Note: This piece, you’ll find, is dated. It was written during an Indian summer late last year. Fearing it to be too much of a drag, I wavered and decided, ultimately, to table it. Rereading it in our post-Trump era of accelerating ensauvagement I found my pessimism—and anxiety—hasn’t waned. My country is diseased. It is bipolar. I worry, perhaps like any loving son, that it is “on the skids.” But this is not so much an obituary as a portrait of the nation as an old man.
“Do you have the nagging feeling something is wrong with you?”
I note the sensation of being reeled-in; the mononymous “Sadiq,” sender of the unsolicited email, is on (up?) to something. His premise—promise—is tantalizingly nonspecific—the second coming of Christ would be a close analogue—and yet augurs my own prophecy of an impending, streamlined solution (“Click here now!”) to the Gordian knot that is this year: “Become the man you used to be, guaranteed!” Not only does Sadiq divine with surgical precision two cherished pet afflictions, my nostalgia and Weltschmerz; he pledges, with a rinky-dink brand of pomaded enthusiasm, to fix me up. The mensch.
What is the matter with me? I’m constipated, lethargic, undersexed, underemployed. (Full disclosure: I’m now full-time.) On occasion my ticker trips into and out of an arrhythmia of free jazz. (Think Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra.) I fall asleep to reruns of Firing Line and wake up besieged by dreams of Brooks Brothers ties and pens flocking overhead like Canada geese to warmer climes. I have resorted to bottom-shelf syrahs and a flip phone. I am a writer.
“Sorrow,” wrote philosopher Henri Bergson, “begins by being nothing more than a facing towards the past […] And it ends with an impression of crushing failure, the effect of which is that we aspire to nothingness.” Sadiq’s email forgoes elaboration of its seductive carrot—probably it links to a black market trade in phony pills for erectile dysfunction. Decline, and all of its melancholic correlatives, is its implicit theme, at any rate. (The id is willing, but the flesh is weak.) The falling part, in practice less a postscript than the fag end of the same thing, also goes unmentioned—that would be a tad uncouth—but is, at any rate, a well-documented phenomenon (see the Roman Empire, Mankind, the Life Alert lady). I’ll admit my redeemer has hit a spot of bother, and that perhaps I’m lodging a wily serpent scheming to carry me wither I wouldest not. To a psychiatric clinic, for instance.
How’s that for solipsism? Forgive me—Science insists I am a product of my environment, a child of our time (a child being a “product of conception”). Who would conceive of such times! Such weird times, living out the planned obsolescence of an already defective product. Yes, I am an American. (We are always a decade or two behind Europe.) But orchestrating the ritardando of a nation—President Obama called this “leading from behind”—is a storied pastime. “There is just something missing in everything,” sensed Austrian novelist Robert Musil, “though you can’t put your finger on it.” His book, The Man Without Qualities, was published amid the heinous events of the second World War and the Shoah, yet the sentiment still lingers “in the air.” The essence of deficiency, of a malignant cynicism, the acrid fumes of this summer’s Grand Guignols—I smell rotten eggs. More conspicuously it is in the streets, in our politics, our mores and social (mis)behavior. You’ve seen the pictures. And you know the drill. Revere, Spengler, Toynbee, Houellebecq—the soothsayers of Western Civilization have again lit the lamps of the Old North Church. Only it is not the redcoats, nor a Red Scare, for whom they sound the alarm this time, but for America’s own feral (defective) children (products)—We the People. The call is coming from inside the house. We are haunted. “Are you Cioran by any chance?” the gloomy French philosopher was asked one day by a passerby. “I used to be,” he says.
During a plague the shock value of this realization is somewhat tempered by the circumstances—being indoors is de rigueur. I find myself, in the spirit of A. E. Housman, a “stranger and afraid, in a world I never made,” myopic and pajamaed, betting my salvation on the last great refuge of hucksterism: the spam box. Click here now! Perhaps you can put a finger on it. For a moment, picturing my transfiguration, I feel positively Micawberish, a stupid half-smile lifting in proud defiance of reason to the dead bulk of the computer screen. The mouse hovers over the text, the text over a cheap mystery, mystery over my Sadiq. But I hesitate and navigate the arrow twenty or thirty tabs over to the good stuff, real manna—the ever-breaking news—a dog to his vomit. Kismet be damned. Click.
To be, or not to be saved. If not the question, it is an apt one for quicksilver times like these. Oswald Spengler is emphatic: “Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue.” (From a watery grave Captain Ahab silently pumps his fists.) There will be no champion—Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the disinherited knight, never shows, and Rebecca is burned at the stake. Herod’s minions overtake Bethlehem before Joseph gets word and Christ’s assignment ends with his nativity. Is this the font of my misery? My surmises that the cause is irrevocably lost? That our tale does not end with a “happily ever after”? This is not a spell of triumph for the patriot. The élan vital of the American is gagged, suppressed as much by administrative zealots (“Six feet, or else!”) as interior conflicts of purpose, identity and meaning made inexorable (again) by “the Course of human events.” (Internet pundit Eric Weinstein has observed, “The Big Nap is over.”) Is it—this tohubohu—a cycle of remission and relapse endemic to high culture, perhaps existence on the whole? Something seasonal, like sleep (or journalism, says Terry Teachout), “made to be drifted into—and out of”?
No, “The world has always been in turmoil,” said Whittaker Chambers in the throes of his witness against Alger Hiss and communist infiltration into federal institutions; its dysfunction, in the parlance of Weinstein’s “intellectual dark web,” is a feature, not a bug. (Even the world’s end, warned a sardonic Thomas Merton, “will be legal.”) It has not, however, always collaborated—the nouveaux enfants du siècle with their sympathetic magistrates in corporate towers and government—on such a monolithic scale in its own demise. Defeat—the Éric Zemmours of the age would call it suicide—seems the point, erasure the intended effect, death—in classic Freudian gloom—“the goal of all life,” if not the bread of it.
What on earth is wrong with us? Bruce Robinson’s cult classic Withnail and I makes a prescient diagnosis from the bowels of better days (“For whom?” I hear my critics howl), Tom Wolfe’s “‘Me’ decade”: “We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell, making an enemy of our own future. What we need is harmony, fresh air, stuff like that.” But, “what dreams may come,” warns The Bard, “must give us pause.” Some three centuries on, the wounds of Dresden and Dachau still wet, Aldous Huxley gussies them up: “the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.” And the dream of Power, I’d add, begets deceit. “Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer,” smirked G. K. Chesterton. Imagine his heartburn at the prospect of trading blows with a buxom, expecting “woman” who only yesterday made water standing up.
If only we could speak of little leaves! (“The fundamental task is to achieve smallness,” argued economist E. F. Schumacher.) For it is happening, again—tawny and fire engine red ones, frostbitten and dislodged by rain, have bunched at the curb and wedged their petioles into the windshields of cars that no longer go anywhere. Piled like bones they give cover to toddlers and fumbled footballs. And in the evenings, with a breeze, they skitter like rats across lawns, break up and into quiet houses on the soles of wet cleats. The dream of Summer begets the Fall “with slow and lingering descent,” as Rilke observed. “It is the law.” He who has eyes to see, let him weep.
Perhaps I’m dressing our dilemma in so much poetry because this moment looks and sounds so predictably dreary, so much like the perfect realization of Guy Debord’s “spectacle” that affirms the degradation of life into mere appearance and script. (“There is life no longer,” says Theodore Adorno.) I haven’t read The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit but I feel a sequel—how about They/Them In the Drawstring Black Hoodie—may be in the offing, ripe as the moment is for caricature and “deconstruction.” In the dream of the Clean Slate devotees of The Good Life are seduced by and subsumed in a one-dimensional, vulgar and banal preoccupation called organizing. (Or disorganizing, if you’d rather.) You’ve seen these pictures, too. To paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville, nothing is less poetic than the life of a man in these United States. (Our women fare somewhat better, save the Cardi Bs and HRCs who seem to have confused the deadly sins for the heavenly virtues.) Case in point: this generation’s fetish for disorder. Having scorched the good in search of novelty, they turn to the bad and call it good. Hence, “the highest degree of illusion,” says Ludwig Feuerbach, “comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”
I confess, it’s got me down in the mouth, all this talk of “burning it down,” of endings and decay. Even Angela Merkel, Germany’s indefatigable chancellor, sometimes longs “for a room in which I can go to be sad.” Her disarming admission—not for nothing is she endearingly nicknamed “Mutti,” or “Mommy”—is perhaps evidence of a collective wish for less, for the world (of Gene Deitch’s The Hobbit) “before men came to power and ruined magic forever.” (Ladies, carpe diem.) Perhaps we long to turn off, to return, as Milan Kundera imagines in The Joke, to the “mute stage of evolution when there were no words and people communicated by simple gestures, pointing at trees, laughing, touching one another.” The days, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson (preempting psychedelia), when, “Earth laugh[ed] in flowers.” She must cry now in bullhorns, riot shields and tattoos.
Must she cry now in bullhorns, riot shields and tattoos? All these wagging fingers and judge-y tongues; it’s too much. (I hear the Grinch—and my dad—lamenting, “All the noise, noise, noise, noise!”) “You’re too this, not enough that,” yell the Little Caesars. It’s hell, said novelist André Malraux of “the attempt to force human beings to despise themselves,” to saddle them like he-goats with the crimes of the dead. Yes, the mot juste for it—the mood, I mean, in these United States—is diabolical. Stańczykian. Do you know the painting? Jan Matejko’s Stańczyk during a Ball at the Court of Queen Bona in the Face of the Loss of Smoleńsk. A crestfallen jester, stunned by news of his country’s defeat on the battlefield, sits alone in contemplation, his bauble tossed aside. To his right, in lavish digs, the royals and their flatterers muck it up, unperturbed. To his left a shooting (falling?) star streaks across the night sky, a portent of doom.
Are we not losing Smoleńsk, too? The news stings—syphilis cases in Alaska are double last year’s tally—and dumbfounds—Scots, for fear of a second pandemic, are not permitted to visit another’s home until the ministers of Riaghaltas na h-Alba say, “jump.” And the French, once the fierce stewards of liberté, nonetheless tolerate the despotic insults of Manu’s ecology minister, who has put the kibosh on traditions of “totally unjustified energy consumption,” such as drinking coffee on a heated terrace in winter. Because climate change, as the kids say these days. Skolstrejk för klimatet! Dodge one hell only to be thrust into another.
Why have we largely acquiesced to, and even accommodated, such ham-handed top-down perversions of the social contract? Because we despair, poet Les Murray would say. “You feel beneath help, beneath the reach even of Godhead.” The new vernacular we parrot with the same enthusiasm of the cognoscenti through muzzles—Peter Hitchens-ese for “masks”—festooned with demands (“Vote,” “Stay home,” “Wear a mask!”), demagoguery (“This was preventable,” “Masks shouldn’t be political,” “I can’t breathe!”) and run-of-the-mill shout-y slogans (“Read my lips”). Voices, disembodied and vague, somehow slither through, but they are the thrown utterances of the ventriloquist dummy—all eyes, no mouth. The effect is unsettling, surreal—spooky action at a socially sanctioned distance—and deceptive. Frankly, the act—and it is a strange, boring breed of performance art—is unworthy of a people commanded to “love thy neighbor.” For the heart is wicked—what it cannot trust it will doubt and dismiss, or worse.
We take the face, said the late Roger Scruton, “very seriously.” It is “the image of the soul within” and, if God’s word has any currency, that of our Maker, too. The surgeon, the trick-or-treater, the skier and bride veil theirs—for protection, make-believe, warmth, seduction—with an understanding that it is abnormal, a brief caesura in the routine. The criminal shares in the custom but hides his in order to exploit. Such is the power of the face in a free society—that its concealment, contra that of our bodies, is largely objectionable. Scruton pushes even more forcefully: a covered face broadcasts plans “to take advantage of the community without belonging to it.” France (again, but in a more sober state of mind), instead of compromising their allegiance to fraternité, had the gall to ban the burqa and niqab. For the protean American, loyal only to her feelings (and followers), this level of conviction—of (gasp!) discrimination—is likely too “problematic.” (Dare I say, racist?)
And that’s the rub—whatever its value in mitigating the spread of disease, the mandate to cover the face has benefited one figure unfailingly: the social engineer. He has not been idle, reconfiguring the world—to the specs of Hannah Arendt—into one primed for “the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” The pandemic (and its stooges) has made of us émigrés—trespassers, really—within our own communities. The effect is not unlike the modish carnivalization of cities into mises en scène of amusement and spectacle at the expense of livability; authenticity is sacrificed at the altar of vanity. (A visitor to my hometown may solicit a “wheel of fortune” to decide for him the next stop on his tour of mindless debauchery.) The celebration of autonomy—remember that?—can now preclude that of others and will even be officially endorsed in designated (occupied) spaces replete, like Russian matryoshka dolls, with smaller segregated “free speech zones,” a kabab stand, “grief rituals” and screenings of Paris Is Burning (see Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone). Little is more American than secession—we have been “bowling alone” for decades, at will. But we do so now by fiat and custom (or—see above—illegal commandeering), finding solidarity (or is it sorrow?) in our shared uselessness and isolation, creature from creature, just as sin divides creation from Creator.
Decline, disenchantment, separation—these are staples of the human condition, the nougat-y center of dis-ease that is the perennial experience of living in finitude. Eve eats the apple. Oedipus fills his eyes with the dagger-like pins of Jocasta’s brooch. The limp flesh of neighbors and brothers in blue and gray turns Antietam Creek an unnatural rouge. New York City health officials press the amorous to fornicate through a hole in the wall—to mitigate the risk of infection from COVID-19—while men in pillow-white hazmat suits dig mass graves on nearby Hart Island for the virus’ kinless victims. The horror! The horror! As a day is to God like a thousand years, and a thousand years a day, so it is with human folly. We are, in 2020, still immersed in the arguments and atmospheres of 1862, 1968 and Eden. Sadiq’s bait was a ruse—the snake! We are already the men we used to be.
Blame free will, peeve of the bipedal animal that aspires to immortality. This little piggy wants what he should not. This one wants too much. Perhaps Walker Percy’s Little Way, “not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh” is enough. But moderation long ago went the way of the lamplighter, percipience the way of the cloister. Blame serpents. Blame the arc of history. (I hear Bill Buckley, with a mouthful of Red Wing peanut butter, still yelling, “Shhtop!”) We have a rendezvous with destiny, do we not? Think of it—a New America! Who cares if the way to it is crooked or straight, paved in strife or love, lies or truth? (Pontius Pilate, his arms draped about my Sadiq, shrugs, “What is truth?”) Let the leaves fall. It all ends in tears anyway.
Image: Matejko, Jan. Stańczyk during a Ball at the Court of Queen Bona in the Face of the Loss of Smoleńsk. 1862, the National Museum, Warsaw.
Impolitic 