The Incredible Shrinking Man
The steady decline in the quality of our public discourse, this abrasive coarsening of the culture makes us all a little smaller, a little more closed off in echo chambers of our own making. Last week, when elected officials hung from balconies doing their modern-day Mussolini acts with rallying cries such as, “Meet ‘em at the state line!” and some of the general public got to personally spit upon members of Congress should serve as a reminder of how low we’ve gone and a harbinger of what lies ahead. The roots of this kind of vitriol run deep in American politics, and more broadly in the underpinnings of civil society, so it is unfair to characterize some of the piss in the pool we see nowadays as the nadir of civilization, but I’d say we’re coming close.
Some of the rhetoric coming out of America’s nuthouse fringe – the ones that remind me of rabid Lyndon LaRouche supporters, militia types and right-wing utopians – sounds as overheated as stuff ultra-liberals have spouted for years in opposition to everything from nuclear proliferation to gay rights that liken closing a city park to an act of fascism and all such exaggerations. The problem facing us as we attempt to grab from the ether some essence regarding the truth of our existence is that when news never stops, none of it really matters. It’s easy to discount the other guy’s point of view when you never have to hear him out, like the way an AM radio talk show host cuts off a dissenting caller who was set up as a straw man by the screener and subsequent callers feast upon the blood in the water mindlessly parroting the party/corporate line.
To get to real solutions, we’re going to have to get rhetoric out of the gutter and start talking about what matters while refusing to waste our time with media that spits the world at us in split-screened sound bites without bothering to acknowledge context and our ability to reason past the act of consuming whatever the next commercial has to offer. Honest debate about compassion, security, love of country, fear and what it means to be free can only come from people who actively resist being shrunken into boxes, checked off like lines on a census form.
Flying Dreams
Some of the best ones are when you’re just floating, warm updrafts support but don’t interfere with feeling the air crisply circulating all around and direction depends only on the interplay of molecules you have met yet.
The bad kind is when you’re going along fantastically, in superhero pose and suddenly the air solidifies in front of you, blocking your path and dropping you like a rock. Flight becomes fall as the ground rushes up to meet you and you can’t for the life of you think what you’ll say upon greeting.
In any event, I’ve heard they’re really all about sex anyway.
© David Mark Speer
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