Sunday, February 2, 2020

My new project

For years, I've wanted to be a flaneur, that is, someone who wanders the city taking a temperature of how people feel and the way they're expressing it. My models have been Adam Gopnick, Tom Wolfe, Lytton Strachey, Max Beerbohm, Luc Sante, Nick Tosches. (There are flaneuses, I know, but I have not read many of them.)

While my fantasy might take the form of my being an epicurean, more robust version of Alexander Dumas, and while the truth is I am not as good or dedicated a writer, what the reality of my intent comes to is that I would sit quietly sipping a cafe au lait and making notes in public places, later to put them into understandable form explaining the minutiae of what is happening during this period of American history. For the past year, I have indulged a version of this fantasy by wanting to go to the southern border to witness the immoral division of refugee families. I've found a couple opportunities I thought could afford me getting down there with other people, which is an important element to me, but mostly those opportunities passed by and I came nowhere near taking advantage of them.

The desire to be a witness is strong, too strong I've realized to be limited by a time (say, a two week vacation) and a region (Arizona or New Mexico). We're living in interesting times when a lot of observable evils are not only out in the open but relatively reported on. Because of that, the tack of the people committing these evils is to pretend they're not only necessary, they're the norm.

They are neither. They remain cruel and unnecessary. It's my intention to draw attention to them for people who might not otherwise be aware of them.

I've proved, I think, my bona fides in the anti-trump arena, so I'm deciding to comment as little on these actions and ideas as possible, letting their own sin sink them. This may work or it may prove too heavy or heartbreaking to point to without providing context or alternative. We'll see. As this is Groundhog's Day, my avatar will be one peeping out on the world, maybe looking for sun, maybe just wondering what the noise is.

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