Redtree Times

Boxed In, 2019

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

— The Genius of the Crowd, Charles Bukowski

I have been watching current events closely for years and it seems like we are in a convergence of crazy at the moment. You’ve got the wife of a Supreme Court justice fomenting an insurrection, senators saying they would support overturning the law which made interracial marriage legal while spouting pure bigotry at the recent confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson, truckers driving in circles around DC for god knows what reason, and on and on.

And that’s without even mentioning the horror show of Putin’s War.

I don’t want to go into any of that right now. It’s maddening and chaotic. Not the chaos of which I wrote yesterday, that which spawns creation.

This is an ugly sort that destroys order and creates even more chaos to fill the void.It brings to  mind the poem The Genius of the Crowd. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) wrote this in 1966 and it speaks of the ugliness and dangers of populism.

I am not a huge Bukowski fan but this one always makes me think. In it, he warns of those who tell you how to live and behave but don’t practice what they preach. He also warns of playing down to the lowest common denominator because at that level imagination and creativity is absent. In their place, those without imagination replace it with their sole area of genius, their hatred.

Their perfect hatred.

That seems to fit this moment. The unimaginative have rallied around their hatreds, finding a twisted sort of order in the chaos it creates.

I am not going to go on further. I will just share a reading of the poem from Tom O’Bedlam and let it go at that.