The wrongness of always being right

Rain and a hard cold wind blasting in from the north, toasting muesli this morning, roughly following my friend Annie’s excellent recipe for granola. Rolled oats, a spoonful of bran, honey, chopped hazel nuts  or whatever  nuts I have around — pecans or walnuts — perhaps some dark-brown Demerara  sugar, a pinch of spice. A warming toasty start to the day.

 
Suppose self-righteous indignation were revealed to be another kind of addiction? We all know the  outraged and righteous of the world, especially on political or religious forums, always frothing and pointing  fingers, always holding the moral high ground and never wrong. So tiring.

But the notion of self-righteous indignation being a drug high seems to develop naturally out of recent scientific results that show that addiction is actually the most natural of human processes. You’ve heard the phrase “addicted to love.” Well, you can deliberately enter less salubrious mental states. You can deliberately go to Las Vegas, and the slot machines are now tuned to track the pattern of your behavior at the slot machine and change their rewards pattern so you start getting more rewards when it calculates that you’re about to stand up and give up and leave. So there’s gambling, thrill addiction. Well, it turns out that there’s substantial evidence that self-righteous indignation is one of these drug highs, and any honest person knows this. We’ve all been in indignant snits, self-righteous furies. You go into the bathroom during one of these snits, and you look in the mirror and you have to admit, this feels great! “I am so much smarter and better than my enemies! And they are so wrong, and I am so right!”

And if we were to recognize that self-righteous indignation is a bona fide drug high, and that yes, just like alcohol, some of us can engage in it on occasion — as a matter of fact, when I engage in it, I get into a real bender — but then say, “Enough.” If we were to acknowledge this as a drug addiction, then it might weaken all the horrible addicts out there who have taken over politics in America.

 
A friend of mine has  just had heart surgery and I jump each time the phone rings. Mumbling prayers under my breath, keeping fingers crossed, sending off loving hopeful thoughts into the  indifferent ozone.

And for another friend who has stopped smoking and wonders why she can’t stop romancing the damn habit, this poem from Patrick Phillips, via American Poetry Review

Elegy for Smoking

It’s not the drug I miss

but all those minutes

we used to steal

outside the library,

under restaurant awnings,

out on porches, by the quiet fields.

 

And how kind it used to make us

when we’d laugh

and throw our heads back

and watch the dragon’s breath

float from our mouths,

all ravenous and doomed.

 

Which is why I quit, of course,

like almost everyone,

and stay inside these days

staring at my phone,

chewing toothpicks

and figuring the bill,

 

while out the window,

the smokers gather

in their same old constellations,

like memories of ourselves.

 

Or like the remnants

of some decimated tribe,

come down out of the hills

to tell their stories

in the lightly-falling rain—

 

to be, for a moment, simply there

and nowhere else,

their faces glowing

each time someone lifts,

like a gift, the little flame.

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