I must keep knocking myself out of this narrative fallacy that we are in a story that ends well, but are almost wholly caught in the uncertainty of events and in the decisions of men (almost all men) who care nothing for what is good. This feels like a whirlwind, and that is why I keep trying to distance myself from hourly and daily episodes of the storm and instead try to see underlying patterns and tendencies.
We live at the mercy of a global capitalism that has made everything and anyone a commodity. With the internet, cell phones and other devices and venues, we live within a system of communication and data collection we have happily helped create; our demand for its products has no limit even as it pushes us towards voyeurism and vicarious experience as the primary way of life. We live within the realm of celebrity adulation, instant, desentizing pornography, and a demand for drugs, legal and otherwise, that has never been more pronounced. The seas are rising and a sizable portion of the population derides this fact as fantasy. We are withdrawing from nature, turning inwards, inhabiting screens, immersing ourselves in spectacle and huddling inside our homes.
I wonder sometimes if we have not become “enmeshed within [the American] Empire’s power to enthrall, lobotomize and oppress or [that we are not ensnared] within our own fantasies and vanities, our willed innocence”.## Some Americans believe that white people will keep them in power forever. Some believe that the liberal heaven will follow these years of tribulation. Some believe that the American story always works out for the best, whatever the best is, but do you not also feel that the speed of terrible events and their racket in passing have become overwhelming, as if we are living within an enormous bell and outside it is being struck with hammers until we grow deaf to everything except the worst sounds.
The Democrats in their present incarnation will not save us. They have their own severe problems. They are led by septuagenarians. They have yet to find a new way of thinking about the nation’s problems that is not a template of the New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society. They have offered no answers for the pervading difficulties of creating good jobs, reducing alienation, or tempering or reforming the marauding effects of 21st century capitalism. They live in revolutionary times but too often think within stagnant patterns. Besides Biden, 75 years old, who do the Democrats have who might run for President who can speak to voters as human beings, who is utterly at ease in his skin, who knows how to connect?
In contrast, many Republicans have lost their minds. Many would be very happy to install a kind of feudalism. Many have learned how to hate anyone not of their tribe. For example, Republicans are perfectly fine with the suppression of voters as long as they are people of color or young. They have gerrymandered Congressional districts wherever they have been able to do so (as have Democrats when they have had overwhelming power). Pennsylvania Republicans want to impeach Supreme Court Justices who threw out their gerrymandered districts in favor of a fairer arrangement, a move attempted in Kansas when the courts ruled against them. Their first recourse when opposed is often anti-democratic down to the bone. They have nothing new to say. They have no new ideas. They cry victim, they stoke fear, they call for tax cuts, they call for vengeance. That is it.
Trump has become the apotheosis of this trend. A long quotation from David Frum’s most recent book is helpful here:
“Trump has contaminated thousands of careers and millions of minds. He has ripped the conscience out of half of the political spectrum and left a moral void where American conservatism used to be.
The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.”
“Conservatives”+, Frum writes later, “will never abandon conservatism. If the day comes when they conclude that their side can’t win elections democratically they will reject democracy.”
Trumpocracy warns that the day of reckoning is upon us—that the liberal democracy that is our heritage “imposes limits and requires compromises,” and that Trumpism is its mortal enemy. For example, the Trumpian right has embraced moral lunacy, a paranoiac rage against Democrats and all gun control advocates.
Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York tells a radio host that “Obviously, there’s a lot of politics in it. It’s interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats.”#
Wayne La Pierre of the NRA warns against socialism, the loss of freedom, and embraces a garbled, terrifying belief that “ the constitutional right to bear arms “is not bestowed by man, but granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright.”*** Therefore, oppose the NRA and one opposes God. This is very close to murder-speech, rhetoric meant to call forth violence against the enemy. The enemy are other Americans.
I want to believe in optimism as an ethic and necessary virtue, but I am often made sleepless by bad dreams — what happens when this supercharged economy breaks down? What happens if (probably when) Trump fires Mueller? What happens if we go to war with North Korea? What happens when the poisoned earth will no longer sustain us? What happens when the birds begin to fall from the skies or simply disappear? What kind of madness awaits us? Some version of fascism? Secession and the country forever splintered? Refugee columns making their way, like the Okies of the 30’s, from one region to another in search of sanctuary?
Worst of all, after Parkland I thought of Goya, the prophet of apocalypse, who captured in one painting what many of us have come to believe — that we have elected a governing elite willing to devour its children.
See what I mean by bad dreams?
If it all goes wrong, it will happen like this I think — suddenly, the warning signs apparent, our lives slipping along as if normalcy could be forever preserved. From Exit West:
“It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class … but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”^^
Hamsin’s superb novel tells the story of lovers in Syria who witness its destruction through civil war. They become refugees (with a magic-realist twist). Do you think we are immune to such a fate? Do you think we can live outside history and escape the story of every other empire who has come before us?
But maybe we have crested the wave. Maybe Trump has begun his downward arc. I have to keep reminding myself that Trump has been in power for 409 days. Watergate, from the break-in to Nixon’s resignation went on from June ’72 to August ’74.
CNN, the Times, the Post and CBS have done pretty well in trying to hold him and his lackeys to account, and even though Trump just goes on and on like Godzilla trashing Tokyo, they have not backed down, but have sharpened their focus and their commitment to telling the truth. Hundreds of new candidates are running for office on the state and federal level because they have been inspired by their collective disgust with Republican policy. The survivors of Parkland have risen to the occasion. Our children may lead us in having discovered the most effective way to speak truth to homicidal power. How can one despair when you watch them?
If there is a way forward, I think it must begin with some collective acknowledgement that the preservation of life, both human, and the lives beyond human who share the planet with us, all life then, that this is the sacrosanct principle, and money and guns and all the poisons of 21st century American civilization may not displace that principle. We need a new ethos to oppose a predatory economic machine and its agents. We better find a path toward a more just civil life. We need a place to begin a weaving together of a common idea by which we can abide, one that moves us away from atomized individuality, away from alienation, away from our rage –one that reaffirms the value of our lives within a community and that makes sacrifice and honor, pity@ and courage the preeminent virtues. We need to find our way into imagining the lives of those who do not look like us and who live close by and far away.
I suspect that years of turmoil and realignments and suffering are ahead of us. Sometimes this present moment feels as if it had to come, that it is the ‘boiling down’ of all our political and cultural toxins into some grotesque essential compound.
We cannot continue as we are. The end of that road is a scene of rubble and pain. I do not think we have much time left to choose.
*from Trumpocracy, The Corruption of the American Republic by David Frum (Frum is an old school conservative, the kind who actually believe in facts and integrity)
***Wayne LaPierre’s speech to CPAC on February 22, 2018.
+I do not like Frum’s use of the word “conservative” here. That word can have an honorable meaning. The ones who lead the Republican Party now and its most rabid followers are not conservative in any real sense. They are pure reactionaries, budding fascists, oligarchs and oligarch want-to-be’s.
##from “Writing Teacher” by John Edgar Wideman. The New Yorker, January 22, 2018.
^^from Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (you should read this and Janine Di Giovanni’s The Morning They Came for Us)
@“the feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others”
