As I write this, the new president has been in office for a year. He has sought to make good on an agenda that satisfies the wish lists of his corporate sponsors (massive deregulation) and his base (Muslim bans, deportations). He endorsed an astonishingly cruel and senseless health care bill, signed a massive tax cut for corporate America, and stocked the judiciary with reactionary ideologues. We now know that his campaign at least attempted to conspire with a hostile foreign power to win the election, and that he will obstruct the investigation into this treason at any cost.
He stocked his cabinet with a consortium of feckless plutocrats, many of whom appear driven to raze the departments and agencies they run. Environmental protection, diplomacy, civil rights, free trade, public education, health care—all are hurtling toward that familiar Trumpian terminus: bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the markets for white supremacy, mass shootings, corporate profiteering, and nuclear cataclysm are booming.
His personal conduct remains an adolescent psychodrama: popularity mongering, conspiracy mongering, Twitter mongering, the tireless projection of his mongering onto perceived enemies. His aides and allies are mortified by his cognitive deterioration, his inability to read, or concentrate. It becomes more and more obvious that he’s unfit for the office. And yet the office belongs to him.
The press has begun to take him more seriously, if only because he now possesses the power not just to spike ratings but to destroy lives. But the networks continue to fall for the same tricks over and over, dispatching pundits to howl over what he says rather than allowing journalists to explain what he has done, and intends to do. Cable anchors continue to marvel at his ability to “change the conversation” without acknowledging that they are the ones changing the conversation.
And all the while, the president’s balance sheet, hidden from public view, swells with foreign favors—Chinese patents, hotel suites awash in sheiks, Russians snapping up condos—a racket so flagrant as to make Nixon’s deal with dairy farmers seem demur. For now, Trump operates within a familiar pocket of privilege, cosseted by the healthy economy he inherited and congressional allies whose legislative ambitions require them to ignore his impeachable corruptions.
The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, launched after the president’s sacking of Comey, continues to lay bare the web of corruption and lies that marks Trumpworld as something closer to a mafia operation than a presidential administration. And yet, even if Mueller presents definitive proof that a sitting president colluded with Russia and obstructed justice, it is not clear—as it was during Watergate—that he will be removed from office. Meaning that the only real limits on his power, aside from the courts, are his own ineptitude, inattention, and sloth. He has the heart of an autocrat but the mind of a gorilla.
No one knows what Trump will do if there is, for instance, a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil, or a provocation engineered by a foreign enemy, or even large-scale protests in American cities, whether he will heed the rational voices in his orbit or those eager to activate his despotic impulses. We can say only two things with assurance: that innocent people will get hurt, and that it will never be his fault.
My literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, didn’t live long enough to see Trump barnstorm through the Rust Belt swing states. But Vonnegut foresaw the underlying dynamics at those events with ruthless precision. “It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor,” he observed in Slaughterhouse Five. “Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters…. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.”
And I think, too, about guys like Robert Mercer (candidate Trump’s patron) who used a talent for financial computation to amass billions and has chosen to invest in an ideology that sanctifies his fortune, and depicts those in poverty as worthless. This mindset, a precise repudiation of the Beatitudes, proudly displays the moral logic of eugenics. It is the wet dream of capitalism tumbling into the nightmare of fascism.
It is also the inexhaustible story of class, of Gatsby, “the colossal vitality of his illusion,” and of the man who vanquishes him, Tom Buchanan. “I couldn’t forgive him or like him,” Nick Carraway tells us, “but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream.
That is Marlow, struggling to convey the horrors of his expedition. And it is how I feel for much of my waking life, how many Americans feel, as we attempt to understand and absorb the unstable aggression of this new president. “He struggled with himself too. I saw it,—I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”
The vitality of his delusion is precisely what makes Kurtz so hypnotizing. “I was fascinated,” Marlow confesses. “It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair.” Men of desperate action have long ruled the American imagination. And yet their strength, as Conrad reminds us, is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
We are remitted, time and again, to the province of Ahab, the gasping ruin of that final scene, the mad captain taken under by his quarry, the young orphan who served him, who lives to tell the tale only by holding fast to a casket of American wood. How bad will it get? How much of our common good, our decency, will we surrender? To what extent are we to blame for this outcome? And what are we to do now that it is upon us?
In the novel The Visit of the Royal Physician by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist, a German doctor named Struensee is summoned to the court of the mad Danish king and winds up importing the Enlightenment to the “filthy little country” of Denmark. He abolishes cronyism and torture, funds hospitals, and grants citizens unprecedented freedoms. But Struensee has a fatal flaw, one his lover, the queen, spots instantly. “She had felt a unique pleasure when she understood for the first time that she could instill terror. But he did not. There was something fundamentally wrong with him,” she observes. “Why was it always the wrong people who were chosen to do good?”
I thought about this question a great deal during the Obama era, as he courted enemies bent on his destruction, as he declined to prosecute the criminal avarice of Wall Street executives, as he extended the Bush tax cuts and, in particular, as news emerged that he knew, months before the election, of the FBI investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Because Struensee lacks the will necessary to purge the court, its reactionary forces naturally rise up to destroy him. “Then the spark was ignited everywhere, and the masses poured out: the poor, those who had never dreamed of a revolution but were now offered the comfort of violence, without punishment, without meaning. They revolted, but with no purpose other than the excuse of purity.”
The novel asks whether noble ideas alone are enough to improve the world, or whether bloodshed is the necessary price of moral progress. A quick survey of American history doesn’t offer much room for hope. Our nation was forged in war, expanded by means of an energetic genocide, and liberated from the sin of slavery at the price of half a million souls. Struensee, by contrast, attempts to legislate equality and tolerance by decree, from the safety of a royal den.
At the height of his influence, the Royal Physician decides to take the King on a tour of the countryside, so that he can see the conditions his people endure. At dusk, they spot a severely beaten teenage serf, seated on a wooden trestle. Struensee jumps out of the royal coach, hoping to secure a pardon for the boy. But a mob of peasants approaches and he panics: “Reason, rules, titles, or power had no authority in this wilderness. Here the people were animals. They would tear him limb from limb.” Struensee has the purest of motives, but he mistrusts the people he hopes to save.
A version of this mindset animates both sides of our present divide. We now know that many voters, especially older whites, haunted by the terror attacks of 2001 and a rising demographic tide, are willing to see the rights of Muslims, immigrants, and people of color abrogated. But so, too, there are Americans who look upon these abrogaters as an unruly mob, impervious to moral logic, angry, armed, and dangerous.
As we sort ourselves into like-minded communities, both online and off, the divide widens. Politicians and media executives, marketers and algorithmists, mine this division for profit, presenting visions of the “other side” so monstrous that we retreat into the psychic comfort of our own righteousness. One of my journalism students captured the crisis quite succinctly, in the form of a question: “What do you do if, no matter what you write, the reader won’t believe you?”
I thought about how new the precepts of the enlightenment (science, reason, equality) are within the flickering span of human history. Perhaps the regression of our Fourth Estate is just the visible symptom of some much deeper moral regression in the body politic, a return to ancient superstitions. Perhaps we yearned for a style of leadership that rejected enlightenment altogether, that affirmed our primitive impulses. Perhaps we authored a story in which the resurrection of the American spirit required the shuttering of the American mind.
Or perhaps I should have told my student this: that the essential commodity of journalism, like religion, is the mirage of certainty. This mirage appears most obviously in the demagoguery of talk radio, but dwells also within the self-congratulating pieties of the left. As a people, we are besieged by doubt, and therefore desperate to construct a world free from our tormentor.
In the introduction to his piercing essay collection, Loitering, Charles D’Ambrosio describes what it feels like, as a recovering journalist, to withstand such discourse. “In a leveling climate of summations,” he observes, “crowded with public figures who speak exclusively from positions of final authority, issuing an endless stream of conclusions, I get a wary sense in my gut of a world that’s making its appeal to my indolence and emptiness, asking only for surrender.”
That’s how most of us feel. But we conceal our uncertainty “in shame, or something of that character, feeling isolated and singular, useless and a little vulnerable.” Like D’Ambrosio, we suppress the disquieting truth “that we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.”
The fate of America, and of the species, now depends on our ability to solve crises that are beyond empirical doubt: climate change, resource depletion, inequalities of wealth and opportunity, all of which are triggering mass migrations, political unrest, and violent extremism. We can begin to solve these crises only if we reject bad stories and place our faith in reason and empiricism.
Rising against all this—Enlightenment 2.0, you might call it—comes a familiar tide of dogma, marked by reactionary fervor, a scorn of science, the privileging of faith above fact, and blunt appeals to savagery.
In politics, it has taken the form of a ruthless free market theology, a make-believe retreat from globalism, a nostalgia for white hegemony camouflaged in enraged nationalism. But this style of thought isn’t restricted to our political discourse. It has become the default setting of a culture that lurches about within the shadow of its own extinction yet lacks the moral imagination to change its destiny.
Trace this conflict back a few millennia and we arrive at the dividing line between prophetic literature and apocalyptic writing. Isaiah and Jeremiah preached an angry gospel but promised deliverance. They wanted to rescue their nation before it was too late. Apocalyptic writers deemed the world beyond repair, and looked to a future in which paradise for the select would be achieved only by upheaval.
You can see this mindset at work among the tech billionaires prepping their luxury bunkers for nuclear winter or plague, and among citizens like my mother-in-law, a woman barely clinging to the middle-class, in declining health, whose creed consists of stories told by Fox News and the Catholic Church, who despises Obamacare and Planned Parenthood but does not fear global warming, or even death, which will empanel her soul in the ultimate luxury bunker.
I say this not to mock my mother-in-law’s faith. Only to stress that her interests extend beyond her soul. She has three grandchildren, the youngest of whom is four years old. All three will have to live on this Earth. The quality of their lives will depend on whether enough of the adults around them can turn away from celestial fatalism and toward the enormity of our earthly tasks.
Surveying the ruin of his schemes, Struensee is left to wonder: “Was that what a human being was? Both an opportunity and a black torch?”
Not long ago, my wife and I saw Moonlight, a film that manages to capture—far more vividly than I was able, in my account of the Canyon—the hidden lives of boys in neighborhoods such as Liberty City. Because we see movies in the theater so rarely, our kids naturally wanted to know what Moonlight was about. And so we set about trying to explain how difficult it can be to grow up gay, especially if you are an African-American boy living in poverty.
Our son Jude, who is eight, had a rather striking reaction, which he whacked out on the ancient typewriter we recently gave him. It read as follows:
Gay meens happy
That is grammatically correct.
That does not have ANYTHING to do with gender, racism, or anything. Gay people could easily be called happy people. And then there is the truth that Gay people are just happyer than us. There is no way someone would go raise taxes just for them right? That has all been proven wrong by our leader, who has gone against happy people. Now the people WHO are really married to the same gender are called people.
That is grammatically correct.
Jude’s objection here was to our modern usage of the word “gay.” But the more I studied this note, the more convinced I became that he was lodging an emotional complaint—about the manner in which the election had embittered our national and domestic mood.
Throughout the campaign, we tried to keep our kids focused on positive goals: distributing wealth more fairly, battling global warming, electing our first female president. But they’re not dumb. You can sort of hide stupid from a second grader; you can’t hide mean. In the months since the election, the kids have seen us muttering darkly, getting upset more often, arguing.
What Jude picked up on was the visceral sense that the big winner in 2016 was a politics of despair and division, the feeling that one side can be happy only if another side is sad, that there is no collective hope.
“How’s all that hopey-changey stuff working out for ya?”
This smirking query, posed a few years back by Sarah Palin, strikes at the heart of our republic. What happens when we treat hope as a sucker’s game? When policy goals are eclipsed by the exaltation of grievance, a desire to exhaust, confound, and dispirit? You can turn on cable television at any hour of the day and watch professionals being paid to mangle hope. Bucky Dunn is on right now.
There’s a reason Trumpism derived so much vampiric energy from its abuse of immigrants: because immigrants possess what must be, particularly for those who feel their own horizons dimming, an unbearably hopeful vision of America. That has all been proven wrong by our leader, who has gone against happy people.
The longer I spend on the planet, the more convinced I become that children exist not just to perpetuate our DNA, or replenish our faith in the species, but to remind us of the power vested in stories.
For the past year, I’ve been telling our four-year-old Rosalie stories about a little girl named Posalie, who goes on various hyperglycemic adventures with her best friend, Pipsqueak the Penguin. They spend a lot of time with Chocolatte, the God of the Chocolate Volcano, and recently, guided by a golden hummingbird named Eggbert, they journeyed to the center of the Earth, which they discovered was not made of iron and nickel but salt water taffy, predominantly the chocolate kind with a blurry dab of cherry in the middle.
Rosalie, who can be a little bossy, routinely calls out warnings and instructions to Posalie. She recently pressed herself against my chest, where she understood Posalie to live, and was thrilled when Posalie reported being able to see her face over the clouds. The two of them were soon having lengthy and urgent conversations, whisper-screaming questions and answers at each other, as you would in a cave.
A few months ago, my wife had to have surgery and spend a night in the hospital. Rosalie appeared unfazed by her absence, though at bedtime she called out to Posalie to explain the situation and asked if Posalie would come out of my chest and snuggle with her.
I paused for a long moment. “Posalie’s already asleep.”
“We can wake her up,” Rosalie replied, quite reasonably.
“But her mommy and daddy will worry if she’s not there.”
Rosalie’s face froze, then her chin started to tremble, followed by the rest of her. I could see at once all the fear she’d been holding in about her mommy. “Why can’t she come now?” she said, and broke down sobbing.
I’ve been trying to keep this moment in mind amid all the calculated deceit enveloping us. People believe what they need to believe. Our stories about the world arise from the panic of our inner lives. Beneath all our lesser defenses—the swirling rage and paranoia and indifference—are human beings somehow in pain.
The question before us now is whether enough of us can confront our bad stories and divine their meaning, and begin to tell better ones. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” as James Baldwin reminds us. “But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” How did so many of us come to believe that hatred would lead to rebirth? Or that elections don’t matter? Or that America will endure regardless of our misbehavior?
In this version of the story, America is the Prodigal Son, wayward at times but always returning home to feast on the fattened calves of the family estate. It’s a myth we cling to because the alternative is simply too bleak: that our style of capitalism has, under the guise of democracy, acted as a financial centrifuge, perhaps the most brutal aggregator of wealth in human history, built on a foundation of slave labor and fortified by plunder, imperial warfare, the decimation of the labor movement, the predation of Wall Street, the steady subjugation of public oversight to private gain. Greed and self-interest do not fade away as a natural function of evolution, nor at the direction of Christian mercy.
If there is a status quo to protect, it resides with those who control the nation’s wealth and have devised a political system in which that wealth serves as an instrument of raw power. Any reformation must therefore begin by dismantling these mechanisms.
Americans of all stripes clamor about wanting to believe in our electoral system. Why not target the glaring procedural defects: campaign finance, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, voter suppression? Of these issues, only the last is a matter of dispute, and the basis of that dispute is a racist fantasia about “voter fraud” that even Republican voting officials admit is false.
Reform in these areas is unlikely to come from members of our political or media class. Too many people make too much money off the current system. But if our citizenry is truly sick of the special interests, the lobbyists, the PACs and negative ads, the mechanics of corporate influence, if they’re sick of political lines being drawn by partisans and campaigns conducted exclusively in swing states and votes being weighted differently, then citizens must become a lobby, must push for laws that bleed money from politics and unrig our elections. This lobby should consist of nearly every citizen of this country who is not a billionaire, a demagogue, a network executive, a pollster, a consultant, or a politician.
We just obediently handed 100 percent of the presidency to a candidate who received three million votes fewer than his opponent, from barely 25 percent of the eligible voters. The same thing would be true if Clinton had won. Is that the story of a democracy? Or a tyranny of the elites?
None of these notions is new. They amount to a revival of what Teddy Roosevelt proposed in his famous New Nationalism Speech of 1910. The former president argued that human welfare should be valued above property rights, and that the federal government should safeguard social justice against corporate greed.
The platform he outlined included a National Health Service, social insurance for the elderly and needy, an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, worker’s compensation, farm relief, an inheritance tax, a federal income tax, a securities commission. His political reforms included suffrage for women and the direct election of Senators, who were at that time selected by state legislatures. He also called for strict limits on campaign contributions, the registration of lobbyists, and the recording of all Congressional proceedings, “to destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.”
Roosevelt sought to defend the founding principle of America: equality of opportunity. “In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next,” he observed. “At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War.”
There has been much talk since the election of The Resistance, an umbrella term meant to signify the forces aligned against the new administration and its interests. But if we’re serious about our democracy, we need to take up a more fundamental reformation, of the sort that Roosevelt envisioned.
This will require us to confront our underlying habits of thought and feeling. Nearly half our voting population doesn’t bother to exercise its franchise. Another quarter consistently votes against its interests. It doesn’t matter how many of our fellow political junkies we get to “like” our latest online offering if we cannot awaken the sleeping giant of our democracy: the apathetic.
We must also change our relationship toward the Fourth Estate. If we want media corporations to treat democracy as something more than an entertainment product, we have to do so first. We can’t keep consuming politics like a sporting event or a farce. The more we watch pundits yelling at each other, the more the networks will show us pundits yelling at each other. The more we watch experts explaining the effects of policy on citizens, the more the networks will show us experts explaining the effects of policy on citizens. It’s that simple.
You can’t advocate for serious discourse and simultaneously participate in the trivialization of discourse. Or rather, you can. But the story is going to end badly.
When the filter through which we view the world privileges propaganda over reportage, the inevitable result is an erosion in our public standards of truth and decency. The men and women in charge of our media filter face a moral impasse. Do they want to operate as a free press or a for-profit corporation? Is their core product information or inflammation?
“If ever there was a people ripe for dictatorship it is the American people today. Should a homegrown Hitler appear, whose voice, amongst the public orders, would be raised against him in derision? Certainly no voice on television: ‘Sorry, the guy has a lot of fans. Sure, we know he’s bad news, but you can’t hurt people’s feelings. They buy soap, too.’” Gore Vidal wrote that in 1958.
Nearly six decades later, Les Moonves, the chairman of CBS, ratified this view, not with shame but a businessman’s unctuous wink. Sociopaths and demagogues sell more soap than newsmen, so give them their turn at the mic. Bad news for the country remains banner news for the shareholders.
The same philosophy infects insta-moguls such as Mark Zuckerberg, who allowed Facebook to become a sewer of disinformation during the campaign. If he and the other titans of social media want their tech-utopian happy talk taken seriously, they can start by taking some personal responsibility for their sites and cracking down on the agitprop cranked out by Albanian propaganda farms, which their bloodless algorithms so efficiently promote.
I imagine the bad story Zuckerberg tells himself at night these days is that his failure to do so represented a defense of free speech. The real story is that he wants market share, even if it comes at the expense of democratic integrity. As for Moonves, he tells himself that he is merely recording the decline of our Republic, like the Greek historian Tacitus who documented the atrocities of Nero. But history will not record Moonves as Tacitus. He will be the fiddle Nero played while Rome burned.
We are all products of the stories we live, the ones drawn from our memories, the ones our parents tell us, the ones inflicted upon us by the world. Our children are the stories we send out into the world.
When I was four years old, my parents sat my two brothers and me down and told us a strange story. My father, they said, was going to link arms with some friends and block the road leading to a nearby air force base, so vehicles couldn’t go in or out. Dad was doing this to protest the war in Vietnam, but it was illegal and he might wind up in jail. This was just months after the 1968 Democratic Convention, at which the National Guard had bloodied hundreds of protestors, and those scenes must have been on his mind, because he later confessed to me that he was shaking when the police descended upon him.
My mother’s political awakening was a more complicated business. Her parents, Irving and Annie Rosenthal, grew up during the Great Depression and perhaps because of what they saw, they came to believe that the bounty of the Earth should be divided more or less equally among its inhabitants. This was a dangerous view to hold during the 1950s, and Annie, who taught at PS 113 in Harlem, and later became an assistant principal there, was eventually asked to testify before the New York City Board of Education. This was all part of the work done by the House Committee on Un-American Affairs, championed by Joseph McCarthy and his protégé Roy Cohn. In the end, Annie didn’t testify. She took an early retirement instead. She was lucky, compared to a lot of other folks.
As a child, my mother never knew her parents were Communists. They concealed the extent of their involvement to keep their daughters out of danger. The weekly meetings they attended were passed off as social gatherings. Irving published articles under a pseudonym. What they couldn’t hide was a pervasive sense of anxiety around politics.
Toward the end of her life, my mom wrote a short memoir about growing up as a red-diaper baby in the Bronx. She knew the country was heading in a dark direction and she felt called to speak about her own experiences.
One story that never made it into that manuscript took place when she was just a young girl. It had haunted her ever since. She played piano quite seriously in her youth, and one day she was practicing a Mozart sonata in her family’s tiny apartment. Her dad began arguing about politics with his brother Saul. The dispute grew loud then angry and my mom found herself getting more and more upset until finally she stopped playing altogether and began, instead, to weep.
Her father turned to her, bewildered. “What’s wrong?” he said. “We were just having a discussion.”
This was one of the last stories my mother ever told me. It is how America feels to me these days: a beautiful song drowned out by shouting.
Like many red-diaper babies, my mother was obsessed with the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, suspected Russian spies who were sent to the electric chair. My mom had just turned fifteen when they were killed and she had, by then, sussed out the true nature of her parents’ political beliefs. She carried this fear through her life. But she never allowed it to disable her decency. In college, she and two other white classmates went with a group of African-American students to a local restaurant in Southern Ohio and insisted upon being served—in accordance with the law but against the customs of this particular establishment. She and my father both marched for Civil Rights and against the war in Vietnam.
These were the stories I heard as a kid. I understood them to mean that moral progress comes at the cost of personal sacrifice, sometimes in the face of armed resistance, that we are summoned to this sacrifice despite our own fears, at those moments when a greater cause activates the individual conscience.
My parents believed in the America that gave women the vote and immigrants a refuge and fought to end slavery and segregation. They were hippies of an upwardly mobile sort, idealists who took us to live, briefly, on a commune. The next summer, as you’ll recall, Nixon was chased from office, and a spirit of bruised idealism and reform flourished.
On the day after the election, I went swimming with my son Jude. We were in Florida, at a writing conference, and on the way to the hotel pool I spotted a young father with his daughter, who looked to be about three. She was seated on the chaise lounge next to her dad, happily munching on potato chips.
“Let’s not have any more snacks,” the dad said, “It’s going to be dinner soon.”
The girl continued to feed chips into her mouth, at a slightly greater clip.
“Good luck with that,” I said to the dad ruefully, as I passed by.
He laughed and we felt that instant kinship shared by fathers of young, iron-willed daughters against whom we know ourselves to be essentially powerless.
Some minutes later, my son pulled me to his side in the shallow end. “Look at that man,” he whispered. “Look at what he’s wearing.”
I glanced up and saw the young father with whom I’d just shared a moment of levity, a bright red Make America Great Again hat perched on his head.
Jude wanted me to react with horror, or at least indignation. But I had no idea what stories had led this guy to put on that hat. I knew only that he was a father, like me, an American on vacation and at the mercy of his lovely daughter. To make any further judgment about him would be a failure of moral imagination. We’re suffering from enough of that already.
The real question, then, is what stories guide our fellow citizens? How have these stories led so many to squander their franchise? To accept the idea that we can be united by those who sow discord, or made great without admitting what, in our weakest moments, we are? Amid the constant prod of monetized distraction, can we slow down and start to connect the dots between our compulsive consumption of entertainment and the degradation of our public discourse, between the bread and circuses and the corrupt leaders? Can we activate what Foster Wallace called the “deep need to believe”?
If we’re ever going to get out of this mess, we can no longer fritter away our passion on tribal contempt. We have to fight in a new way. We have to be the fools in charge of forgiveness.
A century ago, William Butler Yeats composed “The Second Coming,” whose famous opening stanza concludes:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
These lines, summoned in response to the atrocity of World War I, are a vital, if unsettling, reminder that humans inevitably struggle through cycles of terror and violent upheaval. Every epoch heralds its own rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.
There is some evidence to suggest that Americans are revising their political attitudes, coming to view democracy as a more participatory arrangement, calling for vigilance and activism. But to stem the tide of cruelty in this country, to overcome the fatal “passivity and egoism” Huxley warned of, I believe we must also embrace a deeper and more personal form of resistance.
We must resist what the poet Wallace Stevens referred to as “the pressure of the real,” the manner in which our souls become desensitized by the grim and unending procession of accounts we call news. We mustn’t succumb to a panic that robs us of our imagination, our capacity to contemplate and wonder and invent.
It’s not enough just to fight bad stories. If that’s all we do, we will become trapped in a reactive cycle, debunking one outrage after another, with no greater mission than mitigation. We have to be able to dream up stories that offer a vision of the American spirit as one of kindness and decency, the sort that powered the Emancipation Proclamation and the New Deal and the War on Poverty.
Joseph Conrad, so famous for peering into our heart of darkness, never lost his great faith in the act storytelling, and the pursuit of art more broadly. Scientists and thinkers, he observed, make their appeal “to those qualities … that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living.” The artist, by contrast, “speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives, to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity … in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
The story of America is, in some ways, quite simple. We were a nation borne of high ideals and low behaviors, the land of all men are created equal and slave labor. We’ve been engaged in a pitched struggle ever since, between greed and generosity, between the comforts of ignorance and the burden of moral knowledge. Nobody knows how the story ends because we haven’t written it yet. We know only that it belongs to us: our actions, our convictions, our doubts. We can pretend that we live apart from those who suffer, that we owe them nothing. But I can’t think of a single story—at least not one I could find in a church, one I would read to my children—that accords with this view.
A few years back, I went on the radio to talk about The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about the mass migration that besieged America during the Great Depression. I said just about what you would expect: that it was a brave and beautiful novel, that Steinbeck wanted Americans to question why we tolerate avarice, why we so often side with the mighty and turn our backs on the meek, and that he wanted his readers to recognize what he had witnessed as a journalist: that our government can and does act as a force for good in the lives of the disenfranchised.
I received a few responses to the segment, but the one I remember most vividly came from a man who insisted that, while he understood the book was a classic, its final scene had always disgusted him. The book ends, of course, with the Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon, giving birth to a stillborn child in a barn where she has sought shelter from a storm. Also in the barn is an emaciated stranger. The final lines read:
Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. ‘You got to,’ she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. ‘There!’ she said. ‘There.’ Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her finger moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
What was she doing smiling, my correspondent wanted to know. Wasn’t it creepy enough that she was breastfeeding a grown man?
I wanted to tell him he was missing the point of the story. The point of the story was that the man was starving to death. The point of the story was that she was saving his life.