AN ODE TO SAPIENS

...who we are

I wake up early every morning thinking I’d be much smarter on this day to avoid turning on the news in order to start out with some small sense of tranquility. But before I’ve even had a chance to run a cup of coffee through my Keurig and pop a couple of Ginger Snaps, the New York Times is buzzing in the pocket of my PJ’s telling me I better grab the remote ‘cause in a part of the country that’s three hours ahead of me, some brand new, astonishingly heinous shit is already taking place, and I certainly wanna be able to mark the minute the democracy is declared dead.

Okay, maybe a little bit hyperbole, but only a little...and of course anyone who knows me, knows I haven’t owned a pair of PJ’s since I was in fifth grade, but am I gonna say my phone is stuck down the front of my undershorts? No, I’m not! (I’ve got it on “vibrate.” Call me.)

Three minutes into having succumbed to MSNOW (let’s keep up with the trends) my mind can’t help but drift back to Yuval Noah Harai’s Sapiens. If you haven’t read it (what planet do you live on?) the biggest takeaway (for me) is that it’s pretty much undeniable that we Homo’s became masters of the planet due to our ability to lie. (Harari calls it our ability to create fictions.). Once a gathering became larger than about a hundred fifty (the maximum number at which everybody knew everybody else, we had to make up stories (fictions) we could gather around. Once migrations began, later generations began looking different from each other due to nothing more than weather, but those of us who looked alike were drawn to each other to fend off danger from those who looked different (mostly due to skin color, but maybe because a few of us were getting Romeo-and-Juliet-like with the Neanderthals). Because we had gotten so spread out, different groups came up with different fictions based on our diverse physical environments, and those fictions often clashed, ramping up our perceived threat of the “other.” Simply put, we’re warlike.

I just covered millions of years in a paragraph; and I can already hear you parroting all of my teachers and most of my friends over the years: “Crutcher, will you please get to the point?!?

I will. See, when I click the remote on MSNOW to see what has already gone on in that part of the country where, as I indicated, old guys get up to pee three hours ahead of me, I find myself slack-jawed at the fictions the MAGA-mob has come up with. Their ordained leader, Jabba-the-Cheeseburger has jerked awake in the middle of the night with crippling indigestion that he blames on socialists and “terrible persons” (reporters), rather than his stupefying eating habits, and made some mind-numbing declaration that his Faux News cabinet has to spin into a story.

And they fucking do it! I swear, if I had a pistol and one bullet, and was somehow caught in a room with Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, I’d shoot myself. (If you’re worried that I have a gender bias, you can substitute in Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth.)

The MAGA minions and their leader have created a fiction about white, male homo Sapiens that have drawn a majority of white males, way to many white females and an inordinate number of random, intellectually lazy humans of every ilk together, believing that MAGA leaders give a shit about them.

And here’s the problem, simply stated. From the Revolutionary War, through the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the American fiction of equality started on a faulty basic premise. It’s a fiction that can’t be rectified without a Constitutional mulligan. A complete do-over.

Hang with me a just a little longer. Our “rule of law” began favoring wealthy, landowning white males; the only original federal office-holders. Along the way the Constitution added, through amendments, Blacks (but only three-fifths in the beginning, and subject to literacy tests that the majority of whites couldn’t pass), and finally women. At this point, the political structure was locked in, But we kept informally adding to that American fiction; that each of us was exceptional for having had the luck to be born here; that we were a melting pot; welcoming immigrants in search of “freedom” from all over the world.

But nobody ever lit the fire under that “melting pot.” Read any legitimate history covering events leading up to World War I. Follow that with any legit history leading up to World War II. Pick your own favorite era. We’ve always treated immigrants like shit, like the way the original stewards of this land should have treated us.

I remember sending eight chapters of my second manuscript to Liz Darhansoff, my agent, and receiving a response saying something very close to, “You have one chapter here. If you continue in this direction, I’m afraid I won’t be able to represent this story.” Liz probably didn’t know where that story would have ended up, but she knew wherever it was, it would suck, because I was working from a bad basic premise.

It’s late, but America needs a Liz Darhansoff at thirty-thousand feet to tell us we don’t have one chapter here. Start over, she might tell us, with a premise that will come to a climax where decency reigns, where all citizens and all legitimate immigrants have the greatest prospect of rising to the level of their capabilities.

In my storytelling imagination, our first chapter covers the entirety of our first two-and-a-half centuries; we’re here and on the cusp of seeing our error; that we started with a faulty basic premise, then told ourselves fiction after fiction to make that basic premise hold.

In our second chapter we write a new Constitution where our new premise is true rule of law. The plot will be harrowing because the enemies of rule of law, those in power now, will be clever antagonists, fighting to their figurative and sometimes literal deaths to keep what they have.

These new revolutionaries, our protagonists, will take all money out of politics, allowing every human who runs for office an equal amount of government funding and can spend no more. Every candidate gets the same amount of electronic air time. We keep our three branches of government, but all members of those branches are governed by the same rule-of-law by which citizens are governed. No office holder is allowed make a dime from their position in government. No lobbyists; bribery results in immediate removal and prosecution. Every political position has a term limit; Supreme Court judges included. Presidents are limited to one term of six years, so they don’t have to spend a first term running for a second.

And last but definitely not least, any office holder who swears allegiance to the Constitution must prove they know what’s in the Constitution.

There’s gotta be more...this is just the rough outline of our fiction, and just so you know, if you didn’t already...it ain’t gonna happen.