We Are All The Catcher In The Rye Now

 

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” 

 Holden Caufield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye

 

Are we telling a story or are we careening downhill hellbent on sailing off a cliff?  Is the death march to destruction a kind of nihilistic event lacking coherence?

I really don’t know anymore.

Stories have plots and characters, heroes, and villains.  Our current story has one, incoherent sociopath who defies all logic.  He is the villain without conscience.  He is the priest who worships himself and chaos.

His chief acolyte bleeds from his eyes and has flies in his hair.  What a spectacle!  What a great, villainous sidekick to evil incarnate.

The plot, however, makes no sense.

These evil-doers don’t measure up.  They are not smart enough to be coherent.  The garage-sale Mussolini and his stuffed shirt fly-boy cannot even get on the same page.

Seduced by the dark side?  That denotes consideration and movement.  No, they are a discordant cacophony of emptiness.  They know no other dance except the single-dimension danse macabre.  They strut and preen and bluster through the hall to peals of laughter and pungent ridicule.  They have their impotent, flaccid henchmen, stiff-arming their allegiance to their own hollow-king.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.  These are men without a country; these are rebels without a cause trapped in their own befouled gene pool.  Separate them.  Challenge them.  They fall down.  They cannot hold up.  They are afraid of their own shadows.  They think strength in numbers will save them.  A white hood will keep their identities safe.  Their masculinity needs a prop:  a long gun or a big knife.  Like their leader, size is everything.

History has seen these self-serving crybabies before.  It never ends well for them.  They are the waste kings on the dump of a larger, better, and more worthy story, a tale of hope and human achievement.  They are the hollow-king’s hollow men.

Take your shiny boots and unearned military medals and go home.  Practice your salute and your cowardice from the safety of your secret gardens.  Your time has come to get off the stage.  Your day, so short and murderous, is done.

We have lost so much—hundreds of thousands of dead; millions infected; millions, going back through history, enslaved, maltreated, brutalized, and killed.  American innocence is dead.

But it is not too late to seek a better world, Tennyson reminds us.  “We are not now that strength which in old days / Mov’d earth and heaven, that which we are, we are: / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Let us gather in a field of rye at the edge of a cliff, a silent army of the righteous, to profess our faith in the future, to dream our dreams of love and redemption, and to save ourselves from the fall.  We hold in our hands a flock of white birds.  Release them to the promise of the sky to consort with the angels.  Believe.