Postmortem

Friends—

This began as an email to my kids, but went on from there. For what it's worth—

Well, I voted. Other than writing a few posts and making a short YouTube piece, that’s all I did, so I’m as culpable as anyone for letting the country go down the toilet. I didn’t exactly waggle the handle: it has a self-flush mechanism.

In my outer cortex, I grok the dimensions of the disaster, and the only rational hope I can offer is some historical perspective on the human capacity for screw-ups: a guy holding four aces might still get distracted by a bug flying into his eye. The Roman Empire survived hundreds of years, even after Caligula, and people sang songs, baked bread, had birthday parties, made love in the very worst of the worst of times. Not that that’s great comfort to the millions who may be directly affected by this vast belch from the body politic.

We might take some perverse comfort if the results would somehow improve the lives of those who voted for the victors—if, say, Hispanics got screwed but the white working class actually saw a decent paycheck. I don’t see that happening any time soon. One part of me despises the deeply-cherished ignorance of the people I grew up with, and another part has great empathy—I don’t like to see them conned yet once again.

What to do? Some friends are in deep grief, some shaken to the core, and indeed some people need to plunge straight to the bottom, to feel the pain fully, in order to take the next breath. For me it’s different. My view of humankind hit ultimate bottom at age sixteen, and from there there was nowhere to go but up. I can imagine being utterly poleaxed by something happening to my mate or to my kids, but short of that, I’m an intensely armored sonofabitch. I expect the worst. I expected this worst. I don’t recommend that as the best survival strategy: it’s just that it works for me.

But even for me, the waking nightmares are real, and they don’t diminish by listening to NPR post mortems or nostrums about the need for us all to “come together.” Good idea: then what? Or that “The people have spoken.” Somehow I don’t think that’s what Whitman meant when he spoke of his barbaric yawp.

For myself, I know what I have to do is to focus on the immediate. The next two weeks of performing King Lear in Portland and Puget Sound. Sleeping, eating, writing, making love. Forget the fucking speculations on what may or may not happen, what might have, would have, could have, and who dropped the ball. The ball is dropped, it’s stomped flat, it’s a dead piece of rubber: don’t look for the fingerprints. Just tend the garden, for now.

For the future? Is there some way we can manifest Emma Goldman’s desire for a revolution she could dance to? Is there some path for a progressive movement that embraces joy, that’s not grim-faced, that’s not motivated by storms of rage but by storms of hope? Damn, I’m just a writer, an actor, and I like my glass of wine at dinnertime. But I do dream of a shining path that’s not a name coopted by murderous ideologues. And I dream strongly in the dark days.

Love & that stuff—
Conrad