The Man From Hopeless

I think Jeff Wells may be on to something.

I don't regard it as excessive to believe we've reached the end, regardless of the end having been anticipated since the beginning. It's unlikely that the sky will roll up like parchment one day and that will be that. We'll probably go on living well beyond the end, marking each incremental degradation as the New Normal, and with the dust of death settled on every sweet thing. (In other words, less The Omega Man, more Children of Men.)

And perhaps, if hopelessness is where this story ends, it's where we can begin to write another.

That may be the most appropriate phrase for it, "incremental degradation", the more concretely realized iteration of the proverbial slow-boiling frog. The frog, as they say, does not comprehend the increasing heat of the water until it's too late; we, on the other hand, constantly review our options and priorities, and revise just how much we are still willing to put up with.

The politics of hope is a nice idea, but as Wells says, it may still be the wrong idea. Even people who loathe the various corruptions and mendacities of the Cheney administration, the blustery mediocrities rigging the game and jiggering the terms of debate with cheap semiotic tricks, still hope that in the end, at worst, these men are merely decent fools, well-meaning idiots engaged in a horrific exercise of violent futility.

Maybe approaching this from the standpoint of despair, rather than being demoralizing and demotivating, brings with it the empowerment of clarity, of demonstrating their fundamental indecency, of casting their schemes and tactics into more stark profile, one that demands more than mere hope.

I'm being polemic here, but not as much as one might hope, because while I won't pretend to have full insight into the totality of what these people want, I believe that they have made it abundantly clear that they are intent on getting it, regardless of the consequences. And placing one's feeble hope in the notion that some heroic Democratic politician will ride in and save the day, when they can't even muster the nerve to put the liars and defamers out of business (or at least give them a well-deserved smackdown), seems too small an expense.

Rather than simply giving up, which is what many seem to have done while doing their little hope dance, reacting from the perspective of despair could mean giving more, of understanding that there is no deus ex machina. This is it, and either we stand tall against going deeper into the big muddy, or we hoist up the hip waders and trudge further, head down, hoping someone comes along to do it for us.

It's almost impossible to know just where to start, but really, I think the key is holding the enablers in the media accountable for their (in)actions, and making sure that the ones who are actually doing their jobs seriously and honestly get the most attention. It doesn't seem like too much to ask for, to have the opinion-makers and self-important pundits have to back up the things they say.