There's a part in Pink Floyd's "Hey You," when in the midst of our protagonist's devolution, we hear what can only be described as the sound of a drill -- or many drills, whirring together beneath the temporarily quieted drums and guitar.
This drilling comes right after the line, "and the worms ate into his brain," and right before the protagonist, Pink, cries out from his self-imposed existential isolation. His plea is shouted at everyone, at anyone, at you, the listener. "Can you help me?" Pink yells in the pivotal moment on The Wall. "Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all. Together we stand, divided we fall."
Pink's desperate plea comes just before his final mutation into a monstrous reactionary, a nazi, becoming the thing that killed his father in the Second World War. The drilling, in fact, was the burrowing of the worms into Pink's brain, the representation of moral, psychological, and spiritual rot taking over his mind even as he calls out for help from behind the wall he has helped build over his tumultuous life.
Every one of us knows someone who has had the worms drill into their brain. All of us are familiar with the phenomenon on a deeply personal level: a friend or family member, perhaps an acquaintance, has let fear and hatred take over, allowing a corrosive mix of bigotry and ignorance override his better senses. The person controlled by the worms perceives nothing rationally, and makes no sober-minded decisions. The worm-infested brain is precisely the opposite: it's drunk on hatred borne from personal experience, learned prejudice, and the toxic sway of our Misinformation Age. The person whose brain has been invaded by decay makes us sick. Such a person would be worthy of our pity if we didn't loathe their very existence. They're disgusting, wretched, heinous additions to the human race.
The dark thoughts come quickly and without apology: the world would be better without them.
I buck at the idea of changing hearts and minds in this Misinformation Age, largely because the internet provides us with a justification for any behavior, political or otherwise. Tribalism and polarization have reached warp speed as everyone gains access to the internet, the uncensored collection of all human knowledge that has been warped into an unstoppable weapon for enemies of humanity, whose political ideologies thrive on chaos, confusion, and mistrust. How can one's mind be changed if the internet can always tell them that they're not wrong to hate and fear a certain group? When everyone is right, no one is right. Truth is unknowable when everything is true. The internet -- the final piece of the postmodern puzzle -- concludes our collective journey toward objective notions of reality, of truth, of human nature and morality. There are no changing hearts and minds in this environment. An internet connection guarantees this.
But, if you're like the reader of this little blog who recently told me that my writing has made him more interested in dying and dying quickly, there's more: I think we can and should tell our worm-infested loved ones that they are, in fact, ruled by internal decay. It's quite a remarkable spectacle to see your once-apolitical aunt or uncle or mom or dad blame their financial struggles on undocumented families scraping by on serf wages while being hunted by jackbooted ICE agents. It's surreal to see your buddy abandon all reason and decency and back a low life running for a powerful office. And they should know how you feel, what you see in the terrible light of day -- that you're deeply concerned by what they've become as the worms creep in through cable TV and radio and the internet (if you watch closely, you can see the worms slither out of the cable news anchor's mouth and into the viewer's brain, and if you mute it, you can hear the drilling). It's hard, I know, but we owe it to friends and family to tell them in so many words that they are firmly in the grips of the disease the corroded Pink from the inside out, because the worst part about the worm-controlled mind is that the owner of the mind doesn't know -- or doesn't want to know -- that fear and hate have crippled her critical thinking faculties. The worms are sneaky like that.
None of this is meant to abdicate responsibility for furthering the anti-human agenda that has plunged its razor-sharp fangs into the soft underbelly of our politics. We cannot simply blame it on the worms. The person who shrugs as fellow citizens in the richest nation in history die because they lack access to basic health care should be called out for his callousness, and for supporting the vile reactionaries who ensure such suffering persists. No one should be allowed to hide behind the worms, as The New York Times permitted in its recent Nazi Next Door puff piece. Decent people should instead confront these happy purveyors of hatred and tell them that they have been overtaken, and that their capacity for good has been eroded by the nightmarish belief system they have come to embrace. Tell them not to be a pawn. Tell them to refuse to give in to the sweet little lies whispered in their ear by the rich and powerful. Allowing the worms to make a home in one's mind is a choice. Rejecting the worms is a choice.
I find Pink's words, however tortured, comforting in the face of such political, social, and existential horror. As loathsome as Pink becomes in The Wall's final few songs, calling for ethnic cleansing and a very British version of MAGA, we shouldn't forget what he bellows after the worms -- the rot -- invade his mind: "Can you help me?"