Yet another man has self-immolated, this time in New York City. He drove from Florida to New York to light himself on fire in what he saw as a protest against a corrupted US government controlled by billionaires. A few weeks back another man lit himself on fire in DC to protest treatment of Palestinians, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
While this is not the act of a man in full control of his mental faculties it is also not a casual way to commit suicide. Not only is it very public, and very dramatic, it is an extremely painful and awful way to decide to end your life.
Personally I think this speaks to our current societal condition.
There is no escape from politics in our daily lives.
And, the products created to engage with us online are created to keep us online, they have been purposely designed to want us to feed on the programs, be it a Tik Tok, or Instagram, Twitter, or Youtube. They have all been created to appeal to our senses in a way that we want to stay engaged. Willingly or not.
I know that I am certainly not immune to the pull of these devices and programs.
I can find myself sitting on a beach with the most spectacular view imaginable splayed out before me, and yet I’ll reach for the phone. The most beautiful and expensive yachts go by to enter the Lake Worth Inlet, and head for Palm Beach, and instead of viewing this parade I reach for the phone. I’ll sit at home watching a series on Netflix and become bored with a scene, and I reach. The wife wants a drink, so we put the series on pause to allow her to go grab something as we watch, and in that very brief interlude I reach again.
I think this is all related. I know it may sound like a stretch but I think society is being stretched to their last nerve, being pulled, manipulated, aggravated, in many, many small and insignificant ways that in the cumulative affect is making us all a bit insane.
Where can you go to escape politics, the culture wars?
We used to escape to “Hollywood”, and movies. There was a time, pre-air conditioning, that people escaped both the heat outdoors, and reality, for just a few hours of leisure escape, into a whole different world onscreen.. Sure the stories could be morality plays, and based in three acts on time honored traditional tales, rewritten as a love story, or big western showdown, but we were at that time a moral nation.
Today you sit home, watch a streaming service, and are treated to an entirely different morality tale, one absent all morality. I just recounted some “Baby Reindeer” seven part series I watched where the main character experienced homosexual rape and yet went back for more on multiple occasions, dated a trans woman, had his father confess to being buggered by members of the Catholic Church in his youth, and had a serious stalker ruining all aspects of his life. Oh, and he enthusiastically took hard drugs regularly and recklessly, and as a main character was a person going nowhere in life, no where at all.
If, in watching television, you are seeking an escape from our societal culture wars and this is “Number One on Netflix”, then you haven’t escaped the culture wars at all, what you have done is to bathe in a seven part propaganda machine meant to mainstream perversion and depravity. Certainly all of these things happen in our society, all the bad things that happened to this main character. But trumpeting them and showing them as if common fare is to normalize the behaviors, is to say look around you, this is what is happening all around you unnoticed.
Except it isn’t.
These are rare incidents. This is not an “everyman’s story”. Raising awareness will not lead to some cure. There are no male homosexual perverted rapists watching “Baby Reindeer” and coming away with some message of “Yeah, I see the damage, uh, I think I’ll refrain from that activity next time”.
So you can’t escape into movies anymore, they are no longer a world where the poor and struggling can go and see Fred Astaire dancing in a tuxedo and be taken from their life of want into an entirely different world of glamour and riches. Or to forget the bad day at work and the bad boss experiences and go out to the local theater and see John Wayne avenge the bad guys, and feel as if he is winning one for you.
No, pretty much all fare coming out of “Hollywood” these days is just depraved. And we are learning that “Nickelodian” was grooming our kids with some pretty ridiculous scenes, this isn’t limited to adult content. Bill Maher this week showed a woman from Disney bragging on a zoom call during Covid that she “tried to shove as much LGBTQ+ as she could” into their children’s programming. She said slow at first but when no one stopped her she just got bolder and bolder. Your kids, exposed to alphabet mafia propaganda unwittingly and constantly, a purposeful bombardment.
You can’t escape, your kids can’t either.
I have found that “X”, or Twitter, is nothing but a rage machine. It takes mere minutes to turn you from a happy, content, bright individual to a monster who wants to shout out in 140 characters the worst bile imaginable. In less than minutes. People post their politics there with a staunch and firm hand, and it is easy to want to go on “blast”, use the F word liberally and just eviscerate strangers.
Across these other platforms it is all a “look at me” machine, and if you aren’t sitting in a resort, or fancy restaurant, as all your friends and relatives seem to be, you can feel as if you are falling behind. Failing. Losing in the game of life.
This one over here is eating a steak that costs $ 125, a real “Tomahawk Chop”. That one over there is in the South of France. You can’t name a town in the South of France, how the Hell did your friend from college get over there, afford to just spend weeks there? You are struggling to make your car payment. They are dining oceanside and drinking bottles of Beaujolais.
Your anxiety goes up. Your sense of self-worth goes down. All while sitting on your own sofa. This one is posting a picture of their new BMW, that one just got engaged and is sporting a two carat rock. Your hair is a mess and you have eighty-seven dollars in your checking account. “Kill me now” is all you can think.
These devices, the online community, it is pervasive, it is ever-present, it surrounds us all constantly, without interruption, there is nowhere to turn to turn it all off.
No wonder a man can become so overwhelmingly engaged in conspiracy theories about how our government has been consumed by the Oligarchy. You can go down the rabbit hole of discussion, videos, and articles for days on end. You can have sleepless nights chewing on a single subject, become over-engaged. And if you are someone prone to depression, or emotional problems, or even someone feeling a bit blue, taking this rabbit hole plunge can send you soaring over the edge. Not just into suicide, but self-immolation, which is suicide lit up large for all to witness. This isn’t half-a-bottle of pills in bed and only close family and friends learn about your demise. This is a Broadway production of suicide. This is someone driven to heights of mental illness beyond comprehension.
I think we see this reflected today everywhere we look. We can’t escape politics, we can’t escape the culture wars, we can’t remove ourselves from our anxieties because the devices and programs are written to heighten our anxieties, grip our anxieties.
Everyone you meet is on edge. Fights break out at Waffle House daily, on every corner in NYC, those of us in full control of our faculties and living just a normal vanilla life sit back and read about all this, and view the ongoing madness, and feel as if the world is spinning out-of-control.
And yet there we are, keeping it all together because after all we aren’t insane, we are well-mannered individuals, our minds are capable of coping, and even we reach. For the computer, the tablet, the phone.
People need an escape. To the movies, to sports.
Sports. Women now compete with “transgender men”. See, can’t escape. A basketball player suspended from gambling, the online world intruding again. Now we can’t trust basketball results. Let’s turn on golf, oh look a LIV-PGAT war has broken out in the staid, stuffy, country club world of golf. Football? CTE, Kneeling for the anthem.
AAAIIIGGHHH!
Movies are “Woke”, sports are “Woke”.
Seriously, what are we all supposed to do?
When the escape from the drudgery becomes more drudgery, all hope is lost.
When all hope is lost and you have nowhere to turn, what happens?
Look around at how the madness is spreading.
This, this our current reality, this is what happens.
The question is, what happens next?