Twilight at the Last Chance Saloon (#937)

Twilight at the Last Chance Saloon

By David Benjamin

“Doubting everything may be a workable plan for individual survival in a fracturing media universe dominated by algorithms and digital media of dubious authenticity, but pervasive doubt could just as well bring on civilizational ruin…We’re bringing on a death-spiral of distrust — and I fear that in the 2020s and beyond, grifters peddling alternative facts may come to suffocate us all…”

— Farhad Manjoo, N.Y. Times, 20 Nov. ‘19

MADISON, Wis.  — Welcome to the Last Chance Saloon. 

This is where you come to drink yourself into a stupor, give up on everything and stagger out, through those swinging doors, into the ninth chapter of Revelations, the really gruesome part with the bottomless pit and all those locusts with women’s hair, lion’s teeth and “tails unto scorpions,” when “men seek death but shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them…”

We have our differences, but here we all share the urge to kneel down in a nice, secluded restroom stall, blow our cookies and surrender. Check out the left end of the bar, where the green Apocalyptics cluster, convinced that humanity has sacrificed the Earth to the extractionist ravishers of virgin prairies and rain forests, coral reefs and salmon streams. Prophets of doom swilling organic vodka, they tear their hair and rend their non-synthetic garments, frightened that it’s too late to prevent being drowned all together in a roaring, sucking maelstrom clogged and polluted with plastic bottles, PCBs, pigshit and chlorpyrifos. Among them also are the dead-enders of social justice, gorsuched and kavanaughed into hopelessness, staring into an abyss of Trumpian bluster and groveling putinescence.

 Down there at the rightmost extreme of the bar, man’s fate is even more hideously dire. There, believers in the pure godhead good of holy Herr Trump tremble at the deep and toxic malignancy of the destroying-angel, savior-impeaching Democrats. They rage and fume, in seeming impotence, against liberals, radiclibs, feminazis, antifas and socialists, against Greenpeace and tree-huggers, against Muslims and Mexicans and Muslim Mexicans, against Black Lives, colored girls and Pocahontas manquées, against the armies of scalpel-wielding abortionists slashing open wombs and impaling babes, against roaming bands of transgender marauders barging into unisex toilets, kicking in the doors and French-kissing teenage boys (and girls) while their pants are down.

Mass-staria!

But here’s the secret of the Last Chance Saloon. Dominating the bar, the real force for grim defeat and suicidal rumination, are the ones in the middle who don’t have a rat’s ass to give. Sunk in sullen silence are the partyless, the uncommitted, disengaged and dubious, the true nihilist harbingers of Parousia, ferociously faithful to the futility of doing anything at all. There is no system — “hit me again, Sam” — no democracy — “make it a double” — no justice or law — “aw hell, make it a triple” — no heroes, no villains, no values but greed — “with a beer chaser, Sam!” It’s all rigged, we’re all screwed and you can’t fight it — “dammit, where’s my drink, Sam?”— so it’s best to just give the world the finger, bang the bar and order one more for the road. 

Among recent patrons at the Last Chance was, evidently, Timothy Egan, who wrote in the Times,“There’s no relief from the exhaustion of our national crackup. Even without impeachment, the holidays are a bracket of culture wars, the muted expressions of cheer loaded with political subterfuge.”

But unlike many of us, Egan did not linger in the bar. He had one light beer and went home. On the way, he remembered that America “is not an ethnic, racial or religious state but an idea.” He cited a reminder issued by President Obama in 2016: “What makes us American, what makes us patriots, is what’s in here. That's what matters. That's why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own. That’s why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That’s why our military can look the way it does, every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.”

Obama’s appeal to our better, more sober and neighborly selves, to our union, has scant audience in the Last Chance Saloon in 2019. He said then — and keeps saying — that beyond the swinging doors is not Nietzsche’s abyss, or Jonathan Edwards’ mouth of hell, or the bottomless pit of Revelations. America is out there, and it’s a nice place full of nice folks. 

Egan lamented that America’s historic trend toward a national ethos of tolerance and inclusion is neither steady nor constant. We have swung away often from our first, founding idea that all men are created equal. We backslid even at the beginning, when the Founders enshrined slavery in the Constitution, denying suffrage to all but the white, male and landed. Egan’s measured reflections suggest a pendulum.

In the Last Chance Saloon, the bleak zealots at each far end of the bar peer up fearfully at an immense spiked mace suspended from a creaky ceiling. Their eyes behold a wrecking ball set in motion by the beasts and the horsemen of their fiendish foe, plummeting toward them with a force that will obliterate all they hold dear, blasting them like locusts into the bottomless pit, “… and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail…”

This is the nuclear pendulum which, if we read the Bible or get our news from Facebook, swings ominously above Trump’s America. It is Poe’s pendulum. It’s the wrong pendulum.

The one described by Obama, disregarded by the pessimist Farhad Manjoo and implied by Egan, was hung in the Panthéon, in Paris, in 1851, by Léon Foucault. His elegant idea was to suspend a brass-coated lead ball from a wire long enough (220 feet) to demonstrate, by the movements of this gentle pendulum, the rotation of the earth. Within a circle drawn by Foucault on the floor of the Panthéon and marked with gradations of longitude and latitude, the glistening bob described a circuit that took 31 hours and 50 minutes to complete. And then it would start all over again.

The mute philosophical observation of Foucault’s benign pendulum was that nothing stands still, everything changes, and sooner or later, everything will swing back to where it was before.

But it won’t stay. 

Although the fatalist mob currently overcrowding the Last Chance Saloon seems to have forgotten Foucault’s unassailable proof, it is a stubborn truth that remains self-evident.