Donald Dewey has published more than 30 books of
fiction and nonfiction. In 2015 he published two mysteries: the
double-book The Fantasy League Murders/The Bolivian Sailor,
and Green Triangles. Later this year, he will publish
the biography Buccaneer: James Stuart Blackton and the Birth
of American Movies.
Growing
up in Brooklyn in the middle of the 20th century meant TV encounters
with Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and Birmingham, Alabama
Commissioner ‘Bull’ Connor. While McCarthy railed
against phantom communists and pushed thousands toward blacklists
and unemployment lines, Connor used his authority in his city’s
fire and police departments to unleash hoses and attack dogs
against civil rights marchers. In the parlance of my Brooklyn
streets, both were punks whose lies and bluster thrived until
their swaggering became too transparent as desperation.
McCarthy
and Connor eventually went away, but their departure also abetted
an illusion that can be more perilous than their behaviour had
been while they were still on the planet --- to wit, that progress
can be linear, that once combatted for what they are, infamies
such as demagoguery and racism will have had their day. We have
warned ourselves against this tempting presumption, of course.
We haven’t had to be on a dance floor to value the insight
about two steps forward and one step backward. We haven’t
had to tune in to sports talk shows to second all those clichés
from players about never letting ourselves get too high or too
low. And we certainly haven’t had to be students of the
writings of Georg Hegel or Karl Marx to appreciate that social
dynamics can require reversals as a condition for achieving
further advances. All that wisdom -- intuitive, robotic, or
theoretical -- has always been out there for counseling patience,
telling us not to be aghast when past vilenesses return as pressing
community concerns.
Fine.
No such thing as linear progress. Receives daily confirmation.
But then there is also my life, where that wisdom is hardly
reassuring, in fact feels plenty hollow.
All
through the Nixons, Reagans, and Bushes, I harboured a drop
of optimism, wanting to believe that even they knew that for
all their fictional alibis for wars, callous indifference to
social oppressions, and numerous monopolistic arrogances we
spoke if not a common language at least operated from a common
alphabet. Granted that wasn’t much, not with the bodies
being piled up in Vietnam, the Middle East and inner city neighbourhoods,
but it left open a frail hope that somewhere along the line
brutishness might hesitate a second before clomping on. And,
let it be said, that hope also had to defy the rendition practices
of the Clinton administration and the deportation enthusiasms
of the Obama White House. It wasn’t necessary to be partisan
to dangle from a ledge of credulousness.
Then
along came November 2016, and ever since then the two-step-forward-one-step-backward
tango has lost the last measure of rationalization it might
have had. If the present Washington cartoon is the antithesis
posited by Hegel and Marx, their synthesis to come will have
to be Utopia. With the administration’s every new pronouncement
and appointment the stretch between my morning and twilight
years takes on clearer shape as a mockery leaving me back where
I began with McCarthy and Connor, allowance made only for witnessing
the boomerang in high-definition peacock colours rather than
on grainy black-and-white newsreels. Have all these years --
years that have included successful mass protests against our
foreign invasions, our (albeit belated) awareness of how we
have been poisoning the climate, and the election of an African-American
president -- amounted to little more than a long confident march
into a wall? This isn’t a political or ideological question,
it is a life question. And I would really like to know the answer
before being told to pick out a crematorium.
Give
or take the odd itch to start a nuclear war with North Korea
to show who’s narcissistic boss, the most conspicuous
answer looms not from any specific policy issue, but from the
now-presidential cretinizing of American society, promoting
ignorance, amnesia and exploitation as a given. Why worry about
the mere facts of a NAFTA, intrigues over Russia, or all those
earthquakes in Oklahoma when the very concept of truth has been
dismissed as being less conclusive than a Geico commercial?
Who cares about contradictory things said or done between yesterday
and today when the betting is on an attention span that values
only Nick at Nite for anything worth preserving? What’s
wrong with the Constitution being deregulated along with everything
else?
Many
analyses of this desolate tableau have already been pondered
and printed, and in all kinds of tones -- polemical, legalistic,
black humorous. But what even perceptive pundits have neglected
in their astonishment and outrage is time. Historians and political
scientists can afford to take the long view, digging into the
likes of James Buchanan and Warren Harding for comparisons to
the present havoc, but those primarily answerable to their own
lives, in the here and now, find little solace in these excavations.
A very personal clock is ticking for a life such as, say, mine,
and it doesn’t find consolation in the follies of the
1850s and 1920s.
The
starting point here is the most visceral one -- feeling. And
as with the punks in my Brooklyn neighbourhood who once kept
Lucky Strikes in business standing on the corner and cracking
witty things to the women hurrying past, intimidation is one
of its settings. The frissons from merely talking about eliminating
Meals-on-Wheels, for instance, may convey as much delirium as
threat, the kind would-be tough guys need for impressing themselves
with their insensibility, but that doesn’t make the pathetic
harmless. Would-be tough guys occasionally give in to their
masturbatory fantasies.
But
that said, my strongest feeling within the orbit of the 45th
President of the United States is that of simply being cheapened
by having to share the air with him and his bag men; cheapened
as a human being. It is a scabby feeling, like waking up in
a flea pit of a hotel room, knowing immediately that it is too
late to ask how I got there and that I will probably never get
out fast enough to forget having been there. It is stirred at
the mere image of that perpetually glowering face and by the
sense that there is nothing behind it except an endless Quaker
Puffed Oats succession of other glowering faces. In contrast
to some of his predecessors, even the most baleful of them,
the only alphabet we have in common hints at three-letter crossword
puzzle answers that he is incapable of solving and that I would
take no pride in solving. Intelligence may not be everything,
but in the right enervating conditions it can be made to feel
altogether irrelevant.
Obviously,
the melancholy and disillusionment within my attitude can be
exploited as disabling components working to the benefit of
the New Punks and not at all helpful to pushback movements around
the country and the world. Pazienza! If we’re going to
take on these cretins, we cannot be ashamed of what we have
invested. Punks are still punks. They have never graduated to
the status of those hoodlums who assure imminent victims that
there is nothing personal in what they are about to do, that
it’s just business. The last thing the New Punks are capable
of understanding is that for me, who has never been diagnosed
with amnesia, it is both personal and business.
