Fiddling
The Author just doesn’t know what to think about the Supreme Court decision on Affirmative Action, or the investigations into Hunter Biden’s sordid misconduct, or the seemingly countless affronts to law and decency that defined the Trump administration, or the ongoing fallout of global inflation, or the acceleration of hate-speech and hate-laws against members of the LGBTQ community, or the horrific and unprecedented activist Supreme Court counter-ruling against its own decades-old Roe v. Wade decision, or the ongoing Orwellian book bans and education-control legislation (none of which, it must be said, target The Author’s obscure, esoteric, largely unreadable body of work), or the expansion of NATO, or the moral calculus behind the use of cluster bombs, or the fact that several members of the United States’ legislative branch seem literally insane.
This is because The Author is aware — as are the editors of Poets & Suicides Magazine — that this very partial list of the mounting (and perhaps insurmountable) tribulations of the global body politic are rendered meaningless by the twin facts that Planet Earth is becoming swiftly uninhabitable and that we are ill-equipped to do anything about it. It seems to the editors of this unread and irrelevant publication that the still-growing obsession with social justice issues and identity politics, alongside accelerating righteousness regarding issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, amounts to a whole lot of human fiddling while the Earth burns. In fact, there seems to be an interesting mathematical relationship between the universal and the personal; as the universal problem of our shared Earth’s impending Heat Death becomes more dire, the personal and individual obsession with what The Author has called “identity boxes” seems ever more dominant in our intellectual discourse.
“What’s that? You’re a trans Haitian mermaid? Great — now would you help me put out this fire?”
Sometimes, when embroiled in passionate conversation regarding the fate of marginalized groups and/or the individuals whose personal marginalizations are like extra spice in the Pad Thai, The Author wants to slap everyone into wakefulness (not Wokefulness — ha ha ha ha!) and remind them that, in fact, they are all much more the same than they are different. This, The Author realizes, is an affront to the very notion of the identity box, a denial of the importance of intersectionality and the various social-justice movements spawned by our collective outrage re: The Unfairness of Life and the Accident of Birth. But The Author also believes — and we at Poets & Suicides are here repeating The Author’s words verbatim from various transcribed interviews — that “Pain is pain, and no one is having a good time here.”
Temperatures continue to rise. Flooding has become commonplace. Droughts brought on by extreme waves of heat are drying up sources of fresh drinking water. Hurricanes worsen each season. Tornadoes have begun appearing in places they have never before appeared in recorded human history. Sea levels rise, oceans warm, reefs die and fish boil right in their proverbial fish-tracks. Wildfires burn across the earth, making air less breathable and destroying the trees that might help remedy that problem. We passed the point of no return several hundred miles ago. We are doomed, friends, more doomed than ever before, and yet somehow also less able to acknowledge it. Perhaps our obsession with, e.g., Affirmative Action Policy, is simply a way to keep ourselves busy while we wait for the deadly deluge or the earth-razing inferno to arrive at our literal and metaphorical door. Or maybe, just maybe, we are exactly as myopic — each and every one of us on God’s green Earth — as The Author has always claimed that we are.
In any event, it’s a good day to be human. Alis grave nil, friends! May language release you from its lies!