Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

I’m all in when it comes to establishment clause of the US Constitution. I think it was put in as a response to more topical and pressing reasons that were very much alive in the minds and memories of the founders. Intriguingly, those reasons are proving just as important today even though we have accumulated vastly more knowledge to build our reasoning on. That said, I find it curiously entertaining about the recent news from Texas requiring schools to display the 10 Commandments in classrooms. 

Curious because, if you’re going to insist on paying attention to the mighty 10, I wonder how much attention is going to be paid to the latter half of the list. You know the ones about bearing false witness (lying), stealing, killing, commtting adultery, and coveting. 

Entertained because, hey this is just another ring in the circus run by clowns searching for a ringmaster. Remember, this is coming out of the same brain dumps that think ignoring and not teaching history is a good idea and that teachers shouldn’t be able to talk about our flaws and differences as individuals and a society.

So, tell me. How’s a teacher going to respond when some youngster asks about the lying, cheating, stealing, killing, adultering and coveting that these modern day clown crusaders practice and praise so openly?

Remember kids say the darndest things. 

And five will get you ten that the last half of the 10 Commandments will eventually get edited out of the picture. 

In the beginning there was one rule. Don’t eat the damn apple.

We’ve been adding rules, regulations, laws, by-laws, and constitutions ever since. Rules may be meant to be broken so I guess we like to break things because we keep making more and more of them. We also like to make rules for others and not ourselves in the same way we think other folks’ rules don’t apply to us. Heck, even those who don’t like rules and regulations as a thing into and of themselves, love making up rules and regulations to try and circumvent the rules and regulations that get in their way. We’re a wacky bunch we humans.

I once leased from and later worked for a theatre manager who had an ever expanding lease. Each time a tenant would do something he deemed inappropriate he would add a new clause to the lease to try and prevent that behavior in the future. He also, at lease signing, had the practice of reading out loud each and every clause in the lease and telling new tenants exactly who was responsible for the addition of each clause. It was always quite a show. Too bad he didn’t sell tickets to watch it.

We don’t like to reigned in. It’s where this whole freedom thing comes from. We want to be free to do what we want. We just don’t want those we disagree with to be free to do what they want. So we make up rules. If we have enough power we make up rules to take away rules from others. Those are the rules.

When someone gets angry and wants to get rid of red tape, they typically have to use “the rule of law” to do so.

That old comfort blanket, “the rule of law,” has seen better days. It may actually just be hanging around like that quilt your grandma made as a reminder of what’s lost. Memories of things long gone. Or perhaps were never really there in the first place.

Consider:

• The stripping of child labor protections. Who knew folks in Arkansas read so much Dickens?
• The battle over abortion.
• Voting restrictions.
• Guns.
• Sheriffs who choose not to enforce laws they don’t like.
• Banning books and libraries.
• Anything happening in Florida, Arkansas, or pick a red-state.

That list could go on. (And does.)

“The rule of law” only works as a rule when everybody plays by the same rules. Or more importantly pretends to. Sad fact. At no time in history has everyone played by the same rules. We’ve done a lot of pretending though.

Ignoring all the rules when they get in the way seems like the latest trend. Take Clarence Thomas. Take Neil Gorsuch. Please. Take most of the Supreme Court thinking a bit too supreme for most people’s liking. And not caring that they are essentially undermining whatever they aren’t hiding behind those robes.

Take any number of politicians. Throw a dart and you’ll score a bullseye. But I don’t think it’s a new trend.

Are we living in some sort of new age where those of us offended (easily or no) by rule-making rule-breakers really have no where to turn?

No. It’s always been this way. Throughout the history of mankind. Pretending takes too much effort. There’s just no longer any incentive to hide the game, much less the rules. The illusion has been shattered from the top to the bottom. When a huge chunk of the populace can push hard to nominate and elect an indicted decaying orange turd for president, given all that we know, but the system can’t seem or want to find a way to hold him accountable, there’s no system or collection of rules to have faith in any longer. When the chief justice of the Surpeme Court can simply decline to answer questions about the intergrity of his institution what’s the point of that instituion even existing any longer.

Some of those suffering are going through the same kind of awakening that most children do when they discover their parents are human and have faults. Many doing the yelling and screaming about this supposed rule breaking are just pissed that they weren’t shameless or gutless enough to do it first.

The shysters no longer give a damn about things like shame. The suckers and the suckups keep contributing, whether they be small donors or large and it’s better to focus their energy on hoovering up the loose change than  the masquerade.

The rules haven’t changed. The games haven’t changed. The game players just realize they don’t have to work so hard on their act to bilk the bumpkins.

Read this book. Highly recommended. 

That’s the summary and the sum. 

I’m a big admirer of Jeff Sharlet. Have been for awhile. That admiration deepened with his latest book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. (That’s not an affiliate link if you’re wondering.) 

Sharlet likes to get right into the middle and the depths of the topics he’s exploring. He certainly does here as he walks the walk and talks the talk with a number of folks in the MAGA world seeking to understand just how close the embers of their smoldering hatred is to igniting. 

Here’s a quote from the blurb that comes close to doing this book justice:

Exploring a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with our precarious present that brings to light a decade of American failures as well as a vision for American possibility.

Make no mistake. While Sharlet’s style makes for more than engaging reading the subject matter is not easy to swallow. But it’s a medicine that I think we all need to take if we want to understand what’s afflicting our national psyche in this era beyond the media moments both social and otherwise.

As someone who thinks we’re already in the early stages of this country’s next Civil War I would argue the word “slow” in the title might have more aptly applied 7-10 years ago. That said, the stories and moments Sharlet relates leave no doubt that the divisions we face are so deep that the chances to bridge them are few and far between and perhaps already out of reach.

Again, I highly recommend the book as I do the rest of Sharlet’s work. If you haven’t seen The Family on Netflix. I’d encourage you to check that out as well as Sharlet’s other work.