Pessimist's piquant Christmas greeting

In my will, I am going to establish that all the countries of the world be renamed. Dethrone the irrelevant histories and traditions that gave us terms like America, France, Japan, Australia, North Korea, Ireland. I’ll require, by my final legal document, that a very unaccustomed reality be injected into the world. The new names will be such as these: Don’s Perfect Resort, Macron’s Digs, Abe Lobby, Scottland, Kim’s Haunt, Mike’s Parlor. And I’ll mandate that these names constitutionally change each time a new potentate replaces the old.

Fact is, there is no better reason for any nation’s calling card than this, a psychological one: We billions all live here, but there will forever be those disturbed individuals who need to remake the world in their name, and do remake it in their name.

Just consider your own, or any normal person’s life. You are alone or you have a family, you love one or more of them; you have friends; you have a job or career that you hopefully have good or at least stoic-like feelings about. Your life is, on the cosmic scale, fundamentally insular: It’s your time on this Earth and you sometimes have deep and wide feelings that are like a great novel, though which only you will read. You do not get it in your head to bend millions of people’s lives to an agenda concocted in your neurosis. You do not think we are all on a big ship’s theme cruise: the Medicare for All cruise, the One Percent Get Most cruise, the Control Women cruise, the liberal or conservative or socialist cruise. The Democracy cruise. The Slave State cruise.

I suspect we will always live on a planet that the sick power-seekers will terraform with their special pollutions. That sub-elite minority will always squat in the midst of the numberless majority and sway its branches, teach its lessons, convince it that the world is people and purposes, not life itself. I don’t have any solution to this ageless misinterpretation except to begin to re-perceive leaders down, deflate their importance. Vote for those whose mind turns to the quiet individual not to an airy or iron theme. There would need to be this different psychology. There would need to be this different way of seeing human meaning.

I think the world would actually be more interesting if it became atomistic, a vast scattering of individuals minding their own business, not pervaded by a constantly playing background jingle. Hikers, workers, artists, family men and women. Book clubs, culture centers, support groups, craft guilds, scientific circles. Probably most people wouldn’t agree with me, as my spirit here is different. In that spirit, I see the atheist world as more exciting than one run by God. To me, his never-moving bulk blocks out the real mystery behind him.