Duckett, "Everything Works Backwards"

You know who knows anything? Nobody.

I am currently reading Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, and I am at the part where the Soviet Union has collapsed and the nations of Eastern Europe are finally free from Communist oppression. These are events that I actually lived through, and while what I best remember about that time is being irritated by how often MTV played Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now,” I also recall the shock at how seemingly swiftly it happened and the giddy optimism about everything being okay from then on. Naturally, it turned out a little differently from what we all anticipated, and it’s a good reminder that our expectations are often at odds with everything we know that occurred previously. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” is a beautiful sentiment, but it presumes that there is such a thing as justice, or even a moral universe that has an inclination to bend in its direction, when really people do bad things to other people for as long as they can and until they are forced to stop and even then there is a part of them that lays in wait, for hundreds of years if necessary, until they can do it again. When viewed in this light only the good things that happened in history should really be seen as a surprise, which I guess is what Jesus Jones was on about in that fucking inescapable video back in 1991.

So. What can you say about a weekend where the only good news was that Austria decided not to vote for a far-right nationalist as president? Austria! Are we really entering a century where Germany and Austria are going to be the beacons of hope and freedom that rise above the totalitarian tide washing over the rest of the world? Who knows? Not me, and certainly not anyone who tells you that they do. Nobody knows anything, but everyone sure seems pretty loud about their own opinions. And certain, so fucking certain. You know that Jonathan Swift quote, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him”? If he were alive today he would have to revise it to, “When anything anywhere appears in the world, you may know it by this sign, that the dunces are all in on social media telling you what it means and how you should react to it, usually in a series of tweets that show up out of sequence when some other dunce, whose idiot opinion it has confirmed, points to it with a succinct and seemingly authoritative ‘Thread.’” Everyone’s a fucking dunce and all they want to do is show you how smart they are. God, I really need to get off Twitter. I’m the biggest dunce of all.

Anyway, here’s music. This will be especially helpful if you’ve got Jesus Jones stuck in your head, sorry. Enjoy.