From the Magpie (Today)

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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In the paper today—which will not be the day you are reading this, it’s just this day, already gone—the Magpie reads that men are putting cigarettes behind their ears in Mosul, where Iraqi forces have taken the city back from the Islamic State. Smoking has been banned there since 2014, when the Islamic State took over. In Mosul, for today, the war is over. Today, the Magpie gets an email from a longtime friend of a different race who says that she sees all the headlines, but she has to believe that things are getting better, that Hillary will win, that she doesn’t want to be naïve, but she needs to focus on the virtues, on the possibility of union. Today, the internet shouts that Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks did “Daddy Lessons” at the Country Music Awards and brought down the house. “My daddy said shoot,” they sang together, united across musical and racial lines by the lyrics, “girl, it’s your second amendment.” In the song, the one they all want to shoot is a man who’s playing them. The implication is that they will and we, the listeners, will cheer them on for blowing that bastard away.

Today, Billboard’s number one song in the country is “Closer,” by The Chainsmokers, a fakey R&Bish track about a guy who is at war with himself about wanting more than a hook-up that sounds as if it was ground out by Ken dolls in a miniature plastic recording studio on a suburban rec room floor. Or maybe that’s the video. Today, the top movie in the country is Boo! A Madea Halloween, starring Tyler Perry in pearls and a dress buttoned up to the neck fighting back against a pack of ghosts who are actually frat boys; followed by Inferno, another Dan Brown-novel-based movie about a global conspiracy being fought back by a professor of something called symbology; and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, a Tom Cruise movie about a global conspiracy being fought back by a vigilante. Today, according to the Nielsen ratings, the World Series is the top network television show and NFL Football is the top cable show, followed immediately by The Walking Dead. The difference between football players and zombies is a bit obscure to the Magpie. If one were to fall asleep during the football game and wake up to zombies lumbering around, would one know that it was a different show?

Today, Pantone’s color of the year is still actually two colors—Rose Quartz and a baby blue called Serenity—and anticipation is building for 2017’s color, which will be announced in December. At least one designer has suggested that Hunter Green will win. Today, the stock market is up a little. Clinton, according to many headlines, is down in the polls. Today, it is warmer in the Northeast than it should be at this time of year. It was warmer than it should be yesterday too. Today, the number one book in the country is Escape Clause, by John Sandford, which is about a detective investigating the disappearance of two rare tigers from the Minnesota Zoo. Today, the Magpie notices more homeless people on public transportation, which is what happens every winter, even though, today, it’s as warm as spring. Today, the Westboro Baptist Church is picketing Juilliard in a protest against what they term “the vanity called the Arts.” This does not seem to the Magpie like a war the Westboro Baptist Church can win. Today, friends are leaving to join the protest at Standing Rock.

Today, in other words, all the wars are still on. There are winners and losers. Even the colors are vying for the top spot. Investigators, and professors of symbology, and Tyler Perry in pearls, and the Westboro Baptist Church, and Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks, are chasing ghosts and bad guys and zombies and tigers and linebackers and cheatin’ men and the arts, oh my. Most of the villains are fake, and most of the heroes are, too. The Magpie doesn’t think that shooting your player boyfriend is quite what the framers of the second amendment had in mind. The lead singer of the Chainsmokers is so spectacularly bland that it’s difficult to imagine to what, besides that one part, one would hook up. It’s like you’d just slide off. His battle with himself is like two empty outlines fighting each other. Maybe the tigers just wanted to get the hell out of the zoo. Why chase them?

Meanwhile, the men in Mosul put cigarettes behind their ears. Sometimes they smoke them. The smoke rises in the air and it cost a lot, that smoke. The Magpie passes a woman on a street corner who is saying sternly into her phone, “The mockingbird is a symbol. The mockingbird is a symbol.” Maybe she is a professor of symbology. The smoke is a symbol, too, of course, which is why The New York Times focused on that detail. It’s a symbol of westernization, of secularism, of American freedom. What kind of horrible people would ban smoking? Another rule of the Islamic State was that all men had to wear beards. That’s a symbol, too, which in another context would be funny: mandatory beards. In this context, it is not.

And now you think I am going to say that all the battles are fake, and all the stakes are fake, and all the blood is movie blood, and that it’s all an elaborate game, it’s smoke and mirrors. But that is not true. The stakes are real, the battle is real, and the results will not be symbolic, although they may be most visible to us in signs and symbols that seem trivial: a brick, a joke, a hair-do. We see so many battles that are spectacle that it may be hard to wake up to the battles that are not. It doesn’t matter if Hunter Green wins, or who wins the World Series (sorry), or whether or not some boyfriend is on the real. What happens tomorrow, however, matters. The smoke is just the part you can see. Underneath, the world is burning.