SEPTEMBER 24, 2022 – Blogger’s note: Perhaps it’s a good sign that 32 days post-transplant, I’m now able to be cranky with reckless abandon. (Trigger warning: take this post with a grain of salt.)
Today between rainy periods, I got myself out of the house and hiked for an hour, including hill climbs at “Little Switzerland.” But then things went downhill, despite my best efforts to effectuate the contrary.
What triggered the downhill run? Three things, each my own doing.
First was my glance at the current political landscape. Current campaign ads for the state’s Party of Personality Cult stir fear by highlighting local crime. Stolen cars; ripped-off catalytic converters; people in parking lots and walking their neighborhoods being held up by armed punks. None of this behavior is acceptable, but it’s hard not to see the cynical irony in the Cult Party’s messaging: (a) one reason punks are armed is because the Cult Party is dead set (so to speak) against any meaningful gun control; and (b) grand auto theft is nothing comparable to grand attempted murder of our democracy—to say nothing of jeopardizing its physical security by ignoring all norms and laws regarding the handling of top secret documents and highly classified information. By “attempted murder,” of course, I mean the January 6 insurrection and Cult members themselves committing voting fraud in an attempt to reverse the results of what they claim—with zero evidence—was a rigged election. Among members of the Cult, the assault on democracy prompts denial at worst and dismissive shrugs at best.
Second, as a diversion from politics, I watched a portion of The U.S. and the Holocaust, the latest documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein. I found this excellent work to be so disturbing, I had to give it a rest less than halfway through the first episode—an installment focused on this country’s outlandish and reprehensible history of xenophobia. Current cries to “Keep the illegals out!” (including the “legals” (asylum seekers) among the “illegals”) is nothing new—despite the promise captured in The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus nearly 140 years ago.
After yanking off the scabs of history and politics of the Cult, I found myself in a bad funk. To remedy the situation, I plunged into a third pool of troubled waters: a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that our daughter-in-law Mylène gave me almost a year ago.
I’d been working on the puzzle for several days, which effort had already driven me nearly insane. Until today, I could rattle off the cognitive benefits of “working” a jigsaw puzzle. Today’s sessions left me cross-eyed and cranky. At one point I added a little music to lift my spirits. Instead of my usual fare, I retrieved an hour-and-a-half of the Beatles. Big mistake. The recordings comprised a collection of concert performances, not remastered, studio-engineered sound. What spilled from the speakers was horribly out of tune. There was no way I could “Let it Be.” I had to shut down the whole operation—Beatles and jigsaw puzzle—before my state of mind turned into a rotten strawberry field.
On the bright side, there’s always the morrow—with with no history, no politics, and no jigsaw puzzle accompanied by bad intonation.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
2 Comments
I commend you to keep watching Ken Burns as you are able. There are good people in the mix who, at some (or great?) personal risk did the right thing and some others were saved (just not enough). I felt, at the end, some hope that we might be able to save more this time around. (Separately, do you read Heather Cox Richardson’s almost daily blog?)
Thanks, Deb. I most definitely will–and for reasons I’ll cite in a subsequent post. I subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s daily blog but confess that I’m not good at reading them–beyond the introductory paragraph, knowing where they’re going to lead. But I must exercise more courage there, as well. — Eric
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