This American Strife

All in all, it’s been a lousy millennium so far. A number of you (some of whom I possibly respect) are poised at your keyboards to pound out emails to me to insist that I’m absolutely wrong, and this is the best time ever to be alive. I (somewhat) respectfully disagree. Beginning with the “Y2K Bug” the 21st century has been a roller-coaster of dread and disappointment and I’m no longer young enough to fight it off.

The 1970s were dreadful in every way, or at least they seemed so at the time, but they were a wonderland of joy and enlightenment compared to what we’re slogging through right now. Plus, since I was in my teens for most of them, I was resilient. I was going through the mini-Depression as a depressed baby of Depression babies and yet I somehow did all right. I wallowed in a state of abject misery but it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. In fact, it was good practice for 2026.

This is not going to be a column about politics, so those of you in the highest dudgeon can stop your typing right now. Yes, my Periodical Postage costs shot up by over a hundred dollars. Yes, I just received notice from my printer that ink and paper prices are shooting toward the stratosphere. That doesn’t mean you should drop print for an online-only subscription. (I’m not consigning The Syncopated Times entirely to the digital Memory Hole, where AI and expediency tend to reduce everything we once loved to undifferentiated mush: the Infotainment Stupidhighway as the Path of Least Resistance.)

No, I need you to renew your print subscription so that I can keep this paper on paper. That thing over there that didn’t need to happen is affecting everything. (I reserve the right not to use nouns to describe it.) If I don’t pop your bubble of denial, will you kindly send me a renewal check? I haven’t raised prices since 2019 and certain people of my household acquaintance are prodding me to raise prices again. I just won’t.

I don’t mean to bring down the room. I’ve just realized what’s wrong with us goes way beyond the team sports of politics. We’re living through a plague. It’s not Covid nor is it any of the old-timey diseases coming back for a nostalgia tour. It’s a pandemic of madness, which is characterized by eight billion separate subjective realities. None of them exactly coincide. Some of them are directly antithetical. Some turn to ancient texts for an anchor in truth; others cleave unto science and technology for that comfort. Adherents of both extremes are arm-wrestling for control of the bus while the majority look on in slack-jawed horror.

But none of us quite get along. My innate sense of irony (which may look like cynicism in a dim light) prevents me from adopting either extreme truth. I can’t bring myself to sing hymns, swear oaths, or use chatbots to answer life’s most pressing questions. Some days (when I’m not using word-processing and desktop publishing programs to lay out this periodical) a fountain pen is about all the technology I’m willing to handle. Likewise, the only prayer I know by heart and am willing to recite is “God save me from magical thinking.” Amen.

As such, I’m something of a pariah. I used to have great friends and we’d all bump along on the dark trail trying to figure things out together. I’m still trying to figure things out but I’ve acquired some certainties. I’m afraid I have a fondness for the Bill of Rights and the evidence of my senses. I consider each one as a plank in the floor I know I can’t fall off of. The current century has done its best to shake the hell out of that floor and yet I’m still here, hanging on for dear life.

Y2K, 9/11, numerous personal and family tragedies (I’ll spare you), my embrace and subsequent abandonment of certain conspiracy theories (again, I’ll spare you), various creative and professional pursuits (songs, poems, novels, a radio program), walking backwards into starting The Syncopated Times from the bones of The American Rag, three years of staying home during Covid (i.e., business as usual), 1/6/2021, and whatever the actual hell it is that we’re living through.

My perception of all of the above is rock-solid, but it is mine alone. Others will claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. By their idiosyncratic compass (for which they vouch similar unerring accuracy) I’m the Antichrist. (If I were the Antichrist I’d certainly have a nicer car.) By my watch, they’re escapees from a special-needs care home. We might have been friends once.

I’m quick to blame them for their choices, at least one of which led us to that (unnamed) big thing that didn’t have to happen and is now causing so much trouble. If I could just accept that they’re suffering from this pervasive madness, this Plague of Subjectivity, I might feel more magnanimity toward them even as they’re hurling epithets.

I’m mad, too—in the sense of being angry. I’m also incredibly weary and inconsolably sad.

And whether or not I have any right to be, I am disappointed in humanity. Right now, I’d rather nap and do crossword puzzles than associate with others or listen to music or do just about anything else that used to fall under the heading of “fun.”

The only remedy is to set my fury aside and accept that we’re all at least a little bit nuts here in 2026. Seen as a medical issue, there is always the remote possibility that the fever will break and we’ll start to get better. At least, we might try to empathize with each other. Yes, empathy has a bad reputation of late; there are even books damning it as “toxic.”

But it may be our last, best shot at breaking this mad, lonely cycle of strife.