This morning I woke up to learn that my old backyard, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, is on fire. The area is near the doggie lake, in the Nethermead section, where we used to take our tyke to the Halloween “scary walk” every year.
Who knows what started it. A cigarette spark? A still-burning bbq briquette? What does it matter, really, when the last few days feel like our whole world is on fire? Like our brains are on fire.
A few days ago, in Budapest, some Americans wept at THE NEWS. Yes, THAT news. The feeling is that a runaway freight train has been loosed, and no one, nowhere, will be spared. That is, no one but “the chosen few”, the billionaires, the so-called power brokers.
Does anyone remember the tales of those who leapt from ledges, their fortunes in flames, back in 1929?
“Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.” That’s what Springsteen sang around 40 years ago. How prescient.
There are freight trains running through the middle of our heads. People can’t sleep or even think. Paralyzed, they Google “tariffs”. “Authoritarian”. Or they simply play Wordle and post their scores on the Book of Faces.
There are those who think bad things can’t happen. That the system will be a fire-break and stem the conflagration. They are certain the center will hold and that our better angels will prevail.
We apparently have no better angels.
A recent trip to the Czech Republic, Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary proved instructive. We stood where 85+ years ago, men and women cheered an Austrian housepainter, a little man with a funny mustache and a way with words. These citizens of the post-WWI trauma embraced his pathology, his promise of newfound pride for the forgotten, those left behind. It felt all too familiar.
Causation? A confluence of calamities, like the fires of Prospect Park. Bad things can, and do, happen. Where I visited, millions were murdered. Walls were built and cities partitioned. Dreams were demolished. All by cruel, damaged little men with withered, dark hearts.
Humanity is capable of greatness. But ultimately, the species is sad. How disappointing is it that we cannot remember the ghosts of the past. Instead, we cling with a limpet-like grip to our optimism bias.
We are a failed, silly, species.
In Prague, in Budapest, the streets bustle and, yet, there are top-notes of despair and cynicism that pervade the zeitgeist. Nothing good can ever really happen — that was the vibe in some quarters, where people had the positivity beaten out of them for many years.
Is that where we’re headed?