byChrisWhite – 2018

There is a peculiar incantation to the drift of thought, a rhythm as ancient as breath, as unreliable as memory, and I suspect it begins not in the mind but somewhere lower, a pulse below the ribs, soft and erratic. Call it what you will, contemplation, madness, the machinery of a restless soul. My own mind wanders like a mongrel dog through the brambles of song lyrics, burnt cheese, the glint of chrome on a Buick long gone.

It is not a curse. It is an inheritance. And in the ragged continuity of this drifting, I have found meaning that no catechism nor constitution could ever name.

I make no apology for the dilapidated engine of my cognition. It stutters. It forgets. It embellishes. The brain, after all, is not a vault but a cellar; things ferment there. Truth, fiction, recollection, delusion.

They share shelf space. And when I pull something down into the daylight, it is rarely what it was when first stored. Age gives it teeth or wings or wounds. The stories I tell, half of them happened, and the rest ought to have. That is enough.

These days, the thoughts drift less toward Led Zeppelin and more toward the circus of governance. Not by choice. It is a pull, magnetic and grotesque. Something in the blood calls out to it, some grim instinct I hate to admit, yet here I am doing exactly that.

The world does not simply tilt; it spasms. Every new day greets us with scandal or speech or scripture, all performed before the cameras like the ancient rites of Druids around Stonehenge, though the altars have changed, the punch-list different. It is louder now, crueler, more absurd. And yet—and yet—eerily familiar. Perhaps we have always been a nation of firebrands pretending at civility. I hope we were better. I need to believe we were better. 

Once we believed in newsmen. Anchors were oracles, their baritones resonant with a kind of secular holiness. They told us what was. And we nodded, spoon in mouth, television warm. Now, the truth is bespoke. Tailored to fit the ideological silhouette of every fool with a remote. We do not consume information. We curate it. The news is no longer a mirror but a menu. Everyone eats alone.

I confess my bias. I am an extremist centrist in exile. I believe in the mad fantasy that reason might one day triumph over theatrics. That we might feed the hungry and yet balance the ledger. That the old and the lame might be cared for without dismantling the house we built. But such thoughts mark one as a relic. Moderation is neither saint nor martyr in this new religion. It is simply ignored.

In truth, I think most of us live in the narrowing middle. We are not the caricatures they draw of us. We are not red or blue, not beasts or saints. We are complicated, contradictory, inconsistent. But tribalism has made nuance a liability. We speak in absolutes now. We speak like zealots. Because it is easier. Because it feels safer. The neighbor with the yard sign becomes the enemy. The cousin with the bumper sticker, a heretic. We have forgotten how to disagree without drawing blood. 

Or better yet, how do disagree without the other knowing. 

And so we clutch our certainties like relics, terrified of the void that might open if we let them go. This is not patriotism. It is pathology. We are sick with identity, bloated on slogans. We no longer seek to understand. We seek to win.

Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times” spins somewhere in the brain. It scratches at memory. Youth, perhaps. Or defiance. Or the particular sadness of knowing that joy never stays long. And in the great cathedral of that music, in the madness of its crescendos, I sometimes find clarity. Not because the lyrics answer anything—they don’t, but because they remind me that mystery can be music, and music can be enough.

It is true, we are more alike than different. But try telling that to a man with his eyes glued to a channel that has taught him otherwise. He will not believe you. He cannot. His entire epistemology depends on your deception. We live in echo chambers. We have confused hearing with understanding. And in doing so, we have rendered ourselves deaf.

No man truly understands Washington. It is a palace of illusions. Theater performed behind locked doors, beneath marble and menace. The citizens watch, but they do not see. They judge, but they do not know. We shout from the cheap seats, not realizing that the script was written long ago, and not for our benefit. Their fights are staged to impress, and further indoctrinate. 

So I drift. I return to music, to thought, to reverie. I abandon the pundits and the polls and disappear into the squall of “Dazed and Confused.” There, in the vibration, in the distortion, is a kind of truth. It is not neat. It is not comforting. But it is real.

And I think, perhaps, that is the point. That truth is not found in doctrine or headlines or the declarations of the righteous. Truth is fugitive. It slips past you, disguised. You catch it only in fragments. In the twitch of a smile. In the hesitation before someone answers a question. In the smell of rain on a rusted gate.

Respect, then, becomes the only commandment worth keeping. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. To respect those who think unlike you, that is the final frontier of grace. We celebrate diversity until it confronts us. Until it challenges our orthodoxy. Then we retreat into contempt. But this is not strength. It is fear, finely dressed.

If you’re transgender, and it is conservatism you despise, choose to respect the person, and in so doing, respect yourself. If you’re in a motorcycle gang and you despise transgendered people, choose to respect the person and the same freedom of choice you made when you grew the ponytail. In the end, we all make choices and want the other to respect our right to choose. So, what’s the issue? Do that. 

We don’t choose our politics. Politics chooses us. Half get picked by one team, the other half get picked by the other team. And both teams are made up of idiots who cannot seem to respect the other’s team. 

And where does it lead? To silence. To violence. To a world where love is conditional and agreement is the price of admission. But that is not the world I choose. I choose the wild tangle of differing minds. The long table where argument and affection coexist. Because that is what is real. Everything else is posturing.

I dare you lay a list of every actual party line, not the ones the teams’ ascribe to each other but the real one’s, and not pick at least one thing you agree with from the other team. Not possible unless you’re disabled in some way. 

I sit there now. In my mind. The room is full. The voices rise and fall. Somewhere in the distance, a song plays. You know the one. And I think: John Bonham was a hell of a drummer. That much, at least, we can agree on.