Personal essays
It’s time to jump out of the pot
Tempo
“You know,” says Tina, “every now and then I think you might like to hear something from us that is nice and easy.”
And the guitar strums quietly behind her has Ike sings that he left a good job in the city.
And there’s subtext.
She’s talking to us while he looms in the background and we know that there are aspects of their marriage that are - let’s say - problematic at best.
In one of those if you know you know moments, she goes on to say, “but there’s just one thing, you see, we never, ever do nothing nice and easy. We always do it nice and rough.”
She explains that their going to start the song nice and easy and end it nice and rough so you know what’s coming. It’s the ultimate spoiler and no way to avoid it as the song is playing under her introduction.
Sure enough, a little over two minutes in, the slow and easy part comes to an end and the uptempo part.
We’re not surprised. They told us.
Change
I’ve been thinking a lot lately of this phenomenon of things changing slowly then all of a sudden.
My friend Brian posted about this and mused about the difference between a big wave that breaks and the beginnings toward a big change that fizzles.
I understand the point he’s trying to make but these feel like the same thing to me. Once a wave breaks, the water recedes and their’s no indication that it was ever there. It is also a big change that fizzles.
That’s not what Brian meant. I think he meant something more like when the Berlin wall came down. Something was building and you could feel it. The changes came with decisions made over months starting in August, 1989, but mostly we remember when the dam burst and the wall was open in November of that year.
That’s really not that long ago.
You can see the effects of a divided Germany and can see architectural differences in the different sectors of Berlin. But to a casual visitor, the wave broke and real change happened.
That, I think, is the distinction Brian is making.
Frogs
Even though it’s been debunked, we continue to hear the story of boiling a frog.
The idea is that if you put a frog in warm water and heat it up very slowly, it won’t notice when the water is boiling and it will die.
Researchers found that at some point the frog will notice that the water has gotten too hot and they’ll jump out.
It’s used as an analogy for how we slip into political realities without noticing. I think we generally have more of a Proud Mary experience.
The Obama administration was that first part of Proud Mary. Things were nice and easy.
Don’t get me wrong, I mean that in a relative way. Things weren’t nice for a lot of people and they weren’t easy for most people. But we could mainly get back to our lives. We were making slow progress as a people trying to fix things.
It’s not that we didn’t notice an opposition party determined not to help the people they represented but we somehow felt it would work it’s way out.
Then the Obama administration came to an end and the music slowed to a stop. And then bang. The next administration started up with a Muslim ban, images of locking kids in cages, and abandoning our allies.
We knew. Just like Tina’s intro, they told us we were headed to rough.
The song ended and we seemed to learn nothing. There was Biden and things felt nice and easy again.
Sure not as nice as it should be and good lord we’d changed our notion of what easy was.
Another election and this time we had no excuse.
Even if you don’t pay attention to the words of Proud Mary, you’ve heard it before. You know what happens.
Sure enough bang. The current administration is levying tarrifs, no they aren’t, yes they are. They’re dismantling agencies, invading cities, and taking money away from people and programs to give to the rich.
We’re not surprised. They told us.
Finally, we seem to be getting to a temperature where more and more people are noticing the water is getting a bit too hot for their liking and jumping out of the pot.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 297. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe