America, Today
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius’s point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn’t think he was a minor character in anything.
- John Barth.
Fuck, man.
I haven’t the slightest idea what to do today. Since the election, I’ve been forcing myself to read the news daily, always clicking open my browser with the same visceral feeling of impending doom I get when I look down at the scale during one of my annual “diets.” But today, I can’t; today I’m going to do the same thing I do when the check-engine appears on my dash or a troublesome bump materializes on my lower back: I’m going to ignore the shit out of it and hope it goes away. I’ll be like the proverbial ostrich, head buried deep in the sand, because honestly I cannot fucking fathom doing anything else.
Since I can’t think of anything else to do, I’d like to tell a story. I used to have this map of the world above the headboard of my childhood bed. I don’t remember much about it other than it was pastel colored and almost certainly one of those standard Mercator projections, the kind that makes Greenland appear to be several measures longer than the circumference of the sun. I loved that thing. I would sit, Indian-style, for hours and stare at that map. I maintain that there is no greater tool for kick-starting the imagination of a curious child than a simple map. To a child, a map is nothing but endless possibility.
Sometimes my mother would sit with me and point things out. She showed me the Angel in the Middle East — the borders of the countries that when traced suggests an angel, head down and hands clasped in prayer. She showed me the Boot of Italy, where our grandparents where from, and Sicily, the ball it kicked across the Mediterranean. And she showed me America. She showed me America the most, because I was mesmerized by America. I stared and stared at America. My mother told me that I was special because God loved America the most. He loved us the most because we were the greatest country on Earth. She said this not with sarcasm, but with the easy spoken cadence of someone stating something that is plainly truthful. I believed her wholly. I believed her for years, long after I was too old to be so gullible, and long after, in fact, I believed that God was a thing that existed. It was just common sense: In the great, grand story of life, America was the star.
And then last November I finally accepted she was wrong.
I’ve spent my life traveling this county; I went to all 50 states before I went abroad once. I would tell anyone who listened that America’s diversity of people, climate and culture made it like visiting 50 different countries. I vigorously maintained that while America’s march of progress was maddeningly slow, it was also perpetual. Inexorable. I believed it was manifest destiny. But for reasons that I can’t bring myself to face, I was blind to the fact that progress is not guaranteed in America — it’s tenuous. I blatantly ignored the reality that manifest destiny is not a catchphrase for American liberalism, but a tangible, horrifying thing that America actually did. My personal blinders were destroyed on November 8, and though time may prove that to be a valuable thing, for now it’s just so terribly sad. There were some delusions I was hoping to hold on to forever, ya know?
Yes, my loss of innocence is immaterial when so many people are in so much danger, and it is deeply troubling that it took the election of heartless demagogue to wake me up to reality. But whatever. I’m taking a break from qualifying my sadness, just for today. This is fucking heartbreaking, and I don’t know what else to do.
Surely the head-in-the-sand technique is not an effective long-term strategy, and I’m not advocating for it. (Apathy, after all, is one of the reasons we are in this spot today.) But for right now? For today? I don’t know — maybe today, total avoidance is the best method to survive this latest day of infamy. (And considering the soon-to-be-just-plain President’s love of attention, you can feel free to consider ignoring the inauguration a form of anarchy.) It’s OK to look away when the republic goes down in flames. Fuck, we’re only human.
So today: Do whatever you need to get by. But tomorrow?
Tomorrow go here.
Tomorrow read this.
Tomorrow consider these.
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story, Barth wrote in his second novel, The End of the Road. And he’s right: The entirety of the world comprises minor characters in someone else’s magnum opus. Americans believe this twice-over I think. If God is our author, we were His protagonists.
I still believe Barth’s quote applies. It’s just been real hard to discover that we were the villains all along.
