Thoughts Before the Drugs Kick In
If you’re reading this on Thursday morning, a surgeon is carving chunks out of my left knee. I’ll be home later today, with a big bottle of pills, so we’ll see what comes after that. I may babble incoherently in print, which means that my writing won’t change at all and you won’t notice any difference. “This man is clearly on drugs,” you’ll think, and for once I really will be.
A surgeon is carving on my body because I tore my meniscus, back in December, on a backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon. The day after I climbed out of that big hole in the ground, I woke up with a sore knee — and now here we are. I had a discussion, recently, in which I was urged to regret the backpacking trip: “Aren’t you sorry you did that?” I wasn’t at all, so the conversation went on: “But you got hurt!”
It made me think of a recent essay on Substack, Truth Hurts, on “pain tolerance and truth avoidance,” because no, I didn’t regret doing something that caused me injury; I enjoyed it, I accept that life comes with some degree of risk and pain, and the doctor will fix the damage (and give me drugs). So, like, shrug. The connection to attitudes about pandemic-era risk tolerance comes pretty easily. The author of that essay about truth and pain, John Carter, describes the connection between pain tolerance and a willingness or ability among critical thinkers to “'redpill' themselves: systematically confronting all of their previously held assumptions and ruthlessly discarding them when the observable facts contradicted what they'd previously believed.” It’s hard, it hurts, and not everyone can take the confrontation with socially comfortable expressions of belief. Worth your time to click on that link and read.
Related, an essay from a “COVID-unvaccinated” nurse, Nancy Benedict, works through a lifetime of training and patient-care experience to explain that “the decision not to take the experimental mRNA shot was carefully considered.” I recommend A Nurse’s Story, and look for this moment:
Then I had a moment of clarity and…well, slap this mama. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Two plus two equals four.
Alert, thoughtful, and armed with a lifetime of experience, Nancy Benedict redpilled herself. We need more people to take this journey.
Looking ahead, I’ve been planning to write the follow-up to Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, in which I described progressive activism as an unmoored attitude with no fixed system of values. Part Two is that, in the current milieu, it’s also hard to make meaning out of “conservative” politics. A recent essay at eugyppius discussed Manfred Kleine-Hartlage’s description of the conservative as “an instinctive defender of traditional, organic structures” who has “conformist impulses” that place him “among the elite or its most enthusiastic supporters.” But: “The problem is that we live in an inverted order. The leftist opposition has taken charge; the conservative conformists have been driven into the opposition.” Read eugyppius for the rest, but yes: Rand Paul is not a conformist striver, and Nancy Pelosi isn’t a bold innovator who battles against dogma and tradition. The “progressives” run the country club; corporations are Woke AF, and this is corporate messaging:
So our political landscape is unbalanced and unclear, “left” and “right” aren’t positioned where they usually play on the field, dogs and cats sleeping together, etcetera.
The thing I’ve been meaning to point to, in the middle of all of this, is the Omaha Platform. In 1892, the Populist Party met in convention to draw up a party manifesto. The convention delegates believed that the game had become rigged — that politics was a sham, and corporate power thrived on a foundation of unearned privilege: “The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.” They thought newspapers sucked, and they hadn’t even met Taylor Lorenz yet.
The Populists said things that sound, in 2022, like leftist politics: “We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”
But they also said things like this: “We believe that the money of the country should be kept as much as possible in the hands of the people, and hence we demand that all State and national revenues shall be limited to the necessary expenses of the government, economically and honestly administered.”
And this: “RESOLVED, That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration.”
They were left and right, frustrated people looking for a path. Rejecting a choice between two parties and two perspectives, the Populists made an argument about a set of policies they believed would work. Whatever you think of their specific proposals, they didn’t begin from loyalty to the two-party system, from a world of two choices. And pretty clearly, we need to borrow some of that independence of thought.
And with that, I head out to see the doctor. I leave you with this final, and perfect, thought:
More to come.
Substack did strange things to the end of this one -- fixed now. And now I really have to go.
I'm assuming the general anaesthetic kicked in as you typed 'the'. Hope it goes well.