Bad Stories

What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

Steve Almond

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781597092234
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Dissertations en politique et relations internationales

" Almond draws on everything from The Grapes of Wrath to the voting practices of his babysitter to dismantle the false narratives about American democracy." —Cheryl Strayed, international-bestselling author of Wild Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn't just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond's effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices—from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin—to help explain the roots of our moral erosion as a people. The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press into a for-profit industry, our enduring pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at providing clarity. It's the book you can pass along to an anguished fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what the hell happened to our country. "Almond holds up literature as a guide through America's age-old moral dilemmas and finds hope for his country in family, forgiveness, and political resistance." — Booklist

ONE FINAL BAD STORY

AMERICA IS INCAPABLE OF MORAL IMPROVEMENT

As I write this, the new president has been in office for a year. He has sought to make good on an agenda that satisfies the wish lists of his corporate sponsors (massive deregulation) and his base (Muslim bans, deportations). He endorsed an astonishingly cruel and senseless health care bill, signed a massive tax cut for corporate America, and stocked the judiciary with reactionary ideologues. We now know that his campaign at least attempted to conspire with a hostile foreign power to win the election, and that he will obstruct the investigation into this treason at any cost.

He stocked his cabinet with a consortium of feckless plutocrats, many of whom appear driven to raze the departments and agencies they run. Environmental protection, diplomacy, civil rights, free trade, public education, health care—all are hurtling toward that familiar Trumpian terminus: bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the markets for white supremacy, mass shootings, corporate profiteering, and nuclear cataclysm are booming.

His personal conduct remains an adolescent psychodrama: popularity mongering, conspiracy mongering, Twitter mongering, the tireless projection of his mongering onto perceived enemies. His aides and allies are mortified by his cognitive deterioration, his inability to read, or concentrate. It becomes more and more obvious that he’s unfit for the office. And yet the office belongs to him.

The press has begun to take him more seriously, if only because he now possesses the power not just to spike ratings but to destroy lives. But the networks continue to fall for the same tricks over and over, dispatching pundits to howl over what he says rather than allowing journalists to explain what he has done, and intends to do. Cable anchors continue to marvel at his ability to “change the conversation” without acknowledging that they are the ones changing the conversation.

And all the while, the president’s balance sheet, hidden from public view, swells with foreign favors—Chinese patents, hotel suites awash in sheiks, Russians snapping up condos—a racket so flagrant as to make Nixon’s deal with dairy farmers seem demur. For now, Trump operates within a familiar pocket of privilege, cosseted by the healthy economy he inherited and congressional allies whose legislative ambitions require them to ignore his impeachable corruptions.

The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, launched after the president’s sacking of Comey, continues to lay bare the web of corruption and lies that marks Trumpworld as something closer to a mafia operation than a presidential administration. And yet, even if Mueller presents definitive proof that a sitting president colluded with Russia and obstructed justice, it is not clear—as it was during Watergate—that he will be removed from office. Meaning that the only real limits on his power, aside from the courts, are his own ineptitude, inattention, and sloth. He has the heart of an autocrat but the mind of a gorilla.

No one knows what Trump will do if there is, for instance, a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil, or a provocation engineered by a foreign enemy, or even large-scale protests in American cities, whether he will heed the rational voices in his orbit or those eager to activate his despotic impulses. We can say only two things with assurance: that innocent people will get hurt, and that it will never be his fault.

My literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, didn’t live long enough to see Trump barnstorm through the Rust Belt swing states. But Vonnegut foresaw the underlying dynamics at those events with ruthless precision. “It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor,” he observed in Slaughterhouse Five. “Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters…. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.”

And I think, too, about guys like Robert Mercer (candidate Trump’s patron) who used a talent for financial computation to amass billions and has chosen to invest in an ideology that sanctifies his fortune, and depicts those in poverty as worthless. This mindset, a precise repudiation of the Beatitudes, proudly displays the moral logic of eugenics. It is the wet dream of capitalism tumbling into the nightmare of fascism.

It is also the inexhaustible story of class, of Gatsby, “the colossal vitality of his illusion,” and of the man who vanquishes him, Tom Buchanan. “I couldn’t forgive him or like him,” Nick Carraway tells us, “but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream.

That is Marlow, struggling to convey the horrors of his expedition. And it is how I feel for much of my waking life, how many Americans feel, as we attempt to understand and absorb the unstable aggression of this new president. “He struggled with himself too. I saw it,—I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”

The vitality of his delusion is precisely what makes Kurtz so hypnotizing. “I was fascinated,” Marlow confesses. “It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair.” Men of desperate action have long ruled the American imagination. And yet their strength, as Conrad reminds us, is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

We are remitted, time and again, to the province of Ahab, the gasping ruin of that final scene, the mad captain taken under by his quarry, the young orphan who served him, who lives to tell the tale only by holding fast to a casket of American wood. How bad will it get? How much of our common good, our decency, will we surrender? To what extent are we to blame for this outcome? And what are we to do now that it is upon us?

In the novel The Visit of the Royal Physician by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist, a German doctor named Struensee is summoned to the court of the mad Danish king and winds up importing the Enlightenment to the “filthy little country” of Denmark. He abolishes cronyism and torture, funds hospitals, and grants citizens unprecedented freedoms. But Struensee has a fatal flaw, one his lover, the queen, spots instantly. “She had felt a unique pleasure when she understood for the first time that she could instill terror. But he did not. There was something fundamentally wrong with him,” she observes. “Why was it always the wrong people who were chosen to do good?”

I thought about this question a great deal during the Obama era, as he courted enemies bent on his destruction, as he declined to prosecute the criminal avarice of Wall Street executives, as he extended the Bush tax cuts and, in particular, as news emerged that he knew, months before the election, of the FBI investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Because Struensee lacks the will necessary to purge the court, its reactionary forces naturally rise up to destroy him. “Then the spark was ignited everywhere, and the masses poured out: the poor, those who had never dreamed of a revolution but were now offered the comfort of violence, without punishment, without meaning. They revolted, but with no purpose other than the excuse of purity.”

The novel asks whether noble ideas alone are enough to improve the world, or whether bloodshed is the necessary price of moral progress. A quick survey of American history doesn’t offer much room for hope. Our nation was forged in war, expanded by means of an energetic genocide, and liberated from the sin of slavery at the price of half a million souls. Struensee, by contrast, attempts to legislate equality and tolerance by decree, from the safety of a royal den.

At the height of his influence, the Royal Physician decides to take the King on a tour of the countryside, so that he can see the conditions his people endure. At dusk, they spot a severely beaten teenage serf, seated on a wooden trestle. Struensee jumps out of the royal coach, hoping to secure a pardon for the boy. But a mob of peasants approaches and he panics: “Reason, rules, titles, or power had no authority in this wilderness. Here the people were animals. They would tear him limb from limb.” Struensee has the purest of motives, but he mistrusts the people he hopes to save.

A version of this mindset animates both sides of our present divide. We now know that many voters, especially older whites, haunted by the terror attacks of 2001 and a rising demographic tide, are willing to see the rights of Muslims, immigrants, and people of color abrogated. But so, too, there are Americans who look upon these abrogaters as an unruly mob, impervious to moral logic, angry, armed, and dangerous.

As we sort ourselves into like-minded communities, both online and off, the divide widens. Politicians and media executives, marketers and algorithmists, mine this division for profit, presenting visions of the “other side” so monstrous that we retreat into the psychic comfort of our own righteousness. One of my journalism students captured the crisis quite succinctly, in the form of a question: “What do you do if, no matter what you write, the reader won’t believe you?”

I thought about how new the precepts of the enlightenment (science, reason, equality) are within the flickering span of human history. Perhaps the regression of our Fourth Estate is just the visible symptom of some much deeper moral regression in the body politic, a return to ancient superstitions. Perhaps we yearned for a style of leadership that rejected enlightenment altogether, that affirmed our primitive impulses. Perhaps we authored a story in which the resurrection of the American spirit required the shuttering of the American mind.

Or perhaps I should have told my student this: that the essential commodity of journalism, like religion, is the mirage of certainty. This mirage appears most obviously in the demagoguery of talk radio, but dwells also within the self-congratulating pieties of the left. As a people, we are besieged by doubt, and therefore desperate to construct a world free from our tormentor.

In the introduction to his piercing essay collection, Loitering, Charles D’Ambrosio describes what it feels like, as a recovering journalist, to withstand such discourse. “In a leveling climate of summations,” he observes, “crowded with public figures who speak exclusively from positions of final authority, issuing an endless stream of conclusions, I get a wary sense in my gut of a world that’s making its appeal to my indolence and emptiness, asking only for surrender.”

That’s how most of us feel. But we conceal our uncertainty “in shame, or something of that...