These last few days, and my own hometown’s appalling part in them, have battered my spirit into an ugly husk of itself, a balloon of despair inflated within a leathery suit of nerve-aching skin.
I am not being merely melodramatic, as can certainly be my way; my beloved country’s slippery slope down into blind idiotic autocracy, where willing fools embrace racism and bigotry-bound violence with a red-hat brown-shirt fervor, all the while defiantly professing their by-damn American purity, has me nauseated, literally nauseated, an unshakable pit of bile-seeping ugliness at my core.
My 19-year-old son, Luke, went to this travesty, our local up-licking of burnt-orange adipose tissue frocked in cheap fascism. Luke carried his sign outside, in line with protesters. Once inside the rally, he bit his lip when he needed to. He is now despondent at what he witnessed, because where do you go, physically, mentally, when raging hatred is everywhere you look? I think that part hurts me the worst.
I am hiding right now, literally hiding, in a small upstairs room, darkened but for a strand of pearl-sized purple lights casting faint shadows on all the strange esoterica, the beat-up old Pynchon and H.S. Thompson paperbacks, the African tribal masks and folk-art figurines, that I metaphorically clothe myself in for comfort, crowded by slumbering cats, irrigating these raw spiritual wounds in the powerfully inclusive new National album (“days of brutalism and hairpin turns,” indeed), cut with brilliant Joe Henry, Josh Rouse, Dylan (“This place don’t make sense to me no more!”) and McMurtry songs, drinking wine from the bottle.
If you do not understand why this might be so, then I fear you may well be part of the problem.
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