Phthursday Musings: America Goes Coup Coup

I intended to write something a little more serious today. Something to work things out in my mind. “Musings” just didn’t seem quite right as a way to think about the aftermath of one of the darkest days in American history.

But the thing is, I’m in the midst of what’s shaping up to be another 55 hour work week. I’ve tried a couple of times to start something more substantial, but haven’t really been able to get it going. And honestly, I don’t want to rail about police or fascism or what-have-you right now.

I’m just too tired to be too mad. I think I should be much, much angrier but I’m not.

I think I thought that if we ever had quite such a day that I wouldn’t be spending it buried in work, I wouldn’t be cooped up at home… I wouldn’t feel so damn detached from it. And I do feel detached from it. Maybe that’s not quite the right word. But I don’t have a better one.

I’ll have more to write about it all. I’ve been reading some things which, as it so happens, are relevant to all of this. Maybe in a couple of days.

It’s hard to get down thoughts about much of anything else. But here goes:

I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. I’ll still check on the laptop because I don’t have an alternate answer for how to stay in touch with some people.

I’m with the economist Matt Stoller. You look at the totality of the record, and somebody should be arresting Mark Zuckerberg and charging him with at least anti-trust violations. Facebook is essentially a criminal enterprise.

Many, if not most, of the largest corporations are also essentially criminal enterprises, of course, this being America and everything.

Not that I expect someone like Zuckerberg to ever get arrested, mind you. Not a single banker got arrested after 2008. Look, white collar criminals can only get arrested if they do truly, truly heinous things, like commit mail fraud, or be Martha Stewart.

We’re transitioning, without knowing exactly what it is that we’re transitioning to. I can look back and see a lineage of how electronic communication has worked in my own life for 25 years. That constant evolution has, if anything, notably slowed down in the last few years compared to all the ways it was changing before. Whether you think this is because of Facebook and Google and Twitter and so forth, or you think that a certain point was reached where it only made sense for all of them to consolidate around what they had… I don’t want to get into that so much here because I don’t think it’s the most relevant question. My point is that we’ve been centralizing and now I think we’re entering an era of splintering, and I think we should embrace it.

I finished reading 26 books in 2020. For a while my pace was a lot higher, and as the year wore on, I just couldn’t focus as well.

Most of the books I read, I haven’t talked to anyone about them. I keep harboring this idea that we all read books and we discuss the books and the books make us think and then when we discuss we think some more and it’s all terribly edifying. But in reality, it seems like I read and at best I make an off-handed comment about a book and then move on.

I could write about books here but that seems kind of weird since the whole point I’m making is to discuss and not just write book reports, you know?

I know others have a different take on reading and see it a very personal sort of thing. And I don’t suppose I’m going to outright stop reading! But it seems especially strange to read books “everyone else is reading” and… that’s it.

I don’t know that a “book club” is the answer. But I do wonder if there isn’t something else to be done. This, to me, is a realm where even if we’re “splintering” as I wrote above, we could still be coming together in a different way, without it having to be centralized in a social media thread. I’m hoping someone had a concrete suggestion here.

Most of what I read is nonfiction. The books that stood out, though, seem to have been among the sillier of the fiction books.

Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth is ridiculous and eminently worth your time. It’s about chickens. Mostly though I think it’s about finding meaning where it seems like there’s not a lot of meaning to be found.

Ring On Deli by Eric Giroux is very much the same thing. I mean, it has almost nothing in common with Barn 8. It takes place in Massachusetts instead of Iowa. There are chickens, but they’re not central to the plot. But it too is about finding meaning where it seems like there’s not a lot of meaning to be found. And I think it’s an especially perceptive book about the daily murkiness of the human condition. You should probably buy it. You might not talk to me about it later; you might not talk to me ever again after reading it. But, you might. If you do eed my advice here, please order it directly from the source: https://ringondeli.com/

I try to write most of these musings before Thursday. This week I had nothing. And it’s getting late in the day. I suppose it’s time to channel my grandmother and say:

Well, bye.