You know what’s frustrating? You know? You don’t? Let me tell you.
It’s about being this absolute monarch in this little kingdom of the skull, with the ability to be tyrannical, to choose emotions or ideas, activities and dreams, to choose or abandon goals, and to be able to imagine this bright transcendant universe which you yourself own and manage, and then to have to be forced to leave this kingdom and travel outside of it for a bit.
They WILL NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THE SUPERIORITY OF YOUR COUNTRY. They’re total jingoists, self-involved, full of conceited ideas and unwilling to see things in the correct light.
To get slightly less silly for a second, after sitting around fantasizing about the way that things should be for a while and then looking at, say, Google News, is to feel this sense of towering impotence. I’m one man. I’m a cell out of a body. I’m a human member of a republic. I’m just a single man that shuns the limelight, that shuns crowds or making my voice heard.
I mean, I’m putting my voice out *here*, but this is hardly an attempt to make my voice heard.
And there’s this desire that at least I feel, a desire to help my country, to work with my fellow human beings to create a better world for all of us, and yet I (outside of my kingdom) I can’t superimpose what is (outside of my kingdom) my poorly thought, shoddily imagined, and generally half-baked ideas over this intricate and functioning layer of ideas, corrupt or old fashioned though they might occasionally be.
I’m just a man, poorly schooled. I’d like to contribute my voice to the larger conversation. But the best I can really hope to do is to add the hubbub, the general clamor. A democratic republic is designed so that it can withstand factioned politics and the raging of the mob. It is designed, in other words, to exclude my voice in all but the most general way.
I suppose that that is as it should be. I can make my voice more directly heard by writing letters and by communicating with my congresspeople. That would make my voice more strongly heard than that of most other citizens, or at least more strongly heard than the voice that I’ve had til now.
And yet my crazy tyrannical ego clamors for a full say. For speeches on the floor of the Senate. To expound wittily on The Daily Show. To be exactly as charming as I am in my skull, outside of my skull, where- truthfully?- where I’m just another ignorant blowhard. A right-thinking blowhard, surely. But a blowhard nonetheless.
That’s not, I suppose, totally true. What is this, after all, but an attempt to write, even if haltingly, and to think, even if poorly? It’s a playground, it’s a one-speed with training wheels. Here I can run alongside myself urging myself along, here to pick myself up after I skin my metaphorical knee and dissolve from imperial tyrant to hurt child. I’m trying to write, trying to think. Points for effort must be awarded. As I slowly leak out onto the page old rehashed thoughts that need to escape, perhaps room for new thoughts, better thoughts, will emerge within my skull.
Perhaps.
Either way I’m neither as great nor as terrible as I like to imagine. And the continued application of fingertips to keyboard will surely not hurt anyone. It probably can only help.
Probably.
