29 Jul Not Waving but Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
“Not Waving but Drowning”
— Stevie Smith, 1957
I’m not really a huge poetry guy. As some of you long-timers may remember, that was Melcher, whose commentary on and selection of poems were once a “bonus” feature here at The Political Forum. That said, I do like a few poems quite a bit, including the one above, which I’ve always found both disquieting and relevant to the analysis of the nexus between politics and markets. Call me a cynic, I guess.
There is a story that Chris Cornell, the late, great vocalist for Soundgarden and Audioslave, used to tell. It wasn’t a happy story – and it’s even unhappier in retrospect.
According to Cornell, Layne Staley, the vocalist for Alice in Chains, had something of a breakdown at the funeral for Andrew Wood, the vocalist for Mother Love Bone. Wood had been Cornell’s roommate, and the whole lot of them – Wood, Cornell, Staley, and the rest of the Seattle-based grunge-music crowd – were all very close and shared a deep and abiding friendship. Additionally, the whole lot of them – Wood, Cornell, Staley, and the rest of the Seattle-based grunge-music crowd – also shared a proclivity for drug use, heroin predominantly. Most of them were users. Some of them were addicts. And all of them were aware of each other’s usage. Wood was one of the addicts, and his addiction finally caught up with him on March 19, 1990, when he was just 24.
The way Cornell told the story, Staley broke down in tears and frustration, distraught that he couldn’t save Wood from his demons. He thought that he should have known better, that he should have seen that Wood was close to the edge. He said he could see it all happening right in front of his eyes but didn’t have the wherewithal to recognize what it meant. Staley felt deeply and profoundly guilty about his silence, what he saw as his complicity in Wood’s death. In essence, he broke down because he thought his friend Andrew was waving, when he was actually drowning. He didn’t want anything like that to happen to any of them again.
As many of you know, however, it did happen again. Indeed, it happened 12 years later, when Staley himself died from a heroin overdose.
Cornell talked about all of this, especially Staley’s breakdown, specifically to process his own guilt, to confess that he hadn’t taken Staley seriously enough and that he – and everyone else in their friend group – had discounted the potency of Layne’s shame and remorse. Again, the point of it all was to suggest that they all had to look out for one another, to recognize the differences between waving and drowning. They’d been wrong about Wood, and they’d been wrong about Staley.
And then they were wrong about Cornell.
On May 18, 2017, Cornell hanged himself in his hotel room.
In his last few years, Cornell had become very close with another prominent rock vocalist, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, who saw the older Cornell as both a friend and a mentor. At Cornell’s funeral, Bennington just barely averted having a breakdown of his own, while performing a powerful and moving rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in tribute to his friend.
Tragically, two months later – on what would have been Cornell’s 53rd birthday – Bennington committed suicide. By hanging.
Today’s note was originally going to be about the Russia Collusion, Biden Incompetence, and Epstein File scandals. Among other things, I planned to rant about how profoundly politicized and bifurcated this country is. Despite obvious and inarguable criminality in all three of these scandals, there is almost no chance that anyone important will ever be punished. Certainly, no one important will go to jail.
The reason for this, of course, is that the nation is utterly and irreparably broken. A huge percentage of Democrats still believe the Russia Collusion narrative and will never believe otherwise, no matter how many documents Tulsi Gabbard releases. Another huge chunk of Democrats knows the story is BS but doesn’t care. Because it’s BS that was created with noble intentions, to stop Donald Trump.
The same is true to some extent for the two other scandals, as well – with parties and ideologies flipped where necessary. The only thing that makes the Epstein scandal different from the others is that, in addition to its partisan divisions, it has also produced a group of onlookers (from both sides) who are eager to see everything made public because they think that Epstein was a spy. They are convinced, in fact, that he was a Mossad agent because…of course he was. In other words, this scandal is just as stupidly and destructively politicized as the other two, only with a heaping helping of rabid antisemitism mixed in just to keep things spicy.
Anyway, I was going to remark on the scandals, lament that the politicization of everything will be this great nation’s undoing, and observe that it’s difficult – nigh on impossible – to imagine how we get back to something approximating normal from this. But I’ve done that before, many times, even recently. You all know this by now. The politicization of everything has turned the people of this country into warring factions, with friends who share common “values” on one side, and enemies who have different values on the other. Our institutions – formerly a bulwark against partisan treachery – have been corrupted and will almost certainly not save us, which means that we’re all going to have to fend for ourselves. Or rather, we’re going to have to find a way to muddle through the coming dark ages by building new communities and fending for each other, for those whom we will lift up and partner with as the rot reeks its havoc and we wait for rebirth to take hold.
In order to do this, however, we will first need to teach ourselves to recognize those who need lifting up or who are willing and able partners. We will have to pay attention to those with whom we would build community, identifying when they are in need, and showing them when we are in need. In short, we will have to learn the difference between waving and drowning.
As I have written before, and as the above anecdotes confirm, my generation – Generation X – has been pretty terrible about this stuff historically. The cynicism and nihilism we developed, both as a reaction to and as a defense against the dysfunction we inherited from the Baby Boomers, left us slow to develop our internal and external awareness. But we have no choice now. We must learn, not just for ourselves, but also for our children – Generation Z – who will be the nation’s last, best hope for rebirth after the crash.
ANNOUNCEMENT:
I wrote this piece last Friday, but held it, as I pondered what I wanted to say in this announcement. I guess what I want to convey is that this is likely the last publication of this newsletter in this format – at least for the time being. The bottom line is that writing this has, for the last three years, been my very enjoyable but very time-consuming hobby. For a variety of reasons – some good, some not so good – I can’t continue to do this as a hobby. I have plans for the near term and for the longer term, and, with any luck, I will have more announcements to make in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, feel free to reach out for more details, and in any case, I will see soon, in one form or another.
Many thanks,
Steve
