It has gotten very cold very suddenly in New York and I like it; I like it better than the balmy Novembers of recent years. Of course, the weather is randomly extreme in one direction or another — and it averages out, globally, to too warm. But this observation is neither here nor there; the New York Times and other news outlets, and lots of people on Twitter tell me I should be thinking about the first day of impeachment proceedings. I find it utterly strange that the consequence free show trial of a single man is of such singular importance. It’s only when our lives our totally emptied of their own singular importance that we can begin to find the soap opera called ‘President Trump’ so fascinating — more fascinating than the health of our souls, our bodies, our culture, our planet. The great triumvirate of American interests are, in no particular order: sports, politics, pop-culture. Almost all content is related to these subjects. If you had to add a fourth major interest, it would be food. If you had to add a meta-subject, a subject which transcends and absorbs all the other subjects, it would be money. What we’ve done is invested our hope for our own lives — hope for our own soul’s salvation — in the progress of external things, external events, whose success we can mark and document, and thus take some banal comfort in: the President does or doesn’t get impeached; the Lakers win or don’t win; Kanye releases his album and it’s good or bad. We’re obsessed with ephemera like this because we actually have no real interest in our inner-lives or the inner-lives of others. If humanism is the dedicated study of human excellence, then our culture is anti-humanist in the sense that it partakes in study only of human bullshit, a kind of bizarre humanism. If environmentalism is a loving care for the health of the planet, then we’re anti-environmentalist in the sense that we care only for the shadows we see flickering in our hands.
