May You Live in Interesting Times

So goes the Gypsy curse.

But there's something seductive about interesting times. Many of us imagine what we'd be like in a true crisis. We'd like to think that we would know what to do in that situation, that we'd be the one who avoids getting trampled in a stampede of panic, that we might be the one to save a child from a burning house. Beyond just retaining control over oneself, we imagine that we'd rise to the occasion of interesting times. We'd be the person we always thought we were, if only something would come along to let us prove it.

Much of human mythology serves as a corollary to the Gypsy Curse. The story goes like this:

A young man from an inconsequential town somewhere in the hinterlands is called to fight some existential battle. He is reluctant at first, but once the gravity of the situation is made clear by wise but impotent elders, he becomes a champion of the cause. After much travail the young man becomes a sage himself, a battle-hardened beacon of morality. He defeats the great enemy and returns home to his inconsequential town to settle down in peace, get married, have kids and grow old and wise gracefully. That story is found with little variation in Star Wars, King Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Superman, Perseus, Moses and many others. Sure, sometimes there's no girl in the end, and sometimes the hero is actually of noble blood, though raised by farmers, but the myth gets at that yearning all the same. We all want to live in Interesting Times so we can be heroes too.

The Gypsy Curse also comes up in today's conspiracy theories. People would like to think that 9/11 was more than just an act of wanton violence, that despite all possible evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, or that the Federal Reserve makes us all the pawns of 19th century industrialists. There is no reason to get into the business of refuting or supporting these claims. Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that it won't satisfy that human desire for Interesting Times. There will always be another conspiracy to uncover.

Today, many of us believe that there is something sinister lurking in the back rooms of American government, multi-national corporations, and other seats of power. Matt Taibi writes that:

The people who really run America don't send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country's corporate boardrooms happy. You don't elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal.

Another way to put this is that the truth is less interesting than fiction, even if it's sometimes stranger than said fiction, and sometimes even worse than we could have imagined. The genius of true evil is in its banality-- its numbing of the passions that might actually put up a fight against it. Good and evil aside, epic battles are extraordinarily rare. Much more common are the thousands of small decisions, deals and compromises that are at the root of any cooperative endeavor, be it public or private. There is nothing more numbing than a shareholder report that arrives in the mail, or a committee meeting on CSPAN, and there are few things that are more important.

About heroes and villains, Taibi also writes:

In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style "false flag" and "black bag" operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life.

Evil is boring. If you want to do something about it, you'll have to be boring too. There will be no war, no sudden illumination of the truth. You'll have to fight tooth-and-nail just to stay awake as you toil at a computer screen for days, months, years, even decades. You'll have to resist the powerful draw of the Gypsy Curse.