A Letter to a Friend (Dispatches From the Fly on the Wall)
I am surprised you remove this particular piece of information from your otherwise consistent croon against corporate-corruption controlling critical off-shore business-governments. It seems more like a focused attack on products you have a distaste for. No, to maintain our conspiratorial conjecture, we must consider additional motives:
What might be offered in place of the pictured, generally ineffective, candy-coated chemical beans and gooey lotions; what new elixir is now available as the cure for all of our ills? There is likely some French pharma company, isn’t there, well into development of their new substitute for aspirin. The whole chaos of this particular moment isn’t even the sad, comic frenzy in the streets, an apocalyptic dress rehearsal that most of the actors don’t realize is a test for the later show. The worst part–by far the worst!–are the uproarious profiteers, whom I’d guess have always been at the bottom part of any social crisis. You know, those who stoke our fears by telling us that everything we ever used doesn’t work any longer? And now we’re made to think ourselves helpless, abandoned in a woods we’d once mastered. But–through magic!–any money you have left after glancing over the grim edge of economic collapse, can still be used to buy a brand new salve to all the conflicts you refuse to face. There’s a cure for that. It’s called numbness.
The profiteers are the cockroaches of crisis, those rich and clever enough, also, to bullhorn that anyone decrying their practices is somehow an enemy of freedom. But what sort of freedom are they blaring? Individual freedom? The right to choose for yourself? The most intimate of all, conflicting personal belief? No, none of this is of interest to the profiteer. You can have any of those limited freedoms just so long as it doesn’t interfere with business. The free market, that is their political ideology. Being free to charge whatever, in whatever circumstance, and refuse to accomodate those under the range of the exorbitant costs forced onto a panicked world, survival of the fittest of the open market. This is the motive behind the profiteers, and a great many of them presently (and probably always have, in the history of our nation) reside in the white house administration, those cutthroat corporate crooks, culled from various degenerate libertarian schools of thought, that believe human existence comes secondary to individual profit.
Whenever we find everything worthless–no one and nothing to trust; every person everywhere only in it for themselves!–when all we can see is a predatory world, a hooting jungle we are lost within, when so much has happened and you’ve just had enough and you sink into that solemn place buried so deep inside of you, this is the moment to we must revive. Is it really all darkness? If life is not in favor of the sun, but merely being pulled back into the giant black hole that will one day consume our universe, then there is no reason for thinking, much less hoping, if you can no longer see yourself as the great hero you once felt the world was waiting for.
Yes, we all have, often shamefully, those childhood dreams that developed our god-complexes in later years. Superheroes, or even God Itself, those were our fantasies of who we wanted to be. Even the bad guy aficionados understood there was a sense of justice, of a difference between right and wrong. But this new self-focus, at times it can get incredibly dangerous. A born-again selfishness is a terrifying way to live in this ebb-tide reality we’re all securely trapped within. It is like a cloud of dark magic, really more of an evil cleric’s curse, and it descends upon the future-oriented in a scream of “Now! Now! Now!”
Darkness can be a lot of fun. I have fun with it. Doom is very interesting. But the glamour of such a way of life is always shrinking, a bitter, snarling moment sunk deeply into your core, either setting off or blocking such oblivious fixations as hope. We start by eliminating joy, and then go in for the kill, endlessly, tearing everything apart until there is nothing left to care about.
Even indoors, we can still look out the window. And while human activity has become more pastoral than any time over the past hundred years, this does not mean that people are interacting, nor hardly even looking your way (I was outside today, walking my dog. It was a lovely day. A neighbor walked by and nodded nervously at me. I said, “Good morning.” They kept their head down in response, mumbling uncertainly, “Muh-muh-orning,” then scurried away.) But there is still something interesting in the silence, in those bright, solitary moments when we can feel that the air is still alive, that there is yet a reason for living, and that shutting the door forever in the face of any form of trust is the beginning of our return to the caves.
