In the Godforsaken Wilderness — The Revealer

Sound and Fury on the Delaware

kh1242 — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 16:00:54 +0000

By Patrick Blanchfield

A bitter wind is coming off the Delaware River, and the Trump supporters at the rally in Neshaminy State Park are growing restive. We’re in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, right across the river from Jersey, not far from Levittown and Trenton, it’s below freezing, and the People 4 Trump “Spirit of America” rally is starting fifteen minutes late. A crowd of some five hundred people stamp feet in the cold, rub mittens together, and drag on coffee and cigarettes. Finally, on the stage at the center of the lawn, someone gets a sound system working and starts playing music. It’s Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” and soon people are hollering and belting out the lyrics together.

Justice will be served and the battle will rage

This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage

And you’ll be sorry that you messed with

The U.S. of A.

‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass

It’s the American way

It’s early March, Trump’s been in office for only a little more than a month, and here in Southeastern Pennsylvania, supporters have gathered to rally in support of a sitting President. The event website promised a “sign waving rally [that] will be peaceful, positive, patriotic, uplifting, and open to anyone that supports an America First agenda.” At least as far as the signage goes, the participants have delivered, bringing hundreds of flags and hand-painted cardboard signs and banners.

The crowd itself is full of middle-aged and older men, bikers in leather outfits, dudes in camo hunting gear, men in work clothes. But there are dozens of families, toddlers in Trump gear, and a not-inconsiderable number of women carrying tiny dogs in their arms and purses. The cars in the lot are all sorts – not just pickups, minivans, and SUVs, but more than a few luxury cars too. The organizers have proclaimed that “unlike those protesting against President Trump’s vision, we are a diverse coalition that are the heart and soul of America that wants our nation to fulfill our potential, as the greatest nation on God’s green earth!” Practically speaking, though, the sea of faces is overwhelmingly white. I count maybe two-dozen people who might be Latino, and fewer still Black people. In fact, there are more Black folks on the stage in front of the cameras than there are in the crowd itself.

After a song and a prayer, the event gets underway in earnest. The organizer, Jim Worthington, is a local businessman, the owner of an athletic club who spent some $30,000 campaigning for Trump and went as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. He’s lean and photogenic, and gets visibly emotional talking about Trump, a “great man,” and the “movement” this rally represents. He’s also relentless in extolling “positivity,” telling everyone in the audience that we should appreciate the media: “We’re grateful they came out in the cold to the cover this, we should thank them.”

Meanwhile, while Worthington speaks, a man in a black hoodie and sunglasses roams the crowd, confronting people he believes to be journalists, demanding “Are you fake news?” He shoulders into an interview being conducted by a TV correspondent and a cameraman, and asks, “Who are you with?” The reporter says he’s with a local TV affiliate, but that doesn’t satisfy the man. “That’s not good enough, that doesn’t mean anything, you could be fake news.” The reporter tries to turn around and resume to his interview, but the man isn’t having it, cutting in front of him and starting to get handsy, jabbing his fingers at the reporter’s chest and throat. “Are you fake? Are you fake news, man?” The reporter and his cameraman abandon their interview attempt and walk away, the man in the hoodie following them, only getting angrier and louder. Later, I see him berating another cameraman – this time, one wearing a Trump Make America Great Again hat in addition to his press badge. But that doesn’t stop the questions. “Who are you with? Are you fake?”

Disjunctions like these keep piling up. Worthington’s followed by the emcee, a woman who was a former contestant on the Apprentice (“I was on a little show … maybe you’ve heard of it …”) who receives tepid recognition when she compliments everyone on their civic engagement and eagerness to contribute to a new phase of the “movement.” Then another speaker gets up and promptly launches into a tirade that I find hard to follow, but that the audience loves. He starts by bringing up recent controversy over the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, which he paints as a “fake news” misdirection. “The moment Trump announced Sessions,” he says, “They [the Democrats] went after him. What are they trying to hide?” Someone in the crowd yells “Pizzagate!” but he keeps going – the real story is how Hillary “sold uranium to the Russians.” Next he’s on to condemning Philadelphia Democrats and sympathizing with the “good people who moved out” following various outrages. He mentions “that time the Democratic Mayor blew up a whole block in West Philly,” alluding to the MOVE bombing, and then in the next breath accuses city Democrats of “being soft on ISIS,” and introducing an unacceptable soda tax. The crowd loves all of this – some yell “Lock her up!” and others start to chant “Trump! Trump! Trump!” in rapid cadence. Everyone has gotten the memo about being “positive and uplifting” but their actual enthusiasm seems to lie elsewhere.

On the stage, Worthington takes over again, congratulating the crowd on its “diversity” and recognition of how “the time has come to work together, to celebrate difference, to embrace the other side.” There’s no room for hate or “divisiveness,” he continues, as the cameras focuses in on his perfect hair and manicured features. Meanwhile, only feet away, another man walks around taking pictures and chatting people up. He’s wearing a jacket with “Infowars, Est. 1996” printed on across the black shoulders. Below that logo is a caricatured face of a green-skinned old man with a hooked nose, beady red eyes, and sharp vampire teeth complete with dripping blood; a caption beneath the cartoon reads “Deport Soros.” It’s like Count Dracula meets the Jud Süß, a cartoon that feels like it’s ripped from the pages of Der Stürmer.

I admit I have a hard time processing all this. Anodyne pap about tolerance and democratic participation unfolds seamlessly alongside barely contained rage and images of bigotry so galling they almost don’t seem real, and which no one apparently feels any need to conceal.

And then, with a few parting words of further congratulation and pride from Worthington, the event suddenly ends, fifteen minutes early. We walk back to our cars as the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” plays on the sound system.

Waiting to leave the jammed parking lot takes almost as long as the event itself. Idling in the car alongside scores of others, fumes rising from exhaust pipes and cigarette smoke from cracked windows, I find myself wondering – what was the purpose of this event? From the music playlist to the speakers’ rhetoric, it felt like a kind of exercise in repetition, a sort of hollow reprise of a campaign event. But, of course, Trump wasn’t here, he’s already won. And so here these people were, listening to a speaker break down in tears telling the story of how he met Trump visiting a hospital (“such a great man”), and yelling about how Democrats are “thugs,” all as though trying to recapture some sort of long-gone glow. I kept looking for some kind of collective effervescence on the field, but I couldn’t feel any of it. People seemed ardent, sure, but never particularly joyous; if anything, the unifying emotion seemed to be loneliness itself, a force that brought everyone together while still leaving them somehow apart.

I finally get out of the parking lot, pulling past a crude roadside memorial to someone apparently killed in a car crash. Then it’s on to the state road and the highway, passing vacant industrial parks, moldering factories, boarded-up row homes, and stripmall after stripmall. The roadside billboards are like a catalogue of bleakness: treatment centers for painkiller addiction; an alert with mugshots of two brown men wanted for a bank robbery; recruiting posters for the military; an ad for something called “Nostalgia Fest” (“Meet Gary Busey!”). And then, just past the big casino, an ad for a gambling support hotline: “If I could just win again.”

A few miles further on, as the neighborhoods get wealthier, right next to the highway, I pass a strange structure, a tower with massive vents along its bottom. It contains a special chamber into which paying customers can enter and stand in a vertical wind tunnel with fans above and beneath them. A switched is flipped, and then the fans turn on, lifting the customer into the air and suspending them there. For a little bit, the attraction promises, you’ll be able to experience what it’s like to fly.

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In the Godforsaken Wilderness is a blog being written by Patrick Blanchfield in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. You can read past posts here.

All photographs taken by Patrick Blanchfield. Please do not reproduce without permission.

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Patrick Blanchfield is the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Sound and Fury on the Delaware appeared first on The Revealer.

Private Suffering in Political Circumstances

kh1242 — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 19:05:12 +0000

(Patrick Blanchfield)

By Patrick Blanchfield

On Third Avenue a crowd gathers to watch a suicide attempt. People in business suits, nannies pushing strollers, shoppers with their bags, a few construction workers – they stop, mill about, crane their necks backward, trying to see. Twenty stories up a straight line of identical brick balconies, someone wants to jump. Police on the balcony above drop a weighted net down to more cops on the balcony two floors below, ensnaring the jumper’s balcony completely. From so far below, it is impossible to see what happens next; the would-be jumper is never quite visible.

The crowd starts to disperse. It’s rush hour. People have places to be, and quite a lot to process besides. Just hours ago, breaking news from the White House: Executive Orders calling for immigration crackdowns, sweeping bans on refugees, doubling-down on the construction of a Mexican border wall, more. “If I’m any more late to work,” says a middle-aged Latina woman, pulling herself away from the scene, “Tomorrow, that’s gonna be me.”

The circumstances of any given suicide can be inscrutable. A fatalist might say: as much as any other human action. But the lives of the mentally ill are not metaphors, neither for cheap philosophizing nor easy political commentary. And yet respecting people, mentally ill or otherwise, who take their own lives as real humans with real problems means also acknowledging that their pains can be more than just idiosyncratic. “All private suffering,” observed Victor Klemperer in his diary entry of October 30, 1936, writing of a friend feared likely to kill himself, “is multiplied and poisoned a thousand times over by the political circumstances.” Born Jewish but a convert to Protestantism, and married to an “Aryan” woman, Klemperer was a Professor of Romance Languages at the Technical University of Dresden and a meticulous diarist. His diary narrates life under an increasingly threatening and murderous regime, speculating on political developments, relating the everyday stories of other people, family friends. There are depressions, nervous breakdowns, suicides. Another close friend, a wry and brilliant man with a whimsical fondness for beetles, and a Jewish convert to Protestant like Klemperer, struggles for months and ultimately kills himself; a year later, a destitute Klemperer “envies [him] a hundred times a day” and writes of trying to clothe himself in one of the dead man’s old suits. Klemperer and his wife only narrowly escaped deportation to a concentration camp by fleeing amid the chaos of the firebombing of Dresden. More than once, as the world goes to hell around him, Klemperer contemplates taking his own life: “Where do people find the courage for suicide?”

How many people have killed themselves because of Donald Trump? Simply articulating the question reveals a kind of crass reduction: what “because of Donald Trump” might mean could be as singular as any given person’s reasons for their despair, the many pressures that Trump’s rise to power and what it represents may only crystallize or add to. But still, the question isn’t an idle one. It’s anecdotal, but therapists have reported that the election and subsequent developments have taken a toll on the well-being of many of their patients. “Trump may represent the general scary frightening figure, like the monster under the bed,” says one Oakland psychoanalyst. “Trump is coming to symbolize all their fears.” The strain is particularly acute for those already at risk and in distress: racial, religious, and sexual minorities, those with traumatic personal and family histories, others. “One could imagine people from families of immigrants who have come from countries where there’s been a genocide, whether it be the Jewish Holocaust or any number of traumatic experiences, are carrying the stories of the previous generations,” the analyst continues. “Something like a Trump presidency is bound to stir up echoes of the past.” Certainly, shortly after Trump’s win in November, one segment of his supporters, self-identified neo-Nazis, celebrated what they saw as new leverage for goading vulnerable Americans into taking their own lives: “You can troll these people and definitely get some of them to kill themselves.” Trump, for his part, has suggested he associates suicide with personal weakness.

The morning of the suicide attempt, the city feels on edge, brittle. Maybe it’s the headlines, maybe it’s the bizarrely balmy weather. Maybe the self-care and self-soothing mechanisms people are using to cope just aren’t quite working. I’ve been binging on TV like never before, and walking through the tension I find myself thinking of Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, waxing philosophical about the supposedly palpable misery of the show’s Louisiana setting: “Got a bad taste out there. Aluminum, ash, like you can smell the psychosphere.” For once, the idea of a sense of dread and enervation so omnipresent you can taste it somehow doesn’t feel overwritten. And even that TV series’ shabby payoff seems suggestive: a pressure-cooker buildup of Lovecraftian anxiety, tantalizing hints of monstrous conspiracies at the highest levels of political power, all of it collapsing and leaving the viewer with a cheap and ugly dénouement where the real bad guys are a pair of inbred white trash swamp mutants straight from central casting. The true monsters get away, the cosmic struggle is revealed to be a sleight of hand, and we’re left with caricatures and a vague sense of guilt and shame about the whole thing. Drinking with friends later, thinking along these lines, I venture a tired, perhaps jaded question: even after the election, how many of us had been expecting our political struggles to involve facing something different? But what we wound up with was something, crueler, more grotesque, more blatant, and just tackier than we could’ve possibly imagined. There we were, gearing up to fight The Yellow King; now, here we are, facing This Orange Asshole.

But it’s no joke, no disappointing TV show. Trump may have always been a soft man, a poltroon, a ghoul, but now, he’s the one sitting where the buck stops for killings of actual people, with doubtless more to die soon. And when I dream, my nightmares about Trump aren’t in the genre of prestige-TV horror; instead, they’re dreams of Great Powers at war, of nations pitched at each other in mutually assured butchery. Suicide of a sort, but on a titanic scale, and to the sound of trumpets.

Washington Square Park, January 25, 2017 (Patrick Blanchfield)

Social space is not entirely dominated by dread. I attend three protests in two weeks. In Washington Square, demonstrators brought together by the Council of Islamic Relations (CAIR) protest the Executive Orders, holding lighters and glowing cellphones aloft in the gathering dusk: “No Ban, No Wall, New Yorkers for All.” Days later, a march, this time in Philadelphia, thousands stream down past City Hall: “We. Are. A. Sanctuary. City.” Some seventy-five people gather at a busy intersection in my small town in Chester County, Pennsylvania: “No Ban, No Fear, Refugees Are Welcome Here.” In all these places, the rhythmic chants, like so much of the protest signage, broadcasts counter-messages of acceptance and welcome, directed at refugees, immigrants, the marginalized. You are welcome here. Your life matters.

At the smallest rally, the one in suburban Pennsylvania, it seems like the town’s entire clergy is there, children and retirees and military veterans too. Hundreds of passing cars honk in support, drivers pump their fists in the air. Only a few passersby engage negatively, throwing up the odd middle finger, rolling down their windows to harangue “Get a job!” One man in a four-door sedan gets agitated: “Don’t you know they’re cutting off the heads of Christians, I’ve got to look after my babies.” A white-haired priest in sneakers calls back at him: “Well, then, God bless you and your family, you take good care of them.” A woman in a battered Prius stops at the light, and starts talking at the crowd through her open window. “You people, you’re un-der-in-formed,” she enunciates, disgusted, waving a cigarette over her steering wheel before driving off. “He only wants to keep out Syrians. Just the Syrians.” It turns out that there actually are two Syrian immigrants in the crowd, middle-aged women who live only a few miles apart but have never met before; they start talking, and discover they both went to the same high school in Aleppo.

Vik Muniz artwork from the Second Avenue Subway, New York City (Patrick Blanchfield)

These moments feel powerful. Affirmations of life, sudden patches of light breaking through the mounting darkness. “While we were marching,” says a young girl at one protest, clutching a homemade picture of multi-colored stick people smiling and holding hands, “I forgot Donald Trump existed.” But the glow of the rallies is evanescent. Walking back home alone, sign on my shoulder (“PA WELCOMES REFUGEES”), a van tears past, and a man yells “Trump!” out the window, as though that one word says everything it needs to, like a curse.

New York again. The art in one station of the new Second Avenue subway is a series of Vik Muniz mosaics portraits of everyday New Yorkers, real people. A woman in a sari, a Hasidic man, a gay couple, laughing children, more. Under other circumstances, a cynic might find the representation of the theme of diversity heavy-handed, particularly alongside a looming inscription of “E Pluribus Unum.” But somehow, on this morning, a day or two after the anonymous suicide attempt, and after the nighttime rally in the Park, it all feels almost painfully lovely. On the platform, an old man and a little girl sit on a bench watching a pair of buskers play a gentle bluegrass cover of The Grateful Dead’s ‘Friend of the Devil.’ MTA workers carrying clipboards walk around, talking to each other. Somewhere, someone laughs. It all seems decent and hopeful, like it’s holding together somehow, no matter how threatened, how fragile it may be.

On the train train, the doors close, and the music drowns out as we pull away. We’re halfway to the next station when the emergency brake is thrown and the entire train screeches to a halt, nearly sending passengers flying. “Man-on-the-tracks-man-on-the-tracks-man-on-the-tracks” crackles an urgent voice on the overhead. In the car, passengers exchange glances – Is it … ?

No, it’s just a worker, a man in a hard hat, doing repairs somewhere up the tunnel on the far side of the tracks. He waves the train forward.

We pick up speed and hurtle into the darkness.

***

In the Godforsaken Wilderness is a blog being written by Patrick Blanchfield in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. You can read past posts here.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Private Suffering in Political Circumstances appeared first on The Revealer.

On Bullshit News

kh1242 — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 19:39:37 +0000

By Patrick Blanchfield

Since the election, you’ve probably seen, heard, or read someone wringing their hands over the proliferation of “fake news.” The argument goes like this: fraudulent headlines and bogus stories are manufactured by cynical operators, spreading like wildfire via social media, and our capacity for informed decision-making, so vital to the welfare of our democracy, suffers as a result. If you believed that the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump, for example, you might have given him your vote; if you believe actors are being bussed in and paid to protest the election results, you might view all such dissent as in bad faith. And so forth.

Clearly, fake news is a problem. Perhaps you should consider avoiding the “news” from sites on aggregated lists like this one – at least if your news feed isn’t full of dubious headlines from still other sites telling you that those lists are also fake. And provided, of course, that the gatekeepers you turn to for such lists aren’t themselves operating with their own agendas.

But you know what’s also a problem, alongside – and, I think, just as much as – “fake news”? Bullshit news: “news” that grabs your attention, your clicks, and your outrage, sapping public energy and awareness. Bullshit news is news that screams “NEWS!” in inverse proportion to how much it actually matters – and that, not coincidentally, pulls your eyes away from news that does.

Let’s consider some examples. Weekend before last, you doubtless saw the stop-the-presses news that Mike Pence was booed by the audience at a weekend showing of Hamilton, and then addressed by cast members (remember?). This likely dominated your newsfeed in no small part because Donald Trump promptly spent much of the subsequent weekend tweeting about it. Meanwhile, in the glut of hashtag campaigns, thinkpieces, and impassioned defenses of the theater, free speech, and the truly political act that is dropping a thousand bucks for a ticket to a hip-hop musical celebrating the glorious promise of American democracy, what got lost in the shuffle was the nontrivial fact that our present-elect settled a massive lawsuit for running a massive con job that shamelessly bilked thousands of people out of their life savings. Of course, this was not a coincidence. The coverage analytics couldn’t be clearer on that score: the Trump University settlement was gaining momentum, and presto, Trump began tweeting about Hamilton, and that was that. In other words: the Hamilton story was bullshit news, but we ate it up, spent a weekend in high dudgeon, and then patted ourselves on the back for doing it. And now, this past weekend, just as The New York Times released a devastatingly thorough assessment of the Trump Organization’s myriad foreign entanglements, Trump took to Twitter and unleashed a firestorm by ludicrously claiming to have been stabbed in the back by fraud during an election that he won.

We need to realize now that this is how things are going to play out going forward: bullshit headlines, however grotesque and disturbing they may be, will serve to distract our attention from far more damaging matters. Precisely when we need to pay attention the most, to respond in sustained and focused ways, we’ll instead get served up some quick, tempting hit of bullshit – just enough to get our outrage fix, an opportunity to make some witty puns, to find solidarity in retweets, memes, and quick chuckles, and then move on to the next episode.

Fake news and bullshit news operate in tandem. Fake news may appeal to paranoiac, reactionary “low information” types, but bullshit news is catnip for outraged, ostensibly savvy liberals at the end of their tethers. On some level, it’s understandable. The past eighteen months have left us enervated and frayed, reacting reflexively, signal-boosting everything that’s come across our feeds in the buildup to a climactic showdown at the ballot box.

But that showdown is over now – and we’re entering a new phase. Before, it was a scramble, a sprint; now we’re in a marathon that’s all about judiciously consuming information and weighing priorities. Over the four years to come, remember this: Trump operates on the belief that “the American public has a two-to-three week attention span.” Trump still has some scores of lawsuits pending against him, and his administration’s conflicts of interest are only going to get more flagrant, too. Yet if we get thrown each time he does something vulgar and gobsmacking, none of these things will matter. In an ideal world, our attention bandwidth would be unlimited. In the real world, though, our susceptibility to novelty and outrage translates into shabby tradeoffs, particularly when issues demand longer-term follow-through. It’s hard to wrap our heads around a White House Chief Strategist who allegedly muses about the genetic superiority of various people and whose worldview basically boils down to a Decline of the West space opera – and so we’ll drown in endless chatter about some “new” twenty-something reactionary small-fry goose-stepping in a DC hotel basement instead (even though, as Kelly Baker argues, they’re not “new” at all). But we have to resist that temptation and buck the cycle.

Because if there’s one thing that Trump, bullshitter extraordinaire, can weather and outlast, it’s bullshit. Even worse: he thrives on it. Compare your sick burn or witty meme responding to Trump’s latest outrage to posting a dogshaming photo on Instagram. Odds are your pup, blissfully unaware of the social media exposure, will just piss on your couch again, because that’s what dogs do. Trump, though, revels in that limelight and embraces your umbrage, gleefully promising to do even worse next time – and playing up the spectacle of your distress and mockery over his bullshit as proof to his followers that you’re an oversensitive and feckless tool. He’s like a dog that pisses on your couch while snapping a selfie and tagging you in it. Shaming the shameless is a fool’s errand.

Here’s the bottom line. The danger of focusing attention on the latest installments of a demagogue’s florid personality politics is that that fixation directly serves their interests. Whether such is their conscious intention or not is immaterial – as is the question of whether Trump specifically is a puppet master or a hapless savant. What matters is that our focusing on such distractions leaves deeper structures of politics unnoticed, and more troubling developments proceed unremarked. So: reject the fake news, but also, please, resist the bullshit. We may all be lying in the gutter of our information silos, but if we can’t keep our eyes on the bigger picture, we’re done.

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In the Godforsaken Wilderness is a blog being written by Patrick Blanchfield in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. You can read past posts here.

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The post On Bullshit News appeared first on The Revealer.

There are Endurable Moments

kh1242 — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:55:47 +0000

Samuel Beckett photographed by Jane Bown, 1976

By Patrick Blanchfield

This is the first post in a blog, In the Godforsaken Wilderness, that Patrick Blanchfield will be writing in the coming days and weeks.

The people are kept in urns, giant amphorae, immobile, up to their necks in dirt. They babble in fear and anguish, but they do not acknowledge each other. Their eyes are locked forward, their speech is so much rapid overtalking.is anyone looking at me?

am I as much as being seen?

it will come it must come there is no future in this

is there something I should do with my face other than utter? weep?

Samuel Beckett’s 1961 short theater piece, Play, offers a nightmarish landscape of alienation, pain, recrimination, and grief. As staged and filmed by Anthony Minghella, the dysphoria is palpable. The characters, unnamed, “so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of the urns,” tell fragments of a story of betrayal and heartbreak, a story which implicates all of them, and which they are condemned to repeat, infinitely, chattering past each other in the dark.

Surveying the past days, I cannot banish the thought of this play. Lives in desperation, immured apart from one another – what better image of us all, in our little silos of information and expectations, could there be? And then another image: an earthquake comes, a giant hammer, smashing the urns. Broken shards and spilled earth lies everywhere, mingled with writhing, naked limbs. The formerly sessile people are now rudely exposed to the sky. Will they die of exposure? Will they remain catatonic? Will the babbling continue? What will they do?

Make no mistake about this: for masses of people, the election news came not just as a shock, but as a kind of trauma. For Freud, trauma was defined by the element of surprise. Your body is, until the moment of disaster, in motion or at rest, under your control, a coherent part of a comprehensible world. Until suddenly – it is not. Tossed from your seat in a train wreck, flung into the air by an exploding shell, you become a rag doll: buffeted, powerless, at the mercy of forces indifferent or cruel, in any event beyond your control. It is telling that Freud reached in his examples for symbols of accelerating modernity: trains, long-range munitions. These embodiments of speed and power are monuments to human ingenuity – but also, by accident or design, things that can disrupt, dismember, and destroy, revealing us in all our vulnerability. Describing the First World War, Walter Benjamin framed such dislocation as collective, and epochal: “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of forces of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human life.” Technological innovation begets new dislocation; “progress” is also a word for novel flavors of pain, helplessness, and grief.

Still from Anthony Minghella’s film “Play”

How does one recover from such trauma? “You know how refrigerators have that hum?” an analyst who was one of my teachers would say. “That sound of the motor, it’s always running, continuous, so you forget it. You only notice it when it’s off. What I’ve come to think from working with traumatized people,” he’d continue, “Is that we all have a buzz like that going on in the background of our minds, a constant awareness, taken for granted: You are alive. With trauma, that sounds stops. You’re victimized, powerless, you have no choice but to dissociate as whatever happens to you happens to you. Part of what makes trauma so difficult, though, is that you don’t die – you come back. But once that sound stops, to whatever extent it returns, it’s never the same. You died. But here you still are, alive.” The task of working with trauma as a therapist, he’d go on to say, is helping the traumatized person reckon with this experience – perhaps not to integrate it into their “daily life,” so to speak, but to recuperate the possibility of Life as such.

We are lucky: we have not died. But to think that death and horror is not now more at our door than it was before – and even more now for those of us who were already more vulnerable – is a lure, a luxury. This was “just” an election, yes, and the exercise of the democratic transfer of power will proceed. But autocracy is not an equally indifferent option among a range of political preferences. The status quo of the American polity was already underwritten by violence and bigotry, yes, and the ideology of our noble exceptionalism was indeed always already an absurd lie. But this does not mean that the horrors to come cannot be even worse. And the edifice of American hegemony, such as it is, and the rule of law, whatever that means, will hold. But the norms that have been obliterated in the past months are gone for good, and while the old ones were indeed frivolous and hypocritical, what will follow in their absence will be grim and mean.

One of Beckett’s characters in Play seeks to convince herself that all is not as bad as it seems. I had anticipated something better. More restful. Less confused. Less confusing. And yet, she says, still: There are endurable moments.

The idea of a return to normalcy, to daily life, holds its comforts. One cannot abide without such things. But the mere existence of “endurable moments” is not Life: grasping at them is no way to live, and retreating into them is no politics worth the name. The urns are shattered, and now can choose either to finally face each other or to pretend, as we lie in the dirt, that we can crawl back in.

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