Politics! The trouble was that they had a
dictator now, which, according to some people (white), they had never had
before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been
having, constantly, since the beginning of the world. Her stupidity panicked
her, as well as the way her voice now sounded when she talked to people who
hadn't stopped being stupid yet.
The problem was that the dictator was very funny, which had maybe always been
true of all dictators. Absurdism, she thought. Suddenly all those Russian
novels where a man turns into a teaspoonful of blackberry jam at a country
house began to make sense.
[...]
Where had the old tyranny gone, the tyranny of
husband over wife? She suspected most of it had been channeled into weird ideas
about supplements, whether or not vinyl sounded "warmer," and which
coffeemakers were nothing but a shit in the mouth of the coffee christ. "A
hundred years ago you would have been mining coal and had fourteen children all
named Jane," she often marveled, as she watched a man stab a finger at his
wife in front of the Keurig display. "Two hundred years ago, you might
have been in a coffee shop in Göttingen, shaking the daily paper, hashing out
the questions of the -day—and I would be shaking out sheets from the windows,
not knowing how to read." But didn't tyranny always feel like the hand of the
way things were?
At nine o'clock every night she gave up her mind. Renounced it, like a belief. Abdicated it, like a throne, all for love. She went to the freezer and opened that fresh air on her face and put fingerprints in the frost on the neck of a bottle and poured something into a glass that was very very clear. And then she was happy, though she worried every night, as you never do with knowledge, whether there would be enough.
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This:excerpt
image: The Great Dictator, The Guardian
The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin
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