The Elusive Tyranny of Reality

When Dick Cheney comes over all smug about the members of the reality-based community, to whom is he referring?  The vast majority of Americans who have signed on with one of the Big White Guy in the Sky plans (otherwise known as Verizon and Sprint or Catholic and Protestant)?  The Biblical creationists who disdain the findings of Hubble because it can’t locate the firmament?

Probably not, since they all voted for him.  But still.  What about the people who think that our government killed JFK?  What about the people who thought margarine was good for you? (recommendation now reversed by the medical establishment; please forget we ever made it)

Where is this reality-based community?

Or, as a character in a Terry Pratchett book said, “You’re responsible to the truth?  Really?  How?  Does the truth come and slap you in the face if you get it wrong?”

The scary thing about this community is the geographical vagaries and absent infrastructure of the community.  There is a certain lack of governance as well…

What Darth Cheney presumably meant to say was that we liberals lack vision because we feel constrained by what “responsible” “experts” have told us, while the merry band of Reverse Robin Hood Neocons set out to refashion what is possible.  In the Agincourt fashion of Henry V’s “we few, we lucky few” speech, Cheney seeks to rally the impossible dream.

Of course, Harry actually had a plan (the longbow) and, you know, won.  Although there were likewise some gaps in the occupation plan.  Cheney isn’t even eligible for the Eternal Honor Merit Badge pioneered by Thomas Beckett’s change-by-martyrdom strategy.

I think what Cheney fails to grasp (and perhaps Harry and Thom as well, though we have subsequently written that tragic edge into their stories for them) is that we would all dearly love for there to be a reality based community to migrate to – however depressing the atmosphere, however eternally partly cloudy the sky, an address in the real-estate would at least relieve of us of this lingering feeling that a good life is something that one gets away with, quickly, before history changes its judgments on our values or the status quo crushes us under it.  Humanity is the original source of the idea for built-in obsolescence.

But even the tenuous link with that fairy-land of reality (gripped until dawn by a faithful Janet Reno) is not something that just any Thom, Dick or Harry can conquer.

The thing about overthrowing reality is:  it only happens in retrospect, after the next regime of reality is safely established.

define viable

So:  what does it mean to be a viable human?

Capable of surviving on one’s own.

So:  viability begins at approximately six years old.

That’s actually quite generous, too.  I mean, maybe a little urban scavenging street-kid could (probably not) hack it… possibly a hunter-gatherer kid in a really gentle climactic environment, preferably on an island where there wouldn’t be so many large predators.  And I’m not really at all confident in the street kid at 6 as far as our current society goes.

So if the child/fetus begins to gain some kind of “rights”counterbalancing the mother’s  at the point of viability, that couldn’t *start* to happen any time before the 30th trimester.  I mean, seriously, a newborn’s primary skills are screaming (sure to get it killed by a predator) and, well, nothing – since it can neither suck nor shit without being fed by someone else.  It can breathe, for a while.

If Nature did not see fit to give it any kind of right to life (being born dead without extensive and continual intervention over a period of years), why should we?

Well, presumably, there are practical reasons.  We don’t like people to engage in indifference to the needs of small children, since after all if everyone did that there’d be no one to pay our pensions or stand behind the counter to dispense the medications we’d be buying with them.  And there’s probably someone who’s willing to take the thing in.

Nonetheless, there should not be any delusion that we do this because the child has a “right” to life; there is no such thing as a “right” to demand that others behave constantly and exhaustively for one’s own benefit over a period of many years.  We may be *able* to do this and we may *choose* to do so; indeed, we may come to define ourselves as a people based on our excellence in caring for others.

But that is our right, not theirs.  No one else has a right to my labor (pun intended).

What now?

The entire reality – that “collective hunch” as Lily Tomlin put it – is “really” a sea we have created to see the ripples of TheReal in; as if the world were a mirror for the wind, the leaves the bright flash of its hair, the grass the cool sussuration of its skin.  It makes itself up in us.

(All is vanity – actually a vanity, a mirror for the toilette of the unseen).

TheReal and reality cannot exist apart; they are what Romeo and Juliet mistook themselves for/became.

Because with every moment of the Thing, the Colour Out of Space, the Haunting of Hill House… there is always a morning after:  a Midas who cannot bear to see his daughter wear yellow, but a Midas who all the same knows he “has” normality when he sees it interrupted by memory.  A Lazarus who cannot sleep.  But who nonetheless continues.  A Schliemann standing at a little soiree, staring at the clean, buffed nails adorning his hand hard-edged with calluses won from shovel after shovel of Troy’s dirt…  his heartbeats metronome the moments between explanations of the difference between Paris and Paris.

This is a love note – a little Cyrano deBergerac pen pal piece – from reality to TheReal:  we love you.

Every time we take out the trash, we hope the bag will rip and some impossible piece of an artifact will fall out, half a crown, a map, a feather made of night.  A blue bottle that sloshes full but weighs nothing.  A snail shell in which you can see the night sky.

Anything.

We love you.  We cannot live without you.  We need not.  Like Morrison’s Beloved, you return for us.  Like a boomerang, nicked with the blood of some fantastic prey.

Every last breath is a waiting room for deus ex machina; a lobby always full before a door that might yet open.  A thirst that might bring rain.

In our secret hearts, we always hope that the answer to “What now?” will be your face.

You are the wind beneath our world.

You are the glance that need not speak.

You are (,) beloved.