What This Is, And Isn't

I don’t know, to be quite honest with you.

There does, though, seem to be some confusion on that question, if the handful of puzzled emails I’ve received in the last week are any indication. I’m still trying to get a handle on who stumbles in here, into The Rake‘s little sidecar in cyberspace. I’m not even sure who reads The Rake, but I’m guessing I’ll get a general idea in due time.
I should warn you right now, though, those of you who are unfamiliar with my previous stint of hard labor shoveling words into a hole: this is probably not the place for literalists, for people who are earnestly prepared to believe what they read. I am, as more than one of you has already observed, an unreliable narrator. And, yes, there are more important things in the world than the sort of nonsense you’re likely to find here, many more important things.
It’s not that I don’t care about those things. I do care, and I already spend entirely too much time reading about them and railing about them until I’m blue in the face to my wife and friends. The thing, though, is that I’m not, unfortunately, a man who’s going to be able to shed any important light on any of the pressing issues of the day. My opinions on those important things and issues are pretty much the same as those held by tens of millions of other people, and every bit as impotent in the face of the opposing views held by tens of millions of my other fellow Americans (as if you can ever really say “my fellow Americans” with a straight face anymore, as if you could ever truly say “jury of one’s peers”).
I’m not indifferent, and I’m not yet ready to throw up my hands, even when it appears that I am, quite literally, throwing up my hands. I plod my way glumly through the newspapers every morning, page by page and column by column. I do some of the things that I consider to be my duty as an American; I vote, write the occasional angry letter to public figures, and volunteer my time. I routinely give money to organizations or causes that seem worthy to me. Yet these gestures feel increasingly like inadequate acts of atonement or pathetic attempts at absolution –which they doubtless are– rather than meaningful forms of redress for the mess we’re in.
“There will be much hope, but not for us,” Franz Kafka wrote in his diaries, and like so much else he wrote, those words could well serve as an epitaph for our time.
If you’ve made it this far you’re likely thinking by now that I have, in fact, thrown up my hands. Like I said, though, I do throw up my hands, but I haven’t yet thrown up my hands, and I think there’s an important distinction in there somewhere.
The problem at the bottom of all the other many problems right now is this: political discourse [sic] in this country is insufferable. I find politicans and the parasitic pundits who live off the beached and bloated host of the American political leviathan to be as uncompelling, unconvincing, and unattractive a group of characters as has ever been assembled in any one time and place in the history of mankind.
They don’t move me. They don’t change my mind. And even given their now acknowledged place as part of the entertainment industry they fail to entertain me.
And the American heart doesn’t really move much anymore, either. (William Merideth’s “great sloth heart” has never been more universally apt.) Oh, it wiggles a bit now and then, trembles or constricts (timidly, violently, almost imperceptibly), or shifts a few degrees to the left or right, but it doesn’t move. When the heart won’t move, the mind can’t be changed, and the wonderful thing about the lost art of real, stirring political oratory and strenuous debate was that it had the ability to both move hearts and change minds. Go to the library and check-out a volume of great speeches sometime, or, better yet, get your hands on a copy of Say it Plain: Live Recordings of the 20th Century’s Great African-American Speeches. That wonderful book and CD package is full of passionate, roaring orations that moved hearts, changed minds, and moved and changed the world.
I’m sorry, but this thing –whatever it is– will never do that.