Austin at Large: Life’s Short, Eat Dessert First: A time for gratitude and discernment, and for enjoying both cake and ice cream – News
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Some people in this town will be spared the Old Testament anger I planned to pack into this room this week before I decided to write something more seasonally appropriate. So many holidays this week! By the time our next issue comes out, Austin will have used up or thrown away his Thanksgiving leftovers (don’t keep them any longer; that’s disgusting), lit his first candles for Advent (Sunday) and Hanukkah (Monday night) and off you go headlong into the end of the year. to let go of everything. Last year’s winter vacation was much less pleasant than it could have been, as President Apesh * t would not go quietly and thousands of Texans would not stay home and gift everyone with coups and COVID in January. Do you remember all of that So things are getting off to a better start, and hopefully this time we can get through every 12 days of Christmas without another deadly epidemic or constitutional crisis.
But I still wouldn’t blame you if you decided to have your dessert first. We may have relief from these man-made disasters this year, but we have a lot of Chaos Agents who want you to feel like things are getting a lot worse. I will again be that positive minded friend reminding you that this is not true. Yes, things would be better if we’d avoided the coups and the COVID that we’d both gladly blame the disgraced old Apesh * t for, except that so many of his partisans want him to let his sad legacy pass moves indefinitely. Our governor, for example. This is annoying all the time and justifies your own Old Testament anger about right and wrong if it helps you calibrate your own attitudes. But that would also pamper yourself with small gestures of friendliness, such as having a dessert first. (Or latkes. Mmm. Dessert for dinner!)
Potatoes, but also pancakes
It’s a Festivus miracle that a severely broken person can wreak so much chaos and disorder just to be the center of attention. Future stories will attribute the number of corpses to old Apesh * t accumulated in the process, which is cold comfort now – as the QAnon shaman’s defender put it so nicely last week, Dolt 45 has “a few damn things” to do , including clearing up this damn mess and taking care of a lot of the donkeys that are [he] used up because of January 6th. “
On our blue side of the road, it is popular not to agree to the premise that the MAGA nation is an aberration, bound in time and space by the power of its cult leader, and not really indicative of the fundamental terms in American politics today. “You see,” we say, pointing out monstrosities like the ban on abortion in Senate Law 8, “this is how Republicans are all the time and always will be, and the only way forward is to eradicate them completely and apesh * t is just a distracting sideline. “My answer is that these two premises can be true in different ways at the same time. Just as latke’s are potatoes but also pancakes and the Messiah is both the King of Nations and a messy human baby rolled into one Stall sleeps, our former president is both a fading tabloid and the avatar of his party’s attraction to malice, hatred, and greed.
One of my old priest friends in San Francisco framed this for me decades ago with a different food metaphor: cake and ice cream. We like them both, we enjoy them together, we don’t have an urgent need to put ourselves above the other, but we also know that they are very different. Cake is structural, an embodied essence, while ice cream is situational, existential, experiential, and contingent. Once it melts, ice ceases to exist, but until it begins to melt it cannot be eaten. Cake uses most of the same ingredients but is a way to preserve them instead; It’s sophisticated, the inevitable and only result of the various inputs (ingredients, amounts, techniques) that made up its recipe, and it persists even if it soaks up all of the melted ice. And so forth. We have talked about political systems on a large historical scale, but that applies well to this present moment. Some things that are portrayed as egregious and extraordinary are, like cake, the predictable outcomes of our policies. Some things that are defined as normal and authentic expressions of enduring truths, like ice cream, are the time-bound product of circumstances that can change for many reasons, including accidental coincidences.
Caution! It’s Mr. Softee!
Donald John Apesh * t Trump is like the Emperor of Ice Cream, a runaway Mister Softee Truck that tosses frozen pudding in the face and causes mayhem. But at some point it will melt. Joe Manchin, on the other hand, is like a little Debbie snack cake that will never change its condition. The way we do politics means there will always be a Joe Manchin, but it is unlikely that there will ever be an apesh * t again.
This can be difficult to analyze and react to right now, and my own job is a great source of this difficulty. Our country is too big and diverse for interpersonal politics (be it retail with voters or negotiations in Congress) to suffice; Media narration and storytelling are not just a way, but really the only way for most people to make sense of their society. That means people like me have to be critical of what we emphasize, repeat, downplay, ignore; Instead, we have an incentive to do the opposite and chase clicks and clout and make things appear both worse and less structured than they actually are. Let’s celebrate the good this Christmas season and treat ourselves to an extra portion of dessert.
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https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2021-11-26/austin-at-large-lifes-short-eat-dessert-first/
