AC Charlap: You should have been at the protests.
Evan Tucker: I hadn't taken a shit in a week and I'd just taken three laxatives!
AC Charlap: Are you really writing that on facebook?
Evan Tucker: Anybody who cares unfollowed me, what does it matter?
AC: Do you want the rest of the world to unfollow you?
ET: I'd alienate every potential reader in the world if it bought me a good bowel movement.
AC: Well keep going on this track because the that is exactly what you're doing.
ET: I didn't have time to go to the protest, I was too busy being sick.
AC: Wasn't that your excuse for why you didn't do any field work before the election?
ET: I WAS sick! Maybe the sickest I've ever been, and the world is better off without my canvassing.
AC: If another thousand people in swing states reasoned like you then we have our reason Kamala lost.
ET: You remember what happened in 2016! I locked myself out of my car in Chester County, PA while my phone was out of battery and I had to flag down three other volunteers to help me figure out my car situation when they could have been knocking on doors.
AC: It's absolutely true, you are the reason Hillary Clinton lost. I suppose the world is better off without you protesting.
ET: Damn straight!
AC: But just in case your reasoning is flawed... just in case... couldn't the extra laxatives have waited until Sunday?
ET: You try walking around and shouting with a stomach the size of a volleyball.
AC: That's not what I mean. Are you sure there aren't... other reasons you didn't go?
ET: Of course there were other reasons!
AC: Would you care to enumerate them?
ET: No.
AC: Are you sure?
ET: Anybody who's read my writing for long enough knows exactly what they are.
AC: Then why are we having this dialogue?
ET: Because if I don't have someone to talk to about all this with I'm going to go crazy.
AC: Crazy like... what? Create an imaginary interlocutor?
ET: Exactly!
AC: How can you talk about all this if you refuse to talk about it?
ET: Not my opinions, my dread.
AC: Is that a pretentious way of saying 'fears'?
ET: No. It's a precise way of saying 'fears'.
AC: OK, what do you 'dread'?
ET: If I found it easy to say I wouldn't have to have a dialogue about it.
AC: What's so hard about saying you're scared?
ET: Saying the 'why.'
AC: OK Chicken Little, why?
ET: Why what?
AC: Why're you scared?
ET: Because people like you aren't acknowledging what's going on.
AC: Like me?
ET: Yes, people like you. People who were raised on American can-do optimism and believe we're evolved and sheltered from the animals our peoples used to be.
AC: You do realize that I'm you, right?
ET: That's what makes this so difficult.
AC: OK now I'm confused.
ET: The whole world is right now, why should you be any different.
AC: Why should YOU be any different?
ET: Fuck you.
AC: Why do all your dialogues end up with insults like this?
ET: I am that I am.
AC: What you are is crazy!
ET: Were you the last to notice?
AC: Alright sparky, let's both settle down. So what in particular is driving you crazy today?
ET: I think you know exactly what's driving me crazy.
AC: Why would I know that? Because I'm you?
ET: Because it's what's driving everyone crazy today.
AC: So why can't you talk to them?
ET: I don't want to scare them.
AC: So why don't you write them down where an audience of every facebook friend who hasn't unfollowed you can read it.
ET: Yeah, but if I write it here they can choose to stop at any point.
AC: Is that why you began by posting so vulgarly about your constipation?
ET: No, I chose to write about that because that's the other major thing that's on my mind.
AC: So this is all a bit like a mental bowel movement?
ET: If you want to be vulgar about it.
AC: You're the one writing about taking three laxatives.
ET: AC shut up already or I'm going to kill you off.
AC: Alright Hamlet Jr., let's hear your kvetch-de-cour.
ET: Here it comes asshole...
AC: Can we get rid of the BM metaphors please?
ET: My last little corner of hope for the world is gone. Even if the world gets better, my world never will. Or more to the point, our world never will. It will take the rest of our lifetimes to rebuild what's being destroyed over my generation's lifetime.
AC: 'Your generation's lifetime'?... You're forty-three, not 607, and almost half your generation will live to a hundred.
ET: You said you'd listen!
AC: Not if what you say is bullshit.
ET: My generation will live to be a hundred if we don't die in war or environmental catastrophe. And even if my generation rebuilds the world successfully, it will be for the benefit of someone else. With any luck it'll be for our children and grandchildren and not for the benefit of some far off people we know fuckall about who accrued rewards purchased with our blood.
AC: You're a lot of fun on dates aren't you.
ET: That's what happened everywhere else but here!
AC: That's quite a selective reading of history but do go on.
ET: The US lost one in every three-hundred-ninety-five citizens in World War II, Russia lost one in six, yet we were considered equal partners in victory.
AC: You don't think Stalin's incompetence had something to do with that death toll?
ET: His determination to spill blood until he won had even more.
AC: Are you pr*ising St*lin for being willing to k*ll people?
ET: Of course not, but when the world lapses into total war, somebody has to die.
AC: Okayyyy...
ET: In a total war, the society which wins sacrifices on a level so unimaginable that everyone has multiple loved ones who died and multiple loved ones who wish they were dead.
AC: You're lucky I'm the part of you that's unaffected by these thoughts or else I'd be advising you to drive to a psychiatric hospital.
ET: And then once they've thrown enough death at their enemies, the war stops, and the country that lost everything has to share their victory with some Uncle-Sam-come-lately intercessor who waited until the last possible moment to tip the scale toward the victors and lost so comparatively little that they're in a 100x better position to enjoy victory's fruits.
AC: So you're saying that 21st century America is 20th century Russia?
ET: If we're not Nazi Germany.
AC: Forgive me, Tucker, for suggesting, I do think you're letting emotion cloud your judgement.
ET: I have no idea if there's any comparison that works, but we are so close to a tectonic eruption. The Republican party spent an entire generation carefully removing all the levers of power so that they would have an unbroken, generations long hold on the American government.
AC: Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory.
ET: But the moment the Republican establishment was ready to seal off power's levers from everyone but them, their party was kidnapped by the country's smallest mind who flew over the plans of dozens of clever men by acting like the child Republicans hoped every American citizen would become.
AC: The point being...
ET: The point being that we are at the precipice of a world where all the safeties are completely hollowed out of democracy and liberal rule of law. Leave aside global warming and AI for a minute and just focus on the international system: Putin, Trump, Xi, Modi, Netanyahu, Erdogan, they're all old as shit. They'll be gone in five to twenty years, but according to polling, the children of their subjects are the most divided generations in modern history, and they will be left with the chaos of a world whose safeguards they hollowed out for everyone but a few autocrats and a couple hundred oligarchs.
AC: Your good cheer never ceases to amaze.
ET: Democracies are no longer democracies again. Capitalism is once again an indisputable socialism for the rich. International systems are being destroyed to which we owe everything like NATO, the WHO and the World Bank. After the Ukraine invasion every small nation in the world has incentive to build weapons of mass destruction and AI could make them as easy to construct as a bow and arrow. And all that is without taking global warming and AI into consideration.
AC: You say all this like it's a foregone conclusion! Nothing is written! Didn't the basket cases of your grandparents' generation think the world was going to end in a pile of nuclear ash?
ET: In my grandparents' generation there were exactly two existential threats, both of which were pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at the other, watching them vigilantly, and no other country had the power to distract them from each other. However close the Cold War came to nuclear war, we didn't get there because the world always knew who to call to stop it.
AC: And we don't now?
ET: We don't now.
AC: Why not?
ET: Because when you have eight separate cold wars between twenty-eight nuclear powers, one of them is going to get hot, and the world would very quickly choose sides, and any of those other powers could be drawn in: who even knows if the alliances will remain stable?
AC: Won't we learn how to control this?
ET: Eventually, but we may easily lose a billion people first.
AC: Well now you're making me depressed.
ET: I can scare you so much more if we keep going.
AC: You've worn me down. Mazel Tov. I can't take any more of this tonight.
ET: Well if you're not going to fight back I can't keep writing.
AC: If it helps you write I promise I'll go back to bullying you tomorrow, but for the meantime I need to get some rest and dream about cleansing the world in a lake of fire.
Monday, April 7, 2025
Dialogue of a Dissolute State
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