“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself,” admonished Camus.
Does that include non-professional writers? People who like to indulge on the side? Because it seems as if civilization is ever more intent on destroying itself, and I feel like I should write something--anything.
I grant that cyberspace likely does not need another blog. I would contend that both the cosmos and the polis actually need less noise and more listening. And, Wendell Berry even warns us against screens in “How to Be a Poet (to Remind Myself)”:
...
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in…
Yet, as Donald Trump orders 59 Tomahawk missiles to Syria--or was it Iraq?--over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.” As he authorizes the dropping of the “mother of all bombs.” Did he authorize it? Yes, “Everybody knows exactly what happened. What I do is I authorize my military.” As the reality-show president takes on a new lethal reality, it is difficult not to write something--anything--even if it ends up just being for myself in this little echo chamber.
We know that this did not begin with Trump, nor does it end with him. Imperialism and war have been part of the national fabric for generations. They have been sold and swallowed since our founding. The juxtaposition of our great proclamations of liberty next to our crimes has provided theater of the absurd to Native American, Vietnamese, Iraqi, and countless other audiences.
Yet, what the man-child Trump and his opportunist acolytes do is heighten that absurdity even more--by the day, it seems. They take the absurdity and rub it in our faces. They rub it, in particular, in the faces of the most vulnerable: the poor, the immigrant, the refugee. Yes, we should have been resisting the tripartite evils of racism, poverty, and militarism (M.L. King) all along. Yet, Trump is now, and thus we must resist now.
Historian Timothy Snyder in his recent, short manifesto, On Tyranny, warns us of the trappings of the web: “Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.”
That is, the words must become flesh.
