The Inscrutable Pull of Darkness

How to fight monsters, Part I

Keep leading with your chin, Donald.

To have witnessed the worst impulses of humanity only to find out that not only do they still lurk, but they’ve emerged intact—operative, robust, and, currently in our society, dominant. A human being so bad a worse one could not have been created in a lab is running things now along with a coterie of people who share his dark vision, his cruelty, and his insatiable need for more.

We are here because these men and women took actions many of us found unfathomable—they placed pressure on the weak joints of our institution, they discarded norms, they cheated, they lied, they stole. There was never any depth to which they would not sink; there was no line they would not cross.

The blame lays squarely with them, but, of course, we need to acknowledge the complicity of many in the corporate media, the failures of a large percentage on the left to recognize the problems, and those who had a real part but chose not to use it.

If you add the silo of information, the spread of disinformation, and the ignorance, willful or otherwise, of tens of millions of Americans, it’s hard to imagine how we could have avoided this dark moment.

I know we’re tired; we’re all broken to one degree or another; and I’ve heard from enough of you to know that many of us are also afraid. These are all understandable reactions to what’s going on, but stoking and provoking those reactions is also the goal of the current regime. They want to break us irreparably.

This cannot happen. We have to do everything we can to prevent it from happening.

The first thing step in fighting the monster, is to acknowledge who we’re dealing with—and I don’t just mean the people in charge (I think that’s been clear for a while); I mean the people who support them, who champion them, who give them the inch, who capitulate needlessly in the hopes of accruing some vague benefit at the expense of everybody else.

There are no excuses anymore—not ignorance, not naiveté, not thinking that rolling the dice with this country’s future by voting for a fascist was some kind of legitimate protest. We accept none of these. The truism, we are more alike than we are different no longer applies because the ways in which they are different from us render them unfit to participate in this waning democracy. We cannot join hands with such people. The barriers between us are insuperable. We must remember, that everything they do, whether it’s their passive acceptance or their active harm, is a direct threat against us and our hopes for what this country could be or could have been.

Kick sand in their faces. Throw a wrench in the gears. Bring everything to a grinding halt if you have to. The only time is now.

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When I was in college, I was staying with a friend and he had the 5-album box set of Laurie Anderson’s United States Live (1984). [Pro-tip: If you’re interested in getting to know Anderson’s music, maybe don’t start with “Sweaters.” Trigger warning for bagpipes.]

So it wasn't until she released her 1989 album, Strange Angels that I started listening to her. Now, there are very few of her songs I don’t love. Sweaters, however, is still a hard pass.

“Ramon” seems like a fitting thing to listen to in this moment.

So when you see a man who is broken

Pick him up and carry him.

And when you see a woman who’s broken.

Put her all into your arms.

Cause we don’t know where we come from.

We don’t know what we are.

Bonus tracks:

These two songs from Big Science, “Let X=X” and “It Tango,” are my favorites of Anderson’s. On the album, they are connected by a bridge and need to be listened to that way but, unfortunately, they are always separate as downloads or videos. Another reminder that one of these days I have to get a turntable.

I think these songs illustrate how spare, inventive, clever (in a way only Laurie Anderson is), and beautiful her work is. Sometimes all at once.