Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

America is 245 years old.

That’s under 2.5x older than Betty White.

Was.

RIP

Danish scientists believe there is a shark in the Greenland vicinity c̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶T̶r̶u̶m̶p̶ who is older than that. So is Twinings Tea. And despite one being a fish and the other inanimate objects, both are more civilized than the US, as of late.

“Civilized” exists in contrast to barbarity: you know, behavior like storming the Capitol, or rioting and looting and other American pastimes.

It may mean, simply, not being rude. You know, like tweeting and commenting and canceling and baseball and other fun-filled American pastimes.

“Civ” is derived from the Latin root “civis” which relates to being of a city. A citizen. The denotations are straigjtforward: “A citizen is either a native or naturalized member of a state who owes allegiance to its government and is entitled to its protection” (Dictionary.com).

The Declaration of Independence is under attack because of its hypocrisy, and as one of the persons completely omitted from it until 1920, I continue to defend the power and potential set forth. On the surface, it publicly rejected the divine right of kings in favor of the divine rights of non-kings. BOOM.

In the depths, lurks the potential – that self-upgrading feature that whomever the hell is running Apple and my Android should build in without the constant notications and space gorging.

Redirect.

For a while it seemed like we were growing up. We outgrew the terrible twos and potty trained. The better angel in us won the great internal conflict. We made it to middle school where the bully problem persisted. We elected some curious, disastrous, and handsome G.O. presidents. There was a lot of color war.

Fast forward, or flashback, to the 1980s. Please let’s never ruin that decade. Can we keep it under glass with laser sensors that neither Indiana Jones nor upside down Tom Cruise could compromise? The Love’s Baby Soft – Silver City Pink – Hello Kitty – First Wave – Shoulder Padded – Good Bill Cosby days. The penultimate 20th century decade when no one – absolutely no one- used the word “penultimate” and the last decade when no one except maybe Al Gore used the Internet.

80s kids are now mid-century years old, which is 1/5 the age of America, which should make us feel ancient, while underscoring how young this superpower truly is. A superpower that projected authority and capacity but recently revealed itself to be the man behind the curtain.

Our Toto is the internet.

Since the start of the pandemic the information coming at us from trusted sources who contradict one another – even themselves – with the ferocity of, well, our internet addiction.

I am not an existentialist: I grip the (uncool) belief that essence precedes existence. We did not create meaning. We find it.