Violins in a Musty Attic

Sylvia Shawcross

There is a kind of dark twisted amusement that strikes me sometimes. I don’t know about you. Oh I know. There is not a dang thing funny about a dang thing in this world right now but if you become jaded enough well, it is almost pure comedy.

Today I’m indulging my jadedness. Normally I don’t go there (much) but today I am because I spent part of the night watching Gaza being bombed to smithereens and in the foreground of the image of all that violence, a bird flew to a tree, down to the ground and then back again.

A black bird in an open yellow grass field like a touch of grace in hell.

Yes. I know. We’re perhaps days away from a likely 3rd world war being formally announced and everyone is hysterical and horrified and outraged and practically bleeding from their hair roots with apoplectic apocalyptic consternation. It’s a terrible thing. Truly it is.

The mooing herds in the Ukraine and the Middle East are busy killing or being killed and that’s just the wars Legacy media has decided to cover. Neither one really knows quite why or how this kill or be killed happened exactly and who started it all but killing is what they’ve ended up doing. Because everyone else was doing it?

Perhaps it is the comfort of numbers even if it means being killed if you go into battle or are killed for not going into battle. Or you’re just sitting there like a Mallard duck with other ducks on a pond waiting for the hunter. I suppose not having choices is okay if everyone else around you has no choice too. There’s a macabre comfort in that. I don’t know. You won’t go out alone I guess.

Apparently none of the mooing herd asked themselves “what if they had a war and nobody showed up?” That’s the thing the mooing herds keep missing. Historically. I guess they didn’t know they had that choice. And I guess sometimes they don’t—if we’re being ruthlessly real about Mallard ducks and stuff.

I always used to say it couldn’t get worse, but of course it does. A lot of the time it does. But that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh and laugh and laugh. We’re all supposed to be brain-damaged in one form or another from Covid or its vaccine anyway so we might as well go in that direction: that cackling inappropriateness of the mad as they trip the light fantastic to the percussion of bombs and artillery.

You can hear the violins play sometimes. The pathos everywhere blinds the heart, as Ghandi said I think, “An eye for an eye and the world goes blind.” It is after all far better to laugh to the bitter end than weep and wail. Isn’t it? Well… if you can manage it.

But let’s not think about that. We’re the mad after all for this particular piece anyway—the stark-raving mad like hatters at tea parties or sinister old women locked in attics in musty old storylines. And in that spirit let us look at the ludicrous conundrum everyone seems to have found themselves in now.

It is “pick your side” time again in Derangementville. We all now know if we’re black or white, trans or cis, oppressed or oppressor, green or anti-green, minority or majority, indigenous or colonialist, trusting the science or trusting in God, pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, liberal-which-is-now-conservative or conservative-which-is-now-liberal, pro-truckers or anti-truckers, pro-immigration or anti-immigration, freedom-loving or communist, toilet-paper under or toilet-paper over.

We have evolved into complete self-obsessed definitions of all sorts of colourful labels almost to the point where we haven’t got any more room to stick the labels. Just when we’re busy making t-shirts saying “Leave the children alone,” we have to switch again. Jews for Jesus? Or Save Palestine? Be grateful you are here at this point and not still wearing your Ukraine flag or your #Me-too scarf. You’d be so humiliated in social situations—everyone would be laughing and pointing at you.

But here’s the funny part, isn’t it: All these people in the public eye are desperate to decide which side they’re on to proclaim to the world. The contortions and agony is so evident. The long-thought out reasoning. The deeply-emotional depths of soul and personal history and feelings exposed. The ridiculous expectations of common people demanding a stance from in-the-public-eye-people.

You know why it is funny? Nobody cares.

We have reached that point now. We don’t friggin’ care. It is only those who think so highly of themselves that they have to proclaim such things. All of it… is a so-what. It is a so-what kind of world now.

So. The only solution is to have no opinion at all.

It is what it is. You are not a leader of a country making decisions. You are not an elite puppet-master pulling strings. You do not have the money to buy your way into high-ranking decision-making circles. You are not any of these things. You are just another face with an open mouth promulgating viewpoints while the world burns. This is also known as an influencer in a madhouse. Nobody cares anymore. That’s the sad truth. Perhaps in my jadedness I’m being harsh. I don’t mean to be. I’m just saying what I see as a sad truth and what I’m starting to believe about my own work here. To what end all these opinions? To what end?

We just want the killing to stop.

Until then, we’re just going to laugh. Until we cry. Which we do.

Until we have another thing to be divided over and we have to turn on the t-shirt machine again. Maybe the next thing won’t involve death and destruction. Maybe it’ll just be a mild tornado or a skirmish in a country we’ve never heard of populated by mostly albino roosters and hairy-arsed hermaphrodites. On that perhaps it would be appropriate to have an opinion.

Freedom to have no opinion at all is perhaps at this point the greatest freedom we can have.

Otherwise: Peace. Here. Now.

P.S. I’m a bit angry today. My apologies. (I’m still Canadian in that respect.)

Here’s an earworm because the more things change the more they stay the same: