Involuntarily I sometimes have an image of myself as having appeared, dream-like, at a huge bonfire not only apparently commemorating but resignedly celebrating the end of our American culture, whatever it was in the first place.
I wonder if it ever really existed. I can't reconcile what we are now with what I thought we were previously. There's plenty of beer at the bonfire and it's so big it doesn't present as an event, where the crowd has some cohesion, but as a spectacle.
Someone throws a chair on the fire. It seems to represent the sadness and futility of trying to make something decent out of life. If we Americans can fail the way we have it means humanity's problems aren't circumstantial, at root, but inherent in us, our kind.
That's sad but it's a pure, species corollary to the sadness any normal person feels about their own mortality and the utter weirdness of contrasting the importance of your existence to yourself with the incomprehensible extent of our actual inconsequence.
I've always found that awkward awareness lightening and liberating. All the irritating, everyday crap becomes nothing. It all seems like nothing. So now I'm trying to feel that way about our country and species, that it was destined to end and that it's not a big deal.
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