Sometimes, I make the mistake of reading Harper’s. Incisive writing, good editing, excellent research, funny little snippets of popular and unpopular culture. It’s a brilliant magazine, I can’t deny it. But things like excerpts from the wedding vows of a pretentious lit-crit couple make me cringe. And the article None Dare Call it Stolen, an analysis of what really happened in Ohio in November 2004, makes me so angry I can’t sleep.
There doesn’t seem to be much I can do to encourage my leaders to get off their butts and impeach the president (and besides, what do I want, Cheney in charge? He’d be worse.) And there doesn’t seem to be much I can do to stop people from writing their own self-indulgent wedding vows, either.
I mean, people deeply involved in politics or weddings or divorces or disputes with roommates enter these weird alternate universes where it totally makes sense to rig an election, write incredibly tacky vows, force bridesmaids to buy expensive and hideous dresses, or pour dye into someone else’s laundry detergent. And I can’t do anything about any of that.
I can’t stop the war, or the hurricane. I can’t stop people believing in Intelligent Design. I can’t even persuade people to use my company’s software, even when they totally acknowledge I’m right. I’m just standing here, railing against the power of things greater than I am and all I can do is wait for something to go wrong and say “I told you so.” And that doesn’t really help. It doesn’t help me and it doesn’t help anyone else.
I told you that election was going to be stolen. I told you that building a city below sea level would make you subject to horrible storms. I told you that going to war in the middle east with too few soldiers was a terrible idea. I told you that writing postmodern wedding vows was tacky. Did you listen? Of course not.
And you won’t listen next time. I mean, the election system hasn’t been fixed for ’08. People are going to rebuild on the shores of the floodplains. The east african plains ape is all about ignoring prudent advice and doing crazy shit like this, migrating across land-bridges and hunting mastodons and building things in floodplains and digging for gold. Of course they get hurt, and of course they get back up and do it again, and nobody can stop all of them from doing crazy stupid shit. And ultimately, that’s what’s good about people, too: their ability to keep doing apparently absurd things and surviving in one way or another, and creating amazing things in the process.
I just… I sometimes wish I was in charge. At least I’d be able to mandate non-tacky wedding vows.
Secretly Ironic 