The Water in Our Fish Bowl is Gross AF
How 2020 is demanding that we deal with our collective shit and why subscribing to The Think might be fun. (Or at least a fine idea.)
The year was 2005. George W. Bush had just been re-elected in what some of us considered one of America’s original doomsday events. Youtube went online for the first time launching a Nike ad that earned the title of the internet’s first ever viral video. Chris Rock hosted the Academy Awards calling it the Def Oscar Jam because of the (count em) four black nominees (a foreshadowing of #oscarssowhite) and a prolific writer named David Foster Wallace gave one hell of a commencement speech at Kenyon college.
After ascending the podium and tying his signature sweat catching bandana around his head, David Foster Wallace begins with this joke;
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
This “didactic little parable-ish” story standard of commencement speeches points out that in DFW’s words,
“the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
Ah, but that was 2005 and this is 2020. Whereas we might have envisioned the original parable-cum-joke* to be two fish swimming in a stream or the open ocean, the cultural milieu that is 2020 feels like it’s happening in a fish bowl. A small one bottomed out by toxic colored pebbles meant to be decorative but rendered garish. The fish, perhaps two gold fish swimming in circles, the carassius auratus versions of sisyphus, woefully aware of the futility of the task. The water in the fish bowl is polluted tap, and it hasn’t been changed in too long. The fish unwittingly gobble up the tiny cylindrical fecal matter that percolates to the top, unable to differentiate between it and the flakes of food they haven’t been given with any regularity ever.
To answer the older fish’s question, the water is full of shit. The shit show that has been 2020 is undeniable. The default setting of unconsciousness that DFW talks about is a far less likely mindset now than it was in 2005. Unless we are insulated by privilege or immune by blissful ignorance, we are right now painfully aware that 2020 has quite possibly been the greatest shit show on earth. Ok, maybe that’s just hyperbole considering there have been some other terribly dark and trying times in the history of the earth but I really wanted to make that loose Circus reference damn it, and regardless of the shit shows of the past, our present one feels, well, pretty shitty.
We can blame the insane clown president for the state of the bowl, sure, but the murky waters have long been in the making. The mass incarceration of black and brown people began with Nixon and Reagan’s war on drugs and rose exponentially thanks to a Clinton era crime bill. The killing and lynching of black people at the hands of police has been happening since slavery , and the wealth disparities that have left America’s over 500,000 homeless people dreadfully vulnerable to this killer disease have existed for a long time. Even before the pandemic, millions of Americans were without health insurance, underinsured, or one paycheck away from eviction, to say nothing of the millions more who were already food insecure. (AKA as hungry.)
And speaking of college graduation speeches, the new pandemic pod solution, sky high college tuition rates, student loan debt, and the even more glaring savage inequalities in the public school system have made undeniable that education from primary to post secondary is classist and racist. The very college where DFW gave his commencement speech is notoriously expensive, commanding a staggering $58,000 a year in tuition.
So here we are you and me. In a fish bowl world of shit. I am not as privileged as many, and more privileged than some. This shit has been apparent to me for a long time. I am less alone in my disdain for unfettered capitalism than ever. More Americans can now relate to the ever present stress of living paycheck to paycheck, or to the unfair loss of housing, or to the gnawing pangs of hunger. More Americans now know the sleepless nights of financial insecurity, the worry of medical bills gone unpaid, or the tragedy of medical care that is inadequate or simply cannot happen. Even if you were one of the fortunate people that got to spend quarantine redecorating or remodeling your house, or shopping yourself into a stupor on Amazon, you’re probably a little (a lot) more aware of the shit around you. (Those food lines and makeshift morgues were hard to ignore, even if you were busy keeping your newfound anxiety disorder at bay by perfecting your sourdough recipe.)
Ironically, DFW ends his commencement speech at Kenyon College by talking about the value of real education. “It is about the real value of a real education,” he explains, “which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
You and I didn’t need to shell out $58,000 a year for this gem of a lesson. We don’t- we can’t- forget that “this is water” because the water is toxic and oxygen deficient and it needs to be changed. But how? Voting is a good start but even Noam Chomsky agrees that voting isn’t enough. In a recent interview on DemocracyNow! he pointed to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements as examples of the ways that the populace can push an agenda into the mainstream dialogue in order to impose pressures on elected officials. We need only to look at the Black Lives Matter protests and riots to know that many Americans refuse to accept the murder of black people at the hands of police as a fact of life. We are no longer willing to put up with that shit.
I took a course in college on non-violent protest movements and it seems to me that organized boycotts are a great way to incite change, but 2020 hasn’t seen many of those- potentially because Amazon and Instacart were at times our only life line to the goods that we needed, or because we have yet the strength or fortitude to abandon our own conspicuous consumption.
For me, to circle back around to the point of this newsletter, the seeds of change are sewn when we think critically, engage in discourse, speak truth to power, and create and consume wisely and with intent to educate and inspire or provoke thought. Some of my favorite journalists, public figures, and TV shows over the years have being doing just that. Anand Giridharadas, The Daily Show, The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, DemocracyNow!, Noam Chomsky, Robert Reich, and Jacobin are just a few that come to mind. Movies like 13th finally got the viewership it deserved this year despite being released in 2016 and winning a BAFTA, and the Social Dilemma seems to have struck a chord with a populous who lives their lives online. (Aka, us.) Comedy legends like Dave Chappelle, Neal Brennan, and Sarah Silverman have never shied from reflecting back to America its flaws and fallacies, and we finally have fully fleshed out LGBT characters on shows who are being portrayed by actual LGBT people. All get my vote for the redeeming aspects of the current cultural milieu. That is to say that I choose to “interact” with this art and these people and their work and words because, as Margaret Meade once said,
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world.”
Join me here, at The Think to engage and reflect, have a few laughs and maybe call out some shit when we see it. We’ll share thoughts and clips, books, music, and words. Sustenance for trying times.
Speaking of Sarah Silverman and Americans, here’s a clip worth a watch:
*Incidentally, my sentence above using the phrase, “parable-cum-joke” is the proper use of the word cum. Cum is is a preposition meaning, “combined with” also used to describe things with a dual nature and function. I can’t imagine why we stopped using cum in our writing. (I know that anyone whose ever graduated suma cum laude has already become acquainted with this snicker inducing preposition but still, who doesn’t love a good parable-cum-joke?)
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