Life And Death And Politics

Since the death of my aunt, the last of that generation in my family, I've had a hard time finding motivation to write here. It's been a long time since I've felt as involved in something really meaningful as being there when she died. Few moments are as intimate, and that my cousin was willing to share it with Judy and me has left me grateful, still deep in thought.

By comparison, the usual political bullshit, threatening though it is to our future, seems well beneath the merely annoying. As depressing as are the rise of Rick Perry and the enthusiasm of so many (any at all, really) for Michele Bachmann, two people who represent the lowest common denominator and the worst of our human inclinations toward scapegoating, paranoia, divisiveness, and resorting to magical thinking, I find it hard to get as excited as I've been. Or, maybe, it's that I just don't want to. Life is about life. Today's politics avoids it, is nothing more than rude noise. Destructive, dangerous noise. Scary noise. But suddenly, reading the latest outrage from the RWS™ or their congressional tools, instead of wanting to vent my anger by pounding the keyboard I find myself taking a breath and turning the page. Or I start to write, and quit halfway through. (The latest was Michele Bachmann's claim of being linked into god's message service regarding Irene, her claim she was kidding, and her explanation that makes it clear she wasn't. What kind of god kills a couple score of innocents, I wondered; sends a message to D.C. by wreaking destruction everywhere but there, scourging the city by leaving it with nothing but a couple of cracked phallic symbols. What, he could't just pick up the phone? And then I hit the delete button.)

On the evening of my aunt's death, after taking my cousin out for a nice dinner and talking about the events of the past days and weeks, Judy and I shared a feeling of having participated in something transcendent (at least w/r/t our pathetic politics). For Judy, it was the first time she'd attended death. For me, it was among many I'd seen as a surgeon, but this was emotionally very different. I was there when my dad died, too. Then, I'd had to participate in the decision to withdraw support, help my mom to understand through the fog of her dementia, be the medical liaison between his caregivers and my siblings. Freighted it was, and still is. If there are no second thoughts, there remain many unpleasant ones. When Maria died, sad as it was, the end of an inspiring life lived to the fullest, her way, it seemed undeniably a part of life, a necessary part, about which, notwithstanding understandable grief, there were needed no regrets.

Against this, the kabuki of broken and cynical politics seems an afterthought, a nearly laughable (were it not so horrible and depressing) example of people deliberately missing the point, missing it by a mile. Because it's what their supporters demand.

So who knows? With any luck, I'll maintain this sense of the value of life and of the emptiness of our current brand of politics, and stop caring so much. At dinner with my cousin, the three of us were talking about all sorts of things. Mentioning the approach of our fortieth anniversary, I came up with a little witticism: the secret of a long marriage, I said, is learning how to stop giving a shit. It got a good laugh. The little stuff, the unimportant things, idiosyncrasies, the ones that used to drive me crazy: in the end, who cares? What do they matter?

The prospect of a Perry or Bachmann or Romney presidency -- choose among the proudly illiterate or the unabashedly unprincipled -- is hardly unimportant idiosyncrasy, given the inevitable damage to our country that would follow. Even so, against having spent those most precious moments, I think I just might not give a shit any more. If the US elects any of those as its next president, well, it deserves every bit of the devastation that will follow. Of course the destruction will fall upon us all, even those who saw it coming and called out warnings. But WTF. It is what it is.

And since it'll be too late to change once the havoc is wreaked, not caring will be the only option left, short of killing our neighbors and eating them.