Do you ever look around and think, wow, this is an absurd time to be alive! Well then, this essay is for you. Less the usual capturing of current events, more broad societal reflections.

Infection

Amongst other things, I’ve been reflecting on what unique phenomena make this modern era so bizarre and at times infuriating, as I often do. We live in the aftermath of a slow moving disaster, a behemoth so large that it’s nearly impossible to take in and comprehend, and so the destruction it leaves in its wake is… confusing. That is to say, there has been no single event - no singular war, no revolution, no Great Depression, no actual cataclysmic strike from nature. Those things are horrible but they make ready sense - that is, the disaster they leave in their wakes makes ready sense. Instead here, in this modern time, in my country that is the United States of America, we have had a slow burn. We have had a great festering wound deep inside the body, a thing brought on and spread by microscopic parasites, tiny unseen things that go unnoticed to daily human perception, but under a microscope would be seen to have horrific whirring circular mouths filled with dagger-like teeth, wormy writhing segmented bodies of pulsating doom, evil little beady eyes of red that see nothing but the flesh of the host in front of them. These things have feasted and multiplied and spread, burrowed through the muscle and ligaments and then the organs and into the bone marrow, and now finally, they have consumed most of what is available, and they are beginning to eat their way outward, through the deepest layers of flesh first, just starting to break through the epidermis in a strange outpouring of oozing bile and writhing mess.



And isn’t that some nice imagery?

What I am saying is, the infection has spread unnoticed, and only now when the symptoms become undeniable at the surface do we begin to realize the extent of the situation - the deep seriousness of the disease.

A Bash for Barons (Affordability is a HOAX!)

The country has been sold out from under us. This has happened for a long time, maybe since its inception in truth, but the veneer is being pulled away with vigor, and the guardrails are being smashed with glee. I believe the current wave starting with offshoring, with “free trade deals” and no worker protections, with concurrent union busting and demonization, all of which served to hollow out and then pressure and crush what was the working class and the middle class. We were then told that was just the Rust Belt, an interesting cultural phenomenon that could be summarized in a few articles about the people that voted for Obama and then voted for Trump in 2016. AND THAT’S THAT! As if a single portion of the actual issue had been addressed, let alone solved, and as if the problem ended with a generation headed towards retirement, with no consequences for the up and coming generation that is now in the exact same predicament. Dim prospects and a lot of pent up anger, what could go wrong!?

And more recently, what used to take corporate, lobbyist, and political maneuvering and finagling is now done out in the open. Antitrust laws aren’t in it; political donations are made on an unseen scale, best highlighted by the world’s richest man to the world’s gaudiest candidate; the tech lords talk increasingly of becoming actual lords; the surveillance spooks move out of the shadows and speak cheerfully of the advent of total surveillance via artificial intelligence and flying robots, which have themselves been normalized by the now commonplace unexciting word, “drone.” It’s just a fun little gizmo! Please do not mind the death doodad; it is just delivering your burrito and surely will not have a fucking Gatling gun placed on its back in future :)

Houses are increasingly unaffordable, and you know what? Maybe you don’t need a house. Instead, the price of what were once luxury goods, i.e. televisions and computers, have come down, so you can have those. You can have a laptop and you can go to a coffee shop and do nothing on your laptop and be told that because you bought a $7 latte you cannot afford a house. Meanwhile the federal minimum wage is still, somehow, $7.25 an hour, and jobs such as the barista that made your latte, the latte that everyone from you to the elites enjoys and wants made THE RIGHT WAY quickly and efficiently, jobs such as those are portrayed as base, easy, and undeserving of anything more than that most minimum of wages. That job is essential to everyone’s enjoyment of that commonplace thing, but you know what? Fuck it, fuck them, that’s a stupid job, and that person should do something BETTER if they want to make enough to live a basic life.

Meanwhile, Netflix is buying Warner Bros, actually no, Paramount wants to buy Warner Bros for some $108 billion, even though no one willingly uses Paramount and their app works less well than the Sims 1, and Larry Ellison, who barely has anything to do with Paramount!!!!! (just that his son heads it), is worth like $250-400 billion, no one knows, and is very tight with Donald Trump, the President, and champions AI and talks happily about the aforementioned total surveillance state onstage at events no normal people are invited to, casually saying ghoulish things like, “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

So that guy and Netflix, who used to send DVDs in the mail like 20 years ago, are fighting over the final stages of media consolidation as you sit and pay increased prices to watch what is increasingly lazy and controlled programming. BUT you watch it on the TV that was unaffordable not so long ago!!!!! Your flat screen (which no one says anymore because they’re all flat screens) is thin and sleek and HUGE, and isn’t that nice? Do not worry about your lack of a house to put that TV in, or lack of a living wage, or soon lack of a job or freedom under the very technologies and systems that these barons are openly fighting over as the gaudy president screams at his FTC to approve whatever mergers they want. Please do not worry. Just watch the new season of Stranger Things while you wait for the third season of Euphoria to come out where they’re all middle-aged and still doing drugs and fucking each other but maybe working office jobs, I don’t know.

Miseducation

Right… quite a tangent there. What was the point?

I believe the point was, the robber barons have emerged again, and now they are giddily wielding and consolidating their power out in the open, and they are buying our elections and politicians through direct payment, and if you have the gall to say something like, “Ok, so the presidential election cost about $250 million to buy, can I please have a living wage, or at least not have to declare bankruptcy to go to the doctor?” YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF BUDDY.

The American education system has been gradually worn down, with a love for standardized testing and easily totable METRICS replacing any holistic sense of… well, an education. It is better to memorize a fact than it is to come to a conceptual understanding. This has been a long process, certainly spurred on by Bush 2 and his “No Child Left Behind” policies, as well as Republicans’ general disdain for the public education system, and myriad other factors that I’ll leave to longer format and people better studied than me. Then you throw in the recent culture war fixation with education and it’s a hard storm on an unrepaired structure. The arguments are over how gay a book is, and the general idea of a quest for knowledge, or better yet, the intrinsic value of continuously learning, are thrown out the shattered window right before the building falls in on itself.

So what happens when the fundamental idea of education, of being educated, of learning for learning, is twisted and sullied and cast away? Well, I would argue what happens is, the current state of the nation. How’s our public discourse been feeling?

Culture Wars

And speaking of culture wars at large, which are really just hyper-obsession with cultural issues (and certainly not class or economic issues), I believe the combination of the aforementioned two issues is largely to blame. There’s a lack of an educated way of parsing information and conducting discourse among the broader populace, and then there’s a very insidious pushing of the cultural issues by the wealthy, powerful, and politically-connected using the technologies that they push and the media systems that they increasingly control. To them, THE ELITES, it is very good if you and I argue over how gay a book is. It is very bad if you and I shake hands and then turn on them, asking why they need $400 billion, or why being a barista or a delivery driver is essential and yet “not a real job” that deserves a living wage. No, no, PLEASE PIONS do not shake hands, do not feel solidarity for one another, and please GOD do not organize! Instead, please look at this nonbinary person with blue hair, or this Venezuelan man with a tattoo, or even this ASSHOLE with a camo hat and a don’t tread on me license plate. Why don’t you all yell at each other and allow us to fly on our private jets to our helicopters which we’ll then take to our megayachts which we’ll then take to our tropical bunker islands WHERE THERE ARE NO SEX SLAVES! Please keep yelling long enough for us to finish our autonomous AI drone fleets so by the time you realize that you’re just a stupid little serf there will be no hope of mass rebellion ;) ;)

Webs

Yes indeed. Meanwhile, the magic little rectangles in all of our hands and pockets connect the world together at all times, which was a wonderful promise at first, but has instead turned out to be a constantly evolving nightmare. The connection was promised to be a thing of unity, like a vast network of humanity holding hands across the globe, but it has instead turned out to be a spider web, a sticky thing that is nearly impossible to escape, an intricate thing with a terrifying creature at its center, a patient predator that is willing to wait for us all to become ensnared before it flits casually over, injecting its venom and wrapping us up completely in the web, knowing then that it can take its sweet time and consume its prey when it pleases… it’s nice that the spider has plenty of wonderful snacks for later!  

Fin

Now, I realize that some portions of this essay may come across as being a bit CYNICAL. But alas, I do not actually feel cynical about life as a whole. Life, according to my recent studies and calculations, still seems to be the best thing on offer. No, what I’m really trying to get across is that some of the strange feelings that seem to be unshakeable in these modern times are JUSTIFIED. Does it seem like we’re not getting a fair shake? Do things seem very dumb, or warped, or just plainly absurd? Does it seem like there’s a uniquely bizarre character to the era in which we live? WELL, if you answered yes to any or all of those questions, then perhaps you will believe me when I say the point of this screed has not been to wallow in cynicism or overly-reductionist takes on the current paradigm, but to say that such feelings of general malaise or swirling bewilderment are JUSTIFIED and that we are living in ABSOLUTELY ABSURD TIMES.

Cheers!