Nobody has seen Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in public in a while. Is that because the 84-year-old former majority leader is dead? Well, now that is an interesting question. What is death? A man who does not pursue his dreams dies every day. Mitch McConnell's dream was to be a United States Senator, a position he has held since 1985. Could one not then argue that he is in fact the livingest guy around?
What after all is "a pulse"? Many things throb rhythmically. That is nothing special. That is not what makes something alive. A disco beat throbs. Is a disco beat "alive"? Does it have highly remunerated aides whose entire livelihood depends on its continuing ability to occupy elected office, who will attest to it being "alive," three weeks after paramedics traveled to the disco beat's house to treat someone there who had gone into cardiac arrest, and with no one having seen the disco beat in public since then? You have really got a lot to think about right now, in my opinion.
A heartbeat after all is a rhythm. A series of beats. In between the beats, it is not beating. Is it "dead" in those intervals? What if some of the intervals are longer than others? Athletes and the very fit often have slower heartbeats than others, and this is a sign of health. Bear that in mind when you feel qualified to draw conclusions about a heart that beats very slowly. If you are not jumping out from behind a shower curtain to screech "Dead! Dead! Dead!" at LeBron James in between each of his mighty and well-spaced heart contractions, then to state as fact that the brazenly evil avatar of obstructive minority rule in the United States is a corpse in the interval (three weeks and counting) between two of his even more powerfully spaced-out heartbeats makes you a hypocrite. I do not think that is the kind of example you are trying to set for your children.
When you step back and look at the bigger picture, aren't we all "visibly decomposing?" Clear eyes cloud and are fanned by wrinkles; plump baby cheeks become jowls; the organs liquefy into a noxious sludge. This process is an inescapable fact of human life. Some of us have the wisdom to call it "normal aging." Must it proceed at the same pace for everyone? If the man who orchestrated and led the charge to defeat campaign finance laws, so that corporations and billionaires could wield essentially limitless power over the American electoral process, appears to maybe suffer some of the ravages of age a little faster than Tom Brady, are you telling me that this gives any wiseacre or whistleblowing coroner license to just go online and allege that he has been dead for three weeks? No wonder no one can trust anything they read on the internet.
Maybe it is normal in Mitch McConnell's heredity for the lips to dry and peel back from the teeth in a macabre grin in an otherwise totally not-dead 84-year-old who is just hanging out and not moving at all due to not wanting to. Maybe, the way a parent in one family might warn their adult child, "We are very prone to Type-2 diabetes; three of your grandparents got it in their 40s," in Mitch McConnell's family a hale youngster is told, "In our family everyone does not die at 84, but instead, after a normal and not alarming bout of cardiac arrest, forms a chrysalis and metamorphoses into Dolph Lundgren inside of there if the media will simply chill out and leave it alone long enough."
Memory is a truly mysterious thing. Events do not literally imprint themselves into our brains; we imprint them ourselves, with all the imperfect craftsmanship, and thus unreliable authorship, to be expected of fallible creatures working unconsciously in the spongy crud or whatever of their own brain matter. Research indicates that over time, the further into the past a life experience recedes, the less one's memory of that event truly is a memory of the event itself; rather, it becomes a memory of an earlier memory, a story told third- and then fourth-hand, a Ship of Theseus. Ultimately, by which I mean three weeks after the last time you saw whatever it was (an 84-year-old sociopath who dedicated his four-decade Senate career to his preference that society should die altogether if the alternative were for it to become one iota more just and equitable, for example), what you are left with is essentially a neuronal stage-play dramatization of the meaning of the original event in your understanding of your life.
What I am getting at here is that maybe Mitch McConnell was always a pumpkin mounted on the end of a broomstick, being waved around by a ventriloquizing Senate page. Maybe all he ever could say was "Hello, ah am Mitch McConnell, and ah am not dead a'tawl," in a deep rural Kentucky accent. How can you say that he ever was not? Are you truly arrogant and foolish enough to trust your own decaying brain matter over the manifest reality observable outside of yourself? Who knows what the pumpkin on the broomstick will look like in your head when you try to remember it three weeks from now. It could look like Ronald McDonald, for all you know.
Have you ever considered that some people just find morgues very relaxing, and prefer to convalesce in one? I didn't think so! Maybe it is you and not Mitch McConnell who has been a visibly braindead pants-shitting husk for the past several years. Maybe it is you who are bloated and outgassing due to the anaerobic putrefaction of your innards.
Listen. "Mitch McConnell" is not that uncommon of a name. I bet there are like a million of them in the United States. Probably like 5,000 Mitches McConnell die, in the state of Kentucky alone, each and every day. That means that every single day, any number of sinister robed and hooded individuals are probably visiting various hospital morgues, mortuaries, and funeral homes, and hissing at various staffpersons to "stand aside" and that they "have come for the one called 'McConnell.'" They could be there for a multitude of reasons, all of them none of your business! Those tinctures and accursed daggers could be cerements of mourning. To assume that all of these individuals are "obviously necromancers" is the height of ignorance. They could be any type of a wizard.
