Just go to sleep, I think. Nothing left for you tonight but a late start tomorrow.
It is 1:26 AM on my mother’s birthday, and it is another night in North Texas with temperatures below freezing. As it is February, that may not seem like remarkable, but it has been a cold new year so far by local standards. It was sleeting in Fort Worth earlier, and on Thursday it will snow for what must be the third time this year, with two other snow days trailing back into the late days of 2009.
I turned 30 last year, in the middle of what has become a year and a half without a day job. I have freelanced and with both regular contract work and the occasional freelance article, there have been few days when I haven’t worked during that time. I wrote my first travel essay about Obama’s inauguration on commission for my friend Harvey Kronberg a little over a year ago. I even had my first cover story, a happy milestone that was borne from a long month of writing and pitching and resolved with the publication of a feature in June’s Texas Observer.
During that same time, I have been half-crazed with doubt. I finished my Master’s degree but delayed thesis defense out of fear: fear of a completely dried-up freelance writing market, fear of the worst economy of my life time, fear of student loans, fear of incredibly high competition for too few jobs, even in my very specific and particular fields of expertise. The crash – which people like me have labeled “The Great Recession” – has resulted in a savaged but salvaged economy. It is still so fucked that the unfucking will alter the American political landscape for decades.
In that time I also seem to have lost my taste for politics. Not long ago I was (at the very least) a practiced observer of state and national affairs, and a burgeoning scholar / expert on international relations and affairs, especially on transnational terrorism and related aspects of foreign policy. The scholarly stuff still interests me and is probably a puzzle I will spend years trying to solve or pull apart. As for electoral politics: I still know What It All Means, of course, but the part of my brain that once demanded that I plug my numbers and analysis into words of some kind has come undone, or broken. There’s no longer any urge, if you can dig it. There’s no urge, and the only reason for that lack of interest that I can surmise is a dark bloom of cynicism.
I don’t even care to pay attention to the day-to-day stuff in politics anymore – the 24 hour news networks were once like watching sports for me, and taking in a policy debate or electoral horse race was so vital to me as to be a foregone conclusion – I always had time for it, for debates and polling. I would always do it.
Tonight, Farouk Shami and Bill White debated their merits as Democratic candidates for governor of the state of Texas. My good and longtime friend Angela was in the audience and ended up with some screen time during the broadcast.
Text messages from several friends:
Angela is on TV! Did you see Angela at the debate?
I wasn’t watching. (Sorry, Angela.) I wasn’t watching just like I didn’t watch Perry, Hutchison and Medina go at it for Republican hearts and minds a week earlier. I never even planned to turn it on because I don’t care, as an individual, a voter, a liberal, or even as a writer who has paid his mortgage more than once by writing about politics. I don’t care what they have to say despite knowing that I ought to. As a Modern Man, I have at least momentarily succumbed to the worst sin possible of someone smart enough to pay attention: I have intellectually shipped my oars, gone adrift in the certainty that none of it matters much at all.
The Republicans, at both the state and national levels, have revealed themselves to be everything I’ve always said they are, so no surprises there. The Democrats have enormous majorities at the national level and apparently couldn’t get a shit rocket off the ground even if it was attached to a non-shit rocket. This was also predictable and as such is somehow more worrisome than the GOP’s self-affirmation as the party of scoundrels.
Some of my friends have turned their smug faces towards the bleak sunshine of partisan nationalism. My liberal pals blame Obama (a sentiment I think is too simplistic, and one I don’t accede to) or the congressional leadership (which makes more sense but is also probably too wide a net). During a recent lament on health care reform, Obama was taking a rhetorical beating at the hands of some some friends and Democratic Party officials. Eventually the bottle landed on me and my friends wanted to know what I thought.
I said, Better this than a unified GOP government. Better this than President Palin with both the House and Senate, wreaking uncontrollable havoc that isn’t only wrong-headed and irreparable but non-sensical and based on something akin to wanton elitist whimsy.
(As I said this, I imagined a well-known actor dressed as a military officer, injecting a cat with something candy purple and murmuring “This is the way its always done, right?”)
Better this, I continued, than the soup line, or the Mad Max apocalypse that we just barely averted with the evils of government spending. We only convinced Wall Street to close the fiscal rape rooms after we saw ourselves getting credit-swapped in the leaked pictures, and then only for a little while. Now they’re back, and the only cold comfort is that it could probably be worse.
Now I wonder if that’s where I’ve landed on politics, and the future, and life. Is that all there is to it? Appreciating the fact that things could be worse?
Probably not. I think maybe the problem is that most of my caring for most of my adult life has manifested itself as writing, in one form or another. I think I’m tired of writing about politics and that I’m ready to write about other things. This is probably due at least in part to feeling disconnected from the political process, and from a national politics / Obama / Hope hangover. I should not only have free healthcare by now, but also a neighborhood compost energy laser collective and a fucking jet pack. But I have none of those things and so here we are.
It took me more than two weeks to write this. It was calming, just knowing that a draft of it was hovering in a data cloud somewhere, incomplete but pointing towards something new.
Since I started writing this, I’ve started having dreams again. They are strange – in one, I am unceremoniously shit-canned from a non-paying writing job for unknown reasons by Keith Olbermann, in another I am back in London, living and working but carrying a sharp worry about the whereabouts of my dog, Molly – but their occurrence means I am at least sleeping deeply enough to dream, which hasn’t happened in over a year.
It is 2:56 AM on my best friend Dave’s birthday, and it is another night in North Texas with temperatures below freezing. I’m taking a small step in a new direction, which proves to me that political cynicism isn’t the end of the intellectual line, that there is indeed more to it than appreciating the fact that things could be worse. Sometimes you just appreciate a thing for what it is – or you just are, rather than trying to be – even if you have to talk a little jive along the way.
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