Waiting For Godon’t

with apologies to Samuel Beckett

 We, and I mean Americans here specifically, like Vladimir and Estragon in Godot, wait endlessly for someone to come, someone who, by the way, never does. Like the dreamy, drowsy, Estragon who cannot seem to rouse himself from a troubled slumber into a waking reality, we are a people dreamily drugged into a nightmare of inaction and somnolence and, like Estragon, cannot even seem to take our boots off…no less put them on in our case, all the while muttering…

“Nothing to be done”.

Just like Estragon, we vaguely recall being beaten and abused the night before but cannot seem to do more than mutter and speculate on the merits of waiting on a Godot-like savior to come and rescue us from our collective malaise.

And just as “a terrible cry” announces the arrival of Lucky, the slavishly abused baggage boy and his autocratic master, Pozzo; a resounding wail has begun to emanate from the bowels of the abused masses that we are now amongst. The herky-jerky side show that is the current administration is more Kabuki theater than Senatorial substance. More grimace than governance. And just as Lucky’s only speech in Godot starts strong and seemingly cogent in some aspects, it rapidly descends into an escalatingly fast gibberish that seeks only to distract and divert the collective attention of a traumatized nation and world away from the Machiavellian movements that are now an hourly occurrence.

He Blinded Us with Non-Science as Thomas Dolby might have put it.

Just as in Godot; while Lucky and Pozo play out their pantomime of master and slave with increasing fervor, assuring all others that he is blind and Lucky, mute, “45” seeks to blind us with a tumultuous cascade of alternative truths, non-fact facts, and an ever-increasing spew of outer-directed insults designed to make us forget the horrors of yesterday’s news with the freshly crapped piles of today’s mess. Insult meet Injury.

Insult meet Injury.

We feel, as Estragon and Vladimir, not just a boredom, a banality, but a sickness of the soul. As they contemplate hanging themselves as an escape, we contemplate our fates as also somehow out of our control and hanging seems an option to us, as well. If the Godot we are waiting for does not arrive, what then, are our options?

Beckettt once said of the name Lucky; “I suppose he’s Lucky to have no more expectations”. Are we then the Lucky ones of our new world order? Do we have so little expectations of anything other than a growing maelstrom of malice that we sit, like character studies in a play, waiting for our societal Godot that never comes?

Or do we take the belts we were going to hang ourselves with and pull up our big boy pants and say “GODON’T!” “Enough” “You are not the boss of me”

Much has been written, speculated, and theorized about Thomas Beckett’s motives and intentions in the the writing of the play and the use of the name Godot. Like the “God” issue in the title that is never addressed in the play, is the unseen force behind the action a god-like one? Does it triumph over the evil that the character of Pozzo embodies or even temper the abuse of Lucky the slave? All speculation. All interpretation.

Yet we are now in a waiting game with our very world and our lives in the balance. Forces of apparent and unrepentant evil have taken charge and are plowing us under the soil even as they seek to pollute the very ground we are now burrowing blindly through. Deregulation, power-grabbing, punitive posturing, bloviating bluster now comprise our daily mail. What are we to do? What are we to think?

I believe that the constant, drumming, churn of twitter-talk is designed to numb us into submission. The chanting of the crowds before the election; “Lock Her Up!!” “She Lied” seemed even then reminiscent of Christians in the coliseum. It seems now more Hitlerian, more evil, more tinged with a subliminal hatred for us, the very people that “they” seek to govern…or is that control?

The total disregard for sense and science, the lack of concern over even the optics of their conflicts no less the nepotistic neophyte they have in power next door to the president is stunning. The bloated, festering, dishevelment of a Bannon that now appears truly to be the man behind the curtain is a sinister version of the Wizard in Oz. The “Shining City on a Hill” of Reagan’s vision has morphed into the Triumph of a Trump Tower.

In the end, Vladimir and Estragon, failing to do themselves in because of faulty planning, resolve to bring a better rope…tomorrow. And so, still waiting for their Godot, we have end scene; mike drop; lights up; applause.

Are we to act out our narrative’s end in a similar fashion? Are we too paralyzed with waiting to put an end to our abuse, our torture?

Those of us of a certain age are weary. We thought we had played our time on the stages of discontent as youthful witness to past abuses of power. We acted, we rose up, and we were counted. We made a difference for those that are here beside us now.

It is time to once again energize our aching hearts and bodies to make OUR America STRONG again….from within. It has nothing to do with borders or bombs; it has everything to do with people, power, and the balance within which those two things exist.

The wrong people have the power. And we are more than ready to not wait for our Godon’t to save us. He is a figment of a movement that wants to own our souls and our minds. We will not let it.

We will not let it.