1 Boring Old Man

Like you, I don’t know what I feel yet. I guess it’s like getting married, or having a kid, or getting divorced, or a war ending. People always ask what you feel, and the answer is something you make up – but doesn’t really come from knowing the answer.And then by the time you’re used to whatever-has-happened, the question doesn’t really matter any more.

The sun still comes up in the morning. My computer is filled with graphs and pictures from several years of trying to make sense of things. I wonder what will happen to things like the Daily Show. I know what I hope will happen to Talk Radio and Fox News.

There are some lingering things. A lot of bad stuff happened in the last eight years – will it be ferreted out and ‘prosecuted?’ Something really rotten seems to have happened in Alaska. It’s hard to make sense out of that vote. If it’s voter fraud, it’s huge voter fraud [It seems really dumb to have done it]. Did they think we wouldn’t notice? And then there’s the future: Consumer Confidence, the National Debt, Recession, Depression, the Housing Bubble, Overpopulation, and the inevitable disillusionment that Obama can’t fix it in a day… Yikes.

I’m having a few odd memories. Some time back, we went to the North Carolina Mountains this time of year – the ‘leaf season.’ We were staying close to Carl Sandburg’s home near Flat Rock, and I spent a day there. Up on the top floor, there’s a library, separate from all his other books, that had his books about Lincoln. It was impressive. I didn’t know there were that many Lincoln books [At the time, I didn’t even know that Sandburg was a ‘Lincolnist’]. He studied and wrote about Lincoln from his 40’s until his death at 89 – writing a number of biographies.

I remember coming home and looking up when Lincoln was shot, and when Sandburg started writing about him. It was about 60 years later. It set me to thinking about how long does it take for ‘perspicacity’ to set in? When does history truly become history – something that can be studied objectively? I concluded that it was when the observers [historians] were no longer caught up in it. But it was also when the historian kind of knew how things played out. So Historians cheat a bit. They know the end of the story when they’re looking at its roots.

That sounded like my profession, psychoanalysis, to me. The observer hasn’t been a participant, isn’t caught up in the story, and can see how the story played out. I recall enjoying that thought. But right now, I don’t like it so much because I want to know what in the hell happened to us. I have a ton of thoughts about it, but I am way too embroiled in the whole thing to reach any conclusions.

I even thought about setting up a new blog that kept up with the emerging story of the last eight years, of inviting you and others who have gone on the similar path to guest blog to see if there is a way to clarify some of the confusion we still have about this recent time. It wouldn’t work if I couldn’t find some rational contributors from the other side [I even feel that " rational contributors from the other side" sounds absurd – showing my extreme bias]. But those are just thoughts driven by a wish to cognitively master something that seems intrinsically irrational to me. I still can’t mount an argument for the other side without invoking greed, or narcissism, or power-mania, or paranoia. I don’t think that’s how historians think.

Whatever the case, I feel like all of you are my ‘war buddies’ – like we were in the trenches together when they released the mustard gas. And I sure appreciate your being there. I doubt there will be a VFW club or a park bench where we will sit and tell war stories, but it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Maybe that’s where my blog thought comes from – "The Park Bench." My old Civil Rights friends from 40 years ago are still special to me, though we don’t talk about it so much as we used to. I guess "it’s finally history."