The Concoction Resembles The Cure/Disease (for Jake Berry)

Despair. Troubling thoughts and startling moments, nightmares and the far worse waking thoughts that seem to go on forever, that’s what I feel when I look at this country under the control of the Republican Party. Who thought to call them parties I don’t know but one thing I do know is this, it only feels like a party when you’re on the inside. Everyone else is either a server or watching from the wings.
I was overcome with an intense depression tonight as I thought of what to write. It had been coming on for most of the day as it usually does but tonight was different. I am so proud that you are reading this my good friends and that we together share a belief that things could be better given time and reason.
You see the headlines and you watch the reports on television and you know that neither one is speaking to you. You know that this is someone else’s idea of what matters. Filtered through the table in a boardroom, through an editor, through a typist, a printer and a camera crew somehow a story gets out. But by the time it gets to the reader or the viewer, even on live television, the message is distorted. Marshall McLuhan was right and all else is wrong. “The medium is the message”, he wrote and took you and I by the mind and showed us the path lit by the horrors of a future digital age. As George Bataille wrote,

Higher
than the dark top of the sky
higher
in a mad opening
a trail of light
is the halo of death


- Chris Mansel