The Year of the Snake
As this new administration comes to power with the thinnest margins of Congressional control imaginable, the corporate overcorrection towards “anti-woke” and anti-inclusivity at Meta, (this has been discussed to death, but Mark Zuckerberg presenting himself as an avatar of masculinity, boy howdy!) Amazon (Democracy dies in what?), and even Starbucks (whose executives absolutely, never even for one second, wanted people to sit in their stores without making a purchase, but thought pretending otherwise was good marketing) is quite a precipitous pivot.
And while I understand the current baksheesh as price of business thing, and can thus see Tim Cook’s position on donating to the inauguration fund, Zuckerberg throwing T**** a big party after his indoor inauguration (which will doubtlessly be billed as “the largest indoor inauguration ever”) is a truly ridiculous. This is showing the con in question that you are a mark with endless potential for being worked over.
Despite recent carping by Andreessen and all of this thirsty behavior by Zuckerberg, one thing massive wealth cannot buy outright is societal approbation. Anyone who has been paying even a small amount of attention over the past twenty-five years knows that Mark Zuckerberg is a mealy-mouthed, feckless, solipsistic nerd, whose “hot or not” undergrad website was initially coded well enough to regrettably METAtaztize into his current company and billions in wealth; however, regardless of this, he still has the charisma of a jar of whitefish.
2.
As Faulkner acknowledged in not so many words when he accepted the Nobel Prize quite a few years ago, we as humans are some real pieces of work.
We don’t really seem to need very much incentive to be nasty, as it’s seemingly coded into our DNA as implacably as our impulse to altruism, and now here we find ourselves in a new era of “permission,” living in “T****’s America,” and all that nonsense.
I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg has always thought gay people were “mentally ill,” but “prominent”members of our society even quite recently feared pushback for equating sexuality and mental health disorders, or using other forms of highly demeaning language, but that exercise of caution in service of inclusion seems to have really worn on the privileged over time.
All that being what it is, I am not just going to repudiate whatever garbage urges this “permissive” moment offers up in the way of intrusive thoughts going forward, as there is really something quite ugly in the zeitgeist right now, but am in fact going to mobilize in quite the opposite direction and double down on choosing to be my better self whenever possible.
We can’t out ugly the big ugly rearing it’s head right now, but we can choose, in whatever version of the present we’re living in, to follow the call of our better angels, not the siren call of pointless cruelty.
I was on my way to work yesterday, and ended up in line at the gas station behind an elderly woman who was buying an improbable number of scratch tickets in cash, and as she inspected her scratchies and recounted her cash a few more unnecessary times, I could feel the vengeful ghost of Ayn Rand hissing in my inner ear, “this person is an OBSTACLE!”
But then I took a breath, and I reminded myself that:
It was not my turn.
I told myself that I would calmly wait my turn, and would not spend the ensuing time wishing multiple calamities upon the low stakes gambler in front of me.
All of this current embrace of cruelty for cruelty’s sake does not bode well for the present, but it also does not fully augur the future. There’s always a backlash against the backlash, ad infinitum, and kindness still remains free, hope still remains a muscle, and while we cannot choose our times, we can still choose how we inhabit them.