Someone to Blame - Nov 9 2025

 

Someone to Blame

Nov 9 2025

The metaphors speak for themselves;

blind canyon, 

cul de sac,

rabbit hole.

Where the only out 

is to double back.

Otherwise, you’re a fly against the glass,

bumping your nose repeatedly

and buzzing your wings;

the briefer rests and rising pitch

matching your frustration. 

Sometimes, the rabbit hole branches out.

(Or could just as well

be mole rat, prairie dog, gopher hole.)

You come to a fork

go right or left

burrow down deeper;

the tunnel narrowing

and the dark dank air

heavy with the smell

of dead matter

and living soil.

Perhaps find yourself trapped

with other enthusiasts

who also love to push 

as far as they can;

untroubled by the darkness,

blind to their foolishness,

and lost in a warren

of radical ideas.

All breathing the same air,

repeating the same thoughts,

and reinforcing certainty

as they urge each other on.

A good spelunker

would trail a line of rope

to follow back out.

But for these true believers

there’s no returning.

Like flies in a bottle

with nowhere to go

they beat against the walls,

buzzing angrily

on impervious glass

thinking they see light,

not knowing that they’re trapped

in hard-packed earth.

They won’t die right away

so much as wind themselves up

with single-minded certainty.

But soon enough

breathing the same stale air,

exhausted 

by hate, envy, and rage

their time will come;

if not in violence, then quietly

imprisoned in their sinkhole.

And few will miss them

in their subterranean lair,

exchanging high-fives

as they plot and scheme

and feel aggrieved

and look for someone blame.

The clever term “manoshere” has been coined for this: adolescent men, almost all right wing extremists, hunching over computer screens in their parents’ basements wallowing in the macho rantings of jacked men who either believe what they’re saying or are minting money by exploiting the ingenuous, sexually frustrated, and chronically unemployed. Where conspiracy theories are born, racism is a source of meaning, and misogyny gives an illusion of power.

A paragraph in Walter Isaacson’s piece in today’s Atlantic (excerpted from his forthcoming book The Greatest Sentence Ever Written) inspired this poem (see below). The book is based on the ideal of ”the common ground”:  about the increasing division in America, social inequality, and the friction between rugged individualism and the common good. 

People go to their own cul-de-sacs online, dive down different rabbit holes on the internet, listen to opposite ends of the talk-radio dial, and let algorithms turn their social-media feeds into echo chambers. The technology that promised to connect us, to be the public’s common ground, found a better business model in dividing us.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/greatest-sentence-ever-isaacson-excerpt/684491/