Nothing Is New

The longer that a person lives, the nearer the probability that that person finds him or herself with a freezer full of mountain lion steaks creeps toward 1.

And when that day eventually comes, it has been my experience that such a person will shortly thereafter find himself annoyed that even Steve Rinella lacks an honest guide to preparing sirloin of puma. The internet suggests parboiling the meat before marinating. Good lord. Is nothing sacred?

It looks a bit like pork, this person may conclude, and at least that’s a place to start. And isn’t necessity the mother of innovation, after all? This person may brine it, pound it flat, dredge it in flour and egg and pretzel crumbs and fry it in oil until the trichinosis cysts are probably mostly pretty much zapped and then enjoy it over a bed of spaetzle and mushroom gravy.

“Triumph!” this person will say and celebrate this new regional curiosity before conceding at last that this really is just schnitzel.

Because after alcohol, weapons, and sandwiches, the next thing the various cultures of humanity have independently derived is the process of breading something and boiling it in fat. This is not a new concept at all, and smilodon steaks were probably some of the first delicacies enjoyed by humans. Go figure.

Which is reassuring as we look to our current political climate, that nothing, really, is unprecedented. We have a tendency, as Americans, to forget that our nation is a mere 250 years old, and that we are not special.

After all, who is more a modern day Don Quixote than Don Trump? The delusional megalomaniac who is inspired by fictions to joust windmills and abuse hotel staff? (Sancho Panza, in this analogy, is, of course, the Republican Party, biding its time and suffering indignity for the promise of a castle that will never come*). The tragic hero and patron saint to generations of dreamers has finally found a host.

And we should not be surprised that when, in 1939, Henry Miller was appalled by the spiritual decay of the American worker, he coined the minimalist movement: “Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable.”

And spoke directly to Colin Caepernick and the BLM: “the flag has become a cloak to hide iniquity. We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it it means danger, revolution, anarchy.”

And could not possibly have known the prescience of his words, “We’ll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye – just wait and see. The capital of the new planet – the one, I mean, which will kill itself off – is of course Detroit.”

This is, of course, a step beyond the generational gripes about “kids these days,” as old as Socrates. It should be unnerving that Miller’s observations on the social landscape of the United States at the dawn of the second world war feel so relevant.

That his warnings that our “passions are easily mobilized by demagogues” feels written for the present, and “to-day when a man or woman succeeds in escaping from the horrors of Europe, when he finally stands before the bar under our glorious national emblem, the first question they put to him is: ‘how much money have you?’ If you have no money but only a love for freedom, only a prayer for mercy on your lips, you are debarred, returned the slaughter-house, shunned as a leper,” need only replace “Europe” with “Honduras” to represent perfectly our southern border.

It is right that we should wring our hands. But then we continue to read, if we wish, we can see a glimmer of optimism there. Because Miller reminds us that “a great scourge never appears unless there is a reason for it,” and Cervantes concludes that “neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.”

We have the benefit of looking back to recognize that our missteps are not special. That as hopeless as it sometimes looks we have not blown it yet, and while, sure, the last time we all elected nationalistic demagogues 60 million people had to die, if we would like things can be different now.

*and clapped-out, in-too-deep, just-wants-a-nap Rocinante is Mike Pence, duh.