So I was standing there on the court floor of the Marin County Hall of Justice, holding up my pants with one hand while trying to slip my belt back through the loops, and thinking about the state of things, which is personally fine these days but collectively dismal if it’s the country I am thinking about.
People adapt. This is both our blessing and our curse. If the human race did not adapt to its earthly environment it could not make it, yet it is our collective ability to adapt to craziness which, eventually, can sink us. This is what philosphers think of as ironic and what I think of as God’s sense of humor.
In this particular lifetime I have seen us adapt to the metric system, Sammy Davis, Jr., fast food, and the nuclear arms race. Politically, what used to be a lie is now “spin.”
They have a metal detector, along with security personnel, waiting for everyone who seeks admission or has been summoned to the courtrooms at the civic center. John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced Attorney General, once observed, “this country is going to go so far to the right you will not even recognize it.”
We’ve adapted to metal detectors everywhere, especially in public buildings or places where masses of people congregate. We’ve been told that ‘heightened security’ is necessary to protect us from vague but powerful forces known as ‘terrorists.’ We are surrendering freedom in increments. We will, if we fail to change course, one day awaken in a country which no longer has a meaningful Bill of Rights.
I’m all in favor of adapting to the natural environment. The human race has no practical alternative if it wishes to survive. But what exactly such adaptation consists of is a dangerous question and we don’t seem to have an answer just yet.
People lie to us about public matters. They wish to scare us into buying whatever it is that they’re selling, and it works. When it’s pop music or television shows, the damage is not so great; there are alternatives. Genius often rises anyhow. But when it’s public policy, when it’s wars or economic measures, the penalties are more severe and harder to reverse.
When I was a kid, there were strawberries. Today, except at farmers markets and the occasional health food emporium, there are these things they call strawberries but aren’t. They appear to be strawberries. However, beneath the gassed-to-red skin the flesh is white, watery, faintly metallic.
Retaining the terms, eviscerating the meaning, what we’ve got left is not what we thought we had and not what we’d been promised, once upon another time. It’s something to consider when you find yourself standing there next to a metal detector and holding up your pants with one hand because somebody said we had to adapt to a fictitious, post-something world.
