604660 immoveable feast
kevin,
As you know, the last time I got mad was sometime before Ash Wednesday. I'm deeply sorry to report that that majestic, Jesus-inspired, anger-free streak has ended.
Today, 11 September, I got mad right as we were having dinner for John A.'s birthday. (He's 28. That's something like 4 in cat years.)
The event presents itself as something of a blur mere hours afterward; but it began with a vaguely disparaging comment I made in Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's general direction--"She's not good," perhaps--and my father's equally vague reply--something to the effect of, "Come on, she's not so bad."
In fact I like both John McCain and her in spite of myself. I'd like for the two of them and their telegenic families to continue appearing on TV and in the blogues from now until the end of the American empire--i.e., forever, always, amen. It would delight me to see them appear and reappear, though perhaps in a more limited fashion than they do now--less than 24/7, but more than Summer Sanders.
It's just that I prefer they not be president.
Unlike you, I have left the neighbourhood and have experienced some things. I know Obama's not going to fix Washington, that both Democrats and Republicans are in the pockets of interests far richer and more powerful than mine. That in a capitalist democracy as in blackjack, this or that party might win a few hands, but the house always wins in the end. That the house in question is not, has never been, and (unless something very strange happens) never will be my beautiful house.
Yet government continues, miraculously, to be potent--more than just a rubber stamp for the egos of free-market cowboys. Five days from now, the Washington Post's front page will read,
$700 Billion In Shareholder Value Vanishes,
and it will be up to policymakers at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to rescue the banks from their fuck-ups. We won't know for some time whether their calculations are right and we'll avert The Great Depression II: This Time It's Global; but for the first time since this same date in 2001, I get the sense that Americans feel toward government the way we feel about cops when there's a mad sniper on the loose: we're glad they're there.
In the next few days I will jump into a quagmire of political and economic blogues; I will read about a 2005 housing finance reform bill that would have increased regulation on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and possibly prevented the current mortgage market crisis. The bill passed the House with bipartisan support but was attacked and ultimately shot down by the deregulation-loving Bush administration.
I will not know what any of this means because I am not nearly smart enough.
But I will understand that there are other people out there who are smart enough, who study this sort of thing day in and day out, who are in essence the same sorts of people I mostly try not to be in everyday life, but whom I deeply respect for their knowledge and dedication nonetheless. I'm talking about: nerds.
This point, cat, brings us back to my feelings of anger that I am feeling today. Nerd glasses aside, McCain and Palin are the least nerdy ticket ever to run for the White House. He's a war hero whose credentials of courage are--no pun intended--unimpeachable. She's a hunter, a fisher, and a first-rate babe. Neither of them knows the difference between a Zapatista and a Zapatero. I'd love to go with them on a camping trip or to the shooting range.
It mystifies me why the thought of my father voting for John McCain should anger me so. Perhaps it has to do with the nonchalant way my father will drop the sentence "More people died in abortion than in the Iraq war" into our conversation, exactly eight days from now--not the sentiment itself, but the nonchalance. He doesn't trust Obama. Obama doesn't have experience, he says. He feels like he doesn't know Obama. When it comes to the question of President Palin, he says, "Son, why don't you give her a chance?"
My pops is a good man, and there are only approximately infinity things that deserve my anger more than he does. It's only because he's my father--mine--that he has the combination to my locker of rage. What I want: a president who does his homework. Shouldn't a father whose primary advice to me growing up was "Study hard" understand this?
Here's what'll happen. This anger will go away a few hours from now. I'll try to deny that I felt it; but I'll have to admit it, in light of all the evidence. And then I'll feel guilty about it. And then that guilt will turn into sadness. And then I'll also realize the colossal stupidity of having had my seven-month streak of not feeling anger broken by something Sarah Palin-related, which will be a real bummer that will have to be appended to the existing sadness. And then I'll realize the stupidity of having tried to maintain such a dumb streak in the first place. Jesus never said, "Don't get mad." Only a person with too much time on his hands would even attempt such a thing. It's unnatural. And then I'll feel that way, sad, for some time. Tomorrow, 12 September, David Foster Wallace will die by his own hand, which has fuck-all to do with me; but we civilians won't know about it until the following evening, 13 September; I'll spend much of 14 September rereading highlighted passages[3] of Infinite Jest (for pleasure); and 15 September will be the Wall Steet nosedive, which has fuck-all to do with me except that I am an American. On 16 September, having gotten bored of sadness, I'll be back to my normal self.
Unless I'm not. What then, cat? A life of ease has ill prepared me for sadness that lasts longer than a day or so. This body will not tolerate it. I'll read up on the history of Easter. It'll take my mind off things.
Easter is the first Sunday after the first fourteenth day of the moon that is on or after the ecclesiastical vernal equinox.[1]
Fixing the date of Easter each year has involved the churches in a complicated mathematical problem accompanied by prolonged and acrimonious controversies involving disputed ecclesiastical authority.[2]
What it will do, actually, is serve me a cold reminder that human beings cannot simply agree on even small things, that we will go to war over whether Christ's beard was one inch long or two. That we will expect nations to play nice with each other when even two co-workers at a job that means nothing cannot get along. Or a boy and a girl. Or a man and his father.
Under normal circumstances I would pack my sadness in a lunchbox and take it with me wherever, its portability a sign that I am the master of it and the consumer of it. I hope this sadness can be contained and carried soon, little cat. I hope it is not a meal meant for the whole class. I wish you would stop following me around, purring.
________
1. (Wikidpedia)
2. (Encyclopedia Americana, 1959 ed.)
3.
He remembered kicking the bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold turkey. Abrupt withdrawal. The bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds--he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second--less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely in the moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he came in. For he had abided with the bird.
But this inter-beat present, this sense of endless now--it had vanished in Revere holding along with the heaves and chills. He'd returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk's edge, and ceased to abide because he no longer had to.
His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the bird's hurt was. He wonders, sometimes, if that's what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward: abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis's own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: it's a gift, the now: it's AA's real gift: it's no accident they call it the present.
--Infinite Jest (859-60)