HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE
A newspaperman in John Ford’s 1962 film, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE said, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Here’s a legend.
When campaigning for the 1960 presidential nomination, John F. Kennedy repeatedly used the phrase, “In the Chinese language, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, one representing danger and the other, opportunity.” At the time, this was news to native speakers of Chinese. But it was such a nice turn of phrase that it has become a commonplace idiom – even in China.
The trouble with Kennedy’s comment is not that it’s wrong, exactly, but that when people use it, they tend to assume that the dangers and opportunities are distributed fairly throughout the population. Most of the time, though, the game is rigged. It’s pretty clear in contemporary America which groups get to take advantage of the opportunity and which get to live with the danger.
As we wade ever deeper into our current danger/opportunity, the more I’ve been thinking a lot about a seemingly random comment I overheard at a party back in the 1980s. A guy said, “I wish I was either a little bit smarter or a little bit dumber.” Smarter, and he’d know how to solve his problems. Dumber, and he wouldn’t even know he had problems.
That, too, was a nice turn of phrase, which is why I remember it decades later. And the thing that has struck me over those years is how much easier it is to get dumber than to get smarter. Smarter is hard work. Dumber? Tune out, turn off, and drink up. Relief is just a swallow away.
As Thomas Grey put it in 1742: “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” Remember the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis? Nothing but trouble. In Adam’s fall, we sinned all; Trump’s in the White House, ha, ha, ha.
The morning after that dreadful election day in November, 2016, I made a commitment not to look away. I could at least be a witness, if nothing else. In one sense, I’m pleasantly surprised that I’ve been able to stick to it for this long. But right now, I feel stuck.
The worse Donald Trump gets, the harder it is to talk about him intelligently. Narcissistic? Ignorant? Racist? Dishonest? Immoral? Incompetent? Sure, he’s all those things and worse. He was all those things yesterday, and he’ll be all those things tomorrow. How many times can I say that? How many different ways? And at what point might it cease to matter?
Paying attention to this shit is painful. The more we know about Trump’s cruelty and corruption, the more it hurts to know that there’s very little we can do about it. Ignoring it just seems wrong. Obsessing about it just seems unhealthy. So where’s the middle way?
The formulation “one nation, indivisible” was always aspirational to some degree, although it was an aspiration that our forefathers were willing to fight for. Nowadays, we seem to have given up. Some very fine people on both sides. Divisibility has become a feature, not a bug. “Divide and conquer” has replaced “united we stand.”
We’ve been in some bad places before, and we’ve always muddled through. We gave up slavery and let women vote. We turned ourselves into an agricultural and industrial powerhouse. We led the fight against fascism, and then helped those former enemies turn into modern democracies.
We outsmarted, or at least outlasted, the Soviet Union. They boasted about their tractor production and glorious beet harvests. We gave the world television and rock & roll. They didn’t stand a chance. For one brief, shining moment, we were the last superpower standing.
We thought it was because of our military superiority, so we built ever more complex (and expensive) weapons systems. We tried them out in Korea, in Vietnam, and in one hot spot after another in the Middle East. The weapons worked as advertised, in the sense that they looked cool on TV as they reduced more civilian infrastructure to rubble. They worked considerably less well at convincing our enemies to give up. It turned out that none of our high-tech weapons helped much against an enemy that was patient, persistent, and smart.
But a high tech weapon is a terrible thing to waste. If we can’t use them to kill foreigners, perhaps they’ll work on our own citizens. Let’s militarize local law enforcement and find out. Arms dealers continue to get rich, and cops get to act macho. That was the opportunity part of the crisis.
We’re seeing what the danger part looks like right now.
Lois Lowry writes books for young adults. Her novel, THE GIVER, won the Newberry Medal in 1994. It’s dystopian science fiction, in the tradition of LORD OF THE FLIES, 1984, and THE HUNGER GAMES. The society it depicts is clearly American, but it’s set in a future America that has gone horribly wrong. Lowry didn’t offer much backstory, and over the years her young fans have written to ask: “Would you please write a prequel to The Giver so we could find out how all that happened?”
Lowry answered that question definitively in a recent online article (link below): “Dear Reader: guess what. You don’t need a prequel. You’re living in one.”
I gave away the punchline, but there’s much more. Read the whole thing.