My Search for Prescience

Certain book titles pop up in my head--I wonder why the ones which do--and Smiling Through the Apocalypse recurs these days, a collection of articles from Esquire from the 1960's. It must resonate with my enforced participation in the spectacle of Trumpism and all-irresponsible impending government, but I know that Trump may somehow end up looking good through the luck of Reagan and the laundering of Fox News. Anything is possible but accountability is unlikely. 

After all, even following the multiple calamities of the Bush years, Iraq and Katrina and economic collapse, each showcasing Republican malfeasance and incompetence, we soldier on as though there is any doubt whatsoever about who caused what, so I am looking now for prescience in past journalistic writings. The current stuff is too prejudiced by the onslaught of Republican unreason, a typhoon and tidal wave of ill-will and bias preventing any normal digesting of events.

Yet again--and this goes back to Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker's hard medicine--a Republican may benefit from the Democrats playing grownup and trying to run the country well in spite of right-wing sabotage, foot-dragging and intransigence. If I were to characterize it I would say that I'm looking for what it was that we were taking for granted--intelligence and inclusion and decency, maybe. I'll let you know what I discover, the essential question being what the fuck has happened to us.

Now to try to find that book...

Some time later: Not only did I find Smiling Through the Apocalypse but I read the editor Harold Hayes's introduction and I already have an opinion which I will share with you and refuse to delete or alter in order to hold my own feet to the fire and require accountability from myself. The difference I see is respect, on many levels. I recall reading somewhere of someone who worked on relationships and he said he could tell instantly in a restaurant which couples were doomed. 

If he could see contempt the relationship was already over and everything else was a formality. Americans now not only have contempt for one another it is personal. The kind of contempt I remember--and still support--was for behaviors, which are circumstantial and changeable, however deeply rooted. The new contempt has nothing to do with behaviors--rather with identity, conformity, adherence to certain opinions and other arbitrary and accidental things--and it is therefore racist. 

So we are locked in a relationship with crazy people, effectively addicts and compulsives--everything else is a formality. There is no Union, to begin with. The disrespect extends to everything else except money and power, as I see it. There is no respect for the institutions and traditions of our country, the latter especially since it is more between-the-lines and easily reinterpreted and subverted, not that the denial of scientific consensus​ has been a particular problem.

Respect is learned at the foot of the hill of one's selfhood, of having a sense of individuality, of place, of authenticity, personal integrity, responsibility and security. The hang-up, I suspect, is with authenticity, the baby-boomers having been raised in the homes of greatest-generation parents and feeling that they will never measure up, so they reject the entire frame of reference and assert themselves simply by existing in the brave, ugly new world they inadvertently create. 

There's nothing positive about it, being a byproduct of Oedipal outrage, narcissism and a sense of smallness, giving it a paranoid aspect. Once you start blowing things up where do you stop? As with George W. Bush the destruction is an end in itself, the only way he can find a place within a context rid of his father's shadow, by standing in the ruins of daddy's civilization, not an "end" in that it's irrational and unsustainable and futile. It's nihilism, the antimatter of intelligibility.

Harold Hayes represents a rational, intelligible, integrated system of higher standards but--and this is the matter for my reading of the articles--did anyone see it? Did anyone diagnose and comprehend it, that the sixties cliche of rebellion and non-conformity was operating within the system as a corrective but that the right-wing crazies, who identified with authority and came up short, would overreact and destroy the order they wrongly saw as threatened by sixties culture?

To be continued... 

Or, maybe not. This post is getting too long, probably under the influence of those articles from Esquire, so I will end it here and take it up later, I hope, in another entry. To the enemies of Trumpism: Hang in there. Despair gets us nowhere, but attack when you can. Yes, they are the enemy and we are the good guys and victory is possible. If there is accountability, out there somewhere, it is on our side and if not we were always screwed anyway.