Is This Thing Working?

Spinning, Hate Crimes, Treasure Hunting, &tc.

Dear Friends,

I spent a good deal of time yesterday staring at a computer screen. In all my preparations for filming our concert last weekend I’d made some miscalculations—namely, the sheer size of the video file. It took a lot of computing power to break that file down into manageable chunks, and there were some regular software crashes and plenty of moments of staring at the little icon just spinning. And spinning. And spinning. The computer was stuck. It couldn’t figure out how to get out of whatever dead end it had encountered. More than once I wanted to tap the screen firmly with my index finger: Hello? Is this thing working?

That’s what I want to do with our body politic. Hello? Is this thing working? The “thing” being our Republic. We seem to be spinning, and spinning, and spinning, stuck in some kind of infinite loop and not knowing how we get out of it. We have before us the prospect of an upcoming Presidential election in which nearly 80 percent of the country believes the incumbent to be too infirm and incompetent for the job, and the frontrunner to challenge him is also old and incompetent and facing trials and possible prison. How did we get ourselves into this dead end? How is it possible there is no way out? How can we just keep spinning in this vortex?

When the software program cannot “solve” the problem, it crashes. The same might be true of Republics. I’m not sure, but we seem to be on our way to finding out.