What the f**k is wrong with America?
I am acquainted with an woman who has made a lot of money dressing rich women with second homes in Palm Beach. For many years she has flown back and forth from NYC to West Palm to personally pin hems and shorten cuffs, take out seams for ample figures and nip in waists for those to whom food consists of gin and tonics and not much else. I don’t know her customers but I can imagine them, swanning around during those endless cocktail parties, air-kissing their frenemies, maybe lingering their moist colorful lips on a particular male guest’s cheek, the modern handkerchief drop.
She very recently came back from Palm Beach and told some of us who were Zooming with her that they are still partying like its 1999 (she didn’t say that — I am referencing Prince here. Doubtful she knows who he is). Sans masks, sans brains, blithely conducting their lives as they have since there were Lily Pulitzer dresses. Someone asked this woman if she were quarantining — actually didn’t ask but said “you should be quarantining” knowing that our acquaintance has adopted many of the benighted attitudes of her customers.
She answered “Yeah, sure”, meaning, “uh,uh. No way.” I am sure I was witnessing the emergence of a superspreader event on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and left the Zoom meeting. I can’t let it go unsaid how bewildered and aghast I was during this brief conversation. I was pretty sure that my acquaintance, though she canoodled with this Aderal-addled swath of “society”, was sensible, a businesswoman from New York who could separate the whites from the yolks. I quickly called a friend of mine who was there to verify what I heard which is something I do alot. “Did I hear that correctly?” is my way of signaling condemnation of anti-social behavior.
Many, many years ago I worked for a magazine publisher in ad sales. The Publisher of the magazine was a fuzzy-haired soft-spoken man who took a particular liking to me. I was a horrible performer (that is another story altogether); he eventually had to let me go. I remember when he told me that I had three months severance to find another position, he looked at me for a while and said “you can’t walk around telling people what is wrong with them, you know. You have to make a living, Kathy. But I do admire that in you for what it is worth.”
My early life has become a parable of sorts. The moment described above has had a long shelf-life in my memory, and has become a touchstone for me. You might say that I am someone who learns from her mistakes. I often need to be knocked on the head with a heavy object to awake from my own witlessness. Yet I am quietly sure that I have collected some meaningful bits of information along the way that fall into place at some point, that have created a path with well-worn stones that have been walked on by those before me. I am, whether I am aware of it or not, seeking the company of others who bore witness to the suffering and beauty of former and current times— historians, authors, memorists, composers. Together with my 21-Century pod of close allies and friends, I join in a conversation already begun many millions of years ago. When consciousness struck.
It is this conscious shock of recognition, of truth that washes over me sometimes with such fierceness that I gasp inside. I hear it, I see it — and want all others to hear and see what I hear and see. When I wake up from bizarre dreams with improbable shifting scenes, tidal waves, New York Buildlings that loom like concrete Redwoods, sometimes friendly, sometimes menacing. I dream of being lost forever, of not being able to run away from unseen predators. Everything in my dreams is a symbol that creates discomfort throughout the day, that nudges the darkest parts of me with sharp elbows until I forget it completely until next time. I live with these unconscious fears which change into everyday anxiety, depending on the weather, the news, the irritations that come with living among others.
In the aftermath of yesterday’s whiplash of a day — from the astonishing victories in Georgia to the storming of the Capital, I am looking at these opposing events as connected, even though the ambitions and hopes for Georgian activists to lift up their voters with compassion and practical solutions to voter suppression couldn’t be more polar opposite than the insurrectionists who feel that their rights have been destroyed by conspiring Socialists, and others, who do not belong in their America. So much better ink that I could ever spill has been published over the past four years to describe the multiple internal and external forces that have compelled both overt treasonous behavior from the president and his henchmen and followers, as well as the breathtaking humane work of some of our national treasures — Stacy Abrams, Ta Nahesi-Coates, Isabelle Wilkerson, The Lincoln Project, MSNBC hosts and their guests, Larry Wilmore, Randy Rainbow, Sara Cooper, Trevor Noah, Robert Paxton for his brilliant book on the origins of fascism, Kurt Anderson for both Fantasyland and Evil Genuises which I read back to back, and on — who have kept the darkness at bay for me. (I am leaving out fiction altogether as well as streaming media because it is too overwhelmingly a crowded category of glorious escapes). Ah, I do have to include, however, Ava duVernay for her brilliant and devastating When They See Us but that will be my only official streaming entry.
There has been an urgent repetitive message in my body that I have heeded — a call for information that seems so necessary for me to exist in a connected, non-disembodied flow. I have felt the terror of living in a vaccum of self-perpetuating negativity, old narratives of being misunderstood, offended by others because they didn’t acknowledge me in a way that no one could possibly do much less be required to do, grudge fests, and some (minor) self harm. At around 36, which was the first point in my life where the tidal wave of the past engulfed me to near obsolescence, I lay down some of my more destructive weapons and joined a fellowship of intimate strangers who knew my story better than I. This precipitated a long and often grueling self-study of my habits, my oversized emotions and reactions, my delusions. If this doesn’t sound like much fun, it wasn’t, but I knew somewhere in that deep part of the self that exists separately from our personalities there would be some payoff for me, and others. Indeed there has been and it looks like nothing that the naked eye can see. I am older, quite a bit softer around the edges with my mother’s double chin which often takes me back towards the beckoning arms of rage and self-harm, reminding me of those awful floppy plastic creatures that are found at gas stations and car dealerships. I see this now, having walked through the many tunnels, passageways and open roads of straight up experience, neat — no rocks. I see the rage and sorrow bubbling up when I am caught off guard. I know when the illicit joy of victimhood strikes me. I know how shut-down I can get — how bleak the world can look. I know this because I have made it my mission to know this about me. I now know that the emptiness inside of me would not be assuaged with anything less than knowledge. And that the more I avoided scaling the slippery escarpment of consciousness the more I would suffer. Throughout these past four years, living with Trumpism and its deadly aim to destroy our republic, I have spent endless futile hours trying to understand his psychology to better understand the world we face. I ended up abandoning my quest — the person was too much of a black hole for me, and too much the stuff of my own deepest fear. The fear of losing my mind in trying to determine his. I thought of falling into a void so vast, deep and infinite that I will never come back. I became more sensible and started to read more about our history, modern European history, books about racism, caste systems, fascism, Stalinism, even early Trumpism (The Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green comes to mind). I accumulated a library of the great thinkers, historians, and the oracular, supplemented by comic genuises to lighten the burdens that come with knowledge. Because here is the big thing about knowledge — once you own it, you will never be the same. The genie is out of the bottle and can be very inconvenient and troublesome. Guilt and conflict emerges when there is knowledge as the truth argues incessantly with your more primitive self — the one with all the grievance of being a child, loved and loathed by a father with PTSD from WWII, a mother frightened by everything and ashamed of who she was, a violent brother. I used to cry to myself — someone, anyone, can you hear me?
There seem to be very few paths to take if knowledge, defined as knowing something through observation and experience, is one’s main purpose. If I have learned, for example, that my partner, whom I love dearly, is triggered by certain things I say or do, do I — a)continue to say or do with the knowledge that he is triggered? or b) do I make a decision to not say the thing I most want to say in the moment to make myself feel better as a committment to my love and respect for him? Obvious answer is B (although A is so tempting much of the time). So I ask America, again, what the f**K is wrong with you, with us? Isn’t it time you found out?
