You Like A Mystery?

Here’s a mystery.

It’s a dark and stormy afternoon. Assailants are loose. They have fractured their victims. They go for the skull. Bodies are strewn across the land. Get me Morse on line one, Barnaby on two. Columbo, Spade, Sherlock, Marple, Poirot, Bosch, Vera and Inspector Foyle.

Americans don’t like each other anymore but we love our mysteries. Why? Because they get solved and we walk away with the illusion of resolution. In real life we have many cold cases to account for.

All the suspects are summoned to the library of the manor house. Everyone has been lying to keep the drama alive. Pages have been turned. Just when you have the solution from the couch the guy is wiped out, yet another victim. As the chief inspector unriddles the puzzle a hand reaches out from behind the drapery. A knife is plunged and the lights go out. A body lies on the floor. Who did it Mac, who did it? Whiskey, he says, then, L.B. he gasps with his last breath. So now we know it was Lionel Barrymore or Lucretia Borgia or Lauren Bacall or Laura Bush, Les Brown or Larry Bird or Lucille Ball or Leonard Bernstein or Elbee the butler or maybe he was saying, I’ll be damned.

On T.V. dramas the obligatory phrase first spoken by the investigator is, What have we got? What we’ve got is a crime scene in America. Get out the yellow tape and wrap it around the heartland. Democracy is the victim. That’s us. We are witness to an absence. What was, ain’t no more. Fairness and decency, gone. Diversity and justice, no longer. Our curriculum lies. Our legislators are invertebrates. Half of us are deniers. Half don’t vote. I hope it’s the same half.

Here we are living inside the greatest mystery in my lifetime. One out of three are suspects. Make that two out of five. Accomplices. Everyone knows but none of them tells. Crime, evidently, pays. The body politic is on life support. We need to be transfused. Quick, is there a doctor in the house who transplants hearts?

What were you thinking, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will ask. Did WWII mean nothing? The next skirmish might be at the Canadian border with millions seeking asylum from proto-Fascism.

First came genocide followed by fratricide and now we are witnessing assisted suicide. The autopsy report describes a self-inflicted wound. The murder weapon is a convergence of Fox news, social media, a miscreant sociopath and the latent malice in our sin-sick souls. An enormous noose and a hanging tree await.

We know whodunit. The motive is avarice and power for some, for others it’s a settling for simplistic answers, an incoherent vilification.  Somnambulance has metastasized. It’s an open and shut case. Historians are writing Democracy’s obit. The Shadow warned us what lurks. 

Can those who have lost their way be rehabilitated? Can a compass be installed to point north towards fellowship, the best version of ourselves? That is the mystery, perhaps beyond the reach of our former sleuths. It remains for us to find our ethical center.