2+2=4...if we can keep it.

on dystopian living, freedom fighting, Dubya nostalgia, and the real Jackasses

“Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced. Ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive.”

I remember, so many years ago, seeing Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and hearing the train-hopping hobo tender this sentiment.

I remember feeling how true that was for me then: I saw the film immediately following 9/11, as an idealistic and indignant 16-year-old watching the second Bush administration’s imperial follies, basking in the sunset of the analog age.

And to remember that time while living in this one is...surreal. There’s certainly a youthful nostalgia involved here—but it’s also true that what we’re living through right now was then merely the stuff of dystopian satire. And we thought that was a dark time.

It’s been noted by some—myself included—that the George W. Bush we then regarded as Satan himself now seems positively avuncular by comparison. The man who presided over illegal wars, authorized warrantless surveillance of American citizens, sanctioned torture, and had a singularly prodigious talent for mangling the English language...he was (forgive me) bush-league compared to the cretin(s) at the helm of the malfeasant regime we’re living under today in the U.S.A.

I know I probably take it harder than most. And I try sometimes to just watch Jackass or read Nicolas Sparks novels and to let it go. We need to be able to let it go, to disconnect, to develop and maintain healthy coping mechanisms. The challenge is to do so without tuning out. The ‘flood the zone’ strategy has proved frighteningly effective at seeing too many overwhelmed and opting to ignore the magnitude of the moment. I’m sometimes in their number. But then sometimes the better (?) angels of my nature win out, and I have to do what I can, what I must.

The United States is now being run by a defacto mafia Don, heading what the NY Daily News recently called “the most powerful crime syndicate in history.” The President of the United States is (and I’m not stooping to his schoolyard name-calling level here; these descriptors and designations are objectively factual) a degenerate demagogue, a preternatural ignoramus, and a convicted felon who brazenly and regularly flouts the rule of law and displays contempt for the constitution while dismantling vital federal agencies and trampling on civil liberties, nakedly accepting bribes from corporations and corrupt foreign governments, targeting and extorting law firms and universities and longstanding international allies, looting and plundering public funds and repeatedly suing his own government for his personal gain, terrorizing and unlawfully detaining and sanctioning the extrajudicial murder of American citizens, and weaponizing the United States Department of Justice as his personal law firm (headed by two former personal attorneys) to prosecute political opponents and critics and to cover up (among so many other things) his possible entanglement/complicity and that of his inner circle in child sex-trafficking (which he campaigned on exposing), a scandal that’s now seeing the downfall of international figures around the globe.

But “the Dow is over 50,000!” “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” And oooh, looks like all the Jackass movies are streaming now!

And all that (pre-crackpot distractions) is just the tip of the iceberg, of course; there’s still a genocide underway in Gaza cloaked in a sham ceasefire agreement, and brutal wars in Ukraine and Sudan and Yemen and Myanmar. And, speaking of icebergs (i.e. the melting of), a climate crisis which continues to threaten and upend global stability—and disproportionately impacts low-income and poor communities.

But the super rich party on, oblivious to and unconcerned with the suffering they inflict upon the rest of us and the destruction they leave in their wake. They are, as Fitzgerald described them, “careless people…they smash(ed) up things and creatures and then retreat(ed) back into their money...and let other people clean up the mess…” And it’s easy for them when they’re always just a PJ away from their yachts and bunkers and private islands (which may or may not be stocked with captive underage women).

I’d venture to guess (however ironically) that Eric Arthur Blair, for all his prescience, never envisioned his nom de plume becoming the neologism it has—but 77 years after the publication of his final and most famous book, and 42 years post- his fictionalized dystopia, life seems more Orwellian than ever. If you’re paying attention, it truly seems stranger than fiction, and too absurd to possibly be true. But, despite what our very own Big Brother explicitly suggests, what you are seeing and what you are reading is what’s happening. And if only for the moment, we still have the freedom to say that 2+2=4…if we can keep it.