Landscape, Walter Clark, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Absurd is a word that cannot exist.
I know the previous sentence is, itself, absurd because I know, as you do, that it is a word. It’s been written, performed, analyzed, and philosophized about for centuries.
I’ve also used it twice already.
It’s a word I’ve been thinking a lot about since the pandemic began, and how, since normalcy is now a refugee, unmoored and adrift in a sea of uncertainty even as COVID cases continue to subside, the world feels ridiculous. Irrational. Out of tune.
Everything is coming apart at the seams, it seems.
Is our reality crumbling?
Absurd just fits this current situation of political and social upheaval. It’s comfortable. Familiar. A well-worn jacket we can wrap around our shoulders when there’s a cold bite in the air that’s eager to unsettle us. It’s easy to brandish about, labeling any incongruity we encounter as indefinitely incongruous as we head home with our heads down.
We use it as an antidote to the ills that afflict us.
We saw disease and death ravage our country’s most vulnerable for the sake of capitalism and a megalomaniac. We saw a violent coup fail for an emperor without clothes or moral code, nearly toppling our democracy in an effort to further enshrine white supremacy in our country.
Further Reading:
The narratives tilt, spin, and twist into unfamiliar shadows, co-opted by bad-faith actors and regurgitated for reactionaries. And our only answer is exasperated denials that it’s even happening as we question our own sanity.
To accept the current reality of crumbling democratic norms, rising right-wing authoritarianism, and worsening economic and social disparities is to confront what feels like an insurmountable laundry list of impending disasters. And that’s just at home.
But this is our world. Our reality. And we can either live with it or fix it, but regardless of what we do, we can’t keep categorizing such impasses as absurd and outlandish and expect things to fix themselves because we’re staring down two distinct possibilities for our future:
America is surpassed as a global superpower, undone from its own incompetence and infighting.
Corporate America fills the void for the profit of it, though we know capitalism shows little loyalty to America and it will quickly capitulate to powerful malignant forces to protect the bottom line.
Neither works for Americans, but we could work to create something better, though it’d mean admitting our current absurd reality does not exist. And that’s not easy.
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