We’ve built such a humiliating world. Facebook banned our president from sharing Nazi imagery after his campaign posted a red triangle used to identify the communists, labor organizers, and other prisoners sent to concentration camps. A few hours later, the New York Times posted a fever-dream headline that said, “Twitter Labels Trump Tweet About ‘Racist Baby’ as Manipulated Media.” I’m logging this here in case I ever feel nostalgic about the good old days in five or ten years.
It’s already been a long summer, and the hurricanes haven’t even started yet. But the pandemic is still going strong and there’s a heatwave in Siberia. Some areas are hitting temperatures of 90 degrees and breaking previous records by as much as twenty-five degrees. An article in the Guardian adds an appropriately 2020 spin: “Unusually high temperatures in region linked to wildfires, oil spill, and moth swarms.”
Meanwhile, I move through my responsibilities and commitments by reminding myself to do these things with kindness or not at all. By the end of the day, this little maxim had blurred into André Breton’s admonition that “beauty will be convulsive or not at all.” More than ever, surrealism might be the best strategy for surviving these days.
