The Last Fourth of July

A Meditation on How Much Things Suck

This week when I stood up to leave at the end of a session, my therapist and I wished each other a happy Fourth of July. We both added, simultaneously, “Could be the last one!” I suspect it’s a joke that’s being made a lot right now, with varying inflections of irony, dread, and rue.

I was a political cartoonist and writer for over a decade, most of which time was dominated by the imbecilic jingoism of the War on Terror, and by now I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve given up on this country. But this most recent time may have been the worst—worse even than George W. Bush’s re-election after his pointless  invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I got to interview Jules Feiffer in 2004, on the eve of that election. He’d been a political cartoonist and writer for longer than I’d been alive, so maybe he could provide me some perspective: were things really as bad—“They’re worse,” he answered, before I could even finish the question. “They’re worse!”

For one thing, to compare it to the most recent wave of insanity, the Cold War years and McCarthyism: Joe McCarthy was not President of the United States. The Supreme Court was not run by Joe McCarthy. […] Joe McCarthy was not the Attorney General. I mean, we had some bad guys in office, but they weren't as bad as Joe McCarthy and now they are.

McCarthy’s lawyer, the Wormtongue to his Saruman, was the sniveling, self-hating Roy Cohn, who, after McCarthy drank himself to a well-deserved death, took on as his own protégé the up-and-coming young moneyed scumbag Donald Trump. (Trump has publicly lamented that he doesn’t have a lawyer and ally today as unscrupulous and cruel as Cohn.) In America, the cancer of fascism only ever goes into remission.

Up until this last week, I was still, in retrospect, naïve: Total presidential immunity? Come on—an obviously preposterous claim, certain to be summarily quashed, a no-brainer even for this conservative court. But it’s now clear that this court was never really even “conservative”; they don’t have any judicial philosophies or legal principles at all. They’ve been contemptuous of any ethical standards—disdaining to recuse themselves from cases in which they had clear conflicts of interest, unashamedly accepting bribes, giving public opinion the finger. Like the rest of the MAGA cabal, they regard law and language as so much fastidious effeminate horseshit; they’ll make whatever noises with their mouths (“Roe is settled precedent”) and scrawl whatever marks on paper they have to in order to get what they want. And what they want is now nakedly plain: they’ve come out of the closet in full authoritarian drag.

I’m still coming to understand, belatedly, how much of what maintained this Republic for almost (but not quite) a quarter-millennium was not law or regulation but what they now call “norms”—the tacit contract to uphold the forms of democracy. E.g., if you lose an election, you give a concession speech, write a letter of advice to your successor, and show up at the inauguration, ensuring the peaceful transition of power so we don’t degenerate into something like late Rome, with assassinations, coups and civil wars every election. It’s like the miraculously effective agreement not to cross the double-yellow line so that we don’t all die in head-on collisions. Though come to think of it the social contract not to kill each other has started fraying, too; machine-gunning all your high school classmates used to be an unhealthy fantasy, but not what William James called a “live option.” Maybe it was the slow erosion of those social norms and mores over the decades that made possible—inevitable—the phenomenon of Trump or someone like him: a true sociopath, congenitally incapable of giving a fuck about anything other than himself, who would watch the edifice of the Republic collapse before enduring a blow to his ego. He and his cult are invincible to shame: Joseph Welch’s career-ending question to Senator McCarthy—“At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?”—wouldn’t even register with Trump; his supporters would be buying NO SENSE OF DECENCY T-shirts online the next day.

This upcoming election is what science fiction writers call a Jonbar hinge—one of those pivotal points in history when the timelines diverge, leading to two radically different futures. Neither is ideal: one is a continuation of the same failing geriatric corporatocracy we’ve discontendedly lived in our whole lives; the other, a fascist theocracy with a vindictive toddler-god as figurehead. I was talking with my girlfriend the other night about how much difference a Presidency—one man, one administration—really makes. Trump was already president for four years, she pointed out, but the institutions of the republic are resilient, and we survived. (Except for the people who died because he told them the virus was gonna blow over and masks were for pussies and the vaccine was sus.) I talked about the 2000 election, which younger readers may not know much about. At the time, a lot of people felt there was no substantial difference between the two candidates, a couple of what today they’d call nepo-babies: one, the sitting Vice-President, was the son of a powerful Senator; the other, a Governor, son of a former President and CIA director. The main issue discussed at their debates, I recall, was prescription drug prices. The election was so close that it came down to only a few thousand votes in Florida, and the recount down to volunteers squinting earnestly at “hanging chads”—those little circles of paper still dangling from the voting punchcard—to try to determine whether they represented intended votes. In the end the recount was truncated by an orchestrated mob and a more dignified version of the same thing, the Supreme Court. (I myself am not among those who’ve “lost trust” in the current Supreme court, because I realized they were partisan hacks a quarter-century ago, after the indefensible Bush v. Gore.) Al Gore was an early believer in climate change and an advocate of green energy; George W. Bush was a callow, gladhanding, not-overly-bright guy whose highest ambition was to be Baseball Commissioner. But a lot of voters must’ve figured any more or less competent administrator could handle the job; this was at the end of an idyllic decade that had commenced with the U.S.’s chief global antagonist unexpectedly collapsing like a soufflé, during which our most controversial domestic issue was a blowjob, and everyone had been lulled into assuming that history was over now and things would just go on like this forever. Who knows what timeline we’d be living in if Al Gore, and not George Bush, had been president when the second plane hit the tower? Donald Trump, living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, must’ve figured, How hard can this shit be before a global pandemic shut down the planet. There will undoubtably be more crises in the next five years, climatic catastrophes if nothing else, and Trump will be unequal to them at best; and some, like Russia’s determination to reclaim its empire or Israel’s final solution to its Palestinian problem, he’ll actively abet.

And a second Donald Trump term would not be like the first: in the first, he was still struggling against the inertia of what he calls “the Deep State,” which is to say the career bureaucrats, administrators, and military officers who actually make the government function. Part of “Project 2025,” the agenda of Trump’s cabal, is removing independent heads of government agencies and installing apparatchiks solely loyal to Trump. And now that the ideological fanatics and religious dingbats he appointed to the Court have restored the divine right of kings, retroactively validating the defenses of would-be autocrats from Nixon to Charles I, he’ll be able to have Joe and Hunter Biden executed on live TV, order the military to massacre protesters, and summarily cancel the next election without worrying about being held to account for it. The Republican Party hasn’t won the popular vote in twenty years; for everyone under 40 they’re synonymous with Nazis; they are demographically terminal and they know it. Most Americans simply do not want what they want. And so they are executing a last-ditch plan to seize the levers of power regardless of popular will and impose their shithole paradise on us all. All the chess pieces are in place; all it takes now is an electoral victory in November and they figure they’ll never have to lose—or hold—an election again.

I was so depressed the night that Supreme Court decision was handed down—less “handed” than flung, or spat—that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought about going to a bar, regressing to my War-on-Terror fallback. Instead I called my old comrade-at-arms from those days, Megan. She, as she said later, had yet to fully absorb the implications of the court’s decision, and was still mostly angry at the Democratic Party leadership who hid and downplayed Biden’s decline for so long, who told us we were being alarmist and disloyal for questioning the President’s competence and admonished us to come together and get behind the candidate. Megan’s mother, like mine, suffered from dementia toward the end of her life, and she recognized the blank-eyed, slack-mouthed expression she’d seen on Biden’s face at the debate. (To be fair, Trump has an advantage in comparing cognitive abilities, because he’s always spoken in incoherent gibberish, so no one expects any better of him.) I personally would vote for the corpse of Joe Biden over Donald Trump, counting on the technocrats who surround him to run the executive branch and prop up his husk at photo ops. I would vote for George W. Bush if he were running against Donald Trump, because at this point what it’s come down to is not age or inflation or the atrocity of Gaza but a referendum on democracy: do you want the experiment to go on, or admit that it failed? Unfortunately, if you decline to vote as a protest against the Democrats’ support for Israel or the moribund two-party system, you’re just a useful idiot for the fascist cause.

I know how important it is these days to have an online opinion about every public matter; you have to sound like you know what you’re talking about and are absolutely certain of it and act as if you’re held this opinion forever. I don’t have one of those. I’m incredulous and despondent and helplessly enraged; I pray daily to baby Jesus to send a divinely anointed maniac or heroic time traveler from the future to blow Donald Trump’s brains out. I wish I were as intrepid and well-informed as the literary optimists I admire, like Rebecca Solnit and Kim Stanley Robinson—smart, tough-minded, unsentimental optimists, looking the facts in the face but not backing down. I’m currently writing a book about the future—future histories, utopias and dystopias, systematic prognostications—and I’ve noticed that a lot of modern utopias posit some sort of global cataclysm, like nuclear war, to sweep the chessboard of history clear and make way for a new social order. It’s a failure of imagination, an admission of defeat in the face of the hopeless mess of the present; the author can’t see any way to get there from here. But, although there will certainly be cataclysms as climate change accelerates in the decades to come, the worst thing about a fascist coup in America wouldn’t be that the world will come to an end, but that it won’t. There’ll be the nightmare of election night, and the horror of waking up the next day and realizing it’s actually real, but then we’ll also have to wake up the day after that—just another Thursday—and that day after that one, and get through them all, still going to work and running errands and deciding what to have for dinner. As my girlfriend reminded me, people endured Franco, and Pinochet, and life was unbearable under those monstrous regimes—a lot of people were abducted and tortured and murdered—and yet they bore it. And opposed and undermined it in what ways they could. And eventually those regimes ended. A lot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s utopian novels involve a long journey by foot, across the frozen deserts of Antarctica or Mars, keeping your head down and putting one foot in front of the other. Robinson himself likes to hike, but it’s also a metaphor for what it takes to reach utopia: not an apocalypse, or a close-fought battle, but stoic, plodding endurance. A goddamned slog.

Although one thing we learned on Election Night 2016 is that anyone who confidently tells you what’s going to happen is full of shit. My friend Margot, sitting next to me right now, suggests that by next Fourth of July we could all be toasting our first black female president and reminiscing about how things looked so dark for a while there that we nearly gave up hope. I’m writing this at a picnic table by a pool on the Fourth of July, ignoring good friends I don’t see often enough to do it, so I’m going to end this now. I’ll just leave you with a memory of a younger, sunnier time—which is also a glimpse of good times yet to come, somewhere on the other side of all this. I used to throw an annual 4th of July party at my cabin—the Undisclosed Location, as I called it, after the term the press gave to wherever George and Mr. Cheney used to hide from the terrorists. I would invite everyone I knew, far-flung friends from up and down the eastern seaboard, from every circle of my life. It lasted for days. Dave and Dave and Chris always played guitar at raucous singalongs down on the beach, passing the whiskey ‘round the flame pit. Sometimes I’d recite Scott Fitzgerald or Hunter Thompson from memory. At night everyone trouped down to the pool at the church center at the end of the point to go skinny dipping en masse. I’d make big Rock ‘n’ Roll Breakfasts, break out my homemade Uncle Ray’s dandelion wine. Sally brought a trunkload of party dresses, and for one night all the boys wore party dresses (Big Jim got a hot pink taffeta gown but I was made to wear some cheap slutty number—a sequined tube top and leopard-print mini). One night Captain Ray and his friends set out by boat from Baltimore, drunk, figuring they’d find my cove in the dark; they arrived three days later, sunburned and dehydrated, like castaways lost at sea years before. Zero reported that the girl he’d snuck off to the neighbors’ dock with knew some secret sex trick he couldn’t describe that had made him come instantly: “Even thinkin’ about the Holocaust didn’t help,” he lamented. Everyone drove to the Rendezvous Inn in town (Michael clinging to the roof of the car the whole way—he’d thought they were just driving a couple doors down), and drank and danced for hours before they realized they were all still in swimsuits and no one had any money. I broke my collarbone in a lightsaber duel. Another year I got into trouble with my girlfriend for dancing naked around the flame pit in mixed company, all of us chanting the terrible words: Hey, hey/ Whaddaya say/ To chicken and biscuits every day? But maybe my favorite moment from all the Fourths of July was when Aaron drove a whole vanload of us across the bridge over the Susquehannah with Big Jim blasting Mojo Nixon’s “This Land is Your Land,” en route to the Big M Drive-In, which was showing that summer’s blockbuster, Independence Day, an all-star special-effects alien-invasion extravaganza. Near the climax of that film the fictional President gives a Hollywood version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech to the fighter pilots about to attack the alien mothership:

Perhaps it’s fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom—not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive!"  Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!

We’re fucked