We’ve all heard the expression, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” What does this mean? Should it even matter?
For a few weeks now, I’ve been ruminating on several things during this period of lockdown, or as I call it, “house arrest.” One of them is how social interactions and the so-called “glue” that holds us together seems to have been altered (perhaps permanently damaged?) by the novel coronavirus—maybe even worse than the lungs of someone who acquired Covid-19.
I’ve been spending minimal time in Zuckerberg’s Lunchroom, aka, Facebook. Why? Because people I once respected, or at the very least—could tolerate—have become people I hope I never have to ever spend time with in real time, again.
I know that I’ve been scarred by grief and loss. To not recognize this shows ignorance about anything related to the loss of someone held dear. At the very least, when someone is snatched from your life, you forever carry that experience and it colors perceptions, emotions, and human interactions.
Having touched on that, the process of moving through the time of days, weeks, months, and even years after a tragedy forces you into various altered states. It’s an evolution back to some newly-constructed “normalcy.” Then, you are thrown into stasis induced by stay-at-home orders and you feel like you have been ejected back into a place of darkness, pain, and you’re flailing about struggling to stand again.
We know little about how these weeks of isolation and distancing will shake out in societal ways. Because we’ve chosen to obsess about the medical fallout from ‘Crona, we’ve rarely considered the social-psychological aspects. My sense is that the latter will be much greater and will affect us in ways that will tack towards darkness. But I could be entirely wrong.
I hate the limitations of left-right explanations of politics and ideology. But because we’re slaves to the binary, it’s what is most often utilized by way of framing events, especially across our media landscape. Using this, then, I offer this observation: the left has glommed onto “keeping us safe” as a primary narrative arc. Liberals have tended towards demonizing anyone who dares to vary from this and the mantras of “Orange Man bad,” and “put on a damn mask.” If a group of people dare to challenge what is an obvious (to me and others) hijacking of liberties and elements clearly guaranteed to us in the Constitution, they are impugned as ____________ (pick your go-to pejorative: dumb, stupid, selfish, benighted, etc.). We are the “deplorables” highlighted by Hillary Clinton during her unsuccessful run for president in 2016.
These ad hominem attacks are particularly rich when I see them on Facebook coming from people I know. There’s a guy I met after Mark was killed. He’s been a foodworker in Portland. His occupation of bartender has permitted him to make a decent living in the high-end restaurant industry. I also know he’s grown tired of the life, at least that’s what he told me three years ago. At the time, I tried to offer him some encouragement during my own period of deep loss. As someone who ventured out to follow my own dreams of writing, I told him he was capable of following his own inclination towards something new and perhaps better than waiting on elitist assholes who probably can’t make a grilled cheese, but fancy themselves as “foodies.”
Seeing him on Facebook makes me sad. Since Covid-19 changed life for all of us, he’s been one of the “virtuous” types common across the Zuckerberg platform. He’s now an authority” on almost every element of how we should all be living. I think he’s probably really stressed out about being a new dad, or perhaps his move to the western part of rural Maine is causing anxiety, I don’t know. At times, he seems to have come unglued—like many people have during this time of moving 6+ feet beyond one another. He’s railed against his former employer, the industry that’s done a good job of providing an income for the past 20 years, and it seems like he’s forgotten that. But then again, all of us are doing our damned-well-best to hold it together these days. I just wish he’d spend less time inveighing against anyone who doesn’t subscribe to his own versions of conspiracy theories dressed up as virtue signaling, or at least that’s what it seems like when he’s on his soapbox. Then again, I’ve been mounting my own platform over the past few weeks. I hope things go well for him, actually. He was someone who was there for me in the first year after Mark was killed and I miss him and sometimes this comes out as anger.
Facebook is full of way too much anger and accusations, IMHO. That’s why I rarely go there other than to play a bit of music. Once open mics come back, I might never return.
I heard a quote attributed to Katie Couric the other day. I think it might have been offered by that day’s fill-in for Rush Limbaugh. [I can hear the liberals, now, who know me: “Oh no! Why is Jim listening to Rush Limbaugh?”] Anyways, Couric apparently was offering her assessment of our current news-gathering mores and said something like this: “People consume news for “affirmation not information.” The context noted was that this is due to our country being so divided, politically. I’d concur with her assessment.
If you are someone who continues to use information to deepen your understanding of the complexities of life and the world, however, this need for continual affirmation is troubling. It creates dissonance. I live in a state that’s usually dissonant.
Fritz Heider was an Austrian-American social psychologist. He was one of the founders of interpersonal social psychology. One of his most important contributions was balance theory: he explained how people develop relationships with others and their environment. He maintained that people have a preference for “balance” in relationships and understanding their sense of place. People prefer balance to dissonance. It’s much easier to affirm those things that make us feel at-home in our worlds.
Lately, I find being told that my “wellness” is of great concern to people like Janet Mills and her medical sidekick, Dr. Shah to be irritating at best. The sheeple of the great state of Maine seem to have grown fond of the Shah man. I’m not sure why. He’s not anyone I’d ever want to spend a minute with. But, they gush about his daily briefings offering up little for moving forward with life beyond quarantine.
Save us from Mills and Shah (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
I work in Portland. I’m forced to spend my time in the city to collect a few shekels to barely pay my bills. As soon as my shift if done, I high-tail it south to get as far away from the social do-gooders, like Spencer Thibodeau, Kate Snyder and their types. They know better than we do what’s best for us, collectively. That’s our governor, and Dr. Shah, along with Anthony Fauci, another “scientist” who’s never had to run a business, meet a payroll, or do anything else except to live in his hermetically-sealed worldview (politically-motivated at that).
These forays back to blogging take me away from my music. I wish I’d spent the past 20 years learning to play the guitar better. But woulda-coulda-shoulda never changes a fucking thing. It only keeps us from what we have right now, which is today.
Music is always “on” in my life. This week, I’m listening to lots of Replacements’. On my excursions to and from work, it’s been the live discs that got released in 2017. The ‘Mats never got their due as a live band, which is where their greatness is revealed in all its drunken, sloppy glory on For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s, recorded back in 1986. It exists as one of the few good recordings (in a sea of bad bootlegs) of their live performances.
Paul Westerberg and the boys were from the deplorable class, like me. We were born into working-class sensibilities, which means we got the shitty end of the stick in terms of social class structure. I’ve been thinking of this line a lot, from “Bastards of Young.”
The ones, love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones, love us least are the ones we’ll die to please
If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them
Like Westerberg, I don’t pretend to understand life’s complexities. But I still attempt to see beyond mere binary ways that constrict and limit the possibilities. And I live with the dissonance that goes with the territory.