Sunday morning is a springish cloudy day. I am at Starbucks again. The room is buzzing, overlapping conversations. Briefly speaking with two friends, – we are to join the demonstration planned for Saturday at the end of this week. We will meet in Geneva on the bridge over the Fox River to chant and yell for an hour. It has come to this. Screaming at traffic, urging neighbors to resist the inhuman, earth-destroying policies of Trump/Musk/MAGA.

To continue yesterday’s story: a scene that Nietzsche paints for us, the recluse-madman Zarathustra has yet to be shouted down. Zarathustra details what is necessary if the townspeople are to become Overman, the one heralded by Zarathustra. Such a self-possessed human will arrive, or rise up to inherit the future. The farfetched prospect is as outrageous today, as when Nietzsche wrote between 1883 and 1885.

The first step in overcoming the malaise that grips our contemporary typical experience of ourselves,- is to feel contempt for the tepid, shallow hash, of overweening ego and ‘exceptionalism’ of which our American self-awareness is composed. Get over yourself insists Zarathustra! Shut up, calm down, have a long look at yourself. Admit the damage you’ve caused by your middle-of-the-road refusal to stand up, – allowing toxic capitalism to rape the earth, females second classed, the non-gendered forced to take left-overs in jobs and education. Look at yourselves! Feel the “mother fucker” that you have become!

The first step is the hardest step, the most painful…

What is your greatest experience? It is the hour of the great contempt.
The hour in which even your happiness becomes repulsive to you,
and even your reason and virtue.

The hour when you say:
“What good is my happiness!
It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency.
But my happiness should justify existence itself!”

The hour when you say:
“What good is my reason!
Does it long for knowledge as the lion for his food?
It is poverty and dirt and wretched contentment!”

The hour when you say:
“What good is my virtue?!
As yet they have not made me passionate.
How weary I am of my good and my bad!
It is all poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!”

The hour when you say:
“What good is my being just and right!
I don’t see myself as fervor and fuel.
The just however, are fervor and fuel.”

The hour when we say:
“What good is my pity!
Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man?
But my pity is not a crucifixion.”

Have you ever spoken this way? Have you ever cried this way?
Oh! that I could hear you cry like this!

It is not your sin – it is your self-satisfaction that cries to heaven; it is the sparingnessness of your sin that cries to heaven.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue?
Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated?
Behold, I teach you the Overman:
He is that lightning,
He is that frenzy.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Prologue aphorism 3

Always! There is always a song to fill us. This coincides with the message of the post for today: My Little Town by Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel.