A margin of error for two…

To err is human, all too human, and I’m as guilty of peccadilloes of omission as the next carbon-based biped schmo. Maybe more. Yet, the particular instance of mortality I want to confess to has little to do with a stingy conscience, and more to do with an overabundance of loose talk, a glut of gab. It’s the direct result of an excessively nourished theorizing instinct. My greedy little speculation-gremlin sometimes becomes pretty voracious and to sate his appetite for the uncanny he transforms into his alter-ego, fuzzy-wuzzy fantasy. I let loose his reins and allow this to occur, completely willing to go along for the ride.

In any courtroom, my observations about the recent petrochemical refinery explosion and its pernicious effects on our aquatic cousins would have been deemed immaterial: street-corner prophesying inspired by a perfect storm of smoke and journalistic wildfire. Headlines about terrorism, sabotage, and predictions of insurrection titillated my bored imagination. The image of a GULF storage facility bursting into flames alongside that of hundreds of fish bobbing belly-up in a lagoon conjured up scenes from the fiction of Don Delillo. The idea that there was a brotherhood of malcontents fighting some misguided crusade for the wrongfully-jobless with willfully reckless acts of destruction stirred the cauldron further, and the possibility of government dissimulation sweetened the deal. Growing up, I became acquainted with many dystopias courtesy of the Sci-Fi channel, HP Lovecraft, Philip K Dick, and other masters of paranoid prose, and I’ve become adept at decoding the symbols that are meant to signal impending societal meltdown in speculative fiction. They were all there, in living color. Economic downturn, general strikes, mass-unemployment, civil unrest, and the image of a huge industrial structure ablaze on the television screen to be seared into the collective unconscious of an already hostile populace. Hell, the ominous black smoke-cloud right outside my house could have been spewed by the mind of Don Delillo. But, because I was satisfied enough with these signifiers of doom to confidently report that I was now a citizen-spectator in a banana-colony hurdling to its own home-grown Armageddon, I didn’t stop to make the distinction between fiction and fact. This wasn’t some fantasy-nightmare, this was real life, and however frequently the latter may resemble the former, it isn’t as structured by genre-conventions or authorial logic. This became apparent when a plot-twist was delivered with graceless suddenness to my own front-door.

I read the front page of the paper and then the relevant story within. The press’s confidence in the criminal scenario had vanished and the headlines confidently declared that officially the CAPECO petrochemical refinery had burst into flames unaccountably. This was the new reality, the brief period of competing explanations and discursive chaos had been tidily succeeded by a new consensus. It was unanimously confirmed that there was no party to blame for the disaster except ill fortune. Clearly, to advocate the “terrorist” explanation was now to openly declare oneself a lunatic, a conspiracy-theorist, and a UFO-chaser.

By printing those big black words in trustworthy, reliable typeface, Puerto Rico’s journalists turned their backs on me. While I was relieved that a disaster had been proven to be an isolated shake-up, rather than a harbinger of anarchy to come, I also felt betrayed. Whereas the night previous my theorizing was the product of a sane and healthy mind, to the Puerto Rico Daily Sun I had suddenly become an irrelevant wacko. I had nothing to do with their careful fact-checking and quantifiable evidence. I felt like the lone remaining fire-worshipper in a village that had embraced an unfamiliar, foreign god overnight. Once a member of the elect, I was now an embarrassing relic from a less enlightened era.

Surely, Wittgenstein or Thomas Kuhn would have something erudite to say about this definitive phenomenon which turned everything I’d uttered about the CAPECO explosion into incoherent babble. The same words I’d read myself in the papers, the authority of which was to be taken for granted by thousands of citizens, would only fall on deaf ears if I repeated it now.

Maybe this apology has morphed into more of a confessional with trace amounts of softheaded amateur sociology, but I remain committed to making the honesty of my contrite feelings very clear. If only to avoid from now on the uncanny sensation of being coughed up and forgotten by the restless zeitgeist after feeding off of the strength he gave my ill-formed suspicions.