Writer's Block

At the moment I've got six posts in draft in various states of assembly.  Well, technically there are hundreds of posts which I've started and abandoned over the years, but there are six which are current and topical and begun in the last week with clean hands and good intentions.

And they sit there gathering dust because I have not been able to get the Past to leave the room for a few days to let me finish them.

Writers writing about writing is inherently boring to everyone else, but this is where I am today, so this is what I write.

As you know, the Liberal superpower is Memory.  And a mighty superpower it is.  But like most superpowers it comes with a price, and that price is that the Past is always there, perched on our shoulders, reminding us of exactly how long and sad the long, sad road to where we are today has been.  How many decades into the dim, distant past the record of Republican treason, sedition and catastrophe really stretches.  How relentlessly the Right has been dragging us into virtual open war over the fate of our democracy.

And how, at every mile-marker along the road to Hell, we Liberal Casandra's have been pleading with whoever would listen to please stop this madness.  Shouting into the abyss, "How can you not see how bad this is and how much worse it can get?  How can you continue to pretend this won't end in tears and tragedy?"

In my case, if I were to lay all +9,000 posts I've written over the last +14 years end-to-end, a fair reading of them would put you in the hospital be a series of fairly accurate and increasingly dire observations about present state of our republic, where things appeared to be headed, and how bad our situation was likely to get if things went on the way they were going.

And so, more and more often these days, when I take up my quill and foolscap to write about the calamity we can see all around us, the Clio, the Muse of History, is ever-present at my elbow.  She riffles through my archives and chides me.  Admonishing me.

Didn't you write pretty much this same thing (but better) back in 2005?

Didn't you already squeeze that metaphor dry in 2010? 

Aren't you poaching from the columns you did on Tom DeLay?  On Katrina?  From your obit for David Broder?  From "Like a Virgin" the dozenth time?  From "Bush-Belly Sneetches" for the hundredth time?

And you know what?  That constant, reproving voice in my ear is right.  Now that I have a fairly impressive body of my own written work and my own graphics, I do find myself leaning on them more and more.  I do this because nothing has fundamentally changed; it's just gotten exponentially worse in exactly the way we all feared it would way back in 2005.

And 2007.

Back before Tom DeLay was on "Dancing With The Stars".  Before everyone but us apparently secretly agreed to pretend the Bush Administration never happened.

And having traveled all this way with you, here is one thing I have learned: when the oily rags, old dynamite and mercury fulminate that some idiot has been storing in his basement the next to the leaking gas pipe and corroded fuse box finally explodes and takes out the whole block, the last person that idiot wants to hear from is the guy who has been warning him all along that this was a disaster waiting to happen.

And if you have been warning the same highly paid and well-respected dullards and goons over and over again for decades because they keep repeating the oily rags/old dynamite/mercury fulminate disaster over and over again, your situation only gets worse.  And so you watch, horrified, as they blow everything up again again, and every fucking time it ends with a bigger pile of rubble and more comprehensive catastrophe.  And every time the people who sound the alarms early and often are pushed even further into the corner, while the people who were paid to repeat over and over again that there was no cause for alarm are promoted higher and higher.

But I find that even at my age I am educable -- if you hit in the head often enough, eventually I figure out how the world works.  For example, right now I am a minor foot-soldier volunteering on a local project that is absolutely doomed to fail.  How do I know it's doomed to fail?  Because in a previous career I used to simultaneously manage a dozen projects that were each twenty times the scale and complexity and budget of this one.  Did it for ten house a day, every day, then I'd go home and work on this blog from ten at night until one in the morning.

Yeah, I know.  I had no life.

But I was very good at what I did, which is how I know this project is going to bomb.  Hard.  I can even predict to a fairly high degree of accuracy exactly how and when it will finally be pronounced DOA, and the size and shape of the memory hole down which it will be dumped.

Am I going to chime in?  Raise the alarm?

Oh hell no.  Somewhere up the food chain there are people being paid to beat this dead horse, and brother, I have learned my lesson.  I will lend my stoop labor to this thing, but not my brain.  Not my experience.

Because I still hold out a tiny hope that one day I will once again have a proper job with a regular paycheck.  And you know who gets hired these days?  The person who knows enough to sing a sweeping aria about how everything is awesome, and it's only gonna get better.  Who recites a paean to brilliance of the organization's strategic plan.

And you know who doesn't get hired?  Who never gets a foot in the door?

The smartass who can see that the building is on fire and says out loud that, just maybe, someone  should grab a fire extinguisher.

Behold, a Tip Jar!