When I read there was a new television series with the logline: The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness I knew it was my kind of show for my type of mood.
Or moods.
Or mood swings.
Choose one of the above.
But what I didn’t know was that Pluribus, the new one-hour Apple TV series, was created by writer-director Vince Gilligan, the same guy who created Breaking Bad, one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
Or that it would center on an acerbic gay writer with a devoted spouse who secretly thinks most of what they write, not to mention most of the world, is sub-par, nee trash, despite how they appear in public.
Talk about hitting a little too close home.
I mean, not every day, but at least sporadically.
But let’s table the actual events in Pluribus for a moment and stick to its theme:
Misery vs. happiness in a topsy-turvy world.
It is said you can choose optimism vs. pessimism, or to look at the glass as half-full vs. half-empty.
But what happens when you look out your window or at your screen and see masked government goons disappearing a young Dad in handcuffs while they blithely drive away with his one-year old daughter?
Or watch the White House take a literal wrecking ball to a huge chunk of the historic east wing of the…White House… in order to build a Gatsbyesque ballroom, yet happily turn its back on millions of Americans whose health care costs are doubling, tripling or more because it’s refusing to negotiate the government shutdown?
Or stand incredulous when POTUS is vociferously defended by elected officials after he is filmed literally asleep at his Oval Office desk during a press conference, and then awake yet undisturbed when a man literally faints right beside him at the same gathering moments later?
I guess I could go have a chicken salad sandwich and an iced tea and marvel at how lucky I am to be in the California sunshine but….really?????
The current climate in the U.S. (Note: Not to be confused with climate change, which is another subject entirely) is volatile. And shifting. Right to left and back and forth. And the effect is dizzying, not only to us but everyone else in the world.
The Latin phrase E pluribus unum – which translated means “out of many, one” – appears on the U.S. dollar bill and on all of our coins (Note: Not to be confused with bitcoins, which is also a whole other thing).
But these days it’s hard to see the country as one of anything except, maybe one big glorious mess.
And that’s if you’re an optimistic, glass half-full kind of a person.
There are moments in history when the vast majority of the United States are in lockstep, but mostly that’s after we’ve won a war, staved off a terrorist attack, earned the most Olympic gold medals or landed some American humans on another planet or celestial body.
But these days it hardly ever happens otherwise.
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The fraying edges of what is good and bad and right and wrong in the zeitgeist more and more appears to depend on what side of the “argument” you’re on.
But arguing is tough when there is less and less personal interaction, or more and more dependence on carefully-mastered, fictional talking points being passed off as truths.
Or alternative facts.
The actions of rabid, fat cat Wall Street investors tell us we are just at the beginning of the AI boom but raise your virtual hand if you think that will get you closer to the real truth or the synthetically drawn truth that those who run the machines would like you to believe.
It’s one thing to hear facts you know aren’t facts spouted by a man in orange makeup, or by a government employee with an innocuous religious symbol of their choice around their neck.
But it’ll be far more difficult to counter the lies and manipulations (Note: Untruths is the polite word but this is not a moment for manners) when you’re going against the grain of a hive mind most of the world has been talked into believing through the means of production.
I suspect this is all only the beginning of what Vince Gilligan is offering up for us to think about with Pluribus. And that, alone, is a BIG thought, though nowhere near a brain-breaking one.
All he’s asking us to do is follow a mouthy lesbian (Note: Among my favorite people) who is faced with the eventual extinction of her own thoughts and persona in favor of hive mind thinking and is told to sit back and enjoy it.
It will bring her unimaginable, incomprehensible happiness, i.e. NIRVANA.
Who is telling her?
Well, for the sake of spoilers, let’s just say the “hive mind.” And the mere small handful of others humans left in the world who are leaning that way because, hey, who doesn’t want Nirvana.
Who wouldn’t want a promise of unlimited joy, peace, global agreement and personal cooperation in just about everything?
Not to mention, everything and everyone is so…. nice.
All the time.
Like – 100% of the time.
Personally, one of the joys in life is not to have to be one thing 100% of the time.
Or to be forced to agree with a higher power dictating how you should live and what you should do each day, even if they are sure it will bring you incalculable contentment.
One person’s contentment is often another person’s incarceration. And too often the latter is anything but humane.
Especially these days.
Murat Evgin – “Nobody Told Me” (from Pluribus)
notes from a chair 