‘I should write, I should write,’ since I have to justify what is simply unspeakable: I cannot keep my eyes’ off the ruins of American democracy, any more than I can keep from rubber-necking a fatal car crash.
In fact, I’m over it, and I’m over the country I still love, but can no longer care about.
Yeah—it’s gotten that bad. I know that you can still love something you no longer care about. You love it because you’re human. You no longer care about it…well, because you’re human. And being human, for me, means that at a certain point, I have to disengage. I lived with an alcoholic, I loved him, I left him.
He made choices I thought were wrong.
So did the country.
He’s happy with the choices.
So are we, or rather, now…
…they.
Which is not to say that Trump is popular—but who cares? They hate him now because gas prices are high, food prices are high, the Canada tariff-war is jacking up the price of hamburgers—as well as car parts.
They don’t hate him because of the corruption, the complete betrayal of the US constitution, or even because he’s just a completely loathsome individual. They love the loathsome. Hate is enduringly sweet.
I assumed somebody would find an off-ramp, and speed onto it. The dementia could not be clearer. Later generations will be screaming at us: HOW COULD YOU NOT SEE IT!!!!??? The Germans will get a complete pass for Hitler and World War II.
It’s gonna be a hard meeting, that postmortem encounter with my grandmother. Because it’s not just the educational system that completely failed, in the half century since my grandmother died. Forget not reading Virgil: nobody not collecting an old-age pension has any idea of what Civics is.
Civics was the quaint idea that a society that was going to govern itself needed rules and structures, and that participants in the game of democracy needed to know the rules of the game. It’s why I scream, “BUT THE SUPREME COURT OVER-RULED THE TARIFFS!!” at the television, when Trump re-re-re-re-re-reimposed the tariffs on Canada.
I am screaming, but no one else is, and that’s because nobody knows the rules and nobody cares about the rules. What IS important is somebody named Taylor Swift—who sings, or people think she does. Or maybe she acts. I don’t know because it’s not important, and you won’t know because she’s not important. But we’re sitting down here obsessed with what she is or isn’t doing, which is more important than public policy or the future of our beloved country.
No one gives a shit, really, because nobody knows enough to give a shit. Just keep the gas cheap and the fast-food flowing.
So it’s a problem that nobody knows the rules of the game we’re supposed to be playing. It’s also a problem that nobody attaches any importance to the game we’re playing. We are spectacularly spoiled: we have forgotten (indeed, most of us never knew) how freaking important freedom is. Seeing American troops policing American cities has become the norm—pretty soon, we’ll be thanking them for the “service,” as they continue to deport anybody brown (US citizen or not) to the concentration camps that we’re ignoring.
That—I would have to tell my grandmother—is the worst of all. It is not that democracy is fragile—Venetian glass enlightening a city. It is that Philistines drifted in first, and then the haters.
Not just the haters of the usual (imagined) sins or sinners: the gays, the political left, the freedom-of-choice women, the atheists. Robertson Davies, in one of his novels, talks about the Eros-people and the Thanatos-people. Some people embrace life—the craziness, the unpredictable, the unregulated. Some people embrace death: the ordered, sterile, filed.
MAGA and Trump attract the Thanatos-people. They’re not just living in the darkness, they’re actively spreading it. They seek light and smother it. They see tradition or decency, and the slime oozes from them, reflexively, and covers all. Whatever was good in American society has been squelched.
I loved the country.
I no longer love my countrymen.
