If You Call This Victory

V-E Day, The PEN Gala, and Whether, on Due Consideration, We Are Fucked

Once, many years ago now, I was sitting in a West Village bar called the Fat Black Pussycat with a couple of friends and, several beers in, I pointed out that each of us was the grand champion who had beaten out millions of rivals in the race to fertilize the egg. We were all already winners! “Yeah, I guess,” grumbled Dave, glancing around at the dim, deserted afternoon dive and, by implication, the rest of the world beyond it. “If you call this victory.”

It seems worth noting for the record that it takes the span of just one human lifetime for people (Americans, at least) to collectively forget that fascism is bad. This May 8th marked 80 years since Hitler’s Nine-Year Reich was finally ground into rubble under the treads of Russian and American tanks. (The average American life expectancy is 78.4 years.) In the same week that the democracies of Europe were observing that occasion with solemn memorials and moments of silence, the demagogue Americans had elected their president even after he’d attempted a putsch was evasive about whether it was his responsibility to uphold the constitution or respect due process, continued to illegally deport American citizens to be indefinitely detained in third countries, and renewed his threats to buy Canada. More recently, voters in Poland—one country you’d think would have reason to be jumpy about any signs of resurgent fascism—elected a thuggy populist who sucks up to Trump. In despondent moods, it’s enough to make you wonder who really won the war.

This is all, to say the least, disheartening. Leaving aside (for this essay) the reasons it’s depressing to be a citizen of a collapsing democracy, to a writer it feels like disproof of the hopeful notion that books, writing, history, language itself, or other means of transmitting information from one generation to the next—anything other than dumb blunt first-hand experience—ever teaches anybody anything at all. The Satayana epigram says that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it, but, it's subsequently been pointed out, those who do remember it just get to watch with glum foreknowledge as the rest of ignorant gung-ho humanity drags us all along with them into some familiar, avoidable hell.

My artist friends currently all seem to be struggling under a blanket sense of enervation and futility. A friend just texted me from Oslo, where she’s attending the World Expression Forum 2025, a symposium on free speech. “Quick summary of the day’s panels and speakers on the future of democracy, free expression, journalism, and art so far,” she wrote: “WE ARE FUCKED.” It’s a sentiment you hear a lot these days, the unofficial slogan of the left. “I don’t know if I actually care enough to dedicate my mental activity to further consideration of just how much things suck and our impending political doom,” one wrote, accounting for his own recent silence. I had a long talk with my fellow cartoonist Tom Hart, who sent me the pages of a story he was writing as he drew them, a story about being unable to write or draw. “My planet is overrun by greedy, hostile men,” he wrote. “My country is now ruled by them. There are wars and oppression everywhere, and I just want to make art.” He and I were comrades-at-arms during the bellicose hysteria of the “War on Terror” after 9/11; those old enough to remember those dark times will not need to be reminded what a devastating deterrent alternative comics and editorial cartoons were to the Bush administration’s ill-advised plans to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The current times feel even more demoralizing than those did, and artists even more impotent in their opposition. It’s hard for Tom and me, both now in our fifties, to parse out how much of this is just a function of the ebbing energies and eroded hopes of age, but a young colleague tells me she’s having the same difficulties. In addition to the doubts and frustrations attendant on any young writer, and worries about AI and climate change rendering her vocation and species (respectively) obsolete, she feels at a loss to articulate what’s currently happening in this country and fraudulent in trying to offer any hope or encouragement about it. She’s also suffering from a nauseating déjà vu, having just moved to the U.S. from Hong Kong, where she got to experience the collapse of another former bastion of democracy. Although I was born here, I feel like an exile; the America I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore, and I don’t know how to find my way back to it. I wish I could disown the hateful, barbaric country we’ve become—driving out our finest minds, betraying our allies, toadying to thugs and strongmen. Our current rulers, like all barbarians, delight in smashing and pissing on the silly trinkets that civilized people love: higher learning, science, the arts. As an artist living in such times, at some point you gotta ask yourself honestly: what good does any of it do?

Last week I attended the PEN America gala, riding the coattails (or evening gown, rather) of a writer friend who’s both way more successful and much more of a joiner than I am. Depending on how many drinks you’d had, the night felt like either a heartening gathering of people committed to literature redoubling their determination to defend freedom of expression, or a self-congratulatory pageant for an effete intelligentsia, doomed in the face of brute stupid power. The event is held at the Museum of Natural History, so we had cocktails beneath the towering saurian skeletons in the lobby, and dinner under the vast, striated underside of a blue whale. The mute looming presence of those extinct and endangered creatures might’ve been interpreted, if you were gloomily disposed, as a bad omen.

But I met some people there whose lives repudiate reflexive pessimism; their resistance to our thuggy government has been more than performative. At cocktails I complemented the motley jacket of a Falstaffian figure who proved to be named Skip; he works on the “intellectual freedom taskforce” at Penguin/Random House, suing governments that attempt to ban that publisher’s books. (As we were talking, he was warmly greeted by a woman who looked exactly like, and was, Sarah Jessica Parker, who in addition to her better-known work has her own publishing imprint.) At dinner I was seated next to one Janet Mills, whose current job is being the governor of Maine. Governor Mills was, Ms. Parker and other celebrities notwithstanding, the star of the evening; people constantly approached our table to thank her, shake her hand, take selfies with her, and tell her how much they admired her. In the course of recounting her unconventional path to the governor’s mansion, Governor Mills told me that in her younger, more bohemian years, a boyfriend had once held a gun to her head,¹ which made some retroactive sense of her laconic sang froid in facing down a clumsy attempt at bullying by a soft, spoiled rich boy.

Among the featured speakers that night were the family of Galal El-Behairy, an Egyptian poet who’s been in prison for the last eight years for writing the lyrics to a song. This sounds bizarre, almost absurd, to artists in Western democracies, whose governments realized long ago that you don’t even need to persecute artists if you just don’t pay them. Maybe we artists in America are a bunch of crybabies, already histrionically declaring defeat when the worst we’ve had to face are book bans and yanked grants, not hanging or gulags, the same way I’m easily rendered apoplectic by inescapable labyrinths of voice mail/passwords/confirmation codes, because I’ve never had to endure standing in hours-long lines in dingy, depressing civic spaces to fill out forms full of insulting personal questions just so I could buy my kids something for dinner.

It’s not as if most writers or artists (not even famously hubristic cartoonists) ever had reason to believe that our work was going to stop a war or smash fascism or bring down The Man. Kurt Vonnegut, author of one of the best-known American antiwar novels, once calculated that the cumulative firepower of all the art and literature deployed in opposition to the Vietnam War had had the effect of a single banana-cream pie three feet in diameter, dropped face-down from a height of five feet. Arguably the most popular work of antiwar art ever created was the TV series M*A*S*H, consistently among the highest-rated shows throughout the decade after our withdrawal from Vietnam, but by the year its run ended people were already psyched to invade another country. One feeble consolation for the ineffectuality of political art is that the art itself may have intrinsic beauty or enduring worth. I recently saw a show of Der Neue Sachlikheit (“the New Objectivity”), the movement that throve in the Weimar era of Germany. In addition to the work of artists I already knew and admired—Grosz, Dix, Beckmann—I discovered artists I’d never heard of who were just as good, like Karl Hubbuch and Georg Scholtz. Even their most hilarious and damning caricatures failed to halt the ascent of Hitler, but it was one of the most fecund periods of twentieth century art, indicting the demagogues, generals, and profiteers who were the architects of fascism and the piggish citizens who abetted them; its influence reverberates today in the work of artists like Ralph Steadman and Steve Brodner. We’re all contributing our complaints to the great ongoing bitch session of art and literature.

Another option for frustrated, despairing artists or writers is to put art aside for the duration of the crisis and enlist in some more pragmatic effort to resist the fascists, the way people of every profession have put their peacetime work on hold when they’re conscripted into service in wartime. A novelist friend of mine has been assisting aspiring immigrants ever since the first Trump administration, helping with administrative and bureaucratic hassles, accompanying them to court as an interpreter, supporter, and token respectable white lady, work she credits with preserving her sanity throughout that administration’s daily insults to the Constitution and basic human decency. Currently she devotes her time to escorting asylum applicants from courtrooms after their hearings, down hallways filled with waiting ICE agents—“some plainclothes, some armed and in tactical gear.” Last week she confronted some agents who’d abducted some of her advisees after a hearing, following them down the hall and repeatedly telling them that what they were doing was blatantly illegal. She was shaking with rage and fear, but she didn’t stop until the elevator doors closed in her face.

“Of Things to Come,” Georg Scholz, 1922

I remember complaining to my writing teacher, when I was 14 or 15, that it seemed like everything worth saying had already been said. (I was disappointed to learn that I had not invented metafiction, which I’d felt had been clever.) He said: “Yeah, it has, but people forget everything, so ya gotta say the same things all over again in a new way in every generation.” This was an unsatisfying answer to me then, and remains so now, but it is, unfortunately, true. Like Anne Lamott says: “In a hundred years?—All new people.” Which she means as optimistic—each new generation a tabula rasa, unsullied by the sins and traumas of the past, still malleable, with limitless potential. But it also means that every century you’re faced with a few billion clueless newbies to try to give a crash course in civilization before they wreck everything.

A lot of people seem to assume that these are the end times—because of encroaching fascism, or accelerating climate change, or the fascists’ determination to not only deny climate change but actively abet it. We find it hard to envision any future at all, let alone a better one. It’s easy to forget that everyone felt the same way in the misremembered-as-idyllic 70s and 80s, because of pollution, overpopulation, acid rain, and nuclear winter. This apocalyptic fatalism is common to pretty much every generation since anyone first realized that times were changing. “Is it not late?” asks Annie Dillard in The Time Being. ”A late time to be living?

Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?—our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.

It might be more more helpful, more heartening, to think of ourselves as being nearer the beginning of history than the end of it, at the dawn of civilization, with everything yet to be decided. Democracy is still a new and fragile phenomenon, running counter, in many ways, to human nature. It was always an experiment, improbable of success; its survival and triumph throughout these two centuries has been a tenuous, provisional victory in an ongoing war against humanity’s baser instincts—the submissive yearning for a big abusive daddy to tell us what to do, the tribal lust to watch some outsider get their face stomped on. What’s happening in the U.S. now is definitely unprecedented in our history, but it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere: Americans have been infatuated with authoritarianism since before we were even free of it, when George Washington’s officers proposed, to his horror, that he be crowned king, and they’ve flirted with fascism since the thirties, culminating in a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, presided over by a towering portrait of (once again) involuntary conscript George Washington. World War II was just another battle in a war that’s been going on for all of history, one that has to be fought all over again in every generation. What turns out to have been the brief idyll in which I was born—the relative stability of the Cold War standoff, the alliance of Western democracies against totalitarianism, the priority of education and science in America—was only the aftereffect of that war, which killed eighty million people and wrecked the infrastructure of half the planet. Humanity was, briefly, shocked by what it had done to itself. But the resolve “Never Again” has proven to be as ephemeral as a vow to Never Drink Again once the hangover fades. Now the fascists are holding a gun to all our heads: immigrants, women, minorities, trans people, academics, researchers, journalists, artists. We may not be the Greatest Generation—we might actually be the Worst—but unfortunately we’re the only ones here. So once more unto the breach, I guess, God fucking damn it to hell. We go into this fight as soldiers have throughout history—with absolutely no enthusiasm for it, bitching and cursing, crying and heaving our guts up, forcing ourselves forward against every instinct, unable to believe this shit, wishing to God we were home.

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1. I tell this story here only because the governor has told it publicly elsewhere.