Who by common trial
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” — Joan Didion
{ As if we have not lost enough. We have now also lost Leonard Cohen. }
The unthinkable, the unfathomable. The almost, but not quite unimaginable thing has happened here. From The Plot Against America by James Traub in Foreign Policy:
We must turn to fiction for analogies. In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagined that Charles Lindbergh, the pro-German isolationist and mega-celebrity, won the Republican nomination for president in 1940 and then defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lindbergh signs peace treaties with Nazi Germany and Japan and installs Henry Ford as secretary of the interior. Anti-Semitic mobs attack Jews while the Ku Klux Klan is unleashed on blacks. White nationalism rules the country. This was allegory, not fantasy: Roth was writing about something he found latent in America. Trump has come along to exploit that dormant spirit with such genius that he has achieved what Lindy, the spokesman for the America First movement, barely dreamed of.
Just a month or two ago, I was having dinner with my wife Linda in Ballard, a hip, eclectic neighborhood in Seattle. Humming with shops and cafes, Ballard is intensely liberal, creative, tolerant, and diverse. On a perfectly lovely early evening, we dined outside and watched life go by. The world writ small, sweet and false.
As the couples and dog-walkers and headphone-wearers and just-off-from-work moms and retirees and baristas and bakers and bohemians and skateboarders and photographers and musicians drifted past, I felt a shadow.
“We’re in a place,” I said to Linda, “that you and I have never been before. In a couple of weeks, we could find ourselves on a night like this and suddenly here come two or three, or five or six, or ten victorious Trump supporters. They feel empowered. They feel they have permission — to taunt, scream, terrify, insult, injure. Their side, their team, their religion, has won. And we are the “liberals” and the “losers.” And their most primal instincts — to visit their own wounds onto us, has legitimacy.”
FUCK YOU! LIBERAL KIKE FAGGOTS! HEY YOU, UGLY CUNT! HEY YOU, NIGGER! YOU GOT A NEW PRESIDENT!
Ballard is an unlikely setting for this, but who really knows? And for the first time, because of our politics and world view, thoughts about our personal safety in the public square came into view. I’m white and male, so yes, it’s almost, but not entirely absurd for me to worry. But I had a real intimation, a taste in my mouth, of what it must be like for people who always have to worry, who always taste fear. Black men and women. A black person driving a car. Women — walking alone at night, in a park, in a parking lot, in a parking garage, on the street. And now Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, Asian Americans, Jews. That evening I began to know something I’d never known before and never thought I would. It could happen here. Now we see it has already begun.
On an almost daily basis, I think about Ta-Nehisi Coates, the brilliant writer at The Atlantic who’s kidhood took place on the streets of Baltimore, who is working out for himself which story, which version, holds. I lived in Baltimore for eight years, and it changed me. It’s a slice of impossibly-broken-but-still-resilient America that not many people know unless they’ve lived there or gotten a glimpse of it on The Wire. The ground there is fertile for writers. And it’s a terrible place for the systematic mistreatment of black people by the police force. From Coates’ scorching book, Between the World and Me:
…the stories I wanted to tell myself could not be matched to truths.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been telling us and telling us and telling us and telling us—America is a white supremacist nation. He’s been telling us that the dream is only a fable. And the fable is built on the subjugation of people of color. The entire ‘heaving apparatus’ to quote his mentor, David Carr, rests on the back of black people. Then and now.
I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. ~ from Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Those 12 bolded words shocked me. I wanted — needed — to believe something different, better. I knew that some Americans — but yes, Americans, us, we — had terrorized, murdered, lynched, whipped, dragged and tortured black bodies. Are still killing black bodies. In cold blood. On the streets of American cities. We annihilated native people in the name of manifest destiny. Still, I wanted, as Joan Didion wrote, to tell myself a story in order to live. I wanted to escape into the Dream. I wanted a fable, even if the fable was messy, compromised, tainted, only half true. But Coates is the heir to James Baldwin and here is what Baldwin said:
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. ~ James Baldwin
Listen to these opening lines of W.E.B DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk:
Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it. They approach me in a half-hesitatingly sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying, ‘How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town, or Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? To the real question How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
On a podcast this morning, I heard a journalist tell of her six-year-old girl crying on the way to school. She could not fathom how this man who insulted women and girls and everyone else had become our president.
In the shifting phantasmagoria of our experience, there is another girl and another story. There are going to be many more days like this.
Today at Plano East Senior High, a group of boys took off a girl’s hijab.
Aaron Sorkin is right; the Klan did win last night. Consider this gold nugget about the 1920s Klan, uncovered in 2011 by two academics, Roland G. Fryer, Jr. of Harvard and Steven D. Levitt University of Chicago in 2011. From Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan:
…the 1920s Klan is best described as a social organization with a wildly successful multi-level marketing structure fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.
The modern version of this is the current Republican Party, marching arm in arm with the conservative media industrial complex, selling hatred and paranoia and conspiracy and intolerance to buyers all across America. It has worked. If we’re going to survive, we have to destroy it.
I don’t know what to say. I am afraid; I can honestly say that. I’m terrified. I’m terrified for people who are more vulnerable than me. I’m terrified for our country. We are truly in foreign territory.
I believe this—I believe that the press, the political opposition, all of us, have a responsibility to resist what is coming in every way we can find. The rules have been rendered quaint and nostalgic.
Fight back. This is not normal. And don’t fool yourself, this is much, much worse than you think.
Read this below and then go read the full piece at the New York Review of Books. Autocracy: Rules for Survival.
- Believe the autocrat.
- Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
- Institutions will not save you.
- Be outraged.
- Don’t make compromises.
- Remember the future.
And send your love to this beautiful, beautiful man, on his way to heaven.
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew her
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
