The Melancholy Muckraker - A Second Helping

Dearest Reader,

Please think of me as that relative you dread – you know, the one who makes a scene at weddings and ruins every holiday with his soul-deadening criticism of everybody’s life-choices and only associates with the rest of the family so he can make them feel as miserable about their lives as he feels about his. Believe me, you'd feel rather miserable if you were me too and for your sake I won't get into why. I'm not enough of an idiot to have (yet another) place where I can expose the black hole of irresponsibility and missed opportunity that is my life story to the internet. Alas, as a consequence I have no credentials for a column you should read and surely no rational account of why you should trust my expertise will suffice. My sole qualification for writing this column is my burning desire to make you all as miserable about the state of our world as I am.

Misery shall take two forms in this column. The first shall be to show the unpleasant, dirty, compromising acts it takes in order to make the world a better place – and how even after we've accomplished our long sought-after goal, we still have no idea if we've not affected metamorphosis for the worse not better. Such is inevitably the manner that inevitably accompanies the most harrowing ordeal on Earth - social change.

The process of social change is an endless series of thought-crippling anxieties followed by a heedless charge into the action's abyss which provokes still more infinities of crippling anxiety. There is no salvation from the future's uncertainty - if there were, the future would already be here.

But the future does have its markers. It has signifiers as to where we're headed in addition to where we've been that mark the dimensions of our miserable existence. Occasionally, perhaps it can even rescue us from our spiritual darkness. The word for this rescue process, much abused and yawned at even more, is culture.

Inevitably, culture is the word people use when they mean 'something too boring to be entertainment.'  Perhaps they're right to be so dismissive. But if they are, then that's because culture is a word far too vast to be contained by what entertains us. Everything that is boring in life is culture, and sadly, everything that's interesting in life is culture as well when you analyze it enough to make it boring.

Unfortunately, everything that’s important in life - vegetables, education, family, exercise - is boring. We’d like to think that there is a way of understanding life without the boredom of memorizing and verifying all those dull statistics. But the truth is that the alternative is still more dull. Statistics can predict your future, but they can’t tell you who you are. In in order to figure that out, you have to act like one of those pompous intellectual masturbators who clears a room within a second of mentioning Marshall McLuhan - because you can only understand yourself through the employment of all those vague, descriptive terms which help you to realize what you like and hate, and indulge in all the bloviating it takes in order to understand why you think about it the way you do. Even if you take the time to try to understand why people are the way they are, then you won’t have a foolproof way of predicting the future, but you’ll certainly have a smaller margin of error than you did before.  

The name of the column is The Melancholy Muckraker – mostly because I couldn’t call my column Paul Krugman or Savage Love or some other name that would bring me many more readers. In short, this column exists to grind your nose in the shit (apologies to Ms. McGarry) of just how . If it’s successful, you’ll love to hate me. And who knows, you may thank me later just like you thanked that relative for being the only family member to tell you that you have a drinking problem.

Your Frenemy,

Evan