If I'm asked what I'm thinking about at the moment, it's some variation on the fact that the cult leader never leaves the cult on his own volition. Let me give you some context.
It's hard to bitch about experiencing sub-clinical agitated depression when you firmly understand how blessed you truly are when compared to the people around you. After all, when I start talking about why I'm feeling down or out of sorts, I start boring myself almost instantly, so I can only imagine how people on the receiving end of the communication must feel. How fortunate am I? My job has changed, but I still have a job. My housing situation has changed, but I have a stable home. I'm less than two months away from turning 50, but I can say that each birthday is halfway to death and it's a statement more positive with each year. I can do frivolous things like golfing and buying CD's and drinking funky flavors of Mountain Dew straight from the lab and not have to instantly worry about my health or my wealth. I love and am loved.
But hassles aside, the driving force in my instability is knowing how abnormal each day is here in America, "America" as both a land and an idea, with the land constructed on and bloodied by the twin pillars of genocide and slavery and the idea being deconstructed and reconstructed before our very eyes. By embracing irony and cynicism and postmodern operationalizations of facts and truth, the American Left -- heterogeneous and polyglot right down the lines -- checked out in the '70s and left the American Right to play the long game. That long game is the Right's consolidation of wealth and power behind a corrupted confidence game in every sense of the word, moving from Reagan (an objectively horrible President for the majority of Americans) to Trump (somehow even worse on every metric) in the space of four decades, the creation and perpetuation of a fucking cult that may sadly be the most accurate snapshot of the American character. And you can't vote cult leaders out of leadership. That's not how cults function.
A quarter century of exposure to psychological concepts can't help but push me into some dark places as I conjecture what the rest of 2020 will bring. I would expect to see vigilante shootings increase in volume and velocity as we approach the election. I would expect to see Trump's polling numbers go up, especially among those who are strongly motivated to vote. On Election Night, I would expect to see early returns favoring Trump while the actual vote clearly favors Biden, which will then be rejected by Trump and his followers. The divide will be taken to the courts and to the streets, and more Americans will die. And swirling all around are the intractable crises of climate and illness, of stressors chronic and acute, stressors that have no party or religious affiliation. We're never getting back to normal, and the new normal slides further into abnormality with each passing day. In the face of all that, I'd argue that agitated depression is a valid response to the fact that the cult leader never leaves the cult on his own volition.
But enough about me. How are you?
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