“A low dishonest decade”

Woman, reading the news.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Writing is a retrospective artform. It does not always lend itself well to live recordings, which run the risk of turning simply into stenography. But occasionally, when national moods turn feverish enough, and history and sensation have no choice but to converge, you get pieces written in the moment that speak fully to the moment, like Auden’s famous poem, “September 1, 1939”:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade…

It’s helpful to return to these pieces when your own decade, your own century, takes another of its dishonest turns.

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Flipping through the news. The videos coming out of Switzerland, the politicians’ speeches. The Belgian prime minister is quoting Gramsci: “‘If the old is dying and the new is not yet born, you live in a time of monsters,’ and it’s up to him to decide if he wants to be a monster — yes or no.” The Canadian prime minister delivers a disquieting speech concerning the collapse of the postwar world order. The American president confuses Iceland for Greenland and describes himself as “daddy” to the island’s people, that “they called me ‘daddy’ last time.”

Like all previous iterations of fascism, the American reprisal of the ideology is fixated with a hysterical notion of “masculinity” that is nearly cartoonish in its application. (Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume work Male Fantasies, published in the 1970s, is an interesting look at this phenomenon as it appears in an earlier century’s context.) Back in 2017, I wrote a little bit about this in a brief piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books; it’s not my favorite thing I’ve ever written—I was 26 when I wrote it, very young—but parts of it still hold up, I think:

“Father no longer knows best, though. Trump and the alt-right, tied as they are to a bloated ideal of masculinity and the corporeal male body, have little in common with the old tropes of heads of state acting as wise fathers for their kingdoms. Instead, Trump taps into another old fear, that in which the body and health of the monarch correspond to the health of the nation. The Fisher King was stabbed in his groin. “I sat upon the shore,” begins the last stanza of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, told from the perspective of the Fisher King. “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” His body, absolute, is dying. L’etat, c’est moi. America, it’s Trump.”

(Another snippet from the U.S. president earlier on Wednesday, speaking of himself: “Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible, dictator-type person.’ But sometimes you need a dictator.” —Who’s “you”?)

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In 2016, feeling increasingly nervous by the country’s destabilizing political mood and having some empty time after I had been laid off by the magazine I had once worked at, I spent three months working on the Hillary Clinton campaign as a deputy digital director in Iowa. I had never worked in politics before and will not work in them again. But I’m glad I did it: that year, and that election, was probably the last time that anything could have been done to truly prevent what is going on now. The mood in the state was uneasy. When I landed in Des Moines in August 2016, I carried two books with me, Joan Didion’s Political Fictions and E. M. Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy. I didn’t really have time to read them. They functioned more as talismans, or good luck charms. The luck quickly ran out.

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As I write this, I am listening to Meredith Monk’s “Ellis Island.” It came up by chance in a radio show I have on in the background dedicated to an hour or two’s worth of contemporary classical piano, selecting pieces from a range of composers. There is a hypnotic, surging quality to this brief piece, written in the early eighties for a short film about immigration and the history of Ellis Island that Monk put together. At the end, a few discordant notes—nothing jarring, but enough to notice —chime.

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I think best in fragments these days, my attention wandering with the news.