Pylimitics

Cold misty rain, supposedly all week. it’s not a soaking rain, but the damp chill seems icier than even the silent cold days of midwinter. The forecast for the week is gray and dank; every day shows rain. I wonder how long weather forecasting will continue. I wonder about the mediocrity of “the world’s richest man,” and how he can expect to really go — that is, send other people — to Mars, and continue to own a company selling highly technical electric cars, after gutting the funding for science and research. I see a bleak future waste land growing more and more likely as the people in power here are shallow courtiers with no understanding or competence beyond performing for their king, the orange infant. And how can it be that the orange infant was elected, that millions of my neighbors and fellow citizens actually voted for it? That is the cruelest detail. 

T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land just over a century ago. It begins “April is the cruelest month.” Eliot lived in a time and a society stunned by the Great War. The unexpected, unimaginable violence. The stupidity. The viciousness. This April feels a little like that. Willful stupidity, gleeful viciousness, the callous destruction of the social order in the name of…what? Anything? Just a sudden hysterical tantrum? The senile whims of a selfish old cheater? 

Geoffrey Chaucer began the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales saluting the sweet showers of April. He lived in a time and a society much closer to nature than we are today. Spring was important and welcome. It was a celebration of renewed life after winter. Centuries later, Eliot’s winter had been what kept people warm, insulated from the awful new truths of the world. My world, too, has new truths, awful and terrible. 

What to do, in this next April with its showers, sweet or not? With a new waste land looming. What to do? Should I flee, seeking the calmer, kinder structure of the old world, escaping my waste land for the places where Eliot’s cruel April began? Where the warmth of Chaucer’s world prompted pilgrims to visit the shrine of their holy martyr, Thomas Becket?

Maybe I should try to see all the stupidity and viciousness from another point of view. It’s cruel and nasty, but also absurd. Mark Twain noted this in Pudd’nhead Wilson and Other Tales: “April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.” Twain’s and Eliot’s times seem vastly different, but Twain wrote that book just 28 years before Eliot’s poem. That’s the same span between 1997 and now, and 1997 doesn’t seem too distant. That was the year NASA launched a mission to fix the Hubble space telescope, which had already been in orbit for seven years. Princess Diana died in a car accident. 121 nations signed a treaty banning anti-personnel land mines. The US did not sign the treaty, joining North Korea.

So what to do, laugh? Is it a grim laugh, an executioner’s chuckle, a despairing sigh of a laugh? Recognizing that to stay is absurd, to flee is equally so. Our need to believe in rationality and understanding “confronts the unreasonable silence of the world,” as Camus said. Do we just live with the absurdity? And so what to do?

There was a protest at every Tesla dealership on Saturday. At the nearest one, the protestors were screamed at by a man with a bullhorn. The man worked at the gas station across the street from the dealership. The gas station. It’s an institution that would be erased by the success of Tesla. Absurd. Ideology and the ignorance it demands has been raised above rationality. 

The sycophant installed as leader of public health harbors ignorant prejudices about medicine, about which he knows little, and asks his educated staff only for confirmation of his biases, not facts or realities. The voting population chose the candidate who will attack them, would destroy them, and cares nothing about them. The new régime is embracing enemies and turning against longstanding allies. What to do, what to do. We cannot even pen lettres à un ami allemand, because we no longer have a German friend. Perhaps in the end all we can really do is imagine Sisyphus is happy.