My Blog Week: November 29 to December 5

A Word on the Week

Stasis Oasis

“But you’d rather be, or I should say, you need to be, comforted by an explanation you believe is true. Here’s what’s funny. Anything outside the realm of proof, a generality, will satisfy you better than specific evidence. Why is that?”

A quote from my own novel, Sequence of Events (which I’m running through a fresh edit before submitting it to a few publishers, but you can learn more about it on the Sequence page).

In the novel, H. Bruce Van Nest, practitioner of the propagandist arts, never has occasion to answer this question. But I’ll answer it now. This is the fundamental stuff of conspiracy. Conspiracy, that is, for the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys (also the Karens) of the world…

If your business were going under, and you were told, “Nothing is left in the relief fund”—

But, you learned that the director of the fund, Joe Smith, had embezzled $500,000, which he had deposited in his sister’s bank account; further, that he is hiding out at his sister’s house, 39 Buckingham Blvd, you might say, “So arrest the guy. Get the money back.”

This is a straightforward problem, but it doesn’t solve yours. You may need to cut hours, lay off employees, max out credit cards in the short run, in the hopes of some compensation untangling itself from the criminal prosecution of Joe Smith, in time to be your salvation. So many wrong choices, that you can personally make and feel bad about…

If you were told, “Some of those guys in charge’ll tuck that money in their own accounts, and just give out some cock and bull there’s nothing left…”, you’d have leeway in explaining failure, to your employees and yourself. It becomes a “What can you do?” circumstance.

But still, there’s the difficulty of: “If the people handling the fund are crooked, why don’t we investigate? Why don’t the reporters put a little heat on them? Why don’t we stage a protest?”

When you have options, you can still feel inadequate, not committed enough to emerge from your trials a hero or a victim. Unless you overcome pain and discouragement to do what you really don’t want to…

As you’d rather not march in a protest, but you can’t prove it’s impossible for you to stir yourself…

However, suppose you had asked why no one was investigating, and been told, “Those guys have powerful interests protecting them. No, it’s never gonna be worth anyone’s while to investigate. And the reporters are in on it.”

I’ve written in WoWs past, of how the obstructionist’s goal is to create The Problem That Can’t Be Solved. And we’ve seen this play out over and over through the Trump years—his angry and aggrieved MAGA crowd, who have trouble articulating what makes them angry, but have successfully resisted being helped, even by voting for a president who’ll work at the job, who wants them not to die of COVID, who might forgive their student loans, etc.

And lately, they’ve begun carrying their anger off to other suitors. The GOP makes them mad; Fox News makes them mad. They can go on being comfortably lateral in their movements, because of the narrative that “antifa” and others are backed by the powerful, therefore the MAGA government they elected is continually thwarted by these hidden and unstoppable forces, therefore no action can be taken, and resentment is the only option.