Bad for the brain, worse for the heart

I cannot keep up. I can barely keep up reading the posts of others who are trying, bravely, to keep up. But they can’t keep up either.

Heather Cox Richardson valiantly tries to present a matter-of-fact daily keeping-of-the-minutes for future historians. This attempt to keep up earns her criticism as “alarmist” or — because she is a woman — “hysterical.” Because the attempt to maintain a dispassionate record of current events is, due to the current events being recorded, inevitably alarming. Even her deliberately neutral convention of titling all of her posts with only each day’s date is somehow perceived now as partisan or alarmist. The title “January 3, 2006” thus gets interpreted by some as hyperventilating, even if the post itself is merely a terse account of the actual events of that day.

But Dr. Richardson didn’t create or curate those events. She’s just trying to keep up.

My generation of old-school bloggers are also struggling to keep up. We’ve done this before — opposing ill-conceived, dubious American invasions and occupations is how a lot of us first got into this whole blogging thing, after all. But the pace and chaos and incoherence of the present has us running ragged to keep up. Here, for example, is Robert Farley at LGM:

I suppose at this point that we hope that Maduro isn’t immediately replaced by a more brutal successor, that Venezuela does not collapse into civil war, and that the United States does not get further drawn into that conflict. That’s all I got, folks; hope. And not much of it.

Adam Silverman got tasked with writing up an “explainer” for Balloon Juice and seems unhappy with the assignment. Even prolific link-and-snark curmudgeons like rmj at Adventus are struggling to keep up.

No blogger or reporter or pundit or historian or commentator is going to be able to help us make sense of what’s going on when the people in charge are, themselves, unable to make sense of it. “After Venezuela operation, Trump says the whole hemisphere is in play,” Politico reports, with the president hinting at invasions of Cuba, Greenland, Mexico, and Colombia, by name. So far.

I keep thinking of this scene, from Heart of Darkness and then from Apocalypse Now:

“Are my methods unsound?” Kurtz asks. And Marlow/Willard says “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

Lurking beneath that scene, of course, is the horror of Kurtz’s description of the only real method he understands: “Exterminate all the brutes.” Or, as Kurtz’s heir put it yesterday, live on television on Fox & Friends, “We can do it again, nobody can stop us.”

That statement seems alarming, which I guess is why I have to source it to a post on BlueSky and not to the more official channels of mainstream journalism, where that quote hasn’t gotten much attention at all. I suppose that reporting on the president of the United States saying, “We can do it again, nobody can stop us” might seem “alarmist.”

The title for this post comes from Wendell Berry’s “First Amendment” to his “Mad Farmer Manifesto”:

To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart. The world
is a holy vision, had we clarity
to see it—a clarity that men
depend on men to make.

We cannot hope to keep up with the unholy visions. But we can seek and perhaps create the clarity to see something better.