Beckett and Brooks

Here I am, Beckett’s character saying, I can’t go on…………I’ll go on. That line from his novel, The Unnamable, was written soon after the end of WWII with all its inhumanity on display. Caught between despair and persistence, was the existential belief that we must make our life meaningful even in a world of the absurd.

Today, we bear witness to nothing less than the systematic overthrow of our founding precepts. Every day, another outrage aimed to subvert our Constitution. I would like to ask one question to the man in the Oval: Why did we enter the war against fascism?

I try to convince myself that writing itself strikes a note of affirmation for the choir of which I am a member. It is an act of resistance and a shout against my own impulse towards futility.

It also makes me think of the line, I got it. I got it. I don’t got it, from Mel Brooks' High Anxiety. I live in that space between what I can carry and what I can't, between what is actual and what I profess. 

I live a privileged life with a closet of clothes, eating when hungry and unafraid of being blown to smithereens. Survival is not an issue.

Yet I pontificate on my keyboard. I get it but I don’t get it. The accident of geography which has deposited me safely flanked by two oceans from a far different reality, has altered my consciousness. It has kept me well-fed and well-clothed but ill-prepared to meet the enormity of daily struggles endured by billions of others.

When I take on the very real perils of climate change and it becomes my weather, my next breath, I fall into inaction and despair... but I go on. 

Pass the Prosecco as the talk goes to the disfigurement of our country literally and ethically. Beckett, with all his melancholia, leaned toward going forward in spite of the pull otherwise. Mel Brooks' character declares he's got it, he's got it, then doesn't. It's too heavy and he lets go. 

As William Bendix proclaimed in Life of Riley, It's a revolting development. Of course, that wasn't a call for revolution, but an incipient revolt may be just what is now taking place. I call it a true populism as opposed to the pseudo populist movement of MAGA.

An aggrieved class is always present under capitalism. Trump told them they were heard and he herded them like sheep, with enough wool to pull over their eyes.

Democrats have a tent full of felines who cannot be herded. Some scratch and their curiosity can be a killer, while others purr. Some cats are hep; others are the donor class who have been declawed. They make good pets. Most people aren't allergic to them as they are to alley cats.

The shepherd tells his flock whom to hate and they say bah on cue. Dems. are a cacophony with an urgency to become a choir.