On censorship and its discontents

Explored quite obliquely. But if you squint, you can maybe just find the outlines

Here’s how I define my current relationship with censorship: once a stranger playing at speech police is granted authority to deprive me of an audience I’ve spent decades cultivating — and this is true in a very real sense, right down to my ability even to contact allies I’ve supported or colleagues I’ve in the past written for professionally — I’ve lost the war for my public self, making all the battles I might otherwise have continued to fight akin, in my estimation, to screaming into the void or punching at clouds. And because of that, I’ve gradually and predictably moved from anger to despair to sadness to resolve.

My silencing, as I’ve come to think on it, has been a sort of social death sentence; and I’m no longer hopeful of the supposed amnesty I was promised by a modern-day billionaire philosopher king in a leather jacket and a catturd beanie. I’m no longer interested in bargaining. I’ve reached acceptance. And I’m contented.

Conversely, here’s how I define my current relationship with drinking: alcohol may ultimately win the war, defeating me on the battlefields of both heart and liver; but in the interim — with a well-honed thousand yard stare and a Kegerator — I’m winning every last goddamned battle, planting my victory flag every time I fall into a deep sleep, then awake again the next day to kick the ass of a healthy, stout pitcher. Along with several of its friends.

In my existential resolve toward my burden, then, I’m very much like Camus’s Sisyphus — only dressed in an Hawaiian shirt, sandals and socks, and with my augmented disposition far more gregarious and prone to laughter at certain times of the day. Because it turns out pushing a boulder up a hill with one hand while holding a drink in the other — especially with earbuds and a smart phone a regular part of the task— isn’t a punishment nearly so bad as we’ve been led to assume it is: in fact in practice, a solid playlist and a comfortable buzz seem to heal a surprising array of old wounds.

So Camus had it partially correct. Still, at final glance, he strikes me as something of a whiner who — though he found meaning in engaging the travails of existence — portrayed that engagement as an act of great psychic trauma. He made coping into a form of gritty, fraught heroism. And he did so because he spent years accommodating his own narcissistic introspection, when what he really needed to do was find a stiff drink and an iPhone loaded with Jimmy Buffett songs.

Myself, I’m more an optimist. Or perhaps a masochist. Because my punishment, such as it is, keeps getting increasingly enjoyable — so long as it remains properly sauced.

Think of me as Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, only without the script having yet settled on an ending.

I will admit that my having been largely silenced on social media apps like Twitter has contributed greatly to my desire to self medicate: after all, there’s a terrible loneliness that can befall you when you’re left out of important cultural conversations by something other than your own free will, despite having already invested so much of your life in public intellectualism and debate.

But the idea that all self-medication is equal or equally problematic is absurd. For instance, virtually no one in the health profession would chide me for taking up yoga on my own, I don’t think. So I’ve simply replaced exotic stretches with Clamato, Tabasco, Michelob Ultra, and a shit ton of 80s music, complete with its peripheral nostalgias.

Given my current circumstances? I’m okay with that. I’m growing content with tending my own garden. And I think I’ll remain contented until the keg blows. So long as kegs remain readily replaceable.

— all of which may resolve in rough strokes into some incipient extended metaphor that I haven’t quite worked all the way through. It may similarly speak to stages of grief over a loss of social reach, a loss of public autonomy, or of the intersection of public and private, of the growing demolition of our ability even to pretend we’re having fruitful conversations on important social conflicts and their potential solutions. Which seems the point, sadly.

Or — and I can’t stress enough how this is equally possible — maybe I’m just a degenerate drunk.

At any rate. What was the question again…?