The Rub — Tit for Petty Tat

The Rub — Inaugural Post

To die, to sleep,

No more. And by a sleep, to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to — ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub.

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause.

-Hamlet

When the troubled Prince of Denmark, at peak existential and mental health crisis, utters his oft-quoted soliloquy, analytical rigor leads to paralysis. As miserable as Hamlet is, as profound his suicidal ideation, he worries that taking his own life may, in the ultimate ironic twist, be an overcorrection that solves nothing.

He’s right to wonder if instead suicide is a choice that will boomerang and condemn him to purgatory — his best efforts to escape this mortal coil foiled. This propensity for overcorrection, seeking such an extreme opposite that it reveals itself as in inverse doppel, the barely concealed mimicry of the loathed thing itself, is the essence of the rub.

When I survey the cacophony of voices battling over cultural and political issues, I can’t but interpret most positions, policies, condemnations and exhortations as overzealous, fatuous corrections of perceived and loathed ills. Examples are aplenty.

If middle school children, just steps from one of the most elite educational institutions in the world, can’t manage advanced arithmetic, instead of implementing a more aggressive teaching module, the experts scratch algebra from the curriculum. “The kids have difficulty learning math so let’s not ask them to learn math.” No harm, no foul. Because Mark Twain leaned into capturing the local dialect and hierarchies of the Pre-Civil War South by transcribing a word common in daily parlance, one which offends contemporary ears, we ban his novel. To counteract years of diet culture forced on women in pursuit of the idolized string-bean silhouette, feminists and disability advocates proselytize gluttony and obesity as healthy, beautifying lifestyle options for young women. To battle the insouciance of many to the real problem of sex assault of which many women are victims, we criminalize all overtures and expressions of straight male libido as not just attempts at rape, but articulations of a monolithic rape culture.

Given the current vibes, it’s easy to identify what’s labeled “left” and “progressive” as the most constant source of overcorrection which is in itself an overcorrection. In the chicken or the egg framework of the swirling culture wars, the right and conservative circles participate and inflame equally. In a vortex of stark dialectical reasoning — I adopt the position the most diametrically opposed to that of my enemy — it’s common to overlook that the arc of a pendulum, like the trajectory of a boomerang, always circles back. Or in a quantum theory-inspired interpretation, maybe the points were always the same, but obscured by different perspectives. How can we navigate this destructive tit-for-petty-tat symbiosis, and find air for nuanced conversations and enlightened decisions? That’s the true rub.

I’d initially conceived of this Substack as a continuation of my first blog post/essay “Just Not An Identity Politics Kinda Girl,” as a memoir-inflected exploration of culture and politics from a heterodox, non-identitarian perspective, with occasional posts about cinema — my true love — and my dating woes. After a few years of seeing this ideology parody itself with more extreme expressions and emboldened disciples (read: grifters), what more is there to highlight about identity politics other than it’s regressive and inane, that it bores me and labels, even one as potentially liberating as heterodox, are narrow and passé?

Instead, I can’t help but view most contemporary happenings through this prism of overcorrection and its collateral damage. “The Rub,” it is.

Originally published at https://geshamarie.substack.com.