This morning I woke up, dragged myself out of bed in the still-dark, switched on the radio, stumbled to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee brewing, took a shower — thinking, all the while, "Gee, I’m tired. I must not have slept very well" — and then put on my bathrobe, my glasses, and my watch. As I was performing the last of these actions, I looked down at my wrist to see what time it was. At which point my still-on-autopilot brain registered that it was 3:30 in the morning. A glance at the clock next to my bed confirmed it: I’d gotten myself up four hours early. So I poured the hot coffee into a thermos, went back to bed, and slept until seven, when the alarm (which didn’t go off at three, which you’d think would have clued me in, but it didn’t) went off.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve woken up in the middle of the night thinking it was time to get up. On one occasion when I was in high school, I woke up at around two in the morning, absolutely convinced that it was in fact two in the afternoon — despite overwhelming visual evidence, i.e. pitch darkness outside, to the contrary. My mother, who woke up when she heard me walking around and bumping into things, had to argue with me to convince me that it was still night. My mind, when half-awake, is not at all rational, but it’s implacably stubborn.
You know, when I started this post I meant it to be a random funny journal-esque piece, but now I’m starting to see it as a political allegory. Somehow I’m recasting that two a.m. dispute into an exchange somewhere in the White House:
"Mr. President, sir, it’s not two in the afternoon. It’s two in the morning."
"No, no, it’s two in the afternoon. I believe that, and so should you."
"But don’t you see how dark it is?"
"You just have to have faith that it’s afternoon."
"Mr. President…How can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?"
"My instincts. [Pause] My instincts."
"Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough!"
I borrowed the last three lines directly from an exchange between George W. Bush and Senator Joe Biden, as reported by Ron Suskind in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Said article has been linked all over the place, and has already made the phrase "reality-based community" a byword; the best take on it I’ve read so far is Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s post on pointy-haired bosses (hat tip to Rana). (By the way, those bitter guys Teresa talks about, who can’t understand why their manuscripts get rejected? I’ve met the college-age version of those guys a few times myself. They’re the ones who fly into a rage when they don’t get an A and insist that it’s all your fault that you don’t appreciate their brilliance. Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with too many of these larval Pointy-Haired Boss types, but they do tend to leave a lasting impression.)
Elsewhere, Michael Bérubé thinks it’s all too much like science fiction (comparisons with The Matrix are probably over-obvious, so I’m happy to see a mention of one of my personal favorites, Dark City, instead). William Gibson is reminded of Robert Mitchum’s character in Night of the Hunter.
"We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." That sentence says it all, really. It would be ludicrous if it weren’t so disturbing, coming as it does from people in high places who think they’re always right because believing something automatically makes it so.
My instincts told me with total certainty last night that it was morning when it wasn’t. And my apologies for stretching this analogy to such lengths. But all I can think now is, are we really going to re-elect a man who not only insists, based on his instincts, that night is day, but also refuses to back down when people point to the darkness outside the window?
And having said that, I am now going to take a long hot bath so I can relax before going to bed and this time sleep the whole night through.
