Romping Through the Apocalypse

When the only comfort is selfie-like preening and the understanding that it can always get worse.

Some people get drunk. Others take drugs. Still others channel their worldly despair into workalcoholic obsessions or lose themselves in helping others…. What usually works for me, however, is the playful pleasure of makeup, hair, and fashion.

Today, for instance, I spent my lunch break in front of a nearby store’s dressing room mirror trying on rompers. Summer’s coming! Laser-like, I focused on how my reflection looked in different styles and colors.

But nothing worked. I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. For I kept thinking of the words I’d discovered from an interview with man-of-letters George Steiner:

….we can’t shave in the morning, we can’t look at ourselves, knowing a hundred thousand people are being buried alive; the razor doesn’t work on the skin. No woman can put on her makeup and think of herself as human.

At the time he was referring to the Holocaust, the Soviet gulag and, specifically, Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide. But he could be talking about the horrors happening right now in Syria and the hopelessness of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Jarring, isn’t it? Juxtaposing a narrative about coming to terms with the seemingly never-ending tragedy of the human condition with the latest summer styles (I really do like the way long sleeves make rompers less in-your-face, more subtly sexy).

From my protective perch in that part of Europe that remains idyllic, the views over the Mediterranean and back across the Atlantic seem distressingly, increasingly similar. The protesters taking over the Iraqi parliament and the dysfunction in the U.S. Congress have the same root cause: the inability to compromise and work together toward a common good. President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is treated as if he’s the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. And remember Republican Senator Mitch McConnell’s brazen boast — dashing all bipartisan, for-the-good-of-the-country hopes — when he said his only goal was to defeat President Obama?

It’s that kind of rhetoric that sets up the following (very plausible) scenario, as recently envisioned by Joel Garreau in Foreign Policy magazine:

So what if Hillary Clinton wins in a squeaker? Where does this year’s anger go and how is it manifested? Suppose a significant minority of the country refuses to recognize the legitimacy of her administration? I am beginning to fear the sort of “Bleeding Kansas”-style resistance we saw in the 1850s. Imagine Oregon-militia style takeovers of federal facilities happening routinely. Imagine IRS offices fire-bombed. Imagine state legislatures — South Carolina, Arizona, Idaho — declining to cooperate with what they call “the illegitimate Clinton regime.”

We’ve seen this movie before — a century ago when W. B. Yeats penned, “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”

So maybe, as George Steiner posits, we are not really — and never were — rational Homo sapiens on the road upward but, instead, forever condemned by Original Sin? He calls it “dis-grace, fall from grace, interruption of some kind of relationship to God…. Then history is a punishment, and we have stumbled into history essentially to suffer and we will continue so till the end….”

In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to make myself playfully pretty, trying on selfie-worthy clothes like rompers, returning me to the innocence of a baby.

But I haven’t abandoned all hope, not yet anyway…hopeful at least that you’ll read and think and recommend! Thanks.