A Moment of Reaffirmation
It started quite innocently: three days ago I sent a word file to the printer; I heard the printer cough up pages in the bedroom where we keep it; I went into the bedroom to gather the pages as they were falling onto the floor.
And behold: every single one was successfully printed; every single one was legible, showing up on the correct side, since we use recycled manuscripts – this one from my novel AAN ZEE –; the ink had not run out; and the document was complete without fail. Verily, it was the most beautiful experience of that day, if not the week that had passed. The experience was sheer bliss, almost erotic.
And I had to ask myself what exactly was so wonderful, and then it dawned on me that it was the display of rationality at work, of the successful workings of cause and effect, of the perfect coincidence between my expectation and the real-life outcome in this little part of the world. In some way, my whole understanding of myself as a sentient being was newly affirmed. The workings of the printer following thousands of steps of digital communication using the internet, Bluetooth, long established printing protocols, integrated circuitry, electrons obeying the dictum of quantum mechanics – it all was internally consistent, and consistent with the model of the world in my head.
And this is the thing: it was all in striking contrast to everything else that is going on in the USA right now, a world that increasingly gains the contours of Alice in the Wonderland where witnesses are beheaded for their testimony and acts of pure evil are commended by awards in high places. Secretaries in the cabinet are selected not on account of their relevant expertise but of their determination to wreck the department they will be in charge of. A bunch of billionaires, obscenely, are supposed to take care of the needs of people who possess nothing and whose earnings are one thousandths of their supposed benefactors. Justice will be meted by the whims of the president-king. And there is one single advisor whose counsel is to be ruthless in pursuing profit on the backs of the poor.
What is going on right now makes us realize, if nothing before, what degree of fortitude was required to resist the pressure for conformity in the Third Reich.
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