I’ve been meeting to write a long post for days but every evening when I have completed the tasks of the day, I’ve just been too tired and crawl under the covers instead. I’m still somewhat more fatigued than I think I should be. (Nothing seriously physiologically wrong as I had my usual medical check up a few weeks ago and everything was fine). Maybe it’s just the thing I discuss constantly with my patients – a brain that thinks it’s somewhere around thirty years old and a body that is definitely not. I continue to keep up with everything I need to do (although rehearsal on top of a full work day is a bit harder than it used to be) and I’ll just continue to carve out naptime.
What may be going on is a natural phenomenon deeply connected with primitive brain reflex arcs. Our brains are built from the inside out with the most primitive functions tied to keeping us alive in the deepest and most ancient structures (what I usually refer to as the lizard brain). Our lizard brain is what keeps our internal organs running, provides the circuitry that creates such things as hunger and thirst, and is acutely aware of danger and makes us do what is necessary to preserve life and limb. Our primitive reaction to danger is usually referred to as fight or flight. But there is a third setting – play dead. I don’t know about the rest of you but modern politics and pandemics have created a constant stream of danger stimuli for roughly a decade now which is pretty inescapable if you’re an informed person. My danger circuits may just have worn out and gotten stuck in the play dead setting making motion and activity just that much harder than it needs to be. I’ve certainly noticed this for some years in subtle ways like a need to sit in the car for a few minutes when first arriving home after work and allowing my brain a little off time before I get out and head into new patterns and activities. When I query friends, many of them have noticed themselves doing something similar. And it’s a new behavior for all of us.
I attended a performance of Big River at Virginia Samford Theatre this evening. For those of you not conversant with everything Broadway of the last century, it’s a musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Roger Miller in the mid 80s. I last saw it staged about forty years ago in Sacramento at Sacramento Music Circus. (Music Circus is one of the last surviving old fashioned summer stock companies staging eight or so musical revivals, one a week, in the round in a large tent). When I first moved to Sacramento for my residency, my apartment was three blocks away so I saw pretty much everything they did. I eventually moved about twelve blocks uptown but Steve and I continued to walk down on summer nights seeing sll sorts of terrific Broadway names in the classics. As far as I know, Music CIrcus continues strong even though I haven’t been back to Sacramento for any significant length of time since being forced out by UC Davis’ bad decision making in the late 90s. I hope the tent has better air conditioning than it used to.
As I was watching the show tonight, I began to think about Mark Twain’s ruminations on the American character as exemplified by Huck and Jim’s journey downstream on their raft and how there are observations that he made with Huck’s awakening to Jim’s humanity that very much apply to our political moment. The electorate, both red and blue are together on a metaphorical raft at the moment and, like Huck, prey to being forced to share their space with con men like the King and the Duke (who are cut from the same cloth as some of our current power figures). We too can open our eyes, join together, help each other, and come out the better. But we need to want that and I’m not sure that either side has decided they really want to bridge the divide quite yet. I don’t know what it’s going to take. And that’s one of the things that scares me most.
This week has been about the base of MAGA, the part that organized itself around a bunch of nonsensical social media posts by someone purporting to have the real truth of the so called deep state and how it has something to do with sex trafficking and cannibalism amongst other eddifying issues, erupting in fury as Trump has tried to downplay the various scandals involving his old buddy Jeffrey Epstein. For those who were hoping MAGA would implode, it won’t. It’s going to take a lot more than decades old gossip about bad behavior amongst the rich and powerful to undo that particular brain fever. It does, however, give some interesting insights into the mindset of those who follow the QANON cult thinking and how detatched from obersvable reality they seem to have become. None of the Epstein issues really bothers me one way or another. Let the court system sort it all out and if there has been illegal behavior and it has been proven, let it be appropriately punished, no matter who was involved or what their political affiliation. I read someone’s opinion piece that this is all coming to a head now because Trump has started to realize how badly played he has been by Putin and he has therefore tilted the US back toward the Ukraine. As Putin’s only real interest in Trump was for him to hand him Ukraine on a silver platter, with that moving out of reach, he’s now trying to push the Epstein narrative as a way to take Trump down. Given that many of the loudest social media voices on the right are amplified by Russian bot farms, there may be something to this.
There’s been lots of bad news in the last week but there’s only two things that truly scare me. The first is the speed with which the administration is busy building and consolidating an extrajudicial detention and punishment apparatus. The politicization of the military with the National Guard in California, the building of detention centers with zero information and oversight, the enormous increase in budgets for iCE which is being remade in the mode of a secret police force does not bode well. They’ve pretty much limited themselves to detaining immigrants at the moment but there are signs that they are spoiling to go after those whom they feel are getting in the way of their detention plans. I can easily see rounding up and detaining of citizen demonstrators and monitors of ICE action coming shortly and it will only be a short step from that to detaining those whom they feel fund or provide support to these people and then it will be open season on political opposition. And when citizens are disappeared into detention without warrants or judicial review, what will you do? It’s not that much of a step to make the disappearance of inconvenient persons permanent.
The other is the silencing of media opposition through the leveraging of corporate power. Anyone who thought that corporations would stand against the current administration is awfully naive. Corporations exist for the sole purpose of producing profit. They will bend whatever way they think is necessary to keep the money flowing. It took less than six months for most of corporate America to back away from DEI and support of the LGBTQIA community. The government has essentially killed PBS and NPR with the recision bill that it forced through congress. CBS, as its parent company Paramount Global is desperate to complete a merger with Skydance which requires federal approval, has essentially emasculated Sixty Minutes and offered up Stephen Colbert’s head on a silver platter to appease Trump. From what I can tell, both the Washington Post and the New York Times have both backed off any hard hitting reporting on the administration at the behest of corporate ownership. Pretty much all media in the US is owned by one of six large corporate entities which will do whatever is necessary to preserve their bottom lines. Given recent history, this means not leaning too hard on the administration or its policies. So how are we supposed to get the information we need as to what’s actually going on in DC?
Only about 10% of the population pays attention to politics and federal policy. The vast majority of Americans have no idea of the enormity of the change that’s currently going on or what it is likely to mean for their lives over the next year or two. A compliant media isn’t likely to inform them. It’s not in their interest. When things start going south for more and more of us, I have no idea how people are going to interpret that or where they are going to try and place blame. That’s one thing I really despise about American culture – the idea that everything bad must be somebody’s fault and that you need find the culprit and blame/shame them. The world doesn’t really work that way. But we’ve never been a country willing to accept how the world works – either the natural or the man made.
Sometimes I think I need to get on a raft and head off somewhere myself.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 