Implicit Self
Images from my soul, dedicated to the world that makes me
On the failures of 2016
More than half the year is gone as I write this, I am trying to remember the last time I felt a year suck years off me. It’s not like that hasn’t ever happened before after all. It is just that it has been a while and the last time I was young…
But let me begin with the House of Cards season 3. I am sure everyone who usually watches the show has already done so and I obviously did the same about the first week it was released. While I still recall being nearly blown away last season, by Claire, this season she the character (not the actor) was underwhelming. Last season to this season the encroachment has begun: by the ink blots that rise from the wall paper to take over the room and make everything blurry and never ending. Frank and Claire tried their wiles against each other, the Klu Klux Klan hoarding was surprisingly well timed considering the current political scenario. Nobody won, Frank got shot by the one person who knew the truth, or had an inkling of it, which was not so bad, but did not lead to anything: Snowdens aren’t born in all parallel universes, whistle blowing at high stakes usually doesn’t lead to any noise…. There was some good moments of screen chemistry between Claire and the writer. The speeches he is supposed to have written though, left me entirely unimpressed, unmoved and yes: underwhelmed. I think that was the failure, the big speech writing, the historical act of running for President and Vice President as a couple needed something more. In detective/crime stories I always look for police procedure, I think as far as election procedure goes, House of Cards is doing a good job, so that is something. The double knock in the end did finally resonate as two great minds unite to rule. If the next season is not the last, it will still be last for me. Robin Wright deserves better.
Talking of failures, one show that is NOT a failure at all is VEEP and if I were to continue watching an American show based on politics it would be VEEP.
Then, we must get on with real politics and that is synonymous to Trump these days. Of course the Brexit vote and the false propaganda by both sides that finally led to the demise of British politics as the remain side bloated risks of leaving the EU and the leave side exaggerated its monetary value. David Cameron will be remembered as the person who brought about Brexit, willy nilly, even if by most other measures he did a decent job in building infrastructure, he was a PM that reduced prejudice unlike what I can say about the current Indian one.
Now it is on to Boris Johnson, once a dodgy PM candidate, who looks uncannily like Trump’s lost sibling, now the new Foreign minister in the cabinet of the new PM Theresa May who may be crazy but post-hurriedly took over Cameron, but maybe the cleaner stuff in the dirty laundry(rephrased from Marina Hyde who is so good!). Others in the leave campaign have left, the political scene: the creepy, underhanded Michael Gove dissatisfied with success that looks like British self -destruction, wanted a more individualistic personal feel as he turned against, again, another ‘friend’ or ally to add to the list that had previously contained David Cameron: Boris Johnson and quickly took a nosedive out of existence, for now. Nigel Farage, of the UK Independence party (note the paradoxical name of the party at this point) who claimed he never wanted to be a ‘career’ politician and only waited till the referendum resulted in the ‘LEAVE’ vote to quit his party leadership and is now going to visit the US for Trumps triumph in the final debacle also called Republican national convention. Thats in July. I would call that nomination of Donald Trump, who no amount of drumpfing was able to dislodge, historic, but history is usually made by and for the winners and if this gets into history, then surely it will not just be a failure of 2016, but of human intellectual achievement of all time put together. So let us hope it won’t make it to history. It being in the present is bad enough.
I think the failure is not of the year, which started with all its hope in the people who were going to live in it and work magic in it. It is in the people who yet again choose to remain selfish and short sighted and never take any lessons. Who choose to remain ignorant and unfeeling and want no part in the aftermath of the world they created by being ignorant and selfish in the first place, only to recreate it. The vicious circle just spun back to ‘Start’. It hasn’t stopped since before Vietnam, perhaps ever since the west felt the need to rule and got the weapons to do so against the unseen enemies for untenable reasons and gets reset every time people act blind and spew hatred against an enemy they create out of ignorance and a skewed view of the world.
The year also saw me fielding a personal struggle. I don’t think I won either. Two weeks ago I would have been hopeless in writing this last line, but last night I realized that I was brave at what might have been cancer (but it wasn’t) and tried to make things work with family (and failed terribly). But we all tried. Some of us tried our best, me and my mom. It didn’t work. These days she tells me thats life. I wish she had told me that before. But at least, we tried. Tried to conquer stress, the inevitable loggerheads of contrasting personalities, the defeating repulsion of like poles, the hopelessness of caring from long distance. We tried. If everyone did that I don’t think it would be a failure. Life, that is. But democracy means, everyone does not have to.
Implicit Self 