Seriously! Or do I mean sincerely? (Reading John Gallaher on a Poet Gang I'd never heard of, associated with a thang called "The New Sincerity.") I myself am so tired of the ironic pose.
After all, this is it, right here, right now.
A shout-out to all my students, who in spite of the end-game desperation that engulfs us all at this time of the semester, have been staying after class to talk excitedly about a number of really vital things. In the last few days, we have discussed the importance of fighting to preserve the environment, the joys and satisfactions of writing, and how utterly cool it is that they can now begin to see how much they've learned over the last three months. They tell me about new movies, new links, new slang, new trends. This is the great thing about teaching. You learn so much.
(I know, I know, Hallmark moments, but it's late, today I had a 12-hour day of classes and student meetings, and then watched Jon Stewart and Colbert. Colbert talked about two of the politicians vying to take over the House Energy Committee, John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who refuted global warming by quoting the Bible (god promised: no more floods) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), who explained that wind, which is necessary to cool off the world, would be slowed down by wind turbines and so the world would get hotter if we transitioned from fossil fuels to wind energy. OMFG.)
After this I had to watch two episodes of Family Guy, the sheer weirdness of which helped me to detox from the surreal nightmare that is our current political shitstorm. After the election I told myself no more politics. Do I ever listen to myself? Evidently not.
Should we listen to ourselves? We tell ourselves some seriously crazy shit. The left brain keeps on reassuring us that our narratives make sense. But more on left brain's shenanagans another time.
We can't listen to the deliberately stupid or the intentionally delusional without becoming a little crazy ourselves. I think Shimkus and Barton are just carrying water for the energy lobby and are relying on OUR decorum and sense of fairness to give them a seat at the table of public discourse.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe humans, as a race, have gone on for as long as we can. Maybe its time we did have a great die off. Hopefully, whatever comes next will look at the ruins, discern what happened and learn from our mistakes.