a word of more sounds is to hurt. The more long the word, the worse the hurt. To make words short is to hurt, too: the small bots know when we speak short but think long.

A pain like a lance in the skull. A rise of harsh gall. A throat through which air will not pass.

We choke on long words.

We can choke to death.

Some of the first to die were those who heal the sick. They fell to their knees on the floors of each health care place. They fell, those who cut bad parts out of meat gone wrong, the trunks of the sick still wide and red. They fell, those who gave the drugs that stop thought and pain. And so fell those who helped. They could not stop the long thoughts of part names and sick names and drug names. The sole ones left were kids who had just been born. The sole voice sounds their squeals.

Also dead: those who built and fixed the tools that help us do work. Cars crashed. Planes fell. Trains went off tracks. Once things broke, none who knew how they worked could bear to fix them. Those part names, too, were too long. The strands of the World Wide Web snapped: none could tend a box of bits and bytes.

Math was not safe from the loss of words. We lost the name of the sum of four and three, and of all things more than ten.

We could not buy or sell for the big sums of old – and our trade from land to land came to an end.

The flow of goods more close to home did, too.

There were folks who were well versed in How Works The World, who worked in labs and fields and who could think hard and clear – but the more they knew and thought, the more they hurt. They could not save us. And we could not save what they knew.

And so we lost the names of beasts and plants, of stones and germs and worlds, of the small bits that bind to make all things.

We try to teach and keep known the Past Times, but we can not speak the names of the lands or those who ruled them, or tell why wars were fought, or tell of trade or lore.

But it is the small, dear things that hurt the most. Not the things we have lost in our minds, but the things we have lost in our hearts.

We have lost our names, and the names of our moms.

We have lost the names of our pets. We call them by new names, but the beasts cock their heads and whine.

We have lost the names of our gods and of those who once came to save us.

We try to teach things and keep things known – but we know we must try to let go.

There are those who fret, who fear that grand things can not be taught or learned if we can not speak grand words. They say all is lost, in a way that can not be fixed.

They may be right.

But the young are quick to learn.

They make new names for those things we need to know, but which we can not speak.

The sum of three and four.
The clear drink we need to live.
The parts at the ends of our hands that we use to grasp things.
The bad taste at the back of the tongue.

They make new names for those things we may not need to know, but which help make up our world.

The sun hued weeds that grow in cracks, whose young leaves we can eat.
The lights and sounds of the sky when it storms.
The masked beast with rings on its tail.
The red fruits that grow on trees.

In each place of this scarred land, from East Sea to West Sea, they learn. Each tribe in its own way.

But it is seen that they draw and they paint and they dance and they sing with a force and a need that we old ones can not know.

We can not speak as they do. We have only these small words.

But when the last of us who think long thoughts has died – teeth clenched tight on the tip of our tongue, clenched tight on the name we can not let go – it may be that still there is hope.

A work of weird flash fiction for http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2017/01/06/flash-fiction-challenge-apocalypse-now/

Ha Ha, Only Serious

I’ve lost track of how many election-related posts I’ve started, stalled, and scrapped.  I try to say something significant, interesting, or relevant, but what can even be said?  What can even be done?  Every time I think I’ve given some tidy summation of the absurdity, something even more implausible happens.  But there’s only days to go before the elections, so no matter how incoherent a thesis I may have, no matter how sprawling and meandering my thoughts may be, this is – hopefully – my last chance to get any of them out there, so I might as well dump them all, stream-of-conscious, and have done with it.  Goodness knows it’s not like my observations have any significance, so I’m not even sure why I’ve tried to make anything clear or conclusive this whole time.  It’s not as if reality itself makes sense anymore, after all.

This lack of sense is, really, the core of it all.  Things that seemed like jokes at first have become ha-ha-only-serious. Donald Trump is running for president? Haha, he’ll drop out in a week.  Haha, okay, a month.  Haha, can you believe he said Mexico is “sending their rapists?”  He’s done for sure, now!  A few months and an official nomination later, haha, can you believe he joked about how his wealth and fame can even let him get away with sexual abuse?  He’s done for sure, now!

Repeat ad nauseam, ad absurdum.

Donald Trump says ridiculous things.  He calls for violence against protesters, he insults women based on their appearance as if that’s relevant to their abilities, he has advocated barring all Muslims from entering the United States.

But he’s just being funny, right? It’s hyperbole.  Trump doesn’t actually want anybody to attack anybody for protesting, and he doesn’t really think that our history of violently attacking protesters was better – that people should be punched in the face and sent out on stretchers. Right?  He just said so as a joke.

 

But here’s the thing.  If he’s serious, then that’s an unforgivable call to violence, and if he’s joking, that’s unforgivably devoid of empathy or awareness.

I see three options, if he or his supporters ever walk back a derogatory or violent statement by saying it was a joke:

1) Trump knows exactly what historical horrors he’s evoking when he “jokes” about inciting violence against protesters or “jokes” groping the genitals of unconsenting women, and he’s making these comments to demonstrate just how little he cares about anybody who’d stand in opposition to him.  A similar “joke” would be going up to a woman whose son was just stillborn and telling her all the dead baby jokes he can think of. “What, it’s just a joke! I’m not saying YOUR dead baby, or that there should be dead babies, I love babies! YOU’RE a baby! If you weren’t so sensitive, maybe, I’m just sayin’, maybe your baby wouldn’t have died, how about that? Personal responsibility.”

2) Trump has almost no sociopolitical or historical insight, and he’s making one of those babbling toddler jokes that prove he doesn’t understand how jokes work, or how language works, or how logic works. “Why… why is… why did the dinosaur… eat… eat a shoe? Because he wanted to be race cars! Hahahaha!” His supporters, like a toddler’s parents, see everything this half-formed mind produces as brilliant, unique, innovative, and proof that the child is a genius who’s going to grow up to be president someday.

3) It’s some kind of elaborate metajoke where the real joke is on whomever laughs. It’s “No soap, radio” on the national stage.

 

I could probably go into a whole exploratory tangent that tried to figure out how ethics intersect with humor.  From Mel Brooks’ quote that “Tragedy is when I stub my toe; comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die” to the old saw that “Comedy is tragedy plus time,” there’s an understanding that comedy often involves something Wrong or Terrible happening, usually to somebody other than you.  There’s been tension, or risk, or sheer juxtaposition, and laughter serves to acknowledge that something unexpected and juxtaposed just happened, but to also acknowledge (or assert?) that everything’s safe.  There’s a good reason America’s Funniest Home Videos always had the canned audience laughter – without it, even with the goofy sound effects and the stupid voiceovers, there would’ve been uncertainty, discomfort, or even fear.

How soon is “too soon?” What things are too serious and important to joke about?  What responsibility does the teller of a joke have for the feelings it evokes in people?  Can they take credit for the mirth but wave off the people who are infuriated, insulted, or hurt?  What responsibility does the listener of a joke have for the feelings that arise in them, or that they choose to express?  These things vary intensely, depending on content, context, culture, and the individuals in question.

He doesn’t have to be a stuffy, humorless, serious politician, because he’s Not A Politician. And because he’s Not A Politician, he doesn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else has.  That very refusal to follow convention becomes a selling point. If you don’t like the status quo, you’re more likely to favor anyone who flouts it.

 

The trickster figure is important in almost every culture.  It’s necessary to have someone who shakes the halls of power, who points out that the Emperor has no clothes, who reminds everyone that social conventions are largely constructed things with only the clout we’ve collectively agreed to give them, and that the more stiff and serious an institution tries to be, the more absurd it becomes. A trickster’s power comes from being able to confuse, stymie, and subvert. It’s the power of liquefaction, like an earthquake turning solid ground to mud.

But can the trickster still serve that purpose if the he attains power?  Can he – or would he – still shake the halls of power if he was living in them?  Would he point out his own lack of clothes?  Would he allow the defiance of conventions to continue?  Or, on ascension, would those very same acts of rebellion become strictly forbidden?  After all, he’s The Person Who Can Change Things, and he’s in the place of power, and he’s Making America Great Again. No further mockery, satire, protest, or complaint would be necessary.

A trickster’s influence comes from being able to do the unexpected, the unpredictable, and even the unthinkable. But a leader’s influence often comes from the opposite.  Because what followers want most often is for today to be more or less like yesterday.  Hopefully better, but generally the same.  Isn’t that what people are asking for when they say “Make America Great Again?” They’ve seen stagnant wages, outsourcing, corruption, and abuse, they’ve seen a lot of Todays that are a lot worse than the Yesterdays they remember, and they just want a stable world again.  They miss being able to have a 40-year career in the same company, with a living wage, cost of living increases every year or two, decent benefits, and a retirement plan. Instead, loyal employees are being coerced into early retirement so that some know-nothing graduate can do their job as an unpaid intern. If they’re lucky, they can come back as “independent contractors” for wages that may or may not make up for the outrageous self-employment taxes. Is this something that a trickster could secure, though?

When someone’s entire public persona seems to rely on saying whatever’s attention-getting at the time, on being prepared to dismiss everything as a joke, on being prepared to rescind every deal, to renege on every promise, to deny every fact – can they actually lead?  Can they be followed?

 

Does it even matter if they deny facts, though?

My concern is that facts don’t matter anymore.  I wish they did, but even if someone is shown objective and factual evidence that their belief is wrong, they only believe it even more fiercely. Forget any attempts to argue that Trump’s polemics show him to be a demagogue, a proto-fascist, a narcissist, a sex offender, a misogynist, a bigot, a tax cheat, a potential nuclear bomber / war criminal, or anything else one might hypothetically suggest, based on the man’s own statements: he, and Pence, and his supporters, would all gladly reply NOT that Trump was misunderstood, but that he had never actually said the thing he was recorded saying. Even if I were trying to explain things as some expert in political science, it wouldn’t help, because that’s not how this game is being played. To paraphrase something I’ve read in various forms, trying to counter this campaign rationally is like trying to play chess with a pigeon: no matter how good you are and how well you play, the pigeon is just going to knock down the pieces at random, take a crap on the board, and strut about as if it’s won.

So that’s it. Nobody can be convinced, no minds can be changed, truth squidges out from beneath the boottreads of Truthiness, and I might as well fight absurdity with absurdity:

 
Donald Trump is a tulpa. An egregore. An entity willed into existence by force of the American peoples’ beliefs. A corporeal thoughtform of the American Fever Dream.

 

Is it any less ridiculous than some other presumably-joking allegations?  Like the one that says he was paid by Hillary Clinton to throw the election (though, ala The Producers, it’s backfiring?)  Or the one that says he’s illiterate? Or the one that says he’s Andy Kaufman in disguise?  Does it even matter anymore? This all began with Truthiness, so why not take it all the way and assert, even more fully, that the reality of the situation is, and only is, what people have believed it into being.

After all, look at how involved he was in the WWF, back in the day.  It’s not so hard to imagine that Donald Trump is still a larger-than-life character, one that he’s completely committed to portraying, never breaking kayfabe in public.  That’s a fun argument, but why not go even farther and claim that this character isn’t even HIS character, that there IS no “real Donald Trump” behind the facade, and that the reason Donald Trump seems like an living caricature of The Sleazy Fat Cat Billionaire is because that’s precisely what he is.  He’s not an actual person, he’s a psychically-generated avatar of Big Business, of The Rich, of Success, of Capitalism, of Materialism.  His focus on gaudy opulence is glamour in both the conventional and the occult senses of the term.

However, those who’ve believed him into being – a group that includes both his adherents and his opponents – do not, as a whole, know enough about business, politics, wealth, or success to know what to imagine in the first place, so there are all sorts of little flaws in the model.

 

First of all, there’s the name. It’s a little on the nose, wouldn’t you say?  “Trump,” in English, derives from “triumph,” and is most used in reference to card games where a card of a certain suit can, regardless of the broader rules, automatically outrank all others.  In other words, a trump card doesn’t just have artificially- and arbitrarily-increased importance and success, it has a certain inbuilt privilege, a silver spoon in its mouth.  Fitting for an entity that believes he should win because he is A Winner, and because everyone else is a loser, because nobody else is him.

However, “trump” has another meaning of “to fabricate, devise, or deceive,” as in “trumped-up allegations.”  That meaning derives more from the Old French tromper, meaning “to blow a trumpet.” As the Online Etymology Dictionary explains, charlatans and snake-oil salesmen would blow horns to try to attract attention – and to attract a new mark to scam.  Given the entity’s self-absorption, history of duplicitous business practices, and accusations of outright fraud (as in Trump University,) both these connotations are apt, as well.

As for Donald, the Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that it ultimately comes from the Proto-Celtic *Dubno-valos – meaning “world-mighty, ruler of the world.”  I mean, come on now.  A self-important, bloviating huckster who’s focused on winning, and is trying to become the leader of the free world, is actually named “World-Ruler, Fabricated, Triumphant, Deceitful, and Loud?”  Even Dickens and Rowling are more subtle about the names of their characters!

 

And look at the ego.  You can’t NOT look at the ego, because there’s nothing else to him.  Armchair psychiatrists love to point out the failures of empathy and the signs of narcissism. He focuses on his will and his will alone, asserting that he and he alone can fulfill the public’s wishes and “Make America Great Again,” despite a complete lack of experience and understanding.  He doesn’t thank, he doesn’t regret, he doesn’t mourn, he doesn’t apologize. He can’t truly understand or feel empathy for any other perspective but his own, because he’s been created a He simply wants whatever he wants and pursues it, regardless of anyone else’s needs, regardless of what anything means.

How can someone so self-centered be seen as someone who’d faithfully serve an entire country?   This might seem baffling, but if he’s perceived instead AS a manifested force of will, then there’s no conflict at all.  His is the will of the people, because HE is the will of the people.  They wished him into being, and into relevance, and he will stay relevant for as long as that belief-in-his-relevance is sustained.

Look, too, at the time a veteran gave him his Purple Heart, and Trump responded with “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” That statement strongly implies that he wanted the award for its prestige alone, since that award is only granted to people who’ve been injured or killed in action, circumstances which inherently entail bravery, effort, and sacrifice.  In short, he wanted to get the Purple Heart, not to earn the Purple Heart, and so long as he has one, he appears to see the difference as immaterial.  Why?  Because he, being the American Fever Dream, IS getting-without-earning, being-without-meaning.  He cannot be otherwise, and he knows he is the most important, valuable, and flawless entity that exists, so he therefore can’t care about – or even conceive of – a meaningful difference between Getting and Earning.

 

And then there’s the complete lack of clear plans or policies.  The people who’ve created him don’t know what a good policy would be, so neither does he.  But people know what they want to feel.  They want to feel safe, they want to feel exceptional, they want to feel powerful, they want to feel free.  So all Trump needs to do is make noises that perpetuate those feelings, and it keeps the feedback loop going. There doesn’t need to be any truth, any possibility, any reality to the things he says or promises – it just needs to be believed. No matter how unbelievable it seems, it just needs to be enough to resonate, because belief alone is what sustains his pseudo-existence. There may never have been so shameless a demagogue.  But, when it is what The American People want to hear, clearly it is reflective of democracy.

 

Why does Trump speak so poorly, with such mangled sentence structures and such elementary words?  Because that’s the vocabulary level of the people who’ve believed him into being, and because sometimes his mishmash of programming causes him to emit a disjointed string of stock phrases that his believers like to hear.

 

Other more obvious flaws are in the ill-shaped physical form that’s been manifested for him. Trump wears suits, because businessmen wear suits.  But his suits are just as baggy as any suit an average guy wears off the rack, because the average American doesn’t know enough about good tailoring to imagine it any better.

This also explains the hair: there’s just enough conflict between whether he should be the stereotypical balding boss or the suavely-coiffed playboy to create a strange middle-ground: Uncanny Valley transplants and a combover with more architectural innovation than any of his buildings.

As for the tan, the collective consciousness still associates paleness with sickness – but recognizes that genuine tanning only happens if someone spends a lot of time in the sun (which is unlikely for a businessman like Trump, who is imagined as either working very hard in NYC boardrooms.)  Therefore, to maintain that veneer of youth and accomplishment and vigor, he’s been manifested with an overdone spray tan and/or fell-asleep-on-the-tanning-bed look, replete with pale goggle-spots around the eyes.

 

Why, if Donald Trump is an egregore, has he appeared to age, then? Two interlocking reasons.  The first is that he’s a product of his time – the same 80s-era Yuppie zeitgeist that spawned the ideas of Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman, the one fueled by Robin Leach and Reaganomics, Madonna and Miami Vice, Dynasty and Dallas.   The second is because his current power relies on the idea that today’s world isn’t similar enough to the world of the 80s anymore – but that it could be or should be.  Time needs to have passed, and it needs to have passed for Trump, too. He has to be advocating a return of the 80s, not asserting that nothing has changed.

Furthermore, although he’s meant to seem larger-than-life, Trump also needs to appear “real.”  He has to epitomize the American Dream of ascending to wealth and success through hard work and determination – despite that he did no such thing, started off with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father, and would’ve been more successful if he’d invested all his money and done nothing than if he’d gone through with all his ultimately-failed business ventures.

The result is a collection of physical features which are all meant well, and are all intended to be better than the alternatives of age, balding, relative pallor, etc. – but which add up to the exaggerated caricature we see, a form that reflects its believers’ desperate attempts to reconcile reality and desire – a form that reflects the cognitive dissonance that has brought him into being.

 

Why the dissonance?  Why not make him square-jawed and clean-cut?  It’s because he’s meant to reflect the same dissonance we feel as Americans.  We grow up inculcated with the American Dream, and it feels un-American, undemocratic, anti-capitalist, and almost obscene to deny it: to deny that everyone can get everything they want if they work hard, and any failure to have what you want means only a fault in you and your work effort, not in anything systematic.  Nevermind that the system itself has been set up so that only “the right people” succeed in the first place, so that underdog stories are rare, and so that – once again – things stay mostly the same for as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, whether it’s because of greed, ambition, an erosion of protections, public apathy and cynicism, or the sheer fact that there won’t be any consequences and there’s no need to put up the pretenses anymore, income inequality is worsening and the very wealthiest people are becoming exponentially more wealthy than everyone else put together.  Perhaps, even though these same sorts of issues preceded the Great Depression, that doesn’t matter now – because “the right people” weren’t affected by the first Great Depression, so why should this generation’s elite care if there’s another one?  Have they ever not made their success at the expense of their inferiors? Why should they shy away from doing so more blatantly?  It’s not as if the masses can do anything to change it, anyway.

Besides, thanks to that American Dream, we – to quote that old adage – think of ourselves as temporarily-embarrassed billionaires.  We can be rich and successful, we should be rich and successful, and we WILL be rich and successful – we just need to try harder.  So whenever any initiative would threaten to increase taxes on the people who can most afford it, we rankle, because that could be us someday.  And if we’re getting our well-deserved rewards for being Good Americans, working hard, and achieving the dream, why should we have to give anything up to those “takers?”  They say some of them don’t even pay taxes; how useless is that?

 

Make no mistake, it’s hard for the white, working-class schmos of America.  Jobs are being outsourced, and nobody seems to be up in arms.  It’s suddenly becoming damn near mandatory to send your kids to college, but tuition is skyrocketing and there’s less and less out there to help.   Lobbyists and special interest groups seem to get all the attention, but your industry isn’t big enough or influential enough to sway anyone toward helping you.  Yet it seems like other groups are getting no end of public sympathy and support.

A lot of his supporters see patience, compromise, and diplomacy as weaknesses and hurdles, not as integral parts of any process.  They’ve lived whole lives being told never to give up, never to back down, never to show vulnerability, never to cry. When shit goes bad – and it always does – they don’t have the money or the resources to just buy a new thing.  They’ve got to make do with what they’ve got, use the ingenuity at their disposal, and try to come up with something unconventional that does the trick.  Or they use something they heard at their Granny’s knee, and that she heard from her Granny before her.

And what do they get?  Jokes about uneducated, inbred hillbillies.  Jokes about flyover states. Jokes about outhouses from the same people who advocate for clean water in Bangladesh. Jokes about trailer homes from the same people who advocate for Habitat for Humanity. Jokes about bad teeth and diabetes from the same people who see poor dental care and nutrition as absolute tragedies when they happen to someone on the other side of the planet.  Jokes from the people who are so wealthy, so safe, and so privileged that they can afford to throw away money on feel-good bullshit – everything from kale to quinoa, yoga to pilates, “spirituality” to The Secret – and who act as if they and the world around them are actually better off because of their mindfulness and positivity.

 

So there’s an appeal in the demagogue, in someone like Trump or Sanders who wants radical change. When “The System” itself is corrupt, then playing by the rules of that system can surely only foster further corruption.

But the thing about fascist demagogues is, they don’t care about truth or ethics or legality, just about results.  They don’t care about the rule of law.  The people who want one in office want him there explicitly because he doesn’t care about the rule of law. But instead of a slow and steady change – instead of electing officials at the local level who can affect things close to home, they’d rather have one person knock everything down from the top so it could all be restarted in one great go. Suddenly, decades of experience become a liability. They don’t want a stable status quo, they don’t want business as usual, they don’t want stability, they want things to change, even if it’s for the worse for a while, because that’s what it seems like it would take to make an improvement. They don’t want checks and balances, they want him to make all the decisions, because he’s a winner, everyone else is a loser, and he’ll make America great again.  And he can be as harsh as he wants in the process, because everyone he’s disrespecting and alienating deserves to be disrespected and alienated, because they’re the weird fringes of America – and he’s the only person who’s even paying lip service to Real America, as embodied by the rural blue-collar worker.

We’ve come to accept that politicians are full of bluster and bullshit.  So much so that, when we encounter someone whose lies aren’t just stretches of the truth, or lies by omission, or lies by exaggeration, but are wholesale fabrications – or complete denials of ever having said things, despite video evidence or his own prior statements – he can still be embraced because “at least he’s not a politician.”  So many promises have gone unfulfilled for so long that, now, someone can promise to create national databases tracking religious minorities, or to keep them from entering the country, or can threaten to deport legal citizens – and have this handwaved away because “It’s not like he’d actually do that; he’s just trying to appeal to his base.” He can brag about sexually assaulting women, and have this handwaved away because “It’s not like he’d actually do that; he’s just trying to appeal to his friends.” That roughness and crudeness and lack of experience become virtues. And, furthermore, the sorts of people who maintain racist, sexist, bigoted beliefs get the reassurance that such things really are normal and reasonable.  He can joke about imprisoning someone who, after many thorough investigations, was not found to have broken any laws – but “It’s not like he’d actually do that; he’s just trying to appeal to Republicans.”

 

It’s been a fact forever that politicians lie. They tell lies to get votes. They tell lies to get campaign financing. They tell lies for strategic purposes, because revealing the truth would be much more destabilizing. Diplomacy is just a lie with a doily on it.

But we’re surrounded by so many kinds of lies now. We’ve grown up with mass media, so we’re used to inaccurate representations of reality.  We’re used to reality shows where everything is actually scripted; nobody’s surprised or horrified anymore to learn that they’re fake.

Amid those shows, we’re used to commercials where every product is the best, the greatest, the most important, the most significant. We’re swimming in superlatives.

If we think we’re avoiding entertainment and picking up “real news,” we’re used to sharply-polarized media with a 24/7 news cycle that wrings every last possible plausibility from the most popular, ratings-grabbing story – media that attempts to create stories about outrage and scandal even where none exist. There’s no “fairness doctrine” anymore, so being Fair And Balanced can be the equivalent of having a NASA scientist on to talk about the latest mission, split-screened with a literal flat-earther.

We’re used to a gatekeeperless Internet where anyone can say anything and have equal chance of being heard – which is wonderful, but which helps us forget that not anyone can say anything and have equal chance of being correct.  We’re used to bite-sized bullshit in Facebook posts, we’re used to “Like and share if you agree,” we’re used to emails that say Bill Gates will share his millions if you pass along this email; we’re used to seeing people play along with them because “It can’t hurt.” We’re used to Internet comments full of random insults and invective based on no facts, just boredom and the desire to cause a stir.

We’re used to sarcasm and satire.

And even if you think that media rots your brain and education is more important, we’re used to teaching for the test, even when that doesn’t help anyone retain that knowledge or apply it.  Even science is marred by biases and the replicability crisis.

As long as things can seem to be the case in some measurable way – even if you’re ultimately measuring something else, and poorly – it can be treated as reality.

Informing is not as important anymore as appealing to the pre-existing beliefs and, through obfuscation, manipulation, and outright lies, making them look more like the truth.   And perhaps, on our end as receivers, there’s just so much to parse all the time that we can’t help but fizzle out at some point and begin accepting things at face value. Perhaps, biologically, we just can’t process all the information we take in with as much critical thought as would be necessary to truly understand and to more safely navigate our way in the world.  (Assuming we’re so lucky as to have learned how to think critically about information in the first place.)

For all these reasons and a bunch of others that I’m surely not even thinking of right now, the media landscape has become reality-proof. Giant headlines and chyrons can proclaim certain ideas – while the inevitable retractions, if they come at all, are hidden away.  One person’s complaint can be spun into outrage, creating its own backlash of outrage.  The very idea of “breaking news” has been broken, because that label will get slapped on the most pointless and arbitrary non-events, in the hopes that someone will stop and pay attention, and people paying attention is more important than people actually learning anything.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates all of this better than Fig. 1, a Buzzfeed listicle of absurd breaking news stories.

This is as close as we come to media literacy.

I wonder whether the combination of ratings-driven media, the lack of gatekeepers and the accessibility of alternate sources of information, and the general ethos of postmodernism are all working together to keep people outraged, fearful, confused, and disparate, each with such drastically-different beliefs about reality that communication is impossible. The Overton window might not even explain it anymore: it’s not just moving, it’s undergoing mitosis.  I wonder if there’s not enough consensus left to describe one window with fringed ends, but whether some peoples’ Unthinkables have become others’ Sensibles, whether that’s the legalization of gay marriage or the idea of barring all Muslims from entering the country.

I can’t find anything as clear and solid as a study – and, believe me, I’m aware of the irony in referring to anecdotal “evidence” – but it seems to me that, even as sarcasm and satire grow more prevalent, the average person’s ability to recognize them as such is dwindling. I knew college students who’d never heard the word “parody” before. I saw 50-something adults believe that Stephen Colbert was being sincere on The Colbert Report.  I’ve seen people not only be unable to take a joke, but unable to recognize them as jokes.  And I’ve seen the rise of antihumor, cringe humor, trolling, and other such modes where the humor comes not from what’s said, but from the disappointment, confusion,

So I have an utterly unfounded pet theory that the ability to detect sarcasm and satire might have correlations with political leanings, in that “liberals” might be more willing to perceive additional layers of interpretation in a statement whereas “conservatives” might be more willing to take things at face value.  The downsides of this being that “conservatives” might fail to recognize when something is a joke, sarcasm, a lie, a scam, etc – and that “liberals” might create a whole new unintended meaning through their interpretation and erroneously ascribe that to the author’s intent.  The fringes on both sides have similarities, though – believing in conspiracies based on bad information that they value over “mainstream” news, which they believe cannot be trusted.

 

But the point of this seeming digression is that there is an eroding consensus about reality itself now.  Not just in distinguishing sarcasm from sincerity, satire from assertion, joke from advocation, but even fact from opinion.  This entire election cycle – this entire year – has felt like a coma dream.  I have heard, in full sincerity and from multiple media outlets, outlandish phrases I never thought I would hear.  Phrases like “Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump,” “the late David Bowie,” “Swedish Fish Oreos,” and “World Series Champions the Chicago Cubs.”  And while, yes, I have long loved the idea of subjective reality, and while I believe that we have some ability to influence our perceptions of reality, and while I also believe that there is an extent to which our perception of something as reality can help us behave and believe as if it were reality, and while I ultimately also believe that this sort of subjunctive-case reality helps enable us to, through actual words and deeds, create those conditions in objective reality – a set of beliefs some people sum up as “magic(k added for supplementary potassium,) my worst nightmares are also those where my genuine beliefs and truths, like that the sky is blue, our planet is called Earth, and there are four lights – are treated like insane ramblings and I’m ignored, mocked, or put away.

I’m not arguing here that reality is subjective and that any failure of reality to reflect my subjective preferences is therefore Bad, and people need to learn better.  I’m arguing that, whether you try to explain or understand the world through fact or fantasy, science or religion or magic, myth or metaphor or mechanism, you take on some responsibility.   That the people who say things have some responsibility to avoid misleading others, but the people who perceive things have some responsibility to think critically and avoid being misled, and that it works best if we’re all aware of how constructed our worldviews are and do a little more to keep our assumptions in check.

 

In some small way on Tuesday, Americans get to exert their will on reality.  The voting process has undeniably many problems – the electoral college, first-past-the-post, the fact it’s on a Tuesday, the long lines.  And, yes, one could try to argue that it doesn’t matter, that it’s all decided already – whether you’re a Trump supporter who wants to say it’s all rigged, or a third-party supporter who’s angry Johnson and Stein weren’t in the debates, or a Bernie supporter who thought the primary was fixed, or someone who wants to vote FOR a candidate and can’t support either option, or an apathetic person who thinks everyone’s equally terrible and there’s no point getting involved or speaking out or trying. Who knows, maybe any or all of that is true, and the Secret Masters of the Illuminati have already decided every president through 2032.  Maybe we, the people who vote and argue and participate, are dupes, believing in a false reality.

But maybe we just need to act like democracy itself isn’t broken, and this act itself will *be* democratic.  One that lets us do what we can to keep that main scaffolding in place while we try to make more significant changes at the local level.  Maybe we can try to bring about that change we want in our neighborhoods, help to shape the reality we live in every day, through the people we choose for our Board of Education and our Court of Criminal Appeals.

Even if it does nothing to exert my will on objective reality, I’ll still perform an arbitrary and meaningless ritual by going to vote. Even if it changes nothing but my own perceptions, I’ll value that sense of investment, of participation, of affirmation, regardless of how my state as a whole actually decides or what the electoral college might do thereafter.  Perhaps I might as well stick pins in a voodoo doll, or focus on a sigil, or cross my fingers, or pray.  But I’ll try to fill the circle next to Clinton’s name – and close the circle on a rite to banish Trump back into irrelevancy.