William Rivers Pitt sees it
It has seemed to me for awhile - almost from the time I awoke from a life of political apathy three years ago - things have gone awry in a very big way.
The disruption goes beyond war and politics and global warming. It is there 24×7, gnawing at the consciousness of anyone who dares to look into the shadowy edges of daily life, away from the bright and shiny distractions. Anyone who perceives it is called. There is an imperative to engage in the struggle: to become a teacher, a healer, an artist, an organizer, to use and to develop whatever skills one has and commit them to mending what is being torn asunder.
I think William Rivers Pitt sees it and is trying to wrap his mind around it.
- Hal
I May Have Gone Insane
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Wednesday 19 September 2007
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
- Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits”
It is a legitimately demented phenomenon, all the more so because it all started with a joke. Not even a funny joke, either, but a sad and threadbare thing I told only to myself, and no one else. When the clustered elements of our collective national burden erupted in masterfully synchronized bedlam, as they so often seem to, I had that joke to tell myself, and it may not have helped much, but it was there.
Every time another cacophony of freshly minted lunacy was unleashed - lunacy regarding Iraq, the NSA domestic surveillance program, White House defiance of subpoenas, timorously flaccid performances by the Congressional majority, or merely when enduring the repeated “nukyalur”-ized butchery of public political rhetoric was required by my employers, all of which emphatically pegged the needle on my Pandemoni-O-Meter - I had that joke to tell myself.
The joke is spherically terrible, i.e. bad in every possible direction in three dimensions and across 360 rounded degrees. It isn’t even a joke, really, which may be why it went so abruptly and bewilderingly sideways on me months ago. The joke, to be embarrassingly honest, is more like some half-bright mantra than anything else. As I came to discover, however, it managed to settle my mind when the needle was in the red. Perhaps the thing is best described as my self-generated Zen koan; though it did not actually stop my mind in proper koan fashion, it kept me from putting my head through the wall, and that made it valuable indeed.