Ink Tea Stone Leaf

There isn’t a whole lot more that I have to say about what happened on November 5th this year, except that I meant every word I said two weeks ago, and that while I remain loath to predict anything, I will predict that it won’t be a month after Inauguration Day before Donald Trump gives a concrete demonstration of why he should not have been allowed to even run for President again. When he does, at least one third of the country will profess to see no problem with his actions, no matter how they actually feel about them, and many others will ask why the Democrats did nothing to stop him. I learned the script last time, you see.

Having already explained all the reasons why Donald Trump is an unacceptable President, in addition to the man himself having done just about everything he could in the last few months to demonstrate how repugnant he is, I won’t go into the list of things I am worried about happening in the next four years. It’s a very long list. It is in fact a subset of an even longer list of worries I have about the direction of the United States and the whole world over the course of the 21st Century, but I have even less inclination to get into all that, and I suspect whoever stumbles onto this essay is totally uninterested. Most Americans are totally uninterested in history, and I believe this is doubly so for the history of the future. Besides, as I’ve said, I don’t like to make predictions. Therefore, I’ll just tell you one thing I worry about, in a very immediate sense: my wife requires a very expensive medical procedure twice a year, and she could end up losing her insurance coverage if a Republican majority in Congress, in conjunction with a President who doesn’t give a damn about anything that doesn’t benefit himself, should decide to eviscerate Medicaid funding.

That’s it, that’s all the doomsaying I’ll allow myself today. I hope it’s sufficient.

Some of you might be thinking, “I don’t like that guy either, but I didn’t have any real choice but to vote for the fascist,” and you might be comfortable knowing that there are a lot of people in the media and the establishment who will buy your bullshit. I will not be placing an order, unfortunately. I will be placing your name on a list of people who are not to be trusted to do the right thing, no matter how easy it is. That’s a lot of you, it turns out, and it’s extremely disappointing, but that’s what this has come to.

Some of you might also be thinking “I literally don’t know what’s going on or why any of this matters,” and let me just say that I believe you, one hundred percent. I’ve never believed anything more than this, nor would it be mathematically possible to do so. My capacity for belief tops out there. I’ll see you in two years, when you’re contemplating whether to bother to vote for Congress and asking why all of those beautiful tariffs didn’t make prices go back to what they were in 2019. I won’t have a better answer for you then than I do now, but I’ll see you regardless, because in spite our most fervent wishes we truly never will be rid of each other.

__________

About two years ago I read a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn called Tightrope. It is an examination of the desperate circumstances of America’s rural, poor, and working class citizens, who have been forced to make do for decades in an economy that is less amenable to upward mobility and a society that has fewer reliable means of supporting its members than the one in which their parents lived. A sense of despair gradually overtook the country as the people fell into debt, addiction, and rootlessness. The general American prosperity of the 20th Century had moved on and left them behind. It is a sobering portrait, and it proves how much work has to be done to improve so many people’s lives.

Of course, the policies that made incomes more unequal, that cut funding for essential services, and that moved the fabled American Dream further and further out of reach have largely been championed by the Republican party, while the position of the Democratic party has generally been to provide material support to working people. Many of these negative trends specifically date to the late 1970s and 1980s, when the politics of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan achieved a conservative realignment of the American electorate, drawing more working-class people into voting for policies that made it harder to stay healthy and put food on the table.

Poor Democrats, imagine having the temerity to think that pro-union politics would endear you to members of labor unions! Those college-educated elites just don’t get it: Republicans have largely gotten away with all this because the Democrats, who tend to support policies that reduce inequality and support economic security, also tend to advocate froufrou boutique issues like civil rights for gay people, while casting doubt on the divine righteousness of traditional social hierarchies. Compared with an economy that quietly rots from the inside out, isn’t that the real dystopia?

When I was sorting out my thoughts on Tightrope, I said that America is a country that hates itself. I think I’d like to clarify and elaborate on this statement now, so that there’s no confusion as to what I mean. In this formulation, the America that hates is an abstraction of the median American citizen’s opinions, which are basically reactive and driven by prejudice to a much greater degree than principle. The America that is hated is an abstraction of the country as a whole, as it actually exists, in contrast to the other abstraction of the country as a whole, as the carefully constructed mythologies of Paul Revere and Manifest Destiny and “I Have a Dream.” Since these abstractions are different things that only happen to share a name, perhaps it is too pithy to say that America hates “itself,” but the tragedy is once again that they can never truly be rid of one another.

The America that hates is hostile to the very land it lives on, because it does not belong to this America in an absolute sense: it is home to an environment and an ecosystem that dare to suffer sympathetically when they are exploited. Because the land cannot absorb the costs of unrestrained industry without growing toxic and uninhabitable, it is contemptible.

The America that hates is hostile to the institutions and the system of government it has made for itself, because these institutions expect them to be consistently informed about the issues, to understand how things work, and to vote every two years with a virtuous wisdom that puts the common good ahead of petty grievances and resentments. This America would prefer to complain about a government it can do nothing about, than to elect a government that it must take responsibility for.

The America that hates is hostile to the culture it produces, because most of it is a facile, plastic reproduction of what is actually meaningful, while the remainder is an authentic expression of the history and aspirations of the Americans who deserved better. Culture that challenges the soul, speaks to the truth, and will not flatter the complacency and preconceptions of its audience makes this America feel inferior and stupid, and nobody likes that.

The America that hates is hostile to the American people, because no matter how science has advanced this America has adhered to the conviction that too many of them are essentially inferior, down to the level of their DNA; women who don’t know or acknowledge their place, racial and ethnic minorities that will not accept that they are of a second class. This America hates the Americans who have lost everything and need help getting it back, or who can’t find a job that pays them well enough to live decently. It hates the Americans who won’t wear the right clothes or use the right pronouns or have the right sex, it hates the Americans who have made the defense of their humanity and their lives into their “whole personality.” It hates the Americans who would be Americans by choice and not by an accident of birth, because they dared to believe it was worth the hatred. It hates all of these Americans who ask them to care, who heard one line in an old poem and thought that this was a land where they might live freely.

God forbid it should care about so many Americans. God forbid the America that hates should open its eyes and see itself in them.

__________

The verdict is four more years of fascism, at minimum. The country may reject fascism in 2028 and it may even succeed in rooting it out, but it won’t be because “the people” learned from the experience. That is not something “the people” can do, in this or any other country. “The people” can’t even remember that before Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, it was legal for health insurers to refuse to insure people with preexisting health conditions – and that the insurers did exactly that. That was twelve years ago; most of them were adults then. I don’t know what their excuse is supposed to be.

When I was growing up, I was taught that the freedom and democratic self-government of the people of the United States were our most important national treasure, the core of who we were and the justification for our existence as an independent nation. The people who struggled to extend American liberty to the people who lacked it from the start, fulfilling a promise that was incompletely offered, were our pantheon of heroes. The people who fought to defend freedom and democratic self-government from foreign and domestic threats were our champions. It was all very gauzy and obscured a ton of complications, misconceptions, and contradictions, but no matter what I learned I remained convinced that the best thing about this flawed empire of ours was that it had tied itself to a set of powerful aspirations that could be suppressed for a time, but could not be ignored forever.

It turns out that too many people don’t give a shit about all that. When I taught social studies in middle and high school, I used to console myself that the kids who were apathetic about voting and disinterested in our shared history would understand and appreciate more as they matured. I never had any evidence that this was so; I always just sort of hoped. What else can you do in an impossible job?

Most of those kids that I taught are old enough to vote now, and I’m confident that at least some of them voted for the guy who abused his position to incite a violent assault on the U.S. Congress in order to overturn the lawful results of the election he just lost. If I asked them why, I’ll bet a few of them would tell me about how weird they think Kamala Harris sounds when she laughs. They might even flat-out admit they don’t think a black woman should be President, who knows? The reasons don’t matter in the end. What matters are the consequences, and they shall endure.

If you want optimism then you’ll have to find it yourself. For my part, I don’t believe the America that hates is any more ideologically committed to submitting itself to authoritarian rule than it is to anything else. The winds will blow in another direction one day, and this is not the end of the story. Since things are so grim now, that will have to be my optimism.

I hope that if you’re reading this, you can find a way to be alright until things change again for the better. We don’t get to choose our history, but we do get to live in our futures.

I’ll end with the words of a well-known song that I put on the other day, without thinking much of it until I heard them.

I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted, too
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you