Be all their sins remembered
Josh Crowley joins us today to write about the one single question that matters and why the masters of the world will never find happiness.
He previously wrote about the cult of the just world.
Luke O'Neil
The poor and sick in America, he wrote, are poor or sick because of the choices they made. The wealthy, on the other hand, have earned their riches by their savvy. Wealth is righteously earned and poverty is righteously dispensed as punishment. It's just that simple. Don't think anymore about it.
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Be all their sins remembered
by Josh Crowley
People tend not to play Hamlet’s soliloquy right. You know the one. At least not in the movies.
If it’s been a while since you’ve heard the whole speech, it’s Hamlet waxing existentially about living versus dying. Trigger warning for suicide by the way. Actors, no matter their talents, always play it either too weepy, like Laurence Olivier seeming like he’s so depressed by the idea that it’s putting him to sleep, or too unhinged, like Kenneth Branagh delivering the lines as if he’s trying to intimidate Clarice Starling from behind bulletproof glass.
Then there’s Mel Gibson, an antisemitic prick whose performance doesn’t bear mention beyond this opportunity I’m taking to remind everyone what a shitty person he is.
You can find some good ones on YouTube from various stage performances (Sir Ian McKellen’s is lovely, albeit abridged), but what so many of them seem to miss is that Hamlet’s suicidal contemplation isn’t born solely out of sadness or hopelessness, but also, and perhaps mostly, from exasperation. Yeah his dad died and he’s bummed about it, but he doesn’t mention that at all. What he does mention is the unpleasantness, large and small, that we all experience simply as a matter of being alive.
“The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”
He’s not just talking about his own personal suffering but the shared miseries that befall each of us. The fundamental question at the center of it isn’t “should I kill myself?” it’s “why would anyone not kill themselves in this place except for the fact that we’re terrified of the alternatives?”
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
Much like our old pal Hamlet, I also puzzle over the nature of existence, and lately I’ve spent a lot of my time wondering about a single question: who the fuck is any of this for?
Suffering has always been a core pillar of the human experience, to such an extent that we have a major world religion built around one guy enduring so much of it that it’s somehow supposed to save the rest of us from it. Eventually, anyway, so they claim. But suffering seems to have reached a bit of a fever pitch, hasn’t it? Even after you factor out that the media has a negativity bias (nobody reports that someone didn’t get murdered) and a tendency to sensationalize and capitalize on grief, it’s hard not to get the sense that most of the population of the world has been ground down to a throbbing, inflamed mass, each of us a frayed nerve left behind after the rest of the tooth has been worn away.
Recently, in the morass of needless agony that oozes down the inside of our screens every day, something in particular struck me: even the people who have everything, the people responsible for maximizing our collective pain for their own exclusive benefit, seem to be nothing but miserable.
Look at Donald Trump, America’s grossest elderly toddler, the poster child of dumb and pointless cruelty, lurching from one unforgivable atrocity to another like an unthinking animal bred only to cause harm. All he ever talks about is how aggrieved he is, how unfair it’s all been for him. Woe is Trump. Poor widdle baby, so mistreated by the media.
And then there’s Elon Musk, one of the saddest and most pathetic humans ever to live, behaving as if his net worth were somehow linked in a cosmic database to how much of a worm he is. Imagine being on track to have more money at your disposal than the entire federal revenue of Canada but spending all your time desperately seeking approval from teenage racists and misogynists on the social media platform you bought to surround yourself with their praise and adoration. If that is our definition of success, as his acolytes insist, humanity is a failed evolutionary experiment.
The worst parts of the internet were recently abuzz with memes glorifying Darth Vader thanks to Elon posting a poorly-AI-mangled image of Anakin Skywalker on a throne surrounded by the adult faces of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher pasted onto children’s bodies and Natalie Portman from about 4/5 of the way through Black Swan, adorned with the caption “This is what they stole from us.”
Sorry, was having a net worth briefly exceeding a trillion dollars not enough for you? Was buying your way into a role in government that allowed you to dismantle programs based solely on your ideological whims and greedy desires with absolutely no accountability or personal consequence not enough? You killed hundreds of thousands of people and got away with it! The only way you could get closer to Anakin Skywalker is if you burned off your dick and balls inside a volcano.
I’m sure a lot of people would be happy to assist with that endeavor if he really wanted it.
For the better part of the last decade and much of the last fifty years, motherfuckers like these two have held nearly all the wealth and power and have been able to shape the country at multiple levels, all to their fancy, and it’s brought nothing but misery to everyone involved. I can’t think of a more resounding indictment of all their beliefs, such as they exist, than the fact that even they don’t seem to have been made happy by any of it. We’ve done things entirely their way for so long, solely for their benefit, and it’s only made literally everyone miserable.
The other day Democrats across the country absolutely swept federal- and state-level elections in an astonishing and irrefutable rebuke of all this shit. Elon dumped about half a billion dollars into campaigns that nearly all lost, which makes these victories even more impressive considering the arsenal of resources and propaganda they were up against—including attempts at sabotage from other Democrats.
With a Fetterman-proof majority in the Senate (finally) and an overwhelming majority in the House, we’ve got the next two years to not only course-correct but perhaps even make progress toward a sustainable and just future. This moment in time offers so many opportunities, but unfortunately there are few people less capable of meeting it than Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the nominal leadership. If we’re not careful, Democrats are going to absolutely squander their chance. At this point, Democrats in congress are the only thing that can stand in their own way, so we’ll have nobody to blame but them, and they need to be made constantly aware of this in the term to come. Considering their recent historic unpopularity, they would be wise to listen.
As cathartic and beautiful as it has been to watch some of the worst people who’ve ever lived get utterly trounced and rejected by the country at long last, it’s hard not to remember all those political cartoons from fifty and eighty and a hundred and twenty years ago, illustrated by people experiencing the exact same problems we have today, and worry that things are only going to stay bad forever. We’ll continue to live in a world that doesn’t work for anyone, including its cruel despotic architects, suffering the same enduring but entirely needless miseries, opting to bear the ills we have rather than fly to others that we know not of.
Americans can’t even afford groceries or gas on decades-stagnant wages while contending with rampant inflation, tariffs, and price gouging. We’ve been helpless to stop a genocide funded by our tax dollars despite nationwide protests. Our political discourse over the last two years has been utterly dominated by obsessing over whether or not a couple dozen trans athletes should be allowed to play sports—a premise based on the belief that they have an unfair advantage from having been born with a penis, invalidated at its outset by these athletes’ largely average performance in their arenas. A vast majority of us have wanted universal healthcare for years upon years, but our ostensible representatives refuse to actually represent us and many of us still go bankrupt from health expenses even with “good” private insurance. Globally we’re experiencing the early effects of climate apocalypse, and the stupidest third of our population thinks we should do everything we can to make it worse. With a misguided definition of “fairness” we keep giving them a say in making such extinction-level decisions. Even those of us with pretty good lives—among which I’m incredibly fortunate to count myself—are still a handful of bad months away from financial ruin, and we’re powerless to stop any of the unforgivable monstrosities perpetrated by people with a million times as much wealth and power as we have. At times it feels like this whole goddamn world is actually Hell, or some kind of simulation built to maximize our desire to end our own lives. Maybe both.
Compounding all this exasperating ever-present despair is the fact that it seems like people have felt it forever. The pendulum of recorded history, stretching well back before Shakespeare, keeps swinging from left to right (though, it always seems to stop just left of center, strangely), yet we never manage to escape the oscillation of misery. It’s been like this for so long that it seems like it can never be any different.
It can, though, and it has to be, but our only chance is if we decide together to never do things their way ever again. It’s clear that even they’ll be happier. All Democrats have to do now is to not lose the name of action.
Josh Crowley is a writer, engineer, and musician living in northern New Jersey with his wife, daughters, and pets. You can find out more at joshcrowley.com