Card of the day: Queen of Swords
Currently listening to: We Are Imaginary’s new self-titled album
Card of the day was Queen of Swords which usually matches with objective and constructive criticism, principles, and fairness. However the occurrences of the past two weeks have rendered all of that null and void. Imagine saying something like “Maybe hyper-violent men acting as federal agents shouldn’t go door-to-door hunting people down and throwing flash grenades into cars with children in them” and getting told you’re crazy. Imagine someone laughing at you when you say “Maybe it was a mistake to let capitalists with dreams of fascism wield unimaginable power.” Anyway that’s where I’m at.
A silver lining, though: Bandcamp banned all AI music from its platform the other day, ramping up moderation to root out anything created using generative AI tools. I wrote an article about it for Start-Track here. Unfortunately that is just about the most productive thing I’ve done all week. January has always brought fog and listlessness but this year the onslaught of dread and disbelief has made it even more insufferable. I wish I could teleport to Minneapolis and get my boots on the ground helping folks, if I’m being honest. What can I do besides sit here and watch the world blow up? That’s not me resigning myself. I ask myself that question every day: What can I do?
A lot of the things I’m doing during my day-to-day just don’t seem important. My day job – creating what are essentially PowerPoints – does help people, but to me it seems pedantic to fuss over the font color of a block of text when people need food, supplies, water, first aid. I write about music, which helps musicians, but at the end of the day I wonder how much influence my words have on their success, and wish I could provide more monetary aid. I go and do errands – groceries and such – but I always wonder to whom my money goes, and how it’s being spent, and so on.
Many folks in my life seem on edge, or are going through a rough time, or are having panic attacks on the regular. I don’t necessarily feel any of this, but I am and always have been an INFP according to the Myers-Briggs, and I am a Cancer in both my moon and rising signs, so I feel everyone’s worry twofold if not tenfold. Watching people fear for their lives and seeing my friends freak out over the country’s and world’s descent into madness and war has not been great for your boy. But turning away won’t stop it from happening, and distracting myself with little pleasures – TV shows, movies, books, etc. – helps in the short-term, but not the long-term.
I think the idea of “being here now” has become enshittified. People use mindfulness to say, “Focus on the present! Don’t worry about the future. Enjoy the things you like and just live in the moment!” And I say no, that’s not the point of it at all. We can be here now, and we can enjoy and experience things, but we have to consider the past and the future as well. And we should track our present to help us prepare for the future. I’m not saying we should go nuts about preparing – building bunkers and buying twenty-pound barrels of processed slop – but we should learn from our past and our present in order to take on the next day even stronger and smarter than before. And we should ponder the importance of the battles we fight. Is a font color so important? No. Is getting an article about We Are Imaginary’s new album out within a day super important? No, that can wait a bit. Is it important to at least share news about the atrocities of ICE, open people’s minds to the cruelty of the world and how to change it, and try to help folks see what we can do to make a better world, instead of let armed goons take over in the name of an aging billionaire and his libertarian technocratic white nationalist friends? Yes. That is very, very, very important.
David Roth – one of our greatest living writers, in my book – wrote an article for Defector called “Fascists Are Pathetic“. I identify with Roth in that our strengths lie in our words. Then again, Roth has written for various outlets and worn awards over the past several years, and I only have a couple total years as a music writer, having taken a long hiatus between my stints at both The Deli and Start-Track. But Roth’s article showcases the importance of acting against fascism in any way possible, using whatever skills you have in order to do so. Even if you can only ridicule these fools – through laughing at ICE’s ass when they slip on ice while trying to act tough, or calling the president a pedophile protector when he comes to visit your job, or continuing to harp on the fact that Kristi Noem killed her fucking dog – that works. We all need to cut down fascists however we can, for our own sakes. At least we can say we did something important.
Imagine saying “We need to cut down fascism” and someone pushing their glasses up their nose and going “Erm, actually, we shouldn’t?” May I refer you to the timeless words of The Muslims.