In the morning, my wife and I walk to our favorite coffeehouse. We stop at the coffeehouse right across the street to chat with neighbors, the one we call “the place too close to walk to,” because coffee is our reward for walking. We walk by the tree covered with wishes people write and hang up – “a pony,” “a cure for Mom’s cancer,” “to be happy,” “world peace” – a tree most of whose fruit will not ripen. We admire gardens; some are straight from the pages of gardening magazines, and beautiful, others are chaotic like ours, and beautiful. We are greeted by cats, dogs and people. At the coffeehouse, they ask “the usual?” and it usually is. We’ve been going there for well over ten years and have acquired “Resident Old Couple” status. We have watched children we met there grow up. On the way home, we walk down a lane between the houses and, at the right time of year, pick blackberries. For a time we forget that we are living amongst a nation split apart by multiple crises.
America is a country where an entity calling itself “The Church of Glad Tidings” recently presented an assault rifle to Michael Flynn who “joked,” to great laughter, about “find(ing) someone” in Washington, D.C. Who would Jesus shoot?
It is a country where a person who has amassed wealth primarily through activities of no benefit to society can become a serious contender in the Democratic presidential primary largely on the basis of being able to spend a lot of that wealth on advertisements. On the other hand, it is a country where too many people are persuaded how to vote by such advertisements. Truth has become a commodity, traded by those who can pay the most. Liars argue in court that the telling of lies is the expression of political opinion, protected by the right to free speech.
Speculation about a deep state is perverse while the system that holds political power is operating in plain sight, based on the concentration of wealth in a few and the minimal feedback loop whereby a fraction of that wealth can be spent to halt any attempt to change the system. One party feeds off that system more, but both are corrupted. It works through the worst form of oppression, that dominates not primarily through crude violence but through tricking people to collude in their own oppression. How else to explain the paradox of the control and exploitation of so many by so few?
The amount of money that an individual gets to control (only sometimes earns) is a law neither of God nor nature, but the result of complex rules evolving in society, rules that in a democracy could be changed. Detailed analysis of the gap between earnings and cost of renting can be found in the report “Out of Reach 2021.” The report can be summarized by saying that about a half of full-time workers who are renters have difficulty affording normal rent and very many could be made homeless by an unexpected financial hit. “Billionaire wealth vs. community health: Protecting essential workers from pandemic profiteers” is a downloadable report published in November 2020. By way of example, it reveals that, as of Nov. 17, 2020, the combined wealth of 647 U.S. billionaires had increased by almost $960 billion in eight months. I do not envisage a revolution of the people in its traditional form happening in America, but all it would take is for people to vote in their own interests.
America is a country where being suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill can result in a man being brutally murdered while a family can make billions of dollars enabling the opioid crisis and enjoy impunity and immunity apart from having to forfeit a fraction of that fortune.
Among a substantial section of the American population, there appears to be a collective death wish and a form of mass delusion in which the voices heard come through the Internet. What psychoanalytic theory can explain so many politicians doing so much for personal gain or ideological imperatives that will almost certainly bring misery to their own children and grandchildren? Propaganda, which used to be a weapon of the state, has been democratized. Anyone with a device can generate, or at least spread, messages like “Strike a blow for freedom, drive on the left.” Political speech is too often reduced to pre-linguistic screeches: as “cancel culture,” “woke,” “Critical Race Theory.” Education has become a multiplier of inequality operating in the service of the rich by failing to nurture in students an expectation of agency and critical disposition (my favorite t-shirt, from Real Change, Seattle’s counterpart of Street Roots, reads “Be Silent. Consume. Die”). Myth is preferred to history, slaves were African immigrants, the land was empty when the white man arrived. Science is good as long as it is being used for making weapons of mass destruction, exploitation of the earth’s resources or space travel, but not in preventing people dying.
In global terms, far from being a leader, the United States is a country whose political response to the crises facing humanity is negative. At a time when humanity is careening off the cliff of climate catastrophe, the four years of the Trump administration were spent with the foot on the accelerator. Jonathan Swift captured some of ex-president Trump’s essence in “The Art of Political Lying,” written in 1710. Is Trump working for the Russians? I don’t know enough to answer that question, but let me ask another. As a Russian agent, could he have done and still be doing as much damage? Until recently I believed that a second Civil War might be imminent. I now believe it is already happening, in a different form from the first. Future historians may debate whether it was declared on Nov. 3, 2020 or Jan. 6, 2021.
At my age, having led a full and privileged life, I await death with equanimity. There are islands of sanity in the ocean of madness, moments of joy in this time of tragedy. My wife and I have friends all over the world. There are more books in our house worth reading than we can possibly read before we die. But we grieve for the young, to whom our generation is leaving no future.
Brian Greer came to the United States from his native Ireland in 2000. With his wife, Swapna Mukhopadhyay, he works on the cultural and political aspects of mathematics education.