Love at a Reasonable Price

I had a weird dream last night
It was a weird movie

Michael J. Fox played a young man with thick hair who had somehow ended up with a magical elevator. It could go straight up as high as you wanted, with, as your companion throughout the ride, a built-in circus sideshow type hologram or puppet (the puppet in the booth in Tom Hank’s “Big” meets the Wizard of Oz’s floating face and booming voice in Frank L. Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz”) with spinning psychedelic eyes and a wooden-looking pinocchio nose and wooden-looking doll hands projecting out on either side of a red satin cloth.

Michael J. Fox invited a three young people (two women and a man; I think the man and one of the women were a couple) into the elevator disguised as an enclosed balcony set with a small table bearing a delicious spaghetti meal. Soon it turns out that one of the women (I see dark brown hair in forward-sweeping bob cuts on all my ladies) would’ve only charged like $10,000 for whatever the couple had charged $30,000 for. And the elevator rockets up and everyone panics until the couple agrees to come down to a fair price. Something to do with contracting? Construction?

But Michael J. Fox just leaves the elevator on the ground outside of his apartment building, and a couple teenage boys that the dream seems to think are the same people who were in the elevator, even though they clearly aren’t, find the elevator there on the grass between the bushes and they take it for a joy ride, and the crazy puppet with the crazy spinning eyes and the wooden-looking mouth with teeth painted in white warns them in increasingly desperate tones that they are moving into air they cannot breath, completely losing it with even eye-spinning that protrudes beyond and obscures his face and with wooden mouth opened wide to reveal dark hollow. Finally the two young idiots relent and dial the elevator back down, but in their panic they dial it down too fast and it crashes on the ground and they walk away shaking their heads from the broken elevator which now looks like a giant smashed-up and rumpled Cookie Monster outfit or puppet or something big and lying across the lawn next to the base of a nondescript cement (at the base), shiny dark-yellow plastic siding, and regular windows in black metal frames apartment building.

And the dream morphs into a narrator lamenting how we lost the movie before we found out how the Michael J. Fox character reacts to the demise of his magical elevator. But not lamenting much, since, after all, in this genre of easy-drinking 80s movie, the magical tool would of course have to be lost, leaving our hero with no choice but to find his happy ending without it, and losing a magic elevator that only goes straight up is not much of a loss, when compared to the typical wonders of magic. And then the narrator is wondering at the fact that Michael J. Fox, though an extremely short man, was a favorite lead in Hollywood films for the better part of a decade many decades after Hollywood had changed its mind that short men were better proportioned for the screen.

And then we see Humphrey Bogart in his typical all-grays gangster suit and upturned-collar trench coat (looking exactly like Albert Camus in that famous picture with him in a trench coat, cigarette on his lips, and determined eyes screwed thoughtfully forward) walking in a trench so he can be taller than some leading lady in a flapper’s silver sequin dress, or maybe in a nice white flowing dress.

And there’s a little talk of how it’s kind of a shame that now short men have no particular professional niche. Sure, they can be jockeys, but for that they have to be both very short and incredibly slight, and the world can only support a few jockeys at any one time in history.

Author: Amble Whistletown, with Bartleby Willard
Editor: Bartleby Willard, with Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson, with Andy Mac Son O’ Watt.

Trump is popular with MAGA partly because liberals are terrified that he will destroy democracy.
This proves to Republicans that he can do what they need to do: hurt liberals.
Why do they hate us so much?
Who do they think we are?
What is going on?
They are going to harm the country out of this need to hurt us.
I don’t know how badly; I can’t tell if this really is the tipping point from which we cannot recover.
What is the point where playing politics turns into supporting political evil?
I think Trump supporters have passed that point here in 2024.
Am I right?
If so, how can I clarify the picture in a way that allows them to see things as they really are while there is yet time for them to change course?

But the number of our fellow Americans who hate “us” (whatever that is) is not enough to power the Trump coalition. And our haters also love Trump and are certain he will save both the country and their souls. It must just be that many people either don’t believe us that electing Trump in 2024 poses an existential threat to our democracy or are so delusionally cynical that they think this is already Putin’s Russia (try living there a while and then come back to us about that). It seems obvious to me that you don’t make things better by blowing up a system of government that keeps government out of tyranny’s hands by letting the people regularly vote their leaders in or out.

Do we trace the beginning of the end to our democracy to Democrats choosing globalism and adding in redistribution over protectionism and unions, rather than pushing back completely on the Republicans? (The Republicans had long prioritized Wall Street, but then with Clinton the Democrats jump in, with the caveat that via redistribution all will be well?) Because a man wants to tell a woman that he is worthwhile, and part of the case that he has (since I guess time immortal) made to her is that he has a good job, he is a good worker? No man wants to put his arm around a woman and explain that he has no way of providing for her, but hey, that’s okay, the government will look out for us. And no woman wants to explain that of her man to her family. And the government can’t provide everything anyway. But Biden is pro-union in a way no US president has been in a long time. And the Democrats could put together a compromise between competition and prioritizing good, secure jobs. Maybe the Republicans could too, but there will be long-term good government without democracy (for the simple reason that in democracy the point is to govern well and be rewarded at the ballot, but in autocracy, the point is to stay in power and to stay in power and to stay in power), and Trump poses a unique existential threat to US American democracy. Why is it that that is so obvious to me but so many people think it’s all just politics as usual? Well, maybe a third of the country knows Trump is dangerous, a third knows he’s the savior needed to cure all our ills and destroy all our personal and collective evils, and a third knows it’s all just politics as usual. In short: it’s the normal Democrat-, Democrat-, and ShoulderShrug-true-believer breakdown in 21st Century US American politics. But this time there really is a twist: the Democrats are right and the Republicans are wrong, and our nation is facing an existential crisis. But how to convince a nation so used to believing only its side and/or so used to believing nothing?

Can our democracy survive a 2024 Trump presidency? Who knows? But why would we want to find out? What is the great thing to expect from a more streamlined administration under the control of an unhinged would-be authoritarian? Now that he’s figured out he doesn’t need pesky people like that crazy lib William Barr who kept moronically telling him that the election wasn’t stolen? People like that, who simply couldn’t see that “reality” and “truth” are just tools for getting what you want: finally the GOP is ready to move beyond all that, into pure nihilism! Who can’t feel the energy? Who doesn’t want to get up out of their seats and praise the Noise?

Do nations rise and fall based on how many a man can tell his woman he’s got a good job, that he’s a valued worker, that he won’t let her down?

Why do I wake up at four in the morning worrying about the country?
Because this is what I hear from Donald Trump:
This is how we do America from now on: I pick who wins major elections.
Because I am the King of the Greatest! And you need to suck my dick and admit you like it!
And this is what I hear from the GOP:
OKay, yeah, that’s an approach we could work with.
That’s a workable strategy. We can come up with think tanks and talking points for that.
And this what I hear from Trump’s fans:
That’s right! Make them suck it!
And this what I feel like:
Don’t you hear? He’s saying everyone has to … glug glough uck

Rules, rules, rules.

Bartleby is only permitted to turn into a sea creature and go sit on the bottom of the deepest darkest sea for ten hours a week, and for no more than four hours at a time.

Amble is only allowed four bottles of tainted love a week, and no more than one per day.

Andy can have only five units of alcohol a week, and no more than 2 units in a day (2 units would be equivalent to one of those giant glasses of wine he’s wont to pour himself).

Why these rules?
These rules are just to say that these three men — a fictions within fictions, a real character within fictions, and a person (whatever that is) in the real world (whatever that is) — are not allowed to abuse substances for the duration.

What is the duration?
And what happens when they transgress the bounds?

Good questions!
The duration is from now until someone other than Donald Trump becomes president of the United States.
If they break their rules, they are not permitted to touch their substance of choice for one month — a penalty which terrifies them all.

Discipline! To stop the evil!

For so long now we’ve wished to the stop the evil, whatever that is.

What eats a human, a relationship, a family, a pile of overlapping groups, a nation from the inside out?
Why, the evil does, of course!

But what is this thing “the evil”?

In individuals: the evil is corruptions in the communication between an individual’s soul and their own feeling/thinking/acting.

For example: We see someone knocked down and this little flinch of meanness rises in us, a little desire to shove them further down, and if we give in to that flinch — either out of pure malice or goaded by surrounding circumstances playing with bits of malice, bits of cowardice, bits of confusion, bits of self pity, bits of … — we look away from the Love shining through each moment, and worship our own self-centered weaknesses rather than the Love that chooses everyone. Every time we do this we corrupt our own relationship with our own heart of hearts and drift a little further away from our own sense of meaning and order. To the degree we so drift, we lose the ability to feel/think/act in ways that are meaningful to ourselves. And so we slip a little further into the empty noise chaos of nihilism.

In groups and nation states: the evil is systems that select for evil actions.

For example: In authoritarian states, the supreme political good is getting, maintain, wielding, and exploiting power. To the degree a state slips into the logic of might makes right, success in the state requires collaborating with people and organizations that routinely hurt their own citizens in order to suppress dissent and exercise power. And without “success” in such a state, one often has trouble providing for and protecting oneself and one’s loved ones. And so corrupted states select for crimes against humanity, which encourage, reward, and foster internal corruptions. That is to say: Serving a dictator encourages, rewards, and fosters personal evil.

But when can we say the other side has gone too far?
For thirty years the gulf between Republicans and Democrats has widened.
We already think the other side is some mixture of incompetent and evil.
So we’re inoculated against their critiques and beholden only to those on “our side” for self-analysis.
That’s how we got into this jam, where I am almost certain that in supporting rather than repudiating a known enemy to democracy the Republicans are placing our democracy in extreme jeopardy, therewith committing a grave political evil, and they say I’m just full of shit and if anything the evil dictator of error is Joseph Biden.
I know that they are seeing everything upside down and this topsy-turvy vision is a willful, a self-imposed error, and thus not just a wrong-headed political opinion but an act of evil.
But they know I’m full of shit and aren’t worth the paper I’m printed on.

They are wrong this time, but we’ve been crying wolf on each and huddling in our separate echo chambers for so long now, it is easy for them to picture me as the unfaithful shepherd, who cries “wolf!” in order to direct everyone’s attention away from his own (party’s) crimes.

What’s to be done?
I am right this time, but what good does that do me if they can’t see that, though I’m not always right, and sometimes it’s more a matter of opinion than of straight up right or wrong, this time I am right and they are wrong, and they should stop supporting Trump and start demanding politicians who respect and honor the outcomes of both elections they win and elections they lose?

Still, here we are, and we ought to try to help somehow or other. So let’s at least step away from the mindless stupors.

But how will we shake out the jangles if we can’t collapse into controlled demolitions of our thought and feeling?
Surely we must shake out the jangles to avoid even worse collapses! Surely we must shake out the convoluted meshwork’s of hurt hearts and desperate emotional/mental lunges! Otherwise we’re sure to fall into uncontrolled demolitions of our thought and feeling! Surely we must regularly flee from the tension that constantly bends our shoulders down and forward, our hips and pelvis up, our head over and down, our knees up, fly from the tension that forever makes a panicked roly-poly out of our inner space. Otherwise we’re sure to lose our balance and run to harder drugs and more reckless spiritual retreats! And that would surely be dangerously irresponsible. Right?

Anyway, how can we think and feel fresh if we don’t regularly liquidate our thinking and feeling?

What are we getting wrong here?
We know we’re not quite catching the nuances, but we can’t quite make out our missteps.

Be that as it may!
Let’s turn off the substance abuse while seeking other was to relax the jangles, shake out the convolutions, and melt our thought and feeling.
Maybe meditation?
Running?
Freewriting?
There’s things we could try.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

How lucky we have had it!
How easy we have had it!
How pleasant it has been!
How docile and yet bouncy.

A safe place to stay.
Good food and clean water.
Even perks like amazingly good decaf teas and coffees, too much high quality wine, strolls in the park, restaurants and museums, periodicals and music rushed to the telephone, books and other riches delivered to the door, movies beamed into the laptop.

And so many years of never worrying about being bombed, or being persecuted for political opinions, or being jailed for no reason or without appeal!
So many years luxuriating in a well-functioning liberal democratic republic!
How sweet it’s been.

What is political evil?
Is it not true that people supporting Trump now are committing crimes against humanity?
We think they are.
Are we right?
Would telling them to please stop being evil help?

What is the task of the citizens of a democratic republic?
Is it not most fundamentally to act as a final check on madness and corruption in government?
And aren’t those Republicans who vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential primaries failing in that most basic duty?

Remember when John Goodman / Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski would go on those tirades about how he didn’t watch his friends die face down in the mud in Nam so that [whatever he was outraged in that moment] ?

Remember laughing at his character and that the movie was so clever and flowed so beautifully and with so much verve?

Did we, so young and snug in our Pax Americana and never-fail-empire, laugh too far past the poignancy?

Hard to say.

But it is true that people have fought hard and sacrificed much so that you and I and we all together could enjoy the safe harbor of a government of by and for the people.

And you, Trump voters: All you’ve been asked to do in the service of our shared nation and home is accept reality and your place in it, and vote accordingly. But you can’t even make that little intellectual/emotional sacrifice of admitting that you have a political responsibility that goes beyond owning the libs. You talk a big game about personal responsibility, but here you can’t even be bothered to get your heads out of conspiracy theories and huff-and-puff certainty in your own moral and spiritual superiority and/or the infinite, and all-justifying depth of your grievances. You can’t be troubled to prefer a realistic narrative about Donald Trump’s actions vis a vis democracy to a fantastical one. Is there not a point where willful ignorance of the reality surrounding a core moral duty shades into regular old evil? And have you not sailed past that point by voting for Trump in 2024?

One never knows everything and you can always find someone willing to claim anything. But Donald Trump, though lacking any justifiable grounds for declaring the election stolen, attempted to coerce state and federal leaders to throw the election to him, rallied a mob with the lie of a stolen election and set them to march on the Capitol while the Senate meeting to confirm Biden’s victory, exhorting them to “take our nation back”, and performed other actions meant to thwart the will of the people and undermine the peaceful, law-based transfer of power fundamental to a working democratic republic. This much anyone with any willingness to choose reality over la la land can easily know. Not KNOW in some infinite perfect sense. But know deep and well enough to know that Donald Trump, who rather than repenting of these attacks on our shared government continues to repeat well and consistently repudiated lies about a stolen election, should not be entrusted with political power ever again. Add to this how conservative think tanks and Trump insiders alike are planning how to rid the next Trump administration of pesky dissenters (not liberals, but people with enough principles to tell Trump that he’s wrong–like, for example, William Barr when he repeatedly investigated and dutifully shot-down Trumps many desperate stolen-election conspiracy theories; or like Mike Pence, who, though both privately and [with perhaps life-threatening consequences] publicly pressured by Trump to not certify the 2020 election, did his constitutional duty and certified the election), and handing the keys to the most powerful nation in the world back to Donald Trump can only be described as criminally irresponsible.

What should we do? No one’s perfect. And many Trump voters are in many ways better citizens than many Trump detractors. However, Trump voters are together pumping poison into our shared democracy, and this is a crime against themselves, us, and humanity.

Because a functioning democratic republic is a spiritual good: It is a framework through which citizens can together evolve both their shared conversation/reality and their shared government, while serving as a final check on madness, corruption, and tyranny. And in this way the citizens can create an environment that selects for ideas and actions that benefit the general welfare of the nation and her citizens, rather than an environment that selects for ideas and actions prioritizing stealing power away from the people.

Why are thugocracies invariably incompetent? Because you usually, over time, hit the target you are aiming for, and thugocracies aim not to rule well and be rewarded for it at the ballot box, but to suppress dissent and hold onto power at all costs.

What should we do?
Telling people they are being evil rarely helps.
And Trump supporters are primed to see half the nation as their sworn enemy, as traitors to America, God, family, and everything deserving of love and affection in this wide world.
But maybe if we gently point out the plausibility of our account and the implausibility of the one they are serving: Maybe a gentle but consistent reminder of and appeal to our shared humanity and the principle — without which all is chaos, nihilism, and hell — that what is true is true for everyone. Trump’s most fundamental tactic is an assault on this principle. He uses truth and facts as weapons, with the implicit claim that “reality” is just stories you make up in order to get your way. What is going on inside his supporters? Are they not at some level and to some degree bowing to the Donald’s nihilistic narrative that “reality” is nothing but a tool for getting, holding, and wielding power — that claims of “true” and “false” are to be judged not by how accurate they are, but by how well they serve the one true good of dominating other people?

Trump’s fantasy has the power to wreck this nation, since we cannot meaningfully share government if we cannot meaningfully share reality.

The counter to Trump’s basic lie is this basic truth: We are all in this together; we all share the universal values (aware, clear, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing); and we all, as citizens of a democratic republic, have both a right and a duty to seek (as individuals and in the many overlapping groups and organizations to which we belong) the active spiritual, ethical, emotional, and intellectual clarity needed to together nudge our shared government away from the worse and towards the better.

We humbly ask GOP voters to stop being evil and start voting exclusively for candidates who have not attempted to replace democratic rule with their own immortal reigns. Not because we are good and you are bad, but because we are all both good and bad, and what you are doing here and now is bad and we see it and feel it in our bones.

People always have reasons for the bad things they do. But at the end of the day, we are responsible for what we do. It is never completely clear what’s going on. But Trump’s authoritarian tendencies (see Trump’s Threats to Democracy), his concentrated and prolonged efforts to cheat his way to victory in 2020, and the lessons he’s learned about how to be a more successful authoritarian are clear enough that the wise course is clearly to steer clear of him.

“We’ve cut more regulations in a year and a quarter than any administration, whether it’s four years, eight years or, in one case, 16 years,” he said. “Should we go back to 16 years? Congressman, can we have that extended? The last time I jokingly said that, the papers started saying ‘he’s got despotic tendencies!’ No, I’m not looking to do it, unless you want to do it.”

That was Trump in 2018. There’s other examples from other years. Abusers will sometimes prep their victims. They’ll sometimes work a long time at twisting their victim’s reality until abuse to both abuser and abused alike as something reasonable, normal, deserved, maybe even good.

Okay, there’s that angle, but there’s also the way an abuser will feel a person out — see what they can get away with, gradually expanding their territory of domination. That has an element of prepping and seducing, but also an element of cautious exploration.

Or do we go too far?
We feel that Donald Trump is abusing the nation.
Why don’t his fans feel abused?
Why do his biggest fans feel safe, snug, loved, sheltered, beloved, prized, heard, exalted, ecstatically free?

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Watson

What if you were a Christian after all?
Not the kind that believes Jesus Christ is the Son of God, or that after he was crucified he descended into hell, where he whiled three days, before returning to heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father, where he will judge the quick and dead for eternity Amen.
Not that kind of Christian, but the kind that reads the Bible and goes to church and prayers and meditates, and generally seeks to relate to the Love prior to all traditions via the Christian tradition.
Because? Because that’s the one that you know in your bones, the one that reminds you of being young and decent.
What about that?
Why not?

My wife
my wife
my wife

a soft belly upon which I might rest my head

my wife
my love
my home

a joyful giggle upon which I might lay my days

my wife
my girl
my baby

a gentle hand upon which I might hang my world.

my wife
where are you?
and could you push against me enough
to keep me from melting in the rain like dirty old snow
and could we push against the evil enough
to keep this land from running down the gutter, shimmering with oily writhing, with bright plastic detergent bottles floating here and running aground there.

He’s done.
Why is he still alive?
Long ago he stopped living, but still he remains, pouring himself another drink, putting on another playlist, writing another memo to the void.

The drinker is a boring tale.
The drinker is going nowhere.
The drinker is getting stale.
The drinker is full of show-care.
The drinker is an empty husk
His soul has left his chest
Left in the rain, he rusts.
Caught by some pain, he’s pressed
against the clapboard wall
of an old shed ready to fall

The drinker is done
So what does the man inside the drinker do?
The emptiness won
So what does the plan inside the world come to?

I’m on the give-up
I’m on the fall-apart
I wanted to tell someone
about how it hurts
and how I can’t solve it
can’t riddle my way out of it
how I need a friend who would believe me but no one believes me and I can’t even believe me anymore, but still this truth (not any kind of Truth!) undoes me from the inside out.

But all that
feels like a luxury
in this time of war
in this age of evil
in this crime sneaking through
in this lie winning easy
in this sabotage invited in, no, no need to hide in a Trojan horse or anything! Come right in! We’re ready!

Please God help us.
We’re in a jam.
I would raise a mirror up to our faces.
I would catch us in the act.
I would show us what we’re up to and what it amounts to.
So as to turn us from this crime.
To sidestep the evil, off-ramp before we wreck.

I got nothing.
A gazillion miles of nothing.
Let me down here.
Let me off here.
Let me disappear here and now.
Let me never-mind while there’s still a star left in the sky, a star left to wish upon.

Please God help us.
Help us see things as they really are.
Guide me away from myself.
Guide me towards the wider vision, the deeper heart, the gentler mind.
Guide me up on out of my narrow self.
Cause I’m spinning my wheels inside my wheels, going nowhere forever.

Tell me what to do.
Tell me how to help.
Tell us what to do.
Tell us how to help.
Cause we got nothing.

Lord help us.
We can’t figure this out on our own.
And time is running out.

Copyright: AM Watson

[To the Rescue]
[Next: 4. A Time of Evil]

Let us — before we attempt to save our souls, the souls of our fellow citizens, and the heart of things with words so true and beautiful that they cause human hearts and minds to smile and gently turn more fully towards and align better with the Love that chooses everyone — admit to ourselves and our would-be seranadees* where we think we find ourselves today, on January 15th, 2024, a remarkably cold Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States of America.

*[Editor’s Note: We hereby define a “seranadee” as someone who is serenaded.

Author’s Note: Unnecessary formality. The definition is assumed by the clause.

Editor’s Note: I’m the editor and I’m going to make Editor’s Notes where I see fit.

Author’s Note: Dear Readership, please forgive the heavy-handedness of my fat-fingered, smudge-drunk editor.

Editor’s Note: I hereby define a “bartleby” a something so petty and annoying that you wouldn’t think it possible, were there not a Bartleby Willard to give the term meaning.

Author’s Note: Don’t bartleby me, little man!

Editor’s Note: That’s right — it can be a verb too.]

We’ve been writing increasingly distraught essays, culminating in “A Time of Evil”, published January 5, 2024, in which we come right out and tell our fellow citizens that they are being evil. I mean, what? Why lie? So let’s read and edit that essay one more time, and call it Chapter Four: A Time of Evil, with the subtitle, Your Evil.

But people are always both good and bad. The same basic stuff that liberates the concentration camps makes and runs concentration camps. So maybe we should also have a Chapter Five: Humans Are Dangerous.

And then we cannot pretend that we are angels in heaven, watching human affairs while God beams God’s clarity directly through our conscious spaces, allowing us to gently and in perfect compassion and with complete Love understand how individual humans fit together and how groups of humans fit together and how everything fits together in this world. So then perhaps we need a Chapter Five: We are Not Angels, with the subtitle, Our Evil.

This chapter will be mostly about your author and editor, but it could also touch on US American liberals, although so much of what we see US American conservatives attacking and hating us for seems to us to be straw men.

Like, what are you even talking about? People who vote democrat are mostly not culturally radical.

This idea that somehow the be all and end all of my political thought is forcing transgender operations on school children while they recite a Statement of Faith affirming that all bad things in the world are the fault of white people and everybody else is a hapless victim of white people: These kind of attacks leave me dumbfounded.

What are you talking about?

I agree that we could spend a moment all together thinking about the consequences of trans operations and what safeguards we could put in place to prevent people from regretting an irreversible decision a few years down the road.

And I don’t think white people are bad and all other people are good. I think all people are iffy, and we need to work with where we are now.

I think working with where we are now does include admitting past mistakes and trying to think through how they still harm us and what we can do to lessen that harm and hasten the day when we all reach our full potentials alone and together in this interwoven tumble-along-together. But that’s not the same as saying white people need to admit they are bad deep in their marrow, deep in their culture, in some fundamental way that they cannot escape any more than they can escape the color of their skin. I don’t think that kind of talk is either true or helpful. And for some time there has been a possible storyline which goes something like this, “If you’re white, everything you have is stolen, and everything bad that happens to you is only because you are so pathetic that even after stealing everything from everyone else, you still ended up a loser, what an incredible loser you must be!” And that’s just as dumb a storyline as any other this-is-what-you-are storyline.

I don’t hear that storyline as a predominate one within liberal US America. Still, I feel it myself a little tiny bit hanging the air. But I feel all kinds of very iffy storylines hanging in the air here and there, draping themselves over this moment of weakness and that one. We all have access to an infinity of shifting storylines; none of them are true; some are truer than others; people on all sides of all issues at some level understand that.

The way for humans to find common ground with other human beings mostly comes down to spending time together, talking together, working together, being a community and in relation with one another. There is something both very good and very bad about humans. It is very good because, assuming we spend time together and are motivated to share ourselves with one another, this tendency towards discovering common ground allows us to overcome prejudices and to realize our shared humanity. It is very bad because it can also, when groups are intellectually and/or emotionally siloed off from one another, lead to a mindless group-think. Force two (average) people together long enough and they start finding ways to agree, ways to get along, ways to share reality.

If we open our hearts and minds to everyone while most fundamentally remaining centered in the Love that chooses everyone, we can’t help but grow into a wiser, brighter reality — one that connects Love = Reality to our feeling/thinking/acting in this world. If we open our hearts and minds only to those who agree with our prejudices, we can help each other to grow further and further from the Love that chooses everyone, to ensconce ourselves more and more in brittle, narrow, empty realities.

Be that as it may!

Let’s have look at what we think this moment is telling us, how we read it, where we think we find ourselves.

[Editor’s Note: About the chapters here sketched out: You can’t always trust this author to do what he says he’s going to do.

Author’s Note: We’re making this up on the fly? You don’t need me to do what I said I’d do a chapter ago; you need me to do the same thing you need you to do: what’s best for everyone. But how? And so we go under. But here and there we pause to outline a path. Subject to revisions. It’s just a book. Just a desperate attempt to find the mirror of our moment in time to change our hearts and reorientate our mind. Doomed to fail? I don’t know.

Let’s just relax, shall we? Everybody take a breath. Shake it out.

Julian of Norwich said God does everything and will bring all to the best for them who are saved, but then in places she seems to suggest all are saved, which would make the formulation: God does everything and all is done to the best for all. If Julian’s right about the gist of things, and we’re right about her gist of things, then the gist of things does suggest that Donald Trump is an agent of God. But so is Joseph Biden. Winston Churchill. Adolf Hitler. Mahatma Gandhi. You. Me. Everybody always all the time. Agents of God.

But Julian had another perspective. The one above is the one where she didn’t see the creature doing anything, but instead saw God doing all things through the creature. In another place in her Revelations of Divine Love, Julian sees sin, and sees that God does no sin. But then it gets really confusing. Sin is no thing. And God thanks us for our suffering and sin is part of our suffering; so God thanks us for our sin?

We just read about how some evangelical Christians claim that Trump is God’s agent like Cyrus the Great, the Persian leader who, as per Isiah, was used by a grateful God to free the Israelites of their Babylonian captivity.

What?

What did Jesus say was the most important commandment? Was it pretend you know the mind of God and can see how God shapes geopolitics and tells you you’re special and chosen and will be an example to the nations and anybody who doesn’t see that can take their poisonous blood and get the hell gone? No, there’s no evidence that that was even in the running. When asked what the most important commandment was Jesus said, “Love the Lord God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” But more on this later.]

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson

[To the Rescue]
[Next: 4. A Time of Evil]

[To the Rescue]

Bartleby: We gotta do somethin’

Amble: Like what?

Bartleby: Stop the evil.

Amble: Oh, come on! You know we can’t. The best we can do is hope we don’t participate too awful much in it.

Bartleby: Not with that attitude! With that attitude we can’t stop the evil!

Andy: Hey! No using that retort! Then I’m like back being seven years old in the thick brown-shag rowhouse living room being schooled by a father who’s ten years younger and a million miles more naïve (this being back when we all KNEW for a FACT that the United States of America would be a functioning democratic republic forever, and that the whole world was currently and would keep on forever following suit — since, I mean, democracy’s the best form of government, so it was only a matter of time … obviously! … ) than I am here and now in my lonely present.

Bartleby: Oh ho ho ho! Look who’s come in from his jet-set lifestyle financed by our irresistible prose, poetry, philosophy, and letters of deepest and most spiritually-refined love!

Andy: Actually, … about that, … uh, … never mind.

Amble: How did the copyright holder get here!? This ain’t no legal fiction: it’s a fiction fiction!

Bartleby: Whatever the magic, I’m glad you’re here, Andy. We need to do something about all this evil running roughshod over our shared destinies. And we you need to agree.

Andy: And I do. I totally agree. We have to stop the evil. We can’t keep slip-sliding every which way. The stakes have gotten too high. We’re going to have to learn how to actually help.

Amble: But how?! For that we’d need spiritual insight! And that’s just not happening.

Bartleby: Speak for yourself, tainted-love addict!

Amble: Like you’re the one to talk, Mr. “I’m Gonna Turn Into A Large-ish Sea Creature And Go Pout on the Bottom of Some Cold Dark Sea Whenever Things Don’t Quite Bend My Sulk-Whine-Pout Way”!

Bartleby: I never said that! That’s slander!, by which I mean “spoken defamation”.

Amble: I don’t care what you mean, and here I write it down within the idea-based space of this laptop I’ve got opened up here on a heavy-duty picnic table that looks suspiciously like one that used to be under the broad leaves of an old oak tree in Prospect Park! And, voila, call it “libel”, by which you’ll mean, “written defamation”, if you will, though we all know it’s the God’s Truth! You’re actions have time and time again bellowed, “Call me Mister ‘I’m Gonna Turn Into A Large-ish Sea Creature And Go Pout on the Bottom of Some Cold Dark Sea Whenever Things Don’t Quite Bend My Sulk-Whine-Pout Way’!” Again and again has your behavior chiseled this statement into the bones and marrow of human history.

Andy: All right, guys! Let’s cool it! We can’t stop the evil with internal strife.

Bartleby: I submit for your considerations: We start with a “Save Democracy” Lent. Like regular Lent, but instead of giving up something to be grateful to Jesus for allegedly saving our immortal souls by converting God-as-the-Son into the ultimate (“nuclear option”) sacrificial lamb, we’ll give up something until we’ve stopped Trump.

Amble: Yes! Until we’ve stopped Donald Trump from shoving his swollen certainty down our throats while whispering soft and smooth into our ears, “you know you like this, it’s okay, you can admit”!

Andy: Oh! OK. Give something up. Sure. Like what? Maybe I could give up meat.

Bartleby: You don’t even eat that much meat. Are you not aware where we are? We are the precipice. If there is a time to put the spirit first, it is now. How can we expect to interpret God’s guidance well if we don’t put the spirit first? And how can we figure out how to actually help without interpreting God’s guidance well?

Amble: Maybe I could give up info-harems.

Bartleby: Not good enough — especially now, as you’ve Susan to bleed your filthy passions into.

Amble: Oh?! Am I with Susan in this storyline? I was worried because she’s not yet been mentioned.

Bartleby: I don’t know. We’ll see. Let the moment and the Beauty percolate within me. And we’ll see. But in any case, TV-love is for you a side-weakness. You, Amble, need to give up tainted love. And, Andy, you need to give up alcohol.

Amble and Andy at the same time, loud and with giant terrified eyes: NO!

Bartleby: Yes! We’ll never be able to focus on the task at hand and God’s will for us and all the land unless we sacrifice vices we’re really attached to, vices that have seeped in and smashed right through, claiming us as their own, choking seed’s the spirit’s sown.

Amble: Hmmmm. Good point. So what’re you gonna give up?

Andy: Yeah, what?, and by posing this question I do not commit to giving up alcohol. I’m merely procedurally curious.

Bartleby: Ok, I’ll, I’ll …

Amble: You’ll give up turning into a sperm whale and sinking to the bottom of the North Atlantic, pouting in utter darkness, almost-freezing waters, and madcap pressure.

Andy: Yeah!, and by affirming this position I do not commit to giving up alcohol, which I clearly need to keep my brain lubricated and my heart open.

Bartleby: Do you guys want to stop the evil, or what?

Amble: Yes.

Andy: Well, I want it to stop. So much so that I’m willing to spend my spare time and energy helping to stop the evil, if there’s a way, a reliable path towards stopping the evil.

Amble: (to Andy) Same difference! (to Bartleby) That’s a, “Yes”, Andy’s in.

Bartleby: Okay, then I give up turning into sperm whales, Greenland sharks, and other large sea animals and sinking to the bottom of a deep dark frigid sea to contemplate the Forms.

Amble: You are the hell not contemplating the Forms down there! You are pouting!

Bartleby: Call it what you will, I won’t do it until US American democracy has fended off Donald Trump’s hostile takeover.

Amble: Okay, me too. No tainted love. No hiding in knowingly-twisted-up and purposely-misconstrued love.

Andy: Oh, fuck! What will I do? How will I cope? I’m so used to drinking on the weekend, so as to waste my life while pretending I’m alive and kicking. Fuck! OK, Ok, okay, let’s make a real effort here.

Author: B Willard
Editor: A Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

[To the Rescue]